Feverborn

21

Dancer grinned. “I especially like the last part. Nice rhyme.”

Jada was far from pleased with the paper. “They ‘appear to be round black spheres’? How much more redundant could that be? A sphere is round.”

“Some folks don’t think like that, Jada. You know you have to spoon-feed when conveying information to the masses. Keep it simple, stupid.”

She shot him a cool look.

“I’m not saying you’re stupid. Christ, Mega. We both know your brain weighs more than your whole head.”

“A logistical impossibility.”

“Not with you. Your brain probably exists in a higher dimension than your body. I think the paper’s perfect. It communicates exactly what we want to get across in the simplest possible terms. Now freeze-frame me around like you used to so we can slap these things up. It’ll be like old times.” He arched a brow. “A month ago for me.”

Old times. It was difficult for her to wrap her brain around the fact that she’d lived so much life while he’d lived so little.

“I’ll put them up and be back soon.”

“Don’t do that to me,” Dancer said coolly. “Once, you deposited me on the sidelines at the abbey, the night we battled the HFK. Then you got deposited. You know how it feels. We’re a team. Even if I’m only fucking human, I’ve proved useful many times.”

She looked at him sharply. There was someone much older than a seventeen-year-old in his eyes. “You’re…less indestructible than I am. We need your mind on the black hole problem.”

“So, you want to park me somewhere to guarantee free access to my brain? Get a clue: ‘only fucking humans’ have been going to war for this world since the dawn of time. You’re not the only one that can make a difference. Your attitude invalidates the efforts of every military man and woman on this planet.”

“You could die. Exposing you to risk is illogical.”

“We all can. Any time, Mega. Shit happens.” He looked at her levelly, with those brilliant aqua eyes. “Bugger it, my whole family’s gone and we both know it. You think you’re the only one left with something to prove, something worth putting your life on the line for? If we don’t work together, I work alone. But I work.” He gave her a faintly bitter smile. “With or without you. Look at it this way, if you keep me close, you have a better chance of keeping me alive. If you don’t, who knows what danger I could get myself into?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Life isn’t.”

“You sound just like him.”

“Not necessarily a bad thing all the time,” Dancer said, intuiting exactly who she meant: Ryodan.

“Trying to rope me—”

“Bloody hell, Jada, I’m not trying to rope you. I’m trying to work with you. Leave it to you to decide someone helping is a hindrance or a cage.”

She went still. This wasn’t Dancer. Not the Dancer she knew, the one who always went along with her decisions. Never gave her guff. Well, except for once. “You never used to talk to me like this before,” she said coolly.

He snorted. “I was never willing to risk it. You ran at the drop of a hat. My every move was designed to keep the magnificent Mega from dashing off. One wrong phrase, one hint of emotion or expectation, and she vanished into the night. I watched every bloody word. I lived with the constant awareness that if I cared about you and you figured it out, you’d leave. Then you left. Again. For another month. Didn’t even tell me you were back. Then I heard you told Ryodan’s men you weren’t even willing to work with me. Was I dead to you? You shut me out completely and now only spend time with me because you have a mission you need me for. I’m sorry if you don’t like what I have to say but I’m not walking on eggshells around you anymore. If you want to avail yourself of my many splendid qualities—and they are pretty stupendous,” he flashed her a smile, “accord me the courtesy I give you. Take me as I am. A real person, with desires and boundaries of my own.”

Jada spun on her heel and began to walk away.

“Great. And there you go. Fine. I’ll be fine alone. I’m always fine alone,” he shouted after her. “It’s just that you’re the only person I ever feel completely alive with. You’re the only girl that ever gets half of what I say. Do I really have to come up with some fucking superpower just to hang out with you?”

She stopped. Completely alive. She remembered feeling that once. Running the streets of her town with him, laughing and planning and fighting, amazed and thrilled that she got to be alive in such an exciting time. She remembered, too, the unique feeling of being so easily understood by him. They’d had an effortless rapport.

“Run away,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s what you do best.”

Killing was what she did best. She didn’t run anymore. She never ran. She knew the price. She never reacted. Merely divined the logical, efficient action most likely to yield intended results and pursued it.

Was she running?

She went still, sought that cold clear place inside herself, tacked the emotions and elements of their interaction on a truth table of sorts, analyzing her responses. She pinned his words here, overlaid the subtext, her words there, interpreting the subtext. Then in the middle of the whole thing she taped up the question: What harm if I let Dancer help me hang the papers?

Absolutely none.

In fact, there was more potential for something to go wrong if she left him behind.

There was an unacceptable amount of “reaction” evident in her actions. She knew better. She who controlled herself, survived.

She turned around. “You may come with me.”

“Why do I feel like I just won the battle but lost the war?” he said softly.

—

The slipstream was beautiful, trailing past them like a starry tunnel. It took thirty minutes to plaster papers around Dublin proper. Hours to return for more at the old Bartlett Building, then dash around the outlying districts, distributing them far and wide, knocking on doors, hanging them on houses with lights on inside when no one answered.

It felt good to be back out, taking care of her city again. Along the way they tore down every Dublin Daily they saw, as they’d been written in a way that imparted no useful news and incited fear. For the dozenth time she wondered who was crafting the slanted things. All they’d done was turn the entire city on her and Mac.

“Holy human surfboards, you caught a perfect wave every time!” Dancer exploded when they paused, back in town, near the River Liffey. “Not one rough start or stop. We didn’t hit a bloody thing!” His beautiful eyes were brilliant with excitement. “That was incredible! You’ve gotten massively better at freeze-framing.”

“I learned a few things Silverside.” She winced inwardly at his Batman quip. She’d given them up long ago. Shortly after she’d accepted that Ryodan had never read a single comic and had no idea the lengths to which Batman and his fearless sidekick would go for each other.

“No kidding. It felt different. Instead of trying to force yourself into something that didn’t want us there, you were in sync with it. One with the force.”

She had Shazam to thank. She would never have survived without her cranky, mopey wizard/bear/cat manic-depressive binge-eater.

He was watching her. “Did you meet anyone in there? Did you have friends?”

“A few. I don’t want to talk about it.” Some things were private. She’d lost too much. She wasn’t losing anything else. Feeling suddenly drained, she grabbed a couple of power bars from her pack, ripped them open, dropped down on a nearby bench, and shoved one after another into her mouth. She missed the glistening silvery pods Shazam had encouraged her to eat on the planet with the dancing vines, the ones that had kept her fueled for days. She’d filled her pack with them before she left that world and had been rationing them for herself since. Back on this world, food didn’t pack nearly the energy punch as it had on many in the Silvers. Too much processing, not enough purity. Or maybe Earth just didn’t have any raw elemental magic in the soil anymore.

They sat in silence for a time, watching the river roll by.

When Dancer touched her hand, she moved it quickly. Nearly stiffened but caught herself.

“Easy, wild thing.”

She looked at him. “Is that what you think I am?” Others thought her rigid, passionless.

“I see it in your eyes. Deep. You bank it. Wilder than you were before. And, I have to say I like it. But you’re something else, too. Softer in some places.”

He was clearly deranged. There was nothing soft about her.

He put his hand on the bench between them, palm up, fingers relaxed, and gave her a look. It was an invitation. His hand would stay or go, as she wished.

How long had it been since she’d twined her fingers with someone’s, felt that click as they locked into place, the heat of someone’s palm against hers? The feeling that she wasn’t alone, that someone was in life with her. Young, they’d raced through the streets, holding hands and carrying bombs and laughing their asses off.

“When we’re kids,” Dancer said, “we’re made of steel. And we think we’re invincible but stuff happens and that steel gets stretched and pulled and twisted into impossible shapes. Most people are torn apart by the time they’re married and have kids of their own. But some people, the few, figure out how to let that steel heat and bend. And in all the places other people break, they get stronger.”

Eyes narrowed, curious, she moved her hand to his, placed it on top, palm to palm. He didn’t try to lace their fingers together. Just sat there, her hand resting lightly on his. She suspended the moment, absorbed it, tried to wrap her brain around it. But brains didn’t wrap well around hands.

“How did you get wise?” she said. “Nothing ever happened to you. Until the walls fell, your life was charmed.” She didn’t mean to sound cutting. It was simply the truth. It had fascinated and bewildered the teen she’d been. They’d been so much alike, sprung from opposite sides of a wide track. She’d had a nightmarish childhood, and his had been storybook perfect. Yet they’d understood everything about each other without ever having to say much of anything.

“I’ve got a bloody IQ through the bloody roof,” he said dryly. “Besides, you don’t have to suffer what other people have in order to understand. Not if you have half a brain and a willing heart. And where you’re concerned, Mega, my heart’s always been willing. I hate that you got lost in the Silvers and I didn’t even know it. I hate that you suffered. But I can’t say I’m sorry you grew up.”

She stared out over the water, saying nothing. She had no idea what to say. He wanted to be more than friends. He’d made that clear today. She wasn’t there. One day, maybe she could be. In the meantime this was oddly…well, odd. And a little…nice. She’d known the closest thing to safe she’d ever felt, years ago with Dancer.

But there was something in her that was—as others believed—rigid and unyielding, something that couldn’t bear the thought of bending even one inch. And touching and caring meant bending. There was a place inside her where she simply couldn’t let go. She’d let go of the wrong things.

They thought she was fearless. She wished that were true. There were things she feared.

She’d thought the day she got back to Dublin would be the best day of her life.

It had been one of the worst. The cost had been too high.

She drew her hand back to her lap.

Dancer stood up. “What do you say we work on our own map of the anomalies? Screw Ryodan and his monopoly on information.”

And just like that her sorrow ebbed and she stood like the young, strong woman she was, not the woman handicapped by tears locked in a box deep inside her. Fully aware, as Ryodan had said, that it was impossible to seal away a single emotion. Fully aware the price of no pain was no joy.

Because if those tears ever started to flow, she’d drown.

—

Jada hurried through the abbey, books tucked beneath her arm. She had two hours before she would head to Chester’s. She’d spent the day putting up her papers and mapping black holes around Dublin. On the way back to the abbey, she’d stood outside the funnel cloud that surrounded BB&B, staring up at it, forcing herself to remain cold, logical, an arrow toward the goal. Nothing more.

They had their agenda on Earth. She had her own elsewhere.

She wanted to go back into the Unseelie king’s library but wasn’t willing to lose more time Earthside. One never knew the price of stepping through a Silver. Besides, until she spoke with Barrons, she had no way of deciding which Silver would take her into the White Mansion. Five and a half years Silverside and she’d never managed to learn a bloody thing about the mirrors that could so dispassionately give or take life.

Penetrating the funnel cloud wouldn’t be a problem. She’d mastered that magic year two, Silverside. A few well-placed wards could degrade almost any self-contained Fae storm, allowing passage.

For a month now, ever since she’d arrived back in Dublin, she’d been looking for a ward, a spell, a totem, some way to mark a Silver, embed something on its shimmering surface, something visible from both sides.

Her efforts had yielded no fruit.

Now, as she moved through the corridors of the abbey, she gathered recent news from the sidhe-seers and dispatched orders, impatient to be in her chambers, craving Shazam’s warm, irascible presence and time alone with him to analyze and refine her plans.

He was slumped in a mound of fatness and foul mood. He didn’t even lift his head when she came in.

“I brought you something,” she said, removing an oily brown paper bag from her pack. His head shot up. He was insatiably curious.

He was insatiable, period.

His whiskers trembled with anticipation and he burped.

“Have you been eating something while I was gone?” she demanded.

“What do you expect? You didn’t leave me anything.”

“Technically, you don’t need to eat.”

“Ever heard of boredom? What am I supposed to do in here all day? Make the bed I never get out of because there’s no place I’m allowed to go?”

She assessed the room. Every single pillow was gone.

When he belched again, a feather floated from his mouth.

“They couldn’t possibly have tasted good.”

“Good is relative when all you have is nothing,” he said sourly.

“Soon I’ll let you out. Soon you’ll be free again.”

“Right. And soon sentient beings will stop destroying one another and themselves. Not. We’re all going to die. Alone and miserably. With lots of pain. That’s the way life goes. People make promises and don’t keep them. They say they care about you and forget you.”

“I didn’t forget you. I never forget you”

She tossed three raw fish on the bed and Shazam exploded upright, straight up in the air, bristling with excitement. He fell on the fish like they were manna from Heaven, slurping and sucking and devouring every morsel until only fine bones remained on the down comforter.

“You are forgiven,” he said grandly, settling down to polish his face with spit-moistened paws.

If only she was.

22

Jada pressed her palm to the door of Ryodan’s office a full hour earlier than she’d been advised to arrive. He might think he’d ordered her to be there, but no one ordered her anymore. They worked with her or against her.

She’d refined her thoughts during her time with Shazam, the two of them deciding her next move would have to be risked, that she’d have to accept the tattoo he’d offered.

So when the door slid aside, before she even stepped in, she said, “I’ll let you tattoo me.”

Barrons and Ryodan both looked over their shoulders at her, and she was struck suddenly by how…inhuman they looked, their faces more savage, their movements more…animalistic and sleek, as if caught momentarily off guard, engrossed. But their masks went up the instant they saw her and then they were just Barrons and Ryodan again.

The owner of Chester’s was sitting backward in a chair, watching monitors, while Barrons sat behind him, tattooing his powerfully muscled back.

Ryodan reached for a shirt, tugged it on over his head. When he stood, he and Barrons exchanged a look, then Barrons nodded at her and said, “Jada, good to see you,” and walked out.

“You shouldn’t cover fresh tattoos,” she told Ryodan coolly. “They weep.”

He stood legs wide, arms folded, silver cuff glinting, looking down at her. “How would you know anything about tattoos or weeping?”

She was five-foot-ten now, and still had to arch her neck to look at him.

“I’ve heard,” she said. He had a tight-fitting tee-shirt on. Then again probably every tee-shirt he put on was tight because of his sheer width and musculature. She could see the delineation of each muscle in his abdomen through the shirt, the pronounced outline of his pectorals. His lats flared, his biceps were sculpted, his forearms thickly corded. For a moment she was fourteen again, looking up at him. And she finally understood and acknowledged what she used to feel. The teen had suffered an intense crush on Dancer. The superhero had been utterly infatuated with Ryodan. They’d become her world when Mac had turned her back. She’d felt safe being with Dancer. Yet Ryodan had made her feel safe.

They stood a long moment, ten feet apart, looking at each other as silence spun out.

“What changed your mind?” he said finally.

“I’m not sure I have fully changed my mind,” she said, noting his second use of the interrogative in a single conversation and wondering if he really was done baiting her all the time. “How does it work?”

He sliced his head once to the left. “If you mean the mechanics of it, too bad. Bottom line is this: if you let me tattoo you and you carry the phone, I can find you if you ever get lost again.”

“Details.”

“There are three numbers programmed in. Mine. You call it, I answer. The second one is Barrons’s number. If I don’t answer for some reason, Barrons will. The third one is called IISS.” He waited.

“I resent being cued. It makes me not want to know.”

Tiny lines around his eyes crinkled as he threw his head back and laughed.

Jada fisted her hands behind her back. She hated it when he laughed.

“Good to see you haven’t lost all your irrational prickliness,” he said. “IISS stands for I’m In Serious Shit. Use it only if you are.”

“What will happen?”

“Hope you never find out. But if you’d called it in the Silvers, I’d have been there.”

“How quickly?”

“Very.”

“What good would that have done?”

“I’d have gotten you out.”

“Who can say your way would have been better? Maybe it would have taken us ten years with you leading the way.”

“Doubtful. Maybe it would have taken ten days. And you wouldn’t have been alone.”

“Who says I was alone?”

“Do you want it or not.”

“Seriously, ten days?” She assessed him remotely, wondering if it could possibly be true. This man had awed her with his unfathomable abilities and strength. She’d never forgotten how he could out-everything her, from spying a drop of condensation on a frozen sculpture she couldn’t see, to freeze-framing faster, to always being able to find her no matter what. I tasted your blood, he’d said once. I can always find you.

She’d believed that. Even Silverside.

He sighed explosively and raked a hand through his short dark hair. “Ah, Dani. It doesn’t work in there. Would that it fucking did.”

“The tattoo?” she said, refusing to believe he’d just skimmed her mind. “Then you’re not doing it. And it’s Jada,” she corrected. “Every time you call me the wrong name, I’ll call you a wrong one. Dickhead.”

“That I tasted your blood. It doesn’t work in Faery.”

“If I don’t invite you into my thoughts, stay out of them. It’s called respect. If you don’t respect me, you don’t get to know me.” She stepped closer, moving to stand nose-to-nose, staring straight into those cool silver eyes that used to so intimidate her, but she would never have let him know that. They didn’t intimidate her now.

He inclined his head. “Understood. I won’t do it again. Much. Often, it was the only way I could stay one step ahead of you.”

“Why did you think you needed to?”

“To keep you alive.”

“You thought I needed a foster parent?”

“I thought you needed a powerful friend. I tried to be that. Are we still talking or are you ready to tattoo?”

“I still don’t understand how it works.”

“Some things require a leap of faith.”

She gave him her back and swept her ponytail aside. “Have at it.”

His fingers moved across the nape of her neck, at the base of her skull, lingering. She suppressed a shiver. “How long is this going to take?”

“I can’t work with this spot. Too bloody much scar tissue from you cutting the last one off.”

“If you tattooed me, why didn’t you give me the phone then, too? What was the point of tattooing me at all?”

“We had this conversation. You wouldn’t have carried it. You would have believed it was another of my infamous contracts. However, at some point I knew you would. I prepared for that eventuality.”

“I’m not an eventuality. Get off my neck if it won’t work.”

“I’m not touching you,” he said. “I touched the scar only briefly.”

Still, she felt the burn of his fingers against her skin, the faint electrical charge. She spun to face him. “Where, then?”

He arched a brow. “The second best location is at the base of your spine.”

“A tramp stamp?” she said incredulously.

“Its effectiveness increases bound to the base of the spine.”

“And I still don’t know what that effectiveness is. This could be just another one of your—”

“And that’s precisely why I never tried to get you to carry the phone,” he cut her off roughly. “For fuck’s sake, you vanished and I couldn’t find you. Do you really think I’m going to let that happen again? If you believe nothing else, concede it will work for that reason alone. I don’t lose things that are mine.”

She arched a brow and said coolly, “I’m not yours and never was.”

“Tramp stamp or get the fuck out,” he said coldly.

She stood motionless, realigning herself deep inside. This day was hands down the most brutal one she’d had since she returned. People had been clawing at her all day with their feelings and demands and expectations. She didn’t know how to live in this world anymore. Didn’t know how to pass through unscathed, unchanged. It was changing her. She could feel it.

“Fine,” she said flatly. Kicking a chair into place, she dropped into it with her back to him, legs splayed around it, stripped off her shirt and leaned forward, resting her arms on the back, stretching long and lean.

“We don’t have all night,” she said finally, breaking the long silence.

“Ah, fuck,” he said softly, and she knew he was looking at the scars.

23

I go looking for Jo, and man, that’s one chick I just don’t get.

She told me this morning she “doesn’t wanna wanna fuck me.”

How can that shit even happen in the same sentence? One wanna negating the other wanna makes no fucking sense.

Some things are simple. Leave it to a woman to point a man down a straight path then twist it into a bloody maze before he even takes two steps.

You wanna fuck somebody.

There it is.

Nothing complicated about that at all.

And if you wanna fuck somebody, why would you waste any time thinking twice about it when you could be using that time to fuck them? Do women sit around all day dreaming up bipolar-crazy-ass conversations just to make us bugfuck crazy?

