Page 18 of Shamrocked
“Sort of.”
She pushed her plate away and turned on the barstool to face me. I turned, too, taking her hands in mine when she reached for me. “Why do you think we’re friends? I mean, really? What brought us together?”
I’d often wondered myself why the tall, beautiful, sophisticated redhead would ever be friends with a dowdy short geek like me, who’d rather paint or read a book than dress up and go on a date.
She gave me a sad smile, her eyes shimmering suspiciously. “You’ve always had a kind of magic about you, but you don’t see it, do you?”
“Me?” I scoffed and pulled back involuntarily. But she squeezed my hands harder, refusing to let me go. “Hardly.”
“Not leprechaun magic, exactly. But magic. You get a look in your eyes, like you’re seeing the world in a way that I can’t possibly understand, even though I want to. And when you pick up a brush and paint that vision that only you can see, it’s truly magical. It’s like you’re letting us mere mortals peek into this incredible secret world that exists in your head. You’re like a deer in the woods, barely seen, tiptoeing carefully through the underbrush so you don’t make a sound. Sometimes I’m afraid if I move too quickly that I’ll startle you, and you’ll be gone.”
I squeezed her hands firmly. “Me, leave you? Never happening.”
“That’s why I hated Jonathan so much,” she whispered, but her eyes flashed with a wicked promise of pain and lots of it, on the man who’d hurt me. “Every single day you were with him, it was like watching a beautiful flower wither and dry up, locked away from the sun. He kept you shuttered and safe in that normal, boring, little life, and it was all a lie. You deserve so much more than safe and normal. You deserve fairy tales and adventure. Remember when we were kids? We’d go on adventures in the woods behind the trailer park, looking for the lost castle and the forgotten prince. We’d slay dragons and…”
My ears roared with rushing winds, like I was falling into a deep, bottomless well.
Of course.
Her words brought back childhood dreams and games that I’d forgotten so long ago.
“Ri? Are you okay? What is it?”
I slammed my hand down on the coin and closed my eyes.Warwick, I need you.
Something warm and hard suddenly pressed against my back and he whispered in my ear. “I thought you’d never ask.”
10
Ihated asking for help, especially from an extremely sexy leprechaun, but I had to admit that Warwick made himself extremely useful. By the next morning, I had an abandoned warehouse at my disposal, set up with more blank canvases than I could possibly paint in a month and all of my completed paintings set up around my work area as a reminder of what I was doing. He even set up a comfortable bed for me to collapse on when I was exhausted—and he managed to resist making a single sexual innuendo or inappropriate remark.
How could he, with my gargoyle glaring right beside me?
I was too busy to even think about sexual innuendo. I painted for hours. Fell into a stupor on the bed. Guzzled coffee or gobbled sandwiches and soup when Vivi insisted I eat. And then started painting again in a frenzy. Everything inside me was breaking apart, floating away…
And sliding into perfect place.
Vivi took off from work to help photograph each painting and spent hours on the Internet searching for churches near our hometown. Because I was fairly certain that those games we’d spent as children, wandering around the countryside surrounding Lake Taneycomo, looking for the abandoned castle, hadn’t been games. And the lost prince… Had to be my gargoyle. Why he might be locked up in the Ozark Mountains… I had no idea. But everything in my gut insisted that was exactly where he was.
My legs trembled with exhaustion when I finally laid the paintbrush down. My eyes throbbed with a brutal migraine splintering through my skull, but I was done.
Silently, Warwick whisked an office chair up behind me as I started to sink to the floor and Vivi immediately started taking pictures.
“I recognize parts of this.” Her voice rose with excitement. “The way Taneycomo curves in the background—remember? We could see that bend from the top of Noble Point.”
Noble Point had been one of our favorite places. Each summer, we’d built a watchtower at the top and pretended we were Riders of Rohan, ready to light the fires to call the armies to war. You could see for what seemed like thousands of miles in all directions. “Was there a church anywhere near there? I don’t remember one.”
“Let’s find out.” She stepped over to a folding table one of them had set up, and Warwick pushed me over so I could see. On top was a large map with red and green circles dotted across the surface. “The green circles are old churches that I know have closed and could be considered abandoned. The red ones are churches too, but they’re still open as far as I know.”
“Which one’s the oldest? With crumbling stone walls and an old cemetery nearby?”
She consulted her meticulous notes. “Not all of them had notes about a cemetery, at least that I could find. It looks like the oldest church in the area is Our Blessed Lady of the Lake.” She lifted her gaze to mine, her eyes shining with excitement. “It’s near Noble Point too. Let me pull up the images online and see if it strikes a chord.”
I tried not to be too excited, but my heart pounded and I held my breath, waiting until she turned her laptop around so I could see the pictures.
The church was definitely old and made of stone, but it wasn’t falling down and abandoned.
“This isn’t what it looks like today,” she said hurriedly, seeing the doubt on my face. “This photo was taken in the nineties and they closed the church to open a new one. The website even says they reused a lot of the stone, but the original foundation is still there. That could be what you’re looking for.”
