The Morrigan's Curse

by Dianne K. Salerni

  Jax nodded, holding the phone to his ear. “Interesting . . .”

  “More than interesting, Jax.” Billy sounded very sure of himself. “The island is owned by a company with a lot of properties—a company that’s been around a long time, under a lot of different names, going back practically to the Mayflower. They own suppliers of military equipment! Guns, helicopters, planes!”

  Now Jax’s heart was racing. Unbelievable. Billy had done what the Morgans hadn’t been able to do—on his computer—through pure geekiness, perseverance, and a willingness to read through a lot of weird crap. “You sent me an email with what you’ve got?”

  “Pictures of the island, links to the paranormal website, stuff I dug up on the company . . . You’ll give it to Riley?”

  “Right away.”

  “Tell him to call me back.”

  Jax hesitated. Billy wanted Riley’s praise, of course. But what would Riley do with the information? Fulfill his duty as a member of the Table and hand it off to the Morgans? Or withhold the information until he came up with a plan to “extract” Addie on his own?

  Jax had no doubt that Sheila could send a military team to that island before the end of Wednesday to do whatever she thought most prudent—no matter if Addie and other innocent Kin children were killed in the process. He was less sure how Riley would manage to get himself to an island in Maine without the help of Deidre’s numerous and convenient modes of transport, let alone what kind of action he’d take to pluck Addie and the orphans out of the Llyrs’ hands. Time was of the essence. The Morgans had concentrated their search in remote areas first, assuming that the Llyrs would be hiding—not living blatantly in a mansion on a private island. Eventually, though, the Morgans would find this island even without Billy’s tip. The time advantage Jax had was short.

  Riley knew his limitations. I don’t want to die stupidly, he’d said. We can’t confront these people without an army backing us up. But if the Morgans killed Addie on information Riley gave them, Evangeline would never forgive him.

  “I’ll tell him, Billy,” Jax said finally, “but he’s going to want to jump on this right away. If you don’t hear from him, it’s because he’s figuring out a plan. I’ll keep you informed, but I might not be able to get back to you till Thursday.”

  “Dang. I hate being a Normal,” said Billy. “Tell Riley to be careful. You too, dude.”

  “I will.” Jax ended the call and deleted the text. He got into the settings and blocked Billy’s number in case he tried to call back. Then he put the phone back on Riley’s dresser where he’d found it.

  I’m taking the decision away from you, bro. You can thank me later.

  16

  ON GRUNSDAY MORNING, JAX waylaid Evangeline as soon as she woke up. She came out of her closet-bedroom yawning and rubbing her eyes, wearing shorts and an old T-shirt of Riley’s. Seeing her dressed like that, with the too-large shirt hanging almost to her knees, reminded Jax of something he couldn’t put his finger on.

  “What’s happened?” she asked when she spotted Jax waiting for her. “Did Sheila Morgan find them? Did she—”

  “No!” Jax quickly reassured her, the fragment of memory gone. “The Morgans haven’t found the Llyrs.” That was literal truth. The Morgans hadn’t found them. Billy had. Jax couldn’t lie to his liege, but he could leave out a detail here and there. “I just wanted to let you know there’s been no bombings or anything and give you a heads-up about your day.” He explained about the meeting she and Riley had with Bedivere. Then he handed her a packet of saffron. Evangeline reached under the hem of her shirt and slipped the container into her shorts pocket. Jax heard the crinkle of paper from something already in there. Addie’s letter. Which explained why he hadn’t found it while she was absent.

  “I was thinking,” he said. “Maybe you should split up the last pages of that letter. Give one to me rather than keep it all in one place.”

  Evangeline frowned. “Why? Was he looking for it?”

  “No,” Jax said quickly, not wanting to get Riley in even more trouble. “I was. It’s all you have of Addie. We don’t want anything bad to happen to it.”

  She eyed him skeptically. “I know what you’re doing, Jax. You want to try the scrying spell on your own.”

  Jax sighed. Nobody seemed to take him at his word these days, but at least they weren’t guessing his real purpose. “I won’t waste it. I promise.”

