Darkfever

CHAPTER 17

My folks have some funny sayings. They were born in a different time, to a different generation. Theirs was the "hard work is its own reward" generation. Admittedly it had its problems, but mine is the "entitlement generation" and it has its fair share, too.

The EG is made up of kids who believe they deserve the best of everything by mere virtue of having been born, and if parents don't arm them with every possible advantage, they are condemning their own children to a life of ostracism and failure. Raised by computer games, satellite TV, the Internet, and the latest greatest electronic device—while their parents are off slaving away to afford them all—most of the EG believe if there's something wrong with them, it's not their fault; their parents screwed them up, probably by being away too much. It's a vicious little catch-22 for the parents any way you look at it.

My parents didn't screw me up. Any screwing up that might have been done, I did to myself. All of which is my roundabout way of saying that I'm beginning to understand what Dad always meant when he said, "Don't tell me you didn't mean to do it, Mac. Omission or commission—the end result is the same."

I understand now. It's the difference between involuntary manslaughter and homicide: the dead person is still dead, and I highly doubt the corpse appreciates any legal distinctions we make over it.

By omission or commission, one orange, two candy bars, a bag of pretzels, and twenty-six hours later, I had blood on my hands.

I'd never been so happy to see the first rays of dawn in my life as I was that next morning. I'd ended up doing exactly what I'd sworn I wouldn't do: I'd cowered in my brilliantly lit, borrowed bedroom from one daybreak to the next, trying to make my meager snacks last, and wondering what plan Barrons could possibly have devised that might guarantee our safety from Rocky O'Bannion, quite pessimistically certain there was none. Even if he managed to scare off a few of O'Bannion's men, there would only be more. I mean, really, how could one man hope to stand up to a ruthless mobster and his loyal pack of ex-fighters and thugs who'd once taken out twenty-seven people in a single night?

When the first rays of a rosy sunrise pressed at the edges of the drapes, I hurried to the window and pulled back the curtain. I'd lived through yet another Dublin night and that, in and of itself, was swift becoming cause for celebration in my badly warped little world. I stared dumbly down into the alley for a long moment, as the sight that greeted me slowly sunk in.

Or didn't, I guess, because before I knew it, I'd raced from my fourth-floor retreat and was pounding bare-heeled down the back stairs for a closer look. I burst out into the early, chilly Irish morning. The concrete steps were damp with cold dew beneath my bare feet as I hurried down them, into the rear alley.

A dozen or so feet away, in the early morning light, a black Maybach gleamed, with all four of its doors ajar. It was making that annoying bing-bing sound that told me the keys were still in the ignition and the battery hadn't yet run down. Behind it, hood to trunk, stretching down into the beginnings of the abandoned neighborhood, were three more black vehicles, all with their doors wide open, emitting a chorus of bings. Outside each car were piles of clothing, not far from the doors. I had a sudden flashback to the day I'd gotten lost in the abandoned neighborhood, to the derelict car with the pile of clothing outside the driver's door. Comprehension slammed into my brain and I flinched from the horror of it.

Any fool could see what had happened here.

Well, at least any sidhe-seer fool who knew what kind of things that went bump in the night around these parts could.

The cop who'd seen us yesterday morning had apparently reported to O'Bannion, and at some unknown hour after dark, the mobster had come looking for us with a full complement of his men, and as evidenced by their stealthy backdoor approach, they'd not been coming to pay us a social call.

The simplicity of Barrens' plan both astounded and chilled me: He'd merely turned off the outside lights, front and rear, allowing darkness to swallow the entire perimeter of the building. O'Bannion and his men had stepped out of their cars, directly into an Unseelie massacre.

Barrons had known they would come. I was even willing to bet he'd known they would come in force. He'd also known they would never make it farther than the direct vicinity of their own cars. Of course, I'd been safe in the store. With the interior lights ablaze and the exterior lights extinguished, neither man nor monster could have reached me last night.

Barrons had baited a death trap—one that my theft had made necessary. When I'd reached up and blithely removed that weapon from the wall, I'd signed death warrants for sixteen men.

I turned and stared up at the bookstore, now seeing it in an entirely different light: It wasn't a building—it was a weapon. Only last week I'd stood out front, thinking it seemed to stand bastion between the good part of the city and the bad. Now I understood it was a bastion—this was the line of demarcation, the last defense—and Barrons held the encroachment of the abandoned neighborhood at bay with his many and carefully placed floodlights, and all he had to do to protect his property from threat at night was turn them off and let the Shades move in, hungry guard dogs from Hell.

