She wasn’t, the little beast told her, sounding enormously cross and depressed for whatever reason he was always spectacularly cross and depressed, picking herself up mentally and shifting sideways, she’d merely managed to hitch a ride through one of the higher dimensions—and how was quite perfectly beyond him, considering how primitive and clumsy she was.
She’d asked his name, not surprised they could communicate in the strange fashion they did because by then she’d already seen too many strange things to be surprised by much of anything.
He’d announced with nearly hysterical despair that he had no name but was not averse to being given one.
With tears streaming from enormous violet eyes, he’d told her that his life was without meaning and he preferred to remain in the eighth dimension—which she couldn’t possibly understand, seeing how she couldn’t even manage the fifth one adequately—where no one could see him because there was no one to see him, and when someone is unseen and alone, nothing matters, not even matter.
He’d only returned to the third dimension when he’d sensed her there, he’d told her, around great hiccupping sobs, because he thought she might be troubled to finger-comb his matted fur (considering the dirty orange mass of tangles on her own head wasn’t a complete mess), perhaps trim his nails (though not quite as short and dirty as hers), which were too sharp to chew and getting painfully ingrown.
She’d christened him Shazam!, hoping he would grow out of his brood into the moniker and become an epic companion. She’d later changed it to Shazam, as he favored the wizard more than the superhero.
This was during her first year Silverside, as she called it, before she’d hacked off her hair, when she still believed she might be rescued and was yet willing to risk connecting with the seemingly more reasonable occupants of the worlds she briefly inhabited.
Trapped on the planet Olean, roughly a sixth the size of Earth’s moon, for months, she’d traveled the small continents, seeking the way off world with the gloomy, prone-to-vanishing-without-warning, small-cranky-needy-feline-bear thing by her side, absorbing all he had—or was willing—to teach her between his nearly comatose bouts of depression that alternated with alarming binges of eating everything he could get his paws on.
She’d been instructed by her mopey, volatile companion to stop locking her grid down mentally, and instead expand her senses and feel for the disturbances looming in her path.
She’d ended up with far more bruises than she’d ever gotten doing it her way.
But one day, blindfolded, aching in every limb, depressed and aggravated by his eternal defeatist commentary on everything from the ominous portent of the angle of the sun in the sky to the certain impending destruction of his world as clearly foretold by the bent of the teleporting tree limbs, she finally began to see what he was saying.
Thanks to Shazam, Jada now freeze-framed effortlessly, sensing all obstacles, impacting nothing, riding the slipstream as smoothly as an unobstructed water-park slide.
Here, now in the abbey, moving in the fifth dimension, she sensed enormous energy ahead. It wasn’t Ryodan, she’d left him in her dust in the study.
It was Fae/not Fae. Prince/not prince.
Thirty feet to go and nearing, twenty-five, twenty—
She slammed into a solid wall and bounced off it, exploding out of the slipstream, cartwheeling her arms for balance.
“Ah, Dani,” Ryodan said, smiling faintly. “Didn’t see you there.”
She went still. Her ass, he hadn’t. She didn’t press her fingers to her cheekbone, which she was certain would soon bruise. She was the eye of the storm, not the storm. Never the storm.
“I realized years ago your vision wasn’t as astute as I’d once believed,” she said without inflection. He’d been in the slipstream with her and she hadn’t even known. She would learn to sense him. She would eradicate that vulnerability.
His smile vanished.
Good. She hadn’t reacted. She’d responded. She was Jada. Not the one he remembered. In the periphery of her vision, wings unfurled and she turned to assess the visitor. The last she’d seen Christian, he was unconscious, being transported by his clan back to Scotland, along with his uncle’s remains.
Flakes of iridescent ice crystalized in the air and began to fall, dusting the Cruce-gilded floors of the abbey. The temperature dropped sharply and a six-light segment of the hall’s torchères went out. The prince in the Highlander was displeased, affecting the environment.
