I pulled over in a parking lot to study the map, then headed southwest, intending to skirt the edge of the Dark Zone on my way out and, if I had to, put on my MacHalo and drive through part of it to get out of town. But as I approached the perimeter of the abandoned neighborhood, I slammed the brakes and stared.
The entire edge of the zone was a dense black wall of Shades, pressing at the pools of the light cast by the street-lamps on Dorsey Street. It stretched left and right as far as I could see, a massive barricade of death.
I put the car in reverse and backed away. I would go through it only if I had to. I wasn’t yet ready to admit defeat.
I spent the next fifteen minutes driving the ever-decreasing circumference of my world, hemmed in by danger on all sides. The edges of the Dark Zones had met and merged with the mobs, and I watched in horror as Unseelie in human glamour drove people into those waiting, killing shadows.
It finally occurred to me to get out of the flashy red car that was beginning to attract a dangerous amount of attention, so I sped back to BB&B where I planned to swap it for something nondescript, and figure how to escape the city.
As I turned down the side street leading to the store, I slammed the brakes so hard I nearly gave myself whiplash.
Barrons Books and Baubles was dark!
Completely. It was surrounded by night on all sides.
Every exterior light on the bookstore was out.
I stared blankly. I’d left them all on. I eased off the brake and inched closer. In the gleam of headlights, glass glittered on the cobbled street. The lights weren’t off. Someone had broken them all out, or—considering how high they were mounted—shot them out. Or . . . someone had sent those flying Fae, maybe even Hunters, to do the job. Were they perched up there right now, on the cornices, looming over me? There were so many Fae in the city that my sidhe-sensor felt bombarded, overwhelmed by presences too numerous to count or differentiate. I peered up, but the roof of the store was lost in darkness.
Although the interior lights were on, they were set at the subdued, after-hours level, and what spilled onto the pavement through the beveled glass door and windows was not enough to deter my enemy. One more city block had fallen to the Shades: mine.
Barrons Books and Baubles was part of the Dark Zone.
Would the Shades’ more substantial brethren enter BB&B tonight, smash it up, break out the interior lights, and render it unsalvageable? Could they? I knew Barrons hadn’t warded it against everything, just the bigger risks.
My eyes narrowed. This was unacceptable. The Fae would not take my sanctuary! I would not be turned out into the streets. They would get their nasty, shady petunias out of my territory and they would do it now. I spun in a screech of tires, and drove in the other direction. Four blocks from the Dark Zone’s new perimeter, the mob pushed me back. I floored it in reverse, narrowly missing parked cars, stopping beneath a pool of bright streetlamps. I could hear angry shouts, breaking glass, and the thunder of the approaching mob. I would not be swallowed up by it. But I had to act fast.
I stepped out of the car, plunged my hand beneath my jacket, and fisted it around my spear. I wasn’t losing it this time.
A cold, windborne mist pricked my face and hands. The storm had begun. But it wasn’t just storm I sensed in the air. Something was wrong, terribly wrong, besides angry mobs and hordes of Unseelie, and Shades overtaking my home. The wind was strange, blowing from multiple directions, reeking of sulfur. The fringes of the chaotic, destructive crowd surged around the corner, two blocks from where I stood.
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“V’lane, I need you!” I cried, releasing his name.
It uncoiled from my tongue and swelled, choking me, then slammed into the back of my teeth, forcing my mouth wide.
But instead of soaring into the night sky, it crashed into an invisible wall and plummeted to the pavement, where it lay fluttering weakly, a fallen dark bird.
I nudged it with the toe of my boot.
It disintegrated.
I turned my face to the wind, east and west, north and south. It eddied around me, buffeting me from all sides, slapping me with hundreds of tiny hands, and I suddenly could feel the LM out there, working his dark magic to bring the walls down. It was changing things.
I flexed the sidhe-seer place in my mind, focused, turned inward, seeking, hunting, and for an instant I actually got a flash of him, standing at the edge of a stark, sheer black cliff, in an icy place, red-robed, hands raised—and was that a heart held high, dripping blood?—chanting, summoning arts powerful enough to crash a prison wrought from living strands of the Song of Making, and it was doing something to all magic, even Fae, making it go terribly wrong.
