“You got the Many-Mouthed Thing?” I exclaimed. “Way to go, Dani!”
“Thanks,” she said proudly. “He was tough to kill. You wouldn’t believe—”
“Bed. Now. ” Her roommate shoved Dani into the room and pulled the door shut behind her, remaining in the hall.
“You know she’s just standing on the other side of the door, listening,” I said. “What’s the point?”
“Stay out of our business, and get that thing out of here. ”
“Well said,” came the voice of steel I’d been waiting for.
Sidhe-seers fell back, allowing a silver-haired woman through. I’d wondered how long it would take her to get here. I’d wagered two or three minutes. It had taken her five. I’d wanted a few minutes alone with the sidhe-seers, unimpeded by Rowena, to clear my name. I’d said what I had to say to her followers. Now I had a few things to say to their leader.
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I glanced up at V’lane. He returned the look, face impassive, but his eyes were blades, hundreds of sharp shiny edges that could spill blood in the blink of a lethal eye.
With a rustle of her long white robes, the old woman stopped in front of me. Her age was impossible to pinpoint; she might be sixty, she might be eighty. Her long silvery hair was intricately plaited in a crown above a finely wrinkled face. Glasses rested on a small pointed nose, magnifying the fierce intensity and intelligence in her piercing blue eyes.
“Rowena,” I said. She was wearing what I guessed must be Grand Mistress garb: a white hooded robe, with emerald trim, and a misshapen shamrock—the symbol of our Order’s pledge to See, Serve, and Protect—emblazoned on the breast.
“How dare you?” Her voice was low, controlled, and furious.
“Oh, you should talk,” I said, in the same tight voice.
“I invited you to assume your place among us and waited for you to accept my offer. You didn’t. I could only conclude you had turned your back on us. ”
“I told you I would come and I was planning to, but a few things came up. ” Things like being hunted down, abducted, locked up, and tortured to death. “It was only a few days. ”
“It was a week and a half! Days matter now, even hours. ”
Had it really been a week and a half? Time flew when you were dying. “Did you give them orders to kill me if it was the only way they could get my spear?”
“Och, it was not I who spilled sidhe-seer blood today!”
“Oh, yes, it was. You sent them after me. You sent six of your women to attack me. I would never have killed any of them, and they know it. They saw it happen. Moira collided with my spear. It was a terrible accident. But it was just that—an accident. ”
She slipped her glasses from her nose, and let them rest on her chest, suspended by a chain of delicate seed pearls behind her neck. Without taking her gaze from my face, Rowena addressed her enclave. “She’s calling murder an accident, she is. Betraying us to our enemies and guiding them past our wards. This woman is our enemy, too. ”
“I have known where your kind hide for millennia,” V’lane purred. “Your wards are laughable. They could not prevent a nightmare of me from getting in. You stink of old age and death, human. Shall I weave you dreams of it, haunt you with them?”
Rowena stared past him. “I do not hear it speaking. ” To me, she said, “Give me the spear and I will permit the two of you to live. You will remain here with us. It will leave and never return. ”
Snow dusted my cheeks. Soft gasps filled the corridor. Some of the sidhe-seers held out their hands, palms upward, to catch the whirling, icy flakes. I guessed none of them had seen a Fae prince before.
V’lane’s voice was even colder than the unnatural snow caused by his displeasure. “Do you think to kill me with the sword you have hidden in your robes, old woman?”
I groaned inwardly. Great. Now he had both weapons. Should I Null him and try to take them back?
Rowena reached for the blade. I could have told her not to bother. V’lane raised the sword she sought in a flash of silver, and rested the razor-sharp tip in the wrinkled hollow of her throat.
The Grand Mistress of the sidhe-seers went very, very still.
“I know your kind, old woman. And you know mine. I could make you kneel before me. Would you like that? Would you like your lovely little sidhe-seers to watch you writhe naked in ecstasy before me? Shall I make them all writhe?”
