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Lists had become my anchors. They got me through the days. The oblivion of sleep got me through the nights.
2The Tuatha Dé Danaan were said to possess eight ancient relics of immense power: four Light and four Dark. The Light Hallows were the stone, the spear, the sword, and the cauldron. The Dark were the mirror, the box, the amulet, and the book (Sinsar Dubh).
Jericho Barrons and I were done with each other. Or so I thought. It would turn out to be just one more of those things I was wrong about. Soon, we would be living inside each other’s hip pockets, whether we liked it or not. And believe you me, we didn’t.
“You came to me. Remember that.” He never did let me forget it. You chose, he would remind me later. You could have gone home.
“Sometimes, Ms. Lane,” he said, “one must break with one’s past to embrace one’s future. It is never an easy thing to do. It is one of the distinguishing characteristics between survivors and victims. Letting go of what was, to survive what is.”
I hated my hair and I hated my life and I could feel it blazing in my eyes. He, on the other hand, looked pleased as punch. “What just happened, Barrons? What did you do to me?” I accused. Improbable though it seemed, I was certain that somehow he’d had everything to do with my sudden malaise. He laughed and stood up, looking down at me. “You, Ms. Lane, can sense the Sinsar Dubh. And you just became very, very useful to me.”
“You’ll get used to it—” “So you keep saying,” I muttered. “—and your reactions will lessen in time.” “I have no intention of spending that much time around it.” “It” was photocopies of two pages allegedly ripped from the Sinsar Dubh. Photocopies—not even the real thing—he was thrusting at me.
“Very good. And Ms. Lane?” I glanced at him questioningly. “Try to act like you like me.” When he put his arm around me and pulled me close, the shiver went clear down to my toes.
Well, maybe now’s a real good time for me to get right back out of it, I’d said. Try, the look he’d given me had said. Even if I managed to close my heart and turn my back on my sister’s murder, Jericho Barrons wasn’t about to let me go.
“Figure out another way to explain me. I don’t care what you come up with. But if you call me your latest piece of petunia again or make uncalled-for references to my mouth and oral sex with you, you and I are through.” He raised a brow. “Petunia, Ms. Lane?” I scowled. “Ass, Barrons.” He crossed his arms and his gaze dropped to my glossy Lip-Venom red lips. “Am I to understand there are called-for references to your mouth and oral sex with me, Ms. Lane? I’d like to hear them.”
I told you we were going to visit a vampire in a Goth-den tonight. Why, then, Ms. Lane, do you look like a perky rainbow?” I shrugged in kind. “Take me or leave me, Barrons.” He took me. As I’d known he would. There are a few things a hunting man can’t do without. His bloodhound is one of them.
The way I saw it, what Barrons had just told me was this: A Faery not only wouldn’t care whether I lived or died, it wouldn’t even really register that I was dead, just that, before, I could walk and talk and change my clothes by myself, but afterward I couldn’t, as if someone had yanked the batteries out of me. It occurred to me that I could really learn to hate the Fae.
Womankind’s greatest mistakes: falling in love with a man’s potential.
Anything would be preferable to calling myself a sidhe-seer. It felt like an admission of defeat, a willful embracing of the strange dark fever I seemed to have caught the moment I’d set foot in Ireland. The craziness had begun that very night, with the Fae at the bar and the batty old woman.
With his left arm around my waist, his right hand on my shoulder, fingers lightly brushing the swell of my breast, he steered me toward the entrance, locking gazes with any man brave or stupid enough to let his gaze dip below my eyes, holding it until the man looked away. He could not have more clearly branded me his possession.
“Attitude shapes reality, Ms. Lane, and yours, to coin a grossly overused American phrase, sucks.” I didn’t get what he was trying to tell me that night, but later, when it counted, I would remember and understand. The single greatest advantage anyone can take into any battle is hope.
A sidhe-seer without hope, without an unshakable determination to survive, is a dead sidhe-seer. A sidhe-seer who believes herself outgunned, outmanned, may as well point that doubt straight at her temple, pull the trigger, and blow out her own brains. There are really only two positions one can take toward anything in life: hope or fear. Hope strengthens, fear kills.
“Fine, Barrons,” I said, “but I’m keeping this. And that’s non-negotiable.” I raised the spear I was gripping. Maybe I couldn’t fight off vampires and mobsters, but at least I could give the Fae a decent battle. He looked at the spear for several moments, his dark gaze unfathomable. Then he said, “It was for you all along, Ms. Lane.
“You came looking for this mess, Ms. Lane. You sauntered in here all innocence and stupidity asking for the Sinsar Dubh, remember? I told you to go home.” “Yeah, well, that was before you knew I could find things for you. Now you’d probably tie me up and drug me to keep me here,” I accused. “Probably,” he agreed. “Though I suspect I’d have no problem at all finding more effective means.”
Only last week I’d stood out front, thinking it seemed to stand bastion between the good part of the city and the bad. Now I understood it was a bastion—this was the line of demarcation, the last defense—and Barrons held the encroachment of the abandoned neighborhood at bay with his many and carefully placed floodlights, and all he had to do to protect his property from threat at night was turn them off and let the Shades move in, hungry guard dogs from Hell.
“So long as that world doesn’t kill me first,” I said. “And it certainly seems to be trying its darnedest.” He smiled faintly. “I don’t think you understand, Ms. Lane. I won’t let it kill you. No matter what.” He stood and walked across the room. As he opened the door, he shot over his shoulder, “And one day you will thank me for it.”
