Page 24

CHAPTER 24

Mariner Boy

E veryone went dead quiet.

Tick. Tick-tock.

Someone was in Naruka. In our house, with the library and the paintings and…

Crash .

“Ye let me deal with this now,” James warned as both Tye and Kazie edged past him out the kitchen.

I rose, most of my breakfast uneaten.

Bryn clasped my hand. “Rowan, wait.”

Tiny jolts of energy shot up my arm as his fingers curled to my pulse, pressed there lightly. Despite the intruder, it was suddenly just us in the kitchen. Us and the clocks and the coffee pooling at my feet.

I looked away, heart hammering as he kept my hand in his. Had he visited the Gate every day for her ?

But, of course, I couldn’t ask that.

Yet he had a mate, and he’d said nothing while expecting me to tell him everything I saw in the Gate.

“Let me go,” I said quietly.

His throat bobbed once, then he did.

I turned, letting the kitchen doors whisk closed behind me as I entered the roaring warmth of the lounge.

And for a moment, forgot all about Bryn and his mate.

“Jayzus, that’s me twelve poems of Enniskerry,” James cursed as a book soared through the air with unnerving accuracy. “Ye absolute feckin’ ejit.”

Across the room, in front of the pool table, stood a man who looked vaguely familiar. Greasy hair, a square, cut-off jaw, and a set of very large ears. A vein throbbed at his temple and sweat dripped down the thick column of his neck onto a fur-collared jean jacket.

The man from the bar, I realized after a heartbeat.

Kazie pointed a glittery nail at him. “Colm, don’t you dare touch another thing.”

He swiped a lamp, threw it.

She didn’t even move, just pursed her lips at the heap that landed five feet to her left. “Carmen liked that lamp. So, guess I’m glad it’s gone,” she singsonged.

To my left, Tye stalked toward Colm with his shoulders back, fists clenched. Colm was about to end up face-first in Simona’s dung.

“Easy, Tye,” James warned. “We don’t need the Gardaí at the door like.”

I didn’t know what the local cops would make of a library full of centuries of stories about winged people and soul energy. James would probably find himself at the wrong pyre of an Irish witch trial.

“What, ya wanna let him destroy the rest of the damn place?” Tye barked, then jabbed a finger at me before pointing to the door. “Roe, get on out of here.”

Colm followed Tye’s finger, ball-bearing eyes narrowing on me. “So yer still here, are ye? Haven’t they told ye their fairy tales that had Lana going crazy?” He tossed a chair out of his way. “Yer gonna be next, ye hear me? They took Lana, buried her body up there. I know they did. Too many going missing,” he spat, and lunged for the fire poker.

Everyone sucked in a breath, backing up when he brandished it.

I bumped into something hard and warm.

Bryn’s fingers curled over my shoulder, thumb grazing my neck. “Rowan, you should return to the kitchen,” he murmured, voice vibrating against my back.

Like hell I was leaving James out here with Colm and a fire poker. Bryn couldn’t do anything with his cane, James was too soft to kill a tiny spider, and Kazie was afraid of spiders.

We all looked at Tye.

Colm tossed another book across the room but kept the poker extended. “Tell me where Lana is,” he demanded as Tye edged around him.

“We buried her in Simona’s barn,” Tye mocked.

“ Tye !” James exclaimed, pulling at his hair. “Would ye stop baiting him like!”

He grinned as Colm rounded on us.

“She left, you idiot,” Kazie hissed. “Probably couldn’t stand the sight of your ugly mug.”

This time, the book that sailed for her only nearly missed.

I reached for the screwdriver in my tool belt, palming the flathead instrument like it’d be some help against a three-foot iron rod. Nereida could use this though—she could throw a dagger a hundred feet, would have probably pinned this guy to the wall with it.

James held out his hands pleadingly. “Colm, ye know someone in her family passed away. She had to leave quickly.”

“That’s feckin’ bullshit. She came to me the night before she went missing, raving about what you all have going on here,” Colm shouted. “Said you gave her drugs—”

That sounded familiar.

“—and ye made her hallucinate. Then the next day, poof—she’s gone,” Colm said, snapping the fingers that weren’t holding the poker. “Just tell me the feckin’ truth. Tell me where she is.”

In a move like water, Bryn slipped in front of me.

But the action drew Colm’s attention, and his hazel eyes fixed on my new bodyguard. “Who the hell are ye?”

With the screwdriver clenched in my fist, I tried to step around again, but Bryn backed up, pressing me between the wall and the hard line of him. Not a bad place to be under another circumstance.

We can arrange such .

I rose on my tiptoes, met Tye’s eyes over Bryn’s shoulder. Do something , I mouthed, then tried to pass Bryn the screwdriver under his arm.

“Rowan, I am not planning on replacing a lightbulb,” he said mildly, boxing me in like Colm wasn’t bearing down on us both.

