I opened my eyes and read the inscription on her headstone, although I had no need. My parents had been too distraught to think, nodding blankly as all their friends murmured sadly and too many times to count, while clutching their children close, No parent should outlive their child.
I’d made all the funeral decisions.
Alina McKenna Lane. Beloved Daughter and Sister. And beneath it, in flowing calligraphy: If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever.
Beside me, Christian snorted. “You want to dig up your sister’s grave?”
“Yes,” I said flatly.
“Why, lass?”
“I want to see her body.”
“That’s twisted, even for you.”
“Says the man who’s stalking his uncle’s corpse. You said you could move the dirt. Can you raise her casket?” I glanced around the cemetery. “And somehow glamour us so those people walking over there, staring at us, don’t see what we’re doing?”
“Bloody hell, you better find me solid information on my uncle, Mac.”
“Do all Fae get testy when humans ask them to perform minor tasks?”
“I’m not Fae,” he growled, and moved to stand beside me.
“Ow!” I snapped. “What did you just do?” I’d felt a sharp tug on my hair, as if a cluster of strands had been yanked out at the roots.
“Sorry, lass. My wings. I’m not always certain where they are. Looks like some of that red stuff in your hair is still sticky.”
I rubbed my head where it stung. I didn’t feel any paint.
Then I forgot all about my hair when the ground in front of me began to tremble and churn, as if something enormous was rising from the bowels of the earth. It shook and shivered and dirt poured up and tumbled away from the burial plot as the casket emerged from the ground.
Christian was pretty darned handy.
“I don’t know why you’re bothering, Mac,” he said irritably.
“I need to see that she’s dead.”
He gave me a strange look with those strange eyes. “There’s nothing dead in there, lass.”
“I put something dead in there,” I snapped. “And it had damn well better still be there.”
“Whatever.” He shrugged.
When the casket settled next to the gaping hole in the earth, I stepped close and ran my hands over the lid.
Cool wood. My sister’s home now.
I dusted it lovingly, brushing away clods of dirt.
Months ago I’d stood with Christian near another casket, both determined to open it and dreading it, just like today. But that had been a coffin of ice, containing the concubine/Seelie queen.
This casket was mortal, not Fae. I remembered the day I’d chosen it, the fancy one with the elaborate inlaid burl, the elegant pin-striped cream silk. Funny how you obsessed over funeral details when you lost someone you loved, as if they might somehow see all the care you were putting into the last things you would ever be able to do for them. I’d chosen the one with the many hidden compartments, into which I tucked treasure after treasure, so she could take them out in Heaven and smile. I know, foolish to an extreme. Assuming there was a Heaven and assuming she went, I highly doubted the coffin went, too. It had been a time of madness. It had cost a fortune. I hadn’t cared. Only the best for Alina.
I remembered closing the lid myself, I’d even insisted on turning the crank to seal it. I’d tucked the key into my pocket for some absurd reason. As if I might someday visit her, dig her up, and talk to her or something. That key was in a jewelry box in my bedroom, a mile away.
“I need you to break the seal,” I told Christian. “Make it open.”
The casket exhaled a soft plosive and the lid shifted slightly.
I stood there every bit as woodenly as I’d stood there a little over a year ago, feeling as cold and hard as her new home. Tears spilled from my eyes.
With shaking hands, I raised the embossed upper panel of the casket.
I shouldn’t have been surprised.
By this time I’d thought myself beyond all surprise.
There was nothing inside.
I’d lost my sister.
Now I’d lost her corpse, too.
15
“I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes, the words are maps…”
I stalked into Chester’s in a shit of a mood, leaving Christian at the Sinatra club with yet another whiskey in his hand. He’d declined my invitation to join our meeting. Said he had more immediate problems than the fate of the world and he was sure we’d figure it out, considering how controlling and micromanaging Ryodan was about everything he owned—and as he believed he owned the entire world and everything in it, and could play with it all like his personal chess set—the bastard would surely find a way to patch things up to his liking. He’d added that at least we were now both in the same boat, with missing corpses, and maybe I should ask Ryodan about mine.
