She’d made her own kind of peace by freeze-framing into the future, faster than the wind, faster than any pain could follow. Seeking adventure, sensation, stimulation, because as long as she was feeling something new, she didn’t feel anything old. Past is past, she’d crowed to anyone who’d listened.
She knew Ryodan’s words by heart. She knew everything he’d said by heart. Few adults had given her useful words. Tucked into a Mega brain behind a gamine grin and insouciant swagger, they’d always been treasured.
The wound you refuse to dress is one that will never heal. You gush lifeblood and never even know why. It will make you weak at a critical moment when you need to be strong.
Tonight her unhealed wounds had cost her. And him.
She’d watched him die once, gutted by the Crimson Hag. Somehow, miraculously, he’d returned from the dead, whole and good as new. She wasn’t worried that he might die from these burns.
Regardless, looking at him in this condition made her feel sick.
She closed her eyes, reliving the abbey under attack, the bloodbath of a battle, so many dead, cut down so young, the hellish fire, the moment she’d felt her mind snap.
Shazam.
Ryodan stumbling from the inferno, carrying her and her stuffed animal, both unharmed.
Which brought her to thoughts of the completed tattoo at the base of her spine, the cellphone in her pocket, and the certainty Ryodan could find her no matter where she went.
Of course, now that she had what she’d so desperately wanted, she couldn’t justify pursuing a personal agenda.
Forgotten in her hand, the protein bar had melted and chocolate ran warm and gooey through her fingers. She devoured it in two bites, barely chewing, licked her hand, and pocketed the wrapper.
Her hands curled into fists.
“Ryodan, we’ve got problems. Mac’s gone. She tried to save us from the Sweeper by using the Sinsar Dubh. When she took a spell from it, the Book possessed her. I can’t find Barrons. I don’t know if Mac is still in there somewhere. I do know the Book will destroy everything it comes in contact with.” She paused then said flatly, “Logic dictates I kill her at the earliest opportunity.”
Which, technically, had passed.
She’d taken Mac’s spear before she’d undone her restraints, erring on the side of caution. She should have attacked the moment the Book revealed itself with its nightshade-toxic gaze. She was faster and the Book had been having obvious acclimation problems, struggling to get off the table, swaying slightly as it found footing. She could have stabbed it with the spear, cleaved it in half with her sword, ensuring the body that held the Sinsar Dubh would rot and die.
Mac’s body.
Eventually.
Slowly and horrifically.
For a woman who lived by the motto carpe momentum et cetera sequentur, she’d never wanted to seize a moment less.
She knew why and told the unconscious man heatedly. “Because friends don’t give up on friends. They never give up.”
The body on the mattress shivered but said nothing.
Lost in the Silvers versus lost in the Book: Jada didn’t perceive the odds of rescue as substantially disparate. The fallout, however, could be catastrophically different: one girl, never to be seen again, versus the earth’s total domination and destruction. Assuming the black holes didn’t destroy it first.
“Lor told me you didn’t know where I’d gone,” she told the silent room. “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t Mac’s either. People need to stop thinking they’re responsible for my actions. It wasn’t like I needed to be rescued. I’ve never needed to be rescued.” She’d always found a way to save herself.
Still, she knew intimately the despair of day after day passing, followed by nights cold, hungry, alone; of belief dying bit by bit.
Mac had sacrificed herself, to ensure Jada’s survival. If Mac hadn’t opened the Sinsar Dubh and used a spell to save them, the Sweeper would have sent horribly “fixed” versions of Mac and Jada out into the world, which might have been every bit as deadly as the Book being unleashed on it. And who could say the Sweeper’s work on Mac’s brain wouldn’t have freed the Sinsar Dubh anyway? There’d been no easy, good choices tonight, only the lesser of evils—two women destroyed or one.
Over her dead body was Mac waiting for a rescue that never came.
As she stood and moved toward the door, Ryodan muttered something too garbled for even her acute hearing to decipher.
She glanced back. “You shouldn’t be trying to talk. Rest. Heal. Get back on your feet.”
