Shadowfever

“It hasn’t presented itself yet.”

“I need to find a woman named Augusta O’Clare.”

“She’s dead.”

I stopped walking. “You knew her?”

“She was Tellie Sullivan’s grandmother. It was to their home Isla O’Connor asked me to take her the night the Book escaped from the abbey.”

“And?”

“You’re not surprised. Interesting. You knew I was at the abbey.”

“How well did you know my moth—Isla?”

“I met her that night. I visited her grave five days later.”

“Did she have two children?”

He shook his head. “I checked later. She had only one daughter. Tellie was babysitting her that night. I saw the child at her house when I took Isla there.”

My sister. He’d seen Alina at Tellie’s. “And you think I’m not the Unseelie King?”

“I think we don’t have all the facts.”

I felt like crying. The day I’d set foot on the Emerald Isle, the slow erosion of me had begun. I’d arrived, the beloved daughter of Jack and Rainey Lane, sister of Alina. I’d accepted being adopted. I’d been elated to discover I had Irish roots. But now Barrons had just confirmed that I wasn’t an O’Connor. He’d been there when Isla died and she’d had one child. No wonder Ryodan had been so sure. There was nothing to identify me at all but a lifetime of impossible dreams, an oubliette of impossible knowledge, and an evil Book and a ghastly Hunter with a disturbing fondness for me.

“What happened that night at the abbey? Why were you there?”

“We’d gotten wind of something. Talk in the countryside. Old women gossiping. I’ve learned to listen to old women, read them over a newspaper anytime.”

“Yet you made fun of Nana O’Reilly.”

“I didn’t want you to go back and dig deeper.”

“Why?”

“She would have told you things I didn’t want you to know.”

“Like what you are?”

“She would have given you a name for me.” He stopped, then chewed out the next words. “Inaccurate. But a name. You needed names then.”

“You think I don’t now?” The Damned, she’d called him. I wondered why.

“You’re learning. The abbey was the focus of the talk. I’d been watching it for weeks, trying to devise a way in without setting off their wards. Clever work. They sensed even me, and nothing senses me.”

“You said ‘we’d’ gotten wind. I thought you worked alone. Who is we?”

“I do. But dozens have hunted it over time. It’s been the Grail for a certain type of collector. A sorcerer in London that ended up with copies of pages that night. Mobsters. Would-be kings. Following the same leads, we glimpsed one another now and then, gave each other a wide berth as long as we thought the other might one day provide a valuable lead, although I never saw the Keltar. I suspect the queen cleaned up after them, kept her ‘hidden mantle’ well hidden.”

“So, you were outside the abbey?”

“I had no idea anything was going on inside. It was a quiet night, like any other I’d watched it. There was no commotion. No shouting, no disturbance. The Book slipped out into the night unnoticed, or bided its time and left later. I was distracted by a woman climbing out a window in the rear of the abbey, holding her side. She’d been stabbed and was badly injured. She headed straight for me, as if she knew I was there. You must get me out of here, she said. She told me to take her to Tellie Sullivan in Devonshire. That the fate of the world depended on it.”

“I didn’t think you gave a rat’s petunia about the fate of the world.”

“I don’t. She’d seen the Sinsar Dubh. I asked if it was still at the abbey and she said it had been but was no longer. I learned that night that the damned thing had been practically beneath my nose for the past thousand years.”

“I thought it was always there, since the dawn of time, long before it was an abbey.” I wasn’t above prying into his age.

“I’ve been in Ireland only for the past millennia. Before that, I was … other places. Satisfied, Ms, Lane?”

“Hardly.” I wondered why he’d chosen Ireland. Why would a man like him stay in one place? Why not travel? Did he like having a “home?” I supposed even bears and lions had dens.

“She said it killed everyone in the Haven. I had no idea what the Haven was at the time. I tried to Voice her, but she was slipping in and out of consciousness. I had nothing with which to stem her injuries. I thought she was my best bet to track it, so I put her in my car and took her to her friend. But by the time we got there, she was in a coma.”