Карен Монинг - Burned

“There are things Dani doesn’t know about herself,” he says finally. “It’s a delicate situation.”

I frown, not liking the sound of that. “What kind of things? What are you saying?”

“I answered your question. Answer mine.”

I want to find Dani. Now doubly so. Is there something I don’t know about the night Alina died? Something that might change everything? I should have enlisted his help from the beginning. The man has his ways. I sigh. “The night I chased her through a portal into Faery.”

He grits, “Talk. Now.”

By the time we get to Chester’s, we’re not speaking. Hostility is a wall between us. He blames me for chasing her through. He says if she dies, it’s on my head. Like I don’t know that. He insists I go looking for her. I tell him Barrons vetoed that for good reason.

He gets on his cell phone, which shouldn’t work, and barks orders to his men. Says they’re better off in Faery right now than at the club and orders them to start searching for Dani.

Then he’s talking to Barrons and arranging for him to meet us at Chester’s. I don’t like that one bit. I have no doubt he’s putting Barrons in the presence of at least one, perhaps multiple Unseelie Princesses, to encourage me to deal with the situation swiftly. It’s one of his demands with which I intend to fully comply. I’m too starved for Barrons myself to tolerate the idea of another female touching him.

I stalk into Chester’s, hand on my spear, a wave of grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous Unseelie trailing me like a morbid bridal train.

At the top of the chrome and glass stair, the woman pauses and looks down. The air inside Chester’s just altered, charged by the presence of powerful newcomers.

She is highly attuned to subtle nuances from years of training and meditation. She has battled blind and deaf. And won.

These auras are far from subtle.

Three have entered from two different locations. She scans the dance floors, picking them out: there is the one called Ryodan, polished, bestial owner of this club; a second of the Nine known as Barrons, that keeps largely to the shadows¸ collector of antiquities and the most versed of them all in dark magic; and a young, blond woman that leads a small army of Unseelie as black as the shadowy nimbus that surrounds her.

All exude enormous power.

She glances at her bait, nude, perfect, and prime for the hook, then below.

There are possibilities. There are choices.

There is never emotion involved.

Two of the three who’ve entered are on her list but each will be a difficult kill, taxing her many skills, and to attempt it with both present would be suicide.

She plays to win at her choice of time, place, and method.

As they move through the subclubs, approaching her, one from the east, two from the west, she aborts her mission, slips down the stairs and exits Chester’s.

She will reconvene with the others, dispatch tasks for the night, move to the next name on her list.

Once, 939 Rêvemal Street was an elegant aboveground nightclub frequented by Dublin’s young, bored, and beautiful. It’s now a fetish-filled underground orgiastic ball from a Daliesque painting.

The first time I came here was with Dani. It’s gotten a lot worse since then. Or better, depending on who you are and what you want.

For the See-you-in-Faery girls, who call the Fae the new vamps, and will do virtually anything for the high of eating Unseelie flesh, the place is paradise. More Fae stake out their bizarre corner of the sex trade here every night.

As I push into the mass of people, laughing, drinking, eating things I try really hard not to look at, I toss coolly over my shoulder, “How do you justify the number of people who get enslaved and killed here every night in order to grow your damned empire?”

“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.