Darkfever

CHAPTER 11

"I don't want it," I repeated, backing away. "Get it away from me!"

"It won't harm you, Ms. Lane. At least not in this form," Barrons said again.

I didn't believe what he was saying the fifth time any more than I had the first. I flung an arm behind me, at the rug still damp from my cleaning efforts. "What do you call that? If I had anything left in my stomach at all, I'd still be on my hands and knees. I don't know about you, but I call impromptu vomiting harm." Not to mention the deep sense of dread I still couldn't shake. The fine hair on my body was standing on end as if I'd been hit with a high-voltage charge. I wanted to put as much distance between 'it' and me as was possible.

"You'll get used to it—"

"So you keep saying," I muttered.

"— and your reactions will lessen in time."

"I have no intention of spending that much time around it." 'It' was photocopies of two pages allegedly ripped from the Sinsar Dubh. Photocopies—not even the real thing—he was thrusting at me.. Mere facsimiles had me plastered up against the wall in my frantic efforts to avoid it. I could feel a Spidey-moment coming on. If he didn't back off, I was going to scale the walls using only my Gentlemen-Prefer-Blondes-Blush nails as rappelling spikes, and I seriously doubted it was going to work.

"Take slow, deep breaths," Barrons said. "You can overcome it. Concentrate, Ms. Lane."

I gulped air. It didn't help.

"I said breathe. Not do a fish-out-of-water imitation."

I looked at him coldly, inhaled, and held it. After a long moment, Barrons nodded, and I exhaled slowly.

"Better," he said.

"Why is this happening to me?" I asked.

"It's part of being what you are, Ms. Lane. Thousands of years ago, when the Fae still ran the Wild Hunt, destroying anything in their path, this was what a sidhe-seer felt when the Tuatha Dé riders approached en masse. This was her warning to lead her people to safety."

"I didn't feel it when I saw any of the Unseelie," I pointed out. But as I reflected on those first two times, I realized I had gotten queasy, and both times a general, inexplicable sense of dread had preceded my "visions." I'd just not recognized it for what it was because I'd not been able to pin it on anything. With the last monster, I'd been so obsessed with getting to Alina's, and I'd crashed into it so fast, that I couldn't decide whether I'd felt anything in advance or not.

"I said, en masse," he said. "Alone, or in pairs, their impact is not as great. It is possible only the Sinsar Dubh will ever make you this sick—or perhaps a thousand Unseelie bearing down on you. The Dark Book is the most powerful of all the Fae Hallows. As well as the deadliest."

"Stay back," I snapped. He'd closed to less than a yard from me, holding those terrible pages. He took another step forward and I tried to make myself into wallpaper. Very yellow, very spineless wallpaper.

"Master your fear, Ms. Lane. They are mere copies of the real pages. Only pages of the Dark Book itself could do you lasting harm."

"They could?" That certainly put a problematic spin on things. "You mean even if we manage to find this book, I'm not going to be able to touch it?"

His lips curved but his eyes stayed cold. "You could. I'm not certain you would like yourself afterward."

"Why wouldn't I—" I broke off, shaking my head. "Forget it, I don't want to know. Just keep those pages away from me."

"Does this mean you're giving up the quest to find your sister's murderer, Ms. Lane? I thought she begged you to find the Sinsar Dubh. I thought she said everything depended on it."

I closed my eyes and sagged back against the wall. For a few minutes there I'd completely forgotten about Alina. "Why?" I whispered as if she were still there to hear. "Why didn't you tell me any of this? We could have helped each other. Maybe we could have kept each other alive." And that was the bitterest part of it all—how things might have turned out, if only she'd confided in me.

"I doubt you would have believed, even if she had. You've been a tough sell, Ms. Lane. As much as you've seen and heard, you're still trying to deny it."

His voice was much too close. Barrons had moved. I opened my eyes. He was standing right in front of me, yet my sickness hadn't intensified—because I hadn't seen him coming. He was right; my reaction was as much mental as it was physical, which meant at least part of it was controllable. I could retreat, go home, and try to forget everything that had happened to me since I'd arrived in Dublin, or I could figure out how to go forward. I touched my short, dark locks. I hadn't butchered my beautiful blonde hair for nothing. "You see the Fae, too, Barrons, yet you have no problem holding those pages."

"Repetition dulls even the keenest senses, Ms. Lane. Are you ready to begin?"

