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 nothing. 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 ceiling, and was hard and smooth, made of nothing that could shiver.

It shivered beneath my fingertips. This time my sidhe-seer 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 believed? 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 camouflaged 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 fashioned by the Unseelie King himself as a means of moving between the realms of Man and Fae. It was part of the Unseelie Hallow known as the Sifting Silvers, and it was in my bookstore! 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 nightmares about. Things like . . . well, like that hideously deformed thing currently morphing into shape before my very eyes.