The Omen Daughter

“Oh, child, you are a storm waiting to burst.”

He paced like a caged lion — teeth gritted, lips pinched, fingers flicking restlessly against his thigh.

Was he nervous, angry, unsure? All three fit the situation as another strained cry leaked from behind the alabaster wall. Trying to pinpoint which emotion plagued him only made him pace faster.

When would it be over?

Hard as it was to stay still, it was far more difficult not to throw open the doors and rush to her side. She was in pain, and it was because of him and his selfish desire for her.

Behind the walls and doors, silence fell. It was weighted, and carried with it a sense of foreboding. His throat swelled and his heart hammered as sharp, controlled footsteps grew in intensity from the room beyond the closed doors.

He caught the eye of the woman who held more than just his life in her hands. His heart sank deep — travelling beyond his stomach and into his feet — when she stepped out into the corridor. The doors closed so quickly behind her that he didn’t catch even a glimpse of the room within.

Starched as stiff as the collar around his neck, she stood tall and unmoving. So still that he was certain she wasn’t breathing, until her lips parted and shattered his world.

It was a girl.

A newborn baby girl.

Which meant both mother and child would be sent away to some faroff village on the coast, away from prying eyes. A scandal would surely follow if anyone discovered he had broken tradition and fathered a daughter.

His mouth relaxed enough to speak, but his tongue fell slack when she told him to be quiet and vacate the hallway.Easierwas how she worded it, it would be easier if he didn’t lay eyes on either of them.

It was all well and good in theory. In practice, it sent a sharp and agonising pain through his chest.

To be forever separated from his wife. To never see his daughter.

The idea was simply too much.

He loved them both so dearly that when the carriage carrying them away became no more than a dot on the horizon, he stepped off the battlements.

Plunging down to his eternal rest was a sweeter punishment than living without his soul mate and pretending their precious girl did not exist.

Had he been a stronger man, he might have fought harder against the rigid rules, pushed back against the shame, and dismantled the stigma of bearing a female child. But he was not a stronger man.

All of it existed because Brentwoods only fathered sons.

Their centurieslong bloodline had seen only the births of men, the women marrying into their prestigious family from outside. A powerful family, with ties to the first pagans and Wiccans, gifted with powers that manifested physically in the world.

Always, without fail, born male.

Until the afternoon Aoife was born.

Living on the west of the island was hard at times. The salt winds that sliced across the land before falling into the valleys separating one side of the island from the other were just the tip of its difficulties.

A small saving grace was that the cottage they called home was in better condition than the rest of the village. Excluding the grand manor house at the top of the hill, theirs was almost palatial.

It was also horribly clichéd.

With its white decorative fence and honeysuckle that curled like a lover around the small red door. Its unruly branches partially blinding the crosshatched windows; it was fairytale perfect.

And that was as far as the fairytale extended.

Fingers long since pruned, numb and lathered with so much soap she’d lost all grip, Aoife was only an hour into her day.

With a mother who worked in the kitchens of the manor on the hill, the housekeeping fell entirely to Aoife. That morning happened to be the day for the bedsheets.

Normally Saturday was a washing day; to have the bedding fresh and ready for Sunday. It meant a night on roughly spun sacks, but come Sunday it was always worth it, wrapped in the soft linen spreads gifted by the Lord of the land.

The change in schedule was down to the man who had just departed her mother’s room. Handsome as he was, he also had a seedy quality that Aoife didn’t trust; particularly when he left behind a small knapsack filled with gold coins.

Healthy was the only word for the amount. Certainly more than her mother earned in a month in the kitchens.

Confident it was more than her mother could count, Aoife had slipped a coin or two into her apron pocket once the man was gone. She never asked who he was or why he visited. She knew it wasn’t just for talking, as her mother had once claimed.

From her earliest memory, Aoife had known the man was a frequent guest in her mother’s bed; she simply hadn’t understood in what sense at the time.

Now, at the ripe age of seventeen, there was no mystery left in her mother’s talks. The thought made Aoife’s skin hot and her chest flutter, before the inside of her thighs ached with a memory of her own.

It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. Just strange. Like her body knew precisely what it wanted and how to get it, while her mind screamed blind panic and told her never to speak to him again whenever they passed in the village square.

Aoife couldn’t bring herself to meet Ronan’s eye.

Not after that evening in the tavern cellar. The breathless staring contest, both of them silently willing the nosy busybody rifling about downstairs not to turn the corner and find them. Head dropping into her wrinkled hands, Aoife groaned into her palms.

Everything had been going so well, right up until the panic set in and the heat of it dissolved into the lingering burn of impending mortification.

