Barrons draped an arm over my shoulder and I moved into the shelter of it. The thing on my tongue burned. My brand itched. At that moment, I despised them both.
“Stay away from her,” Barrons growled.
“She comes to me of her own will. She calls me, chooses me.” V’lane was in high glamour, gold and bronze and iridescent ice. He raked me with an imperious gaze. “I will attend to you later. You broke our bargain. There is a price for that.” He smiled, but Fae don’t really smile. They paste a humanlike expression on and it chills to the bone because it looks so unnatural on their unnaturally perfect faces. “Do not fear, MacKayla, I will—how do you say? — kiss it and make it better when I am through.”
I removed my hand from my fly. “I didn’t break our bargain intentionally, V’lane. Barrons overheard something he shouldn’t have overheard.”
“Omission or commission, what difference?”
“There is one. Even the courts of law permit the distinction.”
“Human law. Fae law acknowledges no such thing. There are outcomes. The means by which they are achieved have no bearing. You said you did not know how to track the Book.”
“I don’t. I just followed a hunch tonight. Got lucky. You?”
“Impudence and lies, MacKayla. I suffer neither.”
“You won’t harm a hair on her head, or I’ll kill you,” said Barrons.
Really? With what? I wanted to ask. V’lane was a Fae. My spear was gone and Rowena had the sword.
The Book’s icy pull was diminishing rapidly. It was moving swiftly. Its next victim was in a car, and a fast one. I had a smug, utterly beside-the-point car-lover thought: not faster than mine. I had a Viper. Its keys were in my pocket.
The smug thought faded. It offended every ounce of my being to let the Book get away, to allow it to go cruising off to destroy more lives. But no matter how insistently my sidheseer senses were screaming at me to track it, I didn’t dare. Not with Barrons and V’lane here. I needed to know more about the Book. I needed to know how to get my hands on it, and do the right thing with it. Who was I kidding? I needed to know what the right thing was. Assuming I eventually got it, who could I trust with it? V’lane? Barrons? God forbid, Rowena? Would the Seelie Queen herself shimmer in and save the day? Somehow, I doubted it. Nothing in my life is easy anymore.
“You have no right to it,” V’lane was telling Barrons.
“Might makes right. Hasn’t that always been your motto?” Barrons said.
“You could never understand my motto.”
“Better than you think, fairy.”
“There is nothing you could do with it even if you managed to get it. You do not speak the language in which it was scribed, and could never hope to decode it.”
“Maybe I have the stones.”
“Not all of them,” V’lane said coldly, and I knew from the disdain in his voice that he had at least one, if not both of the other translation stones we’d been hunting. All four of the mystical translucent blue-black stones were necessary to “reveal the true nature” of the Sinsar Dubh. Barrons had one already when I met him. I’d recently stolen the second one from Mallucé, the event that had precipitated the hostilities between us.
Barrons smiled. Clever man. Until that moment, he’d suspected but not been certain. “Maybe I learned enough from your princess that I don’t need all four,” Barrons sneered, and there was a world of insinuation in his words. Even I, who had no idea what he was insinuating, heard the insult in them, and knew it cut deep. There was history between V’lane and Barrons. They didn’t despise each other just because of me. There was more than that going on here.
Ice dripped from V’lane’s iridescent robes, flowed down the cobbled street and expanded, covering the pavement from gutter to gutter with a thin black sheet that cracked like gunshots as it encased the warmer stone.
Good, let them fight. Let the Book disappear and carry my problems with it. To add fuel to the fire, I said, “Why do you two hate each other so much?”
“Have you fucked her yet?” V’lane ignored me completely.
“I’m not trying to.”
“Translation: Your efforts have failed.”
“No, they haven’t,” I said. “He hasn’t tried. FYI, boys, and I use that term loosely, there’s more to me than sex.”
“Which is why you’re still alive, Ms. Lane. Keep cultivating those parts.”
Since I had them both together, for a novel change, I had a hunch I wanted to test. “What is Barrons?” I asked V’lane. “Human, or something else?”
