I lost track of time for a while then, racing down streets and alleys, drawing up short, doubling back, trying to avoid the mobs, and evade the troops of Rhino-boys, with whom I had repeated close calls, since I could no longer sense them, now that my sidhe-seer senses were deadened by my gruesome meal.
They marched militantly, rounding up the stragglers to herd into the mobs. I crisscrossed the same blocks dozens of times, hiding in doorways and Dumpsters. I had a terrible moment where I got hemmed in between two groups of them, and was forced to sidle behind cardboard boxes in the shadows of a trash bin, and turn off all my lights to let the horde of Unseelie crash by.
I tasted death sitting there in the darkness, wondering if there were Dark “Spots”—really tiny areas where only one or two Shades lived—and any moment it might slither from a crack and get me, and the thought was almost worse than flinging myself into the middle of the passing Unseelie, which, by the way, I unzipped my Baggies and ate some of, sitting there with my knees tucked up in the darkness behind the steel bin. Maybe, as I’d once joked to Barrons, Shades really didn’t like dark meat, and they’d leave me alone.
After the troops passed, I crawled out and clicked myself back on.
Yes, people were being driven. Gathered and herded.
Lambs to the slaughter. My people.
And there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. Eating Unseelie might have transformed me from a pocketknife into an Uzi, and turned me into a walking weapon, but I was still only one weapon, and acutely aware of it. I was defense, not offense. There was no offense to be made in this city tonight. Not even Savage Mac, the cockiest of cocky, felt punchy. She felt threatened, feral. She wanted to find a cave to hide in until the odds were more in her favor. I was inclined to agree. Survival was our prime directive.
The first time I’d eaten Unseelie, nothing had fazed me. But that night I’d only had to worry about a single rotting vampire, plus I’d had Barrons by my side. Tonight, I was trapped in a rioting city of hundreds of thousands of people, it was Halloween, the Unseelie were numerous and horribly organized, V’lane was unreachable, and Barrons was a country away.
I finally found myself in a semilit deserted alley, with no militant footfalls or sounds of rioting nearby. I ducked into a doorway lit by a single, naked overhead bulb, to take care of something that badly needed taking care of. I removed my pack carefully, dropped it, ripped off my jacket, and gingerly, delicately removed my spear harness, which I placed on the ground.
The entire time I’d been running and hiding, its heavy weight had been a burning terror against my body. What if I fell? What if I got caught in a crowd again and someone jostled me? What if the tip pierced my skin? Hello, Mallucé. Goodbye, sanity. I might be tougher than I used to be, but I had no doubts about my ability to cope with rotting to death.
I stripped off my sweater and T-shirt, then put my sweater, jacket, and MacHalo back on and belted the spear harness on the outside of my coat, without touching anything but the leather straps.
I tied the T-shirt I’d removed around the bottom part of the harness, forming an additional layer of protection between the tip and me.
Ironic, the thing I love most, that makes me feel so powerful under normal circumstances, becomes my greatest liability, and the thing I fear most when I pilfer dark power. I can have one, or the other—but never both.
Carrying the dichotomy one step further, I could no longer sense the spear, which meant I could inadvertently hurt myself on it. However, I could also no longer sense the Sinsar Dubh, which meant it could no longer hurt me, and send me crashing to my knees, helpless, in a dangerous situation.
Duh. I stood in the doorway marveling, and not in a good way, at my own stupidity. If eating Unseelie made me unable to sense the Sinsar Dubh, then all I needed to do next time it popped up on my radar was get as close to it as I could, eat Unseelie, and get closer. Close enough to pick it up.
An image of the Beast as I’d last seen it materialized in my mind.
Yeah, right. Pick it up. Sure. What then? Put it in my pocket? I didn’t have one large enough.
So, I knew how to get close to it without being incapacitated by pain. I still had no idea what to do then. If I touched it would I, too, turn psycho? Or was I a sidhe-seer/Null/OOP-detector mutant that was somehow exempt? A moot point right now, with my odds of surviving the night looking so grim.
