BlackWind: Viraiden and Bronwyn (25 page)

“As you have let go?”

Bronwyn smiled. “In my mind, I let him go long before now, but my heart is finally losing its grip on him, Brian. Don’t get me wrong. I will love him forever, but I’ve finally come to realize that it’s time to move on. I don’t think he’d want me to spend my life alone.”

“I know he wouldn’t. But he’d want you to be with the right man.”

“And who would that be?”

A light tap on the window brought Bronwyn’s head around. Cree opened her door and offered his hand to help her out.

“They’re expecting a severe thunderstorm,” he said. “You’d better get to the motel.”

“Aren’t you coming with us?” she asked as she took his hand.

“I need to buy a suit, remember?”

“Do you want us to come with you?”

“I think the man is old enough to buy his own clothes, Bronnie,” Brian snorted.

“Yes, but he doesn’t know Albany and—”

“I’m not an imbecile,” Cree growled. “I can find my way around.”

Bronwyn ground her teeth. “I didn’t say you were stupid, Aidan,” she began, but a severe thunderclap cut her off. She shrieked involuntarily.

“Get her to the motel, Brian,” Cree ordered.

“Will do.” Brian ushered Bronwyn toward the rental car.

As Brian started the engine, Bronwyn looked back and wondered aloud why Cree was entering the funeral home.

“He’s got to have a car, doesn’t he?” Brian asked, pulling onto Dawson Road. The downpour started and he squinted at the windshield. “He probably went in to call the rental place.”

“I suppose you’re right. I just hate for him to be roaming around lost in the rain.”

Brian adjusted the rearview mirror. “He’ll be fine. The man is perfectly capable of taking care of himself.”

* * * * *

They allowed him to see Dorrie before the embalming process began. He wanted to hold her, to kiss her flesh before it was corrupted with chemicals and by the touch of strangers’ hands.

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The ride to Albany had been hell. He could smell her as she lay in the coffin behind him. It was the scent of death, of impending corruption and it had saddened him more than he thought possible.

It was also the scent of his mother—flesh of his flesh—she who had brought a portion of him into this world. It had been she who had been the first to love him, she who had taken care of his needs and had seen to his hurts, she who had known of the love that had been his entire being and had encouraged it.

The funeral director had opened the coffin and left the lid up. There was a dim light just to the right of the catafalque upon which the coffin sat. The glow from the torchere cast its light upward, away from the coffin, so the illumination did not fall directly on the dead woman’s face. Thoughtfully, the director had also placed a prie-dieu before the coffin.

Viraidan Cree stood beside Sean Cullen’s mother’s coffin for a long while, gazing at the serene face that belied the years of physical and mental abuse she had suffered at the hands of Tym Cullen. He let his attention crawl over the deep lines in Dorrie Cullen’s countenance—refusing to dwell on the scars he also found there—and marveled at the stark whiteness of her cropped hair. His vision traveled to the gnarled hands lying atop one another. There were wrinkles there too, and liver spots and extended purple veins that seemed so fragile against her milky white skin. Returning his scrutiny to her face, he traced the paper-thin consistency of her half-closed eyelids and the thinness of her lips. The creative touch of the cosmetician had yet to apply the rouge, powder and lipstick. The stitches had yet to seal those thin lips and eyelids together for all eternity.

Taking a deep breath, the part of him that was still Sean Cullen made the Sign of the Cross and slipped to its knees on the prie-dieu. He hung his head, his hands clasped on the back of the prayer stand then began the memorized prayers of his childhood for the Repose of a Soul. When his prayers were done, he raised his head and looked at his mother.

That part of him that was Viraidan Cree had never known a mother’s loving touch.

He had never seen the female part of the equation that had given him life, had never heard a lullaby sung to him when he was sick or a gentle voice assuring him all would be well with his world. He wondered what Dorrie Cullen’s voice had been like, and when the soft singing began in his head, he knew Sean was giving him the opportunity to know.

