[English] DARKFEVER

Author : Karen Marie Moning

My philosophy is pretty simple—any day nobody’s trying to kill me is a good day in my book.
I haven’t had many good days lately.
Not since the walls between Man and Faery came down.
But then, there’s not a sidhe-seer alive who’s had a good day since then.
Before The Compact was struck between Man and Fae (around 4000 B.C. for those of you who aren’t up on your Fae history), the Unseelie Hunters hunted us down like animals and killed us. But The Compact forbade the Fae to spill human blood, so for the next six thousand years, give or take a few centuries, those with True Vision—people like me who can’t be fooled by Fae glamour or magic—were taken captive and imprisoned in Faery until they died. Real big difference there: dying or being stuck in Faery until you die. Unlike some people I know, I’m not fascinated by them. Dealing with the Fae is like dealing with any addiction—you give in, they’ll own you; you resist, they never will.
Now that the walls are down, the Hunters are back to killing us again. Stamping us out like we’re the plague on this planet.
Aoibheal, the Seelie Queen of the Light, is no longer in charge. In fact, nobody seems to know where she is anymore, and some people are beginning to wonder if she is anymore. The Seelie and Unseelie have been smearing their bloody war all over our world since her disappearance, and although some might say I’m being broody and pessimistic, I think the Unseelie are gaining the distinct upper hand over their fairer brethren.
Which is a really, really bad thing.
Not that I like the Seelie any better. I don’t. The only good Fae is a dead Fae in my book. It’s just that the Seelie aren’t quite as lethal as the Unseelie. They don’t kill us on...

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Prologue

My philosophy is pretty simple—any day nobody’s trying to kill me is a good day in my book.

I haven’t had many good days lately.

Not since the walls between Man and Faery came down.

But then, there’s not a sidhe-seer alive who’s had a good day since then.

Before The Compact was struck between Man and Fae (around 4000 B.C. for those of you who aren’t up on your Fae history), the Unseelie Hunters hunted us down like animals and killed us. But The Compact forbade the Fae to spill human blood, so for the next six thousand years, give or take a few centuries, those with True Vision—people like me who can’t be fooled by Fae glamour or magic—were taken captive and imprisoned in Faery until they died. Real big difference there: dying or being stuck in Faery until you die. Unlike some people I know, I’m not fascinated by them. Dealing with the Fae is like dealing with any addiction—you give in, they’ll own you; you resist, they never will.

Now that the walls are down, the Hunters are back to killing us again. Stamping us out like we’re the plague on this planet.

Aoibheal, the Seelie Queen of the Light, is no longer in charge. In fact, nobody seems to know where she is anymore, and some people are beginning to wonder if she is anymore. The Seelie and Unseelie have been smearing their bloody war all over our world since her disappearance, and although some might say I’m being broody and pessimistic, I think the Unseelie are gaining the distinct upper hand over their fairer brethren.

Which is a really, really bad thing.

Not that I like the Seelie any better. I don’t. The only good Fae is a dead Fae in my book. It’s just that the Seelie aren’t quite as lethal as the Unseelie. They don’t kill us on sight. They have a use for us.

***.

Though they barely cre*** us with sentience, they have a taste for us in bed.

When they’re done with a woman, she’s a mess. It gets in her blood. Unprotected Fae-*** awakens a frenzy of ***ual hunger inside a woman for something she should never have had to begin with, and will never be able to forget. It takes a long time for her to recover—but at least she’s alive.

Which means a chance to fight another day. To help try to find a way to return our world to what it once was.

To send those Fae bastards back to whatever hell they came from.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, ahead of the story.

It began as most things begin. Not on a dark and stormy night. Not foreshadowed by ominous here-comes-the-villain music, dire warnings at the bottom of a teacup, or dread portents in the sky.

It began small and innocuously, as most catastrophes do. A butterfly flaps its wings somewhere and the wind changes, and a warm front hits a cold front off the coast of western Africa and before you know it you’ve got a hurricane closing in. By the time anyone figured out the storm was coming, it was too late to do anything but batten down the hatches and exercise damage control.

My name is MacKayla. Mac for short. I’m a sidhe-seer, a fact I accepted only recently and very reluctantly.

There were more of us out there than anyone knew. And it’s a damn good thing, too.

We’re damage control.

ONE

A year earlier . . .

July 9. Ashford, Georgia.

Ninety-four degrees. Ninety-seven percent humi***y.

It gets crazy hot in the South in the summer, but it’s worth it to have such short, mild winters. I like most all seasons and climes. I can get into an overcast drizzly autumn day—great for curling up with a good book—every bit as much as a cloudless blue summer sky, but I’ve never cared much for snow and ice. I don’t know how northerners put up with it. Or why. But I guess it’s a good thing they do, otherwise they’d all be down here crowding us out.

Native to the sultry southern heat, I was lounging by the pool in the backyard of my parents’ house, wearing my favorite pink polka-dotted bikini which went perfectly with my new I’m-Not-Really-a-Waitress-Pink manicure and pedicure. I was sprawled in a cushion-topped chaise soaking up the sun, my long blonde hair twisted up in a spiky knot on top of my head in one of those hairdos you really hope nobody ever catches you wearing. Mom and Dad were away on vacation, celebrating their thirtieth wedding anniversary with a twenty-one-day island-hopping cruise through the tropics, which had begun two weeks ago in Maui and ended next weekend in Miami.

I’d been working devotedly on my tan in their absence, taking quick dips in the cool sparkling blue, then stretching out to let the sun toast drops of water from my skin, wishing my sister Alina was around to hang out with, and maybe invite a few friends over.

