Darkfever

CHAPTER 14

It was a quarter past eight by the time I made it back to the bookstore. I knew Barrons was there as soon as I turned the corner. His big black-and-chrome hog was parked outside the brilliantly spotlighted front, playing kissing cousins with Fiona's sedate sedan.

I rolled my eyes. My day continued to cruise downhill. I'd been hoping that Fiona had left on time, before Barrons had arrived, and before she could rat me out.

No such luck.

I detoured around back, deciding I would sneak in from the rear, pretend to have been upstairs all day—with my iPod on in case anyone claimed to have knocked—and see if I could pull it off. You never knew what you could get away with until you tried. Maybe nobody had bothered checking on me.

When I rounded the rear of the building, my gaze automatically shot to the end of the alley, past the store, to the dark perimeter of the abandoned neighborhood beyond the rear floodlights. I paused, searching for shadows that shouldn't be there. A humorless smile curved my lips; the strangest things were becoming instinctive.

I spotted four clusters of darkness that were wrong. Three clung to the shadowy eaves of a building two doors down on the right; the fourth was on my left and behaving far more boldly. It was creeping back and forth along the stone foundation of the shop directly adjacent to Barrons, shooting and retracting dark tendrils of itself, testing the edges of the pool of light flooding the rear entrances.

All four of them pulsed hungrily at my approach.

Stay to the light, Barrons had told me, and you will be safe. The Shades can only get you in full darkness. They are unable to tolerate even the smallest amount of light. You must never, Ms. Lane, ever enter the abandoned neighborhood at night.

Well, why doesn't somebody go in there during the day and fix all those broken streetlamps? I'd asked. Wouldn't that get rid of them? Or at least help?

The city has forgotten that section exists, he'd replied. You will not find a district of the Gardai that claims it, and if you ask city power or water they will have no record of service to any address within its bounds.

I'd snorted. Cities don't just lose entire neighborhoods. That's impossible.

He'd smiled faintly. In time, Ms. Lane, you will cease using that word.

As I climbed the steps to the rear door, I raised my fist and shook it angrily at the Shades. I'd had my fill of monsters for the night. The Shade that was creeping along the foundation startled me by bristling visibly back at me. I found its display of sentient hostility chilling.

The rear door was locked, but the third window I tried slid up easily. I muttered beneath my breath about Barrens' appalling lack of safety-consciousness, as I boosted myself up and over the sill. After a quick bathroom stop, I headed for the front of Barrons Books and Baubles.

I don't know what made me hesitate when I went to open that second door that separated residence from store, but something did. Maybe I heard my name as I was reaching for the knob, or my curiosity was piqued by the urgent undertone in Fiona's voice that was carrying clearly through the door, although her words did not. Whatever the reason, rather than betray my presence, I nudged the door slightly ajar, pressed my ear to the crack, and displayed a dearth of manners that would have appalled every woman in my family ten generations back; I eavesdropped on the conversation taking place beyond it.

"You have no right, Jericho, and you know it!" Fiona cried.

"When will you learn, Fio?" Barrons said. "Might makes right. That's all the right I need."

"She doesn't belong here. You can't let her stay. I won't stand for it!"

"You won't stand for it? When did you become my keeper, Fio?" There was danger in the very gentleness with which Barrons asked the question, but Fiona either didn't hear it, or chose not to heed it.

"When you started needing one! It's not safe to have her here, Jericho. She must go—tonight, if possible, tomorrow at the very latest! I can't be here all the time to make sure nothing happens!"

"No one asked you to," Barrons said coldly.

"Well, someone needs to," she cried.

"Jealous, Fio? It doesn't become you."

Fiona sucked in an audible breath. I could almost see her standing there: eyes bright with passion, two spots of color high on the cheekbones of her aging movie-star face. "If you must take this to a personal level, then yes, Jericho, I am. You know I don't want her here. But it's not just about me and what I want. That child is as ignorant and innocent as the day is long—"

Okay, I really resented that.

