Darkfever

CHAPTER 12

Glamour: illusion cast by the Fae to camouflage their true appearance. The more powerful the Fae, the more difficult it is to penetrate its disguise. The average human sees only what the Fae wants them to see, and is subtly repelled from bumping into or brushing against it by a small perimeter of spatial distortion that is part of the Fae glamour.

And that was why the monster in the alley with mule-size genitals and leechlike sucking mouths had instantly known what I was—I'd been unable to avoid crashing into it.

Any other person would have been repelled the instant they'd rounded the corner, and stumbled clumsily, careening off nothing they could see. You know all those times you say, "Geez, I don't know what's wrong with me—I must have tripped over my own feet?" Think again.

According to Barrons, McCabe had no idea his 'bodyguards' were Unseelie who'd addressed each other as Ob and Yrg when they'd escorted us from the Throne Room in guttural tones Barrons and I had pretended not to hear. McCabe's usual staff of bodyguards had disappeared three months ago and been replaced by the Rhino-boys, a type of Unseelie Barrons believed were low-to-mid-level caste thugs dispatched primarily as watchdogs for the highest-ranking Fae.

After thinking about that for a minute and following it to the logical conclusion, I'd said, Does that mean an Unseelie is hunting for the Sinsar Dubh, too?

It looks that way, Barrons replied. And a very powerful one, at that. I keep catching wind of someone the Unseelie call the "Lord Master," but so far I've had no luck discovering who or what this Lord Master is. I told you, Ms. Lane, that you had no idea what you were getting into.

The Unseelie were terrifying enough. I had no desire to encounter whatever they addressed as their ruler. Well, maybe now's a real good time for me to get right back out of it, I'd said.

Try, the look he'd given me had said. Even if I managed to close my heart and turn my back on my sister's murder, Jericho Barrons wasn't about to let me go.

Sad fact was we needed each other. I could sense the Sinsar Dubh and he had all the pertinent information about it, including a few ideas about where it might be and who else was looking for it. Left to my own devices, I would never be able to find out about parties like the one at Casa Blanc and get myself invited there. Left to his own devices, Barrons would never know if the book was nearby, perhaps even in the same room with him. He could be standing right next to it, for all he knew.

I'd gotten a good idea just how important I was to him last night. If the book was metal, I was Jericho Barrons' own private state-of-the-art metal detector. After Ob and Yrg had returned to McCabe, Barrons had escorted me through floor after floor of the starkly decorated house. When I'd felt nothing, he'd marched me all over the manicured estate, including the outbuildings. He'd insisted we cover the grounds so thoroughly that I hadn't gotten back to my borrowed bedroom to sleep until just before dawn. Reluctant though I was to feel something so awful again, I'd been almost disappointed when my newly discovered Spidey-sense hadn't picked up the faintest tingle anywhere.

Still, to me, the bottom line wasn't about the Dark Book at all. It was about uncovering the details of my sister's secret life. I didn't want the creepy thing. I just wanted to know who or what had killed Alina, and I wanted him or it dead. Then I wanted to go home to my pleasantly provincial po-dunk little town in steamy southern Georgia and forget about everything that had happened to me while I was in Dublin. The Fae didn't visit Ashford? Good. I'd marry a local boy with a jacked-up Chevy pickup truck, Toby Keith singing "Who's Your Daddy?" on the radio, and eight proud generations of honest, hardworking Ashford ancestors decorating his family tree. Short of essential shopping trips to Atlanta, I'd never leave home again.

But for now, working with Barrons was my only option. The people I met during our search could be people Alina had met too. And if I could somehow find and retrace the path she'd taken through this bizarre film-noir world, it should lead me straight to her killer.

I would be seriously rethinking the wisdom of that before long.

I picked up my pen. It was Sunday afternoon and Barrons Books and Baubles was closed for the day. I'd woken up disoriented and badly missing Mom, but when I'd called, Dad had said she was in bed and he didn't want to wake her. She hadn't been sleeping well, he said, even though she'd been taking something that was supposed to help her. I'd carried on an achingly one-sided conversation with him for a few minutes, but his efforts had been so painfully halfhearted that I'd given up. At a loss for what to do, I'd finally grabbed my journal and gone downstairs to the bookstore.

