Bloodfever (5 page)

I stomped back downstairs and outside to the garage. The rain had abated but the sky was still dark with thunderclouds, and dawn was a promise I wouldn't have believed, if I'd not lived through twenty-two years of them. Down the alley to my left, Shades restlessly shaped and reshaped the darkness at the edge of the abandoned neighborhood.

I flipped them off. With both hands.

I tested the garage door. Locked, of course.

I went to the nearest blacked-out window and smashed it in with the butt of my flashlight. The tinkle of breaking glass soothed my soul. No alarm went off. “Take that, Barrons. Guess your world isn't so perfectly controlled, after all.” Perhaps it was warded like the bookstore, against other threats, not me. I broke out the jagged edges so I wouldn't get cut, hoisted myself over the sill, and dropped to the floor.

I flipped on the light switches by the door then just stood there a minute, grinning like an idiot. I've seen his collection before, even ridden in a few of the cars, but the sight of them all together, one gleaming fantasy after another, is a total rush to somebody like me.

I love cars.

From sleek and sporty to squat and muscley, from luxury sedan to high-performance coupe, from state-of-the-art to timeless classic, I am a car fanatic—and Barrons has them all. Well, maybe not
all
. I haven't seen him driving a Bugatti yet, and really, with 1003 horsepower and a million-dollar price tag, I'm hardly expecting to, but he's got pretty much every car of my dreams, right down to a sixty-four and a half Stingray, painted what else but British racing green?

There, a black Maserati crouched next to a Wolf Countach. Here, a red Ferrari stretched on the verge of a purr, next to a—my smile died instantly—Rocky O'Bannion's Maybach, reminding me of sixteen deaths that shouldn't have happened to men who hadn't deserved to die, and at least part of it was on my head: sixteen deaths I'd celebrated because they'd bought me a temporary stay of execution.

Where do you put such conflicting feelings? Is this where I'm supposed to grow up and start compartmentalizing? Is compartmentalizing just another way of divvying up our sins, apportioning a few here and a few over there, shoving our internal furniture around to hide some, so we can go on living with the weight of them individually, because collectively they'd drown us?

I shoved all thought of cars from my mind and began looking for doors.

The garage had once been some kind of commercial warehouse, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it occupied nearly a city block. The floors were polished concrete, the walls poured concrete, the beams and girders steel. All the windows were painted black, from the glass-block apertures near the ceiling, to the two double-paned glass openings at ground level by the doors, one of which I'd busted. The garage had a single retractable dock door.

Other than that and a bunch of cars, there was nothing. No stairs, no closets, no trapdoors hidden beneath rubber mats on the floor. I know, I looked, there was nothing.

So where were the three subterranean levels and how was I supposed to get down to them?

I stood in the center of the enormous garage surrounded by one of the finest car collections in the world, tucked away in a nondescript alley in Dublin, and tried to think like its bizarre owner. It was an exercise in futility. I wasn't sure he had a brain. Perhaps there was only a coldly efficient microchip in there.

I
felt
more than heard the noise, a rumble in my feet.

I cocked my head, listening. After a moment, I got down on my hands and knees, brushed a thin veneer of dust from the floor, and pressed my ear to the cold concrete. Far beneath me, in the marrow of the ground, something bayed.

It sounded maddened, bestial, and it raised the fine hair all over my body. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the mouth capable of making such a sound. It bayed over and over, each soul-chilling howl lasting a full minute or more, echoing up from its concrete tomb.

What was
down
there? What kind of creature possessed such lung capacity? Why was it making such a sound? It was darker than a wail of despair, emptier than a funeral dirge; it was the bleak, tortured baying of a thing beyond salvation, abandoned, lost, condemned to the agony of hell without beginning or end.

Chicken flesh sprouted all over my arms.

There was a new cry then, this one more terrified than tortured. It rose in gruesome concert with that long, terrible howl.

They both stopped.

There was silence.

