Reign of Evil

Walker slowed to a walk. YaYa did as well and called Hoover through his own MBITR connection. The dog slowed but kept going. YaYa called in a stern voice and the dog stopped. She turned and loped back with a disappointed look on her face. Not that she was disappointed she couldn’t keep going, but that her human team members were so damn slow. If the dog could shake her head in exasperation she would have.

YaYa found a minivan parked on the side of the road in front of a nineteenth-century stone house. He checked the driver’s side door. It was unlocked. Although it would have been nice if the keys had been inside, they weren’t that lucky. But it was an older model and it wasn’t long before he’d hot-wired the ignition and they were backtracking to where the others waited with the witch in a copse. It was the farthest they had dared go. After those trees were open fields with homes and travel trailers. None of them thought that they’d go unnoticed.

The three other SEALs got in after the witch was loaded into the back.

Walker wondered if Holmes had spoken to Ian on his private command channel. “Any word from Section 9?”

“Not a one.”

“We going there?”

“Only place to go.” Holmes glanced at Laws. “He thinks that’s where it’s heading.”

Laws shrugged slightly. “Only reasonable place to go.”

Preeti called and Holmes automatically put it on the squad frequency. The first thing she said was, “The Tuatha. Don’t trust it.”

“Too late,” Holmes said. “Tell us what you know.”

“The Tuatha wasn’t just any faerie. It was perhaps the most powerful of them all.”

Holmes’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

Preeti began to recount her research, but Holmes soon cut her off. “Get to the point, Preeti.”

“I think the Tuatha that the Bohemian Grove had taken and used is none other than Merlyn the Magician.”

“Seriously?”

“Absolutely. Let me explain. In the body of English literature Merlyn appears more than six hundred times spanning fifteen hundred years.”

Yank interrupted, “But it’s fiction.”

“Very true. But there’s a tradition in England, as there is in most countries, to use folklore as the basis for literature. The continued incarnations of this historical figure set a pattern.”

“Couldn’t they all be referencing the original source?” Walker asked.

“They could, but that wouldn’t explain some of the divergence. Especially his disappearance from English literature and his appearance in German literature in the early 1800s.”

Laws shook his head. “Wasn’t he just the creation of Geoffrey of Monmouth, though? Merlyn is and has always been a literary figure.”

“Nope. Geoffrey just associated him with Uther Pendragon and gave him credit for moving the stones that make up Stonehenge. And it was Sir Thomas Malory who first paired Merlyn with King Arthur. What I’m talking about is a series of Middle Welsh poems which were later retold in the Black Book of Carmarthen and which refer to Merlyn and his relationship with Arthur centuries before Malory or Geoffrey.

“His original name was Myrddin and first came to light while he was living in Caer-fyrddin, or Carmarthen, which stakes its claim as the oldest established town in Wales. Caer means ‘Fort’ and fryddin is believed to be a version of ‘Myrddin,’ meaning ‘Fort of Merlyn.’ Modern scholars agree that the name is eponymous to the town—that the town derived its name from ‘Myrddin’—but doubt that Myrddin existed prior to the town, despite what medieval scholarly texts assert the same.”

“So modern scholars doubt what scholars closer to the era believed?” Laws asked.

“Exactly. These same modern scholars associate Myrddin with Lailoken, who was a sixth-century prophetic wild man mystic.”

“But you disagree.”

“There are Roman texts identifying Myrddin as a guide in the area circa AD 27.”

Walker could tell by his expression that Holmes was getting impatient. “And this is significant how?”

“Camarthen wasn’t founded until it became a defensive fortress in AD 75. Forty-eight years later.”

Holmes’s eyes lit up. “Now you have my attention.”

“The rest is supposition, with me asking myself how a being could exist over the span of at least two thousand years. And that was as—”

“A Tuatha Dé Dannan jumping from host to host,” Holmes finished.

“But let me tell you the best part.”

“Go ahead.”

“Section 9 has a record from 1909 of killing a man known as Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz y Pascual, who was a Spanish pianist and composer working and living in London. He was identified as being part of a plot to kill Edward the Seventh, son of Queen Victoria. He’d created an opera during which assassins associated with the Golden Dawn were going to kill the King by flooding his private box with acid vapors.”

“The Golden Dawn are of German origin,” Laws interjected. “They’re organizationally descended from Rosicrucians.”

“Isn’t the Bohemian Lodge tied to the Golden Dawn?” YaYa asked.

Holmes waved them silent. “I don’t get it.”

“The opera to be performed that night was called Merlyn.”