2 comments/ 10585 views/ 12 favorites A Hope for Rauri Ch. 01 By: TaLtos6 *** One that I've always liked, the original title was "For the Love of the Banshee", but it wouldn't fit in the title field on Lit. once you add the chapter numbers. :( Anyhow, in case you're not aware or might not care, more likely, there is more in common than Gaelic between the Irish and the Scots. They sound different and all of that, but there are some common roots - such as some of their ancient mythology. So you might have heard of the Sidhe. In Scotland the same folks are the Sith, pronounced about the same way. They had a lot of the same legendary beasties, such as banshees. And then there are some that are distinct, such as the huge dog which portends a death as well. And then there's Wesley Valence, one-time archer, foot-soldier, hired hand, gunslinger, investigator and all around nice guy. He's in Wyoming. What's that got to do with Scotland? Hey, gimme 20 minutes and I'll tie that together. This chapter's short though 0_o *** --------------------- Loudon Hill, East Ayrshire, Scotland. 2013 The night was still and cool, and to some, it might easily have felt cold after perhaps more than a few minutes. Winter had mostly given up its hold on the land and spring hadn't tightened its grip yet either, so the land seemed to be held in a cold and yet snowless and soggy way. Something which happened at this time of year was that the earth gives off some of the heat which it has received from the sun during the day. The moist warmth rises from the wet ground into the cold air just above it and the result is called adiabatic fog by the weather forecaster folks. The mists which rise then are never very thick in that they hug the ground -- which is why it's called ground fog by regular people. With almost no moon and no human activity in the area anymore, there was little light to see by. But there were things here which didn't require very much light if it was needed at all. Near the bottom of a long slope, there stood the eaves of the nearby woods. Hidden just a little under those eaves, lay the ruined remains of Backhill farm. In the light of day, there wasn't very much to be seen there, other than the foundation ring and the remains of the hearth, since it had been made out of fieldstones, the sort of rock which caused plowshares to snag or break if the man working the pair of horses didn't get them stopped in time before they struggled through the obstruction. The place was ages old and it's builder and original owners were long forgotten, having had several resident families over it's long past, though during the last several hundreds of years, most had never stayed long, other than out of necessity until the farms they'd build for themselves elsewhere were complete enough to move into and Backhill was deserted once more. The last residents had come and gone sometime during the nineteenth century and after that long standing in disuse, well, Backhill now didn't stand at all anymore. Though tonight ... If one had been standing nearby and that meant in the trees which grew near the place and seemed to protect it somehow, not closer than perhaps a hundred feet, then one might have seen Backhill farm as it had appeared more than half a millennium before, not that it had ever changed all that much. The few buildings were there again in the mist, looking maybe a little foreboding somehow under their thatched roofs. And if one was standing there this night right then, one might have seen the door to the home open silently as a lone figure stepped out into the darkness and begin to walk slowly out of the trees, sobbing softly. The figure stood all alone for several minutes and it could be said that it was during those few minutes that the hypothetical human observer -- had there really been one there -- was at greatest risk of being noticed by the figure. Since there was no human there, she only stood weeping quietly. A dark shadow came to her notice in the otherwise almost impenetrable dark of the place as it padded on large feet down the slope toward her. She began to walk and they met a little closer to the bottom that to the top. After that, they turned and walked off, the figure's sobs slowly growing louder until at last, as they strode out of sight gaining speed as they went, her weeping became low moans of sadness which rose until she began to screech and wail as they vanished from view. But there had been an observer this night. Just not a human one. She stood and watched for a time and once the others were out of her sight, she looked down and shook her head slowly, thinking and wondering for perhaps the hundredth time whether she'd done the right things out of her pity for another so long ago. Maybe it was time to fix this, she thought. Before it grew any worse. A Bean Sith had never walked the night in the company of a Cù Sìth. Either one alone could be enough to stop a human heart if they arrived to warn of a death. But together, ... and not leaving off at only warning, ... Such a thing had never happened before, though it seemed to be happening now. She just wanted a better option out of the narrow range of ones which came to her mind. She left then, turning to walk through the night in a different direction. After many minutes, she had the beginnings of an idea. ------------------------ Wyoming, U.S.A. 2013 The slight crosswind was driving him a little nuts. It wasn't much when it was there, it was just the annoying way that it would drop off to nothing at the most irritating times, and so far, it usually happened as he was in the middle of squeezing off the shot. It wouldn't be such an annoyance if Wesley was just a regular guy out doing a little plinking in his rural backyard with a .22, or out at a range trying to hit a printed target of a freaking wild turkey at twenty yards. But he wasn't in either of those places and he didn't do those things. He moved his head and looked through his spotting scope there on it's little tripod. He saw the target, but that wasn't the issue. He was shooting at a thousand yards, so the bullseye was like three feet across at that range. He could hit that in a blizzard, as difficult as it could be at times. He wasn't here for that either. He was here out of a desire to attain a personal goal. His own bit of very quiet glory. He doubted that anyone would ever know of it and he didn't give a crap if no one ever found out about it. This was personal. There were lots of shooters who could hit a three-foot bull at a thousand yards he guessed, some of them more readily than others, he supposed. To do that took skill, patience, some dedication and most of all, it took money. You can't do that with a rifle that you bought on impulse over at Sears Roebuck when they were having a sale. Scoring a bullseye at a thousand yards. That was a signpost that he'd passed long ago, though there were times when it was a bitch for even him to manage, given the capricious nature of the way that the air currents moved and influenced the flight of a bullet. Like now. He didn't care about that anymore. He was here to nail it. He wanted to place a five shot group inside of the center of that bullseye with a maximum spread of four inches. The breeze just wasn't cooperating, that was all. Looking through the scope again, he saw the target, but that wasn't what he was looking at. He picked up his binoculars with his left hand and looked down-range, rolling the focusing adjustment as he did to look at the grass between him and that target. He wanted to check the way that the grass blew in the breeze and then he hoped to try to look for the little waves of heat rising from it -- tiny mirages which waved out there to tell him quite accurately what he needed to know about the breeze. With that and a little calculation in his head, he'd know just how much windage to allow for on this range and today -- right now. But he didn't see that. Well, actually, he did. He saw the way that the breeze blew the grass from the left and as he focused farther out, he also saw the way that it blew the grass from the right about four hundred yards farther on. Then it went left again out at about eight hundred and fifty yards. It didn't help that his personal goal was to nail this without a scope on his match rifle. No sir, he wanted this achievement while shooting through micrometer iron sights -- pretty much the hard way. The sights themselves were worth more than a lot of people would have put into the cost of their rifles, though he was really trying to negate one of his own innate advantages here by doing it this way. Even through a spotting scope, a lot of people could see the bullseye, though it appeared as a small dot to the unaided eyes of most people that far away, but how many could clearly see the four inch imaginary bullseye that he was shooting for? He could and he didn't even need a scope to do it, other than to make this go a little quicker and to appear to be like any of the other shooters here on the range today. He didn't need the spotting scope at all. He just couldn't get the fucking wind to behave for three freaking minutes, is all. He set his rifle down on its short little bipod and reached for his GPS. A few button presses later, and he saw that sunrise here would happen tomorrow at 6:12 AM local time. So he'd be here waiting even before the range opened. Early morning = no misbehaving thermally-induced crosswinds. It was too late in the early afternoon for this, he decided. Too much heating of the ground by the sun. Too much turbulence. He didn't give a crap about the wind, just as long as whatever it did, it kept doing that for the time that he needed to place his shots once he'd figured it out. He sat up and began to pack his things up. The rest of the afternoon would be spent in cleaning the rifle and chalking this up to just bad luck. To go on shooting now was just wasting his money on match-grade ammunition. As he walked back to the parking lot, he saw a middle-aged woman walking toward him. After a second, he knew that the woman wouldn't be passing him and going on the other way, either. She sure didn't look like a shooter. If he had to guess, he'd say that she'd been a little long into most people's idea of a beauty back in her day, not that it made much difference, he supposed. She probably ruled the local PTA with an iron fist. But one look told him that in her day, there likely wouldn't have been much competition for her in just about any beauty pageant that she'd have cared to enter. His next thought was that she wouldn't have ever bothered with something that stupid anyway. "Hello," the woman said, sounding very definitely British as well as something else which he couldn't place, "Are you Wesley Valence, by any chance?" Wes stopped dead right there and looked into the woman's face for a moment. Then he began to walk again a moment later, the woman now tagging along. "You already knew who I was," Wes said flatly, "So why ask?" The woman looked a little perplexed for a second, "I dunno, mate. It just seemed like a way to open the conversation, I suppose." "We're not having a conversation," Wes replied, still walking, "You're talking. I'm walking." Wes reached into his pants pocket for the keys to his car and unlocked it. Opening the trunk, he began to place his things inside. "I was wondering if I might have a chance to speak with you, if you don't mind," the woman said. Wesley stopped and turned, "Well wonder no more. You can't, ok?" "Look," she said, trying to hide her growing annoyance, "please just tell me what it would take to buy just a little of your time this afternoon." -------------------------------- "Alright," Wes said, feigning a little more weariness than he actually felt at the moment, "Here we are in the hotel bar. Thanks for the drink," he smiled as he carefully swished the golden fluid around in the tumbler of stupidly expensive single-malt scotch, "you have my attention for as long as the drink lasts. Now, what can I do for you?" The woman looked like someone who'd rehearsed her pitch all the way across the Atlantic and was now on the leading edge of losing a bit of her nerve -- or the rest of her patience as she searched in her purse for a moment and then handed him her card. "My name is Cleena Danann. That's all that you need to know at this point." He nodded, looking at the card with her name and addresses in Ulster and Edinbugh and at least three telephone numbers, the long, European kind. He put it in his pocket where everything but her name and email address vanished a moment later. "You're known to be a bit of a first-rate investigator. My employers have a job that needs doing." Wes looked at his drink and reminded himself to suppress his inner smart-ass. "You do know that I have an answering service, right?" "I do," the woman nodded. "I also know that you don't answer your calls for about a week at a time. I didn't want to wait that long." "Well if you left a message, I'd get to it. I just took a few days off to come here. You uh, ... you should also be advised that I charge like crazy, alright? I also don't do PI work, following wandering husbands around and like that if that's what this is about." "I am aware of that," she said, "we don't need anything like that. We need to locate someone who is ... a little more difficult to locate. The job is in Scotland and there is a bit of a personal angle to it for you, we believe." Wes tried to appear uninterested, but it all came out in the next few minutes anyway. Well, the Englishwoman had paid for another glass of the Glenlivet, after all. "We're trying to locate and if necessary authenticate an apparition, and -- " "Excuse me, "Wesley interrupted, "You said an apparition. I'm afraid that I don't do ghost hunts. For one thing, I don't believe in them. For another, they're ... well I'd guess that they'd be just a little harder to track down, not having a mailing address and all." "Yes, yes, we know all of that," his companion said, looking a little annoyed again, "We also know that you are very likely descended from Aymer de Valence, who was the second Earl of Pembroke at the time of the Wars of Scottish Independence." Wes was stuck now and regretting the way that he'd allowed the dame to talk him into even this. Now he was fairly certain that he'd have to listen to the woman's no-doubt rabid interest in a tale that he knew probably better than anyone. His ancestor had been a major player in that war on the English side, a staunch supporter of Edwards I and II and one of the leaders of the King's army during the campaign. Aymer De Valence had left no legitimate heirs when he died, though there was one bastard son who was known of. The trouble here was that he was hoping that this idiot wasn't about to tell him that there had been another. He sighed, hoping that, with a bit of luck, he'd get to hear that the trail of that other bastard had run dry and couldn't be verified for certain. Wesley Valence knew that it couldn't. He knew that the trail ended there. Because Wesley Valence was the other bastard. He'd just modified his name to try to blend in a little better as he walked down through time, stuck as he was in a bit of immortality. And stuck as well in a part-time fur coat, every now and then. So he listened, pretending like hell to appear to be barely half-interested as the Brit chattered almost excitedly. "... and so we know that Roger de Valence served under Gilbert de Clare as a mounted archer and, well, after their defeat at Bannockburn, which was a rout by the end, a great many of the English forces sought refuge at Bothwell Castle, the Earl of Hertford and many of his people among them. Robert the Bruce left then to continue the war that he was waging almost at the guerilla level at that point, now that he was gathering steam as it were. He left some troops under the command of one of his younger brothers, Edward Bruce, and -- " "You mean de Brus," Wesley said, "Look, I know all of this. I wrote a history essay on it once in high school, ok?" He was lying here to her, but that wasn't the point. "For the life of me, I'll never get why everybody calls them Bruce. Half of the fucking English lords then were Norman, a lot of the Scots too." He looked at the woman, "Norman, you know? French?" "Er, ... yes," the happy historian said, "like de Valence, hmm?" "Right," Wesley nodded almost sullenly, "So you were saying?" "Ah, well," she smiled enough to make him suppress his groan, "it seems that there was a man in charge of Bothwell Castle at the time, a Walter fitzGilbert, and he'd been a loyal supporter of the English crown for years by that point through the William Wallace years, having risen to the title of the constable of the castle by royal decree. But when Edward Bruce appeared on the lawn, demanding that the castle yield, fitzGilbert promptly handed it over and walked out, so that he could be handed the barony of Cadzow right after as his reward. The Earl of Hertford and all of his retinue were slaughtered by the Scots." Well, Wesley thought, not all. As he sat on the bar stool, he remembered the dark day and night which followed. The battle of Bannockburn had occurred on the 24th of June, 1314 and he remembered it well. Because he'd been there that day. He'd been a young man of twenty-one winters seven years before that, fighting the Scots at the Battle of Loudon Hill and trying not to shit himself in his fear of dying. He knew the man in charge of the English side as his father though he'd never met him. He just knew that from what his mother had told him. The fight had been badly managed by the English and superbly crafted in it's preparations by Robert the Bruce. The thing of it was that he hadn't known at the time that he didn't have that much to be afraid of. He found to his amazement as they fled the field and were hounded by the Scots that he was a lot harder to kill than they were. A memory flared in his brain of trying to get just a little farther ahead of a roaring giant of a Scot and failing at it. As he tried desperately to climb a rise of wet and slippery grass, the man had caught him by the ankle and spun him over onto his back, laughing with glee as he gored the terrified young man through the gut with his spear. There was a bit of a crystalline moment then for them both as the Scot stood waiting for Wesley to die and tried to twist the spear in a little more as though that might be the reason that it didn't seem to be working. Wes had been immobilized in his moment of agony -- for just a second -- before he'd grabbed the shaft of the spear to snap it off like a matchstick and pulled out the long point from his abdomen to get up, reach for the man and rip him at least three times right through with the long and carefully sharpened metal tip of it, almost lifting the man to his tiptoes in doing it. The look of amazed surprise on the man's face had almost been worth hanging around for to watch, but Wes had hesitated only long enough to see the start of the fade in the giant's eyes as his life left him. He was gone and running before the man had even fallen onto his face. It wasn't until he remembered to look as he'd stumbled along and been amazed that there had only been a thin wet scar in the place that he'd been torn -- and that was gone by daybreak the next morning. When anyone had asked, he'd had to lie about all of the blood on his clothing. It had happened on the 24th of June and there had been the Battle of Glen Trool early the previous April. Roger Wesley de Valence had missed that one, since he'd been rolling around deep in the forest in the throes of the strangest sickness then and whenever he'd had a moment of clear thought, he'd wondered what was wrong with him. He'd lain there screaming on and off for a day and a half, almost barking mad at times. A Hope for Rauri Ch. 01 When he wasn't just barking. He'd only discovered the scarred wound on his shoulder a month later, but by then, he'd already had to fight down the strangest sort of hunger to kill something -- anything -- if it had annoyed him just a little. The day before Glen Trool, there had been a raid on their camp, just as the evening gloom deepened, not far away on the eastern shores of the Clatteringshaws Loch. Wesley had been posted as one of the pickets out in the woods and a little far from the others. They were spread that thinly. All that he'd been told had been to stay sharp, listen, and watch for any wandering Scots who might be searching for them. But something else took the nervous young man that night in those dark woods. It also tore the lives of three others out of them in the blink of an eye each time. Not one of them had been given even the time to cry out or scream. Wesley hadn't had that luxury either. He'd heard a faint rustle in the leaves and as he'd turned his head to look, something large and dark had him. He'd never even gotten the briefest look, so he never knew just what had happened. Less than an hour later, the Scots attacked and the group of English soldiers were badly beaten, though many got away in the darkness and the net effect was that the English were alerted to the presence in the area of their opponents. But by then, Wesley had already forgotten why he was there in the first place. He was all alone in the pitch black forest around him, the only living man there by then. And he was already sick and on his face in the damp leaves on the forest floor, writhing slowly in agony and fear. Whatever had attacked him was nowhere around. Wesley had followed the English camp and caught up to it not long before things at Loudon Hill got underway. No one knew him. Any who might have remembered him were elsewhere in the English host preparing to walk into the fight that everyone knew was about to begin. After Loudon Hill, the English forces withdrew. Wes slipped away and stayed in the area, living on sheep for the most part and being very careful about which ones and how many that he took. He only knew that something in him had changed. He also remembered the small farm under the trees and the young woman who lived there. She was a little tall and her hair was a deep auburn color. And she had startlingly clear and bright green eyes that gave him the most trouble to hold in his gaze on as he'd asked her for some food one day. She knew from his voice that he wasn't from anywhere near there. It didn't seem to matter to her very much anymore. He remembered the way that she'd asked him if he'd seen a young man in his wandering and he'd listened to her describe her husband. He'd answered honestly that her description could fit many men that he'd seen there, alive and dead. She'd nodded in a vacant way and showed him her small root cellar and told him to take what he wanted. Then she'd walked away out into the open land at the edge of the trees which hid the little place from sight. Wesley remembered standing there in amazement as she'd just walked away, beginning to sob softly. His hunger drove him to gather up a few things before he looked back in time to see her drift over the small rise out there, walking slowly. Just then, one of the turnips had fallen from his grasp and he'd bent to pick it up again. When he looked once more, she was gone over the rise. He'd looked around carefully and seeing no one, he'd run after her, wanting to ask more, wanting to know about her, and needing to see those eyes again. But she wasn't there when he'd crested the rise himself and he stood there, looking out over acres of grasslands and a few sheep. The turnip fell from his hand again. He stayed in the area for the next seven years. He'd only seen her a few times after that day, and though he'd tried to seek her out, he barely got a little close and she didn't appear to hear him as he called out carefully for her to please stop a moment. The last time that he saw her was at another tiny farm a distance away on the other side of the volcanic plug which was the tip of Loudon Hill and she'd walked into the little house there. He'd spent the next two days waiting for her, but he never did see her leave and when at last he couldn't wait any longer; he'd gone over to the door and pulled it open. The place was deserted and he saw no sign that anyone had been there in what had to have been a month, to judge by the life form that he saw growing in the uneaten stew in the pot over the long-cold hearth. He hardly ever spoke to anyone, fearful over the way that his speech gave him away. But he did hear of it when the news reached the area that Edward I, king of England was dead, and he also heard of it a few years later that the English were returning, as though Edward II had suddenly remembered that he had enemies to the north of him. After thinking about it just a little, Wes had decided that on a personal level, he didn't much care who won this mess, but he knew that he stood a far better chance to get fed and maybe paid in the service of the invaders, so he began to travel. It all led him to be at the battle of Bannockburn - another ill-advised scheme which produced even worse results for his side than Loudon Hill. In that one, between five or six hundred Scots had been able to send off an army of three thousand. At Bannockburn, similar tactics in preparing had been used and it allowed two to three thousand mounted and up to sixteen thousand foot soldiers to be humbled by a far smaller Scottish force. Once the rout began, Wes had run along with everyone else and finding himself in the midst of the throngs around the Earl of Hertford, he'd walked along with the rest in through the gates of Bothwell Castle. He remembered being no one of importance and having to spend the night in the open prepared to defend not the stoneworks of the place, but the wooden palisade out beyond it. When the slaughter began, he came to his senses and leapt over the palisade and escaped. He gently interrupted the woman's no-doubt thrilling blow-by-blow, account of Bannockburn. "Hey, ... uh, ..." "Cleena," she said, "Cleena Danann." "Yeah, thanks, Cleena," he smiled uncomfortably, "Where's this connection to me?" "We're not really very certain at all, but we have come to think that you must be a descendant of Roger de Valence. He was not accounted for in amongst the dead at Bothwell, though it's likely that few if any there even knew him well at all. We've tried, but we can't seem to find all that much of your ancestry by working backward, either, I'm afraid." Wes smiled a little, though it was rather thin, "Well, please don't try too hard or I might refuse to work for you just out of principal. Somebody like me and what I do can sometimes make an enemy here or there and I'd like to keep my living relations healthy, ok? Tell me about this ghost." She shook her head, "It's not a ghost, Mr. -- " "Call me Wes, please," he said with the little smile again, "Go on." "Have you ever heard of anything called a sidhe, Wesley?" He shook his head and she began to tell him of things which completed the appraisal of her which he'd already begin to come to -- the one where he was coming to think of her as a nut, but she called the bartender over and paid him for more whisky, demanding that he leave the bottle there on the bar in front of them. She turned her head to look at him a little seriously, "Take what remains of this bottle to your room after we are done here. I can see that you are beginning to think that I am an idiot, so I wanted to show you that I am, at the very least, a rather wealthy one. Now please listen as I continue, if I may." Wes nodded, seeing that she'd just dropped over six hundred dollars on buying his ear. ---------------------- "So," she smiled, "How soon can you begin? I have a retainer here for you in a bank draft of fifty thousand American dollars. I would hope that it would be enough for a start." Wesley stretched and nodded a little as he sat and he smiled, "For fifty large, I'd be all yours about one and one-half seconds after I know that it's cleared the bank." He raised his hand without another word to her and when the bartender stepped over, he said, "Please bring another bottle and leave it here as well. For the price of this stuff, I'd never forgive myself if I let this fine woman sit only nursing the one glassful." The bartender nodded and walked away. Wes smiled at Cleena, "You get to take one home too." -------------------------- He sat in his room afterwards, pushing the last swab soaked with cleaner through the barrel of his rifle. He was more than a little surprised to be honest. With the last of it done, he packed it all up once more and walked to the little desk in the room with his notepad PC. As soon as it finished booting, he accessed the wi-fi in the hotel and pulled out his bank card. He closed the notebook seven minutes later and poured himself another drink. There had been a deposit made in his business account of fifty thousand dollars within twenty-seven minutes of the time that she'd walked out of the place. For even someone as old as Wes was on the inside, there was a phrase and he uttered it then as he stared into space. "Holy ... " He opened the notebook again and began to glean all that he could on the apparently many forms of Sidhe that she'd mentioned knowing of. As he did, he recalled a little of their conversation. "A what? You want me to find a ... How do you say that again?" "The spelling depends on the locality," Cleena said, "though it is pronounced in much the same way. Overall, this is Gaelic, but there are several flavors. Where we need you to search, it's Scotland and there, what you're to find is called a Bean Sìth," she said, emphasizing the different spelling as she sounded it. "So that's a banshee, right? That's what it sounded like to me." She nodded. "Now, you also ought to know that the Scottish 'Sith' is their word for the Irish 'Sidhe'. Overall, it means 'woman of the sidhe', understand?" He'd nodded, "Annnd, so then, one of these, ... women wails and weeps to foretell of a death, have I got that right?" She shook her head a little apologetically, "It's a little complicated, Wesley. For the most part, you're correct except for a few things. The legend goes that the previous inhabitants of Ireland were defeated by the Milesians and went to live underground in mounds called sidhe, which is where they get their name." He'd stopped her there, "But, I thought that fairies and -- " She said nothing though she nodded with a sort of smile before she went on. "Try to forget the romantic notion that all fairies have wings. Most of them by far do not. The Irish Bean Sidhe or Bean Si is attached in a way to noble Gaelic families and will keen and wail for only them or their descendants -- those which begin with 'O', such as the O'Gradys, the O'Neills, the Ó Longs, the Ó Briains, the Ó Conchobhairs, though the Caomhánachs are included as well. In Scotland, it's families with 'Mac' and both the Irish and Scottish ones will include Norman-Irish or Norman-Scottish families like the ones whose names include 'fitz'." "Clear as, uh, mud, I'd say," he smiled, "So who am I supposed to be looking for?" She'd sighed then, and she was silent for a moment before she said, "The one that you're to find breaks the rule. So far, we know that she's cried for Scots and even Irish-Scots and not only of those families. She only seems to draw the line there and does not appear for anyone else, not that I'd think that they'd mind being excluded. This legend is very old, Wesley. As more and more time goes by, fewer and fewer know of it and the effects are a little disturbing, as you might imagine. Things have changed with the times. Where once, a banshee might have stood wailing at a lonely crossroads late at night, those crossroads are now roadways. She has almost caused several road accidents over the years as drivers swerve in horror around such an apparition. We need you to seek her if you can and learn what you can, if anything. We don't know if she's real or only some sort of phantom. If that's the case, she won't even know that you're there if you were to stand in her presence. There are a few other, slightly troubling aspects, however. Very closely related to the Bean Sith is the Bean Nighe, which is another type of, ... fairy, you might say. The name translates to 'washer woman' and she's sometimes seen as a woman who weeps while trying desperately to wash blood from an article of clothing which resembles something worn by the doomed person in a river or stream. They may actually be the same thing. As well, there is the Leannan Sìth, one which is rather more dangerous to men, though I'd prefer to speak of that one to you once you're on the ground in Scotland. Now, here is where we'll meet, you and I, ...." As the memory of the conversation faded in his mind, Wes read on about the sidhe for a while and then got ready to go to bed. He had a few things to do the next day, like drive home and pack. -------------------------------- In a rental van out at the edge of the next town, someone else sat reflecting on the day. She was pleased overall at the way that it had gone. She was only a little uncertain of one thing, not that it was a very large issue to her. Midsummer's Eve was coming up in a few weeks and if she could have her way, this might be finished by then. If she had her way, none of this would be happening at all. But as it was, she thought that as unconventional as it might appear to anyone, hiring Wesley could provide her with the solution to an old problem, which was what -- specifically - to do about the 'Bean Sith of the Awful Hand'. She knew that many wouldn't necessarily approve of her methods here, not that it mattered to her in the least. And it had gone so well, Wesley being so inured to being in the presence of people that he hadn't even noticed, ... well, ... that she wasn't one. But she knew very well who she'd been sitting with in that hotel bar, and it didn't matter at all what he said. She knew that she'd spent a large part of her afternoon today with Roger Wesley de Valence. THE Roger Wesley de Valence. The same one who'd escaped the massacre at Bothwell in 1314, and the same one who'd survived being spiked right through that day at Loudon Hill in 1307. He was only seven hundred and twenty-eight years old now and out of the countless many human lives which had swirled around them both today, she was the only one who knew why he'd lived this long, though she herself was far older than only that. She'd known it the instant that she'd seen him walking away from the rifle range, a tall, muscular man with dark hair over a lean face with gray eyes. Over seven hundred years old and looking not a day over twenty-eight. Only he hadn't looked that way to her then and she'd only seen that if she wanted to. What she'd been speaking with that afternoon was an even taller and more powerful-looking werewolf. The thought caused her to smile to herself for a moment. Well, she might be ages old, but she certainly wasn't dead, at least not yet. For what he was under the human skin that he liked to show to the world, Wesley was a very fine-looking male, if you only looked to see it, no matter which way you looked. She opened the door a moment later and walked into the dark hills on a moonless night. She'd never been on this side of the Atlantic before since she'd never had a need before now. She thought she might as well take a look around in these woods. There were a few shouts and rather Gaelic-sounding curses in the trees a few minutes later as Cleena got to know firsthand why most people and other animals avoided the small black nocturnal ones who walked about with two white stripes running front to back in their fur with their fluffy tails in the air. She'd wondered why it hadn't seemed nervous about her at all. Now she knew something about a creature which had no European counterpart and she didn't like it. ----------------------- Wes was almost asleep when it hit him. There was something odd about her name -- besides that it was an odd name. He'd likely never have known the difference, but he recalled reading something like that as he'd done his own reading about the sidhe. He sat up a moment later and got out of bed to step to the table and start his notebook up again before he ambled off to the john for a pee. Back online two minutes later, he tried to think of where he'd read it. Danann. Danann. He was looking at a web page with his answer a few minutes later. What he saw caused him to wonder even more. The supposed and legendary, mythical previous inhabitants of Ireland were known as the Tuatha Dé Danann, or 'People of the Goddess Danu', who defeated the prior Fir Bolg people. He sighed as he read. The place sure seemed to have had it's share of landlords. He read a little further and saw that to many back in the day, the fairies and other assorted legendary beasties of that place were the literary versions of the ones who'd gone before. He sat back for a moment. Alright, he thought, but that first name, ... He retrieved her card and sat looking at it, seeing that there was only her name and email on it now for some reason. He had his answer even quicker for that one. 