There were a lot of daughters, now. Six at least, assuming Margrit Knight hadn't already gone and gotten herself with child. There was the one, the stumpy gargoyle's daughter, that nobody was even supposed to know about, but then, Grace knew a lot of things she shouldn't. And the other gargoyle's daughter—but she was dead, which was just as well, because she'd been mad and dangerous both.
Bloody Janx and Daisani had four between them: the half-breed girls Kate and Ursula, who had at least gone away after their fathers wrecked a good chunk of Manhattan, and then these two. Jana, the first full-blood child born to the dragons in Grace's long life and more, yet barely a century out of the shell. She took everything seriously, an emerald-eyed child whose black hair held red highlights that reminded Grace of her father, and whose slight human form carried the weight of a dragon with it. Jana, and then her sister Emma, who was half a vampire and half a witch. That one flitted about, sweetly interested, hardly tethered to the world: even her hair floated, black strands idling along with her as if they been exploring and then drawn away before they were quite finished. Her guileless blue gaze made it easy to imagine she didn't realize when she poked her pretty nose where it didn't belong, but Grace didn't believe that for a minute. If they'd had the decency to go away like Kate and Ursula had, then Grace could have put them out of her mind and forgotten about them. Kept herself and her world beneath the city streets safe and quiet a while longer, no itch to search out the impossible or answer questions that had been left lying for centuries now. At least the mother had left, that cold-blooded Russian creature who was all a witch and had been Baba Yaga's daughter besides. She claimed she was no longer that at all, but neither did she take a name to define herself as anything else, and there had never been a witch's daughter whom Grace had known who didn't owe something to her mother.
"Witches," Grace spat aloud, if softly. At her side, the police detective cast her a questioning glance. Grace, casting a sidling glance back, thought if she were to be honest, it might not only be the damned witches who awakened the itch to answer unexamined questions. But then, honest wasn't a word Grace used to describe herself, and if history books did, she no longer knew if they might be liars.
The stolen light beneath the city did Tony Pulcella no favors. He was meant for sunshine, where his olive skin glowed and his brown eyes lit half to gold. He could have been cast from the opposite mold used for Grace herself; she was moonlight pale and had been long before she took to the tunnels beneath New York to live. But he came down into the tunnels to visit more often than Grace went above. She had her excuses; Grace always did. The runaways and street kids she helped shelter and keep warm needed her presence to maintain order, or a homework group needed a tutor, or there was trouble in the tunnels that only the likes of Grace O'Malley could chase off. Tony found the time to come to her, delaying going home from work, or coming in early to spend an hour or two beneath the streets. Some nights he went from his shift at the precinct to the tunnels and back again; she didn't remember, quite, when he'd begun leaving a clean suit in the cool brickwork chamber she called her own. It had been years—decades—since a man had tried so hard, for her.
It had been decades—centuries, even—since she'd allowed one to.
And that thought lay too close to the itch to answer impossible questions for Grace's comfort, so she leaned in to kiss the detective before remembering that the daughters were still there. She muttered, "Witches," again, against his mouth this time, and less bitterly.
"What about us?" Emma's sweet voice drifted across the chamber: round concrete walls had bounced Grace's curse to her, though if the young witch heard the distaste in Grace's word, her tone said she'd taken no offense.
"Witches get Grace's back up," Grace replied. Emma chuckled, but a spark lit in Tony's gaze. She'd touched too hard on her own mysteries there, and though he was patient for someone who solved puzzles for a living, he wouldn't wait on it forever. That he already knew more than most made no never mind; a mystery wasn't solved unless all the pieces fell into place. And she had no fear that her secrets would drive him away: Tony Pulcella had been glad to learn of the Old Races' secret existence alongside his own world. Margrit Knight had underestimated him. Grace didn't want to do that her own self, but the habit of silence was hard to break.
But break it she must, and soon, or lose the man, and she'd lost enough loves in her long life already.
"Which witch was it that cursed you?" Emma asked, oblivious to—or, Grace thought with a sharp look at the ethereal girl, privy to—Grace's most secret thoughts. Emma looked up from her task—repairing jeans, a dull chore she appeared to enjoy—with such a gormless gaze that Grace snorted disbelief. A smile touched Emma's lips and she returned to her mending, but her attention, sharper now, remained on Grace.
"Fúamnach. Her name was Fúamnach, and she was said to be a daughter of the Tuatha."
"The people beneath the hills," Emma murmured to her mending. "Perhaps she was the only Tuathan to ever truly exist. You know how witches are made, after all."
Tony blurted, "I don't!" with the air of a man knowing he's overplayed his hand but desperate not to let the moment of revelation slip past. Jana, who, though in human form, was lazing beside a heating pipe that protruded from the wall, let go a laugh. "And of all of us, you should, as you're the only one who could."
"Detective Pulcella doesn't carry any secrets dark enough to bring a witch to life," Emma said in a pleasantly disagreeable tone. "Not even if it lay bursting from the earth, all but alive already."
"The very definition of a good man." Jana settled again, though she'd truly barely moved at all, as Grace watched Tony's expression twitch between pleased and chagrined.
"A man needn't have dark secrets to be a man, Tony. We don't all need to carry darkness inside us."
"I know, I know. It's the patriarchy, isn't it. Convincing us that men have to have dark sides to be really manly." A thread of rue wound its way through the detective's words, but Grace's smile grew.
"That it is. A witch is born from human secrets, mo chroí. Secrets whispered into the earth until they take on life of their own, for there's power in secrets. There's blood and hate and anger and lust in secrets, and there's love and laughter and joy. More hate, though, or at least that's what births most witches."
Tony shot Emma a startled look. The girl laughed aloud. "Not I. I was born the usual way, as was my mother, who was the daughter of a man her mother later ate. But my grandmother." Emma nodded. "She was born of the earth, and secrets, and no living mortal will ever slay her."
"Baba Yaga," Jana said from where she lounged. "Mother says she has grimoires full of secrets about the Old Races, but she won't let me fly to Russia to steal them."
Grace saw it, the protest that flew to Tony's lips and went no farther: Baba Yaga? that protest said. The Russian fairy tale? The witch from folklore? She saw, too, what he thought then: that he had—albeit unknowing—tracked a dragonlord's criminal activities for years, that his ex-girlfriend was in love with a gargoyle, that he sat amongst fairy tale creatures even now, and that he had known, accepted, that Grace herself had long since been cursed by a witch. She saw all of that in his indrawn breath and the silence he kept with it. His next breath, though, he spoke with, and said, "I guess if there are witches it's not surprising we know the names of one or two. But I didn't know the one you said," he said to Grace. "Fooam… nack?"
"Fúamnach." Grace emphasized the noch at the end and Tony repeated it under his breath. "The Tuatha dé Danann were the fairy folk of Ireland, long ago. Human-sized, not the twee things like Tinkerbell. They were said to live beneath the hills—"
"—and witches are born from the earth," Tony finished, almost triumphant. "Was she the only one?"
Grace shrugged one shoulder. "The Tuatha were before even my time, love. Ask Daisani, or Janx."
Tony, dryly, said, "I'd rather not," and laughter rippled around the chamber.
Then it was Emma, the witch's daughter—of course—who asked the question no one, not Tony, not the massive gargoyle Alban Korund, not even endlessly curious Margrit Knight, had been bold enough to ask: "What happened?"
A smile pulled at the corner of Grace's mouth. "I got involved with a girl."
She wasn't meant to be at sea at all. Had never been meant to be: the price of being a girl, even if she was the only child of the O'Malley and his wife. She remembered still the day she had asked her father if she might go to Spain with him. Remembered his booming laugh and his mocking answer that she could not, because her long red hair would be caught in the ship's ropes.
Remembered, too, his face as she had drawn her belt knife and sawed her braid off as she stood there in front of him, and how the plaits sprang free into rivulets like blood upon the earth when she threw the severed hair at his feet.
They called her mhaol after that, cropped-hair or baldie, but the O'Malley let her sail with him to Spain, and she returned to Ireland's western shores with a good command of Latin, and the skill to write it. She was nine then, and the next seven years she spent at her father's side, learning the art of leadership and the skills to sail a ship. She was years married and the mother of three when her father died, and not a soul, not even her father's son by another woman, disputed her claim to being the O'Malley, head of her clan. Nor did anyone dare decry the O'Malley when she took to the seas to protect their westward-facing lands, as every O'Malley had done before her.
And neither, more was the pity, did anyone dissuade her of the taking of a bad wager: that she herself alone could navigate a small little currach from miles beyond Clew Bay back to the safety of shore on a morning when a red sun rose warning of storms.
It had seemed a fine idea at the time. Saint Brendan had done it, after all. Had taken himself and nine monks all the bloody way to the Americas, if legend could be trusted. In the small hours of a morning, having taken deeply of the drink, Grace, trusting both legend and her own navigational skills, had been fool enough to let someone drop her off in the hide-hulled boat in the middle of the ocean. The night had been clear, though, with no hint of the upcoming storm. Now, at dawn and still half-stupid with drink, Grace scowled at the scarlet sky as if the weight of her impotent gaze might cow it into fair blue. The sky cared not at all, and the storm would care even less when it drowned her. Grace swore, once at those who had laid the bet, and thrice at herself for taking it.
The currach was a wee little thing hardly long enough to lie down in, with no mast and a single bloody oar. A child could paddle it around the bay for a week without tiring, but the bay would bring a child back to shore with its tides. The ocean would offer Grace no such help, and besides that, if she didn't come to a casual docking at her own castle on Clare Island she would be laughed out of being the O'Malley; making landfall in north Mayo, or down the country at Galway, would nearly be worse than never making landfall again at all. She took the oar in her hands, feeling it settle familiarly against old callouses, and set off with one eye on the sky and the other on the horizon, where a shadow marked Ireland's placement in the cold northerly sea.
A pleasant ache settled into her shoulders and arms as she worked her way east, and the thought struck her that, so long as she beat the storm getting home, rowing across the ocean wasn't a bad way to spend a morning. There were no children wanting attention and no men seeking advice, no ships to collect taxes on and no squabbles with the other clan lords to tend to. Just herself and her sweat and the cool sea air, with the sound of gulls complaining and water slapping the boat to keep her company.
That and the wind coming up. More than was safe: enough that she was only holding her own against the sea rather than being driven back to the west, and then in a little time, she was no longer managing even that. Waves swelled, tossing the currach as they wished; it became Grace's duty to lash the oar down, that she might not lose it, and do what she could to keep the boat from filling as rainwater pissed down from the sky. Her fingers went numb with the cold, and in due time, so did her mind. Dry was a thing of the past, a distant memory not to be dreamed of in the moment; indeed, drawing another breath above the water was all that could be dreamed of, in the moment.
She was too wet and too cold and too tired to even realized it when the currach capsized.
A Serpent slept beneath the ocean's surface. Far beneath: it wound around the ocean floor, squeezing and flexing, stretching and sighing. Earthquakes rumbled when it did, and mountains rose, or great belches of gas erupted in bubbles that reached the sky. A bubble had caught her, and drifted downward again, as if her weight was enough to anchor it but too little to send her falling through its curve into the cold water beyond. It sank until it bounced against the bottom, and with each bounce, brought her closer to the serpent.
It was the devil himself, she decided: if there'd been a serpent in the garden, it had to be this one, large enough to end the world. Though it didn't look interested in ending the world, or anything else. It might even have been said to save her. "Sure and of course it did," Grace said beneath her breath. "I'm the O'Malley, after all," and laughed at her own audacity.
The Serpent opened its eye at the sound of her laughter, an eye three times her height and full of its own glittering light. There shouldn't be any light this deep at all: she shouldn't have been able to see the Serpent, or anything else. But then if she was applying good sense, she ought to have drowned an hour or more ago.
Maybe she had.
The thought made her shudder from her bones out. She was cold, as the dead were meant to be, but so was the fathomless water, so that was no signifier. She breathed still, but perhaps the dead breathed, on the other side of the night. "What do you want of me?"
An answer came, but not in words. Hardly even in images: it was as though the sense of what the mighty beast wanted overwhelmed her, took her thoughts and mind and self away to be replaced by a knowledge as endless as the sea. Mortals skimmed the surface of the sea, fighting battles with each other and the weather, all almost too small to notice. All just large enough, together, to sometimes disturb the Serpent's sleep. To make it aware, as a creature so vast could hardly be, of the lesser beings in the world it encircled. Very few other living things came to its notice: sea serpents, perhaps, for they dove so deep as to find the Serpent himself, and brought with them whispers of the world above. Perhaps it was those smaller serpents who had made him aware of humans at all. Other sea monsters, squids and great whales, brushed by him from time to time, carrying stories of the small things that hunted on the surface. And sometimes a ship sent its crew into the deep as well, but very few, very few indeed, of those drowned sailors brought with them enough of a spark to draw the Serpent's attention. More of those luckless seafarers were taken by the siryns, whose songs had once soothed the Serpent's slumber, but who never swam into the deeps where he coiled around the heart of the world. For all that they lived in the ocean, they were closer to belonging to the other, his counterpart, the green thing that grew through all the land and nurtured the life that had crawled from his domain into hers. The serpents were his, and perhaps even their winged brethren who flew the skies above, but the dragons never came into the sea, and the Serpent was—
"Lonely," Grace breathed, "and curious, I'd say. What has that to do with me?"
The world as she knew it, blue and green and grey, came to life as if the Serpent woke every memory she had at once. The sun raced through the sky and hid behind clouds, a thousand days of living, of dying, of birthing and fighting. Clear moments she remembered without prompting: her red braid bleeding on the ground, her childrens' first squalls. Moments she had forgotten and many of them better left so: unwarranted cruelty and unbearable shame awakened to haunt her, for she wouldn't easily forget them again. Moments that lay in between, forgotten in the daily business of life but recalled with a certain scent or taste. Memory even seemed to cast forward, as if the Serpent couldn't quite understand imagination or anticipation, and saw a dream of what might be as something no less real than the recollections of what had been. The one constant was Grace herself, a fixed and always-changing point, weighted, going forward, with a sense of observation: the Serpent, seeing her world through her eyes.
"Hah! And what do I get out of this?"
Water pressed in, sudden and cold and unforgiving. Salt filled Grace's lungs, and a sensation of fish nibbling at her fingers, at her flesh, at her very bones, gave a seafarer's answer to the question. She flung her hands up as if she could protect herself from the surging ocean and found no water clawing at her face, but still felt the weight of it in her chest and throat. As quickly as it had come, it vanished, leaving her coughing and doubled as she gasped for air. Wiping her eyes, she wheezed, "You'll throw me back to land, then, like a fish too small to keep? It's a devil's bargain, beastie, but it's better than drowning. I'll take it, and sing a song for my supper, too."
The Serpent's eye glittered again and its whole head settled a little, like a cat expecting a bit of meat thrown to it if it lay quietly enough. Grace ran her hand over her eyes again and frowned at its glimmering gaze. "You wouldn't really want me to sing, beastie. My brother Donal has the voice for it, but mine is only passing fair." The Serpent waited, and she sighed. "Though who else would sing for you here in the depths, I suppose. Those mermaids you put me in mind of haven't sung in a long time, have they? All right, but the decision is yours to regret." Her voice, she knew, wasn't as bad as all that, but even when they were no taller than her knee, her children went to their father or uncle for lullabies when they could. Grace found one of those tunes and brought it to life for the Serpent, and then another, for she knew the words and melodies as well as anyone might, even if her song wasn't as sweet as another's might be. And then for the sake of singing, she sang a third, making bold enough to sit by the Serpent's jaw and close her eyes while she drew jigs and poems and laments from memory, until her voice was gone. She had been hours under the sea, she thought, though the cold no longer seemed to touch her. It was magic at work, and she who had never done more than blow a kiss to the fairy forts to help pass safely by, was content with that: superstition could be winked at, but magic could not be denied. She stood, not surprised to find her muscles stiff, and looked up at the Serpent again. Its eye was lidded, barely a glimmer of light curving at the bottom, but something shone at the inner corner. Grace reached for it, then snorted at herself: the beast's eye was thrice her height; she could hardly hope to reach the distance up to its eye without climbing its face. Bold she might be, but not that bold.
As if it heard her, the Serpent opened its eye again. Grace swore she saw amusement flicker in its depths, before the monster shook its enormous head once and sent her bouncing across the sea floor and up into the waves.
She awakened on a beach, drenched to the bone and cold as a dead man's knuckles. She'd made a pillow of her hands and a stone while she slept, if sleep it could be called, and sat up rubbing at a sore spot where the stone had poked against her cheek. Even under the dull light of a dreary day—rain drizzled down and the sky was so uniformly grey Grace couldn't tell where the sun sat in the sky—even in that light, the stone she'd used as a pillow shone a deep grey opalescence, so liquid in appearance she prodded it to make certain it wasn't a puddle. It wasn't; the ache in her cheek told her that, but she prodded it anyway, then lifted it in her hands. It filled her two palms, its gently rounded bottom fitting against them nicely. The whole of it was roughly oval, but swollen to a nub at the top, like a tear frozen just before it finished settling from its fall. It hadn't the weight of a stone, either, any more than it had the look of the rocks on the rest of the beach: if she looked away from it, she could imagine she held nothing in her hands at all. Grace stood, the stone in one hand, and looked out to the water as if she might see a serpent's coil break the surface and sink again. There was nothing there but the choppy white of small breaking waves, and the arguments of gulls as they dove at the water. At least the storm was over, and if she hadn't come home direct to Clew Bay, then she had still survived, which was more than might be expected, even of the O'Malley.
She wrapped the stone in the extra fabric of her shirt—its saffron yellow was dulled by seawater now, and would need to be re-dyed—tied a knot to keep it from falling out, then struck out for higher land and a sense of where she might be. Far enough away from home that Croagh Padraig, the holy mountain, couldn't be seen once she'd found a hilltop to look from, but then, with the high fog, even the hilltop she stood on was shrouded. The wind, if it blew like it had done through all the summer, would be from the north, but Grace hated to set out only to learn she'd been going the wrong way once the skies cleared. By all rights the sea should at least be to the west, but she'd spent a night nestled with a serpent at the heart of the world, and she didn't like to chance it that all was as it might usually have been.
