Criminals and barbarians, I’d mocked when he’d told me. He certainly looks the part.
“How old would you say he is?”
“In this picture?”
“No, now.”
“He’s thirty. I saw it on his driver’s license.” His birthday was coming up; on Halloween he’d be thirty-one.
“Look at the date on the magazine.”
I flipped to the cover. The photo had been taken seventeen years ago, which meant he’d been thirteen at the time of the photograph, if the date on his driver’s license was to be believed. Obviously, it wasn’t. No thirteen-year old boy in the world looked that mature.
Christian handed me another magazine, this one featuring a gathering of wealthy socialites at a gala at a British museum. Again, Barrons was unmistakable in it, even half turned as he was from the camera. Same hair and faultlessly tailored clothing, same expression on the haughty old-world face: a mixture of boredom and predatory amusement.
I flipped to the cover. This photo had been taken forty-one years ago. I flipped back to the photo and studied it carefully, looking for anomalies. There were none. It was either Barrons, or he had a grandfather who’d been his identical twin, and if this was Barrons in the photo, he was currently seventy-one years old.
Next, Christian passed me a photocopy of a newspaper article with a faded black-and-white photo of a group of uniformed men. Barrons was the only one not wearing a uniform. As was the case in the last two photos, he was angled slightly away, as if trying to slip off before the shot could be snapped. And, as was the case in the last two photos, he didn’t look a day older or younger than he did today.
“Do you know who that is?” Christian pointed to the big, rawboned, thirtyish man in the center of the photograph.
I shook my head.
“Michael Collins. He was a famous Irish revolutionary leader.”
“So?”
“He was killed in 1922. This picture was taken two months before he died.”
I did some rapid math. That would mean Barrons wasn’t seventy-one, he was an extremely well preserved one hundred and fifteen. “Maybe he had a relative,” I offered, “with a strong genetic resemblance.”
“You don’t believe that,” he said flatly. “Why do people do that? Say things out loud they don’t even remotely believe?”
He was right. I didn’t believe it. The pictures were too identical. I’d spent enough time with Jericho Barrons that I knew the way his limbs moved, the way he stood, the expressions he wore. It was him, in all those pictures. Inside, a part of me went very still.
Barrons was old. Impossibly old. Being kept alive by Gripper possession? Was that possible? “Are there more of these?” I wondered how far back Christian’s uncles had traced him. I wanted to take these photographs with me, slap them against Barrons’ chest and demand answers, even though I knew I’d never get any.
He glanced at his watch. “Yes, but I have to go.”
“Let me hold on to these a few days.”
“No way. My uncles would kill me if Barrons got his hands on them.”
I relinquished them reluctantly. I could begin research of my own, now that I knew what to look for. I wasn’t sure I needed to. What difference if Barrons were a hundred, a thousand, or several thousand? The point was: He was inhuman. The question was: How bad was whatever he really was?
“I’m leaving for Inverness tomorrow and won’t be back for a week. There are. things at home I need to take care of. Come and see me next Thursday. I believe you and I can help each other.” He paused then said, “I believe we may need to help each other, Mac. I think our purposes may be tied together.”
I nodded as we walked out, although I had my doubts. I’d been turning into a real bottom-liner lately and, regardless of how much Christian might know, or his involvement in maintaining the walls between realms, or how much I might enjoy his company, the bottom line was he was a man who couldn’t see the Fae, and that meant, in a fight, he’d be a liability, one more person I’d have to worry about keeping alive, and lately, I was having a hard enough time keeping myself alive.
I shouldered past tourists, wound my way between Rhino-boys and assorted Unseelie, and was a few blocks from the bookstore, passing one of the countless pubs that characterize Temple Bar, when I glanced in the window, and there she was.
Alina.
Sitting with a group of friends in a low-backed corner snug, tipping back a bottle of beer. Lowering it and laughing at something the guy next to her had just said.
I closed my eyes. I knew what this was, and he needed to get some new tricks. I opened them and glanced down at myself. At least I wasn’t naked. “V’lane,” I said. Did I ever have a bone to pick with him!
“MacKayla.”
Ignoring the reflection of the tall, erotic golden creature behind my shoulder, I focused that ancient, alien, sidhe-seer place inside my brain on the illusion: Show me what is true, I demanded. The vision of Alina ruptured with the suddenness of a bubble bursting, revealing a group of boisterous rugby players toasting their latest victory.
I turned and was slammed upside the head with death-by-sex Fae.
My knees got soft, my nipples got hard, and I wanted sex on the sidewalk, sex bent over that nearby car, sex up against the wall of the pub, and who cared if my naked petunia got smashed up against the window for all to see in the process?
V’lane is a prince from one of the four Seelie Royal Houses, and it’s difficult to look at him directly when he’s in high glamour. He’s gold and bronze, velvet and steel, and his eyes blaze with the stellar grandeur of a wintry night sky. He is so unearthly beautiful that it makes a part of my soul weep. When I look at him, I hunger for things I don’t understand. I ache to be touched by him. I’m terrified of his touch. I think sex with him might undo my essential cellular cohesion, and shatter me into fragments of a woman that could never be pieced back together again.
If V’lane were a signpost, it would read Abandon All Personal Will, Ye Who Tread Here, and while I never thought much about will back home in Ashford, here I’ve begun to think it’s all I really have to call my own.
I tried regarding him with slightly peripheral vision. It didn’t help. My clothing was painfully constricting, and I battled the overwhelming urge to remove it.
Fae princes drip such raw eroticism that it provokes a woman’s senses beyond anything she was meant to experience, turning her into an aroused animal, willing to do anything for sex. While that might sound like it promises the kinkiest escapades and most incredible orgasms of your life, Fae don’t grasp basic human concepts like death. Time has no meaning to them, they don’t need to eat or sleep, and their sexual appetite for human women is enormous, all of which leads to one inevitable outcome: A woman caught in a Fae prince’s spell usually gets fucked to death. If she survives it, she’s Pri-ya: an addict, a void of insatiable sexual need that exists for one purpose, to serve her Master—and that’s determined by whoever is currently giving her sex.
The first few times I encountered V’lane I’d begun stripping where I stood. I was getting better at resisting, because I was catching my hand every time it moved to the hem of my sweater, before I began pulling it off over my head. Still, I wasn’t sure how long I could keep it up.
“Mute it,” I demanded.
A slow smile curved his lips. “I am muted. Whatever you feel is not coming from me.”
“You’re lying.” I briefly visited Christian’s charge that I was thinking of having sex with someone. V’lane was not a someone. He was a something.