My sister had been missing the marrow in her bones, her endocrine glands had been drained, her eyeballs were collapsed, and she’d had no spinal fluid. The coroner had been at a complete loss.
I wasn’t. Not anymore.
I knew what caste had killed Alina. What had gnawed and ripped and torn at her flesh to slowly and carefully remove all her inner fluids as if they were gourmet delights.
What they’d said penetrated, belatedly.
Brought us tasty to drink, fast one? Last one was sweet.
I froze, horrified. Surely that didn’t mean what it sounded like it meant. Dani was the fast one. What—Why—My brain turned to sludge.
They were staring behind me with hopeful expressions. “She issh ourssh, assh well?” Six mouths spoke as one. “You mussht take her sshpear for ussh. You mussht make her helplessh, like you did other blondie. Leave in alley with ussh again.”
Dani. I open my mouth. I can’t seem to make a sound.
I hear a choking noise behind me, a strangled sob.
“Do not go, fassht one!” Six mouths cry, gazes fixed behind me. “Come back, feed ussh again! We are ssho hungry!”
I turn and stare at Dani.
Her eyes are enormous, her face pale. She’s backing away from me.
If she draws her sword, it’ll make everything easy.
She doesn’t.
“Draw your sword.”
She shakes her head and takes another step backward.
“Draw your fucking sword!”
She bites her lower lip and shakes her head again. “Ain’t doing it. I’m faster. Ain’t killing you.”
“You killed my sister. Why not me?” The dark lake in my head begins to boil.
“Ain’t like that.”
“You brought her to them.”
Her face screws up with anger. “You don’t know a fecking thing ’bout me, you stupid fecking fecker! You don’t know nothing!”
I hear rustles behind me, leathery wet sounds, and I whirl. The freaks that killed my sister are taking advantage of the distraction and trying to leave.
Not a chance in hell. This is what I’ve been living for. This moment. My revenge. First them, then her.
I lunge for them, screaming my sister’s name.
I slice and rip and tear.
I begin with my spear and end with my bare hands.
I fall on the pair like the beast form of Barrons. My sister died in an alley with these monsters working on her, and now I know it wasn’t fast. I can see her, white-lipped with pain, knowing she’s going to die, scratching a clue into the pavement. Hoping I’ll come, afraid I’ll come. Believing I could succeed where she failed. God, I miss her! Hatred consumes me. I devolve into vengeance, I embrace it, I become it.
When I finish, there are no pieces larger than my fist.
I’m shaking, gasping, covered with bits of flesh and gray matter from smashing their skulls.
Feed ussh again! they’d demanded.
I double over and hit the pavement, puking. I puke until I dry-heave, then I dry-heave until my ears ring and my eyes are stinging.
I don’t have to look behind me to know she’s long gone.
I finally got what I came to Dublin for.
I know who killed my sister.
The girl I’d begun to think of as my sister.
I curl in a tight ball on the cold pavement and cry.
37
As I stepped out of the shower, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. It wasn’t pretty.
In all the time I’d been in Dublin, with all the horrors I’ve encountered, I’ve never seen quite this expression on my face.
I look haunted. Haunted is all about the eyes.
I feel haunted.
I came here for revenge. I brace my palms on either side of the bathroom sink and lean close into the mirror, studying myself.
Who’s in there, behind my face? A king that wouldn’t think twice about killing a fourteen-year-old girl I love? Loved. Hate her now. She took my sister to an alley, gave her to monsters that slaughtered her.
I can’t even think things like why? It doesn’t seem to matter. She did it. Res ipsa loquitur as Daddy would say. The thing speaks for itself.
I don’t have the emotional energy to dry my hair or put on makeup. I dress and drift downstairs where I slump on the sofa in the rear seating area, as thunder rolls in the leaden sky. The day is so thick with rain that it looks like dusk at noon. Lightning crashes.
I’ve lost so much. And gained precious little.
I’d had Dani in the gains column.
Finding out who killed Alina made the pain of her death fresh again. It made it all too visual for me. I’d told myself she died instantly and whatever had been done to her had happened postmortem. I knew better now. While they’d slowly drained her, she lay there scratching a clue into the pavement for me. I sat, torturing myself with thoughts of her torture, as if that might accomplish something useful, besides torturing myself.
Leftover cake mocked me on the coffee table. Unopened presents teetered nearby. I’d baked a cake for my sister’s murderer. I’d wrapped presents. I’d painted her nails. I’d sat and watched movies with her. What kind of monster was I? How could I have been so blind? Were there clues I’d never noticed? Had she ever slipped? Revealed knowledge of Alina she shouldn’t have had but I hadn’t been paying enough attention?
I dropped my head in my hands and squeezed, rubbing my temples, tugging my hair.
The journal pages!
“She has Alina’s journal,” I said, incredulous. The journal pages that had shown up for a brief time had made no sense to me. They’d never really told me anything and they’d appeared at the strangest times. Like the day Dani had brought my mail in and there’d been one in the stack. In a thick, fine envelope, just the kind a corporation like Rowena’s might use.
