Burned (19 page)

I stare up at him. How can he possibly know that? “You can read minds.”

“Human thoughts are loud. We take what’s offered. Humans offer too much. Of everything.”

“What are you going to do? Teach me to fight?” I glance down at my slender arms. Though strong from gardening, milking, and working our land, I doubt I possess the ability to hurt another human being. I would feel their pain. I don’t invite that.

“Not me.”

He escorts me from the elevator into the most blissfully silent corridor I’ve ever walked. I turn in a slow circle, listening but hearing nothing. This level must be powerfully soundproofed. There’s no faint beat of music, not even white noise, only the perfect absence of sound. “Who, then?”

He guides me down the hall with a hand at the small of my back, opens another door, and we step into a dimly lit, long room with faintly illuminated rectangles that lead to additional rooms beyond.

There are no furnishings here. No table, sofa, rug, or chair.
The floors are polished ebony. The walls are ivory. A diffuse glow emanates from the perimeter of high, coffered ceilings with stamped leather insets above Romanesque cove moldings. There are large corbels on two of the walls, as if once treasures were displayed. The room is refined.

The occupant is not.

A man is stretched on the floor, staring up, arms crossed behind his head. Like the rest of Ryodan’s men, he is tall, wide, powerfully muscled, scarred, and not there. He wears black camouflage pants low at his hips, feet bare. His arms are tattooed, his head nearly shaved, his face shadowed dark with stubble. He looks like a rogue military commander from a unit the world never hears about.

“Kasteo will be your instructor.”

I stare at him in disbelief. Jo has told me tales of the Nine, though they’ve been of little use. Kasteo is the one that does not speak. According to Jo, something transpired a long time ago and he hasn’t uttered a word since.

“Is this your idea of a joke? He doesn’t talk!”

“You don’t listen. Match made in heaven.” Ryodan stalks over to Kasteo and looks down at him. “Kasteo will be your instructor,” he says again, but this time it’s an order and a warning to the man on the floor. “The woman feels the pain of the world. You’ll teach her to stop feeling it. Then you will help her learn to control her environment. Finally, you will teach her to fight.”

Kasteo, of course, says nothing. I’m not certain he even heard. He appears in a trance, elsewhere.

Ryodan walks to the door. “You’ll remain with him until I decide you’ve gotten what you came for.” The door closes behind him, and I stand there a moment, staring blankly at it, then at Kasteo.

I rush to the door and place my palm to the wall where Ryodan pressed it, but nothing happens.

I hammer on the door. “Ryodan! I must return to the abbey! Ryodan, let me out!”

The only response is the most enormous silence I’ve ever heard.

“This is not what I meant!”

I hammer until my fists are bruised.

“Ryodan, you can’t do this! My charges need me! There are things you don’t know! I came here to tell you!”

I feel as if I’m in the bowels of the earth, forgotten.

I shout until my throat burns.

The man on the floor never stirs.

I’m unable to count the passage of time in this silent, empty place.

After a length of it, I sink to the floor and lean back against the wall, one hand resting lightly on my belly.

Surely he’ll feed me.

Surely there is a bathroom here somewhere.

Surely he’ll come back so I can convey to him the urgent state of our abbey.

I sit and stare like the unmoving, unblinking man on the floor. After a time, I become aware of the simplicity of the moment. Not only is there no sound on this level, there seems to be a dearth of emotion.

Cautiously, I lower the shields I’ve held since I was five years old, barriers that have shut out the world, and walled me in.

Nothing.

Again, I lower, lower. When I continue to encounter nothing, I take a deep breath, brace myself, and drop them flat.

I gasp.

Still—nothing!

I feel no anger or greed, no lust or fear or pain or need. That’s always the worst for me: the many crushing, painful needs that can never be satisfied. Here, deep below Chester’s, there is absolutely no emotion charging the air, compressing me, forcing me into a defensive posture.

It’s sublime. My heart can breathe.

For the first time in my life, I feel only me.

I didn’t even know what I felt like.

For the first time in my life, I can hear myself think.

