Page 169 of A Winding Wave of Magic
Caomhán snorted. “Well, I’ve no great love for the Council, considering I’ve been working against them for the last twenty years.”
“Working to get yourself killed, more like,” Aoife added dryly.
“Why should we have to keep ourselves so secret?” Caomhán retorted. “A thousand years of repression, and this is what happens. A seer with more power than anyone’s seen for generations, and she’s got no idea what to do with any of it.”
My jaw dropped. “What—I—how do you know that?”
Caomhán grinned, revealing two incisors slightly longer than I’d expect on the average person. “I could smell your power the minute you stepped on the island, Cass. Plus, you mumble to yourself when you’re waiting for waves. Didn’t you know that?” He turned back to his aunt. “Were we not all obsessed with keeping hid, maybe Cassandra would have grown up with a bit more acceptance of herself.”
“What do you mean, you’re working against the Council?” I said once I’d recovered from my shock. “What have you been doing?”
“Fae liberation. From rules. Stupid feckin’ laws chasing us into shadows.” Caomhán shook his head while he fingered his glass. “I’m tired of having me life controlled by a bunch ofsasanaigh. And I’m not the only one.”
“Caomhán!” I said suddenly, recalling the short conversation Jonathan had had with themurúchin Dublin. “The Order, whatever that is. They’re tracking you.”
Caomhán leaned back in his chair with a satisfied expression. “Well, I should hope so. Otherwise, I’m not affecting a thing, am I?”
“There was another shifter I met,” I said. “In Dublin. A friend of Jonathan’s. We met him at a pub called The Roving Raider.”
“Ah, that’d be Cary, though I wouldn’t say he and Jonny are friends, exactly.Aintín, wasn’t old Cary a sweetheart of yours once upon a time?”
“He’s a gobshite,” Aoife pronounced but didn’t argue the point.
“What else did he say?” Caomhán pressed. “Aside from mentioning yours truly?”
“That someone named Beatty was killed,” I said. “And a raven was seen flying from the scene. I’m pretty sure they meant Caleb Lynch. Er, Jonathan’s father.”
He paled at that and quickly glanced at Aoife, who confirmed what I said with a quick nod.
“Damn,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be the bearer of bad news.”
Caomhán shook away my fear. “It was always coming. The war’s just creeping closer. It’ll be even here soon enough.”
I frowned. “What war?”
“Between those who want out of the Council’s grip and those loyal to their cause. It’s not just Caleb Lynch who wants what Penelope O’Brien was hiding, Cassie. We’re dying, all of us. And we need the cure.”
I frowned. “Dying? Who’s dying?”
He gestured around the room, as if there was something there I should see. “The fae. Little by little, all the magic in the world is decaying, like a cancer’s killing it off. There’s fewer of us now than there were even fifty years ago, much less five hundred or two thousand, when the Council first began. More and more fae are having plain children. Others have been dying too early, never knowing their true selves. We became obsessed with secrecy and stopped telling the young who they really were. ‘Natural selection,’ they called it. But it’s just death in a bottle.”
“And you think coming out will change that?” I said.
“There’s some who think the Secret of the Magi is Pandora’s box, with hope still left inside. Sure, and I’ve heard that one. Maybe it’s the elixir of life. A map to the fountain of youth. So Caleb Lynch wants it because he thinks it’ll make him live forever since he gave it up the first time to a siren’s call. But others think hope comes in the form of something different.”
Now I leaned closer too. “Like what?”
Caomhán shrugged before tipping back a slug of whiskey. “Dunno. But I think the real secret is the one we’re all keeping. And I’ll fight to the end of my days, whether that happens inforty years or four hundred, for us to give up that particular ghost.”
“I don’t see how that’s related to our mortality,” I said. “Or Penny’s Secret.”
“Nor I,” Aoife concurred. “Never have.”
“So you think he’s wrong?”
“I think we deserve to live the way we want, as we are, death or not,” she said. “I don’t care about immortality or the Council or any of their shite. But I do agree with my nephew on one point. Secrets ruin the soul. They eat you up inside. Ours is killing us, I believe that, so it’s time to let it go.”
