He stares at me, hard. “Who am I?”
I stare back. There is danger here, in this moment. I do not like it. I want more “Tubthumping” and tell him so, but he turns off the music.
“What happened on Halloween, Ms. Lane?” He fires the question at me, and I now have the strangest feeling he has been asking me this question over and over for a long time but I block it every time he asks it. Refuse to even hear it. And that perhaps there are dozens of questions he’s been asking me that I have been refusing to hear.
Why is he calling me that new name? I am not she. He repeats the question. Halloween. The word gives me chills. Something dark tries to bubble up in my mind, to break the surface I keep placid and still with sex, sex, sex, and suddenly I am no longer laughing but my body is trembling and my bones are so soft I fall to my knees.
I clutch my head in my hands and shake it violently.
No, no, no. I do not want to know!
Images bombard me: A mob shouting, surging out of control. Rain-slicked, shiny dark streets. Shadows moving hungrily in the darkness. A red Ferrari. Glass breaking. Fires burning. People being driven, herded into hell.
A place of books and lights that falls to the enemy. It mattered to me, that place. I’d lost so much, but at least I had that place.
A gruesome meal. A weapon I both need and fear. People rioting. Trampling one another. A city burning. A belfry. A closet. Darkness and fear. Finally, dawn.
Holy water splashing, hissing on steel.
A church.
I shut down. Walls slam in my heart, my mind. I will not go there. There is/was/will never be a church in my existence.
I look up at him.
I know him. I do not trust him. Or is it me I do not trust?
“You are my lover,” I say.
He sighs and rubs his jaw. “Mac, we have to leave this room. It’s bad out there. It’s been months. I need you back. ”
“I am right here. ”
“What happened at the”—he breaks off, his nostrils flare, and a muscle works in his jaw—”church?”
It seems he does not want to hear about what happened at this church any more than I want to know about it. If we are in agreement on this, why does he push?
“I do not know that word,” I say coolly.
“Church, Mac. Unseelie Princes. Remember?”
“I do not know those words. ”
“They raped you. ”
“I do not know that word!” My hands are fists; my nails hurt me.
“They took your will. They took your power. They made you feel helpless. Lost. Alone. Dead inside. ”
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“You should have been there!” I snarl, but I have no idea why. I was never at a church. I am shaking violently. I feel like I might explode.
He drops to the floor on his knees in front of me and grabs my shoulders. “I know I should have!” he snarls back. “How the fuck many times do you think I’ve relived that night?”
I beat at him with my fists, hard. I punch him and punch him. “Then why weren’t you?” I shout.
He does not resist my blows. “It is complicated. ”
“‘Complicated’ is just another word for ‘I screwed up and am making excuses!’” I yell.
“Fine. I screwed up!” he yells back. “But I only ended up stuck in Scotland because you asked me to go help the bloody damned MacKeltars!”
“And there you go making excuses!” I stare at him, furious, betrayed, and I do not know why.
“How was I supposed to know? Do I look omniscient?”
“Yes!”
“Well, I’m not! You were supposed to be at the abbey. Or back in Ashford. I tried to send you home. I tried to get you to go to Scotland. You never do what I tell you to do. Where the fuck was your fairy little prince? Why didn’t he save you?”
“I do not know those words—fairy, prince. ” They burn my tongue. I hate them.
“You do, too! V’lane. Remember V’lane? Was he there, Mac? Was he at the church? Was he?” He shakes me. “Answer me!”
When I say nothing, he repeats in that strange multilayered voice he sometimes uses, “Was V’lane there when you were raped?”
V’lane failed me, too. I needed him and he did not come. I shake my head.
His grip on my shoulders relaxes. “You can do this, Mac. I’m here. You’re safe now. It’s okay to remember. They can never hurt you again. ”
Oh, yes, they could. I will not remember, and I will never leave this room.
Here there are things that keep the monsters away.
I need those things. Right now.
His body. His lust. Erases it all.
