A gaping chasm suddenly opened up in the ancient churchyard, swallowing centuries-old grave markers and debris. A funereal black coach, drawn by four black horses, burst from the underworld onto the grounds of the defunct monastery. Fire spurted from the horses’ nostrils while sparks flew from the wheels of the ebony coach. Silver sconces mounted outside the carriage held tapered black candles topped by flickering orange flames. Opaque black curtains concealed the carriage’s interior.
You’ve got to be kidding me, Baird thought. When did Saint Patrick’s Day turn into Halloween?
The unearthly carriage was spooky enough even before you took into account its driver: a headless coachman wielding a human spine as a whip. Vertebrae rattled loudly as he cracked the grisly whip above his snorting steeds, urging them on. Although missing from his shoulders, his severed head was mounted on a spike protruding from the coach’s dashboard. Black eyes gleamed with demonic animation above a fiendish grin that stretched from ear to rotting ear. Moldering flesh had the bluish-green tint of rotting cheese—and, judging from a sickening odor being carried on the night breeze, smelled like it, too.
“The Dullahan,” Jenkins ID’d the coachman. “Come to carry his fated passenger off to the land of the dead.”
The ghastly apparition, along with its shocking entrance, was enough to convince Max’s henchmen that they had better places to be, especially with their victory slipping away. Already battered by the fray, Owens and the other men abandoned their fallen leader to flee the ruins as fast as their bruised bodies could carry them.
Good riddance, Baird thought. We’ve got enough on our plate right now.
Such as Lady Sibella, who was not so easily discouraged by the untimely arrival of the death-coach. She hissed at the interloper, baring her fangs. Clearly, she wasn’t about to let a little thing like a headless coachman and fire-snorting demon horses get between her and her revenge.
Unless …
An idea occurred to Baird. It was risky, but if she could just keep Sibella good and mad at her, maybe she could use the snake-woman’s vengeful nature against her?
“Hey, Scales!” she taunted. “You forget about me? We’ve got unfinished business, remember?”
Sibella wheeled about, her reptilian gaze shifting from the oncoming coach to Baird. Fury made her look even more demonic. “Guardian!”
“That’s right. I took your Pot, just like Deidre took your head. Guess that makes you a two-time loser!”
Overcome with rage, she charged at Baird, who turned and ran—directly into the path of the speeding death-coach. Sibella chased her, heeding only the call of vengeance.
“That the best you’ve got, Sibby? No wonder Deidre made short work of you back in the day!”
Sibella was right on Baird’s heels. The timing was going to be tricky, Baird realized, but if she got it right …
She threw herself forward, out of the way of the coach.
Sibella wasn’t so lucky.
The coach ran the other woman down, trampling her beneath the sparking hooves of the horses. Sibella let out an unusually sibilant scream as she fell beneath the wheels of the coach. Would this be enough to send her back to whatever hell she had escaped from?
We should be so lucky, Baird thought.
Trapped beneath the coach’s wheels, at least for the moment, Sibella hissed and squirmed and vowed bloody vengeance on all present.
“To Hades with every one of you! You will pay for this indignity. No power on Earth can protect you from—”
The Dullahan’s bony whip disputed that claim. Seated behind the reins of the coach, he lashed Sibella to quiet her as he attended to his fatal business. The door of the coach opened of its own accord, revealing a beckoning emptiness as black as death. The spiked head swiveled toward Grady. Its moldy lips uttered a single word:
“O’Gradaigh.”
“No way,” Stone said. He stepped between the coach and the leprechaun, adopting a protective stance. Ezekiel and Baird hurried to join him. “You might as well turn around and go back where you came from, bud. We’re not letting you take Grady,” Ezekiel yelled at the driver.
Baird felt the same way. The fiddler was a crafty one all right, but he obviously had a good heart, as proven by the way he had watched over Bridget and her family all these years. Curse or no curse, she couldn’t just stand by and let the coachman take him, not without a fight.
The Dullahan’s head scowled. He cracked his whip in warning.
“Nay, me brave friends.” Grady slipped past the Librarians. “Sure and I appreciate youse standing up for me, but I won’t have youse risking yerselves on me account.” The leprechaun sighed wearily, seemingly resigned to his fate. “I’m tired of running and hiding. ’Tis time I finally pay the piper. Maybe then sweet Bridget will be left alone.…”
“But I gave the Cauldron to the banshee,” Baird said. “Isn’t that enough?”
