“I don’t suppose you’d call him that the next time you see him, and let me watch his reaction?”

“Don’t think that would work, Barrons,” I said sweetly. “Nobody ever sticks around when you show up. Darndest thing. Almost as if everyone’s afraid of you.”

My saccharine humor exorcised the ghost of his smile. “Did you have a specific car in mind, Ms. Lane?”

I wanted blue-collar muscle tonight. “The Viper.”

“Why should I let you take it?”

“Because you owe me.”

“Why do I owe you?”

“Because I put up with you.”

He smiled then, really smiled. I snorted and looked away. “The keys are in it, Ms. Lane. The keys to the garage are in the top drawer of my desk, right-hand side.”

I glanced at him sharply. Was this a concession? Telling me where he kept his keys? The offer of a deeper, more trusting association?

“Of course you know that already,” he continued dryly. “You saw them there the last time you snooped through my study. I was surprised you didn’t try using them then, rather than breaking my window. You might have saved me some aggravation.”

Barrons deserves to be aggravated. He’s the most aggravating . . . whatever he is . . . I’ve ever met. The night I’d broken a window to get into his garage, it hadn’t occurred to me to try those keys because I’d been so certain he was keeping some huge dark secret locked up in there, that he’d surely never let the keys just lie around. (He is keeping some huge dark secret in there, I just haven’t figured out how to get to it yet.) He’d caught my nocturnal B&E on the video cameras hidden in the garage, and left the incriminating evidence outside my bedroom door. “Let me guess, you have video cameras hidden in the store, too?”

“No, Ms. Lane, but I can smell you. I know when you’ve been in one of my rooms, and I know your nature. You snoop.”

I didn’t try to deny it. Of course I snooped. How else was I supposed to find anything out? “You can’t smell where I’ve been,” I scoffed.

“I smell blood tonight, Ms. Lane, and it’s not yours. Why is your face bruised? What happened today? Who bled in my bookstore?”

“Where’s the abbey?” I countered, fingering the lump on my cheek. I’d iced it, but not soon enough. It was hard and painful to the touch. I’d taken most of the blows to my body. My ribs were a mess, it hurt to breathe deep, and my right thigh was one massive contusion. My shins had huge goose-eggs on them. I’d been afraid several of my fingers were broken, but aside from being a little swollen, they seemed okay now.

“Why? Is that where you plan to go tonight? Do you think that’s wise? What if they attack you?”

“Been there, done that. How did you find me last night? Were you looking for me?” The question had been vexing me. Why had he shown up when I was with V’lane? It seemed too coincidental to have been coincidence.

“I was on my way to Chester’s.” He shrugged. “Coincidence. The bruise?”

Chester’s. Where Inspector O’Duffy had spoken to a man named Ryodan who, according to Barrons, talked too much about things he shouldn’t be talking about—Barrons himself. I made a mental note to find Chester’s, track down the mysterious Ryodan, and see what I could learn. “I got in a fight with some other sidhe-seers. Evade if you want, Barrons, but don’t treat me like an idiot.”

“I knew you were nearby last night. I detoured to make certain you were safe. How did the fight go? Are you . . . unharmed?”

“Mostly. Don’t worry, I’m intact in all the ways you need me to be. Never fear, your OOP detector is here.” My hand went to the base of my skull. “Is it the brand? Can you find me so easily by it?”

“I sense you when you’re near.”

“That sucks,” I said bitterly.

“I can remove it if you wish,” he said. “It would be . . . painful.” His brilliant gaze met mine and we stared at each other a long moment. In those obsidian depths I saw the darkness of Mallucé’s grotto, tasted my own death again.

Through the annals of history, women have paid a price for protection. One day, I won’t have to. “I’ll deal with it. Where’s the abbey, Barrons?”

He wrote “Arlington Abbey” and an address on a scrap of paper for me, got me a map off the bookshelf, and marked it with an X. It was several hours from Dublin.

“Would you like me to accompany you?”

I shook my head.

He studied me a long moment. “Then good night, Ms. Lane.”

“What about OOP detecting?” We hadn’t done any in days.

“I’m busy with other things now. But soon.”

“What are you busy with?” It was innocuous as questions go. Sometimes he answers those.

“Among other things, I’m tracking down the bidders on the spear,” he said, reminding me that he’d gotten several names from Mallucé’s laptop in the grotto; contenders in an auction for the immortal weapon. I imagined he was trying to find out what they had in their possession that we wanted, and we’d be robbing them as soon as he had the lay of the land, and a plan in place. OOP detecting loomed on the horizon. I was startled to realize I was rather looking forward to it.

Barrons inclined his dark head and left. I stared at the door after he’d gone. There were times that I wished I could go back to my earliest days with him, when I’d thought he was just an overbearing man, as in human. But he wasn’t, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past few months, in some of the most painful ways, it’s that there’s no going back, ever. What’s done is done, the dead stay dead (well, mostly; Mallucé had a few problems with that), and all the regrets in the world can’t change a thing. If only they could, Alina would be alive and I wouldn’t even be here.

I picked up the phone and dialed the number I’d looked up earlier. I wasn’t at all surprised that someone answered at such a late hour, at Post Haste, Inc., the Dublin courier service that housed Rowena’s bicycling sidhe-seers who kept tabs on what was happening in and around the city under guise of delivering letters and packages.

Their motherhouse, the abbey, was far from the city, and I was informed stiffly that the abbey was where Rowena was now.