“Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” I muttered. “By the time she gets around to telling us anything, the Unseelie will have killed a billion more humans.” No matter. I was back in the walls of the abbey. It was time to go to work on plan A. This meeting had been plan B.

I looked at Dani. “You said you’d been trying to get into the Forbidden Libraries. Do you know where all twenty-one of them are?”

Her eyes sparkled.

Dani knew her way around the abbey’s endless maze of stone corridors as well as any sidhe-seer in the first five circles of ascension, she told me proudly. There were seven circles of ascension in total, with the seventh being the Haven itself. Kat and her crew were in only the third. She herself was subject to no such limits, Dani confided smugly. Rowena had set her apart from such matters, as her own personal charge.

“So Rowena told you where all the libraries are?” That just didn’t sound like the GM I knew.

Well, no, Dani hedged, not exactly. So, okay, maybe she’d learned most of what she knew about the abbey before Rowena and the other women figured out that a soft breeze meant she was near, when she’d still been able to snoop freely. What did it matter? She knew, and that was more than any of the others knew! It had taken her years to track down the libraries, and she still wasn’t certain of a couple because she couldn’t get down those corridors, but the way she figured it, they had to be libraries, because what else would Rowena be hiding?

“Place is huge and deadly weird, Mac,” she told me. “There’s parts of the abbey don’t make sense. Wasted space where you think something should be but ain’t.”

I wanted to see all those places, but right now I needed to focus on the libraries. I’d barely slept last night. The conversation I overheard between my parents had played like a stuck record in my head. Baby, I’m sorry to tell you this, but according to some ancient prophecy, there’s something wrong with you and you’re going to doom the whole world. …

I’d been anxious to get my hands on the prophecy before. Now that it was supposedly about me, I was desperate. I wouldn’t believe it was about me until I saw it with my own eyes, and even then I probably still wouldn’t, unless it spelled out my entire name and said something as indubitably incriminating as: Beware of that evil MacKayla Lane; she’s a piece of work. Gonna doom the whole world, that wench.

I snorted. Absurd. Had Alina learned any of this? Was that why she’d kept me so far away? Not just for my own good but because she’d learned something about me that made her afraid to get me involved, for the world’s sake?

“Nah,” I said derisively.

“Is, too,” Dani defended. “I can show you ‘em.”

I snapped back to the present. “Sorry, I was thinking out loud. I believe you, and I want to see those places. But first the libraries.”

We wound down one corridor after the next. They all looked the same to me. The abbey was huge. Without Dani, I might have wandered for days, trying to find my way around. Before I came to the abbey the first time, I’d researched it and learned that the enormous stone fortress had been constructed on consecrated ground in the seventh century, when a church originally built by St. Patrick in 441 A.D. had burned down. That church had been built to replace a crumbling stone circle some claimed had, long ago, been sacred to an ancient pagan sisterhood. The stone circle had been predated by a shian, or fairy mound, that had allegedly concealed within it an entrance to the Otherworld.

Translation: This specific spot of earth, this precise longitude and latitude, had been a place of great importance, sacred and protected, as far back as records went and—I had no doubt—even further. Why? Because a book of unspeakable power had been trapped beneath it for thousands and thousands of years?

The abbey was plundered in 913, rebuilt in 1022, burned in 1123, rebuilt in 1218, burned in 1393, and rebuilt in 1414. It was expanded and fortified each time.

It was added on to in the sixteenth century and again extensively in the seventeenth, sponsored by an anonymous wealthy donor who completed the rectangle of stone buildings, enclosing the inner courtyard and adding housing—much to the astonishment of the locals—for up to a thousand residents.

This same unknown donor bought the land around the abbey and turned the enclave into the self-sustaining operation it was today. If I ever had the time to act instead of always being so busy reacting, I wanted to find out who that unknown donor was.

I glanced at my watch. It was three P.M., and my schedule was tight. I was supposed to meet the sidhe-seers in Dublin at seven, then Barrons at ten, for who knew what purpose. Further hampering my appointment calendar was the LM’s threat to return for me in three days, which put an uncomfortable squeeze on, because I couldn’t decide what day that was going to be. Was he counting all day yesterday, which meant he would return on Saturday morning? Or had he meant to begin counting on Friday, which meant he would return Sunday? Maybe he’d meant to allow me three full days and planned to come back on the fourth. It was all irritatingly vague. Not only had he threatened me, but he’d not even given me a specific date and time for my impending … whatever.