Oh, Goddess, oh, Goddess, she had no father. Colm was dead, but he wasn't her father, had never been her father. Yet she had loved him so much! He had been warm and loving and funny. He'd helped her build things, helped her learn to ride a bike, to skate, to ride a horse. It had always been him and Mum, him and Mum, at school things, at circles, at sabbats. She needed him so much to have been her father! He was her dad! Her dad! Oh, Goddess, it all just hurt too much! Her whole life her dad had been living a lie, pretending. He hadn't been able to tell her the truth-or to tell Mum. How could he have not told Mum? How could Gran have done this? It felt so wrong! At last Moira lost her footing, sliding and tumbling against the wet grass. Fresh dirt smeared her hands and face, but she lay where she had fallen, gasping in cold, painful breaths. Her hair soon felt wet. Overhead, the sky was darkening, the clouds blotting out any sunset there might have been. In this one afternoon her whole life, her whole past, had been ripped away, to be left just a blank.
Finnegan flopped next to her, whining, pressing his soft brown, white, and black side against her, licking her face. Moira burst into sobs, putting her arms around him, holding him to her. He licked her face and lay next to her, and she cried and cried against him, the way she had when she was a little girl. She wished she were dead. She couldn't bear the fact that her dad had known all along she wasn't really his, yet he'd loved her so much anyway. That seemed so sad and pathetic and unselfish that she simply couldn't stand it.
"Oh, Finn, Finn," she sobbed against him. "It hurts too much."
Her school clothes were sodden and muddied, her hair was wet, her face was tearstained and mud-streaked. But she lay against Finnegan and sobbed, trying to let out the emotional pain that threatened to dislodge her soul from her body.
She didn't know how long she lay there, but gradually exhaustion overcame her and her sobs slowed, then quieted. She felt completely spent, utterly drained of emotion. Blinking, she realized vaguely that it was quite dark outside. Finnegan was resting by her side, taking the occasional gentle lick of her face, as if promising to stay as long as she needed him. Her chest hurt, and the ground was hard, and she was cold, freezing, and soaked through. But she couldn't get up, couldn't move, had no idea where she was. She would just lie here forever, she decided, almost dreamily. She would never move again.
"There you are," said a gentle voice, and Moira jerked in surprise. Finnegan hadn't growled, but he sat up alertly, his eyes locked on… Ian.
Moira felt frozen, stiff. Ian dropped lightly to sit next to her, seeming to neither notice nor care that he was going to ruin his clothes. Moira's first insane thought was that she probably looked like the Bride of Frankenstein. Then she thought fiercely, So what? My whole life just got ripped away from me-I don't care what I look like!
Slowly Ian put out his hand and stroked the light hair away from her chilled, wet face. "I felt you get upset this afternoon while I was being tutored," he said. "It was strange, like you were sending waves of upsetness. Then later I was putting up shelves in my mom's pantry-it's a disaster in there-and I pictured you running over the grass, with the sea in the background. It's taken me a while to find you."
"Thanks," Moira said, her voice small and broken. She struggled to sit up and felt Ian’s arm around her shoulders.
"Brought a tissue," Ian said with a grin, handing it to her. Moira wiped her eyes and nose, knowing it was just a drop in the bucket in terms of what she needed. She crumpled the tissue and put it in her jacket pocket, feeling cold and miserable and self-conscious. What time was it? She glanced at the sky, but there was no moon. What in the world was she supposed to say?
Gently Ian pulled her against him so that her face was on his shoulder, his arms around her back. He stroked her hair and let her cry, and she felt the warmth of his body and his arms surrounding her.
14. Morgan
The second Moira ran out the door, Morgan jumped up after her, but Sky grabbed her arm, hard.
"Let her go," she said. "She needs some space. Finnegan's with her-and we can keep an eye on her in other ways, without just chasing her farther away."
Morgan hated using her powers to spy on her daughter, but she realized Sky was right-it was the only way to keep Moira safe right now without upsetting her even more. Through the window Morgan watched in despair as her daughter raced through the garden gate and flew up the road, her long straight hair whipping in back of her.
She felt numb. No, that wasn't true. It was just that the huge, varied emotions she was feeling were working to cancel each other out. Anger, disbelief, despair, sadness, regret. And all the while the hope that Hunter was really alive was in there, too, mixed in with everything else.
Katrina got heavily to her feet. "I'll be going, lass," she said, her voice subdued. "Now, looking back, I don't know how I could have thought this wouldn't rebound on us all like a hand grenade."
"How could you not have thought that?" Morgan exploded. "How could you have possibly thought this was a good thing for anybody? You wanted me for Belwicket? So you lied to me about my child for sixteen years? It's crazy! Not even about Moira… but about Colm, too. I believed he was her father. That had a huge impact on our marriage, our lives. Every time I looked at Moira, I saw Colm's daughter. Now you tell me all those thoughts were a lie. What were you thinking?"
The older woman's shoulders bowed, and she sighed. "We didn't know the side effects. I thought it was for the best. You were dying. I'm sorry." She sounded beaten and sad, and Morgan couldn't help feeling an instinctive sympathy for the woman she'd loved like a second mother for years now. But nothing gave Katrina the right to do what she'd done.
"You did this to my life, Colm's life, Moira's life, so your coven would be strong," Morgan said. "How dare you? How dare you?" Morgan was shaking-she couldn't remember the last time she had been so angry.
"Belwicket is more than that, Morgan," Katrina said, pleading with her to understand. "It's our lives, the lives of our ancestors. It's our power. It's our heritage, yours and mine. And please understand, I didn't do it just for the coven. I did it out of love, too-for you and for your unborn child. You have to know that."
"Just leave, please," Morgan said quietly. She had no way to make sense of any of this at the moment, but she couldn't have even if she'd wanted to-she had something far more important to deal with.
"If that's what you want," Katrina said. "But please remember how much I love you." There were tears on her face as she closed the door behind her.
After Katrina left, Morgan paced the room nervously, emotions threatening to explode out of her like fireworks. She couldn't believe it-it was just too big, too huge, too amazing. On top of everything else, today she'd found out that her only child was Hunter's daughter.
"Oh, Goddess," she cried, turning to Sky. "Hunter's daughter!" She threw herself into Sky's arms and finally allowed herself to cry.
"Moira is Hunter's daughter," Sky said, repeating the words as if they were a miracle.
"I had Hunter's daughter," Morgan said, pulling back to look at Sky. "Hunter and I had a child." And then she thought of her marriage, of Colm, who had been so good, so accepting, and she felt terrible and furious all over again.
"They lied to me!" she said, letting go of Sky and starting to pace again. "More than that! They spelled me! Spelled me! All this time I've been living a lie! Every day of my life Colm knew our life was a lie, and he said nothing! He and Katrina and Pawel-I thought they were my family. They were deceiving me! For almost sixteen years-I can't believe it."