I notched my chin higher. “Maybe I haven’t felt that, exactly, yet, but I will one day.”
“I will give it to you now. Ecstasy that you would die for, but I will not permit it. I will stop before that happens.”
His words chilled me: he was just another vampire, promising to stop before he drained the last drops of blood that kept my heart beating. “Forget it, V’lane. I’m sorry I summoned you. I’ll take care of things myself. I don’t need you or anybody.” I opened the car door.
He slammed it so quickly that I nearly lost a finger. I was startled by his sudden violence. He crushed me back against the Viper, and touched my face. His eyes were razor sharp, hostile; his fingers feather-light. “Who bruised you?”
“I had a fight with some sidhe-seers. Quit crowding me.”
He traced a finger over my cheekbone, and the ache vanished. He dropped his hand to my rib cage and pain no longer spiked through me with each breath. When he slid his palm across my thigh, I felt the hemorrhaged blood drain from the contusion. He pressed his legs to mine and my shins were no longer bruised. My flesh burned in the wake of his touch.
He dropped his head forward, lips close to mine. “Offer me something in exchange for what you ask of me, MacKayla. I am a prince and we have our pride.” Though his touch was soft, I felt the rigidity in his body, and knew I’d pushed him as far as he would go.
In the Deep South, we understand pride. We lost everything once, but by God, we held on to our pride. We heaped fuel onto the fire of it, stoked it as high as a crematorium. And we immolate ourselves on it sometimes. “I know how the Book is moving around. I haven’t told anyone.” The length of Vlane’s body against mine was unhinging doors in my mind, showing me rooms I was better off not knowing existed.
His lips brushed my cheek and I shivered. “Barrons doesn’t know?”
I shook my head, turned it away. His lips moved to my ear. “No. But I’ll tell you.”
“And you won’t tell Barrons? It will be our secret?”
“No. I mean yes. In that order.” I hate it when people pile questions on top of each other. His mouth was fire on my skin.
“Say it.”
“I won’t tell Barrons and it will be our secret.” No loss there; I hadn’t planned to tell him, anyway.
V’lane smiled. “We have a deal. Tell me.”
“After you help me.”
“Now, MacKayla, or you go in alone. If I am to accompany a Null inside sidhe-seer walls, I require payment in advance.” There was no room for negotiation in his voice.
I hated parting with any of my aces in the hole, but if I had to give V’lane a piece of information that I’d rather not give him, in order to keep Rowena from going after my back every time it was turned, so be it. I couldn’t guard against all the dangers in the city. The Fae were bad enough, but at least I could see them coming. Rowena’s minions were perfectly normal-looking humans who could get too close before I even knew they were a danger. While my instincts to lash out at a Fae were strong, my instincts to strike at a human weren’t, and I didn’t want them to get better. Humans weren’t my enemy. I needed to send Rowena and her sidhe-seers a great, big “Back Off” message, and V’lane was the perfect courier.
Still, I didn’t have to tell him everything. I pushed him away and slid out from between him and the Viper. He watched my retreat with a mocking smile. I felt better with a dozen paces between us, and began to recount select portions of what I’d seen, lying in the sour-smelling puddle. I told him that it was moving from person to person, making them commit crimes.
But I didn’t tell him the three faces the Book had presented, or the severity of the crimes, or that it was killing the carrier before it moved on. I let him believe it was passing itself off from one live human to the next. That way if he decided to try to track it, too, I’d have an edge. I needed all the edges I could get. I knew V’lane didn’t really consider humans viable life forms, and I had no more reason to trust him than I did Barrons. V’lane might be Seelie, and Barrons might keep saving my life, but I had far too many unanswered questions about them both. My sister had trusted her boyfriend right up to the end. Had she made excuses for the Lord Master, the way I’d been making them for Barrons? So what if he never answers any of my questions? He’s told me more about what I am than anyone else. So what if he kills ruthlessly? He only does it to keep me safe . . . I could string together half a dozen at a moment’s notice. V’lane, too: So he’s a death-by-sex Fae; he’s never really harmed me. So what if he gets off on making me strip in public places? He saved me from the Shades . . .
I’m a bartender. I like recipes. They’re concretes. Was the drink recipe for seduction one shot charm and two shots self-deception, shaken, not stirred?
“You remained conscious the entire time?”
I nodded.
“Still you cannot approach it?”
I shook my head.
“How do you plan to find it again?”
“I have no idea,” I lied. “Dublin has over a million people in it, and the crime rate has been skyrocketing. Assuming it stays around the city, which I’m not even sure we can assume” (this was a lie; I don’t know why I was so sure of it, but I believed the Book had no intention of leaving Dublin’s chaotic streets at the moment, nor at any time in the near future) “we’re looking for a needle in a haystack.”
