As I suspected, he’d stacked Silvers to form a gauntlet no intruder would make it through alive, protecting his underground abode.
Nine months ago, if I’d been able to figure out how to get in, I’d have gotten killed within the first few feet. I was attacked the instant I stepped inside. I didn’t have time to draw my spear. When the first volley of teeth and claws came at me, my lake instantly offered and I accepted without hesitation.
A single purple rune glowed in my palm.
My attackers fell back. They hated it, whatever it was.
I swirled through fog to my waist, absorbing the barren landscape. Skeletal trees glowed like yellow bones in the sickly moonlight. Crumbling headstones listed at acute angles. Mausoleums hulked behind wrought iron gates. It was brutally cold here, almost as frigid as the Unseelie prison. My hair iced, my brows and nose hairs frosted. My fingers began to numb.
The transition from this Silver to the next was seamless. All of them were. Barrons was far more adept at stacking Silvers than Darroc had been and even more skilled, it seemed, than the Unseelie King.
I didn’t even see the change in my environment coming. I suddenly had one foot in an icy cemetery and the other in a stifling desert of black sand, sun beating down on me. I glided forward into the searing heat and was instantly parched. Nothing attacked me on this scorched terrain. I wondered if the sun alone would keep certain trespassers out. The next mirror gave me fits. Abruptly, I was underwater. I couldn’t breathe. I panicked and tried to back out.
But I hadn’t been able to breathe in the Unseelie prison, either.
I stopped fighting it and half-swam, half-walked on the ocean floor of some planet—not ours, because we didn’t have fish that looked like small underwater steamboats with whirling wheels of teeth.
My glassy lake offered a bubble of sorts, sealed it around me, and everything that came at me bounced off.
I was beginning to feel downright indestructible. Cocky. I put a little swagger in my rolling steps.
By the time I passed through half a dozen more “zones,” I was beyond cocky. Every threat that came at me, my dark lake had an answer for. I was getting drunk on my own power.
From a landscape that would have been called “Midnight on a Far Star” if it had been a painting, I burst into a dimly lit room and blinked.
It was Spartan, Old World, and smelled good. Deep, drugging spices. Barrons. My knees felt soft. I smell him, I think of sex. I’m a hopeless case.
I knew instantly where I was.
Beneath the garage behind Barrons Books and Baubles.
41
I wanted to explore. I would have explored, except for the child crying.
Of all the things I expected Barrons to have secreted away from the world and protected so well, a child wasn’t on my list.
Clues to his identity? Surely.
A luxurious home? Definitely.
A kid? Never.
Bemused, I followed the sound. It was faint, coming from below. The child was sobbing as if its world was ending. I couldn’t tell if it was a girl or a boy, but the pain and sorrow it felt was soul-shredding. I wanted to make it stop. I had to make it stop. It was breaking my heart.
I moved through room after room, barely noticing my surroundings, opening and closing doors, looking for a way down. I was distantly aware that the true jewels of Barrons’ collection were here, in his underground lair. I passed things that I’d seen in museums and now knew had been copies. Barrons didn’t mess with copies. He loved his antiquities. The place hummed with OOPs somewhere. I would find them eventually.
But, first, the child.
The sound of it crying was killing me.
Did Jericho Barrons have children? Maybe he’d had one with Fiona?
I hissed, then realized how Fae I’d sounded and pretended I hadn’t just done that. I stopped and cocked my head. As if he’d heard my tight-lipped exhalation, the crying got louder. Saying, I’m here, I’m near, please find me, I’m so scared and alone.
There had to be stairs.
I stalked through the place, yanking open door after door. The crying was getting on my last maternal-instinct nerve. I finally found the right door and stepped inside.
He’d taken serious precautions.
I was in a fun-house room of mirrors. I could see stairs in a dozen different places, but I had no way of distinguishing between reflection and reality.
And knowing Barrons as well as I did, if I went for the reflection, something very nasty would happen to me. He obviously cared a great deal about the protection of the child.
My dark lake offered, but I didn’t need it.
“Show me what is true,” I murmured, and the mirrors fell dark, one after the next, until a chrome staircase gleamed in the low light.
