So I’d forced myself out of the bookstore and into the rapidly deepening dusk. I’d rolled my eyes at the inspector, and ground my teeth against the oppressive sense of dread that cloaked me every time I saw that terrifying black specter, watching, waiting. I’d notched my chin higher and made myself walk straight past it like it didn’t even exist—and as far as I could tell, it didn’t, because Jayne had ignored it and O’Bannion sure hadn’t looked at it on the way back, but then again, I’d tugged my camisole down to reveal a shocking amount of cleavage to tempt him to turn around. I’d done for one O’Bannion what I’d failed to do for the other, and the scales inside me had leveled a little.
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I hoped he’d continue his search tomorrow, in the daylight, and not stop in here on his way by. But if, despite my efforts, he went back into the abandoned neighborhood tonight, well, I’d done the best I could, and frankly I wasn’t sure how important it was another O’Bannion remained among the living. Dad says Hell has a special place for men who abuse women. There are Unseelie monsters and there are human ones.
“Was he a good kisser, Ms. Lane?” Barrons asked, watching me carefully.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand at the memory. “It was like being owned. ”
“Some women like that. ”
“Not me. ”
“Perhaps it depends on the man doing the owning. ”
“I doubt it. I couldn’t breathe with him kissing me. ”
“One day you may kiss a man you can’t breathe without, and find breath is of little consequence. ”
“Right, and one day my prince might come. ”
“I doubt he’ll be a prince, Ms. Lane. Men rarely are. ”
“I’ll get your envelope, Barrons. What then?” What crazy zig was my life going to zag down next?
“I took the liberty of placing garments in your room. Tomorrow evening we leave for Wales. ”
Turned out Elle Masters wasn’t there the next day, nor, much to my relief, was the dreamy-eyed guy.
Instead, I met a fourth-year student who worked for Elle, and was holding the envelope for me. He was tall with dark hair, a great Scottish accent, a ton of curiosity about Barrons, who he’d heard about from his employer I guess, and pretty dreamy eyes himself, an unusual shade of amber, like tiger eyes, framed by thick, black lashes.
“Scotty” (we never got around to introducing ourselves, I was in too much of a hurry to get out of there and on with my day) told me Elle’s six-year-old daughter was sick and she was keeping her out of school, so he’d swung by to pick up the envelope on his way into work.
I took it and hurried out the door. Scotty followed me halfway down the hall, making small talk with a charming Scots burr, and I got the distinct impression that he was working up to asking me out. Two gorgeous guys in the same department, two normal guys! I would only be torturing myself if I spared a second thought for either of them. The Ancient Languages Department at Trinity was off limits for me in the future. Barrons could run his own errands, or hire a courier service to do it for him.
On my way back to the bookstore, I pretended not to see nearly a dozen Unseelie Rhino-boys, escorting their new protégés down the streets, shaping them up for human society. They pointed and spoke, their charges nodded, and it was obvious they were being indoctrinated into their new world—my world. I wanted to stab every one of them with my spear as I walked by, but I refrained. I’m not in this for the little battles. I’m here for the war.
All of them were casting Fae glamours to make themselves appear human to varying degrees of attractiveness, but either they were rudimentary efforts, or I’ve gotten better at penetrating the Fae façade because aside from a momentary blurriness, a brief vacillation of color and contour, I saw them in their true forms. None were as revolting as the hideous Gray Man who’d preyed on women, stealing their beauty through the open sores in his flesh and hands, although all made me feel queasy, but that’s just the effect of any Fae on my sidhe-seer senses; it’s my early-warning system. I picked up a group of ten of them on my “radar” a full two blocks before encountering their little monster-posse. I counted three new types of Unseelie I would make notes on later in my journal, perhaps on the plane to Wales tonight.
When I got back to the bookstore, I steamed open the envelope. The adhesive edge curled quickly and the glue seemed sparse, making me wonder if I’d not been the first to do it.
