“I’m nearly done. I’ll be there tomorrow.” The line went dead.
Three o’clock in the morning.
I shot straight up in bed.
Heart hammering. Nerves screaming.
My cell phone was ringing.
“What the feck?” Dani snapped when I answered. “You sleep like the fecking dead up there! I been calling you for five fecking minutes!”
“Are you okay?” I demanded, shivering. I’d been in that cold place again. Shadowy dream remnants slipped away but the chill remained.
“Look out your window, Mac.”
I pushed out of bed, grabbed my spear, and hurried to the window.
My bedroom, like the last one that Barrons trashed, is on the rear of the building, so I can watch the back alley out my window, and keep tabs on the Shades.
Dani was standing down there, in the narrow path of light between the bookstore and Barrons’ garage, cell phone propped between her skinny shoulder and ear, grinning up at me. Shades watched her hungrily from their roost in the shadows.
She was wearing a long black leather coat that was straight out of a vampire movie, and much too big through the shoulders. As I watched, she slid something long and alabaster and shiningly beautiful out from under it.
I gasped. It could only be the Sword of Light.
“Let’s go kick some fairy ass.” Dani laughed, and the look in her eyes was anything but thirteen years old.
“Where’s Rowena?” I dropped my PJ bottoms and thrust a leg into jeans, teeth chattering. I hate my Cold Place dreams.
“Ro’s away. She left on a plane this afternoon. Couldn’t take the sword with her. I snuck out. You wanna talk or you wanna come slay some Unseelie, Mac?”
Was she kidding? This was a sidhe-seer wet dream. Instead of sitting around, thinking, talking, researching—I could get out there and do something! I thumbed off my phone, layered two T-shirts beneath a sweater and a jacket, tugged on boots, grabbed my MacHalo on the way out and strapped it on, wishing I had one for her, too. No matter; if we ended up in the dark somewhere, I’d stick to her like sidhe-seer glue.
We took down eighty-seven Unseelie that night.
Then we lost count.
FIFTEEN
I spent most of the day before Halloween cleaning up after the prior night’s festivities. Unlike the aftermath of fun back home in Georgia, the remnants of a rollicking good time in Dublin weren’t sticky plastic cups, crusts of half-eaten pizza, and cigarette butts dropped in beer bottles, but dead monsters and body parts.
Problem: when you kill a Fae, they cease projecting glamour, and contrary to pop culture’s inane belief, the corpses do not disintegrate. They remain here, in our world, perfectly visible to all. In the pleasure of the kill, I forgot the corpses. So did Dani. It’s not like they suddenly become visible to me when they die. They’re always visible to me.
I learned from the morning news about the discovery of “movie props displayed in gruesome fashion around Dublin,” rubbery monsters from the set of some “in-production horror movie, arranged as a prank, and people mustn’t be alarmed, but call the Garda; they’ve designated manpower to clean . . . er, pick them up.”
My phone was ringing before the spot was over. It was Rowena. “Clean them up, you bloody imbecile!”
I was eating breakfast. “They just said the Garda are taking care of it,” I muttered around a mouthful, mostly to irritate her. I’d been thinking the same thing. I needed to tidy up, and quickly. I was ashamed of myself for not realizing what I was doing.
“Did you leave a trail of bodies that can be traced to you?”
I winced. Probably. “I didn’t know you cared, Ro,” I said coolly.
“Was Dani with you last night?” she demanded.
“No.”
“You did all that by yourself?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How many?”
“I lost count. Over a hundred.”
“Why?”
“I’m sick of doing nothing.”
She was quiet for several moments, then, “I want you at the abbey for the ritual tomorrow.”
I almost choked on a bite of crusty muffin top. That was the last thing I’d expected her to say. I’d been bracing for a lengthy accounting of my many failings, and had been contemplating hanging up before she had the chance to begin. Now I was glad I hadn’t. “Why?”
There was another long silence. “There is strength in numbers,” she said finally. “You are a powerful sidhe-seer.” Whether I like it or not remained unsaid, but floated in the air.
Like the MacKeltars, she wanted all the power that she could get at her disposal.
I’d been thinking of crashing it anyway. I felt drawn to fight with them. If they were making a stand, I wanted to be there. I didn’t feel drawn to join the MacKeltars the same way. I guess blood tells. Now I had an invitation. “What time?”
“The ceremony begins precisely one hour after sunset.”
I didn’t need to consult the calendar hanging in my bedroom upstairs to know the sun would rise tomorrow at 7:23 A.M. and set at 4:54 P.M. Nature rules me in ways she never used to. I can’t wait for the long, bright days of summer again, and not just because of my love of the sun. These short, dreary days of fall and winter frighten me. December 22, the Winter Solstice, will be the shortest day of the year, at seven hours, twenty-eight minutes, and forty-nine seconds of daylight. The sun will rise at 8:39 and set at 4:08. That gives the Shades fifteen hours, thirty-two minutes, and eleven seconds to come out and play. More than twice as much as humans get. “When will we know for sure it worked?”
“Shortly after we open the orb,” she said, but she didn’t sound certain of that. It was unsettling to hear doubt in Rowena’s voice.
“I’ll think about it.” That was a lie. I’d most definitely be there. “What’s in it for me?”
“That you ask such a thing only reinforces my opinion of you.” She hung up.
I finished my muffin and coffee, then headed out to sweep up breadcrumbs, and keep the monsters from my door.
I stuffed Unseelie corpses in trash Dumpsters, hid them in abandoned buildings, and even managed to shove two into a concrete pour on a construction site when the workers took a coffee break.
I dragged the ones closest to the bookstore into the nearby Dark Zone. Even in broad daylight, it was hard for me to make myself go in there. I could feel Shades in all directions, the pulsating darkness of their voracious, terrible hunger. Where did they go? Were they wedged in tiny dark crannies of the bricks, watching me? Did they slither off underground? Were they piled up in dark corners inside the decrepit buildings? How small could they get? Might one be hiding in that empty soda can, at just the right angle to avoid the light? I’d never been a kick-the-can girl, and wasn’t about to start now.