Shine (31 page)

“The dialect’s different here.” Zachary picked up his sweater from the back of the sofa, and the notepad and pen next to the room phone. He shuffled to the balcony doors, smoothing his pillow-tousled hair. “But I’ll try.”

I sat cross-legged on the bed, listening to Zachary’s muffled foreign
words through the door. At one point, he repeated the same phrase three times, slower with each pass. Either he had run up against a Scottish-Irish language barrier, or he couldn’t believe his ears and had to confirm what the ghost was telling him.

Finally the violet glow disappeared. Zachary came back inside.

I bounced off the bed. “Anything interesting?”

“Aye.” He wiped his feet on the woven rug, and I realized he hadn’t put shoes on to go outside.

“You must be freezing.” I handed him the green wool throw-blanket from the back of the chair. He took it from me, a dazed look on his face.

“Must be hard to get used to,” I said. “Talking to ghosts?”

“Aura, that wasn’t just any ghost.” He moved stiffly to sit on the love seat. “It was Padraig Murphy.”

I sat down hard on the ottoman across from him. “Brigit Murphy’s son? The one my mom and dad said tried to raise the ancient gods on the day of the Shine?”

“That Padraig Murphy.”

“How did he know where to find us? How did he even know who we were?”

“He said he had connections in the living world. Also, remember, my real name was on the original reservation for Ballyrock.” He shook his head. “Stupid of me, but back in March I didn’t know—”

“So what did Padraig want?” I grabbed for the notepad, but Zachary pulled it out of reach.

“Give me a moment tae think, lass.” He switched on the lamp and squinted at his notes. I knocked my knees together in my impatience.
“Some of this could be wrong,” he said. “His accent was brutal, and the Gaelic around here is so different from Scottish.”

“But …”

“But he said a mistake was made. His mother did a ritual the morning of the Shine, trying to make the Tuatha Dé Danann—the ancient gods—rise again. They thought whoever was in the light at the moment of the solstice would give birth a year later to an incarnation of the day-god Óengus.”

I gasped. “Just like we guessed! What’d he say about the mistake?”

“He said the ritual awoke an even older power within Newgrange.”

“Older than the Tuatha Dé Danann?” I tried to remember who had supposedly lived in Ireland before those legendary folks. “More superheroes?”

“Not people. A gateway, between the living and the dead. A gateway that wasn’t meant to be opened.”

“Whoa. That makes it sound like since the Shine, more people are becoming ghosts.” It fit with a theory we’d discussed after first reading my mother’s journal: that the Shine opened up the world of the living to those who’d died suddenly. Then the Shift gave those wandering dead a better chance at peace by giving them people to talk to—all us post-Shifters.

“That wasn’t the only mistake. The power from the solstice sunrise was supposed to go into only one person.” He lowered the notepad into his lap. “But it split in two. It went into your mother and my father. Padraig saw it happen.”

“He was there at the Shine, when they were filled with light? When Eowyn saw it?”

“He worked as a guide at Newgrange. It was his idea to have visitors walk through the light. Some guides still do it, some don’t.”

So Padraig Murphy had engineered the Shine, but instead of freeing the ancient gods, it had freed the dead—or at least some of them—in the form of ghosts.

“That’s amazing!” I jumped to my feet, wishing I could tell the world what we’d just figured out. Except, I wasn’t totally sure what that was. “Hang on. What exactly got split between your dad and my mom?”

Zachary paused, maybe translating in his head, and when he spoke, the words came slow. “Remember what Eowyn said about Newgrange being built for two purposes? To serve the dead, but also to separate them from the living.”

“Right.” I hopped on my toes. “Oh! If the Newgrange power split between your dad and my mom, then each of us has one, I don’t know, manifestation of it? I help ghosts, and you scare them off.”

“Usually.”

“Did you tell Padraig we can trade powers when we kiss?”

“Of course not,” Zachary said. “He seemed confused that we could both talk to him, but I distracted him with questions.”

