I was the wrong gender.
Dani got kudos for trying. She freeze-framed, but I could have told her not to bother. This one sifted. I knew because its male counterpart had once sifted down a street at me and, if not for Barrons, would have killed me.
The Unseelie vanished into thin air, leaving Dani standing a block down the street from me, sword drawn back, seething at having lost her kill. “What the feck was that, Mac?” she said. “I never seen one before. You?”
“Barrons called it the Gray Man. We killed it. I thought it was one of a kind, but we just saw the Gray Woman.”
“What’s her specialty?” Dani looked morbidly fascinated. I’d been that way once. Obsessed with all the terrible ways I might die at an Unseelie’s hands. Or claws. Or hundreds of sharp-toothed mouths, like Alina.
“They have a taste for human beauty. Barrons says they destroy what they can never have, devour it like a delicacy. They cast a glamour of physical perfection and choose the most attractive humans to seduce. They feed off them through touch, leeching their beauty through the open sores in their hands until they’ve stolen all there is to steal, leaving their prey as hideous as they are.”
They didn’t kill their victims but left them alive to suffer, and sometimes returned to visit them, drawing some sick sustenance from their horror and misery. I’d watched the Gray Man feed twice. He’d been especially terrifying to me because, for years, I’d shamelessly used my looks to my advantage, flirting for better tips, batting my eyelashes at a traffic cop, feigning sultry-blond stupidity to get my way. Before I’d come to Dublin, I thought my looks were pretty much the only power I had, and losing them would have made me feel worthless.
“Barrons says the victims inevitably commit suicide,” I told her, “because they can’t face living, looking like they do.”
“We’ll bag the bitch,” Dani said coolly.
I smiled, but it faded quickly. We’d arrived at our destination, and I stared, spirits sinking. I wanted answers and I’d been counting heavily on getting some here, but 939 Rêvemal was a complete disappointment.
A few months ago, Chester’s elegant granite, marble, and polished-wood façade would have drawn the upper crust of the city’s bored rich and jaded beautiful, but, like the rest of Dublin, it had been brought to its knees on Halloween, and the once-sophisticated three-story building was a wreck. Stained-glass windows crunched beneath our boots as we skirted riot debris. Marble entry pillars were deeply scored by gash marks that looked as if they’d been made by something with talons of steel. Lavish French-style gas lamps had been ripped from the sidewalk and tossed in a twisted pile, blocking the club’s entrance, as if whatever Unseelie was responsible had held some special hatred for the place.
The club sign dangled by cables in front of the pile. It had been smashed to bits. The front and sides of the building were heavily covered with graffiti. Between the lamps and the club sign, there was no getting into the building through the front door.
And no reason to.
Chester’s was as deserted as the rest of the city.
I punched my palm with a gloved fist. I was sick of dead ends and nonanswers. “Let’s go hunt the Gray Woman. She’s got to be around here somewhere,” I growled.
“Why?” Dani looked at me blankly.
“Because I’m frustrated and pissed off, that’s why.”
“But I ain’t ever been in a club,” she protested. “I even dressed for it.”
“That isn’t a club, Dani. It’s a destroyed building.”
“There’s all kinds of stuff happening here!”
“Like what? Shades having a party inside all that rubble?”
She laughed. “Aw, man, I forget you’re deaf! You can’t hear the music. It’s got a cool beat, different from most I’ve heard. I been listening to it for blocks now. Down, Mac. We gotta go down.”
* * *
Dani was right: The music was different. But as I would soon find out, it wasn’t the only thing different about Chester’s. In fact, nothing was normal. The club would shift all my paradigms and slam home the many changes the world had gone through while I’d been otherwise … occupied.
The entrance to the club was now around back: an inconspicuous battered metal door in the ground that looked like a forgotten cellar entry. If Dani hadn’t been able to hear the music, I would have walked right past the place and never suspected a thing.
The door creaked as it opened on a narrow black maw. I sighed. I hate being underground, but somehow I keep ending up there. I unhooked the MacHalo from my pack, punched on all the lights, and strapped it on my head. Dani did the same, and we descended the ladder in a blaze of light, opened a second trapdoor, and descended a second ladder. We found ourselves in the middle of an industrial foyer of sorts—tastefully decorated in the height of urban chic—facing tall double doors.
I still couldn’t hear any music. The doors had to be seriously thick. I flexed the sidhe-seer place in my head, wishing I had some idea what to expect, but the channel was still full of static, just louder.
Dani slanted me a narrow-eyed look. “Don’t you kinda think there’d be guards or something?”
“I think making it through the Dublin night alive and figuring out where this place is might be all the guards it needs,” I said dryly. I shoved at the door. It didn’t budge. “That and getting the door open.” I slipped off my MacHalo and strapped it, still blazing, onto my pack. I tousled my hair to get rid of hat-head.
Dani joined me, and together we shoved open the door and got our first look at Chester’s.
I love you so much you must kill me now …
The music was so loud, the bass vibrated my bones. They were playing Marilyn Manson’s “If I Was Your Vampire,” but it had been rerecorded to a completely different beat—a little dreamier, a little darker, a thing I wouldn’t have thought possible.
