Shadowmagic - Sons of Macha Read online

  SONS OF MACHA

  JOHN LENAHAN

  For Tim and Sarah (Mel) Lenahan.

  The only ones I still show off for.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One: Special Agent Murano

  Chapter Two: Ruby

  Chapter Three: Macha

  Chapter Four: The Oak

  Chapter Five: Graysea and Essa

  Chapter Six: The Yew House

  Chapter Seven: Diddo

  Chapter Eight: Lugh

  Chapter Nine: Ona’s Book

  Chapter Ten: Nora

  Chapter Eleven: Judgement

  Chapter Twelve: The Hermit of Thunder Bay

  Chapter Thirteen: Captain Jesse

  Chapter Fourteen: Ivy Lodge

  Chapter Fifteen: Maeve

  Chapter Sixteen: The Worry Stone

  Chapter Seventeen: Connemara

  Chapter Eighteen: Connemara Maeve

  Chapter Nineteen: Mícheál

  Chapter Twenty: Eth

  Chapter Twenty-One: Master Eirnin

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Hive

  Chapter Twenty-Three: The Choosing

  Chapter Twenty-Four: War

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Dumb Idea

  Chapter Twenty-Six: King Bwika

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Prince Codna

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Fand

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Grove

  Chapter Thirty: The Shadowrune

  Chapter Thirty-One: Nora

  Chapter Thirty-Two: The Twins of Macha

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Mother Oak

  Chapter Thirty-Four: A Wave

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Beginnings

  Acknowledgements

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Special Agent Murano

  He wasn’t a Scranton cop. I could tell that as soon as he walked in. The pressed suit and the newly cut hair made me suspicious but the Italian shoes were a dead giveaway.

  ‘Conor O’Neil?’ he said in a low voice that made me think he had been practising it in a mirror.

  ‘Hay-na,’ I replied using the local vernacular. His confused look confirmed that he was an out-of-towner. Not that I minded; the local police had been none too gentle with me. Understandable, considering they were certain that I killed my father, bombed their police station, hospitalised about two dozen of their fellow officers and kidnapped their favourite detective. So when a Scranton cop elbowed me in the ribs when no one was looking it was forgivable but not pleasant. This new guy was a relief. He looked like he played by the book – hell, he looked like he wrote the book.

  ‘My name is Special Agent Andrew Murano.’

  ‘You’re a Fed?’

  He flashed his identification card emblazoned with a big ‘FBI’ across it.

  ‘Wow, what did I do to deserve the Eliot Ness treatment?’

  ‘Kidnapping is a federal crime.’

  ‘Well then you can go home, I didn’t kidnap anybody.’

  ‘That’s not what Detective Fallon tells us,’ the FBI man said, opening a folder on the table between us.

  ‘Well Detective Fallon can kiss my …’

  ‘You claim,’ Murano interrupted, ‘that you accidentally took Detective Fallon to a magical land where you rode dragons together.’

  I winced. ‘Well, when you say it like that, it sounds a bit far fetched.’

  ‘No, not at all, Mr O’Neil. Do go on.’

  I really didn’t want to. Telling a story as crazy as mine is kind of fun the first time around but after a while it loses its appeal. I’ve often heard that women hate it when men mentally undress them with their eyes – well, I had the opposite problem. Everyone I told my story to mentally dressed me in a straitjacket. But I recounted my tale once again, ’cause Brendan told me to tell the truth.

  Brendan and I had arrived from Tir na Nog into the Real World not far from Brendan’s house. The portal connecting The Land to the Real World deposited us inside a small patch of trees exactly at the spot where Brendan’s mother said mystical ley-lines converged. Brendan had always considered that just another one of his mother’s hippy-trippy crazy ideas, but he was learning that many of her crazy ideas were turning out to be true. Detective Fallon and I were the only ones who made the trip. Essa was supposed to join us but she was still mad at me for the Graysea thing.

