Faefever

Chapter 10

I slept fitfully and dreamed of the sad woman again.

She was trying to tell me something but an icy wind kept stealing her words each time she opened her mouth. Laughter rippled on the chilling breeze, and I thought I recognized it, but I couldn’t lift the name from my mind. The harder I tried, the more frightened and confused I became. Then V’lane was there, and Barrons too, with men I’d never seen before, and suddenly Christian appeared, and Barrons moved toward him, with murder in his eyes.

I woke up, iced to the bone, and in a state of alarm.

My subconscious had put something together that hadn’t penetrated my conscious mind: Today was Thursday, Christian was returning from Scotland, and Barrons was onto him, because of me.

I had no idea what Barrons might do to him, and didn’t want to find out. The lie-detecting Keltar was no match for. whatever my employer was. Teeth chattering, I grabbed my cell off the night table, and called the ALD. The dreamy-eyed boy answered, and told me Christian wasn’t due in until afternoon. I asked for an apartment, home, or cell number, and he said the personnel files were locked up in the department head’s office. She was gone for a long holiday weekend, and wouldn’t be back until Monday.

I left an urgent message for Christian to call me the instant he walked in.

I was about to tug the covers up, snuggle down, and try to shiver myself warm, when my phone rang.

It was Dani.

“She almost caught me, Mac!” she said breathlessly. “She didn’t leave PHI at all yesterday. She slept in her office, and I was up all fecking night, waiting for a chance to get in. Then a few minutes ago she finally went downstairs, for breakfast, I thought, and I slipped in but I couldn’t find the book you wanted. There was another one in her desk, so I took pictures of it, but I didn’t get many because she came right back, and I had to go out the fecking window and I tore my uniform and banged myself up something wicked. I couldn’t get what you asked for but I tried, and I got something else. That counts, doesn’t it? Will you still meet up with us?”

“Are you okay?”

She snorted. “I kill monsters, Mac. I fell out of a stupid window.”

I smiled. “Where are you?” I could hear horns honking in the background, the sounds of the city waking up.

“Not far from you.” She told me. I knew the intersection.

I glanced at the window. It was still dark out. I hated her being out there in the dark, regardless of her superspeed, and I doubted she had the sword. “There’s a church across the street.” It was brilliantly lit. “I’ll meet you in front of it in ten minutes.”

“But the rest of ’em aren’t here!”

“I’m just coming for my camera. Can you get the girls together this afternoon?”

“I can try. Kat says you have to pick a place where the other. couriers. won’t see us.”

I named several cafés, all of which she nixed as too risky. We finally settled on a below-street pub, aptly named The Underground, that offered darts and pool tables, but no windows.

I hung up, brushed my teeth, splashed water on my face, tugged on jeans, and zipped a fleece-lined jacket over my PJ top, then jammed a ball cap on my head. My blond roots were showing. I made a mental note to stop in a drugstore on the way back and grab a couple boxes of color. It was depressing enough that I had to have dark hair. I wasn’t going to cheese it up with a sloppy dye job.

It was 7:20 when I hit the pavement. The sun wouldn’t rise until 7:52 A.M. It would set at 6:26; I’ve become a bit obsessed with the precise timing of natural light, and keep a chart of it on my wall, next to the map where I track Unseelie hot spots and Book activity. I stayed to the lights as much as I could, moving from the pool cast by one streetlamp to the next, a flashlight in each hand, my spear heavy and comforting in my shoulder harness. My MacHalo was for deep night work only. If the people passing by thought it was bizarre that I was carrying lit flashlights, I didn’t care. I was staying alive. They could smirk all they wanted. A few of them did.

As I hurried down the street, I pictured myself three months ago, compared it to what I looked like now, and laughed. The businessman hurrying along next to me glanced over. He met my eyes, jerked a little, and stepped up his pace, leaving me behind.

It had rained during the night, and the cobbled streets were shiny in the predawn light. The city perched on the expectant edge of day about to explode: buses honking, taxis vying for space with commuters, people checking their watches and rushing to their jobs, other people. or things. already doing theirs, like those Rhino-boys sweeping the streets, and picking up trash.

I watched them surreptitiously, struck by the oddity of it. The non-sidhe-seer passerby would see only the human glamour they projected, of the still half-asleep city employee, but I saw their stumpy gray limbs, beady eyes, and jutting jaws as plain as the skin on the back of my hand. I knew they were watchdogs for higher-ranking Fae. I didn’t get why they were doing human dirty work. I couldn’t see a Fae stooping to it, Light or Dark Court. The many low-level Unseelie were chafing my sidhe-seer senses. Usually Rhino-boys don’t bother me too much, but in mass numbers they make me feel like I have an ulcer. I poked around inside my head, wondering if I could mute it somehow.

That was better! I could turn the volume down. Very cool.

Dani was leaning jauntily against a streetlamp in front of the church, bike propped against her hip. She had a painful-looking knot on her forehead; the undersides of her forearms were scraped raw, and dirty; and she’d torn holes in the knees of her pinstriped pants as if she’d gone sliding on all fours down an asphalt roof, which, she told me breezily, she had. I wanted to take her back to the bookstore, clean and bandage her up. I told my bleeding heart to get over it. If we ever ended up fighting back to back, I’d need to trust her to deal with all but critical wounds.

Dani slapped the camera into my hand with a cocky grin, and said, “Go ahead, tell me what a great job I did.”

I suspected she didn’t hear praise often. Rowena didn’t seem the type to waste breath on a job well done, when she could save it for a job badly done. I also doubted Dani got much nurturing from the other sidhe-seers. Her mouthy defensiveness made her hard to cuddle, and her sisters-in-arms had their own worries on their minds. I thumbed on the camera, glanced at the measly seven pages she’d photographed, of the wrong stuff, and said, “Great job, Dani!”

She preened a moment, then hopped on her bike and pedaled off, skinny legs pumping. I wondered if she ever used her superspeed while biking and, if she did, would you see only a flash of green whizzing by? Kermit the Frog on steroids. “Later, Mac,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ll call you soon.”

I headed back to the bookstore by way of the drugstore. It was light enough to put away my flashlights. I did, then stared down at my camera, zooming in on the photos, trying to figure out what she’d gotten.

I knew better than to walk with my head down. I didn’t even dare carry an umbrella in the rain for fear of what I might bump into.

When I careened off the shoulder of a man standing near a dark, expensive car parked at the curb, I exclaimed, “Oh, sorry!” and kept right on going, blessing my luck that it had been a human I’d bumped into, not a Fae—when I realized I had my “volume” way down—and it hadn’t been a human.

I whirled, whipping my spear from my jacket, willing the people passing by—most with their noses buried in a newspaper, or on their cell phones—not to see me, as if maybe I could throw a little glamour of my own. Melt into the shadows with the other monsters.

“Bitch,” spat Derek O’Bannion, his swarthy features contorted with hatred. But his cold, reptilian gaze acknowledged my weapon and he made no move toward me.

Ironically, that weapon is the spear I stole from his brother, Rocky, shortly before Barrons and I led him and his henchmen to their death-by-Shade behind the bookstore. Capitalizing on Derek’s hunger for revenge, the LM recruited him as a replacement for Mallucé, taught him to eat Unseelie, and sent him after me to get the spear. I’d convinced the younger O’Bannion brother that I would kill him if he so much as blinked at me wrong, and I’d let him know just how terrible that death would be. The spear killed anything Fae. When a person ate Unseelie, it turned parts of the person Fae. When those parts died, they rotted from the inside out, poisoning the human parts of the person, and ultimately killing them. The one time I’d eaten Fae, I’d been terrified of the spear. I’d seen Mallucé up close and personal. He’d been marbled with decay. Half his mouth had rotted, parts of his hands, legs, and stomach had been a decomposing stew, and his genitals. ugh. It was a horrific way to die.

O’Bannion yanked open the car door, muttered something to the driver, then slammed it again. The engine turned over and twelve cylinders purred to the quiet life of understated wealth.

I smiled at him. I love my spear. I understand why boys at war name their guns. He fears it. The Royal Hunters fear it. With the exception of the Shades, who have no substance to stab, it will kill anything Fae, allegedly even the king and queen themselves.

Someone I couldn’t see pushed the rear car door open from the inside. O’Bannion rested his hand on the top of the window. He was far more riddled with Fae than he had been a week and a half ago. I could feel it.

“Little addictive, huh?” I said sweetly. I dropped my spear, pressed it to my thigh, to dissuade potential busybodies from calling the Garda. I wasn’t willing to sheathe it. I knew how fast and strong he was. I’d been there myself, and it had been incredible.

“You should know.”

“I only ate it once.” Probably wasn’t so wise to admit that just then, but I was proud of the battle I’d been winning.

“Bullshit! Nobody who’s tasted the power would give it up.”

“We’re not the same, you and I.” He wanted dark power. I didn’t. Deep down, I just wanted to go back to being the girl I used to be. I would trespass into darker territories only if my survival depended on it. O’Bannion considered embracing the darkness a step up.

I feinted a jab at him with my spear. He flinched, and his mouth compressed to a thin white line.

I wondered, if he stopped eating it now, would he revert to fully human, or, after a certain point, was it too late, and the transformation couldn’t be undone?

How I wished I’d let him walk into the Dark Zone that day! I couldn’t fight him here and now, in the middle of rush hour. “Get out of here,” I stabbed air again, “and if you see me on the street, run as fast and as far as you can.”

He laughed. “You stupid little cunt, you have no idea what’s coming. Wait till you see what the Lord Master has in store for you.” He ducked into the car, and glanced back at me, with a smile of malevolence and. sick anticipation. “Trick or treat, bitch,” he said, then laughed again. I could hear him laughing, even after he’d closed the door.

I tucked the spear in my harness then stood on the sidewalk, gaping, as he drove away.

Not because of anything he’d said, but because of what I’d seen as he’d settled back into the supple, camel-colored leather seats.

Or, rather, who I’d seen.

A woman, beautiful and voluptuous, in the way of aging movie stars from a time long gone by, when actresses had been worthy of the title Diva.

My “volume” was on high. She was eating Fae, too.

Well, now I knew: While Barrons might have killed the woman he’d been carrying out of the mirror, he hadn’t killed Fiona.

I opened Barrons Books and Baubles at eleven on the dot, with a new ’do. I’d colored it two shades lighter than Arabian Nights this time and looked closer to my age again (black hair makes me look older, especially with red lipstick), then run down the street for a quick cut, and now a few longish wedges of bang framed my face. The result was feminine and soft, completely at odds with how I felt inside. The rest of it I’d twisted up and stabbed with a hair pick. The result was flirty, casual elegance.

My nails were cut to the quick, but I’d brushed on a quick coat of Perfectly Pink, and glossed on matching lipstick. Despite these concessions to my passion for fashion, I felt drab in my standard uniform of jeans, boots, a black tee under a light jacket, with spear holstered, and flashlights tucked. I missed dressing up.

I sat back on the stool behind the cashier counter, and eyed the tiny jars of wriggling Unseelie flesh lined up there.

I’d managed to cram a lot into my morning. After the drugstore, I’d hit a corner convenience, bought baby food, dyed my hair, showered, emptied the contents, and washed the jars. Then I’d gone out again, attacked a Rhino-boy, cut off part of his arm and stabbed him, putting him out of both our miseries, and making sure he didn’t live to tell any tales of a human girl stealing Fae power. Then I’d sliced and diced the stump of arm into bite-size pieces.

If only I’d kept some handy, as I’d wanted to after feeding Jayne, Moira might not have died. If something unexpected and awful happened while I was in the bookstore, I wasn’t going to be caught unprepared this time; I wanted a dose of superpower close at hand. It wasn’t as if it would ever expire. It was the only snack I knew of with an immortal shelf life.

My hunting and gathering expedition had nothing to do with Derek O’Bannion or Fiona, or the reminder of how weak I was compared to them. It was proactive. It was smart. It was just plain, good common sense. I slid the small fridge out from beneath the rear counter and tucked several jars behind it, before sliding it back in. The others I would stash away upstairs later.

After catching myself staring at them for several minutes without blinking, I stuffed the jars in my purse. Out of sight, out of mind.

I opened my laptop, hooked up my camera, and began uploading the pages. While I waited, I called the ALD again, to make sure the dreamy-eyed boy really understood the urgency of the message I’d asked him to relay. He assured me he did.

I tended to customers for the next several hours. It was a busy morning and sales were brisk. It wasn’t until early afternoon that I got to sit down, and take a look at the pages Dani had photographed.

I was disappointed by how small they were, barely the size of recipe cards. The scribbled lines were cramped tightly together, and when I finally managed to begin deciphering the small, slanted script, I realized what I had was a pocket notebook of observations and thoughts penned in a badly butchered version of the English language. The spelling made me suspect the author had had little in the way of formal education, and had lived many centuries ago.

After studying it for some time, I opened my own journal, and began to write down what I believed was a fair translation.

The first page picked up in the middle of a lengthy diatribe about The Lyte and The Darke—which I swiftly realized meant the Seelie and Unseelie—and how dastardly and “Evyle” they both were. I already knew that.

However, halfway through the page, I found this:

Sae I ken The Lyte maye nae tych The Darke nae maye The Darke tych The Lyte. Whyrfar The Darke maye nae bare sych tych, so doth the sworde felle et low. Whyrfar the Lyte may nae bare sych Evyle, sae The Beest revyles et.

Okay, so that sounded like the Seelie hated the Unseelie and vice versa. But not quite. There was something more here. I puzzled over it several moments. Did it mean the Seelie couldn’t actually touch the Unseelie, and vice versa? I read on.

Tho sworde doth felle thym bothe, yea een Mastr and Myst! Ay t’hae the blade n ende m’suffrin!

The sword killed both Unseelie and Seelie, up to the highest royalty. I knew that, too. So did the spear.

Sae maye ye trye an ken thym! That The Lyte maye nae tych The Beest, nr The Darke the sworde, nr The Lyte the amlyt, nr the Darke the spyr.

So may you try and know them, I scribbled my translation. The Light (Seelie) may not touch the Beast (Book?) and the Dark (Unseelie) may not touch the sword. “I get it!” I exclaimed. This was important stuff! The Seelie can’t touch the amulet, I wrote, and the Unseelie can’t touch the spear.

What it was saying was that the Seelie couldn’t touch the Unseelie Hallows and Unseelie couldn’t touch the Seelie Hallows—and that was how you could tell them apart!

I’d just found the perfect way to lay my questions to rest about whether or not Barrons might be a Gripper! If he was, he couldn’t touch the spear.

I lay my pen aside, thinking back. Had I ever seen him touch it? Yes! The night he’d stabbed the Gray Man, while I’d hung, suspended by my hair.

I narrowed my eyes. Actually, I hadn’t seen him touch it that night. When he’d returned it to me, the hilt was still stuck in my purse, with the spear protruding from it. He’d handled it through the fabric. And although he’d said he was going to wear it to the auction, strapped to his leg, I’d never pulled up his pants leg and gone looking for it. For all I knew, he might have left it laying on the desk, right where I’d placed it for him, and where I’d later reclaimed it.

Okay, but the night we’d stolen the spear, surely he’d touched it at some point, hadn’t he? I closed my eyes, replaying the memory. We’d gone underground and broken into the Irish mobster Rocky O’Bannion’s treasure chamber. Barrons had made me pluck it from the wall, and carry it to the car. He’d instructed me to break the rotting shaft from the spearhead. I’d been carrying it ever since.

I opened my eyes. Clever, clever man.

I had to put him in a position where he had no choice but to hold the spear. To take it. Touch it. I would settle for no less than skin on steel. If he were a Gripper—or an Unseelie of any kind—he wouldn’t be able to do it. It was that simple.

So how was I going to trick him into taking it?

These pages had been worth Dani’s efforts for this tidbit alone. I was glad the book on V’lane had been gone, and this had been there in its place.

I resumed reading. It was slow going but fascinating.

The author of the pocket notebook was no sidhe-seer. Its scribe was a man, or rather a young boy, who’d been so beautiful he was mocked by the warriors of his time, though loved by the lasses who’d taught him his letters.

At ten and three, he’d had the misfortune of capturing the eye of a Faery princess, while taking a shortcut through a dark and tangled wood.

She’d charmed and seduced him off to Faery, where she’d swiftly transformed into something cold and frightening. She’d kept him locked in a golden cage at court, where he’d been forced to watch the Fae play with their human “pets.” Among their games, their favorite was turning mortals Pri-ya: into creatures who begged for the touch of a Fae, any Fae—in fact, for the touch of anything at all, for the “vilest of things to be done to them, and to do foul things to each other,” according to the young scribe. These creatures had no will, no mind, no awareness of anything but sexual need. They knew neither morality nor mercy, and were as likely to turn on one another as rabid animals. The boy had found them terrifying and feared being given to what had become of his human companions. He had no way of tracking time but he watched hundreds come and go, and began a growth of manly hair, which was when the princess began once more to look his way.

When the Fae were no longer amused with their pets they cast them from Faery to die. In this manner, the letter of the Compact wasn’t violated. They didn’t actually kill the humans they captured. They just didn’t save them. I wondered how many had died in madhouses, or been used for exactly what they wanted, and killed by their own kind.

The boy listened to all that was said, recorded all he heard, because when the dying were discarded, their possessions went with them, and, although he’d lost hope for himself, he hoped to warn his people. (The child hadn’t known that hundreds of years would have passed by the time he was released from Faery.) He hoped something he recorded might save one of them, perhaps hold the key to one day destroying his terrifying, merciless abductors.

A chill kissed my nape. That his plan had worked meant the boy was long dead. And as he’d hoped, his notebook had found its way back to the world of Man, and eventually into the hands of a sidhe-seer, to be passed down through the centuries, and end up in Rowena’s desk. Why was it in her desk? Just some light reading at lunchtime, or was she looking for something?

I glanced at the clock. It was two-thirty, well into afternoon. I snatched up my cell phone and dialed the ALD again. There was no answer. Where had the dreamy-eyed boy gone? Where was Christian? I snapped my laptop closed, and was thinking of heading over there when my cell rang. It was Dani, and the girls were already at the pub waiting for me, so could I hurry?

When I descended the stairs into the shadowy, substreetlevel pub, I found seven women in their mid- to late twenties waiting for me, not including Dani. Two had been present the day Moira had died: the tall, gray-eyed brunette with the unwavering gaze that kept sweeping the pub—and I doubted she missed much—and the skinny, dark-eyed girl with platinum hair, heavy black eyeliner, and matching nail polish, who was rocking slightly in her chair to a rhythmic beat, although her iPod and earbuds lay on the table. The only exit was the entrance I’d come in and, with no windows, the place felt dark and claustrophobic to me. As I took my seat, I could see they were as uncomfortable as I was with our close, dimly lit surroundings. Five cell phones lay on the table, emitting wan glows. There were two Notebooks open, running on battery power, displaying bright white screens. It was all I could do not to pull out my flashlights, turn them on, and slap them down on the table, adding my share to the lot.

We nodded stiffly to each other. I got straight to the point. “Do you have unrestricted access to the library Rowena told me about?” I asked the group of women. I wanted to know just how useful an alliance between us might be.

The brunette answered, “It depends on your place in the organization. There are seven circles of ascension. We’re in the third, so we can enter four of the twenty-one libraries.”

Twenty-one? “Who could possibly use that many books?” I said irritably. I’d bet there was no handy card catalog around, either.

She shrugged. “We’ve been collecting them for millennia.”

“Who’s in the seventh circle? Rowena?”

“The seventh is the Haven itself, the High Council of. you know. ” That level gray gaze swept the pub uneasily.

I glanced around, too. There were five customers in the place. Two were shooting pool, the other three were brooding into their beers. None of them were paying any attention to us, and there wasn’t a Fae in sight. “If you don’t feel comfortable talking in a public place, why did you ask me to pick one?”

