Blood Marriage

Eight: In Which Missy Finds a Latch

Rather than wait on Xavier to pick her up after her lesson, Alice snuck past the silent librarian and out the doors, deciding to find her own way back to their room. She took a few wrong turns, but did manage to make it back to the room.

The palace seemed oddly empty. Despite the fact that there had been a crowd at their wedding, no one was around now. She wondered if there was a town outside the castle walls where the courtiers and other Shadow Fae lived, but if such a thing existed, she wasn't certain she'd ever get to see it.

At least... not if she kept listening to Xavier.

Once in the bedroom, she decided to search for anything that might give her more information, anything that might tell her something about Florian. Alice didn't know if there was a separate office that Xavier kept for palace work, but there had to be a desk in the room for a reason. It was probably best to start there, and then she could move to searching the wardrobes, under the bed, and looking around the walls for hidden compartments.

That last one might have been a stretch, she thought, but it couldn't hurt to check every possibility.

The secretary-style desk was practically empty, with only a blank notebook, some pens, and a few documents in the fae language. Alice traced her fingers over the top of the desk, pulled out all the drawers, and found nothing.

"Look under the bottom. I see a latch," Missy said, staring up at the underside of the desk from her position on the floor.

Alice reached under the bottom of the desk, moving her hand until she found a small indention in the wood. When she pulled the right way, something clicked under the desk, and a small compartment opened.

Perhaps checking for hidden drawers wasn't a stretch, after all.

Leaning forward, she hesitantly reached inside the hidden drawer until her fingers found two objects. The first was a leatherbound book with deckled edge pages, the cover water stained and worn from use. Alice flipped it open to look inside, but almost immediately cursed under her breath.

Whatever it was, it wasn't written in English. There were markings at the top of each entry that looked like numbers, possibly indicating days and years, so she assumed it was a journal. However, that was all she could intuit. Even the characters looked strange and otherworldly, like the fae writing had in the library earlier. Alice wasn't one to learn languages quickly, and she wasn't sure how it might translate, so she simply shut the book for the time being. It had to be important if it was hidden... she just didn't know why.

The second object in the drawer was, at least, something she'd seen before. As she reached into the back of the compartment, Alice's fingers touched something cool, round, and metal. She wrapped her hand around the palm-sized object and pulled it towards her, surprised to see the silver pocket watch from the wedding gift table.

"Soul trap watch...?" she muttered, glancing at Missy.

"Looks the same to me," the possum confirmed. "Let's not open it and test it, though."

"Good plan," Alice said, staring down at the silver watch.

Why would Xavier choose to store this in his desk? And why hide it? If it had been a wedding gift, wasn't it something that should be in the treasury?

... Did the Shadow Court have a treasury, she wondered?

In any case, this watch had been specifically picked out from the rest of the gifts. Xavier had chosen to keep it close, within easy reach, but hidden. He hadn't once mentioned it to her, either, and Alice did not like the pressing feeling in the pit of her stomach when she thought about that. She didn't understand why it was here, but this was dangerous. Shouldn't he at least have told her about it if he was keeping it in their shared room?