“Wake her,” I said.
Kat tucked the blanket more closely around her. “She’s lived nigh a century, Mac. I imagine her bones are weary. ”
“We need to know more. ”
Kat cast me a look of rebuke. “I’ve yet to hear a word about a prophecy or the Book. ”
“Exactly why we need to wake her!”
“Focus less on your kin and more on our problems,” Kat chastened.
It took several minutes of gentle shaking and coaxing, but the old woman finally stirred. She seemed to have no awareness that she’d been asleep and resumed talking as if she’d never stopped.
It was a time of great hope, she said. The six most potent sidhe-seers lines began to grow stronger again: the Brennans, the O’Reillys, the Kennedys, the O’Connors, the MacLoughlins, and the O’Malleys. Each house was producing daughters with gifts awakening sooner, developing more quickly.
But things changed and dark days came, days when Nana walked the land and felt the wrongness beneath her feet. The soil itself had been … tainted. Some foul thing had roused and was stirring in the belly of the earth. She bid her girls discover the source. Bade them stop it at any cost.
“Are you a sidhe-seer, too?” I asked. “Did you once live at the abbey?”
Nana was asleep again. I shook her. It didn’t work. She snored on. Kat made the old woman tea. I added a second bag to her mug.
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Five minutes later, although her head still nodded dangerously, her eyes were open and she was sipping tea.
She’d no use for the abbey. No care for study. Her bones knew truths. What need had a woman of more than bone-knowing? Learning, she scoffed, confused the bones. Reading blinded the vision. Lectures deafened the ears. Look at the land, feel the soil, taste the air!
“Dark days. ” I coaxed her to focus. “What happened?”
Nana closed her eyes and was silent so long I was afraid she’d fallen asleep again. When they opened, they glistened with unshed tears.
The two children who’d once played in her garden changed. They became secretive, fearful, exchanging troubled looks. They no longer had time for an old woman. Though she’d been the one to set them on their course, had pointed the way with her bones, they shut her out. They whispered of doings of which Nana had caught only bits and pieces.
Hidden places within the abbey.
Dark temptations.
A book of great magic.
Two prophecies.
“Two?” I exclaimed.
“Aye. One promised hope. One pledged blight upon the earth and more. Both hinged upon a single thing. ”
“A thing?” I demanded. “Or a person?”
Nana shook her head. She didn’t know. Had assumed it was a thing. An event. But it might have been a person.
Kat removed the teacup from the old woman’s hand before it spilled. She was nodding off again.
“How was the Book contained in the abbey?” I pressed.
She gave me a blank look.
“Where was it kept?” I tried.
She shrugged.
“When was it brought there and by whom?”
“‘Tis said the queen o’ the daoine sidhe placed it there in the mists o’ time. ” A gentle snore escaped her.
“How did it get out?” I said loudly, and she jerked awake again.
“Heard tell ‘twas aided by one in the highest circle. ” She gave me a sad look. “Some say yer mam. ” Her lids closed. Her face sagged and her mouth fell open.
My hands fisted. My mother would never have freed the Sinsar Dubh. And Alina was not a traitor. And I was not bad. “Who was my father?” I demanded.
“She’s asleep, Mac,” Kat said.
“Well, wake her again! We need to know more!”
“Tomorrow’s another day. ”
“Every day counts!”
“Mac, she’s weary. We can begin again in the morning. I’ll be staying the night. She shouldn’t be alone. She should never have been alone this long. Will you be staying, as well?”
“No,” Barrons growled through the door.
I inhaled slowly. Exhaled. I was in knots inside.
I had a mother.
I knew her name.
I knew where I came from.
I needed to know so much more!
Who was my father? Why had we O’Connors been getting so much bad press? Blaming my mother, then my sister, now me? It pissed me off. I wanted to shake the old woman awake, force her to go on.
I studied her. Sleep had smoothed the wizened face, and she looked peaceful, innocent, the hint of a smile touching her lips. I wondered if she dreamed of two young girls playing in her gardens. I wanted to see them, too.
