Burned

22

In the five days since Ryodan interred me beneath his nightclub, I have neither heard voice nor experienced another’s emotion.

I should worry. I should care. I should be hammering on the door, demanding to be freed, but in these rooms I have experienced the first peace of my existence.

The entry room is unfurnished but the rest are not. There are four others: a bedroom with a soft pillow-top mattress so uniformly surfaced I know it was never used prior to my arrival; a bathroom with a large, gentle rain shower; and a kitchen stocked with food and beverages that tell me as surely as condemning words that Ryodan had been planning this for me, perhaps for quite some time.

The fourth and final room is the largest, walled with mirrors, housing a state-of-the-art gym.

Kasteo has not spoken a word.

Nor have I.

I’ve spent five days and nights simply feeling myself, my unborn child, without the constant drone of interference I’ve endured my entire life.

Kasteo lies on the floor.

He gets up and works out.

Occasionally he showers.

He doesn’t speak and I haven’t seen him eat. Perhaps he cooks while I’m asleep. I’ve seen no dirty dishes.

I, on the other hand, am voracious. Eating for two with an appetite I’ve never known before.

I’ve become a hedonist, sleeping ten hours at a time, taking long indulgent showers behind a locked bathroom door, making myself meals of meat and potatoes and more meat, which I’ve not had in months.

Nothing, no one, disturbs me here. No emotion, no voice, no seductive dark prince.

These five days and nights have been transformative.

I’ve realized, during this brief, unexpected, only vacation I’ve ever had from the world, what my problem is.

I’ve never been able to fully block the emotions of others because I didn’t know what silence felt like. I found it impossible to strive for a goal I couldn’t fathom, to re-create a thing of which I’d no knowledge, like a blind man trying to paint a picture of sky and clouds and sun.

I now know a stillness in my center, that it exists and where to find it, and I’m certain I can locate it again amidst the boisterous din of Dublin, the abbey, even the desperate and dangerous shark tank of Chester’s.

The man who isn’t there brought me to the blessedly silent lair of another man who isn’t there and gave me the greatest gift I’ve ever received: the time and space to take a deep breath and explore my inner terrain, comprehend the strengths I have to work with and the weaknesses that have crippled me.

I can’t begin to imagine why he did it. It seems a kindness from a man I would never have counted kind.

He has shown me that goal which always eluded me. That sacred inner place that is mine, and no one else’s, the eye in the storm where I can stand unharmed by the chaos whirling around me with jagged sharp edges and bulk enough to knock me from my feet.

Rather than locking me away to torment me, he did it to show me a thing I was desperate to find.

It confounds me. I find myself questioning everything I thought I knew about Ryodan. Running prior conversations through my mind, realizing the man I believed moderately intelligent and highly manipulative of others — to their own detriment and destruction — is in fact highly intelligent and enormously manipulative of others, but I’ve begun to suspect it’s because he’s trying to fix what he perceives as the things they want fixed but don’t know how. He sees the bird’s-eye view and takes the hard, catalytic actions. Unsettling, disturbing to those of us that don’t, makes it easy to call him bastard, heartless.

But why would he bother?

There are only two possibilities: either he wants whatever goal he will achieve by altering that person, or, unfathomable as it is, he cares about the world he pretends to scorn, and the people in it.

Then why run a den of such depravity as Chester’s?

Unless … where better to sort the wheat from the chaff?

Even I know it’s impossible in times of war to save everyone. For the love of Mary, it’s impossible in times of peace. Is the nightclub his distillery where he sorts the vintages and tucks into his personal cellar the most complex, interesting wines, the most potent and impressive whiskeys?

And he considers me of value.

Easier to believe he wants something of me, although I cannot imagine what.

I’m eager to test myself, experience emotional commotion. See if I can maintain my newfound balance.

Yet I’ve developed a grudging respect for the man who brought me here.

You’ll remain with him until I decide you’ve gotten what you came for, he said.

So I remain. I came for the strength of concrete without the price of it. If Ryodan is true to his word, I will leave with it.

I’d stay here a very long time to reach that goal.

Before I sought him out that night, I’d already admitted to myself I wasn’t good for the abbey. I knew I wasn’t the one to replace her, a mere week after Rowena died. But there was Margery and she was toxic, and the Sinsar Dubh was stirring and my women were in need, so I stayed and battled to the best of my ability, without weapon, without the strength of sometimes-necessary deceit and sleight of hand.

I was unfit to lead.

So I don’t hammer the door, I don’t shout for salvation.

My salvation is currently stretched on his back on the floor, staring up at the coffered ceiling, wearing black camouflage pants, tattooed and hard and silent.

Ryodan brought me here to give me silence.

I wonder, clever man that he is, if he brought me here also to somehow give this man words.

What could make someone stop speaking a thousand years ago? I can barely grasp, much less accept that anyone has lived so long.

How would it feel, if you cared for such a person, to watch his complete retreat? To see him day in and out, yet never converse again? To know that he could speak to you if he chose to, but won’t? Day in, day out, your brother in arms, in your reach yet completely unreachable.

Ryodan has ordered this mute, dark man to be my teacher.

Will he obey?

I need instruction to cement my newfound center. I need training, discipline, and strength. I’m not leaving without it.

