Earth's Requiem(85)

A sudden chill marched down her spine. Had her naïveté almost doomed Earth? I have no business dabbling in arcane magics. None. I don’t know enough. She shivered, remembering her impressions from the photographs she’d found in the study. “You said they weren’t human. Did you figure out what those things upstairs are?”



“We think so,” Fionn answered. He threw his leg over a chair, picked up the mead bottle, and drank. “Hmph. Nearly empty.”

“There would be more where that came from,” Arawn said.

“You didn’t answer me.” Aislinn felt like a nag, but she had to know.

“The ones in the crypts were not exactly spilling secrets,” Bran said dryly, “but we believe they are the product of humans who mated with Lemurians.”

“If that is true,” Fionn added, looking grim, “it means the Lemurians plotted for years to create gateways to allow the dark to infiltrate Earth so they could ally with their power. The last Surge was only one piece of a much-larger puzzle. Though they do not look it, the Old Ones are a dying race, which is why they attempted to blend their bloodlines with humans. How they managed to have such a pairing take is beyond me.”

“How does Marta fit into all of this?” Aislinn was mystified.

“That’s easy,” Arawn said. “The Lemurians struck a deal with some greedy humans—likely scientists. Who knows how they twisted DNA to come up with viable offspring. The two in the crypts are brother and sister. Marta was their child.”

“Were they the only ones?” Aislinn asked. A macabre fascination filled her, along with an understanding of why Marta was so tall.

“We have no idea,” Gwydion replied. “But if the Lemurians have been successful bringing human DNA into their bloodlines, their alliance with the dark may well prove unstoppable.”

“I told you we needed to act,” Fionn muttered.

“Aye, that ye did,” Bran agreed. “And here we thought ye were simply besotted with the MacLochlainn.” He shrugged. “At least we know the feel of the hybrid race now. ’Twill make it easier to hunt them.”

“No wonder Marta went mad.” Aislinn felt disgusted and impressed at the same time. The woman must have been amazingly powerful to trap her parents into holding the gates between the worlds so she could travel back and forth to Taltos and probably other places as well.

Then she remembered the wolf. “Rune. I’m sorry.”

“I wondered why she did not smell entirely human.” The wolf was on his feet, clearly agitated. “She raised me. I thought all humans smelled that way until I met others.” A growl emanated from the back of his throat. “I should have asked more questions.”

“It wouldna have mattered,” Gwydion said. “She wouldna have answered.”



Aislinn went to Rune and knelt next to him. She searched for a way to tell him Marta hadn’t been in her right mind. That maybe human intelligence couldn’t coexist in the same body with anything Lemurian, but he shook her off and left the kitchen. With a worried-sounding squawk, the raven followed him.

“There is much we do not know,” Arawn said. “Marta may have embraced her Lemurian side or despised it. Mayhap she only hated her parents. I am not as certain as Gwydion that the two above hold all the gateways. Yet, they hold enough of them that it would be foolhardy to disturb the binding.”

Aislinn stumbled to her feet. “From what I overheard in Taltos, Marta hated the Lemurians and did everything in her power to subvert them. How soon can we go back there and obliterate those bastards?”

“’Tis the dark gods who have to go,” Bran said thoughtfully. “Without them, the Lemurians would not have enough power to bother anyone.”

“And the human-Lemurian spawn—if there are more of them,” Fionn added.

“Tricky of them,” Gwydion muttered, “to be making something that looks so like a human that we never would have thought to look twice.”

“So Taltos isn’t the answer?”

Aislinn looked around at the men. No one answered her. For some reason, she felt thwarted. She’d found something she could handle, but it wasn’t the salvation she’d hoped it would be—not for Earth, and not for her. Even if she’d been able to destroy the harmonic, it wouldn’t have affected the dark gods at all. A complex strategy she could only begin to guess at linked the Convergence and its Surges to the Old Ones, the dark gods, and their minions. She hoped they could figure it out before it was too late. Maybe her nerves were playing off the urgency in Marta’s journals, but she didn’t think any of them had much time left.