I try to weep, but nothing comes.
Something rattles deep in my chest.
I do not recognize it.
I am no longer what I was.
I look at the others.
None of us are.
The images stopped. I was back in the bookstore. I was shaking. Grief was an open wound in my chest. I was bleeding for the child I’d just lost, bleeding for Alina, for all the people dying out there in this war we’d been unable to prevent.
I jerked, looked up at him. If he thought he was going to get tit for tat, he was wrong.
I was raw. I was badly off balance. If he touched me right now, I might be nice. If he was nice right now, I might touch him.
His face was impassive, his eyes flat black, his hands fisted at his sides.
“Barrons, I—”
“Good night, Ms. Lane.”
Couldn’t we have taken something faster?” I complained, as we skirted abandoned cars and dodged IFPs at what felt like a snail’s pace.
Barrons gave me a look. “All the Hunters were busy tonight.”
“Well, can you at least step on it?” I groused.
“And end up in another IFP? They’re moving, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
I had, and it seemed highly unfair. Static, they were predictable, but the last two we’d encountered on our way deep into Irish country had been unattached, floating several feet off the ground, drifting wherever the wind carried them. Dodging a stationary IFP was hard enough. Dodging one that was blowing erratically felt like one of those dances you do when you run into someone on the street and both of you keep stepping to the same side, trying to get out of each other’s way. Only, in this case, it seemed the floating IFPs wanted to dance. Take you in their arms. Swallow you up.
“The last one took us forty minutes to get out of.”
Problem was, you couldn’t back out of them easily. Once you were inside one, it seemed to shift cunningly, concealing the entry point. You had to fumble around for an exit. “Point,” I conceded.
I was bored, restless, and impatient to get to the old woman’s cottage. And here we were, lumbering along, taking forever, in the Alpha.
I glanced around the interior of the Hummer and saw a CD case on the backseat. I wondered what Barrons listened to when he was alone. I punched on the audio. Rob Zombie blared:
Hell doesn’t love them. The devil’s rejects, the devil’s rejects …
He punched off the audio.
I raised a brow. “Could you be any more trite, Barrons?”
“‘Trite’ is merely another word for overdone by the media to the point where the common masses—that would be you, Ms. Lane: common—are desensitized by it, most often to their own detriment because they have become incapable of recognizing the danger staring at them from the eyes of a feral animal or down the barrel of a loaded gun.”
“I’m not common and you know it.” I would never admit he had a valid point. Mirror neurons did funny things to us, made us mentally live things we observed, firing whether we were performing the action ourselves or merely watching someone else perform the action, numbing us bit by bit. But who needed media to desensitize? What was I going to be like after living a few more months of my own life? Numb to everything. “Look at you. All stalky and badass.”
“Stalky. Do you think that’s a word, Ms. Lane?”
“Who was the child?” I said.
For a moment he said nothing. Then, “You ask absurd questions. What did I feel?”
“Grief.”
“What bearing would something as trivial as the child’s name or his relevance to my existence have on anything?”
“Maybe it would help me understand you.”
“He died. I felt grief. End of story.”
“But it’s not quite that simple, is it, Barrons?” I narrowed my eyes. “It’s not the end of the story.”
“Try, Ms. Lane. Just try.”
I inclined my head appreciatively. I hadn’t even really reached out to test the edges of his mind; still, he’d felt it.
“I let you off easy last night. You punched into my head.”
“You invited me. Got all rubby up against my mind.”
“I invited you to slaughter. Not to where you went from there. There’s a price for that. Don’t think you’ve escaped. I’ve merely delayed sentencing.”
I shivered on a cellular level, refused to identify the emotion behind it. “Try, Barrons,” I mocked. “Just try.”
He said nothing. I looked over at him. There was a strange tension in his upper lip. It took me a second to realize Barrons was trying not to laugh.
“You’re laughing at me,” I said indignantly.
“Look at you, all puffed up on yourself. Took a push into my head last night and now you think you’re the Shit.” He gave me a hard look. It said, Get in my skin, go as deep as I go, then you can puff about something. Until then, you’re feeble, Ms. Lane. “And, for the record, I could have stopped you.”
He could have? He wasn’t a boaster. Jericho Barrons had let me see his grief? Why? Just what the hell did that mean?
We both saw the floater at the same time.
He yanked the wheel. We barely missed the drifting IFP.
“Those things are dangerous! Where are they coming from? Are they new or are the stationary ones somehow getting cut loose?”
He kept his gaze on the road. “Looks like they’re getting cut loose by someone. Probably the Unseelie, just to add to the random chaos.”
We drove for a time in silence, occupied with private thoughts. I suspected he was still brooding about the drifting IFPs, but I’d moved on to alternately worrying and being excited about the woman we were on our way to see.
After last night’s exhausting events, I didn’t stumble to bed until nearly eight in the morning, and then I slept until Barrons pounded on my door at five o’clock this afternoon.
A sidhe-seer was waiting downstairs, he told me.
I’d tugged on jeans and a sweatshirt and rushed downstairs, expecting to find Dani.
It was Kat, exuberant with information. They’d found a woman who might talk to us, a woman who could tell us about “unholy doings at the abbey” that had happened twenty-some years ago. They’d stumbled on her by accident while scouring the countryside for survivors. She refused to leave her cottage. Wasn’t about to go anywhere near that “befouled parcel o’ land” and insisted they not breathe a single word to the Grand Mistress about her or she’d seal her lips for good. She’d waved a walking stick forged of purest iron in her gnarled fist and said she knew a thing or two about the Old Ones and was just foine on me own, so get ye awa!