He blinked. Then he blinked again, trying like hell to clear the chaos from his brain. Where was the noise? The panic, the ferocity, the smell of horses and upturned earth and anger?
“Where’s Nuala?”
But Gen had left his side and didn’t answer. He was lying on his back, Zeke realized, weighted down and worthless, his vision filled with electronics and his ears filled with the dissonance not of chain mail and battle cries but chirping alarms. Every ounce of him ached as if he’d been run over by a truck, and his head felt like a pumpkin that had been tossed from a roof. And there was no homely bean tighe to heal him this time. There were white-coated medicos with Irish faces and astonished smiles. No fairy clothes and hobbit houses but IVs and curtains and clean white walls. From his experience with his pediatrician sister, his best guess was that he was in an ICU.
His first instinct was to jump up and get back to the battle. His second was to cringe from the pain of trying. He ached in every cell of his body, and he could still feel that pummeling he’d been taking. It must have been bad, because his limbs felt leaden and useless. The rest of him was trembling with weakness, as solid as a deflated water balloon. It made him sympathize with the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. Zeke suddenly had the feeling he knew what it was like to have your stuffing ripped out by flying monkeys.
He tried turning his head, only to have it explode out one side. “Ohhhff,” he groaned, closing his eyes against the suddenly too-bright lights. “That last guy must have been wearing roach stompers.”
“Last guy?”
Zeke’s eyes flew open at the sound of that voice. His heart all but stopped. Jake. Leaning over the bed, looking like a man who’d just survived a month’s trek across the desert, his face bristly, his eyes red-rimmed and drawn, his hair tangled and a good two days past the need for washing. He seemed to be having trouble keeping his hands still, but he was smiling. The same smile Zeke had seen on Gen. As if he were witnessing a miracle.
“Where’s your hat?” was the only thing Zeke could think of to say.
It took a lot, after all, to get Jake out of his flat-crowned cowboy hat. It was his signature. It was also his camouflage. Jake could hide a lot of anger and terror and joy beneath the brim of that hat. Zeke felt naked himself to see all those emotions right out there on his big brother’s square-jawed face. He wanted to hide from the pain he’d etched on those hard planes.
“My hat,” Jake said, reaching one hard, work-roughened hand out, as if he couldn’t help it, and laying it on Zeke’s sore shoulder, “is at the B&B. We’re staying with Mrs. O’Brien.”
“I hope she hasn’t poor-me-ed you guys out of breakfast.”
Zeke huffed a surprised laugh. “No. Your friend Colm forewarned us.” That quickly, he lost his smile. “We…uh, we didn’t expect you back, Zeke.”
And Zeke, still trying to assimilate his precipitous change of surroundings, realized that he was at once profoundly glad to see his family and crushingly distraught by finding himself back. “Nuala wouldn’t let me stay,” he admitted, hating the sound of tears in his voice.
“Nuala?” Jake shook his head. “I’m afraid you’re confused.”
“Not a huge surprise,” Gen piped in from where she’d come up behind Jake, her hazel eyes brisk with pragmatic good sense. “We had a pretty active hospital pool going on when you’d wake up.”
“If you’d wake up,” his little sister Lee added from behind Gen, her features stricken. Now her features were elfin. Blonde, bright-eyed and pixie fair. Not those guys in armor who looked like linebackers from the 49ers. “You really feel all right?” she asked, patting Zeke’s hand where it lay uselessly on the bed.
“I’m fine,” he assured them. “Except where the Dubhlainn Sidhe place-kicker drop-kicked my head, I’ll be up and around in no time. Thank God for chain mail, huh?”
He saw somebody at his periphery—one of the staff, maybe—turn suddenly at his words. Probably not any happier to hear about the Dubhlainn Sidhe than Nuala had been, he thought, which brought him right back to where he’d been before. How could he get back to Nuala and her world? Why had they sent him away? God, he hoped they’d succeeded. That the queen was safe and they were on their way to restoring the balance. That Xender had kept his oath to protect Nuala. He closed his eyes just a moment at the exquisite pain of not knowing. Not hearing whether she was alright. He hated it that he hadn’t been able to stay and help.
How, he wondered, had they sent him back? Why? And why hadn’t Nuala at least taken the time to tell him goodbye?
He could only think of one reason, and he decided that he simply wasn’t going to consider that.
