“I’m not a princess, either,” I snapped, then frowned. “And how do you know where my spear is?”
“Barrons approaches.” The words were nearly indistinguishable from the chilly morning breeze. A breath of sultry warm air, in sharp contrast to the frigid wintry day, gusted down my shirt and caressed the tops of my breasts.
I yanked my coat shut and buttoned it. “Stay out of my clothes, even as the hot air you are, V’lane.”
More laughter. “Unless you wish to see the one that exploited you at your weakest, perhaps even made you so, go southeast, MacKayla, and quickly.”
A snapshot from late last night flashed behind my eyes: me, nude, straddling Barrons’ face.
I went.
Certain dates are stuck in my head, permanently scarred there.
July 5: the day Alina called my cell phone and left a frantic message that I ended up not hearing until weeks later. She was murdered mere hours after she placed that call.
August 4: the afternoon I stumbled into a Dark Zone for the first time and ended up on the front steps of Barrons Books and Baubles.
August 22: the night I had my first skull-splitting encounter with the Sinsar Dubh.
October 3: the day Barrons fed me Unseelie to bring me back to life and I experienced the intoxicating effects of dark Fae power.
October 31: yeah, well, enough said. It had been an insane few months.
Today I had no idea what the date was, so I couldn’t etch it into my memory just yet, but I knew I would never forget a single detail of it.
The entirety of Dublin had been devoured by Shades, turned into a wasteland. If there was another person alive in the city besides myself, they were in deep hiding.
I walked for hours through eerily silent districts. Not one blade of grass remained, not a shrub, bush, or tree. I knew I shouldn’t waste time, especially if Barrons was nearby, but I needed to see this.
I collected snapshots of the city like bricks, and I stacked and mortared them into a wall of determination: I would live to see this affront to humanity undone.
What few newspapers were left on the stands were dated October 31, the last day Dublin had functioned. The city had fallen that night and never gotten back up.
Storefronts were bashed in, windows broken out. There was glass everywhere, cars abandoned, some on their sides, others burned.
The worst part of it was the dried husks—I quit counting after a while—blowing down the streets, tumbleweeds of human remains, that part of us that Shades find indigestible.
I would have wept, but I didn’t seem to have tears left in my body. I gave the bookstore wide berth. I couldn’t bear to see if it had been destroyed. I preferred to keep my second-to-last image of it in mind, the way it had looked the afternoon of Halloween: Everything in its place, waiting for me to return, push open the door, pick up the mail, straighten the magazines people were always riffling through, start a fire, curl up on the chesterfield with a good book, and wait for that first customer of the day.
Every streetlamp I passed had been smashed, many ripped right out of their concrete bases, twisted and flung, as if by raging giants. Shades have no physical form, so I assumed some other caste of Unseelie must have done this to ensure that, if we somehow managed to get our grids back up and running, there’d be no lamps to route the power to.
Almost as bad as the husks—I cringed every time I stepped on one and it crunched beneath my feet—were the piles of clothing, cell phones, jewelry, dental devices, implants, and wallets. Each was a sacred burial mound in my mind.
Still, it didn’t keep me from picking up a few things.
An open switchblade caught the cold morning light, and my attention. I suspected its owner had been trying to stab the unstabbable when the Shade devoured him. “I’ll put it to good use,” I told the pile of black leather topped by a necklace of metal skulls. “I promise.” I retracted the blade and slid it into my boot.
My next scavenged prize was a chunk of living Unseelie flesh I found flopping in the street. I had no idea where it had come from, how or why, but it sure might come in handy. Ingesting Fae flesh not only made the average human able to see the Fae—including the innately invisible Shades—as well as any sidhe-seer, it also bestowed superstrength and heightened senses, the ability to dabble in the black arts, and miraculous healing powers.
I used my new switchblade to dice it, then stopped in a ransacked drugstore, where I pilfered baby-food jars, washed them out, and presto—I had a new stash of Unseelie sushi, if I needed it. Assuming, of course, I got into a situation dire enough that I would A: be willing to sacrifice my sidhe-seer talents, which seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds; B: let myself be vulnerable to my own spear again, which I fully intended to have back by the end of the day, come hell or high water; and C: ever be willing to put any part of anything Unseelie in my mouth again. I’d had more than my unwilling fill.