Across Time Part 24

Cate joined them at the door. "How long do we have?"

Lachlan rubbed his face. "Days. Perhaps less than a week. Not long.

Paulinus has set his sights on bringing the island to its knees." Lachlan looked down at Cate. "Let us hope she moves quickly, else we may be the last of our people."

"How could you?"

Jessie locked eyes with her mother, but refused to respond.

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"Dr. Uhl said you were combative and rude. Rude, Jess. You just can't seem to get out of your own way, can you?"

"Is that a rhetorical question?"

"Don't get fresh mouth with me, young lady. I've had enough of your antics. If we didn't feel that sending you back to San Francisco was a reward instead of a punishment, you'd be packing your bags right now."

"But we don't want to foist our problem on someone else," Rick added, entering the parlor. He sat next to Reena and held her hand.

"Is that what I've been reduced to? A problem?" Leaning back, Jessie swallowed the anger rising in her throat.

"Don't act the victim here. You left your appointment early, you were disrespectful, and now, you have earned a restriction."

Jessie shot forward. "Are you kidding me? I'm seventeen. Who puts a seventeen-year-old on restriction?"

"Maybe if you started acting more mature and less rebellious, we wouldn't have to."

"Look, Jess, we have a lot of work to get done here. Every day that goes by without guests is a day we get deeper and deeper in debt.

We can't afford to be chasing after you and worrying that your- activities-are casting a gray cloud over the inn."

"And you think putting me in lockdown is the answer?" Jessie crossed her arms and shook her head sadly. "Then bring Daniel home.

It's not fair that you've sent him to the hinterlands because of your dark and, if I might add, erroneous suspicions about me. I'll stay home, but I want him to come home."

Rick chuffed and shook his head. "This is not a negotiation, Jessie.

Daniel will come home when we feel it is best."

Jessie rose. "Fine. Anything else?"

"Yes. Finish painting room five. Your mother and I have some errands to run and I want it to be done by the time we get back."

When Rick and Reena finally drove down Morning Glory, Jessie was already ten minutes late to meet Ceara at her boat. Time was already taking on a new meaning now that she had a destiny to fulfill.

Destiny.

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What an interesting word, she thought. People her age didn't usually think about destiny or purpose. We just go through life expecting tomorrow to be there like a gift waiting to be unwrapped.

With little planning or preparation until our senior year, and then BLAM, everyone expects us to know what we want to be for the rest of our lives. Even then, most people still don't really know what their purpose is. What's worse, they don't even care until it's too late, and then they're stuck doing something they never saw themselves doing when they were younger.

But she cared. She cared very much. The more time pa.s.sed, the deeper her feelings were for a woman she would never meet. And those emotions were becoming stranger now, because they were no longer Cate's emotions, nor were the visions Cate's alone. They were her own now, borne of an ancient spirit that had raised its head and whispered to her to remember the ancient ways.

And to remember her love.

How perfectly natural it felt that it was the love of another woman that touched her so deeply. She'd never been attracted to girls, herself, but she'd had a lesbian friend her soph.o.m.ore year who was one of the coolest kids she'd ever met. Unlike Jessie, the girl didn't do drugs, so their friends.h.i.+p was short-lived. Still, she had always wondered what it would feel like to love a girl. It was something she and Wendy had talked about one super-stoned moment.

Jessie had tried her best to love guys, to plug that void she'd felt her whole life, but love in high school was a pseudonym for s.e.x, and she'd had her fill of that. After the first six guys, she had wondered what all the fuss was about. It was no big deal, and in the end, she decided it was more of a ha.s.sle than it was worth.

But now . . . now that she could feel what love truly felt like, she could understand how s.e.x with someone she really loved might be more meaningful. That kind of love was eternal and binding, and yes-void-filling. It had already managed to soothe that hollow feeling that had been such an intrinsic part of her being. Jessie heard, and she was remembering. It wasn't a coincidence her parents had dragged her to Oregon and the Money Pit. It was her destiny, and it was now her *

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job, her responsibility to keep Maeve from harm and to protect a way of life.

