Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
SELENE
Iwas walking again. I always knew I was dreaming, and yet I never tried to wake.
The air was silver and suspended, like a breath held too long.
Beneath my feet, the ground was soft with moss, though I couldn’t remember stepping into the forest. The trees rose tall and close around me, their trunks pale where moonlight touched them and shadowed where it didn’t. There was no wind, and yet the leaves whispered.
I moved forward because that was what I always did here. I knew something patiently waited for me. Perhaps that should have felt like a warning, but I wasn’t afraid.
The clearing slowly revealed itself, the trees bending enough to expose a circle of light on the ground. The moon hung low, larger than it should have been, its glow spilling across the earth in a wide, luminous veil.
I stopped at the edge where the air thickened, like I always did. As if the world beyond that circle did not quite belong to the places I knew.
A dark figure stood in the light, tall and still. Maybe he would finally tell me why I found myself in that spot again. I tried to move forward to ask but couldn’t, so I stayed still and studied him, wishing the moonlight would show me his face this time.
He watched something in the distance, but the moon’s brightness blurred the details, softening the edges of everything. I knew only the outline of him. The breadth of his shoulders, the angle of his stance, and the sense of weight in the way he occupied the space.
He didn’t move or beckon me. He simply existed. As if he was waiting.
Then he turned. Just enough that I might see, before the moonlight blinded me.
I woke with a start.
My bedroom was still dark, the pale gray of pre-dawn pressing against the sash windows of my Dalkey flat. The only sounds were the occasional shush of a car on the road below and the soft creak of the old building settling around me.
I lay still for a moment and listened, allowing my pulse to settle.
I’d dreamed of the forest often in my younger years, but eventually the dreams stopped.
They’d returned recently and appeared almost every night.
I probably needed a therapist to help explain why.
My best guess was that my aunt’s death had triggered them.
I exhaled slowly and pressed my lips together. It was just a dream. A remnant of something that surfaced in sleep and slipped away again when I woke. There was no need to give it more weight than that.
I pushed back the covers and prepared to pack.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand as I stuffed my favorite sweater into my suitcase.
Before I could make my way to it, several more notifications dinged.
I opened the screen to find several messages from Clara and Maeve, starting with Clara letting us know she was on the train, coming from downtown Dublin, and that we should pack for rain.
Maeve had chimed in to say she was already waiting at her train stop before adding to Clara’s comment. Definitely pack for rain. And magic.
I stared at Maeve’s message for a moment and then smiled. I already had a warm, waterproof coat ready to go, but how did one pack for magic?
That I might see something I couldn’t explain sent an excited shiver through me, though I didn’t believe in such things as magic.
Or did I? Thoughts of my odd occurrence with the vase at the townhouse sparked in my mind. Could that have been some kind of magical interference? Maybe.
I was still debating the idea twenty minutes later as I drove my compact economy car, heading to pick up my friends.
I was so deep in thought that I almost missed the stop sign at the bottom of the road.
The second the shape and color of it registered in my mind, I slammed on the brakes.
Luckily, they caught, and the car stopped.
I sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel, my heart pounding like the bells of Christ Church Cathedral, all clanging at once. I sucked in a breath and exhaled through my nose. All was good. Everything was fine. No one was hurt.
More importantly, my friends had not witnessed my blunder.
By the time I pulled carefully into the station car park, it was as if the near miss had never happened.
Maeve strode from the station just as I stepped out of the car.
Her loose red curls danced in the early May wind, tickling the knit scarf she’d wound twice around her neck.
Its lovely shade of green matched her eyes that sparkled with adventure.
She had a large, overstuffed bag slung over one shoulder and a takeaway cup in each hand, which she lifted toward me like an offering the moment she spotted me. “Coffee, because I love you and I knew you’d forget to make any.”
I met her at the back of the car and popped the trunk before I took the cup, grateful for her gift. “I didn’t forget. I deprioritized it.”
Her grin grew larger as she rolled her eyes. “Away with you.”
Clara emerged seconds later, composed and impossibly tidy for someone who’d caught an early train. She’d smoothed her ash-blonde hair into its usual precise knot and held a sensibly sized overnight bag in one hand and a coffee cup that matched ours in the other.
She looked at my car. Then at me. “You made it. And no dents either.”
