“Or doesn’t care if you survive.”
“Time will tell, old dude.”
“When you’re ash. And I’m still here.”
“Alone. Because Dani and I will have died, battling a supervillain together, and moved on to the next adventure. Together.”
Ryodan said flatly, “Never going to happen,” and stalked off toward the abbey.
I shot Barrons an uneasy look. He didn’t look any more pleased than I felt. Ryodan’s comment had sounded like an insinuation he meant to keep Dani alive at any cost. And he’d already proved he was willing to do what it took.
“And that’s the thing that’s never going to happen,” I muttered at Ryodan’s retreating back. Dani had already become a bit of a beast as far I was concerned. No way she was turning into a bigger one.
I narrowed my eyes, looking past Ryodan, absorbing the abbey as a whole, beyond the overgrown topiaries, the dazzling, trellised gardens, to the structure of the building itself.
It was here that the battle with the Hoar Frost King had been fought and the icy Unseelie vanquished. Unfortunately, not before it had deposited a cancer in our world. I’d missed that fight. Been in the Silvers with Barrons hunting a summoning spell for the Unseelie king. But I’d heard all about Dani and Ryodan saving the day down by the far end of…Oh!
I blinked but it was still there. Near the ancient chapel that abutted Rowena’s old quarters, where the IFP they’d used to destroy the HFK had been tethered, the night was darker than black.
The absolute absence of light mapped a perfect circle nearly the size of a small car. I pointed it out to the others. “Did either of you know about this?”
Barrons shook his head.
Dancer sighed. “I was hoping we’d killed the Hoar Frost King before it managed to make one of its cosmic deposits, but it fed while we were untethering the IFP. It looks like the flatted fifth we were feeding it was a bloody rich source.”
As if we’d needed any reminders why we were here or how dire our situation, hovering near the south chapel, a mere fifteen yards from the wall of the abbey, was the largest black hole I’d seen yet.
“And if it expands enough to reach the wall?” I demanded. I knew the answer. I wanted someone to tell me I was wrong.
“If it behaves like the one we saw beneath Chester’s,” Barrons said, “the entire abbey and everything in it will disappear.”
“Best case scenario,” Dancer disagreed. “I’ve been studying these things, tossing in small objects. Each one I’ve seen was suspended aboveground. I believe they all are, since the HFK took the frequency it wanted from the air and left its deposit in the same place. Which makes sense because once the sound waves contacted another object, they would no longer have emitted undiluted frequency. Each item I tossed in was instantly absorbed and the anomaly grew slightly. Worth noting, its growth was not proportionate to the mass of the item absorbed.”
“For fuck’s sake, what’s your point?” Barrons growled.
“I’m making it. When the hole beneath Chester’s absorbed Mac’s ghouls—which glided aboveground, by the way—it sucked them upward and in. Nothing I’ve tossed to any of the black holes was in direct contact with another object.”
Maybe I didn’t know the answer. Maybe the answer was worse than I’d thought.
“Worst case scenario,” Dancer continued, “it’ll devour the abbey and everything it’s touching, sensing it all as a single large object.”
“But the abbey is touching the earth!” I exclaimed.
Dancer said, “Precisely.”
“How quickly could it absorb it, if it did?” Barrons demanded.
“No way of knowing. It could be the holes will always suck things upward and in, provided the object is small enough that it doesn’t counter the pull of the thing’s gravity. It could be very large objects like the earth are beyond their ability to tackle and it would merely take a chunk of the abbey. If it emits inadequate gravitational force, one might assume matter would separate under oppositional tension as competing gravities reach critical inertia. Problem is, I can’t confirm they function identical to what we understand as black holes, and frankly that understanding is limited and speculative. Performing an experiment elsewhere might topple an unstoppable cascade of dominoes.”
“Sum it up,” I said tersely.
“Bottom line: I suggest we don’t let the black hole touch the abbey even if it means tearing the place down to get it out of the way.”
9
“Out of dark a hero forms, city’s knight that serves no throne…”
Jada stared into the night, watching through the window as visitors passed from sight beyond the columns of the grand entrance of the abbey.
She’d known they would come. Those who wanted her to be someone she was no longer, someone who would never have survived those insane, bloody years in the Silvers.
They thought she’d stolen their Dani away. She hadn’t. They thought she was split. She wasn’t.
She was what Dani had become.
Which wasn’t the Dani they’d known.
But how could they expect a teenager who’d leapt into a Silver to come out the same five and a half years later, as if nothing had happened to her while she was gone?
It wasn’t possible.
Fourteen-year-old Dani was as irretrievable as anyone’s youth.
Their desires were illogical. But desires usually were. She had a few of her own that defied reason.
She knew the name she’d taken for herself upset them. But no one had called her Dani for longer than she could remember, and she’d wanted a fresh start to put the past behind her.
She was home.
Life began now.
As she’d learned to live it.
