a second if he should tel the two of them everything, but then he realized that if anyone had a right to know, it was probably Briony’s two closest friends. “What kind of fey might resemble a vampire?”
“Um…” The two geeks looked at one another for a while, as though it might help them think. As much as he liked them, Kevin couldn’t help the thought that they were probably attempting some kind of sci-fi nerd mind meld.
Steve came out of it first. “I guess there’s one thing. It’s not one of the Irish sidhe though, but it’s kind of broadly good, and it has fangs.”
“Fangs sound about right,” Kevin said. “What are these things cal ed?”
Steve shrugged. “I forget what the word is. It’s Norwegian or something.”
“Danish,” Maisy said, “and it’s ‘hugtandalf’.
What? Nicky wanted me to come up with rules for playing one a couple of months back.”
“So these…”
“It just translates as ‘fanged elves’,” Steve said.
Kevin couldn’t believe it. It sounded like he’d gotten luckier than he could have hoped for. Thank goodness for geeks. “Do you know anything about them?”
Maisy nodded. “Wel , assuming that we can take a Faeries, Fey and Sidhe rules supplement as accurate. They’re actual y pretty cool. They have fangs, like vampires, which come down whenever their emotions are running high, and they have these amazing powers…” Suddenly Maisy stopped. “Kevin, why are you so interested in this?”
Kevin ignored the question. “Do you know where they live? Where they come from? Please, Maisy, it’s important.”
Maisy shrugged. “They’re supposed to live on a special world ful of magic…”
“Which could be on the other side of a portal,”
Steve finished for her.
Maisy looked at Kevin expectantly. “Is that where Briony went? Hang on… she’s one of them, isn’t she? That’s why you’re asking. Briony’s a fanged elf.” Maisy practical y jumped out of her seat. “That is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard! And it explains so much. No one human has skin and hair that nice.”
“Shh.” Kevin put a finger to his lips. “Not so loud. I’m sure Briony and Aunt Sophie wouldn’t want the whole school to know.”
“Sorry.”
Kevin took a breath. “So, if I wanted to find this fey world, how would I do it? I know, I know, it’s just a game, but pretend for a moment that I real y needed to get in there to reach level twenty or something.”
Maisy thought a little more. “The fey like nature,” she said, “so maybe the more natural a place, the more likely it wil be to hold the gate. They’d put it in the woods, obviously. Maybe near streams or certain types of trees and flowers. In a lot of things, fey have affinities for particular types of natural settings, and don’t like to stray into other ones.”
Kevin nodded. “That fits with where the gate came up before. But I don’t know if that’s enough. You both know how big the woods are. Hundreds of acres.
Thousands. How am I going to find the right kind of clearing in al that?”
Maisy smiled like she knew something that Kevin didn’t. “You just look for it.”
That wasn’t exactly the kind of answer Kevin had been hoping for. He got up to leave. “You’ve both been very helpful. At least now we know what Briony could be. I have to go, though. I need to start looking for a way in. Fal on can’t go, Jake can’t go, so that leaves me.”
“Settle down,” Maisy said. “I didn’t mean looking by physical y combing the woods. I meant looking electronical y. Ever since we joined the Preservation Society, Steve and I have been looking at ways to use technology to keep track of supernatural activity.”
That caught Kevin’s interest. He’d done enough science to understand the possibilities of wel -
constructed search algorithms. The way they could show up patterns that people often couldn’t pick out on their own. “You have something that works?”
“Of course,” Steve said. “Wel , sometimes, anyway. And this time, it should be simple. You just tel me everything you remember about the clearings where the gate opened, and then I take satel ite maps of the forest, and I set a program looking for those characteristics. Easy.”
Kevin could see the possibilities at once.
“You’re right. It wil stil leave us with a lot of possibilities, but I’l know where they are, and I can check on them.”
“Of course,” Steve said, “if you could give me enough data on when and where gates had opened in the