Burned
Page 37

“Like prison camps, the darker side of Chester’s could only be born in a vacuum of morality. I didn’t create that vacuum,” he murmurs behind me, close to my ear. His hand on the small of my back, he steers me around a raucous tangle of mostly naked people.
“But you exploit it. That’s just as bad.”
“We’re all animals. Wolf or sheep. Shark or seal. And some are useless strutting peacocks.”
I don’t dignify his barb with a response. Let him think me a peacock. Better that than the Sinsar Dubh walking.
“I do nothing more than allow my patrons the right to choose which animal they aspire to be. If they say, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Ryodan, may I be lamb to the slaughter?’ I say, ‘Good-the-fuck-riddance. Quit breathing oxygen someone else deserves more.’ ”
“You despise them.”
“I don’t despise them. I despise what any warrior would.”
“Weakness? Not everyone can be as strong as you and me.”
He laughs softly, near my ear, that I put myself in his category. “I despise their willingness to die. Humans come to Chester’s of their own free will. I give them what they want. I’m not responsible for how fucking soulless their wants are.” He closes a hand on my shoulder. “Slow down. You will first determine if there are other princesses in my club. Only when you’ve ascertained there are none will you ascend those stairs.”
I bristle but he’s right. I was hurrying, absorbing nothing. In my haste to eliminate anyone who could chain Barrons to a bed, I’d completely forgotten about searching for additional princesses.
I stop walking and go completely still—well, as still as I can with my train of Unseelie that never interpret my body language correctly slamming into me with soft puffs of yellow dust.
I push them away and permit the carnal madness of the place to wash over me, embrace it, open myself up and seek the lovely, cool sidhe-seer center in my mind.
Use me. I’m better, the Sinsar Dubh purrs.
I let Poe do my talking, refuse to engage. It pounces and runs with any answer I give, no matter how innocuous, like a psychotic ex-boyfriend craving emotional engagement. So long as I keep my mind occupied reciting the complex lines, I can’t hear the Book as well, and it has the added boon of keeping me from replying absently, distracted by external events.
It used to be, when I first arrived in Dublin, that the presence of Fae made me nauseous, some more than others. I felt them in the pit of my stomach, a psychic acid. The afternoon I walked unwittingly into the Dark Zone adjacent to Barrons Books & Baubles, I’d nearly been on my knees puking for the final few blocks.
But repeated exposure to anything desensitizes—repeated exposure to Barrons excluded, of course, which seems to have the opposite effect—and lately on the rare occasions I’ve removed my carefully constructed blockade against the incessant din and reached out to sense Fae, in the absence of crippling nausea, I’ve discovered each caste emits a different frequency.
In the acres of chrome and glass known as Chester’s, beyond what the average human ear can hear, there’s a secret symphony going on. It’s the music of the Fae: the guttural, militant hum of the Rhino-boys; the piercing chime of the tiny, flying, puckish death-by-laughter fairies that look deceitfully like exuberant Tinker Bells; the ominous knell of the red and black uniformed guard that once served Darroc; the siren-song of Dree-lia and her new consort, who looks so much like the deceased Velvet he must be his brother.
I eliminate the diversity of each subclub until only one song remains: Seelie and Unseelie combined.
It’s jarring, cacophonous. It gets on my last nerve. I wonder if they hear it, and if that’s why the dark and light courts tried to eliminate each other all those eons ago—they literally couldn’t stand each other’s music. Humans kill for less.
If I could hear only the Seelie, it would be lovely. The Unseelie alone would be beautiful, too, in an eerie way. But together they chafe, antagonize, instilling and intensifying tension. I wonder how long we have until the light and dark courts war again, ripping apart our world in the process. For the moment, they’re drugged on the endless availability of pleasure to be had. I know better than to think it will last.
I identify various castes and swiftly discard. There’s at least one Unseelie Princess in here, and if I isolate her frequency, I can scan for more.
You’d think it would be so powerful, so unique, it would be easy to find.
It’s not.
I stand there for five solid minutes grasping and coming up empty-handed. I begin to worry she can conceal herself even from me.
Behind me Ryodan and my Unseelie troop grow restless.
“Mac, time’s wasting. What are you doing.”
“I’m working on it. Shush.” I just got a flicker of an anomalous frequency somewhere upstairs. The anomaly fades. Then it seems to be nearing.
“Do you feel something,” Ryodan says suddenly.
Abruptly it vanishes.
“Mac, I feel—ah, fuck, where’d it go.”
I think: What, Ryodan has sidhe-seer senses, too? Impossible. I sink deeper into my center, shed layers of muscle and skin, detach from everything and everyone, block out the world, block out myself. I become primal, ancient sidhe-seer without self, constraint, or definition.
Then there’s something beyond the top of those stairs again, dark, chaotic and pounding, potently seductive, energizing, inflammatory: a version of Wagner’s March of the Valkyries. From Hell. On steroids.