Chapter 431
Trina clicked a few buttons on her laptop. “I want you to listen carefully to the voice in the background.” She hit play, and Cadence and I both leaned in trying to hear.
It was easy to hear the voice but impossible to decipher what the Vampire speaking was saying. His voice was low, and his tone was quiet. It sounded like a bunch of nonsense to me, but then I figured he must be speaking another language.
“Play it again,” Cadence said, really straining this time. She shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Any guesses?”
“We think whatever he is saying was designed to work with the reflective surfaces to open the portal. But we don’t know what it means,” Oswald explained.
“Do you think it’s Gaelic?” Cadence asked.
“Probably,” Job said, “but unless we can find someone who speaks it, we might not know.”
“I’ve got someone on the way for that,” I assured them.
Cadence turned to me. “Why don’t you go back to the basement and see if you can pull what is being said out of the Vampire’s minds? If we know what they’re saying, it might help us figure out how to unsay it.”
“Okay.” I didn’t think she was right that we could just undo everything, but I couldn’t see any harm in knowing what was being said. I didn’t want to sit in there and watch footage and stare at the 3D model anyway.
“While you’re there, see if you can pull anything else out of them. We have more info now than we did before. And do another hunt for Holland.”
“All right.” I waited to see if there was anything else. There didn’t seem to be, so I headed back to the basement to make friends with the Vampires.
Ashley was still asleep when I got there, but she was lying on the floor now, with a blanket and a pillow. It was kind of weird, looking at her passed out on the floor in front of all those Vampires, but I didn’t say anything. There were a couple of Independents in the far corner of the area just standing around. I decided not to bother them to let me into the cells, though. I could do what I needed to from outside of the room.
I knew it had to be one of the guys, and it wouldn’t have been Bryce. So I started with Ty, looking specifically for a strange Gaelic phrase. It took a lot longer than I thought it was going to because his memories of what had happened at the Eidolon Festival were not his own. They were intermingled with Holland’s overlay, the blackness that clouded Ty’s own account of where he’d been during the time that the portal opened and the Guardians disappeared, and it was nearly impossible for me to find anything in there of any value whatsoever.
Frustrated with Ty, I moved on to the other students Stewart had abducted and changed. Their memories weren’t any more helpful than Ty’s had been. I felt like I was going in circles, and without knowing who held what position at the festival, I had no idea who would’ve done what.
So I did something I didn’t want to and asked to see the footage from the night before again to see if I could tell who had positioned the artifacts and who had been the one to shout the phrase. Hannah was able to provide Alex’s angle to me. It was the best view because he went in last. I had to watch it over and over again in slow motion, but about the sixth time, I was almost positive I saw Ty off in the background, walking their direction. By then, the objects would’ve already been placed, which meant he had to have been the one to shout the phrase to make the portal open just as Brandon and Jamie walked past the reflective surfaces.
I went back to Ty, where I’d first started hours ago, and this time, I planted the information into his head that he was missing. I filled in the blacked out part of his mind the best I could, and then I went back, to before the Eidolon Festival, to him meeting with Stewart and describing what it was Ty was supposed to do that night. He was still missing large sections of memories. But then I caught a break. I got the hint of a phrase I did not recognize, somewhere deep inside his mind. “Solas na fala.” I dug all around it but couldn’t find anything more. I knew that couldn’t be the entire phrase. Frustrated, I opened my eyes.
“Ty!” I said, getting his attention through the door. “Does the phrase ‘solas na fala’ mean anything to you?”
He looked at me, confused, and shook his head. “No. Solas na fala? No. It doesn’t mean anything to me. Why?”
“I think you said it last night, at the Eidolon Festival. I think there was more to it. Are you sure? Are you certain you don’t remember Dr. Stewart teaching you a phrase to repeat at the festival?”
He continued to stare at me for a long time before he cocked his head to the side, his eyes going blank. “Leig solas na fala fala a-mach d’anam!”
As soon as Ty repeated the phrase, the other three men shouted it as well. I jumped into their heads, one at a time, and saw the parts they’d played spring back into their memories. I saw the reflective surfaces being dropped into place, and Ty and one of the other guys standing off to the side, waiting for the exact right moment.
Finally, I had our answer. I wasn’t exactly sure what we were going to do with this information, but at least we knew the magic words that made the portal open now. “Thank you.” Ty continued to stare at me blankly, like he had no idea what I was thanking him for.
