Chapter 2: The Shepherd's Crook
The rain began as a fine, persistent mist, clinging to Brigid’s illusionary shawl and beading on her real sweatshirt beneath. It made the muddy track that wound up from the village into the dark hills a treacherous glue. Every step was an effort, a suctioning pull that threatened to steal her shoes.
The Shepherd’s Crook had been a cacophony of suspicion and clues. The hot stew, greasy and thick with turnips, had steadied her hands. The coin—a modern American quarter she’d found in her jeans—had passed with a shrug from the barmaid, who’d pocketed it as “foreign.” The old men by the fire, their voices lowered not enough, had been the compass.
“Aye, the lights again last night up at the Monaghan place. Green and silver, like will-o’-the-wisps in the garden.”
“Whisht, man. She’ll hear you. That one has ears in the stones themselves.”
“Witch or not, she mended young Liam’s leg after the horse kicked him. Bone was showin’. Two days later, he’s walking. No fever, nothing.”
“Unnatural, is what it is. The old one, Maeve, she at least keeps to the old ways quiet. This new one… she walks like she owns the very mist.”
Brigid had eaten slowly, forcing each bite, the words etching a map in her mind. Monaghan. Witch. Healer. Maeve. Not her grandmother, but an ancestor.
The road narrowed, the village lights dwindling to fuzzy yellow smears below. The only sounds were the squelch of her steps, the sigh of wet wind through gorse, and the low, constant thrum of the journal against her palm. It wasn’t a painful pulse, but a persistent one, a second heartbeat that felt increasingly like a compass needle finding true north.
She crested a rise and there it was.
A sturdy stone cottage, smaller than she remembered from her visits, but unmistakable in its shape against the gloom. No electric yard light, no modern plumbing vents. Smoke curled from a central chimney, and candlelight glowed in two small, diamond-paned windows. A low stone wall enclosed a garden, where even in the fading light she could see the strange, silvered glint of plants that didn’t belong in any 19th-century herb patch.
This was the place. The heart of the Féth Fiada. Her family’s seat.
Trembling—from cold, from exhaustion, from a hope so sharp it hurt—she pushed the rough wooden gate. It screeched on iron hinges.
The cottage door flew open before she reached it.
The woman who stood there was a shock. She was young, maybe in her mid-twenties, wrapped in a shawl of deep green. Her hair was a wild, untamed riot of red, darker than Jan’s but just as vibrant, flowing loose over her shoulders. Her eyes, green as Brigid’s own, blazed with an intelligence that was immediately, profoundly familiar. This wasn’t the stern, ancient Grandma Monaghan Brigid knew. This was a woman who came before.
“Who are you to walk up to my door smelling of ripped sky and sorrow?” the woman demanded, her voice melodic but firm, carrying the lilting accent of the land.
Brigid stopped, her illusion shimmering under that direct, powerful gaze. She could feel it—a probing touch, not magical in the Archimedean sense, but something older, rooted in the land itself. The woman was tasting the energy around her.
“My name is Brigid,” she said, her own voice sounding thin and modern.
“Brigid,” the woman repeated, and a curious frown touched her lips. She stepped forward, out of the doorway and into the damp twilight. She circled Brigid slowly, her eyes missing nothing: the odd cut of the illusion, the way Brigid’s right hand was clenched and held slightly away from her body. “You’ve the look of us. But you’re not from any village I know. Your clothes… they’re a song my eyes hear but my hands can’t feel.” She stopped in front of Brigid again. “And you’re bleeding time from every pore, child. It’s dripping off you like rainwater. What have you done?”
The directness shattered Brigid’s last reserve. The weight of the impossible hour crashed down. A sob escaped her, harsh and ugly. She held up her right hand, turning it to show the journal, leather melded seamlessly to her skin, pulsing with a soft, internal light.
“It took me,” Brigid choked out. “I was reading… and it just… it took me here. From 2026.”
The woman’s eyes widened. Not with disbelief, but with a dawning, horrified understanding. She reached out, not for the journal, but to cradle Brigid’s face in warm, rough hands. She peered into her eyes, past the tears, searching. Brigid felt the probe again, deeper this time, a gentle descent into her essence.
She saw the woman’s breath catch. Recognition, profound and dizzying, flooded her features.