I wasn’t sure who was pissier, him or me. He was certainly more loquacious about it.
I pushed through the crowd, grateful for the first time that Chester’s was off the grid in terms of morality and legality. Although many eyes in the crowd observed me with shock and a good bit of fear, no one tried to mess with me.
I was almost sorry about that.
My sister’s casket was empty.
I knew for a fact that I’d buried her.
I knew for a fact it was her.
I knew every inch of my sister. The barely-there stretch marks on the sides of her hips that she’d hated whenever she wore a bathing suit after having lost twenty-five pounds rapidly when she caught mono, then gaining it back again. The birthmark so similar to mine. The funny shape of her second toe, longer than the big one. The fingernail on her right hand that never grew right because she’d gotten her finger slammed in a car door and the nail had darkened with a blood blister and fallen off.
I’d buried Alina.
If I hadn’t, nothing in my entire existence was certain.
I slapped my palm to the wall of Ryodan’s office and stormed in.
“Ms. Lane,” Barrons said.
“I need to talk to you,” I snapped. “Alone. Now.”
Ryodan said, “We’re having a meeting—”
“I. Don’t. Give a damn.” I said to Barrons, “Now.” I forced myself to add, “Please?”
He was on his feet before I even added the please. I turned and stormed back out, down the stairs, through the club, feeling him behind me all the way. I stopped only when I reached the corridor that led to the server’s wing. Then I spun sharply to face him. “Do you know where there’s a private closet?” I demanded with a touch of hysteria.
“I’m not sure I know the difference between a private closet and a public one, Ms. Lane,” he said dryly.
“Someplace there are no bloody cameras!”
He went motionless, swept my body with that dark, inscrutable gaze, and the shape of his mouth changed. “Ah, Ms. Lane, did you pull me out of there to fuck?”
“You bet your ass I did.”
“Bloody hell. I don’t know what happened to you—”
“I don’t want to talk about it! Are you going to cooperate or not?” I snarled.
“—but goddamn woman. I like you this way.”
He shoved me back against a wall, palmed open a door I hadn’t even noticed, backed me in, spun me around, and crushed me against the wall, kicking the door shut behind us.
Then my jeans were down and he was inside me with a rough growl, and I was ready for him because I’m always ready for him, pushing deep and hard, and I was flattened against the wall with my hands over my head, shoving back with my ass, and that was all I needed to find a lifeline, to connect, to remain sane.
—
When we returned to Ryodan’s office, I felt remarkably better. I could think again. I wasn’t a raw mass of pain and confusion and fear. I’d dumped all that on Barrons’s big hard body. I’d turned the savagery I was feeling
toward myself and the world on him. I’d nipped and fought and fucked and cleansed.
God, I love that man.
He’d understood exactly what I was doing. No words. No discussion. No pointless questions or offering of empty platitudes about whatever was bothering me.
He’d assessed.
I was pain and violence.
He’d given his body as a Band-Aid for the wound.
I suspected there would be times he would seek the same from me, and I made a promise to myself in that wonderful, fantastic, lovely closet that if I ever sensed in him what I felt myself tonight, I’d rise to his need as willingly and intensely as he’d risen to mine.
He’d taken and given, encouraged and incited…and finally soothed my wildness.
Sex is so damned healing.
“Better?” Ryodan said dryly after we walked back in.
My hair was a mess. Barrons’s shirt collar was askew. And Ryodan never missed a trick.
“Much, thanks. You?” I said just as dryly.
“Not as good as you,” he murmured, silver gaze cool.
“Where’s Da—Jada and Dancer?” I said, looking around. I could smell that they’d recently been there. We must have just missed them.
“I saw no reason to waste their time simply because you were wasting mine.”
I arched a brow. “And that means?”
“That he sent them off to do something else because he wants to talk to you without them around,” Barrons said.