“Only you would think you need a screwdriver to replace a lightbulb.”

Bryn’s response was to flatten me against the wall. “How I do enjoy your wit, Rowan. However, perhaps this is best left to me.”

Well, if it was, Colm was about to turn us both into a Ruhaven skewer.

“Lad, ye’d better leave now,” James warned, sliding to Kazie and grasping her outstretched hand.

The room quieted, all but for the slowly ticking clocks and the sound of Colm’s heavy breathing as he advanced with the poker on Bryn.

Then he stopped. His eyes widened, so much that the underside of his eyelids pulsed a sickly red. He backed up a step, mouth popping open, then another, until the chesterfield caught him behind the knees and he toppled over. His face went sheet white.

I gripped Bryn’s shoulder, felt the muscle ripple underneath.

And then I knew—a glimmer. He’d shown Colm a glimmer.

A shudder rolled down my spine at the memory of what Bryn had shown me in that room in Oslo—a ripple of something underneath the surface that was terrifying not in the image, but in the knowledge that something other existed.

“You’re crazy,” Colm mumbled as Tye grabbed him by the collar, but he didn’t have to do much, as Colm was tripping over his heels to get out.

Tye kicked open the main doors and tossed Colm bodily through the sunlit gap. Simona’s annoyed baying groaned through before Tye shut the doors, locked them. “Well, ain’t that fun,” he said, dusting his hands.

When Bryn stepped away from me, James demanded, “What the bleedin’ hell did ye do that for? Ye think ‘tis not bad enough he’s got the idea we’re a bunch of witches up here, now ye’ve got to show him Evil Bryn too!”

I choked on a laugh. Evil Bryn.

Kazie ducked around James to pick up his book. The breath wheezed out of him when she slapped him in the stomach. “I never liked these poems, too stuffy. English ,” she said to me with a flick of her hair. “Better to read something in Ruhaven, and plus, it’s all men. Really, James.”

They were crazy. All of them.

I narrowed my eyes at Bryn, who was eyeing me thoughtfully. And especially you.

Me, my Rowan?

“James, aren’t you going to call the police?” I pressed as he righted the furniture.

“What— Bring the Gardaí here? Reading me journals and looking at me paintings? No, we’ll let him walk it off so. Best this whole thing goes away, though I’ve not an idea for how to make it so.”

S ince absolutely nothing fazed Tye, including a half drunk Irishman barging into Naruka, he asked me to help him clean out the stalls to make room for the tractor he’d rented. He wanted to get the fields turned before he headed back to L’Ardoise to straighten things out with the renters.

So I spent the next week helping him as much as I could. Unlike James, Bryn, or Kazie, we didn’t talk about Ruhaven, but the various games we were missing back home. Hockey was starting up again and so was football, but with the time difference, the only matches we caught were on Sunday evenings.

And as promised, Tye had booked us two tickets to a hurling match on Saturday.

“Do you play any sports?” I asked Bryn as we made our usual morning walk to the Gate. Burnt leaves crunched under our feet.

“Rowan, I confess I have never found any appeal in chasing an inflatable ball.” Well, when you put it that way . “But before my leg, I enjoyed glacier walking in the fjords near my home in Odda, though I would not consider that a sport.”

It was the most Bryn of responses. “Not really a team sport, I’m guessing.”

“On the contrary. It requires a great deal of teamwork.”

Silence descended, so thick and heavy that I said, lamely, “So you aren’t from Oslo?”

He tugged his cane out of a dense patch of mud. “No, I grew up in Odda, where I worked on my mother’s ship, then attended art school in Trondheim, and after my exile, found work in the capital.”

“Mother’s ship ? What were you doing there—painting?”

Amusement danced in the corners of Bryn’s eyes. “I am sure my mother would have found that preferable to my working as one of the crew.”

My eyes widened so far in their sockets my eyeballs would have toppled out if they weren’t attached at the corneas. “You were a sailor ?”

“You sound surprised.”

I scanned his pleated trousers, tailored sweater, and cashmere scarf. “But they’re… And you’re…you’re…”

His lopsided grin was the work of a god who knew precisely what she was doing. “I am what, Rowan?”

I swallowed the hum in my throat. “Just you.” Amusement flickered. “So I guess you’re a knot expert.”

His face barely changed. “I am sure I could tie a boat without it floating away.”

I was picking up his rhythm now. “You’re kind of funny.”

Over the next half hour, I discovered ten varieties of fish I’d never eaten—and two I definitely never would. According to his mother, Bryn had almost sunk her ship twice, but he was sure she exaggerated the second attempt. When the boat’s chef quit, he’d taken over the cooking for a week, which ended in half the crew having food poisoning.

