I remembered the last time I’d gotten close to the Sinsar Dubh and passed out, and reading the next day about the man who’d killed his entire family, then driven himself into an embankment, mere blocks from where I’d lost consciousness. Everyone interviewed had said the same thing—the man couldn’t have done it, it wasn’t him, he’d been behaving like someone possessed for the past few days. I recalled the rash of gruesome news articles lately that echoed the same sentiment, whatever the brutal crime—it wasn’t him/her; he/she would never do it. I stared at the woman who was no longer who or what she’d been when she’d turned the corner and entered this street. A woman possessed. And I understood.
It wasn’t those people committing the terrible crimes.
The Beast was inside her now, in control. And it would retain control of her until it was done using her, when it would dispose of her and move on to its next victim.
We’d been so wrong, Barrons and I!
We’d believed the Sinsar Dubh was in the possession of someone with a cogent plan who was transporting it from place to place with a purpose, someone who was either using it to accomplish certain goals or guarding it, trying to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.
But it wasn’t in the possession of anyone with a plan, cogent or otherwise, and it wasn’t being moved.
It was moving.
Passing from one set of hands to the next, transforming each of its victims into a weapon of violence and destruction. Barrons had told me that Fae relics had a tendency to take on a life and purpose of their own in time. The Dark Book was a million years old. That was a lot of time. It had certainly taken on some kind of life.
The woman disappeared around the corner, and I dropped to the pavement like a stone. Eyes closed, I gasped for shallow breaths. As she/it moved farther away, vanishing into the night where God only knew what she/it would do next, my pain began to ease.
It was the most dangerous Hallow ever created—and it was loose in our world.
Creepy thing was, until tonight, it hadn’t been aware of me.
It was now.
It had looked at me, seen me. I couldn’t explain it, but I felt it had somehow marked me, tagged me like a pigeon. I’d gazed into the abyss and the abyss had gazed back, just like Daddy always said it would: You want to know about life, Mac? It’s simple. Keep watching rainbows, baby. Keep looking at the sky. You find what you look for. If you go hunting good in the world, you’ll find it. If you go hunting evil . . . well, don’t.
What idiot, I brooded, as I dragged myself up onto the sidewalk, had decided to give me special powers? What fool thought I could do something about problems of such enormity? How could I not hunt evil when I was one of the few people who could see it?
Tourists were flooding back into the street. Pub doors opened. Darkness peeled back. Music began playing, and the world started up again. Laughter bounced off brick. I wondered what world they were living in. It sure wasn’t mine.
Oblivious to them all, I threw up until I dry-heaved. Then I dry-heaved until not even bile remained.
I pushed to my feet, dragged the back of my hand across my mouth, and stared at my reflection in a pub window. I was stained, I was soaked, and I smelled. My hair was a soppy mess of beer and . . . oh! I couldn’t bear to think about what else. You never know what you’ll find in a gutter in Dublin’s party district. I plucked the clip from my hair, scraped it back, and secured it at my nape where it couldn’t touch much of my face.
My dress was torn, I was missing two buttons down the front of it, I’d broken the heel off my right shoe, and my knees were scraped and bleeding.
“There’s a lass that gives a whole new meaning to falling-down drunk, eh?” A man sniggered as he passed by. His buddies laughed. There were a dozen of them, wearing red cummerbunds and bow ties over jeans and sweaters. A bachelor party, off to celebrate the joy of testosterone. They gave me wide berth.
They were so clueless.
Was it really only twenty minutes ago I’d been smiling at passersby? Walking through Temple Bar, feeling alive and attractive, and ready for whatever the world might decide to throw at me next? Twenty minutes ago, they’d have circled around me, flirted me up.
I took a few lopsided steps, trying to walk as if I weren’t missing three and a half inches of spike beneath my right heel. It wasn’t easy. I ached everywhere. Although the pain of the Book’s proximity continued to recede, I felt bruised from head to toe, from being held in the crushing vise of it. If tonight turned out anything like the last time I’d encountered it, my head would pound for hours and ache dully for days. My visit to Christian MacKeltar, the young Scot who’d known my sister, was going to have to wait. I looked around for my missing heel. It was nowhere to be seen. I’d loved those shoes, darn it! I’d saved for months to buy them.