“Zeke?” Gen leaned closer, lifting one eyelid, then the other. Gen never could resist checking reflexes.
“You’re a pediatrician, Gen,” Zeke drawled. “Don’t pretend you know what you’re doing.”
“A pupil’s a pupil,” she assured him. “And yours have been doing some pretty spectacular things. I wanted to make sure they were finished.”
“I’d lay five to one she’s checked on him more than the staff,” Jake offered dryly.
“Don’t be silly,” Lee retorted with a quick, bright grin. “Nobody takes a sure bet in this family. The staff even gave Gen her own coffee mug in the doctors’ lounge.”
“Hey, you’ve hit the big time now, Gen,” Zeke taunted his older sister. “You might want to quit your fancy job at home and take your show on the road.”
Just as Zeke knew she would, Gen scowled. “Thanks, but no. The fame isn’t worth all that jet lag.”
Zeke smiled, comforted by the family banter. It was better than worrying about Nuala. Better than seeing Jake standing there at the periphery, as if it was just too painful to come closer.
“When did I show up?” Zeke asked.
The three siblings exchanged looks. “You, uh, fell four days ago,” Gen said, evidently claiming the post of family spokesperson. “Since then you’ve been right here…well, when you haven’t been in surgery.”
Okay, that he hadn’t expected. “Surgery?”
“Everything’s okay now,” she assured him with a too-bright smile and a pat on his arm, the kind he remembered all too well from his own stint walking ICU waiting rooms the time his sister Lee had been almost fatally injured. “Especially now that you’re awake.”
Not the question he’d asked. “But I had surgery.”
She shrugged. The rest looked even more uncomfortable. “Well, you hit your head pretty hard tumbling down that hill. “They had to go in and relieve the pressure. You’re…well, you’re kind of bald.”
He’d been there for four days? Who were they kidding? He hadn’t even been in the same time and space continuum.
“When did I have this surgery?”
“The first day. You scared the snot out of us, Zeke. Now we just need to know that you didn’t suffer any damage.”
“You mean, like, do I like Jell-o? No. I still don’t. But you’re wrong, ya know. I haven’t been here all along.”
Another series of looks were exchanged. Evidently a decision was made to placate him. “Well, fine,” Gen said in her best professional voice. “You can tell us all about it after you get a little more rest. For now, I need to get Jake back for a shower. He’s beginning to offend the staff.”
Lee’s grin was a bit giddy. “Ten bucks says he falls asleep first.”
Zeke couldn’t help it. “Gimme a little of that action.”
Nothing said Kendall like an active betting pool.
His siblings patted him again, as if reassuring themselves that he was there. They had no idea. If it were up to him, he wouldn’t be. At least until he knew what had happened back on that field of battle. Until he said a proper goodbye to the next queen of the fairies, the kind that would keep him for the rest of his life and go down in the annals of legend. But when he gauged the expressions on his siblings’ faces, he knew that was something he couldn’t share. Not yet. Not until he understood better what had just happened.
Not until his head stopped hurting.
Gen bent and kissed his forehead, and then Lee. Zeke thought to reach up and pat them back, but his arm was just too heavy. So he smiled and watched as they turned for the door, Jake behind them. Zeke thought he would try to sleep, but suddenly the sight of his family disappearing through the door panicked him.
“Jake?”
Jake stopped. He must have seen the anxiety in Zeke’s eyes, because he waved everybody off. “Go on down. I’ll catch up.”
Gen scowled. “Jake, your own children refused to hug you this morning.”
Zeke knew what she meant was that Jake needed to sleep before he collapsed. He should have waved his brother on to his rest, but he couldn’t. Not just yet. There was something he really needed to know first.
“It’ll only take a minute,” he told his sister.
“Well, what’s so important?” Gen demanded.
Zeke did his best to grin. “Guy stuff.”
The girls snorted, sounding much like Cadhla in high dudgeon, and walked on out the door. Jake returned to lean a callused hand on the bed rail.
“What’s up?” he asked.
But Zeke didn’t know how to ask. What should he say? Have you been dreaming of a beautiful woman who was trying to suck out your soul? Are you as afraid to close your eyes as I am?
“I’m sorry” was what he could say. “Jake, I’m so sorry.”
