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 mut-tered 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 freak¬ing 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 mag¬nolias, 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.
As I approached the bookstore, I scanned the facade of the old-world, four-story building carefully. Exterior spotlights mounted on the front, rear, and sides bathed the tall brick building in light. The brightly painted shingle proclaiming BARRONS BOOKS AND BAUBLES that hung perpendicu¬lar to the building, suspended over the sidewalk on an elabo¬rate brass pole, creaked as it swung in the increasingly chilly night breeze. The sign in the old-fashioned green-tinted win¬dows glowed soft neon: CLOSED. Amber torches in brass sconces illuminated the deep limestone archway of the book¬store's grand, alcoved entrance. Ornate, diamond-paned cherry doors nestled between limestone columns gleamed in the light.

All was well with my "home." The lights were on, the building protected from my deadly neighbors. I stopped and stared for a moment down the street, into the abandoned neighborhood, making sure no Shades had made inroads into my territory.

The Dark Zone at the edge of Barrons Books and Baubles is the largest one I've seen so far (and the largest I hope to ever see!), encompassing more than twenty city blocks, crammed to overflowing with lethal dark shadows. Two things character¬ize a Dark Zone: darkness and death. Creatures of night, the Shades devour everything that lives, from people, to grass, to leaves, even down to the worms in the soil, leaving behind a wasteland.

Even now, they were moving restlessly, writhing like flies stuck on tape, desperate to exchange their lifeless shadows for the fertile, well-lit neighborhoods beyond.

For the moment I was safe. The Shades can't tolerate light, and near the bookstore, I was bathed in it. However, if I were to wander twenty feet down the street, into the gloom where the streetlamps were all out, I'd be dead.

I'm obsessed with my neighbors. They're vampires in the truest sense of the word. I've seen what they do to people. They consume them, leaving only piles of clothing, jewelry, and other inanimate objects, topped by a small, dry papery husk of whatever human matter they find unpalatable. Like leaving the tail of a shrimp, I guess; part of us is too crunchy for their taste. Not even I can kill them. They have no real sub-stance, which makes weapons useless. The only thing that works against them is light, and it doesn't kill them, it just holds them at bay Penned in on all sides by the lights of sur-rounding neighborhoods, this Dark Zone had remained roughly the same size for several months. I know; I scout its perimeter regularly.

If you're not a sidhe-seer, you can't even see them. The peo¬ple who die in a Dark Zone never know the face of their execu-tioner. Not that the Shades have faces. Featureless is their middle name. If you are a sidhe-seer, they're still difficult to separate from the night, even when you know what you're looking for. Darker than the darkness, like inky black fog, they slither and slide, creeping over buildings, oozing down drain-pipes, twining around broken streetlamps. Although I've never gotten close enough to test my hunch and hope I never do, I think they're cold.

They come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from as small as a cat to as large as—

I blinked.

Surely that wasn't the one that had cornered me in the back parlor the night Fiona, the woman who used to run the book-store, had tried to kill me, by letting a horde of them inside while I slept! The last time I'd seen it, roughly five weeks ago, counting the month I'd lost in Faery, it had been about twenty feet long and nine feet high. It was now twice as large, a dense cloud of oily darkness stretching nearly the entire length of the deserted building adjacent to Barrons.

Did they grow from eating us? Could one get as big as a small town? Maybe hunker down on top of it and swallow it whole?

I stared. For a thing that had no face, it certainly seemed to be staring back at me. I'd flipped this thing off a time or two. Last time I'd seen it, it had shaped itself into an almost human form and shot the insult right back at me.
I wasn't about to teach it any new tricks.

I gave myself a brisk shake, and immediately regretted it. My head hurt so badly my brain felt bruised, and I'd just jos¬tled it from side to side against the inner walls of my skull. Though the rain had finally stopped—or rather taken one of those all too brief Dublin hiatuses—I was wet and freezing, and had better things to do than stand out here brooding over one of my many enemies. Things like eating a half a bottle of aspirin, and standing under a scalding shower. Things like clearing my head so I could ponder the ramifica¬tions of what I'd seen tonight, and finding Barrons to tell him all about it. I had no doubt he would be as astonished as I was by the Book's method of locomotion. What dark agenda was it pursuing? Were random chaos and violence purpose enough?

