A Mix of Death and Gods
Time to himself, I thought. Well, fuck him.
I should’ve enjoyed my solitary visit to Bective Abbey where The Lost Teachings of Dead Monks had been hidden, then illustrated, then taken far away for the benefit of the known world. Instead, I’d been preoccupied with alternating worries for and anger at Charlie.
It was almost as if every weapon in my large arsenal of self-defeating fears was coming true, courtesy of Law of Attraction’s darker magic. Not even the beautiful AD 1347 arrangement of stones into delicate archways around the now-grassy cloister could distract me enough to stop wondering what Charlie was doing or why. We were supposed to have come here together, but no, Charlie needed to “think things through,” he’d said.
“I’m in the crossroads,” he’d whispered to me in bed when he’d finally come back to our hotel room, only to sleep fully clothed next to my naked body and with his back to me.
“Whatever,” I’d muttered back at him.
Not even the news that the Scholar’s Library had been blown to early eighteenth-century rubble could keep my mind off his irrational behavior. When I’d finally slept, it was to the accompaniment of nightmares.
When I woke, he was gone, leaving behind a note saying that he’d see me that night and that I should go sightseeing without him while we waited for news of the library’s contents and identification of the body found inside.
Angry, I’d dressed and called a cab before getting a cryptic message from Dru that I should visit the Hill of Tara for a meeting in the afternoon. I couldn’t help but think of Raven or the two blondes in black dresses and pearls. Which one was the body? Was there more than one in the collapsed building?
“In cases like these,” Charlie had told me as he lay awake beside me, after explaining the chaos in Dublin, “the only way they can tell is to count the heads.”
I’d turned my back to him in the bed we’d shared and wrapped my arms around myself. Yeah. As if I didn’t know a few things about bombs and explosions.
Of course, war and death were nothing new in the world. Not just my world but the world beyond me. That much I learned wandering the perimeter of Trim Castle, a twelfth-century Norman stronghold that was later the boundary of the English Pale but was now green-covered gray ruins.
The Irish countryside was full of earth where blood had been notably shed, those stories captured in over a thousand years of written word and another thousand of oral tradition. One more war, one more death, one more tragedy was a part of human history with its long red line of blood and white line of bone passed down through DNA from one generation to the next. There were no events that had not gone before. Just the human experience of surviving and succumbing.
I was no different. Just another protector of possessions and knowledge, and maybe the future. That was my job as a “librarian” for Drusilla St. Augustine and, more recently, for the Historical Society.
At the same time, prayer and spiritual alignment that promised some sort of immortality—physical or not—were also nothing new in the world, almost as if it were a counterbalance to war and death and tragedy. Walking through rain at Bective Abbey and getting my boots wet in the lush pastureland that surrounded it, lost in contemplation over what life must have been like there eight hundred years ago, I’d realized that. I’d felt the same at Newgrange with its large, round structure that inside was a dark and claustrophobic chamber that seemed to me a mix of death and gods.
As an empath, I could still feel the heaviness of war on the ancient battlefields while in the holy places. I felt a sense of acceptance of life and inevitable death in tune with one another more than in opposition. Plague, battle wounds, torture, famine were all feared but to some extent expected in the long line of history, and life then was lived closer to the bone. A far cry from the relative safety and expected long life of the modern world in First World countries.
And I felt it all. Every emotion. Every sweep of events that comprised daily life in centuries past where nothing remained but stone ruins. Maybe that’s what we’d go back to one day. Maybe all the technology and comforts would give way to a return to dark ages someday, sooner rather than later if certain written prophecies of Daegan were to be believed.
The Hill of Tara, from the moment I stepped outside the rented car and onto the parking lot, felt alive.
I glanced over my shoulder and counted the five other cars and a small, white tourist van. Nothing looked remotely suspicious, though a handful of people using the ancient land as a dog park was somewhat off-putting. I ignored the spattering of little shops selling Celtic jewelry, what might have been a café, and an orange tabby cat walking along the tops of two outdoor tables.
Dru’s message had told me to find the gate and head to Lia Fail—the Stone of Destiny—on top of the hill, and that I should do so when the sun was low in the sky. The rain had turned to mist and then to none, but it was still too cloudy for me to tell exactly where the sun was, even with an occasional burst of sunbeam on grass so green it hurt my eyes to look at it. My best guess was that darkness would fall in another two hours, and I’d have to drive back to Dublin in the rain and night.