I moved silently down it, drawn by the siren lure of the child’s sobs.
Once again, my expectations were shot.
The crying was coming from behind tall doors that were chained, padlocked, and engraved with runes. I shouldn’t have been able to hear it at all. I was astonished I’d ever been able to hear Barrons roaring this far underground.
It took me twenty minutes to break the chains, wards, and runes. He obviously wanted this child protected to the hilt. Why? What was so important? What was going on?
When I pushed open the doors, the crying stopped abruptly.
I stepped into the room and looked around. Whatever I’d expected, it wasn’t this. There was no opulence here, no treasure or collectibles. This was little better than Mallucé’s grotto beneath the Burren.
The room was hewn from stone, a cave cleared out in the bedrock of the earth. A small stream ran through, appearing in the east wall, disappearing beyond the west. There were cameras mounted everywhere. He would know I’d been here, even if I walked back out right now.
In the center of the room was a cage that was twenty by twenty, made of massive iron bars, closely spaced. Like the doors, it was heavily runed. It was also empty.
I moved toward it.
And stopped, stunned.
It wasn’t empty as I’d thought. A child lay in the cage, curled on its side, naked. He looked about ten or eleven.
I hurried to him. “Honey, are you all right? What’s wrong? Why are you in there?”
The child looked up. I staggered and went to my knees on the stone floor, stupefied.
I was looking at the child from the vision I’d shared with Barrons.
Every detail of it was crystal clear in my head, as if I’d lived it yesterday—a rare glimpse into Barrons’ heart. I could close my eyes and be back there again with him, that easily. We were in a desert.
It’s dusk. We hold a child in our arms.
I stare into the night.
I won’t look down.
Can’t face what’s in his eyes.
Can’t not look.
My gaze goes unwillingly, hungrily down.
The child stares up at me with utter trust.
“But you died!” I protested, staring at him.
The boy moved toward me, came to stand at the edge of the cage and wrapped his small hands around the bars. Beautiful boy. Dark hair, gold skin, dark eyes. His father’s son. His eyes are soft, warm.
And I’m Barrons, staring down at him …
His eyes say, I know you won’t let me die.
His eyes say, I know you will make the pain stop.
His eyes said, Trust/love/adore/youareperfect/ you willalwayskeepmesafe/youaremyworld.
But I didn’t keep him safe.
And I can’t make his pain stop.
We’d been in the desert holding this child, this very boy in our arms, losing him, loving him, grieving him, feeling his life slip away …
I see him there. His yesterdays. His today. The tomorrows that will never be.
I see his pain and it shreds me.
I see his absolute love and it shames me.
He smiles at me. He gives me all his love in his eyes.
It begins to fade.
No! I roar. You will not die! You will not leave me!
I stare into his eyes for what seems a thousand days.
I see him. I hold him. He is there.
He is gone.
But he’s not gone. He’s right here with me. The boy presses his face to the bars. He smiles at me. He gives me all his love in his eyes. I melt. If I could be someone’s mother, I would take this child and keep him safe forever.
I push to my feet, moving as if I’m in a trance. I’ve held this child, inside Barrons’ head. As Barrons, I loved him and I lost him. In sharing that vision, it became my wound, too.
“I don’t understand. How are you alive? Why are you here?” Why had Barrons experienced his death? There was no question that he had. I’d been there. I’d tasted it, too. It was reminiscent of the regrets I’d felt about Alina …
Come back, come back, you want to scream … just one more minute. Just one more smile … one more chance to do things right. But he’s gone. He’s gone. Where did he go? What happens to life when it leaves? Does it go somewhere or is it just fucking gone?
“How are you here?” I say wonderingly.
He speaks to me, and I don’t understand a word of it. It’s a language dead and forgotten. But I hear the plaintive tones. I hear a word that sounds like Ma-ma.
Choking back a sob, I reach for him.
As I slip my arms through the bars and gather his small, naked body into my arms, as his dark head floats into the hollow where my shoulder meets my neck, fangs puncture my skin, and the beautiful little boy rips out my throat.