I should be afraid of him. And sometimes in the middle of the night when I’m alone and I think about him—especially when I picture him carrying the dead woman’s body, and the look on his bloody face—I am.
But when he’s standing in front of me, I’m not.
I wonder if it’s possible for a person to do some kind of “numbing” spell, create a glamour so complete that it deceives all the senses, even sidhe-seer ones.
“There’s something on your lapel.” I dabbed at it. He’s also meticulous, never a man to sport lint or stains on his clothes, but tonight his dark suit had a shiny spot on the left side. I was dabbing at a . . . man, for lack of a better word . . . who’d had birthdays untold, and walked in Unseelie Hallows, carrying around corpses. It felt as absurd as brushing a wolf’s teeth, or trying to mousse his fur. “And I wasn’t kissing him.”
And I’d like to know what the feck you were doing with that woman in that mirror, I thought. But I didn’t say it. There’s a legal term my dad likes to use: res ipsa loquitur—the thing speaks for itself. I knew what I knew, and now I was watching him. And my back. Very carefully.
He knocked my hand away. “Then why was his tongue in your mouth? Was he conducting a clinical test of your gag reflex?” He smiled, but not nicely. “How is your gag reflex, Ms.
Lane? Are you a hair trigger?”
Barrons likes to use sexual innuendo to try to shut me up. I think he expects the well-raised southern belle in me will think eew and back off. Sometimes, I do think eew, but I don’t back off. “I’m a spitter, if that’s what you’re asking.” I flashed him a too-sweet smile.
“Didn’t look that way to me. I think you’re a swallower. His tongue was halfway to China and you were still taking it.”
“Jealous?”
“Implies emotional investment. The only investment I have in you is my time, and I’m expecting a big payoff. Tell me about the Sinsar Dubh.”
I glanced at my hand. It had come away from his lapel wet. I angled it in the light. Red looks black at night. I sniffed it. It smelled like old pennies. Gee, blood. No surprise there. “Have you been in a fight? No, let me guess; you saved a wounded dog, again?” I said dryly. That was the excuse he’d used last time.
“I had a nosebleed.”
“Nosebleed, my petunia.”
“Petunia?”
“Ass, Barrons. As in you are one.”
“The Book, Ms. Lane.”
I looked into his eyes. Was there a Gripper in there? Something very old looked back. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“Why did you call after him?”
“I haven’t seen him since the last time we saw the Book. I keep V’lane informed. You’re not the only shark in the sea.”
He raked me with a contemptuous glance. “It’s a Fae prince’s fundamental nature to enslave a woman with sex, Ms. Lane. It’s a woman’s fundamental nature to be enslaved. Try to rise above it.”
“Oh, it is not a woman’s fundamental nature to be enslaved!” Everywoman reared up in me, battle-ready.
He turned and walked away. “You wear my brand, Ms. Lane,” floated over his shoulder, “and if I’m not mistaken, you now wear his. Who owns you? I don’t think it’s you.”
“It is, too,” I yelled at his retreating back, but he was already halfway down the street, vanishing into the darkness. “I don’t wear his brand!” Did I? Exactly what had V’lane embedded in my tongue? I fisted my hands, staring after him.
Behind me, militant footfalls approached. I reached instinctively for my spear. It was back where it was supposed to be, holstered beneath my arm again. I needed to figure out how V’lane was taking it. Had he returned it when he’d kissed me? Wouldn’t I have felt it? Could I persuade Barrons to ward, so it couldn’t be taken from me? He seemed to have a vested interest in my having it.
A troop of ugly gray-skinned Rhino-boys marched by, and I busied myself digging in my purse, partly to keep from watching them, counting their numbers, and trying to decide if they were new in town or if I’d seen them before, and partly to keep my face concealed in shadow. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Lord Master was circulating a WANTED poster of me, with a detailed sketch. It was probably time to change my hair again, start wearing ball caps or wigs.
I resumed my trek to the bookstore. It hadn’t eluded my orgasm-drenched brain that V’lane had disappeared the moment Barrons had appeared. Maybe he wasn’t a Gripper but an even worse Unseelie that I’d not yet encountered. In a world that kept growing darker every day, Barrons sure did seem to have a knack for keeping all the monsters at bay.
Because he was the biggest, baddest monster of all?
Monday morning I woke up slow and hard.
Most mornings, I spring out of bed. Despite the fact that my life hasn’t turned out how I wanted it to, it’s the only one I have, and I try to milk it for all it’s worth. But some days, despite my best intentions to plunge into the day and grab what happiness I can—even if it’s only a perfect latte topped with cinnamon-sprinkled foam, or twenty minutes dancing around the bookstore with my iPod jamming—I wake up feeling bruised, coated with bad dream residue that clings to me all day.
I was slick with it this morning.
I’d had the dream about the beautiful dying woman again.
And now that I’d had it, I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten it for so long. For years, as a child, I’d dreamt it over and over, so often that I’d begun confusing the details with reality, and started expecting to see her somewhere when I was awake.
I had no idea what was wrong with the sad woman, just that it was something awful, and I would have given my right arm, my eyeteeth, maybe even twenty years off my life to save her. There wasn’t a law I wouldn’t have broken, a moral code I wouldn’t have violated. Now that I knew Alina and I were adopted, I wondered if it wasn’t a dream, but a memory, borne in my infancy and suppressed, creeping out at night when I couldn’t control it.
Was this beautiful, sad woman our biological mother?
Had she given us up because she’d known she was dying, and her sorrow was the pain she felt at being forced to give us to new parents?
But if she’d had to give us up because she was dying, why had she sent us so far away? If I was truly an O’Connor, as Rowena, Grand Mistress of the sidhe-seers claimed, it seemed likely Alina and I had been born in Ireland. Why would our mother have sent us out of the country? Why not let us be raised by people who could have taught us about our heritage, indoctrinated us like the other sidhe-seers? Why force our adoptive parents to swear to raise us in a small town, and never to let us go to Ireland? What had she been trying to keep us away from? Or what had she been trying to keep away from us?