I snorted as if what she said was preposterous. “Put your bag in the trunk with mine. Maeve, yours will have to go in the backseat since there’s not room.”
I headed for the left side of the car, quickly remembered the steering wheel was on the right, and course-corrected. Clara chuckled, and Maeve called out to me. “Boot.”
Maeve approached, and I glanced at my footwear, expecting to see toilet paper or gum stuck to my sole. When I lifted my gaze in confusion, she grinned and thumbed over her shoulder toward the back of the car. “It’s not a trunk. You’ve been here six months, Selene. It’s a boot.”
She didn’t wait for my response as she opened the door behind mine and stuffed in her enormous bag. Then she winked at me as she headed to the opposite side of the car. “This is going to be grand.”
Morning was in full swing by the time we were on our way. Dublin slowly faded in my rearview mirror as terraced houses gave way to roundabouts. Soon, the busyness of the city dissolved into the open road and the start of something greener.
The sky was low and Irish gray, the shade that made every color beneath it richer and more saturated. The weather forecast was light rain, but that was practically a sunny day in Ireland.
In the backseat, Maeve pressed her face close to the window like a child watching the world from a moving train, her breath occasionally fogging the glass.
Her excitement vibrated to the front of the car.
“This is what I’m talking about. It’s glorious, and it’s been this way for thousands of years. ”
Clara studied the landscape with interest and a small smile. She might not have been blasting her eagerness like Maeve was, but I suspected she was happy for our trip too. She released a slow breath. “It’s hard to imagine how old everything is.”
Maeve nodded with appreciation. “The land is ancient, and it remembers everything that’s ever happened.”
I glanced out at the fields, the stone fences, the patches of bluebells and yellow gorse. Something about the setting tugged at me and drew me in. It wasn’t familiarity exactly. More like recognition. Though that couldn’t be, since I’d never traveled to this country.
But my relatives had. They’d lived here.
I’d read somewhere that ancestral trauma could be passed down from generation to generation. I wondered if the same was true of ancestral longing. If the land could call someone home, even when you hadn’t known you’d left.
Then Aunt Kit’s annoying warning about Ireland drifted in. That place isn’t good for our family. I rolled my eyes as usual, though she wasn’t around to see.
My aunt had repeated those words whenever I showed too much curiosity about our heritage, and I always assumed she meant something practical. Like those who’d left during the Famine, when so many families had packed up and abandoned their homeland, never wanting to speak of it again.
Aunt Kit had never specifically said that’s what happened with our ancestors, but I wondered.
Maeve leaned forward between the seats, her sudden nearness pulling me back to the present. “Have you ever heard about thin places?”
“No,” Clara said immediately.
Maeve snorted. “Yes, you have. You just pretend otherwise.” She redirected her question to me without pausing. “Thin places, Selene?”
I glanced back at her briefly. “I haven’t. Tell me more.”
She inhaled an excited breath, always happy when I played along. “They are places where the veil between worlds is thinner. Places where the old world presses closer to ours. The places where stories come from. Some people can feel it.”
Clara shook her head, smiling as she dismissed Maeve’s claims. “They’re just stories, not reality.”
Maeve fell back against her seat with a sound of theatrical disdain. “You are allergic to wonder.”
“I’m allergic to being wrong,” Clara replied mildly. “And you are frequently wrong.”
Maeve caught my gaze in the rearview mirror, her grin turning wicked, and her accent slipped into something more lyrical. “And yet I’m the one who ends up having fun.” She gave my arm a gentle poke. “You’re not afraid of fun, now are you?”
I had been lately. I’d poured myself into my work, and without realizing it, I’d shut myself off from the social part of my life that I used to enjoy.
But something about the road and the gray sky and the fields rolling past had loosened a knot I’d been carrying between my shoulders for months. I was in a different country now, a different version of the world, and it seemed like a good reason to try living again.
“Let’s just say I’m willing to keep an open mind.” I glanced at my sidekick. “How about you, Clara?”
A smile stole over her face, but she quickly hid it. “I suppose I can do that.”
Maeve beamed at me in the rearview mirror as if we’d just agreed to something much larger than a fun trip.
The road stretched ahead, carrying us closer to Killarney, and I wondered if it would live up to Maeve’s hype.