      15      

“I’m just a crack in this castle of glass”

MAC

I hear music in my dreams. I heard such exquisite melodies during my teens that one day I decided I was fated to be a brilliant composer, put songs to paper, and share them with the world. I joined the band that very day. I even signed up for extra classes and asked Mom and Dad to hire a tutor to help me learn to read and write sheet music. I plunged into the world of an aspiring musician with enormous enthusiasm, certain of my predestined success.

In less than a month my tutor stalked out of our house and refused to come back, and the high school band director asked me to please do the entire band a favor: quit.

I have no musical talent.

My clarinet sounded like an apoplectic yak. For the brief days I blew the trumpet, a hostile-sounding pig snorted along in jerky fits and starts with the rest of the irritated band. I
never knew when a sound was actually going to come out of the horn and it always startled me when it did. My violin unleashed a trio of enraged, tone-deaf banshees, and I couldn’t blow the flute well enough to make any more sound than with my lower lip on a soda bottle. Something about the pucker eluded me. The drums turned my arms into a pretzel-prison from which there was no escape. I would have given the tambourine a try—I really think I might have excelled at the hip-bump—but sadly the instrument wasn’t offered at my school. I think that’s why I love my iPod so much. I have music in my soul and can’t get it out.

This morning, like the two before it, the melody of my subconscious has been different. Three mornings in a row I’ve awakened with the strains of a symphony fading from my mind that is beyond horrific. Last night was the worst yet, as if I’m becoming attuned to it, hearing it louder, feeling it more intensely.

My psyche is bruised, my spine hot, and my stomach cramped. The new song is unlike any of the others I’ve heard in my dreams. It doesn’t leave me glowing, feeling uplifted and free, nor do I see dreamy, fantastic images while it plays.

I can use none of my usual vocabulary to describe it. I lie in bed with my head under the covers, trying to figure out what was so disturbing about the melody that I woke with pillows clenched to my ears, arms aching from the strain of having held them there half the night.

I search for words: scary? No. Worse.

Depressing? No. Worse.

Capable of making me insane if I had to listen to it too long?

Worse.

Is there worse than insane?

I roll over and poke my head from beneath the mound of pillows and blankets. I’m alone in bed, which I often am, at least while I’m sleeping, since Barrons doesn’t require it.

However, I am not alone in the room.

Without the wards on the bookstore to keep them at bay—Barrons said it would take weeks to collect more of the necessary ingredients—my grim stalkers huddle close, pressed to three sides of the bed, on the fourth roosting atop the headboard, bony shoulders hunched upward, swallowing their heads and necks. Two crouch on the bed right next to me. My pajamas have cobwebs on them. I’ve been sleeping in pj’s, not about to risk being unconscious, nude around any Unseelie.

Needless to say, sex hasn’t been happening here. Although when Barrons is touching me, or even just next to me, I enjoy the same wide berth they grant him, I don’t get off on being an exhibitionist, at least not to Unseelie.

Not only am I bitchy, bored, and too powerful for my own good, I don’t get to vent on Barrons’s big, hard body, and I’m massively overdue for it. I’m beginning to think it’s all some part of the universe’s conspiracy to see just what it takes to make MacKayla Lane snap.

Like a wake of vultures, every last one of them is facing me, peering down.

Well, in as much as they might face me, peering down, considering I’ve never seen beneath those voluminous hoods and can’t even say whether they have faces or eyes. I used to think they were clothed. They’re not. The dusty, cobwebbed, cowled cloaks they wear have the texture of black chicken skin and are part of them.

Ryodan said they were the caste that once attended the king in his private chambers. Do they stalk me—not because the
Book within me deliberately summoned them—but because, like K’Vruck, they sense me as part of the king they once served? If so, when the king takes the Book out of me, they should vanish, too.

At the moment they’re mute. Not a chitter, not a rustle.

I find their silence nearly as disturbing as the dark symphony of my dreams. Had it gotten so loud they could hear it in my head? Did it button the lips of even my loquacious tormentors?

I wonder if, like the vultures they resemble, they, too, have highly corrosive stomach acid that makes them capable of digesting putrid carcasses infected with bacteria and parasites dangerous to their species.