But Jake didn’t understand what Zeke meant. “For what?” he asked, looking so exhausted that Zeke couldn’t believe he was still upright. “Finally taking your turn in an ICU? It was only a matter of time, after all. I’m just surprised it took you so long.”
Zeke tried to suck in a breath for courage. He had to know. “Have you been having any…uh, dreams? Nightmares?”
“Nightmares?” Jake asked.
Zeke held his breath, completely unsure of what he wanted his brother to say. But when Jake grinned, he knew Jake was still blissfully and thankfully oblivious.
“Yeah, I have nightmares. The three of you. And my three kids. I got lots of nightmares.”
Which meant that whatever else had happened, the Dubhlainn Sidhe had not crossed worlds to torment his brother. Which also meant that it was going to be even harder to convince his brother of what had happened—what was happening—in that other world inhabited by the kinds of beings Jake Kendall simply wouldn’t recognize.
Jake Kendall was a rancher. He still lived on the land where he’d been born, drove a battered pick-up truck and ate every Saturday at the town diner, ordering the same meal for the last twenty years. Jake Kendall’s first and only flight of fancy had been marrying his beautiful wife Amanda. If Zeke had had trouble believing in fairies, the idea would give Jake a stroke.
Amanda. Zeke would tell Amanda. Let her tell Jake. Amanda believed in fairies, after all. She wrote about them. She’d written that book that claimed his great-great-grandma had been a witchy woman.
But for now there was nothing Zeke could do to make Jake understand. His own brain felt like sludge, and his brother smelled like a locker room. So he dredged up a semblance of a smile so he could send him off to rest.
“Yeah, fine. Thanks.” It was an effort, but he waved a hand in Jake’s direction. “Go get a shower before the staff just turns a fire hose on you. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“It is the morning.”
“Then this afternoon. And, Jake?”
Jake held. Zeke exchanged one of those male moments, when there was so much to say you simply couldn’t say it. “Thanks for being here.”
Jake’s smile was wry. “Amanda would have cut out my liver with a kitchen knife if I hadn’t come.”
He smiled, and Zeke smiled back, their comfort recovered. It was enough for Zeke to let his brother out the door.
Waiting until Jake was gone, one of the nurses, a beautiful young woman with near-black hair, sassy blue eyes and a name tag that read Maureen came over to check Zeke’s status.
“Well, now, isn’t it grand you’ve decided to attend the party?” she greeted him. “From what I’ve been hearing, sure, you’re the life of it.”
At any other moment in his life, Zeke would have risen to her flirting like a like a large-mouth bass to a spinning lure. She was everything he liked: smart and pretty and interested. She was even gentle enough that she didn’t set up a clamor of pain in his head. Rolling him one way and then the other, she changed the bed beneath him as if he were an infant. She checked monitors and cuffs and IV lines, and something that seemed to be taped to his head. And all the while, she hummed a familiar tune in a sweet voice.
A tune Zeke had just heard the night before.
“Where’d you hear that?” he demanded.
She smiled down at him. “Hear it? Everywhere. It’s an old Irish air my da plays on the fiddle.”
“But I just heard it….”
That got a musical chuckle out of her. “Of course you did,” she assured him. “Haven’t I been hummin’ it around here ever since you came? It’s a favorite of mine. ‘May Morning Dew’. Pretty, isn’t it?”
She had no idea. Especially if heard on a fairy harp. Zeke closed his eyes against fresh grief.
“You all right, then, Mr. Kendall?” she asked.
“Fine.” Disoriented. Frustrated. Furious. “Just tired.”
“And why shouldn’t you be? Even sleeping through the festivities, you could still use more.”
“Festivities?”
She grinned and pointed to where what looked like a turnip sat on the station desk with a face carved in it. “Sure, wasn’t last night Halloween? I don’t suppose you were conversin’ with the dead, now, were you? It would have been the day to do it.”
“No,” he said, unable to look away from the grimacing vegetable. “But I rode with the queen of the fairies. Does that count?”
Maureen laughed, obviously delighted at Zeke’s sense of humor. “Ah well, that would have been enough to exhaust you, right enough. Go ahead and rest up now. We won’t be bothering you for a while.”
And then she patted him on the shoulder, too. Did everybody have to do that? he wondered irritably. As if he were a six-year-old who’d just lost his way in a mall?
