“Not a word, Ms. Lane.”
“—you might have helped him kill my sister?”
“You’re stretching.”
“Am I? What else did you teach him?”
“A few minor Druid arts.”
“In exchange for what?”
“What did Darroc say? Did he promise you your sister back again?”
“Of course.”
“And did you tell your rapist you’d think about it?”
“He said he was coming back for me in three days. And that I’d better be willing.”
“But you,” Barrons said softly, stepping closer, “ah, my dear Ms. Lane, you think you have nothing more to lose. When do these three days expire?”
“That’s what really pisses me off. I don’t know. He was annoyingly vague.”
Barrons looked at me, then a faint smile curved his lips, and for a moment I thought he might laugh. “The nerve. Threatening you and not being precise about it.”
“My sentiments exactly.”
The faint smile was gone. His face was cold. “You will not leave my side again.”
I sighed. “I was pretty sure you’d say that.”
“Do you want him to take you again?”
“No.”
“Then you won’t be stupid. You won’t go dashing off into danger at precisely the most inopportune moment for some seemingly noble cause, only to get abducted by the villain, through no fault of your own, because you had to do the honorable thing; after all, aren’t some things worth dying for?” he said dryly.
I cocked my head. “I didn’t know you read romances.”
“I know humans.”
“Ha. You finally admit you aren’t one.”
“I admit nothing. You want truths from me? See me when you look at me.”
“Why did you smash the birthday cake I got you into the ceiling?”
“You were trying to celebrate the day I was born. Come, Ms. Lane. I have something to show you.”
He turned and moved into the rear of the store without looking back to see if I was following.
I followed. Major OOPs, dead ahead.
“Who’d you have to kill to get the third one?” I stared. Three of the stones necessary to “reveal the true nature” of the Sinsar Dubh glowed an eerie bluish-black on the desk in his study.
He looked at me. Do you really want to know? his dark gaze mocked.
“Scratch that question,” I said hurriedly. “V’lane has the fourth, right?” On that note, I wondered where V’lane had gone and why. What had happened to him in that warded corridor? Why had he hissed at me, and what had caused him pain? I’d expected him to sift in shortly after it had happened and either explain or be seriously ticked off at me.
I believe so.
“But we don’t know where.”
Not at the moment.
“Quit talking without talking. You have a mouth; use it.” I resented the implied intimacy of our wordless dialogues.
“I was using my mouth a few days ago. So were you.”
“Quit reminding me,” I growled.
“I thought we were past unnecessary pretenses. I stand corrected.”
I moved toward the desk, both drawn and repelled by the power the rune-covered stones were throwing off. I recognized the one I’d stolen from Mallucé’s lair. It was the smallest of the three. The second was twice its size, the third even larger. They had sharply hewn edges, as if they’d been chiseled with great force from some substance with vastly different chemical composites and universal laws than anything on our world. Arranged in close proximity to one another, each of the three emitted a delicate crystalline chiming sound of different duration and pitch. The sound was hauntingly beautiful. And intensely disturbing. Like wind chimes from hell.
“You said that if all four were brought together, they would sing a Song of Making. The Song? Or a lesser one? Are there lesser songs?”
“I don’t know.”
I fidgeted. Barrons admitting to ignorance disturbed me as much as the sound coming from the stones.
I reached out to touch one of them. As my hand passed above it, its banked glow flared so bright it hurt my eyes. I drew my hand back.
“Interesting,” Barrons murmured. “Are you up for an experiment?”
I looked at him sharply. “You want to try to corner the Book with three.” To study it, see how it might react and if anything further would be revealed.
“You game?”
I considered it a moment, remembering what had happened the last time he and I had gone chasing the Book.
The thing had abruptly changed course and headed straight for us. It had gotten Barrons in its thrall. It had gone for Barrons, not me. There was nothing wrong with me. I was fine. I was the same Mac I’d always been. Daddy himself had said that I was as good as they came. Everybody knew how wise Jack Lane was. “Sure,” I said.
While he gathered the stones and began wrapping them in velvet cloths, I stared at the Unseelie mirror. It had been standing right beneath my nose in his study for months, but I’d never once sensed its Fae presence and that it was part of a vast network of Unseelie Hallows. It was closed now, masquerading as a perfectly normal mirror.
“How does it work?” I asked.
He continued wrapping the stones in silence.
“Oh, come on,” I said impatiently. “It’s not like I’m trying to pry into your head to uncover any of your precious secrets. The Fae are screwing up my planet and I’m going to kick their asses off it. All knowledge, like weapons—good. So, spill.”
He didn’t look up from what he was doing, but I could see a faint smile playing at his lips.
“Sometimes I think you refuse to tell me things just to irritate me.”
“But you never do anything just to irritate me,” he said dryly.
“Not when it involves something that might be important. What if I get trapped somewhere with no escape but a Silver? I wouldn’t even know how to use it.”
“You think you’ve got the balls to step into one of those things?”
“You might be surprised,” I said coolly.
“Not if you do everything like you fuck.”
I wasn’t going to let him discombobulate me by bringing up sex. “I want to learn, Barrons. Teach me. If I knew a fraction of what you know, my odds of surviving would be way higher.”
