“Yes. As a matter of fact they were. They were supposed to be protecting the Book.” I distanced and acquitted myself.
His opened his mouth, closed it again, then exploded, “You’re the ones who had the Sinsar Dubh to begin with? We knew somebody was guarding it; we just didn’t know who. Och, for the love of Christ, lass, what did you do with it? Lose the bloody thing?”
I clarified my pronouns again. “They lost it. I’m not part of them.”
“You certainly look like a sidhe-seer to me.”
“Don’t be trying to blame me, Scotty,” I snapped. “Your uncles were supposed to be keeping the walls up. The sidheseers were supposed to be guarding the Book. The Fae were supposed to strip the LM’s memory before they dumped him on us, and I was supposed to be home with my sister playing volleyball on a beach somewhere. It’s not my fault. None of this is my fault. But for some idiotic reason, I seem to be able to do something about it. And I’m trying, so get off my back!”
We faced off, breathing fast and shallow, glaring at each other, two young people living in a world that was coming apart at the seams, doing their best to stop it, but realizing rapidly just how long the odds were. Tough times make for tough words, I guess.
“What’s your terrible idea?” I said finally, in an effort to get things back on track.
He inhaled and released it slowly. “My uncles want Barrons to help them hold the walls on Samhain. They say he’s Druid trained, and not afraid of the dark side.”
I laughed. No, he certainly wasn’t afraid of the dark side. Some days I was pretty sure he was the dark side. “You’re right. It’s a terrible idea. Not only does he know you guys have been spying on him, Barrons is mercenary to the core. He doesn’t give a rat’s petunia about anyone but himself. Why would he care if the walls come down? Everybody’s afraid of him. He has nothing to lose.”
“What did you just say?”
“In a nutshell, he doesn’t care.”
“You said he knows we’ve been spying on him? How?”
I gave myself a mental smack in the forehead. I’d completely forgotten the reason I’d come here in the first place. I hastily recounted how Barrons had used Voice to interrogate me about my recent activities, and that visiting Christian had been one of them. I told him I’d been trying to reach him all day, to warn him, and when I hadn’t managed to get in touch with him by four, I’d come by to wait for him. When I finished, Christian was regarding me warily.
“You let him do that to you? Push you around like that? Force answers from you?” The tiger-gold gaze swept me up and down, the handsome face tightened. “I thought you were . . . a different kind of girl.”
“I am a different kind of girl!” Or at least I had been when I first came to Dublin. I wasn’t sure what kind of girl I was now. But I hated the look in his eyes: aloofness, censure, disappointment. “He’s never done it before. We have a complicated . . . association.”
“Doesn’t sound like an association to me. Sounds like a tyranny.”
I wasn’t about to discuss the complexities of life with Barrons, with anyone, especially not a living, breathing polygraph test. “He’s trying to teach me to resist Voice.”
“Guess you aren’t very good at it. And good luck. Voice is a skill that can take a lifetime to learn.”
“Look, you guys were planning to talk to him anyway. I’m sorry, okay?”
He measured me. “Make up for it, then. Talk to him for us. Tell him what we want.”
“I don’t think you can trust him.”
“I don’t, either. I told my uncles that. They overruled me. The problem is we aren’t sure we can keep the walls up, even with Barrons’ help.” He paused then said grimly, “But we know we can’t without him.” He opened a notepad, tore off a scrap of paper, wrote on it, and handed it to me. “Here’s where you can reach me.”
“Where are you going?”
“You think Barrons won’t be coming after me? I just wonder what’s taken him this long. My uncles told me if he ever got wise to me, I should get out, fast. Besides, I told you what I came back to say, and they can use me at home.” He moved toward the door, opened it, then paused and looked back at me, golden eyes troubled. “Are you having sex with him, Mac?”
I gaped. “Barrons?”
He nodded.
“No!”
Christian sighed and folded his arms over his chest.
“What?” I snapped. “I’ve never slept with Barrons. Subject that to your little lie detector test. Not that I see how it’s any of your concern.”
“My uncles want to know exactly where you stand, Mac. A woman who’s having sex with a man is a compromised source of information, at best. At worst, she’s a traitor. That’s how it’s my concern.”
I thought of Alina, and wanted to protest that it wasn’t true, but what had she betrayed to her lover, believing them to be on the same side? “I’ve never had sex with Barrons,” I told him again. “Satisfied?”
His gaze was remote, a tiger assessing its prey. “Answer one more question, and I might be: Do you want to have sex with Barrons?”
I gave him a hard look and stormed from the room. It was such a stupid question, and so far out of line, that I refused to dignify it with a response.
Halfway down the hall, I drew up short.
