My hunting and gathering expedition had nothing to do with Derek O’Bannion or Fiona, or the reminder of how weak I was compared to them. It was proactive. It was smart. It was just plain, good common sense. I slid the small fridge out from beneath the rear counter and tucked several jars behind it, before sliding it back in. The others I would stash away upstairs later.
After catching myself staring at them for several minutes without blinking, I stuffed the jars in my purse. Out of sight, out of mind.
I opened my laptop, hooked up my camera, and began uploading the pages. While I waited, I called the ALD again, to make sure the dreamy-eyed boy really understood the urgency of the message I’d asked him to relay. He assured me he did.
I tended to customers for the next several hours. It was a busy morning and sales were brisk. It wasn’t until early afternoon that I got to sit down, and take a look at the pages Dani had photographed.
I was disappointed by how small they were, barely the size of recipe cards. The scribbled lines were cramped tightly together, and when I finally managed to begin deciphering the small, slanted script, I realized what I had was a pocket notebook of observations and thoughts penned in a badly butchered version of the English language. The spelling made me suspect the author had had little in the way of formal education, and had lived many centuries ago.
After studying it for some time, I opened my own journal, and began to write down what I believed was a fair translation.
The first page picked up in the middle of a lengthy diatribe about The Lyte and The Darke—which I swiftly realized meant the Seelie and Unseelie—and how dastardly and “Evyle” they both were. I already knew that.
However, halfway through the page, I found this:
Sae I ken The Lyte maye nae tych The Darke nae maye The Darke tych The Lyte. Whyrfar The Darke maye nae bare sych tych, so doth the sworde felle et low. Whyrfar the Lyte may nae bare sych Evyle, sae The Beest revyles et.
Okay, so that sounded like the Seelie hated the Unseelie and vice versa. But not quite. There was something more here. I puzzled over it several moments. Did it mean the Seelie couldn’t actually touch the Unseelie, and vice versa? I read on.
Tho sworde doth felle thym bothe, yea een Mastr and Myst! Ay t’hae the blade n ende m’suffrin!
The sword killed both Unseelie and Seelie, up to the highest royalty. I knew that, too. So did the spear.
Sae maye ye trye an ken thym! That The Lyte maye nae tych The Beest, nr The Darke the sworde, nr The Lyte the amlyt, nr the Darke the spyr.
So may you try and know them, I scribbled my translation. The Light (Seelie) may not touch the Beast (Book?) and the Dark (Unseelie) may not touch the sword. “I get it!” I exclaimed. This was important stuff! The Seelie can’t touch the amulet, I wrote, and the Unseelie can’t touch the spear.
What it was saying was that the Seelie couldn’t touch the Unseelie Hallows and Unseelie couldn’t touch the Seelie Hallows—and that was how you could tell them apart!
I’d just found the perfect way to lay my questions to rest about whether or not Barrons might be a Gripper! If he was, he couldn’t touch the spear.
I lay my pen aside, thinking back. Had I ever seen him touch it? Yes! The night he’d stabbed the Gray Man, while I’d hung, suspended by my hair.
I narrowed my eyes. Actually, I hadn’t seen him touch it that night. When he’d returned it to me, the hilt was still stuck in my purse, with the spear protruding from it. He’d handled it through the fabric. And although he’d said he was going to wear it to the auction, strapped to his leg, I’d never pulled up his pants leg and gone looking for it. For all I knew, he might have left it laying on the desk, right where I’d placed it for him, and where I’d later reclaimed it.
Okay, but the night we’d stolen the spear, surely he’d touched it at some point, hadn’t he? I closed my eyes, replaying the memory. We’d gone underground and broken into the Irish mobster Rocky O’Bannion’s treasure chamber. Barrons had made me pluck it from the wall, and carry it to the car. He’d instructed me to break the rotting shaft from the spearhead. I’d been carrying it ever since.
I opened my eyes. Clever, clever man.