He muttered again, jerking with such violence that several pieces of spelled cloth protecting his skin fell away. When she moved to the mattress and knelt to replace them, he blew the cloth from his face and went into instant convulsions from the effort.
She didn’t tell him to stop trying to speak. Ryodan made his own decisions. Whatever he wanted to say, he badly wanted her to hear.
When he was still again, she bent near his mouth. His once beautiful face was a charred, monstrous mask, eyelids blistered, lips burned to a raw gash.
She’d done this to him. Her meltdown. Her heart the Sweeper had deemed flawed. She’d always excelled at the pretending game. But she’d taken it too far this time. She’d lost sight of what was imaginary and what wasn’t. And it had cost them all, those she hated caring about yet had never been able to stop caring about.
He spoke carefully then passed out so hard he no longer shivered. It had taken all his strength to murmur a single sentence.
Jada gently replaced the spelled cloth, eyes shining, torn between hushed awe and a fierce desire to snicker.
He’d said, Holy psychotic PCs, Robin, we’ve a murderous MacBook on the loose!
“Batman,” she said, hoping he was in a place of no pain. “This time around, I’m wearing the cape.”
She took the stairs three at a time to Mac’s room on the fourth floor.
It wasn’t there.
A room still occupied the location; it just wasn’t the same one she’d been in earlier. The cozy, messy bedroom had been supplanted in her absence by a parlor with a red crushed-velvet sofa, a faded Persian rug, crystal lamps, and a cheery fire burning in an enameled hearth.
She walked back out into the stairwell and glanced up, eyes narrowed.
When she’d left earlier to follow Mac, the stairwell hadn’t continued past the fourth floor. There’d been only a ceiling with elaborate crown molding where now a dizzying staircase ascended.
From years Silverside, Jada was accustomed to shifting spatial dimensions. Barrons Books & Baubles housed at least one powerful, distorting Silver, if not more; a mystery to be explored when time permitted. She found the Nine’s secrets intriguing to an obsessive-compulsive degree.
She located the bedroom on the sixth floor, on the left side of the corridor, not the right, shrugged out of her coat, stripped off her shirt and swapped it for one of Mac’s. Her clothing was stained with dried blood, entrails, and dusted with the pungent yellow residue of the zombie-eating-wraith straitjacket she’d briefly worn. The combined stench was overwhelming her sense of smell, diluting it. After wiping her face with a damp towel, she scrubbed down her pants and boots as well.
She grabbed Mac’s black leather biker jacket and began transferring her many weapons, protein bars, and last remaining energy pod. While strapping on the sword and tucking the spear into a thigh holster, she spotted the cuff she’d given Mac on the table by the bed.
She had no idea why Mac had taken it off but she wasn’t about to leave it lying around. She’d risked a great deal to take it. Crossing the room in a few long-legged strides, she shoved the cuff onto her wrist and pushed it up under the sleeve of her jacket.
A charred stuffed animal, wedged between pillows on the bed, stuffing-guts spilling from its slashed belly, watched her every move with round, shiny, reproachful black eyes.
I see you, Shazam.
She shook herself briskly. Emotion was dea
dly. Plans and objectives, clarifying.
She tucked the stuffing back in, tugged the edges closed and gently placed the teddy bear on a high shelf.
Then she turned, dashed down the stairs and burst out the back door, into the gloomy Dublin dawn.
She used her left hand, her sword hand, to trace the same spell she’d etched earlier to pass through the whirling tornado surrounding Barrons Books & Baubles. Black veins flared beneath her skin, licked up into her wrist, and her hand went ice cold. Many years ago she’d stabbed a Hunter with the Sword of Light and something had seemed to seep through her weapon into her fingers. She’d learned Silverside that her left hand cast better, stronger spells. It often itched and tingled, and sometimes at night she’d wake up to find her hand cold and black. Shazam had professed a special fondness for being scratched behind his ears with her left hand, claiming it felt different, but when pressed for more information, the grumpy, cranky beast had merely flashed a Cheshire smile and refused further discourse.
Shazam. Her heart hurt. Grief was a silenced wail that had no beginning or end, just a long, agonizing middle.