I stiffened, dropping my leg from the arm of the chair where I’d tossed myself in a fairly relaxed position. Sat up straight and folded my arms. Ryodan wanting to talk to me in semiprivate is never a good thing. Private would worry the hell out of me.
“We need to talk about the Sinsar Dubh, Mac,” said Ryodan.
I blew out a gusty sigh. Recent sex aside, this was not turning out to be a banner day in Dublin. “What about it?” I was irritable all over again.
“Dancer has a theory. He thinks the Hoar Frost King inadvertently deposited the components of a Song of Destruction. He thinks the only thing that will stop the black holes from taking over this world entirely is a Song of Making.”
That made two of us. I said nothing.
“The Sinsar Dubh allegedly contains parts of that song.”
“Allegedly,” I underscored. “The truth is, none of us know a damn thing about the Book. It’s all legend and myth and supposition.”
“Which is precisely why we need you to tell us what’s actually in it. Unless you’d rather we try Cruce,” Ryodan said evenly.
Surely not even Ryodan was arrogant enough to try to interrogate Cruce in his prison. “You think you could question a psychopathic Book?”
“I suspect that’s not what he is.”
“What do you mean?”
“In the past, the Book possessed whoever touched it. That’s not what happened with him. He knew the First Language and was able to read it. The spells traveled up his arms, into his body. Did you ever see that happen before when someone handled it?”
I shook my head. It had always seized control of the person, taken them over completely. Never had the Book itself been destroyed.
Yet only a thin pile of gold dust and a handful of red, winking gemstones had remained of the Sinsar Dubh on the slab.
“The sentient Book crumbled once he was finished. Legend holds there are two parts to the Sinsar Dubh. A Book of words, spells on a page. And a second facet, the thing that evolved into a living, intelligent, hate-obsessed being with far more power than the words it contained. It appeared the sentient Sinsar Dubh was destroyed that night, and Cruce merely absorbed the knowledge.”
“Oh, God,” I breathed. “You could be right.” That prick. Had he gotten all the power without any of the price? That would make him pretty much…well, nearly the Unseelie king. I narrowed my eyes. “We don’t know that for certain.”
“But if it’s true, we wonder if you could do the same.”
“Can you tell us anything, Ms. Lane?” Barrons said.
I swiveled my head to look at him. I’d been “Mac” mere minutes ago. “Why do you do that?”
His eyes said, Do you really want to call me Jericho?
I thought about it a minute and was rather startled to realize I didn’t. Jericho was…intimate. Jericho and Mac were a completely different entity than Ms. Lane and Barrons. They existed in a different place. A freer environ, a sacred one. And I liked that difference. I nodded, smiling faintly. His dark eyes gleamed with something appreciative, and I practically preened.
You continue to evolve, his eyes said. Keep fucking me instead of worrying.
“Tell me about the Book,” Ryodan said. “I want to understand how it’s in you.”
I sighed and tried to figure out how to explain it. “I’ve got this place inside me. I don’t know how to say quite where, I think it must be in my head. It’s a deep, glassy black lake but it’s more than that, too. There are caverns and pebbled shores. Who knows, maybe I’ve got a whole bloody country inside me. I think the lake is my sidhe-seer place. But it was altered by something else inside me and now it’s…different. If there were boundaries, I can’t tell where they are anymore.”
“The Book,” Ryodan said.
I looked at Barrons. I don’t know why. Maybe just to make sure he was there, as he’d been there the single time I dived to the bottom of my dark glassy lake and beheld the Sinsar Dubh in all its shining, tempting glory. Just in case talking about it made it do something evil, I wanted to know he was nearby.
“It’s there,” I said peevishly. “At the bottom of the lake. But I have to swim all the way down to get to it. It’s in a black cavern, on a pedestal. Closed.” I glared at him. “For good reason.” I’d closed it that afternoon, months ago with Barrons. Whumped it firmly shut.
“Have you gone inside your head and looked at it recently,” said Ryodan.
