THIRTEEN
W hat the feck is going on in your back alley?”
I glanced up. Dani stood in the doorway of the bookstore with the early afternoon sunlight gilding her auburn curls, bathing her delicate features in light. A sprightly slip of a girl, she was wearing a uniform of light green trousers with a white and green pinstriped poplin shirt, emblazoned on the pocket with a shamrock and the letters PHI. She looked cute and sweet and innocent, and I knew better. I didn’t know which startled me more: her presence, or the sunshine. Both had crept up on me while I’d been reading, absorbed in the day’s news.
I returned my attention to the gruesome story. A man had killed his entire family—wife, kids, stepkids, even their dog—then driven his car halfway across town, straight into a concrete bridge abutment at eighty miles an hour, not far from where Barrons and I had been last night. According to friends, neighbors, and coworkers, no one could explain it. He’d been a loving husband, an excellent employee at the local credit union, and a model father who’d regularly made time for his children’s sporting and academic events. “You want to cuss, Dani,” I told her, “do it around someone else.”
“Feck you,” she retorted.
“Real mature there,” I said, without looking up. “Trying on adulthood by cussing. You and a gazillion other teens. Do something original.” Back home, I’d rarely read anything other than the Sunday paper, specifically the lifestyle and fashion sections. Had crimes like these always been going on, and I’d just never noticed? Had I been so criminally oblivious?
Dani wheeled her bike in the door. “I don’t have to do something original, I am original.” She hesitated. “So, what’s going on out back?”
I shrugged. “You mean the cars? No clue.” I wasn’t about to admit to someone who was plugged into the sidhe-seer community that I’d stolen a Fae Hallow and in the process gotten sixteen humans killed. I’d been reading up on the paranormal and it appeared there was a golden rule: Harm no innocents, and humans somehow seemed to unilaterally get accorded that status, an irony heavily underscored by the newspaper I was reading.
“No. I meant the half-wiped Grug.”
“Grug?”
She described it, what was left of it. “I call them Rhino-boys.” I dropped the paper. “There’s one out back, half eaten?”
She nodded and her lips quirked. “Rhino-boys, I get that. They’re gray and lumpy and make that funny noise in the back of their throats.”
“Is Grug their Unseelie caste name?” Was this true sidhe-seer lore? I was starving for it. I wanted explanations, rules. I wanted someone to take my life and make sense out of it. I wanted a Sidhe-Seer Compendium.
She shrugged. “We don’t know squat about the Unseelie. It’s just what we call them. I like your name better. So, you gonna finish it off, or do you get off on torturing ’em? What do you do with the other parts? Keep ’em in a jar or something?” She glanced around, looking for those jars with an expression that said simultaneously “I’m so bored” and “Hey, way cool.”
“Oh, God, you think I—No, Dani, I don’t get off on torturing them! I didn’t know it was out there.” It bothered me immensely that something big and bad enough to eat Unseelie had been nearby, and I’d not even known it. It bothered me more that Dani thought I was so twisted. Who was this kid’s role model? Where did she get her ideas? TV? Video games? Kids these days seem both dangerously impressionable and dangerously desensitized, as if their lives have somehow assumed comic book proportions, ergo, comic book relevance—or a complete lack thereof. If I had to read about one more group of teenage boys killing a homeless person and saying, “I don’t know why we did it, it was like…hey, you know…that Internet game we play,” I was going to start stabbing humans with my spear, golden rule be damned. “Did you kill it?” I asked.
“With what?” She poked out a slim hip. “You see a sword tucked into this uniform? Strapped on my bike somewhere?”
“A sword?” I blinked. Surely she didn’t mean the sword. “You mean the Seelie Hallow, the sword of light?” I’d read about it in my research; it was the only other weapon capable of killing Fae. “That’s what you’ve been getting your forty-seven kills with? You have it?”
She gave me a smug look.
“How on earth did you get it?” According to the last book I’d read, it had been in the custody of the Seelie Queen herself!
The smug look faded a little.
I narrowed my eyes. “Rowena gave it to you.” From her crestfallen expression, I continued guessing, “And she keeps it, and doesn’t let you carry it much, does she?”
