Bloodfever

Chapter 11

V’lane!” I snarled.

I was naked—he was near.

“It is time for our hour, MacKayla,” said a disembodied voice.

“Put me back right now! Barrons needs me!” How had he so cleanly swapped one reality for the next? Had he moved me, or worlds? Had I just been “sifted”? But I hadn’t even seen him, or felt him touch me, or anything!

“At the time of my choosing was our deal. Will you dishonor it? Should I undo my part of it as well?”

Could he do that? Rewind time and dump me back into the Shade-infested bookstore, crouching before my enemy with too few matches left? Or did he mean to let the Shades back in right now, and when I got home from Wales, I’d have to clear it again, this time, without his help? I had no desire to face either. “I’m not dishonoring it. You are. Give me my clothes back!”

“We discussed nothing of attire in our bargain. We are on equal footing, you and I,” he purred, behind me.

I whirled, fury in my eyes, murder in my heart.

He was naked, too.

All thought of Barrons and basement doors opening and potential dangers behind them vanished. Nor did it matter how I’d gotten here. I was here.

My knees turned to ash. I collapsed to the sand.

I looked away but my eyes didn’t. My central nervous system was currently serving another master and had no interest in will. Will? What was will? Papers you signed in case you died, that was it. Nothing to do with my current situation. All I needed to do now was entrust my body to the Maestro before me who would play it like no other, stroking it to unimaginable crescendos, plucking chords no man had ever sounded before, or would ever match again.

A Fae prince naked is a vision that renders all other men eternally inadequate.

He stepped toward me.

I trembled. He was going to touch me. Oh, God, he was going to touch me.

Over the course of my many encounters with V’lane, I would attempt repeatedly to describe him in my journal. I would use words like: terrifyingly beautiful, godlike, possessing inhuman sexuality, deadly eroticism. I would call him lethal, I would call him irresistible, I would curse him. I would lust for him. I would call his eyes windows to a shining heaven, I would call them gates to Hell. I would fill entries with scribblings that would later make no sense to me, comprised of columns of antonyms: angelic, devilish; creator, destroyer; fire, ice; sex, death—I’m not sure why those two struck me as opposites, except perhaps sex is both the celebration of life and the process whereby we create it.

I would make a list of colors, of every shimmering shade of bronze, gold and copper, and amber known to man. I would write of oils and spices, scents from childhood, scents from dreams. I would indulge in lengthy thesaurus-like entries trying to capture the sensory overload that was Prince V’lane of the Fae.

I would fail at every turn.

He is so beautiful that he makes a part of my soul weep. I don’t understand those tears. They aren’t like the ones I cry for Alina. They aren’t made of water and salt. I think they’re made of blood.

“Turn. It. Off.” I gritted.

“I am doing nothing.” He stopped in the sand next to me, towered above me. The parts of him I needed, those perfect, incredible parts I burned to have inside me, slaking my terrible, inhuman lust, were within arm’s reach. I fisted my hands. I would never reach. Not for a Fae. Never. “Liar.”

He laughed and I closed my eyes, lay shuddering on the soft white sand. The fine grains against my skin were the hands of a lover, the breeze at my nipples a hot tongue. I prayed the ocean wouldn’t begin to lap at any part of me. Would I come apart? Would my cells lose the cohesion necessary to maintain the shape of my humanity? Would I scatter to the far reaches of the universe, flakes of dust borne off on a fickle Fae wind?

I rolled so my nipples pressed against the beach. As I turned, my thigh grazed the tender, aching flesh of my mons. I came, violently. “You bastard…I…hate…you,” I hissed.

I was standing again. Fully clothed in my clingy catsuit, spear in hand. My body was cool, remote; not one ounce of passion stirred in what had an instant ago been enflamed loins. I was master of my will.

I lunged for him without hesitation.

He vanished.

“I sought only to remind you of what you and I might share, MacKayla,” he said behind me. “It is extraordinary, is it not? As befits an extraordinary woman.”

I spun and lunged again. I knew he would only vanish once more, but I couldn’t help myself.

“What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand? The n or the o? No is not maybe. It is not I like to play rough. And it is never, never, never yes.”

“Permit me to tender my apologies.” He was in front of me again, clothed in a robe that was a color I’d never seen before and couldn’t describe. It made me think of butterfly wings against an iridescent sky, backlit by a thousand suns. His eyes, once molten amber, burned the same strange hue. He could not have looked more alien.