I squeezed my inner eye shut before it got me killed. I was standing in the middle of a street in a rioting Dublin, trapped in the city, alone.
V’lane would not be sifting in to save the day.
The mob was less than a block away. The marauding front-liners had just noticed my car and were roaring like maddened beasts. Some toted baseball bats, others swung batons taken from fallen Garda.
They were going to beat my Ferrari to smithereens.
There wasn’t time to dig out my cell phone and try to call Barrons. They would be on me in seconds. I knew what happened to rich people during riots. I also knew they wouldn’t believe I wasn’t rich. I wasn’t about to get beheaded with the aristocracy just because every now and then I got to drive a nice car that didn’t even belong to me.
I grabbed my backpack from the car, and ran.
A block away another mob approached.
I plunged into it, and lost myself inside it. It was a horrible, smelly, hot, surging mass of humanity. It was rage unstop-pered, frustration unleashed, envy unsuppressed. It howled with victory as it looted, smashed, and destroyed.
I couldn’t breathe. I was going to throw up. There were too many people, too many Fae, too much hostility and violence. I swam in a sea of faces, some feral, some excited, others as frightened as I imagined I must look. Fae are monsters. But we humans hold our own. Fae might have incited this riot, but we were the ones keeping it alive.
The cobbled stones were slippery from the misting rain. I watched in horror as a young girl fell, crying out. She was trampled in seconds as the crowd swept on. An elderly man—why on earth was he out here?—went down next. A teenage boy was jostled into a streetlamp, rebounded, lost his balance, and vanished from view.
For time uncounted then, I was driven by a single imperative: Stay on your feet. Stay alive.
I rode the crowd, an unwilling mount, feet trapped in the stirrups, from one block to the next. Twice I managed to break free, fight my way to the outer fringes, only to be drowned in the herd again, propelled forward by its relentless stampede.
I feared two things: that they would gallop me straight into a Dark Zone, or that the Sinsar Dubh would make a sudden appearance, and I’d fall to my knees, clutching my head. I couldn’t decide which death would be worse.
My cell phone was in my backpack, but there wasn’t enough room to maneuver in the crowd and get to it. I worried that if I slipped my pack from my shoulders, it would be jerked from my hands and carried off. My spear was cold and heavy under my arm, but I was afraid if I whipped it out, I might be speared by it in the crush.
Unseelie.
I had baby food jars of it in my pockets.
With its dark life in my veins I would be able to break free of the mob.
We were nearing the edge of the Temple Bar District. The Dark Zone wasn’t far. Were we being deliberately driven? If I were able to float above this riot, would I see Unseelie herding us from behind, cattle to the slaughter?
“Sorry,” I muttered. “Oops, didn’t mean to hit you. ” Without pissing off anyone badly enough to get myself punched, I managed to extract a jar from my pocket. I’d twisted the lids too tight to open them one-hande
d. I jostled for space, and popped the lid. Someone shoved into me and I lost my hold on it. I felt it hit my boot and then it was gone.
Gritting my teeth, I dug for another one. I had three in my pockets. The rest were sealed in plastic bags tucked inside my boots. I’d never be able to get to them in the crush. I was more careful with this jar, easing it out, clutching it for dear life—which I hoped it was. I had to get out of the crowd. I knew my landmarks. I was two blocks from the Dark Zone. I managed to pop the lid but was unwilling to duck my head to eat it, for fear of taking an elbow in the eye, freezing or stumbling in pain, and going down.
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I raised the bottle close to my body, tossed my head back, gulped and chewed. I gagged the entire time I chewed. No matter that I’d been craving it; it was work to get it down, crunchy with gristle and cystlike sacs that popped when I chewed. It wriggled in my mouth, and crawled like spiders in my stomach. When I lowered the jar, I was looking straight into the eyes of a Rhino-boy, around the heads of two humans and, from the expression on his beady-eyed, bumpy gray face, he knew what I’d just done. He must have seen the pink-gray flesh moving in the jar as I’d tossed it back.
