I remember the night the corporeal Book almost made Barrons pick it up. It was the only time I ever saw Jericho Barrons back down. He’d raced through rainy Dublin streets, away from the enemy.
My sensory deprivation is absolute. It’s as if the world doesn’t even exist. For all I know, it doesn’t. For all I know, the Sinsar Dubh has already K’Vrucked it. Using my body.
Terror is a voracious thing, devouring the darkness around me. In moments it will devour me, too.
Whatever I am, I make my essence…pause. If I were physical, I’d be a woman going still, eradicating emotion, focusing pure intellect on a problem. Even stripped of my body—I exist. That’s enough. That’s a starting point. I’m beginning to think that all the bad things that happened to me in the past year were simply the universe’s crash course in waking me the fuck up so I could face this moment. Talk about condensed training. What haven’t I already survived?
This is just one more problem. Each one has always seemed bigger and more insurmountable than the last. That’s nothing new.
I will not cede the crumbs of my existence to mindless panic. Here, where there is nothing, I have something, and it’s enough: choice.
I will choose anything over fear.
Rage is fuel. Rage is gasoline. And Ryodan wasn’t completely right—because rage, wielded as a weapon, with focus, purpose, and skill, is also massively useful energy. Anger can refine, distill, clarify.
Besides, there’s nothing left to burn in here but myself.
And if I incinerate my body in the process—good.
I encounter a sidhe-seer in the underground city.
We nearly crash into each other as we round a corner from opposite directions. I carry neither light nor torch. Shadows soothe my newborn eyes.
“Mac!” the woman gasps.
I access my meticulous files, attach neural impulses to visual stimuli: her name is Margery, she’s power-hungry and fancies herself clever.
I drop the feet of the body I’m dragging behind me, coughing lightly to conceal the thud. She sweeps the beam of her flashlight over me. I blink and hide myself before the blinding glare hits my eyes, to reveal serene green.
I blink several more times. The light is brutal. “Get that bloody light off me,” I growl. I see bright spots on the dark walls, on her shirt, even after she turns it away.
“What are you doing down here?” she says.
“I was checking on Cruce. You?”
“I thought to do the same,” she replies stiffly. “What with the fire and the attack, I feared he might have escaped.”
“And what were you going to do if he had? Raise a hue and cry? Scream? Would you scream, Margery?” I purr.
Her eyes narrow. “Mac, are you all right?”
“Never been better,” I tell her, stepping closer, but it’s not true. Something happened to me while I was destroying the slab in the cavern that once housed Cruce and me, smashing and stomping it so it could never be used again, that cold, hated stone. My body began to tremble. Walking had become a wobbly affair and I’d had to sit for a time.
“Well, then,” Margery says, “let’s go check on him together, shall—”
I punch my fist through shirt, flesh, and bone and rip out her heart.
I clench it in my fist and crush. Blood drips. Muscle explodes. Bits plop to the floor. Interesting. That’s what gives them life. How fragile. Inconsequential.
Margery’s body teeters and slumps to the floor.
Life to death in an instant. Not with a bang. Not even a whimper.
It wasn’t nearly as satisfying as I’d thought it would be.
Disappointed, I grab Cruce’s ankle, bump over the body, and continue down the corridor.
I go up and up, winding my way through the many levels beneath the abbey, dragging my prisoner who grows heavier with each step.
I wonder if I should have eaten Margery’s heart.
Perhaps I weaken because my body requires food. I never paid attention to how often MacKayla ate or what. I consider when she last fed her body. It was quite some time ago.
I decide to eat the next human I see.
As I drag Cruce up the final flight of steps, my breathing grows labored. I pause at the top to catch my breath. For so long, I desired corporeal form. It was my sole focus. But like killing, my new body disappoints. Eons ago, before the bastard king trapped me beneath the abbey, I traveled galaxies the same way my prior incarnation traveled this world, luring host after host into picking me up, possessing them. I’d not found a single animate form I was able to possess that hadn’t rapidly decomposed, until MacKayla. But while she doesn’t come apart at a level of cellular cohesion, her body has its share of weaknesses. I must find a way to temporarily strengthen the bird in my hand besides eating the flesh of my children until I become fully, untouchably immortal.
