“Aw, honey, keep dancing like that, you’re gonna get me killed,” Lor said close to her ear.
“I doubt that,” she said dryly.
“Figure it’s worth dying for. If only to get off on the look on that fuck’s face.”
She didn’t dissemble. Didn’t ask who. She knew who, and he knew she did. Lor was a hammer. He called it like he saw it, pounded words like nails into conversation and didn’t care what anyone thought of him. “And what is the look on ‘that fuck’s face’?” she murmured. “He’s behind me. I can’t see him.”
Lor laughed and spun them so she could see Ryodan standing on the edge of the dance floor, tall, powerful, dressed in dark slacks and a white shirt, sleeves rolled back, cuff glinting. Watching, thunderclouds in his eyes.
Once she’d seen him laugh.
Once she’d watched him fuck. A lifetime ago.
Their eyes locked. He took two steps toward her and she flared her nostrils, cut him a cool look.
He stopped.
Lor slid an arm around her waist, turned her away.
“Then why didn’t he find me?” she said. She wanted to know how hard he’d searched. How he’d reacted. If he’d mounted a rescue and how extensive it had been. She’d had no one to ask that wouldn’t promptly report back to him.
Lor wouldn’t carry the tale. They’d shared secrets in the past.
“Aw, kid, he tried. As soon as he heard you were missing. We didn’t know you were gone for a coupla weeks. Mac didn’t tell Ryodan right away.”
Jada cultivated fluidity, resisting the urge to tense. “Mac didn’t tell you right away that I went into the hall?”
Lor shook his head.
She was momentarily breathless. She’d believed they were all out hunting for her. Worrying. Moving mountains to find her. She’d waited. Living by WWRD: What Would Ryodan Do.
“Boss said Mac was chompin’ at the bit to go after you but Barrons vetoed it. Said if she followed you through you’d just keep running.”
True, she acknowledged. She’d been running as if the hounds of Hell were on her heels that night, determined to outrun everything, especially herself. She wouldn’t have stopped if Mac had followed her. She’d have leapt into the nearest mirror in the hall. But truth, the pernicious bitch, didn’t make her feel better. “Why didn’t she tell Ryodan?”
“Dunno. You gotta ask her that. But, honey, it’s not like those two get along real well. They sure weren’t spending any time together. Maybe she was giving you time to find your way out. Maybe she had her own problems.”
Jada did the math. She’d been gone five and a half years and they hadn’t even started looking for her until two weeks after she’d gotten back. She’d spent those weeks coldly combing the country, amassing her wandering army of sidhe-seers who’d come to Dublin for one reason or another, inspiring their loyalty with her strength and laser focus, implementing the plans she’d made wandering through Hell, trying to figure out how to regain what she’d lost by coming home. Years that felt like centuries had passed for her. It had been a single week for those she’d counted friends.
She closed her eyes, finding her center. The place where she felt no pain, only purpose. When she’d fixed herself firmly there, she opened her eyes, kissed Lor lightly on the cheek and thanked him for the dance.
Then she turned to find Ryodan, deliberately late for their meeting.
He was gone.
—
“I thought we were having a meeting,” Jada said as she entered Ryodan’s office.
“We are,” he said, not taking his eyes from the monitor he was watching beyond her head.
“I’d hardly call the two of us a meeting.”
“What would you call us?”
Us, he’d said. With interrogative inflection. As if there was an “us.” Once, she’d thought them Batman and Robin, two superheroes, saving the world. “Was that a bona-fide question with proper punctuation?” she mocked.
“Dani needed things to fight. I was the logical choice. Even something so small as improper punctuation kept her distracted.”
“What are you saying? That you’re not really endlessly irritating—you just irritated me endlessly to keep me occupied?”
“No need to go hunting dragons when the one right next to you keeps yanking your chain. And you had so very many chains to yank back then.”
She stared at him, but he still wasn’t looking at her. That was exactly what he’d done, kept her racing from one thing to the next, provoking her so incessantly that even when she wasn’t with him, she’d been fuming about how much he annoyed her, planning how to one-up him the next time.
Or impress him.
Get him to look at her with respect, admiration.
God, she’d hero-worshipped this man! Constructed endless fantasies around him.
He looked at her then. Sharply. Hard. And she belatedly remembered his ability to skim minds, hoped she hadn’t thought that last part loud and on the top of her brain.
On the off chance she had, she tossed him something to throw him off course.
“I hated you,” she said coolly.
“You were an explosion of unchecked desires.”
“You were a complete void of them.” Not always, though. Just around her.
“Now you’re an implosion of repressed passion. Find the middle ground.”
You’re not the boss of me, rose to the tip of her tongue, and she bit it off so hard she drew blood, hating that a mere month in this world could unravel her so much, send her sliding down the slipperiest of slopes right back into who and how she’d once been.
“Never tell me how you think I should be,” she said. “You don’t know a thing about who I am now. You don’t know what I lived through and you don’t know the choices I had to make.”
He inclined his head, waiting.
“Oh, that’s not happening. I’m never going to tell you,” she said.
