Darkfever

CHAPTER 5

"I was hoping you could tell me something about my sister," I asked the second-to-last instructor on my list, a Professor S. S. Ahearn. "Do you know who any of her friends were, where she spent her time?"

I'd been at this most of the day. With Alina's e-mail schedule clutched in one hand, and a campus map in the other, I'd gone from class to class, waited outside until it was over, then cornered her teachers with my questions. Tomorrow I would do the same all over again, but tomorrow I would go after the students. Hopefully the students would yield better results. So far what I'd learned wouldn't fill a thimble. And none of it had been good.

"I already told the Gardai what I know." Tall and thin as a rail, the professor gathered his notes with brisk efficiency. "I believe it was an Inspector O'Duffy conducting the investigation. Have you spoken with him?"

"I have an appointment with him later this week, but hoped you might spare me a few minutes in the meantime."

He placed the notes inside his briefcase and snapped it shut. "I'm sorry, Ms. Lane, I really knew very little about your sister. On those rare days she bothered to come to class at all, she hardly participated."

"On those rare days she bothered to come to class?" I repeated. Alina loved college, she loved to study and learn. She never blew off classes.

"Yes. As I told the Gardai, in the beginning she came regularly, but her attendance became increasingly sporadic. She began missing as many as three and four classes in a row." I must have looked disbelieving, perhaps a little stricken, because he added, "It's not so unusual in the study-abroad program, Ms. Lane. Young people away from home for the first time… no parents or rules… an energetic city full of pubs. Alina was a lovely young girl like yourself… I'm sure she thought she had better things to do than sit in a stuffy classroom."

"But Alina wouldn't have felt that way," I protested. "My sister loved stuffy classrooms. They were just about her favorite thing in the world. The chance to study at Trinity College meant everything to her."

"I'm sorry. I'm only telling you what I observed."

"Do you have any idea who her friends were?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Did she have a boyfriend?" I pressed.

"Not that I was aware. On those occasions I saw her, if she was in the company of others, I didn't notice. I'm sorry, Ms. Lane, but your sister was one of many students who pass through these halls each term and if she stood out at all—it was through her absence, not her presence."

Subdued, I thanked him and left.

Professor Ahearn was the fifth of Alina's instructors that I'd spoken to so far, and the portrait they'd painted of my sister was that of a woman I didn't recognize. A woman that didn't attend classes, didn't care about her studies, and appeared to have no friends.

I glanced down at my list. I had a final professor to track down, but she taught only on Wednesdays and Fridays. I decided to head for the library. As I hurried out into a large grassy commons filled with students lounging about, soaking up the late-afternoon sun, I thought about possible reasons for Alina's unusual academic behavior. The courses offered through the study-abroad program were designed to promote cultural awareness, so my sister—an English major who'd planned to get a Ph.D. in literature—had ended up taking courses like Caesar in Celtic Gaul and The Impact of Industry on Twentieth-Century Ireland. Could it be she'd just not enjoyed them?

I couldn't see that. Alina had always been curious about everything.

I sighed and instantly regretted the deeply indrawn breath. My ribs hurt. This morning I'd awakened to find a wide band of bruises across my torso, just beneath my breasts. I couldn't wear a bra because the underwire hurt too much, so I'd layered a lacy camisole trimmed with dainty roses beneath a pink sweater that complemented my Razzle-Dazzle-Hot-Pink-Twist manicure and pedicure. Black capris, a wide silver belt, silver sandals, and a small metallic Juicy Couture purse I'd saved all last summer to buy completed my outfit. I'd swept my long blonde hair up in a high pony-tail, secured by a pretty enameled clip. I might be feeling bruised and bewildered, but by God I looked good. Like a smile that I didn't really feel, presenting a together appearance made me feel more together inside, and I badly needed bolstering today.

I'll give you until nine P.M. tomorrow to get the bloody hell out of this country and out of my way. The nerve. I'd had to bite my tongue on the juvenile impulse to snap, Or what? — you're not the boss of me, second only to an even more juvenile impulse to call my mom and wail, Nobody likes me here and I don't even know why!

