Chapter 43
THE RUBY SEEKS
There it was.
The answer to one of my questions, circling for months, finally landing—and instead of relief, it left me hollow.
“Ossivian told me to keep one ruby, and to spend the other as currency. That one—cast to the wind and beyond my control—would find its way, after more than six hundred years, to the daughter of flame. The one who was both maker and seer.”
The realization echoed through me, ricocheting inside my chest like it couldn't find a place to land.
This being she called Ossivian had spoken of me six centuries ago—and somehow, impossibly, part of that felt right.
But another part of it felt wrong. Not incorrect, but misaligned.
Like a truth spoken too soon, or not fully enough.
I felt the urge to speak, to correct something I couldn't yet name.
Baird felt it too—I saw it in the way he went suddenly still, alert, as if something inside me had shifted and he'd sensed the change.
Restlessness surged through me, questions tumbling over one another, my mind scrambling for reason, for proof.
As though logic alone might save me from what instinct already knew.
One question clawed its way to the surface, scattering the others. “The gods told you to seek me,” I said. “But how did you find me?”
Magda regarded me for a long moment, her head tilting, her gaze confused, searching. “Bastien,” she said at last. “I'm sorry, Mira. I thought you already knew.”
I shook my head, unease coiling tight in my chest as I began to pace before the hearth. “I don't understand.”
“He told me of his visions—a seer who looked like Agnes, set on a collision course with Baird. He was nearing the end then, his will to live already gone after losing Clémence. The coincidence was too precise. The timing too perfect. He knew my story. He knew how long I had waited.” Her gaze moved from me to Baird, heavy with something like remorse.
“I told him to watch her. For me. And when he followed her to the Goldsmith's Guild, when he saw her in that classroom, he knew. She was the one.”
Baird finally spoke. “Did ye ken?” The calm in his voice was wrong—too measured, too controlled, completely at odds with the fury in his eyes. “Did ye ken he came here to ask me to kill him?”
“Did I know?” Magda said, lifting a shoulder casually, almost flippant. “No. But did I suspect? That's another matter entirely, Baird.”
He turned away from her then, and the anger radiating from him was almost physical.
The anger of a man who realized he'd been maneuvered, used.
Even without the Sanguis Amantium bond, Magda could see it clearly.
It was etched into his posture, his clenched jaw, the way his hands curled at his sides.
Despite his near constant teasing about me not being much of an actor, Baird Campbell wasn't much of one either.
“Stop acting like a child, Baird. Didn't that act change you? It stripped away the guilt you'd carried for centuries and left room for something else—for love. The man you were before that night couldn't have loved Mira the way you do now.” Magda’s conviction was steadfast.
Baird was unwilling to drop it. “Ye used me and Mira. The same way ye used Bastien.”
For the first time I saw Magda's anger flare. Baird's power was a predator's instinct—brutal at times but honest. Magda's anger seemed calculated, someone who could justify any sin if it served her purpose.
“Don't speak of Bastien. You knew nothing of him—you made him into the monster you wanted him to be, and now you speak to me about being used?” she said coldly.
“Spare me your outrage.” Her voice sharpened as centuries of resentment bled through.
“I was used by the gods themselves. Molded into a weapon because I failed to heed my grandmother's warnings. They made me pay for it—made others pay for it so they could feel powerful through my suffering. And if they were truly gods…” Her lips twisted.
“Anca and Dani would not have died that night.”
The escalating tension in the room was a fraying high wire to my nerves, the rising tide of anxiety flooding me. I scanned the room and noticed Robbie gone.
“He took Bunny for a walk.” Sorcha said in answer to my unspoken question.
She sat there in the way she sometimes did, a mindful watcher letting things unfold, hands clasped in her lap.
But the twinkle in her eye signaled she wanted to cut in.
“Magda—so Bastien told ye about Mira, but that was almost two years ago. Why did ye show up now?”
