The Gift of Friendship
He looked shocked at his own words. He grimaced and lifted off of me, at least enough that I could breathe, but kept me pinned to the ground. I was pretty sure I could take him, but the will to do so had left me. He’d said enough.
“Sorry,” he murmured. “I didn’t mean that.”
I closed my eyes. I couldn’t hide my tears, so at least if I closed my eyes maybe they wouldn’t be so obvious. “No, I think you meant it. There are too many reasons for you not to want to be with me. Too much to overcome.”
The weight of his body lifted off. I opened my eyes to see someone pulling him back and throwing him away from me.
Jakin bent over me. He offered me his hand.
I stared at his extended palm, then glanced over at Charlie who was already scrambling to his feet and scurrying toward his wife-to-be. I took a deep breath and grabbed Jakin, not by the hand but by the wrist. His wrist pressed into mine around my Algiz rune scar as he pulled me to my feet. He drew me to him protectively. I let him.
The moment his Walking Lightning bind rune touched my scar past, present, and future flashed before my eyes. I dropped his wrist and held my arm close to my chest, so it didn’t happen again. It had been different with Raven. A lightning bolt full of positivity and purpose and partnership. But with Jakin it was dark, full of the baggage that he brought to his faith, just as Raven had told me.
Charlie scooped up his fiancée from the ground. Her torn sleeve fell loose, almost to the ground, and her head and arms fell backwards as he struggled to carry her. He shot a withering glance over his shoulder at me and picked his path back towards the visitors’ center.
I watched him go, knowing that he would now be dependent on Bambi Torrelli and whatever contacts she had here in Ireland to make it back. But they wouldn’t make it back ahead of me. For Bambi Torrelli as well as for Charlie, any prospect of retrieving The Lost Teachings of Dead Monks was gone. At least for now.
Jakin wrapped his arms around me and held me tightly. We stared out at the sea together. He rested his chin on top of my head.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I wanted to sink into his arms and be safe there, but I couldn’t quite find that spot. I breathed in the scent of him with all its familiarity, but his smell had faded. Was this the best I could expect out of life? A supposedly good man like Charlie could never imagine himself with someone like me, and yet here was Jakin Crutchfield, who less than a year ago had wanted me dead. A man who had violated me, drugged me, offered me up to the gates of hell as a sacrifice to bring back his true love, and somehow in there had decided that he might have made a mistake and that I might have been what he wanted after all. Was this the best that I could ever do? My penance for the sins I’d committed as a child?
Jakin nuzzled my neck, his long, dark hair tickling my nose and his scruffy beard scratching my skin. I didn’t move. He kissed my jaw, very gently, and whispered again, “I am so sorry.”
He tried to wrap my arms around me, but my wrists fell limply against each other, scar against scar, rune against rune, Algiz against Hagalaz. I saw it then. Like a flash of light. Like a bolt from the sky above had struck me between the eyes. I saw myself sometime in the future. Not with Charlie. Not with Jakin. But with someone else. I couldn’t see a face or hear a voice, but as an empath, I felt love from nearby. Someone with me, sometime in the future. Deep friendship. Partnership.
I heard my own voice, though I couldn’t recognize the words. Light, happy, festive. Joking about a song from the 80s. I could feel the warm Gulf breeze in my long hair, somewhere in Florida. Cool white sand under my bare feet.
A mission. A purpose. A partner.
I pulled my wrists apart, and the vision faded. The memory, however, remained. And with it, hope.
Jakin sank his fingers into mine, intertwined them, and led me down the path toward the visitor’s center. I let him, but if he meant it as anything more than an apology, it was too late. No matter how much he regretted now what he’d done to me, there was no going back, no do-overs, no future for us, even though I sensed empathically that’s what he hoped for now that Charlie was out of the way.
We didn’t talk until we were almost at the end of the path. Three people were standing there, waiting on us from the stone wall next to O’Brien’s Tower.
“What are you doing here, Jakin?” What I really wanted to say was, Why you?
“I’m Darbyshire’s back up. Drusilla sent me here to escort you back home. She put me on a flight over here just as soon as she knew something was wrong. I didn’t get here until this morning. You’ll have to forgive me if I’m too jetlagged to make much sense.”
