Page 56 of Of Blood and Bone (Chronicles of The One 2)

“So your mom’s always said.”

“After the battle, after more training, after I saw the first shield through the crystal, and the dark there tried to draw me to it, that’s when the Book of Spells called me.”

The moon set before she finished telling them all of it.

“I probably left some things out, but not on purpose. I needed you to know everything because it’s not right you don’t. And not telling you makes it seem like I think you’re weak, and you’re not. I want time to just be home, like today. Just to be home. And to train and practice, to help you and the boys train and practice. Then … I’ll know when I have to go. I’ll know.”

“Where will you go?” Lana reached for her hand.

“New Hope,” Fallon and Simon said together.

Fallon smiled at him, nodded. “Yeah, New Hope. So much started and ended there. So much is waiting there. It’s where I’ll need to go.

“To New Hope,” she said as her eyes deepened. “Where the light brought them, where the signs led them, where the blood of the sire stained the ground. There to raise an army, to forge the weapons against the dark. From there to the great cities, to the rubble and the ruin, across the seas, under the earth. Betrayal, blood, lies bear bitter fruit, and some will fall along the way. With the rise of magicks, the clash of the light and the dark, the worlds tremble.”

Now Lana rose, took a small bottle from a cupboard. “Two drops,” she said.

“I don’t get queasy from visions anymore.”

“Maybe not, but you don’t usually have one after you’ve been up most of the night. Two drops. Stick out your tongue.”

Though she mentally rolled her eyes, Fallon did as she was told. Lana leaned down, kissed the top of her head.

“I know what it’s like when it comes on so fast and strong. Like being filled up and hulled out at the same time.”

On a sigh, Fallon leaned into Lana, comforted by someone who knew, really knew.

“What works in us gives so much.” Gently, Lana stroked Fallon’s hair. “And demands so much. I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to feel that power surge inside me, or how to fight. How to use everything I have, everything I am to fight. Now, because I was given time and love, I have more to fight for.”

“I didn’t mean … I saw you, through the crystal. In New York, the life you had before, the way you had to leave it. And how strong you were going forward, always going forward. In the mountains, what you did there, faced there. I watched you fight for yourself and me and others, day after day, month after month. I saw that day in New Hope.”

“I would have spared you that.”

“Why?” Fallon pulled back, eyes fierce. “I saw people who’d begun to build something good, something bright and real. Honoring their dead, celebrating life. I saw the faces of those who came to kill me. I know those faces now. I saw my birth father give his life for you, for me, and saw you strike back.”

“It was grief.”

“It was power. Power—yours and mine. How many lives did you save that day? And how many more when you, with me inside you, with his blood on you, ran, alone? Left another place, another home you loved, friends who’d become family. You took his ring, for love. You took his gun. A woman thinks of the rings, but a warrior thinks of a weapon, Mom, and even in your grief and shock, you were a warrior.”

“I had a child to protect.”

“You did. Alone, hungry, scared, you kept going.”

“I nearly gave up. You came to me.”

“You wouldn’t have given up. You never give up. I just gave you a boost when you needed one. I saw you come to the ridge above the farm, and I saw on your face something I hadn’t since you ran. I saw hope. And…”

Fallon reached out, took Simon’s hand. “I saw that hope realized in kindness, and the building of trust, and love. It’s a lesson, that trust can build between strangers, but they have to take the first step, and that’s faith.”

“When did you get so smart?” Simon asked.

She squeezed his hand, looked straight into his eyes. “I saw you kill a man who gave you no choice, though you’d given him one. He wasn’t your first, or your last. I come from warriors, my mother, my fathers. And from power and strength. From kindness. When I’m afraid I won’t be good enough, brave enough, smart enough, I think of you, what you’ve taught me, and what I’ve seen through the crystal.”

She rubbed her eyes and looked all at once like a young girl up far too late. “I wish none of what’s outside the farm, what’s coming, would touch the boys. But it will. You know more, the soldier knows more than you’ve told us—or told Mom—or taught us. I … watched the soldier, too, in the before, through the crystal.”