“Oh, you foolish, brave girl,” she whispered, her own eyes glistening. “You’ve walked the pleat. I’ve only ever theorized… Dear God. I see my father’s stubborn brow in you. And my mother’s fire.” A tear traced through the freckles on her cheek. “I am Anne. But they call me Annie. And you, Brigid… you are of my blood, aren’t you? A daughter of my not-yet-born son’s son’s son.”
It was an affirmation, not a question. The familial truth, spoken aloud in the 19th-century dark, unleashed a torrent in Brigid. She nodded, weeping in earnest now. Annie didn’t hesitate. She pulled Brigid into a fierce, enveloping embrace. She smelled of peat smoke, dried herbs, and a potent, clean power that was the very antithesis of the journal’s cold math. It was the smell of home.
“Come inside, a stór. You’re safe now.”
The cottage was a single, large room, dominated by a massive hearth where a peat fire glowed. Bunches of herbs hung from the low ceiling beams. A curtain partitioned off a sleeping area. It was both familiar and alien. A younger, brighter version of her grandmother’s sanctuary.
Annie sat her by the fire, wrapped a real, thick woolen blanket around her, and pressed a cup of hot, sweet tea into her left hand. She examined the fused journal with a healer’s touch, her fingers hovering inches above the leather.
“This is Archimedes work,” Annie murmured. “Precise. Arrogant. They think they can stitch the fabric of God’s creation with numbers alone. The binding is soul-deep. I can’t remove it without tearing you. But I can soothe its hunger.” She placed her palm over Brigid’s hand. A warmth, green and gold and alive, flowed from Annie into the journal. The pulsing slowed, the light dimming to a dormant ember. “There. It will sleep for a time.”
The relief was so physical Brigid slumped. “Thank you.”
“Tell me everything,” Annie said, sitting on a stool opposite her, her gaze unwavering.
Brigid told her. The Dark Market. The journal. The accident that created her triad with Will and Sarah. The theory of temporal folding. The violent translocation. The man in the alley and the spectral bear. Aisling’s upcoming wedding, the photo in her pocket. As she spoke, Annie’s face moved through expressions of fascination, anger, and deep sadness.
“A triad,” Annie said, a smile touching her lips. “A soul-cohort. That is rare and beautiful magic. I can feel the echoes of them on you. Two bright threads, stretched thin across an ocean of years.” Her smile faded. “The wedding you will miss… this Aisling. She is a Monaghan?”
“My cousin,” Brigid said softly. “Fergus’s daughter.”
Annie blinked, sitting back. “Fergus. I’ve not even met the man I’ll bear anyone with yet.” She laughed then, a rich, rousing sound that filled the cottage. “Oh, the tangled webs! So you are both my descendant and my harbinger. You carry the future in your pocket, stained with sick.” She grew serious again. “The journal’s original author—he tested his hypothesis. He must have. This is the key to his prison, or his grave. You are holding a man’s lost time.”
The door latch lifted.
Both women turned. An older woman stepped inside, shaking rain from a black shawl. She was stern, back straight as a rod, her grey hair in a severe bun. Her eyes, the same Monaghan green, swept the room and landed on Brigid with the force of a physical blow.
“Mother,” Annie said, rising. “This is Brigid. She’s… come a long way.”
Maeve Monaghan—a namesake for Brigid's formidable grandmother and just as formidable in her own way—closed the door. She didn’t approach the fire. “I felt the tear in the veil. The sickly, metallic taste of forced time. And now I find it sitting in my daughter’s kitchen.” Her voice was flint on steel. “Who are you, girl? And what chaos do you bring to my door?”
“She’s family, Mother,” Annie said, a protective edge in her tone.
“From where? I know every branch of this family.”
Brigid met the older woman’s gaze. “From the future. I’m Brigid O’Connor. I'll be born in about a hundred and twenty years.”
Maeve’s face went utterly still. For a long moment, the only sound was the crackle of the peat. Then, she crossed herself slowly. “Mary, Mother of God. Time-walking is an abomination. The Féth Fiada whispers of the damage you’ve already done, just by being here. Your presence is a stone thrown into a still pool.”
“She was pulled, Mother. She didn’t choose this,” Annie argued.
“And yet the damage is done. The ripples have already reached the source. I felt it shudder an hour past.” Maeve’s eyes pinned Brigid. “You cannot stay. You must go back.”
“I don’t know how!” Brigid’s voice broke. “The journal is the key, and it’s fused to me.”
