Celtic Fire

She moved gingerly at first, with the lightest of touches, then started laughing as she rubbed her hand across the smoothest of surfaces.

This was no quern; it had been used for sharpening blades, not grinding down grain. She knew that she was right. The only question that remained was whether this was the stone she was looking for, or whether it was just any old mislabeled whetstone, and she couldn’t work that out by touch alone. It would have to wait. Today was about showing her doubting twin precisely what she was capable of.

It had taken a while to convince him that she was right about the stone, and even then there was that gleam in his eye he got when he was humoring her. Thirteen minutes older than her, he liked to think that he was the dynamic force in their little family of two, but she was no slouch. And this would prove it.

She held the cup of coffee a few inches from her mouth, feeling the heat and breathing in the aroma, savoring every second of it.

* * *

BEFORE AWENA WAS able to brew another pot of coffee, she heard the sound of a car approaching.

Geraint coming home.

She wanted to rush to the door and hurry him inside, eager to show what she’d found. It was funny how life didn’t change—once upon a time it would have been showing him the new eggs in the birds’ nests or foxes in the woods behind the house. Now it was just a different sort of treasure. He’d always humored her then, always followed out to let Awena show him what she’d found and pretended it was the most interesting thing in the world, even if he’d already seen it. He was the perfect big brother like that. Or he had been. He wasn’t quite so generous now, a little less tolerant of her whims now they were older and supposed to be beyond flights of fancy. He wouldn’t chase her down to the bottom of the garden to hunt fairies anymore, but that didn’t stop her wanting to share her tumbling train of thought with him every bit as much as she always had.

“Awena,” he called, opening the door.

So many great things in life began with something simple like a door opening, she thought, metaphorical or literal.

“Kitchen,” she replied, grinning like an idiot despite wanting to come across as nonchalant, confident, grown up. She wanted him to walk into the room on his own and see the stone on the table for himself, let him join the pieces together and work it out without her having to spell it out for him.

But he ruined it, walking in blindly and sitting down without even noticing it. He was obviously preoccupied with something he was as every bit as desperate to tell her as she was to tell him. So Awena said nothing, giving him a chance to say his piece, but then he saw the huge stone and whatever he’d been about to tell her was shunted out of his mind.

“What the hell is that?”

It wasn’t quite the response she had been hoping for, but it had certainly got his attention.

It was painfully obvious he was unhappy she’d gone ahead and done everything without him, but she didn’t care. She’d pulled it off. She’d proved what she was capable of. She’d done it. Not them. Not him. She had.

She twisted her lips into a half smile and shook her head, knowing that her eyes were still smiling.

“Don’t play games, Awena. There was no need to take stupid risks. We should have planned this out together. There were other ways.”

“Were there, now? Like what exactly? Walking up to the museum with a blank check and saying name your price? Don’t be ridiculous.”

“But I could have paid someone else to do it.” He thumped the table in frustration, but the stone didn’t even move so much as a millimeter. “There was no need to put yourself in danger. What would I do without you? Did you even think about me when you were playing cat burglar?”

“There were no risks,” she lied smoothly. It helped that she almost believed that herself. “It was a good plan. Besides, I wanted to do this on my own. I wanted to make you proud of me. I wanted to make him proud.” She wasn’t sure why she said that. She hadn’t thought of their father for days, for weeks even. But that was her dad; he was like a specter that loomed over the pair of them, ever present even when he wasn’t there. She saw the way that Geraint looked at her when she mentioned him, but let it pass.

“I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear about it.” He raised both palms in surrender, then walked past the table to join her, seemingly more interested in the coffeepot than her prize. It hurt that he showed no interest in it, but she knew he was just trying to punish her.

Awena was pissed with him. She’d been so excited to share her success with him, but now all she felt like doing was giving him the silent treatment. He always made out that he was the strong one, the rock, but she’d seen how he could be when he thought she wasn’t looking. He might not like what she had done, but he wouldn’t stay angry with her for long.

She’d give him an hour.

Maybe less.

Then he’d be all over the stone, talking about it, and wanting to hear every audacious word of her heist like it was some grand story.... Still, he’d already ruined it for her.

“So, how was your trip?” she asked, turning the focus back on him. She knew he was dying to tell her now he was over the shock of what she’d done. He shrugged. “Stop sulking,” she said. “You know you want to tell me.”

“Fine,” was all he managed, but nothing more. He still couldn’t take his eyes from the stone. She continued to sip her coffee in silence and waited as he started to circle it until finally he crouched down to look at it more closely.

She smiled as he ran his fingertips over the surface just as she had done.

He was hooked.

Chapter 7 (#ulink_cf4ade52-b81a-5017-ae7f-87d07482acd3)

The museum was closed.

