The following morning, we drove into town to get a look at the records. The three of us walked into the building together, but Gabriel and I stayed back while Embry used his Gift to make the woman behind the desk trust him.
“They’re public records. You can’t take the books out, but anyone can access them,” she assured him.
“Thank you.”
He nodded for us to follow him to the second story of the building, which was set up like a very small library, only all the books were basically ledgers and registries.
“Is there an index?” Gabriel asked, but I was already going through the cards by the desk. It was empty, and by the looks of it, no one ever worked there. It was more for people consulting the books.
I found Judith and Ric’s marriage certificate, then used that to track down her birth certificate. “They hold death, marriage and birth certificates in the blue books. Now that I know Judith was born in 1540 to George and Irene, I can look up when her parents were born and find their parents and so on,” I explained what I was doing.
“I’ll look into her father,” Embry went to get the right year for him, while Gabriel went to get her mother’s, and I scribbled down everything about Judith that might eventually be useful.
“I think I’ve found one,” I ventured, stumbling upon an ancestor with a mother named Kiara. “You needed parental consent to marry before twenty-one, but her mother was deceased,” I showed them the marriage certificate.
“Kiara?” Embry asked. Thanks to ‘Kiara’s Cure’, the name itself was enough to tell me we had to look into it.
“According to Saoirse’s birth certificate, she was born in Ireland,” I handed it over.
“Meaning we have to find the building like this in Ireland to go any further?” Gabriel verified.
“We also have the place Saoirse was born. If it was a family home they had for generations…” I let the thought linger, not sure what I was hoping to find other than memories. Unless a relative of mine was still living there, it was very unlikely that I would find any kind of paperwork in an old house.
“Haven’t they digitized all of this yet?” Embry asked, putting the books we were no longer using back on their shelves.
“Not anywhere that I can find without raising suspicions,” I turned him down. I wanted to google all this recent information to find out more, but if they were using computer chips to track us, I was not going to chance it.
“What’s on your mind?” Gabriel asked when I stared at the word ‘deceased’.
“Do you think Henry had anything to do with it, or he just started hunting us with Annabelle?” I asked. “Do either of you know how old he really is?”
“Older than us, but I don’t know more than that,” Gabriel told me.
“I wonder if he knew all of them.” I thought back to my memories of him. “He didn’t look like he knew Annabelle when he saved her, but he might have spotted her from a distance and approached her because he knew she was one of them. But he seemed genuinely surprised when she could do magic…”
“You can check his memories after we kill him,” Gabriel didn’t appreciate my intimate knowledge of him. He worried that the more I knew about Henry, the harder it would be for me to harm him, or allow them to, once we got to it. He underestimated how much I despised the man.
“I’ll find us a boat,” Embry sighed.
“A real one, or…”
“They have ferries to Ireland, I’ll do my best,” he told me before we followed him outside.
We already had all of our possessions, so we drove the rental car back to one of the company’s locations and made our way to the ferry on foot. Embry took us through a shortcut to avoid the larger crowds.
“Have you lived in the United Kingdom?” I asked him. He hadn’t used a map since we landed.
“Not exactly. I’ve visited many times, stayed for longer stretches, but never long enough to buy a place to call my own.”
“You stayed with…” I let it linger. I knew they were both in love with Annabelle and utterly devoted to her, at least until Embry met Beth, but I couldn’t imagine that they never even entertained the thought of any other women for those three centuries.
“Other Gifted, mostly.”
“Delia is from here, originally,” Gabriel shared. “Still has family in the area, but I couldn’t risk contacting her. Or them.”
“Are they okay?” I asked. I last saw Delia when she, Tristan and Benjamin travelled to Florida to be decoys for me, Gabriel and Embry. She had told Gabriel she missed him, but I didn’t think there was anything there. Or maybe I didn’t want there to be.
“They left word that they made it safely. I haven’t heard that they asked for help, but such a request wouldn’t have come to us. It would have gone to someone else in the network who was closer and not busy protecting you.”
“Is she who you stayed with?” I asked Embry.
Before he had the chance to answer, a man with long black hair and an eyebrow ring walked over from the street and stopped right in front of me. My breath caught in my chest as I brought my hands up, waiting to see his eyes, or for him to make a move to tell me if he was just a tourist, or someone trying to kill me.
“You came,” he said as five other people arrived and stood around us. I had yet to master 360° freezing, so I couldn’t take care of everyone at once, but I also wanted to know what he was talking about.
“How did you find us?” I asked the man who, for the moment, seemed more intent on scaring me than killing me.
“We’ve been waiting for you.”
“In this alley?” I looked around to see if there was something special about it, but came up short.
“Don’t play innocent,” he warned. “You won’t get it.”
“Get what?” I asked, but he had already pulled out his weapon, as did all of his friends. I knew I couldn’t freeze them all, but I wasn’t prepared to blow them into smithereens either.
I put up my shield when he came at me and sent him flying back into some garbage bins. The guys each took on two of the assailants, meaning I didn’t have a clear shot until they stood still. I grabbed a discarded piece of wood from the pile of trash nearest me and hit one of the men attacking Embry. I thought I got him on the head and incapacitated him at least a little, but he turned around and faced me with nothing but anger and annoyance.