Now I was sprawled on my stomach on the comfy sofa in the rear conversation area of the bookstore, notebook propped on a pillow in front of me.

Sifting: a method of Fae locomotion, I wrote.

I nibbled the tip of my fine-point, felt-tipped fuchsia pen and tried to figure out how to write this one down. When Barrons had explained it to me, I'd been horrified.

You mean they can just think themselves somewhere and that's how instantly it happens? They just want to be someplace—and then there they are?

Barrons nodded.

You mean I could be walking down the street and one could just pop in alongside me and grab me?

Ah, but there you have a tremendous advantage, Ms. Lane. Grab it back and you'll freeze it like you did the one in the alley. But do it fast, before it sifts you to someplace you really don't want to be.

And then what am I supposed to do? Start toting weapons around with me so I can kill them while they're frozen? No matter how horrific the Unseelie were, the thought of carving something up while it couldn't even move was abhorrent to me.

I doubt you could, Barrons said. Both Seelie and Unseelie are virtually indestructible. The higher the caste, the harder they are to kill.

Great, I said. Any ideas what I should do once I turn them into all-too-temporary statues?

Yes, Ms. Lane, he'd replied, with that dark, sardonic smile of his. Run like hell.

I brushed the tips of my lashes with sable mascara, and wondered what one wore to visit a vampire.

The chic red sweater set I'd brought with me from home not only didn't go so well with my darker hair, I was afraid it might be construed as a flirtatious invitation to color me bloodier. The dainty silver cross earrings my aunt Sue bought me for my last birthday would no doubt be considered provocative, as well. I glanced at my watch. Indecision over my outfit was making me late for my midnight appointment with Barrons. I wasn't going to have time to dash to the church down the street and dab holy water at my wrists and behind my ears; my version of Eau de Don'tbiteme.

I stared in the mirror. I couldn't make myself look like the women at Casa Blanc if I wanted to, and I didn't. I liked me. I liked my colors. I missed my hair so bad it hurt.

Sighing, I turned my head upside down, hair-sprayed it liberally, then set the lacquer with a blast of heat from my dryer. When I tossed it back again and finger-combed it—thanks to Ms. Clairol's Medium Hot Rods—I had a head of shoulder-length, tousled Arabian-Nights curls that framed my face seductively and made my green eyes stand out even more than they usually did. Slightly uptilted at the outer corners, with long dark lashes, my eyes were one of my best features, a brilliant shade of green, the color of new young grass at Easter. I have clear, even-toned skin that tans really well and goes with pretty much any shade. I didn't look bad with dark hair. I just didn't look like me. I looked older, especially with the candy-apple red I'd just glossed on my mouth, a concession to Barrens since I was sure he wasn't going to like the outfit I'd just decided on.

As I slipped into my clothes, I remembered how Alina and I used to make fun of vampire movies and novels, and of the whole paranormal craze in general that had been launched by the creation of one small, pale, bespectacled boy who lived beneath the stairs.

That was before I knew there really were things out there in the night.

"What the bloody hell do you have on, Ms. Lane?" Barrons demanded.

What I had on was a luscious gauzy skirt of nearly every pastel hue on the color wheel that hugged my hips and kicked frothily at my ankles, a form-fitting rose sweater with silk-trimmed cap sleeves and a plunging silk-edged neckline that made much of my bust, and dainty pink high heels that laced around my ankles. The colors went stunningly with my sun-kissed skin and dark curls. I looked feminine, soft, and sexy in a wholesome young woman way, not a Casa Blanc way. I strode briskly past rows of bookcases to where he stood waiting impatiently by the front door of the shop, and stabbed a finger in his direction. "If you treat me like one of your skanks again tonight, Barrons, you can just forget about our little arrangement. You need me as much as I need you. That makes us equal partners in my book."

"Well, your book is just wrong," he said flatly.

"No, yours is," I said just as flatly. "Figure out another way to explain me. I don't care what you come up with. But if you call me your latest piece of petunia again or make uncalled-for references to my mouth and oral sex with you, you and I are through."

