My headache was turning brutal. If I didn’t get aspirin soon, it was going to spike right back up to vomiting pain.
He looked at me. Although Jayne had perfected what I call cop-face—a certain imperturbable scrutiny coupled with a patient certainty that the person they’re dealing with will eventually sprout several extra assholes and turn into a complete one—I’ve gotten better at reading people.
He was scared.
“Go home, Inspector,” I said softly. “Kiss your wife, and tuck your children in. Count your blessings. Don’t go hunting for curses.”
He looked at me a long moment, as if debating the criteria of cowardice, then turned and stormed off toward Temple Bar.
I heaved a huge sigh of relief and limped into the bookstore.
Even if it hadn’t been a much-needed sanctuary, I would have loved BB&B. I’ve found my calling, and it isn’t being a sidheseer. It’s running a bookstore, especially one that carries the best fashion magazines, pretty pens, stationery, and journals, and has such an upscale, elegant atmosphere. It embodies all the things I always wanted to be myself: smart, classy, polished, tasteful.
The first thing that strikes you when you step inside Barrons Books and Baubles, besides the abundance of gleaming rich mahogany and beveled glass windows, is a mildly disorienting sensation of spatial anomaly, as if you’ve slid open a matchbox and found a football field tucked neatly inside.
The main room is about seventy feet long and fifty feet wide. The front half vaults straight up to the roof, four grand stories. Ornate mahogany bookcases line each level, from floor to molding. Behind elegant banisters, platform walkways permit catwalk access on the second, third, and fourth levels. Ladders slide on oiled rollers from one section to the next.
The first floor has freestanding shelves arranged in wide aisles on the left, two seating cozies, fore and aft, with an elegant, enameled gas fireplace (in front of which I spend a great deal of time trying to thaw out from Dublin’s chilly weather) and a cashier station on the right, behind which is a fridge, a small TV, and my sound dock. Beyond the rear balconies on the upper levels are more books, including the very rare ones, and some of those baubles the sign mentions, secured in locked display cabinets.
Costly rugs drape the hardwood floors. The furniture is old-world, sumptuous, and expensive, like the authentic tufted Chesterfield sofa I like to curl up on and read. The lights are antique sconces and recessed bulbs of a particular amber hue that cast everything in a warm buttery glow.
When I cross the threshold from the cold, wet, crazy streets outside and step into the bookstore I feel like I can breathe. When I open for business and begin ringing up purchases on the old-fashioned cash register that tinkles a tiny silver bell each time the drawer pops open, my life feels simple and good, and I can forget all my problems for a while.
I glanced at my watch, and kicked off my ruined shoes. It was nearly midnight. Just a few hours ago, I’d been sitting in the rear conversation area with the enigmatic owner of the bookstore, demanding to know what he was.
As usual, he hadn’t answered me.
I really don’t know why I bother. Barrons knows virtually everything about me. I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere he has a little file that encompasses my entire life to date, with neatly mounted, acerbically captioned photos—see Mac sunbathe, see Mac paint her nails, see Mac almost die.
But whenever I ask him a personal question, all I get is a cryptic “Take me or leave me,” coupled with a broody reminder that he keeps saving my life. As if that should be enough to shut me up and keep me in line.
Sad fact is, it usually does.
There’s an intolerable imbalance of power between us. He’s the one holding all the trump cards while I’m barely managing to hang on to the few lousy twos and threes life deals me.
We might hunt OOPs, or Objects of Power—sacred Fae relics, like the Hallows—together, fight and kill our enemies side by side, and, recently, even try to tear each other’s clothing in a case of lust as sudden and searing as the unexpected sirocco I’d somehow glimpsed in his mind while kissing him—but we sure didn’t share personal details of our lives or schedules with each other. I had no idea where he lived, where he went when he wasn’t around, or when he might come around next. It irked me. A lot. Especially now that I knew he could find me anytime he wanted, using the brand he’d tattooed on the back of my skull—his fecking middle initial Z. Yes, it had saved my life. No, that didn’t mean I had to like it.
I peeled off my dripping jacket and hung it up. Two flashlights crashed to the floor and went rolling. I needed to find a better way to carry them. They were cumbersome in my pockets and constantly falling out. I was afraid that pretty soon I’d be known as “that crazy flashlight-carrying chick” around the parts of Dublin I frequented.
I hurried to the bathroom at the back of the store, gingerly toweled my hair, and wiped gently at my smudged makeup. There was a bottle of aspirin upstairs shouting my name. A month ago, I would have immediately fixed my face. Now, I was just happy I had good skin and glad to be out of the rain.
I stepped from the bathroom and through the set of double doors that connected the bookstore to the private residence part of the building, calling for Barrons, wondering if he was still around. I pushed open the doors and checked in all the rooms on the first floor, but he wasn’t there. There was no point in searching the second and third floors. He kept all the doors locked. The only open rooms were on the fourth floor, where I slept, and he never went up there, except once, recently, to trash my bedroom when I’d disappeared for a month.
I considered calling him on my cell phone, but my head hurt so bad that I vetoed the idea. Tomorrow was soon enough to tell him what I’d learned about the Sinsar Dubh. Knowing him, if I called him tonight and told him, he’d try to make me go back out and hunt it, and there was no way I was going anywhere but straight into a hot shower and a warm bed.
I was headed up the back stairs, when something moved in my peripheral vision. I turned, trying to pinpoint the source. It couldn’t have been a Shade; all the lights were on. I backed down a step and scanned the rooms I could see. Nothing moved. I shrugged and started back up.
It happened again.
This time I got a weird feeling, not quite a tingle of my sidhe-seer senses, more like a prelude to it. I glanced in the direction that was bothering me: Barrons’ study. After poking my head in, I’d left the door ajar. Beyond it, I could see the ornate fifteenth-century desk, and part of the tall mirror that filled the wall behind it, between bookcases.