Maybe he was, after all. God knew he felt lost. He felt abandoned and betrayed, and he had no earthly idea how to go about doing something about it. He was reduced to lying like a lump of protoplasm while other people took care of his most basic needs. A far cry from a sword-wielding berserker. A farther cry from the man who’d made Nuala, daughter of Mab, scream out in ecstasy.
He couldn’t believe it. He was fighting tears. He hadn’t even cried when his mother died. He’d walked through those harsh days dry-eyed and cold, more intent on being Lee’s big brother than Mary Rose’s son. He’d made it through those days and all the days after without once breaking down. But now, trapped in the hushed chaos of a hospital, more alone than at any time he could ever remember in his life, he fought the ache that crowded the back of his throat. He squeezed his eyes shut, furious that he could be so weak. Frightened that it could actually come to this.
She was gone.
He’d wasted so much of his time with her, when he’d known he would have to leave. He’d taken everything she’d offered him without giving back the one gift he actually could offer a fairy princess. He hadn’t told her that he loved her, that he would take that love with him wherever he went, to warm those empty cold nights out under a desert moon, to soothe those moments when he thought no one else in the world understood him. He would take her with him in his heart when he joined his family in their celebrations and claimed none of his own.
If only he could, he would go back and hand her his gift like a silver-wrapped package. And then he would stay to soak in the sight of her reaction. He would sate himself on her, just once more, to hold him for the rest of his life.
Because she was gone. And he had to go on. Alone.
Maureen was as good as her word. She left Zeke alone for quite a long time. Long enough for her to return to find him asleep, his cheeks streaked with dried tears.
Zeke didn’t dream. He didn’t revisit the glens and hills of the world of Faerie, or visualize Nuala as she sat astride her war horse preparing for battle. He didn’t suffer instruction from Sorcha or Mab herself on what he needed to know. He lay completely insensate for hours, his battered body healing as his family tiptoed in and out of his room to make sure he didn’t slip away again. And then, from one breath to another, he woke knowing what he should have realized before.
“It’s the third test,” he said, startling Lee where she sat next to his bed, reading.
“What?”
He thought he felt better. More substantial, as if somebody had stuffed some of his straw back into him while he slept. He felt more aware, more discerning. Obviously a few more synapses were firing in his battered gray matter.
Or he’d just had enough time to figure out the obvious.
“I thought Mab had just sent me back,” he said, rubbing at the lingering ache in his forehead. “But she didn’t. She meant this to be my third test.”
Lee wasn’t keeping up. “Third test?”
Zeke wanted to laugh, but he figured it would hurt too much. So he smiled. He knew now. He was going to get another chance to see Nuala. Neither she nor Mab was finished with him yet.
“Don’t you see?” he demanded, blithely unaware that Lee had no idea what he was talking about. “I imagined the third test would be something about sex. God knows I thought the other two were. But they were really about how much I knew Nuala. How much I cared for her. I needed to want only her, be true to her. The third test is for me to believe in her. And if I’m right—which I know I am—then when I’ve proven I love her enough to never hesitate in trusting her, then I’ll at least get to say goodbye.”
“To whom?”
Zeke gingerly turned his head. “To Nuala, of course.”
But Lee was blinking, as if he were speaking a foreign language. “Zeke?”
“Uh huh?”
“Who’s Nuala?”
Which was when Zeke remembered that Lee had no idea what he’d been through. And he had no idea how to tell her. For a very long time, he simply stared at her, overloading his poor battered brain all over again.
“It’s a long story, Lee.”
She grinned. “I bet it is. Is she a stewardess or an archeologist? Did you meet her here or at home?”
“I met her…I met her at her mother’s house. She’s…” He was surprised by the ache of more tears. How did he tell Lee what Nuala was? She was his soul, his laughter, his magic. She was Grace Kelly in The Swan, Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. Whimsical and regal and seductive as an Irish air on a fairy harp.
“Good God, she must be something,” Lee blurted out. “You’re all poetic.”
For a second Zeke thought maybe she’d picked up that annoying habit of mind reading that fairies excelled at, but then he realized he must have spoken aloud. And Lee deserved an answer. Before the last few days, he would have blustered and protested and pretended to be joking. He couldn’t do that now. It would be an insult, to him and to Nuala.
“She is something,” he told his little sister. “She’s the woman I love.”
As simply said as that. As basic.
