They were rewiring the streetlamps and carefully resetting them in the sidewalks. They were sweeping up debris. They were replacing bulbs. They had brooms and jackhammers, wiring materials, wheelbarrows, and concrete.
I was supposed to kill them. That was what I did, what I was made for.
But they were putting Dublin back to rights.
I wanted Dublin back to rights. Did this mean they were working to restore the power, too?
“Are you doing it to keep the Shades out?” I shook my head at the oddity of having just initiated a conversation with a Rhino-boy I would have wondered if my day could get any stranger, but my days always get stranger.
“Pigs,” one of them grunted, and the rest of them agreed, snorting. “Eat everything. Leave nothing for the rest of us.”
“I see.” I decided I would let them finish cleaning up the block first and kill them on my way back. Hands in my pockets, I resumed walking.
“Pretty girlie-girl, want to live forever?” one of them grunted at my back. They all snorted and snuffled as if at some inside joke. Like, duh, maybe eating them in exchange for sex really didn’t give you immortality, just some new, never-before-heard-of Fae STD. “Got something you can suck on, girlie-girl.”
Ew. “Not a chance,” I said coolly.
They should have let me go. I would have let them go. But Rhino-boys aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box. I heard hoofed feet shuffling, moving toward me. Their bribe hadn’t worked, so they were switching tactics to brute force. They’d picked the wrong woman to mess with. I hate Unseelie.
“Think twice,” I warned.
I suspect Rhino-boys have a hard enough time thinking once.
A few moments later, the six of them were dead and I was walking toward BB&B, thoroughly pissed that I’d had to kill them before they finished wiring the lamps.
The last look I’d gotten at the bookstore was late in the afternoon on that hellish Halloween that would forever be burned into my memory as the second-worst night of my life. All the exterior lights had been broken out. I wasn’t sure what to expect as I turned down the street I’d once considered my “way home.”
I stopped, stared, and smiled faintly. Of course.
On a street of heavily damaged and looted buildings, BB&B alone stood untouched. The elegantly restored façade of the Old World four-story brick building was immaculate. The spotlights mounted on the front, rear, and sides, which had been broken out last I saw it, were now replaced. The brightly painted shingle proclaiming BARRONS BOOKS AND BAUBLES had been rehung perpendicular to the building, suspended over the sidewalk on an elaborate brass pole, and it creaked as it swung in the drizzly breeze. The sign in the old-fashioned green-tinted windows glowed soft neon: CLOSED. Amber torches in brass sconces illuminated the deep limestone archway of the bookstore’s grand alcoved entrance. Ornate cherry diamond-paned doors, nestled between limestone columns, gleamed in the light.
I wondered if the bookstore meant something to him, that he’d gone to such lengths. Did it hold sentimental value? Or was it merely his possession, his statement to the world in general that nothing and no one would ever take what was his?
I stepped into the alcove, tried the door. It was unlocked. I pushed it open.
I never tire of my first glimpse of my shop. Once you get past the immediate sense of spatial distortion—as if you’ve opened the door of an old-fashioned phone booth only to find the Library of Congress inside—you notice that luxury and comfort have never gone so effortlessly hand in hand.
The main room is about eighty feet long by sixty feet wide and vaults five stories to a muraled ceiling. On the second, third, fourth, and fifth floors, bookcases line each wall from base to cove molding. Behind elegant banisters, catwalks permit access, while ladders slide on oiled rollers from one section to the next.
But it’s the first floor I spend so much time on, with its freestanding bookcases crammed with all the latest, greatest reads standing tall on polished wood floors scattered with plush rugs. Two seating cozies, fore and aft, boast opulent yet comfy chesterfield sofas and brocaded chairs topped by soft throws, centered around my beloved respite from the Dublin rain and cold—fancy enameled gas fireplaces.
I glanced at my well-stocked magazine rack (sadly out of date) and my cashier’s counter. I smiled at the old-fashioned register with the tiny silver bell that tinkled whenever the drawer popped open.
I moved to the counter.
A note was propped on the register.
Welcome home, Ms. Lane.
“Arrogant, overconfident jackass.” Keys lay on the counter beside it.