'Cleena' was an anglicised version of 'Clídna', 'Clionadh', 'Clíodna' and even, 'Clíona'. And all of them were other versions of the original. Clíodhna. He read on and sat back again, though this time, his mouth hung open. And who was the original? Why, the Queen of the Banshees of the Tuatha Dé Danann, who else? He sat staring at the screen for a few moments more and then he reached for the remnants of his bottle of Glenlivet. Well if THIS little discovery didn't call for a drink ... He pulled out his phone and looked at it, thinking about calling the only friend that he had in the world who knew his secret. A Hope for Rauri Ch. 02 ***So here's where I trot out the sidekick. For a male detective, if he has a male sidekick, it's often to inject a little humor. If the sidekick is female, she's often portrayed as being hopelessly in love with him. Shauna is Wesley's sometime sidekick, though he tends not to be shy at all about telling anyone that she's the mastermind, which is sometimes not far off the mark, not that he's a dumbell, by any means. She does love him, however, and this is their back-story. 0_o *** --------------------- Louisiana, 1858 Shauna Kavanaugh awoke suddenly in the middle of a thunderstorm. When she'd been little, her Irish father had died at sea, and her mother had taken her to live with some of her relatives. That part of the family was incredibly well-off and at first, little Shauna had to adjust to now being a child of privilege on a large plantation in Louisiana. She didn't know anyone from the area and she didn't have many friends, other than a few of the laborers' children. She'd lost her father early, but he'd given her gifts to last a lifetime. She learned of one as her mother sat brushing her hair one day. According to his family's tales and legends, Shauna had one female relative far back who was reputed to have been a fairy maiden who'd given her heart to a human man. No one believed it, of course, her mother had been quick to point out to her. But early on while still a little girl, Shauna found that she could understand the speech of most anyone who came from either Ireland or Scotland. It never happened often, but sometimes a traveler from those lands had difficulty making themselves understood in Louisiana, and more than once, Shauna's mother had taken her off on a carriage ride to see whether her girl could help and usually, she could quite easily. Considering that she'd been born over there, come here as a tyke and had never known anyone but her father who'd had his own accent in his speech, such a thing was considered remarkable -- especially since to many people those two groups of accents weren't all that much alike. Another thing that she had as an innate ability was the questionable gift to be able to see things and people which other folks could not. It might take years before something became clear to her or it might only take an instant. But she did see clearly all the same. If she had known a few children from the other plantations, then she might have heard the talk about her family and how they seemed to prosper in these worsening times when talk of war between the states was in the air and on everyone's tongue. There were no slave families on her family's plantation. But there were imposters; people who appeared to be slaves working there. They wouldn't speak to anyone, not to visitors and not even to human slaves from other plantations on the rare occasions when they'd met. The work of running the place went on around the clock some days. And still the work got done. While they were slaves of a sort, they weren't from Africa and hadn't been procured at any slave auction. They only labored for a few years to return whence they came and were replaced by others. Generations before, a pact had been made which provided the workers -- who were most assuredly not human, no matter how indistinguishable they might be from the living slaves, and a large measure of the wealth. There was a gateway; and one of the female Kavanaughs was the gatekeeper; a human attendant who allowed the passage of various infernal folk on their way to the mortal and corporeal world and back. There were other parts to the agreement, but this was the main thing. But Shauna didn't know about any of that. As she grew a little older, maybe six or seven, there came the night when there was a storm and she couldn't sleep for the racket of the driving rain and the thunder. She got out of her bed and went to the window to look out and watch. Shauna loved storms. But what she saw there from her window was her Aunt Ophelia, a comely-looking woman walking out to the older and smaller of the three barns carrying a lantern which she was trying to shield so that it didn't give out enough light to be seen much as she walked. Shauna had always been a curious little girl and she'd never been one to pass up a chance for a little adventure -- anything to break up the long and monotonous passage of the slow days for a spoiled girl. Her bedroom was on the ground floor next to her mother's, and there was an outside door just around the corner from the door to her room, so she wrapped her dark cloak around herself and she stepped out, thinking to ask her aunt when she got there. But she never did ask her aunt. The events in the barn had precluded it. Shauna saw that her aunt wasn't there alone, so she hid herself in a vacant stall and peeked. She saw her aunt speaking in hushed tones to a ... a ... She didn't know what, but if he was a man, then he was the strangest one that she'd ever seen. He had the appearance of something somewhere in between a man and a huge dog or wolf. And there was that tail. She couldn't see exactly what was going on, but at one point not long after, she watched as her aunt bunched up and lifted the hem of her dress so that the other person could see what lay beneath. That other person smiled then and he fell to his knees, and for a time, Shauna only saw that her aunt was backed against the wall, still holding up her dress and though her eyes were closed, she was smiling, so whatever was done, it must have been the reason for that smile. A smile on that face was a rare thing, Shauna knew. Mostly, her aunt Ophelia was a dour and grim thing to her, as beautiful as she was. A little later, Shauna watched as the pair lay down one on top of the other. She still didn't know what it all meant, but from the sounds that Ophelia made, it must have been nice, she guessed. The little vignette ended when the stranger turned his head to look straight at Shauna. Her aunt looked to be too happy to have other thoughts about anything, but the way that the stranger looked frightened Shauna. He was making curious motions with his body, though he was looking right at her and his mouth was moving. What frightened young Shauna Kavanaugh was the way that she could hear his voice in her head. She sure heard no sounds other than the ones which came from Aunt Ophelia and a little thunder now and then. As clear as a bell -- as plain as day, she heard a rasping voice in her mind. "Leave, young one. This is not for you -- yet. Your time comes, but not this night." She didn't know how she'd done it, but Shauna Kavanaugh ran out of the stall, made a left turn and shot out of the doorway, somehow doing it all and even closing the door without making a sound before she ran straight to the large plantation house and back to her room. The cloak was off and hanging in an instant and Shauna was trembling in her bed after that for a long time. The trouble was that after getting over her fright, she found that she was a little excited over it all, so she still chalked it up as being a good bit of adventure. She just didn't know what had been meant. The next day, no one said a thing about the muddy tracks from the door into the little girl's room. The silent servants just cleaned it all away. Her bedsheets with the mud from her bare feet were washed, and life went on. The only difference that she saw came at dinner when Ophelia looked at Shauna and smiled a little coyly. It wasn't until Shauna was much older when she'd realized that her aunt knew even then that Shauna would come back to the barn some night. She remembered looking at her mother then and seeing nothing like that sort of look on her face, so she guessed that her aunt was keeping the little secret for the moment at least. -------------------------------- Evangeline Kavanaugh walked through the rain of a different foul and stormy night some weeks later with Ophelia, both of them as close together as they could get, partly for the slight shelter that it afforded them both, but mostly to hide the glow of the lamp from the view of the house as they made their careful way to the old barn together. This had begun out of their closeness as sisters in a way. Evengelina had always wondered a little why Ophelia had never gotten married -- never even entertained any suitors who might have come. Most often it had fallen to their servants or Evangeline herself to send them away. True, she herself was a widow now with a small daughter, but still, at least she'd had a man and begun her family before fate had taken her husband from her. It had taken a night much like this to learn just why her sister seemed content to live on the plantation as a spinster. Several close lightning strikes and the rippling crackles which presaged the long roars of the thunder had caused Evangeline to sit up in her bed and give up her hopes of a restful night's sleep, at least for the moment. That was when she'd seen the glow passing by her window in the night. She'd sat up and gone to look out of the window, and after a moment, that was when she'd seen her sister walking quickly out to the barn in the driving rain. Thinking that something might have been wrong, she'd pulled her cloak around her and gone out herself, thinking that if Ophelia needed any help with whatever the concern might have been, well, she'd be there. But when she got to the door, she'd found it locked from the inside and from the sounds which began to come to her ears, she ran to one of the rear doors. Finding it open, she slipped inside and after a moment of blinking and wiping the rain and her wet hair out of her eyes, what she saw almost brought her to her knees in shock. That didn't happen, but she did need something and found herself hanging on the crossbeams of one of the stalls with both hands. The oldest of their barns, this one no longer sheltered any livestock and was used most often to store hay for the horses and feed for the other animals as well as some of the machinery, such as their cotton gin. But it still had stalls and Evangelia was glad of it then. She saw her sister with most of her clothing off already, standing in the midst of four large creatures, who looked to be helping her out of what she wore as carefully as something like that could do it. As she stared transfixed at the sight, Evengelina saw clearly that Ophelia was in no fear of them. She only stood caressing what she could on them and kissing the nearest of them passionately. They were all tall and every one was a male besides -- that much was abundantly clear to her. She'd read of things such as this, but she'd never taken it as more than the fanciful writings of someone with a wild imagination. But right there, out in the open space in the middle of the barn, well, there was all the proof that anyone would ever need as to the existence of such creatures. Her sister was standing very nearly naked in the middle of four werewolves. None of them looked to be slavering beasts -- well, not particularly so, it seemed, and between them all and Ophelia, Evangeline suddenly knew what this was about. She was a grown woman and she knew of the carnal things that men and women did. She'd done them herself, obviously. She'd gone to watch a few times on the rare occasions when their overseer had declared that it was too hot to work and the silent workers had just lain in the shade of the trees to slowly fuck the day and the evening away. Once or twice, she'd even seen it when a new young doe as the overseer called them had made her transition into adulthood with the help of perhaps a pair of females helping as they could while one or two males rutted with the young one. But now she was seeing what they really were under the guises that they all wore when they worked for her family. That night, Ophelia had eased herself down to kneel naked in the hay and even Evangeline had been surprised as all of them rutted into her one after another. There were times when her sister had been mounted from behind while she sucked a different male at the same time. And there were two times that she'd had three at once and appeared to be in heaven. Very busy, to be sure, but definitely in bliss. Something else came to Evangeline's mind then and she stared for a time until she saw that she was correct. As large and powerful-looking as the males all were, and as forceful as they appeared to be with her sister at times, there was never any sort of the cruel violence to it that she'd have thought would happen. If it could be said of them all, they appeared to be trying to be careful and even gentle with Ophelia at times. It was clear that they were very appreciative. She watched and as the shock of it all faded, Evangeline had begun to become aroused herself, and after a time, she drew up the hem of her gown and began to tease herself as she watched, wanting to try to remember this scene. She was an adult woman who was a widow, after all, so her bed was quite often a very lonely place late at night. There had been the odd man come to call from the town. Most often, they were someone that she'd seen at church on Sundays, and while she could see nothing wrong with most of them, there was also nothing there for her somehow. She knew that as a widow and a mother, her options were limited. But how to know if the man was only there to try to marry himself into her family's fortune? She'd just given up. So watching something as primal and wanton as this was something which she hoped to use to warm her lonely bed at night by herself. But there are by-products and signs to feminine arousal, even like what Evangeline had been doing as she'd begun to carefully frig herself. Her breathing changed, though she'd tried hard to keep it even and still and there was always the gentle scent of human female arousal. In a barn with at least four male werewolves in it and with their noses along with their sharp ears, well ... she knew that she was playing a rather risky game there alone on the shadows. She'd had no idea that night, but there was a fifth male and a female. They were the alphas of the group, not that Evangeline knew anything about that sort of thing then, and they were watching as well from the other side of the barn. And their noses weren't as near to the wildly aroused and happy human woman in the middle of the males of their pack. And of course, they weren't close enough to have the sounds that Ophelia made get in the way of detecting the slight huffs and gasps of a second woman in the barn. The she-wolf turned her head and after a moment of careful sniffing, she looked at the other females and gestured silently with her chin. Evangeline's terror began as she was discovered by the females. She stood on watery legs and struggled as she was held up on her feet by two of them. The alpha female began to remove her gown and Evangeline fought it - or tried to. The gown was the victim then and it was torn off her in seconds. Evangeline never forgot that night and what she'd done in the hay right beside her sister. She'd been pawed and felt and forced to perform all manner of carnal acts on the males AND the females for their pleasure of her. As well, she'd been dragged and moved around so that she'd had to do the very same things -- some of them, anyway - to Ophelia, who told her not to fear and also how much she enjoyed this with her. It took her a while, but she'd also seen eventually that no one really harmed her, other than some slight scratches and nips and overall ... It had been wonderful. Much later that fateful night, the two sisters walked slowly on aching hips back to the house. There was semen in their hair and even a little still on both of their faces, though they'd tried to wipe it off for each other. Their thighs felt a little sticky here and there and they also felt wonderfully slippery as their vaginas and anuses seeped with the fluid. But they were happy. To Evangeline at the time, it was both surprising and astounding, the way that those males had of attaining their climaxes in her and filling her with so much more seed than she'd ever gotten out of her husband or any man before in her life to that point. It was deliciously hot to her when it came and best of all, there was always more to be had from the same male in perhaps as little as a minute if he stayed in her. She remarked on it in a whisper to Ophelia who'd nodded and said that yes, as what those males were, they usually gave several gushes each time, so she had to be sure to remain still for it or continue bucking against them, but a little softer, and it often helped if she could catch the male's eye and give him a hopeful look then because she'd learned that they liked to see it and would then strive to give her more. In time, both Ophelia and Evangeline were held as a slightly sacred pair to the pack who sometimes came to the barn and left little signs for their human goddesses of love which only they'd been taught to read so that they might know that their lovers were there and waited for them. About a year after it had begun, they were bitten very carefully by the alpha pair and turned. The two days that it took to get past the sickness and the learning of how to control themselves were hidden by the ruse of the sisters leaving for a visit to see a sick friend. In reality, the sisters were back in their barn the same night fucking with every werewolf who came to them before being bitten. They just didn't know about Shauna until a time later when she was discovered as she lay in the hayloft peeping at them. She was found that night by one of the females and Evangeline wondered why Shauna was not afraid of the werewolves in the least. Another of the females came forward and told of finding Shauna there in the loft some days previous, playing with some of their whelps there in the hay, as naked as they were. When asked, Shauna had said that it was only fair to her mind. She'd always wanted friends more than anything, and so, having found them, she made friends and had wanted to show them that she was no different to them -- even though she was, of course. Shauna told her mother and her aunt that she'd never told a soul of what she'd seen there, because of her friends and their parents and she knew enough not to tell anyone. From then on, Evangeline brought her daughter along on the nights when they went and Shauna either played with the other children or she lay in the hay and slept with them under the watchful gaze of at least one of the females. Child's play is child's play of course, and it happened one day that Shauna was bitten by a whelp and she turned as well. The event was a joyous one for them all, not least of them Shauna herself. It all ended when the people of the town came one night and burned down the barn. Shauna was panicking, lost and choking in the smoke for a short time until the female alpha came to her out of nowhere and told her to climb up onto her back, "You must be away from this or it is your death, my little friend. Everyone else is out and safe but you, so come." Shauna saw the slightly red glare in the eyes of the female as she looked back when Shauna climbed up to get settled, "If even one of you is harmed in the least, we will leave none alive in that town of fools. The priest will be mine before the dawn regardless, for we have found out that he guides them and was here with his holy book when it began. I will show him the worth of such nonsense this night." And so in the aftermath of the burning of their barn, the pack moved on and Shauna lost her friends as they moved away. Not long afterward, Ophelia announced that the new house was almost completed and would soon be ready to move into. A Hope for Rauri Ch. 02 That would take a little time, she'd said, because the new house was in Missouri. Shauna didn't know anything about a new house or what this portended, but she gathered that they'd be moving in a while. In the meantime, her mother told her, she was going to be sent off to a school far away. It pretty much happened that way too. She was gone and didn't come home, other than for a few holidays until she was almost grown. ------------------------------ After years, a few hundred anyway, Wes had been all over Europe and had gotten well and truly tired of it. By then, he'd managed to amass and save a fair bit of wealth and so he'd sailed to the New World to begin again there. There hadn't really been a plan to it in his mind, but his travels took him westward after a time. He met and just lived as a hired hand out on a farm of poor croppers out in Missouri. They couldn't pay him much, but then he didn't need much where he was there and he liked the work and the way that they just accepted him and the fact that he could just about walk over the hill to be alone -- on those nights when it had been what he'd wanted. What he'd come back to the last time was something that stayed with him forever. A crew of Unionist "irregulars" had stopped by. They were irregular in that they liked to spout the talk, but it was more of a cover for intimidation, robbery and murder in a fairly lawless place. For the most part, they operated without much in the way of official sanction. It took them only a moment to decide that the small family on the isolated little farmstead just had to be confederate supporters to judge by the sound of their accents so they had to be run off their land, now that everyone was in the mood for it. The poor farmer had little in the way of any sentiment on either side of the issue. He just wanted to feed his family, so he refused to be run off the land that he and Emily had given everything for. He didn't really see it as a choice. But the men had only smiled and drawn their guns. So Wes had been away one day and come back to find them all dead, even the two children. He buried then as he could, but found that something seethed in his breast after he'd figured it out. By poor luck and happenstance, he'd blundered into a state in the union which was intent on eating out it's own heart -- and the civil war had barely begun. He felt for the slaves which were purported to be in the middle of this, but he had another pull in him and it tugged in in a different way and for a different reason. A few months later, Wes joined a group of confederate raiders, seeing it as a chance to get even a little with the sort of system which had allowed the slaughter of 'his' family. He wasn't really interested in the slavery issue; he'd never known anyone who'd had any among the poor families where he'd lived. It was more to strike a blow at the kind of place who'd allow almost open banditry while proclaiming that they were a proper state as he'd been told when he came there.. They'd begun as Quantrill's raiders, but by then Quantrill himself had lost control of them and they were under the command of somebody else. But after a time, Wes also saw that what they was doing for the most part was not as it had been explained to him at the outset. What he was a very reluctant part of was just the same thing which had been done to that family -- it was just done to other unfortunate people. Once he'd figured that out, Wes stayed as far in the background as he could get, seeing that there wasn't all that much difference. It was little more than neighbor against neighbor in a lot of the borderlands between Missouri and Kansas. He would ride and take part when they ran into units of the blue-coated soldiers who'd been sent to re-take Missouri, but the thing that he loved the most was when they ran into their opposite numbers. He hated the Jayhawkers with a passion that ran deep in him. ------------------------------ Shauna Kavanagh was a bright and precocious girl of sixteen when she was sent to her last school, the finishing school in Washington, though her family's sentiments were solidly secessionist. Through old family friends, she was recruited as a spy by the Confederate Secret Service -- the youngest to serve, gleaning information from her schoolmates about the doings of their families and cadet boyfriends. It took her only minutes to meet and make a friend her own age there. The girl introduced Shauna to her mother when she brought her home over Thanksgiving. One thing led to another and the older woman quickly recruited Shauna and a little later, it became a weekly thing where Shauna made the trip to the friend's home and passed her knowledge, even getting riding lessons out of it. Shauna was moderately successful, but shunned the socialite existence after the end of the war, having had enough of it already by then. ---------------------- The war ended, and rather than go back to a regular life -- since he knew nothing of it by now, Wes struck out on his own. Nobody knew him as one of those raiders, the ones being sought to stand trial for their war crimes. Wes saw it as a bit of a joke. He knew that if the South had won, it would have been the roving bands who called themselves Jawhawkers who would have been hunted instead. Wesley Valence became an outlaw. He'd never ridden in to take the proffered olive branch because he doubted that it would lead him to anything other than his discomfort as they tried to kill him in various ways. No sir, Wes had kept the guns that he'd been issued and ridden away alone the day that they'd been told that the war was over. He made out not too badly, never having to kill any man that he robbed and he thought of himself as fortunate in that regard. It was one thing to have to do the things that he found himself doing to stay fed. It was another thing to kill somebody over what he might have in his pocket at the time. One day, he found himself a little close to his old home -- the nearest town anyway - and he was a little surprised to find that it was his birthday once he found out the date. He went to a whorehouse that evening, wanting to find a little company and release that didn't involve transferring the callouses from his hands onto his dick, as he'd smirked to himself. The trouble with that ... Well, the trouble with that was that he'd wanted to buy himself a birthday present. Out of the women there, he found a girl that he liked very much at first sight. She'd come -- she'd said -- because there was nothing else that she could do other than starve after her family had come to much the same end as his croppers had. He hadn't learned that right away. That had come out afterward as she'd lied to him, not wanting him to know that she came from wealth and had fallen pretty far in her descent. He liked her smile and the way that she seemed a little shy as she told him that her name was Lila. Wes had smirked then looking down and the girl had asked why. "I don't know much about a lot of things," he said as he looked up with a little humor as he removed his hat to hang it up. "I was in the war and well, a lot of the boys in my group would just go hog wild whenever we were in a town with a place like this. It might say somethin' about 'em all, I sure don't know, but at least half of 'em come back tellin' me that they were in love." He began to work on the buttons of his shirt while she worked at getting his pants undone as he continued. "Funny thing. From what they said, not everybody went to the same place, and not many had the same girl." She stopped as he paused to look up and, thinking to get this started before he had too much time to think, she kissed him. Wes liked it, but he wasn't the sort to let too many things get to him in a way that might interfere with his thoughts, since the ability had been one of the things which had kept him alive and drawing breath since he'd gone to England to fight in his father's army centuries before. "But they all raved about Lila. Surely not every girl in all of those places has the same name. And it surely couldn't have been only you that they were all so happy about." He pushed her away gently, looking straight into her dark eyes, "So what's your real name, Sugar? I guess you could lie to me about that too, it sure don't matter much, but just give me a name that ain't a lot of cowshit coated in molasses like what you said about where you come from." The girl looked at him, liking him for more than his money -- for the first time since she'd begun this profession. "I'm sorry, Baby," she cooed as she pulled herself to him and licked the salty residue of his sweat from his throat, "My real name's Shauna." -------------------------- Hours later, Shauna looked over at the man next to her in the bed. Sweet Jesus; that had been something. While she'd thought that he was one of the many 'retired' soldier boys of one side or