Faefever

I finally found myself in a semilit deserted alley, with no militant footfalls or sounds of rioting nearby. I ducked into a doorway lit by a single, naked overhead bulb, to take care of something that badly needed taking care of. I removed my pack carefully, dropped it, ripped off my jacket, and gingerly, delicately removed my spear harness, which I placed on the ground.

The entire time I’d been ru

I stripped off my sweater and T-shirt, then put my sweater, jacket, and MacHalo back on and belted the spear harness on the outside of my coat, without touching anything but the leather straps.

I tied the T-shirt I’d removed around the bottom part of the harness, forming an additional layer of protection between the tip and me.

Ironic, the thing I love most, that makes me feel so powerful under normal circumstances, becomes my greatest liability, and the thing I fear most when I pilfer dark power. I can have one, or the other—but never both.

Carrying the dichotomy one step further, I could no longer sense the spear, which meant I could inadvertently hurt myself on it. However, I could also no longer sense the Sinsar Dubh, which meant it could no longer hurt me, and send me crashing to my knees, helpless, in a dangerous situation.

Duh. I stood in the doorway marveling, and not in a good way, at my own stupidity. If eating Unseelie made me unable to sense the Sinsar Dubh, then all I needed to do next time it popped up on my radar was get as close to it as I could, eat Unseelie, and get closer. Close enough to pick it up.

An image of the Beast as I’d last seen it materialized in my mind.

Yeah, right. Pick it up. Sure. What then? Put it in my pocket? I didn’t have one large enough.

So, I knew how to get close to it without being incapacitated by pain. I still had no idea what to do then. If I touched it would I, too, turn psycho? Or was I a sidhe-seer/Null/OOP-detector mutant that was somehow exempt? A moot point right now, with my odds of surviving the night looking so grim.

I dug out my cell phone to call Dani and tell her what was happening in Dublin. There was no way I could make it to the abbey. I glanced at my watch and was stu

Dani answered on the second ring. She sounded hysterical. “Feck, Mac!” she cried. “What did you do to us?”

I’d been adjusting the straps on my pack to accommodate my bulky external harness, and alarm made me drop it. “What’s wrong?” I demanded.

“Shades, Mac! Fecking Shades came out of the fecking Orb when we opened it! The abbey’s full of ’em!”

I was so stu

“Rowena says you betrayed us! She says you set us up!”

My heart constricted. “No, Dani, I didn’t, I swear! Somebody must have set me up!” The thought iced my blood. There was only one person who could have, one person that walked among those dark vampires without fear. How easily he’d relinquished the relic. How quickly he’d agreed to give it to me. Yet he’d not given it to me that night. Thirty hours had passed between my request, and his delivery. What had he been doing during those hours? Spiking a sidhe-seer’s drink with Shades? “How bad is it?” I cried.

“We’ve lost dozens! When we opened the Orb, they splintered, and we thought the light from the ritual killed them, but they fecking grew back together in the shadows. They’re everywhere! In closets, in shoes, anywhere there’s dark!”

“Dani, I didn’t do this! I swear to you. I swear on my sister. You know what she means to me. You have to believe me. I would never do this. Never!”

“You said you’d come,” she hissed. “You didn’t. Where are you?”

“I’m stuck in the city, holed up between York and Mercer. Dublin’s a nightmare, and I couldn’t get out. People have been rioting for hours, and the Unseelie are driving them into the Dark Zones!”

She sucked in a breath. “How bad is it?” she echoed my question.

“Thousands, Dani! Beyond counting. If it keeps up like this—” I broke off, unable to make myself complete the thought. “If you guys come in, we can save some of them, but I can’t do it by myself. There’s too many Unseelie.” But if the abbey was full of Shades, they couldn’t leave. We couldn’t afford to lose the abbey. The libraries were there, and God only knew what else. The lightbulb above me flickered and made a sizzling noise as if it had taken a power surge.

It’s hard to say what makes the brain suddenly piece things together, but I had one of those moments where a series of images flashed through my mind and I was stupefied by the simplicity and obviousness of what I’d been missing: Rhino-boys collecting trash, repairing streetlamps, driving city trucks, replacing broken bricks in the pavement. “Oh, no, Dani,” I breathed, horrified, “forget what I just said. Don’t come into the city, and don’t let anyone else. Not now. Not for any reason. Not until after dawn.”

“Why?”

“Because they’ve been pla

Full battery.

No service. The cell phone towers had just gone down. I had no idea how much Dani had heard.

“—city into a Dark Zone,” I whispered.

The lightbulb above me flickered again. I looked up at it. It sizzled, popped, and went dark.