No Time to Cry (Nine While Nine Legacy Book 1) (11 page)

Beyond beautiful. They all shared that
something
other
feel.

Janice had completed her task and now
there was an assortment of delicious smelling food arranged along the length of
the table from which to choose. A platter of roasted chicken sat at the far
end, one filled with roast beef was nearest to mine. In between were dishes of
rosemary roasted baby potatoes, glazed carrots, and freshly baked, still warm
rolls. The smell of it all mingled, creating a cloud of delectability that set
my just rediscovered hunger on edge. I hadn’t eaten since morning, and though
my appetite was enlivened, I wasn’t very confident of being able to swallow a
bite, with Gideon on one side, Liam across from me, and the unknown purpose of
this meeting hovering directly over my head.

 “Would you care for roast?” Gideon
asked me, slices of medium rare roast balanced on a serving fork.

“Yes, please,” I answered, watching as
he lay the pieces of meat on my plate, though having no idea whatsoever how I
was going to consume any of it. There was something intimate in his serving me
food; I knew all too well I shouldn’t be feeling that way given his station
within this group, and the fact that this
was
a group…of
death
.

He filled my glass with a Syrah, which I
was finding myself very thankful for. 

Plates were passed, the savory fare
dished out, glasses filled.

I was still mesmerized by the wood of
the table. The waves in the grain of the wood, combined with the flaming
variegated colors, had a hallucinatory effect that I had a hard time pulling my
eyes from.

“It’s Cocobolo wood,” Gideon informed me.

“Oh.” I pulled my eyes from the
undulating embers within the table. Michael had Cocobolo eyes.

Gideon raised his glass and the others
followed suit, mine fell in a step behind.

“To new beginnings…and new bonds,” he
toasted, they all toasted, raising their glasses to me.

I sampled from my glass, it was
wonderful. I looked at Liam over the rim. He was engrossed in conversation with
Erin. Music played softly in the background, similar in genre to my Dead Can
Dance station on Pandora…in fact…that actually was Dead Can Dance that was
currently playing.
The Host of Seraphim
. I stifled a laugh that
threatened to bubble up and out. The song was a favorite of mine, very
atmospheric, soothing, but not coma inducing.

As I ate, or attempted, small bites, I
noticed the others stealing glances my way. I was the newbie, the outsider, the
different one.
I remembered the ambiguous words of Gideon and Liam
faintly in my mind.

Gideon and Liam were speaking to each
other in low tones. The other four talked with one another, comfortable with
well known company. I wondered how long they had all been together at this.

“So, Iliana,” Gideon turned his
attention to me, as he refilled my wine glass, “is the apartment to your
liking?”

“Yes, it’s perfect. Thank you,” I
stumbled.

“What did you do with yourself the past
couple of days?”

He didn’t know? I figured he ‘knew all’
or something, or at least what I’d been up to. Should I tell him?
Hey
Gideon, I sat around all pissed off and stewing over this whole flipping
situation, how you don’t really tell me anything and just leave me sitting
around waiting for you…’cause a girl really likes that. Oh, and I spent at
least half of one of those days thinking about your kiss.

Nah, maybe not.

“I shopped, I painted.” Liam was
watching, listening to our exchange. “Nice thing about Capitol Hill is how
accessible everything is, a great walking neighborhood.” I felt a surge of that
influence, that new
something extra
that I did not use to possess, rise
within me. I felt Michael list ever so slightly in his chair. At the same
moment I felt his survey of me.

“I used to come here years ago. I’m glad
I can still find my way around.”

Gideon stilled. He laid his fork on his
plate, remained still for a moment, his brow furrowed, his eyes suddenly hard.
What had just happened? All the affable sounds of the dining room ceased and I
felt all eyes hesitate on me.

“How often?” Gideon asked, his voice
stone edged. All previous warmth and geniality departed.

“What?” I asked, confused deeply. “How
often did I shop? Or how often have I been here?” What had I done now to get
his knickers in a bunch so quickly? His eyes turned to me. I tamped down one of
those shivers. How could I feel that even when he was so angry at me?