“Stop it, V’lane,” I said sharply.
“She did not save you from me,” he said, reminding me of the time he’d nearly raped me in the museum. “She stood by and watched you suffer. I merely mean to—how do you say it?—return the favor. I will punish her for you. Perhaps then you will forgive me a little. ”
“I don’t want her punished, and it wouldn’t be a favor. Stop it. ”
“She interferes and offends you. I will eliminate her. ”
“You will not. We have a deal, remember?”
Sword poised at her throat, hilt balanced on his palm, he glanced at me. “Indeed, I remember. You are helping me aid your race. For the first time in seven thousand years, Fae and Man are working together for a common cause. It is a rare thing, and necessary if we both wish to survive with our worlds intact. ” He looked back at Rowena. “Our combined efforts will accomplish what all your sidhe-seers put together cannot. Do not make me angry, old woman, or I will abandon you to the Hell that is coming if MacKayla fails to find the Sinsar Dubh. Cease trying to steal her weapon from her, and start protecting her. She is the best hope for your race. Kneel. ”
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I didn’t care for that “best hope for your race” stuff. I test poorly. I’ve never functioned well under pressure.
He forced Rowena, white-lipped and shuddering, to her knees. I could see the battle raging within her small, sturdy frame. Her robe trembled, her lips peeled back from her teeth.
“Stop it,” I said again.
“In a moment. You will never again come before me bearing weapons, old woman, or I will forgo the promises I have made, and destroy you. Help her in her quest to help me, and I will let you live. ”
I sighed. I didn’t need to take a look around to realize that I had made no friends here tonight. In fact, I was pretty sure I’d made things worse. “Just give her back the sword, V’lane, and get us out of here. ”
“Your wish, my command. ” He took my hand and sifted us out.
The instant we rematerialized a few dozen yards from the Viper, I slammed him with the palms of both hands, willing him to freeze with every ounce of that foreign place inside my skull.
Unlike the first time I’d tried Nulling him the night we’d met, he stayed frozen longer than a few heartbeats. I was so surprised that I didn’t move myself, until he began to move, and I hit him again, putting everything I had into my desire to neutralize Fae. If intention was what counted, I was strong in that department. I’d been intending to grow up one day, for years. I had intentions down pat.
I timed it. He stayed frozen for seven seconds. I searched him quickly for my spear, patting him down, sending little “Stay frozen, you bastard” messages with my palms along the way.
No spear.
I stepped back and allowed him to unfreeze.
We stared at each other across the ten feet I’d put between us and I saw many things in his eyes. I saw my death. I saw my reprieve. I saw a thousand punishments in between, and knew the moment he decided to take no action against me.
“It’s really hard for you to view me as a valid life form, isn’t it?” I said. “What would make you take me more seriously? How many years would I have to live to count as whatever it is you credit as being worthwhile?”
“Longevity is not the defining factor. I do not credit most of my own race as worthwhile; a view born not of arrogance but of eons spent among those who are the worst of fools. Why did you Null me, sidhe-seer?�
�
“Because you majorly screwed up my plan in there. ”
“Then perhaps the next time you should confide in me the subtler nuances of your plan. I believed you wanted to establish the upper hand, and I endeavored to aid you in achieving that end. ”
“You made them think I was allied with you. You made them fear me. ”
“You are allied with me. And they should fear you. ”
My eyes narrowed. “Why should they fear me?”
He smiled faintly. “You have barely begun to understand what you are. ” Abruptly, he vanished.
Then his hand was in the curls at the back of my head, and his tongue was pushing in my mouth, and that hot, dark, frightening thing was piercing my tongue and embedding itself there, and I exploded in a violent orgasm.
He was ten feet away again, and I was sucking air like a fish out of water and floundering as badly. Shock waves of such intense eroticism rocked me that I was momentarily immobilized. If I’d tried to move, I would have collapsed.
“It only works once, MacKayla. I must replace my name on your tongue each time you use it. I assumed you did want it back?”