  Brendan’s mother Nora was one of those older women who looked great even into her seventies. You could see by her face that she had all of her marbles (and then some) and her physique showed that she was still strong. Good thing too, ’cause the shock that Brendan and I gave her when we showed up to the front door on horseback would probably have killed a lesser senior citizen.

  When his mother asked him where he had been, Brendan started by saying, ‘You’re not going to believe this.’ But only a couple of minutes into the story it was plain to see that she did. She had believed in Filis and Faeries and Brownies and Tir na Nog all of her life and tears came to her eyes as Brendan told her that the Queen of the Druids recognised him as one of their own.

  Brendan’s daughter Ruby was at school. He wanted to go and get her but Nora convinced him that that was a bad idea. He was apparently a very famous missing person. There had even been a TV show recreating Mom and Nieve’s attack on the police station and Brendan’s picture had been on every TV, newspaper and Internet screen in the country. Showing up in a third-grade classroom, we decided, might cause a bit of a commotion.

  We were sitting down to a nice cup of tea in the kitchen when Brendan saw something outside the window and said, ‘Oh my gods.’ He jumped up and took a big carving knife out of a wooden block on the counter and said ‘Take it!’

  I did.

  ‘Now drop it.’

  I didn’t have a clue what was going on. ‘What?’

  ‘I said drop it.’

  He was so frantic I did what I was told.

  Then he said, ‘Tell the truth – it’ll keep you out of a serious jail until I can figure things out.’

  Before I even had time to say, ‘Huh?’ a zillion screaming cops barrelled in the front and back doors with guns drawn. Brendan hit me in the stomach, spun me around and dropped me to the ground with my arm twisted behind my back. ‘I’ve got him,’ he shouted. ‘He’s disarmed!’

  I was cuffed, dragged to my feet by my hair, slammed against the wall and then tossed head first into a police wagon. All the while I kept hearing cops asking Brendan how he was. I saw Brendan’s mother on her porch as they were closing the doors of the van.

  ‘It was very nice to meet you, Mrs Fallon,’ I said.

  Brendan was right. Telling the truth got me a room in a secure mental hospital where my daily interrogators alternated between cops who wanted to kill me and shrinks who wanted to understand me. I couldn’t decide which I liked better. Special Agent Murano was my first change in a couple of days.

  I took a deep breath and told the story of how my dad was not dead. That he was alive and well in Tir na Nog, the mythical Irish Land of Eternal Youth, where I assisted him regaining the throne by helping him attach his missing hand and then chopping off my uncle’s hand.

  Then I narrated the story of how, when I got back home, Detective Fallon arrested me for my father’s murder and how my mother and aunt busted me out of jail and how they took me back to The Land and how Detective Fallon got transported with us by accident and then we had to search all over The Land and had to fight a battle and ride a dragon so I could use its blood to save my father’s life. And now we are back again so Brendan can see his daughter and tell his mother that he is a Drui
d. I left out the mermaid stuff ’cause that just sounded kooky.

  When I finished I had a long hard look at Special Agent Murano to see if I could figure out which group he was going to join. The group that thought I was crazy or the group that thought I was pretending to be crazy. Agent Andy was difficult to read. He clicked off his tape recorder and tilted his head towards the armed guard that was standing by the door.

  ‘Would you object, Conor, if we had a little conversation in private?’

  ‘Why?’

  Agent Murano leaned in so close I could smell his heavy cologne. ‘I have a lot of experience with unusual events,’ he said in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Let’s just say I would prefer to talk about your situation without prying eyes.’ Then he winked at me.

  ‘What, are you like an X-File guy?’

  He smiled. ‘When we are alone.’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  The FBI man dismissed the guard and then lowered the Venetian blinds that were in front of what I assumed was a two-way mirror.

  I started to get excited. When you tell a story as crazy as mine, to as many people as I had and none of them believe you – you start to doubt your sanity. Could it be that I had finally met someone who truly believed me?