I lean back against the wall and study him, as I have for nearly a week now. He’s not catatonically withdrawn. He simply doesn’t interact with anyone around him at all.

“Kasteo,” I say. “I’ve stopped feeling the pain of the world. Help me learn to control my environment. Teach me to fight.” To one who stopped living a millennium ago, I say, “Show me how to live.”

The man who has stared at little but the ceiling for nearly a week, who has not so much as once acknowledged my presence, slowly turns his head to the side and looks across the floor at me.

Then stares back at the ceiling.

23

I’m fourteen, finally old enough to enter the circle of standing stones for the first time. Ban Drochaid — the White Bridge, as these stones are called — was once a bridge through time, for the right Keltar for the right reasons. But my clan abused the gift, and the Fae queen who’d granted it took it away.

Still, the stones hold ancient power. Only one avenue was closed to us.

I stand with my da and uncles between the dual bonfires of our great May celebration, and prepare with solemn pride to help them usher in the season of rebirth with ritual and chant.

Our women, no less strong than our men, gather round, clad in the old ways, with brightly colored skirts, laced blouses, and bare feet, in honor of the coming feast, which will be attended by the entire village that thrives in the valley below our mountain.

The night sky is black and crystal clear, with thousands of glittering stars scattered like diamonds on a cloak of mink. Diamonds.

I want a girl with a mind like a diamond …

“Dani,” I whisper through lips that are cracked from dehydration. I taste blood, it bubbles in my throat, choking me. Pain lances my ribs, my gut, my groin.

Focus.

The heather has not yet begun to bloom, and although the grass is still recovering from April’s unexpectedly frosty kiss, yellow May flowers have blossomed and are strewn everywhere, on doors and windows, on the livestock, around the necks and in the hair of our women, scattered around the stones.

My da and uncles awe me, tease me, push me, teach me. I want to be like them when I am a man: wide-shouldered, with a ready laugh, a spine of steel, and courage beyond compare.

Was she worth this? Dying over and over? You gave yourself up so she could fight for those sheep. Fuck sheep. You’re not a sheepdog anymore. You’re a rabid wolf.

I gave myself up to watch her shine. Because I knew what the massacre of so many people that she loved would do to her. Steal the light from her eyes. I wanted to watch her save the world, and feel on top of it.

I inhale sharply. I just stumbled as I passed between my uncles, took an inadvertent elbow in my stomach, nothing more.

There’s Tara, our housekeeper’s daughter and Colleen’s best friend. Later tonight a group of us will go for a midnight swim in the loch and shriek from the icy slap as we plunge deep. I’ll try hard not to stare at Tara’s wet blouse when she gets out, but och, the lass is growing in all the right places and I stare in spite of myself. She always spots me, tosses her head of fiery curls, catches the tip of her pretty pink tongue between her lips and smiles, eyes shining.

Near her stand Jamie, Quinn, and Jonah, the elderly, impoverished MacBean’s grandsons, orphaned when their parents died last year in a car crash. This is their first Beltane without them. They join us nearly every evening for supper, lonely but not alone, as food is more plentiful in our household than theirs. Old MacBean was injured a decade ago, walks with a cane and has only the food he can harvest from the land.

I look around, smiling, filled with plans. I will one day be laird, as my da before me. I’ll live in a mighty old rambling wonderful stone castle filled with history and tradition, take a bonny lass to wife—

Dani is unprotected and that bastard Ryodan is—

Pain rips through my entrails and I scream.

I know why I’m obsessed with her. She’s the innocence I’ve lost. As I was going dark, she was getting nothing but brighter. She’s the ready smile of a fourteen-year-old that believes the world is one long, incredible adventure. Her dreams are still intact. She’s everything I’m not anymore. She tackles life with abandon, lives in the moment, never gives up.

She reminds me of Tara, dead three years now, of a rare bone disease. I wept at the funeral for the girl who smiled all the way through her brief but brutal decline, to the twilight that came too soon.

I see the ghosts in Dani’s eyes. You’d have to be blind not to.

I want to chase them, as nothing can chase mine.

I want to keep her from ever changing into something so terrible as I’ve become.

I want to shelter her from the hard truth that life takes from you, whittles away at your hope and scrapes the flesh from your bone and leaves you so changed you can’t even recognize yourself in the mirror anymore.

I want her to always be Dani, as she is now, but the thing I was becoming got so fucked up about it. I hope the last action I chose to make as a free man cancels some of it out.

I thought turning Unseelie Prince was the most difficult battle I would ever face.

I was wrong. I thought I was in Hell. Then I found out what Hell really was. It’s enough to wrench a laugh from my cracked lips at the sheer absurdity of it.

Pain stabs through my abdomen, sears and rips and gnaws with tiny razor teeth right down into my groin as I’m flayed alive. I scream again, flee back to the Highlands, and see the …

Bonfires.

The crisp air smells of roast pig and gently charring peppers and potatoes. We’re about to walk the livestock between the twin fires, twins like Colleen and me, like my uncles Dageus and Drustan, before driving them out to the summer pastures. We’ll relight the doused fires in our castles from the sacred, protective flames of Beltane. We’ll feast and my family and friends will dance and life will seem like one perfect, long dream from which I plan to never awaken.

