Behind me, militant footfalls approached. I reached instinctively for my spear. It was back where it was supposed to be, holstered beneath my arm again. I needed to figure out how V’lane was taking it. Had he returned it when he’d kissed me? Wouldn’t I have felt it? Could I persuade Barrons to ward, so it couldn’t be taken from me? He seemed to have a vested interest in my having it.
A troop of ugly gray-skinned Rhino-boys marched by, and I busied myself digging in my purse, partly to keep from watching them, counting their numbers, and trying to decide if they were new in town or if I’d seen them before, and partly to keep my face concealed in shadow. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Lord Master was circulating a WANTED poster of me, with a detailed sketch. It was probably time to change my hair again, start wearing ball caps or wigs.
I resumed my trek to the bookstore. It hadn’t eluded my orgasm-drenched brain that V’lane had disappeared the moment Barrons had appeared. Maybe he wasn’t a Gripper but an even worse Unseelie that I’d not yet encountered. In a world that kept growing darker every day, Barrons sure did seem to have a knack for keeping all the monsters at bay.
Because he was the biggest, baddest monster of all?
Monday morning I woke up slow and hard.
Most mornings, I spring out of bed. Despite the fact that my life hasn’t turned out how I wanted it to, it’s the only one I have, and I try to milk it for all it’s worth. But some days, despite my best intentions to plunge into the day and grab what happiness I can—even if it’s only a perfect latte topped with cinnamon-sprinkled foam, or twenty minutes dancing around the bookstore with my iPod jamming—I wake up feeling bruised, coated with bad dream residue that clings to me all day.
I was slick with it this morning.
I’d had the dream about the beautiful dying woman again.
And now that I’d had it, I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten it for so long. For years, as a child, I’d dreamt it over and over, so often that I’d begun confusing the details with reality, and started expecting to see her somewhere when I was awake.
I had no idea what was wrong with the sad woman, just that it was something awful, and I would have given my right arm, my eyeteeth, maybe even twenty years off my life to save her. There wasn’t a law I wouldn’t have broken, a moral code I wouldn’t have violated. Now that I knew Alina and I were adopted, I wondered if it wasn’t a dream, but a memory, borne in my infancy and suppressed, creeping out at night when I couldn’t control it.
Was this beautiful, sad woman our biological mother?
Had she given us up because she’d known she was dying, and her sorrow was the pain she felt at being forced to give us to new parents?
But if she’d had to give us up because she was dying, why had she sent us so far away? If I was truly an O’Connor, as Rowena, Grand Mistress of the sidhe-seers claimed, it seemed likely Alina and I had been born in Ireland. Why would our mother have sent us out of the country? Why not let us be raised by people who could have taught us about our heritage, indoctrinated us like the other sidhe-seers? Why force our adoptive parents to swear to raise us in a small town, and never to let us go to Ireland? What had she been trying to keep us away from? Or what had she been trying to keep away from us?
Were there other memories my child’s mind had blocked? If so, I needed to find them, knock them loose, and remember.
I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. I spun the handle to full hot, and let the scalding spray steam the air. I was shivering, icy. Even as a child, the dream had always left me that way. It was bitterly cold wherever the dying woman was, and now I was cold, too.
Sometimes my dreams feel so real it’s hard to believe they’re just the subconscious’s stroll across a whimsical map that has no true north. Sometimes it seems like Dreaming must be a land that really exists somewhere, at a concrete latitude and longitude, with its own rules and laws, treacherous terrains, and dangerous inhabitants.
They say if you die in a dream, your heart stops in real life. I don’t know if that’s true. I’ve never known anyone who died in a dream to ask. Maybe because they’re all dead.
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The hot spray cleansed my skin but left my psyche coated. I couldn’t soap away the feeling that it was going to be a truly sucky day.
I had no idea just how sucky.
I learned in one of my college psych courses about comfort zones.
