Выбрать главу

Yeah, right. Pick it up. Sure. What then? Put it in my pocket? I didn’t have one large enough.

So, I knew how to get close to it without being incapacitated by pain. I still had no idea what to do then. If I touched it would I, too, turn psycho? Or was I a sidhe-seer/Null/OOP-detector mutant that was somehow exempt? A moot point right now, with my odds of surviving the night looking so grim.

I dug out my cell phone to call Dani and tell her what was happening in Dublin. There was no way I could make it to the abbey. I glanced at my watch and was stunned to find it was nearly seven o’clock. I’d been running and hiding for hours! The ritual might already be completed and if it was, sidhe-seers could come to the city and help me save some of the people being driven to death-by-Shade. I might not be able to make a difference, but seven hundred of us could. If they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—come because Rowena vetoed it for some idiotic reason, I would call Barrons and if he didn’t answer, I’d call Ryodan, and if neither of them answered, it was probably time for IYD: if you’re dying. A pall of death hung over Dublin like grief over a funeral. I could smell it, taste it on the air. If no sidhe-seers were coming in to join me, I wanted out, any way I could get there.

Dani answered on the second ring. She sounded hysterical. “Feck, Mac!” she cried. “What did you do to us?”

I’d been adjusting the straps on my pack to accommodate my bulky external harness, and alarm made me drop it. “What’s wrong?” I demanded.

“Shades, Mac! Fecking Shades came out of the fecking Orb when we opened it! The abbey’s full of ’em!”

I was so stunned that I nearly dropped the phone. When I got it back to my ear, Dani was saying:

“Rowena says you betrayed us! She says you set us up!”

My heart constricted. “No, Dani, I didn’t, I swear! Somebody must have set me up!” The thought iced my blood. There was only one person who could have, one person that walked among those dark vampires without fear. How easily he’d relinquished the relic. How quickly he’d agreed to give it to me. Yet he’d not given it to me that night. Thirty hours had passed between my request, and his delivery. What had he been doing during those hours? Spiking a sidhe-seer’s drink with Shades? “How bad is it?” I cried.

“We’ve lost dozens! When we opened the Orb, they splintered, and we thought the light from the ritual killed them, but they fecking grew back together in the shadows. They’re everywhere! In closets, in shoes, anywhere there’s dark!”

“Dani, I didn’t do this! I swear to you. I swear on my sister. You know what she means to me. You have to believe me. I would never do this. Never!”

“You said you’d come,” she hissed. “You didn’t. Where are you?”

“I’m stuck in the city, holed up between York and Mercer. Dublin’s a nightmare, and I couldn’t get out. People have been rioting for hours, and the Unseelie are driving them into the Dark Zones!”

She sucked in a breath. “How bad is it?” she echoed my question.

Thousands, Dani! Beyond counting. If it keeps up like this—” I broke off, unable to make myself complete the thought. “If you guys come in, we can save some of them, but I can’t do it by myself. There’s too many Unseelie.” But if the abbey was full of Shades, they couldn’t leave. We couldn’t afford to lose the abbey. The libraries were there, and God only knew what else. The lightbulb above me flickered and made a sizzling noise as if it had taken a power surge.

It’s hard to say what makes the brain suddenly piece things together, but I had one of those moments where a series of images flashed through my mind and I was stupefied by the simplicity and obviousness of what I’d been missing: Rhino-boys collecting trash, repairing streetlamps, driving city trucks, replacing broken bricks in the pavement. “Oh, no, Dani,” I breathed, horrified, “forget what I just said. Don’t come into the city, and don’t let anyone else. Not now. Not for any reason. Not until after dawn.”

“Why?”

“Because they’ve been planning this. I’ve been seeing Unseelie in city jobs, and I didn’t get it until now. It’s not just the street sweepers, or the trash collectors.” Where better to learn about one’s enemy than from the leavings of their life, their refuse? The FBI always infiltrated their suspect’s daily lives, bugged their house, and staked out their trash. “It’s the utility workers, too.” How long had the LM been orchestrating his macabre symphony? Long enough to have thought through every bit of it, and his time as a human had taught him well what our weaknesses were. “They’ve got control of the grid, Dani. They’re going to turn the entire—” I held my phone away from my ear and looked at it.

Full battery.

No service. The cell phone towers had just gone down. I had no idea how much Dani had heard.

“—city into a Dark Zone,” I whispered.

The lightbulb above me flickered again. I looked up at it. It sizzled, popped, and went dark.

Chapter 18

My world was falling apart around me.

I was cut off from V’lane, Barrons was looking like the ultimate traitor, the abbey was full of Shades, BB&B was a Dark Zone, the city had fallen to rioters and Unseelie, and it was about to descend into total darkness.

Once it did, nothing alive out in the streets would be safe. Nothing. Not even grass and trees. Well, I might be, illuminated by my MacHalo, armed with my spear (that could kill me horribly at this point), but what if a group of rioters or Unseelie attacked me en masse and rendered me defenseless? What could I hope to accomplish by wandering the city? Could I save lives? What would I do with them if I did? How would I keep them safe when the lights went out? Would they, like drowning people, claw and fight me to death to steal my lights? If I died, who would track the Book? I’m no coward. But I’m no fool, either. I know when to fight, and I know when to survive to fight another day.

Every cell in my body wanted to go up, get off the ground, far from the streets and alleys and lanes that would soon run dark with a flood of Shades, closer to the dawn that loomed on what seemed an impossibly far horizon.

Twelve hours. Plus some. I scoured the streets for my Alamo, refusing to ponder the outcome of that battle. I would do better.

I finally settled on an old church with a high steeple, an open belfry, and stone archways where I could perch, and watch my flanks. The tall, double front doors were locked. I liked them that way. There were no windows facing the street. I liked that, too. Here was my fortress, the best I could do, for now anyway.

I circled around the back, kicked in the door of the refectory, and slipped inside. After barricading the door with a heavy china cabinet, I swiped an apple and two oranges from a fruit basket on the dining table, and hurried through the dimly lit communal areas of the church.

It took me a while to find the entrance to the belfry, at the rear of the large chapel, beneath the choir balcony, in the thick of the massive organ pipes. The narrow door was almost completely concealed behind a bookcase that had been shoved in front of it, I suspected to prevent curious kids from making the climb. I pushed the bookcase aside—an easy nudge as pumped up on Unseelie as I was—and opened the door. It was pitch black beyond. Bracing myself, I stepped inside, lighting up the tower. No shadows recoiled, no inky darknesses slithered. I exhaled with relief.

A narrow, rickety wooden stair, more ladder than step, circled a hundred and fifty feet of stone wall to the belfry. It was actually nailed to the mortar in places; there were neither braces nor suspension for it, and it looked about as safe as a house of cards. I wondered when the last time was that anyone had actually ascended it. Did bells need to be serviced? Or was it more likely the last time anyone had climbed those stairs was fifty years ago?