I have no idea how long I’ve been staked to the side of a cliff. I’ve recounted every day that I can recall, relived it in extraordinary detail.

It has kept me from falling.

It has kept me from going mad.

Unexpectedly, it has also silenced the monster I was becoming.

I no longer loathe and fear what was happening to me, because so much worse has happened to me. Perspective is a funny thing. You think your back is to the wall, then something worse corners you, and the first threat looks puny in comparison.

There is only me now, a Keltar who’s been mutated with immense power and perhaps will always be, but each time I’ve died on this cliff and held my own, maintained my sanity, reminded myself of my heritage, who I was born to be, the madness of the Unseelie Prince faded a little more. Strengthened by my ordeal, staked to the side of this bloody godforsaken cliff, the prince overtaking me was overtaken.

I am not a man that was once a Highlander, who got swallowed alive by the depravity and homicidal mania of a death-by-sex Fae.

I am a Keltar druid who now happens to possess Unseelie power and a bloody enormous sex drive. Not sure that last part’s much of a change.

My head sags forward, blood gushes from my cracked lips. She’s at it again, needling away, yanking out my entrails and knitting feverishly on a gown that will never be complete.

The cruelty of it is intolerable. My entire body is on fire with pain.

Fires.

The Highlands.

Beltane.

I recall this particular night of my fourteenth year for three reasons.

It was the first night I was recognized as a Keltar druid. Heady stuff for a young lad.

It was also the night Uncle Dageus warned me, made me suspect my happy dream would end before I was ready.

Like Tara.

Like I won’t let it for Dani.

When Da and the others place the sacred chalice and staff on the slab, Uncle Dageus moves close and puts a hand on my shoulder, pulls me aside and gazes down. Golden eyes so like my own stare into mine.

Fire purifies and distills, he says. Fire transforms. You must remember that when the time comes it seems only to ravage and destroy.

So, too, does pain.

One day you will walk through flames, lad.

Of the Beltane fires? I ask curiously. This was not a tradition with which I was familiar, but many of our more complex druid rituals were cloaked in secrecy until certain ages.

Flames of another kind. Hellfire. You will believe you canna possibly endure the agony.

At ten and four, I shiver, startled by the solemnness and sorrow in his eyes. There’s gravity in his low voice that makes me more than uneasy; a young man that prides himself on his courage, I taste the sudden ash of fear.

I canna prevent it. The stones are closed to us now. I would spare you if I could.

Are you foretelling my future? I ask warily. Do I lose my virginity this year? I add quickly. I’d pose that question to none other of my uncles, but Dageus was different. The eyes of women follow him everywhere. I want to be like him one day, lady killer (but not a lady murderer) with the same slow, sexy smile that melts my (pretty darned hot, she’s only ten years older than me) aunt Chloe every time.

I’m ready. I want Tara to be the one.

He smiles sadly.

It’s whispered among my clan that Dageus has glimpsed moments in the years to come. That when he traveled through time — before the Seelie Queen took away our power to navigate the centuries in hours of need — he saw hours, even days, of our lives. He’s never spoken of it, but we’ve always suspected. He has a canny sense of premonition that’s proved invaluable on more than one occasion.

I doona ken the how and when it happens, so I doona ken how to prevent it, short of locking you away and that’s no’ a life. Time is tricky. It may or may not come to pass, but if it does it will test you beyond imagining. If that hour comes, you must hold on to one thing.

I shiver again. What?

Love. You can only be broken without it. So long as the smallest spark of love, pure, protective, and good, exists within you, that which is Keltar in you will survive. You will return.

Return.

I know a harsh truth.

So long as I stay in the magnificent Highlands of my mind I will never return.

You must face the fire. I doona ken how long you must endure. You must hold on, remain aware. You must be prepared when your opportunity arises, or it will fail. Uncle Dageus laughs softly. Every man’s time comes eventually. It will not, however, be yours. With luck, you’ll live forever.

I’d stare up at him, rejecting it, refusing to believe he had any powers of prophecy. Telling myself no one lives forever (not knowing I’d turn Unseelie Prince) and his rambling only made him half mad, likely from the constant chatter of the thirteen dead Draghar within him. Then I’d torn from his grip, raced off, and refused to speak to him for days.

Now I wish I’d asked him questions, now I wish I knew what he saw, what my opportunity is because I sure as hell don’t see one.

Love?

Can I even feel it anymore?

I’ve hated everyone and everything around me since the moment I began to change. I ran from those who cared about me. I concede it’s possible my hatred hastened the changes, fed the wrong things, starved the right ones. But love? To feel it here and now? I’m not sure it’s even possible.

Och, but of course it is.

It’s what I’ve been doing all along. Like my da and all my clan before us, the Highlands are our greatest love. I was shielding myself without understanding the nuts and bolts of it. I’m not a man that could wed a woman, follow her to another country and live there. I’m wedded to my motherland, to the very soil of Scotland.

