Bloodfever

Rowena looked startled. “What is this of a sister?”

“Oh, please.” Here it was, the real reason I hated her. Not just for turning me away and shattering my beliefs about my family, but why hadn’t she found my sister? With her spelled signs, her advertisements, and her bicycling spies, why hadn’t she drawn Alina in? Taught her? Saved her? “She was in Dublin for months. She hung out in the pubs all the time. How could you not have run into her?”

“Would you expect me to encounter every single person in Chicago on a visit?” she snapped. “Dublin is a big city, and we have only recently become organized. Until a short time ago, I was busy elsewhere. How long was your sister here? What did she look like?”

“She was here for eight months. She was blond like…like I was the first time you saw me. Same color eyes. More athletically built. A bit taller.”

Rowena searched my face, as if absorbing and breaking down my individual features, trying to place them in random arrangements on another woman. Finally she shook her head. “I’m sorry, MacKayla, but no. I never met your sister. You must tell me what happened. You and I are sisters in more than vision and cause; we are sisters in loss. Tell me everything.”

“We aren’t sisters in anything, and I’m not giving you my spear, old woman.” She wasn’t going to suck me in with sympathy.

She gave me a hard stare. “I sent you away the first time. The second time I tried to get you to come back here with me, but you refused. We’ve both turned the other away once. I won’t make that same mistake again. Will you?”

“You should have found my sister. You should have saved her.”

“You have no idea how much I wish I could have. Let me save you instead.”

“I don’t need saving.”

“If you’re working with Jericho Barrons, you do.”

“What do you know about Barrons?”

“That there are not, and never have been, any male sidhe-seers, MacKayla. It is a gift of matriarchy.”

I scoffed. “A gift? It killed my sister and ruined my life. As for Barrons, what is he, then? Because he sure can see the Fae, and he helps me kill them, which is more than you’ve ever done.”

“Is that all one must do to win your trust, MacKayla? Battle alongside you? Let us go kill a Fae together then, right now. Do you know what’s in his heart? His mind? Why he does it? What he’s after?”

I said nothing because there was nothing to say to that. Most of the time I wasn’t sure he even had a heart, and whatever thoughts he entertained he kept intensely guarded.

“I didn’t think so. He tells you nothing, does he?”

“He’s told me more about what I am than you have.”

“You haven’t given me a chance.”

“I gave you two.”

“Try again, MacKayla. I’m ready to talk. Are you ready to listen?”

“Do you know what he is?” I pressed.

“I know what he isn’t, and that’s all I need to know. He’s not one of us. We are pure of heart, pure of purpose. You see that shamrock?” Rowena pointed to a picture behind her desk of a large green clover on a background of embossed gold. “Look at it. Do you know why it’s considered lucky, and has been for longer than anyone can recall?”

I shook my head.

“Before it was the clover of Saint Patrick’s trinity, it was ours. It’s the emblem of our Order. It’s the symbol our ancient sisters used to carve on their doors and dye into banners millennia ago, when they moved to a new village. It was their way of letting the inhabitants know who they were and what they were there to do. When people saw our sign, they declared a time of great feasting and celebrated for a fortnight. They welcomed us with gifts of their finest food, wine, and men. They held tournaments to compete to bed us.” She strode to the picture, snatching a pencil from the desk on the way to it. “It is not a clover at all, but a vow.” She traced the lines of the two bottom leaves, left to right, with the eraser. “You see how these two leaves make a sideways figure eight, like a horizontal Möbius strip? They are two S’s, one right side up, one upside down, ends meeting. The third leaf and stem is an upright P.”

So that was why the shamrock looked misshapen! It was. The upright leaf was flatter on the left side, the stem stiff.

“Over thousands of years they’ve forgotten us, added a few flourishes, occasionally a fourth leaf, and now they think it’s a lucky clover.” She snorted. “But we haven’t forgotten. We never forget. The first S is for See, the second for Serve, the P for Protect. The shamrock itself is the symbol of Eire, the great Ireland. The Möbius strip is our pledge of guardianship eternal. We are the sidhe-seers and we watch over Mankind. We protect them from the Old Ones. We stand between this world and all the others. We fight Death in its many guises and now, more than ever, we are the most important people on this earth.”

I almost broke into a rousing, emotional “Danny Boy,” and I didn’t even know the words. She’d made me feel part of something huge; she’d given me chills and I resented it. I’d never been much of a joiner and it’s hard to want to join a club that’s dissed you twice. Yes, I have a long memory and hold grudges. I would do with her what I did with everyone else: Mac Lane, P.I.: I would pump her for all the information I could get. Later I would take my journal somewhere quiet, make notes, decide who to trust…sort of, or at least who to throw in with for a while.

“I suppose you have a collection of stories and records somewhere?” If so, I’d love to get my hands on it.

She nodded. “We do. We have more information on the Fae than one person could sort through in a dozen lifetimes. Some of our…less physically inclined members have been recruited to bring us into the twenty-first century. They’ve begun the laborious task of converting it all to electronic files. Our library, though vast, is coming apart at the spines.”

“Where is this library?”

She measured me. “In an old abbey, a few hours from Dublin.”

An old abbey. Right. I was going to kill Barrons the next time I saw him.

“Would you like to see it?”

With every ounce of my being. I wanted to say take me, show me, right now, walk me up and down those halls, teach me who I am. But I didn’t. What if she got me out there among hills and sheep and ruins, overpowered me with a coven of her faithful, and stole my spear? I understood the value of my weapon. There were only two capable of killing Fae. She had one—and countless followers who were unarmed. I had the other. Hardly seemed fair, even to me. I wasn’t interested in fair. I was interested in my own survival. “Maybe sometime,” I said noncommittally.