I sighed inwardly and told myself to get over it. At the moment, I had bigger problems on my mind.
I hadn’t passed out.
I’d been within fifty yards of the Sinsar Dubh, and I’d stayed conscious the entire time.
Barrons was going to be so pleased. Delighted, even, although delight is a difficult expression to read on that dark, arresting face. Chiseled from savagery by a sculptor-savant, Barrons is a throwback to a lawless time, and looks as stoically primitive as he behaves.
It appeared recent events had “diluted” me, and I was now more like the Book.
Evil.
On my way back to the bookstore, it began to rain. I limped miserably through it. I hate the rain. For many reasons.
One, it’s wet, cold, and nasty, and I was already wet and cold enough. Two, the sun doesn’t shine when it’s raining and I’m an unapologetic sun-worshipper. Three, it makes Dublin at night even darker than usual, and that means the monsters get bolder. Four, it makes me need an umbrella and when people carry umbrellas they have a tendency to pull them down really low and hunch behind them, especially if the rain is being blown into their faces. I’m no different. And that means you can’t see what’s coming toward you, which in a busy street usually results in people careening off one another with muttered apologies, or bit-off curses, and in Dublin means I could run smack into a Fae (their glamour doesn’t physically repel me like it does normal people) and betray myself, all of which adds up to: When it rains here, I don’t dare carry an umbrella.
Which wouldn’t be so bad except it rains here all the freaking time.
Which means I get completely soaked and that leads me to the fifth thing I hate about rain: my makeup runs and my hair becomes a mop of cowlicks.
But every cloud really does have some kind of silver lining and, after a good, hard drenching, at least I no longer smelled quite so bad.
I turned down my street. It’s not really my street. My street is four thousand miles away in the rural Deep South. It’s a sunny, lushly overgrown street, framed by waxy-leaved magnolias, brilliant azaleas, and towering oaks. My street doesn’t rain all the time.
But I can’t go home now, for fear of leading monsters back to Ashford with me, and since I need someplace to call my own, this rainy, gloomy, dreary street will have to do.
As I approached the bookstore, I scanned the fa?ade of the old-world, four-story building carefully. Exterior spotlights mounted on the front, rear, and sides bathed the tall brick building in light. The brightly painted shingle proclaiming BARRONS BOOKS AND BAUBLES that hung perpendicular to the building, suspended over the sidewalk on an elaborate brass pole, creaked as it swung in the increasingly chilly night breeze. The sign in the old-fashioned green-tinted windows glowed soft neon: CLOSED. Amber torches in brass sconces illuminated the deep limestone archway of the bookstore’s grand, alcoved entrance. Ornate, diamond-paned cherry doors nestled between limestone columns gleamed in the light.
All was well with my “home.” The lights were on, the building protected from my deadly neighbors. I stopped and stared for a moment down the street, into the abandoned neighborhood, making sure no Shades had made inroads into my territory.
The Dark Zone at the edge of Barrons Books and Baubles is the largest one I’ve seen so far (and the largest I hope to ever see!), encompassing more than twenty city blocks, crammed to overflowing with lethal dark shadows. Two things characterize a Dark Zone: darkness and death. Creatures of night, the Shades devour everything that lives, from people, to grass, to leaves, even down to the worms in the soil, leaving behind a wasteland.
Even now, they were moving restlessly, writhing like flies stuck on tape, desperate to exchange their lifeless shadows for the fertile, well-lit neighborhoods beyond.
For the moment I was safe. The Shades can’t tolerate light, and near the bookstore, I was bathed in it. However, if I were to wander twenty feet down the street, into the gloom where the streetlamps were all out, I’d be dead.
