“Otherwise you wouldn’t care if I remained alive,” I said, stating her unstated implication.
“Otherwise it wouldn’t signify.”
I deflected the pain of the jab, remaining focused on her, realizing I might have a unique insight into Jada. How had I forgotten I’d once gone away and come back different myself? When I believed I’d killed Barrons, grief and rage had turned me into a cold, hyperfocused bitch. Jada might never tell me what she’d gone through in the Silvers but it was a sure thing it hadn’t been a walk in the park. How would someone have reached me during those days and nights of unyielding obsession when I’d found it perfectly reasonable to sleep with my sister’s lover and plot the destruction of the world? Could anyone have? “I know you’re not Da—not the person we remember. I’d like to get to know you now.”
“Take the spear. I am what you see. There is no getting to know me.”
“I’d like to hear about your time in the Silvers.” Perhaps the right actions could have thawed me back then. Maybe love, if someone had been able to rattle me enough to feel it. I did recall enough of those dark days to know the last people in the world I’d wanted to see were my parents. Jack Lane would have disturbed me deeply. Staying savage and psychotic would have been extremely difficult around the man who’d taught me to be everything but. What might penetrate Jada’s icy facade? “I want to know what your life was like.”
“My life is now.”
“Jada, I’m sorry I chased you that night. I wish I could do it over again. Keep you from going through.”
“Once again implying that I am a mistake. That I came back wrong.” She looked at Barrons and Ryodan, who were standing behind me in silence. “How does one get her to focus?”
I snatched the spear from Jada’s hand. “Bees.” I changed the subject that was clearly as dead as a three-day corpse. “And bats. I wasn’t out here taking a cheery stroll through your gardens. I was investigating. Figure out how to keep the damn things from getting sucked into that hole or we’ll be tearing down the abbey.”
“No one is tearing down my abbey. This evening,” Jada said. “Galway. Three miles east of town there is one of these anomalies much higher in the air. Bring Dancer. I’ll meet you there.”
“This evening, Chester’s,” Ryodan said flatly. “That’s where we’ll be. Unless you think you can save the world alone.”
Jada was motionless a moment then, “The map I saw—”
“The map Dani saw,” he corrected.
“—I assume you’ve continued tracking the anomalies.”
“Every bloody one. And there are more than there were. You’re missing information. I have it.”
“Tonight, then. Chester’s.” She turned and freeze-framed out.
—
Dawn was pressing at the edges of the drapes by the time Jada sought her private quarters to sleep for a few hours. It had been three days since she’d last rested, and she wanted to be sharp for the meeting tonight.
Working with a team was so much more complicated than working alone. But none of the things she’d learned Silverside had the least effect on the growing tears in the fabric of their reality. Closing the doors on Cruce had been difficult but doable. Not a single ward or spell she’d mastered affected the black holes. She’d tested them exhaustively on the smaller, isolated ones.
Long ago she’d have pursued her investigation alone, but she’d lost too much and was unwilling to lose more. The girl she’d once been was impulsive, to her own detriment. Jada had conditioned herself to pause before acting. She was uncomfortably aware that very pause might be why she’d failed to predict the Crimson Hag’s moves on the cliff. Intellect and gut were two vastly different things, with disparate strengths and weaknesses.
Imperfect as a child. Imperfect as a woman. But at least she could choose her imperfections.
The Dragon Lady’s library in the east wing was her domain, locked, warded, and spelled so nothing could get in or out unless she permitted it. Inside the ornate yet comfortable book-filled chambers was everything she needed to survive. And a few things she’d gathered for no discernible reason.
Seeing Dancer had been uncomfortable. The others she’d managed with nominal discomfort, reminding herself of one past incident or another, mortaring the wall between them.
Not Dancer. They’d had a single argument long ago about boundaries and friendship, about letting each other breathe, but it had steamed off like fog on a sunny morning.
He’d accepted her on first sight, had said, “Jada,” letting her know right off the bat they were fine, the same as his hand had always held easy, letting her stay or go. He’d said, “Welcome home,” and meant it, smiled, and it was genuine, with none of the rejection she saw in other people’s faces.
Mac, too, seemed different, but Jada had no desire to ponder it.
She moved into the second room of the chamber, draping various bits of shirts and towels and throws over lamps and sconces as she went, dimming the lights. Thanks to Cruce, all lights burned at all hours, and she hadn’t yet fathomed how to degrade that particular magic. She no longer feared Shades in the abbey. Her sidhe-seers had exterminated the last of them.
When she reached the bed, she rummaged beneath it and removed a small wooden box containing various items she’d collected upon her return to the city. She withdrew a folded piece of paper smudged with chocolate, sat on the bed, undid her hair, and ran her fingers through it.
Time. Both enemy and ally.
They thought she’d lost five and a half years of her life. She hadn’t. She’d lived them. They were the ones who’d lost five and a half years of her life. And held it against her.
Absurd.
She turned to gaze at handwritten words she knew by heart.
