Ashes on the Waves (5 page)

I had indeed said it out loud because she lowered her cup and met my gaze straight on. “Well, this is unexpected, Prince Leem. What brought this on?”

“I . . .” What a fool I was—a desperate drowning person grabbing for one last moment of life. I stood and placed the coffee cup on the tray. “I apologize. I don’t know what came over me. Thank you for the coffee and the company.” How could I have been that stupid? I so rarely got to talk to anyone and I had let my guard down and allowed my base instincts to take over. Base, animal instinct and no
thing more. With Anna of all people. Shame rushed through me in a torrent, forcing reason from my head and driving me to leave in such haste, I didn’t spare a second look back.

Instinct, so far from being an inferior reason, is perhaps the most exacted intellect of all.

—Edgar Allan Poe,
from “Instinct vs. Reason—A Black Cat,” 1840

T
he ceiling of my birth mother’s shed held no great wonders, but I had memorized it to the finite detail. The morning sunlight crept in around the curtains from the only unboarded window, illuminating every familiar imperfection and knothole. This had been a toolshed to a small house owned by Francine’s aunt. Francine had taken pity on my mother and had begged her elderly relative to allow her to live here. It was just big enough to hold a tiny bed, a small, wood-burning stove that could also be heated with propane, a table, and my mother’s prized possession, a copper bathtub that was hidden by a curtain tacked to the ceiling. The tub was a luxury few on Dòchas had and no one knew where she had gotten it. There were a lot of unanswered questions about my mother. Thanks to me, they would never be answered.

My foster parents had adopted me on the day of my birth, and I’d lived in their house near the harbor until my foster mother died. After that, my relationship with Pa became so contentious, I had to leave. My birth mother’s abandoned shed seemed like the perfect refuge.

Out of honor to his wife, Pa still supported me in a sense. He provided enough propane to keep me alive in the winters, which were brutal on Dòchas, and for that I was grateful.

Dòchas.
I laughed out loud. Naming the island Dòchas was a joke of some kind, surely. “Hope.” The island of hope. No more hopeless a place existed on earth, I was certain of it. Or had been until yesterday, when a gorgeous ray of hope fleetingly entered my life for a brilliant few hours. I rolled over in bed and touched the small charcoal drawing I’d made last night. The curve of the throat, the sloping shoulders. Such hope. Now gone because I’d allowed thoughts to become words.
Careless fool.

The wooden planks leading to my door creaked. I held my breath and listened. No one had ever come to my shed before. Even Francine allowed me privacy and never intruded. Perhaps I’d imagined it. Things were always muddled after a bad night from the Bean Sidhes and last night had been the worst ever. It was almost as if they were trying to tell me something rather than just punish me. Their cries had been more panicked than mournful, which was unusual.

No more noise from outside. It must have been my imagination. I tucked the drawing under my pillow and rolled ov fze=er. I never slept in. Nobody on Dòchas did. Laziness meant death from starvation or cold, so it was a luxury no one could afford. Still, this morning, it certainly was tempting.

The creak sounded again. Someone was definitely outside. “Hello?” I called. I was answered by a delicate rapping against the wood. “Just a minute,” I shouted, grabbing my trousers from the floor and slipping them on. The shirt was another issue. Putting it on one-armed took a little longer. “I’m coming,” I said, holding the collar in my teeth as I fumbled to get the shirt turned right side out so I could put it on. It had to be Francine coming to check on me. She had instructed me not to come in until lunchtime after I told her about my visit to Taibhreamh.

Rap, rap, rap
.

“Hold on.” I tugged the sleeve over my bad arm and reached around behind my neck to pull it to my good side. The buttons would have to wait; it took me a while to button a shirt.

Fully expecting to find Francine, I yanked the door open. “Anna.” It came out almost as a gasp.

“Heya, Leem,” she said with a half smile. She looked tired—as tired as I felt. Her pale skin was marred with dark circles under her red-rimmed eyes. Most people wouldn’t have noticed this, but I’d memorized her yesterday. Something had happened last night.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

She scanned me head to toe. “I might ask you the same thing.”