“Seattle. You’ve been here? How often?”

“Lots of times. I used to come here all
the time. I had friends here.” I was baffled. Why did it matter?

He pushed away from the table, standing
up brusquely, running his hand coarsely over his jaw, deep in thought.

Deep in anger.

“Oh for the love of the gods…what did I
do now?” I huffed.

It only took three ticks of the mantel
clock for Halah and Nicklaus to join him. I looked at Liam, shrugged, he looked
a little sick. I threw my hands up, exasperated. I downed the last of my wine
and then helped myself to a little more. I leaned back in my chair.

Ah hell, let them all be all ruffled and
disgruntled and whatever else they felt like being. I felt like a goddess
tonight and I wasn’t going to let them ruin my night. All this furtiveness and
mysterious crap was idiotic. If you pull a girl out of her life and give her a
new one, for the love of Puck, tell her what the heck is up already.

Erin excused herself from the table, the
room. Liam followed. What was that about? He was just going to walk away and
leave me to this? I turned to Michael, who was still seated, and silent.

“It was eight years ago. What’s the big
deal?” I asked him, since everyone else had moved far from me.

Our eyes caught, I felt dizzy. He didn’t
feel human. I don’t even quite know how to explain it other than that way. He
just did not
feel
human. I guess it’s one of those things you’d never
even say unless confronted with someone who must not be…human, I mean. Anyway,
he was much more than a mere human. And like Gideon, I wondered if he ever had
been.

“Gideon will explain it.”

“I’ve been waiting days for answers.”

“In time,” he stated calmly. I felt a
tranquility wrap softly around me. It was coming from him. He was doing it.

“You’re not a Coimhdeacht,” I stated.
Knowing he was not, just as I
knew
he
was not human.

“No. I’m of the Léimhanam.”

Huh. Had Gideon told me that one? I
could recall so little of that first meeting, so overwhelmed by it all, except
of course how crazy it all  sounded.

Gideon was returning to the table, his
countenance still resolute and glowering. But oh, what an imposing figure he
was.

I was still feeling serene, and knew
that it was more from Michael than from the wine I was sipping. Nicklaus and
Halah took their seats, resuming their meals, as did Liam and Erin.

But Gideon remained standing at the back
of his chair. I couldn’t help it. I felt a blush of warmth spread through me,
my heart rate pick up.

What is wrong with me?

“Where are you planning on going later
tonight?” He asked. His temper reined in, at least for the time being.

“To Allegory. It’s a club, a dance
club.”

“And will your friends from here, the
ones you used to visit, be joining you?” His voice was tight, brimming with
carefully bridled anger.

“No, of course not.” I nearly laughed at
the ridiculous question. Of course he didn’t know the details. “I haven’t even
been here in eight years. And the friends I did have, they were friends with my
ex-fiancé first. He cheated on me with my best friend. He took custody of those
friends.” I shrugged.
C’est
la vie. “So, rest
assured, I have invited none of them to come out and play, I haven’t spoken to
them since that happened.” I couldn’t help being incensed, having to reflect on
that painful time.

Gideon sat back down; he didn’t seem
quite as pent up now with ferocity, seemingly made more unperturbed by my
proclamation.

“I have not been to Seattle in eight
years because it’s one of the last places I would choose to come on my own
accord now,” I expounded. “Why do you think I’m so pissed? I mean, besides the
whole dying part.” I paused wanting my words to sink in to Gideon’s brain.

 I locked eyes with him. “I die and
I get to come back to a place where I already dealt with so much pain when I
was alive, a place that represents one of the worst times in my life. It began
as one of the best places…”

The memory of how in love I was, how
blissful, brought a smile to my face. But summoning up the incident that
transpired on my last trip to Seattle, remembering that even though it was so
many years ago, ripped open that old wound enough to make the pain feel fresh.
It killed my smile instantly. “And one brief moment turned it into the most
awful place, filled with sadness and heartbreak...lost dreams. Those people, I
don’t know them anymore, and I have no idea if they still live here.”

