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“I wondered how V’lane knew about that. ” I might have found his knowledge of the Unseelie Princes incriminating, except both V’lane and Barrons always seemed to have the inside scoop on everything. It no longer surprised me.
“—in exchange for him telling her what you’d learned about how the Book was moving around. That you were targeting it by tracking the worst crimes. But now there’s so much violence everywhere, and no newspapers or TV, so there’s no way to find the fecking thing. ”
I thought about that and smiled. “Except for me. ” I was even more important now.
Dani grinned back. “Yup. I figure we’re the two most kick-ass weapons she’s got. ”
“But she’s still keeping the sword from you, isn’t she, Dani? Doling it out when she feels like it?”
Dani’s expression soured and she nodded.
It was time for some meddling, and Dani was definitely primed. “Doesn’t it seem wrong to you that the two most powerful sidhe-seers in this abbey aren’t armed at all times? Don’t you think, since you’re superstrong and superfast, you deserve to carry the sword? I bet even your hearing is superheightened, isn’t it? That’s why you heard me come in today, when no one else did, isn’t it?”
She nodded.
“You’re amazing, Dani. You’re hands down the most valuable asset Rowena has. And look at me—not only can I track the Book, I can Null the bastards. Freeze them, shut them down cold while we kill them. Remember the night we fought together?” It had been exhilarating. I wanted to do it again. I wanted to do it every night, until the night was ours again. I wanted to be out there prowling, hunting them like they hunted us. I wasn’t willing to be afraid any longer. It was time for them to be afraid of me.
Her eyes narrowed, her lips parted on a sharp breath, and she nodded again. Her sword hand was clenching and unclenching, like mine did when I didn’t have my spear and I thought about Fae. I wondered if I got that almost-not-quite-human look on my face sometimes, too.
I didn’t need to see a window to know that night was falling. I could feel the approach of twilight in my bones, as surely as I imagined a vampire must. No matter how heavily warded the perimeter of the abbey was, without my spear I felt like I was missing an appendage: the most important one. I might be immune to death-by-sex Fae glamour—though I wouldn’t trust that completely until I’d tested it on some other Fae besides V’lane—but they could still capture me if they came in force. And if turning me Pri-ya wouldn’t work this time, they could just torture me to make me do what they wanted. I wasn’t immune to torture. Pain bothered me. A lot. I needed my spear. Now.
“Dani, you and I were made for those weapons. Nobody else can use them like we can! Nobody else is as strong or has as many abilities. By keeping the spear and sword, Rowena makes all of us vulnerable. How dare she sit in her study with both of the only weapons that can kill the Fae, leaving the whole abbey unprotected? She’s too old to use them! If a Fae got past the wards, she’d be worthless in a fight. We’d be sitting ducks. She knows the Seelie want the Hallows back. That it’s just a matter of time. Shouldn’t those weapons be in the hands of the two sidhe-seers most capable of defending and keeping them? And isn’t that us?”
“What are you thinking? You wanna go talk to her together? Gang up on her? Tell her she has to give us the weapons?” Dani looked thrilled by the idea.
I snorted. “Talk? Hardly. Rowena needs a little wake-up call. We don’t work for her. We don’t answer to her. We work with her. By choice. Or not at all. ”
Fear battled with savage glee in the adolescent’s face. “You know there’s no going back if we do this,” she said breathlessly.
“Who wants to go back?” I said coolly. “I want to go forward. And if you’re always looking over your shoulder, worrying about the next step you’re taking, you can’t. Hesitation kills. ”
“Hesitation kills,” Dani echoed like a battle cry, and punched the air with her fist. “I’m in, Mac. ”
There are moments in my life when I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be, doing exactly what I’m supposed to do. I pay attention to them. They’re my cosmic landmarks, letting me know I’m on the right path. Now that I’m older and can look back and see where I missed a turn here and there, and know the price I paid for those oversights, I try to look sharper at the present.
