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“Feck you,” she retorted.
“Real mature there,” I said, without looking up. “Trying on adulthood by cussing. You and a gazillion other teens. Do something original. ” Back home, I’d rarely read anything other than the Sunday paper, specifically the lifestyle and fashion sections. Had crimes like these always been going on, and I’d just never noticed? Had I been so criminally oblivious?
Dani wheeled her bike in the door. “I don’t have to do something original, I am original. ” She hesitated. “So, what’s going on out back?”
I shrugged. “You mean the cars? No clue. ” I wasn’t about to admit to someone who was plugged into the sidhe-seer community that I’d stolen a Fae Hallow and in the process gotten sixteen humans killed. I’d been reading up on the paranormal and it appeared there was a golden rule: Harm no innocents, and humans somehow seemed to unilaterally get accorded that status, an irony heavily underscored by the newspaper I was reading.
“No. I meant the half-wiped Grug. ”
“Grug?”
She described it, what was left of it. “I call them Rhino-boys. ” I dropped the paper. “There’s one out back, half eaten?”
She nodded and her lips quirked. “Rhino-boys, I get that. They’re gray and lumpy and make that funny noise in the back of their throats. ”
“Is Grug their Unseelie caste name?” Was this true sidhe-seer lore? I was starving for it. I wanted explanations, rules. I wanted someone to take my life and make sense out of it. I wanted a Sidhe-Seer Compendium.
She shrugged. “We don’t know squat about the Unseelie. It’s just what we call them. I like your name better. So, you gonna finish it off, or do you get off on torturing ’em? What do you do with the other parts? Keep ’em in a jar or something?” She glanced around, looking for those jars with an expression that said simultaneously “I’m so bored” and “Hey, way cool. ”
“Oh, God, you think I—No, Dani, I don’t get off on torturing them! I didn’t know it was out there. ” It bothered me immensely that something big and bad enough to eat Unseelie had been nearby, and I’d not even known it. It bothered me more that Dani thought I was so twisted. Who was this kid’s role model? Where did she get her ideas? TV? Video games? Kids these days seem both dangerously impressionable and dangerously desensitized, as if their lives have somehow assumed comic book proportions, ergo, comic book relevance—or a complete lack thereof. If I had to read about one more group of teenage boys killing a homeless person and saying, “I don’t know why we did it, it was like…hey, you know…that Internet game we play,” I was going to start stabbing humans with my spear, golden rule be damned. “Did you kill it?” I asked.
“With what?” She poked out a slim hip. “You see a sword tucked into this uniform? Strapped on my bike somewhere?”
“A sword?” I blinked. Surely she didn’t mean the sword. “You mean the Seelie Hallow, the sword of light?” I’d read about it in my research; it was the only other weapon capable of killing Fae. “That’s what you’ve been getting your forty-seven kills with? You have it?”
She gave me a smug look.
“How on earth did you get it?” According to the last book I’d read, it had been in the custody of the Seelie Queen herself!
The smug look faded a little.
I narrowed my eyes. “Rowena gave it to you. ” From her crestfallen expression, I continued guessing, “And she keeps it, and doesn’t let you carry it much, does she?”
Dani scowled and propped her bike against the wall. “She thinks I’m too fecking young. I’ve killed more Fae than all her other little kiss-ass acolytes she sends out combined, and still she treats me like a child!” She stomped over to the counter, and looked me up and down. “I bet you can’t kill the Grug. I bet Rowena’s wrong about you. What kind of special powers do you have? I don’t see anything special about you. ”
Without another word I skirted the cashier counter, pushed through the connecting doors, and headed for the rear of the store.
What was eating Unseelie outside my bedroom window? I didn’t like it one bit. It was bad enough that I had to worry about Shades and whatever was beneath the garage but now I had to worry about a monster-muncher, too. Nor did I like that such a thing had happened twice now, with me in the immediate vicinity. Were such macabre feasts taking place across the city and I just didn’t know it because I wasn’t getting out much? Or was it happening specifically around me? Was it coincidence, or something more?
