Burned

by Karen Marie Moning

  When I came here months ago, seeking Ryodan to repay my debt, he said a thing I’ve been unable to stop thinking аbout: Drop your blinders and raise the sewer to eye level; admit you’re swimming in shit. If you don’t acknowledge the turd hurtling down the drain toward you, you can’t dodge it.

  I’ve come to get out of the toilet bowl and become the commode that flushes the shit.

  The fragment of a Faery fire-world I prayed was responsible for the grass that grows tall and green beyond my bedroom window, directly above Cruce’s icy prison, is gone now, yet the meadow is more verdant than before, exploding with poppies, red, fat, bobbing, opium-drenched blossoms that drug my senses on warm evenings when the projection of a great, black-winged prince circles my bed.

  I have warded him out of my tangle of linens with blood-magic, an art I’d sworn never to practice, a line I wouldn’t cross.

  But it is no longer only myself I must protect.

  Elaborate golden trellises have pushed up from the earth all over the abbey’s grounds, draped with black roses that reek of exotic spices and far-off lands.

  Dozens of standing stones have appeared in the gardens, etched with symbols I can’t read. A pair of megaliths awaits a cover stone to become a dolmen. It makes me shiver when I pass.

  Pearl benches frame a vast, brilliant, many-tiered fountain in which water sparkles as turquoise as a Caribbean sea.

  Animals I’ve never seen before peek at me from trees fringed with lacy vines that grow strange beyond our walls, shedding brown bark for ivory threaded with silver, sprouting low-hanging canopies of sapphire leaves.

  The floors in my section of the abbey are changing from stone to polished gold.

  At night I hear male laughter echoing down our halls and corridors. The lights within our walls glow soft gold day and night, without electricity to source them. Our fires blaze, without wood to feed them. Our generators run only a small number of lamps. We removed the bulbs. Still they glow. Something unholy powers the rest.

  Cruce is changing our home, taking it over, and I know it’s only a matter of time before the jailer is evicted by the jailed, Paradise lost.

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  We talk of it amongst ourselves but so far have said nothing to outsiders. This is our home, for many of us the only good one we’ve known. If we do not find a way to stop the transformation, we will be forced to leave.

  Soon.

  We are not yet ready to admit defeat.

  If we are driven forth, who will watch the abbey? Will we sit idly beyond its walls, praying the prisoner never breaks free?

  I cradle my belly with one hand protectively. I’ve not yet begun to show. I devote most of my energy to shielding it. I must secure our future.

  When I reach the bottom of the glass stairs in the glass house that the concrete demon Ryodan calls home, he is waiting for me.

  But of course.

  “Why did you lie about Sean?” I ask him.

  “I didn’t lie. You sewed my words into a cloth of your choosing. If you’ll recall, I urged you to talk to him that night. Had you heeded my advice, you would have known, soul mates and all, confiding everything. ”

  “Don’t mock me. ”

  “Don’t make it so easy. ”

  “You said you were collecting my debt from him. ”

  “I said I was willing to accept the replacement of a missing server as full payment, and let you off the hook. ”

  “And put me on another. ”

  “You chose to become the worm. A little conversation goes a long way, Katarina. You’ve still not told Sean that Cruce fucks you in your dreams. ”

  I say nothing and he laughs.

  “Yet here you are. Seeking me again. Come for more answers to which you won’t listen. I only waste my breath once. Leave. ” I remain where I am.

  He sweeps me with that cool silver gaze and arches a brow. “Be very certain you know what you’re doing, Katarina,” he warns softly. “If you ask something of me, I will not stop until I feel the request has been satisfied. As I deem fit. ”

  I fix on two words he uttered. “You do not feel. ”

  “It’s you, my ever-serene cat, that fails to feel, denying at your own peril the hunger of your heart. ”

  “Nor do you know anything of the heart, mine or any others. ”

  “State your cause. I have pressing matters to attend. ”

  I stare up into the face of the man that does not exist, that according to my empathic senses is not even standing there, and choose my words with care. I can proceed with nothing less than one hundred percent commitment to my course, and am fully aware this path will make or break me. I wish I could predict which one it will be, but I’m untested, unproven.