"— and she doesn't have the slightest idea what she's doing. She has no notion of the danger she's in, and you have no right to continue placing her in it."

"Not right, Fio, might. Remember? I'm not interested in rights. I never have been."

"I don't believe that, Jericho. I know you."

"No, Fio, you only think you know me. You really don't know me at all. Stay out of this or leave. I'm sure I can find another to" — he paused a moment as if searching for precisely the right words—"serve my needs."

"Oh! Serve your—oh! Is that what I do? Serve your needs? You'd do that, too, wouldn't you? Find someone else. Just pack me off on the nearest train. I bet you wouldn't even say good-bye, would you? You'd probably never even think of me again!"

Barrons laughed softly, and although I couldn't see either of them, I pictured him taking her by the shoulders, maybe brushing his knuckles to the pale, soft curve of her cheek. "Fio," he said, "my foolish, sweet, faithful Fio; there will always be a place for you in my thoughts. But I am not the man you believe me to be. You have romanticized me unforgivably."

"I have never seen any more in you than I know you could be, if you wanted to, Jericho," Fiona declared fervently, and even I—a child as ignorant and innocent as the day was long, to coin a recently minted phrase—could hear the blind conviction of love in her voice.

Barrons laughed again. "And there, my dear Fio, you make one of Womankind's greatest mistakes: falling in love with a man's potential. We so rarely share the same view of it, and even more rarely care to achieve it. Stop pining for the man you think I could be—and take a good, long, hard look at the one I am." In my mind, Barrons grabbed her when he emphasized the word 'look' and was now shaking her, not quite so gently.

There was another silence, then a sharp, pained feminine gasp, and a much longer silence.

"She stays, Fio," Barrons murmured after some time. "And you will keep your peace about it, won't you?"

I was beginning to think I'd missed her reply when Barrons spoke again, harshly. "I said 'won't you, Fio?"

"Of course, Jericho," Fiona replied softly. "Whatever you wish." Her voice was dreamy, as carefree as a child's.

Taken aback by her sudden, drastic change of heart, I closed the door with careful stealth.

Then I turned and beat a hasty path for the dubious security of my borrowed bedroom.

Later that evening, hours after Barrons had come to yell at me through my closed door for going out today and risking the safety of his personal OOP-detector, then gone—yes, Fiona had ratted me out—I stood at my bedroom window and stared out into the night. There was no order to my thoughts. They jumbled and tumbled like autumn leaves in a whirlwind.

Where was Alina's journal? There was no way she hadn't been keeping one. If she'd thought she was falling in love, she would have written page after page about her new boyfriend every night, especially if she'd not been talking to me or anyone else about him. Though I'd been considering asking Barrens to help me search for it, after the conversation I'd just overheard, that was a big, fat no. Nor was I about to confide in him about my little visit from the death-by-sex Fae.

Was V'lane really a Seelie prince? The proverbial "guy in the white hat"? It sure didn't seem like it. But then, would any Fae ever seem good to a sidhe-seer? Not that I was admitting that I was one or anything. I was still holding out hope that something else was going on. Like maybe I was sleeping and stuck in a long, awful nightmare that would end if only I could wake up. Or maybe I'd been hit by a car and was lying in a hospital bed back in Ashford, having coma-induced hallucinations.

Anything would be preferable to calling myself a sidhe-seer. It felt like an admission of defeat, a willful embracing of the strange dark fever I seemed to have caught the moment I'd set foot in Ireland. The craziness had begun that very night, with the Fae at the bar and the batty old woman.

In retrospect, I could see the old woman hadn't been crazy, she'd been a sidhe-seer, and she'd actually saved my life that night. Who could say how things might have turned out if she hadn't stopped me from betraying myself? Honor your bloodline, she'd said.