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I pushed open the back door and scanned the alley, left and right.
It took me a few moments to spot it. Nearly two-thirds of it was gone and what remained—the head, shoulders, and stump of a torso—had been tossed into an overflowing Dumpster. Like the mangled Fae in the graveyard, it was in obvious agony.
I hurried down the stairs, scrambled up the small mountain of trash, and crouched over it. “What did this to you?” I demanded. No mercy killing this time. I wanted information in exchange.
It opened its mouth, made a wordless, whimpering sound, and I turned away. In addition to having no hands or arms left, it had no tongue. Whatever had stopped short of devouring it meant for it to suffer, and had left it unable to speak or communicate in any way.
I removed the spear from the holster I’d rigged beneath my jacket this morning, and stabbed it. It died with a rank gust of icy breath.
When I clambered back down the pile of refuse, Dani was waiting for me, wide-eyed. “You have the spear,” she said reverently. “And what an awesome holster! It’s so compact I could carry it around all the time, everywhere. I could kill them twenty-four/seven! Are you superfast?” she demanded. “If not, I should probably have that spear. ” She reached for it.
I put it behind my back. “Kid, you try to touch my spear, I’ll do worse things to you than you’ve ever seen done. ” I had no idea what I was talking about, but I suspected if anyone tried to take the spear from me, that savage Mac inside, the one that hated pink and hadn’t particularly minded watching the Rhino-boy flail in eternal pain, might do something we’d both regret. Well, at least one of us would regret. I was becoming too complicated for my own peace of mind. Would Dani try to take it with her superspeed? Would I find something in that hot, alien place in my skull to fight her with?
“I’m not a kid. When are you fecking grown-ups going to see that?” Dani snapped, turning away.
“When you stop acting like one. Why did you come here?”
“You’re in trouble,” she tossed over her shoulder. “Rowena wants to see you. ”
Turned out PHI was not the twenty-third letter in the Greek alphabet but Post Haste, Inc. Courier Services, and Dani a delivery girl, explaining the uniform and bike.
It was two in the afternoon on Thursday, when I hung my Closed Early placard on the bookstore door and locked up. “Shouldn’t you be in school, Dani?”
“I’m home-schooled. Most of us are. ”
“What does your mom think about you running around killing Fae?” I couldn’t imagine the mother of any young child being okay with it. But I guess when there’s a war on and you’re born a soldier, there’s not much choice.
“She’s dead,” she said nonchalantly. “Died six years ago. ”
I didn’t say I was sorry. I didn’t mouth any of the platitudes people resort to in times of grief. They don’t help. In fact, they chafe. I commiserated on her level. “It fecking sucks, doesn’t it?” I said vehemently.
She flashed me a look of surprise and the nonchalance melted. “Yeah, it does. I hate it. ”
“What happened?”
Her rosebud mouth twisted. “One of them got her. One day I’ll find out which one, and kill the fecker. ”
Sisters in vengeance. I touched her shoulder and smiled. She looked startled, unaccustomed to sympathy. Six years ago, Dani would have been seven or eight. “I didn’t know they’d been
around that long,” I said, meaning the Unseelie. “I thought they’d only recently been freed. ”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t an Un that got her. ”
“But I thought the…other ones”—I spoke vaguely, mindful of the wind—“didn’t kill us because of the…you know. ”
“Compact? That’s a bloody crock. They never stopped killing us. Well, maybe some of them did, but most of them didn’t. ”
We walked the rest of the way in silence, with Dani pushing her bike. She wasn’t comfortable talking on the streets. We skirted Temple Bar and crossed the River Liffey.
PHI Courier Services occupied a three-story building painted the same light green of Dani’s pants, trimmed in cherry, adorned by tall, arched windows. The sign above the entry sported the same emblem emblazoned on her shirt, but the shamrock looked misshapen, out of proportion. Something about the sign perplexed me. If I’d happened down this street on my own and seen it, I’d have walked straight into the building without hesitation, gripped by an irresistible compulsion.
