Ninety-seven days from Halloween—the night the walls crashed—is February 5.
Which means I’ve been gone at least twenty-four days, probably longer. The flyer was faded, worn by the elements. Much more snow and I’d never have seen it.
However long I’ve been gone, Dublin hasn’t changed much.
Although many of the streetlamps that were ripped from the concrete and destroyed have been replaced and the broken lights repaired, the power grids are still down. Here and there, generators hum, dead giveaways of life barricaded in buildings or holed up underground.
We pass the red façade of the Temple Bar, of the bar district. I glance in. I can’t help myself. I loved the place BWC—before the walls crashed.
Now it’s a dark shell, with shattered windows, overturned tables and chairs, and papery husks of human remains. From the way they’re piled, I know the patrons were crammed inside, huddled together when the end came.
I remember the way the Temple Bar looked the first time I saw it, brightly lit, with people and music spilling from open doors into the cobbled streets of the corner beyond. Guys had whistled at me. I’d forgotten my grief over Alina for a blessed second or two. Then, of course, hated myself for forgetting.
I can almost hear the laughter, the lilt of Irish voices. They’re all dead now, like Alina and Barrons.
I remember spending the long week before Halloween walking the streets of Dublin for hours on end, from dawn ’til dusk, feeling helpless, worthless, for all my supposed sidhe-seer skills. I wasn’t sure any of us would survive Halloween, so I’d tried to cram as much living into those last days as possible.
I’d chatted up street vendors and played backgammon with toothless old men who spoke a version of English so heavily distorted by dialect and gums that I’d understood only every fifth word, but it hadn’t mattered. They’d been delighted by a pretty girl’s attention, and I’d hungered for paternal comfort.
I’d visited the famous tourist hot spots. I’d eaten in dives and slammed back shots of whiskey with anyone who’d do them with me.
I’d fallen in love with the city I couldn’t protect.
After the Unseelie had escaped their prison and savaged her—dark, burned, and broken—I’d been determined to see her rebuilt.
Now I longed only to replace her.
“Do you sense it, MacKayla?” Darroc asks.
I’ve been keeping my sidhe-seer senses as closed as possible. I’m tired and have no desire to find the Sinsar Dubh. Not until I know everything he knows.
I open my senses warily and turn the “volume” up to a two on a scale of one to ten. My sidhe-seer senses are picking up the essence of countless things Fae, but none of them is the Sinsar Dubh. “No.”
“Are there many Fae?”
“The city is crawling with them.”
“Light or Dark Court?”
“It doesn’t work like that. I can only pick up Fae, not their allegiance or caste.”
“How many?”
I adjust the volume to three and a half. A tenth this much Fae in close proximity used to have me holding my stomach and trying not to puke. Now I feel charged by it. More alive than I want to be. “They’re on all sides of us, in twos and threes. They’re above us, on the rooftops and in the skies. I don’t get the feeling that they’re watching us, more that they’re watching everything.” Are they, too, hunting my Book? I’ll kill them all. It’s mine.
“Hundreds?” he presses.
“Thousands,” I correct.
“Organized?”
“There is one group to the east that is considerably larger than the others, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Then east we go,” he says. He turns to the princes and barks a command. They vanish.
I voice a growing suspicion. “They’re not really gone, are they? They never are when you send them away.”
“They remain close, watching but unseen. A sift away, with more of my army.”
“And when we find this group of Fae?” I press.
“If they are Unseelie, they are mine.”
“And if they’re Seelie?”
“Then we will drive them from Dublin.”
Good. The less Fae in my way, the better.
Few have ever seen the Seelie, save the rare mortal stolen away and kept at the Fae court and, of course, Barrons, who once spent a great deal of time there, sleeping with a princess, before killing her and pissing off V’lane for all eternity.
I’ve seen thousands of Unseelie, but until now even I—sidhe-seer extraordinaire—have seen only a single Seelie.