Turned out PHI was not the twenty-third letter in the Greek alphabet but Post Haste, Inc. Courier Services, and Dani a delivery girl, explaining the uniform and bike.
It was two in the afternoon on Thursday, when I hung my Closed Early placard on the bookstore door and locked up. “Shouldn’t you be in school, Dani?”
“I’m home-schooled. Most of us are.”
“What does your mom think about you running around killing Fae?” I couldn’t imagine the mother of any young child being okay with it. But I guess when there’s a war on and you’re born a soldier, there’s not much choice.
“She’s dead,” she said nonchalantly. “Died six years ago.”
I didn’t say I was sorry. I didn’t mouth any of the platitudes people resort to in times of grief. They don’t help. In fact, they chafe. I commiserated on her level. “It fecking sucks, doesn’t it?” I said vehemently.
She flashed me a look of surprise and the nonchalance melted. “Yeah, it does. I hate it.”
“What happened?”
Her rosebud mouth twisted. “One of them got her. One day I’ll find out which one, and kill the fecker.”
Sisters in vengeance. I touched her shoulder and smiled. She looked startled, unaccustomed to sympathy. Six years ago, Dani would have been seven or eight. “I didn’t know they’d been around that long,” I said, meaning the Unseelie. “I thought they’d only recently been freed.”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t an Un that got her.”
“But I thought the…other ones”—I spoke vaguely, mindful of the wind—“didn’t kill us because of the…you know.”
“Compact? That’s a bloody crock. They never stopped killing us. Well, maybe some of them did, but most of them didn’t.”
We walked the rest of the way in silence, with Dani pushing her bike. She wasn’t comfortable talking on the streets. We skirted Temple Bar and crossed the River Liffey.
PHI Courier Services occupied a three-story building painted the same light green of Dani’s pants, trimmed in cherry, adorned by tall, arched windows. The sign above the entry sported the same emblem emblazoned on her shirt, but the shamrock looked misshapen, out of proportion. Something about the sign perplexed me. If I’d happened down this street on my own and seen it, I’d have walked straight into the building without hesitation, gripped by an irresistible compulsion.
“It’s spelled,” Dani explained, watching me study it. “It draws people like us. So does the ad in the paper. She’s been gathering us for a long time.”
“You think maybe you’re telling me things she doesn’t want me to know?” Where did her loyalties lie? Wasn’t she Rowena’s creation?
Dani thought about that a minute and I had a sudden insight into her character. Like me, she didn’t trust anyone. Not completely anyway. I wondered why.
“Go to the back.” The gamine redhead hopped on her bike. “I’m late for deliveries. See ya around, Mac.”
Around back were dozens of green and white bicycles, four motorbikes, and ten delivery vans, all emblazoned with the same misshapen shamrock. If PHI was a cover, it was nevertheless a thriving business.
I walked up the rear steps of the building and knocked. A woman in her forties, with rimless glasses and a shiny cap of brown hair opened the door, ushered me inside, led me up two flights of stairs, to a room at the end of a hall, and left me at the door without saying a word. My sidhe-seer senses were getting a tingle. There was either a Fae or Fae OOPs through that door—and I doubted it was an actual Fae. Rowena probably kept Dani’s close sword at hand, perhaps other relics as well.
I pushed it open and stepped into a handsomely appointed study with hardwood floors, paneled walls, and a huge fireplace. Sunlight spilled through tall windows framed with velvet. Floor and table lamps lit every nook and cranny. I would find this was a common trait among sidhe-seers, turning on all the lights we can. We hate the dark.
The old woman was seated behind an antique desk, but she wasn’t looking so old today. On the two prior occasions I’d seen her, she’d been drably dressed. Today she wore a turquoise suit with classic lines and a white blouse, and looked twenty years younger, closer to sixty-something than eighty-something. Her silvery hair was pulled back from her face in a single plait that circled her head like a crown. The creamy pearls that glowed at her ears, throat, and wrist were the same lustrous color as her hair. She looked elegant, in charge, and, although diminutive of build, full of piss and vinegar as my father would have said. I guessed the dreary, aged appearance she donned in public was deliberate and useful; people tend to grant unkempt seniors a special invisibility, as if by not noticing them they won’t have to acknowledge the same creature in themselves clawing closer to the surface with each tick of the clock.
Glasses on a beaded chain rested on her chest. She raised them now, slipped them onto a finely pointed nose. They magnified the size, fierce color, and the fiercer intelligence of her sharp blue eyes. “MacKayla. Do come in. Have a seat,” she said briskly.
I gave her a curt nod and stepped into the room. I glanced around, wondering where the sword was. Something Fae was in this room. “Rowena.”
Her eyes flickered and I knew she didn’t appreciate the familiarity. Good. I meant to establish us as equals, not mentor and student. She’d lost the chance to mentor me when she’d turned her back on me. We looked at each other in silence. It stretched. I wasn’t about to speak. This was our first battle of the wills. It wouldn’t be our last.
“Sit,” she said again, gesturing to a chair in front of the desk.
I didn’t.
“Och, for the love of Mary, get your spine down, lass,” she barked. “We’re family here.”
“Really?” I leaned back against the door and folded my arms. “Because where I come from, family doesn’t abandon their own in need, and you’ve done that to me twice. Why did you tell me to go die that night in the pub? You gather sidhe-seers. Why not me?”
She tilted her head back and peered down her nose, assessing, measuring. “It had been a difficult day. I’d lost three of my own. And there you were, about to betray yourself, and the saints only knew how many of us, if you weren’t stopped.”
“It had to be obvious I had no idea what I was.”
“What was obvious was that you were fascinated by a Fae. I told you, I thought you were Pri-ya, one of their addicts. I had no way of knowing it was the first Fae you’d ever seen, or that you were unaware of what you were. Those who are Pri-ya are beyond our help. By the time that kind of damage has been done, the will is demolished and the mind virtually gone. I will never sacrifice ten to save one.”
“Did I look like my mind was gone?” I demanded.
“Actually, yes,” she said flatly. “You did.”