Burned

by Karen Marie Moning

  Me. You could crush them in your sleep, said inner demon purrs.

  I opt, instead, to crush the twinge of insecurity that invited the Book’s commentary, resuming my silent recitation with a sigh.

  Exasperated that I can’t see, I push between them and am rewarded with a quick glimpse of a dozen armed women grouped around a central figure standing in front of Rowena’s ornate desk, but Barrons pushes me back and growls, “Stay there. ”

  His guttural words spark that freaky collision of dual realities again.

  Stay there, he’s growling, back in my room at the Clarin House, I want you that way.

  But you said I could—

  Your turn next.

  Page 79

  This is about me, remember. That’s what you said. I want what I want now.

  I catch my breath and hold it. Something’s trying to kick up from my subconscious through murky waters and it’s having a hard time, weighted at the ankles by stones; a swimmer trapped in a dark cave where it was meant to remain forever.

  Unless … somehow … the boulder blocking the entrance got jostled … nudged aside, freeing fragments of memory like tadpoles desperate to break the placid surface of my mind.

  “She said she’s not receiving visitors,” a woman snaps.

  “Put down that fucking gun or you’ll be eating it,” Barrons orders.

  “Retreat and we’ll let you live,” she counters. “Don’t move another inch. ”

  “Try to stop me. ”

  Try echoes in my mind. In my alternate reality, I hear him saying, Try, Ms. Lane, just try.

  “Move away from her,” Barrons growls. “Show yourself, Jada. ”

  “You move,” the woman counters. “What’s behind you? Show us now!”

  Move, you bastard, I’m snarling at the Clarin House.

  “You will leave, immediately,” a new voice says in a cool monotone.

  Barrons laughs. “I’ll leave when I’m bloody well ready. ”

  When I’m ready echoes, and in my cramped, rented room, Barrons closes his hands on my ribs.

  “Jada, it’s here. They brought it with them!” one of the women cries.

  “You aren’t welcome here. I don’t interfere with your world. Don’t interfere with mine. You’ll regret it,” that same cool monotone says.

  In both realities my ribs suddenly hurt. Between Barrons’s and Ryodan’s backs, I glimpse a beautiful woman, long hair pulled back in a high ponytail that falls to her waist.

  She dwindles as a peculiar tunnel vision overtakes me, then I’m seeing only Barrons’s back.

  Then his face, as he stretches his big, hard body over me.

  Images smash into me, one brick to my head after another, and I grimace, closing my eyes …

  Barrons popping the buttons on my fly.

  He makes me a deal: If I’m not wet, we won’t have sex.

  If I am, we will.

  I’m wet. I’m so damn wet. I’ve never been wet like this before.

  He was right. With Billy James’s older brother, and all the boys before him, when it was over, I wondered what the fuss was about.

  He was right: If it’s perfectly good, it’s not good enough.

  And I knew that night, staring up at him, that touching this man would change my soul, alter me forever, that sex with him would blow my fucking mind.

  My sister was dead.

  My heart was in pieces.

  I was useless and my life was meaningless.

  I wanted my mind blown.

  Then I’m on the floor, and his big, hard, beautiful body is on me and I’m in a rage of passion I didn’t know I was capable of feeling, grabbing his waistband, busting the zipper, feeling him shove into me, throwing back my head and roaring.

  Alive. So damned alive.

  “Oh, my God,” I breathe. “I had sex with you that night. All night. I didn’t even know you. I didn’t even like you. ”

  Barrons mutters, “Ah, fuck. Not now. ”

  “Jada, they set it free!”

  “Are you certain?” the cool monotone says.

  “Yes, wait … no it’s—wait, yes … what the hell?”

  Ryodan thunders, “I want to see Jada. Get out of my way. ”

  Out of my way echoes. At the Clarin House, Barrons is saying, I’ll give you until nine P. M. tomorrow to get the bloody hell out of this country and out of my way. Then he bends over me and begins to speak in a voice that sounds like a thousand voices, muttering ancient words.

  Here, in the abbey, I freeze.