the other, home now and wanting a little joy and pleasure as they'd passed through, she'd been sorely mistaken. He was anything but. He didn't speak much, so you had to listen when he did. She thought that she could get used to that in a man. She sighed. She could get used to a lot of things about this one. For one thing, he'd said nothing about his own experience at the outset, so she'd just assumed that he was just another farmboy from somewhere or other -- just another neophyte looking to get his toy wet just a time or two on his way back to 'Becky' or 'Katie' or whatever her name might be. They were all the same out here, the similarly inexperienced, but properly-raised bumpkin heifer-girls who knew enough to moan and cry out at the right points while he huffed over her so that she could have her four to eight offspring on a little ditch-farm where he'd work himself to death for her. Shauna Kavanagh knew what lay underneath in a lot of those boys. She knew that each and every one was living his life, quietly wishing for the rest of that life that he'd known that the ten times that she'd let him anywhere close to her slit was all that he'd ever get. She blinked and looked on a little sadly. Oh no, she thought as she forced herself not to kiss those lips again. Not this one. She hoped that this one had as much of a brain as she thought that he did, because to think of him in a situation like that felt like a crime to her. Those simple farmboys. She saw them every Sunday morning as she looked out through her window as she got ready to go to sleep while their wives led them into the church to hear the droning sermon of the week. But she knew something those cows never would. They'd gotten what they wanted in their docile capons, but they didn't have the slightest clue that she and the others whom they loved to look down on, well they really ought to thank them. While they paraded their menfolk and their broods into and out of the church, they never saw it from her angle -- the way that most of those men looked at her place of employment out of the corners of their eyes in passing, trying desperately to think of a valid-sounding need to go to town without their wives, something like a need to see the horse doc, or the smith -- any little reason to run over for something that their walking whipping posts would never think to give them. She smirked, the ploughboys had become men out in the world, and had then run home to forget what they'd learned out there to become the tubby overworked turds who were dying to get a little relief from the little overworked woman who held their chains tightly in their fists, completely believing the reverend who told them that it was just the same thing as what the animals did to procreate and nothing more. But not this one, she was sure of that. If he even had a 'Becky' and she had a brain, she'd never let him out of the bed, so that couldn't be where he'd come from. He'd surprised her right out of the gate, getting to his knees on the floor in front of the armchair that he'd asked her to sit in. She'd looked at him curiously, but she's agreed. The next thing she knew, he had her leaned back, with her bloomers right the hell off and he'd grabbed her ankles then and lifted them, holding them up for her as he'd fucked her deep and hard. At one point, he'd made her call for the attendant to get them a little booze and he did that (and she'd made the transaction afterward) with her standing on one leg with her ass on a table by the door with her other leg over his shoulder. Shauna had done it all breathlessly; even feeling a little embarrassed. But though he'd fucked her to a lot of joy more than once like that, he hadn't even broken a sweat at it. She knew right then that this man was different. He took her out of her boredom and fucked her six ways from Sunday. He was a loving monster, the emphasis on the adjective, she decided, and he was all that she'd never known that she liked so much. He tasted so nice anywhere that she tasted on him and the semen that he gave was wonderful, since it was a little unlike any that she'd ever coaxed from a man. It was a little thicker in consistency and was it ever warm! He gave a lot when he gushed and she could feel it when it came to her -- just from the heat. It left the nicest feeling of warmth inside her. She'd never felt anything like that before. The only disturbing thing was that there was something else about him and she just couldn't quite look at him in a way that would allow her to see what it was somehow. She just knew that it was there. She didn't want to think about him getting up and leaving. She now didn't want to service the regular dolts. It was easy enough to be pleasant in her job. That was what it was all about, after all. But after only six months at this, Shauna was beginning to get jaded. She felt little most times, only making the motions and the noises to get the rubes to squirt as quickly as possible. She was here because she needed the money. The old family plantation back in Louisiana was closed and sold off, the silent workers gone the very next day. The plan had been to start up fresh farther west at the cusp of an economic boom. But it had never happened. There had been no boom. She and her mother and her aunt came here and there was nothing but a large house. The cost of the construction and the move had eaten deep into the family pockets and then Ophelia had taken sick, wasting away to a stick before she passed. Her mother was the next gatekeeper, but by then, there was little traffic from that other place for some unknown reason. She'd found her mother hanging in one of the sheds one day, having made good on her thoughts to do that and no longer ready to accept the role. The note warned her daughter to never go to the stable. Well that was easy to do, Shauna thought. There weren't enough horses here to need that stable anyway. With no farming going on, she kept her horse in the barn. That night, she'd had the strangest dream. As she walked away with her mother's note in that dream, thinking to ride into town to notify someone, she looked over and saw the stable door open. The same man was waiting there -- or a similar one -- who she'd first seen fucking her aunt in the stables back in Louisiana. Maybe it was to be her turn now. He beckoned to her and she went. When she walked into the stable, the first man was gone and in his place stood this man -- the same one who was lying beside her asleep in the bed. The same man. She was sure of it. Only in her dream, this man had turned into something else, something four-footed but still nice for her to look at. He looked at her and in her dream, she'd pulled up her dress to show him what lay there under it. The next part of the dream saw her under him, on her hands and knees while a lean creature with fur over a non-human face fucked her from behind. In the middle of that, she'd looked up and seen into a mirror out in a barn of all places and stared at her own face, looking back at her -- looking just like the beast there behind her, since that was what she really was anyway. She'd awoken terrified and covered in sweat. It had taken a good while to get her heart rate back to normal as she thought over what she remembered of the nightmare. She was so aroused that there had been only one help for it. But now that man -- or a dead-ringer for him was here with her. She needed time to think. Her mother's death made Shauna the owner of a large place with no way to make it go and a stable that she would never walk into. So it had come down to this and a little thievery when she had the chance for it. She never went back home again. Now she was a whore in Dead Dick Gulch or whatever it was called. She looked at him again. What she knew that she'd do was about the last thing that she wanted to do to this man. She wanted, as she watched him sleep, to hold onto him until he awoke. If she could have had her wish then, she'd go wherever the hell he went, doing her damndest to make it something for the two of them. Shauna smiled up at the ceiling. One night and she knew that he'd be somebody to hang onto and never lie to, never try to deceive, and never give him anything but her best. She knew it and it was why she smiled. She knew that he didn't look down on her at all over what she was. Shauna had always been 'a little on the thin side', as her mother had always said. The trait separated her from the other women in the family who'd always tended toward the more lush side. Shauna had never really been all that thrilled with the way that she looked, with what she'd have said was mousy brown hair and dark brown eyes. She knew that, had he lived long enough to see it, her Da would have called her lovely in her own elfin way. Coming from only him, she'd have been pleased with the complement. But to herself, she was lanky, bony and pretty much a washout at never attaining the busty description that she'd have killed to have heard said of her. But this man Wesley seemed to have no proper fear of anything, least of all a woman's wrath, even if she was a whore. He'd called her beautiful. He'd turned 'mousy' into 'a delightfully rare shade, lighter than chestnut', and 'yellowish- brown' into 'haunting and captivatingly dark' eyes. And he'd tied every single thing that she hated about her body together in a way that had even wrapped it up beyond her ability to argue him down over it. She wondered if he might be Irish if he had that ability. She hadn't thought it even possible, but she'd finally met a man who she thought that she might be able to believe in, besides her dim memories of her father. But the smile passed after a moment. Her wishes were things just as fanciful now as they'd been when she was a girl. If she could have her way, she'd love to be his anything. But, ... So she waited a little longer and then she eased herself out of the bed to get dressed quietly, but quickly. With a cautious look over her shoulder, she took most of what he had in his moneybelt and even the gold pieces that he kept in his boots against a dire need. After that, she left by the back door, heading straight to the stables. She tossed a half-dollar to the night boy, for keeping her horse looked after and then saddling her up after midnight on the nights when he knew that she'd be leaving. She was out of town and down the dark road a minute after that. -------------------------- It was summer 1868 and he was alone out in the wildlands when it came to Wes where she was, the woman who'd robbed him. Once he'd gotten over his anger, he'd rationalized it to himself by reminding himself that what she'd stolen from him had already been stolen from somebody else. He tried not to think about going to prison for stealing money which he never got the benefit of having. A Hope for Rauri Ch. 02 He'd heard a little talk of the queen of the steamboat seductresses; women who made their living by acting as beautiful and witty escorts on the river trade. With many communities passing anti-gambling ordinances, it had been only a natural thing to move the gaming to the large steam craft which plied the river out of the reach of those laws. By that time, Wes had gotten some experience at gambling professionally. He wasn't necessarily the best, but he knew when to keep his hands in his pockets and his mouth shut. He'd begun conservatively, taking his lumps occasionally if he bet poorly, usually from not noticing something or someone in the form of the better gamblers on the river. By now, he made use of the dashing figure that he cut on the boats and he usually came away with his money and then some in his pockets and a lovely woman on his arm. He made the perfect river gambler, too. At his apparent tender age in this business, he could charm the bustle off of any woman -- especially the rich, slightly older ones. He knew that he tended to attract the hustlers as well, but the long Army Colt at his side lent him a bit of a dangerous air to those who didn't know better. The ones who did took it as the warning that it was meant to be and a lot of them left him alone. A long gun like that was either carried by an idiot or somebody who knew how to use it well, and one look if you knew what you were looking for and you'd see that the old piece wasn't just there for show. It was old, but it was well-looked after. Most especially, it also looked well-used. As far as most of the hustlers, he knew who they were and what they were as well, so he usually didn't allow the charade to go on for long. He still remembered the young whore from long ago, the one who could have had him so easily, but hadn't laid out the hook for him. He knew that now. He still couldn't decide whether he wanted to kiss her or shoot her, but he knew that he wanted to at least see her again. If he got the chance of it, he'd like to take her to bed again too. He'd probably shoot her after that. If things had gone differently and she hadn't robbed him in his sleep, he'd have loved to take her out here and try to make a go of it. He had no "Katie" in his life, and he wanted none of the usual kinds. He was prepared to work hard for the right woman. But he knew where that road led a lot of the time. He just thought that if she felt the same way, it might be worth a shot. He snorted then and tossed his cigarillo into the small fire. Sure, he thought, at least out here, there was nowhere to run with his money. He kicked some sand on the fire and went to bed down. ------------------------- He didn't know why, but when he woke up the next day, Wes felt strangely different somehow, though there was no reason to it as far as he could tell. Then he remembered that he'd had a dream. In it, he saw and finally spoke with the one woman who had captivated him completely long before. If it could be said that Wesley Valence was missing his heart, it was because it had been taken from him unknowingly by a sad young widow long ago and very far away. She hadn't known it and likely wouldn't have cared, having her own troubles, but Wes had fallen in an instant and as in many things about him, he hadn't ever been the same since. As he struggled, trying to see a little sense in it, he'd been surprised to find a man at the entrance to his little enclave among the rocks. "Took me a while, I'll give you that" the man smiled, "but I put it together; who you were and where you've been. You had a good run but it's done now. I guess I should have looked a little harder when we killed your rebel-assed family. If I'd known you were there hiding out in the scrubland out here, I'd have used one less bullet on the girl I shot." The statement was designed to provoke Wes and he knew it. He let it slide, trying to remember that face. "Toss yer gun and I'll bring ya in. That way, you'll get a few more days to live and a coupla free meals, Reb." The only thing that kept Wesley motionless now were the thoughts of the odd dream still there in his head. So real. So uncommonly visceral to him somehow. He suddenly remembered a woman with dark red hair and bright green eyes whenever he closed his eyes to blink. He looked at the man, remembering him now. "So you WERE a murderer and a thief, but NOW you're a sheriff, or a marshal? Really, just what the fuck are you, old man? Well besides a robbing, murdering, jawhawker gone to fat." The loading lever on the Winchester pointed at him moved and he knew that a bullet was now in the chamber. The man still sneered, "I'm a bounty hunter these days, you bastard, and I SAID --" Wes's hand found his old Colt in less than the blink of an eye, because in the time that it took to blink, the long pistol was up and the hammer had been drawn back during the movement. The rocks rang with the roar of the pistol and then there was a new place in that sour face to attract flies. That sour face still looked just as stupid; but the man fell backward missing some of the skull at the rear of his head. Wes nodded to the corpse, "Heard ya." He was still shaking his head as he mounted up an hour later to ride off toward St. Louis, wanting to book passage on one of the boats again. He found it a little unsettling as he rode, thinking it over. He'd always been fast with that pistol, but he'd never been that quick before. He'd never felt the desire to tear chunks of meat from a human body and eat it raw before either, just from what the ass had said about 'his' adopted family. He was a little thankful to have fought that urge down. ---------------------------- She was the picture of perfect charm and grace as she stood next to the man that she'd set aside in her mind as her mark for this night. She also knew that he was feeling a lot of pride to have someone as lovely as her there with him. She wanted to smirk, but she held it in. If he was a tenth of the man that he thought himself to be, then she'd be here next to him if he was broke. Well that was certainly never going to happen. She saw a man walk past far across the crowded room and he drew her eye, following his progress with her gaze. Shauna knew him at once and she wanted to curse. She sipped at her drink and laughed along with something that the fool next to her had said. She didn't even have to listen, she told herself sadly; she just had to be quick enough to see the reactions of others to know what to do. The fool brayed like a mule when he laughed. This was going to take a bit of concentration from her tonight; to allow someone like this to paw her a little until the powder in the drink that she'd serve him later in his room while she was naked took effect. She thought about Wes, wondering about him a little. From the way that he was dressed, he must be doing alright, she decided, weighing her chances at dropping this sucker to try a run at the tall one. But she knew that it likely wouldn't fly if she did that. Then she thought about ditching the old pig anyway and just trying to get away. The trouble was that being on a river steamboat while it was underway sort of narrowed down her escape options more than a little bit. She thought about the side-paddles and thought that at least she could jump over the stern railing if she really had to and likely almost drown from the weight of her clothing. Though what she was would prevent her drowning, it would do little to stave off the unpleasantness of nearly getting there. She decided to make her move a little early and she whispered to the rich man, telling him of her desire for him. Apparently, he was the sort of rich man who would take his 'conquest' to bed when he was good and dammed well ready to. She wondered how long that would take and decided that she didn't want to invest any more of her own time in the ox. Her next thought was to leave as unobtrusively as possible and just lock herself into her room. But she found a derringer pressing against her ribs very uncomfortably as the mark leaned over. The way that he held her arm tightly went past uncomfortable. After the briefest instant where she reminded herself why it wouldn't do to rip his face off, since she was very much stronger than he was - well, since she was a werewolf, after all, she went another way. His attempt to hold her arm seemed to push her off-balance for a second and she had to reach to keep her new hat from falling off. "Shauna Kavanaugh," he said with a self-important sneer, "I'm arres- OH!" Shauna drew back the hatpin quickly from where she'd jabbed him under his armpit. When he reared back a bit from the pain, she reached for his face and dropped the pinch of powder that she'd grabbed along with the pin from her hat onto his tongue. She quickly jabbed his tongue once with the pin and it caused the man to gasp. "Well I would have used a different word, Virgil, or whatever your name is," Shauna whispered, "Here, drink this, you'll feel better almost right away." The hatpin was already in the glass of mint julep. The ground leaves in it had softened and he drank it down in one long gulp. She stepped away then and walked as he went to his knees choking on what was in his throat. The already-dying Secret Service agent looked up at her and saw mostly blue halos around every oil lamp in his sight. He wavered for a second, looking in her direction. Shauna looked back, appearing as though she didn't know him or why he'd been looking her way. As she pushed through the doors, she heard him fall and smiled a little, knowing that the convulsions were beginning. She'd figured it out at only the last second and now stepped outside and walked to the rear of the boat. She kept her eyes open the whole way. These clowns never work alone, she thought as she reached into her bag. There looked to be no one there at first, but she knew better. There might even be three of them with one waiting for her in her room. "Been a long hunt for you, Miss Kavanaugh, " a voice said out of the shadows. Shauna spun to her right, but the agent had the drop on her, covering her with his pistol. "What's the meaning of this?" another male voice said from almost beside her, "If you're thinking to rob my girl, you'd better think again, sir." Shauna looked up and saw his face, about the last face that she'd have expected to see in these circumstances as the newcomer drew a long-barreled Colt and cocked the hammer. "Step aside please sir," the agent said, "I'm placing this woman under arrest for espionage. She was a Confederate spy during the war. If she's your girlfriend -- " "Well, since she is my girlfriend, then you're in pretty deep, I'd say" Wes smiled. "I used to ride with Quantrill's men, but we were under Bill Anderson then. I never liked hurting civilians if they'd done me no harm." He leaned forward and grinned, "But I sure did like shooting down bluebellies -- especially if their officers were stupid enough to challenge us and then fight with muzzle-loaders on foot." The statement was enough to cause the man to stare for a second and it was enough. There was a muffled gunshot and the man fell over the stern. He was out of sight in seconds. Shauna looked back, but Wes was over ten feet away by that point and the pistol in his hand was pointing straight at her. "Pull that pepperbox out of your bag, Shauna," he said just loudly enough for her to hear it. She slowly drew out the small, multi-barreled pistol that she'd fired from inside of her bag. "How did you know?" she asked. "I didn't," he smiled, "I just wanted to be sure. You can put it back now. Were you really a spy, or is that something that I ought not to ask?" She nodded, "Were you really, ..." He laughed a little, "It was before you and I met. I rode with them, but Captain Quantrill was gone by that time I rode with Anderson. If you want out of this and don't want to swim for it, then you'd better stick close to me until at least two stops from here down the river. We're newlyweds, by the way, you and me, so we'll be spending a lot of time in my cabin. Just don't fix me a drink." "Why are you doing this?" she asked. He grinned a little in the darkness, "I figure you owe me for what you took a long time ago. If you've got that much with you then --" "I don't, Wes," she said seriously, "I've been real sorry that I took it ever since. I didn't even want to take it then, but I needed the money." He sighed, "I sort of guessed something like that. Everybody needs the money west of this fucking river. We'll work something out somehow. Let's go to my cabin and talk a little. You can have the bed. There's a chair I can sleep in." "If we're gonna work something out, then I guess the bed's a good place to start talking it over," she smiled a little hopefully. They walked along the dark deck to the front of the boat and entered there to go to his cabin. "You poison the big guy?" he asked and she nodded. "Yessir. I boiled a big pot of water and threw in chopped-up Monk's Hood, Deadly Nightshade, and Devil's Glove root. When I didn't think I'd get any more in, I boiled it for an hour more and spooned it all out and just boiled it down til it was thicker'n molasses. I put it on a couple of hat pins and set them aside. The rest I boiled again until it was solid and I ground it down to dust." "That what you put in his mouth?" "Yeah," she said, removing the last of her clothes, "it's an old family recipe. You coming to bed or not?" she asked, "If I gotta work something out, well, I'd rather work it outta you for starters." When he climbed into bed with her a few minutes later, Shauna kissed him and smiled. "Wesley Valence, you are a brave man. How can I start to work off my debt? I mean, besides what we're about to do?" He pulled her closer and sighed as he felt her breasts against him, "Don't worry about it for now and don't try to kill me. If you think you want to, just talk to me first. Don't poison me and please don't shoot me. "If you can abide with all that, we'll moren' likely get along fine." It took Shauna only a moment to skin that down as she put her leg over him and shifted, wondering what he'd do as he learned that he was in a bed with a werewolf. What he did was to shift himself and they stared at each other and laughed until they cried. She kissed him once and smiled, understanding everything at once, "You're just the same as me. You want a friend too, don'tcha?" ------------------------------ Wes stood on the deck of the boat near the boarding plank as people of all manners and sorts embarked or disembarked. They'd be here at this stop for another hour. The covered body of the federal agent had already been taken off and was in the back of the wagon which would take it to a morgue. In the meantime, he kept an eye open as he watched Shauna work the crowd. She wasn't dressed as a beautiful young woman in finery today. The trick today was to look 'regular' as she'd told him. He didn't know what that was as it applied in her present configuration. She'd said that they had to change the way that they looked and he'd supposed that for her, that meant wearing a drab, dark dress -- as plain as sack cloth, and her hair just in the usual sort of tight bun that women used to keep their hair off their necks. But that hadn't been it at all. He was still amazed at her as he watched what looked to be a boy there in the crowd lifting money from the distracted and the unsuspecting. She'd cut her long hair short with his help and she hadn't been satisfied until it was far too short to be the way that any woman would wear it. It was just over her collar and she wore a working man's cap pulled down low with a plain man's jacket and trousers of all things. He hoped that the disguise was working for her, he thought, because he could spot her in the middle of any crowd -- but then he knew that he was unconsciously looking for her in any crowd, so that was no measuring stick. She still looked wonderful to him, now that they'd decided on their partnership. Just before they met up, she waved him over and whispered something to a middle-aged woman who smiled to them both when he got there. He hadn't been ready for anything like what she told him then. "Your friend Tommy here told me about the two of you wanting to have a place of your own. I understand," she said, "My younger boy is the same way. It must be so hard to have to hide your kind of love in times like these." Wes tried not to stare as she reached into her bag and pulled out a purse of coins, "Here," she said, "God bless you and keep you both safe. I hope that you find your place in the sun here." "Thank you Ma'am," Wesley said as he ducked his head in a little attempt at a bow, doing what he could to cover his shock, "And God bless you as well." "Oh, you both look so sweet," she smiled as she walked away. They stood together and watched as the woman walked down the plank to look back at them with a soft smile before she turned away and began to look for a carriage. Wes and Shauna walked to the opposite side of the deck as she passed over what she'd gotten to him. He was astounded. There just had to be more than a few people howling out for the law over this much. "What the hell did you tell that lady, uh, ... Tommy is it?" Shauna smiled up at him, "Uh-huh, I started out poorer than dirt when I was just little before we moved to Louisiana. I learned that there are soft touches, and most of them are women just like her. If you find one, you gotta know how to work them, is all. This is the same thing I used to do to get money for a sweet now and then back where I was just a little bigger than a tyke. I just knew what she wanted to see in me, since I'm here as a boy." Wes still couldn't believe it, "She thinks, ... Jesus, Shauna, she thinks we're a couple of -- " She nodded, looking into the purse, "Uh-huh, I put on my little act, and for the price of what looks like enough to buy us a real good horse here, ... " She smiled at him, "she gets to believe that she's seen and recognized something that's very special to her heart. She misses her son -- wherever he is -- and she thinks that we're a couple of boys who love each other very much and have run off to find a place where we'll be left alone to farm a little and screw a lot. Well it's not that far off, is it? Not when you think about it." "You be careful there, 'Tommy'," he grinned a little as he looked out over the crowd, "I might just kiss you right here in front of God and everybody in another minute or so." He looked down and chuckled then, "They'd run us right the hell out of town -- if they didn't string us up over it." Twenty minutes later, a young pair of people walked off. Not many noticed them, other than perhaps a few of the womenfolk who might have been there to watch the crowd for a little idle entertainment. All that they saw was a couple of young men looking as lost as anyone else might who was traveling here with little between them but their friendship, because they sure couldn't have very much money between them. Six blocks from the docks and they were buying horses and saddles. Their few things went into their saddlebags and eleven minutes later they were at the outskirts, a little food wrapped tightly and carried in a pack and the two were off, headed for a nondescript and weatherbeaten old farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere. "Hey," Shauna called over, "what's the name of where it is that we're goin' anyway? You never told me." "It doesn't have a name. The nearest town is called Peculiar, where I met you that time. It's most of an hour away at a good walk. There's nobody there. All along the borderlands between Missouri and Kansas, there's nobody until the people start coming back, but that won't happen for awhile yet, I'd say. A Hope for Rauri Ch. 02 There's still idiots out there like the war ain't never stopped or even slowed down. They still go on, neighbor against neighbor. The Jawhawkers were running anybody who they thought might be southern sympathizers off their land even before the war, like what happened to the family that I used to work for. After Captain Quantrill's raid on a town called Lawrence over what the Jawhawkers did to some people there and a place called Osceola, a Union general ordered that the borderlands be cleared out and the rest were run off and then it was all legal, what they'd been doing for years anyway. So there's nobody there. Why?" he asked. "Just wanted to know," she smiled, "If it doesn't have a name, then we'll just have to give it one. Let's see, ... from what you said, there's just that farmhouse left there -- if it hasn't fallen in. I know, we'll call it Bum Fuck. Yeah," she smiled, liking it, "Bum Fuck, Missouri." He laughed a little, "Why in the hell would you want to call it that?" "I dunno," she grinned as she looked off into the distance ahead of them, "I wanted to call it something nice." He almost dislocated his neck when he looked over at her in shock, "Nice?" "Well it is to me," she smiled over at him, "the way that you do it for me, anyway. Lots of men want that," she said, "But they never put a thought into it when they come to do it with a whore. They just want to plough into you and bang you as hard and fast as they can until they're happy. You never do it that way. You're nice to me and you do it so that I can like it too. That and the way that you are with anything else that we do, well, it makes me want to be in love with you. I know we're only a couple of people who can be friends. I know that now and I like it. I also know that if neither one of us finds the one that we want, or if we have to keep hiding and if they DON'T come to kill us, then we'll probably just live like that. I know we could probably be fine like that." She looked over across the space between them, "But I think we're not the ones for each other. We're just the ones that we have right now." He looked over and nodded, "I don't know what it is. I have this feeling that I don't belong, or I don't fit in." "Me too, Wes," she sighed as she reached for a canteen, "But I know that you fit in me just fine, and I hope it's enough for you. I know it's enough for me." ------------------ That had all been a long time ago, Wesley realized. Almost a century and a half. Shauna Kavanagh was still his dearest friend and they'd long ago ironed out their wrinkles about