Guardian of the Dead (17 page)

There were plenty of stories about the history of the Riccarton Bush, but none of them talked about a mysterious woman living there. There were listings for Reka Gordons, but none of them referred to the woman I was seeking. It didn't surprise me that she wasn't in the White Pages, but she also wasn't mentioned on the drama club's threadbare website, nor in the university listing of enrolled students. When I thought about it, I realised I wasn't even sure if she
was
a student, or what she did if she wasn't. Iris had said that she'd just moved to Christchurch, but it was as if she'd come from nowhere, unnoticed.

Maybe she had.

She'd mocked me for reading fairy tales, which might mean there was something more useful in the stacks, but I was horribly aware I didn't have time to prowl aimlessly through the shelves on the fourth floor devoted to mythology and folklore. Mark had promised me Kevin's safety until tonight, and sunset would come, the newspaper website assured me, at 5.04 pm.

The lab began to fill up as I browsed through tabs, and every time the door opened I craned to see. But it was never Mark. Doubt wormed at me. Maybe this ‘research' was just another ploy to get me out of the way. Maybe he'd lied to me about everything, and was even now plotting with Reka.

I clamped down hard on the rising paranoia and went on.

Sometime after noon, I pushed back from the screen and pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes, my stomach gurgling. It had been a long time since breakfast, and I was beginning to have wistful visions of the vending machines in the basement.

Desperate and bored, I tried naming dictionaries. Gordon was a traditional and very common Scottish clan name, not at all special unless you were the type of person who liked to go around claiming your ancestors were once Highland kings. Reka was listed as a few things, including the M
ori word for ‘sweet'.

I sat up so fast my wheeled chair skidded backwards, making me clutch at the heavy desk for balance.

‘I'm an idiot,' I said out loud, and ignored the vicious glare from the engineering student on my left. Reka was paler than I was, and I'd assumed she was P
keh
too. But her song had been M
ori, or something very like it.

M
ORI
V
AMPIRE
, I typed. Nothing. Well, that was stupid anyway. I'd seen her in daylight. M
ORI
WITCH
sent me off on a survey of
tohunga
, the religious guardians and special craftsmen, whose knowledge had been handed down verbally for hundreds of years. It would have been fascinating if I hadn't been in such a hurry, and I wondered if some of the stories about curses and transformations could possibly be true. Until this last week, reading
The
Lord of the Rings
six times in one school holiday when I was fourteen had been the closest I'd come to dealings with the supernatural.

But if women could walk out of the night and try to turn me into a tree, why couldn't all the rest of it be real? Including my father's faith?

This was no time for a religious crisis. I tried M
ORI
I
MMORTAL
, and got a bewildering number of pages dealing with cosmology and the intricate, contradicting myth cycles. I scanned through a few of them anyway. There was a little bit on T
ne-mahuta, God of Forests, journeying to the uppermost of the twelve heavens and bringing back the three baskets of great knowledge from the God of all creation, but it didn't seem applicable. Anyway, if Reka was a big-G God, I was sunk. There were more pages concerning the trickster hero M
ui trying to permanently secure immortality from the Goddess of Night and failing badly, but that didn't seem right either.

My heart thudded.

Hidden in an asterisked hyperlink on one of the M
ui stories, there was a brief note referring to the long-lived, fair-skinned, bright-haired fairy people who lived in the mists, and created great magic with their songs.

‘Yes!' I crowed, and stabbed my finger at the screen.

‘Do you
mind
?' the woman next to me snapped, the beads in her dark braids clicking against each other as she whipped her head around.

‘Sorry,' I whispered, and tried to keep further yelps of triumph internal.

ALL READY NOW

I
PRINTED OUT A LIST
of texts that looked promising and took the stairs down to the fourth floor two at a time. I was terrified and excited, and incapable of waiting for anything, much less the slow library elevators.