I paced behind the armchair, sliding my hand over its dark wooden frame. “So how do we know he’s not making it up?”

“We don’t. We only know that he believes it, because ghosts can’t lie. There is a way to test it, though.”

“How?”

“He said we need to go to the Dowth passage tomb for the solstice sunset. Not this afternoon, because the twenty-first is the one
day during the year Dowth is open to the public. Tomorrow, when we can go alone.”

“Cool.” I’d wanted to go to Dowth, anyway. It was basically a mini Newgrange, but with two passages instead of one, and since it hadn’t been restored, it looked the way Newgrange had for thousands of years. “If it’s not open to the public, how do we get in?”

“Padraig says the gate’s got just a padlock. Bolt cutters would do the job.”

A thrill snaked up my spine at the thought of breaking into a historic monument. “Hey, the solstice is technically on the twenty-second, anyway, at like two a.m., so it’ll be the right day. But I still don’t understand
why
we need to go to Dowth.”

Zachary hesitated, running his finger along the notepad’s spiral spine. “I asked him to repeat himself, because I wanted to make sure. He said, if we both go to Dowth at solstice sunset, we could shut the gate between the living and the dead.” He looked at me. “Aura, we could end the Shift.”

O
bviously, we didn’t sleep the rest of the night. Instead, we built another fire and sat together on the love seat, sometimes speaking, sometimes silent, turning this mystery over in our minds.

Could we really end the Shift?
we wondered. Did we even
want
to? My lifelong dream was to make the ghosts go away—until Logan had died, haunting me and the others he loved. As painful as that had been for all of us, it had given him a chance at peace and closure he otherwise wouldn’t have had.

“But don’t forget,” Zachary said, “before the Shift, some people still became ghosts. And a few others could see them.”

I couldn’t forget that, not when my own father had haunted Aunt Gina, one of the few people who could see ghosts before the Shift (and who had lost the ability afterward).

“It would be like turning the world back to normal,” I said. “But this
is
normal for me, for all post-Shifters.”

“And how’s that working out for ya?” His voice held a bitter edge.

I put my head on his shoulder, hoping it would comfort him. He’d probably suffered worse than any post-Shifter had. So far, at least.

“The DMP draft starts today,” he pointed out. “Things are going to get really bad there in the States. Probably everywhere else, too.”

“And we could stop it. Make it all go away.” We’d be doing the world a huge favor by ending the Shift.

I checked the clock on the mantel: five thirty. Though sunrise wasn’t until almost nine, we had to arrive at Newgrange by seven thirty, and we’d probably get lost on the way.

Time to get ready for the biggest day of our lives.

I stood, then froze as a new thought hit me. “Zach, what if Padraig Murphy isn’t exactly right? What if it’s not the sunset at Dowth we need to be at to stop the Shift? What if it’s Newgrange at sunrise?”

Zachary rubbed the faint stubble on his chin. “Maybe. That is where it all started, with your mum and my dad.” He gazed up at me. “Maybe it’ll end there, too.”

We didn’t get lost on the way to Newgrange, and I decided to take this miracle as a sign that Zachary and I were meant to be there. (Even though it was his father’s connections that got us VIP tickets, so we wouldn’t have to go through the usual lottery.)

Like in an enchanted gateway, frost-speckled lanterns lit our way down the arched arbor connecting the parking lot to the visitor center.
Inside, the greeters gave us special solstice pins and offered us hot drinks while we waited for the bus that would take us to Newgrange itself. Zachary, of course, dragged me straight toward the visitor center exhibit, where I paced, overcome with excitement, while he absorbed facts he probably already knew.

I made a hasty trip to the ladies’ room—too much hot cocoa plus nerves—and when I came out, what I saw stopped me in my tracks.

A middle-aged man was following Zachary, a man I remembered from my flight from Baltimore to Atlanta. He’d walked near me when I changed gates at the Atlanta airport, but then had taken a different international flight.

To Glasgow.

