Barrons took my arm and turned me toward the staircase, but I shook him off and turned back to Lor. I was getting way too much bad press. I wasn’t a stone. I hadn’t been created by the Unseelie King. And I wasn’t a traitor.
One of those things I could have a satisfying fight about.
“Why am I a bitch?” I demanded. “Because you think I slept with Darroc?”
“Shut her up before I kill her,” Lor told Barrons.
“Don’t talk to him about me. Talk to me about me. Or do you think I’m not worthy of your regard because, when I believed Barrons was dead, I hooked up with the enemy to accomplish my goals? How terrible of me,” I mocked. “I guess I should have just laid down and died with a whimper. Would that have impressed you, Lor?”
“Get the bitch out of my face.”
“I guess taking up with Darroc makes me pretty … well”—I knew what word Barrons hated, and I was in the mood to try it out on Lor—“mercenary, doesn’t it? You can blame me for that if you want to. Or you can pull your head out of your ass and respect me for it.”
Lor turned his head and looked at me then, as if I’d begun to speak his language. Unlike Barrons, the word didn’t seem to bother him. In fact, it seemed he understood, even appreciated it. Something flickered in his cold eyes. I’d interested him.
“Some people wouldn’t see a traitor when they looked at me. Some people would see a survivor. Call me anything you like—I sleep fine at night. But you will look at me when you say it. Or I’ll get so far in your face you’ll be seeing me with your eyes closed. You’ll be seeing me in your nightmares. I’ll scorch myself on the backs of your eyelids. Get off my back and stay off it. I’m not the woman I used to be. If you want a war with me, you’ll get one. Just try me. Give me an excuse to go play in that dark place inside my head.”
“Dark place?” Barrons murmured.
“As if you don’t have one,” I snapped. “Your cave makes mine look like a white beach on a sunny day.” Shouldering past them, I pushed up the stairs. I thought I heard a rumble of laughter behind me and glanced over my shoulder. Three men stared at me with the dead, emotionless gazes of executioners.
But, hey—they were all looking.
Behind a chrome balustrade, the upper floor stretched: acres of smooth dark-glass walls without doors or handles.
I had no idea how many rooms were up here. From the size of the downstairs, there could be fifty or more.
We walked along the glass walls until some tiny detail I couldn’t discern signified an entrance. Barrons pressed his palm to a dark-glass panel, which slid to the side, then he pushed me into the room. He didn’t step in with me but continued moving down the hall to some other destination.
The panel slid closed behind me, leaving me alone with Ryodan in the room that was the guts of Chester’s. It was made entirely of glass—walls, floor, and ceiling. I could see out, but no one could see in.
The perimeter of the ceiling was lined with dozens of small LED screens fed by cameras that panned every room in the club, as if you couldn’t see enough of what was going on merely by looking down past your feet. I stayed where I was. Every step you take on a glass floor feels like a leap of faith when the only solid floor you can see is forty feet below.
“Mac,” said Ryodan.
He stood behind a desk, couched in shadow, a big man, dark in a white shirt. The only light in the room came from the monitors above our heads. I wanted to launch myself across the room and attack him, claw his eyes out, bite him, punch him, stab him with my spear. I was astonished by the depth of hostility I felt.
He’d made me kill Barrons.
High on that cliff, the two of us had beaten, cut, and stabbed the man who’d been keeping me alive almost since the day I arrived in Dublin. And I’d wondered for days that had felt like years if Ryodan had wanted Barrons dead.
“I thought you tricked me into killing him. I thought you’d betrayed him.”
“I kept telling you to leave. You didn’t. You were never supposed to see what he was.”
“You mean what you all are,” I corrected. “All nine of you.”
“Careful, Mac. Some things don’t get talked about. Ever.”
I reached for my spear. He could have told me the truth on the cliff, but, like Barrons, he’d let me suffer. The more I thought about how both of them had withheld a truth from me that would have spared me so much agony, the angrier I got. “I was just making sure that when I stab and kill you, you’ll come back so I can do it again.”
