SONS of DON

by Brenda L. Harper

  She might not be a doctor, though. Would anyone want to see a clinically insane doctor?

  She trapped the bird between her cupped hands and pulled it to her chest. She could feel it shivering slightly against her palms.

  “Goodbye, little birdy.”

  She tossed it out the window and watched it fly high into the sky, circling above her before it came to rest in the tree that stood just a dozen feet outside the window where he grew in the neighbor’s yard. It was almost as though the bird had no interest in leaving her.

  If only there had been an adult in her life with that kind of loyalty. Maybe things would have turned out differently.

  Chapter 18

  “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

  Gwen sat up a little, pulling the book she had been pretending to study closer to her. “We promised Ms. Dru we would.”

  “But after what happened earlier—”

  “I’m okay.”

  She glanced over at Cei, her face growing a little warm as it did each time she met his eyes after her spontaneous kiss earlier in the day. He hadn’t said anything about it, and she thought he probably understood it was just an in-the-moment kind of thing. But she still felt like an idiot for doing it, anyway.

  He seemed to understand because he didn’t push her any further. He simply turned back to his own research.

  Gwen had been studying the same books for more than an hour, but she hadn’t found anything new. She finally decided to go find something else. They’d reviewed all the books that had Blodeuwedd’s story in them. Maybe if they looked at books about Welsh myths…it was worth a try.

  She searched the computer and came up with a dozen candidates. As she moved along the aisles, she thought about Bran. Pictured his easy smile, his kind face. And then she heard his name on the lips of that woman who attacked her. It caused a shudder to rush down the length of her spine.

  It was just a part of her hallucination. She’d heard his name because he was a part of her life and the insanity pulls information out of the subconscious when creating a hallucination. She’d looked it up on the painfully slow computer at the Langleys’.

  She might be going insane, but she hadn’t lost her ability to reason things out.

  She grabbed the books she needed quickly and made her way back to Cei. He didn’t look up as she returned, but he moved his papers out of her way. She settled back down, running her fingers through her hair as she organized them and decided which to start with. She was really too tired and too overwrought to concentrate, but this was better than sitting around her bedroom wondering how long it would be before she could no longer tell the difference between reality and fantasy.

  The first book she opened touched on the history of Wales. She glanced through the table of contents, deciding it probably had little to offer. The same with the next two books. She opened a fourth and ran her fingers over the chapter titles, some familiar as they covered the same topics as the others. But then something caught her eye.

  Dialannan Gruffydd: Diary of Gruffydd.

  Dialann. That was what was on the cover of the book Gwen found in Tony’s office.

  Diary. It was a diary.

  Gwen thought of the woman she’d seen in her hallucination. She was writing in the book…it was her diary. She was writing a diary. But people back then didn’t write down anything. If there was anything she had learned in Ms. Dru’s class, that was it. Yet, the book was here. And it had those words on the cover.

  Where had it come from? How did it survive all this time? Who was that woman?

  Obviously, Gwen knew that the woman in her hallucination wasn’t real. But someone had written the book, right? And the cover did say diary, so that suggested that it was the personal writings of someone. It could be a woman.

  Gwen stood and snatched her backpack off the floor.

  “Where are you going?”

  She turned slightly, rocking back on her heels as she remembered Cei sitting across from her. “The bathroom.”

  He glanced at her backpack, but he didn’t say anything. He just turned back to his own studies.

  Gwen walked past the bathrooms and headed for the front doors. She had to take another look at that book.

  Tony wasn’t in his office when Gwen arrived moments later. He’d said something about a department meeting when she and Cei arrived that afternoon after a short ride on the public bus. She let herself in—Tony never locked the door, at least, he hadn’t since she began working for him—and flipped on the light. It seemed as though the chaos had grown since her last visit. There were more piles on the floor, and half the books she’d put on the shelf the day before had been taken off. She sighed. Proof that he’d undone what she did. What was the point in paying her to come organize for him if he wasn’t going to leave it organized?

  The book was no longer on the floor. Gwen stood in the doorway and surveyed the room, afraid to step inside and knock over another of these many, reproducing stacks. That would make it harder to find anything.

  How could one man make so much mess? The room almost looked as though someone had tried to search it. Not that anyone could find a thing in this place. Magazines that she had placed in nice piles yesterday were once again scattered on the floor. Paperwork that had been stacked nicely on the shelves—using the word ‘nice’ quite loosely, of course—was now on the floor. And, now that Gwen had a moment to think about it, the piles were not the same, not stacked the way she had stacked them over the last few days. They had been divided, separated, as though someone had reordered them in an attempt to find something.

  Warning bells began to ring in Gwen’s head.

  “Tony?” she called.