My iPod was tucked into my dad’s Bose SoundDock on the patio table next to me, bopping cheerily through a playlist I’d put together specifically for poolside sunning, composed of the top one hundred one-hit wonders from the past few decades, plus a few others that make me smile—happy mindless music to pass happy mindless time. It was currently playing an old Louis Armstrong song—“What a Wonderful World.” Born in a generation that thinks cynical and disenchanted is cool, sometimes I’m a little off the beaten track. Oh well.

A tall glass of chilled sweet tea was at hand, and the phone was nearby in case Mom and Dad made ground sooner than expected. They weren’t due ashore the next island until tomorrow, but twice now they’d landed sooner than scheduled. Since I’d accidentally dropped my cell phone in the pool a few days ago, I’d been toting the cordless around so I wouldn’t miss a call.

Fact was, I missed my parents like crazy.

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At first, when they left, I’d been elated by the prospect of time alone. I live at home and when my parents are there the house sometimes feels annoyingly like Grand Central Station, with Mom’s friends, Dad’s golf buddies, and ladies from the church popping in, punctuated by neighborhood kids stopping over with one excuse or another, conveniently clad in their swim trunks—gee, could they be angling for an invitation?

But after two weeks of much longed for solitude, I’d begun choking on it. The rambling house seemed achingly quiet, especially in the evenings. Around supper time I’d been feeling downright lost. Hungry, too. Mom’s an amazing cook and I’d burned out fast on pizza, potato chips, and mac-’n’-cheese. I couldn’t wait for one of her fried chicken, mashed potatoes, fresh turnip greens, and peach pie with homemade whipped-cream dinners. I’d even done the grocery shopping in anticipation, stocking up on everything she needed.

I love to eat. Fortunately, it doesn’t show. I’m healthy through the bust and bottom, but slim through the waist and thighs. I have good metabolism, though Mom says, Ha, wait until you’re thirty. Then forty, then fifty. Dad says, More to love, Rainey and gives Mom a look that makes me concentrate really hard on something else. Anything else. I adore my parents, but there’s such a thing as TMI. Too much information.

All in all, I have a great life, short of missing my parents and counting the days until Alina gets home from Ireland, but both of those are temporary, soon to be rectified. My life will go back to being perfect again before much longer.

Is there such a thing as tempting the Fates to slice one of the most important threads that holds your life together simply by being too happy?

When the phone rang, I thought it was my parents.

It wasn’t.

It’s funny how such a tiny, insignificant, dozen-times-a-day action can become a line of demarcation.

The picking up of a phone. The pressing of an on button.

Before I pressed it—as far as I knew—my sister Alina was alive. At the moment of pressing, my life split into two distinct epochs: Before the call and After.

Before the call, I had no use for a word like “demarcation,” one of those fifty-cent words I knew only because I was an avid reader. Before, I floated through life from one happy moment to the next. Before, I thought I knew everything. I thought I knew who I was, where I fit, and exactly what my future would bring.

Before, I thought I knew I had a future.

After, I began to discover that I’d never really known anything at all.

I waited two weeks from the day that I learned my sister had been murdered for somebody to do something—anything—besides plant her in the ground after a closed-casket funeral, cover her with roses, and grieve.

Grieving wasn’t going to bring her back, and it sure wasn’t going to make me feel better about whoever’d killed her walking around alive out there somewhere, happy in their sick little psychotic way, while my sister lay icy and white beneath six feet of dirt.

Those weeks will remain forever foggy to me. I wept the entire time, vision and memory blurred by tears. My tears were involuntary. My soul was leaking. Alina wasn’t just my sister; she was my best friend. Though she’d been away studying at Trinity College in Dublin for the past eight months, we’d e-mailed incessantly and spoken weekly, sharing everything, keeping no secrets.

Or so I thought. Boy was I ever wrong.

We’d been planning to get an apartment together when she came home. We’d been planning to move to the city, where I was finally going to get serious about college, and Alina was going to work on her Ph.D. at the same Atlanta university. It was no secret that my sister had gotten all the ambition in the family. Since graduating high school, I’d been perfectly content bartending at The Brickyard four or five nights a week, living at home, saving most of my money, and taking just enough college courses at the local Podunk university (one or two a semester, and classes like How to Use the Internet and Travel Etiquette didn’t cut it with my folks) to keep Mom and Dad reasonably hopeful that I might one day graduate and get a Real Job in the Real World. Still, ambition or no, I’d been planning to really buckle down and make some big changes in my life when Alina returned.

When I’d said good-bye to her months ago at the airport, the thought that I wouldn’t see her alive again had never crossed my mind. Alina was as certain as the sun rising and setting. She was charmed. She was twenty-four and I was twenty-two. We were going to live forever. Thirty was a million light-years away. Forty wasn’t even in the same galaxy. Death? Ha. Death happened to really old people.

Not.

After two weeks, my teary fog started to lift a little. I didn’t stop hurting. I think I just finally expelled the last drop of moisture from my body that wasn’t absolutely necessary to keep me alive. And rage watered my parched soul. I wanted answers. I wanted justice.

I wanted revenge.

I seemed to be the only one.

I’d taken a psych course a few years back that said people dealt with death by working their way through stages of grief. I hadn’t gotten to wallow in the numbness of denial that’s supposed to be the first phase. I’d flashed straight from numb to pain in the space of a heartbeat. With Mom and Dad away, I was the one who’d had to identify her body. It hadn’t been pretty and there’d been no way to deny Alina was dead.

After two weeks, I was thick into the anger phase. Depression was supposed to be next. Then, if one was healthy, acceptance. Already I could see the beginning signs of acceptance in those around me, as if they’d moved directly from numbness to defeat. They talked of “random acts of violence.” They spoke about “getting on with life.” They said they were “sure things were in good hands with the police.”

