When we finally docked in Ireland, I was more than happy to set foot on solid ground, even if I still felt wobbly. We used a tourist map to find the address Saoirse was born at in 1462, not expecting to find much, since we knew she ended up in England, but I was expecting more than a literal pile of rubble.
“The parish church should have some records,” Embry put his hand on my shoulder.
“Maybe they’ll have a family plot in the cemetery,” I was staying optimistic, but I was no genealogist, and the farther back we went, the harder it would be to track my ancestors down. Not to mention we had no way of knowing when the first one of us appeared.
It was a short walk to the parish cathedral made of large stones. I took the ‘est. 1225’ as a good sign for finding information on Kiara, but we wouldn’t be able to go much further than that.
“Good morning,” a priest walked over and whispered as soon as we opened the doors. “Are you here for the mass?”
“No, we’re…” I looked back to the guys, but it was a small building, and everyone looked busy at the moment. “Yes, we are,” I decided.
“Wonderful, it’s just starting,” he ushered us over to some pews near the back. I made sure to kneel and do the sign of the cross before taking my seat.
I hadn’t been in church for ages. Mrs. Boyd used to bring me with her, but after she died, Mr. Boyd didn’t see the point in it. ‘God is everywhere. Why should I have to go to church to talk to him?’ was his answer the one time I asked about it.
I only said yes to put us in the priest’s good graces and not disturb the mass, but being back in a church brought me so many questions. I always believed in God and Jesus Christ in a very compartmental way. When they taught us about the Big Bang in school, I listened and accepted it as fact. But I also knew that God created the earth and man and woman and everything I read in the Bible. Both facts existed in my brain simultaneously, as long as I never tried to consider which was right.
I spent most of the service trying to figure out what I believed in, given my new knowledge of Magic and Gifted and the upheaval of everything I took for granted. By the end, I decided I needed a third compartment to make sense of it all and allow magic, religion and science to co-exist in my mind.
We followed the dozen or so congregation members towards the exit, but the priest who let us in stopped us before we could talk to the priest who said mass.
“Are you interested in a tour as well?” he asked us. He was a plain man in his forties, but he had a smile that made his eyes twinkle.
“That would be lovely,” I said, speaking for the group again.
“I’m Father Dunn,” he extended his hand to shake mine, then did the same for Gabriel and Embry. “What brings you to Killaloe?”
“I’ve been working on my family tree, and one of my ancestors was born a few minutes from here back in 1462,” I gave him a partial answer.
“That’s exciting!” his enthusiasm seemed genuine, but misplaced for someone his age, in his profession. “I grew up not even ten minutes from here. What’s the name?” he asked.
“Saoirse Muldoon,” I shared, reading his face for any sign of recollection. The guys were staying close, but so far letting me handle it.
“Don’t know any Muldoons in town, but we have records going back to the late fifteenth century, if you want to know more about it,” he offered.
“That would be brilliant, thank you.”
He brought us to a small office in the back and went through stacks of black volumes before he found the one he was looking for. “We’ve been digitizing the records to make them more comprehensible. Faded ink and elegant handwriting are not helpful when trying to decipher names and dates,” he shared.
“This is incredible, thank you,” I flipped through the printed pages representing church records of the time.
“You can’t search by people, but if you know when in 1462, you can find the entry that records her birth.”
“January 1st,” I found her faster than I would have expected. “If her mother was born here, would she also be in the book?”
“This is the oldest book we have. It goes all the way back to 1425. We lost anything before then in a fire.”
“Deaths too?” Embry inquired.
“Anything a priest would have presided over,” he agreed. “Can I fetch you all some tea?”
“Thank you,” Gabriel told him.
It surprised me that he left us alone in the office, but it seemed to be a pretty small town.
“You’re going to go through every page?” Embry asked me.
“We know she died before 1480, so it’s just eighteen years,” I said, flipping through the pages. “Kiara Muldoon died in 1468,” I showed them. “They found it shocking, probably because she was only twenty-eight.”
“Can you remember anything?” Gabriel tried.
“Maybe if I touched her tombstone, or we can go back to the pile of rocks later?”
“Let’s see how far back we can go, then we’ll ask Father Dunn about her grave,” Embry suggested.
I kept searching when Father Dunn came back with the teas, scribbling names and dates onto a post-it while Embry and he discussed World War One. I wouldn’t have pegged him as such a war aficionado, but Embry recognized a medal on the desk and the conversation was never-ending.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” Father Dunn asked when I closed the volume. Kiara was either first generation, or her parents were born before the fire.
