“I have no idea,” I lied. “Dublin has over a million people in it, and the crime rate has been skyrocketing. Assuming it stays around the city, which I’m not even sure we can assume” (this was a lie; I don’t know why I was so sure of it, but I believed the Book had no intention of leaving Dublin’s chaotic streets at the moment, nor at any time in the near future) “we’re looking for a needle in a haystack.”

He studied me a moment, then said, “Very well. You have upheld your end of the bargain. I will keep mine.”

We got in the car and headed for the abbey.

Arlington Abbey was constructed on consecrated ground in the seventh century, when a church originally built by Saint Patrick in A.D. 441 had burned down. The church, interestingly, had been built to replace a crumbling stone circle some claimed had, long ago, been sacred to an ancient pagan sisterhood. The stone circle had allegedly been predated by a shian, or fairy mound, that had concealed within it an entrance to the Otherworld.

The abbey was plundered in 913, rebuilt in 1022, burned in 1123, rebuilt in 1218, burned in 1393, and rebuilt in 1414. It was expanded and fortified each time.

It was added onto in the sixteenth century, and again extensively in the seventeenth, sponsored by an anonymous, wealthy donor who completed the rectangle of stone buildings, enclosing the inner courtyard, and added housing—much to the astonishment of the locals—for up to a thousand residents.

This same unknown donor bought the land around the abbey, and turned the enclave into the self-sustaining operation it is today. The abbey boasts its own dairy, orchards, cattle, sheep, and extensive gardens, the highlight of which is an elaborate glass-domed hothouse rumored to house some of the world’s rarest flowers and most unusual herbs.

And that was all I’d been able to find out about the place in the twenty minutes I had to surf the Internet before leaving for the destination Barrons had given me.

Today, Arlington Abbey was owned by a subcorporation of a much larger corporation that was part of the vast holdings of an even larger corporation. Nobody knew anything about its modern-day operations. Oddly, no one seemed to find that odd. I found it spectacularly odd that a country that took such loving care of its abbeys, castles, standing stones, and countless other monuments asked no questions about the most extraordinarily well preserved abbey within its boundaries. But they didn’t, and there it sat, in the middle of nearly a thousand acres, silent and mysterious and private, and nobody bothered it.

I wondered what tremendous importance this site had for sidhe-seers that they’d doggedly protected it, even under guise of Christianity, and rebuilt it each time it had been destroyed, fortifying it ever stronger until now it loomed, a forbidding fortress over a still, dark lake.