Blood Rite (Maggie Devereaux Book 2)

by Stephen Penner

  As she milled through the crowd, she consciously focused in on the conversations swirling about her, listening to the words to see whether she could understand their meanings.

  An overweight vendor in a dirty apron held a bag of potatoes aloft. “Two quid per kilo!”

  A tall blond man inspected a clay pot. “Oes coffi gyda chi?” he asked.

  A scarf-headed woman walked past, cooing to the baby in her arms. ‘Hush, baby girl, hush.’

  An elderly woman in a woven shawl squinted up at the sky. “Looks like rain.”

  The various word and phrases flowed into Maggie’s ears. She couldn’t see all the speakers, and amid the cacophony of ideas she couldn’t distinguish between traditionally spoken English and magically translated Welsh. But eventually her eardrums popped and Maggie knew the spell had finally passed. A relieved smile on her face, she stepped up to a bakery cart with a sign reading ‘Bara/Breads’ and asked, quite happy to have to do so, “Do you speak English?”

  “Why of course, love,” came the reply from the stout woman behind the bilingual sign. “What would you like?”

  “I would like a croissant,” Maggie replied, relishing in the sound of her own voice. She pointed to the largest, most buttery-looking crescent roll in the pile before her. Then she had a thought. “Actually, make it two.”

  A few steps away was a beautiful slate fountain, its central column rising a good ten feet into the air with clear, cool water spilling out into a large circular pool boasting a tile bottom, submerged coins, and a rim more than wide enough to be used as a bench. Although most of the stone circle was already occupied by a varied collection of marketgoers and/or tourists, a few spaces still remained and Maggie quickly parked herself in the nearest opening, a cool, wet breeze on her sun-heated back, and half of the first croissant already in her mouth.

  Her hunger being thus addressed, Maggie could return her attention to her morning’s work—and the unexpected problem it had presented. She had been cautiously confident that the prophecy of the Welsh Book of Souls would speak to the kidnapping of a young boy, and in that, she supposed with another bite of croissant, she had been right—sort of. But the prophecy had actually spoken of two children: a boy and a girl. And to the best of her knowledge, there was no related kidnapping of a little Scottish girl. She supposed it a safe bet that a second kidnapping complete with bloody inscriptions was likely to have made the papers and the evening news. So she was left to wonder whether her trip to Wales hadn’t turned out to be just a wild goose chase after all, its only benefit having been the resounding success of her translation spell.

  She swallowed the last of the first croissant and bit off the first of the second.

  She deduced silently, as she people-watched the market crowd, that there were two possibilities. First, the prophecy in the Welsh Book of Souls was not the prophecy referred to in the bloody inscription above Douglas MacLeod’s crib, in which case she’d just wasted two days in beautiful, sunny Aberystwyth, Wales. Or second, it was the same prophecy but she just hadn’t heard about the second kidnapping yet.

  Another bite of croissant.

  She couldn’t quite believe she had the wrong prophecy. In part, she hated to admit she might have been wrong. But moreover, it was that last sentence after the diagram in the Welsh Book of Souls. ‘She will return to fulfill the prophecy,’ it had said, just like on the wall above Douglas’ crib. Maggie had thought at first that the bloody words might have referred to the prophecy of the return of the MacLeod Banshee. But it seemed more likely that it referred to this prophecy of kidnapping and infanticide. Which left the second alternative.

  Another mouthful of roll.

  ‘One each from the two great clans,’ the prophecy had said. But which clans? Maggie wondered. The MacLeod boy was heir to the MacLeod clan, one of Scotland’s ancestral aristocracy—certainly a ‘great’ clan in the broader sense of the word. But what of the girl from the other great clan? Which clan would that be? Again, it seemed likely that the kidnapping of the child, a daughter, of a second Scottish chieftain would have made a splash on both the front page and the evening news. But there had been no such reports.

  And another bite. The last of the second croissant waited nervously in her hand.

