Celtic Fire

She managed to get her prize into the Land Rover—hiding it on the floor behind the driver’s seat—just as she heard the sound of a siren in the distance.

Even with the weird night acoustics of the town, she could tell the patrol car was still making its way through the one-way streets. Close but no cigar, she thought, grinning for the first time that night.

She fired the engine up and threw the car into first, pulling away from the grass verge without turning on her lights.

The police siren was closing in, but instead of turning right and following the road out of town, she drove straight across into Broadway, a narrow lane that led only to the Roman amphitheater and the rugby field. There, without so much as a streetlight to guide the way, she had no choice but to turn on the lights so she could navigate what amounted to a dirt track.

It was a calculated chance. She knew how the police thought. They’d expect her to run. Hiding in plain sight wasn’t in their playbook. Hiding out in the parking lot outside the old Roman amphitheater was not logical, so it was her best shot at getting away with the robbery. She’d watched the parking lot over the past week, making sure that it wasn’t unusual for cars to be left overnight. Every night there’d been a handful of motors in there, left by people who’d spent the evening in the rugby club and decided to return to collect their car in the morning.

She pulled into a space beyond the last vehicle and turned off the engine.

She sank back into the soft leather bucket seat and closed her eyes, tension flooding from her body.

She’d done it.

She gave herself a minute to savor the fact, then climbed onto the backseat and settled herself beneath a picnic blanket to wait for morning.

Chapter 2 (#ulink_61ae40ef-e261-5ba3-92de-0a15c5ebb201)

Daybreak began somewhere over the horizon.

The faint glow in the sky signaled the start of the day.

For the curate, there was more than enough time before the 8:00 a.m. service to unlock the doors of the cathedral and make the preparations for Communion.

He hurried along the path in the slowly brightening gloom, enjoying this time of the morning as he always did, when God’s glory was there for all to wonder at. He was a simple man who enjoyed simple pleasures. Anyone who had ever heard him in the pulpit knew that. The curate crossed the old wooden footbridge spanning the brackish water of the narrow River Alyn before it moved out to the sea. The man in the shadows knew that it wouldn’t be long before he arrived—the curate was a creature of habit—and like it or not he was going to have to give up his search for now if he wanted to slip away unnoticed.

He had already spent a couple of days checking the grounds, examining individual gravestones, crossing them off on the rough map he had sketched out to be sure he didn’t return to overlapping areas of the bone garden.

But he still hadn’t found what he was looking for.

More than once he had been approached by staff and clergy of the cathedral asking if he was all right, or if he needed any help looking for a particular grave. Each time he smiled politely, said thanks but no, and they left him to wander the huge grounds. It was more attention than he wanted to draw to himself, but it was of the natural sort, in keeping with what the staff saw every day. That was the trick, to remain inside the ordinary, not to do something outside of it that would be remembered. There were tourists doing wax rubbings of some of the older gravestones, school groups being given a guided tour of the noteworthy dead and told the stories of the old town in hushed voices.

The curate’s shuffling figure drew closer, the man looking like something out of a cartoon as he held up a hand, conducting the nature around him in time with the music he was humming, and the man knew he’d have to stay where he was now until the holy man had gone inside. He was a genuinely happy man. There were so few of those in the world. He almost skipped as he came through the lych-gate, his footing sure on the cracked and broken cobblestones that lead up to the main cathedral doors. A huge weeping willow overhung the path. Its long thin dagger-leaves rustled in the breeze. To hide from the curate, the man had taken to the deep shadows the willow cast rather helpfully.

He was silent, still, allowing the shadows to shroud him. That meant he was as good as invisible to the curate.

As the curate neared he took a single slow step back, allowing the tree trunk to come between them.

When his heel came down it was on something harder than grass, but as he placed his weight on it a sound cried out.

A strange noise...

A voice calling?

The curate stopped in his tracks, his head cocked on one side as he looked directly at the man even though he couldn’t see him for the protection of the shadows.

“Hello?” The curate waited for a response, his eyes scanning the shadows for any sign of movement, which proved he couldn’t see the man hiding there. The man didn’t answer. “Who’s there?”

The man held his breath, readying himself in case the clergyman moved closer.

He would hate to have to kill him.

Mercifully he stood still, too.

He had no idea what had caused the “voice”—the sound of stone grinding against stone. Some sort of echo effect caused by being so close to the great cathedral?

