04 Silence (7 page)

Josh laughed at that. “From what I can see, she’s about as far from that as it’s possible to be. Assuming these journals are correct, then what she is would be closer to one of the fey.”

“The fey?” Kevin asked. “Like a fairy? Holy-”

“She doesn’t have
all
the features,” Josh said, “so I could be wrong. But maybe a form of it. I don’t know much about the fey, though. As you can probably guess, trying to grow up normal, this fantasy stuff was never rea
lly
my thing.”

Kevin stole a glance at Jake, who nodded.

They could both think of two people who were about as heavily into that kind of thing as it was possible to be.

“And that’s
all
I know,” Josh said. “Now, excuse me, because I have a lot to do. Saving the others was one thing, but
all
this means that a new concern has sprung up. Pietre’s new lair, wherever it is, seems to be attracting a lot of old vampires. A lot of powerful vampires.
Until
y
ou brought me this, it didn’t make sense. But now,
well,
I can see that master vampires would flock here, if they knew that there was a way to Palisor. Our war, far from being over, seems to be just beginning.”

Kevin couldn’t help a little twinge of fear at that.

He suppressed it, though. He had more important things to deal with. Like seeing a couple of people who might know more than he did about the fey.

For Kevin, the hardest part was waiting, rather than running straight to meet with Maisy and Steve. He met them at the school, to avoid the kind of attention that showing up at their houses would bring from their parents. Of course, walking into a school and cornering a couple of the students could have brought its own problems, but Kevin was able to arrange a meeting to talk to the principal about possibly doing more teaching work there as a cover for what he actua
lly
wanted. That meeting actua
lly
went quite
we
ll.

Apparently, the students had loved him, and the principal was
willing
to overlook his sudden disappearance as a result. It was enough to make Kevin wonder what life would have been like had he not been bitten. Would he have just settled into a job like this? Would he have been happy doing it?

Kevin pushed those thoughts from his mind. He needed to find his favorite two geeks. It was a long shot, trying to find out more from them, but with any luck, some nugget of valuable information would have lodged itself in one of their brains, disguised as a TV or fantasy game reference. At the very least, both Maisy and Steve deserved to know what was going on with Briony. She was their friend too.

Since it was lunch, Kevin found them in the cafeteria, and sat down at their table. Both Steve and Maisy looked up in surprise to see him sitting there with them. Apparently, they hadn’t heard that he was in the school.

Maisy took the lead. “Hey,” she said. “What are you doing here? Where’s Briony?”

Kevin reached out, snagging one of her fries. “That’s what I need to talk to you about.”

“That sounds ominous,” Steve said.

Kevin shrugged. “I guess it depends on whether you
call
disappearing through some sort of gate into another world ominous or not.”

“Another world?” Maisy just stared at him for a second or two, as though waiting for a punch line.

“You’re not joking, are you?”

Kevin shook his head. “I wish I were. Briony went through it after Mrs. Edge, along with a kid who can shift into a dragon.”

“And you just let that happen?” Maisy demanded.

“There was kind of a battle going on at the time,” Kevin pointed out. The excuse didn’t seem to cut much ice with Maisy. “Look, I’m doing my best to get her back.”

“What did the gate look like?” Steve asked.

Apparently, the disappearance of Briony was one thing, but the sudden appearance of gates to other worlds was something else entirely. “Are we talking
Stargate
here, or windows to another reality, or what?”

“Steve,” Maisy said warningly.

Steve looked across at her. “You can’t
tell
me that you’re not interested. Gates to other worlds? It sounds like any fantasy gamer’s dream.” He reached out towards Maisy’s fries, but she slapped his hand away. “You let Kevin steal some.”

“Yes,
well,
he doesn’t have his own.” Maisy looked thoughtful for a moment. “
All
right,
I
’ll
admit it. The whole idea does sound pretty interesting.”

“Like something out of a game,” Steve insisted.

Maisy sighed. “
All
right, like something out of a game. Only it isn’t. A game, I mean.”

Kevin nodded. He knew that it was Maisy he had to convince. With Maisy on board, Steve would probably do just about anything. “That’s why I’m here. I just don’t know enough about what’s going on, and I figured that, as regular gamers-”

“As geeks, you mean?” Maisy said.

“-you might at least have a vague idea about how things were supposed to go.”

Steve looked pleased by that, but Maisy looked a little more doubtful.

“I don’t know, Kevin,” she said. “Getting information from games isn’t going to be that accurate, is it? I mean, just look at how different vampires are.”

Kevin nodded. “I know, but there are some similarities, right? It’s
all
based on the original legends somewhere down the line. And that’s
all
I need. Any information is better than none right now, believe me.”

Maisy nodded, and ate a mouthful of her lunch.

“I guess so. So what exactly do you want to know?”

“What do you know about the fey?”

Maisy and Steve looked at one another. Maisy gestured with her fork as though trying to give shape to an idea. “That’s… kind of a big area, Kevin. These days, people use the word ‘fey’ to cover
all
kinds of things. Practica
lly
everything out of Northern European and Celtic mythology, for a start. You’re going to have to narrow things down a little.”

“
Well,
” Kevin said. He wasn’t sure for a second if he should
tell
the two of them everything, but then he realized that if anyone had a right to know, it was probably Briony’s two closest friends. “What kind of fey might resemble a vampire?”