Beyond the half-crumbled wall that once concealed the stairwell, I hear the crush of stone beneath shoes. Someone is near.
Abandoning Cruce’s body, I skirt debris and hoist myself up and into the demolished room beyond.
And smile.
There’s a pretty, delicate thing searching the ice-covered rubble for supplies. Perhaps pretty, delicate things, like strong, arrogant things, are more satisfying to kill. Margery was stout, dour, and dull, and died so quickly.
“Full of fun and games and slowly,” I murmur. Then I’ll eat. Or perhaps I’ll eat while she’s still alive. Perhaps living flesh better nourishes.
MacKayla never ate a human, bound by scruple, chained by morals, but it’s conceivable that human flesh, like Unseelie, may confer some power.
It’s a theory worth testing.
MacKayla knows this woman well.
“Jo,” I say, hurrying to join her. “Can I help?”
JADA
She sat in the passenger seat of the Hummer across the wide console from Barrons, ripping open a bag of stale chips she’d pilfered from a box of supplies in the back.
“Talk,” Barrons barked as he started the Hummer. “What happened to Mac? Were you there when it did?”
Jada recounted the tale, from the moment she’d seen Mac out the window of the bedroom, hurrying down the alley following what had looked like an ambulatory trash heap, calling Barrons’s name; her decision to follow; her subsequent assault by the ZEWs and waking in the warehouse; to the final moments of Mac’s decision to take a spell from the Sinsar Dubh to save them. She was about to tell him what happened once Mac had risen from the table when Barrons suddenly growled, “Mac.”
“Where?” Jada straightened instantly. “Stop the Hummer.”
“Not here. The abbey. I just felt her. She’s furious.”
“Sounds like the Book to me.” Its malevolence in the warehouse had been staggering, so palpable it seemed to suck the very oxygen from the air.
“It’s her. I haven’t been able to sense her at all for hours and suddenly she’s—bloody hell—I lost her again.”
“Is it a tattoo? Is that how you know Mac’s location?”
“You’re wondering if Ryodan can track you.”
“Yes.”
“Did he finish the tattoo?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
Jada felt a muscle begin to twitch beneath her eye, pressed a chip-salted finger to it and willed it to go still. Ryodan hadn’t told her that along with being able to track her if she phoned him—which put the ball in her court—he now had his very own Marauder’s Map of her that he could unfold and observe anytime he chose—which put the ball in his court. There was no place she could hide, not with Dancer, not snooping at Chester’s, perhaps not even in Faery. “Is it something you have to think about or do you just know where she is all the time?”
“It requires little thought.”
“You said she was furious. Does the tattoo allow you to feel what she’s feeling?”
“Certain emotion. At times.”
“How accurate and how far is the reach?” she said c
oolly.
“Depends.”
“On what?” she said frostily.
“Get over it. No magic is without price. You asked for it. Ryodan has no single-edged swords. Nor do you.”
“Maybe not. But at least I don’t go around—”
Barrons cut her off: “We have bigger problems than your irritation over not having absolute freedom and control. We all want that. None of us have it. One thing signifies: if you’d known, would you still have asked for the tattoo?”
Jada closed her mouth. Even knowing, yes, she would have taken his tattoo. She quickly polished off the last of the chips and ripped open a candy bar, wondering where the Nine stored their enviable supply of food—and why?—it wasn’t as if she’d ever seen one of them eat.
Barrons said, “After Mac used the spell, what happened?”
“The Sweeper and the wraiths vanished. The Book pretended to be Mac at first and said that it had sifted them backward.”
Barrons looked at her sharply. “In time?”