She says, all serious like, Lor, you’re a really sweet guy (who the bloody fuck is she talking about? I’m looking around the bed but it’s only me and her) but I don’t want to do this again (she announces, with her ass way up in the air, me driving into her dirty-dog-buried-to-the-hilt-and-she’s-howling style). It was wrong from the get-go (what was wrong was me doing a brunette with little tits but you don’t hear me complaining), and I don’t want to keep compounding the same mistake (I don’t point out that she seems to be enjoying the hell out of said mistake, if the sounds she’s making are anything to judge by, and before she started using her mouth to say such stupid shit it was her idea to use it sucking my dick, but that’s me, a paragon of restraint), so we need to stop this.

Then she drops the mother of all bombs on the parade of bombs she’s already dropped and it’s a wonder my dick doesn’t go limp from the shrapnel. Well, actually, that’s not a wonder.

Naked woman. Hard dick.

She says—and get this nut-job-crazy-bitch-ass-shit that came out of her mouth next, Lor, I might need you to help me. I might change my mind, and if I do, I need you to say no.

I stop what I’m doing, grab her by the hair, turn her head toward me and stare at her. “You’re saying if you come to me later today, saying ‘I want you to fuck me, Lor,’ I’m supposed to say no?” I’m having a hard time with the nuances of this.

She’s looking all hot and flushed and sweaty, with glazed eyes and kinda panting, and she nods and gasps, “Exactly.”

I shove her head back down and get back to business. Which, I might point out, she’s loving the hell out of.

Thinking the whole time, I don’t get brunettes. It’s why I avoid ’em. Never heard a blonde say such a fucked-up thing.

I’m supposed to help a woman that doesn’t wanna wanna fuck me but obviously does wanna fuck me and sucks dick with the tender aggression and dedicated zeal of a wet, velvet-lined vacuum be strong enough not to fuck me when I thoroughly enjoy fucking her?

Women.

Whose bright idea was it to make them?

No wonder we got booted from the goddamn Garden.

After a few days with Eve, Adam couldn’t think straight.

—

I find Jo in the corridor of the server’s quarters. Her eyes flare and she backs away when she sees me coming, thrusting her tray of dirty glasses out at me, like something so puny could keep me from getting what I want.

I don’t do the caveman routine. It doesn’t work with brunettes. It’s why I hate ’em. They take work.

“You said you got a problem with your memory,” I say.

She looks wary. “You mean my sidhe-seer gift?”

“Sure do, babe. You can’t organize it. Wading knee-deep in mental detritus.”

She gives me a look when I say “detritus” like all I could possibly know are four-letter words, and I think, Keep thinking that, babe. Lor’s just a dumb blond. I’m gonna blow her messy-ass mind and when I’m done maybe it’ll be clean enough in there she’ll be able to see when you wanna fuck you wanna fuck.

“Lessons start tonight. After your shift.”

“I’m not going to have sex—”

“Oh, yes you are. You’re gonna fuck me every time I give you a lesson. Ain’t no free lunches. And when I’m done you’re gonna be goddamn brilliant. And then, maybe, I’m not gonna want to fuck you anymore.”

She gives me a skeptical look. “How are you going to help me organize what’s in my head?”

“Loci. Latin for ‘places.’ Mnemonic device for managing memory. Simonides, Cicero, Quintilian all used it. I’m going to teach you to build a memory palace.”

“How come I’ve never heard of this before?” she says suspiciously.

“Probably can’t find it in your mess in there. The mess that thinks you don’t wanna fuck somebody you wanna fuck.”

“A nicer person would offer to teach me, not bully me into trading sexual favors.”

“Uh-huh. A nicer person would. And I’d hardly say it’s you trading me a favor. Seems damned mutually beneficial to me. You want what you want from me, you gotta give me what I want from you. And hopefully we’ll both get so sick of each other by the time it’s over, we’ll leave each other alone.”

She narrows her eyes and I can tell the idea appeals to her. Hell, it appeals to me. The sooner I get her out of my system the sooner my life gets simple again.

“How do you know anything about this kind of stuff?”

“Honey, when you’ve lived as long as I have, if you don’t have a filing system, you’re fucked. Besides,” I flash her a wolfish grin, “I needed a good way to track my chicks, skirts, and babes through the millennia. Every fuck. All in there. Every last detail.”

She gets a weird look, and I think, Aw, shit, Ryodan wasn’t as open with her as I thought he was, then it turns into a scoff and I breathe a little easier. “Millennia?” She laughs and says, “Yeah right.” She blushes. “I’m in your memory palace.”

And she’s the one I’d like most to take out with the trash at this point. “Every time you come. Smell. Taste. Sound. Deal or not?”

“I’ll try it once,” she says. “And if I think you have anything to teach me, we’ll continue.”

Aw, honey, I think, we’re definitely gonna continue.

—

I start out simple. I tell her about the London cabbies and the test they have to take called the Knowledge. First thing about mastering any subject is understanding the mechanics of it.

Like the clit.

I’ve studied it exhaustively, in theory and with a butt-load of practical application. It’s remarkably like a dick with a foreskin, erectile tissue, and even a tiny little shaft. But it’s way better. Women got some eight thousand sensory nerve endings in it. The penis only has about four thousand. On top of that, the clit can affect another fifteen thousand nerve endings, which means a whopping fucking twenty-three thousand nerve endings exploding in an orgasm.

We definitely got the short end of the dick, er, stick.

I also know Marie Bonaparte (one sexually adventurous babe!) had her clit surgically moved closer to her vagina because she couldn’t score a Vag-O. Another goddamn brunette, thinking too much, hanging out with Freud. I could’ve helped her with that problem without moving nothing. Once she did, it didn’t work anyway ’cause she didn’t take into consideration three-quarters of the clit is embedded in the woman’s body and can’t be moved.

Then there’s the fact that this amazing little clit men got screwed out of actually grows throughout a woman’s lifetime.

By menopause it’s seven times larger than it was at birth and fucking-A—there’s a reason older women are hot as hell in bed! Can’t imagine what kinda nut I’d bust with a dick seven times this size. Not sure there’d be anyplace I could put it, so I ain’t gonna bemoan that one. And clits are all different: some are little nubs, some are big, some hide, some protrude, and each one is as unique as the woman attached to it.

“Clits?” Jo says, blinking. “I thought we were talking about cabbies.”

“Clits, cabbies, different means, same end. Pay attention. You’re getting me off track.”

“I didn’t say one word about clits,” she says, looking pissy.

“You were thinking about them.”

She blows out an exasperated breath. “What about this test, the Knowledge? How does this have anything to do with me remembering where I put things in my head?”

“I’m getting to that. Goddamn woman, learn to take your time on the buildup. So the cabbies in London study for years, memorizing the patterns of twenty-five thousand streets, locations of some twenty thousand landmarks, and have to be able to plot the shortest distance between any two areas, including all significant places of interest along the way. Like two or three out of ten actually manage to pass the Knowledge.”

“And?”

“Their right posterior hippocampus is seven percent larger than the average person’s. Not because they were born that way, babe. Neuroplasticity.”

She blinks at me like she’s having a hard time understanding English. She mouths the word “neuroplasticity.” “You know this how? Why?”

“I drove a cab for a while. Coupla months.”

“In London?”

“Why the fuck do you think I’d tell you about a test I didn’t take?”

“You took a test? And passed? You drove a cab?” She’s looking at me like I’m from outer space.

“Do you know what the babes in London are like? How many wives fly in or out without their husbands from all kinds of international places? Look at me, honey. I’m a walking, talking, fucking Viking that loves to fuck. I had the run of the airport.”

“Oh my God. You were a cabbie to get laid.”

I wink at her. “Fun times.”

“Okay,” she says, shaking her head briskly, “we’re done with clits and cabbies. What does this have to do with my problem? Are you saying I have to increase the size of part of my brain? How am I supposed to do that?”

“Like the clit, the brain can change. The right posterior hippocampus registers spatial encoding—”

“I’m having a real hard time with your sudden language proficiency,” she says, eyes narrowed.

“Babe, I ain’t dumb. I’m efficient.”

She leans back in her chair, looking at me with a slow smile tugging at her lips, and she’s trying not to let it happen but all the sudden she busts out laughing. “I’ll be damned,” she says when she finally stops laughing, and all the sudden I don’t like how she’s looking at me. Like she sees something I didn’t want her to see. Don’t ever want a babe to see. I’m suddenly wondering how smart this arrangement was.

But in for a goddamn penny and all. So I start telling her about the theory of elaborate encoding, embellishing memories and inserting them spatially, tying them to a place, and suggest she use the abbey, because it’s so familiar to her. Some folks argue fictional places are superior, but when you already got a great big sprawling fortress you grew up in to use, why do more work than necessary? That’s pretty much the motto of my life.

“So you’re saying I encode everything I want to remember into various images and tuck them into different places at the abbey in my mind? Sounds like a lot of work,” she says.

“Yeah, but you only gotta do it once. And it gets easier when you get the hang of it. You gotta trick it up. Make it funny somehow. I remember this chick, I never knew her name and I wanted to file her and the woman was a serious-ass kink, so I called her Lola, you know, the Kinks—‘L-O-L-A low-la.’ ” I belt it just like Ray Davies, and fuck me they always did put on one helluva show. “I made her a bent paper clip resting in the fold of the sleeve on the Ray Davies statue in my study.”

“Paper clip? You have a Ray Davies statue in your study? What else is in your study?”

“Don’t be nosy, honey. It ain’t attractive. She was twisted. Like a bent paper clip. It worked for me.”

She ponders it, worrying that hot lower lip of hers that has some serious suction power. “And this really works?” she says finally.

“It’s all about taking control of your inner space, babe.”

She stares at me a long moment in silence. She opens her mouth and closes it again, rubbing her forehead. Then, looking like she can’t even believe what’s coming out of her mouth, she says, “Can we just fuck?”

I’m on her before she even finishes the sentence.

I think I just gave a whole new spin to talking a chick into fucking.

24

“You want me to hunt the woman that looks like your sister?” Barrons said.

I nodded. I was sick of not knowing what was really going on in so many areas in my life. It was bad enough that I had this thing inside me that, if it had rules, I didn’t know any of them, but now there was some creepy trash-heap Unseelie out there that had managed to freeze me in helpless horror, even though my sidhe-seer senses were currently neutralized, and another unknown entity masquerading as my dead sister.

Two of those three things I could take decisive action about. Starting with the one that posed the greatest threat to my sanity.

“I want you to capture her,” I clarified. “And I want you to bring her somewhere I can question her.”

“You blew this off in Chester’s.”

I sighed. “I didn’t want to say anything in front of Ryodan. You know he chews a bone until it’s nothing but splinters. I didn’t feel like being his bone at the time.”

“Do you believe it could be Alina?”

“No. I think it’s completely impossible. But I want to know what the hell it actually is.”

“You told me you buried your sister. You were certain it was her. Have you changed your mind?”

“Nope. I buried her.” I don’t bother mentioning that I also recently exhumed her corpse and it wasn’t there. I saw no point in further complicating an already complicated issue. I wanted to examine the Alina-thing first, then I’d disclose all, if necessary, to Barrons.

“I won’t be able to bring her to the bookstore,” he said.

I nodded. He was going to have to change from man to beast to hunt Alina, and I didn’t think for a minute any Hunter would permit the creature Barrons became on its back and fly them over our private tornado. “Do you have another place nearby that’s well warded?”

“The basement where you were Pri-ya is still protected.”

Our eyes met and we had an intense nonverbal conversation, graphic reminders of sex, raw and aggressive, hungry and obsessive. You are my world, I’d said. Don’t leave me.

You’re leaving me, Rainbow Girl, he’d said, and I’d known even then I was under his skin as deeply as he was under mine.

“Is the Christmas tree still up?” I said lightly.

I left it like it was. Best fucking cave I ever lived in, his dark eyes said.

One day, we’ll do it again, I sent back. I wouldn’t have to fake being Pri-ya. Not with this man.

He stretched and moved, began subtly changing.

“Uh, Barrons, we have a meeting. I thought you’d go afterward.”

“Ryodan canceled it,” he said around teeth much too large for his mouth. “He’s tattooing Dani. Jada.”

“She’s letting him?” I said incredulously.

“She asked.”

I narrowed my eyes, mulling that over. “You were inking Ryodan. Same kind of tats you wear. I never saw those on him before.” And I’d seen him naked. “Is he giving her a phone? Will he be able to find her like you found me?”

“Speaking of,” he growled, twisting sideways with a series of painful-sounding crunches, “you do still carry the cell, Ms. Lane.”

“Always,” I assured him.

“I’ll find this thing you seek, but when I return it’s imperative I finish my own tattoos.”

“Oh, God,” I said slowly. “When you’re reborn all your tats are gone. Even the ones that bind us together.”

“And until I replace them, IYD won’t work. That, Ms. Lane, is the only reason I wanted you to remain in Chester’s the other day. Until I finish them.”

IYD—a contact in my cellphone that was short for If You’re Dying—was a number I could call that would guarantee Barrons would find me, no matter where I was. “I’m not completely helpless, you know,” I said irritably. Dependence on him makes me nuts. I want to be able to stand so completely on my own one day that I feel like I measure up to being with Jericho Barrons.

“Head for the basement. I’ll see you there. This won’t take long.” He turned and dropped to all fours, loping off into the night, black on black, hungry and wild and free.

One day I want to run with him. Feel what he feels. Know what it’s like in the skin where the man I’m obsessed with feels most completely at home.

For now, however, I’m not running anywhere. I’m flying on the back of an icy Hunter to the house on the outskirts of Dublin where I once spent months in bed with Jericho Barrons.

—

Dreams are funny things. I used to remember all of mine, wake up with the sticky residue of them clinging to my psyche, the slumbering experience so immediate and intense that if I was in my cold place, I’d wake up freezing. If I was hearing music, I’d come to singing beneath my breath. My dreams are often so vivid and real that when I first open my eyes I’m not always sure that I have awakened and wonder if “reality” isn’t really on the other side of my lids.

I think dreaming is our subconscious way of sorting through our experiences, tying them into a cohesive narrative, and filing like with like in a metaphorical way—so in the waking we can function with a tidily organized past, present, and future we barely have to think about in the moment. I think PTSD occurs when something so shattering happens that it blows everything that’s stored neatly into complete chaos, disorganizing your narrative, leaving you drifting and lost where nothing makes sense, until you eventually find a place to store that horrible thing in a way you can make sense of. Like, someone trying to kill you, or discovering you’re not who you thought you were all your life.

I have houses in my dreams, rooms filled with similar pieces of mental “furniture.” Some are crammed with acres of lamps, and when I dream I’m looking at them, I’m reliving each of the moments that illuminated my life in some way. My daddy, Jack Lane, is in there: a solid, towering pillar of a lamp made from a gilded Roman column with a sturdy base. My mom is in that room, too, a graceful wrought-iron affair with a silk shade, dispersing in her soft rays all the gentle words of wisdom she tried to instill in Alina and me.

I have rooms with nothing but beds. Barrons is in those rooms pretty much everywhere. Dark, wild, sitting sometimes on the edge of a bed, head down, gazing up at me from beneath his eyebrows with that look that makes me want to evolve, or perhaps devolve into something just like him.

I also have basements and subbasements in my dream houses wherein lurk many things I can’t see clearly. Sometimes those subterranean chambers are lit by a pallid gloom, other times corridors of endless darkness unfold before me and I hesitate, until my conscious mind inserts itself into the dream and I don my MacHalo and stride boldly forward.

The Sinsar Dubh lives in my basements. I’ve begun to wonder endlessly about it, feeling like a dog with a thorn deep in my paw that I just can’t chew out. It manifests often when my subconscious plays.

Tonight, waiting for Barrons to bring the Alina-thing to me, I stretched out and fell asleep on silk sheets in the ornate Sun King four-poster bed in which Barrons fucked me back to sanity.

And I dreamed the Sinsar Dubh was open inside me.

I was standing in front of it, muttering beneath my breath the words of a spell that I knew I shouldn’t use but couldn’t leave lying on the gleaming golden page because my heart hurt too damned much and I was tired of the pain.

I awakened, drenched by an abject sense of horror and failure.

I stood abruptly, scraping the residue from my psychic tongue. In my dream the words I’d muttered had been so clear, their purpose so plain, yet awake, I didn’t have one memory of the blasted spell.

And I wondered as I had so many times in recent months if I could be tricked into opening the forbidden Book in a dream.

Like I said—I don’t know the rules.

I looked around, eyes wide, filling them with reality, not shadows of fears.

The Christmas tree winked in the corner, green and pink and yellow and blue.

The walls had been plastered—by Barrons months ago—with blow-up pictures of my parents, of Alina and me playing volleyball with friends on the beach back home. My driver’s license was taped to a lamp shade. The room held virtually every hue of pink fingernail polish ever made, and now I knew why I couldn’t find half the clothing I’d brought with me to Dublin. It was here, arranged in outfits. God, the lengths he’d gone to in order to reach me. There were half-burned peaches-and-cream candles—Alina’s favorite—strewn on every surface. Fashion and porn magazines littered the floor.

Best cave indeed, I thought. The room, with the hastily plumbed shower I was certain he’d had to force my sex-obsessed ass into on frequent occasions, smelled like us.

I frowned. What a terrible place to bring the facsimile of my sister. Surrounded by memories of who I was, who she was, how integral a part of my life she’d been.

I cocked my head, listened intently with the last day of my Unseelie-flesh-heightened senses.

Footsteps above, something being dragged, sounds of protest, heated yelling, no male answer. The beast was dragging the imposter of my sister to the stairs. I guessed she’d gotten the screaming out of her system. But then again, if it were a Fae masquerading as my sister, it wouldn’t have screamed. There would have been some kind of magic battle. I was interested to learn how and where he’d found it, if it had put up a fight.

I pushed up from the bed and braced myself for the coming confrontation.

—

The screaming started in the basement, loud and anguished, beyond the closed door. “No! I won’t! You can’t make me! I don’t want it!” it shrieked.

I kicked open the door, stood framed in the opening and glared at the imposter. It was near the bottom of the stairs, with Barrons blocking the stairwell, it was trying to clamber back up on its hands and knees.

Was it going to pull the same stunt it had at 1247 LaRuhe? Pretend to be so terrified of me that I couldn’t possibly interrogate it?

I stalked closer and it curled into a ball and began to sob, clutching its head.

I moved closer still and it suddenly puked violently, whatever it had in its stomach spewing explosively on the wall.

Barrons loped to the top of the stairs, shut and locked the door. I knew what he was doing. Transforming back into the man in private. He would never let anyone besides me see him morphing shapes. Especially not a Fae.

I studied the sobbing form of my sister, filled with grief for what I’d lost and hate for the reminder, and love that wanted to go somewhere but knew better. Such a screwed-up mixture, so poisonous. It lay curled on the floor now, holding its head as if its skull might explode as violently as its stomach just had.

I narrowed my eyes. Something about it was so familiar. Not its form. But something about the way it looked, laying there curled, clutching its skull as if it was—

“What the hell?” I whispered.

Surely it hadn’t studied me that closely! Surely it wasn’t playing such a deep psychological game.

I began stepping backward, moving away, never taking my eyes off it. Five feet. Ten. Then twenty between us.

The thing that was impersonating my sister slowly removed its hands from its head. Stopped retching. Began to breathe more evenly. Its sobs quieted.

I strode briskly forward ten feet and it screamed again, high and piercing.

I stood frozen a long moment. Then I backed away again.

“You’re pretending you can sense the Book in me,” I finally said coldly. But of course. Alina—my dead sister, not this thing—had been a sidhe-seer and OOP detector like me. If my sister had stood near the Sinsar Dubh, like me, might it (me) have made her violently sick?

I frowned. She and I had lived in the same household for two decades and she’d never sensed anything wrong with me then. She hadn’t puked every time I’d walked in the room. Was it possible the Sinsar Dubh inside me had needed to be acknowledged by me to gain power? That perhaps, before I’d come to Dublin, it had lay dormant within and quite possibly would have remained that way forever if I’d not awakened it by returning to a country I was forbidden to enter? Had Isla O’Connor known that the only way to keep my inner demon slumbering was to keep me off Irish soil? Or was there something more going on? Had there really never been any Fae in Ashford because it was so boring while we’d been growing up? Or had my birth mother somehow spelled our sidhe-seer senses shut, never to awaken unless we foolishly returned to the land of our blood-magic?

