We’d set off bombs and investigated mysteries. He’d invented things for me, given me a bracelet I’d lost Silverside, and I’d shown him my zany, expeditious velocity world. We’d watched cartoons, played at being Pinky and the Brain, other times I’d been Tasmanian devil with him or the Roadrunner, whizzing us around our town, twisting and carving and embedding our initials into everything.
We’d grown up and tackled even more important mysteries, saving the world together, falling in love.
I’d gotten his not-so-subtle message: we have more than one red thread.
And those threads aren’t gender or even species specific, at least not in my case. Some of them are romantic, some of them aren’t.
Mac’s one of my threads, our lives inextricably intertwined. I think Mac and Christian also have a red thread, their interactions not always easy but definitely transformative.
Shazam is one of my threads, too. I think Kat may be as well. We have things to learn from each other; she with her enormous empathy and me with my formidable walls.
Rowena was a great big nasty thread but not a red one. I think people can invade your life and tangle themselves around you, a black rope, and if you create too much bad Karma together, maybe they become one of your red threads in a next life, and ever after, until you get whatever you’re supposed to learn from your involvement with them—these people who force their way in and wreck your world. Perhaps it’s a lesson in some kind of cosmic forgiveness.
I haven’t learned it yet. I don’t forgive her. She was one crazy bitch and I still don’t know everything she did to me.
Ryodan is one of my red threads, too. He might be a massive red rope, ten times as thick as a normal thread. I’m afraid Dancer saw that.
Love is funny. Even though you don’t have that person anymore, you still have the feeling. You didn’t lose your love. You lost the tangible, tactile, sense-sational ability to experience the person or animal you lost.
Grief is all about not being able to touch anymore. Not being able to use your senses to experience them on a physical level. They’ve moved beyond an impenetrable veil, beyond your hands and mouth and eyes.
And…of course…that led me to another thought I tried to box and failed.
I was losing my ability to touch everything.
I recognize rabbit holes when I see them. That was a long, bottomless one.
I pushed myself up briskly, refusing to tumble over that edge. It was what it was. Period. Patterns, meaning, not my forte. Action, swift and sure, I get that.
I glanced at my phone for the time, grabbed my sword, shoved it over my shoulder into the sheath, and turned to the bedroom to freshen up and head for Chester’s. If I didn’t hustle he’d be hammering on my door.
The one who’d been willing to make Dancer one of the Nine for me. I had a brief flash of the two of them sitting together, talking about me, Ryodan offering to save Dancer, Dancer knowing I wanted them both. Holy hell. Complicated relationships. My life is full of them.
As I entered my dark bedroom and moved for the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face, I felt it.
There was a living presence in my room. Lurking, seething, oozing darkly in the corner behind me.
Not Fae.
Enormous malevolence, terrifying.
I pivoted sharply. It hulked in the corner to the right of my bed, filling it up, cramming it with darkness heaped upon darkness.
No, it crouched, making itself much smaller than it actually was, voracious, and suffocatingly evil.
My sword was in my right hand instantly, my left bare, upraised.
“Show yourself,” I snarled.
It glided forward from the dense inky shadow it had woven around itself and, as its human-seeming form appeared bit by bit, head last, I realized it was removing a mask from its face.
I have a theory about people I suspect is universal: when someone conceals something from you, it makes you want to see it. The moment the mask cleared that side of its face, I stared, and was instantly ensnared by its terrible gaze.
There are rules in this world that you only learn by violating them. Some things you can never talk to, like the Fear Dorcha, who can steal a piece of your body if you’re that kind of fool. The bastard took my mouth once, left me unable to tell the world the many brilliant things I had to say. Mac saved me from him.
And now, in addition to Unseelie princes, I learned there are other things you can never lock gazes with.
The moment my eyes met the bottomless, wet, suffocating, mist-filled gaze of the single enormous eye this creature had been concealing behind its mask, I was rooted to the ground, unable to move. No possibility of kicking up into the slipstream. That evil, consuming eye speared a piece of me and locked onto it with savage barbs that wouldn’t let go.
I felt it enter my mind then, not like Ryodan, with a subtle dip, but a ruthless javelin with a shiny fishhook on the end that had multiple prongs, as it ripped into the very meat of me, yanking, pulling, wrenching something from my body.
And I knew in that moment, bloody hell I knew for a fact, that I had a soul because that’s what it was taking from me.
The very essence of Dani O’Malley was caught on its lethal barb. The building blocks of all that I am, my strength and power, my truths and lies, my heart and brain and fabric and energy. My subconscious, my conscious, my id and ego, my entire personality was being extracted on the hooked end of its javelin. I was losing everything that was me. It was scraping me like a mussel from a shell, to devour me, absorb my strengths and abilities, and once it had me, I would never exist again. It was death so final it was beyond my comprehension. This thing, whatever it was, trafficked in obliteration of the human soul.
End of all adventures permanently. End of all red threads.
There is no greater abomination in my universe. I don’t fear death. I resent the fuck out of it. I don’t like commercial breaks in my programming. But I don’t fear it because I know I’m a permanent, indelible, massive, fat-tipped Sharpie, I can’t be scrubbed out of the Cosmos.
