Shadowfever

Then he’d splashed ice water on me.

For what? Leaving? I changed the sign because I don’t plan to be here much longer.

He’d walked off without making innuendo or extending an invitation.

He’d just left.

Giving me a tiny taste of what it felt like. Barrons walking off, leaving me alone.

Would he really go away for good when this was done? Vanish without saying good-bye the moment he had his spell?

I trudged into my fifth-floor bedroom and threw myself across my bed. I usually pretend there’s nothing strange about sometimes finding my room on the fourth floor and sometimes on the fifth. I’ve become so inured to “weird” that the only thing that worries me much anymore is the possibility that my bedroom might one day disappear entirely. What if I’m in it when it goes? Will I go, too? Or be stuck in a wall or floor as it makes its grand exit, yelling my head off? As long as it’s still somewhere in the store, I feel reasonably secure with my parameters. After the way my life has turned out, if it does disappear, I’ll probably just sigh, gear up, and go hunting for it.

It’s hard to lose the things you’ve come to think of as yours.

Was all this going to be over soon? Sure, we’d screwed up tonight, but I wouldn’t screw up next time. We were meeting at Chester’s tomorrow to make a new plan. We had our team; we’d keep trying. Conceivably, we could have the Sinsar Dubh stowed securely away in a matter of days.

And what would happen then?

Would V’lane and the queen and all the Seelie leave our world and go back to their court? Would they manage to get the walls back up somehow and scrape the Unseelie blight from my world?

Would Barrons and his eight close up Chester’s and disappear?

What would I do, with no V’lane, no Unseelie to fight, no Barrons?

Ryodan had made it clear that no one was allowed to know about them and live. They’d been hiding their immortal existence among us for thousands of years. Would they try to kill me? Or just leave and remove all trace of evidence that they’d ever been here?

Could I search the world over and never find any of them again? Would I age and begin to wonder if I’d imagined those crazy, passionate, dark days in Dublin?

How could I age? Who would I marry? Who would ever understand me? Would I live out the rest of my life alone? Become as cantankerous and cryptic and strange as the man who’d made me this way?

I began to pace.

I’d been so worried about my problems—who he was, who I was, who Alina’s killer was—that I’d never looked into the future and tried to project the likely outcome of events. When you’re fighting every day simply for the chance to have a future, it’s kind of hard to get around to imagining what that future might be like. Thinking about how to live is a luxury enjoyed by people who know they’re going to live.

I didn’t want to be alone in Dublin when this was all over!

What would I do? Run the bookstore, surrounded by memories for the rest of my life as those of us who remained painstakingly rebuilt the city? I couldn’t stay here if he didn’t. Even if he left, he’d still be here, everywhere I looked. It would almost be worse than him dying. Barrons’ residue would stalk this place as vividly as the concubine and the king lived in the White Mansion’s inky corridors. I’d know he was out there, forever beyond my reach. Glory days: achieved and gone by twenty-three, like a has-been high school football player sitting in his double-wide, chugging beer with his friends at thirty, two kids, a nagging wife, a family van, and a grudge against life.

I slumped down on my bed.

Everywhere I turned, I’d see ghosts.

Would Dani’s ghost haunt me in the streets? Would I make that happen? Would I go that far? Premeditated murder of a girl who was little more than a child?

You choose what you can live with, he’d said. And what you can’t live without.

It had never occurred to me that the outcome of my time in Dublin might be a future of living in a bookstore without Barrons ever again, walking the streets filled with my—

“Oh, feck it, she was my sister,” I growled, punching my pillow. I didn’t give a damn if we weren’t born to each other: Alina had been my best friend, my heart-sister, and that made us sisters any way I looked at it.

“Where was I?” I muttered. Ah, yes, streets filled with my sister’s ghost, compounded by the ghost of the teenager I’d come to think of as my little sister, who’d been involved with killing my sister. Would I walk the streets with those phantoms every day?

What an awful, empty life that would be!

“Alina, what should I do?” God, I missed her. I missed her like it was yesterday. I heaved myself up from bed, grabbed my backpack, dropped cross-legged on the floor, pulled out one of her photo albums, and opened the sunny yellow cover.

There she was with Mom and Dad at her college graduation.

There we were, at the lake with a group of friends, drinking beer and playing volleyball like we were going to live forever. Young, so damned young. Had I ever really been that young?

Tears slipped down my cheeks as I turned the pages.

There she was on the green at Trinity College, with new friends.

Out in the pubs, dancing and waving to the camera.

There was Darroc, watching her, his gaze possessive, hot.

There she was looking up at him, completely unguarded. I caught my breath. Goose bumps rose on my arms and neck.

She had loved him.

I could see it. I knew my sister. She’d been crazy about him. He’d made her feel what Barrons made me feel. Bigger than I could possibly be, larger than life, on fire with possibilities, ecstatic to be breathing, impatient for the next moment together. She’d been happy in those last months, so alive and happy.

And if she’d lived?

I closed my eyes.

I knew my sister.

Darroc had been right. She would have gone to him. She would have found a way to accept it. To love him anyway. We were so fatally flawed.

But what if … what if her love might have changed him? Who could say it wouldn’t have? What if she’d gotten pregnant and there was suddenly a baby Alina, helpless and pink and cooing? Might love have softened his edges, his need for revenge? It had worked greater miracles. Maybe I shouldn’t think of her as flawed but as a wrench in the works in a good way, who might have changed the outcome for the better. Who could say?

I turned the page and my cheeks flamed.