They made their way into the knots of people at the back of the crowd and slowly inched toward the bridge. George took the lead, shouldering his way through the confused and shouting crowd. Magdalena clutched his hand, afraid of being torn from his side by the pressing throngs and being unable to make her way forward alone. Forced to walk behind him, Magdalena tightened her grip on George’s fingers.
“Excuse me… coming through… excuse me, let us pass,” came George’s insistent and commanding voice as he made a path through the mob. Then they burst through the front line of the mob and nearly tripped over yellow police tape extending across the entrance to the bridge.
The strands of tape stretched between the statues that guarded either side of the balustrades of the bridge. A handful of policemen stood on the other side of the tape, milling about. Some peered over the stone balustrades at the rushing water. One officer still held a roll of tape in his hands, which he had apparently just finished using to close off the bridge. Metal barricades blocked the plaza leading down to the river. Was that Fr. Dmitri in the crowd near the barricade? She couldn’t be sure, and the face she glimpsed was swallowed by the ever-growing crowd of the angry, the frustrated, and the fascinated.
Magdalena turned to George.
“The bridge! It’s closed!” she exclaimed. “The flood…?”
George glanced around them.
“Yes,” he finally answered. “It seems the authorities think the bridge is in danger of being swept away.”
Dmitri continued to stand to one side, where the assassin’s spirit had left him. The crowd quickly grew around him as people intending to cross the bridge arrived and were prevented from moving forward by the police and their yellow tape. From where he was standing, near the barricades the police had brought from the tower, he could tell the river had overflowed its banks and had formed a large, roiling pool where tourists had been able to rent rowboats only yesterday.
“No one can cross from here to the Old Town. The conferences will be closed down,” Dmitri realized. He had to find the others and tell them of this newest treachery, the assassin who had prevented his attempt to contact the saint.
“Father Dmitri! Where are you going? What is happening?” voices called out to him as he attempted to circle around the swarming crowd with difficulty, headed back to the hotel. He looked up to find his wife standing nearby with Theo.
“I woke and found you had gone out already. So I thought to see you at the conference sessions this morning,” Sophia told him. “I met Theo here on the street, as he was headed to the conferences as well. But there seems to be something going on, blocking everything. Why is this crowd here? What is blocking the road ahead? Why are you walking back toward the hotels?”
“Is this another magic trick of George’s?” Theo asked.
Fr. Dmitri nodded. “I’m afraid it is, yes. The authorities have just closed the bridge to pedestrians. The Old Town and Little Town are sealed off from each other. But that is not the worst of it.” He described his encounter with the assassin.
“Mother of God!” his wife exclaimed. “The leader of the king’s assassins! Who is this Jarnvithja he spoke of? It seems the wicked are lurking around every corner, in league to stop us!”
“But the bridge is closed?” Theo exclaimed. “That can only mean one thing: the bridge is in danger of collapsing!”
Sophia turned to Theo. “Yesterday. When we saw the water rising. I was afraid of such a thing!”
“Yes, and now—thanks to what Elizabeth told us last night and what the assassin confirmed for your husband—we know it is part of their plan,” Theo acknowledged.
“If the bridge collapses, the city will be completely at their mercy,” Sophia said to her husband.
“But surely we cannot let his threat stop us!” the priest responded. “We must continue our efforts, strike back!”
“I agree with you wholeheartedly,” Theo said.
“So how do we proceed?” Sophia wanted to know.
“What do you think of continuing to wake the power of the Royal Road on this side of the river?” Dmitri asked him. “I know we all scurried back to our hotels last night after Elizabeth’s demise at the Astronomical Clock and the strange fire that attacked us. We apparently cannot use the salt and tarot cards to waken the portions of the Royal Road coming from the Old Town Square that cross the bridge, but we can begin again, yes? Here, in the Little Town, and follow the Royal Road up to the castle?”
“Do you think it wise to do that in the daytime? Even if people are distracted?” Theo pointed to the crowd gathered at the police tape.
“Yes, it is probably best to wait for night to resume our procession,” Dmitri said. “But there must be something we can do in the meantime, yes?”
“Such as obtain another chalice for pouring the salt?” his wife interrupted. “Maybe Victoria has one. Otherwise we must continue to pour the salt from the box, but we agreed earlier that a chalice would add power.”
“We should try to contact Victoria, yes,” Theo responded. “An excellent idea, Sophia.”
“Where did Victoria say she would meet us this morning?” asked Sophia. “When we parted last night, she turned down that street.” She pointed at a lane that branched off the main street.
“She said she would meet Sean in his hotel lobby,” Theo recalled. “She is probably there now.”
Early that morning, unable to sleep, Sean checked his e-mail account on the computer outside the hotel’s breakfast room.
His eyes skimmed the list of people who had sent him e-mail since he had written to his nephews and his graduate student about erecting cairns on the possible graves of the Dearg-due. There was nothing from his nephews. There was no message from Seamus. No message had any indication that it might have a digital photo or two attached as evidence of the cairns.
