Darkfever

CHAPTER 21

"Inspector O'Duffy, please," I said briskly. I'd snatched up the phone as soon as I'd let myself into Barrons Books and Baubles and rung up the Pearse Street Garda Station. "Yes, yes, I can hold." I drummed my fingers impatiently on the cashier's counter at Fiona's station while I waited for the duty officer on the other end of the line to transfer my call to the detective who'd handled Alina's case.

I had another clue for him and this one was etched in stone: 1247 LaRuhe. I was going with him when he went to check it out, and if he wouldn't let me, then I'd just have to tail him. Surely with all the slinking around in the shadows I'd been doing lately, I'd acquired a measure of stealth.

"Yes, Ms. Lane?" The detective sounded harried when he picked up, so I explained quickly where I'd been and what I'd found. "We've been over this," he said when I was done.

"Who's been over what?" I asked.

"The address," he said. "First, there's nothing to prove she wrote that. Anyone might have—"

"Inspector, Alina called me Junior," I interrupted. "And her fingernail file was right there at the scene, dented and scarred from gouging at the stone. Even without knowing the significance of 'Jr., I'm surprised one of your people didn't find it and put two and two together." Not to mention the cosmetic pack. Hadn't they examined the scene at all?

"We saw the address, Ms. Lane, but by the time we were notified of the body, the scene had been contaminated by onlookers. If you were just there yourself, you saw how much trash is in that alley. We could hardly catalogue everything on the pavement. We had no way of knowing if anything in the area originated inside her purse."

"Well, didn't you think it a little odd there was an address gouged in stone right next to her body?" I demanded.

"Of course we did."

"So? Did you track it down? Did you go there?" I asked impatiently.

"Couldn't, Ms. Lane. It doesn't exist. There is no 1247 LaRuhe in Dublin. Not an avenue, street, boulevard, or lane. Not even an alley named that."

I bit the inside of my lip, thinking. "Well, maybe it's outside of Dublin. Maybe it's in another city nearby."

"We tried that, too. We were unable to find any such address, anywhere in Ireland. We even tried variations of the spelling from Laroux to something as simple as La Rue. № 1247 anywhere."

"Well, maybe it's in… London or something," I persisted. "Did you check out other cities?"

Inspector O'Duffy sighed deeply and I could picture him on the other end of the line, shaking his head. "Just how many countries do you think we should search, Ms. Lane?" he asked.

I took a breath and let it out slowly, biting my tongue on: However many you need to in order to find my sister's killer, I don't care if it's a thousand.

When I didn't reply, he said, "We sent her file to Interpol. If they'd found anything, they'd have notified us by now. I'm sorry, but there's nothing else we can do."

Armed with spear and flashlights, I hurried down the darkening streets to a gift shop/café in the Temple Bar District that offered a wide selection of maps, ranging from beautifully laminated close-ups of Dublin to detailed spreads of Ireland, to the equivalent of Rand McNally road map books. I bought one of each, tossed in England and Scotland for good measure, then went back to my borrowed bedroom and, as full night fell, sat cross-legged on the bed and began searching. A foreign country's Gardai couldn't be half as motivated as a vengeance-hungry sister.

It was nearly midnight before I stopped, and then only because five hours of squinting at tiny print had turned the pounding of my earlier headache into an all-out attack on my skull with small jackhammers. I'd found many variations of LaRuhe, but none at 1247, or 1347, or even 1427, or any other number that seemed close enough that Alina might have made a mistake, not that I believed she had. She'd carved out a message with her dying breath and I just couldn't see her getting it wrong. There was something here, something I was missing.

I massaged my temples gently. Headaches aren't a common thing for me, but when I do get one, it's usually a killer and leaves me drained the next day. I folded the maps and stacked them on the floor next to my bed. Barrons might know, I decided. Barrons seemed to know everything. I would ask him tomorrow. Right now I needed to uncramp my legs and try to get some sleep.

I stood, stretched gingerly, then padded over to the window, pushed the drape aside, and stared out into the night.

There was Dublin, a sea of rooftops. Down in those streets was a world I'd never imagined.

