Darkfever

CHAPTER 22

Though it was only two weeks from the day I'd first gotten lost in the eerie, deserted streets of the abandoned neighborhood, it felt like another lifetime.

Probably because it was.

The Mac who'd followed a woman's outflung arm into an urban wasteland that day had been wearing a killer outfit of pink linen, low-hipped, wide-legged capris, a silk-trimmed pink T, her favorite silver sandals, and matching silver accessories. She'd had long, beautiful blonde hair swept up into a high ponytail that brushed the middle of her back with the spring of each youthful step.

This Mac had shoulder-length black hair: the better for hiding from those monsters hunting Mac Version 1.0. This Mac wore black jeans and a black T-shirt: the better for potentially being bled upon. Concealing her Iceberry Pink manicured toenails were tennis shoes: the better for running for her life in. Her drab outfit was finished off with an oversized black jacket she'd swiped from a coat hook by the front door as she'd left: the better for concealing the foot-long spearhead tucked into the waistband of her jeans (tip stuck in a wad of foil), the only silver accessorizing this carefully selected ensemble.

There were flashlights jammed into her back pockets and more stuffed into her coat.

Gone was the energetic step that had bounced so prettily on air. Mac 2.0 strode with determination and focus on feet that were rooted firmly to the ground.

This time, as I moved deeper into the Dark Zone, I understood what I'd been feeling my first time through: the blend of nausea, fear, and that edgy, intense urge I'd had to run. My sidhe-seer senses had been triggered the moment I'd crossed Larkspur Lane and unwittingly begun traversing the missing eighteen-block section between it and Collins Street. Though the Shades retreated during the day and went somewhere utterly dark, their lightless sanctuary had to be here somewhere in this forgotten place. All around me I could feel the presence of Unseelie—as I had that day—but I'd not yet known what I was, or understood what I'd been in the middle of.

This time, there was something more, too. I was willing to bet the little map I'd drawn myself would prove unnecessary. Something was tugging at me from a southeasterly direction, both luring and repelling. The feeling made me think of a nightmare I'd once had that had left an indelible impression on my memory.

In my dream, I'd been in a cemetery at night, in the rain. A few graves over from the sepulchre where I stood, was my own tomb. I hadn't actually seen it. I just knew it was there with that irrefutable dream-kind-of-knowing. Part of me wanted to run away, to flee the rain-slicked grass and stones and bones as fast as I could, and never look back, as if merely beholding my own grave might seal my fate. But another part of me had known that I would never have another moment's peace in my life if I was afraid to walk over there and look at my own headstone, stare down at my own name, and read aloud the date I'd died.

I'd woken from that nightmare before I'd had to choose.

I wasn't foolish enough to think I was going to wake from this one.

Fixedly ignoring the dehydrated human husks blowing like tumbleweeds down the fog-filled, deserted street, I left the map I'd drawn myself in the left front pocket of my jeans, and gave myself over to the dark melody of my personal Pied Piper. I saw the abandoned neighborhood a little differently this time as I walked into it.

As a graveyard.

I recalled Inspector O'Duffy's complaint the first time I'd met him: There's been a recent spike in homicides and missing persons like we've never seen before. It's as if half the damn city's gone crazy.

Not nearly half by my count, not yet anyway—although I could well imagine his consternation over corpses such as the one the Gray Man had left in the pub the other night—but here were O'Duffy's missing persons.

All around me. I was passing them, block after block.

They were outside abandoned cars, in neat piles. They were scattered up and down sidewalks, half-buried beneath litter that would never get collected again because these streets didn't show up on any maps used by city employees.

Though a conscientious sweeper or trash-collector might occasionally take a look while passing by and say, "Gee, what a mess down there," it was no doubt followed swiftly by a "not my route, not my problem."