Oh yeah, feeling that matrixlike skewed sense of reality again.

Why was I even speculating such nonsense? This thing was not my sister!

It raised its head and peered at me with Alina’s tear-filled eyes. “Jr., I’m so sorry! I never meant for you to come here! I tried to keep you away! And it got you! Oh, God, it got you!” It dropped its head and began to cry again.

“Fuck,” I said. It was all I could think of. After a long moment I said, “What are you? What’s your purpose?”

It lifted its head and looked at me like I was crazy. “I’m Mac’s sister!”

“My sister died. Try again.”

It peered at me through the dimly lit basement, then, after a moment, got up on all fours and backed away, pressing itself against a crate of guns, drawing its knees up to its chest. “I didn’t die. Why aren’t you doing something bad to me? What game are you playing?” it demanded. “Is it because Mac won’t let you hurt me? She’s strong. You have no idea how strong she is. You’re never going to win!”

“I’m not playing a game. You’re the one playing a game. What the hell is it?”

It drew a deep shuddering breath and wiped a trickle of foamy spit from its chin. “I don’t understand,” it finally said. “I don’t understand anything that’s happening anymore. Where’s Darroc? What happened to all the people? Why is everything in Dublin so damaged? What’s going on?”

“Ms. Lane,” a deep voice slid from the shadowy stairs. “It’s not Fae.”

“It’s not?” I snapped. “Are you certain?”

“Unequivocally.”

“Then what the hell is it?” I snarled.

Barrons stepped into the light at the bottom of the stairs, fully clothed, and I realized he must store caches of clothing all over the city, in case he needed to transform unexpectedly.

He swept the Alina look-alike with a cold, penetrating gaze.

Then he looked at me and said softly, “Human.”

25

The first time the Unseelie-king-residue came to the white, bright half of the boudoir in which he’d left her trapped by magic beyond her comprehension, the Seelie queen melted back against the wall, turned herself into a tapestry, and watched silently as a graphic scene of coupling unfolded before her unenthusiastic but eventually reluctantly fascinated gaze.

Hers was the court of sensuality, and he had once been considered king of it for good reason. Passion drenched the chamber, saturating the very air in which her tapestry hung, draping another bit of sticky, sexually charged residue on her weft and weave.

A visitor would have seen no more than a vibrant hunt scene hung upon the wall of the boudoir, and at the center, before the slab upon which the mighty white stag was being sacrificed, a slender, lovely woman with pale hair and iridescent eyes, standing, staring out from the tapestry and into the room.

She’d cut her queenly teeth on legends of the enormously brilliant, terrifyingly powerful, wild, half-mad godlike king that had nearly destroyed their entire race, and certainly condemned it to eternal struggle, with his obsession over a mortal.

She despised the Unseelie king for locking her away. For killing the original queen before the song had been passed on. For dooming them to striking alliances with weaker beings in order to survive, limping along with only a hint of their former grandeur and power.

She despised herself for not seeing through her most trusted advisor, V’lane, and being locked away by him as well, in a frozen prison, trapped in a casket of ice, scarcely daring to hope the seeds she’d planted long ago among the Keltar and O’Connor and various others might come to fruition and she would live. Carry on to try to survive the next test she’d also foreseen.

This—spelled into a chamber with memory residue—was not living. Buried in another coffin of sorts while her race suffered who knew what horrors.

The Unseelie prison walls were down. Even frozen in her casket, diminishing, being leeched of her very essence by the void-magic of the Unseelie prison, she’d felt the walls around her collapse, had known the very moment the ancient, compromised song had winked out.

She, more than any of the Seelie, understood the danger her race now faced. She was the one who’d used imperfect song, fragments she’d found hither and yon through the ages, to bind the Fae realms to the mortal coil. She’d only been able to secure her imperiled court by marrying it to the human planet.

Irretrievably.

And if that coil were devoured by the black holes, so, too, would be all the Seelie realms.

With the king, she’d pretended to know none of this, yet it had been precisely why she’d urged him to take action.

She knew their situation was worse even than that. She’d sought the mythic song herself, striving to restore that colossal magic from which their race had sprung. She’d studied the legends. She knew the truth. The song called an enormous price from imperfect beings, and they all were, to varying degrees. There was no easy way forward. It would cost her many things.

But she knew something else, too: a thing not even the Unseelie king knew. If she were able to manipulate and seduce him into saving Dublin, thereby her court, the price demanded would be levied most harshly against him.

The tapestry she’d become rippled and shuddered as she watched the residue of the Unseelie king’s lies. For if she believed them, it was her on that pile of lush furs and bloodred rose petals, as diamonds floated lazily on the air, illuminating the chamber with millions of tiny twinkling stars.

If she believed him, she had once been mortal, and once been in love with the slaughterer of their race, the maker of the abominations, the one who’d cared nothing for the former queen to whom he’d been trothed, and less for the court he’d abandoned.

Cruce forced a cup from the cauldron of forgetting on you, the king had said before he left.

She’d never drunk from the cauldron. The queen was not allowed.

Before you were queen. When you were mine.

She didn’t believe him. Refused to believe him. And even if she had—how could it matter? She was what she was now. The Seelie queen, leader of the True Race. She’d spent her entire existence as that. Had no memory of his lies. Wanted none.

And yet, she could divine no purpose for this charade.

He needed nothing from her. He was the Unseelie king. He was an it, an entity, a state of existence, enormously beyond any of their race’s comprehension. He needed nothing from no one. Legend was too complex and contradictory to unravel his origins. Or theirs.

She narrowed her fibrous eyes, the threads of the tapestry rippling. How could such a being as the mad king fabricate such depth of emotion as she was now seeing?

Emotion was alien to their race in this, its purest essence. They felt but facsimiles of it, enhanced by living with the primitive race she’d chosen to settle her people among, for that very reason. To expand their pale existence, to amplify their wan desires in order to sate them more amply.

Yet on the great round dais, a woman that looked and moved identically to her, gazed down at the being she’d taken inside her body, inside her very soul, and laughed as Aoibheal had never known laughter. Touched as she herself had never touched. Was moved by the king she loathed far more intimately and with greater sensation than she had ever believed possible.

Forget your foolish quest, the woman on the bed said, sobering suddenly. Run away with me.

The king residue was abruptly angry. She could feel it, even as a tapestry. We had this conversation. We will never have it again.

It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t need to live forever.

You won’t be the one left behind when you die.

Make yourself human with me, then.

Aoibheal narrowed her eyes further. A Fae make itself human for a human? Never. Only one, Adam Black, had ever insisted on such an absurd, devaluing action, and there were reasons for his madness that were her fault entirely.

The king displayed the proper Fae response.

Revulsion.

Refusal to abandon the glory that it was to be of the Old Race, the honored ones, the First Race. Perhaps in his case even—the First One. Still…the song had not been entrusted to him. Rather to a female. For good reason. Women were not blinded by passion. They were clarified by it.

As the king rose and towered over the woman he claimed Aoibheal was, she felt what the woman on the bed felt and it was chafing and uncomfortable: tired of fighting for something she knew she would never attain. Weary of trying to make the blind see. Knowing her lover had passed beyond her ability to reach.

But the woman on the bed felt something else Aoibheal could not understand at all.

That love was the most important thing in the universe. More so even than the song. That without love and without freedom, life was worth nothing.

The woman on the bed wept after the king was gone.

The woman in the tapestry watched in silence.

If she must pretend to be that woman to secure her Court’s existence, so be it.

But it would cost the king everything.

26

“It can’t be human,” I protested, staring at the thing that looked so heartbreakingly like my sister. “It’s not possible. I’ve heard of doppelgangers but I don’t believe in them. Not this perfect. Not this detailed.” Except for a few minor things, like the diamond ring on her finger.

The imposter was sitting, leaning against the crate, its head swinging back and forth between us, eyeing me warily as if to ascertain I wasn’t about to begin moving toward it again.

I gazed at Barrons in mute pain and protest. Now more than ever, I was wondering if I’d ever escaped the Sinsar Dubh’s clutches that night in BB&B.

You are here and I am here and this is real. Barrons shot me a cool, dark look. Don’t flake out on me now, Ms. Lane.

I stiffened. I never flake out.

Remember that. And don’t do it. Focus on the moment. We’ll figure this out. You’re trying to see the whole fucking picture in a single moment. That’s enough to make anyone crazy. What do you do on a bloody minefield?

Try to get off it?

One step at a time.

He was right. Focus on the moment.

I looked back at the thing masquerading as my sister. It sat, looking as confused and disturbed as it had since the moment I’d first seen it. Then it looked up at Barrons, searchingly. “Who are you? What are you to her?”

Barrons said nothing. Answering questions isn’t high on his list with anyone but me, and that’s only because I have things he wants.

It went on in a rush, “My sister is carrying the Sinsar Dubh. It’s in her clothing somewhere. We have to get it away from her. We have to save her.” It cringed as it spoke the words, snatching a quick glance at me, as if it expected me to suddenly rain death and destruction on its head for speaking those words.

“I’m not carrying the Sinsar Dubh,” I snapped to whatever it was. “It’s inside me. It has been since birth. But it’s not in control of me.”

I hoped.

It blinked at me. “What?”

“My sister died over a year ago in an alley on the south side of the River Liffey after scratching a clue into the pavement. What was that clue?”

“It was 1247 LaRuhe, Jr. But, Mac, I didn’t die.”

I felt like I’d just been kicked in the stomach by a team of frigging Clydesdales. For the teeniest of instants I wondered if it was possible. “Someone watched you die,” I prompted.

“A girl with red hair. She took me to the alley. But she left before I…I—”

“Before you what?” I demanded coldly.

It shook its head, looking hurt and confused and lost. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. It’s all…fuzzy.”

Oh, that was convenient. “You don’t remember. That’s because my sister died. Dead people don’t remember things. They sent Alina’s body home to me. I saw it. I buried it.” I’d mourned it. It had become my inciting incident, the catalyst that had reshaped my entire life.

“Mac,” it gasped. “I don’t know! All I know is I was in that alley and I was gouging a clue into the pavement for you. Then…I guess…I must have lost consciousness or something. Then two days ago I found myself standing in the middle of Temple Bar with no freaking clue how’d I gotten there! I have no idea what happened. And everything has changed! It’s all so different, like I came to in the wrong—” It broke off, narrowing its eyes. “That happened a year ago? I was in that alley a year ago? I’ve lost a year? What is the date, I need to know the date!” Its voice rose with hysteria as it surged to its feet.

I took a step forward without meaning to and it pressed back against the crate, trying to become paper thin. Its hands went to its head, then one shot out to ward me off. “No, please, don’t come any closer!” It whimpered until I took a step back.

I looked at Barrons.

It is conceivable, his eyes said.

“Bullshit!” I snapped. “Then how do you explain the body I buried?”

Fae illusion?

I cursed and spun away. Turned my back on the imposter. I couldn’t keep looking at it. It was dicking with me royally. I couldn’t believe the body I’d buried hadn’t been her body. I didn’t want to believe it.

Because deep down—desperately and with every ounce of my being—I wanted to believe it. Discover that someone, somehow, perhaps a Fae, had hidden my sister away and she’d never died at all. What a dream come true!

Unfortunately, I don’t believe in clichéd happy endings anymore.

“Why do you have a ring on your finger?” I shot over my shoulder.

“Darroc asked me to marry him.” Its voice caught on a sob. “You said he’s dead. Is that true? Have I really been missing for a year? Is he alive? Tell me he’s alive!”

I glanced over my shoulder at Barrons. Is it really human? Could whatever it is be fooling even you? I sent silently.

I sense her as fully human. Further, Ms. Lane, she smells like you.

I blinked, my eyes snapping wide. Do you think she’s my sister? If Barrons believed it, I might have a complete meltdown. Or suspect my entire reality of being false. Barrons was nobody’s sucker.

Not enough evidence to make that call.

What do I do?

What do you want to do?

Get that thing out of here.

Kill it?

No. Remove it

What will that accomplish, Ms. Lane?

It will make me feel better at this very moment and that’s enough.

Continue questioning her, he ordered.

I don’t want to.

Do it anyway. I’m not taking her anywhere.

She’s not a “her.” She’s an “it.”

She’s human. Deal with it.

I waited for him to remove the imposter. He didn’t. Pissed, raw, seething, I kicked a crate out from the wall and dropped down on it. “You can start by telling me about your childhood,” I fired at it.

It gave me a look. “You tell me,” it fired right back.

“I thought you were afraid of me,” I reminded.

“You haven’t done anything.” It shrugged. “At least not yet. And you’re staying far enough away. Besides, if I really lost a year and Darroc’s dead, do your worst,” it said bitterly. “You’ve got my sister. I don’t have anything left to lose.”

“Mom and Dad.”

“Don’t you dare threaten them!”

I shook my head. It was acting like my sister. Bluffing me like I would have bluffed. Tried to keep the Book from knowing I had parents, if it didn’t already know, then threatening if the Book appeared to be threatening them. Another twist of the worm in my apple. I was rapidly losing my grip on reality.

“Who was your first?” Failure, I didn’t add.

It snorted. “Leave it to you to remind me of that. LDL.”

Limp-dick-Luke. The town jock had remained a virgin much longer than most high school guys for a reason. He hadn’t wanted word to get out that the powerhouse on the football field wasn’t in bed. The loss of her virginity had been an epic failure. He’d never managed to get hard enough to break her hymen. But Alina had never told. Only me, and we’d christened him LDL. I’d never told either.

If my sister wasn’t dead, what had I been fighting for? Grieving? Avenging? If my sister wasn’t dead, where the hell had she been for a year?

Dani carried the blame for her death. If my sister wasn’t dead, what really happened that night in the alley?

“Rightie?” I looked at Barrons. I so didn’t want this thing—or anyone for that matter—checking out that man’s package, but there were things, intimate things, Alina and I had shared. Such as eyeing a man’s crotch and deciding which side he tucked his dick down. Alina used to say, “if you can’t tell where it is, Jr., you don’t want to know any more about it.” Because it wasn’t big enough to be noticeable.

Barrons stood, legs wide, arms folded, blocking the stairs, watching us with dispassionate calm, studying, analyzing, mining this unfolding madness for validity.

Its eyebrows rose as it looked at him. “Goodness. Serious leftie.”

Barrons shot me a lethal look.

I ignored it. I wished I could figure out something to ask the fraud that I didn’t know the answer to, because if this was some kind of projection, the Book inside me could very well have access to all the information I did. Might have “skimmed my mind” like the corporeal one for every last detail. But if I didn’t know the answer, I couldn’t confirm it. Complete catch-22.

You’re thinking with your brain, Ms. Lane. It’s not your most discerning organ.

What is? I snapped silently.

Your gut. Humans complicate everything. The body knows. Humans censor it. Ask. Listen. Feel.

I blew out an angry breath and shoved my hair back. “Tell me about your childhood,” I said again.

“How do I know you’re not the Sinsar Dubh, playing games with me?” it said.

“Ditto,” I said tightly. “Maybe what’s inside me is merely projecting you.” And I was lost in a vortex of illusions.

Understanding manifested in its eyes as it absorbed what I’d said. “Oh, God, neither of us know for sure. Shit, Jr.!”

“You never used to say—”

“I know, fudge-buckets, petunia, daisies, frog. We made up our own cuss words.” It snorted and we both blurted at the same time, “Because pretty women don’t have ugly mouths.”

It laughed.

I bit my tongue. Hating that I’d spoken with the imposter. The inflection so much the same. Cant of head nearly identical. I refused to laugh. Refused to share one moment of camaraderie with a thing that simply couldn’t exist.

“How is the Book inside you? I don’t understand,” it said. “And why hasn’t it taken you over? I heard it corrupted anyone that touched it.”

“I’m the one asking the—”

“And exactly why is that? If you really are Mac, with the Book inside you somehow, and you aren’t corrupted, and I really am your older sister”—it emphasized its seniority just like Alina would have—“and I’m not dead, don’t I deserve a little understanding?” It frowned. “Mac, is Darroc really dead? I can’t find him anywhere.” Its face seemed to tremble for a moment, threaten to collapse into tears, then it stiffened. “Seriously. Tell me about Darroc and what the heck happened to Dublin, and I’ll tell you about my childhood.”

I sighed. If this was somehow magically my sister, she was as stubborn in her own way as I was. If it wasn’t, I still obviously wasn’t going to get anywhere unless I bartered a bit.

So, I filled it in on Darroc’s pointless death when the Book had popped his head like a grape and gave it a scant sketch of recent events. Then I folded my arms and leaned back against the wall.

“Your turn,” I said to the softly weeping woman.

27

Jada knifed into the night, sharp, hard, and deadly.

This she understood. Killing made her feel alive.

She chose to believe she’d been born the way she was—not mutated as Rowena’s journals had implied with endless self-aggrandizement—and this was her gift to her beloved city: cleansing the streets of those who would prey on innocents.

It didn’t signify if her victims were Fae or human.

If they destroyed, they were destroyed. She knew a thing about human monsters: they were often the worst kind.

Killing those who killed was clean, simple, a calling. It distilled her, burned her down to fierce white light inside. Few had the taste for it. It was messy. It was violent. It was personal, no matter how impersonally she dealt the death blow, because at some point, whether Fae or human, their eyes met, and psychopaths and monsters also had plans, goals, investment in their existence, and resented dying, hated it, flung slurs and curses, sometimes begged with fear-slicked eyes.

She’d once thought she and Mac were the perfect pair. Mac could kill as coldly and competently, though not as quickly.

Each rabid dog Jada put down saved the lives of countless good people, normal people unlike her, those who cared and could make the world a better place for the children, for the old ones, for the weaker ones who should be protected. She knew what she was and wasn’t, never a daily need filler, but a big-picture woman.

She appreciated her gifts for what they were: speed, dexterity, the acute vision, auditory and olfactory senses of an animal, a brain that could compartmentalize the most minute details, divvying things up and sealing them off so nothing interfered with her mission.

Jada sliced her way through the streets of Dublin beneath a full moon haloed by a rim of crimson. Blood in the sky, blood in the streets, fire in her blade and heart. She stabbed and sliced, flayed and felled, reveling in purity of purpose.

Since her last rampage, the Unseelie had changed their tactics, donning glamour, clustering in groups.

They thought this afforded them protection. They were wrong.

She could take out a group as easily as a single enemy, and it saved her time hunting them individually. The stumpy-legged slow ones Mac had christened Rhino-boys were too easy. She preferred the red-and-black-clad guards to the highest castes: not sifters themselves but nearly as fast as she was, highly trained in combat.

Then there were the singularities, her preference. Sifters, they had to be trapped in a net of iron or lured into a metal-walled pit. Those were the ones that tried to tempt her with offers of the glories they could bestow with their enormous power.

Nothing affected her resolve. She was untouched by any plea, every offer.

She knew what she was. She knew what she wanted. And the tattoo Ryodan was taking his bloody time layering into her skin was critical to her goals.

She sputtered in the slipstream, dropped down without meaning to, and stumbled into a park bench, bruising her shin. She snapped her sword up sharp and hard, spun, checking all directions. She was alone. Nothing to kill.

Ryodan. The prick.

She inhaled deeply of crisp, humid, ocean-salted air. Breath was everything. When nothing else could be done: one could breathe and shape and infuse that breath with strength and purpose. She tossed her head and straightened her spine.

Ryodan had knocked her out of the slipstream in the abbey.

And just now, in the street, the mere irritating thought of him had disrupted her focus, impairing precise manipulation of a delicate dimension.