Sitting back on the small backless stool, Aoife dried her hands on her apron. Lamenting over what had almost been her first time would not get the housework done, and there was still plenty of it left.

She slopped the scrubbed sheets into the metal tub and kicked it across to the mangle, wrapping the apron around the handle to protect her palms as she fed the sheets through the rollers.

From her position, she had an unobstructed view into the neighbouring cottage’s front room. Already familiar with its layout from years of childhood visits, it took her a moment to register what she was looking at.

A towel wrapped at narrow hips. A halfsmile curving up before the lips parted into a full smirk.

Aoife was unabashedly ogling her neighbour.

It wasn’t the first time she’d caught sight of Fionn Callahan, rather more than she’d intended. Which made being caught a second time considerably worse.

Coming to her senses, Aoife cupped a hand over one side of her face, shielding the deep crimson painting her cheeks from view.

No doubt he would find every cause to bring it up again, leaving her red faced for days, just as he had after the first time.

That occasion had come down to terrible timing and a near identical setup, both of them left red faced and unable to meet each other’s eyes for a solid day or two. Aoife had been in the garden hanging washing when the sound of sloshing water drew her gaze to Fionn’s window. One downward glance, one spectacularly awkward smile, and Aoife had kicked a bucket clean across the path just as Fionn toppled out of the metal tub.

Though equally mortified, Fionn had found his cure for embarrassment in teasing Aoife mercilessly about it for a week. At the time she’d been too prudish and green to follow half of what he was implying, but it had left her flushed and unsettled all the same.

Shaking off the thought, Aoife cranked the mangle steadily, feeding the sheets back and forth to wring out as much moisture as possible before they were pegged to the line.

One eye drifted to the window again. Relief settled in her chest at finding Fionn absent from view. With his gaze and smirk safely elsewhere, Aoife turned her attention to the small wooden sundial just outside the window.

The sky was clear for once, the early morning sun already bright, the shadow ought to have been sitting neatly across the carved face.

There was nothing.

Aoife leant toward the glass, frowning past the small smears speckled across it, and looked up and down the garden before looking back at the sundial.

Still nothing.

The sundial lost her attention when a flicker of movement drew her eye to the neighbouring garden. The sunflowers stood tall and bright, their thick stalks and broad petals shivering as they swayed in a lively breeze.

Aoife looked down at the impatiens growing in neat rows around the cottage. They were perfectly still.

And among their stalks, a new flower had appeared.

Rhododendron.

Aoife’s frown deepened as she recognised it.

“Beware,” she whispered, her voice swallowed up by the kitchen and then another voice answered, low and unhurried, filling the room from behind her.

“And caution.”

The stranger finished her sentence, and within the words lay an unspoken command:be still, and don’t do anything rash.

Aoife’s grip tightened on the mangle handle as though it might offer some comfort. It didn’t.

She turned slowly.

A man was circling the kitchen table with the unhurried ease of someone browsing a market stall. One whitegloved hand glided across the smooth surface before lifting at the edge to inspect the fabric beneath for dust.

After a moment, a quietly impressed sound parted his lips. Aoife looked at his face.

His features were sharp, as though carved fresh from marble that very morning; handsome, and impeccably composed. The tailored suit and gold diamond encrusted cane hanging over his arm spoke volumes of considerable wealth.

Keeping her eyes on him, Aoife took slow, careful steps toward the fireplace and the iron poker balanced against the coal bucket. Something solid in hand would make this considerably less terrifying. Particularly now that the man had reached over and plucked a knife from the block beside the stove.

He turned it in the light, a vague smile crossing his mouth.

“Leave it.” Calm. Certain.

Aoife stopped dead.

The man set the knife back into its slot with a deliberate metallic thud. His eyes — aqua, and unsettlingly sharp — fixed on her, and whatever resolve Aoife had mustered drained quietly out of her.

A smile broke across his face, satisfied but tinged with something like disappointment. “Can’t say I am at all pleased with you,” he announced, finger and thumb pressing together in thought.

The comment knocked her sideways.

Who was this man?

Why was he in her house?

His smile shifted — slow and unreadable — as his heavy brows dropped a fraction over those almost unearthly eyes. He sighed gently. “You’re seventeen, correct?”

Aoife nodded. Her tongue had entirely abandoned her.

He nodded in return, evidently satisfied by something in her answer. One by one, he peeled off the fingers of his gloves and tucked them into his breast pocket, then drew his large hands behind his back and rolled his broad shoulders back. It made him appear taller. His already considerable frame seemed to fill the kitchen.