I add to those mountains and valleys the faces of those I ache for and would protect, etch them in vivid detail on the backs of my eyelids, my mother and father, my siblings Colleen and Cara and Cory, and Tara, och, my sweet, sweet Tara — the third reason I recall that evening so clearly, she took my virginity that starry night on a mossy bed near the loch and bloody hell did I love her for it, and love doesn’t die just because the person does, although it would be infinitely easier if it did — my friends and villagers and the lovely, brilliant, risk-taking, cocky Danielle O’Malley who conceals her broken heart behind a gamine grin, and I roll them all up into one ball of light and hold on.

I take a final look at my clan, inhale the scent of roast pig and potatoes, whisper a farewell to my long-dead Tara, shove away from my blessed retreat and force myself to embrace awareness.

I will be ready when my chance for escape comes.

I open my eyes and stare into the hideous face of the Crimson Hag as she slices my gut open.

Again.

24

I have a small psychotic break, overwhelmed by too many shocks to process. My brain pulls the plug on my body.

I should run. I should figure out how to make my feet move. At the moment they are neither attached to my ankles nor controlled by conscious thought.

I flip channels, my remote stuck on three train-wreck movies I can’t stop watching: IhadsexwithBarronsandhetookmymemory/theyknowI’mtheSinsarDubh/JadaisDani/WTF?

Barrons and I had sex the first night I met him. And he removed that memory like a thief in the night, as if he had every right to, when he had none. For months before I ended up in his bed (again!), he was walking around with a graphically detailed memory of every intimate carnal thing we’d done that night — and oh God was it graphic and intimate and carnal! — while I’d recalled none of it.

He knew what my ass looked like in every possible position. He knew what my face looked like when I came and that I swallow. That night, grieving and alone in a city I didn’t know, a city that had been hostile and unwelcoming since the moment I stepped foot in it, I’d become a wild thing, scrapped all my inhibitions, had sex like I’d never had it before, tried everything I’d ever wanted to try with enormous enthusiasm and not one ounce of self-consciousness.

It was no wonder he was always looking at me like he wanted to have sex. We’d had sex and he wanted it again. And I couldn’t blame him. It had been rock-your-Id-to-its-hedonistic-core phenomenal. Raw. Dirty. Mind-blowing. Addictive. I’d painted that dilapidated room with pain and passion, used sex like a bandage for the jagged wound Alina’s death had sliced into my soul.

As if that little secret exploding out of my subconscious isn’t enough to deal with, the new sidhe-seers have one among them that is my worst nightmare. The willowy brunette in army-green camo pants and tank is like me: she can sense the Sinsar Dubh. Not only am I not unique anymore, I’ve been outed.

Oh yeah, I need to run.

My feet are roots.

The third thing is perhaps the most stupefying.

I just saw Dani three weeks ago. She was fourteen. A cocky, swaggering kid.

And I’m supposed to believe this grown-up, controlled, beautiful woman is the rambunctious, sparkling-eyed teenager I chased into the Hall of All Days?

“Impossible,” I whisper, peering at her, searching for some trace of the effusive, laughing, brilliant, funny girl I know. The one I love.

It’s not there.

If it’s her, I should be relieved that she’s back and alive.

If it’s her, I’m so not.

This woman is about twenty and absolutely frigid. She doesn’t look as if she’s laughed a single day in her life.

Besides, this “Jada” has supposedly been in Dublin for a few weeks. In black leather pants, a fitted top (with a plunging neckline, and if those are Dani’s boobs life isn’t fair), and black leather jacket, she looks composed and cold as a colonel. When she runs a hand over her perfect (straight, not one ounce of curl) red hair in its perfect high ponytail that swishes her waist as she moves, I catch a quick flash of silver and gold at her wrist, the only adornment she wears. It’s not like she needs much. In addition to being stone-cold, she’s that kind of beautiful, too, with startlingly high cheekbones and arched brows above glittering eyes. Is this really Dani’s pixieish face grown up, matured from delicate with a sharply pronounced jaw to sophisticated, sculpted, and cool?

Is it possible Dani lost years in the Hall of All Days, and returned a mere week of our time later, this much older? And immediately began collecting sidhe-seers to form a small army?

Anything is possible in post-wall Dublin, and certainly in the fickle hall. Running the sidhe-seers is precisely what a grown-up Dani would try to do. Dublin and her sidhe-seer sisters always came first to her.

Still, I don’t see a trace of the “Mega” in this icy woman.

Ryodan begins to pace a slow circle around her, reminding me of the way Barrons stalked me that night he decided I had no right to something that was indisputably mine.

She stands still, completely at ease with something like him behind her back.

That seals it. It’s definitely not Dani. She would never let Ryodan behind her. She would spin with him. Like I did with Barrons.

The women on the floor begin to push up, but Jada gestures to them and commands, “They’ll only take you back down. Remain on the floor. I won’t have any of you injured by them.”

“We’re better fighters than you’re giving us credit for,” Green Camo who outed me growls.

“These are two of the Nine I discussed with you earlier. Remain down.”

Green Camo may be my enemy but I totally get the look of fury and frustration that flashes across her face. Accept that you’re outgunned? Stay on the floor and don’t even try to fight? What kind of life is that?

