I resumed reading. It was slow going but fascinating,
The author of the pocket notebook was no sidhe-seer. Its scribe was a man, or rather a young boy, who’d been so beautiful he was mocked by the warriors of his time, though loved by the lasses who’d taught him his letters.
At ten and three, he’d had the misfortune of capturing the eye of a Faery princess, while taking a shortcut through a dark and tangled wood.
She’d charmed and seduced him off to Faery, where she’d swiftly transformed into something cold and frightening. She’d kept him locked in a golden cage at court, where he’d been forced to watch the Fae play with their human “pets.” Among their games, their favorite was turning mortals Pri-ya: into creatures who begged for the touch of a Fae, any Fae—in fact, for the touch of anything at all, for the “vilest of things to be done to them, and to do foul things to each other,” according to the young scribe. These creatures had no will, no mind, no awareness of anything but sexual need. They knew neither morality nor mercy, and were as likely to turn on one another as rabid animals. The boy had found them terrifying and feared being given to what had become of his human companions. He had no way of tracking time but he watched hundreds come and go, and began a growth of manly hair, which was when the princess began once more to look his way.
When the Fae were no longer amused with their pets they cast them from Faery to die. In this manner, the letter of the Compact wasn’t violated. They didn’t actually kill the humans they captured. They just didn’t save them. I wondered how many had died in madhouses, or been used for exactly what they wanted, and killed by their own kind.
The boy listened to all that was said, recorded all he heard, because when the dying were discarded, their possessions went with them, and, although he’d lost hope for himself, he hoped to warn his people. (The child hadn’t known that hundreds of years would have passed by the time he was released from Faery.) He hoped something he recorded might save one of them, perhaps hold the key to one day destroying his terrifying, merciless abductors.
A chill kissed my nape. That his plan had worked meant the boy was long dead. And as he’d hoped, his notebook had found its way back to the world of Man, and eventually into the hands of a sidhe-seer, to be passed down through the centuries, and end up in Rowena’s desk. Why was it in her desk? Just some light reading at lunchtime, or was she looking for something?
I glanced at the clock. It was two-thirty, well into afternoon. I snatched up my cell phone and dialed the ALD again. There was no answer. Where had the dreamy-eyed boy gone? Where was Christian? I snapped my laptop closed, and was thinking of heading over there when my cell rang. It was Dani, and the girls were already at the pub waiting for me, so could I hurry?
When I descended the stairs into the shadowy, substreetlevel pub, I found seven women in their mid- to late twenties waiting for me, not including Dani. Two had been present the day Moira had died: the tall, gray-eyed brunette with the unwavering gaze that kept sweeping the pub—and I doubted she missed much—and the skinny, dark-eyed girl with platinum hair, heavy black eyeliner, and matching nail polish, who was rocking slightly in her chair to a rhythmic beat, although her iPod and earbuds lay on the table. The only exit was the entrance I’d come in and, with no windows, the place felt dark and claustrophobic to me. As I took my seat, I could see they were as uncomfortable as I was with our close, dimly lit surroundings. Five cell phones lay on the table, emitting wan glows. There were two Notebooks open, running on battery power, displaying bright white screens. It was all I could do not to pull out my flashlights, turn them on, and slap them down on the table, adding my share to the lot.
We nodded stiffly to each other. I got straight to the point. “Do you have unrestricted access to the library Rowena told me about?” I asked the group of women. I wanted to know just how useful an alliance between us might be.
The brunette answered, “It depends on your place in the organization. There are seven circles of ascension. We’re in the third, so we can enter four of the twenty-one libraries.”
Twenty-one? “Who could possibly use that many books?” I said irritably. I’d bet there was no handy card catalog around, either.
She shrugged. “We’ve been collecting them for millennia.”
“Who’s in the seventh circle? Rowena?”
“The seventh is the Haven itself, the High Council of . . . you know . . .” That level gray gaze swept the pub uneasily.
I glanced around, too. There were five customers in the place. Two were shooting pool, the other three were brooding into their beers. None of them were paying any attention to us, and there wasn’t a Fae in sight. “If you don’t feel comfortable talking in a public place, why did you ask me to pick one?”