Because it was safer than my cheap room at the inn, I moved into his bookstore. It’s well protected against most of my enemies with wards and assorted nasty tricks, and stands bastion at the edge of what I call a Dark Zone: a neighborhood that has been taken over by Shades, amorphous Unseelie that thrive in darkness and feed off humans.
Barrons and I have formed an uneasy alliance based on mutual need: We both want the Sinsar Dubh—a million-year-old book of the blackest magic imaginable, allegedly scribed by the Unseelie King himself, that holds the key to power over both the worlds of Fae and Man.
I want it because it was Alina’s dying request that I find it, and I suspect it holds the key to saving our world.
He wants it because he says he collects books. Right.
Everyone else I’ve encountered is after it, too. The hunt is dangerous, the stakes enormous.
Because the Sinsar Dubh is a Fae relic, I can sense it when it’s near. Barrons can’t. But he knows where to look for it, and I don’t. So now we’re partners in crime who don’t trust each other one bit.
Nothing in my sheltered, pampered life prepared me for the past few weeks. Gone is my long blond hair, chopped short for the sake of anonymity and dyed dark. Gone are my pretty pastel outfits, replaced by drab colors that don’t show blood. I’ve learned to cuss, steal, lie, and kill. I’ve been assaulted by a death-by-sex Fae and made to strip, not once but twice, in public. I discovered that I was adopted. I nearly died.
With Barrons at my side, I’ve robbed a mobster and his henchmen and led them to their deaths. I’ve fought and killed dozens of Unseelie. I battled the vampire Mallucé in a bloody showdown with the Lord Master himself.
In one short month I’ve managed to piss off virtually every being with magical power in this city. Half of those I’ve encountered want me dead; the other half want to use me to find the deadly, coveted Sinsar Dubh.
I could run home, I suppose. Try to forget. Try to hide.
Then I think of Alina, and how she died.
Her face swims up in my mind—a face I knew as well as my own; she was more than my sister, she was my best friend—and I can almost hear her saying: Right, Junior—and risk leading a monster like Mallucé, a death-by-sex Fae, or some other Unseelie back to Ashford? Take a chance that some of the Shades might cop a ride in your luggage and devour the charming, idyllic streets of our childhood, one burnt-out streetlamp at a time? When you see the Dark Zone that used to be our home, how will you feel, Mac?
Before her voice even begins to fade, I know that I’m here until this is over.
Until either they’re dead or I am.
Alina’s death will be avenged.
ONE
Y ou’re a difficult woman to find, Ms. Lane,” said Inspector O’Duffy as I opened the diamond-paned front door of Barrons Books and Baubles.
The stately old-world bookstore was my home away from home, whether I liked it or not, and despite the sumptuous furnishings, priceless rugs, and endless selection of top-rate reading material, I didn’t. The comfiest cage is still a cage.
He glanced at me sharply when I stepped around the door, into full view, noting my splinted arm and fingers, the stitches in my lip, and the fading purple and yellow bruises that began around my right eye and extended to the base of my jaw. Though he raised a brow, he made no comment.
The weather outside was awful, and so long as the door was open, I was too close to it. It had been raining for days, a relentless, depressing torrent that needled me with sharp wind-driven droplets even where I stood, tucked beneath the shelter of the column-flanked archway of the bookstore’s grand entry. At eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, it was so overcast and dark that the streetlamps were still on. Despite their sullen yellow glares, I could barely see the outlines of the shops across the street through the thick, soupy fog.
I backed up to let the inspector enter. Gusts of chilly air stepped in on his heels.
I closed the door and returned to the conversation area near the fire where I’d been wrapped in an afghan on the sofa, reading. My borrowed bedroom is on the top floor, but when the bookstore is closed on weekends I make the first floor, with its cozy reading nooks and enameled fireplaces, my personal parlor. My taste in reading material has become a bit eccentric of late. Acutely aware of O’Duffy on my heels, I surreptitiously toed a few of the more bizarre titles I’d been perusing beneath a handsome curio cabinet. The Wee People: Fairy Tale or Fact? was chased by Vampires for Dummies and Divine Power: A History of Holy Relics.
“Dreadful weather,” he observed, stepping to the hearth and warming his hands before the softly hissing gas flames.