who and what they were. They'd had their long talks about her strange dreams and what they both really were. Shauna didn't mind it. She even liked it like that. These days, they worked together at his business when they needed to and they even made love together every now and then, but mostly, they were about the rarest kind of friend to each other than any person could ever be lucky enough to have. It had been a long and careful talk between them, but when Shauna had asked him for it, Wesley had bitten her to strengthen her even more and cared for her until she could care for herself. They'd each taken humans -- that is, regular ones, as lovers now and then, but they both knew where that would lead, and anyway, it never worked out or lasted very long. He smiled to himself and pressed her number on his speed dial list. He knew that he was going to need her help with this job. "Hello?" "Hey, Shauna," Wes smiled, "You doing anything now?" He heard her fingers skittering across the keyboard of her laptop, even from where he was. "Nothing Wes, just girl stuff. Filing my nails and washing my hair, mostly. Sometimes, I get a little bored with that and do it the other way around -- washing my nails and filing my hair. What's new?" "I need to see you in the morning. I'm about a hundred miles away or so, but I've just picked up some work for us. I got something here that's gonna test your Irish." He heard her chuckling laugh and it brought him memories of her pretty throat. "Does that mean that you've done something that'll make me angry with you again, or are you trying to tell me that you're in the mood for one of our four day love fests again?" she smiled. "I was thinking about flying you a little past your ancestral homelands. We're gonna need to be in Scotland in less than a week." "Whatever you say, Wes, as long as I get to have you in a bed at some point in it, now that I've talked myself into the mood." A Hope for Rauri Ch. 03 ***Landing in Scotland, Wes & Shauna hit the ground running. This chapter will be a bit busy, I’m afraid. I’d planned it differently and it came out to only 2 Lit pages, sooooo... I’ve elected to leave well enough alone as far as the character’s accents, only adding things where I felt it was needed. Oh and somewhere near the end, you get to meet the namesake of this and I give her a voice to say a few syllables. ;) I do want to make mention of a little something, ... well a few of them. There are a few twists coming in this little tale, and some are a little subtle. ~chuckle~ More than anything, I hope that the reader will enjoy them. 0_o **** Shauna missed her toenail and almost painted a stripe of her nail polish onto the dash as she snapped her head around. “We have to hunt down a Banshee? Wes, I’m an Irish girl; as in, I was born there before we came here when I was small. My Da loved to sit and tell me this stuff for hours. But even I don’t believe any of that shit.” She watched the slow smile come to his face as he spoke, not taking his eye off the road as they negotiated the complexities of finding the airport parking, “I got a retainer of fifty Gs. For that kind of money, I might make one up if I have to. Why are you painting your toenails now? We’ll be there and walking for miles in about another minute.” Shauna rolled her eyes, “The words ‘airport’ and ‘about another minute’ are mutually exclusive. Don’t worry, these’ll be dry long before I need them to be. So who was the lady that you met?” “That’s what I’ve been wondering ever since I figured out the bullshit name that she gave me.” He began to tell her everything about the day a few days past, leaving no detail which he could remember out of it, since he knew that Shauna hated to have any omissions possibly come at her from out of left field. By the time that they were at the gate, she was silent, thinking and chewing on what she’d heard. He liked that about her. By the time that they were airborne, she was already lost to him as she sat scouring the net with her laptop open next to him, scribbling notes to herself as she went. They only spoke very seldom and quietly during the flight. There were times when she closed the PC and leaned against him to doze, but he knew that her mind was already whirring even then. It always did at times like this. It was one of his many favorite things about her. -------------- They landed at Glasgow and rented a Range Rover for the drive to Bannockburn. Wesley cursed and muttered about the strangeness of driving on the wrong side of the road to him. “I’ll drive if you want,” Shauna smiled, “Hey, just think of it as your other ‘right’, ok? How were you thinking of trying to find her?” Wes was a little slow to answer as he tried to read the roadsigns on the shoulder next to him, “From what Cleena said, this banshee seems to be drifting away from the rules a little.” “That doesn’t make sense,” Shauna said, “Not that any of it does in the light of a twenty-first century day. From what I know, a Banshee is what she is and that’s it - well, that’s assuming that she even exists at all.” She felt his hand on hers and she looked over. “And given the nature of the lovely and supposedly mythical or imaginary creature which just made that remark ...” She smiled a little and nodded, “Yeah. You’re right. I can’t go calling the kettle black either, can I? So what did you have in mind?” Wes shrugged, “Well if she is branching out, it might work to our advantage. I obviously won’t know where to be when I’m looking for her, since I won’t have any sort of handle on who might be dying at any given time. About the only thing that I’ve been able to think of so far is to try to use this drifting thing that she’s started, according to Cleena. She’s also started to go to the funerals. She never interferes and always stands well away from everyone. From what Cleena told me, she’s a slightly tall woman in long black clothes with a dark shawl pulled close over her head who stands and weeps, but won’t ever speak to anyone - even to answer the simplest question. It must creep a fair number of people out, to my way of thinking. Anyway, I might not be able to predict a death, but I can sure as hell read about it in the online obituaries of the papers on the web, and if one happens not too far from where we are, ...” Shauna nodded as they pulled into the hotel parking lot, “Not bad for a start.” She fought a little to stifle a yawn, “This jet lag thing is nuts. It was late in the afternoon when we got to the airport and we had to wait forever, and then it was just getting light when we landed. Now we drive out here and it’s like lunchtime, but I’m already about on my ass.” “Hang on then,” Wes smiled, “We’ll check in and we can nap until suppertime. We’re still a day early for me to call Cleena anyway.” Out under the trees at the edge of the open parkland adjoining the parking area, someone watched as they were met by a porter who took their luggage and guided them inside. She noted the presence of the other person in the vehicle and stared cautiously as Shauna walked inside with Wesley. She should have thought about it beforehand and specified that he come alone. -------------- The next day, Wesley was looking more like an interested tourist as they walked out of the visitor’s center and began the trek to Bothwell Castle. Shauna watched him with interest for a while. “Why do I see you looking a little like you weren’t here, Wes?” “I was,” he smiled, “I just don’t remember it being this ... friendly-looking then. All I saw around me were grim and worried faces. Everybody knew that the ones making our decisions made them with no thought to the outcome for their own army. They were just here to try to gain a little glory and live through it if they could. Not a lot of forward planning going on inside their helmets at the time, like what to do about it if the Scots didn’t just run away. I saw the king as he watched a bunch of Scots come out of those woods over there where there weren’t supposed to be any to block him. They got to their knees to pray for a moment as they often did and the idiot said that they were asking for mercy. I knew right then that it was all just going to be a clusterfuck, and I was right.” Walking through Bothwell Castle later on, Wes just looked around and smiled, “I was never in here. I was out there, waiting for a whack of screaming big guys to climb over the wooden fence to get at us. But I’d had enough of it by then. The king ran off long before that, along with most do the rest and I hopped the fence and headed for the trees. I had to kill a few that I ran into, but that was all the foot-soldiering that I needed to experience. I could eat better just looking after myself. I wasn’t there for king and country anyway. I was just poor and hungry. The only difference was that by then, I wasn’t the same as I’d been when I got here seven years before.” ------------ They’d just finished their meal when Cleena found them in the dining room, looking surprised and delighted as she walked over, “Hello Wesley. Who’s this beauty that you’re sitting with this evening?” Wesley stood up and indicated a chair, “This is Shauna Kavanaugh, my associate and business partner. For the work that I was given and it’s. ... unconventional nature, I thought that I’d likely need the brains of the outfit.” “A wise choice, perhaps,” Cleena smiled, “and some rather fortuitous timing on your part, I might add. There is the town of Stirling not four miles distant from where we sit. Our Bean Sith was heard the night before last from as far as we are away now. An elderly man by the name of Feargus MacAlpine has passed in that place and the funeral is set for tomorrow at 2. It might be that he’ll have a mourner that he never knew in his life there, if you take my meaning.” Shauna nodded, taking it all down on the little pad of paper that she always carried, “Gotcha.” As they chatted, Cleena saw Shauna as what she was, a female werewolf sitting in a hotel dining room as Shauna asked about the way that she saw this sith changing roles. “Well, it isn’t really a huge jump,” Cleena said, “A Bean Nighe is a type of Bean Sith anyway. The difference is that historically, a Bean Nighe was always a human woman to start with who had most often died during childbirth. The Sith - or Sidhe would take her and she’d be what she became until the day that she was supposed to have died, if her death hadn’t come as a result of her labor. So it was supposed to be a temporary thing after which, her spirit could rest in her grave once more. “So, there’s a way that a regular person could become one of the sidhe?” Shauna asked. Cleena nodded, “So the legend goes, at any rate.” Shauna wrinkled her nose a little, “What’s that smell?” “Anyhow, I must go.” Cleena said, standing up, with Wesley standing a moment later, “I only wanted to see that you’d gotten here safe and sound.” “Wait, Cleena,” Shauna said, “I’d like to have your phone number if I could. There were no numbers on the card that you gave Wes a few days ago.” Cleena looked surprised, but then she rattled off her cell number as Shauna wrote it down. At her suggestion, Shauna gave Cleena her own and the woman entered it and saved it to her contact list in seconds. “It was good to see you again,” Wes said, “I’ll be in touch after the funeral.” Cleena thanked him and said goodbye, already walking away. When Wes sat down again, he saw the expression on Shauna’s face. “What?” She nodded once in the direction of Clenna’s exit, “Wesley old friend, I don’t know if it’s just a female thing or what, but that girl as I saw her, was anything but what she tried to look like to me, and I can tell you right here that she’s not pleased to meet me here, either. I think that she wanted to have you come here alone.” He sat digesting it for a moment. “What do you mean ‘as you saw her’?” “I dunno,” Shauna said in a thoughtful and quiet way, “She puts on this front of a middle-aged woman who was beautiful in her day, but what I saw after a few seconds was that if she’s old, it’s only in years. She looked like the most beautiful queen that I’ve ever seen in my life. Princess Grace never looked that good on her best day.” She grinned a little after the next few seconds, “Hey, do they have skunks here?” He shook his head, “No, though she sure smelled like she’d met one the hard way, didn’t she?” Shauna nodded and they both began to laugh. ------------ Long after they’d returned Wesley’s room, they’d sat together comparing notes and trying to plan so that they might have at least some eventualities covered the next day... Long after they’d admitted to each other that neither one now felt tired because their systems had managed to decide that back home, this was the start of another day and they shouldn’t really be feeling tired ... And long after they’d shared a little quiet love together, just because they’d wanted to ... A figure walked through the passageways inside of a mound now far away indeed from the nearest living humans, since none lived near anymore. One even had to walk quite a way to come to the remains of any places where humans had once lived before the call of modern work had lured them all away from the hardships of living out here long ago. Outside on some days, one could hear the swooshing roar of the flying mechanical mounts which today’s human warriors rode. Every so often, one might see groups of their current warriors as they practiced making war in ways that she almost couldn’t understand. But for the most part, the land around here was empty of them, other than the very few who came because they liked to tramp for miles over a wild and free countryside and told themselves afterward that it had been a grand experience. She chuckled a little at that thought. They wouldn’t think that highly of the rugged land out there if they HAD to do it in order to survive and feed their loved ones. After the first slight thrill at not having to stay quite so hidden anymore, the figure now wondered if it was really all that good a thing. She looked at the walls of her hall and admired the swords and shields of the warriors of the Aos Sí - what were left of them, anyway. After a moment, she gave out a quiet call and waited. Another figure appeared a little later and walked toward her, bowing low as she drew near. “I have seen that you are no longer content to only weep and wash clothing. I see also that soon, it will also not be enough for you to only scream out your sadness as you pretend to care about the ones that you know are to die very soon.” She regarded the other one for a long moment. “Next, can I expect to have to watch as you jump further? From Bean Nighe to Bean Sith to Leannan Sìth? Do you expect to be queen yourself one day?” The other one looked up, “I have no words for my thanks for what you have done for me. After so long ...” “After so long a time spent nursing the pain of your loss long ago,” the queen nodded, “Sadly, what I have watched is not the slow mending and healing which I had hopes to see one day. You still carry this pain as though it is a cherished thing.” “The memory, my queen,” the other began, “I try to hold the memory of him.” The queen shook her head for a moment, “Really? Is that why?” She stepped over to her throne and sat on one of the armrests to look back. “Very well. So tell me then, weeper, ... What was his name? What was the color of his eyes, can you tell me?” The other one stood in a moment of shock. It gave way to minutes of desperate attempts to force her mind to recall. At last, she seemed to crumple a little and sank to her knees weeping for herself again. Clíodhna stepped over and placed her hand on the other one’s shoulder very gently, “You whip yourself over something very small. I took you in to save you from the cruelest sort of death for a female of any sort of thinking race. Even Tuatha Dé Danann can ache for their broken hearts to stop beating. We are not different in that way. But you began as close as can be to a human, and human hearts, while they burn so brightly, were never meant to burn so long. The best and wisest thing now would likely see me give your death to you. But though it would end this for you, I cannot see the good in it. To have kept you among us for so long only to die as you would have anyway and to no purpose is an even colder and more empty feeling to me.” She sank to her knees in front of the other one and held her face in her hands to softly kiss her before she sat back with a warm smile, “I now work to a different plan; one where I might see you happy for once.” She looked around the hall for a moment and laughed a little, “Such a thing might cause the walls to sunder for the shock of it. So for now, I will allow you to continue, but I want for you to think of leaving this way. The danger is that as Leannan Sìth, you will cause much suffering on your own, and if you are allowed to go the final step, what then? I can say that perhaps the unhappiest among us are the Baobhan Sith, who are not really even mine to guide much anymore as they seek to cause harm out of no other need than their hate of others who have and know love and warmth. That is something that I will never allow you. I would kill you first to keep you from that fate. Before you go to think on these things, hold another thought in your mind. The one that you fail to name anymore loved you for perhaps three winters and you counted yourself fortunate for it. I know of one who has never forgotten your face for over seven hundred years and he lives still, just as you do.” The red-haired one looked up in shock, “Truly? Thi-this is so?” “I may be Tuatha Dé Danann, but that does not mean that I am one who enjoys causing hope and then snuffing it out. Be patient,” the queen smiled, “and go your way.” ----------- It looked to Wes that this MacAlpine hadn’t managed to amass all that many people who might have wanted to come and pay their respects if the small number who stood there waiting a little impatiently in the late April rain was anything to judge by. The day was a dark and dreary one, he thought, just about perfect for the one that he had in mind to mark his own passing whenever that came about. The minister was out there, giving it a good go as he worked to earn the contents of the envelope that he’d already been given, as much as the spring downpour threatened to soak him to the skin as he droned on over the man’s travails and troubled life. Wes barely heard the shutter on Shauna’s camera as she stepped around watchfully, taking the occasional very discrete shot of the proceedings. For himself, Wesley was standing there in a light overcoat and holding his umbrella, and getting just as wet as everyone else as the wind shifted sometimes now and then, as if it was intent on making sure that everyone got properly soaked on both sides. He tried hard not to stare, but she was there, just a little ways off, a slightly tall woman weeping quietly in the rain. Now that he’d been warned about it, he made sure not to neglect his own ability to see past things if they were being hidden to a degree. He was still kicking himself to think that he’d missed seeing Cleena in a more informative way. He began to move a little then, just sidling off to one side a bit as he pretended to be interested in the eulogy of a man he’d never met in his life. He glanced over and then he saw her again - that woman. The same one who’d asked him about her husband all of those hundreds of years before. She still looked the same to him, still just as sad and as enigmatically beautiful as she had that day when he’d asked her if she might spare him an onion or a turnip. She hid it well, he thought, but he could see past the dark cloth which wasn’t really there. He could see right past that to the dark green heavy velvet dress that she wore. Her face was lovely, though her long auburn hair was dripping from the rain. Shauna looked past the woman at the slight rise of ground there behind her. What she saw at first was a bit of a dark spot in between two of the many decorative shrubs growing all around them in this tastefully planned-out cemetery. But after a moment, she saw that it wasn’t just a dark spot and it wasn’t a shadow either, since the overcast sky left the sun no way to play tricks such as that. Shauna bent forward a little, wanting to shield her camera from the rain as she swapped lenses for a longer one. Raising the camera to her eye once more, she pretended to be trying for a shot of a large headstone nearby for a moment and then swinging slowly just a little to the right. She saw something and it wasn’t a shadow. Not with a leg underneath a shoulder like that. But then it was gone. Shauna began to walk then, moving around the funeral party to begin to walk up the rise as though she was just wandering for a moment or two. When she stepped sideways through the space between the two shrubs, shuddering a little over the way that the wet fronds and branches transferred their cold water to her, she heard the low warning growls begin. She turned toward the sounds and she found herself in a small square ringed with shrubs and paved with flat stones. In the center, there was a raised reliquary which she supposed contained the remains of somebody or other. In the corner diagonally opposite to where she stood there was that shadow again, a large smudge darker than the rest and darker than the day by a wide margin. She stepped slowly closer a foot or so at a time and the center of the darkness appeared to turn, preparing to go. A Hope for Rauri Ch. 03 She held up her palm and did the best that she could, seeing something inside the smudge. What came out of her was Gaelic as old as she knew to make it as she said, “Hold” in a half questioning, half pleading tone. The growls stopped, ending in a questioning note and the center of the smudge turned toward her waiting uncertainly. Shauna really wasn’t sure about anything, least of all what she ought to do here, but the darkness began to solidify to a degree and she found a sigh escaping her throat and then with a quick look around to make certain that she was unobserved by anyone but that darkness, she let herself slide as far into her wolfen shape as she could, encumbered as she was in human clothing. Wes was only five feet or so from the weeping woman now, listening to her soft sobs. The minister had finished his eulogy and was preparing to go, though he did his bit in offering what comforting words that he could to the five family members that Wes had been able to pick out. There was the widow or possibly the sister - he didn’t know for sure. Then there were who he guessed were the daughters and their men, judging by the few common facial features that he saw. All of them were drifting a little in the direction of the road and wherever they’d parked their cars. He was thinking of trying to speak to the dark woman when the minster seemed to notice her and walked over. Wes watched as the holyman tried to ask her if she was alright and did she need a ride anywhere. For that, he received a look as though she was a little surprised, though she wept on and eventually shook her head, saying nothing. At that point, she turned and began to slowly walk in the other direction, leaving the minster standing and looking a little uncomfortable. He appeared to almost shrug to himself as he began to head after the rest. Wes continued to watch as the woman, who now was beginning to appear as more of an apparition with each step that she took began to move away. As she was just at the corner of the walkway where it turned out of sight, she turned her head and looked at Wes for a moment and then she was gone. He began to follow her and when he reached the spot where she’d looked back, he saw no one there as he looked out over the majority of the cemetery. At that point, Wes noticed that he didn’t see Shauna anywhere and he walked in the direction that he’d last seen her move in. As he neared the shrubs with the gap between them, he saw something dark which almost grunted in surprise and then it was gone. Wes shouldered into the gap and he saw Shauna on her knees on the wet stones with her hand raised as though she’d been touching something which was no longer there and her face wore a strange expression. “Hey, ...” he began softly, “Shauna, are you ok?” She didn’t appear the have heard him at all. He just saw her on her knees looking wolfish with a rather vacant expression. “Shauna?” She seemed to come back to herself then and she saw him as though for the first time in this. “Huh? Oh... Uh, yeah.” She got to her feet and she was human in her appearance the next instant. “Are you alright?” He asked, “What happened there? You went wolf in here. In daylight. What was that all about and what was that shadow thing that was here?” She looked back toward the corner of the shrubbery and then she looked at him for a moment, “Come on. Let’s go Wes. We need to talk, and I really need a cup of coffee, followed by at least two more of something hot. Let’s get out of here.” ---------------- As they drove through the rain, Wes tried to get something out of Shauna, but she seemed preoccupied in flipping through the shots that she’d gotten, looking at the display at the back of her camera. She seemed dissatisfied over them. “I looked past that tall woman and I saw something behind those bushes back there, so I went to see what it was. Wes, I saw a shadow and inside of it, I saw ...” She paused there and Wes waited. Hearing nothing from her, he looked over and she shrugged as she looked out of the windshield at nothing, “... somebody wonderful.” Wes waited a full three seconds as he drove before he looked over again, “Is that it?” “I dunno,” Shauna said, “I had trouble seeing him at first, because he was hanging right at the edge of the space where I was. He looked like the slightest mistake that I might make would cause him to be gone the next instant. I guess you could say that I saw a dog - a freaking huge one - and I can’t say that I’m sure of it or anything because of the darkness, but I’d just about swear that, ... ok, just concentrate on driving the car here, alright?” She took a breath then and said, “It was really hard to see, but I saw right away that he wasn’t just a dog, no matter how big he was. Wes, there was a brain in there, no less bright than yours or mine and I could hear his questions to me. He asked me who I was and what I was doing there. I ... I answered as best I could, though I didn’t tell him very much.” She sighed then, not that it was loud, though Wes caught it and looked over. “He let me touch him, Wes. I touched the side of his face. That’s when he must have heard you coming and he left.” Wes said nothing, though he nodded. “Is that why you were there like that?” She nodded, “I don’t know why, ... I just ... I didn’t want him to leave before I’d had a chance to really see him better, I guess. There was something about him, and I mean more than just what you’d see looking at a dog. Next to you when you’re like that, he was the finest male that I’ve ever seen.” Wes nodded at that, trying to fit things together as he drove. “And in the darkness that he made to hide himself in, I could have sworn that he was a little green.” He said nothing to that and when she looked over after a few seconds, she saw that he was smiling and trying like hell to keep it at that. They both burst into laughter. “I’m really not crazy,” she chuckled after the mirth began to fade, “I really saw that.” He nodded, “I’m not doubting you. It’s just that what you said was about the last thing that I’d have expected to hear right then, that’s all.” “What did you get out of staring at the woman?” she asked, “I saw you trying to do your best not to, and I guess that you fit right in with the way that everybody else was looking at her, since I’m sure that nobody knew her at all and they were wondering what the hell she was doing there, just like I could see that they were looking at us the same way. She’s the one, isn’t she?” He looked over and he nodded slowly, “Yeah. That was her. All this time, and I’d still know her anywhere.” Wes and Shauna had known each other for such a lone time and there were no secrets between them at all. She knew what had happened to him all that time ago and she knew that he still sometimes had dreams in which a tall beautiful woman walked through his sight, never stopping and never answering his questions or even his attempts to get her attention. She just called it his fixation with tall dark redheads to lighten things up when he spoke of it because his expression often grew into a bit of a haunted look then. She saw that he was wearing that look right then. “Well,” she smiled with a little laugh, “I guess I might come to know how you feel, partner. I’ve just seen someone that I don’t think that I’ll forget anytime soon either.” Shauna’s phone rang then and she looked at the number, “I’ll bet that the roaming charges are gonna be sky high on this job. From the number, I think this is Cleena.” She answered and after a few moments, she looked over, “She wants us to drive to that place, ... Loudon Hill. Can we do that?” While he was thinking it over and looking at the sky and then his watch, there was more conversation over the phone and Shauna disconnected, “She suggested meeting us there not long after about seven or eight tomorrow morning. I told her we’d be there.” -------------- Right about the time that Shauna and Wesley sat down together in the dining room of the hotel to look at the menus and consider what to have for supper, Cleena - or Cliodnha as she was properly known, was sitting on her seat in her hall, lost in thought. She raised her head after a moment, looking away down a long dark passageway as a faint sound came to her ears. She rose then and began to walk. As she strode, the sounds of weeping came to her ears and she wondered a little. To her mind, no one here had much of any reason to be sad enough to weep over anything - other than one person and even that one didn’t really do much of that here in her queen’s hall. She reached the door to a small bedchamber and she looked in. There on the bed was the one, long back from the funeral of the mortal that neither of them knew. She hadn’t been crying by then anymore, Cliodnha thought, so what was the trouble now? The woman looked up as her queen stepped into the room and tried to wipe her red eyes, not that it did the slightest good. “What is wrong?” the queen asked. “I have been thinking of what you said to me, and I was even coming to have a hope that I might see the one that you spoke of to me.” She reached for a handkerchief and wiped her eyes again, giving in at the end to blow her nose as discreetly as possible. “I think that I might have even seen him this day,” she sniffled, “There was one at the grave where I was today who plainly did not belong with the others. I tried not to look, though I saw him clearly as I left. I know him - or at least, I can say that I remember him.” “Did he look good to you?” Cliodnha asked with a small smile, “He is here from far away. I met him not too far from where he resides. I thought that he looked fine and handsome to my eyes. He is here with another looking for you as I asked him to. What is wrong?” The one on the bed stared for a moment and then she burst into loud and mournful tears once more. Cliodnha sat on the bed and tried to comfort the woman, not understanding this at all. “I found him to be ... as ... as you said, and I found a small hope in my breast that if I was ... if I was careful, ... But I went to wash not long ago and ... and when I took off my dress, ...” She stopped there, hanging her head to cry again. It was many minutes of Cliodnha sitting and stroking the dark hair before she learned any more. Finally, she asked what it might be that could be so wrong and the young woman looked up with her red eyes and tear- streaked face. “I - I remembered what you said to me. ... I have done nothing. And yet ...” She reached down and lifted the hem of her dress, “My queen, ... It is already too late!” Cliodnha looked down and she stared. There, where the woman’s feet ought to have been, she saw only the gray, fur-covered hocks and the dark and slight shine of a pair of cloven hooves, larger than what a doe might have and much closer to the ones worn by an elk. “Can you hide them?” she asked, looking up. The woman nodded, “Yes, but they remain there every time when I do not think of them. What am I to do? No one will want me and, ...” her lovely face began to contort as she fought to retain some composure, “I do not want to lie in the earth as a dead thing! And now, “she sobbed, “Now least of all! My queen, ... please, ... can you help me?” Cliodnha shook her head a little, “I did not do this. I must think on it. Do not despair yet. Let me think and ... I might know of one to ask.” She hugged the woman for a moment, trying to offer a little hope and then she got to her feet and walked out of the room, talking long strides out of her haste. She walked to the main part of her hall and then she called out in a strange way. After moment, she heard an answering cry and she nodded to herself