Her eyes flickered and I knew she didn’t appreciate the familiarity. Good. I meant to establish us as equals, not mentor and student. She’d lost the chance to mentor me when she’d turned her back on me. We looked at each other in silence. It stretched. I wasn’t about to speak. This was our first battle of the wills. It wouldn’t be our last.

“Sit,” she said again, gesturing to a chair in front of the desk.

I didn’t.

“Och, for the love of Mary, get your spine down, lass,” she barked. “We’re family here.”

“Really?” I leaned back against the door and folded my arms. “Because where I come from, family doesn’t abandon their own in need, and you’ve done that to me twice. Why did you tell me to go die that night in the pub? You gather sidhe-seers. Why not me?”

She tilted her head back and peered down her nose, assessing, measuring. “It had been a difficult day. I’d lost three of my own. And there you were, about to betray yourself, and the saints only knew how many of us, if you weren’t stopped.”

“It had to be obvious I had no idea what I was.”

“What was obvious was that you were fascinated by a Fae. I told you, I thought you were Pri-ya, one of their addicts. I had no way of knowing it was the first Fae you’d ever seen, or that you were unaware of what you were. Those who are Pri-ya are beyond our help. By the time that kind of damage has been done, the will is demolished and the mind virtually gone. I will never sacrifice ten to save one.”

“Did I look like my mind was gone?” I demanded.

“Actually, yes,” she said flatly. “You did.”

I thought back to that night, my first in Dublin. I’d been heavily jet-lagged, overcome with grief, feeling bitterly alone, and I’d just seen something that couldn’t possibly have been there. Perhaps the expression on my face had been a bit…stupefied, maybe even blank. Still…“What about the museum? You abandoned me there, too,” I accused.

She folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. “You appeared to be in league with a Fae prince—and again, Pri-ya. You were stripping for it. What did you expect me to think? It wasn’t until I saw you threaten him with the spear that I began to understand differently. Speaking of which, I need to see that spear.” She rose, skirted the desk with the agility of a much younger woman, and extended her hand.

I laughed. She was crazy if she thought I was handing my weapon over. I’d sooner put it through her heart. “I don’t think so.”

“MacKayla,” she said sternly, “let me see that spear. We are your people. We are sisters in this war.”

“My sister is dead. Did you see her, too? Did you make the same snap judgment and turn her away? Tell her to go die by herself? Because she did,” I said bitterly. “The Fae ripped her to shreds.”

Rowena looked startled. “What is this of a sister?”

“Oh, please.” Here it was, the real reason I hated her. Not just for turning me away and shattering my beliefs about my family, but why hadn’t she found my sister? With her spelled signs, her advertisements, and her bicycling spies, why hadn’t she drawn Alina in? Taught her? Saved her? “She was in Dublin for months. She hung out in the pubs all the time. How could you not have run into her?”

“Would you expect me to encounter every single person in Chicago on a visit?” she snapped. “Dublin is a big city, and we have only recently become organized. Until a short time ago, I was busy elsewhere. How long was your sister here? What did she look like?”

“She was here for eight months. She was blond like…like I was the first time you saw me. Same color eyes. More athletically built. A bit taller.”

Rowena searched my face, as if absorbing and breaking down my individual features, trying to place them in random arrangements on another woman. Finally she shook her head. “I’m sorry, MacKayla, but no. I never met your sister. You must tell me what happened. You and I are sisters in more than vision and cause; we are sisters in loss. Tell me everything.”

“We aren’t sisters in anything, and I’m not giving you my spear, old woman.” She wasn’t going to suck me in with sympathy.

She gave me a hard stare. “I sent you away the first time. The second time I tried to get you to come back here with me, but you refused. We’ve both turned the other away once. I won’t make that same mistake again. Will you?”

“You should have found my sister. You should have saved her.”

“You have no idea how much I wish I could have. Let me save you instead.”

“I don’t need saving.”

“If you’re working with Jericho Barrons, you do.”

“What do you know about Barrons?”

“That there are not, and never have been, any male sidhe-seers, MacKayla. It is a gift of matriarchy.”

I scoffed. “A gift? It killed my sister and ruined my life. As for Barrons, what is he, then? Because he sure can see the Fae, and he helps me kill them, which is more than you’ve ever done.”

“Is that all one must do to win your trust, MacKayla? Battle alongside you? Let us go kill a Fae together then, right now. Do you know what’s in his heart? His mind? Why he does it? What he’s after?”

I said nothing because there was nothing to say to that. Most of the time I wasn’t sure he even had a heart, and whatever thoughts he entertained he kept intensely guarded.

“I didn’t think so. He tells you nothing, does he?”

“He’s told me more about what I am than you have.”

“You haven’t given me a chance.”

“I gave you two.”

“Try again, MacKayla. I’m ready to talk. Are you ready to listen?”

“Do you know what he is?” I pressed.

“I know what he isn’t, and that’s all I need to know. He’s not one of us. We are pure of heart, pure of purpose. You see that shamrock?” Rowena pointed to a picture behind her desk of a large green clover on a background of embossed gold. “Look at it. Do you know why it’s considered lucky, and has been for longer than anyone can recall?”

I shook my head.

“Before it was the clover of Saint Patrick’s trinity, it was ours. It’s the emblem of our Order. It’s the symbol our ancient sisters used to carve on their doors and dye into banners millennia ago, when they moved to a new village. It was their way of letting the inhabitants know who they were and what they were there to do. When people saw our sign, they declared a time of great feasting and celebrated for a fortnight. They welcomed us with gifts of their finest food, wine, and men. They held tournaments to compete to bed us.” She strode to the picture, snatching a pencil from the desk on the way to it. “It is not a clover at all, but a vow.” She traced the lines of the two bottom leaves, left to right, with the eraser. “You see how these two leaves make a sideways figure eight, like a horizontal Möbius strip? They are two S’s, one right side up, one upside down, ends meeting. The third leaf and stem is an upright P.”

So that was why the shamrock looked misshapen! It was. The upright leaf was flatter on the left side, the stem stiff.

“Over thousands of years they’ve forgotten us, added a few flourishes, occasionally a fourth leaf, and now they think it’s a lucky clover.” She snorted. “But we haven’t forgotten. We never forget. The first S is for See, the second for Serve, the P for Protect. The shamrock itself is the symbol of Eire, the great Ireland. The Möbius strip is our pledge of guardianship eternal. We are the sidhe-seers and we watch over Mankind. We protect them from the Old Ones. We stand between this world and all the others. We fight Death in its many guises and now, more than ever, we are the most important people on this earth.”

I almost broke into a rousing, emotional “Danny Boy,” and I didn’t even know the words. She’d made me feel part of something huge; she’d given me chills and I resented it. I’d never been much of a joiner and it’s hard to want to join a club that’s dissed you twice. Yes, I have a long memory and hold grudges. I would do with her what I did with everyone else: Mac Lane, P.I.: I would pump her for all the information I could get. Later I would take my journal somewhere quiet, make notes, decide who to trust…sort of, or at least who to throw in with for a while.