Drawn by grim fascination, or perhaps some long-dormant genetic need to understand all I could about the Fae, I approached the Maybach. The pile of clothing outside the driver's door was topped by a finely made black leather jacket that looked just like the one I'd seen on Rocky O'Bannion the night before last.

Barely repressing a shudder, I reached down and picked it up. As I lifted the supple Italian leather, a thick husk of what looked like badly yellowed, porous parchment fell out of it.

I jerked violently and dropped the coat. I'd seen that kind of 'parchment' before. I'd seen dozens of them, blowing down the deserted streets of the abandoned neighborhood that day I'd gotten lost in the fog, all different shapes and sizes. I remembered thinking that there must be a defunct paper factory somewhere nearby with broken windows.

But it hadn't been paper blowing past me—it had been people. Or what had been left of them, anyway. And that day, if I'd not made it out before nightfall, I would have become one of these… these… dehydrated rinds of human matter, too.

I backed away. I didn't need to peer beneath any more coats to know those husks were all that was left of Rocky O'Bannion and fifteen of his men, but I did anyway. I lifted three more, and that was all I could take. The men hadn't even been able to see what was killing them. I wondered if the Shades had attacked simultaneously, waiting for all of them to get out of their cars, or if only the front two men had stepped out of each car and then, when the two in the rear had seen them go down, sucked into little scraps of whatever it was the Shade palate found indigestible in humans, they too had lunged out, guns blazing, only to fall victim to the same unseen foe. I wondered if the Shades were clever enough to wait, or merely driven by mindless, insatiable hunger.

If they'd gotten me that first night I'd been lost, I'd have been able to see what was coming—great big oily darknesses—but I'd not have known I was a Null, or even a sidhe-seer, and although I probably would have raised my hands to try to fend it off, I wasn't sure the Shades had a tangible form that I could touch to freeze.

I made a mental note to ask Barrons.

I stared at the four cars, at the piles that were all that remained of sixteen men: clothing, shoes, jewelry, guns; there were lots of guns. They must have been packing at least two each; blue steel littered the pavement around the cars. Apparently Shades killed quickly or all the guns had silencers, because I hadn't heard a single shot last night.

No matter that these men had been criminals and killers, no matter that once before they'd wiped out two entire families, I could not absolve myself of their deaths. By omission or commission, my hand was in it, and I would carry it inside me for the rest of my life in a place that I would eventually learn to live with, but never learn to like.

Fiona arrived at eleven-fifty to open the bookstore. By mid-afternoon, the day had turned overcast, drizzly, and cold, so I flipped on the gas logs in the fireplace in the rear conversation area, curled up with some fashion magazines, and watched the customers come and go, wondering what kind of lives they had and why I couldn't have one like that, too.

Fiona chatted brightly with everyone but me and rang up orders until eight o'clock on the dot, when she locked up the store and left.

Mere hours after its urbane owner had killed sixteen men, all was business as usual at Barrons Books and Baubles again, which begged the question: Who was the stone-colder killer—the overzealous ex-boxer turned mobster, or the car-collecting bookstore owner?

The mobster was dead. The very-much-alive bookstore owner stepped in from the rain, a little later than usual but no worse for the wear, at half past nine that night. After relocking the front door, he stopped at the cash register to check on notes Fiona had left him about two special orders placed that day, then joined me, taking an armchair opposite my perch on the sofa. His blood-red silk shirt was splattered with rain and molded to his hard body like a damp second skin. Black trousers clung to his long muscular legs, and he was wearing black boots that had wicked-looking silver toes and heels. He had on that heavy silver Celtic wrist cuff again that made me think of arcane chants and ancient stone circles, complemented by a black-and-silver torque at his throat. He radiated his usual absurd amount of energy and dark, carnal heat.

I looked him straight in the eye, and he gazed straight back at me, and neither of us said a word. He didn't say, I'm sure you saw the cars out back, Ms. Lane and I didn't say, You cold-blooded bastard, how could you? And he didn't counter with, You're alive, aren't you? So I didn't remind him that he'd been the one to jeopardize my life to begin with. I have no idea how long we sat there like that, but we had a complete conversation with our eyes. There was knowledge in Jericho Barrons' gaze, a bottomless pit of it. In fact, for a moment, I imagined I saw The Tree Itself in there, smothered with delicious, shiny red apples just begging to be eaten, but it was only a reflection of flames and crimson silk on irises so dark they served as a black mirror.