“Then we must un-fuse it,” Maeve said coldly. “Annie, the silver thistle and hawthorn bindings. We will purge this artifact from her flesh, even if we must scrape it away.”
Annie stepped between her mother and Brigid. “No. You feel the binding as well as I do. It’s threaded into her soul-print. Tearing it out will shred her. She stays. We protect her. We learn from the journal. We find a way to send her back whole.”
The standoff crackled in the small space. Maeve’s jaw tightened. She looked at her daughter’s defiant posture, then at Brigid’s pale, desperate face.
“You were always too soft for this duty, Annie,” Maeve said, but some of the rigidity left her shoulders. “She is a danger. To herself, to the Source, to all of us. But you are right. A healer does not cause harm to cure it.” She let out a long breath. “She can stay the night. One night. Tomorrow, we consult the deeper currents. We will see what the Féth Fiada wills.”
She turned and disappeared behind the curtain into the sleeping area.
Annie sighed, some of the tension leaving her. “She’s terrified,” she said quietly to Brigid. “The Féth Fiada is everything to her. To all of us. Its disruption could unmake this valley.” She poured more tea. “Rest. You’re exhausted.”
But exhaustion was a distant country. Brigid was wired, her mind churning. Annie seemed to understand. As the night deepened and Maeve’s soft snores came from behind the curtain, Annie moved about the cottage, humming. She lit a pipe with fragrant tobacco, the smoke curling in the firelight. She was a contained storm of vitality, and Brigid watched, mesmerized by the living ghost of her heritage.
A firm knock at the door, just short of midnight, made Brigid jump.
Annie’s face lit with a secret, knowing smile. “He’s early,” she whispered, padding to the door and opening it just enough.
A man stood in the rain, a tall silhouette with broad shoulders. “Annie,” he said, his voice a low rumble.
“Padraig. You’re soaked. Get in here.”
He ducked inside, shaking water from his dark hair. He was perhaps thirty, with a strong, weathered face and eyes that went immediately to Annie with a possessive heat that made the air thicken. He was a blacksmith; Brigid could see the soot ground into his hands, the powerful build of his arms and chest under his damp linen shirt.
He noticed Brigid then, frozen by the hearth. His gaze sharpened with question.
“A cousin, visiting from across the water,” Annie said smoothly, crossing to him. “She’s asleep on her feet. Pay her no mind.” The lie was effortless, but she placed a hand on Padraig’s chest, claiming his attention fully. “I’ve missed you.”
The look that passed between them was a naked, hungry thing. Padraig’s concern about a stranger evaporated. He grabbed Annie’s waist and pulled her against him, crushing his mouth to hers. The kiss was not gentle. It was a consuming, wet clash of teeth and tongue, a low groan pulled from his throat. Annie kissed him back with equal ferocity, her fingers tangling in his hair.
Brigid, trapped by the hearth, felt her face flush. She should look away, but the raw authenticity of it held her captive. This was no period-drama courtship. This was need.
Annie broke the kiss, breathing heavily. “Take me to bed,” she murmured against his lips, not a request but a command.
She led him by the hand toward the curtained alcove, but not behind the curtain where Maeve slept. Instead, she guided him to a pile of thick sheepskins and woven blankets near the far wall, in a nook sheltered by a large wardrobe. A lover’s nest, separate from the familial bed.
Annie began unfastening the ties of her dress with impatient hands. Padraig watched, his eyes dark, then pulled his own shirt over his head in one swift motion. His torso was a landscape of hard muscle and dark hair. He was already hard, the thick outline of his cock straining against the rough fabric of his trousers.
Annie let her dress fall, and she was naked underneath. Her body was lush, full-breasted with hips that curved generously, her skin milk-pale and dusted with freckles even across her breasts. She was magnificent, utterly unashamed.
“Fuck, Annie,” Padraig breathed, drinking her in.
She stepped into the sheepskin nest and lay back, opening her arms. “I’m cold, Padraig. Warm me up.”
He was on her in an instant, his mouth finding hers again as his hands roamed her body. He palmed a breast, his thumb rubbing rough circles over her nipple until it pebbled tight. He broke the kiss to suck that nipple into his mouth, his tongue lashing it, his teeth grazing with just enough bite to make Annie cry out and arch into him.
Brigid watched, mesmerized and aching. This was her great-great-grandmother, a woman of fierce magic and fiercer passion. It was like watching Jan, but root-deep, wilder.
