Dark Witch (The Cousins O'Dwyer Trilogy #1)(72)

“What else have you seen?” Branna demanded.

His face shuttered. “Too much, and not enough.”

“I’m not looking for riddles, Finbar.”

“You’re looking for answers, as always you do, and I don’t have them. I’ve seen the fog spread, as you have, seen him watching from the shadows, a shadow himself. I’ve seen you under that same bright moon, glowing like a thousand stars. With the wind flying through your hair, and blood on your hands. I’ve wondered if it was mine.”

Saying nothing, Branna rose to go to the stove, to pour the simmering sauce in a bowl.

“I don’t know what it means,” Fin continued, “or how much is real and true, how much is wondering.”

“When the time comes, it’ll be his blood spilled.” The cheer left Connor’s voice. Now there was only a hard edge, a lick of temper.

“Brother. I am his blood.”

“He doesn’t own you.” With her shoulders very straight, her eyes very direct, Iona looked at Fin. “And feeling sorry for yourself isn’t helping. He’s been around, waiting for hundreds of years,” she continued in a practical tone as Branna shot her a quietly approving look over her shoulder. “What the hell has he been doing for centuries?”

“Fin thinks he goes back and forth, when he’s a mind to, between times, or worlds. Or both,” Boyle added.

“How does he— Oh, the cabin, the ruins. The place behind the vines. If he can do that, why doesn’t he kill Sorcha before she burns him to ashes?”

“He can’t change what was. Her magick was as powerful as his, maybe more,” Fin speculated, “before she took ill, before he killed her man. It’s her, I think, who spellbound the place, protects it still. What was, was, and can’t be altered. I’ve tried myself.”

“Well now, you’re full of secrets, aren’t you then.” Branna dropped the bowls on the table, snatched up the salad to put it aside.

“If I could’ve finished what she started, and ended him, it would be done.”

“But so would you,” Iona pointed out. “Maybe. I think. Time paradoxes are . . . paradoxical.”

“In any case, I couldn’t change it. My power was there, I felt it, but it made no matter. And I couldn’t hold my place, if you take my meaning. It all wavered, and brought me back where I’d started.”

“You could’ve been lost,” Connor reminded him. “Taken somewhere, or some time else entirely.”

“I wasn’t. I think it’s like a string of wire, from then to now, and there’s no veering off from the wire.”

“But there’s a lot of years on the wire,” Iona mused. “Maybe it’s a matter of finding the right spot.”

“Change one thing that was, it all changes. And you should know better,” Branna said to Fin.

“I was young, and foolish.” He sent Iona a quick smile. “And feeling sorry for myself. Now that I’m older and wiser, I see it’s not any one of us who’ll end him or the curse he carries, but all of us.”

“What if we all went back?”

Connor paused in ladling sauce over his pasta to study Boyle. “All of us, together?”

“Maybe it would change things, but we don’t know when he’ll try to harm any one of us, or what else he might do. I don’t know why you can’t change what was, or why you shouldn’t try when what was is something evil.”

“It’s a slippery hill to climb, Boyle.” Branna twirled pasta, untwirled, twirled it again. “Some ask if you had the way and means, wouldn’t you go back and kill Hitler? Oh, the thousands of lives saved, and so many innocent. But one of those lives saved might be worse and more powerful than Hitler ever dreamed.”

“But don’t you try all the same? A lot of years on the wire, as Iona said. Can’t we find the time, the place, take the battle to him? A time and place we know won’t wink Fin out of existence.”

“Thanks for that.”

“I’m used to you,” Boyle shot back to Fin. “And have no desire to run the businesses on my own. Is there not some magick the four of you can devise to give us the best chance of it?”

“We may not come back to the world we left, if we come back at all,” Branna insisted.

“Maybe we’d come back to better. He’s a shadow in this time, as Fin said.”

“Shadows fade in the light.” Meara lifted her wine. “That’s something to consider. I may not be able to conjure a spell, but I know basic physics. Is it physics? Ah, well, action, reaction, yes? And I know it’s always better to take the enemy by surprise, on ground of your choosing.”

“You’d go?” Iona asked. “I mean if we could, and would.”

“Well now, unless I had a hot date lined up.”

“It’s not a joke, Meara.”

Meara reached over, rubbed a hand on Branna’s arm. “You’ve carried the weight long enough. Time to spread it around. Saying we’re a circle and really meaning it are different matters, Branna. You can’t protect us all, so let’s protect each other.”

“We could think on it. On how to find that time and place, and block him from knowing it. And how to make the time and place here and now—or here and when we’ve found the answer to destroying him once and for good.”