“I’ve wondered the same thing myself. I didn’t choose this ability, any more than the stupid parameters accompanying it.” I shivered. Now that the fire inside me was gone, I felt chilled to the bone and my teeth began to chatter. The last time I’d had a near miss with the book I’d felt the same thing, iced to the seat of my soul by the sheer evil of the thing.
He stepped to the fireplace, lit the gas flames, and returned with a blanket. I wrapped myself in it and gingerly sat up.
“Tell me what it feels like when it happens,” he demanded.
I looked at him. For all his solicitude with the fire and the blanket, he was cold, remote, seeing professionally to my needs. I wondered to what extent he’d allowed my “distress” to intensify before retreating. What a quandary it must have been for him to be so close to the Sinsar Dubh, yet afraid that using me to locate it would kill me—before he’d located it—effectively putting his OOP detector permanently out of commission, and losing his advantage in the game.
If he’d had any kind of guarantee of keeping me alive till that last terrible moment, would he have sacrificed me for the book?
I had little doubt on that score. There was violence in him tonight. I could feel it. I had no idea why he wanted it, but I did know this: The Dark Book was the end-all, be-all to Barrons. He was obsessed, and obsessed men are dangerous men. “You’ve never been so close to it before, have you?” I guessed.
“Not that I was aware of,” he said tightly. He whirled suddenly and punched the wall, a compact, careful blow—a controlled release of fury. Bits of plaster and lathing disintegrated around his fist, leaving it buried in the wall to the exterior brick. He leaned against it, breathing heavily. “You have no idea how long I’ve been hunting the cursed thing.”
I went very still. “Why don’t you tell me?” What might he say? Ten years?
Ten thousand?
His laughter was harsh, the brittle sound of chains being dragged across bones. “So, Ms. Lane?” he prompted. “What happens when you get close to it?”
I shook my head, and instantly regretted it. I was sick of Barrons’ evasions, but my headache was a hostile squatter occupying every inch of my head, breaking ground behind my eyes with a pointy-bladed shovel. I closed them. The day was coming when I was going to get my answers, one way or another. For now I’d give him his, in hopes that he might be able to shed light on the glaring problem of my inability to approach the book my sister had demanded that I find in her dying message.
“It hits me so suddenly and with such force that I don’t have time to think about it. All I know is one second I’m fine and the next I’m in such intense pain that I’d do anything to escape it. If it went on for very long and I didn’t pass out, Barrons, I think I’d beg you to kill me.” I opened my eyes. “But it’s more complex than that. It’s as if whatever I’m sensing is an utter anathema to everything I am. As if we’re point and counterpoint, each other’s antithesis. We can’t occupy the same space. Like we’re two magnets that repel, but it repels me with such force that it nearly crushes me.”
“Polar opposites,” he murmured. “I wonder…”
“Wonder what?”
“Dilute the opposite, would it still repel?”
“I don’t see any way to dilute the power of the book, Barrons, and I just don’t see myself getting that much stronger.”
He waited for my brain to catch up.
I scowled. “You mean dilute me? Make me a little evil so maybe the book would let me near? What good would that do? Then I’d be evil and I’d get an evil book and I’d probably do evil things with it. We’d win the battle to lose the war.”
“Perhaps, Ms. Lane, you and I are fighting different wars.”
If he thought becoming evil was a solution, not a problem, he was right, we were.
THIRTEEN
W hat the feck is going on in your back alley?”
I glanced up. Dani stood in the doorway of the bookstore with the early afternoon sunlight gilding her auburn curls, bathing her delicate features in light. A sprightly slip of a girl, she was wearing a uniform of light green trousers with a white and green pinstriped poplin shirt, emblazoned on the pocket with a shamrock and the letters PHI. She looked cute and sweet and innocent, and I knew better. I didn’t know which startled me more: her presence, or the sunshine. Both had crept up on me while I’d been reading, absorbed in the day’s news.
I returned my attention to the gruesome story. A man had killed his entire family—wife, kids, stepkids, even their dog—then driven his car halfway across town, straight into a concrete bridge abutment at eighty miles an hour, not far from where Barrons and I had been last night. According to friends, neighbors, and coworkers, no one could explain it. He’d been a loving husband, an excellent employee at the local credit union, and a model father who’d regularly made time for his children’s sporting and academic events. “You want to cuss, Dani,” I told her, “do it around someone else.”