High school brought along a whole new set of problems. I shook my head, in no mood to relive teenage horrors. Bright side was, this Valentine’s Day could have been a whole lot worse. At least I’d get to sleep tonight with the comforting knowledge that Barrons was alive.
“Where to now?” I asked.
He stared straight ahead. The rattlesnake moved in his chest.
We pulled up at 939 Rêvemal Street, in front of the demolished entrance to Chester’s, the club that had once been Dublin’s number-one hotspot for the jaded rich and beautiful bored, until it was destroyed on Halloween. I stared at him disbelievingly.
He parked and turned off the engine.
“I’m not going in Chester’s. They want me dead in there.”
“And if they smell fear on you, they’ll try to kill you.” He opened the door and got out.
“Your point?”
“If I were you, I’d try to smell like something else.”
“Why do I have to go in?” I groused. “Can’t you visit your buddies by yourself?”
“Do you want to see your parents or not?”
I leapt out, slammed the door, and ran after him, skirting rubble. I had no idea why he was offering—certainly not because he was trying to be nice—but I wasn’t about to miss the opportunity. As unpredictable as my life was, I wasn’t going to miss a single chance to spend time with the people I loved.
As if he’d read my thoughts, he tossed over his shoulder, “I said see them. Not visit with them.”
I hated the thought of my parents being held in the belly of the seedy Unseelie hangout, but I had to concede that underground, in the middle of Barrons’ men, was probably the safest place for them. They couldn’t go back to Ashford. The Unseelie Princes knew where we lived.
The only other possibilities were the abbey, the bookstore, or with V’lane. Not only were there Shades in the abbey still, the Sinsar Dubh had paid a deadly visit, and I didn’t trust Rowena with a butter knife. I certainly didn’t want them hanging around me, seeing what a mess I’d become. And V’lane—with his dim understanding of humans—might decide to tuck them away on a beach with an illusion of Alina, which my dad could handle, but it would definitely push my mom over the edge. We might never get her out of there.
Chester’s it was.
The club had once been the most popular place in the city, accessible by invitation only, with marble pillars that framed an ornate entrance into the three-story club, but lavish French-style gas lamps had been ripped from the concrete and used as battering rams against the façade. Fallen roof supports had crushed a world-renowned hand-carved bar and shattered elegant stained-glass windows. The club sign dangled in pieces above the entrance, chunks of concrete blocked the door, and the building was heavily covered with graffiti.
The new entrance to the club was around back, secreted beneath an inconspicuous, battered metal door in the ground, close to the crumbling foundation. If you didn’t know about the club, you wouldn’t give a second thought to what appeared to be a forgotten cellar door. The dance floors were so far underground and so well soundproofed that, unless you had Dani’s superhearing, you’d never know there was a party going on.
“I can’t be part of an Unseelie caste,” I told him as he opened the door. “I can touch the Seelie spear.”
“Some say the Unseelie King created the sidhe-seers with his imperfect Song. Others say he had sex with human women to found the bloodlines. Perhaps your blood is diluted enough that it poses no such problem.”
Typical Barrons. He had an answer for all the things I didn’t want to know but none for the things I did.
After descending a ladder, pushing open another door, and going down a second ladder, we arrived at the real entrance to the club, an industrial foyer with tall double doors.
Since I’d last been here, someone had hired a decorator and replaced the tall wood doors with new ones that were black and glossy, the height of urban chic, so highly polished that I could see the couple who’d followed us down reflected in them. She was dressed like me in a long slim skirt, high-heeled boots, and a fur-trimmed coat. He stood near, his body angled in on her, like a walking shield.
I jerked. No couple had followed us down. I hadn’t recognized myself. It wasn’t that my hair was blond again—the black doors reflected only shape and movement, not color—it was that I looked like someone else. I stood differently. Gone was the last vestige of baby softness I’d brought with me to Dublin last August. I wondered what Mom and Dad would think of me. I hoped they could see past the changes to the Mac I still was somewhere beneath it all. I was excited and nervous to see them.
He pushed the doors open. “Stay close.”
The club hit me like a blast of overblown sensuality, cool in chrome and glass, black and white, the height of industrial muscle dressed in Manhattan posh. The décor promised uninhibited eroticism, pleasure for pleasure’s sake, sex worth dying for. The enormous interior was terraced with dance floors, each served by their own bars on a dozen different sublevels. The mini-clubs within the club had their own themes, some elegant on polished floors, others heavy on tattoos and urban decay. The bartenders and servers reflected the theme of their sub-club, some in topless tuxes, others in leather and chains. On one terrace, the extremely young servers were dressed like uniformed schoolchildren. On another—I turned sharply away. Not looking, not thinking about that one. I hoped Barrons was keeping my parents somewhere far from all this debauchery.
Although I’d mentally prepared myself to see humans and Unseelie mingling, flirting, and pairing off, I’m never ready for it. Chester’s is anathema to everything I am.
Fae and human were not meant to mix. The Fae are immortal predators, with no regard for human life, and those humans foolish enough to think for one moment that their tiny inconsequential lives matter to the Fae … well, Ryodan says those humans deserve to die, and when I see them in a place like Chester’s, I have to agree. You can’t save people from themselves. You can only try to wake them up.
The static of so many Unseelie crowded into one place was deafening. Grimacing, I turned off my sidhe-seer volume.
Music spilled from one level to the next, overlapping. Sinatra dueled with Manson; Zombie flipped off Pavarotti. The message was clear: If you want it, we’ve got it, and if we don’t, we’ll create it for you.