“Why did you bring Unseelie through the dolmen in the warehouse at LaRuhe when you had a Silver you could have used instead?” I employ small questions to lull him. Get him off guard. Then I’ll sneak a big one in. Like most men-who-would-be-king, he likes to hear himself talk.
“Low-caste Unseelie are distracted by anything upon which they might feed. I needed a short passage, void of life, through which to herd them. I would never have gotten them out of this world and into yours. Besides, many of them would not have fit through such a small opening. ”
I remember the horde of Unseelie—some wispy and diminutive, others fleshy and enormous—that had poured through the giant dolmen the night I’d caught my first glimpse of the crimson-robed Lord Master and realized, much to my horror, that he was my sister’s boyfriend. The night that Mallucé had nearly killed me and would have, if Barrons hadn’t miraculously appeared and saved me. I try to evict the memory, but it’s too late.
I’m in the warehouse, trapped between Darroc and Mallucé …
Barrons drops down next to me, long black coat fluttering.
Now that was just stupid, Ms. Lane, he says, with that mocking smile of his. They would have figured out who you were soon enough.
We battle Darroc and his minions. Mallucé injures me badly. Barrons carries me back to his bookstore, where he heals me. It’s the first time he ever kisses me. Like nothing I’ve ever felt before.
Once more he saved me—and what did I do when he needed me?
Killed him.
The silent scream is back, welling up inside me. Biting it down takes all the strength I possess.
I stumble.
Darroc catches my arm and steadies me.
I shake him off. “I’m fine. Just hungry. ” I’m not. My body has shut down. “Let’s get out of here. ” I step into the Silver. I expect to meet resistance, because I always have in the past when entering a Silver, so I duck my head and push forward a little. The silvery surface is thick, gluey.
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I explode out the other side into a headlong sprawl. I scramble to my feet and whirl on him, as he glides from the mirror with smooth grace. “What did you do? Push me?”
“I did no such thing. Perhaps it is the Silver’s way of saying ‘good riddance’ to the stones,” he mocks.
I’d not considered the effect they might have. Tucked away in the rune-covered leather pouch in my backpack, I’d forgotten them. My sidhe-senses don’t seem to work in the Silvers. I don’t feel their cold, dark fire in the pit of my brain.
He smirks. “Or perhaps it’s saying good riddance to you, MacKayla. Give them to me. I will carry them through the next Silver and we will see what happens to you then. ”
The next Silver? Only then do I realize we’re not back in Dublin but in another white room which has ten mirrors hanging on the wall. He’s made it difficult for anyone to follow him. I wonder where the other nine go.
“As if that’s going to happen,” I mutter. I adjust my backpack and dust myself off.
“You do not wish to know. Are you human or are you stone?” he goads. “If I carry them, and the mirror expels you with such force again, we’ll have our answer. ”
I’m not a stone. “Just tell me which mirror goes to Dublin. ”
“Fourth from the left. ”
I push in, but warily this time, in no mood for another fall. This Silver is strange. It takes me into a long tunnel where I move through one brick wall after the next, as if he has stacked Tabh’rs, like the one in Christian’s desert that was inside a cactus, only these are concealed in brick walls.
But where?
I catch a blurred glimpse of a street at night through the next Silver and am buffeted by a chilly breeze. Then I’m blasted so hard across a cobbled alley into a brick wall that it stuns me. This one is solid and impenetrable.
I’d know my city blindfolded. We’re back in Dublin. I hug the wall, determined to stay standing. I’ve been on my ass enough today.
I might be shaky on my feet—but at least I’m on them when my sidhe-seer senses kick in with a vengeance, as if awakening after a long, resented sleep enforced by being in the Silvers. Alien energy slams into my brain: The city is teeming with Fae.
Objects of Power and Fae used to make me feel sick to my stomach, but continued exposure has changed me. Their presence no longer incapacitates me. Now I get a dark, intense adrenaline rush from them. I’m shaky enough already from lack of food and sleep. I don’t care where the Unseelie are, and I’m not about to start looking for the Book. I close my eyes and concentrate on turning down my “volume” until it goes silent.
