by Love, Dianna
His sigh could have been heard a mile away. He closed his hand, killing the flame. He crossed his arms. “Ya still need light.”
She had her hand on her chest, breathing fast. “Give me a minute.”
Imortiks and demons had not panicked her, but a small flame terrified her. If she knew him better, she’d know that he would protect all this history with his life. He needed to learn what had happened with his family and the world while he’d sat imprisoned for centuries.
Queen Maeve had stolen everything from him.
Luigsech appeared to have recovered. She strode past him, returning to the sitting area where he heard her pulling out drawers and digging around. She muttered to herself the whole time.
The sound of a drawer being shoved closed snapped loudly in the silence before she entered the back area again shining a tiny light. Speaking to him as though he had trouble understanding simple words, she held up the light. “This is an LED, somethin’ we use today for instant light instead of startin’ a fire in a freakin’ archival library.”
“I did not start a fire,” he argued.
She turned to him. “That’s like claimin’ a dog won’t bite because it belongs to you and you trust it. If the animal has teeth, it has potential. If you flick open a flame in your hand, that flame could burn this building down before you managed to stop the fire.”
Dismissing him, she waved her wee light at the shelves as she walked away mumbling to herself again, pausing to read text, then moving on. Halfway back, she pulled out a thick book and handed it to him without looking his way. “Hold this.”
He stepped over and took it.
She did that three more times until he had a tall stack on one hand.
“That should be enough to get me started,” she murmured as she turned to him. Her gaze landed on the books. She snapped, “Two hands, dammit. Don’t ever risk damagin’ a book by holdin’ that much weight with one hand.”
“’Tis not a strain,” he told her dryly.
“I don’t care. Two. Hands. Give it to me.” She shoved the light into her mouth and took the books from him, cradling them like babes. Then she grumbled something he couldn’t figure out due to talking around the light between her teeth.
When he followed her into the front area again, she promptly sat in her reading chair and shot him a look he took as mine. She placed the books in her lap, removed the light from her mouth, and placed it on the table beside her.
Luigsech asked in a frosty tone, “Are you goin’ to stand over me as I read?”
“I have not decided.” What an unusual woman who quivered at the idea of a tiny flame but jumped into fight deadly beings.
She huffed out a sound that could be a sigh or a growl.
He walked across the room, giving her his back, anything that would encourage her to get busy.
Anxious to find Tristan, Daegan sent out another telepathic message. Tristan, call me. Tell me where ya are.
Tristan’s voice erupted in his head, yelling, I escaped, but I’m not gonna make it. Cathbad and a dragon are after you. Get out of Ireland now and save everyone before ...
Then nothing.
Chapter 6
“Stay here!” Daegan ordered, then vanished from where he’d been standing only three feet from her reading chair.
Casidhe stared at the spot, trying to wrap her head around what had happened.
He had teleported.
She knew he could, based upon what she’d been taught about that dragon shifter, but it did not lessen the shock of someone disappearing in a blink.
What should she do now?
Daegan was gone.
She could escape and find Fenella on her own.
She snatched up the desk phone and dialed Fenella, excited at the chance to hear her friend’s voice. The phone rang over and over, then went to voice mail.
Casidhe slammed the receiver back onto the base.
Why was Fenella not answering her phone?
Because she was not with the phone. Casidhe dropped her face into her hands. What was she missing? She sat up then dropped back in the chair. This was an opportunity, but she had to make the right choice.
What would happen if she escaped and was not here when Daegan returned? She didn’t even know how long that would take.
He’d be furious.
She could live with that. Or could she? He’d presented a case for working together.
Daegan would help her find Fenella and she’d help him find the grimoire to save his people, but then he refused to tell her the location of Fenella’s phone.
In fact, she had zero proof Quinn or any of his people had found anything on Fenella’s phone. Daegan could have been staring off at nothing when he supposedly received telepathy then just lied to her.
On the other hand, here she was thinking about abandoning him as he tried to help his people.
What proof did she have he really intended to use that grimoire to save anyone and not use it for his own gain?
She grabbed her hair. How had all this become her problem?
Because she wanted to find Fenella.
Casidhe jumped to her feet and shook her fists at herself. “You’re so stupid!” She’d been so torn up worrying about Fenella, she’d grasped at the first straw of hope. How could she know for sure what was going on with Fenella?
Her friend might be with Cathbad or hiding somewhere if that druid, or someone else, had frightened her. Casidhe only knew one thing for sure.
If Fenella was in no danger, she’d be calling for Casidhe. If the roles were reversed, Fenella would not take some stranger’s word that he knew anything about Casidhe being safe or not.
Daegan wanted to find out who had his friend and Casidhe had handed that to him by allowing Quinn to go into her mind.
