“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Basically,” Blondie said, taking a seat at one of the nearby long, low tables that peppered the room, “supes aren’t entirely in the closet, here. Long ago we ran around free with the humans. That’s why there’s such a strong fairy mythology. We were the Fair Folk, the Tylwyth Teg, et cetera.”
“But not everyone knows about us now,” I said. “Magog said she had to hide her true form from the humans.”
“True,” Sarah conceded. “There grew to be too many problems between our kind and humans. Our numbers were shrinking, while the human population kept growing. Tensions kept increasing, but when Christianity finally took hold on the island we knew we had to go underground. Imagine what the witch trials would have done to our people?”
My lips twisted in silent acknowledgement. “But we’re standing in the middle of the British Museum, in a room that’s apparently run by the supernatural, for the supernatural. That’s not really underground. Well, we are underground, literally, but you know what I mean.”
Sarah smiled at me, her face again flashing into my own before shifting. I was never going to get used to that. “Our leaders recognized early that the feudal system respected power, and that it could keep secrets if the benefits for doing so were obvious. Despite all the political changes here on the Island for human society, some things haven’t changed, and respect for power and lineage is one of them. Let’s just say we’ve made it worthwhile for this human government to keep our secrets, although there are often slips. Why do you think the British are still so obsessed with fairies, and stories of strangers from other worlds popping round to save them?”
“Oh my god, is Doctor Who real?” I asked.
“The Doctors are actually a team of different Alfar who handle situations that, in reality, are probably the fault of the supernatural community to begin with. But yes.”
“Whoa,” I said, awed out of my little mind. “Awesome. Can I meet them?”
“Yeah, no,” said Anyan. “As they’d probably kill us on sight.”
I sighed, all fantasies of becoming the Doctor’s next sidekick blown away by the fact that, apparently, the Doctor would blow me away.
And not in a fun way, my virtue warned my libido, which had perked up at the word “blown.”
“So the government knows about this room?” I said.
“There’s a very secret part of a very secret part of our government that knows about it, yes. In fact, most of that secret part of the government is secretly made up of supes, but that’s a secret.”
I shook my head, resetting my rattled brains.
“Huh?” I asked.
“Basically we’ve weaved ourselves into the echelons of human power in a way unheard of in other countries. The closest approximation of what we’ve done here on the Island is in your North America, but because you’re all in different Territories there’s been no single, top-down infrastructure to embed in your human governments. Therefore your supernatural communities mostly use their positions in human government to monitor and to cover things up. Here on the Island, we can make things happen.”
I frowned at Sarah, unsure how I felt about that bit of information. But she ignored my expression, and continued talking.
“This room is, in many ways, symbolic of our relationship to the human inhabitants of our Island. One can see it as built inside the human edifice, yes. But one can also see it as having the human edifice built around us, with us as its backbone—its core.”
“And here is housed the greatest compendium of supernatural knowledge ever gathered in one place, since the Great Library in Alexandria burned,” Blondie said, moving towards Sarah who, alarmingly, again began to look like Blondie the closer the Original came towards her. When Blondie was standing next to Sarah (who was now fully Blondie) she leaned in to kiss her doppelgänger on the cheek. “Whilst Sarah has been its prisoner.”
“Its curator,” Sarah corrected, laughing, but our own Blondie’s expression told me she hadn’t been joking. I realized at that moment there was something else going on here, something I didn’t understand. I filed that information away to ask Blondie about, later, if I had the chance.
Okay, I was also really curious about Sarah, and their relationship. But I liked to hide my nosiness behind legitimate questions, whenever possible.
Anyan cleared his throat, obviously trying to head off any pity party before drinks could be poured.
“So what are we doing here?” asked the barghest, pointedly.
Sarah straightened, walking back towards the little cart she’d been hovering around since we walked in.
“You’re here because rumours have been spreading about the Red and the White. I knew someone would come to me, eventually, for information. So I began compiling everything we have.”
“And?” Anyan prompted.
“And, a book is missing.”
“Who cares?” squeaked Hiral, doing a strange magic-fueled hop to stand on the table next to me. He sniffed his long blue nose and again scratched at what I imagined were his equally blue balls. “It’s a library. I bet books disappear all the time.”
Sarah gave Hiral a long look, and then took a very small book off of the shelves behind her. She tossed it to the gwyllion. Hiral’s long blue fingers snatched it out of the air and he looked at the doppelgänger curiously.
“Try taking it out, gwyllion,” she said. “Even with your powers—your being able to get in anywhere you want and hide yourself—you try leaving this library with that book.”
I watched in a combination of alarm and respect as Hiral disappeared, and I mean disappeared both physically and magically. It was like there was nothing in that room with us except for a high-pitched, maniacal giggle that was making its way swiftly towards an open set of double doors on the far side of the library.
Then we heard a howl as the laughter hit the lintel, and suddenly Hiral—now entirely visible—was shooting across the room, his little form smoking as he shrieked in pain.
“Like I said,” Sarah said dryly, as we watched Hiral’s huddled form pant and swear from the patch of rug he’d finally landed upon, “a book is missing. A book about the Red and the White. And as you have seen, it’s not easy to get a book out of this room.”
“What book was it?” I asked.
Sarah paused, as if trying to figure out how to word what she wanted to say. When she did start speaking, the look on her face was confused, but it was as if she was as baffled by her confusion as she was actually confused.
“This is where it gets tricky,” she said. “The fact is, the book shouldn’t be important.”
“And why is that?” asked Anyan.
In response, Sarah began to lay out all the books and scrolls lying in front of her. The majority seemed to have been made in batches of the same time period, and most were really old looking. Anyan walked over to flip open one of the actual bound books, and it revealed an inside full of beautiful illuminations, like in the Book of Kells. Then all of the reading material made a huge jump in time, to what looked like the relatively old, but still very much modern, textbooks. Indeed, the only thing the old stuff and the new stuff had in common from here was that it was all dauntingly thick, with the last, modern hardbacks being about the same size as my compiled Shakespeare.
“These are all the exact same book,” Sarah said. “They’re the sort of textbook version of the Red and the White, updated through the centuries as they’ve been resurrected. Many of our kind have a copy of this book already—they’re sort of the supernatural version of, say, War and Peace. It’s a daunting read, so not everyone picks it up, but enough people do that it’s hardly rare. And pretty much everyone’s been forced to read it at some point or other, as part of their schooling.”
“Do you have supe school?” I asked.
Sarah gave me an exasperated look. “Of course we do.”
“And you all read this book?”
“Yes.”
“So why steal it?”
“Exactly.”
“Was there something special about the stolen copy?”
“I can’t think of how,” Sarah said. “It’s definitely one of the new versions that’s missing. I know that. But they’re all supposed to be the same book. They have to be the same book.”
Here Sarah’s brow furrowed, as if she were concentrating on something. “I know they’re the same book,” she said, “because I wrote the last version. I modernized the language, and I researched what was written in the past, and I told what happened to the Red and the White after they were destroyed by Cyntaf…”
Again Sarah’s voice trailed off, and she stared at the textbooks in front of her as if she weren’t entirely sure she’d ever seen them before. The way she was acting, it was like someone who’d been way too heavily glamoured for way too long. But that sort of glamour-abuse only happened with humans, at least that I knew of. I snapped to when Sarah started speaking again, rubbing her hands down the front of her dress as if she wanted to make sure she was still all there.