Someone to Lean on
“You are correct. I blew it up. I had to.” Raven nodded. “We have libraries around the world. The St. Augustine Special Collections Library is the most recent and, in my opinion, the safest. At least until the peninsula of Florida is underwater.”
Probably. Nine gates of safety. All separate vaults, each one more progressively secure than the previous. Every day, and with every assignment, the number of dangerous books in Dru’s collection grew.
“But why blow up the Scholar’s Library? It seemed secure. And The Lost Teachings of Dead Monks? You were going to authenticate it later in the week.”
“And I will.”
I turned to him. “It’s not lost? Like, destroyed?”
“No. But this is why we needed to meet face to face. I’ll be out of town for a few days. I don’t want you going back there, either to look for me or the book or just to gawk.”
I would never gawk, I thought, somewhat put off.
“As I said, we have other libraries around the world. Sister libraries, daughter libraries. Libraries parading as used bookstores. The Darbyshire Library was a parent library, but the valuable books that were saved, as well as The Lost Teachings of Dead Monks, will go to the St. Augustine Library for safekeeping. Terre insisted on this plan over a year ago, before he died. He trusted your mentor there. You’ll hand carry The Lost Teachings to Florida with you. It’ll be a few weeks before the larger shipment of books leaves Dublin. It’ll take that long to remove them safely from their hiding spot in the rubble. The structure was altered to drop three cages of rare books into a vault below if we needed to, let’s say, permanently terminate usage of the location. They’re retrievable, but only when it’s safe.”
Suddenly the layout of the building made sense. There was a bottom floor that could not be seen in the public part of the Scholar’s Library or from outside, and below it, a basement vault.
“I still don’t understand why you had to blow up the library. And books. There’s never a good reason to blow up books.”
He laughed. “Sometimes, there is. We needed to make any potential thieves think it was lost for good and to keep them away from even more dangerous works in our keeping. The Lost Teachings of Dead Monks could certainly be one of those sacrificial books that needs to be destroyed to protect the rest, but the Historical Society has plans for it, and so does the priesthood. That’s why I took the book with me when I left last night through an underground exit. I knew we were being watched. Nike and Illyria left ahead of me and were, as we suspected, followed a short distance. They split up, as did the man and woman tailing them. When it was clear that neither Nike nor Illyria had the book, the people following them broke off. By that time, the explosion had already happened, and I was headed north to a small temple where I have the tools I need to authenticate The Lost Teachings after I’m done with my ritual preparation.”
“So the artifact is safe?”
“Safer than you are. I contacted the woman who calls herself Drusilla St. Augustine and asked for this conference with you and Charlie.”
“Yeah. Charlie.”
Raven pointed at the other lushly-green mound with two stones erected on top. I followed, my arm in his. The ground was slippery, but I felt unusually secure latched onto him.
“We knew this would happen one day. In our precognition of the library, we—the priesthood, that is—saw outside interests as shadows, watching and eventually breaking in.”
“Aoife?”
He caught his breath for a few seconds, maybe surprised that I was piecing the puzzle together. “Not Aoife. There’s a spell, a ‘working’ around the book to keep it hidden from her. Terre did it himself and it will hold as long as the chain of custody, so to speak, isn’t broken. Terre to the senator to you and Charlie to me, then back to you, and then from you to your mentor.”
“If not your High Priestess, then who? Somebody she put up to it?”
“We don’t know. The threat is coming from outside. We have no idea how anyone would have learned about it. I know the senator would not have divulged his secret, but effectively, our cover was blown. Someone, a small group, has learned about it in the last few days. We had to have a plan to destroy the library and anyone inside it if they breached the hall leading to the rare books vault. Everything else was expendable. Plus, we needed to throw off anyone else who might come looking for a dangerous book.”
“Make them think everything was gone so no point to continue looking for the book.” Made sense. “If someone was about to get their hands on dangerous books, or if they did, it would be necessary to kill them and destroy whatever book they got.”
“That’s what happened last night.” Raven walked me past a small passage grave and pointed at the stone to the right on the next hill where a stone and a Celtic cross stood. “Lia Fail,” he whispered with reverence.
