HauntingBeauty
Chapter Thirty-five
SEAN prayed Danni would smile, laugh. Tell him she was joking. But of course she didn’t. She stood there looking miserable and hurt, staring at him with those big gray eyes. He concentrated on the faceted silver and pewter, rainy day slate that swirled together around the black of her pupils. Anything to keep his thoughts from following where she led.
It said you’ d been killed that night. . . .
“Whatever you read was wrong,” Sean said. “Obviously.” Danni continued to stare at him as he struggled to sound sure. To convince her.
You weren’t alone, though . . .
When she spoke, her voice was gentle, soothing. But her words—they came like tiny darts, puncturing his skin without drawing blood. “I don’t think it was wrong, Sean. It said yours and the unidentified woman’s bodies were the only ones ever found.”
“Are you hearing yourself? If I’d been killed at fourteen, explain how I’m here now, a grown man?”
“I can’t.”
“Exactly.”
“But I can’t explain how either one of us is here, now. Our being in Ballyfionúir twenty years in the past isn’t even a possibility.”
“Not for me, maybe,” he said, still trying to keep it light. If he didn’t take it seriously, then how could she? “But you do this kind of thing all the time.”
“No, I don’t. Until you barged into my life, I hadn’t had a vision in years. Not since I was little.”
“My life has been ordinary up until now.”
“Has it really?”
There was demand in the question, and it cut him to the bone. He’d told her he loved her, and she’d spun the conversation into this miasma of accusation and plea. This inquisition intended to make him doubt his own fucking existence.
“Do you remember when you came to the antique shop to see me?” she asked.
He stared at her, trying to follow the jump in topic. He couldn’t. What did that have to do with the death and bodies?
“In Arizona,” she went on in a patient voice. As if she was talking to an imbecile. “We talked about going to dinner, and then those women with their kids, they were staring and we thought it was weird. But it wasn’t. They were staring because I was alone, talking to myself—at least that’s how it looked to them, like you weren’t there.”
“Can you hear yourself? A couple of women give you strange looks and you’ve twisted it into—”
“It’s more than that and you know it. They didn’t hear you, Sean. They didn’t see you.”
“Now I’m invisible?”
“No, dammit. Not invisible. Dead. You’re dead, Sean.”
The words rang out like a clap of thunder. They sucked the air from his lungs and made him gasp, cough, stagger back a step. He should be laughing at that. Clearly she was unwell. Did he look dead for fuck’s sake? But the feeling of being suctioned away from inside out wouldn’t permit laughter.
“Not all your ducks are quacking, are they, sweetheart?” he said, trying to hide his malaise, his fear. Because that’s what it had become, this hollowed-out feeling.
“Don’t make jokes.”
“Well, I’m having a hard time thinking what else to do, seeing how I’m dead.”
“Not now, you’re not,” she said.
“And you’re not making a bit of sense.”
“Think about it,” she said grimly. “In a few hours, something is going to happen. My mother is going to try to leave with the twins. I think you and your father are going with them. But something goes wrong. A boy and a woman are murdered and their bodies are left behind.”
“But that makes you dead, too.”
She looked frustrated, wild-eyed, and serious all at the same time. “Listen to me. We are both here and alive now because we’ve come back in time. We are here before the murders. And if history repeats itself, then tonight Michael—you as a boy—will be killed.”
“And then what happens to me as a man? Let me guess. I sprout fucking angel wings and fly away?”
She swallowed and looked down. “I’m only guessing,” she began, and her voice shook. The sound of that tremor running through her words eliminated the last of his insulating disbelief. As crazy as it sounded, she meant what she said, and it hurt her. “But I would say that when the boy is killed, the man will cease to exist.”
His laugh was thin and forced. It brought the little dog’s head up from her paws to watch them warily.
“You will never have the chance to grow up, Sean. Not really. You’ll spend your days wandering this town, never acknowledged. Never seen. Isn’t that how it was?”
