The dark clouds creeping over the city exploded, thunderheads crashing, raindrops biting with October’s chill teeth, flash-flooding the pavement, gushing down the gutters, overflowing the grates, and sweeping all my customers away.
I cataloged books until my vision blurred. I made myself a cup of tea, turned on the gas logs, cozied up to the fire, and paged through a book on Irish fairy tales, hunting for truth in the myth, while picking at a lunch that was the UK equivalent of Ramen noodles. I haven’t had much of an appetite since I ate Unseelie. Not for food, anyway.
Last night Barrons and I hadn’t said a word to each other all the way back to the bookstore. He’d dropped me at the front and watched me walk in. Then, he’d given me a smile that was all teeth and nastiness, and driven straight into the Dark Zone, managing to say “Fuck you, Ms. Lane,” without even bothering to open his mouth. He knows how much his refusal to tell me why the Shades don’t eat him irks me.
I want to be so fearless. I want to be so bad and tough that all the monsters leave me alone.
I tugged Alina’s journal entry from my pocket and read it again, more slowly this time.
Her worst fear had come true, and here I was, left alone with a lifetime of things unsaid and undone. I’d never gotten that hug. I knew I needed to push past the emotional punch and focus on the Haven’s prophecy, the five, and the new questions her journal entry raised, but I was detoured by memories. There’d been so many nights that I’d sprawled on my bed, talking to Alina on the phone. Mom was always making good stuff, filling the house with the mouth-watering aroma of yeast, caramel cream sauces, and spices. Dad was always yelling at the Braves with old man Marley during baseball season. I would have prattled aimlessly about boys and school and my idiotic complaints about whatever I used to complain about, believing the whole time she and I were immortal.
What a shock when life ends at twenty-four. Nobody’s ready for it. I missed my rainbow quilt. I missed my mom. God, I missed—
I stood, crammed the page back in my pocket, and pruned my dark thoughts in the seedling stage before they could sprout. Depression gets you nowhere but tangled in an overgrown garden that can choke the life out of you.
I moved to the window and stared out at the rain. Gray street. Gray day. Gray rain, splashing grayly on gray pavement. What was that Jars of Clay song on my iPod? “My world is a flood. Slowly I become one with the mud.”
As I stared, unblinking into the grayness, a brilliant shaft of sunlight splintered the rain, directly in front of me.
I looked up, seeking its source. The beam pierced the dark clouds, a radiant lance shot down from heaven, forming a perfect golden circle on the dreary, drenched sidewalk, inside which there was no rain, no storm, just sunshine and warmth. I thumbed a Tums from my pocket. My tea and noodles were abruptly an unpleasant stew in my stomach.
Speaking of the sidhe-seer’s equivalent of Lucifer . . .
“Funny,” I said. But I wasn’t laughing. Fae-induced nausea coupled with an impossible illusion spelled one thing: V-l-a-n-e. The only thing missing was a frenzy of Fae lust, and I braced myself for it. His name piercing my tongue suddenly tasted sweet as honey, felt smooth and supple and sexy in my mouth. “Go away,” I told the illusory shaft of sun, focusing my sidheseer center on it. It didn’t evaporate.
Then V’lane was standing in it, but he wasn’t Fae, and he wasn’t the biker man. He was a version of himself I’d never seen before: he looked human, and he was definitely muted. Still, he was inhumanly beautiful. He was wearing white swim trunks that contrasted perfectly with his gold skin, and flaunted his flawless body. His hair slid like silk over his bare shoulders. His eyes were amber, warm with invitation.
He’d come to punish me. I knew that. And still I wanted to step outside, splash through the rain and join him in his sunny oasis. Hold his hand. Run away for a while, maybe to Faery, where I could play volleyball and drink beers with a perfectly convincing illusion of Alina. I stuffed that thought back in my padlocked box and checked the chains. They weren’t holding so good today.
I will attend to you later, he’d said last night. You broke our bargain. There is a price for that.
“Leave me alone, V’lane,” I called through the window. It echoed off the glass back at me, and I wasn’t sure he heard. Maybe he could read lips. Suddenly the windowpane separating us was gone. Drops of wind-driven rain needled my face, my hands.