I walked with him, thinking more about last night than the history I could feel all around me. “Who’s the dead book thief?”
“We don’t have a name yet. The body is male but not so recognizable. We do have footage of a woman on the stairs outside our door. From the footage, you interrupted her. Red hair—”
“Yes!” After I’d almost fainted on the threshold of the library, she’d literally leaped over me. “Who is she?”
“We didn’t recognize her with her disguise.”
I chuckled. Disguise was a good word for it. She resembled the avatar Charlie had created for the virtual St. Augustine Special Collections Library on Fourth World, the simulated librarian he’d nicknamed Rune O’Maney. If anything, she looked like some type of cosplay model on her day off with her vivid red hair, multiple silver hoop earrings, nose ring, and rather bland street clothes. Charlie had designed the avatar based on a story Jakin had told about his redhaired sister who had died young. I’d had weird visions of his sister myself, but this woman on the stairs was a pale imitation of Zara Crutchfield and a disconcerting imitation of a 3D animated image Charlie had created in an online simulation. A copy of a copy of a copy.
“However,” Raven continued, helping me up the next hill when my boot slipped, “our facial recognition AI got a hit.”
My mind raced. I could think of a few people who wanted to get their hands on our special books: in particular, The Key to Hell and Death with its ritual to raise the dead and a hundred more rituals to raze the living. Books of this sort had value on the black market for their age and rarity alone. Add in that some of these books contained long lost secrets, recipes for poisons, sketches of weapons, and initiation ceremonies of every secret society—except the Historical Society—and their esoteric value raised the stakes to world destruction.
“Anyone I know?”
“Doubt it. Nike and Illyria got a good look at the two who followed them. Between the first three and the one who actually breached the library and had to be stopped, we’re sure enough of the identity of the woman on the stairs. Two brothers, Marco and Rafe Torrelli, their sister Catherine, aka Lovey, and Marco’s not-so-naturally redhaired wife… Bambi.”
“Bambi? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I wish. Nicknames. Also known as Barbara Ann Simmons. This isn’t the first time we’ve run across this foursome. In it for the money and not the power. No magical knowledge, which of course would take their actions to a whole new level of trouble. They appear to be starting their own collection of antiquities, mainly books but a few other interesting pieces have been linked to them. Amplification rings, like the one you usually wear, for example.”
My fingers went immediately to the empty space on my left hand where I normally wore the pretty stone Dru had given me for Christmas before I joined the military. She called it the “Joan of Arc stone,” and it had a way of amplifying my gift—and often curse—of empathy.
I’d lost it in an airport right before the military recruited me, but Dru had gifted it to me again when she took me home with her from Budapest. I’d stopped wearing it every day when it magnified my certainty that Charlie was hiding something and I could almost discern what it was, just through the waves of strange emotions I felt off his skin when I was near him.
The truth was, I really didn’t want to know what Charlie was hiding. If I could ignore the red flags, I could find a moment of happiness with someone everybody knew was such a good guy and good for me. I was the one everyone knew was troubled, and Charlie was as close to trouble-free as any man in my life had been. At least, until we started talking about a more structured relationship.
As I’d told Emry Rivera while I’d packed my suitcase for Ireland, if I died on this trip, I wanted her to bring together all the men I’d ever loved to be my pallbearers—so they could let me down one last time. She’d laughed and lectured me on listening to my intuition.
“Come,” Raven coaxed. “Time to meet the Stone of Destiny.”
We waited for a couple of Brazilian tourists to finish taking selfies in front of the huge rock jutting out of the ground overlooking the Irish countryside in all directions. It wasn’t hard to believe that the stone might have been bigger a thousand years or more ago, and that the ancient High Kings of Ireland had been crowned on that stone, looking out over the panoramic view of all they ruled. It was said to be a magical stone from an alien race or maybe from fairies or some other shining, winged beings.
