Barrons dropped to the sidewalk in front of me with a soft thud of boots hitting stone, his long black coat billowing out around him. “You probably should have thought about that before you froze it, Ms. Lane,” he said coolly.

Hanging as I was put me eye-to-eye with him. I transferred my grip from my scalp to the Gray Man’s immobilized arm and used all my strength to take some of the weight off my hair. “Can we talk about this after you’ve gotten me down?” I gritted.

He crossed his arms over his chest. “You wouldn’t be having an after if I weren’t here to save you. Let’s talk about where you went wrong, shall we?”

It wasn’t a question, but I tried to answer it anyway. “I’d rather not just now.”

“One: It was obvious you didn’t expect it to sift in on you and you weren’t prepared for it. Your spear was down at your side. Your purse should have been up and you should have been ready to stab the Gray Man through it.”

“Okay, I messed up. Can I have my purse now?”

“Two: You let go of your weapon. Never let go of your weapon. I don’t care if you have to wear fat-clothes and strap it to your body beneath them. Never let go of your weapon.”

I nodded, but not really. I couldn’t move my head that much. “Got it. Had it the first time you said it. Now can I have my purse?”

“Three: You didn’t think before you acted. Your greatest advantage in any one-on-one battle with a Fae is that it doesn’t know you’re a Null. Unfortunately, this one does now.”

He retrieved my purse—finally—and I reached for it with both hands but he held it beyond my grasp. I clamped my hands back on the Gray Man’s arm. I was getting a headache the size of Texas. I tried to kick him but he sidestepped it easily. Jericho Barrons had those kind of flawless reflexes that I’ve only ever seen before in professional athletes. Or animals.

“Never freeze a Fae, Ms. Lane, unless you are absolutely, one-hundred-percent sure you can kill it before it unfreezes again. Because this one”—he tapped the rigid Unseelie coat hanger upon which I was draped—“is perfectly conscious even though it’s frozen, and the very instant it unfreezes it’s going to sift out with you. You’ll be gone before your brain even manages to process that it has unfrozen. Depending on where it takes you—you might materialize surrounded by dozens of its kind—you will be there, your spear will be here, and I won’t have any idea where to begin looking—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Barrons,” I exploded, kicking wildly in midair, “enough already! Will you just shut up and give me my purse?”

Barrons glanced down at the spear, which was half-poking out of my purse, and plucked the ball of foil from the lethal tip. Then he leaned forward and got right in my face. Up close I could see how truly furious he was with me. The corners of his mouth and rims of his nostrils were white, and his dark eyes burned with anger. “Never get separated from this thing again. Do you understand me, Ms. Lane? You will eat with it, shower with it, sleep with it, fuck with it.”

I opened my mouth to tell him not only didn’t I have anyone I was currently doing that last thing with, I never called it that, and didn’t appreciate him calling it that, when my perspective changed abruptly. I’m not sure if the Gray Man began moving before Barrons stabbed it in the gut, or after, but something wet suddenly sprayed me, and it let go of my hair. I fell to my knees and got a face full of sidewalk.

The Gray Man slumped next to me. I instantly backed away on my hands and knees. A deep wound in its abdomen oozed the same grayish-green stuff that I was revolted to discover was also on my shirt, my skirt, and my bare legs. The Unseelie looked from Barrons to the spearhead—half-wrapped in what used to be my favorite purse, and might still have been if not for the slime dripping all over it—its eyes blazing with disbelief, hatred, and rage.

Though its wrath was for Barrons, it swung its head around and the last words it uttered were for me. “The Lord Master is back, you stupid bitch, and he’s going to do the same thing to you he did to the last pretty little sidhe-seer. You’ll wish you’d died at my hands. You’ll beg for death the same way she did.”

A few moments later, when Barrons gave me my purse back, even though I knew it was already dead, I pulled out the spear and stabbed it again anyway.

TWENTY

In the year since the day I got on a plane to fly to Dublin, determined to find my sister’s killer and bring him to justice, I’ve learned that you can discover just as much from what people don’t say to you, as what they do.

It’s not enough to listen to their words. You have to mine their silences for buried ore. It’s often only in the lies we refuse to speak that any truth can be heard at all.

Barrons disposed of the Gray Man’s body that night—I didn’t ask how. I just went back to the bookstore, took the longest, hottest shower of my life, and scrubbed my hair three times. Yes, I took the spear into the shower with me. I’d learned my lesson.

The next day, I finished up at the museum without incident. No V’lane, no old woman, and not a single OOP in the entire place.

For the first time since I’d been staying at the bookstore, Barrons didn’t make an appearance that night. I guessed he must have slipped out while I was upstairs, answering e-mails on my laptop. It was a Saturday, so I thought he might have a date and wondered where a man like him went on one. I couldn’t see him doing the movie-and-dinner routine. I wondered what kind of woman he went out with, then remembered the one from Casa Blanc. Out of sheer boredom, I imagined them having sex, but when the woman began looking more and more like me, I decided there were wiser ways to kill time.

I spent the evening watching old movies by myself on a small TV that Fiona kept behind the counter in the bookstore, trying not to stare at the phone, or think too much.

By Sunday morning, I was a wreck. Alone with too many questions and no one to talk to, I did what I’d sworn I wouldn’t do.

I called home.

Dad answered, as he had every time I’d called from Ireland. “Hi,” I said brightly, crossing my legs and twirling the phone cord around my finger. I was sitting on the comfy couch in the rear conversation area of the bookstore. “How’s it going?”

We chatted halfheartedly for several minutes about the weather in Georgia and the weather in Dublin, before moving on to comparing and contrasting the food in Georgia to the food in Dublin, then he launched into a rambling diatribe that supposedly linked climates with high per-annum rainfall to dour personalities and, just when I was thinking he’d surely exhausted his run of banality and we could begin a real conversation, he started in on one of his favorite filler topics about which he’d been known to pontificate for hours: the ever-fluctuating price of gas in America and the role the president was playing in our current economic woes.