Dani scowled and propped her bike against the wall. “She thinks I’m too fecking young. I’ve killed more Fae than all her other little kiss-ass acolytes she sends out combined, and still she treats me like a child!” She stomped over to the counter, and looked me up and down. “I bet you can’t kill the Grug. I bet Rowena’s wrong about you. What kind of special powers do you have? I don’t see anything special about you.”
Without another word I skirted the cashier counter, pushed through the connecting doors, and headed for the rear of the store.
What was eating Unseelie outside my bedroom window? I didn’t like it one bit. It was bad enough that I had to worry about Shades and whatever was beneath the garage but now I had to worry about a monster-muncher, too. Nor did I like that such a thing had happened twice now, with me in the immediate vicinity. Were such macabre feasts taking place across the city and I just didn’t know it because I wasn’t getting out much? Or was it happening specifically around me? Was it coincidence, or something more?
I pushed open the back door and scanned the alley, left and right.
It took me a few moments to spot it. Nearly two-thirds of it was gone and what remained—the head, shoulders, and stump of a torso—had been tossed into an overflowing Dumpster. Like the mangled Fae in the graveyard, it was in obvious agony.
I hurried down the stairs, scrambled up the small mountain of trash, and crouched over it. “What did this to you?” I demanded. No mercy killing this time. I wanted information in exchange.
It opened its mouth, made a wordless, whimpering sound, and I turned away. In addition to having no hands or arms left, it had no tongue. Whatever had stopped short of devouring it meant for it to suffer, and had left it unable to speak or communicate in any way.
I removed the spear from the holster I’d rigged beneath my jacket this morning, and stabbed it. It died with a rank gust of icy breath.
When I clambered back down the pile of refuse, Dani was waiting for me, wide-eyed. “You have the spear,” she said reverently. “And what an awesome holster! It’s so compact I could carry it around all the time, everywhere. I could kill them twenty-four/seven! Are you superfast?” she demanded. “If not, I should probably have that spear.” She reached for it.
I put it behind my back. “Kid, you try to touch my spear, I’ll do worse things to you than you’ve ever seen done.” I had no idea what I was talking about, but I suspected if anyone tried to take the spear from me, that savage Mac inside, the one that hated pink and hadn’t particularly minded watching the Rhino-boy flail in eternal pain, might do something we’d both regret. Well, at least one of us would regret. I was becoming too complicated for my own peace of mind. Would Dani try to take it with her superspeed? Would I find something in that hot, alien place in my skull to fight her with?
“I’m not a kid. When are you fecking grown-ups going to see that?” Dani snapped, turning away.
“When you stop acting like one. Why did you come here?”
“You’re in trouble,” she tossed over her shoulder. “Rowena wants to see you.”
Turned out PHI was not the twenty-third letter in the Greek alphabet but Post Haste, Inc. Courier Services, and Dani a delivery girl, explaining the uniform and bike.
It was two in the afternoon on Thursday, when I hung my Closed Early placard on the bookstore door and locked up. “Shouldn’t you be in school, Dani?”
“I’m home-schooled. Most of us are.”
“What does your mom think about you running around killing Fae?” I couldn’t imagine the mother of any young child being okay with it. But I guess when there’s a war on and you’re born a soldier, there’s not much choice.
“She’s dead,” she said nonchalantly. “Died six years ago.”
I didn’t say I was sorry. I didn’t mouth any of the platitudes people resort to in times of grief. They don’t help. In fact, they chafe. I commiserated on her level. “It fecking sucks, doesn’t it?” I said vehemently.
She flashed me a look of surprise and the nonchalance melted. “Yeah, it does. I hate it.”
“What happened?”
Her rosebud mouth twisted. “One of them got her. One day I’ll find out which one, and kill the fecker.”
Sisters in vengeance. I touched her shoulder and smiled. She looked startled, unaccustomed to sympathy. Six years ago, Dani would have been seven or eight. “I didn’t know they’d been around that long,” I said, meaning the Unseelie. “I thought they’d only recently been freed.”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t an Un that got her.”
“But I thought the…other ones”—I spoke vaguely, mindful of the wind—“didn’t kill us because of the…you know.”
“Compact? That’s a bloody crock. They never stopped killing us. Well, maybe some of them did, but most of them didn’t.”