The spear was in my hand, but suddenly my hand was in a huge fist, and the tip was pointed at my own throat.
Ryodan could move like Dani, Barrons, and the others. So fast I couldn’t defend myself. He stood behind me, arm snaked around my waist.
“Never make that threat. Put it away, Mac. Or I’ll take it for good.” He jabbed me with the tip of the spear in warning. “Barrons wouldn’t let you do that.”
“You might be surprised what Barrons would let me do.”
“Because he thinks I’m a traitor.”
“I saw you with Darroc myself. I heard you in the alley last night. When deeds and words align, the truth is plain.”
“I believed both of you were dead. What did you expect? The same survival instinct you admire in each other offends you in me. I think it worries you. Makes me more unpredictable than you’d like.”
He guided my hand to the holster and tucked the spear back in. “ ‘Unpredictable’ is the key word there. Did you flip, Mac?”
“Do I look like I flipped?”
He brushed hair from my face, tucked it gently behind an ear. I shivered. He bristled with the same kind of energy Barrons did—heat, muscle, and danger. When Barrons touches me, it turns me on. But when Ryodan stands behind me, locking me in place with an arm of steel, touching me tenderly—it scares the hell out of me.
“Let me tell you something about flipping, Mac,” he said softly against my ear. “Most people are good and occasionally do something they know is bad. Some people are bad and struggle every day to keep it under control. Others are corrupt to the core and don’t give a damn, as long as they don’t get caught. But evil is a completely different creature, Mac. Evil is bad that believes it’s good.”
“What are you saying, Ryodan? That I flipped and I’m too stupid to know it?”
“If the shoe fits.”
“It doesn’t. Point of curiosity: Which camp are you and Barrons in? Corrupt to the core and don’t give a damn?”
“Why do you think the Book killed Darroc?”
I knew where this was going. Ryodan’s theory was that I wasn’t tracking the Sinsar Dubh; it kept finding me. He was about to tell me that it had killed Darroc to further its goal of getting closer to me. He was wrong. “It killed Darroc to stop him. It told me no one was going to control it. It must have learned from me that Darroc knew a shortcut to containing and using it, and it killed him to prevent me or anyone else from discovering it.”
“How did it learn that from you? A cozy chat over tea?”
“It found me the night I stayed at Darroc’s penthouse. It … skims my mind. Tasting me, knowing me, it says.”
His arm tightened painfully around my waist.
“You’re hurting me!”
His arm relaxed minutely. “Did you tell Barrons this?”
“Barrons hasn’t exactly been in a talkative mood.”
Ryodan was no longer standing behind me. He was at his desk again. I rubbed my stomach, relieved he was no longer touching me. He was so much like Barrons that his body against mine was disturbing on multiple levels. I couldn’t make out much of his face in the shadows, but I didn’t need to. He was so furious that he didn’t trust himself not to harm me if he remained close.
“The Sinsar Dubh can pick thoughts out of your mind? Have you considered the potential ramifications of that?”
I shrugged. It wasn’t as if I had much time to consider anything. I’d been so busy jumping from the fryi
ng pan into the fire and back into the frying pan again that reflection upon the various possibles wasn’t top on my list of priorities. Who could worry about potential ramifications when the real ones kept kicking you in the teeth?
“It means that it knows about us,” he said tightly.
“First of all, why would it care? Second, I hardly know anything about you at all, so it couldn’t have gotten much.”
“I’ve killed for less.”
Of that I had no doubt. Ryodan was stone cold and suffered no conflicts about it. “If it even bothered skimming for information about you, the only thing it knows is that I thought the two of you were dead and you’re not.”
“Not true. You know a great deal more than that, and that the Book might know about us at all should have been the first thing you told Barrons the moment he changed back and you knew he was alive.”
