Shadowfever

“Dude—sucky! Who writes that kinda drivel?” Dani exclaimed over my shoulder.

Jo sniffed. “I did the best I could what with the woman not spelling a single word the same way twice.”

“Would it’ve killed her to be a little more specific?” Dani groused.

“She probably thought she was being specific,” I said. The nuances of language changed constantly, especially dialect and lingo. “Really, Dani, who’d be able to translate ‘dude—sucky’ a thousand years from now?”

But it wasn’t only language that compounded things. Communicating a dream was difficult. I’d been so troubled by my Cold Place dreams in middle school that I’d finally told Daddy I was having a recurring nightmare. He’d encouraged me to write it down, and together we’d tried to decide what it meant.

Logical, pragmatic Jack Lane believed the brain was like a vast computer, and dreams were the conscious mind’s way of backing up and storing the day’s events in the subconscious, filing away memories and organizing lessons. But he’d also believed that if a dream kept recurring, it suggested the mind or heart was having a problem dealing with something.

He’d proposed that my dream reflected a child’s natural fear of losing her mother, but even at ten, that hadn’t quite rung true for me. Now I wondered if Daddy had secretly worried that the recurring dream had something to do with the biological mother I’d lost, that perhaps I’d been trapped somewhere cold, forced to watch her die.

That was what I’d been thinking, too, until my recent experience in the White Mansion with the concubine and king, when I’d realized she was the woman from my dreams, coupled with my latest dream, where watching her die felt like I had perished. Now I was troubled by an entirely different possibility.

Regardless, when I’d attempted to write down my Cold Place dream, it had come out looking a lot like this prophecy: vague, dreamy, and confusing as hell.

“Besides, we think we have it sorted out,” Jo said. “The word ‘Keltar’ means magic mantle. The clan of the Keltar, or MacKeltar, served as Druids to the Tuatha Dé Danann thousands of years ago, when the Fae still lived among us. When the Compact was negotiated and the Fae retired from our world, they left the Keltar in charge of honoring the Compact and protecting the old lore.”

“And we’ve learned there are five male Druids living,” said Mary.

“Dageus, Drustan, Cian, Christian, and Christopher,” Jo said. “We’ve already dispatched a message to them, asking them to join us here.”

Unfortunately, Christian was going to be a problem.

“You said you knew where the four stones are,” Kat said.

I nodded.

“So all we need is you to tell us where the Book is, one of the Keltar to pick it up and bring it here, the four stones laid around it, and the five of them to re-inter it with whatever binding song or chant they know. It sounds like one of them will know whatever needs to be done at the end. I spoke to one of their wives, and she seemed to understand what was meant by ‘the inhabited or possessed.’ ”

“Re-inter it where?” I demanded, watching Rowena closely. It looked as if my only role in the entire matter was to track it. This entire time I’d been feeling as if I had to do it all, but my part in the prophecy was really very small. There was nothing in the prophecy about me that was bad. Just that Alina might die and I would long for death—been there, done that. I felt a huge weight slip from my shoulders. There were five other people responsible for the bulk of it. It was all I could do not to punch the air with a fist and shout, Yes!

“Where it was before,” she said coolly.

“And where’s that?”

“Down the corridor Dani said you couldn’t pass,” Jo said.

The Grand Mistress shot her a quelling look.

“Can you get past the woman who guards it?” I asked Rowena.

“Don’t fash yourself with my business, girl. I’ll do my part. You do yours.”

“V’lane couldn’t get past it, either,” I fished, wondering why.

“No Fae can.” Smugness dripped from her words, and I knew she’d had something to do with that.

“Who is the woman that guards the hall?”

Jo answered, “The last known leader of the Haven.”

Rowena’s current Haven was cloaked in secrecy. “You mean my mother?”

“Isla was not your mother! She had only one child,” Rowena snapped.

“Then who am I?”