  “It’s not that. But I know how to be on guard against another attack, and you—”

  “I can be on guard, too. You said my sensitivity for information would make me good at this, and if there’s any sign of danger, I’ll break the connection.” Still, she hesitated, so he added, “I can try while you and Riley are out this morning. We’ll tag-team her and wear her out.”

  With a sigh, Evangeline removed the letter from her pocket. “There’s only one page left. Good thing Addie’s such a complainer, or we’d have run out before now.” Then she frowned. “This meeting with Bedivere and Riley. Why aren’t you coming?”

  Jax stuck to the story Riley believed. “Well, after last week’s . . . disagreement, I thought you two might like some alone time. To, uh, make up, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, Jax!” Evangeline smacked his arm with Addie’s letter. But she also blushed and didn’t try to convince him to come with them. Just like Riley hadn’t.

  Instead, she gave him half the remaining page of the letter and cautioned him to be careful—twice. Jax promised he would and folded the half sheet into his pocket.

  When Stink hadn’t shown up by the time Riley and Evangeline left for their meeting, Jax started getting worried. He considered jumping on his own, but if Dorian couldn’t reliably land in the park across the street, how was Jax supposed to make it all the way to New England?

  Then he heard a commotion in the kitchen—the sound of a metal bowl hitting the floor and Mrs. Crandall shouting. Jax heaved a sigh of relief and ran toward the noise. Stink scampered out of the kitchen just a few steps ahead of Mrs. Crandall’s broom. “Jax! Your brownie chewed a hole through the window screen!”

  Jax smacked himself in the head for being so stupid. Stink couldn’t jump into the cabin via brownie tunnels. The house was warded against magical intruders, just like Addie’s cell in the Dulac basement had been.

  Stink sprang from the floor, caught the front of Jax’s shirt, and climbed to his shoulder. “I’ll get him out of here,” Jax said. “Maybe we’ll go for a bike ride.”

  Mrs. Crandall made it clear she didn’t care where he went, as long as he took Stink. With the brownie clinging to his shoulder, Jax pedaled out to the grounds of the neighboring ski resort, which was closed for the summer. He maneuvered around the barricades that blocked off the parking lot and coasted to the edge of ski trails that were knee deep in unmowed grass. A metal rack for stowing snowboards and skis made a handy place to lock up his bike. He pulled out the papers tucked into the back pocket of his jeans.

  One was Addie’s letter. The others he’d printed from Google Earth last night. He unfolded several aerial photographs of an island off the coast of Maine and spread them on the ground. There was a close-up view of the house on the island, its outbuildings, and the runway. Jax had been skeptical about Billy’s find until he saw the airplane hangar with its white wooden siding. Painted white boards. That was the image Addie had used to block the scrying spell, right before Jax and Evangeline had been zapped with an electrical charge.

  He’d also printed a zoomed-out view that showed the position of the island in relation to the mainland. He’d circled their present location in red marker and drawn a line out to the island. “Let’s see how smart you are, Stink. We’re here.” Jax pointed. “And I need to go there. To this island and this house.” He held up Addie’s letter. “To find this girl.”

  Stink sat on his haunches and looked back and forth between Jax and the maps. He lifted up his smushed-in little face and rubbed it against Addie’s letter like a cat. Then he
bounded into the tall grass, gave a hop, and vanished.

  “No, wait!” Jax stood up. “Not without me!”

  Seconds later, Stink reappeared and scampered on all fours back to Jax. He’d just made a brand new hole at Jax’s request.

  Jax gathered up the printed photos and got down on hands and knees to enter the tunnel, which was little more than a pocket of magical substance. He could feel it pressing against him, crinkly, but soft and elastic. The world around him was visible through the translucent walls: the empty parking lot, the chair lifts, and the dormant snow-making equipment. When he looked for his bike, it wasn’t there. As Dorian had said, the tunnel existed outside of time, and small changes in the environment didn’t register right away.

  Stink ran ahead, and the tunnel expanded. Jax followed, crawling on his hands and knees. The fabric of the tunnel stretched to make room for his body, and after a few yards, Jax paused. The tunnels in the Dulac building had been tall enough for an adult man even though they were created by creatures the size of Stink. Why? No sooner had he thought of the question than the answer came to him. Because, before I ever entered them, Dr. Morder and Uncle Finn had already been through them.

