If he’d had any kind of guarantee of keeping me alive till that last terrible moment, would he have sacrificed me for the book?

I had little doubt on that score. There was violence in him tonight. I could feel it. I had no idea why he wanted it, but I did know this: The Dark Book was the end-all, be-all to Barrons. He was obsessed, and obsessed men are dangerous men. “You’ve never been so close to it before, have you?” I guessed.

“Not that I was aware of,” he said tightly. He whirled suddenly and punched the wall, a compact, careful blow—a controlled release of fury. Bits of plaster and lathing disintegrated around his fist, leaving it buried in the wall to the exterior brick. He leaned against it, breathing heavily. “You have no idea how long I’ve been hunting the cursed thing.”

I went very still. “Why don’t you tell me?” What might he say? Ten years?

Ten thousand?

His laughter was harsh, the brittle sound of chains being dragged across bones. “So, Ms. Lane?” he prompted. “What happens when you get close to it?”

I shook my head, and instantly regretted it. I was sick of Barrons’ evasions, but my headache was a hostile squatter occupying every inch of my head, breaking ground behind my eyes with a pointy-bladed shovel. I closed them. The day was coming when I was going to get my answers, one way or another. For now I’d give him his, in hopes that he might be able to shed light on the glaring problem of my inability to approach the book my sister had demanded that I find in her dying message.

“It hits me so suddenly and with such force that I don’t have time to think about it. All I know is one second I’m fine and the next I’m in such intense pain that I’d do anything to escape it. If it went on for very long and I didn’t pass out, Barrons, I think I’d beg you to kill me.” I opened my eyes. “But it’s more complex than that. It’s as if whatever I’m sensing is an utter anathema to everything I am. As if we’re point and counterpoint, each other’s antithesis. We can’t occupy the same space. Like we’re two magnets that repel, but it repels me with such force that it nearly crushes me.”

“Polar opposites,” he murmured. “I wonder…”

“Wonder what?”

“Dilute the opposite, would it still repel?”

“I don’t see any way to dilute the power of the book, Barrons, and I just don’t see myself getting that much stronger.”

He waited for my brain to catch up.

I scowled. “You mean dilute me? Make me a little evil so maybe the book would let me near? What good would that do? Then I’d be evil and I’d get an evil book and I’d probably do evil things with it. We’d win the battle to lose the war.”

“Perhaps, Ms. Lane, you and I are fighting different wars.”

If he thought becoming evil was a solution, not a problem, he was right, we were.

What the feck is going on in your back alley?”

I glanced up. Dani stood in the doorway of the bookstore with the early afternoon sunlight gilding her auburn curls, bathing her delicate features in light. A sprightly slip of a girl, she was wearing a uniform of light green trousers with a white and green pinstriped poplin shirt, emblazoned on the pocket with a shamrock and the letters PHI. She looked cute and sweet and innocent, and I knew better. I didn’t know which startled me more: her presence, or the sunshine. Both had crept up on me while I’d been reading, absorbed in the day’s news.

I returned my attention to the gruesome story. A man had killed his entire family—wife, kids, stepkids, even their dog—then driven his car halfway across town, straight into a concrete bridge abutment at eighty miles an hour, not far from where Barrons and I had been last night. According to friends, neighbors, and coworkers, no one could explain it. He’d been a loving husband, an excellent employee at the local credit union, and a model father who’d regularly made time for his children’s sporting and academic events. “You want to cuss, Dani,” I told her, “do it around someone else.”

“Feck you,” she retorted.

“Real mature there,” I said, without looking up. “Trying on adulthood by cussing. You and a gazillion other teens. Do something original.” Back home, I’d rarely read anything other than the Sunday paper, specifically the lifestyle and fashion sections. Had crimes like these always been going on, and I’d just never noticed? Had I been so criminally oblivious?

Dani wheeled her bike in the door. “I don’t have to do something original, I am original.” She hesitated. “So, what’s going on out back?”

I shrugged. “You mean the cars? No clue.” I wasn’t about to admit to someone who was plugged into the sidhe-seer community that I’d stolen a Fae Hallow and in the process gotten sixteen humans killed. I’d been reading up on the paranormal and it appeared there was a golden rule: Harm no innocents, and humans somehow seemed to unilaterally get accorded that status, an irony heavily underscored by the newspaper I was reading.

“No. I meant the half-wiped Grug.”

“Grug?”

She described it, what was left of it. “I call them Rhino-boys.” I dropped the paper. “There’s one out back, half eaten?”

She nodded and her lips quirked. “Rhino-boys, I get that. They’re gray and lumpy and make that funny noise in the back of their throats.”

“Is Grug their Unseelie caste name?” Was this true sidhe-seer lore? I was starving for it. I wanted explanations, rules. I wanted someone to take my life and make sense out of it. I wanted a Sidhe-Seer Compendium.

She shrugged. “We don’t know squat about the Unseelie. It’s just what we call them. I like your name better. So, you gonna finish it off, or do you get off on torturing ’em? What do you do with the other parts? Keep ’em in a jar or something?” She glanced around, looking for those jars with an expression that said simultaneously “I’m so bored” and “Hey, way cool.”

“Oh, God, you think I—No, Dani, I don’t get off on torturing them! I didn’t know it was out there.” It bothered me immensely that something big and bad enough to eat Unseelie had been nearby, and I’d not even known it. It bothered me more that Dani thought I was so twisted. Who was this kid’s role model? Where did she get her ideas? TV? Video games? Kids these days seem both dangerously impressionable and dangerously desensitized, as if their lives have somehow assumed comic book proportions, ergo, comic book relevance—or a complete lack thereof. If I had to read about one more group of teenage boys killing a homeless person and saying, “I don’t know why we did it, it was like…hey, you know…that Internet game we play,” I was going to start stabbing humans with my spear, golden rule be damned. “Did you kill it?” I asked.

“With what?” She poked out a slim hip. “You see a sword tucked into this uniform? Strapped on my bike somewhere?”

“A sword?” I blinked. Surely she didn’t mean the sword. “You mean the Seelie Hallow, the sword of light?” I’d read about it in my research; it was the only other weapon capable of killing Fae. “That’s what you’ve been getting your forty-seven kills with? You have it?”

She gave me a smug look.

“How on earth did you get it?” According to the last book I’d read, it had been in the custody of the Seelie Queen herself!

The smug look faded a little.

I narrowed my eyes. “Rowena gave it to you.” From her crestfallen expression, I continued guessing, “And she keeps it, and doesn’t let you carry it much, does she?”

Dani scowled and propped her bike against the wall. “She thinks I’m too fecking young. I’ve killed more Fae than all her other little kiss-ass acolytes she sends out combined, and still she treats me like a child!” She stomped over to the counter, and looked me up and down. “I bet you can’t kill the Grug. I bet Rowena’s wrong about you. What kind of special powers do you have? I don’t see anything special about you.”