Morgan answered Katrina's gentle tap on the door. Rain and wind gusted in with her mother-in-law.
"Hi," Morgan said. "Where did this storm come from? Moira's caught in it in Cobh."
"It's not a natural storm," said Katrina, sitting stiffly in a chair at the dining table. "You didn't work it, did you?"
"Me?" Morgan looked at her in surprise as she put the teakettle on the stove. "No, of course not. Why?"
Katrina shrugged. "Someone did. No one I recognize. But it is magickal."
Uneasy, Morgan filled the teapot and fetched two mugs. She'd been so deep in her thoughts she hadn't even sensed the magick behind the storm. Now someone was working weather magick. Was it Ealltuinn? Were they behind all of the things that had been happening? "I didn't sense it," she murmered
"You could, if you were outside for a minute," said Katrina.
Something in the older woman's voice made Morgan look up. "What is it, Katrina?" She slid into a chair and started to pour the tea.
"Morgan-have you been working magick I don't know about?" Katrina looked uncomfortable and concerned. "I don't mean herb spells and practice rites. I mean big magick, dangerous magick, that none of us know about."
"Goddess, no, Katrina! How can you ask that?"
Katrina's blue eyes met Morgan's over the table. She hesitated, circling her hand widdershins over her mug to cool the tea. "I don't know," she said finally. "I just feel… off. I feel like something is off somewhere. Out of balance. And then that black smoke."
Nodding, Morgan said, "Keady Dove and I are trying to trace it. We need more people, though. Perhaps tomorrow you, Christa, and Will can help us."
"Yes, of course," said Katrina. "That's a good idea." She fidgeted in her chair, looking around. "I just feel-off balance." She seemed frustrated about not being able to explain it better.
"It isn't because of anything I've been doing," Morgan said. "But there's been some odd stuff happening, that's a fact."
She told Katrina about the face in the window, the chunk of morganite, and even her dream. "Plus there was the hex pouch and the black smoke. Now a worked storm." She listened and realized that the storm had already blown over.
"Odd, odd." Katrina shook her head. "Let's try to scry now. Maybe if we join our powers, we can begin to figure out what's going on. It doesn't seem like we can afford to wait until tomorrow." Morgan glanced at the clock. It was almost six, but when Moira was with Ian, time seemed to have no meaning. She nodded.
Morgan generally scried with fire, which spoke the truth and could be very powerful, but often showed only what it wanted you to see. Colm had only rarely scried-it didn't work well for him. Some people used water or stone. Hunter had used stone. It was difficult and gave up its knowledge only reluctantly, but what it told you could be relied upon.
Morgan fetched a short pillar candle from her workroom. It was a deep cream color, and Morgan had carved runes into it and laid spells upon it to help clarify its visions.
Morgan set the candle in the center of the table, dimmed the room's lights, and sat down across from Katrina. They linked hands across the table.
"Goddess, we call on thee to help us see what we should know," Morgan said. "We open ourselves to the knowledge of the universe. Please help us receive your messages. Someone is working against us-please show us their face and their reasoning."
"We ask it in the name of goodness," Katrina murmured.
Morgan looked at the candle's blackened, curled wick. Fire, she thought, and pictured the first spark igniting. With a tiny crackle the wick burst into flame, coiling more tightly in the fire's heat. A thin spire of joy rose steadily in Morgan's chest: magick. It was the life force inside her.
Breathe in, breathe out. Relax each muscle. Relax your eyelids, your hands, your calves, your spine. Release everything. Release tension, release emotion of all kinds. Release your tenacious grip on this world, this time, to free yourself to receive information from all worlds, from all times. Scrying was a journey taken within. The fire called to her, beckoned. The candle released a slow, steady scent of beeswax and heat. Show me, Morgan whispered silently. Show me.
A tannish blotch formed before her, blotting out some of the candle's light. Morgan squinted, and the splotch widened and narrowed. It looked like a… beach. The image pulled back a bit, and Morgan could see a thin rim of blue-green water, cloudy and cold-looking, pelted by rain, crashing against the narrow spit of sand that flowed horizontally across her vision. The coastline was dotted with gray-blue rocks, pebbles, boulders, thick, sharp shards of shale pushing upward through the beach, thrust there by some prehistoric earthquake, now clawing the sky like clumsy fingers of stone.
A beach. A beach with cold gray water and stones. Where was it? It was impossible to say. But there was no southern sunshine, no pure white sand, no clear water showing rays and corals. It was a northern beach, maybe at the top of Ireland or off the coast of Scotland?
A dim, slight figure started wandering toward the water. Morgan knew better than to look directly at it: like many optical illusions, if you stared straight at a vision, it often disappeared. She kept her gaze focused on the center, feeling the slight warmth of the candle on her face. The figure became clearer. It, too, was the color of bleached sand, tan and cream, and it had splotches of crimson on its chest, the top of its head. It was tall, thin, and it was staggering. A man.
Breathe in, breathe out. Expect nothing: accept what conies. Show me.
The man approached the water, then dropped to his hands and knees, his head hanging low. Who? Morgan didn't ask the question, just let the word float gently out of her consciousness. Soon the figure seemed larger, closer. Morgan tried not to look, tried only to see without looking.
