“Sale price of one hundred and thirty-two million dollars, Ms. Lane,” Barrons said. “The estate was originally built for an Arab oil prince who died before it was completed. At forty-eight thousand square feet, it’s larger than the private residence at Buckingham Palace. It has thirteen en-suite bedrooms, an athletic center, four guesthouses, five pools, a floor of inlaid gold, an underground garage, and a helipad. ”
“How many people live here?”
“One. ”
How sad. All this and no one to share it with. What was the point?
“It has state-of-the-art security, two dozen guards, and a panic room in case of terrorist attacks. ” He sounded perversely pleased by those facts, as if he relished the challenge.
“And just how do you plan on getting us in there?” I asked dryly.
“I called in a favor. The guards won’t be a problem. But make no mistake, Ms. Lane. It still won’t be easy. The security system must be disarmed, and there are half a dozen wards to be broken between us and him. I suspect the old man will be wearing the amulet. We may be here for some time. ”
We made our way down the hill, and were nearly to the house when I spotted the first body, partially concealed by a bank of thick shrubbery. For a moment, I couldn’t make out what it was. Then I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Gagging, I turned away.
It was one of the guards, not simply dead, but badly mutilated.
“Fuck,” Barrons cursed. Then his arm was behind my knees, and I was over his shoulder, and he was running with me, away from the house. He didn’t stop until we’d reached one of the outlying guesthouses.
He dropped me to my feet and pushed me back into the shadows beneath the eaves. “Don’t move until I return for you, Ms. Lane. ”
“Tell me that was not the favor you called in, Barrons,” I said in a low, careful voice. If it was, he and I were through. I knew Barrons wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up, but I had to believe such butchery was beyond him.
“They were supposed to be unconscious, that’s all. ” His face was grim in the moonlight. When I would have spoken again, he pressed a finger to my lips then moved off into the night.
I huddled in the shadows of the guesthouse for a small eternity until he returned, though by my watch a mere ten minutes had passed.
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His voice preceded him. “Whoever did it is gone, Ms. Lane. ” He stepped into view and I smothered a sigh of relief. The only thing I hate worse than the dark is being alone in it. I didn’t used to be that way, but I am now and it seems to be getting worse. “The guards have been dead for hours,” he told me. “The security system is disarmed and the house is wide open. Come. ”
We moved directly for the front entrance, not bothering with stealth. We passed four more bodies on the way. The front doors were open, and beyond them I could see an opulent round grand foyer with a dual staircase that unfurled gracefully up each side and met in a landing suspended beneath a domed skylight hung with a glittering chandelier. I stared straight ahead. The marble floor had once been polished pearl. It was now splashed with crimson, strewn with bodies, some of them women. The housekeeping staff had not been spared.
“Do you sense the amulet, Ms. Lane? Are you picking up anything?”
I closed my eyes to shut out the carnage, and stretched my sidhe-seer senses, but carefully, very carefully. I no longer thought of my ability to sense OOPs as a benign talent. Last night, after finishing yet another book on the paranormal—ESP: Fact or Fiction?—I’d been unable to sleep so I’d lain there thinking about what I was, what it meant, wondering where the ability came from, why some people had it and others didn’t. Wondering what was different about me, what had been different about Alina. The authors contended that those with extrasensory abilities utilized parts of their brains that were dormant in other people.
Wondering if that was true, and bored out of my gourd—late-night TV is lousy in any country—I’d fingered my spear and gone poking around in my own skull.
It hadn’t been hard to find the part of me that was different, and now that I knew it was there, I couldn’t believe I’d been unaware of it for twenty-two years. There was a place in my head that felt as old as the earth, as ancient as time, always wakeful, ever watching. When I focused on it, it pulsed hotly, like embers in my brain. Curious, I’d played with it a little. I could fan it into a fire, make it expand outward, consume my skull, and pass beyond it. Like the element it resembled, it knew no morality, didn’t understand the word. Earth, fire, wind, and water are what they are. Power. At best, impartial. At worst, destructive. I shaped it. I controlled it. Or didn’t.
Fire isn’t good or bad. It just burns.
Now I skimmed it, a stone skipping the surface of a placid sea; a deep, dark sea I intended to keep placid. There would be no stirring of still waters on my watch.
I opened my eyes. “If it’s here, I can’t feel it. ”
“Could it be somewhere in the house and you just aren’t close enough?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, Barrons,” I said unhappily. “It’s a big estate. How many rooms are there? How thick are the walls?”
“One hundred and nine, and very. ” A muscle worked in his jaw. “I need to know if it’s still here, Ms. Lane. ”
“What are the odds of that?”
“Stranger things have happened. Perhaps the massacre was the result of a foiled robbery attempt. ”
It certainly looked like an expression of rage. Incensed, inhuman fury.
I told him the truth, although I knew it would seal my fate and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was pass through those doors. “I couldn’t sense Mallucé’s stone until I was in the same room with it. I didn’t pick up on the spear until I was above it, and I only sensed the amulet once I was inside the bomb shelter door. ” I closed my eyes.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Lane, but—”
“—I know, you need me to walk the house,” I finished for him. I opened my eyes and notched my chin higher. If there was the slightest chance the amulet could still be in there, we had to look.
