“Right. And that’s why you shouldn’t have it.”

“A little touchy, are we?”

I flushed. I was. “Someone tried to steal it from me recently, and it went badly,” I explained. “Where have you been, anyway? I’ve been calling you all day. I was getting worried.”

“My plane was delayed.” He unlocked the door, and pushed it open. “I’m glad you’re here. I was going to call you as soon as I got in. My uncles have an idea they want me to talk to you about. I think it’s a terrible idea, but they insist.”

“Samhain is the night your uncles have to perform the next ritual, isn’t it?” I said, as we stepped inside. “And if they don’t get it right, the walls between our worlds are going to come down and we’re all screwed.” I shivered. It had sounded weirdly like I’d just made a proclamation: The walls between our worlds are going to come down and we’re all screwed.

Christian closed the door behind me. “Smart girl. How’d you figure it out?” He gestured to a chair opposite his but I was too wound up to take it. I paced instead.

“The sidhe-seers mentioned Samhain. They want. ” I trailed off and looked at him hard, searching his gaze for. I don’t know. maybe a big, block-lettered message that said YOU CAN TRUST ME, I’M NOT EVIL. I sighed. Sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith. “They want the D’Jai Orb to try to reinforce the walls. Would it work?”

He rubbed his jaw and it made a rasping sound. He hadn’t shaved in several days and the shadow beard looked good on him. “I don’t know. It’s possible. I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know what it does. Who are these sidhe-seers? You’ve found more of your own, then?”

“You’re kidding, right?” He knew so much about Barrons, and the Book, that I’d assumed he also knew about Rowena and her couriers, and probably V’lane, too.

He shook his head.

“You said you followed Alina. Didn’t you see other women out there, watching things that weren’t there?”

“I had reasons to watch your sister. She had a photocopy of a page of the Sinsar Dubh. I’ve had no cause to watch others.”

“I got the impression your uncles knew everything.”

Christian smiled. “They’d like that. They think quite highly of themselves, too. But no, for a long time we believed all the sidhe-seers had died out. A few years ago, we discovered we’d been wrong. How many have you come across?”

“A few,” I hedged. He didn’t need to know. V’lane and Barrons knowing about the abbey was bad enough.

“Not the truth, but it’ll do. You can keep the numbers to yourself. Just tell me this: Are there enough to put up a fight if we need them to?”

I didn’t sugarcoat the sour fact. “Not with only two weapons. So, what’s this terrible idea of your uncles’?”

“A while back, they had a run-in with Barrons, and they’ve been toying with the idea since. They’re no longer toying. Uncle Cian says power is power, and we need all of it we can get.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What kind of run-in? Where?”

“At a castle in Wales, a month and a half ago. They’d been chasing the same relics for some time, but never actually tried to rob the same place, on the same night.”

“Those were your uncles? The other thieves that were after the amulet, the night Mallucé took it?” The night V’lane had snatched me out, sifted me off to a beach in Faery!

“You know where the amulet is? Who is Mallucé? And they aren’t thieves. Some things shouldn’t be loose in the world.”

“Mallucé is dead and no longer matters. The Lord Master has it now.”

“Who’s the Lord Master?”

I was astonished. What did he know? Anything of use? “He’s the one who’s been bringing the Unseelie through, the one who’s been trying to tear the walls down!”

He looked blank. “He’s the one who’s been doing the magic against us?”

“Duh,” I said.

“Doona be ‘duh’ing me, lass,” he growled, his burr thickening.

“How can you know so many things, but none of the important ones? You’re the ones who are supposed to be protecting the walls!”

“Right, the walls,” he said. “And we’ve been doing it. To the best of our ability. With our own blood. Can’t try much harder than that, lass, unless you want us to revert to the archaic ways and sacrifice one of our own, an idea I just went home to explore, but was forced to conclude wouldn’t work. What about the sidhe-seers? Aren’t they supposed to be doing something, too?” He cast my accusation of slacking off on the job right back at me.

“Yes. As a matter of fact they were. They were supposed to be protecting the Book.” I distanced and acquitted myself.

His opened his mouth, closed it again, then exploded, “You’re the ones who had the Sinsar Dubh to begin with? We knew somebody was guarding it; we just didn’t know who. Och, for the love of Christ, lass, what did you do with it? Lose the bloody thing?”

I clarified my pronouns again. “They lost it. I’m not part of them.”

“You certainly look like a sidhe-seer to me.”

“Don’t be trying to blame me, Scotty,” I snapped. “Your uncles were supposed to be keeping the walls up. The sidheseers were supposed to be guarding the Book. The Fae were supposed to strip the LM’s memory before they dumped him on us, and I was supposed to be home with my sister playing volleyball on a beach somewhere. It’s not my fault. None of this is my fault. But for some idiotic reason, I seem to be able to do something about it. And I’m trying, so get off my back!”

We faced off, breathing fast and shallow, glaring at each other, two young people living in a world that was coming apart at the seams, doing their best to stop it, but realizing rapidly just how long the odds were. Tough times make for tough words, I guess.

“What’s your terrible idea?” I said finally, in an effort to get things back on track.

He inhaled and released it slowly. “My uncles want Barrons to help them hold the walls on Samhain. They say he’s Druid trained, and not afraid of the dark side.”

I laughed. No, he certainly wasn’t afraid of the dark side. Some days I was pretty sure he was the dark side. “You’re right. It’s a terrible idea. Not only does he know you guys have been spying on him, Barrons is mercenary to the core. He doesn’t give a rat’s petunia about anyone but himself. Why would he care if the walls come down? Everybody’s afraid of him. He has nothing to lose.”

“What did you just say?”

“In a nutshell, he doesn’t care.”

“You said he knows we’ve been spying on him? How?”

I gave myself a mental smack in the forehead. I’d completely forgotten the reason I’d come here in the first place. I hastily recounted how Barrons had used Voice to interrogate me about my recent activities, and that visiting Christian had been one of them. I told him I’d been trying to reach him all day, to warn him, and when I hadn’t managed to get in touch with him by four, I’d come by to wait for him. When I finished, Christian was regarding me warily.

“You let him do that to you? Push you around like that? Force answers from you?” The tiger-gold gaze swept me up and down, the handsome face tightened. “I thought you were. a different kind of girl.”

“I am a different kind of girl!” Or at least I had been when I first came to Dublin. I wasn’t sure what kind of girl I was now. But I hated the look in his eyes: aloofness, censure, disappointment. “He’s never done it before. We have a complicated. association.”

“Doesn’t sound like an association to me. Sounds like a tyranny.”

I wasn’t about to discuss the complexities of life with Barrons, with anyone, especially not a living, breathing polygraph test. “He’s trying to teach me to resist Voice.”

“Guess you aren’t very good at it. And good luck. Voice is a skill that can take a lifetime to learn.”