She knew what she needed.
Hand on the hilt of her sword, she went fluid and kicked up into the slipstream.
30
“Step into my parlor said the spider to the fly…”
Putting pen to paper clarifies my thoughts.
Before I came to Dublin, I didn’t have many thoughts to ponder other than new drink recipes and what guy I wanted to date.
Since my arrival here, I’ve filled journal after journal. The way I saw it, there were only three real possibilities and they were, unfortunately, equally plausible.
1. The Sinsar Dubh is already open. I opened it in a dream and I’ve been using it without even realizing it, turning myself invisible when I wanted to disappear, turning myself visible again because I couldn’t get the bullets out, and raising my sister from the dead because I couldn’t stand living without her. Either the Book is allowing me to use it without repercussion (at this point anyway) in an effort to lead me down a dark path with a darker purpose that will bite me in the ass soon enough or I’m stronger than the Book and can use it without being corrupted. (Gee, wouldn’t that be nice?) (And why did the Book stop talking to me after I vanished that night? Why did it bitch the whole way back to Dublin then shut up? Further, why did it always seem so…wishy-washy compared to the corporeal Book?)
2. The Sinsar Dubh is closed and tricking me. It’s not wishy-washy at all, just playing me like a maestro. Making me underestimate it. Granting my wishes, trying to make me think it’s already open. Why? So I might reach for one of its spells myself, believing I’m in control. And when I do, it’s all over. Hello psycho-Mac.
3. My sidhe-seer gifts are far more enormous than I realize. I can do all these things without the Sinsar Dubh and that’s why it wanted me for a host. Because together we’d be unstoppable. It’s possible much of the magic I’ve used comes from the part of the lake that is my heritage, not the Book at all, and it’s just trying to make me believe that power belongs to it, not me.
“You’re still trying to label things, Ms. Lane,” Barrons said, reading over my shoulder.
“I knew you were there,” I said irritably. I always do. He’d walked in the back door of BB&B about twenty seconds ago. Every cell in my body comes to hard, frantic, sexual life when he’s near. I hadn’t expected to see him. It was barely noon and he’s a night owl, not an afternoon one.
Between withdrawal that made me feel all my nerves were raw, flayed, and twitching on the surface of my skin and the many frustrating, slinking hours it took me to get back from the water tower to Chester’s—all so I could dependently ask Barrons to get a Hunter to take me back into the bookstore—I was in a sour mood. But I’d also been in no mood to risk running into the Unseelie princess, her army, and her human guns. I couldn’t outshoot or Voice all of them at once.
For being so bloody powerful, I couldn’t even walk home by myself. It pissed me off. Asking Barrons for things drives me crazy.
“Makes two of us, Ms. Lane.”
“Well, do something about it,” I said pissily.
“There you go, asking me for things again.”
I stretched on the love seat I’d dragged from his study into the rear of the wrecked bookstore and peered up at him over my shoulder. I couldn’t find him for a second. He was motionless, fading beautifully into shadow, existing in that seamless, not-quite-there way he existed only around me and only when we were alone.
“Okay. I give up. What am I doing wrong?”
“At the moment? Not fucking me.”
He yanked my head back with a fistful of my hair, arched my neck at a hard angle, and sealed his mouth over mine, tongue going deep, kissing me so hard and raw and electric that my mind blanked and I dropped my journal, forgotten.
Can’t breathe with this man. Can’t breathe without him.
“Where do you feel most free,” he murmured against my mouth.
I bit his lip. “With you.”
“Wrong. You know why you fuck so good?”
I preened. Jericho Barrons thought I fucked “so good.” “Because I’ve had a lot of practice?”
“Because you fuck like you’re losing your sanity and can only find it again on the far side of depravity. Not by taking a shortcut. By taking the very long, lingering way around. You look like a pretty, soft, breakable Barbie. You fuck like a monster.”
That pretty much summed it up. “Do you have a point?”
“Don’t be afraid of the monster. She knows what she’s doing.”
“Why are you still talking?”
“Because my dick isn’t in your mouth.”
“That can be remedied.” I was over the love seat and on him, taking him down hard to the floor beneath me, and he was falling back, laughing and oh, God, I love that sound!
I ripped his zipper open as we went, then my hands were against his hot skin and my mouth was on his dick and nothing could rattle me, nothing could touch me, because I was rattling Jericho Barrons’s cage and, as always, while it lasted, I would be whole and perfect and free.
—
Later he said, “You think of the Sinsar Dubh as being an actual book inside you.”
“And?” I said drowsily. Apparently sex with Barrons was the cure for everything, including the tightly wired tension of withdrawal. I’d been shooting furtive looks at my fridge, with its lovely baby food jars of canned Unseelie all day. Clenching hands and jaw, refusing to let my feet walk me over to it. But Barrons in my mouth pretty much makes me stop thinking about anything else in it.
“I doubt it’s either open or closed. Stop thinking of it so concretely.”
“You mean it’s embedded in me, inseparably, and my ethical structure is the proverbial cover? And I need to stop worrying about the Book and think about me. What I can live with. What I won’t live without.”
