Burned

by Karen Marie Moning

  Was that a flicker in those icy emerald eyes? I narrow my eyes, staring back, searching for some hint of Dani O’Malley. It isn’t there.

  “She,” Barrons growls, “is not remaining anywhere but with me. ”

  “Maybe I want to stay here with them,” I say, not meaning a word of it. “At least the sidhe-seers only tried to kill me. Not steal pieces of my mind. ”

  “I didn’t steal anything. I merely kicked it beneath a rock until you could deal with it. It’s not my bloody fault it took you so long. Had I wished to excise it completely I could have. ”

  “It’s not your right to excise anything. Temporarily or permanently. ”

  “Take her below,” Jada orders the women.

  “Don’t push me,” I warn.

  “You’ll go willingly or you’ll be dragged. I don’t understand how you have become another Sinsar Dubh nor do I care. I’ve seen stranger things. ”

  I shoot a glance at Ryodan and am surprised to see he appears completely unfazed to learn that I am the Sinsar Dubh walking, or rather, about to be running.

  “It’s unnecessary to understand how an animal became rabid to put it down,” Jada continues. “You’ll be dealt with accordingly. ”

  “Good luck with that,” I say coolly.

  My inner copy is perversely silent. I know why. It’s waiting to see what I’m willing to do. That’s a big fat nothing. It’s going to have to protect itself, offer me something I can use free of price.

  Nice bluff, MacKayla, it purrs. Try again. You will never let them lock you up and you know it.

  You will never let them lock us up, I retort silently. I will not kill these people. Give me crimson runes. I’ll only use them on the others, not you. I swear.

  You will kill everyone and destroy everything around you in order to survive. It’s the way you’re wired. I know. I’m the wiring.

  Page 87

  I recite feverishly:

  And the Raven never flitting still is sitting, still is sitting on the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door …

  “Look around you. You can’t even control one Book. How do you think to control two,” Ryodan says.

  Jada/possibly Dani says coolly, “In fishing for information, one might advocate the use of interrogatories. ”

  Ryodan laughs. “Ah, Dani, there you are. You can run. But you can’t hide. ”

  “If by that you mean this Dani person to whom you so erroneously and tediously refer also remarked upon your deliberate omission of proper punctuation as a psychological tactic intended to subtly coerce, the logical conclusion is merely that multiple women find your methods transparent,” she delivers in a cool rush.

  If Jada wasn’t currently threatening me, I’d like her for that one. I should run but I’m stuck on this train wreck channel, trying to decide if Jada could possibly be Dani, trying to silence my inner demon o’er whom the lamplight isn’t streaming so well. It’s goading me, scaring me, telling me they’re going to imprison me and no one will care. No one will save me.

  Barrons won’t let that happen.

  Barrons took your memory, the Sinsar Dubh reminds. He’s mercenary to the big, badass core. You are not the exception to his self-serving rules. There are no exceptions.

  “You signed a contract I keep in my office,” Ryodan says to Jada. “Drop by, I’ll show it to you. ”

  “I signed nothing. But if I had, a coerced oath endures only as long as the coercer holds greater power. There’s no power greater than mine in this room. ”

  Ryodan says softly, “Holy strawberries, Dani, we’re in a jam. ”

  I look at him like he’s sprouted two heads. Holy strawberries? In a jam? Even Barrons looks stumped.

  He continues, “But don’t worry. Holy priceless collection of Etruscan snoods—you really butchered that one, by the way—I’ve got it in the bag. How about this one: holy borrowing bibliophile, let’s book. ”

  Jada’s eyes narrow almost imperceptibly.

  “Ah, but I couldn’t possibly have heard that one, could I. Unless I was there when you didn’t know it. As I’ve always been there. Dani. I know what’s wrong. And we’re going to fix it. ”

  “My name is Jada and there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m superior in every way. ”

  Now she sounds like Dani.

