His heart was my cage.
Dictating my actions. Making me think hard about everything I said and did. Knowing it was going to end badly no matter what I said or did. How was I supposed to care about someone I knew I wouldn’t get to keep? By any logic, it was stupid. Self-destructive. Pointless. Bring on the erosion. I’d said to him last night, You do know you’re going to die before me, right? He’d laughed and said, Wow, that’s arrogant, Mega. I don’t take nearly the risks you do. Nobody ever knows how long anybody is going to live. Stop thinking about it. I don’t. Live in the moment. You always used to.
Back then it was enough. I’d believed my moments infinite. Jackie Paper was never going to leave Puff alone.
“Sure thing, Brain.” I kicked up into the slipstream.
MAC
I got a little slice of heaven that afternoon.
In a lovely townhouse, with a brightly painted red door, adorned by colorful planters filled with sopping wet blooms in every window, on the north side of the River Liffey, I had lunch with my sister Alina and my parents.
The Lane family reunion couldn’t have been more perfect.
When I knocked on the door, Mom opened it, burst into tears of joy, and exclaimed over her shoulder, “Jack, Jack, come quickly! Our baby’s here!”
Then my daddy and sister were both in the doorway and I was engulfed in Jack Lane’s fierce bear hug that smelled just like it always did of peppermint and aftershave, then Alina and Mom had their arms around both of us and we stood in a group hug, crying and laughing, and my heart had nearly exploded from trying to hold so much joy.
The many horrors of the past year melted away in that embrace and it felt for a few moments as if the Lanes had merely gotten together in Ireland for a family vacation. My sister had never died, I’d never killed, and the world wasn’t about to end.
Not. But it still felt pretty damned wonderful.
They told me Alina had found them weeks ago, and although they’d been disbelieving, even hostile at first, that “nice Mr. Ryodan had come by,” taken her away and done a blood test that proved she was indisputably their daughter. (I didn’t tell them he’d no doubt bitten her, not drawn blood, and exchanged a glance with Alina, who winked at me before we shared a private smile.) Daddy said they would have eventually believed it was her, even without a test of any kind, because he knew his girls.
Mom made fried chicken (Mr. Ryodan had sent a pantryful of other groceries—“Mr. Ryodan” really knew how to work the moms), biscuits, and greens, followed by the best peach pie I’d ever tasted.
We sat around the small table in the tall-ceilinged, bright kitchen, laughing and talking, reveling in the one thing we’d believed we would never get to do again—be a family making normal, family small talk. Mom made me unbraid my hair and told me it was too platinum for my coloring, and whatever hair vitamins I was taking, I might want to back off unless I wanted to turn into something from a fairy tale, like Rapunzel. I didn’t tell her I’d already turned into something from a fairy tale. Figured I’d save that doozy for later. I noticed Alina wasn’t wearing her engagement ring anymore and I didn’t miss the fleeting sadness that occasionally crossed her face, like when Mom teased her about that handsome man Mr. Ryodan sent to drop supplies off a few days ago. I made a mental note to ask my sister which of the Nine it had been. Last thing I wanted was Alina hooking up with one of them, although, I mused…that Jason Statham look-alike was totally hot and, well, Alina wasn’t any more normal than me. Well, slightly more normal but not all that much. Daddy had lost weight, laboring with District Ten on various projects, and looked more handsome and robust than ever. Mom was no longer part of WeCare. They’d up and closed their doors out of the blue with no explanation. She’d turned her efforts to a local outreach center instead, which oversaw multiple greenhouses and was developing dozens of local farms.
After lunch we sat in the dark blue parlor that sported wing-backed chairs, a lovely chandelier, tall windows, and white wainscoting, gathered near a softly hissing gas fire as I filled them in on why I’d been gone so long (omitting a LOT). When I told them how I’d defeated the Sinsar Dubh and left it trapped in the boudoir, my daddy’s eyes had gleamed with pride. “That’s my girl,” he told me fiercely. “I knew you wouldn’t doom the world.”