“Perhaps you’d no longer want to.”
“Would you just cooperate?” I said, exasperated.
“I do not know that word,” he mocked in falsetto.
“I’m trying to arm myself so I can fight like I fuck,” I snapped. “But you refuse to help.” I hated it when he reminded me of when I’d been Pri-ya.
“I was beginning to wonder if you were ever going to say that word again, Ms. Lane. Time was, you had no reservations. ‘Fuck me, Jericho Barrons,’ you’d say. Morning, noon, and night.”
There are two kinds of verbal honey a Southern woman can slather on her words when she feels like it: the kind that attracts flies, melts men’s hearts, and firms up all their other parts, or the kind that makes a man want to curl up and die. I employed the latter. “I didn’t know getting you to talk was so easy, or I’d have said it five minutes ago. Fuck you, Jericho Barrons.”
He raised his head and laughed, teeth flashing white in his face. I dug my nails into my palms.
“The Silvers,” he said, when he’d stopped laughing, “once numbered in the tens of thousands, but some say they’re now infinite. Fae things tend to—”
“I know. Take on a life of their own. Change, evolve in strange ways.”
“When the Seelie King first made them—”
“Unseelie King,” I corrected.
“He was Seelie first. And quit interrupting me if you want me to keep talking. When the Seelie King first made them, they formed a network of absolute precision and predictability. It was a brilliant invention. They were the Fae’s first method of travel between dimensions. Entering one of them inst
antly deposited you in the Hall of All Days.”
“What’s the Hall of All Days?”
“The Hall is … well, think of it as an airport, the main arrival and departure point of the entire network. It’s lined with mirrors that connect to mirrors on other worlds, in countless other dimensions and times. One can stand in the Hall, examine the individual glasses, and choose from hundreds of thousands of places to go. It was the Fae version of a … quantum travel agency.”
“V’lane told me the king originally created the Silvers for his concubine, not for other Fae at all. He said the king created them so she could live inside the mirrors, never aging, and have other worlds to explore until he found a way to make her Fae like him.” I wondered again what had happened to V’lane earlier this afternoon. Even though I knew I couldn’t count on it, I felt a little naked without his name in my tongue.
“Did he also tell you that when the queen felt the power of the king’s creation spring into existence, she demanded to know what he’d done, and that, to allay her suspicions because she hated his concubine so much, he had to pretend he’d made the Silvers as a gift for her?”
“V’lane said the king gave the queen only part of them.”
“Unfortunately, he had to give the queen the nexus that contained the Hall of All Days. His concubine got only a small portion of what he’d made for her, sealed off from the rest. To compensate, he built his concubine the fantastical White Mansion, high on a hill, a house of infinite rooms, terraces, and gardens. He made that part of the Silvers accessible only through mirrors that hung in his own private chambers.”
“So there are two separate parts to the Silvers.” This was a lot to absorb. “One is a collection of possibly infinite mirrors that connect to other dimensions, worlds, and times, from the main ‘airport’ in the Hall of All Days. The other is a sealed-off smaller network that’s where the concubine lived. I guess once she died, that part was never used again,” I mused. The Silvers were fascinating stuff. I couldn’t imagine being able to step inside a mirror and instantly be transported to some other world or time.
“V’lane told you a lot.” Barrons sounded irritated.
“He tells me more than you do. Makes me wonder who to trust.”
“Motto to live by: Never trust a fairy. Did he tell you how the king’s concubine died?”
“He said she hated what the king had become so much that she left him the only way she could. By ending her own life.”
“Did he bother pointing out that everything the king had done, he’d done for her? Did she think of that before she decided to kill herself? Did it ever occur to her that sometimes a willingness to turn dark for someone else might just be a fucking virtue?”
“It doesn’t sound like he went dark for her. It sounds like he was ticked off that she was going to die and willing to do anything to keep her.”
“Perspective, Ms. Lane. Get some.”
The Lord Master had said the same thing. “You think the concubine should have appreciated that her lover turned into an obsessed jackass and overlooked the horrific results of his experiments? Maybe if instead of spending all his time—wasn’t it tens of thousands of years she waited? — trying to make her live forever, he’d just loved her for the mortal lifetime she had, she’d have been happy!”
Barrons looked at me sharply. “The Silvers are a mess now,” he continued abruptly. “There’s nothing predictable about them.”
“Because Cruce cursed them. Who exactly is Cruce?” I kept hearing his name, but that was all. I didn’t even know whether he was Seelie or Unseelie. “And what was the curse?”
“Irrelevant. He’s dead.” Barrons placed the stones in a black leather pouch covered with delicately glistening runes and tied it with a leather drawstring. The moment he sealed the bag, the chiming ceased and the stones fell silent. “But his curse will never die. It corrupted the Silvers irrevocably. What was once an easily navigated network is now a place of complete chaos. Now some Silvers take you to the Hall, but others don’t. Worlds and dimensions fractured and are splintered with IFPs. Some of the main mirrors shattered, others sprang into existence where they were never supposed to be. Many of the two-way Silvers in the Hall are now one-way tickets to wastelands. The looking glasses themselves changed, casting illusory reflections. The Hall of All Days collided with the concubine’s realm, with parts of Faery, and some of it even crashed into the Dreaming.”