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I was so not healthy. Nor was I remotely sure about the police in Ireland.

Accept Alina’s death?

Never.

“You’re not going, Mac, and that’s final.” Mom stood at the kitchen counter, a towel draped over her shoulder, a cheery red, yellow, and white magnolia-printed apron tied at her waist, her hands dusted with flour.

She’d been baking. And cooking. And cleaning. And baking some more. She’d become a veritable Tasmanian devil of domesticity. Born and raised in the Deep South, it was Mom’s way of trying to deal. Down here, women nest like mother hens when people die. It’s just what they do.

We’d been arguing for the past hour. Last night the Dublin police had called to tell us that they were terribly sorry, but due to a lack of evidence, in light of the fact that they didn’t have a single lead or witness, there was nothing left to pursue. They were giving us official notice that they’d had no choice but to turn Alina’s case over to the unsolved division, which anyone with half a brain knew wasn’t a division at all but a filing cabinet in a dimly lit and largely forgotten basement storeroom somewhere. Despite assurances they would periodically reexamine the case for new evidence, that they would exercise utmost due diligence, the message was clear: Alina was dead, shipped back to her own country, and no longer their concern.

They’d given up.

Was that record time or what? Three weeks. A measly twenty-one days. It was inconceivable!

“You can bet your butt if we lived over there, they’d never have given up so quickly,” I said bitterly.

“You don’t know that, Mac.” Mom pushed ash-blonde bangs back from blue eyes that were red-rimmed from weeping, leaving a smudge of flour on her brow.

“Give me the chance to find out.”

Her lips compressed into a thin white-edged line. “Absolutely not. I’ve already lost one daughter to that country. I will not lose another.”

Impasse. And here we’d been ever since breakfast, when I’d announced my decision to take time off so I could go to Dublin and find out what the police had really been doing to solve Alina’s murder.

I would demand a copy of the file, and do all in my power to motivate them to continue their investigation. I would give a face and a voice—a loud and hopefully highly persuasive one—to the victim’s family. I couldn’t shake the belief that if only my sister had a representative in Dublin, the investigation would be taken more seriously.

I’d tried to get Dad to go, but there just wasn’t any reaching him right now. He was lost in grief. Though our faces and builds were very different, I have the same color hair and eyes as Alina, and the few times he’d actually looked at me lately, he’d gotten such an awful look on his face that it had made me wish I was invisible. Or brunette with brown eyes like him, instead of sunny blonde with green.

Initially, after the funeral, he’d been a dynamo of determined action, making endless phone calls, contacting anyone and everyone. The embassy had been kind, but directed him to Interpol. Interpol had kept him busy for a few days “looking into things” before diplomatically referring him back to where he’d begun—the Dublin police. The Dublin police remained unwavering. No evidence. No leads. Nothing to investigate. If you have a problem with that, sir, contact your embassy.

He called the Ashford police—no, they couldn’t go to Ireland and look into it. He called the Dublin police again—were they sure they’d interviewed every last one of Alina’s friends and fellow students and professors? I hadn’t needed to hear both sides of that conversation to know the Dublin police were getting testy.

He’d finally placed a call to an old college friend of his that held some high-powered, hush-hush position in the government. Whatever that friend said had deflated him completely. He’d closed the door on us and not come out since.

The climate was decidedly grim in the Lane house, with Mom a tornado in the kitchen, and Dad a black hole in the study. I couldn’t sit around forever waiting for them to snap out of it. Time was wasting and the trail was growing colder by the minute. If someone was going to do something, it had to be now, which meant it had to be me.

I said, “I’m going and I don’t care if you like it or not.”

Mom burst into tears. She slapped the dough she’d been kneading down on the counter and ran out of the room. After a moment, I heard the bedroom door slam down the hall.

That’s one thing I can’t handle—my mom’s tears. As if she hadn’t been crying enough lately, I’d just made her cry again. I slunk from the kitchen and crept upstairs, feeling like the absolute lowest of the lowest scum on the face of the earth.

I got out of my pajamas, showered, dried my hair and dressed, then stood at a complete loss for a while, staring blankly down the hall at Alina’s closed bedroom door.

How many thousands of times had we called back and forth during the day, whispered back and forth during the night, woken each other up for comfort when we’d had bad dreams?

I was on my own with bad dreams now.

Get a grip, Mac. I shook myself and decided to head up to campus. If I stayed home, the black hole might get me, too. Even now I could feel its event horizon expanding exponentially.

On the drive uptown, I recalled that I’d dropped my cell phone in the pool—God, had it really been all those weeks ago?—and decided I’d better stop at the mall to get a new one in case my parents needed to reach me while I was out.

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If they even noticed I was gone.

I stopped at the store, bought the cheapest Nokia they had, got the old one deactivated, and powered up the replacement.

I had fourteen new messages, which was probably a record for me. I’m hardly a social butterfly. I’m not one of those plugged-in people who are always hooked up to the latest greatest find-me service. The idea of being found so easily creeps me out a little. I don’t have a camera phone or text-messaging capability. I don’t have Internet service or satellite radio, just your basic account, thank you. The only other gadget I need is my trusty iPod—music is my great escape.

I got back in my car, turned on the engine so the air con***ioner could do battle with July’s relentless heat, and began listening to my messages. Most of them were weeks old, from friends at school or The Brickyard who I’d talked to since the funeral.

I guess, somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d made the connection that I’d lost cell service a few days before Alina had died and was hoping I might have a message from her. Hoping she might have called, sounding happy before she died. Hoping she might have said something that would make me forget my grief, if only for a short while. I was desperate to hear her voice just one more time.

When I did, I almost dropped the phone. Her voice burst from the tiny speaker, sounding frantic, terrified.

