Chapter Twenty-Eight
‘And now you know.’
The words pull me from the vision and I find myself sitting on a garden chair, bound to it by writhing bands of shadow. Meg stands in front of me, almost unrecognisable. Her hair is streaked with blood, her chin squared, cheekbones sharper.
Nanny Bet is bound to a chair opposite me, struggling against the same dark binds.
I close my eyes and I think of Brigid. My aunt. My dad’s sister. A gravestone with a ‘B’ on it beside Granda Frank’s.
‘You saw everything,’ Nanny Bet says.
I nod. ‘How could you pretend your own daughter didn’t exist?’ The night air chills the tears on my cheek that I didn’t even know were there.
Nanny Bet’s head sinks forward and she lets out a groan. ‘My girl, my baby girl.’ Her shoulders sag as she sobs. ‘You… you took everything from me. My daughter, my husband and now my son. You take everything.’
Meg sweeps forward in a single movement and takes Nanny Bet’s throat in her hands again, gripping tightly. ‘You failed in your duty.’
Nanny Bet spits in her face. Meg’s hand jerks back like strings pulled by a puppeteer and slaps her.
The sound ignites a flame in my chest. ‘Meg, you’re hurting her.’
She flicks a finger and we’re released from our bonds. I scramble over to stand between my nan and Meg: my friend and the goddess within her. ‘So you showed me the truth. What do you want now?’
Meg smiles like we’re talking about what paint to buy for an art project. ‘She wants you to do your duty.’
Nanny Bet’s stands. ‘Fuck our duty. The things you made me see. The murders, wars, people screaming in pain, broken bodies, torn and bloated. Generation after generation. Ghosts haunted my every waking moment. But I did my duty because that’s what my family has always done.’
She wipes away a tear. ‘My mother told me to remember the dead. To remember the sacrifices that people made, those that fought for what they believed in to protect this land. To create art that would move people.’
‘And then you broke your blood oath,’ says the goddess.
‘You took my daughter,’ Nanny Bet growls.
As Meg raises her hand again, the black spots pucker, like something is trying to push through.
Bones crack as the talons of a bird rip through her nail beds, blood dripping on the grass.
Meg screams, but then the Morrigan’s voice grates out like metal.
‘She was a warrior. A poet and a fighter. A soldier with goddess-given powers. A martyr. She died protecting this land.’
‘She was a child!’ screams Nanny Bet. ‘A child you filled with poison and hatred. She didn’t know what she was doing.’
‘You should be proud of her. She was fighting the army—’
‘You know nothing of this place,’ shouts Nanny Bet.
‘This is not the Ireland of the old stories and myths.
What the people here went through was unlike anything else before.
Yes, great wrongs were done to this community, but it was not one of your old wars.
My Brigid was a frightened, angry child picking up a weapon.
‘And now you’ve manipulated another child who’s read books and done stupid little spells in her room, rosemaryinfused love potions and fantasies of war. Neither of you knows what it’s like to lose someone.’
Fury settles into Meg’s hardened features, and when she speaks I hear three voices, coarse, hot and raging. ‘We are war and death. It is not your place to question us. You are there to tell our stories.’
‘You murdered my child and expected me to watch it play out time and time again. You drove my son to madness and my husband to…’ Her voice cracks again. ‘I blamed him for what happened, but it was you.’
‘He was a fighter too.’
The tricolour on the coffin. I clear my throat. ‘Was Granda Frank in the IRA?’
Nanny Bet nods.
‘Was Dad?’
‘No, he was too young to really know what was going on, but Brigid idolised Frank. She loved her visions too. She actively sought out glimpses of war, replayed every murder that happened during the Troubles. She’d talk to your granda late into the night…
’ She glares at Meg. ‘She was blinded by rage and…’
I wipe at my eyes. ‘What happened?’
Nanny Bet’s breathing is ragged but she takes a steadying breath. ‘She was at a demonstration and a soldier fired a rubber bullet and…’ She breaks down and her words are lost until she takes a calming breath and speaks shakily. ‘Your granda and daddy saw it all.’
