THREE
I’d die for him.
There’s nothing else to say.
I’d give the last breath in my body and the last hope in my heart to keep him alive. When I thought I was crazy, he came to me and made sense of it all. He helped me understand what I was, showed me how to hunt and hide. He taught me that there are necessary lies. I’ve been learning a lot about those lately. Every time Mac calls I get more practice. I’d die for her, too.
He’s made me see myself differently. He lets me be the woman I always wanted to be. Not the perfect daughter and honor student who feels like she has to do all the right things to make Mom and Dad proud, or the perfect big sister who always tries to set a shining example for Mac, and keep the nosy neighbors from ever turning their sharp, gossipy tongues our way. I hate small town busybodies! I always wanted to be more like Mac. She doesn’t do anything she doesn’t feel like doing. When people call her lazy and selfish, she doesn’t care, she’s happy. I wonder if she knows how proud of her I am for that?
But things are different now.
Here, in Dublin with him, I can be anyone I want to be. I’m no longer trapped in a small town in the Deep South, forced to be the good girl. I’m free!
He calls me his Queen of the Night. He shows me the wonders in this incredible city. He encourages me to find my own way, and to choose what I think is right or wrong.
And the sex, God, the sex! I never knew what sex was until him! It’s not soft music and candlelight, a choice, a deliberate action.
It’s as involuntary as breathing, and as impossible not to do. It’s slammed up against a wall in a dark alley, or flat on my back on cold concrete because I can’t stand one more second without him. It’s on my hands and knees, dry-mouthed, heart-in-my-throat, waiting for the moment he touches me, and I’m alive again. It’s punishing and purifying, velvet and violent, and it makes everything else melt away, until nothing matters but getting him inside me and I wouldn’t just die for him—I’d kill for him, too.
Like I did tonight.
And when I see her tomorrow.
I hated him.
Oh, I’d hated my sister’s murderer before, but now I hated him even more.
Here, in my white-knuckled hand, was proof that the Lord Master had used his dark powers on Alina, turned her into someone she wasn’t, before killing her: A page torn from her journal, penned in the beautiful, gently sloping hand she’d begun perfecting before I’d even learned to read.
A page so unlike Alina that it couldn’t have been more obvious he’d brainwashed her, done that Voice thing to her he’d done to me the other night in the caves beneath the Burren, when he’d demanded I give him the amulet and come with him, and I’d been unable to resist or deny him. With the power of a few mere words, he’d turned me into a mindless automaton. If not for Barrons, I would have trundled off behind him, enslaved. But Barrons, too, was skilled in the Druid power of Voice, and had freed me from the Lord Master’s spell.
I knew my sister. She’d been happy in Ashford. She’d loved being the person she was: bright, successful, and fun, idolized by me and most everyone else in town, the one whose smiling face was always in the newspaper for some honor or another, the one who did everything right.
He calls me his Queen of the Night.
“Queen of the Night, my petunia.” My sister had never wanted to be queen of anything, but if she had, it certainly wouldn’t have been the night. It would have been something festive, like Ashford’s annual Peach & Pumpkin Parade. She would have worn a shiny orange ribbon and a silver tiara, and been on the front page of the Ashford Journal-Constitution the next day.
I always wanted to be more like Mac. She’d never once said she wished she was more like me! When people call her lazy and selfish, she doesn’t care. Had people really said that about me? Had I been deaf back then, or just too dumb to care?
And what she’d written about sex was definitely not my sister. Alina didn’t like it doggie-style. She’d considered it demeaning. On your hands and knees, babe. Yeah, right, she’d say, and laugh. Up yours.
“See, not Alina,” I told the page.
Who had my sister killed the night she’d written this entry? A monster? Or had the Lord Master brainwashed her into killing one of the good guys for him? Who had she been going to see the next day? Had she been planning to kill her, too? Were they humans she’d been killing, or Fae? If they were Fae, how had she been killing them? I had the spear. Dani, a courier for Post Haste, Inc., the false front for the organization of sidhe-seers run by the Grand Mistress, Rowena, had the sword. Those were the only two weapons I knew of that could kill a Fae. Had Alina discovered some other weapon I didn’t know about? Of all the pages in her journal, why had someone sent me this page?
Most important and troubling of all: Who had sent it to me? Who had my sister’s journal? V’lane, Barrons, and Rowena all denied ever having met her. Might the Lord Master himself have sent it, thinking perhaps, in his twisted arrogance, that it would make me find him as attractive as my sister had? As usual, I was adrift in a sea of questions and if answers were lifeboats, I was in imminent danger of drowning.
I picked up the envelope and studied it. Plain, off-white vellum, thick and tasteful enough to have been custom-ordered; still, it told me nothing.