Tonight was one of those perfect moments: speeding into Dublin in a well-stocked Range Rover beneath a moon so bright and full that I could have driven without headlights if I’d wanted to, with Dani at my side, armed with the Sword of Light, and me holding the Spear of Destiny. It felt like heaven in my hand, the weight of it, the breadth of it, the way it fit my palm so perfectly.
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Getting the sword hadn’t been difficult, but I hadn’t expected it to be. Truth was, Dani could have taken it anytime she’d wanted. She knew all of Rowena’s hiding places, and blasting down doors is one of her specialties. Rowena had controlled her by simple fear of repercussions, and Dani—thirteen and treated like an outcast so much of the time—was starved for what little approval and attention she got.
Now she had my approval and attention, and it was unconditional. Or at least not predicated on her being subservient to me. I would never do that to her.
The spear had been trickier. As we’d figured, Rowena was carrying it. I never expected to be able to take it stealthily. I just wanted to take it and get out fast. And for that—plus about a zillion other reasons—I’d needed Dani.
I had her slam us both into Rowena at high speed. While I kept the old woman busy trying to get untangled from me on the floor, Dani stayed in high-speed mode, patted her down, snatched the spear from a pouch the old woman had sewn into her robes, grabbed me again, and whizzed us both out.
Rowena’s shouts had roused the entire abbey. We’d fled into the night, followed by cries of “Traitors, traitors!”
“We can never go back to the abbey, Mac. ” Dani looked simultaneously exhilarated and as young and lost as I’d ever seen her. I remembered being a teenager and didn’t envy her a bit. Emotions ran so high and changed so quickly, it was hard to know which end was up.
I laughed. “Oh, we’re going back, Dani. I need things there. ” Answers. Lots of them. Tomorrow I would begin working on how to get into the Forbidden Libraries and putting together my own troops of sidhe-seers.
“They’ll never take us back, Mac. We ganged up and defied Rowena. We’re outcasts. Forever. ” She sounded as miserable as she did proud.
“Trust me, Dani. I’ve got a plan. ” I’d been fleshing it out while I was tracking Shades and driving them outside. “They’ll take us back. I promise. ” More important, I planned to take them with me. But I needed to make a big statement first. I needed to show them how it could be. I knew what the other sidhe-seers wanted the most and I could give it to them, and that was the key to motivating any pack to follow a leader. Standing in the hall while they voted, I’d felt it in my blood. They were sick to death of menial tasks, of being corralled and ordered about, tired of seeing the world fall apart on their watch while they did the only thing Rowena would let them do: gather what survivors they could find and teach them to do what the pathetic and defeated did—hide.
What they wanted most of all was to hunt and kill Fae. And why wouldn’t they? They’d been born to do it!
During her time as Grand Mistress, Rowena had tried to civilize them, circumscribe them, organize them, but she’d only been polishing their surfaces, changing nothing where it counted, because deep inside every sidhe-seer was a hunter, bred to kill Fae, stalking, snarling, waiting with bated breath for the opportunity to do it. Beneath the skin of even the most timid sidhe-seer was a different creature entirely. Case in point? See pink Mac go black.
I was going to invite them out to play.
I was going to give them the opportunity they’d been jonesi
ng for, show them what we could do together. Having only two weapons wasn’t the most desirable situation, but there were ways to work with it. If I could motivate five hundred sidhe-seers to fight and capture as many non-sifting Fae as possible, Dani and I could focus solely on killing them, instead of having to waste time hunting them ourselves. On our own, Dani and I might be able to take out a hundred a night, but if the Fae had already been captured and rounded up, we could kill a thousand in a few hours! Maybe more. And that was if every sidhe-seer at the abbey managed to find and capture only two apiece!
There was no doubt that Dani and I would be better than the other sidhe-seers at capturing the Fae and that pretty much any sidhe-seer could stab them, but I was never letting my spear go again. I would tell the other sidhe-seers the same thing I’d told Dani: We needed to keep the weapons because we were the only two who could protect them if the Seelie came for them. I would never let any of them know what I knew: that V’lane could take both weapons away from us at any time if he felt like it.
