“Barrons. Motherfucking shield.”
I laughed softly. “Oh, how that must chafe.”
“Which is why,” he said, as we finally pulled away from the curb and began to drive through Dublin, “two years later, we don’t know a single thing about our enemy. According to Lor, those humans that enter the club are tampered with. He interrogated a few, said they come out either unwilling or unable to discuss anything they’ve seen. Her mandate should have come with an expiration date. It didn’t. Now that the bookstore is missing, along with Mac and Barrons, we’re enforcing an expiration date. Tonight.”
Surely, he didn’t mean…“Where are you taking me?”
He flashed me a wolf smile, all teeth and hunger. “Elyreum.”
Yes! Adrenaline cold-cocked my heart! This wasn’t a date. It was a mission. I’d been aching to do this for a small eternity. Dying to stalk into their club and rattle their world. Let those bastards know we were watching and waiting, and it wasn’t over.
“You do realize, I’m carrying the sword they all want.”
“Bloody hell, yes, I do,” he said, with unconcealed relish.
We drove in silence for a time and he turned the music back up right as Miley Cyrus was singing, Don’t you ever say, I just walked away, I will always want you.
“Wrecking Ball.” I often felt like one. His taste in music was starting to freak me out. I wanted to know if we were listening to the small, local volunteer-run station or an iPod he’d loaded with personal choices. I wanted to know if he was, like, sending me subliminal messages. He had just walked away. Period. End of subject. No song lyrics could change that.
There was no commercial interruption when the song ended but that wasn’t a tell; nobody advertises anymore. I keep waiting for some kind of underground renegade radio station to pop up that offers both music and biting social commentary, but none has. I’d start one myself if I had more time but I no longer get to do a lot of the things I’d like to do. I have astounding taste in music, it runs the gamut all over the place, the product of watching endless discontinued and frequently retro TV shows.
“Foxy, Foxy” by Rob Zombie came on next. Ryodan snapped the radio off and parked the Ferrari half a block down the street from Elyreum.
I glanced at the club and said something to him I never thought I’d hear myself say. “Ryodan, have you thought this through?”
He laughed, and I lost my breath for a moment, watching him. “What fun would there be in that?”
“You do realize we could start a war?”
He met my gaze and held it. “Don’t you think it’s time we cut everything loose? See what the hell comes of it?”
I narrowed my eyes, not missing his pointed dual message but not about to address it either. “Potential gain?”
“Nothing has happened in two long years, has it? I mean, nothing of any real significance. You’ve changed. The world has changed. But not one bloody, meaningful thing has resulted. You pass through this city, touching everything. And nothing. And nothing touches you. You don’t do a single thing that might cataclysmically alter you or the world’s course. How bloody sick are you of that?”
He was speaking my language. But then he always had.
“We can sit on our hands and wait endlessly, only to find we waited too long and don’t like the outcome. Or we can bloody well shape that outcome. Perhaps Mac and Barrons need help. Perhaps they need us to create a distraction, be a linchpin, turn things on their head, force the Fae court’s hand. You and me, Dani, we’re good at that.”
I could taste the danger on my lips as I met his feral, fierce smile with one of my own. “Objectives?” I said breathlessly.
“Ascertain to what degree the Fae have changed, what we’re up against. Find out where the bloody hell Mac and Barrons are. The Fae are as arrogant as they are immortal. If they have the upper hand, if they’ve somehow captured Mac and Barrons, they won’t be able to resist rubbing it in our faces. One simple tell: if they’re desperate for your sword, we’ll know she’s still alive.”
I inhaled sharply. This was what I’d been waiting for. Backup. Someone to break the bloody rules with me because not even I am a formidable enough weapon against an entire race of immortals. Although there’d been many nights I’d nearly convinced myself I was. “I’m in like Flynn,” I said fervently.
He flashed me a slow, sexy smile. “First, tell me something you missed about me.”