“We didn’t think you’d meet in private after what happened. I’m Kat, by the way,” the brunette said. “This is Sorcha, Clare, Mary, and Mo.” She pointed to each in turn. The skinny Goth was Josie. The petite brunette was Shauna. “That’s the lot of us,” Kat said, “though if you prove useful, and your loyalties are true, more will join us.”

“Oh, I’m useful,” I said coolly. “The question is, are you? And as for loyalties, if yours are with the old woman, I suggest you rethink them.”

Her gaze cooled to match mine. “Moira was my friend. But I saw what I saw, and you didn’t mean to kill her. Doesn’t mean I have to like it, and doesn’t mean I have to like you. It does mean I’m after doing everything I can to stop the walls from coming down, and if that means I have to join forces with the only person I know can sense the Sin—er, Book—here I am. But back to loyalties; where are yours?”

“Where any sidhe-seers should be. With the humans we’re supposed to protect.” I didn’t say what else I was thinking—in exactly this order: my family, my vengeance, the rest of the world.

She nodded. “Very good. The leader of a cause is never the cause itself. But make no mistake, we listen to Rowena. She’s been training most of since we were born. Those she didn’t teach from birth, she’s spent years gathering and educating.”

“Then why are you going behind her back, and meeting with me?”

All eight, including Dani, shifted uncomfortably and either glanced away or fiddled with something; a coffee mug, a napkin, a cell phone.

It was Dani who finally broke the silence. “We used to guard the Book, Mac. It was ours to protect. We lost it.”

“What?” I exclaimed. “You lost it?” I’d been blaming the Fae for the mess we were in, for making Darroc human, but the sidhe-seers were complicit, too? “How did you lose it?” Then again, knowing what I knew of it, how had they contained it to begin with? How had any sidhe-seer gotten close to it? Weren’t they all repelled by it, like me?

“We don’t know,” Kat said. “It happened twenty-some years ago, before any of us came to the abbey. Those who lived through those dark days share little detail about them. One day it was there, hidden beneath the abbey, then it was gone.”

So that was why Arlington Abbey had been continuously rebuilt and fortified ever stronger—because beneath it they’d been protecting the greatest menace known to Man! How long had it been there, hidden in ground, guarded by whatever was held sacred by each age? Since it had been a shian? Before even that?

“Or so we’ve heard,” she continued. “Only the Haven knew it was there to begin with. The night it vanished, they say terrible things happened. Sidhe-seers died, others disappeared, and rumors flew, until the entire abbey knew what had once been hidden beneath their very feet. That was when Rowena formed PHI, and opened branches all over the world, with couriers out in the streets, listening for even a vague rumor of it. She’s been trying to track it since. For many years, there was no account of it, but recently it surfaced, right here, in Dublin. There are many of us who fear it was our predecessors’ failure to contain it that has caused the problems we’re having now, and only by getting it back do we have any chance to fix them. If you can sense the Book, Mac, then you really are our best hope, like. ” She trailed off, as if reluctant to say the word aloud. She stared into her coffee but I saw what she struggled to hide: pure, raw fascination. Like Dani, she was smitten. She cleared her throat. “Like the Fae you brought that night said.” She wet her lips. “V’lane.”

“Rowena says you’re dangerous,” Josie said hotly, raking a black-nailed hand through a fringe of pale bangs. “We told her you could sense it but she doesn’t want you to go after it. She says if you find it, you won’t do what’s right, that you want revenge. She says you told her that your sister was killed in Dublin, so she did some checking, and your sister was a traitor. She was working with him, the one who’s been bringing all the Unseelie through.”

“Alina wasn’t a traitor!” I cried. Every occupant in the place turned to look at me. Even the bartender dragged his attention from the small TV behind the bar. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Alina didn’t know who he was,” I said, carefully modulating my voice. “He tricked her. He’s very powerful.” How had Rowena found out about Alina’s involvement with the LM?

“So you say,” Kat said softly.

Those were fighting words. I rose from my seat, hands splayed on the table.

She rose, too. “Easy, Mac. Hear me out. I’m not accusing you, or your sister. If I truly believed you traitors to our cause, I wouldn’t be here. I saw the look on your face when Moira—”She broke off, and I saw deep, unspoken grief in her eyes. They’d been close. Still, she was here, trying to connect with me, because she believed it was best for our cause. “We’re not here to speak of the dead but to plan for the living,” she continued after a moment. “I know that things are not always what they seem. We learn that from birth. But you can see the bind we’re in. We need you, but we don’t know you. Rowena is against you and, while we normally support her in all things, her attempts to recover the Book have failed. She has tried many times. We need results, and time is of the essence. You asked Dani for a show of faith, and she gave you it. Now we’re asking you to return the favor.”

I bit back an instinctive refusal. “What do you want?” I’d vowed never to prove myself to the old woman, but these women were not Rowena. I badly wanted to be invited to the abbey again. They were the only people I knew who were like me. I’d been banned from the only club I’d ever wanted to join. With V’lane’s name on my tongue, I wouldn’t be at their mercy at the isolated fortress. If things took a threatening turn, he’d be there to rescue me the moment I opened my mouth.

“Can you sense all Fae objects?”

I shrugged. “I think so.”

“Have you heard of the D’Jai Orb?”

When I nodded, she leaned forward and said urgently, “Do you know where it is?”

I shrugged. I’d been holding it in my hands a little over two weeks ago, but I had no idea where it was right now, only that it was in Barrons’ possession. “Why?”

“It’s important, Mac. We need it.”

“Why? What is it?”

“A relic from one of the Seelie Royal Houses that contains some kind of Fae energy that Rowena believes can be used to reinforce the walls. We need it fast, before Samhain.”

“Sowen. What’s sowen?”

“If you can get the Orb and bring it to us, we’ll tell you everything we know, Mac. Even Rowena will have to believe in you then.”

Chapter 11

I hurried back to the bookstore, deep in thought. Not, however, with my head down. I wasn’t making that mistake again today. I won the struggle not to frown at two Rhino-boys that were repairing a streetlamp. What was their deal? Shouldn’t they be supporting their dark brethren, the Shades, and busting out the lights, instead of fixing them?

I couldn’t believe the sidhe-seers had been guardians of the Book and lost it. How had it been lost? What had happened that night twenty-some years ago?

My meeting with the sidhe-seers had answered few questions, and raised more.

What was sowen? How did the D’Jai Orb fit in? How had Barrons gotten it? What did he plan to do with it? Sell it to the highest bidder? Could I steal it from him? Did I want to burn that bridge? Were there any bridges left between us?

If the Orb was my passport to Sidhe-seer Central, I was determined to get it, by fair means or foul. Was Rowena manipulating their efforts to befriend me? Had she allowed Dani to photograph those pages and give them to me, seemingly on the sly?

My short time in Dublin had me looking for games within games everywhere I turned. I’d sure like to get Christian into the same room with a few people and employ his lie-detecting abilities while I asked questions.

Speaking of the Scot, I tried calling him again. There was no answer, again. Grrr. Wondering what exactly constituted “afternoon” in the dreamy-eyed boy’s world, I let myself into the store, opened my laptop, and logged onto the Net.

My search for “sowen” yielded no results. I tried half a dozen different spellings, and was about to give up when a Google search result caught my eye. It was about trick-or-treating, which brought to mind O’Bannion’s earlier crack.

I looked up Halloween and bingo, there it was: sowen—gee, why didn’t I think of spelling it S-a-m-h-a-i-n?

Samhain had its origins, like many modern holidays or celebrations, in pagan times. As the sidhe-seers had been inclined to erect churches and abbeys on their sacred sites, the Vatican had been wont to “Christianize” ancient, pagan celebrations in an if-you-can’t-beat-them-and-don’t-want-to-join-them-rename-it-and-pretend-it-was-yours-all-along campaign.

Scrolling past the various names, etymology, and pictures of jack-o’-lanterns and witches, I read.

Samhain: the word for November in the Gaelic language marks the beginning of the dark half of the Gaulish year, with Beltane adventing the light half.

Great. So, these past few months hadn’t been the dark ones?

Technically, Samhain refers to November 1, christened All Saints’ Day by the Vatican, but it’s Samhain night— Oiche Shamhna, October 31st, that has long been the focus of ritual and superstition.

Celts believed All Hallows’ Eve was one of the liminal (Latin, meaning threshold) times of the year, when spirits from the Otherworld could slip through, and when magic was most potent. Since the Celts held that both their dead and the terrifying, immortal Sidhe resided in mounds beneath the earth, on this night both could rise and walk freely. Festivals were held and large communal bonfires were lit to ward off these evil spirits.

I read entry after article, astonished by how many countries and cultures held similar beliefs. I’d never given any thought to the origins of Halloween, just happily collected the candy, and in later years had a blast with the costumes and parties, and enjoyed the great tips if I was working.

Bottom line was the walls between our world and the “Otherworld” were dangerously thin on the last day of October, at their most vulnerable at precisely midnight, the crack between one half of the year and the next, the threshold between light and dark, and if anything was going to try to get through, or if anyone—say an evil ex-Fae with vengeance issues—wanted to bring them crashing down around our ears, that was the time to try it.

Certain nights of the year, lass, Christian had told me, my uncles perform rituals to reinforce our pledge and keep the walls between our realms solid. The last few times, some other dark magic rose up, and prevented the tithe from being fully paid. My uncles believe the walls won’t last through another incomplete ritual.

Certain nights. Wouldn’t last through another incomplete ritual.

Was Samhain the night the MacKeltars’ next ritual was to be performed? Were we that close to disaster—two short weeks away? Was this the meaning of O’Bannion’s snide threat?

I thumbed redial and called the ALD again. Again, there was no answer. The waiting had been making me crazy all day, and now I didn’t just need to warn him, I needed answers. Where was he?

Powering down my laptop, I locked up and headed for Trinity.

Surprisingly, I dozed off, slumped sideways against the wall outside the locked offices of the ALD. I think it was because I felt like Mac 1.0 there, in the brightly lit hallway, on a college campus, surrounded by the happy sounds of youth that didn’t have a clue what was waiting for them out in the real world.

I woke to someone touching my face and my inner sidheseer exploded.

The next thing I knew, Christian was on the floor beneath me, and my spear was at his throat. My muscles were rigid. I was ready for a fight; my adrenaline had no outlet. Dreams had shattered the moment I’d felt myself touched. My brain was cold, clear, and hard.

I took a deep breath, and ordered myself to relax.

Christian nudged the spear from his throat. “Easy, Mac. I was just trying to wake you. You looked so sweet and pretty asleep.” His smile was fleeting. “I’ll not be making that mistake again.”

We separated awkwardly. As I’ve said before, Christian is a man, and there’s no mistaking it. I’d been straddling him much the way I’d straddled Barrons recently. Either my spear hadn’t intimidated him or he’d managed to. well, rise above it.

Speaking of my weapon, his gaze was fixed on it with fascination. It was emitting a soft, luminous glow. “It’s the Spear of Destiny, isn’t it?” He looked awed.

I slid it back in my shoulder harness and said nothing.

“Why didn’t you tell me you had it, Mac? We’d been bidding on it, trying to buy it. We thought it was out there on the black market. We need it now more than ever. It’s one of only two weapons that can kill—”

“I know. It kills Fae. That’s why I have it. And I didn’t tell you because it’s mine and I’m not giving it up.”

“I didn’t ask you to. There’s nothing I could do with it, anyway. I can’t see them.”

“Right. And that’s why you shouldn’t have it.”

“A little touchy, are we?”

I flushed. I was. “Someone tried to steal it from me recently, and it went badly,” I explained. “Where have you been, anyway? I’ve been calling you all day. I was getting worried.”

“My plane was delayed.” He unlocked the door, and pushed it open. “I’m glad you’re here. I was going to call you as soon as I got in. My uncles have an idea they want me to talk to you about. I think it’s a terrible idea, but they insist.”

“Samhain is the night your uncles have to perform the next ritual, isn’t it?” I said, as we stepped inside. “And if they don’t get it right, the walls between our worlds are going to come down and we’re all screwed.” I shivered. It had sounded weirdly like I’d just made a proclamation: The walls between our worlds are going to come down and we’re all screwed.

Christian closed the door behind me. “Smart girl. How’d you figure it out?” He gestured to a chair opposite his but I was too wound up to take it. I paced instead.

“The sidhe-seers mentioned Samhain. They want. ” I trailed off and looked at him hard, searching his gaze for. I don’t know. maybe a big, block-lettered message that said YOU CAN TRUST ME, I’M NOT EVIL. I sighed. Sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith. “They want the D’Jai Orb to try to reinforce the walls. Would it work?”

He rubbed his jaw and it made a rasping sound. He hadn’t shaved in several days and the shadow beard looked good on him. “I don’t know. It’s possible. I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know what it does. Who are these sidhe-seers? You’ve found more of your own, then?”

“You’re kidding, right?” He knew so much about Barrons, and the Book, that I’d assumed he also knew about Rowena and her couriers, and probably V’lane, too.

He shook his head.

“You said you followed Alina. Didn’t you see other women out there, watching things that weren’t there?”

“I had reasons to watch your sister. She had a photocopy of a page of the Sinsar Dubh. I’ve had no cause to watch others.”

“I got the impression your uncles knew everything.”

Christian smiled. “They’d like that. They think quite highly of themselves, too. But no, for a long time we believed all the sidhe-seers had died out. A few years ago, we discovered we’d been wrong. How many have you come across?”

“A few,” I hedged. He didn’t need to know. V’lane and Barrons knowing about the abbey was bad enough.

“Not the truth, but it’ll do. You can keep the numbers to yourself. Just tell me this: Are there enough to put up a fight if we need them to?”

I didn’t sugarcoat the sour fact. “Not with only two weapons. So, what’s this terrible idea of your uncles’?”

“A while back, they had a run-in with Barrons, and they’ve been toying with the idea since. They’re no longer toying. Uncle Cian says power is power, and we need all of it we can get.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What kind of run-in? Where?”

“At a castle in Wales, a month and a half ago. They’d been chasing the same relics for some time, but never actually tried to rob the same place, on the same night.”

“Those were your uncles? The other thieves that were after the amulet, the night Mallucé took it?” The night V’lane had snatched me out, sifted me off to a beach in Faery!

“You know where the amulet is? Who is Mallucé? And they aren’t thieves. Some things shouldn’t be loose in the world.”

“Mallucé is dead and no longer matters. The Lord Master has it now.”

“Who’s the Lord Master?”

I was astonished. What did he know? Anything of use? “He’s the one who’s been bringing the Unseelie through, the one who’s been trying to tear the walls down!”

He looked blank. “He’s the one who’s been doing the magic against us?”

“Duh,” I said.

“Doona be ‘duh’ing me, lass,” he growled, his burr thickening.

“How can you know so many things, but none of the important ones? You’re the ones who are supposed to be protecting the walls!”

“Right, the walls,” he said. “And we’ve been doing it. To the best of our ability. With our own blood. Can’t try much harder than that, lass, unless you want us to revert to the archaic ways and sacrifice one of our own, an idea I just went home to explore, but was forced to conclude wouldn’t work. What about the sidhe-seers? Aren’t they supposed to be doing something, too?” He cast my accusation of slacking off on the job right back at me.

“Yes. As a matter of fact they were. They were supposed to be protecting the Book.” I distanced and acquitted myself.

His opened his mouth, closed it again, then exploded, “You’re the ones who had the Sinsar Dubh to begin with? We knew somebody was guarding it; we just didn’t know who. Och, for the love of Christ, lass, what did you do with it? Lose the bloody thing?”

I clarified my pronouns again. “They lost it. I’m not part of them.”

“You certainly look like a sidhe-seer to me.”

“Don’t be trying to blame me, Scotty,” I snapped. “Your uncles were supposed to be keeping the walls up. The sidheseers were supposed to be guarding the Book. The Fae were supposed to strip the LM’s memory before they dumped him on us, and I was supposed to be home with my sister playing volleyball on a beach somewhere. It’s not my fault. None of this is my fault. But for some idiotic reason, I seem to be able to do something about it. And I’m trying, so get off my back!”

We faced off, breathing fast and shallow, glaring at each other, two young people living in a world that was coming apart at the seams, doing their best to stop it, but realizing rapidly just how long the odds were. Tough times make for tough words, I guess.

“What’s your terrible idea?” I said finally, in an effort to get things back on track.

He inhaled and released it slowly. “My uncles want Barrons to help them hold the walls on Samhain. They say he’s Druid trained, and not afraid of the dark side.”

I laughed. No, he certainly wasn’t afraid of the dark side. Some days I was pretty sure he was the dark side. “You’re right. It’s a terrible idea. Not only does he know you guys have been spying on him, Barrons is mercenary to the core. He doesn’t give a rat’s petunia about anyone but himself. Why would he care if the walls come down? Everybody’s afraid of him. He has nothing to lose.”

“What did you just say?”

“In a nutshell, he doesn’t care.”

“You said he knows we’ve been spying on him? How?”

I gave myself a mental smack in the forehead. I’d completely forgotten the reason I’d come here in the first place. I hastily recounted how Barrons had used Voice to interrogate me about my recent activities, and that visiting Christian had been one of them. I told him I’d been trying to reach him all day, to warn him, and when I hadn’t managed to get in touch with him by four, I’d come by to wait for him. When I finished, Christian was regarding me warily.

“You let him do that to you? Push you around like that? Force answers from you?” The tiger-gold gaze swept me up and down, the handsome face tightened. “I thought you were. a different kind of girl.”

“I am a different kind of girl!” Or at least I had been when I first came to Dublin. I wasn’t sure what kind of girl I was now. But I hated the look in his eyes: aloofness, censure, disappointment. “He’s never done it before. We have a complicated. association.”

“Doesn’t sound like an association to me. Sounds like a tyranny.”

I wasn’t about to discuss the complexities of life with Barrons, with anyone, especially not a living, breathing polygraph test. “He’s trying to teach me to resist Voice.”

“Guess you aren’t very good at it. And good luck. Voice is a skill that can take a lifetime to learn.”

“Look, you guys were planning to talk to him anyway. I’m sorry, okay?”

He measured me. “Make up for it, then. Talk to him for us. Tell him what we want.”

“I don’t think you can trust him.”

“I don’t, either. I told my uncles that. They overruled me. The problem is we aren’t sure we can keep the walls up, even with Barrons’ help.” He paused then said grimly, “But we know we can’t without him.” He opened a notepad, tore off a scrap of paper, wrote on it, and handed it to me. “Here’s where you can reach me.”

“Where are you going?”

“You think Barrons won’t be coming after me? I just wonder what’s taken him this long. My uncles told me if he ever got wise to me, I should get out, fast. Besides, I told you what I came back to say, and they can use me at home.” He moved toward the door, opened it, then paused and looked back at me, golden eyes troubled. “Are you having sex with him, Mac?”

I gaped. “Barrons?”

He nodded.

“No!”

Christian sighed and folded his arms over his chest.

“What?” I snapped. “I’ve never slept with Barrons. Subject that to your little lie detector test. Not that I see how it’s any of your concern.”

“My uncles want to know exactly where you stand, Mac. A woman who’s having sex with a man is a compromised source of information, at best. At worst, she’s a traitor. That’s how it’s my concern.”

I thought of Alina, and wanted to protest that it wasn’t true, but what had she betrayed to her lover, believing them to be on the same side? “I’ve never had sex with Barrons,” I told him again. “Satisfied?”

His gaze was remote, a tiger assessing its prey. “Answer one more question, and I might be: Do you want to have sex with Barrons?”

I gave him a hard look and stormed from the room. It was such a stupid question, and so far out of line, that I refused to dignify it with a response.

Halfway down the hall, I drew up short.

Dad’s told me all kinds of wise-sounding things over the years. I haven’t understood a lot, but I filed it all away because Jack Lane doesn’t waste breath, and I figured one day some of it might make sense. You can’t change an unpleasant reality if you won’t acknowledge it, Mac. You can only control what you’re willing to face. Truth hurts. But lies can kill. We’d been having a talk about my grades again. I’d told him I didn’t care if I ever graduated. It wasn’t the truth. The truth was I didn’t think I was very smart, and I had to work twice as hard as everyone else to get passing grades, so I’d spent most of high school pretending not to care.