  I resist the urge to cradle my abdomen. I must not telegraph in front of this man. I must become something else. He has a bold hand and a sharp chisel. The clay has chosen the sculptor. This male, whatever he is, possesses power beyond my humble skills. He and his men know what I do not: how to protect what is theirs. They are ruthless and hard. And successful.

  If I think to care for my charges, for my child, I must learn to be similarly successful.

  “I’ve come to acknowledge the turd. ”

  He smiles. “It’s about time, Katarina. ”

  I suffered my father’s disappointment mere days after I was born, although at the time I didn’t know it for what it was, only that I was rejected and alone. As the years passed, his anger and disgust at the useless daughter he couldn’t barter away to further cement his position grew so oppressive, I learned to avoid him whenever possible. My mother’s greed and impatience, shallowness and fear, were my childhood companions.

  Then there was Sean, with whom I grew, who loved me, uncomplicated from the first, even as I wept. Still, it’s often difficult to bear the nuances of his every emotion. Filet mignon or rib eye, we’re all imperfect cuts, marbled by fears and insecurities, even the best of men.

  As we move deeper into Chester’s, the barrage of chaotic emotions begins to subside, affording me a rare and blessed respite: the volume of the world’s endless sensations has been reduced from a ten to a four. We navigate one glass corridor after the next, and I wonder that he leads me so deep into his club where others are not permitted. After a time, he glides his palm over a smooth glass wall and an elevator appears.

  “Where are you taking me?” I ask as the elevator door closes, sealing me in a much too small compartment with a much too large man. I feel like Dante, descending into the inferno, but I have no Roman poet as my guide.

  “From this moment on, any questions are mine. Assuming you wish to be concrete, without the price. ”

  I stare up at him. How can he possibly know that? “You can read minds. ”

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  “Human thoughts are loud. We take what’s offered. Humans offer too much. Of everything. ”

  “What are you going to do? Teach me to fight?” I glance down at my slender arms. Though strong from gardening, milking, and working our land, I doubt I possess the ability to hurt another human being. I would feel their pain. I don’t invite that.

  “Not me. ”

  He escorts me from the elevator into the most blissfully silent corridor I’ve ever walked. I turn in a slow circle, listening but hearing nothing. This level must be powerfully soundproofed. There’s no faint beat of music, not even white noise, only the perfect absence of sound. “Who, then?”

  He guides me down the hall with a hand at the small of my back, opens another door, and we step into a dimly lit, long room with faintly illuminated rectangles that lead to additional rooms beyond.

  There are no furnishings here. No table, sofa, rug, or chair. The floors are polished ebony. The walls are ivory. A diffuse glow emanates from the perimeter of high, coffered ceilings with stamped leather insets above Romanesque cove moldings. There are large corbels on two of the walls, as if once treasures w
ere displayed. The room is refined.

  The occupant is not.

  A man is stretched on the floor, staring up, arms crossed behind his head. Like the rest of Ryodan’s men, he is tall, wide, powerfully muscled, scarred, and not there. He wears black camouflage pants low at his hips, feet bare. His arms are tattooed, his head nearly shaved, his face shadowed dark with stubble. He looks like a rogue military commander from a unit the world never hears about.

  “Kasteo will be your instructor. ”

  I stare at him in disbelief. Jo has told me tales of the Nine, though they’ve been of little use. Kasteo is the one that does not speak. According to Jo, something transpired a long time ago and he hasn’t uttered a word since.

  “Is this your idea of a joke? He doesn’t talk!”

  “You don’t listen. Match made in heaven. ” Ryodan stalks over to Kasteo and looks down at him. “Kasteo will be your instructor,” he says again, but this time it’s an order and a warning to the man on the floor. “The woman feels the pain of the world. You’ll teach her to stop feeling it. Then you will help her learn to control her environment. Finally, you will teach her to fight. ”

  Kasteo, of course, says nothing. I’m not certain he even heard. He appears in a trance, elsewhere.