She scraped loose strands of hair from her face, smoothed it back using the blood and goo on her hands, and plastered it smoothly, albeit chunkily, behind an ear. Then she reached into a boot and retrieved one of the last remaining pods she’d found Silverside, popped and swallowed it. She despised the thought of carrying boxes of protein bars around with her all the time, wasting space she might otherwise use for weapons and ammo. She was curious whether Dancer might invent a more potent and portable source of fuel in his endless experiments at Trinity College’s abandoned labs.

A dry chittering above pressed her back into the shadows of a nearby doorway. Tipping her chin upward, she peered with narrowed eyes, wondering if they, too, could be slain. Analyzed potential methods of trapping them. Mac’s stalkers had ceased trailing her for some reason, and although Jada had never seen them harm anyone, she knew they were neither benevolent nor benign.

A flock of a hundred or more carrion wraiths flew overhead, streaking across the crimson-ringed moon, cloaks trailing like ghastly skeletal black fingers beneath wispy low-hanging clouds. Their faces glinted with metallic adornments, and she shivered, an atavistic response. She recognized the flocking pattern: they were hunting. But what? Mac was visible again, and though the teenager she’d once been would have wondered about the hows and whys of that, the woman she’d become wondered about nothing that didn’t further her purposes.

Only when the zombie eating wraiths—the ZEWS—had passed did she slide back up into the slipstream and head for Chester’s.

Three days, he’d said. That was how long it would take him to complete his tattoo.

And Jada would have the final weapon she needed.

The great and powerful Ryodan on a leash.

—

“Goddamn it, do you know what you just did?” Ryodan growled when she burst into his office.

Jada dropped into a chair, tossed her legs over the side and folded her arms behind her head. She had no doubt he’d watched her dramatic entrance on one of his endless monitors. Stretching lean, she shot him a cool look. “Walked through the club.” And patrons had parted around her as if she were carrying the Black Plague. Peeled away from the icy killing machine.

“Drenched in Unseelie guts,” he clipped.

“Blood, too,” she said lightly.

“You go slaughtering Fae, then come sauntering into my club wearing pieces of them. My employees serve Fae here.”

“Perhaps they should be on the menus, not in the booths.” He was as angry as she’d ever seen him. Good. Maybe he’d work faster to get rid of her tonight. She and Dancer could investigate the black holes without him. Once she had the map. “Have the rules changed and I didn’t get the memo? Last I heard, I wasn’t supposed to kill on your turf. I didn’t.”

He moved so quickly she didn’t see him coming. And she had a moment of sudden insight: not only did he move faster in the slipstream, he accessed it more quickly. She’d never tried to streamline her time entering, only her time within. She added a new challenge to her list.

He towered over her. “Don’t play games with me, Jada. Belligerence is beneath you.”

She neither shifted position nor acknowledged his criticism. “I didn’t have time to change.”

“Then you’ll make it now. I’m not working on you with that much death on your skin.” He raked her with a cool glance. But deep in those silver eyes there was something hot. Excited by the carnage she wore. She narrowed her eyes, expanded her senses, wondering for the umpteenth time about this man’s secrets.

She realized they were both breathing shallowly and instantly altered her pattern, lengthening her inhales and exhales. She didn’t need a mirror to know what she looked like.

Savage. Eyes much too bright, hot and cold at the same time.

Blood and guts on her face, in her hair. Covered with it, boots, jeans, skin. Body thrumming with barely harnessed energy.

Hungry, even after so much killing, to lash out, to do something to balance the scales inside her that felt so impossibly out of kilter. “You want me to waste time leaving to take a shower when we have—Don’t touch me!” She was on her feet, yanked to them. Her hands went up and out, blocking, knocking his hands away.

They stood like that, a foot apart, and she thought for a moment he was going to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, but he didn’t. Merely let his hands fall. Good thing. She would have kicked his ass across the office.

He said coldly, “You tell yourself you’ve learned the right things to turn on and off inside you. You haven’t. You killed tonight with fury. I smell it on you. And you lied to yourself while doing it. You killed from the pain of not knowing how the fuck to live in this world. Get used to it. A superhero doesn’t flaunt his kills. He slides in, takes the lives he came for, and slides back out, wearing shadow.”

“How would you know? You’re the villain of the piece.”

“Not tonight, Jada. Tonight it was you. How many did you kill?”

She said nothing. She had no idea.

“How many were human?”

Again she said nothing.

“And you’re certain they deserved to die. Certain you’re thinking coolly enough to pass that judgment.”

She could stand in silence a long time.

“I’ll say it one more time. Jada. Let me teach you.”

“The only thing I’ll let you do is tattoo me.”

“You’re brittle.”

“I’m steel.”

“Brittle snaps.”

“Steel bends.”

“Christ, you’re so close.” He shook his head in disgust.

“To what?” she said derisively. “To the way you think I should be? Isn’t that what you’ve always been doing? Like Rowena? Experimenting on me? Determined to make me what you want?”

He went still, assessing her intently. “You know what Rowena did.”

“I live inside my own head. I’m brilliant.”

He didn’t speak for a moment, as if debating what to say and what not to say, and she wondered what he thought he knew that she didn’t. Measuring her. Deeming her, if she could read the look in his eyes, on the verge of an explosion. She wasn’t. She had herself completely under control. To prove it, she once again adjusted her breathing. Deepening it. She wasn’t entirely certain how it had gotten so shallow again.

He stepped back then, as if giving a cornered, wild animal room so it wouldn’t spook. “Rowena wanted you to be what she wanted you to be,” he said finally. “I want you to be what you want you to be. And it’s not this.”

“You don’t know what I want. Your inferences are incorrect. Tattoo me or I leave.”

Another measured look. “Wash and I’ll tattoo you.”

“Fine. Where’s the nearest lav?” She wanted that tattoo.

Without bothering to reply, he turned for the door.

She followed, chafed that he had something she wanted badly enough that she would follow. Chafed that she was so wired her hand trembled as she swept her sword back to pass through the door.

Chafed that he was right.

She had killed with fury tonight.

She’d played Death like a lover, seeking release. If she’d really wanted to help Dublin the most logical and efficient way possible, she’d have gone to Inspector Jayne, forged a new alliance, and cleaned out his overflowing cages so the Guardians could capture more. Let a hundred Guardians net for her so she could slay even greater numbers. But efficient killing hadn’t appealed to her, standing there, methodically slicing off the heads of dull-eyed, defeated enemies. There was something about the heat of the hunt she’d craved.

She had no desire to analyze motives that had been so clear at the last full moon, now splintered, impaling her every way she turned.

She followed him in silence. She would put up with anything, do virtually anything, to get her tattoo finished.

—

“Unbutton your jeans.”

Resting her head on her arms on the back of a chair, Jada didn’t move. “Make it smaller. I doubt any part of it needs to be on my ass.”

“I won’t bastardize the spell. Do you want it to work or do you want to walk around with a tat that may not perform at the critical moment?”

She popped the top two buttons on her jeans and shoved the waistband down. Then his hands were on the lower part of her back where it met her hips, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from shivering. Her skin felt too hot, the air too cool.

Once, she’d watched him touch a woman like this, close his hands on her body where he was touching her now. He’d been pushing into her from behind and thrown his head back and laughed; beautiful, cool, strong man. She’d wanted to catch that moment in her fourteen-year-old hands, explore it, understand it, strain it through her fingers. Be the cause of it happening.

Joy. This cold, hard man was capable of joy. The conundrum had fascinated her. And stirred something inside her that she now understood with a mature woman’s brain, that moment when her young body had intuited on a visceral level that she, too, would experience those things, that her body was made for it, and soon a whole new realm of experience beyond imagining would open to her.

The fourteen-year-old had crouched, hidden in a ventilation shaft above Level 4, and closed her eyes, pretending to be the woman he was with. Trying to imagine how it would feel. Being the woman who made that man feel that way. Shivering with a blend of sensation so intense it almost hurt: hungry, anxious, wild, too hot, too cold, too alive. She’d found a large vent in a bathroom, sneaked out for a closer look, and nearly gotten caught.

Lust. It was a blinding thing. One might as well gouge out one’s own eyes. Yet for some, indulged as a surface dance between strangers, it was a way of feeling without having to.

She inhaled and straightened her back. Young. Strong. Untouchable. She focused on radiating all those things, particularly the last.

He’d been working on her for over two hours, after a wasted hour in which he’d insisted she clean up and wait until her clothing was laundered by one of his many employees. She would have sat nude in front of him to get the damned ink.

Then again, perhaps not.

She’d examined the beginning of the tat yesterday with a mirror, looking over her shoulder into another mirror. It was a complex pattern with a brand in the center, layered in gray and black and something else, something glittering that wasn’t any type of ink she’d ever seen. It shimmered in the hollow of her back, seeming to move in tandem with her subtlest shift, like silvery fishes beneath the surface of a lake. Somehow he was embedding a spell into her skin. And she hoped—only one. The devil was multifaceted, and so, too, might be his ink.

It offended every ounce of her being to let Ryodan do such a thing. Yet if he could genuinely track her with it no matter where she went, mortal or Silverside, she wanted it more than any other weapon she might have been given. As she’d recently told an Unseelie princess, there was the devil who couldn’t get the job done and wouldn’t eat you, and the one that could but might. She knew which one Ryodan was. And was willing to take her chances. “This would work, even in the Hall of All Days?” she asked again, finding it nearly impossible to believe. But she would be depending on it.

“Hell itself couldn’t keep me from joining you with this on your skin.”

“Why are you doing it?” He always had motives. She couldn’t divine this one. What did it matter to him if she got lost again? She didn’t buy his line that he didn’t lose things that were his. She wasn’t, and they both knew it. He wanted something from her. But what?

“Figure it out. You’re brilliant.”

“You need me to save the world?”

“I don’t need anything.”

That left want. “Why are you always interfering in my life? Don’t you have better things to do?” It had made her feel special all those years ago, that the powerful and mighty Ryodan had paid attention to her. Solicited her input, desired her around. Though she never would have admitted it and had bitched endlessly about it. He’d thought she had a great deal to offer and would one day be “one hell of a woman.” It had given her a kind of aiming-at point. Silverside, she’d kept aiming at it.

Her faith in his power, his attention to those details he’d chosen to track, had been absolute.

She’d waited.

He hadn’t come.

His hands were no longer moving at the base of her spine. She felt nothing for several long moments, then the light dance of his fingers across her scars. He traced one after the next. She should stop him. She didn’t. It was almost as if his fingers were saying: I see every injury you suffered. You survived. Bang-up fucking job, woman.

“I could remove them,” he said.

“Because a woman shouldn’t have battle scars. The same thing that brands a man a hero marks a woman as disfigured.”

“There’s nothing disfigured about you. Except your aim. Work on that.”

She was silent then. She was wary around this new Ryodan; the one that didn’t push and poke and prod but treated her like…well, she wasn’t sure what he was treating her like, and that was the crux of it. She couldn’t get a handle on how to respond to him when she didn’t understand his overtures. It was like trying to return a tennis ball on a court when someone had changed the rules and you didn’t know which spot you were supposed to smash the ball back into. Once, they’d lobbed that ball back and forth like pros, intuiting each other’s every move. Now when he swung, she spent too much time staring at the ball in the air.

In his office, she’d kissed him. He hadn’t kissed her back. Now he was touching her intimately, with her shirt off, but made no move or comment to indicate it was anything but business. Not that she would have entertained anything but business. Why had he said “Kiss me or kill me” that day in his office? Had it been merely another of his position-clarifying tactics, like the night she’d discovered that, although the Crimson Hag had killed him, he’d somehow come back as good as new and insisted she choose between being disappointed that he was still alive or being loyal to him?

He’d brought her to what she was fairly certain were his private quarters, a spartan set of rooms deep beneath Chester’s. She was also fairly certain it wasn’t his only place and, like her and Dancer, he had many well-stocked lairs in which to retreat from the world.

Ultramodern, ultrasleek, the room was shades of chrome and slate and steel. Black, white, and, like the man himself, every shade of gray. In the room adjoining the one in which they sat was a bed with crisp white sheets and a soft, dark velvet spread. The bedroom had smelled of no one but him, which didn’t surprise her. He would never take a woman to one of his places. It was never that personal. The decor was tactile, complex but simple. The kitchen was white quartzite and more steel. The bathroom sculpted of thick, silver-veined marble and glass. Everywhere she looked, the lines were straight, clean, sharp, hard, like the lines of his face, and his philosophy.

“So if I call IISS what happens again?” she fished.

He didn’t reply and she hadn’t expected him to, but nothing ventured nothing gained. Sometimes you could trick an answer out of someone. He’d already given her as much of an answer as he would and it had been a complete nonanswer: hope you never find out.

His finger moved slowly over a long thin scar close to her spine. “Knife?”

“Whip with steel points.”

He touched a spray of white bumps. “Shrapnel?”

“Blow-dart gun.” Filled with tiny crystalized rocks. Blown by a beast on a planet of eternal night.

“This?” He touched a messy, shallow one near her hip.

“Fell down a cliff. Did that one myself.”

“Stay or go?”

“The scars? Stay. I earned them.”

He laughed. After a moment she felt something very like the tip of a knife at the base of her spine. “I’m one inch away from ripping out your throat,” she said softly.

“Blood binds. I need some of yours to set this layer of the spell.”

“How much?”

“Minor.”

“You’re mixing yours with it.”

“Yes.”

Blood spells had nasty, pervasive side effects. This man’s blood in hers was not something she wanted. His tattoo, however, was. “Proceed,” she said without inflection.

He did, and she found herself slipping back into that strange, almost dreamy place she’d been in since he’d begun inking her. As he’d worked, his big strong hands moving with precision against her skin, the angry thrumming in her body had faded, her muscles had stilled, her tension calmed. She was having a hard time remembering what had driven her out into the streets today on such a murderous rampage. Languor infused her limbs and her stomach no longer hurt. Her psyche was beginning to feel drowsy and relaxed, as if she could just stretch out and sleep for a long, long time and not have to worry while she did because this man would stand guard and she could rest knowing that whatever predators were on this world, the world’s greatest predator was right next to her and she was sa—

She sat up straighter, flexed her muscles and snapped back into high alert.

There was no such thing as safe. Safe was a trap, an ideal that could never be achieved. And hero worship was pointless. There were no heroes. Only her.

Behind her, he said, “You don’t have to be on guard all the time. Nothing can hurt you here.”

He was wrong. Anytime there was another person in the room with you, the possibility for hurt existed.

“You’re doing something to me,” she accused.

“I can have a certain…agitating effect on a woman.”

He meant “whip her into a frenzy.” She’d seen him do it.

“I can also have a gentling one.”

“Stop it. I didn’t ask for it.”

He pressed his wrist to the base of her spine, held it a long moment, no doubt melding blood with blood, then said, “That’s it for tonight.”

“Finish it,” she demanded. “I know you can.” There was a sudden coldness behind her as the heat of his body vanished.

Her shirt hit her in the shoulder, and after a moment she yanked it on over her bra, knowing it was pointless to argue. She stood, stretched, and turned around.

“Tell me what happened to you in the Silvers and I’ll finish it.”

They looked at each other across the space of the chair. “I grew up,” she said.

“The long version.”

“That was it. You said you’d give me the map.”

He tossed it to her and she caught it with one hand, slipped it into her pack. Of course he’d give it to her now. He knew she’d return for the tattoo. She’d wanted the map for two reasons: to test theories on the smallest of the holes, and alert people of their precise locations to avoid inadvertent deaths. Of far greater importance was finding a way to remove the cosmic leeches from the fabric of their reality.

“Tomorrow night, same time?” she said.

“I’m busy tomorrow night.”

Fucker. He was going to dick with her about finishing the tat?

He herded her to the door with his presence, subtly yet irrefutably.

“Got a date with Jo?” she said coolly.

“Jo’s fucking Lor.”

She looked at him. “How did that happen? Lor does blondes. And I thought you and Jo were exclusive.” She hadn’t believed that for a moment. Jo wasn’t Ryodan’s type.

His cool eyes lit with amusement. “It was a getting-over-the-ex fuck. And now they’re both tangled up in it.”

She arched a brow. “You dumped her, so she pulled a revenge fuck?”

“She dumped me. And her take on it was ‘scraping the taste of me off her tongue.’ ”

No woman dumped Ryodan. Or scraped the taste off. If Jo had, he’d not only let her, but set the plan in motion. “What are your plans for tomorrow night? Cancel them. This is more important. I could get lost,” she ordered.

“I suggest you avoid mirrors until we complete it. Day after. My office in the morning. I’ll finish it.”

“Tomorrow. During the day.”

“Busy then, too.”

Why was he delaying? What was his motive? “I’ll just let myself out.”

“You won’t. You have the sword. I have patrons. I plan to keep them.”

She was silent a moment then said, “I won’t kill any of them, Ryodan. I’ll respect your territory.”

“If I respect yours.”

“Yes.”

He held out a cellphone. “Take it. IISS won’t work yet but the other numbers will.”

She slipped the cell into her pocket as she slipped out the door.

He closed it behind her, remaining inside, allowing her to leave unattended because she’d given her word. He’d taken her word as covenant.

She turned for no reason she could discern and placed her hand, palm flat, to the door.

Stared at it, head cocked, wondering what the hell she was doing.

After a moment she shook herself and strode briskly down the hall, swiped the panel and entered the elevator. The teen she’d been would have barged into every one of Ryodan’s private places on these forbidden lower levels she could invade before he managed to stop her. And, she understood now, she’d have done it mostly for the rush of their confrontation when he finally did.

The woman had her own business to attend.

Inside the room, Ryodan removed his hand from the door.

—

“Is it the day yet? Is it? Is it? IS IT?” Shazam exploded from beneath a tangle of blankets and not one pillow, later that night when she entered their chambers.

“Soon,” she promised. “And keep your voice down,” she reminded.

“You smell again,” Shazam fretted, turning circles in agitation. “I don’t like the smell of him. He’s dangerous.”

“He’s necessary. For now.”

When she stretched out on the bed, Shazam pounced, landing on her stomach with all four paws, hard. “Not one thing more? Just necessary?”

“Ow! Good thing I didn’t have to go to the bathroom!” She knew from too many enthusiastic early-morning greetings that forty-odd pounds of Shazam was hell on a full bladder. Not to mention the tenderness of a fresh tat pressing into the bed. “Not one thing more,” she assured him.

“Did he finish it?”

“Not yet. Soon.”

He deflated as abruptly as the melodramatic beast was wont. “It’s all going to go horribly wrong,” he wailed. “Everything always does.” He sniffed, violet eyes dewing.

“Don’t be such a pessimist.”

He ruched the fur along his spine and spat a sharp hiss at her, working himself into a snit. “Pessimists are only pessimists when they’re wrong. When we’re right, the world calls us prophets.”

“Ew, fish breath!”

“Your pitiful offerings, my bad breath. Bring me better things to eat.”

“We’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

He shifted his furry bulk around, parking his rump south of her chest (soft spots he wasn’t allowed to pounce ever), his belly so fat he had to spread his great front paws around it. Then he leaned forward and slowly touched his wet nose to hers. “I see you, Yi-yi.”

She smiled. Everything she knew about love she’d learned from this pudgy, cranky, manic-depressive, binge-eating beast that had been her companion through hell and back, too many times to count. He alone had protected her, loved her, fought for her, taught her to believe that life was worth living, even if there was no one there to see you living it.

“I see you, too, Shazam.”

28

I’d left her. The woman that looked like my sister and had far too many of her memories and unique characteristics—I just left her there—in the basement where I’d been Pri-ya, sitting in the middle of crates of guns and ammo and various food supplies, looking unbearably lost and sad.

So, Mom and Dad think I’m dead? she’d asked as I was leaving.

They buried you. So did I, I’d flung over my shoulder.

Are they okay, Jr.? Did Mom lose it when she thought I was dead? Was Daddy—

They’re here in Dublin, I’d cut her off coldly. Ask them yourself. Go try to convince them. On second thought, don’t. Stay away from my parents. Don’t you dare go near them.

