Just as Della suspected all along, Sebastian had not taken the ritual well. He had stared at them like he had come back to the apartment expecting to see a normal group of people and was instead greeted by a freak show.
For a moment, Della felt embarrassed. Here they were, four grown adults, standing in a circle of yellow powder with the lights off, communing with ghosts. From the outside, it looked absolutely ridiculous. It kind of looked ridiculous from her point of view too.
Except that it worked.
“What in the world are you doing?” he demanded.
“We were performing a ritual to speak with a dead friend until you interrupted,” Richard said.
Della winced then shrugged. Now that he had caught them in the act, maybe it was time for the direct approach.
“That cult I told you about is trying to steal some valuable books from Montague’s estate. We thought he might know more about it, so we got into contact.”
“With your dead friend.”
“Yes.”
“You talked to your dead friend in order to get clues about an evil cult working in Scotland.”
“Yes.”
Sebastian shook his head and walked out.
“That went rather well,” Richard said.
“Should I go after him?” Della asked.
“Let him process this for a bit,” he said, beginning to clear up the ritual area. Cassandra helped.
Della stood there a minute, unsure what to do next.
“Maybe I should call him.”
“He’ll work through it himself and get back to us,” Richard said. “He’ll come around. It’s hard to accept these things at first.”
“It would help if he had felt anything at the ley nexus,” Lucas said, slumping on the couch. “I still don’t understand why his power isn’t manifesting.”
“Neither do I,” Richard said.
“I’m going to call him,” Della said.
“Waste of time. Leave him be,” Richard said.
She did anyway. His phone was busy.
Great, Della thought. He’s probably calling all our friends back in Oxford and telling them what a nutcase I am.
She paused for a moment.
What friends? I’ve cloistered myself in the lab and library so much that I hardly have any friends. I can count my friends on one hand, and they’re all here.
And I have a feeling I have one less now.
A few minutes later, Sebastian returned. He looked uncomfortable and didn’t meet anyone’s eye. An awkward silence filled the apartment. Della sat in a corner, pretending to use her phone while looking up enough to give Sebastian a chance to speak with her. Richard and Cassandra flicked on the television, and Lucas fiddled around in the kitchen for a bit until Sebastian cleared his throat.
“Look… I, um, I’m sorry I broke your ritual. I’ve been meaning to ask you something. Bjorn and I stayed at Maeshowe until the fire crew got finished. They couldn’t find anything wrong with the electrical system, no reason why it should have shorted out. I also noticed that all of you looked sick and unsteady there, and at the stone circles too. Della fell over. Was that witchcraft?”
“Imprecise term,” Richard said, muting the television and turning to him. “It’s ley energy.”
“Ley lines. Yeah, I’ve heard of them. Never given them much thought. Look, I did a bit of research online before coming up here, trying to figure out what was going on since Della didn’t see fit to tell me anything substantive. Did you know a famous occultist died here a few months back?”
“Yes,” Della said. “That’s one of the reasons we’re up here.”
“Ah, well, someone was caught trying to break into his house.”
Richard perked up. “Really? But that house has been cleared out.”
“So you do know about it,” Sebastian said.
“About the occultist, not about the break-in. Where did you find this information? His next of kin didn’t mention it.”
“I’m not sure they knew. Here, let me find it.”
Sebastian went to his room and pulled out his laptop, and everyone gathered around. Della was irritated to see that when Sebastian sat on the couch, Cassandra went behind him and leaned over, showing off her cleavage. Della got some pleasure from the fact that Sebastian didn’t even notice. No one had seen fit to tell Cassandra that Sebastian was unavailable in a most fundamental way. She wondered if they all got the same devious pleasure from it that she did.
Sebastian got onto a small forum called “Northern Mysteries.” Judging from the subject lines, it was devoted mostly to Wicca and alternative archaeology in Scotland. He scrolled down a long way before finding a thread titled “MacHugh House Ritual Break-in.”
“I recognized the name from an obituary I found online,” Sebastian explained. “When you said you had some occult group up here in Orkney, I did an internet search and found out about this fellow Frederick MacHugh on one of the smaller islands. He was an occultist who died a few months ago.”
“Yes, that’s the man whose estate my friend purchased,” Richard said. “Now I’m stuck with the books, and someone is trying to get them.”
“That’s what I thought. So I did some background work and found this.”
Richard smiled. “My, my, you’ve been a busy bee. Why didn’t you tell us earlier?”
“I, um, didn’t know if you’d take it seriously or if it was pertinent to the case. I, um, sorry…”
Della studied her ex-boyfriend. He was blushing, and his words came out haltingly. He still wouldn’t look at any of them.
He must be embarrassed that he’s finally taking all this seriously, Della assumed. I sure know how that feels.
Sebastian opened up the thread. It was dated from a month before and had only a few responses.
The thread started with a post saying that some user called witch666 had a dream that a great treasure was buried under the MacHugh house and that she had summoned her familiar to go search it out. “As you know,” the poster wrote, “the famous MacHugh library had already been cleared out, which is why my dream felt so important. I became convinced that there was something there the estate sale missed. My familiar searched the house high and low and could not find it, although it sensed a great magical energy. We have to go there in person to find it. Who’s with me?”
