She hissed, “If you are Pri-ya and he has put you up to infiltrating us…”

“I am no one’s puppet, Rowena,” I said without looking back. “Not his. Not Barrons. Not yours.”

FOURTEEN

I settled into the tufted leather seat of the high-backed snug, or booth as we call them back home in the States, and ordered a beer and a shot.

For the first time since I’d come to Dublin, I felt curiously at peace, as if a critical game piece had been placed on the board today, and the match was finally, fully under way.

On one side of the board was the Lord Master. He was bad. He was bringing Unseelie through. He planned to destroy our world.

On the other side of the board was me—tiny little hand waving here, a dot the size of a pencil tip on an aerial shot of the planet. I wanted vengeance for my sister and I wanted the Fae to get the feck, as Dani would say, out of our world. I was good.

There were three other major players on the board: V’lane, Barrons, and Rowena.

They all had one thing in common: They wanted me.

One was a Fae. One was an unknown. One was—I was pretty sure, though she’d not said and I’d not asked—the Grand Mistress of sidhe-seers.

They all had their private agendas and secrets.

And I had no doubt all three of them would lie to me as smoothly and easily as they’d put a knife through each other’s backs.

I pulled out my journal and began writing.

I started with V’lane. According to Rowena, he’d been telling me the truth. He was a Seelie prince, a member of the queen’s High Council, and working on her behalf to stop the Unseelie from entering our world and taking it over. That seemed to place him on my side of the board, the good side, which was a little hard to swallow because I knew that he was ruthless and would manipulate me to the brink of death to achieve his ends, in addition to trying to have potentially lethal sex with me along the way.

He was at least one hundred and forty-two thousand years old, probably substantially older. I wasn’t sure it was possible for him to understand how a human felt about anything, therefore the damage he might do to me, even if he was trying to abstain from damaging me, was immense.

Barrons was next. Indisputably self-serving, could he be the most treacherous of the three? When Rowena had mentioned the abbey, a few hours from town, then said that Dani had been looking for me at the bookstore for the past month, I’d known instantly that Barrons must have followed the young girl and tracked her, or Rowena herself, back to the abbey at some point.

My abbey.

Then he’d had the gall to try to make me do a drive-by, no doubt to see if the Sinsar Dubh was perhaps secreted away beneath the abbey grounds—after all, who better to stand guard over a book of dark Fae magic than a horde of sidhe-seers who could see any and all of the monsters that might try to come after it?—without ever saying, Oh, by the way, I found the headquarters of sidhe-seers while you were gone and I bet they might be able to tell you something about yourself. No, there would be no voluntary sharing of useful information with me.

Barrons walked among Shades and came to no harm. Barrons could see the Fae; he knew about Druids; he had abnormal strength and speed; and although it had taken me some time to admit it to myself, what stared out at me from behind those jet eyes didn’t seem thirty years old. Was he a human who’d somehow learned to cheat time? Was he Fae and I couldn’t sense it? If so, how powerful a Fae was he, that he could out-glamour a sidhe-seer? Was it possible one of those diaphanous Fae had slipped inside him and taken over what used to be Barrons? I discarded that thought the instant I had it. I didn’t believe anything, not even a Fae, could take over Jericho Barrons.

Fiona had disappeared after attempting to harm his OOP detector. An inspector who’d been snooping into his business was killed. People that interfered with Jericho Barrons had a convenient way of vanishing or dying. Still…I had no proof he’d done anything nefarious in either of those cases.

He didn’t seem to want more Unseelie in our world. Nor, however, did he seem to have any interest in trying to save our world. Was he really so mercenary and ambivalent? Did he genuinely want the book just to sell it to the highest bidder?

Then there was the question of how he planned to touch it, assuming we found it. The Sinsar Dubh was so evil it corrupted anyone who came in contact with it. Did he believe he could tattoo protection spells into his skin that would permit him to touch it without it corrupting him? Could he?

I rubbed my forehead and tossed back my shot. It burned all the way down my throat. I thumped my chest with my fist and drew a scorched breath.

The only thing that was certain about Jericho Barrons was that nothing was certain. With far more questions than answers, I couldn’t place him on either side of the board.

With V’lane tentatively on the good side, and Barrons on the sidelines, next was Rowena. What a piece of work. Rowena should have been someone I could position firmly on my side of the game, and in terms of single-mindedly opposing the Unseelie and the Fae in general, I could. The problem was I didn’t feel I could in terms of my welfare.

I knew V’lane and Barrons both wanted me alive, and had the ability to keep me in that condition. However, I wasn’t so sure about Rowena. If she believed there was someone more qualified—and more malleable than I—to honor her holy triumvirate of See, Serve, and Protect with my spear, to what lengths might she go to take it from me? If humans met Fae ruthlessness with equal ruthlessness, how were we different from them? Didn’t there have to be some defining factor? Was I really supposed to walk up to a human woman and kill her because a Fae had stepped inside her, without first trying to see if there was some way to get it out? Tonight when I went to sleep would I dream about the deaths I’d caused by letting her walk away?

Thinking about Rowena sucked. I added a little note with an asterisk: if she isn’t the Grand Mistress, who is?

I moved on to making notes about the minor players like Mallucé, who’d been working for, and two-timing, the Lord Master. According to Barrons he’d still not been seen or heard from during the month I’d been gone, which I decided meant the vampire’s memorial service had been for real, and he really was dead. If he’d survived what Barrons and I had done to him, he would have been back among his worshippers long before now. I wondered if the Lord Master had someone new serving his purposes. I brushed Mallucé off the board. One down!