They’re my parents, too! Mac, you have to believe me. Why would I lie? Who else would I be? What’s wrong? What happened to you? How you did get so…hard?

I’d stormed out. Some part of me had simply shut down and there’d been no turning it back on. I’d gotten “hard,” as she called it, because my sister had been murdered.

For the past twenty-four hours I’d refused to even think about the imposter. I’d done nearly as good a job of keeping it in a box as I did with the Book.

But when it seeped out, it went something like this:

What if it really was her?

My sister, alone out there, and I’d turned my back on Alina in this dangerous, Fae-riddled city?

What if she got hurt? What if she was somehow truly, miraculously alive and ended up getting killed by a black hole or an Unseelie because I’d stormed away and left her alone, too wary, too suspicious, to let myself believe?

I’d have gotten my second chance—and blown it.

I suspected I might kill myself if that turned out to be the case.

What if she went to see my parents? They wouldn’t be as realistic as me. They’d welcome her back blindly. Daddy might start to feel skeptical in time but I guaran-damn-tee if that imposter knocked on their door, they’d let her inside their house in one second flat.

On the other and just as plausible hand: what if it was an imposter sent to fuck me up royally, get me to trust it, only to do something terrible to me in an unguarded moment? Who could get closer to me (and my parents) than my sister?

Or what if I was stuck in one gigantic illusion that hadn’t ended since the night I thought I’d bested the Sinsar Dubh?

Because I longed so desperately for it to be her, to believe that Alina had somehow survived, and I wasn’t stuck in an illusion, I was a hundred times more suspicious of this whole situation. My sister was my ultimate weakness, next to Barrons. She was the perfect way to get to me, to manipulate me. She was the very thing Cruce and Darroc and the Book had all offered me back, at one point or another, to try to tempt me.

I’d lived with Alina’s ghost too long. I may not have made peace with it, but I’d accepted her death. There was a painful closure in that, a door that couldn’t easily be reopened.

She claimed she couldn’t remember a single thing from the moment she’d passed out in that alley until she’d been standing in Temple Bar, a few days ago.

How convenient was that?

You couldn’t refute amnesia. Couldn’t argue a single detail. Because there were no details.

Just exactly what might have happened to her? Was I supposed to believe some fairy godmother (or Faery godmother, to be precise) had swooped in, rescued her moments before she died, healed her then put her on ice until this week? Why would any Fae do that?

Dani believed she’d killed Alina. No, I’d never gotten full details. I didn’t know if she actually remained in that alley until Alina was stone-cold dead or not. Nor did I think Jada would tell me, if I were to ask. And on that note, I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want Jada/Dani having to relive it.

Oh, God, what if they ran into each other in the streets?

I glanced at Barrons as we ascended the stairs to Ryodan’s office. “There’s no other solution, Barrons,” I said bitterly. “I’m going to have to talk to it again. I need you to—”

He gave me a dry look. “Check your cellphone.”

“Huh?”

“The thing you call me on.”

I rolled my eyes, pulled it out. “I know what a cellphone is. What am I looking for?”

“Contacts.”

I thumbed it up. I had four, since he’d hooked up my parents to their incomprehensible network. There were now five.

Alina.

“You put the thing’s phone number in my cell? How does it even have a phone that works? The only network running is hardwired and about as reliable as—Wait a minute, you gave it one of your phones? When?”

“Her. Quit trying to carve emotional space with pronouns. And I’m not your bloodhound,” he growled. “You don’t dispatch me to fetch prey. When I hunt, it ends in savagery, not a fucking soap opera.”

“It wasn’t a soap opera,” I said defensively. The imposter might have been hysterical but I’d been cool as a cucumber.

He shot me a look. “The dead sister always comes back. Or the dead husband. Or the evil twin. Mayhem and murder inevitably ensue.”

“Who even says words like ‘mayhem’?” At some point, while I slept, anticipating I’d want to talk to it again, Barrons had taken a phone to it and programmed mine. And washed his hands of us. I glanced at him sideways. Or not. Knowing him, he would keep a close eye on the imposter.

“You think I should have kept interrogating it—her,” I said irritably. Easy for him to think. His heart hadn’t been quietly hemorrhaging while looking at it. He hadn’t been the one questioning his own sanity.

He gave me another look. “Strip the scenario of your volatile emotions,” he clipped.

I bristled. “You like my volatile emotions.”

“They belong in one place, Ms. Lane. My bed. My floor. Up against my wall.”

“That’s three places,” I said pissily.

“Any fucking place I’m inside you. That’s one. Keep your friends close. Enemies closer,” he said tightly. “She’s indisputably one or the other. And you bloody well let her walk away.” He turned and stalked off down the corridor.

I stared after him with a sinking feeling. Damn the man, he was right. Whatever the Alina look-alike was, forcing it out of my space and mind might assuage my immediate discomfort but that only increased the potential for future peril. Mine, hers, my parents, everyone’s.

I sighed and hurried after him. I would call the imposter the moment our meeting was over.

Assuming we all survived it.

—

When we entered Ryodan’s office, Sean O’Bannion was standing inside. Nephew to the dead mobster Rocky O’Bannion, he shared the same rugged, black Irish muscular build and good looks and was Katarina’s lover. Well, unless something was happening downstairs with Kasteo, he was. Staying in close quarters with one of the Nine, alone for a long period of time, was pretty much the worst thing a woman in a monogamous relationship could do. I wondered why she was down there. Why Ryodan had permitted it. There was no way Kat would come out of that room the same as she’d gone in.

“You haven’t seen Katarina at all?” Sean was saying to Ryodan. “Since when? Killian said he saw her here a few weeks ago.”

“This Killian of yours told you she was in my office?” Ryodan said.

“No, he said he saw her walking through the club. Said she seemed hell-bent on something. He kept an eye out for her but didn’t see her leave. I’ve not been able to find her since.”

Ryodan said, “I haven’t seen her lately.” He glanced up and shot me a hard look: Speak and I’ll rip out your bloody throat, woman.

Beside me, Barrons growled softly.

I’d made two oaths during my time in Dublin: one to the Gray Woman, with my proverbial fingers crossed because the bitch had tried to kill Dani and that was unforgivable enough in and of itself, but I’d also known she was going to kill still more innocents. Endlessly, until she was stopped. Steal their beauty, torture and play with them while they died. They would be someone’s sister, brother, son, daughter. And more of the human race would be lost. I’d never had any intention of honoring it. A coerced oath, forced by a murderer, while threatening the life of someone I love, is not an oath. It’s extortion.

I’d taken another oath, more recently, that I would keep forever. Even if it cost me. Even if it pained me enormously, which I was certain it would. I held Ryodan’s gaze levelly. Your secrets, mine.

After a moment he inclined his head.

Sean turned to look at me. “Have you seen Kat, Mac?”

“Not lately.” I availed myself of Ryodan’s technique, which even Christian would have had a hard time seeing through. I hadn’t seen her. Lately. Depending on how you defined lately. The trick was the same as outsmarting a polygraph, tell your mind the truth while telling the lie. “But I’m sure she’s okay,” I added hastily, not wanting him to worry more than he was. The skin beneath his eyes was smudged dark from stress and lack of sleep. I could only imagine what he was going through.

“I’m not so bloody sure. She’s been missing for weeks.”

“Dani was missing for weeks, too,” I said. “And she’s back just fine now.” Well, that wasn’t entirely accurate but she was back. “I’m sure she’ll show up. Maybe she’s off on confidential sidhe-seer business or something.” One thing I knew for sure, Kat was safe where she was. Physically. Mostly.

He shook his head. “No one at the abbey has seen or heard from her. And Kat’s never gone somewhere without telling me first. We tell each other everything.”

Ryodan said dryly, “No one tells each other everything.”

“We do,” Sean said coolly. “I’m sore fashed and I’ll tell you that. It’s not like my Kat. I’ve been dropping by Dublin Castle twice a day, checking the bodies the Garda are collecting off the streets.”

I cringed inwardly. “I’m so sorry, Sean. Is there anything I can do to help?” It was all I could do not to shoot Ryodan a nasty look. Sean was worried sick about Kat and he had every reason to be. If someone went missing in Dublin these days, the odds were high they were dead.

Sean said soberly, “Aye, keep your eye out. Let me know if you hear a whisper of a word about her. You’ll find me in the piano pub with the lads most evenings. If I’m not there, any one of them will get word to me.”

“I’ll let you know if I hear anything,” I promised.

He nodded and stepped out.

The moment the door closed, I spun on Ryodan and hissed, “I’ll keep your secrets, but you need to let him know somehow that she’s all right.”

“Because it’s not fair,” he mocked.

“Because there’s no need to inflict suffering if you can prevent it,” I retorted.

Those cool silver eyes dismissed me. “He’ll brood, he’ll pine. She’ll return. He’ll get over it. No damage done.”

I scowled at him. The man was as immutable as Barrons. They didn’t view a month of worry as remotely significant because a month was the blink of an eye to them, and besides, everyone died.

Immortals. Pains in the asses, every one of them.

“Let’s get this over with,” I said brusquely. “I have things to do.”

—

Our path to the small cell in the dungeon was interrupted again, this time by Christian MacKeltar.

The moment we stepped off the elevator and turned left, I felt an icy wind at my back and he was there.

I turned and gasped, startled. Christian looked nearly full Unseelie prince, taller than he usually was, much broader through the shoulders, with great black wings angled up and back and still sweeping the floor. Anger colored him in shades of the Unseelie prison. Ice dusted his wings, his face.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” he snarled at Ryodan. “I can’t do this. I won’t.”

“Then your uncle will suffer.”

“You do it!”

“I did the hard part. He’s alive.”

“He’s never going to forgive you.”

“Yes he will. Because one day he’ll feel something besides the pain and horror and he’ll be glad that he’s alive. No matter the price. That’s the way it works for men of a certain ilk. But you know that, don’t you, Highlander?”

Ryodan turned away and we resumed walking toward the cell in silence, buffeted by an icy breeze.

—

In the narrow stone cell, I dropped into a chair, edgy and irritable.

My Unseelie flesh high had evaporated without warning, late this afternoon at BB&B, while I was struggling to disengage one of my least damaged bookcases from a pile of splintered furniture and stand it upright again.

The unwieldy tower of shelves had fractured several toes when it crashed to the floor, inadequately supported by abruptly too-weak muscles. Fortunately, even without Unseelie flesh, I heal quickly and no longer sported even a slight limp.

Unfortunately, withdrawal was setting in, making me short-tempered and more impatient than ever.

I wanted this over with. I’d already decided to tell them I still couldn’t find the Book, even with my sidhe-seer senses open again. How would they feel if I tried to make them go rooting around inside themselves for whatever was in there? Attempted to get them to let me use their inner demon in its wildest, most uncontrolled form?

They wouldn’t tolerate it for a second. Why should I? There had to be another way to save our world. Speaking of, before I went disturbing anything I shouldn’t, I glanced at Barrons. I have to show you something back at the bookstore. Tonight.

Can it wait?

It shouldn’t. It could help us with the black holes. But I want you to take it. I’m not the one to use it.

He inclined his head in assent.

If something goes wrong…I told him where to find it, figuring him finding my journals, too, would no longer matter to me if the worst happened tonight.

Nothing will go wrong.

Easy for him to say. My Book had been far too quiet lately.

I closed my eyes and pretended to be sinking inside, questing for my inner lake, beneath which gleamed a monster. Recalling the first time I’d discovered the place, the dark chamber, the freedom and power I’d sensed in it. Before I’d known how corrupted it was.

I’d once loved having that inner lake. Now I despised it.

A flood of water exploded inside me, gushing up, icy and black. I choked and sputtered and my eyes shot open.

“What is it,” Ryodan demanded.

I swallowed surprisingly dryly, for all the water inside me. “Indigestion,” I said. “I don’t think this is going to work.”

Ryodan said, “We’ve got all night.”

And I had no doubt he would sit here all night with me, and make sure I sat here, too.

I closed my eyes again and sat very still, not reaching, merely feeling tentatively. What was going on? My lake had never exploded up to meet me like that, nearly drowning me.

Waters rippled and stirred. Deep down, carving chasms in my soul, there was a rapid, rushing current. I didn’t like it. I’d never felt it before. My lake had always been still, serene, glassy, disturbed only when things of enormous power floated to its surface.

Yet now I felt as if there was something in there that contained a vicious undertow. And I might get swept away by it if I wasn’t careful.

I opened my eyes. “Just exactly how do you think the Book could possibly be of any use to us?”

“We’ve been through this.”

“I can’t read it. I won’t open it.”

“Fear of a thing,” Barrons said, “is often bigger than the thing.”

“And if the damn ‘thing’ is even a tenth the size of my fear of it, that’s bad enough,” I retorted. “You stood in the street with me and watched what it did to Derek O’Bannion. It came after you, too. You sensed its power. And you’re the one that told me if I took even one spell from it, I wouldn’t ever be the same.”

“I said if you ‘took’ a spell. It’s possible there’s a way to access information without taking one. It’s conceivable you could read it without utilizing an ounce of magic. Like Cruce. You know the First Language.”

Was it possible? His contention didn’t sound entirely implausible. I did know the First Language, there inside me in the tatters of the king’s memory. But those memories were part of the Book itself. If I reached for my knowledge of the First Language without it being offered, did that mean I was opening the Book? “I’ve always felt that simply opening it of my own will would doom me.”

“It’s already been open. You closed it.”

I hadn’t thought about any of this in months. I’d shoved every memory of the Sinsar Dubh into a far, dark corner of my mind. He was right. The Book had been open inside me that afternoon when he found me staring sightlessly outside BB&B, lost in my own head, debating whether I dare risk taking a spell from the Sinsar Dubh to free his son.

But I hadn’t opened it. It had been open, the Book offering. Big difference.

Might I have read the spell to save his son, scanning only the words without disturbing the magic, without getting turned into a soulless, evil psychopath? Books could be read. Spells had to be worked. Was information one thing and magic entirely another? I wasn’t sure I could split hairs that finely. I wasn’t sure the Book would either.

Still, Barrons had a point. Fear of a thing was often worse than the thing itself. I’d been afraid of him once. Now, I couldn’t even conceive of such a reaction to this man.

I wanted desperately to believe the Book wasn’t the great, all-knowing, all-spying evil I’d been assuming it was.

Unfortunately, I’d have to face it to find out.

Maybe it was silent because it was gone. Maybe my lake had swallowed and neutralized it. I was inundated with maybes lately. Limp noodley things you could do nothing with.

I sighed and closed my eyes, no longer pretending. I wanted to know. What was at the bottom now? What was going on in the vacuum of dread I carried in my gut every blasted day?

I dove deep, kicked in hard, rejecting fear. I had Barrons and Ryodan in the room with me. What more could I ask as I faced my inner demon?

I swam, holding my breath at first, diving into one towering wave after the next, getting drenched by violently churning water capped by thick foamy brine. I ran out of breath and started struggling against the sensation of suffocation. I forced myself to relax like I had the day I stepped through the Unseelie king’s great mirror in their boudoir and my lungs froze, knowing I had to breathe differently there. Now, I drew the water into my lungs, became one with it.

The waves fought me, buffeted me, as if trying to expel me, but it only strengthened my resolve. Was this why I’d nearly drowned when I first sought it? Because the Book no longer had all that much power—perhaps never had—and didn’t want me to figure that out? And it was throwing up some huge, watery smoke screen to keep me from discovering the truth? Maybe my adamant rejection of it the night it turned me invisible had weakened it somehow. That was, after all, the night it had ceased speaking. And maybe I’d turned visible again because the single spell it offered had been a temporary one, with a finite, albeit damned convenient end date.

I dove deeper, inhaling my icy lake, felt it rushing through my body, filling me with sidhe-seer power. I kicked and thrust and swam, following a gold beacon, forced my way through the chilling undertow and finally drifted lightly down into a dark, shadowy cavern.

Last time I’d been here, the Sinsar Dubh had been crooning to me like a lover, welcoming me, inviting me in.

A towering wall exploded in front of me.

I shattered it with a fist.

Another!

I kicked through it, swinging and cursing.

Wall after wall sprung up and I blasted through them as if my life depended on it.

Whatever the Book didn’t want me to see, I was going to see.

This was ending.

Here, tonight.

I wasn’t leaving this cavern until I knew what I was dealing with.

Wall after wall tumbled, no match for my fury, until there it was: an elaborately carved ebony pedestal upon which lay a shining golden Book.

Open. Just like in the nightmare I’d recently had.

I stood motionless in the cavern.

So—it could open itself. I knew that. No big.

I’d closed it before.

I would close it again.

But first I’d see if it really was possible for me to look at it, understand the words, without using the spell.

Still…if it wasn’t—and I turned into a homicidal maniac?

I almost wavered then. Stood, dripping water for a time, having a hard time persuading myself to move forward.

I could walk away right now. Say I couldn’t find it. Storm back out of my head and let sleeping dogs lie.

I sighed.

And live forever with this eternal instability? Be undermined day after day by fear of the unknown? It was past time for me to face my demons.

Clenching my jaw, I stalked to the pedestal and forced myself to look down. Half expecting I wouldn’t understand a single word. That perhaps there wouldn’t even be any words there. That perhaps my churning sidhe-seer waters had stripped it clean of all forbidden magic.

The blood in my veins turned to ice.

“No,” I breathed.

I would be evil if I’d used it.

I would be crazy.

I would be a psychopath.

I wasn’t any of those things.

At least I didn’t think I was.

“No, damn it, no!” I said again, backing away.

Not a murmur from the Sinsar Dubh, not a chuckle, not a jibe.

Just me alone with the hollow echo of my footfalls.

And my failure.

I’d had no problem reading and understanding the words carved into the Book’s ornate golden pages. The First Language had flowed as easily as English across my mental tongue.

And those words had seemed as familiar as a beloved and often repeated nursery rhyme.

The Sinsar Dubh was open to a spell to resurrect the dead.

29

Jada moved through the crisp cool dawn in perfect sync with her environment, eyes closed, feeling her way through the slipstream.

Shazam had taught her that all things emitted frequency, that living beings were essentially receivers that could pick up the vibrations if they could only achieve clarity of mind. Meaning no ego, no past or future, no thoughts at all. Unadulterated sensation. He contended humans lacked the ability to empty themselves, that they were too superficial, and that shallowness was marbled with identity, time/ego obsessed, and given the complexity of her brain, he’d doubted that she would ever get there.

Given the complexity of her brain, she’d been quite certain she would.

And had.

Becoming nothing and no one was something she knew how to do.

Now, she heard with some indefinable sense the dense, simplistic grumble of bricks ahead, the complex whir of moving life, the sleek song of the River Liffey, the soft susurrus of the breeze, and turned minutely to avoid obstacles, melding with the razor edge of buildings.

She was being hunted.

She’d passed small clusters of angry, armed humans, clutching papers with her picture. Mostly men, determined to gain power and ensure a degree of stability in this brutally unstable city by capturing the legendary Sinsar Dubh.

Fools. They felt nothing more than a brisk wind as she passed, on her way to her sacred place. Her bird’s-eye view. The water tower where she’d once crouched in a long black leather coat, sword in her hand, and belly-laughed, drunk on the many wonders of life.

As she pulled herself up the final rung and vaulted onto the platform, the smell of coffee and doughnuts slammed into her, and although her face betrayed nothing, inside she scowled.

She dropped down from the slipstream to tell Ryodan to get the hell off her water tower. They weren’t supposed to meet for another few hours and this was her turf.

But it was Mac she saw, sprawled out on the ledge as if she was perfectly at home, slung low in the old bucket car seat Jada had dragged up there herself, ball cap angled over her badly highlighted hair to shadow her face. She was dressed nearly identical to Jada, in jeans, combat boots, and a leather jacket.

“What are you doing on my water tower?” Jada demanded.