I’d glowed quietly. My daddy’s approval was welcome salve to the injury of the many sins I’d committed in the process. When I told them I was, also, however, the Faery queen and already the castes were coming to me with petitions, my mom was the one who surprised me the most.
“I can’t think of anyone better to lead them,” she said. “That nice Mr. Ryodan told us some of what you’ve been through in the past year. I don’t think there’s anything you couldn’t handle now.”
I blinked. Wow. Rainey Lane had become downright adaptable. Then again, I shouldn’t be surprised—like mother like daughter. I’d love to know what Ryodan had told her. Surely not that I’d been raped, almost killed multiple times, and was a killer. I made a mental note to dig further into that, if the opportunity presented itself. I had a hard time picturing him talking favorably about me but it was clear he presented a very different picture of himself to “normal” people than he did to me.
Daddy said, “Does that mean you know the song that can save the planet and we aren’t going off world? Good grief, I just said off world.” He laughed and rubbed his hands together briskly. “I have to admit, I find the notion quite intriguing. I’ve always had a bit of wanderlust and no time to indulge it.” He told me Ryodan had the Lanes in the first wave of colonists, packed and ready to leave at a moment’s notice.
Sighing, I shook my head. “It means I’m the one that can supposedly sing or wield it, whatever that means, but no, we’ve not yet figured out what it is. Dancer’s working on it right now.” I filled them in on the music box and the strange song it contained that I heard so differently than everyone else.
Alina startled me by saying, “Mac, I hear music when I stand near one of the black holes. Do you hear it, too?”
I nodded.
She said, “It’s awful. It makes me feel like I’m coming apart at the seams or something. It makes me feel nearly as sick to my stomach as the Sinsar Dubh did.”
“That’s exactly how it makes me feel!” My sister and I shared yet another unusual sidhe-seer talent. “Do you hear the songs of the various castes as well?” I made a mental note to take Alina to listen to the music box, wondering if she would hear it the same way I did.
She nodded. “Each caste has a unique melody. The Seelie songs are harmonious, beautiful, but the Unseelie music is jarring and discordant. Their songs feel…incomplete somehow, like something’s missing and if only it was there, the music might be lovely.”
“Exactly! Wow, the O’Connor girls really got the sidhe-seer gifts, didn’t we?” And those gifts needed to be passed on. Alina needed to have babies. A lot of them, as I highly doubted children were in store for me. Although we’d never discussed it, I didn’t think they were an option with Barrons. We’d never used protection and he wasn’t a reckless man. I couldn’t see him fathering a child casually.
“How odd does it feel,” Alina asked me, “to be charged with leading the very race we were bred to kill?” She frowned. “I guess that means I shouldn’t slay Fae anymore, eh? This is going to be quite an adjustment.”
Back when I’d first come to Ireland, I often imagined how it might have been—had my sister survived—to fight back-to-back with her, two powerful, nulling sidhe-seers killing Fae by the thousands. I’d known it would never happen because she was dead. Now it would never happen for a totally different reason. My life hadn’t merely changed, it’d done a complete one-eighty.
“It’s an adjustment, and yes, it would probably be a good thing if you stopped killing them,” I said dryly. How complex things were becoming. The queen’s sister killing Fae would definitely not go over well with my race.
When my phone vibrated, I extracted it
from my pocket and glanced down.
Meet at Chester’s. We have a problem.
It was Barrons. “I have to go,” I said, dismayed. I’d hoped to stay much longer, perhaps even spend the night. Alina and I had so much to catch up on! I wanted to know everything that had happened to her before she’d—well, whatever had happened. I wanted to hug her endlessly, tell her how much I loved her, laugh with her, go somewhere together. Enjoy a slice of normalcy while we could.
She and I made plans to meet later tonight at Temple Bar, where we were—by God, come hell or high water—going to drink Coronas with lime (and piss off every Irishman in the bar because who would choose piss-water over a dark, robust Guinness?) and talk until we ran out of things to say (which had never happened and never would), then go back home, fall asleep in the same bed, and wake up in the morning to my mom cooking breakfast and my daddy reading Ryodan’s World News by the fire.