as she walked to her throne and sat down, thinking furiously and wishing that the time might pass a little faster toward the dawn. It would be that long at least before she saw the one that she’s called to, and it had not been a command. It had been a respectful request. After a time, she looked up and she saw the woman almost hanging against the side of the root-covered stone of the doorway and she beckoned with a wave. When the red-haired one stood before her, she called softly in another direction and in a moment, the dark shape was before her as well. “I hold it in my mind to see if things might go a little right this night,” she said to them both. “I know of what happened near the grave this day and I have thought of it awhile.” She indicated the rest of the hall with a slow sweep of her hand, “Things have changed and things always will. To go on as before is to become little more than the ghostly echoes which disturb the sleep of the humans.” She looked at them, from one to the other, “So I send you both forth this night. There are things which you must seek to know, not for me so much as for yourselves. Have a care what you do and do nothing which causes harm or hurt. Learn what you can about what you seek to know and might find a wish for - and be back here in my hall before the first crowing of the cock.” She felt the question there in the minds of both and she smiled, “The nearest cock, however many leagues that might be from this lonely place.” She smiled in a way which was meant to offer her understanding and a little hope to the woman, “Try hard if you can to hold your tears back this night. Now go.” ------------- Shauna was in her room, thinking of going to sleep and hoping that it wouldn’t be too long in coming to her since they had to be up early in the morning and driving if they were to arrive at Loudon Hill to meet Cleena. She just had trouble with two things. One of them was the chill of the day and how wet she’d gotten out there. She’d already had a shower and it had helped, but it was nowhere near as long as she’d have liked to have spent under the stream of hot water. The result was that she’d felt a little better, but that it hadn’t been enough. The other thing was the thought of the being that she’d seen out there and the way that the memory just wouldn’t leave her alone. Well, she thought to herself, she might be able to change one of those things, at least. She undressed and stepped into the bathroom to turn on the shower. -------------- Wes had his shower and got into the bed in his room. He was a little pleased that Shauna wasn’t there with him because he knew that if she were, they’d have one of their little moments. He smiled to himself for a second as he pulled the covers up. He had no way to classify the phenomenon, but there was something that he knew about his dear friend, and it was not fixable. Whenever he’d asked about it, she’d just told him in all sincerity that it happened because she was a woman. If she had something going on in her head, she’d have a hell of a time getting to sleep. Wes wasn’t like that at all. They could be in bed together with her talking to him and if she paused to think of anything for longer than about a minute and a half, well, he was gone then and already sleeping. If she woke him or if she asked about it the next day, he’d smile a little sheepishly and say that she must have stopped speaking for long enough. And of course, she’d hit him for it, though not hard and it was only out of her exasperation with him. And he could make it worse, if he was feeling a little mischievous by putting on his best innocent and mystified expression. “Don’t men ever stay awake and worry or think of anything?” she’d asked him at least several dozen times over the years, never being able to understand. “I dunno,” he’d always reply, “I only know that if I think about anything, I might not be able to sleep - so I don’t.” And she’d hit him again, every time. Right then, he’d have bet pretty much anything that Shauna wouldn’t get much sleep at all tonight after what she’d seen. He closed his eyes and tried not to think about anything. -------------- Shauna shut the water off, feeling warm and comfortable at last as she stepped out of the shower and began to towel off. All that she needed to do now was to get her hair a little on the road to being dry . She’d worry about looking good in the morning. But as she walked out into the rest of her room, she stopped and saw someone there who almost caused her to drop the towel that she was trying to wrap around her a little better. He was there in her room, sitting on the floor by the bed, looking back at her. In her best old Gaelic, she asked him if he’d come for her and he nodded as his thoughts came to her mind. “Aye. To see you once more, I’ve come this far and could not help myself. I could not abide the waiting.” He looked down, “I am sorry if I cause you shame by being here.” Shauna had never been what she might have said was a fool. She also wasn’t what one might call shy in terms of her body - as far as her human appearance went, anyway. What she looked like in her more wolfen form, ... well, that was another matter. It wasn’t so much that she was shy even then, but what she looked like then certainly wouldn’t have necessarily been any normal human’s epitome of beauty. In strictly human terms, of course. Her ears were quite normal - for a German shepherd, and her eyes had the same sort of yellowish brown color to the irises, though those irises were shaped much like the ones of a dog or a wolf. Where it can be said that a human girl’s nose sticks out a little bit in front of the lips and mouth, Shauna’s when she was like this, well, one could say that they were almost about even, since her jaws jutted forward. Her hair was still the same, though it also tended to look a little more like a mane and it blended well into the rest of her ... pelt. And aside from the effects of having just gotten out of the shower, there was nothing ratty or unkempt about her at all. Her hips were still there, though she stood on long legs which were lovely in their way, though she could stride as a bipedal wolf on her large feet, and she had a bit of a bushy tail then as well. Her breasts were still there too, though as a wolf and not a nursing one at present, they were much smaller and a little flattened in a way as they lay covered in her soft fur. Her nipples were still there in evidence all the same. Her bosom was still a pleasant-looking swell - just not particularly large. Sure, her hands were larger like this and were a sort of blend between a hand and a paw in a way and her arms were longer, but that all had to do with the adapted musculature so that she could - if she wished to - quite easily bound along on all fours, though not quite in the same manner as a dog would. So if one were the sort of human who was prone to being easily shocked into fear or fright, then Shauna - like she was as a werewolf, was near enough in one sudden glance to stop somebody’s heart if she came at them from out of nowhere in the dark. But it must be said that if one had the eyes to see it, she was still rather beautiful even then. She just didn’t look human at all. But the one waiting for her wasn’t human either, not really. And he had his own canid shape, as large and powerful as he was. He was one who Shauna suddenly felt a bit of a desperate hope in her heart could and would like her that way. So she shifted. As he looked down to avert his gaze, she dropped the towel and walked to him. He didn’t mean to, and indeed, he’d have said - if asked in other circumstances - that it might be a little rude to show some overt sign as his reaction. But the sight of Shauna like that did have an effect on him and he gasped just a little anyway, completely taken by her beauty. “I offer an exchange then,” she smiled as she reached to slip her fingers into the coarse fur on his large head, “I can let you see me in both ways, if you will do the same for me, since you seem to share what I feel about you. Do you?” A Hope for Rauri Ch. 03 The large head looked up at her, just a little above the horizontal to look at her face. He was careful to do that, for to look straight ahead would have found him looking at her lovely breasts. “I do,” he nodded, “I could not stay outside of the wall there. Please, if you have a name that I might know, pray tell it to me so that I might have the sound of it to carry in my heart. But - Do you not feel shame and fear of me?” She shook her head with a soft smile as he watched her complete her shift into something which resembled him more than her human form and she walked to him on four legs and sat down before him. “What I am,” she began, “What we are - as close as we might be to one another - I feel no shame to see the look in your eyes for me. I would walk a very long way if I might only see that look in your eyes at the end of it.” He nodded once as he brought his face nearer to hers and they sniffed each other, a little eager to gain what they could by using the sense and what it brought to them as what they were here. “The male,” he began, “He is yours?” “No,” she sighed as she leaned in to sniff along his jaw for a moment. She inhaled his wonderful scent a little slowly since she found it intoxicating, “He is an old friend. We have known each other for a long time. We mate sometimes, but it is to give to each other. As what we are, he and I, there are never very many for us, and for us both, we have never found the one, that is all. My name is Shauna Kavanaugh. Tell me who I sit here with. I must know the name of the beast who can warm me from this far away.” “I have no true name,” he said, “though I am called Sam by some. I am one of the Coin Sith tribe, and there are not many of us now. I am the youngest adult of my clan now.” She gasped as she sat back to stare as politely as she could, “You are a Cù Sìth! Then you are of the Sith people. I have never met one. I am lucky this night, I think.” His gaze at her grew even softer than it had been to this point, “I do not know. Most fear me. I bring news of death most often; it is my task, as well as other things. What sort are you? I see nothing of the Aos Sí to you, though by your name you are one of the ones that I might bay over when you pass. I hear your name and I know it as Caomhánach, yet I have seen no one like you before.” She was bright enough to notice that he’d missed something about her and she let it pass, not seeing the need to correct him. She only smiled a little and she slid her snout along his and he returned the gesture with the softest groan, “I was born a human in the land of Eire, but we traveled to another land where I grew up. I was a human, until I was bitten as a girl. Later, the male that you spoke of bit me so that I might become stronger, since I wished for it. We are werewolves; I think that I can be thought of as a changeling in that way. What other tasks have you?” He sighed, not wanting this to end, though it was his fear that it now would, “Men fear me if they must travel out on the roads at night for I can bring death to them, though I seldom do without cause. Also, it is said that to hear my cry is the only warning they might have to hide and lock up their women, lest I come to take them away. I can make them come to me willingly, though they do not know of it and I carry them back with me.” He seemed to remember himself then and he was quick to tell her that she was in no danger from him. It wasn’t strictly true, but he didn’t want this to end. So he didn’t speak of the rest. It caused her to laugh a little, “From what I see and feel about you, mighty beast, I think that we are both in some danger here, are we not?” She licked his lips and he opened his mouth for her, returning the gesture as they both groaned quietly for a moment. When he drew back, the huge animal was smiling - as much as his features would allow as he nodded with what she held a hope in her breast was his lust for her and more than that besides. “Oh, I have such a hope that we are, Shauna Caomhánach. I have never felt something this strongly before.” She motioned toward the bed with her chin and a little smile, “Come then. I have never been this fast to get to what I have the want in me to have with you this night.” “I cannot,” he said a little apologetically, “I am too heavy for the bed the way that I am. I know that you want it this way from me first.” “I do at that,” she grinned, “So? I see no reason why we have to break the furnishings. Give me what we both ache for - I can feel that you do as well - give it to me right here in that way and then, if you are as good as your word, I can see what I already know that I also want with you in the bed. You are not so heavy then, are you?” “No,” he chuckled, “I think that I must look more, ... ordinary then.” “I think not,” she laughed again as she changed herself back into her human form, moving to kneel on the floor with her head laid on her arms on the bed with a sweet smile for him over her shoulder, “not from what I have had little glimpses of in you. Come and take me, wondrous beast.” She sighed as she felt his hot breath near her bottom. The short little inhalations brought her a little cold feeling, as wet as she was for him, but the exhalations were hot blasts which felt so good to her that she even whimpered once or twice. It was his cold nose against her which almost caused her to jump straight up, but she settled right down when his tongue began, and she raised her hips as much as the position would allow, since she couldn’t have her head any lower like this. Shauna knew what she wanted from him here. She just hoped that he knew enough to give it to her in the right place. But then he mounted her and she was a little lost in the way that for such a large thing, he certainly was careful and gentle as she felt his forelegs holding her. A moment later, she felt that his paws were like hers and could also grip in the way of hands as he placed one of his on her hip and to Shauna’s joy, it spanned the distance from the dimple above her cheek right around to where he could almost hold the top of her thigh with his fingers and his palm covered about a third of her cheek. In seconds, she also felt his first probing little thrusts and she couldn’t help the small smile which came to her. He was in the right place. She felt it as he stiffened and grew out of his sheath for her and in less than a quarter of a minute, he’d reached his full size and had slowed his thrusting so that he could take her in one long and very slow go. She moaned out loudly and she pressed herself back as far as she could to take him in. As the werewolf female that she was, it had always been a small and slightly unfortunate sadness to her that any human male that she’d liked enough to allow things between them to get to this point had always felt just a tiny bit cool to her. It was due to her higher internal body temperature, she knew. It wasn’t a big deal; it was only a reminder that she’d left that behind long ago. It was also another reason why she’d always loved to do this with her friend Wesley since he was the same as she was and it always felt right to them. She’d heard his sad thoughts on the same thing whenever he’d taken a human woman to try to grow a love with. But this amazing creature filled her with his warmth and so when she could, she asked him if she was warm for him and he’d only lowered his head next to hers and licked her ear, “What do you think, Shauna? I have never had such a wonderful bitch beneath me as I do now.” She groaned as she felt the careful way that he brought his huge paw around to graze her breast and she finally laid her head down on her arms and closed her eyes, not wanting to see the way that the room moved from his thrusting and plowing. She also didn’t want to be distracted in any of this, and she loved to feel the heat of his balls as they kissed up against her so softly, so incredibly warmly and ... So incredibly well. Oh fuck, Shauna thought as she felt her first hints of the rushing thrill of her first climax begin to come to her. She opened her mouth and began to moan for him, needing to in order to let it out of her and wanting as well to let him know that she was his in this. She wondered for a moment if there was anything that she ought to be doing for him here, but nothing came to mind. Nobody - not even Wesley Valence - had ever fucked her so nicely before. If there was such a thing as being allowed to choose the manner in which one might die and receive that gift, then this was the way that she wanted it when it was her time. Well, not the first time, she decided. After maybe three or four times. Or, um, ... ten. --------------- She noticed the shift in him even from outside of the outer wall of his room - sensing it as he’d laid all of his cares aside in the enviable way that many males have when they lie down to sleep. From where she stood, she could tell that his thoughts weren’t stupid or shallow; not at all. He was bright enough to know that whatever lay undone in his day, there was nothing more to be attempted without cost to his rest, and so he laid his burdens down and went to sleep. She found it an admirable quality - even enviable from the feminine viewpoint. Think things through elsewhere and plan if one must. Lay aside the ongoing troubles and burdens which cannot be grappled with or changed anymore for one day and sleep. Pick them up again in the morning. Females do not do this, she admitted to herself. We think, or perhaps worry - and they are interchangeable very often. We weigh options. We formulate and shape our plans. She wanted to chuckle as she finished the admission in her mind. We lose much time to it when we could be sleeping. The thoughts and the plans come anyway. A little smile crossed her beautiful face for a moment as she sought to sense it as his brain made the first testing steps toward deep sleep. There was much power to him, she thought. Well, there had to be if his unguarded life force and thought processes could be detected from as far away as the shrubbery outside of the building. She noticed the change which she’d been waiting to sense and she came into the room as little more than a dream, settling to stand and become solid matter as she moved in order to observe him a little better. She stood in the room looking down at him, bathed as he was by the thin bands of light and dark there on his body, painted that way by the yellow rays of the parking lot lighting through the venetian blinds at the window. It had been a little time as she’d waited earlier on the other side of that window, careful lest a passerby notice her out there and also very cautious not to allow those lights to cause her to leave her own shadow on his bed. He’d fallen asleep as he’d wanted to, though now that she was here, she was seeing him grow restless as he slept. So with more of her patience and curiosity, she was given the small reward of watching him as he worked more and more of his wondrous body out from under the covers, eventually throwing them almost completely off in his sleep right before her eyes. It caused her to smile softly as she regarded his body. She tried to remember the way that it felt to have the arms of a man around her in a bed; the way that it felt to move against him only a little and feel the way that her breasts used to thrill at times like that. And not at only the times while they were loving. At all of the other times when they were only a pair who loved each other whenever she had the time to be with him. She thought back over the males that she’d had so long ago when she’d had far fewer cares of her own. As often happened, her thoughts drifted to the one who’d meant the most to her, back when she struggled under the new mantle of her heavy task. She would come to him when she could, sometimes for only some stolen moments. Even now, she wondered if perhaps there had been some undiscovered way that she could have cast aside her cares forever and just been someone with perhaps a harder, though much simpler life. But she’d done her best and found no help for it. Nature found its way eventually, as it so often does - being nature after all, and she’d carried her new burden, knowing the only possible and unavoidable end. And after a time, - once her little one could walk and was learning to speak, she’d left that burden with her lover when they’d parted and she’d taken up her own regret to walk back and live in the chains of her power and the responsibilities which came with them. Looking at this male, she could see herself wanting to lose herself in him. Her mind recalled the nights spent in a poorer and much more humble place - and yet, it had been a place where much joy had existed. Bones and sinews under his skin, she saw as she looked. Muscle and strength in abundance and a very sweet face, if you looked past the rugged attractiveness there. She closed her eyes for a moment, thinking of doing the thing which her heart screamed at her to do. For some moments, she ached as she fought back the want in her to throw off her clothing and get into the bed. It was killing her somewhere inside of herself. This one was the perfect one to live that simple and joyous life with; the one which she’d always wanted for herself and could only have tastes of. She knew herself and she was thankful that it wasn’t raining. It would have been more than she could stand then. Her eye flicked out to regard the night out there past those venetian blinds. Calm and still out there. A good thing, because it allowed her to fight down what she wanted and concentrate more on what was needed. But she knew herself. She knew ... She knew that if it had been raining outside and even better, a cold and sleet-filled rain and if there was a bed for them not far from a warm hearth in a cozy place with oak beams for rafters and a thatched roof, she’d - She wanted to shake her head to clear it, but she didn’t because she knew that it wouldn’t have done her a bit of good. She looked at his chest and she knew that on a night where it pissed icy cold rain, if there was such a place and such a bed and hearth, she’d want to stay in his arms for the rest of her life. But she could do none of those things. She was here to help another, so she turned to the window and nodded. A second female stood beside her in an instant, looking uncertain. She smiled and sighed out her very nearly silent admonition to be careful. After that, she faded to become like a dream again, passing through the wall to land hurrying away across the parking lot. At the edge of the lot she passed easily over the fence and once she’d reached the woods, she began to run - as though doing it would leave her heart’s foolishness behind. It wouldn’t, and she knew it, but it allowed her to gain some distance so that she might be far from anyone if her tears overtook her. It seldom happened, but after seeing one like him and knowing that you did what you did for your own when you had to ... well, it was the right thing, if not to at least a part of her own selfish heart. In the room, the second female stood and looked down at the sleeping one. More than anything else, she wondered about him, trying hard to think of why a man like he’d been back then in the glade of her lonely sadness and grief would have remembered anything of her then. From what she could recall, every one of her own breaths back then had felt like a curse for the way that it reminded her of the wall which stood between her and the dead husband that she’d loved with everything that she’d had. The one that she now couldn’t remember anything of at all. Earlier - and it had taken some time and a lot of internal struggle, she could recall that her man had been a little barrel-chested and stout, coming from people who worked hard at their crofts to stay alive and keep their loved ones that way. But that was all that came to her. And she still for the life of her could not recall his name anymore. If she’d felt a little like a living person back then - though it was what she’d been - she wondered if she would have felt this way to look at this man when he’d asked her for something to eat - anything at all. He’d been starving then. It had been plain to see and she guessed that she was still alive enough then to know the way that it felt to have nothing to eat when one’s gut ached for something, anything. Like one of her small and stone-hard turnips. Now, she looked down at him as she took in the sight of his body and all of the details which came to her eyes. As sleeping men went, he looked very good to her and it came to her as a bit of a shock, noticing it for the first time in who knew how long. What she could see of him here was very pleasant to regard like this. In her life, she’d never known a man shaped as this one was. She looked at his face and she could see a lot of strength in him, just as he slept, and the rest of him, ... It came to her that this man - or whatever he was to be able to live on as just as she was doing herself - well this man, ... this one man, now seemed to her to represent her salvation in a way. To hear of her queen speak of it during their talk afterward, this one man was perhaps her only chance now. So now, she thought as she watched him sleep, she’d come here as she’d been told to at the right time to try to know a little of him. She saw that there was strength to him. Oh, that was very plain and clear to her eyes. She saw his face and she wondered about him even more. She knew that he was not of her people - well, who they had been, at any rate so long before. She knew from the few things that he’d said as he’d asked her for something to eat and when she’d heard his quiet thanks from behind her that day as she’d walked off to leave him. He was one of the hated English army. She hadn’t cared then. Just as she didn’t care now, though out of a different reason, she supposed. As she stood there she wondered for a moment. If she’d seen him before she’d ever met her husband, ... would she feel this way about him then? She guessed in her silent way that she’d have noticed him if she’d had a look at him, say in the village square while she was there to bargain and buy a few things that she might have needed. She tilted her head a little in order to get a clearer look at his face for a moment. She nodded to herself then. If she’d seen this one then, she’d have looked. Who wouldn’t have, really? He stirred then and she caught her own slight gasp as he moved. Instead, she inhaled slowly, forcing herself to do it so as not to make a sound. As she watched, she saw the way that the flesh rode over the ridges on his abdomen and the way that he moved as he rolled over toward the side of the bed where she stood, his head still on the pillow with his hand underneath it. He strained a little then, as though he was stretching somehow, but it was only for a moment, only long enough for his slight yawn to pass from him in his sleep. Her eye drifted to the muscles over his ribs and his large shoulder as those parts of him moved. And then he was still once more and breathing deeply. She sank to her knees so that she could see his face better in the shadows. He looked as though he could look a little grim if he had the need of it, but otherwise, she saw nothing dark about him which might indicate cruelty. She saw the lines on his face which showed her the way that his face drew back when he laughed and she found that she liked that. But there was another thing to him. She could almost barely see it, just not what it was. She didn’t know and couldn’t say, but she had the sense that it was this quality that he had which was responsible in some way for his long life somehow. She just didn’t know what it was. He looked like a man clear enough, but it was as though there was a shadow of something else which she just could not see enough of to be able to determine much more. A Hope for Rauri Ch. 03 And it brought her a very small sense of alarm; not much and like this, easily overlooked and almost forgettable. Just not quite so. After another long moment, she decided that it was time that she’d better leave. With him asleep and not having really met him - and not wanting to awaken him - she felt as though she’d gotten everything that she could from him in trying to learn about him. It really wasn’t enough for her, though she knew what she’d say if her queen asked over it. She found that she liked him and she’d say that. It wasn’t as though she’d been given a range of men to choose from, was it? He was the one; she’d been told who could live alongside her for however long she still had remaining to her on this earth, so he would be enough, since he had to be. As she got ready to stand up to go, she noticed with a shock that his eyes were open and he lay there regarding her quietly. She wondered how it was possible for her to have missed it when it had happened and those eyes opened. She wondered why there was no shock visible to her in him. He smiled at her. She couldn’t believe it. He was smiling at her! He thought for a moment about the differences of speech over the long time. “Prithee,” he said very quietly, not far at all above a whisper, “Stay but a moment. I would hate to have to wait as long again to speak with you.” To him, she looked for a moment as though she thought to run, but then ... she didn’t. “My name is Wesley,” he said as he lifted himself up just a little to regard her with his hand holding his head up, “Roger Wesley de Valence. I was born in the year 1286 in England and I am the bastard of Aymer de Valence. I fought in his army and I even saw him a few times, though I never spoke to him as he did not know me. I did not come to rob you and others of your country. I came because the army was work which could feed me.” She nodded slowly then, reeling a little over the way that she now suddenly wanted more than anything to throw off her clothing and get into the bed with him. She’d have given him all of the turnips that she owned - which was none, now that she thought of it. She’d have given him anything just to lie against him and to feel those arms around her for a quarter of an hour. She wondered then if it happened whether it would be enough and she doubted it, knowing herself as she did, even though the way that she felt now was the strangest thing after so long. She was so torn, wanting to feel him against her and wanting also to accept what she’d been told. If this was the one - and he looked like this ... She wanted an end to her uncertainty about her future. She wanted to cling to him for the life that she’d have. But there was that something about him - that unknown quality which seemed to hover around him and trouble her somehow. He looked into her shocked face and his smile appeared a little strained for a moment, “I have always remembered your kindness to me. Please tell me your name, Lady.” She blinked for a moment and then she said, “Brìghde I was baptized in our parish sir, but I am not and never was a lady as you may know the word. My father always called me Rauri from when I was a girl because of my hair. But it is a man’s name, to be sure.” He smiled then as his eyes drifted to her hair, though it was too dark to see the color of it, “Aye, it was and still is a man’s name, though I have heard it used by some women over the last fifty years now. I think that Rory is a fine name as is Brighde. I am so happy to find you here, Rory, but if I can ask it, why are you here? I do not ever have dreams this pleasing to me that I can remember.” “I - I ... “she hesitated, “I saw you at the graveside this day and I thought that I knew you. I came back to see.” She looked down, completely flustered now over the way that her eyes had drifted as she’d sought for something to say to him in reply. In doing it, her eyes had drifted over him and the way that he was so obviously naked - as nice as it was to see, but then she was now realizing in a little bit of horror that he must have seen her eyes as she looked there just as she’d said that she’d come to see and - “I don’t mind.” She was about to stammer out that she had to go and she even began to say the words, but ... “I must go, I - I should not be here with you there in the bed and I feel ... as though I have taken advant - “ She looked at him, “Your pardon, sir, what did you say?” He tried not to grin, feeling her discomfiture very clearly. He kept his little smile there, though as slight as it was, he had it going full blast, “I said that I do not mind you being here at all.” He reached for the covers and drew them up only as much as he needed to cover what he thought might be distracting her. “If I had but the right words to say which might make you want to stay here a little longer, then I would say them and any others that I knew of if only they might keep you here so that I could speak with you, since I am enjoying it so.” But his words seemed to be having the opposite effect on her and she got to her feet and began to back away. Wesley wanted desperately to find a way to cause her to want to stay a little longer, but he knew