FOUR
I turned, scowling. Barrons has a habit of popping up, without warning, when I least expect it, at the most inconvenient times. I absorbed him in slow degrees, the only way to look at him. As a whole, he’s jarringly present in the space he occupies, as if ten times the man occupies a normal man-sized space. I wonder why. Because there’s an Unseelie stuffed inside him? I wonder how old he really is.
I should be afraid of him. And sometimes in the middle of the night when I’m alone and I think about him—especially when I picture him carrying the dead woman’s body, and the look on his bloody face—I am.
But when he’s standing in front of me, I’m not.
I wonder if it’s possible for a person to do some kind of “numbing” spell, create a glamour so complete that it deceives all the senses, even sidhe-seer ones.
“There’s something on your lapel.” I dabbed at it. He’s also meticulous, never a man to sport lint or stains on his clothes, but tonight his dark suit had a shiny spot on the left side. I was dabbing at a . . . man, for lack of a better word . . . who’d had birthdays untold, and walked in Unseelie Hallows, carrying around corpses. It felt as absurd as brushing a wolf’s teeth, or trying to mousse his fur. “And I wasn’t kissing him.”
And I’d like to know what the feck you were doing with that woman in that mirror, I thought. But I didn’t say it. There’s a legal term my dad likes to use: res ipsa loquitur—the thing speaks for itself. I knew what I knew, and now I was watching him. And my back. Very carefully.
He knocked my hand away. “Then why was his tongue in your mouth? Was he conducting a clinical test of your gag reflex?” He smiled, but not nicely. “How is your gag reflex, Ms.
Lane? Are you a hair trigger?”
Barrons likes to use sexual innuendo to try to shut me up. I think he expects the well-raised southern belle in me will think eew and back off. Sometimes, I do think eew, but I don’t back off. “I’m a spitter, if that’s what you’re asking.” I flashed him a too-sweet smile.
“Didn’t look that way to me. I think you’re a swallower. His tongue was halfway to China and you were still taking it.”
“Jealous?”
“Implies emotional investment. The only investment I have in you is my time, and I’m expecting a big payoff. Tell me about the Sinsar Dubh.”
I glanced at my hand. It had come away from his lapel wet. I angled it in the light. Red looks black at night. I sniffed it. It smelled like old pennies. Gee, blood. No surprise there. “Have you been in a fight? No, let me guess; you saved a wounded dog, again?” I said dryly. That was the excuse he’d used last time.
“I had a nosebleed.”
“Nosebleed, my petunia.”
“Petunia?”
“Ass, Barrons. As in you are one.”
“The Book, Ms. Lane.”
I looked into his eyes. Was there a Gripper in there? Something very old looked back. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“Why did you call after him?”
“I haven’t seen him since the last time we saw the Book. I keep V’lane informed. You’re not the only shark in the sea.”
He raked me with a contemptuous glance. “It’s a Fae prince’s fundamental nature to enslave a woman with sex, Ms. Lane. It’s a woman’s fundamental nature to be enslaved. Try to rise above it.”
“Oh, it is not a woman’s fundamental nature to be enslaved!” Everywoman reared up in me, battle-ready.
He turned and walked away. “You wear my brand, Ms. Lane,” floated over his shoulder, “and if I’m not mistaken, you now wear his. Who owns you? I don’t think it’s you.”
“It is, too,” I yelled at his retreating back, but he was already halfway down the street, vanishing into the darkness. “I don’t wear his brand!” Did I? Exactly what had V’lane embedded in my tongue? I fisted my hands, staring after him.
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?