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“Just make yourself at home while I finish looking for a volume I’ve mislaid. I filed it away, I’m sure of it. I just have to remember where.”
She cast a skeptical glance at the heaped stacks and paper-filled crates before lifting her eyes to the overflowing shelves. Filed? There was a system behind this clutter? This she had to see to believe.
As she watched, he scanned the shelves first. “It’s not under authors I know, nor authors I think I know.” He dropped to rummage through a box. “Nor under authors I detest—an especially large category, by the way.”
He straightened, casting one more puzzled look around the room. “Perhaps it’s filed under authors as insane as myself.” He tapped a thoughtful finger to his chin. “That’s a definite possibility.”
Cat bit her lip, torn between amusement and distress. Aidan really expected this man to be of help? “Perhaps I should leave you to your search.” She started for the door.
“No, please stay, Miss O’Connell.”
She subsided onto a lumpy sofa. Folded her hands in her lap before raising a passive face to her inquisitor.
“Aidan related how he met you. Quite extraordinary. A female thief. And a jolly good one the way Aidan told the story.” He adjusted his spectacles, examining her through great bug eyes. “Yet you speak and act with the elegance of an aristocrat. I saw it myself as soon as I met you. Told Maude even, ‘that is a young woman of breeding, that is.’ Ask her, she’ll tell you. So how is it you came to be lurking about in Aidan’s library with malicious intent?”
“Circumstance can make anyone act in unexpected ways. And desperate circumstances call for desperate acts.”
“Yes, yes. Very true,” he muttered as he fumbled in his coat pocket. “But surely you regret your criminal activity.” A somber note crept into his voice. “It presses upon your soul with the weight of chains.” Out came a marble. “Haunts your dreams.” A pair of dice. “A guilty stain that never washes away.” A chicken bone.
Her hands clenched to fists as she fought outrage. “I do what I must to survive in a world all too quick to condemn a young woman’s folly while admiring that same inclination in a man.”
His brows rose into his wrinkled, liver-spotted forehead as he considered her words before nodding as if in agreement. Dropping his eyes to study his left shoe. “One moment’s weakness changes everything. There’s no going back. We bear our guilt forever. And only our victims can give us the absolution we seek.”
Her victim? She hoped he wasn’t referring to Jeremy. Anyone less victimized she couldn’t imagi
ne. He’d gotten everything he wanted. And with little inconvenience.
But perhaps he referred to someone else. Someone completely innocent of any wrongdoing, whose only fault was being born to a stupid, weak girl who’d loved both unwisely and too well.
Cat put aside the diary with a sigh. Massaged her throbbing temples in a vain attempt to ease the blinding headache. Obviously Aidan’s father had used the impenetrability of the language as well as the unappealing side effects to keep snoopers away. And for good cause, as Cat found with every fresh entry. Spells ranging from innocuous to lethal riddled the margins. Potions an apothecary would run from shrieking in horror. And descriptions of creatures whose existence seemed conjured from nightmare. These, coupled with the day-to-day entries of a man more than slightly fanatical about the close-knit circle of scholars under his titular head, made for dense reading. Denser translation.
As weeks and months passed under her thumb, the diary’s tone grew angrier. Hostility and resentment filled the pages, coinciding with more sinister magics. A spell that could devour a man from the inside out. An experiment in reanimation that begat a walking, stinking corpse that had to be hastily unreanimated. She still gagged over that one. An entry detailing a meeting where someone was “disciplined.” She’d mentally added the quotation marks after she’d read two entries later about the second experiment in reanimation. Also a failure, thank goodness.
Through it all, the network of mages grew. Stretching like spider legs out from Belfoyle to places as far reaching as Dublin, London, Edinburgh, Paris. Surely they didn’t simply gather to complain about Other persecution and experiment with dark mage energy. Men didn’t collect conspirators without a purpose. So why?
Tonight she and Aidan had been working through an entry that spoke of the High King’s final resting place and the unearthing of the Sh’vad Tual, describing the stone as the final key. Though the key to what was left decidedly vague.
She rolled her neck. Stretched to relieve the knots in her shoulders. Wished she could untangle the knots jumbling her insides as easily. Aidan’s careless gesture of comfort in the garden had lit fires she’d hoped long since extinguished.
It was Jeremy all over again. A handsome man. The desire to belong. The need to be loved. She’d read this book before. She knew how the story turned out. A weak woman. A willing man. Heartbreak to follow.
But would it? After that one veiled comment, Aidan had never again referred to her shocking ruination. And though she’d studied him covertly at every opportunity, he never showed the slightest discomfort or embarrassment in her company. As if he didn’t care. As if it truly didn’t matter to him. A thought only adding to the wild roundabout of emotions.
“It doesn’t make sense. The words tease at a reason, but they don’t explain anything.” Aidan broke her from the useless circle of her thoughts. Pacing the room like a frantic automaton, hand tapping a rapid beat against his leg, he’d long since discarded his coat. Loosened his neck cloth. “What was my father doing?”
She cupped her chin in her hand. “You knew him. Was he always so secretive?”
He threw up his hands in frustration. “He was a scholar with a scholar’s amazement that what he found easy might in fact be bloody incomprehensible.” His words grew harsh with long-held anger. “No doubt Brendan would understand Father’s riddles. Brendan had the same Byzantine personality. Wheels within wheels. But Brendan’s gone. And I’m left to figure out what the man was trying to get at.”
“So that would be . . . yes,” she replied, keeping her tone light. Doing her best to ignore the undercurrents of old pain and remembered betrayal.
He caught her attempt at lightheartedness. Offered her an apologetic laugh. “Aye, a definite yes.” He rubbed a thoughtful hand over his chin. “And you’re sure that’s what those last paragraphs say?”
Cat nodded. Wished she hadn’t. “Take my word or don’t. I’m not reading it again. Feeling like I’ve had my innards stirred with a stick wasn’t part of our deal.”
Rubbing the back of his neck, he cast her a compassionate look. “It does take some getting used to.”
“I don’t want to get used to it,” she grumbled, wrapping her arms more firmly around her torso, wishing she could go to bed. Make up for the hours she’d missed last night.
