The Angel Stone: A Novel (9 page)

I awoke, arms flailing, grasping for something solid to hold on to, to keep from fading into nothingness. My hand hit the edge of the night table, hard enough to bring me fully awake and send something skittering across the floor … 
claws scraping bark
 …

I jumped to my feet, scanning the predawn shadows of my bedroom for the winged creatures in my dream. But then I saw a glint of silver on the floor beneath the window and padded cautiously over to it, keeping my eyes on the window for winged monsters. I knelt and picked up the silvery object, which turned out to be the Luckenbooth brooch. The half
brooch. I traced the heart with my fingers and noticed that along the inside rim of the heart were little bumps. I’d seen them before and always thought they were part of the design, but now, looking more closely at them, I saw that they were prongs that had been worn down by time. Prongs that had once held a stone. I held the brooch up to the window. The milky light of dawn filled the loop inside the heart and glowed there like an opal—like a tear-shaped opal.
An angel’s tear
. At some time, my brooch had held the angel stone.

Although it was only five in the morning, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep anymore. Pulling a warm fleece hoodie over T-shirt and leggings, I slipped the brooch into the pocket to keep it close by me. Then I went downstairs, made coffee, and spent the next few hours searching for more information on the angel stone or the hallow door—and finding nothing. I emailed Frank and Soheila, telling them I’d like to talk to them both later about a research topic for this winter’s MLA conference. We’d agreed that MLA would be code for
need to talk
. The code worked.

It was barely light out when I heard a knock at my door and opened it to find Frank, Soheila, and, more surprising, Mac Stewart on my front porch.

“Frank was worried by your email,” Soheila said, giving me a meaningful look.

“I was worried, too,” Mac said, slapping his flannel-covered chest. “You shouldn’t have gone into the woods with that man, Callie. He’s a”—Mac lowered his voice and leaned in to whisper—“vampire!”

“I know, Mac,” I said, “but he’s a perfectly well-behaved one. He wanted to warn me about some blood-drained creatures
he’s found in the woods …” I looked past the porch to the trees on the edge of my property. Even in the morning light, the woods had taken on a menacing look.

“Yes, we need to talk about that, too,” said Soheila, “but right now Mac has something he needs to tell you. May we come in?”

“Of course!” I said quickly, embarrassed I’d kept them standing on the porch so long—not that I had anything in particular to hide in my house, but I felt that, with her acute senses, Soheila might pick up some residue of the dreams I’d been having. As I opened the door, I found myself sniffing the air, as if erotic dreams would have a particular scent, but all I smelled was a delicious aroma wafting out of a bag Mac carried.

“Oatcakes!” Mac said. “My mom made them for you!”

“Thank her for me,” I said, hoping that Mac’s mother hadn’t somehow gotten the idea I was a potential wife for Mac. “I’ll brew some more coffee to go with them.” I steered my guests toward the living room, but they all followed me into the kitchen. Mac sat at the kitchen table and folded his hands in his lap like a boy waiting for his afternoon snack. Soheila went to the cupboard to take out the Franciscan Rose teacups left there last fall by my erstwhile roommate, Phoenix. Frank sat down next to Mac and leaned so far back I was afraid he’d break my spindly kitchen chair. I turned my back on them and busied myself at the coffeemaker and arranging the oatcakes on a plate. The rich buttery smell instantly brought me back to childhood and made me feel calmer. I brought the plate over and Mac eagerly tucked into the warm oatcakes, slathering them with the strawberry jam I’d also provided.

“Just like my nan always served them,” Mac mumbled, spewing crumbs.

Soheila and Frank exchanged a look across Mac, as if he were their overgrown child who was refusing to perform for their guests.

“Your nan’s culinary preferences are very interesting, but you told us that she had something to tell Callie,” Frank said impatiently. He looked up at me. “Mac said you were the only one she could tell.”

“That’s what Nan told me. She said Callie was the only one she could tell about the hallow door.”

“Your nan knows how to find the hallow door?” Now I was the one impatient with Mac. “Why didn’t she mention this earlier?”

Poor Mac’s eyes widened. I hadn’t meant to snap at him, but hours of fruitless search had left me frustrated.

Frank cleared his throat and looked embarrassed. “Mrs. Stewart hasn’t been well …” he began.

“She fell last summer,” Mac said. “Hit her head and broke her hip. She needed surgery, and when she came out of it she wasn’t right in the head. She’s always been sharp as a tack, but after the surgery she didn’t even know me.” Mac’s voice betrayed the hurt of a favorite grandson. “We thought she’d be senile for the rest of her life, but then yesterday when I was there for my weekly visit she sat up in bed, her old self again, and asked me to send for Cailleach McFay.”

