Bloodfever

Mallucé wasn’t the only worry on my mind. Was the Lord Master really unable to get past the ancient wards laid in blood and stone around the bookstore, as Barrons assured me? Who’d been driving the car transporting the mind-bending evil of the Sinsar Dubh past the bookstore last week? Where had it been taken? Why? What were all the Unseelie recently freed by the Lord Master doing right now? And just how responsible was I for them? Does being one of the few people who can do something about a problem make you responsible for fixing it?

It was midnight before I slept, bedroom door locked, windows buttoned up tight, lights ablaze.

The instant I opened my eyes, I knew something was wrong.

TWO

I t wasn’t just my sidhe-seer senses that tipped me off, screaming something Fae was very near.

My bedroom has hardwood floors and there’s no threshold strip beneath the door. I usually wedge a towel into the gap—okay, several—packed in by books, fortified with a chair, topped by a lamp so if some bizarre new monster slithers in through the crack, the lamp breaking will startle me awake, and buy me just enough time to be almost conscious when it kills me.

Last night I forgot.

As soon as I roll over in the morning, I glance at the haphazard stack. It’s my way of reassuring myself that nothing found me during the night and I live to see another day in Dublin, for whatever that’s worth. This morning my observation that I’d forgotten to stuff the crack was accompanied by another that made my heart freeze: The gap beneath the door was dark.

Black. As in pitch.

I leave all the lights on at night, not just inside my bedroom but inside the entire bookstore, and outside the building, too. The exterior of Barrons Books and Baubles is flanked front, sides, and back by brilliant floodlights, to keep the Shades in the adjacent Dark Zone at bay. The one time Barrons turned off those lights after dark, sixteen men were killed right outside the back door.

The interior is also meticulously lit, with recessed spotlights on the ceilings and dozens of table and floor lamps illuminating every nook and cranny. Since my run-in with the Lord Master, I’ve been leaving all of them on, twenty-four/seven. So far Barrons hasn’t said a word to me about the pending astronomical utility bill and if he does I’m going to tell him to take it out of my account—the one he should be setting up for me for being his own personal OOP detector. Using my sidhe-seer talents to locate ancient Fae relics—Objects of Power, or OOPs for short—is hardly my idea of a dream job. The dress code leans toward black with stiletto heels, a style I’ve never gotten into; I prefer pastels and pearls. And the hours are lousy; I’m usually up all night, playing psychic lint brush in dark and scary places, stealing things from scary people. He can take my food and phone bills out of that account, and I could use a clothing allowance, too, for the things of my own that keep getting ruined. Blood and green goo are no friends of detergent.

I craned my neck to see out the window. It was still raining heavily; the glass panes were dark, and as far as I could tell from the warm cocoon of my bed the exterior floodlights weren’t on, which hit me about as hard as getting dropped, bleeding, into a tank of hungry sharks.

I hate the dark.

I shot from bed like a rock from a slingshot—one moment lying there, next crouched battle-ready in the middle of the room, a flashlight in each hand.

Dark outside the store, dark inside, beyond my bedroom door: “What the fr—fuck?” I exclaimed, then muttered, “Sorry, Mom.” Raised in the Bible Belt by a mother who’d firmly advocated the pervasive southern adage that “pretty girls don’t have ugly mouths,” Alina and I had created our own language for expletives at a young age. Ass was “petunia,” crap was “fudge-buckets,” the f-word was “frog.” Unfortunately, when you grow up saying those words instead of the actual cusswords, they prove every bit as hard a habit to break as cussing and tend to come out at inopportune moments, undermining your credibility in a big way. “Frog off, or I’ll kick your petunia” just doesn’t carry a lot of weight with the kind of people I’ve been encountering lately, nor have my genteel southern manners impressed anyone but me. I’ve been retraining myself, but it’s slow going.

Had one of my deepest fears manifested while I’d slept, and the power had gone out? As soon as I had that thought, I realized that not only was the clock still blinking the time, 4:01 A.M., cheery and orange as ever, but, duh, my overhead was on, same as it was every night when I went to sleep.

Juggling two flashlights into one hand, I fumbled the phone from the receiver. I tried to think of someone to call but drew a complete blank. I didn’t have any friends in Dublin, and although Barrons seems to keep a residence in the store, he’s rarely around and I have no idea how to reach him. There was no way I was calling the police.

I was on my own. I replaced the receiver and listened hard. The silence in the store was deafening, fraught with terrible possibilities—monsters lurking with homicidal glee, right outside my bedroom door.

I wriggled into my jeans, swapped a flashlight for my spear, stuffed three more flashlights in the back of my waistband, and crept to the door.

I could feel that there was something Fae beyond it, but that was all I knew. Not what, how many, or even how close, just a deep malaise in my stomach accompanied by a foul itchiness in my brain that made me feel like a cat with its back up, claws out, fur spiked. Barrons assures me sidhe-seer senses improve with experience. Mine had better start improving fast or I won’t live to see next week. I stared at the door. I must have stood there for five minutes trying to talk myself into opening it. The unknown is a vast paralyzing limbo. I’d like to tell you that the monster under the bed is rarely as bad as your fear of it, but in my experience it’s almost always worse.

I slid the dead bolt, parted door from jamb in the narrowest of slivers, and knifed the sharp white beam of my flashlight through it.

A dozen Shades shrank back, retreating with oily swiftness to the edge of the light and not one inch further. Adrenaline kicked me in the teeth. I slammed the door shut and drove the dead bolt home.

There were Shades inside Barrons Books and Baubles!

How in the world had that happened? I’d checked the lights before I’d gone to bed—they’d all been on!

I pressed myself against the door, shaking, wondering if I’d really woken up or if I was still dreaming. I’ve had some bad dreams lately and this was certainly the stuff of nightmares. I might be a sidhe-seer and a mythic Null, I might have one of the Fae’s deadliest weapons in my possession, but even I’m defenseless against the lowest caste of Unseelie. Ironic, I know.