He raised a brow. "Petunia, Ms. Lane?"

I scowled. "Ass, Barrens."

He crossed his arms and his gaze dropped to my glossy Lip-Venom red lips. "Am I to understand there are called-for references to your mouth and oral sex with me, Ms. Lane? I'd like to hear them."

Eyes narrowed, I sidestepped his idiotic taunting. "Is this Malluce guy really a vampire, Barrens?"

He shrugged. "He claims to be. He is surrounded by people who believe he is." He scanned me from head to toe. "Last night you said you wanted to know what to expect so you could better select your attire. I told you we were going to visit a vampire in a Goth-den tonight. Why, then, Ms. Lane, do you look like a perky rainbow?"

I shrugged in kind. "Take me or leave me, Barrens."

He took me. As I'd known he would.

There are a few things a hunting man can't do without. His bloodhound is one of them.

McCabe lived twenty minutes to the north of the city, in my idea of a modernistic nightmare.

Mallucé lived ten minutes to the south of Dublin, entombed in garish tatters of the past. The Victorian Era, to be precise—those sixty-three years from 1837 to 1901 during which Queen Victoria ruled Great Britain and called herself Empress of India—immortalized, erroneously perhaps, by opulent, velvet-draped, sensualistic, and often cluttered home decor.

Steampunk was the theme of the night at Mallucé's: Victorian-style clothing tweaked in edgy ways, ripped, distorted, and blended with Goth, Rivet, and Punk—although I admit sometimes I have a hard time picking up the subtle details that differentiate the individual pockets of the Dark Fashion world. I think you have to live in it to get it.

We left the Porsche with an Unseelie Rhino-boy valet at the door, whose glamour looked like unvarnished deathpunk to me. In contrast, I did indeed resemble a perky rainbow.

Mallucé's lair was a monstrous, rambling affair of brick and stone that was a mishmash of various types of Victorian architecture, leaning heavily toward Addams Family Goth, with an embarrassment of turrets and porticos, wrought-iron balustrades and battlements, oriel windows and transoms, and enough ornate cornices and brackets to dizzy the eye, not to mention baffle the soul.

Four tall stories were stacked haphazardly on top of each other, cresting in a black roofline against the cobalt night sky that made no sense, but leapt whimsically from flat to dangerously steep and back again. Trees with skeletal limbs, badly in need of a trim, scraped against slate, like oaken nails on the lid of a coffin.

The house rambled over an acre and I wouldn't have been at all surprised to learn it had upward of sixty or seventy rooms. On the top floor, strobe lights flickered beyond tall narrow windows, in tempo with raucous, driving music. On the lower floors the ambience was different: black and crimson candles were the light of choice, and the music was soft, dreamy, and voluptuous.

Barrens had given me a good bit of background about our soon-to-be host on the way over. Mallucé had been born John Johnstone Jr. to old British money some thirty years ago. When the senior Johnstones had died in a suspicious car accident, leaving their twenty-four-year-old son sole heir to a several-hundred-million-dollar fortune, J. J. Jr. had turned his back on his father's vast financial empire, sold off one company after the next, and liquidated all assets. He'd cast off his embarrassingly redundant name, gotten it legally changed to the singular, romantic Mallucé, dressed himself in the height of refined steampunk, and presented himself to Goth society as one of the newly undead.

Over the years, several hundred million dollars had bought him an extensive cult of true believers and hardcore groupies, and in some quarters, the name Mallucé was nearly synonymous with Lestat.

Barrons had never met him face-to-face but had seen him on several occasions in the trendier nightclubs. He'd made it his business to track Mallucé's interests and acquisitions. "He goes after many of the same artifacts as I," he told me. "Last time he tried to outbid me in an exclusive Internet auction—a wealthy recluse in London, Lucan Trevayne, disappeared and within days a large portion of his collection was up for grabs on the black market—I had a hacker standing by who took down Mallucé's entire computer network at the crucial moment." Dark eyes glittering, Barrons smiled, a predator relishing the memory of a cherished kill.