Tears fell heedlessly down the Reaper’s cheeks as the old Irish lullaby wafted gently through his mind. He felt a phantom touch—long-remembered by the man who was so much a part of him—upon his brow, along his back, and knew vicariously the loving touch he had been denied as a bantling. He felt arms surrounding him, holding him, giving him comfort, and he thought his heart would break with the grief that welled up inside him.

“Mama,” he sobbed, and felt to the very depths of him the agony that Sean Cullen was feeling.

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He covered her frail hands with his own. The hardness of her flesh, the coldness, did not register. All he felt was the sadness at the loss of those loving hands. Never again would his mother touch him, hold him or place her sweet kisses upon his feverish brow. Never again would she croon to him in her lilting voice or chastise him with exaggerated annoyance. She was gone from his life forever. Only her gentle memory would remain.

His shoulders shook beneath the weight of his sorrow. He clung to her hands, needing the contact, wishing with all his heart he could feel those rigid fingers enclose his own just one more time. He longed to feel her brush the hair back from his eyes. To hear her sweet Irish lilt as she called him Seannie.

He would never know how long he would have stayed that way had the funeral director not come in to bid him leave. He had not even been aware of the violent storm lashing against the building.

“We are under a tornado warning, sir,” the director said softly.

Cree nodded. It was all he could do to heave himself from his knees, bend over Dorrie Cullen and place a gentle kiss on her work-worn brow.

As he drove through the pouring rain—his own tears rivaling the water cascading down the car windows—he knew a grief so encompassing it was hard to draw breath.

At one point, he pulled off the road, crossed his arms over the steering wheel, lowered his head to his hands and cried, barely aware of the keening sound dredged up from his closing throat.

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There were only a handful of people at the funeral liturgy the next day—Brian, Bronwyn and Cree, along with a few older parishioners who came to any and all funerals held at Saint Teresa’s. Tymothy and Dorrie Cullen had made no friends in Albany and the only neighbors who had been friendly to Dorrie while they lived there had either died or moved away.

It was a sad little affair with the priest obviously embarrassed by the lack of mourners. Although his homily was well-written and equally well given, he had not known the dead woman and the words he spoke of her sounded generic. Even the music—though traditional—seemed out of sync.

There was a short trip to the cemetery under a steel gray sky that threatened more rain. Only two cars—the hearse and the limo—drove Dorrie Cullen to her final resting place.

Bronwyn sat between Brian and Cree in the limo and neither man spoke. Her hand was in Brian’s but she was conscious of the length of Cree’s leg alongside her own. Now and again in church she would look beside her at the Reaper but—just as she had seen him do in church in Grinnell—he sat like marble, his head down, his eyes closed throughout the ceremony. Though he joined Brian and Bronwyn when they walked up to Communion, he did no more than touch Dorrie’s casket, shaking his head at the priest’s offer of the Host.

The Rite of Committal, the graveside part of the ceremony, was brief. The three of them scooped up handfuls of the Georgia red clay to fling into the gaping maw of the grave as the casket was lowered.

“From dust have we come and unto dust we shall return,” Father McElroy spoke.

Brian was trembling violently by the time the casket had finished its six-foot journey into the belly of the earth. His face was stark white, his lips quivering.

Cree gently pushed Bronwyn aside and put his arm around Brian. He drew the man to him, lowered his head and said something Bronwyn couldn’t hear. But when he had spoken, Brian raised his tear-streaked face and nodded. Whatever had been said seemed to calm the man.

“Eternal rest grant unto her, oh Lord.”

“And let perpetual light shone upon her,” Bronwyn answered and heard Cree echoing her words.

“May her soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.”

“Amen,” Bronwyn whispered.

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Brian turned abruptly and walked to the limo as fast as he could. His shoulders were bunched against his grief and he looked like a man battling the forces of nature to reach his destination. Once more the sky had turned to a leaden gray and lightning made jagged lines across the western horizon. It seemed fitting that the elements should mourn the passing of Dorrie Cullen.