People like to find them and stay in them. A comfort zone can be a mental state: belief in God is a lot of people’s comfort zone. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking faith; I just don’t think you should have it because it makes you feel safe. I think you should have it because you do. Because somewhere deep inside you, you know beyond equivocating that something greater, wiser, and infinitely more loving than we’re capable of understanding has a vested interest in the Universe, in the way things turn out. Because you can feel that, as much as the forces of darkness might try to gain the upper hand, there is an Upper Hand.
That’s my comfort zone.
But comfort zones can be physical places, too: like your dad’s favorite recliner that your mom keeps threatening to send to Goodwill, with those sagging springs, the torn upholstery, and some kind of no-worry guarantee because the moment he settles into it every night, he relaxes; or your mom’s breakfast nook, where the sun shines in at the perfect angle every morning as she sips her coffee, and she kind of glows sitting there; or the rose garden your elderly neighbor prunes to perfection, despite the sweltering summer heat, smiling the day away.
Mine is the bookstore.
I’m safe inside. As long as the lights are on, no Shades can get in. Barrons warded the building against my enemies: the Lord Master; Derek O’Bannion, who wants me dead for stealing the spear and killing his brother; the terrifyingly Satanic Unseelie Hunters that track and kill sidhe-seers on general principle; all of the Fae, even V’lane—and if by some bizarre fluke something did get in, I’ve got an arsenal plastered to my body and I’ve hidden weapons, flashlights, even holy water and garlic in strategic locations throughout the store.
Nothing can hurt me here. Well, there’s the owner himself, but if he’s going to harm me, it won’t be until he’s done with me, and since I’m far from finding the Book, he’s far from done with me. There’s a measure of comfort in that.
You want to know somebody? I mean, really know somebody? Take away their comfort zone and see what happens.
I knew I shouldn’t have been up on the third floor, cataloging books, with an untended cash register and an unlocked front door two floors below me, but it had been a slow day and my guards were down. It was daytime and I was in the bookstore. Nothing could hurt me here.
When the bell over the front door tinkled, I called, “Be right down,” and inserted the book I’d been about to catalog on its side on the shelf to mark my place. Then I turned and hurried for the stairs.
Something that felt like a baseball bat slammed me in the shins as I passed the last row of bookshelves.
I went flying, headfirst, across the hardwood floor. A banshee landed on my back, tried to grapple my wrists behind me.
“I’ve got her!” the banshee yelled.
My petunia, she did. I’m not as nice a person as I used to be. I twisted, grabbed a fistful of her hair, and yanked on it hard enough to give myself a sympathy headache.
“Ow!”
Women fight differently from men. You couldn’t get me to hurt a woman’s breasts for anything. I know how tender my own are when I’m PMSing. Besides, we feed babies with them. Using a handful of her hair as leverage, I wrenched her around, slammed her on her back on the floor, and grabbed her by the throat. I nearly choked her by default when a second banshee landed on my back, but this time, I sensed her approach and pistoned back my elbow, nailing her squarely in the abdomen. She doubled over and rolled away. A third one vaulted herself at me, and I punched
her in the face. Her nose cracked beneath my fist and spurted blood.
Three more women appeared and the fight got really vicious, and I lost all my illusions about women fighting differently, or being the kinder, gentler sex. I didn’t care where I hit, as long as my punches connected, and I was hearing thuds and grunts. The louder the better. Six against one wasn’t playing fair.
I felt myself changing like I’d changed that day in the warehouse in the Dark Zone, when Barrons and I had first battled side by side, against the Lord Master’s minions and Mallucé. I felt myself turning into a force to be reckoned with, a danger in her own right, even without the dark aid of Unseelie flesh. It still didn’t stop me from wishing I had a bite of it handy.
I felt myself becoming sidhe-seer, growing stronger, tougher, moving faster than a human could, striking with the accuracy of a trained sharpshooter, the skill of a professional assassin.
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Only problem was—their green Post Haste, Inc. uniforms were a dead giveaway—they were sidhe-seers, too.
Fight scenes bore me in movies and since I’m telling this story, I’m fast-forwarding through the details. I was outnumbered, but for some reason, they seemed a little afraid of me. I decided Rowena must have sent them, and perhaps she’d told them I was rogue, unpredictable.