“Damn you, Charlie,” I murmured, remembering him all over again.
Together, he and I could have walked these ancient fields where long-ago High Kings of Ireland had been crowned, but instead he was … somewhere else. Doing God knew what. Being vague. I could feel my anger rising again and shook it off, trying to enjoy the moment. I hated feeling angry, but I couldn’t keep pushing it down. It wasn’t like I got to walk the Hill of Tara every day, and here I was worrying over Charlie instead of soaking in the history.
I trudged over the lush, green grass and the muddy spots left by so much rain in one day. The weather was too cold, too breezy, and I sank my fists into the pockets of my jacket and wished for gloves. My boots were muddy and wet, and the lower half of my jeans were damp, but at least I’d layered two T-shirts and a sweater under my jacket.
“Layer, layer!” I could hear Dru’s lecture in my head.
Standing over the edge of a wide trench that curved around the nearest grassy mound, I studied the best way to descend. I stepped around a patch of slick mud, slipping and sliding and almost going down on my ass. I recovered my balance with a relieved sigh and kept moving, just in time for a small dog trailing a leash to bump my knee as it raced past me.
I went down hard. I tried to get my grip to push to my feet, but the slippery mud offered no traction. I kept sliding, committing myself to the downward motion as I threw my arms over my head as a counterweight.
I finally came to a stop at the bottom of the wide trench, but I was on my back, sprawling in the grass and craning my neck to keep my hair out of the mud. I stared up at fast-moving clouds in the sky and a sudden blue that almost hurt my eyes. I assessed my damage, realizing that the only real injury was to my pride, and did my best to sit up.
“Need help?”
I saw the hand before I saw the man. Large and firm in front of me, the outstretched hand curved to secure my wrist and then lift me up.
I reached for the wrist and saw the Walking Lightning tattoo between the palm and the thick, black sweater. I hesitated for only a moment before wrapping my fingers around his wrist and allowing him to pull me to my mud-covered feet.
That bind rune tattoo could belong to only one of two living men, and the other was in Florida under Dru’s watchful eye.
I found my footing and steadied myself against Raven’s chest, grabbing his shoulder and feeling instantly guilty about my muddy handprint. I looked up at him and he grinned. Jakin and Charlie were both taller than I was, but Raven was at least a foot taller and looked as if he might’ve first come to Ireland centuries ago on a Viking ship and spawned folktales about his wizardry. His hair hung loosely at his shoulders and a stray beam of sunlight hinted at hidden gold in his hair before clouds darkened the light and it looked a mundane brown again.
“You’re alive!” I blurted out. I blushed, but there was no one around to hear, except for the little dog that had bumped into me earlier and was fast running back to his mistress further down the hill.
“I hope you think that’s good news.” He brushed away the mud on his sweater but didn’t seem upset about it. He pointed to the back of my jacket and the back thighs of my jeans. “That’s not going to come off easily,” he said.
I lifted the hem of my jacket, and he winced at the sight of the thick mud slathered on my denimed ass. Already, I could feel its cold dampness soaking uncomfortably through the fabric.
“That’s not the usual way that people try to take home a bit of Tara with them, but I suppose, if you really want dirt from the Hill of the High Kings, that will do. Normally, I’d recommend asking permission of the spirits here, but they seem to find it amusing to be dredging you in their mud. If you practice any sort of magic, then the dirt of Tara sprinkled into any spell should help it manifest more steadfastly.”
“I, uh, don’t practice magic.”
“You should. You have gifts, like your mother.”
“Woah. Wait, what? You knew my mother?” He seemed too young, even to have known her as a child.
Raven looked away. “Or so they say. Terre Vanderholt told me she was an empath, like you, but not as gifted as you could be. You know, if you ever want to take your gifts to the next level, I could teach you. I think you’re worthy of consideration into the Priesthood of Daegan.”
“Uh, no. No, thank you. I’ve had quite enough of priests and priestesses, thank you.” Jakin, Aoife, Terre Vanderholt, and a handful of power-hungry wannabe priestesses that hadn’t made the cut.
“I understand. The day may come when you change your mind. It did for me. If so, I’m willing to help. The priesthood is about darkness, yes, but it’s also about finding light in darkness. Or even light within light.”