I pulled my shirt closed and ran my hand through my bed-tousled hair. I probably looked a mess. “I’m fine.”

She leaned to look around me into the shed. “Are you going to invite me in or are we going to stand out here like a couple of losers?”

I shot a look over my shoulder at my shed. “You might prefer it out here. It’s not much.”

She answered with an arched eyebrow.

I stood aside. “Come in, please.” I groaned inwardly as the beautiful creature entered the monster’s cave. She looked anomalous among my things—like precious art amid ruins.

She took a deep breath through her nose. “It smells good in here. Like wood and nature.”

“Cedar,” I said. “The walls, ceiling planks, and beams are cedar.”

She studied my bookcase by the door. “All classics. Don’t you read anything recent?”

“The books were my mother’s. I don’t have access to any others. My ma gave them to me saying my mother would have wanted me to have them. Since there’s no school on Dòchas, these were my education.”

“Who is Ma?”

“My mother died at my birth. Ma was my foster mother. She passed away a year ago.”

“I’m sorry, Liam.” She resumed her study of my bookcase. “Yuck. Tennyson, Shakespeare, Keats, Milton, Poe, Hugo? Well, if these are what you grew up on, that explains a lot.” She ran her fingers over the paint-stained easel in the corner. “You paint?”

“Sometimes.” Having her in my space felt wrong. She didn’t belong here any more than I belonged in her world.

She studied the splattered tabletop and floor. “You paint a lot.” She ran her forefinger over the corner of the table and held up the blackened tip toward me in question.

“Charcoal. I sketch occasionally.”

“May I see?”

“No.” The word came out louder and quicker than I’d intended, and she winced in response. “I’m sorry. It’s just not a good time.”

She peeked behind the bathtub curtain. “I did sort of ambush you. Francine said you wouldn’t mind, though.”

“Why are you here, Anna?” I don’t know what answer I was anticipating, but it certainly wasn’t the answer she gave.

“To kiss you, of course.”

I’d never fainted in my life, but I was certain I was on the brink at that moment. “I’m sorry about that. It was wrong of me.”

She smiled. “I thought it was adorable.”

Adorable.
I stood stunned in the middle of my tiny shack staring at the most beautiful girl in the world, unable to move—hardly adorable at that moment.

She approached my bed and my heart rate doubled. “Okay, how about breakfast, then?” she said.

Breakfast I could manage. Being alone and this close to her would kill me outright. “That sounds perfect. I need to take care of some things first if that’s okay.”

“What kind of things?”

It was my turn to answer with an arched eyebrow.

“Oh,” she said. “I’ll just wait outside, then.” She flashed me a brilliant smile and slipped out the door.

After taking a deep breath and waiting for my heart to slow to a non-lethal rate, I splashed water on my face, combed my hair, and brushed my teeth using the basin and pitcher on the table by my bed. After a bit of fumbling, I managed the buttons on my shirt and joined her outside. “One more moment, please,” I said as I headed to the outhouse.

“Well, that answers that,” she said when I joined her on the path in front of my shed. “I noticed you didn’t have a toilet.”

“The only structure with indoor plumbing on the island is the mansion,” I replied.

“Well, that kinda sucks,” she said with a smile. “I bet you don’t stay in there reading the paper like my dad does.”

I laughed. “Certainly not in the winter anyway.”

She became serious all of a sudden. “How do you stand it, Liam? Living in a place like this, so isolated and cut off from the real world. So backward.”

To me, this
was
the real world. It’s all I’d ever known. And all I ever would know.

I inserted my key in my lock. I had installed the lock, probably the only one on Dòchas, after someone had broken in and written threats on my walls last year.

“You don’t even have running water,” she said. “I’d go nuts.”

I stepped past her and struck out on the path toward the pond. “You don’t miss what you’ve never had, Anna.” And at this moment, no words had ever been truer. After my blunder yesterday, my pain and longing had grown far more intense than it had ever been over the years—almost untenable. As much as it thrilled me to experience her in this grown-up state, it might have been better left as it was: a childhood love in a pretend kingdom by the sea—the imaginings of my fanciful mind.

We stepped into the clearing next to the pond and she gasped. “It’s gorgeous! I had no idea this was here.” It pleas k.t size="ed me she found one of my favorite places beautiful.