And his assessment of people! What a cynic. "Walking victim, my petunia," I muttered. I heard myself and groaned. Born and raised in the Bible Belt, Mom had taken a strong position about cussing when we were growing up—A pretty woman doesn't have an ugly mouth, she would say—so Alina and I had developed our own set of silly words as substitutes. Crap was fudge-buckets. Ass was petunia. Shit was daisies and the f-word, which I can't even recall the last time I used, was frog. You get the idea.

Unfortunately, we'd said them so often as children that they'd become a habit just as hard to break as real cusswords. To my endless humiliation, the way it usually worked was the more upset I got, the more likely I was to fall back on my childhood vocabulary. It was a little difficult to get an out-of-hand bachelor party at the bar to take you seriously when your threat was they'd better "back off or the bouncer was going to kick the fudge-buckets out of them and toss their petunias right out the door." In this desensitized day and age, clean language got you laughed at more often than not.

I cleared my throat. "Walking victim, my ass."

Okay, I'll admit it; I'd been quaking in my proverbial boots by the time Jericho Barrons was done with me. But I'd gotten over it. There was no question in my mind that he was a ruthless man. But a murdering man would have killed me last night and been done with it. And he hadn't. He'd left me alive, and by my reasoning, that meant he would continue to do so. He might bully and threaten me, even bruise me, but he wouldn't kill me.

Nothing had changed. I still had my sister's murderer to find, and I was staying. And now that I knew how to spell it, I was going to find out exactly what the Sinsar Dubh was. I knew it was a book—but a book about what?

Hoping to miss the rush-hour crowds and conserve money by eating less frequently, I stopped for a late lunch/early dinner of crispy fried fish and chips, then headed for the library. A few hours later, I had what I was looking for. I had no idea what to make of it, but I had it.

Alina would have known some clever way to search computer indices and go straight to what she wanted, but I was one of those people who needed the placards at the ends of the aisles. I spent my first half hour at the library pulling books about archaeology and history off shelves and toting them to a corner table. I spent the next hour or so paging through them. In my defense, I did use the rear indexes, and midway through my second stack I found it.

Sinsar Dubh¹: a Dark Hallow² belonging to the mythological race of the Tuatha Dé Danaan. Written in a language known only to the most ancient of their kind, it is said to hold the deadliest of all magic within its encrypted pages. Brought to Ireland by the Tuatha Dé during the invasions written of in the pseudohistory Leabhar Gabhala³, it was stolen along with the other Dark Hallows and rumored to have found its way into the world of Man.

I blinked. Then I scanned down the page for the footnotes.

Among certain nouveau-riche collectors, there has been a recent surge of interest in mythological relics, and some claim to have actually beheld a photocopy of a page or two of this "cursed tome." The Sinsar Dubh is no more real than the mythical being said to have authored it over a million years ago—the "Dark King" of the Tuatha Dé Danaan. Allegedly scribed in unbreakable code, in a dead language, this author is curious to know how any collector proposes to have identified any part of it.

The Tuatha Dé Danaan were said to possess eight ancient relics of immense power: four Light and four Dark. The Light Hallows were the stone, the spear, the sword, and the cauldron. The Dark were the mirror, the box, the amulet, and the book (Sinsar Dubh).

Leabhar Gabhala (The Book of Invasions) places the Tuatha Dé Danaan thirty-seven years after the Fir Bolg (who followed Cesair, the granddaughter of Noah, the Partholonians and the Nemedians) and two hundred and ninety-seven years before the Milesians or Q-Celtic Goidelic people. However, earlier and later sources contradict both the true nature of the Tuatha Dé and their date of arrival as put forth by this 12th-century text.

I closed A Definitive Guide to Artifacts: Authentic and Legendary and stared into space. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Seriously. One of those little down ones from inside a decorative pillow. If you'd just swished it at me, I would have toppled.

Mythological race? Dark King? Magic? Was this all some kind of joke?

Alina didn't get into woo-woo stuff any more than I did. We both loved to read and watch the occasional movie, but we always went for your run-of-the-mill mysteries, thrillers, or romantic comedies, none of the bizarre paranormal stuff.

