SEVEN
Like jacked-up pickup trucks in the Deep South, Harleys are an ode to testosterone: the bigger and louder the better. Down south, trucks and bikes roar Look at me! Hot damn, I’m big and noisy and wild and, yeehaw, wouldn’t you like a piece of me?
Barrons’ Harley didn’t roar. It didn’t even purr. A chrome and ebony predator, it glided soundlessly into the night, whispering, I’m big and silent and deadly, and you’d better hope I don’t get a piece of you.
I could feel fury in the set of his shoulders beneath my hands as we careened through narrow alleys, around corners, laying the bike so low I had to tuck up my feet and keep my legs crushed to the sides for fear of scraping off a few layers of skin, but as with everything else Barrons undertook, he was a master of precision. The bike did things for him I wasn’t sure a bike could do. Several times I almost wrapped my arms and legs around him and clambered onto his back, for fear of falling off.
His body bristled with anger. The fact that I knew something about the Book that I hadn’t told him was as deep a transgression as transgressions could go, as far as he was concerned. I’d learned the last time we’d had a brush with the Sinsar Dubh that it was his end-all/be-all, for whatever reason. Despite the unnerving dark energy rolling off him, eventually I hugged him with all my might just to stay on the bike. It was like embracing a low-level electrical current. Sometimes I wonder if Barrons has any real awareness of risk of injury. He doesn’t live like he does.
“It’s not like you don’t keep secrets from me!” I finally shouted against his ear.
“I don’t keep ones from you that involve the fucking Book,” he snarled over his shoulder. “That’s our deal, isn’t it? If nothing else, we’re honest with each other about the Book.”
“I don’t trust you!”
“And you think I trust you? You haven’t been out of fucking diapers long enough to be trusted, Ms. Lane! I’m not even sure you should be allowed to handle sharp objects!”
I punched him in the side. “That’s not true. Who ate Unseelie? Who survived no matter the cost? Who keeps getting out there facing all kinds of twisted monsters, and still manages to find something to smile about while she does it? That takes real strength. That’s more than you can do. You’re grumpy and broody and secretive all the time. You’re no joy to live with, I can tell you that!”
“I smile sometimes. I even laughed about your . . . hat.”
“MacHalo,” I corrected tightly. “It’s a brilliant invention, and it means I don’t need you or V’lane to keep me safe from Shades, and that, Jericho Barrons, is worth its weight in gold: not needing either of you for something!”
“Who came to teach you Voice tonight? Do you think you could find another teacher? Those who can use that power don’t share it. Whether you like it or not, you do need me, and you’ve needed me since the day you set foot in this country. Remember that, and stop pissing me off.”
“You need me too,” I growled.
“That’s why I’m teaching you. That’s why I gave you a safe place to live. That’s why I keep saving your life, and try to give you the things you want.”
“Oh, the th-things I w-want,” I stammered because I was so mad I tried to spit all the words out at once. “How about answers? Try giving me those!”
He laughed, and the sound bounced back off the brick walls of the narrow alley down which we sped, making it sound like men were laughing all around me, and it was creepy. “The day I give you answers will be the day you no longer need them.”
“The day I no longer need them,” I told him icily, “will be the day I’m dead.”
By the time we arrived at the crime scene, the shooter had blown his head off, what hostages had survived were being treated, and the grim duty of counting and collecting bodies had begun.
The street was closed around the pub from one end of the block to the next, crammed with police cars and ambulances, and crawling with Garda. We parked and dismounted a block from the scene.
“I’m assuming the Book was here. Do you feel it?”
I shook my head. “It’s already gone. That way,” I pointed west. An icy channel sluiced east through the night. I would lead him in the opposite direction, and eventually claim that I’d lost its “signal.” I felt sick to my stomach, and not because of all the bodies and blood. The Sinsar Dubh is the ultimate in nausea. I reached in my pocket and thumbed out a Tums. I had the beginnings of a brutal migraine, and hoped it wouldn’t spike.
“Later you’re going to tell me everything you know. Somehow you’ve figured out how it’s moving around the city, and it’s linked to the crimes, isn’t it?”
He was good. When I nodded gingerly, trying not to split my skull, he said, “And somehow you managed to coerce Jayne into feeding you information. How you accomplished that, frankly, confounds me.”
“Gee, maybe I’m not as inept as you think I am.” I popped another Tums in my mouth and made a mental note to start carrying aspirin, too.
After a pause, he said tightly, “Maybe you’re not,” which was very nearly an apology from Barrons.
“I fed him Unseelie.”
“Are you fucking nuts?” Barrons exploded.
“It worked.”
His eyes narrowed. “One might think you’re developing situational ethics.”
“You think I don’t know what those are. My father’s an attorney. I know what those are.”
A faint smile curved his lips. “Get back on the bike and tell me where to go.”
“I’ll tell you where to go,” I muttered sourly, and he laughed. As we sped down the street, away from the Dark Book, my headache began to ease. I was abruptly so aroused that I caught myself on the dangerous verge of rubbing my aching nipples against Barrons’ back. I jerked away instantly and glanced over my shoulder. My heart sank. I reached for my spear. It was gone.
Barrons must have felt the tension in my body, because he glanced over his shoulder at me, and saw what I’d seen: the Fae Prince, sifting down the street behind us, one moment there, then gone, the next, a few dozen feet closer.
