Author Interview with Kat Chant

“What about the time in-between? What was it like inside Newgrange for all those years?”

He stiffened. “It was a living death where I forgot what it was to be a man.”

His voice was flat, all emotion compressed. She did the same when shrinks queried too closely into her father’s death, as if mentioning the banshee could call it. Biting her lip, she concentrated on the laneway, which was narrow, overgrown and winding. Misjudging him made her squiggle inside. If he was really twenty-six—or nearly—he was only a few years older than her and not some ancient immortal playing at being a youth.

It was almost unbearable to think of how vulnerable he must feel, here, in an unfamiliar world and the only one of his kind.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I never guessed it would be so bad. I was told fairy hills led to Tír na nÓg, and I always thought that sounded pretty near heaven.”

“Comes of having the victors tell my people’s story. Banishing us to a life in the Land of Youth sounds a lot better than condemning us to be buried alive.” His voice lost its deep smoothness and became rough and ragged. “Liz, I don’t have the heart to be talking about this. Let it rest.”

The forty questions spinning in her head over this version of events vanished as the headlights lit an old farmhouse painted buttercup-yellow with blue-trimmed windowsills and doorframe. The colors were wrong, but she knew the place. It was exactly the house she’d drawn as a child: three windows along the top, and a window on either side of a door down below. Her throat tightened until she could barely breathe.

“Here?” She didn’t need to ask, but it was more polite than, ‘How’s it feel to be living in my home?’

Angus didn’t reply. Unless she counted the thunk of his head hitting the passenger window.

Panic bubbled through her stomach. “Shit, McCraggan. You had better not be dead.”

There was a faint fog on the glass from his breath. He was alive, properly alive, not Undead or something in-between as she’d half-feared. She pushed on his right shoulder, and he slumped back. The map light revealed an unhealthy pallor to his face.

“Angus?” She squeezed his arm, then, hesitantly touched his cheek. His stubble rasped under her palm. “Can you hear me? Are you all right?”

His eyelids flickered open. “Tonight took a lot out of me. More than I expected.”