  So maybe the kidnapping just hadn’t happened yet. And maybe, with proper thought, it could be avoided—if the second ‘great clan’ could be deduced. Assuming MacLeod was the first great clan, what made them so great? Maggie tried to remember her Scottish history. There had been a time, she recalled vaguely, when Western Scotland, primarily the Hebrides and surrounding islands, had been a sort of quasi-independent kingdom—under the romantic name ‘The Lordship of the Isles’—while the remainder of Scotland was ruled from Edinburgh. Had the MacLeods been the royal family of that western duchy? And had that left the Stuarts, Scotland’s ancient monarchy, in charge of the eastern half of fair Alba?

  MacLeods and Stuarts. Maybe that was it. It made a certain sense. Although Maggie couldn’t help but wonder why a Welsh book of prophecies would care overmuch about the royalty of the northern Celts. Still, if that was what the prophecy meant, then the girl to be kidnapped would be a Stuart. But Maggie had most definitely not heard anything about any Stuart child being kidnapped. There was no way that wouldn’t have made the news. But then she wondered something else: were there even any Stuarts left?

  Hadn’t the Stuart line died out after Bonnie Prince Charlie, having failed in his 1746 attempt to regain the British throne, died childless? His only sibling, Henry, was a priest and had therefore also, one could assume, died without issue. That would mean there could be no Stuarts to kidnap. So no MacLeod-Stuart pair. Hmm.

  Maggie swallowed her last bite of croissant.

  But then again, there must be someone now who’s head of the Stuart Clan. The clan couldn’t just exist without a chieftain, could it? There must be someone to raise the clan standard at the Highland Games in Braemar each year. There must be someone, somewhere, who—whether they know it or not—can trace their lineage back to some great monarchy of the second great clan.

  These thoughts and more swirled in Maggie’s head as she continued to people watch. Then the crowd parted somewhat and her eye caught the figure of a young woman stepping out of the butcher shop across the cobblestone square. What grabbed Maggie’s attention was the abnormal—almost urgent—cock of the woman’s head as she stepped up to the baby carriage she’d left outside the shop, her one hand holding aloft two small, brown paper wrapped packages, and her other reaching in no doubt to pull back the blankets beneath the pram’s awning.

  The woman’s hand followed this innocuous motion with an agitated flurry of searching, the blankets and other coddling being pulled up and over the sides of the carriage. Then the hand retracted, cold and limp looking, as the woman began to bounce lightly on the balls of her feet. Her head jerked frantically from the pram to the butcher shop to the crowded market and finally back to the pram which Maggie knew was empty.

  The nervous bouncing increased to near jumping in place and the wrapped meat fell disregarded to the cobblestones at her feet. She ran shaking hands through her long black curls and even from that distance, Maggie could see the mascara beginning to smear at the corner’s of the young mother’s eyes.

  The woman looked again into the butcher shop, then again to the empty pram. And as the gray-black tears began to stream down her cheeks, she pulled at her sable curls, looked to the sky and screamed the pain of a mother whose baby has just been kidnapped.

  For ritual sacrifice, Maggie knew. And she was off like a shot.

  She darted through the crowd, scattering ‘Excuse me’s and ‘Pardon’s at the marketgoers past whom she desperately clawed. The young mother’s sobs trailed after Maggie as she headed back the way she’d come. She wanted to help the heartbroken woman, but knew any aid she could offer would come not from consoling the woman beside her empty pram, but rather from retracing her own steps from when she had entered the mark
et. For she knew two other things as well. First, she’d found the right prophecy. And second, she had seen the kidnapper with the child.

  ‘Two infants … one from each of the two great clans…’

  Stupid translation spell, Maggie cursed to herself as she craned her neck to try to catch some glimpse of the scarf-headed kidnapper. The spell had succeeded in translating the unknown words into understandable concepts, but then her brain had insisted on relabelling these concepts in a language she knew. But concepts are ambiguous, whereas words are not—or at least are less so. So when confronted with an Old Welsh word consistent with the concept for ‘family,’ her brain had looked perhaps first to the English ‘family,’ then perhaps to the Gaelic equivalent ‘clann,’ and opted finally for the compromise word, ‘clan,’ an English word borrowed from the Gaelic. Cognates and circular labeling had led to a mistranslation.

  Not ‘two great clans,’ Maggie realized as she reached the edge of the marketplace, ‘two great families.’

