From Bad to Cursed (11 page)

There was a pause.

“Are you sure?” Megan asked.

“Honestly?” Tashi said, “
I
don’t care. But there’s no reason for you to drive all the way out to Lakewood when I’m going over after dinner. If I tell her I have it, she’ll be fine.”

Megan hesitated.

“Do whatever you want,” Tashi said, starting to turn around. “At least call her.”

“No,” Megan said. “Here, you can have it.”

She stepped out into the golden evening light, holding the book like an offering.

Tashi laughed again as she took it. “Adrienne would die if she knew you were just carrying it around. She thinks if somebody sees it, they’ll automatically guess it’s a sacred vessel and want to steal it or something.”

As the door started to close, she reached out and stopped it.

The energy in the room seemed to crackle.

Tashi squinted. “Megan, what happened to your knees?”

“I tripped,” Megan said. “Getting out of the—on the—tile. I should probably wear a long skirt tomorrow, or I’ll get massacred in Betterment. Bruises are totally un-sunshiny.” Then she faked a laugh.
Ho ho ho, massacres are hilarious.

“I wouldn’t worry,” Tashi said. “But your shirt is stained.”

We all looked at Megan’s light green shirt. On each side, near the hem, were a pair of grayish smudges.

“You’re right,” Megan said.

“That might not come out,” Tashi said, turning to leave.

I took that as a personal challenge.

“Stay sunny,” I said. She gave me a wry smile and started for the sidewalk. We watched her go all the way past the park before breaking formation.

“She knows we took the book,” Megan said. “She totally knows.”

“I’m sure she thinks it was an accident,” Kasey said, still gazing out the window. “She’s very trusting.”

“Here’s what we know,” Megan said. “Until we can figure out how to safely destroy the book, we’re somehow connected with Aralt. We swore that in exchange for all the fun stuff, we would give him some gift. And…” She made a disgusted face. “He’s lusty.”

Fun stuff? I gazed at Megan for maybe a millisecond too long before I started talking. “We can keep researching
libris exanimus
,” I said. “But maybe we need to face the fact that we can’t fix this tonight. And we definitely can’t destroy the book.”

“Because it’s gone,” Megan said.

“Even if it were here,” I said. “It’s too risky.”

The thought popped into my head like a hunch:
But we’ll be fine.

“But we’ll be fine,” I said.

Megan and Kasey shrugged.

“I guess,” Kasey said, not totally convinced.

For the next hour we searched for more information. Kasey manned the computer while I worked on Megan’s shirt.

There wasn’t much to be learned about a
libris exani
mus
. All we’d been able to look up were the definitions of the two words and a paragraph at an occult website making them sound like some urban legend of the dark side:
If any went undiscovered long enough to escape the most
common form of destruction (burning by pious locals or clergy), they were generally believed to have been so well-hidden as to have almost certainly decayed completely.

“Well, ours isn’t decayed,” Megan said, a hint of defiance in her voice.

But if something was dead, how would you keep it from decaying?

By connecting it to something that was alive?

I sat straight up.

Maybe the oath allowed Aralt to feed off the girls, sort of the way they were feeding off of him. They tapped into whatever it was that made you popular, pretty, and smart, while he got to suck on their life energy. Symbiosis. Like hippos and those little birds that eat their fleas.

“Hey, guys. Listen,” I said, picking up the notepad where Megan had written down the translation. “‘I invite him to a
union
.’ ‘
Together,
we will grow. ’”

Kasey’s lips turned down in dread.

I was breathless. “The power center,” I said. “It’s not the book. It’s the girls who took the oath. The Sunshine Club.”

“All of us,” Megan said slowly.

Not
all
of us. I avoided meeting her glance.

“So what does that mean? What do I look for?” Kasey asked.

“It means there’s no point in burning the book. It’s just a glorified instruction manual. Maybe it’s where he lives when he doesn’t have a Sunshine Club to leech off of.” Energized by my own insight, I took Kasey’s chair at the computer. “Here, let me try.”