“Jada, he sifted in!” Brigitte exclaimed. Then mouthed silently around his back, Our wards didn’t work, what the fuck?
“At ease,” she told her first in command, which meant “hold your weapons for now.” Christian wasn’t who or what he’d been before his time on the cliffs. Though he’d been largely unconscious for the duration of the ride back from Germany, she’d seen enough to know something had changed him, tempered his wildness and madness.
There was a sudden commotion as more sidhe-seers joined them in the hall. She allowed herself a moment to bask in seeing the corridor of the grand old abbey lined with self-possessed, well-trained, heavily armed women, as it always should have been. Each face was a life, with a family, a vivid story, and she’d already made a significant dent in committing them all to memory.
Christian glided down the hallway toward her, part muscled Highlander, part sleek, dark Faerie, majestic black-velvet wings trailing the gold floor, and despite having been trained to stand their ground, a few of her sidhe-seers peeled back.
She didn’t fault them. He was formidable. She made a point of never underestimating either enemy or ally. His treatment of her now would define which one he was. His transformation seemed to have halted midway, leaving his skin golden, not white-blue, his lips pink, not blue-black, but he had the long midnight hair, muted tattoos, and majestic wings of a hauntingly beautiful, deadly Unseelie prince.
But his eyes! She fixedly avoided staring into them, blurring her focus slightly, absorbing his face as a whole with no clear features. His gaze leaned more toward Fae than human and she knew she would weep blood were she to meet it directly.
In faded jeans and a cabled Irish sweater split down the back to accommodate his great midnight wings that arced high and swept wide, he personified wolf in sheep’s clothing. At his throat, a torque writhed, glinting, not an adornment but rather part of his flesh and quite possibly bone.
He’d saved her once from what she’d thought would have been a hellish decision. She’d known nothing of hellish decisions back then.
“Dani, lass,” he said quietly.
“Jada,” she corrected.
He studied her, from hair to boots and back again but with none of the sexual heat she’d once seen in that sometimes-black, sometimes-whiskey gaze. With her slightly unfocused gaze, she noticed his eyes widen, narrow with anger and that all-too-familiar rejection, then go void of all emotion.
Oh, yes, trapped in unending pain, he’d learned control. Learned to pull his feelings back and box them so they couldn’t turn into fuel that would burn a person alive.
One did. Or didn’t survive.
“Fair enough,” he said. “I bring no quarrel to you or yours. You’ve my thanks and a favor owed for seeing me off that cliff. I would speak with that one.” He jerked his head toward Ryodan.
She inclined her head, granting permission, wondering what had brought him here tonight, if they might work together toward common goals.
Christian stalked past her to the bastard that could still knock her out of freeze-frame. “What the bloody fuck did you do with my uncle?”
Before he’d been captured by the Hag, so many years ago for her, Christian would have stormed these halls and tried to kill Ryodan for the slightest offense, real or imagined. He was now demonstrating forethought and patience.
She didn’t tell him to save his breath. Ryodan would never answer. No one interrogated that man, certainly not a walking lie detector.
“Precisely what I sai
d I would do,” Ryodan said mildly. “I brought him back.”
Christian went still, mining the comment for its true ore. After several moments he growled, “Truth. Yet it was not his body you gave us. Explain yourself.”
Ryodan never explained himself.
“There were countless bodies in that chasm. I thought I recognized the plaid,” Ryodan said.
She narrowed her eyes. He was behaving uncharacteristically, this man who did nothing without a complex agenda. What was his game?
“It was our tartan,” Christian allowed after a pause. “Yet not our kin. Where the bloody hell is his corpse?”
“I have no other knowledge of his corpse. I suggest your clan search the chasm thoroughly. Perhaps I missed something.”
Jada studied Ryodan intently. “ ‘Perhaps I missed something’?” If he had, which she found quite frankly impossible, he would never admit it.
“Did that already. Sifted straight there. None of the bodies belonged to my uncle.”