Inhaling deeply, she focused on her city.
She’d not seen a single person since leaving the warehouse with the exception of Ryodan, and suspected Barrons was out searching for Mac, perhaps for her as well. The streets were empty, silent, glistening gray beneath a bank of dense thunderclouds. Were it a normal morning—if there was such a thing anymore—there’d have been both Fae and humans milling in the street, but any human who’d seen the Fae gathering en masse last night had either joined up and been killed or gone to ground, fearing a death march similar to the one on Halloween when the walls between worlds had been destroyed.
As she passed the church where she’d nearly frozen to death, she scanned the black hole suspended over the rubble, assessing size and circumference. It was larger by nearly a third, exuding a gentle pull of distortion. Mac had told her she could hear music coming from the black holes, but even with her extraordinary hearing Jada couldn’t detect the faintest vibration.
She considered her current problems: Black holes devouring the world, the Song of Making lost, nearly half her sidhe-seers injured or dead, another attack on the abbey imminent until Cruce was freed or destroyed, the Unseelie King and former queen absent, Mac possessed by the Sinsar Dubh.
Banner day in Dublin. No time to print a daily.
It occurred to her that if they could find a way to control Mac/the Sinsar Dubh, it might not be entirely a bad thing that she’d opened the Book. If they didn’t hurry up and find a way to patch the black holes on their world, or at least find a way to stop them from growing, the human race had no future, and allegedly the Sinsar Dubh, scribed by the Unseelie King, contained information about the legendary Song of Making. She’d pondered that allegation at length, not certain she believed it was possible because, according to all the myths she’d uncovered about the history of the Fae royals, including the many oral stories she’d collected Silverside, the king had never succeeded in re-creating it—so how could anything about it possibly be in his Book? Maybe the Book contained clues? Bits and pieces the king had collected hinting at the true nature of the song that, with Dancer’s help, might be analyzed and improved upon? Speaking of Dancer, she had to somehow get word to him that Mac had gone postal. She wondered if he still checked their hidden cubby at the O’Connell Street Post Office, and made a mental note to drop him a message there, assuming she didn’t run into him before then. He had the uncanny knack of showing up whenever she thought really hard about him.
She eased up into the slipstream and vanished. In that higher dimension, the world slid by without friction. Buildings, people, their many messy emotions, disappeared beyond a beautiful, starry tunnel. If only she could eat enough to maintain the metabolism to fuel it, she’d live in the slipstream and never come down—a superhero, protecting her world, unseen, untouched.
She was nearly to Chester’s when she crashed into a brick wall she’d not sensed—which meant one of the Nine—and dropped back down.
Scent came before sight: Jericho Barrons. She ricocheted off his chest and went flying. With those lightning-fast reflexes that could pluck her out of freeze-frame, he grabbed her arm and stopped her from careening violently down the street.
“Dani,” he said.
She tipped her head back and stared up into eyes black as midnight, a dark, savage face. Every hair on her body stood up on end, as if charged by a sudden surge of electricity. He threw off the same kind of primal energy as Ryodan. She’d once crushed on Jericho Barrons violently. Before she realized he and Mac belonged together like earth and sky, night and day, fire and ice. She’d found tatters of legends about the Nine on some of the worlds she’d traveled Silverside, but never managed to find an origin myth, only songs and tales of nine merciless warriors who battled for gain and, despite dying, came back again and again. Unkillable, unstoppable, unbreakable, she hungered to be those many “uns” herself. No matter the price. She snatched her hand away and smoothed her hair. “It’s Jada.”
“Have you seen Mac?” he said.
That was Barrons. No small talk. She appreciated it and answered in kind. “She’s been possessed by the Sinsar Dubh.”
Barrons went so still she lost him in the early morning gloom. Just when she’d decided he’d left, his disembodied voice murmured, “So, that’s why I can no longer feel her.” Then he was there again, morphing out of the brick wall that had been behind him. He could be a perfect chameleon when he chose. “Are you certain?” he said so softly that she shivered, because she knew what soft meant from this hard, implacable man. It meant every ounce of his energy had just been diverted and channeled into a mother lode of a nuclear missile that was locked, loaded, and targeted on whatever had just offended him, and that he would expend no more energy than was strictly necessary to speak.