As I stepped into the alcove and began digging in my purse for my keys, I heard footsteps behind me. I glanced over my shoulder and scowled.

Inspector Jayne joined me in the arched entry, dashing rain from his coat with a gloved hand. I'd passed him earlier in the street, on my way to see Christian, before my encounter with
the Sinsar Dubh. He'd given me a look that had promised ha-rassment, but I'd figured I'd had a day or two before he got around to making good on that promise.

No such luck.

Tall and burly, with brown hair neatly combed to a side part, his craggy face was set in harsh lines. Brother-in-law to the late Inspector Patty O'Duffy—the inspector who'd originally han¬dled my sister's murder case, and who'd had his throat cut while clutching a scrap of paper with my name on it—Jayne had recently hauled me down to the Garda station and held me all day on suspicion of murder. He'd interrogated and starved me, accused me of having had an affair with O'Duffy, then turned me out into the dark heart of Dublin, minus my Shade-repelling flashlights, to walk home by myself. I wasn't about to forgive his callous treatment.

I'm going to be tape to your ass, he'd told me.

He'd been proving true to his word, following me, staking me out, watching my every move.

Now, he looked me up and down and gave a snort of dis¬gust. "I'm not even going to ask."

"Are you here to arrest me?" I said coolly. I quit trying to pretend T had a heel and leaned lopsidedly against the door. My calves and feet hurt.

"Maybe."

"That was a yes or no question, Jayne. Try again." He didn't say anything and we both knew what that meant. "Then go away. The store is closed. That makes it private property right now. You're trespassing."

"Either we talk tonight, or I come back in the morning when you have customers. You want a homicide detective hanging around, interrogating your clientele?"

"You don't have any right to interrogate my clientele."

"I'm the Garda, lady. That gives me all the rights I need. I
can and will make your life miserable. Try me."

"What do you want?" I growled.

"It's cold and wet out here." He cupped his hands, blew on them. "How about a cup of tea?"

"How about you go screw yourself?" I flashed him a sac-charine smile.

"What, my overweight, middle-aged brother-in-law was good enough for you, but I'm not?"

"I did not have sex with your brother-in-law," I snapped,

"Then what the fuck was he doing with you?" he snapped hack.

"We've already been through this. I told you. If you want to interrogate me again, you're going to have to arrest me, and
this time I'm not saying a word without an attorney." I glanced over his shoulder. The Shades were moving restlessly, vigorously, as if stirred up by our discord. Our arguing seemed to be... exciting them. I wondered if anger or passion made us taste even better to them. T forced the macabre thought from my mind.

"Your answers were no answers at all, and you know it."

"You don't want the real answers." I didn't want the real
I answers. Unfortunately, I was stuck with them.

"Maybe, I do. However... difficult to believe... they might seem."

I gave him a sharp look. Though he wore his usual deter¬mined dog-with-a-bone expression, there was a subtle new component to it that I'd missed before. It was the same compo¬nent I'd glimpsed in O'Duffy's eyes the morning he'd come to see me, the morning he'd died, a wary, maybe - my-world-isn't-quite-what-I-thought-it-was look. A sure sign that, like O'Dulfv, Jayne was about to start poking into matters that were proba¬bly going to get him killed. Although O'Duffy's method of death seemed to imply a human murderer, I had no doubt he'd
been killed for what he'd been learning about the new kids in town—the Fae.

I sighed. I wanted out of my nasty, wet clothes. I wanted to wash my disgusting hair. "Let it go, will you? Just let it go. I didn't have anything to do with O'Duffy's murder, and I don't have anything else to tell you."

"Yes, you do. You know what's going on in this city, Ms. Lane. I don't know how or where you fit into things, but I know you do. That's why Patty came to see you. He didn't stop by that morning to tell you anything about your sister's case. He came to ask you something. What was it? What had been burning such a hole in his brain all night that he couldn't wait until Monday to talk to you, that he sent his family on to church and missed Mass? What did Patty ask you the morning he died?"

He was good. I'd give him that. But nothing more.

"Will I die, too, Ms. Lane, now that I've come to see you?" he said roughly. "Is that how it works? Should I have woken my children and kissed them good-bye before I left this morn¬ing? Told my wife how much I loved her?"

Stung, I said, "It's not my fault he died!"

"Maybe you didn't kill him, but maybe you didn't save him, either. Did you answer his questions? Is that why he died? Or if you had, would he still be alive?"

