Blood Rite (Maggie Devereaux Book 2)

by Stephen Penner

  “A healer herself, aye?” Ellen offered.

  A broad smile blossomed across Maggie’s face and her eyes sparkled at the suggestion. “Aye,” she agreed happily. “A family tradition perhaps.”

  “Well, then,” Ellen broke in, her empty stomach suddenly asserting itself. “Are you ready for dinner?”

  “Oh, aye,” Maggie set the picture back down and picked her faux-brogue back up. “I ken this lovely wee place Iain show’t me. Fair bonny it is.”

  Ellen laughed and shook her head. “You know,” she began as they walked toward the door, “we don’t really sound like that.”

  “Yeah,” Maggie replied matter-of-factly, in her flat American tone, “I know.” She locked the door behind them and they headed off to dinner.

  ***

  “Okay, granted,” Maggie conceded, running a frustrated hand through her auburn locks. “But you have to admit that palatal mutations only account for a portion of the dialectical variation of—”

  Beep! Beep-Beep! Boop! Beep!

  A cellular phone interrupted the debate. It was ringing somewhere inside the restaurant, although actual ringing having become somewhat passé, the phone was playing the techno-pop version of ‘Rule Britannia.’

  “Hello?” It was the woman at the next table. She was facing away from Maggie and Ellen, but her gentleman friend was offering an embarrassed grin in exchange for the several disapproving glances he was receiving.

  “Now?” the woman asked, obviously perturbed. Maggie noticed that she had short, straw-colored hair above her black jacket. She looked familiar.

  “Right, then,” the woman barked into the phone. “Fifteen minutes.” The voice was familiar too.

  The woman beeped her phone off. “Sorry, Richard. I have to go. Duty calls.”

  Maggie was so intent on trying to recognize the woman’s voice that she failed to realize she had begun staring, rather rudely, right at the woman’s head. So when the woman turned around and their eyes met, Maggie was almost as surprised as the other woman looked.

  It was Elizabeth Warwick. Sergeant Elizabeth Warwick. Of the Aberdeen Police Department. ‘It’s pronounced “Warrick,”’ Maggie could hear the sergeant’s voice echo from their first meeting months earlier. It was Sgt. Warwick who had come to Maggie’s aunt and uncle’s home to investigate the King’s College murders last fall. It was Sgt. Warwick whom Maggie had gone to with an offer to help in the investigation, only to be politely rebuffed. Maggie had wondered whether she wouldn’t be forced to reveal the source of her knowledge, but thankfully it hadn’t come to that. Warwick didn’t know her secret.

  But as they locked gazes, Maggie was startled by the expression she found in the police officer’s dark eyes. It wasn’t just surprise at seeing each other again—there was something else there as well. Something probing. It combined appraisal with knowledge…and something more. Maggie felt like a book being read.

  “Miss Devereaux,” Sgt. Warwick said formally, even as she stood up and pulled her small, efficient-looking purse over her shoulder.

  “Sergeant Warwick,” Maggie replied almost sadly. She wondered where last fall’s ‘Maggie’ had gone.

  Then Sgt. Warwick strode quickly and officially to the exit as Richard signaled for the check.

  “Do you know her?” Ellen asked her dining companion.

  Maggie frowned. “I think so.”

  ***

  “Well, dinner was nice,” Ellen said as Maggie opened the door to her flat. Time to call it an evening. “Same time tomorrow?”

  “Absolutely.” Maggie paused in the doorway. “Let’s meet at the registration table again.”

  “It’s a date,” Ellen ratified. Then, with a sly smile, she added, “But don’t tell Iain.”

  Maggie laughed despite herself and felt a pleasant flush sear to her cheeks. “Time to go, Ms. Walker,” she announced with finality. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Still blushing slightly, Maggie locked the door behind her and then strolled lazily to the couch and plopped herself down.

  And that’s when she saw it.