The man had mousy brown hair, rimless glasses, and the world’s blandest face. Zero distinguishing features, which as Zachary had once told me, made him the perfect spy.

In the visitor center exhibit, he stood one display behind Zachary. Instead of the business suit he’d worn in the Atlanta airport, the Bland Man now wore a long-sleeved navy rugby shirt and khaki pants.

As he started to turn my way, I stepped into the gift shop. I stood by the jewelry stand, slowly rotating one of the spinning racks to examine the merchandise. For an excuse to look behind me in the mirror, I chose a pair of triple-spiral earrings and held them up to my ears.

Bland Man stood about twenty feet behind me, pretending to read a newspaper but glancing my way.

I put the earrings back and instead took the matching necklace to the cashier.

“Isn’t it exciting?” she asked. “The sunrise?”

“Can’t wait.” I let my gaze wander as I fished in my purse for my wallet. Bland Man was in the same position, but now looking down the exhibit hall toward Zachary.

“With any luck, the clouds will lift just in time.”

I grinned and held up a pair of crossed fingers, then wondered if that gesture meant the same in Ireland as it did in America. I was about to ask the cashier when Zachary came out of the hallway and spotted me.

He approached the counter with light steps. “That exhibit is so brilliant. I didn’t think there was anything left to learn about Newgrange, but—oh, that’s beautiful.” He picked up the pendant on the leather loop. “A gift for your aunt?”

“It’s for me. I probably should get her a souvenir, huh? Be right back,” I told the cashier as I took the necklace and my change from her.

I led Zachary to the far wall near the picture frames. “There’s a guy here who was on my flight from Baltimore to Atlanta.”

“So?”

“So he didn’t get on my Dublin flight. He went to Glasgow.”

Understanding dawned on Zachary’s face. “He went where he thought you’d be going.”

“Where MI-X had booked Aura Salvatore a ticket. My Dublin flight was packed, so he couldn’t change once he realized his mistake. He must’ve doubled back here once he got to Scotland.”

“And you say he’s in the building.”

“He was behind you in the exhibit.” I undid the clasp of my pendant, then handed it to Zachary and turned so he could put it on me and have an excuse to face the door.

“What’s he look like?”

I lifted my hair and told Zachary what Bland Man was wearing. “He’d blend in anywhere.”

“I see him.” He fastened the clasp behind my neck but kept his hands beneath my hair, stalling. “The DMP and MI-X can’t operate anywhere in the Republic, much less on Irish government property like this.”

“He’s also not wearing a pin for the solstice sunrise.”

“Then he won’t be able to follow us up to the monument.”

I let my hair fall and adjusted the necklace around my throat. “But how did he even get into the visitor center without a ticket?”

“Let’s find out.” He led me from the gift shop.

Was he going to confront the guy? Whatever happened to secrecy and subterfuge?

We walked past the man, easing my fears, and continued on to the registration desk. The young lady behind it—Seana, according to her badge—beamed at him.

“Happy solstice!” she said.

“Cheers, and a fine one tae you, too, lass.” Zachary laid on the Scottish accent harder than I’d heard him do since we’d arrived. “A bonnie morning, aye?”

“Aye,” she breathed, then straightened her posture. “I mean, yes, it is. How can I help you?”

“I’m in a spot of bother.” He leaned his elbows on the smooth black stone of the desk. “The man behind me to the left—no, don’t look—he’s been watching me, and I think he might’ve been a teacher of mine in primary school. It’d be pure awkward if I couldn’t remember him, ye ken?”

Seana laughed. “I’m terrible putting names to faces, too. So embarrassing.”

“Is there a wee chance he signed in? I noticed he’s not got a pin wot the rest of us have.”

“The visitor center here is free and open to everyone, not just the people going to the megalith.” Her brow creased. “Although we don’t open to the public until half past eight. I’ll ask Mary Frances.” She went to the other side of the desk and spoke in a low tone to an older, authoritative-looking woman, who peered past us at Bland Man.