I guessed word was getting around, between Mallucé, and the LM, and O’Bannion and now Jayne eating them. He bellowed, ducked his head, and charged. I spun, and began violently pushing my way through the crowd. I managed to get the third bottle out, and gulped that, too, as I fought toward freedom.
The only other time I’d eaten Unseelie, I’d been mortally wounded, and close to death, so I didn’t know what to expect. Last time, it had taken several large mouthfuls just to begin the healing, and nearly ten minutes to complete the journey from dying to more alive than I’d ever been. Tonight I was whole and uninjured. Strength and power slammed into me like I’d taken a needle of adrenaline straight to my heart. A chilly heat suffused me as the potency of Fae spiked my blood.
Savage Mac raised her head, and looked out through my eyes, thought with my brain, and rearranged my limbs into a sleeker composition: powerful, predatory, padding on certain paws.
Within moments, I was free of the crowd, but in the distance, I could hear another approaching. The city had gone crazy tonight. I would learn later that Fae in human glamour had broken into houses and businesses all over town, attacked owners and residents, and driven them out into the streets, forcing the riots to begin.
I glanced back. It appeared I’d lost the Rhino-boy in the crush. Or maybe he’d decided he was more interested in the destruction of an entire mob, than measly me. Behind me was the Dark Zone. Ahead was another mob, its front wave led by Rhino-boys smashing out streetlamps with baseball bats. To my left were sounds of violence. To my right was a pitch-black alley. I slipped off my backpack, dug out my MacHalo, strapped and buckled it beneath my chin, then hit the Click-It lights, one after another, until I blazed like a small beacon. I smacked my wrists and ankles together, lighting up my hands and feet.
The mob rushed me in a great wave.
I took off down the dark alley.
I lost track of time for a while then, racing down streets and alleys, drawing up short, doubling back, trying to avoid the mobs, and evade the troops of Rhino-boys, with whom I had repeated close calls, since I could no longer sense them, now that my sidhe-seer senses were deadened by my gruesome meal.
They marched militantly, rounding up the stragglers to herd into the mobs. I crisscrossed the same blocks dozens of times, hiding in doorways and Dumpsters. I had a terrible moment where I got hemmed in between two groups of them, and was forced to sidle behind cardboard boxes in the shadows of a trash bin, and turn off all my lights to let the horde of Unseelie crash by.
I tasted death sitting there in the darkness, wondering if there were Dark “Spots”—really tiny areas where only one or two Shades lived—and any moment it might slither from a crack and get me, and the thought was almost worse than flinging myself into the middle of the passing Unseelie, which, by the way, I unzipped my Baggies and ate some of, sitting there with my knees tucked up in the darkness behind the steel bin. Maybe, as I’d once joked to Barrons, Shades really didn’t like dark meat, and they’d leave me alone.
After the troops passed, I crawled out and clicked myself back on.
Yes, people were being driven. Gathered and herded.
Lambs to the slaughter. My people.
And there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. Eating Unseelie might have transformed me from a pocketknife into an Uzi, and turned me into a walking weapon, but I was still only one weapon, and acutely aware of it. I was defense, not offense. There was no offense to be made in this city tonight. Not even Savage Mac, the cockiest of cocky, felt punchy. She felt threatened, feral. She wanted to find a cave to hide in until the odds were more in her favor. I was inclined to agree. Survival was our prime directive.
The first time I’d eaten Unseelie, nothing had fazed me. But that night I’d only had to worry about a single rotting vampire, plus I’d had Barrons by my side. Tonight, I was trapped in a rioting city of hundreds of thousands of people, it was Halloween, the Unseelie were numerous and horribly organized, V’lane was unreachable, and Barrons was a country away.
I finally found myself in a semilit deserted alley, with no militant footfalls or sounds of rioting nearby. I ducked into a doorway lit by a single, naked overhead bulb, to take care of something that badly needed taking care of. I removed my pack carefully, dropped it, ripped off my jacket, and gingerly, delicately removed my spear harness, which I placed on the ground.
