"We can do this the easy way or the hard way."

"Ballocks, child. We won't be doing this at all."

"Tell me what the prophecy says, Rowena," I said again, and this time I used Voice to command her. It resonated, echoing back at me off the abbey's stone walls. Sidhe Sidhe-seers rustled and murmured.

Eyes bulging, hands fisted, Rowena began to spit out words in a language I didn't understand.

I was about to order her to speak in English, when Kat cleared her throat and moved forward. Her face was pale, but her voice was calm and determined when she said, "Don't do this, Mac. You needn't coerce her. We found the book containing the prophecies in the Forbidden Library you opened. We can tell you all you need to know." She held out her hand for the papers I'd brought. "May I?"

I gave them to her.

She searched my gaze. "Do you believe Darroc was right?"

"I don't know. I could Voice Rowena and see what she knows. I could interrogate her thoroughly."

Kat looked back at Rowena, who was still speaking. "It's Old Irish Gaelic," she told me. "Took a bit of time, but we've translated it. Come with us. But hush her, will you?" She shivered. "It's not right, Mac. It's like what you did to Nana. Our wills must be our own."

"You can say that, knowing she's probably been using coercion on all of you for years?"

"Her power doesn't begin to compare to yours. There is seduction and there is rape. Some of us suspected she had...compelling leadership abilities. Still, she made wise and fair decisions."

"She lies to you," I said. Kat was far more forgiving than I was.

"Withholds. A small but important difference, Mac. She was right about faith. Had we been told as children we might be Unseelie, we may have walked a very different path. Release her. I'm asking you."

I looked at Kat a long moment. I wondered if she had something besides emotional telepathy, a kind of emotional balm she could apply if she chose. As I looked into her eyes, my anger at Rowena seemed to diminish. And I could see a grain of truth in what Kat had said. Alina and Christian had called them "necessary lies." I wondered if someone had told me when I was, say, nine or ten that I was Unseelie, if I would have thought I was destined to be bad and never even tried to be good. Would I have thought: What's the point? What's the point?

I sighed. Life was so complicated. "Forget the prophecy, Rowena," I commanded.

Instantly, she stopped speaking.

Kat raised a brow and looked amused. "Is that truly what you wished her to do?"

I winced. "Don't forget it! Just stop talking about it!"

But it was too late. I'd Voiced her to forget it, and I could tell by the look of disdain on the old woman's face that every word of it had been wiped from her mind.

"You are a danger to us all," she said haughtily.

I raked my hands through my hair. Voice was tricky.

"My daughters will tell you of the prophecy I no longer recall thanks to your ineptitude at Druid arts. They will tell you freely, without coercion. But you will consent to my terms: You work with our order and no one else. If I recall the shape of it, we know what we need. You will track it. We will do the rest, with..." She trailed off, rubbing her forehead.

"The five Druids and the stones," Kat supplied.

"You found the prophecy and it actually tells us what to do?" I said.

Kat nodded.

"I want to see it."

We gathered in the Forbidden Library, a small, windowless room that had failed to impress me when I'd first found it, spoiled as I was by Barrons Books and Baubles. Dozens of lamps were positioned around the low-ceilinged stone room, bathing it in a soft amber glow, bright enough to keep Shades at bay but diffuse enough to minimize damage to ancient fading pages.

Now, as I glanced around, it affected me differently than it had the first time. In my absence, sidhe sidhe-seers had organized the dusty chaos, dug old tomes out of trunks, carried in bookcases, and arranged things for easy access and cataloging.

I love books, they're in my blood. I wandered the dry stone room, stopping here and there to pass my hands over fragile covers I longed to touch but wasn't willing to risk harming.

"We're copying and updating everything," Kat said. "For millennia, only the Haven was permitted access to these histories and records. In a few more centuries many of them would have been dust." She gave Rowena a look of gentle rebuke. "Some of them already are."

"Och, and if you one day carry the scepter of my position, Katrina," Rowena said sternly, "you'll come to appreciate the limits of a single lifetime and the difficult choices that must be made."

"The prophecy," I said impatiently.

Kat motioned us all to a large oval table. We pulled out chairs and tucked in around it.

"We translated as best we can."

"Some of the words aren't Old Irish Gaelic," Jo said, "but appear to have been invented by a person self-schooled."

"Jo's our translator," Dani said, with equal measures of pride and disdain. "She thinks research is fun. As fecking if. if."

"Language!" Rowena snapped.

I blinked at her. She was still on that kick? I'd gotten so inured to "fecking" that it hardly even seemed like a cussword to me anymore.

"Ain't your problem no more. You ain't the boss of me." Dani gave Rowena a hard stare.

"Och, and you're so happy on your own, are you, Danielle O'Malley? Your mam would rise from her grave were she to ken her daughter left the abbey, consorts with a Fae prince and others of dubious blood, and takes orders from none at the tender age of ten and three."

"Don't give me no tender-age bunk," Dani growled. "'Sides, I'm gonna be ten and four four soon." She beamed around the table. "February twentieth, don't forget. I like chocolate cake. Not yellow. Hate fruit in my cakes. Chocolate on chocolate, the more the better." soon." She beamed around the table. "February twentieth, don't forget. I like chocolate cake. Not yellow. Hate fruit in my cakes. Chocolate on chocolate, the more the better."