“Yes!” I added quickly, the question that had been circling in the back of my mind suddenly shoving its way to the front. I was grateful to Sorcha for deflecting the anger—at least for the moment—between Baird and Magda before it could ignite into something neither of them could take back.
Magda regained her composure. “Ossivian told me I'd know when the ruby was ready to be found. I've been watching you from afar since Bastien found you, and when you listed the ruby ring on your website, I knew it was the one…it was time.”
The echo of my heart's contractions pounded in my ears until my stomach roiled in protest, the reverberation increasing in intensity by the minute.
An awareness shattered what little calm I had left.
I'd been here trying to decipher answers to all the questions I'd asked myself for the past few months, and I couldn't piece it together.
But there was someone with answers, and I just realized what I was feeling was anger. Not mine, not Baird's through our bond.
Brigid's anger.
My chest heaved, and I held my arms out away from me awkwardly.
Even hanging at my sides they were too close, too constricting.
The ache I'd been carrying for Baird all day surged hot and insistent, along with my magic, buzzing to life in my veins.
Sensation crowded in from every direction, too much, too fast.
“Baird,” I said, my voice pitching high, unsteady—betraying how close I was to losing control.
He was at my side before the thought had even finished taking shape.
The words spilled from me in a rush. All this circling, all these fragments we'd been clawing at—human, vampire, witch—trying to make sense of a story none of us fully understood. And all the while, the one who held the answers had been right there, waiting for me to finally ask.
“Get the ruby ring from the safe,” I said quickly, panicked. “It's trying to show me something. Something I can't see yet. A piece of this I'm missing.”
I heard the familiar tones of the code being entered on the safe lock, distant as the swell of anxiety took me, pulse thudding, a cold sweat trickling down my neck. Baird swept back into the room and dropped the ring into my hand. I motioned to Magda for her necklace.
When they touched, the two rubies thrummed with power, bleeding red—dense at the source, fading at the edges beyond my cupped hands.
The heat built fast, searing my palms, and then, like a spark to dry kindling, Brigid's Sun leapt to life.
Glittering light burst outward, scattering the red haze of the rubies.
At first—like the time in my studio—her light coalesced into the shape of the goddess, bright but indistinct, standing in my living room.
Then Brigid spoke, light and heat cascading off her in waves, transforming before our eyes.
No longer the washed-out silhouette I'd seen before, but a woman of flesh and blood: copper waves of hair, green eyes—the same Brigid I'd met on the summit of Goat Fell in my dream.
Called here by me, but it was not me she addressed first. It was Magda.
“Make no mistake, blood drinker. When you speak of the will of the gods, it is I you name. The gods may have sat by and watched the crimes against you and your family, but it is my power—and mine alone—flowing through the one you call daughter of flame, for she is my hand upon the earth.”
Her hand thrust out in my direction, but her eyes never wavered from Magda.
“The hand that turns the wheel of time and fate.
The hand that brings your daughter back—the child too young, too innocent, who paid the price when you turned from your grandmother's warnings. Your grandmother carried the Sight, like Bastien did from his mother—like Mira.”
Brigid's anger was palpable, carried in a voice that made me cower for the first time.
Gone was the gentle mothering tone that—despite speaking only in riddles—always filled me with peace.
“I used you—not some nameless, faceless god—to exact my vengeance upon Ivar and his men for what they had done.” Brigid laughed, the sound of archaic judgment—sharp and caustic.
“Humans believe they know the gods, but you are too consumed by yourselves to see the truth. The ones other people may call Persephone, Ostara, Flora, Freyja, Vesna—we are one and the same. Different names pressed upon a single will.” Her final word, almost a snarl, left no doubt.
“Mine.”
I glanced at Magda; her black eyes held only shock, Brigid's power pressing down hard enough to smother even a vampire's darkness.
“I saw your fate. It was I who set the wheel in motion—to grant you a second life, and your daughter a second chance at breath.” Brigid's next words came softly, deliberately, each one placed where it would hurt the most. “But know this, Magda: it is not your wish I now fulfill through Mira's magic. I answer the dying plea of another.”