A cairn stood on a hilltop not so far away, and near the cairn, smoke from a fire made a line against the fog, before mist made the smoke its own. Grace, cursing the shoes she'd lost in the sea, made her way down the hill and through forest to the cairn-hill, where the smoke came from not near, but within, the cairn itself. She stopped short and cast another glance toward the sea, half-suspicious of mockery now. It was one thing to be faced with the Serpent of Eden itself, and another altogether to then march up a hill to a grave with living beings within. "I am the O'Malley," she shouted at the cairn. "If this is earth of the Tuatha dé Danann I mean you no harm and will leave you in peace!"
Silence met her cry: silence, and then the soft scramble of shifting earth before a child's face emerged from the cairn. A filthy child's face, with hair so matted and dirty it had no color of its own, and as human a child's face as ever there was. "My mother is Fúamnach of the Tuath Dé."
Grace crouched, her breath leaving her in a laugh. "And your father?"
The child shrugged. "A man."
"And yourself?"
"My mother's daughter, but nothing more. I have no old magics or godhead. I have run away," the girl declared. "I will not be of use to her in the only way the untalented daughter of a god might be."
"And what way is that?"
"She sups on my flesh and drinks of my blood to bring the power she wasted in making me back into herself." The child extended a hand to show Grace that three fingers were missing, and the dirty scars that said she had not been born without.
"Mother of God." Grim with curiosity, Grace added, "Why not eat you all at once?"
The child's gaze was flat. "Had I been born a son she would have, but a daughter has some power of her own, and not even a witch dares eat it all at once, for fear of losing herself to the rising magic. I cannot work magic, but neither can she eat me all at once."
"Mother of God," Grace said again. "How do I stop her from eating you?"
"Why would you do that?"
Grace's eyebrows rose. "We don't often eat children, where I come from. Much as we might sometimes like to."
The girl's expression became so suspicious that Grace laughed. "Children try the soul, girl, but we don't eat them. If you've run away I suppose you won't be calling your mother here, so tell me how to find her." She glanced toward the sea, hardly visible now beyond the hills, and muttered, "And tell me if the sea still lies to the west. I don't know this land at all, and I would have said I knew Connacht like the back of my hand."
"Some witches live in houses that walk the earth, that they may not be easily found. Others cast a glamor on the hills they call their own, that the mind slips and cannot see clearly when it encounters the witch's home. My mother lives in Mabh's tomb, but you'll never find her by climbing the hill and calling her name. You must enter my barrow, and go always to your left, even when the path leads only to the right. When you've gone thrice sinister a circle, you will find her by her fire, gnawing on my bones."
Grace glanced at her own fingers, the ones the child was missing. "They're thin bones there. Surely she's eaten them all by now."
The girl, filthy as she was, managed an even filthier look, and dragged both herself and a stick from the cairn. With the stick's help, she stood, letting Grace look her fill at a leg half missing. "She ought to have taken both my legs at the start," the girl snarled, "so I couldn't run away."
Sickness rose in Grace's gullet, though she didn't look away. "How do I kill a witch?"
"With the secret that birthed her," the child said, and to Grace's drawn-down eyebrows, bitterly, said, "You don't. You might bargain with her, but no human has much a witch desires."
"All I have with me is my own life, and that, I already owe to my people and my children. How can I help you?" Wind crawled up Grace's nape, ruffling short hair and lifting bumps on her arms. She would have said that witches and magic were not for the likes of her to truck with, but fate meant to say differently.
"You might steal me away," the child said hopelessly. "I might travel safely over the water, or not, but even if I should die on the salty sea I would die my own creature, and not my mother's meal."
"Now that I can do," Grace said with a smile. "Why would you die on the sea, when you sail with the O'Malley?"
"Because a witch can't cross running water wider than her stride," the girl said in a withering tone, "and I am a witch's daughter."
Grace gently set her teeth together, thinking of her own daughter Margaret, who was thirteen years of age and obnoxious, and did not slap the tone out of the witch's daughter's mouth. "A daughter with no witchery of your own save the life in your veins, so perhaps not a witch yourself. Have you tried to cross water, child, or have you stayed on your hilltop here, like your mother Fúamnach before you?"
A look of guilt and shame skittered across the girl's face before she wiped it into defiance. Grace held up a hand, silencing the excuses that were no doubt about to come, then stood with a sigh. "Down the hill with me, lass, and we'll find a stream to see if you can cross it. At the worst I'll bring you home and wash you, and I'll find the filí to see what tales of witch's secrets he knows. And if I cannot squirrel you away, and I cannot defeat her, then thrice widdershins a circle I'll go and bargain with her, for there must be something a mortal lord can offer a witch."
The girl, leaning on her stick, swayed. "Why?"
Grace sighed again. "Because we don't eat children, girl, and this O'Malley, at least, knows what it is to defy fate and write it the way you wish."
The girl could cross a stream, though she stood a long time on the far bank after Grace waded through, staring at the water as if it might leap from its bed and drown her on its own. Grace waited, if not patiently, until the girl lurched forward awkwardly, with the air of one going to her own death. Her foot, then her stick, plunged into the water, and nothing more happened: no shrieking, no wailing, no melting, no—Grace didn't know, truth be told, what might happen to a witch trying to cross running water. Whatever worst it might be, though, it didn't come to pass, and the girl, astonished, came to stand at Grace's side on the near bank.
"There," Grace said. "We've learned a thing about you. What's your name, child?"
"I have none. A witch doesn't name her daughters, for a thing with a name is a thing defined by something other than its mother."
Grace muttered something not even she could understand, then said, "What name would you choose?"
The girl slid a glance laced with uncertain hope at her. "O'Malley?"
A bark of laughter broke from Grace's throat. "Well, you'll not be the O'Malley; that title is taken. All right, then. Máire," she decided, because to give a witch's daughter the Virgin's name seemed like the best way to draw her away from the witch. "Máire O'Malley. You're my clan now, girl, and no one will eat any more of you so long as I live."
They went south together, for Máire knew the way even when Grace didn't recognize the land. In only a little time the witch's glamour faded and Grace knew the way home. The serpent had thrown her far to the north, though: it was two days' walk before they came to the beaches that Grace called her own, and had the moon not broken through to shine half as bright as day, it might have been another morning before they found Grace's people.
It was testament to them, and to Grace's reputation, that no one had yet begun funeral preparations, or to call her oldest son the O'Malley. Grace kept the tale of the serpent to herself, and claimed that Máire, an orphan, had found her washed up on shore, and offered help. The clan embraced the girl for that, and laughed good-naturedly at her discomfort. Well, a mother who ate her bit by bit wasn't one to show much affection, Grace supposed. Máire would get used to it—or not—and soon enough she'd be judged on her own merits, instead of simply being welcomed as the girl who helped the O'Malley. A fire was built of driftwood, then built higher still, to celebrate the O'Malley's return, and the night ran long with joy. Grace went among those at the beach, reassuring them that it was her own self home safe again, and sent word to her castle on the island that she was returned. The lads in the boat warned her—as if she needed warning—that her children would insist on fighting the out-going tide, and come to shore to meet their mother. In the warning was a question they didn't quite dare ask aloud: why the O'Malley meant to remain on the shore, rather than going to her keep to see the children immediately. But they didn't ask, and she didn't answer, and they did as they were bid, bringing word to her family in their castle.
Her reason for staying a while longer stood on the shore of Clew Bay looking toward Clare Island with something like true fear writ on her dirty features, though. "Crossing a stream is one thing," Máire whispered when Grace came to stand at her side. "A bay of sea water is another."
"What happens, when a witch tries to cross water?" Grace kept her voice low, though with a bonfire going and fish roasting over it, not many were nearby to listen to the O'Malley and her new ward. "Does it drag her down and drown her?"
"Maybe, if she can get onto it in the first place. I saw my mother try, from time to time. It was as if she walked into a wall. At the edge of the water, she could simply go no farther."
"And yet she tried."
"There's never been a witch yet who didn't try to take more than was hers to have." Máire wet her lips, watching the changing tide. "I stood at the stream so long for fear of feeling that wall, if I stepped forward."
"Do you feel it now?"
"No, but…" Máire gestured to the sea, inching backward from where they stood. Even the tide mark lay a few steps ahead of her: she hadn't nerved herself up to the test yet. If it were her own child, Grace would seize the girl and drag her bodily into the water, laughing while she screamed and played at getting away. But her own children had no fear of the sea, nor of their mother's intentions, and so Grace put out a hand, not making quite so bold as to take Máire's without the girl's consent. Máire looked at Grace's outstretched fingers as though she'd never imagined holding someone else's hand, then carefully fit her palm against Grace's. Grace gave an encouraging nod and took a single step forward, waiting to see what Máire would do. She hesitated, then hitched forward, then again, hobbling through sand and stone toward the water's edge.
Grace stopped there, half a step before the retreating waves could reach their toes. "Feel anything, lass?"
"The sand is cold and wet between my toes," Máire said, revulsed and fascinated all at once.
"Well, aye," Grace said, amused. "But anything else? A wall?"
"No, but…." Máire shrugged. Grace clucked her forward like she might a horse, and together they stepped into the fading edge of surf. Máire yelped at the cold, but neither bounced backward as if she'd encountered a wall, nor fell foaming into the water as if determined it should drown her. A few more steps had them knee-deep, as deep as they could go without soaking their clothes. Máire stopped there, her breast heaving like a horse who'd run a race. "I feel its pull."
"Acht," Grace replied softly, "so have all of us, child. It's what draws us to the sea again and again, even when the storms take our lovers and our fathers and our brothers."
"That isn't—" Máire stopped, seeing that Grace knew that wasn't what she meant, and letting Grace see that surge by surge, Máire began to understand, too, what Grace had meant. "Will it take my foot out from under me?"
"If it can. Make no mistake, Máire O'Malley. The sea will drown you if it can, as sure as if you were a witch, but I think, my girl, that it won't do it because you're a witch. Now, will we go back to shore or wade in until we're wet through and through? There are blessings in the sea, a chuisle mo chroí, as sure as there are deaths."
"'Cushla machree'?"
"It means my pulse, or my heart."
"My mother had no such fond names for me."
"Your mother," Grace said pleasantly, "was an auld bitch, so to hell with her and her ways."
Máire O'Malley laughed for the first time then, and went into the sea to come away a witch's daughter no more.
Nothing, Grace knew, was ever that simple, and yet she was surprised when the witch came for her daughter.
She came at night, in the dark of the moon, two full weeks after Máire crossed to the island for the first time. She came to the edge of the bay and stood wreathed by flame that seemed to have no smoke, and there lifted her voice so loudly that she could be heard across the water, all the way on the island, where Grace O'Malley stood listening and watching from the height of her tower castle. Curses spilled from the witch's lips, but Máire, at Grace's side, listened and shook her head. "She's only raging. There's no power in her words. Even if there was, the water would stop it."
"I may be born and bred to the sea, but even I can't stay on the ocean forever," Grace said wryly. "What happens if I go to parlay?"
"She'll kill you."
Grace's eyebrows rose. "She can try."
"She is Fúamnach, witch of the west, daughter of the barrows, and she will kill you. Perhaps not all at once, but your death will be hers and every day you keep from dying will fill her coffers with a little more of the power of the O'Malley. Do not treat with her, or the price paid may echo down the centuries."
"So I must not go, I cannot stay, and I will not give you back to her. Where does that leave me, Máire O'Malley, once a witch's daughter?"
"It leaves you a fool for helping me," Máire said quietly, and slunk away with her head bowed in guilty relief. Grace watched her go, then stood, listening a while longer to the witch on shore roaring threats and anger across miles of shifting water. Below, keeping watch on the island shore, her own men shifted uncomfortably, clumping together in ways they usually would not. Some tested the wind, as if it blew ill, and others hunkered down with a scowl so deep it changed the set of their shoulders: they liked the witch not at all, even knowing nothing of who or what she was.
Well, they must be shown that the O'Malley was not afraid, whatever else might come of it. Grace went below to put on her finest léine, thigh length in saffron, with snug sleeves that stopped at the elbow, so the great loose cuffs could fall free. Over this went her coat, short and snug heavy wool dyed deep green, with the seam unfastened from the elbow down so the léine's cuffs could fall free, and the sleeves wrought with leather knotwork patterns that told of her own exploits—for while she might do the witch an honor of wearing her best, even a witch ought to remember who the O'Malley was, and what it meant to bear that title. She wore trousers beneath the léine to ward off the wind, and boots, but her head she left bare, to remind all who saw her that she was Gráinne Mhaol, the O'Malley, who wore her fiery hair cropped short that it would never tangle in the ropes aboard her ship.
Those who saw her stride out from the castle took heart: she saw it in the corners of her eyes, how they straightened and pulled their shoulders back, lifting their chins and finding defiance to replace fear. She went alone despite that, in a currach with a sail to go with its oars. The wind was with her, so she made a fine sight, leaving the island behind, and the truth was that curiosity, more than terror, writhed in her gut. She had never met a witch, and only believed in magic because she had sung to the Serpent at the heart of the sea.
She expected Fúamnach to stand twenty feet tall, so easily had she been seen from the water, but the closer Grace got, the more ordinary in size the witch became, until Grace leapt from boat to shore and found she stood taller than the daughter of the barrows, and had bathed more recently besides. Not even the wreath of flame could burn away the witch's scent, if flame it was at all: Grace felt no heat from it, and smoke still did not rise. Despite the stink, though, Fúamnach was not as Grace imagined, ancient and wizened and grey. She had the lines of beauty in her face, and her carriage was strong and certain. Máire, once clean and combed and dressed in more than rags, favored her, a thought the girl would hardly appreciate. Fúamnach herself wore—not rags, but a gown that should have long since tattered to thread. It was too aged or too dirty to be named any particular color, but its cut was exceptionally fine, and the fabric beneath the grease had once been expensive. Gossamer and gold, Grace thought, such as the fair folk were said to wear.
The witch spat the same words she had been speaking all along, in a language so old Grace was hardly certain it was Irish at all. As she touched the shore, the force of the phrases hit her, nearly knocked her back into the currach. She staggered with them, feeling the weight of Fúamnach's hatred, then gathered herself and stepped forward. Something flickered in the witch's eyes: fear, or surprise, or perhaps simply more anger, but it gave Grace a branch to hang on, and so a smile pulled at the corner of her lips. "I am the O'Malley. You have something to say to me?"
"You have stolen my child. Give her back to me." This time the witch spoke an Irish Grace could understand, though that was no surprise: Máire knew the modern tongue too.
"I can't give back what I haven't taken. Máire came with me of her own free will, as God intended she should be able to."
"She is mine."
"She belongs to her own self and no one else," Grace murmured. "What will it take to drive you from my shores? Our oldest filid have reached back to the stories of their fathers and their fathers before them, and the secret that made you is not among the stories that they know, so your death is not a thing I can command." The witch's eyes flickered again and Grace hid a smile: she ought not know of how witches were born, and it discomfited Fúamnach that she did. Pressing the advantage, Grace repeated, "What will it take to send you away?"
Fúamnach's lip curled, showing a bit of fine white tooth. She sniffed the air, though how she could smell anything besides herself, Grace didn't know. Still, sniff she did, then said, "You've the scent of magic about you."
"I am trucking with witches," Grace replied dryly.
The witch hissed like a cat, showing a whole mouthful of good teeth. Perhaps it was magic that kept them strong, for surely the witch was as old as the hills, and ought to be toothless. "Other magic," she snapped. "Deep magic. I will have that, and leave you."
Grace waggled a finger. "I might trade it, for Máire's freedom and your departure. But how do I know you'll keep your word?"
"Witches don't lie."
"I doubt that."
Fúamnach hissed again. "The Tuatha cannot lie."
"But there's never been a faerie born who couldn't twist the truth. I want a blood oath on it, that Máire is free and you'll haunt Connacht no more."
Rage glittered in the witch's eyes, but she drew a knife from beneath her gown and lifted her hands, shaking her sleeves back to expose her wrist. Grace stepped forward and caught the knife hand, staying the blow. "Blood spilled on the earth will do me no good if you break your word and return. I'll fetch a cup, and the deep magic besides. Wait on me, Fúamnach, daughter of the barrows, and cry your terrible cries no more. My men need sleep, and I have no patience with theatrics."
She took a perverse pleasure in Fúamnach's impotent fury, but then, since the day she threw her hair at her father's feet she had always enjoyed thwarting those who thought themselves more powerful than she. She wouldn't have grown up into the O'Malley, otherwise; for a woman to lead the clan she had to be more than anyone expected. And she was, it seemed, more than Fúamnach of the barrows expected, for the power in the witch's arm relaxed, and she strained no more against Grace's hold. Grace nodded once and released her, then returned to the currach and cursed her way back across the water to the island, in part because the wind was against her and more because if a witch was interested in the serpent's gift, there was more to the thing than a bit of shining rock. Though Grace, being no witch herself, could hardly imagine what good it would do her, so the bargain seemed sound enough.
She took herself into the castle whistling, and back out again as cheerfully, with a bag with her treasures at her hip. Dawn colored the sky gold and rose as Grace returned to shore and presented Fúamnach with a bowl of lacquered oak to bleed in. The witch glowered but cut her arm, dripping blood into the bowl as she snarled, "On my blood I will not return to Connacht so long as the O'Malley holds Umhaill," a vow that Grace considered, smiled at, and agreed to.
Fúamnach's eyes glowed with greed as Grace took the stone from the bag at her hip. It felt cool in her palms despite having been near her body's warmth, and its shimmer reflected her face back at herself as she offered it to the witch. Fúamnach cradled it close, stroking the glimmering surface, then lifted her gaze to meet Grace's with a furious smile twisting her lips. "Hear this, Gráinne Ní Mháille, called Gráinne Mhaol and Granuaile, called Grace, called the O'Malley. You have taken three things from me: my daughter, my blood, and Connacht, where I have long since dwelled, and you have only given me one in return. I take two more in exchange, to make our bitter bargain equal. I take your land for my child's life, and your death for my blood. I am banished from Connacht; so be it. Let all of Ireland be a stranger to you before you die, for your life will be long and your death longer yet. I curse you to walk this earth, Ó Máille, until you taste the kiss of angels, for that is the price of treating with a witch."
