By the time we were finished, I would be one of those experts, I thought. Unfortunately, there probably wasn’t a great demand for stuttering witches who could read Middle Irish. But if it helped get my father out of that awful place where he was trapped, that was more than enough of a pay-off for me.
I started to turn a page in the book but couldn’t. My hand reached for it but somehow failed to pick it up and turn it. I had reached another of the wards. Donovan and I had opened all the others together, but I didn’t see any reason I couldn’t do this one by myself. Under my breath I sang, “Let this ward now dissolve, let the pages turn. By the power within the earth, now this boon I earn.”
Like a thunderclap, something struck me with enough force to knock me back hard against the sofa. Hard enough, in fact that it tipped over with me. The back of the sofa landed on the floor with a heavy thud. I found myself lying there with my feet sticking straight up in the air.
Beth and Taylor rushed out of their rooms a moment later, jolted out of sleep by the sound, I guess. “Oh, my God!” Taylor exclaimed when she saw me lying there.
I rolled off the sofa and tried to stand up. Before I made it to my feet, Beth pointed and said, “The book’s on fire!”
I looked at the coffee table and was horrified to see that she was right. Flames shot up from the open pages of the book. Taylor grabbed one of the throw pillows that had fallen off the sofa, and I knew she was going to try to beat out the fire with it.
“No!” I cried. Those were mystical flames, so the pillow probably wouldn’t do any good. I didn’t want either of them getting hurt. I circled the sofa and thrust my hands toward the book. “Let burning cease, banish the flame. Put everything right and make it the same.”
The fire disappeared. I hurried over and dropped to my knees next to the coffee table, anxious to see how much damage had been done. Relief washed through me when I saw that only a couple of pages were slightly charred around the edges.
“He b-booby-trapped the damn thing!” I said, referring to Eamon.
I wondered if the other spells and wards we had gotten through so far had had similar traps attached to them. In that case, it had to mean that the power of both Donovan and myself was required to finish reading the book. That was a lot of power. Eamon must have felt that it would be better to destroy the book than to let a witch or warlock of inferior power get into it. That’s how dangerous it was.
I looked up at Taylor and Beth. Both of them wore pajamas and the slightly befuddled expressions of somebody who had been woken out of a sound sleep. “I’m sorry, you guys,” I said. “I didn’t know there was going to be an explosion.”
“What explosion?” Beth asked. “All I heard was a big thump when the sofa fell over.”
“Yeah, me, too,” Taylor said. “Did I really sleep through an explosion?”
“Well…maybe not.” The blast could have been a mystical one that only I heard. Maybe you had to have powers to sense it.
I tried to explain that, but they just looked even more confused. Beth said, “It’s all right, Aren. We know there are a lot of things going on right now that we don’t fully understand.”
“I don’t think I want to fully understand them,” Taylor muttered.
“As long as you’re all right, and that book that’s so important to you is all right, don’t worry about us,” Beth went on.
“Thank you,” I said. I looked down at the book again. “I’m just glad it didn’t burn up.”
Taylor sniffed the air and said, “Actually, I think something is burning.”
I shot to my feet and said, “My muffins!”
o0o
Breakfast wasn’t ruined. I was able to scrape off enough of the burned parts that the muffins were still edible.
The three of us together had set the sofa upright. When I finished cleaning up after breakfast, I took a second cup of coffee with me and sat down in front of the book again. A faint scorched odor lingered in the air when I leaned toward it, but it smelled more like burnt electrical wiring than anything else.
Break or no break, I wasn’t just about to try bypassing another ward by myself. I didn’t know if Donovan was awake yet, so I sent him an e-mail asking him to call me as soon as he got it. I didn’t go into any details, just told him that we needed to talk.
Taylor went back to bed. Now that she’d had breakfast, she was good with sleeping until one or two o’clock in the afternoon on a weekend. Beth came out of her room dressed in sweats to go for a run. I told her goodbye and sat back to wait to hear from Donovan.