Make no mistake, I took a beating. Six sidhe-seers is an army and they kicked my petunia six different ways to Sunday, but they couldn’t keep me down.
How abruptly a situation can flip from bad to irrevocable, leaving you standing there thinking, Wait a minute, who’s got the remote? Where’s my rewind? Can I just go back a lousy three seconds, and do things differently?
I didn’t mean to kill her.
It was just that, once it penetrated that they were sidheseers, I kept trying to talk to them, but none of them would listen to me. They were determined to beat me unconscious, and I was equally determined not to be beaten unconscious. I wasn’t about to let them drag me to the abbey against my will. I would go on my own terms, how and when I felt safe—and after this underhanded ambush of Rowena’s, that might be never.
Then they started demanding my spear, poking and prodding me, trying to find out if I was wearing it, and something in me snapped as I realized that Rowena had sent my own people after me—not to bring me in, but to take my weapon away from me, as if she had the right! I was the one who stole it. I was the one who’d paid for it in blood. She thought to leave me defenseless? Over my dead body. No one was taking my hard-won power away from me.
I reached beneath my jacket to pull it out and wave it threateningly, to make them back off and listen to reason, and as I yanked it from my shoulder holster, the brunette in the ball cap lunged for me, and she and the spear . . . collided. Violently.
“Oh,” she said, and her lips froze on the round shape of the word. She blinked, and coughed. Blood blossomed on her tongue, and stained her teeth.
We looked down at my hand, at the blood on her pinstriped blouse and the spear lodged in her chest. I don’t know who was more mystified. I wanted to let go of it and back as far away as I could from the terrible thing it had done to her—those cold inches of killing steel—but not even under such circumstances could I force myself to let go of the spear. It was mine. My lifeline. My only defense in those dangerous, dark streets.
Her lids fluttered and she looked suddenly . . . sleepy, which I guess isn’t so odd; death is the great sleep. She shuddered, and sort of wrenched herself backward, twisting. Blood gushed from the unplugged wound, and I stood there holding the stopper. Green goo from stabbing Unseelie was one thing. This was human blood, on her shirt, her pants, on me, everywhere. I felt hot and cold at the same time. Too many panicked thoughts collided in my mind, blanking it out. I reached for her but her eyes closed and she stumbled backward.
“I’ll call an ambulance,” I cried.
Two of the sidhe-seers caught her as she fell, and lowered her gently to the floor, snapping orders at each other.
I fished out my cell. “What’s the emergency number here?” I should know it. I didn’t know it. She was still, too still. Her face was white, her eyes closed.
“It’s too late for that,” one of them snarled up at me.
Screw medical help. “I can get something else to save her,” I cried. I should have kept those stupid sandwiches! What had I been thinking? Fact was, I should probably start carrying live Unseelie chunks with me, everywhere. “Just keep her still. ” I would rush outside, grab the nearest dark Fae, drag it back here, and feed it to her. She would be fine. I would fix this. She wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be. Unseelie would heal her. As I lunged for the stairs, one of them grabbed me and jerked me back.
“She’s dead, you fecking idiot,” she hissed. “It’s too late. You’ll pay for this. ” She shoved me violently and I slammed into a bookcase.
I stared at the green-garbed women huddled around the body, and my future flashed before my eyes. They would call the police. I would be arrested. Jayne would lock me up and throw away the key. He’d never buy self-defense, especially not with a stolen, ancient spear. There would be a trial. My parents would have to fly over. This would destroy what was left of them: one daughter rotting in a grave, the other in a jail cell.
They gathered her up, and began carrying her toward the stairs, taking her down to the main floor.
They were disturbing the crime scene. If I were to have any hope at all of proving my innocence, I would need it intact. “I don’t think you should do that. Aren’t you going to call the police?” Maybe I could make it out of the country before they did. Maybe Barrons could fix this. Or V’lane. I had friends in high places. Friends who wanted me alive and free to do their bidding.