A silence filled the chamber as Grace finished her story, the sort of silence that didn't know if it should applaud or gasp or question. Jana was unlikely to break it, as she appeared mostly asleep, but Emma's eyes were enormous with interest. Tony finally spoke. "Did you all really talk that formally all the time?"
Exasperation blew out of Grace in a raspberry. "Jesus, man, have you no respect for the telling of a tale? There are forms, Tony, you don't just—" She saw him laughing at her, and subsided into mutters.
"I have a thousand questions," Emma whispered. "How could you have given up the Serpent's Tear, even for someone's life? Don't you know what it can do? Did you lose the Ireland you knew? Did Fúamnach ever get to return to Connacht? Don't you know a witch couldn't harm you, not if you had a tear from the Serpent itself? What song did you sin—"
"Stop!" Grace held up both hands. "You'd ask all thousand if I let you. Yes," she said more softly. "I lost Ireland to the English long before my own death fighting the bastards. And Fúamnach regained Connacht even before that, for England made a county of Mayo, and all our kingdoms were subsumed. I lost it all, little girl, all for the price of a child. She died. My foster-daughter, Máire O'Malley, drowned on the sea not a year later. But she died free of Fúamnach, and perhaps I would have lived to see Ireland fall regardless of the old bitch's curse."
"You would have," Emma said. "You did. She didn't curse you. She couldn't."
"And yet here I live and breathe before you." Grace shrugged, throwing away the accuracy of the details.
Irritation crossed Emma's face. "You're not hearing me. How did you die?"
"In battle." Beside her, Tony made a surprised sound. Grace shrugged at him, too, as if to ask what it was he'd expected. He muttered, "I don't know," not loudly enough to interrupt Emma, who demanded, "And what happened then?"
Grace sighed. "I rose up a wraith, a ghost, young again in incorporeal body, but old of mind. I've walked the line between life and death ever since."
Emma, the witch's daughter, rose and came to stand in front of Grace. Behind her, still lazing near the heating pipe, Jana lifted her head as if making sure her sister required no support. For once, though, Emma's hazy gaze was focused, even intense. "Tell me what a ghost is. What it can do."
"You're mad. A ghost is a spirit of the dead. They walk through walls and—" Grace flung her hands wide, exasperated again. "They speak with the other side. They haunt people. They're ghosts!"
"They're usually tied to a place," Tony said. "A house or their place of death or even a person. They're often murder victims, or have some unresolved business to deal with before they can move on. Some of them have the ability to interact with the world, usually violently. Those ones are poltergeists. Ghosts are usually able to fly, or at least levitate. They're depicted as wearing sheets, which is probably meant to represent burial shrou—what?" he asked of Grace's half-accusing, entirely astonished look.
"When did you get to be such an expert on ghosts?"
"When I started dating one!"
A smile crooked the corner of Grace's mouth. "That's the nicest thing anybody's said to Grace in a long time."
"Well, what else was I supposed to do? A lot of my job is trying to understand things, and you're a hell of a mystery."
Grace tilted over to kiss him, then curled her fingers in his hair and drew the kiss out, long enough that Emma made an impatient noise to break them up. "Are you tied to a place, Grace? Were you murdered? Are you unnecessarily violent? Can you fly? Do you haunt anyone? Do you know any other ghosts?"
Grace sat back from Tony with a sigh. "In all my born days and all my long nights I've never met another ghost, no. Get to the point, witch's daughter."
"I've gotten to it twice already! A witch can't hurt you, Grace. She couldn't curse you. She couldn't. Not if you held the Serpent's Tear."
"I'd given it to her already, girl."
"Daagh!" Emma stamped her feet in frustration, an action swifter and more mercurial than any mere human could manage. Jana, lazily, came to her feet and crossed the room to put an arm around her sister's waist. "You're not hearing Emma, Grace, or you don't know enough about what you did. You spoke with the Serpent at the heart of the world, and he gave you a gift."
"I know more of the Serpent now than I did before Margrit's stunt with the gargoyle council," Grace allowed. "What's that to do with the price of tea?"
"He is the Serpent," Emma said, speaking with urgent precision, like she was trying to impart something to a particularly obstinate child. "He's half the core of this world, Grace. He's half of what all magic is made of. And he liked you. Fúamnach didn't curse you to a half life. The Serpent gave you a tear, and with it granted you immortality."
Little enough in the world could render Grace speechless, but she sat wordless under the weight of Emma's declaration for nearly ever, turning it this way and that to see if sense could be made of it. It couldn't: she said, "I died," flatly.
"And you rose up young again. Reset to when the Serpent had known you." Emma sounded unflappably certain of herself.
"I walk through walls and turn iron to mist."
"Because you believe yourself to be a ghost." Emma's voice softened suddenly. "The Serpent's Tear, Grace—I've read about them in Mother's grimoires. There have only ever been a handful of them, and they imbue their owner with power. Not mortal magic, either, not even such as ours, but a whisper of the Serpent's power. You can do—" She caught her breath. "You can do anything, with a Tear."
"I gave the—Tear, if that's what you say it is, to Fúamnach centuries ago. Whatever power it might have is surely hers to command."
"You traded it." Emma sank down into a bundle, her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them. Jana went with her as naturally as if they were twins, though they shared not a drop of common blood. "A trade and a gift are two very different things. Had you given it to her, its power would be lost to you, but it was one thing offered for another. In all of these centuries, the Tear will have strengthened Fúamnach's magic, just as the heat from the pipes warms Jana, but she can't command its magic herself. The most she can do is siphon some of it, and it may be that your ghosting is from that little drain of power over all these years."
Grace closed her eyes, blocking out both Emma's earnest young face and the portents of what she said. She was cold, but she had been cold for centuries: ghosts were. Her heart, which had never stopped beating in all her living—or unliving—days, felt thick and slow and heavy in her chest, and knocked an ache into her lungs with each dull thump it made. That ache was almost a physical thing, which she needed: without it she thought sickness might rise and overwhelm her; the beads of sweat on her lip and hairline said it was all too possible.
Tony Pulcella's warm arm went around her waist. He pulled her closer to him, silent as she turned her face against his shoulder and breathed, long shaking breaths that did little to quell the roiling of her stomach. He rarely used cologne, for which she was grateful: even the scent of his soap and skin was nearly too much for her. A tremor started somewhere in her gut and rattled out, and came again in waves. Tony's warmth was suddenly welcome. "Tell me," Grace finally said in a harsh tone. "Tell me from the start, so that I understand."
Jana, into Emma's hair, said, "Mother would be better at this," and Emma murmured, "But Mother isn't here," before raising her voice and speaking to Grace. "A Serpent's Tear confers immortality to the one it is freely given to. In exchange, the Serpent…"
"Watches," Grace said hoarsely. "I remember that part of the bargain well enough."
"Watches," Emma agreed. "Barely, though. We're too small for him to really understand. But he watches, and sometimes bits of his knowledge slip through."
"Grace knows more than she should," Grace whispered, and from the corner of her eye saw Emma nod. "And?"
"The Tear—" Emma sighed. "Its ultimate power is to grant a wish, Grace. But if a wish isn't made by the one to whom it was gifted, then it…empowers her. The Serpent is…vast. What it understands…you died. You lived again. To you, that's a ghost. And so the Serpent's power…helped you become a ghost. You walk through walls. You turn iron to mist."
"That," Tony breathed against Grace's shoulder, "is a story I want to hear someday."
"Ask Stoneheart," Grace replied, while Emma went on, "Fúamnach knew what the Tear was. She knew what it would do to you, and I think she saw you didn't know. The curse was a trick, Grace. I'm sorry. She set you looking for the kiss of angels, knowing you'd never find it."
Grace finally lifted her head. "Why not?"
The child of a witch and a vampire, sister to a dragon, stared incredulously at the ghost. "There's no such thing as angels!"
A weak laugh broke the cold weight in Grace's chest. "Sure and there's not. Of course there isn't. What madness would that be? Angels and devils and gods, oh my. Hah!" A shiver brought some of the cold back, but she straightened out of Tony's arms. He let her go, but a part of her thought there would be a reckoning for that, soon enough. Not for pulling away, but for the thing in her that made her determined to stand on her own. The thing that had made her the O'Malley, and had set her fighting a losing battle against the encroaching English, hundreds of years ago. The thing that kept her under the streets, in fact, trying to save runaways like Máire, to make up for having not quite saved the girl enough, in Ireland so many years past. All this time she had told herself it was being a ghost that kept her apart, but the truth of that was coming undone, and aye, there was a reckoning to come. "So I'm a ghost by my own design, tricked by a witch to wander the earth a lonely soul, and now you tell me that there's a wish to be made, witch's daughter? I could have my mortality back, if I made the Tear mine again?"
"You could have whatever your heart desired," Emma said.
Grace, without meaning to, cast a glance at Tony. His slow smile warmed her as much as his arms had, and she told herself that a ghost couldn't blush, never mind that it seemed she wasn't a ghost at all. Centuries of believing it had to count for something. She did return the smile, as soft and slow, for she might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, before saying to Emma, "How do I undo a trade with a witch?"
Jana, the dragon's daughter, whose hoard was her own sister and mother, shrugged. "Offer her something she wants more, or kill her."
Tony barked laughter. "I thought witches couldn't be killed. What's she going to want more than a wish-granting rock?"
Emma fixed him with a thoughtful look. "Perhaps a handsome young man to make another daughter with."
"She could find that herself," Grace said sourly, but laughed at the grimace that pulled Tony's face. "Don't worry, love. Grace won't trade you for a bit of shiny stone. You say the Tear is mine anyway," she added, to Emma. "Can't I just take it back?"
"It would work if you did," Emma agreed. "Whether you'd—" She stopped abruptly, and Grace smiled.
"Whether I'd survive it? I would, though, wouldn't I? Because I'm the Serpent's chosen." She pulled a face and got up to stretch, shaking leather-clad limbs and rubbing the numbness of sitting on concrete out of her bum. All three of the others watched, the girls idly and Tony with an appreciative tilt of his head. "She'll still be in Ireland," she said, mostly to herself, then frowned at Tony. "Fuck. It takes a passport to travel overseas these days, doesn't it?"
"I know a dragon who might bring you," Jana drawled. "For a price."
"When was the last time you left America?" Tony asked.
Grace shrugged at him and gave Jana a hard look all at the same time. "Grace has been here a long time, love. There was nothing for me in Ireland. I might have stayed and fought on against the English, but where? The clan had watched me die, so I'd have had to gone somewhere else, become someone new. I'd be no longer the O'Malley, and have to watch every day as the Ireland I'd known was eaten away by conquerors. I might have," she said, voice dropping low and seething. "Had I known I couldn't die? Oh, I might have fought on, and perhaps I'd have made a difference. But I had already been Grace O'Malley, whom the English called the pirate queen, and even as a queen I couldn't hold Umhaill, or treat with bloody Bess, or keep my country mine. And we fickle humans, we only love legends when they're safely dead and gone: had I stayed, immortal, among them, I'd have lost them sooner than later, and broken my heart all the more when I left." She fell silent, breathing through her teeth, then snarled, "Though it would have been worth it to walk unkillable through Cromwell's camp at Drogheda and rip the bastard's throat out with my hands. Damn!"
She spun away from the listening trio and slapped a palm against the wall, angry enough—but not fool enough—to hit it harder. She heard Tony's indrawn breath, an answering murmur from one of the girls, and knew that her lust for revenge over injustices three centuries and more in the past bordered on incomprehensible. Not one of them had even a third her years, much less the sudden, bitter insight that she might have done more, then, than she had known.
Tony, though, rose and came to her side. Folded his arms and leaned his shoulder on the wall she'd hit, his head lowered but his gaze cast upward, so he watched her through his eyelashes. In a woman—in another man, even—she might have called the gaze coquettish, but she had led men for too long to think Tony had come to flirt her into calmer waters. His was the look of a man ready to do as his officer required, but it was love, not mere loyalty, that drove the look in his eyes. Despite herself, Grace chuckled, and the hint of a smile played at the detective's mouth. "You all right?"
"No. Yes." Grace gave a loose-shouldered shrug. "I don't like finding out I've been a prisoner of my own mind for nearly half a millennia, but there's no taking it back, not any more than I could go back and tear Cromwell's throat from his miserable body. And if the witch holds no power over me…" She sighed. "Well, that's a better thing than learning my every breath is at her whim."
"Would you really want to give it up? Your immortality?"
Grace shook her head. "Ten minutes ago Grace didn't know she had a choice, love. Now? I don't know. But I'm none too keen on Fúamnach draining power that should be mine, either. And yet the bargain was made." She looked past Tony's shoulder, finding a middle distance in the chamber.
"Máire died young, though."
"I traded the Tear for the girl, not for her long life. How do I come calling four hundred years later, to say the deal's done and the stone is my own to take?"
"You were tricked when you made the deal to begin with."
"That's nothing to do with the price of tea." Grace sighed, bringing her focus back to Tony. "I suppose I ought to get that lawyer involved."
Tony laughed. "Margrit? Well, she'll give you her two cents on the moral and righteous thing to do, whether it's the legally acceptable one or not."
A smile pulled at the corner of Grace's mouth. "Will you never forgive her, then?"
"Aaaah…" Tony waved a hand. "We could never really forgive each other for what we were. It's most of why we didn't work out. Even before all of this came along." He waved again, but this time encompassed the sisters, whose heads were ducked together as they murmured to one another. "So, sure, I forgive her. But that doesn't stop her from being sanctimonious." He paused, then, with a pull of his face, admitted, "Or me, either."
"And there, now, mo chroí, that's why I'm so fond of you. You admit the truth about yourself to yourself, which is rare enough. Take it from a woman who's been lying to herself for centuries."
"You didn't know you were." Tony stepped into Grace's space, sliding his hands around her waist and tugging her against him. "'My pulse', huh?"
"Did you not know what it meant?" Grace smiled against his pulse, pressing her lips against his throat.
"We call each other 'rigatoni' as an endearment in my family, not 'my heart'." Tony tipped his head back, sighing as she kissed his throat again, then chuckled, a tingling vibration against her lips. "This isn't talking to Margrit."
"Fúamnach has waited four hundred years," Grace murmured. "She can wait another night."
A moment later, Emma said, "Ew," with perfunctory sincerity, dragged Jana to her feet, and left the O'Malley and her lover to their business.
Margrit Knight stood five foot three in her bare feet on a good day, and made it a habit to never be caught flat-footed if she could avoid it. Grace O'Malley, though, excelled at catching people off-guard, and grinned lazily down at the petite lawyer, who sighed and left her apartment door open, invitation to come in. "Normal people don't show up at three in the morning without warning, Grace."
"And when was the last time you were normal people?" Grace slunk in after Margrit, bumping the door closed behind her. The apartment wasn't much different from when she'd visited last: two bedrooms down the hall to the right, a bathroom nearly across the hall from the front door, a kitchen to the left, and a dining room, then a living room, wrapping around behind it. A fridge twice Margrit's age still dominated the kitchen, but the dining room table was no longer impossibly laden with papers, and the living room had a new couch. New cushions and strong springs were necessary, Grace guessed, when one member of the household weighed in at several hundred pounds in his natural form. "Was it after you met Stoneheart, or before? I'd think that would have been the end of normal people, never mind supping of a vampire's blood."
Margrit gave her a scathing look that said she preferred not to be reminded of that incident. More fool she, Grace thought, when it was the two sips of blood that reduced her need for sleep and allowed her to live the double life she'd chosen with her gargoyle partner. Rather than address it, though, Margrit said, "You should talk," without particular heat. "I can still count the years since 'normal' on two hands. You, though…what do you want, Grace? You don't usually come knocking."
"I never come knocking, lassie."
"A point which I forbore to make, so thank you for making it for me." Margrit climbed onto a counter with the ease of a child and opened a cupboard, reaching for a bottle of whiskey that she withdrew half an inch before glancing at Grace for confirmation.
"Far be it from me to refuse a dram," Grace drawled.
Margrit rolled her eyes. "You do want something, if you're laying on the Irish." She still got the whiskey down, hopping off the counter as easily as she'd climbed up, and pulling out a couple of crystal tumblers from another cupboard. "On the rocks or straight?"
"Straight. Most people would have a step-ladder, love."
"Probably." Margrit poured the whiskey, handed one to Grace, and collected the bottle as she gestured toward the living room. "Come on and lay it on me. Last time you showed up here in the middle of the night it was to be dramatic and ghostly at me, so I'm braced for more of the same."
"You're not wrong to be." Grace followed her into the living room and took the opposite corner of the couch to where Margrit sat. The whiskey bottle went on the coffee table, in easy reach. "Where's Stoneheart?"
"Lurking over Janx's old territory. I've told him dozens of times that there won't be any trouble with the djinn and selkies, but he watches anyway." Margrit smiled into her whiskey, murmuring, "It's what he does."
"And you," Grace said, "give advice."
Margrit's eyebrows rose. "You need advice?"
"I've a quandary."
"This should be good." Margrit nursed her drink while Grace sketched the details of the deal she'd made with the witch, then she sat back, considering Grace's story. "So you're asking me if you have a legal standing to take the Tear back?"
Grace drained her own whiskey, which she'd left untouched. "I am."
"I'd say no. You both got what you wanted out of the trade, and like you said, it's not her fault that Máire died. At least, I assume it isn't, and it's centuries too late to tell. Now." Margrit lifted a finger along-side the tumbler, light bouncing off the gold liquid within and brightening the underside of her hand. "That's my legal interpretation of the matter, but legal code doesn't take serpents at the heart of the world into account. Have you asked him?"
Grace, dryly, said, "I don't have his cell phone number."
Margrit laughed. "I forgot to get it myself. But he's down there. There must be some way to commune with him, without…"
"Drowning? I wouldn't count on it, love. And what would I ask him, whether trading away his Tear was legally binding? I don't think the question would mean much to him."
"Didn't you say he watches through you, though? Which means you have a connection to him." Margrit moved her hand a little, pushing the question aside. "I don't know what you'd ask him. Whether he could recall the Tear, maybe. Or whether he knows—Foo-am-noch," she said carefully, then, with more confidence, "Fúamnach's secret. Something that would give you leverage over her."