What bloodline? A bloodline of sidhe-seers? Every question I thought of only bred a host of other questions. Did that mean my mom was supposed to be one, too? That thought was simply ludicrous. I couldn't see Rainey Lane, spatula in one hand, dish towel in the other, pretending not to see the Fae any more than I could see Mallucé forgiving me for stealing his stone and inviting me along on a shopping trip for the latest in shabby-chic Goth fashions. Nor could I see my tax-attorney father faking Fae-blindness.

My thought bounced back to V'lane. What if the Fae was lying and was actually an Unseelie, working to free more of his brethren to prey upon my world? And if it was telling the truth, why did the Seelie Queen want the book containing "the deadliest of all magic"? What did Aoibheal plan to do with it, and how had this highly sought-after book gotten lost in the first place?

Who could I trust? Where could I turn?

Had Alina known any of what I was learning? Had she been to McCabe's and Mallucé's? What had happened to her when she'd first arrived in Dublin all those months ago? Whatever it was—when it had begun—she'd found it exciting. Had she met a man who'd dragged her into this dark underworld, as I had? Had she met a Fae who seduced her into it? He's been lying to me all along, she'd said. He's one of them. By 'them' had she meant 'Fae'? "Oh God," I whispered, stunned by the thought. Had Alina thought she was in love with a Fae? Had it wooed her, used her? Had she been an OOP-detector, too? And a Null, like me?

Was I unwittingly following the same steps she'd taken, down the same path to the same eventual destination—death?

I mentally tallied everyone that was looking for the Sinsar Dubh: There was Barrens, McCabe, Mallucé, V'lane, and according to V'lane, the Seelie Queen, and from the presence of the Unseelie watchdogs at McCabe's and Mallucé's, at least one big, bad Unseelie that might or might not be called the Lord Master. Why? What were all these, er… people, for lack of a better word, after? Did they all want it for the same reason? And if so, what was that reason?

We can't let them have it, Alina had said of the Sinsar Dubh. "Gee, sis, could you have been a little more specific?" I muttered. "Who shouldn't get it?" Even if by some fluke of fate I found the darn thing, not only would I probably not be able to touch it, according to Barrens, I wouldn't have any idea what to do with it.

I sighed. I had nothing but questions and nobody to ask. I was thick in the middle of people who guarded secrets and pursued hidden agendas as naturally as they lived and breathed and—probably—killed. Just look at the 'men' I'd met in the past week: McCabe, Mallucé, V'lane, Barrens. Not a normal one among them. Not a safe one in the bunch. A lamb in a city of wolves, Barrens had called me shortly after we'd met. Which one will take you down, I wonder?

Secrets. Everyone had secrets. Alina had taken hers to the grave. I had no doubt that trying to ask V'lane questions when I saw the Fae again—I wasn't stupid enough to think it was done with me—would be an exercise in futility. The alleged prince might answer me, but I was only an OOP-detector, not a lie detector. And Barrons was no better. As Fiona's little dispute with him revealed, he was keeping secrets, too, and I was somehow in even more danger than I already knew.

That was a cheerful thought. As of this morning I'd pretty much figured out that any time I walked out the door I was taking my life in my own hands, but apparently I was in danger while I was here, too.

God, I was homesick! I missed my life. I missed The Brickyard. I missed Saturday night closes with my bartending buddies. I missed our obligatory three A.M. Huddle House stop for pancakes, where we'd try to unwind enough to sleep before dawn and, in the summer, plan what lake to meet at later that day.

We'll be seeing Roark O'Bannion tomorrow, Ms. Lane, Barrons had told me through my locked and barricaded door when he'd climbed four flights to chew my head off. He's the third big player on the field. Among other things, he owns O'Bannion's, a posh bar in downtown Dublin. It's Old World with wealthy clientele. As you seem to have a problem dressing yourself, Fiona will fetch you appropriate attire. Do not leave the bookstore again without me, Ms. Lane.

It was three in the morning before I slept, and when I did, it was with the closet door wide open, and every single light in the bedroom and adjoining bathroom ablaze.