“Yes.”
His eyes darkened, eerie shadows swirled in his irises, and a muscle worked in his jaw. “How certain?”
“Unequivocally.”
“What happened?” he said, a bare whisper.
She tightened her ponytail, pulling it up higher. Her hair was curling again, or trying to. She hated it curly. It made her feel like Dani, out of control. Those at the abbey didn’t know the Sinsar Dubh was once again roaming Dublin, and she had little time to fortify what was left of the fortress against the next attack, whether instigated by those trying to free Cruce or Mac herself. “We have to get to the abbey, Barrons. We can talk on the way.”
He pulled out his cellphone, thumbed up a contact, and held the phone to his ear. “Do you feel the Sinsar Dubh?”
Jada heard a woman’s frantic voice carrying clearly from his phone. She knew that voice. She heard it in nightmares, crying, begging, and finally screaming. She shivered, reached for another protein bar and wolfed it down.
“Barrons, I’ve been trying to call you! I felt it about an hour ago! Here. In Dublin. What’s going on? You said it was locked up. How did it get out?”
“Where is it right now?”
“It headed north, into the country, then I lost it. Where are you? Where’s Mac? I’m coming with you.”
“No you’re not. Find your parents. Stay with them until you hear from me.”
“But M-Mom and D-Dad d-don’t know I’m alive,” Alina stammered.
“Fix that. And if you feel the Sinsar Dubh approaching, take Jack and Rainey to Chester’s and call me. If you can’t get to the club, go to ground wherever you can.”
“What’s going on?” Alina demanded. “I have a right—”
“Do what I said.” Barrons hung up.
Jada listened to the exchange with narrowed eyes, realizing the woman Mac had said was walking around Dublin looking and acting like her sister somehow was on Barrons’s autodial. He seemed to believe it really was Alina and, like Mac, the woman could sense the Sinsar Dubh. But he didn’t trust her entirely. Either that or he didn’t want one more liab
ility to worry about.
“Mac’s headed for the abbey,” Barrons said.
Jada filed thoughts of Alina away for later perusal. They were entangled with far too many emotions to be entertained at the moment. They went into the same box that held so many other things that she would get to…one day.
By the time they got to Chester’s and climbed into a big black armored military Humvee, she was operating with her usual machine-like efficiency despite her many recent shocks and unhealed wounds.
Past was past. Tidying up one’s internal landscape was a luxury of the safe.
Safe was something she’d never been.
MAC
I force myself to stop screaming.
The silence is absolute.
I’m in a vacuum.
No, that’s not quite it. I’m drifting in space, blind, with no radio. Though my initial impression was of being stuffed inside a tiny box and I know somewhere there are walls, I feel as if I’m floating without friction in a vast darkness.
I’m aware of absolutely nothing but my own awareness of absolutely nothing.
It borders on madness.
Hell isn’t other people, as Jean-Paul Sartre claimed; it’s being trapped somewhere dark and silent with only your own thoughts, forever.
Terror wells inside…whatever I now am.
A disembodied consciousness?
Do I still exist? Am I in a box inside my body, or something worse? Am I dead? Is this being dead? Would I know?
Fear threatens to obliterate me. Here, in hell, I want to be obliterated. I want the horror of the hellish awareness of only my own awareness to stop.
I’m screwed.
Barrons may have punched into my head once to save me from the Sinsar Dubh, but back then I still controlled my body and the Book was locked away, unopened. There’s no way he’s getting in here now, past the psychopath that imprisons me. I felt the power of the Sinsar Dubh. It was incomprehensible. Ugly, sick, twisted, hungry, and enormous as the Unseelie King. It scraped me out of every nook and cranny of my body and stole it from me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. In those brief moments of contact I’d felt I, too, was a psychopath; its touch had been so palpably evil, so saturating, that I’d been contaminated by its mere presence. It was bigger than me. More focused, driven by such an enormity of rage and malevolence that it, too, was enormous. I’d felt a mere mouse in its house.