I stared at the green-garbed women huddled around the body, and my future flashed before my eyes. They would call the police. I would be arrested. Jayne would lock me up and throw away the key. He’d never buy self-defense, especially not with a stolen, ancient spear. There would be a trial. My parents would have to fly over. This would destroy what was left of them: one daughter rotting in a grave, the other in a jail cell.
They gathered her up, and began carrying her toward the stairs, taking her down to the main floor.
They were disturbing the crime scene. If I were to have any hope at all of proving my innocence, I would need it intact. “I don’t think you should do that. Aren’t you going to call the police?” Maybe I could make it out of the country before they did. Maybe Barrons could fix this. Or V’lane. I had friends in high places. Friends who wanted me alive and free to do their bidding.
One of them shot me a murderous look over her shoulder.
“Have you taken a good look at the Garda lately? Besides, humans don’t police us,” she sneered. “We police our own. Always have. Always will.” There was an unmistakable threat in her words.
I poked my head over the balustrade and watched as they reappeared downstairs. One of them glanced up at me. “Don’t try to leave; we’ll just hunt you,” she hissed.
“Oh, take a ticket and get in line,” I muttered as they banged out the door.
“I need to borrow a car,” I told Barrons when he walked in the front door that night, shortly after nine.
He was wearing an exquisitely tailored suit, an impeccable white shirt, and a blood-red tie. His dark hair was slicked back from his handsome face. Diamond cuff links glinted at his wrists. His body hummed with energy, saturating the air around him. His eyes were startlingly brilliant, restless, darting everywhere.
I’ve felt that body on top of mine, been the focus of that consuming gaze. I try not to think about it. I have a box inside me now that never used to exist. I never needed it before. It’s down in my deepest, darkest corner, and it’s airtight, soundproofed, and padlocked. It’s where I keep thoughts I don’t know what to do with, that could get me into trouble. Eating Unseelie hammers on the inside of that lid incessantly. I try to keep kissing Barrons in that box, too, but it gets out sometimes.
I would not put the death of the sidhe-seer in the box. It was something I had to deal with in order to move forward with my goals.
“Why don’t you ask your fairy little boyfriend to take you wherever you want to go?”
That was a thought, but there were other thoughts attached to that thought that I hadn’t thought through yet. Besides, back home whenever I got really upset about something, like breaking a nail the same day I’d spent good money on a manicure, or finding out that Betsy had gone to Atlanta with her mom and bought the same pink prom dress as me, totally ruining my senior experience, I used to get in my car, crank up the music really loud, and drive for hours until I’d calmed down.
I needed to drive now, to lose myself in the night, and I wanted to feel the thunder of hundreds of stampeding horses beneath me while I was doing it. My body was bruised in a dozen places; my emotions were black and blue all over. I’d killed a young woman today. Commission or omission, she was dead. I cursed the vagaries that had led me to choose that precise moment to unsheathe my weapon, and her, that exact moment to lunge. “I don’t feel like asking my fairy little boyfriend.”
Barrons’ lips twitched. I’d almost made him smile. Barrons smiles about as often as the sun comes out in Dublin, and it has the same effect on me; makes me feel warm and stupid.
“I don’t suppose you’d call him that the next time you see him, and let me watch his reaction?”
“Don’t think that would work, Barrons,” I said sweetly. “Nobody ever sticks around when you show up. Darndest thing. Almost as if everyone’s afraid of you.”
My saccharine humor exorcised the ghost of his smile. “Did you have a specific car in mind, Ms. Lane?”
I wanted blue-collar muscle tonight. “The Viper.”
“Why should I let you take it?”
“Because you owe me.”
“Why do I owe you?”
“Because I put up with you.”
He smiled then, really smiled. I snorted and looked away. “The keys are in it, Ms. Lane. The keys to the garage are in the top drawer of my desk, right-hand side.”
I glanced at him sharply. Was this a concession? Telling me where he kept his keys? The offer of a deeper, more trusting association?
“Of course you know that already,” he continued dryly. “You saw them there the last time you snooped through my study. I was surprised you didn’t try using them then, rather than breaking my window. You might have saved me some aggravation.”
Barrons deserves to be aggravated. He’s the most aggravating. whatever he is. I’ve ever met. The night I’d broken a window to get into his garage, it hadn’t occurred to me to try those keys because I’d been so certain he was keeping some huge dark secret locked up in there, that he’d surely never let the keys just lie around. (He is keeping some huge dark secret in there, I just haven’t figured out how to get to it yet.) He’d caught my nocturnal B&E on the video cameras hidden in the garage, and left the incriminating evidence outside my bedroom door. “Let me guess, you have video cameras hidden in the store, too?”
“No, Ms. Lane, but I can smell you. I know when you’ve been in one of my rooms, and I know your nature. You snoop.”
I didn’t try to deny it. Of course I snooped. How else was I supposed to find anything out? “You can’t smell where I’ve been,” I scoffed.
“I smell blood tonight, Ms. Lane, and it’s not yours. Why is your face bruised? What happened today? Who bled in my bookstore?”
“Where’s the abbey?” I countered, fingering the lump on my cheek. I’d iced it, but not soon enough. It was hard and painful to the touch. I’d taken most of the blows to my body. My ribs were a mess, it hurt to breathe deep, and my right thigh was one massive contusion. My shins had huge goose-eggs on them. I’d been afraid several of my fingers were broken, but aside from being a little swollen, they seemed okay now.
“Why? Is that where you plan to go tonight? Do you think that’s wise? What if they attack you?”
“Been there, done that. How did you find me last night? Were you looking for me?” The question had been vexing me. Why had he shown up when I was with V’lane? It seemed too coincidental to have been coincidence.
“I was on my way to Chester’s.” He shrugged. “Coincidence. The bruise?”
Chester’s. Where Inspector O’Duffy had spoken to a man named Ryodan who, according to Barrons, talked too much about things he shouldn’t be talking about—Barrons himself. I made a mental note to find Chester’s, track down the mysterious Ryodan, and see what I could learn. “I got in a fight with some other sidhe-seers. Evade if you want, Barrons, but don’t treat me like an idiot.”
“I knew you were nearby last night. I detoured to make certain you were safe. How did the fight go? Are you. unharmed?”
“Mostly. Don’t worry, I’m intact in all the ways you need me to be. Never fear, your OOP detector is here.” My hand went to the base of my skull. “Is it the brand? Can you find me so easily by it?”
“I sense you when you’re near.”
“That sucks,” I said bitterly.
“I can remove it if you wish,” he said. “It would be. painful.” His brilliant gaze met mine and we stared at each other a long moment. In those obsidian depths I saw the darkness of Mallucé’s grotto, tasted my own death again.
Through the annals of history, women have paid a price for protection. One day, I won’t have to. “I’ll deal with it. Where’s the abbey, Barrons?”
He wrote “Arlington Abbey” and an address on a scrap of paper for me, got me a map off the bookshelf, and marked it with an X. It was several hours from Dublin.