  A low moan filled the room, like the keening of a bear cub. Gwen dropped her bag and carefully stepped through the room. It was fairly small, not many places for someone to hide, even with all these stacks and piles of stuff. Just the desk. A big, mahogany thing, it was solid all the way across on the side that face the door. But when Gwen slipped around the side, she found Tony lying on the floor between the desk chair and the desk itself, his head sitting at an odd angle against an open drawer.

  “I’m here,” she said, dropping to her knees in front of him. “Where are you hurt?”

  He touched his forehead lightly, not opening his eyes to even try to focus on her. Gwen had no idea what to do. She took a first aid class last year, and her anatomy and physiology class in her last school had been quite informative. But those things didn’t really prepare one for something like this.

  The only thing that kept running through her mind was the admonition that a person with a potential head injury should not be moved. How was that for a future doctor?

  She pressed her fingertips to his carotid artery—at least she knew where that was—and felt the wild beating of his pulse. It was strong, if a little too active, so that had to be a good thing. He was pale, but not in that way that was often described as a deathly pallor in the books she liked to read. And when she touched his hand, his skin wasn’t sweaty or clammy. He felt quite warm, actually.

  “Should I call 911?”

  “Cei,” he said, peeking at her from one eye. “Is he with you?”

  “No. He’s down in the library still.”

  Both Tony’s eyes popped open with that bit of news. “You shouldn’t be wandering around alone, Gwen. Not after what happened this morning.”

  “That was nothing, just a crazy homeless woman.”

  Tony’s eyes narrowed slightly, his mouth moving as though he had something he wanted to say, but decided not to say.

  “What happened here?” she asked.

  Tony reached into his front pants pocket and freed his cellphone. “Call Cei,” he said. “It’s the first—”

  “Cei has a cellphone?”

  “Call him.”

  Gwen took the phone, taking just a second to study its layout before initiating the appropriate buttons to make the call. She didn’t have a cellphone—had neve
r had one, despite requesting one several years in a row through the secret Santa program the state ran for foster children—but that didn’t mean she hadn’t seen her classmates use them enough to know what to do. She was actually quite proud of herself as she listened to the ringing of the open line.

  “What’s up, Tony?”

  “It’s Gwen, Cei. Tony’s been hurt—”

  “Where are you?” he demanded, his voice filled with an anger she’d never heard in it before.

  “His office.”

  “What are you doing there? You were supposed to be in the bathroom. For crying out loud, I’ve been standing in the damn lobby in front of the bathroom door for five minutes, waiting for you to come out.”

  “Well, I’m not there. I’m in Tony’s office and he’s hurt.”

  “Hurt?” The anger ebbed a little. “Hurt how?”

  “He’s hit his head.”

  “Stay there. Do you hear me? Stay where you are until I get there.”

  Cei hung up before she could answer.

  “He’s sure in a mood.”

  Tony chuckled a little and then winced from the pain the movement shot through his head. “You should see him when he’s really angry. Wouldn’t want him as my enemy, that’s for sure.”

  “He’s been with you for a while?”

  “I’ve known Cei longer than…”

  Tony stopped, his eyes moving over her for a long moment. He reached out his hand to her. “Help me up, will you?”

  “You shouldn’t move. You might have a serious head injury.”

  “I don’t think so. Just knocked me silly for a minute.”

  Gwen hesitated, but Tony was the adult in this situation. She climbed to her feet again and took his hand, helping him with some strain to his feet and into the office chair. As she did, they uncovered a puddle of blood that was at least a foot wide. How could he lose that much blood and still be breathing, let alone laughing?

  “Tony?” she said, panic coming into her voice.

  “Some of it’s ink,” he said, grabbing her hand and pulling her around to face him. “There was a bottle of ink on top of the desk.”

  “That doesn’t look like ink.”

  “It is. Believe me.” He pulled her closer to him, forced her to look at him with the intensity of his stare. “Do you think I would be talking to you if I lost that much blood?”

  “We should get you to a hospital. Call 911.”

  She still had the phone in her other hand. She turned it on, began to dial, when Tony snatched it from her fingers.

  “It’s fine,” he said, climbing to his feet again. “See?” He did a quick twirl. The back of his shirt was covered in blood that was beginning to dry and was sticking to his flesh. The back of his hair was matted, so thick with congealing blood that she could hardly tell what was hair and what was skull. She felt the strength go out of her knees as she stared at it, felt the blood rush from her cheeks.

  Maybe pre-med really was a bad idea.

  She sat heavily on the edge of the desk as she waited for her vision to clear from the dark spots that wanted to overwhelm it. Tony turned back to her, saw her struggling, and carefully guided her into his chair.

  “Let me get you some water.”

  “You’re the one who’s hurt.”

  “But you’re the one who looks like you just saw a ghost.”

  “Maybe I did.”

