Night's Child

  Night’s Child – Sweep Book 15

  Cate Tiernan

  Prologue

  Three minutes to five. In three minutes it will all begin, Morgan Rowlands thought, wrapping her hands around her heavy mug of steaming tea. She swallowed hard, refusing to start crying until later, when she knew she wouldn't be able to help it. "Cool the fire," she whispered, circling her left hand widdershins, counterclockwise, over her tea. She took an experimental sip, trying to wash down the lump in her throat.

  She gazed out the plate-glass window of the small tea shop in Aberystwyth, Wales, where she and Hunter Niall had agreed to meet. It was darkening outside, though it was barely five o'clock. After living in Ireland for three years, Morgan was used to the early darkness from heavy clouds, but she sometimes missed the stark cold and thick, glittering snow of upstate New York, where she had grown up.

  Heavy raindrops began to smack against the window. Morgan took a deep breath, the weather outside reflecting her emotions inside. Usually she welcomed the rain as the main reason that Ireland and Wales both were so incredibly lush and green. Tonight it seemed dreary, dismal, depressing because of what she was about to do-break up with the person she loved most in the world, her muirn beatha dan. Her soul mate.

  Her stomach was tight, her hands tense on the table. Hunter. Oh, Goddess, Hunter. It had been almost four months since they'd been able to meet in the airport in Toronto- for only six hours. And three months before that, in Germany. They'd had two whole days together then.

  Morgan shook her head, consciously releasing her breath in a long, controlled sigh. Relax. If I relax and let thoughts go, the Goddess shows me where to go. If I relax and let things be, all of life is clear to see.

  She closed her eyes and deliberately uncoiled every muscle, from her head on down to her icy toes in her damp boots. Soon a soothing sense of warmth expanded inside her, and she felt some of the tension leave her body

  The brass bell over the shop door jangled and was followed almost instantly by a blast of frigid air. Morgan opened her eyes in time to have her light blocked by a tall, heart-breakingly familiar figure. Despite everything, her heart expanded with joy and a smile rose to her face. She stood as he came closer, his angular face lighting up when he saw her. He smiled, and the sight of his open, welcoming expression sliced right through her.

  "Hey, Morgan. Sorry I'm late," Hunter said, his English accent blunted by fatigue.

  She took him in her arms, holding him tightly, not caring that his long tweed overcoat was soaked with icy rain. Hunter leaned down, Morgan went on tiptoe, and their mouths met perfectly in the middle, the way they always did. When they separated, Morgan stroked a finger down his cheek. "Long time no see," she said, her voice catching. Hunter's eyes instantly narrowed-even aside from his powers of sensing emotion as a blood witch, he knew Morgan more intimately than anyone. Morgan cleared her throat and sat down. Still watching her, Hunter sat also, his coat sprin-kling raindrops onto the linoleum floor around his chair. He swept his old-fashioned tweed cap off his head and ran a hand through his fine, white-blond hair.

  Morgan drank in his appearance, her gaze roaming over every detail. His face was pale with winter, his eyes as icy green as the Irish Sea not three blocks away. His hair was longer than Morgan had ever seen it and looked choppy, uneven.

  "It's good to see you," Hunter said, smiling at the obvious understatement. Under the table he edged his knee over until it rested against hers.

  "You too," Morgan said. Did her anguish already show on her face? She felt as if the pain of her decision must surround her like an aura, visible to anyone who knew her. "I got tea for two-want some?"

  "Please," he said, and Morgan poured the spare mug full of tea.

  Hunter stood up and dropped his wet coat over the back of his chair. He took a sip of tea, stretched, and rolled his shoulders. Morgan knew he had just come in from Norway.

  What to say? How to say it? She had rehearsed this scene for the last two weeks, but now that she was here, going through with it felt like revolting against her very being. And in a sense, it was true. To end a relationship with her muirn beatha dan was fighting destiny.

