She was all the people I couldn’t save.
I skirted the busy craic-filled streets of Temple Bar and headed straight for the college. Last night I’d walked through the heavily trafficked tourist zone that boasted over six hundred pubs, but tonight I was in no mood to be reminded that there were only two known weapons that could kill Fae and hundreds, if not thousands, of Unseelie in the city. My encounter with the Sinsar Dubh had sobered me. The sheer evilness of the thing had served as a grim reminder that, although I might have recently triumphed in an against-all-odds type of situation and walked out of it stronger, there was worse in store for me yet.
When I arrived at the office that housed the staff of the Ancient Languages Department, Christian met me at the door, looking young, hip, and hot in faded jeans, rugged boots, and a sweater, his long, dark hair pulled back at his nape in a leather thong. He gave me a charged, appreciative look, making me glad I’d taken care with my appearance. A woman likes to know her efforts are paying off.
He took my arm and suggested we go somewhere else. “They’re discussing the budget,” he advised in a deep, husky brogue, adjusting his stuffed backpack over a well-muscled shoulder.
“Don’t you need to stay?”
“Nah. Only full-timers have to suffer the meetings. I’m part-time.” He flashed a killer smile that made me stand up straight. Christian was the kind of good-looking that hit you over the head, made you keep stealing second and third glances at him: the five-o’clock shadow on the strong jaw, the broad shoulders, the flawless dark skin, and the striking tiger-eyes. There was an easy grace to his long-limbed body that hinted at maturity beyond his years. “Besides, it’s not a place I’m comfortable talking, and we’ve a great deal to talk about, lass.”
I hoped that meant someone was finally going to tell me something useful about my sister. He led me to a windowless study room off a vending area in the nearly deserted basement of the building. We settled into folding metal chairs, beneath the hum of fluorescent lights, where I imagined Alina might have sat and studied a time or two. I wasted no time asking Christian how he’d met her. I wondered if he’d been one of the boys she’d dated when she’d first come over, before she’d been brainwashed by the Lord Master. I sure would have. In another life. A normal one.
“She came to the ALD, looking for someone to translate a page of text.”
“What kind of text?” I thought instantly of the Sinsar Dubh.
“Nothing I could translate. My uncles couldn’t, either.”
I assumed his uncles were linguists and said so.
He smiled faintly, as if amused by the question. “They’re historians, after a fashion, knowledgeable about antiquities and such. I’ve never stumbled across a text they couldn’t translate.”
“Did you ever find out what it was?”
“My turn, Mac. I’ve a few questions of my own. What happened to you the other night? Why’d you cry off?”
“I told you. My dad called, and we got to talking about Mom and how she’s getting worse and I lost track of time. Then, by the time I got off the phone, something I ate for dinner wasn’t agreeing with me and I felt so sick I just went to bed.”
“Nice try,” he said dryly. “Now tell me the truth.”
“I just did.”
“No, you didn’t. You’re lying. I hear it in your voice.”
“You can’t hear whether I’m lying in my voice,” I scoffed. “Body language might tell you a thing or two, but—”
“Yes, I can.” He cut me off with a faintly bitter flash of that killer smile. “Literally. You lie, I hear it. And I wish I didn’t. You have no idea how often people lie. All the bloody time, about everything, even stupid things that make no sense to bother lying about. Truth between us, Mac, or nothing at all. Your choice. But don’t bother trying to fool me. You can’t.”
I began to ease off my coat, remembered my arsenal, and thought better of it, settled back in my chair, and crossed my legs, one high heel swinging. I searched his face. My God, he was serious. “You really know when people are lying?”
He nodded.
“Prove it.”
“Got a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Is there a man you’re interested in?”
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
I stiffened. “I am not.”
“Yes, you are. He may not be a boyfriend but there’s someone you’re interested in enough that you’re thinking about having sex with him.”
I glared. “I am not. And you can’t possibly know that.”
He shrugged. “Sorry, Mac, I hear the truth even when the person isn’t admitting it to themselves.” One dark brow lifted. “I don’t suppose it might be me?”
I blushed. He’d just made me think it. Us. Naked. Wow. I was a perfectly healthy woman, and he was a gorgeous man. “No,” I said, embarrassed.
He laughed, gold eyes glittering. “Lie. A whopper. Gotta love that. Have I told you I’m a big believer in fulfilling a woman’s fantasies?”
I rolled my eyes. “I wasn’t thinking it before you said it. You put the thought in my head and then, there it was, and I was thinking it.” And that worried me, because I could think of only two other people—and I was using that term loosely about both—that I might have been thinking of having sex with before he’d made me think about having sex with him, and both were terrible choices. “This doesn’t prove anything.”
“Guess you’ll have to take me on faith then, until you get to know me. I take you on faith. I don’t ask you to prove that you see the Fae.”
”People think about having sex all the time,” I said irritably. “Are you aware of every time you’re thinking about it, and who with?”
“Bless the saints, no. I wouldn’t get anything done. Most of the time it’s just background music, you know, sex-sex-sex-find-in-it-before-more-perfectly-good-sperm-die, playing in my head, to an easy, sensuous beat, then somebody like you walks in and it ratchets up to that Nine Inch Nails song my uncle plays all the time for his wife.” He grimaced. “We leave the castle and go somewhere else when he does that.”
“Your uncle listens to Trent Reznor?” I blinked. “You live in a castle?” I didn’t know which thought was weirder.
“Big. Drafty. Not as impressive as it sounds. And not all my uncles are as cool as Dageus. Men want to be him. Women adore him. It’s irritating, actually. I never introduce my girlfriends to him.”
If he was anything like Christian, I could see why.
“Point is, Mac, don’t lie to me. I will know. And I won’t put up with it.”
I pondered his claim. I knew what it was like to be capable of doing something others would consider impossible. I decided to take him at face value, and see what came of it. Time would tell. “So, is it a gift of birth, like me being a sidhe-seer?”
“You don’t think being a sidhe-seer is a gift. Nor is my . . . little problem, and yes, much to my parents’ inconvenience, I was born this way. There are necessary lies. Or, at least, kind ones. I never got to hear any of them. I don’t get to hear them now.”
Alina had said the same thing: Necessary lies. “Well, look on the bright side of it, you don’t get to hear any lies, but nobody around you gets to tell any, either. Do you think it’s easy to be around someone that you have to tell the truth to all the—oh!” I drew up short. “You don’t have many friends, do you?” Not if he spoke his mind freely, and he looked like the kind of guy that did.
He shot me a cool look. “Why’d you cry off last night?”
“I had a close call with a Dark Hallow, and they make me too sick to function if I get too close.”
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and stared at me with fascination. “Now that was a celestial choir of truth, lass! You saw a Dark Hallow? Which one?”
“How do you know about the Dark Hallows? Who are you and what’s your involvement in this?” I didn’t need any more mystifying men in my life.
“How much truth will you give me?”
I hesitated only briefly. Of all the men I’d met in Dublin, he seemed the most like me; essentially normal, but afflicted with an unwanted, life-altering talent. “As much as I can, if you do the same.”
He nodded, satisfied, then settled back in his chair. “I come from a clan that, in ancient times, served the Fae.”