  Ryodan walks to the door. “You’ll remain with him until I decide you’ve gotten what you came for. ” The door closes behind him, and I stand there a moment, staring blankly at it, then at Kasteo.

  I rush to the door and place my palm to the wall where Ryodan pressed it, but nothing happens.

  I hammer on the door. “Ryodan! I must return to the abbey! Ryodan, let me out!”

  The only response is the most enormous silence I’ve ever heard.

  “This is not what I meant!”

  I hammer until my fists are bruised.

  “Ryodan, you can’t do this! My charges need me! There are things you don’t know! I came here to tell you!”

  I feel as if I’m in the bowels of the earth, forgotten.

  I shout until my throat burns.

  The man on the floor never stirs.

  I’m unable to count the passage of time in this silent, empty place.

  After a length of it, I sink to the floor and lean back against the wall, one hand resting lightly on my belly.

  Surely he’ll feed me.

  Surely there is a bathroom here somewhere.

  Surely he’ll come back so I can convey to him the urgent state of our abbey.

  I sit and stare like the unmoving, unblinking man on the floor. After a time, I become aware of the simplicity of the moment. Not only is there no sound on this level, there seems to be a dearth of emotion.

  Cautiously, I lower the shields I’ve held since I was five years old, barriers that have shut out the world, and walled me in.

  Nothing.

  Again, I lower, lower. When I continue to encounter nothing, I take a deep breath, brace myself, and drop them flat.

  I gasp.

  Still—nothing!

  I feel no anger or greed, no lust or fear or pain or need. That’s always the worst for me: the many crushing, painful needs that can never be satisfied. Here, deep below Chester’s, there is absolutely no emotion charging the air, compressing me, forcing me into a defensive posture.

  It’s sublime. My heart can breathe.

  For the first time in my life, I feel only me.

  I didn’t even know what I felt like.

  For the first time in my life, I can hear myself think.

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  15

  “I’m just a crack in this castle of glass”

  MAC

  I hear music in my dreams. I heard such exquisite melodies during my teens that one day I decided I was fated to be a brilliant composer, put songs to paper, and share them with the world. I joined the band that very day. I even signed up for extra classes and asked Mom and Dad to hire a tutor to help me learn to read and write sheet music. I plunged into the world of an aspiring musician with enormous enthusiasm, certain of my predestined success.

  In less than a month my tutor stalked out of our house and refused to come back, and the high school band director asked me to please do the entire band a favor: quit.

  I have no musical talent.

  My clarinet sounded like an apoplectic yak. For the brief days I blew the trumpet, a hostile-sounding pig snorted along in jerky fits and starts with the rest of the irritated band. I never knew when a sound was actually going to come out of the horn and it always startled me when it did. My violin unleashed a trio of enraged, tone-deaf banshees, and I couldn’t blow the flute well enough to make any more sound than with my lower lip on a soda bottle. Something about the pucker eluded me. The drums turned my arms into a pretzel-prison from which there was no escape. I would have given the tambourine a try—I really think I might have excelled at the hip-bump—but sadly the instrument wasn’t offered at my school. I think that’s why I love my iPod so much. I have music in my soul and can’t get it out.

  This morning, like the two before it, the melody of my subconscious has been different. Three mornings in a row I’ve awakened with the strains of a symphony fading from my mind that is beyond horrific. Last night was the worst yet, as if I’m becoming attuned to it, hearing it louder, feeling it more intensely.

  My psyche is bruised, my spine hot, and my stomach cramped. The new song is unlike any of the others I’ve heard in my dreams. It doesn’t leave me glowing, feeling uplifted and free, nor do I see dreamy, fantastic images while it plays.

  I can use none of my usual vocabulary to describe it. I lie in bed with my head under the covers, trying to figure out what was so disturbing about the melody that I woke with pillows clenched to my ears, arms aching from the strain of having held them there half the night.

