Tattoo Read online

  Annabelle crossed over to the desk and picked up a pen. Without being asked, Lionel slid a sheet of paper across the desk to her, and a few quick lines later, Annabelle's crisscrossed crescents were staring back at us from the sheet.

  Lionel took the pen from Annabelle and quickly extended a few of the lines on the paper. “Like this?” he prompted.

  Annabelle nodded.

  “I've seen this before,” Lionel said. “You're right in that. Quite recently, I think. The question is, where?” He pulled on the edge of his beard, twisting it between his thumb and index finger. “Were there other symbols with it?”

  Annabelle turned to us, and I could tell from the expression on her face that she couldn't remember exactly what our symbols looked like.

  “Annabelle?” Lionel waited.

  With a sigh, Annabelle turned around and in one graceful move lifted the hair off the nape of her neck.

  Lionel slipped on a pair of green-rimmed glasses and leaned forward. “Why, it's the symbol, Annie,” he said. “Where did you get that?”

  Annabelle lowered her hair and then looked at me.

  Why did I have to go next? Feeling myself on the verge of a blush, I turned around and let my shirt slide up just enough to show the tattoo.

  “The others have them, too?” Lionel asked. Annabelle must have nodded, because a second later, he asked me to come closer so that he could get a better look at the symbol on my back. As if this wasn't awkward enough already.

  I walked over to his side of the desk and let him take a good look at my back. “Interesting”

  I had never thought I'd live to see the day when an eighty-year-old Russian guy thought my back was interesting.

  Delia bared her stomach for him as if it was the most natural thing in the world. To the old guy's credit, he didn't so much as blink and merely bent down, getting a good look at the symbol before sketching it and mine onto the notepad next to Annabelle's.

  Lionel turned to Zo. “And I suppose you have one as well?” he asked.

  Zo opened her mouth and then closed it again. Doing an impressive balancing act, she stood on one foot and pulled the sneaker off the other.

  “Your foot?” the older man asked.

  “Yes,” Zo answered. “You got a problem with that?”

  I stared at her. Had the fact that this guy was practically ancient completely escaped her attention? Only Zo would pull the tough-girl routine with an octogenarian.

  Lionel chuckled. “This one, she has fire,” he told Annabelle. “I like her”

  Annabelle couldn't resist the opportunity to give Zo a hard time. “How ironic,” she said in a low voice not meant for Lionel's ears. “He thinks you have fire”

  Absolutely without any ceremony, Zo plopped her foot down on top of Lionel's desk. I'd never realized how freakishly flexible she was.

  The fury of lines crissing and crossing each other across her skin, accented with a few thick dots, had Lionel wrinkling his brow.

  “What?” we all asked in unison.

  “I assume these are all from the same symbol set?” he asked, as if the fact that we were wearing the symbols on our bodies wasn't odd in the least.

  “They all came together,” I replied.

  Lionel looked at Annabelle. “And you think they're all in the same language?” he asked.

  Annabelle nodded. “I think so”

  Lionel motioned to Zo, and she removed her foot from his desk and sat down in one of the nearby chairs. Lionel gestured for the rest of us to do the same, and then he flew into professor mode, nodding toward the notepad. “These,” he said, gesturing to my symbol and Annabelle's, “appear more pictorial in nature” Seeing his words weren't hitting home with anyone but Annabelle, he explained. “They seem to resemble that which they might well represent, like Egyptian hieroglyphics” He gestured between the two symbols. “In this one, we can easily see a sun”

  That's what I'd thought it looked like.

  “Though the translation could be a myriad of related ideas. Light, fire, day”

  “Fire,” I said softly. I could practically see the moment when Zo's “why didn't I get a cool power?” answer registered on her face. It hadn't been any big cosmic plan. She'd just picked the wrong tattoo.

  “Or it may symbolize something else altogether,” Lionel continued. “A lion, for instance”

  “What about the other one?” Annabelle prompted, bringing Lionel back from Happy Translation Land.