  “I tasted your blood. I know your fucking soul. I felt you in Chester’s and I felt you tonight. ”

  “Like you, I have no soul. Like you, there are ledgers to be balanced. You’re in the red. Unlike you, I don’t sit at a desk and endlessly shove papers around. ”

  “You talk as if you know me. ”

  “So I’ve heard. If you tasted someone’s blood against their will, it is likely that person will kill you for it. ”

  “Bring it on. Dani. ”

  “Jada. ”

  “You think this keeps you safe. You think you don’t feel. ”

  “There are ledgers. Those I kill. Those I reward. ”

  “There are legends. You used to be one. ”

  She says coolly, “I am legend. ”

  “Dani’s a legend,” Ryodan says. “Not you. ”

  “This Dani appears to matter to you. ”

  “Always. ”

  “Perhaps you had a funny way of showing it. ”

  “How would you know. ”

  “I’ve heard. ”

  “You’ve heard, my ass. I know you. I saw you when Dani was ten. Jada. You looked right back at me. We fought that night. I won her back from you and I will again. I’ve seen you other times as well. You may wear a woman’s body now but it belongs to Dani. You have no right to be here. ”

  I gape at Ryodan. Is he saying what I think he’s saying? Not only did Dani leave and come back older, but she came back someone else? There’s a word for it … I rummage for what remains scattered around my brain from the entry-level psychology course I took … aha! Dissociative disorder. Is he saying she’s fragmented? And he knew this? No way. I would have seen it. Wouldn’t I?

  Jada trains her emerald gaze on me. “She is who doesn’t belong here. Faulty logic imprisons one Sinsar Dubh while the other is permitted to roam Dublin. It is what it is regardless of the vessel. ”

  “Oh, you should so talk,” I snap. “Dani. ”

  “I. Am. Jada. ”

  “Whoever the fuck you are,” Barrons growls, “you’re not touching Mac. ”

  Page 88

  “Well, you’re not touching me either,” I growl up at him.

  “Deal with it, Ms. Lane. ”

  “Deal with it?” I say incredulously. “Ms. Lane, my bloody ass. You called me Mac that very night, that first night we met and screwed our brains out, and what do I get ever since? I’ll tell you what I—”

  “During. You changed. You became the woman after. A stiff blindered horse that spooked on new terrain. I expected better—”

  “Oh, and because your expectations weren’t met—”

  “They were bloody well exceeded, which is why the after—”

  “You think you have the right to just strip the entire experience from one party to the—”

  “—was such a grand disappointment, and if—”

  “—event as if they—”

  “It wasn’t an ‘event. ’ It was a motherfucking revelation. ”

  “—don’t even have the right to remember whatever the hell mistake they—”

  “Which is precisely why I did it. You thought it was a mistake, then you—”

  “—chose to make, just like they might choose to keep the memory, because after all, they were there and it was theirs and possession is nine-tenths of—”

  “—started getting all tight-lipped and pissy and I knew if—”

  “—law. ”

  “I am the law. ”

  “Apparently. Heil. ” I click my heels together and salute.

  “Can’t you two find a better fucking
moment for this,” Ryodan says tightly.

  “Really,” Green Camo agrees.

  “Stay the hell out of my business,” I snap at both of them.

  “Don’t decorate the goddamn room with it,” Ryodan fires back.

  “As if you’re not doing some decorating of your own. You’re just pissed that my argument with Barrons derailed your argument with Dani. ”

  “Mac can decorate anything she bloody well pleases. With anything she pleases,” Barrons says tightly. “Her business, your blood, half your fucking face, who gives a fuck. ”

  “Nice defense, Jericho. Not. He can’t push me around, but you can?” Frosted sugar coats my words.

  “Merely trying to keep us on point,” Ryodan clips.

  I say, “I’m dead on point. The point is—”

  “That I am not Dani,” Jada interrupts coolly. “The point is the three of you are dysfunctional, volatile, inefficient, and in my way. Not to mention—” She pierces me with that emerald ice stare. “—a grave threat to our world. ”

  “Oh, I’m dysfunctional, Ms. Alter Ego? Really? Pot meet kettle. ” The second I say it, I wish I hadn’t. If Jada really is Dani, her current state is my fault.

  Someone enters the foyer behind me, boots tapping smartly on the floor, and Jada stares past me at the new arrival.