I closed my eyes, flexed that sidhe-seer place, and found it easy to sip at the edges of her mind. It was, like her bones, weary and without defense.
And there they were: two girls, one dark, one blond, maybe seven or eight, running through a field of heather, holding hands and laughing. Was one of them my mother? I pressed harder, tried to shape Nana’s dream and make it show me more.
“What are you doing?” Kat cried.
I opened my eyes. Nana was staring at me, looking frightened and confused, hands tight on the arms of her rocking chair. “‘Tis a gift to be given, no’ taken!”
I stood and spread my hands placatingly. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I didn’t think you’d even feel me there. I just wanted to know what she looked like. I’m so sorry. I just wanted to know what my mother looked like. ” I was babbling. Anger that she’d stopped me vied with shame that I’d tried.
“Ye ken what she looked like. ” Nana’s eyes drifted closed again. “Yer mam was e’er takin’ ye to the abbey wi’ her. Search yer memories. ‘Tis there ye’ll be finding her, Alina. ”
I blinked. “I’m not Alina. ”
A soft snore was her only reply.
It had been, Barrons said, a grand waste of time, and he wouldn’t be escorting me back to see the old woman again.
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How could he say that? I exploded. I’d learned the name of my mother tonight! I knew my own last name!
“Names are illusions,” he growled. “Nonsensical labels seized upon by people to make them feel better about the intangibility of their puny existences. I am this. I am that,” he mocked. “I came from so and so. Ergo I am … whatever the blah-blah you want to claim. Bloody hell, spare me. ”
“You’re beginning to sound dangerously like V’lane. ” I was an O’Connor, from one of the six most powerful sidhe-seer lines—that mattered to me. I had a grandmother’s grave I could visit. I could take her flowers. I could tell her I would avenge us all.
“Irrelevant where you came from. What matters is where you’re going. Don’t you understand that? Have I succeeded in teaching you nothing?”
“Lectures,” I said, “deafen the ears. ”
We were still arguing hours later, when he pulled the Hummer into the garage behind the bookstore.
“You just don’t like that she knew something about what you are!” I accused.
“An old bag of rural superstitions,” he scoffed. “Brain-starved by the potato famine. ”
“Got the wrong century there, Barrons. ”
He glowered at me, appeared to be doing some math, then said, “So what? Same result. Starved by something. Reading blinds the vision, lectures deafen the ears, my ass. ”
We both leapt out of the Hummer and slammed the doors so hard it shuddered.
Beneath my feet, the floor of the garage trembled.
The concrete actually rumbled, making my shins vibrate, as a sound from something that could only have been born on the far side of hell filled the air.
I stared at him across the hood of the Hummer. Well, at least one of my questions had been laid to rest: Whatever was beneath his garage wasn’t
Jericho Z. Barrons.
“What do you have down there, Barrons?” My question was nearly drowned out by another swell of hopeless, anguished baying. It made me want to run. It made me want to weep.
“The only way that could ever possibly be any of your business is if it was a book, and one that we need, and it’s not, so fuck off. ” He stalked from the garage.
I followed hot on his heels. “Fine. ”
“Fiona,” he snarled.
“I said ‘fine,’ not Fiona. ” I plowed into his back.
“Jericho, it’s been too long,” a lightly accented, cultured voice said.
I stepped out from behind him. She looked stunning as ever in a hip-hugging skirt, fabulous boots that clung to the shapely lines of her long legs, and a low-cut lace blouse that showcased every voluptuous curve. A long velvet cloak was draped lightly about her shoulders, flapping gently in the night breeze. Blowsy sensuality. Fae on her skin. Expensive perfume. Her flawless skin was paler than ever, more luminous, her lipstick blood-red, her gaze frankly sexual.
My spear was in my hand instantly.
She was flanked by a dozen of the Lord Master’s black-and-crimson-clad guard.
“Guess you’re not important enough to merit protection from the princes,” I said coolly.