"You're a bit of a conniving bitch, aren't you, Margrit Knight?"
"Says you," Margrit said in a half-offended tone, and then, with a twist of her mouth, "Bitches get shit done. You need leverage, Grace. Otherwise you're at a stalemate. Not that I'm condoning murder, but even if I was, neither of you can strike the other down, so you're going to have to find another way. Find something else she wants, or find her secret. Witches," she said under her breath. "Why do the Old Races seem easier to deal with than witches?"
"Because witches are human magic." Grace sat back, stretching her legs expansively.
Margrit leaned over to the coffee table, got the bottle, and poured more whiskey for both of them. "Humans aren't supposed to have magic."
"Most of you—us—don't. There are dream-walkers and a couple others, but magic is a thing they do, not a thing they are. The gargoyles and all, the whole lot of them, they can look human on the outside but once you know the truth, you know they've never been and never will be like us. And that makes it all right, in its way. They are magic. Sometimes we have it, but it's a thing inside us, not who and what we are in our bones. That's why witches feel wrong. They're human-born but made of magic, and that's not how human-born things are meant to be."
Margrit looked askance at her. "And how do you know all that?"
Grace pulled a face. "Grace knows lots of things she shouldn't."
"The Serpent's Wisdom." Margrit lifted her glass in a salute.
"So it seems." Grace returned the toast and drank the second glass in as swift a swallow as the first. Margrit, watching, said, "Do you not get drunk?"
Grace arched an eyebrow at the drink Margrit sipped. "Don't tell me you do. Not with all that vampire blood swirling in your veins."
"You know, I haven't tried? Maybe you and I should go on a bender. Drink all the boys under the table. Win a few bets."
"Before I find a way to end this curse."
"Except it's not a curse," Margrit said. "It's a gift. Do you really want to give up immortality?"
"Tony asked that too. Ask me again your own self when you've lived four hundred years."
Margrit smiled. "Implying that you'll be here in four hundred years for me to ask."
"Don't lawyer your way around this one," Grace said severely, and Margrit laughed. "Let's say I get the Tear back. What do I do with a wish, Margrit Knight?"
Margrit sighed, taking a larger swallow of her drink. "I don't know. I've never been able to decide if I should go big or go home, with a wish. There's all the legalese, you know?"
"Only a lawyer thinks wishes have legalese."
"You're wrong, though. There's literalism in wishes. Look at Midas, wishing everything he touched would turn to gold. That's obviously a terrible wish, because he didn't mean everything. He meant he wanted to be able to turn specific items into gold, not that his dinner and his daughter should be included. So when you have three wishes, is the first one 'I wish these would be taken in the spirit they're meant instead of the literal words I say'? Or do you just try to limit the wishes in a smart way? 'I wish, with no changes in my health or circumstances, that I would be the most miserable person in the world?' What are the effects of wishing for something abstract, like happiness? God forbid you should wish for no more conflict. That could kill everybody on the planet. Wishes have consequences. Even 'I wish I wasn't immortal anymore…'. Think about that, Grace. You could die on the spot. So you have to be careful with wishes."
Grace leaned forward and poured herself another drink. "I'd think wishes came along every day, the way you've thought out how they ought to be used. Anybody ever tell you that you think too much?"
"Many people, often." Margrit swirled her whiskey. "If they really came along every day maybe I wouldn't have thought so much about it. They're abstract, this way. And maybe a real wish does respond to intent instead of literalism. That would be…" She smiled. "Well, that would be more wish-like. That would be how magic is supposed to work. Like a dream. Like a wish. You know what I mean."
"I do." A key turned in the front door and Grace's head came up like a startled cat's, wary of what lay beyond.
"It's only Alban," Margrit said, amused. "He lives here too, you know."
"I know a gargoyle in a high-rise apartment seems wrong," Grace muttered, but stayed put as the big gargoyle came around the kitchen corner and paused, surprised, to see her.
"Grace."
"Stoneheart."
"'High-rise' makes it sound fancier than it is." Margrit rose to give the gargoyle—not that he looked the part right now, being in human form—a kiss. "Grace came by for some legal advice. Have you ever heard of a Serpent's Tear?"
Alban's eyes, yellowish even as a human, darkened in thought. "There are whispers about them in the memories. Why?"
"I had one," Grace said succinctly, "and I lost it. Traded it," she amended, because the detail mattered. "I'm wondering if I can get it back."
"Ask Janx. He's as close as anyone is to the Serpent." Alban retreated to the kitchen to get his own crystal tumbler, and even poured himself whiskey when he returned to the living room to sit, but didn't drink any of it. Grace watched the chair he took sink under his weight, but didn't offer to trade places with him. Margrit got her own glass and perched on the wide arm of his chair, bird-like in comparison to his bulk. They looked well together, though, as if they'd been designed to be aesthetically pleasing: Margrit, small and brown-skinned with a wealth of loose curls highlighted with gold that brushed the collar of a comfortable, bright shirt. Alban was over a foot taller and nearly that much broader than she, hewn of straight lines and pale shades beside her, alabaster skin and white-blonde hair falling down his spine in a simple ponytail incongruous with the grey suit he wore. Grace smiled, and Margrit lifted an eyebrow. "What?"
"You two should have a portrait done. A painting, not a photograph. Janx left the city months ago." She muttered, "Besides, Grace tastes good with ketchup," to herself, and though Alban looked baffled, Margrit laughed aloud.
"Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons. I don't think you've got much choice, though, Grace. Not if you want the Tear back. You need some kind of advantage. She traded it to a witch," Margrit said to Alban. A remarkable—for a gargoyle—expression of you're fucked crossed the big man's face.
To her own surprise, Grace laughed. "Stoneheart thinks I haven't a chance of recovering it."
Margrit twisted to look at Alban, eyebrows lifted in curious amusement. "Doesn't she?"
"Witches don't easily give up what they've taken."
"But the gargoyle memories might know something about Fúamnach. As much as anyone else might. Could you look?"
Alban lowered his gaze to the drink he hadn't sipped from, then lifted it again to meet Grace's eyes. "Is it a sign of friendship that you just ask me, or a sign you think I'm easily taken advantage of? You wouldn't ask Janx so directly. You'd sidle around, looking for a way to make him offer, or for it to seem like an advantage to him, and Daisani—"
"Daisani I wouldn't ask at all," Grace said with a shudder. "I'll wheedle and deal if you want me to, Stoneheart. You do owe me one, and I'll call that favor in if I must."
Interest glittered in Margrit's eyes, though she left the question unspoken. Alban, though, cast an edged smile at his drink. "If I were a wiser man I'd insist on it."
"But you're not a man at all." Grace flung herself back in the sofa, arms spread wide. "So you'll do it."
"I already have." Alban shook his big head once. "There are whispers, here and there. Memories of a memory. Not about Fúamnach, but about the birthing of witches. It may be that contained somewhere in the stone we have all their secrets, but despite our best efforts—despite our vaunted beliefs—even the gestalt has suffered. We're so few now that we remember less than we should."
"Some good you are," Grace said without heat, then, more slowly, "I suppose it's Janx, then."
"You could find out what Fúamnach wants now," Margrit said from contemplation of her glass. Grace frowned and the lawyer lifted her gaze. "Everybody wants something. Find out what Fúamnach wants now. Get it. Trade for it. The Tear for her newest desire."
"What could a witch want more than a wish-granting rock?"
"She can't use the Tear. Not for more than siphoning power, anyway. Which is good, as far as it goes, but she'll never be able to wish on it. Maybe there's something she wants more."
"Dragon's blood," Grace muttered. "A virgin's tears."
"Eye of newt," Margrit agreed. "There's a lot out there Grace can find, that someone else couldn't."
Grace drew her face long, giving Margrit a severe look that made her laugh. "I'm sorry. Are you the only one allowed to talk about yourself in the third person?"
"Grace is the only one who spent fifty years as the O'Malley. Try half a century of a title like that and then four hundred years of a half-life and see if you don't get a little strange with how you refer to yourself."
"Negotiator," Alban rumbled so quietly it was almost inaudible, but Margrit's spine straightened and she cast him a look that held an opinion or two about the use of that name. She didn't say anything else, though, and Grace rose.
"You've given me a path or two to follow, at least. I thank you for that. Alban, I'll call our debt even, for your efforts."
"That's generous," Alban said in a tone that suggested he expected loopholes. Grace didn't disabuse him of the notion, and let herself out through the front door like a normal person might, though the idea of wafting through a wall and giving Margrit Knight the willies stayed with and amused her as she returned home.
Tony woke up when she came home, instantly more coherent than he ought to be in the small hours of the morning. "It's hanging around with you inhuman creatures," he said when Grace commented. "I think it's rubbing off."
"I think you need more sleep, love." Grace dropped a kiss on him as she drifted through the chamber, looking for things that weren't there. She'd owned and lost, or rid herself of, a lot in her life: not much was left now. Not much to show she'd lived four centuries, but that was the idea. It was hard enough to gain teenage trust; carrying around loot a hundred years out of date only made her seem stranger than she was, and she had plenty of that going on already. So, although she still had the now-pitted blade she had carried as the O'Malley, it lay tucked in a teak chest at the foot of her bed, as did everything else from her youth. The concrete and brick room beneath the city streets reflected someone who lived sparsely: a bed, candles for light, a scattering of books. She'd seen Alban's lair before it was raided, and her own life didn't look so different, save she walked the world day and night alike, and the gargoyle was bound to night. She rarely felt the lack of things, but tonight, with dawn breaking above the city and only artificial light here to mark the difference between night and day, her world felt empty.
But that was the shock of revelations talking, for all that she didn't show much of it on the outside. A clan leader had to keep her own counsel, and a ghost even more so. Only she wasn't a ghost at all, but a creature half-damned by good intentions. Someone else might have wept and wailed and rent her breast; Grace O'Malley was made of sterner stuff. Or at least more inured to the improbable than most, by dint of having lived through more of it, if nothing else. Still, beneath the surface lay a whirlpool that could draw her down if she let it: not even centuries of existence made it easy to reconcile the idea that she'd been misled about the circumstances of that life for most of that life.
A rueful smile pulled at her mouth and she turned to look at the detective sitting on her bed. His black hair was tousled and the sheets were rumpled around his waist, his arms looped around his knees. She ought to be telling him all of this, not keeping it tamped down inside. Easier thought than done, though, for when she opened her mouth to speak again, what she said was, "Your lawyer had a lot of ideas," rather than offer any hint of her turmoil.
"Were any of them good?" Tony asked dryly. "She has a lot of bad ideas."
"She has a lot of dangerous ideas," Grace disagreed. "Most of them turn out well enough in the end. All of these were dangerous," she added after a moment's thought. "Would you take Janx or Daisani, if you had to choose?"
"Janx," Tony said without missing a beat. He scooted to the side of the bed and swung his legs over, reaching for his slacks. "I know he's a dragon, but I spent years on a task force trying to bring the man down. I understand some of how he works. Daisani…" He shook his head and stood, buttoning his slacks. "The high finance world is a whole different kind of evil, never mind the vampire part of it." He reached for his shirt and Grace, amused, said, "Do you have to get dressed?"
He lifted his eyebrows. "You didn't come to bed when you came home, which means you're not going to, not before I have to get to work. So I'm up and I'm listening. Are we going after Janx?"
Grace stopped the we? that tried to cross her lips, grateful and bemused by the offer all at once. "I've a witch to find, first, and a bargain to undo."
"Can you even do that? Blood oaths, and everything?"
Grace chuckled and knelt in front of the chest that lay at the foot of her bed. Tony tried not to watch too avidly as she opened it; she'd never done that before in his presence, and trusted he respected her enough to not have gone digging around in it himself. She took out a small, soft bundle of cloth, unwrapped a vial of ancient glass from within its folds, and shook the rusty dust inside the glass. "I can return her blood, if that's what she wants."
Fascinated horror paled Tony's face. "That's—that's—is that four-hundred-year-old witch's blood?"
"It is so."
Tony dropped to his knees beside her, an awful, wonderful grin twisting his mouth. "I bet you could sell that for a fortune on the internet."
Grace laughed. "How would I prove what it was? And if I did, how would I return it to the old bitch to gain her favor?"
"I don't know, but it just seems—" Tony reached for the vial, stopped himself, and crushed his hand between his thigh and calf to keep himself from doing it again. "It seems like you should hold on to some of it. Just in case."
"Magic isn't done with eye of newt and toe of frog, love."
Tony's eyebrows shot up. "Are you sure about that?"
"Sure enough." Grace dropped the cloth back into the trunk, closed it, and rose, eyes sparkling, with the vial still in hand. "Maybe we'll save a wee bit of it for ourselves. Just in case."
Sheer youthful delight brightened Tony's features. "Awesome. How did you even keep it this long? Shouldn't it have disintegrated?"
"I scraped it still wet from the bowl, stoppered it, and never opened it again." Grace gave the vial another little shake. "And perhaps there's a bit of magic in it, too. I don't know, love. I've never tried keeping anyone else's blood for nigh unto half a millennia."
"That…is just as well." Tony made a face as Grace tucked the vial away again for safe-keeping, this time in a bag that would do for traveling.
"It is. And if you're up for it, I thought on our way to Ireland we might pay a visit to the Serpent."
"We?" An incredulous note broke in the small word, more, even, than Grace would have put in it herself, had she said it.
"Unless you're not up for it, Detective."
"No, I just—can I? You're—" Tony made a swift gesture that encompassed Grace and, it seemed, the whole of her world. "You're magic, Grace. I'm just…me."
"I don't know," Grace admitted. "But I'd like you with me as far as you can go. If you're willing."
A smile lit Tony's brown eyes. "I wouldn't miss it for the world. How do we call on a mythical monster at the heart of the sea?"
Grace shrugged. "The only way I know is to drown."
"And you said Margrit's plans were dangerous." Tony Pulcella stood on the stern of a ship, bundled in a winter jacket and still crossing his arms over his chest like he could contain another degree or two of warmth by doing so. Grace, beside him in her black leathers, didn't feel the cold, but then, she hadn't for centuries. She didn't even wear a hat, her blonde hair glowing in the autumnal sea sunlight, and Tony glowered at her like it might warm him up.
"We talked about this," Grace said with more patience than she felt.
Tony sighed explosively. "Talking about it is different than standing here watching you get ready to dive off the back end of a cargo ship, Grace."
"You took a month off work so we could do it. What did you think Grace would do, lose heart?"
A chuckle broke through Tony's scowl, obviously despite his best efforts. "I don't think that's even in your vocabulary." He leaned on the railing, cheeks scoured ruddy by the wind, and rubbed his hands together. "I still don't really…understand…."
"I told you." Grace's voice gentled. "I'm hard to see, Tony. Unless I want to be seen, I'm…"
"A ghost." Tony looked over his shoulder, not at Grace, but toward the bulk of the ship, where, somewhere, a small crew kept the behemoth running. He had taken a month off work, a vacation long enough to require real finagling to achieve, and he had bought only a single ticket for the cargo ship's handful of private berths. His passport had been updated and stamped on the way out of the harbor, but Grace herself had simply slipped aboard, unnoticed, while Tony dealt with the formalities. She had waited for him in his berth to let him know she was there, but the call of the sea was stronger than she'd imagined, and on the giant ship she couldn't feel the waves moving her at all. Once Tony was marginally settled, she'd abandoned him for the upper decks, barely willing to return to the berth at night: at night, she could see the stars unimpeded, as she hadn't in centuries, not in New York.
The truth was she could have stowed away even as a wholly ordinary, living human being, and she didn't see how the crew could have found her. Not as long as she brought food of some kind, at least. The ship was preposterously enormous, like a city block set on the sea. Shipping containers of all hues were stacked high, their size dwarfed by the ship, and the comparative handful of crew unimaginably small in the midst of it all. It had taken fifty men to sail one of her galleons; this ship, vastly larger, was staffed by barely half that. They were specks, and as a normal stowaway she would only have been one more, crawling over the ship's surface.
As she was, though, she was less than that, even. Grace O'Malley had become a street legend for a reason: always slipping in and out of places she shouldn't be, never caught by cops even when they swore half a second before they'd been staring right at her. They were right, too, but that was the ghost in her, able to fade away in a moment. Save that it wasn't ghostliness at all, but Fúamnach's draw on the Tear, stealing precious bits of tangibility from Grace, half a world away. "It hardly matters," she said aloud, and Tony looked surprised.
"That you're a ghost? If it really doesn't matter, why are we doing this?"
"Whether I'm a ghost or just a human stretched thin. Sorry, it was my own thoughts I was following, and not what you're after saying. We're doing it because Grace doesn't like to be tricked. Because I've been ill-used, and I won't have that if I can stop it. And because perhaps—" Grace caught her breath and let it out again. "Because perhaps a half life isn't enough, if there's more to be had."
Tony pushed off the rail and turned to lean on it the other way, his butt against the metal, as he put a hand out toward Grace. She took it and stepped into his embrace, smiling as she nestled against his chest. "The cold might not bother me, but the warmth is nice."
"What would the crew see, if they noticed me right now? A lunatic cuddling the air, or a woman in black who didn't belong on the ship?"
"The woman, and then I'd disappear, and in time they'd be telling tales of ghosts. If sailors are as superstitious a lot as they were when I sailed, they might put you overboard for consorting with me. I hate the size of this ship," she said, suddenly fierce and surprised at her own honesty. "There's no sense of the sea with it. It's only a floating fortress, beaten by the winds."
"Someday," Tony said against her short hair, "you'll have to take me sailing on a real ship. One with sails, I mean. One you can sail."
She smiled up at him, lips against his jaw. "Will you be my crew, Tony Pulcella?"
"For as long as you'll have me." Tony fell silent a moment. "Grace, before you do this, before you go into the sea…"
"Don't be giving declarations of undying love," Grace said, somewhere between serious and amused. "I can't take the melodrama."
"You bleach your hair almost white and wear black leather so you're a ghostly floating head while you skulk around the city streets," Tony said dourly. "Don't pretend you don't love melodrama. But, listen, I want to say this. I hoped it would be me."