Two hours later, Barrons decided I'd had enough practice. I couldn't bring myself to touch the photocopied pages, but at least I was no longer retching in close proximity to them. I'd figured out a way to close my throat off against the involuntary heaves. Nearness still made me feel perfectly miserable, but I could muster and maintain a presentable mask.

"You'll do," he said. "Get dressed. We're going somewhere."

"I am dressed."

He turned toward the front of the store and looked out the window at the night. "Go put on something more… grownup… Ms. Lane."

"Huh?" I had on white capris, dainty sandals, and a sleeveless pink blouse over a lace-trimmed tank. I thought I looked perfectly grown-up. I circled around in front of him. "What's wrong with me?"

He gave me a brief glance. "Go put on something more… womanly."

With my figure, nobody could ever accuse me of not being womanly. Understanding might come slowly to me sometimes—but it comes. Men. Take them into a classy lingerie store and I guarantee you they'll find the only thing in there made of cheap black leather and chains. My eyes narrowed. "You mean sleazy," I said.

"I mean the kind of woman others are accustomed to seeing me with. A grown one, if you think you can manage that, Ms. Lane. Black might make you look old enough to drive. The new hair is… better. But do something with it. Make it look like it did the night I woke you."

"You want me to have bed-head on purpose?" "If that's what you call it. Will an hour be enough?" An hour implied that I needed a lot of help. "I'll see what I can do," I said coolly.

I was ready in twenty minutes.

My suspicions about the building behind the bookstore were confirmed; it was a garage, and Jericho Barrons was a very rich man. I guessed the books and baubles trade was pretty darned lucrative.

From the eye-popping collection of cars in his garage, he chose a modest-by-comparison black Porsche 911 Turbo that roared deep in its masterfully engineered five-hundred-and-fifteen-horsepower throat when he slid the key into the ignition on the wrong side of the steering wheel and turned it. Yes, I know cars. I love fast, pretty ones and the subtle class of the pricey Porsche appealed to every shallow bone in my twenty-two-year-old body.

He put the top down and drove much too fast, but with the expert aggressiveness any high-performance vehicle capable of running zero to sixty in three-point-six seconds demanded.

One neighborhood melted into the next as he worked the engine, shifting up and down through the stop-and-go traffic of the city. Once past the outskirts of Dublin, he opened it up. Beneath a nearly full moon, we raced the wind. The air was warm, the sky brilliant with stars, and under other circumstances I would have tremendously enjoyed the ride.

I glanced over at him. Whatever else he might be—obviously a sidhe-seer himself and a royal pain in the petu—ass most of the time—Barrons was now just a man, lost in the pleasure of the moment, of the finely crafted machine in his hands, of the wide-open road and the seemingly limitless night.

"Where are we going?" I had to shout to make myself heard over the dual roar of the wind and engine.

Without taking his eyes off the road, for which I was eminently grateful at a hundred and four miles an hour, he said, "There are three main players in the city that have also been searching for the book. I want to know if they've found anything. You, Ms. Lane, are my bloodhound," he shouted back.

I glanced at the clock on the dash. "It's two in the morning, Barrons. What are we going to do, break and enter and creep around in their houses while they're sleeping?" It was a measure of how surrealistic my life had become that, if he replied in the affirmative, I suspected the first thing out of my mouth wouldn't be a protest but a complaint that he'd made me get overdressed for burgling. High heels and a short skirt would certainly make running from the police or angry, armed property owners very difficult.

He slowed a little so I could hear him better. "No, they're night people, Ms. Lane. They'll be up and just as willing to see me, as I am to see them. We like to keep tabs on one another. They, however, don't have you." A slow smile curved his lips.

He was hugely pleased with the new secret weapon he had in me. I had a sudden dismal view of my future, of being led around and asked incessantly, like one of those Verizon commercials, Do you feel sick now?

He sped up and we drove another ten minutes or so in silence, then turned off the main road into the entrance of a walled estate. After being cleared by a pair of coldly efficient white-uniformed security guards who, after a quiet phone call, retracted an enormous steel gate, we purred down a long, winding drive, framed on both sides by huge, ancient trees.

The house at the end of the drive was anachronistic to its setting, which seemed to suggest a stately manor house had once stood there but had been razed to be replaced with this sprawling, chilly, brilliantly spotlighted Meet-the-Jetsons' affair of steel and glass. See-through skywalks connected five levels that slanted at slight upward angles, and metal-framed terraces sported New Age furniture that looked positively miserable to sit in. I admit it; I'm old-fashioned. Give me a wraparound porch with white wicker furniture, swings on each end, slow-paddling ceiling fans, ivy-covered trellises, and hanging baskets of ferns, all beneath the shade of waxy-blossomed magnolia trees. This place was way too artsy and not nearly homey enough for me.