“If you need food or shelter you are welcome,” the curate called. “I can get you a hot drink as soon as I have done my duties inside. Would you like that? Tea? Coffee?”

The man tried hard not to laugh.

There was something about do-gooders that brought out the worst in him. Put them in the robes of the church—which they stupidly believed gave them a cloak of invulnerability—and they were insufferable. He decided to have some fun. “I could murder a cup of tea,” he replied in a voice more gruff and deeper than his usual tone. It masked his accent. “Thank you.”

The cleric waved in his direction, the smile on his face broader than the simple act of boiling water warranted, and made for the main door of the cathedral with his keys jangling in his hand. The curate was clearly a trusting soul. But then why would he imagine the man would need anything more than that? Why would he conjure imaginary thieves intent on mugging him? Why indeed.

No doubt there were processes and procedures in place to protect the relics—triggers that would dispatch a silent alarm to the police if anyone tried to force their way inside. That didn’t concern him. He had no interest in what was inside. None of the ritualistic paraphernalia held any fascination for him. It wasn’t about value. While there was a chance that what he was searching for lay inside the building, it was a slim one because by rights it would have been discovered long ago if that was the case. No. The only thing that interested him about this particular patch of hallowed ground was a long-lost burial plot he knew must lie somewhere within the property.

And what was buried there along with the old bones was worth more to him than anything the church in Wales held precious: it was the final resting place of Giraldus Cambrensis, Gerald of Wales.

Once he was sure that the curate was inside he waited another moment, then heard other voices carrying in the air as the holy man was greeted by his brethren. The man then ran as quickly and as lightly as he could to reach the car he had parked in a pay-and-display lot tucked at the bottom of an overgrown country lane a couple of hundred yards beyond the towering spires of the cathedral.

He was intrigued by the “voice” and the curious stone that seemed to have triggered it, but it wasn’t worth the risk of returning in daylight. At least not today. A few days, maybe, to allow the curate to forget about the poor soul who was too timid to come in to claim his cup of tea.

He started the car and drove carefully through the narrow lanes and one-way system until he found himself on the road to Haverfordwest. Once he reached Solva he pulled off the road to take advantage of the unobstructed—and spectacular—view over the bay, then settled back to catch a couple of hours’ sleep.

Chapter 3 (#ulink_66d0cd43-95ca-5cdd-9aa1-5a26062a5709)

Another day, another flight, another country.

World traveler or not, Annja had flown enough long-haul flights to know she’d want nothing more than sleep when she reached her final destination, but more likely than not the room wouldn’t be made up. That was the problem with an evening departure from New York. It was great in theory, if you could sleep on the plane, but she couldn’t so she’d effectively been up all night without the joys of dancing and pounding nightclub bass to keep her going. That’d slow the whole body clock adjustment thing along with her screwed-up circadian rhythms. One thing she’d noticed was the older she got, the more difficult the adjustment was. A few years ago jet lag barely touched her.

Through the window to her left she saw nothing but cloud below her, thick, white and impenetrable.

She checked her watch. There was still about an hour until landing, which meant somewhere below her lay the endless deeps of the Atlantic Ocean. Soon enough they’d hit the change of air as they traversed Ireland. That was always an invitation to turbulence, like Greenland. It was something about the warm air and cold air colliding.

Annja had been looking forward to this trip for a while.

She’d already earmarked a bunch of places she wanted to visit to research possible segment ideas for Chasing History’s Monsters, not that she’d shared them with Doug Morrell, her producer on the show. As much as she loved Doug, there was a limit to how many times she could stomach her ideas being energetically talked over in favor of zombies and werewolves as seemed to be his usual habit.

She’d made sure there was time for pleasure included in her schedule.

There were places she wanted to revisit while she was here, places that she’d visited when she had researched the show on the legendary King Arthur, and even though she’d thought she had left little unsaid at the time there was something absolutely fascinating—and undying—about the Grail King. She wanted to revisit Glastonbury first, and climb to the top of the tor on a sunny day. She wanted to look down from the summit and imagine what it might have been like if the land around it had been flooded.

Could the tor really have been the mythical island of Avalon?

Anything was possible, of course, but she was experienced enough to put flights of fantasy out of her head. One thing Annja Creed prided herself on was that she dealt in facts. What the rest of the world didn’t know was that there were some facts that it was best they never learned.

“Orange juice?” the flight attendant asked, disturbing her thoughts.