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.
The fourth had me gritting my teeth, cursing whoever had placed these ancient designs. Rowena? I wanted to learn.
I made the mistake of trying to barge through the fifth to get the discomfort over with quickly and slammed into it like a brick wall. I bounced off and went sprawling.
Dani snickered.
I tossed my hair from my eyes and glared up at her.
“Dude. Happens to me all the time.”
I stood and warily approached the ward line. It wasn’t a simple ward line. There were layers of wards, shimmering, one on top of another. To date, the only wards I’d seen were silvery delicate-looking things.
These wards had a bluish tint, sharper lines, and more-complex shapes. Now that I was paying careful attention, I could feel the slight chill they threw off. The pages in the Book of Kells had nothing on the intricacy of these designs. Knots became fantastical creatures, morphed into incomprehensible mathematical equations and then back into knots again. I knew nothing of wards. Where was Barrons when I needed him?
I spent ten minutes trying to get through it. If I ran at it, it bounced me off. If I tried to press slowly forward, it simply didn’t yield, as if there genuinely was a wall there that I just couldn’t see.
“Try blood,” Dani suggested.
I looked at her. “Why?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes when Ro needs fierce wicked mojo, she uses blood. Some of the wards we placed around your cell had my blood in ‘em. I figure since you can cross most of ‘em, your blood might do something. If not, you can try mine.”
“What do I do with it?”
“Dunno. Drip some on the wards.”
After a moment’s consideration, I decided it couldn’t hurt. (The day would come when I would discover I was wrong about that. Adding blood to some wards is even more stupid than throwing gas on a fire and, in some cases, actually transmutes them into living guardians. Take it from me, never indiscriminately drip your blood on wards of unknown origin!) I reached into my boot for my switchblade. “Stay back, in case something goes wrong,” I told her.