Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Rowan arrived then and after greeting Ethel with warm respect and sharing a handshake-hug with Tee, gathered me up out of my chair and into an intimate hello. Into my hair he said, “I’m just outside if ye need me.”
“I need you,” I said.
“Excellent, shall I take tea too or call forth my ancient great-granny tae explain things?”
For the third time in a row, Ethel scoffed. I wondered if she was more insulted that Rowan didn’t think she was capable of helping me with my energy problem, not that bringing Orabilia back was impossible.
He bent to my lips and with a lingering warmth kissed them, reminding me that he was there, forever, and all I needed to do was to call his name to have him show up at my side.
“Bye,” I said against his lips, looking into his granite-blue eyes. “Have fun with Peabody hoovering gravestones.”
“I will, and for the record, I believe he’s stalling. It’s Ethel he really wants tae meet but is intimidated.”
With another kiss, he was out the side door of the kitchen as if he’d been there before and knew it also led to outside, TJ in tow.
Ethel motioned for me to sit. “Tell me what you see, then what you feel.”
I wasn’t sure what I felt, but I told Ethel what I saw. While Rowan and I were speaking, she’d placed four items at my place: a rock, a feather, a flower, and a shallow bowl of water above the feather.
“Now, what is it that you feel?”
“Feel?” I asked, mulling it over. “Cold draft from the door behind me, your eyes on the side of my head, Rowan farting around with my brother and Peabody out in the graveyard.”
“The items on the table, child.”
“Ah, from the stripes and brown dots, the feather looks to be a hawk’s tail feather. The rock is granite, probably from a nearby loch, and the flower…feverfew, Tanacetum parthenium, genus Asteraceae.”
“You are closed to it,” she finally said.
“Wouldn’t you be? I want none of that man.”
“He is you, in you, of you; take what he’s given you, child. Or forever be haunted by him as you run from what you cannot escape.”
Ethel and I sat for a long while, me counting the seconds, Ethel, staring at me, making the side of my head feel the heat of her gaze. I wasn’t sure if it was disappointment or a challenge to try harder.
“Fine,” I said and picked up the rock; it was cold.
I put it down and picked up the feather; there was something about a feather that always invited a touch down its smooth spine.
I did; the silk of the pennaceous barbs was slippery against the pads of my fingers, and I couldn’t help but imagine that bird employing each feather it possessed to take flight, to soar through the heavens and touch the sky, looking down on us like ants in a field.
“Stop.”
I was on my third stroke of the slippery feather. I looked over at Ethel. She had dipped the fingers of one hand into the water, and the other was held open, palm facing the floor.
“That’s enough for now. Do you know how you did it? Are you in control?”
“How I did what?”
“You traveled there, became the bird, and were connected to it, flying through the sky. You did not notice?”
“I mean, sure, I was imagining that,” I retorted, not liking how clearly she was able to view my thoughts.
“Look to the table once more.”
The flower had changed. “Oh,” I said, “it’s dried now.” I looked at the shriveled thing and could only think, How long have I been sitting here?
“Just the moment,” Ethel answered my thought aloud, “but you’ve journeyed far, and to do so, drew on energy around you.
It is a light thing that you’ve done, compared to recent events, but this was you in control.
It’s what I expected.” She dried her fingers off as she added, “What I expected you to be able to do this time next year.”
“Oh,” I whispered, then looked at my hands. “What does that mean?”
“It means that your emotions are making you volatile. We will focus today on working through those emotions. I’ll have you focus on naming them so that you may drain yourself of residual energy like you did making the field grow.
” She gave me a knowing smile, a confession that she’d been watching my progress from afar.
“Then we will work on balance and intent.”
“Do you really think she won’t mind?”
How Peabody clutched his meter to his chest as he breathlessly asked that made Rowan think of a schoolboy asking about his crush. In a way, he was, the academic studying magic desperate to meet the ancient magician inside the church.
Rowan sighed and looked away from Peabody.
There was a pleasant view from the graveyard, not as pleasing as the one off the top turret of Castle Laoch, but he had to give this view its due as the only pleasant thing about the place.
His skin felt like it was going to crawl off his bones as he stood there on the consecrated ground where Minorys had been laid to rest for the better half of the past thousand years.