At least they don’t vomit like vultures when threatened or urinate straight down their legs to cool themselves and kill the bacteria they pick up wading through rotting corpses.

Good the fuck morning to me.

It’s a broody one, as usual.

“Back up, you bastards,” I mutter, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed.

They don’t. They brush against my pajama bottoms, leaving it covered with cobwebs and yellow dust.

I can’t get back to BB&B fast enough. At least there I slept in peace, got to have sex, and woke in a room free of vermin.

I perch on the edge of the mattress, staring up at my flock. The
Sinsar Dubh
said they were my “priests” and that I could command them. I know better than to trust the
Sinsar Dubh
and I worry that if I issue even one tiny command such as, “Get the hell away from me and that’s an order,” the Book will somehow own a piece of my soul.

Or maybe if you start ordering this caste around, it antagonizes
them so much they eat you. Or perhaps they’ll start vomiting and pissing, and then I’ll be walking around all the time in upchuck and urine, stinking of three different things instead of a single bad smell.

One thing I do know is things can
always
get worse, most often at the precise moment you’ve decided they can’t.

And so I remain, as Barrons would pithily say, idiotically passive.

I sigh and begin to dress, thinking I might kill for a Starbucks, heavy on the espresso.

I lose sense of time in Chester’s. There are no windows, and if you stay there a while it messes with your circadian rhythm. I think I’ve been here three nights now, listening for the music of an Unseelie Princess, and trying to figure out how to get past Ryodan’s wards and explore the many secrets of Chester’s.

Time and again I’ve turned around and walked away rather than call on something inside me to push past a particularly sticky spot, allowing the Book no opportunity to goad me.

I lost two and a half hours in the street that afternoon and have no idea what the Book did with me. I don’t know if I spent all of it torturing and killing, or—I terminate that thought. No point in going there. It’s done. I can’t undo it. I can only never let it happen again. Brooding about it will only make me feel worse, and when I feel my worst is when the
Sinsar Dubh
talks the most.

As I round the perimeter balustrade and approach the top of the stairs, flanked by my gaunt ghouls, I realize it must be early morning, as the club is empty except for the many waiters and waitresses wiping things down. I hope they use antibacterial cleanser because virtually every horizontal surface
gets used as a bed at some point. There are only a few hours when the dance floors are deserted. Ryodan closes the doors at dawn and doesn’t reopen to the public until eleven
A.M
. I’ve heard that’s when he gives his infamous nod to some woman and takes her upstairs. I’ve also heard that for an uncommonly long time it’s been the
sidhe-
seer, Jo. Really, how much of a relationship can she think they’re having when he’s still “selecting” her every morning?

As if I’ve summoned the event merely by thinking of it, I turn the corner to see Ryodan standing at the top of the stairs, looking down.

Lucky me. I get to witness the nod. Woohoo. Could my morning get any better?

I stop abruptly and bony vultures pile into my back. They’re still silent. It creeps me out.

I glance down to my right, past the railing. There’s Jo, looking up, waiting. I wonder again what the hell he thinks he’s doing with her. What she thinks she’s doing with him. Anyone can see they’re no match. Anyone can predict how this disaster will end. One morning Ryodan will walk to the stairs.

He’ll look down and Jo will look up.

And Ryodan will look beyond her, to some other woman, and nod.

Jo will never share his bed again.

Barrons and his men are something else. I may not care for Ryodan, we have baggage between us, but I have to admit any woman takes one look at him and wonders. And wants. It’s visceral. You know that when one of the Nine gets down to fucking, your world is about to get rocked like never before. And like it never will again. Unless you become a Nine groupie. Which I can honestly say might have its merits.

If I was Jo, and it was Barrons at the top of these stairs,
what would I do? Like Jo, would I choose to take what I could get of the hottest, dirty, intense sex and passion I’d ever experience, and deem it worth a shattered heart?

There’s no question it will break hers.

I see the hunger in her face. I see the light in her eyes as she gazes up at him. I see the tenderness and the desire and need in every line of her body.