  Tony crossed to the door, slipping out into the outer office to get a bottle of water from the small refrigerator kept out there. He came back a second later, a fact Gwen knew only because of his heavy footsteps as he tried to move around the stacks and piles. Her eyes didn’t seem capable of lifting themselves from the puddle of blood.

  It was congealing. Ink did not congeal.

  “How are you walking?”

  “I told you, it’s not—”

  “It is.” She looked over at him. “I may be a kid, but I know blood when I see it.”

  “Head wounds bleed a lot. Sometimes it can look quite life threatening when it really isn’t.”

  Tony twisted the lid off the bottle of water and handed it to her. She sipped some to make him happy. But she had that feeling again, that sense of the surreal. There was something very wrong here. This time it wouldn’t be as easy to dismiss as part of her diminished sanity.

  “What happened?”

  “Hmm?” Tony said, backtracking a little as he stepped over several book piles to move to the front edge of the desk.

  “What happened? How did you hit your head?”

  “Slipped and fell,” he said, his gaze busy watching his fingers play with the bottle cap he was still holding.

  “That’s it? Just slipped and fell?”

  “Doesn’t take much more than that.”

  “Then who searched through your stuff?”

  He glanced at her. “What do you mean, searched?”

  Gwen gestured toward the mess on the floor in front of the desk. “Someone reorganized all my piles and knocked half the stuff off the shelves.”

  “That was me,” he said, but his words were missing that self-depreciating laugh he often has when he talks about his disorganized habits. “I was looking for a book I thought I’d lost.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head, still not looking at her. “Can’t find a thing anymore.”

  Gwen had to move away from that puddle. She stood, stumbled over books as she tried not to fall on Tony. Really, it seemed more like someone had been in a hurry when they searched through the stacks. It didn’t look like a scatter-minded professor had been looking for a book he needed for class; it looked like a criminal was looking for the murder weapon, or something.

  She bent low to move a few books around in the corner where she had left that book, the diary, on the floor. It wasn’t there—she hadn’t really expected it to be. She turned around, again surveying the area before she moved. The moment she spotted it, shoved under the front edge of the desk, Cei stormed in.

  “Why the hell are you up here?” he demanded, stepping in front of Gwen.

  “Tony’s the one who’s hurt. Isn’t that a little more important right now?”

  Cei didn’t even look in Tony’s direction. He was studying Gwen, looking for injuries the same way he had done that morning, just without the touching. Gwen found herself kind of missing the touch.

  “You shouldn’t have left the library without telling me where you were going.” He cocked his head slightly. “Why would you lie to me?”

  “I…” Gwen began to say until she realized she had no excuse for that. Instead, she went on the defensive. “When did you become my guardian, anyway? I thought that was Theresa and Tony’s job.”

  “After this morning—”

  “This morning was just a freak thing. Right?” Her eyebrows rose. “Isn’t that what you said?”

  Uncertainty softened the hard angle of Cei’s jaw. “You still shouldn’t have wandered off. And you shouldn’t have lied.”

  “Children,” Tony said from his perch on the edge of the desk. “I think we’ve all been through quite enough today. Why don’t we head home?”

  Cei continued to look at Gwen for a long moment, but she wasn’t about to back down. She stared right back until he finally took a step backward, and promptly lost his footing on a slick pile of magazines.

  Gwen grabbed his arm, kept him from falling all the way to the floor. He dragged himself up and jerked away.

  “You’re welcome.”

  He gave her one last look before he stormed out the door.

  “You should be careful with him,” Tony suggested as he followed. “He has quite a sense of pride.”

  “No kidding.”

  Gwen watched them go out into the main corridor, Tony catching up with Cei and whispering something in his ear that made him turn away. It gave her a second to grab the book and shove it into her backpack before joining them beside the elevators.

  They were both s
ilent on the short drive home. Then they disappeared into Tony’s study, leaving Theresa to deal with dinner, the twins, and the rest of the evening chores. And it gave Gwen the opportunity to slip up to her room and study both books in privacy.

  There was something going on here. And she had a feeling these books were the center of the whole thing.

  Chapter 19

  Gwen laid the books out, side by side, on the floor of her bedroom. Just as she had thought, the outer covers and the paper on the inside were virtually the same. She wasn’t an archeologist, or whatever, but she was pretty sure they came from the same time period. The handwriting on the inside looked similar, too. But there was something slightly different about the writing in the book Gwen had found on her window sill. She couldn’t quite say what it was, but it seemed different.

  She ran a finger over the writing—all the while a voice in the back of her head was telling her that she probably shouldn’t be getting the natural oils in her hands on it—tracing swirls and curves here and there. She still didn’t quite understand the words, but she was beginning to recognize the odd combination of consonants that marked the language. It was Gaelic. But there were differences from the language she could look up on the internet, subtle ones that made it hard to figure out.