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“Thousands, Dani! Beyond counting. If it keeps up like this—” I broke off, unable to make myself complete the thought. “If you guys come in, we can save some of them, but I can’t do it by myself. There’s too many Unseelie. ” But if the abbey was full of Shades, they couldn’t leave. We couldn’t afford to lose the abbey. The libraries were there, and God only knew what else. The lightbulb above me flickered and made a sizzling noise as if it had taken a power surge.
It’s hard to say what makes the brain suddenly piece things together, but I had one of those moments where a series of images flashed through my mind and I was stupefied by the simplicity and obviousness of what I’d been missing: Rhino-boys collecting trash, repairing streetlamps, driving city trucks, replacing broken bricks in the pavement. “Oh, no, Dani,” I breathed, horrified, “forget what I just said. Don’t come into the city, and don’t let anyone else. Not now. Not for any reason. Not until after dawn. ”
“Why?”
“Because they’ve been planning this. I’ve been seeing Unseelie in city jobs, and I didn’t get it until now. It’s not just the street sweepers, or the trash collectors. ” Where better to learn about one’s enemy than from the leavings of their life, their refuse? The FBI always infiltrated their suspect’s daily lives, bugged their house, and staked out their trash. “It’s the utility workers, too. ” How long had the LM been orchestrating his macabre symphony? Long enough to have thought through every bit of it, and his time as a human had taught him well what our weaknesses were. “They’ve got control of the grid, Dani. They’re going to turn the entire—” I held my phone away from my ear and looked at it.
Full battery.
No service. The cell phone towers had just gone down. I had no idea how much Dani had heard.
“—city into a Dark Zone,” I whispered.
The lightbulb above me flickered again. I looked up at it. It sizzled, popped, and went dark.
EIGHTEEN
My world was falling apart around me.
I was cut off from V’lane, Barrons was looking like the ultimate traitor, the abbey was full of Shades, BB&B was a Dark Zone, the city had fallen to rioters and Unseelie, and it was about to descend into total darkness.
Once it did, nothing alive out in the streets would be safe. Nothing. Not even grass and trees. Well, I might be, illuminated by my MacHalo, armed with my spear (that could kill me horribly at this point), but what if a group of rioters or Unseelie attacked me en masse and rendered me defenseless? What could I hope to accomplish by wandering the city? Could I save lives? What would I do with them if I did? How would I keep them safe when the lights went out? Would they, like drowning people, claw and fight me to death to steal my lights? If I died, who would track the Book? I’m no coward. But I’m no fool, either. I know when to fight, and I know when to survive to fight another day.
Every cell in my body wanted to go up, get off the ground, far from the streets and alleys and lanes that would soon run dark with a flood of Shades, closer to the dawn that loomed on what seemed an impossibly far horizon.
Twelve hours. Plus some. I scoured the streets for my Alamo, refusing to ponder the outcome of that battle. I would do better.
I finally settled on an old church with a high steeple, an open belfry, and stone archways where I could perch, and watch my flanks. The tall, double front doors were locked. I liked them that way. There were no windows facing the street. I liked that, too. Here was my fortress, the best I could do, for now anyway.
I circled around the back, kicked in the door of the refectory, and slipped inside. After barricading the door with a heavy china cabinet, I swiped an apple and two oranges from a fruit basket on the dining table, and hurried through the dimly lit communal areas of the church.
It took me a while to find the entrance to the belfry, at the rear of the large chapel, beneath the choir balcony, in the thick of the massive organ pipes. The narrow door was almost completely concealed behind a bookcase that had been shoved in front of it, I suspected to prevent curious kids from making the climb. I pushed the bookcase aside—an easy nudge as pumped up on Unseelie as I was—and opened the door. It was pitch black beyond. Bracing myself, I stepped inside, lighting up the tower. No shadows recoiled, no inky darknesses slithered. I exhaled with relief.
A narrow, rickety wooden stair, more ladder than step, circled a hundred and fifty feet of stone wall to the belfry. It was actually nailed to the mortar in places; there were neither braces nor suspension for it, and it looked about as safe as a house of cards. I wondered when the last time was that anyone had actually ascended it. Did bells need to be serviced? Or was it more likely the last time anyone had climbed those stairs was fifty years ago?