But this thing defied all the rules. It could erase me forever.
As it continued to rip me from my body, dragging me into its wet, suffocating mist, swallowing me whole, I caught a glimpse of the horror of it, the horror of what it contained.
Tens of thousands of souls like mine, becoming more powerful with each it stole. Tens of thousands—maybe a hundred thousand souls—screaming with panic and madness, existing in a formless half-life, as fuel for something that was erasing every shred of their individuality, molding them into a formless lump of its own will, blotting them out of existence bit by torturous bit and they were aware of being destroyed.
I caught a vision then, within its dark mind, of bodies shambling like zombies, controlled by it. It despised them, barely kept them alive, made them fight like dogs for scraps of food. Tormented them endlessly, laughing as they mindlessly did its bidding. It not only grew ever more powerful with each soul but was amassing…
An army.
Of humans.
Slaves. Countless human souls destroyed.
This thing had been taking my adults! This was the “him” on the other side of those narrow black mirrors, reeking of wood smoke and blood. But more, so much more. All over Western Europe it had been culling humans, growing in power, pursuing its dark agenda, which was…oh, holy hell—the obliteration of the entire human race!
It wanted us dead. Gone. Forever eradicated, never to return. It hated us beyond reason. It planned to turn its army of humans against us, then against the Fae, and with my sword it had a damned good chance at wiping both races out. Even more horrifying, it believed once it acquired a certain number of souls, it would be so powerful its demonic eye would no longer be necessary. It would only have to stroll through a city and inhale every human soul in it, its
deadly reach expanding wider with each new acquisition.
I was right about you, it purred. You are worth a hundred of them.
I scowled. Surely more than that.
Its mocking laughter echoed inside my soul. It found me arrogant. It hungered to eat me, become me, assimilate me, steal everything I’d worked so hard to become.
With enormous effort, I made a box, and deposited myself within it. I ended up with less than half of me inside, it had the other half.
Battle is futile. I existed long before your puny race came along and will exist long after you are gone.
It yanked savagely.
I stretched long and painfully thin, dug mental feet beneath the rim of my box. I needed a name, damn it. I wasn’t leaving without one and I would be leaving.
Who are you?
God, Death. Soulstealer.
But I caught a name beneath it, deep beneath. It was proud, far more arrogant than me. It wanted its name said, over and over, it commanded its soulless army to repeat an endless chant, worshipping it. That was the indecipherable chant I’d heard through those dark mirrors.
Balor.
It was a place to start. I instantly embraced the Hunter’s darkness within, encouraged it to explode inside me, slam into my brain, back down to my heart, then raised both hands and flung them at it.
How are you moving? Balor screamed.
I released bolt after bolt of pale blue—
Holy hell, where was I?
Rocketing through a wormhole, achieving superluminal velocity, faster than I’d ever managed in my slipstream, exploding into open space, drawing to a sudden complete halt in the middle of a circle of Hunters.
She comes, they gonged. It’s time.
I hovered there, feeling as if I stood in a doorway, one land behind me, one land ahead; both fascinating, both real, and all I had to do was lift my foot and take a step either way.
And for a split second I hungered to go forward not back, to feel great, black Hunter wings churning ice as I soared, exploring the mysteries of the universe, no door barred to me, to be so bloody powerful and untamed and wild and free, the biggest bad in the universe, owning the skies, tasting of stardust and eternity, and it felt oddly as if I belonged there, as if my destiny was writ in these very stars—
But.
My people.
NO, IT’S NOT TIME, I roared, resisting with every ounce of my will. MY WORLD NEEDS ME!
Then I was rocketing back through that wormhole at a dizzying speed and I was in the room with Balor, and my beautiful pale blue lightning was exploding, not only from my hands but my body, crackling out in powerful bursts, jolting the god, again and again, and Balor was roaring inside my head, screaming with pain, then he was buckling in the corner, doubling over, clutching his leg, and he whipped his head back and roared at me, as if insulted beyond enduring, You wounded my fucking leg!
I gathered myself to hurl a bolt straight into his face.
Balor dropped his mask over his eye and exploded into a cloud of misty, damp black dust that smelled of coffin linings and the sterile chemicals of autopsy rooms and morgues, so cloying and suffocating that I couldn’t breathe.
Abruptly, he was gone.
I tried to whirl and scan the room, in case he’d circled back for another attack, but I had no sense of space, couldn’t comprehend myself in relationship to it.
My strength was decimated, both from the tug of war over my soul and the staggering high voltage still sparking beneath my skin.
I drew a ragged breath then another, trying desperately to center myself.
I raised a foot to take a step but when I brought it down, it didn’t feel solid. I stumbled and went crashing to the floor, cracking my head on the corner of the bed frame.
Everything went black.
Rowena was in my life long before I met her at eight.
After the rejection of Seamus, a man my mother deeply loved, a man who might have been our savior, she fell apart. Her heart had taken too many blows.