The danger of the Dark Zone was this: Although these lanes and avenues wouldn't show up on any map, there was nothing to keep people from driving down them, or walking in, just as I had on my first day in Dublin. As close as it was to the Temple Bar District, there was a lot of foot traffic, and I'd seen myself just how much of that traffic was tourists too inebriated and full of craic to notice a radical change in environment until it was too late. A car might have a decent chance of getting through at night, with headlamps and interior lights ablaze, so long as the driver didn't stop and get out for any reason—like to indulge in a drunken urination—but I wouldn't take that gamble myself.

I noticed another thing that had eluded me on my first time through: There were no animals here. Not a single hissing alley cat, no beady-eyed rats, not one pooping pigeon. It was truly a dead zone. And those very small husks now made sense to me, too.

Shades ate everything.

"Except Barrens," I muttered, more deeply aggrieved by that than I cared to admit. The other night when we'd taken on the Gray Man, I'd felt a kinship with my enigmatic mentor. We'd been a team. We'd rid the city of a monster. Maybe I'd fumbled my first try, but the end result had been good, and I'd do better next time. I'd frozen it—he'd stabbed it. No more women would be robbed of their beauty and youth. No more would die horrific deaths. It had been a good feeling. And I guess in the back of my mind I'd been thinking that when I finally found out who or what had killed Alina, Barrens would help me go after it.

I suffered no delusions that the police or a court of law would be able to help me in my quest for justice. I had no doubt her murderer(s?) would be something only Barrons, I, and other sidhe-seers could see, and I only knew of one other sidhe-seer. Not only didn't I think the old woman would be much help taking down an Unseelie or ten, I didn't want her help. I never wanted to see her again. I know the old "kill the messenger" adage is hardly fair, but adages become adages because they resonate. I resented that woman every bit as much as her message.

I shook my head and turned my thoughts back to my sister. 2247 LaRuhe, Jr., Alina had written with her dying breath. She'd wanted me to come here to find something. I hoped it was her journal, though I couldn't imagine why she would have hidden it in the abandoned neighborhood. I doubted it was the mysterious, deadly Sinsar Dubh, because—although I was feeling the typical Fae-induced queasiness, which, by the way, I was finding easier to deal with—I wasn't suffering anything close to the killer nausea mere photocopies of the book had induced. All I was picking up from whatever was push-pulling me in a southeasterly direction was a sense of supernatural danger, but it was muted, as if whatever awaited me was… well… dormant.

I wasn't able to derive much comfort from that because dormant is just another word for "liable to explode at any moment," and from the way my life had been going lately, if there was a volcano in the vicinity, it was going to spew lava in my face sooner rather than later.

Sighing, I pressed on through the fog.

1247 LaRuhe was not what I'd expected at all.

I'd expected a warehouse or one of those dilapidated tenement buildings that had sprung up, replacing residences in the area when industry had moved in and taken over.

What I got was a tall, fancy brick house dressed up with an ornate limestone facade, smack in the middle of blocks upon blocks of commercial factories and warehouses.

The owner had obviously refused to sell, holding his or her bitter stand against the transition and decay of the neighborhood until the very end. The residence looked as out of place here as a Bloomingdale's would in the center of a low-income housing project.

There were three skeletal trees in the large, foggy, wrought-iron-fenced front yard with no leaves, no birds in the branches, and I was willing to bet, if I dug at their bases, not one worm in the ground. The terraced gardens were barren and the stone fountain at the grand, arched entrance had long ago run dry.

This was Wasteland.

I looked up at the elegant residence warily. Its veneer of civility and wealth was sharply undermined by what had been done to the many tall mullioned windows.

They'd all been painted black.

And I had the creepiest feeling that something was pressed up against those big dark eyes, watching me.

"What now, Alina?" I whispered. "Am I really supposed to go in there?" I so didn't want to.

I didn't expect an answer and I didn't get one. If angels really watch over us like some people believe, mine are deaf-mutes. It had been a purely rhetorical question, anyhow.