Ryodan suddenly kicks up into that way of moving that’s a blur, then Jada is a blur and there’s a small whirlwind of commotion in the middle of the study accompanied by a ferocious smudge of sound that could be raised voices or just plain snarling. I feel like I’m watching a cartoon featuring two Tasmanian devils, then suddenly Jada and Ryodan reappear, facing each other: he’s spitting savagery, she’s pure ice.

“Don’t touch me again,” she says with arctic frost. “Men have died for less. Even men who aren’t men.”

“You cut it off,” Ryodan explodes. “That’s why I couldn’t get a lock on you last week at Chester’s. You fucking cut my tattoo off. And you mutilated yourself in the process.”

“I’ve never had a tattoo on the back of my neck.”

“I didn’t say it was on the back of your neck.”

“That’s where you touched me.”

“I touched other places, too.”

“And will pay for it. Sleight of hand. A diversionary tactic. Intent infuses action. You’re easy to read.”

“Redundant much, Dani. Should have left it at sleight of hand.”

“I’m not Dani. Nor have I ever had a tattoo. But if someone thought to place a mark on me I neither wanted nor approved, I would certainly cut it out. I’m no cattle to be branded.”

I rub the tattoo on the back of my skull and shoot Barrons a pissed look. “Moo,” I say frostily.

“Don’t even start,” he says. “It saved your life repeatedly.”

“It was for your protection,” Ryodan says.

“Precisely,” Barrons clips.

“I don’t need protection nor have I ever,” Jada says. “I protect. I hunt. I am the predator, not the prey. Leave now and I will permit you to go. We will, however, meet again.”

I slant a look up. “Precisely.”

“ ‘Permit,’ ” Ryodan mocks. “Explain your ability to move in hyperspeed. Dani.”

“If this ‘Dani’ is to be identified on the basis of a single attribute, one might propose anyone — even you — are this person upon whom you seem so fixated, as you, too, share that talent.”

Jada is suddenly gone and I feel her touching me, patting me down at light speed, looking for the Book, finding nothing. By the time Barrons blurs into motion to blast her away, she is standing near the desk again.

Ryodan told me Dani could move fast enough to give him a run for his money. When she chose. I frown. He also said there were things Dani didn’t know. Exactly what kind of things?

The women on the floor stare up, watching, awaiting the next command from their leader.

“She’s not carrying it,” Jada informs Green Camo.

Green Camo says, “I feel two. One where it should be. The other coming from her.”

“Of this you are certain.”

“Unequivocally.”

“You will leave now,” Jada informs Ryodan and Barrons. “But she,” Jada looks at me, “will remain.”

Was that a flicker in those icy emerald eyes? I narrow my eyes, staring back, searching for some hint of Dani O’Malley. It isn’t there.

“She,” Barrons growls, “is not remaining anywhere but with me.”

“Maybe I want to stay here with them,” I say, not meaning a word of it. “At least the sidhe-seers only tried to kill me. Not steal pieces of my mind.”

“I didn’t steal anything. I merely kicked it beneath a rock until you could deal with it. It’s not my bloody fault it took you so long. Had I wished to excise it completely I could have.”

“It’s not your right to excise anything. Temporarily or permanently.”

“Take her below,” Jada orders the women.

“Don’t push me,” I warn.

“You’ll go willingly or you’ll be dragged. I don’t understand how you have become another Sinsar Dubh nor do I care. I’ve seen stranger things.”

I shoot a glance at Ryodan and am surprised to see he appears completely unfazed to learn that I am the Sinsar Dubh walking, or rather, about to be running.

“It’s unnecessary to understand how an animal became rabid to put it down,” Jada continues. “You’ll be dealt with accordingly.”

“Good luck with that,” I say coolly.

My inner copy is perversely silent. I know why. It’s waiting to see what I’m willing to do. That’s a big fat nothing. It’s going to have to protect itself, offer me something I can use free of price.

Nice bluff, MacKayla, it purrs. Try again. You will never let them lock you up and you know it.

You will never let them lock us up, I retort silently. I will not kill these people. Give me crimson runes. I’ll only use them on the others, not you. I swear.

You will kill everyone and destroy everything around you in order to survive. It’s the way you’re wired. I know. I’m the wiring.

I recite feverishly:

And the Raven never flitting still is sitting, still is sitting on the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door …

“Look around you. You can’t even control one Book. How do you think to control two,” Ryodan says.

Jada/possibly Dani says coolly, “In fishing for information, one might advocate the use of interrogatories.”

Ryodan laughs. “Ah, Dani, there you are. You can run. But you can’t hide.”

“If by that you mean this Dani person to whom you so erroneously and tediously refer also remarked upon your deliberate omission of proper punctuation as a psychological tactic intended to subtly coerce, the logical conclusion is merely that multiple women find your methods transparent,” she delivers in a cool rush.

If Jada wasn’t currently threatening me, I’d like her for that one. I should run but I’m stuck on this train wreck channel, trying to decide if Jada could possibly be Dani, trying to silence my inner demon o’er whom the lamplight isn’t streaming so well. It’s goading me, scaring me, telling me they’re going to imprison me and no one will care. No one will save me.

Barrons won’t let that happen.

Barrons took your memory, the Sinsar Dubh reminds. He’s mercenary to the big, badass core. You are not the exception to his self-serving rules. There are no exceptions.