There followed an argument in which some posters said it was wrong to break into a dead man’s house, another warned of a curse on the property, and another poster, named DarkArts, simply said, “DM me.” The thread stopped at that point until a final post five days later from a new poster who gleefully wrote, “witch666 and DarkArts got busted trying to break into the MacHugh house! They’re being arraigned in Kirkwall for burglary. Never liked those two. White magic is stronger than black!”
“They missed something,” Della said. “The next of kin missed something, and the local group sensed it. That’s why they tried to get into the house.”
“Could be,” Richard said. “From what I know, MacHugh’s next of kin was not close to him, and none of them dabbled in the hidden arts. They would not have thought to search the house for hiding places, and MacHugh would not have told them.”
Cassandra leaned a little closer to Sebastian’s laptop, purportedly to read the thread again. “From what I heard, he was quite secretive. I doubt he told anyone any details of what he did in his house beyond what was absolutely necessary for performing group rituals. There might be all sorts of lovely goodies in there.”
“This thread is strange, though,” Richard said, frowning. “It’s written in such an amateurish fashion, as if by a bunch of people who know nothing of true magic.”
“Perhaps it’s a code?” Lucas suggested.
“If so, it’s not a very subtle one.”
“Perhaps they are newbies,” Della said. It seemed amateurish even to her amateurish eyes. “But this witch666 person has a bit of the Talent and really did sense something.”
“This talk of a familiar is nonsense,” Cassandra said. “They don’t work the way this person says they work. And any practitioner powerful enough to actually have a familiar wouldn’t be chatting on some cheap online forum.”
“So she’s lying about that,” Della said with a shrug. “There are plenty of people in the occult community who exaggerate their abilities or pretend to knowledge they don’t have. I think we should check it out.”
Sebastian hung his head, looking dejected.
Della looked at him with sympathy. You’re really having a hard time with this, aren’t you? But it’s all beginning to sink in.
“I agree,” Lucas said. “While Maeshowe is obviously a center of the disturbance, we’re going to have a tough time getting back in there after what happened, and we still don’t know exactly what’s going on. Perhaps we can find out what’s souring the ley lines.”
Richard rubbed his chin. “MacHugh could have left some powerful ritual unfinished when he died. That might have done it.”
Cassandra flicked her long hair. “Perhaps you’ve been getting all this wrong. If this local group wants the books to fix the problem, maybe they aren’t the enemy.”
“If they weren’t the enemy,” Della said with deliberation, “then they wouldn’t have had the fire spirit attack us. They would have approached us openly.”
“Besides, the books only protect you from problems with the ley lines. They don’t fix them,” Richard said.
Sebastian threw his hands in the air. “I have absolutely no idea what you people are nattering on about!”
Richard patted his thigh. “You just sit there and look pretty.”
“We should go to his house and take a look around,” Della said. “That person who started the forum chat actually gives the GPS coordinates. Good way to telegraph that you’re about to commit a crime. No wonder they got caught. If we’re more careful than they are, perhaps we can find traces of the ritual and that will give us a clue.”
Sebastian started tapping away on his laptop.
“What are you doing?” Della asked.
“Instead of looking pretty,” Sebastian grumbled, “I’m looking up ferries from Mainland to Stronsay. Looks like there are two round trips a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The ferry takes nearly two hours.”
“Then we should get the morning one,” Della said. “Are there hotels there, just in case we don’t get everything done before the evening ferry leaves?”
Sebastian did a bit more searching. “There are a couple of guest houses, both shut because it’s off season.”
“Let’s risk it,” Della said.
So the next morning, when the sun had not yet risen on the rainy northern winter’s day, they bundled into a ferry at Kirkwall harbor. The ferry was a wide, hulking steel ship with room for cars to drive onto the back. Only a few did, and the spartan seating area inside with its steel floors and hard plastic seats was all but empty. Only a few other people, obviously locals, sat reading or looking absently out the rain-streaked windows at the lights of the harbor. It was cold, and the seas looked rough. Della wondered if Cassandra would get sick again.
With a sound of the horn, the ferry began to pull out. It passed the harbor’s few piers where fishing boats with bright-red hulls and white cabins bobbed in the water. Sebastian went to the far end of the sitting area and started texting. Della put up the hood of her raincoat and went outside to get a better look.
Sharp sea air filled her lungs. Out on the water, it felt colder, and a soft rain fell, making the deck slick and spraying her face as it came down at an angle thanks to the strong breeze. All this was outweighed by the sweeping view.
The sun peeked over the eastern horizon. The clouds did not reach it, and in the distance, the sea shimmered gold.
Kirkwall rested in a wide bay. The town fronted the harbor, dominated by a large brick hotel of the Victorian era. Bjorn said they served good meals. He had made it sound like an invitation. After the craziness of the previous day, however, she wasn’t sure that invitation still stood. He hadn’t called, and he hadn’t been asked to come along on this trip. Della felt a mixture of disappointment and relief. Things were coming to a head, and it would be best if an innocent like Bjorn stayed well clear.
