She raises an eyebrow. ‘Unless?’
‘You spare my family, including my dad. And give me back my nan and Meg.’
The crows caw. ‘We do not bargain with mortals.’
‘Fine, have a nice life.’ I walk away, her eyes on me, my back exposed.
‘Wait.’
I turn slowly. ‘Yes.’
The Morrigan looks at the crow on her left and whispers something, before rasping at me, ‘Will you do your duty? Will you tell the story? Will you be a file báis?’
A clink of crockery from the kitchen draws my gaze and I see Nanny Bet clutching a mug.
My arms are heavy. ‘You promise you’ll return them?’
The crow on the right croaks and the goddess nods. ‘If they wish to be returned. Meg, on the other hand, has made her decision.’
‘No, that’s not what I… Meg, please, you can stop this. Come back to me.’
Doubt flickers across Meg’s face. ‘Michael, I…’ The cold stare of the Morrigan returns. ‘You are testing my patience, child. If you want your family back, you will tell the untold story.’
‘Which one?’
She walks to the edge of the garden and points out over the city as a tower of light reaches into the night sky. Acre Street.
Chapter Thirty
The pinhole camera and notebook jostle in my backpack as I weave through the streets. There is shouting in the distance, the sound of glass smashing. Police sirens. A couple argues in a house and two men grapple with each other as they fall out of a bar. The scent of the Morrigan’s war cry is thick in the air.
A car window pulls down and a man calls me a ‘fruit’. There’s a pulse in my fists, an itch in my teeth. I want to hurt him. I want to crush him. I want to split his skin and feel his bones crunch under my—
Get out of my head.
I run from the car, from the shouts, from the violence.
The sounds seem to be swallowed by the light emanating from Acre Street as I turn down silent and empty streets, past shuttered shops and restaurants, getting ever closer. I check my phone, two missed calls from Mum. It’s after 1 a.m. That can’t be good.
Dad…I can save him.
The fog is thicker than before, reaching up to my waist as I push onwards. I’m chilled to the bone and the smell of blood is overpowering.
I hate all of this. The Morrigan, the powers and the history that has caused so much harm to my family. I pass a mural showing the faces of young men, frozen in youth, the years of each one’s death underneath. I don’t even know who they are.
The mural shimmers and one man looms out from the wall, his face destroyed, skull caved in.
So much bloodshed. I can see why Mum and Dad left. Death is everywhere.
But what good did leaving do them?
We’re still here, trying to heal wounds we don’t even know exist. People walk among the ghosts that only we, the filí báis, can see.
I turn onto Acre Street and the light towers above me.
My aunt died here before she ever got the chance to become my aunt. My grandfather saw it happen. My father was forced to forget it. My mum and I have lived with what was left of him.
This riot destroyed my family and I never knew anything about it until this week.