And I’d thought the graveyard was bad. At least those bodies had been bloodless, embalmed, and tidily interred.
Barrons made the rooms more bearable for me as we went, by going ahead, entering them first, draping the bodies with sheets or blankets, and when none were available, stowing them behind furniture. Only after he’d “secured” a room, did he exit it and send me in alone, the better to focus on my search, he said.
While I appreciated his efforts, I’d already seen too much and frankly, it was hard not to glance behind a sofa or a chair, at the bodies he hadn’t covered. They exerted the same gruesome hold over me as the husks left by the Shades, as if some wholly irrational part of me thought by staring long and hard enough, immersing myself in the horror of it, I might learn something that would help me avoid the same fate.
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“They have no defensive wounds, Barrons,” I said, exiting another room.
He was leaning up against the wall a few doors down, arms crossed over his chest. He was getting bloody from moving the bodies. I focused on his face, not the stains on his hands, or the dark, wet splotches on his clothes. His eyes were intensely bright. He seemed harder, larger, more electric than ever. I could smell the blood on him, the metallic tinge of old pennies. When our gazes locked, I jerked. If there was a man behind those eyes, I was a Fae. Jet, bottomless pools regarded me; on those glossy obsidian surfaces tiny Macs stared back at me. His gaze dropped, raked over my clingy catsuit, then worked back up very slowly.
“They were unconscious when they were slaughtered,” he said finally.
“Then why kill them?”
“It would appear for the pleasure of it, Ms. Lane. ”
“What kind of monster does that?”
“All kinds, Ms. Lane. All kinds. ”
We continued our search. Whatever fascination the house might once have held for me was gone. I hurried through an art gallery that would have made any major metropolitan museum curator swoon with envy, and felt no more than the bitterness of the man who’d been driven to acquire the spectacular collection only to hang it in a windowless, vaultlike room where none but him could ever see it. I passed over a solid gold floor, and saw only the blood.
Barrons found the old man—who’d paid over a billion dollars for the amulet, blissfully ignorant that he’d not only not postponed his death, but had just spent an obscene amount of money to hasten it—dead in his bed, his head half ripped off from the force with which the amulet had been torn from his neck, chain marks scored into the shredded skin of his throat. So much for longevity; by trying to cheat death, he’d succeeded only in expediting it.
Our search was fruitless. Whatever had once been housed there—the amulet, perhaps other OOPs—was gone. Someone had beaten us to it. The Unseelie Hallow was out there in the world, amplifying the will of a new owner, and we were back at square one. I’d really wanted that amulet. If it was capable of impacting reality, and I could figure out how to use it…well, the possibilities were endless. At the least, it could protect me; at best it could help me get my revenge.
“Are we done here, Barrons?” I asked, as we descended the rear stairs. I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t get out of the marble mausoleum fast enough.
“There’s a basement, Ms. Lane. ”
We turned at the bottom of the final flight, and began walking toward a set of doors in the wall past the base of the stairwell.
At that very moment, they began to swing open.
Abruptly, I was no longer in the house at all, but standing on a white powder beach with a warm, salty breeze tangling my hair.
The sun was shining. Alabaster birds swooped low, gliding along lapis lazuli waves.
And I was naked.
ELEVEN
V ’lane!” I snarled.
I was naked—he was near.
“It is time for our hour, MacKayla,” said a disembodied voice.
“Put me back right now! Barrons needs me!” How had he so cleanly swapped one reality for the next? Had he moved me, or worlds? Had I just been “sifted”? But I hadn’t even seen him, or felt him touch me, or anything!
“At the time of my choosing was our deal. Will you dishonor it? Should I undo my part of it as well?”
Could he do that? Rewind time and dump me back into the Shade-infested bookstore, crouching before my enemy with too few matches left? Or did he mean to let the Shades back in right now, and when I got home from Wales, I’d have to clear it again, this time, without his help? I had no desire to face either. “I’m not dishonoring it. You are. Give me my clothes back!”
“We discussed nothing of attire in our bargain. We are on equal footing, you and I,” he purred, behind me.
I whirled, fury in my eyes, murder in my heart.
He was naked, too.
All thought of Barrons and basement doors opening and potential dangers behind them vanished. Nor did it matter how I’d gotten here. I was here.
My knees turned to ash. I collapsed to the sand.
I looked away but my eyes didn’t. My central nervous system was currently serving another master and had no interest in will. Will? What was will? Papers you signed in case you died, that was it. Nothing to do with my current situation. All I needed to do now was entrust my body to the Maestro before me who would play it like no other, stroking it to unimaginable crescendos, plucking chords no man had ever sounded before, or would ever match again.
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A Fae prince naked is a vision that renders all other men eternally inadequate.
He stepped toward me.
I trembled. He was going to touch me. Oh, God, he was going to touch me.
