Since I’ve been on my own, I’ve been eating a lot of popcorn, cereal, instant noodles, and snack bars. I have a hot plate in my bedroom, a microwave, and a small fridge. That’s the kind of kitchen I know how to get around in.
But today I’d donned my chef’s hat, limp and unused though it was. I might have purchased the tray of rich, buttery shortbreads at a pastry shop down the street, but I’d made the sandwiches myself, cutting loaves of fresh bakery bread into pretty little shapes with fancy edges, preparing the filling, and spreading my special recipe between the slices. My mouth watered just looking at the bite-size snacks.
I glanced at my watch, poured water over Earl Grey to steep the tea, and carried cups to the table near the rear conversation area, where a fire crackled brightly, chasing the chill from the gloomy October day. Though I was loath to lose business or break routine, I’d closed the shop early because I had to conduct this meeting at a time when I knew my employer was unlikely to show up.
I’d gotten a major wake-up call last night when I’d watched Jericho Barrons step out of the mirror.
I’d fled up the stairs faster than a Fae sifting space, locked my door, and barricaded it, heart pounding so hard I’d thought the top of my skull might blow off.
It was bad enough that he was keeping an Unseelie Hallow in the store, hidden from me, and using it, probably regularly, considering it was in his study, but . . . the woman . . . God, the woman!
Why had Barrons been carrying a blood-covered body in his blood-covered arms? Logic screamed: Duh, because he’d killed her.
But why? Who was the woman? Where had she come from? Why was he bringing her out of the Silver? What was inside that mirror? I’d examined it this morning, but it had been flat, impenetrable glass again, and whatever the way inside, only Barrons knew it.
And the look on his face! It had been the look of a man who’d done something that he’d found in, if not pleasure, some kind of comfort. In his face there’d been a certain . . . grim satisfaction.
Jericho Barrons was a man it wouldn’t be hard to romanticize (overlooking the toting around of savaged bodies, of course). Fiona, the woman who’d run the bookstore before I’d come along, had been so blindly in love with him that she’d tried to kill me to get me out of her way. Barrons was powerful, broodingly good-looking, insanely wealthy, frighteningly intelligent, and had exquisite taste, not to mention a hard body that emitted some kind of constant low-level charge. Bottom line: He was the stuff of heroes.
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And psychotic killers.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in Dublin, it’s that there’s a very fine line between the two.
I wasn’t about to romanticize him. I knew he was ruthless. I’ve known that since the day I met him, and saw him staring at me across the length of the bookstore with cold, old eyes. Barrons does exactly and only whatever serves Barrons best. Period. Keeping me alive serves him best. Period. But one day it might not. Exclamation mark!
Why did he have an Unseelie Silver in his study? Where did he go in it? What did he do? Besides carry dead women around.
The shadow-demons in the mirror had behaved just like the Shades in the Dark Zone had when he’d walked through it: yielding to his passage, giving him wide berth. The Lord Master himself had taken one look at him recently, and walked away.
Who was Jericho Barrons? What was Jericho Barrons? Possibilities crowded my mind, each worse than the last.
I had no way of knowing what he was, but I knew what he wasn’t. He wasn’t someone I was going to be telling anything about what I’d learned about the Sinsar Dubh last night. He kept his secrets? Fine. I was keeping mine.
I had no desire to be the one responsible for putting Jericho Barrons and the Dark Book in the same place together. He walked in one Unseelie Hallow and was hunting another. Gee, might that make him Unseelie of some kind? Maybe one of those dainty, transparent ones that could slip inside human skins and take them over, that I called Grippers? Was it possible one had possession of him?
I’d considered the idea once before but swiftly discarded it. Now I had to admit that I’d had no basis for dismissing it, other than that . . . well . . . I’d been romanticizing him, telling myself Jericho Barrons was too tough to be possessed by anyone or anything. Who was I to say that was true? I’d watched a Gripper walk straight into a young woman in the Temple Bar District not so long ago. The moment it had entered her, I’d no longer been able to sense Unseelie within her. She’d passed for human to my sidhe-seer senses.