“The Dreaming!” I exclaimed. “There’s actually a Fae realm with that name?”
“It doesn’t belong to the Fae. The Dreaming is far older and belongs to no one. It’s where all hopes, fantasies, illusions, and nightmares of sentient beings come to be or go to rest, whichever you prefer to believe. Complicating things further, Cruce’s curse caused tears in the walls of the Unseelie prison, and now the Silvers connect to the prison, as well.”
“Well, then, why haven’t the Unseelie escaped before?”
“Some have. But the Unseelie prison is so enormous that few discovered the rifts in the walls, and the Silvers are so impossible to navigate that only a handful ever managed to find their way into your world. One could stay lost inside the network of the Silvers forever. They’re no longer a realm of the present, but hold the residue of the past. Some say they’re also projections of all the possibles, that they really have become the Hall of All Days that have ever been and ever will be. There are no assurances. The Fae avoid them completely.”
“But not you. And not the LM.”
“There are ways—Druid arts that can seal off portions of the Silvers if used wisely, affording a degree of control over temporary transport within a limited space. Depending on the Silver you have to work with, it is not without … discomfort. The cold in some of them is difficult to bear.”
I knew that. I’d seen him step from it, coated with crystals of iced blood. I’d felt the gust of icy soul-numbing air. “And you killed the woman you carried out of the Silver why?” My voice was spun sugar on a knife’s edge.
“Because I wanted to.” He matched my sugary lightness of tone. “Didn’t expect that, did you, Ms. Lane? Not only an answer but an incrimination, in your book. Come,” he said, and his dark gaze glittered with sudden impatience. “The night won’t last forever.”
“What’s the Unseelie prison like?” I wanted to know if it was the cold place I sometimes went to in my dreams. If so, how could I possibly know of it?
“Multiply the chill in my Silver by infinity.”
“But what does it look like?”
“No sun. No grass. No life. Just cliffs and cliffs of ice. Cold. Darkness. Despair. The air reeks of it. There are three colors there: white, black, and blue. The fabric of the place lacks the necessary chemical compositions for any other colors to exist. Your skin would be as white as bleached bones. Your eyes, dull black. Your lips, blue. Nothing grows. There is only hunger without sustenance. Lust without satisfaction. Pain without end. There are monsters there that have no desire to leave, because they are such monsters.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked as we headed out back to, I assumed, select an incredible car from Barrons’ incredible collection.
“Enough. Tell me, Ms. Lane, if you could go back to the day Alina was leaving for Trinity and stop her, would you?”
“Absolutely,” I said without hesitation.
“Knowing that this would all play out anyway? The Book was already loose. This was going to happen whether or not she came to Dublin. Just a different variation on the same destructive theme. Would you have kept her in Ashford to keep her alive, never learned what you are, and most likely died in complete ignorance at the hands of some Fae?”
“Isn’t there a third option?” I said irritably. “What’s behind door number three? Haven’t you ever seen Let’s Make a Deal?”
He gave me a look.
Obviously not.
“What are we driving tonight?” I asked, as I reached for the doorknob.
CHAPTER 23
&
nbsp; I am not riding that.” There were times when I had to put my foot down with Barrons. This was one of them.
“Shut up and get on.”
If I’d shaken my head any more violently, my neck would have snapped.
“On. Now.”
“In your dreams.”
Our “ride” was a Royal Hunter.
Barrons had somehow gotten a Hunter to land in the alley between BB&B and the garage—one of those terrifying beasts whose primary purpose was to eradicate my kind from the face of the earth. Admittedly, it was one of the smaller ones—the size of a narrow two-story house rather than a five-story apartment complex—and it wasn’t throwing off that massively deadly feel of the ones Jayne had shot at, but still, it was a Royal Hunter, the caste responsible for murdering countless sidhe-seers for thousands of years. And he expected me to touch it?
I hadn’t sensed it because it was somehow … dampened.
It crouched there, blacker than pitch, looking all Satanic, with leathery wings and fiery eyes, horns and a forked tail. Its labored exhalations puffed gusts of smoke down the alley into what used to be the biggest Dark Zone in the city. The space between the bookstore and the garage was twenty degrees colder than the rest of the night.
I reached inside my coat for my spear.
“Don’t you dare,” said Barrons. “It’s under my control.”
We stared at each other.
“What did you have to offer a Hunter to get it to do this? How does one mercenary pay another?”
“You should know. How are your precious principles lately?”
I scowled at him. After a moment, I released my spear.
“It can cover the city far more quickly than we can in a car. Your … IFPs, as you call them, don’t bother it, making it the wisest choice of transport.”
“I’m a sidhe-seer, Barrons. It’s a Hunter. Guess what Hunters hunt? Sidhe-seers. I am not getting on it.”
“Time is short, Ms. Lane. Move your ass.”
I poked mentally at the Hunter to glean its intentions, expecting to encounter a roiling pit of homicidal sidhe-seer thoughts.
Dreamfever f-4 Page 23