That didn’t take long. I grabbed my phone from the table as soon as it started to buzz. When I saw that the call was from Donovan, I opened it and said, “Good morning.”
“I hope so,” he said. “I got your e-mail. What’s up?”
“A couple of things have happened.” I hesitated. Did I want to tell him about Eamon’s visit and the book being booby-trapped? Some things might sound crazier on the phone than they would in person, and having a thousand-year-old warlock show up unexpectedly in the middle of your living room especially struck me as one of them. “Do you think you could come over here sometime today?”
“I can come right now,” he said. With a note of worry in his voice, he went on, “Are you all right, Aren?”
“I’m fine,” I assured him. “It’s just that there have been some…developments on this end. How about you? Have you found out anything else about those private detectives?”
“Not yet. You’re determined to be mysterious about this, aren’t you?”
“That’s not it,” I told him. “I just don’t want you to think I’ve lost my mind.”
A moment of silence passed on his end, then he said, “Well, that’s certainly intriguing. I’ll be there in twenty minutes or so, if that’s all right.”
“That’s fine.” That would give me time to get dressed, brush my hair, and put on some makeup. I would do that for any visitor, I told myself, not just Donovan. “I’ll see you then.”
I broke the connection and set the phone on the table again, next to the ancient book. As I went to get ready, I reminded myself that Eamon had seen me in my comfortable old PJs, with no makeup and my hair still damp from the shower, and he hadn’t seemed to mind. Then I told myself that was a strange thought to have.
I was dressed in a pair of jeans and a comfortable cotton shirt by the time Donovan got there. He smiled at me as I let him into the apartment. “Good morning,” he said. “You don’t look any the worse for wear for last night.”
“What do you mean b-by that?” I asked with a frown as I closed the door.
“I saw something on the news about a riot at some nightclub. You know the TV stations here. ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’ They said it was set off by some girl who showed up to deliver a singing telegram to a bachelor party.”
I sniffed and said, “So naturally you thought of me. Some g-girl, indeed.”
“Yeah, but it was you, wasn’t it?”
I shrugged. “Wh-what if it was?”
“The cops called it a riot, Aren. I wanted to be sure you weren’t hurt.”
“I’m fine. Although it might have been w-worse if I hadn’t stopped time.”
His eyes widened slightly as he looked at me. After a second he said, “I love the way you mention so casually that you did something ninety percent of witches wouldn’t even be able to do.”
“It seemed like the thing to do at the time. S-so to speak. And it allowed me to get out of there without causing a p-problem. There’s nothing wr-wrong with that, is there?”
“Not a thing,” Donovan said. “Is that what you wanted to tell me about?”
“No, that’s just a s-sidelight.” I gestured toward the sofa. “Why don’t you sit down?” My hostessing instincts kicked in. “Can I g-get you a cup of coffee?”
“Sure, that would be great. Thanks.”
I brought a cup for him and one for myself from the kitchen. By the time I was back in the living room, Matilda was curled up
in Donovan’s lap. Like me before Matilda came along, he had never considered himself a cat person, but he had warmed up to her and vice versa.
I handed him the coffee, and as he took it he said, “What happened to the book?”
I sat down at the other end of the sofa, warily keeping my distance. “You noticed?”
“Kind of hard not to,” he said. “It looks like a couple of the pages caught on fire. There’s not much damage, though. You must have gotten it put out in a hurry.”
I sipped my coffee and said, “I tried t-to take one of the wards off of it, and I guess Eamon set a trap to destroy the b-book if the person trying to open it wasn’t powerful enough.”
Donovan looked surprised. “You did that by yourself?”
“Why not?” I asked, making an effort not to sound defensive. “Everybody keeps talking about how p-powerful I am.”
“Yeah, but – ” He stopped himself.
“But inexperienced, right?”