We walked the rest of the way in silence, with Dani pushing her bike. She wasn’t comfortable talking on the streets. We skirted Temple Bar and crossed the River Liffey.
PHI Courier Services occupied a three-story building painted the same light green of Dani’s pants, trimmed in cherry, adorned by tall, arched windows. The sign above the entry sported the same emblem emblazoned on her shirt, but the shamrock looked misshapen, out of proportion. Something about the sign perplexed me. If I’d happened down this street on my own and seen it, I’d have walked straight into the building without hesitation, gripped by an irresistible compulsion.
“It’s spelled,” Dani explained, watching me study it. “It draws people like us. So does the ad in the paper. She’s been gathering us for a long time.”
“You think maybe you’re telling me things she doesn’t want me to know?” Where did her loyalties lie? Wasn’t she Rowena’s creation?
Dani thought about that a minute and I had a sudden insight into her character. Like me, she didn’t trust anyone. Not completely anyway. I wondered why.
“Go to the back.” The gamine redhead hopped on her bike. “I’m late for deliveries. See ya around, Mac.”
Around back were dozens of green and white bicycles, four motorbikes, and ten delivery vans, all emblazoned with the same misshapen shamrock. If PHI was a cover, it was nevertheless a thriving business.
I walked up the rear steps of the building and knocked. A woman in her forties, with rimless glasses and a shiny cap of brown hair opened the door, ushered me inside, led me up two flights of stairs, to a room at the end of a hall, and left me at the door without saying a word. My sidhe-seer senses were getting a tingle. There was either a Fae or Fae OOPs through that door—and I doubted it was an actual Fae. Rowena probably kept Dani’s close sword at hand, perhaps other relics as well.
I pushed it open and stepped into a handsomely appointed study with hardwood floors, paneled walls, and a huge fireplace. Sunlight spilled through tall windows framed with velvet. Floor and table lamps lit every nook and cranny. I would find this was a common trait among sidhe-seers, turning on all the lights we can. We hate the dark.
The old woman was seated behind an antique desk, but she wasn’t looking so old today. On the two prior occasions I’d seen her, she’d been drably dressed. Today she wore a turquoise suit with classic lines and a white blouse, and looked twenty years younger, closer to sixty-something than eighty-something. Her silvery hair was pulled back from her face in a single plait that circled her head like a crown. The creamy pearls that glowed at her ears, throat, and wrist were the same lustrous color as her hair. She looked elegant, in charge, and, although diminutive of build, full of piss and vinegar as my father would have said. I guessed the dreary, aged appearance she donned in public was deliberate and useful; people tend to grant unkempt seniors a special invisibility, as if by not noticing them they won’t have to acknowledge the same creature in themselves clawing closer to the surface with each tick of the clock.
Glasses on a beaded chain rested on her chest. She raised them now, slipped them onto a finely pointed nose. They magnified the size, fierce color, and the fiercer intelligence of her sharp blue eyes. “MacKayla. Do come in. Have a seat,” she said briskly.
I gave her a curt nod and stepped into the room. I glanced around, wondering where the sword was. Something Fae was in this room. “Rowena.”
Her eyes flickered and I knew she didn’t appreciate the familiarity. Good. I meant to establish us as equals, not mentor and student. She’d lost the chance to mentor me when she’d turned her back on me. We looked at each other in silence. It stretched. I wasn’t about to speak. This was our first battle of the wills. It wouldn’t be our last.
“Sit,” she said again, gesturing to a chair in front of the desk.
I didn’t.
“Och, for the love of Mary, get your spine down, lass,” she barked. “We’re family here.”
“Really?” I leaned back against the door and folded my arms. “Because where I come from, family doesn’t abandon their own in need, and you’ve done that to me twice. Why did you tell me to go die that night in the pub? You gather sidhe-seers. Why not me?”
She tilted her head back and peered down her nose, assessing, measuring. “It had been a difficult day. I’d lost three of my own. And there you were, about to betray yourself, and the saints only knew how many of us, if you weren’t stopped.”
“It had to be obvious I had no idea what I was.”