There was the darkness of the abandoned neighborhood. I wondered if I'd still be looking out this window in a month—God, I hoped not! — and if so, would the darkness have spread?

There sat three of the four cars of the O'Bannion entourage. Someone had taken the Maybach and closed the doors of the others. All sixteen piles of clothing were still there. I was really going to have to do something about them. To someone in the know, it was the same thing as staring out the window at sixteen corpses.

There were the Shades, those lethal little bastards, moving around down in the alley at the edge of the Dark Zone, pulsing at the perimeter as if angry at Barrons for keeping them at bay with his toxic barrier of light.

I gasped.

And there was the man himself: stepping into the abandoned neighborhood, moving from the safety of his floodlights into complete darkness.

And he didn't have a flashlight!

I raised my hand to knock on the windowpane. I don't know what I was thinking, I guess to get his attention and call him back before he did something stupid.

Then I paused, my knuckles half an inch from the glass.

Barrons was anything but stupid. He did nothing without a reason.

Tall, dark, and graceful as a midnight panther, he wore unrelieved black beneath his long black coat, and as he walked, I caught the glint of steel on his boots. Then even that was gone, absent the light to reflect it, and he was just a lighter shadow in the shadows.

You must never, Ms. Lane, ever enter the abandoned neighborhood at night, he'd said not so long ago.

Okay, then why was he? What was going on? I shook my head and paid for it instantly, as tiny jackhammers fell over, then righted themselves and renewed their attack with vigor: rat-a-tat-tat-TAT-TAT! I clutched my skull and stared down uncomprehendingly.

The Shades weren't paying Barrons the slightest bit of attention. In fact, if I were a woman given to fancy, I would have said the oily darknesses actually peeled back with distaste as Jericho Barrons passed by.

I'd seen the husks the Shades left. I'd seen the evidence of their voracious appetite. The only thing they feared was light. They kill with vampiric swiftness, Barrons had told me. I'd written that in my journal, appreciating the phrase.

I watched him move deeper into the abandoned neighborhood, black on black, until he and the night became one. I stared blankly down the alley after him for a long time after he'd gone, trying to make sense of what I'd just seen.

There were really only two possibilities I could think of: either Barrons was lying to me about the Shades, or he'd struck some kind of dark bargain with the life-sucking Fae.

Whichever it was, I finally had my answer to whether or not I could trust him.

That would be a great, big NOT.

When I finally turned away, brushed my teeth, flossed, washed my face, moisturized, ran a brush through my hair, slipped on my favorite sleep shirt and matching panties, and crawled beneath the covers, I wasn't sure of much, but I did know this: I wasn't going to be asking Barrens any questions about addresses tomorrow.

I woke up the next morning with the answer burning in my brain.

Years ago, in some book I'd read, the author had postulated that the human mind was little different from a computer, and that one of the primary functions of sleep was downtime to integrate new program files, run backup subroutines, defrag, and dump minutiae so we could start fresh the next day.

While I'd slept, my subconscious had attended to my consciousness' dreck, determining data or detritus, dispatching it accordingly, allowing me to see what I would have seen much sooner if I had not been blinded by inner chaos. I would have slapped myself in the forehead if I hadn't been in that delicate just-recovered-from-a-headache state.

I scrambled from bed—I didn't need to turn on a light, I slept with every one of them lit, and would for years to come—and picked up map after map, examining the copyright date. Each was current, as any good tourist map would be, compiled from information collected over the past year.

But Barrons had told me the city had 'forgotten' one entire section existed—the abandoned neighborhood. That no district of the Garda would claim it, that city utilities would contend no such addresses existed. Did that mean there were streets in Dublin nobody remembered anymore? And if so, had they "fallen off the map," so to speak?

If I were to examine another map—say, one from five years ago—would the Dublin preserved in shamrock-embossed laminate look identical to the one I had now? Or would parts of it be missing?

Could it be the answer I was looking for had been staring me in the face all the while from just the other side of my windowpane?

"Bingo!" I stabbed the map with the fuchsia tip of my favorite pen. "There you are!"