He stared at her, remembering the emptiness of his life, the vacuous and nomadic days. The purposelessness. But still a desperate man inside him tried to pretend that it wasn’t true. “Then who came to your house in Arizona? Tell me that? And if you get killed, too, then why don’t you ‘cease to exist’ as well?”
“Because I’m still alive as a child. Don’t you see? In my case, the woman who will die isn’t real yet . . . Dáirinn will still grow up and become her. Me. But for you, the child dies before he can become a man. . . .”
Sean stared at her and to his horror, he did see. It was insanity, and yet didn’t it answer so many questions? How many times since he’d come here with Danni had he been overwhelmed by the tangibility, the clarity and delight of every experience? How many moments had he passed just drinking in the feel of the damp Irish air against his skin, the lilt of his words rolling off his tongue, or the scent of this woman filling him with pleasure?
“How did you get to Arizona, Sean?” Danni asked again.
He tried to avoid answering. Tried to deflect it, ignore it as he’d done the first time. But there it was—a giant black question mark against the white of his memory.
“I don’t know.”
His response brought a shimmer to the gray of her eyes, turning them into gloam and gale. A distorted reflection of himself glistened in their depths. He didn’t want to look there. He wanted to hold his illusions close and tight. But it was too late.
All those years, all that time when he’d felt like he was going through the motions but not really connected to the cause and effect around him. How many days had he felt ignored, snubbed, rejected? He’d been invisible, seen only by his grandmother. And perhaps worst of all, he hadn’t even known it.
His legs felt weak and he staggered back, sitting down heavily on the bed. Danni reached out, but he recoiled from her touch as comprehension filled his mind.
A memory rushed to the surface and rolled over him. He watched it play in his head as if he were a bystander to a horror he’d somehow managed to bury for all these years. He’d been fourteen and angry, furious and guilt ridden by the deaths of his mother and young brother. The weight of responsibility sickened him like a disease.
Five years after their tragic deaths Niall had fallen in love with Fia. Sean had suspected it even before he’d had it confirmed when he’d seen them together. And all he could think of was the accusation his mother had hurled across the kitchen that day. She’d accused Niall of loving Fia MacGrath, and Niall had denied it.
Sean had followed his father the night Fia MacGrath had disappeared. He’d come upon them in the cavern, thinking it was time to confront his father. To tell Niall how much he hated him. But then Cathán MacGrath had shown up with his gun and something had snapped inside of Sean. Sean had stood by and done nothing to help his brother or his mother that day so long ago, but he couldn’t do the same when Cathán threatened his father. He’d thrown himself in front of Niall, a man he thought he hated, and taken the bullet meant for him.
He could see it now, his father’s face as he held Sean, crying and begging Jesus to tell him why, why. . . .
Christ in heaven, if what Danni said was true, then whatever had sent him into this tailspin of fate would repeat. The beautiful sensation of living, of really living, would evaporate like the fog, and he’d never be the wiser until once more she brought him to this moment—here and now—where everything would be stolen away again.
He glanced at Danni, caught her staring back with an expression that made him pause. She looked . . . guilty. Why? What did she have to feel guilty about? She turned her face away and the answer rolled over him.
She’d known. She’d known from the start, and yet she’d said nothing. She’d touched him and made love with him, knowing it would all end tonight—not just that her mother would disappear with Danni and her brother, but that Sean would die. Was it just a game to her? A foray into the imagination, a fantasy that could be lived without risk to herself? Because she would go on. But for Sean it was the end of the road.
“Never trust a MacGrath,” he said softly, repeating the words that his kinsfolk had said a hundred times before.
“Sean, don’t,” she whispered, looking at him like she cared what he thought and what he felt. But he didn’t believe it. He didn’t believe her. He’d been so enthralled by the idea that she saw him, that she got him, that he’d never even realized he wasn’t getting her. Not anymore.
Angrily he pulled on his clothes and turned to the door. “Have a nice life, Danni,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you on the other side. Then again, maybe not.”
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