I stopped short of the stone by a good ten feet, and Raven halted next to me. At the base, Lia Fail was encircled with long, narrow stones that protected the ground. The grass had been tromped away in the next circle of space around the Stone of Destiny and, between the stone dais and the muddied grass, slick muck and pools of rainwater threatened to capsize any foot that passed.
“Let’s see how your empathic gift responds to the Stone of Destiny,” Raven suggested, but I hung back. “What’s wrong?”
I pointed at the mud. “I’m not exactly graceful. I’ll have to crawl through that mud on my hands and knees, and I’m still not sure I can make it without faceplanting.” The wet mud on the seat of my jeans was uncomfortable enough. I didn’t want to wallow in it on all sides.
“Hmmm. Follow me.” He held tight to my arm, even when one foot slipped. My hiking boots were no match for Ireland, but Raven delivered me to the Coronation Stone, regardless of my destiny, and waited for me to put my hands on it.
What I felt more than anything was pain and cold. The sacred stone had been vandalized over the years. Beyond that, I felt the vast numbers of hands that had touched it. Years and generations. All the energy left there, so little taken or understood. I closed my eyes and reached my energy deep into the stone, reaching back through a hundred years, a thousand, more. All the way back to the first hands to touch it.
Power. Shining. Too bright to see. Something coming again but in a different way.
I’d felt something like it before but more faintly from the ring Dru had given me. The steady hum drew me in, pulled me downward, as though I were melding with the stone. A jolt of electrical energy coursed through me, out the top of my head and the soles of my feet. I yanked my hands away from the rock, and cried out, lurching backward.
Raven caught me and held me up. “What is it at the center?” he whispered in my ear.
I didn’t hear him at first. My ears were full of thunder, my hands full of lightning.
“Lilah,” he asked again, “what did you feel as far back as you could go?”
I blinked at him. “Angels.” Then I shook my head. “This is too much for me. Get me away from here.”
Within minutes, we were walking down the hill toward a small church and cemetery under tall oaks. The storm that had come through earlier had left the courtyard and graves littered with limbs bigger than my arm. We said nothing until we stopped to rest by the graves. Above, the ravens in the trees were so loud that I could barely talk over them.
Raven hiked his chin skyward to watch the black birds, ominous in their extended cawing. “The Morrigan. Can’t you feel Her? The Death Goddess?”
I held up one hand and leaned against a grave with an impression of Cernunnos, The Horned God, worn into the stone. “Stop. Please.” I threw my empathic shields up around me and tried to soothe the jagged edges of energy and thousands of years of thousands of emotions. A few drops of cold rain struck my cheeks.
Raven was watching. Raven was always watching.
“You should go soon,” he said. “It’ll be dark and it’s a long drive into Dublin. The rain is starting up again. I’ll be in preparations for the next three days before I authenticate The Lost Teachings. I’ll contact you as soon as I’m done, through the woman who calls herself—”
“Drusilla St. Augustine. I know, I know.”
“I’ll tell you where to meet. You will hand carry the book to her for safekeeping, and you will deliver it to her personally. Don’t tell anyone and let no one else touch it.”
“Um, okay.” I wiped away a drop of rain from my nose.
“I’m very serious, Lilah. Don’t tell anyone that the book is in your possession. Not even Charlie.”
I stepped under the edge of the tree to avoid the increasing rain drops. My hands still tingled. “Why not Charlie?”
The Last Priest shook his long hair. Raindrops had caught in the loose strands, and his shake didn’t dislodge them all. He looked as if he wanted to say something. I could feel his indecision. Finally, he said, “Do you trust Charlie?”
“Of course,” I answered without hesitation. “With my life.”
Raven studied me. “Do you? Do you really?”
“Well, um….” Did I? Charlie was trustworthy and loyal. Unlike other boyfriends, he’d never cheated on me. I had no doubt at all about his interest in other women. He was so faithful and dependable that he might have been boring had I not known what unfaithful and undependable looked like. “Charlie’s a good guy. A good guy. Good man. You don’t know him like I do, or you’d never ask.”