“What was obvious was that you were fascinated by a Fae. I told you, I thought you were Pri-ya, one of their addicts. I had no way of knowing it was the first Fae you’d ever seen, or that you were unaware of what you were. Those who are Pri-ya are beyond our help. By the time that kind of damage has been done, the will is demolished and the mind virtually gone. I will never sacrifice ten to save one.”
“Did I look like my mind was gone?” I demanded.
“Actually, yes,” she said flatly. “You did.”
I thought back to that night, my first in Dublin. I’d been heavily jet-lagged, overcome with grief, feeling bitterly alone, and I’d just seen something that couldn’t possibly have been there. Perhaps the expression on my face had been a bit…stupefied, maybe even blank. Still…“What about the museum? You abandoned me there, too,” I accused.
She folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. “You appeared to be in league with a Fae prince—and again, Pri-ya. You were stripping for it. What did you expect me to think? It wasn’t until I saw you threaten him with the spear that I began to understand differently. Speaking of which, I need to see that spear.” She rose, skirted the desk with the agility of a much younger woman, and extended her hand.
I laughed. She was crazy if she thought I was handing my weapon over. I’d sooner put it through her heart. “I don’t think so.”
“MacKayla,” she said sternly, “let me see that spear. We are your people. We are sisters in this war.”
“My sister is dead. Did you see her, too? Did you make the same snap judgment and turn her away? Tell her to go die by herself? Because she did,” I said bitterly. “The Fae ripped her to shreds.”
Rowena looked startled. “What is this of a sister?”
“Oh, please.” Here it was, the real reason I hated her. Not just for turning me away and shattering my beliefs about my family, but why hadn’t she found my sister? With her spelled signs, her advertisements, and her bicycling spies, why hadn’t she drawn Alina in? Taught her? Saved her? “She was in Dublin for months. She hung out in the pubs all the time. How could you not have run into her?”
“Would you expect me to encounter every single person in Chicago on a visit?” she snapped. “Dublin is a big city, and we have only recently become organized. Until a short time ago, I was busy elsewhere. How long was your sister here? What did she look like?”
“She was here for eight months. She was blond like…like I was the first time you saw me. Same color eyes. More athletically built. A bit taller.”
Rowena searched my face, as if absorbing and breaking down my individual features, trying to place them in random arrangements on another woman. Finally she shook her head. “I’m sorry, MacKayla, but no. I never met your sister. You must tell me what happened. You and I are sisters in more than vision and cause; we are sisters in loss. Tell me everything.”
“We aren’t sisters in anything, and I’m not giving you my spear, old woman.” She wasn’t going to suck me in with sympathy.
She gave me a hard stare. “I sent you away the first time. The second time I tried to get you to come back here with me, but you refused. We’ve both turned the other away once. I won’t make that same mistake again. Will you?”
“You should have found my sister. You should have saved her.”
“You have no idea how much I wish I could have. Let me save you instead.”
“I don’t need saving.”
“If you’re working with Jericho Barrons, you do.”
“What do you know about Barrons?”
“That there are not, and never have been, any male sidhe-seers, MacKayla. It is a gift of matriarchy.”
I scoffed. “A gift? It killed my sister and ruined my life. As for Barrons, what is he, then? Because he sure can see the Fae, and he helps me kill them, which is more than you’ve ever done.”
“Is that all one must do to win your trust, MacKayla? Battle alongside you? Let us go kill a Fae together then, right now. Do you know what’s in his heart? His mind? Why he does it? What he’s after?”
I said nothing because there was nothing to say to that. Most of the time I wasn’t sure he even had a heart, and whatever thoughts he entertained he kept intensely guarded.
“I didn’t think so. He tells you nothing, does he?”
“He’s told me more about what I am than you have.”
“You haven’t given me a chance.”
“I gave you two.”
“Try again, MacKayla. I’m ready to talk. Are you ready to listen?”
“Do you know what he is?” I pressed.
“I know what he isn’t, and that’s all I need to know. He’s not one of us. We are pure of heart, pure of purpose. You see that shamrock?” Rowena pointed to a picture behind her desk of a large green clover on a background of embossed gold. “Look at it. Do you know why it’s considered lucky, and has been for longer than anyone can recall?”
I shook my head.
