Chapter Three
“What do you mean, a fake?” Graves demanded.
“It isn’t talking to me,” Kierse said.
Graves strode back toward her and took the stone out of her hand. “There’s no magic in it.”
Her new magical intuition worked to show her the magic of things, but she’d never seen any magic around the cauldron or the spear in the last couple months, either. As if she could only see magic cast by other people and not inside an object itself.
“You knew,” Kierse said, turning to Lorcan. “That’s why you were waiting here for us.”
“For you,” he corrected.
“Whatever,” she said, blowing him off. “Do you know where the real stone is?”
“Not since it disappeared from the Druids about a quarter century ago,” Lorcan said.
That was what Graves had said, too.
There were many stones of power in the history of these little islands.
The Stone of Scone, which the British monarchy had used since they stole it from Scotland in the 1200s to crown their rulers, the Lia Fáil, a twelve-by-two-foot stone on the Hill of Tara in Ireland that represented the very stone they were looking for and was routinely vandalized as a fake, and of course, Arthur’s sword in the stone.
None of them were the real Stone of Fal. And apparently this one wasn’t, either.
“We had it safely outside of Dublin for hundreds of years, and then it was stolen when the Fae council fell,” Lorcan continued. His gaze shifted to Graves, accusation in his irises. “Convenient.”
“If I had the stone, you’d know,” Graves said.
“Why would we be here if Graves stole it in the first place?” Kierse demanded.
“Because it isn’t going to work for him like all of the other artifacts,” Lorcan said. “They took the measure of him.”
“The spear certainly cut down Declan in my hands,” Graves said, reminding him of how he had killed Lorcan’s second-in-command.
Lorcan took a step forward, his facade breaking for a second.
Then he seemed to think better of it, gritting his teeth.
“You can wield it, but the magic doesn’t answer you.
There’s a reason the spear belongs to Kierse,” he said, gesturing to the weapon over her shoulder, “and the sword belongs to me and the cauldron belongs to Genesis. The stone would no more choose you than any other stranger.”
Kierse didn’t have to look to Graves to know how that cut him deep.
Whatever was in these objects that spoke to them seemed to only speak to their Irish heritage.
It should have worked for Graves, but the only time an artifact’s magic had ever worked at his hand was when the sword revealed Kierse’s heritage.
“If you don’t know where the stone is,” Kierse said, “then I personally would not like to be reminded how much you like to hear yourself talk.”
She turned on her heel and headed out of the vault. Tonight was a bust. All that planning and prep and they got a fake stone. She hated to admit how much her heart sank at the prospect.
The stone was supposed to be her way out of this bullshit.
It did more than make royal proclamations and declare the rightful ruler of Ireland.
It was the holder of all geas. Any decree made while holding the stone was bound not just by law but by the magic of the god itself.
And traditionally, a geas made elsewhere—or any kind of binding—could be broken by the stone as well.
And Kierse had a binding she was in desperate need of breaking.
She should have known it was too good to be true.
“Walter, is the way clear through the tunnels?”
“Negative,” he said.
She was sure he’d heard everything that had happened in the vault but was glad that he was a man of few words.
“Fuck it,” she muttered as she climbed the stairs that led up to Archie’s home. The warlock was unconscious. She’d slip out through the front door rather than brave more tourists and an angry ghost.
She took the stairs two at a time, wrenching the door open when she heard George’s voice crack through her earpiece. “Wait, someone’s moving around!”
But she had already taken one step into the room and came face to face with a large, befreckled man.
“Archie is up,” Walter added unhelpfully.
“Yeah, thanks for that,” she grumbled.
“Who the fuck are you?” Archie asked with menace, his hands suddenly before him as power radiated from his body.
“Oh shit,” Kierse said as she put her hands up.
The warlock didn’t look like much. He was on the short side with a paunch around his middle.
He wore a plaid button-up and had a receding hairline with frizzy, curly red hair.
His spectacles lay across the bridge of his nose.
And though he seemed to have stopped aging sometime in his thirties, she knew he was a couple hundred years old.
His green eyes held all the wisdom and annoyance of being disturbed at his age, but he was generating enough power to level the block.
Which was understandable since she’d just broken into his house.
Time to engage in her tried-and-true thieving rules. Her exit was already lost. Distraction was probably off the table along with sleight of hand. And since she probably couldn’t play this one—even if she was a good actress, which she wasn’t—that left her least favorite: run.
But she never got the chance.
Graves and Lorcan barreled up from the depths below instead of taking the tunnels.
Archie raised his hands, which were marked with swirling symbols and circles. “Graves?” he snarled.
“It’s been a long time, Archie,” Graves said.
Then Archie’s eyes landed on Lorcan, and he shot light out of his fist toward him. “You!”
Lorcan blocked the blow, the magic dissipating before him. “I was just leaving.”
“I have nothing to do with him. Me and my associate,” Graves said, gesturing to Kierse, “were checking in on you because I was in the country. I found you unconscious and this thief in your vault.”
“They’re as much thieves as I am,” Lorcan snarled.
“You think me a fool?” Archie asked.
Graves reached to stop him, but already Archie was moving his hands in some intricate order, backing up into a dark circle at the center of his floor. The words coming out of his mouth were unintelligible. Not any known language Kierse had ever heard. It was as grating as nails down a chalkboard.
“Don’t let him finish!” Graves said, rushing forward.
Lorcan moved at the same moment as if they were a united front and hadn’t only seconds earlier been at each other’s throats.
Kierse had never seen them work together.
They’d been enemies for hundreds of years, and killing each other every six months with god magic didn’t exactly engender cooperation.
But both of their earliest training had been together.
It seemed that even several centuries and animosity couldn’t change that.
“The stone,” Graves shouted as he tossed it to Kierse.
She grabbed the fake stone out of thin air just as they reached the black circle, and they promptly bounced off an invisible barrier at its edge.
Graves went one direction, colliding with the wall nearest the door. His body went straight through an antique painting, and they both crashed down onto the old hardwood floors. Lorcan landed against a bookshelf, tearing the shelving from the walls as he slid down to a red-and-white rug.
Lorcan groaned as he slowly came back to his feet.
Graves dusted debris off his black suit. His gray eyes darkened and were absolutely diabolical as he looked up at the warlock at the center of the room.
The dark circle changed to a glowing gold light in the center of the room, blocking their exit to Blair Street. They could brave the tunnels again through the South Bridge vaults, but Kierse wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t send something after them if they didn’t stop him here.
“Entering my home uninvited was a mistake,” Archie said in that same disembodied, scratchy voice. “You will regret it.”
He clapped his hands together, and his head tipped upward, gold light flowing out of his mouth toward the ceiling.
The torrent was so oppressive that Kierse had to back up, her back hitting a large wooden hutch full of priceless china.
Graves and Lorcan exchanged a glance. And though neither of them could get into the other’s head, it certainly seemed as if they had spoken.
“Don’t move until we give the go-ahead,” Lorcan said. She narrowed her eyes at him, but he held his hand out as a peace offering. “Please, I don’t want you to get hurt.”
Before she could tell him that she didn’t need him to take care of her, Archie stopped spouting gold magic from his mouth.
A pop sounded in her ears, and then out of nothing three disgusting, humanoid beings, the likes of which she had never seen, stood before her.
Monsters, real monsters. And all three looked like they wanted to kill anything that got in their way.