Burned (14 page)

“They would not be so happy to have you,” Rath mocks. “You are nothing alike. You are weak and pliable. They are steel.”

Barrons says, “All
sidhe
-seers are off limits to you.”

“Fuck you,” Kiall says. “One of them infiltrated our compound
and took out thirty of my finest before we were able to stop her. I keep her in a cage, happily mindless.” He slants a look at me. “She sucks my dick at my command with the zeal of one I knew before.”

Barrons’s chest expands and I don’t have to look at him to know his eyes are glittering bloodred. I see the change in the princes’ faces across the table. Fury explodes in my blood so hot and hard, it hits my heart like a sledgehammer. Some days I’m made of nothing but triggers. Rape scars deep.

Destroy them now. You know you can
, my dark companion purrs.
They humiliated and used you, made you feel powerless—you who possess more raw power than they could ever hope to achieve. Remind these pigs that the Fae have always been ruled by a woman
.

Sure, toss me a few crimson runes
, I mutter at it. I’d kill to get my hands on those again, the strange binding runes it shared with me at critical moments, believing I would never figure out that I could also use them to seal the physical
Sinsar Dubh
’s cover closed. Until Cruce tricked me into removing them. I knew I shouldn’t have pulled the damned things off down there in the cavern the night we sealed it on the stone slab. Or at least held onto a few for future use, rather than let Velvet sift them away.

I’d love to see if they’d also work on my inner copy somehow, but although the
Sinsar Dubh
goads endlessly, even saddled and rode me today, it offers me no runes or spells to use without price as it did before. A once-robbed John, it won’t remove its wallet from its trousers again until it gets the action it paid for.

Nice try, sweet thing. NOT
.

I pick up with my mental chant where I left off last time,
muttering the fourth, fifth, and sixth stanzas of “The Raven.” Beneath the table, I feel Barrons’s hand move to my thigh, and in the strength of his fingers is his commitment to destroy them with me, the reminder to be patient. It cools my blood enough that I retain my impassive stare.

The Unseelie Princes hold a
sidhe
-seer Pri-ya. I wonder what her talent is, if they exploit it. I worry about her soul. She has no Barrons to rescue her. Inside me, the
Sinsar Dubh
falls silent. “Tell me about these
sidhe-
seers,” I say to Ryodan.

“They’re black-ops trained and militarily focused, led by a woman they seem willing to follow to death. Word is they connected after the walls fell. Some were soldiers, stationed in Iraq, others hail from Asia, skilled in martial arts.”

“We want them
all
dead,” Rath growls.

Before I can say it, Kat asks, “Have you met their leader?”

Ryodan says, “We’ve been tracking her but no luck so far. They speak her name like she’s some bloody damned mystical warrior, protected by the elements. Their home was destroyed; they want a new one and intend to make it here.”

I feel Kat’s tension. I say, “You are in charge at the abbey. She won’t take it from you. If we must enforce it, we will.”

“I’m not so sure I’d be entirely sorry to see it go,” she murmurs.

I look at her, startled, wondering if I heard her right. She’s looking at Sean, her expression bleak. I ponder the irony that she denounced her mafia parents years ago to escape this very fate, yet now sits with us making barbarous laws in a barbarous time, enforcing them without mercy.

Black-ops trained. Mystical warrior. Lovely. Probably sporting egos the size of K’Vruck. Who knows what gifts they possess? It’s possible that one of them, like me, can sense the
Sinsar Dubh
and she’ll follow its siren song straight to my front door.

Distantly, I hear Ryodan and Barrons agreeing the princes may do whatever they want with any
sidhe
-seers who invade their walls, but those who steer clear are to be left alone.

I don’t think this city is big enough for us all.

      9      

“Oh, Death, you come to sting with your poison and your misery”

JADA

When she enters Chester’s, both men and women pause in conversation to turn and watch her pass. It might be the body. It might be the walk.

It’s definitely the attitude.

An enormous palace of chrome and glass, the underground club is a hot mess of humans and Fae, reeking of sex, spices, and cigarette smoke, divided into countless subclubs where anything can be obtained for the right price.