“Mac! Oh God, Mac, where are you? I need to talk to you! It rolled straight into your voice mail! What are you doing with your cell phone turned off? You’ve got to call me the minute you get this! I mean, the very instant!”

Despite the oppressive summer heat, I was suddenly icy, my skin clammy.

“Oh, Mac, everything has gone so wrong! I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought he was helping me, but—God, I can’t believe I was so stupid! I thought I was in love with him and he’s one of them, Mac! He’s one of them!”

I blinked uncomprehendingly. One of who? For that matter, who was this “he” that was one of “them” in the first place? Alina—in love? No way! Alina and I told each other everything. Aside from a few guys she’d dated casually her first months in Dublin, she’d not mentioned any other guy in her life. And certainly not one she was in love with!

Her voice caught on a sob. My hand tightened to a death grip on the phone, as if maybe I could hold on to my sister through it. Keep this Alina alive and safe from harm. I got a few seconds of static, then, when she spoke again she’d lowered her voice, as if fearful of being overheard.

“We’ve got to talk, Mac! There’s so much you don’t know. My God, you don’t even know what you are! There are so many things I should have told you, but I thought I could keep you out of it until things were safer for us. I’m going to try to make it home”—she broke off and laughed bitterly, a caustic sound totally unlike Alina—“but I don’t think he’ll let me out of the country. I’ll call you as soon—” More static. A gasp. “Oh, Mac, he’s coming!” Her voice dropped to an urgent whisper. “Listen to me! We’ve got to find the”—her next word sounded garbled or foreign, something like shi-sadu, I thought. “Everything depends on it. We can’t let them have it! We’ve got to get to it first! He’s been lying to me all along. I know what it is now and I know where—”

Dead air.

The call had been terminated.

I sat stunned, trying to make sense of what I’d just heard. I thought I must have a split personality and there were two Macs: one that had a clue about what was going on in the world around her, and one that could barely track reality well enough to get dressed in the morning and put her shoes on the right feet. Mac-that-had-a-clue must have died when Alina did, because this Mac obviously didn’t know the first thing about her sister.

She’d been in love and never mentioned it to me! Not once. And now it seemed that was the least of the things she’d not told me. I was flabbergasted. I was betrayed. There was a whole huge part of my sister’s life that she’d been withholding from me for months.

What kind of danger had she been in? What had she been trying to keep me out of? Until what was safer for us? What did we have to find? Had it been the man she’d thought she was in love with that had killed her? Why—oh why—hadn’t she told me his name?

I checked the date and time on the call—the afternoon after I’d dropped my cell phone in the pool. I felt sick to my stomach. She’d needed me and I hadn’t been there for her. At the moment Alina had been so frantically trying to reach me, I’d been sunning lazily in the backyard, listening to my top one hundred mindless happy songs, my cell phone lying short-circuited and forgotten on the dining-room table.

I carefully pressed the save key, then listened to the rest of the messages, hoping she might have called back, but there was nothing else. According to the police, she’d died approximately four hours after she’d tried reaching me, although they hadn’t found her body in an alley for nearly two days.

That was a visual I always worked real hard to block.

I closed my eyes and tried not to dwell on the thought that I’d missed my last chance to talk to her, tried not to think that maybe I could have done something to save her if only I’d answered. Those thoughts could make me crazy.

I replayed the message again. What was a shi-sadu? And what was the deal with her cryptic You don’t even know what you are? What could Alina possibly have meant by that?

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By my third run-through, I knew the message by heart.

I also knew that there was no way I could play it for Mom and Dad. Not only would it drive them further off the deep end (if there was a deeper end than the one they were currently off), but they’d probably lock me in my room and throw away the key. I couldn’t see them taking any chances with their remaining child.

But . . . if I went to Dublin and played it for the police, they’d have to reopen her case, wouldn’t they? This was a bona fide lead. If Alina had been in love with someone, she would have been seen with him at some point, somewhere. At school, at her apartment, at work, somewhere. Somebody would know who he was.

And if the mystery man wasn’t her killer, surely he was the key to discovering who was. After all, he was “one of them.”

I frowned.

Whoever or whatever “they” were.

TWO

I quickly learned that it was one thing to think about going to Dublin and demanding justice for my sister—and entirely another to find myself standing there in the jet-lagged flesh, across an ocean, four thousand miles from home.

But standing there I was, in rapidly deepening dusk, on a cobbled street in the heart of a foreign city, watching my taxi drive away, surrounded by people speaking a version of English that was virtually unintelligible, trying to come to terms with the fact that, although there were more than a million inhabitants in and around the city, I didn’t know a single soul.

Not in Dublin, not in Ireland, not on the entire continent.

I was as alone as alone could be.

I’d had a major blowout fight with Mom and Dad before I’d left, and they weren’t speaking to me. Then again, they weren’t speaking to each other, either, so I was trying not to take it too personally. I’d quit my job and withdrawn from school. I’d drained my checking and savings accounts. I was a twenty-two-year-old single white female alone in a strange country where my sister had been killed.

Gripping a suitcase in each hand, I spun in a circle on the sidewalk. What in God’s name did I think I was doing? Before I could entertain that thought long enough to go tearing off in a panic-stricken dash after my departing cab, I squared my shoulders, turned, and marched into The Clarin House.

I’d chosen this bed-and-breakfast for two reasons: It was close to where Alina had kept a small, noisy apartment over one of the many Dublin pubs, and it was one of the least expensive in the area. I had no idea how long I would be staying, so I’d booked the cheapest one-way flight I’d been able to find. I had limited funds and needed to watch every penny, or I could end up stuck abroad without enough money to make it home. Only when I was convinced the police—or An Garda Síochána, the Guardians of the Peace, as they were called over here—were doing the best job possible would I begin to even consider leaving Ireland again.