Padraig’s mouth moved down Annie’s body, over the soft swell of her stomach, through the fiery thatch of curls between her thighs. He didn’t tease. He hooked her legs over his shoulders and buried his face in her cunt.
Annie’s head fell back, a sharp cry torn from her. “Yes! Right there, mo chroí. Don’t you dare be gentle.”
He wasn’t. He ate her with a voracious intensity, his tongue spearing inside her, then flattening to lap broad strokes over her clit. The sounds were obscenely wet, loud in the firelit cottage. Annie’s hips rocked, grinding herself against his mouth, her fingers clutching at his hair. “Fuck, fuck, your tongue… I’m gonna come all over it.”
She did, suddenly, her body seizing, a ragged, sobbing moan erupting from her as she shuddered under his mouth. Padraig held her through it, drinking her down, his own low groans vibrating against her.
Before the last tremors had faded, he was moving up her body, fumbling with his trousers. He freed his cock—thick, veined, ruddy with want—and positioned himself at her entrance. He looked into her eyes, a question in his.
“Do it,” Annie panted, her eyes glazed with pleasure. “Fill me up. I need to feel you for days.”
He pushed inside.
Annie’s mouth opened in a silent gasp, then a deep, satisfied groan as he sheathed himself fully. Brigid could see the stretch, the way Annie’s body welcomed and took him. There was no slow build. Padraig set a brutal, driving pace from the first stroke, pulling almost all the way out before slamming back in, the slap of skin on skin a sharp counterpoint to the rain on the thatch.
“You feel so good,” he grunted, his voice strained. “So fucking tight and wet for me.”
“Harder,” Annie demanded, her nails scraping down his back. “Make me yours. Remind me.”
He obliged, his thrusts becoming piston-like, jolting her body with each deep penetration. The sheepskins rustled beneath them. Annie wrapped her legs high around his waist, taking him even deeper, meeting each thrust with a roll of her hips. Her breasts bounced with the force of it.
“Touch me,” she ordered, grabbing his hand and bringing it between their sweat-slick bodies. “Make me come again while you fuck me.”
Padraig’s thumb found her clit, already swollen and sensitive. He rubbed it in tight circles, matching the rhythm of his hips.
Annie’s cries grew higher, more desperate. “Oh god, yes, just like that, I’m there, I’m there, Padraig!”
Her second climax ripped through her, her inner muscles clamping around his cock in rhythmic pulses. Padraig swore, a guttural, filthy word, and his control shattered. His thrusts lost all rhythm, becoming frantic, desperate lunges. With a final, deep grind and a choked roar, he came, spilling inside her, his whole body shuddering with the release.
He collapsed on top of her, both of them breathing in ragged, heaving gulps. The air hung with the scent of sex, sweat, and peat smoke.
After a long moment, Padraig shifted, rolling to the side but keeping an arm draped possessively over Annie’s waist. He kissed her shoulder. “Witch,” he murmured, affectionate and awed.
“Yours,” she whispered back, smiling, tracing a finger down his chest.
It was only then that Padraig seemed to remember they weren’t alone. He lifted his head, his eyes finding Brigid across the room. There was no embarrassment in his gaze, only a sleepy, satisfied curiosity.
Annie followed his look. Her smile softened, becoming knowing, almost apologetic. “Life is short, and the world is hard, a stór,” she said quietly to Brigid, as if explaining the rain. “Joy must be taken where it’s found, and held tightly.”
Brigid could only nod, her own body humming with a sympathetic, lonely ache. The triad bond, stretched across time, throbbed dully in her soul. She missed Will’s tender touch, Sarah’s exploratory passion. She felt like a ghost at a feast.
Padraig’s eyes drifted closed. Soon, his breathing evened into sleep. Annie lay awake a while longer, her hand stroking his hair, her green eyes reflecting the firelight. She looked at Brigid, and then deliberately down at the journal on Brigid’s fused hand.
“Tomorrow,” Annie mouthed silently, her expression turning resolute. “We find your way back to your joy.”
Brigid curled tighter under her blanket, the echoes of their passion still warming the air, the journal a silent, sleeping weight on her skin, and the relentless tick of lost time a drumbeat in her heart.
Brigid curled tighter under her blanket, the echoes of their passion still warming the air, the journal a silent, sleeping weight on her skin, and the relentless tick of lost time a drumbeat in her heart. She finally slept, but it was a thin, porous thing, filled with swirling equations and the sound of Aisling crying in a rain-slicked Dublin alley that didn’t yet exist.
