Isla's Inheritance Read online

I paced around the edge of the park, along the concrete border corralling the tanbark. My bag swung from my shoulder and Ryan’s half-finished drawing was in my hand, rolled up in a manner that would have horrified my cousin.

  Was this sense of pent up frustration what kept a tiger pacing its cage?

  Jack arrived after fifteen minutes. He seemed different: younger, somehow. But he was dressed in identical clothes to last time, a hood covering his ears as always.

  “Are you okay, Isla?”

  The same question he’d asked me the day before. Only this time I answered it immediately, refusing to get sidetracked. “No. They found Dad unconscious outside his farm. He’s in the hospital.”

  He blinked. “I am sorry.”

  “My cousin drew this.” I unrolled the paper; the image was smudged from being furled, but the details were still clear. “That’s Dad, but what does this mean?” I jabbed at the black stain Ryan had drawn across his chest.

  Jack studied the image for several long moments. My gaze remained glued to his face, looking for signs of recognition.

  “Did you ask your cousin what it is?”

  “He said it just came to him,” I replied, impatient.

  “Has he drawn anything else that ‘just came to him’ recently?”

  I nodded. “A painting of my mother. He said he dreamt of her, but he never even knew what she looked like before that.” Jack stared at me with those strange sapphire eyes. It made me angry. “Look, so far I’ve tried to believe you with all the weird stuff you’ve told me. I’ve trusted you, and I haven’t freaked out.” Much. “So tell me. What the hell is going on?”

  “Walk with me,” he replied. I took another angry breath, but he nodded towards the street. Sarah had rounded the far corner, Hamish trotting in front of her, ranging like a fish on a line. Neither of them had noticed us. Yet.

  Grumbling under my breath, I set off, heading away from the park and up one of the connecting footpaths that crisscrossed our suburb, choosing one that led towards the small local shops. Jack walked beside me.

  The path cut through a small reserve lined with tall shrubs and a few trees. Long grass flanked the path. We walked until we were out of sight of the park.

  I turned and put a hand my hip, scowling. “Okay, talk.”

  He left the path, swishing through the damp grass to one of the trees, a tall pine close to the back fence of a quiet suburban house. He sat beneath it, curling his legs under him with feline grace. I reluctantly joined him, cringing as I waited for water to soak through the seat of my pants. But the ground under the tree was dry. I put my bag down beside me.

  “Your cousin is your aislinge,” he said without further preamble. Another strange word, this one pronounced “ashling”. When he saw my complete lack of understanding, he shrugged. “He is a … a seer, a visionary. Some aosidhe can imbue the power of extraordinary perception onto one of their court. This cousin of yours is, well, yours.”

  “Ryan,” I said, voice barely a whisper. The this is crazy feeling I’d had over the past couple of days returned in full force.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “His name is Ryan.”

  He nodded, accepting that.

  “You’re saying I somehow made it so he can see the future?”

  “Maybe not the future. Only time will tell, as far as that goes. But the present, yes, and with more clarity than a normal human, or even many of our kind.”

  “So I gave him the power to see things I can’t even see?” That didn’t make a lot of sense.

  He nodded, a lock of hair falling from the confines of his hood. It hung across his cheek, a strand of gold.

  “Right. Well, let’s say that’s true—”

  “It is.”

  “—what is he seeing in this picture?” I laid Ryan’s sketch flat in front of him so he could study it, the paper crackling as my hands trembled.

  Jack looked at the drawing for several minutes. My impatience built like a scream inside me; when I thought I might explode with it, he spoke again. “It looks as though your father has been elf shot.” This time he didn’t wait for me to ask. “Elf shot is a weapon available to some aosidhe. It causes paralysis in its target.”

  Someone had shot my father? Who made me terrible costumes for school plays and taught me to swim? Who laughed too loudly in the movie theatre, so that I ducked my head with embarrassment?

  I didn’t know of a single reason anyone, let alone an aosidhe, would want to hurt him. But I didn’t know my father’s history with the fae either, and cursed the rotten timing of the attack. It seemed unlikely to be a coincidence. The thought made the hair on the back of my arms prickle with anxiety. Jack had said the séance could have drawn unwanted attention. Was this what he meant?