  I search for words: scary? No. Worse.

  Depressing? No. Worse.

  Capable of making me insane if I had to listen to it too long?

  Worse.

  Is there worse than insane?

  I roll over and poke my head from beneath the mound of pillows and blankets. I’m alone in bed, which I often am, at least while I’m sleeping, since Barrons doesn’t require it.

  However, I am not alone in the room.

  Without the wards on the bookstore to keep them at bay—Barrons said it would take weeks to collect more of the necessary ingredients—my grim stalkers huddle close, pressed to three sides of the bed, on the fourth roosting atop the headboard, bony shoulders hunched upward, swallowing their heads and necks. Two crouch on the bed right next to me. My pajamas have cobwebs on them. I’ve been sleeping in pj’s, not about to risk being unconscious, nude around any Unseelie.

  Needless to say, sex hasn’t been happening here. Although when Barrons is touching me, or even just next to me, I enjoy the same wide berth they grant him, I don’t get off on being an exhibitionist, at least not to Unseelie.

  Not only am I bitchy, bored, and too powerful for my own good, I don’t get to vent on Barrons’s big, hard body, and I’m massively overdue for it. I’m beginning to think it’s all some part of the universe’s conspiracy to see just what it takes to make MacKayla Lane snap.

  Like a wake of vultures, every last one of them is facing me, peering down.

  Well, in as much as they might face me, peering down, considering I’ve never seen beneath those voluminous hoods and can’t even say whether they have faces or eyes. I used to think they were clothed. They’re not. The dusty, cobwebbed, cowled cloaks they wear have the texture of black chicken skin and are part of them.

  Ryodan said they were the caste that once attended the king in his private chambers. Do they stalk me—not because the Book within me deliberately summoned them—but because, like K’Vruck, they sense me as part of the king they once served? If so, when the king takes the Book out of me, they should vanish, too.

  At the moment they’re mu
te. Not a chitter, not a rustle.

  I find their silence nearly as disturbing as the dark symphony of my dreams. Had it gotten so loud they could hear it in my head? Did it button the lips of even my loquacious tormentors?

  I wonder if, like the vultures they resemble, they, too, have highly corrosive stomach acid that makes them capable of digesting putrid carcasses infected with bacteria and parasites dangerous to their species.

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  At least they don’t vomit like vultures when threatened or urinate straight down their legs to cool themselves and kill the bacteria they pick up wading through rotting corpses.

  Good the fuck morning to me.

  It’s a broody one, as usual.

  “Back up, you bastards,” I mutter, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed.

  They don’t. They brush against my pajama bottoms, leaving it covered with cobwebs and yellow dust.

  I can’t get back to BB&B fast enough. At least there I slept in peace, got to have sex, and woke in a room free of vermin.

  I perch on the edge of the mattress, staring up at my flock. The Sinsar Dubh said they were my “priests” and that I could command them. I know better than to trust the Sinsar Dubh and I worry that if I issue even one tiny command such as, “Get the hell away from me and that’s an order,” the Book will somehow own a piece of my soul.

  Or maybe if you start ordering this caste around, it antagonizes them so much they eat you. Or perhaps they’ll start vomiting and pissing, and then I’ll be walking around all the time in upchuck and urine, stinking of three different things instead of a single bad smell.

  One thing I do know is things can always get worse, most often at the precise moment you’ve decided they can’t.

  And so I remain, as Barrons would pithily say, idiotically passive.

  I sigh and begin to dress, thinking I might kill for a Starbucks, heavy on the espresso.

  I lose sense of time in Chester’s. There are no windows, and if you stay there a while it messes with your circadian rhythm. I think I’ve been here three nights now, listening for the music of an Unseelie Princess, and trying to figure out how to get past Ryodan’s wards and explore the many secrets of Chester’s.

  Time and again I’ve turned around and walked away rather than call on something inside me to push past a particularly sticky spot, allowing the Book no opportunity to goad me.