  It had been four years since she had first met Hunter, Morgan mused. She absently turned her silver claddagh ring, on the ring finger of her right hand. Hunter had given her this ring when she was seventeen, he nineteen. Now he was twenty-three and a man, tall and broad-shouldered-no longer a lanky teenager, the "boy genius" witch hired as the youngest Seeker for the International Council of Witches.

  And she was no longer the naive, love-struck high schooler who had just discovered her legacy as a blood witch and was struggling to learn to control her incredible powers. She'd come a long way in the few years since the summer after her junior year of high school, when she'd first learned there were actually a few surviving members of her mother's coven, Belwicket. She'd been spending the summer studying in Scotland when they came to her, finally able to reveal themselves after the dark wave was defeated and- more importantly- Ciaran MacEwan was stripped of his powers. They'd told her how they'd survived the destruction of their coven by escaping to Scotland, where they'd been hiding for decades. When they'd heard of Morgan's existence, they'd come to enlist her help in rebuilding the coven that had shaped their families for hundreds of years. And she'd been doing just that since moving to Ireland a year after her graduation from high school, and loving every moment-except for the fact that being in Cobh meant being apart from Hunter.

  Hunter reached across the table and took her hand. Morgan felt desperate, torn, yet she knew what she had to do, what had to happen. She had gone over this a thousand times. It was the only decision that made sense.

  "What's the matter?" he asked gently. "What's wrong?" Morgan looked at him, this person who was both intimately familiar and oddly mysterious. There had been a time when she'd seen him every single day, when she'd been close enough to know if he'd cut himself shaving or had a sleepless night. Now he had the thin pink line of a healed wound on the curve of his jaw, and Morgan had no idea where or when or how he had gotten it.

  She shook her head, knowing she couldn't be a coward, knowing that in the end, with the way things were, they had to pursue their separate destinies. In a minute she would tell him. As soon as she could talk without crying.

  As if making a conscious decision to let it go for a moment, Hunter ran his hand through his hair again and looked into Morgan's eyes. "So I spoke to Alwyn about her engagement," he said, refilling his mug from the pot on the table.

  "Yes, she seems happy," Morgan said. "But you-"

  "I told her about my concerns," Hunter jumped in. "She's barely nineteen. I talked to her about waiting, but what do I know? I'm only her brother." He gave the wry smile that Morgan knew so well.

  "He's a Wyndenkell, at least," Morgan said with a straight face. "We can all thank the Goddess for that."

  Hunter grinned. "Uncle Beck is so pleased." Hunter's uncle, Beck Eventide, had raised Hunter, his younger brother, Linden, and Alwyn after their parents had disappeared when Hunter was eight. Hunter was sure that Uncle Beck had always blamed Hunter's father, a Woodbane, for his troubles.

  "Anything but a Woodbane," Morgan managed to tease. She herself was a full-blood Woodbane and knew firsthand the kind of prejudice most Wiccans had against her ancestral clan. "Right," said Hunter, his eyes still on her.

  They were silent for a moment, each lost in their own thoughts. Then Hunter finally said, "Please tell me what's wrong. You feel weird."

  He knows me too well, Morgan thought. Hunter was feeling her uneasiness, her sadness, her regret.

  "Are you ill?"

  Morgan shook her head and tucked a few bangs behind one ear. "No-I'm okay. It's just-I needed to see you. To ta
lk to you."

  "It's always too long between times," Hunter said. "Sometimes I go crazy with it."

  Morgan looked into his eyes, saw the flare of passion and longing that made her throat close and her stomach flutter.

  "Me too," Morgan said, seizing the opening. "But even though it's making us crazy, we seem to be able to see each other less and less."

  "Too true," Hunter said, rubbing his hand over his chin and the days' worth of stubble there. "This has not been a good year for us."