“That’s what it sounded like,” Jada said grimly.
“Fuck,” he said softly. “If it can manipulate time…”
“We’re in a world of shit,” she finished for him.
Barrons was silent a moment then said, “Resume. I want to know every detail, no matter how seemingly insignificant.”
Closing her eyes, Jada re-created the scene in her head and painted the picture for him with attention to details that would have impressed even Ryodan.
Half an hour from the abbey, Jada stretched and the cuff on her wrist pinched her arm. Thinking she’d slid it up too far, she unzipped the sleeve of her jacket and shoved it back to reposition the wide armband. The ruby gemstones on the gold and silver cuff glowed as if lit by tiny crimson flames. She turned it this way and that, examining it. “Bugger,” she muttered.
“What?” Barrons demanded.
The cuff she’d so easily removed many times in the past had somehow become a seamless band of metal, with no way to take it off short of hacking off her own hand. When she’d stretched, it had caught on her arm, trapping a tiny piece of her skin.
“My cuff. It’s closed. It never was before.”
“Where did you get it?”
“I took it off Cruce when I first arrived at the—ah, shit!”
“What the fuck?” Barrons snarled. He hit the brakes so hard it gave her whiplash.
An enormous red object had just materialized out of thin air. It crammed the entire front seat from window to window, lap to ceiling, obliterating her view of the windshield. It was wedged in so tightly, the two of them were packed beneath it like sardines in a can. She tried to kick up into the slipstream but nothing happened. She was too tightly compressed. Shifting her focus swiftly, she sped up only her fists and began pounding the intrusion.
“Jada, it’s not attacking us. Look at it,” Barrons snarled.
She drew her fists in close to her body and shot him a look. “Are you kidding me? I can’t see anything but it.” She barely had enough room to keep her head jammed back against the seat, with a scant few inches between it and her face.
Barrons had adopted a similar posture, head back against the seat, studying it through narrowed eyes. “Mac may have sent it. I’ve seen those runes before.”
“What runes? There aren’t any runes on it. It’s a bloody red blob.”
“The whole thing is made of runes fused together. And it’s not entirely a blob. There’s a foot jammed up against my window.”
“What kind of foot?”
“What do you mean ‘what kind of foot?’ How the bloody hell many kinds of feet are there?”
“Among the Unseelie alone, thousands: hooves, tentacles, claws, pincers. Then there’s the Seelie castes. Humans. Animals. Be precise.”
“A human foot. I see toes.”
“Painted nails?”
“No.”
“Hairy?”
“No hair. Big feet. Male.”
Jada frowned. She’d never seen anything like it. Not here, not Silverside. She lightly prodded it.
It instantly stung her fingers and tried to latch on, much as the stinging sentences from the Boora Boora books in the Unseelie King’s library had once done. “Barrons, we’ve got to get this thing out of here!”
When he kicked open the door, the blob expanded instantly, exploding out, dangling from the Hummer, and Jada finally had enough room to shove it off her lap and vault from the vehicle.
Barrons maneuvered himself from beneath it, dragged the blob to the ground by a foot, and they stood staring down at it.
“What the hell is it?” she demanded.
Barrons paced a tight circle around it, examining it from every angle. “The question is ‘who?’ ”
“Well, whoever it is was either enormous to begin with or the runes caused it to grow and expand once employed.” She still couldn’t see any runes.
Without another word, Barrons grabbed it by a foot, dragged it around to the back of the Hummer, hefted it and quickly thrust it in. When the rear doors wouldn’t close, he stripped off his belt, looped it through the handles and tied them together.
“What are you doing? What if it keeps growing? The Blob did.” She’d loved that movie, had gorged on jellybeans and Snickers, watching it with Dancer, a long time ago, in another lifetime. Snickers. How could you not love a candy bar that was named after a good chortle? “It could absorb us both. Then who will save Mac?”