I’m obsessed with my neighbors. They’re vampires in the truest sense of the word. I’ve seen what they do to people. They consume them, leaving only piles of clothing, jewelry, and other inanimate objects, topped by a small, dry papery husk of whatever human matter they find unpalatable. Like leaving the tail of a shrimp, I guess; part of us is too crunchy for their taste. Not even I can kill them. They have no real substance, which makes weapons useless. The only thing that works against them is light, and it doesn’t kill them, it just holds them at bay. Penned in on all sides by the lights of surrounding neighborhoods, this Dark Zone had remained roughly the same size for several months. I know; I scout its perimeter regularly.
If you’re not a sidhe-seer, you can’t even see them. The people who die in a Dark Zone never know the face of their executioner. Not that the Shades have faces. Featureless is their middle name. If you are a sidhe-seer, they’re still difficult to separate from the night, even when you know what you’re looking for. Darker than the darkness, like inky black fog, they slither and slide, creeping over buildings, oozing down drainpipes, twining around broken streetlamps. Although I’ve never gotten close enough to test my hunch and hope I never do, I think they’re cold.
They come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from as small as a cat to as large as—
I blinked.
Surely that wasn’t the one that had cornered me in the back parlor the night Fiona, the woman who used to run the bookstore, had tried to kill me, by letting a horde of them inside while I slept! The last time I’d seen it, roughly five weeks ago, counting the month I’d lost in Faery, it had been about twenty feet long and nine feet high. It was now twice as large, a dense cloud of oily darkness stretching nearly the entire length of the deserted building adjacent to Barrons.
Did they grow from eating us? Could one get as big as a small town? Maybe hunker down on top of it and swallow it whole?
I stared. For a thing that had no face, it certainly seemed to be staring back at me. I’d flipped this thing off a time or two. Last time I’d seen it, it had shaped itself into an almost human form and shot the insult right back at me.
I wasn’t about to teach it any new tricks.
I gave myself a brisk shake, and immediately regretted it. My head hurt so badly my brain felt bruised, and I’d just jostled it from side to side against the inner walls of my skull.
Though the rain had finally stopped—or rather taken one of those all too brief Dublin hiatuses—I was wet and freezing, and had better things to do than stand out here brooding over one of my many enemies. Things like eating a half a bottle of aspirin, and standing under a scalding shower. Things like clearing my head so I could ponder the ramifications of what I’d seen tonight, and finding Barrons to tell him all about it. I had no doubt he would be as astonished as I was by the Book’s method of locomotion. What dark agenda was it pursuing? Were random chaos and violence purpose enough?
As I stepped into the alcove and began digging in my purse for my keys, I heard footsteps behind me. I glanced over my shoulder and scowled.
Inspector Jayne joined me in the arched entry, dashing rain from his coat with a gloved hand. I’d passed him earlier in the street, on my way to see Christian, before my encounter with the Sinsar Dubh. He’d given me a look that had promised harassment, but I’d figured I’d had a day or two before he got around to making good on that promise.
No such luck.
Tall and burly, with brown hair neatly combed to a side part, his craggy face was set in harsh lines. Brother-in-law to the late Inspector Patty O’Duffy—the inspector who’d originally handled my sister’s murder case, and who’d had his throat cut while clutching a scrap of paper with my name on it—Jayne had recently hauled me down to the Garda station and held me all day on suspicion of murder. He’d interrogated and starved me, accused me of having had an affair with O’Duffy, then turned me out into the dark heart of Dublin, minus my Shade-repelling flashlights, to walk home by myself. I wasn’t about to forgive his callous treatment.
I’m going to be tape to your ass, he’d told me.
He’d been proving true to his word, following me, staking me out, watching my every move.
Now, he looked me up and down and gave a snort of disgust. “I’m not even going to ask.”
“Are you here to arrest me?” I said coolly. I quit trying to pretend I had a heel and leaned lopsidedly against the door. My calves and feet hurt.
“Maybe.”
“That was a yes or no question, Jayne. Try again.” He didn’t say anything and we both knew what that meant. “Then go away. The store is closed. That makes it private property right now. You’re trespassing.”