Dawn was a grey supplication through the small windows. She woke to the smell of frying bread and the low, tense murmur of voices. Annie and Maeve were already up, speaking in hushed Gaelic near the hearth. Padraig was gone, his departure unnoticed in the night. The sheepskins were neatly folded.
“She must be prepared, daughter. The Source will test her. You know this.”
“She’s just a girl, Mother. Thrown here. The test could break her.”
“If she is truly of our blood and carries that,” Maeve said, shooting a glance at Brigid’s hand, “she is already broken in ways that must be mended. The Féth Fiada will decide.”
Brigid sat up, the blanket falling. Both women turned. Annie’s face was strained; Maeve’s was unreadable stone.
“We go to the wellspring today,” Maeve announced, as if continuing a conversation Brigid had been part of. “You will present yourself and that artifact to the heart of the power my line is sworn to guard. It will judge the nature of the tear you’ve made. It will show us the path, or it will show us the consequence.”
“What kind of consequence?” Brigid asked, her voice rough with sleep.
Maeve’s green eyes held hers. “Oblivion. For you, for the artifact, perhaps for this timeline if the rupture is deemed toxic. The old powers are not gentle. They are preservers. They excise infection.”
A cold that had nothing to do with the morning damp settled in Brigid’s bones. Annie moved to her side, handing her a warm piece of sod bread. “Eat. You’ll need your strength.” Her touch was brief, a press of reassurance. “The Féth Fiada is not cruel. But it is absolute. Tell it the truth. Show it your heart.”
“And if my heart wants to go home?”
Annie smiled, but it was sad. “Then hope that home is where it wants you to be.”
The wellspring was not a pond or a glittering cave. It was a fissure in a hillside, choked with fern and moss, looking like nothing so much as a scar in the earth. The air above it shimmered, however, like a heat haze on a cold day. A low, sub-audible hum vibrated in Brigid’s teeth. The journal awoke. A faint, analytical pulse radiated from her palm, as if it were tasting the energy, trying to deconstruct its waveform.
“Approach,” Maeve commanded. She and Annie stood flanking the fissure, their postures formal, their hands open at their sides. They began to chant, words that were older than Gaelic, sounds that shaped the shimmering air into visible, intertwining strands of green and silver light.
The light reached for Brigid.
It coiled around her ankles, cool and insistent, and pulled her toward the fissure. She didn’t walk; she was drawn. The hum intensified, becoming a choir of whispers—voices of past guardians, the land’s slow thoughts, the raw song of magic itself. It was overwhelming, beautiful, and terrifying.
“State your name and nature to the Source,” Maeve’s voice cut through the chorus.
“Brigid Moira O’Connor.” Her own voice sounded small. “I’m… a student. A sister. A… a triad. I was pulled through time by this journal. I belong in the year 2026. I want to go home.”
The strands of light tightened, climbing her legs, her torso. They probed the edges of the journal, and a discordant shriek ripped through the harmonious hum. The journal flared, a harsh blue-white glare fighting against the green-silver. Equations, sharp and angular, burned in the air around Brigid’s hand, defensive theorems firing automatically.
The Féth Fiada recoiled. Then it attacked.
The gentle pulls became viscous bands, constricting. The light turned searingly cold, burning with frost. It was judging the journal, and finding it a violent, foreign calculus, a scalpel where the Source was a living vine. And Brigid, fused to it, was complicit.
Pain lanced up her arm. She cried out, falling to her knees. Visions, not of the future, but of the damage, assaulted her. She saw the very hillside behind her eyes, but withered, the trees skeletal, the Féth Fiada’s glow sickly and dim. The infection Maeve feared.
“No!” she gasped. “I don’t want that! I want to fix it!”
She focused, not on the defensive math of the journal, but on the feeling of her triad. She clawed past the pain, reaching for the golden threads in her soul. She thought of Will’s laugh during a lab mishap, the way his kindness felt like a safe harbor. She poured the memory into the light. She grabbed for Sarah’s empathy, the night Sarah had simply held her during a panic attack, their thoughts blending into calm. She offered that communion.
The brutal cold softened. The visions of blight wavered.
She pushed again, thinking of Aisling—not the crying vision, but her cousin’s fierce, reconciled grin across a Chicago pizza. She thought of Jan’s chaotic, loving freedom. She thought of the baby Rick, a promise of a future. She offered her longing, her love, her desperation not to ruin but to return.