I stood in the doorway and stared.
Here was the new Temple Bar. Gone underground.
Chester’s: slick, chic, the height of urban sophistication married to industrial muscle. Chrome and glass, black and white. Coolly erotic, basely sexual. Manhattan posh wed to Irish mob.
Everything’s black, no turning back …
The place was huge, the tables packed. The tiered dance floors were crammed with hot bodies. It was standing room only. I was astonished to see that so many humans had survived and were still in Dublin—partying, at that. Under other circumstances, it might have been a pleasant surprise.
These so weren’t other circumstances.
Dani grabbed my arm. It would bruise. “Un-fecking-real,” she breathed.
I nodded. I’m a sidhe-seer. To me, things are simple: There are two races—human and Fae. I work with V’lane because I have to in order to save my people. I’ll work with the Queen of the Fae for the same reason. But it’s programmed into my genes, coded into my blood, that these two races were always intended to live separately, and it’s my job to keep things that way.
Chester’s was a sidhe-seer’s nightmare.
It was crammed with Fae and humans—mingling.
No, it was worse than that. They were socializing.
Oh, who was I kidding? Young, attractive humans by the dozens were flirting outrageously with Unseelie. On one of the dance floors, half a dozen girls were licking a Rhino-boy’s sharp yellowed tusks with pretty pink tongues. His beady eyes gleamed; he was grunting like a pig and stamping a hoof.
On another dance floor, a blond had pulled up her shirt and was rubbing her bare breasts against a tall, dark faceless Fae, while two other women tried to push her away so they could have their turn.
In a booth, a shirtless male waiter, showcasing his chiseled abs with heavily oiled skin, was caressing the … uh … udders of a thing I’d never seen before and hoped I wouldn’t again.
Beside me, Dani stiffened. “Ew. Just ew! That’s disgusting.” She made a gagging noise in the back of her throat. Then she snickered. “Sure gives a whole new m
eaning to the phrase ‘I gave her the finger,’ don’t it?”
“What? Where?”
She pointed.
A woman was sucking erotically on the tip of a Rhino-boy’s stumpy finger—which he’d given to her by cutting it off his hand.
I inhaled sharply as, the reality of what was going on here smacked me between the eyes. Humans weren’t just cozying up to the newest exotic big-bad because it was something different and exciting.
As Dani had feared, Unseelie were the new vamps.
My generation has an incurable, bottomless obsession with the undead. The heavily romanticized version, of course: the defanged fangbanger, not the real deal, which is really dead and really kills you.
As I watched, the woman bit down hard and began chewing with an expression of near-religious ecstasy.
These humans were eating Unseelie—not to fight them off and reclaim our world, but for the rush of it.
Unseelie flesh—the new drug.
“They’re trading sex for the high,” I said flatly.
“Looks like,” Dani said. “Let’s just hope those skanks can’t get knocked up.”
The thought was too awful to contemplate.
A young Goth-girl with feverishly bright eyes approached. “You better hurry! The song’s almost over!”
“So?” Dani said.
Goth-girl looked her up and down. “Not a bad idea. Gangly and awkward might just intrigue. They like experimenting.”
I didn’t have to look at Dani to know her hand had gone inside her long coat to her sword. “Easy, Dani,” I said softly. “You’re not.”
But the girl was already going on, vapidly intense. “You two must be new. They play it once a night, and while it’s playing you can try to persuade one of them to choose you. Otherwise, you aren’t allowed to approach them. Competition’s fierce. It can take weeks to get one to notice you.”
“Choose you for what?” I encouraged.
“Where’ve you been all this time? To make you immortal like them. If you eat enough sanctified flesh, you become immortal, too. Then you get to go to Faery with them!”
I narrowed my eyes. Did eating Unseelie really change you? Or were the dark Fae capitalizing on a lie? I was inclined to believe the latter. Mallucé had eaten it constantly, long-term, and had never become immortal. “How much is enough?” I fished.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Nobody knows yet. It keeps wearing off. But we will. I’ve had it four times! It’s incredible! And the sex—OMG! See you in Faery,” she chirped brightly, and dashed off, and I didn’t have to hear anyone else say it—although I would hear it so many times over the next few months that I’d want to kill somebody—to realize I’d just heard one of the many strange new buzz phrases in this strange new world.
“This is worse than an IFP,” Dani muttered. “I feel like I’m stuck in an IFCF.”
I raised a brow.
“Interdimensional Fairy Cluster Fuck,” she said sourly. “Don’t they see what’s happening? Don’t they know the Unseelie are destroying our world? Don’t they see we’re gonna die out if we don’t stop them?”
Apparently they didn’t care. I needed a drink. Badly. Pushing through the crowd, I headed for the bar.
CHAPTER 16
A heavily industrialized version of Trent Reznor’s “Closer” was playing by the time I grabbed a bar stool and barked at the bartender’s back that I needed a shot of top-shelf whiskey and make it fast.
I want to feel you from the inside …
Due to recent experience, I had a far greater understanding of the darker half of the Fae race than I’d ever wanted. I knew the emptiness that drove them. I’d been food for their bottomless hunger.