Furious, I nodded. Figured he’d not told me about that little catch.
He disappeared. This time he did not reappear.
I felt for my spear. It was back.
I stood still, waiting for the last of the aftershocks to pass. I wondered if I’d actually succeeded in Nulling V’lane tonight, or if he’d been faking it. I was growing increasingly paranoid, wondering if everyone was playing games with me. Surely anything that could move that fast could evade my sophomoric efforts at sidhe-seer magic. Or had I genuinely taken him by surprise? What might he gain by pretending? An ace in the hole? That maybe someday I’d really need to Null him, and that would be the day I’d find out it didn’t work, and never had?
I turned around and began walking toward the Viper. I hadn’t glanced in its direction since we’d materialized. I did now, and gasped.
The Wolf Countach was parked on the far side of it, deep in the shadows, and Jericho Barrons was leaning back against it, arms crossed over his chest, dressed from head to toe in black, every bit as dark and still as the night.
I blinked. He was still there. Hard to peel apart from the darkness, but there.
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“What in the . . . how . . . where did you come from?” I sputtered.
“The bookstore. ”
Duh. Sometimes his answers make me want to strangle him. “Did V’lane know you were standing there?”
“I think the two of you were a little too busy to see me. ”
“What are you doing here?”
“Making sure you didn’t need backup. If you’d told me you were taking your fairy little boyfriend, I wouldn’t have wasted my time. I resent it when you waste my time, Ms. Lane. ”
He got in his car and drove away.
I followed him most of the way back to Dublin. Near the outskirts, he kicked his horses into a gallop I couldn’t match, and I lost him.
SIX
It was a quarter till four when I drove the Viper down the back alley behind the bookstore. The predawn hours between two and four are the hardest on me. For the past few weeks, I’ve been waking up every night at 2:17 A. M. on the dot, as if it’s my official preprogrammed time slot to have an anxiety attack, and the world will fall apart, even worse than it already is, if I don’t pace my bedroom and worry it safe.
The bookstore is unbearably quiet then, and it’s not hard to imagine that I’m the only person alive in the world. Most of the time I can handle the mess I call my life, but in the butt-crack of the night even I get a little depressed. I usually end up sorting through my wardrobe, meager as it is, or paging through fashion magazines, trying not to think. Putting outfits together soothes me. Accessorizing is balm to my soul. If I can’t save the world, I sure can make it pretty.
But last night, haute couture from four different countries couldn’t distract me, and I’d ended up snuggled under a blanket on the window seat with a dry volume about the history of the Irish race, including several lengthy, pedantic essays about the five invasions and the mythic Tuatha Dé Danaan, cracked open on my lap, staring out the back window of my bedroom at the sea of rooftops, watching the Shades slink and slither out of the corner of my eye.
Then my vision had played a trick on me, and blacked out the horizon as far as I could see, extinguishing every light, blanketing Dublin in absolute darkness.
I’d blinked, trying to dispel the illusion, and finally was able to see lights again, but the illusory blackout had seemed so real that I was afraid it was a premonition of things to come.
I pulled the Viper into the garage and parked in its allotted space, too tired to even halfheartedly appreciate the GT parked next to it. When the floor trembled beneath my heel, I stomped my foot and told it to shut up.
I opened the door to step out into the alley, flinched, slammed the door shut again, and stood there on the cusp of hyperventilating.
The garage where Barrons houses his fabulous car collection is located directly behind the bookstore, across an alley approximately twenty-five feet wide. Multiple floodlights on the exteriors illuminate a path between the two, affording safe passage from the Shades on even the darkest night. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet devised a means of perpetual light. Bulbs burn out, batteries die.
Several of the lights on the façade of the garage had outlived their usefulness during the night: not enough that I’d noticed in the glare of the Viper’s headlights and the soft spill coming from the bookstore’s rear windows, but enough to have created a sliver of opportunity for a truly enterprising Shade, and unfortunately, I had one of those shadowing my doorstep.
