“What do I want? To live my life. To end this curse that hangs over all of us, and crush what remains of Cabhan.”
“That’s not just for you. Just you, Branna,” Iona insisted. “Money, travel, sex? Home, family?”
“Enough money to travel to exotic places and have reckless sex with exotic men.” She smiled as she poured more tea. “That should cover the lot.”
“I’ll travel with you.” Meara laid a hand over Branna’s. “We’ll break hearts the world over. You’re welcome to join us,” she told Iona. “We’ll see all the wonders, and take our pleasures where we find them. Then you can come back, pick the one you’ll keep, and make the babies. I’ll build my house and barn, and Branna will live her life exactly as she pleases, curse-free.”
“Agreed.” Branna lifted her teacup to toast. “We’ve only to vanquish ancient evil and earn great wealth, and the rest is but details.”
“Both of you could have all that exotic sex now,” Iona protested. “It’s not hard to have your pick of men when you look like Celtic goddesses.”
“We’re keeping her,” Meara told Branna. “She’s a wonder for my ego.”
“It’s true. Branna looks like something out of a fairy tale without even trying, and you’re this image of a warrior princess. Men should be falling at your feet.”
The door opened, bringing in the rain, along with Connor, Boyle, and Fin.
“Not all of them,” Meara murmured.
“Look what I’ve dragged in.” Connor shook rain from his hair like a dog as Kathel bounded over to greet the newcomers. “It was haul them in or build a bleeding ark. Have you tea and biscuits to spare?”
“Of course. Don’t track up my floor. Has the business world shut its doors then?”
“For the day,” Boyle told Branna. “We were nudging Fin along to buy us dinner, but damn near drowned considering the where.”
“And here’s better.” Connor walked over to hold his hands out to the fire. “Especially if someone could be cajoled into making a vat of soup.”
“Someone?”
Connor merely smiled at Branna. “And I thought of my own darling sister.”
“You think of me in the kitchen entirely too often.”
“But you’re brilliant in it.” He leaned down to kiss her.
“I’ll peel and chop whatever you need.” It was, Iona calculated, sort of like asking Boyle to dinner. “You can peel and chop, can’t you, Boyle?”
“I can, especially if it gets me dinner.”
“I’m willing to be a kitchen slave for a hot meal on a night like this,” Meara added. “What of you, Fin?”
He continued to unwind the scarf from around his neck. “Whatever Branna needs or wants tonight.”
“Then I’d best go see what there is to put together for this famous vat of soup.” She rose, and moved through the rear doorway. The dog left Fin’s side to follow her.
“She’d be easier if I went on,” Fin said.
“You’ll not.” A rare edge of anger laced Connor’s voice. “It can’t be that way, and she knows it as well as you do. We need you. I’ve told Fin and Boyle what happened a few days ago,” he told Iona.
“What happened?” Meara demanded.
“I’ll tell you as well, in a moment. But it stands, Fin. We need you, and she understands that. In the end she won’t let what’s tangled between you get in the way of it.”
“Maybe someone should tell me about the tangle.” Iona shoved her tea away. “It might help to know all the details instead of trying to figure everything out with pieces of them.”
Fin walked over to the table, then tugged down the neck of his sweater. “This is his mark, the mark your blood put on mine. I bear it, and Branna won’t see past it to what she is to me or what I am to her.”
Iona rose to study it closely. A pentagram, as the legend claimed, and as clear and defined as a tattoo. “It doesn’t look like a birthmark, but more like a scar or a tattoo. Were you born with it?”
“No. It . . . manifested much later than that. I was more than eighteen.”
“Did you always know?”
“Not where the power had come from, no, but only that I had it.” He adjusted his sweater. “You’re a steady one, Iona.”
“Not really, or not enough. Yet.”
“I think you’re wrong there.” He tipped her head up with a hand on her chin. “You’ll hold when it counts most, I think. She’ll need that steadiness from you, and that open mind.”
“Connor says we need you, and I trust him. I’m going to go help Branna get started.”
“I’m with you.” Meara rose. “Give her a few minutes to settle into it, but don’t gorge on the biscuits. She’ll do whatever needs be, Fin, whatever the cost.”
“As will I.”
Iona went with Meara through the back, in and out of the storeroom, and into the house.
“Wait, before we go into Branna.” Iona stopped. “What happened between Fin and Branna? I’m not asking you to gossip, or betray the sisterhood, and one that’s so obviously close and intimate between you and Branna. I think you know that. I hope you know that.”