When she realized she’d been gone a virtually insignificant amount of time, Earth-time—a fact nearly beyond her comprehension at first—she’d known those at the abbey would never follow an abruptly older Dani as readily as they would an unknown warrior. Much depended upon the presentation of facts—more so than the facts themselves. Since they’d “met” her as Jada, many of the sidhe-seers still had a hard time believing she’d ever once been the rebellious, calamitous teen.
Even if she’d continued calling herself Dani, those people she’d been closest to would have found her disturbing. They would have rejected she’d come back at nearly twenty, under any name—because what they couldn’t accept was that she’d lived five and a half years of life without them and was different now.
But not entirely.
Everything she’d done since her return demonstrated who she was, what she believed in, the things she lived for. She’d begun recruiting sidhe-seers, rescued the abbey, started training the women to be the warriors they should always have been, as the prior Grand Mistress had unforgivably failed to do. She’d hunted her past enemies, protected her past allies. She’d obsessed over repaying a debt to Christian.
Still, sheep, as she’d once called the willfully blind, perceived things in black and white. Saw only that a fourteen-year-old explosively emotional child who tried to outrun her issues by darting into the Silvers had come back a mature, self-possessed woman and was, in their opinion, the wrong version of her.
They’d rejected her completely.
With the exception of Ryodan, hadn’t even recognized her. And he’d rejected her, too. Decided the “other” part of her that was so useful when necessary had taken her over entirely, as if she were that bloody incompetent. Couldn’t even see her looking right at him with Dani’s grown-up eyes.
Adaptability, he’d said, was survivability, and she’d been listening. Now he condemned her for her method of adaptation without even knowing her challenges or choices.
She found that immensely offensive.
Perhaps a more tactful woman wouldn’t have provoked Ryodan with comments that Dani was dead or scorned the teen she’d once been, but just as he had all those years ago, he’d irritated her, offending her even more beca
use she’d believed herself beyond such a response—never a reaction, because reacting could be so deadly.
When she first returned, she had been beyond such responses, hardened by savagery and frozen by a glacier of grief in her heart, but day-to-day life in Dublin wasn’t the same as battling her way home with a single, consuming purpose. It was more complex, and certain people seemed to possess the ability to bring out the worst in her. She’d forgotten she had those parts. Attachments were chains she’d taken pains to avoid, yet here she was, stuck in the middle of link after link.
Recent weeks had been muddied with emotional humans, both inside the abbey and out, fragments of flawed relationships, subtle traps lurking everywhere she turned, time spent in a Hummer with two of those she’d intended to kill before she reconsidered the timing and perhaps even the intention, a past she’d put away, all of it stirring things in her she’d never wanted to feel again.
She’d survived by not feeling.
Thoughts were linear. Feelings were grenades, pin out.
Thoughts kept you alive. Feelings drove a person to leap into a Silver that took them straight to Hell.
Five and a half years, most of it alone.
Before that, fourteen years, eternally misunderstood.
Back in Dublin, in charge of over five hundred sidhe-seers, and growing every day.
Still alone. Still misunderstood.
She turned from the window and glanced in the mirror. Gone was the wild, curly hair that had driven her crazy that first, treacherous year in the Silvers until she hacked it off with a knife. Although it was long again, she’d learned to control it with product and heat. Her sword was the only adornment she wore, breaking the stark black of her attire. She met the emerald-eyed gaze of her reflection levelly before turning away from it and settling in a chair behind the desk, waiting.
She knew what they’d come for, and would work with them because her city was in danger, the world’s fate at stake and she couldn’t save it by herself. She knew what she was: one of the strongest, therefore a protector of those not as strong. She would function as part of a team, despite the peril to her inner balance, because the world depended on it.
They’d brought Dancer with them, whom she’d hoped to continue avoiding. She would accept his presence because his mind expanded into unexpected places and in the past he’d grasped things she’d missed. There was no question his inventiveness was a valuable commodity. She understood the danger the black holes presented, and hadn’t fought so ruthlessly to get home only to have it stolen from her again.
They’d been young together. Exploding with excitement for the next adventure, wild and free.
He still was.
But she was no longer the swaggering, cocky, impassioned teen she’d been, and he, too, would despise her for stealing his friend.
They were predictable.
Mac had allowed her to keep the spear, as she’d known she would if she concealed that she had the sword long enough, unable to bear the thought of Dani defenseless. One more thing she’d learned from Ryodan: assess the lay of the land, evaluate the physical and emotional clime, and present the face that serves the immediate purpose.
Pretending not to have the sword, unable to openly slaughter Unseelie, her need to kill had built a fever pitch inside her, and the moment she’d had the spear, she ripped through the streets, venting all those dangerously pent things in an explosion of guts and blood.
Mac felt guilty for chasing her into the hall. That was useful. But Mac had only been chasing her because Dani had run. There were more successful ways to run than with one’s feet. If there was blame, Jada had owned it long ago.
Not accepting her for who she was now? That was entirely on Mac’s head.
She’d given the spear to her sidhe-seers to use as they saw fit, as the prior Grand Mistress should have done. Checks and balances. The sidhe-seers would remove more Unseelie from the streets and save more people than Mac would, neutered by fear of her dark cohabitant.
