No matter. I wasn’t staying on the ground.
The rungs gave out in two places. Both times my heightened strength and reflexes saved me. Without Unseelie hammering through my veins, I would have slipped through the treads, plunged fifty feet, and broken something serious in the fall. Both times I was excruciatingly aware of the cold weight of the spear against my body. I hated having to carry while I was like this. I was a water balloon with a pin taped to my side, rolling across the floor, tempting fate.
Perching precariously on the last rung, I strained to reach the trapdoor, pushed it up, hoisted myself through, and glanced around. I was in a room directly beneath the spire. Overhead was a second platform similar to the one I was on, above which hung two great brass bells. The room I was in appeared to be a utility room of sorts, with boxes of tools, and a broom closet that was partially open. I moved to it, made sure it was Shade-free, and closed it. Slightly cracked closet doors give me the creeps.
I climbed the final ladder, ascending to the bells.
I was surprised to find the storm was far north of the city now; the clouds had broken and moonlight, though wan, illuminated the belfry. I clicked myself off so I wouldn’t be a blazing X-marks-the-spot-of-nubile-young-sidhe-seer. Four tall stone archways, twice as high as my head, framed the spire east, west, north, and south. I stepped into the one facing east, and shivered in the cold breeze, staring down at Dublin.
Fires burned in many places, and cars lay on their sides in the streets, and thousands upon thousands of rioters raged and looted, and destroyed. I watched them ebb and flow up and down city blocks. I watched a group of several thousand driven straight into a Dark Zone, forced into the waiting wall of pitch, where they were sucked dry of life down to a rind of human remains. I heard their cries of horror. I’ll hear them till I die.
I stood looking out over Dublin as darkness took the city, grid by grid, district by district as if, somewhere in Dublin’s basement, circuit breakers were being systematically thrown.
I remembered the night I’d curled in my window seat at BB&B, and my eyes had played a trick on me.
It was no trick now. Or rather, it was the greatest Halloween trick of all. There would be no treats handed out in Dublin tonight. This was what Derek O’Bannion had been talking about.
At 8:29 P.M., darkness reigned absolute.
Even the fires had been extinguished.
The sounds floating up were different now, the voices fewer, and frightened, not angry. Militant footfalls passed beneath me regularly. The Unseelie were still at it, collecting us, killing us. It took every ounce of self-control I possessed to not go down there to hunt in the darkness and try to save those humans that remained.
Out there, past a certain bookstore, a Dark Zone was spreading unchecked, taking over the city.
Dublin was without hope until 7:25 A.M.: Dawn.
I wondered what was happening with the MacKeltars. Was Barrons sabotaging that ritual, too? It made no sense to me. Why would Barrons want the walls down? Did Barrons want the walls down? Might the Orb have come to him already sabotaged, a prepackaged grenade, just waiting for the pin to be pulled? Where had he gotten it? Was I a hopeless fool, still trying to make excuses for him?
Were the walls already down? Was this the flood of Unseelie that had been freed from their prison, the ones wrecking the city? Or were they merely harbingers, and the worst was yet to come?
I dropped to the cold stone floor of the aperture, drew up my knees, folded my arms, and rested my chin on them, looking out at the city. My body bristled with the dark energy of Unseelie flesh, with the protective urges of a sidhe-seer, magnified by Fae steroids, demanding that I do something, anything.
I shuddered in the grip of my internal battle. I felt like I was crying, although no tears fell. I didn’t know yet that tears are not possible for a Fae, or for anyone under the influence of it.
Seeing BB&B surrounded by Shades, swallowed up by a Dark Zone, had been bad enough. Seeing all of Dublin dark was overload. How many people would be left by dawn to try to reclaim it? Any? Did Unseelie now guard wherever it was the utilities were controlled? Would we have to form armies to fight our way in and seize control from them? My world had changed tonight. I had no idea in how many ways, but I knew it was bad.
I sat in the cold stone opening, watching, waiting.
Three and a half hours later, the first of my questions was answered.
At eleven fifty-nine, the skin all over my body began to crawl. Literally. I scratched myself feverishly. Even deadened as my sidhe-seer senses were from my dark meal, I still felt it coming. No, the walls had not yet fallen. They were falling now.
The world was changing, becoming.
I felt a crushing sense of spatial distortion, stretching me, twisting, compressing. I was gigantic and paper-thin. I was small and round as a berry. I was inside out, my bones exposed. I was a bag of skin again.
Then the world felt suddenly much too large and horrifically skewed. The buildings below soared up at jagged, impossible angles, vanished down to pinpoints then erupted again. I watched as laws of physics were rewritten, as dimensions that were not meant to coexist crashed into each other and vied for dominance, contested for space to fill. I watched as the fabric of existence was ripped apart, and sewn back together again, aligned on diametrically opposing principles.
The universe screeched in protest as barriers collapsed, and realms collided; then the night was filled with another kind of screeching and I scrambled back, melting into the shadows, afraid of the shadows, but more afraid to turn my lights on, because the second of my questions was being answered: No, the Unseelie had not yet been freed from their prison. They were coming now, galloping down on a dark wind blowing from the horizon that had substance, the stuff of nightmares. Led by Death, Pestilence, Famine, and War?
They came.
I watched them come.
The ones who have no names, the abominations, those who are flawed yet live, those who hunger yet can never be sated, those who hate eternally, who need beyond bearing with their twisted limbs and psychopathic dreams, those who know but one joy: the hunt, the kill, the nectar of dust and ashes.
They soared over my head, high above the city, a vast, dark wave that stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, obliterating the sky, shrieking, howling, trumpeting their victory, free, free, free for the first time in nearly a million years! Free in a world warmed by sun, populated by billions of strong hearts beating, exploding with life, bursting with sex and drugs and music and glories untold that had been forbidden to them forever.
They came, the Wild Hunt, the winged ones, carrying their brethren in beaks and claws and other things that defied description, streaming from their icy hell, icing the world a slippery shining silvery frost in their wake.
I retreated into the belfry, my breath crystallizing on the bitterly cold air.
Then I retreated even farther, slinking to the lower platform, where I crept to the broom closet, pushed my way in between mops and pails, and shut the door.
Fingers numbed by cold, I shredded my T-shirt in the wan glow of one Click-It, stuffed pieces of it into every potentially telltale nook and cranny, then clicked myself on from head to toe until I filled the tiny room with light.
Heart pounding, eyes wide with terror, I backed into a corner, drew my knees to my chin, laid my spear harness on the floor beside me, and began the long vigil to Dawn.
PART THREE Dawn
“Turned out I was wrong.
It wasn’t the dark I should have been afraid of, at all.”