I could probably find someone hanging out at Chester’s who was in love with dying. Or too drunk to—

Was I losing my humanity? Or had I always been a little short to begin with?

I clutched my head and groaned.

Suddenly every muscle in my body tensed as if standing up in greeting, even though I didn’t move. “Barrons.” I dropped my hands and raised my head.

“Ms. Lane.” He took a chair across from me with such eerie grace that I wondered how I’d ever believed he was human. He poured himself into the brocade wing chair, like water over stone, before settling into sleek muscle. He moved as if he knew where everything in the room was, in precise measurements. He didn’t walk, stalk, or prowl; he glided with flawless awareness of all other atoms in relation to his. It made it easy for him to conceal himself behind inanimate objects and to assume a similar … structure or something.

“Have you always moved like that in front of me and I just never noticed? Was I oblivious?”

“No and yes. You were oblivious. Head up that tight pink ass. But I never moved this way in front of you.” His look dripped sexual innuendo. “I might have moved this way a time or two behind you.”

“Not hiding anything from me anymore?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“What does someone like you conceal?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” His glittering eyes raked me with a hard once-over.

It had been nearly a week since we’d killed Fiona in the Silvers, and my wardrobe was giving me more fits than ever. I was wearing distressed black leather pants with a tattooed gray grunge element and my favorite baby-doll pink tee that said I’m a JUICY girl across the front and had chiffon cap sleeves. I’d tied a Goth scarf around my blond curls and had on a pair of Alina’s dangling heart earrings. My fingernails had grown out and I’d done a French manicure on my hands, and but I’d painted my toenails black. The dichotomy didn’t end there. I had on a black lace thong and a pink-and-white-striped cotton bra. I was having issues.

“Identity crisis, Ms. Lane?”

There was a time when I’d have fired back a pithy retort. But I was drunk on the moment: sitting in my bookstore, sipping hot cocoa, staring across a coffee table at Barrons by candle and firelight, with my journal and iPod handy and the assurance that my parents were well and my world was mostly fine except for my own little personality crisis. Friends and loved ones were safe. I breathed. So did the people that mattered to me. Life was good.

Not long ago, I’d thought I would never step foot in this place again. Never see the faint, sexy lift of his lips that told me he was amused but still waiting to be really wowed. Never bicker and banter and argue and plan. Never bask in the knowledge that, so long as the previous owner of this establishment was alive, this place would stand bastion in far more than mere latitude and longitude, keeping Dark Zones, fairies, and monsters at bay. It was the place of last defense in my heart.

Although I hated him for letting me grieve, I couldn’t be more grateful that he was unkillable, because it meant I would never have to grieve him again.

I could never be broken about Barrons. Nothing could hurt me where he was concerned, because he was as certain as the nightfall, he would recur as eternally as the dawn. I still had questions about what he was and concerns about his motives, but they could wait. Time might sort things out in ways pushing and prying never could. “I don’t have any idea what to wear anymore, so I tried to cover all bases.”

“Try skin.”

“Little chilly for that.”

We looked at each other across the coffee table.

His eyes didn’t say, I’d heat you up, and mine didn’t say What are you waiting for? His didn’t reply, Fuck if I’m making the first move, so I was careful not to say, I wish you would, because I can’t, because I’m … and he didn’t snap … choking on your pride?!

“As if you aren’t.”

“Excuse me?”

“Really, Barrons,” I said drily. “I’m not the only one who didn’t just not have that conversation, and you know it.”

There was the faint, sexy lift of his lip. “You’re a piece of work, Ms. Lane.”

“Right back at you.”

He changed the subject. “The Keltar moved their wives and children into Chester’s.”

“When?”

Our sojourn in the White Mansion had cost us nearly five weeks, Dublin time. We’d stopped in the libraries on the way out and taken as many of the Unseelie King’s books as we’d been able to wrap up and carry out along with Fiona’s body. I’d not only missed Dani’s birthday, I’d missed my own, on May 1. Time sure did fly.