Cree had found the black suit he had gone after, Bronwyn thought, as she walked alongside him. He had also found a black shirt and tie. She idly wondered if he ever wore anything other than the unrelieved black. Not that the black did anything to detract from his powerful male beauty. If anything, it only added to the allure, the mystery of Viraidan Cree, and she could imagine him in no other garb. Glancing at him, she noticed he had taken a pink rosebud from the spray that had blanketed Dorrie’s casket. The perfect bud seemed out of place in his powerful hand.

“He’s going to need you, Aidan,” she said softly.

“Aye, I know.”

“You are a good friend to him.”

He made no reply.

She put a hand on his arm. He stopped and looked down at her.

“Will you talk to me about Sean one day?” she asked.

He stared at her for a long time. “One day I
will
talk to you about him.”

There was no need to remain in Albany. As soon as they left the cemetery they drove to the airport where the jet’s crew had turned in the two cars Cree and Bronwyn had rented. Already onboard was what little luggage they had brought with them, including a locked cooler Brian had purchased to hold the Sustenance Cree had somehow commandeered while he was out the evening before.

“Don’t ask,” he had snapped when Bronwyn inquired about the plastibags of blood.

“But I brought plenty,” she protested, but his warning look made her drop the subject.

Earlier that morning, Cree had administered Brian’s shot of tenerse, but Brian had been so nervous about the coming funeral that Bronwyn offered to inject Cree. Once more, she played witness to the agony the med caused the Reaper and had massaged away the stinging. Before he turned away, he had looked at her with eyes that smoldered with desire.

“Dr. McGregor?” Mr. Ludlum called as they neared the jet.

Bronwyn let Cree and Brian go on ahead, stopping to see what Ludlum wanted.

“Yes?”

He smiled hesitantly. “I forgot to tell you that one of the nurses from the hospital had sent along a box for you. I had it in the trunk of the limousine on the way here. I gave it to that nice Captain Jeffreys and he put it onboard.”

“A box? For me?”

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Ludlum waved his hands about. “It was a box of old letters that belonged to Mrs.

Cullen. The nurse said many were from you and she left it to your discretion to give them to Dr. O’Shea and his son as you saw fit.”

At the mention of Sean, Bronwyn flinched, but she managed to thank the thin man.

“I’ll see it.”

“Godspeed, Dr. McGregor.” He spun on his elegant loafer heels and wobbled off, pumping his arms as though he was trying to take flight. The image of a vulture seemed to settle over his stick-thin frame.

Shaking her head at the unkind thought, Bronwyn climbed the steps into the jet.

Brian was sitting in the chair she had used on the flight down so she moved further back in the plane. Cree seemed to be lost in thought, his attention riveted on the rain that was now beading the window. As she took her seat, she asked the stewardess for the box Ludlum mentioned.

“It’s in the baggage compartment, Doctor. Remind me when we land and I’ll get it for you.”

Bronwyn nodded and buckled her seat belt. From where she sat, she could see Cree’s stony profile and she wondered what he was thinking. There was a remoteness about him that seemed to warn people away, and the stewardess gave him a wide berth. She wished she was sitting opposite him, at least that near, for the distance between seemed insurmountable.

As the jet began to taxi down the runway, Bronwyn laid back her head, closed her eyes and reveled in the feeling that propelled her skyward. She wondered if Cree could feel her exhilaration.

“Aye,” he whispered to the gathering dusk outside his window. “I am very aware of what you feel, beloved.”

* * * * *

Bronwyn yawned as the plane settled once more to earth. It was pitch black outside when they landed in Newton, Iowa. She heard Cree talking softly to Brian. The Reaper was hunkered down beside the older man’s chair. He patted Brian’s shoulder, then stood and looked at her.

“Can you get home by yourself, Bronwyn?”

She blinked. “You don’t want me riding back to Baybridge with you?” she asked, hurt rife in her voice.

“I need to talk to Brian in private while he’s still able to listen. Would it be all right if I called one of my men to pick you up?”

“Ah, yes,” she said, surprised by his question. “Where are you going?”

Brian chuckled. “Out for a wee drink, we are. Or five or six or ten.”

Bronwyn frowned. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Aidan.”

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“I’ll take care of him, Bronnie,” Cree replied.