Page 60 of Crown of the Fae King

While we were at dinner,Wickham made half a dozen calls and sent a slew of texts. "We’ll stay in a hotel tonight," he said. "But tomorrow, we'll at least have beds. And we'll get a vehicle. Too far to bicycle, and we cannae pop back and forth on the regular, or we're sure to be caught."

“If the other house is Headquarters, what will we call this one? The Oxford House?”

“Nay. Never that. We shall call it…Hope House.”

“Because you hope your sisters never come?”

He choked on his drink, then gestured all around. “Because we hope many things from this place.” He pointed to my abdomen, where Hank lay heavy in my money belt. “For example, I hope to find out more about your star stone. It’s too bad there wasnae a mention of it in the Trinity books.”

“Yeah. Too bad,” I said, but if I were honest, I was relieved. If Wickham knew just what I carried around with me, he wouldn’t want me within miles of himself or the people he cared about.

If I were lucky, very lucky, I could have my answers and keep my secrets too.

Contrary to our original plan,we stayed in the hotel for three days while a couple of Wickham’s acquaintances came down from the Scottish Highlands to get the house furnished. Sophie Ogilvy was a merchandiser, whatever that was, and Dezi McHenish was an event planner and interior designer. They were both married to a couple of “Soni’s Highlanders,” had attended the wedding, and knew all about O’Ryan’s monsters, so we didn’t have to guard what we said around them. And every once in a while, I’d catch sight of a knife hilt sticking out of their clothes.

Wickham never asked for my opinion, so I figured my ability to decorate anything at all was judged by my Hazelton apartment. The fact that he’d seen it only after Andy Weaver had tossed the place hadn’t helped.

I hoped he didn’t think I was the one to drape my underwear from the TV antennae.

Two days after the women arrived, our rooms were ready for us, thankfully, on the first floor. If I ever had to run for the door, I wouldn’t be risking my neck on the stairs along the way. There were two wings projecting off the back of the house. They put Wickham in one and me in the other, near the rooms they’d claimed for themselves for as long as they were in town.

So we had a girl’s wing and a boy’s wing, with a master bedroom in the center section for the MacKenzies, if they ever came to stay. I estimated we could house everyone we knew without needing the second floor.

While Sophie and Dezi were busy directing deliverymen at the house, Wickham and I spent the first two weeks at the libraries of various colleges, studying campus maps, and learning where the oldest manuscripts could be found.

On our master map, Wickham outlined in red any library that might prove helpful, including Faculty libraries we couldn’t just walk into. Any restricted areas that would require us popping in afterhours would be saved as our last resorts. He was confident we would find what we were looking for without magic—though we had yet to find out if actual fairies might be guarding the Fae books inside the Bod.

One Friday afternoon, my optimism was seriously lagging. “If they guarded the Fae books, why wouldn’t they be guarding The Covenant?”

“Most certainly they are,” he said quietly. “But we mustnae stroll ‘round the information desks asking which of the librarians might be bribed by a shiny gem or two. And the very last thing we want to do is ask point blank where we might findthat document. What fairies are here—and there may be many—might have as strong a reaction to our interest as the last one, the one who came after ye.”

He stared me down, made sure I’d gotten the point.

“We must find our own answers…and pray we succeed before we draw the wrong attention.”

The memory of the last time I looked into the purple eyes of a particular librarian took me back to the floor of that car. Naked and shivering from both cold and pain, dreading the next touch of those hands, wishing they would finish me off already. I tried to shake it out of my mind, detach it somehow as the reason for the bandage on my arm. But suddenly those bandages were screaming at me, demanding I acknowledge why they were there in the first place.

I watched, crazed, as my left hand found the hooks that held the elastic fabric together. I lifted my arm, unwound the fabric, caught the heavy bottom half as it fell away. There was a black mesh trash can on the floor at the corner of the table, so I leaned over and dropped the whole mess inside, picked the last bits of cotton off my skin, and tossed them in after.

I might have imagined my arm complaining, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t have stood it another second!

Wickham hovered over me, searching for a way to help me, to keep me from falling apart. And suddenly, I remembered him doing the same inside the car, carefully covering me with his dark coat, his face pinched and frustrated by his powerlessness.

“Easy, Lennon. Easy now. Dinnae hurt yerself. We’ll call it a day, aye? Take a break from it tomorrow.”

Take a break? Yes, please.I nodded.

He held up my coat and I slipped my arms in. So much easier without the cast. He didn’t mention doctor’s orders or try to retrieve the bandages from the trash can, just gathered our stuff and led me to the back of one of the large stacks.

“I’ll come back to collect the car. For now, let’s pop home. To Hope House.”

Hope sounded foreign at the moment, but I nodded and took his hand.

One morning,I found a man named Alwyn in the kitchen cooking breakfast for me, Sophie and Desi. Wickham had popped to the Mediterranean to check on the MacKenzies, Kitch, and Persi. I wondered if the break he had suggested the day before meant a nice break from each other. We had been together for weeks, and I was tired of his voice, tired of his sober, pretty face. And I realized how much I missed having Persi and Everly around.

Persi, I suspected, was having some long-awaited time alone with Kitchens. The way they avoided each other had to mean something.

As for furnishing the house, I wasn’t any help lifting things or assembling things, but I was happy to lend moral support as Sophie and Dezi turned our hollow Hope House into a home. Even with my arm out of a cast, I didn’t dare use it much. However, in the middle of the night, I realized I could have swung a sword if I needed to...

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