He propped himself up on a shoulder, muscles rippling and bunching, and looked down at me, smiling faintly.
I touched his lips with my fingertips. I adore this man’s mouth, what it does to me, but I most especially adore the rare occasions he smiles or laughs out loud. In the low light, the dark, harsh angles of his face seemed chiseled from stone. Barrons isn’t a classically handsome man. He’s disturbing. Carnal. Base. Forbidding. Big and powerful, radiating primal hunger. His eyes are blades, slicing into you: dark, ancient, glittering with predatory intensity. He moves like a beast even in his human skin. A woman takes one look at him, her stomach drops like a stone and she runs like hell.
Which direction she goes is the defining point: she’ll run away—or toward him—depending on her ability to be honest with herself, her hunger for life and willingness to pay any price at all to feel so damned alive. “What? Why are you smiling?” I said.
He bit my finger. “Stop fishing for compliments. I give you enough.”
“Never enough. Not when it comes to you. Do you think I used it? Do you think I brought Alina back from the dead?”
“I think neither of those questions signify. You’re alive. You’re neither insane nor psychotic. Life goes on, and in the going, reveals itself. Quit being so impatient.”
I pushed my hands into his thick dark hair. “I love how you simplify me.”
“You need it. You, Ms. Lane, are a piece of work.”
“I’ll show you work. I want this.” I leaned forward and murmured into his ear. “Right now. Exactly that way. And this and this. And I want you to keep doing it until I’m begging you to stop. But don’t stop then. Make me take it a little longer.” I wanted to feel no responsibility. No control.
“And bloody hell, woman, there you go, asking me for things again.” He stood and tossed me over his shoulder, one big hand clamped possessively on my bare ass, to take me to that place we sometimes went when I had a serious kink in my already seriously kinked chain.
“Hard life, Barrons.”
“I’ll show you hard.”
Of that I had no doubt. Every possible way.
Damn, it was good to be alive.
—
Much later with a voice that was raw from—well, let’s just leave it at raw—I said to him when I was fairly certain he was meditating deeply enough that he wouldn’t hear me, “I should have gone after her.”
“Dani,” he murmured.
Well, shit. He was aware after all.
“Always.”
“Yes, Dani,” I said.
“Analyze the odds. You know she’d have kept running.”
“But Barrons, she made it out, losing virtually zero Earth-time. Maybe I could have caught up with her, somehow. Maybe she would have gone to a safer world if I’d chased her through, with a quicker way home. Maybe she wouldn’t have had to be alone in there the whole time and she and I would have battled our way back to Dublin together.”
“Maybes are anchors you chain to your own feet. Right before you leap off the boat into the ocean.”
“I’m just saying. I think I know what I did wrong.”
“What’s that?”
“I didn’t believe in magic. I’m living in a city of it, jam-packed with dark magic, evil spells, twisted Fae, and I have absolutely no problem believing in all of them. But somehow I stopped believing in the good magic.” I prodded him in the ribs, where black and red tattoos stretched across his hard stomach and trailed down to his groin. “Like Bewitched. Or The Wizard of Oz—”
“An untrained witch and a charlatan,” he said irritably. “Did you just bloody poke me in the bloody ribs?”
“Okay, or Dumbledore, he’s the real thing. My point is you can’t believe only in Voldemort. You have to believe in Dumbledore, too.”
“Or you could just believe in me.” He caught my hand and put it exactly where he wanted it.
I smiled. I excelled at that.
—
Hours later I was holding my cellphone in that hand, staring at my recently created contact.
The good magic, including those possibilities that weighed in on the side of the positive, not the negative, was heavy on my mind.
Barrons was gone, back to Chester’s, where we would meet soon. I bit my still-swollen lower lip and worried it as I punched the Call button. It rang only once and she was on the line.
“Mac?” Alina said quickly. “Is that you?”
Fuck. Instant pain. How many times had I sat in my room in Dublin, dialing her damned number to listen to her recording, wishing just one more time to hear her answer? More times than I cared to count. Yet here it was. I could get addicted to this alone. Merely being able to call and hear something that sounded like my sister answering. I wondered where she was. Where Barrons had no doubt set her up, probably warding the place to keep her alive, too.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey, Jr.” She sounded happy to hear from me, but wary.
“Where are you?”
“My apartment.”
I closed my eyes, wincing. I could walk over there, bound up stairs I’d once sat on sobbing as if my soul was being hacked in two, slowly and with a chain saw. She’d open the door.
And instantly double over, puking, because even if she really was my sister, I couldn’t hug her, because I was anathema to her now.
“Want to come over?” she said hesitantly.
“So I can make you puke some more?”
“Your boyfriend—”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Okay, the man you love,” she said flatly, “brought me some pages photocopied from the Sinsar Dubh. He said you used them to learn to manage the discomfort. I’m practicing. I don’t like puking any more than you like making me puke.”
Working with those pages had helped me only to a point. But unlike the corporeal Book—which had enjoyed tormenting me—I had no desire to hurt Alina. If she really was. And if she practiced enough with them, maybe one day I’d get that hug. If she really was. “When did Darroc give you the engagement ring?” It was bothering me, a nagging detail.
