My gaze lingered on Barrons, savage, elegant, despotic, and enormously self-contained. I recognized that shirt, open at the throat, cuffs rolled back. I knew the pants, too, so dark gray they were nearly black, and his black and silver boots. Last time I’d seen him, he’d been gutted on a frigging cliff again—me, Barrons, and cliffs are a proven recipe for disaster—and his clothes were bloody and torn, which meant at some point he’d stopped at his lair behind the bookstore for a change of clothing. Tonight, after I’d left? Or days ago, while I’d tossed and turned on the chesterfield in a fitful sleep? Had he walked through the store? How long had he been back? His senses were acute. He knew I was invisible. If he’d bothered walking through the store while I slept, he’d have seen my indent on the sofa. Had he looked for me at all?
“You fucking turned him,” Lor growled. “What the fuck is so special about him? And you killed me just for getting a little uninterrupted time in the sack and fucking Jo!” He snorted. “Aw, man, this is gonna go tribunal. You should have let him die. You know what the fuck happens!”
What was tribunal? I knew what the word meant but couldn’t fathom who might serve as the Nine’s court of law. Did this mean they’d turned humans in the past? If so, what had the tribunal done with them? It wasn’t as if they could be killed. At least not until recently. Now there was K’Vruck, the ancient icy black Hunter whose killing blow had laid Barrons’s tortured son to rest. Would they locate him and try to get him to kill Dageus? Would they expect me to help coax the enormous deadly Hunter near? Had Dageus been saved from one death only to die a more permanent soul-eclipsing one?
Barrons spoke and I shivered. I love that man’s voice. Deep, with an untraceable accent, it’s sexy as hell. When he speaks, all the fine muscles in my body shift into a lower, tighter, more aggressive gear. I want him all the time. Even when I’m mad at him. Perversely, maybe even more so then.
“You violated our code. You created an untenable liability,” Barrons growled.
Ryodan gave him a look but said nothing.
“His loyalties will always be first and foremost to his clan. Not us.”
“Debatable.”
“Our secrets. Now his. He’ll talk.”
“Debatable.”
“He’s a Keltar. They’re nice. They champion the underdog. Fight for the common good. As if there is such a bloody thing.”
Ryodan smiled faintly. “Nice is no longer one of his shortcomings.”
“You know what the tribunal will do.”
“There will be no tribunal. We’ll keep him hidden.”
“You can’t hide him forever. He won’t agree to stay hidden forever. He has a wife, a child.”
“He’ll get past it.”
“He’s a Highlander. Clan is everything. He won’t ever get past it.”
“He’ll get past it.”
Barrons mocked, “Repetition of erroneous facts—”
“Fuck you.”
“And because he won’t get past it, you know what they’ll do to him. What we’ve done to others.”
How many others? I wondered. What had they done?
“Yet you have Mac,” Ryodan said.
“I didn’t turn Mac.”
“Only because you didn’t have to. Someone else extended her life. Giving you the easy way out. Maybe our code is wrong.”
“There are reasons for our code.”
“That’s a fucking joke, coming from you. You said yourself, ‘Things are different now. We evolve. So does our code.’ Either there are laws or there aren’t. And if there are laws, like everything in the universe, they exist to be tested.”
“That’s what you’re after? Establishing new case precedence? Never going to happen. Not on this point. You want to turn Dani. Assuming she’s ever Dani again.”
“Nobody’s turning my fucking honey,” Lor muttered darkly.
“You took the Highlander, as your test case,” Barrons said.
Ryodan said nothing.
“Kas doesn’t speak. X is half mad on a good day, bugfuck crazy on a bad one. You’re tired of it. You want your family back. You want a full house, like the old days.”
Ryodan growled, “You’re so fucking shortsighted, you can’t see past the end of your own dick.”
“Hardly short.”
“You don’t see what’s coming.”
Barrons inclined his head, waiting.
“Have you considered what will happen if we don’t find a way to stop the holes the Hoar Frost King made from growing.”
“Chester’s gets swallowed. Parts of the world disappear.”
“Or all.”
“We’ll stop it.”
“If we can’t.”
“We move on.”
“The kid,” Ryodan said with such contempt that I knew he was talking about Dancer, not Dani, “says they’re virtually identical to black holes. At worst, consuming all objects within to oblivion. At best, from which there is no escape. When we die,” he carefully enunciated each word, “we come back on this world. If this world doesn’t exist, or is inside a black hole…” He didn’t bother finishing. He didn’t need to.
Lor stared at the monitor. “Shit, boss.”
“I’m the one who’s always planning,” Ryodan said. “Doing whatever’s necessary to protect us, ensure our continued existence while you fucks live like tomorrow will always come.”
“Ah,” Barrons mocked, “the king wearies of the crown.”
“Never the crown. Only the subjects.”
“What does this have to do with the Highlander?” Barrons said impatiently.
Exactly what I was wondering.
“He’s a sixteenth-century druid that was possessed by the first thirteen druids trained by the Fae—the Draghar.”
“I heard he was cured of that little problem,” Barrons said.
“I heard otherwise from a certain walking lie detector who told Mac his uncle never managed to exorcise them completely.”
I scowled, pressing my fingers to my forehead, rubbing it as if to agitate my memory and recall exactly where I’d been when Christian told me that—and if there had been any damned roaches around. That was the problem with roaches: they were small and could wedge themselves into virtually any crack to eavesdrop unseen.