I push him back on the floor, frantic with need. He responds savagely. We explode at each other, grabbing fistfuls of hair, kissing, grinding our bodies together. Rolling across the floor. I want to be on top, but he flips me over and pushes me forward, spreading me. Licks and tastes me until I come and come, then carries me to the bed and covers me with his body. When he pushes himself inside me, in my anger I push, push, push back at him with that magic place inside my head, because I am sick of him stirring up things inside me. It is my turn to stir things up inside him, and
—we are in his body, both of us, and we are killing violently, and our cock is hard while we do it. It never felt good to kill before. It never felt bad, either, but now it exhilarates. Now it is power, it is lust, it is being alive. The children are dead, the woman cold, the man dying. Bones crunch, blood sprays—
He knows I am there. He shoves me out with such violence that it flattens my magic completely. I am awed by his strength. It excites me.
Our sex is primitive.
It exhausts me. I sleep. I do not know who I am anymore.
I thought I was an animal.
I am no longer so sure.
* * *
It’s hard to say what makes the mind piece things together in a sudden lightning flash.
I’ve come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit, too, has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows when the harm is too much to bear. If it deems the injury too great, the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it. For some people, that time never comes. Some stay fractured, forever broken. You see them on the street, pushing carts. You see them in the faces of the regulars at a bar.
My cocoon was that room.
After Barrons left—I later realized he often left while I slept—I dreamed.
Some say dreaming is another place we go. That we don’t know it as such because it’s not a physical realm we recognize. It exists in another dimension, which mankind has not yet discovered and to which it attributes no credence.
I dreamed my life back.
Alina and I playing, laughing, running hand in hand, chasing butterflies with nets, but we don’t catch them, because who wants to trap a butterfly in a net? Too fragile, too delicate. You don’t want to break their wings. Like sisters and love. You have to be vigilant with precious things. I fell asleep on my watch. I wasn’t vigilant. I didn’t hear the undercurrents in her voice. I was lazy and ignorant in my happy pink world. A cell phone dropped into a pool. Ripples spreading on the surface. Everything changed forever.
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I am grief.
I dream my parents, but they’re not. Alina and I were born to others, but I have no memory of them, and I wonder for the first time if someone took those memories from me.
I am betrayed.
I dream Dublin and the first Fae I ever saw and that nasty old woman, Rowena, who told me to go die somewhere else if I couldn’t protect my bloodline, then left me alone without offering me the smallest bit of help.
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I am anger. I didn’t deserve that.
I dream Barrons and V’lane, and I am lust wed to suspicion, and those two emotions together are poison.
I dream the Lord Master, my sister’s murderer, and I am vengeance. But no longer hot. I am cold vengeance, the lethal kind.
I dream the Book that is a beast, and it speaks my name and calls me kindred.
I am not.
I dream Mallucé’s lair. I eat the flesh of immortal beings and I am changed.
I dream Christian and Dani and the abbey of sidhe-seers. O’Duffy, Jayne, Fiona, and O’Bannion, the Hunters, and the monsters invading my streets. Then the dreams come darker and faster, blows from a world-class boxer bruising my brain, pulping my heart.
Dublin goes dark! The Wild Hunt! The smell of spice and sex!
I am in the narthex of the church, and there are Unseelie Princes all around me, and they slice me open and rip out my insides and scatter them all over the street, leaving a shell of a woman, a bag of skin and bones, and the horror of it, God, the horror of watching yourself from the outside as everything you know about yourself gets stripped away and demolished, not just the loss of power over your body but power over your mind, rape in the deepest, most hellish sense of the word, but wait—
There’s a spark.
Inside that hollowed-out woman, there’s a place they can’t touch. There’s more to me than I thought there was. Something that no one and nothing can take away from me.
They can’t break me. I won’t cease. I’m strong. And I am never going to go away until I’ve gotten what I came for.
I might have been lost for a while, but I was never gone.
Who the fuck are you?
