Diabhal – Kathleen Kaufman

But I do need you to play along. You need to be stoic and understanding. You need to let your father feel good about signing the papers. And then we can worry about the business of the rest of your life.” “I have a demand,” Ceit said firmly. Judge Conners blinked in surprise. “What would that be?” “I want to see my mother in the care center.

I haven’t seen her since she was in the hospital. I want to see her one last time before whatever happens happens.” Ceit looked into the woman’s eyes, dark with a lightness in the shadows. “Very well,” Judge Conners said, a bit confused. “I can’t see how it would hurt. But I need your word that you’ll let us get through this today with as little drama as possible.” Ceit nodded. It wasn’t the plan she arrived with, but it would do.

Judge Conners stood and went back to her seat at the head of the table. “One thing…” Ceit said suddenly as the judge went to press a button that would let the others know to reenter. “These sessions are always recorded. How will you explain this conversation?” Judge Conners laughed. “It never happened, Ceit.” She pointed to the security camera in the corner and the audio recorder on the table.

“This equipment is old, some of it from the seventies. A few minutes of garbled audio, and all the camera shows is me comfort- ing you. No one cares much.” With that she pressed the buzzer, and the rest of the party entered. For the next thirty minutes, Ceit answered every question stoi- cally.

She told her father it was for the best she stay at MacLaren Hall. She thanked Frank the caseworker and her lawyer. She shook Judge Conners’s hand. She gave her father a stiff and stilted hug. #7139 He seemed as one whose life had been drained from his veins. His pale face was nearly translucent, his eyes dead. Ceit knew that whatever torments she had been subject to, he had endured worse.

With no malice in her heart, she said goodbye to Boyd Healy. oie was a long, squat building flanked on one side by a decaying doughnut shop and the other by a recycling plant. As Ceit got out of the MacLaren Hall van, Frank the caseworker following her, the roar of a compressor filled her ears. Frank cast her a sympathetic look and surveyed the scene. “I take it you’ve never been here before?” he said quietly. Ceit shook her head. The last time she had seen her mother was in Cedars-Sinai Hospital right after the incident.

Her mother had been in intensive care then, and Ceit had had to look through the glass at her. Grace Robertson had lain in the bed attached to all manner of tubes and wires.

Copyright © 2019 Kathleen Kaufman This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Book design: Meg Reid Cover Design: Francois Vaillancourt Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kaufman, Kathleen, author. Title: Diabhal : a novel / Kathleen Kaufman. Description: Nashville : Turner Publishing Company, [2019] Identifiers: LCCN 2019006650 (print) | LCCN 2019009635 (ebook) | ISBN 9781684423217 (epub) | ISBN 9781684423194 (pbk.) ISBN 9781684423200 (hardcover) Subjects: | GSAFD: Occult fiction. Classification: LCC PS3611.A8284 (ebook) | LCC PS3611.A8284 Ds3 2019 (print) DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https: //Iccn.loc.gov/2019006650 Printed in the United States of America 19 2010987654321 — ; | oe To my husband—my sun, my moon, and all my stars.

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_ ara : ) Bho} ee hae 5 se. THE SLUAGH APPEARED ON A TUESDAY MORNING. Grace was quite unaffected at the time. In fact, she was utterly unaware of their presence for the hour it took to set the dough to rising. She had half hung the wash before her eye set to twitch- ing and her lips became numb.

By midafternoon, her speech was slurring and her eyes had crossed. Boyd hadn’t known what to do. For all his suspicions, he hesitated to call the elders. It could, after all, be a case of the flu; or perhaps the grain had gone to rot, and the ergot was causing her to mutter and her head to twitch in tiny spasms. No need to set the elders to worrying over something that could be cured with a night’s rest.

When the children arrived home from school, their backpacks in hand, he sent them to their rooms to finish their homework. Later he heated a can of soup from the cupboard and sliced them both a slab of yesterday’s bread.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: dae3f422438e9fa3
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 11,759,457 bytes (11.215 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781684423217, 9781684423194, 9781684423200
• Pages: 325
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 394.86 minutes
• Total Words: 78,972
• Total Characters: 437,061
• Average Words per Page: 242.99
• Average Characters per Page: 1344.8

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