“She knew my name? But I’ve never met her.”

“Um … I may have mentioned you to her,” Frank said. “I went to her the morning of the solstice to ask if she knew any way to unmask a nephilim. She was friends with my grandmother and I knew she had spells for unmasking predators, but it never occurred to me she knew anything about opening a door to Faerie …” A terrible look came over Frank’s face, and he slapped his hand down on the table. “Damn! It was
right after that she had her fall. I must have drawn their attention to her.”

“You mean to say that those nephilim creeps hurt my nan?” I’d never seen Mac Stewart look so angry. His bland innocent face turned the color of his flannel shirt, and his bee-stung lips drew back in a grimace.

“But why?” I said. “Just because she knows something about another door …”

“She knows more than that,” Mac said. “Nan used to tell us stories about how the Stewarts had destroyed evil monsters back in Scotland.”

Frank pounded the table again. “I should have protected her!”

“Don’t blame yourself, Frank,” Soheila said, laying her hand over Frank’s.

Instantly I saw a change come over Frank. His anger poured off him like water moving over a rock. He lifted startled eyes to Soheila, and she removed her hand.

“That’s right, Mr. Delmarco, it’s not your fault. It’s those … 
those bastards!
What kind of monster would pick on a sweet old lady? Well, they’ll be sorry they did. She’s herself now and is fit to be tied. When my nan gets her temper up—well, you don’t want to be on her bad side. I once let my brother Ham fall off a ladder when I was supposed to be watching him, and I couldn’t sit for a week.”

“Your grandmother sounds like a formidable woman, Mac,” I said, repressing a smile at the thought that a good spanking might defeat the nephilim. “But I wouldn’t want to put her in more danger by involving her.”

“I don’t think we have a choice,” Soheila said. “All my research into the angel stone indicates it was last seen in Scotland in the seventeenth century.”

“That coincides with what I read in the story Nicky gave me.” I told them about the ballad of William Duffy and the broken brooch.

“You have half of the brooch?” Frank asked.

I took the piece of jewelry out of my pocket and laid it on the table. The empty tear-shaped loop seemed to shimmer against the white enamel surface. “My mother said it was an heirloom passed down through generations of my father’s family,” I said.

“Then your ancestors must have once had the stone,” Soheila said. “That makes sense. I found a reference that said that only a doorkeeper could wield the power of the stone.”

“That’s great,” I said, “but my mother never mentioned a stone that went with the brooch. I think the fairy girl—my ancestor—must have lost it or had it taken from her …” I remembered the moment in the dream when I—or the first Cailleach, I supposed—was running through the meadow. I knew in the dream that she didn’t have the stone with her, but I didn’t know why not or what had happened to it. “In Mary McGowan’s note, she says witch hunters had come to the village—”

“They might have been nephilim,” Soheila interrupted. “Many witch hunters were.”

“Maybe. But why would she run away if she had something to destroy them?”

“Maybe the stone didn’t work without the whole brooch,” Frank said. “What was the name of the village?”

“Ballydoon,” I said.

“That’s where the Stewarts come from!” Mac exclaimed, his features freed from anger with the elasticity of youth. “Callie, that means our people come from the same village. It’s like we’re fated to … meet,” Mac finished bashfully. I was afraid he’d been about to say fated to
marry
.

“It might even mean you’re related,” Frank added teasingly.

Mac’s smile vanished. “Related? But that would mean …”

“Don’t worry,” Frank said. “You’d be distant cousins at most—kissing cousins.”

I kicked Frank under the table. “Let’s focus on learning where the stone is and how to get it. When can I visit your grandmother, Mac?”

“Oh, she’s my great-grandmother, at least! No one even knows how old she is. We can’t find a birth certificate for her and she says she can’t remember the year, although she does say she remembers Calvin Coolidge’s inauguration, so I guess she’s pretty old. We Stewarts are long-lived.” He puffed out his chest, as if he’d come up with a selling point that was sure to convince me to marry him even if we
were
distantly related. “I’ll take you there to meet her later. The doctors wanted to have a look at her this morning, so she suggested that we come around teatime.”

I couldn’t suppress a smile. The woman had been in a state of dementia for three months and now she was ready to conduct a high tea. “Okay. We can all go at four.”

Mac’s face fell at the inclusion of Frank and Soheila.