that there was nothing which would help his cause, just by looking at her face. He guessed that he could understand the reason, though in actual fact, he couldn’t have been more wrong. She did want to stay. She wanted more than anything now to stay right there and speak with him - even if that was all that happened. In the short time that he’d been awake, she knew that the queen was correct. He was more than a little charming and attractive and he was someone who she now wanted to know, the first in so very long, but, ... She’d remembered her legs and feet. “I must go, Wesley,” she said, walking toward the wall. “Wait Rory,” he said, “Will I ever see you again?” “I - I do not know, I - I hope I - “ And then she was gone, right through the wall. He jumped up and ran to the window, but she was already almost out of sight. A second later, ‘almost’ no longer applied, and he sighed. He gave a thought to grabbing some clothes and running out after her. He was easily desperate enough to do it. But he knew that it would do no good. She was gone. Even if he could catch her somehow, he knew that it wasn’t something which would have gone well. He eased himself back down onto the bed and looked at the ceiling, trying to burn her features into his memory even more than they’d always been. And he knew without a doubt that he wouldn’t be getting very much sleep at all tonight. A Hope for Rauri Ch. 04 ***More than anything now perhaps, Wesley wants to know just WTF is really going on. Oh, and to maybe clear up a little confusion, "Bean Sith" is perhaps better pronounced as "Beyan She". Anglicized, it's "Banshee". There. All done. :) 0_o *** ---------------------- Shauna was on her front, a naked woman lying on top of a naked man like she'd never seen in her life before. She sought for comparisons as they traded kisses there in the bed, and the only one ... The only one which stayed with her was patently ridiculous. Try as she might, she could only think of Bam-Bam Rubble, a cartoon character all grown up and in the fine flesh here in the bed with her tonight. He was blonde, blue-eyed and gorgeous to her like this. And he was the sexiest man on the planet in her opinion. She just couldn't get the image out ...of her ... mind. She began to chuckle right through a kiss and he asked her about it. "May I call you Sam?" she smiled down at him as she kissed his nose, "I was thinking about a proper name and 'Awesome' just won't do for a first name -- though it is the truth." He nodded, "From you, it pleases me." He inhaled and let it out, still smiling, "So then for you, I am Sam. There are none in this land who call me by that name, though there are a very few in Eire." She felt one of his hands as it played with her bottom, and she also felt the way that he was hardening underneath her. She smiled again, "I can give you another look at the other side of me, if you think that you would like it like that." He nodded, and she wondered how he could do that, almost ripping her heart clean off it's hinges there in her chest with only his soft little smile. So, for him as well as herself, she admitted, she shifted the other way once more and in a moment, she was the female werewolf sitting astride him as she lifted herself a little and guided them together again. With it done, she looked at him and as stupid as it seemed, Shauna could have cried out in joy as she saw in one look and she absolutely knew that she was the female who had the same effect on his heart as he had on hers. In point of fact, and unknown to her, she was incorrect. She began to move on him, rocking her hips as she smiled down at that face. This was something that she and Wesley never did. They were both either human or they weren't when they fucked. It had always been that way, too. For one reason or another, they just didn't like the way that things lined up when they mixed their shapes. But Shauna really liked it now, just as her beautiful blonde there did. She raised her arms above her head, almost dancing in her slow and sensuous way for him. She wanted to moan for him again, but then it was decided by him and what he did. The sounds escaped her throat as she felt his human hands and fingers begin to trace over her, teasing her nipples and breasts, playing with her tail, sliding down over her belly to toy with her lips just a little in the nicest way that she'd ever felt. He sat up then, holding her and she was able to grab at a pillow to try to place it on top of the other one and with him like that, she placed her arm around his thick neck and ... They could trade kisses and best of all, they could look deep into each other's eyes -- a man and a she-wolf bitch giving to each other equally. He looked as surprised as she felt and guessed that she must have looked, but then she felt her passion rising in her just as she felt his rising to meet it. She hung on then and opened her mouth wide, needing to feel first his kiss and then how wonderful it felt to place her mouth over his as she teased his tongue. He gasped and it seemed to spur him somehow. Shauna found herself bouncing on him from his motions as he cried out a little while she moaned into his mouth and they came very close together a few moments later. It had taken a lot, but she'd managed to suppress the need to throw her head back and almost bay for him as he filled her. Shauna collapsed against him and it toppled Sam. They chuckled a little weakly as she rode him down to lie on him again. "Oh, that was good," she smiled as she kissed his throat, "and quite a ride for a while there, Bam-Bam Sam." He didn't get it, not having the reference and it caused Shauna to laugh in delight. -------------------------------- They met for an early breakfast the following morning, both of them noticing the tiredness of the other, so it was a while and one coffee at least before either one dared to begin. As they drove off toward Loudon Hill, they were both surprised as they compared notes. "Well," Shauna said, trying not to grin now that she was fully functional, "at least I got laid." As Wes nodded, she looked out at the countryside, "I just wonder if I've also got a new boyfriend. Look, Wes, - " "It's ok," he smiled, "I hope very much that's what it is and if not, then that's what I really hope that it turns into for you Shauna. I mean, look at us. We've been together on and off for so freaking long and we've always said that if one of us finds somebody that it won't change our friendship. I love you, Shauna. I always have and you know it. So many times over the years, I've wanted to give up and just accept what we've always had between us and go from there. But we both know ..." Shauna nodded, "I know, Baby. I've been the same. We've always been the same, you and me. So many times, I've wanted to come to you and just say 'What the hell, let's just do this thing and make it permanent between us'. But there's always this one thing -- like a little scrap of something in my head or my heart or something, just like it's in you." She sighed, "Well, whatever this is that I seem to have with Sam, I'm not going to lose sight of my best friend. I want you to at least get to know that girl enough to be able to figure out if there's something there -- other than a lonely banshee. So you say that she can actually speak?" He nodded, "Yeah, though I have to try to remember the way that people spoke more then, since it's different. Her name is Rory -- well, it was her nickname to her father, really. She does seem to be able to get what I mean easily enough." He moved a little, trying to stay limber as he drove, "She's still the object of the search for us, any way that you slice it, but now I've got another thing in my head and it's bugging the hell out of me." Shauna looked over, "How do you mean?" He shrugged, "I keep thinking about an old Doobie Brothers song about a guy who thinks he has something with a girl, when really, there was nothing there at all. It was called 'What a fool believes'. I'm a little scared that I might be like that. I mean, I only spoke to her once way back then and I just felt something. It's still there, Shauna. I still feel that way after last night and it's even stronger." He shook his head and frowned, "We're not here for me to find out if I'm an idiot. I figured out that I was a long time ago. We're here to find her and then find out what Cleena wants us to do about it." He said nothing after that. Shauna fell silent as well, though she reached over to hold his hand. ----------------------------------- They saw Cleena waiting for them some distance from the car park when they arrived. "I hope that you're ready to go on a little bit of a hike today," she said. She turned and began to walk as soon as she'd seen them both nod, though she slowed enough to allow them to catch up with her. "Where are we going?" Wes asked. When she turned her head, they saw that she wasn't wearing the sort of severe expression that they thought that they'd heard in her voice. She just sounded tired and a little regretful. "We're going to find our weeper," she said, "I'm going to lead you over a fairly large part of Scotland in a single day and sometime in it, I'm going to have to make something of an admission to you." "How do you mean?" Shauna asked. But the smile turned a little sad then and Cleena said only, "Not just yet, Shauna dear. I'll need to work up to it and that will take a little while. Please allow an old woman to work up steam at her own rate. Just know that your fee is real and you will have it. I just need to come to be in a better place within myself for it -- and that will take some walking." She said nothing more and Shauna exchanged curious glances with Wes as they went. At last, they came to the remains of the little croft under the trees. "This was once known as Backhill farm," Cleena said, "and that is because it lies as it does on the back of Loudon hill." She looked at Wesley then, "This is the place where you first saw and met a young woman long ago." He nodded and she spoke again, "Please, Wesley, don't ask me how or why I know that. You'll have the answer to that and more in just a little time." She turned to walk off around the base of the hill and they walked after her until they came to another dark grove on the other side. "This was once known as Underhill Farm, since, ... well, since it's under the hill, quite obviously. There has been no one living in either one for a long time. This one was abandoned more recently, some time early in the last century. Well, at least by humans. We've always been here." They both looked at her and then she smiled, "It will also be our gateway for the rest of today." She held her hand out in the direction of the ruin and they stared -- since it didn't look like one now. If anything, it looked as though it might have been left behind only the previous week. Cleena turned to lead them toward it. Shauna was almost bursting, wanting to know how, ... who ... what, ... the hell was going on here, but Cleena just opened the door and led them inside. The air was warm from the fire there in the hearth -- which they'd seen wasn't smoking at all from the outside when they'd seen the place from there, and it smelled like what was in the pot over the fire was a wondrous stew of some kind with plenty of meat and hearty vegetables to it. But that wasn't what caught their attention after they'd seen it. They were staring a little at the middle-aged couple in the room. They looked like nothing other than a pair of farm folk, a little stout to be sure from the hard work and the good food. Just a pair of farm folk used to living there. Well, a pair of farm folk who were fucking fairly happily. The man's trousers were around his ankles for the most part and the slightly round and happy-looking woman was on the counterboard with her dress high up and her legs very nearly so. "Good Morning, Hobbs," Cleena said, "Tom and Dotty both. I've just come in with a pair of visitors. Pay us no mind and carry on, please." The pair looked just a little shocked -- though they didn't stop their fucking for even a second as they dipped their heads as they could. "A fair mornin' te ye, my queen," Tom said with respect. Dotty echoed him, "We was just rememberin' our time here is all, your Highness. It got us te thinkin' about things and then we just wanted te do as we always did then." "Well," Cleena laughed as her voice shifted to match theirs, "By all means then. Ye both keep doing it and a fair day to ye both fer it, I'm sure." She led the astounded pair -- who'd heard the couple's very cheery and polite greetings to them as they'd passed by and returned them on their way to a door on the opposite wall. What amazed Wes was that Tom said that they remembered him from when he'd come in long ago when the old place was newer. Oh, aye," Dotty huffed a little, "Why, I was just a wee strip of a maid back then with almost nuthin' fer a chest for my Tom te kiss. We was picked te come here and watch. But Tommy liked ma wee charms so much and he was such a handsome young buck then that I just fell fer him in a minute. I think that he was between my knees a minute after that and before I could say, 'Oy, that's good', well there went ma maidenhead." She winked at the visitors, "And of course I made bloody certain that he fell fer me, if ye ken what I'm sayin', and we've been a pair ever since. I remember ye and how we waited while ye looked around and we was so happy te see ye go so we could do a wee bit more of this then." From Wes' memory of the place, the door led to the outside and the woods there. But they could both see through the opening that it didn't lead there at all. It led to a passageway. As soon as she'd closed the door behind them, Cleena rolled her eyes and smiled, "They're always doing that every time that I see them. They always have and I guess -- as well as hope -- that they always will. They're the keepers of this gate and for so long, they haven't needed to be here, since no one ever comes through the door which is no longer there to most eyes is it?" "They said that they knew me from when I came in there before," Wes said in a quiet and wondering tone. "I did walk in once, but there was no one in there, and the hearth looked to me as though it had been cold for weeks." "They called you Queen," Shauna remarked. Cleena's voice sounded different suddenly for the slightly lower pitch and the more pronounced Scots accent as she said, "Oh, they were here then. They just had no need to show themselves or that place as anything other than a deserted croft house. Since we've come this far and are out of the sight of anyone else from the day-to-day mortal world outside, I guess that I can begin to reveal a little more of things to you both." As she stood before them, she was no longer the middle-aged woman. She stood on long legs and was fairly tall clothed in much finer rainment, and not looking very much like a queen at all, unless perhaps it was one who chose an adventurous lifestyle. Her garb spoke of a rather more active life lived in a place just a little more, ... wild, it might be said. She appeared to be more ready to walk into the pages of an adventure novel set sometime during the middle ages than a woman who sat on a throne and did queenly things, whatever they might be. In the blink of an eye, Cleena had gone from middle-aged and lovely to at most, no older than perhaps thirty in her stunningly beautiful appearance. Her hair now was a golden blonde silk and it hung very long down her back and Wes noticed that she had bright green eyes where he was sure that he'd seen brown eyes until now. Her manner of speech changed even further into something rather more Gaelic sounding as well, though neither he nor Shauna had any trouble understanding her. Wesley managed to raise her eyebrows as he bowed, "So are you Queen Cliodnha, now?" Shauna was no dummy, she was only a little shocked, but she recovered instantly and bowed as well. The woman before them looked a little surprised as she nodded. She also looked a tad more imperious and also, there was something else to her -- a very slightly dangerous look in a way that was felt much more than seen. But she did appear to be a little pleased at their recognition. "Well it is very obvious to me that you both come by your reputations rather honestly if you know my true name," she chuckled, "though I did not try to hide it very much. So then you must also know what I am." They both nodded and Wes said, "We just don't know much of anything else." "Come," the queen smiled, "and I can help with that as we go." "Where are we going?" Shauna asked. "To a place a little north from here and a lot less of a walk if we do it this way, Shauna," Cliodnha smiled, "I am bringing you to my hall. Your admirer and lover lives there, though he does not know of your coming there today, and the one which we seek ought to be at least a little nearby as well, I hope." As they walked, she began to try to explain. "Brìghde -- the one which you seem to like to call Rauri as her father did -- as do I, it must be said, was a young widow when you first met her, Wesley. Her husband had been killed in the same battle which you were in. I watched, convinced that you men were all mad to want to do the things which I saw to serve a worthless king." She shrugged a little honestly, "I hope that I do not offend you too much, but to us, most of them were, are, and always will be worthless. It is a very rare thing for us to see one and consider that he -- or she -- is otherwise, though this last one seems to have kept to what a queen must be to her people far more than most. At any rate, Rauri was a heartbroken widow, something which the human world has never seemed to have a shortage of. Most find ways to deal with their grief and come at last to accept their grievous loss after a time. Then they carry on somehow. But some, like that one, never can. They grieve on and on until it kills them at last -- whether it is out of not having a care over what they do as they struggle on without their men or even simply -- as in her case -- they starve out of not eating because they don't care anymore to go on living. I sought her out before that happened, but she was already well on the way to it by that time. On the day when I spoke to you first, I mentioned a type of Bean Sith called a Bean Nighe, Wesley. I mentioned it again when I met Shauna here at the hotel. More than a tortured one who died in labor, Shauna was correct in her thinking that it was a way for a human woman to become one of the Sith in a sense. For poor Rauri, I made use of the method to keep her from completing her trip into a very early and unfortunate grave because it saddened me -- and I should mention that overall, it happens so very rarely to one such as I am. It is my place to watch far more than to act in the matters of human lives, though for that one, I acted because I had to. She has been one of my Bean Siths for a very long time now, though in one way or another, that time must soon end." She smiled at Wes for a moment, "That is why I sought you out, Wesley. I know that you and Shauna are accomplished searchers of things. I also knew that you'd met Rauri once a little before I took her. As well, I knew that in the space of a single heartbeat or two, my poor heartbroken widow had, without even knowing of it, or how, why, or anything else, almost captured the heart of another." She sighed a little wearily, "I just didn't know it at the time that it happened. It only came to me later after much thought. That poor thing has wandered and wept in her sadness while keening for the deaths of others for all of the time since then, never having the hope in her heart for anything more for herself. It had been my hope that she would recover after a time, but she has not. However I could not keep her in my view at all times, since I am a little busy myself." As they'd walked on the way seemed to open up into a large cavern. "What is this?" Wes asked, "It can't be a mine. There doesn't seem to be any order to it." "No, it is no mine or earthwork of men. The pathways are ... " She shrugged, "The only answer that I might make that could mean much is to say that they are magic." Wes shrugged, "They can't be. I don't believe in magic much." The queen shrugged, "Believe what you like, Wesley. To us and now you -- for today -- this earth is open and porous enough for us to travel through. To one with no magic or idea of it -- or even enough imagination to try to believe, this is all solid stone." Walking with Cliodnha, both Shauna and Wesley had noticed doors of all sorts as well as gates and passageways which branched off to either side of them. Where they walked, the passageway was not straight and curved or rose and fell, wandering as it did. Cliodnha led them to one then which seemed to resemble a dimly glowing portal and she stopped. "Time for a bit of a brief look outside, I think," she smiled and stepped through with them following. A Hope for Rauri Ch. 04 They stood blinking in the bright light of a sunny day at around noon -- which surprised them both. "When you walk in the mounds of the faerie," Cliodnha smiled, "time becomes a thing most fluid and very elusive to most people who are much used to living outside of one." "My father used to tell me stories when I was just a little girl," Shauna said, "I remember him saying to me that if a mortal goes inside of a mound -- or even breaks a fairy ring as they dance -- you can end up far from where you were in time, if you ever come out at all." Cliodnha nodded, as though seeing Shauna with slightly different eyes suddenly, "Then your father told you truly. I see a touch of the Sidhe in you, Shauna, a relation far back, I think." Shauna shrugged, "It's a bit of a family mystery. There was supposed to be a faerie maiden once who married a man in my family, but I've never been able to find out who or how far back." "Such a thing is exceedingly rare," Cliodnha said with a small smile, "Most often, it is the men who ache to be allowed to live with the maidens which they might meet. One of the Sidhe most often have few reasons to want to leave and go to live in the mortal world -- since the price for it is high to them most times. But we were speaking of time. As the sorts of creatures which we are -- we three as we stand here, even though we are different, we are not as affected by what Shauna's father told her. Time has appeared to have passed, and it has, but not from the same reason. In this case, we have walked only a quarter of an hour and yet we are a long way indeed from Loudon Hill." "What do you mean the creatures that we are?" Shauna asked and Cliodnha laughed softly. "I do not know if it goes in both directions for you, Shauna, but from the first moment that I saw Wesley and then from when I met you, I have seen you both as you also are -- a pair of what some refer to as werewolves. I see that all of the time, or most of the time, anyway; a very beautiful she-wolf and a handsome male, both wearing the ill-fitting human clothing which looks fine when they are viewed by humans." She gestured toward the horizon with a wave of her hand, "Where we stand now, we are in the middle of what is today known by many humans as the southern uplands of Scotland. Do you see that range over there? The group of hills which lies there, looking for all the world as the fingers of a hand if you think on it for a moment?" She waited then as first Shauna and then Wesley saw the reference and nodded. "Together, those hills are what is known as the Awful Hand. It can be a terrible thing to have to walk across the breadth of it -- especially in wintertime. That is where my hall is and that is also the home of my most troubled subject -- the Bean Sith of the Awful Hand, as she is coming to be known to the few people who live anywhere even close by. Few do these days, though most have heard her as she begins her travels to where someone lies dying." She smiled a little, "At least I can take a little comfort in the knowledge that her passing by here as she goes will not rouse very many of the neighbors as they try to sleep." She led them back inside then before standing with a bit of a thoughtful look for a moment. "Rauri needs two things above all," she said, "before I can begin to tell myself that this long and sad time is passing. Most and soonest of them, she needs a friend. And second, she will then need someone to love her." She saw that neither of them had put it together yet, so she went on, "And both of those will need to be able to show her a very deep ability to be understanding, for she has had other things to weep over of late." They began to walk once more and Cliodnha turned to Shauna for a moment. "I would like for you to understand something. I know very well the ways in which a female heart works, having one myself. What I want you to try very hard to understand is that I hold nothing against you in any way. I can say that at first, your arrival here caused me some concern, but I have since learned more of you and I wish that we might come to a sense of friendliness between us -- especially now that I see that you are even more than you appear to one with my eyes. A were she-wolf and such a startlingly lovely one -- AND carrying Fae blood ..." She snorted quietly and grinned, "I cannot think that it could be a bad thing, dear Shauna, but if I had been asked as to the possibility of it, I'd have laughed and said no. It is more than your charm which draws me to you, friend. I have something to say to you as my advice and I find that it is as slightly daunting as the want to cut a tea rose from it's bush with only a blade and no gloves. Can you see my meaning?" Shauna looked over and she nodded carefully, "Go on, Cliodnha. I'm listening." The queen took a breath and let it out. "I know that you have lain with the Cu Sith. I would not care much, other than I like you and so I hope that it was very good for you together." "Can you tell me anything about him?" Shauna asked, "He seemed a little, ... mysterious to me somehow. I had a good time, but there was something, ... I dunno, it's hard to pin down. I couldn't tell if he was just having trouble communicating, or whether he was hiding something about himself." Cliodnha frowned, "I cannot say much because I do not know him well. He has only been with me for less than a year and he keeps to himself much of the time. I think that out of what he is, he leads a lonely life. I must tell you that while he lives in my hall, aside from day-to-day things, he is not under my command completely since I am not his liege. He and his kind belong to another." "But," Wesley began, "You're the queen, aren't you?" She nodded, "A queen I am, yes and I am queen in my hall and it's surroundings. But I am queen over only some, and not all of the Sith. There is another who holds them all and me besides. I am as a lord to those not of my kind. She is my lord, and she is the one who holds Shauna's lover to account in other matters, not I." She turned to Shauna then, "I need to say to you that, knowing this -- what I have just said to you both -- I want for you to have a care over your heart with that one. I do not say it to try to drive anything between you. Remember that for the little that I know of him I like him as well. Just be a little watchful as you can, Shauna." She looked to be feeling a little frustrated over having to choose her words for a moment, "He may act as his heart drives him to act -- and that is to the good for my part if his heart is true. But, ... he may also act as his queen commands. That is what I mean to say." "But, why would his queen care?" Shauna asked and it seemed to cause Cliodnha even more trouble. "Remember one thing always," she said, "Are all humans good in your view?" Wesley and Shauna looked at each other and shook their heads. "Then why," the queen asked, "do others, humans mostly, always seem to want to think and believe that the Aos Sí must always be good? Just like humans, many of us are not. Most of us are if we feel as though we wish to be. I saved Rauri, but I might not have if I'd seen her only the previous week or the one after. I wish to believe, lovely Shauna, that if you do not hold the Cù Sìth of my hall by the heart now, then you surely cannot stand far from it, by what was told to me and by what I saw in him. I quite liked to see him that way. But if his queen ordered it, then it is also my belief that he would do as he must, and the hold that you might have on his large heart would not protect you if it is there. All that I say -- and likely very badly - is to keep your wits about you for the next little time -- certainly this day. Can you do this?" Shauna looked over and her expression showed that she didn't know what to think. "I think I get it," Wes said quietly as he put his hand on Shauna's shoulder, "What she's trying to tell you is that for today, for some reason, it would probably be best for you not to lead with your heart." "Oh, thank you, Wesley," Cliodnha smiled, nodding in a bit of relief, "Americans always seem to have the way to say things clearly. I know that you were born an Englishman, but to my eyes, you have taken the mannerisms of the Americans and wear them like a warm cloak." Shauna nodded and said that she got it, but deep down, she didn't really trust Cliodnha either. Cliodnha sensed it and spoke again in a very low tone, "I cannot say it in another way. While you are in my hall, Shauna, you are safe. Do not, for any reason, leave there unless it is with me as I bring you both back to Loudon Hill. Do not leave with him, no matter where he says that you are to go. Stay in my hall. Even if you go with him to a quiet chamber if you wish to be alone with him, I have many chambers for that. It is not something to leave over. So do not leave my hall unless you are in my company, for to set foot out of it, ... I cannot keep you safe otherwise -- and it is what I wish to do for you." "I think I understand -- at least some of that," Shauna nodded, "but can you give me at least a clue about what the danger is, from what I see just looking at you here?" Cliodnha said nothing for a moment. She looked around and backed up into a little alcove of stone and silently beckoned them to come to her. When they did, she held up her hand for them to wait as the motions of her other hand caused the stone of the place to grow around them, creating a very small space which they now stood in, and she caused a small flare of light to hang above them all. Even so, she beckoned them to lean closer to her and she began to whisper. "Did he say what his duties are?" Shauna whispered her reply, "Yes. He told me that he foretells of a coming death, just like a banshee, and he also said that he can take women away with him if they're not hidden and locked up in time." "One of the Coin Sith can take them even if they WERE hidden and locked away," Cliodnha whispered, "They go of their own will and if they cannot get free to go with him, they go mad. Did he say where he takes them and why?" Shauna shook her head, "No, he just said that I'm not in danger." The queen nodded, "From him, acting alone, you are not, perhaps -- unless he is commanded otherwise by his queen. At one time, and it still happens now and then, there are suddenly more Aos Sí babes than there are breasts to feed them from. When that becomes known, his queen sends him and others out. The women who are brought back are milked then to feed the many little mouths. None of them take much, but there are many then." Shauna blinked, "But I'm not nursing. I've never given birth." "No," Cliodnha agreed, "but you can be made to -- just as any grown female can. Birthing a babe is not needed. In time, I have seen that most of those women are happy, and I do not understand it or care to, really, but many of them are taken by the Fae as lovers and live very happy lives, making their own little ones with them. But it was never a choice which they were given and they can never leave. Remember that, and remember this as well. All of those women were brought by one of the Coin Sith as commanded. Lest you mistake my words, I have never commanded such a thing. Whenever births happen in my hall, there is always enough milk for those little ones in the breasts of their mothers, since my hall is in a lonely place and there are not as many there. Say nothing of what I have said to anyone, Shauna. Only remember it if anyone tries to lead you away from the hall without me there; not only your Cu Sith lover, anyone, for they may be acting on commands from another." She turned to Wes then, "And for you, I have other words of care and caution, but I will not need to make a hiding place to tell of them." She moved her hands in a curious manner, and the rock wall around them receded. Cliodnha turned and led them on. "There is a type of Sith out of the ones which I command which is not seen much -- even hereabouts anymore," she said. "As a matter of fact, I have but one of them in my hall at present. Before her, there has not been one in over a hundred years, closer indeed to a hundred and fifty in