It held an invitation, an exclusive one, extended by a host who denoted himself or herself with only a symbol, no address. On the back was jotted a partial list, intended to tantalize. It included an object long held to be mythical, two religious icons the Vatican was rumored to be looking for, and a painting by one of the Masters believed lost in a fire centuries ago.
Barrons and I were going to an auction tonight, a very private one, the kind of black market sale Interpol and FBI agents nurture sweet, career-making dreams of one day busting.
EIGHT
W ales is one of four constituent or home nations of the United Kingdom.
England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are the other three.
Ireland—not to be confused with Northern Ireland—is a sovereign state, and a member of the European Union.
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The entire United Kingdom, at about 94,000 square miles, is slightly smaller than the state of Oregon. The island of Ireland, both Northern and the Republic, is roughly the size of the state of Indiana.
At 8,000 square miles, Wales is tiny. To put Wales in perspective, Scotland has four times the land mass, and Texas is thirty-three times as big.
I know all of this because I looked it up. When my sister was killed and I was forced, wings untried, from my gently feathered nest in Ashford, Georgia, my eyes were opened in more ways than one. I took stock of myself and realized that among other things, I had no global awareness. I’ve been trying desperately to dispel my provinciality by teaching myself a bird’s-eye view of things. If knowledge is power, I want all of it I can get.
The flight from Dublin to Cardiff took a little over an hour. We landed in Rhoose, about ten minutes from the capital city, at eleven-fifteen. A chauffeur fell into step beside us and ushered us into a waiting silver Maybach 62. I have no idea where we went from there because I’d never been inside such a car, and was too busy examining the luxurious interior to notice much more than city lights whizzing by, and finally darkness beyond the panoramic glass roof. I reclined my seat to nearly horizontal. I tested the massage option. I stroked the soft leather and the gleaming wood. I watched the velocity with which we hurtled into the night on the ceiling instruments.
“When we arrive, you will take your seat and not move,” Barrons said for the fifth time. “Do not scratch your nose, fidget with your hair, rub your face, and no matter what I say to you, you must not nod. Speak to me, but softly. People will listen if they can. Be discreet. ”
“Still as a cat, quiet as a mouse,” I replied, flipping through the movie selections for my personal flat-screen TV. The car was capable of what critics called a “blistering performance,” achieving 0–100 in five seconds. Barrons must be a serious collector for our hosts to have sent such a car after him.
I didn’t become aware of my surroundings again until Barrons was helping me from the car, tucking my arm through his. I liked my attire tonight better than anything he’d chosen for me in the past. I had on a black Chanel suit that was all business, sexy heels that weren’t, and fake diamonds at my ears, wrists, and throat. I’d sleeked my short dark curls with a leave-in conditioner and tucked it behind my ears. I looked like money and liked how it felt. Who wouldn’t? Up until now the most expensive outfit I’d ever worn was my prom dress. I always figured the next expensive dress I’d get to wear would be the one my daddy bought me for my wedding, and if life was good, about half a dozen more between that and my funeral. I certainly never would have wagered
on haute couture and fancy cars and illegal auctions and men who wore silk shirts and Italian suits, with platinum and diamond cuff links.
When I finally glanced around, I was startled to find we were on a deserted country lane. Stiff men in stiffer suits herded us a short distance down a shadowy path through the woods, stopping us in front of an overgrown bank. I was perplexed until they parted the dense foliage, revealing a steel door in the side of an embankment. We were guided through it, down an endless, narrow flight of concrete stairs, through a long concrete tunnel lined with pipes and wires, and into a large rectangular room.
“We’re in a bomb shelter,” Barrons said against my ear, “nearly three stories beneath the ground. ”
I don’t mind telling you it creeped me out more than a little, being so deep in the earth with only one way out, and that back the way we’d come, through a dozen heavily armed men. I’m not claustrophobic but I like the open sky around me, or at least the knowledge that it’s right on the other side of whatever walls I’m enclosed by. This felt like being buried alive. I think I’d rather die in a nuclear holocaust than live in a concrete box for twenty years.