While my mother was defeated by grief, and out of work thanks to Seamus’s spineless, vindictive way of erasing her from his life, Rowena dispatched the man who would become her pimp. Feigning love, the bastard began his endless manipulations, treating her at first better then finally worse than anyone ever had. By then pain and despair had become Emma O’Malley’s normal. She expected to be abused by life.
Rowena sent the next boyfriend, too, an aficionado of drugs, to introduce her to the only escape she would ever know, besides death.
Her sadistic plan: to subject me to even more pain and suffering, to burn my world down around me as I watched, helpless, to char me beyond repair.
To see what rose from the ashes.
To step in as my savior and rescue me from my cage, hoping for a broken, malleable weapon. One that would despise herself for the darkness within, one so deeply fractured she would grovel for crumbs of kindness, despite the many superpowers that made her infinitely more powerful than Rowena herself.
Her plan worked.
I broke.
But I scarred stronger.
When she found me, wandering Dublin at eight, and realized things hadn’t unfolded according to her careful plan, she used black arts to tamper with my mind, burying the real one beneath a false memory of her discovering me, rescuing me from my cage as I lay waiting to die. Like any good liar, she salted her lie with grains of truth; let me continue to believe I killed my mother by strangling her through the bars. She wanted me tormented by the blade of matricide.
Silverside, I meticulously ferreted out her spells and compulsions. I didn’t get rid of my demons, I don’t think that’s possible for me. But I know them by name now. And they obey me, not the other way around.
After I moved into the abbey, even before I knew the extent of Rowena’s involvement in our lives, I had a dream that I killed her.
Later, when I discovered all she’d done to us, I had that dream again.
I’d hungered to kill her.
I told myself the only reason I didn’t was because the other sidhe-seers would have ostracized me, and I’d wanted desperately to belong. I wouldn’t have felt an ounce of regret; rabid animals need to be put down. My anger would definitely have ebbed.
But there was a deeper reason that gave me pause.
Both times, as she lay dying in my dreams, I’d seen a flash of pure, evil triumph glittering in that sadistic blue gaze.
Glee. Gloating. Jubilation.
Her eyes had said: You are an animal, you are a monster, you are damaged beyond repair. I did that to you and I may be dying but I took you down with me. I may go to Hell but you’ll live in it every day for the rest of your life. I shattered you and you will never be anything but a creature of impulsive reactions, a killer of innocents. You are as ugly and corrupt as me.
I’m glad Mac killed her.
I never wanted to give her the opportunity to look at me that way or feel she had a single reason to gloat.
Because I know a priceless truth: when someone has done everything in their power to mangle your wings beyond recognition, to slice them to shreds so that they can never be used, there is only one way to win.
Fly.
RISING
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world
The master calls a butterfly.
—RICHARD BACH
Live without your sunlight, love without your heartbeat
I WOKE IN THAT RARE, smooth, focused mood that told me I was either under attack or Ryodan had spelled me into a healing slumber again. Given my fragmented memories, it was the latter.
I sat up, glancing around in the dim light. The room was huge, with high transomed ceilings of ornate, dark tiles, the walls wainscoted black. To my right was an enormous fire in a hearth that
filled half the wall, a black leather sofa and chairs, a dark coffee table, above which hung a single shimmering cut-crystal chandelier, reflecting hundreds of tiny flames.
I was alone, in a high-backed, black-velvet bed, tangled in black silk sheets.
I could smell him on the sheets. Picture him too easily here, naked, powerful, savage yet controlled, those cool silvery eyes glittering hot, bloodred with beast. I knew how he fucked, like a man on fire. Uninhibited, raw, one hundred percent focused. I’d watched him when I was far too young to have seen it, yet old enough to have shivered with awareness. Clutching a fistful of silk to my nose, I inhaled. It was a violent turn-on, slamming lust painfully awake and alive. I’d never once gotten to have the kind of sex I wanted to have, the way I lived my life, at a headlong, all-out run, wild, unrestrained.
Torture.
I thrust the sheet away and began sorting through disjointed memories.
Ryodan finding me on the floor at Sanctuary, rolling me in a blanket, tossing me over his shoulder, carrying me. A brief flash of Chester’s nightclub, then darkness.
Ryodan demanding I wake, drink a protein shake, wake, drink more. Fighting with him, wanting only to sleep. A gloved hand behind my head. Liquid poured down my throat, being threatened with a feeding tube again.
No matter how far off the deep end I went, he always brought me back.
Balor. The memory slammed into my mind laced with pure adrenaline and I tensed.
Holy soul-sucking fiends, I needed to talk to Ryodan, to the Shedon! We had to find Balor but more importantly we had to figure out how to kill him, since even my staggering power had proven ineffectual against the god. My first blast alone would have blown any Fae to bits. Yet all I’d managed to do to the deadly, rapacious Balor was wound his leg.
Exhaling gustily, I scraped my long tangled hair from my face. And blinked, staring down at my hands. Both were coal black. In one of my fists was a tangle of raven curls. In the other was a tangle of red. I shoved up one sleeve, then the next. Thorns on both arms.