  “If it does go with the first symbol, and I think it might, I'd be tempted to say it was a moon, though of course this is total speculation. The kind that a tenured professor of great standing would never indulge in, you understand”

  “Understood,” Annabelle said with a nod. “And the others?”

  “I can't venture a guess on that one” Lionel brought his pen to touch Delia's tattoo. “However, it's the final symbol that throws me the most. It's smaller than the others, the lines more jagged. Most strikingly, it does not seem to be a pictorial representation of anything. In fact, it looks rather like some mix of Sumerian, Japanese, and early Celtic characters”

  “So everyone else has a symbol and I have a letter?” Zo asked. Clearly, she thought she was getting the short end of the tattoo stick yet again.

  Lionel shook his head. “There's a continuity among the symbols, if you disregard size. Something about the angles at which the lines intersect or would intersect. The near symmetry, as well, of all the symbols strikes me as odd. These symbols belong together, which makes me question if the first two are indeed hieroglyphic in nature, or if. “

  Lionel fell into silence, scribbling on the notepad. “If only I could remember where I'd seen the moonlike symbol before,” he said.

  “In one of these books?” Annabelle asked, gesturing toward the stacks and stacks of books scattered around the office.

  “Perhaps,” Lionel said, tugging on his beard. “Perhaps”

  The phone rang, and I practically jumped out of my skin. This whole impending doom vibe had me kind of on edge.

  “Lionel Kavoslaski” Lionel answered the phone and then put his hand over the mouthpiece. “If you'll excuse me, my dear ones, I have to take this. If you'd like to look through the books, you may”

  The four of us huddled in Lionel's doorway to discuss our options.

  “That's a whole lot of books,” Zo said. “And what's to say there's anything in there about these symbols? What if they aren't even symbols?”

  “Do you have a better lead?” Annabelle asked, bristling a bit that Zo was questioning her plan of action. “The lady who sold us the tattoos has disappeared. All we have to go on is Bailey's dreams and these tattoos. You heard what Bay said about this whole ‘she comes' business. Even if we hadn't wanted to get to the bottom of this before, I definitely would now”

  Translation, I thought: do not argue with the power of my charts.

  Zo looked down at her still-bare foot.

  “Annabelle's right,” I said. “This isn't just about me figuring out a way to not set people on fire anymore.

  Something's coming. Something evil. Something big. For all we know, it's already here” This pep talk wasn't turning out the way it had in my mind, but I pushed on. “If these symbols mean something, they might give us a hint about what we're supposed to do to stop it” I paused, looking over at the pile of books, which seemed to have grown about a million times bigger since the last time I had looked.

  “What about the voices you hear, Bay?” Delia asked me. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure Lionel wasn't listening, but he was completely absorbed in the phone conversation he was having, which had recently switched over from English to some language I didn't recognize.

  I touched my hand to my back.

  Dark.

  “Just a reminder to be home before dark,” I said. “Sheesh. For someone who seems like they might need us to save the world or something, these voice people sure aren't very helpful”

  “I can't believe
the voices in your head gave us a curfew” Delia blew a strand of chestnut brown hair out of her face. “I mean, honestly, what is the world coming to?”

  Somehow, I didn't think we wanted to know the answer to that question.

  “What about the names the voice people gave Bailey?” Zo asked finally, still looking for any excuse not to spend what was left of our daylight hours looking through old books that were probably written in languages we couldn't even read. “I mean, if they are real …real whatever-they-ares, then shouldn't we be able to find out something about them? And maybe about whatever it is they expect us to fight?”

  “Good point,” Annabelle said. She sounded almost surprised. “But we all have computers at our houses. We can google there” She paused. “And that's pretty much the only thing we can do after dark, so in the”— A-belle looked at her watch—”one hour and forty-seven minutes of daylight we have left, we'd probably be better off dealing with resources that we don't have at home”

  “That would be the books?” Zo asked. Annabelle patted her sympathetically on the shoulder, and Zo sighed.

  “It won't be that bad,” I consoled Zo, who despised book work about as much as she did water bras and thong underwear.