The address, neatly typed in generic font, could have come from any inkjet or laser printer, anywhere in the world.
MacKayla Lane c/o Barrons Books and Baubles, it said.
There was no return address. The only clue it offered was a Dublin postmark, dated yesterday, and that was no clue at all.
I sipped my coffee, thinking. I’d gotten up early this morning, dressed, and hurried down from my bedroom on the top floor of the shop so I could stock the new dailies and monthlies, but I’d gotten distracted by the stack of mail piled on the counter. Three bills into it, I’d found the envelope containing the page from Alina’s journal. The pile of mail teetered; the monthlies were still boxed.
I closed my eyes and rubbed them. I’d been hunting for my sister’s journal, desperate to find it before someone else did, but it was too late. Someone else had gotten to it before me. Someone else was privy to her innermost thoughts, and had at their disposal all the knowledge she’d gained since she’d arrived on Ireland’s Fae-infested shores.
What other secrets did her diary contain, besides unflattering personal insight into me? Had she written about the location of any of the Hallows or relics we needed? Did someone else know about the Sinsar Dubh, and how it was moving around? Were I and my anonymous foe both hoping to track it the same way?
The phone began to ring, a local number. I ignored it. Everyone that mattered to me had my cell phone number. Seeing Alina’s handwriting, hearing her words spoken aloud in my mind, as I’d read them, had left me feeling raw. I was in no mood to talk books to a customer.
The phone finally stopped ringing, but after a three-second pause, began again.
The third time it started ringing, I picked it up, just to shut it up.
It was Christian MacKeltar, wondering what had happened to me the other night, and why I hadn’t returned any of his calls. I could hardly tell him it was because I’d been a little busy being driven to my knees by a sentient Book; watching my murderous employer tote a dead body around; serving addictive, cannibalistic tea to a homicide detective in order to turn him into my informant, then steering him around the city, forcing him to see monsters; and just now, reading up on how my sister had loved having sex with the very monster responsible for bringing the rest of the monsters through to our world.
No, I was quite certain all of that would only alienate a man I was hoping might prove a valuable source of information.
So I offered him a colorful bouquet of lies, and made a new date with him for tonight.
_____
By the time I left to go see Christian, Barrons still hadn’t put in an appearance, and I was glad. I wasn’t ready to face him yet.
As I locked up the bookstore, I scanned the Dark Zone. Three Shades toed the edge of the light. The rest slithered and slid in the shadows. Nothing had changed. Their prison of darkness still held.
I turned briskly to my left and headed for Trinity College, where Christian worked in the Ancient Languages Department. I’d met him several weeks ago, when Barrons had sent me to pick up an envelope from the woman who ran the department. She hadn’t been there, but Christian had.
Then we’d run into each other a second time, a week ago, in a pub, where he’d stunned me by telling me he’d known my sister, and even knew what she and I were. Our conversation had been rudely interrupted by Barrons, who’d called to warn me Hunters were in the city, and told me to return to the bookstore. I’d been planning to call Christian the next day and find out what else he knew, but on my way home, I’d been cornered by Hunters and abducted by Mallucé and, needless to say, I’d had my hands a little full battling for my life. Then, the other night, the debilitating appearance of the Sinsar Dubh had prevented us from meeting again. I was anxious to find out what he knew.
I pushed my curls back from my forehead and fluffed them with my fingers. I’d dressed up again tonight, wound a brilliant silk scarf through my hair and tied it, letting the brightly colored ends trail over my shoulder, and drape softly in my cleavage. I was nothing if not determined; at least twice a week I would wear bright, pretty clothes. I was afraid if I didn’t, I’d forget who I was. I’d turn into what I felt like: a grungy, weapon-bearing, pissy, resentful, vengeance-hungry bitch. The girl with long blond hair, perfect makeup, and nails might be gone, but I was still pretty. My shoulder-length Arabian-night hair curled flatteringly around my face, complementing my green eyes and clear skin. Coupling red lipstick with my darker ’do made me look older, sexier than I used to.
I’d chosen clothes tonight that hugged my curves and showed them to their best advantage. I was wearing a cream skirt, with a snug yellow sweater in honor of Alina (beneath a short, stylish, cream raincoat that concealed eight flashlights, two knives, and a spear), high heels, and pearls. Dad said the day they’d picked us up from the adoption agency, Alina had been dressed like a sunbeam, and I’d been a rainbow.
Alina.
Her absence in my life was so painful that it was a presence. Grief still kicked me awake in the morning, kept me company all day, and crawled into bed with me at night.
Dublin was a constant reminder of her. She was here in every street, in the face of every young coed who had no idea what was walking right alongside her, masquerading as human. She was laughing in the pubs, and dying later in the dark.