The Féth Fiada’s bands loosened. The conflicting lights—green-silver and blue-white—ceased their war. They began, hesitantly, to weave. The journal’s cold math unraveled, not defeated, but informed, its rigid equations accepting variables of heart and heritage. The light from the fissure flowed into the journal through Brigid’s hand, and for a moment, they were one circuit: woman, book, and ancient power.
A new vision flashed.
Not of blight, but of a connector. A singular, shimmering thread, taut as a violin string, stretching from the journal in her hand into the roaring, chaotic rainbow of the time-pleat she’d fallen through. And at the other end of that thread, faint but unmistakable, was the warm, golden knot of her triad’s bond. A tether. A way home.
The light released her. It withdrew into the fissure, the humming fading to a contented whisper. Brigid slumped forward onto the wet moss, panting, the journal on her hand now-warm with a new, integrated energy.
Maeve was the first to reach her. The old woman’s hands, surprisingly gentle, turned Brigid’s face. She searched her eyes, and for the first time, Brigid saw something other than severity there. A wary respect.
“It showed you,” Maeve stated.
“A thread,” Brigid coughed. “A way back. But the journal has to… recalibrate. It needs to learn the path from the Féth Fiada. It will take time.”
“How much time?” Annie asked, helping her sit up.
“I don’t know. A day? Maybe more.” The reality crashed in. Aisling’s wedding was in less than two weeks. Her own time. Every hour here was an hour lost. “I need to get back before—”
“Before you disrupt more than a hillside,” Maeve finished, but her tone held no venom. It held calculation. “You will stay here. You will work with the Source. You will teach that cursed book the path. We will shelter you.” She stood, brushing moss from her skirts. “But know this, Brigid O’Connor from the future. You are an event now. Your presence is a ripple. And ripples attract attention from both shores of time.”
In the present, in a suburban Chicago backyard still littered with the bright plastic toys of a six-month-old, the air rippled with a different kind of tension.
Mike Williamson watched from his deck, a sleeping Rick against his shoulder, as Jan O’Connor trampled his petunias. She was dragging his gas grill to the center of the lawn, its wheels leaving dark scars in the grass.
“You know, I just reseeded that,” he said, without real heat. He was too used to this.
“It’s a focus point, Mikey. A conduit for terrestrial resonance.” Jan grunted, shoving the grill into place. She was wearing only a pair of tiny, black lace shorts and an open silk kimono that flapped around her. Her small, pert breasts were fully exposed to the late afternoon sun.
Casey Kapowski walked out, handing Mike a beer. “Terrestrial resonance. That why you’re using our grill instead of, I dunno, a ceremonial stone?”
“It’s steel. It’s been cooked on. It holds the energy of communal gathering. Also, I’m hungry. We can have burgers after.” Jan turned, her kimono gaping. “Will, Sarah, center circle, now. Clothes off. We need skin contact with the energy grid.”
Will Sommers, pale and drawn from a sleepless night, exchanged a look with Sarah. Sarah, her usual baggy sweatshirt already looking like a shield she was reluctant to drop, gave a tiny, nervous nod. They began to undress with the hesitant practicality of people at a doctor’s office.
Off to the side, Fatima Abaza sat cross-legged on a patio chair, an ancient, leather-bound book open on her lap. Her fiancé Hank loomed behind her, a mountainous, confused presence.
“Is any of this in the manual, Fati?” Hank asked, nodding at Jan who was now scattering salt in a complicated pattern around the grill.
Fatima didn’t look up. “The Liber de Lunae Viridis describes a ritual of sympathetic location using emotional bonds. It calls for a silver basin, water drawn at moonrise, and seven specific herbs.” She glanced at Jan, who was now lighting a bundle of sage with a Bic lighter. “She’s using a Weber Genesis and what smells like poultry seasoning. So no, Hank. She is not following the actual ritual.”
“But it’ll probably work anyway?”
“With Jan, it usually does. The principles are directionally correct. The aesthetic is… improvised.”
Stacy Steinberg leaned against the deck railing, her athletic arms crossed. She wore yoga pants and a tight tank top, her 9mm holster conspicuously absent on the kitchen counter inside. Polluck, the battle-scarred cat, circled her ankles suspiciously, his good eye on Godfrey II. The golden retriever puppy lay in a sunny patch, chin on paws, watching the humans with an expression of profound boredom.