I turned slowly.

He was leaning in the doorway, arms folded, looking young and hot and everything a girl could want. He arched a dark brow. What a gorgeous guy. He was the one I should be thinking about having sex with.

“No,” I said clearly. “I don’t want to have sex with Jericho Barrons.”

“Lie,” Christian said.

I headed back to the bookstore, flashlights on, watching everyone and everything. My brain was too stuffed with thoughts to be able to sort them out. I walked, and watched, hoping my gut would piece things together into a plan of action, and notify me when it was done.

I was passing the Stag’s Head pub when two things occurred: the black ice of a Hunter dusted me, and Inspector Jayne squealed to a stop in a blue Renault, flung open the passenger door, and barked, “Get in!”

I glanced up. The Hunter hovered, great black wings churning ice in the night air. It terrified me in my special sidheseer place. But I’d seen and done a lot since my last encounter with one of them, and I wasn’t the same anymore. Before it could speak in my mind, I sent it a message of my own: You’ll choke on my spear if you make one move toward me.

It laughed. With a whuf-whuf of leathery, midnight sails, it rose into the twilight and vanished.

I got in the car.

“Slump,” Jayne fired at me.

Raising both eyebrows, I slumped.

He drove to a brightly lit back parking lot of a church—I could see the steeple from where I crouched—pulled in between cars, and turned off the lights and engine. I sat up. The parking lot sure was packed for a Thursday night. “Is it some kind of religious day?”

“Stay down,” he barked. “I won’t be seen with you.”

I withdrew to the floorboards again.

He stared straight ahead. “The churches’ve been packed for weeks. The crime hike is scaring people.” He was silent a moment. “So, how bad is it? Should I get my family out?”

“I would, if it were my family,” I said frankly.

“Where should I take them?”

I didn’t know what the rest of the world out there was like in terms of Unseelie, but the Sinsar Dubh was here, an evil centrifuge, distilling people to their darkest essences. “As far from Dublin as you can.”

He continued staring straight ahead in silence, until I began to fidget impatiently. I was getting a cramp in my leg. There was something else he wanted. I wished he’d hurry up and get to it before my foot went to sleep.

Finally, he said, “That night, that you. you know. I went back to the station and. saw the people that I work with.”

“You saw that some of the Garda are Unseelie, “ I said.

He nodded. “Now I can’t see them anymore but I know who they are. And I tell myself you did something to me, somehow, and it was all a hallucination.” He rubbed his face. “Then I see the reports coming in, and I watch what they do, or rather don’t do, like investigate a bloody damn thing, and I. ”

When he trailed off, I waited.

“I think they killed O’Duffy to shut him up, and tried to make it look like a human did it. Two more Garda have been killed. They’d begun asking a lot of questions, and. ” He trailed off again.

The silence lengthened. Abruptly, he looked straight at me. His face was red, his eyes bright and hard. “I’d like to have tea with you again, Ms. Lane.”

I stared. That was the last thing I’d expected. Had I created an addict? “Why?” I said warily. Was he craving it like I was? Could he sense the tiny jars of wriggling flesh in my purse, yet to be deposited on the upper floors of the store? I could. I’d been feeling the dark pull of it beneath my arm all afternoon.

“I swore to uphold the peace in this city. And I will. But I can’t this way. I’m a sitting duck,” he said bitterly. “You were right, I didn’t know what was out there, but now I do. And I don’t sleep at night anymore, and I’m angry all the time, and I’m useless, and it’s more than my job to fight it, it’s who I am. It’s who Patty was, too, and that’s why he died. His death should mean something.”

“It could end up meaning your death,” I said softly.

“I’ll take that chance.”

He didn’t even know my “tea” would give him superpowers. He just wanted to be able to see them again. I could hardly blame him. I’d created this problem by feeding it to him in the first place. How would I feel in his shoes? I knew the answer to that: After an initial period of denial, exactly the same. Jayne wasn’t the ostrich I’d pegged him as, after all.

“If you betray yourself, they’ll kill you,” I warned.

“They might kill me anyway, and I won’t even see them coming.”

“Some of them are pretty horrific. They can startle you into betraying yourself.”

He gave me a tight smile. “Lady, you should see the crime scenes I’ve been on lately.”

“I need to think about it.” Eating Unseelie had many repercussions. I didn’t want to be responsible for what the good inspector might become.

“You’re the one who opened my eyes, Ms. Lane. You owe me. You get one more heads-up on the house, but after the next crime, it’s no tea, no tips.”

He dropped me a few blocks from the bookstore.

The interior lights of Barrons Books and Baubles were at the closed-for-business level when I let myself in, which was enough to keep Shades away but little more.

I moved to the counter, dropped my flashlights, and stripped off my jacket. There were some papers on it that hadn’t been there earlier. I riffled through them. They were receipts for a backup generator, a state-of-the-art security system, and a proposal for installation. The bill was astronomical. An appointment was noted for the work to begin the first week of November.

I didn’t hear him behind me. I felt him. Electric. Wild. One foot in the swamp. Never going to crawl all the way out. And I wanted to have sex with whatever he was. Where was I supposed to put that in my head? I wadded the thought up, stuffed it in my padlocked box, and tested the chains. I was going to need a few more.

I turned and we had one of those wordless conversations that were our specialty.

Nice apology, I said, but not enough.

It’s not an apology. I don’t owe you one.

Our wordless conversation ended there. We’re getting worse at them. Distrust clouds my eyes, and I can’t see past it.

“Do you have news for me, today, Ms. Lane?” said Barrons.

I thrust my hands in my pockets. “No run-ins with the Book.”

“No calls from Jayne?”

I shook my head. He could Voice me on that one, and I’d still be able to say no. He’d asked the wrong question. I took perverse pleasure in that.

“Any contact with V’lane?”

“Aren’t you Question Boy tonight? Why don’t you try judging my actions?” I said. “Speaking of which, I’ve decided I see the wisdom of your advice.”

“Has Hell frozen over?” he said dryly.

“Funny. I’m not going to ask you questions tonight, Barrons. I’m going to ask you for three actions.” It seemed my gut had come up with a plan. I hoped my instincts were sound.

Interest uncoiled like a dark snake in his eyes. “Go on.”

I reached beneath my jacket, removed my spear from the shoulder harness, and held it out to him. “Here. Take this.”

Here it was, the moment of truth. So simple. So telling.

Dark eyes narrowed; the snake in them moved. “Who have you been talking to, Ms. Lane?” he said softly.

“No one.”

“Tell me what you’re after or I won’t play your little game.”

There was no room for negotiation in his voice. I shrugged. It was past time to force this confrontation. “I’ve heard that an Unseelie can’t touch a Seelie Hallow.”

“So, now I’m not eating them,” he said, reminding me of a prior accusation I’d made against him, “I am them? You’ve quite the imagination, Ms. Lane.”

“Just take it,” I said irritably. The suspense was killing me. I knew he wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Barrons was a Gripper. That was all there was to it.

Long, strong, elegant fingers closed around steel. He took the spear.

Astonished, certain his features would be contorted in pain, my gaze flew to his face.

There wasn’t a flicker of a lash, not the smallest shift of a muscle. Nothing. If anything, he looked bored.

He offered it back. “Satisfied?”

I refused to take it. Maybe if he kept holding it, something would happen.

He waited.

I waited.

Eventually I started to feel stupid and took the spear back. He thrust his hands in his pockets and regarded me coolly. I was deflated. Barrons wasn’t Unseelie. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how completely I’d made my case against him, and convicted him. It explained everything: his longevity, his strength, his knowledge of the Fae, why the Shades left him alone, why V’lane feared him, why the Lord Master had walked away—all of it made sense, if Barrons was an Unseelie. But he wasn’t. I’d just proved it. And now I had to go back to square one and start trying to figure out what he was all over again.

“Try not to look so disappointed. One might almost think you wanted me to be Unseelie, Ms. Lane. What’s your second request?”

I wanted him to be something. I wanted to be able to peg him and put him somewhere and quit being torn in half, one moment believing him my avenging angel, the next, certain he was the devil himself. I couldn’t live like this, not knowing who to trust. Off-kilter, I blurted, “I want you to give me the D’Jai Orb.”

“Why?”

“So I can give it to the sidhe-seers.”

“You trust them?”

“In this,” I qualified. “I believe they’ll use it for the greater good.”

“I despise that phrase, Ms. Lane. Atrocities have been committed in its name. What is the greater good but tyranny’s chameleon? For eons it has changed skins to sate the current ruler’s hunger for political and spiritual dominion.”

He had a point there. But in this case, the greater good was my whole world, as I knew it, and I wanted to keep knowing it. I clarified. “They think they can use it to reinforce the walls on Halloween.”

“Very well. I will bring it to you tomorrow night.”

I almost fell over. “Really?” Two surprises: Barrons wasn’t Unseelie, and he’d just agreed to hand over a priceless relic, asking nothing in return. Why was he being so nice? Was this his apology for last night?

“What’s the third thing you want, Ms. Lane?”

This one was going to be a little trickier. “What do you know about the walls between realms?”

“I know they’re paper-thin at the moment. I know some of the smaller, less powerful Fae have been slipping through the cracks, without the Lord Master’s help. The prison continues to contain the most powerful.”

His comment sidetracked me. “You know, that just doesn’t make sense. Why are the less powerful ones able to escape? I’d think it would be the other way around.”

“The walls were created from a formidable magic,” he said, “which no Fae has been able to match since. At great cost to herself, the queen wove living strands of the Song of Making into the walls of the prison, which slams the magic of the Unseelie back at them. The stronger the Unseelie, the stronger the wall; by attempting to break free, they actually join forces with their gaoler.”

Cool trick. “So, do you know why the walls are so thin?”

“Aren’t you Question Girl tonight?”

I gave him a look.

He smiled faintly. “Why are the walls so thin?”

“Because when the Compact was struck, humans were appointed to help maintain them. But those responsible for keeping them up with their rituals—the most important of which take place every Halloween—have been attacked by dark magic each time they’ve performed it over the past few years. They’ve exhausted the limits of their knowledge and power. If it happens again this year—and there’s every reason to expect it will—the walls will come down completely. Even the prison walls.”

“What does this have to do with me, Ms. Lane?”

“If the walls come down completely, all the Unseelie will get out, Barrons.”

“So?”

“You told me once you didn’t want that to happen.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s my problem.” He was looking bored again.

“This is the third action I want. I want you to make it your problem.”

“In what manner?”

“They think you can help them. Can you?”

He considered it. “Possibly.”

I wanted to strangle him. “Will you?”

“Motivate me.”

“If nothing else, it’ll keep me safer. A safer OOP detector is a happier one. Happier is more productive. ”

“You haven’t detected anything of use to me for several weeks.”

“You haven’t asked me to,” I said defensively.

“There’s an OOP you know I want, yet you withheld information from me about it.”

“You have that information now. What’s the problem?” Had I just sounded like V’lane?

“The problem is I still don’t have the OOP, Ms. Lane.”

“I’m working on it. I’ll be able to work faster, the safer I am. If the walls come down, every Unseelie out there will be hunting it, getting in my way. You told me once that you didn’t want more of them in your city. Was that a lie?”

“Point made. What do you want from me?”

“I want you to join them on Halloween and help them perform the ritual. And I want you to promise not to harm them.” Because of the delicate way I’d shaped our conversation, it sounded as if I was asking him to help the sidhe-seers.

He measured me a long moment, then said, “I’ll swap you an action for an action. Get me within sight distance of the Sinsar Dubh, and I’ll help your little friends.”

“Help my little friends,” I countered, “and I’ll get you within sight distance of the Sinsar Dubh.”

“I have your word?”

“You trust my word?”

“You’re an idealistic fool. Of course.”

“You have my word.” I’d deal with the problem of the promise I’d just made in the future. Right now, I needed to keep the walls up, and make sure the human race had a future.

“Then we have a deal. But your action doesn’t hinge on the outcome of mine. I will do my best to help them with their ritual, but I can’t assure you success. I know nothing of their abilities, and it’s magic I’ve not done before.”

I nodded. “I accept your condition. You’ll help them, and not harm them?”

“You trust my word?” he mocked.

“Of course not. You’re a cynical bastard. But they seem willing to.”

The faint smile was back. “I’ll help them and not harm them. Take a note, Ms. Lane: You undermine yourself as a negotiator when you permit your opponent to see emotion. Never betray emotion to an enemy.”

“Is that what you are?”

“It’s how you treat me. Be consistent and follow through on the finer nuances.” He turned away and moved toward the fire. “Who am I to assist and protect? The old witch herself?”

“It’s not the sidhe-seers.”

He stopped and went very still. “Who is it?”

“The MacKeltars.”

He was silent a long moment. Then he began to laugh, softly. “Well played, Ms. Lane.”

“I had a good teacher.”

“The best. Hop on one foot, Ms. Lane.” Voice lessons had begun.

I had a feeling they might be brutal tonight.

Chapter 12

Even Rowena will have to believe in you, then.’ Isn’t that what you said, Kat? I did what you asked. I got the Orb. And now you’re telling me the old woman still won’t let me into her libraries?” I was so furious I nearly slammed down the phone.

“She said you’ll be welcome once the Orb has served its purpose, and the walls are standing strong.” Kat had been apologizing for several minutes, but it had done nothing to defuse my temper.

“That’s bogus and you know it! What if the walls come down anyway? I can’t help it if whatever she plans to do doesn’t work! I kept my part of the bargain.”

On the other end of the phone line, Kat sighed. “She said I had no right to speak for her in the first place. And I’m sorry I did, Mac. I didn’t intend to mislead you, please believe that.”

“What else did she say?” I asked tightly.

She hesitated. “That we were to cease all contact with you until after Samhain, and if we didn’t, then we no longer had a home at the abbey. That we could live in Dublin with you. She means it, too.”

I had a momentary flash of Barrons Books and Baubles overrun by young sidhe-seers, and the look on the intensely private owner’s face. A fleeting smile touched my lips before anger erased it. “And what did you say?”

“I said I didn’t think we should have to choose, or shut out a sister sidhe-seer when times were as dangerous as these, and I didn’t understand why she despised you so much. And she said she can see moral decay as clearly as she can see the Fae, and you’re. ”

“I’m what?”

Kat cleared her throat. “Rotten to the core.”

Unbelievable! My rate of moral decay was about as high as my tooth decay—I didn’t have a single cavity. The woman hated me. She’d disliked me since the first, and my visit with V’lane had only made things worse.

I eyed the Orb, resting on the counter in a box padded with bubble-wrap. I was glad I’d refused to turn it over until I’d secured an invitation to return to the abbey from the Grand Mistress herself. “Then she can’t have the Orb,” I said flatly.

“She said that was what you’d say, and that it proved her point. She said you’d choose your pride over saving our world from the Fae,” said Kat.

What a clever, manipulative old bat! She’d had decades to perfect her politics. Until a few months ago the only politics I’d ever worried about were the two waitresses who always pretended they’d had terrible nights so they wouldn’t have to tip me out, as if my flair for swift, exceptional drink-making had played no part in their financial success.

“I told her she was wrong. That you care about us, and about the world. She’s being unfair, Mac. We know that. But we. well, we still need the Orb. We may not be able to get you inside the abbey, but we’ll. uh. ” her voice dropped to a near-whisper, “we’ll help you as much as we can. Dani said she thinks she can get more pages from the book. And we might be able to slip a few others out, if you tell us what you’re looking for.”

My hand curled and uncurled. The spear felt heavy in my harness. “I need to know everything there is to know about the Sinsar Dubh. How you guys got it in the first place, how you were keeping it contained and where. I want to know every rumor, legend, and myth that has ever been told about it.”

“Those books are in the forbidden libraries. Only the Haven has access!”

“Then you’ll have to figure out how to break in.”

“Why don’t you ask, er. you know. him. to sift you in?” Kat said.

“I don’t want to involve V’lane in this.” I’d considered that already, and the mere thought of him in the same room with all those books about his race made me cringe. Arrogance alone might make him destroy them. Humans have no right to know our ways, he would sneer.

“You don’t trust him?”

His name was bittersweet, invasive on my tongue. “He’s Fae, Kat! He’s the ultimate in self-serving. We may be after the same goal of keeping the walls up, but to him humans are just a means to an end. Besides, the entire abbey would know we were there, and I’d be looking for a needle in a haystack, without enough time and seven hundred sidhe-seers closing in.” It was a bad idea, all the way around. “Do you know who the members of the Haven are, and if any of them might be persuaded to help?”

“I doubt it. Rowena selects them, for their loyalty to her. It didn’t used to be that way. I heard we used to vote on the council members back in the day, but after we lost the Book, things changed.”

Talk about tyranny. I really wanted to know what had happened twenty years ago, how the Book had been lost, who was to blame. “I also need to know about the Haven’s prophecy, and the five.”

“I’ve never heard of either,” Kat said.

“See if you can dig up something. And anything about the four translation stones, too.” I had a lot of questions I needed answered. Not to mention all the ones about where I’d come from. But for now, those were going to have to wait.

“Will do. What about the Orb, Mac?”

I stared broodingly at it. If I toughed it out until Halloween, and refused to let Rowena have it, might she relent and share information with me? I doubted it, but even if she did, what would that accomplish? What good would information serve at such a late hour? As the old woman had said, time was of the essence. I needed information now.

If the walls crashed, would the LM send every Unseelie in existence out hunting for the Book? Would the streets of Dublin run so thick with dark Fae that no sidhe-seer would dare enter them, not even me?

We couldn’t let things get that far. The walls had to stay up.

Maybe having the Orb in advance would help Rowena perfect the ritual she planned to perform. Between the sidheseers, Barrons, and the MacKeltars, surely they could get the ritual right one more time, and buy me until next Halloween—an entire year—to figure things out. I swallowed my pride. Again. I was really beginning to resent the greater good.

Besides, there was an abbey full of sidhe-seers as worried as I was. I wanted them to know I was firmly on their side. Just not their leader’s. ”I’ll drop it by PHI sometime tomorrow, Kat,” I said finally. “But you guys owe me. A big one. Several big ones. And tell Rowena it’s a darn good thing one of us is grown-up enough to do the right thing.”

_____

At seven o’clock Saturday evening, I was sitting in the front conversation area of the bookstore, legs crossed, foot kicking air impatiently, waiting for Barrons.

Your problem, Ms. Lane, he’d said last night, after he’d handed me the Orb, is you’re still being passive. Sitting around, waiting for phone calls. Although Jayne wasn’t an entirely bad idea—

Jayne was a brilliant idea and you know it.

— time is not on our side. You must be aggressive. You promised me a sighting. I want it.

What do you suggest?

Tomorrow we hunt. Sleep late. I’ll be keeping you up all night.

I’d shrugged off a thrill of unwanted sexual awareness at his words. No doubt Barrons could keep a woman up all night. Why night? Why not hunt the Book during the day? Where did he go? What did he do?

I’ve been tracking crimes in the dailies. Night is its time. Has Jayne ever called you during the day?

There was that. He hadn’t.

Seven o’clock, Ms. Lane. You’ll have an hour of Voice first.

I stood up, stretched, caught sight of my reflection in the window, and admired the picture. My new jeans were French and fit like a dream, my sweater was pink and soft, my boots were Dolce & Gabbana, my jacket was Andrew Marc, made of the supplest black leather I’d ever seen, and I’d woven a brilliant pink, yellow, and purple silk scarf through my hair and taken my time with my makeup. I looked and felt great.

Barrons was still apologizing, or maybe just trying to get on my good side. This morning when I’d awakened there’d been four shopping totes and two hanging garment bags outside my bedroom door, full of new clothes. It wigged me out that Barrons had shopped for me. Especially considering what was in some of those bags. The man had exceptional taste and an eye for detail. Everything fit. That wigged me out, too.

The bell over the door tinkled and Barrons stepped in. He was night in an Armani suit, silver-toed boots, black shirt, and dark eyes.