Jessie thought back to when she saw Cate stab that soldier in the back. When had that happened? Was that before Cate and Lachlan's vision, or after?

Desperate to know more, Jessie had waited for her parents to leave and immediately ran down the backstairs and into the night.

"Restriction, my a.s.s," she muttered, careful to avoid the motion-sensor lights on the porch. Destiny would not be slowed down by parental restrictions. The clock was ticking.

Five minutes later, Jessie stood on the deck of the boat, out of breath from running the entire way.

"Come in, come in, my dear," Ceara said from her cabin below.

Jessie ducked as she entered the cabin and was surprised to find several large books strewn about the table, and a laptop plugged in on the counter.

"There is a great deal for you to know before you go back there, Jessie."

Jessie nodded. "I know. I don't think I have ever felt this stupid.

Why didn't I ever pay attention?"

Ceara batted the question away. "Believe me when I say this, Jessie Ferguson. What you were, you shall never be again. Who you are now, and who you are going to be, was never fully your own decision. Trust that you have already begun to change. You must learn to understand these changes. Without understanding, you will be lost."

Jessie nodded. "I have been lost, Ceara. Here-now, is the first time I've felt-found."

"Good. Your eagerness to complete your quest will make the learning easier. Come. Sit."

Jessie sat at the table and stared down at the open book. It was an encyclopedia of ancient religions, and it smelled as old as G.o.d, himself.

"First, you must remember what they are, because what they believe is vital to your understanding of what it is they need to know. Without knowing them, you can only guess at how to help them."

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Jessie shook her head. "I don't understand. Why can't I just open a history book and see what happened and then tell them that?"

Ceara sat across from Jessie and as she pulled the encyclopedia to her a Celtic cross fell from the folds of her silk scarves and swayed about an inch above the table like a pendulum. Jessie didn't remember ever seeing it before. "You cannot read a single history book and then run to tell them what happened."

"Why not?"

"First off, there is always more than one account of a historical incident. Actually, there are always several different accounts of any one single event."

Jessie frowned, thinking back to a time when she and Wendy had seen a man run out of a mini-mart. He had just robbed the store, they both saw him, and yet, their "eyewitness" accounts of his appearance were vastly different.

"Many historians claim there were six million Jews killed during the Holocaust in Europe, while other historians dispute that by saying there were not even six million Jews in the whole of Europe. If you only read the latter account, you would be accepting a revisionist's point of view. To get the facts, you will have to research, and research well. You will have to consider the subjectivity of the author, how much research he or she did, etcetera, etcetera."

Jessie sighed. "I hadn't thought of that. I guess I would have just gone forward and maybe even given them incorrect information."

Ceara nodded. "Without knowing precisely what they are up against, you could inadvertently send them all prematurely to their graves. Life, my dear, isn't just good and evil. It is layered and textured, and if you do not understand each layer, you cannot make the right decision as to what to tell them."

Jessie nodded slowly. She was just now beginning to see the scope of her involvement.

"So, we shall start at the beginning with a crash course in Druids and Druidry. Ask any questions you may have, but pay close attention."

"Can't I just tap into Cate for all of this?"

"Normally, you might be able to, if you were experienced at astral *

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projection or other phenomena, but after two thousand years, think about how many other lives your soul has lived. It would be like going into a haystack and expecting to retrieve hay straws that were cut in August of nineteen sixty-one. It cannot reasonably be done, especially by an untrained individual. You must re-learn what your soul knows . . . in essence, you must remember, and in remembering, you will find yourself wondering, how do I know this? "

Jessie nodded. "Soul memory."

Ceara nodded. "Yes. When one wonders why they are afraid of bridges, you will know it is because of something the soul remembers but can't quite bring to light. So, we suffer with our phobias, our neuroses, even our love of things, and yet, we do not know why they exist for us."

"How sad. No wonder Cate thinks we, in our time, are so disconnected from ourselves. We are."

