Canon turned to me, all judge and no jury. “Why now?”
That was the question, wasn’t it?
“I don’t know.” I glanced at my left forearm, where the shamrock tattoo was just visible beneath the sleeve. “But lately, it feels like it’s leaking into everything else.”
Silence again.
Moab ran a hand over his scalp, eyes closed. “You want to fix it, or you want to make it worse?”
I smirked, the old me slipping back in. “I just want to sleep.”
Scarlette softened, just a little. “You ever try talking to her? In the dream?”
I paused. “No. But I want to.”
Canon nodded, more to himself than anyone. “Then maybe you should.”
Vin scribbled furiously, eyes lighting up with something I couldn’t place. “If it’s Dublin, I can trace the O’Toole line. Cemetery records, old city plans. Might tell us what you’re looking for.”
Moab snorted. “Or it might be you had a concussion and your brain’s stuck in a feedback loop.”
“Either way,” I said, “I want to know.”
Canon closed his eyes, then stood up. “Then we go to the source.”
Scarlette stared at me, long and hard. “You up for it?”
I met her gaze. “Yeah.”
The decision settled over the room, final as a gravestone. We sat there, four broken machines trying to solve a mystery older than any of us. The whiskey burned clean, and for a moment, the nightmares felt a little lighter. But only for a moment.
***
The next day, I tried to shake the night off, but it clung like old blood on my knuckles.
We met at the clubhouse again—no women, no civilians, just the inner circle. Canon had a printout of some family tree he’d found online, but I didn’t care for it. He read it off anyway, dry as a priest’s ashes, names stacked and branched, each one ending in a date and a cold dash. Moab kept pulling up pictures on his phone, Google-stalking Irish cemeteries and shaking his head every time the Wi-Fi died. Scarlette sat beside me this time, close enough that our shoulders brushed. I pretended not to notice, but I did.
Vin held the notebook like it was a hostage, waiting.
Canon gestured at me. “If there’s more, now’s the time.”
I stared at the water ring left by my glass, watched it seep into the ancient wood. Every instinct said to lie, to play it off as a head injury, but I couldn’t. Not after last night, not with them looking at me like they cared if I lived or went full ghost.
So I started.
“I see it at night, mostly.” My voice didn’t sound like mine—too thin, too raw. “Sometimes when I close my eyes. It’s always raining, or about to. Cold. The kind of cold that gets inside your teeth.”
Moab grunted. “That tracks. Ireland’s a wet shithole.”
“Let him talk,” Scarlette said, and I almost smiled.
“It’s the same graveyard, but sometimes it’s not a graveyard at all. Sometimes it’s a hill, or a field, or a dark stone house with a thatch roof and a chimney coughing black smoke. I know the path to the door like I’ve walked it every day of my life, but when I try to open it, my hands go right through.”
Vin scribbled, head bowed.
“There’s fighting. Lots of it.” My jaw ached just talking about it. “Muskets, pikes, swords. You hear the noise before you see the men—boots pounding, metal on bone, screams in two languages. There’s fire sometimes, but it’s the smoke that sticks with me. Peat, blood, wood, all of it mixed. I can taste it even now.”
I paused. Scarlette laid a hand on my forearm, feather-light. The shamrock ink seemed to shiver under her touch.