I glared at him. "Go away."

He reached inside his coat and withdrew a handful of folded maps from an inner pocket.

I glanced away sharply, hating everything about the mo¬ment. This was a deja vu I never wanted to revisit.

Patty O'Duffy had brought me maps, too. That Sunday morning he'd come to see me at the bookstore, he'd illustrated in cartographic detail a graphic impossibility, a discovery I'd beat him to by nearly two weeks: Parts of Dublin were no
longer being printed on the maps. They were disappearing, falling off the plats and out of human memory as if they'd never existed. He'd discovered the Dark Zones. He'd been scouting them out, going into them, a mere dusk away from dying.

Jayne leaned closer until his nose was inches from mine. "Looked at any of these lately?"

I said nothing.

"I found a dozen of them on Patty's desk. He'd circled cer¬tain areas. It took me a while to figure out why. The Garda have a warehouse on Lisle Street seven blocks from here. You can't find it on a single map published in the last two years."

"So? What's your point? That in addition to murder, I'm part of some vast mapmaking conspiracy? What will you charge me with next, colluding to get tourists lost?"

"Funny, Ms. Lane. I took a long lunch yesterday and went to Lisle Street. I tried to take a cab, but the driver insisted there was no such address and refused to go there. T ended up hav-ing to walk. Care to hear what I saw?"

"No. But I'm pretty sure you're going to tell me anyway," I muttered, massaging my temples.

"The warehouse is still there, but the city around it seems to have been.. .forgotten. I mean, completely forgotten. The streets aren't being cleaned. The trash isn't being collected. The lamps are out. Sewage has backed up into the gutters. My cell phone couldn't get a signal there. Right in the middle of the city, T couldn't get a bloody signal!"

"Not getting what this has to do with me," I said in my most bored voice.

He didn't hear me, and I knew he was walking the deso¬late, debris-filled streets in his mind again. A Dark Zone doesn't just look abandoned; it oozes death and decay, makes you feel slimy with it. It leaves an indelible mark on you. It will wake you up in the middle of the night, heart in your throat, terrified of the dark. I sleep with all the lights on. I carry flash-lights, 24/7.

"I found cars abandoned in the middle of the streets with the doors wide open. Expensive cars. The kind that get stripped for parts before the owner can even return with petrol. Explain that," he barked.

"Maybe Dublin's crime rate is decreasing," I offered, knowing it for the lie it was,

"It's skyrocketing. Has been for months. Media's been cru-cifying us over it."

They certainly had. And after what I'd seen tonight, the lo¬cal escalation in violent crime was a fact I was especially inter-ested in, I had an idea germinating.

"There were piles of clothing outside the cars with wallets in the pockets. Some of them were stuffed with cash, just wait¬ing to be stolen. For Christ's sake, I found two Rolexes on the sidewalk!"

"Did you pick them up?" I asked with interest. I'd always wanted a Rolex.

"But you know what the strangest thing was, Ms. Lane? There were no people. Not a single one. As if everyone had agreed at exactly the same moment to vacate twenty-some city blocks, right in the middle of whatever they were doing, with¬out taking a single thing, not their cars, not even their clothes. Did they all walk out naked?"

"How would I know?"

"It's happening right here, Ms. Lane, There's an area miss¬ing on these maps right next to your bookstore. Don't tell me you never look down that way when you leave."

I shrugged. "I don't leave much."

"I follow you. You leave all the time."

"I'm pretty self-engrossed, Inspector. I rarely look around." I glanced behind him, for the dozenth time. The Shades were
still behaving shadily, trapped in their darkness, licking thin, dark, nasty Shade lips.

"Bullshit. I interrogated you. You're smart and sharp, and you're lying."

"Okay, you explain it. What do you think happened?"

"I don't know."

"Can you think of anything that might explain what you found?"

A muscle worked in his jaw. "No."

"Then what do you expect me to tell you? That evil creatures of the night have taken over Dublin? That they're right down there"—I flung my arm out to the right—"and they're eating people and leaving the parts they don't like behind? That they've claimed certain territories as their own, and if you're
stupid enough to walk or drive into one after dark, you'll die?" There, that was as close to warning him as I could get,

"Don't be a fool, Ms. Lane."