Mac looked up at her. “I don’t see your name on it anywhere.”

“You know it’s my water tower. I used to talk about it.”

“Sorry, dude,” Mac said mildly.

“Don’t fecking ‘dude’ me,” Jada said sharply, then inhaled long and slow. “There are plenty of other places for you to be. Find your own. Have an original thought.”

“I watched the Unseelie princess kill one of the Nine about an hour ago,” Mac said, as if she hadn’t even heard her. “She’s carrying human weapons now. Marching with a small army. They shot the shit out of Fade. Started to rip his body apart.”

“And?” Jada said, forgetting her irritation that Mac was here. She’d tried to strike an alliance with the Unseelie princess but the powerful Fae had chosen Ryodan instead, striking a deal for three of the princes’ heads. Apparently that alliance was over, if she was now killing the Nine.

“He disappeared. The princess saw it happen.”

Jada went still. She knew the Nine returned. Somehow. She didn’t know the nuts and bolts of it but she certainly wanted to. “Why are you telling me this? Your loyalties are with them, not me.”

“They’re not mutually exclusive. My loyalties are to you as well. Coffee?” Mac nudged a thermos toward her.

Jada ignored it.

“Got doughnuts, too. They’re soggy, but hey, it’s sugar. It’s all good.”

Jada turned to leave.

“I saw Alina the other night.”

Her feet rooted. “Impossible,” she said.

“I know. But I did.”

Jada relaxed each muscle by section of her body, starting with her head and working down. Opponents tended to focus at eye level, so she always eradicated signs of obvious tension there first. She didn’t want to talk about this. She didn’t think about this anymore. “I watched her die,” she said finally.

“Did you? Or did you leave before it was over?” Mac held out a doughnut.

Jada ate it in two bites, wondering if this was some kind of twisted joke Mac was playing on her. Then, in a single swallow, she tossed back the little plastic cup of coffee Mac had offered.

“Fuck,” she exploded. “That was hot.”

“Duh. It’s coffee,” Mac said, arching a brow.

“Give me another doughnut. Where did you find them?”

“Little vendor a few blocks from BB&B. And I didn’t.” She frowned. “I had to ask Barrons to go get breakfast, and believe me, every time I ask for anything, I get this freaking lecture on how he’s not my fetch-it boy. I have to slink through the damn streets to go anywhere, hiding from everyone. They’re hunting me.”

“Despite my paper retracting the accusation, they’re hunting me, too,” Jada admitted. “We had a small mob at the abbey yesterday.”

“What did you do?”

“I wasn’t there. My women told them none of the accusations were true. Although they didn’t believe it, my sidhe-seers are formidable and the mob’s numbers were small. They’ll be back in greater force at some point,” she said, not certain why she was even having a conversation.

But sliding through dawn over Dublin this morning, for the first time since she’d returned, she’d felt…something…something to do with being here, home, back, and that maybe, just maybe, everything would work out all right. She’d find a place for herself and Shazam here.

She took the second doughnut Mac was holding out. “They’re not bad,” she admitted, eating slowly enough to taste it this time.

“Better than protein bars. I hear music coming from the black holes. Do you hear it?”

Jada looked at her. “What kind of music?”

“Not good. It’s pretty awful, frankly. I couldn’t hear anything for the past few days, but once the Unseelie-flesh high wore off, it was there. Not all of them. The small ones give off a kind of innocuous hum, but the larger ones give me a serious migraine. Did you see Alina gouge something into the pavement?”

Jada said nothing.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Mac said.

“I did it,” Jada said coldly. “My action.”

“I’m not saying you didn’t. I’m saying there were extenuating circumstances. Just trying to unskew your self-perception.”

“My perception is not skewed.”

“You have responsibility dysmorphia syndrome.”

“You should talk.”

“You were a child. And that old bitch was an adult. And she abused you. It wasn’t your fault.”

“I don’t need absolution.”

“My point exactly.”

“Why are you on my water tower again?” she said icily.

“Best view in the city.”

There was that. Jada crouched on the edge and looked down. “I didn’t see her gouge anything into the pavement.”

“Then she may have lived,” Mac said slowly.

“No. Absolutely not. Rowena never would have let me leave until she was dead. She always made me stay until the last.” She looked at Mac. “Alina’s not alive. Don’t let someone play you.”

Then she stood and turned for the ladder.

“If you see someone who looks like her in the streets, do me a favor and leave her alone,” Mac said. “Until I sort this out.”

Jada stood motionless a moment, not liking anything about what Mac had just told her. Alina was dead. And if there was something out there masquerading as her, it would only bring trouble. “Do me a favor,” she said coolly.

“Anything.”

“Stay the fuck off my water tower in the future.”

As she slid up into the slipstream, she heard Mac say, “When I look at you, Jada, I don’t see a woman who killed my sister. I see a woman who got hurt that night in the alley every bit as badly as Alina did.”

Jada shoved herself up into the beauty of the slipstream and vanished into the morning.

—

“Breakfast?” Ryodan said when Jada entered his office.

“Why is everyone trying to feed me this morning?”

“Who else tried to feed you?”

“We’re not friends,” Jada said. “Don’t pretend we are.”

“Who shit in your coffee this morning?”

“And you don’t say things like that. You’re Ryodan.”

“I know who I am.”

“What is with everyone this morning?” she said, exasperated.

“How would I know. You haven’t told me who everyone is.”

“Don’t talk to me. Just finish the tattoo.”

“After you eat.” He took a silver lid off a tray and shoved a platter toward her.

She stared at it. “Eggs,” she murmured. She hadn’t seen them in such a long time.

And bacon and sausage and potatoes. Oh, my.

“Try the yogurt. It has something extra in it,” he said.

“Poison?”

“A protein mix.”

She gave him a cool look and shook her head.

“Food is energy. Energy is a weapon. It would be illogical to refuse it.”

Jada dropped into a chair across the desk from him and picked up the fork. He had a valid point. Besides, eggs. Bacon. Yogurt. There was even an orange. The aroma of it all was incredible.

She ate quickly, efficiently, shoveling it down in silence, barely chewing. He was finishing her tattoo today. She was vibrating with energy, afraid he might change his mind for some reason. When she’d polished off the last crumb, she shoved the platter out of the way, yanked her shirt over her head, unbuttoned the top two buttons of her jeans and looked at him expectantly.

He didn’t move.

“What?” she demanded.

“Turn around,” he said. “I’m working on your back, not your front.” His silver eyes were ice.

She turned around backward in the chair, hooking her ankles around the rear legs, resting her arms on the slatted back.

“Relax,” he murmured as he settled into a chair behind her.

“I’m not tense,” she said coolly.

He ran his fingers along the two tight ridges of muscle along her spine. “This is your idea of supple. It’s a bloody rock. It’ll hurt more if you don’t relax.”

Closing her eyes, she willed herself smooth, long, lithe. “Pain doesn’t compute.”

“It should. It’s a warning your body needs to recognize.”

After a few minutes of his hands at the base of her spine, she felt that peculiar languor spreading through her body and snapped, “Stop doing that.”

“You keep tensing.”

“I do not.”

He traced his fingers along her spine again, delineating the hard ridges. “You want to have this argument.”

“You’re tattooing my skin, not my muscles.” She breathed easy and slow, relaxed again. It was merely her eagerness to see the ink done, nothing more.

“You’re wrong about that.”

She wasn’t sure if he was skimming her mind or not, if he meant her muscles or her eagerness. “I can relax my own muscles.”

“Keep bitching, I stop working.”

“You like that, don’t you—having the power to push people around?”

“That’s why I’m giving it away.”

She closed her eyes and said nothing. Was that how he thought of the tattoo he was etching into her skin? That he was giving his power to her? She wondered again what would happen when she called IISS. Precisely how much of a leash she would have him on, exactly how smart and powerful the great Ryodan really was.

She hoped enormously.

“Did you ever see anything like the black holes while you were in the Silvers?” he said after a time.

She shook her head.

“Talk, don’t move. This must be precise.”

“I saw many things. Nothing like those holes.”

“How many worlds?”

“We’re not friends.”

“What are we?”

“You asked me that before. I don’t repeat myself.”

He laughed softly. Then, “Stretch long. There’s a hollow at the base of your spine. I need it flattened.”

She did, then one of his hands was on her hip, stretching her out even more.

Then she felt the tip of a knife at her back, followed by a deep burn of a slice, and a sudden warm gush of blood.

“Nearly there,” he murmured.

Prick after prick of needles in a rapid dance across her skin.

Time spun out in a strange, dreamy way, and she relaxed more deeply than even she was capable of achieving on her own lately. It wasn’t entirely bad, she decided. What he did to her was nearly as good as sleep. Rebooted her engines, took her down to ground zero and fueled her up again.

Then she felt his tongue at the base of her spine and shot out of the chair so fast she knocked it over and stumbled into the wall. She spun and shot him a furious look, rubbing an elbow that would undoubtedly be bruised. “What the bloody hell are you doing?” she snarled.

“Finishing the tattoo.”

“With your tongue?”

“There’s an enzyme in my saliva that closes wounds.”

“You didn’t lick me last time.”

“I didn’t cut as deeply last time.” He gestured at a mirror above a small cabinet in an alcove. “Look.”

Warily, she turned her back to the mirror and peered over her shoulder. Blood was running down her spine, dripping on her jeans, on the floor.

“Put a Band-Aid on it.”

“Don’t be a fool.”

“You’re not licking me.”

“You’re being absurd. It’s a method. Nothing more. The wound must heal before I set the final mark. Sit the fuck down. Unless you have a good reason you don’t want my saliva closing the wound.”

He’d removed them both from the equation with his words. Saliva. Closing a wound. Not Ryodan’s tongue on her back. Which was exactly what she should have done—seen it analytically. Many animals had unusual enzymes in their spit. She was bleeding profusely, and hadn’t even known he’d cut so deep.

She picked the chair up, repositioned it and slid back into the seat. “Go on,” she said tonelessly. “You startled me. You should have told me what you were doing.”

“I’m going to close the wound with my saliva,” he said slowly and pointedly.

Then she felt his tongue at the base of her spine, the stubble of his shadow-beard against her skin. His hands were on her hips, his hair brushing her back. She closed her eyes and sank deep into nothing inside her. Moments later he was done. He traced a final emblem with his needles and told her she was free to go.

She bolted from the chair and headed for the door.

“Choose wisely, Jada,” he said softly behind her.

She froze, hand on the panel, turned and looked at him. She had no intention of replying. But her mouth said, “Choose what wisely?”

He smiled but it didn’t touch his eyes. That cool, clear silver gaze had always seemed to stare straight into her soul. She studied him, realizing his eyes weren’t quite as void as she’d always thought. There was something in them, something…ancient. Immortal? And patient, endlessly patient, as he moved his chess pieces around. Aware, brutally, intensely alive and on point, and she had a sudden certainty that Ryodan saw right through her.

He knew. He’d known all along what she wanted.

“Why else would you let me tattoo you,” he murmured.

He’d tattooed her with full awareness of what he was doing; giving her a collar, a leash to yank anytime and anyplace she wanted, with absolutely no foreknowledge of how she might choose to use it. Why would he do that?

And in those complex, every-shade-of-gray eyes, she thought she saw something else. Thought she heard him speak.

When the time comes, trust will be your weakness.

“I always choose wisely,” she said, and left.

—

Trinity College. Jada remembered discovering it at nine years old while taking her first ever tour of the city. The sheer number of people coming and going, laughing and talking, flirting and living, had astonished the child. She’d felt like she was on fire with life. Born of a fool’s fever, her mom used to say about her, words slurring with drink and exhaustion after another long day working two jobs, still finding time at night to take lovers. Jada knew nothing of that—the circumstances of her conception, how foolish it had been or not, and hadn’t cared. She’d only known that she was born with a fever that made everything brighter, hotter, and more intense for her.

She’d been alone most of her life. People on TV weren’t the same as the real thing.

Even out in the world, she’d been more isolated at nine than most grown-ups, with no clue who her father was, her mother dead. No home. Just a yellow, mom-scented pillowcase with little ducks embroidered along the edge in a house that held an iron cage she never wanted to see again.

Trinity was college. A magical word to the child, a place she’d seen on TV, where people gathered in large numbers, smack bang in the middle of the craic-filled city, and learned fascinating things, fell in love, broke up, fought and played and worked. Had lives.

Jada moved across the campus, deciding if Dancer tried to feed her, she would go back to the abbey. She’d had her fill of people behaving abnormally today.

She found him in one of the lecture halls that either had already housed an inordinate amount of musical equipment, including a baby grand piano, and an entire computing lab, or he’d moved everything in there to consolidate efforts and save time walking from building to building on campus.

He wasn’t alone. When Jada dropped down from the slipstream and walked in, he was sitting on the piano bench, close to a pretty woman, one hand on her shoulder, as they laughed together about something.

She stopped. Nearly backed out. They looked good together. How had she failed to see what a grown man he was when she’d been fourteen? She was struck again by the idea that he’d downplayed himself for her, to hang out with the child she’d been. And now that she was grown up, he wasn’t doing it anymore.

Were he and the woman lovers? The woman looked like she wanted to be, leaning into Dancer’s tall, athletic body, smiling up at him. His dark, thick hair had gotten long again, falling forward into his face, and she curled her hands into fists. Years ago she used to wash it for him, drape a towel around his shoulders and cut it. He’d take his glasses off and close his eyes and she’d used the privacy to stare unabashedly at his face. They’d nurtured each other in small ways. In the back of her mind, she’d harbored the vague idea that maybe one day she’d be a woman and he’d be a man and there might be something magic between them. Dancer had been the only truly good, uncomplicated person in her life.

She must have made some small noise because he suddenly glanced over his shoulder and his face lit up.

“Jada, come in. I want you to meet everyone.”

She moved forward, wondering what was going on. They’d always been a team. Just the two of them. She’d never seen him with anyone else. Ever. She hadn’t even known he had friends.

He was striding toward her, long-legged, good-looking, full of youthful enthusiasm and energy. The pretty woman wasn’t far behind him, hurrying to catch up. Glancing between Dancer and Jada with a guarded expression.

“Good to see you,” he said, smiling.

“You have no intention of feeding me, do you?” She thought she’d better get that out of the way first.

He raised a brow. “Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Okay then, no. Jada, this,” he swept an arm around the woman’s shoulders and pulled her forward, “is Caoimhe Gallagher. She was working on her doctorate in music theory before the walls fell. She and”—he gestured toward the bay of computers where a young man with brilliantly colored hair was hunched before a screen—“Duncan, were living in one of the dorms.”

Jada studied the woman he’d called “Keeva,” wondering if she was one of the O’Gallagher clan endowed with sidhe-seer blood. If so, she belonged at the abbey.

“Aye, and there’s Squig and Doolin,” Caoimhe said, offering her a hesitant smile and pointing down the line of screens. “Brilliant with math, not much for the talking. We’d no clue they’d taken up in the old library. More than a few of us managed to survive, hiding here on campus.”

Dancer said, “I found them shortly after I started working in the labs. Apparently I was making a lot of noise.” He grinned. “Caoimhe’s been helping me refine some of my theories about the black holes, what made them, what might fix them. Wait till you hear some of her ideas about music and what it really does. She’s got perfect pitch and her ear is bloody unreal!”

Jada looked at the woman’s ears but saw nothing of note.

“I hum it, she can play it,” Dancer clarified. “I give her frequencies to work with, and she makes songs out of them.”

“I hadn’t realized others were working with us,” she said coolly.

“Unless someone drops the bloody Song of Making in our lap, Jada, we can’t do it alone,” he said. “C’mon. Let me show you around.”

—

She left Trinity half an hour later, seeking solitude.

In the past, Dancer had a way of subtly recharging her, making her feel pretty much perfect. But today she’d realized he made a lot of people feel that way.

His “crew” saw him the same way she did: superbrainy, unpredictable, funny, high-energy, attractive.

She’d liked having him all to herself. It was confusing to watch him interact with people he’d known for a while, realizing he had a life that hadn’t included her.

While she’d a life that hadn’t included him, she’d believed she was his entire world.

Today she’d wondered if it had been Caoimhe he’d watched Scream with, that night she wasn’t around. Wondered if, when he’d disappeared for days in the past, he was off with these friends she hadn’t known he’d had, laughing and working and implementing plans.

Back then she’d appreciated that he hadn’t held on to her too tightly. But she’d also assumed his life had kind of stopped happening when she wasn’t around. That he’d gone—alone—to one of his labs, where he thought about her the entire time and invented things to help her. Her self-preoccupation had been so intense, she’d believed when she wasn’t present in certain parts of the world, those parts of the world were put in a jar on a shelf until she returned.

Not so. His life had gone on while she’d kept him at bay, determinedly dodging anything that hinted at a restraint.

She remembered Mac telling her once that the reason grown-ups mystified her was because she wasn’t factoring their emotions into her equations. She’d never understood how careful Dancer had been around her so she wouldn’t startle and run. Apparently so cautious he’d kept their friendship completely separate from the rest of his life and friends.

There’d been nine in all that she’d met, working on various matters related to their problem. Some were studying the hard science of the holes, others searching for the softer Fae lore, and those, like Caoimhe, working with Dancer one on one, teaching him everything they knew about music, speculating with him as she once had. It was jarring to an extreme, but then the whole day had been.

She knew what she needed.

Hand on the hilt of her sword, she went fluid and kicked up into the slipstream.

30

Putting pen to paper clarifies my thoughts.

Before I came to Dublin, I didn’t have many thoughts to ponder other than new drink recipes and what guy I wanted to date.

Since my arrival here, I’ve filled journal after journal. The way I saw it, there were only three real possibilities and they were, unfortunately, equally plausible.

1. The Sinsar Dubh is already open. I opened it in a dream and I’ve been using it without even realizing it, turning myself invisible when I wanted to disappear, turning myself visible again because I couldn’t get the bullets out, and raising my sister from the dead because I couldn’t stand living without her. Either the Book is allowing me to use it without repercussion (at this point anyway) in an effort to lead me down a dark path with a darker purpose that will bite me in the ass soon enough or I’m stronger than the Book and can use it without being corrupted. (Gee, wouldn’t that be nice?) (And why did the Book stop talking to me after I vanished that night? Why did it bitch the whole way back to Dublin then shut up? Further, why did it always seem so…wishy-washy compared to the corporeal Book?)

2. The Sinsar Dubh is closed and tricking me. It’s not wishy-washy at all, just playing me like a maestro. Making me underestimate it. Granting my wishes, trying to make me think it’s already open. Why? So I might reach for one of its spells myself, believing I’m in control. And when I do, it’s all over. Hello psycho-Mac.

3. My sidhe-seer gifts are far more enormous than I realize. I can do all these things without the Sinsar Dubh and that’s why it wanted me for a host. Because together we’d be unstoppable. It’s possible much of the magic I’ve used comes from the part of the lake that is my heritage, not the Book at all, and it’s just trying to make me believe that power belongs to it, not me.

“You’re still trying to label things, Ms. Lane,” Barrons said, reading over my shoulder.

“I knew you were there,” I said irritably. I always do. He’d walked in the back door of BB&B about twenty seconds ago. Every cell in my body comes to hard, frantic, sexual life when he’s near. I hadn’t expected to see him. It was barely noon and he’s a night owl, not an afternoon one.

Between withdrawal that made me feel all my nerves were raw, flayed, and twitching on the surface of my skin and the many frustrating, slinking hours it took me to get back from the water tower to Chester’s—all so I could dependently ask Barrons to get a Hunter to take me back into the bookstore—I was in a sour mood. But I’d also been in no mood to risk running into the Unseelie princess, her army, and her human guns. I couldn’t outshoot or Voice all of them at once.

For being so bloody powerful, I couldn’t even walk home by myself. It pissed me off. Asking Barrons for things drives me crazy.

“Makes two of us, Ms. Lane.”

“Well, do something about it,” I said pissily.