“I do, and still it’s not easy to say to you what she hasn’t. I’ll tell you they were in love. Young and wild for each other. Happy in it, though they scraped and squabbled. She was going onto seventeen when they came together the first time. It was after they’d been together the mark came on him. He didn’t tell her. I don’t know whether to blame him for that, but he didn’t tell her. And when she found out, she was angry, but more, she was devastated. He was defensive and the same. So it’s been an open wound between them ever since. A dozen years of wanting and turmoil and too much distrust.”
“They still love each other.”
“Love hasn’t been enough, for either of them.”
It should be, Iona thought. She’d always believed it would be. But she went with Meara toward the kitchen to do what she could to help.
* * *
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN AN ORDINARY GATHERING OF FRIENDS AND FAMILY ON A RAINY NIGHT. The little fire simmering in the kitchen hearth, with the big dog snoring in front of it. The wine Connor pulled out, uncorked, and poured generously into glasses. Volunteers dutifully peeling and chopping small mountains of potatoes and carrots, mincing garlic and onions while the hostess busied herself dredging chunks of beef in flour, browning it in a big, sturdy pot on the stove. The scents rising up, teasing of what was to come, and the mix of voices all talking to or over one another.
It might have been just a gathering, Iona thought while she chopped carrots, and the parts that were warmed her, gave her so much of what she’d come to understand she’d yearned for her whole life. But it wasn’t just a friendly gathering, and the undercurrents tugging and pulling beneath the surface were deadly.
Still, she didn’t want to spoil the moment, send ripples over that surface. After all, she stood hip to hip with Boyle—who unquestionably had a more competent hand than she with the kitchen knife—and he seemed more relaxed here than when they worked together at the stables.
And he smelled wonderful, of rain and horses.
Better to say nothing, she decided, than say the wrong thing. So she watched and listened instead. She watched Connor reach over to flick a tear from Meara’s cheek as she minced onions, and caught the easy flirtation in the gesture in his eyes.
“If you were mine, Meara my love,” he said, “I’d ban onions from the house so you’d never shed a tear.”
“If I were yours,” she shot back, “I’d be shedding them over more than onions.”
He laughed, but Iona wondered. Just as she wondered when Fin topped off Branna’s wineglass and, at her request, handed her oil for a skillet. Their polite tone remained as stiff as their body language, but under it—oh yeah, undercurrents everywhere—there boiled such passions, such wild emotion she’d have had to have been both blind and heartless not to feel it.
It was Connor, she thought, who kept it all going, tossing out comments, questions, knitting the group together with relentless cheer and encompassing affection.
The man struck her as next to irresistible. So why did Meara—
“You study everything and everyone,” Boyle put in, “as if there’s to be an exam within the hour. And your brain’s full of questions and conclusions.”
“It feels like family.” She spoke the first thought that popped from the tangle of them in her mind. “It’s something I always wanted to feel, be part of.”
“Sure it is family,” Connor told her. “And yours.”
“You’re generous with people. It’s your nature. Not everyone is, or at least they’re more cautious before opening the door. I’m the newest here, on a lot of levels. Observing gives me a better sense of that family. Even just observing Boyle peel and chop a lot faster and better than I do.”
“Well now, he’s no Branna O’Dwyer,” Fin told her, “but he’s a passable cook. It’s just one reason Connor and I tolerate him.”
“If a man can’t toss a few things in a pan, he’s too often hungry. Here, put the palm of your hand on the tip, fingers up, out of range.” Boyle took Iona’s hand, to show her. “And the other on the hilt so you can use that to steer the blade.”
She let him guide her hands to produce nice, neat rounds of carrot, and appreciated the light press of his body to hers.
“I’ll have to practice,” she decided. “And figure out what to do with them after I chop them. It’s probably just as well I didn’t get the chance to ask you to dinner.”
She glanced up and around at him, caught the surprise on his face, and the hint of embarrassment as the room went quiet.
“You’re better off with Branna doing the cooking,” Iona continued. “I’ll have to figure out some other way to get you on a date.”
When Connor failed to disguise a chuckle with a cough, she shrugged.
“Family,” she said again. “And more, family with the kind of problem and mutual goal that means we could all get our asses kicked, or worse, tomorrow or anytime after. So I figure there’s not a bunch of time to waste or circle around what might make us happy. Speaking as someone who’s lived her life with half the happy, I’d like to finish it out—especially considering potential ass kickings—with a great big armload of it.”
From where he stood, leaning against the counter, Fin smiled at her. “I believe I’m already half in love with you myself.”
“You don’t have half to spare.” Then she sighed. “Now, let’s see. Who else can I embarrass?”
“You haven’t me,” Fin told her. “And as for love, deirfiúr bheag, there are no limits to it.”