I feel like I’m going to be sick.
‘She died fighting for what she believed in.’
There is a kindness in her tone and I hate it. ‘My dad was never the same again after what he saw.’
Nanny Bet breathes in sharply and Meg’s eyes flicker over her.
‘What is it?’
My nan’s eyes are cast down.
‘Tell him,’ says the Morrigan.
Nanny Bet lowers her head.
The answer is right there, but I don’t want to face it. I’ve tried so hard to believe that what she was doing was for the best, but I can’t believe she’d go as far as to…
‘You stole his memories of Brigid dying?’ My stomach twists as she nods. ‘But how? He saw it all himself. How could you make him forget?’
She’s unable to meet my gaze. ‘At first I didn’t have to.
He was only eight when he saw her die. Even though he remembered the day, he couldn’t remember what actually happened, his brain had blocked it out.
It’s a trauma response. We don’t remember what we can’t handle.
So for a while we carried on. Then he started having nightmares about her and one day he confided in me that he’d seen her ghost in the garden. ’
She spits at Meg’s feet. ‘They made him take her place. An eight-year-old child. He was barely able to process losing his sister, when he started to see her everywhere. It broke his heart, but still I was grateful that he couldn’t remember what he’d seen that day.’
She sniffs. ‘And then the lights from Acre Street started shining. They called to him. He saw what had happened – he saw her die right in front of him – and he was traumatised all over again. I wanted to help him. I just thought if I could protect him from what he couldn’t handle, then he could process it when he was ready.
‘I told him to record everything he saw, then I destroyed it. I hoped that if I kept taking the details of Brigid’s death from him, he might heal like he was supposed to if he didn’t have this curse.
I’d already lost so much. I just wanted to keep him safe.
He wasn’t meant to remember it. They made him. ’
‘He was a poet,’ the goddess growls. ‘You tried to make him forget who he was. To forget how his own sister died. You drove him away. You tried to end the line of the filí báis.’
Meg rests a hand on my shoulder and a hum of electricity passes through me.
She turns me towards her and I see her blood-streaked face is glowing white.
‘But you can change all that, Micheál. You can make up for your family’s infidelity.
’ She smiles and it’s like the sun finding me as Meg’s voice returns.
‘The Morrigan are here for you. She’s always been here for you.
She even made sure you were born in Ireland. ’
Mum went into labour early.
‘Amazing, right?’ She laughs and I remember how we met. She’s the first person I’ve even been able to be myself with. She’s my friend. I trusted her.
But her eyes are dark, her too-white skin shimmering. Sharp talons covered in blood catch the moonlight.
I’m fucking terrified of her.
‘What do you want from me?’
Meg beams and pulls me into a hug. Her skin is ice-cold and another ripple of energy flows through me. I want to pull away as she whispers in my ear, ‘I want you to be yourself, Michael. That’s all I ever wanted. I don’t want you to lie about who or what you are. Don’t you want that too?’
She steps back and I see something like love in her expression. She sees me as I am, all of me.
‘I do.’
‘No!’ Nanny Bet pushes between us. ‘I won’t lose you too.’
I turn to her. ‘Then you have to stop the secrets. I love you and I know you went through unthinkable things, but you can’t control people like that.
’ She looks ready to crumple but I force myself to continue.
‘Dad had the right to deal with his grief, to make up his own mind about what he could handle.’
Nanny Bet sags and I guide her to the chair. ‘I know,’ she murmurs. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Can you ever forgive me?’
I kneel down. ‘Of course I do.’
She breathes out. ‘I love you. I only want the—’
‘Silence.’ A wave of iron fills my senses as Meg rushes past me to stand behind Nanny Bet, gripping the sides of her face.
I go to lunge for the goddess, but I’m frozen in place again. An icy cold burns my chest as I’m enveloped by rings of shadow. ‘Meg, let her go.’
Meg’s eyes widen but it’s the Morrigan that speaks. ‘We must have vengeance.’