  “I couldn’t find Clare and Sorcha,” the woman behind me says.

  “No matter. You will place them as I instructed you. Quickly. ”

  The look on Jada’s face chills me. It tells me she believes she’s won.

  Place them? What “them”? I frenziedly sort and discard possibilities, racing to a terrifying conclusion: if Jada actually is Dani, she knows how to immobilize the Sinsar Dubh—with the four stones we placed on the slab in the cavern. The same stones Kat retrieved from the cavern and tucked away for safekeeping. Once the Sinsar Dubh was no longer on the slab, they were unnecessary and we worried about leaving coveted objects of power lying around the cavern since we couldn’t close the doors. Jada’s been in residence long enough to have found them.

  I’m always blocking lately, with the exception of my constant antenna for the Unseelie Princess. Now, I cautiously open my sidhe-seer senses.

  And gasp.

  I feel them! The pulsing blue-black binding presence of the stones is here in the room with me!

  Lock you up, lock you down, make you sleep beneath the ground, the Sinsar Dubh coos.

  Make you sleep, too, I retort silently.

  “She brought the stones,” I say to Barrons. “Stop her!”

  He’s on it before I finish speaking. There’s a blur of motion as he lunges for the woman Jada called Brigitte, but Jada blocks him and they collide with such force that they both go flying backward to opposite sides of the room and crash against the walls.

  Then Barrons and Ryodan are rushing Brigitte, who’s already placed one of the stones in the far corner, but they slam into Jada, who manages to get there a split second before them. She grabs Brigitte and freeze-frames her to place the next stone but collides with Barrons and one of the stones goes flying, smashes into a painting on the wall and drops to the floor. The painting crashes down on top of it. I lunge for it, determined to get at least one of the damn things so they can’t box me in, but the others beat me to it by a mile.

  Page 89

  I leap for it again and get slammed into a wall by a blur. I pursue the stone obsessively for a good thirty seconds but all I get for my effort is a bloody nose and three broken fingers.

  I finally back off and watch the three blurs whiz around the room as they fight a battle I can’t even track, much less get in on, feeling bizarrely invisible.

  Jada’s women are doing the same thing, with the exception of Brigitte, who’s being used as a hockey puck by three players who aim for and block goals at the speed of light. She’s bloodier every time she surfaces for a split second before vanishing again.

  I sidle toward the door. If I’m not in the room, they can’t trap me.

  Every sidhe-seer in the room moves to stop me. Their expressions are icy, easy to decipher.

  I am the target.

  I am the enemy.

  Green Camo gives me a condemning look that makes me want to throttle the bitch. I’ve subdued the Book this long, and done a bang-up job with one small exception. I’d like to see how well she would handle being possessed by the Unseelie King’s darkest demons.

  Draw your spear, the Sinsar Dubh purrs. Destroy them. You know you can.

  And let you take over and kill them all? Not a chance.

  I quit moving, lean back against the wall and sigh, thinking it’s funny how things change so quickly. Last season I was Dublin’s MVP, the hunter, and everybody wanted me on their team. This season I’m the hunted, a liability that kills innocent people, and now the world wants to neutralize me.

  The sidhe-seers know my secret. They’re going to stalk me as relentlessly as I stalked the Sinsar Dubh.

  End goal: put Mac down.

  If Jada really is Dani, she’ll publish a cool, accusatory Jada Journal and post it all over the city long before the sun is up, outing me to the world. There’ll be no place I can hide unless I pack up and leave this planet for good with Barrons—

  I’m not even talking to Barrons at the moment.

  My mom and dad will know what I’ve been concealing from them for months. One daughter dead, the other damned.

  The snarling blurs accelerate, darting this way and that. Brigitte goes slamming into a wall and I wince in sympathy. My bones have already begun to heal. She doesn’t have the same gift.

  Gift? Longevity could be used against me just like it was against Barrons’s son. For Cruce to be influencing the environment, he must be cognizant in his icy prison in the cold stone chamber deep below the earth, aware his body is frozen, that he’s trapped. Do the minutes creep like hours? Immortal, does he tally the seconds as they tick by, stretching to hellish infinity?

