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.
“Barrons!” I shouted. For reasons my taciturn host refuses to divulge, the Shades leave him alone. That the deadly bottom-feeders of the dark Fae give Jericho Barrons a wide berth perturbs me immensely but I’d promise to never ask him another question about it again, if only he’d cut a swath through them right now and save me.
I shouted his name until my throat hurt, but no knight-errant rushed to my rescue.
Under normal circumstances, if the Shades had been outside the store in the streets, dawn would have driven the amorphous vampires back to wherever it is they hide during the day, but it was so stormy I doubted enough light could filter through the bookstore’s alcoved windows to affect them in here. Even if the dense cloud cover passed and the sun came out, strong sunlight wouldn’t enter the main floor of the bookstore before early afternoon.
I groaned. But Fiona would, long before that. This past week she’d begun working extended hours at the bookstore. Increased customer demand, she’d said. Lots of early morning clients. She’d been arriving at the shop at precisely eight-forty-five A.M. to open the bookstore at nine o’clock sharp.
I had to warn her off, before she walked into a waiting Shade ambush!
And now that I thought about it, I was pretty sure she knew how to reach Barrons, too. I snatched up the phone and rang the operator.
“County?” he inquired.
“All of Dublin,” I said briskly. Surely Fiona lived nearby. If not, I’d try the outlying counties.
“Name?”
“Fiona…uh…Fiona…” With a sound of disgust, I dropped the phone back in the cradle. I was so panicked I hadn’t realized I didn’t know Fiona’s last name until I’d needed it.
Back to square one.
I had two choices: I could stay up here, safe with my flashlights while, in a few hours, the Shades devoured Fiona and any number of innocent, hapless patrons who might subsequently stroll through the door she unlocked, or get my panicked act together and stop that from happening.
But how?
Light was my only weapon against the Shades. Though I suspected Barrons might get positively hostile if I set his store on fire, I had matches, and it would certainly drive them out. However, I didn’t want to be inside the building when it went up in flames, and since I could hardly jump from the fourth floor, and there was no fire escape or convenient stash of bed linens to knot into a rope, I filed that option away in the category “Last Resort.” Unfortunately I could see only one other resort, and it wasn’t a sunny spot in the Bahamas. I stared dismally at the door.
I was going to have to run the gauntlet.
How had the Shades gotten inside to begin with? Was the power out in part of the store and they’d slithered in through a crack? Could they do that? Or had the lights somehow gotten turned off? If so, I could creep from switch to switch, armed with flashlights, and turn them back on.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the child’s game Don’t Touch the Alligator, but Alina and I used to play it when Mom was too busy with something else to notice that we were hopping from the Sunday parlor sofa, to her favorite lace-covered pillows, to that awful chair Gram brocaded to match the curtains, and so on. The idea is that the floor is full of alligators and if you step on one of them, you’re dead. You have to get from one room to the next, without ever touching the floor.