  "Well, it's been good for us separately," Morgan said. "You're practically running the New Charter yourself, setting up offices all over the world, working with the others on guidelines. What you're doing is incredibly important. It's going to change how witches interact with each other, with their communities. . . ." She shook her head. The old council was now barely more than a symbolic tradition. Too many witches had objected to its increasingly autonomous and even secretive programs to search out witches who were misusing magickal power. In response to that, Hunter and a handful of other witches had created the New Charter. It was less a policing organization than a support system to rehabilitate errant witches without having their powers stripped. It now included improving witches' standings in their communities, education, public relations, help with historical research. Wicca was being pulled into the twenty-first century, thanks in large part to Hunter.

  "There's no way you could stop now," Morgan said. "And me . . . Belwicket is becoming more and more important to me. I really see my future as being there. It supports the work I want to do with healing, and maybe someday I could become high priestess-a Riordan leading Belwicket again."

  Morgan's birth mother, Maeve Riordan, had died when Morgan was a baby. If she had lived, she would have been high priestess of her clan's ancestral coven, Belwicket, just as her mother, Mackenna, had, and her mother before her.

  "Is that what you'll be happy doing?" Hunter asked.

  "It seems to be my destiny," Morgan responded, her fingers absently rubbing the cuff of his sweater. Just as you are, she thought. What did it mean to face two destinies that led in opposite directions? "And yes, it makes me happy. It's incredibly fulfilling, being part of the coven that my birth mother would have led. Even though we're now on the other side of Ireland from the original one, the whole experience is full of my family's history, my relatives, people I never had a chance to know. But it means I stay there, commit myself to staying in Cobh, commit myself to making my life there for the foreseeable future."

  "Uh-huh," Hunter said, a wariness coming into his eyes.

  Now that she had gotten this far, Morgan forced herself to press on. "So I'm there. And you're . . . everywhere. All over. Meanwhile we're seeing each other every four months for six hours. In an airport." She looked around. "Or a tea shop."

  "You're leading up to something," Hunter said dryly.

  Over the last four years she and Hunter had talked about the distance between them many times. Each conversation had been horrible and heartbreaking, but they had never managed to resolve anything. They were soul mates; they were meant to love each other. But how could they do that when they were usually a continent apart? And how could that change when each of them was dedicated, and rightfully so, to their life's work?

  Morgan didn't see any way to make it work. Not without one of them giving up their chosen path. She could give up Belwicket and follow Hunter around the world while he worked for the New Charter. But she feared that the joy of being with him would be tempered by her frustration of not pursuing her own dream and her guilt that she was letting down her coven-and even her birth mother, whom she'd never known. And then what good would she be to Hunter? She didn't want to make his life miserable. And if she asked him to give up the New Charter and stay with her in Ireland, he would be in the same position-thrilled to be with her, torn that he couldn't be true to a meaningful calling of his own. She couldn't ask him to do that.

  Breaking up-for good-seemed like the fairest thing for both of them. She wanted Hunter to be happy above all else. If she set him free, he would have the best chance of that. Even though the idea of never holding him, kissing him, laughing with him, even just sitting and looking at him again seemed almost like a living death, still, Morgan believed it was for the best, ultimately. There seemed to be no way for them to be together; they had to do the best they could on their own.

  Back at home Colm Byrne, a member of Belwicket, had confessed he was in love with her. She liked him and he was a great guy, but he wasn't her muirn beatha dan. There was no way he would ever touch what she felt for Hunter, and she wasn't breaking up with Hunter to be with Colm or anyone else, for that matter. This wasn't about that. This was about freeing herself and Hunter to give all of themselves to their work and freeing them from the pain of constantly longing for these achingly brief reunions.

  "Hunter-I just can't go on like this. We can't go on like this." Her throat tightened and she released his hand. "We need to-just end it. Us."

  Hunter blinked. "I don't understand," he said. "We can't end us. Us is a fact of life."

  "But not for the lives we're living now." Morgan couldn't even look at him.

  "Morgan, breaking up isn't the answer. We love each other too much. You're my muirn beatha dan-we're soul mates."

  That did it. A single tear escaped Morgan's eye and rolled down her cheek. She sniffled.

