Feversong

  MAC

  Here, drifting in nothing, my thoughts sparkle like diamonds, translucently clear.

  Perhaps it’s because I have no physical distractions. Perhaps it’s because, for the first time since I was a fetus, I’m completely alone, free from the ever-present influence and malevolent manipulation of the Sinsar Dubh.

  Out there, beyond my box, in the world, the Book is walking around, controlling my body, doing God knows what with it (I refuse to indulge that train of thought, I can’t do anything to stop it, and the horrific things I might imagine would only dilute my clarity), but once it was trapped. For twenty-three years.

  I simply have to replicate its path to freedom.

  But first I have to figure out what it did; what I did, that enabled it to take control of my body away from me. Barrons says possession is nine-tenths of the law. So what did I do that allowed the Book to exploit its one-tenth possibility?

  I understand how it got me the day I killed the Gray Woman but I don’t understand how it evicted me this time.

  Something about the moment I used one of its spells gave it the ability to overpower me, but what?

  I turn my thoughts back to the instant it gained control and sift through my motives. Unlike that gloomy day I’d killed the Gray Woman, I hadn’t been trying to make myself feel better, nor had I been seeking to improve my life.

  At the moment I reached for the spell, all I’d been thinking of was Dani, that I wanted her to live out loud and in every color of the rainbow, unchanged, unaltered by a dispassionate entity that believed itself so superior that it could re-create her according to its own design—and who the hell was it to judge? I’d been thinking that I’d do anything to see her happy, hear her belly-laugh again, snicker, crack herself up, maybe fall in love and—who knows, if Shazam was really real, she’d save him and they’d swagger around Dublin, doing superhero things together. I’d even gone so far as to imagine her having children of her own someday, thinking how brilliant and amazing they’d be and what a terrific mother she’d make. I’d wanted her to get up off that fucking table, unchanged, unharmed. She’d alrea