“Not bothering with the mirror tonight?” I said breezily, “Or have you forgotten I know you walk around in it?”

“Kneel before me, Ms. Lane.”

His words surrounded me, infiltrated me, drove me to my knees, like a human before a Fae.

“Doesn’t that just burn?” He gave me one of his scarier smiles. “Kneeling to me must offend every ounce of your perky little being.”

I’d show him perky. Jaw clenched, I tried to rise. I tried to scratch my nose. I couldn’t even do that. I was as locked in place as a person in a body-encompassing straitjacket. “Why does your command lock down my whole body?” At least my vocal cords were working.

“It doesn’t. My order only holds you on your knees. The rest of you is free to move. You’re overmuscling yourself, struggling so hard you’re locking up. When someone uses Voice on you, they’ve got you only to the letter of their command. Remember that. Close your eyes, Ms. Lane.”

It wasn’t an order, but I did it anyway. I managed to wiggle my fingers then my entire hands. I poked around inside my head. The sidhe-seer place burned hot but everything else was dark. The sidhe-seer place didn’t have a thing to do with resisting Voice.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

What an odd question. Didn’t he know everything about me? I’d like to be able to Voice him on that one. “I’m Mac. MacKayla Lane.” Perhaps O’Connor in my blood, but Lane in my heart.

“Strip away the name. Who are you?”

I shrugged. Ha—now only my knees were rooted. The rest of me was moving freely. I swung my arms, to make sure he knew it. “A girl. Twenty-two. A sidhe-seer. A daught—”

“Labels,” he said impatiently. “Who the fuck are you, Ms. Lane?”

I opened my eyes. “I don’t get it.”

“Close your eyes.” Voice ricocheted from wall to wall. My eyes closed as if they were his. “You exist only inside yourself,” he said. “No one sees you. You see no one. You are without censure, beyond judgment. There is no law. No right or wrong. How did you feel when you saw your sister’s body?”

Rage filled me. Rage at what had been done to her. Rage at him for bringing it up. The thought that no one could see or judge me was liberating. I swelled with grief and anger.

“Now tell me who you are.”

“Vengeance,” I said in a cold voice.

“Better, Ms. Lane. But try again. And when you speak to me, bow your head.”

I was bleeding by the time the night’s lesson was over. In several places. They were self-inflicted wounds.

I understood why he’d done it. This was tough, well, not love, but tough life lessons. I had to learn this. And I would do whatever it took.

When he’d made me pick up the knife and cut myself, I’d seen a glimmer of light in the darkness inside my skull. I’d still cut myself, but something deep inside me had stirred. It was there, somewhere, if I could just dig deep enough to get to it. I wondered who I’d be by the time I got there. Was this why Barrons was the way he was? Who had put Jericho Barrons on his knees? I could hardly even picture it.

“Did you hurt yourself when you learned?” I asked.

“Many times.”

“How long did it take you?”

He smiled faintly. “Years.”

“That’s unacceptable. I need this now. At least to be able to resist, or I’ll never be able to get near the LM.”

I thought he was going to argue with me about getting near the LM but he said only, “That’s why I’m skipping years of training, taking you far ahead into difficult territory. Tonight was only the beginning of. pain. If you’re not okay with where it’s going, tell me here, and now. I won’t ask again. I’ll push you as far as I think you can go.”

I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I’m okay with it.”

“Go bandage yourself, Ms. Lane. Use this.” He withdrew a small bottle of ointment from his pocket.

“What is it?”

“It will speed the healing.”

When I returned, he held open the door, and ushered me into the night.

I glanced instinctively to the right. My gargantuan Shade was a dark cloud on top of the building next door. It loomed menacingly, and began to slither down the brick façade.

Barrons stepped out behind me.

The Shade retreated. “What are you?” I said irritably.

“In the Serengeti, Ms. Lane, I would be the cheetah. I’m stronger, smarter, faster, and hungrier than everything else out there. And I don’t apologize to the gazelle when I take it down.”

Sighing, I moved for the bike but he turned left. “We’re walking?” I was surprised.

“For a few hours. I want a look at the city, then we’ll come back for a car.”

Unseelie were everywhere in the damp, cobbled streets. The ever-increasing crime rate didn’t seem to be keeping anyone at home. The juxtaposition of the two worlds—carefree humans, some half drunk, others only beginning their night on the town, laughing and talking, mingling with the predatory, grimly focused Unseelie draped loosely in glamour that I now had to work to see, as opposed to having to work to see past—painted the night with the slick menace of a traveling carnival.

There were Rhino-boys, and those creepy-looking street vendors with the huge eyes and no mouths; there were winged things, and things that scampered. Some were in high glamour, walking down the sidewalk with human companions. Others perched on buildings, birds of prey, selecting a kill. I half-expected one of them to recognize us, sound the alarm, and descend in force.

“They’re self-serving,” Barrons said, when I mentioned it. “They obey a master as long as he’s in their face. But an Unseelie’s true master is its hunger, and this city is a banquet. They’ve been trapped for hundreds of thousands of years. There is little left of them but hunger at this point. It’s consuming to feel so empty, so. hollow. It blinds them to all else.”

I looked at him sharply. He’d sounded strange there at the end, almost as if he felt. sorry for them.

“When did you last kill one of them, Ms. Lane?” he said suddenly.

“Yesterday.”

“Was there trouble you didn’t tell me about?”

“No. I just cut him up for parts.”

“What?” Barrons stopped and looked down at me.

I shrugged. “A woman died the other day. She wouldn’t have, if I’d had it handy. I won’t make that mistake again.” I was secure in my conviction that I was doing the right thing.

“The woman in my store?” When I nodded, he said, “And just where are you keeping these. parts, Ms. Lane?”

“In my purse.”

“Do you think that’s wise?”

”I think I just said I did,” I said coolly.

“You do realize if you eat it again, you won’t be able to sense the one thing we need?”

“I’ve got it under control, Barrons.” I hadn’t even looked at the jars since lunch.

“One never has an addiction under control. If you eat it again, I will personally kick your ass. Got it?”

“If I eat it again, you can try to personally kick my ass.” Being able to hold my own with Barrons had been one of the many upsides to eating Unseelie. I often craved it for that reason alone.

“I’ll wait till it wears off,” he growled.

“What fun would that be?” I would never forget the night we’d fought, the unexpected lust.

We looked at each other and for a moment those clouds of distrust lifted and I saw his thoughts in his eyes.

You were something to see, he didn’t say.

You were something to feel, I didn’t reply.

His gaze shuttered.

I looked away.

We walked briskly down the sidewalk. Abruptly, he grabbed my arm and detoured me down a side alley. Two dark Fae were doing something near a trash can. I really didn’t want to know what.

“Let’s see how good your fighting skills are, Ms. Lane, when you’re not pumped up on Unseelie steroids.”

But before I could lose myself in the bliss of killing a few of the bastards, my cell phone rang.

It was Inspector Jayne.

Chapter 13

The next few days settled into a strange routine, and sped by with me mostly in a daze.

Barrons came each night and taught me Voice. And each night, unable to find my backbone, I came away with fresh wounds.

Then we hunted the Sinsar Dubh.

Or rather he hunted the Sinsar Dubh, and I continued taking great pains to avoid it, as I had the other night when Jayne had called to tip me off, steering Barrons in the opposite direction, keeping us far enough away that I wouldn’t betray subtle signs of its proximity, like flailing in a puddle, clutching my head, or foaming at the mouth.

At some point, each day, V’lane appeared to question me about the fruits of my labors. I made sure I had no fruits. He began bringing me gifts. One day he brought me chocolate that wouldn’t make me gain weight, no matter how much I ate. Another day he brought me dusky, spicy-smelling flowers from Faery that would bloom immortally. After he left, I threw them both out. Chocolate should make you fat and flowers should die. Those were things you could count on. I needed things to count on.

When I wasn’t busy being yo-yoed back and forth between the two of them, I tended the bookstore, badgered Kat and Dani for information, and continued pushing my way through stacks of books about the Fae, having exhausted my Internet search for anything of use. There was so much role-playing and fanfic online that it was impossible to distinguish fact from fiction.

I was getting nowhere, a car spinning its tires in the mud, all too aware that, even if I got out of the mud, I didn’t know where to go.

The tension and indecision in my life became unbearable. I was edgy, and snapped at everyone, including my dad when he called to tell me Mom finally seemed to be getting better. They were decreasing her Valium, and increasing her antidepressants. She’d cooked breakfast Sunday: cheese grits (how I missed those!), pork chops, and eggs. She’d even made fresh yeast bread. I pondered that breakfast after I hung up. Tried to place it somewhere in my life, while I munched a power bar.

Home was a gazillion miles away.

Halloween was ten days away.

Soon, the sidhe-seers would be doing their thing at the abbey. Barrons and the MacKeltars would be doing theirs, in Scotland. I hadn’t yet decided where I would be. Barrons had asked me to accompany him, no doubt to OOP-detect the MacKeltar estate while we were there. I was considering crashing the abbey. I wanted to be somewhere, doing my part, whatever that might be, even if my part was only keeping Barrons and the MacKeltars from killing each other. Christian had phoned yesterday to tell me things were moving ahead, but if they survived the ritual, they might not survive each other.

Come All Hallows’ Eve, the walls would stand or fall.

Weirdly, I’d begun looking forward to Halloween, because at least my waiting would be over. Limbo would end. I’d know what I had to deal with. I’d know exactly how good or bad things were going to be. I’d know if I could be relieved—a year would buy me plenty of time to figure out what to do—or if I should be terrified. Either way, I’d have concretes.

I had no concretes where the Book (beast!) was concerned. I didn’t know how to get it or what to do with it.

I had no concretes where Barrons or V’lane were concerned. I didn’t trust either of them.

Making matters worse, each time I glanced out the window, or stepped outside, I had to battle the intense biological imperative to slay monsters. Or eat them.

Rhino-boys were everywhere, looking absurd in city employee uniforms, stumpy arms and legs popping buttons and straining seams. I felt a constant mild nausea from their presence. Reluctant to turn my “volume” down again, I’d begun taking Pepcid with my morning coffee. I’d even tried switching to decaf to calm my nerves. That had been a monumental mistake. I needed my caffeine. I made it one day.

Something had to give. I was a jumpy, broody, temperamental mess.

I can’t tell you how many times over those endless, angsty days, I decided to trust Barrons.

Then tossed him out in favor of V’lane.

I made my cases painstakingly, with lengthy lists of pros and cons neatly tabulated in my journal in three columns, tallying their “good” actions, “bad” actions, and those of “indeterminate nature.” The latter was by far the longest column for them both.

One day I even persuaded myself to throw in the towel, give Rowena my spear, and join up with the sidhe-seers. There was not only safety in numbers; I could pass off the crushing responsibility of decision-making, and hand it over to the Grand Mistress. If the world subsequently went to hell in a handbasket, at least I was off the hook. That was the Mac I knew. I never wanted to be in charge. I wanted to be taken care of. How had I gotten myself stuck in this mess where I was supposed to take care of everyone else?

Fortunately by the time Rowena returned my call, I was even grumpier, she was her usual pissy self, we’d swiftly gotten into one of our standoffs, and I’d come to my senses, pretending I’d only called to make sure she’d gotten the Orb, since she hadn’t been there when I’d dropped it by. If you called expecting thanks, you’ll be getting none from me, she’d snapped and hung up, reminding me of all the many reasons I couldn’t stand her.

Each day, I made one more slash mark on my calendar, and October 31 marched closer.

I remembered past Halloweens, the friends, the parties, the fun, and wondered what it would bring this year.

Tricks? Or treats?

Oh, yeah, something had to give.

At noon on Wednesday, I was at a spa in St. Maarten, getting a massage—V’lane’s latest gift from whatever Human Dating Manual he was reading. Was it any wonder I was rapidly losing any sense of reality? Monsters and mayhem and massages, oh my.

When it was over, I dressed and was escorted to a private dining room in the hotel where V’lane met me on a terrace overlooking the ocean. He pulled back a chair and seated me before a table drenched with linen, fine crystal, and finer food. Mac 1.0 would have felt many things: flattered, flirtatious, in her element. I felt hungry. I picked up a knife, stabbed a strawberry, and ate it off the blade. I might have used my spear but, as usual, it vanished the moment he appeared. I felt more naked without it fully clothed than I did nude, and if given the choice, I would have walked through the resort bare as I’d been born, if it had meant keeping the spear.

For the past few days, V’lane had been in his most humanlike form when we’d met, heavily muted. He, too, was trying to get on my good side. Ironically, the more he and Barrons tried, the less I trusted them both. Heads turned when the Fae Prince moved through the public places he took me. Even turned off, women stared after him with voracious eyes.

I dug into the spread with gusto, piling a plate with strawberries, pineapple, lobster, crab cakes, crackers, and caviar. I’d been living on popcorn and ramen noodles too long. “What exactly is the Sinsar Dubh, V’lane, and why does everyone want it?”

V’lane’s eyelids lowered halfway and he looked to the side. It was a human look, secretive, contemplative, as if he were sorting through a wealth of information, trying to decide how much, if anything, to share. “What do you know of it, MacKayla?”

“Virtually nothing,” I said. “What’s. in it. that everyone wants so badly?” It was hard to think of it as a book, with an “it” for information to be “in” when scored into my mind was the dark shape of the Beast, not pages at all.

“What did it look like when you saw it? A book? Ancient and heavy, bound by bands and locks?”

I nodded.

“Have you seen the creature it becomes?” He absorbed my face. “I see you have. You neglected to tell me that.”

“I didn’t think it was important.”

“Everything that concerns the Sinsar Dubh is important. What legends do humans tell of our origins, sidhe-seer?”

It was a sure sign he was displeased when he called me by title, not name. I told him what little I’d learned from the Irish Book of Invasions.

He shook his head. “Recent history, grossly inaccurate. We have been here far longer than that. Do you know the history of the Unseelie King?”

“No.”

“Then you do not know who he is.”

I shook my head. “Should I?”

“The Unseelie King was once the King of the Light, the Queen’s consort, and Seelie. In the beginning, there was only Seelie.”

He had me. I was riveted. This was true Fae lore straight from a Fae. Stuff I doubted I’d ever find in the sidhe-seer archives. “What happened?”

“What happened in your Eden?” he mocked. “What always happens? Someone wanted more.”

“The king?” I guessed.

“Ours is a matriarchal line. The king held vestigial power. Only the queen knew the Song of Making.”

“What’s the Song of Making?” I’d heard of it from Barrons and seen references in the books I’d been reading but still didn’t know what it was.

“Impossible to explain to your stunted consciousness.”

“Try,” I said dryly.

He gave me one of his affected shrugs. “It is life. It is that from which we come. It is the ultimate power to create, to destroy, depending on how it is used. It sings into existence. change.”

“As opposed to stasis.”

“Exactly,” he said. Then his eyes narrowed, “You mock me.”

“Only a little. Do Fae really only understand those two things?”

A sudden, icy breeze buffeted the terrace and tiny crystals of frost settled over my plate. “Our perception is not limited, sidhe-seer. It is so vast it defies your paltry language, as does my name. It is because we comprehend so much that we must distill things to their essential natures. Do not presume to think you understand our nature. Though we have long consorted with your race, we have never shown our true face. It is impossible for you to truly behold us. If I showed you—” He stopped abruptly.

“Showed me what, V’lane?” I said softly. I popped a bite of cracker spread with lightly frosted caviar in my mouth. I’d never had it before. I wouldn’t be having it again. Rhino-boy was more palatable. I hastily downed a strawberry chased by a gulp of champagne.

He offered me a smile. He’d been practicing. It was smoother, less alien. The day heated up again; the frost melted. “Irrelevant. You wanted to know of our origins.”

I wanted to know about the Book. But I was eager to hear anything else he was willing to share. “How do you know the history of your race, if you’ve drunk from the cauldron?”

“We have stores of knowledge. After drinking, most seek immediately to become reacquainted with who and what we are.”

“You forget to remember.” How strange. And how awful, I thought, to be so paranoid, to have lived so long madness settled in. To be reborn but never truly wiped clean. To come back fearful, in a place of such strange and treacherous politics. “The Seelie King wanted more,” I prompted.

“Yes. He envied the queen the Song of Making, and petitioned her to teach it to him. He had become enamored of a mortal of whom he did not wish to be deprived until he had sated his desire for her. It did not appear to be waning. She was. different to him. I would merely have substituted another. He asked the queen to make her Fae.”

“Can the queen do that? Make someone Fae?”

“I do not know. The king believed she could. The queen refused, and the king tried to steal from her that which he sought. When she caught him, she punished him. Then she waited for his obsession to pale. It did not. He began. experimenting on lesser Fae, in hopes of teaching himself the Song.”

“What kind of experiments?”

“A human might grasp it as an advanced form of genetic mutation or cloning, without DNA or physical matter to mutate. He tried to create life, MacKayla. And he succeeded. But without the Song of Making.”

“But I thought the Song is life. How could he create life without the Song?”

“Precisely. It was imperfect. Flawed.” He paused. “Yet it lived, and was immortal.”

I got it, and gasped. “He made the Unseelie!”

“Yes. The dark ones are the Seelie King’s children. For thousands of years he experimented, concealing his work from the queen. Their numbers grew, as did their hungers.”

“But his mortal woman must have been long dead by then. What was the point?”

“She was alive, kept so in a cage of his making. But trapped, she withered, so for her, he created the Sifting Silvers and gave her worlds to explore. Although time passes outside them, within them it does not. One might spend a thousand centuries in there, and walk out not one hour older.”

“I thought the mirrors were used for travel between realms.”

“They are used for that, too. The Silvers are. complicated things, doubly so, since they were cursed. When the queen felt the power of the Silvers spring into existence, she called the king to court and demanded he destroy them. Creation was her right, not his. In truth, she was disturbed to discover he had grown so powerful. He claimed to have made them as a gift for her, which pleased her, as he had paid her no tribute in eons.

“But the king gave her only a portion of the Silvers. The other he kept hidden from her, for his concubine, where he planted lush gardens and built a great, shining white house upon a hill with hundreds of windows, and thousands of rooms. When his mortal grew restless, he made her the amulet, so she could shape reality with her will. When she complained of loneliness he made her the box.”

“What does it do?”

“I do not know. It has not been seen since.”

“Are you saying he also made her the Book? But why?”

“Patience, human. I tell this tale. The king’s experiments continued. Eons passed. He created more. aberrations. Over time, of which we have a fortunate abundance, they began to improve until some of them were as beautiful as any Seelie. The Unseelie royalty were born, the princes and princesses. Dark counterparts to the Light. And like their counterparts, they wanted what was rightfully theirs: power, freedom to come and go, dominion over lesser beings. The king refused. Secrecy was a necessary part of his plan.”

“But someone went to the queen,” I guessed. “One of the Unseelie.”

“Yes. When she learned of his treachery, she tried to strip him of his power but he had grown too strong, and learned too much. Not the Song, but another melody. A darker one. They battled fiercely, sending their armies against each other. Thousands of Fae died. In that age, we still had many weapons, not merely the few that remain. Faery withered and blackened; the skies ran with the lifeblood of our kind, the planet itself upon which we lived wept to see our shame, and cracked from end to end. And still they fought until he took up the sword and she took up the spear and the king killed the Faery Queen.”

I inhaled sharply. “The queen is dead?”

“And the Song died with her. She was slain before she was able to name her successor and pass on her essence. When she died, the king and all the Unseelie vanished. Before dying, she had managed to complete the walls of the prison, and with her last breath uttered the spell to contain them. Those Unseelie that eluded the spell’s radius were hunted by the Seelie, and killed.”

“So, where does the Book come into all this?”

“The Book was never meant to be what it was. It was created in an act of atonement.”

“Atonement?” I echoed. “You mean for killing the queen?”

“No. The king’s atonement was to his concubine. She slipped from the Silvers and took her own life. She hated what the king had become so much that she left him the only way she could.”