With an explosive inhalation, I snap upright in bed, and my eyes fly open—like coming alive after being dead and interred in a coffin.
I am Mac.
And I’m back.
One of my college Psych professors claimed that every choice we made in life revolved around our desire to acquire a single thing: sex.
He argued that it was a primitive, unalterable biological imperative (thereby excusing the human race our frequent idiocy?). He said that from the clothing a person selected in the morning, to the food they shopped for, to the entertainment they sought, at the very root of it all was our single-minded goal of attracting a mate and getting laid.
I thought he was a jackass, raised a manicured hand, and told him so with lofty disdain. He challenged me to rebut. Mac 1. 0 couldn’t.
But Mac 4. 0 can.
Sure, a lot of life is about sex. But you have to pull up high and look down on the human race with a bird’s-eye view to see the big picture, a thing I couldn’t do when I was nineteen and pretty in pink and pearls. Shudder. Just what kind of mate was I trying to attract back then? (Don’t expect me to analyze Mac 4. 0’s predilection for black and blood. I get it, and I’m perfectly fine with it. )
So, what’s the big picture about our lust for sex?
We’re not trying to acquire something. We want to feel something: Alive. Electrically, intensely, blazingly alive. Good. Bad. Pleasure. Pain. Bring it on—all of it.
For people who live small, I guess enough of that can be found in sex.
But for those of us who live large, the most alive we ever feel is when we’re punching air with a fist, uncurling our middle finger with a cool smile, and flipping Death the big old bird.
—Mac’s journal
I was mad as hell.
I had so many grievances that I didn’t even know where to begin listing them.
I was pissed-off walking. Or rather pissed-off sitting, tangled in crimson silk sheets that smelled like somebody’d been having a sexathon.
That would be me.
And that made me even madder.
Just when you think your life has gotten as crappy as it can get, it goes and gets crappier. Gee, Mac doesn’t get to have a choice about having sex with someone. Good-bye: dating, flirting, and building up to that special romantic moment. Hello: I’m getting screwed senseless, and then, when I’ve gotten about as low as I can get, I’m getting screwed back to my senses—although I wouldn’t in a million years admit any such thing to the man who was no doubt feeling impossibly smug that, by the power of his sexuality alone, he’d rescued me from the mindless state it had taken multiple Unseelie death-by-sex Fae to drag me to, kicking and screaming.
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If I knew Jericho Barrons, he was walking around feeling like his dick was the most huge, magnificent, perfect, important creation under the sun.
Which—I winced—I vaguely recalled telling him a time or two.
Well … maybe several times.
I yanked the sheets up over my breasts with a snarl. The animal I’d been recently hadn’t left me. She was still in me and would be forever. I was glad. I welcomed her feral nature. Pink Mac had needed a good dose of savagery. It was a savage world out there.
I was coldly glad to be alive, glad that I lived another day, no matter the methods by which it had been accomplished. I was also seething, furious at everyone I’d met and everything that had happened to me since the moment I’d left Ashford, Georgia.
Nothing had gone as planned. Not one thing. My sister’s murderer was supposed to be a human monster that I was going to bring to justice, either via Ireland’s Garda or by my own methods. I wasn’t supposed to get caught up in a deadly war between the human race and a supernatural, supersexed, immortal, and mostly invisible race, little more than a weapon to be used by whoever could figure out how to manipulate me most effectively. And that was only the beginning of the many, many things that had gone wrong.
Speaking of manipulative bastards …
What was the point of Barrons’ stamping a tattoo on the back of my skull if he hadn’t been able to use it to find me when I needed help the most? What was the point of V’lane embedding his name in my tongue if, at the crucial moment, it wouldn’t work? Weren’t Barrons and V’lane supposed to be the most powerful, dangerous, brilliant players of all? That was why I’d allied myself with them!
But both had failed me when I’d needed them the most. I’d counted on them. I’d believed Barrons could find me. I’d believed V’lane would instantly appear when summoned. I’d believed Inspector Jayne could help me with certain problems. Those three had been the extent of my diversification.
