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dense with fairy lore, sightings, overheard conversations, and speculation. Faithfully preserved by her ancestors, added to over the centuries, the tomes were stuffed to overflowing with fairy fact and legend.
    In there somewhere would be information about the creature she’d seen tonight.
    Perhaps, she clung determinedly to the optimistic thought as she hastened down the hallway, the thing didn’t even signify in the fairy scheme of things. Perhaps it had no greater desire to bother her than she had to bother it.
    Perhaps she was worrying for no reason at all.
     
    And perhaps,
she thought dejectedly many hours later, dropping a dusty volume in her lap as if burned,
the moon was made of cheese
.
    It
was
a fairy.
    And not just any fairy.
    It was the worst fairy of all.
    And desire? It had it in spades. To bother her? Oh, she’d be lucky if that was all it did. Torture her, play with her for its own amusement, drop her in the midst of some medieval Highland battle and watch her get trampled by snorting warhorses: Those were all possibilities, according to what she’d just read. If it stayed true to form—the thought made her shiver—it would seduce her first. Try to, she amended hastily. (The fact that, according to what she’d read, no mortal woman could resist it was a thought she refused to ponder overlong. That arrogant, vainglorious fairy was
not
getting a piece of Gabby O’Callaghan.)
    Rubbing her eyes, she shook her head.
Leave it to me,
she brooded,
to never do anything by halves.
It wasn’t enough to merely betray herself to the Fae, she had to go and do it to the most notorious one of all.
    A silver-tongued seducer, it was said to be so devilishly charming that mortals didn’t even realize they were in danger until it was much too late. It went by Puck, Robin Goodfellow, and Wayland Smith, among countless other names.
    A rogue even among his own kind . . .
    When she’d begun searching, she’d been afraid it might take her days to wade through the rambling tomes and discern the identity of the creature she’d seen, assuming it was even in there. The earliest volumes were written in Gaelic, which—despite Gram’s valiant efforts to teach her the old tongue—Gabby still couldn’t speak, and could scarcely muddle her way through reading.
    The
Books of the Fae
were a nightmare to sort through, written in myriad and often illegible scripts, with notes crammed into the margins of every page, cross-referencing other notes crammed into other margins on equally difficult-to-decipher pages.
    More than once Gabby had complained to her grandmother that someone “really needed to set up an index and organize these damn things.” And more than once Gram had smiled, given her a pointed look, and said, “Yes, someone should. What’s stopping you?”
    Though Gabby would have done nearly anything her beloved grandmother had asked of her, she’d determinedly avoided
that
task.
    She’d buried herself instead in modern-day law books that were far less disturbing than ancient tomes that brought to life an exotic world, which her continued existence and hope for a normal future depended upon her ability to ignore.
    After hours of fruitless searching, Gabby had finally noticed another book, one she couldn’t recall having seen before, a slimmer volume tucked back in a corner, as if it had inadvertently gotten pushed behind the other books and forgotten. Curious, she’d reached for it, brushing thick dust from the cover.
    Highly intelligent, lethally seductive . . .
    Bound in soft black leather, the tome she’d nearly overlooked contained the information she sought. Her ancestors had taken the subject matter so seriously that they’d devoted a separate volume to it.
    Unlike the other volumes, which were written in disjointed, sporadic journal fashion and dealt with whatever fairy had recently been sighted, the slim black book addressed only one, and flowed in chronological order, complemented by numerous sketches.