“Controlling water isn’t. It’s something that, other than the Fomorii, only the old gods can do; and even then, there is only one of the old gods I know of that could have managed something of that magnitude.” He waved his hand towards the water.
My knees started to weaken and I slumped to the wet sand. “What are you saying?”
Luke crouched beside me and took my hands in his. “I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think your father is dead. I think your father is very much alive and well. Because the only person you could have gotten that ability from—to control water like that—is Lir.”
I frowned, “Who?”
Luke helped me to my feet.
“Lir is one of the old gods; not truly a Tuatha, but something more. He could control all the waters, and he was very well known for his taste in women. He particularly liked women with green eyes.”
We all turned to look at Darcy, who stood, her face bright red from the tips of her ears to the base of her collarbone.
Luke snorted, “Isn’t that right, Darcy?”
2
“My father is alive?” I asked the question, my voice cracking with surprise. I shouldn’t have been taken off guard by the fact that my mother had lied to me. Not after everything else she’d done.
I wiped my hands on my jeans in an attempt to get the sand off my skin. “Never mind, it’s not like it matters now.” I turned my back on Darcy, and faced Luke. “Come on, we’d better go.”
We had been lucky, I guess, to fall where there weren’t a lot of people to notice our “miraculous” survival. Or the sight of a helicopter being tossed about in the sky. Then the distant sound of sirens reached my ears. On second thought, maybe someone had noticed. I picked up my pace; after my last encounter with the police, when Ashling first went missing, the last thing I wanted was to deal with them now that I’d been in a helicopter crash that I’d survived without a scratch.
Feet slipping in the wet sand, and then in the loose gravel closer to the road, I kept up a quick pace.
“What about me?” Darcy yelled after us.
Turning to face her I lifted both eyebrows. “What about you?”
“Are you just going to leave me here?”
I nodded once. “Yup.” With my back once more to her I headed towards the road.
“Are you really just going to leave her there?” Luke said, catching up with me.
Again I nodded. “She’ll be fine, she always is. She’s never needed me or Ashling.” At one point in my life, speaking that truth would have hurt; it would have made all the old wounds open back up. But not now. Whatever relationship we’d had was over and done with.
Darcy followed at a distance, backing off a little whenever I turned to glare at her. It was a bit like shooing away a stray animal that thought you had something for it to eat. More than anything else now, it was just irritating. Then again, I did want to know what the hell had happened on the helicopter; why Darcy had seen Balor and the Banshee Queen, and how she had shown me.
We slogged through the rocks and rough pampas grass, then we finally scrambled up on to the road. Staring up and down the road, I stopped as I tried to place where we were. It seemed familiar, but there are a lot of backwater roads on the east coast of Vancouver Island. “I think we’re close to a gas station. There’s one up the road if I’m remembering right.” I glanced over my shoulder, catching Darcy’s eye. “Try to keep up,” I said.
Within a few moments of walking, we could indeed see a gas station in the distance. The red and yellow sign shimmered in the heat waves that rose off the blacktop, the angle of the hill so steep it looked as though the sign was only a few feet off the ground. It was probably a half hour walk, all uphill.
My clothes were starting to seriously itch as the salt water dried on my skin, but that wasn’t really what was bothering me. I paused in our walk, waiting for Darcy to catch up to us.“You showed me something, in the helicopter; how did you do that?”
Her eyes darted sideways. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
My eyebrows lifted of their own accord. “Really? So the whole rocking about, holding your head, crying that you didn’t want to see anything. . . . that was nothing?”
Lips tightening, she continued to look away from me. I poked her in the arm. “Darcy, stop lying to me. How did you show me Balor and the Banshee Queen?”
Cora and Luke gasped in unison, giving me a nice stereo affect. Luke recovered first. “Wait, what?”
“Yes, I’d like to know exactly what’s going on, Darcy,” Cora said, her tongue flicking out towards my mom.