“So, let me get this straight,” Casey said, taking a sip of Mike’s beer. She looked at the gathering. “My grill is now an energy conduit. Jan is half-naked. Will and Sarah are about to be fully naked. And this is going to find Brigid how, exactly?”
“The triad bond is a unique soul-signature,” Jan called over, crouching to draw a glyph in the grass with a stick of charcoal. “Like a magical GPS ping. But it’s stretched across time now, which is fucking with the signal. Will and Sarah are the receivers. I’m the amplifier. The ritual syncs us up, we cast a net into the temporal maybe, and we feel for her.”
Will, now shirtless, shivered in the cool breeze. “And we have to be naked because…?”
“Because clothing inhibits truthful connection, Will. Fabric is a lie we tell the world.” Jan stood, wiping her hands on her shorts. “Also, sex magic is the most powerful kind for this. The emotions are highest, the connection is purest. We’re gonna fuck, and we’re gonna think really hard about Brigid.”
Sarah, down to her bra and panties, hugged herself. “Jan… I want to find her more than anything. But this feels… invasive. Using our bond, like this.”
Jan’s demeanor softened. She walked over, taking Sarah’s face in her hands. “It’s not invasive, sweetie. It’s using the tool you have. Your love for her is the fuel. The sex is just the ignition. It’s how our Order works. We’re gonna burn bright, and we’re gonna light her way home.” She kissed Sarah’s forehead. “Trust me.”
“I do,” Sarah whispered. But her eyes were uncertain.
Casey leaned toward Mike, her voice low. “Place your bets. How much of this is legit, and how much is Jan seeing a hot, vulnerable triad and thinking ‘buffet’?”
Mike bounced Rick gently. “I’m saying sixty-forty. Sixty percent sincere desperation, forty percent opportunistic horniness.”
Stacy snorted. “I’m going seventy-thirty. In favor of horniness.”
Hank cleared his throat. “Fati? Percentages?”
Fatima sighed, closing her book. “With Jan, the motives are always… braided. The need to help is real. The desire for sexual communion is also real. They are not separate drives for her. They fuel each other. So it is one hundred percent both.”
Jan, now guiding a naked Will and a naked Sarah to stand inside the salt circle, heard them. She shot a glare over her shoulder. “You can critique my methodology all you want from the cheap seats. But we need a locational fix before Johnny can even try to reach her. This is how we get it.” She stepped into the circle with them, letting her kimono slide off her shoulders to pool on the grass. Completely naked now, her freckled skin looked almost ceremonial in the sunlight.
She turned to face Will and Sarah, the three of them forming a triangle. “Now,” Jan said, her voice dropping, losing its defensive edge, becoming focused and low. “Close your eyes. Don’t think about us. Don’t think about them.” She gestured vaguely toward the deck. “Think about Brigid. Remember the last time you were all together. Really together.”
Will closed his eyes, his brow furrowed in concentration. Sarah followed, her hands reaching out instinctively, finding Will’s and Jan’s. Jan took their hands, completing the circuit.
A faint, green shimmer began at their feet, tracing the salt circle.
“Remember her smell,” Jan murmured. “That lavender shampoo and the ozone hint of her magic.” Jan’s own power, usually a rampant, joyful tsunami, began to coil inward, focused. The air grew heavier, warmer. “Remember the sound of her voice when she’s explaining something she loves. That excited, rapid-fire cadence.”
On the deck, the casual murmuring stopped. They all felt it—a pressure drop, a thickening of the air. The playful skepticism was erased by a tangible, gathering power. Even Godfrey lifted his head, ears perked.
Inside the circle, Will’s breath hitched. Behind his eyelids, it wasn’t a memory of Brigid studying. It was the memory of their first time, the three of them, the accident that bound them. The terrifying, exhilarating surge of connection. Sarah gasped softly, her hand tightening in Jan’s, clearly sharing the same cascade of sensory memory. The taste of Brigid’s skin, the feeling of her magic intertwining with theirs, the perfect, terrifying moment of becoming one.
“Good,” Jan breathed, her own eyes closed. “Now, chase that feeling. Follow the thread.”
Jan released their hands. Instead, she reached for Will’s cock, which was already half-hard from the intense emotional feedback. She stroked him to full, rigid length, her touch knowing and firm. Will groaned, his head falling back.