And he’d been too afraid to tell her. God, he hoped he had the steadfastness to pass this third test so he could at least rectify that mistake. So they could have that to bind them between worlds when they lost the sight and sound of each other.
“I don’t suppose she has red hair, does she?” Lee asked, absolutely delighted.
“Yeah. She does.”
Lee clapped. “Wait ’til I tell Gen,” she chortled. “You owe her fifty bucks, ya know. She said you’d be bringing home a red-headed Irish lass within six months.”
Zeke battled the ache of loss and smiled for his sister. “I won’t be bringing her home,” he said, costing Lee her smile.
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged, and it hurt. “She, uh, she can’t marry me.”
Lee frowned. “Is she already married?”
How to explain it? How to open his mouth without weeping again? “Let’s just say she has a responsibility I can’t be part of.”
Lee looked as if she was about to protest again. It made Zeke smile. Little Lee, who had suffered as much as any of them, had strode through her life with a defiant joy that had helped buoy them all. She had dosed her handsome husband with it, literally saving his life in the process. She had brought it to her work as an actress and playright. No matter what tragedies Lee performed on stage in Chicago, she simply refused to believe that she couldn’t make everything turn out all right. And Zeke just couldn’t explain why this time she would fail.
So he reached through the railings and took her hand. “It’s all right,” he told her, feeling a tear slide down into his hair. “I had her for a while. I can remember her.”
And Lee, unused to seeing her big brother cry, reached over the bed and just held him.
“I’m sorry,” she told him. “Oh, Zeke, I’m so sorry.”
He shook his head. “I’m not.”
And he found that whatever happened, he wasn’t. He would grieve, and he would go on. He might marry someday, find a woman who could be his friend and his lover. But he knew he would never have another soulmate. A man only got one chance for that kind of luck.
“Besides,” he said, trying hard to make light of the anguish that thought brought, “if I just believe, like with Tinkerbell, she’ll be able to come say goodbye.”
“That’s it?” Lee demanded, backing up. “You’re just going to leave her?”
“Well,” he mused, more to himself, “I do know somebody who knows her. I can keep track through him.”
“Another anthropologist?”
“A nine-year-old basketball fan.”
“Zeke,” Lee protested. “You’re not making sense.”
Which finally made him laugh. “Oh, Lee, you have no idea.”
“No idea about what?” Jake asked, stepping into the room.
Lee lifted tear-blurred eyes to their big brother. “Zeke’s in love, but he can’t marry her.”
Jake prided himself on never showing a reaction. He gave away his surprise by stumbling. “I’m sorry?”
“Her name’s Nuala,” Lee told him. “He met her at her mother’s, and he loves her. But they can’t stay together.”
“Why not?”
Oh, what the hell? He would have to tell them sooner or later. “Because she’s a fairy and I’m not.”
Zeke realized that slack-jawed was a very descriptive term. Lee was stunned. Jake looked like he’d been slapped in the face with a wet fish.
“Pardon?”
“More to the point, she’s a fairy princess who will rule when Mab, Queen of Fairies, goes away to the Land of the West. She has to stay, and I had to come home. To the warm bosom of my family.”
Jake didn’t even look over to Lee for her reaction. “Uh huh,” he said, slipping his hands into his jeans pockets. His personal ritual of governing. Whenever Jake was about to gather the information he needed to make his decisions, he slid his hands into his jeans pockets. “And you met her when?”
Zeke flashed a bright grin that belied the dread that curled in his belly. “When I fell down the cairn and was kidnapped by the Queen of Fairies.” He looked over to Lee. “That’s her mother. Nuala’s mother, that is.”
Lee’s eyes were the size of dinner plates. “Oh.”
Zeke had the overwhelming urge to laugh. God, the look on Jake’s face.
“The Queen of the Fairies,” his brother said, his voice flat.
Zeke managed a limited nod. “Mab. She’s also called Maeve. Quite a gal. Horny as a hoot owl, as Amanda would say. Matter of fact, all the fairies are. Horny, that is. Quite a randy lot. But they throw great parties.”
Jake looked like he wanted to test Zeke’s forehead for fever. “Zeke…”
Lee had gone from sympathetic to furious. Wearing a scowl the size of Utah, she slammed her hands on her hips, her traditional position of judgment. “Zeke Kendall, how dare you? I was really feeling sorry for you. And then you pull this stunt.”