I wished that it hadn’t been Jakin. I didn’t want him to see me like this—weak and hurting. Vulnerable. Why couldn’t Dru have sent someone else? But I supposed that she had no one else. Emry’s physical disabilities kept her from assignments that involved travel or danger. Dru had her own reasons for staying out of Europe. Her old enemies believed her dead, and her new face and name kept her safe in North America. Too many injuries made it difficult for her to be the badass she’d once been. She’d needed brute strength and Daeganean magic, so she’d sent Jakin, a powerful priest in his own right. However hard it was for me emotionally to have an old boyfriend escort me home, it did make sense for Jakin to be the one to accompany me back to Florida. He had both the physical strength and the dark magic to either keep me safe or to kill me, and he was no longer interested in killing me.
I trudged beside him toward O’Brien’s Tower and the three waving silhouettes. Jakin kept a firm hand on my elbow, even though my footing was more solid now than it had been all week. The waves below hit the cliffs near the tower, splashing across the walkway ahead of us. We paused to wait for the interval between sprays. I turned back for one last look at Charlie carrying his bride-to-be toward a car parked not too far from us. He was out of his crossroads now, and whatever devils had danced with him there, he would take home with him. He had made his choice, and it wasn’t me. It was a choice he would have to live with. I would have to live with it, too.
Jakin tugged me forward. In spite of our careful planning, the upward splash of waves still sprinkled us as we ran as fast as the wet ground would allow toward where Raven and the blondes waited. The wind was strong now from the incoming storm. Hurricane force. Strong enough that it was hard for me to walk. Nike and Illyria rushed to meet me, both of them enveloping me in a hug at the same time.
“I am so sorry, darling,” Nike said in one ear over the howl of the wind.
“We saw,” Illyria added by explanation.
I nodded and nothing more. I wasn’t used to female camaraderie in matters of the heart, but I appreciated it.
Raven stood farther back, waiting his turn, then he stepped forward with both his hands open to me. He shifted the thin, unstructured backpack on his shoulders and smiled reassuringly. It’s funny how quickly an empath can bond with someone, especially in ritual or any situation where the other person is stark naked. I could feel his emotions. Peace. Warmth. A gentleness of heart that soothed my jagged edges. The same power that Jakin carried with him in his bones, and yet light instead of dark. Some memory somewhere of us together in the darkest of ages, priest and priestess and lovers somewhere in medieval Wales. He felt like family, like home I’d never known.
I felt safe. I had forgotten this feeling. Maybe some vague memory of it as a child snuggled up in Mommy’s chair as she told me stories of kings and knights and sorceresses in castles filled with bright-colored tapestries and walls not yet destroyed by the ravages of time.
He pulled me to him in a warm hug and held me against him for what must have been a full minute. He placed one hand in the center of my back, fingers splayed, and the other on the top of my head in what might have appeared to others as a loving embrace. He matched his breathing to mine and leaned in to touch his forehead to mine at the exact spot I knew to be the sixth chakra. He inhaled, but somehow, I had the feeling he was inhaling through his crown chakra, and as I breathed out, the bright protective light infused in me.
I felt that same euphoria I had felt on the Hill of Tara and at the altar at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I could feel the flow of it through my blood and breath, from Raven, from something greater.
When he stopped, he kissed me on the cheek and said into my ear, “That should give you a little boost over the next few weeks.” He rested his palms on my shoulders. “Look at me, Lilah.”
I raised my gaze to his. We stood there for a moment, wordless, yet more was communicated between us in silence than I had ever had from any speech. For a split second, I wanted to turn and look over my shoulder to watch Charlie drive away, if I could even see him from this vantage point, but Raven shook his head.
“I can’t tell you to forget about him, Lilah. I can’t tell you that it shouldn’t hurt. It’s a testament to the vastness of your heart that you’re able to love or trust anyone, so take that as a good sign. It means that you have the ability to love again and to trust again.”
I wanted to shake my head.