“Maybe. But other than me feeling that you’re trying to convince yourself, here’s the problem. Very few people knew your reason for coming to Ireland. Or your instructions to take the book to the Scholar’s Library. Please think about this for me. Who knew?”
Defensive, I ticked off the names I knew. “Me. Dru. Charlie. The senator. You. Who did you tell, Raven?”
“No one. Not even Nike and Illyria knew what you brought me, though they do now and have had to go into hiding. The senator is dead. Dru wouldn’t tell anyone, and she knows more about this situation than any of us. That leaves you. And Charlie.”
“I haven’t told anyone what the mission was. Who would I tell? I don’t exactly have a huge social circle.” I hadn’t said anything to anyone. Not even Emry. In fact, I’d said precious little to Charlie. “Everyone back home thinks this is a romantic trip with Charlie. They don’t even know I’m on assignment.” Though it seemed that every time I went anywhere for fun, Dru had some assignment to throw on top of it that made it into a business rather than pleasure trip. She’d joked that a pleasure trip was the perfect cover.
“As I said, do you trust Charlie?”
“I trust him!”
“Then why isn’t he here?”
I shrugged. I didn’t want Raven to know. Finally, I bowed my head. “We had a pretty bad fight.”
“About what?”
“Sheesh? Really? Nosy much?”
“Come. Walk with me. I promise to catch you if you fall.”
Raven didn’t deserve my wrath, and I instantly regretted hissing at him. “Sorry.”
He pressed his lips into a thin, sad line. Charlie and I were having some problems. That much was obvious to anyone, even someone who wasn’t a powerful priest to a dead god.
With one finger, he lifted my chin. “Do you think Charlie would betray the library?”
The more important question was the one he didn’t ask: did I think Charlie would betray me?
“Here’s what I know about your Charlie. He’s hiding something.”
“Most of us are.”
“True. But we have one dead Marco Torrelli and three members of his family missing. They were last seen in the area a few hours before Marco cut his way through a library window and the bars across it and got halfway to the lower floor before we could remotely drop the cages and blow the building. How did the Torrellis know you were coming to Ireland? How did they know you were going to the Scholar’s Library? And most importantly, how did they know The Lost Teachings of Dead Monks was coming up for a transition in ownership?”
“You think it was Charlie? No. Impossible.” Was it?
“They have a pattern with every new batch of acquisitions. They find some poor idiot and they start slowly. At first, it’s casual and friendly. Then they get you to do something for them, something small. They praise you for your help. They make you feel like you’ve never been praised before. Then they ask for a little more, and you give a little more. It’s social engineering and psychological warfare. You feel good helping them. Great, even. It’s addictive. Maybe there’s even a romantic element.”
Rain misted harder on my face. I shook my head furiously. “Not Charlie. He wouldn’t have another woman in the wings while he’s with me. He’s not like that.”
“Then maybe it’s not anything romantic. Maybe just friendship. Or appreciation for a job well done. Or gratitude for being helpful. If he has a weakness, they’ll exploit it. It’s simple in the beginning, then the lure takes you farther down the rabbit hole. Eventually, you’re invested in their plight, whatever that plight may be. Probably one tailormade to your personality because they’ve been studying you and know what makes you tick.”
I ignored the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. If Charlie had a weakness, it was helping people. Even sacrificing for them. It made him feel alive, and I’d wondered more than once if his attraction to me was based on his desire to be the one to save me from myself.
“Then,” Raven continued, “they ask you to do something special and a little risky. Usually something one step over the legal line. Not too bad. But enough that they have something small to blackmail you with now and can ask you for something bigger or something riskier. So you take one more step into the ring, thinking that will undo what you’ve already done but instead, you get more and more invested in their drama, and they appeal to the better part of you. Could Charlie fall prey to that?”
I wrapped my arms around my body and pulled my jacket tighter against the coming rain. Charlie was smarter than Raven gave him credit for.
“They go after your better nature. Honor. Reputation. Family. Dreams. Soon enough, you have no choice but to help them, whether it’s to steal a book or spy on your employer. And Lilah? Everyone who has fallen prey to the Torrellis has taken their own lives when caught. At least, we think these were suicides and not homicides.”
