47. Invitations
47
INVITATIONS
Wearied by my restlessness, rather than refreshed by my transient slumbers, I arose with the dawn…
— LADY SYDNEY MORGAN, THE WILD IRISH GIRL
A few weeks later, I still hadn’t heard anything from Jonathan. It had been more than six weeks, and his spot at the end of the table, closest to the door, stayed empty.
When I finally sacrificed my pride and asked Robbie about him one evening over a bowl of chicken and barley stew, he only shrugged and shook his head. “You know Jonny.”
But the truth was, I didn’t. Maybe I had been privy to certain parts of his mind, but those moments were fleeting. Maybe it was common for him to disappear for months at a time. Or to kiss a woman like he loved her and vanish without a trace.
I turned over a spoonful of barley with a scowl. Better I didn’t think along those lines.
About to take a bite of her own bowl, Caitlin snorted.
Don’t say a word , I thought, knowing she was listening.
She chuckled, but to my surprise, cooperated.
“So…where do you think he’s gone?” I asked Robbie.
Again, his thin shoulders rose and fell under the green plaid shirt he wore approximately three times a week. “Who knows? Could be Rome—though if he were at his lab I think we’d have heard from him by now. Jonny likes to wander, you know?”
I didn’t. That was the point.
“He told me he was looking for his father.” I wasn’t quite able to hide my bitterness.
Caitlin pursed her lips across the table and closed her eyes, her spoon poised mid-air like a conductor’s baton. After a moment, she opened them and shook her head as she resumed eating. “He didn’t find him. That’s all I can get, as he’s shielding something fierce. Seems he’s out in a wood somewhere, but I don’t know which one or whether he’s still chasing his dad. Could be he’s just out for a frolic.”
“Frolic?” I bit my lip. She made it sound like he was chasing rainbows with a magic dragon.
“Not quite,” Caitlin replied. “He runs about in the woods. Maybe goes for a hunt. Jon gets a bit restless when he’s stuck in one place for too long. One way he’s like his dad, I suppose.”
“Speaking of staying in one place too long,” Robbie said. “We’re all headed to Doolin tomorrow in the morning. Perhaps you’d like to join us.”
“I don’t know that the girls deserve such a treat after neglecting their chores tonight.” Caitlin finished her stew and stood to clear their daughters’ bowls along with hers. They had long escaped to their rooms, taking advantage of our conversation to sneak away without clearing their dishes.
Robbie ignored his wife’s grumbling, and I followed suit.
“What’s in Doolin for you?” I wondered.
“The north field needs amending,” he told me. “It’s too late in the growing season for more kelp, and I’m trying a new hybrid of corn out there.”
“She doesn’t care about your experiments, Rob Connolly,” Caitlin said as she rejoined us with a mug of her favorite after-dinner tea. “Bronagh has to be measured for her school uniform too, and the twins would never forgive us if we didn’t take them. There’s a good chance we’ll stay the night. You’d be better off here.”
“Do you want to come anyway?” Robbie asked anyway, ignoring his wife’s sharp glare. “Christ, Cait, she can have a bit of fun, can’t she?”
“She’s in training , Rob. Ever heard of it?”
“No, not me, a professor at Brigantian College. Never heard of such a thing.”
I smiled at their friendly bickering. Much as a trip off the island sounded nice (there were only so many afternoons at the Arts Center I could take), nicer still would be a break from Caitlin’s relentless demands—and she was already annoyed that I’d gone to the mainland to buy a new surfboard. I didn’t have to read her mind to know she would prefer I stayed here and continued working without her.
“I’ll stay here,” I said. “Have dinner at the pub. And practice, of course.”
“You’ve been a bit lax with your divination,” Caitlin said. “Before I get back, I want you to summon at least four waking prophecies and journal. We’ll parse them together.”
I glowered at a carrot in my spoon. Divination was my least favorite clairvoyance skill after shielding. I wasn’t a complete failure—Jonathan was right about that. I was learning to separate future visions from the past, as they had a particular feeling I was beginning to recognize. But everything seemed like gibberish whenever I looked for the future. Visions overlapped, and nothing ever felt coherent unless I was sleeping. Even then, it was hard to know how much was actually the future, and how much was mixed with my own state of mind.
“I will,” I told her as I scraped the bottom of my bowl.
I’d get up early tomorrow and do the work. After that, I’d enjoy an entire day without Caitlin. An entire day doing whatever I wanted.