“Darroc is a jealous lover,” she said lightly. “He does not permit them near me, should they turn my head. He tells me what a relief it is to have a woman in his bed, after the bland taste of the child he ripped to pieces. ”
I sucked in a sharp breath and would have lunged, but Barrons’ hand closed like a steel cuff around my wrist.
“What do you want, Fiona?”
I wondered if she remembered that Barrons was at his most dangerous when his voice was that soft.
For the barest moment, as she looked at Barrons, I saw unabashed, vulnerable longing in her eyes. I saw hurt, pride, desire that would never stop eating at her. I saw love.
She loved Jericho Barrons.
Even after he’d thrown her out for trying to kill me. Even after taking up with Derek O’Bannion and now the LM.
Even with Unseelie flesh running through her veins, lover to the darkest denizens of the new Dublin, she still loved the man standing next to me and always would. Loving something like Barrons was a pain I didn’t envy her.
She devoured his face with tender concern, searched his body with undisguised ardor.
Then her gaze hitched on his hand around my arm, and it emptied instantly of love and burned with fury.
“You have not wearied of her yet. You disappoint me, Jericho. I’d have forgiven a passing fancy, as I’ve forgiven so many things. But you test my love too far. ”
“I never asked for your love. I warned you repeatedly against it. ”
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Her face changed, tightened, and she hissed, “But you took everything else! Do you think it works that way? I might have pointed the gun at my head, but you’re the one who put the bullets in it! Do you think a woman can give a man everything while still withholding her heart? We are not made that way!”
“I asked for nothing. ”
“And gave nothing,” she spat. “Do you know how it feels to realize that the one person you’ve entrusted with your heart has none?”
“Why are you here, Fiona? To show me you have a new lover? To beg to return to my bed? It’s full, and always will be. To apologize for trying to destroy the one chance I had by killing her?”
“The one chance you had for what?” I pounced on it immediately. Getting angry at her for nearly killing me hadn’t been about me at all but about the fact that I was somehow his one chance at something?
Fiona looked at me sharply, then at Barrons, and began to laugh. “Ah, such delicious absurdity! She still doesn’t know. Oh, Jericho! You never change, do you? You must be so afraid—” Abruptly, her mouth parted on a sudden inhalation, her face froze, and she sank to the ground, looking startled and confused. Her hands fluttered upward but did not achieve their destination. She crumpled limply to the pavement.
I stared. There was a knife buried deep in her chest, straight through her heart. Blood welled around it. I’d not even seen Barrons throw it.
“I assume she came with a message,” he said coldly, to one of the guards.
“The Lord Master awaits that one. ” The guard nodded toward me. “He said it is her final chance. ”
“Remove that”—Barrons glanced at Fiona—”from my alley. ”
She was still unconscious, but she wouldn’t remain that way long. Her flesh was laced with enough Unseelie that not even a knife through her heart would kill her. The dark Fae in her blood would heal the injuries. It would take my spear to kill what she was now. Or whatever weapon Barrons had used on the Fae Princess. But his knife sure had succeeded in shutting her up.
What had she been about to say? What didn’t I know that Barrons might be afraid I’d find out? What “delicious absurdity”?
I glanced up at “my wave,” the one I’d chosen to carry me through this dangerous sea. I felt like a child plucking daisy petals: I trust him, I trust him not, I trust him, I trust him not.
“And you can tell Darroc,” said Barrons, “that Ms. Lane is mine. If he wants her, he can bloody well come and get her. ”
I went straight to both gas fireplaces the next morning, lit them, and turned them up as high as they would go.
I’d had the dream about the beautiful cold woman again. She was alone, something was very wrong with her, but deeper than her physical pain was the suffering in her soul. I’d wept in my dream, and my tears had turned into ice crystals on my cheeks. She’d lost something of such importance that she no longer cared to live.
