Hope strengthens. Fear kills.
Someone really smart told me that once.
Every time I think I’m getting wiser, more in control of my actions, I go slamming into a situation that makes me excruciatingly aware that all I’ve succeeded in doing is swapping one set of delusions for a more elaborate, attractive set of delusions—that’s me, the Queen of Self-Deception.
I hate myself right now. More than I’d ever have thought possible.
I squat on the cliff’s edge, screaming, cursing the day I was born, wishing my biological mother had drowned me at birth. Life is too hard, too much to handle. Nobody told me there’d be days like these. How could nobody tell me there’d be days like these? How could they let me grow up like that—happy and pink and stupid?
The pain I feel is worse than anything the Sinsar Dubh has ever done to me. At least when the Book is crushing me, I know it’s not my own fault.
This moment?
Mea culpa. Beginning to end, all the way, I own this one, and there will never be any hiding from that fact.
I thought I’d lost everything.
How ignorant I was. He warned me. I had so much more to lose!
I want to die.
It’s the only way to stop the pain.
Months ago, on a hellishly long night, in a grotto beneath the Burren, I wanted to die, too, but it wasn’t the same. Mallucé was going to torture me to death, and dying was the only chance I had of denying him that twisted pleasure. My death had been inevitable. I saw little point in drawing it out.
I’d been wrong. I’d given up hope and nearly died because of it.
I would have died—if not for Jericho Barrons.
He’s the one who taught me those words.
That simple adage is master of every situation, every choice. Each morning we wake up, we get to choose between hope and fear and apply one of those emotions to everything we do. Do we greet the things that come our way with joy? Or suspicion?
Hope strengthens …
Not once did I permit myself to feel any hope about the person lying facedown in a pool of blood. Not once did I use it to strengthen our bond. I let the onus of our relationship rest on broader shoulders. Fear. Suspicion. Mistrust drove my every action.
And now it’s too late to take any of it back.
I stop screaming and begin to laugh. I hear the madness in it.
I don’t care.
My spear sticks up, a cruel javelin, mocking me. I remember stealing it.
For a moment, I’m back in the dark, rain-slicked Dublin streets, descending into the sewer systems with Barrons, breaking into Rocky O’Bannion’s private cache of religious artifacts. Barrons is wearing jeans and a black T-shirt. Muscles ripple in his body as he casts aside the sewer lid with the ease of a man tossing a Frisbee in the park.
He’s disturbingly sexual, to men and women alike, in a way that sets your teeth on edge. With Barrons, you aren’t sure if you’re going to get fucked or turned inside out and left a new, unrecognizable person, adrift with no moorings, on a sea with no bottom and no rules.
I was never immune to him. There were merely degrees of denial.
My respite is too brief. The memory vanishes and I am again confronted with the reality that threatens to shatter my hold on sanity.
Fear kills …
Literally.
I can’t say it. I can’t think it. I can’t begin to absorb it.
I hug my knees and rock.
Jericho Barrons is dead.
He lies on his stomach, motionless. He hasn’t moved or breathed in the small eternity that I’ve been screaming. I can’t sense him in his skin. On all other occasions, I’ve been able to feel him in my vicinity: electric, larger than life, vastness crammed into a tiny container. Genie in a bottle. That’s Barrons: deadly power, stopper corking it. Barely.
I rock back and forth.
The million-dollar question: What are you, Barrons? His answer, on those rare occasions he gave one, was always the same.
The one that will never let you die.
I believed him. Damn him.
“Well, you screwed up, Barrons. I’m alone and I’m in serious trouble, so get up!”
He doesn’t move. There’s too much blood. I reach out with my sidhe-seer senses. I sense nothing on the cliff’s edge but me.
I scream.
No wonder he told me never to call the number on my cell that he had programmed as IYD—If You’re Dying—unless I really was. After a time I begin to laugh again. He’s not the one who screwed up. I am. Was I played or did I orchestrate this fiasco all by myself?
I thought Barrons was invincible.
