"Angry, child?" she asked.
She thought she'd heard me.
"Do you know who we caught? I'll give you a hint.
He was stealing a car from you.
We almost disposed of him--but he belongs to you, doesn't he? We decided to bring him along and see if you would play the game." "Gabriel is welcome to drive anything I own," I told her in clear tones--and hoped that even Gabriel's human ears could hear me.
"The Gray Lords are not going to be happy that you brought a human into fae matters." She laughed.
Her laughter caught me completely by surprise.
Any woman with a voice as deep as hers usually has a complementary laugh.
But hers was delicate and light-- completely inhuman, like silver bells ringing--and the sound of it told me what kind of fae she was, which only made my stomach clench harder.
Gabriel was in more than one kind of danger.
There was a pad of paper next to the phone on the wall.
I pointed at it, and Auriele got up soundlessly and brought it back to me.
"So you figured out who we have," the fae woman said.
"Did his mommy call you? He's awfully sweet-looking, don't you think?" There was a wistfulness in her voice.
"If this were a different age, I would keep him for my own." I waited for the diatribe about how it was different in the old days-- I've heard a lot of variations on that over the years.
But there was only silence.
I wrote, Fairy queen.
Travels with five to twenty fairy followers.
Used to capture humans to use as servants/lovers.
Takes them to her own realm, sort of like Underhill but different.
Enchantment: humans perceive time passing oddly.
"Rip Van Winkle"(100 years) or "Thomas the Rhymer" (seven days became seven years).
I underlined Thomas the Rhymer's name because it was history and Rip was a story by Irving that might or might not have been based on various legends--including Thomas's.
Her laughter like tinkling of silver bells.
Also some sort of mesmerizing spells.
Robs victims of free will--might have the same effect on her fae followers, too.
Rule bound more than most fae, but powerful within those rules.
That book had taught me a lot more about the fae than I'd known before.
I hoped something would help us find Gabriel before the fairy queen decided to keep him.
"You are patient," she said.