I turned my back to him and headed toward my rented car in the parking lot through the gate I’d entered.
“Lilah!” Raven followed me.
“You’re wrong. I love Charlie. I trust Charlie. I trust him because I love him. That’s what you do in a relationship, and I’m not going to let you make me lose faith in him.”
He finally caught up with me. “How can I make you understand how dangerous the Torrellis are? People don’t have to have a demon inside to be evil. Do you really think we would have” —his voice cracked— “destroyed the library named for my dead parents over nothing?”
I paused to let his words sink in, then ignored them and continued walking.
“I’m not saying these things to make you lose faith in him. But if not Charlie, then who else have they been feeding off? You?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Okay, one last question, and I’ll stop badgering you. How many books are missing from the St. Augustine Special Collections Library?”
I stopped but didn’t turn around. My hair hung in damp curls, hiding my face from him as I stared at the grass and mud under my feet. Suddenly hoarse, I cleared my throat. “Two.”
“Which ones? Tell me the order.”
“A book on libraries in Ireland. Not worth the cost of time spent looking for it. It disappeared in mid-January. Maybe late December, but we didn’t realize it was gone until the middle of the month. Not a big deal, but I spent a lot of time searching for it. So did Charlie. He thought Emry, our scholar-in-residence might have borrowed it, but each book has a chip in the spine, so it can’t just walk away unless you have certain permissions in the security system. Emry could have, I suppose, but she said not. Or maybe Samantha misfiled it.”
I felt a sudden lightness in his emotions when I mentioned Emry. They must’ve met at some point because I had the distinct impression of affection for her, even though she’d never mentioned him.
“And the next book? Was it more important?”
Swallowing hard, I forced myself to breathe. I couldn’t stand the uneasiness welling inside me. “Yes. A book of maps of Atlantis, with Atlantis being described in measurements identical to Ireland. The esoteric value wasn’t much, but it’s rare enough to fetch five thousand, maybe six thousand dollars. Not an important book but valuable enough that Charlie and I spent days searching for it. And it was removed from Gate Four sometime in late January.”
What I didn’t tell Raven was that only Dru, Charlie, and I had unfettered access to Gate Four.
“Have you told your Drusilla St. Augustine?”
“No.” I knew what would happen. An all-out investigation. Our books didn’t just disappear, but neither book was what we considered dangerous. Both were garden-variety rare books.
“When did you and Charlie first know about The Lost Teachings and its transition?”
I turned my back on Raven. “Mid-December? The university library, including our Special Collections library, was closed for Winter Break. Dru told us to keep our calendars open for this week for an easy pickup in Ireland.”
Raven capped my shoulders with his palms and said nothing.
“It can’t be Charlie,” I almost pleaded.
Raven slid his hands over my arms, down to my hands, and laced his fingers through mine, his chin on my shoulder. I wanted to wriggle away but found that I couldn’t. I needed someone to embrace me and tell me everything would be all right. I wanted Charlie to be holding me here on the Hill of Tara, but damn him, he wasn’t. I let Raven quiet me, his steady energy washing over me as our breathing matched. This wasn’t sexual, but there was an intimacy that felt familiar, if lifetimes away. The power of his deliberate touch gave me a preview of who and what he was as a priest of Daegan.
“I don’t mean to hurt you with these questions, but you have to face them or you’re in danger. Let me ask you one last question, please, and then I’ll put an end to this torture and send you back to Dublin. I’m going to give you a little power boost, okay?”
I didn’t understand but nodded anyway. I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Has Charlie been acting strangely since the first book vanished? Search deep in your senses. Think of the Stone of Destiny and how you reached deep down through time to the beginning to see the true essence of what was there. Now think of Charlie and the distance he’s put between you and why. Confront his energy with yours and see the truth.”
Raven curled his shoulders around mine, reaching down to bring our laced hands closer and crossing my arms as he brought my hands up to my chest. He pressed the bind rune tattoo on his right wrist hard into the Hagalaz scar on my left wrist.
No!
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