Dark Witch (The Cousins O'Dwyer Trilogy #1)(78)

The way her footsteps echoed in the quiet only added to the atmosphere.

“You know a lot about it,” she commented. “Did you study up?”

“Didn’t have to. I had an uncle worked here on some of the repairs and improvements.”

“So my blood built it, and yours helped keep it. That’s another connection.”

“True enough. And I’ve had two cousins and a couple of mates married here, so I’ve been around and about it a few times.”

“It’s a good place for a wedding. The continuity, the care, the respect. And the romance—tales of kings and priest hunters, Cromwellians and James Bond.”

He laughed at that, but she only smiled. She felt something here. A kinship, a recognition, and now a kind of knowing.

She’d come here before, she realized, or her blood had come.

To sit, perhaps, in that quiet reverence.

“Candles and flowers, light and scent. And music. Women in pretty dresses and handsome men.” She wandered again, painting it in her mind. “A fretful baby being soothed, a shuffle of feet. Joy, anticipation, and love making a promise. Yes, it’s a good place for a wedding.”

She wanted it for hers, this place of age and contrast and endurance.

She went back to him, took his hand again. “Promises made here would matter, and they’d hold, if the ones making them believed it.”

Back outside she wandered the ruins, brushing her fingers over old stone, moved through the cemetery where the long dead rested.

She took pictures to mark the day and, though he grumbled about it, persuaded Boyle to pose with her as she took a self-portrait with her cell phone.

“I’ll send it to my Nan,” she told him. “She’ll get a kick out of seeing . . .”

“What is it?”

“I . . . The light. Do you see it?” She held out the phone to him.

On the screen they posed with her head tipped to his shoulder. She smiled, easy, and Boyle more soberly.

And light, white as candle wax, surrounded them.

“The angle maybe. A flash from the sun.”

“You know it’s not.”

“It’s not, no,” he admitted.

“It’s this place,” she murmured. “Founded by my blood, kept by yours—that’s part of it. It’s a good place, a strong place. A safe one. I think they came here, the three. And others that came from them. Now me. I feel . . . welcome here. It’s a good light, Boyle. It’s good magick.”

She took his hand, studying the back of it where dark magick had spilled blood.

“Connor said it was clean,” he reminded her.

“Yeah. Light banishes shadows. Meara was right about that.” Still holding his hand, she looked into his eyes. “But like promises made, the light has to believe it.”

“And do you?”

“I do.” She lifted her free hand to his face, rose on her toes to brush her lips to his.

She believed it. Deep down in her belly she carried faith and resolve. And her heart came to accept what she understood as she’d walked with him along the paths and tidy gardens that opened for spring, among the spirits and the legends, into the promise kept by one of hers.

She loved. At last. Loved as she’d always hoped. He was her once in a lifetime. And with him she had to learn patience, and hold only to that faith as well. The faith that he would love as she loved.

She put on her best smile. “What’s next?”

“Well there’s the Ross Abbey. Actually, it’s a friary. Ross Errilly. It’s not far, and you’d probably like to poke about in it.”

“Bring it on.”

She glanced around as they walked to the truck, and knew she’d come back. Maybe to walk the Stations or just stand in the breeze and look out at the fields.

She’d come back, as her blood had come.

But now, as he drove away, she looked forward.

She saw it from the road, the foreboding mass of it, its peaks and tower and rambling walls. Under the thick sky it looked like something out of an old movie where creatures who shuffled in the dark hid and plotted.

She couldn’t wait to get a closer look.

The truck bumped down a skinny track with pretty little houses on one side, laced with gardens with blooms testing the chill. The other side of the track spread with fields loaded with cows and sheep.

Ahead, beyond the tidy and pastoral, loomed the ruins.

“I didn’t study up,” he told her. “But I know it’s old, of course—not as old as the abbey, but old for all that.”

She walked toward it, heard the whistle of the wind through the peaks and jut of stone, and the flapping of wings from birds, the lowing of cattle.

The central tower speared up above the roofless walls.

She stepped inside a doorway, and now her feet crunched on gravel.

Vaults for the dead, or stones for them fixed flat into the ground.

“I think the Brits kicked out the monks, as they were wont, then, as they were wont, the Cromwellians did the rest and sacked the place. Pillaged and burned.”

“It’s massive.” She stepped through an arch, looking up at the tower and the black birds that circled it.

The air felt heavy—rain to come, she decided. Wind blew through the arched windows, whistled down the narrow curve of stone steps.