  ‘Have you met people from The Land before?’

  The agent shushed me, took off his jacket and covered the security camera that was mounted on the corner of the wall.

  ‘So you have a file on Tir na Nog, right?’

  Once again he raised his finger in front of his lips, picked the intercom off the table and unplugged it. Then after looking around to see that no one or nothing could overhear us, he covertly gestured for me to come close. I stood and looked around myself. It was very cloak and dagger. I just got within striking distance of him when – that is exactly what he did – he struck. He slammed the intercom into my stomach just below my ribs. Whether he had been trained or had lots of practice in using office equipment to cause pain, I don’t know, but he was certainly good at it. Every molecule of air flew out of my body and the agonising spasms in my solar plexus made it so I was having a hard time replacing any of them. I was on the ground, doing a convincing impression of a fish out of water, when he bent down and slammed the intercom into my right shin.

  I once heard that the only good thing about pain is that you can only experience it in one place – let me tell you now: that’s not true. Getting slammed in the shin just meant that I hurt from my chest to my toes. Then he slammed the damn thing into my head and I hurt all over. I tried to ask why but my breathing still wasn’t working and then I had a thought that terrified me so much I didn’t even care about the pain.

  ‘Did Cialtie send you?’ I said as loud as I could.

  Apparently it wasn’t very loud at all because Agent Murano leaned over and said: ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Were you sent by my Uncle Cialtie to kill me?’

  He grabbed me by my hair and dragged me back into a chair where he handcuffed my hands behind my back.

  ‘Still with the Faerieland stories. Do you want me to kick the crap out of you again?’

  ‘No,’ I answered honestly.

  ‘Then enough with the dragons and the Pixies.’

  ‘There are no Pixies in Tir na Nog.’

  That line earned me a backhand across the face that made my vision swim for a second. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want you to knock it off with the insanity talk. The last four federal crimes I have investigated in this state have all gotten off with insanity pleas. My nickname in the office is The Shrink. I refuse to lose another case to the nuthouse.’

  Relief washed over me; he was not an assassin hired by my uncle, he was a plain old ordinary Real World jerk. I smiled.

  ‘What, O’Neil, is so funny?’

  ‘The Shrink,’ I said laughing.

  Murano flew into a rage, he re-hit me in the stomach and overturned the chair I was cuffed to, my head bounced off the floor and I thought I was going to throw up. I really didn’t want to get hit again but I couldn’t help it, I was still laughing.

  ‘OK, OK,’ I said, my face pressed against the linoleum. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  The agent picked me off the floor – the cuffs cut in to my wrists. He put his face inches from mine. For a horrible second I thought he was going to kiss me. ‘You are going to confess to being a terrorist.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re going to admit that you are a terrorist. You don’t have to name names. You can claim that you never met your masters but you kidnapped Detective Fallon because you hate your country.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘Maybe I am,’ Murano said, ‘but I’m going to make sure you are not crazy.’

  ‘So let me get this straight – you are punching a man who is tied to a chair and I’m the terrorist?’

  The crazy G-man tipped my chair over once again. This time I think I did black out for a short time. The next thing I remember there was drool on the floor and I finally had a pain in my head that hurt enough to block out all of the other pains in my body.

  ‘OK, OK, I said, ‘I’ll say anything you want. Let’s just try and keep my grey matter inside my skull.’

  You know all that talk about how advanced interrogation techniques are no good because a tortured prisoner will tell you anything? Well, it’s all true. I talked about how Tir na Nog was really a code word for a bunch of anarchists that wanted to overthrow the United States of America and then the world. When I started to get too outlandish, Agent Murano shook his head until eventually I just let him write my confession. We started getting along so well I even persuaded him to get me a burger and a shake. Don’t get me wrong, I still loathed the man. Anyone who would use their power to beat a shackled insane person (I know I’m not really insane but he didn’t know that) is just below snakes – and that’s giving snakes a bad name. I was slurping at the last of my shake when Murano came in holding my ‘confession’.

