Chapter 24 #2
She had no words. No consciousness. She was pretty sure she blacked out.
When her eyes opened, Duncan was braced over her, his intense green gaze fixed on her face. “I love you so much,” he whispered. “Thank you for calling me your man.”
She could feel his erection pressing against her thigh, so she shifted until he was at her entrance, and then Duncan slid inside and rocked into her with an aching, easy rhythm that made more tears fall from the corners of her eyes.
Duncan kissed them away and whispered something. It took her a moment to understand what he was saying because his accent was so thick.
“…sweetest woman. God love me, you’re so brave, Carys. Never imagined…”
“I never imagined love like this.” She wrapped her hands around his wrists and turned her face so she could kiss his arm. “I thought it was only in books.”
He let out a harsh laugh, and then his body tensed and the pace of his thrusts increased.
Carys lifted her legs and wrapped them around his hips, drawing him closer until they were a single creature of flesh and heart and tangled limbs. She was he and he was everything and she could not imagine a time when loving Duncan was not part of her soul.
“I love you.”
Duncan came with a harsh breath and buried his face in Carys’s neck.
She trailed her fingers along his nape, kissing his temple and pressing her cheek to his. “You are the dream that I was too afraid to dream.”
And tangled with her lover, Carys fell asleep.
“He always loved you.” Seren was sitting on the side of the loch where the kelpie had tried to kill Carys. “Or I guess he loved the idea of you. And then he met you, and he fell in love with the real you, not the idea.”
“Was that how you loved Lachlan?”
“I love Lachlan.” Seren swallowed hard, her fierce gaze pointed into the distance. “Just because you’re dead it doesn’t mean you stop loving someone.”
“I’m sorry.” Carys was sitting next to her on a fallen log not far from where Aisling had been taken by the kelpie, where Lachlan had lost yet another woman who had loved him.
“I didn’t know. I mean, I knew that he’d lost his wife, but I didn’t know about…
” She spread her hands and looked over the shimmering loch, the pearlescent sky, the forest where she could see unicorns grazing along the verge.
“All of this. Or you. Or who you were to me.”
Seren turned to Carys. “If you had known?”
Carys frowned. “Then it would have been like… I don’t know, sleeping with my kind-of-dead-sister’s husband.” She shook her head. “So that’s a no.”
Her Shadowkin nodded. “I can accept that.”
Carys watched Seren’s face, which was like looking into a mirror if that mirror was distorted by time, experience, and death. “It’s very strange.”
“What in particular?” The curl of her lip at the corner was her father’s.
“Looking at you. It’s my face, but it’s not.” She smiled. “I see King Dafydd in you.”
Pain streaked across Seren’s expression. “Did you pull me into your dream so you could torment me?”
“Okay, no.” Carys stood up. “And I didn’t pull you into any dream.”
“Didn’t you?”
Carys looked around, but she didn’t see any crows. No starlings. No darkness or cold. “I don’t know why you’re here. I’m not in any special place. I was in the Brightlands with Duncan; then I was here. I haven’t seen a sign of the Morrígan since she drove those bison into a stampede.”
Seren stood and started pacing. “It’s possible that the crow goddess is thinning the barriers between all the worlds,” she said. “Not just the Shadowlands and the Brightlands. Valhalla could meet Hades. Elysium collide with the Duat. Gods and monsters would be thrown together if she succeeds.”
“And what would happen then?”
Seren turned to her. “I don’t know. No one knows because there has never been a time when the Morrígan could collect acolytes like she can now.”
“I’m supposed to find Annwn,” Carys said. “I think the plan is for me to find my way to Annwn.”
Seren’s eyes went wide. “No.”
“I’m just telling you what I’m being told, okay? If you think I have control over any of this—”
“Mortals who visit Annwn do not return.”
Shit. That was not ideal.
“Okay… Well, a druid told me—or kind of implied—that’s where I need to go.”
“Find another way.” Seren crossed her arms over her chest.