“Before it was the clover of Saint Patrick’s trinity, it was ours. It’s the emblem of our Order. It’s the symbol our ancient sisters used to carve on their doors and dye into banners millennia ago, when they moved to a new village. It was their way of letting the inhabitants know who they were and what they were there to do. When people saw our sign, they declared a time of great feasting and celebrated for a fortnight. They welcomed us with gifts of their finest food, wine, and men. They held tournaments to compete to bed us.” She strode to the picture, snatching a pencil from the desk on the way to it. “It is not a clover at all, but a vow.” She traced the lines of the two bottom leaves, left to right, with the eraser. “You see how these two leaves make a sideways figure eight, like a horizontal M?bius strip? They are two S’s, one right side up, one upside down, ends meeting. The third leaf and stem is an upright P.”
So that was why the shamrock looked misshapen! It was. The upright leaf was flatter on the left side, the stem stiff.
“Over thousands of years they’ve forgotten us, added a few flourishes, occasionally a fourth leaf, and now they think it’s a lucky clover.” She snorted. “But we haven’t forgotten. We never forget. The first S is for See, the second for Serve, the P for Protect. The shamrock itself is the symbol of Eire, the great Ireland. The M?bius strip is our pledge of guardianship eternal. We are the sidhe-seers and we watch over Mankind. We protect them from the Old Ones. We stand between this world and all the others. We fight Death in its many guises and now, more than ever, we are the most important people on this earth.”
I almost broke into a rousing, emotional “Danny Boy,” and I didn’t even know the words. She’d made me feel part of something huge; she’d given me chills and I resented it. I’d never been much of a joiner and it’s hard to want to join a club that’s dissed you twice. Yes, I have a long memory and hold grudges. I would do with her what I did with everyone else: Mac Lane, P.I.: I would pump her for all the information I could get. Later I would take my journal somewhere quiet, make notes, decide who to trust…sort of, or at least who to throw in with for a while.
“I suppose you have a collection of stories and records somewhere?” If so, I’d love to get my hands on it.
She nodded. “We do. We have more information on the Fae than one person could sort through in a dozen lifetimes. Some of our…less physically inclined members have been recruited to bring us into the twenty-first century. They’ve begun the laborious task of converting it all to electronic files. Our library, though vast, is coming apart at the spines.”
“Where is this library?”
She measured me. “In an old abbey, a few hours from Dublin.”
An old abbey. Right. I was going to kill Barrons the next time I saw him.
“Would you like to see it?”
With every ounce of my being. I wanted to say take me, show me, right now, walk me up and down those halls, teach me who I am. But I didn’t. What if she got me out there among hills and sheep and ruins, overpowered me with a coven of her faithful, and stole my spear? I understood the value of my weapon. There were only two capable of killing Fae. She had one—and countless followers who were unarmed. I had the other. Hardly seemed fair, even to me. I wasn’t interested in fair. I was interested in my own survival. “Maybe sometime,” I said noncommittally.
“Let me give you a taste of what you’re missing.” She moved to the desk, opened a drawer, and removed a thick volume bound in leather, tied with a cord. “Come.” She placed it on the desk, motioned me over, and opened it, handling the time-stained pages with care. “I think this entry might interest you.” She traced her finger down the page. It was an alphabetical record of some kind, a sidhe-seer lexicon, and we were in the V’s.
I gasped.
V’lane: Prince of the Court of the Light, Seelie. Member of Queen Aoibheal’s High Council and sometimes Consort. Founder of the Wild Hunt, highly elitist, highly sexed. Our first recorded encounter with this prince took place in—
She closed the book and returned it to the desk drawer.
“Hey!” I protested. “I wasn’t done reading. When and what was the first encounter? How sure are you of those notes? Are you positive he’s Seelie?”
“The Fae prince you kept at bay in the museum was born to the Court of the Light and has been with his queen since the dawn of time. Join us, MacKayla, and we will share with you all we have.”
“And demand what in return?”
“Allegiance, obedience, commitment. For that we will give you a home, a family, a sanctuary, a noble cause, and put all the lore of the ages at your disposal.”
“Who was Patrona?”