But why would she have given me those entries? They’d pretty much just been about …
“How much Alina loved me.” Tears stung my eyes.
The bell over the door tinkled.
I rose in a half crouch and waited. Who was here in the middle of the day?
My muscles stayed tense, and my gut tightened with anticipation. I eased back down to the sofa.
I responded that way to only one man. Jericho Barrons.
I was lost in grief and fury and hated being alive. And still I wanted to stand up, stripping as I went, and have sex with him right here on the bookstore floor. Was that the sum total of my existence? I didn’t get the erudition of I think therefore I am. Instead, I got I am, therefore I want to fuck Jericho Barrons.
“Got a little messy in my back alley, Ms. Lane.” His voice floated around bookcases, preceding him.
Not nearly as messy as I’d’ve liked. I wished I had those Unseelie bastards alive right now to kill all over again. How was I going to do what I was supposed to do?
Maybe I could just take her to an alley and give her to some monsters to die. She would be hard to catch, but my dark, glassy lake was stirring, whispering, offering all kinds of assistance, and I knew that I had more than enough juice to catch the kid. To do anything I wanted. There was something very cold inside me. Always had been. I wanted to welcome it now. Let it chill my blood and frost all my emotions until there was nothing left in me that was haunted because there was nothing left in me.
“The rain’ll clean it up.”
“I don’t like messes on my—”
“Jericho.” It was plea, lament, and benediction.
He stopped speaking instantly. He appeared around the last bookcase and stared at me. “You can say it that way anytime, Mac. Especially if you’re naked and I’m on top of you.” I could feel his gaze on me, searching, trying to understand.
I didn’t understand myself. The plea had been to not pick on me right now. Sarcasm would undo me. The lament had been a sharing of my pain, because I knew he understood pain himself. The benediction was the part I couldn’t explain. As if he was
sacred to me. I looked up at him. He’d been with my alleged mother the night she’d left the abbey, the night the Book had escaped, and never told me. How could I revere him? I didn’t have the energy to confront him. Learning that Dani had killed Alina had left me feeling like a popped balloon.
“Why are you sitting in the dark?” he said finally.
“I know who killed Alina.”
“Ah.” The single word said more than most people can say in entire paragraphs. “Beyond a shadow?”
“Black and white.”
He waited. He didn’t ask. And I suddenly understood that he wouldn’t. This was part of who he was. Barrons did feel, and when he felt most strongly, he spoke the least, asked the fewest questions. Even from here I could feel the tension in his body as he waited to see if I would tell him more. If I didn’t, he would continue walking through the store and vanish as silently as he’d glided into view.
But if I spoke? What if I asked him to make love to me? Not fuck me hard, but make love.
“It was Dani.”
He said nothing for so long that I began to think he hadn’t heard me. Then he released a long, weary-sounding breath. “Mac, I’m sorry.”
I looked up at him. “What do I do?” I was appalled to hear my voice crack.
“You’ve done nothing yet?”
I shook my head.
“What do you want to do?”
I laughed bitterly and nearly began sobbing. “Pretend I never found out and go on like it never happened.”
“Then that’s what you do.”
I tipped my head back and looked up at him in disbelief. “What? Barrons, the great hand of vengeance, is telling me to forgive and forget? You never forgive. You never walk away from a fight.”
“I like to fight. You do, too, sometimes. But in this case, it doesn’t sound like it.”
“It’s not that I—I mean … it’s … God, it’s so complicated!”
“Life is. Imperfect. Royally fucked up. How do you feel about her?”
“I—” felt like a traitor answering him.
“Let me rephrase that: How did you feel about her before you found out she’d killed Alina?”
“—loved her,” I whispered.
“Do you think love just goes away? Pops out of existence when it becomes too painful or inconvenient, as if you never felt it?”
I looked at him. What did Jericho Barrons know of love?
“If only it did. If only it could be turned off. It’s not a faucet. Love’s a bloody river with level-five rapids. Only a catastrophic act of nature or a dam has any chance of stopping it—and then usually only succeeds in diverting it. Both measures are extreme and change the terrain so much you end up wondering why you bothered. No landmarks to gauge your position when it’s done. Only way to survive is to devise new ways to map out life. You loved her yesterday, you love her today. And she did something that devastates you. You’ll love her tomorrow.”
“She killed my sister!”
“With malice? Spite? Out of cruelty? Hunger for power?”
“How would I know?”
“You love her,” he said roughly. “That means you know her. When you love somebody you see inside them. Use your heart. Is Dani that kind of person?”
Jericho Barrons was telling me to use my heart. Could life get any stranger?
“Think maybe somebody told her to do it?”
“She should have known better!”
“Humans, in their infancy, tend to be infants.”
“Are you making excuses for her?” I snarled.
“There is no excuse. I’m merely pointing out what you want me to point out. How has Dani treated you since the day you met?”
It hurt to even say the words. “Like a big sister she looked up to.”
“Has she been loyal to you? Taken your side against others?”