I shivered, chilled by the dark tale.

“They say the king went mad and when his madness finally abated, he beheld the dark kingdom he had created with horror. In her name, he vowed to change, to become the leader of his race. But he knew too much. Knowledge is power. Immense knowledge is immense power. So long as he had it, his race would never trust him. Aware they would not let him near the Cauldron of Forgetting, and even if they did, they would destroy him the second he drank from it, he created a mystical book into which to pour all his dark knowledge. Freed of it, he would banish it to another realm where it could never be found and used for harm. He would return to his people, their Seelie King, beg their forgiveness, and lead them into a new age. The Fae would become patriarchal. The Unseelie, of course, would be left to rot in their prison.”

“So that’s what the Book is,” I exclaimed, “part of the dark king himself! The worst part.”

“Over the eons it changed, as Fae things do, and became a living thing, far different from what it was when the king created it.”

“Why didn’t the king destroy it?”

“He had made. how do you say it?. his doppelgänger. It was his equal and he could not defeat it. He feared one day it might defeat him. He cast it out, and for much time it was lost.”

I wondered how it had come to be in the sidhe-seers’ care. I didn’t ask, because if V’lane didn’t know it had been there, I didn’t want to be the one to tell him. He despised Rowena, and might decide to punish her, and other sidhe-seers could suffer in the process. “Why does the queen want it? Wait a minute, if the queen is dead, who is Aoibheal?”

“One of many who came after, and tried to lead our race. She wants it because it is believed that, somewhere in all its darkness, the Book contains the key to the true Song of Making that has been lost to my race for seven hundred thousand years. The king was close, very close. And only with living strands of that Song can the Unseelie be reimprisoned.”

“And Darroc? Why does he want it?”

“He thinks foolishly to possess its power.”

“Barrons?”

“The same.”

“Am I supposed to believe you’re different? That you would blithely hand all that power to the queen, with no thought for yourself?” Sarcasm laced my words. V’lane and self-serving were synonyms.

“You forget something, MacKayla. I am Seelie. I cannot touch the Book. But she can. The queen and king are the only two of our race that can touch all the Hallows, Seelie and Unseelie. You must obtain it; summon me, and I will escort you to her. We alone have any hope of rebuilding the walls should they come down. Not the old woman, nor Darroc, nor Barrons. You must place your trust, as I have, in the queen.”

_____

It was dark when I returned, massaged, manicured, pedicured, and waxed. There were a dozen long-stemmed red roses wrapped in tissue paper waiting for me, propped in the alcoved entrance to the bookstore. I bent to pick them up, then stood in the lighted cubby, fumbling with the card.

Help me find it, and I will give you your sister back. Refuse and I will take what you prize most.

Well, well, all my suitors were calling. There was a disposable cell phone tucked into the leaves with a text message waiting: Yes or no?The reply number was zeroed out; I could text him back, but I couldn’t call him.

“V’lane?” came Barrons’ voice from behind me.

I shook my head, wondering what “I prized most” was, afraid to contemplate it.

I felt the electricity of his body behind me as he reached around me and took the card from my hand. He didn’t move away, and I battled the urge to lean back into him, seeking the comfort of his strength. Would he wrap his arms around me? Make me feel safe, if only for a moment, and if only a delusion?

“Ah, the old ‘what you prize most’ threat,” he murmured.

I turned around slowly, and looked up at him. He stiffened and sucked in a shallow breath. After a moment, he touched my cheek.

“Such naked pain,” he whispered.

I turned my face into his palm and closed my eyes. His fingers threaded into my hair, cupped my head, and brushed the brand. It heated at his touch. His hand tightened at the base of my skull and squeezed, and he raised me slowly to my tiptoes. I opened my eyes and it was my turn to inhale sharply. Not human. Oh, no, not this man.

“Never show it to me again.” His face was cold, hard, his voice colder.

“Why? What will you do?”

“What it is my nature to do. Get inside. It’s time for your lesson.”

After I’d received yet another failing grade, Barrons and I cruised the streets.

I’d gotten no tips from Jayne since his last call, four nights ago. I read the paper each morning. If I recognized the Sinsar Dubh’s calling card, and I was pretty sure I did, it was jumping to a new victim every night. I knew what the good inspector was doing: he was waiting for his “tea.”

I was waiting for divine inspiration to strike at any moment, and show me the way, who to trust, what to do. I had no doubt Jayne would get what he wanted before I did.

I was wrong.

We’d been at it for almost six hours, driving up and down, muscling through the city in the Viper. After so many nights, I knew every street, every alley, every parking lot. I knew the location of every convenience store and petrol station that was open between dusk and dawn. There weren’t many. Crime might not be keeping the partyers at home—the drunk and lonely are hard to corral; I know that from bartending—but it was certainly sending the small-business owners and their employees packing well before nightfall.

It made me sad to see Dublin battening her hatches. Just last night, we’d discovered a two-block Dark Zone that wasn’t on my map, by driving through it. I mourned each newly darkened block as a personal loss, a few inches off my hair, a drabber outfit. We were both changing, this boisterous, craicfilled city and I.

Normally, when we went hunting, Barrons drove in case I lost control of my primary motor functions, but it had been getting more difficult to turn him away from near brushes with the Book, so I’d insisted on driving tonight.

He made a lousy passenger, barking directions I ignored, but it was better than the alternative. Last night when we’d had a near brush with the Book, I’d pretended to have an abrupt desperate need to use the bathroom—the only gas station open was one we’d fueled at, in the opposite direction—and he’d given me an unnervingly searching look. I suspected he was getting suspicious. After all, he could read the paper, too. This morning’s crime had been less than a mile from where I’d had him turn around last night. Although he didn’t know my radar had been getting stronger, I had no doubt he was going to put two and two together eventually.

And so I was driving, my sidhe-seer senses on high alert, waiting for the faintest tingle, so I could subtly turn us away, when something totally unexpected happened.

The Sinsar Dubh popped up on my radar, and it was moving straight toward us.

At an extremely high rate of speed.

I whipped the Viper around, tires smoking on the pavement. There was nothing else I could do.

Barrons looked at me sharply. “What? Do you sense it?”

Oh, how ironic, he thought I’d turned us toward it. “No,” I lied, “I just realized I forgot my spear tonight. I left it back at the bookstore. Can you believe it? I never forget my spear. I can’t imagine what I was thinking. I guess I wasn’t. I was talking to my dad while I was getting dressed and I totally spaced it.” I worked the pedals, ripping through the gears.

He didn’t even try to pat me down. He just said, “Liar.”

I sped up, pasting a blushing, uncomfortable look on my face. “All right, Barrons. You got me. But I do need to go back to the bookstore. It’s. well. it’s personal.” The bloody, stupid Sinsar Dubh was gaining on me. I was being chased by the thing I was supposed to be chasing. There was something very wrong with that. “It’s. a woman thing. you know.”

“No, I don’t know, Ms. Lane. Why don’t you enlighten me?”

A stream of pubs whizzed by. I was grateful it was too cold for much pedestrian traffic. If I had to slow down, the Book would gain on me, and I already had a headache the size of Texas that was threatening to absorb New Mexico and Oklahoma. “It’s that time. You know. Of the month.” I swallowed a moan of pain.

“That time?” he echoed softly. “You mean time to stop at one of the multiple convenience stores we just whizzed past so you can buy tampons? Is that what you’re telling me?”

I was going to throw up. It was too close. Saliva was pooling in my mouth. How far behind me was it? Two blocks? Less? “Yes,” I cried. “That’s it! But I use a special kind and they don’t carry it.”

“I can smell you, Ms. Lane,” he said, even more softly. “The only blood on you is from your veins, not your womb.”

My head whipped to the left and I stared at him. Okay, that was one of the more disturbing things he’d ever said to me. “Ahhh!” I cried, letting go of both the wheel and the gearshift to clutch my head. The Viper ran up on the sidewalk and took out two newspaper stands and a streetlamp before crashing to a stop against a fire hydrant.

And the blasted, idiotic Book was still coming. I began foaming at the mouth, wondering what would happen if it passed within a few feet of me. Would I die? Would my head really explode?

It stopped.

I collapsed against the steering wheel, gasping, grateful for the reprieve. My pain wasn’t decreasing but at least it was no longer increasing. I hoped the Book’s next victim would hurry along and tote it off in the other direction, fast. Hardly sidhe-seerlike, but I had problems.

Barrons kicked open the door, stalked to my side, and yanked me out. “Which way?” he snarled.

I would have fallen to my knees but he held me up. “I can’t,” I managed to say. “Please.”

“Which way?” he repeated.

I pointed.

“Which way?”

He’d Voiced me. I pointed the other way.

Grabbing a fistful of my hair, he took off, dragging me behind him. Closer, closer still. “You’re going. to. kill. me,” I cried.

“You have no idea,” he growled.

“Please. stop!” I was stumbling, blind to everything but the pain.

He released me abruptly and I fell to my knees, gasping, crying. It hurt so bad. Shrieking in my head. Ice in my veins. Fire under my skin. Why? Why did the Book hurt me? Surely I was no longer that pure and good! I’d been lying to everyone. I’d killed a sidhe-seer—granted, it had been by accident, but it was still innocent blood on my hands, along with all of O’Bannion’s men. I’d been thinking lustful thoughts about men no sane woman would think lustful thoughts about. I’d been carving up other living creatures to eat to steal their.

Strength. That was what I needed. Unseelie strength and power; the darkness that was kith and kin to the Book, living inside me.

Where was my purse?

I fumbled for it through the pain. It was in the car. I’d never make it there. I couldn’t even stand up. I whimpered with the agony of simply trying to raise my head. Where was Barrons? What was he doing? The air was ice. The pavement beneath me frosted, and I felt it move up my knees, and creep over my thighs. An arctic wind whipped at my hair, tore at my clothes. Debris battered me.

What was Barrons doing? I had to see!

I sought the sidhe-seer place in my head. The mere existence of the Book inflamed it. It was everything we feared in the Fae. Everything we existed to defend against.

I inhaled fast and deep, sucking down breaths so icy they burned my lungs. I tried to embrace the pain, and convince myself I was one with it. What had Barrons said? I overmuscled things. I had to relax, quit fighting it. Let it crash over me and ride it like a wave. It was easier said than done, but I managed to push back on my knees, and raise my head.

In the middle of the cobbled street, thirty-five feet away, was the Beast.

It looked at me. Hello, Mac, it said.

It knew my name. How did it know my name? Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

The shrieking in my head stopped. The pain vanished. The night stilled. I was in the eye of its storm.

Barrons was five feet from it.

I wish I could describe it to you. I’m glad I can’t. Because if I could find the words for it, they would be stuck in my head forever, and I don’t want anything about it stuck in my head. Its visage is terrible enough, but once it’s no longer in front of you, your brain can’t quite hold on to it. The way it moves, the way it looks at you. The way it mocks. The way it knows.We see ourselves in other people’s eyes. It’s the nature of the human race; we are a species of reflection, hungry for it in every facet of our existence. Maybe that’s why vampires seem so monstrous to us—they cast no reflection. Parents, if they’re good ones, reflect the wonder of our existence and the success we can become. Friends, well chosen, show us pretty pictures of ourselves, and encourage us to grow into them.

The Beast shows us the very worst in ourselves and makes us know it’s true.

Barrons was leaning.

The Beast became the innocent hardcover.

Barrons bent to one knee.

The hardcover became the Sinsar Dubh, with bands and padlocks. It waited. I could feel it waiting.

Barrons reached.

For the first time in my life, I prayed. God, no, please, God, no. Don’t let Barrons pick it up and turn evil because if he does, we’re all lost. I’m dead, the walls are down, and the world is a bust.

I realized, then, that the reason I’d been so conflicted since the night I’d watched Barrons step out of the Unseelie mirror was because, in my heart, I didn’t really believe he was evil. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think he was good, either, but bad is potential evil. Evil is a lost cause. I hadn’t been willing to trust my heart because I’d been afraid I’d make Alina’s mistakes, and as I was dying, the bodiless narrator of my life would remark, Gee, there goes the second Lane girl, dumber than the first. The most confused we ever get is when we’re trying to convince our heads of something our heart knows is a lie.

His fingers were inches from the Sinsar Dubh.

“Barrons!” I shouted.

He flinched and looked back at me. His eyes were black on black.

“Jericho,” I cried.

Barrons shook his head, once, a violent jerk from side to side. Moving like a man with bones fractured in every limb, he pushed himself slowly to his feet, and began backing away.

Suddenly the Book morphed into the Beast and rose, and rose, and rose until it towered over us, eclipsing the sky.

Barrons turned then, and ran.

The pain was back, crushing, crucifying. The night turned cold and life-sucking, and the wind returned, screaming with the voices of the unavenged dead.

I felt myself scooped up.

I flung my arms around Barrons’ neck and held on as he ran.

At four o’clock in the morning, we were sitting in front of a fire in the bookstore, in the rear conversation area, behind bookcases where no passersby might see us, not that any were expected at four o’clock in the morning on the edge of a Dark Zone.

I was snuggled in a nest of blankets, staring into the flames. Barrons brought me a cup of hot cocoa he’d microwaved, using two packets of instant from Fiona’s old stash behind the cash register. I accepted it gratefully. Every few minutes, I jerked with a convulsive chill. I doubted I would ever get warm again.

“She’s with O’Bannion, you know,” I told him through lips that burned with cold. Even Barrons looked chilled, pale.

“I know,” he said.

“She’s eating Unseelie.”

“Yes.”

“Do you care?”

“Fio is her own woman, Ms. Lane.”

“What if I have to kill her?” If she came after me now, I’d have no choice but to stab her.

“She tried to kill you. If her plan had worked, you would have been dead. I underestimated her. I didn’t think her capable of murder. I was wrong. She wanted you out of the way and was willing to sacrifice anything I might want, or need, to accomplish it.”

“Were you her lover?”

He looked at me. “Yes.”

“Oh.” I swirled the cocoa with my spoon. “She was a little old, don’t you think?” I rolled my eyes at myself as soon as I said it. I was going by appearances, not reality. Reality was Barrons was at least twice her age; who knew how much more?

His lips curved faintly.

I began to cry.

Barrons looked horrified. “Stop that immediately, Ms. Lane.”

“I can’t.” I sniffled into my cup of cocoa so he couldn’t see my face.

“Try harder!”

I gave a great sniff and shudder, and turned it off.

“I have not been her lover for. some time,” he offered, watching me carefully.

“Oh, get over yourself! That’s not why I cried.”

“Why, then?”

“I can’t do it, Barrons,” I said hollowly. “You saw it. I can’t get. that. that. thing. Who are we kidding?”

We stared into the flames for a time, until long after my cocoa was gone.

“What did it feel like to you?” I said, finally.

His mouth shaped a bitter smile. “All this time I’ve been hunting it, I’ve been telling myself I would be the exception. I would be the one who could touch it. Use it. I would be unaffected. I was so certain of myself. ‘Just get me within sight distance of it, Ms. Lane,’ I said, convinced I’d all but have it in the bag then. Well, I was wrong.” He laughed, a sharp bark of a sound. “I can’t touch it, either.”

“Can’t? Or won’t?”

“A fine distinction. Irony, perfect definition: That for which I want to possess it, I would no longer want, once I possessed it. I would lose everything to gain nothing. I am not one for exercises in futility.”

Well, at least I no longer had to worry about Barrons or V’lane getting the Book before I did. V’lane couldn’t touch it because he was Seelie, and Barrons wouldn’t touch it because he was smart enough to realize that whatever purpose he wanted it for would be instantly forfeit to the Beast’s all-consuming nature. “Was it coming after us?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It certainly looked like it, though, didn’t it?”

I nestled deeper into my blankets. “What are we going to do, Barrons?”

He gave me a dark look. “The only thing we can do, Ms. Lane. We’re going to keep those fucking walls up.”

Chapter 14

When I unlocked the front door Thursday morning to open for business—a measure of how desperately I wanted to be a normal girl in a normal world—Inspector Jayne was waiting for me.

I stepped back to let him in, closed the door, then, with a gusty sigh, ceded the absurdity of my actions, and flipped the sign back to CLOSED. I wasn’t normal and it wasn’t a normal world, and pretending wasn’t going to accomplish a thing. It was time to call yet another of my own bluffs. The bookstore lulled me with temporary comfort that I had no right to. I should be anxious, I should be afraid. Fear is a powerful motivator.

I took the inspector’s damp coat and motioned him to a seat near the fire. “Tea? Er, I mean, normal tea?”

He nodded and sat.

I brought him a cup of Earl Grey, took a seat across from him, and sipped at my own.

“Aren’t we the pair?” he said, blowing his cup to cool.

I smiled. We certainly were. It seemed a year ago that he’d dragged me down to the station. Months since he’d accosted me in the alcove with his maps. “It has downsides,” I told him, meaning eating Unseelie. He knew what I meant. It was what he’d come here for.

“Doesn’t everything?”

“It makes you superstrong, but the Fae can’t be killed, Jayne. You can’t engage them. You must be satisfied merely seeing them. If you start trying to kill them, they’ll know you know, and they’ll kill you.”

“How strong does eating it make you? As strong as one of them?”

I considered it. I didn’t know, and told him that.

“So, it might?”

I shrugged. “Regardless, you still can’t kill them. They don’t die. They’re immortal.”

“Why do you think we have prisons, Ms. Lane? We’re not allowed to kill the serial murderers, either.”

“Oh.” I blinked. “I never thought of imprisoning them. I’m not certain anything would hold them.” Except an Unseelie prison woven from the fabric of the Song of Making. “They sift, remember?”

“All of them?”

He’d made another good point. I’d never seen a Rhino-boy sift. I supposed it was possible only the more powerful Fae could do it; the princes and the one-of-a-kinds like the Gray Man.

“Isn’t it worth a try? Maybe we lowly humans can come up with a few surprises. While you do your thing, others can be doing theirs. The word in the street is that something bad is coming, soon. What’s going on?”

I told him about Halloween, and the walls, and what would happen if they came down.

He placed his cup and saucer on the table. “And you would have me go out there defenseless?”

“It has other downsides, too. I’m not sure what they all are, but one of them is that if you get wounded by one of the immortal weapons, you’ll. ” I described Mallucé ’s death for him. The decomposing flesh, the dying body parts.

“How many of these immortal weapons are there, Ms. Lane?”

“Two.” How far he’d come from denying missing parts of the maps to so casually speaking of dining on monsters and immortal weapons!

“Who has them?”

“Uh, me and someone else.”

He smiled faintly. “I’ll take my chances.”

“It’s addictive.”

“I used to smoke. If I can quit that, I can quit anything.”

“I think it changes you somehow.” I was pretty sure eating Unseelie was why I’d been able to get closer to the Sinsar Dubh. There was a lot about eating Dark Fae I wasn’t clear on, but something had made the Book perceive me as. tarnished, diluted.

“Lady, you’ve changed me more than an early heart attack. Quit stalling. No more tips, remember?”

For the time being, I didn’t want tips. I had no desire to know where the Book was, other than as a means of avoiding it.

“You didn’t give me a choice when you opened my eyes,” the inspector said roughly. “You owe me for that.”

I studied his face, the set of his shoulders, his hands. How far I’d come, too. Far from seeing an enemy, an impediment to my progress, I saw a good man sitting in my store, having tea with me. “I’m sorry I made you eat it,” I said.

“I’m not,” he said flatly. “I’d rather die seeing the face of my enemy than die blind.”

I sighed. “You’ll have to come back every few days. I don’t know how long it lasts.”

I went to the counter, rummaged in my purse. He accepted the jars a bit eagerly for my taste, revulsion married to anticipation on his face. I felt like a supplier to a junkie. I felt like a mom, sending her child off to face the perils of first grade. I had to do more than pack his lunch and put him on the bus; I had to give him advice.

