Esmerelda and Ann met me back at my house and I relayed Sergei's mysterious no-show and no-call situation to them.
"That's not good, not good at all," Esmerelda said sounding concerned.
"Yeah, I have known of Sergei and his family for years and they're not the type to just blow off a commitment like this, especially something of such great importance. Even more so, involving a beautiful woman, but most particularly the beautiful woman part," she said with a hint of sauciness to her tone.
"Are you implying he's only helping Erin because of her beauty?" Esmerelda queried Ann.
"Not at all, but I will say that he, his brothers and all of the men in his lineage are known to have a thing for the ladies, especially beautiful ones... Though not only beautiful ones," she said while chuckling to herself.
I rolled my eyes a bit and looked to the both of them trying to get across how concerned I was at Sergei being missing. It just didn't seem like him to disappear-- after all, he'd helped me of his own accord and ushered me off to safety and security without me even realizing I was in serious danger.
"Not so much as a tech message on one of your beep-boop gadgets?" asked Esmerelda.
I laughed at her attempts at communicating in the way that regular humans without superpowers operated and asked her, "You mean a text message on a cell phone?"
"Yes, that's precisely what I said," she replied and I made a mental note to maybe help bring some 21st-century technology into the lives of the Fae folk who clearly shunned it. It couldn't hurt to integrated technical advances with the ancient magic and traditional ways of the Fae people. I wondered to myself if I could somehow fuse magic and tech to form a safer, more effective system of protection for what I was beginning to accept were my people. I determined that I would look into that further and figure out exactly what would be most useful and how I could implement it to the community.
It could only help to have more awareness, more effective communication, access to information and a virtual network interconnected with an ancient tradition. Some of the Fae folk were actually ancient--Ann was over 100 years old, and I couldn't imagine having lived both now, and at the dawning of the 20th century. These ideas brought me great excitement but it didn't help me figure out what was going on with Sergei now. He used modern tech much as I did, but that wasn't helping me find him at the moment. Esmerelda and Ann decided they would reach out the rest of the council members and they would use their contacts to make sure Sergei was OK.
I was grateful that he'd made sure I was safe before he decided to blow me off but I couldn't help but be pretty miffed at him. For his sake, I hoped he had a good reason for being unreliable today. He was supposed to be helping me understand who I was and how I was going to become what I was expected to be by the Fae. Now I felt abandoned and alone-- and Brigid, the banshee wasn't exactly warm, which just amplified the feeling of lonliness. In fact, her literal chilling presence brought its own problems, including that I was literally freezing whenever she was close to me-- I was going to need to invest in sweaters and hoodies!