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.