Besides, Mac would be fine, even without the spear. She had the cuff and she had Barrons at her side.
When something like Barrons walked at a woman’s side, he walked there forever, and not even death would come between them. He would never permit it.
There was no place Mac could go that Barrons wouldn’t follow.
Not even the Hall of All Days.
—
“What the fuck is this.”
Jada went motionless. It was human nature to tense when startled or afraid. Illogical and self-defeating, as once you stiffened, evasion was more difficult. It had taken her a long time to overcome the instinct, perfect a go-still-and-be-water response. In battle, the combatant who was most fluid won.
Damn the Nine and their inexplicable abilities. She’d not been able to find a single origin myth about them on this world or any other, and she’d searched. She who could destroy a thing controlled it.
Ryodan was in her study, standing right next to her, thrusting a sheet of paper at her, and she’d not even felt his air displacement.
He was good. Moving normally, she could sense him. When he moved in his enhanced, whatever-the-hell-it-was state, she might as well be blind.
She turned toward him, tipped her head back and was momentarily in the past, staring up from whatever hopeless situation she’d landed herself in, an impertinent Batman quip on the tip of her tongue, hoping to see him, praying to see him, towering over her, finally there to get her out of her worst jam yet. They’d fight side by side, blast their way home.
“A Dublin Daily,” she said without inflection.
“Written by.”
“Me, of course. Diversify the pool of the hunted and all. More targets. Less risk. My exoneration.”
“You admit it.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because you pissed me off and you know what happens to those who piss me off.”
“As I said before, I’m all you have left of her—the one you prefer. So fuck you,” she delivered in a cool monotone.
He smiled faintly. She had to bite her tongue to keep her features from rearranging into a frown. He wasn’t supposed to smile. Why was he smiling? His smiles had always made her uneasy.
“You betrayed those who are mine,” he said softly.
She stood slowly, drawing up to her full height of five feet ten inches, faced him and folded her arms. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out. You always do. Get to the point. Black holes.”
“Nice sword, Dani. Mac know you have it.”
“Jada. She’s about to. I hide nothing. I do nothing I need to hide unless I’m concealing or misrepresenting facts to get something I want. Oh, wait, am I you or me?”
He leaned closer until they stood nearly touching but not. “Battle ready, are you, Dani,” he murmured. “Feels good, doesn’t it. To fight with someone who can take it. Someone who can’t be broken. Remember that when you choose your allies in this city. I can’t be broken.”
“Nor can I.”
“You learned how to bend in the right places. The supple don’t break.”
“Holy astonishing accolades,” she mocked, “a compliment.”
“Put some fire behind your actions and I might like you again.”
“Again.” She hadn’t meant to softly echo the word, but around him, more than anyone else, her mouth tended to function independent of her self-imposed rules. She suspected it was because she’d talked to him incessantly, those early years in the Silvers. Answered herself back as him. Measured her decisions by whether the great Ryodan would have deemed them useful, wise.
Silver eyes met hers and locked. “I didn’t like Dani.”
“At least you’re consistent,” she said coolly.
His silver eyes were ice. “I loved her.”
She failed to control it. Every muscle in her body locked. She refused to do what her body was screaming to do, break the lock with motion, turn away, distract her hands with something, evade his much too sharp
gaze, which even now was searching her, trying to translate her body language. He’d always seen too much. She willed herself to relax, went fluid. “You don’t know the meaning of the word.”
“Refusal to permit emotion is a noose with a very short rope.”
“Emotion is a noose with a very short rope.”
“I agree to disagree. For the moment. Dancer is here. I expect you to—”
“My cooperation has nothing to do with what you expect. Nothing I do has anything to do with what you expect.” For years she’d lived precisely that way. “Merely that I will do whatever it takes to save my world.”
“Our world.” He turned toward the door at the sound of footsteps approaching.
“Is the only thing we’ll ever share.”
“Careful, Dani. Crow is something you used to like to do. Not eat.”
The footsteps sounded wrong to her. People were running, shouting.
Jada darted sideways into the slipstream and blew past him.
If her elbow was slightly out and nailed him in the ribs, it was a matter of haste, nothing more.
10
“You think you own me, you should have known me…”
On a tiny world of teleporting trees, Jada encountered a furry creature that could best be described as a cross between a feral lynx and a chubby koala bear, with a feline face, a shaggy silver-smoke pelt, and a fat white belly. Its paws were enormous, with thick, sharp black claws. Its ears were tall and perky and great silver tufts curled out of them.
It was surprisingly agile despite its pudginess, capable of shimmying up trees on the rare occasions they remained stationary long enough, and loping great distances at astonishing speed.
It had morosely informed her it was the last remaining survivor of its race.
Incessantly talkative, cranky, prone to fatalistic commentary on virtually every topic, it had mocked her many bruises from colliding with the impossible to predict, randomly relocating trees, chastised her for no doubt starting a certain apocalypse with her chaotic crashes, and taught her to better navigate “the slipstream.”