"Ditto, Inspector," I said sharply. "You want my advice? Stay out of places you can't find on maps. Now go away." T turned my back on him.

"This isn't over," he said tightly,

It seemed, lately, everyone was saying that to me. No, it certainly wasn't, but I had a sinking feeling I knew how it was going to end: With one more death on my conscience to oc-cupy my already sleepless nights. "Leave me alone, or go get a warrant." I slid the key into the door and unlocked it. As I opened it, I glanced over my shoulder.

Jayne was standing on the sidewalk, in almost exactly the same spot I'd occupied five minutes earlier, staring down into the abandoned neighborhood, brows drawn, forehead fur-rowed. He didn't know it, but the Shades were staring back, in that faceless, eyeless way they have. What would I do if he be-gan walking down there?

I knew the answer and I hated it: I'd whip out my flash¬lights and follow him in. I'd make a complete and utter specta¬cle of myself rescuing him from something he couldn't and wouldn't ever be able to see. Probably get locked up in the mental ward at the local hospital as thanks for my trouble.

My headache was turning brutal. If I didn't get aspirin soon, it was going to spike right backup to vomiting pain.

He looked at me. Although Jayne had perfected what I call cop-face—a certain imperturbable scrutiny coupled with a pa¬tient certainty that the person they're dealing with will eventu¬ally sprout several extra assholes and turn into a complete one—I've gotten better at reading people.

He was scared.

"Go home, Inspector," I said softly. "Kiss your wife, and
tuck your children in. Count your blessings. Don't go hunting for curses."

He looked at me a long moment, as if debating the criteria of cowardice, then turned and stormed off toward Temple Bar.
I heaved a huge sigh of relief and limped into the book¬store.

Even if it hadn't been a much-needed sanctuary,
I would have loved BB&B. I've found my calling, and it isn't being a sidhe-seer. It's running a bookstore, especially one that carries the best fashion magazines, pretty pens, stationery, and journals, and has such an upscale, elegant atmosphere. It embodies all the things I always wanted to be myself; smart, classy, pol¬ished, tasteful.

The first thing that strikes you when you step inside Barrons Books and Baubles, besides the abundance of gleam¬ing rich mahogany and beveled glass windows, is a mildly disorienting sensation of spatial anomaly, as if you've slid open a matchbox and found a footballfield tucked neatly in-

side.

The main room is about seventy feet long and fifty feet wide. The front half vaults straight up to the roof, four grand stories. Ornate mahogany bookcases line each level, from floor to molding. Behind elegant banisters, platform walkways per¬mit catwalk access on the second, third, and fourth levels. Ladders slide on oiled rollers from one section to the next.

The first floor has freestanding shelves arranged in wide aisles on the left, two seating cozies, fore and aft, with an ele¬gant, enameled gas fireplace (in front of which I spend a great deal of time trying to thaw out from Dublin's chilly weather) and a cashier station on the right, behind which is a fridge, a small TV, and my sound dock. Beyond the rear balconies on
the upper levels are more books, including the very rare ones, and some of those baubles the sign mentions, secured in locked display cabinets.

Costly rugs drape the hardwood floors. The furniture is old-world, sumptuous, and expensive, like the authentic tufted Chesterfield sofa I like to curl up on and read. The lights are antique sconces and recessed bulbs of a particular amber hue that cast everything in a warm buttery glow.

When I cross the threshold from the cold, wet, crazy streets outside and step into the bookstore I feel like I can breathe. When I open for business and begin ringing up purchases on the old-fashioned cash register that tinkles a tiny silver bell each time the drawer pops open, my life feels simple and good, and I can forget all my problems for a while,

I glanced at my watch, and kicked off my ruined shoes. It was nearly midnight. Just a few hours ago, I'd been sitting in the rear conversation area with the enigmatic owner of the bookstore, demanding to know what he was.

As usual, he hadn't answered me.

I really don't know why I bother. Barrons knows virtually
everything about me. I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere he has a little file that encompasses my entire life to date, with neatly mounted, acerbically captioned photos—see Mac sun-bath.e, see Mae. paint her nails, see Mae almost die.

But whenever I ask him a personal question, all I get is a cryptic "Take me or leave me," coupled with a broody re-minder that he keeps saving my life. As if that should be enough to shut me up and keep me in line.

Sad fact is, it usually does.