Brigid moved a step closer to Magda, power coiling in every syllable.
“A man pure of heart. A maker—like Mira—another smith who forged metal with fire. One who loved you, and your daughter, beyond what even I believed a mortal heart could bear. A man who loved so fiercely that, at his passing, all the gods wept.”
Magda fell to her knees, trembling at the sheer force of Brigid's will and the power of memories and regret.
“The one you called Dani. It is his wish I grant—Let Anca live.”
Brigid turned to me, dismissing Magda as if she were no longer present.
“Mira—the questions that still haunt you, let them go for now. The one who will bear the ruby ring will be revealed soon, but for now you—and Magda—must wait.” Her corporal body began to fade, reverting to the outline of pure light.
“No! Wait!” I cried, unwilling to let her slip away again without answers, despite her admonishment. “Why did you choose me for this?” I pleaded, all the while knowing my hope was foolish.
“Your hands ache for truth, but I haven't hidden it from you, Mira.” Her form dimmed, then the flame was snuffed. The silence that followed was wrong. She was gone.
Her words echoed in my head—and then I felt it. An ache bloomed in the center of my palms, the same hands still clutching Magda's necklace and the ring. I held the necklace out to Magda and set the ring on the counter.
I rubbed one palm and then the other, pressing my thumbs into the hollows until the pain sharpened.
When that didn't help, I pinched harder, trying to smother it with something new.
Erase one pain with another. I'd done the same thing the night before with Baird, when the ache in my belly had swallowed everything else.
I'd taken in too much—too much information, too many other people's feelings boring straight into my heart.
Too much for my introverted self. I needed time to process.
Alone. With Baird. To hold him in the quiet of the bedroom, with only the crackle of the fire and the thick stone walls pressing close.
“We need to be alone,” I said. No apology. Just fact. My voice stayed level, even as Brigid's cryptic words pressed in—and the ache lingered in my hands.
I glanced around and realized Robbie hadn't made it back. Baird caught my look, gave me a brief nod, and headed for the door to find him—and Bunny.
Magda and Sorcha stood. Magda looked confused, as if dismissal were a sensation she hadn't had to interpret for centuries.
Sorcha, for all she normally kept hidden and patiently waited for me to discover on my own, suddenly wore a look that said she had a secret—and wanted to share it with me.
Magda slung a leather bag over her shoulder, Sorcha already waiting in that odd way she did with her wrist threaded through the arched handle of her bag.
I ushered the witch and the vampire toward the door.
According to Brigid, Magda and I had more waiting to do.
And although Magda knew how—and where—to find me, I had no way to reach her when, not if, a potential buyer came calling about the ruby ring.
It was another reminder that everyone seemed to know more than I did, even as everything kept circling back to me.
I was the common thread. The point of contact. Whether I liked it or not.
Magda opened her bag and withdrew a card holder.
She slid out a business card—white linen stock, the ink a deep, blood-dark crimson.
Her name was set in a modernist sans-serif font: clean, elegant, and faintly cold.
Her email and phone number followed beneath.
Entirely on-brand. No flourishes, nothing else—only what you needed to know, and not a bit more.
It felt like there was a version of Magda she allowed the world to see. Tonight, I'd been shown more of the story that made her—and the knowledge settled between us, quiet and shared. I suspected very few were ever let that close.
Outside, Baird stood with Robbie near his car waiting. The look on Robbie's face seemed to indicate Baird had relayed the visit from Brigid, and Robbie was glad to have missed it. Just before Sorcha got into the passenger seat, she pulled me aside and whispered in my ear.
“We should talk about the creature Magda referred to as Ossivian. Ye know how to reach me.” She meant for me to use The Call of the Hearthfire again.
“When ye are ready.” That was the look I saw in her eyes moments ago in the living room.
I gave her a quick nod and a squeeze on the shoulder, for the first time feeling something close to trust in the odd witch.