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No matter. I wasn’t staying on the ground.
The rungs gave out in two places. Both times my heightened strength and reflexes saved me. Without Unseelie hammering through my veins, I would have slipped through the treads, plunged fifty feet, and broken something serious in the fall. Both times I was excruciatingly aware of the cold weight of the spear against my body. I hated having to carry while I was like this. I was a water balloon with a pin taped to my side, rolling across the floor, tempting fate.
Perching precariously on the last rung, I strained to reach the trapdoor, pushed it up, hoisted myself through, and glanced around. I was in a room directly beneath the spire. Overhead was a second platform similar to the one I was on, above which hung two great brass bells. The room I was in appeared to be a utility room of sorts, with boxes of tools, and a broom closet that was partially open. I moved to it, made sure it was Shade-free, and closed it. Slightly cracked closet doors give me the creeps.
I climbed the final ladder, ascending to the bells.
I was surprised to find the storm was far north of the city now; the clouds had broken and moonlight, though wan, illuminated the belfry. I clicked myself off so I wouldn’t be a blazing X-marks-the-spot-of-nubile-young-sidhe-seer. Four tall stone archways, twice as high as my head, framed the spire east, west, north, and south. I stepped into the one facing east, and shivered in the cold breeze, staring down at Dublin.
Fires burned in many places, and cars lay on their sides in the streets, and thousands upon thousands of rioters raged and looted, and destroyed. I watched them ebb and flow up and down city blocks. I watched a group of several thousand driven straight into a Dark Zone, forced into the waiting wall of pitch, where they were sucked dry of life down to a rind of human remains. I heard their cries of horror. I’ll hear them till I die.
I stood looking out over Dublin as darkness took the city, grid by grid, district by district as if, somewhere in Dublin’s basement, circuit breakers were being systematically thrown.
I remembered the night I’d curled in my window seat at BB&B, and my eyes had played a trick on me.
It was no trick now. Or rather, it was the greatest Halloween trick of all. There would be no treats handed out in Dublin tonight. This was what Derek O’Bannion had been talking about.
At 8:29 P. M. , darkness reigned absolute.
Even the fires had been extinguished.
The sounds floating up were different now, the voices fewer, and frightened, not angry. Militant footfalls passed beneath me regularly. The Unseelie were still at it, collecting us, killing us. It took every ounce of self-control I possessed to not go down there to hunt in the darkness and try to save those humans that remained.
Out there, past a certain bookstore, a Dark Zone was spreading unchecked, taking over the city.
Dublin was without hope until 7:25 A. M. : Dawn.
I wondered what was happening with the MacKeltars. Was Barrons sabotaging that ritual, too? It made no sense to me. Why would Barrons want the walls down? Did Barrons want the walls down? Might the Orb have come to him already sabotaged, a prepackaged grenade, just waiting for the pin to be pulled? Where
had he gotten it? Was I a hopeless fool, still trying to make excuses for him?
Were the walls already down? Was this the flood of Unseelie that had been freed from their prison, the ones wrecking the city? Or were they merely harbingers, and the worst was yet to come?
I dropped to the cold stone floor of the aperture, drew up my knees, folded my arms, and rested my chin on them, looking out at the city. My body bristled with the dark energy of Unseelie flesh, with the protective urges of a sidhe-seer, magnified by Fae steroids, demanding that I do something, anything.
I shuddered in the grip of my internal battle. I felt like I was crying, although no tears fell. I didn’t know yet that tears are not possible for a Fae, or for anyone under the influence of it.
Seeing BB&B surrounded by Shades, swallowed up by a Dark Zone, had been bad enough. Seeing all of Dublin dark was overload. How many people would be left by dawn to try to reclaim it? Any? Did Unseelie now guard wherever it was the utilities were controlled? Would we have to form armies to fight our way in and seize control from them? My world had changed tonight. I had no idea in how many ways, but I knew it was bad.