“You signed a contract I keep in my office,” Ryodan says to Jada. “Drop by, I’ll show it to you.”

“I signed nothing. But if I had, a coerced oath endures only as long as the coercer holds greater power. There’s no power greater than mine in this room.”

Ryodan says softly, “Holy strawberries, Dani, we’re in a jam.”

I look at him like he’s sprouted two heads. Holy strawberries? In a jam? Even Barrons looks stumped.

He continues, “But don’t worry. Holy priceless collection of Etruscan snoods — you really butchered that one, by the way — I’ve got it in the bag. How about this one: holy borrowing bibliophile, let’s book.”

Jada’s eyes narrow almost imperceptibly.

“Ah, but I couldn’t possibly have heard that one, could I. Unless I was there when you didn’t know it. As I’ve always been there. Dani. I know what’s wrong. And we’re going to fix it.”

“My name is Jada and there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m superior in every way.”

Now she sounds like Dani.

“I tasted your blood. I know your fucking soul. I felt you in Chester’s and I felt you tonight.”

“Like you, I have no soul. Like you, there are ledgers to be balanced. You’re in the red. Unlike you, I don’t sit at a desk and endlessly shove papers around.”

“You talk as if you know me.”

“So I’ve heard. If you tasted someone’s blood against their will, it is likely that person will kill you for it.”

“Bring it on. Dani.”

“Jada.”

“You think this keeps you safe. You think you don’t feel.”

“There are ledgers. Those I kill. Those I reward.”

“There are legends. You used to be one.”

She says coolly, “I am legend.”

“Dani’s a legend,” Ryodan says. “Not you.”

“This Dani appears to matter to you.”

“Always.”

“Perhaps you had a funny way of showing it.”

“How would you know.”

“I’ve heard.”

“You’ve heard, my ass. I know you. I saw you when Dani was ten. Jada. You looked right back at me. We fought that night. I won her back from you and I will again. I’ve seen you other times as well. You may wear a woman’s body now but it belongs to Dani. You have no right to be here.”

I gape at Ryodan. Is he saying what I think he’s saying? Not only did Dani leave and come back older, but she came back someone else? There’s a word for it … I rummage for what remains scattered around my brain from the entry-level psychology course I took … aha! Dissociative disorder. Is he saying she’s fragmented? And he knew this? No way. I would have seen it. Wouldn’t I?

Jada trains her emerald gaze on me. “She is who doesn’t belong here. Faulty logic imprisons one Sinsar Dubh while the other is permitted to roam Dublin. It is what it is regardless of the vessel.”

“Oh, you should so talk,” I snap. “Dani.”

“I. Am. Jada.”

“Whoever the fuck you are,” Barrons growls, “you’re not touching Mac.”

“Well, you’re not touching me either,” I growl up at him.

“Deal with it, Ms. Lane.”

“Deal with it?” I say incredulously. “Ms. Lane, my bloody ass. You called me Mac that very night, that first night we met and screwed our brains out, and what do I get ever since? I’ll tell you what I—”

“During. You changed. You became the woman after. A stiff blindered horse that spooked on new terrain. I expected better—”

“Oh, and because your expectations weren’t met—”

“They were bloody well exceeded, which is why the after—”

“You think you have the right to just strip the entire experience from one party to the—”

“—was such a grand disappointment, and if—”

“—event as if they—”

“It wasn’t an ‘event.’ It was a motherfucking revelation.”

“—don’t even have the right to remember whatever the hell mistake they—”

“Which is precisely why I did it. You thought it was a mistake, then you—”

“—chose to make, just like they might choose to keep the memory, because after all, they were there and it was theirs and possession is nine-tenths of—”

“—started getting all tight-lipped and pissy and I knew if—”

“—law.”

“I am the law.”

“Apparently. Heil.” I click my heels together and salute.

“Can’t you two find a better fucking moment for this,” Ryodan says tightly.

“Really,” Green Camo agrees.

“Stay the hell out of my business,” I snap at both of them.

“Don’t decorate the goddamn room with it,” Ryodan fires back.

“As if you’re not doing some decorating of your own. You’re just pissed that my argument with Barrons derailed your argument with Dani.”

“Mac can decorate anything she bloody well pleases. With anything she pleases,” Barrons says tightly. “Her business, your blood, half your fucking face, who gives a fuck.”

“Nice defense, Jericho. Not. He can’t push me around, but you can?” Frosted sugar coats my words.

“Merely trying to keep us on point,” Ryodan clips.

I say, “I’m dead on point. The point is—”

“That I am not Dani,” Jada interrupts coolly. “The point is the three of you are dysfunctional, volatile, inefficient, and in my way. Not to mention—” She pierces me with that emerald ice stare.“—a grave threat to our world.”

“Oh, I’m dysfunctional, Ms. Alter Ego? Really? Pot meet kettle.” The second I say it, I wish I hadn’t. If Jada really is Dani, her current state is my fault.

Someone enters the foyer behind me, boots tapping smartly on the floor, and Jada stares past me at the new arrival.

“I couldn’t find Clare and Sorcha,” the woman behind me says.

“No matter. You will place them as I instructed you. Quickly.”

The look on Jada’s face chills me. It tells me she believes she’s won.

