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.
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.”
“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—”
“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’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.