After exchanging repeated hugs and kisses, I slipped out into the rain and opened my umbrella, glanced up in the general direction of the sky and thanked my lucky stars for days like these.
Then followed it up with a fervent prayer that I might be on the receiving end of many, many more of them.
I hurried through the gushing, neon, and rain-slicked streets of Dublin beneath a slate sky, umbrella canted against the brisk wind-driven rain, marveling at how normal it all seemed.
Young trees sprouted rain-soaked leaves, flowers retreated into sopping buds beneath the downpour, a sodden bee buzzed wetly by to land in a window, seeking refuge in a crack in the stone sill.
There were insects in Dublin again. It was a small but momentous triumph merely to have bugs in the world after the devastation the life-sucking Shades had wrought on our city.
High on buildings, doves cooed, sheltering beneath dripping eaves. I even glimpsed a young battered tomcat disappearing behind a trash Dumpster.
Even though the human race knew it was facing potential apocalypse, life was going on all around me. I wasn’t the only one who’d gone through hell, lost people, almost been killed, and learned to adapt in the past year. The entire human race had suffered, in every city across the world. Everyone’s preconceptions had been shattered. They’d confronted immortal beings from another world, fought and scrambled to survive, faced food shortages, walked numbly through ruined cities, found new places to live, lost and mourned loved ones. Those of us left were warriors determined to make each day count and savor the small joys, because who could say what tomorrow might bring? Or, even if it would come.
As I splashed down a narrow cobbled alley, a flicker of movement caught my eye and I glanced up to see ZEWs huddled atop the building on both sides of the street, heavily cowled heads bent, peering down at me. I stopped walking, let my umbrella fall back and turned my face up into the rain, staring back, unafraid.
I wasn’t broken anymore. Inspect me, I willed up at them. Just try to find something lacking. Or something extra. I’m undivided, unbroken, and downright unbreakable.
As one, the flock lifted off and quickly merged into the leaden sky.
I smiled and resumed my rapid pace through the city, looking everywhere, drinking it all in.
People sat, eating and talking, behind the rain-drizzled windows of bars and restaurants that now had food to serve again. There were few Fae out and about, mostly lower-caste Seelie (taking hasty glances at me before crossing to the other side of the street), and I knew why—Fae don’t care for rain. They like things to be pretty, clean, glamorous. I also suspected many of them might be off meeting somewhere en masse, discussing me. Perhaps the Unseelie as well. That was a meeting I was going to have to locate and attend at some point. As soon as Cruce came to his senses and acknowledged that I was a wolf he didn’t want in his backyard.
I rounded a corner and nearly crashed into a cluster of people gathered in the street outside a small church, wearing bright yellow rain slickers, working outside under tents on—Oh!
I stopped and stared. A few dozen workers had erected high scaffolds around the perimeter of a large black hole and were raising a waterproof tarp on long poles up and over it, careful to keep a fair distance between the tarp and the subtle gravitational pull of the sphere.
“What are you doing?” I called.
The burly man directing their endeavors shouted to be heard over a sudden crash of thunder, “It’s the bloody rain! Falling into the holes and feeding them! The water is making them grow! We’re tarping off the largest ones first but the bloody wind keeps blowing rain in sideways!” To a man on the other side of the sphere, he shouted, “Find a way to peg the tarp to the ground so the sides don’t blow it into the—Ah, shit, Colin no! Bloody hellfire! Nooooo!”
I gasped with horror. A gust of wind had just caught the edge of the tarp that was draped on poles and scaffolding and whisked it into the sphere. Instantly, every single thing touching the tarp, poles, and scaffolding was stretched thin as spaghetti, sucked into the black hole and devoured.
I stood, staring dumbly. The sphere had taken everything connected to the sole thing that had touched it. A mere corner of the tarp—and the entire apparatus and men erecting it were gone. They hadn’t even had time to scream.