  North and South. Gadelic and Brittonic. Scottish and Welsh. MacLeod and whatever Welsh surname the little girl who’d just been kidnapped bore.

  Maggie scanned the horizon in vain for any sight of the woman who’d brushed past her on her way out of the marketplace. No sign of her. Maggie felt sick to her stomach, aware that the translation spell had been doubly flawed.

  In the staticky flicker of the fading spell, Maggie had failed to notice that she hadn’t actually heard the words uttered by the scarf headed kidnapper—she had simply understood them. They could have been in English; they could have been in Welsh. They could have been in her lost dialect of Old Gaelic. Maggie would never know.

  A final scan of the area confirmed that the kidnapper was gone. She’d vanished. And the infant girl with her.

  ‘She shall return to fulfill the prophecy.’

  Maggie’s soft faced hardened into a determined scowl. The prophecy shall not be fulfilled, she swore to herself, and headed back into the crowd.

  Marching back to the butcher shop proved considerably easier than running out of it, in part because she’d shed the urgency to push past people, and in part because the mass of people had begun to thin. While misery loves company, the feeling is rarely mutual, especially when the misery is a stranger’s and offering comfort might mean getting involved. But while Maggie might not be able to offer much comfort, she could offer something perhaps more valuable: information. Information which might prove to be the only lead to catching whomever stole the poor mother’s baby. The woman could take it or leave it, but Maggie couldn’t keep what she knew—however incredible—to herself. If the woman thought Maggie was crazy, then fine—Maggie could just leave, no harm done. It wasn’t like she would be relaying her fantastic story to the police or anyone like that.

  The crowd was even thinner back by the butcher shop. A crusty half-ring of gawkers had solidified some fifteen to twenty feet away from the still weeping woman. She sat alone on the stone steps of the shop, her head in her hands and her back rising and falling sharply in hyperventilating sobs. Her black hair hung over bony knees which were pulled up and bent in to meet each other above pigeon-toed feet. The packaged meat lay discarded in its original landing spot near the pram, tragically empty among its numerous blankets. Eyeing the uncaring crowd disapprovingly, Maggie pushed through their number and walked up to the crying woman.

  “Miss?” Maggie bent over and set a gentle hand on the woman’s back. “Miss?”

  The young woman looked up with a start but with less surprise than Maggie would have expected. Her red-rimmed eyes and gray streaked cheeks displayed a visage apparently numb with grief.

  Maggie sat down next to her on the step. “I think,” she began simply enough, “I may have some information about who took your baby.”

  Just then a strong hand from above gripped Maggie’s shoulder. She looked up and around, the surprise on her own face not at all hidden.

  “Have you then?” asked the large policeman towering over her. “And who the hell are you?”

  29. Just the Facts, Mag

  “Good Morning, Miss Devereaux.”

  Sgt. Jeremy Llewellyn’s voice was taut and angry as he paced restlessly before the table Maggie was seated at. His inhospitable demeanor matched perfectly with the intimidating stone walls of the Aberystwyth Police Department’s interrogation room.

  “Good morning,” Maggie replied, rather coolly, she thought, considering the circumstances.

  The room was small, with four cinderblock walls painted a sickening shade of green. A large metal door, painted an equally unpleasant blue loomed to Maggie’s right, while opposite the door was a long, horizontal mirror that reflected Maggie, the police officer looming across the table from her, and the second officer seated in a pink plastic chair in the far corner.

  “Thank you for agreeing to meet with us.” Officer Jessica Kernough said from her seat in the corner. She was an attractive woman in her late twenties, with shoulder length, strawberry blond hair and feminine curves suppressed beneath her bullet-proof vest and black police uniform.

  Llewellyn was considerably less attractive. He was tall and thin, with needle-like features, small teeth and an unpleasant squiggle of brown hair atop his long head. His chest was incongruously thick, shrinking quickly to a narrow waist and long, spindly legs.

  “Well then, Miss Devereaux.” Llewellyn stopped in front of her and leaned onto the table. “Let’s get to it, shall we?”

  Maggie nodded cautiously. “All right.”

  “You told Officer Bradley,” he peered down at her over his long, pointy nose, “that you had information regarding the kidnapping of the Owen girl.”

