Rarities Unlimited 02 - Running Scared

how to write Latin or Greek or even a version of the local Celtic language using the Greek or Latin alphabet, or even runic symbols.”
    “Granted. With—”
    “Revisitation privileges,” he interrupted. “Gotcha.”
    “Not yet,” she shot back. “Assuming this well-traveled, scholarly adviser was a Druid—”
    “Safe assumption,” he cut in again. “The Druids were advisers to kings and chiefs. That was their job. No revisitation privileges on that one. It’s as close to established fact as it gets about the Druids.”
    Maybe she wouldn’t bother calling Niall. Maybe she would just kill Shane now and be done with it.
    He lifted his dark eyebrows in silent query. “Something wrong?”
    “Is anything right?” she retorted. “Oh, the hell with it. I’ll grant it all. That still doesn’t mean you can legally own the Druid hoard, much less show the damn gold on New Year’s Eve! Unless you have a previously concealed desire to spend time in jail?”
    “Nope. Finished?”
    Her mouth opened, then shut. She licked her lips and knew she had to talk fast. Really fast. “Look, if it exists, the Druid hoard is the legacy of a time and a place when magic was real. Supposedly it was gathered and/or held by the greatest Druid of all—Merlin. No!” She held up her hand to prevent Shane from interrupting. “Supposedly the hoard was composed of solid gold objects inscribed with supernatural designs. Some sources say the objects magically vanished at Merlin’s death. Others say they went into the Druid hoard, which had been passed down from the head Druid priest to the next leader for a thousand years or more.”
    “You read the article,” Shane said, lifting the magazine.
    “I read its source material in Latin when I was on my way to a Ph.D. I read pretty much the same thing in a translation from a seventh-century Welsh poem. I read it in a precursor to English so old it couldn’t be told from ancient French or ancient German. I read it in a scholarly text from Chaucer’s time. Ditto for the Shakespearean era. And I read reams of codswallop from the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Something about ending a hundred-year cycle brings out every nut in the fruitcake.”
    “I’m impressed. I didn’t find the reference from Chaucer’s time.”
    She blinked, absorbing the fact that for all his careless manner, he had researched the subject thoroughly. “It’s in a locked collection at UCLA.”
    “I’ll get a copy.”
    She didn’t doubt it. “No need. I kept copies of all the information I ever came across about Merlin’s gold or the Druid hoard.”
    Even as his instincts shivered up and down his spine, Shane became unnaturally still. “Why?”
    “I wanted to find it,” she said simply. “I went to Wales and the south of England and northwest Scotland and spent months . . .”
    Her voice died. She wondered how she could describe it to him, the time-deep silence of standing stones, the elusive whisper of hidden springs, the unbearable beauty of a crescent moon balanced in the arms of an ancient oak.
    “I chased legends,” she said. “It was great for my dissertation, but all I found were some places that made the hair on my arms stand up.”
    “Stonehenge?”
    “No. Oh, it was impressive and all, yet . . .” She shrugged. “It excited me intellectually but not here.” She held her fist against her belly. “Other things I found went straight to my gut. They were more real than my own memories.” Her hand opened as though to hold or to share something that no words could describe. “There were hill forts in Wales, standing stones, burial platforms, grave markers. All of them were too old to have been built by the people whose artistic style we call Celtic, but these places had been used by Celts. By Druids. These places were . . . different.”
    Shane waited, wondering what she saw with unfocused eyes that were as clear and deeply blue as a Welsh lake. When she didn’t speak, he asked softly, “What are you seeing?”
    “Midnight harvests in modern oak groves where the harvester wore white and cut sacred mistletoe with a silver knife. A black spring surrounded by an ancient stone ring, and the bush shading that spring decorated with ribbons, coins, fresh flowers, and carvings of hands or feet or genitals—whatever the modern supplicants wanted cured. But most of all I remember falling asleep in the center of an oak grove and standing stones that leaned like old men