I nodded at the bind rune on his wrist and murmured, “Walking Lightning.”
“Tell me, Lilah. How many runes do you see within this bind rune?” He held his right wrist close to my face so I could study it.
The diamond-shaped head of the bind rune was closer to his heart and the bent walking leg closer to his hand, as if he could fling his hand outward and command energy from his fingertips to someone else. I’d always thought the Daeganean tattoo was strangely upside down, but now I understood that it was about the point of view.
I counted two, then three runes—Sowilo for success, Gebo for partnership, Kenaz for clarity. I guessed there were many more than I could discern.
“I don’t know,” I half-joked. “Thirteen?”
“Close.”
Raven seemed surprised at my answer, but he didn’t know the affinity for runes I’d inherited from my mother’s bedtime stories. He reached for my wrists, first the right and then the left, pulling back my sleeves and inspecting the scars there.
Scars. Not tattoos but just as intentionally placed, long ago, when I was a child who no longer wanted to live because I’d lost everything and everyone I loved, including my own innocence.
“Ooh,” he moaned. “You did this to yourself?”
I nodded. Usually, I hid them behind pewter cuffs, but I’d left my cuffs at home to avoid problems getting through airport security. They weren’t merely for warding off nosy gawkers but also had the very real ability to hide small but sharp weapons inside them, and I didn’t want to end up on a no-fly list when Dru needed me for assignments that were beyond driving distance.
“When I first saw the markings, I wondered how you got them. Don’t you know that you should never tattoo or draw a rune or bind runes onto your body unless you’re trained and prepared to accept their lessons? They aren’t just pretty, aesthetic drawings. They come with their own specific blessings and curses. It does not much matter your intent in placing them there or your reasons why. The energy of runes is stronger than any ability to control them. Instead, they will control you. I could understand, maybe, why you would choose a protection rune.”
He ran one slender fingertip over Algiz on my right wrist, and I shivered at his touch.
“It’s obvious,” he continued, “that this energy has propelled you far in life. You have no choice but to be a protector as long as these scars are etched into your flesh.”
He shook his head at the scar on my left wrist. “But why ever would you cut Hagalaz into your own body? Why a rune of such destructive power?”
I pulled my wrists out of his grip and hid them from him in the same protective way I always did when Jakin had found himself entranced by my scars. I slid both wrists along my body, down to my hips, and pressed them against my muddy denim.
The truth was, they were both runes that I had liked out of my mom’s old book on runes and the Elder Futhark. I had missed her badly, and I had cut into my own skin long lines that avoided tendons and sinew as much as possible.
Just because I was almost a child suicide did not mean that I had wanted more pain. I was not a cutter, seeking to feel something, anything again.
I was a child, an unrecognized empath, who felt too much of everything.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. It’s just that if the priesthood had been able to get to you before you were kidnapped, none of this would ever have happened.”
I stared at him. How did he know? Was he psychic or, like seemingly every other priest or priestess of Daegan, did he have access to my life story? Was he so sure of his priesthood’s intentions toward me or were these his intentions toward me?
“We could have taught you how to use your gift. Instead of you learning it in such a vile situation.” For a moment, he stared off into the distance as if he could see something I could not. “Or did they know and choose to do nothing?”
I shuddered. For a moment, all those memories flooded back. I tried to push them out of my mind, but the energy of those feelings remained.
The smell of the moldy cellar.
The constant crying of my older companion chained to a nearby post.
The bleak sunlight through the small window, near the ceiling and so covered with dusk and muck that almost no light could make its way in.
The smell of feces and urine.
The metal bucket of water we were expected to drink from and the thin layer of green that grew on top.
The concrete walls seeming to close in around me.
The sound of footsteps coming closer to the cellar door. Closer! Closer!
“Lilah! Lilah, come back to me!”
Raven snapped his fingers in front of my face, and I jerked to a start, almost losing my balance again on the grassy hill. He cupped his palms over my shoulder and held me steady.
“It’s okay, Lilah. You’re okay. You’re safe now. You’re right here with me, and I’m not going to let anything hurt you. That’s all in the past. It can’t hurt you anymore.”
“It hurts me all the time,” I whispered, then shook my head. I turned away from him and started walking ahead of him along the trench, but he caught up with me.