“This was really helpful,” I agreed. “Do you think you could point us to where she was buried?”
“Let me see,” he came over to see her death entry that I bookmarked, but got uncomfortable as he read the information. “She’s not in our plot,” he told me delicately.
“What do you mean?” I asked, going back to the book. I saw nothing wrong with her entry, other than a few symbols underneath her name, but every death notice had a variety of symbols.
“This symbol here means she’ll be in the Cillin,” he waited for me to understand, but I didn’t.
“What’s a Cillin?” I asked.
“It’s a special burial place for stillborn babies, and the ones that die before we can baptize them,” Gabriel filled me in, but he directed it at the priest, since Kiara was neither.
“It’s for anyone who didn’t have the right to a proper catholic burial.”
“As in she wasn’t catholic?” I pressed.
“It says she committed suicide.”
“She killed herself?” I was shocked, and by the looks of it, so were Embry and Gabriel.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “The closest one isn’t that far, but they’re unmarked graves.”
“Might be worth a look,” I tried to smile in gratitude. It wasn’t that she killed herself that bothered me; it was the idea that she did it because the bad guys were closing in, and they buried her as a sinner because she sacrificed herself to save the world.
“Here, I’ll write down the directions for you, and if there’s anything else I can help you with, just let me know,” he handed me another post-it, so we thanked him for the teas and headed out.
We left by the back of the church to follow the Father’s directions and encountered a colossal statue of the Virgin Mary in the courtyard.
“Henry definitely had something to do with it,” I bit my bottom lip and looked up at them. I still wasn’t sure I believed that he was evil from the start of his relationship with Annabelle, but I couldn’t face the idea that Kiara just gave up. Especially when she’s the one they named the Cure after.
“Or someone like him,” Gabriel agreed, which surprised me. He was the last person I expected to hear defending Henry, of all people.
“That’s probably why they moved to England.”
“It would have been quite the scandal,” Embry agreed.
I absent-mindedly ran my fingers along the bottom of the statue, but as soon as my hand touched the smooth rock, everything went blurry…
From what I could tell, I looked exactly like myself, and all the other Bearers, but I was someone new. I’d been through it with Beth, but it was still a shock to feel the baby kick my bladder. The woman whose memory I was in, probably Kiara, didn’t even notice the kick. She was staring up at the Virgin Mary statue, with tears pouring down her face and a war between guilt and determination in her heart.
She left the statue and scurried through the streets, looking over her shoulder like she was being followed and expected an attack at any moment. She turned down a street where it seemed like the sun vanished. As if the clouds of smoke from the chimneys all converged together to block out any light. I shivered and, though she stood tall and kept walking, she pulled her shawl tighter around herself.
When she got to a rather large wooden shack with dead animals hanging beside the doorway, she paused and took a deep breath. She brought her hand to her bulging stomach and rubbed it protectively, taking more deep breaths to stop the tears that had been threatening to fall ever since this memory started. One more and she knocked.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t come,” the woman said as a greeting. She left the door open, but that was the only welcome Kiara got as the woman went back to chopping something putrid-smelling and purple.
“If there were any other option, I wouldn’t have,” Kiara looked right into the woman’s eyes, her jaw set.
“This is dark magic, love. Not the kind you can take back,” the old woman softened, but still looked disappointed. Her hair was just as curly as mine, but much longer and blonde. Her face had many wrinkles, but I would have bet money she got them from smiling more than frowning. Except today.
“I know.”
“Are you sure about this Kiara? Curses come with consequences that no one can predict. Putting a curse on yourself doubles the danger.”
“Saoirse is far away and safe with her father, but if they get me, it won’t matter where they are or what we do. The power they would gain is unimaginable. They would be unstoppable, wreaking havoc on the world, immune to any manmade weapons, resistant to most magic… if one life can save millions, how can I not?”
“But it isn’t just one life, is it?” the woman eyed Kiara’s stomach, which she cradled protectively.
“They’re still a few days out and he’s nearly ready.”
“You’ll wait?” for the first time, the woman was hopeful.
“I will do everything in my power to keep him safe,” my voice shook and the tears slowly rolled down my cheeks. But Kiara’s determination did not waver.
“God help you,” the woman shook her head before grabbing two pieces of paper from a small wooden chest, and a handful of powders.
“You couldn’t have called it Kiara’s Brave Sacrifice?” she asked, reading the title of the first paper while the woman crushed the powders together. Kiara’s Curse sounded intriguing until you realized it was Kiara’s Curse on Kiara.