  He didn’t.

  He wouldn’t.

  Some things are sacred. Until you act like they’re not.

  “You used Voice on me. ” My lips feel numb, my tongue thick. “You took my memory away. ”

  “Now is not the time for it, Ms. Lane,” Barrons says tersely.

  “The time for it,” I echo incredulously. “It was never the time for it. ”

  “Yes, Jada, I’m certain,” a woman says urgently. “They set it free!”

  “Brigitte, collect the items and return with them immediately,” the cool monotone orders. “Bring Sorcha and Clare. ”

  “We bloody well did not,” Barrons snaps. “And I said, Ms. Lane, we will discuss this later. ”

  Page 80

  Barrons and Ryodan disappear then reappear in the middle of the group of armed sidhe-seers and guns go flying. Finally my line of vision is unobstructed! From within a blur of motion, I hear thuds of fists landing and savage female grunts. Then I see a dozen women sprawled on the floor, some holding bleeding noses, others squinting through rapidly swelling eyes, one clutching an arm to her chest that’s obviously broken. Their guns are gone, in a broken pile near the far wall.

  Ryodan is standing motionless in the middle of the fallen sidhe-seers, as if he’s carved of stone, staring at the woman that must be Jada. He makes a sound like a soft implosion, a noise I’ve never heard before from any of the Nine, a ragged gasp of pure astonishment and … anguish?

  Unable to fathom what could possibly elicit such a reaction from the cold, controlled man, I repress all I’m feeling—betrayal, shock, horror, bewilderment, and no small amount of fury—and move forward for a better look at the focus of his attention.

  My age or slightly younger, tall, with a killer body that’s long and lean and muscled and curvy in all the right places, it’s the eyes that get me. They’re emerald ice. They lock with mine for a long, frigid moment. Stone-cold eyes, they chill me, and I’m not easily chilled.

  I look down, around me, and realize all the women in the room, including Jada, are staring at me.

  Belatedly, I process the comments that were being made while my world was unraveling.

  Guess the “away team” ain’t so “diluted” after all. So much for my “rare” ability to sense the Book. One more way I’m no longer quite so special.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” I mutter.

  “She has the Sinsar Dubh!” a brunette in green camo cries, pushing herself up. “Get her!”

  “Bloody. Fucking. Hell,” Ryodan says.

  Women lunge up, straight for me.

  Barrons moves in front of me like my personal shield. “Over my dead body. ”

  “It happened before,” Jada says tonelessly. “I’m certain it will again. And again. But that’s how it works with your kind, isn’t it. ”

  “Bloody. Fucking. Hell,” Ryodan says again.

  “I can’t believe you did that to me,” I say numbly.

  “Dani,” Ryodan whispers.

  “For fuck’s sake, now isn’t the time. Either of you. I said we’ll discuss it later, Ms. Lane. And Ryodan, we’ll find her. ” Barrons snarls, “Focus on the moment. ”

  “I am,” I clip stiffly. “Forgive the fuck out of me if this moment got tangled up with the one you stole from me. ”

  “Easy to thieve that of which one was so
eager to be quit,” he barks, harsh and rapid as hostile fire.

  Ryodan says carefully, “We just did. ”

  “Did what?” I snap, not following him at all. Things are happening too fast. My brain is rubber cement, sticky and nonabsorptive.

  I should run. I’m in the abbey. They know what I am. They’re going to lock me up. Imprison me next to Cruce.

  “Find Dani,” Ryodan says.

  “What the fuck are you nattering about?” Barrons practically shouts.

  “Who even says words like ‘natter’?” I know the answer. Men who steal people’s memories.

  “I don’t natter. ”

  “Spell it the fuck out,” Barrons snarls.

  “Jada,” Ryodan says tightly, “is. Dani. ”

  Part II

  I go inside my head and become that other me, the one I don’t tell anybody about.

  The observer.

  She can’t feel hunger in her belly or cramped muscles from being in a cage for days on end.

  She isn’t Dani.

  She can survive anything. Feel nothing.

