“Could you really have found me in Faery if I’d been tattooed?”
He looked away and said nothing. Then, “I would have at least known you were alive. I didn’t even know that.”
“Why didn’t you offer me the cuff first, instead of trying to tattoo me?”
“Because, Ms. Lane, a cuff can be removed or forgotten. A tattoo can’t. I still prefer the tattoo. The cuff is a concession, and one I’m making only because you’ve finally pulled your head out and begun exploring your…talents.” He smiled faintly.
Aha, so what I’d tried to do with that strange place in my skull had had some effect on him! That was something. It wasn’t exactly bending spoons with a thought, but it was a start. “Couldn’t somebody cut a tattoo off me?” Didn’t the ink go only so many layers of skin deep?
“It would be risky and immensely painful. I intended to hide it.”
I looked down at myself. “Just where were you planning to hide a”—I veered sharply away from that cliff—“I don’t want to know.” I examined the cuff. “Does it do anything else?”
“Nothing you need to worry about. Put it on. Now.”
I saw all kinds of nonnegotiable in his eyes and I knew he would tattoo me, and I would have to leave, and despite my bravado, I wasn’t ready to be on my own in this dark world.
I slipped it on my wrist. It was huge. I pushed it up my arm but it just slid back down, and fell off over my hand. He caught it before it hit the floor, and forced the ends apart. He placed it above my biceps and squeezed it until the ends met. I had just enough muscle to keep it where it was.
“What did you and V’lane do in Faery?” he asked casually.
I shrugged, in no mood to talk about Alina, and I suspected telling him I’d had the most intense orgasm of my life on a beach beneath a Fae sun probably wouldn’t go over real well. I glanced at the floor. It occurred to me the garage had been silent tonight. I wondered if his monster slept. Barrons had watched me break into the place on his video cameras. He knew I knew. “What do you keep under your garage, Barrons?” I countered. I was so certain of his answer that I mouthed it along with him.
“Nothing you need to worry about.” He gave me a cold look. “If you already know the answer, Ms. Lane, don’t waste my time. You just wasted a month of it.”
“Fine, Barrons, keep your secrets but know this: I’ll only confide in you to the extent that you confide in me. You keep me in the dark, I’ll keep you in the dark, and you know what that does? Leaves us both bumbling around in the dark. Seems pretty stupid to me.”
“My night vision’s just fine. Burn the bikini, Ms. Lane. Trust nothing he gives you.”
I snorted and shrugged my cuff-bound arm at him. “But I can trust what you give me? Give me a break.”
“If you think to stand between V’lane and me, and play both ends against the middle, you’ll get ripped to pieces. If I were you, Ms. Lane, I’d choose a side, and fast.”
I began restoring order to the store the next morning: sweeping, dusting, tossing broken baubles in the trash, and restocking books. Barrons had suggested I leave the shop closed, but I needed the store. Illusion was one salve, purpose and routine were another.
He hadn’t broken my iPod and sound dock; thankfully I’d had them safely tucked away in a cabinet beneath the register, so I listened to old Beach Boys music while I cleaned. I sang along to “Sloop John B.” at the top of my lungs: I want to go home. This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.
Every now and then, I’d glance out the window at the blustery fall sky, and try to deal with the fact that while I’d sunned with my pseudosister, summer had turned to fall overnight—literally; it was now October. I consoled myself with the thought that six hours of good sun was probably all I’d have gotten in a month in Dublin anyway.
The store was nearly presentable by lunchtime, after which I turned my attention to the month of newspapers that had piled up in my absence, delivered but not sold. I gathered a couple of packing boxes and began tossing the dailies in to drag out to the trash later. After a few moments, I stopped pitching them, riveted by the headlines.
While I’d been gone, Dublin had suffered an unprecedented hike in crime, and the media was crucifying the Garda over it. (On a personal note, I hoped that meant Inspector Jayne would be too busy with other cases to continue harassing me.) The incidence of unsolved muggings and rapes was up by sixty-four percent, and homicides by nearly one hundred and forty-two percent year-to-date—but that was only half the story the papers were telling: The brutality of the crimes had intensified as well.
I read paper after paper, digested one alarming news story after the next. These were no straightforward murders. They were vicious, sadistic killings, as if the darkest, most disturbed part of people was boiling to the surface and spilling over. Every few days, the headlines announced some new, shockingly more violent multiple-homicide-cum-suicide.
Was it possible that Unseelie walking among humans—even unseen—was changing people? Unlocking their ids? Unleashing the most depraved in us all?
What else had happened while I’d been gone? I glanced uneasily to my right, as if I could somehow see through the wall to know if the cancerous Dark Zone had metastasized in my absence. If I went searching through maps, would I find more parts of the city missing?
“This is awful,” I told Barrons, later that night, as we got into the only nondescript vehicle he owned, the dark sedan we’d used the night we’d robbed Rocky O’Bannion. “Have you seen the news lately?”
He nodded.
“And?”
“A great deal happened while you were gone, Ms. Lane. Perhaps it will make you think twice about spending time with V’lane.”
I ignored the jibe. “I called my dad today. He acted like we’d just talked a few days ago.”
“I sent him a few e-mails from your laptop. He called once. I covered for you.”
“You hacked into my laptop? That’s personal!” I was outraged. I was also glad he’d kept my dad from worrying in my absence, and curious how he’d gotten past my security measures. “How?”
He gave me a dry look. “Your general password, Ms. Lane, was ‘Alina.’ Your e-mail password was ‘rainbow.’”
I huffed into the passenger seat. It was stiff and cold. There were no seat heaters. I preferred the Viper, or the Porsche or the Lamborghini or pretty much anything else, but it seemed anonymity was the name of the game tonight. “Where are we going, Barrons?” I asked irritably. For a change, he hadn’t specified my clothing, and left to my own devices I’d chosen jeans, a sweater, and boots, with a jacket.
“An old abbey, Ms. Lane. A simple drive-by. No need to walk it. It won’t take long, but it’s a few hours’ drive from the city.”
“What do you think might be there? Are we looking for something specific?”
“Just looking.”
“Was the abbey built on an ancient sidhe-seer site like the graveyard?” Barrons did nothing without good reason. Something about the abbey made him think there might be an OOP there. I wanted to know what it was.
He shrugged.
“Well, why aren’t we going to walk it?”
“It’s occupied, Ms. Lane. I doubt they would welcome us.”
“Monks?” I knew monasteries often had strict rules about permitting women on the grounds. “Or nuns?” They’d take one look at Barrons and decide the devil himself had come knocking. He not only looked dangerous, he emanated something that made even me feel like crossing myself sometimes, and I’m not religious. I see God in a sunrise, not in repetitious ritual. I went to a Catholic church once—sit, stand, kneel, kneel, stand, sit—and got so stressed out trying to anticipate how next to position myself that I’d missed most of what was being said.
He grunted noncommittally in that way that meant he was done answering my questions, so I might as well save my breath. I wondered what he thought we were going to accomplish with a mere drive-by at this mysterious abbey, considering how close I had to be to sense an OOP. That thought raised another very belated one—and I smacked myself in the forehead. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten until now. “Who came through the basement door that night in Wales, Barrons?” He hadn’t mentioned a thing about it.
From the immediate tension in his body I knew the memory was not a pleasant one. “More bloody thieves.”