“You fell for Charlie because there was a moment when you saw him as pure and good and representative of everything that you wanted or needed. It doesn’t mean that he was or that he is, but that’s what he represented to you, and that was the magic of falling in love with him. It’s the same for him. He saw in her something that he lacked in himself regardless of how she presented herself to him. It’s what he thought he was getting. What he wanted and needed. You needed a partner who wouldn’t be like the rest, so you overlooked critical flaws in him. You did get a man who wasn’t like the rest. You got someone who desperately needed to be needed and would give up everything—his career, his relationships, you—to have it. He may have believed you could have filled that deep chasm in his life, but he thought he found someone who could fill it better. At least temporarily. I’m not going to tell you to get over him tomorrow or stop thinking about him or even to stop worrying about him. I know this is going to hurt for a while, and that you’ll continue to worry about his safety and happiness.”
I wanted to argue but didn’t have the will.
“And I know that just as you’ll fear for him, you’ll also kick yourself for feeling any empathy for him. But I will tell you this: I could show it to you by pressing my sacred mark against your scars, or you could look any time you want by pressing your own scars together, but I would ask you not to. Don’t spend precious moments of life looking at your future with him. Let life unfold as meant to. Let the surprises come. He will come back to you, though.”
The wounds were still fresh, but I still felt a zing of hope at the thought of Charlie one day coming back to me, not even on his knees, but simply back in my life as he had been last fall and over the winter. Even as friends.
Reading my thoughts, Raven shook his head. “Don’t, Lilah. Don’t wait for it. By the time he comes back to you, there will be someone else in your life. Someone new.” He shrugged as if in answer to the question already forming in my head. “I don’t know who it is. I can’t see that yet, but I haven’t looked, and I don’t think I will. I’ll give you your privacy. But by the time Charlie comes back to you, you really won’t care. You won’t care if he’s back and wanting to be your lover or your husband, or even just a friend to have a conversation with. He will be back, just like all the other men you’ve loved will be back.” He glanced over my shoulder and back at me, then leaned forward to say in my ear, “Even Jakin. They will all come back to you, and it will be your choice. All on your terms.” He kissed me on the forehead and took me by the hand. “Come. I have something for you. It’s not for the others to hear.”
He led me closer to the tower. As we walked through the arch, we stopped against the force of the wind. A gust caught us and forced us back a few steps. He squeezed my hand, and we both laughed and tried again.
On the other side of the tower, out of sight of our companions, but with a good view of the cliffs and to the north of us, Raven led me to a quieter spot where there was less wind and less need to speak so loudly.
He slung the backpack off his shoulders and clutched it in front of him. “I have something for you,” he said. “Good news.” Grinning, he unzipped the limp backpack and pulled out what looked like a large plaque with an Irish-Gaelic word etched into it. “Here,” he said, “Hold it.”
I took the lacquered object in my hands. Some type of decorative plaque? I frowned up at him. “I-I don’t understand.” Was it a going-away present?
“It’s The Lost Teachings of Dead Monks. After I authenticated it last night, Nike encased it in a 3D-printed case that will keep anyone, including the airlines, from opening it. It will be safe until you place it in the hands of the woman who calls herself Drusilla St. Augustine.”
I gripped the package and stared down at it. “No one can open it?”
“No. Jakin doesn’t know. He’ll think it’s a present from the priestesses and me. In a way, it is. If either Charlie or Mrs. Torrelli had gotten their hands on it today, assuming they even knew that the artifact was inside and didn’t think it was another fake like the one we planted in the stolen satchel, they still could not have opened it.” He tucked one finger under my chin and lifted my gaze to his. “Nor, Lilah, could you.”
Heat burned in my face. He knew I would have tried.
“You can’t blame me, can you? That book could have changed my future.”
He chuckled and drew me in for a quick hug, The Lost Teachings between us. “That’s where you and Charlie both got it all wrong. Even the senator. It’s never been about what the book can do, but what you can do with the book. I could walk down there right now and stop Charlie from leaving, maybe, and hand him this book so that he could use it to change his future and everything that he’s done that has led up to this moment and redeem himself to you, but it would not matter at all. I could do the same for you right now, but in your emotional state—in your despair—nothing would change, and you would still watch Charlie leave with someone else.”
“I don’t understand. I thought The Lost Teachings book was some kind of tool for making your dreams come true.”
Raven gritted his teeth and sucked air through them. “Yeah, sorta. It’s a tool for focusing your energy, that’s all. If you expect that life is always conspiring in your favor, as the senator did, then so be it. But if you’re expecting, as Charlie did, that you will be caught in your own lies and that you will lose everything, then those are the fears rather than hopes that you will bring in to be. Or if you use it as a tool to focus your thoughts on how you will always be alone and unloved or how you don’t deserve to be happy—”
Embarrassed, I jerked my head in the other direction. I knew what he was going to say.
