Right. I called her a cunt and now I’m strangling her. My fury multiplies.
I permitted you to stay and watch her die, the Sinsar Dubh gloats.
Permitted, my ass.
I’m here and I’m not leaving and her dying is never happening. Dani is what I opened the Book for and I will destroy it for her, too. I gather all my will and focus it on the hand around her throat.
LET GO LET GO LET GO, I will with the full force of my rage.
NEVER, the Sinsar Dubh thunders back, flattening me, crushing me paper thin, nearly blasting me from my passive presence in my limbs.
On Jada’s throat, my fingers tighten cruelly. She chokes, clawing at my arm.
How can the Book be so strong when it was recently so weak? I focus again on my hand, zero in on a single finger, stoking my rage. If I can affect even one finger, that’ll prove to me that I can—
A strong arm hooks my throat from behind and yanks hard, choking off my air. The Book instantly releases my grip on Jada, realizing belatedly that although it had made my body invisible, suspending her in the air had given its position away.
I seize upon the fact with interest. It’s fallible. It makes mistakes.
The Book uses my lips to shape soundless words, and suddenly a dozen duplicate versions of me spring into existence, cramming the office with identical Macs. I realize dimly that I look like hell, assuming we all look alike.
Lor and Fade go into instant battle mode, attacking versions of me.
“I’ve got the real one, she’s still invisible!” Barrons roars.
That may be true, but the other Macs are fighting like banshees, leaping on Lor’s and Fade’s backs, kicking, punching. The Book is either capable of throwing glamour that actually has substance or weaving a highly sophisticated illusion of it that convinces the others they’re actually interacting with it. Whichever it is, the end result is the same. Time seems to suspend a moment while I apply this information to my sister, Alina. Was she, too, nothing more than one of these types of illusions? Never back from the dead at all, merely an elaborate ruse that fooled everyone? If I questioned one of the duplicate Macs, would they, too, be fully programmed with pertinent information like Alina was? Now that the Book had what it wanted, did that mean Alina had already ceased to exist?
The Book doesn’t fight the arm around my throat, instead it stabs viciously back past my rib cage, and I feel the spear sink into Barrons’s body. It must have seized it from Jada’s thigh sheath at the same time it grabbed her by the throat—in the instant that, stunned by my transition, she’d hesitated and didn’t kick up into the slipstream fast enough. I’d missed that part because I was occupied destroying my box and discovering my power. I hear a soft hiss of breath, then Barrons growls and his hold on my neck loosens.
The Book ducks and twists from his grasp, scrambles away, and plasters back against the wall. I try desperately to turn my eyes to the left, to see how badly I’ve injured Barrons, but the Book doesn’t cooperate. From the corner of my eye I see him move, lunge to his feet again, and heave a sigh of relief. The last time I’d driven my spear into him, he’d died.
Suddenly the many Macs go motionless and begin to chime an ear-splitting melody that is so wrong, so painful, that everyone in the office, including the Book, claps hands to ears, wincing. The hellish, crystalline symphony builds to an excruciating crescendo. I feel the horrific vibration deep in my bones.
The glass walls of the office rumble and begin to crack with the sound of thunder rolling, the floor beneath me begins to shudder, and abruptly it collapses beneath us in an explosion of glass.
Clawing air, I plunge to the dance floor below and slam into the floor hard. My body rolls, scrambles up in the midst of a tangle of humans and Seelie who trample one another in a desperate dash to escape the shower of glass.
Barrons hits the floor a dozen feet away, landing on top of a club patron brutally decapitated by a sheet of jagged falling glass. Slipping in blood, he bounds to his feet and roars, “Where the fuck did she go?”
Lor crashes into a knot of screaming women and Fade slams into a table next to him, shattering it with his weight.
“She vanished again,” Lor snarls.
“Find her,” Jada shouts from somewhere in the slipstream. “She took the spear back. We have to stop her before it’s too late!”
