EIGHTEEN
T he Lord Master’s gaze flicked away from me, passed with cursory interest over Mallucé. “I’d come to finish him myself,” he said. “He’d become a liability. You saved me the trouble. How did you do it?” He studied me, the blood splattered on my face, clothing, and hands, the glaring lack of injuries. A slow smile spread over his exotic, beautiful face. “You ate Unseelie, didn’t you?”
I said nothing. I guess something in my eyes did, though. Framed behind him in the doorway were a dozen or so Unseelie of a caste I’d not seen before, wearing black uniforms with red insignia, clearly his personal guard.
He laughed. “What a surprise you are. Lovely like your sister, but Alina would never have done it.”
My sister’s name on her murderer’s lips incensed me. “Don’t even say her name. Nothing about her is yours. Nothing about her ever was.” If Barrons took this fight from me, I’d kill him.
But I wasn’t going to get this fight. Not here. Not tonight.
The Lord Master’s voice deepened, hardened, rolled with the thunder of a legion of voices. It did something inside my head; echoed, whispered, rearranged things. “Hand me the amulet. Now.”
I picked it up and handed it to him, wondering even as I did it what I was doing, why I was obeying. It glowed a faint blue-black invitation the moment I touched it. His eyes widened fractionally. He took it from me swiftly.
“Another surprise,” he murmured.
That’s right, you bastard, I am epic, so watch out, I wanted to say, but my vocal cords weren’t under my control any more than anything else was at the moment.
“Stand,” he commanded. The amulet blazed in his hand, eclipsing the feeble light I’d managed to make and been so proud of.
I stood as jerkily as a puppet on strings, mind resisting, flesh obeying. I swayed before the red-robed Lord Master, stared into his too-beautiful-to-be-human face, and waited for him to rule me. Had he done this to my sister? Had she been not duped by him, but stripped of choice like I was now?
“Come.” He turned and, automaton-like, I began to follow.
Barrons exploded from the shadows and hit me like a missile, taking me to the ground beneath him.
The Lord Master turned in a whirl of robes.
“She stays with me,” said Barrons. His voice, too, rolled with the thunder of a multitude, reverberating inside my skull. Of course I was staying with him. What had I been thinking?
What the Lord Master did next was so incomprehensible to me that I was still blinking blankly at the opening, several minutes after he was gone.
He took a long look at my enigmatic mentor, jerked his head at his guard—and left.
NINETEEN
W e raced back to Dublin in the sleek, stolen stealth of Rocky O’Bannion’s black Maybach.
I made no attempt at conversation, nor did Barrons.
I’d been through too much in the past, however many hours it had been. Twenty-seven, I would learn later. I’d faced a Hunter, discovered my specter was not only real but a greater threat than the Unseelie chasing me; been locked in a cave, tortured, beaten to the brink of death, rescued; eaten the living flesh of an Unseelie, gained superhuman strength and power and lost God only knew what, battled a vampire, gotten into a fight with Barrons that had skewed dangerously toward the end, lost a powerful Dark Hallow to my sister’s murderer, and worse, been unable to function with any will at all in his presence, and if Barrons hadn’t been there to save me yet again, I would have trundled off behind my archenemy, ensorcelled by the crimson-cowled Pied Piper.
Then when I’d thought nothing else could possibly startle or surprise me, the Lord Master had taken one look at Barrons—and walked away.
That worried me. A lot. If the Lord Master walked away from Barrons, how much danger was I in on a daily basis? I’d been feeling invincible up until those last few moments in the cave. Until one man in the room with me had stripped away my will with mere words, and the other man in the room with me had apparently intimidated that one into leaving. Bad and badder.
I glanced across the front seat at Badder. I opened my mouth. He looked at me. I closed it.
I don’t know how he continued driving, because we stared at each other for a long time. The night whizzed by, the air inside the speeding car pregnant with all the things we weren’t saying. We didn’t even have one of our wordless conversations this time; neither of us was willing to betray a single thought or feeling.
We looked at each other like two too-intimate strangers who’ve woken after the lovemaking and don’t know quite what to say to each other, so they say nothing at all and go their separate ways, promising, of course, that they’ll call, but each time they look at the phone over the next few days, the discomfort and mild embarrassment of having taken off their clothing in front of someone they didn’t really even know rises up, and the phone call never gets made.
Barrons and I had taken our skins off around each other tonight. Shared too many secrets, and none of them the important ones.
I was about to look away when he reached across the seat, touched my jaw with his long, strong, beautiful fingers, and caressed my face.
Being touched by Jericho Barrons with kindness makes you feel like you must be the most special person in the world. It’s like walking up to the biggest, most savage lion in the jungle, lying down, placing your head it its mouth and, rather than taking your life, it licks you and purrs.
I turned away.
He returned his attention to the road.
We completed the drive in the same strained silence it had begun.