He brushed a thumb over her cheek. “No color, yes.”
Deducing he meant she looked pale, Rose huffed inwardly. Yeah. No surprise there.
She glanced down the corridor again, wondering if she’d imagined the whole night, from her reaction at the bar to Mr. Armani Viking, to the strange siblings who’d pretty much told her she was going to die. But not tonight, so yay me!
“I feel like I’m in a very strange dream.”
“What?”
She sighed heavily and strode by him to put her phone in her locker. “Nothing. I better get back to work.”
She wouldn’t say it, but she was glad Ivan walked her out into the club. Her disquiet was strong. Rose searched the vaulted room as she made her way back to the bar, looking for the siblings, for the man.
Was it all just an elaborate joke?
“Of course, it was,” Rose griped to herself.
But joke or not, Niamh had gotten to her. She’d freaked her out, and Rose didn’t want to be alone.
When the club closed in the early hours, Rose broke her own rule and let Ivan walk her home.
2
Frustration seethed through Fionn as he let himself into his suite. The sitting room off the bedroom felt too small for his current mood. He needed somewhere to pace, to vent his irritation.
Shrugging out of his coat, Fionn had flashes of his previous visits to this hotel in Zagreb. He’d stayed several times in the past, always under a different name. His first visit was in 1926. The hotel was only a year old and the first stop for travelers on the Orient Express. He’d been there as an investor in a new radio station. The wealth he’d amassed over the last two centuries was convoluted. To stay out of the pages of history, he’d used false names, and traveled all over the world to make his investments in industries that were booming at the time.
His last visit to Zagreb had been twenty years ago, and he’d stayed in the presidential suite, a sprawling apartment that included a kitchen and staff quarters. Room to pace. To vent.
However, that visit hadn’t required secrecy, and the presidential suite was too visible. Hotel staff more than paid attention to the occupant and Fionn didn’t need that kind of scrutiny.
Speaking of which …
Pulling his mobile out of his pocket, he swiped across the edge and hit the single icon with the letter b on it.
Brannigan picked up after two rings. “Fionn.”
“Update?”
Bran chuckled. “And a good evening to you too,” he teased in a thick Dublin accent time had never diluted.
“Update,” Fionn repeated, in no mood for the boy’s perpetually high fucking spirits.
“Right, right. There’s no sign of the Blackwoods. If they’ve followed you to Zagreb, they’re doing a good bloody job of covering their arses.” Bran paused. “So … was it the girl?”
For nearly three centuries, Fionn had waited for a prophecy to come true. Technically, he’d waited for over two thousand years, but he’d been asleep for most of that. Thank fuck.
As it was, it was hell to wait for the children of Aine’s prophecy to be born.
Seven children born as fae in the human world, with the ability to reopen the gate to Faerie.
Seven children who had been hunted by several factions of the supernatural community, including Fionn himself. Fionn knew only of the existence of two of them. A young woman he called the psychic, and another called Thea Quinn, who was no longer fae, and as such, no longer of use to him.
But the girl, the psychic, she was the key to the ones who were left.
Using fae magic sent up a flare to anyone who knew what to look for and brought Fionn down on her every time. However, as soon as he got within the same city limits as her, she disappeared off his radar. Her signature had become familiar to him now, and he and Bran had studied the events surrounding her appearances.
The girl had been recorded in the same city as three of the seven fae children. Two of those three had been killed by his old acquaintance, Eirik, along with a third that the girl had no connections with as far as Fionn was aware. A woman the girl had met with was Thea Quinn. Fionn had no idea how they had connected, but he knew that days after their meeting in Prague, Thea Quinn had killed Eirik, the oldest vampire in the world.