Dad’s told me all kinds of wise-sounding things over the years. I haven’t understood a lot, but I filed it all away because Jack Lane doesn’t waste breath, and I figured one day some of it might make sense. You can’t change an unpleasant reality if you won’t acknowledge it, Mac. You can only control what you’re willing to face. Truth hurts. But lies can kill. We’d been having a talk about my grades again. I’d told him I didn’t care if I ever graduated. It wasn’t the truth. The truth was I didn’t think I was very smart, and I had to work twice as hard as everyone else to get passing grades, so I’d spent most of high school pretending not to care.
I turned slowly.
He was leaning in the doorway, arms folded, looking young and hot and everything a girl could want. He arched a dark brow. What a gorgeous guy. He was the one I should be thinking about having sex with.
“No,” I said clearly. “I don’t want to have sex with Jericho Barrons.”
“Lie,” Christian said.
I headed back to the bookstore, flashlights on, watching everyone and everything. My brain was too stuffed with thoughts to be able to sort them out. I walked, and watched, hoping my gut would piece things together into a plan of action, and notify me when it was done.
I was passing the Stag’s Head pub when two things occurred: the black ice of a Hunter dusted me, and Inspector Jayne squealed to a stop in a blue Renault, flung open the passenger door, and barked, “Get in!”
I glanced up. The Hunter hovered, great black wings churning ice in the night air. It terrified me in my special sidheseer place. But I’d seen and done a lot since my last encounter with one of them, and I wasn’t the same anymore. Before it could speak in my mind, I sent it a message of my own: You’ll choke on my spear if you make one move toward me.
It laughed. With a whuf-whuf of leathery, midnight sails, it rose into the twilight and vanished.
I got in the car.
“Slump,” Jayne fired at me.
Raising both eyebrows, I slumped.
He drove to a brightly lit back parking lot of a church—I could see the steeple from where I crouched—pulled in between cars, and turned off the lights and engine. I sat up. The parking lot sure was packed for a Thursday night. “Is it some kind of religious day?”
“Stay down,” he barked. “I won’t be seen with you.”
I withdrew to the floorboards again.
He stared straight ahead. “The churches’ve been packed for weeks. The crime hike is scaring people.” He was silent a moment. “So, how bad is it? Should I get my family out?”
“I would, if it were my family,” I said frankly.
“Where should I take them?”
I didn’t know what the rest of the world out there was like in terms of Unseelie, but the Sinsar Dubh was here, an evil centrifuge, distilling people to their darkest essences. “As far from Dublin as you can.”
He continued staring straight ahead in silence, until I began to fidget impatiently. I was getting a cramp in my leg. There was something else he wanted. I wished he’d hurry up and get to it before my foot went to sleep.
Finally, he said, “That night, that you . . . you know . . . I went back to the station and . . . saw the people that I work with.”
“You saw that some of the Garda are Unseelie, “ I said.
He nodded. “Now I can’t see them anymore but I know who they are. And I tell myself you did something to me, somehow, and it was all a hallucination.” He rubbed his face. “Then I see the reports coming in, and I watch what they do, or rather don’t do, like investigate a bloody damn thing, and I . . .”
When he trailed off, I waited.
“I think they killed O’Duffy to shut him up, and tried to make it look like a human did it. Two more Garda have been killed. They’d begun asking a lot of questions, and. . . .” He trailed off again.
The silence lengthened. Abruptly, he looked straight at me. His face was red, his eyes bright and hard. “I’d like to have tea with you again, Ms. Lane.”
I stared. That was the last thing I’d expected. Had I created an addict? “Why?” I said warily. Was he craving it like I was? Could he sense the tiny jars of wriggling flesh in my purse, yet to be deposited on the upper floors of the store? I could. I’d been feeling the dark pull of it beneath my arm all afternoon.
“I swore to uphold the peace in this city. And I will. But I can’t this way. I’m a sitting duck,” he said bitterly. “You were right, I didn’t know what was out there, but now I do. And I don’t sleep at night anymore, and I’m angry all the time, and I’m useless, and it’s more than my job to fight it, it’s who I am. It’s who Patty was, too, and that’s why he died. His death should mean something.”
“It could end up meaning your death,” I said softly.
“I’ll take that chance.”
He didn’t even know my “tea” would give him superpowers. He just wanted to be able to see them again. I could hardly blame him. I’d created this problem by feeding it to him in the first place. How would I feel in his shoes? I knew the answer to that: After an initial period of denial, exactly the same. Jayne wasn’t the ostrich I’d pegged him as, after all.
“If you betray yourself, they’ll kill you,” I warned.
“They might kill me anyway, and I won’t even see them coming.”
“Some of them are pretty horrific. They can startle you into betraying yourself.”
He gave me a tight smile. “Lady, you should see the crime scenes I’ve been on lately.”
“I need to think about it.” Eating Unseelie had many repercussions. I didn’t want to be responsible for what the good inspector might become.
“You’re the one who opened my eyes, Ms. Lane. You owe me. You get one more heads-up on the house, but after the next crime, it’s no tea, no tips.”
He dropped me a few blocks from the bookstore.