CHAPTER ELEVEN
Interestingly, by the time we arrived back at Oona’s home, Finnlagh had already departed. Charles and Giselle were seated on the rocking chairs on the big front porch, and Damien, who once again held the baby, was occupying the porch swing.
Valentin had been seated on the steps, but he rose to his feet as soon as we cleared the tree line.
“You look a little green around the gills, sugar,” Giselle called out as I approached.
“Motion sickness,” I said, and Charles popped up from his seat for me to take it.
“Sit down,” he said gallantly, guiding me to the chair.
Hazel flew inside—to notify Buntie about the needed tea I imagined— and Valentin continued to stand at attention until Oona claimed one of the chairs at the small café table on the porch.
“Finnlagh has returned to his home, so he would be there when the children arrive from school,” the Hunter said, as he joined Oona at the table. “You are all safe to speak freely.”
“My children will be home soon as well. Our time is limited,” Oona said, removing the sheathed sword from her back.
Charles frowned at them both. “You say you trust Finnlagh, yet you won’t talk in front of him? Care to explain why?”
Oona’s head whipped around as she glared at him.
“Have you not been paying attention? Finnlagh’s father is the King of the Light Fae!
Finnlagh stays out of the machinations of the light court, and lives his life here, quietly in the hollow, helping other Fae who want to assimilate in the mortal world.
He is a good and noble male, a friend, and my children call him ‘Uncle.’ I have no wish to put him in an untenable position against his father. ”
“This is,” Damien began, “a very difficult situation. For many reasons.”
“Yes,” Charles said, looking from one to the other. “I’m starting to see that.”
With a sigh, I let my head drop back against the rocking chair. The mint leaves had taken the edge off, but if I moved my head too quickly I’d probably heave again.
Valentin gently cleared his throat. “Did Lorna learn anything that can help us?”
Oona explained to the others that I had confirmed there’d been coercion—Fae Magick— at play in Shelby’s death.
“So, she was Faery led. The Accords have been broken, then.” Valentin sounded none too happy about that.
I kept very still and breathed slowly, hoping that the last of my nausea would fade. Charles dropped his hand on my shoulder and soon I felt steadier. He was sending me some healing energy.
Although I was surprised at his kindness, I did not comment on it in front of the others. While I sat, the other group discussed the ramifications of the light court being involved or getting their hands on the grimoire.
“I’m sorry, but I’m not feeling very well,” I told the group after a few minutes. “Damien, could you drive Charles and me back to town? I’d like to go back to our hotel and lie down for a while.”
“I’ll do it,” Giselle offered. “I need to get back anyway.”
We said our goodbyes, and Giselle drove us back to town. I sat in the front, kept my eyes on the road, and managed not to get any more nauseous than I already was. Once we picked up our rental car and arrived back at the hotel, I took off my shoes, went directly to the bed, and lay down.
Charles went to the bathroom and came out with a wet washcloth.
“Thanks,” I said as he sat beside me. Gently he brushed my bangs back from my face and lay the cool damp cloth across my forehead.
“You are still pale,” he said.
I made a face. “Yeah, I bet.”
“Here,” he said and took a pillow and propped up my head. “Is that better?”
“It is.”
“Now that we’re alone, tell me what you discovered.”
I filled him in and he sat quietly listening. After a moment he offered to go and fetch me a lemon-lime soft drink for my stomach which sounded great to me.
“Take some time,” he said. “Gather your thoughts, the answers will come.”
He slipped out, and I lay there in the dark, going over what I’d learned that day…
Shelby had told me the grimoire was hidden in plain sight, that,‘It’s right under his nose. All mixed in with the others.’ And she had also claimed that he’d never find it. What else had she said? I struggled to remember her exact words.
‘If anyone can find it, you can,’ she’d told me. ‘Look for the row with the horseshoes. They won’t be able to touch it there.’
Row as in a row of books? I wondered, Like from a store or public library?
Oh my stars, she’d said she had swapped the book out!
Perhaps she meant that she’d switched the cover of the book, making Sawyer think he’d still had the grimoire in his possession when in actual fact, he’d had the cover with very different interior pages.
