Blood Magick by Nora Roberts Read Free Book Online Page A

couldn’t be sure of the place as it was vague and scattered as dreams can be.” She took a single pancake for herself. “I was here, getting my first cup of coffee, and I turned around. There she was.
    “She looks like me—or I like her. That was a jolt of surprise, just how close we are there—though she was heavily pregnant. Her son comes today—or not today, as in her time it was still a fortnight to Samhain.”
    “Time shifts,” Iona murmured.
    “As you say. They’d gone to Ballintubber Abbey on the way here. That’s where the dream took me.”
    “Ballintubber.” Iona shifted to Boyle. “I felt them there, remember? When you took me to see it, I felt them, knew they’d gone there. It’s such a strong place.”
    “It is, yes,” Branna agreed. “But I’ve been there more than once, as has Connor. I never felt them.”
    “You haven’t been since Iona’s come,” Fin pointed out. “You haven’t been there since the three are all in Mayo.”
    “True enough.” And a good point, she was forced to admit. “But I will, we will. On your wedding day, Iona, if not before. She said the others, those before us, guard the place, so Cabhan’s barred from it. He can’t go in, see in. It’s a true sanctuary if we find we need one. They, who came before, gave light and strength to the three. And hope—I think she needed that most.”
    “And you,” Iona said, “all of us. Hope wouldn’t hurt us either.”
    “I’m more for doing than hoping, but it gave her what she needed. I could see it. She said—in the dream, and here—we will prevail. To believe that, and they’ll be with us when we face Cabhan again. To find the way. To know, if it isn’t for us to finish, another three will come. We will prevail.”
    “Though it takes a thousand years,” Connor added. “Well then, I’m fine with hope, fine with doing. But I’ll be buggered if I wait a thousand years to see the end of Cabhan.”
    “Then we find the way, in the here and the now. I had pancakes once when I went to Montana in the American West,” Fin commented. “They called them something else . . .”
    “Flapjacks, I bet,” Iona suggested.
    “That’s the very thing. They were brilliant. These are better yet.”
    “You’ve rambled far and wide,” Branna said.
    “I have. But I’m done with rambling until this is done. So, like Connor, a thousand years won’t suit me. We find the way.”
    Just like that? Branna thought and struggled against annoyance. “She said they’d be with us, next time we faced him down. But they were there on Samhain, and still he got away from us.”
    “Only just there, or barely,” Connor remembered. “Shadows like? Part of the dream spell we cast, that could be. How would we bring them full—could it be done? If we could find
that
way, how could we not end him? The first three, and we three. And the three more with us.”
    “Time’s the problem.” Fin sat back with his coffee. “The shifts. We were there on Samhain, but from what you say, Branna, they were not. So they were but shadows, and unable to take part. We have to make the times meet. Our time or theirs, but the same. It’s interesting, an interesting puzzle to solve.”
    “But what time and when?” Branna demanded. “I’ve found two, and each should have worked. The solstice, then Samhain. The time should have been on the side of light. The spells we worked, the poison we created, all done to mesh with that specific time and place.”
    “And both times we wounded him,” Boyle reminded her. “Both times he bled and fled. And the last? It should’ve been mortal.”
    “His power’s as dark as ours is light,” Iona pointed out. “And the source of it heals him. Longer this time. It’s taking longer.”
    “If we could find his lair.” Connor’s face turned grim. “If we could go at him when he’s weakened.”
    “I can’t find him. Even the two of us together failed,” Fin reminded him. “He has enough, or what