Chester’s was full of the Unseelie King’s abominations, and humans were welcoming them, competing to get noticed by them, willing to let them “feel them from the inside” if that was what it took to get their fix, seduced by the promise of heightened strength and senses and the temptation of immortality. I’d never understood why anyone would want to live forever. It had always seemed to me that death lent life a certain poignancy, a necessary tension.
“Maybe two billion of us needed to die,” I muttered. I was in a foul mood.
“I’ll take one, too.” Dani hoisted herself onto a stool beside me.
“Nice try.”
“You ever gonna let me grow up? Or you gonna be like everybody else?”
I looked at her, then amended my original order to two shots of Macallan, one-hundred-proof. Daddy had done the same thing to me at her age. Tough love.
Shot glasses clinked on the polished chrome bar top, accompanied by a deep “Hey, beautiful girl.”
My gaze jerked to the bartender and I did a double take. It was the dreamy-eyed boy that I’d first met while scouring a museum for OOPs and had later been surprised to find working with Christian at Trinity College’s ALD, the Ancient Languages Department. My first impulse was pleasure that he’d survived. It was squelched by suspicion. Coincidences make me nervous.
“Small world,” I said coolly.
“Big enough.” He flashed an easy smile. “Most of the time.”
“New job?”
“City changes. Jobs, too. You?”
“Unemployed. Nobody buying books.” They were all out hunting one.
“Different look. Going dark, beautiful girl?”
I touched my hair.
“More than the ‘do.”
“Enough to survive.”
“Hard to say when enough’s enough.”
“Look who’s working where.”
“Look who’s drinking where.”
“I can handle myself. You?”
“Always.” He gave me another of those smiles and moved down the bar, tossing glasses, pouring high, fast, and flashy.
Beside me, Dani choked, spit, wheezed, and began to cough uncontrollably. When I patted her back, she jerked away and skewered me with a glare. “What are you trying to do? Kill me?” she squeaked, when she could speak. “That’s petrol! Who would wanna drink that?”
I laughed. “You develop a taste for it.”
“I think I mighta been born with all the tastes I need!” She pilfered a handful of cherries from across the bar, crammed them in her mouth, and hopped down from her stool. “Grown-ups are weird,” she said darkly.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“Take a look around.”
I didn’t like the idea and told her so.
“C’mon, Mac, I’m superfast and superstrong. Nobody can touch me. I’m the one should be worried about leaving you alone, slowpoke.”
Put that way, she had a point.
“Gimme room to breathe, Mac.”
She was fidgeting from foot to foot, and the look in her eyes said she was about to whiz off whether I said okay or not. I had a sudden unwanted understanding of Rowena: How do you mother a kid who’s faster than you, stronger than you, and quite possibly smarter? “Don’t go far, and not for long, deal?”
“Deal.”
“And be careful!” Wind ruffled my hair. She was already gone.
“Who’s the kid?” The dreamy-eyed boy was back. A shot clinked to the chrome counter. I tossed it back, grimaced, gasped. Fire exploded in my gut.
“Friend.”
“Good to have in times like these.”
“How’d you find this place?”
“Same way as you, I imagine.”
“Doubt it.”
“Ever find Christian?”
He was referring to the day I’d called the ALD dozens of times, hunting for the young Scot. I’d been worried sick because Barrons had “Voiced” me into revealing that the Keltars were spying on him, and I was afraid Barrons was going to hunt Christian down and hurt him. “Yes.” I didn’t see any point in telling him I’d lost him again, perhaps permanently.
“Seen him lately?”
“No. You?”
“No. I’d like to.”
“Why?” Susp
icion was me.
“Friends—good to have in times like these.”
“What do you think of this place?” Why was he here? Another pretty boy in search of immortality?
“Life and death, beautiful girl. Been about it since the beginning. Will be ‘til the end.”
“What’s your poison? You want to live forever, too?”
“I’d take some peace and quiet. A beautiful girl.” He laughed. “A good book.”
“Man after my own heart. I love a good book, too.” In the mirror above the bar, something caught my eye. I tensed. In a booth behind me, the Gray Woman was holding hands with the well-muscled, gorgeous waiter who’d earlier been flirting with the udder-thing. I could see both what she was and what she was making him see. To him, she was a Fae Princess, inhumanly beautiful, mind-numbingly sexual, gazing at him with rapt adoration.
Only I could see the open, oozing lesions with which she caressed him, with which she was sucking his life away, leaving rotting teeth, rheumy eyes, parchment-thin gray skin. She was making short work of him. He wouldn’t last the hour.
My hand went to the shoulder holster beneath my coat.
“Watch yourself, beautiful girl,” the dreamy-eyed boy said softly.
I tore my gaze away from the mirror and stared at him. He was eyeing my coat, watching my hand move beneath it. He couldn’t possibly know what I was reaching for.
“What are you talking about?”
He looked behind me. “They’re here, and … well, you’ll figure it out.”
Big hands bit down on my shoulders. There were two men behind me. I could feel them. Big, electric, powerful men.
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