I rapped my knuckles on the floor in frustration, wondering just how far in over my head I was.

No longer feeling quite so jackassy or pushy, I left to go back to my room. As I stepped into the alley, the wind scooted trash along the pavement, and the dense cloud cover drifted apart to reveal a window of dark sky. Dawn was moments away, yet the moon was still bright and full. To my right, in the Dark Zone, Shades no longer crouched in the shadows. They'd fled something, and it wasn't the moon or the dawn. I'd watched them a lot from my window lately; they ceded the night in petulant degrees, the largest of them lingering until the last.

I glanced to my left and sucked in a breath.

“No,” I whispered.

Just beyond reach of the building floodlights a tall, black-shrouded figure stood, folds of midnight cloth rustling in the wind.

Several times over the past week, I'd thought I'd glimpsed something out a window, late at night. Something so trite and clichéd that I'd refused to believe it was real. And I wouldn't now.

Fae were bad enough.

“You're not there,” I told it.

I dashed across the alley, vaulted up the stairs, kicked open the door, and burst through it. When I looked back, the specter was gone.

I laughed shakily. I knew better.

It had never been there to begin with.

I took a shower, dried my hair, got dressed, grabbed a chilled latte from the fridge, and made it downstairs just in time for Fiona to show up, and the police to arrive to arrest me.

FOUR

I
told you. He was working on my sister's case.”

“And when did you see him last?”

“I told you that, too. Yesterday morning. He stopped by the bookstore.”

“Why did he stop by the bookstore?”

“Oh, for heaven's sake, I told you that, too. To tell me he'd reviewed her case and there was still no new evidence and that he was sorry but it was going to have to stay closed.”

“Do you expect me to believe Inspector O'Duffy, who incidentally has a lovely wife and three children he takes to church every Sunday, followed by brunch with his in-laws—a family outing he's missed only four times in the past fifteen years, and then for funerals—bypassed that in favor of making an early morning, personal visit to the sister of a deceased murder victim to tell her an already closed case was staying closed?”

Well, fudge-buckets. Even I was gripped by the illogic in that.

“Why didn't he use the phone?”

I shrugged.

My interrogator, Inspector Jayne, waved the two officers flanking the door from the room. He pushed up from the table and circled it, stopping behind me. I could feel him back there, staring down at me. I was acutely aware of the ancient stolen spear tucked into my boot, inside the leg of my jeans. If they charged and searched me, I was in big trouble.

“You're an attractive young woman, Ms. Lane.”

“Point?”

“Was there something going on between you and Inspector O'Duffy?”

“Oh, please! Do you really think he's my type?”

“Was, Ms. Lane. Do I think he
was
your type. He's dead.”

I glared up at the Garda looming over me, trying to use dominant body posture to intimidate me. He didn't know how bad my day had already been, or that there wasn't much in the human world that frightened me anymore. “Are you going to arrest me or not?”

“His wife said he'd been distracted lately. Worried. Not eating. She had no idea why. You know?”

“No. I told you that, too. Half a dozen times now. How many more times do we have to go over this?” I sounded like a bad actor in a worse movie.

He did, too. “As many times as I say we have to. Let's take it from the beginning. Tell me again about the first time you saw him here at the station.”

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

“Open your eyes and answer the question.”

I opened my eyes and stared daggers up at him. I still couldn't believe O'Duffy was dead. Royally screwing up my world, he'd had his throat cut holding a scrap of paper with my name and the address of the bookstore written on it. It hadn't taken long for his brothers in—well, not exactly arms, the Dublin police don't carry guns—to come looking for me. I'd spent the morning battling Shades and a death-by-sex Fae, discovered something monstrous lived beneath Barrons' garage right behind my bedroom, and now I was in the police station being interrogated on suspicion of murder. Could my day get any worse? Oh, they'd not pressed formal charges, but they'd sure used scare tactics on me back at the bookstore, making them think they were. And they'd made it clear they'd jump on any reason they could find to back me up against a wall and start snapping mug shots. I was a stranger in this city, nearly all the answers I gave sounded evasive because they were evasive, and O'Duffy's Sunday morning visit to me really did look suspicious.