  Is this my fault?

  “I’m pretty sure—” I swallowed the quaver in my voice and tried again. “If the doctors had seen an arrowhead on the x-ray they would have said something to us.”

  “They would not have seen it.”

  We both fell silent as an older woman and her fluffy black poodle walked up the pathway. She glowered, eyes narrowed with suspicion. I scowled back at her. I had nothing to be ashamed of here.

  The poodle sniffed and moved on, taking its owner with it.

  “If he’s paralysed, does that mean he’s awake?” I asked once the woman was out of earshot. The idea of being trapped in your own body, aware but unable to move or communicate… I shuddered. The summery air didn’t feel so warm now.

  “I do not think so.”

  “But you don’t know?”

  “I have never been elf shot. Or spoke to one who has. But the stories of those who are shot and recover speak of it as a deep sleep.”

  “Like Sleeping Beauty or that other guy … Rip Van Winkle.” He stared at me blankly, and I grimaced, rolling up Ryan’s drawing. “Can you remove it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” The sudden ache of disappointment turned my voice into a wail. “You healed the burn on my hand.”

  “I can only heal injuries within a day of them being inflicted, and elf shot is not a normal wound in any case. The paralysis can only be healed by removing the arrowhead, and I do not have that kind of power.”

  “But it can be done?”

  “Yes.”

  Hope flared in my chest. “Who has the power?”

  “You do.” His reply was simple, direct.

  And ridiculous.

  “I … what?”

  “If you have the power to make an aislinge then you have the power to remove elf shot,” he said.

  “But I don’t remember making an aislinge!”

  “It probably happened around the time of your coming of age. Your birthday,” Jack told me. “Do you remember having any physical contact with this Ryan around that time? Anything unusual?”

  Suppressing a juvenile giggle edged with hysteria at the phrase “physical contact”, I leaned back against the tree. We’d gone out to dinner that night, and Ryan had waited with me in front of Prime Time until Dominic arrived for our date. My cousin had squeezed my hand, I recalled, sending an electric shock along my skin.

  I explained all of this to Jack.

  “That may have been it.” He shrugged. “I must confess, I have never seen the process myself, only heard of it. But it is possible you were emitting energy as part of coming into your own, and you inadvertently channelled it into him.”

  The idea Jack wasn’t all-knowing was alarming … but reassuring, too. My sense of ignorance lessened. Even if I had accidentally turned Ryan into some sort of painting visionary by spilling invisible magic all over him.

  “Have you seen elf shot removed before?” I asked him.

  “Yes, once.”

  “Can you show me how, exactly?”

  “I can explain what I saw. You will have to do the rest. But … it is somewhat conspicuous. We will need privacy.”

  A vision of me conducting an arcane ritual naked by moonlight, like some
thing from a Hollywood movie, flashed before my eyes. “Conspicuous how, exactly?”

  “It will be flashy, in a manner that is not of human origin.” His words did little to ease my mind. He patted my arm. “All that is required of you is concentration and your power. But it will be visible to anyone, not just the duinesidhe.”

  I thought about the busy ICU, crowded with patients, nurses and visitors. “That might be a problem. Dad’s not in a private room.”

  “Can you get them to move him?”

  “I doubt they’d listen. But they might move him out of the ICU on their own if he remains stable. Those beds are for high-risk patients.” I tipped my head to the side. “Today when Sarah and I went to visit, he had a seizure. Could that have been caused by the elf shot?”

  “Possibly.” He brushed that errant lock away from his face.

  “We had iron with us.”

  He paled, eyes widening. “Then yes. The elf shot is a thing with a purely fae nature. It will react to iron as one of us would.”

  I pursed my lips. “I don’t suppose we could use iron to destroy the elf shot, could we?”

  “That would not be a good idea.”

  “Why?”

  “It would almost certainly kill your father as well.”

  “Oh. Forget that then.”

  He smiled. “Indeed.”

  We sat in silence for a while. The sun and shadows played across the footpath as the clouds somewhere above our tree shelter raced across the sky, blown by a high-altitude wind we couldn’t feel. How strange a turn my life had taken. Especially in the last forty-eight hours.

  Although it was becoming apparent my life was always strange; I was just the last to know.

