34. Dubliners
34
DUBLINERS
We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law. Butalways meeting ourselves.
— JAMES JOYCE, ULYSSES
W e were about halfway across the Atlantic when I awoke to the smell of breakfast and coffee. After bidding the quickest farewell possible to Sybil, Jonathan had escorted me back to the jet to enjoy a private flight to Boston to pick up the rest of my things, then on to Ireland while we slept. My books had been relegated to storage, but I’d insisted on bringing my surfboard and wetsuits along with my clothes and the mysterious box from Penny.
I opened my eyes to find Jonathan sitting in the plush leather seat across from me, neatly shoving forkfuls of scrambled eggs and bacon into his mouth and washing them down with coffee nearly white with cream. He offered a well-satisfied smile before returning directly to his meal.
I chuckled. He was literally the cat who got the cream this morning.
“Would you like some breakfast?”
A flight attendant, an Irish girl with a spate of freckles dancing across her nose, touched me gently on the shoulder. Her polite inquiry was overshadowed by an obvious crush on my voracious seatmate.
I shrugged off her touch and intrusive thoughts and tugged the folding tray out from my armrest. “Yes, please. Black tea too, if you don’t mind.”
I couldn’t help but notice a marked difference between the quality of my breakfast and Jonathan’s. His eggs looked distinctly fluffier, and his bacon crispier than the lifeless serving I was delivered.
“Just wait a moment,” he said when I bent to take a bite.
His eyes glittered, and his lips moved. The delicious scent of freshly scrambled eggs wafted from my plate.
I smiled and picked up a piece of now-perfectly crisped bacon. “Thank you.”
I was rewarded with a Cheshire-like grin before Jonathan scooped another forkful of food into his mouth. “It’s a charter jet, not the Ritz. But that doesn’t mean we have to eat like we’re still in coach. Have a nice sleep, then?”
“I did, actually. I’ve never been able to sleep on a plane before. You’d better be careful with your little tricks, or else someone’s going to notice.”
Jonathan shrugged. “The attendant’s a siren, if you couldn’t tell. She won’t say a word.”
“So, remind me again,” I said before taking a sip of the now-excellent tea. “First we go to Dublin, and then we fly to Connemara, then board another flight out to the islands?”
Jonathan nodded and speared a piece of egg.
“It’s a shame we can’t fly through London. I’d love to see Gran’s flat there, too.”
“Your flat now,” Jonathan corrected me. “And there will be time for that. You’ll have to go to England anyway since the Council convenes in Northumberland. Not very close to London, but on the same island, at least.”
The island in question had not yet come into view. I opened my window, which only revealed a slate-blue ocean as far as I could see. The Aran Islands, a trio of tiny limestone villages where Gran had been raised and spent the majority of her girlhood, had good surf, or so Google said. It would be cold, of course, but I was used to that after years in Oregon. More importantly, a rare “perfect wave” regularly broke just off the coast of County Clare. I chose to focus on that, and all thoughts of dark mumbling shadows, vise-like constrictions, and ice-cold mothers seemed very far away as I contemplated what was ahead of me.
Three hours later, we landed at a private airport outside of Dublin and were shuttled through customs within ten minutes of disembarking. No crowds. No jostling shoulders. No spats of memories or thoughts I did not want to know.
I could definitely get used to this.
Overhead, clouds settled atop the skyline, an atmospheric cape that sent pangs of homesickness through my chest, for all it looked like Oregon. The air had the same heavy, dampness of Manzanita, though with little of the salty wind. The ends of my hair were already starting to curl. I tugged a thin cashmere cardigan from my backpack. One of Gran’s hand-me-downs, it was a favorite of mine, wearing at the elbows.
“I think you’ll like Dublin,” Jonathan said as we waited for a taxi.
“Oh, I do like Dublin,” I said, pulling my arms through the sleeves.
“You’ve been here before?”
“Just the docks. Reina and I took a freighter to Europe when we were sophomores. Did the whole sightseeing thing around Europe, staying in hostels and whatnot. We had a few hours here before the boat to Liverpool, which we mostly used to grab a Guinness at a pub from Ulysses. I remember it being old and smelling a lot like pipe tobacco. But I liked the weather because it felt like home.”
“Joyce was a siren, you know. A bloody crazy one, too.”
“How do you know that?”
Jonathan didn’t answer my question, just gave me an “Of course he was, stupid” look and simply said, “Do you think a human could have written Finnigan’s Wake ?”
He had a point. James Joyce’s final book was two thousand pages of obtuse, coded prose only a few steps removed from gibberish. One of my professors had challenged his students to read as much of the book as we could—and, more importantly, bring some kind of understanding to it—within the sixteen-week span of the semester. Fueled by strong Irish whiskey and homemade soda bread, my group had met twice weekly and made it approximately three pages into the text.
