"You bastard," I whispered. Before he'd dragged me from one bizarre "player's" house to the next, before he'd gotten me to rip off both a vampire and a mobster, I'd still had a chance. It might have been a slim one, but it had been a chance. Now it was a whole different ball game and I was playing in the dark and somehow, everyone but me had night-vision goggles and understood the rules of play. And I suspected this had been part of Barrons' plan all along: to shave down my options, to whittle away my choices until he'd left me only one—to need him to survive.

I was furious with him, with myself. I'd been such a fool. And I couldn't see any way out. Still, I wasn't entirely helpless. I needed him? I could swallow that if I had to, because he needed me, too, and I was never going to let him forget it. "Fine, Barrons," I said, "but I'm keeping this. And that's non-negotiable." I raised the spear I was gripping. Maybe I couldn't fight off vampires and mobsters, but at least I could give the Fae a decent battle.

He looked at the spear for several moments, his dark gaze unfathomable. Then he said, "It was for you all along, Ms. Lane. I suggest you remove the shaft and make it portable. It's not the original and only the head itself matters."

I blinked. It was for me? Not only did the relic have to be worth an absolute fortune on the black market, but Barrons was also a sidhe-seer and could use it to protect himself, too, yet he was going to let me hang on to it? "Really?"

He nodded. "Obey me, Ms. Lane," he said, "and I will keep you alive."

"I wouldn't need to be kept alive in the first place," I snapped, "if you hadn't dragged me into this mess."

"You came looking for this mess, Ms. Lane. You sauntered in here all innocence and stupidity asking for the Sinsar Dubh, remember? I told you to go home."

"Yeah, well, that was before you knew I could find things for you. Now you'd probably tie me up and drug me to keep me here," I accused.

"Probably," he agreed. "Though I suspect I'd have no problem at all finding more effective means."

I looked at him sharply. He wasn't joking. And I never wanted to know what those "more effective means" might be.

"But considering everything that's after you, I don't need to, do I, Ms. Lane? Which puts us right back where we started: Go to your room and do not come out again for any reason until I come for you. Do you understand me?"

Mom says humility isn't one of my strengths, and she's right. To reply would have reeked of capitulation, or at the least, acquiescence, and although he might have won this particular battle, I sure didn't have to admit it, so I stared down at the spear in stony silence. The spearhead shimmered like silvery alabaster in the brightly lit anteroom. If I broke it off to a short shaft, it would be only about a foot long. The tip was razor-sharp, the base about four inches wide. It would no doubt fit nicely in my largest purse, if I could figure out a way to keep the lethal point from puncturing the side.

When I looked back up, I was alone.

Barrons was gone.

CHAPTER 17

My folks have some funny sayings. They were born in a different time, to a different generation. Theirs was the "hard work is its own reward" generation. Admittedly it had its problems, but mine is the "entitlement generation" and it has its fair share, too.

The EG is made up of kids who believe they deserve the best of everything by mere virtue of having been born, and if parents don't arm them with every possible advantage, they are condemning their own children to a life of ostracism and failure. Raised by computer games, satellite TV, the Internet, and the latest greatest electronic device—while their parents are off slaving away to afford them all—most of the EG believe if there's something wrong with them, it's not their fault; their parents screwed them up, probably by being away too much. It's a vicious little catch-22 for the parents any way you look at it.

My parents didn't screw me up. Any screwing up that might have been done, I did to myself. All of which is my roundabout way of saying that I'm beginning to understand what Dad always meant when he said, "Don't tell me you didn't mean to do it, Mac. Omission or commission—the end result is the same."

I understand now. It's the difference between involuntary manslaughter and homicide: the dead person is still dead, and I highly doubt the corpse appreciates any legal distinctions we make over it.

By omission or commission, one orange, two candy bars, a bag of pretzels, and twenty-six hours later, I had blood on my hands.

I'd never been so happy to see the first rays of dawn in my life as I was that next morning. I'd ended up doing exactly what I'd sworn I wouldn't do: I'd cowered in my brilliantly lit, borrowed bedroom from one daybreak to the next, trying to make my meager snacks last, and wondering what plan Barrons could possibly have devised that might guarantee our safety from Rocky O'Bannion, quite pessimistically certain there was none. Even if he managed to scare off a few of O'Bannion's men, there would only be more. I mean, really, how could one man hope to stand up to a ruthless mobster and his loyal pack of ex-fighters and thugs who'd once taken out twenty-seven people in a single night?

When the first rays of a rosy sunrise pressed at the edges of the drapes, I hurried to the window and pulled back the curtain. I'd lived through yet another Dublin night and that, in and of itself, was swift becoming cause for celebration in my badly warped little world. I stared dumbly down into the alley for a long moment, as the sight that greeted me slowly sunk in.

Or didn't, I guess, because before I knew it, I'd raced from my fourth-floor retreat and was pounding bare-heeled down the back stairs for a closer look. I burst out into the early, chilly Irish morning. The concrete steps were damp with cold dew beneath my bare feet as I hurried down them, into the rear alley.

A dozen or so feet away, in the early morning light, a black Maybach gleamed, with all four of its doors ajar. It was making that annoying bing-bing sound that told me the keys were still in the ignition and the battery hadn't yet run down. Behind it, hood to trunk, stretching down into the beginnings of the abandoned neighborhood, were three more black vehicles, all with their doors wide open, emitting a chorus of bings. Outside each car were piles of clothing, not far from the doors. I had a sudden flashback to the day I'd gotten lost in the abandoned neighborhood, to the derelict car with the pile of clothing outside the driver's door. Comprehension slammed into my brain and I flinched from the horror of it.

Any fool could see what had happened here.

Well, at least any sidhe-seer fool who knew what kind of things that went bump in the night around these parts could.

The cop who'd seen us yesterday morning had apparently reported to O'Bannion, and at some unknown hour after dark, the mobster had come looking for us with a full complement of his men, and as evidenced by their stealthy backdoor approach, they'd not been coming to pay us a social call.

The simplicity of Barrens' plan both astounded and chilled me: He'd merely turned off the outside lights, front and rear, allowing darkness to swallow the entire perimeter of the building. O'Bannion and his men had stepped out of their cars, directly into an Unseelie massacre.

Barrons had known they would come. I was even willing to bet he'd known they would come in force. He'd also known they would never make it farther than the direct vicinity of their own cars. Of course, I'd been safe in the store. With the interior lights ablaze and the exterior lights extinguished, neither man nor monster could have reached me last night.