The young girl glanced up from her book and gave me a blank look that was sheer perfection. A halo of curly auburn hair framed slight features, a small straight nose, a rosebud mouth, an impudent jaw. I pegged her for fourteen, fifteen at the most, and already her sidhe-seer façade was nearly flawless. It made me feel downright gauche. Had she taught herself or had someone else taught her?
“I’m sorry, what?” she said, blinking.
I glanced back at the Fae. It was stretched on its back on the edge of a multitiered fountain, as if soaking up the intermittent rays of sun. It was slender, diaphanous, lovely. Like those dreamy, translucent images of Fairy that are so popular in today’s culture, it had a cloud of gossamer hair, a dainty face, and a petite, slim boy-body with small breasts. It was nude and not bothering with a glamour. Why should it? The normal human couldn’t see it, and according to Barrons, many of the Fae believed sidhe-seers had died out long ago or dwindled to inconsequential numbers.
I handed the girl my journal, open to the page on which I’d been sketching it.
She flinched, clapped it shut, and glared at me. “How dare you? If you want to put yourself in danger, have a fine go at it, but don’t be dragging me into it with you!” She grabbed her book, backpack, and umbrella, sprang up, and bounded off in a flash of feline grace.
I dashed after her. I had a million questions. I wanted to know how she’d learned what she was. I wanted to know who’d taught her, and I wanted to meet that person. I wanted to learn more about my heritage, and not from Barrons, who had agendas within agendas. Who was I kidding—even though she was years younger than me, it was lonely in this big city, and I could use a friend.
I was a good sprinter. It helped that I was wearing tennis shoes and she was in sandals. Though she dashed down one street after the next, pushing through tourists and vendors, I continued gaining, until finally she ducked into an alley, stopped, and whirled around. She tossed her fiery curls and shot me a glare. With a cat’s luminous green-gold eyes, she performed a lightning quick scan of the alley, the pavement, the walls, the rooftops, finally the sky beyond.
“The sky?” I frowned, not liking that at all. “Why?”
“Blimey! How did you survive this fecking long?”
She was too young to be cursing. “Watch your mouth. My mother’d wash yours out.”
She shot me a look of pure belligerence. “My mum would have turned you over to the council and had them lock you up for being a danger to yourself and others.”
“Council? What council?” Could it be? Were there that many of us? Were they organized, like Barrons said they’d been in olden days? “You mean a council of sidhe—”
“Stow it,” she hissed. “You’ll be the fecking death of us!”
“Is there one?” I demanded. “A council of…you know…people like us?” If so, I had to meet them. If they didn’t already know about the Lord Master and his portal, they needed to. Perhaps I could turn this whole nasty affair over to someone else, a whole council of someone else’s. Wash my hands of it, single-mindedly focus on my revenge, maybe get some help pursuing it. Had my sister known them, met with them?
“Shoosh it!” She scanned the sky again.
It was making me uneasy. “Why do you keep looking up?”
She closed her eyes, shook her head, and looked as if she were invoking Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and every last one of the saints in a bid for patience. When she opened them again, she hurried over and plucked the journal from beneath my arm. “Pen,” she demanded. I dug one out of my purse and slapped it in her palm.
She wrote: You and I are here, but the wind is everywhere. Cast no words upon it you don’t wish followed back to you.
“That’s awfully melodramatic.” I tried to make light of it, if only to dispel the chill inching up my spine.
“That’s one of the first rules we ever learn,” she said with a scathing glance. “I learned it when I was three. You’re old. You should know better.”
I bristled. “I’m not old. Who’d you learn it from?”
“My grandmum.”
“Well, there you have it. I was adopted. Nobody told me anything. I had to learn it all myself and I think I’m doing a bang-up job. How well would you have done on your own?”
She shrugged and gave me a look that said she would have done way better than me because she was so smart and special. Oh, the cockiness of youth. How I missed mine.
“So what’s with the sky?” I pressed. Was I the rat I’d been feeling like and there were owls above my head?