  “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said finally. “You tell me I have all this power I’ve inherited from my mother, that I’ve given Ryan magical visions and can somehow cure Dad’s coma. But I don’t feel powerful. Sure, iron makes me queasy and burns me if I touch it, but where’s the upside to all of this? Shouldn’t I be developing some sort of superpower or something? Walking through walls, invisibility—something like that?”

  Jack laughed, loud and unexpected, throwing his head back. I smiled despite myself. “You seek further proof?”

  “Superpowers would be better, but yeah. Proof would be nice.” I laughed.

  As he had done the first time we met, he took my hand and touched my fingers to his cheek. “What do you feel?”

  The first thing I felt was my ears burning with sudden embarrassment. “Um. Your skin is warm,” I stammered. “And smooth.”

  “And smooth,” he repeated patiently.

  The penny dropped. “Wait a minute. When I met you, you had wrinkled skin. Now it’s not.” Awkwardness forgotten, I ran my hand across his cheek and forehead. No lines marred them. “Are you saying I had something to do with this?”

  “Yes. That same power you are so sceptical about has allowed me to regenerate my skin.”

  “What caused the wrinkles?”

  “My particular race of duinesidhe are like flowers. We thrive in the sunlight, and wither in the darkness.” I opened my mouth to ask the obvious question, but he continued. “The aosidhe are the sunlight. You contain a source of power within you that enables us to thrive.”

  I frowned, trying to follow what he was saying. “So the reason your skin is smooth is that you’ve somehow recharged your batteries by being around me?”

  “I do not understand the reference to ‘batteries’,” he said, “but the rest sounds correct.”

  “And I carry a, um—” my mind scrambled to find the right words “—power source around in me?” I had a mental image of radioactive-green light glowing out from between my ribs.

  At least I’d be able to find my way to the toilet in the dark.

  “Yes. After a fashion. You can probably also draw more ‘power’—” he made air quotes with his fingers and I had to suppress another giggle. Seriously, who knows air quotes but not batteries? “—from an aspect of the human world. Each of the aosidhe is different. You may take after your mother in that regard, but it is difficult to say.”

  “You haven’t heard anything more about her?”

  “I am trying, but it is hard to get information without revealing too much about who is asking, and why.”

  I grabbed my bag, fishing around in it for the envelope of photos I’d received the day before. I pulled one of the photos out, more or less at random: it was a portrait of my mother in later pregnancy and showed her from the waist up. She wore a grey cardigan over a white top lined with horizontal black stripes, accentuating the roundness of her belly. Her hair was loose, falling over her ears and framing her face.

  I handed it to Jack. “This is her.”

  He took the photo, looking at it for a long while. Then he nodded. “Can I borrow this?”

  “Sure, so long as I get it back. Will it help find out who she is?”

  “Definitely. There is someone I can take it to.”

  We both jumped a little when my phone beeped a text message alert. It was from Sarah. Where are you? Everything okay?

  Getting some air. Home soon.

  “I’d better go,” I told Jack. “Thanks for talking to me.”

  “My pleasure.” He stood and offered his hand, pulling me to my feet. He was stronger than he looked.

  We walked back towards the park. “I’ll let you know once they move Dad to a more private room,” I told him. “Will you contact me if you hear anything about my mother?”

  “Of course.”

  When we arrived at the end of the laneway he stopped. “I truly am sorry about your father, Isla,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  I walked across the park, feeling his eyes on my back, but when I glanced back he was gone.

  If Sarah was annoyed at me for going for a walk without her after she’d invited me for one, she didn’t say anything. In fact, she was solicitous and kind, all of which made me ashamed I was keeping such a large—albeit insane—secret from her. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell her about everything I’d learned in the past few days, or even that I didn’t think she’d believe me, because I was pretty sure she would. I just wasn’t sure where to begin. And the idea of trying made me feel weary all the way down to my toes.

  Feeling guilty, as soon as I had half an hour alone I ordered her birthday present off the internet: a custom watch from a website that would decorate its face to order. After some consideration, and thinking about Ryan’s sketch of Sarah as a rock goddess, I chose an acoustic guitar theme.

  Fingers crossed it arrived in time. Her birthday was in less than two weeks.