  See what’s in front of her for exactly and only what it is.

  Her heart doesn’t break a little every time her mom leaves.

  And she holds no price too high for survival.

  I don’t let go of myself and seek her often because once I got stuck there and she took over and the things she did …

  I live in terror that one day I won’t get to be Dani again.

  —From the journals of Danielle O’Malley

  22

  “I have lived behind walls that have made me alone”

  KAT

  In the five days since Ryodan interred me beneath his nightclub, I have neither heard voice nor experienced another’s emotion.

  I should worry. I should care. I should be hammering on the door, demanding to be freed, but in these rooms I have experienced the first peace of my existence.

  Page 81

  The entry room is unfurnished but the rest are not. There are four others: a bedroom with a soft pillow-top mattress so uniformly surfaced I know it was never used prior to my arrival; a bathroom with a large, gentle rain shower; and a kitchen stocked with food and beverages that tell me as surely as condemning words that Ryodan had been planning this for me, perhaps for quite some time.

  The fourth and final room is the largest, walled with mirrors, housing a state-of-the-art gym.

  Kasteo has not spoken a word.

  Nor have I.

  I’ve spent five days and nights simply feeling myself, my unborn child, without the constant drone of interference I’ve endured my entire life.

  Kasteo lies on the floor.

  He gets up and works out.

  Occasionally he showers.

  He doesn’t speak and I haven’t seen him eat. Perhaps he cooks while I’m asleep. I’ve seen no dirty dishes.

  I, on the other hand, am voracious. Eating for two with an appetite I’ve never known before.

  I’ve become a hedonist, sleeping ten hours at a time, taking long indulgent showers behind a locked bathroom door, making myself meals of meat and potatoes and more meat, which I’ve not had in months.

  Nothing, no one, disturbs me here. No emotion, no voice, no seductive dark prince.

  These five days and nights have been transformative.

  I’ve realized, during this brief, unexpected, only vacation I’ve ever had from the world, what my problem is.

  I’ve never been able to fully block the emotions of others because I didn’t know what silence felt like. I found it impossible to strive for a goal I couldn’t fathom, to re-create a thing of which I’d no knowledge, like a blind man trying to paint a picture of sky and clouds and sun.

  I now know a stillness in my center, that it exists and where to find it, and I’m certain I can locate it again amidst the boisterous din of Dublin, the abbey, even the desperate and dangerous shark tank of Chester’s.

  The man who isn’t there brought me to the blessedly silent lair of another man who isn’t there and gave me the greatest gift I’ve ever received: the time and space to take a deep breath and explore my inner terrain, comprehend the strengths I have to work with and the weaknesses that have crippled me.

  I can’t begin to imagine why he did it. It seems a kindness from a man I would never have counted kind.

  He has shown me that goal which always eluded me. That sacred inner place that is mine, and no one else’s, the eye in the storm where I can stand unharmed by the chaos whirling around me with jagged sharp edges and bulk enough to knock me from my feet.

  Rather than locking me away to torment me, he did it to show me a thing I was desperate to find.

  It confounds me. I find myself questioning everything I thought I knew about Ryodan. Running prior conversations through my mind, realizing the man I believed moderately intelligent and highly manipulative of others—to their own detriment and destruction—is in fact highly intelligent and enormously manipulative of others, but I’ve begun to suspect it’s because he’s trying to fix what he perceives as the things they want fixed but don’t know how. He sees the bird’s-eye view and takes the hard, catalytic actions. Unsettling, disturbing to those of us that don’t, makes it easy to call him bastard, heartless.

  But why would he bother?

  There are only two possibilities: either he wants whatever goal he will achieve by altering that person, or, unfathomable as it is, he cares about the world he pretends to scorn, and the people in it.

  Then why run a den of such depravity as Chester’s?

  Unless … where better to sort the wheat from the chaff?

  Even I know it’s impossible in times of war to save everyone. For the love of Mary, it’s impossible in times of peace. Is the nightclub his distillery where he sorts the vintages and tucks into his personal cellar the most complex, interesting wines, the most potent and impressive whiskeys?

