tending to our family, and our home.”
“We buried them, and so many others, in the churchyard. There was hope in some that it would pass and things would be as they were. Fear as well, and no word from outside for some time. Some fled, never to be seen again. Others came and stayed. Those like we here, and those who accepted that magick was back in the world.
“I know the day you were born,” she said to Fallon. “I saw it that night, that last night with the party lights and the celebrating. I took Ross MacLeod’s hand, and saw. A good man, and none of his doing, not of his knowing. But it would start with him. And on the night he died, in that moment the dark struck, your light burst free, sparked by the blood of the Tuatha de Danann, the blood the MacLeods would pass down to theirs. You would be born in the storm, and delivered not into the hands of the one who sired you, but into the hands of one meant to rear you.”
She sipped more whiskey. “You’ve known loss, all of you, and still so young. You’ll know more. Loss can shake faith if you let it, and the dark gloats when faith seeps out with loss.”
“The dark comes here, too.”
The old woman nodded at Fallon. “It does. They come to the sgiath de solas.”
“Shield of light.”
“Aye, the circle, the shield, the evil they unleashed. And every year, near to the time it opened, they come and make a sacrifice to the dark.”
“Granny, they found Aileen.”
“Ah.” A long, long sigh as she reached for Nessa’s hand to comfort. “I feared it. Since the first year after Year One, they come. They lure a young one, usually a girl, but not always, into the woods. The woods were once green and full of game, a good place. Now cursed by what lives there.”
“What lives there?” Tonia asked.
“It has no name I know. No face, no form but what it steals. It’s a dead place now, that wood, and no one dare enter. I don’t know what they do to the poor girls there. I can’t see, or it may be I won’t see.”
“They tried for me only last year,” Nessa said. “But Granny has charms on my window, on the door. And I wear this.” She gripped the charm around her neck. “Still I felt the pulling, I heard the music, so bright and fun. I went to Granny and stayed all night in her bed. It was Maggie went missing that night, and never found again. She was but twelve.”
“Who are they?” Fallon asked. “Has anyone seen them?”
“The first year there were two, a man and a woman. Both handsome, but a false front, that beauty. Scarred they were under it, and beneath the false front and scars, souls dead and black as pitch.”
Shivering, she drew the shawl closer around her shoulders. “I saw them fly over the MacLeod farm, him on black wings, her on white, and she threw flames at the house, but they bounced away like balls as they flew on. To the circle, to the wood. It was that night the first of the children went missing.”
“Eric and Allegra,” Fallon stated.
“You know them?”
“They killed my sire. They’ve come every year in January?”
“Each year. But the next after that first they had a baby, and they became three who fed the dark. The child grew—pretty as a plum—but with hair dark on one side, pale on the other. As were her wings.”
“Petra.” Duncan’s hand balled into a fist.
“There’s more in her than in them.” Because they trembled a little, Mrs. Frazier used both hands to lift the whiskey to her lips.
Nessa added wood to the fire, whiskey to the glasses.
“More dark in her,” Mrs. Frazier continued, “and a madness you can feel wild on the air as she passes over. Only days ago, they came, but like these last few years, only the mother and daughter.”
“I killed Eric. Or I wounded him,” Fallon corrected. “My father—my life father—finished him.”
“As is just.”
“Only those?” Tonia asked. “No other DUs—Dark Ones?”
“We hear tales of Dark Ones, others, but none have come here but those three. Now two. I see them, though in the week they’re known to come, I close the cottage tight. But I see them.” She tapped her temple. “And on the night they feed the dark, storms rage.”
“Granny says…” Nessa hesitated, then continued at her great-grandmother’s nod. “She