  You will soon know, the Sinsar Dubh reminds silkily.

  As will you.

  Fight, you fucking fool.

  You. I dig in my mental heels, determined to outwait it, wagering my humanity against its psychopathy, betting its survival instincts will kick before mine, if only by a split second.

  Make me do it, sweet thing, you won’t like it.

  I’ll like it better than I’ll like killing all these people. They already think I’m the enemy. If I release the Sinsar Dubh and slaughter these women to free myself, I’ll have proved myself the enemy to anyone left alive. Including me. The rest of the abbey will come after me in force, for good reason. But I won’t even know that. I’ll be a straitjacketed bookworm burrowed into the binding of an insane, homicidal book, staring helplessly out from the pages of my own life, as they’re writ by someone else, and I’d commit atrocities that would damn a saint’s soul.

  Suddenly Brigitte appears and collapses in a battered heap. I study the blurs, concluding Jada now has the stones and is trying to place them.

  As they whiz around the room like small tornadoes, furniture flies, lamps topple, and bulbs shatter. Rowena’s stately study has become a shambles of trashed furniture and demolished decor.

  A jolt of energy suddenly hits me and I flinch. The sensation is familiar. The night we interred the Sinsar Dubh, I had to reach both of my hands into the field generated by the stones to remove the crimson runes from the cover and felt instantly lethargic, nauseated. I’d assumed it was just another facet of my sidhe-seer senses. Now I realize how lucky I was that we’d warded the Book on top of an altar. If I’d had to actually step inside the energy field that night, I would have ended up as trapped as the Sinsar Dubh.

  On the east end of the study, flush to the wall, a line of blue-black flickers and solidifies. Two of the stones have connected. They flare and begin to emit a chilling chime.

  Assuming Barrons and Ryodan defeat Jada an
d the next two stones don’t get positioned, assuming I don’t feel the third stone flare to life and suddenly develop psychopathic tendencies of my own—where do I go from here?

  Page 90

  Do I leave with Barrons and trust him to protect me? I can’t protect myself. I can’t use the spear with any certainty that I won’t kill again. I can’t outrun Jada. My ineffectualness chafes. God, does it chafe.

  Last season’s MVP vanishing into obscurity.

  Oh, yeah, I feel invisible.

  I jerk again.

  The third stone just connected with the other two, and I watch a second line form at the perimeter of the north wall of the study.

  If the last stone is placed, two more blue-black lines will appear on the south and west ends, squaring me in, and I’ll be trapped in Cruce’s hellish, conscious stasis. They’ll collect the stones, gather them close around me as we did with the Book, then carry me down, deep into the earth where I really hate being. No crimson runes are necessary to seal the cover of my Book; my body is lock enough. It’s not like anyone can pry open my skin and read it. The brilliant wards and runes on the towering walls of the cavern will connect to the field of the stones, and intensify it.

  I’ll lie upon a slab, staring up at the ceiling far above (unless adding insult to injury, they put me facedown, God, that would suck), trapped in waking paralysis, a spelled Sleeping Beauty longing for the kiss of a prince (just not Cruce!).

  Am I really going to stand here and let them imprison me? Become the Disney heroine that can’t save herself?

  Accept that you’re outgunned? the Sinsar Dubh mocks. Stay on the floor and don’t even try to fight? What kind of life is that? It’s now or never, sweet thing.

  For the first time since the moment I withstood the temptation to take the spell and free Barrons’s son, I seriously consider opening the godforsaken book and doing whatever I must to walk out of here alive. This time, however, Barrons isn’t in my head to offer counsel and strength.

  This time it’s only me facing the greatest test in my twenty-three years. What am I willing to do to survive? What price am I willing to pay?

  Evil isn’t a state of being, Barrons once said to me. It’s a choice.

  My life flashes before my eyes: who I was, who I am now, what I might become. Whether I can live with myself assuming I one day claw my way back to control. The casualties on my conscience, the ashes I might find myself standing in. I remember the Book killing in the streets of Dublin, remember the Beast it became as it exploded upward, terrifyingly powerful even in amorphous form.