Vampires? Eew. Dead. Enough said. Time-travel? Ha, give me creature comforts over a hulking highlander with the manners of a caveman any day. Werewolves? Oh please, just plain stupid. Who wants to get it on with a man who's ruled by his inner dog? As if all men aren't anyway, even without the lycanthrope gene.

No thank you, reality has always been good enough for me. I've never wanted to escape from it. Alina was the same way. Or so I'd always thought. I was seriously beginning to wonder if I'd ever really known my sister at all.

I just didn't get it. Why would she leave me a message telling me I had to find a book about magic that, according to T. A. Murtough of A Definitive Guide, didn't even exist!

I opened the book and read the first footnote again. Was it possible there were people out there in the world who believed in a book of magic written a million years ago, and my sister had been killed because she'd gotten in the way of their fanatical search?

Jericho Barrons believed it was real.

I thought about that a minute. Then he was nuts, too, I decided with a shrug. No matter how well it had been made, any book would have begun falling apart after a few thousand years. A million-year-old book would have crumbled to dust eons ago. Besides, if nobody could read it, why would anybody want it?

Mystified, I began reading again, working through the second stack and into the third. Half an hour later I'd found the answer to that question too, in a book about Irish myths and legends.

According to legend, the key to deciphering the ancient language and breaking the code of the Sinsar Dubh was hidden in four mystical stones. [Four is a sacred number to the Tuatha Dé: four royal houses, four Hallows, four stones.] In an accomplished Druid's hands, an individual stone can be used to shed light on a small portion of the text, but only if the four are reassembled into one will the true text in its entirety be revealed.

Great. Now we had Druids in the mix. I looked them up next.

In pre-Christian Celtic society, a Druid presided over divine worship, legislative and judicial matters, philosophy, and education of elite youth to their order.

That didn't sound so bad. I kept reading. It went downhill quickly.

Druids performed human sacrifices and ate acorns to prepare for prophecy. They believed day followed night, and held to a credo of metempsychosis in which the human soul does not die but is reborn in different forms. In ancient times it was believed Druids were privy to the secrets of the gods, including issues pertaining to the manipulation of physical matter, space, and even time. Indeed, the old Irish 'Drui' means magician, wizard, diviner—

Okay, that was it. I snapped the book shut and decided to call it a night. My credulity had been sapped. This was not my sister. None of it was. And there was only one explanation for it.

Jericho Barrons had lied to me. And he was probably sitting in his fancy bookstore in his fancy five-thousand-dollar suit, laughing at me right now.

He'd tossed me a red herring, and a whopper of a smelly fish at that. He'd tried to throw me off the trail of whatever it was Alina really wanted me to find with a load of tripe about some stupid mythical book of dark magic. Like any good liar worth his salt, he'd seasoned his deception with truth—whatever it was, he genuinely did want it himself, ergo the deception. Amused by my naivete, he'd probably not even bothered to change the spelling of what she'd said very much. "Shi-sadu." I sounded out the syllables, wondering how it was really spelled. I was so gullible. Maybe there was only a two-or three-letter difference between what Alina had said in Gaelic and what Barrons had pretended she meant, and those few letters were the difference between an object of pure fantasy and some hard-boiled, tangible item that would enable me to shed light on her death. If, for that matter, he'd even told the truth about the word being Gaelic. I could trust nothing he'd said.

Adding insult to injury, he'd tried to scare me with threats and chase me out of the country. And he'd bruised me too.

I was getting madder by the minute.

I left the library and stopped in a drugstore to pick up the few items I needed, then began walking through the busy Temple Bar District back to The Clarin House. The streets were packed with people. The pubs were brilliantly lit; doors were flung open to the temperate July evening and music spilled out onto the sidewalks. There were cute guys all over the place, and I got more than a few catcalls and whistles. A bartender, a young single woman and a music lover, this was my element. This was craic.

I didn't enjoy a bit of it.