“It’s our ice pond. In several months it will be completely frozen over. The freshwater ice is cut and used by the villagers.”

“That makes sense,” she said. “No electricity means no refrigerators or freezers.”

Several ducks paddled lazily across the mirror-like surface, unconcerned by our presence. The trees reflected in a ring, making the pond appear to fold in upon itself in vivid shades of emerald. A log made a natural bench and I gestured for her to sit.

“So, breakfast?” she said with a grin that exposed her perfectly straight, white teeth.

There were no restaurants on Dòchas. I could have gotten breakfast at the shop with my work credit, but at this time of day, I might run into Pa on the dock and wanted to avoid that at all costs. “We need to discuss our options,” I said. “Would you prefer something from the sea or the earth?”

“Anything that works for you, Prince Leem. You should know, though, I don’t eat flesh.”

Oh, God. She’d heard the rumors. My pulse hammered in my ears and I fought to control my breathing. “Nor do I.”

“Cool! So you’re a vegetarian too.”

Ah, I had misunderstood. Relief ran through my body in a warm cascade. “No. I eat meat.”

“But you said—”

“I misspoke.”

She absentmindedly picked a piece of bark from the log. “You’re kinda weird, you know.”

Weird
was an understatement. “So, breakfast from the sea is out,” I said. “Please wait here. I’ll be right back.”

The apple trees were full of fruit this time of year and the one on the far side of the pond was laden with them, even on the low branches. I twisted a couple off and slid one into my shirt pocket. They were small compared with the ones we got in the shop, but two should be sufficient.

Across the pond, I met her gaze. It was strange knowing she was watching me. I was unaccustomed to companionship and didn’t like the feeling of self-consciousness and inadequacy her scrutiny invoked. What did she see when she looked at me? To her, I probably looked like a pitiful disabled eighteen-year-old stuck in a world inferior to her own. Just like when she gazed from the cliff at the sea, she had no awareness of the opportunistic evil under the surface, just waiting for the right moment to assert power.

I will never give evil the opportunity,
I swore inwardly. I would fight it with everything in me.

I lowered myself beside her on the log, far enough away to stave off my impulse to touch her. The impulse was strong—almost overpowering—and based on last night’s “kiss me” debacle, I needed to be wary of my weaknesses.

She reached over and slipped an apple out of my pocket, remaining close for a moment—just long enough for her floral scent to fill my nose and unravel me slightly. “You’ve got it bad, Leem, don’t you?” she whispered in my ear.

She had no idea.

I’d read in the tabloids that she was notorious for saying outlandish things to get a reaction. She told the reporter it was her “shock and awe” approach, and I was experiencing both shock and awe at the moment.

I cleared my throat and shifted slightly away. “Be real, Ann kBewe a,” I whispered. “Don’t play with me. You sought me out for a reason and this isn’t it.”

She nodded and took a bite of the apple. “Way to cut through the BS. You’re right: I did come for a reason. But I’m right too. Admit it.” She took another bite.

Admit I wanted her? I couldn’t. It would give the impulse strength, thereby reducing my control. “Why did you seek me out?” I took a bite of the apple in my hand despite my complete loss of appetite.

“Because you know stuff I don’t. Because I’m scared and need your help.” She placed her fingers on my arm. “Help me, Liam.”

Her complete and total candor surprised me. I’d expected her to keep puffing off squid ink to obscure her real motive, but instead, she cut right to the reason for her visit.

“I’ll help you any way I can. Always.” I pitched what remained of my apple into the pond and a duck pecked at it.

“Weird things are happening. I—”

Pa’s voice cut through the trees like an ax. “Liam, you no good loafer! Where the hell are you?” I knew this tone. He’d been drinking. “Get out here!” He banged on my door hard enough to splinter it. The knocks bounced off the trees surrounding the pond. He must have gotten to my shed via the cliff trail. Only a small copse of trees separated us from his rage. “Francine said you weren’t coming in this morning. You’d better have a damn good reason if you don’t want to freeze this winter. You’d better be in there half dead. If not, you’re gonna be.”