Zeke lost his smile. “It’s no stunt, squirt. I’m serious.”
Jake actually sat down, as if his legs had just given way. He didn’t say another word. Just watched Zeke. Zeke wanted to laugh again. He wasn’t even sure why. He wasn’t doing himself any good telling his big brother about Mab and Nuala, he knew. In fact, if he knew his brother at all—and oh, he did—there would probably be a psychiatric evaluation in his near future.
But he had to tell somebody. He had to paint Nuala’s picture here in the mortal world so she stayed alive to him. So her colors held strong and vibrant. He needed the people he loved the most to know about her. To believe in her as much as he did.
They didn’t.
“Is Amanda with you?” he asked Jake. “She’d understand.”
Amanda, who collected folktales and turned them into award-winning fiction. Amanda believed in fairies.
At least until her brother-in-law claimed to have been kidnapped by one.
“Now, Zeke,” she soothed, patting him. He was getting damned tired of the patting. “This has been a traumatic experience. And naturally, you might, well, have assimilated some of the more fanciful stories of your environment when you were unconscious. To help explain what had happened. It’s how folklore starts, of course. An attempt to define the natural world in a way that gives us at least some illusion of control over it.”
Zeke had moved past impatient a while ago. He was heading into frustration. In a minute he would step right into panic. She had to believe him. Somebody did.
Zeke glared at his collected family. “Amanda, have you ever seen me read a folktale? Ever heard me wax rhapsodic about elves and gnomes, or so much as dress up as Captain Kirk for Halloween? Hell, I didn’t even read Lord of the Rings. I’m not making this up.”
“Of course not,” she assured him. “I believe that you believe it.”
She made a move as if to pat him again. The glare on his face evidently pulled her up short.
It wasn’t going to work. He wasn’t going to get through even to the people he should have been able to count on.
“Never mind,” he sighed, turning away.
“You’ll feel so much better when we get you home,” Lee assured him, looking pinched and unhappy.
“I’m not going home.”
Silence.
“Of course you are,” Jake said. “As soon as we get the clearance from the doctors. They think in a week or so. Maria’s getting your old room ready so you can rehab at the ranch.”
“Fine. Make my reservations,” Zeke agreed, knowing he didn’t look the least agreeable. “As soon as I say goodbye to Nuala.”
Jake was beginning to look ferocious. “Don’t be an ass.”
For once in his life, Zeke refused to back down to his big brother. “I leave after I see her. Not a minute before.”
Lee looked like she was going to cry. “Zeke…”
He glared. “I’m waiting. This is my third test, and I’m not failing it. I don’t care what you say.”
He waited.
The psychologist did come to see him. He listened with calm gravitas as Zeke related the whole story of how he’d fallen down the queen’s cairn and into the lap of a fairy princess. Of how the factions were warring, how Nuala had been about to assume the throne, how she’d sent him back for his own good. Zeke saw the man write “possible fugue state or delusional disorder” in his notes and didn’t care. As long as he faithfully wrote down the account of Zeke’s story.
Zeke graduated from flat on his back in the ICU to sitting in a big, uncomfortable arm chair on the floor. Outside his window, he could see the hills beyond the rooftops of Sligo. In the distance, Maeve looked down on him from her perch atop Knocknarea. If he squinted his eyes, he could almost believe he saw the fairy horde march. He recounted his adventures to himself and mapped the memory of Nuala’s body in his head.
And he waited.
Rain moved in outside and blotted out the mountain. Colm came to visit with his unlit pipe clenched in his teeth and a slice of soda bread smuggled in from Mrs. O’Brien. Zeke told him his story to find that Colm wasn’t any more comfortable with it than his own family.
Zeke took physical therapy to strengthen his left arm and leg, which were still weakened, and sat with the nurses in the lounge drinking strong tea.
And he waited.
Jake began preparations to take everybody home. The doctors told him that Zeke could be transferred to private rehab in the U.S., and the hospital helped Jake make arrangements. Zeke reiterated the fact that no matter what, he wouldn’t go until he saw Nuala.
He knew he had to leave her. He had to live without her for the rest of his life. But he wasn’t going to do it until she said goodbye to him. He had to trust that she would. Because if he didn’t, there would be nothing else to believe in. Not what had happened, not her, not what they’d felt for each other.