I keep waiting for him to move. Roll over. Sit up. Magically heal. Cut me one of those hard looks and say, Get a grip, Ms. Lane. I’m the Unseelie King. I can’t die.
That was one of my biggest fears, whenever I was indulging in any of a thousand about him: that he was the one who’d created the Sinsar Dubh to begin with, dumping all his evil into it, and he wanted it back for some reason but couldn’t trap it himself. At one point or another, I’d considered everything: Fae, half Fae, werewolf, vampire, ancient cursed being from the dawn of time, perhaps the very thing he and Christian had tried to summon on Halloween at Castle Keltar—key part there being immortal, as in unkillable.
“Get up, Barrons!” I scream. “Move, damn you!”
I’m afraid to touch him. Afraid if I do, his body will be cooling noticeably. I’ll feel the fragility of his flesh, the mortality of Barrons. “Fragility,” “mortality,” and “Barrons” all packed together in the same thought feels about as blasphemous as stalking through the Vatican hammering upside-down crosses on the walls.
I squat ten paces from his body.
I stay back, because if I get close I’ll have to roll him over and look in his eyes, and what if they’re empty like Alina’s were?
Then I’ll know he’s gone, like I knew she was gone, too far beyond my reach to ever hear my voice again, to hear me say, I’m sorry, Alina, I wish I’d called more often; I wish I’d heard the truth beneath our vapid sister talk; I wish I’d come to Dublin and fought beside you, or raged at you, because you were acting from fear, too, Alina, not hope at all, or you would have trusted me to help you. Or maybe just apologize, Barrons, for being too young to have my priorities refined, like you, because I haven’t suffered whatever the hell it is you suffered, and then shove you up against a wall and kiss you until you can’t breathe, do what I wanted to do the first day I saw you there in your bloody damned bookstore. Disturb you like you disturbed me, make you see me, make you want me—pink me!—shatter your self-control, bring you crashing to your knees in front of me, even though I told myself I’d never want a man like you, that you were too old, too carnal, more animal than man, with one foot in the swamp and no desire to come all the way out, when the truth was that I was terrified by what you made me feel. It wasn’t what guys make girls feel, dreams of a future with babies and picket fences, but frantic, hard, raw loss of self, like you can’t live without that man inside you, around you, with you all the time, and it only matters what he thinks of you, the rest of the world can go to hell, and even then I knew you could change me! Who wants to be around someone that can change them? Too much power to let another person have! It was easier to fight you than admit that I had undiscovered places inside me that hungered for things that weren’t accepted in any kind of world I knew, and the worst of it is that you woke me up from my Barbie-girl world and now I’m here and I’m wide awake, you bastard, I couldn’t be more awake, and you left me—
I think I’ll scream until he gets up.
He was the one who told me not to believe anything was dead until I’d burned it, poked around in its ashes, then waited a day or two to see if anything rose from them.
Surely I’m not supposed to burn him.
I don’t think there are any circumstances under which I could do that.
I’ll squat.
I’ll scream.
He’ll get up. He hates it when I’m melodramatic.
While I wait for him to revive, I listen for sounds of scrabbling at the cliff’s edge. I half-expect Ryodan to drag his broken, bloody body up over the edge. Maybe he’s not really dead, either. After all, we’re in Faery, maybe, or at least within the Silvers—who knows what realm this is? Might the water here have rejuvenating powers? Should I try to get Barrons to it? Maybe we’re in the Dreaming and this terrible thing that has happened is a nightmare, and I’ll wake up on a couch in Barrons Books and Baubles and the illustrious, infuriating owner will raise a brow and give me that look; I’ll say something pithy, and life will be lovely, chock-full of monsters and rain again, just the way I like it.
I squat.
No scrabbling in the stones and shale.
The man with the spear in his back doesn’t move.
My heart is full of holes.
He gave his life for me. Barrons gave his life for me. My self-serving, arrogant, constant jackass was the constant rock beneath my feet, willing to die so I could live.
Why the hell would he do that?
How do I live with that?