“I suspect your mother never told you for want of keeping you safe.” He spoke gently but with an edge, clucking his tongue when Aoife returned nothing but a blank stare. “It cannot be kept from you any longer, now that you’re of age. Your ignorance is not safe, and you need to be informed.”

He spoke like a teacher. A well educated, silver spoonfed teacher.

It was irritating, the deliberate simplicity of it, as though he wasn’t entirely certain she’d keep up.

“Informed of what?” Aoife found her tongue at last, and its sharp edge came with it. The man’s eyes cut to her briefly.

“You’re a Brentwood, Aoife. One who should never have been born.”

A Brentwood.

That was impossible. And how on earth did he know her name?

The Brentwood family was no secret. Everyone knew of them. Everyone also knew that only boys were born into the Brentwood line.

Aoife was beginning to suspect the man was a very well dressed lunatic. She glanced at the poker. Not far. If she moved quickly enough—

She felt it before she saw it.

The air filled with a crackling static. Then a brilliant flash of lightning struck the fire poker and sent it spinning across the room with a sharp metallic ring that hung in the silence long after it stilled.

Aoife’s outstretched hand remained empty in the air.

She looked at the cane.

The handle was shaped into a snake’s head. Jaws open as though midstrike, eyes of black onyx, its two front teeth formed from what appeared to be either glass or diamond. As Aoife stared, it flickered out a ruby red forked tongue, then slowly closed its mouth, its expression settling into something almost serene.

Aoife pressed a fist to her chest over her hammering heart and swallowed repeatedly against the dryness in her throat.

Nothing was making sense. Questions rose and dissolved before she could catch them.

She wanted to wake up.

She wanted her mother.

Aoife’s gaze slipped briefly to the door, willing the woman to come through it not to save her, just to be there. Just to make the kitchen feel like it belonged to them again.

The man cleared his throat. The cane settled back over his arm. “I wish I could indulge your naivety, Aoife.” There was genuine regret in his voice. “But they will not wait patiently for you. If anything, as you are now, you are precisely what they’re looking for.”

“Who are you?” Aoife shook her head. “Who are they?”

Silence stretched between them.

He appeared almost uncomfortable, or at least uneasy about one of the two questions. He cleared his throat again and straightened his tie.

“The Brentwoods are who seek you out,” he said stiffly. “They want you dead.”

He said nothing further.

So. She was a Brentwood, and the Brentwoods wanted her dead. Aoife was no closer to understanding any of it and the man was still avoiding the first question entirely.

“Who areyou?” she pressed.

His mouth pinched, then softened as his gaze warmed and his lips curved into something sincere.

“I am Cassian Aldric, a Dominus within the Magicae Council.” He stroked a finger down the sharp ridge of his nose and let it fall to his chin. “And I have been sent to be your—” he paused, as though the word had snagged on something “—guardian.”

It clearly wasn’t the word he’d intended.

Nevertheless, she had a name and the outline of a reason.

Cassian’s presence was unwelcome, and the news he carried was worse.

If any of what he’d said was true, then being unable to look Ronan in the eye and accidentally seeing Fionn through the window were now the very least of her problems.

That was, somehow, almost a relief.

Aoife levelled a look at Cassian, drew a slow breath against the anxious claws tightening around her lungs, and asked the question she least wanted the answer to.

“Why do they want me dead?”

Cassian’s expression shifted, pitying, and sad, like a man looking at a wounded animal asking to be spared.

It set Aoife further on edge.

“How much do you know about the Brentwoods?” he asked in return.

“They’re a powerful family. Strong political ties.”

It was nearly everything she knew, her mother had forbidden talk of them, which had never made much sense to Aoife before now. It was starting to.

Cassian smiled again. That same pitying smile.

“Do you know the story of the Last Siren?”

Aoife nodded.

The Last Siren was no children’s tale. It was cold and brutal the treatment of the Siren at the hands of her captors nothing short of barbaric. It was a story for campfire nights, not bedtimes.

Cassian nodded slowly, her answer apparently welcome even as something bitter settled behind his eyes at the mention of it.

“It isn’t just a story. It happened.” His voice dropped low. “The curse the Siren cast before she died is real.” A smile touched his mouth, brief and strange. “And she is standing right in front of me.”

The words landed like a key turning in a lock Aoife hadn’t known existed.

Something snapped in her chest not painfully, not with fear, but with the deep and flooding relief of something that had been held shut for far too long finally giving way.

Cassian’s smile turned dark with quiet satisfaction as Aoife inhaled sharply and, in place of words, let out a sound; loud, melodic, and wholly involuntary.

“You’re a Siren, Aoife,” he said smoothly.