“Um…” The two geeks looked at one another for a while, as though it might help them think. As much as he liked them, Kevin couldn’t help the thought that they were probably attempting some kind of sci-fi nerd mind meld.

Steve came out of it first. “I guess there’s one thing. It’s not one of the Irish sidhe though, but it’s kind of broadly good, and it has fangs.”

“Fangs sound about right,” Kevin said. “What are these things
called
?”

Steve shrugged. “I forget what the word is. It’s Norwegian or something.”

“Danish,” Maisy said, “and it’s ‘hugtandalf’. What? Nicky wanted me to come up with rules for playing one a couple of months back.”

“So these…”

“It just translates as ‘fanged elves’,” Steve said.

Kevin couldn’t believe it. It sounded like he’d gotten luckier than he could have hoped for. Thank goodness for geeks. “Do you know anything about them?”

Maisy nodded. “
Well,
assuming that we can take a
Faeries, Fey and Sidhe
rules supplement as accurate. They’re actua
lly
pretty cool. They have fangs, like vampires, which come down whenever their emotions are running high, and they have these amazing powers…” Suddenly Maisy stopped. “Kevin, why are you so interested in this?”

Kevin ignored the question. “Do you know where they live? Where they come from? Please, Maisy, it’s important.”

Maisy shrugged. “They’re supposed to live on a special world
full
of magic…”

“Which could be on the other side of a portal,” Steve finished for her.

Maisy looked at Kevin expectantly. “Is that where Briony went? Hang on… she’s one of them, isn’t she? That’s why you’re asking. Briony’s a
fanged
elf
.” Maisy practica
lly
jumped out of her seat. “That is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard! And it explains so much. No one human has skin and hair that nice.”

“Shh.” Kevin put a finger to his lips. “Not so loud. I’m sure Briony and Aunt Sophie wouldn’t want the whole school to know.”

“Sorry.”

Kevin took a breath. “So, if I wanted to find this fey world, how would I do it? I know, I know, it’s just a game, but pretend for a moment that I rea
lly
needed to get in there to reach level twenty or something.”

Maisy thought a little more. “The fey like nature,” she said, “so maybe the more natural a place, the more likely it
will
be to hold the gate. They’d put it in the woods, obviously. Maybe near streams or certain types of trees and flowers. In a lot of things, fey have affinities for particular types of natural settings, and don’t like to stray into other ones.”

Kevin nodded. “That fits with where the gate came up before. But I don’t know if that’s enough. You both know how big the woods are. Hundreds of acres.

Thousands. How am I going to find the right kind of clearing in
all
that?”

Maisy smiled like she knew something that Kevin didn’t. “You just look for it.”

That wasn’t exactly the kind of answer Kevin had been hoping for. He got up to leave. “You’ve both been very helpful. At least now we know what Briony could be. I have to go, though. I need to start looking for a way in.
Fallon
can’t go, Jake can’t go, so that leaves me.”

“Settle down,” Maisy said. “I didn’t mean looking by physica
lly
combing the woods. I meant looking electronica
lly
. Ever since we joined the Preservation Society, Steve and I have been looking at ways to use technology to keep track of supernatural activity.”

That caught Kevin’s interest. He’d done enough science to understand the possibilities of
well
- constructed search algorithms. The way they could show up patterns that people often couldn’t pick out on their own. “You have something that works?”

“Of course,” Steve said. “
Well,
sometimes, anyway. And this time, it should be simple. You just
tell
me everything you remember about the clearings where the gate opened, and then I take satel
lite
maps of the forest, and I set a program looking for those characteristics. Easy.”

Kevin could see the possibilities at once.

“You’re right. It
will
still
leave us with a lot of possibilities, but
I
’ll
know where they are, and I can check on them.”

“Of course,” Steve said, “if you could give me enough data on when and where gates had opened in the past, we might be able to do more to predict what
will
happen.”

Kevin thought about the journals of the werewolf kings. Would they have enough information? He didn’t know.

“For now,” he said, “concentrate on the basic search. If we can do more later, we
wi
ll.
” Kevin’s eyes lit up as another thought came to him. “If you knew what to look for, you could also find Pietre and the vampires this way, couldn’t you?”

“Maybe,” Steve admitted.

Kevin got up right as the
bell
signaling the end of lunch rang. He patted Steve on the shoulder and grinned at Maisy. “I was beginning to think it was hopeless, but now I think we may have something.”

Maisy and Steve both smiled, and Maisy leaned across to kiss Steve. “Fina
lly
, we do something for the society that’s helpful.”

She moved over to Kevin, looking up at him with serious eyes. “Look Kevin, I know how you’re worried about Briony. So am I.
We
’ll
get her back. We need her, she’s a big part of Wicked now, and we won’t lose her. We can’t.”

Kevin nodded. He hoped that Maisy was right.

He rea
lly
did. The thought of losing Briony weighed on him like a pocketful of lead. “Let me know when you find something,” he said. “Until then,
I
’ll
be out trying to see if I can come up with anything else that might help.

And be careful.” Already a couple of the goth students were looking across at the three of them. “If Pietre learns that you might be able to track him down…”

“Don’t worry,” Steve said, “
we
’ll
be careful.”

“Or I
will
be anyway,” Maisy added. “And
I
’ll
try to make sure that Steve is, too.”