What if he was secretly working for the forces of darkness, conning me as cunningly as the Lord Master had seduced my sister into hunting the Book? It would explain virtually everything about him: his inhuman strength, his knowledge of the Fae, his familiarity with and ownership of one of the Dark Glasses, the Shades avoiding him, the Lord Master not confronting him—after all, they’d be on the same side.
I blew out a frustrated breath.
The only time I’d ever felt like I could take care of myself, since I’d come to Dublin, was the night Mallucé had nearly killed me, and I’d eaten Unseelie to survive. Revolting as it was, Fae flesh bestowed a degree of Fae power upon the person eating it; made them superstrong, healed mortal wounds, even supposedly granted power in the black arts.
I’d felt like I finally had an edge that night and hadn’t needed anyone else to protect me. I’d been able to kick ass like all the other big bad men around me. I’d been Mallucé’s equal. I’d been nearly as deadly as Barrons himself, perhaps as deadly, just not as well trained. I’d finally felt like a force to be reckoned with, someone capable of demanding answers, of throwing my weight around, without the constant fear of getting hurt or killed.
It had been exhilarating. It had been freeing. But I couldn’t eat Unseelie every day. It had too many downsides. Not only did it temporarily cancel out all my sidhe-seer powers, and make me vulnerable to my own spear (the Hallow killed anything Fae, even if you’d only eaten it; I’d learned that from watching Mallucé rot) but I’d realized over the past week that eating Unseelie was addictive, and a single meal was enough to birth that addiction. Mallucé hadn’t been weak. The lure of Fae power was strong. I’d been dreaming about it at night. Carving off chunks of live Rhino-boy . . . chewing . . . swallowing . . . feeling their incredible dark half-life entering my body . . . electrifying my blood . . . changing me . . . making me invincible again . . .
I snapped out of my reverie to find a dainty sandwich perched at my mouth. A bit of flour from the bakery bread was on my lip.
I thrust the sandwich back on the tray, carried the snacks to the table, and arranged the spread invitingly, near flowered paper plates and napkins I’d picked up on my way back from the pastry shop.
Genteel southern Mac was shamed by my lack of china and silver.
Spear-toting Mac cared only that there might be leftovers and food should never be wasted. People were starving in third-world countries.
I glanced at my watch. If Jayne was a punctual man, he’d be here in three minutes, and I would put my plan into action. It was risky but necessary.
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Last night—between nightmares in which I was chasing the Book and each time I got close to it, it morphed into, not the Beast, but Barrons—I’d lay awake, sorting through and discarding ideas until I’d struck upon one that had impressed even me with its cleverness.
The key to finding the Sinsar Dubh was tracking the most heinous crimes. Where chaos and brutality reigned, It would be found. At first, I’d decided to try to get my hands on a police radio, but the logistics of stealing one, and monitoring it 24/7, had defeated me.
What I needed, I’d realized, I already had.
Inspector Jayne.
Mom always told me not to put all my eggs in one basket, and that was exactly what I’d been doing with Barrons. Who had I cultivated as my backup plan?
No one. I needed to diversify.
If I could persuade one of the Garda to call whenever they received a report of the type of crime that fit my parameters, I’d get an instant lead, without being tied to a radio. I could rush to the crime scene, hoping the Book was still close enough that I could sense it, and use my sidhe-seer senses to track it. Most of the tips would probably prove fruitless, but eventually, I was bound to get lucky, at least once.
Jayne was going to be my informant. One might wonder how I planned to achieve such a monumental twist on the usual police/civilian relationship. That was the brilliant part of my simple plan.
Of course, I had no idea what to do if I managed to actually locate the Sinsar Dubh. I couldn’t even get close to it, and if I managed to somehow, I’d seen what happened to people who touched it. Still, I had to hunt it. It was one of those things programmed into my genes along with my innate fear of Hunters, knee-jerk reactions to Hallows, and constant urge to run around warning people about the Fae, even though I knew I’d never be believed.