Then Darroc’s arms are around me, pulling me to him, holding me up. For a moment, I forget who I am, what I feel, what I’ve lost, and know only that strong arms support me.
I smell Dublin.
I’m in a man’s arms.
He turns me around, drops his head to mine, holds me like he’s sheltering me, and for a moment I pretend he’s Barrons.
He presses his lips to my ear. “You said we were friends, MacKayla,” he murmurs, “yet I see none of that in your eyes. If you give yourself to me, completely give yourself, I will not ever—how did you say it?—let you die on my watch. I know you are angry about your sister, but together we could change that … or not, if you wish. You have attachments to your world, but could you not see a place for yourself in mine? You are even less like other humans than Alina. You do not belong here. You never did. You were meant for more. ” His melodious voice deepens seductively. “Do you not feel it? Have you not always felt it? You are … larger than others of your kind. Open your eyes. Take a good look around. Are these petty, breeding, warring humans worth fighting for? Dying for? Or would you dare to taste forever? Eternity. Absolute freedom. Walk among others that are also larger than a single mortal life. ”
His hands cup my head, cradle my face. His lips move against my ear. His breath is harsh, shallow, and fast, and I feel the hard press of him against my thigh. My own breath quickens.
I pretend again that he is Barrons and suddenly he feels like Barrons, and I’m fighting to keep my head clear. Images flash through my mind, those long, incredible hours spent in a sex-drenched bed.
I smell Barrons on my skin, taste him on my lips. I remember. I will never forget. The memories are so vivid. I swear I could reach out and touch those crimson silk sheets.
He sprawls on the bed, a dark tattooed mountain of man, arms folded behind his head, watching me as I dance naked.
Manfred Mann plays an old Bruce Springsteen cover on my iPod: I came for you, for you, I came for you …
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He did. And I killed him.
I would give my right arm to be back there, for just one day. Live it again. Touch him again. Hear those sounds he makes. Smile at him. Be tender. Not be afraid to be tender. Life is so fragile, exquisite, and short. Why do I keep realizing that too late?
The brand on the back of my skull burns, but I can’t tell if it’s Darroc’s mark that scalds my scalp or Barrons’ brand that burns me because Darroc is touching it.
“Abandon your vows to drag me down and destroy me, MacKayla,” he whispers against my ear. “Ah, yes, I see it in your eyes every time you look at me. I would have to be blind not to see it. I have lived for hundreds of thousands of years in the Court of Grand Illusion. You cannot deceive me. Decry your pointless quest for vengeance, which will only end up destroying you, not me. Let me raise you up, teach you to fly. I will give you everything. And you I will not lose. That is a mistake I will not make again. If you come to me knowing what I am, there need be no fear, no mistrust between us. Take my kiss, MacKayla. Accept my offer. Live with me. Forever. ”
His lips move from my ear; he brushes kisses across my cheek. But he stops and waits for me to turn my head that last inch. To choose.
I turn to vomit hatred al
l over him. He claims feelings for my sister and tries to seduce me, too! Can what he felt for Alina be so easily betrayed? I hate him for seducing her. I hate him for not being faithful to her memory.
Neither of those emotions is anything Barrons would have called “useful. ” I have a memory to live up to. Two ghosts to bring back to life.
I focus on the here and now. What can be used. What can’t.
Beyond his shoulder, I see where we are. If I felt anything anymore, I’d double over, fist in my stomach.
Clever, clever ex-Fae. The bastard.
We’re in the alley, catty-corner to Barrons Books and Baubles. He hid a Silver in the brick wall of the first building in the Dark Zone across from my bookstore.
It was right out back, all this time. In my backyard. He was always watching me. Us.
When I was last here, even though I knew I was leaving to walk straight into a trap, there was buoyancy in my step. Barrons had just told me that when I came out, with Darroc dead and my parents alive, he was going to give me BB&B, deed and all.
I’d had no doubt that I was going to get that deed. I was so cocky, so sure of myself.
Darroc watches me carefully.