As we got out of the car, Barrens said, "Keep your wits about you and try not to touch anything that doesn't look human, Ms. Lane."

I nearly choked on a nervous laugh. Whatever had happened to good, old, wholesome advice like, "Stick together, hold hands, and look both ways before you cross the street?" I glanced up at him. "Not that I would want to, but why shouldn't I?"

"I suspect Fiona is right," he said, "and you are a Null, which means you'll give us away if you touch any of the Fae with your hands."

I looked at my hands, at the pretty pink nails that didn't complement my new look so well. My darker 'do would be better accented by slightly bolder tones. I would need to implement some wardrobe and accessorizing changes. "A Null?" I had to work to keep up with him in my heels as we hurried across the shimmering, white crushed-quartz drive.

"Old legends speak of sidhe-seers with the ability to freeze a Fae by touching it with their hands, immobilizing it for several minutes, preventing it from moving or even sifting place."

"Sifting place?"

"Later. Do you remember what to do, Ms. Lane?"

I eyed the house. It looked like there was a party going on. People milled on the terraces; laughter, music, and the clink of ice in glasses floated down to where we stood. "Yes. If I start to feel sick I should ask to use the bathroom. You'll escort me to it."

"Very good. And Ms. Lane?"

I glanced at him questioningly.

"Try to act like you like me."

When he put his arm around me and pulled me close, the shiver went clear down to my toes.

The house was decorated in unrelieved white and black. The people were, too. If it were up to me, I would carry a great big paintbrush around with me all the time, splashing color everywhere, decorating the world with peach and mauve, pink and lavender, orange and aquamarine. These folks seemed to think leeching the world of all color was cool. I decided they all must be deeply depressed.

"Jericho," a stunning raven-haired woman in a low-cut white evening gown and diamonds purred throatily. But her smile was teeth and viciousness, and for me, not him. "I almost didn't recognize you. I'm not sure we've ever seen each other with our clothes on."

"Marilyn." He acknowledged her with a brief nod that seemed to piss her off royally as we passed.

"Who's your little friend, Barrons?" a tall, anorexically thin man with a frightful shock of white hair asked. I wanted to pull him aside and give him the gentle advice that wearing all black only made him look thinner and sicker, but I didn't think now was a good time.

"None of your fucking business," Barrons said.

"Ah, we're in our usual fine form, aren't we?" the man sneered.

"'We' implies we came from the same gene pool, Ellis. We didn't."

"Arrogant fuck," the man muttered to our backs.

"I see you've got a lot of friends here," I remarked dryly.

"No one has friends in this house, Ms. Lane. There are only users and the used at Casa Blanc."

"Except for me," I said. Weird name for a weirder house.

He gave me a cursory glance. "You'll learn. If you live long enough."

Even if I lived to be ninety, I would never become like the people in this house. The murmured acknowledgments continued as we passed through the rooms, some hungry—mostly from the women—and others damning—mostly from the men. It was an awful bunch of people. I suffered a sudden stab of homesickness, missed my mom and dad with a vengeance.

I didn't see anything that wasn't human until we came to that last room, at the far end of the house on the fifth floor. We had to pass through three sets of armed security guards to get there.

Reality check: I was at a party with armed security guards and I was wearing all black. It couldn't be my reality. I wasn't that kind of person. Sadly, despite the short skirt that bared my pretty tanned legs to well above midthigh, a snug, bosom-enhancing top and high heels, compared to the rest of the women at Casa Blanc, I looked fifteen. I thought I'd turned my shoulder-length dark hair into something wild and sexy, but I obviously didn't know the meaning of those words. Nor did I understand a thing about the artful application of makeup.

"Stop fidgeting," Barrons said.

I took a deep breath and held it for a three count. "Next time a little more detail on our intended destination might help."

"Take a good look around, Ms. Lane, and next time you won't need it."

We stepped through a pair of enormous white doors, into a large white-upon-white room: white walls, white carpet, white glassed-in cases interspersed with white columns upon which priceless objets d'art rested. I stiffened, confronted with double double visions. Now that I knew such monsters existed, it was easier to spot them. I decided these two couldn't be putting much effort into the glamour they were throwing or else I was getting better at penetrating it, because once I saw past their beefy blond bouncer projections, they didn't flicker between the two, but remained Unseelie.