The Fae Prince looked at Barrons, and said nothing.
Barrons shot me a sharp look.
“So, Barrons,” I said sweetly, “tell me about V’lane. Is he a good guy or a bad guy?”
Barrons looked away and said nothing.
I shook my head, disgusted. It was as I’d suspected. Men. Were they the same among all species, whether human or not? “Both of you have something on the other, and neither of you will rat it out, in order to keep your own secrets safe. Unbelievable. You hate each other, and still stick together. Well, guess what? Screw you. I’m done with you both.”
“Big words from a little human,” V’lane said. “You need us.”
“He’s right. Deal with it, Ms. Lane.”
Great. Now they were uniting forces against me. I preferred V’lane disappearing when Barrons appeared. Did this mean V’lane wasn’t afraid of Barrons, after all? I eyed the space between them. If Barrons were to step forward, would V’lane step back? I could hardly suggest it. After a moment’s consideration, I moved out from beneath Barron’s arm, and stepped behind him. I felt him relax a little. I think he thought I was seeking the shelter of his body, using the movement to show that I’d chosen a side. I imagined he looked pretty self-satisfied right now.
I shoved him forward as hard as I could. V’lane glided instantly back.
Barrons jerked a furious look over his shoulder at me.
I smiled. I don’t think many women push Barrons around.
“What games are you playing, sidhe-seer?” V’lane hissed.
The Fae Prince feared Barrons. I tried to process that thought but I’m not sure I succeeded.
“Can you still feel the Book?” Barrons asked, a muscle jumping in his jaw.
“Yes, where has it gone?” demanded V’lane. “Which way?”
“You wasted too much time arguing,” I lied. I still had a faint tingle. It had stopped somewhere. “It passed beyond my radar a few minutes ago.” I wasn’t sure either of them believed me, but what could they do?
Actually, it occurred to me, they both could do something really nasty to me if they felt like it: Barrons could use Voice, force me to tell him the truth, and make me hunt it, and if I understood a death-by-sex Fae’s thrall, V’lane could amp up the sex thing and steer me around like a horny little divining rod.
So, why weren’t they? Because they really were decent guys with decent motives, albeit very screwed-up personalities? Or because they didn’t want each other around when they used me to track it, and neither could think of a way to get rid of the other at the moment?
Were we all letting it get away, to keep each other from getting it? Wow. I used to have a hard time with high school geometry. Life was way more complicated than math.
“Move,” Barrons said. “Get on the bike.”
I didn’t like his tone.
“Where will you go, Ms. Lane, if not with me or him? Back home to Ashford? Will you strike out on your own? Get a flat? Will your father have to come pack up after you, like you cleaned up after your sister?”
I turned and began walking. He followed me, close enough that I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. “He’ll sift you,” he said in a low growl, “if you give him the chance.”
“I don’t think he’ll risk getting within twenty feet of you,” I said coolly. “And you didn’t have to remind me that my sister’s dead. That was a cheap shot.”
I
got on the Harley.
Go with V’lane and be punished for violating our bargain?
I’d take my chances with Barrons. For now.
Chapter 8
Some of your mail missed the slot,” Dani said as she pushed open the front door of Barrons Books and Baubles, and wheeled her bike inside.
I glanced up from the book I was reading (Irish invasions again, some of the most boring research I’d ever done, except for some of the bits about the Fir Bolg and Fomorians) and, after looking behind her to make sure she was alone, smiled. Her curly auburn hair was windblown, her cheeks were flushed with cold, and she’d topped her green pin-striped Post Haste, Inc. courier uniform with a jauntily perched company cap, and her eternal I’m-bored-and-way-too-cool-for-words expression.
I like Dani. She’s different from the other sidhe-seers. I’ve liked her since the day I met her. There’s something kindred in us, besides the fact that we’re both on vengeance quests: her for her mother, and me for my sister.
“Rowena would kill you for coming here, you know.” I frowned, as a suspicion occurred to me. “Or did she send you?”