  “Okay,” Zo said, playing the martyr to perfection. “I give up. We do the books thing”

  “Books,” Delia agreed.

  “Lead on, Book Girl,” I told Annabelle, and with that, the four of us set to work.

  One hour, four false leads, two soda runs, and a whole lot of nothing to show for it later, I was starting to question the wisdom of letting Annabelle put us all on book duty. My back was aching, Delia had broken a nail, and Zo looked about half a second away from committing research mutiny.

  “That's it,” Zo announced. “I'm finished. Done. Completed. Finito” She tossed the book she was working on to the floor. Annabelle glared at her and picked the book up, dusting it off all offended-like.

  “Maybe she's right, Annabelle,” I said. “We've been at this for, like, forever and a half, and we haven't seen anything that looks like any of these symbols”

  “I'm thinking of giving myself a tan,” Delia mused. “What do you guys think?”

  We all glanced at Delia, and then I continued my research-is-evil campaign. “It'll be dark soon,” I said, trying to appeal to Annabelle's reasonable side. “We've got a half hour, forty-five minutes tops”

  “We won't need it,” Annabelle said, a slow smile spreading across her face. Holding open the book Zo had thrown onto the floor, she arched a triumphant eyebrow.

  There, on the page, at the bottom, was Annabelle's symbol. Triumphantly Annabelle read the phrase aloud: “ ‘Thought to be druidic in nature, this lone symbol was recovered at a site in western Ireland at the turn of the century' “

  “Okay, well that does us a whole lot of no good,” Zo said. “So somebody who wrote some book thinks that it might be druidic? And what exactly does that tell us? We don't even know what it means”

  “Ahhhh, but we will”

  The four of us jumped at the sound of Lionel's voice, and Delia, who'd been in the middle of giving herself a homemade tan, turned around, trying not to look suspicious even though she'd only tanned half of her body.

  “You think you can translate the symbols?” Zo asked skeptically.

  “Now that I know who to call, I might be able to help you,” Lionel said. “This book was written a good fifty years ago, my dear. A great deal has been done since then” He looked at his watch. “No good calling just now,” he said. “It's getting late, and as it's a Saturday, and as some of my colleagues are a bit less, shall we say, devoted to the trade than I am, perhaps it had best wait until morning”

  “We'd better get going,” I said, nervous about the whole if-we-stay-out-after-dark-a-nameless-possibly-misty-green-evil-will-smite-us thing.

  “You'll call if you learn anything?” Annabelle asked, giving Lionel solemn puppy dog eyes.

  “Of course,” Lionel said.

  “Thanks,” Zo said, surprising me.

  “Thank you, my dears,” Lionel returned without so much as pausing. “There are few things I like as much as a good mystery, and these “ He gestured to Annabelle's neck and Zo's foot. “These are the things mysteries are made of”

  “You're not going to ask why we're wearing the symbols?” Annabelle asked curiously.

  Lionel shrugged. “Do I want to know the answer?”

  The four of us looked at one another.

  “Probably not,” I said. He might be a genius with remote ancient languages, but personally, I didn't want to be responsible for giving the guy a heart attack, and the …er …sensitive nature of the whole tattoos thing could potentially do that to a person. Especially an old person with a large beard.

  Annabelle bit back a giggle and lost. “Beard?” she whispered to me the second Lionel turned away. “What does his beard have to do with it?”

  We headed for the door. “I liked it better when my thoughts didn't have to be logical,” I grumbled. Having Annabelle catch my random thoughts was starting to freak me out. I had a well-developed thought-to-speech filter for a reason.

  As we passed through the doorway, I tugged my shirt down over the tattoo, just to make sure.

  Dark.

  Sheesh. This supernatural curfew thing was getting old fast.

  Can't you tell me anything else? I asked silently. Like what exactly this thing is that will come after us if we're out after dark?

  The response came from Valgius, his deep, beautiful voice twisted in pain, as if saying these words was burning a hole in his flesh. Slow, unforgiving torture.