  ‘A place for everything and everything in its place.’ A dogma for orderliness. But also one for protection. If everything is in its place, and you have something you want to keep hidden from prying eyes, then it’s a simple matter of making sure that its place is somewhere out of sight. Any diary-writing teenage girl with a little brother can confirm that. But as even most of them eventually find out, it’s almost impossible always to remember to return everything to its place—especially when you had no idea when you dashed out the door that morning that your friend was going to ask to borrow your videotapes on the American Revolution, and you, forgetting that you’d left your ‘diary’ out, led your friend right to it.

  But although what Maggie saw sitting on the floor, clearly visible beneath the end table between the sofa and the farther chair, was a book, it was no diary.

  It was an ancient book she’d found in the sub-basement of the University of Aberdeen’s Historic Collections the previous fall.

  It was written in a forgotten dialect of Old Gaelic, a dialect whose very existence had initially been hypothesized by a Professor Robert Hamilton of the University of Edinburgh, but which Maggie herself had first discovered, cracked and translated.

  And it was a collection of pagan magic rites and spells, a grimoire scrawled down by hand in the half-legible script of some long dead Celt.

  None of which was terribly interesting except for one additional fact.

  She looked down at the ancient tome. “Bhaitit inh chaoimraighanh anh’í chonric hrésia cho inh Talaom. Da’slaointi grád ó nádúhr ochus ail hrésia cho inh naim do’bhaichaidad.”

  The magic was real.

  The book rose smoothly off the floor and into Maggie’s waiting hands.

  She had come to use the magic sparingly—for various reasons—but she always enjoyed the rush it gave her. However, as she accepted the book from the air, there was no smile on her face.

  She had never shown the spellbook to anyone. Anyone. And its ‘place’ was most definitely out of sight in Maggie’s bedroom. But she had left it out of its place that morning when she’d hurried out the door for the conference. So the question was: Had Ellen seen it?

  Ellen hadn’t mentioned it over dinner. It was possible Ellen hadn’t even seen it lying there, or at least hadn’t paid it a second thought. On the other hand, it was a rather striking volume, with an intricate, raised cover in black leather and a large metal clasp hanging broken and open across its closed pages. It would have been hard to miss.

  Maggie frowned, her stomach in a knot.

  Had Ellen noticed it? Picked it up? Perused it? Maybe even recognized it for what it was?

  But then why not mention it when Maggie returned with the videos? Or over dinner? Why pretend she hadn’t seen it?

  Maggie closed her eyes and tried to calm her racing heart. Her skin burned at the thought of someone—even a friend—discovering her secret. She stood that way for a very long time, eyes squeezed shut and mouth clamped into a deep, creased frown. Finally she regained herself somewhat and opened her eyes. No point in panicking, she assured herself. She stepped back, sat down on the couch, and delicately opened the cover, the rigid spine crackling at the effort and the ancient clasp jingling lightly as it passed over the yellowed pages within.

  Maggie nodded at the words she found there, as one might nod to an old friend across a crowded room, and a faint smile again played across her lips. She hadn’t understood, or even recognized, the words when she’d first encountered them the previous autumn. But she had nevertheless labored to understand them and had eventually recognized them to be a lost dialect of Old Gaelic, enabling her to translate and master them. So that now when she looked down at the ancient Celtic words, not only did she read, ‘Inh Laibpohr Dohrgha Tiassain Ochus Damnasiadh,’ but she understood: ‘The Dark Book of Rites and Damnation.’

  Maggie tucked her thick, auburn hair behind he
r ears and turned the antique pages delicately, flipping cautiously through the priceless Gaelic spellbook. Handwritten words and freehand diagrams reflected off her lenses.

  The levitation spell.

  The divining spell.

  The transmutation spell.

  When Maggie reached the end of the tome, having briefly scanned every already-memorized spell secreted between its covers, she carefully closed the book again. Then she looked over at the photograph of her mother and up at the portrait of her ancestor.

  Why, she wondered, isn’t there a healing spell?

  ***

  Dessert. Maybe dessert would take her mind of her ancestry, her spellbook, and the state of her secret. Milk and cookies. A bit juvenile, she knew, but pleasurable nonetheless. And television. If cookies and television couldn’t distract her troubled mind, nothing could. Soon, a plate full of chocolate wafers in one hand and a tall glass of skim milk in the other, she crossed over to the living room, eschewing the day’s still unread newspaper for the TV remote.