Grady shook his head. “Me sentence was passed centuries ago, after I stole the Cauldron to ransom me precious daughter from Sibella. There can be no reprieve for me.” He looked away from the extinct monastery to contemplate the sleeping village and countryside below. “At least I got to set foot on me beloved Ireland one last time.”
He took a step toward the waiting coach.
* * *
“Wait! Don’t give up!”
Cassandra came rushing back onto the scene, breathless and flushed. Before anyone could stop her, she dashed between Grady and the coach.
“Excuse me, Mister Dullahan, sir? If I can have a moment of your time?”
The coachman’s head turned toward her. His headless body raised its skeletal whip.
Gulping, Cassandra backed off, but only physically. She raised her voice to be heard over the impatient hooves and snorting of the horses and spoke with as much confidence as she could muster under the circumstances.
“I, Cassandra Cillian, a true daughter of Erin, appeal for mercy on behalf of Finbar O’Gradaigh, who has surely been punished enough for a crime committed many mortal lifetimes ago. He’s spent more than fifteen hundred years in exile from the land he loves. Can’t we write that off as time served?”
The Dullahan smirked, unmoved by her plea. He cracked his whip, which miraculously extended in length as it snapped past Cassandra to wrap itself around Grady, binding his arms to his sides. The coachman tugged on the whip, dragging Grady toward the open door of the death-coach.
“No! Wait!” Cassandra pleaded. “You have to listen to me. I’m not finished yet!”
Baird, Stone, and Ezekiel grabbed Grady, trying to keep him from being reeled in by the Dullahan. Cassandra could see her teammates straining, but the pull of the whip was too strong. They looked like they were losing a life-or-death game of tug-of-war. Despite their best efforts to dig in, they were surrendering inch after inch as they were pulled across the grounds toward the carriage.
“Don’t let go!” Baird said. “We can do this … maybe!”
“I’m trying,” Stone said, grunting in exertion. “But it’s sucking us in like a black hole!”
“Nah,” Ezekiel said. “We’ve escaped a black hole. This is tougher!”
Grady squirmed in their grasp, struggling to free himself from his would-be protectors, but he was held tight by the three of them.
“Let me go, I beg ye! Save yer selves!”
“Forget it,” Baird said. “Haven’t you heard? You never let go of a leprechaun until you get your wish, and right now I’m wishing for a happy ending … for everyone!”
But the Librarians were losing ground by the moment. Jenkins joined the tug-of-war, but even his immortal vitality was no match for the Dullahan and the ancient curse empowering the coachman. Cassandra realized it was up to her to get Grady’s sentence commuted, if only the right words came to her.
“Hear me, please. You can’t do this. It’s not just.”
“Ye’re wasting yer breath, lass,” Grady said. “This is Ireland. The old ways, the ancient traditions, are too strong. Ye cannot change them!”
“But what of forgiveness and mercy? Those too are Irish traditions, dating all the way back to Saint Patrick at least! Did you know that Patricus first came to Ireland as a prisoner, captured by Irish raiders and taken by force from his home in Britain? He spent six years of his life laboring as a slave before finally escaping back to Britain. After all that, you’d think that he’d never forgive the Irish people, let alone want to set foot on this emerald isle again, but instead he felt a calling to return to Ireland to minister to its people for the rest of his life, even coming to the rescue of O’Gradaigh when the Serpent Brotherhood brought their evil here. If Saint Patrick could find it in his heart to forgive and forget, surely the Fair Folk can do the same for one of their own … for mercy’s sake?”
The Dullahan’s smirk faded as his disembodied head listened to Cassandra, his ghoulish leer replaced by a more thoughtful expression. The bony whip slackened to a degree, slowing Grady’s inexorable progress toward the death-coach.
“It’s working!” Baird cheered Cassandra on. “Keep it up! You’re getting through to him!”
“Not possible!” Grady said. “Once the Dullahan has been summoned, he cannot return empty-handed!”
“This is true,” Jenkins confirmed, while lending his shoulders to the task nonetheless. He strained with the others to keep Grady from the coach. “The lore is quite clear on this point.”
“But does it have to be Grady?” Cassandra asked. “Or can it be someone else, like maybe—”
“Librarians!”
