“This is Morrigan. Your granddaughter.”
The old man held the child out and Mama Parker automatically took the infant. With trembling hands, she opened the blanket and unwrapped the baby.
Richard Parker peered over his wife’s shoulder, and fell instantly, irrevocably in love.
“She looks exactly like Shannon did when she was born,” he said, and laughed through the unexpected tears that burned his eyes. “Just like a little bug.”
“Oh, hon, how can you say that?” Mama Parker’s voice was breathless with emotion. “She is too beautiful to be a bug.”
Richard looked at his wife. They’d been married for almost thirty years, since Shannon was just a little girl. Patricia Parker couldn’t have children of her own, but she’d loved and raised Shannon as if she had given birth to her. And now she was fifty-five and he was fifty-seven—too damn old to raise a baby.
But his eyes were drawn back to Morrigan, who was so much like his Shannon, his Bugsy.
“She has no one but you in this world,” John Peace Eagle said. “Rhiannon said to tell you that she believed in you and knew you would do the right thing.” He paused for an instant, as if he needed to consider his words, and then added, “I have a feeling about this child. I sense a great power within her. Whether that will be power for good or for evil is yet to be discovered. The darkness that haunted her mother will very likely stalk Morrigan, too. If you turn the child away I fear that the darkness may gain an upper hand with her.”
“Turn her away!” Richard felt his wife’s arms tighten around the baby. “Oh, no. We couldn’t turn her away.”
“Pat, you have to be sure about this. We’re not young anymore.”
Smiling, she looked up into her husband’s eyes. “Morrigan will keep us young. And she needs us, hon. Plus, she is all of Shannon we may ever have.”
Unable to speak, Richard nodded and kissed his wife’s forehead.
“My daughter, Mary, is in the cab. She brought some things for the child—diapers, formula, bottles. Such as will get you by for tonight.”
“Thank you.” Pat Parker turned her luminous smile on him. “We appreciate that.”
“Why don’t you and Mary take the baby things into the house? John and I will finish up here,” Richard said.
Pat nodded, but before she walked away she gave Rhiannon’s body one more look. “It’s hard to believe she’s not Shannon.”
“She’s not Shannon,” Richard said with finality. “Shannon is alive and safe in another world.”
The baby started to fret, and Pat’s attention went instantly from the corpse to the child. Cooing to her softly, she hurried around to the cab of the truck. Richard waited until the women and the few sacks of baby supplies disappeared into the house. Then he turned to the old Indian.
“I’m not taking her into town. This is no one’s business but ours.”
John Peace Eagle nodded slowly. “It is good that the modern world does not touch her any longer. She belongs to a different time—a different place.”
“I’d like to bury her down by the pond under the willow trees.” He looked out at the dark pond. “Those trees have always seemed sad to me.”
“Now it will be as if they are crying for her.”
Richard grunted and nodded. “Will you help me?”
“I will.” Together they started for the barn to get what they’d need. “What will you tell Morrigan of her mother?” Peace Eagle asked.
“The truth,” he said automatically, and then added, “eventually.” He wished he knew how the hell he was going to do that.
It was almost dawn before John Peace Eagle and his daughter left. Richard was exhausted. He rubbed his right hand slowly with his left, trying to work out the stiffness that always bothered him if he used it too much. He wondered if the injury would ever truly heal, and then reminded himself that it had been only five months since he’d split it open trying to claw his way out of a hole in the icy pond—a hole made by the evil Nuada as he tried to follow through on his threat to kill everyone Shannon loved. Richard’s skin shivered and twitched, like a horse being harassed by a biting blackfly. He didn’t like to remember that day.
The mewing of the baby pulled his concentration across the dimly lit bedroom. Quietly he got up, walked around to his wife’s side of the bed and peered down at the wriggling bundle. The child was in the old cradle Mama Parker had managed to get from the attic. Shannon’s old cradle. He’d forgotten he’d kept it. Christ, it must have been in that attic for thirty-plus years. Without hesitation, he picked up Morrigan. Patting her back only a little awkwardly, he hurried from the room before she could wake Mama Parker.
“Shh,” he soothed. She was probably hungry. Newborns ate constantly—he did remember that. As he heated up a bottle of formula, the weight and scent of the baby caused even more memories to surface. He’d forgotten that holding his newborn daughter had seemed to him a religious experience. And he wasn’t a religious man. He had no time for the stuffiness and hypocrisy of organized religion. All his life he’d wondered how people could so readily believe God could be contained in buildings and overly translated and dissected words. He found his god, or goddess he mentally corrected with a silent laugh, in rolling pastures of sweet hay, in the warm smell of a well-worked quarter horse, in the loyalty of his dogs. So when he thought of holding this new baby girl in his arms as religious, he didn’t mean that it brought to mind church and such. He meant it brought to mind the perfection of beauty, of the miracle of nature at its finest. He sat down in the rocking recliner with a sigh at the cracking of his knees and the stiffness in his back and shoulders, but his gaze on the baby as she sucked at the bottle and made soft, puppy-like noises wasn’t that of an old man. It was that of a man who was seeing anew the magic of life and birth and love reborn.
“I think we’ll do fine together,” he told the baby girl. “Mama Parker and I aren’t young anymore, but we’re also not stupid as damn knot-headed twenty-somethings. And I’ve had some practice with this father thing. I think if Shannon were here she would tell you that I did just fine with her.”
Thinking of Shannon made him sad, as it always did. He missed her. But tonight, with the warm, sweet weight of the sleepy newborn in his arms he found that he felt his daughter’s loss less sharply. The missing her would never go away, but maybe the pain of it could be eased by this child that was so like her.
He lifted the baby to his shoulder when she was through with the bottle, and chuckled when she belched like a little sailor. “Just like Shannon,” he said. Then he nestled her securely back in the crook of his strong arm and began rocking her. And from the recesses of his memory came lines from a book he’d read to Shannon over and over again when she was a little girl. “‘Johnny Go Round is a tan tom cat. Would you like to know why we called him that?’” The baby blinked up at him and smiled. Richard’s heart, which had felt somehow heavier since the day his daughter disappeared from his world, lifted suddenly as if it had grown wings. He had to clear his throat and blink his eyes before he could continue the story. “‘Well, Johnny goes round when…’”
5
Partholon/Oklahoma
DreamLand is my favorite place. Yeah, I like it better than Epona’s Temple (which I adore), Tuscany (which I drank my way through whilst a group of my students tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to chaperon me) or even Ireland (again, students attempted to keep me in line on our educational pub tour; thankfully they failed). I’ve always been able to control my dreams, even before I came to Partholon and became Epona’s Chosen. As a child growing up in Oklahoma, I thought it was normal to be able to control my dreams.