“You’re impossible,” he growled.
“Pot, meet kettle,” I said sweetly.
“Take this.” He handed me one of the stones, wrapped in velvet. Even inside the thick black covering, it glowed blue-black as soon as I touched it. He looked at me, hard, his gaze unfathomable.
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“We’re coming up on O’Connell. I’ll circle around to the opposite side of the intersection and close in behind it. I want to triangulate it precisely with the stones. The moment you have both the Book and me in your sight, place your stone on the east corner of the intersection. I’ll position the other two where they need to be.”
“What do you expect to happen?”
“Best-case scenario? We contain it. Worst case? We run like hell.”
I headed down the street after Barrons left, certain we were on the right track. It occurred to me that maybe the stones we were carrying were the reason I was no longer feeling any pain. Maybe, as we’d gotten closer, they had erected some kind of protective barrier. They’d been created to harness and contain the Book. Why wouldn’t they shield whoever was carrying them from its harmful effects?
I hurried to the intersection and stood on my appointed corner, waiting.
And waiting.
The Book was moving very slowly, as if out for a leisurely stroll.
“Come on. Move, damn you.” Was a Fae or a human carrying it? The city hummed with Fae static, making it impossible to get a lock on any channel.
As if it had heard me, the Book began moving more quickly, heading right where we wanted it.
Then, suddenly, it was just … gone.
“What the—” I spun in a circle, my radar on high, searching, testing the night. I couldn’t pick up a thing. Not even a faint tingle.
I glanced back down the street. Barrons was nowhere to be seen.
I didn’t like this one bit. We shouldn’t have split up. That was always when bad things happened in the movies, and that was exactly what I felt like at the moment: the ingénue, standing on a horror set. No lights, alone in a city of monsters, with an ancient, sentient receptacle of pure evil somewhere in my immediate vicinity but no longer detectable by me, and with no clue what to do next.
I turned in a circle, stone in one hand, spear in the other.
“Barrons?” I hissed urgently. There was no reply.
Just as suddenly as it had disappeared, the Book was back on my radar. But it was behind me now!
I called for Barrons again. When there was still no answer, I tucked my spear under my arm, whipped out my cell phone, and punched up his number.
When he answered, I told him it had moved and where.
“Wait for me. I’ll be right there.”
“But it’s moving. We’re going to lose it. Head east.” I thumbed End and took off after the Book.
I was rushing toward it, trying to catch up, when the Book suddenly stopped, and I could feel that I was closer to it than I’d initially thought. Way closer. All my readings on the thing were wonky tonight.
I froze.
It was just around the corner, maybe twenty feet away from me.
If I walked to the edge of the building and poked my head around it, I would see it.
I could feel it there, perfectly still, pulsing with dark energy. What was it doing? Was this its idea of cat and mouse? Was it … amused?
It began moving again. Toward me.
Where the hell was Barrons?
It stopped.
Was it trying to spook me? If so, it was working.
What if Ryodan was wrong? What if the Beast did have substance and could shred me? What if whatever was carrying it had a gun and could blow my head off? I was afraid if I retreated, the Book might take it as a sign of weakness, in the way a lion can smell fear, and come after me for all it was worth.
I put on my best bluster and took a step forward.
It moved, too.
I flinched. It was all the way to the corner now.
What was carrying it? What was it doing? What was it planning? Not knowing was killing me.
I was a sidhe-seer. I was an OOP detector. This was what I was made for.
I set my jaw, squared my shoulders, marched to the corner, and came face-to-face with a pure psychopath.
He smiled at me, and I really wished he hadn’t, because his teeth were chain-saw blades that whirred endlessly behind thin lips. He gnashed them at me and laughed. His eyes were black-on-black, bottomless pools. Tall and emaciated, he smelled of dead things, of coffins with rotting lining, of blood and insane asylums. His hands were white and fluttered like dying moths. His palms had mouths, whirring with silvery blades.
Beneath one arm was tucked an utterly innocuous-looking hardcover.
But it wasn’t the Sinsar Dubh that held me riveted.
I stared at the psychopath’s face.
It had once been Derek O’Bannion.
I had the spear and O’Bannion had been eating Unseelie, so stabbing him would maybe kill him. But if I killed him, what would the Sinsar Dubh turn its full attention to next?
Me.
Abruptly, he stopped laughing and yanked the Book out from beneath his arm. He held it with both hands at the farthest possible distance from his body, and for a moment I thought he was offering it to me.
We were so close that, if I’d wanted to, I could have reached out and taken it. I wouldn’t have reached out and taken it for anything in the world.
Then he jerked and spun the volume around, as if the text—if there was anything inside it that remotely resembled text—was upside down and unreadable.
From his mouth came the whine of metal grating on metal, and he opened and closed his lips as if trying to form words, but nothing came out.
For an instant, I glimpsed whites around his pupils. Was that horror in his eyes? Had he just ground out “Help” with those metal teeth? I wanted to run. I couldn’t stop looking.
Then his eyes were pure black again, and his body was jerking convulsively, as if he was being ordered to perform and resisting every step of the way.
His fingers closed on the edges of the Book, and it was no longer an innocuous hardcover. Before my eyes it had morphed into the massive, ancient, deadly black tome with intricate locks, and they were all falling away, and the book was opening in O’Bannion’s hands, and I knew that whatever was left of Derek O’Bannion inside the psychopath did not want the Book to open. It wanted nothing more than to die without ever having glimpsed so much as a single page. Not even one line.