“Then that is the future that you will bring to yourself. The power of The Lost Teachings and the power of the mental labyrinths in this book? Its power is that people believe their reality is formed in this book by using it as a tool, but it isn’t. It’s already formed in them. The book is nothing more than a psychological tool to be incorporated into meditation. Charlie never needed The Lost Teachings to change his life. He changed his life for the worse because of what he believed, not because he gazed upon a few pages of beautiful medieval illustrations.”
Clutching the book, I blinked at Raven. “You mean—?”
“Yes. You don’t need this book to change your future. What you need is to believe.”
Without warning, hot tears spilled down my cheeks. “What I want, more than anything, isn’t even to be happy, but just to be whole again.”
Raven pulled me into his arms and held me there. He kissed both cheeks and then my forehead. “You will be,” he said into my ear. “I swear by Lord Daegan, by both the lightning spark and its fruition, Walking Lightning, that I will help you find the wholeness you yearn for. That’s what friends do for one another.”
He held me against him until I felt safe, as if he could read my mind, and perhaps he could. I had no idea what gifts he had, other than his generosity of spirit. He broke the embrace at last and took The Lost Teachings out of my hands, carefully placing it back into the thin backpack.
The odd thing was, I believed him. I even trusted him. In a way I never had with Ford or with Jakin or with Charlie. With them, there had always been something nagging in the back of my mind that wasn’t quite right, or maybe it was just knowing that one day they would let me down. But Raven’s energy was pure, elemental. I felt nothing in him that was false or ill-intentioned. More than anything I felt for the first time in my life that I had an ally. Even with Dru, there had always been a hint of a mask. With Raven, there was no mask. I could see him as clearly as he could see me.
Raven’s energy shifted abruptly from compassion to sternness. He slid the straps of the backpack around each of my arms and adjusted it so that it wasn’t heavy at all, “You have your passport?” he asked.
I nodded. “Always.” I hadn’t risked it getting stolen or left behind as Charlie had.
“And you have everything else you need? Illyria has retrieved all your baggage though really, there’s nothing that can’t be left behind.”
I smiled at him. I liked the idea of leaving baggage behind. God knew, I had plenty of it over the course of my life.
“Jakin has a car ready. He’ll take you back to Dublin. He’s booked a seat beside you, and he’s been tasked with delivering you to the St. Augustine Special Collections Library as though his life depended on it.” He winked. “And it does.”
“But I thought you said that the book is only a tool, that it’s not the book itself that’s dangerous.”
“I never said the book itself wasn’t dangerous. In the wrong hands, it will incite the belief that’s needed to make things happen. Your professor will archive it in the ninth gate until there is someday someone who can use it for good, but that time is not now. Come now, Lilah, and let’s get you back to Dublin. It’s a long drive, but Jakin drives like a bat out of hell.”
“Will I ever see you again?” I needed all the friends and allies I could get.
He wove his fingers through mine and led me downhill to where Jakin, Illyria, and Nike waited. “You and I have a lot of work to do together, and there aren’t many of us left in the Daeganean priesthood to bear witness to the death and resurrection of our planet. This is why it’s so important that you be made whole. You have work to do, Lilah Burns.” We stopped at the edge of the clearing just out of earshot of our companions. “The fate of humanity will fall to us, or at least to me, and I believe that you’re the one, from what I’ve seen, standing beside me.”
We turned to face each other, and I knew that this was goodbye. At least for a while. My heart filled up with gratitude for him, for everything he’d done for me. Had he not been here in Ireland, and met with me at Tara, then again at the pub in Doolin, and out here on the cliffs of my beloved Moher, I might have despaired over Charlie enough to fall back into old habits and maybe even fling myself off of these cliffs. He’d encouraged me and helped me watch my step, so I didn’t lose my footing.
“What is it about you,” I asked, shaking my head with a smile I could not conceal, “that makes you so special?”
He bent and kissed me on the cheek.
As he walked away and headed back across the green grass toward the trail that had led me from Doolin to Moher, I thought I heard him say, “Because I’m the last priest of the dead god.”
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