I sat in the cold stone opening, watching, waiting.
Three and a half hours later, the first of my questions was answered.
At eleven fifty-nine, the skin all over my body began to crawl. Literally. I scratched myself feverishly. Even deadened as my sidhe-seer senses were from my dark meal, I still felt it coming. No, the walls had not yet fallen. They were falling now.
The world was changing, becoming.
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I felt a crushing sense of spatial distortion, stretching me, twisting, compressing. I was gigantic and paper-thin. I was small and round as a berry. I was inside out, my bones exposed. I was a bag of skin again.
Then the world felt suddenly much too large and horrifically skewed. The buildings below soared up at jagged, impossible angles, vanished down to pinpoints then erupted again. I watched as laws of physics were rewritten, as dimensions that were not meant to coexist crashed into each other and vied for dominance, contested for space to fill. I watched as the fabric of existence was ripped apart, and sewn back together again, aligned on diametrically opposing principles.
The universe screeched in protest as barriers collapsed, and realms collided; then the night was filled with another kind of screeching and I scrambled back, melting into the shadows, afraid of the shadows, but more afraid to turn my lights on, because the second of my questions was being answered: No, the Unseelie had not yet been freed from their prison. They were coming now, galloping down on a dark wind blowing from the horizon that had substance, the stuff of nightmares. Led by Death, Pestilence, Famine, and War?
They came.
I watched them come.
The ones who have no names, the abominations, those who are flawed yet live, those who hunger yet can never be sated, those who hate eternally, who need beyond bearing with their twisted limbs and psychopathic dreams, those who know but one joy: the hunt, the kill, the nectar of dust and ashes.
They soared over my head, high above the city, a vast, dark wave that stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, obliterating the sky, shrieking, howling, trumpeting their victory, free, free, free for the first time in nearly a million years! Free in a world warmed by sun, populated by billions of strong hearts beating, exploding with life, bursting with sex and drugs and music and glories untold that had been forbidden to them forever.
They came, the Wild Hunt, the winged ones, carrying their brethren in beaks and claws and other things that defied description, streaming from their icy hell, icing the world a slippery shining silvery frost in their wake.
I retreated into the belfry, my breath crystallizing on the bitterly cold air.
Then I retreated even farther, slinking to the lower platform, where I crept to the broom closet, pushed my way in between mops and pails, and shut the door.
Fingers numbed by cold, I shredded my T-shirt in the wan glow of one Click-It, stuffed pieces of it into every potentially telltale nook and cranny, then clicked myself on from head to toe until I filled the tiny room with light.
Heart pounding, eyes wide with terror, I backed into a corner, drew my knees to my chin, laid my spear harness on the floor beside me, and began the long vigil to Dawn.
PART THREE
Dawn
“Turned out I was wrong.
It wasn’t the dark I should have been afraid of, at all. ”
—Mac’s journal
NINETEEN
It was the second longest night of my life. The longest is yet to come.
I passed the time culling my memory for good ones, reliving them in vivid detail: those two years when Alina and I were in high school together; the trip we’d made as a family to Tybee Island, the guy I’d met there, who gave me my first real kiss, out in the waves where my parents couldn’t see us; my graduation party; Alina’s farewell bash before she’d left for Ireland.
Silence came long before dawn.
It was absolute; the hours from five to seven were so unearthly quiet I was afraid some cosmic calamity had befallen my closet; that a Fae realm had been victorious in the battle for the right to exist at my precise latitude and longitude, and me and the mops had been relegated Elsewhere. Precisely where Elsewhere might be I had no idea, but at 7:25 A. M. , the moment of sunrise, it was still so utterly silent that when I placed my hand on the doorknob, it occurred to me to wonder if I might open it onto the vacuum of Space.
It would certainly simplify things.
I would be dead, and no longer have to worry about what the day might bring.
If I opened the door, I had to go out there. I didn’t want to. My closet was cozy, safe, perhaps forgotten. What would I find out there? How would I get out of the city? What existed beyond Dublin’s boundaries? Had we lost parts of the world last night, in a metaphysical battle between realms? Was Ashford, Georgia, still where it was supposed to be? Was I? Where would I go? Who would I trust? In the grand scheme of things, finding the Sinsar Dubh suddenly seemed a minor issue.