There was one thing we hadn't covered in our wordless communique that I just had to know. "Did you even think twice, Barrons? Did you feel any hesitation at all?" When he didn't answer, I pressed, "For just a few moments, did you wonder about their families? Or worry that maybe one of them was a last-minute substitute who'd never done anything worse in his life than steal some kid's lunch in fourth grade?" If eyes were daggers, mine would have killed. These were all things I'd been thinking about throughout the long day; that somewhere out there were wives and children whose husbands and fathers were never coming home again, who would never know what had happened to them. Should I gather their personal effects—minus their ghastly remains—and ship them anonymously to the police department? I understood the grim comfort of knowing for a fact that Alina was dead, of having seen her body and laid her in the ground. If she'd simply disappeared, I'd have gone through every day of the rest of my life driven by an unquenchable, desperate hope, searching every face in every crowd, wondering if she was alive out there somewhere. Praying she wasn't in the hands of some psycho.

"Tomorrow," said Barrens, "you'll go to The National Museum."

I hadn't realized I was holding my breath, hoping for an answer that might assuage some of the guilt I'd been stewing in, until it came out in a derisive snort. Typical Barrons. Ask for an answer—get an order. "What happened to 'You will remain here until I return, Ms. Lane? " I mocked. "What about Mallucé and his men? Have you forgotten about that little problem?" O'Bannion might be gone, and I might have a way of protecting myself from the Fae, but there was still one very pissed-off vampire on the loose out there.

"Mallucé was summoned away last night by someone whose orders he apparently could not, or would not, refuse. His followers expect him to be gone for several days, perhaps as long as a week," said Barrons.

My battered spirits lifted a little. That meant, for a few days at least, I could venture out into the city and move about almost like a normal person again, with only the Fae to worry about. I wanted to go back to Alina's apartment and decide just how much damage I was willing to inflict on it to further my search for her journal, I wanted to buy more snacks for my room in case I got stuck up there again, and I'd been itching to pick up a cheap SoundDock for my iPod. Earbuds were fast becoming a thing of my past; I was turning into too paranoid a person to stand not being able to hear the approach of whatever might jeopardize my life next. But at least I could listen to music in my room if I had a SoundDock, and since I was saving money by not paying for a room anymore, I'd neatly justified the purchase. "Why am I going to the museum?"

"I want you to scour it for OOPs, as you call them. I've long wondered if there are Fae artifacts being hidden in plain view, catalogued as something else. Now that I have you, I can test that theory."

"Don't you know what all the OOPs are, and what they look like?" I asked.

He shook his head. "If only it were that simple. But not even the Fae themselves recall all their own relics." He gave a short, dark laugh. "I suspect it comes from living too long. Why bother to remember or keep track of things? Why care? You live today. You'll live tomorrow. Humans die. The world changes. You don't. Details, Ms. Lane," he said, "go the way of emotions in time."

I blinked. "Huh?"

"The Fae, Ms. Lane," he said. "They aren't like humans. Extraordinary longevity has made them something else. You must never forget that."

"Believe me," I said, "I wasn't about to mistake them for human. I know they're monsters. Even the pretty ones."

His eyes narrowed. "The pretty ones, Ms. Lane? I thought all the ones you'd seen so far were ugly. Is there something you're not telling me?"

I'd almost slipped about V'lane, a topic I had no desire to discuss with Barrons. Until I knew who I could trust—if anyone—and how far, I would keep my own counsel about some things. "Is there something you're not telling me?" I countered coolly. How dare he poke at me for keeping secrets when he was chock-full of them? I didn't bother trying to hide that I was trying to hide something. I just used one of his methods on him—evasion by counterquestion.

We had another of those wordless communiques, this time about truths and deceptions and bluffs and calling people on them, and I was getting better at reading him because I saw the very moment Barrons decided pushing me wasn't worth giving up anything himself.

"Try to wrap the museum up as quickly as possible," he said. "After you've finished there, we've a list of places longer than your arm in and about Ireland to search for the remaining stones and the Sinsar Dubh."

"Oh God, this is my life now, isn't it?" I exclaimed. "You expect me to just trudge around from place to place as you select them, with my nose pressed to the ground, sniffing out OOPs for you, don't you?"

"Have you changed your mind about trying to find the Sinsar Dubh, Ms. Lane?"

"Of course not."

"Do you know where to look yourself?"

I scowled. We both knew I didn't.

"Don't you think the surest way to find both the Dark Book and your sister's killer is to immerse yourself in the very world that killed her?"

Of course I did. I'd thought of that all by myself last week. "So long as that world doesn't kill me first," I said. "And it certainly seems to be trying its darnedest."

He smiled faintly. "I don't think you understand, Ms. Lane. I won't let it kill you. No matter what." He stood and walked across the room. As he opened the door, he shot over his shoulder, "And one day you will thank me for it."

Was he kidding? I was supposed to thank him for staining my hands with blood? "I don't think so, Barrons," I told him, but the door had already swung closed and he'd disappeared into the rainy Dublin night.