Place them? What “them”? I frenziedly sort and discard possibilities, racing to a terrifying conclusion: if Jada actually is Dani, she knows how to immobilize the Sinsar Dubh—with the four stones we placed on the slab in the cavern. The same stones Kat retrieved from the cavern and tucked away for safekeeping. Once the Sinsar Dubh was no longer on the slab, they were unnecessary and we worried about leaving coveted objects of power lying around the cavern since we couldn’t close the doors. Jada’s been in residence long enough to have found them.

I’m always blocking lately, with the exception of my constant antenna for the Unseelie Princess. Now, I cautiously open my sidhe-seer senses.

And gasp.

I feel them! The pulsing blue-black binding presence of the stones is here in the room with me!

Lock you up, lock you down, make you sleep beneath the ground, the Sinsar Dubh coos.

Make you sleep, too, I retort silently.

“She brought the stones,” I say to Barrons. “Stop her!”

He’s on it before I finish speaking. There’s a blur of motion as he lunges for the woman Jada called Brigitte, but Jada blocks him and they collide with such force that they both go flying backward to opposite sides of the room and crash against the walls.

Then Barrons and Ryodan are rushing Brigitte, who’s already placed one of the stones in the far corner, but they slam into Jada, who manages to get there a split second before them. She grabs Brigitte and freeze-frames her to place the next stone but collides with Barrons and one of the stones goes flying, smashes into a painting on the wall and drops to the floor. The painting crashes down on top of it. I lunge for it, determined to get at least one of the damn things so they can’t box me in, but the others beat me to it by a mile.

I leap for it again and get slammed into a wall by a blur. I pursue the stone obsessively for a good thirty seconds but all I get for my effort is a bloody nose and three broken fingers.

I finally back off and watch the three blurs whiz around the room as they fight a battle I can’t even track, much less get in on, feeling bizarrely invisible.

Jada’s women are doing the same thing, with the exception of Brigitte, who’s being used as a hockey puck by three players who aim for and block goals at the speed of light. She’s bloodier every time she surfaces for a split second before vanishing again.

I sidle toward the door. If I’m not in the room, they can’t trap me.

Every sidhe-seer in the room moves to stop me. Their expressions are icy, easy to decipher.

I am the target.

I am the enemy.

Green Camo gives me a condemning look that makes me want to throttle the bitch. I’ve subdued the Book this long, and done a bang-up job with one small exception. I’d like to see how well she would handle being possessed by the Unseelie King’s darkest demons.

Draw your spear, the Sinsar Dubh purrs. Destroy them. You know you can.

And let you take over and kill them all? Not a chance.

I quit moving, lean back against the wall and sigh, thinking it’s funny how things change so quickly. Last season I was Dublin’s MVP, the hunter, and everybody wanted me on their team. This season I’m the hunted, a liability that kills innocent people, and now the world wants to neutralize me.

The sidhe-seers know my secret. They’re going to stalk me as relentlessly as I stalked the Sinsar Dubh.

End goal: put Mac down.

If Jada really is Dani, she’ll publish a cool, accusatory Jada Journal and post it all over the city long before the sun is up, outing me to the world. There’ll be no place I can hide unless I pack up and leave this planet for good with Barrons—

I’m not even talking to Barrons at the moment.

My mom and dad will know what I’ve been concealing from them for months. One daughter dead, the other damned.

The snarling blurs accelerate, darting this way and that. Brigitte goes slamming into a wall and I wince in sympathy. My bones have already begun to heal. She doesn’t have the same gift.

Gift? Longevity could be used against me just like it was against Barrons’s son. For Cruce to be influencing the environment, he must be cognizant in his icy prison in the cold stone chamber deep below the earth, aware his body is frozen, that he’s trapped. Do the minutes creep like hours? Immortal, does he tally the seconds as they tick by, stretching to hellish infinity?

You will soon know, the Sinsar Dubh reminds silkily.

As will you.

Fight, you fucking fool.

You. I dig in my mental heels, determined to outwait it, wagering my humanity against its psychopathy, betting its survival instincts will kick before mine, if only by a split second.

Make me do it, sweet thing, you won’t like it.

I’ll like it better than I’ll like killing all these people. They already think I’m the enemy. If I release the Sinsar Dubh and slaughter these women to free myself, I’ll have proved myself the enemy to anyone left alive. Including me. The rest of the abbey will come after me in force, for good reason. But I won’t even know that. I’ll be a straitjacketed bookworm burrowed into the binding of an insane, homicidal book, staring helplessly out from the pages of my own life, as they’re writ by someone else, and I’d commit atrocities that would damn a saint’s soul.

Suddenly Brigitte appears and collapses in a battered heap. I study the blurs, concluding Jada now has the stones and is trying to place them.

As they whiz around the room like small tornadoes, furniture flies, lamps topple, and bulbs shatter. Rowena’s stately study has become a shambles of trashed furniture and demolished decor.

A jolt of energy suddenly hits me and I flinch. The sensation is familiar. The night we interred the Sinsar Dubh, I had to reach both of my hands into the field generated by the stones to remove the crimson runes from the cover and felt instantly lethargic, nauseated. I’d assumed it was just another facet of my sidhe-seer senses. Now I realize how lucky I was that we’d warded the Book on top of an altar. If I’d had to actually step inside the energy field that night, I would have ended up as trapped as the Sinsar Dubh.