They’ll never find me. I’m invisible.
And the Book already has me halfway to the door.
As I’m unwillingly steered into the night, I try once again to exert control over my body. Furiously, I will my feet to stop moving. Cast away the spear. For whatever reason, having the spear makes me more dangerous. That’s reason enough to get rid of it.
Nothing happens. I can’t influence my body at all. What am I doing wrong? What’s the missing ingredient? And what didn’t Barrons tell me? Why didn’t he warn me that the Book has some deadly plan it’s trying to implement? Perhaps I could figure out some way to stop it. If I could figure out how to move.
I shake my inner head and sigh. I know why he didn’t tell me. The same reason he didn’t tell me who I killed. He didn’t want to give me more to worry about. He figured I had enough on my plate, and I do. Either that or he anticipated what I didn’t: that the Book was simply playing me again, and any information he shared with me, the Book might get, too.
And it was playing me.
How did it con me so easily? Why did I risk letting Barrons near me in the first place? I know the Sinsar Dubh is the ultimate deceiver. Why did I blithely allow Barrons to take me straight back into the middle of the people I cared about? I should have known better!
Why do I keep falling for its deceptions? And why is my belief not enough to override the Book’s beliefs? How does its force of will continue to supersede mine?
It occurs to me the answer must lie within the very definition of its nature, and mine, so I begin to tally the differences.
I’m good. It’s evil.
I’m compassionate. It’s savage.
I love. It hates.
No, I can’t even say it hates, just that it has an enormous superiority complex from which stem two mildly emotional states: rage when impeded and glee when full of itself for attaining one of its goals. It’s not capable of any true degree of—
A nonexistent lightbulb pops on in my nonexistent head. That’s it! I buy into its deceptions every time because of my emotions. Love, hope, desire, fear, doubt, confusion blind me. And it keeps winning because it has none.
How do I fight it? I’d asked Barrons.
Become it, he’d said.
I thought he’d meant I should participate to some degree in its violence and savagery, deceive it into believing I’d succumbed fully to its influence, then strike when it least expected it.
But that’s not what he’d meant at all.
He’d meant become it.
Just like it.
WE ARE DESIRE, LUST, GREED, AND THE PATH WE CHOOSE TO SUPREMACY, the Book had said as it feigned falling asleep.
The Sinsar Dubh was appetite and ambition, nothing more, capable of only vague impressions of feelings, leaving it free to coolly dissect and analyze everything around it. While I was preoccupied with my emotions, the Book had nothing in its mind at all but a hunger to figure out how to exploit me. Its path to “supremacy” was unimpeded by the slightest distraction. What an enormous advantage! And so long as I felt, it would always have that advantage, always be able to remain one step (or ten!) ahead of me, merely by keeping me in an emotional tizzy, too confused to focus fully. Emotion diluted my focus!
I snarl silently. Fucker. It used that very thing it lacked against me.
At least now I understood why the past few months had been such a wasteland of foggy confusion. It was always subtly dicking with me. Who can say what subliminal messages it fed me, whispered in my inner ear, perhaps even as I slept. I may never know to what extent it has been able to eavesdrop on me and tinker with my internal hardware, but I
do know one thing: I will never be myself so long as this tick is latched into my skin.
As the Book passes the tumbled east wall of Chester’s, it spies a man and woman, walking slowly, holding hands. Invisible, they don’t even know I’m there until the Book grabs both their heads, and muttering spells, crashes their skulls together, melding their faces at the cheeks. Then it shoves them together more, joining them at the hips, ribs, thighs. They scream as they’re slowly, inexorably, fused skin-to-skin, bone-to-bone, into an awkwardly conjoined twin.
Then the Book just walks away, leaving the grotesque pair tottering about in the street, screaming. It laughs with my mouth, turns my head and glances back, purrs a spell, and instantly the gruesome twin is turned inside out; intestines and organs where their skin once was, mouths, ears, and eyes trapped within.