As usual, I’d woken iced to the bone. Not even a scalding shower had eased the chill. I hate being cold. Now that I’d remembered I’d been having this dream all my life, I also recalled dashing from my bed as a little girl, with frozen feet and chattering teeth, running for the warm comfort of my daddy’s arms. I remembered him wrapping me in blankets and reading to me. He’d put on his “pirate voice,” although in retrospect I have no idea why, and say, Ahoy, matey: “There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold …”
And as Sam McGee had grown hot enough to sizzle on his funeral pyre, I’d shivered myself warm in my daddy’s arms, thrilled by the madness of moiling for gold in the Arctic, dragging the corpse of a friend behind on a sled, to burn on the marge of Lake LaBarge and keep a promise made to the dead.
As I warmed my hands before the fire, I could hear Barrons through the adjoining door, in his study, speaking angrily to someone on the phone.
We’d exchanged a total of eight words last night, after he’d knifed Fiona.
I’d looked up at him as he unlocked the back door, considering all kinds of questions.
He’d pushed the door open and waited for me to walk in, beneath his arm, looking down at me, his gaze mocking.
“What? No questions, Ms. Lane?”
I’d pulled a Barrons and said coolly, “Good night, Barrons. ”
Soft laughter had followed me up the stairwell. There’d been no point in questions. I wasn’t one for exercises in futility.
I heated a cup of water in the microwave behind the counter and added three heaping teaspoons of instant coffee. I opened the utensil drawer. “Damn. ” I was out of sugar, and there was no cream in the fridge. It’s the simple pleasures that have come to mean the most to me.
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Sighing, I leaned back against the counter and began sipping bitter coffee.
“Tell that arrogant fuck I said so, that’s why,” said Barrons. “I need all of you. I don’t care what Lor thinks about it. ”
It seemed he was rallying the troops. I wondered if I would meet the others like Barrons, besides Ryodan. He was determined to have it out with Darroc, get it
over with and out of his way. I was perfectly willing to go along with that plan, so long as I was the one who got to bury my spear in the gut of the bastard who’d begun this whole mess, either killed my sister or gotten her killed, and had me raped. I needed one of the dangers in my life gone. The danger I was living with was keeping my hands full enough.
I hoped it happened today. I hoped the LM marched on the bookstore and filled the streets with his Unseelie. I hoped Barrons would line up his … whatever they were. I would call on Jayne and his men and the sidhe-seers. We would have a battle to end all battles and we would walk away the victors, I had no doubt about it. It wasn’t only the dream that had iced me. My resolve was a solid block of it. I was restless as a caged animal. I was sick of worrying about things that might happen. I wanted them to happen already.
“No, it’s not more important than this. Nothing is, and you know that,” Barrons growled. “Who the fuck does he think is in charge?” A pause. “Then he can get the fuck out of my city. ”
My city. I pondered that phrase, wondered why Barrons felt that way. He never said “our world. ” He always said “your world. ” But he called Dublin his city. Merely because he’d been in it so long? Or had Barrons, like me, been beguiled by her tawdry grace, fallen for her charm and colorful dualities?
I looked around “my” bookstore. That was what I called it. Did we call the things of our heart our own, whether they were or not? And if Dublin was his city, did that mean he had a heart, contrary to Fiona’s beliefs?
“Nah,” I scoffed, and sipped my coffee.
I have no idea how long it flapped on the door before I noticed it.
I would later wonder if someone had walked by and stuck it there while I sipped ignorantly away, eavesdropping on Barrons. Maybe peered in through the tinted glass and looked at me. Smirked or smothered a villainous laugh. I would wonder if it had been Fiona who’d put it there. Would hate her, knowing she would have stood there watching me, relishing my pain.
“Darroc will come,” Barrons was saying, as I squinted at the door. “I told Fiona that I have three of the stones, and I know where the fourth is. ”
He had? When? Had he gone to see her last night while I’d slept? The idea made me feel … betrayed.
I skirted the counter and walked slowly toward the front of the store, where the thing flapped in a gentle breeze on the diamond-paned glass of the door. It was the motion that had caught my attention. Who knew how long it might have taken me to find it otherwise.