Part 8 (1/2)

I breathe a little easier. ”Good, Kat. You?”

”Why weren't you at the abbey the night we battled the h.o.a.r Frost King? We could have used your support, and that's for sure,” she says in her soft, Irish lilt.

There it is, the knife through my already perforated heart. Nice to know I wasn't being paranoid, after all. Leave it to Kat to be so direct.

”Barrons and I were in the Silvers. I didn't get word until it was over. I'm so sorry, Kat.”

Her sharp gaze moves from my left eye to my right and back, and she slowly nods. ”It's as well. We lost many of our sisters that night. We can't afford to lose you. Speaking of losing-have you seen Dani? She's not been by the abbey since we defeated the h.o.a.r Frost King. I've had girls out searching but they've found no trace of her and I've not seen a single of her papers. It's as if she's simply vanished.”

I don't bat a lash. ”I thought she was staying with you.”

”We were arguing that night about where she should live. I believed she was trying to make a point by staying away, but the longer she's gone the more I worry. These are dangerous times, even for her. Would you mind keeping an eye out? And if you see her, tell her she's sorely missed. I want her to come home.”

”Of course.” I want her to come home, too.

”I'm hoping you'll drop by the abbey sometime, Mac. Spend a night with us, or a week if you've the mind. I've been wanting to hear the tale of how you managed to bring the Sinsar Dubh to us.” She pauses then adds, ”There's another thing I'd like to be discussing with you, if you've the time. About Cruce. Seeing how you know more about Fae princes than any of us.”

”His cage is holding, right?” That's another of my recurring nightmares. Cruce gets out, somehow turns me Pri-ya again, and I run off with him to another world where we get down to populating it with little book-babies. Seriously. Books with feet and arms that cry all the time and want some kind of milk I don't have. My dreams have been beyond warped lately.

”Of course.” She pauses again. ”But there are other concerns I'd prefer to discuss in private. If you'll just come to the abbey, you'll see what I mean. This thaw ... I thought when the fire-world threatening our home was gone ... och, but then it didn't and it turns out it wasn't ...” She trails off and for an instant her composure slips.

I glimpse an unexpected uncertainty in her and think, Oh no, not her, too. Coming into sudden power can do funny things to you if you care deeply about the world around you, and we both do. It's like suddenly getting a Murcielago LP 640, V-12 with a testy clutch when you're used to a six-cylinder Mercedes. You drive badly at first, jerky on the gas and brake, don't trust your own feet, sometimes even rear-end the folks in front of you when you try to start from a stop, until you get a feel for it. Or, like me today, crash into a wall and decimate whatever's in the way.

”Kat, what's wrong at the abbey? What's going on?”

”You'll just have to-” She glances past me. ”Barrons.”

”Katarina.”

I feel his energy behind me, s.e.xual, electric. Every cell in my body comes alive when he's near. He moves past us, into the alcoved entry of the bookstore, and I s.h.i.+ver with desire. My need for s.e.x seems directly proportionate to how much emotion I repress, and I'm repressing violently today. When I first came to Dublin, I talked and probed and poked into everything, splashed my feelings all over the place, like the rainbow colors of my wardrobe. Now I wear black and let almost nothing I feel show.

Until Barrons undresses me. Then I explode. I vent the fire and fury of everything I feel on him and he blows it right back at me, a hot, dangerous sirocco that levels and reshapes, and it binds us in a sacred place that needs no sun in the sky, no moon or stars. Just us.

The bell tinkles as he opens the door. I love that sound and imagine it chimes Welcome to Mac's home each time it rings.

”The Unseelie Princes will be coming back with him,” I warn Kat as I watch him go.

”And one Seelie Prince who is fool enough to claim to be king,” Barrons growls as the door closes behind him.

”Can he really control them?” Kat asks.

She's visibly nervous. I don't blame her. The Unseelie Princes are deadly. The two joining us today rode the Wild Hunt in ancient times with two others of their kind, and became renowned far and wide as the fabled Hors.e.m.e.n of the Apocalypse. Cruce is War. I suspect Christian is becoming Death, which means Pestilence and Famine are soon to be my houseguests. Lovely. ”He says he can keep them neutralized inside the store.”

Kat says flatly, ”You do realize he's not there, right?”

”Excuse me?” The man is certainly ”there” enough for me. All six feet three of him and two hundred forty-five pounds of dense, solid, rough-and-ready muscle.

”Barrons. He's like Ryodan. I feel nothing when I reach for either of them with my gift. It's more than a void of emotion, there is no existence there. The s.p.a.ce they occupy is blank.”

”Maybe they can block you. Erect a s.h.i.+eld around themselves. Barrons knows wards like n.o.body's business.” Okay, he seriously needs to teach me that trick. I'm blocking with everything I've got, yet I suspect if Kat decided to probe me, I'd be in a world of trouble.

”I can also discern the presence of wards, Mac. Nothing just walked out that door. A complete absence of anything recognizable as life.”

