Erin, but is that your name?” I pressed. Her smile faltered and a cute furrow appeared between her eyes. Focus, O’Carroll. Guard up.
“It’s a form of my name,” she finally answered, clearly off stride.
“But not your name?” I pressed.
She leaned back, frowning, eyes locked to mine, lips compressed in a flat line.
“Hey Declan,” a voice called from across the room. We turned and I spotted Ashley coming toward us, a strained smile on her face and her eyes locked on the blonde whose name wasn’t really Erin. Behind her came a tough-looking, middle-aged guy who might have been her dad.
Ashley arrived at the table and studied me for a second before glancing at Not Erin, then back to me. She frowned minutely, then turned back to the spooky blonde across the table and her minion.
“Sightseeing, Eirwen?” she asked, an edge to her voice.
“Just interested in your education choices, young Speaker,” the blonde answered, her bearing suddenly formal.
“Declan, this is my dad, Ian Moore. I see you’ve met Eirwen.”
“Well, she said I could call her Erin, but we had just established that wasn’t her true name. Eirwen, is it? Nice to meet you,” I said.
“Likewise, Declan, likewise,” she replied, standing up, the guy next to her popping up like a puppet. “But now I must take my leave,” she said, gliding away without even glancing back to see if her companion was following, which he was.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Moore. Ashley, please don’t take this the wrong way, but your friend was… well, a bit weird.”
“She’s not my friend, Declan, and she’s certainly not yours,” Ashley said, looking at me a bit worriedly.
“Oh, I’m pretty sure of that. She tried to hex me with a charm or something,” I said, holding my hand out to shake her father’s.
He had a powerful grip and callused hands, but then, I would expect nothing less from a blacksmith. Up close, he seemed younger than I would have thought. Ashley was about my age and her dad looked to be in his mid-thirties, which meant he had her young.
He held my hand a moment longer than a normal handshake, pulling me forward just a bit and studying me carefully. “You’re alright then? Not feeling the need to chase after her and offer up your firstborn or anything?”
“Yes, sir, ah, no sir. So it was compulsion of some type, right?” I asked.
“It’s a kind of overwhelming glamour that effects both appearance and personal charisma. She’s very, very good at it. Most men become her babbling slaves,” Mr. Moore said, grimacing. “It helps to hold on to a piece of iron or steel.” He opened his left hand to show me ring of car keys with a tiny steel prybar on it.
“Steel… iron. Sidhe,” I realized.
“Wow, you put that together very fast,” Ashley commented.
“Last name O’Carroll, as in Irish. I was raised on the legends. But they’re real and they’re here?” I asked.
“Yes to both. Not all of the portal gates open to Hell. Some open to our sister world, Fairie,” Mr. Moore said. “It used to occur naturally from time to time, and they would visit. Or sometimes one of us would fall through to their world. Back when the Collider first came online, the very first gates to open were to Fairie. They came through in droves, but only in certain places. They were hunting,” he said.
“Hunting?” I asked.
“Children, Declan. Children like us and our classmates at Arcane,” Ashley said. “But ideally younger.”
“They grabbed Ashley, but it turns out her particular skill is a very, very rare form of telepathy, one they hadn’t seen in a thousand years,” Mr. Moore said, pulling up a chair.
“Fairie has a second dominant species… a very large, very dominant species,” Ashley said, pausing to gauge my reaction. She leaned close and whispered, “Dragons.”
I looked her in the eye and she was dead serious. Glancing at her father showed he was as well. Then I glanced around to see if any of the eating students near us were listening.
“Like flying, fire-breathing dragons?” I asked.
“Exactly. Big as in 747 Boeing big. At least, Gargax is,” she said.
“And you’re their translator, so if the sidhe and the unseelie sidhe don’t want to get their asses kicked by the dragons, then you are suddenly a very important person,” I surmised.
Father and daughter shared a glance, the daughter surprised, the father suspicious.
“Chris said you were a negotiator for another world, between species. He didn’t say anything about elves or dragons, though,” I explained.
“Why