Ceara rose and opened the small window above the sink. "Once the Romans embraced Christianity, and it spread, it all but destroyed other ways of thought in the western world. As you will see, when the one G.o.d replaced the many, the world never recovered. Religions were forced to go underground, to hide, to live in fear of being tortured into false confessions and equally false conversions. As you'll see, the Romans accomplished a great deal on their move toward world domination."

"What finally brought them down?"

Ceara chuckled beneath her breath. "Barbarians, if you can believe it. Barbarians and Romans themselves brought down the great Roman power. But that's another tale. Right now, you must understand who you were, what motivated you to become a Druid and to find yourself in the future."

"But I know what motivated me. Maeve."

Ceara c.o.c.ked her head in question for a mere second, before a slight smile pushed her lips up. "Yes. You anam cara, for whom we would do anything. There is but one connection that neither man nor time can sever, and that is when two souls commit to each other for all of time.

If, of all the soul memories you remember, Cate's feelings about Maeve *

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come through the strongest, then it is clear that saving Maeve is why she came through."

Jessie nodded and rose. Pacing across the small cabin, she jammed her hands in her pockets. "Okay, about this soul mate thing. It's clear they're lovers and all-but I'm not gay."

Ceara shrugged. "The soul is genderless, my dear. In this life, Maeve could be your brother, a friend you haven't met, one of your parents, or anyone you have already come across but were too young to understand what you were feeling."

"Oh-I get it. So a soul mate doesn't have anything to do with s.e.x?"

Ceara shook her head. "Absolutely nothing. In Cate's life, Maeve is her soul mate. They took that love to a physical plane which may or may not happen in your own life. Who knows what you both were in the life after that or the ones before it."

"You mean, like, we could have been pilgrims or pirates or something?"

"Yes. You could have been lovers, friends, siblings, or, you may never have connected in the life after that one. You may have missed each other in certain ages."

Jessie shook her head. "No way. Maeve would have found me."

Ceara c.o.c.ked her head and stared at Jessie. "Oh?"

She did not know how to explain it. She had not been able to put words to it, but ever since she knew Maeve existed, her life was brighter, somehow, more full of light. She was no longer empty and seeking, but content and not alone. And wasn't that silly, since Maeve had been gone for nearly two thousand years?

"My dear, do not hope to understand that which needs no explanation. Go to the bookstore in Eugene, and you will find shelf after shelf of books about finding your soul mate. We are born and we live with two shadows following us; one is the ever-present specter of death, and the other is the shadow of our soul mate, without whom we are not as fulfilled as when they are within us. Maeve is within you because of Cate's eternal bond with her."

Jessie sighed and sat down hard in the chair. To be understood was *

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better than any drug she had ever had. "That's exactly what it is, Ceara.

It's like I finally found what I've been looking for-but-I haven't. Not really. At least, not here in my own time."

Ceara patted Jessie's hand. "Does it matter so that the soul you seek is not here with you right now, when you have access to her in your past?"

Jessie's eyes brightened. "Not really."

"You are young yet, my dear. You have plenty of time to find her or him again. Just know she could be in any form. She could be a child playing in the park. She could be the man who sells newspapers. She could be a professor, a homeless person, or someone you pa.s.s on the street. That is one reason why the Druids believed everyone should be treated with respect, because you never knew whose soul resided in the being you were speaking with."

"Wow."

Ceara nodded. "The world would be a nicer place if we all thought that, eh?"

Jessie nodded, and suddenly her chest was warm and full as she realized that she loved this old woman sitting across from her, this woman, whom her parents had judged and deemed somehow unfit; a woman whom the town made fun of, whom the world had forgotten.

She reached out to Jessie when Jessie didn't know how to reach.

"I'm ready, Ceara. Teach me what I need to know."

Ceara nodded and pulled out a second large tome. She opened up the old book, which crackled from age and disuse to a picture of a Druid. The robe, staff and bonfire in the background brought a feeling of knowing to Jessie. "It took up to twenty years to become a Druid. I am going to give you twenty minutes worth of those twenty years. The rest, you'll have to get on your own."