“You are forgiven, MacKayla. Upon reflection, I realized it was not your fault. You were not responsible for Barrons’ interference. I do not expect you to be able to control him. To demonstrate my understanding, I have come, not to punish you, but to give you a gift.”
His “gifts” all had strings attached, and I told him so, with a tongue that tasted of nectar.
“Not this one. This is for you and only for you. I will gain nothing from it.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I could have harmed you long before now if I wished.”
“So? Maybe you’re just putting it off. Sucking me in for the grand finale.” I brushed rain from my face, and pushed my hair back. It was simultaneously curling and drooping, becoming an unmanageable mess. “You can put the window back anytime.”
“I took your hand and accompanied you into the halls of my enemies, trusting you not to Null me. Return the honor, sidhe-seer.” The temperature was dropping. “I gave you my name, the means to summon me at will.” The rain turned to sleet.
“Not inspiring trust with your little display of temper.” A strong gust of wind dumped a sudden bucket of rain on me.
“Oh! You did that on purpose!” I dragged a sleeve across my face, mopping at it. It didn’t help. My sweater was soaked.
He didn’t deny it. Just cocked his head, studied me. “I will tell you about the one you call Lord Master.”
“I don’t call him Lord Master and never will,” I bristled. I battled the urge to leap out the window, grab him, and demand to know whatever he knew.
“Would you like to know who he is?”
“You said you’d never heard of him when I told you about him.” I studied my nails, knowing if he knew how badly I wanted the information, he’d make it harder to get. Probably try to trade it for sex.
“I have learned much since then.”
“So, who is he?” I said, in a bored voice.
“Accept my gift.”
“Tell me what your ‘gift’ is first.”
“You have no plans for the afternoon.” He glanced at the flooded street beyond his warm, sunny oasis. “You will have no customers. Will you sit in your chair and pine for lost things?”
“You’re pissing me off, V’lane.”
“Have you ever seen the Caribbean Sea? There are hues in those waves that nearly vie with Faery.”
I sighed. No. I’d dreamed of it, though. Sun slanting off water was one of my favorite things in the world, whether it was swimming-pool-blue or shades-of-tropic. During the winter in Ashford, I used to go to the local travel agent’s office in town and thumb through the pamphlets, dreaming of all the exotic, sunny places the husband I hadn’t met yet was going to take me. Part of the reason I was so depressed in Dublin was from simple lack of sun. My time in the subterranean caves beneath the Burren had sapped me. I not only love sun, I need it. I think if I’d grown up in the colder, drearier North, I’d have been a completely different person. Sure, the sun comes out here, but not nearly as often as it does in Georgia, and not the same way. Dublin doesn’t get those months of long, blissfully blazingly hot summer days, crowned by a sky so blue it hurts to look at, and a sultry heat that warms you to the core. My bones are cold here. So is my heart.
A few hours in the tropics, plus information about the Lord Master?
The rain slanting in through the windowless hole pricked my skin with the icy spines of a dozen porcupines. Would he really forgo retaliation against me for breaking our bargain? I was in no position to shut the Seelie prince out of my life. Whether I trusted him or not, I needed to be on decent terms with him, and if he really was offering me a Get Out of Jail Free card, I’d be crazy not to take it. I couldn’t cower in the bookstore from him every time he showed up. I was going to have to confront him on unwarded ground eventually.
“Put the window back.” I wasn’t going to be blamed by Barrons for another missing window, or risk that big nasty Shade out back getting in.
“Do you accept my gift?”
I nodded.
When the pane was back, I went to the counter, swapped my soaking cardigan for a dry jacket over my damp shirt, and bent to extract the spear from my boot and holster it beneath my arm. It was gone.
Apparently the bookstore being warded only kept him out. It didn’t keep him from performing his tricks in or on the store itself. I made a mental note to discuss this problem with the intractable owner and keeper of the wards. Surely with all his secrets and inexplicable abilities Barrons could do better than that.
I flipped the sign to CLOSED, locked up, splashed through the puddles, stepped into the sun and, when V’lane offered his hand, nullified my intent to Null, and laced my fingers with his.