“Perhaps there’s a fragment of Faery splintering the chasm. There were many caves and a fast-running river. Perhaps you didn’t search well enough.”
Nor was he a man who liberally employed the word “perhaps.” He was being questioned—questioned, mind you, which was only one of several oddities here—by one of the Keltar who, on a good day, got under his skin and on a bad one he wanted to kill, yet hadn’t used so much as a single “fuck” or made one aggressive comment. Even his body language was bland, relaxed.
“Did you do something with my uncle’s remains?” Christian demanded.
“I did nothing with Dageus’s remains.”
Jada mentally pinned the elements of their conversation—and absence of elements such as hostility Ryodan should have been exuding—on a structure of sorts in her mind: words here, body language there, subtext sprinkled throughout. Remains, he’d said. Corpse, he’d said. And all his answers were ringing true to the lie detector.
There was a subtle yet significant difference between truth and validity. Ryodan’s responses were tallying up on her structure as valid.
But not true.
There was something here…she just didn’t know what.
She moved to join them, folding her arms, legs wide like them. “Do you know where Dageus is right now?”
Ryodan turned and locked eyes with her. “No.”
“Did you do something with Dageus the night we killed the Crimson Hag?” she pressed.
“Of course. I fought beside him.”
“Did you do something with Dageus after we left?” she rephrased.
“I tried to bring him back.”
She glanced at Christian, who nodded.
Jada understood the art of lying, she’d perfected it herself. Wrap your lie in precisely enough truth that your body presents full evidence of conviction and sincerity, employing sentences vague enough that they can’t be picked apart. The key: the more one simplified the question, the greater the odds of isolating the answer.
“Is Dageus alive?” she said to Ryodan.
“Not as far as I know,” he replied.
“Is he dead?”
“I would assume so.” He folded his arms, mirroring her. “Are you done yet.”
“Not nearly.”
“Do you believe he did something with my uncle, lass?” Christian asked. “Something he’s not telling us?”
Lass. The others despised who she’d become. The Unseelie prince still called her lass.
“I’ve been crystal clear,” Ryodan said. “I did my best to bring Dageus back. The body I returned to your clan was not his. Everyone makes mistakes.”
“Not you,” she said. “Never you.”
He smiled but it didn’t reach his eyes. Then again, it never had. She’d modeled her own infrequent smiles in similar fashion. “Even me.”
“Truth,” Christian said.
“I believe,” she said to Christian without taking her eyes from Ryodan, “that a full-frontal assault never works with this man. You’ve had all the answers you’ll get from him.”
“Truth,” Ryodan mocked.
At the end of the corridor there was a sudden commotion, sharp cries and a scuffle. “She’s here, Jada! The one with Sinsar Dubh inside her!” Mia cried.
“Let her pass,” Jada commanded. “She’s no threat to us at present and there are greater ones that need addressing.”
Although her women grumbled and parted only reluctantly, they obeyed the order.
Without another word she slid up into the slipstream and returned to her study, knowing they would follow.
Where one staged one’s battles was often nearly as important as how.
11
“Never meant to start a war
I just wanted you to let me in…”
I stepped into what had once been Rowena’s study and inhaled lightly but deeply, girding myself to interact with Jada.
Differently this time.
I’d been pondering Dancer’s words as I hurried through the abbey, trying to refine my emotions and stop seeing Jada as the enemy. Open myself to getting to know the icy stranger. Kicking myself for needing someone else to point out that it was my guilt insisting Dani be exactly the same, because if she was, I wouldn’t feel so terrible about chasing her that night.
Dancer was right. My rejection of “Jada” was proportionate to how much I blamed myself, and as he’d so bluntly stated, that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with me.
The problem was, we’d had no warning, no time to adjust. One day Dani had been here, and a few weeks later she was gone, replaced by someone five years older, completely different, and quite possibly an alternate personality.