She turned the page to a blank one and wrote another word. Though the ink was pink, the word slashed, dark and ominous, across the page. Hunters, it said. The chill I’d nearly managed to dispel returned as an ice pick, pierced my back, and slid through my heart. Hunters were the terrifying caste of winged Unseelie whose primary purpose was to hunt and kill sidhe-seers.
She snapped the journal shut.
They’ve been spotted, she mouthed.
In Dublin? I mouthed back, horrified, glancing warily at the sky.
She nodded. “What’s your name?”
“Mac,” I said softly. Did I even want my name on the wind? “Yours?”
“Dani. With an i. Mac what?”
“Lane.” That was good enough for now. How strange it was to feel like you didn’t quite own your last name.
“Where can I find you, Mac?”
I started to give her my new cell phone number, but she shook her head briskly. “We stick to the old ways in times like these. Where are you staying?”
I gave her the address of Barrons Books and Baubles. “I work there. For Jericho Barrons.” I searched her face for a sign of recognition. “He’s one of us.”
She gave me a strange look. “You think?”
I nodded and flipped the page in my journal. I wrote, Are there many of us?
It’s not my place to answer your questions, she scribbled. Someone will be in touch soon.
“When?”
“I don’t know. It’s up to them.”
“I need answers. Dani, I’ve seen things. Does your council know what’s going on in this city?”
Her lucent eyes flared and she gave a single violent shake of her head.
I gave her an exasperated look. “Well, tell your ‘someone’ to hurry up. Things are getting worse, fast.” I flipped my journal open again. I’m a Null, I wrote. And I know about the Lord Master and the Sinsar—
The journal was snatched from my hand and the page shredded before I could blink. She’d done it so smoothly and quickly that my pen was still poised in the air above a page that was no longer there, and I was still shaping the letter D.
Nothing normal could move that fast. She’d reacted with inhuman speed. I searched the pert, gamine face. “What are you?”
“Same as you. Latent talents awaken in times of need,” she said, watching me. “You have your talents, I have mine. Every day we learn more about who we used to be and what we are again becoming.”
“You let me catch you,” I accused. She could have outrun me in a heartbeat. Who was I kidding? This kid could probably leap small buildings.
“So?”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “I wasn’t supposed to, but I was curious. Rowena sent a bunch of us out to find you, to learn where you were staying. Naturally, I’m the one that spotted you first. She made it sound like you were very powerful.” She gave me a disdainful look. “I don’t see it.”
“Who’s Rowena?” I had a hunch and didn’t like it.
“Old woman. Silver hair. Looks fragile. Isn’t.”
Just as I’d suspected, the old woman I’d met my first night in Dublin, on the receiving end of her wrath when I’d stared overlong at the first Fae I’d ever seen. Later, she’d stood by and done nothing when V’lane had nearly raped me in the museum, then followed me, insisting I was adopted.
“Take me to her,” I demanded. I’d hated her for tearing my world apart with her truth. I need
ed more of her truth. She’d called me O’Connor, mentioned someone named Patrona. Did she know where I came from? I almost couldn’t let myself think the next thought; it frightened me as much as it fascinated me, felt like a betrayal of my parents, of all I’d been and done for the past twenty-two years: Did I have relatives somewhere in Ireland? A cousin, an uncle, dare I think it…a sister?
“Rowena will choose the time,” Dani said. When I scowled and opened my mouth to argue, she stepped back and raised her hands. “Hey, don’t get mad at me. I’m just the messenger. And she’ll box my ears for having given you any message at all.” She flashed a sudden, brilliant grin. “But she’ll get over it. She thinks I’m the cat’s meow. I’ve got forty-seven kills.”
Kills? Did she mean Fae? What was this cocky kid killing them with?
She turned to take off on feet that might as well have been winged, and I knew I had no chance of catching her. Why couldn’t I have gotten superhuman speed? I could have used it dozens of times already.