On the trip over, I’d devoured two slightly outdated guidebooks I’d found the day before at The Book Nook, Ashford’s only used-book store. I’d pored over maps, trying to bone up on Ireland’s history and acquaint myself with local customs. I’d passed a three-hour layover in Boston with my eyes closed, trying to recall every detail about Dublin I’d ever picked up from Alina in our phone calls and e-mails. I was afraid I was still as green as an unripe Georgia peach, but hopefully I wouldn’t be the gauche tourist, stepping on toes every time I turned around.

I entered the foyer of The Clarin House and hurried to the counter.

“Evenin’ t’ye, m’dear,” the desk clerk said cheerfully. “’Opin you ’ave reserves, a’sure ye’ll be needin’ ’em such a foine night th’season.”

I blinked and replayed what he had just said in my mind, much more slowly. “Reservations,” I said. “Oh yes.” I handed my e-mail confirmation to the elderly gentleman. With his snowy hair, neatly trimmed beard, sparkling eyes behind round, rimless glasses, and oddly small ears, he actually looked like a merry leprechaun from the fabled Land o’ Green. While he confirmed my stay and checked me in, he thrust flyers at me and prattled nonstop about where to go and what to see.

At least I think he did.

Truth was, I understood little of what he was saying. Though his accent was charming, the suspicion I’d formed at the airport had just been confirmed: It was going to take my sadly monolingual American brain time to acclimate to the Irish inflection and unique way of phrasing things. As rapidly as the clerk was speaking, he might as well have been havering away (one of my new phrases from my trusty guidebook) in Gaelic for all the sense it made to me.

A few minutes later, and none the wiser about a thing he’d recommended, I was on the third floor, unlocking the door to my room. As I’d expected for the price, it wasn’t much. Cramped, only seven or eight feet in either direction, the room was plainly furnished with a twin bed perched beneath a tall narrow window, a small three-drawer dresser topped by a lamp with a stained yellow shade, a rickety chair, a pedestal sink for washing up, and a closet about as wide as I was with—I pushed it open—a whopping two wire hangers, badly bent. The bathroom was a shared deal down at the end of the hall. The only concession to atmosphere was a faded orange-and-pink rug and a matching drape over the window.

I dropped my bags on the bed, pushed the curtain aside, and looked out at the city where my sister died.

I didn’t want it to be beautiful, but it was.

Full dark had fallen and Dublin was brilliantly lit. There’d been a recent rain, and against the coal of night, the shiny cobbled streets gleamed amber, rose, and neon-blue from reflected lamps and signs. The architecture was a kind I’d seen before only in books and movies: Old World, elegant, and grand. The buildings boasted ornate facades, some adorned by pillars and columns, others sported handsomely detailed woodwork and tall, majestic windows. The Clarin House stood on the outskirts of the Temple Bar District, which, according to my guidebook, was the most vibrant, alive part of the city, full of craic—Irish slang for something along the lines of “rollicking good fun.”

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People milled about in the streets, wandering from one of the countless pubs in the district to the next. “Good puzzle” James Joyce had written, “would be cross Dublin without passing a pub.” More than six hundred pubs in Dublin! the headline on one of the many flyers the sprightly clerk had thrust into my hand proudly trumpeted. From what I’d seen on the drive in, I believed it. Alina had studied hard to be admitted to the exclusive study-abroad program at Trinity College, but I also knew she’d thoroughly enjoyed the energy, social life, and many and diverse pubs of the city. She’d loved Dublin.

Watching the people laughing and talking below, I felt as small as a dust mote glimmering in a shaft of moonlight.

And about as connected to the world.

“Well, get connected,” I muttered to myself. “You’re Alina’s only hope.”

At the moment, Alina’s Only Hope was hungrier than she was tired—and after three layovers and twenty hours of travel, I was dog-tired. I’d never been able to sleep on an empty stomach, so I knew I would have to get something to eat before I could turn in. If I didn’t, I’d just toss and turn all night, and wake up both hungrier and more exhausted, which wouldn’t do. I had a busy day tomorrow and needed my wits about me.

It was as good a time to get connected as any. I splashed cold water on my face, touched up my makeup and brushed my hair. After changing into my favorite short white skirt that made the most of my sun-kissed legs, a pretty lilac camisole and matching cardigan, I swept my long blonde hair up into a high ponytail, locked up, and slipped out of the inn, into the Dublin night.

I stopped in the first pub that looked inviting and boasted authentic Irish fare. I selected a quaint Old World place over the flashier urban ones in the district. I just wanted a good hot meal without a lot of fuss. And I got it: a bowl of thick, hearty Irish stew, warm soda bread, and a slice of chocolate whisky cake, washed down by a perfectly stacked Guinness.

Though I was pleasantly sleepy after the filling meal, I ordered a second beer, sat back and looked around, drinking in the atmosphere. I wondered if Alina had ever come here, and indulged myself in a little fantasy of imagining her here with friends, laughing and happy. It was a beautiful pub, with cozy high-backed leather booths, or “snugs” as they were called, lining the brick walls. The bar occupied the center of the large room, a handsome, stately affair of mahogany, brass, and mirrors. It was surrounded by tall café tables and high stools. It was at one of those tables that I sat.

The pub was filled with an eclectic mix of patrons, from young university students to retired tourists, from fashionably attired to sporty-grunge. As a bartender, I’m always interested in what other clubs are like: what they offer, who they draw, and what soap operas unfold in them, because they inevitably do. There are always a few gorgeous guys, always a few fights, always a few romances, and always a few weirdos in any given bar, on any given night.

Tonight would prove no exception.