“I’ll permit you nothing,” I said. “Our hour is up. You dishonored our deal. You promised you wouldn’t sex me up. You broke that promise.”

He regarded me a long moment and then his eyes were molten amber, and he was the tawny Fae prince again. “Please,” he said, and from the way he said it, I knew there was no such word in the Fae tongue.

To the Tuatha Dé there is no difference between creating and destroying, Barrons had said. There is only stasis and change. Nor to these inhuman beings was there any such thing as apologizing. Would the ocean apologize for covering the head and filling the lungs of the man who fell in it?

He’d used the word for me. Perhaps learned it for me. He’d used it in supplication. It gave me pause, as he’d meant it to do.

“Please,” he said again. “Hear me out, MacKayla. Once more I have erred. I am trying to understand your ways, your wants.” If he’d been human I would have said he looked embarrassed. “I have never before been refused. I do not suffer it well.”

“You don’t give them the chance to refuse. You rape them all!”

“That is untrue. I have not used the Sidhba-jai on an unwilling woman in eighty-two thousand years.”

I stared. V’lane was eighty-two thousand years old?

“I see I have made you curious. That is good. I am curious about you as well. Come. Join me. Let us talk of ourselves.” He stepped back and waved a hand.

Two chaise longues appeared between us. A wicker table between them offered a plate with a pitcher of sweet tea and two ice-filled glasses. There was a bottle of my favorite suntan oil stuck in the sand next to the chair closest me, near a pile of thick pastel towels. Sheets of brilliantly striped silk wafted from nowhere, billowed once in the breeze and draped themselves over the chairs.

Salt air kissed my skin. I glanced down.

My catsuit was gone and I was again spearless. I was wearing a hot pink string bikini, with a gold belly chain from which dangled two diamonds and a ruby.

I blinked.

A pair of designer sunglasses appeared on the bridge of my nose.

“Stop it,” I hissed.

“I am merely trying to anticipate your needs.”

“Don’t. It’s offensive.”

“Join me for an hour in the sun, MacKayla. I will not touch you. I will not…as you say…sex you up. We will talk, and at our next encounter, I will not make the same mistakes again.”

“You said that last time.”

“I made new mistakes this time. I will not make those, either.”

I shook my head. “Where is my spear?”

“It will be returned to you when you leave.”

“Really?” Why would he return a Fae-killing Hallow fashioned by his race to me, knowing I would use it to kill more Fae?

“Consider it a gesture of our goodwill, MacKayla.”

“Our?”

“The queen and I.”

“Barrons needs me,” I said again.

“If you insist I prematurely terminate our hour because you feel I have dishonored it, I will not return you to Wales, and you will still be of no use to him. Stay or go, you won’t be with him. And MacKayla, I believe your Barrons would tell you he needs no one.”

That much was true. I wondered how he knew Barrons. I asked him. They must have trained with the same master of evasion because he said only, “It rains in Dublin incessantly. Look.”

A small square in the tropical vista opened before me, as if he’d peeled back the sky and palms, and torn a window open onto my world. I saw the bookstore through it. The streets were dark, wet. I would be alone there.

“It is raining now. Shall I return you, MacKayla?”

I looked at the tiny bookstore, the shadowy alleys to either side of it, Inspector Jayne sitting across the street beneath a streetlamp watching it, and shivered. Was that the dim outline of my private Grim Reaper down the block? I was so tired of the rain and the dark and enemies at every turn. The sun felt heavenly on my skin. I’d almost forgotten the feel of it. It seemed my world had been wet and gloomy for months.

I glanced away from the depressing view, and up at the sky. Sun has always made me feel strong, whole, as if I get more than vitamins from it; its rays carry something that nourishes my soul. “Is it real?” I nodded up at the sun.

“As real as yours.” The window closed.

“Is it mine?”

He shook his head.

“Are we in Faery?”

He nodded.

For the first time since I’d so unceremoniously arrived, I examined my surroundings. The sand was radiantly white and soft as silk beneath my bare feet, the ocean azure, and the water so clear I could see entire cities of rainbow-colored coral beneath it with tiny gold and pink fish swimming the reefs. A mermaid danced on a crest of a wave before disappearing beneath the sea. The tide tossed sand to the beach in a surf of glittering silver foam. Palm trees rustled in the breeze, dropping lush scarlet blossoms on the shore. The air smelled of rare spices, exotic flowers, and salt sea spray. I bit my lip on the verge of saying It’s so beautiful here. I would not compliment his world. His world was screwing up mine. His world didn’t belong on our planet. Mine did.

