“Stay away from her,” Barrons growled.

“She comes to me of her own will. She calls me, chooses me.” V’lane was in high glamour, gold and bronze and iridescent ice. He raked me with an imperious gaze. “I will attend to you later. You broke our bargain. There is a price for that.” He smiled, but Fae don’t really smile. They paste a humanlike expression on and it chills to the bone because it looks so unnatural on their unnaturally perfect faces. “Do not fear, MacKayla, I will—how do you say? — kiss it and make it better when I am through.”

I removed my hand from my fly. “I didn’t break our bargain intentionally, V’lane. Barrons overheard something he shouldn’t have overheard.”

“Omission or commission, what difference?”

“There is one. Even the courts of law permit the distinction.”

“Human law. Fae law acknowledges no such thing. There are outcomes. The means by which they are achieved have no bearing. You said you did not know how to track the Book.”

“I don’t. I just followed a hunch tonight. Got lucky. You?”

“Impudence and lies, MacKayla. I suffer neither.”

“You won’t harm a hair on her head, or I’ll kill you,” said Barrons.

Really? With what? I wanted to ask. V’lane was a Fae. My spear was gone and Rowena had the sword.

The Book’s icy pull was diminishing rapidly. It was moving swiftly. Its next victim was in a car, and a fast one. I had a smug, utterly beside-the-point car-lover thought: not faster than mine. I had a Viper. Its keys were in my pocket.

The smug thought faded. It offended every ounce of my being to let the Book get away, to allow it to go cruising off to destroy more lives. But no matter how insistently my sidheseer senses were screaming at me to track it, I didn’t dare. Not with Barrons and V’lane here. I needed to know more about the Book. I needed to know how to get my hands on it, and do the right thing with it. Who was I kidding? I needed to know what the right thing was. Assuming I eventually got it, who could I trust with it? V’lane? Barrons? God forbid, Rowena? Would the Seelie Queen herself shimmer in and save the day? Somehow, I doubted it. Nothing in my life is easy anymore.

“You have no right to it,” V’lane was telling Barrons.

“Might makes right. Hasn’t that always been your motto?” Barrons said.

“You could never understand my motto.”

“Better than you think, fairy.”

“There is nothing you could do with it even if you managed to get it. You do not speak the language in which it was scribed, and could never hope to decode it.”

“Maybe I have the stones.”

“Not all of them,” V’lane said coldly, and I knew from the disdain in his voice that he had at least one, if not both of the other translation stones we’d been hunting. All four of the mystical translucent blue-black stones were necessary to “reveal the true nature” of the Sinsar Dubh. Barrons had one already when I met him. I’d recently stolen the second one from Mallucé, the event that had precipitated the hostilities between us.

Barrons smiled. Clever man. Until that moment, he’d suspected but not been certain. “Maybe I learned enough from your princess that I don’t need all four,” Barrons sneered, and there was a world of insinuation in his words. Even I, who had no idea what he was insinuating, heard the insult in them, and knew it cut deep. There was history between V’lane and Barrons. They didn’t despise each other just because of me. There was more than that going on here.

Ice dripped from V’lane’s iridescent robes, flowed down the cobbled street and expanded, covering the pavement from gutter to gutter with a thin black sheet that cracked like gunshots as it encased the warmer stone.

Good, let them fight. Let the Book disappear and carry my problems with it. To add fuel to the fire, I said, “Why do you two hate each other so much?”

“Have you fucked her yet?” V’lane ignored me completely.

“I’m not trying to.”

“Translation: Your efforts have failed.”

“No, they haven’t,” I said. “He hasn’t tried. FYI, boys, and I use that term loosely, there’s more to me than sex.”

“Which is why you’re still alive, Ms. Lane. Keep cultivating those parts.”

Since I had them both together, for a novel change, I had a hunch I wanted to test. “What is Barrons?” I asked V’lane. “Human, or something else?”

The Fae Prince looked at Barrons, and said nothing.

Barrons shot me a sharp look.

“So, Barrons,” I said sweetly, “tell me about V’lane. Is he a good guy or a bad guy?”

Barrons looked away and said nothing.

I shook my head, disgusted. It was as I’d suspected. Men. Were they the same among all species, whether human or not? “Both of you have something on the other, and neither of you will rat it out, in order to keep your own secrets safe. Unbelievable. You hate each other, and still stick together. Well, guess what? Screw you. I’m done with you both.”

“Big words from a little human,” V’lane said. “You need us.”

“He’s right. Deal with it, Ms. Lane.”

Great. Now they were uniting forces against me. I preferred V’lane disappearing when Barrons appeared. Did this mean V’lane wasn’t afraid of Barrons, after all? I eyed the space between them. If Barrons were to step forward, would V’lane step back? I could hardly suggest it. After a moment’s consideration, I moved out from beneath Barron’s arm, and stepped behind him. I felt him relax a little. I think he thought I was seeking the shelter of his body, using the movement to show that I’d chosen a side. I imagined he looked pretty self-satisfied right now.

I shoved him forward as hard as I could. V’lane glided instantly back.

Barrons jerked a furious look over his shoulder at me.

I smiled. I don’t think many women push Barrons around.

“What games are you playing, sidhe-seer?” V’lane hissed.

The Fae Prince feared Barrons. I tried to process that thought but I’m not sure I succeeded.

“Can you still feel the Book?” Barrons asked, a muscle jumping in his jaw.

“Yes, where has it gone?” demanded V’lane. “Which way?”

“You wasted too much time arguing,” I lied. I still had a faint tingle. It had stopped somewhere. “It passed beyond my radar a few minutes ago.” I wasn’t sure either of them believed me, but what could they do?

Actually, it occurred to me, they both could do something really nasty to me if they felt like it: Barrons could use Voice, force me to tell him the truth, and make me hunt it, and if I understood a death-by-sex Fae’s thrall, V’lane could amp up the sex thing and steer me around like a horny little divining rod.

So, why weren’t they? Because they really were decent guys with decent motives, albeit very screwed-up personalities? Or because they didn’t want each other around when they used me to track it, and neither could think of a way to get rid of the other at the moment?

Were we all letting it get away, to keep each other from getting it? Wow. I used to have a hard time with high school geometry. Life was way more complicated than math.

“Move,” Barrons said. “Get on the bike.”

I didn’t like his tone.

“Where will you go, Ms. Lane, if not with me or him? Back home to Ashford? Will you strike out on your own? Get a flat? Will your father have to come pack up after you, like you cleaned up after your sister?”

I turned and began walking. He followed me, close enough that I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. “He’ll sift you,” he said in a low growl, “if you give him the chance.”

“I don’t think he’ll risk getting within twenty feet of you,” I said coolly. “And you didn’t have to remind me that my sister’s dead. That was a cheap shot.”

I got on the Harley.

Go with V’lane and be punished for violating our bargain?

I’d take my chances with Barrons. For now.