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One of them shot me a murderous look over her shoulder.
“Have you taken a good look at the Garda lately? Besides, humans don’t police us,” she sneered. “We police our own. Always have. Always will. ” There was an unmistakable threat in her words.
I poked my head over the balustrade and watched as they reappeared downstairs. One of them glanced up at me. “Don’t try to leave; we’ll just hunt you,” she hissed.
“Oh, take a ticket and get in line,” I muttered as they banged out the door.
“I need to borrow a car,” I told Barrons when he walked in the front door that night, shortly after nine.
He was wearing an exquisitely tailored suit, an impeccable white shirt, and a blood-red tie. His dark hair was slicked back from his handsome face. Diamond cuff links glinted at his wrists. His body hummed with energy, saturating the air around him. His eyes were startlingly brilliant, restless, darting everywhere.
I’ve felt that body on top of mine, been the focus of that consuming gaze. I try not to think about it. I have a box inside me now that never used to exist. I never needed it before. It’s down in my deepest, darkest corner, and it’s airtight, soundproofed, and padlocked. It’s where I keep thoughts I don’t know what to do with, that could get me into trouble. Eating Unseelie hammers on the inside of that lid incessantly. I try to keep kissing Barrons in that box, too, but it gets out sometimes.
I would not put the death of the sidhe-seer in the box. It was something I had to deal with in order to move forward with my goals.
“Why don’t you ask your fairy little boyfriend to take you wherever you want to go?”
That was a thought, but there were other thoughts attached to that thought that I hadn’t thought through yet. Besides, back home whenever I got really upset about something, like breaking a nail the same day I’d spent good money on a manicure, or finding out that Betsy had gone to Atlanta with her mom and bought the same pink prom dress as me, totally ruining my senior experience, I used to get in my car, crank up the music really loud, and drive for hours until I’d calmed down.
I needed to drive now, to lose myself in the night, an
d I wanted to feel the thunder of hundreds of stampeding horses beneath me while I was doing it. My body was bruised in a dozen places; my emotions were black and blue all over. I’d killed a young woman today. Commission or omission, she was dead. I cursed the vagaries that had led me to choose that precise moment to unsheathe my weapon, and her, that exact moment to lunge. “I don’t feel like asking my fairy little boyfriend. ”
Barrons’ lips twitched. I’d almost made him smile. Barrons smiles about as often as the sun comes out in Dublin, and it has the same effect on me; makes me feel warm and stupid.
“I don’t suppose you’d call him that the next time you see him, and let me watch his reaction?”
“Don’t think that would work, Barrons,” I said sweetly. “Nobody ever sticks around when you show up. Darndest thing. Almost as if everyone’s afraid of you. ”
My saccharine humor exorcised the ghost of his smile. “Did you have a specific car in mind, Ms. Lane?”
I wanted blue-collar muscle tonight. “The Viper. ”
“Why should I let you take it?”
“Because you owe me. ”
“Why do I owe you?”
“Because I put up with you. ”
He smiled then, really smiled. I snorted and looked away. “The keys are in it, Ms. Lane. The keys to the garage are in the top drawer of my desk, right-hand side. ”
I glanced at him sharply. Was this a concession? Telling me where he kept his keys? The offer of a deeper, more trusting association?
“Of course you know that already,” he continued dryly. “You saw them there the last time you snooped through my study. I was surprised you didn’t try using them then, rather than breaking my window. You might have saved me some aggravation. ”
Barrons deserves to be aggravated. He’s the most aggravating . . . whatever he is . . . I’ve ever met. The night I’d broken a window to get into his garage, it hadn’t occurred to me to try those keys because I’d been so certain he was keeping some huge dark secret locked up in there, that he’d surely never let the keys just lie around. (He is keeping some huge dark secret in there, I just haven’t figured out how to get to it yet. ) He’d caught my nocturnal B&E on the video cameras hidden in the garage, and left the incriminating evidence outside my bedroom door. “Let me guess, you have video cameras hidden in the store, too?”