But there was a message from the Garda Síochána, the national police force of Ireland. The subject line read: “Missing Nephew Report.”
Sean froze. He felt as if his stomach had fallen through the floor beneath him. Unable to move for a few seconds in the predawn darkness of the hotel, he finally dared to click on the message indicator. The screen wavered and a message from a Detective Brendon Quinn came up:
“Professor: I am sorry to report that there has been an incident involving your nephews Donal and Colm late last night in the vicinity of the French Church in the city of Waterford. We are told that the young men were there at your behest and we are in possession of an e-mail from you requesting that they construct a cairn of stones atop the possible grave of a creature known in local folklore as the Dearg-due…”
The message went on to describe his nephew Colm’s version of events at Christchurch cathedral and the French Church that led to the disappearance of Donal and two friends. It was corroborated by two young women who had accompanied them. Sean could hardly breathe. His heart was pounding. Then the tears came cascading down his cheeks.
It was difficult enough to believe the magic and the danger he had found himself in at an academic conference in Prague. It had never occurred to him that his request to build a cairn on gravesites in Waterford might put his family in danger as well.
“I have to help!” he vowed. “I have to save them somehow! They were trying to help me and they’ve been… what? Hurt? Killed? Only God knows!”
He swiped the tears away with the back of his hand and read the message again, struggling to comprehend the report of the ghost of a witch stealing his nephew and friends into the Netherworld and the detective’s disdain for the tale. He sensed the detective’s creeping suspicion of Sean in his request to meet with the professor when he returned to Ireland.
“I have to tell Theo and Fr. Dmitri and Sophia and Victoria… they have to know what it cost those boys who were only trying to do me a favor. And they may have saved us here in Prague.” He pressed his fingertips to his eyelids and tried to wipe away the still-flowing tears again so he could read the message a third time.
“No, I can’t tell Theo and the others. Not yet,” he argued with himself. “I have to find out more details before I tell them, and this news would only distract everyone from the work that still needs to be done here, in Prague, to stop Svetovit!” He bit his lower lip, hoping the pain would distract him from his anguish.
“When I get back home, I have to do something. Not simply talking to the police, either! I will,” he whispered to the computer screen. “I promise.”
Victoria was setting out from her apartment to meet Sean in the lobby of his hotel. It was a strangely overcast sky, the damp air heavy. She had slept fitfully after witnessing Elizabeth’s murder of Wilcox and the magically enforced return of the Dearg-due to her grave in Ireland. In her dreams, her memories of the screams of Elizabeth and the huge flock of crows circling around her woke her repeatedly, as did memories of the searing heat of the ghostly flame that had wrapped around her and Sophia afterward. “Were any of the others able to sleep after what happened last night?” she wondered. When she had finally drifted off to a brief, dreamless sleep, it was difficult to wake up and get out of bed. But she had promised to be in the hotel lobby and go with Sean to Alessandro’s room.
The streets she hurried down toward the hotel were full of the usual people making their way toward their offices and jobs. But as she came closer to the main street leading to the bridge, she was engulfed in a mob that she had not seen since the days of the Velvet Revolution and the overthrow of the Communist government.
“Why this many people? Why here and now?” she asked herself, struggling to navigate her way through the teeming crowds. She strained to hear snatches of conversation as she made her way forward.
“I don’t know… The road is closed ahead… Something about the bridge… No danger of floods but a safety precaution… But we had planned to see the St. Agnes Cloister today!” The cacophony of conversations and languages assaulted her ears. People seemed confused and angry or excited, but not frightened.
Victoria shook her head. But they should be frightened, she thought. “Floods? Yes, they want to wash away the Charles Bridge!” she muttered. “Why else do you think we want to stop them?” she demanded under her breath of no one in particular. With difficulty she finally made it to the entrance of Sean’s hotel and darted through the door into the lobby.
Sean was waiting for her.
“Let’s go,” he announced curtly. “If we have to discover something terrible, I’d rather get this over with.” Without waiting for an answer, he charged onto the street. Victoria hurried after him.
The crowd blocked Sean’s efforts to get to Alessandro’s hotel quickly. Victoria took advantage of the opportunity to explain that the bridge had been closed.
“But I could hardly sleep after… what happened last night,” she told him after explaining the bridge closure. “I am so glad that you were able to convince someone to build those stones on her grave back in Ireland. Who knows what might have happened to us otherwise? We would all be dead on the Old Town Square!”
“I would rather not think about that,” Sean answered, keeping his gaze fixed ahead and over the heads of the crowd. “As it was, it cost my nephews dearly.” Despite his earlier resolution to keep the police message to himself, he told her about the e-mail he had received from the Garda Síochána and the report that one of his nephews was traumatized and the other, along with two of their friends, was now missing and that an hysterical witness claimed that they were being held hostage by the ghost of an Irish witch in the Otherworld.