“Shut. Up,” Barrons said flatly. “And get in.”
Arlington Abbey was the first taste of life Jada had experienced beyond a cage. It had been as magical and mysterious to the eight-year-old girl who’d known neither friends nor freedom as Hogwarts to Harry. Exhilarated to be free at last, she’d zoomed about like a drunken Energizer Bunny, unable to stop, unable to eat enough, talk enough, see enough, live enough. No collars, no chains, no bars. Just the great big wide open. Toilets—not bedpans that piled up outside a cage. Choosing what to eat—not living in dread that nothing would be brought. Having a drink of water whenever she wanted it. Simple things. Priceless things.
Initially she’d considered Rowena’s stifling control inconsequential, given how her life had been, until she began to see how much damage resulted from the headmistress’s machinations, that the sidhe-seers were becoming less, not more—weak, not strong—because of her dominance, subtle manipulation, and sinister experiments. There were the cages you could see and those that weren’t so easy to spot before you were lured into them with sweet promises and lies until you were stuck like a fly on sticky tape with only your shattered innocence for company.
Then Mac had come along and seen it, too—the certain destruction of their order if drastic measures weren’t taken.
Upon escaping the Silvers, Jada had made drastic measures one of her top priorities.
She’d begun shaping the women into teams of skilled fighters with the clear goal of becoming strong, focused, empowered warriors on behalf of Dublin and the world. She’d worked with each sidhe-seer in turn, identifying their strengths and working to enhance them. She fortified the abbey with magic she’d learned Silverside. She found herself somewhere she fit and could always return to—which she’d never had before—a place where she was valued and respected. Five and a half years of wandering had changed her perspective on many things.
The abbey was a ruin.
“We’ll rebuild.” She stared as they entered the long drive, past the Fae corpses to the smoking shell of the once mighty fortress. Near the front entrance of the abbey women tended the injured and wept over the slain. Her gaze lingered on the piles of the dead and her hands fisted. She’d just been getting to know many of them, had quietly reveled in each step they were taking toward becoming empowered warriors. And just like that—their lives were over. Gone. Ash and dust, as if they’d never been, their only future now to become a name chiseled on stone, a catchall for confidences, tears, and belated regrets.
She forcibly d
ragged her gaze away and turned it to the black hole on the grounds, the large inky sphere suspended against a slate sky, and was relieved to note the abbey wall had collapsed and no longer posed a threat.
Barrons stopped the Hummer inside the gate, got out, untied the doors and replaced his belt then dragged the blob by its feet out onto the grounds of the estate, away from the vehicle. He shouted in an unintelligible language to a shadowy figure patrolling the wall, flanked by three of the enormous black-skinned beasts that had fought beside the sidhe-seers last night.
She’d seen him many times at Chester’s. When she’d been younger, he and several of Ryodan’s men had managed to hem her in, despite her freeze-framing abilities, while Ryodan interrogated Mac. His name suited him. Despite standing a good four to five inches taller than Ryodan, with a heavier build, he was easy to overlook; one moment etched in stark relief against the moss-covered wall enclosing the abbey grounds, the next gone until he reemerged from a smudge of shadow.
“Fade,” Barrons said, and moved quickly away with him. As the two men spoke softly, Jada pricked up her ears, but they were speaking a language she didn’t know. After several moments Fade issued a series of commands to the black-skinned beasts and they fell on the blob, snarling and slurping noisily.
It took her a few seconds to realize they were eating the bloody skin off the thing in an effort to free what was inside. What were these dark, lethal beasts of Mac’s that she’d found in the Silvers that could imbibe such dangerous magic? Why were they obeying Fade? What language did they heed? More importantly, how might she gain control of them? Last night, when Mac had alerted her to their presence in battle, she’d watched them carefully, assessing friend or foe. Like the Nine, the beasts Mac had brought could kill the Fae—with no apparent weapon. That made them every bit as valuable as the sword and spear.