So confident she had been. So maddeningly sure of herself and her ability to rebalance the continuum with nothing more than her strength of conviction. Loving Matheson Gregor unconditionally hadn’t saved him, but had doomed them all.
Winter finally came out of her stupor, unfastened her snowshoes and kicked them off. She rushed through the foot of new snow—skirting the deep hole—wrapped her arms around her pine’s shriveled bark, closed her eyes, and listened for even a whisper of life. She pulled off her cap and threw it to the ground to lay her ear against the trunk…and felt nothing. Tears streamed down her cheeks and froze on her jacket as she tightened her embrace and willed her life-energy into the tree…and still she felt nothing other than her own pounding heart racing in horror.
“No!” she cried, digging her fingers into the bark and pressing her body closer. “Wake up!
Give up your stored energy, TarStone, and nourish my pine!”
When still nothing happened, Winter slid to her knees, turned, and leaned against the lifeless trunk, burying her face in her hands. All was lost, including her magic. She couldn’t even feel TarStone’s energy; she couldn’t feel anything but the dark, colorless void of…of nothing.
Winter sobbed uncontrollably, surrendering to self-pity and shame. She had been so busy being happy and hopeful that she had neglected the real threat right under her nose. Thinking love alone would make everything right, she hadn’t even bothered to consider the strength of her enemy’s determination.
How naive she had been, and how foolish to have so readily dismissed the power of despair.
She knewthat when something had been set into motion, be it a physical object or a train of thought, that it wanted to stayin motion. For one thousand years, despair had been hurtling toward mankind’s end, gaining momentum to the point that even her own promised destiny hadn’t been able to stop it.
She didn’t have what it took to be a drùidh. She was so blind to the negative energy that made up the dark side of life, she was ineffectual to recognize it, much less defeat it.
Which brought Winter back to her question to Daar. If she didn’t have the wisdom to be a drùidh,to be powerful and smart enough to vanquish despair, then why had she even been born?
Winter reached in her jacket and pulled out her pencil. She swiped her tears away so she could see and rolled the pencil between her fingers as she thought about what she could do. She flicked her wrist—only to gasp when her pencil suddenly turned into her pinewood staff! She stared at the softly vibrating stick, and her heart thumped with renewed hope as she felt the energy’s warmth flow through her body.
All wasn’tlost. She still possessed the magic!
Matt. She needed to talk to her husband; he would know what to do. Maybe they could combine their strengths and bring her tree back to life.
But Matt had left long before daybreak to finally give Tom the supersonic ride he had been promised. Oh, why had Tom asked to go today of all days!
And Father Daar couldn’t help her, since he’d lost his own power. Robbie! Maybe Robbie could help. But then Winter remembered Daar had told her the pine was Robbie’s source of power as well. Had his guardian energy died with the tree?
Winter pulled out her cell phone and punched in Robbie’s number, and Catherine answered on the fifth ring. “Hello,” Winter said. “Is Robbie home?”
“No,” Catherine told her. “He’s at Gù Brath with your sisters. Happy birthday,” she added.
“How come you aren’t at breakfast with everyone? Finding it hard to get out of bed being a newlywed?”
“I…ah, I’m just headed over there now,” she told Cat.
“Then I guess I’ll see you this afternoon at the big bash.” Cat laughed. “I still can’t believe all you girls were born on the same day. Everyone made it home for the party, didn’t they?”
“Yes, everyone’s come home, including husbands and children. I have to get going, Cat, before they eat all the food. Thanks for the birthday wish, and I’ll see you this afternoon.”
“Bye,” Catherine said, hanging up.
Winter pressed the End button, stared at her phone for several seconds, then dialed Gù Brath.
But she quickly pushed End again before it could ring.
She just couldn’t bring herself to ruin everyone’s day. This might be the last birthday the seven of them spent together, so how could she call home in a panic and pull her papa and Robbie away when they were also helpless to do anything?
Matt was still her best hope. He still had his power, didn’t he? Or had he been tapping her pine tree, since it had grown from the root of his own tree? Darn it, she should have been more curious about the source of his energy.
And that was when Winter realized exactly where she’d gone wrong. Since the day she’d sat in the cave with her back to Matt and he’d told her his heartbreaking story, all she had thought about was how shecould fix the mess he had made. She’d never once stopped to consider that maybe Matt was the one who needed to do the fixing.
How arrogant she’d been about loving Matt unconditionally. How obsessed she’d become with making everything right, to the point that she’d forgotten about Matt’s very real need to be part of the solution.
Darn it, where was that crow when she needed him! Why couldn’t he have explained all this to her in her dream, instead of giving her just enough information to make her think she could right another man’s wrong all by herself? She wasn’t the means to the end, she was only half of the answer! She couldn’t makeMatt find hope; she could only encourage him to look deep within himself to find it again.
Winter hugged her pinewood staff to her bosom, closed her eyes, and willed her husband to come back at twicethe speed of sound. Darn it, she needed him right now; he should darn well sense her desperation. That’s what being married was all about. They were a team, and it was going to take the both of them to fix this mess.
She wasn’t giving up. She refused to lose hope. She had her staff and she had Matt, and they had their baby’s future to protect. And if they blew the top off Bear Mountain getting at that accursed energy inside, then by God, that’s exactly what she and Matt would do—together!
Winter stood beside her old Suburban at the Pine Creek airport and held her hand over her racing heart, undecided if it was still pounding from dread or from her record-breaking snowshoe run down the mountain to where she’d parked her truck. But she could finally feel herself calming down as she worked the genes she’d inherited from her mama and weighed the possibilities and probabilities of various courses of action she and Matt could take.
She did have a few good points to consider. For one thing, her staff was still powerful. And Matt’s staff was too, she hoped. Second, the sun was still shining, the earth was still spinning, and the apocalypse hadn’t suddenly arrived with the death of her pine, which only proved her theory that as long as there was life, there was hope. Winter lowered her hand from her heart to her belly as she came to her third and most positive point: the future was growing inside her, and Winter knew Matt would help her move heaven and earth to protect their child.
The odds were in their favor, Winter decided, and just as soon as her husband got back they would head up to the cliff on Bear Mountain. And there Winter would call on the genes she’d inherited from her papa, and combine her warrior’s heart with Matt’s to vanquish once and for all the energy bent on destroying them.
Winter shaded her eyes to see the sleek jet setting up for a landing, and snorted at the irony of it all. It appeared that it mattered naught if Providence was hoping to bring feminine thinking to the forefront; it was still going to take a fierce battle to win the war.