He seemed to be mulling over that
information.

“Alright.” Gideon drank from his wine,
his infuriation dissipating. His brow relaxing, though his words were
modulated, his voice constrained. “Now what we have to do is deal with the
issue of you becoming a Coimhdeacht in a city in which you lived…and you still
look like
you
. Look like Isabelle.”

“I didn’t live here. I flew up once or
twice a month…eight years ago,” I stressed the eight years part. Eight years
ago. Almost a decade. Was he not grasping that? “And I don’t look all
that
much the same.”

He studied my face
. I felt his hand
at the back of my head, his breath and words against me cheek.
I nearly
dropped my wine glass. I pushed the thought away, and the sensation away,
turning my face from his scrutiny.

“As per Liam’s observation, you look
very much the same.”

“Maybe from what
he
knew.” I
looked at Liam, then to Gideon again, “but eight years ago my hair was black,
very straight, and I was much paler. You can see it on my Facebook page if you
want. If I were ever to run into any of them, on some wonky off chance, they
would never recognize me.”

Gideon considered me, deliberating.
“We’ll give it a try. But, if even one person recognizes you, calls you
Isabelle…” He raised his eyebrows, shook his head solemnly. “Other
arrangements…”

He didn’t finish, but I understood, sort
of, what he was getting at.

~
Chapter Fourteen ~

He’d said Isabelle. My name. My real name…my
old name.

It didn’t sound right on his lips. When
he said Isabelle it didn’t give me that oh-so-pleasing tremor like when he said
Iliana. I nodded my agreement.

“So, let’s try this again, since I was so
obviously unsuccessful three nights ago.” Gideon took a large sheet of
parchment paper, which Liam passed over from the sideboard, and rolled it out
between us.

It was a diagram.

A much more well drawn out one than the
hastily penned counterpart which he’d presented to me on the napkin that first
night downstairs. It looked something akin to a family tree.

“I think it may also prove helpful
having representation of the roles present.” I watched as he pointed to the
bottom rung of the chart.

He read, “Coimhdeacht,” Liam is
currently our only Coimhdeacht. And now perhaps you.” He looked at me, but his
face, I’d noticed, held something of a doubtful bearing that didn’t sit well
with me.

Was he that unsure I could do it? Was he
uncertain about having me around?

I fiddled with my boot, looked at Liam
when Gideon did.

“I’m aware that I’m repeating myself and
that I’ve explained most of this before, but I think emotions were running a
little more on the unruly side that night, and we didn’t get a chance to cover
everything. Hopefully tonight I can make it more cogent.” He gave me a sidelong
glance, a roguish grin edging his mouth. “Hopefully you’ll stay seated this
time?”

I replied with a defiant scowl, or at
least I think that’s what it was. It was at war with something else caused by
that grin of his, so I couldn’t be absolutely sure.

“To begin, the Coimhdeacht is
responsible for the division of
na
mhésen from body,
but never the death. You do not have the ability to do that.”

“Got it,” I told him.

I felt this would go better if I was
taking notes, but I figured he might think I was being a smart ass, so I
didn’t. Maybe I could steal his diagram later.

Wait. What?
Naw
veshen
?

“No. Don’t got it. What is
naw
veshen
?” Such strange words
he spoke, so foreign…and yet…they stirred something in me. There was a distant
familiarity somewhere deep in my mind. But I didn’t understand why or how that
could be remotely possible. I looked at the parchment, to where his pen was
resting, that word didn’t look like it should be pronounced
veshen
.

“Mhésen,” he smiled, pointing to the
diagram, “is the essence or the nature of a being. It holds your consciousness,
ancient recollections and knowledge. It is the fire, the light, the
illumination of a being. It’s what makes
you
very unfalteringly
you
.”

“So it’s the soul.”