She smiled faintly, sadly. “A woman for whom I once had tremendous hopes, killed by the Fae. You’ve the look of her.”
“You said I looked like an O’Connor. Are there O’Connors in your organization? People I might be related to?”
She tilted her head and gave me that look down her nose, with a vaguely approving air. “You spoke to your mother. Very good, I wasn’t certain you would. And?”
My jaw locked. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her she’d been right. “I want to know who I am, where I came from. Can you give me that?”
“I can aid you in your search for truth.”
“Are there or aren’t there O’Connors in your organization?” Why didn’t anyone ever give me a straight answer?
A shadow crossed her face. She shook her head. “The bloodline died out, MacKayla. If you are an O’Connor, or an offshoot of that branch, you are the last.”
I turned away, deeply affected. I hadn’t realized how strongly I’d been nurturing the hope of blood relatives until it was summarily executed with a few words.
Her hand was gentle on my shoulder, although I knew it was made of iron. “We are your kin, MacKayla.”
“Were the O’Connors killed by Fae, too?”
“You’re in a doorway, child, one foot in, one foot out. Make up your mind. That door may close.”
I turned and looked at her. “Where is the Sinsar Dubh?”
“Och, now isn’t that the question.”
“Do you have it?”
“You are asking questions only The Haven have the right to know. I will not answer them.”
“Who are The Haven?”
“Our Council, over which Patrona once presided. Are you a Null?”
“Yes.” She’d shifted gears so swiftly I’d answered without hesitation. I employed her tactic and fired right back at her, “What are the Fae that slip inside humans and don’t come out again?”
She sucked in a breath. “You’ve seen such a creature?”
I nodded.
“What do they look like?” I told her and she said, “Sweet saints, the one Dani described to me, the day she met you! So that’s what it does. I’ve heard rumors such Unseelie exist. We don’t know what they are, and have no name for them.”
“I couldn’t see it once it was inside her.”
“It went beyond your sidhe-seer vision? You mean it wore humanity as a glamour, and you were unable to penetrate it?” She looked as troubled as I felt. “Did you kill it?”
“How could I, without killing the girl?”
Rebuke blazed in her eyes. “So, you left it walking around out there, looking like a human? How many humans will die now because you were too good to take a single life? Will you carry those deaths on your conscience, sidhe-seer? Or will you pretend not to own them? She was no longer human the moment that Fae stepped inside her!”
I both understood her point, and found it abhorrent. “First of all, you don’t know that. And second, I can’t just walk up to a perfectly innocent girl and kill her.”
“Then turn that weapon over to someone who can! When you let her walk away, you didn’t reject the blood of a life on your hands, you accepted the blood of dozens. It will kill. That’s what the Unseelie do.”
“It’s all black and white to you, isn’t it?”
“Gray is but another word for light black. Gray is never white. Only white is white. There are no shades of it.”
“You scare me, old woman.”
“You scare me, child,” she retorted. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened them, the rebuke was gone. “Come to the abbey. You’ve already met Dani. Meet more of your sisters. Learn about us. See what we do and why. We are not monsters. The Fae are. This is a war that is only going to get worse. If we do not meet their ruthlessness with unwavering resolve and equal ruthlessness, we will lose. Those who do not act react. Those who react die sooner.”
“Do you know about the Lord Master and his plans for freeing all the Unseelie?”
“I won’t answer any more of your questions until you make a choice. We have no renegades among us. I permit none. You are with us, or against us.”
“There are shades of gray, Rowena. I’m neither with nor against. I’m learning and deciding who to trust. Instead of bullying me, convince me.”
“I’m trying. Come to the abbey.”
I wanted to. But on my terms, when and how I felt safe, and currently I couldn’t imagine that situation. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Every moment you waste is a moment you might die alone out there, instead of banded with your sisters where you would be safe, MacKayla.”
“I’ll take that chance.”
As I walked out, she called, “Why couldn’t Dani find you for a month?”
I thought about lying but decided to let the chips fall where they may. “Because I was in Faery with V’lane,” I said, as I stepped through the door.
She hissed, “If you are Pri-ya and he has put you up to infiltrating us…”
“I am no one’s puppet, Rowena,” I said without looking back. “Not his. Not Barrons. Not yours.”