But his smile faded as he continued. "Unfortunately, what I'd been hoping to find in Trevayne's collection was no longer there. Someone had beaten me to it. At any rate, Mallucé must have learned of the Sinsar Dubh in the years preceding his father's death. The senior Johnstone dabbled in artifacts and there was a considerable uproar in the antiquities world some time back when photocopied pages of what most believed to be mythical—indeed, a joke of an icon—debuted on the black market. I have no idea how many photocopied sets are out there, but I do know Mallucé saw the pages at some point. The undead fuck's been getting in my way ever since." Barrons said "undead fuck" as if he strongly wished Mallucé dead—not believed him undead.

"You don't think he's a vampire," I said in a hushed voice, as we picked our way through room after room of stoned-looking people draped across low-backed velveteen divans, passed out on brocade chaises, and sprawled in various stages of undress on the floor. We were searching for an entrance to the sub-basement, where a dazedly compliant sloe-eyed Goth-girl had told us "the Master" would be. I tried not to notice the rhythmic thrusts, grunts, and moans as I stepped carefully over half-naked tangles.

He laughed briefly, a hollow, humorless sound. "If he is, the one that made him should be drowned in holy water, defanged, gelded, skinned, staked, and left to blister agonizingly in the sun." He was silent a moment, then, "Feeling anything, Ms. Lane?"

I didn't think he meant embarrassment about what I'd just stepped over, so I shook my head.

We passed half a dozen more Unseelie by the time we found the sub-basement. Mingled in with the white-skinned, pierced and chained, black-nailed, black-lipped Goth-youth, casting similar noir glamours, the Dark Fae were doing things to their unwitting victims I refused to see. Though I saw none as horrific as the Gray Man or the Many-Mouthed-Thing, I was beginning to realize that there was no such thing as an attractive Unseelie.

"Not true," Barrons said when I remarked upon it. "Unseelie royalty, the princes and princesses of the four houses, are every bit as inhumanly beautiful as Seelie royalty. In fact, it is virtually impossible to tell them apart."

"Why are there so many Unseelie here?"

"Morbidity is their oxygen, Ms. Lane. They breathe richly in places like this."

We'd been navigating a maze of subterranean corridors for some time. Now we turned down a long dim hallway that ended in an immense, square black door belted by bands of steel. A dozen men stood guard between Mallucé and any of his too-fervent faithful, shoulders slung with ammunition, toting automatic weapons.

A large bull of a man with a shaved head stepped into our path, blocking our way. The safety pins in his ears didn't bother me. The ones in his eyelids did.

"Where do you think you're going?" he growled, fixing his rifle on Barrons with one hand, resting the heel of the other on the butt of a gun tucked into the waistband of his black leather pants.

"Inform Mallucé that Jericho Barrons is here."

"Why would the Master give a fuck?"

"I have something he wants."

"Oh yeah? Like what?"

Barrons smiled and for the first time I saw a glint of genuine humor in his dark eyes. "Tell him to try to access any of his bank accounts."

Ten minutes later the door to Mallucé's inner sanctum burst open. The shaven-headed messenger stumbled out, his face ashen, his shirt covered with blood.

He was followed by two Unseelie Rhino-boys who jammed guns into our sides and marched us through the doorway and into the vampire's lair. Nausea flooded my stomach and I gripped my purse tightly with both hands so I wouldn't inadvertently touch either of our ugly escorts.

The chamber beyond the steel-belted door was so sumptuously decorated in velveteens, satins, gauzes, and brocades, and so busily furnished in Neo-Victorian that it was difficult at first to locate our host in the clutter. It didn't help that his attire matched his surroundings, the very height of Romantic Goth.

I spotted him at last. Motionless on a low-backed, richly embellished chaise scattered with gilt pillows and tasseled throws, Mallucé was wearing stiff, textured brown-and-black-striped trousers and fine-tooled Italian slippers. His eggshell linen shirt dripped lace at his wrists and throat, and blood at his jabot. He wore a brocade-and-velvet vest of amber, russet, crimson, and gold, and as I watched, he withdrew a snowy handkerchief from a pocket in the inner lining and gently dabbed blood from his chin, then licked a few remaining drops from his lips. Muscular and graceful as a cat, he was pale and smooth as a marble bust. Dead yellow eyes lent a feral cast to his sharply chiseled, too-white face. Long blond hair pulled back in an old-fashioned, amber-beaded queue emphasized his abnormally rigid pallor.