  Plopping down on the sofa, she clicked on the ‘tele’ just as the local evening news was starting. She propped her feet on the coffee table and shoved the first wafer in her mouth. Ahh.

  “—top story tonight is the kidnapping of one year old Douglas MacLeod, son of the MacLeod Chieftain David MacLeod, and heir apparent to the chieftaincy of MacLeod of Lewis. Initial reports lacked details, but the infant was secreted from his third-story bedroom sometime between ten o’clock last evening and eight o’clock this morning when his absence was first discovered by a nanny.”

  Interesting enough, Maggie supposed and she set the remote down on the table, picking up in its stead her glass of milk. Then, refocusing her attention on the television, she dropped the glass of milk onto the floor. She ignored the flowing liquid and stared in disbelief at the image on the screen.

  “—police are said to be focusing on the dramatic warning written in blood on the wall above the crib. Early speculation connects this to the famous Fairy Flag of the Clan MacLeod and the legend of the MacLeod Banshee. This photograph, taken shortly after the police arrived—”

  Maggie’s ears shut off and her eyes drank in the words. Not ‘I AM RETURNED TO FULFILL THE PROPHECY,’ but: ‘A THÁINMHNE NA DOHRGHATAS, SLÁINAICH AN LÁINABH A’SIO.’ Just in view on the floor beside the empty crib.

  “Holy crap,” she gasped in disbelief, but before she could grab a pen and copy down the phrase, the image flicked back to the anchorwoman who began introducing the next story.

  Still ignoring the puddle of milk beneath her, Maggie scrambled off the couch and darted into the kitchen, snatching the newspaper off the kitchen table and sending envelopes flying. I have got to start reading this when I get home, she chided herself as she tore the paper open. The article started on page one, just below the fold, but the photograph was on page five.

  The photo confirmed what her brain had first known when it had seen the bloody inscription on the flickering television monitor. The words were written in the same lost dialect of Old Gaelic as her spellbook—a dialect which, until now, she had been certain no one else in the world but her knew.

  As her eyes were filled with the age-old words, her mind juggled four equally disturbing questions:

  What prophecy?

  Why would the child need to be healed?

  Who wrote this?

  And perhaps most frightening to the young American who had just committed to spending her foreseeable future in Scotland:

  Do they know about me?

  4. MacLeod

  “Why the bloody hell are you wasting time talking with me?”

  David MacLeod’s face was almost as red as the sunset blazing outside his 36th floor office windows, with their panoramic view of the Grampian Highlands to the west and Aberdeen harbor to the east. “You should be out finding my son!” Then, just to make sure he’d been understood, he added, “You bloody idiot!”

  Aberdeen Police Inspector Robert Cameron sighed heavily, wearily. “Now, just calm down, Mr. MacLeod,” he started. “I’ve plenty of lads out combing the streets for your son. But we need to talk to you a bit as well.”

  “Talk to me later, Cameron,” MacLeod growled. He stormed out from behind his massive oak desk and right up to the inspector. Although MacLeod was a large man in his own right—six feet tall with broad shoulders supporting a chiseled jaw and thick, curly black hair—nevertheless he had to tilt his head back to look up at the equally solid six-foot-three Inspector Cameron. “Right now: you find my son.”

  Cameron truly enjoyed being a police inspector and so resisted his urge to head-butt one of Scotland’s more powerful political and business leaders. Instead, he took a deep breath and, without stepping back, replied in as calm and forceful a tone as he could muster, “Mr. MacLeod, without information from you, my men will not be able to focus their investigation properly and you will hamper, perhaps even foreclose, our ability to find your son.”

  MacLeod’s deep blue eyes flared and his face grew even more crimson. “How dare you speak to me that way?!” He stormed three steps away and then spun around again, his arms waving frenetically. “You’re a bloody policeman! A policeman! Do you understand who I am? What I am? I’ll have your badge, Cameron! You’ll be sweeping rubbish by noon tomorrow!”

  Cameron noted with some regret that MacLeod was now out of head-butt range. “Mr. MacLeod,” he calmed his voice even further—it was an old police trick, but one that usually worked. “I need your help to—”

  Bzzztt!! The intercom.