  She. Is. Sídhe.

  “Hey, Mom?” I called up the stairs. “You up there?”

  “Just a minute,” she yelled back. I waited. My mom hated it when I just-a-minuted her, but I was used to the inequity of our relationship. She parent, me child. That was just the way these things worked.

  Several minutes later, my mom finally deigned to join us. “You girls are back early,” she said. “Can I get you something? Cookies? Some dinner?”

  Zo opened her mouth, and I could sense a yes coming on. She loved my mom's cooking, and, for that matter, my mom. Through some miracle, given the lightning speed with which Zo typically responded to offers of food, I managed to cut her off before she could accept my mom's invitation. “We're actually eating at Zo's house,” I said.

  Zo made a face. My mom didn't see it.

  “Your dad's turn for the slumber girls?” she asked Zo.

  Delia, Zo, and I had been sleeping over at each other's houses practically every Friday and Saturday night for as long as any of us could remember, but we'd outgrown calling them slumber parties when we were like nine, a fact that had obviously escaped my mother's attention.

  “I'm just going to go grab my stuff,” I said. “I wanted to make sure it was okay”

  As on top of me as my parents could be about everything else, they almost never said no to a weekend sleepover across the street, especially given the fact that my mom had gotten to play hostess the night before.

  “No problemo,” my mom said. “Do you girls at least want to eat dinner over here first? I could throw together a lasagna. Or some chicken curry. Or—”

  “We already promised we'd eat at Zo's,” I said, cutting her off. I was notoriously bad at keeping secrets from my mom and thus wanted to keep our time together at a minimum until this whole thing blew over. As it was, it was all I could do not to blurt out everything. I was half afraid that if she asked me one more time if she could fix us anything, I'd blurt out, “Yes, could you fix us something that will get rid of ancient evils?” to which my mom would inevitably reply, “Wouldn't you rather have a nice roast?” before realizing what I'd just said.

  I shuddered at the very idea of it.

  “Come on,” I said, practically dragging Zo and Annabelle up the stairs. Delia had gone across the street to her house to pick up a few “extra necessities” and was supposed to
meet us over at Zo's house in five minutes.

  “Remind me again why exactly it is that we have to spend tonight at my house?” Zo asked as soon as my bedroom door was closed behind us. “My dad's a terrible cook”

  Annabelle guiltily nodded her agreement.

  “You'll live,” I said. “We'll order pizza or something” I grabbed the overnight bag I always kept packed and threw in an extra pair of underwear. “And we have to spend the night at your house, because my mom and dad are way too with it for their own good, or ours. We're going to be researching this thing, and I can't get within a five-foot radius of my mom without her little mom radar clicking on”

  My mom had a history of knowing everything I did before I did it. Her accuracy was downright freaky.

  “She'd totally go all Annabelle on us and pull all that juicy info right out of our heads,” I said as I zipped my bag shut.

  “I think I may resent that comment,” Annabelle said thoughtfully. “Not sure”

  “Let's just get out of here before the radar goes off”

  “Did it ever occur to you, Bay, that it may not be that your mom's freakishly perceptive? You may just be a really, really bad liar” Zo pointed out the obvious.

  “A little bit of column A, little bit of column B,” I replied. “Now can we just get out of here?” Without a word, Annabelle and Zo grabbed their stuff and Delia's from the night before, and we trooped down the steps.

  We were halfway out the front door when my mom stopped us. “What did you say the fabulous foursome is up to tonight?” she asked us.

  I looked from Annabelle back to Zo. “Nothing much,” I said. “We'll probably order some pizza, go online “

  She didn't seem to be buying it, and I hadn't even lied yet.

  Quick, I thought, distract her with talk of the dance. My mom was always up for some quality high school discussion, especially if she thought there was even a chance that it might involve boys.

  “… talk about the dance, that kind of thing,” I finished up.

  She took the bait. “Oh, the dance on Monday,” she said. “I'd almost forgotten. Anyone going with a date?”