He sighed again and turned back to Peabody, whose wire-rimmed glasses were catching the mist from the onshore breeze. He answered the man’s question: “I dunno, shall we ask?”
Cole’s brother caught a hint of the conversation and, like the chaos creator he was, came up next to Peabody, cocked a hip as he put his thumb through his belt loop. “She might shrivel your dick if you don’t ask right proper like.”
How could the beautiful rogue woman inside be related to this creature?
Rowan would constantly wonder. Where she’d been gifted with intellect and a powerful sense of fortitude, TJ was like kelp in the loch: He let the water roll off him as the tide rose and fell back.
And like kelp, it wouldn’t be wise to disregard him; they both could be strong as rope and easily clog the propellers of progress.
Rowan cut in, putting the intellectual at ease.
“She will not; she fought beside us on the field and supped at our table.” It was more like Ethel drank them all under the table the evening after the battle.
“Yes, she is passionate about her descendants. This means she is likely to be open to learning about these energies that you study.”
TJ shrugged. “Or that.” He took a beat, then looked at Rowan. “What do you think is going on in there?”
“Ethel is teaching Cole the way of the earth, the way it was, is, and can be.”
“She said Ormr was still in her; he blew up who Cole used to be to make her into the thing she is now. He gave her his magic.”
“She’s no’ ‘a thing,’ as you say. But, aye, she’s magic-touched now.”
“If Ethel is teaching her all that, she’s gonna be in there forever.”
Rowan thought about his wife with copper fire for hair, the only outward evidence of her lineage and its zeal for life. “Aye, she’s a whole lot more comfortable with facts and science than the unnamed forces that surround her.”
“Sure. We call it pigheaded.”
Rowan’s retort died on his tongue when his cell rang. He pulled it from his pocket and excused himself. He’d barely gotten out of earshot before he said to the caller, Charmaine, “Ye have it?”
Rowan could hear road noise behind Charmaine’s words.
She probably had him on speaker in the car.
“Unfortunately, no. And it seems that Murdoch has moved it, as the recovery agents searched the Otey manor house and found nothing. Well, not nothing. They did find sensitive bank files that were not secured. I presume he left the place in a hurry after the bank notified him that they were going to conduct the search. His superiors are leveling disciplinary charges against him for those files and, at my behest, removing him as an officer from your loan. Something that might be more ceremonial, but it cut Murdoch. Apparently, his superiors heard from him immediately. He’s outraged. ”
Rowan underestimated the lengths to which Murdoch would go to get his revenge by playing hide-and-seek with his family’s artifact, and it made his blood boil. “Not yet, he’s not.”
“Now, Rowan. Please, do not do anything so rash as to go there and beat him to a pulp. That will put us in a bind with the picture I am painting of the clan being victims of theft. If you put him in hospital, we’ll look as if we’re not as innocent as we are.”
“Twenty-four hours, Ms. Chevalier. That’s all I can promise before I find him and interrogate him to get back what’s mine.
” He severed the connection and walked farther away from TJ and Peabody to the cliff edge.
The wind tossed his collar and blew his short hair back.
There were stronger forces in the world than him; that wind was his reminder that this thing he wrestled with was a small thing, that he’d get through it, and god willing, no one would be murdered.
Only the quiet he normally felt after several deep breaths at the ocean’s edge did not arrive.
His blood still boiled. His mind’s eye was obsessed with the image of Murdoch’s fine-pressed shirt caught in his fist as he lifted the human pustule off the ground, cutting off the man’s airway.
He didn’t feel or hear Cole until her boots were swishing through the tall grass behind him.
He tried to shutter his thoughts, but it was too late.
Her hand was on his back, and she came around his shoulder, a question in her gaze.
He closed his eyes as he pulled her into his embrace.
He breathed in deeply, taking in her scent—spring, pollen, and warm sun—and felt the knots in his stomach loosen.
The thought of pummeling the banker slid back into the shadows of his mind.
“Walk home with me,” she whispered up to him. “Let Peabody and Tee stay on. Walk with me through the forest. I know it takes Clive a while to walk it, but it can’t be that far, even if the trail meanders. It takes hardly any time to drive here.”
“Nae. I need tae get back and make some calls. Murdoch will be the sorriest sod tha’ ever walked this earth when I’m done with him.”