Still…the sun has always been my drug of choice. And if he would play fair—meaning not try to rape me again—who knew what I might learn? “If you touch me, or in any way try to affect my will, our time together stops. Got it?”

“Your will, my command.” His lips curved with victory.

I took off my shades and glanced briefly at the sun, hoping to sear the devastating beauty of that smile from my retinas, scorch it from my memory.

I had no idea who or what V’lane really was, but I knew this: He was a Fae, and an immensely powerful one. In this battle where knowledge was so evidently power, where information could keep me alive, where Barrons pretty much ruled his far-reaching world because of how much he knew, I couldn’t afford to pass up a chance to interrogate a Fae, and it looked like V’lane, for whatever reason, might just let me.

Perhaps he would lie. Perhaps he wouldn’t about some things. I was getting better at sorting through what people told me. Learning to hear the truth in their lies and the lies in their truth.

“Have you really been alive for eighty-two thousand years?”

“Longer. That was merely the last time I used glamour to seduce a woman. Sit and we will talk.”

After a moment’s hesitation, I perched stiffly on the edge of the chaise.

“Relax, MacKayla. Enjoy the sun. It may be your last chance to see it for some time.”

I wondered what he meant by that. Did he consider himself a weather prognosticator? Or could he actually control it, make it rain? Against my better judgment, I stretched out my legs and lay back. I stared at the sapphire sea, watched graceful alabaster birds pluck fish from the waves. “So, how old are you?”

“That,” he said, “is anyone’s guess. In this incarnation, I have lived one hundred and forty-two thousand years. Are you aware of our incarnations?”

“You drink from the cauldron.”

He nodded.

How long, I wondered, did it take to go mad? My short twenty-two years were sorely testing me. It seemed forgetting might be a comfort. I considered the ramifications of divesting memory, and realized why a Fae might put it off. If he’d spent fifty or a hundred thousand years watching, learning, building alliances, making enemies, the moment he divested memory he would no longer even know who those enemies were.

But they would know who he was.

I wondered if any Fae had ever been forced to drink by others of their race, to rescue them from the vast, desolate steppes of insanity. Or perhaps for more nefarious reasons.

I wondered, considering V’lane had known exactly where I was and what I’d been doing, if he’d been responsible for the massacre at the Welshman’s estate.

“Did you steal the amulet?”

He laughed. “Ah, so that was what you were after. I wondered. It amplifies the will, MacKayla.”

“Your point?”

“I have no use for it. My will needs no amplifying. My will shapes worlds. The amulet was fashioned for one like you with no will of which to speak.”

“Just because we can’t manipulate reality with our thoughts doesn’t mean we don’t have will. Maybe we do shape reality, just on a different scale, and you don’t see it.”

“Perhaps. The queen suspects such might be the case.”

“She does?”

“That is why she sent me to help you, so that you may help us, and together we may ensure the survival of both our races. Have you learned anything about the Sinsar Dubh?”

I thought about that a moment. Should I tell him? What should I tell him? Perhaps I could use it as leverage. “Yes.”

The palm trees stopped swaying, the waves froze, the birds halted mid-dive. Despite the sun, I shivered. “Would you please start the world again?” It was creepy frozen. Things moved once more.

“What have you learned?”

“Did you know my sister?”

“No.”

“How could that be? You knew about me.”

“We learned of you because we were watching Barrons. Your sister, who we’ve since become aware of, did not know Barrons. Their paths never crossed, ergo nor did ours. Now, tell me of the Sinsar Dubh.”

“Why were you watching Barrons?”

“Barrons needs watching. The book, MacKayla.”

I wasn’t done yet. The book was big information, surely worth more of an exchange. “Do you know the Lord Master?”

“Who?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No. Who is this Lord Master?”

“He’s the one bringing the Unseelie through. He’s their leader.”

V’lane looked astonished. No more so than I felt. He and Barrons both knew so much yet were missing chunks of essential information. They were so smart in some ways, and so blind in others.

“Is he Fae?” he demanded.

“No.”

He looked incredulous. “How can that be? A Fae would not follow a human.”

I hadn’t said he was human. He was something more than that. But the way V’lane had just sneered the word human—as if a life-form just couldn’t get any lower—pissed me off so I didn’t bother correcting him. “You’re the one who’s supposed to be all-knowing.”

“Omnipotent not omniscient. We are frequently blinded by how much we see.”

“That’s absurd. How can you be blinded by vision?”

