“Milk? Does it taste like ours?”
“Sure does. A little creamier.”
“I’d love a glass!” she says, and we both laugh because the things we used to take for granted are now luxuries. That’s the way it goes when the world falls apart.
You never appreciate what you’ve got till it’s gone.
Barrons Books & Baubles has spatial issues. I suspect the Silver connecting the store to hidden levels beneath the garage where Barrons has his lair is partially responsible, but I doubt it’s the only thing affecting this particular point of longitude and latitude. I sometimes dream an ancient god or demon coils slumbering in the foundation.
BB&B is four stories most days but other days five, and on rare occasions lately, seven. On Tuesday the mural on the ceiling was roughly seventy feet above my head, today it seems a quarter mile, minuscule in the distance. The harder I try to focus on it, the more difficult it is to see. I don’t understand why anyone would paint such a blurry scene on the ceiling. I used to ask Barrons about it but never got an answer. One day I’ll hunt down construction scaffolds so I can lie on my back beneath it and figure out what the darn thing is.
During my first months in Dublin, I stayed in the residential half of the bookstore and grew accustomed to my borrowed bedroom shifting floors. It even got to the point where hunting for it was kind of fun.
I expect nothing to be easy in these walls. And here is where I’ve known the finest hours of my life.
I stand with Kat at the balustrade that overlooks the bookstore, facing the front entrance. The main room is about a hundred feet long by sixty feet wide. The upper floors are half the depth of the store, accessed by an intricate, curving, red-carpeted double staircase that reminds me of the Lello bookstore in Portugal. On the upper levels are a fabulous array of antiquities and treasures in glass cases or mounted on a wall. Here a plaque of the Green Man sees all, there an ancient sword shines above a war-battered, tarnished shield. I sometimes wonder if all these “baubles” are really Barrons’s possessions collected during various centuries of his life.
Gleaming bookshelves line the perimeter walls from base to cove molding. Behind elegant banisters, narrow passages permit access, and polished ladders slide on oiled rollers from one section to the next.
As I gaze down, to the right is the magazine rack, fully stocked with last October’s editions near more freestanding bookcases. To the left, the old-fashioned cash register sits waiting to ring up a sale, silver bell tinkling, and there’s my pink iPod on a Bose SoundDock ready to play “Bad Moon Rising” or “Tubthumping” or “It’s a Wonderful World.”
Or maybe “Good Girl Gone Bad.”
When the Unseelie Princes enter, flanked by Barrons and Ryodan, I inhale sharply and go rigid.
CRUSH THEM DESTROY THEM IMPALE THEM ON POLES, my inner Sinsar Dubh trumpets.
I close my eyes and dredge up one of the tricks I’ve learned. Occupy my head so thoroughly with something else that the Book can’t get through.
When I was young Daddy used to read poems to me. The more lyrical and musical, the more I’d enjoyed them, and I guess I always had a morbid bent, and he must have, too, because he’d indulged me, on soft summer evenings in the kitchen while Mom did dishes and listened, shaking her head at our choices. I’d understood little of the meaning, just liked the way the words flowed. “The Cremation of Sam McGee” had charmed me. I’d found “A Dream Within a Dream” hypnotic, “The Bells” mesmerizing, I’d obsessed over T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” and in seventh grade recited “The Raven” for a school project, briefly earning for myself the label of nerd until I’d taken extreme fashion measures to change that. Now, looking back, I can see it was a grim choice, but at the time, grief and brutality had possessed the cartoonish proportions of childhood. It had taken weeks to commit the many complex stanzas to my brain.
Remember what the princes did to you, sweet thing, how they ripped you apart and turned you into a mindless animal. As if I could ever forget, the Sinsar Dubh slams me with images so graphic they give me an instant headache.
I block them, focusing instead on how Daddy taught me to break down the poem to memorize it: eighteen stanzas of six lines each, most comprised of eight syllables with a hypnotic placement of stressed syllables followed by unstressed. Trochaic octameter was what he’d called it. I only knew it was fun to say and he was proud of me for learning it, and I’d have done pretty much anything to make Jack Lane proud.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
Break them, the Book demands, force them to their knees before you, make them call you Queen.
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
The rhythm of the poem captivates me as it always did, and I feel like a child again, whole and good and loved.
“ ’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door — only this and nothing more.”
Unlike Poe, I don’t have to open the door. I can slide the dead bolt.
I keep reciting until at last there’s blessed silence. Only then do I open my eyes.
“What on earth?” Kat murmurs beside me, staring down.
Gone are the wild, naked, primitive princes, with kaleidoscope tattoos rushing beneath their skin and mad, iridescent eyes.
They’ve civilized themselves.
In their place stand two black-haired, dark-eyed males that exude power, lust, and otherworldly magic. Torques of the royal Unseelie House glitter like diamond-crusted obsidian at their necks. I know how icy those torques are to the touch, how they vibrate with a hypnotic guttural cacophony, while the torques of the Seelie House croon an irresistible, complex symphony.
No longer do their heads swivel in an eerie, inhuman fashion; they have adopted human mannerisms and movements right down to the smallest nuance. The black wings I felt closing around my naked body as I died a thousand deaths beneath them are gone, concealed by glamour.
“I thought they were at war with each other,” I say.
Kat says, “I thought they were insane, terrifying and revolting. We were both wrong. They recently joined forces. I hear the Crimson Hag has them worried.”
“Christian,” I murmur, and try hard not to think of what he must be enduring.
“He saved us, you know. Possibly the world. Dani was hesitating, trying to decide between her sidhe-seer sisters and the Hoar Frost King. It would have destroyed her to carry the deaths of our entire abbey on her conscience. His sacrifice spared her that horror. We owe him a tremendous debt.”
“Any word on Christian’s whereabouts?”
“His uncles are searching. All of us at the abbey are eager to help mount a rescue, if they find him.”
Although it horrified me that he’d given himself up to the Hag, it also relieved me because it meant the man I knew was still in there, despite the madness. Deep down, he still cared about the world around him. I made a mental note to ask Barrons to aid in the search. He could lean on Ryodan to enlist some of the Nine to go scouting. We couldn’t just leave Christian out there, being tortured and killed over and over. We owed him rescue for the sacrifice he’d made. What he was suffering in the Hag’s sadistic hands would only drive him deeper into Unseelie madness. We needed to save him before he lost all trace of his fundamental humanity.