“And you? How long have you been sitting here?” Ryodan demanded.
“Irrelevant.”
“Why are you here, if she’s in the White Mansion?” I asked. Barrons would never leave Mac alone, unguarded.
“She’s not. She moved things. I was in the White Mansion, outside the chamber, keeping guard. Abruptly, I found myself in the bookstore with her chamber connected to it by a door that didn’t exist before.” He gestured over his shoulder, at a door to the right of the enameled fireplace in the rear conversation area. “Perhaps she sensed a threat approaching and moved us. Then things began to appear, change. Be glad you didn’t come the day she turned everything pink. If you never see a bloody, tufted pink Chesterfield, count yourself lucky. She’s testing her powers. Seeing what she can do. The lemur should vanish soon. Most of it does.”
“Is she eating, drinking? Doing anything?” I asked. God, I just wanted to see her. So many times over the past few years, I’d hungered to talk to her. Now especially, with Ryodan back. Me and Mac are a lot alike yet at the same time couldn’t be more different. She gets emotion but doesn’t always get logic. We’re yin-yang and good for each other that way.
“No. Not only does time pass very differently there, I doubt she needs to anymore. She’s turning Fae. I opened the door. Once. The temporal clash nearly killed me.”
“When’s the last time you ate?” Ryodan demanded.
“Too long.”
“Go. I’ll remain.”
Barrons sliced his head in negation.
“You don’t look good.”
“We make our own choices, don’t we? We don’t listen to the counsel of others. How did that work out for you?”
“For fuck’s sake, let it go. We argued about it then. It seemed the wisest option at the time and you know it,” Ryodan said coolly.
“Time. That’s always the problem, isn’t it?”
I had no idea what they were talking about once again, but silently I agreed. Not enough time with Dancer. Now, not enough with Ryodan before my body had become lethal to the touch.
Ryodan glanced at me. I didn’t even need him to open his mouth to know what he was going to say. “Just go,” I said irritably, “have your alpha Nine catch-up time. I need to do some research anyway.” To Barrons, I said, “Books on the old Earth gods, point me to them.”
He did, and as they headed back to Barrons’s office, I loped upstairs in the general direction of the lemur who’d just swung up over the balustrade, to educate myself on our new, ancient enemies.
* * *
π
They say that those who forget their past are condemned to repeat it. What, then, are those who erase their past condemned to do?
Be devoured by it?
Destroy all hope of a future?
Because that’s pretty much what had happened to our past—a giant eraser had been taken to it.
The Celts were known for not writing things down, ours was an ancient, oral tradition.
Then the Romans had come along and plastered their god names over ours, and if that hadn’t obfuscated our origins enough, Christianity stormed in and pasted yet more names, images, and legends over our gods until we were left with little more than the likes of leprechauns, diminutive, mischievous fairies, and trolls.
We’re a stubborn people, we Irish. We don’t go down easily. The only way Christianity had been able to eradicate our history so completely was by erecting churches on our sacred sites, obscuring their origin and purpose, and renaming our pagan feast days, transforming them into Christian celebrations with none of our traditions behind them.
Our gods were a hot mess of slanted, rewritten press.
I read for hours and instead of discovering answers, found yet more questions. The Fomorians had been stirred in with the Fae, blended with deities from all over Western Europe, and many allegedly defeated or converted by various saints. Saint Patrick was credited not only with driving all snakes out of Ireland, when scientific study conclusively supported that Ireland had never even had snakes to begin with, but meeting with gods from our past and after long discourse converting even them to Christianity.
In other words, our history was shit.
God names and the Tuatha De Danaan names had become largely interchangeable.
Oh yeah, erase that monument to whatever we did that was terrible, so it can bite us in the ass in the future. What goes around comes around, if you’re foolish enough to let it. That’s why I remember every single thing I’ve done, stare at myself in a mirror and meet those eyes that have screwed up, fully aware of my failings, because the day I let myself forget them is the day I could start doing them all over again.
Never. Going. To. Happen.
I pilfered Barrons’s bookstore, gathering up tomes for further reading, jotting names in my notepad on my phone from Abhartach to Balor, Morrigan to Lugh, Dagda and Aine, Medb and Daire, sketchy scant notes about each.
I couldn’t find a single mention of AOZ or a human-abducting god anywhere.
As I was scowling down at my phone, it abruptly turned pink, exploded in sparkling hearts all over the screen, obliterating my notepad, replacing it with a flowery script:
I’m getting there, Dani. Be back soon. Miss you. Love you so much!!! Mac.
I smiled from ear to ear then burst out laughing. Pink and hearts. Mac was still Mac, despite turning Fae. Mac would always be Mac. She’d been through so much, survived possession by the greatest evil known to man or Fae, defeated the enormous psychopathic sentience that had consumed her. Fae knowledge and power would never obliterate Barrons’s Rainbow Girl.
There was no way to text her back and the note vanished, but I was quick enough to snap a screen shot of the message before it disappeared. A memento.