Annja had moved her car from the pub to the hotel, checked in, dropped off her bags and, despite the lure of the big comfortable bed, turned around and headed straight back out again. She’d hoped to get a quick look around the museum before it closed for the afternoon, but when she got there she saw a makeshift sign on the door that said it was closed for the day, so it’d have to wait until tomorrow.

She peered through the long window, pressing her face up to the glass. There were lights on inside, and she could just about make out the shadow-shapes of a handful of people milling around. She tried to shield more of the window from the sun, cupping her hands around her brow as though peering through binoculars. She saw a woman talking to a policeman. There was another man—dressed in overalls measuring up the size of one of the display cabinets. The woman saw her face pressed up against the window and mouthed the words Closed and Sorry, shaking her head before she returned her attention to the policeman with his notebook poised.

It wasn’t exactly difficult to put the pieces together: a man measuring up a display case, a policeman taking a statement; there’d obviously been a robbery. It was surprising that a local museum would have any particularly valuable exhibits, though. Normally these rural sites just offered a few fairly interesting treasures dug up from the site, a few battered coins and rings, with the most precious golden torcs and such being spirited away to London for the British Museum’s collections.

The brochure the landlord had given her mentioned a cache of small Roman coins, which would be both difficult to sell and unlikely to fetch a great deal of money—certainly not enough to make the effort worthwhile—so the theft was more likely to be a case of petty vandalism, probably bored kids looking for a thrill than any international criminal masterminds at work. Kids would have no idea as to the value of anything inside the collection and probably thought it was all priceless.

Hopefully no one had been hurt.

Annja turned her back on the museum and crossed the quiet road.

A handful of cars had driven by while she stood there. Was the place always this quiet? A woman passed her with a buggy. It took Annja a second to realize it was the same woman she had seen in the beer garden earlier, proving just how small a town it really was. The woman smiled at her, clearly enjoying the momentary respite her sleeping baby offered.

Annja proceeded along the road. An old lady weighted down by straining bags overfilled with shopping nodded at her as she shuffled off toward her home, stockings rolled down around swollen ankles. It was like something out of an L. S. Lowry painting, only she wasn’t a matchstick. This was a sleepy little town where strangers smiled at one another in the street. She was from a neighborhood where the guy in the apartment across the landing didn’t say hello, never mind a complete stranger. Her commute involved people crowded in on the subway too scared to make eye contact because they never quite knew what was going on in the heads of their fellow passengers. It was a different world. As much as she enjoyed the hustle and bustle of big cities and the anonymity that came with them, there was something special about quiet places like this. She couldn’t live here, she’d go out of her mind after a week, but for a couple of days it was a great place to recharge.

A signpost shaped like a finger pointed down a narrow lane, promising her that it led to the amphitheater. She’d followed the same lane to move her car from the pub to the rear of the hotel.

Time to go exploring.

Annja walked past the cluster of cottages on the left and realized that it was in the garden of one that the most recent discoveries had been made. She tried to recall what she’d read. There was some kind of preservation order on the buildings that was supposed to prevent people from digging too deep. But the urgent removal of a tree teetering due to severe storms had exposed earth that had never been excavated and led to all sorts of wonderful finds. Sometimes life was funny like that, in order to preserve one way of life another had been kept hidden for over a century and it had taken a brutal act of nature herself to change that. Annja skirted the gardens, following the lane down toward the ruin.

It wasn’t the first time she’d seen an amphitheater, but there was something incredible about seeing it here, right out at the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire.

Beyond the houses the lane opened up, providing more room for school buses to negotiate the track down to the ruin. The camber was quite severe, allowing the rainwater to sluice away without eroding too much of the track. She saw a row of buses parked on the right with a cluster of teenagers milling around them, waiting to board. The kids were full of noise. A few others made their way to cars parked on the other side, no doubt to drive home with parents who’d chaperoned the visit.

Annja kept close to the fence, looking for a gate into the site. What she found looked like a rusty old turnstile from a ballpark. She slipped through, keen to be away from the critical mass of teenagers.

She stepped into a huge open field, its grass clipped as short as a playing field, which maintained the illusion of having entered the ghost of the old stadium. In the center, instead of a diamond, she spotted an information board. She walked over to it.

As she approached the board, the excavated amphitheater was revealed by the subtle change in elevation. It was easy to imagine how the remains had been hidden beneath earth and grass not so long ago. She walked in the footsteps of history, following a line of Romans and Britons before her to the excavation, eventually reaching the center. At this point, she imagined the wooden structure that had once stood above these stone foundations and how it must have towered above anyone down in the arena.

The acoustics were interesting; the stone sides cut out the external noise. Despite the fact they were no more than a couple of hundred meters away, she couldn’t hear the kids who had still seemed so loud before she’d gone down into the heart of the monument. It was a curiously intimate moment of tranquility.

Not that it lasted.

Her cell phone’s ringtone ended the peace.