“You want to know what we took? I’ll show you what we took!” I curled my fingers tightly around the base of the spearhead, yanked it from my purse, and drew it back threateningly. “This!” It was the first time I ever saw such a look on a Fae’s face and it would not be the last. It filled my veins with such a heady rush of power that it was very nearly equal to the insane sexual arousal I was feeling. V’lane, prince of the Tuatha Dé Danaan, feared something. And it was in my hand.
Barrons caught my chin in his hand and forced me to look straight into his eyes. “Don’t,” he barked. “The dead ones stick in your memory. Just go kill the fuck that did it.”
“The Lord Master is back, you stupid bitch, and he’s going to do the same thing to you he did to the last pretty little sidhe-seer. You’ll wish you’d died at my hands. You’ll beg for death the same way she did.”
In the year since the day I got on a plane to fly to Dublin, determined to find my sister’s killer and bring him to justice, I’ve learned that you can discover just as much from what people don’t say to you, as what they do. It’s not enough to listen to their words. You have to mine their silences for buried ore. It’s often only in the lies we refuse to speak that any truth can be heard at all.
There it was: the lie he refused to speak. If we hadn’t been adopted, Dad would have told me that without hesitation.
It was time to go to that alley. But not to say good-bye—to say hello to a sister I’d never known and never would:
Knowing what I knew was out there stalking and slithering along Dublin’s streets, would I have permitted anyone I loved to come over here and see me? Never. I’d have lied through my teeth to keep them away. If I’d had a baby sister that was my only blood relative, safe at home, would I have told her about any of this and risked dragging her into it? No. I would have done exactly what Alina had done: protected her to my dying breath. Kept her happy and whole as long as I could.
“God, I miss you so much, Alina!” I felt every bit as brittle as I sounded, and once more the tears came. I swore it would be the last time I cried. And it would be, for quite some time.
1247 LaRuhe, Jr.
There were the Shades, those lethal little bastards, moving around down in the alley at the edge of the Dark Zone, pulsing at the perimeter as if angry at Barrons for keeping them at bay with his toxic barrier of light. I gasped. And there was the man himself: stepping into the abandoned neighborhood,
The Shades weren’t paying Barrons the slightest bit of attention. In fact, if I were a woman given to fancy, I would have said the oily darknesses actually peeled back with distaste as Jericho Barrons passed by.
Could it be the answer I was looking for had been staring me in the face all the while from just the other side of my windowpane? “Bingo!” I stabbed the map with the fuchsia tip of my favorite pen. “There you are!” I’d just found LaRuhe Street, and—as I’d suspected—it was deep in the abandoned neighborhood.
Were Barrons and I—and God only knew what Barrons really was; I sure didn’t—the only two with any clue that such things were happening? The truth is, your world is going to hell in a handbasket, Barrons had said. Recalling his words, I caught something in them I’d missed before. He’d said “your” world. Not “our” world. Mine. Was it not his world also?
In retrospect, I’m still stunned that I went into the abandoned neighborhood alone that day. It’s a wonder I survived.
Maybe I was numb from so many shocks that I wasn’t feeling the fear I should have been. Maybe, after everything I’d lost so recently, I just didn’t care.
I walked into what all sidhe-seers would one day be calling what I’d christened it, what would one day, and not too far off, begin showing up in cities scattered around the entire globe: a Dark Zone.
I looked up at the elegant residence warily. Its veneer of civility and wealth was sharply undermined by what had been done to the many tall mullioned windows. They’d all been painted black. And I had the creepiest feeling that something was pressed up against those big dark eyes, watching me.
“I thought I heard something behind the pallets,” Mallucé said. “She is a Null, Lord Master. Another one.” I couldn’t help it. I had to know. “You mean Alina, don’t you? The other Null, she was Alina Lane, wasn’t she?” I accused.
“What do you know about Alina Lane?” the Lord Master said softly, in that melodious voice. It was the voice of something larger than life, an archangel, perhaps—the one that fell. “She was my sister,” I snarled, whirling around.
“Now, that was just stupid, Ms. Lane,” Barrons said, shaking his head, as he dropped onto the floor next to me, his long black coat fluttering. “Did you have to go and tell them who you were? They would have figured it out soon enough.” I blinked, stupefied.
The alabaster spearhead seemed to blaze with holy light in my hand as I ducked and twisted, slammed and stabbed. I could feel myself turning into something else and it felt good. At one point I caught sight of Barrons’ startled face, and I knew that if he was looking at me like that, I was truly something to see.
“Mac!” I heard Barrons shout. I slumped down the plastic-shrouded wall, thinking how weird it sounded, him calling me Mac. He’d only ever called me Ms. Lane. I couldn’t breathe.
Under such circumstances, it seemed absurd to continue calling me Ms. Lane and I told him so. Perhaps it was time I did better than “Barrons” myself. “You can call me Mac, er … Jericho. And thanks for saving me.” One dark brow rose and he looked amused. “Stick with Barrons, Ms. Lane,” he said dryly. “You need rest. Sleep.”
I wouldn’t call him Jericho if he didn’t like it. But I wanted him to call me Mac, I insisted sleepily.
“Mac.” He said my name and laughed. “What a name for something like you. Mac.” He laughed again.
I think he kissed me then. It wasn’t like any kiss I’d ever felt before. And then it was dark. And I dreamed.
“You drag me all over the place, making me hunt for OOPs, but do I complain the whole time? No. Suck it up, Barrons. The least you can do is paint my nails while my arm’s broken.
Where’s the Maybach?” An instant smile curved his lips; the quick, possessive smile of a man with a new toy. “O’Bannion didn’t need it anymore. The police don’t even see the—what did you call it—Dark Zone? It would have sat there forever. What a waste.” “Oh, you are just cold,” I breathed. “That man wasn’t even dead a day.” “Spoils of war, Ms. Lane.”