“No! Sean, that’s terrible!” Victoria exclaimed. “We must do something to help them! They did that for us… We cannot leave them there, abandoned! We must rescue them!”
“We will,” Sean agreed. “Or, at least, I will! But we can do nothing for them now. We must finish this business and then I can turn my attention to them once this business is done and I am back home in Dublin. In the meantime, we have to find out what happened to Alessandro and meet the others.”
Victoria bit her lip and nodded. It had never occurred to her that Sean’s nephews might be in any danger from building the cairn at his request.
With difficulty, they made their way to Alessandro’s hotel and rode the tiny elevator upstairs.
They stood in the hallway before his door. Sean tried pushing gently on the door to see if it might be unlocked, but it refused to move. They knocked. There was no answer. Victoria held her breath, hoping to hear someone stirring inside.
Nothing.
They knocked again. Victoria pressed her ear to the door before shaking her head.
“Do you think the front desk would open the door for us?” Victoria whispered.
“Not without a very good reason as to why we think he might be in danger,” Sean whispered back. “Do you really think that telling them an Irish vampire attacked him last night will make them want to help us? I think anything we say will raise more questions about us than Alessandro’s whereabouts, I’m afraid.” He stared at the door a moment longer.
“There is really nothing we can do here then, is there?” Victoria finally put their fears into words.
“No. I think not,” Sean agreed. “And we do not want to be implicated in any police investigation whenever the body is discovered by the housekeeping department. Someone may remember we were here and tell the police as it is. We really should not be seen loitering in front of his room.”
Victoria nodded her understanding. “Alessandro and Wilcox would both rather we keep working to stop George than spend time tangled up with the police, implicated in their deaths, wouldn’t they?”
They turned and made their way out of the hotel as quickly but inconspicuously as they could.
George and Magdalena made their way back towards the castle, away from the crowd being kept off the Charles Bridge.
“I must call Professor Hron,” Magdalena fretted. “I need to tell him what has happened, keep him informed. He should know that the conference delegates staying in hotels on this side of the river will be unable to attend!”
George nodded absentmindedly. He stopped and looked in the window of a small shop.
“There.” He pointed. “Those figures of dough.” He pointed at several items on display. Magdalena paused in her nervous rambling and looked at the figures he was pointing at.
“Those?” she asked. “Those are traditional holiday figures, ornaments to hang on a Christmas tree.” Each figure, resembling a king or a shepherd or angel, was individually wrapped in a plastic packet.
“We should get a handful,” George instructed her. “Five of them.”
“Five? Why?” Magdalena did not understand what George was hinting at.
“One for each of our adversaries,” George told her. He stepped into the shop.
Dmitri, Sophia, and Theo searched Sean’s hotel lobby and breakfast room.
“They are not here,” Theo announced finally. “We must have just missed them.”
“Then we should find them at Alessandro’s hotel,” Dmitri suggested.
Sophia shook her head. “Someone might notice. The more of us at Alessandro’s hotel, the more likely that someone will see or remember one of us and implicate us in Alessandro’s… in Alessandro’s death.” The two men reluctantly agreed.
“So do we wait here for them?” Theo asked.
“We don’t know that they will be coming back,” Dmitri answered, “at least, not directly. I don’t think we have much time to spare. We need to awaken the power of the Royal Road on this side of the bridge as quickly as we can, yes? Even without a chalice. Even without waiting for the cover of darkness.”
His wife and Theo agreed, looking at each other and nodding in concert.
“I’ll go get the salt from my room,” Theo said. “Do you have the tarot cards in your room, Dmitri? Why don’t we meet at the foot of the hill in an hour?”
George and Magdalena shouldered their way through the still-growing crowd back to Magdalena’s apartment.
He handed her the discarded wrappings to throw out. “Now get your other tools,” he told her. She retrieved her tray inscribed with a five-pointed star, the Rabbi’s short staff that they had taken, and the small ritual knife and set them near the chalice.
George took the tray and placed it directly before him. He then arranged the five dough figures on the tray, one at each point of the star. He set the knife next to the chalice and handed the staff to Magdalena. He closed his eyes, sat up straight as a school boy preparing for an exam, and gently set his palms down on either side of the tray.
“Inscribe the magic circle around us,” he said quietly.
Magdalena bent over so that the mushroom-headed tip of the staff she was holding touched the floor. She walked backwards around the table, tracing a circle on the floor behind her as she moved. The energy of the circle crackled in the air around her. The hair on her arms and the back of her neck stood upright. She reached the point where she had begun to trace the circle and stood upright, looking at George for his next instruction. Rainbow hues faintly rippled like Northern Lights in the air around the circle.
George continued to sit quietly, his eyes closed and palms resting on the table. He drew in a deep breath and slowly exhaled.
“Take a seat,” he told her at last. “Opposite me.” Magdalena sat across from George, trying not to jar the table and spill any of the water in the chalice as she pulled her chair closer to what had become an altar. She dared to set the staff on the tabletop next to the chalice, parallel to the knife.
Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy Page 101
