I both understood her point, and found it abhorrent. “First of all, you don’t know that. And second, I can’t just walk up to a perfectly innocent girl and kill her.”

“Then turn that weapon over to someone who can! When you let her walk away, you didn’t reject the blood of a life on your hands, you accepted the blood of dozens. It will kill. That’s what the Unseelie do.”

“It’s all black and white to you, isn’t it?”

“Gray is but another word for light black. Gray is never white. Only white is white. There are no shades of it.”

“You scare me, old woman.”

“You scare me, child,” she retorted. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened them, the rebuke was gone. “Come to the abbey. You’ve already met Dani. Meet more of your sisters. Learn about us. See what we do and why. We are not monsters. The Fae are. This is a war that is only going to get worse. If we do not meet their ruthlessness with unwavering resolve and equal ruthlessness, we will lose. Those who do not act react. Those who react die sooner.”

“Do you know about the Lord Master and his plans for freeing all the Unseelie?”

“I won’t answer any more of your questions until you make a choice. We have no renegades among us. I permit none. You are with us, or against us.”

“There are shades of gray, Rowena. I’m neither with nor against. I’m learning and deciding who to trust. Instead of bullying me, convince me.”

“I’m trying. Come to the abbey.”

I wanted to. But on my terms, when and how I felt safe, and currently I couldn’t imagine that situation. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Every moment you waste is a moment you might die alone out there, instead of banded with your sisters where you would be safe, MacKayla.”

“I’ll take that chance.”

As I walked out, she called, “Why couldn’t Dani find you for a month?”

I thought about lying but decided to let the chips fall where they may. “Because I was in Faery with V’lane,” I said, as I stepped through the door.

She hissed, “If you are Pri-ya and he has put you up to infiltrating us…”

“I am no one’s puppet, Rowena,” I said without looking back. “Not his. Not Barrons. Not yours.”

FOURTEEN

I settled into the tufted leather seat of the high-backed snug, or booth as we call them back home in the States, and ordered a beer and a shot.

For the first time since I’d come to Dublin, I felt curiously at peace, as if a critical game piece had been placed on the board today, and the match was finally, fully under way.

On one side of the board was the Lord Master. He was bad. He was bringing Unseelie through. He planned to destroy our world.

On the other side of the board was me—tiny little hand waving here, a dot the size of a pencil tip on an aerial shot of the planet. I wanted vengeancefor my sister and I wanted the Fae to get the feck, as Dani would say, out of our world. I was good.

There were three other major players on the board: V’lane, Barrons, and Rowena.

They all had one thing in common: They wanted me.

One was a Fae. One was an unknown. One was—I was pretty sure, though she’d not said and I’d not asked—the Grand Mistress of sidhe-seers.

They all had their private agendas and secrets.

And I had no doubt all three of them would lie to me as smoothly and easily as they’d put a knife through each other’s backs.

I pulled out my journal and began writing.

I started with V’lane. According to Rowena, he’d been telling me the truth. He was a Seelie prince, a member of the queen’s High Council, and working on her behalf to stop the Unseelie from entering our world and taking it over. That seemed to place him on my side of the board, the good side, which was a little hard to swallow because I knew that he was ruthless and would manipulate me to the brink of death to achieve his ends, in addition to trying to have potentially lethal sex with me along the way.

He was at least one hundred and forty-two thousand years old, probably substantially older. I wasn’t sure it was possible for him to understand how a human felt about anything, therefore the damage he might do to me, even if he was trying to abstain from damaging me, was immense.

Barrons was next. Indisputably self-serving, could he be the most treacherous of the three? When Rowena had mentioned the abbey, a few hours from town, then said that Dani had been looking for me at the bookstore for the past month, I’d known instantly that Barrons must have followed the young girl and tracked her, or Rowena herself, back to the abbey at some point.

My abbey.

Then he’d had the gall to try to make me do a drive-by, no doubt to see if the Sinsar Dubh was perhaps secreted away beneath the abbey grounds—after all, who better to stand guard over a book of dark Fae magic than a horde of sidhe-seers who could see any and all of the monsters that might try to come after it?—without ever saying, Oh, by the way, I found the headquarters of sidhe-seers while you were gone and I bet they might be able to tell you something about yourself. No, there would be no voluntary sharing of useful information with me.

Barrons walked among Shades and came to no harm. Barrons could see the Fae; he knew about Druids; he had abnormal strength and speed; and although it had taken me some time to admit it to myself, what stared out at me from behind those jet eyes didn’t seem thirty years old. Was he a human who’d somehow learned to cheat time? Was he Fae and I couldn’t sense it? If so, how powerful a Fae was he, that he could out-glamour a sidhe-seer? Was it possible one of those diaphanous Fae had slipped inside him and taken over what used to be Barrons? I discarded that thought the instant I had it. I didn’t believe anything, not even a Fae, could take over Jericho Barrons.