My life was about to finally get back to normal after a long, hellish nine months. I could see a future for myself again.
I’d been through the storm and survived. I’d lost my sister, found out I was adopted, nearly been killed, learned to lie, cheat, steal, and kill, been gang-raped and turned Pri-ya, almost been killed a few more times, killed Barrons, been nearly seduced by the Sinsar Dubh’s illusion of the parents I’d so desperately wanted, killed Rowena, yet still survived to lay the archvillain of the whole piece to rest for good.
I’d said that very day to Jericho Barrons, Bet your ass you’re mine, bud. I’d staked my claim, openly, clearly, in front of everyone, ready to plunge into every fascinating, sexy, intimate, personal aspect of a relationship with him.
Then I’d learned my battle wasn’t over.
A worse one loomed ahead.
I’d merely gotten a breather before round two.
The villain that had killed so many people, so brutally, had an evil twin. And it was inside me. Words can’t express the depths of horror and despair I’d felt.
Discovering, roughly a month and a half ago, my time—three and half months ago for the world—that I harbored within me untapped potential for murder, chaos, and destruction, that my fight might never be over, had changed me.
I’d never bought for a single moment that I could simply walk away, not open it and escape unscathed. Somehow I’d known that the battle I’d just been through was going to seem like a piece of cake compared to the one I was headed for.
The day I’d discovered the Sinsar Dubh was really there at the bottom of my lake, and I was—let us be perfectly fucking precise here—possessed (and by God, I’d wanted a full-fledged exorcism), I’d begun retreating.
I’d lost the last week of May and most of June in the Silvers. I spent the final days of June and most of July throwing up barrier after barrier between Barrons and me.
I’d simplified and objectified our relationship into one of lust and boundaries, and while both were necessary for a good relationship, it took a lot more than that to make it an epic one.
Things we had, like respect and trust, but also freely expressed desires and accountability to whatever degree it took to make both people happy. It took work, a willingness to fight passionately and fairly—out of bed, not just in it—commitment and honesty. It took waking up and saying each day, I hold this man sacred and always will. He’s my sun, moon, and stars. It took letting the other person in; a thing I’d stopped doing. It took being unafraid to ask for what you wanted, to put yourself on the line, to risk it all for love.
We’d almost been there once.
Until I’d run.
My eyes widened. I’d always thought if either one of us might withdraw from our relationship, it would certainly be him, not me.
But I was the one who’d run.
“Like a world class athlete,” he agreed, dark eyes glittering. “Fast as fuck and not about to stop for anything until you’d crossed the finish line.”
I caught my breath. “Why did you stay?” It would have been easier for him to just leave. A lot of men would have. I’d seriously vacated. Retreated and left him with bad moods and sex, and not much more.
“I understood.”
“What did you understand?” I said, because I sure as hell didn’t. Why had I run, knowing I was about to face another battle that was going to be even harder? A smart woman would have let Barrons in more, leaned on him, cultivated his exceptional strengths and extraordinary powers. But no, I’d shut him out. Redefined our relationship completely, lessening it. And he’d let me. Never said a word about it. Just stayed in the capacity I’d been willing to accept.
“It has nothing to do with intelligence or lack thereof. We’re alike, you and I.”
I blinked. Jericho Barrons had just put us in the same category.
“Alpha to the core. Proud. Independent. We’re private and pissy about our battles, especially the internal ones. We don’t want anyone else in the middle of how messy we think we might get, nor do we want to inadvertently hurt someone. I’d have left you completely until I’d seen it through. At least you stayed in my bed. Some of the time.”
I bristled. “If you ever even think of leaving me to—”
“I don’t fight internal battles anymore.” He was silent a moment then added, “Nor will you. Not even about Jo and the others. Yes, I know you know about them.”
I didn’t bother asking how he knew. “How do you figure?” I was pretty sure I still had a hellish battle to wage with myself.
“Because now you understand there are things we do in our lives for which there is—and will never be—any forgiveness. No matter how many people around you offer it. What you’ve done is irrevocable and you’ll find no absolution.”
“Gee, thanks for making me feel so much better, Barrons,” I said, stung.
“You never make peace with some things. But, like an oyster, chafed by a grain of sand you can’t dislodge, eventually you polish it into something of value.”
“How could my murder of Jo and the others ever possibly become something of value?”
“It’s not the action that becomes the thing of value. It’s how you feel about the action that does. You find yourself doing something for another person you never would have done before. You pay it forward. It takes time. Relax. Live. Keep your eyes open. See what comes.”
Relax. Live. Keep your eyes open. See what comes. I smiled faintly. That was all any of us could do on a given day.
I locked gazes with him. You’re my sun—
Hush. You think I don’t know that? I have a bone to pick with you, Ms. Lane.
I arched a brow. Uh-oh. I was Ms. Lane. That was Barrons: the man of few words could get downright loquacious with his criticism. “What?” There was a note of truculence in my voice, but I’d had a rough twenty-four hours and I was tired.
There was a moment back there in the White Mansion. You didn’t move. I wouldn’t have minded if you had.
He opened his arms.