“Nope.” Not about to either. Knowing my luck, it would be open to an extremely useful spell that I’d begin to think I might want, or need, or possibly not be able to live without.
“I want you to,” Ryodan said.
“Are you on board with this?” I fired at Barrons.
His dark eyes flashed. We all have our inner beasts.
And you think you can manage mine? I shot back.
I think I do a damn fine job. Images of what we’d just done surfaced in his eyes.
That’s different.
We control ours. It took time.
How much time?
We made mistakes, was all he said.
You want me to look.
I want this world. I want you. It may be the only way. I see no other alternatives at present. If there’s a way inside you to stop the black holes from destroying Earth, we need it.
I want you. Those three simple words. They undo me. Melt me. Forge me into steel stronger than I am. Barrons’s belief in me is pure titanium.
Over millennia, searching for the spell to free my son, I never once caught wind of anything reputed to contain part of the Song of Making aside from the Book I hunted.
Millennia, he’d said. Barrons had lived for thousands of years. It was one thing to suspect it, another to hear him admit it. My lover was thousands of years old. I was twenty-three. No wonder we had issues.
I frowned, recalling something else I knew about that might be of use to us now. A thing I’d seen in the White Mansion when I was hunting with Darroc for the Silver back to Dublin.
But I’d been stoically refusing to think about it ever since I realized what I had inside me, unwilling to let my inner beast catch wind of it, if it hadn’t already.
I sighed. “I’ll take a look. But if I go batshit crazy down there, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Go?” Ryodan said, his inflection clearly implying he thought I was already there.
I wrinkled my nose at him. “If I’m going to do this, I need a drink first.”
“I’ll have one sent up,”
Ryodan said. “Name your poison.”
“I want to get it myself,” I said coolly, aware I was only trying to stave off the inevitable. But I wanted to walk somewhere of my own volition, feel alive and free for a few more minutes before I risked body and soul.
“We’ll all get one,” he said, pushing up from behind his desk.
When I walked down the chrome and glass stairs with Barrons on my left, Ryodan on my right, I could have been slain by the daggers of envy shot my way, from every subclub below.
If only they knew.
—
I would have opted for the Sinatra club but Ryodan saw Christian looming darkly at the bar and steered us away.
To the kiddie subclub where Jo worked, wearing a short, kicky plaid skirt, white blouse, and baby doll heels, looking pretty, her short dark hair highlighted with gold and blond. She came to wait on us with a wary look when Ryodan gestured, but he only ordered three glasses of Macallan, Rare Cask, with the blandest of expressions. As she hurried away to fill the order, I sensed a stir in the crowd on the dance floor.
I looked around, trying to decide what was causing it, and realized the crowd was parting for some reason, allowing someone or something’s passage.
Jo deposited two fingers of rare cask scotch in front of me. I picked it up, swirled it and sipped appreciatively. I watched, waiting, and finally a woman came into view, heads turning as she passed.
Jada.
Abso-frigging-lutely stunning in a red dress and heels. Bare-legged, hair scraped back high from that beautiful face, ponytail nearly brushing her ass as she walked. Her skin was smooth and creamy, her face smoother, her eyes flashing banked heat. I could make out Dancer’s head behind her, taller than her, even with her wearing heels. Unlike one of the Nine, he wasn’t shadowing her every move, using his body to lead and block. He merely walked with her.
Dani was all grown up, wearing a dress that fit her like a second skin. And that walk! Graceful, long-legged power and heat. Awareness that she was gorgeous.
Dani didn’t swagger anymore.
She strutted. She prowled. She stalked, owning the ground she walked on.
And she was setting the men on fire as she passed. Humans and Fae alike watched her go, coveting, lusting. She shined. Even though she wasn’t our Dani anymore, there was something utterly brilliant about her, almost luminous. Oh, there was still fire within. I’d bet my sanity on it. Well, wait, that wasn’t necessarily a solid bet. I’d bet my right arm.
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