40
Do you hear that?” It was driving me nuts.
“What?”
“You don’t hear someone playing a xylophone?”
Barrons gave me a look.
“I swear I hear the faint strains of ‘Qué Sera Sera.’ ”
“Doris Day?”
“Pink Martini.”
“Ah. No. Don’t hear it.”
We walked in silence. Or, rather, he did. In my world, trumpets were blaring and a harpsichord was tinkling and it was all I could do not to go spinning in wide-armed circles down the street, singing: When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother, “What will I be? Will I be pretty, will I be rich?” Here’s what she said to me …
The night had been an abysmal failure on all fronts.
The Sinsar Dubh had tricked us, but I was the one to blame. I was the one who could track it. I’d had a tiny part to play and hadn’t been able to get it right. If I hadn’t clued in at the last minute, it would have gotten V’lane and probably killed us all—or at least everyone that could be killed. As it was, I’d given V’lane just enough warning that he’d been able to sift out before it could turn the full brunt of its evil thrall on him and get him to take it from the hand of the sidhe-seer who’d been standing there offering it to him.
It had conned Sophie into picking it up right under our noses, while we’d all been focused on where it was making me think it was.
It had been walking along with us for God only knew how long, working its illusions on me, and I had misled them. Very nearly to a mass slaughter.
We’d run like rats from a sinking ship, scrambling over one another to get away.
It had been something to see. The most powerful and dangerous people I’ve ever known—Christian, with his Unseelie tattoos; Ryodan and Barrons and Lor, who were secretly nine-foot-tall monsters that couldn’t die; V’lane and his cohorts, who were virtually unkillable and had mind-boggling powers—all running from one small sidhe-seer holding a book.
A Book. A magical tome that some idiot had made because he’d wanted to dump all his evil from himself so he could start life over again as patriarchal leader of his race. I could have told him that trying to shirk personal responsibility never works out well in the end.
And somewhere out there tonight or tomorrow, though nobody would go looking for her or try to save her, Sophie would die.
Along with who knew how many others? V’lane had sifted to the abbey to warn them she was no longer one of them.
“What was going on with the Hunter up there, Ms. Lane?”
“No clue.”
“Looked like you had a friend. I thought maybe it was the concubine’s Hunter.”
“I hadn’t thought of that!” I forced myself to exclaim, as if stunned.
He gave me a dry look. “I don’t need a Keltar Druid to know when you’re lying.”
I scowled. “Why is that?”
“I’ve been around a long time. You learn to read people.”
“Exactly how long?”
“What did it say to you?”
I blew out a breath, exasperated. “It said I used to ride it. It called me ‘old friend.’ ” One nice thing about talking to Barrons was that I didn’t have to mince words.
He burst out laughing.
I’ve heard him laugh openly so few times that it kind of hurt my feelings that he was laughing now. “What’s funny about that?”
“The look on your face. Life hasn’t turned out like you thought it would, has it, Rainbow Girl?”
The name slid through my heart like a dull blade. You’re leaving me, Rainbow Girl. Then it had been laced with tenderness. Now it was merely a mocking appellation.
“Clearly I was misled,” I said stiffly. That damned harpsichord was back, the trumpets swelled.
When I grew up and fell in love, I asked my sweetheart, “What lies ahead? Will there be rainbows, day after day?” Here’s what my sweetheart said …
“You don’t really believe you’re the Unseelie King, do you?”
The trumpets warbled, the harpsichord fell silent, and the needle screeched as it was abruptly yanked from the record. Why did I even bother talking? “Where did you get that idea?”
“I saw the queen in the White Mansion. I couldn’t think of any reason for her memory residue to be there. Occam’s razor. She’s not the queen. Or she wasn’t then.”
“So who am I?”
“Not the Unseelie King.”
“Give me another explanation.”
“It hasn’t presented itself yet.”
“I need to find a woman named Augusta O’Clare.”
“She’s dead.”
I stopped walking. “You knew her?”
“She was Tellie Sullivan’s grandmother. It was to their home Isla O’Connor asked me to take her the night the Book escaped from the abbey.”
“And?”
“You’re not surprised. Interesting. You knew I was at the abbey.”
“How well did you know my moth—Isla?”