There was no way I could turn my back on this place. Alina had sent me here and I was going in, if it was the last thing I did. It occurred to me that it might just be.

I didn't bother with stealth. If someone or something was watching me, it was too late for that now. Squaring my shoulders, I took a deep breath, marched up the curved walkway of pale pavers, climbed the front stairs, and banged the heavy knocker against the door.

No one answered. I did it again a few moments later, then tried the door. Its owner suffered no security concerns; it was unlocked and opened on an opulent foyer. Black-and-white marble floors gleamed beneath a glittering chandelier. Beyond an ornate round table topped with a huge vase of showy silk flowers, an elegant spiral staircase curved up the wall, adorned by a handsome balustrade.

I stepped inside. Though the exterior was timeworn and in need of things like gutter and roof repair, the interior was furnished in high Louis XIV style, with plush chairs and sofas set against palatial columns and pilasters, richly carved marble-topped tables, and beautiful amber-and-gold light fixtures. I had no doubt the bedroom furniture would be ornate and enormous in true Sun King style. Huge gilt-framed mirrors and paintings of vaguely familiar mythological scenes adorned the walls.

After listening for a few moments, I began moving through the dimly lit house, one hand on a flashlight, the other on my spearhead, trying to get a mental picture of its inhabitant. The more rooms I glanced into, the less I understood. I'd seen so much ugliness in my short time in Dublin that I'd been expecting more of it, especially here in these desolate barrens, but the occupant appeared to be a wealthy, cultured person of highly sophisticated tastes and—

I mentally smacked myself in the forehead—was this where Alina's boyfriend lived? Had she sent me straight to the address of her murderer?

Ten minutes later I found my answer in an upstairs bedroom, beyond a massive bed, in a spacious walk-in closet filled with finer clothing than even Barrons wore. Whoever, whatever the owner was, he bought only the best. I mean, the ridiculously best—the stuff you paid insane amounts for just to insure no one else in the world could wear it, too.

Tossed carelessly on the floor, beside a collection of boots and shoes that could have shod an army of Armani models, I found Alina's Franklin Planner, her photo albums, and two packets of pictures that had been developed at one of those one-hour photo joints in the Temple Bar District. I thrust the planner and albums inside my bulky jacket but kept the plastic packs of photos in my hand.

After a quick but thorough look around both the closet and the rest of the bedroom, to make sure I wasn't overlooking anything else of hers, I hurried back downstairs so I'd be closer to an escape if I needed one.

Then I sat down on the bottom stair, beneath the gold-and-crystal-encrusted chandelier and opened the first pack of photos.

@

They say a picture's worth a thousand words.

These certainly were.

I'll finally admit it: Ever since I'd heard the description of Alina's boyfriend—older, worldly, attractive, not Irish—I'd been having a perfectly paranoid thought.

Was I following in Alina's footsteps, exactly? Right down to the man who'd betrayed her? Had my sister been in love with Jericho Barrons? Was my mysterious host and alleged protector the one who'd killed her?

When I'd walked into this place earlier, a part of me had thought, Aha, so this is where he was going the other night. This is his real home, not the bookstore, and he's really a Dark Fae and for some reason I can't pick up on it any more than Alina could. How was I to know? It certainly would explain those strange flashes of attraction I'd felt toward him on a couple of occasions, if he were really a death-by-sex Fae somewhere under all that domineering authority. Maybe there were Fae that could hide it somehow. Maybe they had talismans or spells to conceal their true nature. I'd seen too many inexplicable things lately to consider anything beyond the realm of possibility.

I'd been vacillating back and forth on the issue: one day thinking there was no way Barrons was the one, the next day nearly convinced he had to have been.

Now I knew for certain. Alina's boyfriend was most definitely not Jericho Barrons.