“Sarah,” Jan said, her voice a husky command. “Touch me. Get me ready for him.”
Sarah, her shyness burned away by the ritual’s urgency, dropped to her knees in the grass before Jan. She didn’t hesitate. She pressed her mouth to Jan’s cunt, her tongue delving inside with a desperate hunger that was part her own need, part a mimicry of how Brigid tasted, of how Brigid felt. Jan cried out, a sharp, musical sound, her fingers tangling in Sarah’s blonde hair.
“Fuck, yes. Just like that. Connect us all.”
Jan’s arousal, amplified by her own Green Moon power, radiated outwards in a wave. On the deck, Mike and Casey both shifted uncomfortably. Hank coughed. Stacy felt a flush of heat that wasn’t from the sun. Fatima simply watched, analytical, nodding slightly as the green glow intensified, rising up their legs like luminous vine.
Jan pulled Sarah up after a minute, kissing her deeply, sharing her own taste. “Now,” she panted against Sarah’s lips. She turned Will, positioning him behind Sarah. “Will, you’re going to take Sarah. Sarah, you’re going to feel him, and you’re going to think of Brigid feeling him. I’m the conduit.”
Will, his eyes glazed with magic and need, guided his cock to Sarah’s entrance. Sarah, bent slightly forward, braced her hands on her knees. He pushed inside her in one smooth, deep stroke. Sarah cried out, the sound melting into a moan as he filled her.
Jan positioned herself in front of Sarah. “Look at me, Sarah.” Sarah’s blue eyes, clouded with pleasure, focused on Jan’s face. Jan took Sarah’s hand and pressed it against her own soaking wet slit. “Now, feel me.”
As Will began to move, thrusting into Sarah with a rhythm that quickly grew frantic, Sarah slid two fingers into Jan. Jan’s knees buckled, but she held herself upright, her other hand gripping Sarah’s shoulder. It was a circuit: Will moving in Sarah, Sarah’s fingers moving in Jan, Jan’s power cycling through them all.
The green glow enveloped them, a shimmering aurora that pulsed with the rhythm of their joining. Will’s thrusts grew harder, deeper, the slap of skin a frantic drumbeat. Sarah was sobbing, tears streaming down her face, not from pain but from the overwhelming overflow of connection—feeling Will, feeling Jan, aching for the missing piece.
“Think of her!” Jan commanded, her voice cracking. “Pour it into the bond!”
Will’s climax approached, a tight coil in his gut. He thought of Brigid beneath him in their dorm room, the wonder in her green eyes. He let go.
With a shout that was more sob than roar, he came, pulsing deep inside Sarah. The release was a key turning. Sarah’s own orgasm tore through her an instant later, an electric cascade that made her fingers curl inside Jan. She screamed Brigid’s name into the suburban sky.
Jan’s magic erupted. The green light didn’t flash; it solidified into a single, searing beam that shot from the center of their circle, not up, but sideways, tearing a vertical seam in the very air above the grill. Inside the tear was not the backyard, but a swirling, chaotic storm of blue-white light and twisted, non-Euclidean shapes—the time-pleat.
And there, visible for a heart-stopping second within the storm, was a faint, golden thread. At its end, a pinpoint of familiar consciousness, tinged with the green-silver of an ancient power. A location. A when.
“Ireland. 1899. She’s at the Source!” Jan gasped, her body shuddering through a climax of her own, triggered by the massive magical expenditure.
The tear snapped shut. The green glow vanished. Will and Sarah collapsed onto the grass, panting, entwined. Jan sank to her knees, sweat sheening her body.
On the deck, there was absolute silence, broken only by the distant sound of a lawnmower.
Casey let out a long, slow breath. “Okay,” she said. “I retract my thirty percent. That was one hundred percent Grade A, unfiltered Jan O’Connor madness.” She looked at the exhausted, naked triad in her lawn. “And it worked.”
Mike, holding Rick tight, met Jan’s triumphant, exhausted gaze. “So she’s alive. She’s in old Ireland.” The relief was immense, overshadowing the surreal spectacle. Then the consequence hit. “Johnny. We need to get Johnny.”
“And we need to do it,” Stacy said, her voice grim, “before Shiv finds out her baby is stuck in the nineteenth century.”
A collective, genuine shiver, unrelated to any magic, passed through everyone on the deck. The race was now measured against two clocks: the unknown mechanics of time, and the terrifying temper of Jan and Brigid’s mother.