  Jax stood up. The tunnel expanded to accommodate him, ending at a height and width just his size. Ha! Right again! Stink continued, creating several yards of tunnel in front of Jax. Then he doubled back and scrambled up to Jax’s shoulder. Jax kept walking and stared at the photos in his hand. “I want to get to this island,” he said, concentrating the way Dorian had told him to. “And this house. I want this tunnel to take me to—”

  The world lurched and spun. His stomach clenched, the way it did on a roller coaster at the moment of weightlessness. But the moment went on and on, as if Jax were really falling. He staggered and fell up against . . .

  . . . a metal trash can.

  “Really, Stink? Don’t you ever think about anything but food?” Jax looked around. He was standing between a white stucco wall and two trash cans—about fifty yards from a beach. The ocean was weirdly calm and silent, without the normal swooshing and crashing of waves or the call of seagulls. A wooden walkway led toward a dock in one direction and an airplane hangar and a runway in the other.

  Jax glanced at the photos in his hand, stunned. He’d jumped from the mountains of Pennsylvania to an island off the coast of Maine in a couple seconds! But if this was the island, there would be dangerous Kin here. He ducked behind the trash cans. Juggling the papers in his hand, he held up Addie’s letter. “We’re looking for this girl, remember,” he whispered to Stink.

  Stink scampered along the wall toward a door and sat back on his haunches.

  Open the door and walk right in? That didn’t sound like a good plan. But Stink couldn’t burrow in if the house was warded, and it must be. That was why Evangeline had failed so many times at scrying for Addie. The times they had glimpsed her location—Jax glanced down the path at the white-paneled hangar—she’d been outside the house.

  He had to trust Stink. Jax stuffed all the papers into his back pocket, hurried along the unsheltered wall, and opened the door. Inside, he found a room filled with mops and brooms, a vacuum, and shelves of cleaning supplies. This was the housekeeper’s entrance. Jax looked at Stink. Smartest. Pet. Ever.

  But Stink remained on the stoop, pacing back and forth in agitation, chittering softly. “What’s wrong?” Jax whispered. He glanced outside, but saw nothing to cause alarm. “We’ve gotten this far. Come on!”

  At Jax’s invitation, the brownie suddenly ceased his complaining and bounded over the threshold. With scarcely a pause, Stink began to burrow through the shelves and bottles of Windex as if they weren’t there, and Jax followed, marveling at the power this brownie tunnel access had given him. He had jumped across the country in the blink of an eye to a magically warded building, entered normally with the turn of a knob, and was now taking a path through the house that would leave him invisible to the residents. Sheila Morgan was right, Jax thought. This has military potential.

  After passing through several walls and part of a kitchen, Jax glimpsed a huge living space with stone-tiled floors and white leather furniture. A wall of glass doors faced the placid sea. If there were Llyrs or other enemy Kin present, they were as invisible to him as he was to them. Brownie tunnels were undetectable to human eyes from the outside, and from the inside, people fell into the same category as Dorian’s “movable objects.” They didn’t register. According to Billy, a cleaning service tidied this house every Thursday, so Jax was probably seeing this room the way the maids left it every week, not the way it looked today.

  The only person Jax had ever seen outside a brownie tunnel while he was inside one was the Morrigan. Since she wasn’t really a person as much as a force of nature—and presumably outside of time herself—it made a bizarre kind of sense.

  An L-shaped staircase led to a second story, but Stink didn’t take the stairs. He angled his burrowing upward, and the spongy substance of the tunnel left the floor of the house. Now Jax had trouble keeping up. There wasn’t much purchase for his sneakers and nothing to hang on to. He scrabbled and struggled, and it was a relief when the tunnel leveled out inside a bedroom on the second floor.

  Stink was gone by the time he got there. Jax looked around, but this room was as clean and tidy as a photograph in a magazine. Stink’s head popped into sight at Jax’s knee level. The brownie made his strange chittering noise, then backed out again. Jax took that to mean it was safe to exit, so he squatted down and pushed out of the hole.