Kill the clocks, those time-thieving bastards
Haunting every mantel, wrist, and wall
Incessantly screaming our time is gone
Marching to war with us all
Kill the clocks they remind me of people
I once met in passing that pushed me aside
To rush to their train or plane or bus
Never seeing where the true enemy lie
Kill the clocks before they’ve seduced you
Into existing as they do, in shadows of the past
Counting the days as they slip by us
Boxed into a world where nothing ever lasts
Kill the clocks and live in the moment
No cogs or gears can steal our now
When you laugh with me, Mega, time stands still
In that moment, I’m perfect somehow
She touched the chocolate stain. It was a lifetime ago that Dancer had given her this poem, the same night he’d given her a bracelet she’d lost in the Silvers. Securely tied, it had been sacrifice that or her hand. At one point or another she’d sacrificed most everything.
“What a mess,” Shazam muttered crossly. He was sprawled in the middle of the bed, on a mound of pillows, peering over her arm. He yawned, baring enormous teeth and a curled-up black-tipped pink tongue. “Not a bit of it works. It should be ‘lay’ not ‘lie.’ What does manage to flow has been bastardized for the sake of the rhyme. Awkward.”
“Those who can’t, critique.”
“As if clocks can be killed, and even if they could I hardly think enlightenment would suddenly descend on such a primitive race, granting the ability to grasp complex temporal truths. Why do you insist on remaining with these three-dimensional people? There’s no question one of you will manage to destroy this world. Sooner rather than later. We should move on now. Did you bring me something to eat?” he said plaintively. “Something with blood and a heartbeat?” His whiskers trembled in anticipation.
“There are power bars—”
He sniffed. “A misnomer if I ever heard one. Not only don’t they confer any appreciable power, I’m quite certain they sap mine. They taste bad and make me depressed.” His violet eyes grew dewy.
“Everyt
hing makes you depressed. If you ever got out of bed—”
“What point is there in getting out of bed when you make me stay in these stuffy, dirty chambers?”
“I don’t make you do anything. I merely asked—”
“Your ‘asks,’ boulders around my neck,” he said woefully. “I’m as unseen as I was on Olean.”
“That makes two of us.” Refolding the poem along the creases, she tucked it back into the box, stretched out on the bed, sword at her side, and closed her eyes. She didn’t undress. She never undressed. Sleeping was dangerous enough. She’d had enough of waking up to battle nude. Although it had certain advantages—blood was much easier to wash off and it often disconcerted the hell out of a human male enemy—she preferred not to.
Shazam got up immediately, turned around three times, lay back down then bounded right back up, bristling so hard the mattress vibrated. “You smell bad. Like a predator. I’m not going to be able to sleep with you smelling up my air. Who touched you? Why did they?”
“I’m not taking a shower,” she said without opening her eyes. “I’m too tired. Besides, we’ve both smelled worse.”
“Fine. I’m not cuddling, then.”
“I didn’t ask you to cuddle. I never ask you to cuddle. I don’t even use that word.”
“You don’t have to. Your expects, bars on my cage.”
“I merely suggested in exchange for grooming, since you have all that fur and blaze like a small sun, you might keep me warm. Some of those worlds were cold.” And still, she often felt she had ice in her bones.
“It’s not cold here. And you haven’t groomed me all day. It was a long day. I was alone the whole time. Because you make me stay in here.”
“You would attract too much attention out there.”
“I would stay in a higher dimension.”
“Until you thought you might get some attention.”
“I like attention.”
“I don’t.”
“Did you ever like attention?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You’re ashamed of me. Because I’m fat. That’s why you don’t want them to see me.”
She slit her eyes open just barely, lids heavy. “I’m not ashamed of you. And you’re not fat.”
“Look at my belly,” he said tearfully, clutching it with both paws and jiggling.
She smiled. “I like your belly. I think it’s a perfectly wonderful belly, all soft and round.” Yesterday, he’d been convinced his ears were too big. The day before that it had been something wrong with his tail.
“Maybe you’re ashamed of yourself. You should be. The fur behind my ears is getting matted.”
“You’re beautiful, Shazam. I’ll groom you tomorrow,” Jada said sleepily.
“It’s already tomorrow.”
She sighed and stretched out her hand. Shazam head-butted it ecstatically.
Jada worked her fingers into the long fur behind his ears and began gently detangling. It was beyond her how he got so matted all the time when he slept most of the day and rarely left the bed.
He turned his face up, eyes slanting half closed with bliss and rumbled in his broad chest. “I see you, Yi-yi.”
Yi-yi was what he’d named her that day long ago on Olean when she’d named him. He’d been saying the same words to her every time she awakened or fell asleep for four years, and wouldn’t rest until she said it back.
“I see you, too, Shazam.”
Sometime later they curled together and slept as they had on so many worlds, Shazam’s head nestled on a pillow of her hair in the hollow between her neck and shoulder, one paw wrapped around her arm, one leg sticking straight up in the air, twitching as he dreamed.
