Bloodfever

It sounded maddened, bestial, and it raised the fine hair all over my body. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the mouth capable of making such a sound. It bayed over and over, each soul-chilling howl lasting a full minute or more, echoing up from its concrete tomb.

What was down there? What kind of creature possessed such lung capacity? Why was it making such a sound? It was darker than a wail of despair, emptier than a funeral dirge; it was the bleak, tortured baying of a thing beyond salvation, abandoned, lost, condemned to the agony of hell without beginning or end.

Chicken flesh sprouted all over my arms.

There was a new cry then, this one more terrified than tortured. It rose in gruesome concert with that long, terrible howl.

They both stopped.

There was silence.

I rapped my knuckles on the floor in frustration, wondering just how far in over my head I was.

No longer feeling quite so jackassy or pushy, I left to go back to my room. As I stepped into the alley, the wind scooted trash along the pavement, and the dense cloud cover drifted apart to reveal a window of dark sky. Dawn was moments away, yet the moon was still bright and full. To my right, in the Dark Zone, Shades no longer crouched in the shadows. They’d fled something, and it wasn’t the moon or the dawn. I’d watched them a lot from my window lately; they ceded the night in petulant degrees, the largest of them lingering until the last.

I glanced to my left and sucked in a breath.

“No,” I whispered.

Just beyond reach of the building floodlights a tall, black-shrouded figure stood, folds of midnight cloth rustling in the wind.

Several times over the past week, I’d thought I’d glimpsed something out a window, late at night. Something so trite and clichéd that I’d refused to believe it was real. And I wouldn’t now.

Fae were bad enough.

“You’re not there,” I told it.

I dashed across the alley, vaulted up the stairs, kicked open the door, and burst through it. When I looked back, the specter was gone.

I laughed shakily. I knew better.

It had never been there to begin with.

I took a shower, dried my hair, got dressed, grabbed a chilled latte from the fridge, and made it downstairs just in time for Fiona to show up, and the police to arrive to arrest me.

FOUR

I told you. He was working on my sister’s case.”

“And when did you see him last?”

“I told you that, too. Yesterday morning. He stopped by the bookstore.”

“Why did he stop by the bookstore?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, I told you that, too. To tell me he’d reviewed her case and there was still no new evidence and that he was sorry but it was going to have to stay closed.”

“Do you expect me to believe Inspector O’Duffy, who incidentally has a lovely wife and three children he takes to church every Sunday, followed by brunch with his in-laws—a family outing he’s missed only four times in the past fifteen years, and then for funerals—bypassed that in favor of making an early morning, personal visit to the sister of a deceased murder victim to tell her an already closed case was staying closed?”

Well, fudge-buckets. Even I was gripped by the illogic in that.

“Why didn’t he use the phone?”

I shrugged.

My interrogator, Inspector Jayne, waved the two officers flanking the door from the room. He pushed up from the table and circled it, stopping behind me. I could feel him back there, staring down at me. I was acutely aware of the ancient stolen spear tucked into my boot, inside the leg of my jeans. If they charged and searched me, I was in big trouble.

“You’re an attractive young woman, Ms. Lane.”

“Point?”

“Was there something going on between you and Inspector O’Duffy?”

“Oh, please! Do you really think he’s my type?”

“Was, Ms. Lane. Do I think he was your type. He’s dead.”

I glared up at the Garda looming over me, trying to use dominant body posture to intimidate me. He didn’t know how bad my day had already been, or that there wasn’t much in the human world that frightened me anymore. “Are you going to arrest me or not?”

“His wife said he’d been distracted lately. Worried. Not eating. She had no idea why. You know?”

“No. I told you that, too. Half a dozen times now. How many more times do we have to go over this?” I sounded like a bad actor in a worse movie.

He did, too. “As many times as I say we have to. Let’s take it from the beginning. Tell me again about the first time you saw him here at the station.”

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

“Open your eyes and answer the question.”

I opened my eyes and stared daggers up at him. I still couldn’t believe O’Duffy was dead. Royally screwing up my world, he’d had his throat cut holding a scrap of paper with my name and the address of the bookstore written on it. It hadn’t taken long for his brothers in—well, not exactly arms, the Dublin police don’t carry guns—to come looking for me. I’d spent the morning battling Shades and a death-by-sex Fae, discovered something monstrous lived beneath Barrons’ garage right behind my bedroom, and now I was in the police station being interrogated on suspicion of murder. Could my day get any worse? Oh, they’d not pressed formal charges, but they’d sure used scare tactics on me back at the bookstore, making them think they were. And they’d made it clear they’d jump on any reason they could find to back me up against a wall and start snapping mug shots. I was a stranger in this city, nearly all the answers I gave sounded evasive because they were evasive, and O’Duffy’s Sunday morning visit to me really did look suspicious.

I repeated the story I’d told an hour ago, and an hour before that and an hour before that. He asked the same questions he and two men before him had asked, all morning and a good part of the afternoon—they’d let me stew for forty-five minutes while they went to lunch and came back smelling scrumptiously of vinegary fish and chips—phrased in minutely different ways, all designed to trip me up. The caffeine from my chilled latte had worn off hours ago and I was starving.

On one level, I could appreciate what Inspector Jayne was doing; it was his job, he was doing it very well, and it was obvious Patrick O’Duffy had been his friend. I hoped they’d done the same for Alina. On another level, it infuriated me. My problems were so much bigger than this. It was an epic waste of my time. Not only that, I felt exposed. With the exception of my trip across the back alley this morning, I hadn’t set foot outside of the bookstore since I’d seen what I’d seen in the warehouse at 1247 LaRuhe a week ago. I felt like a walking target with a bull’s-eye painted on my forehead. Did the Lord Master know where to find me? How high was I on his list of priorities? Was he still wherever he’d gone when he’d stepped through that portal? Was he watching the bookstore? Did he have his Rhino-boys, those watchdogs of the Fae—the lower caste of enormous, ugly, gray-skinned Unseelie with wide, squat, barrel-bodies, jutting underbites, and bumpy foreheads—waiting to grab me the moment I walked out of the police station by myself? Should I try to get myself formally arrested? I discarded that thought the instant I had it. Humans couldn’t keep me alive. I blinked, startled to realize I no longer quite counted myself in that camp.