Today, I needed to be believed. Jayne wanted to know what was going on.
Today, I would show him.
The voice of my conscience protested thinly. I quashed it. Conscience wasn’t going to keep me alive.
I eyed the tray. My mouth watered. Those were no simple egg, tuna, or chicken salad sandwiches, those scrumptious little confections I’d worked so hard to make, and was now dying to eat. Dreaming of eating. Hungering for in a way I’d never hungered for human food.
Those wriggling little delicacies were Unseelie salad sandwiches.
And Jayne was about to get one great, big, eye-opening look at his city.
It went about as well as train wrecks do.
The inspector ate only two of my tiny sandwiches: the first because he hadn’t expected it to taste so awful; the second, I think, because he’d thought surely the first must have been a mistake.
By the time he’d swallowed the second one, he could see that the sandwiches were moving on his plate, and there’d been no chance of getting a third one into him. I wasn’t sure how long the effects of such a small amount of Unseelie would last, but I figured he had a day or two of it. I hadn’t told him about the superstrength, regenerative powers or skill in the black arts that resulted from eating Unseelie. Only I knew he was currently strong enough to crush me with a single blow.
My hands had trembled when I’d forced myself to flush the rest of the uneaten delicacies down the toilet before we’d left. I’d set two aside, in case of emergency. Halfway out the door I’d called my own bluff and gone back to flush those, too. I’d caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, white-faced with the strain of denying myself what I so badly wanted, the bliss of strength, safety from my countless enemies roaming the streets of Dublin, not to mention being able to hold my own with Barrons. I’d clung to the edge of the toilet, watching the chunks of meat swirl around in the porcelain-cradled whirlpool, until they’d disappeared.
We stood on the outskirts of the Temple Bar District, and I was exhausted.
I’d been with Jayne for seven long hours, and I didn’t like him any better now than before I’d fed him Unseelie, and forced him to see what was going on in his world.
He didn’t like me any better, either. In fact, I was pretty sure he was going to hate me for the rest of his life for what I’d made him confront tonight.
I’d drugged him, he’d insisted, shortly after I’d commenced our little monster-tour. Given him hallucinogens. He was going to have me arrested for trafficking in narcotics. He was going to have me kicked out of Ireland and sent home to prison.
We both knew he wouldn’t.
It had taken hours of steering him around Dublin, showing him what was in the bars, driving the cabs, and running the vendor stands, to get through to him, but I’d finally managed. I’d had to coach him the entire time on how to act, how to sneak looks and not to betray us, unless he wanted to end up as dead as O’Duffy.
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Regardless of what I might think of his methods of handling me, Inspector Jayne was a fine cop, with sound instincts—whether he liked what they were telling him or not. Though he’d insisted none of it was real, he’d nonetheless employed the stealth of twenty-two years of investigative procedure. He’d regarded the mouthless, sad, wet-eyed monsters and the leather-winged gargoyles and the hulking masses of deformed limbs and oozing flesh with the perfect impassivity of a nonbeliever.
He’d slipped up only once, a few minutes ago.
I’d quickly nulled and stabbed three Rhino-boys in the dark alley we’d been using as a shortcut.
Jayne stood there, staring down at their gray-limbed bodies, absorbing the lumpy faces with jutting jaws and tusklike teeth, the beady eyes and elephant skin, the open wounds, revealing pinkish gray flesh marbled with pus-filled cysts. “You fed me this?” he said finally.
I shrugged. “It was the only way I knew to show you what you needed to see. ”
“Pieces of these . . . things . . . were in those little sandwiches?” His voice rose; his ruddy face was pale.
“Uh-huh. ”
He looked at me, his Adam’s apple convulsing, and for a moment I thought he was going to vomit but he got it under control. “Lady, you are one sick fuck. ”
“Come on. There’s one more thing I want you to see,” I told him.
“I’ve seen enough. ”
“No, you haven’t. Not yet. ” I’d saved the worst for last.
