Total pages in book: 177
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
But when it landed in her palms, there was nothing but silence.
She glanced up at the two men of her life.
“It’s a fake.”
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.