What idiot, I brooded, as I dragged myself up onto the sidewalk, had decided to give me special powers? What fool thought I could do something about problems of such enormity? How could I not hunt evil when I was one of the few people who could see it?

Tourists were flooding back into the street. Pub doors opened. Darkness peeled back. Music began playing, and the world started up again. Laughter bounced off brick. I wondered what world they were living in. It sure wasn’t mine.

Oblivious to them all, I threw up until I dry-heaved. Then I dry-heaved until not even bile remained.

I pushed to my feet, dragged the back of my hand across my mouth, and stared at my reflection in a pub window. I was stained, I was soaked, and I smelled. My hair was a soppy mess of beer and . . . oh! I couldn’t bear to think about what else. You never know what you’ll find in a gutter in Dublin’s party district. I plucked the clip from my hair, scraped it back, and secured it at my nape where it couldn’t touch much of my face.

My dress was torn, I was missing two buttons down the front of it, I’d broken the heel off my right shoe, and my knees were scraped and bleeding.

“There’s a lass that gives a whole new meaning to falling-down drunk, eh?” A man sniggered as he passed by. His buddies laughed. There were a dozen of them, wearing red cummerbunds and bow ties over jeans and sweaters. A bachelor party, off to celebrate the joy of testosterone. They gave me wide berth.

They were so clueless.

Was it really only twenty minutes ago I’d been smiling at passersby? Walking through Temple Bar, feeling alive and attractive, and ready for whatever the world might decide to throw at me next? Twenty minutes ago, they’d have circled around me, flirted me up.

I took a few lopsided steps, trying to walk as if I weren’t missing three and a half inches of spike beneath my right heel. It wasn’t easy. I ached everywhere. Although the pain of the Book’s proximity continued to recede, I felt bruised from head to toe, from being held in the crushing vise of it. If tonight turned out anything like the last time I’d encountered it, my head would pound for hours and ache dully for days. My visit to Christian MacKeltar, the young Scot who’d known my sister, was going to have to wait. I looked around for my missing heel. It was nowhere to be seen. I’d loved those shoes, darn it! I’d saved for months to buy them.

I sighed inwardly and told myself to get over it. At the moment, I had bigger problems on my mind.

I hadn’t passed out.

I’d been within fifty yards of the Sinsar Dubh, and I’d stayed conscious the entire time.

Barrons was going to be so pleased. Delighted, even, although delight is a difficult expression to read on that dark, arresting face. Chiseled from savagery by a sculptor-savant, Barrons is a throwback to a lawless time, and looks as stoically primitive as he behaves.

It appeared recent events had “diluted” me, and I was now more like the Book.

Evil.

On my way back to the bookstore, it began to rain. I limped miserably through it. I hate the rain. For many reasons.

One, it’s wet, cold, and nasty, and I was already wet and cold enough. Two, the sun doesn’t shine when it’s raining and I’m an unapologetic sun-worshipper. Three, it makes Dublin at night even darker than usual, and that means the monsters get bolder. Four, it makes me need an umbrella and when people carry umbrellas they have a tendency to pull them down really low and hunch behind them, especially if the rain is being blown into their faces. I’m no different. And that means you can’t see what’s coming toward you, which in a busy street usually results in people careening off one another with muttered apologies, or bit-off curses, and in Dublin means I could run smack into a Fae (their glamour doesn’t physically repel me like it does normal people) and betray myself, all of which adds up to: When it rains here, I don’t dare carry an umbrella.

Which wouldn’t be so bad except it rains here all the freaking time.

Which means I get completely soaked and that leads me to the fifth thing I hate about rain: my makeup runs and my hair becomes a mop of cowlicks.

But every cloud really does have some kind of silver lining and, after a good, hard drenching, at least I no longer smelled quite so bad.

I turned down my street. It’s not really my street. My street is four thousand miles away in the rural Deep South. It’s a sunny, lushly overgrown street, framed by waxy-leaved magnolias, brilliant azaleas, and towering oaks. My street doesn’t rain all the time.

But I can’t go home now, for fear of leading monsters back to Ashford with me, and since I need someplace to call my own, this rainy, gloomy, dreary street will have to do.