I look at Darroc. I’d wondered what his reaction would be if I tried to take the spear. I see a look in his eyes now that was not there a short time ago. I am both a greater liability than he knew and a greater asset—and he likes it. He likes power: both having it and having a woman who has it.
I despise walking with Unseelie Princes at my back. But his comment about the Seelie amassing armies, my ignorance about the runes I hold in my hands, and the icy dark Fae sandwiching me make compelling arguments.
I tilt my head, toss my dark curls from my eyes, and look up at him. He likes it when I use his name. I think it makes him feel like he’s with Alina again. Alina was soft and Southern to the core. We Southern women know a thing or two about men. We know to use their name often, to make them feel strong, needed, as if they have the final say even when they don’t, and to always, always keep them believing they won the best prize in the only competition that will ever matter on the day we said, “I do.”
“If we get into a battle, Darroc, will you promise to return my spear so I can use it to help defend us? Will you permit that?”
He likes those words: “help defend us” and “permit.” I see it in his eyes. A smile breaks across his face. He touches my cheek and nods. “Of course, MacKayla.”
He looks at the princes and they are no longer beside me.
I’m uncertain how to return the runes. I’m not sure they can be returned.
When I toss them over my shoulders at the princes, they make sounds like exploding crystal goblets, as they sift hastily to avoid them. I hear the runes steam and hiss as they hit pavement.
I laugh.
Darroc gives me a look.
“I am behaving,” I reply sweetly. “You can’t tell me they didn’t have that coming.”
I’m getting better at reading him. He finds me amusing. I wipe my palms on my leather pants, trying to get rid of the bloody residue from the runes. I try my shirt. But it’s no use; the red discoloration has set.
When Darroc takes my hand and leads me down the alley between Barrons Books and Baubles and Barrons’ garage, which houses the car collection I used to covet, I don’t look to either side. I keep my gaze trained straight ahead.
I’ve lost Alina, failed to save Christian, killed Barrons, am becoming intimate with my sister’s lover. I hurt Dani to drive her away, and now I’ve teamed up with the Unseelie army.
Eyes on the prize, there’s no turning back.
10
Snow begins to fall, carpeting the night in a soft white hush. We march across it, a stain of Unseelie, stomping, crawling, slithering toward Temple Bar.
There are castes behind me that I’ve seen only once before—the night Darroc brought them through the dolmen. I have no desire to inspect them any more closely than I did that night. Some of the Unseelie aren’t so bad to look at. The Rhino-boys are disgusting, but they don’t make you feel … dirty. Others … well, even the way they move makes your skin crawl, makes you feel slimy where their eyes linger.
As we pass a streetlamp, I glance at a flyer, drooping limply on it: The Dani Daily, 97 days AWC.
The headline brags that she killed a Hunter. I put myself in Dani’s head, to figure out the date. It takes me a minute, but I get it—after the walls crashed. I perform a rapid calculation. The last day I was in Dublin was January 12.
Ninety-seven days from Halloween—the night the walls crashed—is February 5.
Which means I’ve been gone at least twenty-four days, probably longer. The flyer was faded, worn by the elements. Much more snow and I’d never have seen it.
However long I’ve been gone, Dublin hasn’t changed much.
Although many of the streetlamps that were ripped from the concrete and destroyed have been replaced and the broken lights repaired, the power grids are still down. Here and there, generators hum, dead giveaways of life barricaded in buildings or holed up underground.
We pass the red façade of the Temple Bar, of the bar district. I glance in. I can’t help myself. I loved the place BWC—before the walls crashed.
Now it’s a dark shell, with shattered windows, overturned tables and chairs, and papery husks of human remains. From the way they’re piled, I know the patrons were crammed inside, huddled together when the end came.
I remember the way the Temple Bar looked the first time I saw it, brightly lit, with people and music spilling from open doors into the cobbled streets of the corner beyond. Guys had whistled at me. I’d forgotten my grief over Alina for a blessed second or two. Then, of course, hated myself for forgetting.
I can almost hear the laughter, the lilt of Irish voices. They’re all dead now, like Alina and Barrons.
I remember spending the long week before Halloween walking the streets of Dublin for hours on end, from dawn ’til dusk, feeling helpless, worthless, for all my supposed sidhe-seer skills. I wasn’t sure any of us would survive Halloween, so I’d tried to cram as much living into those last days as possible.
I’d chatted up street vendors and played backgammon with toothless old men who spoke a version of English so heavily distorted by dialect and gums that I’d understood only every fifth word, but it hadn’t mattered. They’d been delighted by a pretty girl’s attention, and I’d hungered for paternal comfort.
I’d visited the famous tourist hot spots. I’d eaten in dives and slammed back shots of whiskey with anyone who’d do them with me.
I’d fallen in love with the city I couldn’t protect.
After the Unseelie had escaped their prison and savaged her—dark, burned, and broken—I’d been determined to see her rebuilt.
Now I longed only to replace her.
“Do you sense it, MacKayla?” Darroc asks.
I’ve been keeping my sidhe-seer senses as closed as possible. I’m tired and have no desire to find the Sinsar Dubh. Not until I know everything he knows.
I open my senses warily and turn the “volume” up to a two on a scale of one to ten. My sidhe-seer senses are picking up the essence of countless things Fae, but none of them is the Sinsar Dubh. “No.”
“Are there many Fae?”
“The city is crawling with them.”
“Light or Dark Court?”
“It doesn’t work like that. I can only pick up Fae, not their allegiance or caste.”
“How many?”
I adjust the volume to three and a half. A tenth this much Fae in close proximity used to have me holding my stomach and trying not to puke. Now I feel charged by it. More alive than I want to be. “They’re on all sides of us, in twos and threes. They’re above us, on the rooftops and in the skies. I don’t get the feeling that they’re watching us, more that they’re watching everything.” Are they, too, hunting my Book? I’ll kill them all. It’s mine.