“Lovely,” I murmured. “Is this kind of like your undergr—Ow!” Barrons’ boot was on my foot and if he gave it any more pressure, it’d be flat as a pancake.
“There are times and places for curiosity, Ms. Lane. This is not one of them. Here, anything you say can and will be used against you. ”
“Sorry,” I said and I really was. If he didn’t want these people to know he had an underground vault, I could understand that, and if I’d not been so discombobulated by my surroundings, I would have thought of that before I’d brought it up. “Get off my foot. ”
He gave me a Barrons look that defies describing because he has several of them, and they speak volumes. “I’m alert, I swear,” I said crossly. I hate being a fish out of water, and not only was I flopping around on the beach, I was a minnow among sharks. “And I won’t say another word unless you speak to me, okay?”
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He gave me a tight, satisfied smile and we headed for our seats.
The room was concrete from top to bottom, with no finishing touches. Exposed pipes and wires ran the length of the ceiling. Forty metal folding chairs had been set up in the room: five rows of four each on both sides of a narrow aisle. Most of the chairs were already filled with people in elegant evening attire. Those conversing did so in hushed murmurs.
At the front of the room was a center podium flanked by tables, covered with items draped in velvet. Additional draped items lined the wall behind it.
Barrons looked at me. I was careful not to nod. “Yes,” I told him, as we took our seats in the third row on the right side of the room. I’d been feeling it ever since we’d entered the shelter but I’d had no way of knowing if it was a Fae relic, or an actual Fae, until I had the opportunity to examine all persons in the vicinity. There were no glamours being cast; the occupants of this room were human, which meant there was a very powerful OOP under all that velvet somewhere. On a nausea scale of one to ten—ten being the Sinsar Dubh, and most other things topping out at a three or four, with nothing so far between six and ten but the single ten that had made me lose consciousness—it was a five, and I thumbed from my pocket one of the Tums I’d begun taking to help with the discomfort of carrying the spear all the time, which, by the way, I’d left on Barrons’ desk earlier at his direction, so he could strap it to his leg, not mine. I’d hated giving it up, but my sleek suit afforded no hiding places. Though there was little trust between us, I knew he would return it to me quickly if I needed it.
“The door closes at midnight. ” His lips brushed my ear and I shivered, which seemed to amuse him. “Anyone not inside by then doesn’t get in. There are always a couple of last-minute stragglers. ”
I glanced at his watch. There were three and a half minutes to go and still half a dozen seats to fill. During the next minute, five were taken, leaving one empty up front. Though I craned my neck, studying every face, Barrons stared straight ahead. You must be more than my OOP detector tonight, Ms. Lane, he’d told me on the plane, you must be my eyes and ears. I want you to analyze everyone, listen to everything. I want to know who betrays excitement over what item, who wins worriedly, who loses badly.
Why? You always notice way more than me.
Where we’re going tonight, noticing anyone other than yourself is considered a sign of uncertainty, weakness. You must notice for me.
Who noticed for you in the past? Fiona?
Barrons just ignores me when he doesn’t feel like answering.
And so I was the green one, looking around. It wasn’t as bad as I expected because no one would look back at me. Some of their gazes flickered a little, as if they resented being studied when the nature of the game being played prevented them from returning the stare.
I found it silly that they all dressed up so much just to come sit in metal chairs in a dusty bomb shelter, but with people this wealthy, money wasn’t something they had, it was who they were, and they would wear it to their graves.
There were twenty-six men and eleven women. They ranged in age from early thirties all the way up to a white-haired man who was ninety-five if a day, in a wheelchair, accompanied by an oxygen tank and bodyguards. His sallow skin was so thin and translucent I could see the network of veins behind his face. He was sick with something that was eating him alive. He was the only one that looked directly back at me. He had scary eyes. I wondered what a man so close to death wanted so badly. I hope when I’m ninety-five the only things I want are free: love, family, a good home-cooked meal.