I nodded. Even when she’d thought I’d hooked up with Darroc, she’d have remained at my side. Followed me into hell.
“She must have known you were Alina’s sister.”
“Yes.”
“Coming to see you would have felt like facing the firing squad, every time.”
I’d told her we were like sisters. And sisters, I’d told her, forgive each other everything. I’d caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror after I’d said it, when she hadn’t known I was looking. Her expression had been bleak, and now I understood why. Because she’d been thinking, Yeah, right. Mac’s gonna kill me if she ever finds out. Yet she’d still kept coming. When I thought about it, I was astonished she hadn’t hunted down and killed those Unseelie, removing the damning evidence from the face of the earth.
He was silent a long moment, then, “Did she actually kill Alina? With her hands? A weapon?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Everything has degrees.”
“You think some ways of killing are better?”
“I know they are.”
“Death is death!”
“Agreed. But killing is not always murder.”
“I think she took her somewhere she knew she’d be killed.”
“Now you don’t sound certain she killed her.”
I told him what had happened last night, what the Unseelie had said, how Alina’s body had looked, how Dani had vanished.
He nodded in silent agreement when I was finished.
“So, what do I do?”
“Are you asking me for advice?”
I braced myself for a sarcastic comment. “Don’t snap my head off, okay? I had a bad night.”
“Wasn’t going to.” He sat down on his heels in front of me and looked into my eyes. “This one got you. Worse than all the other things that happened to you. Worse than being turned Pri-ya.”
I shrugged. “I got to have sex nonstop, no blame, no shame. You kidding me? Compared to the rest of my life, that was a joy.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time. Then, “But not something you’d care to repeat in full possession of your senses.”
“It was …” I searched for words to explain.
He was motionless, waiting.
“Like Halloween. When people rioted. They loot. Do crazy things.”
“You’re saying Pri-ya was a blackout.”
I nodded. “So what do I do?”
“You pull your fucking—” He bared his teeth on a silent snarl and looked away. When he looked back again, his face was a cool mask of urbanity. “You choose what you can live with. And what you can’t live without. That’s what.”
“You mean can I live with killing her? Can I stand myself if I don’t kill her?”
“I mean can you live without her. You kill her, you snuff her life forever. Dani will never be again. At fourteen, she’ll be done. She had her chances, she fucked up, she lost. Are you ready to be her judge, jury, and executioner?”
I swallowed and dropped my head, shielding myself with hair as if I could hide behind it and not have to come out. “You’re saying I won’t like myself.”
“I think you’d deal with it fine. You find places to put things. I know how you work. I’ve seen you kill. I think O’Bannion and his men were the hardest for you because they were your first humans, but after that, you took to it with a bit of stone cold. But this would be a chosen killing. Premeditated. It makes you breathe different. To swim in that sea, you have to grow gills.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying. Are you telling me to kill her?”
“Some actions change you for the better. Some for the worse. Be sure which one it is and accept it before you do anything. Death, for Dani, is irrevocable.”
“Would you kill her?”
I could tell he was uncomfortable with the question, but I didn’t know why.
After a strained silence, he said, “If that’s what you want, yes. I’ll kill her for you.”
“That’s not what I—no, I wasn’t asking you to kill her for me. I was asking if you would in my shoes.”
“The shoes you w
ear are beyond my ability to fathom. It’s been too long.”
“You’re not going to tell me what to do, are you?” I wanted him to. I didn’t want any of the responsibility for this. I wanted someone to blame if I didn’t like how it turned out.
“I respect you more than that.”
I almost fell off the couch. I parted my hair and looked up at him, but he was no longer squatting in front of me. He’d stood and moved away.
“Are we, like, having a conversation?”
“Did you just, like, ask me for advice and listen with an open mind? If so, then yes, I would call this a conversation. I can see how you might not recognize it, considering all I usually get from you is attitude and hostility—”
“Oh! All I ever get from you is hostility and—”
“And here we go. She’s bristling and my hackles go up. Bloody hell, I feel fangs coming on. Tell you what, Ms. Lane,” he said softly, “anytime you want to have a conversation with me, leave the myriad issues you have with wanting to fuck me every time you look at me outside my cave, come on in, and see what you find. You might like it.”
He turned and began moving toward the entrance to the rear part of the store.
“Wait! I still don’t know what to do about Dani.”
“Then that’s your answer for now.” He stopped at the door and glanced back at me. “How much longer will you dissemble?”
“Who uses words like dissemble?”
He leaned back against the door and folded his arms. “I won’t wait much longer. You’re on your last chance with me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” What was he saying? Would Barrons walk away from me? Me? He never walked away from me. He was the one who would always keep me alive. And always want me. I’d come to count on those things like I counted on air and food.
“During a blackout, people do what they’ve wanted to do all along but have repressed, afraid of the consequences. Worried what others might think of them. Afraid of what they’ll see in themselves. Or simply unwilling to get punished by the society that governs them. You don’t care what other people think anymore. Nobody’s going to punish you. Which raises the question: Why are you still afraid of me? What haven’t you wrapped your head around yet?”
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