The Keepers. Heather GrahamЧитать онлайн книгу.

      To Connie Perry, my extremely dear friend and cohort in many an endeavor. Thank you for all you do—and especially for New Orleans!

      Also, for Daena Moller and Larry Montz and the ISPR. Thank you for some great adventures, too!

       Prologue

      When the world as we know it was created, it wasn’t quite actually as we know it.

      That’s because so much was lost in the mists of time, and the collective memory of the human race often chooses what it will hold and what it will discard.

      But once the world held no skyscrapers, rockets did not go to the moon—in fact, the wheel had barely been invented, and families lived together and depended upon one another. The denizens of the world knew better the beauty of waterfalls, of hills and vales, sun and sunset, shadows—and magic.

      In a time when the earth was young, giants roamed, gnomes grumbled about in the forests and many a creature—malignant, sadly, as well as benign—was known to exist. Human beings might not have liked these creatures, they might have feared them—for a predator is a predator—but they knew of their existence, and as man has always learned to deal with predators, so he did then. Conversely, there were the creatures he loved, cherished as friends and often turned to when alliances needed to be formed. Humankind learned to exist by guidelines and rules, and thus the world went on, day after day, and man survived. Now, all men were not good, nor were all men bad, and so it was also with the giants, leprechauns, dwarfs, ghosts, pixies, pookas, vampires and other such beings.

      Man was above them all, by his nature, and he prospered through centuries and then millennia, and learned to send rockets to the moon—and use rockets of another kind against his fellow man.

      When the earth was young, and there were those creatures considered to be of light and goodness, and others who were considered to be, shall we say, more destructive, there was among them a certain form of being who was human and yet not human. Or perhaps human, but with special powers. They were the Keepers, and it was their lot in life not only to enjoy the world as other beings did, but they were also charged with the duty of maintaining balance. When certain creatures got out of hand, the Keepers were to bring them back under control. Some, in various centuries, thought of them as witches or wiccans. But in certain centuries that was not a healthy identity to maintain. Besides, they were not exactly the witches of a Papal Bull or evil in the way the devil in Dante’s Inferno, nor were they the gentle women of pagan times who learned to heal with herbs and a gentle touch.

      They were themselves and themselves alone. The Keepers.

      As time went by, anything that was not purely logical was no longer accepted, was relegated to superstition, except in distant, fog-shrouded hills or the realm of Celtic imagination, which was filled with Celtic spirits other than those of which we speak. But some of the beliefs of the past were not accepted even there. Man himself is, of course, a predator, but man learned to live by rules and logic, or destroy all the creatures upon which he might prey. Too late for some, for man did hunt certain creatures to extinction, and he sought to drive others to the same fate. But those other creatures learned a survival technique that served them well: hide. Hide in plain sight, if you will, but hide.

      As human populations grew, as people learned to read, as electricity reigned, and the telephone and computer put the world in touch, the earth became entrenched in a place where there were things that were accepted and others that were not. Oh, it’s true that the older generations in Ireland knew that the banshees still wailed at night. In Hungary