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.