It was an area about five feet square, with a six-foot-tall bookshelf filled with books shoved in every which way, in direct contrast to the order Carrie had imposed upon her storage unit. But the battered old Steelcase desk—a relic of the Cold War era, complete with government serial plate along the edge of the desktop—was tidy enough.

On the upper left corner of the desk was a black coffee cup with Witch scrawled across it in red letters. It held two pens, a pencil, and a highlighter. On the lower left corner was a lined notebook. When he opened it, it proved to be blank, though roughly half of the sheets had been torn out.

On the upper right corner of the desk were three books that had never been commercially produced. He held a hand over them before he picked up the first one. It looked to be a handwritten diary, but he couldn’t find the date because it was in Russian—or some other Cyrillic tongue. There were five bookmarks that each marked a passage that Carrie had highlighted.

“Do you read Russian?” Charles asked Tag, who had paused in his own work to look at Carrie’s workspace.

“No,” he said. “But the next one down is in English.”

And so was the third one. Charles handed one to Tag and took the other. Charles’s looked to be a detailed study of the deaths of various fae. It didn’t appear to be a fae-hunter’s diary but a scholarly study based mostly upon folklore. The methods of killing (or manner of dying) were all highlighted.

“How to kill a fae,” Charles told Tag. “Though I didn’t see anything that someone who wasn’t armed with a supernatural weapon could manage.”

“Her bookmarks in mine are all about how to kill vampires,” said Tag. “Some of the methods I know are effective. Some of them I’ve never heard of. But there are enough here that I personally know do not work that it might as well be a study on how to get yourself killed.” He pulled out a folded sheet of lined paper that had been tucked in the back and showed it to Charles.

Back-slanted script, messy but easily readable, covered the page.

Interesting that wooden stake kills vampire when steel or silver does not. What is the difference in the materials? Silver is purifying—which is why it works on werewolves. So why doesn’t it work on vampires? Wood doesn’t work on werewolves. Why doesn’t it work on werewolves?

Why does nothing not magical work on all fae? Not even cold iron.

Then in overlarge letters, as if in frustration:

How do we kill it? Will it stay dead? Emma thinks the Singer is like some of the Native American entities. In the stories, Coyote comes back if he is killed. How do we kill the Singer so he doesn’t come back?