the way that men see the passing of time. I do have two in Eire though. As far as I know, one lives with a writer of books and the other stays near to Ulster and sometimes travels to Dublin, for she loves the life of the musicians there. They are Leannan Sìth, both of them, rather dangerous more to men than women, but sometimes, they take a woman instead if they cannot find a man which suits their, ... tastes, I suppose. They are exceedingly lovely to look at and most any man can fall under their bewitchment quite easily. Only the writer knows of his peril and his lovely muse loves him dearly -- well, for as long as it lasts, which is to say, as long as he does. Leannan Sìth are exceedingly hungry for the love and the life of the one which they choose. They drain the second by building the first into a towering need. The writer knows of his peril, but he is already powerless to stop things and tries as he can to limit their time together. She in turn does exactly the opposite and I know that he will pass within the next three moons." "From what?" Shauna asked, "Or maybe I ought to say, what will he die of?" Cliodnha looked over and offered a slight shrug, "She will drain his life away, for that is what they need, the Leannan Sìth. He must be good for her. They have been together now for past a year and a half. Leannan Sìth are very hungry things and they tend to be restless and will always look to seek out new lovers. If this desire comes to her, that man will not last even as long as I give him. The other loves the ... I think that you call it the scene, the night life of her prey. The ones that she hungers for tend to live hard and short lives anyway, so she has found a good pasture to forage in. Many musicians in this day live short lives. You have likely heard of many like that. While it might be good for sales of their music after their passing, it is not always the drink or the drugs which take them. Once my Leannan Sìth have stolen almost all of their lives away, there is often not enough left to live with for very long. They drain the lives of the men away, though they give much in the way of inspiration. The result is a somewhat short, though brilliant career. To know one is to have an incredible love, though my subjects will always leave at some point as they find less and less life to steal away in their need. Once they are gone, the man pines for a short time and passes, with nothing left in him to go on for long -- no reason to get up out of his bed and nothing to try for without his muse for they are weak and empty by then. Some manage to escape for a time, trying to wean themselves away if they are bright enough to see what is happening to them. But it is usually only for a time, for the echoes of their love with her are very loud in what is left of their souls and those ones usually seek out the forgetfulness and short comfort which men can find in a bottle. For those few, the bottle takes them at last. The one in my hall has not been seen for a short time, as she stays near to the university in Edinburgh, going from one man to the next very quickly. She knows the result of what she does, so she does not stay very long at all with any one man. There are plenty there for her to play with and I believe that she does it that way to try to spare them, leaving as she does before she has had much of a chance to do much harm." She looked over at Wesley, "I understand that you saw Rauri last night. Tell me, Wesley, did she look any different to the memory that you can recall? Was there anything different about her?" He thought about it for a moment, "I can't say to be honest. She looked as I remembered her. What sort of thing, ..." "She has always looked beautiful," Cliodnha said, "I ask wanting to know if to your eyes, she was even more so, ... or is that an unfair question? I think that to lay one's eye on someone who has been in one's heart even in a small way for so many years, ... perhaps it would all seem the same as far as how she looked then. My Bean Sith -- well, the one which concerns us at present, seems to be shifting toward the way of the Leannan Sìth by what I feel, though she has not acted in that way as yet to my knowledge. It is a concern to me and a possible peril to you, Wesley. More, I hold a fear that she might go right past that sort of life. As what she was, a human, now one of us, she can shift and not remain as only one kind. I knew this at the outset long ago, but I did not think that it was a danger, since I did not think that she would go this long and not get better from her grief. I think that her grief might be ending, but I worry for her. If she goes past being Leannan Sìth, there can be only one end for her and that is to become Baobhan Sith, much closer to being a dead thing than a living one. Such things exist elsewhere and your cinema even makes them popular, the ones from other cultures. You call them vampires. Baobhan Sith do not have the teeth, ... well, they do, I would say, but they use their claws to tear open the neck so that they might feed. They do not create others like themselves that way and once sated, go to their graves for a time until the hunger begins again. This fate, more than anything, is what I seek to save Rauri from now, for in some ways, it is already beginning. Baobhan Sith have cloven hooves for feet and she already has them sometimes. She is horrified and wails for herself all over again, thinking that her cruel fate will not let her be. She had the thought that it was something that I did. But I did not. She saw you last night and though you might not have been trying to cause it in her, she felt hope for herself for a short time. But then, she thought of her feet and left you." She motioned toward the wall of the passage and a space appeared, looking something like a mirror. As they looked, the silvery sheen began to fade and they could look deeper. Inside, they saw the banshee sitting on her bed and looking at the floor with a hopeless expression which seemed to be not far from the point of tears. She wore nothing and both Shauna and Wesley gasped quietly. "She's so ... beautiful," Shauna whispered. "To her mind," the queen remarked sadly, "it is but another part of her curse." They watched the girl slowly get to her feet and turn toward the door. Her legs shifted then and they heard the heavy clump as her legs changed and grew fur and hooves. The one in the scene knew of the change and could be seen forcing back the way that she felt to try instead to walk just a little uncertainly. When she reached the door, she stopped and became as she was again, though clearly it was out of her force of will. After that, she opened the door and walked out, bending to take up a bucket. They watched her carry the bucket along to a steaming spring where she filled it and walked on. "What's with the bucket?" Shauna asked, "And that cloth hanging over the side?" Cliodnha looked down and said nothing for a moment as she shook her head. "All of this starts to make me feel far worse. She goes to a place which I made for her in a grotto. No one but Rauri ever goes there. She was against it at first, but I told her that she needed something to ease at least some part of the yearning which all females know. She goes to a single stone there a little high up." Cliodnha raised her hand to close off the view, but Shauna reached for her hand, "Wait. Please?" A Hope for Rauri Ch. 04 Cliodnha stepped back and Shauna stepped a little closer as she watched the banshee slowly walk and climb where she had to in order to get to the top. Once there, she drew out the rag from the steaming bucket and began to wash a part of the rock. It took her a few minutes, and then she set the bucket and rag aside. "It is to wash her place and also, she tries to warm the stone," Cliodnha said quietly. Shauna's eyes widened as Rauri sat down on the wet rock and reached for the pinnacle, a slightly taller part, about three feet higher. Rauri pulled herself a little closer and held on, closing her eyes for a time. There was a bit of a gap between the girl and the pinnacle. A few inches away, there was a smaller pinnacle and Rauri held onto the large one so that she could rub herself a bit on the short, thin one. Then, as Shauna stared, Rauri lifted herself up and slowly sank down onto what she'd been rubbing against -- a single stone spike which was shaped like a phallus. Once there, she sat with her eyes closed and for a moment, they watched as a soft smile came to that face where something such as that almost never appeared. Then, a little at a time, and only by a small amount, Rauri began to use the stone phallus to ease her need and help her to forget her troubles for a short time. Shauna turned away then, and seeing Wesley looking, she reached for his arm and turned him away as well. "Hey, that's a private thing, ok? I'm sure that she doesn't know that we can see her there. Let her have her moment, alright?" He nodded and they looked at Cliodnha, who stood looking back at them in a slightly different way. She smiled then. "Thank you. Thank you both for what I see in you here. Most would have wanted to stay and look on for as long as it went. That place and what she sits on, straddling the rest of the slope on both sides, that is all that Rauri has - all that she ever has had for herself. No one will speak with her much. So she holds no one but the Cu Sith as her friend, and that is only very lately and it is not much, other than as companions when they walk together to foretell of a death. I am not certain that they even speak to one another." Wes looked at Cliodnha and decided to ask what he now needed to know. "Tell us why you're doing all of this, Cliodnha. What's really going on here?" She looked very uncomfortable as she thought for a moment and then she looked up, "I do not think that Rauri is causing the shift in herself. I believe that another could be responsible. For myself; what I want -- if it can be done, Wesley, is for you both to take her away, and I have a hope that you can help her to have a life for once, instead of an existence. My hall has been her home for so long, but now I fear that if she stays, she will end her days soon and go to her grave. All that I have done would have been for nought. I might as well have allowed her to perish not long after she met you. It leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth and a very bad feeling in my breast. She has been a Bean Sith to me, when I did not need her to be. I have always had others. For her to have served me for so long to no end for herself feels so wrong to me. With your help, it might be changed before it is too late. That was my hope." "Cliodnha, I don't know how to give her a life outside of here," Wes said, "I don't know if you're very much aware of things in the human world, but to live there, you need papers and an identity, and, ... well, it gets complicated pretty quickly." "My problem -- at least one of the first ones, "Cliodnha said, "is to find out what it happening to Rauri and why. This, ..." she waved her hands as though swatting at a midge, " ... identity business cannot be truly impossible for you if I can manage my part of things, Wesley. I happen to know of two creatures who must already be able to do something like what Rauri will need, since you both live longer lives that any human and you seem to have been able to manage things well enough." Shauna smiled and nodded to Wes -- who blinked once in thought and then chuckled, "Touché." She turned and led them on, appearing not to wish to speak of much more at least for the moment, and a few minutes later along the winding, twisting, and generally upward-sloping passageway, she stopped to speak with a guard who rose from a seated position. The guard bowed and they walked past, with Shauna and Wes looking aside to return the curious look which they received from the man. "You said that you only rule some," Wes began, "by that, I take it to mean that you rule over banshees as I read. But the old folks back at the farm and that guy with the sword and the bow, ... they don't look like that to me." "I am the queen of the banshees," Cliodnha nodded, not turning her head, "but there are other sorts of the Sith in my hall who are bound to me alone. Not many, however. Gate watchers and a few fighters, for the most part. A few servants also." Shauna saw an opportunity to ask something, so she took it then, "Who is the one that you think could be making Rauri change?" Cliodnha stopped then and they knew that they were back to whispering. "I have asked for my queen to come today, if she can find the time for it. I called to her and she answered that she would try to come. She is The Queen of Elfhame to some, and the Queen of Faerieland to others, depending on their perceptions, I will not name her here, this close to my hall, not unless I stand in the heart of it." "I know her name," Shauna said, "I can't say how I know it, I just do. There's another name -- " Cliodnha nodded, "Aye, there is. To men and others, she is called Gyre-Carling. That is little more than a name. It is the other which I will not invoke here. At certain times, to speak it can also bring her husband, who wonders why she was called. I can only prevent it if I stand at the seat of my own power." "Who's her husband?" Wes asked, but Cliodnha only shook her head and smiled with what might be termed -- if it was indeed that -- a slightly affectionate look. "Come now, Wesley," she smiled, "If I am loth to speak her name, then you might guess that I am also even more so to say his. To have only one of them in my presence is a trial for me. I have no wish to see them both together, if you don't mind." She turned to walk on. "Americans," she said very quietly, though it was said in a way for them both to hear it, "Always inquisitive; always needing to know everything at a glance and all at once. It is a quality which can rouse my ire at most of them. But not you, I find. Not either of you." She smiled, turning her head just slightly so that they could see it, "From either of you, it is a charming trait to me. I wonder what is wrong with me that I allow it and even like it so." "Well, we're just likeable," Shauna said with a little grin. "Yes," the queen sighed as she led them on. They passed another guard and then they were in the center of Cliodnha's hall. With a wave of her hand, she caused the fire which was burning low to leap up and illuminate the whole hall. They saw that on her face, she wore a slightly pleased expression which seemed to say 'There now, that's more to my liking.' But there was a shift in it which was immediately covered with a respectful look as she turned and saw who it was who sat on the throne -- her throne, in her hall. She dropped to one knee then and bowed her head, "Nicnevin, my Queen." The woman sitting there in very fine clothing raised her head and nodded to Cliodnha just once and only very slightly before she turned her head a little to regard the visitors. "Why do you bring dogs into your hall, Cliodnha? Surely you have enough of mine here if you wished to see one. This is your hall and you may do as you will in it, certainly. You could even bring hounds to keep them if you had a wish to hunt. Why bring these strays in?" Her gaze turned icy cold as she glared at Wesley and Shauna, "This is a Sidhe hall and stronghold. You are not of the people. Truly, you are not people at all to my eyes. I see a pair of abominations who do not belong here. You would do well to bow at this point." Shauna wasn't sure just what to do and she looked over at Wes, and watched as a tiny little crooked smile wandered onto his face a little slowly. She knew that smile. It caused her to want to groan. From as far away as she stood from him, a matter of some three or four feet, she already knew. Wesley's inner smart-ass was about to be unleashed. He barely nodded to the other queen -- barely. "Please forgive us, your High and Mightiness. We're Americans." She nodded, "Which makes you buffoons and loud ones at that." Wes still wore the same smile as he nodded, "It might. We tend not to be too big on queens a lot of the time. I'd be more inclined to bow as I have for Queen Cliodnha, if it weren't for the fact that all that I can see of you is your regal ass with your head firmly stuck in it." The reaction was subtle, if it was there at all as the woman on the throne spoke in a low and menacing tone, as soft as it was, "Show yourself, dog. You look absurd to me as you stand on your paws. I wish to see the entire silly business." Their clothing disappeared and both Shauna and Wes shifted instantly to cover their nakedness. "Now go and lie by the fire, like a well-behaved pair of hounds." No one moved. The queen's eyes opened a little after a moment and she raised her hand threateningly, "I commanded you to go and lie down." "Fuck yourself," Wes chuckled, "You're nothing to me, you're not even half-assed funny. Actually no," he said, changing his mind, "Please DON'T do that. How about you just shut the fuck up if you can't manage to show the courtesy of a queen?" He turned to look at Cliodnha, who was still on one knee and openly gaping at him in a little horror now. "Can we just get on with this? I'd just love to have you show me around this wonderful place of yours -- that is, if I haven't offended you too much, and if I have, then please accept my apology." He looked at Nicnevin once more, "Where we come from, the term 'fairy queen' carries a much more pleasant connotation to my mind -- well, unless one of them gets all pissy over something. I've got no time for THEM then either." "Rauri is in her chamber. Down that passage, the only one on the left," Cliodnha said quietly. They turned to go, but the queen on the throne almost sputtered, "I gave no leave for you to go. You will -- " "I'll go where I want; when I want to, Tinkerbell," Wes said with the slightest tone of condescension. "You ought to be pleased. I know I will be. Since I won't be looking at you, you can take the opportunity and fuck yourself while we're gone." Nicnevin stared at their backs in disbelief. Neither of them even looked at her as they walked off. "Before I give in to the growing wrath in me, Cliodnha, rise and come to me so that we might speak of why you called to me -- unless it was to rid your hall of this, ... collection of creatures here." Cliodnha nodded and got to her feet to walk over. Down the passageway, Shauna looked over at Wes, "You came on just a little full-bore back there, didn't you? I mean, she's as pleasant as somebody else's used minipad, but ..." Wes laughed softly, "Sorry, I'm not about to be talked down to by nobody." "Uh, you mean 'anybody'." He shook his head, "No, I'm pretty sure I had it right. I'm not part faerie or Sith or whatever the fuck you gotta be to get spoken to a little politely around this oversized anthill here. She's no god to me, and she sure isn't a queen. She's fuck all. And I didn't go full-bore at all. I didn't even hit her, though it's what her momma should have done a lot more of." He sighed then, "Probably too late to try to play catch-up now." He looked over and spoke a little softly, "Hey, I'm sorry if it's a side of me that you don't like to see, but I don't believe in magic. I'm aware of certain anomalies that I haven't got answers for, like why I am what I am. But that sorry piece of shit back there?" he gestured with his chin, "Same as a ghost to me. I don't believe." --------------------------- Rauri looked up from where she sat on the bed at the sound of the polite knock on her door. She stood up and walked over to open it and a second later, began to sorely regret doing it. She recognized the female from the previous day at the cemetery, but the sight of the large male upset her instantly. "Y --You, ... you are the one who killed my Blackie!" Wes tilted his head, "What? Who's Blackie? I didn't, ... Rauri, look, it's me, Wesley. I just look different now. I don't know what you're -- " But Rauri was already backpedaling, trying to get away from him. It had already come to her that she now knew what that strange quality that she'd thought she'd seen in him the previous night was. "No! No, get away!" Shauna shifted then and began to try to calm the distraught banshee. "Get out of here, Wes," she said, "I'll try to calm her down if I can. Just go for a walk or something, ok?" He nodded, seeing that his standing there wouldn't do any good and he turned away and walked. It led him to a few doorways, some of them guarded by Sith who wouldn't speak to him or answer his questions with other than stony silence. He went down none of the hallways, since the guarded ones were clearly not accessible to him and he didn't know where the others went, so he just walked on. ------------------------------- Rauri stared at Shauna, "Who -- who are you?" Shauna tried not to roll her eyes, "Look, you might not believe it, Rauri, but I'm here as a friend. Try to calm down. Tell me about Blackie." Rauri stood in the corner with slightly wide eyes even still, but she tried. "Blackie was my young little lamb. He was just a new spring ram and, ... " She looked down for a moment, "He trusted everyone and he followed me anywhere that I went. I only stepped away for a moment ..." She pointed, as though Wes hadn't left the chamber, "That one killed Blackie. I just did not know him for what he is. And you are the same, though you stand here as a naked woman." Until that point, Shauna had actually sort of forgotten, being more concerned with the sudden upset in Rauri. She had an idea and asked, "When did this, uh, ... killing happen? I'm sure that there's some mistake." Rauri shook her head, "No, there cannot be. I was twelve. I did not see it happen, though it was only just before, since his little body was very warm. I surprised the beast and he backed away and left. But I know it was him." Shauna touched Rauri's arm gently, "Hey, try to calm down. Wesley knows that he saw you for the first time when he asked you for some food because he was so hungry. I've heard the story for over a hundred years from him. I know that he saw you in 1307. How old were you then?" Rauri thought about it and answered, "I was twenty then, but -- " Shauna still held her arm and she shook her head, "If you were twenty in 1307, then you must have been twelve years old in ... 1299. In the year 1299, Wes was only thirteen years old and he lived in England. The first time that he set foot in anywhere in Scotland was the year that you met him, Rauri. I also know that until only maybe a week or two before then, he was human. He was bitten near someplace called Clatteringshaws Loch and he never saw the one who bit him, either. It's always been a mystery to him. I guess that it might have been that one who was around where you were and killed your lamb. After you met, Wes did kill some sheep, but he told me that he was careful not to take any that he thought might have been yours. He said that he went miles to hunt sheep because of that -- and he never took any lambs. I know that because he told me. You don't know him, but I do. He's my best friend and we've known each other for a long time. We each owe our lives to the other so many times over. He won't even have lamb for dinner at an inn." "Where do you come from?" Rauri asked, "You speak ..." Shauna shrugged, "I come from a lot of places. I was born in Ireland and moved to America, deep down in the south," she smiled as her voice shifted to reflect a Louisiana accent, "Then I went west and eventually, I met up with Wesley and we've been close friends ever since. We live in a place called Wyoming now, still in the west, but farther north. My name is Shauna, by the way," she smiled. Rauri looked to be trying to understand what had been said, since she'd never heard of America. "He is your man?" Shauna shook her head, "He has been, I guess. Now and then, anyway. We've both never found the right person, him and I. We've each fallen in love with others once in a while, but ... because of what we are, it never lasts a long time. The few other werewolves that we've met have either not been what we wanted, or they've just been nuts, so we don't try much anymore. Wes and I get along really well, but it seems to make more sense to us just staying friends. Rauri seemed to remember something then, "I was thinking to go to the kitchen of the hall for something to eat. It must be time for the middle day meal by now. Would you come with me and ... have you hunger? Your talking interests me and, ... I would hear more of it if I could." Shauna nodded, suddenly reminded that a fair amount of time must have gone past and she'd only had two slices of toast at the hotel. "Yes, I'd love to eat something -- if it's allowed. But I'm um, ... I'm not wearing anything. There's some other queen with Cliodnha now. She took our clothes. I could change back, but I've just met you and I wouldn't want to frighten -- " Rauri smiled then, surprising Shauna, until she remembered that Rauri didn't really have any friends and the smile made sense to her then. "Please do it then," Rauri nodded hopefully, "More than anything, I wish to see you like that once again. I do not think that I would be so frightened now. This last while, I seem to have been changing or ... I do not know, really. But I have just met a girl who can change too and ... " She nodded, "I think you make me feel a little better for it." She stood up, "Do you wish to go now?" Shauna nodded and reached out, "Here. Take my hand and hold on while I change. Maybe it won't be too bad if you're touching me as it happens." Rauri grasped Shauna's hand and her mouth opened in a huge smile as Shauna shifted a little slowly anyway. "Now you," Shauna said, "I'd like to see you as you change, if it's alright." Rauri nodded and began to shift, still holding Shauna's hand. It seemed to be happening to a slightly greater degree each time now. Until right then, it had caused Rauri nothing but more and more upset. But now ... They looked at each other and began to laugh. Rauri was now fur-covered nearly to her shoulders and her eyes were a little different as well, though neither of them knew quite in what way. "God, you're amazing to look at," Shauna chuckled, "I really like it!" "I am finding now that it is not such a struggle to control," Rauri grinned, "It was terrible at first, but now I find that it is easier to stay one thing or the other." She led them to the door and out into the passageway, and then they walked off together, smiling as they went, and still holding hands because it felt so good and it obviously gave Rauri a lot more confidence. There were some strange looks cast their way when they reached the kitchen. They were the same looks that Rauri had always gotten which had always reminded her that she was not considered a Sith by anyone here but a few. But today, Rauri didn't mind. Indeed, she didn't care at all, and in moments, they were sitting at a table and eating. The area for it was a little like a very small school cafeteria in a sort of medieval sense and appearance with long tables and many chairs, all hewn out of wood. No one sat near them, and they liked that even more as they chatted. A Hope for Rauri Ch. 04 "Why did you come today?" Rauri asked, "It is seldom that any visitors ever come to the hall." "I think," Shauna began a little cautiously, "that Cliodnha wants us to take you away from here, back to where we live, so that you can actually have a life someplace. She says that you're not happy here." Rauri looked uncertain for a moment, "It is truth. I have never been happy here. Queen Cliodnha has always been kind to me, but she is always so busy. But, ... what am I to do where you live? Do they need Bean Siths there? It is all that I know to do." Shauna shook her head, "No, but at least one furry girl could use a new friend. Wes and I work together back home. Maybe after I get you used to living there, we can find you a better job than always crying over somebody that you don't even know. I don't - well, we don't have many friends, Wes and I. We know some people, but, ... well, they get old and we don't so we can't really know anyone for long. It'll be great just knowing somebody else with the same kind of life." Rauri looked uncertain again and Shauna thought that she knew why. "You'll need to get over that unsure way that you're looking right now, Rauri. If you're going to come with us, you'll need Wes just about as much to help you get started. He's not as ..." "Fierce," Rauri offered, and Shauna nodded, "Yeah, he's not like that. He's more ..." "Hungry-looking," Rauri said, sounding a little amused. "Well yeah," Shauna smiled around a mouthful of potatoes, "You can trust him. That's not something to be concerned over. He's just ..." "Behind you," Rauri chuckled as she pointed. Shauna looked up and over her shoulder, following Rauri's gaze and she saw Wes there. She began to tell him to take a seat and then she noticed by the way that Rauri was now laughing as she watched Wes stealing a pair of Shauna's biscuits. She slapped his hand. "As I was saying," she grinned, "you can't trust this bugger around any type of food." Laughing herself now, she pointed to a chair, "Sit your ass down and I might let you have a little of this. I was just telling Rauri that we might take her back with us -- if you can both agree on it and if I can get her over what was her nervous feeling about you. But that was before you showed her the harmless idiot that I know and love. She knows that it wasn't you who killed her lamb. From what she's told me, I think that it just might have been the one who bit you." Wes sat down and looked across the table, "I am sorry about what happened. Could you please tell me what you saw? What he looked like?" Rauri tried to remember for a moment, but she just said, "I am sorry, but that one looked to me as you do. It was why I thought that it must have been you. Also, I was ... I do not think that I was myself at that moment. How could I have even thought to run that way? I should have run away, yet I ran screaming toward him and he left. He turned and he was gone so quickly. Why do you wish to know of this?" Wes looked down, "I didn't know the one who bit me, and I never knew why he or she didn't kill me as he killed the others in the forest like me. But after a time, I learned that what I got from him or her in the bite made me far stronger than the others that I ever saw. Many of us seek to stay alone. Shauna and I do not, but then we were like this before we met, and even so, we spent a lot of time as just human people. Sometimes, I've run into other werewolves. I would never attack for no reason if they had done me no harm. But many of them just attacked as soon as they knew what I was. I learned then that I am much more than they were, so it made me want to know more of the one who made me." He looked at Rauri a little more searchingly, "Are you thinking to come with us? You would need to learn so many things, but Shauna is good at teaching. She teaches me all the time." Shauna smiled, "He's confusing teaching with giving him a piece of my mind, since he needs that once in a while and I have lots to spare." "No I'm not," Wes chuckled, "Will you come, Rauri? You just have to know that I'm not much different than any man." "That means that he doesn't usually wash his dishes until he needs something to eat from," Shauna said, rolling her eyes. Rauri laughed a little when Wes said, "Unless I use my head and invite Shauna over for dinner. If I'm lucky then, she'll do them. I just have to hear about it for a little while first." Rauri said, "My queen told me that I should ... I cannot say it, ... That I should try to seek your heart, but ... " She looked down for a moment and then back up with a sad expression, "I cannot even think in that way. I only see my lamb lying in my hands." He reached across the table, "Forget it. Don't worry about what she said. I don't really know everything or why she seems want for you to know me like that. All that I know is that someone like Shauna ... someone like me needs help. She didn't say it all, not everything. ... I know that now. I just know that we need to get you away from here. You need to live for yourself. You can't go on the way that you've been living here. Just come with us. We'd love to even know someone else who lives long. I'll help you and I know that Shauna will want to help you even more." Shauna turned to look at Wesley with a slightly startled expression and he only said, "That song is still in my head. I guess there must be more than a little truth in it, so I'm a kind of determined not to let it happen. I'd value a friend more." "How will we go there, where you live?" Rauri asked. It brought her a lot of answers that she couldn't understand, such as flying when one has no wings. Explaining that was a lot easier than the questions that came to Wesley's mind. "How are we gonna get her on a plane? She doesn't have any ID, no passport, no visa, nothing." "I dunno," Shana smiled, "But I can see that you're a little inspired and I know that when that happens, it's