I repeated the story I'd told an hour ago, and an hour before that and an hour before that. He asked the same questions he and two men before him had asked, all morning and a good part of the afternoon—they'd let me stew for forty-five minutes while they went to lunch and came back smelling scrumptiously of vinegary fish and chips—phrased in minutely different ways, all designed to trip me up. The caffeine from my chilled latte had worn off hours ago and I was starving.

On one level, I could appreciate what Inspector Jayne was doing; it was his job, he was doing it very well, and it was obvious Patrick O'Duffy had been his friend. I hoped they'd done the same for Alina. On another level, it infuriated me. My problems were so much bigger than this. It was an epic waste of my time. Not only that, I felt exposed. With the exception of my trip across the back alley this morning, I hadn't set foot outside of the bookstore since I'd seen what I'd seen in the warehouse at 1247 LaRuhe a week ago. I felt like a walking target with a bull's-eye painted on my forehead. Did the Lord Master know where to find me? How high was I on his list of priorities? Was he still wherever he'd gone when he'd stepped through that portal? Was he watching the bookstore? Did he have his Rhino-boys, those watchdogs of the Fae—the lower caste of enormous, ugly, gray-skinned Unseelie with wide, squat, barrel-bodies, jutting underbites, and bumpy foreheads—waiting to grab me the moment I walked out of the police station by myself? Should I
try
to get myself formally arrested? I discarded that thought the instant I had it. Humans couldn't keep me alive. I blinked, startled to realize I no longer quite counted myself in that camp.

“He was my brother-in-law,” he said abruptly.

I winced.

“Assuming you had nothing to do with his murder, I still have to find a way to tell my sister what the fuck he was doing with you the morning he died,” he said bitterly. “So what the fuck was he doing, Ms. Lane? Because we both know your story's bullshit. Patty didn't miss Mass. Patty didn't follow up on cases on his personal time. Patty stayed alive because Patty loved his family.”

I stared dismally at my hands, folded neatly in my lap. I badly needed a manicure. I tried to imagine what the wife of an officer who'd died mere hours after visiting a pretty young woman, and was given the inane reason for the visit I was offering, would think and feel. She'd know she was being lied to, and the unknown always takes on greater, more terrible proportions than whatever truth is concealed behind the lie. Would she believe, as her brother did, that her beloved Patty had cheated on her and betrayed their marriage vows the morning he'd died?

I never used to lie. Mom raised us to believe that every lie puts something out there in the world that's inevitably going to come back and bite you in the petunia. “I can't explain Inspector O'Duffy's actions. I can only tell you what he did. He came by to tell me Alina's case was staying closed. That's all I know.”

I drew comfort from the fact that if I came clean and told him everything, confessed every bit of it, down to my suspicion that O'Duffy had somehow learned that something big, nasty, and not human had moved into Dublin, and been killed because of it, he'd believe me even less.

The afternoon was endless: Who owns the bookstore? How did you say you met him? Why are you staying there? Is he your lover? If her case is closed, why haven't you gone home? How did you get those bruises on your face? Are you working somewhere? How are you supporting yourself? When do you plan to go home? Do you know anything about the three abandoned cars in the back alley behind Barrons Books and Baubles?

The whole time, I waited for Barrons to come and rescue me, the product, I suppose, of growing up in a world where nearly all the fairy tales I'd heard as a child had a prince rushing to the rescue of the princess. Men down south love to play up to that image.

It's a strange new world out there and the rules have changed: It's every princess for herself.

It was five-forty-five before they finally let me go.

O'Duffy's brother-in-law escorted me to the door. “I'm going to be watching you, Ms. Lane. Every time you turn around, it's my face you're going to see. I'm going to be tape to your ass.”