The man raised his head and looked into Morgan's eyes, and her heart stopped with one last, icy beat.
Hunter.
A much older, ragged Hunter. His hair was long and wispy and so was his darker beard. His eyes were dark, haunted, like an animal's, full of pain. His rag of a shirt was tannish, the color of the beach, except for a rust-colored stain sprayed across the chest-blood. His head, too, was marked with blood, old blood, from an old wound, and in that instant Morgan saw in her mind a jagged chunk of shale clipping Hunter across the head, leaving that blood, that wound. Scents rushed toward her: the bitter saltiness of the waves, the coldness of the wind, the metallic tang of blood, the heat of Hunter's skin. Seaweed, wet stone. Illness.
I can't breathe, Morgan thought, shock actually making her feel faint. As she stared, jaw clenched, the image of Hunter faded slowly. She gulped convulsively, trying to get air to her lungs. It was all she could do not to scream, Bring him back! But another image slid forward: a woman. She was dark, the light was behind her, and though Morgan peered desperately, she could make out no details. It was a woman, standing before a huge fire that was spitting and smoking into the air. The woman raised her hand, and in it was an athame. In her other hand she held a writhing black snake, its triangular head whipping back and forth as it tried to bite her. Morgan winced as the woman brought athame and snake together, and then she threw the serpent into the fire. A huge, stinking cloud of smoke rose up, billowed over, and filled the cave. Cave? The smoke roiled poisonously and blotted out the woman's image. Morgan recoiled.
Suddenly the front door burst open and Moira rushed in. "Mum!" she cried. "Mum!"
Startled, Morgan dropped Katrina's hands and pulled back. A gust of cold, wet air swirled in and doused the scrying candle. Morgan blinked, trying to make sense of reality. She'd just seen Hunter. Had Katrina seen him, too?
Moira was there, followed by Ian Delaney, followed by… Killian?
"Mum!" Moira cried again.
Morgan's brain wasn't functioning properly. Katrina was blinking, too, obviously shaken by what they had seen. Morgan felt her heart slowly begin to thud.
"Honey, what is it?" she managed, her voice a croak.
Moira motioned back over her shoulder to Killian. "Mum, who was your dad? Your real father. Wasn't it Angus?"
Oh, no. Not this, not yet. She'd known this was coming- Moira was reading her Books of Shadows. And perhaps it should have come a long time ago. But right now, on top of everything else, it just felt like too much. Morgan's shoulders tensed as she looked at Killian. He shrugged again, an unrepentant look on his face. If you can't tell your own daughter the truth… he seemed to say.
"It's… it's complicated," Morgan said lamely.
Moira's eyes widened, and she gestured to Killian. "So you know him?" Obviously she hoped that Morgan would deny all knowledge of him, but it was too late for that.
"Yes," Morgan said, wishing with all she had that this wasn't how Moira was finding out. "He's my half brother. Killian, come in."
Killian stood a moment, glancing back and forth between Morgan and Moira. "Cute cottage you've got here," he finally said, a bit awkwardly, and then came over and sat at the table. "Is that tea?"
"Yes," Morgan said. "Moira, why don't you sit down, too." She looked over at where Ian was standing, just inside the door. "Ian, I'm sorry-this is kind of a bad time for us."
"I understand," he said, and he went up a notch in Morgan's opinion. He looked like a nice kid. Unfortunately, so had Cal. Ian squeezed Moira's hand, and she let him out the front door. Once he was gone, Morgan pulled out a chair for Moira, who sat down reluctantly.
"I'm so sorry, Moira," Morgan said.
Moira looked from Killian to her mother, her face pale. "I met him in the village," she said. "He says he's your half brother. He says Ciaran MacEwan was your father. Your father! What is he talking about?"
Morgan took a deep breath. Colm, be with me, she thought.
"You know that I was sixteen when I first found out I was adopted," she began. "I've told you about how shocking it was, how weird it made things in my family. And over the next several months I found out more about my birth mother, Maeve Riordan, and Angus Bramson."
"You've told me all this," Moira said. She picked up a paper napkin and twisted it in her hands.
"Later that same fall I discovered that Angus wasn't actually my real father," Morgan went on. She looked at Katrina, who shook her head sadly. "I found out that in fact another witch, Ciaran MacEwan, had had an affair with Maeve, and that was when she got pregnant with me. They were muirn beatha dans, but Ciaran was already married-they couldn't be together. I know Maeve loved him very much." Morgan refused to look at Killian, who was sitting quietly.
"And I think in his own way, he loved Maeve," Morgan went on. "But as I said, he was married, and he already had three children. Killian was his youngest child. I met Killian a long time ago, in New York, and we realized we were half siblings. Since then he and I have kept in touch."
Moira looked stunned and angry. "Ciaran MacEwan! One of the most evil witches in history was your father!" She looked at Killian. "You don't care?"
Killian shook his head slowly. "I wish many things had been different, lass," he said seriously. "I wish Ciaran had not been evil. I wish my parents had loved each other, I wish my dad had been different, I wish my mother could have done better for herself. But it's not Morgan's fault for having been born, and it's not my place to judge anyone. None of us are without stains. I'm happy to have Morgan for a half sister, no matter how we happened to get here."