The chill flows through me. ‘What? What are you doing?’
‘Don’t worry about me, Michael,’ whispers Nanny Bet as a talon runs down her cheek.
Meg turns to me. ‘Remember how confused you were by us being tripartite? We are the Morrigan, we are one, but we are three as well. Your gifts came from me as Badb. The battle crow, they called me. The seer. The prophetess. I dripped my blood into your ancestors’ veins.
Your grandmother’s life is ours and now we will take it back. ’
The talons on Meg’s left hand gleam as she brings it down to Nanny Bet’s throat, tracing the soft skin.
‘Meg!’
The dark eyes of the Morrigan stare at me.
She punctures my nan’s skin and a drop of blood bubbles.
Sweat pools and freezes on my neck. ‘Meg, you aren’t this. You aren’t a killer. You aren’t death.’
Her grip softens. ‘I don’t want to do this,’ says Meg. My Meg.
‘You don’t have to,’ I say. ‘We can end this.’
‘I don’t want to hurt anyone.’ Meg releases my nan and she looks at me. She starts to smile, but then her jaw cracks and she coughs up blood. She strangles a scream and her eyes cloud black.
‘This spirit is weak,’ the voice of the Morrigan slices the air. ‘She will learn.’
Meg’s taloned hand is forced up and there’s a sickening crunch as a bone snaps. Then another. Her fingers snap one by one and her hand is folded all the way back. A tearing sound sends nausea coursing through me as Meg’s hand is crushed from within.
Meg screams and her hand goes limp.
‘I’m sorry, Michael,’ whispers Meg.
‘Meg?’
Then she is gone. The Morrigan’s darkness swims through her eyes and Meg’s ruined hand rests by her side.
‘Don’t hurt my nan, please,’ I beg the Morrigan. ‘I’ll do anything.’
The Morrigan lowers her head to rest on Nanny Bet’s.
‘I’ll spare her. She doesn’t deserve an easy death anyway.’ She bares her teeth in an awful grin. ‘Instead, a punishment for her. And a warning to you.’
The Morrigan closes her eyes, raises her face to the moon and howls.
Dread, fear and agony surge through me as her cry fills every atom of my being.
She’s joined by the crows. They call out from the trees, from the fence, filling the night sky.
More voices join.
From beyond the garden, on the street. From houses nearby.
A baby cries in terror.
A woman curses in rage.
Men keen in grief.
A few houses away, I see a window open. A child leans out and squeals in horror.
A car screeches to a stop somewhere on the estate and a man calls out, ragged and hot with bloodlust.
Across the city beams of light shoot into the night sky. There are roars and shouts.
The familiar pain prickles at my neck and I close my eyes. A series of images flashes in my head, revealing the violence unfurling all over the city, but this is not a vision of the past. It’s happening right now.
A burning bus. Bricks thrown. Smashed bottles in bloodied hands.
Shouting. So much shouting.
And rage. I feel the rage. It ignites and I want to scream at the world; at Ben, at Paul, my dad, my nan, the people rioting, every bully from school. Meg.
The Morrigan.
My anger and hatred finally find a voice and I shout out too.
And as our fury swells, the Morrigan grows.
Shadows rush in from the night sky and lift her. She rises as invisible wings beat the air, which is hot with the stench of blood. Darkness flows over Meg to form a long dress of roiling shadows, as thick as leather, as subtle as silk.
She raises her arms and those talons extend, even on Meg’s broken hand, like darkened, starving roots.
Nanny Bet cowers as shadows envelop her, flowing up her legs, covering her like tar. Her eyes widen in pain.
All at once, my anger leaves me and cold panic floods my system. I push at my restraints, calling out my nan’s name over the battle cries.
It sounds like the entire world is screaming.
Then it stops.
Silence rushes in.
The Morrigan lowers to the ground in her dress of shadows. Feathers and blood adorn her hair, her eyes are empty of all light and colour, and black veins tattoo symbols across white skin.
I can’t see Meg in her any more.
I’ve lost her.