Fianna's Rising by Ron C Nieto

Author:Ron C Nieto [Nieto, Ron C]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Nineteen

Aisling stood and left. She walked in a haze, in a cloud. The world couldn’t quite touch her.

So. That was it.

Her two worlds colliding. Her duty and her heart pulling in opposite directions, forcing her to make a choice.

The small park where everything had started to fall to pieces was quiet when Aisling arrived. She found the bench where she had sat with Ronan, where he’d studied the bracelet and they had decided to go looking for answers. Together.

She plopped down and pulled out her phone. She dialed a number.

How would things have turned out if I had called him instead of Alastar?

“Are you home yet?” she asked when Murtagh picked it up, before he could speak.

“No,” he replied as if it was the most normal conversation opener in the world. Like he’d been expecting her to call. “I can be in Dublin in forty-five.”

“Oh.” That meant he hadn’t even started to head home to Belfast. “Okay. There’s a pub where we can grab a bite. I’ll send you the address.”

Murtagh groaned. “Nothing good comes of you sending me to pubs for meetings.”

Aisling smiled a bit at that. Last time, the friendly drink had led to uncovering a vampire, undoing a curse, and avenging way too many victims.

If she was honest, this time might be even worse. “It’s Irish-Moroccan fusion,” she teased.

“I’m not sure that’s as strong a selling point as you believe.” The timbre of Murtagh’s voice changed, came from farther away, then returned to normal. He’d just connected the call through his car.

Had he just been waiting for Aisling to reach out? Ready to jump and come at any moment?

What if she hadn’t called at all?

“It’s called The Randy Leprechaun.”

A moment of amused silence. “Well. Now I get it.”

Aisling sent the address without disconnecting the call and heard Murtagh tinker around on his end. The navigation system of his Discovery asked him to confirm the route, and then it promptly asked him to find a road. Murtagh grumbled, something along the lines of “If I could find the road by myself, I wouldn’t be listening to a piece of talking junk.” For a while, she just listened to him grappling with the navigation, engaging in as colorful a conversation with it as she’d ever heard him having—what on earth had made her think Murtagh was the serious, straitlaced, brooding type?—while watching the park around her. A few joggers passed by her bench, and one young man hurried by holding the leashes of four different dogs, but it had started to grow cold and people just weren’t out enjoying the day.

How much time had it passed in Tír na nÓg since Niamh had come through?

The thought came to her quicksilver fast, slippery, unbidden.

Would night be about to fall over there too? Or would they still be stuck in that horrible battle?

Not that the two options were mutually exclusive, of course.

“Hey, Murtagh,” she asked after a long, comfortable while. “Who decides what duty is?”

“The mark,” he replied.

It was what she had learned the moment she joined the Fianna, and his answer was easy but… not definite.

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