“Oh no, absolutely not.” He paused, as
if weighing up the best way to word what he was to say. “If anything it would
be what is commonly referred to as the spirit. Souls,” he shook his head with a
look of distaste across his face, “such an abused and overused word. Ghemúcht
is what
your
people refer to as the soul. The term soul is for the most
part an invention of the philosopher Plato.” He stopped and studied me to see
if this was sinking in.

 “Plato invented the term soul, or
the idea of soul?” I was baffled. This was not what I had been taught. This is
not of the belief system I had adhered to all of my life, even if I did so
loosely.

“There’s always been a word for it,
Plato simply named it
soul
and it stuck from then on.” He sipped from
his glass before continuing. “Plato separated the soul into three parts,
rationality, spiritedness, and desire.”

Desire.

That one word emanating from Gideon sent
a small quake up my back.

“As stated in his teachings, each person
had a responsibility to strengthen their
rationality,
so it could
properly guide their
spiritedness and desires
.
Keep in mind,
that in this plan, having spirit and having desire
weren’t considered
evil
,
they provided the vital force that propelled a person through life, they were
never meant to be repressed, only harnessed. Without them humans would never
thrive forward.

“In those times, people didn’t live in
fear of some sort of eternal punishment or damnation, as they do now, if they
failed in this life to have a perfect soul, they would be reincarnated and
could try again next time.”

He must have seen my confusion and
dismay on my face. “I realize I’m off the topic, but I feel as if you should
understand this before I go on further with explaining
Na
Teagmhasach Bháis.”

My brain was spiraling, who
was I to argue at this point? I just nodded for him to go on.

“You have to unlearn
everything you’ve been taught or you will not be able to accept the actual
truth.”
My
head continued to spin. I had never heard any of this.

“Catholic dogma was established roughly
in the third and fourth centuries AD. Under the church rules, urges and
passions were no longer considered healthy workings of the soul, as Plato had
ascribed, but were recognized as
external
forces of temptation and
demons. 

“Falling prey to an unsanctioned impulse
became a sin, a crime against their savior, and could only be absolved by an
agent of their Church. This keeps the body the prisoner of the soul. People
stopped living the way in which they were designed to live. They live in
constant terror of this place called Hell.”

“
Their
church…
their
savior…are you not a part of that church?” After all didn’t angels of some sort
do all this soul parting stuff?

His laugh was one of bitterness when he
answered. “No. We’re not a part of that church, not exactly, not in the way you
think. We existed
many
thousands of years in this realm prior to Plato,
prior to this church. We’ll talk more of that later, it’s rather involved and
complicated and won’t make any of tonight’s subject matter easier to swallow.”

He took another drink while glancing
around the table. “Let’s get back to ghemúcht. Ghemúcht is your mind, your
feelings, your awareness of self and memories, your conscience, your
desires…it’s your moral compass, what became known as the soul, as I said
before. At death, both are shed, or culled from the body. The ghemúcht is a
part of your mhésen.”

He must have seen how baffled I was by
this input of new and incomprehensible information. “If it helps we can refer
to it for now as spirit and soul.”

 I nodded.

“The ‘soul’ is a part of your greater
‘spirit’. The ghemúcht
belongs
to the mhésen, it is entwined through it.
Spirit and soul are one,” he went on.

“Okay, so for the sake of my sanity, and
my brain not imploding, spirit would be equivalent to mhésen, and soul to
ghemúcht?”

 “For the sake of simplicity and
clarity, for now, yes,” Gideon conceded. “The soul
belongs
to the
spirit. The spirit can go on without the soul, and sometimes will choose to do
so, but the soul cannot choose to be without the spirit. And not all spirits
have a soul, some never did, and some just have broken ones.”

I drank from my glass, pondering, and
attempting to arrange, all that was swirling around in my brain. “When we cull,
the ghemúcht comes with the mhésen?”

