I laughed, delighted. This southern belle was a force to be reckoned with! It was amazing. I had power. I was a player. Once I had my spear again, I’d be even better. The playing field against evil had just been leveled.
Speaking of leveling, I wanted Mallucé. Dead. Now. The bastard had shattered my will to live. He was a living, breathing reminder of my shame.
“Did you happen to see Mallucé on the way in? Speaking of the way in, how did you find me? He lied about the cuff, didn’t he?”
“I didn’t see him, but I was more concerned with finding you. The cave system beneath the Burren is vast. I’ll lead you out.” He glanced at his watch. “With luck, we’ll be out of here in an hour.”
“After we kill Mallucé.”
“I’ll come back and take care of Mallucé.”
“I don’t think so,” I said icily. I shot him a look that dared him to argue. I was pumped up, flying on adrenaline. There was no way I was letting someone else fight this battle for me. It was mine. I’d paid for it in blood.
“Give a woman a little power,” he said dryly.
“He broke me, Barrons.” My voice shook.
“Anyone worth knowing breaks once. Once. No shame, no foul, if you survive it. You did.”
“Did you break once?” Who, what could have broken Jericho Barrons?
He stared at me through the dimly lit cavern. The torchlight flickered across his dark face, hollowing out his cheeks, making flame-filled coals of his eyes. “Yes,” he said finally.
Later I would ask how, who. Now all I wanted to know was “Did you kill the bastard?”
I wasn’t sure that twist of his mouth was a smile, but I didn’t know what else to call it. “With my bare hands. After I killed his wife.” He waved his hand at the door of the cell. “You lead, Ms. Lane. I’ve got your back.”
I was “Ms. Lane” again. Apparently I was only Mac when gravely injured or dying. We’d talk about that later, too.
“He’s mine, Barrons. Don’t interfere.”
“Unless you can’t handle him.”
“I’ll handle him,” I vowed.
The cave system was vast. I wondered how Barrons had ever found me. Carrying torches we’d lifted from the wall, we ascended and descended through tunnels and caverns without apparent rhyme or reason. I’d seen pictures of the tourist parts of the Burren. They were nothing like these parts. We were much deeper beneath the ground and way off the beaten path, in the unexplored parts of the labyrinthine cave system. I imagined that if any foolhardy potholers ever found their way here, Mallucé simply removed the problem by eating them.
I never would have found my way out.
Although I was barefoot, either the rocks weren’t cutting my feet, or they were healing as quickly as they were being damaged. Under normal circumstances I found both darkness and confined spaces highly disturbing, but the Unseelie I’d eaten had done something to me. I felt no fear. It was exhilarating. My senses were extraordinary. I could see in the dim, flickering torchlight as well as daylight. I could hear creatures burrowing in the earth. I smelled more scents than I could identify.
Mallucé had moved in. He’d brought many of the Victorian furnishings I’d seen at his house into the caves. In a chamber he’d converted into a sumptuous Goth boudoir, I found my brush on a table, near a bed covered by a stained satin spread. Next to the brush was a black candle, a few of my hairs, and three small vials.
Barrons opened a vial, sniffed. “He was spying on you, projecting himself. Did you ever feel you were being watched?”
I told him about the specter. I shoved the brush in my back pocket. I hated touching what he’d touched but I was leaving no part of me here, beneath the earth, in his hellish domain.
“And you never told me this?” he exploded. “How many times did you see it?”
“I threw a flashlight through it. I thought it wasn’t real.”
“How can I keep you alive if you don’t tell me everything?” he snapped.
“How can you expect me to tell you everything when you never tell me anything? I don’t know the first thing about you!”
“I’m the one that keeps saving your life. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“Yes, but why? Because you need me. Because you want to use me.”
“For what other reason would you have me save you? Because I like you? Better to be useful than liked. Like is an emotion. Emotions”—he raised a hand, made a fist, clenched it tightly—“are like holding water. You open your hand, there’s nothing there. Better to be a weapon than a woman.”
Right now I was both. And I wanted Mallucé. “You can chew my petunia later. I’ve got an earful for you, too.”
We found the spear in a velvet-lined box, near his laptop. I wondered how a laptop could possibly be working down here, until I realized all the lights on it were that strange blue-black shade of cold light the amulet had given off. Mallucé was powering it with black magic.
“Wait.” Barrons punched in a few commands, brought up the screen. A page of text was visible for a split second before icy sparks erupted from the computer and it went dead.
“Did you catch any of that?”
“He had multiple bidders on the spear. I saw two of the names.” He glanced at his watch again. “Get the spear and let’s move.”
I reached for the spear, nestled in velvet, and was just about to remove it from the box when I drew up short, struck by a sudden terrible thought.
I snapped the lid shut. When I picked up the box and tucked it beneath my arm, Barrons gave me a strange look. I shrugged and we moved on.
We left the boudoir, and entered another cavern, crammed with books and boxes and jars with contents that defied description. From the look of things, Mallucé had been dabbling in black magic since long before he’d met the Lord Master. There were boyhood treasures scattered among the vampire’s collection of potions, powders, and brews. I could almost see the young British child, invisible in the shadow of his prominent, powerful father, hating it. Rebelling. Becoming fascinated with the Goth world, so different from his. Studying black magic. Planning his parents’ murder at twenty-four. Mallucé had been a monster long before he’d rechristened himself.
The storage cavern opened into a long, wide tunnel lit by torches. There was a steel door in the wall. It was locked. Neither Barrons nor I could kick it in. He placed both palms against it. After a long moment, he said, “Ah,” and muttered a swift string of unintelligible words. The door swung open, revealing a long, narrow cave that looked to be a quarter of a mile long. It contained cell after cell of Unseelie. Here was Mallucé’s personal larder. I wondered how he’d trapped them all.
Suddenly I sensed him, a maelstrom of decay and fury, gusting down the tunnels toward us.
“He’s coming this way,” I told Barrons. “I think he needs food. He said he has to eat constantly.”
Barrons gave me a sharp look.
I knew exactly what he was thinking. “Not because it’s addictive,” I defended, “but because parts of him had turned Fae from eating Unseelie and the spear poisoned those parts.”
Barrons stared at me. “Parts of him had turned Fae? And the spear poisoned him? And you knew this before you ate Unseelie?”
“Bear in mind the alternative, Barrons.”
“That’s why you left the spear in the box and tucked it beneath your arm. You’re afraid to carry it now, aren’t you?”
“Before, I had a weapon. Now I am a weapon.” I turned and stalked from the cavern, not about to reveal how deeply it disturbed me that I might have gained the power of a Fae—and the weakness of one. I never wanted to touch the spear again. If I accidentally pricked myself, would I, too, begin to rot? What had I become? Kin to my enemy in how many ways? “He’s on the way,” I tossed over my shoulder. “I’d rather he didn’t eat again.”
Barrons stepped through behind me and closed the door. He slipped a vial from his pocket and I realized he’d been pilfering some of the vampire’s things. He splashed a few drops on the door and spoke again in that language I didn’t understand. He glanced around, and I could tell he didn’t like what he saw. “A good soldier chooses the terrain of his battle. You’ve shared the same flesh with him. If you can sense him, I’ll bet he can sense you. He’ll follow.”
“What are we looking for?”
“A place with no way out. I want this over with fast.”