I’d already paid my tab and was just finishing my beer when he walked in. I noticed him because it was impossible not to. Though I didn’t catch sight of him until he’d already passed me and his back was to me, it was the backside of a world-class athlete. Tall, strong, powerful muscle poured into black leather pants, black boots, and—yes, you guessed it, a real drama king—a black shirt. I’ve spent enough time behind a bar that I’ve formed a few opinions about what people wear and what it says about them. Guys who wear black from head to toe fall into two categories: they want to be trouble, or they are trouble. I tend to steer clear of them. Women who wear all black are a different story, but that’s neither here nor there.

So I noticed his backside first, and as I’m scoping it out with a connoisseur’s eye (trouble or not, he was serious eye-candy), he goes straight to the bar, leans over it, and filches a bottle of top-shelf whisky.

Not a soul seemed to notice.

I stiffened with instant indignation for the barkeep; it was a good bet it was his pocket that the sixty-five-dollar bottle of single-malt scotch was going to end up coming out of at closing time when his accounts didn’t zero-out.

I began to slide down from my stool. Yes, I was going to do it—stranger in a strange land, no less—I was going to rat him out. We bartenders have to stick together.

The guy turned.

I froze, one foot on the lower rung, halfway down. I think I even stopped breathing. To say he was movie-star material didn’t cut it. To call him drop-dead gorgeous didn’t either. To say that archangels must have been graced by God with such faces couldn’t even begin to begin describing him. Long gold hair, eyes so light they looked silvery, and golden skin, the man was blindingly beautiful. Every hair on my body lifted, all over, in unison. And I got the strangest thought: He’s not human.

I shook my head at my lunacy and backed up onto the stool. I still intended to tell the barkeep, but not until the man moved away from the bar. I was suddenly in no hurry to get close to him.

But he didn’t move away. Instead he leaned back against it, broke the seal, unscrewed the cap, and took a long swig from the bottle.

And as I watched him, something utterly inexplicable happened. The fine hair all over my body began to vibrate, my meal turned to a lump of lead in my stomach and I was suddenly having some kind of waking vision. The bar was still there and so was he, but in this version of reality, he wasn’t gorgeous at all. He was nothing but a carefully camouflaged abomination, and just beneath the surface of all that perfection, the barely masked stench of decay was rising from his skin. And if I got close enough, the foul odor might choke me to death. But that wasn’t the full of it. I felt as if—if I could just open my eyes a little wider—I would see even more. I would see exactly what he was, if I could only look harder somehow.

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I don’t know how long I might have sat there, staring. Later, I would know that it was nearly long enough to get myself killed, but I knew nothing of that at the time.

I was saved from myself, from my story ending right here and now on this very page, by a sharp rap to the back of my head.

“Ow!” I hopped off my perch on the stool, turned around, and glared at my assailant.

She glared back at me—a tiny old woman, eighty if she was a day. Thick silvery-white hair was pulled back in a long braid from a fine-boned face. She was wearing black from head to toe and I was briefly aggravated to realize I might have to revise my theories about women’s fashion. Before I could say, “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” she reached up and rapped me again, her knuckles cracking sharply against my forehead.

“Ow! Stop that!”

“How dare you stare at him like that?” the woman hissed. Fierce blue eyes glittered furiously at me from within nests of fine wrinkles. “Would you be jeopardizing us all, then, you damn fool?”

“Huh?” As with the elderly leprechaun of a desk clerk, I had to replay her words more slowly in my mind. Still they made no sense to me.

“The dark Tuatha Dé! How dare you betray us! And you—an O’Connor, no less! I’ll be having a word with your kin, I will!”

“Huh?” It suddenly seemed the only word I could manage. Had I heard her correctly? What in the world was a too-ah-day? And who did she think I was? She raised her hand and I was afraid she was about to rap me again, so I blurted, “I’m not an O’Connor.”

“Sure you are.” She rolled her eyes. “That hair, those eyes. And that skin! Och, aye, you’re an O’Connor through and through. The likes of him would snap a tasty little thing like you in two and be picking his teeth with your bones before you even managed to part those pretty lips to beg. Now get out of here, before you ruin us all!”

I blinked. “But I—”

She silenced me with a quelling stare no doubt perfected by half a century of practice. “Out! Now! And don’t you be coming back in here. Not tonight, not ever. If you can’t keep your head down and honor your bloodline, then do us all a favor—go die somewhere else.”

Ow. Still blinking, I fumbled behind me for my purse. I didn’t need to be hit over the head with a stick to know I wasn’t wanted. A few knuckle-raps did just fine. Head high, eyes fixed straight ahead, I backed away just in case the nutty old woman got it in her mind to try to bean me again. At a safe distance, I turned and marched from the bar.

“And that’s that,” I muttered to myself as I stomped back to my cramped, unwelcoming room at the inn. “Welcome to Ireland, Mac.”

I couldn’t decide what had been more disturbing—my bizarre hallucination or the hostile crone.

My last thought before I fell asleep was that the old woman was obviously crazy. Either she was or I was, and it sure wasn’t me.

THREE

It took me a while to find the Pearse Street Garda Station the next day. Things looked a lot different when I was walking on the pretty little map instead of looking down at it. The streets didn’t branch off at quite the same tidy angles, and their names changed without rhyme or reason between one block and the next.

I wandered past the same outdoor café and independent newsstand three times. Man Sees Devil in County Clare Cornfield, Sixth Sighting this Month, one tabloid blared. The Old Ones Are Returning, Claims Psychic, another proclaimed. Wondering who the “Old Ones” were—an aging rock band?—on my fourth trip by I broke down and asked the elderly vendor for directions.