I'd just taken a photographic journey through a part of my sister's life I'd never thought to see, beginning with the first day she'd arrived in Ireland, to pictures of her at Trinity, to some of her laughing with classmates in pubs, and still more of her dancing with a crowd of friends. She'd been happy here. I'd flipped through them slowly, lovingly, touching my finger to the flush of color in her cheeks, tracing the sleek line of her long blonde hair, alternately laughing and trying not to cry as I got a glimpse of a world I'd never expected to see—of Alina alive in this crazy craic and monster-filled city. God, I missed her! Seeing her like this was a kick in the stomach! Looking at them, I felt her presence so strongly it was almost as if she were standing right behind me saying, I love you, Jr. I'm here with you. You can do this. I know you can.

Then the pictures changed, about four months after she arrived in Dublin, according to the dates on the photos. In the second packet of photos there were dozens of Alina alone, taken in and around the city, and it was obvious from the way she was looking at the person behind the camera that she was already deeply in love. Much as it chafed me to admit, the man behind the lens had taken the most beautiful pictures of my sister that I'd ever seen.

You want to believe in black and white, good and evil, heroes that are truly heroic, and villains that are just plain bad, but I've learned in the past year that things are rarely so simple. The good guys can do some truly awful things, and the bad guys can sometimes surprise the heck out of you.

This bad guy had seen and captured the very best in my sister. Not just her beauty, but that unique inner light that defined her.

Right before he'd extinguished it.

I found it impossible to understand that no one had been able to describe him to me. He and my sister must have turned heads all over the city, yet no one had even been able to tell me what color his hair was.

It was shimmering copper, streaked with gold, and it fell to his waist. Now, how could people not remember that? He was taller than Barrons and beneath his expensive clothing was the kind of body a man only got from weight lifting and intense self-discipline. He looked to be somewhere around thirty, but could easily have been younger or older; there was a timelessness about him. His skin was tanned gold and smooth. Though he was smiling, his strange copper eyes held the arrogance and entitlement of aristocracy. Now I understood why he'd furnished his home with the extravagant opulence of the Sun King who'd built the palace at Versailles—it fit him like a glove. I wouldn't have been at all surprised to learn he was the king of one of those small foreign countries few people ever heard of. The only thing that marred his perfection was a long scar running down his left cheek, from cheekbone to the corner of his mouth, and it didn't really mar him at all. It only made him more intriguing.

There were many pictures of them together that had obviously been taken by someone else—yet not one person had been able to describe him to the police, or tell them his name.

Here, they were holding hands and smiling at each other. There they were shopping. Here, they were dancing on top of a table down in the Temple Bar District.

There they were kissing.

The more I looked at the pictures, the harder it was to see this man as a villain. She looked so happy with him and he looked just as happy with her.

I shook my head sharply. She'd thought so, too. She'd believed in him right up to the day she'd called and left me her frantic message: I thought he was helping me, she'd said, but—God, I can't believe I was so stupid! I thought I was in love with him and he's one of them, Mad He's one of them!

One of who? An Unseelie that could somehow pass for human, duping even a sidhe-seer? I wondered again if such a thing was possible. If he wasn't Unseelie, what was he, and why would he ally himself with monsters? The man was clearly a consummate actor to have fooled Alina. But she'd found him out in the end. Had she grown suspicious and followed him here? To his home in the Dark Zone, smack in the middle of where my Spidey-sense was getting all kinds of warnings about supernatural danger?

Speaking of supernatural danger, I'd been so intent on investigating the address Alina had sent me to, then gotten so sidetracked by the photos, I'd not realized whatever had push-pulled me in this direction wasn't even in the house. It was out back, beyond it.

And it was getting stronger.

Way stronger. Like it just had woken up.

I slipped the photos back in their envelopes, stuffed them into an inner pocket of my jacket, and got up. As I hurried through the first floor of the house again, looking for a rear exit, I noticed that there was something really wrong with the mirrors on the walls. So wrong, in fact, that after glancing into the first few, I stopped looking and stepped up my pace sharply. Those surreal-looking glasses were my first taste of the true 'otherness' of the Fae. Although some Seelie and Unseelie walk and talk just like we do, we are so not the same species.