I rolled my eyes. “I told you, I didn’t think about you.”
“I never escaped your box. Not once.”
“Not even.”
“Fine. I’ll tell you what I missed about you.”
“I didn’t ask and don’t want to know.”
“I missed the way your mind works. How you’re willing to make the difficult decisions few people are willing to face, the ones that cost a piece of your soul. How you suffer no hesitation acting on those decisions, despite their price, and each time you hit breaking point, you come up with a new way to put yourself back together again. How you never stop caring, no matter how badly the world treats you, and bloody hell, this world has treated you abominably. How, despite the war you eternally wage between your brain and your heart, you possess the finest of both intellect and emotion I’ve ever seen. You dazzle me, Dani O’Malley. You bloody fucking dazzle me. Top or bottom?”
His question didn’t penetrate at first. I was too distracted by the compliments. He saw my best, the things I was proud of. Flatter my appearance? Not so flattered. I was born in my body. Praise my brain, my spirit? I melt. I’ve worked hard on them both. Then my face screwed up into a scowl and I nearly exploded, What? but swallowed it at the last second. I wasn’t issuing Ryodan an invitation to continue on that topic.
He took it anyway. “Specifically, would you still need to slam down on top of me and vent that endless passion of yours in a hard, savage fuck or have you grown up enough that you could sprawl back on my bed and let me give, while you do all the taking? Who knows, maybe you’d even toss me a few pointers while I was at it. Demand what you wanted. I’d like that. Dani O’Malley taking for a change, thinking only about herself.”
I was having a hard time getting a breath. Pointers. As if. I’d seen Ryodan in action. The man needed no pointers.
“We’re narrowing it down to just those two at the moment. We’ll move on to other positions later. Although I admit to significant interest on the topic of me behind you versus you backed up against a wall, with those long, beautiful, powerful legs of yours wrapped around my waist.”
Behind. First. I grabbed my sword, shoved my door open, kicked my legs out and turned back to look at him, using his own words against him, from long ago. “Some secrets, kid,” I hissed with saccharine venom, “you learn only by participating.”
He threw his head back and laughed, white teeth flashing, eyes glittering.
I closed my eyes, shutting out the vision that had eternally, incessantly, escaped my box.
Ryodan. Laughing.
That was one of the things I’d missed the most about him. The rare moments I’d startled him into a laugh. Glimpsed unadulterated joy blazing in his eyes.
I definitely preferred the top. But that was none of his business. When he stopped laughing, I opened my eyes again.
“Unfortunate,” he said. “Of the two, top is my preference as well.”
“Stay out of my head.” If he’d thought about me so bloody much, he should have called.
“We’ll have to fight for it. See who wins.”
An image of Ryodan and me, stripped naked, sweat-slicked and lust-driven, battling for dominance, slammed into my brain, stupefying me for a moment. “In your dreams.” As I surged from the car, I concentrated on shutting the door gently. If I slammed it, he’d know how much he’d just gotten to me.
The window shattered, glass t
inkling to the pavement at my feet. I sighed. Brain/hand disconnect was clearly one of my unwritten rules around him.
His laughter—that very laughter I’d missed so much—floated out the broken window into the night.
Bright side: I couldn’t be more in the mood for war.
When they come for me
KAT TUCKED THE BLANKET snugly around her sleeping daughter, retrieved the worn copy of The Little Engine That Could from the bed, and turned to slip it back on the shelf.
As she moved to the door and turned off the lights, she glanced back at Rae and, as it always did, her heart swelled inside her chest with more love than she’d believed a single person could hold.
Rae had spent most of the afternoon into the late evening in the gardens, playing with the Spyrssidhe. I love the Spur-shee, Mommy, she’d said before she drifted off. They’re not like me. They’re so light inside.
Other mothers would have asked the question her comment implied. If they’re light inside but they’re not like you, what does that make you?