  "I know," she said in frustration. "But trying to be together isn't working either. We never see each other, our lives are going in two different directions-how can we have a future? Trying to pretend there is one is bogging us both down. If we really, really say this is it, then we'll both be free to do what we want, without even pretending that we have to take the other one into consideration."

  Hunter was silent, looking first at Morgan, then around at the little tea shop, then out the black window with the rain streaking down.

  "Is that what you want?" he asked slowly. "For us to go our own separate ways without even pretending we have to think of each other?"

  "It's what we're already doing," Morgan said, feeling as if she was going to break apart from grief. "I'm not saying we don't love each other. We do-we always will. I just can't take hoping or wishing for something different. It's not going to be different." That was when her voice broke. She leaned her head against her hand and took some deep breaths.

  Hunter's finger absently traced a pattern on the tabletop, and after a moment Morgan recognized it as a rune. The rune for strength. "So we'll make lives without each other, we'll commit to other people, we won't ever be lovers again."

  His quiet, deliberate words felt like nails piercing her heart, her mind. Goddess, just get me through this. Get me through this, she thought. Morgan nodded, blinking in an unsuccessful attempt to keep more tears from coming to her eyes.

  "That's what you want." His voice was very neutral, and Morgan, knowing him so well, knew that meant huge emotions were battling inside him.

  "That's what we have already," she whispered. "This is not being lovers. I don't know what this is."

  "All right," Hunter said. "All right. So you want me to settle down, is that it? In Cobh? Make a garden with you? Get a cat?" His voice didn't sound harsh-more despairing, as if he were truly trying to understand.

  "That's not what I'm saying," Morgan said, barely audibly. "I want you to do what you want to do, what you need to do. I want you to be happy, to be fulfilled. I'm saying that I know that won't be with me in Cobh, with a garden and a cat." She brushed the sleeve of her sweater over her eyes.

  Hunter was quiet. Morgan pulled the long ends of her sweater sleeves over her hands and leaned her face against them. Once this was over, she would breathe again. She would go back to the bed-and-breakfast, get in the shower, and cry.

  "What if.. . things were different?" Hunter said at last.

  Morgan drew a pained breath. "But things aren't different."

  "Things are up to you and me," Hunter said. "You act like this is beyon
d our control. But we can make choices. We can change our priorities."

  "What are you talking about?" Morgan wiped her eyes, then forced herself to take a sip of tea. It was thin and bitter.

  Quickly Hunter reached across the table and took her hands in his, his grip like stone. "I think we need to change our priorities. Both of us."

  "To what?" How could he manage to always keep her so off-kilter, even after four years?

  "To each other," Hunter said.

  Morgan stared at him, speechless.

  "Morgan," Hunter went on, lowering his voice and leaning closer to her,"I've been doing a lot of thinking, too. I love what I'm doing with the New Charter, but I've realized it just doesn't mean much without you there to share it with me. I know we're two very different people. We have different dreams, different goals. Our backgrounds are very different, our families . . . But you know we belong together. / know we belong together-I always have. You're my soul mate-my muirn beatha dan."

  Morgan started crying silently. Oh, Goddess, she loved him so much. "I knew when I met you that you were the one for me," Hunter said, his voice reaching only her ears. "I knew it when I disliked you, when I didn't trust you, when I feared your power and your inability to control it. I knew it when you learned Ciaran MacEwan was your father. I knew it when you were in love with my bastard half brother, Cal. I've always known it: you are the one for me."

  "I don't understand. What are you saying?" It was frightening, how much she still wanted to hope they could be together. It was such a painful hope. She felt his hands holding hers like a vise-as strong as the hold he had on her heart.

  "You came here to break up with me forever," Hunter answered. "I won't stop you, if that's what you want. I want you to be happy. But if there's any way you think you can be happy with me, as opposed to without me, then I'm asking you to try."

  "But how? We've been over this." Morgan said, completely confused.

  "No, not this," said Hunter. "This definitely needs to change. But I can change. I can change whatever I need to if it means that you'll be with me."