“It’s so beautiful,” I said, mostly to myself, but Gabriel was beside me, so he took a break from watching the other passengers to take in the scenery. The ferry to Ireland was better than a boat, but I still preferred land travel. We were nearing our third hour, and I was ready to get off.
“It’s green,” was his response.
“It’s luscious green. I have never wanted to run through a field and roll around in the grass, but I want to do that now.”
He looked at me like he was suddenly struck by how young and immature I was.
“Nothing excites you anymore?” I asked, turning to face him instead of the view.
“I guess I’m letting the context get in the way. You look at it as a silver lining, but I’m looking at all the places people could hide, marred by memories…”
“What memories?” I asked him.
“I have happy ones, like spending weeks with Terrence’s family when I was best man at his wedding, but there have been wars and famines and escaping dangerous people….”
“With Cassie?”
“Sometimes I help other people,” he admitted.
“With the FBI?” I whispered, but more to tease him than to keep it a secret.
“There are amazing people in the world who see someone in need and go out of their way to help them. There are other people who see a weakness and exploit it. Who see something they want and take it, whether it belongs to them or not. When those people have Gifts, they believe the normal rules don’t apply to them. We have the safe houses for those types of situations, but sometimes it’s safest to be constantly moving.”
“We have time, if you wanted to give me an example of these people,” I pointed out. It would be at least another hour until we arrived in Ireland.
“Maybe forty years ago, there was a Gifted who decided his task was to liberate all the child soldiers of the world. It was a beautiful dream, and his Gift was that he could open anything, so he could easily free them once he found them. He got some hired guns for protection, but it cost a lot of lives, both from him and from the children he wanted to rescue. He recuperated at the safe house a few times when a friend of Caleb’s was the guardian, and the conversation turned to Etta and her Gift. The guy saw this as his solution to save all the kids, but instead of bringing the injured to her or asking if she could help, he kidnapped her, chained her to the back of a van and forced her to fix people for him.”
“That’s… he was trying to do a good thing in a terrible way,” I tried to translate my thoughts into words.
“Our callings can drive us mad. Especially if you don’t have an end in sight. Was it one particular child he had to save, or did he have to keep saving them until there were no more child soldiers? I’m sure he started out with the best of intentions, but he eventually built his own army of unwilling soldiers.”
“Did you just rescue her, or did you take care of him too? Are there prisons for Gifteds?” I asked, so many questions floating around my mind.
“There is one prison that has a section to contain Gifteds. There are rooms and devices that can contain Gifts, but before that they would cater the room to the Gifted. When I was a government man, there was a block of cells we visited, where the guards wore hazmat suits tailored to the Gift. As long as they couldn’t touch you, you couldn’t hear them or look into their eyes, you were safe.”
“That seems like…”
“A lot of trouble. There are Gifteds who, although they’re not bad people, don’t like being locked up, or held accountable for the things they do. A lot of them will hang themselves to get out, but if you stumble upon someone who knows what you are… it’s not like we did that for every Gifted who got arrested, but if the crime was violent, we kept them contained.”
“Which prison?” I asked. “Guantanamo, Alcatraz…”
“Rikers,” he shared. “But don’t tell anyone I told you, because it is way above your clearance level.”
“My lips are sealed,” I assured him with a smile.
I convinced him to tell me more about his times in Ireland, finally getting him to admit that the Emerald Isle could be beautiful if you weren’t on the run or fighting for your life, before Embry came back with food.
“What did I miss?” He asked, handing me a chicken and pesto panini.
“I’d say we’re about an hour out, but I can see it and it’s gorgeous,” I filled him in.
“Half an hour according to the screens inside, but I’m glad you’re enjoying this boat ride,” he smiled.
“Enjoying is a stretch, but it’s the best I’ve had yet.”
“At least you’ve got delightful company?” Embry tried.
“And time to go over the Chronicles, the Book of Shadows, and everything we know about Henry’s ritual.”
“Did you come to any conclusions?” Gabriel asked me.
“We know of six ingredients needed to complete it. The kindling from Emmanuel’s Betrayal is what those men were trying to stop us from getting. They can’t possibly be watching every single piece of the cross, because there are thousands. But then again, none of them can prove their authenticity. The church recognizes some as more likely, but that’s it.”
“Our best bet would be to collect all of them and hope at least one of them is real,” Gabriel said like it was a plan rather than an impossible setback.
“The soul of his untouched child just means a virgin, which sounds sketchy, but since my life is at stake either way, I might as well risk my soul,” I swallowed, aware that my face was burning red at that admission. “Tears of Isis are the easiest, because you can buy vervain pretty much everywhere.”
“The arms of Yggdrasil?” Embry pressed.
“That’s where it gets complicated. Yggdrasil is an imaginary tree that connects the Nine Worlds in Norse mythology.”
“What does that mean?” Gabriel furrowed his brow.
“It means I have no idea where we can find it because it’s a mythical thing and no one knows where it is.”
“Henry said he had everything except for your heart,” Embry pointed out that it couldn’t be imaginary.
“We’ll figure it out,” Gabriel stated.
I wanted to argue with his optimism, but I could tell it was determination and he would get it done. “The blood of the incumbent means whoever does it has to prick themselves,” I moved on to the next ingredient. “And we all know about my heart,” I finished.
“Which he will never get,” Embry assured me.
“Fingers crossed,” I agreed, getting him to roll his eyes at me. “I’ve also been trying to figure out how Beth got Kiara’s cure. I think she and Cassie knew more than they let on,” I bit my bottom lip and looked to Embry for his reaction.
“We didn’t keep any secrets,” he gave me an intense stare that could rival Gabriel’s, then sighed, “But she liked to research and look into things on her own. She might have found something she was waiting to get more information on before sharing with me.”
I gave him a smile before looking back out at the expanse of our destination. He seemed convinced, but there had to be a reason no one ever mentioned a spell that could save us to the men responsible for protecting us. Maybe we were right, and it didn’t work unless you completed the ritual first. Perhaps it came with terrible consequences that they weren’t prepared to pay. Either way, I hoped Ireland held the answers we were looking for. But I had a bad feeling about what we would find.