All I’d known was I wanted Dani back and I resented the one who’d taken her—the new Dani. It had been a gut punch, and I’d reacted instinctively, out of pain and grief.
Here, now, buoyed by the clarity of mind, strength, and energy of an Unseelie-flesh high, I could strip my feelings from the situation and perceive it more clearly.
I had no right to reject “Jada.” Whether we liked her personality or not, this was Dani.
She’d made it back by hook or crook, battling God knows what for five and a half long years to return to the only home she’d known, and upon finally making it—not one of us welcomed her back or was happy to see her. Her hard-won homecoming had been an epic failure.
If Dani was in there, a repressed personality, our actions were unforgivable. If this was who Dani actually was now? Doubly unforgivable. We’d all changed. Even my mother. But she’d had the rock that was Jack Lane at her side to share her burdens and leaven the pain. What had Dani had? Anything?
I sighed, looking at her, seated behind the desk. Really looking at her for perhaps the first time since she’d returned.
Dani “the Mega” O’Malley.
All grown up.
Every bit as beautiful as I’d known she would be. Creamy Irish skin, faint dusting of freckles, long red hair swept up in a high ponytail caught in a leather thong, her gamine features both sharpened and softened, resulting in a finely chiseled, stunning face.
This time, however, as I examined her, I looked for the Dani in Jada without regretting the aspects I couldn’t see, focusing instead on the aspects of Dani that still shined through.
Strong. Criminy, she’d always been so strong, and now was even more so.
Smart. Check—fierce intelligence blazed in those slanted emerald eyes above high blades of cheekbones.
Aware. Yes, her gaze was even now skimming the room, taking our measure, missing nothing. It rested briefly on my badly “highlighted” hair. Dani would have burst out laughing. We’d have joked about whether I might add a Mohawk to the mess.
Jada merely noted it and moved on with her assessment.
As did I.
Loyal, she sat in this abbey, training the sidhe-seers as the prior headmistress had never been willing to do.
A warrior, like our Dani, she patrolled
the streets, tirelessly killing the enemy.
Like Dani, fighting for what she believed in.
I offered her a smile. It wasn’t hard. This was Dani. She was here. She’d survived. We could have lost her completely. We hadn’t. I would find a way to love this version of her, too. And maybe, one day, I’d get to see more of the girl I’d once known. Dancer’s reminder that she hadn’t been back long was something to consider. A soldier on the front needed time to decompress from the nightmare. A soldier who’d seen hard battle came back mined with triggers. I knew what those felt like from the rape I endured, the complete and total powerlessness I’d felt. I also knew that every time I’d sensed one of my triggers even potentially being approached, I’d done everything in my power to shut down inside. “Jada.” I infused her chosen name with as much warmth as I could.
“Mac,” Jada replied coolly. Like Ryodan and Barrons, she didn’t comment on my visibility. These were difficult people to surprise. Then she looked past me and her face went stiller than still, as if she’d frozen into a stone statue of a woman.
“Jada,” Dancer said happily behind me. “Welcome home!”
I felt like the biggest shit in the world. The one thing none of us had said, Dancer put right out there right away. Saying the normal thing, the nice thing, the thing she’d probably wanted to hear the most. Making the rest of us look like monsters.
Animation returned to Jada’s face—well, as much animation as it ever had—and she said, “Thank you. It’s good to be back.”
A nice normal reply. More than any of us had gotten from her.
“I can imagine,” Dancer said. “Actually, no I can’t. No clue what you went through, but you kicked its ass, didn’t you, Jada? You made it—just like you always do. Good thing, too. We’re in a world of shit.”
“The black holes,” she agreed.
“I’ve got a ton of stuff to go over with you, when you have a minute. Primarily speculation at this point, but between the two of us, we’ll sort it out. I also finished the Papa Roach spray whenever you have a minute to swing by.”
“No one’s swinging by anywhere.” Shooting Jada a pointed look, Ryodan said, “Someone published a rash of dailies that have everyone looking for us.”
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