Sibella finally slithered out from beneath the coach’s wheels. Mud defiled her ivory skin and scaly attire. With the Dullahan’s whip wrapped around Grady, she was no longer deterred by the coachman’s lash. Spittle sprayed from her lips as she flashed her fangs, reminding Cassandra of the half-woman, half-snake creature in Bram Stoker’s old novel. Hadn’t Jenkins said something about that book being more fact than fiction?
The female Serpent rose slowly to her feet. “You have incurred my wrath for the last time. You will writhe in agony as my venom consumes you from within, until you beg for the sweet release of death!”
“Yeah, speaking of that,” Cassandra said hastily, “what about her?” She pointed out the undead snake-woman. “She’s the one who wanted the Cauldron in the first place, and the one who shouldn’t even be alive right now. She was dead and buried for centuries until the Serpent Brotherhood cheated death by bringing her back from the grave. If anybody here needs a one-way trip back to the Other Side, it’s her.”
“Who are you to condemn me?” Sibella gave Cassandra the evil eye. “No, truly, who are you again?”
“It’s not about me,” Cassandra said. “It’s about making things right.” She looked up at the attentive coachman. “Don’t you think?”
The head spun on its spike to contemplate Sibella. Its fiendish grin returned as it fixed its baleful gaze on the female Serpent. The decapitated coachman wagged its finger in her direction. The bodiless head spoke again:
“Sibella.”
“No!” Her face contorted in fear. “She’s a mere mortal. You can’t listen to her!”
With a flip of his wrist, the Dullahan released Grady from the whip. The spine cracked loudly as he lashed out at Sibella, trapping her in its embrace so that it looked as though she was caught in the coils of a skeletal python. He yanked her off her feet and toward the gaping abyss inside the carriage as she writhed and wriggled in vain.
“You cannot do this! I’m alive … alive!”
“Actually, you died in 441 A.D.,” Jenkins corrected her as, along with the rest of the team, he let go of Grady. “Look it up.”
Screaming almost as loudly as a banshee, Sibella was flung into the coach. An ebony door slammed shut behind her. Her anguished face could be glimpsed briefly through a window as she tore the curtains asunder, but then the Dullahan cracked the spine like a whip once more, more violently than any mortal chiropractor ever had, and the horses sprang into motion, kicking up fiery sparks with their racing hooves. The coach dived back into the bottomless chasm from which it had emerged, vanishing from view even as the earth closed up behind it. Within moments, no trace of the coach—or Lady Sibella—remained.
“Whoa.” Ezekiel clasped the silver handcuffs on Max’s unconscious form. “Did we just drive the snakes out of Ireland again?”
“So it appears, Mister Jones.” Jenkins straightened his tie. “And saved the Library from being looted by the Brotherhood as well. Not a bad night’s work.”
“But what about the Pot?” Stone asked.
“Returned to Tír na nÓg, where it belongs, or so I assume.” Jenkins sighed wistfully. “A pity, really. It would have made a lovely addition to the Hibernian Collection.”
Grady patted himself to confirm that he was still among the living. “Can it be?” he asked, as though barely able to believe it. “I’m truly reprieved, after all these years?”
“Looks like it.” Baird beamed at Cassandra. “Great job, Red. I can’t believe you actually talked that thing into sparing Grady.”
“Well, it wasn’t all me,” Cassandra confessed. “I may have had an ace up my sleeve, as it were.”
Jenkins figured it out. “The Blarney Stone?”
“That’s right,” Cassandra said. “While the rest of you were fighting, I ran back to the Library to kiss the Stone.” She made a face and wiped her lips, which still tasted of grit. “I figured I could use the gift of the gab if I wanted to convince the banshee to leave Grady and his descendants alone.”
“Thus granting you uncommon powers of persuasion, if only for a time.” Jenkins tipped his head to Cassandra. “An elegant solution, Miss Cillian, and, if I may say so, an appropriately Irish one. Your forebears would be proud.”
Cassandra liked hearing that.
“’Tis a wonder such as I never dreamed of,” Grady said, choking up. He appeared overcome with emotion. “I’m a fugitive no longer … and home at last.” Misty eyes sought out the Librarians. “However can I thank youse?”
Ezekiel’s face lit up. “Well, about your gold—?”
Baird elbowed him. “Uh-uh. We’re not going there.”
“As it happens,” Jenkins said, “it would be helpful if you could fill in a few blanks regarding what transpired back in the fifth century, simply for the record.”
Grady grinned at the prospect.
“Och, if it’s a tale ye’re wanting, it will be me pleasure to oblige you … perhaps over a pint or two?”