"If you two can't be quiet, leave," I said.

The book Kat opened was surprisingly small, thin, clad in dull brown leather, and tied with a worn leather cord. "Moreena Bean lived in these walls a bit over a thousand years ago."

"A sidhe sidhe-seer whose gift was vision?" I guessed.

Kat shook her head. "No, a washerwoman for the abbess. They called her Mad Morry for her ramblings, ridiculed her insistence that dreams were as real as those events we lived. Mad Morry believed life was not a thing shaped of past or present but possibles. She believed that every moment was a new stone tossed into a loch, causing ripples that those 'revered among women' for whom she toiled were too dull of mind to see. She claimed to behold the entire loch, each and every stone. She said she was not mad, merely overwhelmed." Kat smiled faintly. "Much of what she's written makes no sense whatsoever. If it has come to pass, we can't tie it to current times or understand her signs. If all she penned in these pages is supposed to pass in order, we are only at the beginning of her predictions. A mere twenty pages in, she tells of the escape of the Sinsar Dubh. Sinsar Dubh."

"She actually calls it that?"

"Nothing in here is ever that clear. She writes of a great evil that slumbers beneath our abbey, that will escape, aided by 'one in the highest circle.'"

"A washerwoman knew of the Haven?" I exclaimed.

"Like as not, she eavesdropped on her betters," Rowena pronounced.

I rolled my eyes. "Elitist to the core, aren't you?"

Kat removed a sheet of yellow legal pad upon which Jo had scribbled a translation and handed it to me.

"There's a great deal of rambling before she gets to the point," Jo told me. "This was a washerwoman circa 1000 A.D. A.D., who'd never seen a car, a plane, a cell phone, an earthquake, and had no words to describe things. She goes on and on about 'in the day of,' in an effort to define when this event would take place. I focused on translating only what pertained to the Sinsar Dubh Sinsar Dubh itself. I'm still working on the rest of her predictions, but it's slow going." itself. I'm still working on the rest of her predictions, but it's slow going."

I scanned it, eager to find proof of my heroic role, or at least no proof of a villainous one.

The Beast will break free and scourge the earth. It cannot be destroyed. It cannot be damaged. An unholy tree, it will grow new leaves. It must be woven. (Walled? Caged?) From the mightiest bloodlines come two: If the one dies young, the other who longs for death will hunt it. Jewels from icy cliffs laid to the east, west, north, and south will make the three faces one. Five of the hidden barrier will chant as the jewels are laid, and one who burns pure From the mightiest bloodlines come two: If the one dies young, the other who longs for death will hunt it. Jewels from icy cliffs laid to the east, west, north, and south will make the three faces one. Five of the hidden barrier will chant as the jewels are laid, and one who burns pure ( (burned on a pyre?) will return it to the place from which it escaped. If the inhabited...possessed will return it to the place from which it escaped. If the inhabited...possessed ( (not sure of this word...transformed?) seals it in the heart of darkness, it will slumber, with one eye open seals it in the heart of darkness, it will slumber, with one eye open.

"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 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?" 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 was the woman from my dreams, coupled with my latest dream, where watching her die felt like the woman from my dreams, coupled with my latest dream, where watching her die felt like I I had perished. Now I was troubled by an entirely different possibility. 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 De 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! 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?"

"Precisely." She managed to try, convict, and execute me with the single word.

"The prophecy said there were two of us. One dies young, the other longs for death." Had she and I been alone, I wasn't sure how far I would have gone to force answers from her, but I knew this much: I wouldn't have liked myself when it was over.

"Like as not, a washerwoman ate a bad bit of fish, had dreams on an uneasy stomach, and declared herself a prophet. The word is bloodlines. Plural."

"Her spelling was appalling. There are extra letters in many words," Jo said.

"You'll need to neutralize those particular wards," I said coolly.

"There will be no Fae present when we seal the abomination away!"

"V'lane won't give me the stone," I told her. "There's no way he'll just hand it over."

"Spread your legs for another Fae and whore it out of him," she said flatly. "Then you will turn them all over to us. There is no need for you to be present when the ritual is performed."

My cheeks pinked, and it infuriated me. This old woman got under my skin like nobody else could. I wondered if my mother-Isla, I corrected hastily-had felt the same. I'd been so elated to discover the identity of my biological mother, and now, with everyone telling me she'd had only one child, I felt as if not only my mother had been stolen away from me but maybe even my sister as well. I'd never felt so alone in all my life.

"Feck you, old woman," I said.

"Don't waste it on me," she retorted. "I'm not the one with the stone."

"What was it you said to me once? Wait-I remember." I used Voice at the full extent of my power when I said, "Haud yer whist, Rowena."

"Mac," Kat warned.

"She's allowed to call me names but I can't tell her to shut up?"

"Sure, and you can, on equal ground, without compulsion. You rely on such powers in times of no need, you run the risk of losing what makes you human. You've a hot temper and a hotter heart. You need to cool them both."

"You may speak, Rowena." Voice had never sounded so pissy when Barrons used it.