"I was in the museum," she said. "I saw what you did! Sweet Jesus, Mary Mother of God and all the saints, who are you, lass?"

I was so disgusted with people in general that I shrieked, "You saw what that thing was trying to do to me and didn't try to help me? If it had raped me, would you have just stood there and watched? Thanks a lot! Appreciate it. Gee, it's getting to the point where I'm not sure who the bigger monsters are—us or them." I spun sharply and tried to walk away but she latched onto my arm with a surprisingly strong grip.

"I couldn't help you and you know it," she snapped. "You know the rules."

I shook her hand off my arm. "Actually, I don't. Everyone else seems to. Just not me."

"One betrayed is one dead," said the old woman sharply. "Two betrayed is two dead. We count precious each of our kind, never more so than now. We cannot take risks that might betray more of us, especially not me. Besides, you held your own in a way I've never seen—and against a prince, no less! Sweet Jesus, how did you do it? What are you?" Her sharp blue gaze darted rapidly from my left eye to my right and back again. "At first your hair fooled me, then I knew it was you, from the bar. That skin, those eyes, and the way you walk—och, just like Patrona! But you can't be Patrona's, or I'd have known. From what O'Connor line do you come? Who is your mother?" she demanded.

I tossed my head impatiently. "Look, old lady, I told you that night in the bar that I'm not an O'Connor. My name is Lane. MacKayla Lane, from Georgia. My mom is Rainey Lane and before she married my dad, she was Rainey Frye. So there you have it. Sorry to disappoint you, but there's not a single O'Connor anywhere in my family tree."

"Then you were adopted," the old woman said flatly.

I gasped. "I was not adopted!"

"Ballocks!" the old woman snapped. "Though I've no notion the hows and whys of it, you're an O'Connor through and through."

"The nerve!" I exclaimed. "How dare you come up to me and tell me I don't know who I am? I'm MacKayla Lane and I was born in Christ Hospital just like my sister and my dad was right there in the room with my mom when I was born and I am not adopted and you don't know the first thing about me or my family!"

"Obviously," the old woman retorted, "you don't, either."

I opened my mouth, thought better of it, shut it, and turned and walked away. I would only be giving credence to the old woman's delusions by rebutting them. I wasn't adopted and I knew that for a fact, as certainly as I knew she was one crazy old woman.

"Where are you going?" she demanded. "There are things I must know. Who you are, if we can trust you and how, by all that's holy, did you get your hands on one of their Hallows? That night in the bar I thought you Pri-ya" — she spat the word like the foulest of epithets—"from the moonstruck way you were staring at it. Now I've no idea what you are. You must come with me now. Stop right there, O'Connor." She used a tone of voice that, not so long ago, would have stopped me dead in my tracks and turned me around, out of respect for my elders if nothing else, but I wasn't that girl anymore. In fact, I was no longer even certain who that girl had really been, as if Mac BTC—Before The Call that day by the pool—hadn't quite been real, just an empty, pretty amalgam of fashionable clothes, happy music, and coltish dreams.

"Stop calling me that," I hissed over my shoulder, "and stay away from me, old woman." I broke into a sprint but wasn't fast enough to outrun her next words, and I knew as soon as she said them that they were going to chafe like sharp pebbles in my shoes.

"Then ask her," rang out the old woman's challenge. "If you're so certain you're not adopted, MacKayla Lane, talk to your mother and ask her."

CHAPTER 19

"What's on the agenda tonight?" I asked Barrons the moment he stepped into the bookstore. I'd been pacing near the front windows with all the lights blazing, both interior and exterior, watching as night fell beyond the illuminated fortress.

I guess my tone was a little tight, because he raised a brow and looked at me hard. "Is something wrong, Ms. Lane?"

"No. Not at all. I'm fine. I just wanted to know what I have to look forward to tonight," I said. "Robbing somebody we get to let live, or somebody we have to kill." I sounded brittle even to myself, but I wanted to know just how much worse a person I was going to be by tomorrow morning. Every day I looked in the mirror it was getting harder to recognize the woman looking back at me.

Barrons paced a slow circle around me. "Are you sure you're all right, Ms. Lane? You seem a little tense."

I rotated at the center, turning with him. "I'm just ducky," I said.

His eyes narrowed. "Did you find anything at the museum?"

"No."

"Did you search every exhibit?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I didn't feel like it," I said.

"You didn't feel like it?" For a moment Barrens looked perfectly blank, as if the idea that someone might disobey one of his orders just because they didn't feel like it was even more inconceivable to him than the possibility of human life on Mars.

"I am not your workhorse," I told him. "I have a life, too. At least, I used to. I used to do perfectly normal things like date and go out to eat and see movies and hang out with friends and never once think about vampires or monsters or mobsters. So don't go getting all over my case because you think I haven't performed up to your exacting standards. I don't plan your days for you, do I? Even an OOP-detector needs a break every now and then." I gave him a disgusted look. "You're lucky I'm helping you at all, Barrens."

He closed in on me and didn't stop until I could feel the heat coming off his big, hard body. Until I had to tilt my head back to look up at him, and when I did, I was taken aback by his glittering midnight eyes, the velvety gold of his skin, the sexy curve of his mouth, with that full lower lip that hinted at voluptuous carnal appetites, and the upper one that smacked of self-control and perhaps a bit of cruelty, making me wonder what it would be like—

Whuh. I shook my head sharply, trying to clear it. From my two brief encounters with V'lane, I knew that merely being in the same general vicinity with a death-by-sex Fae caused an extreme hormonal spike in a woman that did not go away until it was released somehow. What V'lane had done to me today had left me so awfully, icily aroused that it had taken more orgasms than I'd thought possible and a long frigid shower to calm me. And now it seemed I hadn't done a good enough job, because I was still suffering residual effects. There was no other way to explain why I was standing there wondering what it would be like to kiss Jericho Barrons.

Fortunately, he chose that moment to open the mouth I'd been finding so disturbingly sexual and begin speaking. His words abruptly restored my perspective.

"You still think you can walk away from this, don't you, Ms. Lane?" he said coolly. "You think this is about finding a book, you think it's about figuring out who killed your sister—but the truth is, your world is going to Hell in a hand-basket and you're one of the few people that can do something about it. If the wrong person or thing gets its hands on the Sinsar Dubh, you won't be ruing the loss of your rainbow-hued, prettily manicured world, you'll be regretting the end of human life as you know it. How long do you think you'll last in a world where someone like Mallucé, or the Unseelie who's got his Rhino-boy watchdogs stationed all over the city, gets the Dark Book? How long do you think you'll want to? This isn't about fun and games, Ms. Lane. This isn't even about life and death. This is about things that are worse than death."