I'd just found LaRuhe Street, and—as I'd suspected—it was deep in the abandoned neighborhood.

Last night, when I'd needed a map, I'd gone automaton-like to the first place I remembered seeing a prominent display. It hadn't occurred to me that Barrons would have some in the bookstore. Up on the third floor I'd found a large collection of atlases and maps, gathered up a dozen or so, and toted them down to my favorite sofa to begin my search all over again.

What I'd discovered shocked and horrified me. The Dark Zone abutting Barrons wasn't the only part of Dublin that was missing. There were two other areas, which had existed on maps in previous years, that did not exist on any of them now. They were considerably smaller, and on the outskirts, but there was no doubt in my mind that they were areas that had become Shade-infested, too.

Like a cancer, the life-sucking Unseelie were spreading. I couldn't begin to guess how they'd gotten all the way out in those nearly rural areas, but then I couldn't begin to guess how they'd gotten here in the city, either. Perhaps someone had transported them from one place to the next, unknowing, like roaches in a cardboard box. Or perhaps… I had a terrible thought… was that the basis for Barrens' truce with the parasites? Did he take them to new feeding grounds in exchange for safe passage? Were they sentient enough to make and keep bargains? Where did the Shades go during the day? What dark places did they find? How small could they be in repose if they had no real substance? Could a hundred of them travel in a matchbox? I shook my head. I couldn't ponder the horrors of Shades spreading right now. Alina had left me a clue. I'd finally managed to stumble upon it, and all I could think about was finding whatever it was she'd wanted me to find.

I lay the laminated maps of the city on the table in front of me, side by side, and looked at them a long moment. The map on the right was current; the one on my left had been distributed seven years ago.

On the current map, Collins Street was one block over and ran directly parallel to Larkspur Lane. On the map from seven years ago, there were eighteen city blocks between those two streets.

I shook my head, shrugged, and snorted, all at the same time, an explosive expression of how completely freaked-out I was. This was awful. Did anyone know? Were Barrons and I—and God only knew what Barrons really was; I sure didn't—the only two with any clue that such things were happening?

The truth is, your world is going to hell in a handbasket, Barrons had said. Recalling his words, I caught something in them I'd missed before. He'd said 'your' world. Not 'our' world. Mine. Was it not his world also?

As usual, I had a million questions, no one to trust, and nowhere to go but forward. Backward was a path forever barred me now.

I tore a page out of my journal—there were only four blank pages left—laid it over the laminated map and traced out my path, block by block, scribbling in street names. The map itself was too bulky to carry. I needed my hands free. LaRuhe was at the end of a zigzagging path, roughly fourteen blocks into the Dark Zone; the street itself was only two blocks long, one of those short jogs that connect two main roads near multiple five-point intersections.

In retrospect, I'm still stunned that I went into the abandoned neighborhood alone that day. It's a wonder I survived. I don't know quite what I was thinking. Most of the time, as I look back on things and tell you my tale, I'll be able to give you a good idea what was in my head at the time. But this is one of those days that—although the middle hours bear the permanent and highly stamped details of a fiery brand in my mind—began in a bit of a fog and ended in a worse one.

Maybe I was thinking it was still early in the day, the Shades were only a threat at night, and I had my spear, so I'd be safe. Maybe I was numb from so many shocks that I wasn't feeling the fear I should have been.

Maybe, after everything I'd lost so recently, I just didn't care. Barrons had called me Ms. Rainbow the night we'd robbed Mallucé. Despite his disparaging tone, I'd liked the nickname. But rainbows needed sunshine to exist, and there hadn't been a lot of that in my world lately.

Whatever the reason, I got up, showered, chose my outfit with care, gathered my spearhead and flashlights, and went to find 1247 LaRuhe, by myself.

It was nearly noon and I heard the quiet purr of Fiona's luxury sedan pulling up behind me as I walked into what all sidhe-seers would one day be calling what I'd christened it, what would one day, and not too far off, begin showing up in cities scattered around the entire globe: a Dark Zone. I did not look back.