Island of Glass (The Guardians Trilogy #3)(34)

“Let her.”

“We’ll take her down. I damn well finish what I start, and I swear I’d like to go all Black Widow on her ass. But I’m reading the signs, heeding, we’ll say, the seer, so it’s most likely going to be you. A sword ends her—so says the prophet.”

“If I do, it’ll be the biggest pleasure of my life. And I’ve had more than a few.”

“Really?” Since he’d opened the door, she shifted to face him. “So it’s not all dour and dark in immortal land?”

“You’re a pain in the ass, Gwin.”

“I have a medal. Truth,” she said when he flicked her a glance. “It’s a silver disk with PITA engraved on it. A professor I had as an undergrad gave it to me. I wore it when I gave the valedictorian address. I worked with him on a dig about five, six years after, and we ended up sleeping together one night.”

“Just one?”

She only shrugged. “Nothing there, on either side. We decided we’d been attracted to each other’s brain, and the rest didn’t work. It was just weird.” She pointed at him. “Weirdest sexual encounter.”

“No.”

“Come on!” she said with an easy, appealing laugh. “I slept with my anthropology prof’s brain in a tent in Mazatlán. Balance it out.”

He wanted to laugh, barely restrained it. “All right, at random. I slept with a woman who performed in a traveling circus. Tightrope walker, aerialist.”

“What was weird about it?”

“She was crazy as a rabid cat, claimed she was really a snake who’d taken human form in order to procreate.”

“Huh. What century?”

“Ah . . .” That took a little thinking. “The nineteenth, early nineteenth, if it matters.”

“Just curious. What part of her did you sleep with? Yeah, yeah, all of her, but I mean like my professor’s brain.”

“She was fearless.”

“That may have been the crazy, but fearless appeals. Pull over.”

“Why?”

“Pull over,” she repeated.

Though he muttered, he swung over to the excuse for a shoulder. “If you need to piss, we’ll be in Ennis—”

“See that bird?” she interrupted. “On the signpost.”

“I see the bloody raven.”

“It’s not a raven, and it’s the seventh I’ve spotted since we left the barn.”

“It looks like a damn raven.” But he felt a prickle along the back of his neck as the bird sat, the bird stared. “And there are more than seven ravens in the county of Clare.”

“It’s not a raven,” she said again, and shoved out of the car.

When Doyle saw her pull her gun from under her shirt, he pushed out quickly. “You’re not going to shoot a goddamn bird just for—”

As he spoke, the bird screamed, flew straight for them. Riley shot it in midair, turned it to ash.

“Not a raven,” she said yet again, spun around, shot two others who came at them from the rear.

“I stand corrected.”

“Damn right.” She waited, watching, but no others came. “Scouts. She must be feeling better.” After holstering the gun, Riley turned back to the car.

Doyle took her arm. “How did you know what it was? I’ve got eyes, same as you.”

“Moon or not, the wolf’s always in me. The wolf knows when a raven’s not a raven.” She took a moment, leaned back against the car, looked out over the near field where sheep cropped among gravestones and the ruin of what she judged had been a small chapel.

And the quiet was glorious, like a deserted cathedral.

“Don’t you wonder who built that, and why there? Who worshipped there, what they worshipped?”

“Not really.” But the pettiness of the lie stuck between his shoulder blades. “Yes,” he corrected, “now and then, if I walk through a place. You’re right when you say you can feel what and who were there before. In some places, at some times.”

“Battlefields, I find, especially. Ever been to Culloden?”

“Yes, in 1746.”

She pushed off the car, eyes alight, and now she gripped his arm. “April 16? You were there? Actually there, in it? Oh, you’ve got to tell me about that.”

“It was bloody and brutal and men died screaming. That’s any battle.”

“No, but—” She stopped herself. He didn’t tell war stories, but avoided them. “You could at least tell me which side you were on.”

“We lost.”

“You were in the Jacobite army, in the rising.” Completely fascinated, she stared up at him. “Captured or killed?”

“Captured and hanged, and it’s an unpleasant experience.”

“I just bet. Did you—”

When he drew away, skirted the hood, she decided to detour from wars before he just shut down. “Most important societal advance,” she said when she got in the car.

“I don’t think about it.”

“You have to live in society.”

“I try not to.”

“Sociopolitical movements, whether or not they spark and result from revolution, form past, present, future. The Magna Carta, the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, the New Deal. And you can go back to—”