“Mac,” she shot over her shoulder, “one more thing, and if you tell Rowena I told you, I’ll lie. But you need to know. There are no males among us. Never have been. Whatever your employer is, he’s not one of us.”
I made my way back through the Temple Bar District, with its snatches of music spilling from open windows and boisterous patrons stumbling from open pub doors.
The first time I’d ever walked into this part of the city, I’d gotten whistles and catcalls, and had enjoyed them all. I’d been the kind of girl who dressed for attention, in an eye-catching outfit with all the right accessories. Tonight, in baggy clothes and sensible running shoes, with no makeup and rain-slicked hair, my passage through the craic-filled party district went unnoticed, unremarked, and I was grateful for it. The only crowd I was interested in was the one in my head, thoughts crammed into every nook and cranny of my brain, elbowing each other out of the way to get my attention.
Up until now, Barrons had been my only source of information about what I was, and what was going on around me. But I’d just learned there was another source out there, and it was an organized one. There were other sidhe-seers battling and killing the Fae; spunky fourteen-year-olds, with superhero speed, no less.
Up until now, without even knowing her name, I’d discounted Rowena as a cantankerous old woman who probably knew a few others like us and was old enough to recall a bit of sidhe-lore. I’d never dreamed she might be plugged into a community of sidhe-seers, an active network with a council and rules, and mothers who taught their children from birth how to cope with what they were. The ancient enclave Barrons had told me about in the graveyard still existed today!
I was angry that she hadn’t invited me into that community the night we’d met, the night I’d seen my first Fae and nearly betrayed myself—would have, in fact, if she’d not intervened.
But no, far from taking me under her wing when I’d so desperately needed help, and teaching me how to survive, Rowena had chased me off and told me to go die somewhere else.
And that’s exactly what I would have done—died—if I’d not crossed paths with Jericho Barrons.
Unguided, clueless about what I was, one or another of the Unseelie monsters I would have refused to believe was real would have killed me. Perhaps a Shade would have reduced me to a papery husk the next time I’d unwittingly wandered into the abandoned neighborhood. Perhaps the Gray Man would have made shorter work of my beauty than awful hair, bad clothes, and rapidly shifting priorities were managing to do quite nicely. Perhaps the Many-Mouthed Thing would have turned his many mouths on me, or perhaps I’d have been drawn to the attention of the Lord Master and ended up his personal OOP detector, not Barrons’, and he’d have used and killed me just like Alina.
Whatever else Barrons may be—he was the one who’d saved me. He’d opened my eyes and turned me into a weapon. Not Rowena and her merry band of sidhe-seers. I’d take tough love any day over no love at all.
There are no male sidhe-seers, Dani had said. Never have been.
Well, I had news for her: Barrons could see them, he’d taught me about them, and we’d fought them side by side, and that was more than Rowena or anyone else had ever done for me.
I had no doubt she’d send for me soon. She’d had sidhe-seers out hunting for me. She knew I had one of the Seelie Hallows. That day in the museum when V’lane had forced his deadly sexuality on me, she’d seen me threaten him with the spear. When I’d finally escaped, she’d caught up with me and tried to get me to go somewhere with her. But it had been too little, too late. She’d abandoned me for the second time that day in the museum, letting me strip in public and back up like a mindless mare in heat to a death-by-sex Fae and not lifting a finger to help me. When I’d demanded to know why she hadn’t tried to do something—anything—she’d said coldly, One betrayed is one dead. Two betrayed is two dead…we cannot take risks that might betray more of us, especially not me.
She was important, this old woman. And she had information about me, about who I was. And when she sent someone for me, I would go.
But only with guarded thoughts and cautious tread.
At our third encounter, things were going to be very different: She was going to have to prove herself to me.
It was dark by the time I got back to the bookstore. I made my way down the side alley and around to the back entrance, a flashlight clutched in each hand. I noticed Barrons had boarded up the broken window in the garage.