“Never is a long time. I’ll be here at the end of it.” He stood up, reached in his drawer, pulled out an object, and offered it to her.
She arched a brow. “A phone?”
“I can’t track you on other worlds. If you allow me to tattoo you again, and carry the phone always, you will never get lost anywhere I can’t find you.”
Lost. That was how she’d felt. So damned lost. She’d fallen off the face of her earth. The worlds had been so strange, many of them hostile, with so little food that she’d often had to crawl her way through a Silver to her next hope of a world, too hungry, too fevered, to have a whisper of a prayer of accessing the slipstream, Shazam hovering over her anxiously, cursing, weeping, for a novel change giving up his incessant predictions of doom, to urge her on. “You mean if I’d had this phone and hadn’t cut off the tattoo…” she trailed off. “Even in the hall?”
“I’d have come for you the moment you called.”
“Anywhere?”
“Yes.”
“Without limitation at all?” She took pains to mask her incredulity. He was that powerful?
He inclined his head.
“Why the bloody hell didn’t you give it to me back then?”
“Would you have carried it?”
Honesty with herself was now part of her spine, her fundamental structure. At fourteen, she’d carried her own cell only for the music and games. She’d have seethed at the mere idea of carrying a phone for Ryodan, considered it just one more way for him to track and control her, another chain draped around her shoulders by adults who didn’t understand her—and she’d have laughed from the belly as she flung it in the trash. Then kicked the trash can for good measure and laughed some more.
“Let me tattoo you.” He was silent a long moment then said, “Jada.”
She went utterly still, not liking him this way, not trusting this at all. He was being direct, noncaustic. Treating her as if she was exactly what she was—a woman who’d been through hell and made it back by sheer force of will and the skin of her teeth. He wa
s calling her by her chosen name. Asking her to “allow” him to do something. No longer berating her for not being who he wanted her to be. Offering his protection. No longer jabbing at her or giving her anything to fight.
She didn’t know how to deal with this man without fighting him. “No,” she said.
“At least carry the phone.”
She regarded it as if it were a snake that would bite her the instant she reached for it. “It’s a little late to start worrying about me.”
“I always worried about you.”
The door behind her whisked open.
“Hey, guys.” Dancer stepped in to join them. He looked at her, did a double take, and said, “Wow. You look amazing, Jada.”
She felt suddenly nonplussed, a thing she’d not experienced in years. The faint heat of a blush was trying to stain her skin and she willed her capillaries to constrict and deny it. Once before Dancer had seen her in a skirt and heels, the night Ryodan made her change because her clothes smelled like Christian. She’d felt just as off-kilter with the way he’d looked at her then, with a soft stirring of butterflies in her stomach.
Sometimes she felt as split as they thought she was: a young girl hungry to spend time with a young man that was smart and good and real, a grown woman hungry for a grown man with edges sharp enough to cut herself on.
But hunger, like emotion, could drive a person to do stupid things. And the stupid didn’t survive. “It’s just a dress,” she deflected.
“It’s not the dress, Mega,” Dancer said quietly. “It’s the woman in it.”
He smiled at her and she felt herself smiling faintly back. Mega. She should correct him. How young, how naïve, she’d been all those years ago.
She’d had a crush on Dancer. The older, brilliant boygenius she’d idolized. She hadn’t known what to do with it. Hadn’t been ready for that kind of thing. She’d had so little childhood that she’d been determined to preserve what remained as long as possible. Sex was an irretrievable step into adulthood. She’d missed him in the Silvers. Had longed for his inventive, brilliant mind and way of making it seem it was the two of them against the world and that was more than enough, because they would win every battle.
She narrowed her eyes, studying him. He looked older now, especially without his glasses. He had beautiful eyes, flecked with every shade of green and blue, like a tropical sea, with thick, long dark lashes. And he was dressing differently than he used to. She was startled to realize he had a man’s body beneath his jeans and leather jacket, a man’s eyes. Perhaps he’d been dressing younger when she was young, matching her style. Perhaps her fourteen-year-old eyes simply hadn’t been able to see the parts of him she’d not been ready to deal with.
She saw them now.
Ryodan dropped the phone back into the drawer and slid it shut. “I want the two of you to gather every bit of information you have on the anomalies and bring it by tomorrow evening.”
“Already got it,” Dancer said, waving a packet of papers. “Right here.”
“I have other things to do tonight.”
Jada looked at Ryodan but his gaze was shuttered, distant, as if they’d never spoken before Dancer had arrived.
“You said you had a current map of all the black holes,” Jada said. “I want it.”
“I’ll have copies for you tomorrow night.”
“Time is of the essence,” she said coolly. Why didn’t he want to give her the map? Because he didn’t trust she’d come back once she had it?
Dancer said, “The first hole appeared more than two months ago, Jada. They’re growing slowly. I can’t see that another day will make much of a difference. Besides, the map isn’t the most important thing. Knowing their location doesn’t tell us how to fix them. I’ve been working on some other ideas about that.”
“Out. Now,” Ryodan said flatly.
Once, she would have insisted, argued, perhaps blasted up into the slipstream and raised a ruckus to get what she wanted. Or at least put on one hell of a show trying.