I cracked open the door, glimpsed the lower platform beyond, and exhaled with relief. Distastefully, with meticulous care, I strapped my spear harness back on. Unseelie marched through my blood, posturing aggressively. It would continue to do so for days, and I would fear my spear the entire time. I eased from the closet. After a thorough look around to make sure no Shades had assumed squatting rights during the night, I clicked myself off and ascended to the belfry.
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When I stepped into the stone archway, I exhaled another sigh of relief.
The city looked mostly the same. The buildings stood. They hadn’t been burned or demolished, and they hadn’t vanished. Dublin might be worse for the wear, her party dress torn, hose run, stiletto heels broken, but she was in dishabille, not dead, and could one day be craic-filled and vibrant again.
There was no foot or motor traffic. The city looked abandoned. Though signs of rioting littered the streets, from cars to debris to bodies, there were neither people nor Fae moving around down there. I felt like the last person left alive.
There were no lights on, either. I checked my cell phone. No service. By nightfall, I was going to have to be holed up safely again.
I watched the city until day had fully dawned, and sunlight splintered off streets cobbled with broken glass. In the past forty-five minutes, no one and nothing had moved. It seemed the Unseelie foot soldiers had scrubbed Dublin clean of human life, and moved on. I doubted the Shades had gone. I could see greenery on the outskirts of the city. They’d probably gorged until the first rays of morning had forced them to retreat to their hidden cracks and crevices.
I blessed whatever fates had inspired me to make my MacHalo. It looked like it was going to be an integral part of keeping myself alive for a while. Impossible to stay to the ligh
ts when there were no lights to stay to.
First on my agenda was to find batteries, and cram my backpack full of them. Second was food. Third was wondering if Barrons could still track me by the tattoo at the base of my skull in a world that had merged with Faery realms, and if that was a good thing or a bad thing? Would V’lane come searching for me? Had the sidhe-seers survived? How was Dani? I didn’t dare let my thoughts turn toward home. Until I found a phone that worked and could call, I couldn’t handicap myself with those fears.
At the top of the rickety ladder, I slipped off my spear harness and dropped it the hundred-plus feet to the floor below, tossing it into the corner near the door. If the rungs gave way again, I would not fall on my own spear.
I descended slowly, carefully, and didn’t breathe normally again until I’d reached the bottom. I’d eaten all the Unseelie I’d diced and jarred. I felt safer with a stash on me. I wanted more. Needed more. Who knew what battles I might encounter today?
I grabbed a loop of the spear harness, slid it over my shoulder, and stepped through the door, head cocked, listening for voices, movement, any sign of danger. The church was eerily quiet, flatly so. I inhaled, taking full advantage of my Unseelie-enhanced senses. There was a peculiar odor in the air, one I couldn’t place. It appealed yet . . . disturbed me. It smelled kindred . . . but not quite. I hated not having my sidhe-seer senses. I hated not knowing if there might be Fae right around the corner, waiting to ambush me.
I moved furtively forward and added a fourth note to my mental agenda: new footwear. Tennis shoes. Rare are the boots crafted for stealth, and mine weren’t.
Midway across the anteroom, I stopped. To my left was a wide flight of marble stairs, swathed by a carpeted runner that descended to tall double doors exiting the church.
To my right was the entrance to the chapel. Even beyond its closed doors, I could smell the inner sanctum, the faint, cloying scent of incense and that other, elusive, spicy scent that disturbed and intrigued me. In the dim light of the hushed morning, the white doors of the oratory seemed to glow with a soft, unspoken invitation.
I could turn left, and head out into Dublin’s streets, or go right, and take a few moments to confer with a God I’d not spoken to much in my life. Was he listening today? Or had he shaken his head, packed up his Creation Kit, and headed off for a less screwed-up world late last night? What would I talk about? How cheated I felt by Alina’s death? How angry I was at being alone?
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