A terrible thought occurs to me, so awful that for a few moments it eclipses my grief: I would never have killed him if Ryodan hadn’t appeared. Did Ryodan set me up? Did he come here to kill Barrons, who was never invincible, merely difficult to kill? Maybe Barrons could be killed only in his animal form, and Ryodan knew he’d have to be in it to protect me. Was this an elaborate ruse that had nothing to do with me? Was Ryodan working with the LM, and they wanted Barrons out of the way so I’d be easier to deal with, and the abduction of my parents was mere sleight of hand? Look over there while we kill the man who threatens us all. Or maybe Barrons had been cursed to live out some hellish sentence and could be slain only by someone he trusted, and he’d trusted me. Beneath all the cold arrogance, the mockery, the constant pushing, had he given over that most private part of himself to me—a confidence I’d never earned, as I couldn’t have proven any more surely than if I’d stabbed him in the back?
Oh, gee, wait, I did. On Ryodan’s word alone, I’d turned on him.
The accusation of betrayal in the beast’s gaze hadn’t been an illusion. It had been Jericho Barrons in there, staring at me from behind that prehistoric brow, baring his fangs, reproach and hatred blazing in his feral yellow eyes. I’d broken our unspoken pact. He’d been my guardian demon and I’d killed him.
Had he despised me for not seeing through the hide of the beast he’d worn to the man within?
See me. How many times had he said that to me? See me when you look at me!
When it mattered most, I’d been blind. He’d been dogging my every step, treating me with that characteristic Barrons’ combination of aggression and animal possessiveness, and I’d never once recognized him.
He’d come to me in a barbaric, inhuman form, to keep me alive. He’d set himself up as IYD regardless of what it might cost him, knowing he would be turned into a mindless, raging beast capable only of slaughtering everything in his immediate vicinity but for one thing.
Me.
God, that look!
I cover my face with my hands, but the image won’t go away: beast and Barrons, his dark skin and exotic face, its slate hide and primal features. Those ancient eyes that saw so much and asked only to be seen in return burn with scorn: Couldn’t you have trusted me just once? Couldn’t you have hoped for the best, just once? Why did you choose Ryodan over me? I was keeping you alive. I had a plan. Did I ever let you down?
“I didn’t know it was you!” I gouge my palms with my nails. They bleed for a brief moment, then heal.
But the beast/Barrons in my mind isn’t done torturing me. You should have. I took your sweater. I smelled you and granted you passage. I killed fresh, tender meat for you. I pissed around you. I showed you in this form, as in any other, that you are mine—and I take care of what is mine.
Tears blind me. I double over. It hurts so bad I can’t breathe, can’t move. I hunch over, curl in on myself, and rock.
Beyond the pain, if there is such a place, I know things.
Things like: According to Ryodan (if he’s not a traitor, and if he is and somehow still alive, I’ll kill him as dead as we killed Barrons), I have a brand on the back of my skull placed there by the Lord Master, who probably still has my parents, because Barrons is here, so obviously he never got through to Ashford.
Unless … time passes differently in the Silvers and he did have time to get to Ashford before I punched IYD, summoning him here to the seventh dimension I’ve been in since entering the Lord Master’s slippery pink corridor back in Dublin.
I have no idea how long I was in the Hall of All Days or how much time passed in the real world while I sunned with Christian by the lake.
Once, courtesy of V’lane, I spent a single afternoon on a beach in Faery, with an illusion of my sister, and it cost me an entire month in the human world. When I returned, Barrons was furious. He’d chained me to a beam in his garage. I’d been wearing a hot-pink string bikini.
We fought.
I close my eyes and embrace the memory.
He stands there, furious, surrounded by needles and dyes, about to tattoo me—or, more accurately, pretend to tattoo me where he’s already tattooed me but I haven’t discovered it yet—so he can track me if I ever decide to do something as stupid as agree to stay in Faery for any period of time again.