I typed
Aralt.
But that produced too many results. So we added various words, from
oath
to
ghost.
Nothing worked, until I typed in
Aralt
+
Ireland
+
book
.

There was a single result:
THE FAMILY HISTORY OF THE O’DOYLES OF COUNTY KILDARE
.

I clicked the link and got an error message saying,

Page not found.

“Dead end,” Megan said. She sighed and turned toward the mirror over the dresser, combing through her hair with her fingers.

“Not necessarily,” I said, going back to the search engine. I clicked on the link that said
CACHED
, which pulled up an archived version of the page. That brought up the image of a single paragraph of all-caps red writing on a black background.

I AM REMOVING ALL CONTENT DUE TO EXTREME PRIVACY VIOLATIONS WHICH I FEEL HAVE GONE ABOVE AND BEYOND WHAT I WOULD OF CONSIDERED POLITE OR MAYBE EVEN LEGAL!!! BUT I DON’T FEEL LIKE FIGHTING U FASCISTS ANYMORE ITS JUST A STUPID WEBPAGE!

“Um…interesting guy,” Kasey said. “But it still doesn’t tell us anything.”

Searching the phone directory for “O’Doyle” produced thousands of listings.

“Hold on,” I said, directing the browser to another website. I typed in the domain name where the error message had been posted, and the registry information popped up.

ADMINISTRATIVE CONTACT:
123 N0NE 0F YOUR BUS1NESS STREET
N0WHERE, USA

…And a fake phone number.

“Oh,
now
we have all the answers,” Kasey sighed, flopping onto the bed.

I stared at the administrative contact name. It was just a bunch of letters, numbers, and symbols, but something about it was familiar. All of the
O
s were zeroes. And the
i
in
business
was a one.

“It’s leet.” I wrote
l337
on Kasey’s notebook. “L-e-e-t. One of the guys in the Doom Squad thought he was some mastermind hacker. He wrote everything that way.”

I went back to the search engine and typed in
ZEERGONATER
.

A list of results popped up—Zeergonater’s postings on various Internet forums, mostly about urban legends and conspiracies, with a good dose of video game chat thrown in besides.

“This doesn’t help us,” Kasey said. “It’s not like he posted his real name anywhere.”

“Yeah, but…he had to slip up sometime,” I said. I read through some of the postings. Zeergonater had a chip on his shoulder the size of San Francisco, and he seemed hyperaware of covering his tracks, staying anonymous.

Finally, we found a clue. On a post he made about why he chose to live where he lived, Zeergonater wrote that in the span of three hours he could be skiing, surfing, or camping—plus, there was no sales tax.

“Oregon,” Kasey said.

“What makes you think that?” I asked.

“No sales tax,” she said. “Mountains. Ocean. Forests.”

Searching for O’Doyles in Oregon still left us with hundreds of results.

“Go back to the thing about skiing,” Kasey said.

I clicked back through the history and scrolled down to Zeergonater’s second entry in the thread, where he’d posted a picture of his prized snow skis.

“Look,” Kasey said, pointing at the screen. Lightly etched in the red paint of each ski were three letters: LBO.

I scrolled down the phone directory listings.

Lance B. O’Doyle
. And a phone number. I grabbed my cell phone and dialed.

“Hello?”

“Hello, is this Lance?”

A pause. “Maybe.”

“I have a question for you. About a person named Aralt.”

“I told you people to leave me alone!” he snapped. “I took down the stupid webpage. It was just a genealogy thing I did for my grandmother!”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “I don’t care about the page or why you took it down.”

He paused. “Then…how do you know about Aralt?”

“I just heard about him somewhere. I’m curious.”

“Ha,” he said. “Haven’t you ever heard that curiosity killed the cat? Listen, little girl. You don’t want to get messed up with Aralt. There are people out there who can—and
will
—wipe the floor with you.”