I dug out my cell phone to call Dani and tell her what was happening in Dublin. There was no way I could make it to the abbey. I glanced at my watch and was stunned to find it was nearly seven o’clock. I’d been running and hiding for hours! The ritual might already be completed and if it was, sidhe-seers could come to the city and help me save some of the people being driven to death-by-Shade. I might not be able to make a difference, but seven hundred of us could. If they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—come because Rowena vetoed it for some idiotic reason, I would call Barrons and if he didn’t answer, I’d call Ryodan, and if neither of them answered, it was probably time for IYD: if you’re dying. A pall of death hung over Dublin like grief over a funeral. I could smell it, taste it on the air. If no sidhe-seers were coming in to join me, I wanted out, any way I could get there.
Dani answered on the second ring. She sounded hysterical. “Feck, Mac!” she cried. “What did you do to us?”
I’d been adjusting the straps on my pack to accommodate my bulky external harness, and alarm made me drop it. “What’s wrong?” I demanded.
“Shades, Mac! Fecking Shades came out of the fecking Orb when we opened it! The abbey’s full of ’em!”
I was so stunned that I nearly dropped the phone. When I got it back to my ear, Dani was saying:
“Rowena says you betrayed us! She says you set us up!”
My heart constricted. “No, Dani, I didn’t, I swear! Somebody must have set me up!” The thought iced my blood. There was only one person who could have, one person that walked among those dark vampires without fear. How easily he’d relinquished the relic. How quickly he’d agreed to give it to me. Yet he’d not given it to me that night. Thirty hours had passed between my request, and his delivery. What had he been doing during those hours? Spiking a sidhe-seer’s drink with Shades? “How bad is it?” I cried.
“We’ve lost dozens! When we opened the Orb, they splintered, and we thought the light from the ritual killed them, but they fecking grew back together in the shadows. They’re everywhere! In closets, in shoes, anywhere there’s dark!”
“Dani, I didn’t do this! I swear to you. I swear on my sister. You know what she means to me. You have to believe me. I would never do this. Never!”
“You said you’d come,” she hissed. “You didn’t. Where are you?”
“I’m stuck in the city, holed up between York and Mercer. Dublin’s a nightmare, and I couldn’t get out. People have been rioting for hours, and the Unseelie are driving them into the Dark Zones!”
She sucked in a breath. “How bad is it?” she echoed my question.
“Thousands, Dani! Beyond counting. If it keeps up like this—” I broke off, unable to make myself complete the thought. “If you guys come in, we can save some of them, but I can’t do it by myself. There’s too many Unseelie.” But if the abbey was full of Shades, they couldn’t leave. We couldn’t afford to lose the abbey. The libraries were there, and God only knew what else. The lightbulb above me flickered and made a sizzling noise as if it had taken a power surge.
It’s hard to say what makes the brain suddenly piece things together, but I had one of those moments where a series of images flashed through my mind and I was stupefied by the simplicity and obviousness of what I’d been missing: Rhino-boys collecting trash, repairing streetlamps, driving city trucks, replacing broken bricks in the pavement. “Oh, no, Dani,” I breathed, horrified, “forget what I just said. Don’t come into the city, and don’t let anyone else. Not now. Not for any reason. Not until after dawn.”
“Why?”
“Because they’ve been planning this. I’ve been seeing Unseelie in city jobs, and I didn’t get it until now. It’s not just the street sweepers, or the trash collectors.” Where better to learn about one’s enemy than from the leavings of their life, their refuse? The FBI always infiltrated their suspect’s daily lives, bugged their house, and staked out their trash. “It’s the utility workers, too.” How long had the LM been orchestrating his macabre symphony? Long enough to have thought through every bit of it, and his time as a human had taught him well what our weaknesses were. “They’ve got control of the grid, Dani. They’re going to turn the entire—” I held my phone away from my ear and looked at it.
Full battery.
No service. The cell phone towers had just gone down. I had no idea how much Dani had heard.
“—city into a Dark Zone,” I whispered.
The lightbulb above me flickered again. I looked up at it. It sizzled, popped, and went dark.