The vampire separated sinuously from the settee and rose, holding an incongruously modern laptop. With a graceful flick of his fingers, he snapped the chrome case shut, tossed it carelessly on a velvet-draped table, then glided to a halt in front of us.

As he stood there in all his undead stillness, face-to-face with the carnal maleness and disturbing vitality of Jericho Barrens, I was startled to realize that, although I was deep in the belly of a vampire's lair, surrounded by his worshipers and monster minions—if pressed to decide which of the men before me was more dangerous—it wouldn't have been Mallucé. Eyes narrowed, I looked back and forth between them. Something nagged at me, something I couldn't quite put my finger on. It was a thing that I would stupidly fail to put my finger on until it was too late. Before long, I would understand that nothing had been what it seemed that night, and the reason Barrens had faced-off so coolly with the bloodsucking Master was because he'd gone in with the quiet assurance that, no matter what happened, he would walk out alive, and not because he had Mallucé by the proverbial fiscal balls.

"What did you do with my money?" the vampire inquired, his silken voice unmatched by the steel in his strange citron eyes.

Barrons laughed, teeth flashing white in his dark face. "Think of it as an insurance policy. I'll return it when we're through, Johnstone."

The vampire's lips drew back, revealing long, sharp, pointed fangs. There was still blood on them. An expression of utter, mindless rage flashed over his icy face. "The name's Mallucé, asshole," he hissed.

Score one for Barrons, I thought. J. J. Jr. still hated his name. Losing control of an immense fortune didn't seem to bother him nearly as much as merely being addressed by the name with which he'd been christened.

Barrons flicked a contemptuous gaze over the vampire, from frothy, bloody jabot to pointy-toed, silk-trimmed leather slippers. "Mallucé asshole," he repeated. "And here I thought your last name was 'fashion nightmare."

Mallucé's inhuman yellow eyes narrowed. "Do you have a death wish, human?" He'd recovered quickly, his face was blank again, his voice once more controlled, so light and melodic it was nearly a verbal caress.

Barrons laughed again. "Might. Doubt you'll be helping me with it, though. What do you know about the Sinsar Dubh, Jr.?"

Mallucé flinched, almost imperceptibly, but it was there. If I hadn't been watching him so closely, I wouldn't have caught it. Twice now he'd betrayed an emotion, a thing I was willing to bet he rarely did. With a glance at his guards, then to the door, he said, "Out. Except you." He pointed at Barrons.

Barrons wrapped an arm around my shoulder and I instantly shivered, just as I had last night when he'd touched me. The man packed a seriously weird physical punch.

"She stays with me," Barrons said.

Mallucé gave me a deprecating once-over. Slowly, very slowly, his lips curved. The smile didn't work with those chilling, dead, animal-eyes of his. "Someone certainly took that passe Rolling Stones song to heart, didn't they?" he murmured.

Everyone's a fashion critic. I knew which song he meant: "She's a Rainbow." Whenever I listened to it on my iPod, I would close my eyes and spin around, pretending I was in a sun-dappled clearing, with my arms spread wide and my head thrown back, while colors of every hue sprayed from my fingertips like brilliant little airbrush guns, painting trees, birds, bees, and flowers, even the sun in the sky, glorious shades. I loved that song. When I didn't answer him—Barrons and I might have reached an agreement about how he would and wouldn't refer to me, but I was still under orders to keep my mouth shut—Mallucé turned to his bodyguards, who hadn't moved an inch, and hissed, "I said out."

The two Unseelie looked at each other, then one spoke in a gravelly voice, "But O Great Undead One—"

"You've got to be kidding me, Jr.," Barrons muttered, shaking his head. "Couldn't you come up with something a little more original?"

"Now." When Mallucé bared his fangs at them, the Rhino-boy bodyguards left. But they didn't look at all happy about it.