“I call it as I see it, not as you wish it to be.”
“And this reverses it?” she asked of the second sheet.
“It ends the Curse. As long as you haven’t done the unspeakable, it will be like this never happened.”
“It won’t be in my lifetime,” Kiara said it to herself, reading the Cure I’d already seen in the Chronicles. “Is all of this necessary?”
“It’s a simple list of items you have in your chest at home,” the woman sounded exasperated with Kiara’s being difficult, but Kiara knew she wouldn’t be the one using the Cure. It was nice of her to realize that her descendants wouldn’t find the list as easy to track down, but she might have considered preparing us for it.
“Of course. Is it ready?” the powders she had been mixing were producing a yellow cloud of smoke that moved like it was alive, unmolested by the wind, smelling out its environment.
“Give me your hand,” the old woman sighed. I would have thought she was annoyed, or bored, but there was something in her eyes that made me think she cared so much that this was the only way she could get through what she was about to do. As soon as I gave her my left hand, she sliced it open with a tiny blue blade. The drops of my blood sizzled once they touched the powder, turning the smoke to a rust-like color.
“Warning would have been nice.” I said, but the woman put her finger on top of the wound and used my blood to paint a crescent moon on her forehead.
“If I give myself the chance, I will change my mind,” she explained her abrupt manner. “Have you memorized it?”
“I have.”
“Then take my hand, sister, let ye be damned,” her steely gaze broke as her glassy eyes watered. We held hands and started chanting in a language I didn’t understand. The Curse was long, but they repeated it over and over, so it no longer sounded like words, but like a melody; dark and ominous, but also beautiful. The powder caught fire and the rust-colored smoke filled the room.
When the chanting stopped, we lifted our hands to the sky, and the fire exploded, but it was like the smoke and the flames, all the energy in the room shot into my nose and mouth, hitting me right inside my chest. I was still standing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me Kiara died then and there.
“I told you it wasn’t to be taken lightly,” the woman warned, but there was more kindness to her now that it was done. She went to get a cup and filled it with boiling water and herbs, ushering me to take a seat.
“Is this a part of it?” Kiara asked of the Curse.
“This is for your nerves, your heart and protection.”
“I’ve never seen anything like them, Nell. There are hundreds of them, each driven mad with this quest for power. I’ve watched them die and come back to life, seen them murder without a second thought. If they unlock the powers, it will be hell on earth.”
I finished my hot water and stood, taking a cylinder from my bag and handing it to her.
“I don’t want payment for this one,” Nell argued, pushing it away.
“Take it as payment for the Cure then. Or as a thank you for always being there for me.”
“I’ll take it when you use it,” she decided.
“Thank you, Nell. You’re a loyal friend.”
“Not a good one,” she argued, but she still let me take her in for a hug.
I left the wooden shack and walked along the road back to the church, but the world went fuzzy again, until I was in a stony cottage, my heart racing with fear. I also felt overwhelming pain, not from any wound that I could see, but from a primal place that tore through my heart and soul. I was holding a dagger in my right hand, while the left one rubbed my still-pregnant stomach. I took so many deep breaths, but nothing calmed me down in the least.
I stood in the middle of the room, facing the front door, ready. I couldn’t hear anything other than my own heartbeat, pounding in my ears, but I could feel them. It was like when Donovan got to Embry’s villa. I couldn’t feel any individual person, but there was so much magic, more than I could even imagine, coming at me from all sides.
The closer they got, the more panicked Kiara got, her breathing more difficult, until the magic got closer than she was comfortable with. It moved faster, rushing at her. I looked out the window and saw an army of men, women and creatures, ready to strike. My breathing calmed. I let out one last deep breath, then drove the dagger through my heart.
I woke up and heard screaming, before understanding that it was me.
“Kiara?” Embry asked, looking worried, but I was in Gabriel’s arms, and he looked downright horrified. “What happened?”
The look in Gabriel’s eyes told me that this was one of those times where I didn’t just pass out, I acted parts of it out, so he knew exactly what happened.
“They were coming, and I knew I couldn’t stop them. No matter how hard I fought I was alone and there were so many of them, and they would do terrible things to so many people and I didn’t have any other choice,” I said, Kiara’s thoughts mixing with mine.
“Let’s get you somewhere safe,” Gabriel decided, lifting me up in his arms as if I weighed nothing. I wanted to tell him I was fine, that I could walk, so he really didn’t have to… but I felt so safe in his arms that I let him.