He charged at me, sending some kind of blue light ahead of him, so I quickly put up my force shield. He bounced back, but not nearly as far as people usually did. This angered him further, but Gabriel was down to one attacker, so he stabbed him in the stomach with the dagger and came to my defense. His speed was the only thing that put him on somewhat of an equal footing with the man, who had the build of a lumberjack and seemed unfazed by most of our attacks. When I got a clear shot, I froze him, which allowed Gabriel to knock him out for good.
“Follow me.” Embry called out once all of our attackers were on the ground, though I wasn’t naïve enough to believe they would stay there. We ran through a couple of alleys, to the busier streets, and didn’t stop until we got to the docks.
“We’ll take three tickets to Ireland,” Embry told the woman, charming her with his Gift while we tried to look normal.
“They’re boarding in a few minutes,” she gave him a smile as she handed them over.
“What were they doing there?” I asked, looking worriedly back to the city, but no one was following us as we headed for the line at the end of the dock.
“How would he know we would be here? Judith lived hours from here, and those men weren’t following us. They were waiting for us,” Gabriel was upset, but I appreciated him thinking out loud instead of in hushed voices with Embry once I was no longer around.
“Do you think they have another tracker on us?”
“No, I think there is something here that Henry expects us to be after,” Embry argued.
“Do you know exactly where we were when they found us?” I asked.
“A tiny alley.”
“I know that, but was there anything nearby? A museum with relics from Crescent Moon Bearers, a magic shop with grimoires… he told me there was a spell, but I don’t think he would know we found it…” I was thinking out loud.
“We can’t assume he doesn’t know everything we do. We need to act like he has spies following us every step of the way,” Gabriel argued.
“There’s an old bookshop but I don’t think it has any occult origins. There’s business buildings close by, a church, shopping…”
“A church might make sense. You said Henry’s people couldn’t go into churches, which could explain why they were waiting in an alley,” I suggested.
“It’s an old church, I don’t even think they have a museum or anything. It’s not a tourist attraction,” Embry argued.
“What’s it called?”
“Sacred Heart.”
We got to the end of the line and stood behind a girl who looked to be about fourteen, travelling with an older woman in a wheelchair, doing patchwork by the looks of it.
“Excuse me, is that a pamphlet for Sacred Heart?” I asked, noticing the paper in her hand. It was like a newsletter, only it had the name of the church and an enormous picture of a cross on the front of it.
“It’s just the weekly catholic newsletter or something. It’s hers,” she told me before bending down closer to the older woman, who reacted when she heard the name of the church. She said something to her in a language I didn’t understand, before turning to me, “She says they have mass at 7 every evening, but you wouldn’t make it back in time,” she dismissed the older woman.
“Is it worth checking out on our way back?” I asked, sensing something from the way the woman looked at me.
“She says their old priest now lives in Rome, and he brought the Lignum Crucis this week to celebrate the church’s anniversary or something,” the girl translated.
“What’s the Lignum Crucis?” I asked her.
“The true cross,” she told me. “Any authentic fragments of the cross Christ was crucified on are known as Lignum cruces.”
“Thank you so much,” I smiled at the teenager, who took out headphones and put them in before I could ask her any more questions.
“That’s Emmanuel’s Betrayal,” I turned to the guys and whispered, using the spell’s term for the Cross Jesus was crucified on. “That has to be it.”
“Why would Henry think we were going after the ingredients to the ritual?” Embry asked.
“He already said he has all the ingredients except for you, so it’s not like we can collect them first and stop him,” Gabriel shared.
“And the coalescence is a ritual only he can do, right?” I looked from one to the other, but they both shrugged.
“Not necessarily. We are here to protect you, but that doesn’t mean that someone else can’t stand in the way of you getting hurt. Your destiny is shaped by many things,” Gabriel explained.
“We can complete the ritual instead of him?” I confirmed what he was saying, momentarily disregarding the fact that it involved ripping out my heart.
“I don’t know enough about the ritual to answer you as far as magic goes, but I know that even if he is staying alive to complete it, that doesn’t mean that someone else couldn’t.”
“But Henry definitely thinks we’re going after the ritual’s ingredients.”
“Which means we could stay under the radar by not going after them,” Embry understood what I was hinting at.
“But if we’re supposed to be getting them, shouldn’t we?”
“Do you think it can help us?” Gabriel wasn’t so quick to turn me down, but he didn’t look convinced either.
“Even before I knew that magic was real, I knew that you can’t bring people back to life. If Annabelle and Beth had the spell but never used it, I’m thinking it can’t be so easy as putting some things in a bowl and saying a few words.”
“You think only someone who has completed the ritual can use the spell?” Gabriel turned to Embry to see what he thought of it.
“That would explain why he thinks we’re going after it. The ritual ingredients were in public books, and lots of people tried to complete it. But Kiara’s cure, based on the name, was probably tailor-made for my family.”
“Is this something you want to do?” Embry asked me, resigning himself to it.
“I don’t want to, but I would much rather have one of you cut my heart out and have undying power than Henry.”
“Then it’s settled. We’re getting all the ingredients,” he sighed, neither of them happy about it.