Grace leaned back enough to see him more clearly, her eyebrows furled. His gaze was serious in the grey afternoon light, though his wind-swept hair did some damage to the noble intensity of it all. More matinee star than untouchable hero. "Hoped what would be you, mo cuishle?"
"The kiss—your kiss—the—Jesus, it sounds stupid, trying to say it aloud. The kiss of angels. I hoped it would be…a fairy tale. True love's kiss. It sounds worse the more I talk." Tony didn't blush easily with his olive color-ing, but he tried, neck stiff as he turned his face from Grace's gaze. "Talking about true love to a five hundred year old woman who's been married twice—"
"Thrice," Grace said softly, "though once only in my heart. That was all another lifetime, Tony. Another lifetime, a dozen lifetimes ago. Do you really think I'd be diving into the sea today, if it wasn't an angel's kiss I feel when your lips meet mine?"
His eyes came back to hers and Grace brushed her fingers over his mouth. "I'm bad enough at showing it, much less saying it, love. Grace learned to play it close to her chest long ago. But I was content, for all those long years. It's only since you that this half life hasn't been enough. Before that wretched witch's daughter opened her mouth, there wasn't much point in saying so, because what could I do? And even if she had opened her mouth, but I hadn't known you? Ah, Grace might have wanted the Tear back to settle a score. But immortality, love. You know how the song goes."
Tony said, "Grace," his voice suddenly thick, and she pressed her fingertip across his lips, silencing him.
"Not today, and not tomorrow. I've a Serpent to see and a witch to destroy, but when it's all over, love. When it's all over, then we'll find the words to say."
He closed his eyes, then nodded reluctantly. His voice was still rough as he opened his eyes to say, "You're a difficult woman, Grace," and Grace's answering smile was blinding.
"Acht, you think I'm difficult now, wait until I've supped with the Serpent again."
Before he could object—before she could think—Grace spun away from him, ran, and dove over the side of the ship in one long smooth motion.
It had been decades—centuries, even—since she'd swum in salt water. The memory of it hadn't left her, though: the taste, the buoyancy, the relentless cold, and the endless swell of waves. Of course, had she been less a ghost and more a mortal, the dive might have done her real harm, a thought she didn't consider until she broke the water forty feet or more beneath the ship's deck. Nor had she needed to take into account massive propellers driving the huge ship forward, the last time she'd taken a dive from a stern. The momentum of her dive had taken her a fair distance away from those huge props, though, and while she felt their pull as they churned the water, it wasn't quite irresistible. She kicked down-ward, swimming deep, while the water filtered through her, not quite able to seize hold and chill her into immobility. As the water turned black, she stopped kicking, waiting to see if she would drift upward again. No: but then, she hadn't expected to. Breathing was for the mortal, and she had long since known she didn't strictly need to, though she usually did, out of habit. But without real breath in her lungs, there was little to buoy her upward, and the water's pressure was more than enough to keep her submerged.
Swimming all the way to the bottom of the ocean in hopes she'd find the Serpent in the dark had never been the plan, though. Once in his element, all she could really do was—Grace is here, she thought, and tried to make it an open, expansive thought, tinged with amusement. The O'Malley seeks audience with the Serpent.
The Serpent seemed to share nothing of her humor. Grace tried again, wondering how—if—it would recognize her at all. Your watcher, she said silently to the ocean. The one who knows more than she should, through you. I've come back to you, Serpent. I've a question for you.
It had a whole world to encircle, she told herself; a whole ocean to listen to. She should be in no hurry to have her call answered, though that was a thought that should have struck her earlier, before Tony had spent weeks arranging his month-long holiday, and before he'd gotten on a huge fecking ship to deliver her to the middle of the ocean. She could have done all of this by herself, including waiting for however long it took for a bit of flotsam in the sea to gain the Serpent's attention. Tony would have worried, to be sure, but he could have worried safely from land, and not wasted his holidays on a slow boat to Europe. It was sheer arrogance to imagine the Serpent would come when she called.
But then again, Grace had never lacked for arrogance. On a grand scale, a day or a month or a year here won't matter, not to me, she told the ocean, but there's a man up there of whom I'm passing fond, and his days are only mortal in number. You know how fleeting humans are; it's part of why you chose me, so that you might have some sense of our brief lives, through one who was close to them. So I need to speak with you sooner rather than later, beastie, else all the sweetness you long to taste will be dead and gone before I return home.
The water ought to have surged: it ought to have knocked her around with the Serpent's arrival, but there was no such thing. Its enormous eye simply opened in front of her, shedding light, without a drop of water disturbed by its sudden presence. Grace stood tall in the water, aware she was no more than half the size of one of its teeth, and one of the smaller ones at that. "I've some questions for you," she said again, then laughed suddenly, a sound that carried no distance in the heavy water but which bounced off the Serpent's scaly hide regardless. "That conniving old woman Chelsea told Margrit no one had ever spoken with you since the dawn of time. I fancy Chelsea thinks she knows quite a lot, and it was all I could do to keep from laughing at her theatrics. She claims it's you and the Green Mother who hold this world together, and both of you too remote to be known. But perhaps all we have to do is die, to meet you. There's a whole world of theology that might say so."
Water rushed around her as the Serpent blew through slitted nostrils as long as Grace stood tall. "No theological debates, then? All right. Is the witch's daughter right, Serpent? Am I not cursed at all, but gifted with immortality since the first day we met? Was that stone I woke up with a wish in a bottle? And do you know Fúamnach's secret, so I might take it back from her?"
It—he, it, whatever it was—hadn't spoken to her before; why she expected answers now was beyond her, and yet seemed worth asking. The Serpent stared at her, sharing nothing save for his own size and presence, as if challenging her to doubt what it had granted her. Nor could she: looking into its massive eye she thought she was a fool for even daring to call on it, much less demand answers from it. With a sigh, Grace put her hand out like she might have for a dog or cat, and to her surprise the Serpent moved its huge head beneath her palm. Part of a scale on its head, at least; she reckoned its jaws could hold a blue whale or two whole, and the length of its head went beyond her ability to easily measure. But it put its head beneath her hand regardless, and once more the water didn't stir with its movement. "All right, then," Grace said quietly. "I've learned a tune or two since we last spoke, so I'll sing for my supper and then away with me, great beastie, with no more answers than I had before."
To Grace's relief, she was deposited back on the cargo ship, and not thrown all the way back to America, or even farther yet, to the shores of Ireland. The Serpent had known, she supposed, where she'd come from, perhaps because humans didn't belong in the middle of the ocean and the passing ships were the only way she might have reached him. She'd been much closer to land, the last time she'd encountered him, and overall she was grateful for the care it showed in depositing her where she'd come from.
That she returned two days after she'd left was only a problem in that Tony had worried himself pale in her absence, in a way the men serving the O'Malley hadn't, centuries earlier. But none of them had been her lover, either, nor as protective as the police detective tended to be. Margrit Knight—who had ended up with a gargoyle, hah!—had chafed under that protective streak, but Grace found it charming, perhaps because she hadn't met a man in four hundred years who could best her in combat, even if she didn't ghost on him.
A twinge made itself known along her jaw, and she rubbed it, chagrined at the memory it brought. It was true she hadn't met a man in four centuries who could defeat her, but Margrit had handed Grace her ass not all that long ago. Not that there was any shame in losing to a woman jacked up on vampire blood, but still, the loss stung a little.
"You're brooding," Tony said sleepily, at her side. His color was better now that she'd been back a few days, and he'd regained the weight he'd lost worrying about her. Grace dropped a kiss on his temple and nestled back down in the mechanical-quiet of their little room. Her sailing ships had been quieter, for all that the wind snapped the sails and shouts of sailors threaded the days and nights alike. They'd been natural sounds, not like the grinding engines and roaring propellers, or groaning steel and hard boots against metal floors. "Are you sure he didn't say anything useful?"
More awake, the detective wouldn't have asked that again; Grace had already snapped at him about it more than once. But in the dimness of night all she said was, "I'm sure, mo chroí."
"Then we'll figure it out in Ireland. We'll find an answer." He was quiet a moment, his breathing drowned out by the ship's sounds. "I thought I might see it. The Serpent. I stayed up on the deck, looking."
"For two days?" Grace pulled back a little, as though she could see him better that way, in the dim light. "No wonder you looked like death warmed over, love. Why would you do that?" A dry note came into her voice, half teasing and more serious than she wanted. "Don't you trust Grace?"
His eyebrows furrowed, though his eyes stayed closed, and he moved closer, putting his lips against her skin. "Of course I do. I knew you'd come back if you could. Didn't stop me from worrying. But I wanted to see it, if I could. I don't…think you realize how extraordinary you are. Any of you. Not even Margrit, anymore. But I still see all of you through human eyes. I'm as close as any mortal is going to get, but I'm still on the outside looking in. I've never—" Grace, her own eyes closed now, felt the quirk of his smile against her shoulder. "—I've never danced with the devil in the pale moonlight. Which is all right. I've seen what it's done to Margrit. But I can't help wanting to be more a part of it. So I looked for the Serpent."
"Did you hope it would grant you a Tear, too?" Grace murmured.
Tony rose up on an elbow, surprise visible on his face when she opened her eyes. "No. I didn't even think of that. I just wanted to see it. The ouroboros. The Serpent. It's at the heart of so many myths, and it's real. I wanted to see that."
She traced a finger over his jaw, stubbly with a day's growth of beard. "Perhaps that's what Grace will wish for, then. That the good detective might see the Serpent."
He closed his hand over hers. "Don't you dare. What a waste."
"Then what should I wish for, Detective?" Grace turned her back to him, drawing his arm over herself to nestle in his warmth. Easier to whisper of wishes and dreams when there weren't brown eyes gazing on her, weighing her words and her thoughts.
"I don't know, Grace. You don't have to rush it. The Tear has sat around unused for centuries. Another year—or seventy—isn't going to hurt you any." Tony kissed her shoulder.
"True enough," she said, but kept the rest of it, that seventy years would be far too late for him, within. "What would you wish for?"
"I don't know. World peace. An end to hunger. To see the earth from space. That one's selfish, though."
"If the Serpent grants a Tear to a single person, it might be said it's expected to be used selfishly, love. It's not a magic lamp, there for anyone to find through luck alone."
Tony chuckled. "A lucky find means you have to make unselfish wishes?"
"It's a gift from the world if you find a magic lamp," Grace said. "You'd best offer the world something in exchange."
"Is that general Irish philosophy or a Grace O'Malley special?"
"No idea, love. It's a long time since I've been home."
It had been long indeed, and though she felt a fool saying it, the words left her lips anyway: "It's changed."
Of course it had changed; she had known Cork passing well, but it had been sacked and burned and sacked again, all the way up into the twentieth century. If anything was left that she knew, it was buried beneath the roads and sidewalks that had been plastered over the myriad islands that had once held the city between the streams of the River Lee. She knew it wouldn't be the same, of course: she'd seen maps and drawings from before photography, and thousands of pictures since. She knew what it looked like now, but knowing and walking down a broad lamp-lit street that had been river in her day were not the same.
Worse was Clew Bay, which she'd once known like the back of her hand, and which now looked wrong in a hundred ways. The shoreline had shifted until she, who could have walked it blindfolded in a storm, would no longer trust herself to do so. What had been a track was now a road: the road they drove in on, with Tony swearing every time a car passed him on the right. Grace, who walked everywhere anyway, was more bothered by the different beach and the modern scents carried on the wind.
Perhaps it would have been better if she could have come by water, but no: by water, the first thing to break her heart would have been her keep, her castle on Clare Island, which had been home to no one and nothing for centuries now. "My children still live here," she said abruptly, to the water.
Tony, unburdened by troublesome memory but astute enough to leave Grace to hers, turned from a dozen yards down the beach to stare at her in astonishment. "What?"
"Descendants," Grace corrected herself, still gazing at the water. It, at least, hadn't changed: it rolled slate grey under an equally dark sky, until the distant horizon made them one with each other. "They're Browns now, but I've granddaughters still alive. Four hundred years and the blood of the O'Malley still lives on."
"You should meet them!"
"No." Grace smiled briefly. "I wouldn't know them to see them, and it might be worse if I did. What if I saw my own children in their faces? And they may not be properly here at all, not anymore. The house—it was never mine; there was a fort there, in my time—left the family a little while ago." She fell silent, jaw clenching before she spoke again. "I thought she'd had me by the gut when I left here after the Nine Years' War, but the witch's curse gives no quarter. The O'Malley blood may survive, but there's no-thing left of Umaill at all anymore. No house, no lands, no name. Only my own self alone."
"Immortality." Tony's voice was pained.
Grace offered a thin smile. "It's not what we dream it to be, is it? It sounds a grand adventure, and it is. But that adventure comes at a price. A tragedy in unending acts."
"So you don't want to go out to the island." Now Tony sounded wry.
Grace laughed, her humor turning. "No, but you do. You want to see where I once lived."
"I want to see where you ruled."
A rush of fondness washed through Grace. She prowled to the detective, curling herself around him and smiling. "You know just what to say to warm my old, cold heart, a chuisle. It's not what it was."
"But it was yours. What is left, it's still part of who you were. And who knows?" Tony smiled. "Maybe when Fúamnach is dealt with, Umaill will be restored."
"Will I come back and declare myself the O'Malley again?" Grace asked with a smile of her own. "Throw down the gauntlet at the British crown and demand Ireland be free and whole once more? The people rallied to my name for forty years after I died. Will they come fight for me again? Once they've finished putting me through a battery of mental tests and locking me away for my own safety? No, I don't think so. We'll sort the witch and go back to New York, Tony. My life hasn't been in Ireland for a long, long time."
"If this was a decent fairy tale, that's exactly what would happen."
Grace shook her head, still smiling. "There are no fairies, love. Not even Fúamnach herself is of the fair folk, but only the daughter of the barrows, as any witch might be. You'll need to walk in another world, if it's sidhe and druids you want to see."
Tony, grinning now, said, "You've gotten more Irish in the half day we've been here. All right, O'Malley. How do we find us a witch?"
"You're the detective," Grace said with a sniff. "Detect." As Tony pulled a face, she looked back toward the island she'd once called home, indistinct in the afternoon gloom. "I know she's not there, and perhaps we've only half an island to search, as the canal has intersected this country for two hundred years. She may be caught on one side or the other."
"Does a canal count as running water?" Tony wondered.
Grace elbowed him. "I'd hope so, save I've no way to know which half of the island she might be caught on, which leaves us the whole of it to search anyway. I ought to have left you in America, love. I'll be half a lifetime searching every inch of this place, and you've only a month's holiday."
"I've already used up half a lifetime," Tony said. "I can't waste the rest of it waiting for you to come back with a Serpent's Tear. We're going to have to do better than that."
Grace muttered, "You're only thirty-two," but spread her hands in invitation. Tony muttered, "Arguing over semantics is a lawyer trick," back, and more clearly, said, "Can you find your way back to the hill you met Máire on? If Fúamnach can be summoned, that would be a good place to do it from."
"I'm not half sure it was in this world at all," Grace replied, but nodded anyway. "I'd know it well enough. North of here, two days' walk."
Faint alarm splashed across the detective's face. Grace snorted. "No, I'll not be making you walk it, you great lump. I'll make you hike up a mountain, though, to be sure. Get in the car, Tony. It's only an hour or two up the road."
She stomped, she swore, she shouted; she even cut open a vein and dripped blood on the earth, bellowing for Fúamnach to answer her call. She called her by Máire's name, and by the names of the Tuatha de Danaan who were said to be Fúamnach's parents, and after a while Tony sat down to watch instead of keeping an eagle eye out over low hills slowly disappearing into rising fog. "Are you sure you've got the right place?"
"As sure as I can be after four and a half centuries," Grace snapped. "I should have done this on the shores of Clew Bay. She would have expected me there, at least."
"You banished her from the bay."
"Only for so long as I lived."
"You haven't died yet."
Grace shut her teeth on the rising objection, scowling down at the seated detective. After a moment, her ire fleeing, she said, "I did, though, you know. I was after dying at Rockford, for all that I live now. Had I lived my years as the unaging O'Malley, my own people would have turned against me as a witch."
Amusement creased Tony's brown eyes. "'After dying.' I don't even know what that means, you increasingly Irish weirdo."
"It means the thing's done and over with," Grace replied irritably. "You're lucky I speak your bloody, colonizing language at all. I didn't, when I died."
Tony's eyebrows rose. "Didn't you? I thought you talked with Queen Elizabeth."
"In Latin." Grace turned away from the detective, frowning at the foggy hills, though the frown faded. "It was like this, the day I met Máire. Foggier yet, even, but it had that otherworldly feeling."
"What was she like?" Tony fumbled audibly. "Elizabeth, I mean, not Máire."
"A conniver and a bitch with fetid breath. But she held the room." Grace's voice softened. "By God, she held the room. It wasn't that orange hair, either, or the jewels or the paint she hid her age beneath. It was the woman herself, all power and unafraid to use it. She was only three years my junior, and in another world we might have been friends. What a world that might have been, with a free Ireland at Bess's side, rather than beneath her heel. There," she said even more softly. "There, do you see it, mo chroí? The path in the fog?"
Tony rose. "No." But he took Grace's hand, and let her lead him down the hills. "What do you see?"
"A shining path. Light in the fog." It glowed ahead of them, twisting across the land, but the closer they came to it, the more quickly it faded. "Ask me something else."
"What was it like to be a pirate?"
The question came so quickly that Grace laughed. "Been sitting on that one a while, have you, love? I wouldn't have called myself a pirate, though I'll take any title that names me a queen. It's true we took tithe and taxes from any ship in our waters, and true again that the English, feeling those waters should be theirs, hated me the fiercest for it. But they were my lands and my waters, and I protected them as any leader might. It was brilliant," she added with a sudden grin. "Dangerous, cold, wet, often hungry, but brilliant. It's a path through the past," she said, confident now as the fog trail brightened. "Linking who I am now to who I was then. To the O'Malley Fúamnach knew and treated with. Ask your questions, love. I'm never more likely to answer them than now."
"Did you really have a baby on a ship and fight off marauders the next day?"
