Gettin' Lucky

Chapter Seven

“You!” 

Spotting the man standing upon his front lawn, I bolted so fast from the car I forgot to undo the seatbelt. It snapped against my ribs, my left hand struggling to push the button before I broke something. My right was wrapped around the coin burning a hole through my flesh.

Conall glanced up from the halo of clover he stood in, misting rain beading upon his fisherman sweater. “Evening, Lass,” he called, a jolly wave to his hand. “You’re home early.”

The explanation that I left work to head to the bank rolled on the back of my tongue, but I swallowed it. Stomping across the rising puddles soaking into the frosty spring ground, I froze a foot away from him. The man who knocked down my window with a tree. Who found a key under those roots. Who…

Who laughed at my jokes. Who fed me tiramisu. Who rolled up a ball of yarn and dangled it for my disinterested cat. Who strummed my body until I wanted no other hand to touch it.

Who was a fake.

When I didn’t rush into his arms, Conall caught on that something was amiss. The waving arm that extended for a warm embrace thudded to his side. He quirked his head up  as if waiting for me to deliver the final blow. As if he was too much of a coward to do it.

I’d thought of nothing else on the mad drive home. Even left Abby alone with the money, telling her to get it somewhere safe. She turned ghost white at the thought but agreed. 

It couldn’t be true. He couldn’t be… But no matter how much I twisted and turned the puzzle, it kept coming up with the same answer.

Holding my palm flat, I opened my fingers to reveal the glint of gold to the world. Conall winced, but his eyes also zoomed in on the coin and refused to leave.

“This is yours!” I shouted above the rising pelt of rain and slush of car wheels through puddles.

A puff of steam escaped his lips and his head drooped. “Aye.”

“This is why you’re here. This is what you’re looking for!”

Slowly, he raised his gaze off the glint of the coin to meet my eyes. Thunder rumbled inside them, and Conall’s lips parted. “Yes, it is.”

“Your treasure,” I sneered. The logical part of my brain that knew Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and Unicorns were all lies refused to believe this truth.

Conall worried his hand over his scruff, his head bobbing. The rain soaked through his red locks rusting them to a muddled brown. There was no long red beard, no green frock coat, no pointy shoes. He dressed…odd but not for a hipster. Maybe there were still a lot of hipsters in Ireland. And even with the coin in my hand, I was still begging for any explanation other than the truth.

“You’re a leprechaun,” tumbled from my lips, my teeth chattering as drizzle soaked through my shirt and drowned my hair.

Conall snickered and a doleful smile wrapped around his lips. “Now you know the truth.”

“How? Why? What?” Every question I wanted to put to him smashed to nonsense, but I couldn’t stop talking.

Clicking his tongue, Conall dipped a finger into the collar of his shirt and tugged up the coin around his neck. Laying it in the palm of his hand, he said, “A hundred and fifty some years ago, a village swiped my gold. My hard earned keep for a millennia of cobbling, and sweeping, and doing whatever you mortals asked for. In dire straights from the famine, they thought that a leprechaun’s gold coin would fix all their problems.”

He stepped closer to me, leaving the clover path to splash in the puddle. I didn’t back away, but my body shuddered. That was enough to freeze Conall’s gait. “Was your great-Granda who took it, along with over sixty other villagers. I’ve been hunting across all of Ireland, Scotland, England, and finally America for the pieces.”

“Why…why didn’t you stop them? Why didn’t you take it back from them?” Why wait over a hundred years to collect? Why walk into my life, sweep me off my feet, and make me fall for you?

Conall licked his lips, steam puffing off his tongue. “I was all outta luck. Didn’t have a chicken in a fox den’s chance of catching any of ‘em. Not until theirs ran out.”

“So that’s how you…how you managed to get it all to work. The tree, the window, the box,” I recited over the near rube goldbergian chain of events he set off, which luck guided him to. “I don’t understand, you had the flask. Why didn’t you just take the coin yourself?”

“Banks aren’t prone to releasing their secrets to just anyone, especially anyone without that piece of plastic you all carry,” Conall mused with a laugh, but as his wandering eyes slipped back to me, he gulped. In a stricken voice, he said, “And I was curious what you’d do.”

I’d barely looked at the coin, only held it so tight in my hand it was probably imprinted forever into my flesh. Now I gazed down at it. There was a hint of a lion in the relief. Were the circle of letters around the edge  a magic incantation? Either way it was beautiful. 

“You said it was cursed.”