  MacLeod threw his arms in the air again, then bounded to the desk in a single step and slammed on the flashing red button on his telephone—all in one angry motion.

  “What?!” he demanded in the speaker.

  “Um,” a hesitant female voice replied, “there’s a Mr. Genworth here in the lobby. Says he’s from the Aberdeen Herald. Would you like to speak with him?”

  MacLeod closed his eyes and drew in a long, painful breath before responding. “How,” he asked in a tone whose controlled anger was perhaps even more frightening than his previous explosiveness, “in the bloody hell did he get up here?”

  “Um,” the voice started again. Cameron suspected she often started her sentences with that word. “I— I’m not sure. Someone must have let him up from downstairs.”

  “Then ‘someone’ is sacked!” MacLeod shouted into the speaker, spit striking the slatted plastic. “And Miss Logan?”

  “Um, yes?”

  “If that bastard reporter is not out of my lobby in the next ten seconds,” the frightening calmness had returned, “so are you. Do you understand?”

  “Um. Yes.”

  MacLeod let go of the red button and then grabbed a hold of his desk with both hands, his head hanging from his strong neck and his shoulders shrugging in a deep sigh. Cameron shifted his weight uneasily. Best to give him a moment.

  “Cameron?” The calm but scary voice. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you.”

  MacLeod slowly turned around.

  “I’ll give you one last chance, policeman.” He tipped his head back and looked wide-eyed at the inspector. “You leave right now. You find my son. And you keep your job. Understood?”

  “MacLeod,” the ‘Mr.’ was noticeably absent. “I’ve been threatened by far more important people than you.” Cameron wasn’t sure if that was true, but it was a good reply. “If you don’t want me to do my job properly and find your son, that’s your business. But this ‘policeman’ finds that a wee bit interesting—”

  “Cameron!” MacLeod’s face flamed crimson again. “I’ll—”

  “You’ll do as he asks.”

  Both men’s heads turned to the doorway where stood a woman of commanding stature and appearance. She was tall—at least 5′9″—with a slim athletic build and short, sandy blonde hair. She wore a two piece navy blue suit which made her look in uniform even while out of it. A shining silver badge hung prominently from her small leather purse.
“Or you’ve no hope of ever seeing your son again.”

  “Who in the bloody hell are you, girl?!” MacLeod was beside himself now.

  “This is—” Cameron began but the policewoman waved him off.

  “I’m Sergeant Elizabeth Warwick,” she began, “and I stopped being a girl some time ago.” She stepped fully into MacLeod’s office. “And whether you’re willing to accept it or not, Mr. MacLeod, I’m your best chance at seeing Douglas alive again.”

  “Cameron!” MacLeod’s crimson face turned to the inspector even as he threw his open palms toward Warwick. “Do you let all your inferiors speak that way?”

  Cameron smiled. “I may outrank her,” he replied, “but she’s not my inferior. And she’s right. If anyone’s going to crack this case, it’s Warwick. She’s my best officer. That’s why I called her in.”

  “Your best man is a woman?” MacLeod asked incredulously.

  “My best officer,” Cameron repeated coldly, “is Sgt. Warwick.”

  MacLeod shook his head violently and began storming around the room. “No, no, no, no! That is it! You’re both—”

  “You still don’t have a ransom demand,” Warwick interrupted in her best English accent to emphasize her southern roots. She looked at her watch. “It’s now nearly seven o’clock. As many as twenty-one hours have passed since your son disappeared. You won’t be receiving a ransom note. Your son wasn’t abducted for money.” MacLeod looked at the sergeant; she had his attention. “That’s bad.”

  “Whoever abducted your son,” she continued, “did so without anyone in your townhouse noticing a thing. Douglas was spirited out of a third story bedroom by a perpetrator or perpetrators who did so without leaving any trace as to how they entered or exited. They knew exactly what they were doing. It was well planned.” She paused. “That’s bad.”

  MacLeod just stared at her.

  She looked down casually at her perfectly painted fingernails. “Do you want me to discuss the blood?” she asked without looking up.