“Well, forgive the fuck out of me for being shocked senseless when I realized he wasn’t dead. Why didn’t you tell me he was the beast, Ryodan? Why did we have to kill him? I know it’s not because he can’t control himself when he’s the beast. He controlled himself last night when he rescued me from the Book. He can change at will, can’t he? What happened in the Silvers? Does the place have some kind of effect on you, make you uncontrollable?”
I almost slapped myself in the forehead. Barrons had told me that the reason he tattooed himself with black and red protection runes was because using dark magic called a price due, unless you took measures to protect yourself against the backlash. Did using IYD require the blackest kind of magic to make it work? Would it grant his demand to magically transport him to me no matter where I was but devolve him into the darkest, most savage version of himself as the price?
“It was because of how he got there, wasn’t it?” I said. “The spell you two worked sent him to me like it was supposed to, but the cost was that it turned him into the lowest common denominator of himself. An insane killing machine. Which he figured was all right, because if I was dying, I’d probably need a killing machine around. A champion to show up and decimate all my enemies. That was it, wasn’t it?”
Ryodan had gone completely still. Not a muscle twitched. I wasn’t sure he was breathing.
“He knew what would happen if I pressed IYD, and he made plans with you to handle it.” That was Barrons, always thinking, always managing risks where I was concerned. “He tattooed me so he would sense his mark on me and not kill me. And you were supposed to track him—that’s why you both wear those cuffs, so you can find each other—and kill him so he’d come back as the man form of himself, and I’d never be any wiser. I’d get rescued and have no clue it was Barrons who’d done it or that he sometimes turns into a beast. But you screwed up. And that’s what he was mad at you about this morning on the phone. It was your failure to kill him that let the cat out of the bag.”
A tiny muscle twitched in his jaw. He was pissed. I was definitely right.
“He can always circumvent the price of black magic,” I marveled. “When you kill him, he comes back exactly the same as he was before, doesn’t he? He could tattoo his whole body with protection runes and, when he ran out of skin, kill himself so he could come back with a clean slate, to start all over.” That was why his tattoos weren’t always the same. “Talk about your ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card! And if you hadn’t botched the plan, I would never have known. It’s your fault I know, Ryodan. I think that means it’s not me you should kill, it’s yourself. Oh, gee, wait,” I said sarcastically, “that wouldn’t work, would it?”
“Did you know that when you were in the Silvers, the Book paid a visit to the abbey?”
I winced. “Dani told me. How many of the sidhe-seers were killed?”
“Irrelevant. Why do you think it went to the abbey?”
Irrelevant, my ass. Being unable to die—I was still having a hard time wrapping my brain around that and was certain I could come up with some creative ways to test it—had given him a Fae share of arrogance and disdain for mortals. “Let me guess,” I said tartly. “This is somehow my fault, too?”
Ryodan pressed a button on his desk and spoke into an intercom. “Tell Barrons to leave them where they are. They’re safer there. I’ll bring her to them. We’ve got a problem. A big one.” He released the button. “Yes,” he said to me, “it is. I think that when it couldn’t find you, it went to the abbey, hunting for you, trying to get a lead on you.”
“Do the others believe this, too, or is it your personal delusion? Perspective, Ryodan. Get some.”
“I’m not the one that needs it.”
“Why do you hate me?”
“I have no emotion about you at all, Mac. I take care of my own. You are not my own.” He moved past me, pressed his palm to the door, and stood waiting for me to exit. “Barrons wants you to see your parents so as you go about your business you will remember they are here. With me.”
“Lovely,” I muttered.
“I suffer them to live, against my better judgment, as a favor to Barrons. He’s running out of favors. Remember that, too.”
19
“You put them in a glass room? Can’t you give them a little privacy?” I stared at my parents through the wall. Although comfortably furnished with rugs, a bed, a sofa, a small table, and two chairs, the room was made of the same kind of glass as Ryodan’s office, only in reverse. Mom and Dad couldn’t see out, but everyone else could see in.
I glanced to the left. The shower had an enclosure of sorts; the toilet didn’t. “Do they know people can see in?”