I shoved that thought away and turned to another I was still mulling over. If we began feeding Unseelie flesh to normal humans, we could turn every man, woman, and child into a fighter and arm them with the ability to defend themselves. It sickened me to think of billions out there that couldn’t even see the Shades.
“Are the Unseelie projecting glamour?” I asked Dani. “I mean, are they making themselves invisible to the average human?”
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She shook her head. “V’lane says concealment is the Seelie way of things. He says Unseelie get off on human fear. They ain’t hiding nothing. The Shades are still invisible to normal folks ‘cause that’s their natural state, but people can see all the other castes, far as we know. ”
So, other humans could see their death coming, unless it was by Shade. They just couldn’t do anything about it. But if they were fed Unseelie, they would gain superstrength, like Mallucé, Derek O’Bannion, Fiona, and Jayne, and be able to fight back. We could capture far greater numbers, and wouldn’t it be worth it, even if it changed those who ate it on some fundamental level? I wasn’t sure exactly what changes it caused or how long-term they might be, but I didn’t feel worse for it. Fear of my own spear had been the greatest drawback. Wasn’t the survival of our race and our world the most important thing, no matter the means by which it was accomplished? In a “Your Pure Human Genes” or “Your Life” contest, I’d come down firmly every time on the side of life.
“IFP, Mac!” Dani exclaimed. “Dead ahead!”
I veered sharply, skidding around it. It was a small one, the circumference of a carnival calliope. We’d seen three so far. She’d laughed when I told her what I’d christened them. They were easier to see at night. When headlights hit them, they shimmered with thousands of what looked like tiny dust motes dancing on the air. The first—the swamp I’d driven through earlier today—had shimmered pale green; the last two had been silvery. I wondered if their color had anything to do with the landscape inside and what dangers they held, if perhaps similar colors came from similar parts of Fae realms. I made a mental note to begin recording as much as I could about them in my journal. I thought I might organize scouts. Pick half a dozen and send them out to learn everything they could about the Interdimensional Fairy Potholes. Were they gates to Faery? Was there some way to use them to our advantage?
It was quarter to eleven by the time we arrived in Dublin. We worked our way past abandoned wrecked cars, parked near Temple Bar, and got out, MacHalos blazing, weapons in hand.
My sidhe-seer senses were picking up a tremendous number of Fae in the city. I sensed thousands of them, spread out in all directions. Why so many? The city was eerily quiet and appeared to be devoid of human life. Wouldn’t Unseelie want to be wherever the most humans were gathered? It didn’t seem as if any were left here at all.
“Are you sensing a ton of Fae, Dani?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. S’part of the reason I kept coming in. Looking for you and trying to figure out what was going on. Was kinda freaky alone, though. I think Dublin’s, like, their official headquarters or something. ”
I stared into the shadows, searching the night for Shades, glancing from dark alley to darker lane.
Dani didn’t miss it. “I think most of ‘em are gone, Mac. Last time I saw one of the creepy fecks in here was more than a month ago, and it was a really small one. I think they ate their way out and just kept going. Only ones I see anymore are in the abbey with us. ”
I was still keeping my MacHalo on. She made no move to take hers off, either. “Where’s the boarded-up bar you said you saw?” We’d start there. Kill everything that was Fae. Try knocking sense into any humans stupid enough to be found there. “You know what to do if we get surrounded,” I reminded her.
“Grab you and get out fast,” she said with a grin. “Don’t worry, Mac. I got your back. ”
Like I said: It was one of those perfect moments. We fought for hours, racking up the kills. With each Unseelie we “exterminated,” I felt stronger, more charged, more determined to track and destroy the last one, even if it took until my dying breath.
Dani and I punched and stabbed and sliced our way down the dark Dublin streets. Drunk on our own sheer kick-ass glory, we made up a song that would one day become the anthem of sidhe-seers around the world. But we didn’t know that. We only knew that shouting it kept us pumped up, feeling invincible.
We’re taking back the night!
Let there be light.
We’re not afraid anymore.
You took what was mine
And now it’s time
For you and me to settle the score
We’re taking back the night!