He studied me a moment, then said, “Very well. You have upheld your end of the bargain. I will keep mine.”
We got in the car and headed for the abbey.
Arlington Abbey was constructed on consecrated ground in the seventh century, when a church originally built by Saint Patrick in A.D. 441 had burned down. The church, interestingly, had been built to replace a crumbling stone circle some claimed had, long ago, been sacred to an ancient pagan sisterhood. The stone circle had allegedly been predated by a shian, or fairy mound, that had concealed within it an entrance to the Otherworld.
The abbey was plundered in 913, rebuilt in 1022, burned in 1123, rebuilt in 1218, burned in 1393, and rebuilt in 1414. It was expanded and fortified each time.
It was added onto in the sixteenth century, and again extensively in the seventeenth, sponsored by an anonymous, wealthy donor who completed the rectangle of stone buildings, enclosing the inner courtyard, and added housing—much to the astonishment of the locals—for up to a thousand residents.
This same unknown donor bought the land around the abbey, and turned the enclave into the self-sustaining operation it is today. The abbey boasts its own dairy, orchards, cattle, sheep, and extensive gardens, the highlight of which is an elaborate glass-domed hothouse rumored to house some of the world’s rarest flowers and most unusual herbs.
And that was all I’d been able to find out about the place in the twenty minutes I had to surf the Internet before leaving for the destination Barrons had given me.
Today, Arlington Abbey was owned by a subcorporation of a much larger corporation that was part of the vast holdings of an even larger corporation. Nobody knew anything about its modern-day operations. Oddly, no one seemed to find that odd. I found it spectacularly odd that a country that took such loving care of its abbeys, castles, standing stones, and countless other monuments asked no questions about the most extraordinarily well preserved abbey within its boundaries. But they didn’t, and there it sat, in the middle of nearly a thousand acres, silent and mysterious and private, and nobody bothered it.
I wondered what tremendous importance this site had for sidhe-seers that they’d doggedly protected it, even under guise of Christianity, and rebuilt it each time it had been destroyed, fortifying it ever stronger until now it loomed, a forbidding fortress over a still, dark lake.
In the passenger seat, V’lane flinched and seemed to flicker.
I glanced at him.
“We will leave the car here,” he said.
“Why?”
“Those at the abbey are . . . bothersome . . . with their attempts to defy my race.”
Translation: The abbey was warded. “Can you get past their wards?”
“They cannot prevent my entry. We sift place. They cannot ward against that.”
Okay, that was disturbing, but I’d come back to it. First things first. “Barrons said you can sift time, too.” Actually, he’d said the Fae used to be able to, but couldn’t anymore. “That you can go back into the past.” Where Alina was still alive. Where I could save my sister, and this terrible future could be prevented, and we could resume our blissfully ignorant lives, unaware of what we were, happy with our family back in Ashford, Georgia, and we’d never leave. We’d get married, have babies, and die in the Deep South at a ripe old age. “Is that true? Can you go back in time?”
“At one time certain ones among us could. Even then, we were limited, but for the queen. We no longer possess that ability. We are as trapped in the present as humans.”
“Why? What happened?”
He flinched again. “Stop the car, MacKayla. I do not enjoy this. Their wards are many.”
I pulled over, and killed the engine. When we got out, I looked at him across the roof of the car. “So, wards are uncomfortable to you, but that’s all? They don’t actually keep you out?” Could he enter the bookstore anytime he wanted? Were Barrons’ wards keeping me safe from any of the Fae?
“That is correct.”
“But I thought you couldn’t get into the bookstore. Were you just pretending the night the Shades got in?”
“We have been discussing sidhe-seer wards. The magic your people know and the magic Barrons knows are not the same.” His gaze glinted like sharp steel at the mention of my employer. “Come. Give me your hand so I may sift you in. And mind your intent. If you Null me inside those walls, you will regret it. Again, MacKayla, see the trust I grant you? I permit you to take me inside your sidhe-seer world, where I am feared and hated, and I go at your mercy. There is no other among my kind who would consider it.”
“No Nulling. I promise.” Barrons had yet another edge over the rest of us. Why didn’t that surprise me? Was that how he’d managed to conceal the Unseelie mirror from me? With deeper, darker magic than sidhe-seers knew? I couldn’t get too bent out of shape over it, however, because it meant I really was safe in the bookstore. How complex I was becoming: grateful for power wherever it could be found, provided it worked for me. “Are we clear on what I’m going to do, and what you’re not going to do?”
“As clear as your transparent desires, sidhe-seer.”
Rolling my eyes, I skirted the car and took his hand.