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The entire time I’d been running and hiding, its heavy weight had been a burning terror against my body. What if I fell? What if I got caught in a crowd again and someone jostled me? What if the tip pierced my skin? Hello, Mallucé. Goodbye, sanity. I might be tougher than I used to be, but I had no doubts about my ability to cope with rotting to death.
I stripped off my sweater and T-shirt, then put my sweater, jacket, and MacHalo back on and belted the spear harness on the outside of my coat, without touching anything but the leather straps.
I tied the T-shirt I’d removed around the bottom part of the harness, forming an additional layer of protection between the tip and me.
Ironic, the thing I love most, that makes me feel so powerful under normal circumstances, becomes my greatest liability, and the thing I fear most when I pilfer dark power. I can have one, or the other—but never both.
Carrying the dichotomy one step further, I could no longer sense the spear, which meant I could inadvertently hurt myself on it. However, I could also no longer sense the Sinsar Dubh, which meant it could no longer hurt me, and send me crashing to my knees, helpless, in a dangerous situation.
Duh. I stood in the doorway marveling, and not in a good way, at my own stupidity. If eating Unseelie made me unable to sense the Sinsar Dubh, then all I needed to do next time it popped up on my radar was get as close to it as I could, eat Unseelie, and get closer. Close enough to pick it up.
An image of the Beast as I’d last seen it materialized in my mind.
Yeah, right. Pick it up. Sure. What then? Put it in my pocket? I didn’t have one large enough.
So, I knew how to get close to it without being incapacitated by pain. I still had no idea what to do then. If I touched it would I, too, turn psycho? Or was I a sidhe-seer/Null/OOP-detector mutant that was somehow exempt? A moot point right now, with my odds of surviving the night looking so grim.
I dug out my cell phone to call Dani and tell her what was happening in Dublin. There was no way I could make it to the abbey. I glanced at my watch and was stunned to find it was nearly seven o’clock. I’d been running and hiding for hours! The ritual might already be completed and if it was, sidhe-seers could come to the city and help me save some of the people being driven to death-by-Shade. I might not be able to make a difference, but seven hundred of us could. If t
hey couldn’t—or wouldn’t—come because Rowena vetoed it for some idiotic reason, I would call Barrons and if he didn’t answer, I’d call Ryodan, and if neither of them answered, it was probably time for IYD: if you’re dying. A pall of death hung over Dublin like grief over a funeral. I could smell it, taste it on the air. If no sidhe-seers were coming in to join me, I wanted out, any way I could get there.
Dani answered on the second ring. She sounded hysterical. “Feck, Mac!” she cried. “What did you do to us?”
I’d been adjusting the straps on my pack to accommodate my bulky external harness, and alarm made me drop it. “What’s wrong?” I demanded.
“Shades, Mac! Fecking Shades came out of the fecking Orb when we opened it! The abbey’s full of ’em!”
I was so stunned that I nearly dropped the phone. When I got it back to my ear, Dani was saying:
“Rowena says you betrayed us! She says you set us up!”
My heart constricted. “No, Dani, I didn’t, I swear! Somebody must have set me up!” The thought iced my blood. There was only one person who could have, one person that walked among those dark vampires without fear. How easily he’d relinquished the relic. How quickly he’d agreed to give it to me. Yet he’d not given it to me that night. Thirty hours had passed between my request, and his delivery. What had he been doing during those hours? Spiking a sidhe-seer’s drink with Shades? “How bad is it?” I cried.
“We’ve lost dozens! When we opened the Orb, they splintered, and we thought the light from the ritual killed them, but they fecking grew back together in the shadows. They’re everywhere! In closets, in shoes, anywhere there’s dark!”
“Dani, I didn’t do this! I swear to you. I swear on my sister. You know what she means to me. You have to believe me. I would never do this. Never!”
“You said you’d come,” she hissed. “You didn’t. Where are you?”
“I’m stuck in the city, holed up between York and Mercer. Dublin’s a nightmare, and I couldn’t get out. People have been rioting for hours, and the Unseelie are driving them into the Dark Zones!”
She sucked in a breath. “How bad is it?” she echoed my question.