“Fine,” I said tiredly. “Can I get a ride back to the bookstore?”

Okay, that was a no.

“How about the phone? Can I use it?” He gave me another hard look. “Are you
kidding
me? You guys wouldn't let me get my purse this morning. I don't have money for a cab. What if somebody out there mugs me?”

Inspector Jayne was already walking away. “You don't have a purse, Ms. Lane. What would somebody mug you for?” he tossed over his shoulder.

I glanced uneasily at my watch. When they'd picked me up at the bookstore, they'd made me remove the flashlights from the waistband of my jeans and leave them with Fiona.

Thunder rumbled, vibrating the glass panes in the windows.

It was going to be dark soon.

 

“Hey! You there, wait up!”

I didn't break stride.

“Beautiful girl, wait a minute! I was hoping I'd see you again!”

It was the “beautiful girl” part that flung a noose around my foot, the voice that snagged it tight. I raked a hand through my recently butchered hair and looked down at my dark, baggy clothes. The compliment was balm to my soul, the voice young, male, and full of fun. I skidded to a halt. Shallow, I know.

It was the dreamy-eyed guy I'd seen in the museum the day I'd been searching it for OOPs.

I turned bright red. That was the day V'lane had amped up the death-by-sex thing and I'd stripped in the middle of Ireland's famous Ór exhibit, right there in front of God and everybody.

Flushing, I sprinted off again, splashing through puddles. It was raining—of frogging course—and the sidewalks of Dublin's
craic
-filled Temple Bar District were nearly empty. I had places to go, darkness to race, guys who'd watched me strip to avoid.

He dropped into a long-legged lope beside me and I couldn't help myself, I slanted a look at him. Tall, dark, dreamy-eyed, he was boy-on-the-cusp-of-man, in that perfect stage where guys are velvet skin over supple hard bodies, without an ounce of fat. I'd bet he had a six-pack. He was a serious leftie. Once upon a time in my life, I'd have given my eyeteeth for a date with him. I'd have dressed in pink and gold, swept my long blond hair up in a playful ponytail, and painted my nails and toes to match, Young-Hearts-Beat-Free-Tonight Blush.

“Fine, I'll run with you then,” he said easily. “Where you off to in such a hurry?”

“None of your business.” Go away, pretty boy. You don't fit in my world anymore. How I wished he did.

“I was afraid I wouldn't see you again.”

“You don't even know me. Besides, I'm sure you saw more than enough of me at the museum,” I said bitterly.

“What do you mean?”

“You know.”

He shot me a quizzical look. “All I know is I had to leave right after I saw you. I had to go to work.”

He hadn't watched me strip? Some of the ugliness of my life melted away. “Where do you work?”

“Ancient Languages Department.”

“Where?” Hunky and smart.

“Trinity.”

“Cool. Student?”

“Yeah. You?”

I shook my head.

“American?”

I nodded. “You?” He didn't sound Irish.

“Little of this, little of that. Nothing special.” He smiled and winked. Dreamy eyes, long dark lashes.

Wow. Right. This guy was special all the way down to his toes. I wanted to know him. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to feather my lips on those lashes. And he'd probably end up dead if he hung around with me. I killed monsters other people couldn't see and had just spent the entire day in the police station on suspicion of murder for the death of a man I hadn't killed instead of the sixteen I had. “Leave me alone. I can't be your friend,” I said bluntly.

“That's way too intriguing to pass up. What's your story, beautiful girl?”

“I don't have a story. I have a life. And you don't fit in it.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Dozens.”

“Truth?”

“Is.”

“Come on, don't dis me.”

“Consider yourself dissed. Fuck off,” I said coolly.

He held up both hands, “All right. I get it,” and stopped.

I pounded down the sidewalk away from him and didn't look back. I wanted to cry.

“I'll be around,” he called. “If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

Right. Ancient Languages Department at Trinity. I made a mental note never to go there.