I picked up the car keys and glanced around the bookstore to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything. As my gaze swept the four-story room, I shrugged off a sudden, broody fear that I might never see Barrons Books and Baubles again. Like I loved the city, I’d grown to love my store. The hardwood floors gleamed beneath the sconces and cut-amber lamps. The books were all shelved in their proper places. The magazine rack was freshly stocked. The fires were off. The sofas and chairs were invitingly positioned in cozy arrangements. The mural above me was lost in shadows. One day I was going to climb up there and see what it was. The store was tidy and quiet, stuffed with fictional worlds to be explored, business-ready and waiting for the next customer.
I headed for the back door.
It would be waiting for me when I got back tomorrow, when the walls were strong, and I had a whole year to figure things out. I would start keeping regular hours again, and get to work on my plans to set up a Web site and catalog the rare editions upstairs. No more slacking.
But right now, an Italian stallion was waiting for me, stomping and snorting. Out back, a Ferrari was calling my name. There were two hours of road between me and where I was going, and that was one liminal I was going to love every minute of.
Chapter 17
I made it twelve blocks.
My end of town, next to the Dark Zone, had been deserted as a war zone. Now, I knew why.
The streets an eighth of a mile east of BB&B were so packed with people and Unseelie that motor traffic didn’t have a hope of getting through. Most of the Fae were in full human glamour, trying to incite riot, and succeeding.
Garda pushed among them, demanding order with raised batons. There’re enough troubled youth in Dublin—in any city, for that matter—that even a small angry mob can combust and spread like wildfire. Especially on Halloween when all the freaks come out, hiding behind better masks.
While I watched, a few of the Garda—who were actually Unseelie in glamour—began viciously beating a group of youths with their batons, incensing the crowd. Other Unseelie began smashing out store windows, looting and encouraging others to take what they wanted. I called out to a few kids hurrying by to join the fracas. No one seemed to know what the rioting was about, nor did they care. I was afraid to get closer, for fear of damaging the car. Or me.
Bile boiled in my stomach from the compressed multitude of Fae. At least the Sinsar Dubh wasn’t around to incapacitate me. The mob was expanding, pushing outward, and it occurred to me that getting stuck in the middle of it, sitting in a Ferrari, was a really bad idea. I backed up, hastily turned around, and drove away, glad I’d left a few minutes early.
I dug out a map of the city from my backpack and flipped on the interior light. Although the storm still only threatened, the cloud cover had turned day to night a full hour earlier than I’d expected.
Ten blocks north of the bookstore, I encountered another mob. I backed up, swung the car around, and headed west. It was no go. That way out of town was just as bad.
I pulled over in a parking lot to study the map, then headed southwest, intending to skirt the edge of the Dark Zone on my way out and, if I had to, put on my MacHalo and drive through part of it to get out of town. But as I approached the perimeter of the abandoned neighborhood, I slammed the brakes and stared.
The entire edge of the zone was a dense black wall of Shades, pressing at the pools of the light cast by the street-lamps on Dorsey Street. It stretched left and right as far as I could see, a massive barricade of death.
I put the car in reverse and backed away. I would go through it only if I had to. I wasn’t yet ready to admit defeat.
I spent the next fifteen minutes driving the ever-decreasing circumference of my world, hemmed in by danger on all sides. The edges of the Dark Zones had met and merged with the mobs, and I watched in horror as Unseelie in human glamour drove people into those waiting, killing shadows.
It finally occurred to me to get out of the flashy red car that was beginning to attract a dangerous amount of attention, so I sped back to BB&B where I planned to swap it for something nondescript, and figure how to escape the city.
As I turned down the side street leading to the store, I slammed the brakes so hard I nearly gave myself whiplash.
Barrons Books and Baubles was dark!
Completely. It was surrounded by night on all sides.
Every exterior light on the bookstore was out.
I stared blankly. I’d left them all on. I eased off the brake and inched closer. In the gleam of headlights, glass glittered on the cobbled street. The lights weren’t off. Someone had broken them all out, or—considering how high they were mounted—shot them out. Or. someone had sent those flying Fae, maybe even Hunters, to do the job. Were they perched up there right now, on the cornices, looming over me? There were so many Fae in the city that my sidhe-sensor felt bombarded, overwhelmed by presences too numerous to count or differentiate. I peered up, but the roof of the store was lost in darkness.
Although the interior lights were on, they were set at the subdued, after-hours level, and what spilled onto the pavement through the beveled glass door and windows was not enough to deter my enemy. One more city block had fallen to the Shades: mine.
Barrons Books and Baubles was part of the Dark Zone.
Would the Shades’ more substantial brethren enter BB&B tonight, smash it up, break out the interior lights, and render it unsalvageable? Could they? I knew Barrons hadn’t warded it against everything, just the bigger risks.
My eyes narrowed. This was unacceptable. The Fae would not take my sanctuary! I would not be turned out into the streets. They would get their nasty, shady petunias out of my territory and they would do it now. I spun in a screech of tires, and drove in the other direction. Four blocks from the Dark Zone’s new perimeter, the mob pushed me back. I floored it in reverse, narrowly missing parked cars, stopping beneath a pool of bright streetlamps. I could hear angry shouts, breaking glass, and the thunder of the approaching mob. I would not be swallowed up by it. But I had to act fast.
I stepped out of the car, plunged my hand beneath my jacket, and fisted it around my spear. I wasn’t losing it this time.
A cold, windborne mist pricked my face and hands. The storm had begun. But it wasn’t just storm I sensed in the air. Something was wrong, terribly wrong, besides angry mobs and hordes of Unseelie, and Shades overtaking my home. The wind was strange, blowing from multiple directions, reeking of sulfur. The fringes of the chaotic, destructive crowd surged around the corner, two blocks from where I stood.
“V’lane, I need you!” I cried, releasing his name.
It uncoiled from my tongue and swelled, choking me, then slammed into the back of my teeth, forcing my mouth wide.
But instead of soaring into the night sky, it crashed into an invisible wall and plummeted to the pavement, where it lay fluttering weakly, a fallen dark bird.
I nudged it with the toe of my boot.
It disintegrated.
I turned my face to the wind, east and west, north and south. It eddied around me, buffeting me from all sides, slapping me with hundreds of tiny hands, and I suddenly could feel the LM out there, working his dark magic to bring the walls down. It was changing things.
I flexed the sidhe-seer place in my mind, focused, turned inward, seeking, hunting, and for an instant I actually got a flash of him, standing at the edge of a stark, sheer black cliff, in an icy place, red-robed, hands raised—and was that a heart held high, dripping blood? — chanting, summoning arts powerful enough to crash a prison wrought from living strands of the Song of Making, and it was doing something to all magic, even Fae, making it go terribly wrong.