I concluded our sightseeing tour at the edge of a new Dark Zone on the north side of the river Liffey that I’d been planning to scout, so I could ink its parameters on the map I’d nailed up on my bedroom wall. “Remember those places you couldn’t find on the maps?” I said. “The area next to the bookstore? The ones O’Duffy was checking into? This is what they are. ” I waved a hand down the street.
Jayne took a step toward the darkness and I barked, “Don’t leave the light!”
He stopped beneath a streetlamp and leaned against it. I watched his face as he watched the Shades slithering hungrily at the edge of the darkness.
“And you expect me to believe these shadows eat people?” he finally said, tightly.
“If you don’t believe me, go home, get one of your kids, and send them in. See what happens. ” I didn’t feel as cold as I sounded when I said it, but I had to get through to him, and to do that, I needed to hit him where he lived, bring the threat as close to home as I could.
“Don’t you ever mention my children to me again!” he shouted, turning on me. “Do you hear me? Never!”
“When this wears off,” I pointed out, “you’ll no longer know where the Dark Zones are. Your children might walk to school through one, and never come home again. Will you go looking for their piles? Will you even know where to look? Will you die trying?”
“Are you threatening me?” Big hands fisting, he bristled toward me.
I stood my ground. “No. I’m offering to help you. I’m offering you a deal. In a day, give or take a little, you won’t be able to see any of this anymore. You won’t have any idea where the danger to your family lies, and it’s all around you. I can keep you informed. I can tell you where the Dark Zones are, where the majority of the Unseelie are gathering, and how best to keep your wife and children safe. If it gets really bad, I can tell you when to get out of town, and where to go. All I want in exchange is a little information. It’s not like I’m asking you to help me commit crimes. I’m asking you to help me try to prevent them. We’re on the same side, Inspector. Until tonight, you just didn’t know what was on the other side. Now you do. Help me stop what’s happening in this city. ”
“This is insane. ”
“Insane or not, it’s real. ” I’d had a hard time accepting that, too. The bridge connecting the sane world to this dark, Fae-infested Dublin had taken me many faltering steps to cross. “It killed O’Duffy. Will
you let it kill you?”
He looked away and said nothing. At that moment, I knew I’d won. I knew he would call me the next time a crime was radioed in. He would hate every minute of it, he would tell himself he was crazy, but he would make the call, and that was all I needed.
I left Jayne at the Garda station on Pearse Street, assuring him the vision would wear off soon. As we parted, I saw the same hollow expression in his eyes I sometimes glimpsed in my own.
I felt sorry for him.
But I needed someone on the inside at the Garda, and now I had him.
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Besides, if I hadn’t opened his eyes tonight and forced him to see what was going on, he’d have ended up dead in a matter of days. He’d been nosing around too much. He’d have spotted an abandoned car down some back alley and walked into a Dark Zone at night, or whoever’d slit O’Duffy’s throat to silence him would have slit Jayne’s next.
He’d been a walking dead man. Now, at least, he had a chance.
THREE
I’d die for him.
There’s nothing else to say.
I’d give the last breath in my body and the last hope in my heart to keep him alive. When I thought I was crazy, he came to me and made sense of it all. He helped me understand what I was, showed me how to hunt and hide. He taught me that there are necessary lies. I’ve been learning a lot about those lately. Every time Mac calls I get more practice. I’d die for her, too.
He’s made me see myself differently. He lets me be the woman I always wanted to be. Not the perfect daughter and honor student who feels like she has to do all the right things to make Mom and Dad proud, or the perfect big sister who always tries to set a shining example for Mac, and keep the nosy neighbors from ever turning their sharp, gossipy tongues our way. I hate small town busybodies! I always wanted to be more like Mac. She doesn’t do anything she doesn’t feel like doing. When people call her lazy and selfish, she doesn’t care, she’s happy. I wonder if she knows how proud of her I am for that?
But things are different now.
Here, in Dublin with him, I can be anyone I want to be. I’m no longer trapped in a small town in the Deep South, forced to be the good girl. I’m free!
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