  In real time, the sheets on the bed were balled into a knot. There were sneakers on the floor. A small trash can was surrounded by crumpled, used tissues that had failed to make it inside—eww—and a canvas bag of clothes lay nearby. Stink hopped onto a bedside table and stood on his hind legs, puffing out his chest proudly. Jax grinned. This was Addie’s room. He knew it.

  A hairbrush on the table was full of silvery-blond hair that would be useful for future scrying if he didn’t actually encounter Addie in person today. He pulled a few strands from the brush and tucked them into the little square pocket that was located inside the front pocket of every pair of jeans he’d ever owned. Always wondered when I’d have a use for that!

  He looked around the room curiously. There was a ratty, stuffed bunny half hidden under a bed pillow. That surprised him. He hadn’t known thirteen-year-old girls slept with stuffed animals, and it didn’t fit his image of Evangeline’s rebellious sister. He picked up the canvas bag on the floor. Besides the clothes, there were two paperbacks inside—Anne Frank’s diary and The Mists of Avalon—and one old, illustrated hardback of The Land of Oz.

  While he was searching the bag for anything else of interest, Stink leaped off the table without warning, streaked across the room, and jumped through the brownie hole. “What the—” Jax watched him go, then turned around.

  The bedroom door opened. A girl took one step into the room and froze, her eyes growing wide. Jax found himself—finally!—face to face with Adelina Emrys.

  And here he was, caught with an arm up to his elbow in her private possessions.

  Crap.

  17

  WHEN ADDIE FELT THE lurch that signaled her jump over seven days, she hugged Bunny tighter and curled into a ball in the bed. She wanted to hide from the new day, or disappear, or better yet, never have been born with the burden of being an Emrys.

  Addie had done bad things in the past, but this time other people had paid the consequences. She pressed her face into the stuffed rabbit. Bunny still smelled of home.

  “It was not your home,” Bran had said to her last night. “They were not your parents.”

  But the Carroways had been her parents for almost half her life.

  Dale and Emma are dead because of me. And Aine. Normal neighbors I never met. Aine’s baby.

  They’d had to restrain Addie on the plane ride back from Vermont. Madoc and Griffyn had duct-taped her wrists and ankles to the seat and taped her mouth sh
ut. Her treatment had frightened the other children into silence—or at least into confining themselves to muffled whimpers. When the plane landed, the kids had been unloaded and passed into the hands of the Aeron clan. Addie, still bound to her chair, watched through the plane window as the Aerons celebrated their arrival—lifting the children into the air, putting them on their shoulders, and carting them off to Madoc’s boat to be transported to another Mathonwy property. The Aerons were always eager to add to their clan, probably because they got themselves killed so often. And Bran Llyr, for all his talk of “future vassals,” didn’t seem to have much interest in taking charge of the children himself.

  After supervising the boat launch, Madoc reboarded the plane, taxied it into the hangar, and left without speaking to Addie. She was beginning to think they were going to leave her tied to the plane seat for the rest of the day, when Bran finally reappeared. Addie refused to show any fear as he walked up the aisle. What could he do to her that was worse than what he’d already done? She glared at him defiantly when he stood over her, the restored Spear in his hand.

  “A strong spirit is a good thing,” Bran said. “Spirit is what enabled our people to survive Oeth-Anoeth.”

  With Addie bound and gagged as a captive audience, Bran launched into a lengthy description of life in the ancient Welsh fortress. They’d been cut off from the world, knowing only what their captors allowed them to know about modern civilization. Children were carefully matched at birth to preserve bloodlines, but after ten generations, most of the families had died out anyway. Only the lines of Llyr and Arawen had survived, and when Griffyn and Ysabel married, their children would’ve been the last.

  “I admire spirit, Adelina. And stubbornness. And a will to survive,” Bran said. “I do not object to these qualities in you. It’s your loyalty that’s in question.”

  At that, Addie squirmed furiously in her seat, trying to tell him off with her lips taped shut. Bran ripped the tape from her face. “You would’ve had my loyalty if you’d left my parents and my home alone!” she yelled at him, blinking away tears of pain.