“If that’s how you wish to see it. The luck’s long gone,” Conall said.

“But I could still keep it, suffer the consequences anyway.” I weighed the coin in my hands. Was this family relic the reason everything in my life kept going wrong? I could get rid of it, pass it off to the leprechaun and breathe freely for the first time. Not fear every horrific outcome that only chaos can cause. But it’d get rid of him too. He’d have no reason to remain.

“Yes,” Conall breathed, his voice dropping deep into his chest as if he suffered from a twin set of wounds. There was no easy way for him to relieve the pain from either. “You’d continue with your string of bad luck until the coin passes on, but I will not take it from you.”

Keep the bad luck, keep him. Though, probably not. There were more coins out there, more treasures for him to collect. He’d have no reason to even see me, to contact me, to leave a text message. Did leprechauns have phones?

Raising my head, I stared deep into those emerald eyes I tried to get lost in. How long had they suffered for this? How long had he searched and begged for his treasure back? I knew what it was like to have a life full of bad luck, and he had to endure a century of it.

My eyes never leaving his, I reached my hand out. “Here,” I said, upending the coin into his palm. “It’s yours.” I was about to snake my hand back, but Conall enveloped his fingers around mine. Pain bobbed in his gaze as if he was pleading with me to both give him the coin and take it away. But I had no answer and tugged my hand from his grasp.

Weighing the coin in his palm, he bounced it thrice before flicking the golden artifact into the air. When it reached its apex, instead of falling, it began to spin faster and faster until transforming into a stream of light. It beamed directly onto the coin dangling off of Conall’s neck, sealing itself there.

“I keep all my treasures in one now,” he spoke as if he needed me to understand.

Numb, my head lolled to the side. My lips mumbled the compliment, “Smart,” as I began to turn away from the leprechaun caught in the rain. Water seeped through my shoes soaking my socks, the puddles rising as if to trap me in this gloomy purgatory.

“Wait.” Warmth enveloped my frozen fingers, Conall seeming to appear by my side from nowhere. I froze in my march away, my hand locked in his, but I wouldn’t turn to him. I couldn’t let him see the rain washing down my face.

“When I left Éire, when I faced unending nights in the dark, cramped squalor of this mortal life, I never dreamed I’d meet someone like you.”

“The others weren’t as gullible?” my wounded ego spoke for me, the hurt striking like a lash against my heart. I rolled my eyes over my shoulder and from the edge watched Conall glaring at the ground.

The rain ceased drenching his shoulders and hair as if he didn’t have to keep the ruse up anymore. “Who I am, what I am is beyond most mortal’s ken, but you…” Green eyes burned into the sliver of mine that I gave him and a gulp bulged in my throat. “There is none in this realm or the other like you, Jess.”

“What are you saying?” I tried to shake away the buzzing crowding out my thoughts, the headache of truth transforming into a confusion migraine.

Conall stepped closer, ensnaring my eyes. Releasing his grip upon my hand, he tugged off the chain about his neck. The gold coin caught a splinter of light. “That you, Jessica Malley…” He reached over and circled the long necklace around my head. A burst of breath broke from my lungs as the coin of a hundred coins landed against my sternum. 

“Are me treasure,” he breathed, watching as I ran my fingers along the edge of the coin in shock. By the third circle of the mystic runes, I felt his head dip down from the weight of uncertainty hanging in the air. Those emerald eyes; however, wouldn’t drift from me for a second. When did they look at me the way he’d once stared hungrily at his coin?

Conall folded, rain gushing down the back of his shirt as he stumbled away. “If’n ya don’t…”

Splashing through the puddles, I wrapped my arms around him and pulled his lips to mine. Warmth trembled through my frozen body, alighting the fires of hearth and home in my soul. Conall’s safe and comforting embrace pulled me ever tighter to his body. Rain splattered around us, but not a drop would touch our tangling bodies as I lost myself in his Irish kiss. 

Breaking from my lips, Conall brushed his forehead to mine, green eyes burning forever in my vision. “In all my searching, all my long nights and days, you,” he cupped his massive hand to my cheek, a smile dawning upon his lips, “you are the greatest treasure I could ever find.”

As we kissed, the rains faded to reveal a beautiful rainbow sparkling through the rising-blue sky. Hope rode upon those colors of light and a future I’d never dreamed of but couldn’t wait to live. The unluckiest girl in the world and a gorgeous leprechaun entwined in love. Who’d have ever guessed?

THE END