He’d been nice, though, intelligent and interesting.
And completely unavailable, Della told herself. He lives hundreds of miles away from you.
Those thoughts passed as she surveyed the view around her. The ferry was pulling away from the harbor now, the red-and-white fishing boats and the redbrick town dwindling, more of her view taken up with the waters of the bay turned golden by the rising sun. Ahead, right in the middle of the bay, she saw a little skerry, barely twenty yards across, tufted with grass and dotted with cawing seagulls.
The prison for Norsemen, she remembered. The one Sebastian told us about.
She opened her mind up to the ambient energies, wondering if she would feel something off of it, but they passed it too far and too quickly.
Perhaps if I actually went and stood on it, I’d feel something.
Della filled her lungs with sea air and smiled. As terrifying and confusing as this newfound ability could be, it was also fascinating. She’d learned of a whole new way to look at the world. She asked herself, if given the choice between living as she was now or going back to her more innocent and ignorant self, what she would choose. To her mild surprise, she realized that she would not go back to the way things were before. She had grown, and as painful as that growth was, it was necessary. And what she was doing now was important.
If Richard’s interpretation of the Orcadian magic proved correct, the ley lines could affect the whole world. She was safer facing this thing head-on than staying clueless and attending her lectures back in Oxford. Some things affected everyone, and ignorance did not save you.
The ferry let out a long call with its horn. Three horns responded. Della turned from where she had been watching the receding town and leaned over the railing to look toward where the bay let out onto the open ocean. Three fishing boats were entering in a line, coming back from the night’s catch. One by one they passed, giving out another call with their horns, the captains at the helm waving to the captain of the ferry.
The sea got choppier as they passed from the protection of the harbor into open water. Della moved from the stern past the few cars and along the edge of the main cabin to the prow, gripping the handrail as the water got rougher. Once she got to the prow, she planted her feet well apart and held the handrail in front of her with both hands. Above and behind her, she could see the captain at the wheel behind the window. He was the only person she could see. For a moment, she felt embarrassed. He probably thought she was some tourist doing an imitation of that silly Titanic movie. Then she realized he wasn’t paying attention to her at all. He had a more important job to do.
So did Della. She realized she probably should be back in the cabin planning strategy with the others, but the pull of the open sea was too strong. She needed to get away from them for a while, and this beautiful view was the best place to do so.
They left the harbor behind, and the North Sea opened up before her. While to the right and left and ahead she could see other islands, low stretches of grass or rockier eminences, most of her view was taken up by open sea.
The wind blew spray in her face, and the sea grew rougher, rolling the ship up swells and down troughs. She didn’t feel afraid, though. She noticed the railing was set well back from the actual edge of the prow, no doubt to keep people like her from taking an accidental plunge.
While the winds remained strong and the seas rough, the sky above cleared, and they now sailed through full sunlight. Cassandra joined her at the prow.
Of all people to interrupt my solitude. Couldn’t she puke somewhere else?
Della was surprised to notice that she didn’t look sick, as she had on the plane.
“You feeling all right?” Della asked.
“Oh, lovely.” She certainly looked chipper.
“I figured you’d be sick in this weather. I’m surprised I’m not.”
“I don’t get seasick, darling. I’ve been on far rougher seas than this and felt fine. I’m attuned to water magic.”
“Oh.” Della felt a guilty sense of disappointment. “I’ve heard a lot of practitioners are attuned to a certain type of magic. Why did you decide to work on water magic?”
If she was going to be stuck with Cassandra on deck, she might as well learn something.
“I didn’t choose water magic. It chose me. Those with the Talent are attuned to different flavors of magic and find their way to them if they open themselves up to being led. Lucas is attuned to ley and nature magic, although he isn’t really attuned to anything because he insists on not studying. Try as I might, I could not get that lovely man to put in the work. Dear old Richard is more of a ceremonial magic type of practitioner. He has earned a great deal of respect in occult circles for fusing different traditions and creating more powerful rituals than any one tradition could on its own.”
“So, do I have some type of magic I’m attuned to?”
“I’m sure you do. Keep studying it and you’ll find it.”
Della looked out at the approaching island. “It seems everything that happens to me is related to the ley lines. Maybe that’s what I’m attuned to.”
“Perhaps.”
“Or maybe ancient sites? Maybe that’s why I became an archaeologist in the first place. My subconscious was leading me in the right direction.”
“I don’t think so, darling. Ancient sites aren’t magic in themselves. They become magic because they are sacred sites put along ley lines. You have a lot to learn about real archaeology.”
Della seethed. It was bad enough that this woman constantly condescended to her. She was not about to stand being lectured about archaeology by someone who had never studied the subject.
Cassandra gave her a sympathetic look. “If you are attuned to ley lines, you’ve picked a bad time to discover your Talent. You should have learned of it years ago. We’re going to need both you and Lucas for whatever it is we’re facing. Richard and I can’t do it alone. What worries me most, though, is that neither of you are ready. Knowing a little about magic is far, far more dangerous than knowing nothing about magic at all.”