I had to put him in a position where he had no choice but to hold the spear. To take it. Touch it. I would settle for no less than skin on steel. If he were a Gripper—or an Unseelie of any kind—he wouldn’t be able to do it. It was that simple.
So how was I going to trick him into taking it?
These pages had been worth Dani’s efforts for this tidbit alone. I was glad the book on V’lane had been gone, and this had been there in its place.
I resumed reading. It was slow going but fascinating.
The author of the pocket notebook was no sidhe-seer. Its scribe was a man, or rather a young boy, who’d been so beautiful he was mocked by the warriors of his time, though loved by the lasses who’d taught him his letters.
At ten and three, he’d had the misfortune of capturing the eye of a Faery princess, while taking a shortcut through a dark and tangled wood.
She’d charmed and seduced him off to Faery, where she’d swiftly transformed into something cold and frightening. She’d kept him locked in a golden cage at court, where he’d been forced to watch the Fae play with their human “pets.” Among their games, their favorite was turning mortals Pri-ya: into creatures who begged for the touch of a Fae, any Fae—in fact, for the touch of anything at all, for the “vilest of things to be done to them, and to do foul things to each other,” according to the young scribe. These creatures had no will, no mind, no awareness of anything but sexual need. They knew neither morality nor mercy, and were as likely to turn on one another as rabid animals. The boy had found them terrifying and feared being given to what had become of his human companions. He had no way of tracking time but he watched hundreds come and go, and began a growth of manly hair, which was when the princess began once more to look his way.
When the Fae were no longer amused with their pets they cast them from Faery to die. In this manner, the letter of the Compact wasn’t violated. They didn’t actually kill the humans they captured. They just didn’t save them. I wondered how many had died in madhouses, or been used for exactly what they wanted, and killed by their own kind.
The boy listened to all that was said, recorded all he heard, because when the dying were discarded, their possessions went with them, and, although he’d lost hope for himself, he hoped to warn his people. (The child hadn’t known that hundreds of years would have passed by the time he was released from Faery.) He hoped something he recorded might save one of them, perhaps hold the key to one day destroying his terrifying, merciless abductors.
A chill kissed my nape. That his plan had worked meant the boy was long dead. And as he’d hoped, his notebook had found its way back to the world of Man, and eventually into the hands of a sidhe-seer, to be passed down through the centuries, and end up in Rowena’s desk. Why was it in her desk? Just some light reading at lunchtime, or was she looking for something?
I glanced at the clock. It was two-thirty, well into afternoon. I snatched up my cell phone and dialed the ALD again. There was no answer. Where had the dreamy-eyed boy gone? Where was Christian? I snapped my laptop closed, and was thinking of heading over there when my cell rang. It was Dani, and the girls were already at the pub waiting for me, so could I hurry?
When I descended the stairs into the shadowy, substreetlevel pub, I found seven women in their mid- to late twenties waiting for me, not including Dani. Two had been present the day Moira had died: the tall, gray-eyed brunette with the unwavering gaze that kept sweeping the pub—and I doubted she missed much—and the skinny, dark-eyed girl with platinum hair, heavy black eyeliner, and matching nail polish, who was rocking slightly in her chair to a rhythmic beat, although her iPod and earbuds lay on the table. The only exit was the entrance I’d come in and, with no windows, the place felt dark and claustrophobic to me. As I took my seat, I could see they were as uncomfortable as
I was with our close, dimly lit surroundings. Five cell phones lay on the table, emitting wan glows. There were two Notebooks open, running on battery power, displaying bright white screens. It was all I could do not to pull out my flashlights, turn them on, and slap them down on the table, adding my share to the lot.
We nodded stiffly to each other. I got straight to the point. “Do you have unrestricted access to the library Rowena told me about?” I asked the group of women. I wanted to know just how useful an alliance between us might be.
The brunette answered, “It depends on your place in the organization. There are seven circles of ascension. We’re in the third, so we can enter four of the twenty-one libraries.”
Twenty-one? “Who could possibly use that many books?” I said irritably. I’d bet there was no handy card catalog around, either.
