“Do you sense the amulet, Ms. Lane? Are you picking up anything?”
I closed my eyes to shut out the carnage, and stretched my sidhe-seer senses, but carefully, very carefully. I no longer thought of my ability to sense OOPs as a benign talent. Last night, after finishing yet another book on the paranormal—ESP: Fact or Fiction?—I’d been unable to sleep so I’d lain there thinking about what I was, what it meant, wondering where the ability came from, why some people had it and others didn’t. Wondering what was different about me, what had been different about Alina. The authors contended that those with extrasensory abilities utilized parts of their brains that were dormant in other people.
Wondering if that was true, and bored out of my gourd—late-night TV is lousy in any country—I’d fingered my spear and gone poking around in my own skull.
It hadn’t been hard to find the part of me that was different, and now that I knew it was there, I couldn’t believe I’d been unaware of it for twenty-two years. There was a place in my head that felt as old as the earth, as ancient as time, always wakeful, ever watching. When I focused on it, it pulsed hotly, like embers in my brain. Curious, I’d played with it a little. I could fan it into a fire, make it expand outward, consume my skull, and pass beyond it. Like the element it resembled, it knew no morality, didn’t understand the word. Earth, fire, wind, and water are what they are. Power. At best, impartial. At worst, destructive. I shaped it. I controlled it. Or didn’t.
Fire isn’t good or bad. It just burns.
Now I skimmed it, a stone skipping the surface of a placid sea; a deep, dark sea I intended to keep placid. There would be no stirring of still waters on my watch.
I opened my eyes. “If it’s here, I can’t feel it.”
“Could it be somewhere in the house and you just aren’t close enough?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, Barrons,” I said unhappily. “It’s a big estate. How many rooms are there? How thick are the walls?”
“One hundred and nine, and very.” A muscle worked in his jaw. “I need to know if it’s still here, Ms. Lane.”
“What are the odds of that?”
“Stranger things have happened. Perhaps the massacre was the result of a foiled robbery attempt.”
It certainly looked like an expression of rage. Incensed, inhuman fury.
I told him the truth, although I knew it would seal my fate and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was pass through those doors. “I couldn’t sense Mallucé’s stone until I was in the same room with it. I didn’t pick up on the spear until I was above it, and I only sensed the amulet once I was inside the bomb shelter door.” I closed my eyes.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Lane, but—”
“—I know, you need me to walk the house,” I finished for him. I opened my eyes and notched my chin higher. If there was the slightest chance the amulet could still be in there, we had to look.
And I’d thought the graveyard was bad. At least those bodies had been bloodless, embalmed, and tidily interred.
Barrons made the rooms more bearable for me as we went, by going ahead, entering them first, draping the bodies with sheets or blankets, and when none were available, stowing them behind furniture. Only after he’d “secured” a room, did he exit it and send me in alone, the better to focus on my search, he said.
While I appreciated his efforts, I’d already seen too much and frankly, it was hard not to glance behind a sofa or a chair, at the bodies he hadn’t covered. They exerted the same gruesome hold over me as the husks left by the Shades, as if some wholly irrational part of me thought by staring long and hard enough, immersing myself in the horror of it, I might learn something that would help me avoid the same fate.
“They have no defensive wounds, Barrons,” I said, exiting another room.
He was leaning up against the wall a few doors down, arms crossed over his chest. He was getting bloody from moving the bodies. I focused on his face, not the stains on his hands, or the dark, wet splotches on his clothes. His eyes were intensely bright. He seemed harder, larger, more electric than ever. I could smell the blood on him, the metallic tinge of old pennies. When our gazes locked, I jerked. If there was a man behind those eyes, I was a Fae. Jet, bottomless pools regarded me; on those glossy obsidian surfaces tiny Macs stared back at me. His gaze dropped, raked over my clingy catsuit, then worked back up very slowly.
“They were unconscious when they were slaughtered,” he said finally.
“Then why kill them?”
“It would appear for the pleasure of it, Ms. Lane.”
“What kind of monster does that?”
“All kinds, Ms. Lane. All kinds.”
We continued our search. Whatever fascination the house might once have held for me was gone. I hurried through an art gallery that would have made any major metropolitan museum curator swoon with envy, and felt no more than the bitterness of the man who’d been driven to acquire the spectacular collection only to hang it in a windowless, vaultlike room where none but him could ever see it. I passed over a solid gold floor, and saw only the blood.
Barrons found the old man—who’d paid over a billion dollars for the amulet, blissfully ignorant that he’d not only not postponed his death, but had just spent an obscene amount of money to hasten it—dead in his bed, his head half ripped off from the force with which the amulet had been torn from his neck, chain marks scored into the shredded skin of his throat. So much for longevity; by trying to cheat death, he’d succeeded only in expediting it.
Our search was fruitless. Whatever had once been housed there—the amulet, perhaps other OOPs—was gone. Someone had beaten us to it. The Unseelie Hallow was out there in the world, amplifying the will of a new owner, and we were back at square one. I’d really wanted that amulet. If it was capable of impacting reality, and I could figure out how to use it…well, the possibilities were endless. At the least, it could protect me; at best it could help me get my revenge.
“Are we done here, Barrons?” I asked, as we descended the rear stairs. I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t get out of the marble mausoleum fast enough.
“There’s a basement, Ms. Lane.”
We turned at the bottom of the final flight, and began walking toward a set of doors in the wall past the base of the stairwell.