Chapters (50)
- Cover
- Roc Books by Jacqueline Carey
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Forty-three
- Forty-four
- Forty-five
- Forty-six
- Forty-seven
- Forty-eight
I took a shot at tracking down the mysterious lawyer, whose full name was Daniel Dufreyne, in my spare time and hit a dead end. I got his name and contact info from a business card he’d left with Amanda Brooks at the PVB, but the weird thing was there was no business listed on it, nor a physical address—just a cell phone number and a Gmail address. Definitely sketchy. Amanda seemed surprised that she hadn’t noticed, which I chalked up to the whole powers-of-persuasion thing. All I could do was leave a vague voice mail message and send an equally vague e-mail and hope Dufreyne responded. So far, he hadn’t.
Most of the time, I concentrated on poring over the X-Files. While I didn’t have an actual base in which to enter the data yet, the process helped me identify concrete working examples and additional criteria to provide to my genius programmer, Lee. For instance, I’d completely forgotten about the phooka that haunted the fields around Columbine Creek. One of the Donaghue kids came away with a broken arm a couple of years ago after the phooka took him for a wild ride. So, yeah, while I’d be responsible for entering all sensitive data such as the particulars of the incident, Lee needed to create a listing for phookas under the categories of eldritch beings, and a location listing for the creek.
I met with Lee a couple of times to give him my input and discuss the project, which was shaping up to be a lot fancier than anything I’d envisioned, insofar as I’d envisioned anything, which wasn’t far. I’d figured he could create some kind of easy-to-use customized database software and load it onto my laptop, but oh, no. Lee was developing an online database that would be hosted on a dedicated server in an air-conditioned techno-vault in his basement, with backups and fail-safes and layers of encryption and a self-destruct sequence. Okay, I may be exaggerating and I probably have some of the terminology wrong, but basically he assured me it would be more secure than the Pentagon. At least I was pretty sure it would be safer there than loaded on my seven-year-old laptop, and it would be nice to have the luxury of accessing it anywhere.
Or anywhere in theory, I should say. On the downside, Lee informed me that it was too risky to use free Wi-Fi to access this or any password-protected site, which meant I’d have to start paying for Internet service instead of surfing on the bakery’s. Good thing the project was generating a bit of extra income.
The one thing that did worry me was Lee’s ability to access the database. He swore up and down that once I changed the password on the administrative panel, I would absolutely, positively be the only person in the world able to access it.