It happened again and I gaped. The silver reflection of the mirror had just shivered.
I backed down the stairs, never taking my eyes off it. From a safe vantage in the hallway outside the room, I watched it for a few minutes, but the event didn’t reoccur.
I pushed the door open all the way and stepped into the room. It smelled like Barrons. I inhaled deeply. A trace of dark, spicy aftershave lingered in the air, and for a moment I was in the caves beneath the Burren again, where I’d almost died last week, when the vampire Mallucé had abducted me and taken me deep into the labyrinthine tunnels, to torture me to death as vengeance for a gruesome injury I’d inflicted on him not long after I’d arrived in Dublin. I was lying on the ground, beneath Barrons’ wild, electric body, ripping his shirt open, and splaying my hands over the hard, muscled abdomen tattooed black and crimson in intricate, alien designs. Smelling him all around me. Feeling like he was inside me, or I was inside him. Wondering how much more inside him I’d get if I let him inside me.
Neither of us had mentioned that night. I doubted he ever would. I sure wasn’t going to bring it up. It disturbed me on levels I didn’t pretend to understand.
I focused on the room. I’d searched his study once before. Peered into every drawer, looked in the closet, even snooped behind the books on the shelves hunting for I don’t know what, any secret I could dig up on the man. I’d found nothing. He maintains an antiseptic existence. I doubt he permits so much as a hair to lie around that might be used for DNA analysis.
I walked over to the mirror and traced my fingertips across the glass. Elegantly framed, it filled the wall from floor to ceiling, and was hard and smooth, made of nothing that could shiver.
It shivered beneath my fingertips. This time my sidhe-seer senses trumpeted alarm. Yanking my hand away, I stumbled back against the desk with a muffled cry.
The surface was now shivering in earnest.
Did Barrons know about this? I thought wildly. Of course, he did. Barrons knew everything. It was in his bookstore. But what if he didn’t? What if Barrons wasn’t as omniscient as I believed? What if he was dupable, and someone—like, oh, say, the Lord Master—had planted some kind of spelled mirror in his path, knowing his penchant for certain antiquities . . . and Barrons had bought it, and the crimson robed leader of the Unseelie was spying on him through it, or something? How had I failed to sense it? Was it Fae or not?
Smoky runes appeared on the surface, and the perimeter of the glass darkened abruptly to cobalt, framing the mirror with a three-inch-wide border of pure black.
It was definitely Fae! The black edges were a dead giveaway. If they’d been visible earlier, I’d have known instantly what the mirror was, but the true nature of the glass had been camouflaged behind some kind of illusion that even my sidhe-seer senses hadn’t been able to penetrate. I’d been in this room half a dozen times, and never gotten the faintest tingle. Who could craft such flawless illusion?
This was no mere mirror. It was one of the glasses fashioned by the Unseelie King himself as a means of moving between the realms of Man and Fae. It was part of the Unseelie Hallow known as the Sifting Silvers, and it was in my bookstore! What was it doing here? What else might be concealed in the store from me, hiding in plain sight?
I’d seen part of this Hallow before. Nearly a dozen of the eerie silver apertures with black edges had adorned the walls of the Lord Master’s house at 1247 LaRuhe, in the Dark Zone. There’d been terrible things in them. Things I still had nightmares about. Things like . . . well, like that hideously deformed thing currently morphing into shape before my very eyes.
When I’d told Barrons about the mirrors I’d seen at the Lord Master’s house, he’d asked if they’d been “open.” If this was what he’d meant, they had been. When they were open, could the monsters inside them come out? If so, how did one “close” a Sifting Silver? Could it be as simple as breaking it? Could it be broken? Before I could glance around for something to try it with, the thing of stunted limbs and enormous teeth was gone.
I exhaled shakily. I now understood why BB&B had that strange sense of spatial distortion. I’d felt a similar thing in the Lord Master’s house, the day I’d gone into the Dark Zone and discovered my sister’s ex-boyfriend was Dublin’s Big-Bad, but I hadn’t put two and two together. These mirrors, these dimension connecting portals, somehow affected the space around them.
Now something else was coming, moving deep in the glass, whirling silver gusts back with its inexorable stride. I retreated to a safer distance.
Dark shapes drifted over the surface of the shivering mirror. Shadows that lacked definition yet tugged at primal fears. It was one of those times when running probably would have been a really good idea, but the problem was, I didn’t have anyplace to run to. This was my sanctuary, my safe haven. If I couldn’t stay here, I couldn’t be anywhere.
It was closer now, the thing that was coming.
I stared into the mirror, down the narrow, silvery lane fading into blackness at the edges, lined with skeletal trees, cloaked in wisps of jaundiced fog, littered with monstrous creatures forming and re-forming in the mist. It reeked of wasteland worse than a Dark Zone, and I somehow knew the air inside the mirror was a chilling, killing cold, physically and psychically. Only a hellish, inhuman half-life could endure in such a place.
As the dark shape glided down the nightmarish path, the shadow-demons reared back with soundless screams.
More smoky runes materialized on the shivering glass. I couldn’t tell if what was coming walked upright, or stalked on all fours. Perhaps it scuttled on dozens of claws. I strained my eyes trying to identify the shape of it, but the sickly fog concealed its attributes.
I knew only that it was huge, dark, dangerous . . . and almost here.
I exited the room on tiptoe, and pulled the door shut, leaving the smallest of slivers through which to peer, braced to yank it shut and run like hell.
The mirror belched an icy gust of air.
It was here!
Long black coat fluttering, Jericho Barrons stepped out of the glass.
He was covered with blood that had iced to crimson frost on his hands, face, and clothing. His skin was pale from extreme cold, and his midnight eyes blazed with an inhuman, feral light.
In his arms he carried the brutally savaged, bloody body of a young woman.
I didn’t need to feel her pulse to know that she was dead.