Now, she simply turned for the door, refusing to glance over her shoulder, although she could feel his gaze resting heavily on her.
Still, she heard Ryodan’s voice inside her head as clearly as if he’d spoken aloud.
Change your mind, Jada. Don’t be a fool. It won’t cost you anything. Let me be your anchor. I’ll never let you be lost again.
She’d always hated the doors in Chester’s.
They couldn’t be kicked open and they couldn’t be slammed shut.
18
“Ruler of the frozen lands…”
I lied to Mac.
Fortunately she isn’t capable of detecting lies as well as the Highlander/Fae prince/druid/lie detector that I am.
Besides, she’d been so obsessed with digging up her sister’s empty grave that she’d scarcely paid any attention to my small theft. She’d shrugged off the momentary tug she felt at her scalp, embracing my glib excuse and forgetting it.
I know precisely how to sift to a human’s location.
I need part of their physical person in my hand to track them, parting space like so many vines hanging from trees obscuring my vision as I isolate the hunted.
Such as the strands of paint-stained blond hair in the pocket of my jeans.
I know where her loyalties lie.
With Barrons.
With all of the Nine. Far more so than with me and my clan.
I don’t judge her for that. I understand clan and she’s chosen hers. Clan is necessary in times like these.
And so I played performing pony to get close enough to yank out a few long strands of her hair, then sat at the bar and sipped my whiskey, patiently waiting for a sign that something was going on in the bowels of Chester’s, wagering she was indeed in the innermost part of their circle.
Easier than trying to get some of that bastard’s hair, which, frankly, I’m not sure would even work. Although I can truth-detect with the Nine, if I try to apprehend any one of them as a singular entity, they simply aren’t there.
I know death intimately. I know life as well. The Nine register as neither. An hour ago, when Mac had risen, with Barrons and Ryodan flanking her, a severe expression on her face, I’d known something was afoot.
I’d sifted to follow her at a distance, wanting access but desiring not to be seen. I’d cloaked myself in glamour, spreading like moss along the walls, moss she’d touched, causing me to shiver. Moss that had peeled from the walls and coalesced once they entered the room at the far end of the corridor, re-forming as the Unseelie prince/Highlander that I am.
I’d stalked every inch of the dungeon, endless and sprawling. Empty. Utterly empty but for one corridor.
A false corridor.
A wall where in truth there was none. I could feel the invalidity of that stone barricade in every atom of my body.
Still, I couldn’t penetrate it. The bastard had powerful wards, designed to repel both human and Fae, and I was both, therefore blocked.
I’d planned to storm the room into which they vanished, thinking perhaps my uncle’s body was in that small cell and they were trying to perform some bizarre ritual with his potent druid remains.
It, too, was warded against Fae and human.
I stood outside, waiting for them to emerge with the long patience of an immortal.
Finally, the narrow door swung open.
“Where the fuck is my uncle?” I demanded.
Ryodan said coolly, “I already answered your questions, Highlander. As I’m sure you’ve seen, there’s nothing down here.”
I sifted his answer into grains: truth or lie. It told me nothing and made me wonder if somehow the prick had known I’d come hunting and deliberately left parts of the dungeon unguarded, wagering I wouldn’t be able to detect the illusionary wall in the north corridor. “Your false wall. Tear it down. Then I’ll believe you,” I said.
Ryodan’s eyes briefly flickered, and I knew I was right. For some reason, my uncle’s body wa
s behind that wall.
“Tear it down,” I told him, “or I’ll destroy every inch of this bloody nightclub, killing everyone within.” I summoned the elements, drew them to me, beckoned like a lover, exhaled long and slow, and ice crackled down the walls, erupted on the floor, glazing the stone with thick, slippery black. “Then I’ll bring thunder and fire from the sky and burn this place to ash.”
Ryodan vanished.
I’d expected no less.
I sifted out, reappearing down the hall. Keeping a careful distance between us. The Nine can kill the Fae. No idea how. No plans to ever let one of them close enough to find out.
Ryodan vanished again.
I sifted and reappeared standing near Mac, with one arm around her throat. She twisted and kicked and growled. She was strong but I’m stronger. She smelled like me, and I knew she’d been eating my race again. I might have squeezed her neck a bit harder than I should have, but bloody hell, her cannibalism needs to stop.
“Let go of me!” she cried.
Barrons vanished.
I sifted out with a struggling Mac, reappeared in the air above them, wings open. “We can do this all bloody night,” I said. One more sift and I’d vacate the club for a while. Let them stew in the juice of knowing I had Mac with me, beyond their reach.
Barrons snarled.
“You won’t hurt Mac,” Ryodan said.
“But I will destroy your club.”
I dropped lightly to my feet and re-created what I’d watched Cruce do down in the cavern the night we’d interred the Sinsar Dubh. I’d felt his spell, absorbed the taste and texture of it, his methods. Gone seeking information in the king’s old library. I’d only recently embraced my power. Now, I used it to erect an impenetrable wall around Mac and me. One I’d seen them fail repeatedly to breach, standing in the cavern below the abbey.