“The ones that look like Rhinos are watchdogs for the Fae. They spy, and lately, for some bizarre reason, they’ve been doing utility work. I think the ones that fly prey on children, but I’m not sure. They follow them, behind their shoulders. There are dainty, pretty ones that can get inside you. I call them Grippers. If you see one coming toward you, run like hell. The shadowy dark ones will devour you in an instant if you stumble into a Dark Zone. At night, you’ve got to stay to the lights. ” I was half hanging out the door, calling after him. “Start carrying flashlights at all times. If they catch you in the dark, you’re dead.”

“I’ll figure it out, Ms. Lane.” He got in his car and drove away.

At eleven o’clock, I was in Punta Cana, walking on the beach with V’lane, wearing a gold lamé bikini (me, not V’lane; tacky, I know; he chose it) with a hot pink sarong.

I’d released his name to the wind and summoned him shortly after Jayne had left, desperate for answers, and not at all averse to a little sunshine. I’d been thinking about the walls all night and most of the morning. The more we knew about them, the better our odds were of fortifying them. The surest bet for information was a Fae Prince, one of the queen’s most trusted, and one who’d not drunk from the cauldron for a long, long time.

First, he demanded to know the latest about the Sinsar Dubh and I told him, withholding the fact that Barrons had been with me to avoid a potential pissing contest. I told him there was no point in my continuing to pursue it right now, because I had no clue how to get close to it, and since he couldn’t, either, there was no way to get it to the queen. As I said that, a question occurred to me that was so obvious I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before.

“You said the queen can touch it, so why doesn’t she come after it herself?”

“She dares not leave Faery. She was attacked recently, and it left her severely weakened. Her enemies in the mortal world are too numerous. She has fled court and sought an ancient place of refuge and protection within our realm. It is also a place of high magic. There, she believes she can re-create the Song. None but those few she trusts can enter. She must be kept safe, MacKayla. There is no other to lead in her place. All the princesses are gone.”

”What happened to them?” In a matriarchal line, that was a disaster.

“She sent them searching for the Book, along with others. They have not been seen or heard from since.”

And they thought I could do this? If Fae Princesses couldn’t hold their own against the many dangers out there, what chance did I have?

“There’s something I don’t understand, V’lane. The walls of the Unseelie prison were put up hundreds of thousands of years ago, weren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Wasn’t that a long time before Queen Aoibheal erected the ones between our realms?”

He nodded.

“Well, if they existed independently once before, why can’t they now? Why will the prison walls go down, too, if the LM succeeds in bringing those between our worlds down? Why will all the walls fall?”

“The walls have never existed independently. The walls between our worlds are an extension of those prison walls. Without the Song, the queen was unable to fabricate barriers on her own. Separating worlds requires immense power. She had to tap into the magic of the prison walls, and entrust a portion of the new walls’ fortification to humans. A pact of magic inevitably yields stronger results than a solo undertaking. It was risky, but over the protests of her council, she deemed it necessary.”

“Why did the council protest?”

“When first we came here, you were like the rest of life on this world: savages, animals. But one day you developed language. One day the dog did not wag its tail and bark. It spoke. She felt that made you higher beings. She granted you rights and ordered us to coexist. It did not work but, rather than exterminating you—which two thirds of her council was in favor of—she separated us, as part of your new rights.”

It was obvious V’lane didn’t think we’d deserved any rights at all. “Sorry we wrecked your racial supremacy,” I said coolly. “It was our world first, remember?”

Snow dusted my shoulders. “You say that often. Tell me, human, precisely what do you think that establishes? That by dint of fate you happened to begin life on this planet entitles you to it? Under our care your world flourished. We made it verdant; for us Gaea bloomed. Your race has smogged it up, carved it up, concreted it up, and now you overpopulate it. The planet weeps. Your kind knows no restraint. We do. Your kind knows no patience. We are the most patient race you will ever encounter.”

His words chilled me. The Fae could take thousands of years getting around to reimprisoning their dark brethren but the human race would never survive that long. More reason why we had to keep the prison break from occurring. “What’s the LM doing that’s weakening the walls?”

“I do not know.”

“What can we do to fortify them?”

“I do not know. There were agreements reached between the queen and the humans she hid and protected. They must honor those agreements.”

“They have been, and it’s not working.”

He shrugged a golden shoulder. “Why do you fear? If the walls come down, I will keep you safe.”

“I’m not the only one I’m worried about.”

“I will protect those you care for in. Ashford, is it not? Your mother and father. Who else matters to you?”

I felt the tip of a blade caress my spine at his words. He knew of my parents. He knew where I was from. I despised any Fae, good or bad, knowing anything about the people I love. I understood how Alina must have felt, trying so hard to keep us hidden from the dark new world she’d stumbled into in Dublin, including the boyfriend she’d trusted. Had her heart battled her head over him? Had she sensed somewhere deep down that he was evil, but been seduced by his words and charmed by his actions?

Nah, he’d duped her. Despite his assertions otherwise, he’d certainly used Voice on her. There was no other explanation for the way things had turned out.

“I want more than that, V’lane,” I said. “I want the whole human race to be safe.”

“Do you not believe your people would benefit from a reduction in numbers? Do you not read your own newspapers? You accuse the Fae of barbarism, yet humans are unparalleled in their viciousness.”

“I’m not here to argue for the world. That’s not in my job description. I’m just trying to save it.”

He was angry. So was I. We didn’t understand each other at all. His touch was gentle but his eyes were not when he pulled me into his embrace. He took his time with my tongue. I’m ashamed to say I leaned into it, lost myself in a Fae Prince’s kiss, and came four times when he gave me back his name.

“One for each of the princely houses.” With a mocking smile, he vanished.

The aftershocks were so intense it took me several moments to realize something was wrong. “Uh, V’lane,” I called to the air. “I think you forgot something.” Me. “Hello? I’m still in Punta Cana.”

I wondered if this was his way of forcing me to use his name again, so he could replace it again. My apologies, sidhe-seer, he’d say. I have many other concerns on my mind. My ass. If his mind was as vast as he constantly claimed it was, he wasn’t entitled to memory lapses.

My spear was back. People were staring at me. I guess it wasn’t every day they got to watch a bikini-clad, spear-toting woman talking to the sky. I took a good look around and stared myself, realizing it was probably my suit, not my spear, that was most out of place. I’d been so engrossed in my conversation with V’lane that I hadn’t noticed we were on a nude beach.

Two men walked by and I blushed. I couldn’t help it. They were my father’s age. They had penises. “Come on, V’lane,” I hissed. “Get me out of here!”

He let me stew for a few more minutes before returning me to the bookstore. In a gold lamé bikini, of course.

My life changed then, took on yet another routine.

I no longer had any desire to run the bookstore, or sit in front of a computer, or bury myself in stacks of research books. I felt like a terminal patient. My bid to gain the Sinsar Dubh had not only failed, it had forced me to admit that it was hopelessly beyond my reach at the present time.

There was nothing I could do but wait, and hope that others could do their part, and buy me more time to figure out how to do mine—if it was even possible. What had Alina known that I didn’t know? Where was her journal? How had she planned to get her hands on the Dark Book?

Seven days left. Six. Five. Four.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something going on out there, staring me straight in the face, that I was missing. I might have gotten pretty good at thinking outside my tiny little provincial box, but I suspected there was a much larger box that I needed to think outside of now, and to do that, I had to see the box.

Toward that end, I spent my days, armed to the hilt, collar turned up against the cold, walking the streets of Dublin, elbowing my way past tourists who continued to visit the city despite the gloom and the cold and the high crime rate.

Slipping between Unseelie horrors, I popped into a pub for a hot toddy, where I eavesdropped shamelessly on conversations, human and Fae alike. I stopped in a corner dive for fish and chips and chatted up the grill cook. I stood on the sidewalk and made small talk with one of the few remaining human newsstand vendors—coincidentally the same elderly gentleman who had given me directions to the Garda when I’d first arrived here—and who now confided in his lovely lilt that the headlines of the scandal rags were right; the Old Ones were returning. I toured the museums. I visited Trinity’s astounding library. I sampled beers at the Guinness brewery and stood up on the platform, staring out at the sea of roofs.

And I had a startling realization: I loved this city.

Even swimming as she was with monsters, deluged by crime, tainted by the violence of the Sinsar Dubh, I loved Dublin. Had Alina felt this way? Terrified of what might come, but more alive than she’d ever been?

And more alone.

The sidhe-seers weren’t returning my calls. Not even Dani. They’d chosen. Rowena had won. I knew they were afraid. I knew she and the abbey were all most of them had ever known, and that she would skillfully manipulate their fears. I wanted to storm over to PHI and fight. Call the old woman out; argue my case with the sidhe-seers. But I didn’t. There are some things you shouldn’t have to ask for. I’d given them their show of faith. I expected some in return.

I walked the streets. I watched. I made notes in my journal about the various things I saw.

Even Barrons had abandoned me, off looking into some ancient ritual he believed might help on Samhain.

Christian called and invited me out to MacKeltar-land, somewhere in the hills of Scotland, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave the city. I felt like her vanguard, or maybe just the captain going down with her ship. His uncles, Christian told me grimly, were tolerating Barrons, but barely. Nonetheless, they’d agreed to work together for the duration. His tone made it clear that once the ritual was over, there might be an all-out Druid war. I didn’t care. They could fight all they wanted once the walls were fortified.

Three days before Halloween, I found a plane ticket to Ashford outside my bedroom door. It was one-way. The flight was that afternoon. I stood holding it for a long time, eyes closed, leaning back against the wall, picturing my mom and dad, and my room at home.

October in south Georgia is fall at its finest: trees dressed in ruby, amber, and pumpkin; the air redolent with the scent of leaves and earth, and down-home southern cooking; the nights as clear as you can find only in rural America, far from the sky-dimming lights of city life.

Halloween night, the Brooks would host their annual Ghosts and Ghouls Treasure Hunt. The Brickyard would hold a costume contest, inviting the town to come as they wished they were. It was always a blast. People chose the strangest things. If I wasn’t working and it was warm enough, Alina and I would throw a pool party. Mom and Dad were always cool about it, checking into a local bed-and-breakfast for the night. They’d made no secret of the fact that they rather looked forward to getting away from us all for a romantic night alone.

I lived my trip home while holding that ticket.

Then I called and tried to get Barrons’ money refunded. The best they could do was reassign the funds, for a fee, to a future fare in my name.

“Did you think I’d run?” I asked later that night. Barrons was still wherever he was. I’d rung him up on my cell phone.

“I wouldn’t blame you if you did. Would you have gone, if I’d made it round-trip?”

“No. I’m afraid something might follow me. I gave up the idea of going home a long time ago, Barrons. One day I will. When it’s safe.”

“What if it never is again?”

“I have to believe it will be.”

There was a long silence. The bookstore was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. I was lonely. “When are you coming home?” I asked.

“Home, Ms. Lane?”

“I have to call it something.” We’d had this exchange once before, standing in a cemetery. I’d told him if home was where the heart was, mine was six feet under. That was no longer true. My heart was inside me now, with all its hopes and fears and pains.

“I’m nearly done. I’ll be there tomorrow.” The line went dead.

_____

Three o’clock in the morning.

I shot straight up in bed.

Heart hammering. Nerves screaming.

My cell phone was ringing.

“What the feck?” Dani snapped when I answered. “You sleep like the fecking dead up there! I been calling you for five fecking minutes!”

“Are you okay?” I demanded, shivering. I’d been in that cold place again. Shadowy dream remnants slipped away but the chill remained.

“Look out your window, Mac.”

I pushed out of bed, grabbed my spear, and hurried to the window.

My bedroom, like the last one that Barrons trashed, is on the rear of the building, so I can watch the back alley out my window, and keep tabs on the Shades.

Dani was standing down there, in the narrow path of light between the bookstore and Barrons’ garage, cell phone propped between her skinny shoulder and ear, grinning up at me. Shades watched her hungrily from their roost in the shadows.

She was wearing a long black leather coat that was straight out of a vampire movie, and much too big through the shoulders. As I watched, she slid something long and alabaster and shiningly beautiful out from under it.

I gasped. It could only be the Sword of Light.

“Let’s go kick some fairy ass.” Dani laughed, and the look in her eyes was anything but thirteen years old.

“Where’s Rowena?” I dropped my PJ bottoms and thrust a leg into jeans, teeth chattering. I hate my Cold Place dreams.

“Ro’s away. She left on a plane this afternoon. Couldn’t take the sword with her. I snuck out. You wanna talk or you wanna come slay some Unseelie, Mac?”

Was she kidding? This was a sidhe-seer wet dream. Instead of sitting around, thinking, talking, researching—I could get out there and do something! I thumbed off my phone, layered two T-shirts beneath a sweater and a jacket, tugged on boots, grabbed my MacHalo on the way out and strapped it on, wishing I had one for her, too. No matter; if we ended up in the dark somewhere, I’d stick to her like sidhe-seer glue.

We took down eighty-seven Unseelie that night.

Then we lost count.

Chapter 15

I spent most of the day before Halloween cleaning up after the prior night’s festivities. Unlike the aftermath of fun back home in Georgia, the remnants of a rollicking good time in Dublin weren’t sticky plastic cups, crusts of half-eaten pizza, and cigarette butts dropped in beer bottles, but dead monsters and body parts.

Problem: when you kill a Fae, they cease projecting glamour, and contrary to pop culture’s inane belief, the corpses do not disintegrate. They remain here, in our world, perfectly visible to all. In the pleasure of the kill, I forgot the corpses. So did Dani. It’s not like they suddenly become visible to me when they die. They’re always visible to me.

I learned from the morning news about the discovery of “movie props displayed in gruesome fashion around Dublin,” rubbery monsters from the set of some “in-production horror movie, arranged as a prank, and people mustn’t be alarmed, but call the Garda; they’ve designated manpower to clean. er, pick them up.”

My phone was ringing before the spot was over. It was Rowena. “Clean them up, you bloody imbecile!”

I was eating breakfast. “They just said the Garda are taking care of it,” I muttered around a mouthful, mostly to irritate her. I’d been thinking the same thing. I needed to tidy up, and quickly. I was ashamed of myself for not realizing what I was doing.

“Did you leave a trail of bodies that can be traced to you?”

I winced. Probably. “I didn’t know you cared, Ro,” I said coolly.

“Was Dani with you last night?” she demanded.

“No.”

“You did all that by yourself?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How many?”

“I lost count. Over a hundred.”

“Why?”

“I’m sick of doing nothing.”

She was quiet for several moments, then, “I want you at the abbey for the ritual tomorrow.”

I almost choked on a bite of crusty muffin top. That was the last thing I’d expected her to say. I’d been bracing for a lengthy accounting of my many failings, and had been contemplating hanging up before she had the chance to begin. Now I was glad I hadn’t. “Why?”

There was another long silence. “There is strength in numbers,” she said finally. “You are a powerful sidhe-seer.” Whether I like it or not remained unsaid, but floated in the air.

Like the MacKeltars, she wanted all the power that she could get at her disposal.

I’d been thinking of crashing it anyway. I felt drawn to fight with them. If they were making a stand, I wanted to be there. I didn’t feel drawn to join the MacKeltars the same way. I guess blood tells. Now I had an invitation. “What time?”

“The ceremony begins precisely one hour after sunset.”

I didn’t need to consult the calendar hanging in my bedroom upstairs to know the sun would rise tomorrow at 7:23 A.M. and set at 4:54 P.M. Nature rules me in ways she never used to. I can’t wait for the long, bright days of summer again, and not just because of my love of the sun. These short, dreary days of fall and winter frighten me. December 22, the Winter Solstice, will be the shortest day of the year, at seven hours, twenty-eight minutes, and forty-nine seconds of daylight. The sun will rise at 8:39 and set at 4:08. That gives the Shades fifteen hours, thirty-two minutes, and eleven seconds to come out and play. More than twice as much as humans get. “When will we know for sure it worked?”

“Shortly after we open the orb,” she said, but she didn’t sound certain of that. It was unsettling to hear doubt in Rowena’s voice.

“I’ll think about it.” That was a lie. I’d most definitely be there. “What’s in it for me?”

“That you ask such a thing only reinforces my opinion of you.” She hung up.

I finished my muffin and coffee, then headed out to sweep up breadcrumbs, and keep the monsters from my door.

I stuffed Unseelie corpses in trash Dumpsters, hid them in abandoned buildings, and even managed to shove two into a concrete pour on a construction site when the workers took a coffee break.

I dragged the ones closest to the bookstore into the nearby Dark Zone. Even in broad daylight, it was hard for me to make myself go in there. I could feel Shades in all directions, the pulsating darkness of their voracious, terrible hunger. Where did they go? Were they wedged in tiny dark crannies of the bricks, watching me? Did they slither off underground? Were they piled up in dark corners inside the decrepit buildings? How small could they get? Might one be hiding in that empty soda can, at just the right angle to avoid the light? I’d never been a kick-the-can girl, and wasn’t about to start now.

The streets were oddly empty. I would find out later that record numbers of people called in sick the last two days before Halloween. Fathers took long overdue personal days. Mothers kept their children home from school, for no good reason. I think you didn’t need to be a sidhe-seer to feel the taut, expectant hush in the air, to hear the distant drumming of dark hooves on a troubled wind, moving closer, closer.

Closer.

I sliced, diced, and bottled a new stash of Unseelie while I was out. I’d expected Jayne days ago, but decided maybe the effects lasted longer in ordinary humans.

On my way back to the bookstore, I stopped at the grocery to grab a few items, then popped into a bakery and picked up the order I’d placed yesterday.

Then I stood under the spray of a steaming hot shower, naked but for the thigh sheath I’d taken to wearing so I could give myself better than a one-handed hair washing, and scrubbed away the taint of dead Unseelie.

By midnight, Barrons hadn’t shown up and I was feeling pissy. He’d said he’d be here. I’d planned for it.

By one, I was worried. By two, I was certain he wasn’t going to show. At three-fifteen, I called him. He answered on the first ring.

“Where the hell are you?” I snapped, at the same time he snapped, “Are you all right?”

“I’ve been waiting for hours,” I said.

“For what?”

“You said you’d be here.”

“I was delayed.”

“Maybe you could have called?” I said sarcastically. “You know, picked up the phone and said ‘Hey, Mac, I’m running late.’ ”

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line. Then Barrons said softly, “You’ve mistaken me for someone else. Do not wait on me, Ms. Lane. Do not construct your world around mine. I’m not that man.”

His words stung. Probably because I’d done exactly that: structured my night around him, even played out in my head how it was going to go. “Screw you, Barrons.”

“I’m not that man, either.”

“Oh! In your dreams! Allow me to put this into words you taught me yourself: I resent it when you waste my time. Keys, Barrons. That’s what I’ve been waiting for. The Viper’s in the shop.” And I missed it like I missed my long blond hair. We’d bonded, the Viper and I. I doubted I’d ever get it back. It had been heavily damaged from its high-speed trip down the sidewalk and, if I knew Barrons as well as I thought I did, he’d sell it before he’d drive it again, no matter how flawlessly it was repaired. I kind of felt the same way. When you spend that much money, you want perfection. “I need a car to drive.”

“Why?”

“I’ve decided to go to the abbey for the ritual,” I said.

“I’m not certain that’s wise.”

“It’s not your decision.”

“Maybe it should be,” he said.

“I can’t do anything to help the MacKeltars, Barrons.”

“I didn’t say you should. Perhaps you should remain in the store tomorrow night. It’s the safest place for you.”

“You want me to hide?” My voice rose with disbelief on the last word. Months ago, I might have happily hid. Watched late night TV while painting my fingernails and toenails to match, a divine shade of pink. Now? Not a chance.

“Sometimes caution is the wisest course,” he said.

“Tell you what, Barrons: you come be cautious with me, I’ll stay in, too. Not because I want your company,” I said before he could make a pithy comment, “but because of that whole good-for-the-goose-and-gander thing. I’m not going to gander helplessly.”

“You’re the goose, Ms. Lane. I’m the gander.”

As if I could mistake his gender. “That was a double entendre,” I informed him stiffly. “I was being clever. Gander has multiple meanings. What good is being clever when the person you’re being clever to is too dense to get it?”