Grace laughed again. "You've done your reading on Grace, haven't you, love? I did. Wee Tibbot, and I held him in my arm as I came swinging down from the mast to fall upon the thieves, a knife in my teeth, as neat and far more dangerous than any film star you ever did see. And in betwixt that husband and the first, I found a lover in the sea, who stirred me more than any other man for four hundred years. But he was slain and I married again less from fondness than for a need for an army that I might take my revenge on the bastards who took him from me. But you won't want to hear about that; men get jealous too easily."
"I'm secure enough to not get jealous over somebody who's been dead since long before my country was a country," Tony said dryly. "Would you do anything differently?"
"Knowing then what I do now? I might not give up that Tear." They stepped across hills grown small in the fog, and rivers only the width of a trickle, as if they wore seven-league boots while walking the shining path. Grace watched carefully, knowing Tony trusted her to lead him through. "But for Ireland? I don't know. I tried to ally with the Spaniards to crush Bess and keep Ireland free, but the storm took their armada and left me with nothing to show for my troubles. I might use the knowledge of that to send their ships another way, but even then it might have been too late. Áth Cliath belonged to the English already and had long since."
"Áth Cliath?"
Grace glanced toward Tony, then returned her attention to the glimmer through the fog. "Dublin. No, to keep Ireland free of English hands I'd need not only what I know today, but to cast myself back in time a full thousand years from now, not the mere five hundred I've got to my name." She fell silent a moment, urging them forward over land that shifted with every step, then added, "I might act to preserve much of what was lost. Histories. The language. Write them down and hide it away." A thin smile pulled her lips. "Ask Janx to hoard it, to keep it safe for my eventual retrieval, perhaps, in exchange for some future favor. And for my own satisfaction I might see Cromwell dead before he came to power, but to change it all? I'm not sure one person could do that, love. Not even Grace O'Malley. Ah!" She stopped as the path ended in water, Tony catching himself from a stumble at her side.
A river lazed by them, eddies on the grey surface twirling and promising that greater speed ran in its depths. Every swirl caught a bit of fog and whipped it away, until a stretch of water reflected blue from the clearing sky. An island no wider than Grace stood tall emerged, and beyond it the fog remained dense and cool, unaffected by the brightening day.
"Where are we?"
"You can see this?" Grace chuckled at herself. "We've come to the River Shannon, love, a hundred miles or more from where we started."
Tony turned sharply, as if he could follow their path with his gaze. "We've only been walking a few minutes."
"Sure and you can't expect witches to follow the laws of physics, now, can you? But we've not reached the end of the path yet, love. It doesn't end until there." Grace nodded at the streak of blue water leading to the island.
"Gosh, and I forgot my boat. It's a six foot island with two trees on it, Grace. Nobody's out there. Even if there was, it wouldn't be a witch. How could she get out there?"
"Now there's a fine question." Grace prodded the water with a leather-booted toe. It gave and chilled and, when she pulled her foot back, dripped like any other river water would. "The water's real enough. Do you swim, love?"
"Not in rivers!"
"Then perhaps you'd best stay on shore, and be a beacon to guide me home." Grace unlaced her boots and pulled them off to set aside while Tony looked at her with a mix of horror and dismay. "I've come this far. You wouldn't have me go back now, would you?"
"No, but—" He gestured at the river, as if it said everything he needed to.
"It's hard to drown a dead woman, Tony, and I swim well besides."
"You didn't take your boots off to go swim with the Serpent."
"I trusted him to cast me back out. I wouldn't trust a witch as far as I could throw her." Grace stripped her coat and leather pants off too, leaving her in a pale pink t-shirt that fell past her hips, wrinkled at the bottom from where it had been tucked into her pants. She slid her bra off, too, discarding it through a sleeve. "It isn't the leather. It's the metal in the steel toes and zippers and even underwires. Magic is neutralized with iron, so they help anchor me."
Tony cocked his head, a question in the stance, and Grace brushed her fingers over his cheek. Through, really: the touch didn't land, though it raised goosebumps on his skin. He lifted his hand to close it over hers, and she barely felt the pressure. From his expression, it was clear he didn't feel much of anything, either. "I forget," he said after a moment, his voice low.
"I prefer that you do. I work at staying here for you, love. I walk and I climb and I lift, because it's what mortals do. But it is work, for solidity hasn't been my natural state for four hundred years and more. So I can take myself to that island without ever getting wet, and if there's nothing there, then Grace will be back again safe and sound in a heartbeat."
"And if there is something there?"
Grace smiled and kissed Tony, a whisper of air against his lips. "Then we bargain."
Resistance met her at the island's edge, a warning of danger. It would sink, it would shake loose and float downstream, it would catch an unwary traveler by the ankles and drag them down. It wasn't enough to make her panic, nothing so strong that it would awaken greater curiosity in an explorer, but touching the little hump of earth in the river's heart made Grace ill at ease. Had she been only mortal, she would have heeded that twinge of discomfort, perhaps without even knowing it, and pushed away to find some other shore. Instead she drifted downward and stuck her toes into the mucky earth, grounding herself.
There wasn't a thing to be seen save the two trees, both tall and slim and, to Grace's mind, with an air of pride at having claimed this spot of isolated land as their own. Grace chuckled and put her hand on one of them, digging her toes into the dirt more deeply. "Well done," she said to it. "But you're not what called me here, are you. You're no more my destination than the bottom of the sea was, the day the Serpent gave me that Tear."
Fury given physical form exploded around her, the earth torn up and a whirlwind of rage smashing into the unseen walls that barricaded the little island. It spun and whirled and slammed itself around, disturbing Grace not at all: she let it breeze through her, no more impacted by it than she might be by a summer breeze. Finally it slowed, as if spent, or dis-gusted with her lack of response.
"Is it yourself, then, witch? I might have thought you a djinn, with all that storming, save a djinn is stopped by salt water, not a running river. Come, Fúamnach." Grace's voice softened without gentling. "Show yourself."
Fúamnach did not, as Grace half expected, coalesce as a djinn might, but instead expended a final wave of rage and burst from the earth, filthy but familiar. Her nails had grown too long, and her hair was matted and dank, but the beauty that had once been hers still lived on, with large eyes and a jaw that would please even a queen. Her hands curled in on themselves, nails bending every which way, and she stood hunched, like an animal ready to lunge. Only the knowledge burning in her eyes prevented her from bothering: she knew already she couldn't harm Grace, and hated the knowing.
"What happened?" Oh, there were better places to start, bargains to be made, but simple curiosity got to Grace, because Tony was right. The middle of a river wasn't a place to find a witch, and yet here a witch resided.
"Trickery," Fúamnach spat. "Wretched, miserable trickery, and you its mother."
Surprise lifted Grace's eyebrows. "Me? I swear to you, daughter of the barrows, I had nothing to do with this. How long?"
"Five thousand moons."
"Five thou—" Grace did the sums in her head swiftly, and her eyebrows rose farther. "That's most of the time I've been as I am. What happened, Fúamnach?"
"What should the O'Malley care, and why should I answer her questions?"
"Ah, now. The one doesn't matter, and the other…I might strike you a bargain, witch."
Fúamnach's lip curled. "You have nothing I want."
Grace smiled. "I can get you off this island."
Sudden feral interest lit the witch's face. She crept closer, still hunched, her hands clawed against her chest now. "How?"
"I've done less likely things. But surely you know what I want in return, Fúamnach."
Rage flickered in Fúamnach's eyes again, contorting her mouth. "The Tear."
"You're a wise one, you are. It's not yours to begin with, is it. You've never made a wish, for I'd guess you'd be well away from this island if you could have. So I might take it, for all that it was squarely traded between us, but then, the girl died, and the bargain was broken. But I'll bargain again: your freedom for the Tear."
Fúamnach's shoulders rose, neck disapp-earing until she had a turtle's guise, angry eyes gazing out from shadows. "Its power…"
"Does you no good, trapped here. You've siphoned off it for four centuries. Surely that will leave you something to gnaw on, as you once chewed your daughter's bones. And I will have my body back again." Grace thrust her hand out, passing through the witch's chin until she found her hidden throat, then lent herself enough solidity to squeeze. Fúamnach squealed like a pig and scuttled backward as a lash of pain made Grace release her grip. "Don't imagine I can't take more than that," Grace whispered. "Knowing the secret might be all that can kill a witch, but then again, who knows? How many people have gotten close enough to try a knife across the jugular? You knew," she said more forcefully. "You knew what the Tear was, and let me bargain without understanding what it was I bargained with."
"Your ignorance was no concern of mine. Besides." Fúamnach's eyes narrowed and a nasty smile pulled her lips. "You'd have made the bargain anyway, for the life of the child."
"I'd have bargained," Grace agreed, shrug-ging one shoulder. "Perhaps I wouldn't have bargained that. Do we have a deal, witch, or do I leave you to rot in the current of the River Shannon?"
Hatred spasmed across the witch's face again. "We have a deal."
Grace smiled and turned her palm downward, miming slicing it open. "Your blood on it, witch."
"You have my blood already. Burn it, and the binding's made." Madness crept into Fúamnach's gaze again. "Or have you lost it, Gráinne Ní Mháille, as you have lost your land and your people and your very name?"
"I have it still," Grace replied. "Not with me."
"Neither is the Tear with me. Burn the blood and the Tear will return to you, our bargain sealed. But take me from this island, first, or I cannot call the Tear back again."
"You wouldn't be lying to Grace now, would you?"
A snarl creased the witch's mouth. "I told you once the Tuatha cannot lie."
"And I told you the fair folk were well known for twisting words, even if I'm fool enough to believe you're of their ilk. But lie to me, witch, and I'll bring you back to this island the same way I'll free you from it, and you'll rest here forevermore."
"Nothing," Fúamnach snarled, "is forever."
"Close enough." Grace stepped forward, nostrils pinching at the witch's scent: astringent and sour, not rotted but not healthy, either. "Close your eyes, Fúamnach, and hold tight. This will not be pleasant."
The witch eyed her warily. "Are you sure of yourself, that you can do this?"
"Sure enough, at least, and if I'm wrong you're no worse off than you were before, save that I'll know you don't have the Tear and can't stop me from liberating it on my own." A surge of cheer ran through Grace at Fúamnach's filthy look, and she beckoned the witch closer again. "Come on, then. Hold on, and close your eyes."
In four hundred years and some change, she had only rarely extended her intangibility onto another. More often she spent her hours concentrating on being solid, so the kids she helped and the adults she interacted with weren't spooked away by a woman who flickered and faded like a ghost. The last—and hardest—time she'd put herself to such a task was to free a gargoyle from his iron chains. That had burned: the pain had stayed with her for days, settling in the creases of hands that shone with heat scars. It had left a chill in her chest, too, one that hadn't been driven away until she grew close to Tony Pulcella, as if only ordinary human warmth could heal the trauma of trucking, uninvited, with the Old Races.
Carrying Fúamnach, Grace thought, was not quite as bad as that had been.
It wasn't good: the witch writhed and screamed like an angry cat, though Grace didn't think she meant to. Every scream seemed torn from Fúamnach's throat, pain resonating from the sound, and every twitch felt dragged, protesting, from the witch's bones. And that was with Grace drifting as high as she could: down was easier. She could step from the top of New York's tallest buildings and sail unconcerned to the ground below, but floating upward required more effort. She'd long since learned a superhero's jump to start, driving herself farther into the air—much farther—than any mortal could achieve, but even that only took her a few stories up. In New York she could bounce from building to building, using fire escapes or window ledges to gain height, but there were no such edifices to be used along the shore of the River Shannon. She could only leap as high as magic and insubstantial muscle combined would let her, and Fúamnach was fortunate that once aloft, Grace didn't sink down again until she wanted to. She could float along at any given height, guided more by will than wind, but not often at any great speed, either. She could—she did, at times—wink from place to place, skipping the intervening distances, but that took its own kind of toll, rendering her ghostly for longer periods after she'd done it.
Halfway across the river, a screeching witch in her arms, she wished she could do that wink with a passenger, but a single attempt sent bone-shattering shudders through her, and dropped them a dozen feet closer to the water's rushing surface. Fúamnach's shrieks intensified, each one deeper and more dreadful than the one before. Grace whispered a curse under her breath, and when they came staggering to the river's far shore, dropped to her knees and let the witch go in a rustling thump. Fúamnach clawed her fingers into the earth, breaking her nails as she pulled herself away from the river's edge, then lay gasping on the greenery. Grace's shudders stopped, but Fúamnach's continued, wracking her body while Tony stood above them both making helpless gestures with his hands. Grace waved him off, croaking, "I'll be fine," as she pulled her clothes on.
He crouched by her. "You don't sound fine."
"Mortal creatures aren't meant to be dragged through the…" Grace had no word for it, the insubstantial place she lingered. It wasn't the same space djinn moved through when they became incorporeal, for she'd ghosted a time or two when they were nearby, just to see if she could see or sense their presence. She couldn't, nor they hers. "And a witch is born of humanity, no matter how long her years might be or how hard her death is to achieve."
"Are all witches women?"
Grace, dressed now, sat on her butt to put her boots on. "All the ones I've met have been, and all their children, too."
"Mothers are what matter." Fúamnach spoke, her voice rawer than Grace's. "Any man could be a father, but a mother is always known. Mothers and daughters: therein lies the power. The sons…pfaugh!" She spat, then hauled herself to sitting, which seemed as far as she could go.
"And phaugh on some of the daughters as well," Grace murmured, but Fúamnach's hate-filled glare silenced her.
"On all of them, and on more than you think. Where is my blood?"
"Where is my Tear?" Grace rose, dusting dirt off her pants.
Fúamnach's lips curled, revealing snarling teeth. "I cannot call for it without my blood. Five thousand moons in running water, Ní Mháille. No witch can work magic after such torment. Not without all she has lost to breath and bone returned to her."
"You're screwed, then," Tony said thought-fully. "Máire was your blood too, wasn't she?"
Loathing filled Fúamnach's gaze. "That faithless creature is long since a creature of her own. The blood spent there is no longer mine to call on. But the blood I swore an oath with…" She turned her eyes back to Grace and lifted a hand, fingers scrabbling greedily at the air.
Grace sighed and lifted her chin at Tony. "Go on, then."
"Are you sure?"
"As sure as I can be."
Tony shifted his shoulders as if to say it's your funeral, and dipped a hand into his coat pocket to withdraw a stoppered vial with rusty flakes dusting its sides. Fúamnach squealed with greed, reaching for it, but Tony folded the vial in his hand, stepping back and looking to Grace. She nodded and he repeated the shrug, then took a lighter from the opposite pocket and opened the vial to flick the flame inside it. The ancient blood vaporized. Fúamnach shuddered and moaned, a disturbing sound of ecstasy, and though the tiny bit of blood could hardly be enough to revitalize her, color returned to her cheeks. She threw her head back, power coursing through her almost visibly, as if she had been a dry riverbed now flushed with water. Rags and grime fell away and her hair came clean. The earth itself clothed her, greenery and soil becoming a gown. Within a heartbeat she had taken on the guise of a queen, if a queen was one with the very world around her.
Tony exhaled, sharp and surprised, and Grace, who remembered Fúamnach's beauty from centuries past, barely stopped herself from doing the same. She took a breath to ask why, though: Fúamnach's beauty had been incidental, on the shores of Clew Bay; now she clearly reveled in it, eager to share it with the world. But before the question left Grace's lips, she thought she had an answer: left powerless and isolated on an island, she, too, would reach for the best of herself in the first moments of freedom.
Then Fúamnach took a sauntering step or two toward Tony, a smile curling her mouth, and Grace nearly laughed at her own naïveté. She nearly stepped forward herself, about to block Fúamnach's approach, but held herself still at the last moment, waiting and watching. The witch moved into Tony's space, placing her fingertips against his chest. Tony, looking bemused, wrapped his hand around hers and moved her hand away before letting her go. "Friend of mine reminded me a while back not to go around touching people without their permission. You should probably learn that lesson, ma'am."
Fúamnach shot Grace a look as if she couldn't believe she'd properly understood the word ma'am. Grace burst out laughing and spoke in the Irish she'd used, without realizing it until now, on the island. "You heard him right, love. You can take it to mean you're too old for him." She laughed again as Fúamnach snatched her hand back from Tony and spun haughtily, dismissing him as unworthy. Tony, eyebrows arched and a quizzical smile playing at his mouth, glanced at Grace, who said, "You got your point across," in English. His smile turned to a grin, and Grace laughed aloud a third time before challenging Fúamnach with her gaze. "The Tear, Fúamnach."
A cunning look narrowed Fúamnach's eyes. "I've given it to safekeeping in another's hands. From me you have it freely, but from him…"
"I will kill you, witch. I will bind you with iron and stake you with wood, drown you in water and bury you in the earth itself." The words rose up from within Grace as if she spoke with someone else's knowledge, and she thought: thank you, to the Serpent at the heart of the sea.
Fúamnach laughed, sharp and shrill. "There's a recipe for capture indeed, but not for the likes of me."
"Are you sure?" Grace spat. "Has anyone tried it? I will put you back on that island, witch, and leave you to rot.
"You ought to have left well enough alone to begin with," snarled another voice, and Máire, once of the Clan O'Malley, rose up from the river a witch.
There could be no doubt she was a witch: the power poured off her just as the river water did, sluicing and cascading like a thing with a will and a mind of its own. She carried a staff wrought of reeds in her crippled hand, and the river itself shaped a limb for the leg Fúamnach had so long ago supped on as her own. She stepped free of the river's current, fury contorting features grown more mature and experienced since Grace had last seen them, but whatever words she might have said were lost beneath Grace's astonished protest. "You drowned!"
If Máire had an ounce of gentleness in her, it was nowhere to be seen: the look she bestowed on Grace was as scathing, as loathing, as the one she had for the mother of her body. "I did."
"I searched for you." The strength left Grace's voice as swiftly as it had come, ancient distress rising in her breast. "I went into the waters myself, swam as deep as I could, as far as I could. You drowned, Máire. You were lost to me. How—?"
"I thought witches couldn't cross water," Tony said in a quieter, but equally mystified voice. "How can you be in it?"
Máire's blazing anger snapped between the two of them. "The answer's one and the same. Know you how a witch's daughter comes to be free of her mother, mortal?"
Though the title—or insult—could be aimed at no one else, Tony glanced between Grace and Fúamnach before answering. "She was trying to eat you to get her magic back, so…by dying?"