  I hesitated before signing. I had been called a lot of nasty things in my day. Once I had even been called ‘unfunny’ (can you believe that?). But ‘terrorist’ was not something I wanted people saying about me. I imagined that in prison hierarchy, a terrorist would be just a tiny step above a guy who cooks puppies for supper.

  ‘I don’t think I can sign this,’ I said.

  ‘You want we go through all this again, O’Neil?’ Agent Murano said, rubbing his knuckles.

  ‘Well the way I figure it, either I get a beating from you today or I get one every day from my white supremacist flag-loving cell-mate. Sorry, Andy, but I’m sticking with the fire-breathing dragon story.’

  ‘Sign it,’ the FBI man said as he stepped menacingly towards me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘SIGN IT!’

  ‘Sign what?’ Brendan said as he entered the room. The so-called kidnap victim was flanked by a local cop in uniform and an old, grey-haired lady that I at first thought was his mother. Brendan picked up my confession and scanned it. I kept staring at the wrinkled face of the old lady – something about her intrigued me.

  ‘So you’re a terrorist now?’ Brendan said to me.

  ‘Special Agent Murano thinks so.’

  ‘Did he coerce you?’

  ‘I’d say he counselled me,’ I replied. ‘Agent Andy is like a shrink.’

  Murano bristled and pulled Fallon into the corner. I’m sure the special agent meant to whisper but he was worked up and not doing it very well. I could hear every word.

  ‘What do you care if I rough him up a bit? According to the report he had you locked up in a closet for a couple of months.’

  ‘It wasn’t that bad.’

  ‘Come on,’ Murano said, ‘you probably want to take a few pops yourself.’

  ‘I’m not sure his attorney would approve,’ Fallon said, pointing to the old woman.

  ‘No,’ the grey-haired woman said, ‘I’d be fine with that.’

  At the sound of her voice all the ha
irs on the back of my neck stood straight out.

  ‘No you are not,’ Fallon said to her. ‘You were about to tell your client not to sign anything.’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Your client, Mr O’Neil?’ Brendan said pointing to me. ‘You were about to tell him not to say or sign anything.’

  ‘Oh yes, I was.’ A look of confusion crossed her face – it was maddeningly familiar. ‘Yes, what Brendan said – do. Or don’t do.’

  The old woman tilted her head down and with inordinate interest began inspecting the bulb on the desk lamp.

  ‘She was also about to say that she would like some time alone with her client.’ Brendan stared at the woman again. ‘Wasn’t she?’

  The woman straightened up and hurriedly said, ‘Yes, I’d like to be alone with Master On-el.’

  ‘O’Neil,’ Brendan corrected.

  ‘Yes, Prin— Mr O’Neil.’

  Agent Murano finally took notice of the woman. ‘Can I see some identification please?’

  ‘Some what?’

  ‘Identification.’

  The old woman looked like she didn’t know what he was talking about. She looked over to Brendan and said, ‘Can we get on with this?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Brendan said with a sigh, ‘go for it.’

  The woman reached up to her ears and pulled off the marble-sized gold earrings that were hanging from her lobes. She held the two shiny spheres in her palm and incanted under her breath. The gold balls glowed then rose from her palm and encircled each other like tiny binary stars.

  The uniformed cop stepped in to get a better look but Murano backed up and said, ‘What the—’ He didn’t get to finish before the two balls shot through the air and exploded into the chests of the two officers. They were thrown against the wall in a shower of light. When I could see again it looked like they weren’t getting up any time soon.

  Brendan went through the FBI man’s pockets for the handcuff key while the old woman checked on the health of the cop.

  ‘’Bout time you got here,’ I said to Brendan. ‘That Fed is a nutcase. It was only a matter of time before he dropped a starving rodent down my trousers.’