There's an intolerable imbalance of power between us. He's the one holding all the trump cards while I'm barely man¬aging to hang on to the few lousy twos and threes life deals me.

We might hunt OOPs, or Objects of Power—sacred Fae

relics, like the Hallows—together, fight and kill our enemies side by side, and, recently, even try to tear each other's cloth-ing in a case of lust as sudden and searing as the unexpected sirocco I'd somehow glimpsed in his mind while kissing him—but we sure didn't share personal details of our lives or schedules with each other. I had no idea where he lived, where he went when he wasn't around, or when he might come around next. It irked me. A lot. Especially now that I knew he could find me anytime he wanted, using the brand he'd tat¬tooed on the back of my skull—his fecking middle initial Z. Yes, it had saved my life. No, that didn't mean I had to like it,

I peeled off my dripping jacket and hung it up. Two flash¬lights crashed to the floor and went rolling. I needed to find a better way to carry them. They were cumbersome in my pock¬ets and constantly falling out. I was afraid that pretty soon I'd be known as "that crazy flashlight-carrying chick" around the parts of Dublin I frequented.

I hurried to the bathroom at the back of the store, gingerly toweled my hair, and wiped gently at my smudged makeup. There was a bottle of aspirin upstairs shouting my name. A

month ago, I would have immediately fixed my face. Now, I was just happy I had good skin and glad to be out of the rain.

I stepped from the bathroom and through the set of double doors that connected the bookstore to the private residence part of the building, calling for Barrons, wondering if he was still around. I pushed open the doors and checked in all the rooms on the first floor, but he wasn't there. There was no point in searching the second and third floors. He kept all the doors locked. The only open rooms were on the fourth floor, where I slept, and he never went up there, except once, re-cently, to trash my bedroom when I'd disappeared for a month.

I considered calling him on my cell phone, but my head hurt so bad that I vetoed the idea. Tomorrow was soon enough to tell him what I'd learned about the Sinsar Dubh. Knowing him, if I called him tonight and told him, he'd try to make me go back out and hunt it, and there was no way I was going anywhere but straight into a hot shower and a warm bed.

I was headed up the back stairs, when something moved in my peripheral vision. I turned, trying to pinpoint the source. It couldn't have been a Shade; all the lights were on. I backed down a step and scanned the rooms I could see. Nothing moved. I shrugged and started back up.

It happened again.

This time I got a weird feeling, not quite a tingle of my sidhe-seer senses, more like a prelude to it. I glanced in the di¬rection that was bothering me; Barrons' study. After poking my head in, I'd left the door ajar. Beyond it, I could see the or¬nate fifteenth-century desk, and part of the tall mirror that filled the wall behind it, between bookcases.

It happened again and I gaped. The silver reflection of the mirror had just shivered.

I backed down the stairs, never taking my eyes off it. From a safe vantage in the hallway outside the room, I watched it for a few minutes, but the event didn't reoccur.

I pushed the door open all the way and stepped into the room. It smelled like Barrons. I inhaled deeply. A trace of dark, spicy aftershave lingered in the air, and for a moment I was in the caves beneath the Burren again, where I'd almost died last week, when the vampire Malluce had abducted me and taken me deep into the labyrinthine tunnels, to torture me to death as vengeance for a gruesome injury I'd inflicted on him not long after I'd arrived in Dublin. I was lying on the ground, be-neath Barrons' wild, electric body, ripping his shirt open, and splaying my hands over the hard, muscled abdomen tattooed black and crimson in intricate, alien designs. Smelling him all
around me. Feeling like he was inside me, or I was inside him. Wondering how much more inside him I'd get if I let him in-side me.

Neither of us had mentioned that night. I doubted he ever would. I sure wasn't going to bring it up. It disturbed me on levels I didn't pretend to understand.

I focused on the room. I'd searched his study once before, Peered into every drawer, looked in the closet, even snooped behind the books on the shelves hunting for I don't know what, any secret I could dig up on the man. I'd found noth¬ing. He maintains an antiseptic existence. I doubt he permits so much as a hair to lie around that might be used for DNA analysis.

I walked over to the mirror and traced my fingertips across the glass. Elegantly framed, it filled the wall from floor to ceil-ing, and was hard and smooth, made of nothing that could shiver.