I tell him if he tattoos me, we’re through. I accuse him of never feeling anything more than greed and mockery, being incapable of love. I call him a mercenary, blame him for losing his temper when he couldn’t find me and trashing the store, and, while I scathingly concede that he might get an occasional hard-on, it’s undoubtedly for something like money, an artifact, or a book—never a woman.
I remember every word of his reply: Yes, I have loved, Ms. Lane, and although it’s none of your business, I have lost. Many things. And, no, I am not like any other player in this game and I will never be like V’lane, and I get a hard-on a great deal more often than occasionally. Sometimes it’s over a spoiled little girl, not a woman at all. And, yes, I trashed the bookstore when I couldn’t find you. You’ll have to choose a new bedroom, too. And I’m sorry your pretty little world got all screwed up, but everybody’s does, and you go on. It’s how you go on that defines you.
In retrospect, I see through myself with pathetic ease.
There I am, chained to a beam, nearly naked, alone with Jericho Barrons, a man who is so far beyond my comprehension, but, God, he excites me! He plans to work slowly and carefully on my naked skin for hours. His hard, tattooed body is an unspoken promise of initiation into a secret world where I could feel things I can’t begin to imagine, and I want him to work on me for hours. Desperately. But not to tattoo me. I goad him to the best of my naїve, sheltered abilities. I want him to take from me what I lack the courage to offer.
What a complicated, ridiculous, self-destructive feeling! Afraid to ask for what I want. Afraid to own up to my own desires. Driven by circumscription of nurture, not nature. I’d come to Dublin wearing shackles on my bonds. I’d been all nurture.
He was all nature—trying to teach me to change.
Like I said: degrees of denial.
He’d leaned into me, in that garage, sex and barely leashed violence, and when I’d felt his hard-on, it made me feel so alive and wild inside that later I’d had to peel off my bikini and take care of myself in the shower again and again, fantasizing a very different outcome in his garage. One that had taken all night.
I’d told myself it was because I’d spent the day in close proximity to a death-by-sex Fae. Another lie.
He’d unchained me and let me go.
If I were chained to that beam now, I’d have no problem telling him exactly what I wanted. And it wouldn’t involve unchaining me. At least not at first.
I focus through my tears.
Grass. Trees. Him.
He lies facedown. I need to go to him.
The earth is wet, muddy from last night’s rain, from his blood.
I need to clean him. He shouldn’t be messy. Barrons doesn’t like to be messy. He’s meticulous; a sophisticated, exquisite dresser. Although I’ve straightened his lapel a few times, it was only for the excuse of touching him. Stepping into his personal space. Exercising familiarity to underscore that I had the right. Unpredictable as a hungry lion, he might be feared by everyone else, but he never ripped out my throat, only licked me, and, if his tongue was a little rough sometimes, it was worth it to walk beside the king of the jungle.
I can’t do this. I just went through this with my sister. Regret upon regret. Missed opportunities. Bad decisions. Grief.
How many more people will have to die before I learn how to live? He was right. I’m a walking catastrophe.
I fumble in my pocket for my phone. First thing I do is dial Barrons’ cell. The call doesn’t go through. I press IYCGM. Call doesn’t go through. I hit IYD and hold my breath, watching Barrons intently. The call doesn’t go through.
Like the man himself, all lines are down.
I begin to shake. I don’t know why, but the fact that the cell phones don’t work convinces me more than anything else that he’s beyond my reach.
I flip my head down, scrape my hair forward, and, although it takes me a few tries to get the angle right, I take a shot of my nape. Sure enough, two tattoos. Barrons’ brand is a dragon with a Z in the center that shimmers with faint iridescence.
To the left of his tattoo is a black circle crammed with strange symbols I don’t recognize. It seems Ryodan was telling the truth. If the tattoo was put there by the LM, it explains a lot: Why Barrons so heavily warded the basement where he dragged me back from being Pri-ya, how the LM found me at the abbey once the wards had been painted over, how he found me again at the house Dani and I squatted in, and how he’d tracked me to my parents’ in Ashford.
I pull out the small dirk I lifted from BB&B.
My hand trembles.