She hadn’t asked. Time would tell. If Rae believed she was dark for some reason, yet loved as instinctively and freely as she did, there was no point in asking.
Using her gift of empathy on her daughter had proved worthless. Rae felt so much love for her mother, Kat could feel nothing beyond it.
The spots on Rae’s tiny shoulders had vanished. She must have stretched out on something, perhaps lain on two rocks in the grass at just such an odd position. An unnerving freak occurrence, nothing more.
When Rae rolled over in her sleep, mumbling inaudibly, Kat’s phone tumbled to the floor, and she realized she’d forgotten it on the bed. She reclaimed it, tucked her daughter back in, kissed her forehead lightly and smoothed her curls.
As she turned back for the door a radioactive cloud of
PANICFEARHORRORFEARGETRAERUN!
exploded in her head. A scream escaped her lungs, clawing its way up her throat. She choked on it to keep from frightening Rae.
Rooted to the spot by terror, she stood, sputtering softly, trembling from head to toe, staring with wide, horrified eyes.
No, no, no, no, no, began the desperate litany in her mind. Please, God, no, I don’t deserve this, Rae doesn’t deserve this. I’m a good person, a good mother, but I can’t protect us from this!
He towered against the door of the bedroom, barring her exit.
Trapping them within.
Enormous black wings curved loosely forward around his body. She knew those wings. She’d dreaded them. Orgasmed exquisitely, over and over again, wrapped in them.
Breathe, breathe, breathe, you must breathe, she told herself. But her lungs refused to cooperate. Everything was locked down tighter than the Sinsar Dubh had ever been.
It wasn’t possible.
He was dead.
Mac had assured them before she left for Faery that the Unseelie Court had been destroyed, each and every one.
Including Cruce.
Especially Cruce.
Kat had asked repeatedly. And Mac had repeatedly told her she could feel all other royalty in existence. Not by location, just a quiet burn in her mind.
Cruce wasn’t there.
Kat had gone so far as to dip into the Fae queen’s heart to ascertain the veracity of her words. Mac believed Cruce dead.
But now, standing tall, dark, and malevolent, powerful arms crossed, watching her with eyes of…Oh, dear God.
Eyes of such finality.
She jerked and brushed blood from her cheeks. Forced her gaze away, down the thick, dark column of his neck, over the writhing, glittering torque, down his black clad, massive body. His shoulders were enormously muscled, his legs powerfully sculpted.
“Never hold my gaze, Kat,” he purred softly. “I can protect you from much. But not that. It was not my intention to startle you. I sought you in private, so as not to alarm the others.”
She screeched a breath into her lungs that seared them, so desperately was it needed, and angled her body as if she might conceal her daughter from him.
Had he come to take Rae away? Both of them? If that was the choice, she’d go! Just don’t take my daughter from me, she thought hysterically. Anything but that.
“Why are you here?” she whispered faintly.
“Och, lass, it’s Sean, he needs you.”
What was he talking about? How was Cruce even alive? And what was he doing with Sean? And why was his voice so different than she remembered from those hellish, fevered dreams?
“We’ve a bit of a problem, Kat. Have you someone to watch the wee lass?”
His second use of the word “lass” finally penetrated a brain of concrete. Kat blinked, as slow comprehension dawned. “Christian?” she exploded softly. “Is that you?”
His lips drew back in a silent snarl. Then, “Och, Christ, tell me you didn’t think I was Cruce! Do I look that bad?”
She nodded vehemently. “Yes.”
“Bloody hell,” he growled. “He’s dead. I’d know if he was alive. At least I think I would.”
She sucked in a ragged breath and crumpled as the strength fled her body, crippled by the profoundly worst moment of her life—thinking Cruce had returned and was going to take Rae away from her. She had nightmares about that happening, awakened horrified and trembling, clutching a hand to her mouth to hold back screams.
Christian caught her before she hit the floor, swept her to her feet and steadied her with an arm about her shoulders.