The macabre heap collapses to the cobbled pavement, where their now external hearts pulse wetly. The Book leaves them like that, alive.
Walks away, giggling.
The old me would have been overcome with horror, and while I was reeling, the Book would no doubt have driven another knife into me and twisted.
The new me observes with dispassionate calm: distraction/irrelevant/discern its true aim/impede it.
After a long moment in which I make no response, it probes, Mac-KAY-la, in a singsong voice. I know you’re IN there. T-T-T-Tea for two and two for tea, me for me and you for me…did you like that one? I did it just for you.
I say nothing.
Pretending not to care? You can’t fool me. You bleed for everything. You were born to be bled. Born to be RIDDEN, until there’s nothing left of you but bones. Broken horses DIEDIEDIE.
It had always mocked me for caring. While goading, pushing, prodding, trying to make me feel even more emotion.
Don’t talk to it, the Dreamy-Eyed Guy had said. Never talk to it. More recently he’d cautioned, It’s not about eating the candy, it’s about giving away words—even that broody ass poet’s. He’d told me over and over: do not engage. Not even with rhymes to drown it out. Perhaps there were many Fae things one should never, ever open a dialogue with.
After all, how had the Book finally worn me down?
By going silent.
Silence can’t be interpreted. It can’t be anticipated. It gives away nothing. And in most people, prolonged silence instills unease. We fill it up with the very best or worst of our imagination. As Ryodan said, the wise man is the silent one.
Each time I’d conversed with the Sinsar Dubh, I’d leaked information about myself, what mattered to me, what didn’t, intentionally or not. The Book had learned something about me every time I opened my mouth. Perhaps it had even learned from my dreams.
Barrons was right. I’d been its willing victim. By my consent, I’d engaged, interacted, let it gaslight and disorient me until I had no clue which end was up, then once I’d lost my bearings, I’d been easy to point whichever direction it wanted.
If I had a body, I would draw my first deep breath since the moment it evicted me. I understand now. I know what I have to do. Anger was never the answer. It was the precise wrong approach.
I stop looking out from behind eyes I can’t blink, detach from limbs I can’t control, and retreat into myself, eliminating all distraction so I can give one hundred percent focus to my aim. I sink deep into the belly of my body, draw in, small and fetal.
It can make itself invisible.
I can, too.
I believe myself undetectable to the Sinsar Dubh. I devote all my will to that thought then get down to ferreting out and stripping away my emotion, peeling myself down to only those things that are ferocity, power, and will.
Distantly, the Book continues to taunt me but I tune it out. I can’t stop it, so there’s no point in paying attention to it. I must do my work, and return ready.
It takes time, it’s slow going at first, but the more I butcher myself, the simpler it becomes.
I focus like a laser, slicing away every ounce of compassion and mercy I possess. I obliterate kindness, love, laughter, and joy. I scorch doubt and fear from my being. Every shade of terror, anger, frustration, and rage gets burned away. I gouge out confusion, which is so frequently an emotional state, not a mental one. I eradicate guilt, shame, even mild consternation.
I go even further.
I char hope into ash. I don’t need it. Hope postulates a tomorrow. There is only this moment, and the one that focuses most fully on this moment will win.
I singe even desire from my essence, as that, too, could be used against me.
I hack ruthlessly at the finest parts of me, those things that make me feel, those things that make me alive—something the Book can never be, and it knows it and it frustrates it to be so empty, so it tortures and destroys everyone around it—until I, too, am cold and dead: savagery wed to resolution.
I find it startlingly…pleasant…to strip myself down to this unfeeling core as if it’s always been there, waiting for me. I have a skeleton inside my skeleton and it’s made of pure titanium.