“I am particularly partial to your energy theory,” he said when we reached the Gate and the conversation changed to the Inquitate. “Everything in Tallah is about balance. That is why there is Ruhaven and Drachaut, why mates exist. For all, there must be an equal and opposite.”

Mates . Was Bryn about to see his now? Did he want nothing more than this conversation to be over so he could be with her?

Bryn paused mid-unrolling a blanket, looked at me. “Are you well, Rowan?”

“Yeah, fine.”

Because I wanted to avoid even thinking about mates, I stuffed myself into a blanket that even Bryn couldn’t claim wasn’t warm enough and gladly sunk into Ruhaven. Later, after I’d met up with Jamellian and Kazmira, who were still figuring out how to get us to Drachaut, Bryn woke me with coffee and lunch.

And so the week continued, with Bryn hoping to encounter the Inquitate in the Gate, and me worrying that Colm would come back to Naruka—but there was no sign of him. There was no Gardaí at our door, either. So however much he was certain James had buried Lana out back, it wasn’t enough to report it.

What if, instead of moving away, she’d actually made the Fall? That’d explain why she broke things off with Colm.

Would her portrait have “ made the Fall ” next to her name like a sticker you earned, or would there just be a plaque up by the Gate?

I looped my thumbs in my pockets and did a slow walk of the lounge. It was a jolt to realize I knew some of these faces, had passed them every day and never looked.

There was Mohammed, smiling in a polished frame and wearing the glasses that I’d dug up, then Amelia, Ben, and a few others I’d come across in Bryn’s notes. My lips twitched when I found Patrick’s photo.

An orange tabby with one green eye, one blue, posed in his lap—Hermès, according to his diary. Beside it, a painting of a Ruhaven on an Irish hunt was so realistic, I could smell the sweat on the horse’s neck.

Another portrait drew my attention. Noticeably smaller than the rest, it had the faded look of an era just discovering color. But I knew the stern lips of the lady would be crimson, her eyes a piercing gray.

Carmen .

Tye said she’d grown up with James’s mother, which would make her at least fifty. No, sixty. But neither the photograph nor the woman in person looked anywhere near that. Despite 1983 scribbled on the bottom, her skin was as unblemished as Bryn’s, but tighter, like a wet sheet clipped over marble.

I pulled out my notepad, added questions about her age to my notes.

“Hello, Rowan.”

My heart skidded at the voice, at the accent that sketched images of colorful villages in a Norwegian countryside, and I willed it to relax.

I rather enjoy your reaction.

I turned to see Bryn lounging against the kitchen’s doorjamb, a leather bag slung over one shoulder and bunching the otherwise-ironed fabric. Heat from the fire ruffled hair that had grown past his ears since he’d arrived.

“I was worried about you this morning,” he said.

“Worried? Why?”

“Besides my terminal fear you shall fall off our roof? You visited the market with James, where Colm may frequent.”

“I guess I should drag you with me everywhere then, just so you can show Colm your…” I wiggled my fingers, “ glimmer .”

With a smile, Bryn crossed to me, his cane thumping steadily on a rug worn by time, coffee spills, and Kazie. “I must admit, it does sound less intimidating when you say it like that,” he said archly, then grinned when I let out a small laugh.

“Actually, I was thinking about Colm and Lana, how James said she left…”

Bryn kept pace with me as I inspected the portraits. “Yes?”

“Just that, well, she didn’t make the Fall, did she? And her moving is just some, I don’t know, euphemism?”

This time, his grin was a wide smile that lit up his eyes. “Like sending the dog to a farm in the country, is it?”

“Something like that,” I muttered, stepping in front of Carmen’s portrait again.

“You may rest assured we did not send Lana ‘up the farm.’” He glanced at the portrait of Carmen, then my notes, his eyes tightening as he skimmed over the meager lines. “If Lana had made the Fall,” he continued, the air of humor gone, “Colm would not remember her. Because we were never meant to be here, Rowan. When Ruhaven claims us back, we evaporate from the memories of everyone who knew us.”

I studied him. He wasn’t joking. “Evaporate?” I repeated.

He tucked his hands into his pockets, studying me in turn. “From all but Ruhavens’ memories, yes. For everyone else, you will become a name forgotten, an old story—something that happened to a friend, not to themselves—an unoccupied space where your mother once thought you existed.” The room chilled a degree. “Should you choose to accept the call,” he added.

Who would ? When everything that made someone would become nothing—not only their body gone, but not a single mark of them upon anyone’s memory.

“Would you?” I asked.

He brushed my hand, the touch like wind on sea-sprayed skin. “That will depend, but I have time yet. The Gate calls to you before the end. Then you have but a few weeks to make the Fall. Something, perhaps, you shall witness of another first. It is an indescribable experience,” he said, pausing. “To be there when it happens.”

Outside, the chimes picked up their tempo, hollow tones mixing with the drone of cows.