I found a back door, let myself out, and headed straight for the half-raised corrugated steel dock door of a warehouse that sat back off the alley about fifty feet behind 1247 LaRuhe. Whatever was pulling me was in there.

I must have been crazy that day is all I can figure. Though I moved with stealth and kept to the side of the entrance, I walked straight in. The temperature plummeted the moment I crossed the threshold and entered the shadowy interior. The building could easily have housed several football fields. It was an old distribution center, with racking systems a good thirty feet high to my left and right, and a central aisle between them, wide enough to drive two delivery trucks down, side by side. The long aisle was littered with plastic-wrapped pallets stacked ten to fifteen feet high that had not yet been unloaded and transferred to the racking. The chipped and scarred concrete was strewn with haphazard piles of wooden crates and forklifts that looked as though they'd been abandoned midlift. Far down the long aisle, I could see a stark, heavy light, and hear voices.

I crept toward the light, slipping from stack to forklift to crate, working my way stealthily along, drawn by an instinct I could neither understand nor refuse. The nearer I got, the colder it grew. By the time I reached the third-to-last row of racking between me and whatever was ahead, I was shivering and watching my breath puff tiny ice crystals into the air.

By the second-to-last row of racking, the metal of the fork-lift I crouched behind was painfully icy to the touch.

By the last row, I was so nauseated I had to sit down and stay put awhile. All that remained between me and whatever was ahead were stacks and stacks of pallets in a disorganized row that looked as if they'd been shoved back to clear a large area of floor space. Beyond those stacks, I could see the top parts of what looked like massive stones. The dense light that pressed into the gloom where I crouched wasn't natural. It was a heavy, somehow dark light, and not one of the objects it was shining on threw a shadow.

I have no idea how long it took me to get my queasy stomach under control. It might have been five minutes, it might have been half an hour, but eventually I was able to stand up again and forge on. It occurred to me that perhaps I shouldn't forge on; I should just "run like hell" as Barrons had once counseled me and not look back, but there was that whole 'pull' part of the push-pull thing going on. I had to see what was up there. I had to know. I'd come too far to turn back now.

I peered around the corner of a stack of pallets—and erked back violently.

I eased myself to the floor on legs that were shaky again, a hand pressed to my pounding heart, wishing fervently that I'd never gotten out of bed this morning.

After a few deep, careful breaths, I leaned forward and looked again. I think I was hoping I'd just imagined it.

I hadn't.

Though I'd seen pictures in guidebooks and on postcards, I would have expected to find this kind of thing in the middle of a farmer's pasture, not in the rear of an industrial warehouse in the heart of a commercial district, midcity. I'd also gotten the impression they were more moderately sized. This one was huge. I tried to imagine how it had gotten here, then remembered I wasn't dealing with human methods of locomotion. With the Fae, anything was possible.

Looming behind about a hundred Rhino-boys and other assorted Unseelie—who threw no shadows in the oppressive, strange light spilling from it—was a dolmen. Two towering stones stood upright about twenty-five feet apart, and a single long slab of rock lay across the top, making a doorway of the ancient megaliths.

All around the doorway, symbols and runes were chiseled into the concrete floor. Some glowed crimson, others pulsed that eerie blue-black of the stone we'd stolen from Mallucé. A red-robed figure stood facing the dolmen, a deep cowl concealing its face.

An arctic wind so cold it made my lungs hurt blasted through the stones, chilling more than my flesh; the dark wind bit into my soul with sharp, icy teeth, and I suddenly knew if I had to withstand it for very long I would slowly begin to forget every hope and dream that had ever warmed my heart.

But it wasn't the soul-searing wind or the Rhino-boys or even the red-robed figure the Fae watchdogs were addressing as "my Lord Master" that had me cowering in shadows.

It was that the immense stone doorway was open. And through it was pouring a horde of Unseelie.