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.
It happened again and I gaped. The silver reflection of the mirror had just shivered.
I backed down the stairs, never taking my eyes off it. From a safe vantage in the hallway outside the room, I watched it for a few minutes, but the event didn’t reoccur.
I pushed the door open all the way and stepped into the room. It smelled like Barrons. I inhaled deeply. A trace of dark, spicy aftershave lingered in the air, and for a moment I was in the caves beneath the Burren again, where I’d almost died last week, when the vampire Mallucé had abducted me and taken me deep into the labyrinthine tunnels, to torture me to death as vengeance for a gruesome injury I’d inflicted on him not long after I’d arrived in Dublin. I was lying on the ground, beneath Barrons’ wild, electric body, ripping his shirt open, and splaying my hands over the hard, muscled abdomen tattooed black and crimson in intricate, alien designs. Smelling him all around me. Feeling like he was inside me, or I was inside him. Wondering how much more inside him I’d get if I let him inside me.