I’m going to be honest. It sounded a little melodramatic to me. “Please,” I said. “I’ll never bother you again. Just tell me what you know about Aralt.”

“Oh, I
know
you’ll never bother me again,” he said. “You’ll never
find
me again.”

But he hadn’t refused to answer my questions.

“Your website said something about County Kildare?” I said. “Ireland, right? Is that where he’s from?”

He sighed. “The O’Doyles—my ancestors—were one of the best families in the county, even though they weren’t titled. Titles aren’t everything.”

There was a defensive edge to his voice that told me I’d better turn on the flattery. “No, of course not.”

“Aralt Edmund Faulkner was the Duke of Weymouth. He lucked into the title after his uncle died at sea. He was a playboy—he’d make women fall in love with him, then break their hearts and leave them ruined. And it was a bad thing to be a ruined woman back then. A few of them killed themselves. So his family basically shipped him off to Ireland to keep him out of trouble.”

“Sounds like a jerk,” I dared to say.

“Yeah, well, when he messed with the O’Doyles, he went too far,” Lance said, and I heard a note of pride in his voice. “My great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was Captain Desmond O’Doyle, an officer in the Royal Navy. He came home after a long campaign to find his wife five months pregnant with another man’s child.”

“Aralt’s?” I asked.

“Bingo,” Lance said. “She was so overcome with shame that she threw herself off a bridge.”

“That’s terrible.”

“So Desmond challenged Aralt to a duel, which of course Aralt lost, because he was a lazy playboy. And even as he lay on his deathbed, another young woman he’d seduced was with him, weeping and professing her love.”

“Who was that?”

“Some peasant. Maybe a traveler—like a gypsy? She disappeared after he died, but legend says she took his heart with her so he would always be hers.”

Um, ew. “And what about the book?” I asked. “The
libris exanimus
?”

“The what?”

I decided to change the subject. “Who made you take down your website?”

“I don’t know who they are,” he said. “They’re cowards. They hid behind a pair of lawyers who did everything but break my kneecaps.”

“But why?” I asked.

“Who knows? They aren’t descendants—the line died with the Duke, I’m happy to say. I mean, out of twenty pages of history, I had
one
that mentioned Aralt Faulkner, and they sicced their lawyers on me like a couple of junkyard dogs.” He paused. “Now. How did you find me?”

As I answered his question, I heard clicking keys in the background. By the time we were off the phone, the Internet postings and picture of the skis would be long gone.

“Now, listen,” he said. “I’m not kidding, little girl. You don’t want to mess with these people.”

Kasey tugged on my sleeve. She flipped back through her notebook to the page marked
OUIJA BOARD
. Under
EXANIM
was written
ELSPETH
.

“Um, one more question—was Desmond’s wife’s name Elspeth, by any chance?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “It was Radha.”

I shook my head at my sister.

“Was
anybody
named that?” Kasey whispered.

“What was that? Who’s there?” Lance asked. “Who’s listening?”

“Nobody,” I said. “Just my little sister.”

“Okay,” Lance said. “Now listen up, Dora the Explorer. If you dig any deeper on Aralt, you’re going to get in way over your head. Why don’t you and your little sister go find some dolls to play with?”

The line went dead.

“Dolls,” I said. “Right.”

“He’s a little uptight,” Kasey said.

“We know who Aralt was,” Megan said. “That’s pretty good for one day.”

It didn’t seem all that good to me. “Knowing he was a womanizer doesn’t help us. It just reinforces the whole ‘lusty’ thing.”

“And the gypsy—that’s something.” Megan went to my mother’s dresser and stared dreamily at herself in the mirror. “It’s kind of romantic, don’t you think?”

“Which part?” I asked. “That he left a trail of ruined women, or that they killed themselves to erase the shame of falling for the wrong guy?”

She drew back, looking offended. “I’m not saying I want it to happen to me. I’m just saying, to love someone so much you’d give up everything for them is…”

“It’s sick,” Kasey said. “Sorry.”