“Let’s face it, Aren,” he said with a shrug. “Before last Halloween you didn’t even know you could cast spells. And if it wasn’t for what you did in the realm of the witches’ council, we wouldn’t be here, would we?”
Anger flared up in me. “You don’t have to make it sound like it’s all m-my fault. That spell was supposed to b-bring me and my father back here and l-leave you there!”
“Yeah, but the way you phrased it, it sent back the two people with the strongest link between them. That could’ve been you and your father or me and my mother or even me and Angela. But instead it picked…”
“Us,” I whispered when he didn’t go on. I put into words what both of us had been dancing around ever since we got back. Of the five people who had been there, the power that ruled the universe and made our spells possible had decided the strongest link among us was the one between me and Donovan Cole.
Talk about trying to fight fate…
“Aren,” he said.
I squared my shoulders and stared coldly at him. “I guess hate can be just as strong a b-bond as anything else,” I said. “I won’t try to get past any of the wards or protective spells on the book by myself from now on. There’s no reason we can’t work together. Our p-personal feelings don’t have anything to do with it.”
“Right,” he said slowly. “Sure, whatever you say. Was there anything else?”
Still smarting from what he’d said, I shrugged and made the gesture and my voice nonchalant as I said, “Yeah, Eamon came to see me. And you know what? He’s k-kind of hot.”
Chapter 7
Donovan stared at me in silence for a long moment before he said, “Eamon came to see you?” He reached forward and tapped a finger against the book’s leather cover. “This Eamon? The one from a thousand years ago?”
“That’s right. And he was – “
“Hot, yeah, I got that. Was this before or after you nearly burned up the book?”
I wanted to snap at him for taking that snide tone of voice with me, but I didn’t think it would do any good. So I just said, “It was last night after I got home.”
“From causing that riot.”
“I didn’t cause it,” I said. “Some drunken j-jerk named Grady did. But th-that doesn’t have anything to do with this, Donovan.”
He nodded and said, “Yeah, I’m sorry. Forget I said that. Go on. Tell me more about Eamon.”
“I was sitting right there where you are on the sofa. I’d been going through the part of the b-book we’ve already translated, reading about him. I guess I was pretty t-tired, and I dozed off – “
“Oh, now I understand,” he said, nodded. “You dreamed about Eamon. Well, I’m not surprised.”
“It wasn’t a dream!” I said, more forcefully than I really intended. “He was here.” I stood up and circled the end of the coffee table to stand in the spot where Eamon had fought his desperate battle against the other swordsman. Pointing at the floor, I said, “R-right here!”
“This is the part you wanted to tell me about in person so I wouldn’t think you were losing your mind?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, it’s not working,” Donovan said.
“Will you just listen to me, d-damn it?”
He leaned back against the sofa cushions and spread his hands. “I’m all ears,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”
“You promise you’ll keep an open mind?”
“I’m a warlock. I sort of have to be open to the possibility of strange things happening.”
“All right, then.”
I took a deep breath and launched into the story. I told him everything, including how I’d been convinced at first myself that I was dreaming. When I said that, his expression got a little smug, as if he were thinking that’s what he’d said all along, but the smugness went away when I told him about Matilda’s reaction and then about Mr. Clarke knocking on my door wanting to know what all the racket was about.
“Wait a minute,” Donovan said as he leaned forward again with interest on his face now. “This little old man who lives down the hall heard the swordfight?”
“That’s right. You can go knock on his d-door and ask him if you want to.”
Donovan frowned in thought. “What if your dream was so powerful you projected it into the minds of the other people around here, so they just thought they were hearing what you were hearing?”
“Boy, that’s a r-real reach, don’t you think?”
“But it could have happened that way.”
“Maybe. I suppose. But it d-didn’t. He was here, and so was that guy trying to k-kill him.”
“A guy named Carol?”
I shook my head in exasperation. “No, no, you’re getting it all mixed up. Eamon said we should f-find Carol. Anyway, I don’t think it’s Carol-like-a-woman’s-name. I think it’s some ancient M-Middle Irish name that’s spelled completely differently.”
