There are some lines you just can’t let another person cross. They don’t always make sense, they might not always seem like the most important things, but only you can know what they are, and when you butt up against one, you have to defend it. Besides, who knew what else the tattoo might do?
We stared at each other in silence.
This time, if we had one of those wordless conversations of ours I couldn’t hear a thing he said because I was too busy broadcasting a single, deafening word: No. As an afterthought, I felt for that strange place inside my skull, stoked it up into a furnace of flames, and tried to channel everything it would give me into the implacable refusal I was throwing his way. Tried to magic-up my “no,” in a manner of speaking, to amplify it.
I was astonished when Barrons suddenly smiled.
Even more so when he began to laugh, softly at first, but the rumble grew. I felt it deep in his chest, expanding. His hands moved from my throat to my shoulders, his teeth flashed in his dark face. He was electric, a live current up against my body, humming with vitality, burning with energy.
“Well done, Ms. Lane. Just when I think you’re all useless fluff and nails, you show me some teeth.”
I didn’t know if he was talking about my vocal refusal, or if my freshman effort to use that sidhe-seer place in my head to shove at him had worked, but he reached around me and worked at the chains binding me to the post. After a few moments, they dropped to the concrete with a clatter of steel.
“You win. This time. I won’t tattoo you. Not today. But in lieu of that, you will do something for me. Refuse and I tattoo you. And, Ms. Lane, if I chain you up one more time tonight, there’ll be no more talking. I’ll gag you.”
He unbuttoned his shirtsleeve, rolled it back, removed a wide silver cuff from his wrist, and handed it to me. I had a déjà vu moment, flashback to V’lane and the Cuff of Cruce, although this cuff was very different. I’d seen it on him many times. I accepted it and turned it in my hand. It was hot from his skin. Forged of thick silver, ornately embossed with Celtic knotwork, runes, and symbols, and lightly blackened, it looked ancient, like something out of a museum. “Put it on. Never take it off.”
I glanced up. He was too close. I needed distance. I stepped out from between him and the beam, skirting the pile of chains. “What does it do?” I asked.
“It will allow me to locate you if you disappear again.”
“Could you really have found me in Faery if I’d been tattooed?”
He looked away and said nothing. Then, “I would have at least known you were alive. I didn’t even know that.”
“Why didn’t you offer me the cuff first, instead of trying to tattoo me?”
“Because, Ms. Lane, a cuff can be removed or forgotten. A tattoo can’t. I still prefer the tattoo. The cuff is a concession, and one I’m making only because you’ve finally pulled your head out and begun exploring your…talents.” He smiled faintly.
Aha, so what I’d tried to do with that strange place in my skull had had some effect on him! That was something. It wasn’t exactly bending spoons with a thought, but it was a start. “Couldn’t somebody cut a tattoo off me?” Didn’t the ink go only so many layers of skin deep?
“It would be risky and immensely painful. I intended to hide it.”
I looked down at myself. “Just where were you planning to hide a”—I veered sharply away from that cliff—“I don’t want to know.” I examined the cuff. “Does it do anything else?”
“Nothing you need to worry about. Put it on. Now.”
I saw all kinds of nonnegotiable in his eyes and I knew he would tattoo me, and I would have to leave, and despite my bravado, I wasn’t ready to be on my own in this dark world.
I slipped it on my wrist. It was huge. I pushed it up my arm but it just slid back down, and fell off over my hand. He caught it before it hit the floor, and forced the ends apart. He placed it above my biceps and squeezed it until the ends met. I had just enough muscle to keep it where it was.
“What did you and V’lane do in Faery?” he asked casually.
I shrugged, in no mood to talk about Alina, and I suspected telling him I’d had the most intense orgasm of my life on a beach beneath a Fae sun probably wouldn’t go over real well. I glanced at the floor. It occurred to me the garage had been silent tonight. I wondered if his monster slept. Barrons had watched me break into the place on his video cameras. He knew I knew. “What do you keep under your garage, Barrons?” I countered. I was so certain of his answer that I mouthed it along with him.
“Nothing you need to worry about.” He gave me a cold look. “If you already know the answer, Ms. Lane, don’t waste my time. You just wasted a month of it.”
“Fine, Barrons, keep your secrets but know this: I’ll only confide in you to the extent that you confide in me. You keep me in the dark, I’ll keep you in the dark, and you know what that does? Leaves us both bumbling around in the dark. Seems pretty stupid to me.”
“My night vision’s just fine. Burn the bikini, Ms. Lane. Trust nothing he gives you.”
I snorted and shrugged my cuff-bound arm at him. “But I can trust what you give me? Give me a break.”
“If you think to stand between V’lane and me, and play both ends against the middle, you’ll get ripped to pieces. If I were you, Ms. Lane, I’d choose a side, and fast.”
I began restoring order to the store the next morning: sweeping, dusting, tossing broken baubles in the trash, and restocking books. Barrons had suggested I leave the shop closed, but I needed the store. Illusion was one salve, purpose and routine were another.
He hadn’t broken my iPod and sound dock; thankfully I’d had them safely tucked away in a cabinet beneath the register, so I listened to old Beach Boys music while I cleaned. I sang along to “Sloop John B.” at the top of my lungs: I want to go home. This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.
Every now and then, I’d glance out the window at the blustery fall sky, and try to deal with the fact that while I’d sunned with my pseudosister, summer had turned to fall overnight—literally; it was now October. I consoled myself with the thought that six hours of good sun was probably all I’d have gotten in a month in Dublin anyway.
The store was nearly presentable by lunchtime, after which I turned my attention to the month of newspapers that had piled up in my absence, delivered but not sold. I gathered a couple of packing boxes and began tossing the dailies in to drag out to the trash later. After a few moments, I stopped pitching them, riveted by the headlines.
While I’d been gone, Dublin had suffered an unprecedented hike in crime, and the media was crucifying the Garda over it. (On a personal note, I hoped that meant Inspector Jayne would be too busy with other cases to continue harassing me.) The incidence of unsolved muggings and rapes was up by sixty-four percent, and homicides by nearly one hundred and forty-two percent year-to-date—but that was only half the story the papers were telling: The brutality of the crimes had intensified as well.
I read paper after paper, digested one alarming news story after the next. These were no straightforward murders. They were vicious, sadistic killings, as if the darkest, most disturbed part of people was boiling to the surface and spilling over. Every few days, the headlines announced some new, shockingly more violent multiple-homicide-cum-suicide.
Was it possible that Unseelie walking among humans—even unseen—was changing people? Unlocking their ids? Unleashing the most depraved in us all?
What else had happened while I’d been gone? I glanced uneasily to my right, as if I could somehow see through the wall to know if the cancerous Dark Zone had metastasized in my absence. If I went searching through maps, would I find more parts of the city missing?