”Perhaps their wards are beyond our perception.” I want to get off this topic of a.s.sessing people with her gift. I don't want her to think about doing it to me. ”Kat, I'd love to come to the abbey. How's next weekend?” I'll find some excuse or another to no-show. I take her arm and begin gently steering her back and up the stairs, to the tables Barrons arranged for the meeting. ”Hey, would you like something to drink? I've got soda, sweet tea, and water. I even brought some milk back last time I went through the Silvers,” I lie. Barrons brought it from Chester's and I feel a little guilty getting so many perks. But not too guilty to drink it.

”Milk? Does it taste like ours?”

”Sure does. A little creamier.”

”I'd love a gla.s.s!” she says, and we both laugh because the things we used to take for granted are now luxuries. That's the way it goes when the world falls apart.

You never appreciate what you've got till it's gone.

Barrons Books & Baubles has spatial issues. I suspect the Silver connecting the store to hidden levels beneath the garage where Barrons has his lair is partially responsible, but I doubt it's the only thing affecting this particular point of longitude and lat.i.tude. I sometimes dream an ancient G.o.d or demon coils slumbering in the foundation.

BB&B is four stories most days but other days five, and on rare occasions lately, seven. On Tuesday the mural on the ceiling was roughly seventy feet above my head, today it seems a quarter mile, minuscule in the distance. The harder I try to focus on it, the more difficult it is to see. I don't understand why anyone would paint such a blurry scene on the ceiling. I used to ask Barrons about it but never got an answer. One day I'll hunt down construction scaffolds so I can lie on my back beneath it and figure out what the darn thing is.

During my first months in Dublin, I stayed in the residential half of the bookstore and grew accustomed to my borrowed bedroom s.h.i.+fting floors. It even got to the point where hunting for it was kind of fun.

I expect nothing to be easy in these walls. And here is where I've known the finest hours of my life.

I stand with Kat at the bal.u.s.trade that overlooks the bookstore, facing the front entrance. The main room is about a hundred feet long by sixty feet wide. The upper floors are half the depth of the store, accessed by an intricate, curving, red-carpeted double staircase that reminds me of the Lello bookstore in Portugal. On the upper levels are a fabulous array of antiquities and treasures in gla.s.s cases or mounted on a wall. Here a plaque of the Green Man sees all, there an ancient sword s.h.i.+nes above a war-battered, tarnished s.h.i.+eld. I sometimes wonder if all these ”baubles” are really Barrons's possessions collected during various centuries of his life.

Gleaming bookshelves line the perimeter walls from base to cove molding. Behind elegant banisters, narrow pa.s.sages permit access, and polished ladders slide on oiled rollers from one section to the next.

As I gaze down, to the right is the magazine rack, fully stocked with last October's editions near more freestanding bookcases. To the left, the old-fas.h.i.+oned cash register sits waiting to ring up a sale, silver bell tinkling, and there's my pink iPod on a Bose SoundDock ready to play ”Bad Moon Rising” or ”Tubthumping” or ”It's a Wonderful World.”

Or maybe ”Good Girl Gone Bad.”

When the Unseelie Princes enter, flanked by Barrons and Ryodan, I inhale sharply and go rigid.

CRUSH THEM DESTROY THEM IMPALE THEM ON POLES, my inner Sinsar Dubh trumpets.

I close my eyes and dredge up one of the tricks I've learned. Occupy my head so thoroughly with something else that the Book can't get through.

When I was young Daddy used to read poems to me. The more lyrical and musical, the more I'd enjoyed them, and I guess I always had a morbid bent, and he must have, too, because he'd indulged me, on soft summer evenings in the kitchen while Mom did dishes and listened, shaking her head at our choices. I'd understood little of the meaning, just liked the way the words flowed. ”The Cremation of Sam McGee” had charmed me. I'd found ”A Dream Within a Dream” hypnotic, ”The Bells” mesmerizing, I'd obsessed over T. S. Eliot's ”Ash Wednesday” and in seventh grade recited ”The Raven” for a school project, briefly earning for myself the label of nerd until I'd taken extreme fas.h.i.+on measures to change that. Now, looking back, I can see it was a grim choice, but at the time, grief and brutality had possessed the cartoonish proportions of childhood. It had taken weeks to commit the many complex stanzas to my brain.

Remember what the princes did to you, sweet thing, how they ripped you apart and turned you into a mindless animal. As if I could ever forget, the Sinsar Dubh slams me with images so graphic they give me an instant headache.

I block them, focusing instead on how Daddy taught me to break down the poem to memorize it: eighteen stanzas of six lines each, most comprised of eight syllables with a hypnotic placement of stressed syllables followed by unstressed. Trochaic octameter was what he'd called it. I only knew it was fun to say and he was proud of me for learning it, and I'd have done pretty much anything to make Jack Lane proud.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore- Break them, the Book demands, force them to their knees before you, make them call you Queen.

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

The rhythm of the poem captivates me as it always did, and I feel like a child again, whole and good and loved.

” 'Tis some visitor,” I muttered, ”tapping at my chamber door-only this and nothing more.”

Unlike Poe, I don't have to open the door. I can slide the dead bolt.