She shrugged. “We’ve been collecting them for millennia.”
“Who’s in the seventh circle? Rowena?”
“The seventh is the Haven itself, the High Council of. you know. ” That level gray gaze swept the pub uneasily.
I glanced around, too. There were five customers in the place. Two were shooting pool, the other three were brooding into their beers. None of them were paying any attention to us, and there wasn’t a Fae in sight. “If you don’t feel comfortable talking in a public place, why did you ask me to pick one?”
“We didn’t think you’d meet in private after what happened. I’m Kat, by the way,” the brunette said. “This is Sorcha, Clare, Mary, and Mo.” She pointed to each in turn. The skinny Goth was Josie. The petite brunette was Shauna. “That’s the lot of us,” Kat said, “though if you prove useful, and your loyalties are true, more will join us.”
“Oh, I’m useful,” I said coolly. “The question is, are you? And as for loyalties, if yours are with the old woman, I suggest you rethink them.”
Her gaze cooled to match mine. “Moira was my friend. But I saw what I saw, and you didn’t mean to kill her. Doesn’t mean I have to like it, and doesn’t mean I have to like you. It does mean I’m after doing everything I can to stop the walls from coming down, and if that means I have to join forces with the only person I know can sense the Sin—er, Book—here I am. But back to loyalties; where are yours?”
“Where any sidhe-seers should be. With the humans we’re supposed to protect.” I didn’t say what else I was thinking—in exactly this order: my family, my vengeance, the rest of the world.
She nodded. “Very good. The leader of a cause is never the cause itself. But make no mistake, we listen to Rowena. She’s been training most of since we were born. Those she didn’t teach from birth, she’s spent years gathering and educating.”
“Then why are you going behind her back, and meeting with me?”
All eight, including Dani, shifted uncomfortably and either glanced away or fiddled with something; a coffee mug, a napkin, a cell phone.
It was Dani who finally broke the silence. “We used to guard the Book, Mac. It was ours to protect. We lost it.”
“What?” I exclaimed. “You lost it?” I’d been blaming the Fae for the mess we were in, for making Darroc human, but the sidhe-seers were complicit, too? “How did you lose it?” Then again, knowing what I knew of it, how had they contained it to begin with? How had any sidhe-seer gotten close to it? Weren’t they all repelled by it, like me?
“We don’t know,” Kat said. “It happened twenty-some years ago, before any of us came to the abbey. Those who lived through those dark days share little detail about them. One day it was there, hidden beneath the abbey, then it was gone.”
So that was why Arlington Abbey had been continuously rebuilt and fortified ever stronger—because beneath it they’d been protecting the greatest menace known to Man! How long had it been there, hidden in ground, guarded by whatever was held sacred by each age? Since it had been a shian? Before even that?
“Or so we’ve heard,” she continued. “Only the Haven knew it was there to begin with. The night it vanished, they say terrible things happened. Sidhe-seers died, others disappeared, and rumors flew, until the entire abbey knew what had once been hidden beneath their very feet. That was when Rowena formed PHI, and opened branches all over the world, with couriers out in the streets, listening for even a vague rumor of it. She’s been trying to track it since. For many years, there was no account of it, but recently it surfaced, right here, in Dublin. There are many of us who fear it was our predecessors’ failure to contain it that has caused the problems we’re having now, and only by getting it back do we have any chance to fix them. If you can sense the Book, Mac, then you really are our best hope, like. ” She trailed off, as if reluctant to say the word aloud. She stared into her coffee but I saw what she struggled to hide: pure, raw fascination. Like Dani, she was smitten. She cleared her throat. “Like the Fae you brought that night said.” She wet her lips. “V’lane.”
“Rowena says you’re dangerous,” Josie said hotly, raking a black-nailed hand through a fringe of pale bangs. “We told her you could sense it but she doesn’t want you to go after it. She says if you find it, you won’t do what’s right, that you want revenge. She says you told her that your sister was killed in Dublin, so she did some checking, and your sister was a traitor. She was working with him, the one who’s been bringing all the Unseelie through.”
