Darkfever

Dad had been drunk when he’d answered. I’d not heard him drunk in years. Six and a half, to be exact. Not since his brother had died on the way to his own wedding, leaving his bride-to-be a pregnant widow and my dad standing at the altar, best man to a dead man. I’d hung up as soon as I’d heard Dad’s deeply slurred voice, unable to deal with it. I needed a rock—not to have to be one for someone else.

“Wits about you, Ms. Lane,” Barrons cautioned, close to my ear, jerking me from the dark place I’d been about to get lost in. “You’ll need them here.” With his left arm around my waist, his right hand on my shoulder, fingers lightly brushing the swell of my breast, he steered me toward the entrance, locking gazes with any man brave or stupid enough to let his gaze dip below my eyes, holding it until the man looked away. He could not have more clearly branded me his possession.

As soon as we entered the bar, I understood. That was what the women were here: beautiful, impeccably waxed, coifed and groomed, softly laughing, brightly dazzling possessions. Trophies. They weren’t people in and of themselves, but reflections upon their men. As tightly guarded as they were lavishly cosseted, they sparkled and shined like glittering diamonds, showing the world what successes their husbands were, what giants among men.

Rainbow Mac would have been as out of place here as a porcupine in a petting zoo. I straightened my spine, held my head high, and pretended that two-thirds of my supple young body wasn’t exposed by the short, sleek black dress with the bare back and plunging neckline.

Barrons was known here. As we passed, nods were exchanged and greetings were murmured, and all was soft and lovely at O’Bannion’s, if you were careful not to notice the steel every man in the room was packing.

I leaned close to whisper my next question up at Barrons’ ear; even with heels on, he was a head taller than me. “Do you have a gun on you somewhere?” I really hoped he did.

His lips quirked, brushing my hair when he replied, “A gun would only get you killed faster in a place like this, Ms. Lane. Don’t worry, I don’t plan to piss anyone off.” He nodded to a short, cigar-chomping, enormously fat man with a beautiful woman on each mammoth arm. “Not yet, anyway,” he murmured after we’d passed.

We took a booth in back where he ordered dinner and drinks for both of us.

“How do you know I like my steak medium-well?” I demanded. “Or that I wanted a Caesar salad? You didn’t even ask.”

“Look around and learn, Ms. Lane. There’s not a waiter in here that will take an order from a woman. At O’Bannion’s, you eat what is chosen for you, whether you like it or not. Welcome to a time gone by, Ms. Lane, when men provided and women accepted. And if they didn’t like it, they pretended they did.”

Wow. And I’d thought the Deep South was bad. Fortunately, I liked my steak anywhere from rare to medium-well, could eat just about any kind of salad, and was thrilled to have someone else springing for an expensive meal, so I made short work of it. All I’d eaten today was two bowls of cereal, and I was starved. When I finished, I saw Barrons’ plate was still nearly full and raised a brow.

He pushed it toward me. “I ate earlier,” he said.

“So why’d you order, then?” I asked as daintily as I could around a bite of rare filet mignon.

“You don’t go to an O’Bannion business and not spend money,” Barrons said.

“Sounds like he’s got a lot of stupid rules,” I muttered.

Just then a barrel of a man with big-knuckled hands, a flattened nose, and cauliflowered ears approached. “Good to see you again, Mr. Barrons. Mr. O’Bannion invites you and your companion to drop by the back and say hello.”

It wasn’t really an invitation and no one pretended it was. Barrons rose immediately, collected me, tucked me into his body again, and steered me along behind the battered ex-boxer as if, without guidance, I might blindly bounce off walls, a short-circuited Stepford Wife.

I was going to be really glad to get out of this place.

“By the back” meant another building quite some distance behind the pub. We got there underground, following O’Bannion’s man through the kitchens, down a long flight of stairs, and into a well-lit, damp stone tunnel. As we hurried past openings to more tunnels that were either blocked up with stone and concrete or sealed by heavily padlocked steel doors, Barrons murmured close to my ear, “In some parts of Dublin, there’s another city beneath the city.”

“Creepy,” I muttered, as we ascended another long flight of stairs.

I guess I was expecting something out of a movie: a pack of dissolute, heavy-jowled men crammed into a smoke-filled room, gathered around a table, wearing sweat-stained shirts and gun holsters, chewing cigars and playing high-stakes poker, with centerfolds of naked women tacked to the walls.

What I got was a dozen or so well-dressed men talking quietly in a spacious, handsomely appointed room of mahogany and leather, and the only woman on the walls here was the Madonna and Child. But the Madonna wasn’t alone; the august room was virtually wallpapered with religious icons. Interspersed with built-in bookcases graced by a collection of Bibles that I suspected might make even the Pope covetous, hung crucifixes of silver, gold, wood, and even one of those glow-in-the-dark plastic ones. Behind a stately desk hung a series of twelve paintings depicting Christ’s last moments. Over the fireplace was a reproduction of The Last Supper. At the far end of the room were two prayer shrines covered with brightly flickering candles, flanking a larger shrine that held an elaborate antique reliquary containing heavens only knew what—perhaps the tooth or heel bone of some obscure saint. A powerfully built, dark-haired man stood before the ancient religious chasses, his back to us.

I pretended to stumble at the threshold of the door. Barrons caught me. “Oops,” I said meaningfully. Though we’d not agreed on a code, I thought saying OOPs was pretty clear. I was telling him there was an Object of Power somewhere nearby. Not in this room, but close. From the sudden acid in my stomach that seemed to be boiling up through the soles of my feet, I suspected whatever it was lay directly beneath us, in Barrons’ “city beneath the city.”

If Barrons got my not-so-subtle message, he gave no sign of it. His eyes were focused on the man at the shrine, his jaw set.

As the man turned from the reliquary, the two Unseelie flanking him turned also. Whoever the big, bad Unseelie was that was after the Sinsar Dubh, he’d stationed his watchdogs here, too. Our unknown competitor was watching the same people Barrons was interested in: McCabe, Mallucé, and now O’Bannion. Unlike the Rhino-boys at McCabe’s and Mallucé’s, however, these were casting no glamour of being human whatsoever, which perplexed me until I realized that they really had no need. In their natural state, they were invisible to everyone but sidhe-seers like Barrons and me, and we seemed a pretty rare breed. I had no idea why these Rhino-boys had chosen to remain invisible rather than inserting themselves into O’Bannion’s tangible reality as others had done with McCabe and Mallucé, but they had, which meant I had to determinedly not look at them at all. At least when Unseelie were faking passing as humans, I could notice whatever illusion they were presenting and not give myself away, but when they weren’t, I didn’t dare observe the space they occupied, which was easier said than done. Sliding your gaze over something that looks so alien is a little tricky.