Truculence dissipated like a bubble bursting. When I bounded over the couch, sped across the bookstore, and flung myself into them, he caught me up and swung me around and I threw my head back, laughing just like a heroine in one of those romantic movies.
“Sun, moon, and stars,” he growled against my ear.
I punched him in the shoulder. “Hush. You think I don’t know that?”
Then his mouth was on mine and we were on the floor, ushering in the night in time-honored fashion.
By the crimson and silvery light of the moon shafting in the front windows of my bookstore, on a hard floor that felt soft as clouds, I made love to Jericho Barrons. Took my time, slow, lingering, and tender. Poured into my hands every ounce of reverence I felt for this man who understood me like no other, saw straight to my tarnished soul and liked every bit of it, waited patiently while I did dickhead things until I found my way through them, never changed, never stopped being beastly but was capable of enormous loyalty and great tenderness. This lion that I’d sauntered up to wearing my flashy peacock feathers hadn’t snapped the head off my skinny, brilliantly colored neck, he’d only licked me and waited for me to grow claws.
I had neither flashy feathers nor claws now. I’d become yet another thing.
A steel fist inside a velvet glove.
Strong enough that I was no longer afraid to be gentle. Powerful enough that I could be vulnerable. Scarred enough that I could understand and tread lightly around the deepest scars of others.
Then Barrons’s steel was inside my velvet glove and I thought no more.
Later, when I lay stretched on top of his big hard body, I raised my head and looked into his eyes. “Did you see me when I was the Book?”
Yes, his dark gaze said.
I didn’t want to know, yet I needed to know. There was a new part of me that never wanted to hide from anything again. It demanded all truth all the time. If I’d done something, I wanted to know
every detail, own it completely and deal with it. I’d learned that not knowing is so much harder than knowing, no matter how bad the truth is. Whether it’s worse or not, the unknown always looms larger and more terrifying because the doubt it creates undermines our ability to move forward. “Did you see me kill Jo?”
I saw you after the Book had. There’s no question you did it.
The others I killed?
He shook his head. I wasn’t there. I did, however, see a few disturbing things on the way to the White Mansion. I terminated each of them. Quickly.
I inhaled sharply and tears sprang to my eyes. He’d cleaned up after me. When I’d first returned to Dublin this morning I’d wanted desperately to find those terrible things the Book had shown me: the inside out twins, the castrated man, the child, but I’d realized it had been thirty-five days, and although they surely lingered in agony, it had likely been a matter of hours or days and it was far too late for me to be merciful. Barrons had prevented them from suffering. Been the mercy killer for me. I drew back and looked at him through the tears, wondering if this was what he had meant about the grain of sand. “Your feelings about whatever you’d done that was unforgivable got polished into mercy.”
Mercy from a beast like me? he mocked.
Yes, from you.
He said nothing but I knew it was true.
The silence stretched, then he lightly touched his hands to my temples and drew my head into the hollow of his neck.
Suddenly I was in another place and time, a desert of sand, a hot wind gusting over me, tangling my hair. Watching Barrons toss his son up onto a horse. The beautiful little boy laughed with excitement as his father stared impatiently up.
I made him come with me that day because I was in a hurry. I didn’t want to waste the few minutes it would have taken to return him to his mother. There was no reason to hurry. Those few minutes cost him his entire life, condemned him to an eternity of hell.
I swallowed.
The thing that ate at me the most about containing you with the stones was that it appeared my choices were: don’t do it and let you destroy the world; do it and lock you away in Culsan’s chamber, incurring the risk that the world got destroyed by the black holes anyway, leaving you to suffer there forever because I would be gone and unable to come back and free you; or kill you so you would never suffer my son’s fate. I can’t tell you if it appeared the world would end, I’d not have done the latter.
“Thank you,” I said simply.
He inclined his head gravely.
“Was I horrific when the Book was in possession of me?”
“No worse than many humans I’ve known. Where the corporeal Book was a vast, philosophical, brilliant homicidal maniac with enormous power of illusion, the one within you seemed a smaller, egotistical psychopath. Cruce postulated that the Book didn’t copy itself, it had to split, thereby lost many of its parts in the process. I suspect the twenty-some years it lived inside you changed it further. Its time inside your body must have been the most visceral, tangible experience it had ever had, connected to your senses.”
“You think I humanized it.”
“To a degree.”
“Did you know I was in there?”
He smiled faintly. “I felt you early on. You were furious.”
“You felt that? But I wasn’t in control of it then!”
“Your rage was enormous and told me what I needed to know. You were in there, fighting. Later the Book tried to pretend it was shifting back and forth between you and it, and I played along but I could sense only the Book at that time. The only other time I felt you was when I came to you.”
“And told me to become it.”
His dark eyes gleamed. Which you did superbly. My little monster.
I gasped. “You could feel me when I was like that—stripped of all emotion?”
You were a woman who knew her own strength. Powerful. Resolute. Beautiful.
I dropped my head back down into the hollow of his neck, glowing inside. Beneath me lay the only man that could probably ever understand what I’d become at that moment, and could admire it. It would have terrified most men, to watch a woman strip away everything that made her human in order to get the job done. He found my strength beautiful. My monster and his beast; they liked each other.