When I get mad I have imaginary conversations in my head—you know, the kind where you say that really smart thing you always wish you'd think of at the time but never do—and sometimes I get so wrapped up in my little chats that I end up oblivious to everything around me.

That's how I found myself outside Barrons Books and Baubles instead of The Clarin House. I didn't mean to go there. My feet just took me where my mouth wanted to be. It was twenty past nine, but I didn't give a rat's petunia about Mr. Barrons' stupid deadline.

I stopped in front of the bookstore and snatched a quick glance to my left, toward the deserted part of the city in which I'd gotten lost the other day. Four stories of renovated brick, wood, and stone, Barrons Books and Baubles seemed to stand bastion between the good part of the city and the bad. To my right, streetlamps spilled warm amber light, and people called to each other, laughing and talking. To my left, what few streetlamps still worked shed a sickly, pale glow, and the silence was broken only by the occasional door banging on broken hinges in the wind.

I dismissed the unpleasant neighborhood. My business was with Barrons. The open sign in the window was dark—the hours advertised on the door were noon to eight P.M. — and there were only dim lights on inside, but the expensive motorcycle was parked out front in the same place as yesterday. I couldn't imagine Fiona straddling the macho black-and-chrome hog any more than I could picture Barrons driving the sedate upper-middle-class gray sedan. Which meant he was here, somewhere.

I made a fist and pounded on the door. I was in a foul mood, feeling put-upon and wronged by everyone I'd encountered in Dublin. Since my arrival, few had been passably civil, none had been nice, and several had been unapologetically rude. And people said Americans were bad. I pounded again. Waited twenty seconds, pounded again. Mom says I have a redhead's temper, but I've known a few redheads and I don't think I'm nearly that bad. It's just that when I've got something stuck in my craw I have to do something about it. Like coming to Dublin in the first place to get Alina's investigation reopened.

"Barrons, I know you're in there. Open up," I shouted. I repeated the pounding and shouting for several minutes. Just when I was beginning to think maybe he wasn't there after all, a deep voice came out of the darkness on my left, marked by that untraceable accent that hinted of time spent in exotic climes. Like places with harems and opium dens.

"Woman, you are a thousand kinds of fool."

I peered into the gloom. Halfway down the block was a denser spot in the darkness that I took to be him. It was impossible to make out his shape, but that patch of darkness seemed to hold more substance, more potency than the shadows around it. It also made me shiver a little. Yes, that would be him.

"Not so much of a fool as you think, Barrons. Not so much of a fool that I fell for your stupid story."

"A lamb in a city of wolves. Which one will take you down, I wonder?"

"Lamb, my petu—ass. You don't scare me."

"Ah yes, a thousand kinds of fool."

"I know you lied to me. So what is it really, Barrons—this shi-sadu?" Though I'd not intended to emphasize the unfamiliar word, it seemed to ricochet off the surrounding buildings with the sharp retort of a gunshot. Either that or, for a weirdly suspended moment, a total hush fell over the night, like one of those untimely lulls in conversation that always happen just when you're saying something like, Can you believe what a witch that Jane Doe is? and Jane Doe's standing right across the suddenly silent room, and you just want to sink into the floor. "You may as well tell me, because I'm not going away until you do."

He was there before I could blink. The man had lightning reflexes. It made a difference that he wasn't where I thought he was to begin with. He detached from the shadows no more than ten feet from me and crushed me back against the door. "You bloody fool, do not speak of such things in the open night!" Crowding me back to the door, he reached past me for the lock.

"I'll speak of anything I—" I broke off, staring beyond him. The patch of darkness I'd mistaken for him had begun to move. And now there was a second spot slithering along the side of one of the buildings, a little farther down; an impossibly tall one. I glanced over to the other side of the street, to see what idiot was walking through that terrible neighborhood at night, casting the shadow.

There was no one.

I glanced back at the two darknesses. They were moving toward us. Quickly.

I looked up at Barrons. He was motionless, staring down at me. He turned and looked over his shoulder where I had been staring, then back at me.

Then he pushed open the door, shoved me inside, shut the door, and slid three dead bolts behind us.

I