I could end my pain. I could curl up and bleed out next to him. It’d be over so quickly. Maybe I’d get another chance some other time, some other place. Maybe he and I would be reincarnated like in that movie, What Dreams May Come, that Alina and I hated so much because the kids and husband died, then the wife committed suicide.
I love that movie now. I get it, the whole idea of willingly going to hell for someone. Living there, insane if you have to, because you’d rather be insane with them than endure life without them.
He died so I would live.
“Damn you! I don’t want to live without you!”
It’s how you go on that defines you.
“Oh, shut up, would you? You’re dead, shut up, shut up!”
But a terrible truth is shredding my heart.
I’m the girl that cried “wolf.”
I’m the one that pressed IYD. I’m the one that didn’t think I could survive the boar on my own. And guess what?
I did.
I’d driven it away and already been safe by the time Barrons appeared and blasted into it.
I hadn’t really been dying after all.
He died for me and it hadn’t been necessary.
I overreacted.
And now he’s dead.
I stare at the dirk. Killing myself would be a reward. I deserve only punishment.
I stare at the snapshot of the back of my head. If the Lord Master found me right now, I’m not sure I would fight for my life.
I consider attempting surgery on my own skull, then realize I am not in the best frame of mind for that. I might not stop cutting. It’s close to my spinal column. Easy way out.
I slam the blade into the dirt before I can turn it on myself.
What would that make of me? That I got him killed, then killed myself? A coward. But it’s not what it would make of me that bothers me. It’s what it would make of him—a wasted death.
The death of a man like him deserves more than that.
I bite back another scream. It’s trapped inside me now, stuffed down into my belly, burning the back of my throat, making it painful to swallow. I hear it in my ears even though my mouth makes no sound. It’s a silent scream. The worst kind. I lived with this once before, to keep Mom and Dad from knowing that Alina’s death was killing me, too. I know what comes next, and I know it’s going to be worse than last time. That I’m going to be worse.
Much, much worse.
I remember the scenes of slaughter Barrons showed me in his mind. I understand them now. Understand what might drive a person to it.
I kneel beside his naked, bloody body. The transformation from man to beast must have shredded his clothing, exploded the silver cuff from his wrist. Nearly two thirds of his body is inked with black and crimson protection runes.
“Jericho,” I say. “Jericho, Jericho, Jericho.” Why did I ever begrudge him his name? “Barrons” was a stone wall I erected between us, and if a hairline fracture appeared, I hastily mortared it with fear.
I close my eyes and steel myself. When I open them, I wrap both hands around the spear and try to pull it from his back. It doesn’t come out. It’s lodged in bone. I have to fight for it.
I stop. I start again. I weep.
He doesn’t move.
I can do this. I can.
I work the spear free.
After a long moment, I roll him over.
If there was any doubt in my mind that he was dead, it vanishes. His eyes are open. They are empty.
Jericho Barrons is no longer there.
I open my senses to the world around me. I can’t feel him at all.
I am on this cliff, alone.
I’ve never been so alone.
I try everything I can think of to bring him back to life.
I remember the Unseelie flesh we crammed into my backpack what seems a lifetime ago, back in the bookstore when I was getting ready to face the Lord Master. Most of it is still there.
If only I’d known then what I know now! That the next time I saw Jericho Barrons, he’d be dead. That the last words I would ever hear him say were “And the Lamborghini,” with that wolf smile and promise that he would always be at my back, breathing down it, keeping it covered.
The wriggling, chopped-up Rhino-boy flesh is still neatly trapped in baby-food jars. I force it between his swollen, bloodied lips and hold his mouth shut. When it crawls out the jagged gash in his neck, my trapped scream nearly deafens me.
I’m not thinking clearly. Panic and grief ride me. Barrons would say: Useless emotions, Ms. Lane. Rise above them. Stop reacting and act. There he is, talking to me again.
What wouldn’t I do for him? Nothing is too disgusting, too barbaric. This is Barrons. I want him whole again.