“Alina wasn’t a traitor!” I cried. Every occupant in the place turned to look at me. Even the bartender dragged his attention from the small TV behind the bar. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Alina didn’t know who he was,” I said, carefully modulating my voice. “He tricked her. He’s very powerful.” How had Rowena found out about Alina’s involvement with the LM?
“So you say,” Kat said softly.
Those were fighting words. I rose from my seat, hands splayed on the table.
She rose, too. “Easy, Mac. Hear me out. I’m not accusing you, or your sister. If I truly believed you traitors to our cause, I wouldn’t be here. I saw the look on your face when Moira—”She broke off, and I saw deep, unspoken grief in her eyes. They’d been close. Still, she was here, trying to connect with me, because she believed it was best for our cause. “We’re not here to speak of the dead but to plan for the living,” she continued after a moment. “I know that things are not always what they seem. We learn that from birth. But you can see the bind we’re in. We need you, but we don’t know you. Rowena is against you and, while we normally support her in all things, her attempts to recover the Book have failed. She has tried many times. We need results, and time is of the essence. You asked Dani for a show of faith, and she gave you it. Now we’re asking you to return the favor.”
I bit back an instinctive refusal. “What do you want?” I’d vowed never to prove myself to the old woman, but these women were not Rowena. I badly wanted to be invited to the abbey again. They were the only people I knew who were like me. I’d been banned from the only club I’d ever wanted to join. With V’lane’s name on my tongue, I wouldn’t be at their mercy at the isolated fortress. If things took a threatening turn, he’d be there to rescue me the moment I opened my mouth.
“Can you sense all Fae objects?”
I shrugged. “I think so.”
“Have you heard of the D’Jai Orb?”
When I nodded, she leaned forward and said urgently, “Do you know where it is?”
I shrugged. I’d been holding it in my hands a little over two weeks ago, but I had no idea where it was right now, only that it was in Barrons’ possession. “Why?”
“It’s important, Mac. We need it.”
“Why? What is it?”
“A relic from one of the Seelie Royal Houses that contains some kind of Fae energy that Rowena believes can be used to reinforce the walls. We need it fast, before Samhain.”
“Sowen. What’s sowen?”
“If you can get the Orb and bring it to us, we’ll tell you everything we know, Mac. Even Rowena will have to believe in you then.”
Chapter
11
I hurried back to the bookstore, deep in thought. Not, however, with my head down. I wasn’t making that mistake again today. I won the struggle not to frown at two Rhino-boys that were repairing a streetlamp. What was their deal? Shouldn’t they be supporting their dark brethren, the Shades, and busting out the lights, instead of fixing them?
I couldn’t believe the sidhe-seers had been guardians of the Book and lost it. How had it been lost? What had happened that night twenty-some years ago?
My meeting with the sidhe-seers had answered few questions, and raised more.
What was sowen? How did the D’Jai Orb fit in? How had Barrons gotten it? What did he plan to do with it? Sell it to the highest bidder? Could I steal it from him? Did I want to burn that bridge? Were there any bridges left between us?
If the Orb was my passport to Sidhe-seer Central, I was determined to get it, by fair means or foul. Was Rowena manipulating their efforts to befriend me? Had she allowed Dani to photograph those pages and give them to me, seemingly on the sly?
My short time in Dublin had me looking for games within games everywhere I turned. I’d sure like to get Christian into the same room with a few people and employ his lie-detecting abilities while I asked questions.
Speaking of the Scot, I tried calling him again. There was no answer, again. Grrr. Wondering what exactly constituted “afternoon” in the dreamy-eyed boy’s world, I let myself into the store, opened my laptop, and logged onto the Net.
My search for “sowen” yielded no results. I tried half a dozen different spellings, and was about to give up when a Google search result caught my eye. It was about trick-or-treating, which brought to mind O’Bannion’s earlier crack.
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