“There you go, asking me for things again.”

I stretched on the love seat I’d dragged from his study into the rear of the wrecked bookstore and peered up at him over my shoulder. I couldn’t find him for a second. He was motionless, fading beautifully into shadow, existing in that seamless, not-quite-there way he existed only around me and only when we were alone.

“Okay. I give up. What am I doing wrong?”

“At the moment? Not fucking me.”

He yanked my head back with a fistful of my hair, arched my neck at a hard angle, and sealed his mouth over mine, tongue going deep, kissing me so hard and raw and electric that my mind blanked and I dropped my journal, forgotten.

Can’t breathe with this man. Can’t breathe without him.

“Where do you feel most free,” he murmured against my mouth.

I bit his lip. “With you.”

“Wrong. You know why you fuck so good?”

I preened. Jericho Barrons thought I fucked “so good.” “Because I’ve had a lot of practice?”

“Because you fuck like you’re losing your sanity and can only find it again on the far side of depravity. Not by taking a shortcut. By taking the very long, lingering way around. You look like a pretty, soft, breakable Barbie. You fuck like a monster.”

That pretty much summed it up. “Do you have a point?”

“Don’t be afraid of the monster. She knows what she’s doing.”

“Why are you still talking?”

“Because my dick isn’t in your mouth.”

“That can be remedied.” I was over the love seat and on him, taking him down hard to the floor beneath me, and he was falling back, laughing and oh, God, I love that sound!

I ripped his zipper open as we went, then my hands were against his hot skin and my mouth was on his dick and nothing could rattle me, nothing could touch me, because I was rattling Jericho Barrons’s cage and, as always, while it lasted, I would be whole and perfect and free.

—

Later he said, “You think of the Sinsar Dubh as being an actual book inside you.”

“And?” I said drowsily. Apparently sex with Barrons was the cure for everything, including the tightly wired tension of withdrawal. I’d been shooting furtive looks at my fridge, with its lovely baby food jars of canned Unseelie all day. Clenching hands and jaw, refusing to let my feet walk me over to it. But Barrons in my mouth pretty much makes me stop thinking about anything else in it.

“I doubt it’s either open or closed. Stop thinking of it so concretely.”

“You mean it’s embedded in me, inseparably, and my ethical structure is the proverbial cover? And I need to stop worrying about the Book and think about me. What I can live with. What I won’t live without.”

He propped himself up on a shoulder, muscles rippling and bunching, and looked down at me, smiling faintly.

I touched his lips with my fingertips. I adore this man’s mouth, what it does to me, but I most especially adore the rare occasions he smiles or laughs out loud. In the low light, the dark, harsh angles of his face seemed chiseled from stone. Barrons isn’t a classically handsome man. He’s disturbing. Carnal. Base. Forbidding. Big and powerful, radiating primal hunger. His eyes are blades, slicing into you: dark, ancient, glittering with predatory intensity. He moves like a beast even in his human skin. A woman takes one look at him, her stomach drops like a stone and she runs like hell.

Which direction she goes is the defining point: she’ll run away—or toward him—depending on her ability to be honest with herself, her hunger for life and willingness to pay any price at all to feel so damned alive. “What? Why are you smiling?” I said.

He bit my finger. “Stop fishing for compliments. I give you enough.”

“Never enough. Not when it comes to you. Do you think I used it? Do you think I brought Alina back from the dead?”

“I think neither of those questions signify. You’re alive. You’re neither insane nor psychotic. Life goes on, and in the going, reveals itself. Quit being so impatient.”

I pushed my hands into his thick dark hair. “I love how you simplify me.”

“You need it. You, Ms. Lane, are a piece of work.”

“I’ll show you work. I want this.” I leaned forward and murmured into his ear. “Right now. Exactly that way. And this and this. And I want you to keep doing it until I’m begging you to stop. But don’t stop then. Make me take it a little longer.” I wanted to feel no responsibility. No control.

“And bloody hell, woman, there you go, asking me for things again.” He stood and tossed me over his shoulder, one big hand clamped possessively on my bare ass, to take me to that place we sometimes went when I had a serious kink in my already seriously kinked chain.

“Hard life, Barrons.”

“I’ll show you hard.”

Of that I had no doubt. Every possible way.

Damn, it was good to be alive.

—

Much later with a voice that was raw from—well, let’s just leave it at raw—I said to him when I was fairly certain he was meditating deeply enough that he wouldn’t hear me, “I should have gone after her.”

“Dani,” he murmured.

Well, shit. He was aware after all.

“Always.”

“Yes, Dani,” I said.

“Analyze the odds. You know she’d have kept running.”

“But Barrons, she made it out, losing virtually zero Earth-time. Maybe I could have caught up with her, somehow. Maybe she would have gone to a safer world if I’d chased her through, with a quicker way home. Maybe she wouldn’t have had to be alone in there the whole time and she and I would have battled our way back to Dublin together.”

“Maybes are anchors you chain to your own feet. Right before you leap off the boat into the ocean.”

“I’m just saying. I think I know what I did wrong.”

“What’s that?”

“I didn’t believe in magic. I’m living in a city of it, jam-packed with dark magic, evil spells, twisted Fae, and I have absolutely no problem believing in all of them. But somehow I stopped believing in the good magic.” I prodded him in the ribs, where black and red tattoos stretched across his hard stomach and trailed down to his groin. “Like Bewitched. Or The Wizard of Oz—”

“An untrained witch and a charlatan,” he said irritably. “Did you just bloody poke me in the bloody ribs?”

“Okay, or Dumbledore, he’s the real thing. My point is you can’t believe only in Voldemort. You have to believe in Dumbledore, too.”

“Or you could just believe in me.” He caught my hand and put it exactly where he wanted it.

I smiled. I excelled at that.

—

Hours later I was holding my cellphone in that hand, staring at my recently created contact.

The good magic, including those possibilities that weighed in on the side of the positive, not the negative, was heavy on my mind.

Barrons was gone, back to Chester’s, where we would meet soon. I bit my still-swollen lower lip and worried it as I punched the Call button. It rang only once and she was on the line.

“Mac?” Alina said quickly. “Is that you?”

Fuck. Instant pain. How many times had I sat in my room in Dublin, dialing her damned number to listen to her recording, wishing just one more time to hear her answer? More times than I cared to count. Yet here it was. I could get addicted to this alone. Merely being able to call and hear something that sounded like my sister answering. I wondered where she was. Where Barrons had no doubt set her up, probably warding the place to keep her alive, too.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey, Jr.” She sounded happy to hear from me, but wary.

“Where are you?”

“My apartment.”

I closed my eyes, wincing. I could walk over there, bound up stairs I’d once sat on sobbing as if my soul was being hacked in two, slowly and with a chain saw. She’d open the door.

And instantly double over, puking, because even if she really was my sister, I couldn’t hug her, because I was anathema to her now.

“Want to come over?” she said hesitantly.

“So I can make you puke some more?”

“Your boyfriend—”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Okay, the man you love,” she said flatly, “brought me some pages photocopied from the Sinsar Dubh. He said you used them to learn to manage the discomfort. I’m practicing. I don’t like puking any more than you like making me puke.”

Working with those pages had helped me only to a point. But unlike the corporeal Book—which had enjoyed tormenting me—I had no desire to hurt Alina. If she really was. And if she practiced enough with them, maybe one day I’d get that hug. If she really was. “When did Darroc give you the engagement ring?” It was bothering me, a nagging detail.

She made a soft sound that was equal parts irritation and acceptance. A so we’re going to play this stupid game? coupled with I love you, Mac, and I know you can be totally neurotic, so I’m going to humor you. “A couple of weeks before I lost time. Or whatever happened.”

“The body I buried wasn’t wearing it.”

“That makes sense,” she said pointedly, “because it wasn’t mine.”

If the Book was trying to trick me, it might have made that mistake, putting a ring on her finger that hadn’t been on her when I’d buried her, skimming my acknowledgment that they’d been in love and embellishing it with a perfectly human touch. I doggedly pursued my line of questioning. “Were you wearing the ring in the alley?”

“No. I’d taken it off that afternoon. I’d discovered some things about him. We’d had a fight. I was angry.”

“What kind of things?”

“He was into some stuff I didn’t know about. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“When did you put it back on?”

“When I went home to change. After the alley, the next thing I knew, I was standing outside the Stag’s Head, wearing the most bizarre outfit. I didn’t even bring it with me to Dublin. I have no clue how I ended up with it on. Remember the dress I wore my last Christmas at home? The one I hated but you thought looked so good on me? The one that made my ass look flat.”

I pressed a suddenly trembling hand to my mouth.

“That’s what I had on with the ugliest shoes. I’d never even seen them before, and I was freezing. And pearls. You know I haven’t worn those things in years. I wanted to find Darroc, so I went home to change and go hunt for him but when I got there my place had been totally trashed. Did you do that? Did you freak out when you thought I was dead?”

I cleared my throat. Still, it took me two tries to get words out and when I did I croaked like a frog. “Why did you put the ring back on? According to you it was what—like only ten hours earlier that you’d taken it off?” I knew why. I’d have done the same thing with Barrons.

She said softly, “I love him. He’s not perfect. I’m not either.”

So, my sister had the same epiphany I did when it came to relationships. Not surprising. But my inner Book knew I’d had that epiphany. She’d spoken in present tense about Darroc, refusing to believe he was really dead. Again, like me. If someone told me my fiancé was dead and I’d never seen his body, I’d have a hard time believing it, too. I was intimately acquainted with the stages of grief: denial being the first.

“Tell me exactly what happened again. Every detail you remember from the night in the alley to the precise moment you were…here again.” I was struggling to stay focused on logistics when my heart was pounding so hard it felt like it might rupture.

“Why? Have you figured something out, Mac? What do you think’s going on? Oh, God, are you finally starting to believe me? Jr., I’m scared! I don’t understand what’s happening. How could I lose a whole year? How did I end up in that stupid dress?”

I closed my eyes and didn’t say: Well, gee, sis, it’s like this: your baby sister has a big bad Book of black magic inside her and she wanted you back so badly, she brought you back from the dead. In the dress she chose to bury you in because she thought you looked so good in it—and hey, nobody’s looking at your ass when you’re lying in a coffin anyway—along with the pearls Mom and Dad gave you for your sixteenth birthday because you said they made you feel like a princess. And by the way, you’re wrong—those shoes totally rocked that outfit. I know. I bought them at Bloomingdale’s for you, after you died.

Jay-sus.

I’d nearly fallen off my chair when she mentioned the dress. But of course, if I’d brought her back from the dead, she’d be wearing what I buried her in. Ergo, no body in casket.

And my inner Book probably knew that, too. If we were, as Barrons seemed to think, embedded together. Total clusterfuck.

“I’m not sure,” I said finally. “But can we meet somewhere and talk?”

She laughed and said breathlessly, “Yes, Mac. Please. When? Where?”

I had a meeting tonight that I wasn’t missing and I wasn’t sure how long it would take.

So we made plans to meet at her place first thing in the morning. She’d make coffee and breakfast, she said.

It’d be like old times, she said.

31

“Have you planted the icefire?” Cruce asked, striding impatiently across the cavern to meet him as soon as he’d finished flattening his flexible carapace and wedging it beneath the door.

Minutes passed while the roach god assumed form. It was never easy but then little was for a roach, living on the refuse and remains of others. Being chased and hunted and exterminated. Considered an enemy by one and all. In the history of man, he’d never met a human that welcomed a roach into its home, or anywhere for that matter. He was pestilence and vermin, nothing more. Yet.

“Yes,” he finally grated. It had taken time to distribute the tiny pods Cruce had given him containing the blue flames, but he’d seen them well-positioned where they’d not be discovered, and when the moment was right, numerous roaches would be standing by, each with tiny plastic vials Toc had provided, which they would chew through with their heavily sclerotized mandibles to mix a drop of Unseelie blood with the flame.

“Where?” Cruce demanded, and the roach god wondered briefly if he’d merely traded one arrogant, belittling bastard for another. The prince was restless tonight, radiating dark energy, eyes bright. He preferred a cool ally, not a hot one.

The roach god repeated the three locations his ally had chosen: an old library where they stored the largest number of ancient scrolls; the chambers once occupied by the prior Grand Mistress; and the chambers occupied by the current one.

“Well done,” Cruce said. “And you have Toc’s blood?”

The roach god nodded, holding himself together with eons of discipline and relentless hunger for a better way of life.

“Toc had the papers printed as I instructed, and dispersed?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent. When they come—”

“Will they come?” the roach god demanded.

Cruce smiled. “Oh, yes, they’ll come. My name is synonymous with rebellion, and the Unseelie have long memories. We fought for freedom once before and nearly attained it. I will not fail this time. I will rule both the Fae and human realms. They are already mine. I’m merely trapped in a spiderweb for the moment and that will soon change.”

“This world is dying. If it does, I want to go with you where you go.”

Cruce’s gaze locked on him and the roach god shuddered faintly. Ah, yes, this Fae had power. He hid it well.

“This world will not die. My realms are tied to it. When they come and the battle begins, watch and wait. If our side appears to be suffering losses, set the fires.”

“You said it burns hotter than human fire. How hot?” Fire was one thing to evade, Fae fire might be entirely another.

“Not too hot for you,” Cruce said. “Light all three at the same time. I want the fires to divide the humans and scatter them across the abbey. The fools will try to put it out rather than fight.”

“If they don’t?”

“They are governed by emotional attachments. Even the brightest among them suffers this weakness. Go. Now. Watch and wait. When the time is right, burn this fucking place to ash.”

The roach god nodded and let his form collapse abruptly to the floor, disintegrating instantly, a trick he’d perfected in human homes, moving through their houses when they weren’t around, as if he were one of them, sitting on their beds, fondling their combs and toothbrushes, even perching on their toilets, wondering what it would feel like to be whole and large and not a bug.

Thousands of glistening insects rippled across the stone chamber, vanishing into every crack and crevice.

32

When the Hunter circled above Chester’s preparing to land, I was surprised to see there wasn’t the usual boisterous crowd gathered outside the club, jostling and bribing and arguing to get in.

Fewer than fifty humans loitered near the rubble of the former club at a safe distance from the cordoned-off black hole.

There wasn’t a single Fae in sight. Normally, there were more Fae than humans, the lower castes that Ryodan wouldn’t permit into the club, trying to seduce the bored, hungry clientele denied entry with an immediate, less potent (and far less attractive!) fix.

As I slid from the Hunter’s back, I was the target for dozens of sharp, envious glares. Jealous of my “ride,” that I had such a powerful beast seemingly at my command, wondering what magical gifts it bestowed—and if it could be eaten for a high probably.

I wasn’t afraid of fifty humans. Not this close to Chester’s.

I had guns, Voice, a Hunter, and Barrons a text away. Still, I stayed near my ride, one thickly insulated glove on its icy flank. I shivered from cold. Without Unseelie flesh in me, it wasn’t nearly as comfortable to be so close to one of the icy beasts. My thighs were numb and my ass was completely frozen. I rubbed it briskly with my palm, trying to thaw it and restore sensation.

“Where are all the Fae?” I demanded, glancing at the underground entrance, surprised to find it was unguarded.

“The doors are locked,” a woman said. “Does it let you eat it?” she asked with a frighteningly bright smile, shooting a greedy look at my satanic ride.

The Hunter swung its great horned head around and snorted a stunningly precise tendril of fire at the crowd.

The woman’s hair went up in flame. She ran off screaming, clutching her head. The rest of the crowd backed warily away from me.

“The door to Chester’s is locked?” I said incredulously. No one answered me and I got a brief bizarre flash of myself as I must look from their point of view: blond Barbie as Barrons had so pithily said, with crimson-streaked hair tangled wild from the wind, coated from head to toe with a light dusting of black ice, standing next to a demonic-looking winged dragon-beast, weapons bulging in my pockets, spear strapped to my thigh, and a snub-nosed automatic I’d tossed over my shoulder as I left for no reason I’d been able to fathom. Just a bad feeling I might need more weapons than usual tonight, or maybe all that kinky, rough sex with Barrons had made me feel more like my badass self. “Chester’s never closes,” I protested. That would be like the sun not rising.

Suddenly the door in the ground rattled and shot open from below. “Ms. Lane,” Barrons growled as he stepped out. “About bloody time. Let’s go.” He closed the door then bent and traced a symbol on it, murmuring softly.

People began to hem him in, chanting, “Let us in, let us in!”

“Get the fuck out of here!” Barrons roared in Voice that staggered even me, and I felt my feet begin to move of their own volition. Not you, Ms. Lane, he shot me a look.

I stopped and stood, watching in astonishment as fifty people turned like zombies and trudged woodenly down the street. The most I’d ever managed was four with a single command.

Then I scowled at him. “One,” I snapped, “how did you do that to fifty people at once. Two, why did it work on me when I thought I was supposed to be immune to you, and three—”

“The abbey is under attack. Get on the Hunter, Ms. Lane. And read this.” He thrust a paper at me. “We didn’t understand why the club was so empty. One of the patrons brought this in. Then Jada called. The others have already gone ahead.”

He’d waited for me. That must have driven him bugfuck crazy, knowing a battle was being fought and he wasn’t there. Waiting for his girlfriend.

“You’re not my girlfriend, Ms. Lane,” he said coolly.

“You could have gone without me,” I said just as coolly.

“You could have checked your bloody texts.”

I gave him a blank look. “I didn’t get any.” I tugged my cellphone from the front pocket of my jeans. It was completely coated with a thick layer of ice. When I fly, I scoot up beneath the bony apex of the Hunter’s wings because it gives me more to hold on to, and my phone must have been pressed to the underside of the frigid crest. I tapped it against a nearby trash can to crack the ice. Sure enough, three texts messages, and the last one was pissed as hell. I made a mental note to carry it somewhere else when I flew in the future.

“You still could have gone without me.”

“I bloody fucking know that.” He cut me a seething glance.

“Then why didn’t you?”

“Because, Ms. Lane, when the world goes to bloody hell, I will always be at your bloody side. Read the fucking paper. Not even Ryodan saw this one coming. Seems his ‘news’ isn’t as spot-on as it once was.”

I snatched the paper and scanned it quickly.

“Who would print this?” I exploded.

“No bloody clue,” Barrons said tightly. “Up. Now.”

I scrambled back onto the Hunter and, as Barrons settled behind me, reached for the great beast’s vast, unfathomable mind. Can you help us fight? Call more Hunters?

We do not attend matters of Fae and man.

You’ve been flying me around.

You amuse.

Because it sensed the king in me? I wondered. I order you to help us fight.

Not even you.

Can I offer you something? If bribes were what it wanted, I’d try.

It rumbled deep inside, a chuckle of sorts. You have nothing. We have all.

Well, then just hurry! I urged it. My friends are in danger. Take us to the abbey as quickly as you can get us there!

You do not mean that. It rumbled again and I felt its mirth. You would not survive. But it flapped its enormous leathery sails, churning black ice beneath us, and pumped up and up.

We soared beneath the clouds, where the day was still bright, then through the clouds and above them, sailing higher and higher into blackness and stars and cold, cold sky, then just when I thought my lungs might explode and it was getting dangerously hard to breathe, it tucked its wings close to its body like an eagle preparing to plunge and whispered in my mind with a soft rumble, Hold, not-king.

I shoved my arms beneath its tightly wrapped wings and hugged the bony crest, clutching it, clenched my thighs and pressed my face to its frosty hide. It burned and I drew back sharply, but too late, I left a layer of my cheek on its back. “Ow!”

It suddenly went motionless, hanging in the sky like a dead weight, not moving one leathery scale. I remained just as still, bracing for whatever was about to happen.

Suddenly it rocketed forward so fast I’d have flown right off its back if it hadn’t given me warning. I felt like the Enterprise, entering warp speed.