“Hmph.” Caitlin’s expression told me she knew exactly what I was thinking, but she just took a sip of her tea and started discussing the ferry schedule with Robbie.
As far as I was concerned, tomorrow couldn’t come fast enough.
Much to Caitlin’s chagrin, Caomhán’s shining black hair had become a regular sighting for me, though he was often camouflaged among the seals who increasingly joined me on the break in front of Gran’s cottage. Dodging him on my surfboard had become a game I expected to play each morning before training, and to my surprise, our daily banter seemed to harden me against the continuing failure that was my magical education.
So, it wasn’t much of a surprise he was waiting for me in the surf as I paddled out early the next morning.
“Oi, Cassie!” A pale hand rose from the water, lit by the first rays of the sun.
The Connollys had left on the first boat, which meant they crunched over the graveled road just before dawn. I was enjoying a cup of tea and watching the waves out my front window as their car passed at nearly five in the morning. The water was clean and glassy.
“What are you doing out here so early?” I asked as I paddled closer to where he bobbed on the break.
Caomhán, characteristically naked, grinned widely, the reddened tip of his nose the only thing betraying the temperature of the water. He and most other shifters ran a bit hot, he had informed me, but he couldn’t stay in human form long in these waters without starting to freeze. “I’m always out here. You know that.”
“Do you sleep out here?” I wasn’t quite joking. Maybe he did. Maybe the normal rules of seals didn’t apply to a shifter. I couldn’t imagine it was comfortable to be in the water all the time, but then again, I couldn’t turn into a marine animal on a whim.
“No,” he said. “I’d drown, eejit. I’m a murúch , not a fish.”
“Do you sleep with the other seals on shore? What’s it called, a haul out?” I chuckled, imagining Caomhán in his human form cuddled up with the thick, awkward bodies that seals were out of the water.
“Sometimes,” he admitted. “But only if I’m too lazy to clean up at the end of the night. They’re a bit smelly. Fart in their sleep, and the bulls snore like ocean liners.”
At that, I laughed outright. We bobbed up and down for a bit, waiting for a set to roll in.
“So, is it true what they say about shifters?” I asked.
“What’s that?”
“That they’re more animal than human.”
He raised a slick black brow. “Are you asking me what I think you’re asking me, Cassie?”
I lifted one right back. “They do say men only have one thing on their minds. Must be harder if you like your animal form best.”
I beat my fist into the water, sending a big splash that Caomhán neatly dodged before reemerging next to my knee and nearly causing me to topple off my board.
“You don’t want to be playin’ that game with me,” he said with a grin. “I’ll win every time.”
Then he shoved off my board and dove with a grace I couldn’t help but admire. I felt at home in the water, but Caomhán moved as if there was no separation between his body and the ocean.
“To answer your question,” he said once he reemerged, “I’d venture it depends on the person. There are some I know who feel more comfortable in their animal skins than as a human, and they tend to act more like beasts than men. Others do their best to ignore it, like your friend Jon.”
“You know Jonathan?”
Caomhán chuckled. “Oh, to be sure. I’ve known Jonathan Lynch my whole life and a fair amount of his too.”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t tell me. You’re also technically a senior citizen.”
In response, a clear stream of water hit me smack in the temple.
“Hey!”
“I prefer the term well-ripened. But no, I’ve got at least ten years before I hit that mark.”
I shook my head. Caomhán was likely old enough to be my father, then. Apparently, there were no fae on the island my age.
“How do you know about that anyway?” he asked. “You’re not supposed to learn for another four years at least, by the smell of you. So say the spell casters. Are the Connollys actually breaking the rules for once?”
I rolled my eyes. It seemed Caomhán could smell literally everything about me.
“I figured it out,” I lied before changing the subject.
“Gods, your lies stink as bad as your age, Cassie.”
Once again, my splash didn’t quite hit the target. “What did you mean about Jonathan ignoring his animal side?”
I turned back around to search for another wave. Unfortunately, it was a bit flat today, and the waves were proving few and far between.
“Most shifters I’ve known make a habit of changing at least once a day. It’s one reason most don’t live in cities, unless our soul animal is an urban creature, like a rat.” Caomhán wrinkled his nose. “Gods, I’d hate to be half rat, wouldn’t you?”
I couldn’t help but agree with him. “Is it like having a separate person in you? The ‘soul animal,’ you called it?”
He stuck his lower lip out briefly as he considered my question. “Well, no, it’s not as though you have a whole other being inside you. More like a different part of your. What would happen if you tried to ignore the part of you who was a seer? Something so innate it’s been there since birth?”