I was tired, and I’d been sloppy. I should have looked up and checked the spotlights on the buildings the moment they’d come into view. Thanks to the burnt-out bulbs, a thin line of darkness now ran down the center of the alley, where the light cast by the adjacent buildings failed to meet, and the massive Shade that was as obsessed with me as I was with it had managed to pour itself into the crack, creating an inky black wall that soared three stories high and extended the entire length of the bookstore, barring me from crossing the alley.
I’d opened the door to find it towering over me, a greedy, dark tsunami, waiting to come crashing down and drown me in its lethal embrace. Although I was 99. 9% sure it couldn’t do that—that it was trapped in its menacing wall-shape by the light on both sides of it—there was that petrifying . 1% doubt in my mind. Each time I’d thought I’d known its limits, I’d been wrong. Most Shades recoiled from the mere possibility of the palest, most diffuse light. Just waving one of my flashlights in the direction of the Dark Zone usually caused them to scatter.
But not this one. If light was pain, this enormous, aggressive Shade was getting tougher, its pain threshold increasing. Like me, it was evolving. I only wished I was as dangerous.
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I reached inside my jacket, fisted a flashlight in each hand, and yanked the door open again.
One of my flashlights wouldn’t turn on. Dead batteries. When it rains, it pours. I tossed it and grabbed a second from my waistband. Two more came out with it, crashed to the ground, clattered down the steps and spun out into the alley, unlit, wasted.
I had two left. This was ridiculous. I needed a better way to keep myself safe than toting unwieldy flashlights with me everywhere I went.
I turned on another, and ordered myself to step out onto the pavement.
My feet didn’t obey.
I aimed one of my flashlights directly at it. The inky wall recoiled and a hole exploded in it the exact diameter of the beam. I could see it was barely an inch thick.
I heaved a sigh of relief. It still couldn’t tolerate direct light.
I studied it. I wasn’t completely barred from getting to the boo
kstore. I could walk down to the left, parallel to the towering, dark cloud until I reached the end of the building, where the lights of the greengrocer next door prevented it from spreading further, then go around to the front door and let myself in.
Problem was I wasn’t sure I had the nerve, and I wasn’t entirely sure it would be smart. What if, when I was nearly to the end of the Shade-wall, the light on the grocer’s building burned out? Normally, I’d relegate the odds of that happening to the realm of the absurd, but if there was one thing I’d learned over the past few months, it was that absurd really meant “more likely to happen to MacKayla Lane. ” I wasn’t about to risk it. I had my flashlights, but I couldn’t shine them on every part of my body at once, and I certainly couldn’t shine them on all of it.
I could call V’lane. He’d helped me get rid of Shades once before. Of course with V’lane there was always a price, and I would have to let him embed his name in my tongue again.
I considered my cell phone. It had three numbers programmed in: Barrons, IYCGM and IYD.
IYCGM, which was Barrons’ not-so-subtle shorthand for If You Can’t Get Me, would be answered by the mysterious Ryodan who—although Barrons contended he talked too much—hadn’t confided anything useful to me in our recent, brief phone conversation. I had no desire to lure anyone else close to the overly aggressive Shade. I wanted a few days reprieve between deaths on my conscience.
IYD was If You’re Dying, and I wasn’t.
I was sick of depending on others to save me. I wanted to take care of myself. It was only a few hours until dawn. The Shade could stay out there all night for all I cared.
I stepped back into the garage, closed and locked the door, flipped on the brightest tier of interior lights, considered the collection a moment, then crawled into the Maybach to sleep.
It occurred to me, as I drifted off, that my feelings about the car had certainly changed. I no longer cared that it had formerly belonged to the Irish mobster Rocky O’Bannion, from whom I’d stolen my spear and whom I was indirectly responsible for killing, along with fifteen of his henchmen, in the very alley where the monster Shade now lurked. I was just grateful it was comfortable to sleep in.
We expect Evil to announce itself.
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