“Please forgive me. I didn’t mean to resurrect this for you. I can help you, though. I can help you work through this and deal with it. There’s a way.”
I glared at him. It was there all the time, just under the surface. I didn’t need help working through it. Best it stayed buried.
“When you’re ready,” he added. “I take it that Jakin Crutchfield hasn’t tried to help you with this yet?”
“Jakin Crutchfield can go to hell. It’s a place I know very well. He showed me how to get there.”
Part of me still missed Jakin, and it was hard enough to see him around campus, or near the Florida University Library where he insisted on checking up on me. He may have regretted what he did to me, but it was too late, and the damage couldn’t be undone. I’d been quite clear with them that I didn’t want his help now and I didn’t trust him anymore. I had Charlie, and Charlie was a nice guy who gave money to anyone who asked and brought meals to the homeless man just off campus and probably gave away every penny he’d saved. Charlie, unlike Jakin, didn’t try to sacrifice me on some altar in his ritual room to be with the woman he really loved.
I walked faster.
Raven matched my stride. “Someone should be here for you. To help you.”
I stopped and looked up at him but said nothing. Who, exactly, did he expect to help me? I’d always been on my own. And as broken as I was, I’d managed to survive. Maybe not thrive but survive.
Raven seemed to read my thoughts. “Okay, what about your boyfriend? Has he been able to help you through all of this?”
I shook my head. Charlie couldn’t help himself, let alone me, as I had been slowly learning for the last two months. He was too convivial and sweet to be my type, but I’d thought he was solid.
Now, I knew better. It wasn’t that he was solid: it was just that he was untested.
As much as I hated to admit it, both Charlie and I had believed he had a stability I did not. He’d never walked in darkness, never had a single bad thing happen to him in all his twenty-seven years.
I walked in darkness all the fucking time. Lived in it. Breathed it. Wore it like a second skin.
“Hey, look. We don’t really know each other, Lilah, but I know all about you. I’ve read your file, and I just want you to know that I’ll be there to help you if you need me.”
“I have a file?” I rolled my eyes. He kept offering to help me, but I refused to hear that part. “Of course, I have a file. Just how much of it did Jakin contribute to?”
Raven grimaced. “I read your file long before you met him. Before your job at the St. Augustine Library. You were in a secret prison in Budapest. Being tortured by Aoife Jung’s men. You didn’t even know I was there. I couldn’t do anything but watch.”
Too shocked to say anything, I studied the man in front of me. Empathically, I knew he was sincere. There was something more elemental about him than I’d felt in other men. None of the hidden agendas. It wasn’t a lie or half-truth with a plan to get me into his priesthood, or into my pants. Or to bait me into being a human sacrifice.
I didn’t remember Raven in Budapest after The Colonel had released me from my unit to Secretary of State Aoife Jung’s custody. I didn’t remember the men who tortured me under that bitch’s direction. The only thing I remembered was Aoife’s wild eyes and white-blond hair and Dru begging to make a deal with her to take me home.
“Why didn’t you help me then?” I fought the rising anger. I could still see it. Dru on her knees, begging for my life when I would never have begged for it.
Raven stared down at the grass, then finally raised his gaze to me. “Not long before that time, I was injured. It took a long time for me to recover. I had to make a deal with the High Priestess to embrace a destiny I had been running from.” He sighed. “Literally, I could run no more.”
Aoife and her deals. I’d been treated decently until an hour before Dru showed up. The electric shocks were all for an effect that had little to do with me and everything with a negotiation with Dru that made no sense to me. I was just a pawn, but my screams gained from the medieval literature professor whatever the High Priestess had wanted.
Raven scooped his arm through my elbow. “Come. Walk with me. I promise to catch you if you fall.”
Come. Walk with me. I promise to catch you if you fall.
I could barely breathe. The words washed over me like an incantation, soothing, healing.
He waved his hand at the wide, grassy trench in front of us as we kept moving. “The trenches here, they’re like rivers. Not for water but for energy. You see these mounds? Energy does not, when it’s traveling forward, go over the mounds but instead follows the trenches around the mounds, in curves or in spirals. That’s how energy flows. If you’ve seen the old, megalithic stones throughout Ireland with spirals on them, those spirals are energy.”