Music breaks over her in waves as she transitions from one club to the next.

She could find her own personal Jesus on the matte black cement floors where hundreds of meaty, tusked Unseelie that resemble rhinoceroses stamp the floor with hooves and indulge their taste for voluptuous women and Marilyn Manson; or do it her way, which is all she does anyway, where Sinatra croons
from speakers mounted on the polished wood of a stately, old-fashioned bar presided over by three enormously fat Unseelie females with multiple breasts; or acknowledge that she is, in fact, Titanium, as Sia belts out above a mirrored dance floor that pulses with flashing neon lights, crammed with young, mostly naked men and women, attended in air and on foot by golden, sparkling Seelie.

She scans bodies and faces, seeking the one she desires: the more beautiful, the better.

She would select one of the mysterious Nine that work behind the scenes of this club, but the monster she hunts may find them too barbaric or perhaps too dangerous to take the bait. Their formidable reputation precedes them into distant lands.

She has found mention of the Nine in millennia-old annals, tracked them into present times through paintings and photographs. She has identified six of them by name, knows a seventh only by his long silver hair and dark burning eyes. She found a very old portrait of him in Romania that astounds. She knows two of them are half brothers, with different fathers, although the world would never guess it by looking. She knows the sorrow the one she will permit to live may feel, but her ledgers must be balanced. She has been unable to cement either face or name for the remaining two into the meticulous compartments of her memory. The single time she saw all nine of them in one place, one was hooded, the other’s face too heavily painted to see.

Knowledge is power.

Kasteo, Barrons, Fade, Ryodan, Lor, Daku
.

She nearly smiles at the last name. He was once a gladiator for sheer love of the game, and in another century and land, an epic samurai. She anticipates their battle second most.

Their ways are as vile as the Fae, yet two of the six names she knows are not on her list. Two of them she will permit to live.

She hears and dismisses snatches of conversation as she passes.

“Who is she?”

“Never seen her before.”

“Fuck, the bitch is hot!”

“You don’t stand a chance, Bruegger. She’d tear you up.”

“And I’d die a happy man.”

“Think she’s Fae?”

“Dunno. She sure as hell moves like one.”

The Fae she has studied, as well, dissected and assimilated what she found useful. There are many of them on her list.

But she’s not Fae. She’s human.

She moves silently through the subclubs. In her wake, a man who was foolish enough to try to grab her ass as she passed clutches a broken and bloodied hand, and howls with drunken pain and fury.

This time she does smile.

No one touches her except in the clash of a battle she has chosen.

High above, behind the glass balustrade that shapes a perimeter walkway into an inner courtyard for the private upper levels, she spies the perfect worm for her hook and contemplates the anomaly: humans are not permitted up there. Only the Nine and their few chosen. Yet he is both human and up there. Unattended. Stripping and tossing his clothing over a chrome railing to a delighted crowd of women below.

He is nude then and she assesses him clinically. Yes, perfect.

As she approaches the glass staircase that provides access to
the levels where the Nine are rumored to maintain their residences, in addition to the owner’s office, the electronic heart of the enormous club, she processes the second anomaly: the stairs are not guarded at the bottom by two of the Nine, a minor challenge for which she was prepared. Inconceivable, were it not fact.

She would escalate to high alert, but she lives there.

Silently, without questioning her luck—luck always favors the arrow that knows its goal—she ascends the stairs.

      10      

“There’s a she-wolf in disguise coming out, coming out”

MAC

It’s midnight, our meeting ended hours ago, and I’m alone in the bookstore. After Kat left with Sean, Ryodan said something to Barrons about cleaning up after the Hoar Frost King, which made no sense to me since the last of the ice melted weeks ago.

Barrons left to do whatever he does when he comes back with his heart beating, eyes brilliant, fury cooled. He won’t have sex with me if he’s hungry. I have my theories about why.