If she’d hidden the grimoire in plain sight, she could have actually meant it was in the middle of a collection of books. And I knew books.
Pulling out my phone, I did an online search looking for the nearest public library in Hemlock Hollow. It ended up that the closest public library was one county over, in Salem County.
My lips twitched at the coincidence. “Of course, it’s Salem County.
” I chuckled to myself. Shelby had said an ‘appropriate name.’ A Missouri county with the same name as the town where the Witch-trails were held in New England in the 1600s certainly fit the bill.
On a hunch, I quickly searched the address of Sawyer’s parents’ property, checked the local maps online, and saw that the library was only a few miles away.
Shelby told me that she’d run from him, and I’d wager that she’d probably been on foot. What if she’d taken the grimoire to a public library, to hide it and had tucked it into the stacks?
A full body chill washed over me as my intuition kicked in. “I bet that’s exactly what she did.” Rolling to my feet, I ditched the washcloth, put my shoes back on and quickly packed up our bags. Once I was finished, I grabbed my purse and the knapsack that held my magickal supplies.
When Charles returned, he opened up the door and found me sitting on the end of the bed waiting for him with the bags beside me. “I think I know where to look for the grimoire,” I told him without preamble.
In response he simply handed me the soft drink, grabbed the bags and said, “Tell me on the way.”
The Salem County Public Library was a lovely library housed in a beautiful old Victorian.
We strolled through the door about a half hour before close.
Once we were in, we both began to wander through the stacks, and I kept a close eye out for any vintage horseshoes that might be used for decoration or even as part of a sign for different genres of fiction, like Westerns.
I took my time wandering over the first and second floors, and while I did so I cast my magick out trying to sense for anything that was different or out of place. I knew that Charles was using his magick for the same thing, albeit his spells didn’t work the same as mine.
By the time I made it to the third floor—where the children’s section was, I had started to wonder if I’d been wrong about my theory.
I could hear Charles down on the ground floor speaking to the librarian at the desk, and I wandered along the rows of children’s books, scanning with my inner eye and ‘looking’ for something that might feel or appear to not fit energetically.
I went up and down the stacks on the third floor three times, trailing my fingers across the spines of the books and hoping for a ‘hit.’
Despite feeling an overall tension in the atmosphere, there was nothing specific that I could pinpoint. I checked my phone, saw that the library was about to close, and wondered if Charles would have to resort to spelling the librarians into allowing us to remain until we finished searching.
Frustrated by a lack of results, I plopped down into a child-sized chair at the end of one row of books, slid my glasses on top of my head, and dropped my head into my hands.
“Maybe I need to think more like Shelby,” I muttered.
Shelby had been clever and a history major.
She’d taught classes at UMAB…and her spirit had insisted that I could find the missing grimoire.
I scrubbed my hand across my forehead and tried to think about this differently.
Perhaps I was looking too hard…a missing the forest for the trees sort of thing.
With a sigh, I slipped my glasses back on, and my eyes leisurely traveled over the authors’ names on the spines of the books on the bottom row.
I spotted several classic children’s books, many of which had fallen over, and more which were out of alphabetical order of the author’s last names.
Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Treasure Island was shelved after Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Maybe it was the book seller in me, but I simply had to fix it. I slid from the chair and went to my knees in order to more easily reach the lowest wooden shelf. Reaching in, I began to straighten the books, and as I placed them upright my fingertips collided with something rough and cold.
Jerking my hands back, I hunkered down even lower, pushed the books to one side and took a look. There, I found several old horseshoes between the back of the shelf and the books themselves.
Look for the row with the horseshoes, I remembered. Then my eyes fell on the old, oversized copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
“It can’t be,” I whispered. Had Shelby hidden the grimoire from Sawyer in a book written about a literary character with the same name?
As soon as I pulled the classic book from the shelf, I could feel that the binding was loose. Yet I did not rush to open it, as I had no idea if that might alert other Supes—such as the Light Fae—that someone had found the grimoire.
To be on the safe side, I gently placed the book in my lap and then grabbed four horseshoes from the back of the shelf and arranged them around myself in a circle as I sat on the floor
“I create this circle of iron with this charm,” I chanted spontaneously, “to hide my actions and protect me from all harm.”