I tucked my face low (but not too low!) to its hide, as Barrons’s arms tightened around me, and I squeezed my eyes shut against the cutting wind. I could feel the skin of my cheeks dragging back with gravitational force humans were not intended to experience without helmets or space suits.

After a moment I slitted my eyes open and watched stars trail past, like silvery party streamers.

Behind me, Barrons laughed with raw, ferocious exhilaration. I felt the same. Best. Damn. Supercar. Ever.

I sensed the Hunter prodding gently at my mind, making sure I was breathing and alive.

Best safety features, too.

We bulleted through the sky, dropping down and down until at last fields came into view, lush and fantastical from Cruce’s magic. In no time at all we were nearly to the abbey.

“Oh, God, Barrons, look at all the Fae!” Nonsifters crammed the narrow winding road to the abbey, Seelie and Unseelie alike, while more loped and slithered and crawled through meadows, splashed and lumbered across streams. There were humans, too, though not many. I suspected there may have been more but this dark, wild army had fed on them, all pretense at seduction abandoned to the hunger of battle-frenzy. “All for Cruce?” I yelled over my shoulder. “I thought the Seelie despised the dark court!”

“They’re unled,” he shouted into my ear. “The unled are always fickle.”

Once before, I’d seen Seelie and Unseelie gathered en masse. Not in clusters here and there like I’d seen mingling at Chester’s but facing off like mighty armies.

V’lane had been leading the Seelie, while Darroc and I had stood at the front of the Unseelie.

I’d felt the shuddering in the tectonic plates of our planet, even with both sides holding their enormous power in check.

Now there was no division between the courts. Seelie and Unseelie were rushing toward a single place with a single goal.

Our abbey.

To destroy it.

To free Cruce. Break out the most powerful Fae prince in all creation. And they didn’t even know he had all the power of the Sinsar Dubh at his disposal.

“Uh, Barrons, we’re in a world of shit,” I muttered.

“Same page, Ms. Lane. Same bloody word.”

—

“Where are Ryodan and the others?” I cried as we soared low over the battle.

Five hundred sidhe-seers were down there. But I didn’t see a single one of the Nine.

My sisters were facing thousands of Fae with more marching directly for them.

The front lawn of the abbey was a scene straight out of one of the Lord of the Rings movies. Amid towering megaliths and silvery fountains, humans battled monsters of every kind imaginable, some flying, some crawling, others stalking. Some beautiful, some hideous. There were those damned death-by-laughter fairies darting around a sidhe-seer’s head! I watched, horrified. She was still laughing as she was killed by a ghastly Unseelie with tubular fronds all over its body.

There was Jada, slicing a circle around her, the alabaster blade of the sword gleaming. But it was only one weapon and there were thousands of Fae down there, flying, slithering.

“They aren’t bloody sifters,” Barrons said and snarled. “They fucking drove. And they sure as bloody hell can’t be taking the road.”

I sometimes forgot the Nine had limitations. They seemed so all-powerful to me. If I knew them, they’d shift not far from the abbey and lope to battle smack in the middle of the Unseelie. “Well, why didn’t you call more Hunters for them?”

“This is the only one that ever comes.”

“Shit,” I cursed, leaning low, peering over the side.

I heard a low growl behind me, followed by the crunching sound of bones shifting, then the Hunter tensed beneath me and shook itself violently. I clung to the crest of its wings with all my strength.

“You are not my enemy,” Barrons roared behind me. “I’ll change and drop.”

You’ll drop and change, the Hunter snarled in my head. It arched its long neck and shot an enormous burst of flame over its shoulder, blasting Barrons right off its back and singeing the hell out of my coat and hair.

“Barrons!” I screamed as he went tumbling off the Hunter’s back, falling toward the lawn, transforming as he went.

The Hunter banked hard and began to circle back around. I stared down, watching Barrons fall. He was fully transformed by the time he hit the ground, horned, fanged, and ferocious.

He surged up, a sleek black shadow, grabbed the nearest Rhino-boy by the throat and ripped off its head with his enormous jaws.

Then his jaws opened even wider, impossibly wide, then the Barrons-beast vanished.

When he reappeared an instant later the Rhino-boy slumped dead to the ground.

Damn. And I still had no idea how he killed Fae.

The black-skinned beast exploded into battle, savagely ripping and clawing and killing, spraying guts and lifeblood everywhere, its crimson eyes glittering with feral glee. Vanishing. Reappearing.

He does not ride again, not-king. Nor do you.

The Hunter soared lower and turned its head, apparently about to dismount me the same way it had gotten rid of Barrons. I raised both hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’ll jump, okay?” I said hastily. “Just go a little lower, I’ll jump. But try not to dump me in the middle. Get me closer to her.” I pointed to Jada.

The Hunter dropped like a rock, and some twenty feet from the ground I braced myself and dove off the damn thing. I wouldn’t hold up so well under the same blast of fire it had turned on Barrons. I lost my automatic halfway down, watched it smash into the ground. I didn’t care. It was the spear that could make a difference in this battle, and it was secure in its holster.

I tried to tuck and roll to minimize the impact, but the objects I was plummeting toward were moving and I landed smack on top of one of the red and black Unseelie guards and took it to the ground beneath me. I slammed a hand into its ridged breastplate, nulling it, then yanked out my spear and drove it into its gut.

Adrenaline was raging through me, smoothing out my edges, perfecting my reflexes. I rolled, leapt to my feet, and began methodically slashing my way through the slithering, lumbering Fae, determined to get Jada’s back. Criminy, how had she been holding them off this long?

All around me sidhe-seers were fighting Fae in a horrifically unmatched battle. We had three weapons: spear, sword, and Barrons, at least until the others of the Nine got here, and sidhe-seers were going down hard and fast.

As I spun, kicking and stabbing, I was painfully aware of the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic gunfire going off. I have a special hatred for digging bullets out of my body without Unseelie flesh in me, and I’m trying really hard to abstain. I whirled, nulled, and was about to stab when the Unseelie I was after went flying backward, knocked off its feet by a concentrated burst of bullets.

“Hey!” I snarled. “Get off my kill!”

“Sorry!” one of the new sidhe-seers, trained by Jada, snarled back as she hurled herself past me, taking a Rhino-boy off its feet. As I watched, she yanked a machete from a sheath on her back and began hacking the Unseelie into pieces. Damn. The sidhe-seers might not have weapons that killed immortals but they were pretty darned good at slicing them up, rendering them ineffective.

I felt an Unseelie behind me, spun, hand out to null, stab, move. Null. Stab. Move. It was beginning to seem the Fae were ridiculously easy to kill. I was fighting better than I ever had before. Not one of them was managing to land a blow on me, as if deflected by an invisible shield. I was astonished by my own amazing prowess, how much better I’d gotten without even practicing.

I plunged into the battle with ferocity, periodically catching a glimpse of the ebony-skinned beast that was Barrons, lunging, powerful muscles bunching, jaws wide, ripping with talons, shredding with fangs. As I worked my way toward Jada, Barrons pushed farther into the crush, and I realized he was shoving sidhe-seers from harm’s way, trying to make them see he was on their side by taking down Fae in front of them.

I began shouting to all the sidhe-seers I passed, knowing the other Nine would soon be joining us: “The black beasts with red eyes are on our side! Don’t attack them! Don’t kill the black beasts. They’re fighting for us!”

Shit. Not even Jada knew their true form. This was a liability. Although they’d definitely come back, we needed them here to fight.

As I closed in on Jada, I tried to keep an eye out for Barrons. I hated knowing he might die tonight. I suddenly realized how much he must hate knowing the same about me. At least I knew he would come back. Not so for him: I didn’t have a get-out-of-jail-free card.

I shook that thought from my head as I plunged my spear into a particularly vile Unseelie with wet, flailing tentacles and shoved and fought my way through the throng to Jada.

Then I narrowed my eyes, staring at the cuff glinting silver on my wrist. The next Unseelie I turned on, I didn’t null or stab. I just stood there and gave him ample opportunity to take a swing at me.

His fist bounced off as if it had hit an invisible shield.

I scowled. It wasn’t my amazing prowess after all.

I had the cuff of Cruce on and it was as good as V’lane had claimed it was. The Unseelie couldn’t touch me. Damn.

Still, that was sweet.

“Watch your sword,” I snapped to Jada as I moved into range. Like my spear, it could do horrible things to me. I wanted her to know exactly where I was at all times.

Her head whipped up and she looked at me, and I sucked in a breath. Oh, yes. She killed. That was what she did. Her emerald eyes were completely empty of all emotion. She was so drenched in guts and blood that her face was camouflaged and the whites of her eyes were blinding in comparison.

We stepped back-to-back, fell into perfect sync, whirling, slicing, stabbing.

“Who the bloody hell published that daily?” Jada demanded.

“No bloody clue,” I told her grimly.

“I found it on my way back from Dublin. They were already holding them off. My women are dying,” she snarled.

“I brought some…beasts…with me,” I told her over my shoulder. “I have an ally you don’t know about. They’re fighting for us. Let your sidhe-seers know that.” I described them to her.

“Where did you find them?”

“One of my times in the Silvers,” I lied. It felt good to be here, doing this, slaying with Jada. We’d done this before and I’d missed it. I felt so bloody alive fighting with her, as if I was exactly where I was supposed to be and together we could beat anything.

“You trust these allies of yours?”

“Implicitly. They can kill the Fae.”

“Dead dead?” she said incredulously.

“Yes.”

“Is Ry—Are Barrons and the others coming?”

I didn’t know what to say to that and suddenly realized we had a problem. If the beasts showed up but the Nine didn’t, she would wonder why they hadn’t come to help. “I’m not sure how many of them,” I finally said. “I know some of them are off on some kind of mission-thingie for Ryodan.” Wow. That was pathetic. Mission-thingie?

But Jada said nothing and moved away for a time, and I lost her then, as she vanished into the battle to spread the word to her women, and no doubt verify for herself these beasts I’d brought were indeed allies and indeed capable of the impossible.

I devolved into a killing machine, understanding the purity Jada and Barrons found in the act.

Here, in war, life was simple. There were good guys and bad guys. Your mission was also simple: kill the bad ones. No facade of civility required. No complex social rules. There are few moments when life is so uncomplicated and straightforward. It’s disconcertingly appealing.

Eventually I found myself near the front entrance and Jada was there, with several of the Nine in beast form, snarling around her, helping block the door to the abbey.

Ryodan and Lor were there as well, both in human skins, vanishing, reappearing, sticking close.

I snorted. Ryodan thought of everything. Some of the Nine would show their faces, and others would be “off on some mission-thingie.” Great minds think alike.

Around us, the Fae were beginning to fall back. It was one thing to march in to free a prince, but few of them were willing to sacrifice their immortality to do it. Humans could be motivated to fight to the death, protecting the future for their children, defending the old and weak. We’re capable of patriotism, sacrificing for the long-term survival of our progeny and well-being of our world.

But not the Fae. They had no future generations, cared little for others of their kind, and had a serious aversion to parting with their arrogant, self-indulgent lives.

I warily dialed my sidhe-seer senses to a distant, muted station, in no mood to be assaulted by the cacophony of so many jarring melodies.

As I suspected, there was strong discord spreading through our enemy. Some in the outer ranks were loping away, others, near the center, were fighting their way free to do the same.

This was not a focused army. They were stragglers from here and there, unled, un-united. They might have come pursuing a common goal but with no more fully formed plan of attack than frontal assault. And that assault was getting them killed. Permanently.

I sighed, knowing even if the Fae pulled out right now, darkness would soon come crashing down and some would try again. They would launch better attacks, stealthier, more focused and brutal. The news was out: the legendary Prince Cruce was trapped beneath our abbey.

A sudden explosion behind me nearly took me off my feet, and a spray of glass rained down on my back.

“Fire!” someone screamed. “The abbey’s on fire!”

My head whipped around just as another explosion rocked the abbey.

33

Things got crazy then.

Half the sidhe-seers rushed toward the stone fortress, the other half remained on the battlefield, looking impossibly conflicted. I was startled to see that even Jada looked torn. She never showed emotion, yet there was sudden uncertainty, a hint of worry and vulnerability in her eyes.

“Where is the fire? What part of the abbey?” she demanded.

“I can’t tell from here,” I told her. I was too close to the abbey to get a clear view of it.

“It looks like Rowena’s old wing,” a sidhe-seer about twenty feet from us shouted.

I had no problem with that. I wanted everything the old bitch had ever touched burned, and it conferred the added bonus of getting it out of the way of the expanding black hole.

“And the south wing with the seventeenth library!” another sidhe-seer called.

“Get on it. We need what’s in there,” Jada ordered. “Let Rowena’s wing burn,” she added savagely.

“The east wing looks like it’s burning the hottest,” another shouted. “The Dragon Lady’s library. Must have started there. Leave it? There’s nothing in there, right?”

Jada blanched and went completely motionless.

“What is it?” I said. “Do we need to put it out? Jada. Jada!” I shouted, but she’d vanished, freeze-framing into the still-exploding abbey.

Ryodan vanished, too.

Then Jada was back, with Ryodan dragging her. His mouth was bleeding and he had the start of a serious black eye.

“Get off me, you bastard!” She was snarling, kicking, punching, but he had twice her mass and muscle.

“Let the others put it out. Your sword is needed in battle.”

Jada yanked her sword off her back and flung it away from her. “Take the fucking thing and let me go!”

I gaped. I couldn’t fathom anything for which Jada might be willing to throw away her sword. One of the nearby sidhe-seers shot her a look. Jada nodded and the woman picked it up and returned to the battle.

Around us, the fight surged with renewed vigor, as sidhe-seers vacated the lawn to save the abbey.

But this was the only battle that mattered to me. If Jada wanted to fight the fire instead of the Fae, that was her call. I suspected there was something more to it than that. I just didn’t know what. But the intensity of her reaction was spooking me. “Let go of her, Ryodan,” I demanded.

They vanished again, both moving too fast for me to see, but I could hear the grunts and curses, the shouting. Jada was superior to humans in virtually every way. But Ryodan was one of the Nine. I knew who’d win this battle. And it pissed me off. Barrons lets me choose my battles. Jada deserved the same.

They were there again.

“You can die, Jada,” Ryodan snarled. “You’re not invincible.”

“Some things are worth dying for!” she shouted, her voice breaking.

“The bloody abbey? Are you fucking crazy?”

“Shazam! Let me go! I have to save Shazam! He won’t leave. I told him not to leave. And he trusts me. He believes in me. He’ll sit there forever and he’ll die and it’ll be all my fault!”

Ryodan let go of her instantly.

Jada was gone.

So was Ryodan.

I stood blankly a moment. Shazam? Who the hell was Shazam?

Then I turned and raced into the abbey after them.

—

I couldn’t get anywhere near them. I was forced to concede defeat a third of the way down the burning corridor to my destination. The fire wasn’t natural, it glowed with a deep blue-black hue. Wood was being eaten to ash, stone was crusted with cobalt flame, and when I dragged the tip of my spear over a nearby burning wall, the outer surface of the stone crumbled to dust.

Fae-fire, no doubt.

I wondered how it had gotten into the abbey. Had someone slipped inside in the heat of battle? Gone around the back way and broken in? Had the attack on the abbey been far cleverer than I’d thought?

Sidhe-seers were rushing everywhere, carrying buckets and fire extinguishers, but neither had any effect on the flames. Blankets seemed at first to smother it, then the blaze sprang back up, hotter and more voracious than before.

“Icefire,” one of the new sidhe-seers muttered grimly as she pushed past me. “It can only be made by an Unseelie prince.”

How did they know this stuff? Jada’s sidhe-seers were ten times more knowledgeable and well trained than ours. Thanks to Rowena, who’d only permitted a select few into select few libraries, the bitch. Obviously, in other countries, they were actually allowed to read the ancient texts and legends. I narrowed my eyes. “You think Cruce…?” I trailed off.

“Must’ve. Unless new princes have already replaced those slain. It can only be put out by an Unseelie prince,” she tossed over her shoulder. “You wouldn’t happen to know where we might find one of those, would you? One that’s not the current repository for the Sinsar Dubh? Oh, wait, you are, too,” she spat.

I ignored it. As a matter of fact, I did know where to find an Unseelie prince. In the dungeon of Chester’s.

And one of the Nine owed me a favor.

And there were sifters out there in battle, and the Nine could take one alive.

I turned and raced back out into the night.

—

When I returned from Chester’s with a pissed-off Lor and a seething Christian, the battle was over.

Not won—far from won. Just over.

The sidhe-seers had rapidly realized nothing they did affected the fire and returned to the front where they could at least prevent the burning abbey from being invaded. The Fae had retreated but I knew they’d be back. The abbey was ablaze in three wings, with the enchanted, blue-black fire shooting into the sky, and I had no doubt the Fae believed our fortress would be ash by dawn.

“Icefire,” I told Christian. “Only an Unseelie prince can put it out.”

He smiled bitterly, unfurling his wings. “Aye, lass, I’ve seen it before,” he said, his eyes strange and remote, and I knew he was remembering something from his time in the Silvers, or perhaps his time on the cliff with the Hag. Perhaps he’d explored his forbidden powers in a way I was afraid to. Tried to create something to warm himself, trapped in the Unseelie prison, who could say. All I knew was, he was here and knew what it was, and maybe parts of the abbey could be salvaged.

He sifted out abruptly.

Movement near the entrance caught my attention.

I turned to look and gasped.

Ryodan stood in the doorway, stumbling then catching himself on the jamb, so badly burned I couldn’t comprehend how he was even staying upright.

He was a mass of red, weeping blistered skin, blackened flesh, with charred bits of fabric falling off him as he stood.

Jada was motionless, tossed over a badly burned shoulder.

My heart nearly stopped.

“Is she okay? Tell me, is she okay?” I cried.

“Goddamn,” he croaked, swaying in the doorway. He coughed long and deep, an agonizingly wet sound, as if parts of his lungs were coming up. “Relative.” He coughed thickly again.

“What about Shazam? Did you get Shazam?” I said urgently. I couldn’t bear the thought of Jada suffering one more loss. Again I wondered who Shazam was, where he or she had come from, why Jada had never mentioned this person.

“Relative,” he croaked again, and I stared at him, realizing the invincible Ryodan was having a hard time functioning and something had stunned him so completely he was as close to utterly blank as I’d ever felt myself. The look in his eyes was wild. Hunted. Haunted.

Then Lor was gently taking Jada from his arms, cradling her against his chest, and I was relieved to see, except for her singed clothing and charred hair, she seemed virtually unburned. I moved in for a closer look at her face. It was wet, tear-stained. She looked so young, so fragile, her eyes closed, like a child. Without her eternal cool mask, I could see Dani in her features much more clearly. She appeared unconscious, limp, but barely touched by fire, and as Ryodan staggered and I saw the rest of his brutally burned body, I realized he must have used himself as her shield, no doubt whirling around her like a small protective tornado, burning himself, front, back, and sides, so she would remain unscathed while she searched for her friend.

“Where is Shazam?” I said again, swallowing a sudden lump in my throat. It was only the two of them. No one else had made it out.

Ryodan’s eyes were slits, his lids blistered, eyes glittering, seeping bloody liquid, and I held my breath, waiting for his answer. I wondered if he needed to change to heal. I wondered if he was dying and I should get him out of here fast, before he disappeared in front of everyone.

He sighed, another awful gurgling sound, and lifted a melted mess of a hand that was clutching a charred object from which white stuffing exploded.

“Ah, Christ, Mac,” he whispered, and blood gushed from his mouth.

He collapsed to his knees and I raced to his side to catch him, but he roared with agony when I touched him. I yanked my hands quickly away and took charred flesh with them.

As he fell to the ground and rolled over on his side, he convulsed with pain. “She went back in there for this, Mac.” He thrust it at me.

“I don’t understand,” I said wildly. “That doesn’t make any sense. What the fuck is that?” I knew what it was. I wanted him to tell me I was wrong.

“What the fuck do you think? A goddamned stuffed animal.”