“I’m not dense,” he said just as stiffly, and I sensed one of our childish fights looming on the horizon. “As a double entendre it didn’t work. Look up double entendre.”

“I know what double entendre means. And you can just shove your stupid birthday cake. I don’t even know why I bothered!”

The silence was so protracted that I decided he’d hung up.

I hung up, too, wishing I’d done it first.

Twenty minutes later, Barrons stepped through the door from the back of the bookstore. Ice was crystallized in his hair, and he was pale from extreme cold.

I was sitting on the sofa in the rear conversation area, too aggravated to sleep. “Good. You’ve finally stopped pretending you don’t use the mirror. It’s about time.”

“I only use the mirror when I must, Ms. Lane. Even for me, it is. unpleasant.”

Curiosity overrode irritation. “What constitutes ‘must’? Where do you go?”

He glanced around. “Where is the cake?”

“I threw it away.”

He gave me a look.

I sighed, got up, and got it out of the fridge. It was a seven-layer chocolate cake, with alternating raspberry and chocolate cream fillings, frosted pink, with a Happy Birthday JZB in the center, delicately scripted and adorned with flowers. It was beautiful. It was the only thing that had made my mouth water in weeks, besides Unseelie. I set it on the coffee table, then got plates and forks from the cabinet behind the counter.

“I’m confused, Ms. Lane. Is this cake for me, or for you?”

Yeah, well, there was that. I’d been planning on eating a lot of it myself. I’d spared no expense. I could have downloaded forty-seven songs from iTunes instead. “They were out of black icing,” I said dryly. He wasn’t reacting the way I’d planned. He didn’t look the least bit touched or amused. In fact, he was regarding the cake with a mixture of horror and. grim fascination; the same way I regard monsters I’m about to kill.

I fidgeted. At the time I’d ordered it, it’d seemed like a good idea. I’d thought it was a humorous way of poking fun at our. relationship, while also saying, I know you’re really old and probably not human at all, but whatever you are, you still have a birthday, just like the rest of the world.

“I believe candles are customary,” he said finally.

I reached in my pocket, pulled out candles in the shape of numbers, and one I’d whittled to a stub of a period, and stuck them on top of the cake. He looked at me as if I’d sprouted a second head.

“Pi, Ms. Lane? I’d pegged you for failing high school math.”

“I got a D. The little stuff always trips me up. But the big stuff stuck with me.”

“Why pi?”

“It’s irrational and uncountable.” Funny girl, wasn’t I?

“It’s also a constant,” he said dryly.

“They were out of sixes. Seems this time of year six-six-six is big,” I said, lighting the candles. “Obviously, they haven’t seen the real Beast, or they wouldn’t be playing at worshipping it.”

“Have there been more sightings?” He was still frowning at the cake, looking at it as if he expected it to sprout dozens of legs and begin scuttling toward him, thin-lipped, teeth bared.

“It’s been transferring hands every day.” There was a stack of papers by the couch. The crimes the newspapers were reporting made eating breakfast while reading it risky.

He lifted his gaze from the cake to my face.

“It’s just a cake. I promise. No surprises. No chopped-up Unseelie in there,” I joked. “I’ll even eat the first slice.”

“It’s far from ‘just’ a cake, Ms. Lane. That you procured it implies—”

“—that I was having a sweet craving and used you for an excuse to indulge. Blow out the candles, will you? And lighten up, Barrons.” How had I not realized the delicacy of the ice I was on? What in the world had made me think I could give him a birthday cake and he’d be anything but weird about it?

“I’m doing this for you,” he said tightly.

“I get that,” I said. I was really glad I’d vetoed getting balloons. “I just thought it would be fun.” I stood, holding the cake out to him in both hands, so he could blow out candles before they dripped wax on the pretty confection. “I could use a little fun.”

I sensed violence in the room a split second before it erupted. In retrospect, I think he thought he had it caged, and was nearly as surprised as I.

Cake and candles exploded from my hands, shot straight up in the air, hit the ceiling, and stuck there, dripping gobs of icing. I stared up at it. My lovely cake.

Then I was trapped between the wall and his body, with no awareness of having gotten there. He’s frighteningly quick when he wants to be. I think he could give Dani a run for the money. He had my hands pinned above my head, braceleted at the wrists by one of his. The other was around my throat. His head was down and he was breathing hard. For a moment, he rested his face in my neck.

Then he pulled back and stared at me and when he spoke his voice was low with fury. “Never do that again, Ms. Lane. Do not insult me with your silly rituals, and idiotic platitudes. Never try to humanize me. Don’t think we’re the same, you and I. We’re not.”

“Did you have to ruin it?” I cried. “I’d been looking forward to it all day.”

He shook me, hard. “You have no business looking forward to pink cakes. That’s not your world anymore. Your world is hunting the Book and staying alive. They’re mutually exclusive, you bloody fool.”

“No, they’re not! It’s only if I eat pink cakes that I can hunt the Book! You’re right—we’re not the same. I can’t walk through the Dark Zone at night. I don’t scare all the other monsters away. I need rainbows. You don’t. I get that now. No birthdays for Barrons. I’ll pen that in right next to Don’t wait on him and Don’t expect him to save you unless there’s something in it for him. You’re a jackass. There’s a constant for you. I won’t forget it.”

His grip on my throat relaxed. “Good.”

“Fine,” I said, though I don’t really know why. I think I just wanted the last word.

We stared at each other.

He was so close, his body electric, his expression savage.

I moistened my lips. His gaze fixed on them. I think I stopped breathing.

He jerked so sharply away that his long dark coat sliced air, and turned his back to me. “Was that an invitation, Ms. Lane?”

“If it was?” I asked, astonishing myself. What did I think I was doing?

“I don’t do hypotheticals. Little girl.”

I looked at his back. He didn’t move. I thought of things to say. I said none of them.

He vanished through the connecting door.

“Hey,” I shouted after him, “I need a car to drive!” There was no answer.

A large chunk of cake dropped from the ceiling and splatted on the floor.

It was mostly intact, just a little goopy.

Sighing, I got a fork and scraped it onto a plate.

It was noon the next day when I got out of bed, cleared my monster alarm from in front of my door, and opened it.

Waiting outside for me was a thermos of coffee, a bag of doughnuts, a set of car keys, and a note. I unscrewed the thermos top, sipped the coffee, and unfolded the note.

Ms. Lane,

I would prefer you join me in Scotland this evening, but if you insist on helping the old witch, here are keys, as you requested. I moved it for you. It’s the red one, parked in front of the door. Call if you change your mind. I can send a plane as late as 4:00.

CJ

It took me a moment to figure out the initials. Constant Jackass. I smiled. “Apology accepted, Barrons, if it’s the Ferrari.”

It was.

Chapter 16

Liminal” is a fascinating word. Times can be liminal: Twilight is the transition from day to night; midnight is the crack between one day and the next; equinoxes and solstices and New Year’s Day are all thresholds.

Liminal can also be a state of consciousness: for example, those moments between waking and sleeping, also known as threshold consciousness, or hypnagogia, a state during which a person might think herself fully alert, but is actually actively engaged in dreaming. This is the time that a lot of people report a convulsive jerk, or a feeling of physically falling.

Places can be liminal: airports with people constantly coming and going, but never staying. People, too, can be liminal: Teens, like Dani, are temporarily stuck between child and adult. Fictional characters are often Liminal Beings, archetypes that straddle two worlds, marking or guarding thresholds, or are physically divided by two states of existence.

Between-ness is a defining characteristic of liminal. Limbo is another. Liminal is neither here nor there but exists between one moment and the next, poised in that pause where what’s passing hasn’t yet become what’s becoming. Liminal is a magical time, a dangerous time, fraught with possibility. and peril.

Halloween seemed to drag on forever. Ironic, considering I had slept until noon. I had four measly hours to kill until four o’clock, when I would leave the city to head for the abbey, yet it stretched interminably.

I called Dani as soon as I got up. She was excited that I was coming, and told me the ritual was scheduled to begin at six-fifteen.

“So, what is it? A lot of chanting and weirdness?” I asked.

She laughed and said, pretty much so. Invocations had to be recited and tithes paid before the Orb could be opened and its Fae essence released to fortify the walls. I asked what kind of tithes, and she got a little cagey. I wondered if Rowena planned to use my blood or something. I wouldn’t put it past her.

I called Christian and he said all was a go. His uncles had begun the Druid rites at dawn, although Barrons wouldn’t be joining them until later in the day.

I called Dad, and we talked for a long time about cars and my job and the usual light stuff that makes up our conversations lately. I hate that Barrons Voiced him into a worry-free stupor, and I’m grateful for it. If Dad had said one halfway deep or insightful thing to me today, I might have burst into tears and told him all my problems. This is the man who kissed every bump or bruise I ever had, even the imaginary ones when I was little, and just wanted a Princess Jasmine Band-Aid and to be cuddled and cooed at, sitting on his lap.

After a while, I asked for Mom. There was a long pause, and I was afraid she wouldn’t come to the phone—then she did, and I can’t describe the joy I felt at hearing her voice for the first time in months!

Though she chose her words with uncharacteristic tentativeness, she was coherent, clearheaded, and obviously not drugged. Dad said she still tired very easily so I kept the conversation short and sweet, telling her nothing but happy news: My job was fabulous, I had a great employer, I’d gotten a raise, I was hoping to start my own bookstore when I came home, I was making concrete plans to finish college and get a degree in business, and no, I couldn’t make Thanksgiving but yes, I would try as hard as I could to get home for Christmas.

Necessary lies. I understand them now. I could almost feel Alina, standing behind me, nodding her head, as I boosted our mother’s spirits. Every time the phone had rung for me in Ashford, Georgia, and my sister had made me laugh and feel loved and safe, she’d been standing in Dublin, wondering if she’d be alive tomorrow.

After I hung up, I dug into the doughnuts and punched up a random playlist on my iPod. “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” came up first, followed by “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” I turned it off.

I don’t know what I did until three. I think I passed a great deal of time sitting and staring into the fire. Liminal sucks. You can’t grasp it with your hands and shape it. You can’t make midnight come faster, or grow up sooner, or avoid the in-betweens. You can only hang in there, and get through them.

I showered, put on makeup, and sleeked my hair back into a short ponytail. I tugged on black jeans, a T-shirt, a sweater, boots, and a jacket. I grabbed my backpack and stuffed my MacHalo in. I was going to be out late. I holstered my spear in my shoulder harness, tucked in two of Barrons’ short, sheathed knives I’d pilfered from an upstairs display case into my waistband, and loaded myself with diced Rhino-boy, jars in my jacket pockets, plastic Baggies in my boots. I strapped my Velcro bands with the Click-It lights around my ankles and wrists. I even slipped a vial of holy water into the front pocket of my jeans. In this town, you never know what’s coming. As they say back home, I was loaded for bear. All kinds.

I went downstairs, glanced out the window, and did a double take, wondering if I’d lost track of time. It had been clear and light in the cold wintry way of early November, when I’d gone upstairs. Now, at three forty-five, it was nearly dark outside. A storm had blown in while I’d been blow-drying my hair. It wasn’t raining yet, but the wind was kicking up, and it looked like we might get a real ripper any time.

I picked up the car keys and glanced around the bookstore to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything. As my gaze swept the four-story room, I shrugged off a sudden, broody fear that I might never see Barrons Books and Baubles again. Like I loved the city, I’d grown to love my store. The hardwood floors gleamed beneath the sconces and cut-amber lamps. The books were all shelved in their proper places. The magazine rack was freshly stocked. The fires were off. The sofas and chairs were invitingly positioned in cozy arrangements. The mural above me was lost in shadows. One day I was going to climb up there and see what it was. The store was tidy and quiet, stuffed with fictional worlds to be explored, business-ready and waiting for the next customer.

I headed for the back door.

It would be waiting for me when I got back tomorrow, when the walls were strong, and I had a whole year to figure things out. I would start keeping regular hours again, and get to work on my plans to set up a Web site and catalog the rare editions upstairs. No more slacking.

But right now, an Italian stallion was waiting for me, stomping and snorting. Out back, a Ferrari was calling my name. There were two hours of road between me and where I was going, and that was one liminal I was going to love every minute of.

Chapter 17

I made it twelve blocks.

My end of town, next to the Dark Zone, had been deserted as a war zone. Now, I knew why.

The streets an eighth of a mile east of BB&B were so packed with people and Unseelie that motor traffic didn’t have a hope of getting through. Most of the Fae were in full human glamour, trying to incite riot, and succeeding.

Garda pushed among them, demanding order with raised batons. There’re enough troubled youth in Dublin—in any city, for that matter—that even a small angry mob can combust and spread like wildfire. Especially on Halloween when all the freaks come out, hiding behind better masks.

While I watched, a few of the Garda—who were actually Unseelie in glamour—began viciously beating a group of youths with their batons, incensing the crowd. Other Unseelie began smashing out store windows, looting and encouraging others to take what they wanted. I called out to a few kids hurrying by to join the fracas. No one seemed to know what the rioting was about, nor did they care. I was afraid to get closer, for fear of damaging the car. Or me.

Bile boiled in my stomach from the compressed multitude of Fae. At least the Sinsar Dubh wasn’t around to incapacitate me. The mob was expanding, pushing outward, and it occurred to me that getting stuck in the middle of it, sitting in a Ferrari, was a really bad idea. I backed up, hastily turned around, and drove away, glad I’d left a few minutes early.

I dug out a map of the city from my backpack and flipped on the interior light. Although the storm still only threatened, the cloud cover had turned day to night a full hour earlier than I’d expected.

Ten blocks north of the bookstore, I encountered another mob. I backed up, swung the car around, and headed west. It was no go. That way out of town was just as bad.

I pulled over in a parking lot to study the map, then headed southwest, intending to skirt the edge of the Dark Zone on my way out and, if I had to, put on my MacHalo and drive through part of it to get out of town. But as I approached the perimeter of the abandoned neighborhood, I slammed the brakes and stared.

The entire edge of the zone was a dense black wall of Shades, pressing at the pools of the light cast by the street-lamps on Dorsey Street. It stretched left and right as far as I could see, a massive barricade of death.

I put the car in reverse and backed away. I would go through it only if I had to. I wasn’t yet ready to admit defeat.

I spent the next fifteen minutes driving the ever-decreasing circumference of my world, hemmed in by danger on all sides. The edges of the Dark Zones had met and merged with the mobs, and I watched in horror as Unseelie in human glamour drove people into those waiting, killing shadows.

It finally occurred to me to get out of the flashy red car that was beginning to attract a dangerous amount of attention, so I sped back to BB&B where I planned to swap it for something nondescript, and figure how to escape the city.

As I turned down the side street leading to the store, I slammed the brakes so hard I nearly gave myself whiplash.

Barrons Books and Baubles was dark!

Completely. It was surrounded by night on all sides.

Every exterior light on the bookstore was out.

I stared blankly. I’d left them all on. I eased off the brake and inched closer. In the gleam of headlights, glass glittered on the cobbled street. The lights weren’t off. Someone had broken them all out, or—considering how high they were mounted—shot them out. Or. someone had sent those flying Fae, maybe even Hunters, to do the job. Were they perched up there right now, on the cornices, looming over me? There were so many Fae in the city that my sidhe-sensor felt bombarded, overwhelmed by presences too numerous to count or differentiate. I peered up, but the roof of the store was lost in darkness.

Although the interior lights were on, they were set at the subdued, after-hours level, and what spilled onto the pavement through the beveled glass door and windows was not enough to deter my enemy. One more city block had fallen to the Shades: mine.

Barrons Books and Baubles was part of the Dark Zone.

Would the Shades’ more substantial brethren enter BB&B tonight, smash it up, break out the interior lights, and render it unsalvageable? Could they? I knew Barrons hadn’t warded it against everything, just the bigger risks.

My eyes narrowed. This was unacceptable. The Fae would not take my sanctuary! I would not be turned out into the streets. They would get their nasty, shady petunias out of my territory and they would do it now. I spun in a screech of tires, and drove in the other direction. Four blocks from the Dark Zone’s new perimeter, the mob pushed me back. I floored it in reverse, narrowly missing parked cars, stopping beneath a pool of bright streetlamps. I could hear angry shouts, breaking glass, and the thunder of the approaching mob. I would not be swallowed up by it. But I had to act fast.

I stepped out of the car, plunged my hand beneath my jacket, and fisted it around my spear. I wasn’t losing it this time.

A cold, windborne mist pricked my face and hands. The storm had begun. But it wasn’t just storm I sensed in the air. Something was wrong, terribly wrong, besides angry mobs and hordes of Unseelie, and Shades overtaking my home. The wind was strange, blowing from multiple directions, reeking of sulfur. The fringes of the chaotic, destructive crowd surged around the corner, two blocks from where I stood.

“V’lane, I need you!” I cried, releasing his name.

It uncoiled from my tongue and swelled, choking me, then slammed into the back of my teeth, forcing my mouth wide.

But instead of soaring into the night sky, it crashed into an invisible wall and plummeted to the pavement, where it lay fluttering weakly, a fallen dark bird.

I nudged it with the toe of my boot.

It disintegrated.

I turned my face to the wind, east and west, north and south. It eddied around me, buffeting me from all sides, slapping me with hundreds of tiny hands, and I suddenly could feel the LM out there, working his dark magic to bring the walls down. It was changing things.

I flexed the sidhe-seer place in my mind, focused, turned inward, seeking, hunting, and for an instant I actually got a flash of him, standing at the edge of a stark, sheer black cliff, in an icy place, red-robed, hands raised—and was that a heart held high, dripping blood? — chanting, summoning arts powerful enough to crash a prison wrought from living strands of the Song of Making, and it was doing something to all magic, even Fae, making it go terribly wrong.

I squeezed my inner eye shut before it got me killed. I was standing in the middle of a street in a rioting Dublin, trapped in the city, alone.

V’lane would not be sifting in to save the day.

The mob was less than a block away. The marauding front-liners had just noticed my car and were roaring like maddened beasts. Some toted baseball bats, others swung batons taken from fallen Garda.

They were going to beat my Ferrari to smithereens.

There wasn’t time to dig out my cell phone and try to call Barrons. They would be on me in seconds. I knew what happened to rich people during riots. I also knew they wouldn’t believe I wasn’t rich. I wasn’t about to get beheaded with the aristocracy just because every now and then I got to drive a nice car that didn’t even belong to me.

I grabbed my backpack from the car, and ran.

A block away another mob approached.

I plunged into it, and lost myself inside it. It was a horrible, smelly, hot, surging mass of humanity. It was rage unstop-pered, frustration unleashed, envy unsuppressed. It howled with victory as it looted, smashed, and destroyed.

I couldn’t breathe. I was going to throw up. There were too many people, too many Fae, too much hostility and violence. I swam in a sea of faces, some feral, some excited, others as frightened as I imagined I must look. Fae are monsters. But we humans hold our own. Fae might have incited this riot, but we were the ones keeping it alive.

The cobbled stones were slippery from the misting rain. I watched in horror as a young girl fell, crying out. She was trampled in seconds as the crowd swept on. An elderly man—why on earth was he out here? — went down next. A teenage boy was jostled into a streetlamp, rebounded, lost his balance, and vanished from view.

For time uncounted then, I was driven by a single imperative: Stay on your feet. Stay alive.

I rode the crowd, an unwilling mount, feet trapped in the stirrups, from one block to the next. Twice I managed to break free, fight my way to the outer fringes, only to be drowned in the herd again, propelled forward by its relentless stampede.

I feared two things: that they would gallop me straight into a Dark Zone, or that the Sinsar Dubh would make a sudden appearance, and I’d fall to my knees, clutching my head. I couldn’t decide which death would be worse.

My cell phone was in my backpack, but there wasn’t enough room to maneuver in the crowd and get to it. I worried that if I slipped my pack from my shoulders, it would be jerked from my hands and carried off. My spear was cold and heavy under my arm, but I was afraid if I whipped it out, I might be speared by it in the crush.

