This same unknown donor bought the land around the abbey and turned the enclave into the self-sustaining operation it was today. If I ever had the time to act instead of always being so busy reacting, I wanted to find out who that unknown donor was.
I glanced at my watch. It was three P.M., and my schedule was tight. I was supposed to meet the sidhe-seers in Dublin at seven, then Barrons at ten, for who knew what purpose. Further hampering my appointment calendar was the LM’s threat to return for me in three days, which put an uncomfortable squeeze on, because I couldn’t decide what day that was going to be. Was he counting all day yesterday, which meant he would return on Saturday morning? Or had he meant to begin counting on Friday, which meant he would return Sunday? Maybe he’d meant to allow me three full days and planned to come back on the fourth. It was all irritatingly vague. Not only had he threatened me, but he’d not even given me a specific date and time for my impending … whatever.
I planned to discuss it with Barrons tonight. He was my wave. I was counting on him to keep the LM from making good on any threats.
Back to my time crunch. “Take me to the corridors you’re barred from, Dani. What’s keeping you out?” I envisioned thick stone walls blocking them off, maybe vault doors with combinations as long as pi.
I couldn’t have hoped for a better answer.
She gave me a sour look. “Stupid fecking wards.”
Dani knew where eighteen of the libraries were. There were three places in the abbey she’d never been able to get near. The first spot she took me to, wards were etched in the stone floor at ten-foot intervals along the length of the hall, vanishing around a corner.
I sauntered down the warded corridor, barely even flinching, while Dani hooted triumphantly behind me. I turned the corner, passed through another few wards, and came to a tall, ornately carved door.
The door wasn’t as easy to get through. It was loaded with wards and strange-looking runes. I tried the handle. It wasn’t locked, but the moment I touched it I suffered the horrifying sensation of falling from a great height and instantly felt I was being watched/vulnerable/targeted in someone’s crosshairs, an instant away from a bullet in the back of my head.
I snatched my hand away, and the feelings vanished.
I took a deep breath and tried the knob again. I immediately felt as if I’d been stuffed into a small dark box underground and had only moments before I suffocated!
I snatched it back.
I was breathing shallowly and shaking but standing in the hall, perfectly fine.
I peered at the runes on the door and suddenly realized what they were. Since I’d come to Dublin, I’d become a voracious reader of books on the paranormal, devouring articles on topics ranging from Druids to vampires to witches, looking for facts in the fiction and answers in the myths. These were repelling runes! They worked by amplifying the innate fears of whoever tried to cross them.
The third time I grasped the knob, my body was covered with fire ants, biting viciously, and I remembered how, at seven years old, I thought the silky red dirt of the hill would be fun to play in. I’d been terrified of them ever since.
It’s not real.
I braced myself and forced the knob to turn, while the ants shredded the flesh of my fingers away.
The door opened and I stumbled through, choking down a scream, on the verge of clawing my skin off.
All sensation stopped the instant I crossed the threshold.
I looked back. The wood of the threshold was also engraved with repelling runes.
I was through! I was in one of the Forbidden Libraries!
I glanced around eagerly. It wasn’t particularly impressive. Not compared to BB&B. The room was small, windowless, and, despite a number of dehumidifiers, musty. Between shelves and tables filled with books, scrolls, and collectibles, dozens of lamps blazed. Rowena was taking no chances with Shades getting into her precious libraries.
I moved into the room and began searching the tables first, while Dani stood watch far down the corridor. As I’d feared, there were no card catalogs in the Forbidden Libraries. Even though the room was small, a thorough search could take days.
Ten minutes later, Dani yelled, and I hurried out into the hall, jerking as I crossed the spelled threshold, to find a mob of sidhe-seers pushing and shoving at the ward line.
Kat stood in the front of the mob. “Rowena said you managed to pass through some of her wards and were in forbidden archives. She sent us to stop you.”
Well, that answered one of my questions. I’d wondered—now that I could move through wards at will—if I still tripped them when I did. I was surprised Rowena hadn’t come herself.
“To stop me, you’d have to be able to cross the ward line, and”—I glanced down at her toes, on the edge of the line of nearly invisible symbols—”it doesn’t look to me like you can.”
“I can get past most,” Barb said, shoving past her. “You’re not so hot. Jo can, too.” She turned around. “Where’d Jo go?” She looked at Dani. “Wasn’t she just here?”
Dani shrugged. “She left.”
“We’re not after stopping you, Mac.” Kat’s usually solemn gray gaze danced with excitement. “We’re after helping you search.”
I broke the ward lines with chewing gum—yes, chewing gum. Wards are delicate things, easy to deface if you can touch them.
In order to touch them, you have to be able to pass them, which usually makes touching them a moot point, but in this case I needed to scrub the ward’s power away to let my sisters-in-arms through.
In most cases, all that’s required to undermine a ward is to break its continuity, to interrupt the design and short-circuit the flow of energy it generates. Sometimes, if you break one badly, you turn it into something else, but I didn’t know that then and my luck held that day.
Although I could deface the wards on the door, I could do nothing about the repelling runes carved into it and into the wood of the threshold. Each sidhe-seer that stepped across it had to face her personal demons.
They all made it, I was proud to see.
I left them in the library, dozens of sets of willing hands carefully turning ancient pages, delicately unwinding thick scrolls, picking up statues and opening boxes and looking for anything we could use.
Dani and I moved on to the next library. Gaining access wasn’t as easy this time. Again there were multiple ward barriers, but each was of increasing density and intensity. I passed through the first ward with relative ease, the second with a grunt. The third generated a small shock and made my hair crackle. I marked each one with a lipstick from my pocket as I passed through, so Dani could follow me.