High Voltage (Fever #10)(81)
“I’ve got nothing,” I told Ryodan a few minutes later, when we met up where the stately, transomed front entrance had once been.
“This makes no sense,” he murmured as a text alert sounded on his phone. He removed it from his pocket, read it and frowned. Another alert went off and he grabbed my heavily sleeved and gloved arm while reading it and began tugging me across the lot toward the alley.
“What? Where are we going?” I demanded.
“Just come.”
“You don’t have to drag me,” I growled.
“I’m not so sure about that.” He was dashing me along so quickly I barely had time to register where we were heading, but I did and dug my heels in instantly. “Oh, no, hell no! I am not losing time again.” My city needed me now, not months or years later. Shazam needed me.
He gave a sharp jerk and I went stumbling forward, plunging into the wall behind Barrons Books & Baubles, into that precise portal I’d once entered so long ago then spent endless years Silverside, trying to get back home.
I squished into the wall. Then I was the wall. Then I squirted out on the other side, into the infamous White Room, which still lacked tired starlings, where I stood, scowling ferociously at ten enormous mirrors, one of which had so nefariously dumped me into the ancient, inimical Hall of All Days a lifetime ago.
I blinked. The White Room had changed. It was no longer a completely blank, featureless room. Someone had redecorated, or, like everything else in the world, it had been treated to a magical upgrade.
Ornate white moldings crowned the walls, melting into a lavishly transomed ceiling from which a dozen chandeliers hung, glittering like ice in the sunlight. The walls were wainscoted from floor to ceiling with ornately embellished panels. The floor was glossy white marble. The mirrors, however, were exactly the same, hanging without visible means of support, some twirling lazily within elaborate frames, others motionless, in thin, welded chain-link borders. A few of the looking glasses were black as night, some milky, others swirling with unnerving shadows.
They’d once again been shuffled.
I really hated this room.
When Ryodan appeared beside me, I said crossly, “I am not going back into the White Mansion. Or the hall. I don’t care what your reasons are.”
“Barrons texted. He wanted us off site quickly so we’d stop drawing attention to it.”
“Barrons!” I exclaimed. “Where is he?”
“We’re going to him now.”
I inhaled deeply, girding myself. I was all in, wherever he was, but I had unpleasant memories of this place. Going through a mirror and getting lost for years. Coming out chased by the Crimson Hag and killing Ryodan and Barrons. More recently, going in to save Mac, returning to an entirely different Dublin and a deeply angry Dancer. I’d lost weeks I hadn’t gotten to spend with him and, bloody hell, if I’d known our time together was going to be so short—well, the truth was I’d still have gone in, because it was necessary and that’s what I do. Still, I’d lost so much time in my life.
“We won’t be losing time now,” Ryodan said. “We’re using a different stack of Silvers that bypass the White Mansion completely.” When he pushed into the third mirror from the left, a Silver I’d never entered before, I rolled my eyes, shook my head, and plunged in behind him.
After a long, twisting, unpleasant stretch of myself through whatever the Silvers are made of, I stumbled out—I swear the mirrors do that on purpose to you, to keep you off balance—into the heart of Barrons Books & Baubles.
I just stood there a moment, glowing quietly, Harry Potter reunited with Hogwarts. I was in my magical place again where I’d once felt, so long ago—for the first time ever—that I might just belong somewhere. The place holds a sacred, mystical ambience for me. I love BB&B. Love, love, love it. It smells of high adventure bound in leather casings, crammed on shelves waiting to be freed, of Mac’s peaches and cream candles, of Barrons’s fine furnishings and wool rugs, and the spice of my kind of danger. The sounds of this store are music to my soul, the tinkling of the front doorbell, which I intended to bang at least once while I was here, the soft hiss of the gas fire in an enameled hearth, the quiet hum of the fridge behind Mac’s counter.
Mac. I couldn’t wait to talk to her. I had so much to tell her, so much to ask.
I turned slowly, drinking it all in, the elegant furnishings, the way the sun slanted through the leaded glass windows, my beloved, belled door, the strings of colored lights draping the bookcases, the stockings hung on the mantel, the tall, decorated Christmas tree in the corner—Wait, what? Had we lost time after all? It wasn’t December!
“Why the bloody hell do you have a Christmas tree up, Barrons?” Ryodan growled behind me.
I spun and caught my breath, smiling. Jericho Barrons is one of the few constants in my world. Other things might change, but Barrons never does. He’s impervious, immutable, a giant, obdurate stone of a man that not even water can carve. Like Ryodan.
His nostrils flared and a tiny muscle worked in his jaw. “I don’t. That was Mac’s idea. At least it’s not pink this time.”
A flash of movement caught my eye on a tall bookcase behind him. “Uh, Barrons, why is there a lemur in your store?”
His face could not have gone darker. “Mac’s idea, too.”