And who’d saved me?
Dani. A thirteen-year-old kid. A girl.
She’d blasted in, plucked me right out of the LM’s grasp, and whisked me to safety.
No, not safety. Not quite.
She’d taken me to Rowena, who locked me in a cell and left me alone, hellishly alone.
To die?
There were memories from the time of my capture by the LM and my early incarceration at the abbey that weren’t accessible. They were in me. I could feel them, deep, dark, secreted away in a mind that had been impressionable but uncomprehending. They weren’t exactly memories, because memory is stored by a brain that functions and mine hadn’t during those traumatic hours. More like imprints. Photographs snapped but not understood. Conversations overheard. Things seen. It would take work to dredge them from the muck at the bottom of my psyche.
But I would.
The LM hadn’t expected me to ever escape.
Rowena hadn’t expected me to live.
“Surprise,” I purred. “I did. ”
I tossed back the sheet and pushed up from the bed. My body felt good. It was sleeker, stronger than I remembered it being. I stretched and glanced down, then blinked, admiring myself.
Gone was all softness, save my breasts and butt. My calves, thighs, arms, stomach—all were toned, shaped by smooth, sleek muscle. I flexed a bicep. I had one. Long fingernails dug into my palms. I studied them. On Samhain, they’d been cut to the quick.
Just how long had I been having sex with Jericho
Barrons? How long did it take to resculpt a body like mine had been into—Savage Me was pleased to note—this much more useful new shape? What had we been doing? Constant sexual gymnastics?
I shut down that thought. I had a few too many memories that weren’t remotely blurry, and they gave rise to impossibly conflicting emotions.
Like: Thanks for saving me, Barrons—too bad I’m going to have to kill you for doing those things to me and seeing me like that.
I’d had sex with Jericho Barrons.
Not just sex. Incredibly raw, intensely intimate, completely uninhibited sex.
I’d done everything a woman could do with a man. I’d pretty much worshipped every inch of him. And he’d let me.
Oh, no, much more than that—he’d enthusiastically participated. He’d egged me on. He’d plunged right into my animalistic frenzy with me, met me move for move in that dark lust-crazed cave where I’d been living.
I turned to stare at the big silk-sheeted bed. It was exactly the kind of bed I’d expect Barrons to sleep in. Sun King ornate, four-postered, draped in silk and velvet; a sensual masculine lair.
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There were fur-lined handcuffs on the bedposts. I got knotted up in that memory for a minute before I managed to extricate myself.
My breathing was shallow and my hands were fists. “Oh, yes, I’m going to have to kill you, Barrons,” I said coolly. Partly because, for the most minuscule sliver of an instant, while looking at those handcuffs, I’d imagined myself climbing back into bed and pretending I wasn’t cured yet.
And I’d thought interacting with Barrons had been difficult before. Since the day we’d met, we’d maintained a careful wall of non-intimacy between us and rarely slipped. I was Ms. Lane. He was Barrons. That wall had been blasted to dust, and I hadn’t had anything to say about it. We’d fast-forwarded from formal and testy most of the time to See Mac Bare All/Body & Soul, without a single ounce of relationship progression along the way. He’d seen me at my absolute worst, my most vulnerable, while he’d been in complete control, and I still didn’t really know a damned thing about him.
We’d gotten as close as two human beings—well, overlooking the fact that he wasn’t one—possibly could. Now, in addition to wondering whether he’d spiked the Orb of D’Jai with deadly Shades before he’d given it to me to give to the sidhe-seers and whether he’d sabotaged the ritual at the MacKeltars’ on Halloween because he wanted the walls down between Fae and human realms, I knew that killing aroused him. Turned him on. I hadn’t forgotten that enlightening little detail I’d found poking around inside his skull. It cast a harsh new light on the moment I’d watched him walk out of an Unseelie mirror carrying the savaged, very dead body of a young woman.
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