“Nah. I snuck away. I don’t think anyone followed me. You’re top dog on her shit list, Mac. If she’d sent me, she’d’ve sent me with the sword.”
I caught my breath. I never wanted to battle Dani. Not because I was afraid I might not win—although with her superhuman speed, I supposed it was possible—but because I never wanted to see that exuberant, flippant spark extinguished by my hand, or any other. “Really?”
She flashed a gamine grin. “Nah. I don’t think she wants you dead. She just wants you to grow the feck up and obey her every word. She’s waiting for the same thing from me. She doesn’t get that we are grown the feck up. We’re just not good little tin soldiers like the rest of her fluff-brained army. If you have a mind of your own, Rowena calls you a child. If you don’t have a mind of your own, I call you a sheep. Baaa,” she said, making a face. “The abbey’s so full of ’em it stinks of sheep shit on a summer day.”
I swallowed a laugh. It would only encourage her. “Stop cussing,” I said. Before she could get pissy, I added, “Because pretty girls don’t have ugly mouths, okay? I cuss sometimes, too. But I do it sparingly.”
“Who cares if I’m pretty?” she sneered, but I saw right through her. The first time I’d seen her she’d had makeup on and been in street clothes and I’d thought she was older than she was. In her uniform and without all that black eyeliner, I could see she was thirteen, fourteen at the most, and frozen briefly at that awkward stage all of us suffer for a time. I’d had a gangly period, too, where I’d been convinced the Lane genes had betrayed me, and unlike Alina, I was going to grow up ugly and have to spend the rest of my life eclipsed by my older sister while people said sadly, and never quite quietly enough, “Poor MacKayla, Alina got the brains and the beauty.”
Dani was trapped in adolescent limbo. Her torso hadn’t yet caught up with her legs and arms, and although her hormones were wreaking havoc on her skin they had yet to shape her hips and bust. Caught between child and woman was a rough place to be, and she had to fight monsters on top of it. “You’re going to be gorgeous one day, Dani,” I told her, “so clean up your language, if you want to hang out with me.”
She rolled her eyes, leaned her bike against the counter, tossed a rolled-up wad of mail on the counter, and sauntered cockily off toward the magazine rack, but not before I caught the startled, thoughtful look in her eyes. She would remember what I’d said. She would cling to it during her worst moments and it would get her through, the same way my Aunt Eileen’s promise that I would one day be pretty had gotten me through.
“Found it on the sidewalk,” she tossed over her shoulder. “Fecking postmen can’t even hit the slot.” She punctuated it with a glance that was a dare to correct her, and I might have, but she plucked a Hot Rod magazine from the stand.
Nice choice. I’d gone for the same thing at her age.
“Do you know you’re sitting on the edge of a whole neighborhood of nasty Unseelie?”
“You mean the Shades?” I said, absently flipping through the mail. “Yeah. I call it a Dark Zone. I’ve found three of them in the city.”
“You come up with the coolest names. Doesn’t it creep you out that they’re so close?”
“Creeps me out that they exist at all. Have you seen what they leave behind?”
She shuddered. “Yeah. Rowena sent me out with a team looking for some of us who didn’t make it home one night.”
I shook my head. She was too young to be seeing so much death. She should be reading magazines and thinking about cute guys. As I thumbed through the fliers and coupons, I spotted an envelope stuck in the middle. I’d seen that kind of envelope before: thick, plain, off-white vellum.
No return address.
It had a Dublin postmark, stamped two days ago.
MacKayla Lane c/o Barrons Books and Baubles, it said.
I ripped it open with trembling hands.
I talked to Mac tonight.
I closed my eyes, mentally braced myself, then opened them again.
It was soooo good to hear her voice! I could picture her lying on her bed, sprawled across the rainbow quilt Mom made for her years ago that’s frayed at the edges from a hundred washings, but she refuses to give it up. I could close my eyes and smell the caramel-apple pie with pecan crumb crust Mom was baking. I could hear Daddy in the background, watching baseball with old man Marley from next door, yelling at the Braves as if the batter’s ability to hit the ball depended on how loud they could shout. Home feels like it’s a million miles away, not four thousand—a mere plane ride, eight hours and I could see her.