"Not just dying." Fúamnach stood in a hunch, her hands clawed against her chest and fury raging in the stance. "Had she been struck with a knife, her magic would have fled back to me and made me whole again. But the filthy salty sea took her, and in so doing, broke the bond that held her to me."
"But a witch can't survive the open water," Grace said, bewildered. "It's what kept you from her to begin with."
"A witch cannot," Máire snarled. "But a witch's daughter might, especially when that daughter is the foster child of one beloved to the Serpent."
"Beloved?" Grace's voice cracked with disbelieving laughter. "I'd never say so, but if it's the thread that draws you back to life, I'll take it, child of my heart."
"How dare you make such a claim, when you yourself have freed the one who tormented me?"
"I didn't bloody know you were alive, did I! What happened, Máire, how—?"
"The storm snatched me, as it will. My mother's ancient enemy, the sea, confining her to the green isle. I thought as the waters closed over my head that at least she would never have me now, that a death by drowning was better than living to be eaten some day when my foster mother was no more and could no longer protect me. So I let the water take me, waiting for it to drown me, and instead I felt more alive than I had ever been. It was as though the very blood left my body and took the salt sea in instead, freeing the last bonds that tied me to the daughter of the barrows. And once emptied of what she had been, I filled again with magic, a witch in my own regard. But even that wouldn't have been enough to save me, had the Serpent not lifted me from the drifting currents and cast me on land once again."
"Why didn't you come to me?" Grace whispered. "It would have gladdened my heart to see you again, and you must know I would have believed your tale."
"You would have, and perhaps the clan would have too. And then where would I have been, or you? No one would welcome a witch save perhaps yourself, and if you did, you would lose the clan."
"I lost it anyway. I lost it all, just as the witch of the west cursed me to."
Fúamnach spat a sound of pleasure. Grace caught her arm, a threat in the gesture. "I can bring you back to that island, witch." Her gaze snapped to Máire. "You put her there?"
"It took so long." Máire sounded like the child she'd been centuries ago, something akin to a whine in the agreement. "I had to coax the waters away and leave the island dry, and bait it with a thing she wanted more than life itself."
"The Tear?" Tony sounded uncertain.
Máire spat as well. "Me. Me my own self, seeming weak as a kitten and dripping with power that she might have for herself, if only she could eat me up. I lured her, and when she finally came—"
"She left me there," Fúamnach snarled. "The river rose and she fled across it, laughing on the shore as my power died. And there I've lain ever since, dying without death, weak and waiting for the day of my release."
Anger crackled in the air, power coalescing around both witches; Máire's had a heavy feeling to it, like the weight of water, and Fúamnach's felt dark, as if it came up from the earth itself. Tony touched Grace's elbow, his voice low. "Maybe we should get out of here before they throw down."
"Not without the Tear, love." Grace stepped between the witches, hairs standing on her arms as their power washed over her. "I'm sorry to have disturbed your revenge, Máire. Had I known…" She shrugged. "But I didn't, and then again, if I had, perhaps I'd have chosen this path anyway. I need the Tear back, Máire."
"And why is that? Have you a use for it?"
"Not as such, but I know now what it does. And it's having it in her power that keeps me a ghost." Grace reached for Máire's reed staff, slipping her fingers through it rather than grasping it. For a heartbeat, Máire was the girl Grace remembered, pale with uncertainty that bordered on fear. Then the memory was gone, replaced by the older, wiser mask. She favored her long-dead father, perhaps; the lines of her face weren't Fúamnach's fine-boned beauty, but something rawer and more wild. Her hair was still loose and brown, waving like ripples on the water, and her pale gaze remained forthright. The magic in her lent her presence, but even without it, she seemed a woman to be reckoned with.
For once in her long life, Grace had no particular urge to face that reckoning, and yet it stood before her, expecting action. "I'm only half in this world, love. I want to be all in, or—"
Behind her, Tony caught his breath, and the words she might have spoken went unsaid. They weren't true anyway; she wanted to be all in, not all gone, and if in the end her choice came down to her half-life or a quick death, she would hold on to ghostliness for as long as she could. "Do you know where the Tear is?"
"She gave it to a dragon to keep, but the dragons have all been sleeping a hundred years and more."
Grace threw her head back and groaned. Tony said, "Not all of them," and stepped forward to face Máire. "It has to have been an Irish dragon, right? Because she wouldn't be able to draw on the Tear's power if it was across the water—"
"She's been in the midst of running water all these years," Grace said, "Would that not have broken her connection to the Tear, if it could be broken? And yet I'm a ghost."
"Any other item and it might have," Máire conceded grudgingly. "But the Tear is of the Serpent himself, and water is his element."
"Will you do nothing but talk?" Fúamnach demanded. "I have five thousand moons of torment to settle upon—"
A tremendous fist of water rose from the river and seized the older witch, dragged her screaming to the island, and dropped her there as Grace and Tony startled, having all but forgotten Fúamnach's presence at all. Máire spat after her blood mother, whose rage rose and echoed against the water, impotent as her magic. Grace gazed out at her, then turned a shrug on Tony. "I suppose I didn't say she'd be kept on dry land."
"You've a lot to answer for yet," Máire said darkly. "Freeing Fúamnach—"
"Broken record," Tony said. Máire stared at him and he shrugged. "We can go around on this forever, but it's a broken record. Grace took Fúamnach off the island, found out—sort of—where the Tear is, and you put her back. It's over. Let's get the Tear. Did she give it to an Irish dragon or not?"
Máire, sullenly, said, "There are no serpents in Ireland," and Grace laughed aloud.
"Surely even good Saint Patrick couldn't have driven a dragon away, daughter. But if not an Irish dragon, then who? In four hundred years I've met two, and only know of one other who still walks the waking world."
"He was a great red péist who came at Fúamnach's call, though he was no more bound by her spell than one might bind the storm. Curiosity drove him, and he carried the Tear away in a great and terrible paw, promising to keep it safe."
Grace exchanged a glance with Tony, who shook his head. "Can't be. Can it?"
"I know two red dragons, love, and only one of them was alive centuries ago. But he fled New York after the fire."
"What, don't you have his cell phone number?" Tony asked, ruefully exasperated.
Grace sighed. "No. But Margrit does."
"I'll call he—" Tony broke off, patting his pockets. "Or I would call her if the phone wasn't in the car, a hundred miles away!"
"That," Máire said, "I can help you with, for a price."
The waterways of Ireland took them back to the car more quickly than even Grace had imagined, though the journey wasn't a direct one, and there were stretches that even a witch had to traverse on foot. Grace herself might not have needed to, but ghosting a man and a witch both together seemed likely to wear her out, especially after the struggle with Fúamnach at the river. Still, they were no more than half a day going, and while Tony hiked the last piece of road to get the car and the phone, Grace sat at a stream's edge with Máire at her side, watching ripples in the water. "So you had magic in you after all. Has it treated you well?"
"It gave me vengeance." Away from the witch Fúamnach, Máire's anger had fled, and she threw pebbles into the stream like any child might. "I haven't asked much more of it. I've never known what to ask. A life of my own, away from my mother, was more than I dreamed possible, and you granted me that before the magic found me. You shouldn't have traded the Tear, though. I wasn't worth that."
"But you were." Grace smiled. "Perhaps if I'd had something else that appealed, or if I'd known the worth of the Tear, I might have tried another bargain, but in the end I would have made the trade. It's only a rock, Máire. A magic rock, to be sure, but still, only a rock, and you're a human being."
"Am I?"
"A person, at least," Grace amended. "No rock is worth more than someone's life."
Máire cast her an amused look. "I expected you to protest my humanity."
"Grace knows a lot of people who aren't human, these days," she said dryly. "I'm finding it doesn't matter so much. You're my daughter still. That's what I care about."
"Me and that man," Máire said, teasing.
Grace glanced toward where Tony had gone, and nodded. "I'd not have started down this path at all without him. I'd still think myself a cursed ghost, not gifted with a shaky grasp of immortality. It's not using the Tear that's important. It's having it back and not fighting to keep myself attached to this world. What do you want, Máire? What's your price, for taking us halfway across the island?"
"I want to go with you." Máire lifted her chin, gazing at an unseeable horizon. "I've never left Ireland, and it's time I did. Fúamnach is imprisoned and will stay that way or won't, but I've had enough of being her jailer. I've seen all there is to see here, and watched it change through the centuries. It's no more the land of my childhood than it is of yours, and I might be best off breaking all ties with it."
Grace breathed a laugh. "I think you'll find that's impossible, my sweet. Even now, coming back after so long, with it so changed…it sings to me. It says it's my land, where I come from and perhaps where I'll someday rest. But most ties," she agreed with a nod. "Most ties are long since gone, and it would do you no harm to see more of the world. Why did you never go, if the water couldn't stop you?"
"I've made my own prison, I suppose. I would never have believed I could break free of Fúamnach, even when I tried as a child. It was a token protest, one I knew would end in being eaten all up, whether I willed it or not. And then, free from her, I tied myself to the O'Malleys, and when they were gone, to Ireland, for I had nothing else that I knew. But seeing you again gives me strength. I didn't know," she added more quietly. "I didn't know you still lived, after your death. I might have come to find you, if I had."
"I'd certainly have come to find you, if I'd known you lived past your death." Grace shook her head. "What a strange world we live in, Máire. Is it still Máire, or did you take a name of your own?"
"Máire O'Malley is the only name I ever wanted."
Grace put her arm around the witch's shoulder and drew her close to place a smiling kiss in her hair. "Then come with me to—"
"Indonesia!" Tony drove down the hill, leaning out the car door and waving his cell phone at the women. "Janx is in freakin' Indonesia. Grit says we don't need a visa, we can just get on the plane and g—dammit, neither of you have passports!" He stopped the car and got out, running his hand through his hair until short black curls stood up. "The modern world is not equipped for magic, dammit!"
"More like magic isn't equipped for the modern world. Get yourself a ticket, love. Surely a witch and a ghost can slip onto a plane unnoticed, and travel in peace, if not comfort."
Tony pointed the phone at Grace. "I don't know if that's cool or deeply concerning. What if you were terrorists?"
Grace looked at Máire. "Are you a terrorist?"
The witch girl's expression went shifty, then sweetly innocent. "Not for decades, that anyone might prove. You?"
"Never once. A pirate and a soldier, but never a terrorist. At least not by my own definition."
Tony put his face in his hands and walked away to the sound of the womens' laughter.
They joined Tony again outside of the airport, Máire with her hair damp from traveling through fog and Grace stepping free of the shadows with her usual nonchalance. Tony's eyes were bright with anticipation. "I've never been farther than Italy, before. The air smells different here."
"Does it smell like dragon?" Máire muttered. "Indonesia's got a population of two hundred million or more. How are we to find a dragon's hoard in all of that? Or is Jakarta his hoard?"
"We've got an inside man," Tony told her. "I just hope she doesn't show up for a few days. I want to see the city."
"Hate to disappoint, but there's our girl." Grace nodded toward a redhead pulling up in a little snub-nosed green car. "We'll go sight-seeing once we've got the Tear, love."
"You say that like we're not going to be stealing it from a dragon and running for our lives. Kate!" Tony raised his voice and waved to the woman driving. She waved back, gesturing them over, and Tony muttered, "I thought Irish cars were small. Will we all fit in this?" as they went.
"It's not that Irish cars are small, it's that American ones are stupidly huge. And yeah, I've got really good hearing. And a better sense of smell. And neither of them are half as good as my sister's." The redhead reached back to unlock a door and eyed her passengers. "Kate Hopkins," she said to Máire. "You should probably sit in back. You're the smallest. Grace and Tony can wrestle it out for shotgun."
"Máire O'Malley."
"Really." Kate nodded at Grace, who got in back with Máire. "Any relation?"
"In a manner of speaking."
"Your sister's not here, is she?" Tony asked as he climbed in the passenger seat. "No offense, but your father's bad enough."
Kate slid a glance at Grace in the mirror. "How should I take that?"
"As a statement from a man sensibly wary of dragons."
"And even more so of vampires," Tony said.
"Dragons," Máire half-asked, and Kate transferred the glance to her.
"Didn't they tell you? My father is the dragon you're looking for. I wouldn't have come, if Margrit hadn't called asking me to. What is it exactly that you want from him?"
"A stone," Grace said. "It was mine, and I lent it to a witch, who gave it into his safekeeping when you and I were young. I'm coming to reclaim it."
Kate chuckled. "Good luck with that. What are you bringing him in return?"
"A wish," Grace murmured, and looked out the window as Kate drove them north and east through towns that hardly stopped from one to the next. Deep green mountains rose up to the south, and eventually to the north as well, until they reached a shoreline built up in one stretch and forested up to the water in the next.
Kate got out of the car in a rangy movement, not as graceful as her father, but not as ponderous as he could be, either, and stretched like she was twenty-two, not just past her third and a half century. "Anybody bring a snack? We're here until nightfall, anyway."
"Why's that?"
"Because you can get to his island two ways: by boat or by wing, and if you take a boat he'll come out and eat you."
"I bet I can get there another way," Grace said in tandem with Máire. They laughed, looking at one another, and even Kate smiled.
"You probably could, and he might not even eat you. But if you want something from him you probably shouldn't sneak up on him."
"Is it sneaking if he knows we're coming? Margrit rang ahead."
"I'm pretty sure any time you visit a dragon's hoard you're sneaking, whether you're actually sneaking or not."
"'I smell you, I hear your breath, I feel your air,'" Tony said.
Kate pointed an approving finger at him. "Just like that. Sometimes I wonder if Tolkien knew my father, or if he just got lucky."
"Can a witch fly on dragon-back?" Máire wondered, soft and hopeful as a child. She stood on the shore already, a new staff of braided kelp in hand; Grace had no idea what stiffened it, other than the young witch's will.
"Kate's half-sister bears her sister the witch on her back all the time, and their mother, who was Baba Yaga's daughter, besides. They've traveled the whole world that way. The mother says the power of the Old Races betwixt herself and the sea disrupts the magic that holds a witch to a bit of land."
"Now that," Máire said sharply, "is a prize worth knowing."
"Keep it to yourself, then, girl," Grace said in a mother's tone, and all three of them younger than she looked at each other and laughed. Grace tried to find a scolding face, and found a laugh of her own instead. "All right, then. Will you be flying us, Kate, or will it be Janx himself?"
A strange look came over Kate's face. "I think the last person Janx flew on his back was my mother."
"And how long ago was that?" Máire wondered, but Grace lifted her hand to silence Kate, who arched an eyebrow while Máire turned a filthy gaze on Grace.
"Witches trade in secrets, love. Watch what you say."
"Do you not trust me, Mother O'Malley?"
"I do," Grace said, honestly, "but I don't trust witches. It puts me in a bind."
"Unpack that later," Tony suggested. "The sun is setting. Or do we have to wait until the dark of night to fly out?" All three of the women looked at him and he rolled his eyes. "Okay, okay, the middle of the night. Margrit was right. Hanging out with you people makes ordinary humans use melodramatic language."
"'You people,'" Kate said, amused, and Tony pointed a not-particularly-threatening finger at her.
"Don't you start."
Kate laughed and looked up the beach. "Sunset is as fine a time as any, but midnight makes it harder to get caught on satellite imagery."
"Are you big enough?" Grace asked, curious.
Kate gave a liquid shrug. "Not yet, not until I get bigger or they get better, which happens faster than I grow. Better to be in the habit of safety. Unless the witch can call up a fog to hide us?"
A genuine smile split Máire's face. "So I can, and no satellite will think anything of a girl standing on the beach as fog rolls in." She spoke in Irish then, her voice cajoling and sweet, and though Grace heard and understood the words, they slipped away from her memory like cotton candy melting in water. There was a cadence to them, almost a song, but the tune faded as fast as the words, all of it the sounds of magic.
No natural fog came up the way Máire's did: it gathered around her ankle, twining like a cat as it inspected the kelp staff and the one-legged woman leaning on it. Then, as if satisfied, it billowed like a spinning skirt, whirling around her waist and growing fuller with each turn. Máire's song went on, lifting from the mist that swallowed her up. Tendrils of fog brushed Grace's face, startling her with their warmth. She took Tony's hand so she wouldn't lose him. He chuckled, dropping his voice in the way people often did in the fog. "You could just drift away on it, couldn't you?"
"I could, but that would be a cold and lonely fate." Grace tipped her face up, searching for the leading edge of the fog. "How deep does it run, Máire?"
"Not deep enough for a dragon." Máire's voice came dreamily, still half a song. "Another few minutes."
"This dragon can change as slow as the fog." Kate came through the mist like a wraith, wings already tearing away from her spine. A ripple ran through her, distorting her ribs, expanding them; the next breath she took disturbed the fog, drawing it into her, and in the next her arms were forearms, burnished red and clawed with gold.
"Jesus." Tony's hand went cold in Grace's, and even she fought the impulse to step backward. Kate's form flowed again, lengthening, wings enlarging, and again, until there was nothing human left in her at all, only a dragon whose size spiraled away into the fog. Whiskers danced around her face, and she dropped her jaw in a laugh that vibrated Grace's bones. Her wings flickered and she dropped to the lowest crouch she could, four tremendous feet digging into the sand and her belly rubbing against it. Her tail lashed in the distance, disturbing the fog, and Tony's voice cracked: "That's a baby?"
Kate jaw dropped farther, a hiss erupting from her throat. Tony put his hands up and did back away, voice cracking again. "Sorry. A, uh, an adolescent? You're just so fucking big."
Kate's offense softened and she spread her wings farther, invitation to…board, Grace sup-posed. "She's only a quarter the size of her father," she murmured as planted her hands on Kate's spine and vaulted up. "Perhaps not even that."
"I know, but she's still huge!" Tony, still gaping, took Grace's offered hand and let her haul him up. Kate shifted beneath them, settling and shaking until she decided she, if not they, were comfortable, then turned to Máire, who still stood at the water's edge.
The young witch offered the flat of her hand to the dragon. Kate dropped her muzzle, one nostril large enough to cover the girl's hand, and huffed like an enormous horse. Máire, smiling foolishly, brushed her hand back over Kate's snout, rubbing vigorously between the dragon's eyes. "I never dreamed of seeing such a thing."