“Consider being able to see the atomic structure of everything around you, MacKayla, past, present, and part of the future, and exist within that skein. Consider possessing awareness of infinite dimensions. Imagine being able to comprehend infinity—only a handful of your race has yet achieved such awareness. Consider seeing the possible ramifications of each minute action you might make, from your slightest exhalation upon the breeze, in all realities, but you cannot piece them together into a guaranteed finale because every living thing is in constant flux. Only in death is there stasis and even then, not absolute.”

I had a hard enough time functioning on my tiny little nearsighted human level. “So, what you’re saying in a nutshell,” I distilled, “is that for all your superiority and power, you’re no smarter or better off than we are. Perhaps worse.”

A heartbeat stretched into half a dozen. Then he smiled coolly. “Mock me if you will, MacKayla. I’ll sit at your deathbed and ask you then if you would rather be me. Where is this human fool that fancies himself master of anything?”

“1247 LaRuhe. Warehouse behind it. Huge dolmen. He brings them through there. Would you mind squashing it for me?”

“Your wish, my command.” He was gone.

I stared at the empty chaise. Had he really gone to destroy the dolmen through which the Unseelie were being brought? Would he kill the Lord Master, too? Would my vengeance be achieved so anticlimactically? And without me there as witness? I didn’t want that. “V’lane!” I shouted. But there was no reply. He was gone. And I was going to kill him if he killed my sister’s killer without me. The dark fever I’d caught that first night I’d set foot in Dublin had turned into a fever of a different kind: a bloodfever—as in I wanted blood, spilled for my sister. Spilled by my hand. That savage Mac inside me still hadn’t found an audible voice, still wasn’t speaking with my tongue, but we spoke the same language, she and I, and agreed on critical things.

We would kill my sister’s killer together.

“Junior?” said a soft, lilting voice. A voice I’d never expected to hear again.

I shuddered. It had come from my right. I stared out at the waves. I would not look. I was in Faery. Nothing could be trusted.

“Junior, come on, I’m over here,” my sister coaxed, and laughed.

I nearly doubled over from the pain of it. It was exactly Alina’s laugh: sweet, pure, full of endless summer and sunshine and the sure knowledge that her life was charmed.

I heard the slap of a palm on a volleyball. “Baby Mac, let’s play. It’s a perfect day. I brought the beer. Did you get the limes from the bar?”

My name is MacKayla Evelina Lane. Hers is Alina MacKenna Lane. I was Junior on two levels. Sometimes she’d called me Baby Mac. I used to pilfer limes from the condiment tray at The Brickyard on Saturdays. Cheap, I know. I never wanted to grow up.

Tears burned my eyes. I gulped deep breaths and forced air in and out of my lungs. I fisted my hands. I shook my head. I stared out at the sea. She was not there. I did not hear the thud of a ball hitting sand. I did not smell Beautiful perfume on the breeze.

“The sand’s perfect, Junior. It’s powder. Come on! Tommy’s coming today,” she teased. I’d had a crush on Tommy for years. He was dating one of my best friends so I pretended I couldn’t stand him, but Alina knew.

Don’t look, don’t look. There are ghosts and there are worse things than ghosts.

I looked.

Behind the volleyball net, buffeted by a gentle tropical breeze, my sister stood, smiling, waiting to play. She was wearing her favorite neon lime bikini, and her blond hair was pulled back in a bouncy ponytail through the flap of the faded Ron Juan ball cap she’d gotten in Key West on spring break two years ago.

I began to cry.

Alina looked stricken. “Mac, honey, what’s wrong?” She dropped the volleyball, ducked under the net, and hurried across the sand to me. “What is it? Did somebody hurt you? I’ll kick their frogging petunias. Tell me who. What did they do?”

My tears turned into sobs. I stared up at my sister, trembling from the violence of my grief.

She dropped to her knees next to me. “Mac, you’re killing me. Talk to me. What’s wrong?” Her arms went around me, and I was crying against her neck, lost in a cloud of peach shampoo, Beautiful perfume, Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil, and the bubble gum she’d always chewed on the beach to hide the smell of beer on her breath from Mom.

I could feel her warmth, the silkiness of her skin.

I was touching her.

I buried my fingers in her ponytail and sobbed.

I missed her hair. I missed mine. I missed her. I missed me.