The games here are treacherously deep. Always were. I just never saw things as clearly as I do now.
He has called me on my hatred of him and done something probably only a being that had been Fae for a small eternity could do—he has accepted it and offered a full pardon. He has proposed far more than a mere business arrangement and waits for my response. I understand his game. He has studied my race with his coldly analytical Fae mind and knows us well.
By agreeing to be intimate with him, I expose myself on two levels: physically I get close enough to him that he could harm me, and emotionally I run the risk that every woman runs when she’s intimate with a man—where the body goes, a tiny piece of the heart tries to follow.
Fortunately for me, I have no heart left. I’m safe on that score. And I’ve grown damned tough to injure.
My ghosts whisper to each other across me, but I can’t hear them. There’s only one way I’ll ever be able to hear them again.
I turn my head for Darroc’s kiss.
As his lips close over mine, the duality inside me threatens to tear me in half, and if it succeeds, I will lose my best chance at accomplishing my mission.
I hurt.
I need punishment for my sins.
I bury my hands in his hair and channel all those feelings into passion, pour them into my touch, kiss him hard, violently, with explosive feeling. I turn us both around and slam him up against the wall, kissing him like he’s all that ever existed, kissing him with a full measure of humanity. It’s a thing a Fae can never feel, no matter the form they wear—humanity. It’s why they crave us in bed.
He staggers for a moment, draws back, and stares down at me.
My eyes are wild. I feel something inside me that terrifies me, and I just hope I can hang on to the edge of this cliff I’m on. I make a sound of impatience, wet my lips, and shove at him. “More,” I demand.
When he kisses me again, the last part of me that could stand myself dies.
8
It took me a bloody fucking month to get back.
I died three times.
It was worse than the 1800s when I had to book passage on a steamer to cross the bloody ocean.
Fragments of Fae reality everywhere, took down every plane I took up.
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I consider the possibility that, by the time I return, he will have caught her, cut my brand off her skull, and made her impossible to track.
Then I begin to feel her.
She is alive. She still wears my mark.
But what I sense is incongruent with her situation. I expect grief. The woman killed me and, in humans, familiarity breeds a certain emotional bond.
But lust? On the heels of murdering me, who does she lust for?
I entertain myself with thoughts of searing my brand from her skull.
When I finally arrive at the bookstore, what do I see in the alley behind it?
The woman that summoned me to save her, then stabbed me in the back at the first opportunity, isn’t lost in the Silvers, in need of saving.
She’s standing in my alley, kissing the bastard that had her raped and turned her Pri-ya.
No, let us be perfectly precise: She’s grinding herself against him and shoving her tongue halfway down his throat.
My monster rattles its cage.
Violently.
9
Mac! Hey, Mac! Din’t’cha hear me? I said, ‘What the blimey feck you doing?’ ”
I stiffen. I’m drifting in a dark place where I feel nothing, because if I did, I’d kill myself. No right, no wrong. Just distraction. “Ignore her,” Darroc growls against my mouth.
“Mac, it’s me! Dani. Hey, who the feck you kissing?”
I feel her zinging from side to side behind me, stirring my hair with the breeze she creates, trying to see who I’ve got up against the wall.
She’s seen him twice before and would recognize him. The last thing I need is her carrying news back to the abbey: Mac’s teamed up with the Lord Master, just like her sister! Just like Ro said! Feckin’ traitor—must run in the feckin’ blood!
Rowena would exploit it ruthlessly, send every sidhe-seer she has to get in my way and try to take me down. The narrow-minded bitch would put more effort into hunting me than she’d ever spent hunting Fae.
A sudden gust ruffles my shirt, and my hair flies straight up in the air.
“That ain’t Barrons!” Dani snaps indignantly.
The name goes through me like a knife. No, it ain’t Barrons and, unless I’m convincing, it never will be again.
“It ain’t V’lane, neither!” Anger mixes with bafflement in her voice. “Mac, what’cha doing? Where the feck you been? I been looking all over for you. Been a month. Maaac!” she wails the last part plaintively. “I got scoop! Pay attention to me!”