On the east end of the study, flush to the wall, a line of blue-black flickers and solidifies. Two of the stones have connected. They flare and begin to emit a chilling chime.

Assuming Barrons and Ryodan defeat Jada and the next two stones don’t get positioned, assuming I don’t feel the third stone flare to life and suddenly develop psychopathic tendencies of my own — where do I go from here?

Do I leave with Barrons and trust him to protect me? I can’t protect myself. I can’t use the spear with any certainty that I won’t kill again. I can’t outrun Jada. My ineffectualness chafes. God, does it chafe.

Last season’s MVP vanishing into obscurity.

Oh, yeah, I feel invisible.

I jerk again.

The third stone just connected with the other two, and I watch a second line form at the perimeter of the north wall of the study.

If the last stone is placed, two more blue-black lines will appear on the south and west ends, squaring me in, and I’ll be trapped in Cruce’s hellish, conscious stasis. They’ll collect the stones, gather them close around me as we did with the Book, then carry me down, deep into the earth where I really hate being. No crimson runes are necessary to seal the cover of my Book; my body is lock enough. It’s not like anyone can pry open my skin and read it. The brilliant wards and runes on the towering walls of the cavern will connect to the field of the stones, and intensify it.

I’ll lie upon a slab, staring up at the ceiling far above (unless adding insult to injury, they put me facedown, God, that would suck), trapped in waking paralysis, a spelled Sleeping Beauty longing for the kiss of a prince (just not Cruce!).

Am I really going to stand here and let them imprison me? Become the Disney heroine that can’t save herself?

Accept that you’re outgunned? the Sinsar Dubh mocks. Stay on the floor and don’t even try to fight? What kind of life is that? It’s now or never, sweet thing.

For the first time since the moment I withstood the temptation to take the spell and free Barrons’s son, I seriously consider opening the godforsaken book and doing whatever I must to walk out of here alive. This time, however, Barrons isn’t in my head to offer counsel and strength.

This time it’s only me facing the greatest test in my twenty-three years. What am I willing to do to survive? What price am I willing to pay?

Evil isn’t a state of being, Barrons once said to me. It’s a choice.

My life flashes before my eyes: who I was, who I am now, what I might become. Whether I can live with myself assuming I one day claw my way back to control. The casualties on my conscience, the ashes I might find myself standing in. I remember the Book killing in the streets of Dublin, remember the Beast it became as it exploded upward, terrifyingly powerful even in amorphous form.

My body would give it corporeality. Nearly immortal corporeality.

I know what the Book did the last time it walked Dublin’s streets. Killed with unadulterated psychotic glee.

The stakes are simple: me or the world.

Can Barrons save me if I let the sidhe-seers trap me? Will Barrons save me?

A strange calm settles over me as I realize it’s irrelevant.

The bottom line is we choose our epitaphs.

Every moment of every day we decide upon the actions that define us — or so a wise man that wasn’t wise enough not to steal my memory once told me — it’s all about what we can live with and what we can’t live without.

I can’t live with being the woman who freed the Sinsar Dubh to save her own ass, butchering who knows how many people in the process, and who knows how many more before I’m stopped. That’s not going to be chiseled on my Urn. No grave, I’m not getting stuck beneath the ground for freaking perpetuity. And if I have to have a bloody Urn, at least I’m going to choose the inscription.

Heroes fight, the Book derides my decision. Victims give up. Barrons is right, you’re a walking victim, a lamb in a city of wolves. You deserve to die.

I don’t reply. Sometimes the most heroic action you can take looks a lot like inaction to the rest of the world. Sometimes the hardest, longest walk is the one the white-hat takes offstage.

They’ll think they outsmarted you, trapped you. They’ll never believe you chose it. Your “noble” sacrifice will be for nothing because they won’t see it that way, the Book goads.

Totally sucks. And is perfectly probable. Whether or not they understand what I did has no impact on the value of my action. Either I decimate this place and stalk out, probably to destroy the entire world — but hey, I’ll be alive — or I let them put me on ice and trust that those who love me will find a way to rescue me.

While accepting that I may never be rescued.

It may not be the best way for me.

But it’s the right way.

Sadness fills me. I don’t want to be done yet.

I hope Mom and Dad figure it out. I want them to be proud of me. And I hope Barrons — God, I’m so pissed at him right now I can’t even complete the thought! Tears press at the back of my eyes but I refuse to let them flow.

The fourth stone explodes from the blur of motion, skitters across the floor, sliding toward that fourth corner, sliding …

I brace myself for what’s about to happen.

I accept that it’s necessary.

I’m afraid. I hate being afraid.

I won’t get paralyzed looking that way. I square my shoulders, straighten my spine, tuck in my stomach and angle my head, notch my chin slightly upward. What’s that saying? Die young and leave a pretty corpse.

I wish I were as invisible as this battle raging around me makes me feel, fought by opponents with whom I can’t hope to compete because at least then I’d be able to—

About fucking time, the Sinsar Dubh growls. Your wish. My command.

Then it roars, RUN.