“She came to the ALD, looking for someone to translate a page of text.”

“What kind of text?” I thought instantly of the Sinsar Dubh.

“Nothing I could translate. My uncles couldn’t, either.”

I assumed his uncles were linguists and said so.

He smiled faintly, as if amused by the question. “They’re historians, after a fashion, knowledgeable about antiquities and such. I’ve never stumbled across a text they couldn’t translate.”

“Did you ever find out what it was?”

“My turn, Mac. I’ve a few questions of my own. What happened to you the other night? Why’d you cry off?”

“I told you. My dad called, and we got to talking about Mom and how she’s getting worse and I lost track of time. Then, by the time I got off the phone, something I ate for dinner wasn’t agreeing with me and I felt so sick I just went to bed.”

“Nice try,” he said dryly. “Now tell me the truth.”

“I just did.”

“No, you didn’t. You’re lying. I hear it in your voice.”

“You can’t hear whether I’m lying in my voice,” I scoffed. “Body language might tell you a thing or two, but—”

“Yes, I can.” He cut me off with a faintly bitter flash of that killer smile. “Literally. You lie, I hear it. And I wish I didn’t. You have no idea how often people lie. All the bloody time, about everything, even stupid things that make no sense to bother lying about. Truth between us, Mac, or nothing at all. Your choice. But don’t bother trying to fool me. You can’t.”

I began to ease off my coat, remembered my arsenal, and thought better of it, settled back in my chair, and crossed my legs, one high heel swinging. I searched his face. My God, he was serious. “You really know when people are lying?”

He nodded.

“Prove it.”

“Got a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Is there a man you’re interested in?”

“No.”

“You’re lying.”

I stiffened. “I am not.”

“Yes, you are. He may not be a boyfriend but there’s someone you’re interested in enough that you’re thinking about having sex with him.”

I glared. “I am not. And you can’t possibly know that.”

He shrugged. “Sorry, Mac, I hear the truth even when the person isn’t admitting it to themselves.” One dark brow lifted. “I don’t suppose it might be me?”

I blushed. He’d just made me think it. Us. Naked. Wow. I was a perfectly healthy woman, and he was a gorgeous man. “No,” I said, embarrassed.

He laughed, gold eyes glittering. “Lie. A whopper. Gotta love that. Have I told you I’m a big believer in fulfilling a woman’s fantasies?”

I rolled my eyes. “I wasn’t thinking it before you said it. You put the thought in my head and then, there it was, and I was thinking it.” And that worried me, because I could think of only two other people—and I was using that term loosely about both—that I might have been thinking of having sex with before he’d made me think about having sex with him, and both were terrible choices. “This doesn’t prove anything.”

“Guess you’ll have to take me on faith then, until you get to know me. I take you on faith. I don’t ask you to prove that you see the Fae.”

”People think about having sex all the time,” I said irritably. “Are you aware of every time you’re thinking about it, and who with?”

“Bless the saints, no. I wouldn’t get anything done. Most of the time it’s just background music, you know, sex-sex-sex-find-in-it-before-more-perfectly-good-sperm-die, playing in my head, to an easy, sensuous beat, then somebody like you walks in and it ratchets up to that Nine Inch Nails song my uncle plays all the time for his wife.” He grimaced. “We leave the castle and go somewhere else when he does that.”

“Your uncle listens to Trent Reznor?” I blinked. “You live in a castle?” I didn’t know which thought was weirder.

“Big. Drafty. Not as impressive as it sounds. And not all my uncles are as cool as Dageus. Men want to be him. Women adore him. It’s irritating, actually. I never introduce my girlfriends to him.”

If he was anything like Christian, I could see why.

“Point is, Mac, don’t lie to me. I will know. And I won’t put up with it.”

I pondered his claim. I knew what it was like to be capable of doing something others would consider impossible. I decided to take him at face value, and see what came of it. Time would tell. “So, is it a gift of birth, like me being a sidhe-seer?”

“You don’t think being a sidhe-seer is a gift. Nor is my. little problem, and yes, much to my parents’ inconvenience, I was born this way. There are necessary lies. Or, at least, kind ones. I never got to hear any of them. I don’t get to hear them now.”

Alina had said the same thing: Necessary lies. “Well, look on the bright side of it, you don’t get to hear any lies, but nobody around you gets to tell any, either. Do you think it’s easy to be around someone that you have to tell the truth to all the—oh!” I drew up short. “You don’t have many friends, do you?” Not if he spoke his mind freely, and he looked like the kind of guy that did.

He shot me a cool look. “Why’d you cry off last night?”

“I had a close call with a Dark Hallow, and they make me too sick to function if I get too close.”

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and stared at me with fascination. “Now that was a celestial choir of truth, lass! You saw a Dark Hallow? Which one?”

“How do you know about the Dark Hallows? Who are you and what’s your involvement in this?” I didn’t need any more mystifying men in my life.

“How much truth will you give me?”

I hesitated only briefly. Of all the men I’d met in Dublin, he seemed the most like me; essentially normal, but afflicted with an unwanted, life-altering talent. “As much as I can, if you do the same.”

He nodded, satisfied, then settled back in his chair. “I come from a clan that, in ancient times, served the Fae.”

The Keltar, Christian told me, had once been High Druids to the Tuatha Dé Danaan, many thousands of years ago, during that brief time in which the Fae had attempted to play nice and coexist with man. Something had happened that shattered the fragile peace—he skimmed over this part—but whatever it was had caused Fae and Man to go their separate ways, and not amicably.

A Compact was negotiated to permit both races to exist on the same planet but keep the realms separate, and the Keltar were given the duty of performing certain rituals to maintain the walls between them. Over the millennia, they performed them faithfully with few exceptions, and if they failed in some small way, they always managed to make up for it in the nick of time.

But in recent years, the rituals stopped going as expected. On those preappointed nights of the year when the Keltar were to perform their magic, some other dark magic had risen up and prevented the pledge from being reinforced, and the tithe from being fully paid. Although this other magic hadn’t been able to collapse the walls between our worlds, it had seriously weakened them. Christian’s uncles believed the walls would not hold through another incomplete ritual. The queen of the Seelie, Aoibheal, who in the past had always appeared in times of crisis, had yet to be seen, although they’d invoked her by every spell they had at their disposal.

I was riveted by the story. The thought that, for thousands of years, a clan in the Highlands of Scotland had been protecting Mankind from the Fae fascinated me. Especially if they were all like Christian: gorgeous, sexy, self-possessed. It was comforting to know there were other bloodlines out there in the world with special, unusual powers. I wasn’t alone in my awareness of what was happening to our world. I’d found someone besides Barrons who had more information than me, and he was willing to share it!

“My uncles believe something has happened to the queen,” he said, “and as her power diminishes, another’s grows. The walls continue to weaken, and if we don’t figure out something by the time the next ritual must be performed, they’ll come down.”