Daegan’s only motivation for helping Casidhe hunt Fenella was the grimoire. If he got his hands on one or more of the volumes, would he still save Fenella or just teleport away?
That was a duh question if she’d ever had one.
Fenella had no one squarely in her corner with no hidden agenda except Casidhe.
Stomping around the room, Casidhe cursed herself for letting emotions make her decisions.
Screw sitting here.
If she figured out how to find even one volume of the grimoire, she’d get her hands on that volume first and have leverage over Daegan to make his people find Fenella.
That sick feeling of missing something and leaving her friend out on her own lightened a little. Casidhe had a plan, which did not involve taking orders from a dragon shifter who was the enemy.
The minute she left here, she might not get another chance to use her library to track anything. She had no idea how much time was left until Daegan popped back in.
She crossed the room and sat in her chair again.
With him gone, she could use her power to translate the pages at a much faster speed.
She raced through the pages, still careful as she turned them. Once she had her power humming, the pages began moving as she waved a single finger across the top of them.
That was new, but welcome.
Nothing helpful showed up in the first book. She put it aside, heart racing to find anything before Daegan appeared.
Where had he gone?
Who cared? Not her.
Was he in danger?
Who cared? Not her ... well maybe. She didn’t really care, but she did need him to find Fenella.
What if Cathbad showed up?
“Argh!” Her shout banged the walls. What if she reached old age worrying about crap she had no control over?
Back to the books, she scanned faster, put book two aside, and had cracked open the third one when she stopped over halfway in. This book had been written by a man thought to have been a bard who became a writer. He claimed to have been in the courts of royalty and other places people would not believe.
He wrote of great warriors and battles.
She’d read about simila
r accounts by others, but then she found a section where he wrote about how myth and reality were two sides of the same coin.
Backing up a page, she slowly went over the text again.
One knowledgeable in reading ancient languages would have found these passages and translated the magical parts as mythological musings.
She had a trained eye to watch for the meaning beneath the words, especially in medieval text and older.
As she moved her finger slowly above the text, which then lifted off the page in golden symbols, she paused to read one line.
To hide the words is to hide the truth, but those of us who lived before the time of dragons will not lie.
She read on as the writer told of his ancestor who claimed dragons once roamed the world and owned the skies.
Casidhe sat back and considered this man’s words as she stared out the window where a woman from the yarn shop chatted with the baker across the street.
Her gaze tripped back to the book. His writing had a cryptic style. He seemed to have a great story to tell, but wrote as if he could not share every piece. She’d been told dragon history by the best, the families who passed it down from generation to generation. She’d read hundreds of books on the mythology and writers who challenged the reader to think past the normal and open one’s mind to the fantastical.
Those would often leave her chuckling.
But this book did not raise a smile.
This man spoke of a great war among the dragons that destroyed the families.
What made this war stand out is that in other books, the writers would always state how a powerful dragon belonging to a supernatural being had been victorious.
This book had danced around the dragon history, saying only that a war had erupted between families who had been allies and ended with no victor.
Dragons had vanished.
Sitting up to search the pages again, she ran over and over the same words, looking for any hint at the writer’s true name. He’d opened by saying he would not share his identity, only that of his ancestor, the one who knew the truth.
She’d found this book in an estate sale and had kept it because of a foolish reason. She’d enjoyed the lyrical way he’d put words to paper.
Her eyes glazed over and her finger slipped down to touch the page.
A flash of golden symbols jumped so high she dropped the book in her lap and lurched back.
When she removed her finger from the book, the symbols disappeared.
Heart thumping in her chest, she sat forward again and put her finger on the previous word, then made tiny movements with it until the leading edge of the bright letters of a name began to slowly rise high again.
Who was that? The ancestor?
Once again, she read every word in this small passage, then moved on, reading quickly to the end. When she cracked open book four, she knew in the first ten pages it would be of no service to her.
She put the three she could not use away and lifted her LED light in two fingers. She shined the light over books in that same section from the time of just before Herrick had been born.
Lost in her thoughts, she continued to the end and turned to face the back wall of the library area.
Tall bookcases shielding her secret escape door hung two inches away from the wall on one side. She moved it open slowly. The clasp had been broken and the frame torn. Who had ripped open her exit door?
Daegan? No, he would have teleported in.
Cathbad.
The druid must not have had access to the special ability one of Daegan’s people had. That person had remotely viewed how Casidhe had accessed this escape route from the centre.
That meant Cathbad teleported in here too since the front door had not been damaged.
Seeing this only pushed her to hurry more.
She jumped back into her search, pulling out books and quickly deciding if they were useful or not.
She’d exhausted her initial search. Any time that happened, she’d go to her next resource level of finding someone who could tell her more about what she had discovered so far or where to look if she had hit a dead end.
