SCINTILLATE - Book #1 of The Light Key Trilogy

Chapter 25

The afternoon sun played peekaboo behind threatening clouds. Trinity College library hadn't opened until after lunchtime, and so I'd had to impatiently postpone my investigation with a lunch of bangers and mash at a small local pub.

The Book of Kells: Turning Darkness Into Light

The sign outside of the library actually said those words. The same words I'd seen in the vision when I'd unearthed the key in the redwoods. My body hummed with excited energy, and I wished for a fleeting, sad moment that Finn were here with me to share my excitement.

I fingered the key, rotated the small red crystal, and slipped it back inside my shirt. Would I need this key today? Did it unlock something that housed my mother's research? Would it lead me to her?

Giovanni waited in the long line with me, the strap of his messenger bag slung diagonally over his broad chest. He towered over the heads of everyone like a general surveying his troops. I had to smile. His attention was focused on something up ahead. With us, people-watching was a different sport entirely.

His gaze, which could be called cold but wasn't if you looked deep enough, flickered to me. He'd caught me staring. I blushed, and a knowing half-smile turned up his lips. It was maddening because blushing was totally redundant. Apparently, he could read into the silver in my aura. I wanted to learn to read the subtleties of silver, too. I wanted to know what he was thinking, feeling.

"Any idea where we might find this journal of your mother's in a security-tight library with over 200,000 volumes that we are not permitted to touch?"

I rolled my eyes. "I don't answer questions that aren't questions." I knew the odds were against me, but I'd gambled on this trip for a reason. My mother had hidden something here. I knew it. The sign outside proved it.

The line of tourists shuffled into the Long Room of the library. I gasped as soon as I entered. My hand flew to my heart, pressing the key against my skin. The long, narrow room stretched out before us with two stories of books housed in dark wooden shelves soaring up to the barrel-vaulted ceiling like a huge, elegant ship turned upside down. Dozens of alcoves, sections upon sections of books, lined the length of the room. Ornate spiral staircases wound upward in some of the alcoves, while others employed tall, narrow ladders. The alphabet was etched in gold letters up the sides of each row of thick shelves. The brochure said there were over 200,000 volumes in this room alone. It made my book-loving heart race.

In between each recess stood a marble bust upon a wooden pedestal, over forty of them, giving the impression of a fleet of ghostly sentries guarding the ancient volumes—guarding my mother's treasure. But how on earth was I supposed to find anything here? I didn't voice this thought, not wanting to see any trace of smugness on Giovanni's face.

I walked slowly, looking for a box or something in which the key might fit, despairing more with each step. It wasn't likely that anything was going to jump out at me. I was surrounded by a vast sea of leather tomes with no idea how to find the one precious volume I needed.

Waist-high shelves stood in the middle of each alcove. I stopped abruptly. The warm air of Giovanni's breath and the flare of his energy rippled over my neck and shoulder. "What is it?" he asked.

"That carving there, the spiral." It was the one I'd seen in the memory bound to the key. I walked to the next alcove and then the next, past the busts of Jonathan Swift, Sir Isaac Newton, Socrates, Shakespeare. Beneath the stern faces of the world's great writers and thinkers, every single pew of books had this same scrollwork carved into the end pieces of the shelves: a winding spiral with a flower in the middle. I rubbed my temples as I racked my brain for ideas. Where would my mother hide her journal in a place like this? If she and my father and I had anything in common, she'd have hidden it in plain sight.