But not this one. If light was pain, this enormous, aggressive Shade was getting tougher, its pain threshold increasing. Like me, it was evolving. I only wished I was as dangerous.

I reached inside my jacket, fisted a flashlight in each hand, and yanked the door open again.

One of my flashlights wouldn’t turn on. Dead batteries. When it rains, it pours. I tossed it and grabbed a second from my waistband. Two more came out with it, crashed to the ground, clattered down the steps and spun out into the alley, unlit, wasted.

I had two left. This was ridiculous. I needed a better way to keep myself safe than toting unwieldy flashlights with me everywhere I went.

I turned on another, and ordered myself to step out onto the pavement.

My feet didn’t obey.

I aimed one of my flashlights directly at it. The inky wall recoiled and a hole exploded in it the exact diameter of the beam. I could see it was barely an inch thick.

I heaved a sigh of relief. It still couldn’t tolerate direct light.

I studied it. I wasn’t completely barred from getting to the bookstore. I could walk down to the left, parallel to the towering, dark cloud until I reached the end of the building, where the lights of the greengrocer next door prevented it from spreading further, then go around to the front door and let myself in.

Problem was I wasn’t sure I had the nerve, and I wasn’t entirely sure it would be smart. What if, when I was nearly to the end of the Shade-wall, the light on the grocer’s building burned out? Normally, I’d relegate the odds of that happening to the realm of the absurd, but if there was one thing I’d learned over the past few months, it was that absurd really meant “more likely to happen to MacKayla Lane.” I wasn’t about to risk it. I had my flashlights, but I couldn’t shine them on every part of my body at once, and I certainly couldn’t shine them on all of it.

I could call V’lane. He’d helped me get rid of Shades once before. Of course with V’lane there was always a price, and I would have to let him embed his name in my tongue again.

I considered my cell phone. It had three numbers programmed in: Barrons, IYCGM and IYD.

IYCGM, which was Barrons’ not-so-subtle shorthand for If You Can’t Get Me, would be answered by the mysterious Ryodan who—although Barrons contended he talked too much—hadn’t confided anything useful to me in our recent, brief phone conversation. I had no desire to lure anyone else close to the overly aggressive Shade. I wanted a few days reprieve between deaths on my conscience.

IYD was If You’re Dying, and I wasn’t.

I was sick of depending on others to save me. I wanted to take care of myself. It was only a few hours until dawn. The Shade could stay out there all night for all I cared.

I stepped back into the garage, closed and locked the door, flipped on the brightest tier of interior lights, considered the collection a moment, then crawled into the Maybach to sleep.

It occurred to me, as I drifted off, that my feelings about the car had certainly changed. I no longer cared that it had formerly belonged to the Irish mobster Rocky O’Bannion, from whom I’d stolen my spear and whom I was indirectly responsible for killing, along with fifteen of his henchmen, in the very alley where the monster Shade now lurked. I was just grateful it was comfortable to sleep in.

We expect Evil to announce itself.

Evil is supposed to adhere to certain conventions. It’s supposed to cause a chill of foreboding in the intended recipient of its visit; it should be instantly recognizable; and it’s supposed to be hideous. Evil should glide out of the night in a black hearse, fog streaming from its dark flanks, or dismount from a skeletal Harley, leather-clad, wearing a necklace of freshly scalped skulls and crossbones.

“Barrons Books and Baubles,” I answered the phone brightly. “You want it, we’ve got it, and if we don’t, we’ll find it.” I take my job very seriously. After snatching six hours of sleep in the garage, I’d made my way across the alley to the bookstore, showered, and opened shop, business as usual.

“I’m certain of that. You finding it, that is, or I wouldn’t have phoned.”

I froze, hand on the receiver. Was this a joke? He was phoning me? Of all the possible confrontations with Evil I’d imagined, this was not one of them. “Who is this?” I demanded, unable to believe it.

“You know who I am. Say it.”

Though I’d heard the voice only twice before—the afternoon in the Dark Zone when I’d almost died, and more recently in Mallucé’s lair—I would never forget it. Contrary to what Evil was supposed to be, it was a seductive, beautiful voice, mirroring the physical beauty of its owner.

It was the voice of my sister’s lover—and murderer.

I knew his name, and I’d die before I’d call him Lord Master. “You bastard.”

I slammed down the phone with one hand and was already using my other to punch up Barrons on my cell. He answered instantly, sounding alarmed. I got right to the point. “Can the Druid spell of Voice be used over the telephone?”

“No. The spell’s potency doesn’t carry through—”

“Thanks, gotta go.” As I’d expected, the store phone was already ringing again. I thumbed my cell off, and left Barrons sputtering. I was safe from being coerced over the phone lines, and that was what I’d needed to know, fast, before the Lord Master had been able to use it on me.

Just in case it was a paying customer, I said, “Barrons Books—”

“You should have asked me,” came that seductive, rich voice. “I would have told you that Voice is diluted by technology. Both parties must be in physical proximity to each other. At the moment, I’m too far away.”

I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing that was what I’d been afraid of. “I dropped the phone.”

“Pretend what you will, MacKayla.”

“Don’t address me by name,” I gritted.

“What should I call you?”

“Don’t.”

“You have no curiosity about me?”

My hand was shaking. I was talking to my sister’s murderer, the monster that was bringing all the Unseelie through his mystic dolmens and turning our world into the nightmare it was. “Sure. What’s the quickest, easiest way to kill you?”

He laughed. “You have more fire than Alina. But she was clever. I underestimated her. She concealed your existence from me. She never spoke of you. I had no idea there were two with talents like hers.”

We’d been equals in our ignorance. She’d concealed his existence from me, too. “How did you find out about me?”

“I’d heard rumors of another sidhe-seer, new to the city, with unusual abilities. I would have tracked you eventually. But the day you came to the warehouse, I smelled you. There was no mistaking your bloodline. You can sense the Sinsar Dubh, the same way Alina could.”

“No, I can’t,” I lied.

“It’s calling you. You feel it out there, getting stronger. You, however, won’t get stronger. You’ll weaken, MacKayla. You can’t handle the Book. Don’t even think of trying. You can’t begin to imagine what you’d be dealing with.”

I had a pretty fair idea. “Is that why you called me? To warn me off? I’m quaking in my boots.” This conversation was wigging me out. I was on the phone with the monster that had killed my sister—the infamous Lord Master—and he wasn’t cackling maniacally or threatening villainously. He hadn’t come after me with an army of dark Fae, backed by his black-and-crimson-clad personal guard. He’d phoned me and was speaking in beautiful, cultured tones, softly, and without hostility. Was this the true face of Evil? It didn’t conquer, it seduced? He lets me be the woman I always wanted to be, Alina had written in her journal. Would he ask me out to dinner next? If he did, would I accept, to get a chance at killing him?

“What do you want most in the world, MacKayla?”