She made a soft sound that was equal parts irritation and acceptance. A so we’re going to play this stupid game? coupled with I love you, Mac, and I know you can be totally neurotic, so I’m going to humor you. “A couple of weeks before I lost time. Or whatever happened.”
“The body I buried wasn’t wearing it.”
“That makes sense,” she said pointedly, “because it wasn’t mine.”
If the Book was trying to trick me, it might have made that mistake, putting a ring on her finger that hadn’t been on her when I’d buried her, skimming my acknowledgment that they’d been in love and embellishing it with a perfectly human touch. I doggedly pursued my line of questioning. “Were you wearing the ring in the alley?”
“No. I’d taken it off that afternoon. I’d discovered some things about him. We’d had a fight. I was angry.”
“What kind of things?”
“He was into some stuff I didn’t know about. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“When did you put it back on?”
“When I went home to change. After the alley, the next thing I knew, I was standing outside the Stag’s Head, wearing the most bizarre outfit. I didn’t even bring it with me to Dublin. I have no clue how I ended up with it on. Remember the dress I wore my last Christmas at home? The one I hated but you thought looked so good on me? The one that made my ass look flat.”
I pressed a suddenly trembling hand to my mouth.
“That’s what I had on with the ugliest shoes. I’d never even seen them before, and I was freezing. And pearls. You know I haven’t worn those things in years. I wanted to find Darroc, so I went home to change and go hunt for him but when I got there my place had been totally trashed. Did you do that? Did you freak out when you thought I was dead?”
I cleared my throat. Still, it took me two tries to get words out and when I did I croaked like a frog. “Why did you put the ring back on? According to you it was what—like only ten hours earlier that you’d taken it off?” I knew why. I’d have done the same thing with Barrons.
She said softly, “I love him. He’s not perfect. I’m not either.”
So, my sister had the same epiphany I did when it came to relationships. Not surprising. But my inner Book knew I’d had that epiphany. She’d spoken in present tense about Darroc, refusing to believe he was really dead. Again, like me. If someone told me my fiancé was dead and I’d never seen his body, I’d have a hard time believing it, too. I was intimately acquainted with the stages of grief: denial being the first.
“Tell me exactly what happened again. Every detail you remember from the night in the alley to the precise moment you were…here again.” I was struggling to stay focused on logistics when my heart was pounding so hard it felt like it might rupture.
“Why? Have you figured something out, Mac? What do you think’s going on? Oh, God, are you finally starting to believe me? Jr., I’m scared! I don’t understand what’s happening. How could I lose a whole year? How did I end up in that stupid dress?”
I closed my eyes and didn’t say: Well, gee, sis, it’s like this: your baby sister has a big bad Book of black magic inside her and she wanted you back so badly, she brought you back from the dead. In the dress she chose to bury you in because she thought you looked so good in it—and hey, nobody’s looking at your ass when you’re lying in a coffin anyway—along with the pearls Mom and Dad gave you for your sixteenth birthday because you said they made you feel like a princess. And by the way, you’re wrong—those shoes totally rocked that outfit. I know. I bought them at Bloomingdale’s for you, after you died.
Jay-sus.
I’d nearly fallen off my chair when she mentioned the dress. But of course, if I’d brought her back from the dead, she’d be wearing what I buried her in. Ergo, no body in casket.
And my inner Book probably knew that, too. If we were, as Barrons seemed to think, embedded together. Total clusterfuck.
“I’m not sure,” I said finally. “But can we meet somewhere and talk?”
She laughed and said breathless
ly, “Yes, Mac. Please. When? Where?”
I had a meeting tonight that I wasn’t missing and I wasn’t sure how long it would take.
So we made plans to meet at her place first thing in the morning. She’d make coffee and breakfast, she said.
It’d be like old times, she said.
31
“Rise, rise, rise in revolution…”
“Have you planted the icefire?” Cruce asked, striding impatiently across the cavern to meet him as soon as he’d finished flattening his flexible carapace and wedging it beneath the door.
Minutes passed while the roach god assumed form. It was never easy but then little was for a roach, living on the refuse and remains of others. Being chased and hunted and exterminated. Considered an enemy by one and all. In the history of man, he’d never met a human that welcomed a roach into its home, or anywhere for that matter. He was pestilence and vermin, nothing more. Yet.
“Yes,” he finally grated. It had taken time to distribute the tiny pods Cruce had given him containing the blue flames, but he’d seen them well-positioned where they’d not be discovered, and when the moment was right, numerous roaches would be standing by, each with tiny plastic vials Toc had provided, which they would chew through with their heavily sclerotized mandibles to mix a drop of Unseelie blood with the flame.
“Where?” Cruce demanded, and the roach god wondered briefly if he’d merely traded one arrogant, belittling bastard for another. The prince was restless tonight, radiating dark energy, eyes bright. He preferred a cool ally, not a hot one.
The roach god repeated the three locations his ally had chosen: an old library where they stored the largest number of ancient scrolls; the chambers once occupied by the prior Grand Mistress; and the chambers occupied by the current one.
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