Island of Glass (The Guardians Trilogy #3)(24)

Bran merely smiled. “Well now, we never can choose that, can we?”

He’d clicked with Bran, he had to admit it, quicker and easier than he’d clicked with anyone in recent, even distant memory. Something there, Doyle thought now, that had simply spoken to him.

In the blood.

“I’d stopped wanting it. Wanting family,” Doyle said. “That’s survival. For all your power, you don’t know what it is to see centuries of sunrises, to know at each dawn there’ll be no end for you, but there will for everyone who matters to you. If you let them matter.”

“I can’t know,” Bran agreed. “But I know what’s now matters, too. We’re blood, and before we knew that, we were comrades and friends. I’ve trusted you with my life, and the life of the woman I love. I would trust you again. There’s no closer bond than that.”

The bitter in the bittersweet still sat hard in his belly. “They brought me back here, the gods, the fates.”

“But not alone.”

Nodding slowly, Doyle met Bran’s dark eyes. “No, brother, not alone. So, here it started for me. It may be here we’ll finish it.”

? ? ?

As the day faded, Riley took a bowl of soup up to her room. She ate while doing more research. Over the years she’d been to Ireland, and this part of Ireland many times on digs. With her parents as a child on studies.

There would be caves—on land, under the sea—and ruins and stone circles. Until she’d read the journal she’d leaned toward the star being in or around Clare—but had opened to the possibility it fell in another part of Ireland.

But now she was certain Clare held the star.

The Fire Star had been in a cave under the water. Part of a rock in an underground cavern. It had called to Sasha.

The Water Star, again in the water, but this time part of the water, waiting for Annika to find the statue of the goddess and form it back into its brilliant blue.

Pattern would suggest the water again. A cave or cavern in the cold Atlantic waters off the coast. Ice, cold. That fit, too.

Would it sing or call as the other stars had? Who would hear it? Her money, for now, was on Doyle. Possibly Bran, but Doyle had the deepest roots here.

She’d be keeping an eye on him, just in case.

Annika would scout—as only a mermaid could—in the sea itself. And while she did, Riley determined she would dig in her own way, through books, the Internet, maps.

If nothing else, they could start eliminating. If Sasha had a vision or two to give them some direction, some bread crumbs, so much the better, but to Riley’s mind nothing replaced research and action based on it.

She lost herself in it, but this time—considering the race to strip down before the change—she’d set the alarm on her phone to go off ten minutes before sunset.

At its warning, she turned off her laptop, closed her books, opened the balcony doors.

No one and nothing stirred in her view. Under the best of circumstances, she much preferred to go through the change in private. Not just for modesty—though, hey, that counted—but because it was personal.

Her birthright, her gift. One she now believed had a connection to the three goddesses. Maybe she’d write a paper on it, she thought as she undressed, send it to the council. It could be someone had more information there. Information that might add to the whole.

Naked, she sat down on the floor in front of the fire as the sun sank in the west, over that cold Atlantic sea.

She felt it building, that rush, the breathless inevitability. Snaps of power, the first hints of pain. Alone, secure, she flowed into it, absorbed it, accepted.

Bones shifted, stretched. Pain, pressure, and a kind of joy.

Her spine arched as she rolled to all fours, as the dark pelt sprang up along her flesh.

She smelled the night, the fire, the smoke, her own sweat.

And with the night came the fierce triumph.

I am.

The wolf became, and inside it the woman rejoiced.

Fierce and free, she raced through the open doors, leaped over the rail into the cool night air, into the shimmering dark.

And landed on the ground, body quivering with impossible energy. Throwing her head back, she howled at the sky, then all but flew into the thick shadows of the woods.

She could run for miles, and often did in the first hour. She smelled deer, rabbit, squirrel, each scent as distinct and vivid as a photograph.

Even had she been starved, she would neither hunt nor feed. The wolf fasted.

She kept to the trees, instinctively veering away whenever she caught the scent of man or exhaust, heard the rumble of a car on a road. Though they would see only a wolf—what many would take for a large dog.

Lycans weren’t the stuff of horror movies, shambling around on furry legs with nightmare faces and crazed eyes, desperate to rip the throats out of wayward humans.

As much as she loved popular culture, most werewolf movies and books bugged the crap out of her.

Whatever the roots of that lore, they’d been dug up long ago, when lycans had civilized, when rules were set. And any who broke those sacred rules were hunted in turn and punished.

At last she slowed, the manic energy burned off by speed so she could walk and enjoy the night. She explored as she went. Perhaps the forest held secrets or clues.

An owl called, low and long, a nocturnal companion. As she looked up, she saw its eyes gleam back at her. Above the trees, the moon sailed full and white. She let go her own call, just once, honoring it, then turned to take the journey back to Bran’s house on the cliff.