She was important, this old woman. And she had information about me, about who I was. And when she sent someone for me, I would go.
But only with guarded thoughts and cautious tread.
At our third encounter, things were going to be very different: She was going to have to prove herself to me.
It was dark by the time I got back to the bookstore. I made my way down the side alley and around to the back entrance, a flashlight clutched in each hand. I noticed Barrons had boarded up the broken window in the garage.
I was not developing a full-blown obsession with the Shades. I was merely checking to make sure the status quo was still…well, quo. One of my enemies had set up a base camp right outside my back door. The least any good soldier would do was scout it on a regular basis to make sure there were no new developments.
There were no new developments. The floodlights were on, the windows were closed. I dragged the back of my hand across my brow with a sigh of relief. Ever since the Shades had gotten into the store, I’d not been able to get them off my mind, especially the big, aggressive one that had menaced me in Barrons’ parlor, and was currently moving restlessly back and forth at the edge of the darkness.
I blinked.
It was shaping a tendril of itself into something that looked suspiciously like a fist with a single upright human finger—you know which one. Surely it wasn’t learning from me, was it? I refused to entertain the thought. There was no room for it in my head; my brain was full. It had been a trick of the shadows, nothing more.
I turned for the stairs and was on the top step, my hand on the doorknob, when I felt its presence behind me.
Dark.
Empty.
Vast as the night.
I turned, as inexorably drawn as if a black hole had opened at my back and I was being sucked into its event horizon.
The specter stood motionless, watching me in silence, still as death. The inky folds of its voluminous, cowled robe rustled in the breeze.
I narrowed my eyes. There was no breeze. Not the merest hint of wind stirred the back alley. Not a hair on my head moved. I licked my finger and held it up. The air was flat, stagnant.
Yet the specter’s robe rippled, buffeted by a draft that wasn’t there.
Great. If I’d been looking for proof that the ghoulish vision haunting me was a delusion, I’d just gotten it. I’d obviously Photoshopped this thing in from stills stored in my memory compiled from movies, childhood ghost stories, and books. In my mind’s media banks its robes always rustled, I never saw its face, and it always carried a sharply curved, lethal blade mounted on a tall pole of ebony wood like the one it was toting now. It was perfect. Too perfect.
Why was I doing this to myself?
“I don’t get it,” I said. Of course, the specter said nothing. It never did and never would. Because Death wasn’t standing in this alley with me, waiting, with patience born of perpetuity, for the right moment to punch my ticket, call in my chip. The Eternal Footman wasn’t holding out my coat, a subtle yet irrefutable signal that the dance, for me, was over, the ball done, the night through.
And if I wanted further evidence that this clichéd spirit was just that—an apparition, a figment of an overwrought imagination—I had only to remind myself that Barrons, Jayne, and Derek O’Bannion hadn’t seen it, when they’d been in its vicinity. Jayne and O’Bannion weren’t necessarily conclusive evidence, but Barrons was. Good grief, the man could smell a kiss on me. He didn’t miss anything.
“Is it because I killed Rocky O’Bannion and his men? Is that why I keep seeing you? Because I collected their clothes and threw them in the trash instead of sending them to the police, or back to their wives?” I’d had my share of psych courses in college. I knew a perfectly healthy human mind could play tricks on itself, and mine wasn’t healthy. It was burdened by vengeful thoughts, regrets, and rapidly multiplying sins. “I know it’s not because I killed all those Unseelie in the warehouse or stabbed Mallucé. I feel good about those things.” I studied it a moment. How honest did I have to be with myself to get rid of it? “Is it because I left Mom back home in Ashford, grieving, and I’m afraid she’ll never get better without me?”
Or had this thing’s dark conception taken place long before that? Had the seeds of it been planted on a warm sunny day by the side of a swimming pool, while I was stretched out, tanning my pampered hide and listening to happy, mindless music while four thousand miles away my sister was stretched out, bleeding to death in a dirty Dublin alley?
Was it because I’d talked to Alina every week for hours, over the course of months, and never once clued in to anything in her voice, never pulled my head out of my happy little world far enough to sense that something was wrong in hers? Because I’d dropped my stupid cell phone in the pool, been too lazy to get a new one, and missed her dying call, and my last chance for the rest of my life to hear her voice? “Is it because I failed her? Is that it? Am I seeing you because I’m ashamed that I’m the one that lived?”