I once asked him what he ate and he said gently,
None of your fucking business
. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t signify. He is what he is. You take it or leave it, and I’m not leaving. The man isn’t vegan. He has a toothbrush. Life goes on.

After wasting hours poring over yet another tattered, disintegrating volume we brought out of the Silvers with a title that translates roughly as
The Fae Obscene
, I busy myself dusting
and polishing shelves and counters, then check on the weapons I’ve hidden around the store. Anything to keep from thinking about this afternoon, and the terrible thing I’ve done. The terrible things I might continue to do unless I silence the Book forever. I consider going to see Inspector Jayne, learn the location of the O’Leary family, see what their needs are and fill them, but every time I begin to ponder it, I double over with guilt and grief, too sick to my stomach to move.

It’s been a while since I tended my cache. I miss my weapons, but I’m not willing to carry them. After today, I’d rather not carry the spear, but I won’t leave it lying around where someone else might find it, not even at the bookstore. Barrons despises the ancient Fae hallow because it could kill me. I like it for the same reason. A gun can kill you, too. You have to respect it.

I break down my Glocks, PPQs, my Sig and my Kimber, clean, reload, and rack. I save my Nighthawk Custom Falcon Commander .45 for last, because it’s my current favorite, then move on to my rifles. I line them up on the counter, admiring them. I enjoy handling the metal and plastic, the cool iron of the bullets Dani and I made. I practice throwing my switchblades at a Bob I set up in a back room. I even polish my spear, holding it carefully, practice trying to block the horrific images the Book throws at me.

Eventually I run out of idle tasks and begin to pace restlessly, wondering why Ryodan didn’t mention Dani tonight.

He must know she’s missing. Surely he’s looking for her. If she were here, she’d be arguing for a seat at our table. She’s always battled for Dublin, made it her first priority, even when Ro was alive, threatening her, controlling her sword, directing it.

I used Voice on Rowena after I stabbed her, and know she used her gift of mental coercion to force Dani to kill my sister, but I don’t know the details.

I thought I’d made peace with her part in my sister’s death. But it’s one thing to sit in my bookstore, telling myself I can forgive her, entirely another to look her in the face, feel that forgiveness in my heart and communicate it to my arm—as the night we met for the first time since I learned the truth had proven.

I’d lashed out. Barely managed to pull back. I’m just grateful I didn’t black out and lose complete control. I wonder why I didn’t, what was different about the night I drew my spear on Dani and this afternoon when I drew on the Gray Woman.

“Alina, Alina, Alina,” I whisper.

Sometimes I say her name in litany as if mere repetition might have the power to resurrect her from the dead. What no one tells you is that when someone you love dies, you lose them twice. Once to death, the second time to acceptance, and you don’t walk that long, dark passage between the two alone. Grief takes every shuffling, unwilling step with you, offering a seductive bouquet of memories that can only blossom south of sanity. You can stay there, nose buried in the petals of the past. But you’re never really alive again. Spend enough time with ghosts, you become one.

Still, I long for a summer day on the sand in Faery, a Corona in my hand with lime pulp dripping down the sides, near a volleyball net, even if only with the illusion of Alina.

Make it so
, my hitchhiker purrs.
We can
.

“Been there, done that temptation,” I mutter. “Get a fresh idea. The answer is still no.”

The bell suddenly flies off the top of the front door in an
explosion of hardware and screeching metal, shoots straight up in the air then crashes to the floor, where it gives a final, defiant tinkle.

I glance from it to the open door that used to be locked, startled and offended. I loved that bell. “You could have knocked,” I say irritably to Ryodan, who’s standing in the entrance. “I would have unlocked it.”

“I assume you have the spear,” he says.

“Of course I do.” I hadn’t breathed easy until Barrons handed it back to me when our meeting ended.

He jerks his head toward the door. “We’ve got problems. At Chester’s. Now.”

I’m not about to head off with the incessantly scrutinizing owner of Chester’s only to have my dark parade fall into step behind us, and get slapped on a slide beneath a microscope again. The meeting tonight was bad enough. “You told me I could never enter your club armed, and I’m not responsible for your—”