rose Deardra—not the haggard, spurned woman who had roamed the shore for sixty years, but a queen of the Merrow in all her beauty and majesty. As the whirling water carried her to shore, her golden tail separated into two smooth, pearl-white legs, and she stepped out of the water to greet them.
“What happened to your tail?” Eden asked before Nuala had formed some proper words of greeting.
Deardra smiled and bent to pat Eden on the head. “Sometimes I wish we kept our young,” she said. “Your curiosity is refreshing, little one.”
“What do you do with them?” Eden asked, but Nuala interrupted her.
“Greetings, Queen. We give you our thanks for your excellent hospitality. You were, of course, quite right. The hut is certainly not what it first seemed.”
Deardra nodded graciously. “And I, too, am grateful for the service you have given me, and will reward you as you have requested. There are many rooms in my palace below the waves, and adorning one of them is this painting you wish to see. I cannot bring it above the waves, for the touch of air would ruin it. But I can take you to it, and you may consider yourselves fortunate. Not since the Son of Lir have we welcomed one of your race into our home.”
“You are very gracious,” Nuala answered, “but Manannan mac Lir possessed a certain affinity for the water which we do not. We cannot breathe without air.”
“I shall remedy that,” Deardra said, and without warning she stepped forward and kissed Nuala on the lips. It was a slow, lingering kiss, and Nuala could feel tendrils of heat rising in her body. She opened her mouth to take a breath, and then realized it was not Deardra’s mouth on hers that was preventing her from taking in air. She pulled back, eyes wide, and Deardra smiled. “My pleasure,” she murmured, and nodded her head toward the water. “You’ll find you can breathe quite easily once you’re below the surface.”
Nuala took a step toward the water, then turned and looked pointedly at Eden. “Yes, yes, she’ll be right behind you,” Deardra said, bending down to give Eden a quick peck on the lips. “No need to panic,” she said to the child as she led her toward the water’s edge. “You’ll be able to swim in my kingdom as well as you can walk in yours.”
Nuala took Eden’s other hand, and together the three of them disappeared beneath the waves.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Cedar was fighting to stay awake. More accurately, she was fighting to avoid falling asleep on Finn’s shoulder. They were crammed together in the backseat of a rental car, with Rohan and Riona in the front. In the van ahead of them were Anya, Murdoch, and Oscar, as well as Felix and Finn’s sister, Molly. They had flown through the night again, arriving in Dublin just as the sun was beginning to rise. Her head kept nodding, but then Eden’s face would appear in her mind and a fresh jolt of adrenaline would jerk her upright.
“Cedar, sleep, dear,” Riona said. “It’s a four-hour drive, and you might as well take advantage of it.”
“I slept on the plane,” Cedar muttered.
“Not enough,” Finn said.
Cedar looked at him in annoyance. “Don’t the People of Danu need to sleep?” Finn raised his eyebrows at the title. “I looked you up online,” she said in response. “Tuatha Dé Danann means the People of the Goddess Danu.”
“Yes, well, don’t believe everything you read,” he said.
“I haven’t read anything about you specifically, though, although I suppose I don’t know any of your real names, do I? Except for Fionnbharr,” she said, stumbling over the pronunciation.
“Riona is my real name,” Riona said from the front seat. “And Rohan’s isn’t too far off. It’s Ruadhan. He really has less gray, though,” she said with a smile, reaching over to ruffle the hair at the nape of his neck.
“Right, you don’t really look this way either,” Cedar said.
“I do,” Finn said. “One of the perks of actually being young is that it’s okay to look that way. But you’re right about the rest of them, for the most part.” He grinned. “Felix got his old fisherman look off a postcard he saw in a gift store. In reality, he’s…well, let’s just say I hope you don’t ever have the pleasure of seeing him in his true form. He makes the rest of us look like trolls.”
“Yes, well, he does have a flair for the dramatic,” Riona said. “Most