A promise. Right up there with a pinky swear.
I glanced out the window at the darkening sky, gathered up the books I was taking with me, and went downstairs to find bags to toss them in. I was rummaging behind the cash register when Barrons and Ryodan walked in.
Barrons took one look at my books and growled, “Those were in a locked case.”
Duh. “I’m the one that took them out.”
Dark eyes bored into mine. “No way you picked that lock.”
“I know, right?” I replied crossly. I’m a superb lock picker. It’s one of my specialties and the damn thing had defeated me. “I broke the glass with the hilt of my sword.”
“You. Broke. The glass.”
Good grief, Mac told me Barrons got pissy when you messed with his stuff. “You may as well know I took your bike and Land Rover, too, before the garage disappeared,” I informed him, just to clear the air between us.
He stared at me as if I were a specimen on a slide.
“Mac texted,” I said to distract him. “She’s okay.”
He went preternaturally still, so motionless he vanished from my sight for a moment, melting into the wallpaper behind him. Then he was back, saying softly, “She texted. You. Let me see it.”
Ow, I guess she hadn’t bothered to text him. Just sent him Christmas trees and lemurs. I handed him my phone, with the screen shot thumbed up.
He stared at it a long moment, shadows swirling in his dark eyes, and I saw a flash of such pure, unguarded hunger in them that it staggered me. Theirs is unity, a symbiosis, a partnership I dream of, wolves that chose to pack up and hunt together, soldiers who will always have each other’s backs, no matter what, no sin, no transgression too great.
He ran his thumb over the screen as if he might somehow touch Mac through it. And I thought, Holy hell, Jericho Barrons has a…not a vulnerability but yes, that. A weakness, a need. Mac. I’d seen it in her, too. It was what bothered me about love. Wanting someone so much that you felt like you couldn’t breathe when they went away, so intensely that your world lost hal
f its colors and you were oddly suspended until they returned. Like my past two years. Vulnerability any way you looked at it. I glanced uneasily at Ryodan then quickly away. Losing Shazam had nearly destroyed me. Losing Dancer had taken me down again.
Then Barrons’s face was remote, cool and unreadable. He pivoted sharply, stalked to the rear fireplace, rummaged about on the mantel then returned and handed me my phone back, along with an envelope. “Mac asked me to give you this when I next saw you.”
I took it, a sealed white envelope with no writing on it. “What is it?”
“I have no idea. She merely asked me to make sure you got it.”
I wanted to tear it open right then. I didn’t. I would look at it later, in private.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” he demanded.
“If it’s anything to do with Mac, I’ll text you.”
He inclined his head. “And the moment she comes out, I’ll let you know. Until then, give the bookstore a wide berth. Draw no attention to us. The Fae haven’t found her yet and I intend to keep it that way.”
I nodded. “Feed the lemur. Surely you have food in here somewhere. At least put a bowl of water out.” Poor little guy had sat on a bookcase above my head the entire time I’d read. He was lonely. And hungry.
I tucked the envelope in my pocket, packed my books in BB&B bags, and Ryodan and I left, pushing back into the mirror, returning to dusk-cloaked Dublin below.
* * *
π
Later I sat at what remained of my dining room table, sans several leafs, with my books spread out, the envelope from Mac in my hand.
Shazam was nowhere to be seen but last night he’d promised to hang around more. I was counting on that. He was the only living thing I could hug.
Ryodan had been adamantly opposed to me returning to my flat but I’d insisted, reminding him of the stellar warding job he’d done on my bedroom, affording me a place safe from the Fae. If he had his way, I’d be living at Chester’s. Nothing new there. He’d been trying to effect that change of residence since I was a kid.
I wasn’t a kid anymore, I was a woman who’d grown accustomed to her own space and time. I’d agreed to meet him at Chester’s after I investigated whatever was in the envelope from Mac, and spent a few more hours with Barrons’s ancient tomes.
I turned the envelope over, stripped off my glove, and opened it, withdrawing two sheets of paper and unfolding them.
My breath jammed up in my throat and all I could think was, What the bloody hell—how had Mac gotten a letter from Dancer?
I closed my eyes, evened my breathing, braced myself for grief and began to read.
Hi Mega.
“Hi Dancer,” I whispered.
I love you.
“I love you, too.”
I thought I’d say that first so I didn’t start right off with an ominous cliché like: If you’re reading this, I’m dead. But if you are, I am. Don’t worry about me, I’m fine and we’ll see each other again.
I wanted to leave you a letter but I couldn’t think of a place to leave it that A: you wouldn’t find it before I was dead, and B: you’d definitely find it after I was and, honestly, I didn’t want you to have it right away, so I asked Mac to give it to you when the time seemed right. I know my death will hit you hard, and I’m so bloody sorry about that.
I’ve suspected for a while the cosmic clock is winding down for me. I know the signs. You know them, too, and I love you to the ends of the earth and back again for ignoring them with me. That took more than courage, Mega. That took a heart of gold and a backbone of steel.