“Shall I get rid of her?” Darroc murmurs.
“She’s a little tough to shake,” I murmur back. “Give me a minute. ”
I step back, smiling up at him. No one can accuse the Fae of lacking in the lust department. It blazes in his not-quite-human eyes. Banked in that heat, I see surprise he tries but fails to mask. I suspect my sister was a little more … refined than I am.
“I’ll be right back,” I promise, and turn slowly, buying time to brace myself for dealing with Dani. I’m going to have to hurt her to get rid of her.
Her face is bright, eager. Her unruly mass of auburn curls is tamed beneath a black bike helmet, lights ablaze. She has on a long black leather coat and high-top black sneakers. Somewhere under that coat is the Sword of Light, unless Darroc sensed it and took it, too. If it’s still there, I wonder if I could draw it swiftly enough to impale myself before she managed to stop me.
I have goals. I focus on them. No time to indulge my guilty conscience and even less point. When I’m done with what I plan to do, everything that happens in this alley tonight will never have taken place, so it doesn’t matter that I hurt this Dani, because she won’t have to live through it in the future I create.
The enormity of freedom that grants me makes me suddenly breathless. Nothing I do from this moment forth will ever come back to bite me in the ass. I’m in a penalty-free zone. I have been since the moment I decided to remake it all.
I study Dani with strange detachment, wondering how much I should change for her. I could keep her mother from being killed. Give her a life that would never harden her, that would let her be open, soft. Let her have fun like Alina and me, play on a beach, not be out in the streets hunting and killing monsters by the tender age of … however old she was when Rowena turned her into a weapon. Eight? Ten?
Now that she has my attention, she beams, and when Dani beams her
whole face lights up. She bounces from foot to foot, burning off excited energy. “Where you been, Mac? I missed you! Dude—I mean, man,” she corrects hastily, with a gamine grin, before I can make good on a threat I made in what feels like another lifetime that I would call her by her full name if she ever “duded” me again. “You ain’t never gonna believe what’s been going on! I invented Shade-Busters, and the whole abbey’s been using ’em—even though they ain’t saying nothing about how brilliant I am, like I musta accidentally stumbled onto it or something, when those stupid sidhe-sheep never woulda in a gazillion years,” she mutters sourly. But then she brightens again. “And you’re never gonna believe it—even I can’t hardly—but I kicked a Hunter’s ass and killed the fecker!” She frowns and looks a little irritated. “Well, maybe Jayne helped some, but I’m the one that killed it. And, feckin’ A, you ain’t never gonna guess this one—dude!” She begins bouncing from foot to foot so quickly and agitatedly that she becomes a black leather smudge in the night. “The feckin’ Sinsar Dubh came to the abbey and it—”
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Abruptly, she’s no longer bouncing but standing still, looking at me, mouth hanging open, but nothing’s coming out.
She stares past me, at me, then past me again. Her lips tighten and her eyes narrow. Her hand flashes inside her coat.
I can tell by the look on her face that it encounters emptiness where her sword should be. But she doesn’t back up, not Dani. She stands her ground. If I had anything left inside me, I’d smile. Thirteen and she’s got the heart of a lion.
“Something going on here I ain’t getting, Mac?” she says tightly. “I’m standing here, see, trying to think of a reason, any ol’ reason at all, you might be kissing that fecker, but I ain’t finding none. ” She glares at me. “Thinking this is a little worse than me watching porn. Dude. ”
Oh, yes, she’s upset. She just unapologetically “duded” me. I steel myself. “Lot going on here you ain’t getting,” I say coolly.
She searches my face, wondering if I’m playing double agent or something, undercover with the enemy. I need to convince her, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I’m not. I need her to go away and stay away. I can’t afford a superspeedy supersleuth interfering with my plans.
I also don’t want her around long enough for Darroc to realize she could cause serious problems for us if she felt like it. Penalty-free zone or not, there’s no reality in which I could kill Dani or watch her be killed by anyone else. Family isn’t always born; sometimes it’s found.
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