Unseelie.

I had baby food jars of it in my pockets.

With its dark life in my veins I would be able to break free of the mob.

We were nearing the edge of the Temple Bar District. The Dark Zone wasn’t far. Were we being deliberately driven? If I were able to float above this riot, would I see Unseelie herding us from behind, cattle to the slaughter?

“Sorry,” I muttered. “Oops, didn’t mean to hit you.” Without pissing off anyone badly enough to get myself punched, I managed to extract a jar from my pocket. I’d twisted the lids too tight to open them one-handed. I jostled for space, and popped the lid. Someone shoved into me and I lost my hold on it. I felt it hit my boot and then it was gone.

Gritting my teeth, I dug for another one. I had three in my pockets. The rest were sealed in plastic bags tucked inside my boots. I’d never be able to get to them in the crush. I was more careful with this jar, easing it out, clutching it for dear life—which I hoped it was. I had to get out of the crowd. I knew my landmarks. I was two blocks from the Dark Zone. I managed to pop the lid but was unwilling to duck my head to eat it, for fear of taking an elbow in the eye, freezing or stumbling in pain, and going down.

I raised the bottle close to my body, tossed my head back, gulped and chewed. I gagged the entire time I chewed. No matter that I’d been craving it; it was work to get it down, crunchy with gristle and cystlike sacs that popped when I chewed. It wriggled in my mouth, and crawled like spiders in my stomach. When I lowered the jar, I was looking straight into the eyes of a Rhino-boy, around the heads of two humans and, from the expression on his beady-eyed, bumpy gray face, he knew what I’d just done. He must have seen the pink-gray flesh moving in the jar as I’d tossed it back.

I guessed word was getting around, between Mallucé, and the LM, and O’Bannion and now Jayne eating them. He bellowed, ducked his head, and charged. I spun, and began violently pushing my way through the crowd. I managed to get the third bottle out, and gulped that, too, as I fought toward freedom.

The only other time I’d eaten Unseelie, I’d been mortally wounded, and close to death, so I didn’t know what to expect. Last time, it had taken several large mouthfuls just to begin the healing, and nearly ten minutes to complete the journey from dying to more alive than I’d ever been. Tonight I was whole and uninjured. Strength and power slammed into me like I’d taken a needle of adrenaline straight to my heart. A chilly heat suffused me as the potency of Fae spiked my blood.

Savage Mac raised her head, and looked out through my eyes, thought with my brain, and rearranged my limbs into a sleeker composition: powerful, predatory, padding on certain paws.

Within moments, I was free of the crowd, but in the distance, I could hear another approaching. The city had gone crazy tonight. I would learn later that Fae in human glamour had broken into houses and businesses all over town, attacked owners and residents, and driven them out into the streets, forcing the riots to begin.

I glanced back. It appeared I’d lost the Rhino-boy in the crush. Or maybe he’d decided he was more interested in the destruction of an entire mob, than measly me. Behind me was the Dark Zone. Ahead was another mob, its front wave led by Rhino-boys smashing out streetlamps with baseball bats. To my left were sounds of violence. To my right was a pitch-black alley. I slipped off my backpack, dug out my MacHalo, strapped and buckled it beneath my chin, then hit the Click-It lights, one after another, until I blazed like a small beacon. I smacked my wrists and ankles together, lighting up my hands and feet.

The mob rushed me in a great wave.

I took off down the dark alley.

I lost track of time for a while then, racing down streets and alleys, drawing up short, doubling back, trying to avoid the mobs, and evade the troops of Rhino-boys, with whom I had repeated close calls, since I could no longer sense them, now that my sidhe-seer senses were deadened by my gruesome meal.

They marched militantly, rounding up the stragglers to herd into the mobs. I crisscrossed the same blocks dozens of times, hiding in doorways and Dumpsters. I had a terrible moment where I got hemmed in between two groups of them, and was forced to sidle behind cardboard boxes in the shadows of a trash bin, and turn off all my lights to let the horde of Unseelie crash by.

I tasted death sitting there in the darkness, wondering if there were Dark “Spots”—really tiny areas where only one or two Shades lived—and any moment it might slither from a crack and get me, and the thought was almost worse than flinging myself into the middle of the passing Unseelie, which, by the way, I unzipped my Baggies and ate some of, sitting there with my knees tucked up in the darkness behind the steel bin. Maybe, as I’d once joked to Barrons, Shades really didn’t like dark meat, and they’d leave me alone.

After the troops passed, I crawled out and clicked myself back on.

Yes, people were being driven. Gathered and herded.

Lambs to the slaughter. My people.

And there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. Eating Unseelie might have transformed me from a pocketknife into an Uzi, and turned me into a walking weapon, but I was still only one weapon, and acutely aware of it. I was defense, not offense. There was no offense to be made in this city tonight. Not even Savage Mac, the cockiest of cocky, felt punchy. She felt threatened, feral. She wanted to find a cave to hide in until the odds were more in her favor. I was inclined to agree. Survival was our prime directive.

The first time I’d eaten Unseelie, nothing had fazed me. But that night I’d only had to worry about a single rotting vampire, plus I’d had Barrons by my side. Tonight, I was trapped in a rioting city of hundreds of thousands of people, it was Halloween, the Unseelie were numerous and horribly organized, V’lane was unreachable, and Barrons was a country away.

I finally found myself in a semilit deserted alley, with no militant footfalls or sounds of rioting nearby. I ducked into a doorway lit by a single, naked overhead bulb, to take care of something that badly needed taking care of. I removed my pack carefully, dropped it, ripped off my jacket, and gingerly, delicately removed my spear harness, which I placed on the ground.

The entire time I’d been running and hiding, its heavy weight had been a burning terror against my body. What if I fell? What if I got caught in a crowd again and someone jostled me? What if the tip pierced my skin? Hello, Mallucé. Goodbye, sanity. I might be tougher than I used to be, but I had no doubts about my ability to cope with rotting to death.

I stripped off my sweater and T-shirt, then put my sweater, jacket, and MacHalo back on and belted the spear harness on the outside of my coat, without touching anything but the leather straps.

I tied the T-shirt I’d removed around the bottom part of the harness, forming an additional layer of protection between the tip and me.

Ironic, the thing I love most, that makes me feel so powerful under normal circumstances, becomes my greatest liability, and the thing I fear most when I pilfer dark power. I can have one, or the other—but never both.

Carrying the dichotomy one step further, I could no longer sense the spear, which meant I could inadvertently hurt myself on it. However, I could also no longer sense the Sinsar Dubh, which meant it could no longer hurt me, and send me crashing to my knees, helpless, in a dangerous situation.

Duh. I stood in the doorway marveling, and not in a good way, at my own stupidity. If eating Unseelie made me unable to sense the Sinsar Dubh, then all I needed to do next time it popped up on my radar was get as close to it as I could, eat Unseelie, and get closer. Close enough to pick it up.

An image of the Beast as I’d last seen it materialized in my mind.

Yeah, right. Pick it up. Sure. What then? Put it in my pocket? I didn’t have one large enough.

So, I knew how to get close to it without being incapacitated by pain. I still had no idea what to do then. If I touched it would I, too, turn psycho? Or was I a sidhe-seer/Null/OOP-detector mutant that was somehow exempt? A moot point right now, with my odds of surviving the night looking so grim.

I dug out my cell phone to call Dani and tell her what was happening in Dublin. There was no way I could make it to the abbey. I glanced at my watch and was stunned to find it was nearly seven o’clock. I’d been running and hiding for hours! The ritual might already be completed and if it was, sidhe-seers could come to the city and help me save some of the people being driven to death-by-Shade. I might not be able to make a difference, but seven hundred of us could. If they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—come because Rowena vetoed it for some idiotic reason, I would call Barrons and if he didn’t answer, I’d call Ryodan, and if neither of them answered, it was probably time for IYD: if you’re dying. A pall of death hung over Dublin like grief over a funeral. I could smell it, taste it on the air. If no sidhe-seers were coming in to join me, I wanted out, any way I could get there.

Dani answered on the second ring. She sounded hysterical. “Feck, Mac!” she cried. “What did you do to us?”

I’d been adjusting the straps on my pack to accommodate my bulky external harness, and alarm made me drop it. “What’s wrong?” I demanded.

“Shades, Mac! Fecking Shades came out of the fecking Orb when we opened it! The abbey’s full of ’em!”

I was so stunned that I nearly dropped the phone. When I got it back to my ear, Dani was saying:

“Rowena says you betrayed us! She says you set us up!”

My heart constricted. “No, Dani, I didn’t, I swear! Somebody must have set me up!” The thought iced my blood. There was only one person who could have, one person that walked among those dark vampires without fear. How easily he’d relinquished the relic. How quickly he’d agreed to give it to me. Yet he’d not given it to me that night. Thirty hours had passed between my request, and his delivery. What had he been doing during those hours? Spiking a sidhe-seer’s drink with Shades? “How bad is it?” I cried.

“We’ve lost dozens! When we opened the Orb, they splintered, and we thought the light from the ritual killed them, but they fecking grew back together in the shadows. They’re everywhere! In closets, in shoes, anywhere there’s dark!”

“Dani, I didn’t do this! I swear to you. I swear on my sister. You know what she means to me. You have to believe me. I would never do this. Never!”

“You said you’d come,” she hissed. “You didn’t. Where are you?”

“I’m stuck in the city, holed up between York and Mercer. Dublin’s a nightmare, and I couldn’t get out. People have been rioting for hours, and the Unseelie are driving them into the Dark Zones!”

She sucked in a breath. “How bad is it?” she echoed my question.

“Thousands, Dani! Beyond counting. If it keeps up like this—” I broke off, unable to make myself complete the thought. “If you guys come in, we can save some of them, but I can’t do it by myself. There’s too many Unseelie.” But if the abbey was full of Shades, they couldn’t leave. We couldn’t afford to lose the abbey. The libraries were there, and God only knew what else. The lightbulb above me flickered and made a sizzling noise as if it had taken a power surge.

It’s hard to say what makes the brain suddenly piece things together, but I had one of those moments where a series of images flashed through my mind and I was stupefied by the simplicity and obviousness of what I’d been missing: Rhino-boys collecting trash, repairing streetlamps, driving city trucks, replacing broken bricks in the pavement. “Oh, no, Dani,” I breathed, horrified, “forget what I just said. Don’t come into the city, and don’t let anyone else. Not now. Not for any reason. Not until after dawn.”

“Why?”

“Because they’ve been planning this. I’ve been seeing Unseelie in city jobs, and I didn’t get it until now. It’s not just the street sweepers, or the trash collectors.” Where better to learn about one’s enemy than from the leavings of their life, their refuse? The FBI always infiltrated their suspect’s daily lives, bugged their house, and staked out their trash. “It’s the utility workers, too.” How long had the LM been orchestrating his macabre symphony? Long enough to have thought through every bit of it, and his time as a human had taught him well what our weaknesses were. “They’ve got control of the grid, Dani. They’re going to turn the entire—” I held my phone away from my ear and looked at it.

Full battery.

No service. The cell phone towers had just gone down. I had no idea how much Dani had heard.

“—city into a Dark Zone,” I whispered.

The lightbulb above me flickered again. I looked up at it. It sizzled, popped, and went dark.

Chapter 18

My world was falling apart around me.

I was cut off from V’lane, Barrons was looking like the ultimate traitor, the abbey was full of Shades, BB&B was a Dark Zone, the city had fallen to rioters and Unseelie, and it was about to descend into total darkness.

Once it did, nothing alive out in the streets would be safe. Nothing. Not even grass and trees. Well, I might be, illuminated by my MacHalo, armed with my spear (that could kill me horribly at this point), but what if a group of rioters or Unseelie attacked me en masse and rendered me defenseless? What could I hope to accomplish by wandering the city? Could I save lives? What would I do with them if I did? How would I keep them safe when the lights went out? Would they, like drowning people, claw and fight me to death to steal my lights? If I died, who would track the Book? I’m no coward. But I’m no fool, either. I know when to fight, and I know when to survive to fight another day.

Every cell in my body wanted to go up, get off the ground, far from the streets and alleys and lanes that would soon run dark with a flood of Shades, closer to the dawn that loomed on what seemed an impossibly far horizon.

Twelve hours. Plus some. I scoured the streets for my Alamo, refusing to ponder the outcome of that battle. I would do better.

I finally settled on an old church with a high steeple, an open belfry, and stone archways where I could perch, and watch my flanks. The tall, double front doors were locked. I liked them that way. There were no windows facing the street. I liked that, too. Here was my fortress, the best I could do, for now anyway.

I circled around the back, kicked in the door of the refectory, and slipped inside. After barricading the door with a heavy china cabinet, I swiped an apple and two oranges from a fruit basket on the dining table, and hurried through the dimly lit communal areas of the church.

It took me a while to find the entrance to the belfry, at the rear of the large chapel, beneath the choir balcony, in the thick of the massive organ pipes. The narrow door was almost completely concealed behind a bookcase that had been shoved in front of it, I suspected to prevent curious kids from making the climb. I pushed the bookcase aside—an easy nudge as pumped up on Unseelie as I was—and opened the door. It was pitch black beyond. Bracing myself, I stepped inside, lighting up the tower. No shadows recoiled, no inky darknesses slithered. I exhaled with relief.

A narrow, rickety wooden stair, more ladder than step, circled a hundred and fifty feet of stone wall to the belfry. It was actually nailed to the mortar in places; there were neither braces nor suspension for it, and it looked about as safe as a house of cards. I wondered when the last time was that anyone had actually ascended it. Did bells need to be serviced? Or was it more likely the last time anyone had climbed those stairs was fifty years ago?

No matter. I wasn’t staying on the ground.

The rungs gave out in two places. Both times my heightened strength and reflexes saved me. Without Unseelie hammering through my veins, I would have slipped through the treads, plunged fifty feet, and broken something serious in the fall. Both times I was excruciatingly aware of the cold weight of the spear against my body. I hated having to carry while I was like this. I was a water balloon with a pin taped to my side, rolling across the floor, tempting fate.

Perching precariously on the last rung, I strained to reach the trapdoor, pushed it up, hoisted myself through, and glanced around. I was in a room directly beneath the spire. Overhead was a second platform similar to the one I was on, above which hung two great brass bells. The room I was in appeared to be a utility room of sorts, with boxes of tools, and a broom closet that was partially open. I moved to it, made sure it was Shade-free, and closed it. Slightly cracked closet doors give me the creeps.

I climbed the final ladder, ascending to the bells.

I was surprised to find the storm was far north of the city now; the clouds had broken and moonlight, though wan, illuminated the belfry. I clicked myself off so I wouldn’t be a blazing X-marks-the-spot-of-nubile-young-sidhe-seer. Four tall stone archways, twice as high as my head, framed the spire east, west, north, and south. I stepped into the one facing east, and shivered in the cold breeze, staring down at Dublin.

Fires burned in many places, and cars lay on their sides in the streets, and thousands upon thousands of rioters raged and looted, and destroyed. I watched them ebb and flow up and down city blocks. I watched a group of several thousand driven straight into a Dark Zone, forced into the waiting wall of pitch, where they were sucked dry of life down to a rind of human remains. I heard their cries of horror. I’ll hear them till I die.

I stood looking out over Dublin as darkness took the city, grid by grid, district by district as if, somewhere in Dublin’s basement, circuit breakers were being systematically thrown.

I remembered the night I’d curled in my window seat at BB&B, and my eyes had played a trick on me.

It was no trick now. Or rather, it was the greatest Halloween trick of all. There would be no treats handed out in Dublin tonight. This was what Derek O’Bannion had been talking about.

At 8:29 P.M., darkness reigned absolute.

Even the fires had been extinguished.

The sounds floating up were different now, the voices fewer, and frightened, not angry. Militant footfalls passed beneath me regularly. The Unseelie were still at it, collecting us, killing us. It took every ounce of self-control I possessed to not go down there to hunt in the darkness and try to save those humans that remained.

Out there, past a certain bookstore, a Dark Zone was spreading unchecked, taking over the city.

Dublin was without hope until 7:25 A.M.: Dawn.

I wondered what was happening with the MacKeltars. Was Barrons sabotaging that ritual, too? It made no sense to me. Why would Barrons want the walls down? Did Barrons want the walls down? Might the Orb have come to him already sabotaged, a prepackaged grenade, just waiting for the pin to be pulled? Where had he gotten it? Was I a hopeless fool, still trying to make excuses for him?

Were the walls already down? Was this the flood of Unseelie that had been freed from their prison, the ones wrecking the city? Or were they merely harbingers, and the worst was yet to come?

I dropped to the cold stone floor of the aperture, drew up my knees, folded my arms, and rested my chin on them, looking out at the city. My body bristled with the dark energy of Unseelie flesh, with the protective urges of a sidhe-seer, magnified by Fae steroids, demanding that I do something, anything.

I shuddered in the grip of my internal battle. I felt like I was crying, although no tears fell. I didn’t know yet that tears are not possible for a Fae, or for anyone under the influence of it.

Seeing BB&B surrounded by Shades, swallowed up by a Dark Zone, had been bad enough. Seeing all of Dublin dark was overload. How many people would be left by dawn to try to reclaim it? Any? Did Unseelie now guard wherever it was the utilities were controlled? Would we have to form armies to fight our way in and seize control from them? My world had changed tonight. I had no idea in how many ways, but I knew it was bad.

I sat in the cold stone opening, watching, waiting.

Three and a half hours later, the first of my questions was answered.

At eleven fifty-nine, the skin all over my body began to crawl. Literally. I scratched myself feverishly. Even deadened as my sidhe-seer senses were from my dark meal, I still felt it coming. No, the walls had not yet fallen. They were falling now.

The world was changing, becoming.

I felt a crushing sense of spatial distortion, stretching me, twisting, compressing. I was gigantic and paper-thin. I was small and round as a berry. I was inside out, my bones exposed. I was a bag of skin again.

Then the world felt suddenly much too large and horrifically skewed. The buildings below soared up at jagged, impossible angles, vanished down to pinpoints then erupted again. I watched as laws of physics were rewritten, as dimensions that were not meant to coexist crashed into each other and vied for dominance, contested for space to fill. I watched as the fabric of existence was ripped apart, and sewn back together again, aligned on diametrically opposing principles.

The universe screeched in protest as barriers collapsed, and realms collided; then the night was filled with another kind of screeching and I scrambled back, melting into the shadows, afraid of the shadows, but more afraid to turn my lights on, because the second of my questions was being answered: No, the Unseelie had not yet been freed from their prison. They were coming now, galloping down on a dark wind blowing from the horizon that had substance, the stuff of nightmares. Led by Death, Pestilence, Famine, and War?

They came.

I watched them come.

The ones who have no names, the abominations, those who are flawed yet live, those who hunger yet can never be sated, those who hate eternally, who need beyond bearing with their twisted limbs and psychopathic dreams, those who know but one joy: the hunt, the kill, the nectar of dust and ashes.

They soared over my head, high above the city, a vast, dark wave that stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, obliterating the sky, shrieking, howling, trumpeting their victory, free, free, free for the first time in nearly a million years! Free in a world warmed by sun, populated by billions of strong hearts beating, exploding with life, bursting with sex and drugs and music and glories untold that had been forbidden to them forever.

They came, the Wild Hunt, the winged ones, carrying their brethren in beaks and claws and other things that defied description, streaming from their icy hell, icing the world a slippery shining silvery frost in their wake.

I retreated into the belfry, my breath crystallizing on the bitterly cold air.

Then I retreated even farther, slinking to the lower platform, where I crept to the broom closet, pushed my way in between mops and pails, and shut the door.

Fingers numbed by cold, I shredded my T-shirt in the wan glow of one Click-It, stuffed pieces of it into every potentially telltale nook and cranny, then clicked myself on from head to toe until I filled the tiny room with light.

Heart pounding, eyes wide with terror, I backed into a corner, drew my knees to my chin, laid my spear harness on the floor beside me, and began the long vigil to Dawn.