Most of the conversation was about the inconvenience of their current location, the mud damage the short jaunt through the woods had done to their shoes, the dismal state of current political affairs, and the even more dismal weather. No one mentioned the items about to be auctioned, as if they couldn’t have cared less about what was up for grabs. The entire time they pretended not to be interested in anyone or anything around them, they snatched greedy little glimpses by fabricating actions to justify movement. Two women withdrew jeweled compacts and checked their lipstick, but it wasn’t their mouths they examined in those clever mirrors. Four people dropped various items from their laps for an excuse to move about and retrieve them. It was kind of funny in a sad way how many people dove for the goods, trying to use it as their own excuse.
Seven people got up and tried to go to the bathroom. The armed henchmen declined their requests, but at least they got a good look around.
I have never seen a more avaricious, paranoid assortment of people. Barrons didn’t fit in any more than I did. If I was a minnow and they were sharks, he was one of those yet undiscovered fish that lurk in the deepest, darkest reaches of the ocean where sunlight and man never go.
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A distinguished-looking gentleman with silver hair and a neatly trimmed beard entered the room and I thought for a moment he was the final attendee, but he headed straight for the podium. On the way there, he greeted many warmly and by name, with a clipped British accent and sparkling eyes.
When he arrived at the podium, he welcomed us, recounted a short list of conditions to which we’d all agreed to abide by by the mere virtue of our presence, and said that any could leave now that so chose (I wondered darkly if they would be permitted to live if they did). He then detailed accepted methods of payment, and just as the auction was about to begin, a very famous man you would recognize—you see him on TV all the time—slipped into the final seat.
The bidding opened with a Monet and grew more surreal to me from there. I learned that night that some of the finest art and artifacts in the world will never be seen by common man, but will continue to pass down through the ages via a hidden network of the uber-wealthy.
I saw paintings the world didn’t know had been painted, artifacts I couldn’t believe
had survived the ages, the hand-penned copy of a play that has never been and will never be performed, much to our disastrous loss. I learned there are people that will pay a fortune to possess something that is one of a kind, for the sheer pleasure of possessing it and having a handful of their peers envy them the possession.
The bids were mind-boggling. A woman paid twenty-four million dollars for a painting the size of my hand. Another woman bought a brooch the size of a walnut for three point two million. The famous man bought the Klimt for eighty-nine million. There were jewels that had once belonged to queens, weapons owned by some of history’s most notorious villains, even an Italian estate on the block, complete with a private jet and classic car collection.
Barrons acquired two ancient weapons and a journal written by a Grand Master of a secret society. I sat on my hands to keep myself from fidgeting and waited in breathless anticipation, as each treasure was unveiled, taking great pains not to move my head, which is considerably more difficult than it sounds. The urge to flip a curl of hair from my face that had escaped my sleek ’do became nearly debilitating. Until now I’d had no idea how frequently my body betrayed my thoughts until I repeatedly caught myself on the verge of shrugging, shaking, or nodding my head. It was no wonder Barrons read me so easily. It was not a comfortable night, but it was an unforgettable one. When the OOP was finally uncovered, I had no idea what it was, but Barrons knew—and he wanted it badly. I’ve learned to read him, too.
It was a jeweled amulet the approximate size of my fist—I have small hands—fashioned of gold, silver, sapphires, and onyx, and according to the information sheet, several unidentifiable alloys and equally mysterious gems. The amulet’s lavish gilt casing housed an enormous translucent stone of unknown composition, and was suspended on a long, thick chain. It had a colorful history, dating farther back than it possibly could according to what we understood of Homo sapiens’ development, and had been crafted for the coveted concubine of a mythical king known as Cruz.
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