Who would be able to enlighten her on this topic?
Staring unfocused, she searched her cluttered brain for where she would go next to research more on the time before Daegan had been born.
Humans would not understand what she hunted. They would have no more than what she had and not anything close to what she’d been taught as a Luigsech.
Asking humans the questions pounding her head would make her sound like a lunatic or she’d end up in the media right in the middle of the supernatural chaos leaking into the human world.
She needed to find someone ... like her.
Cathbad would probably be a great resource, if not for him possibly wanting to kill her by now.
“If he kills me, I won’t return his book.” She snorted at that ridiculous thought, an indication she was losing her mind in all of this.
Hold it.
What was in the druid’s book?
She hurried to the front room and dug through her backpack, pulling out his book. Holding it in this stillness, she could feel a tiny hum of energy.
Should she open the section he’d warned her about?
Why not? Like it mattered now if she read it against his will?
She paused. The book was titled Before Ainvar. Before jumping into an ancient book on majik and dark druids that Cathbad had indicated would tattle on her if she read the text without him present, she needed to determine the identity of Ainvar first. That would take some time.
Wait, what the hell was she doing? The one commodity she couldn’t waste right now was time.
Was reading anything about druids really important when she had to find a grimoire volume and Fenella? She sat back hard, filled with indecision. She was no closer to finding the grimoire than she’d been the first time Cathbad mentioned it.
She slashed a look at Cathbad’s book again. That druid was as old as Daegan and Herrick. Why would he have wanted her to translate text from one of his books?
Could it be because the druid book had been written before his time?
If so, had the original format for Cathbad’s book been a scroll? The scroll could have been converted to a book later on when codex form came along.
What about the grimoire?
She didn’t even have the name of the person who wrote the Immortuos Grimoire, much less a scribe who might have assisted. She knew most of the annals on dragon history by heart, the rest she knew from spoken word.
If the grimoire had been created prior to Daegan and Herrick’s birth, according to Daegan, chances were the original text had been written on papyrus or parchment.
She sat up suddenly.
Adrenaline woke every nerve in her body.
What if the grimoire was not in a book-like format right now at all? She would be wasting her time to focus on searching her usual way for an actual book.
This grimoire was more than an old book or scroll. A supernatural had developed the majik on those pages to create Imortiks and turn them loose on the world before Daegan and Herrick’s time.
But the writing had evidently also possessed the power to force Imortiks behind a death wall when used by other supernaturals.
She’d been tackling this from the wrong direction.
Instead of getting bogged down with every vague detail from the time of dragons, she should search for someone most familiar with the history of grimoires written by supernaturals. Basically, someone who would have credible information on the Immortuos Grimoire, which might be impossible. That would require finding someone with intimate knowledge of supernaturals.
Again, someone like her.
She snapped her fingers, mumbling, “Hold everything. I know who to call ... if he’ll talk to me.”
Placing the last book on the pile, she moved to her desk and dug through the lower right-hand drawer. Yes, it looked like a rat’s nest, but she had her
own way of organizing her information. Fenella had tried to help her one time and it had taken Casidhe two days to make sense of what the kind-hearted woman had done.
It had also cost them a client expecting information Casidhe couldn’t locate in time.
Fenella never helped again.
Muttering to herself, Casidhe pulled out a chunk of papers, then pushed her fingers around the bottom until she found her business card file, which looked like an oversized wallet.
Not very high-tech, but no one cracked her security code. Not even Fenella.
She sat back and flipped from page to page, scanning cards yellowed from time. No one could read her notes. Only she could translate her scribble.
Turning to the last page of cards, her heart fell as she scanned without seeing ... wait. There it was.
Sliding the card for a local artist out slowly, she turned it over and read her code for his name and contact number.
She protected those who she believed worked toward the best interest of supernaturals.
Redmond Mac Seáin had been considered a foremost expert on Celtic history all the way back to the beginnings. No one questioned his skill and knowledge. Highly-respected institutions had paid him large sums to speak to their students and patrons.
They found the mythology he always included fascinating and enjoyable, but no one believed mythological details on nonhumans could have been real. If they did, they kept those thoughts to themselves.
She’d read his papers and watched films of him speaking. One time, as she’d listened with half an ear, she caught something he said and stopped to replay his words. He’d made a comment in passing, then quickly made it sound as if he’d only joked.
The audience laughed.
She hadn’t.
He’d mentioned how dragons once lived until one destroyed them all by allowing himself to be captured.
That history was in no books. She’d know.
While she might disagree on specifics of what destroyed dragons, Redmond Mac Seáin knew things humans did not.
She’d kept this card in case she ever found a lead on Skarde and would have eventually gotten back to that search if not for the last few terrorizing days.