It shivered beneath my fingertips. This time my sidhe-seet senses trumpeted alarm. Yanking my hand away, I stumbled back against the desk with a muffled cry.


The surface was now shivering in earnest.

Did Barrons know about this? I thought wildly. Of course, he did. Barrons knew everything. It was in his bookstore. But what if he didn't? What if Barrons wasn't as omniscient as I be¬lieved? What if he was dupable, and someone—like, oh, say, the Lord Master—had planted some kind of spelled mirror in his path, knowing his penchant for certain antiquities.. .and Barrons had bought it, and the crimson robed leader of the Unseelie was spying on him through it, or something? How had I failed to sense it? Was it Fae or not?

Smoky runes appeared on the surface, and the perimeter of the glass darkened abruptly to cobalt, framing the mirror with a three-inch-wide border of pure black.

It was definitely Fae! The black edges were a dead giveaway. If they'd been visible earlier, I'd have known instantly what the mirror was, but the true nature of the glass had been cam-ouflaged behind some kind of illusion that even my sidhe-seer senses hadn't been able to penetrate. I'd been in this room half a dozen times, and never gotten the faintest tingle. Who could craft such flawless illusion?

This was no mere mirror. It was one of the glasses fash¬ioned bv the Unseelie King himself as a means of moving be¬tween the realms of Man and Fae. It was part of the Unseelie Hallow known as the Sifting Silvers, and it was in my book¬store! What was it doing here? What else might be concealed in the store from me, hiding in plain sight?

I'd seen part of this Hallow before. Nearly a dozen of the eerie silver apertures with black edges had adorned the walls of the Lord Master's house at 1247 LaRuhe, in the Dark Zone. There'd been terrible things in them. Things I still had night-mares about. Things like... well, like that hideously deformed thing currently morphing into shape before my very eyes.

When I'd told Barrons about the mirrors I'd seen at the

Lord Master's house, he'd asked if they'd been "open." If this was what he'd meant, they had been. When they were open, could the monsters inside them come out? If so, how did one "close" a Sifting Silver? Could it be as simple as breaking it? Could it be broken? Before I could glance around for some-thing to try it with, the thing of stunted limbs and enormous teeth was gone.

I exhaled shakily. I now understood why BB&B had that strange sense of spatial distortion. I'd felt a similar thing in the Lord Master's house, the day I'd gone into the Dark Zone and discovered my sister's ex-boyfriend was Dublin's Big-Bad, but I hadn't put two and two together. These mirrors, these dimen¬sion-connecting portals, somehow affected the space around them.

Now something else was coming, moving deep in the glass, whirling silver gusts hack with its inexorable stride. Ire-treated to a safer distance.

Dark shapes drifted over the surface of the shivering mir¬ror. Shadows that lacked definition yet tugged at primal fears. It was one of those times when running probably would have been a really good idea, but the problem was, I didn't have anyplace to run to. This was my sanctuary, my safe haven. If I couldn't stay here, I couldn't be anywhere.

It was closer now, the thing that was coming.

I stared into the mirror, down the narrow, silvery lane fad¬ing into blackness at the edges, lined with skeletal trees, cloaked in wisps of jaundiced fog, littered with monstrous creatures forming and re-forming in the mist. It reeked of wasteland worse than a Dark Zone, and I somehow knew the air inside the mirror was a chill in;.;, kill in;.; cold, physically and psychically Only a hellish, inhuman half-life could endure in such a place.

As the dark shape glided down the nightmarish path, the shadow-demons reared back with soundless screams.


More smoky runes materialized on the shivering glass. I couldn't tell if what was coming walked upright, or stalked on all fours. Perhaps it scuttled on dozens of claws. I strained my eyes trying to identify the shape of it, but the sickly fog con-cealed its attributes.

I knew only that it was huge, dark, dangerous...and al¬most here.

I exited the room on tiptoe, and pulled the door shut, leav¬ing the smallest of slivers through which to peer, braced to yank it shut and run like hell.

The mirror belched an icy gust of air.

It was here!

Long black coat fluttering, Jericho Barrons stepped out of the glass.

He was covered with blood that had iced to crimson frost on his hands, face, and clothing. His skin was pale from ex¬treme cold, and his midnight eyes blazed with an inhuman, feral light.

In his arms he carried the brutally savaged, bloody body of a young woman.

I didn't need to feel her pulse to know that she was dead.