Part II
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
—Adrienne Rich
The legend of a monster is invariably
worse than the monster.
Unfortunately the monster is usually
quite bad enough.
—The Book of Rain
12
“Yet it was there I felt the crossroads of time…”
Barrons and I landed a safe distance away from the cordoned-off black hole suspended in the air near the underground entrance to Chester’s nightclub.
Jayne and the Guardians had been busy, commandeered by Ryodan to secure each and every black hole in Dublin. I glanced over my shoulder at it and shivered. They disturbed me on a cellular level, even with my sidhe-seer senses muted. Murder was now alarmingly easy: just shove someone into a floating black sphere, no evidence remained. Not that anyone was prosecuting murders at the moment, or even caring, too busy trying to stay alive themselves. The endless line of patrons waiting to get into the club angled sharply away from the roped-off area, apparently liking it no more than I did.
Barrons slid from the Hunter’s back and dropped gracefully to the pavement. It never ceased to amaze me how such a large, massively muscled man could move so lightly, half vanishing into shadow without even seeming to try.
He reached up to help me down, as if my accompanying him was a foregone conclusion.
I had no doubt he planned to head off with Ryodan to do whatever they were going to do about the Dageus situation I’d still not been told about, and I’d be stuck alone at some subclub, sandwiched between black holes above and below, killing time all day, watching various soap operas unfold, waiting for “my man” to come get me and lead me like a dutiful puppet to our next activity.
Not.
Being a woman raised in a rural area of the Deep South—although my mother urged both Alina and me to be independent—I had a tendency to get swept along by a strong man.
Being Barrons, sprung from whatever cataclysm sprung him, he had a tendency to sweep things along without asking—humans falling neatly into the category of “things.”
But I’ve come to understand the difference between nurture and nature, and my nature is vastly different than I once believed. More rigid. Less malleable. More solitary. Less social. It would be easier to embrace what I suspect my true nature is if not for the dark squatter within making me second- and tenth-guess myself.
I’d been invisible and inactive too long. In the streets, I was a target for anyone who’d seen the blasted Dublin dailies. I was considerably less of a target high above them, where those hunting me wanted only to smother me in noxious yellow dust, not control or kill me.
“Go on without me. I want to be in the sky, Barrons.” The morning was aglow with the faint pastel promise of a dazzling Fae-kissed sunrise.
“I want you inside Chester’s.”
“Because you want to keep me safe. The Unseelie king wanted the concubine safe, too. Built a hell of a cage for her.” I would feel useless and aggravated in Chester’s. I would feel stupendously alive high above Dublin. No contest.
He went still, and for a moment I nearly lost track of him, standing right there in front of me. Big, dark man turned transparent shadow. “I’m not the Unseelie king,” he said tightly.
“And I’m not the concubine. Glad we figured that out.” There’d been a time I’d vacillated between thinking we were both one or the other.
“You’re being hunted, Ms. Lane.”
“What’s new?”
“Feeling invincible because you ate a little Unseelie?” Barrons said sardonically.
Feeling alive because sex with him had reminded me who I was, deep down at the core, glued me back together in some intangible way, but I was not about to tell the arrogant beast that. Boundaries were necessary for a successful relationship. Most relationships aborted in the boundar
y-defining stage. Not because people demanded what they needed. But because they didn’t, then got resentful about it.
I wanted to walk beside this man for a long time, and to do that I’d have to be able to be completely myself. I was still discovering what that was. I couldn’t say that I’d ever call us a “couple.” But we were together. Committed to that togetherness as best as we were both able. I wondered what my rules were. Wondered who the woman was that had once been this man’s sun, moon, and stars. If he’d tried to curtail her activities.
“Stay the fuck out of my head, Ms. Lane.”
I blinked. I hadn’t even been aware I was pressing.
“She was her own woman,” he said. “You are, too.”
“That’s what I wanted to know.”
“Ask next time,” he said coolly.
I snorted. “You’ll answer?”
He turned and walked away. Over his shoulder, he tossed, “Try to stay alive, Ms. Lane.”
“You, too, Barrons,” I said softly, as the great beast between my legs flapped its wings and rose, carrying us into the rainbow-streaked morning.
—
If someone had told me, a year and a day ago when I’d stepped off the plane from Ashford after countless, exhausting layovers, that I would one day be flying above Dublin, breathing in the crisp, briny air, on the back of an icy dragon-like creature that wasn’t from our world, taking stock of my city, I’d have laughed and pointed them in the direction of the nearest psychiatric facility.
I’d have been really wrong.
I’d been really wrong about a lot of things back then.
The lure of watching the sunrise on a Hunter had been impossible to resist. As we sluiced through wet clouds, I nestled close to the frigid base of its wings, with the hot brimstone of its breath drifting past my face. Clamping the bony ridge between my thighs, I threw my arms wide and trailed my gloved fingertips through crimson, orange, and pink mist. Head thrown back, gazing up at the dawn, I experienced a moment of uncomplicated bliss.
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