Ryodan had flayed him from gut to chest, before he slit his throat. I carefully peel back the meat of his tattooed abdomen and stuff Unseelie into his exposed, sliced stomach. It crawls out. I consider trying to sew the stomach up, so his body would be forced to digest the flesh of the dark Fae, and wonder if it would work, but I lack needle, thread, or any other means of repairing his torn flesh.
I attempt to put his entrails back into his body, arrange them in some semblance of order, dimly aware that this is perhaps not a normal, sane thing to do.
Once he said: Get inside me, see how deep you can go. With my hands on his spleen, I think, Here I am. Too little, too late.
I use my newfound proficiency in Voice and command him to rise. He told me once that student and teacher develop immunity to each other. I’m almost relieved. I was afraid Voice might raise a zombie, reanimated but not truly revived.
I prop his mouth open with a stick, slit my wrist, and drip blood into it. I have to slice deep to get a few drops and keep slicing because I keep healing. It only makes him bloodier.
I search my sidhe-seer place for magic to heal him. I have nothing of such consequence inside me.
I am suddenly furious.
How could he be mortal? How dare he be mortal? He never told me he was mortal! If I’d known, I might have treated him differently!
“Get up, get up, get up!” I shout.
His eyes are still open. I hate that they’re open and so empty and blank, but closing them would be an admission, an acceptance I don’t have in me.
I will never close Jericho Barrons’ eyes.
They were wide open in life. He would want them open in death. Rituals would be wasted on him. Wherever Barrons is, he would laugh if I tried something as mundane as a funeral. Too small for such a large man.
Put him in a box? Never.
Bury him? No way.
Burn him?
That, too, would be acceptance. Admission that he was dead. Never going to happen.
Even in death he looks indomitable, his big black-and-crimson-tattooed body an epic giant, felled in battle.
I settle on the ground, gently lift his head, maneuver my legs beneath it, and cradle his face in my arms. With my shirt and hot tears that won’t stop falling, I bathe away dirt and blood and clean him tenderly.
Harsh, forbidding, beautiful face.
I touch it. Trace it with my fingers, over and over, until I know the subtlest nuances of every plane and angle, until I could carve it out of stone even if I were blind.
I kiss him.
I lie down and stretch out next to him. I press my body to his and hold on.
I hold him like I never permitted myself to hold him when he was alive. I tell him all the things I never said.
For a time, I have no idea where he ends and I begin.
91 Days AWC
GET YOUR SHADE-BUSTERS!!!
READ ALL ABOUT IT!!!
Yep, you heard me right! The feckers CAN be killed! Brought to you by The Dani Daily, your ONLY source for all the news AWC (After the Wall Crash, morons. I ain’t gonna keep spelling things out for you).
The Dani “Mega” O’Malley SHADE-BUSTER
• 1 chunk Unseelie flesh.
• Fuse.
• Flash powder. Use only pyrotechnic industry-standard mix. Do NOT use chlorate or sulfur. HIGHLY unstable. Take it from me, I know what I’m talkin’ about!
Make cherry bomb. Pack in center of flesh. Run fuse. Mold Unseelie flesh into round shape for easier rolling. Corner Shade, roll in SHADE-BUSTER, and cover your ears! The feckers are cannibals!!! Watch Shade devour snack and disintegrate when the bomb explodes inside it. If it eats LIGHT, it dies!
CAVEATS!
*Kids under 14: Do NOT do this without help. Ain’t gonna do nobody no good if you blow your hands off. We need you in this fight. Be cool. Smart is the new cool.
*You gotta be fast! If you find a ’specially bad nest, write down the address of it on The Dani Daily, stick it on the wall inside the G.P.O., O’Connell Street, Dublin 1, and I’ll take care of it for you. (They don’t call me MEGA for nothing!)
*Do NOT use SULFUR! It makes the mix WAY unstable. I’m still growing back my eyebrows and nose hair.
*’Times the cherry bomb blows before the Shade eats it. Some of ’em are stupid enough to eat the next one you throw in.
LEGAL DISCLAIMER!
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