I couldn’t understand a word he said. I was beginning to see a distinct correlation between age of speaker and unintelligibility of accent. As the grizzled gentleman fired off a spate of lovely lilting words that made no sense to me at all, I nodded and smiled a lot, trying to look intelligent. I waited until he wound down, then took a gamble—what the heck? my odds were fifty-fifty—and turned to go north.

With a sharp clucking sound, he grabbed my shoulder, turned me in the opposite direction, and barked, “Air ye deaf, lass?”

I think. He might have called me a hairy jackass.

Smiling brightly, I went south.

The morning desk clerk at The Clarin House, a twenty-something woman named Bonita (whom I’d understood with little difficulty), had assured me I wouldn’t be able to miss the Garda station once I got there. She’d said the historic building looked a little like an old English manor house, made of all stone, with many chimneys and rounded turrets at each end. She was right, it did.

I entered the station through a tall wooden door set into a deep, high stone arch and checked in with the receptionist. “I’m MacKayla Lane.” I got right to the point. “My sister was murdered here last month. I’d like to see the detective that handled her case. I have new information for him.”

“Who’ve you been working with, luv?”

“Inspector O’Duffy. Patrick O’Duffy.”

“Sorry, luv. Our Patty’s out for a few days. I could set you an appointment with him on Thursday.”

An appointment on Thursday? I had a lead now. I didn’t want to wait three days. “Is there another inspector I could speak to about this?”

She shrugged. “Could. But you’ll be having the best of luck with the one who worked her case. If it were my sister, I’d be waiting for Patty.”

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I shifted impatiently from foot to foot. The need to do something was burning a hole in my gut, but I wanted to do what was best for Alina, not what was the most immediate. “All right. I’ll take an appointment on Thursday. Do you have something in the morning?”

She put me down for the first appointment of the day.

I went to Alina’s place next.

Though her lease had been paid up through the end of the month—nonrefundable—I had no idea how long it might take to sort through her things and get everything boxed up to send back to Georgia, so I figured I’d better start now. I wasn’t about to leave a single shred of my sister four thousand miles from home.

There was police tape over the door, but it had been cut. I let myself in with the key Inspector O’Duffy had mailed to us in the small package of personal effects found on her body. Her apartment smelled just like her room back home, of peaches-and-cream candles, and Beautiful perfume.

It was dark inside, the shutters drawn. The pub below hadn’t yet opened for the day, so it was quiet as a tomb. I fumbled for the light switch. Though we’d been told her place was thoroughly ransacked, I wasn’t prepared for it. Fingerprint dust was everywhere. Everything breakable was broken: lamps, knickknacks, dishes, even the mirror set into the mantel above the gas fireplace. The sofa was sliced, cushions torn, books ripped up, bookcases smashed, and even the drapes were shredded. CDs crunched beneath my feet when I stepped into the living room.

Had this been done before or after she’d died? The police had offered no opinion on the timing. I didn’t know if what I was seeing was the by-product of mindless rage, or if the killer had been searching for something. Maybe the thing Alina had said we needed to find. Maybe he’d thought she had it already, whatever it was.

Alina’s body had turned up miles away, in a trash-filled alley on the opposite side of the River Liffey. I knew exactly where. I’d seen the crime-scene photos. Before I left Ireland, I knew I would end up in that alley, saying my last good-byes to her, but I was in no hurry to do so. This was bad enough.

In fact, five minutes in the place was all I could stand.

I locked up and hurried back down the steps, bursting from the narrow, windowless staircase into the foggy alley behind the bar. I was grateful that I had three and a half more weeks to deal with the situation before her lease expired. Next time I came, I’d be braced for what I would find. Next time I came, I’d be armed with boxes, trash bags, and a broom.

Next time I came, I told myself, as I dragged a sleeve across my cheek, I wouldn’t cry.

I spent the rest of the morning and a good part of a drizzly afternoon holed up in an Internet café, trying to track down the thing Alina had said we needed to find—a shi-sadu. I tried every search engine. I asked Jeeves. I ran text searches in local online newspapers hoping for a hit. Problem was, I didn’t know how to spell it; I didn’t know if it was a person, place, or thing, and no matter how many times I listened to the message, I still wasn’t sure I understood what she was saying.

Just for the heck of it, I decided to hunt for the odd word the old woman had said last night—too-ah-day. I had no luck with that, either.

A few hours into my frustrating search—I shot off several e-mails too, including an emotional one to my parents—I ordered another coffee and asked two cute Irish guys behind the counter who looked about my age if they had any idea what a shi-sadu was.

They didn’t.

“How about a too-ah-day?” I asked, expecting the same answer.

“Too-ah-day?” the dark-haired one repeated, with a slightly different inflection than I’d used.

I nodded. “An old woman in a pub said it to me last night. Any idea what it means?”

“Sure.” He laughed. “It’s what all you bloody Americans come here hoping to find. That and a pot o’ gold, wouldn’t that be the right of it, Seamus?” He smirked at his blond companion, who smirked broadly back.

“What’s that?” I said warily.

Flapping his arms like little wings, he winked. “Why, that’d be a wee fairy, lass.”

A wee fairy. Right. Uh-huh. With Tourist stamped all over my forehead, I took the steaming mug, paid for the coffee, and escorted my flaming cheeks back to my table.

Crazy old woman, I thought irritably, closing down my Internet session. If I ever saw her again, she was going to get an earful.

It was the fog that got me lost.

I would have been okay if it had been a sunny day. But fog has a way of transforming even the most familiar landscape into something foreign and sinister, and the place was already so foreign to me that it quickly took on sinister attributes.