I know what it is, where it came from: the rape of the Unseelie princes. They’d made me feel powerless, helpless, a useless piece of trash to be desecrated and crushed beneath their heel when they were finished amusing themselves with me. As if I were a plastic Barbie doll to be violated and broken and tossed away. And, as I’d laid there in the gutter, seeing myself through their eyes, as the complete irrelevance they’d considered me, I’d hungered to be the predator they were. The one standing. The one destroying.
I’d thought they’d destroyed me.
They hadn’t.
They’d made me stronger. A beast of pure instinct and savagery had been born in that gutter that day.
I’d been afraid of it. I was no longer.
Barrons was right.
There is a monster inside me.
And she’s beautiful.
AOIBHEAL
The Elixir of Remembering worked in similar fashion to the passing of the True Magic from the Fae queen to her successor, with three significant differences: one, the elixir restored memories, while the passage of the matriarchal power contained no memories, just magic and lore; two, the elixir didn’t immobilize the recipient while it was fully absorbed; and three, the memories from the elixir were integrated far more quickly and seamlessly than the queenly power.
On the day she’d been chosen to become the fading queen’s successor, the nearly transparent matriarch had summoned Aoibheal to her boudoir, pressed both palms to her breast and passed the True Magic into her body, where it had expanded and settled. Aoibheal had been immobilized for several long minutes, unable to speak or move while her consort, V’lane, stood at her side, guarding her during that period of vulnerability.
She’d had to acquaint herself with her newfound power.
Young queens were not powerful queens. Time was necessary to sort through and study the many legends, myths, and magic at her disposal. It had been human decades before she’d come into her own.
The elixir worked quite differently. She’d thought her memories had been stolen. They hadn’t. They’d been faded to mere shadows without substance, outlines with no content, and as the golden liquid permeated her essence, those shadows solidified, took shape and became accessible again.
Perhaps because she’d once known the memories, each and every one, they were easier to absorb than foreign, heretofore unknown facts. There was no sudden rigidity as an enormous amount of information was reanimated in her consciousness, no sense of being accosted or overwhelmed; on the contrary, she felt made whole again. At peace in a way she’d not known in her entire existence as a Fae. As if she’d been walking around with her most important parts amputated, then suddenly they were restored, melding effortlessly back into her body again.
Fire to his ice, frost to her flame.
No! She had no desire to see those memories yet.
She wanted her origins first. She wanted to access that time in her life before he’d come
into it, the carefree, wild years during which the memory secreted in the king’s towering Silver had told her she’d been happy and free.
Ah, there she was.
Zara, witch and healer, connected to all, chestnut-skinned and barefoot, she raced across a field of flowers toward her home. Her hair was long, dark, spiraling in glossy curls to her waist. Her eyes flashed with ebony fire and her short shift was the many bold colors of T’murra wings. The tattoos of her clan curved up her legs, fanned across her shoulders and down her spine.
She had family, four generations beneath a simple yet expansive roof: grandparents and parents, siblings and nieces, though no children of her own. Although mortal, they were a long-lived people, surviving well into their hundredth year. As the first memory the king had given her insinuated, she’d loved her life, known and treasured every inch of her small world.
She’d even loved him. That, she now knew without doubt.
But her restored memories were absolutely identical to the True Magic in a single, cruel way.
She could visit and study each one.
But she couldn’t feel them at all.
She’d acquired facts, void of context. It was like reading a human novel about a fictional character’s life. It was why the Fae had no books, didn’t write things down. They derived no sensation from reading.
She had her answer. The loss of who she’d once been was permanent because she had become Fae. Once, she’d lived vibrantly. Now she could only do the equivalent of read about it and wonder how such passion had felt. Knowing that she’d had it and never would again.
What point was there in the king pushing her to restore her memory? She could never be Zara, never be the woman he’d loved to distraction and destruction. That woman was gone, dead, could not be reanimated.
As she’d feared, as the Fae queen with or without the full complement of her memory, the end result was the same.
“Bitterness,” she said and sighed.
“Awk! Bitterness!” the T’murra perched on her shoulder agreed.