“Some have seen visions,” Bryn continued, “others have spoken to the dead, and when we watched Mohammed Fall, James told me he witnessed his entire life pass. He believes it is Ruhaven speaking to us. That she is asking something.”

“It sounds like a religious experience,” I said hesitantly.

“One could consider it such.”

Because a strange silence had fallen, I shifted us back to Lana. “So Lana didn’t make the Fall because Colm wouldn’t have remembered her.”

“Precisely. It was Levi who showed her the Gate, and she became quite inconsolable afterward, choosing to leave promptly. That very night, I presume, though apparently not before telling Colm enough to raise his suspicions.”

Hadn’t I tried the same? Taken James’s car, made a run for it.

“Levi—you listed him as missing.” I opened my notebook, scanned the dates. “And he’s Lana’s triplet.”

“That is correct.” Bryn nipped my notebook from me, quicker than a bird on a worm.

“Hey!”

He looked either amused or disgusted as he flipped through it. “Rowan, it occurred to me when you discovered the triplets that these notes resemble a detective’s of a crime scene. Where is your daily entry on Ruhaven?”

I swiped for the journal, but he lifted it out of reach. God, please, don’t let Bryn see my notes on him.

Why? What shall I find, my Rowan? he seemed to say.

What an ass you were.

Ah, “ were.” We are progressing.

“Bryn, would you—” I dove and missed again, but Bryn snagged me before I could rip the frame off the wall for balance. “I am writing about Ruhaven. Right there,” I insisted when he held the journal out of reach.

“Shall I learn of your entertaining adventures with the Azekiel?” He tilted his head back, spreading the shadowed pages above him, then frowned. “Do not tell me you have only this paltry entry? Surely, he is treating you better.”

I felt the vein under my eye twitch. “ Bryn ,” I ground out. “Please, would you just—”

“Ah, this one must be from the day you thought a clock could return you from Ruhaven.” He spared me a glance that held a touch of humor and warning. “It says only that you beheld a—and I quote you now, Rowan—‘large metal contraption.’” He closed the journal with a snap and held it out. “Certainly, one does not imagine the portrait of beauty that is Ruhaven from this.”

As if I had any right to record a life that wasn’t even mine, to commit the fraud to writing.

“Tell me something,” Bryn continued, limping to a card table, where he withdrew a notepad from his shoulder bag and laid it on the marble top. “Why did you decide to move to Naruka? Was Tye so very convincing?”

I frowned at his tone. “Why are you asking?”

“Morbidly curious.”

“I’d prefer you just morbid.”

This earned me a lopsided grin that replaced the bite in his words. “I do not think so.” He withdrew a blade from his pocket, then turned it to his pencil, shaving off thin wooden strips into a tiny cup. “Are you always so taciturn on this subject?”

Taciturn . “Isn’t English your second language?”

“Third,” he said, his eyes catching the twinkle of the lanterns. “Well, Rowan?”

“I wanted a change, that’s all.”

“A change? Someone does not live their entire life in a town of a few thousand and suddenly move without cause to Ireland. Why did you?”

“I already told you.” He studied my face, and because I didn’t like what he might see, I stared hard at the pictures of those who’d traveled here before me. “What did you say you did in the Gate last? Some research on the gears, or—”

“No, Rowan,” Bryn said firmly. “Tell me this, or perhaps, next time I shall let Kazie or James have the pleasure of anchoring while you are being made love to by a ‘ feathered beast man .’”

I whirled, and caught the wicked humor in his eyes before he blinked it away. “We’re not doing— that —yet. And please don’t call it that.”

Bryn propped his chin on fingers that would make a piano beg to be played by them. “Do you prefer something more descriptive? I can be inventive.”

I bet he could. “No.”

“Then tell me of why you left L’Ardoise.”

I wanted to give the same answer, but his stare killed the words before they could wet my tongue.

Why did I leave?

Yes, Rowan.

I stuffed my hands in my pockets, staring at the portrait of Mohammed, the man whose glasses I’d crushed in my ungrateful fist. What had convinced him to come here? Had he worked long days on a farm like Kazie and dreamed of something better?

Or had he been like me?

It had been hard to work in the shop with my father after Willow died, then to sit down for Sunday dinner with my parents, to see that empty chair and feel what they hadn’t wanted to say aloud. That it shouldn’t have been Willow.

Rowan?

I blinked, my throat suddenly tight and aching, my chest no better. “Let James take me to the Gate again, then,” I said and made for the stairs.

Rising, Bryn grasped my arm as I passed. “Rowan, I did not intend to—”

“ There ya are.” My head snapped up at Tye’s voice. “Thought ya might still be at the Gate.” He rolled out his neck, spared a glance at Bryn. “Ya ready?”

“For?”

“Date night,” he said, grabbing my jacket. “We got a game to catch.”

Bryn’s eyes flashed hot before he dropped my arm.