Jonathan and I were able to load our things into the back of a black cab, positioning my surfboard so it stuck through the back seat in between us. The cabbie was a friendly fellow with coarse gray hair that tickled his collar and matched the bushy mustache hiding his upper lip. As he helped me into the back seat, the cabbie’s hand brushed mine, and I Saw the feral mind of a shifter, though the contact was too brief to identify exactly what sort of animal he was. An opossum, maybe. Or some other kind of rodent.
When I looked up, he nodded as if to confirm my Sight. “Pleasure, bean feasa . Welcome to Dublin.”
“‘Wise woman’?” I wondered to Jonathan over the edge of the surfboard. “Do I appear particularly smart?”
Jonathan’s face shuttered.
“Where to, then?” asked the driver once he was back in the front seat.
Jonathan rattled off an address, and we sat back for the drive into the city.
“Did you talk much to anyone when you were here last?” asked Jonathan. “On your college sojourn, that is?”
“No. The pub was about as social as we got, and I could only bear it for one drink. We tried to stay away from people, for the most part. Why?”
This time I was rewarded with a shrug. “Dublin’s known for having an unusually large concentration of…us. The usual ratio of fae to humans in a city is somewhere around one to fifteen or twenty, and much smaller if you visit rural areas. But here it’s higher, around one to ten, plus a lot of half-humans like yourself who never manifest, but know about our world. Almost enough to allow us to talk freely. It also makes it much harder to track other fae because of the mixture of so much energy.”
I looked out the window, suddenly suspicious of the large group of punk-dressed youth loitering at an intersection. Two of the girls had pink-tipped Mohawks, and their laughter seemed to reach inside the cab.
“They’re not,” Jonathan said, following my gaze, his eyes glittering for a brief second. “Trying too hard. But the one on the edge of the group, the mousy girl with the ratty Chucks, she’s a shifter.”
We passed brick buildings reminiscent of Boston’s, but larger, crumbling in places, and covered with thicker layers of grit. The solemn exteriors, which varied on spectrums of gray, beige, and maroon, were disrupted at their centers by the doors brightly painted in primary colors. Against the mantle of gray and sheen of drizzle not unlike Oregon, the cheery blues, reds, and yellows seemed like a way to welcome as friends whoever crossed their thresholds.
The cab turned onto a cobblestoned street in the Old City and pulled up outside a small boutique hotel whose door was painted a vibrant cerulean blue. The Carson Hotel was guarded by a wrought iron fence and impossibly thick laurel bushes that gave way to ivy climbing up a cracked stone exterior. 1792 was engraved above the lintel.
Jonathan and I got out while the driver unloaded our luggage, leaning my board against the bags on the curb. I took in a deep breath, inhaling the scents of wet plants, wafts of cigarette smoke, and beer that floated up and down the street from the many pubs situated above and below the sidewalk. Beneath the smells, energy pulsed. I wondered what Jonathan Saw when he cared to look.
Jonathan was right about the fae presence here. The cabbie had barely tried to mask his canine instincts as he drove, head on a constant swivel, nose ever-sniffing at the air through his open window. Once I even caught him panting.
He wasn’t the only one. The porter who emerged from The Carson fairly glowed, his siren’s aura pulsing from his flawless white skin and ruddy brown hair like a halo. When he smiled, my knees felt like they were full of water, a casualty of a siren’s overt charisma and charm. I was glad I was a seer and wasn’t relegated to wearing my power on my sleeve that way, safely concealed where no one would see it.
Or could they?
“Welcome, bean feasa ,” murmured the porter, placing my surfboard atop the rest of the bags stacked neatly on the cart before he rolled them into the hotel lobby.
“Why do they keep saying that to me?” I asked Jonathan as we followed him inside.
“It means ‘wise woman’ in Irish,” he said.
“I know what it means,” I said irritably. “I just don’t know why they keep saying it to me .”
“Ireland respects its seers, Cass. It’s known for producing some of the greatest in history—Penny among them. They’ll recognize you for what you are and honor it.”
I frowned, suddenly suspicious of the porter as we followed him into the lobby of the hotel. “Yes, but how do they know what I am? They’ve barely spoken to me.”
I was rewarded with an eye roll, to which I responded with a swift jab to Jonathan’s ribs.
“Careful there!” he exclaimed, rubbing the side of his belly. “You’ve got knives for elbows, did you know that?”
“Then just answer my questions without the side of condescension, will you?” I stuck my elbow out at him until he feigned surrender.
“It’s not hard to See,” he admitted. “I knew instantly what you were. I told you, I could See your energy. You need a brief touch, others like you only have to look inside our minds. Sirens can feel it, and shifters, well.” He tapped the end of his nose.
I gasped. “I smell? ”
He chuckled. “It’s not bad. Just very particular.”
I wasn’t sure what I thought about being so readily identifiable until something else occurred to me. “But because there are so many of us here, a few more won’t be noticed?”
“Nothing like hiding in plain sight,” Jonathan agreed.