“You can help me somehow,” Carys said. “And so can my mother.”
Seren’s chin went up. “Our mother.”
She was there. Tegan was there. “She’s really there, isn’t she?”
“It doesn’t matter who is here. Arawn is the king of this place, and he will not permit your passage,” Seren said. “Tell me what knowledge you need—what secret you must find—and I will find it. No doubt that is what the druid meant. No doubt that is why our dreams have been joined.”
“I don’t know what knowledge I need. I have to go and visit the Mothers.”
Seren frowned. “Which Mothers?”
“One is Oshun, and I don’t know the others.”
“Where?”
“Wales.” She shook her head. “Cymru.”
Seren froze. “You’re meant to visit mother goddesses in Cymru?”
“That’s what it sounds like. They have a bookshop or something and—”
“D?n’s domain,” Seren said.
Carys mentally skimmed the Welsh gods and goddesses she knew, but this one wasn’t hard. “D?n is the mother of all the Welsh gods? The matriarch, right?”
“Not for Arawn,” Seren said. “D?n and Arawn hate each other. It’s a very old fight.” She took a deep breath. “Talk to these Mothers and find out why they want you here, but talk to me before you attempt to enter the underworld.”
“How am I supposed to ask you anything?”
“The same way you called me into your dream this time.”
“I don’t know how I did it this time!” Carys said. “How am I supposed to—”
“You will find a way.” Seren walked over and slapped her shoulder. “You’ve proved remarkably hard to kill, but the last thing our mother would want is another daughter trapped here before her time.”
“You act like it’s a punishment,” Carys said. “I thought Annwn was supposed to be a paradise.”
Seren looked at her from the corner of her eye.
“No place is a paradise when it takes you away from the ones you love.” She walked to the edge of the loch and snarled.
“That fucking traitor Aisling. I’d kill her myself if she was in front of me, then I’d cut her into pieces and feed her to the fish of the sea she loves so much. ”
So clearly no love lost there.
The last thing Carys wanted was to get her Shadowkin on the subject of the woman who’d killed her. “Annwn is the place where warriors go when they die, right? So when Lachlan dies, he can join you, can’t he?”
“Doubtful.” Seren’s blue eyes were hollow. “He’s a son of Alba. He has his own gods. His mother serves Frigg, and his father serves himself.”
“So maybe—”
“I have no interest in speaking of Lachlan’s death,” Seren said. “Lachlan needs to live. For many, many more years.”
Carys thought about telling Seren about Lachlan’s reckless behavior, but what good would it do?
“Treasure your love.” Seren stared over the loch and toward castle hill where the ruins of the old tower still stood, even in Carys’s dream. “I was a fool, you know. I could have loved him for more years, but I fought it because of duty.”
“Lachlan knows that you loved him.”
Seren turned to Carys with tears in her eyes. “Tell him that I love him still. That I might have died but my love never did.”
Carys’s heart ached, looking into eyes that were a grieving mirror of her own. “I will,” she said. “It’ll probably make him sad, but I’ll tell him.”
Seren walked over and stood face-to-face with Carys. “Perhaps it will give him some comfort as well as sorrow.”
“I hope so.” Carys smiled.
“Also tell him” —Seren put a hand on her shoulder— “that I am excusing his transgression with you because you are my Brightkin and the living image of me in the world, but if he takes another lover, I will return from the dead, haunt them both, and see that his lover flees from him in misery.”
Carys froze. “Uh…”
“Joking.” Seren smiled a little bit. “I am joking.”
Well, that was a dark sense of humor.
“Right.”
“Really.” Seren nodded at the forest that had crept closer until the trees surrounded them. “It was a joke. Wake up, Carys.”
“What?”
She turned and was in darkness. The loch was gone, and she was in the forest behind her house. The scent of pine and redwood detritus filled the air. There was a deer ahead of her, its short antlers glowing silver as it walked down a narrow path.
“Wake up, Carys.” The voice was her mother’s. “It is not time yet. Wake up.”