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“It’s spelled,” Dani explained, watching me study it. “It draws people like us. So does the ad in the paper. She’s been gathering us for a long time. ”
“You think maybe you’re telling me things she doesn’t want me to know?” Where did her loyalties lie? Wasn’t she Rowena’s creation?
Dani thought about that a minute and I had a sudden insight into her character. Like me, she didn’t trust anyone. Not completely anyway. I wondered why.
“Go to the back. ” The gamine redhead hopped on her bike. “I’m late for deliveries. See ya around, Mac. ”
Around back were dozens of green and white bicycles, four motorbikes, and ten delivery vans, all emblazoned with the same misshapen shamrock. If PHI was a cover, it was nevertheless a thriving business.
I walked up the rear steps of the building and knocked. A woman in her forties, with rimless glasses and a shiny cap of brown hair opened the door, ushered me inside, led me up two flights of stairs, to a room at the end of a hall, and left me at the door without saying a word. My sidhe-seer senses were getting a tingle. There was either a Fae or Fae OOPs through that door—and I doubted it was an actual Fae. Rowena probably kept Dani’s close sword at hand, perhaps other relics as well.
I pushed it open and stepped into a handsomely appointed study with hardwood floors, paneled walls, and a huge fireplace. Sunlight spilled through tall windows framed with velvet. Floor and table lamps lit every nook and cranny. I would find this was a common trait among sidhe-seers, turning on all the lights we can. We hate the dark.
The old woman was seated behind an antique desk, but she wasn’t looking so old today. On the two prior occasions I’d seen her, she’d been drably dressed. Today she wore a turquoise suit with classic lines and a white blouse, and looked twenty years younger, closer to sixty-something than eighty-something. Her silvery hair was pulled back from her face in a single plait that circled her head like a crown. The creamy pearls that glowed at her ears, throat, and wrist were the same lustrous color as her hair. She looked elegant, in charge, and, although diminutive of build, full of piss and vinegar as my father would have said. I guessed the dreary, aged appearance she donned in public was deliberate and useful; people tend to grant unkempt seniors a special invisibility, as if by not noticing them they won’t have to acknowledge the same creature in themselves clawing closer to the surface with each tick of the clock.
Glasses on a beaded chain rested on her chest. She raised them now, slipped them onto a finely pointed nose. They magnified the size, fierce color, and the fiercer intelligence of her sharp blue eyes. “MacKayla. Do come in. Have a seat,” she said briskly.
I gave her a curt nod and stepped into the room. I glanced around, wondering where the sword was. Something Fae was in this room. “Rowena. ”
Her eyes flickered and I knew she didn’t appreciate the familiarity. Good. I meant to establish us as equals, not mentor and student. She’d lost the chance to mentor me when she’d turned her back on me. We looked at each other in silence. It stretched. I wasn’t about to speak. This was our first battle of the wills. It wouldn’t be our last.
“Sit,” she said again, gesturing to a chair in front of the desk.
I didn’t.
“Och, for the love of Mary, get your spine down, lass,” she barked. “We’re family here. ”
“Really?” I leaned back against the door and folded my arms. “Because where I come from, family doesn’t abandon their own in need, and you’ve done that to me twice. Why did you tell me to go die that night in the pub? You gather sidhe-seers. Why not me?”
She tilted her head back and peered down her nose, assessing, measuring. “It had been a difficult day. I’d lost three of my own. And there you were, about to betray yourself, and the saints only knew how many of us, if you weren’t stopped. ”
“It had to be obvious I had no idea what I was. ”
“What was obvious was that you were fascinated by a Fae. I told you, I thought you were Pri-ya, one of their addicts. I had no way of knowing it was the first Fae you’d ever seen, or that you were unaware of what you were. Those who are Pri-ya are beyond our help. By the time that kind of damage has been done, the will is demolished and the mind virtually gone. I will never sacrifice ten to save one. ”
“Did I look like my mind was gone?” I demanded.