If the porter and the cabbie had been less than discreet, the hotel was practically a celebration of magic. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t one plain human in the lobby. A young male sorcerer was speaking in hushed tones into the house telephone, his eyes blazing a fiery orange color as he looked through the wallet in front of him, willing each of the cards and pieces of money to float in front of him, dancing in midair like a child’s toy. Next to a crackling rowan wood fire, a group of shifters who couldn’t have been anything but house cats chatted, feline eyes a peaceful yellow as they occasionally emitted the distinct thrums of purring from inside their chests.
“Do you do that?” I asked Jonathan as we approached the front desk. “Purr?”
I received only a withering expression of disdain as Jonathan handed his passport to a pert young sorceress with dark brown eyes.
“Welcome back, Mr. Lynch. Hair or swab, sir?” she said as she examined the document with eyes now shimmering like graphite.
“Swab.” Jonathan took back his passport and tucked it into his leather satchel.
There was an awkward silence as the receptionist blinked at me expectantly.
“Er, swab, I guess.” I reached for one of the two sterile packets she offered.
“No, that won’t be necessary, Elsie,” Jonathan said, pushing one back across the counter. “We’ll only be here a night, and be together the whole time. The room is under my name only. Thank you, though.”
Elsie paused. “But, Mr. Lynch, hotel policy?—”
“How’s your father, Elsie?” Jonathan interrupted quietly. “His case before the Council was dismissed, was it not?”
The girl’s mouth opened and closed a few times before she shut it and nodded tightly. “Yes, it was. He’s home and well, sir, thanks to you.” She drew back one of the packets, glancing around to make sure no one was watching, and tucked it away. “Just the one, then.”
Her tone was perfectly civil, but curiosity flashed in her eyes as she glanced at me. I feigned nonchalance and watched as Jonathan tore open the packet and rubbed the swab against the inside of his cheek before handing it back across the counter. The receptionist pressed a button on the desk, and a small square of the wood surface retracted below the rest to reveal a black cup of water.
“Is that a…miniature cauldron?” I wondered, earning a pointed look from Jonathan.
Elsie murmured a short spell, and the water began to boil. “You requested a double suite, is that correct?” she asked, looking at her computer.
Jonathan nodded and handed her a credit card. “Top floor, please. With a balcony.”
“Very good, sir.”
The receptionist ran the credit card and pressed a few more keys. Once a receipt was printed out, she dropped the swab into the water, where it promptly disappeared. The water boiled for a few more seconds then stilled before the wood enclosure slid back into place.
“You’re in Room 613,” she said. “Take the lift to the top floor, and it’s at the end of the hall. Shall we have your luggage brought up?”
“No, we’ll do it ourselves,” Jonathan said. “Thank you, Elsie.”
“No key?” I asked as we turned from the desk and pushed our luggage cart toward the old-fashioned elevators. I had been trying hard not to stare at the proceedings at the desk, though I had been tempted to quote Macbeth .
“None needed,” Jonathan replied. “The doors are enchanted to be energy sensitive. The swab was needed for mine. The room will only recognize me until we leave tomorrow morning.”
“That’s convenient,” I said. “No need to worry about lost keys that way.”
“I suppose. Although if you decide to stay longer and forget to tell the front desk, it’s bloody impossible to get back in once it’s locked on you.”
The elevator doors opened, which I held back as Jonathan pushed our dolly into the compartment. I looked for a set of buttons or a crankshaft, but the wall only bore the same walnut-colored wainscoting that decorated the rest of the compartment. Of course. If the rooms didn’t need keys, why should the elevator need buttons?
“Six,” he said aloud, and the car began to move.
“So, why couldn’t I have access to the room?” I asked from my side of the cart.
My surfboard blocked Jonathan’s face, making only the tips of his sandy hair evident over the edge.
“It’s for your protection. The hotel says any evidence of guest energy is destroyed upon checkout, but I don’t think we can be too careful, under the circumstances.”
“What about yours?”
“I’ve been here dozens of times. If anyone thinks to track me, he’ll just think I’m on another routine trip in Dublin. Nothing special.”
He. Him. The memory of Caleb Lynch’s scowling, wrinkled face flashed along with an ominous thump of my heart. I shuddered, suddenly grateful for Jonathan’s guidance since I had none of my grandmother’s gifts for disappearing wherever I went.
“Don’t you think it’s a little suspicious, then, if a guest doesn’t want access to the room?” I wondered. “Especially if I’m already recognized as a seer?”
“I doubt it. She probably just thought you were a prostitute.”
“She what ?”
“High class, though. I doubt The Carson lets rooms by the hour.”
A pair of dancing, lime-colored eyes leered at me over the edge of my surfboard but disappeared when I threw a wad of tissue from my coat pocket.
“They say seers are good shags too,” he continued, chuckling. “Since they can See what you’re thinking, there’s no guesswork about what you’d want, hmm?”
The doors opened, and Jonathan scampered out before I could throw anything else at him. Thoughts of shadows were gone, and all I could think of was trying to land some sort of debris from my pocket on the back of Jonathan’s head.
“Well, come on, then, my clairvoyant little tart,” he called as he continued down the hall. “Or you’ll not earn your wages tonight.”