One minute I thought I was heading straight for The Clarin House, plowing down block after block without really paying much attention, the next I was in a dwindling crowd on a street that I hadn’t seen before, and suddenly, I was one of only three people on an eerily quiet fog-filled lane. I had no idea how far I’d come. My mind was on other things. I might have walked for miles.

I had what I thought was a really smart idea. I would follow one of the other pedestrians and surely they would lead me back to the main part of town.

Buttoning my jacket against the misting rain, I picked the closer of the two, a fiftyish woman in a beige raincoat and a blue scarf. I had to stick close because the fog was so thick.

Two blocks later, she was clutching her purse tightly to her side and darting nervous glances over her shoulder. It took me a few minutes to figure out what she was frightened of—me. Belatedly I recalled what I’d read in my guidebook about crime in the inner city. Innocent-looking youths of both genders were responsible for much of it.

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I tried to reassure her. “I’m lost,” I called. “I’m just trying to get back to my hotel. Please, can you help me?”

“Stop following me! Stay away,” she cried, quickening her pace, coattails flapping.

“All right, I’m staying.” I stopped where I stood. The last thing I wanted to do was chase her off; the other pedestrian was gone, I needed her. The fog was getting denser by the minute and I had no idea where I was. “Look, I’m sorry I scared you. Could you just point me toward the Temple Bar District? Please? I’m an American tourist and I’m lost.”

Without turning or slowing in the least, she flung an arm out in a general leftward direction, then disappeared around the corner, leaving me alone in the fog.

I sighed. Left it was.

I went to the corner, turned, and began walking at a moderate pace. Taking stock of my surroundings as I went, I stepped it up a bit. I seemed to be heading deeper into a dilapidated, industrial part of the city. Storefronts with the occasional apartment above gave way to rundown warehouse-like buildings on both sides of the street with busted-out windows and sagging doors. The sidewalk whittled down to barely a few feet wide and was increasingly trash-littered with every step. I started to feel strongly nauseated, I suppose from the stench of the sewers. There must have been an old paper factory nearby; thick husks of porous yellowed parchment of varying sizes tumbled and blew along the empty streets. Narrow, dingy alleyways were marked at the entrances with peeling painted arrows, pointing to docks that looked as if the last time they’d received a delivery was twenty years ago.

Here, a crumbling smokestack stretched up, melting into the fog. There, an abandoned car sat with the driver’s door ajar and, outside it, a pair of shoes and a pile of clothing, as if the driver had simply gotten out, stripped, and left everything behind. It was eerily quiet. The only sounds were the muted muffle of my footsteps and the slow dripping of gutters emptying into drainpipes. The farther I walked into the decaying neighborhood, the more I wanted to run, or at least give way to a vigorous sprint, but I worried if there were unsavory denizens of the human sort in the area, the rapid pounding of my heels against the pavement might draw their attention. I was afraid this part of the city was so deserted because the businesses had moved out when the gangs had moved in. Who knew what lurked behind those broken windows? Who knew what crouched beyond that half-opened door?

The next ten minutes were some of the most harrowing of my life. I was alone in a bad section of a foreign city with no idea whether I was going the right way or headed straight for something worse. Twice I thought I heard something rustling about in an alley as I passed. Twice I swallowed panic and refused to run. It was impossible not to think of Alina, of the similar locale in which her body had been found. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong here, and it was something far more wrong than mere abandonment and decay. This part of the city didn’t just feel empty. It felt, well . . . forsaken . . . like I should have passed a sign ten blocks ago that said Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.

I was feeling increasingly nauseated and my skin was starting to crawl. I hurried down block after block, in as straight a general leftward direction as the streets would permit. Though it was only supper time, rain and fog had turned day to dusk and those few streetlamps that hadn’t been broken out years ago began to flicker and glow. Night was falling and soon it would be as dark as pitch in those long shadowed stretches between the weak and infrequent pools of light.

I picked up my pace to a sprint. On the verge of hysteria at the thought of being lost in this awful part of the city at night, I nearly sobbed with relief when I spied a brightly lit building a few blocks ahead, blazing like an oasis of light.

I broke into that run I’d been resisting.

As I drew nearer, I could see that all the windows were intact, and the tall brick building was impeccably restored, sporting a costly updated first-floor facade of dark cherry and brass. Large pillars framed an alcoved entrance inset with a handsome cherry door flanked by stained-glass sidelights and crowned by a matching transom. The tall windows down the side were framed by matching columns of lesser size, and covered with elaborate wrought-iron latticework. A late-model sedan was parked out front in the street beside an expensive motorcycle.

Beyond it, I could see storefronts with second-floor residences. There were people in the streets; perfectly normal-looking shoppers and diners and pub-goers.

Just like that, I was in a decent part of the city again! Thank God, I thought. Though later I wouldn’t be quite so certain about just who had saved me from danger that day, or if I’d been saved at all. We have a phrase back home in Georgia: Out of the frying pan and into the fire. The soles of my shoes should have been steaming.

Barrons Books and Baubles proclaimed the gaily-painted shingle that hung perpendicular to the building, suspended over the sidewalk by an elaborate brass pole bolted into the brick above the door. Alighted sign in the old-fashioned, green-tinted windows announced Open. It couldn’t have looked more like the perfect place to call a taxi to me if it had sported a sign that said Welcome Lost Tourists/Call Your Taxis Here.

I was done for the day. No more asking directions, no more walking. I was damp and cold. I wanted hot soup and a hotter shower. And I wanted it more than I wanted to pinch precious pennies.

Bells jangled as I pushed open the door.

I stepped inside and stopped, blinking in astonishment. From the exterior I’d expected a charming little book and curio shop with the inner dimensions of a university Starbucks. What I got was a ****rnous interior that housed a display of books that made the library Disney’s Beast gave to Beauty on their wedding day look understocked.