“Shh!” Dani suddenly hissed.
I froze, mid-lyric and mid-stab, dying Rhino-boy stuck on my spear, tusked mouth working soundlessly.
I couldn’t hear a thing, but I don’t have heightened senses unless I’ve eaten Unseelie, and thanks but no. I’ll survive with what gifts I have.
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“Pull your spear out,” she whispered.
I did, and the next thing I knew, I was being whizzed down alleys so fast and jerkily that I wanted to puke. I will never understand how Dani can stand moving like she does.
Then we were still and she was pointing. “Look up, Mac!”
I looked, and shivered. With all the Fae in the city, I’d not been able to distinguish castes. I harbored a special hatred for this one: Unseelie Hunters.
Since time immemorial, they have hunted and killed sidhe-seers. Enforcers of Fae law and punishment, mercenary to the core, they work for whoever pays them with whatever it is they want most at the moment. They flip sides constantly. They have telepathic abilities and can get inside your skull and twist you up on yourself. To make matters worse, they chill you to the bone and look like the devil himself, come for your soul.
Two enormous Hunters were circling in the sky, a few blocks from the river Liffey. Twice the size of any I’d seen in the past, they were blacker than night, with great leathery wings, forked tails, talons as long as my spear, and eyes that blazed like furnaces from hell. They were clawing air, talons forward, screaming at something in the streets the way I imagined dragons must scream, churning black ice crystals into the air with every flap of those deadly black sails.
“D’ya fecking believe it?” Dani breathed. “Are they nuts?”
She didn’t mean the Hunters. She meant whoever was down in the streets, shooting at them.
I could see holes being punched in their great wings and healing almost instantly, bullets dropping to the street below. I could hear the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic gunfire.
It was doing nothing much but pissing them off. A lot.
Whoever was doing it was going to get themselves killed!
I looked at Dani, and she nodded. “Better go save their ass,” she agreed, and
reached for me.
I stepped back. “Thanks, but it’s only a few blocks. I’ll walk. ”
I turned.
She grabbed my shoulder and we were there in a heartbeat. I was really going to have to loot a drugstore for Dramamine, because when she let me go again, I could only stand bent over, battling the overwhelming urge to puke on a pair of shiny black shoes.
Momentarily incapacitated was no way to arrive at the scene of potential danger. Superspeed was worse than being sifted. Sifting was smooth. Superspeed was a horse and carriage on a rutted road, at jet speeds, with no shocks.
I looked up from the shoes and blinked. For a moment, words eluded me.
“Ms. Lane. Good to know you’re alive. I’d begun to wonder. ”
Turning to the uniformed troops behind him, Inspector Jayne snarled, “Fire!”
It seemed a lifetime ago that the tough-talking, burly inspector standing before me had picked me up, dragged me off to the Garda station, and interrogated me for the murder of his co-worker and brother-in-law, Inspector Patrick O’Duffy. At least half a lifetime must have passed since I’d opened his eyes to the Unseelie that had invaded Dublin by sneaking bits of their immortal flesh into his dainty sandwiches the afternoon I’d invited him to the bookstore for tea.
Then I’d taken him on a sightseeing tour and forced him to confront what was happening to his city, for the dual purposes of enlisting his aid in tracking the Book and getting him off my ass. After that, we’d spoken only whenever he had a tip about the Book’s location, and very curtly at that, until the day he picked me up off the street again and shocked me by asking me to make him my special “tea” one more time. I hadn’t seen that coming. I’d expected him to close his eyes and mind to the impossible-to-explain, like most people do. He had surprised me.
I eyed him speculatively. When his men paused between rounds, I said, “Are you still eating Unseelie?” Or was he just going after the ones he could see?
Dani made a choking sound. “Eating Unseelie? Eating it? Are you fecking kidding me? It’s goopy, and some of ‘em ooze green stuff and they have … like … pus-filled things in ‘em! Ugh. Just fecking ugh!” She stuck her tongue out and shook her head violently. “Ugh!” she exploded again.