“Actually, yes,” she said flatly. “You did. ”
I thought back to that night, my first in Dublin. I’d been heavily jet-lagged, overcome with grief, feeling bitterly alone, and I’d just seen something that couldn’t possibly have been there. Perhaps the expression on my face had been a bit…stupefied, maybe even blank. Still…“What about the museum? You abandoned me there, too,” I accused.
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She folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. “You appeared to be in league with a Fae prince—and again, Pri-ya. You were stripping for it. What did you expect me to think? It wasn’t until I saw you threaten him with the spear that I began to understand differently. Speaking of which, I need to see that spear. ” She rose, skirted the desk with the agility of a much younger woman, and extended her hand.
I laughed. She was crazy if she thought I was handing my weapon over. I’d sooner put it through her heart. “I don’t think so. ”
“MacKayla,” she said sternly, “let me see that spear. We are your people. We are sisters in this war. ”
“My sister is dead. Did you see her, too? Did you make the same snap judgment and turn her away? Tell her to go die by herself? Because she did,” I said bitterly. “The Fae ripped her to shreds. ”
Rowena looked startled. “What is this of a sister?”
“Oh, please. ” Here it was, the real reason I hated her. Not just for turning me away and shattering my beliefs about my family, but why hadn’t she found my sister? With her spelled signs, her advertisements, and her bicycling spies, why hadn’t she drawn Alina in? Taught her? Saved her? “She was in Dublin for months. She hung out in the pubs all the time. How could you not have run into her?”
“Would you expect me to encounter every single person in Chicago on a visit?” she snapped. “Dublin is a big city, and we have only recently become organized. Until a short time ago, I was busy elsewhere. How long was your sister here? What did she look like?”
“She was here for eight months. She was blond like…like I was the first time you saw me. Same color eyes. More athletically built. A bit taller. ”
Rowena searched my face, as if absorbing and breaking down my individual features, trying to place them in random arrangements on another woman. Finally she shook her head. “I’m sorry, MacKayla, but no. I never met your sister. You must tell me what happened. You and I are sisters in more than vision and cause; we are sisters in loss. Tell me everything. ”
“We aren’t sisters in anything, and
I’m not giving you my spear, old woman. ” She wasn’t going to suck me in with sympathy.
She gave me a hard stare. “I sent you away the first time. The second time I tried to get you to come back here with me, but you refused. We’ve both turned the other away once. I won’t make that same mistake again. Will you?”
“You should have found my sister. You should have saved her. ”
“You have no idea how much I wish I could have. Let me save you instead. ”
“I don’t need saving. ”
“If you’re working with Jericho Barrons, you do. ”
“What do you know about Barrons?”
“That there are not, and never have been, any male sidhe-seers, MacKayla. It is a gift of matriarchy. ”
I scoffed. “A gift? It killed my sister and ruined my life. As for Barrons, what is he, then? Because he sure can see the Fae, and he helps me kill them, which is more than you’ve ever done. ”
“Is that all one must do to win your trust, MacKayla? Battle alongside you? Let us go kill a Fae together then, right now. Do you know what’s in his heart? His mind? Why he does it? What he’s after?”
I said nothing because there was nothing to say to that. Most of the time I wasn’t sure he even had a heart, and whatever thoughts he entertained he kept intensely guarded.
“I didn’t think so. He tells you nothing, does he?”
“He’s told me more about what I am than you have. ”
“You haven’t given me a chance. ”
“I gave you two. ”
“Try again, MacKayla. I’m ready to talk. Are you ready to listen?”
“Do you know what he is?” I pressed.
“I know what he isn’t, and that’s all I need to know. He’s not one of us. We are pure of heart, pure of purpose. You see that shamrock?” Rowena pointed to a picture behind her desk of a large green clover on a background of embossed gold. “Look at it. Do you know why it’s considered lucky, and has been for longer than anyone can recall?”