“Tell me who did this to you,” she said, and she was crying, too. We’d never been able to stand each other’s tears. We’d always ended up crying with each other. Then made pacts that we would stand up for each other forever, take care of each other forever. Pacts that I now knew we’d started making when she was three and I was one, and we’d been left in a world that wasn’t ours—to hide us, I’d begun to suspect.

“Is it really you, Alina?”

“Look at me, Junior.” She pulled away, and used one of the towels to dry my tears, then dried her own. “It’s me. It’s really me. Look, I’m here. God, I’ve missed you!” She laughed again and this time I laughed with her.

When you lose someone you love abruptly, without warning, you dream of getting the chance to see them, just one more time, please God, one more time again. Every night after her funeral I’d lay awake in my bedroom, down the hall from hers, and call good night, even though I knew it would never be answered again.

I’d lay there clutching photographs, re-creating her face in my mind in exacting detail, as if—if I got it exactly perfectly right—I could take it into my dreams, and use it as a road map to lead me to her.

Some nights, I couldn’t see her face and I cried, begged her to come back. I offered all kinds of deals to God—He doesn’t make them, by the way. In my despair, I offered deals to anyone or anything that would listen.

Something had heard me. Here was my chance to see her again. I didn’t care how. I didn’t care why. I absorbed every detail.

There was the mole high on her left cheek. I touched it. There were the freckles on her nose that drove her crazy, the tiny scar on her lower lip from where I’d accidentally bashed her in the mouth with a guitar when we were kids. There were those sunny green eyes, like mine but with more gold flecks. There was the long blond hair, so much like mine used to be.

She was wearing the tiny sterling silver heart earrings I’d saved for six months to buy her from Tiffany’s for her twenty-first birthday.

This was Alina, right down to her toenails painted her favorite summer shade, Cajun Shrimp. It clashed horribly with her lime bikini and I told her so.

She laughed and took off across the sand. “Come on, Junior, let’s play.”

I sat, frozen for a long moment.

I can’t tell you all the thoughts that went through my head then: This isn’t real, it can’t be. Maybe it is. Maybe it’s dangerous. Could this be my sister in another dimension, another version of her, but Alina all the same? Hurry up and ask her questions about her journal and the Lord Master and what happened in Dublin. Don’t ask her questions; she might disappear. All those thoughts passed swiftly and left a single directive in their wake: Play with your sister right here, right now. Take it for what it is.

I stood and ran across the sand, kicking up white powder with my heels. My legs were long, my body strong, my heart complete.

I played volleyball with my sister. We drank Coronas in the sun. I hadn’t brought the limes, of course, but we found a margarine bowl of them in the cooler, and squeezed them into the bottles, pulp slipping down the frosty sides. A beer would never taste so good again as it did that day with Alina in Faery.

Eventually, we sprawled on the sand and soaked up the sun, toes teasing the edge of the surf. We talked about Mom and Dad, we talked about school, we talked about the hot guys that walked by and tried to coax us into another game of volleyball.

We talked about her idea of moving to Atlanta, and how I would quit my job and go with her. We talked about me getting serious about life finally.

It was that thought that sobered me. I’d always been planning to get serious about life and here I was, being exactly who I’d been back then, taking the path of least resistance, the easy way out, doing what made me feel good right now, consequences be damned.

I rolled over and looked at her. “Is this a dream, Alina?”

She turned toward me and smiled. “No.”

“Is it real?”

She smiled again, sadly. “No.”

“Then what is this?”

She bit her lip. “Don’t ask me, just enjoy the day.”

“I need to know.”

“It’s a gift from V’lane. A day on the beach with me.”

“An illusion,” I said. Water to a man stranded for two and a half days in the desert without a drink. Beyond refusing, even if it was poisoned. I knew better but it didn’t stop me from trying: “So if I were to ask how you met the Lord Master, or where to find the Sinsar Dubh?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know those things.”

I wasn’t surprised. V’lane must have lifted her from my memories, which meant she would know only what I knew, and made questions about anything other than experiences I recalled, or my current situation, pointless. “How long have I been here?” As V’lane’s creation, she should know that.

She shrugged again.

“Longer than a human hour?”

“Yes.”

“Can I leave?”

“Yes.”

“Could I choose to stay?”

“And have anything you wanted, MacKayla. Forever.”

Alina never called me MacKayla. In fact, neither did my parents or any of my friends. Only V’lane did. Was he behind those sunny eyes? And still, I wanted to stay here, lose myself on this beach, in this sun, live this day over and over again for the rest of my life. Forget the rain and the fear, the pain and my uncertain future. I could die happily on a hammock in the sun, seventy years from now, surrounded by lost dreams.