Who am I kidding? Home’s a million lifetimes away. I want to tell her so badly. I want to say, Mac, come over here. You’re a sidhe-seer. We’re adopted. There’s a war coming and I’m trying to stop it, but if I can’t I’m going to have to bring you over here anyway, to help us fight. I want to say, I miss you more than anything in the world, and I love you so much! But if I do, she’ll know something’s wrong. It’s been so hard to hide it from her, because she knows me so well. I want to reach through the phone lines and hug my baby sister. Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll never get to do it again. That I’ll die here and there’ll be a lifetime of things left unsaid and undone. But I can’t let myself think that way because—
I fisted my hand, crushing the page into a wad. “Watch the counter, Dani,” I barked, and raced for the bathroom.
I slammed the door, locked it, sat on the toilet, and hung my head between my knees. After a moment, I blew my nose and dried my eyes. Her handwriting, her words, her love for me, had slid an unexpected knife straight through my heart. Who was sending me these stupid, painful pages, and why?
I uncrumpled the page, smoothed it on my legs, and continued where I’d left off.
— if I do, I’ll lose hope, and hope’s all I’ve got. I learned something important tonight. I thought I was hunting the Book, and that would be the end of it. But now I know we’ve got to re-create what once was. We’ve got to find the five foretold by the Haven’s prophecy. The Sinsar Dubh alone isn’t enough. We need the stones and the book and the five.
That was the end of the page. There was nothing on the other side.
I stared at it until it blurred out of focus. When did grief end? Did it ever? Or did you just get numb from hurting yourself on it so many times?
Would I grow emotional scar tissue? I hoped so. At the same time I hoped not. How could I betray my love for my sister by not suffering every time I thought about her? If I stopped hurting, would that mean I’d stopped loving her a little?
How had Alina known about the Haven? I’d only recently learned of its existence and what it was: the High Council of sidhe-seers. Rowena claimed she’d never met my sister, yet Alina had written in her journal about the governing body of the very organization Rowena ran, and she’d somehow learned of a prophecy foretold by them.
I clutched my head and massaged my scalp. Evil books and mysterious players and plots within plots, and now prophecies, too? Before I’d needed five things: four stones and a Book. Now I needed ten? That wasn’t merely absurd, it was unfair.
I stuffed the page in the front pocket of my jeans, stood up, freshened my face, took a deep breath, and went out to relieve Dani of her clerk duties. If my eyes were too bright when I stepped behind the counter, either she didn’t notice, or she understood a thing or two about grief, and left me alone.
“Some of the girls want to meet with you, Mac. That’s why I came today. They asked me to ask you because they figured you wouldn’t even let them in the door, and they’re freaked out that you know a prince.” Her feline eyes narrowed. “What’s he like?” Her young voice was hushed with a dangerous blend of fascination and awakening hormones.
V’lane was the sidhe-seer equivalent of Lucifer; and even if his motives in Mankind’s current predicament mirrored ours, he was to be feared, shunned, and, a deep part of me insisted, destroyed. Seelie and Unseelie alike, the Fae were our enemies. They always had been, and always would be. Why, oh why, do we find the most dangerous, forbidden men the most irresistible?
“Fae princes kill sidhe-seers, Dani.”
“He hasn’t killed you.” She shot me an admiring look. “It looked like you had him eating out of your hand.”
“No woman could have that Fae eating out of her hand,” I said sharply, “so don’t be daydreaming about it.”
She ducked her head guiltily, and I sighed, remembering what it was like to be thirteen. V’lane would have been the object of every one of my teenage fantasies. No rock star, no actor, could have competed with the golden, immortal, inhumanly erotic prince. In my daydreams, I would have wowed him with my cleverness, seduced him with my budding femininity, succeeded in winning his heart where no other woman could because, of course, in my fantasy, I would have endowed him with the heart he didn’t have.
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