Over the course of my many encounters with V’lane, I would attempt repeatedly to describe him in my journal. I would use words like: terrifyingly beautiful, godlike, possessing inhuman sexuality, deadly eroticism. I would call him lethal, I would call him irresistible, I would curse him. I would lust for him. I would call his eyes windows to a shining heaven, I would call them gates to Hell. I would fill entries with scribblings that would later make no sense to me, comprised of columns of antonyms: angelic, devilish; creator, destroyer; fire, ice; sex, death—I’m not sure why those two struck me as opposites, except perhaps sex is both the celebration of life and the process whereby we create it.
I would make a list of colors, of every shimmering shade of bronze, gold and copper, and amber known to man. I would write of oils and spices, scents from childhood, scents from dreams. I would indulge in lengthy thesaurus-like entries trying to capture the sensory overload that was Prince V’lane of the Fae.
I would fail at every turn.
He is so beautiful that he makes a part of my soul weep. I don’t understand those tears. They aren’t like the ones I cry for Alina. They aren’t made of water and salt. I think they’re made of blood.
“Turn. It. Off. ” I gritted.
“I am doing nothing. ” He stopped in the sand next to me, towered above me. The parts of him I needed, those perfect, incredible parts I burned to have inside me, slaking my terrible, inhuman lust, were within arm’s reach. I fisted my hands. I would never reach. Not for a Fae. Never. “Liar. ”
He laughed and I closed my eyes, lay shuddering on the soft white sand. The fine grains against my skin were the hands of a lover, the breeze at my nipples a hot tongue. I prayed the ocean wouldn’t begin to lap at any part of me. Would I come apart? Would my cells lose the cohesion necessary to maintain the shape of my humanity? Would I scatter to the far reaches of the universe, flakes of dust borne off on a fickle Fae wind?
I rolled so my nipples pressed against the beach. As I turned, my thigh grazed the tender, aching flesh of my mons. I came, violently. “You bastard…I…hate…you,” I hissed.
I was standing again. Fully clothed in my clingy catsuit, spear in hand. My body was cool, remote; not one ounce of passion stirred in what had an instant ago been enflamed loins. I was master of my will.
I lunged for him without hesitation.
He vanished.
“I sought only to remind you of what you and I might share, MacKayla,” he said behind me. “It is extraordinary, is it not? As befits an extraordinary woman. ”
I spun and lunged again. I knew he would only vanish once more, but I couldn’t help myself.
“What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand? The n or the o? No is not maybe. It is not I like to play rough. And it is never, never, never yes. ”
“Permit me to tender my apologies. ” He was in front of me again, clothed in a robe that was a color I’d never seen before and couldn’t describe. It made me think of butterfly wings against an iridescent sky, backlit by a thousand suns. His eyes, once molten amber, burned the same strange hue. He could not have looked more alien.
“I’ll permit you nothing,” I said. “Our hour is up. You dishonored our deal. You promised you wouldn’t sex me up. You broke that promise. ”
He regarded me a long moment and then his eyes were molten amber, and he was the tawny Fae prince again. “Please,” he said, and from the way he said it, I knew there was no such word in the Fae tongue.
To the Tuatha Dé there is no difference between creating and destroying, Barrons had said. There is only stasis and change. Nor to these inhuman beings was there any such thing as apologizing. Would the ocean apologize for covering the head and filling the lungs of the man who fell in it?
He’d used the word for me. Perhaps learned it for me. He’d used it in supplication. It gave me pause, as he’d meant it to do.
“Please,” he said again. “Hear me out, MacKayla. Once more I have erred. I am trying to understand your ways, your wants. ” If he’d been human I would have said he looked embarrassed. “I have never
before been refused. I do not suffer it well. ”
“You don’t give them the chance to refuse. You rape them all!”
“That is untrue. I have not used the Sidhba-jai on an unwilling woman in eighty-two thousand years. ”
I stared. V’lane was eighty-two thousand years old?
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“I see I have made you curious. That is good. I am curious about you as well. Come. Join me. Let us talk of ourselves. ” He stepped back and waved a hand.
Two chaise longues appeared between us. A wicker table between them offered a plate with a pitcher of sweet tea and two ice-filled glasses. There was a bottle of my favorite suntan oil stuck in the sand next to the chair closest me, near a pile of thick pastel towels. Sheets of brilliantly striped silk wafted from nowhere, billowed once in the breeze and draped themselves over the chairs.
Salt air kissed my skin. I glanced down.
My catsuit was gone and I was again spearless. I was wearing a hot pink string bikini, with a gold belly chain from which dangled two diamonds and a ruby.
I blinked.
A pair of designer sunglasses appeared on the bridge of my nose.
“Stop it,” I hissed.
“I am merely trying to anticipate your needs. ”
“Don’t. It’s offensive. ”
“Join me for an hour in the sun, MacKayla. I will not touch you. I will not…as you say…sex you up. We will talk, and at our next encounter, I will not make the same mistakes again. ”
“You said that last time. ”