  And he considers me of value.

  Easier to believe he wants something of me, although I cannot imagine what.

  I’m eager to test myself, experience emotional commotion. See if I can maintain my newfound balance.

  Yet I’ve developed a grudging respect for the man who brought me here.

  You’ll remain with him until I decide you’ve gotten what you came for, he said.

  So I remain. I came for the strength of concrete without the price of it. If Ryodan is true to his word, I will leave with it.

  I’d stay here a very long time to reach that goal.

  Before I sought him out that night, I’d already admitted to myself I wasn’t good for the abbey. I knew I wasn’t the one to replace her, a mere week after Rowena died. But there was Margery and she was toxic, and the Sinsar Dubh was stirring and my women were in need, so I stayed and battled to the best of my ability, without weapon, without the strength of sometimes-necessary deceit and sleight of hand.

  Page 82

  I was unfit to lead.

  So I don’t hammer the door, I don’t shout for salvation.

  My salvation is currently stretched on his back on the floor, staring up at the coffered ceiling, wearing black camouflage pants, tattooed and hard and silent.

  Ryodan brought me here to give me silence.

  I wonder, clever man that he is, if he brought me here also to somehow give this man words.

  What could make someone stop speaking a thousand years ago? I can barely grasp, much less accept that anyone has lived so long.

  How would it feel, if you cared for such a person, to watch his complete retreat? To see him day in and out, yet never converse again? To know that he could speak to you if he chose to, but won’t? Day in, day out, your brother in arms, in your reach yet completely unreachable.

  Ryodan has ordered this mute, dark man to be my teacher.

  Will he obey?

  I need instruction to ceme
nt my newfound center. I need training, discipline, and strength. I’m not leaving without it.

  I lean back against the wall and study him, as I have for nearly a week now. He’s not catatonically withdrawn. He simply doesn’t interact with anyone around him at all.

  “Kasteo,” I say. “I’ve stopped feeling the pain of the world. Help me learn to control my environment. Teach me to fight. ” To one who stopped living a millennium ago, I say, “Show me how to live. ”

  The man who has stared at little but the ceiling for nearly a week, who has not so much as once acknowledged my presence, slowly turns his head to the side and looks across the floor at me.

  Then stares back at the ceiling.

  23

  “The nights go on waiting for a light that never comes”

  CHRISTIAN

  I’m fourteen, finally old enough to enter the circle of standing stones for the first time. Ban Drochaid—the White Bridge, as these stones are called—was once a bridge through time, for the right Keltar for the right reasons. But my clan abused the gift, and the Fae queen who’d granted it took it away.

  Still, the stones hold ancient power. Only one avenue was closed to us.

  I stand with my da and uncles between the dual bonfires of our great May celebration, and prepare with solemn pride to help them usher in the season of rebirth with ritual and chant.

  Our women, no less strong than our men, gather round, clad in the old ways, with brightly colored skirts, laced blouses, and bare feet, in honor of the coming feast, which will be attended by the entire village that thrives in the valley below our mountain.

  The night sky is black and crystal clear, with thousands of glittering stars scattered like diamonds on a cloak of mink. Diamonds.

  I want a girl with a mind like a diamond …

  “Dani,” I whisper through lips that are cracked from dehydration. I taste blood, it bubbles in my throat, choking me. Pain lances my ribs, my gut, my groin.

  Focus.

  The heather has not yet begun to bloom, and although the grass is still recovering from April’s unexpectedly frosty kiss, yellow May flowers have blossomed and are strewn everywhere, on doors and windows, on the livestock, around the necks and in the hair of our women, scattered around the stones.

  My da and uncles awe me, tease me, push me, teach me. I want to be like them when I am a man: wide-shouldered, with a ready laugh, a spine of steel, and courage beyond compare.

  Was she worth this? Dying over and over? You gave yourself up so she could fight for those sheep. Fuck sheep. You’re not a sheepdog anymore. You’re a rabid wolf.