And he flat out refused to doubt that.
“Zeke, I’m running out of patience,” Jake said one morning as the two of them sat in a glass atrium. The weather was gray and grim again, the rain pouring down the vaulted glass ceilings. “Unless you can knock me down, you have no say in the matter. You’re coming home.”
Feeling weary again, Zeke faced his brother head on. “No.”
Jake sighed, raked a hand through his hair. He still hadn’t worn his hat. “We can sedate you to get you on that plane.”
“You do that and I’ll never forgive you, Jake. I mean it.”
“Zeke, please. You have to know that you dreamed it all up. The brain is an amazing thing. Yours can create entire worlds. It just happened to do that when you were…asleep.”
“I did not dream it. All I’m doing here is trying to be worthy of the woman I love. Is that so much to ask? Wouldn’t you do as much for Amanda?”
Jake looked like a doctor delivering fatal news. “It’s been eight days, Zeke. Nobody’s coming.”
Zeke turned away to watch the rain sliding down the windows. “She’s coming.”
And then I’ll say goodbye.
Come soon, Nuala, before I lose my courage.
Before I’m too sore and heartsick to savor the time we have together.
They came for him three days later, bearing his clothes and a wheelchair and reams of instructions to dismiss him from the hospital. Zeke begged to be allowed to stay. He couldn’t imagine how Nuala would be able to find him if he left. But rules were rules. The hospital called him cured enough to go home. His bed was stripped and his flowers piled onto a rolling cart.
“I can’t go,” he pleaded, frantic. Knowing he looked wild-eyed, sure the staff—if not his sister—was hiding a big syringe of sedative behind their backs. “Please.”
He hated that his family looked so torn. He would never want to put them through this. They thought Nuala lived within the swollen cells of a brain injury. But Zeke knew.
He knew.
He listened for her even as the nurse helped him struggle into the same jeans he swore Nuala had so laughingly divested him of only a week before. He looked up as the door opened, only to see Gen come to get him with regretful eyes and gentle humor. He took as long as he possibly could to get into his shoes and his shirt and his jacket, to slip his battered old field hat onto his newly bald pate. He’d been half bald after the surgery anyway, and it had seemed easier to start all over again than grow half a head of hair. Lee said it made him look like Vin Diesel. Zeke didn’t care. He just wanted Nuala to be able to recognize him when she came.
She would come.
So he eased into his wheelchair and prayed for a miracle. He held his breath all the way down the long hall as nurses and doctors stopped by to wish him well, to smile at his story of a misadventure on a fairy rath, to meet the man who waited for a fairy princess.
He saw the outside door approach like the gates of hell and knew he couldn’t go through it. His heart began to hammer. His back broke out in a sick sweat. He couldn’t give up. Not yet.
Not yet.
He was almost to the door when he heard it. The light, almost invisible patter of feet, running. He swore he smelled it. Cloves.
He knew it. She’d come for him.
“Stop!” he yelled, planting his size twelves on the terrazzo floor and bringing the procession to a drunken halt.
“What the hell now?” Jake demanded.
But Zeke was already on his feet and turning. He was looking for her, because he knew, he just knew, she was there.
“Nuala!”
But before he even had a chance to see her, his damn left leg gave way. He saw the almost comical dismay on half a dozen faces as they took just a second too long to react. His knee buckled. His right foot slid on the new polish. His arms windmilled, and down he went. Right on his ass. Just like before.
He lay flat on his back, the wind completely knocked out of him. He didn’t see anything above him but Jake and the nurse, and Amanda, hands out, face crumpled with distress, and Lee’s husband, Rock, scowling, ready to bend to pick him up.
He didn’t see her.
“Nuala!”
But the only answer he got was the indifferent chatter of a hospital corridor.
Slowly, as if he’d aged thirty years in the last week, Jake knelt down by Zeke’s head. “Zeke,” he said bending closer, and Zeke knew how hard it was for his brother to do this. “There’s no one there. I’m sorry.”
Zeke didn’t close his eyes. He didn’t jump up and begin to batter at something. He simply lay there, defeated. She wasn’t coming. Something had kept her in her world, something dread. And he might never know what.
He would never see her again.
Fighting the scalding pain of loss, he lifted a hand to Jake. “Okay. Let’s go.”
It was over.