“It’s bad enough that you didn’t tell me about the Book, Ms. Lane, but tell me you didn’t tell him.”
“I had to. I needed him to do something for me, and it was all I had to offer up that I was willing to part with. But I didn’t tell him everything.” In fact, I’d deliberately led him astray, so how had he found me tonight? Dumb luck? He couldn’t possibly be checking out every crime in the city!
Anger reclaimed Barrons’ body, worse than before. He stopped so abruptly that I slammed into his back, fell off the bike, and went sprawling. By the time I stood up and dusted myself off, Barrons was off the bike; V’lane, too, had stopped, and was standing in the street about twenty-five feet away.
“Come here, Ms. Lane. Now.”
I didn’t move. I was pissed that he’d dumped me like that. It had made my head hurt even worse. Besides, a furious Barrons isn’t something you want to stand next to any more than you’d want to cozy up to a pissed-off cobra.
“Unless you want him to sift in and take you, get close to me. Now. Or do you want to go with him?”
I glanced at V’lane and moved to Barrons’ side. V’lane was so glacial with displeasure that a small blizzard was icing his end of the street, and I wasn’t dressed for the weather. Okay, so maybe V’lane scares me a little more than Barrons does. V’lane uses his sexuality against me and I’m susceptible to it. Barrons doesn’t. Even now, my hand was slipping to my fly, grazing the zipper, and I nearly whimpered. I sought that cool alien place in my pounding head. I’m strong, I told myself, a sidheseer. I will not give in.
Barrons draped an arm over my shoulder and I moved into the shelter of it. The thing on my tongue burned. My brand itched. At that moment, I despised them both.
“Stay away from her,” Barrons growled.
“She comes to me of her own will. She calls me, chooses me.” V’lane was in high glamour, gold and bronze and iridescent ice. He raked me with an imperious gaze. “I will attend to you later. You broke our bargain. There is a price for that.” He smiled, but Fae don’t really smile. They paste a humanlike expression on and it chills to the bone because it looks so unnatural on their unnaturally perfect faces. “Do not fear, MacKayla, I will—how do you say?—kiss it and make it better when I am through.”
I removed my hand from my fly. “I didn’t break our bargain intentionally, V’lane. Barrons overheard something he shouldn’t have overheard.”
“Omission or commission, what difference?”
“There is one. Even the courts of law permit the distinction.”
“Human law. Fae law acknowledges no such thing. There are outcomes. The means by which they are achieved have no bearing. You said you did not know how to track the Book.”
“I don’t. I just followed a hunch tonight. Got lucky. You?”
“Impudence and lies, MacKayla. I suffer neither.”
“You won’t harm a hair on her head, or I’ll kill you,” said Barrons.
Really? With what? I wanted to ask. V’lane was a Fae. My spear was gone and Rowena had the sword.
The Book’s icy pull was diminishing rapidly. It was moving swiftly. Its next victim was in a car, and a fast one. I had a smug, utterly beside-the-point car-lover thought: not faster than mine. I had a Viper. Its keys were in my pocket.
The smug thought faded. It offended every ounce of my being to let the Book get away, to allow it to go cruising off to destroy more lives. But no matter how insistently my sidheseer senses were screaming at me to track it, I didn’t dare. Not with Barrons and V’lane here. I needed to know more about the Book. I needed to know how to get my hands on it, and do the right thing with it. Who was I kidding? I needed to know what the right thing was. Assuming I eventually got it, who could I trust with it? V’lane? Barrons? God forbid, Rowena? Would the Seelie Queen herself shimmer in and save the day? Somehow, I doubted it. Nothing in my life is easy anymore.
“You have no right to it,” V’lane was telling Barrons.
“Might makes right. Hasn’t that always been your motto?” Barrons said.
“You could never understand my motto.”
“Better than you think, fairy.”
“There is nothing you could do with it even if you managed to get it. You do not speak the language in which it was scribed, and could never hope to decode it.”
“Maybe I have the stones.”
“Not all of them,” V’lane said coldly, and I knew from the disdain in his voice that he had at least one, if not both of the other translation stones we’d been hunting. All four of the mystical translucent blue-black stones were necessary to “reveal the true nature” of the Sinsar Dubh. Barrons had one already when I met him. I’d recently stolen the second one from Mallucé, the event that had precipitated the hostilities between us.
Barrons smiled. Clever man. Until that moment, he’d suspected but not been certain. “Maybe I learned enough from your princess that I don’t need all four,” Barrons sneered, and there was a world of insinuation in his words. Even I, who had no idea what he was insinuating, heard the insult in them, and knew it cut deep. There was history between V’lane and Barrons. They didn’t despise each other just because of me. There was more than that going on here.
Ice dripped from V’lane’s iridescent robes, flowed down the cobbled street and expanded, covering the pavement from gutter to gutter with a thin black sheet that cracked like gunshots as it encased the warmer stone.
Good, let them fight. Let the Book disappear and carry my problems with it. To add fuel to the fire, I said, “Why do you two hate each other so much?”
“Have you fucked her yet?” V’lane ignored me completely.
“I’m not trying to.”
“Translation: Your efforts have failed.”
“No, they haven’t,” I said. “He hasn’t tried. FYI, boys, and I use that term loosely, there’s more to me than sex.”