I was not developing a full-blown obsession with the Shades. I was merely checking to make sure the status quo was still…well, quo. One of my enemies had set up a base camp right outside my back door. The least any good soldier would do was scout it on a regular basis to make sure there were no new developments.
There were no new developments. The floodlights were on, the windows were closed. I dragged the back of my hand across my brow with a sigh of relief. Ever since the Shades had gotten into the store, I’d not been able to get them off my mind, especially the big, aggressive one that had menaced me in Barrons’ parlor, and was currently moving restlessly back and forth at the edge of the darkness.
I blinked.
It was shaping a tendril of itself into something that looked suspiciously like a fist with a single upright human finger—you know which one. Surely it wasn’t learning from me, was it? I refused to entertain the thought. There was no room for it in my head; my brain was full. It had been a trick of the shadows, nothing more.
I turned for the stairs and was on the top step, my hand on the doorknob, when I felt its presence behind me.
Dark.
Empty.
Vast as the night.
I turned, as inexorably drawn as if a black hole had opened at my back and I was being sucked into its event horizon.
The specter stood motionless, watching me in silence, still as death. The inky folds of its voluminous, cowled robe rustled in the breeze.
I narrowed my eyes. There was no breeze. Not the merest hint of wind stirred the back alley. Not a hair on my head moved. I licked my finger and held it up. The air was flat, stagnant.
Yet the specter’s robe rippled, buffeted by a draft that wasn’t there.
Great. If I’d been looking for proof that the ghoulish vision haunting me was a delusion, I’d just gotten it. I’d obviously Photoshopped this thing in from stills stored in my memory compiled from movies, childhood ghost stories, and books. In my mind’s media banks its robes always rustled, I never saw its face, and it always carried a sharply curved, lethal blade mounted on a tall pole of ebony wood like the one it was toting now. It was perfect. Too perfect.
Why was I doing this to myself?
“I don’t get it,” I said. Of course, the specter said nothing. It never did and never would. Because Death wasn’t standing in this alley with me, waiting, with patience born of perpetuity, for the right moment to punch my ticket, call in my chip. The Eternal Footman wasn’t holding out my coat, a subtle yet irrefutable signal that t
he dance, for me, was over, the ball done, the night through.
And if I wanted further evidence that this clichéd spirit was just that—an apparition, a figment of an overwrought imagination—I had only to remind myself that Barrons, Jayne, and Derek O’Bannion hadn’t seen it, when they’d been in its vicinity. Jayne and O’Bannion weren’t necessarily conclusive evidence, but Barrons was. Good grief, the man could smell a kiss on me. He didn’t miss anything.
“Is it because I killed Rocky O’Bannion and his men? Is that why I keep seeing you? Because I collected their clothes and threw them in the trash instead of sending them to the police, or back to their wives?” I’d had my share of psych courses in college. I knew a perfectly healthy human mind could play tricks on itself, and mine wasn’t healthy. It was burdened by vengeful thoughts, regrets, and rapidly multiplying sins. “I know it’s not because I killed all those Unseelie in the warehouse or stabbed Mallucé. I feel good about those things.” I studied it a moment. How honest did I have to be with myself to get rid of it? “Is it because I left Mom back home in Ashford, grieving, and I’m afraid she’ll never get better without me?”
Or had this thing’s dark conception taken place long before that? Had the seeds of it been planted on a warm sunny day by the side of a swimming pool, while I was stretched out, tanning my pampered hide and listening to happy, mindless music while four thousand miles away my sister was stretched out, bleeding to death in a dirty Dublin alley?
Was it because I’d talked to Alina every week for hours, over the course of months, and never once clued in to anything in her voice, never pulled my head out of my happy little world far enough to sense that something was wrong in hers? Because I’d dropped my stupid cell phone in the pool, been too lazy to get a new one, and missed her dying call, and my last chance for the rest of my life to hear her voice? “Is it because I failed her? Is that it? Am I seeing you because I’m ashamed that I’m the one that lived?”
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