"You won't again," Grace said. "No pureblood dragon can shift so slowly. The chimeric children of the Old Races are wonders unto themselves. Now, come aboard before she takes you in her claws and flies you like a child with an airplane."
Both Máire and Kate turned speculative looks on Grace, who felt the warmth of Tony's snorted breath against her shoulder. "I'd say don't give them ideas, but it's obviously too late. Come on." He sounded five years old. "I've always wanted to fly on a dragon."
Máire came around, trailing her fingers against Kate's shoulder until she reached the dragon's spine. Water whirled upward, lifting her onto Kate's back, and no sooner had she settled than Kate sprang upward, a shockingly smooth and soft departure. Tony shrieked with joy, making Grace and Máire both laugh. Even Kate rumbled with laughter, a deep tremble through her long bones.
The fog came with them, swift and graceful as the dragon herself, but thinning below them so the moon ghosted along over the water, a brilliant crescent that reflected in scattered pieces across the quiet ocean. Tears pulled from Grace's eyes and her teeth went cold from smiling into the wind. Tony shouted something about mosquitoes and she laughed again, then twisted on the dragon's back to kiss him fiercely. He smiled, startled, and Grace turned back again, overwhelmed with emotion. She had lived too long on the edges, her half life souring her connection with the world. It was easy to be cynical, when nothing could touch her unless she wanted it to, and easy to protect herself by wanting nothing to. The street kids she helped kept her from drifting away entirely, but she knew now that she kept even them at an arm's length, as afraid of feeling the glory of their highs as the sorrow of their losses.
Kate roared, a sound that rolled on and on over the ocean. Grace thought there might be words in it, perhaps a warning to Janx that another dragon approached his territory, but then the young dragon dove toward the water, skimming so closely to its surface that her wingtips cut into it and sent sprays into the air. Moonlight caught them and made rainbows, faint and flawless. Máire spread her hands and the spray hung in the air, traveling with them, racing along at eye-watering speed until they flew in the midst of a passage of silver fog and rainbows. Grace wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, then pressed her palm against Kate's back, unsure if a leviathan would even feel such a small touch, but unable to express her thanks in any other way.
The dragon roared again, sounding pleased, and Máire, pointing ahead, cried, "Look!"
Beyond Kate, at the leading edge of the fog and rainbows, dolphins leapt from the water, not silver and grey, but teased into a hundred colors by the reflected light. They arched and dove, innumerable creatures moving in tandem and in waves, so that there were always some above and always some below the surface, where they raced so close to the surface they broke the streaks of moonlight into thousands of bright curves. Kate, so much larger and faster than they, overtook them in a few wingbeats, and only when one leapt beside them did Grace realize what Máire had seen at once. Tony whispered, "Oh my God," into Grace's shoulder, and Grace, speechless, curved a hand back to find his.
Siryns, not dolphins, sped through the water below and beside Kate. Easily twice the size of a human, they took their color not from stolen moonlight but from their own rich palette, deep oceanic blues and astonishing oranges, bright yellows and vivid greens, all the shades of a coral reef painted on swift bodies that held a place somewhere between man and oceanic mammal. Their hair was as brilliant as their skin tones, streaming down their spines to make a play at being dorsal fins; they dove with their hands folded in front of them, making a dolphin's nose at a glimpse, but clearly other at a second glance.
Kate tipped to the side, dipping a wingtip in the water and spinning on it. Laughter burbled up from below as siryns whipped after her, creating a whirlpool with Kate's wingtip at the center. Máire cried out, hands extended and trembling, and there was a plea in her voice, a hope that ran as deep as the ocean. She sang again, bringing a wall of water to life beyond the siryns' wheel: a wall that widened as she sang, thickening until it could carry a siryn in it comfortably. One, and then another and another, of the siryns leapt from their whirlpool to Máire's wall, and Kate slowed in her headlong rush until her wings barely beat enough to keep them aloft as they glided, escorted by a host of merfolk once thought lost.
Grace bellowed, "How—?" to Kate, though a dragon's throat was never made for mortal words, and it was one of the siryns who emerged from the waves to answer.
"Blood calls to blood, ancient one. The beast who bears you saved us, and so when she called, we came. It is our honor."
"It is mine," Grace whispered through a throat gone tight. "Grace bears a message for you, lady siryn, from the Serpent at the heart of the sea. He misses you, and all of his kind who once peopled the oceans."
The siryn—half again as large as the others, and with short-cropped hair that framed large dark eyes—smiled, an expression that shone with moonlight. "We are not long returned to the seas, and have found the Serpent quiet. I will seek him out, and tell him more than we were wont to, when last we swam the world's salt waters."
Máire said, "Lady," in a voice of longing, and extended a hand toward the speaker. The siryn considered it, then gestured an acceptance. Máire curled her fingers, calling the wall of water closer, until the siryn's hand touched hers. The siryn transformed, stepping gracefully from the water onto Kate's back, where she stood above Máire and brushed her fingers over her hair.
Human, she was Amazonian in proportion: taller than Grace and broader of shoulder and hip, thicker of waist and so strongly muscled that even relaxed, she spoke of danger and sensuality. Grace might have elbowed Tony for gaping, save that she could no more draw her jaw up than he could. Máire, though, shone with joyful tears, and the siryn brushed them away. "What a creature you are," she said to Máire. "Caught between so many worlds. Born to a witch, loved by a human mother, blessed by the most ancient, and made half of our element. Child, you will be some time in finding your way, but there is a thing in you that is also in us, so know now and always that you have a home amongst the siryns; so says Ninanak, who is queen among them."
"Thank you," Máire whispered, and then again, helplessly, "thank you."
"I think someday it is we who will thank you." Ninanak bent and kissed Máire's forehead, where a silver imprint lingered a moment and faded. Then the queen leapt back into the sea, and as if her weight bore Máire's walls down, they crashed back to the water's surface, carrying laughing siryns with them.
The siryns left them as Janx's island came into sight, diving deep into the sea and disappearing. Grace, silent with wonder, watched them go, and when they finally reached shore, said to Kate, "I thought they were all lost."
"They were, until I found them." The half-dragon, human once more, spoke with neither pride nor humility. "You're not the first one to take something from my father's hoard, lately."
"Someday I'd love to hear that tale."
"Someday it might be mine to tell." Kate stepped out of Grace's way, gesturing to the volcanic island before them. "He's waiting for you."
Grace turned her attention from daughters fraught with power to the greenery and stone rising in front of her. "I don't suppose you'll give Grace the key to the front door."
Kate laughed. "He'd rather you found it yourself."
"Fecking dragons." Grace eyed the mountain's blown-off top, so long used to its changed shape that trees and bushes swept over the volcanic edge. "Up there?"
"It is the obvious way to enter a volcano."
"It is, but Grace hates to be obvious. Stay here," she said to Tony and Máire, as if they had any choice in the matter when she faded, and simply stepped through the rock.
It had never been difficult, the ghosting. Not unless she brought someone else with her. This time, though, it felt like the mountain itself resisted her, making its sides of thicker stuff, harder to traverse. Perhaps it was Janx's power, pushing her away; ghosts weren't meant to truck with the Old Races. Or anyone else, for that matter; ghosts, save for Grace herself, didn't really seem to exist.
Because she wasn't a ghost, only an enchanted human, and the witch who had long since drawn on the Tear's power, weakening Grace's place in the world, no longer did so. Perhaps she was less a ghost than she had once been, and the walls of the world less willing to let her pass. They might soon refuse to grant her passage at all.
Just before that thought turned to panic, she fell through the mountain's inner side and tumbled down a mound of gold and jewels legendary in proportion. She rolled to her backside, stopping her slide with heels dug in, then, laughing, filled her hands with coins and lifted them to drip through her fingers. They sang as they fell, tinking against one another and starting small avalanches of their own, even as the larger number she'd dislodged clinked and tinkled to a stop. Still smiling, Grace rose to her feet and looked around, then lifted her hands again, empty now, as if to embrace it all.
The volcano's inner chamber glittered. Light and warmth came from everywhere and nowhere—a dragon's purview—and caught edges of gold, chunks of jewelry, magnificent sculptures and astonishing wonders. At a glimpse she knew a dozen precious items lost to history—even an Ozymandias presided, graceful and enormous, over the chamber, making Grace wonder how many colossal statues had been carved of the great Egyptian pharaoh—and trusted that a hundred more would come to light with a little exploration. She bowed to the ancient king, murmuring, "The world has looked upon your works, O Mighty, and despaired. We remember, king of kings, no matter how little of you we might know. We do remember," before an impatient rumble filled the room. "If you want me to laud you, Janx, you'll have to come out where I can see you," Grace called.
Gold shifted beneath her feet, slowly at first and then with greater speed, until to remain standing on it she had to ghost, stepping only lightly in the world. It felt natural, not forced as it had through the mountainside, and she thought perhaps it had been Janx's power after all. What good was it to be a dragon unable to dissuade people from approaching a treasure?
He burst out of the gold like a column of lava, all fiery red and jade-eyed, and let go a roar to shake the foundations of the earth itself. Gold and jewels rained down from half-spread wings, slid down his spine and caught on his scales until he shone as brilliantly everywhere as his gold-dipped claws did. He towered above her, stories tall in height, and had she not only recently spoken with the Serpent, even Grace might have trembled before him. Instead, as full of lightness and joy as she could ever remember being, she called, "You are gorgeous, dragonlord. Would that the world could see it."
Air imploded, a rush of sound and pressure that would have knocked Grace from her feet had she been ordinarily corporeal, and when it ended a man of red hair and jade eyes, dressed in a slim-fitting suit with a high collar, stood atop the mountain of gold where the dragon had been. Not a man: here, in the heart of his own hoard, Janx made no effort at all to draw in the impact of his presence. He was always larger than life, his attention a weighty thing; Grace had seen it drag people down, slow them, frighten them, even when they had no sense of what they truly faced, and she had seen him transfer that attention in the same swift manner he could transfer his dragonly mass. It made him feel as though he moved too quickly for human understanding, and perhaps in fact he did. But here he made no pretense about it, as he usually did in the human world. Here, although the man stood only a few inches over six feet in height, his self filled the chamber as a dragon. It was, in its way, as free as Grace had ever seen him. Stupidly, tears came to her eyes.
"What on earth," Janx said, incredulous.
Grace, almost laughing, brushed tears away. "It's been an extraordinary week, love, and the sight of you steals Grace's breath."
Irritation spilled off the dragon in the way a soothed cat might still raise its hackles: he could not resist a compliment, yet resented that it worked so well on him. Grace laughed again and climbed the mountain of gold to stand just below him, her hands spread to encompass the wonders. "I can only imagine this is the crude and obvious selection of your trove, dragonlord. That this is what the dull and ordinary might be shown, all the better to impress small minds with. I envy those whom you hold dear enough to share what you keep close to your heart, and truly treasure."
Janx thrust his jaw out, a small action with the undertones of great force. "Have you been to kiss the Blarney Stone recently?"
"I didn't think of it," Grace said with perfect honesty. "I should have. Tony would have loved that."
The dragon's eyes lidded, and for all that he seemed human, Grace saw the depths of anger and mistrust in his gaze. "You brought him here. A mortal."
"A mortal who already knows what you are, and who isn't going to betray your secrets or your hoard to the wider world. Your Negotiator sorted that out, so don't play silly buggers with me, Janx. You may not care about crossing me, but I'd say woe betide the fool who crosses Margrit Knight."
"Margrit Knight is still only human."
"Is she?" Grace meant the question honestly enough, and the fact that Janx didn't answer answered it truly enough. Instead he stared down his nose at her, then finally snapped his teeth—she felt the breeze of the gesture, his dragon self only barely hidden—and finally said, "You're here for the Tear."
"I am. Will you give it to me?"
He gestured, an odd twist of one hand, and though he didn't move any more than that—no more, at least, that Grace could see—the Tear was in his hand suddenly, a palmful of opalescent grey. It seemed brighter than Grace remembered, but she had seen it only under Ireland's cloudy skies, and by night, not in the reflective golden heart of a dragon's hoard. A pulse ran through her, less desire than pain, and she had to still her hands to keep herself from trying to snatch it. Janx's lip curled, a breath of thin blue smoke escaping his lips. "What will you use it for?"
"To live," Grace said with a shrug, and, more softly, "to love. I only want to belong in this world again, Janx."
"So," the dragon said, "do we all."
"Then give it to me," Grace said suddenly, impulsively, "and so shall we all. I wish the magic was free in this world, Janx. I wish the magic was free."
The Tear throbbed, a single sudden beat, and erupted into an ever-expanding halo of power.
It hit them first, the dragon and the ghost, and Grace fell backward from the impact. Janx caught her with a lightning-quick hand, and her hand remained solid in his. She flinched, and tried to ghost, and could not.
On the island's shore, Kate exploded uncontrollably into dragon form, the crash of displaced air knocking Máire and Tony to the side. Tony rolled to sitting first, gaping at the young dragon who flailed at the air and sea, trying to right herself again. She had grown immeasurably, the new size unfamiliar and dangerous: Tony ducked as an enormous wing sailed over his head and dragged along the ground, digging a rift of considerable depth. "Kate! Kate! Watch it, you're—you're huge! Watch what you're doing! Switch back, you're—"
"Tony." Máire's voice, small and thin, came from the other side of the ditch Kate had accidentally dug. The dragon yanked her wing upward and beat hard at the air, shooting skyward without a foggy mask to protect her. Tony leapt the ditch, concerned for Kate's well-being but more grateful for her departure. Máire sat up where she'd been knocked to, a few feet up the mountain, and extended a hand toward him. "Tony. Tony, look…" Her hand was whole, four fingers and a thumb, as if Fuamnach had never nibbled away at her, bit by bit.
Tony took her hand, turning it this way and that, then held it, his thumbpad against her palm, as she thumped her other hand against a leg, now whole and healthy, that hadn't been there for centuries. "What happened?"
Máire took her hand away from him, turning it over and back again herself, and shook her head. "The…the magic came back. All the magic she took from me, all the magic she ate in my bones, it came…back."
"How is that even p—" Tony swallowed the question and shot to his feet, swinging around to look at the mountain like he might see through it, into it. "She made a wish."
"She can't have, she—" Máire came to her feet as well, then stared at them, the habit of centuries at war with the instinctive use of a limb she'd once had. "She can't have," she said again, but less certainly. "What did she wish for, to make this happen? To make…" She looked to the sky, where Kate's lithe form made a silhouette between the half-moonlit sky and the wine-dark sea.
The sea beneath her began to boil. Siryns came first, racing higher and farther from the surface with each leap than they had even with Máire's power to change the face of the ocean. Máire made a glad sound, and it came back to them in echoes, the siryns bringing to life a song that had been silent for centuries.
After them, after them came serpents, not many, but some: great winding beasts who broke the water's surface and splashed below again until the sea was a living thing, sinuous and unforgiving. Their iridescent crests split the waves and sent wakes rushing behind them.
Janx, enormous and roaring, burst forth from the caldera of his volcano, spitting fire at the sky, coloring moonlight blue to purple. Kate roared in response and flew to him, their wings beating so hard as they hovered in the air that the wind of it swept down to the island, buffeting Tony and knocking Máire, unsteady on her feet, to the ground again. Laughter rose in Tony's throat as he offered Máire a hand: incredulous laughter that even he couldn't hear under the dragons' roars, which was a noise like the end of the world.
And the water still boiled, surging upward so fast that Tony pulled Máire up the moun-tainside, looking for safety—safety that didn't, couldn't, exist. Not when a vast head finally broke the surface and rose up and up and up, a crested serpent like the others, glimmering in moonlight and dragonfire and large enough to encircle the world. The Serpent lifted itself from the water until its height was equal to that of the dragons', and Janx, boldest of his kind, swept away from Kate's side to make obsequience, bowing to the Serpent from the heart of the sea. He was so large, so ancient and long-grown himself, that he made measure by the Serpent, while Kate looked barely a speck beside the Serpent's impossible size.
The Serpent greeted the dragonlord with such honor as no other had known: he touched his nose to Janx's, then crashed back into the depths, and the sea came rising, and its darkness swept Tony and Máire away.
Magic pulsed, a power so deep that even Margrit, with only a few sips of Old Races magic in her blood, felt it in her bones, and came awake with a jolt, squinting in the morning sunlight. Alban, nestled like a great stone cat in the corner of their room, woke as well, and for an instant all was still as their eyes met in daylight.
Then the power was gone, and Alban slept again encased in stone, while Margrit sat, breathless, in a world that had changed forever.
There is a story as old as time: a story of a lamp, and a wish, and a genie.
The wish was made, and the lamp was cracked, and the djinn, mad with time immemorial spent in darkness, swept out.
Emma, bent over a bit of paper and a smaller bit of spellwork, lifted her head as magic poured across the world. "Oh," she said in delight. "Oh, she did it!"
Jana, as suddenly a dragon as Kate had been, though smaller, transformed back to human and shook herself. "She did what?"
"I don't know," Emma said joyfully, "but it changes everything."
A grimoire almost as old as secrets themselves flung itself off a shelf in Baba Yaga's hut. Its spine cracked as it fell open, and a few creatures escaped: a harpy, screeching and howling with rage as she threw herself about the hut and—by chance—out the door; and a vampire, so quick that, even starved, it disappeared before Baba Yaga leapt on the book and slammed it shut again. She caught a selkie's foot as she closed the book, and stuffed it back between the pages with a drop of blood and a cursed spell that had held a thousand years. Iron and blood bound the grimoire closed again, and the ancient witch clucked to her chicken-legged house, calling it to wakefulness.
It shook itself and shuddered, then hopped to its business, striding swiftly across the land until it reached the shores of the Volga, lifeblood to half a nation. There, the book in the crook of her arms, Baba Yaga leapt down from her hut and called her mortar to hand. It flew to her and she stepped within, then commanded it rise and fly her over the river, the swiftly flowing water that no witch could cross.
The mortar flew straight and true. No pain wracked in the old witch's bones, and the chicken-legged house jumped into the water to swim along behind her.
Baba Yaga smiled a smile with her iron teeth, and the world began to crack.