“I love you, Alina,” I whispered.

“I love you, too, Mac,” she whispered back.

“I’m sorry I failed you. I’m sorry I missed your call. I’m sorry I didn’t figure out something was wrong.”

“You never failed me, Mac. You never will.”

Tears filled my eyes. Where had those words of absolution come from? Did the icy Fae prince understand more about human emotion than he let on?

I hugged Alina, inhaled deeply, and memorized every sensory detail I could greedily gather.

Then I squeezed my eyes shut and went to that place in my head that was so alien, and I fed the foreign fire. When I’d stoked it hot enough and high enough, I murmured, “Show me what is true,” and opened my eyes.

My arms were empty. Alina was gone.

V’lane knelt in the sand before me.

“Never do that to me again,” I said in a low voice.

“You did not enjoy your time with her?”

“It wasn’t her.”

“Tell me you did not enjoy it.”

I couldn’t.

“Then thank me for it.”

I couldn’t do that either. “How much time has passed?”

“I would have retrieved you but I was loath to disrupt your pleasure. You have had so little of it lately.”

“You said you would take no more than one hour of my time.”

“And I meant it. You chose to stay in Faery when you followed her across the sand. I understand freedom is a commodity humans prize highly. I permitted you yours.”

When I would have argued his underhanded methods he pressed a finger to my lips. It was warm, strong, but there was absolutely nothing Fae in his touch. He was muting himself for me. He felt like a man, a strong, solid, sexy man, nothing more. “Some wounds need salve to heal. Illusion is the great salve. Tell me, has your grief for your sister lessened?”

I considered his words and was startled to realize it was true. Although I knew the Alina I’d just played with, and cried with, and hugged and begged forgiveness of had not been real, my day in the sun with her had given me a degree of closure I’d not had before. Although I knew the Alina who’d absolved hadn’t been my Alina, her words had comforted me all the same.

“Never again,” I repeated. Illusion might be a salve, but it was also dangerous. There was enough danger in my life.

He flashed a smile. “Your wish.”

I closed my eyes a moment, trying to clear Alina from my thoughts; the sight, scent, and sound of her lingered all around me. From hugging her, I still smelled Beautiful on my skin. Later I would re-live every moment, and it would comfort me again. I opened my eyes. “What of the Lord Master?”

“The warehouse was deserted. I destroyed the dolmen. It did not appear anyone had been there in weeks. I suspect he never returned to that location once it had been discovered. Tell me everything you know of him.”

“I’m tired,” I said. “Our hour is up.” Plus some. “Return me now.”

“Tell me of the Sinsar Dubh. You owe me that.”

I told him what I knew, that I’d felt it pass me in the streets of Dublin, moving rapidly in a car of some kind, past the bookstore, a little over two weeks ago. He asked me many questions that I couldn’t answer because the mere nearness of the Dark Book had knocked me out, a fact he seemed to find amusing.

“We will see each other again, MacKayla,” he said.

Then he was gone and I was somewhere else. I blinked. Although I’d not terminated our time together prematurely, V’lane still hadn’t returned me to Wales; he’d deposited me in Barrons Books and Baubles. Probably just to irritate Barrons.

It took me a few moments to adjust and focus. Having realities swapped so quickly and completely seems to exceed what the human mind can process—we were not fashioned for such a method of travel—and it goes blank, like the static on late-night television, for a few seconds. It’s a vulnerable time. A person could be ambushed in such a moment.

My hand went instantly to my spear. I was relieved to find it was once again there, in the belt draped around my—“Haha, V’lane,” I muttered, pissed—hot pink bikini. “Jackass.” It was no wonder I was cold.

Then my brain processed what I was seeing and I gasped.

Barrons Books and Baubles had been ransacked!

Tables were overturned, books torn from shelves and strewn everywhere, baubles broken. Even my little TV behind the counter had been destroyed.

“Barrons?” I called warily. It was night and the lights were on. My illusory Alina had told me more than an hour had passed. Was it the same night, nearly dawn? Or was it the night following our theft attempt? Had Barrons come back from Wales yet? Or was he still there, searching for me? When I’d been so rudely ripped from reality, who or what had come through those basement doors?

I heard footsteps, boots on hardwood, and turned expectantly toward the connecting doors.

Barrons was framed in the doorway. His eyes were black ice. He stared at me a moment, raking me from head to toe. “Nice tan, Ms. Lane. So, where the fuck have you been for the past month?”