  “Actually,” Maggie disagreed, “I never told the officer that.”

  Llewellyn straightened up at this. “You didn’t?”

  “No.” Maggie knew this was splitting hairs, was a bit silly, and was probably just going to antagonize them. “I told Ms. Owen that.” But she had to buy herself some time to think.

  Llewellyn pursed his lips with a clicking, puckering noise. He looked to Kernough, but she just smiled and nodded him back to work. Turning again to his subject, he flared his nostrils, then proceeded. “Miss Owen, then,” he corrected. “A single mother by the way. Which is unfortunate.”

  Depends on who the father was, Maggie opined to herself.

  “In any event,” Llewellyn pressed on, “would you agree then that you told Miss Owen—in the presence of Officer Bradley—that you had information regarding the kidnapping of her daughter?”

  Maggie shifted uneasily in her chair. It was one thing to try to console a heartbroken mother with a little information—however sketchy, unbelievable, or carefully edited—to give her some hope that her child might be found. It was quite another to tell the police that the child had been kidnapped to be sacrificed to a dark Celtic god in the hopes it might rekindle an ancient magic—a magic which works, by the way—to aid in driving the English from the British Isles.

  “Something like that,” she admitted. Reluctantly.

  “‘Something like that?!’” Llewellyn kicked the table sending it spinning at once toward and away from Maggie, careening to her left and leaving her quite exposed to the angry policeman. “What the bloody hell does that mean?! Either you have information or you don’t! If you don’t, then why did you approach the Owen woman? And if you do, why won’t you tell us?”

  He stepped right up to her and lowered his voice to a growl. “What are you hiding?”

  Maggie looked up at the police man with knitted brows. She didn’t need this. And she was pretty sure she didn’t deserve it either. Llewellyn was staring down at her, his chest beginning to heave and red blotches crawling up over his jaw. A short fuse apparently. Uncertain how to reply, Maggie looked over to Officer Kernough for help. Somewhat to her surprise, she got it.

  “Calm down, Jeremy,” Kernough counseled with a graceful wave of her hand. She stood up slowly and crossed over to Maggie’s table as she
offered, “Don’t mind him too much, Maggie. He takes his job quite seriously.” Kernough smiled—a warm generous smile, with burgundy lips and perfectly even, white teeth. “But we all do, don’t we?”

  Maggie nodded. “Sure.”

  “And our job,” Kernough pointed to herself and her partner, “is to find whoever took Ms. Owen’s baby and bring them to justice.” She half-sat on the edge of the askew table to Maggie’s left, even as Llewellyn slunk away into an impatient pacing. “But do you know what else our job is, Maggie? Even more important than that?”

  Maggie’s knitted brow creased in contemplation. “What?”

  “To find Ms. Owen’s baby,” Kernough tilted her head softly, sending her thick hair gently swinging, “and bring her home safe.”

  Maggie nodded and smiled weakly. She was starting to relax a bit. “Right,” she offered. “Of course.”

  “You can help, can’t you, Maggie?” The head tilted back, pulling the strawberry tresses with it. “You want to help, don’t you?”

  Maggie’s face betrayed her unique dilemma. “Yes,” she said. But you won’t believe me, she thought.

  “So help us, Maggie. Help us bring little Holly Owen home to her mother safe and sound.” The reassuring smile faded just the right amount to communicate the seriousness of the request. “Whatever it is you know, Maggie, tell us. Please.”

  Maggie thought for a moment, brow still creased and mouth pulled tightly shut. Llewellyn had stopped his pacing and stood scowling expectantly at her. Kernough leaned in just slightly, still smiling. Maggie liked her perfume.

  “Well, I—” Maggie began with a glance to both Llewellyn and Kernough. Then she decided to just speak to Kernough. The Good Cop, Maggie was well aware. But better than talking to the bad one. And clichéd police tactics or no, Kernough had a point—to a point. “I think I may have seen the person who did it.”

  Kernough gave an exaggerated, but satisfied nod. Llewellyn provided an impatient “Hmmph” and resumed his pacing.

  “And what did this person look like?” Kernough inquired casually yet professionally.