“You’re probably right about that.”
“That’s not all, Donovan,” I went on. “He called the name just before he d-disappeared, like this Carol was right there with him. And I heard what sounded like wings flapping.” The theory had been forming sort of nebulously in my head all along, I guess, and now as I talked about it, everything locked into place and I saw how much sense it made. “Carol is the b-bird. The blood falcon.”
Donovan looked at me and said, “Hold on here. You think we’re supposed to go looking for a thousand-year-old falcon?” He grinned as if something had just occurred to him. “That would make it a millennium falcon, wouldn’t it?”
If I’d had something in my hand I would have thrown it at him. Instead I said coldly, “Don’t make nerd-boy jokes at a t-time like this. We’ve got a serious problem on our hands, and I don’t see how we’re going to solve it. No b-bird would still be alive after all this time. It’s not possible, even with Eamon being a w-warlock. He couldn’t have enchanted it to make it live this long.”
“No, but you’re forgetting something…my mother’s private detectives.”
“She wrote ‘falcon’ on all the bills!” I said. “You’re right, there has to be a c-connection.”
“And I’m going to find out what it is.” He shook his head. “But all the agencies are closed until Monday morning. I’ve already called and left messages with them. There’s nothing more I can do until then.”
“So we just wait?” That sounded awful to me. I wanted to know more about the message Eamon had for me, and those private detectives Sharon had hired were our only real hope of a lead.
“We’ve already thrown out the idea of spending the weekend apart,” Donovan said. He nodded toward the book. “Why don’t we just go ahead and work on this like we have been? We’ll see if we can remove the next ward without causing a flood or a tornado or some other catastrophe.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “That’s not funny.”
“I’m not sure I meant for it to be. I don’t want to lose this book, Aren. What we find in here may be the only way of gett
ing my mother out of that place. I know the two of you aren’t exactly buddies, but she’s still my mother.”
He was right about that, even though I didn’t want to admit he could be right about anything. I said, “All right. I guess we might as well put the t-time to good use.”
I went back around the coffee table and sat down, closer to him than I was before but not too close. We leaned forward, and I sang the spell to remove the ward while Donovan chanted it. This had worked every time before, and so I wasn’t too surprised when it did the job this time, too. Donovan reached out and turned the page.
“See?” he said. “I’m not sure there’s any limit to what we can accomplish if we work together.”
I didn’t want to think about that, so I didn’t. Instead I said, “Just look for a word that m-might be pronounced ‘Carol’.”
o0o
We found it quicker and easier than I expected to, which made me think that Eamon had known somehow we were on the verge of reaching this point in the book. If he could jump ahead in time a thousand years to talk to me and cross swords with a bad guy in my apartment, then anything was possible, right?
“I think this is it,” Donovan said as he pointed to one of the words on the page we were studying. He turned to the computer and did a quick Internet search. With a note of excitement in his voice, he went on, “That’s it, all right. C-E-A-R-U-L. Cearul. Pronounced almost like Carol. It means ‘fierce in battle’. Evidently it’s still used as a Gaelic name.”
“How common is it?”
“I have no idea. But that’s what we’re looking for, I’ll bet you. The question now is, who was Cearul?”
“The falcon,” I said.
“Maybe. If the name means ‘fierce in battle’, maybe Eamon took the bird with him when he went to fight his enemies.”
“I notice you’re not acting like I’m some c-crazy person having hallucinations anymore,” I pointed out.
“Hey, if all this stuff ties together and makes sense, I believe it. I want to believe it, because that would mean we’re on the right track, wouldn’t it?”
I nodded slowly and said, “You know, I think m-maybe we are. For the first time since we started working on this, I’m beginning to feel like we might actually be able to do it.”
Misadventures of a Tongue-Tied Witch: Boxed Set Humorous Witch Series Page 18