Good God, he was enormous. Seven feet at least. Massive.
“Easy, Kat. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I thought you knew he was dead.”
She didn’t believe it. She would never believe it until she saw his lifeless form with her own eyes. Christian’s earlier words penetrated at last and, as swiftly as horror had seized her heart, wonder blossomed and happiness flushed her skin. “Sean asked for me?” she said breathlessly, and made the mistake of glancing up to search his eyes.
“Stop doing that,” he growled. “I can’t camouflage it and I bloody well hate wearing sunglasses at night.” He swept a wing around her and swept the blood from her cheeks with the tips of his silken feathers.
The sensation was so familiar, she shuddered and cried softly, “Stop! I’ll get a kerchief.”
He backed away, sensing her revulsion. “I’ve got the Sidhbha-jai muted, lass,” he said stiffly. “I’ll keep it that way.”
As she fumbled about in Rae’s chest of drawers—finding, yes, a sock would do—and wiped her eyes, she watched him carefully in the periphery of her vision.
He’d turned and was staring down at Rae. Then glanced back at her.
Her gaze went instinctively to search his eyes again—by the Saints, she was going to go blind from blood! She dabbed it on another of her daughter’s socks and said faintly, “What do you see?”
He yanked a pair of sunglasses from a pocket, shoved them on and said. “A lovely wee lass, Kat, nothing more.”
It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, she’s my child. “Would you know if she was more?” Fuck, she thought, and she never thought that word. But she’d asked the damned question and it was hanging out there and she waited, breath locked down again, for his answer.
He said nothing for what seemed to her an interminable time. Finally, “Not necessarily. But what are you saying, lass? Have you some reason to fear she’s Cruce’s?”
“No,” Kat said on an explosive exhale.
“Lie,” he said flatly.
Fuck, she thought again. Christian MacKeltar was as bad as she was; a walking lie detector.
Christian sighed but it turned into a darkly amused laugh. “What a world we live in, eh, Kat? I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me that story?”
“You said Sean needs me.” She steered the conversation a
way from a subject she never discussed and certainly wouldn’t in her daughter’s presence, not even while she slept. Some names seemed too powerful to risk uttering. She regretted that his had ever been spoken in her daughter’s room. The mere syllable seemed to hold the power of a divine summons.
“Aye. Kat, have you someone to watch over the lass? I need to take you somewhere. Just for the night.”
She’d suffered such a fright, she felt abject terror at the thought of leaving her daughter. But the abbey was filled with women who vied for the opportunity to babysit Rae and heavily warded against—Again, fuck.
Three times in a night. That word. She demanded, “How did you get in here without setting off our wards, Christian?”
He smiled faintly. It was a terrible smile. White teeth, sharp canines, it brought only more darkness to his eyes. “Och, lass, I’m not what I used to be. None of the Fae are. You’ll be needing new wards. My clan and I can help you with that.”
“Our abbey is no longer safe from the Fae?” she exclaimed softly, horrified.
“Hasn’t been for a long time. Since shortly after the Song was sung.”
“But we’ve not had a single Fae intruder,” she protested.
“They’ve been busy elsewhere. You’re not their current focus. In truth, I doubt they even care you exist anymore.”
“Why?”
“You’re no threat to us. We’ve become what we once were. So, what if you can identify us? We’ll crush you. I don’t mean that personally. But that’s how they feel.”
Kat drew a deep breath, willing her mind and heart to calm. Then she fired off several rapid texts. Regardless of whether Sean needed her or not, Christian had information—and clearly a great deal of it—they didn’t possess and needed to. As well as the ability to help them re-ward the abbey. She inclined her head. “Where are we going?”
“Scotland.”
She cringed inwardly. “You mean to sift me?” That meant she had to touch him, and he reminded her far too much of Cruce.
He smiled again, that haunted and haunting dark smile. “Sorry, lass, it won’t be that easy. We’ll need to fly.”