sleazy. That was freedom.
I smiled grimly. “Jada” hadn’t needed to raise a finger against me. All she’d had to do was rat out my Sinsar Dubh–compromised state, my invisibility, and location to WeCare to place me squarely in the crosshairs of every vigilante, Fae, and nut job in Dublin. Thanks to Dani’s past papers, in which she’d kept the city informed of every detail of the threats she deemed important, including the Sinsar Dubh, the world was fully aware of the astronomical power it contained. Some would hunt me to kill me, others with the futile hope of controlling the iconic, deadly Book. Rather than telling WeCare I was the Book, she’d made them think I had a copy, which made hunting me all the more desirable for those who wanted to possess its power.
I wasn’t psychotic and she knew it. I was holding my own pretty damned well. I’d only killed a single person. By accident. And I regretted the hell out of it. Would give a great deal to be able to undo it.
I was fuming again, all that lovely hostility I’d managed to vent on Barrons’s body flooding right back into my veins like someone had turned on the mother lode of spigots inside me.
This was bullshit. I’d been betrayed to the entire city and I was visible. There would be no more sneaking through the streets to get where I wanted to go. No more evading the searching ghouls in tonight’s sky. It struck me as incalculably odd they’d been hunting for me on the precise night I’d become visible again. Could they sense me so easily?
Not that I wanted to be invisible again, I appended mentally, hastily. If the Sinsar Dubh was listening, and I was sure it was, I was not making wishes. No wishes. Not a single one. “You hear that?” I muttered. “This is me, Mac. Not wishing.”
There was no answer but apparently we were on the outs, the Book and I. Or it was merely intensely occupied doing something nefarious, underhanded, and evil that was requiring all its attention, the results of which would soon bite me in the ass with vicious little teeth. I may as well enjoy the silence and lack of teeth in my ass. Occupy my time with something much nicer in it.
I glanced hungrily at Barrons. Sex on an Unseelie-flesh high was every bit as phenomenal as I’d thought it would be. Eating Fae makes a normal human existence seem a shadow of what life really should be. It enhances all your senses, taste, touch, sound, smell. Sex had been even more mind-blowing than usual with Barrons, each nerve exquisitely sensitive. My orgasms had gone on and on, one barely sputtering out before the next had set me on fire. Oh, yeah, eating Unseelie twice in eight days was probably a really bad idea.
I resolved to think about that in a few days when my high wore off.
Barrons’s eyes opened slowly, heavy-lidded. Lust in those ancient eyes always sparks mine, goads my inner savage. I trailed my fingers up his body, from his stomach to his jaw, savoring each ripple, each hollow. I get off on touching this barbarian, seeing him gentled before he retreats into his hard, controlled, distant shell.
He cupped my chin and brushed his thumb across my lower lip. “Jayne shot at you,” he said, executioner-soft, and I knew he could smell the inspector in the ruined store and that Jayne would be a dead man before dawn.
“Jayne stopped the men who were shooting at me,” I corrected. “A Guardian named Brody instigated it. Red hair. Probably around thirty-five, a little over six foot.” I gave him ample description to find him, should he choose to. He would choose to. “The others were following his lead. He’s the only one I consider a liability among them. He wanted to burn my store,” I said. “The rest will obey Jayne once Brody is gone.”
He smiled faintly at how calmly I spoke of a human’s pending demise. “Good to see you back.” In more ways than one, his eyes added.
I handed him the Dublin Daily. “ ‘Jada’ outed me.”
He scanned it then rose and stalked naked to the shattered counter upon which my lovely antique register used to sit, silver bell tinkling as I rang up orders. Whatever he was looking for wasn’t where he’d left it. He rummaged beneath wreckage then returned with another piece of stained, crumpled paper.
I smoothed it out.
The Dublin Daily
August 3