It tore at him, more than a little, to know he looked into his daughter’s eyes, and looked soldier to soldier. “You’re going to take a few days,” Simon told her. “Call it R and R. Then we’ll start training them.”

“You’ve had a long day,” Lana said. “You should get some sleep now.”

“I’m really tired.”

“Yes, I see that. Go on to bed.”

Nodding, half-asleep already, she hugged Lana, then Simon. “I’m so glad to be home.”

Lana watched her go, listened to her feet on the stairs.

“Simon.”

“We’ll talk. We’ll think, and we’ll talk. But right now somebody else needs sleep. You’re worn-out, babe, and I’m not far behind you.”

“I’ve known. I’ve known since she was inside me, and I still keep running up against the wall of no. No, this is my baby.”

“Join the club.”

He got up, took her hand. “We’re going to do what parents do.”

“What’s that?”

“Worry our asses off and do everything we know how to help her.” They started for the stairs. “You think you can learn that flash deal? Because, hey, you could bring me a cold beer like that.”

He snapped his fingers, making her laugh after a very long day.

CHAPTER TWENTY

She took a week, helped with the harvest, taught her mother how to make a Rainbow Cake. She went fishing with her brothers, hunting with Taibhse and Faol Ban.

At night she flew over the fields and hills on Laoch.

And though she was happy to be home, she missed Mallick, and the routine of work, training, practice, study. She missed Mick and all the others, and quiet times alone in the faerie glade.

But she spent her fifteenth birthday at home, with her family, and treasured every moment.

When the week ended, her brothers took to training like a game. It annoyed her down to the bone, but she took her cues from her father. After all, she told herself, he’d trained soldiers before, and raised children.

“It starts as a game,” he told her. “They’re kids.”

“Colin’s the same age I was when I went with Mallick. He sure as hell didn’t let me treat it like a game.”

“Colin isn’t you. They’ll learn, and more, they’ll compete. With each other, and with you. Then they’ll get better, then they’ll get serious.”

So through the fall and into the winter, it remained, for the most part, a game. She left Travis’s and Ethan’s magickal training to her mother, for now, and tolerated the complaints and malingering when she pushed them through assignments.

Reading, math, mapping.

They liked plotting battle strategies, and Travis particularly shined there.

When it came to the katas, the gymnastics, and sheer endurance, Ethan outpaced his older brothers as if born doing handsprings.

But when, during the wild and windy days of March, she introduced swords, Colin proved fierce, fast, and deadly.

Enough it irritated her a little when he mastered in days forms and techniques that had taken her weeks.

She took to working with him one-on-one, and though she killed him routinely, he made her work for it.

Her father proved a different matter. He’d spar with her,

under strict rules. Blows would not land. He had his line in the sand, no matter how she argued.

He wouldn’t hit his children.

She compromised with a quick shock for any strike, punch, kick. Even under the rules, she couldn’t beat him without using magicks, and learned more and more.

The first time they used knives for combat—much to her brothers’ delight—Simon did what he did whenever a blade was introduced.

He tested them on himself.

“They won’t cut cloth, break flesh, or draw blood,” she told him, as she did before every sword practice.

“Better safe than really, really sorry.” He swiped his knife, then hers, over the back of his arm. “Okay.” He handed her a knife, hilt first.

As they circled each other, the boys called out insults or encouragements. And Lana came outside. It gave her a jolt, as it always did, to see her husband, her child, facing off. Eyes flat and cold, bodies coiled.

Her heart leaped into her throat and stayed lodged there from the first swipe.

Simon lunged in, pivoting away as Fallon did the same so her vicious kick, her follow-up slice missed their marks.

A terrible dance that seemed to go on and on.

By tacit agreement, Fallon and Simon straightened, stepped back.

“Looks like a draw,” Lana called out as the boys moaned and booed.

“You’re good.” Simon swiped sweat from his face.

“You, too.”

Now he grinned. “I was holding back.”

“Oh yeah? So was I.”

“Okay then.” He rolled his shoulders, moved into a fighting stance. “Don’t.”

“You, either.”

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