“I spare their lives and you ask for privacy. This isn’t for you. Or them. It’s insurance for me,” Ryodan said.
Barrons joined us. “I told Fade to bring up sheets and duct tape.”
“For what?” I was horrified. Were they going to roll my parents up in sheets and duct-tape them?
“They can tape sheets to the walls.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks,” I muttered. I was silent a moment, watching them through the glass. Dad was sitting on the sofa, facing my mom, holding her hands, talking softly. He was robust and handsome as ever, and the extra silver in his hair only made him look more distinguished. Mom had that glazed look she got whenever she couldn’t deal, and I knew he was probably talking about normal, everyday things to ground her in a reality she could face. I had no doubt he was assuring her everything was going to be okay, because that was what Jack Lane did: exuded safety and security, made you believe he could deliver on anything he promised. It was what made him such a great lawyer, such a wonderful father. No obstacle had ever seemed too large, no threat too scary with Daddy around. “I need to talk to them.”
“No,” Ryodan said.
“Why?” Barrons demanded.
I hesitated. I’d never told Barrons that I’d gone to Ashford with V’lane, or admitted that I’d overheard a conversation between my parents in which they’d been discussing the circumstances of our adoption, or that Daddy had mentioned a prophecy about me—one in which I supposedly ended up dooming the whole world.
Nana O’Reilly—the ninety-seven-year-old woman whom Kat and I visited in her house by the sea—had mentioned two prophecies: one that promised hope, the other warning of a blight upon the earth. If I genuinely was part of either one, I was determined to fulfill the former. I wanted to know more about the latter so I could avoid it.
I wanted the names of the people Daddy had spoken to all those years ago when he’d gone to Ireland to dig into Alina’s medical history when she was sick. I wanted to know exactly what they’d told him.
But there was no way I could ask him about any of it in front of Barrons and Ryodan. If they got the smallest whiff of some prophecy in which I supposedly doomed the world, they might just lock me up and throw away the key.
“I miss them. They need to know I’m alive.”
“They know. I videoed you walking in, and Barrons showed them the clip.” Ryodan paused, then added, “Jack insisted on it.”
I gla
nced sharply at Ryodan. Was that a faint smile on his face? He liked my father. I’d heard it in his voice when he called him Jack. He respected him. I glowed inside. I’m always proud of my daddy, but when somebody like Ryodan likes him … Even though I couldn’t stand the owner of Chester’s, I took it as a compliment.
“Too bad you’re not really his daughter. He comes from strong blood.”
I gave him a look I learned from Barrons.
“But nobody’s sure exactly where you came from, are they, Mac?”
“My biological mother was Isla O’Connor, leader of the Haven for the sidhe-seers,” I informed him coolly.
“Really? Because I did some digging when Barrons told me what the O’Reilly woman said, and it turns out Isla had only one child, not two. Her name was Alina. And she’s dead.”
“Obviously you didn’t dig deep enough,” I retorted. But I suddenly felt uneasy. So that was why Nana had called me Alina. “She must have had me later. Nana just didn’t know about it.”
“Isla was the only member of the Haven who survived the night the Sinsar Dubh was set free from its prison.”
“Where are you getting your information?” I demanded.
“And there was no ‘later’ for her.”
“How do you know that? What do you know about my mother, Ryodan?”
Ryodan glanced at Barrons. The look they exchanged spoke volumes, but unfortunately I had no idea what language they were speaking.
I glared at Barrons. “And you wonder why I don’t confide in you? You don’t tell me anything.”
“Leave it alone. I’m handling this,” Barrons told Ryodan.
“I suggest you do a better job.”
“And I suggest you go fuck yourself.”
“She didn’t tell you that the Book visited her the other night at Darroc’s. It skims her mind, picks up her thoughts.”
“I think it only picks up the surface ones,” I said hastily. “Not everything.”
“It killed Darroc because it learned from her that he knew a shortcut. Wonder what else it learned.”
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