“What in the . . . how . . . where did you come from?” I sputtered.

“The bookstore.”

Duh. Sometimes his answers make me want to strangle him. “Did V’lane know you were standing there?”

“I think the two of you were a little too busy to see me.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Making sure you didn’t need backup. If you’d told me you were taking your fairy little boyfriend, I wouldn’t have wasted my time. I resent it when you waste my time, Ms. Lane.”

He got in his car and drove away.

I followed him most of the way back to Dublin. Near the outskirts, he kicked his horses into a gallop I couldn’t match, and I lost him.

SIX

It was a quarter till four when I drove the Viper down the back alley behind the bookstore. The predawn hours between two and four are the hardest on me. For the past few weeks, I’ve been waking up every night at 2:17 A.M. on the dot, as if it’s my official preprogrammed time slot to have an anxiety attack, and the world will fall apart, even worse than it already is, if I don’t pace my bedroom and worry it safe.

The bookstore is unbearably quiet then, and it’s not hard to imagine that I’m the only person alive in the world. Most of the time I can handle the mess I call my life, but in the butt-crack of the night even I get a little depressed. I usually end up sorting through my wardrobe, meager as it is, or paging through fashion magazines, trying not to think. Putting outfits together soothes me. Accessorizing is balm to my soul. If I can’t save the world, I sure can make it pretty.

But last night, haute couture from four different countries couldn’t distract me, and I’d ended up snuggled under a blanket on the window seat with a dry volume about the history of the Irish race, including several lengthy, pedantic essays about the five invasions and the mythic Tuatha Dé Danaan, cracked open on my lap, staring out the back window of my bedroom at the sea of rooftops, watching the Shades slink and slither out of the corner of my eye.

Then my vision had played a trick on me, and blacked out the horizon as far as I could see, extinguishing every light, blanketing Dublin in absolute darkness.

I’d blinked, trying to dispel the illusion, and finally was able to see lights again, but the illusory blackout had seemed so real that I was afraid it was a premonition of things to come.

I pulled the Viper into the garage and parked in its allotted space, too tired to even halfheartedly appreciate the GT parked next to it. When the floor trembled beneath my heel, I stomped my foot and told it to shut up.

I opened the door to step out into the alley, flinched, slammed the door shut again, and stood there on the cusp of hyperventilating.

The garage where Barrons houses his fabulous car collection is located directly behind the bookstore, across an alley approximately twenty-five feet wide. Multiple floodlights on the exteriors illuminate a path between the two, affording safe passage from the Shades on even the darkest night. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet devised a means of perpetual light. Bulbs burn out, batteries die.

Several of the lights on the façade of the garage had outlived their usefulness during the night: not enough that I’d noticed in the glare of the Viper’s headlights and the soft spill coming from the bookstore’s rear windows, but enough to have created a sliver of opportunity for a truly enterprising Shade, and unfortunately, I had one of those shadowing my doorstep.

I was tired, and I’d been sloppy. I should have looked up and checked the spotlights on the buildings the moment they’d come into view. Thanks to the burnt-out bulbs, a thin line of darkness now ran down the center of the alley, where the light cast by the adjacent buildings failed to meet, and the massive Shade that was as obsessed with me as I was with it had managed to pour itself into the crack, creating an inky black wall that soared three stories high and extended the entire length of the bookstore, barring me from crossing the alley.

I’d opened the door to find it towering over me, a greedy, dark tsunami, waiting to come crashing down and drown me in its lethal embrace. Although I was 99.9% sure it couldn’t do that—that it was trapped in its menacing wall-shape by the light on both sides of it—there was that petrifying .1% doubt in my mind. Each time I’d thought I’d known its limits, I’d been wrong. Most Shades recoiled from the mere possibility of the palest, most diffuse light. Just waving one of my flashlights in the direction of the Dark Zone usually caused them to scatter.

But not this one. If light was pain, this enormous, aggressive Shade was getting tougher, its pain threshold increasing. Like me, it was evolving. I only wished I was as dangerous.