“It’s better you go yourself, Callie,” Soheila said. “Mrs. Stewart asked specifically for you. She won’t want a crowd—and she’s more likely to tell you about the hallow door since you’re a doorkeeper.”

“And,” Frank added with a mischievous smile, “if she thinks you’re her future granddaughter-in-law.”

Mac blushed for the third time in ten minutes, and I glared at Frank.

“I’d be delighted to meet your nan,” I said to Mac. “Is there anything I can bring her?”

Mac looked down at the pile of crumbs that was all that
was left of the oatcakes. “I don’t suppose you know how to make those?” he asked doubtfully. “I forgot that Ma said I was to save some for Nan’s tea.”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“Really?” Mac gave me an adoring look, and I realized that if I hadn’t had it already, I’d just secured his eternal devotion. Mac said he’d better get his farm chores done then and got up to go.

Soheila and Frank walked with me to the front porch to see him off. As I watched Mac get into his shiny new pickup truck, I thought that I could probably do worse than to marry a man who did all his chores and visited his ancient granny every week at the nursing home even when she didn’t remember who he was.

“You’d go crazy in a month,” Soheila said, divining my thought.

“Yeah,” Frank said, walking ahead to his car. “I don’t see you as a farmer’s wife, McFay.”

Soheila lingered behind for a moment. “But he’d certainly be a better choice than the incubus you’re dreaming about,” she said in a low whisper.

So she
could
sense my dreams. “But it’s not really my incubus,” I objected. “He’s … different.”

Soheila exhaled a world-weary sigh that gusted autumn leaves off my porch. “Of course he’s
different;
that’s why my kind are so seductive. We change with you, shifting ourselves to fit every mood and whim. But remember, Callie, the incubus died in his last incarnation. He can’t come back again. You’ll never be able to be together in the flesh.”

“Then there’s no danger in dreaming about him, is there?” I countered, lifting my chin defiantly.

Soheila shook her head, and the leaves in my yard spun into a small whirlwind. “Just because he can’t have you in
the flesh doesn’t mean he won’t still try to have you in your dreams. He’ll make you unfit for loving anyone else. Don’t let him, Callie. Use him to find the door and the stone if you have to, but then let him go. Or someday you’ll find you’re not able to.”

I spent the afternoon making bannocks. I did, in fact, have a recipe for the traditional Scottish oatcakes, from my father, who had made them for my childhood tea parties when he and my mother weren’t off on an archaeological dig. When I was ten, he’d taught me how to make them, explaining how he’d learned from his grandmother, who had learned from her grandmother. Every family had their own recipe, he’d explained, and the McFay bannocks were known as the lightest and sweetest cakes in all of Scotland. As I kneaded the dough, I could almost feel his hands over mine, showing me how it was done. I had to stop to wipe my eyes on the apron I’d put over the nice Sunday visiting clothes I was wearing.

I took off my apron and brushed flour off my plaid wool skirt. Perhaps I was laying it on a bit thick by wearing a Scottish plaid to visit Mrs. Stewart, but I wanted to make a good impression and so had also put on tights, a crisp white blouse, and even the silver Luckenbooth brooch. Pinning on the brooch, I’d remembered something else my mother had told me when she gave it to me. “A McFay is never complete until he—or she—finds the match to this heart. Your father said
that I was his
other heart
.” If Soheila was correct and my incubus could never return, would I ever find my
other heart
?

Mac came to the kitchen door just as I was transferring the hot bannocks into a basket. He was wearing an ill-fitting sports jacket over a fancier-than-his-everyday plaid shirt (cotton instead of flannel) and dress slacks instead of jeans. When he saw what I was wearing—and smelled the bannocks—he burst into a wide smile.

“My nan is going to love you!”

I instantly felt guilty because I’d gone to all this trouble to get information out of the old lady and not because I wanted to marry her great-grandson. But at least I’d made Mac happy. He grinned all the way to Shady Pines, which was a short drive away, near the edge of the downtown area. I’d passed the nondescript two-story brick building before without really noticing it. There was a large, shaded patio in front, on which elderly people often congregated. Today it was festooned with balloons that said H
APPY
B
IRTHDAY
G
RANDMA
! A large multigenerational group was gathered around a tiny elderly woman wearing a pointed party hat. Mac stopped by on our way in to wish Mrs. Rappaport a happy birthday and ask how her new hip was. I stood in my nice plaid skirt, holding my basket of fragrant bannocks, while the entire Rappaport family scrutinized me as a potential fiancée for Mac. By the time we left here today, the whole town would think we were engaged.