I nodded, even though I’d never heard anything like this. I almost felt he was sharing secrets.
“You’ll notice, Lilah, that many of the stones are laid out using sacred geometry, or sacred math. They’ve found stones all over the world. In pyramids, in passage graves where every stone is the same length, the same magical numbers. With spirals, you’ll see symbols in clusters of five or six spirals. It’s these same proportions, and same numbers, which were applied to the book we call The Lost Teachings of Dead Monks.”
I hadn’t noticed, but I could see them now in my memory.
“That, Lilah, is why the illustrations are so powerful. They’re not just Celtic knots; they have sacred geometry built in to capture the energy and effort that you put into meditating upon each page and multiply it by a force you cannot fathom. Priesthoods as old as mine directed the flow of energy through these trenches. As ancient people, kings to be crowned walked these trenches to the top of the Hill of Tara as preparation. They were able to get into the right mindset in that flow of energy and connect with that power. That’s what we are doing now, Lilah. You and I are connecting with that power. Can you feel it in your hands?”
I nodded again. It was strange, but I felt the tingling—like fire ants or grabbing a live wire—through my palms and coursing up into my shoulders. It was almost a feeling of euphoria. If I could loosen up a little bit, just let go a little bit, I could let it flow through me and adapt to it, but I didn’t dare. I’d already had enough magic in the past year to last a lifetime.
Raven suddenly froze. “Where’s Charlie? Why didn’t he come with you? The woman who calls herself Drusilla St. Augustine said I should expect him, too.”
I shrugged, still opening and closing my fist against the tingling in my hands. “He had to think.” I didn’t mean for my sentence to come out so harsh, but I couldn’t help it.
“I sense something is ‘off’ with him. Is he ill?”
“No. He’s, uh….”
I stopped to think. Charlie had lost at least twenty pounds since New Year’s Day, without trying. He and I had stopped going to the gym together. I knew for a fact he did work out still, though always alone.
“He’s preoccupied lately. He was in Dublin when the bomb exploded last night. Speaking of which—and don’t take this the wrong way—why aren’t you dead, Lord Raven?”
“I’m not a High Priest of Daegan yet. Soon though, at May Eve. And I won’t be Lord Raven. The name I’ve chosen is Lord Aryx, to honor my past incarnations. Why would you think I would be dead?”
“I heard on the news that they found a body they hadn’t identified yet. That this was some type of terrorist incident.”
He shook his head. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Of course.”
“A secret that you can’t even tell Charlie? Particularly because he’s not here. If he were here, he could know it. But since he’s not, this information is not meant for him.”
“Sure.” Even if Charlie and I were already married, I would honor a secret he wasn’t part of the same as I would honor any oath or classified information.
“The reports of a terrorist incident aren’t exactly true, but it’s a good enough cover story.”
“Cover story? I saw the news reports on my hotel TV. There were bits and pieces of all your rare books just fluttering in the street.”
“Not all our rare books. Just our mundane rare books. Which is shame enough but was necessary. The Darbyshire Memorial Scholar’s Library is not a secret. It’s been in existence for hundreds of years, though only the last decade or so as a scholar’s library. What is a secret is that it’s run by the Historical Society, and some members of the Historical Society also happen to be priests and priestesses of Daegan. Like you, none of us have been classically educated as librarians so we have help from those who have been, but we are the protectors of those books. Particularly the five thousand not-so-mundane volumes that cannot fall into the wrong hands.” Raven stiffened his arm and placed his free hand over mine. “Here, let me help you at this little ridge through the mud.”
I could easily imagine how many “wrong hands” might be lurking in the shadows to steal and misuse those five thousand books of Daeganean mysteries.
Silently, I followed him onto the nearest mound and then gasped at the landscape below, the patchwork fields of green and blue green. The clouds in the sky hung low in the distance and a deep shade of blue seemed to shimmer off the green fields like an aura.
I stood arm in arm with Raven with no fear of falling and breathed in the beauty. He slid his hand down my arm and wove his fingers through mine, strong enough to catch me if I needed him.
“Beautiful, isn’t it? Can you imagine all the people who have stood here over the thousands of years before us, looking out from this very hill?”
His hand was warm in mine. A protector of ancient knowledge. His hands were not the wrong hands.
The body in the rubble. I finally understood.
“You blew up your own library.”
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