“It does. You’ll come to understand it
all, with more time. When we talk of it, to keep things simple, we just refer
to the mhésen, since the ghemúcht is a part of the mhésen.” Gideon studied me,
deemed me ready to plunge onward into this abyss of enlightenment. “To
continue, Michael is our Léimhanam.” He gave a nod in Michael’s direction.
“He’s rarely with us; his skills are generally utilized prior to your
assignments. The Léimhanam reads the mhésen, judges it, makes the determination
of its path…whether or not a
B
reithiúnas
will be
necessary.
”
I looked at Michael. He could read…spirits? Had he read mine? Could he read
mine?

“What do you mean its path? If there is
no hell what is there to judge and where would it go?”

“I’m getting to that,” he smiled
slightly again. “Erin is our
B
reithiúnas
. Like Michael,
she’s rarely with us either. She’ll only be with you if there is a crime to be
avenged. If the penalty is to be placed on the corporeal form, instead of on
the mhésen after separation from its body, Erin will show to the cull instead
of you. If she is there without you, it is due to dire circumstances and she
will perform the escort herself.”

“So…I’m
confused. If there is no Hell—because that
is
what you said just a bit
ago, and how humans lived in fear of punishment—then how can there be one of
you that deal out punishment? Doesn’t that contradict what you were just
talking about with Plato and the Catholic Church?”

“I was speaking
of the church’s belief in
eternal
damnation for living as a mhésen is
designed to live in the flesh. The punishment that a B
reithiúnas
deals out is in
response to a life of violent crimes, a life without honor, without respect.
Transgressions against humanity, misdeeds against nature, offenses against
mhésen. Not gluttony, nor coveting, nor sloth, nor any of those other
conditions of free will and choice.

“A moment of
distress, a cleansing, and then freedom, is not the same as an eternity with no
hope. Though facing the B
reithiúnas
in itself can be quite terrifying.
Mhésen under
Fódhla
Laws are not condemned to an existence of pain until the end of
time, they become corporeal again at some point in time depending on the edict
received by
Na Ceann Comhairle
.
I will
explain much more of the
Fódhla
Laws at a later time.
Tonight I just need you to grasp what
we
do directly.”

Fola
Laws?
Naw
Keyun
Kowrlyeh
?
Now what the heck was that? More to be explained…would it never end?

 I shook my
head to clear away some of the thickness of all the words bouncing about in it.

“So, if the
‘torment’ is to be given to the
mhésen
after the
culling, then Erin and I would be there together?”

“Exactly. You
just make sure you get that
mhésen
to its Ingress, don’t
let it wander off. Sometimes they make a run for it.” He looked at me, a glint
in his eye. Was he mocking me? The very outer edges of his lips curved up, just
a bit. He was! But just as quickly it slipped away. “Some
mhésen
are meant to have a painful corporeal departure. If a B
reithiúnas
is involved and
you are present...you wait to make that sever until she tells you to do
it...just in case.”

“In case of
what?’ 

“Sometimes
further offenses have been committed since the time of the issuance of the decree,
and the sentence has possibly increased, from post-sever to pre-sever. Erin may
then have you stay for the culling or dismiss you; it’s her call at that
point.”

I nodded. Wow.

Note to self:
Don’t do anything that will call down the wrath of the B
reithiúnas
.

“She will also
join you in the escort and will take the mhésen into the Ingress. You
do not
go into the Ingress.”

 “Where
does it go…after I escort it to the Ingress?” Another note to self: look up
Ingress.

“That’s for
another time as well.”

I sighed.

Gideon pointed
my attention back to his document. “Nicklaus and Halah are our
Lanmhuchadh,
more commonly known as Reapers. You will always be with one of them. The
Lanmhuchadh brings about the death. They do not decide who is to die” He gave
me a measured look.

“They simply make it happen, in whatever
manner has been predetermined.”

“Who makes
that
decision?”

I was feeling just a tad bristly at the
thought of someone having made that choice in regard to me. In my opinion, a
poorly timed decision.

“You’re getting ahead of me.” He gave me
a half smile. “The
Roghnú
D
eireadh
,
they deliver the death notice. They bring me the mortality declarations on a
daily basis.”