"Easy," Barrons murmured, sensing my tension. To the man seated on the absurd white thronelike chair in front of us, as if holding audience for his subjects, he said in a bored voice, "McCabe."

"Barrens."

I don't generally like big-boned, hard-bodied, auburn-haired men, and I was surprised to find McCabe attractive in a rough-hewn Irish way that would never polish up no matter the wealth he managed to accumulate or the treasures with which he chose to surround himself. But the two Unseelie flanking him, left and right, weren't attractive at all. They were huge, ugly, gray-skinned things that reminded me of rhinoceroses with their bumpy, oversized foreheads, tiny eyes, jutting underbites, and lipless gashes for mouths. Wide, squat, barrel-like bodies strained at the seams of ill-fitting white suits. Their arms and legs were stumpy and they were making a constant deep-in-the-throat snuffling sound, like pigs rooting through the mud for whatever it was pigs rooted. They weren't scary; they were just ugly. I focused on not focusing on them. Aside from mild heartburn and a sense of increased agitation, they hardly made me feel sick at all. Of course, any Fae's impact would now and forever be diminished in the dark shadow of the Sinsar Dubh's.

"What brings you to Casa Blanc?" McCabe said, adjusting the white tie on the white shirt beneath the jacket of his white suit. Why bother? I couldn't help but think. Ties fell into the accessory category and the very definition of accessorizing was accenting or enhancing by artful arrangement of color, texture, and style. Hello—had anyone heard the word 'color' in there? He might just as well have painted himself white.

Barrons shrugged. "Nice night for a drive."

"Almost a full moon, Barrons. Things can get dangerous out there."

"Things can get dangerous anywhere, McCabe."

McCabe laughed, showing movie-star white teeth. He looked me over. "Into something a little different, Barrons? Who's the little girl?"

Don't speak, Barrons had told me on the way there, no matter what anyone says. I don't care how pissed off you might get. Swallow it. His derisive "little girl" ringing in my ears, I bit down hard and didn't say a word.

"Just the latest piece of ass, McCabe."

I no longer had to bite down. I was speechless.

McCabe laughed. "She talk?"

"Not unless I tell her to. Her mouth's usually too full."

I could feel my cheeks burning.

McCabe laughed again. "When she grows up, pass her my way, will you?" He looked me over thoroughly, ice-blue eyes lingering on my bosom and bottom, and by the time he was done, I felt as if he'd not only seen me nude but somehow knew I had a tiny heart-shaped mole on the left cheek of my behind, and another on my right breast, just east of my nipple. His expression changed, his nostrils widened, his eyes narrowed. "On second thought," he murmured, "don't let her grow up too much. What would you take for her now?"

Barrons flashed a mocking smile. "There's a book I might be interested in."

McCabe snorted, brought the tip of his index finger to his thumb, and flicked an imaginary speck of lint from his sleeve. "No bitch is that good. There are women and there's power—and only one of those holds its value." His expression changed again, his lips thinned out and his eyes went chillingly empty.

Just like that, McCabe lost interest in me, and I had the startling realization that, to him, I wasn't even human. I was more like… well, a condom… something he'd use, then toss the soiled remains away from his person—and if we happened to be in a speeding car on the autobahn, or a jet crossing the Atlantic at the time, so what?

Had Alina been in this world? Had she known this obsessive-compulsive man in white? I could certainly see him killing her, or killing anyone for that matter. But could I see Alina believing herself in love with a man like him? Granted, he was rich, worldly, and attractive in a brutish, powerful way. But the inspector and the two girls I'd spoken with had been absolutely certain Alina's boyfriend wasn't native to the Emerald Isle, and McCabe—despite his enormous pretensions—was salt-of-the-earth Irish, through and through.

"Heard anything about it?" Barrons lost interest in me, too, and moved on to a new subject. Simply two men going about their business, with walking, talking—or rather mute—sex-on-heels nearby in case anyone wanted any, just a convenient platter of oyster on the half shell.

"No," McCabe said flatly. "You?"

"No," Barrons replied just as flatly.

McCabe nodded. "Well, then. Leave her and go. Or just leave." It was obvious he couldn't have cared less which option Barrons chose to exercise. In fact, if I'd gotten left, I wasn't sure McCabe would even notice me again for several days.

The King of White had dismissed us.