His question hit a little too close to home, considering I had tried to do that for a very long time.
“It’s useless,” I admitted. “I still See everyone’s thoughts, and I See things I don’t want to. Sometimes I wonder if fighting it for so long made my training that much harder. Like everything is coming at once because I never tried to See it before—just to stop it. Most of the time, I feel like I’m going crazy.”
He nodded. “Yes, well, being a shifter’s something like that. Only that part of you literally changes all of you, and if you don’t give it a chance to run—or swim, in my case—you risk it taking control completely. Very bothersome, as there are moments where you really need to be human.”
“Like when?” I wondered.
“Well, I recall a time when I was a lad. Me mam hadn’t let me swim for three or four days as punishment for eating a whole pie she’d made for Christmas. I was fair dying for the water. We went to Mass, and as soon as I put my fingers in the font, I let out the biggest bark you’d ever heard and kept doing it throughout the whole service. Embarrassed the shite out of Mam when I barked every time the priest invoked the Lord’s name.”
I giggled, imagining him imitating a seal whenever the priest mentioned God. “Is that where Jonathan is? Off being a cat somewhere so he won’t start hissing in the middle of his lectures?”
Caomhán snorted. “Well, Jonny’s cat is a smaller part of him than most of us, considering he’s only a bit shifter. Knowing him, though, he still probably only changes every few months. Do you know when last he did?”
I thought briefly of that terrible night in Manzanita when his cat form chased off another hybrid shifter-sorcerer amidst a fire. I shivered, and it had nothing to do with the water temperature. “I don’t actually know him that well.”
Caomhán cocked his head.
“What?” I asked. “I don’t .”
“That’s not what it sounds like when you talk about him. And sometimes it doesn’t take much time to know someone. Especially for a bean feasa. ”
“Is that what I am?” People used the title, but I still seemed to be the most defective seer in existence. Most of the time I couldn’t keep people out. And then, of course, with the one person whose internal life I’d wanted to See, I couldn’t.
So much for being an oracle or whatever Caitlin claimed I was.
“Shifters just know what all fae should,” Caomhán interrupted my brooding. “You can’t bottle your power. It’ll come out one way or another.”
I sighed. “Sometimes I wish I were plain. Don’t you ever wish you didn’t have to spontaneously turn into a seal to keep yourself whole?”
Caomhán looked shocked. “Why would I want that? It’s all I’ve ever been. And it’s fun.”
He demonstrated just how much fun with another dive into the water, and through the depths I saw a flash of something dark and sleek before he popped out, ruddy-skinned as before.
“You know, I’ve never had to explain it to anyone,” he told me. “Most of the others”—by which I gathered he meant other fae who didn’t shift—“tend to think it below them. They think we’re nothing but dogs.”
I cringed, remembering even Gran using the term “mutt” to refer to shifters. “Well, I don’t,” I said. “My grandfather was a shifter. He was a seal like you.”
“Ciarán.” It was a statement, rather than a guess.
“How did you know? Friend of yours.”
Caomhán hoisted himself up onto my board so his nose was very close to mine, though the lower half of him remained in the water. It took nearly every bit of self-control I had to stay where I was rather than lean away from him. I wasn’t used to anyone being in such close proximity, and definitely not when he wasn’t wearing a shred of clothing.
“What—what are you doing?” I stumbled.
His gaze traveled up and down my face, taking its time. For a moment, I thought he might kiss me and just as quickly realized I had absolutely no interest in it. Was honestly a little repulsed by it. It wasn’t that Caomhán wasn’t handsome—I could objectively say he was. But there was no connection like that between us. If anything, he was more like the annoying brother I’d never had.
Then he surprised me by taking a deep, long sniff.
“You smell like something else, you know,” he told me. “Under your power, your age, and the lies you tell yourself about who knows what, you smell like something I know very well.”
“Oh?” I asked. I wouldn’t lean away. I would not flinch either.
“You smell like family,” he said before flashing a brilliant white smile. “You smell like us.”
Then he shoved off my board and back into the water, causing me to flip in with him before I could get out the question. “Us?”
I floundered up to the surface, blowing salt water out my nose. By the time I managed to scramble back on my board, Caomhán had swum well out of retaliation distance.
“When you’re done with your session, grab the noon boat to Kilronan,” he called with one hand curled around his mouth. “I’ll take you to meet the rest of your kin. Cousin.”
And with a cocky salute, he dove beneath the waves with the same curious submarine flash that meant he was no longer in his human form.