I used to worry that I’d never get to hold you and make love to you in this lifetime. That our red thread was going to have to be a platonic one because you were so young when we met and I had an impaired heart, and it drove me crazy because I knew we’d loved each other before. I knew it the moment I saw you, spitting “fecks” a million miles a minute, feeling everything in life so intensely.
Google the red thread of Japanese myth. If the Internet doesn’t work, look in my photo album, the brown leather one with all the selfies we took together when we were having crazy, stupid fun. Along with those other selfies where we were doing crazy, sexy things. I love you for those. Best. Porn. Ever.
So anyway, I printed out the myth for you, in case the world stays offline, but in brief, the Japanese believe our relationships are predestined by gods who tie together the pinky fingers of those who are supposed to find each other in life. People connected by red threads will have a profound impact on one another, life-changing, soul-shaping impact. They’ll make history together. Although those threads can get tangled, knotted, and snarled, they’re unbreakable. (As an aside, I think it’s best not to take the “unbreakable” part for granted. Choice is paramount. Red threads are sacred. Be gentle with them.) (As another aside, those red threads shoot out from our pinky fingers because the ulnar artery runs from the heart to the little finger and those threads are there to keep our hearts connected, across space and time.)
Thank you for being my red thread. I know how damned lucky I was to get you.
I know you, wild thing. Much better than you think. You thought I loved you because I only saw the good parts of you. You thought I saw you through a filter. I didn’t.
I know about the cage (I hate her for that more than you can know), the killing you were tricked into doing (I hate Rowena, too), the terrible injustices you suffered.
Yet, you came out of it with a heart so pure it takes my breath away. If I could, I’d have saved you a thousand times over. I’d have been your knight in shining armor. I’d have slayed dragons, rescued you, fought wars for you.
But no one saved you. So you save the world.
And now I’m dead and I left you alone and I hate that.
You remember when I asked you about Ryodan? You got mad at me when I said I wasn’t as super as him. You said that I was just as super, just not in the same ways. Thank you for saying that.
I view you the way you view Ryodan. I worship you. I’m in awe of you. I think you’re the most amazing person I’ve ever known.
I envied Ryodan. His strong heart, his immortal body. I envied his long life so much I nearly hated him.
Then one day he came to me, after you told him I was dying. He told me about you. The things you never let me know. He didn’t tell me everything, so don’t get mad at him. I know because I asked questions he wouldn’t answer. He wanted me to know what a miracle you are. He was also taking my measure, trying to decide if I was worthy of you. My respect and esteem for you grew even greater that day, and I hadn’t thought it possible. You’re a one in a googolplex kind of woman, Mega.
Before he left, he offered to get me the Elixir of Life.
When I said no, he offered to make me like him.
I dropped the letter and sat staring blankly. He’d done what? I’d asked him to do that very thing. He’d said no, it wouldn’t work, it might kill him. Then he’d gone to Dancer and offered to do it anyway. For me. I spent several long moments trying to process that, then resumed reading.
He said it wasn’t a guaranteed success, my heart might blow anyway. I might not survive the transformation. But because you loved me, he would try. He said neither the elixir nor becoming like him was without price, both came accompanied by significant problems. He said he would tell me those problems if I chose one of the options.
I’ve never been so tempted in my life.
But there’s a pattern and purpose to all things. I see it in the sublime truth of math, I hear it in the perfection of great musical compositions. This spectacular universe knows what it’s doing.
He also told me the definition of love you gave him when you were fourteen—great one, by the way!—but said you’d missed something.
He said love is the willingness to put the
happiness and evolution of the person you love before your own. Even if it means giving them up.
Time for brutal truth: I always knew you wanted us both. Stop sweating it, wild thing. I’m only one of the many twists and turns of your evolution.
I’m getting tired now. It won’t be long. I want to rest so I can make love to you again tonight when you get home. The way you look at me in bed, with all that fierce emotion blazing from your eyes, the way you touch me—you’re not big on words but I feel it in your hands—and, because of you, I’ve gotten to be the man I always wanted to be in this lifetime.
Dani, my bodacious, magnificent red thread, you rocked my fucking world, you rattled my existence, you woke me up to shades of life I’d never seen before.
I think sometimes we don’t get to see our red threads for a dozen or more lifetimes. I hope other times we get a hundred lives together, back to back. I can’t wait for the chance to love you again.
But it’s not my turn now.
That privilege belongs to someone else.
I love you like pi.
Dancer
I dropped my head in my hands and wept.
All these things made me who I am
WHEN I DECIDE TO box something, I don’t fail.
I did now.
I sat at the table, staring out at the night beyond the windows, remembering Dancer. The first time I’d met him, each and every time after. The times he’d vanish for days then I’d find him again and we’d be so bloody happy to see each other, and crack ourselves up and play with the pure, wild abandon of teens in a world that had no rules except those we made for ourselves. No one to tell us when to sleep or wake, what to eat, what not to eat, no one to tell us how to live. We’d learned from each other.