Tinker to hear him. He didn't think he could face her yet.

But no danger was terrifying enough to keep him from his love's side.

"This one, I think," he whispered, his voice inaudible even to his own ears. He eased around the doorframe and adjusted to the darkness inside the room. "Erin."

The gray outline of a bed faced him.

She isn't here. "Erin," he whispered more loudly.

There was no answer, no uneasy shifting of a sleeping body on the bed.

"Erin!" he said aloud. "Where are you?"

* * * *

There you are, you little punk!

"Have you located him, Gaelen?"

Gaelen jerked his eyes from the polished surface of the table to meet Eochy's.

So, the old bantam was watching me. Gaelen smiled, but didn't answer.

Eochy studied him for a moment, then bent his gray head over his papers.

"All right, now that Phelan's nonsense is over for another year, can we please move on to item three?" He perched his specs on the edge of his nose and peered over them at Gaelen. "This is the most egregious case of miscegenation we've ever had to deal with."

Gaelen hated that word--miscegenation--and wondered how his people had chosen it to describe relations between fairies and others. To him, it smacked of evil hiding beneath white sheets, a word born of fear and irrational hatred.

"Lucas Riley has taken up with a non-fairy woman," Eochy announced.

There was no exhaled gasp of surprise. This was really not a big deal.

"So what, Eochy? Lots of us take up with non-fairies," Gaelen put in.

"Of course, but we're not talking about pixies or sprites or the unfortunate attraction some of us have for..." Eochy pulled off his specs and grimaced. "Trolls. I, for one, could never understand that, but to each his own, I say."

"So, Lucas's own is a non-fairy," Gaelen repeated.

"She is a human."

The gasp of surprise finally rolled over the assembly.

"Human?" Gaelen sat forward and stared. "I don't believe it. Lucas isn't stupid. He knows the laws."

"Know the laws he may, still, he is consorting with a human and he has had relations with her. Not only that, Gaelen, but he allowed her to see his true nature, and she's going to spread the news around that college town like pixie dust at Christmas." Eochy tossed a tabloid newspaper across the table. It slid the last two feet and stopped right in front of Gaelen.

"Read that." Eochy leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers over his belly. "That's the headline that will appear once the reporters get wind of this."

Gaelen lowered his eyes, his stomach already churning. The words on the page jumped out at him, putting his acid pump into overdrive.

Co-ed's Sad Tale: My Boyfriend was Abducted by Aliens!

Gaelen swallowed a mouthful of sour spit, then looked for the subheading.

Ripped from His Lover's Arms.

He couldn't read any more.

"How do you know this is about Lucas? These tabloids make all this stuff up," Gaelen said.

"Do they?" Eochy relaxed, absently twirling the tip of his wing around his meaty fingers. "What about the face on Mars? Hmmm? And I suppose they just made up the story about Elvis Presley working at a gas station in Kalamazoo? No, Gaelen, these guys are the most tenacious investigators on the planet. I just thank the Lord there are aliens. Otherwise, we would have already been found out and either disbelieved out of existence or the Council of Elders in Ireland would have our heads mounted in the empty places at Newgrange."

"Come on, Eochy, they don't take heads anymore." Even as Gaelen said it, his smile faded. The expressions he saw on the faces around him had him wondering.

Eochy wasn't smiling at all.

"The reason the Fairy Controversy was put on the agenda is this. We've received a directive from the Council in Ireland to cease all contact with mortals. It's just too dangerous."

"What!" The word echoed all around the chamber.

Gaelen stared in disbelief. "Eochy, that's unreasonable. We all," he motioned around the chamber, "have careers, lives out there. We can't just drop them." He paused, not even having the words to continue. "To do what? To go where?"

"I suspect we'll all be ordered back to Ireland."

The grumble of discontent grew louder.

"Look, people, I didn't do this. Irresponsibility like that practiced by Lucas Riley did." Eochy leaned back in his big chair. "Don't you remember the stories in Britain in the twenties? A bunch of fairies thought it would be fun to reveal themselves to some schoolgirls. These schoolgirls got their little Brownie camera out and, voila! Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gets on the case and our pictures are all over the London papers." He sighed. "I understand, believe me I do, but times have changed. Revealing ourselves only results in mortal folk going out of their way to disprove our existence. Do you know how many fairies faded to nothing, just because a number of our group couldn't keep their wings folded up?"

Eochy's voice rumbled off the walls, rattling the magic stones in their brass mountings. The last time Eochy had gotten this worked up, he'd shattered a couple of stones and, until they could get some shipped in from Ireland, the North American Council of Fairies had held their meetings in the dark.

"So, what happened, Eochy?" someone asked.

"As far as I can tell, Lucas and this young lady, this--" Eochy referred to his notes.