We had our answer, I thought grimly: if the sphere touched the earth, the same thing would happen. The only question was: to what degree? Perhaps it wouldn’t turn the entire earth into a spaghetti at once, only a fair portion of it, but definitely all of it in time. And who could say? These were objects that didn’t obey any laws of physics. Perhaps a fairly small black hole could simply blip the entire planet out. Blink of an eye. Everyone alive one moment—gone the next.
You have mere months, at best, the queen had said. Before we’d lost thirty-five days in the White Mansion.
In my mind, a clock began spinning at a dizzying speed.
The jarring, discordant music of the sphere grew louder, more cacophonous, and I narrowed my eyes, chilled to the bone—the hole was noticeably larger after its meal. I frowned. Something else about it had changed. The outer two feet or so of the black hole was…whirling, as if the whole thing was encased in a perimeter gyroscope or small dark rim-tornado.
And the bottom of it was whirling barely two feet from the ground.
A mere twenty-four inches was all that stood between us and extinction. We needed to start removing the street from beneath it. Tunnel up from deep in the ground.
Oh, yes, we had a problem. Hundreds of them. What was going on in other countries? Was it raining there, too? Snowing? How close to the earth were their black holes? Was Ryodan keeping tabs on them all?
“Get another crew over here!” the foreman roared to four men who remained. “We’ve got to get this fucking thing covered! Bring more tarps, and mind the buggers this time!”
I had a sudden idea. I pulled out my cellphone and texted Jada.
Meet me at Chester’s ASAP. Urgent.
Abandoning my umbrella, I tucked my head against the storm and ran for Chester’s.
Amendment to my earlier assessment: a mere four inches was all that stood between us and extinction.
The black hole outside Chester’s had always been the largest, but it had grown enormously since I’d last seen it. This one, too, had that new, strange, whirling perimeter.
“What the hell happened here?” I demanded, joining Barrons and Ryodan, who were standing a careful distance away from the hole, wearing dripping, hooded black slickers.
“Early this morning a cult of those ‘See you in Faery’ fucks committed mass suicide by running into the goddamn hole,” Ryodan snarled. “Caught it on my surveillance cameras. A hundred or more raced into it like fucking lemmings off a cliff. It’s one thing if you want to die, but don’t bloody take the world with you.”
“Gee, maybe someone shouldn’t have encouraged their suicidal tendencies,” I said, appalled. “Perhaps if you hadn’t pandered to their delusions in your club—”
“Don’t even start with me.” Ryodan began to
stalk menacingly toward me.
Barrons blocked him instantly. “Never. Threaten. Mac.”
Ryodan said coolly, “I wasn’t. I was merely moving toward her.”
“In a stalking manner,” Barrons said tightly.
“For fuck’s sake, it was a nonthreatening stalk. You know I’d never harm her.”
He wouldn’t? Hmmm. Good to know.
Barrons growled, “My brain fails to distinguish nuances of stalking where Mac is concerned. A stalk is a stalk. All must be terminated. Don’t fuck with me.”
Ryodan growled back, “Got it. Get over it. We have bigger problems. Besides, she doesn’t need protecting anymore.”
“The one who bears your mark doesn’t need it either. Doesn’t stop you from feeling the burn, does it?”
Ryodan had branded Dani. “Just how much do you feel from those tattoos?” I asked.
“Too bloody much,” Ryodan said curtly.
“Seriously.” I looked at Barrons. “How much?”
He regarded me in stony silence.
“I’m not letting this one go,” I said. “You felt my rage, even when the Sinsar Dubh was in control. That means you can sense a great deal more than you’ve ever admitted to me. How much?”
“A great deal,” he finally said.
I met his gaze and held it. Big, beautiful, dark, hard-to-handle man. I was proud to call him mine. Didn’t mean I wasn’t going to still have ferocious arguments with him. And no doubt the occasional knock-down-drag-out fight. But now wasn’t the time. You and I are going to talk later, I said silently.
He smiled faintly, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
I smiled back. It didn’t reach my eyes either. I notched my chin down that same warning bit he was throwing my way, perfectly able to give as good as I got.
Ryodan glanced between us and murmured, “She became what you thought she would. Lucky man.”