GAISCE (At Our Best, Book 3, Part 2 in Baile Series)

Chapter 8 Therapy

Isla

"If I didn't know any better, I'd say you looked to be on the verge of a panic attack." I moved to stand with Callum on a red bridge in a serene, perfectly designed garden.

Callum smiled, but it held no warmth. "Well you are-were, the master of total breakdowns." He looked at me with calculative, yet forlorn hazel eyes.

"You saw something." I stated, hoping my guess was correct. "I saw something."

"I remembered something." He toyed with a flower that had fallen from a cherry blossom tree above. "I wasn't born the way I am." He let the flower fall. I watched it twirl through the air before landing on the clear water below.

"Is Callum Moore haunted by his past?" I questioned.

"You expect me to divulge my secrets to you?" He smiled slightly.

I shrugged. "I'm a very good listener, I could be your therapist. No charge, unless the story gets really boring."

"My story is not boring." His eyes flashed dangerously.

"I'll be the judge of that." I countered.

He chuckled. "Well, I guess it all started when my parents were cast out from the O'Sullivan dynasty." He wiggled his fingers in the air dramatically. "My father was told not to marry my mother and he did it anyway, a motto I live by to this day. Do you what you want. Anyway, everything was going fine until my parents decided to sell me out. At the time I thought they were going to send me to an orphanage. So I ran away when I was ten, but I was captured rather quickly. They sedated me and the next moment I woke I was lying tied up in the back of a van. You see I was a rather smart kid." He turned to give me a grin and I rolled my eyes in response. "I used the 'I need to go to the toilet trick'. Naturally they gave in after a couple of hours and they let me out to go by the side of a country road. It turned out that we were in England. Now, I grabbed a fistful of dirt before I turned around and when one of the guys went to grab me I threw it in his face. I used the distraction to make a break for it, I also happened to be a bit of an athlete."

"You were a gymnast I know."

"How did you know?"

"I may have Googled your name a while back." I replied.

His smile broadened and I frowned. "Did you really?"

"It's not what your thinking."

"And what am I thinking?" He leaned closer to me and I punched him in the shoulder.

"Get on with your boring story."

"Fine. I outran them easily, heading straight for the forest in the distance. Little did I know that it was the acclaimed Wistman's Wood, Hellhound pandemonium." His tone darkened. "I may have been young, but I knew what death felt like, it plagued the air that I breathed and hung heavy from the canopy above. The shadows had eyes, harbouring harbingers of death and prophecy. It was there that I was given the gift of both life and death." He held out his palm, igniting a bright flame from its centre. "The Hellhounds gave me shelter and food, teaching me about my kind and others until I decided to return to society."

"So who were the people that kidnapped you?" I asked.

"I still don't know." He replied. "I've been searching for answers ever since I escaped, but I have found nothing."

"It doesn't make sense." I tried to think of why a couple would allow their child to be kidnapped. I had no answers.

"You know what also doesn't' make sense?" Callum leaned with one elbow on the bridge so he could look at me easier.