always more interesting than sitting at home, filing my nails. I might have to take a ship back and smuggle her in my luggage. I'll figure something out, Wes. I always do, don't I? I'm more concerned about Sam." "That guy you saw last night?" Wes asked and she nodded. "After listening to Cliodnha, I don't really know what to think anymore. I thought there was maybe something there, the way that I felt. I mean, Cliodnha might have come out of the gate in a sort of strange way and she kind of creeped me out to begin with, but the more that I think about it, the more I'm inclined to trust her." Rauri touched Shauna's arm, "You may trust Queen Cliodnha. She always has many cares which she carries, but I have never seen her do anything to cause harm -- unless one has it in their minds to begin. What did she say, if I can ask it?" Shauna told her about the conversation over the Cu Sith and Rauri sat back then and nodded slowly. "To many here, he is not trusted. It is known that he does not want to be here. He yearns to work for his queen in her hall. It is thought that he is here only to spy for her." Wes looked away for a second and seeing his expression, Rauri glanced at Shauna, "What is he doing?" Sauna grinned and pointed to her own head, moving her index finger in a circular motion. Rauri raised her eyebrows and blinked, "He has madness?" Shauna laughed a little, "Close, I meant that the little wheels in his head are spinning. It's probably nearly the same thing." Wes swallowed a last mouthful of the food as he began to stand up, "I need to find out the rest of this story. Could you take us to the throne room -- or whatever it's called?" They walked back along the passageways as Rauri led them. As they drew closer, they heard the sounds of the angry discussion in the distance. ------------------------ "I did what must be done, since you have not in so long. She should have been in the earth hundreds of years ago." They walked into the hall as Cliodnha looked to be ready to explode. "No, you have not. You have been MEDDLING in the affairs of my hall again as you often so often do!" Nicnevin saw the others and raised her hand in a summoning gesture. The opposite doorway darkened and then the Cu Sith walked in. Cliodnha spun on him and he fell on his back in flames which singed him and then disappeared, "I know whence the queen comes by her knowledge of what happens in my hall. You will be gone from here and never return before I have my next thought of you or it will be your last moment, spying hound." "He will be gone in a moment," Nicnevin smiled, "as he takes that one," she said, pointing to Shauna, "to be the next milkcow. And if you cannot control your tongue, Cliodnha, you will no longer be the Bean Sith queen! I want one here who can do as she is commanded." "TAKE IT!" Cliodnha screamed, "Take it from me, this useless mantle which forces me to serve a worthless queen such as you." The Cu Sith stepped forward, laying his ears down as he made low rumbling sounds toward Shauna. She stepped toward him with an unreadable expression, thinking of Wesley's words. "Will you be mine there?" she asked and he shook his head and proved that he could indeed speak in the animal form. "You will come and I will leave you there." Before he could even register her movement, she tore the side of his singed face halfway off with one slash of her claws, and his yelp was more of a pained scream. "Try harder." Shauna grinned, "That didn't work." The beast stepped back, looking burned, confused, and bleeding profusely. Nicnevin seemed not to have noticed it right away. Wes saw the slight delay as did Cliodnha. Nicnevin had spoken the words which removed Cliodnha's standing and was already well into speaking the words to cause Rauri to complete the change to Baobhan Sith. As she began the last phrase, while Rauri was on the verge of collapse, she turned to look at the ex-banshee queen with a smug expression. What she noticed was that Cliodnha wasn't there. Another split-second of delay. She looked around and then up, hearing the thin scream from above her. She raised her arms, but it was a little too late as Cliodnha, now looking more like Rauri and even then some, crashed against her, driving her to the floor. Wes and Shauna stared wide-eyed as they watched Cliodnha rip into Nicnevin with long claws which weren't there a second before. There were other features which they saw on her now, such as the leathery wings, the long teeth and the cloven hooves. "Rauri!" she cried out in a voice which sounded far different, coming from the angular face, "Help yourself now. Come and help me kill, Daughter!" Rauri ran to the spot and they saw that her change was nearly completed, since she looked so much like this new Cliodnha. She didn't even hesitate. She sank her claws in deep and began to tear pieces off as quickly as she could. The Cu Sith seemed to wake up from his stupor and he sprang to help his queen in answer to her anguished call. But Wes clotheslined him and he fell on his back with a crash. Before Wes had even struck him twice, Shauna was in there too and a few seconds later, she had him disembowelled and emasculated. The bloody pulp heaved one last breath as Wes tore in again just before he sank his teeth deep into the black throat to rip it out. After that, there was only the final, wet exhalation from the carcass. "Quickly Rauri," Cliodnha hissed, "drink the blood. You must take a deep draught if you can and then leave some for me. It is our last hope." Rauri moved aside and gnawed into the already bleeding carotid artery. Cliodnha saw a spot for herself on the other side and began as well. As Shauna and Wesley got to their feet, the only sounds were the groans and the frenzied sucking and lapping. Nicnevin fought only slowly as her blood left her and her movements grew ever more feeble. Eventually, there was no more blood which could be gotten and Rauri turned to move away. Cliodnha rolled the body onto it's face and in seconds, she held up a kidney. "Eat," she said, There is more here." After eating one kidney each, they flopped the body onto it's back and Cliodnha had the heart in her hands. "Take half if you can. I will eat the rest and this one will never rise again." When it was done, they rose to their hooves and stood dripping gore as they looked at the others. Rauri shook her head at Shauna, "Sorry. ... I am sorry." "No time for that now," Cliodnha said, pulling Rauri toward the fountain, "Wash and quickly. We must leave," she said to Wes and Shauna, "All of us. We must get out. I am no longer queen here. We must leave before we are attacked." "Why?" Shauna asked. "If I am no longer queen, then you both are not guests anymore. You are intruders, and, ..." she sighed, "I have no wish to harm the ones who have served me for so long." As Rauri lifted her face from the water and climbed out, she stepped very hesitantly toward Shauna. "I am sorry. I have never done that before. Are you ... " "Impressed," Shauna nodded with a smile, "Holy shit, Rauri, that was something." Cliodnha got out of the water, leaving it stained red for a time until the flow cleansed it once more, "Come. Follow me." "Hey, is there any way we can get our clothes back?" Wes asked, "That was a two hundred dollar shirt and the keys to the rental car were in my pants pocket." Cliodnha pointed to the throne, "They are on the shelf at the back." They ran out of the hall with Cliodnha leading two minutes later. The only opposition that they met who was at least a little prepared was the lone guard in the passageway As he began to challenge them, Cliodnha passed her hand in front of his face and he fell asleep. She urged them forward, telling Rauri to lead them while she hung back for a few seconds to listen and try to sense for any pursuit. They made really good time, considering that the werewolves weren't bounding on all fours. The passageway opened before them and Cliodnha passed by above them on her wings. "Hey," Shauna puffed at Rauri, "can you do that too?" Rauri looked over for a second and shook her head as she ran. When at last they came to the door to Underhill Farm, Cliodnha said, "We will come out at Backhill Farm. It saddens me, as I would wish to say goodbye to the Hobbs one last time. But I do not wish to risk having to hurt those two if they know of the changes." "How would they know?" Shauna asked. "The guard knew and no one had come to tell him," Rauri said, "The call has gone out. I heard it in my mind also." They stopped to listen for a moment to a dull booming roar from far behind them. "Run!" Cliodnha shouted, "The passage closes. Run!" They ran. They ran for three minutes with Cliodnha telling them every hundred yards or so not to look back. What she wasn't telling them was that she did look back now and then and she could just see the hallways disappearing. And the rapidly closing seam was gaining on them. When they got to the right door, she hustled them through it and jumped after them just as the now very loud roaring came to an abrupt halt. Wes was standing out in the dark and Shauna was lying on Rauri, who had fallen as she cleared the doorway. There was no floor. There was only soft grass and moss under them. "Look here," Cliodnha said with a relieved smile. She stood holding the open door, which hung over nothing but the darkening evening air. They were at Backhill farm, such as it is and not as it was. Through the open doorway, they saw only gray rockface. When Cliodnha swung it shut, the door disappeared and there was nothing at all there. "That way," Cliodnha said, pointing and they began to walk on the grass. By the time that they reached the car park, there was a tow truck just pulling in to hook the rental up, but with a lot of fast talking and a little money, Wes sorted it out and the tow driver left. Wes unlocked the car with the remote and they all piled in -- all but Cliodnha. "Get in," Wes said, but she shook her head. "I will make another deposit in your bank for your time and to help with any costs for Rauri. I have perhaps a little less than a hundred thousand in American dollars of my own, after the exchange I would guess. Please take good care of Rauri for me." Rauri sat in shock, shaking her head and wanting to get out. Shauna was trying to frame her questions as she hung onto Rauri to prevent her leaving. Wes opened the driver side door and sort of half-stepped out. He shook his head, "It must be the way that American English doesn't come across that well sometimes. What I said was get in the car. If you think about it, it wasn't a request. Look, I know you a little now. You're trying to manage something that's not manageable for the moment at least. I was there, remember? If I'm right in what I think that I was watching, you're not the queen there anymore. You've even said it. To me, that means that you DON'T have a place to go, AND you might have somebody on your tail looking to do you hurt. Hey, I'm just an American werewolf. I just call it the way that I see it, so for at least until we can figure things out, you've got a pair of us watching your back. For that to happen, you need to be at least within arm's reach, so listen carefully; Get ... in ... the ... car. Uh, please." Cliodnha stepped forward and pulled open the door as she sat down and Wes started the car. "Where?" she asked. "To the hotel," Wes smiled, "I happen to know that the closeness of the place to the main motorway means that the restaurant there is a favorite among the road truckers, the ones who do the long hauls, anyway. The hotel kitchen closes stupid early like ten, but they keep their diner kitchen open all night. I don't think I've lived a more odd day than this one. I mean, I know we've been far away and back again, but it seems like the whole day went by in about an hour and maybe a bit. So I'm uh, ... I'm hungry again. I just don't know what you can still manage for yourself, you and Rauri, that's all. Can you still make up clothing, or is that a stupid question? You're awesome to me like that, but you'll stick out a hell of a lot in a place like that over dinner, and Rauri will be even more of an eyeful, since she's not wearing a damn thing, as uh, pleasant as that is to some." Cliodnha turned to look at Wes and she nodded, "We might be able to manage something a little less, ... spectacular, won't we, Rauri?" Rauri was happy again that Cliodnha hadn't abandoned her and she answered that she could wear a dress. "What happened back there?" Wes asked, "I think I can follow it a little, but at some spots, I guess that I just lose the trail of bread crumbs. Why did you look like that?" Cliodnha now faced the curious glances of all three and she just began to explain, "I was the queen of the Bean Sith. My subjects were all of the kinds which there are. I was what I was for a long time, and ... well, one cannot really be the queen if one does not know what they all are. So to BE the queen, I had to learn to BE each one. It served my purpose at the time to be Baobhan Sith, only without the little detail that they are all dead -- since I am not. But I can be as one, as you saw. Rauri was nearing the edge of going over as Gyre-Carling commanded. I had a problem, because just before that, she reft me of my queenhood and I lost much power in an instant. I needed to stop what was happening and I also needed power if only to get you all away. Rauri needed the power and ability to stop what was going on inside of her. To do all of that, we both needed her blood. That was not really Gyre-Carling. I know that you saw it also. We did not really kill her." A Hope for Rauri Ch. 04 "Then who was that?" "Oh, it was a shell of Gyre-Carling, to be sure. The real queen would never have stood for your impudence. It was a living, breathing shell, and it must have taken a great deal of her ability to create and manage over that distance. Still, it lies dead now and she has lost much strength and power, for she put much of herself into it. While Rauri and I, though our unsavory acts, have gained. Best of all, she will not slide fully into Baobhan Sith which was my great fear and better still," she grinned as she looked back between the seats at Rauri, "she seems to have gained in that she can now fully complete the shift and yet remain among the living. Do you feel as though you must drink more blood at some point?" Rauri shook her head, "I was near to losing the middle day meal which I had eaten. It was terrible." "The wings," Shauna said, "Where did you get the wings? I couldn't believe it when they were just there on you all of a sudden and then you were up in the air. How did you do that?" Cliodnha smiled, "This morning, I told Wesley that most of the ones which people call faeries do not have wings and it was truth. But there are those which do. I was not always the terrible queen of the Bean Siths, Shauna. I began as one who was much smaller and I have wings. I only used them in the hall because it suited me to then, since I knew that Gyre-Carling had forgotten it." "But they didn''t look like Faerie wings," Shauna said. Cliodnha grinned, "The wings which are part of human perception are as the wings of a dragonfly, hmm?" When she saw Shauna's nod, Cliodnha smiled, "Well they are like that -- on the very small faeries. But if one grows larger, that kind of wing takes little to break and almost nothing to tear, and they will not hold one up even before then. As we grow larger, either out of growing up or only needing to be bigger for some reason, the wings change to more like what I have." She frowned a little at a thought, "Gyre-Carling has always been a spiteful, nasty thing. She took my male from me when we were very young only to prove to me that she was better somehow. When she saw that I had gotten over losing him, she killed him because she had no love for him anyway. Before she became what she is, I asked the wise old ones if I might become the queen of the Bean Sith and they granted me that. But it could not have happened at a worse time, for it was just then that Gyre-Carling became queen over us all. I could not withdraw by then and she has been happy ever since to keep me under her heel. I have asked a thousand times to be allowed to step down, but ever she laughed in my face. She tends to fall into her towering wraths quite often and when she is like that, she seldom thinks if her rage is upon her. It is why I goaded her to go the last step and she did it, so, though I do not have a home and even an idea of how I might go on, I am finally free at last. She has stripped me of my title, but I live still and if I do not appear in any Sidhe mound and am not seen by others, then I am missing and I now wish to remain so. If she wishes to kill me over what I have done, then let her find me herself. I daresay that I took quite a lot from her today. If it happens, then we will see who is the stronger and more crafty one now." Wes grinned over at Cliodnha as they pulled into the lot, "Yeah. Fuck her if she can't take a joke." It caused Cliodnha to laugh at the absurdity that he'd put into the sound and she nodded finally, "Fuck her indeed." They decided on take-out meals instead and Wes went inside to order and bring them back to the car before they drove around to the main parking lot and got out to go to Wesley's room to eat. "One more question?" Wes asked as they all sat down and Cliodnha nodded. "Why, in the middle of that mess back there, did you refer to Rauri as your daughter, or was that just something said to spur her on?" Cliodnha looked at Rauri, who looked back for a moment. "Can we tell them?" Rauri asked, sounding a little tremulous, a little pleading, and quite obviously a lot hopeful. Cliodnha looked down for a moment and she nodded, "Why not? What is left to hide anymore and we seem to be among some friends." She looked at Shauna and Wes. "I have done my best to be the best at my task that anyone could want, either in the view of my queen -- if she had been one who would have noticed, or in the view of my subjects. But I have done things which I might have done better if I were a better person. I fell into a love with a human man. It can happen, as we spoke of earlier. But it becomes a problem for a queen who must serve an often-ruthless and very cold queen herself. I chose to hide it as best I could, fearing that if Gyre-Carling ever learned of it, then she would command me to kill the very one that I loved. And so," she sighed, "it was my secret and my happiness. It also became an even larger problem when I found that I was with his child. It took some thought, but I carried my child and tried to remain out of Gyre-Carling's view at the same time. But that was only the start of my own heartbreak. I had to leave my child with her father when it became just too dangerous for them. You saw today what harm a spy can do. I knew that one had been placed in my hall even before this one and there have been many. She has not cared -- if she even thought of them -- but most fell by my hand." Wes and Shauna stared at Cliodnha and she nodded with a certain amount of cold pride. "I have been called the terrible queen of the Bean Sith. I came by that name honestly. Gyre-Carling placed her spies, seeking to know what she could of my hall. I did what I had to in order to learn of my enemy, seeking to learn what I could of her hall. It is the weakness of spies. The more loyal the spy, the more there is to learn from him or her. None died slowly. My little girl had to grow up without her mother and my forbidden family was ever in my thoughts. But what could I do? Before I knew it really, she was grown and in love with a man herself. Her father came to hate me over what was done and so I lost his heart. He perished in a fight somewhere; I do not know much of it at all. I only knew that my girl knew nothing of me anymore, save only a dim memory of someone who her father told her left them because she did not love them. My daughter was a grown young woman who did not know of her heritage at all. I watched her often with tears in my eyes, though I wept in happiness as she was wed to a man. It made things easier for me to bear then, because it was plain to my eyes that they loved each other so. But then the English came and I saw what would happen to my daughter after her loss. So, I took her with me one day before she died as well. It was well over a hundred years before I could finally bare my breast and speak the truth to my own grown girl. Rauri is my daughter. Together, we have kept the secret until today. It actually feels very good to me to even know someone who I can tell this to." She looked at Wes and she laid her hand on his wrist, "So now you might see why it was that I did not tell everything. Even Cliodnha the queen of the banshees can feel fear if there is a threat to the only one that she has left." "Mother," Rauri said very softly, "I have never doubted you, from the first moment that I learned of it all. Please do not leave me now." Her mother looked very sad then, "Rauri, I do not know myself what I will do now, where I can go and how I might live. If you leave, and since Gyre-Carling does not know much of you, then it is the best that I could hope for. If I am found and killed, then you still live and you would be even safer then. It is not something that I wish for. It is only what I can still do for you." Shauna slapped her hands on both of theirs, almost upsetting everything on the table. "No," she said, shaking her head, "Just, ... no. It's not an option, not now that we've heard all of this. I don't see why we can't do SOMEthing better than what I've just heard. Are you with me Wes?" Wes knew Shauna better than anyone. If there was one thing about her -- one thing out of the countless things that he loved about her, it was this. When she got her back up and her well-concealed stubbornness came to the fore, well that was just the way that it was going to be, that was all. He thought that at those times, she could be far better than noble. If the world had more people who'd step up because someone just needed a leg up ... "I'm with you, Shauna," he nodded, and then he turned to Cliodnha, "So tell me honestly. You really did like the states, didn't you?" She stared at him for a moment and then she began to smile. "Yes," she nodded, "I did quite like it there. Well, other than meeting one small animal in the dark one night. It was black with white -- " "A skunk," Shauna smiled, "We knew it when you came to the hotel to meet us. In my world, there are only two things that smell worse; a dead skunk that's been frying in the hot sun for two days and a ripped-open snake." Rauri looked at Shauna with curiosity, but she noticed Wes' finger waving at her, "No. Don't even think of asking her how she came to form that opinion." "Do you believe that I can find a place for myself there as well?" Cliodnha asked, and they both nodded. "Do you really think that we can just leave you behind with nothing and no one at your side?" Shauna asked, "From the way it sounds to me, it's open season on you, if not now, then soon. You need to not be here. You don't have anything, other than your name and if anything, that just damns you." The other one thought for a moment, "I hadn't thought of it until just now, but I have no name. The banshee queen is Cliodnha and Cliodnha is the banshee queen. The name goes with the place." "Well, what's your name then?" Shauna asked and Cliodnha shook her head with a shrug. "It has been more than an age since I have heard it. I ... I don't know anymore. I cannot even remember it." She looked around, "How will we manage where we all sleep?" They discussed it and all of them bedding down in the room was just absurd. Yet Shauna and Wes agreed that they didn't want the others to sleep without them nearby, since no one was certain that they'd be left alone if they were discovered. Eventually, it was decided that they'd each stay with one in their rooms, since both had double beds. "We'll have lots of room," Shauna said, "How will you manage?" "I'll let our ladyship Clio have the bed," Wes smiled, "I can live for a night sleeping in the arm chair. We'll bug out early and with a little luck, we can be home in a day." With that decided Shauna and Rauri left for Shauna's room. It got a little weird when Rauri turned and asked about where to go to make water. Shauna hadn't thought of it before, but she guessed that the mother had at least some experience out in the modern world. So she sighed and smiled as she unlocked her door and led Rauri into the bathroom. With a little explanation, things were fine -- until they decided that a proper wash would be in order, given the things which they'd done that day. Shauna got the shower running warm for Rauri and waited inside the bathroom to offer instructions over the smallest things such as shampoo before they switched places and soaked every towel before they'd both gotten themselves and their hair dry. Shauna left the bathroom light on for her guest and they eventually got into the bed where they talked for a while and Shauna decided that she and Wes were doing the right thing. The location was irrelevant as far as this sort of teaching went, she supposed. Rauri would need to learn even if she lived here in modern Scotland. Eventually, Rauri said her very quiet and humble thanks for everything and they fell still. Before long, Shauna heard Rauri's breathing shift and since she was wide awake at least for the moment, she waited and when she felt that it had been a time, she turned her head, just wanting to look at Rauri for a minute. The minute became about thirty as Shauna lay thinking of things that the girl would need to learn until she stopped herself, not wanting the immense nature of the task to keep her from getting to sleep at all. She also found herself trying hard not to stare at Rauri's beauty. It caused her to wonder a few things and she found herself sifting through a few of her memories. At last, she closed her eyes and drifted off. Not long after that, Rauri opened her eyes and turned her head to look at Shauna. Three minutes later, Shauna opened her eyes and they just looked at each other with smiles. "Too strange sleeping in a bed with a stranger?" Shauna smiled. Rauri shook her head, "No. I was thinking of how you wish to help me. I wanted to embrace you for it, but I did not wish to disturb you. Also, I feel a little alone, even like this." Shauna felt her yawn coming to her and she was a little glad of it, so she gave in and then she grinned a little, "It's not worth throwing a night's sleep away over, Rauri. Just turn over and I'll hug you and maybe we can both get some sleep that way. I wouldn't mind at all." Rauri thanked Shana once again and she turned away. It felt so good to feel Shauna's arm over her and she said that she felt better like that, so Shauna smiled and hugged her just a little tighter for a moment, just long enough to leave a kiss on Rauri's shoulder. "Goodnight, Rauri. I know things will get a little strange for you in the next day or so, but we'll get everything smoothed out. Just don't worry, alright? If you do, then neither one of us will get any sleep. Rauri nodded slightly and said goodnight. They were still for a moment or two and then Rauri pushed back a little, seeking more of the feeling of Shauna against her. Shauna liked it, but it also reminded her in a strange way that she'd had more than the beginnings of some hope for the Cu Sith. She tried to push the thoughts from her mind, but they just wouldn't leave, so it was a very strange combination of feelings for her. Seeking a little more comfort, she laid her cheek against Rauri's shoulder and it felt a little better then. But there were still one pair of tears which came to her and Rauri felt them and turned carefully. "What is wrong?" she asked. Shauna didn't want to say anything, feeling incredibly foolish for even wanting to trust anyone. She certainly didn't want to admit it out loud. But Rauri reached for her face and she kissed Shauna softly, "I have made a friend today -- even two. I cannot even recall that I have ever had even one long ago. Shauna, I cannot say how it feels. But I know that I want to help." Shauna nodded and told what was perhaps the most abbreviated version of it that was possible. But Rauri could fill in the blanks. Out of her nature and what she was, she could see and she knew. "Stop, Shauna," she said, "Do not say another thing. Only ... only cry a little if you must. You are not alone now." Rauri reached to hold Shauna gently and she stroked her back softly. Shauna looked at Rauri and nodded, her sniffling fading in a few minutes. They closed their eyes and they were both asleep within another two minutes. --------------------------------- In Wesley's room, they were still talking as Wes opened the minibar "Would you like a drink? There's ice here and a selection of overpriced, and likely crappy booze. I know I'd like one after today." It was almost the wrong thing to say, and Clio -- as Wes had begun to call her -- said that she was sorry to be even the slightest imposition. It made him chuckle as he poured them both a tumbler of whiskey. "It's not that. You're not anything of the sort. I only meant that it's been a heck of a day, at least it has for me. I got both my exercise AND three meals inside of what felt like a couple of hours. And I was given the honor -- even though I'm sure that it wasn't meant for me -- to see you as you probably really are; in this lovely way, and I've enjoyed spending the day with you in spite of what happened or what almost did. And if that wasn't enough, I saw you in a new way when you and your daughter killed the bitch queen, McNoodle or whatever her name was. I thought you looked very nice. I hope I'm not about to sound even more stupid, but I found that look to be very erotic -- in spite of what you were doing." Clio appeared astounded, "You -- you liked to see me that way? I was hoping so much that I wouldn't frighten you, though it couldn't have been helped if it had happened." "Well I wasn't frightened," he grinned, "I really liked it. Maybe you might understand it better if I said that I thought that a naked furry flying girl with hooves was a turn-on that I didn't even know that I liked until then." She tilted her head, "What is a turn-on?" He looked a little embarrassed then, but Wes forged through it. "It's an expression for something which can cause arousal. I'm sorry for saying it now. I hope that I haven't offended you. I guess that I just ought to shut up right about here." Clio was just taking a sip of her drink and she shook her head right afterward, "No-no. It's alright. Like a lot of things which I learn about you, it is a surprise to me, that's all. All this day, I have been hearing what you said in the passageway to me -- that you do not believe in magic. Wesley, it bothered me and I still do not know what to think. If you do not believe in magic, then how was it possible for you to have done what you did? You and Shauna were so brave to even step before a Cu Sith. No one has done that and lived if the Cu Sith did not allow it. You won because you did not believe. She looked down, "All of my life, it has been what I have lived and breathed. It is what makes my life possible. It is what makes, ... me ... possible. But you do not believe --" He set his drink down and he placed his hand on hers gently, "Listen. In many ways, I tend to oversimplify. It helps me to sort things out quickly. I decide and then I don't need to stop to wonder. I don't have the brain to wonder and plan at the same time -- especially when ... I'm ... wilder. I might have ..." He shook his head, "No, I know that I said the wrong thing, and I'm sorry for that. I saw that Cu Sith thing as just a large and probably very advanced dog. Once I had that thought, I could move on to thinking that he probably only knew how to fight like a dog. It caused me to realize that I had the advantage. Dogs don't fight with their claws. They're mostly for traction if they even have a reason to be there." He smiled very slowly. "Werewolves tend to put everything into a fight. I can do more damage that way if I save my teeth for ... close-in, you might say. That's the kind of thing that I mean. Out of all of the things that I saw today, I can say that if anything, ... " he smiled warmly and nodded. "I believe in you." She shook her head, "I have always been what I was, before I was queen and during my time. Now, I do not know my name. I do not know anything. I do not even believe in myself anymore." Wes shifted his hand to take hers into his and he squeezed it gently. "You're facing huge change. It's natural to feel uncertain -- even fear. But I know some things even though I can't explain them to myself. I've never believed in even one single werewolf story -- and I still don't. Because of what I know of myself and others like me, the stories are all just nonsense -- not a scrap of truth to them, any of them. But I'm here, aren't I? Shauna is no fantasy, either. I believe in her just as I believe in myself. I believe in Rauri and most of all, Clio, I do believe in you.