It was times like these that made up for all the times Killian drove Morgan crazy. As close as she had always been to her sister, Mary K., she was still happy to have a sibling with whom she shared a blood bond. She smiled at him sadly, her half brother.
"But Ciaran MacEwan." The horror in Moira's voice was an eerie echo of Morgan's own reaction, so many years ago, to the revelation about her relation to Ciaran. Moira's napkin was in shreds and she started tapping her fingers nervously on a fork. "Did you ever meet him?"
"Yes," Morgan said. "I did. He was… already dark by then. He knew I was his daughter. He wanted me to join him, but I wouldn't. So he tried to kill me and take my powers. But all the same, in his own way, I know he loved me. He was proud of me. He saw something of himself in me."
"Goddess, I hope not!" Moira said.
"It's true," Killian said. "Not that your mum is evil, not at all. But of all of his children, Morgan inherited Da's greatness, his strength, and his ruthlessness. Your mum can be very ruthless." He smiled as he said it, and Morgan knew he didn't consider it an insult.
"Did Ciaran know about you before Maeve died?" Moira asked.
Morgan shook her head. "No. She had me and gave me up for adoption because she didn't want Ciaran to know. But he still came for her, and when she refused to be with him, because he was married and she was with Angus, he locked her and Angus in a barn and set it on fire." How bizarre to state the facts so calmly, Morgan thought.
Moira's eyes were huge and round. "Goddess," she whispered. "He killed them?"
"Yes." Morgan felt a familiar sadness. "He loved her so much, and he killed her. And he loved me and tried to kill me. And I loved him, and in the end I trapped him and bound him so his powers could be stripped. And he died because of it."
"You trapped him and bound his powers?" Moira whispered. "You bound Ciaran MacEwan?"
Morgan nodded, looking down at the table. "And he had his powers stripped. And he was never the same after that, and he hated me for it. And then he died." She swallowed hard and felt that Killian was feeling the same ache.
"And Ciaran is part of you, and you're part of me " Moira trailed off, her eyes full of anguish and confusion. Morgan felt herself being torn apart all over again, watching her daughter suffer the same shock and betrayal she had once experienced. Only it was even worse this time, because Morgan would have taken on a world of pain to spare her daughter an ounce.
"I'm so sorry," Morgan said again, her voice cracking. "I should have told you earlier. It's just-I remember how horrified I was when I realized who my father had been. I would have given anything for it not to be true. And-for you not to have to live with that knowledge as well."
"So Ciaran loved your mum and then killed her, and Ciaran loved you and tried to kill you, and then you bound him and had his powers stripped." Moira shook her head. "And this is my family," she murmured. "This is who you are-who I am."
Morgan jumped up and went to Moira, gripping her shoulders firmly and looking deep into her eyes. "There's more to your family than that," she said. "Maeve was a good, strong witch. She didn't know Ciaran was married when she got involved with him. She loved me so much, she gave me away rather than see harm come to me. You have your gran and Poppy and Nana. You had your dad. I loved your dad, and he loved me, and it was good. Good and safe and true."
"Gran-did you know all this, all about Mum's past?" Moira's voice trembled.
Katrina nodded evenly. "As Killian said, it isn't Morgan's fault who her parents were and what they did. Morgan is a good witch and a good person. The best daughter-in-law one could hope for. One's heritage is important, but one's own choices are more so. Morgan's got nothing to be ashamed of, and neither have you."
Moira just sat and stared at Morgan. "If you've got nothing to be ashamed of," she said, "why haven't you told me any of this? Why am I finding out about it from strangers in tea shops? How could you have lied to me all this time? What's next?" She looked away. "I don't know who you are anymore," she told Morgan, and Morgan felt tears come to her eyes. "I–I need some air." She strode to the front door and pulled it open, pushing through it into the night outside.
"Moira, wait!" Morgan cried, immediately heading after her.
Katrina stopped her, holding her by the shoulders, as Morgan had just held Moira. Morgan started crying, hanging her head. "I'll go after her," Katrina said. "You're both too upset. You stay here. We'll be back soon." She moved toward the door, her arthritis making her limp slightly.
"No, she's my daughter. I need to go," Morgan insisted.
Katrina fixed Morgan with a calm, steady gaze. "If you want what's best for her, you'll let me go," she said. "Moira needs a bit of space right now if she's going to come back to you. Do you understand?"
It went against her every instinct not to go after Moira herself, but Katrina was right-Moira didn't want to see her right now, and if Morgan chased her, Moira would keep running. There was too much danger out there now, danger Morgan didn't yet understand. Moira trusted her grand-mother, and Morgan would have to do the same. "Just… keep her safe," Morgan told Katrina.
Katrina nodded and headed out.
When the door closed behind her, Morgan sat down weakly. She wiped a napkin across her eyes, then dropped her head into her hands. "How many stupid mistakes can I make with her?"
"Quite a few, I should imagine," Killian said, not unkindly. "You'll see… things will be all right in the end."
If only things were that easy, Morgan thought dully.