“We have to make plans to move humans off world, Jericho.” I turned my mind away from myself and toward our many problems. “This planet may die, but that doesn’t mean the end of the human race. They can live on another world, colonize.”
“Ryodan and I are already on it. Years ago we mapped paths in the Silvers to worlds that could sustain human life. We knew this world might one day become more hostile than we desired.” He was silent a moment, then added, “Still, we failed to consider it might one day cease to exist entirely. We’ve never faced the risk of permanent death until recently. Now all of us face the threat of complete annihilation.”
Or eternal hell. Reborn in a black hole to die again and again. I traced my fingers down the sharp angle of his jaw, touched his lips, vowing silently that I would never let that happen.
He caught my hand and kissed each finger then said, “When you think of the lives your opening the Sinsar Dubh cost, think also that if you had not, you would not have become the Fae queen, thereby gaining the only magic that may save this world.”
“You think the lives of the few are worth the lives of the many.”
“The universe works in mysterious ways. When you live long enough, you begin to see a grander purpose and pattern, larger than any of us.”
“The only way that grander purpose works for me is if I manage to save the Earth. I don’t know what I have or how to use it.”
“We’ll figure it out. But if it looks like we can’t, you’re going off world, too.”
I drew back and looked at him. The old me would have bristled, snapped an angry denial. The new me simply kissed him then drew back and said gently, “No, I’m not.” I would live and die beside this man. But I would never leave him.
He smiled then, white teeth flashing in his dark face, rolled me beneath him and stretched his body over mine and unleashed a storm of passion on my body while above us thunder rolled and lightning cracked as an end-of-days deluge broke loose over Dublin.
MAC
When I woke up, Barrons was gone. I amused myself with the thought that I’d so thoroughly exhausted him that he’d had to go eat to regain his strength. I’d tried to exhaust him. I was the one who’d ended up passing out on the Chesterfield. No surprise there.
Last night had been incredible, worth the horrors I’d endured, to end up here, now, the way I was.
I rolled over onto my back and mouthed a silent thank-you at the ceiling for putting me through my recent ordeal. I’d known, the night we’d defeated the corporeal Book, that there was a serious imbalance of power and personal fortitude between me and Barrons, and it had eaten at me. It was an imbalance I no longer felt.
A scrabbling at the front door jarred me from my thoughts. Sighing, I pushed my hair out of my face—holy crap, it was nearly to my waist!—poked my head up and peered over the back of the sofa.
I narrowed my eyes and tried to process what I was seeing.
Little fairies were stuck like colorful tree frogs to every rain-soaked inch of glass on the front of the bookstore.
Peering in at me.
I peered back.
We did that for a few minutes. I had no idea what they were thinking but I was pretty much just thinking, What are these sparkly little spotted and striped things and why are they decorating my store? It was a type of Fae I’d never seen before; diminutive and dainty like the death-by-laughter Fae but less flashy, earthier.
I finally pushed myself up, walked to the window and touched my hand to the glass, tracing the shape of a small, delicate female with sandy spots and tawny hair.
She shivered and began to chirp excitedly.
Then they all started to chirp and clamor an
d scrabble about on the wet glass.
Baffled, I moved to the door and carefully opened it. They remained hanging in the air, plastered to whatever force field Barrons had erected around the store that kept Fae out with the exception of Cruce, when he was permitted. All were slender, velvety-skinned, some had spots in every shade of green with mossy hair, others with gray and white stripes and silvery hair. There were sunny yellow ones with lemon curls, dark brown ones with short muddy shocks of hair, pale blue with cerulean manes, rose beauties with pale pink braids. It was a veritable rainbow of fairies, with varying patterns and designs on their skin.
I waved my hand in a shooing gesture and they peeled away to permit my exit. As I moved out into the alcove, thousands of fairies the size of my hand began to drop from the sky in flashes of brilliant color. I poked my head out past the column and glanced into the street. Fae were plastered to the sides of every building, falling away, landing in the puddle-dotted street where they instantly sank to their knees, bowed their heads and crossed their arms over their chests in an unmistakable gesture of…
Fealty?
Abruptly their chirping was no longer unintelligible.
“Our queen! Our queen! Isn’t she lovely? Oooh, she’s so beautiful!” Trills of excitement rippled through them.
“What are you?” I asked the crowd of tiny beings. “I mean, what caste and why have I never seen you before?”
A slender gray-spotted fairy sloshed forward through a puddle and bowed low. “O Austere and Beneficent Queen, the Spyrssidhe have long been forbidden at court.”
“Why?”
“We were deemed unacceptable and banished, exalted liege,” she said.
“She speaks to us! She speaks to us!” rippled through the crowded, rainy street. “She may hear our petition!”
“By the prior queen?” I asked.
She nodded sadly. “Cast out into the world of Man, to make our homes in trees and streams, among rocks and flowers and the gardens of Man. We felt the rising of a new and different queen and came to petition you, gracious and wise Queen, in hopes you would hear our plea and reconsider our fate.”