I moved furtively forward and added a fourth note to my mental agenda: new footwear. Tennis shoes. Rare are the boots crafted for stealth, and mine weren’t.

Midway across the anteroom, I stopped. To my left was a wide flight of marble stairs, swathed by a carpeted runner that descended to tall double doors exiting the church.

To my right was the entrance to the chapel. Even beyond its closed doors, I could smell the inner sanctum, the faint, cloying scent of incense and that other, elusive, spicy scent that disturbed and intrigued me. In the dim light of the hushed morning, the white doors of the oratory seemed to glow with a soft, unspoken invitation.

I could turn left, and head out into Dublin’s streets, or go right, and take a few moments to confer with a God I’d not spoken to much in my life. Was he listening today? Or had he shaken his head, packed up his Creation Kit, and headed off for a less screwed-up world late last night? What would I talk about? How cheated I felt by Alina’s death? How angry I was at being alone?

I turned left. There were easier monsters to deal with in the streets.

At the top of the stair, lust blasted me, incinerated my will, awakening exotic, excruciating sexual need. For a change, I welcomed it.

“V’lane!” I exclaimed, yanking my hand from the top button of my jeans. I could feel him outside the church. He was moving toward me, down the sidewalk, up the outer stairs, about to enter. He’d found me! I caught myself thanking the God I’d just refused to talk to.

The doors opened and I was blinded by sunlight. My pupils constricted to pinpoints. Framed in the entrance, V’lane’s hair shimmered a dozen shades of gold, bronze, and copper. He looked every inch the avenging angel in a way Barrons never could. There was that unusual scent; the one that beckoned and bedeviled me. Rolling off his skin. Did he always smell this way, and I could only pick it up now because I had Unseelie-heightened senses?

Spiked by his dark brethren, I wasn’t sensing V’lane as a Fae. I felt no nausea. His appearance had been preceded only by his lethal sexuality. He was impacting me as he would any woman. It was no wonder heads turned when we went places. His allure was even stronger with my sidhe-seer senses dead, as if some special quality in my blood normally shielded me from his full effect, but couldn’t when my veins ran with Fae.