“I met her that night. I visited her grave five days later.”
“Did she have two children?”
He shook his head. “I checked later. She had only one daughter. Tellie was babysitting her that night. I saw the child at her house when I took Isla there.”
My sister. He’d seen Alina at Tellie’s. “And you think I’m not the Unseelie King?”
“I think we don’t have all the facts.”
I felt like crying. The day I’d set foot on the Emerald Isle, the slow erosion of me had begun. I’d arrived, the beloved daughter of Jack and Rainey Lane, sister of Alina. I’d accepted being adopted. I’d been elated to discover I had Irish roots. But now Barrons had just confirmed that I wasn’t an O’Connor. He’d been there when Isla died and she’d had one child. No wonder Ryodan had been so sure. There was nothing to identify me at all but a lifetime of impossible dreams, an oubliette of impossible knowledge, and an evil Book and a ghastly Hunter with a disturbing fondness for me.
“What happened that night at the abbey? Why were you there?”
“We’d gotten wind of something. Talk in the countryside. Old women gossiping. I’ve learned to listen to old women, read them over a newspaper anytime.”
“Yet you made fun of Nana O’Reilly.”
“I didn’t want you to go back and dig deeper.”
“Why?”
“She would have told you things I didn’t want you to know.”
“Like what you are?”
“She would have given you a name for me.” He stopped, then chewed out the next words. “Inaccurate. But a name. You needed names then.”
“You think I don’t now?” The Damned, she’d called him. I wondered why.
“You’re learning. The abbey was the focus of the talk. I’d been watching it for weeks, trying to devise a way in without setting off their wards. Clever work. They sensed even me, and nothing senses me.”
“You said ‘we’d’ gotten wind. I thought you worked alone. Who is we?”
“I do. But dozens have hunted it over time. It’s been the Grail for a certain type of collector. A sorcerer in London that ended up with copies of pages that night. Mobsters. Would-be kings. Following the same leads, we glimpsed one another now and then, gave each other a wide berth as long as we thought the other might one day provide a valuable lead, although I never saw the Keltar. I suspect the queen cleaned up after them, kept her ‘hidden mantle’ well hidden.”
“So, you were outside the abbey?”
“I had no idea anything was going on inside. It was a quiet night, like any other I’d watched it. There was no commotion. No shouting, no disturbance. The Book slipped out into the night unnoticed, or bided its time and left later. I was distracted by a woman climbing out a window in the rear of the abbey, holding her side. She’d been stabbed and was badly injured. She headed straight for me, as if she knew I was there. You must get me out of here, she said. She told me to take her to Tellie Sullivan in Devonshire. That the fate of the world depended on it.”
“I didn’t think you gave a rat’s petunia about the fate of the world.”
“I don’t. She’d seen the Sinsar Dubh. I asked if it was still at the abbey and she said it had been but was no longer. I learned that night that the damned thing had been practically beneath my nose for the past thousand years.”
“I thought it was always there, since the dawn of time, long before it was an abbey.” I wasn’t above prying into his age.
“I’ve been in Ireland only for the past millennia. Before that, I was … other places. Satisfied, Ms, Lane?”
“Hardly.” I wondered why he’d chosen Ireland. Why would a man like him stay in one place? Why not travel? Did he like having a “home?” I supposed even bears and lions had dens.
“She said it killed everyone in the Haven. I had no idea what the Haven was at the time. I tried to Voice her, but she was slipping in and out of consciousness. I had nothing with which to stem her injuries. I thought she was my best bet to track it, so I put her in my car and took her to her friend. But by the time we got there, she was in a coma.”
“And that’s all she ever told you?”
“Once I realized she wasn’t coming out of it, I moved on, unwilling to let the trail cool. I had competition to eliminate. For the first time since man learned to keep written archives, the Sinsar Dubh had been sighted. Others were after it. I needed to kill them while I still knew where they were. By the time I returned to Devonshire, she was dead and buried.”
“Did you dig—”
“Cremated.”
“Oh, isn’t that just convenient. Did you question Tellie? Voice her and her grandmother?”
“Look who’s all ruthless now. They were gone. I’ve had investigators hunting for them off and on ever since. The grandmother died eight years ago. The granddaughter was never seen again.”