Ryodan stops abruptly.
“What is it?”
“Getting a read on anything, Mac.”
I expand my
sidhe
-seer senses, reaching, searching. “Like what?”
“I feel the same thing I felt at the club the night you were supposed to kill the Unseelie Princess.”
“You didn’t expressly tell me to kill her,” I remind crossly. “And you’re not a
sidhe
-seer, so how could you possibly be feeling anything?” I glance up at Barrons. “Do you feel something?”
He slices his head once to the left and looks at Ryodan, who stands motionless a long moment then says, “It’s nothing. Forget it.”
But he doesn’t look like he’s forgotten it. He looks deeply disturbed by something. I expand my senses again, searching,
but still get nothing. I cock my head thoughtfully and eye my stalkers, crowded close, left, right, and behind.
Absolutely
nothing. In any direction, with the exception of what’s beneath the abbey. So what the hell are they, then?
Rowena’s chambers are composed of half a dozen rooms: a bedroom, an ornate, regal study, two libraries, an enormous, lovely bathroom with a huge old claw-foot tub, and a stark, uncomfortable waiting room similar to one at a doctor’s office. I snooped through her suite once, but not as thoroughly as I’d like. I suspect there are more secrets tucked away in there, behind warded panels and floorboards, than grains of sand in an hourglass. More than once Dani and I burst through twin sets of French doors and forced our way into her chambers only to find the scowling headmistress had anticipated our arrival.
No such luck making an unannounced entrance today. As we turn the final corner, four armed women stand at the end of the hall, outside the closed doors.
They’re impressive. I can see why our abbey embraced them; it was that or die. Rowena didn’t train her
sidhe-
seers. She suppressed them, deliberately kept them weak and needy. Jada’s women are draped in ammo, clutch automatic weapons, and stare stonily at us as we approach, military training apparent in their strong bodies and stronger expressions.
I’d like them if I met them on the street. I’d like them a lot. I have enormous respect for our military men and women, the everyday heroes who provide the security the rest of us enjoy.
I don’t like them in front of that door.
Kat belongs inside those chambers, not some outsider whose loyalty and objectives are uncertain.
They scan us, taking in the Unseelie at my back but making
no comment. If they crossed continents to get here, they’ve seen stranger things. Criminy, if they served overseas, they’ve seen a small slice of hell.
They raise their rifles in sleek unison, targeting us.
“She’s not taking visitors,” clips a tall woman with short black hair tipped blond at the ends.
I fall back into my hive of Unseelie, a protected queen bee. The body shield idea works for me. I practically cuddle the smelly things. I may be tough to kill, even survived having my throat ripped out, but I don’t need to experience a spray of automatic bullets to know it would hurt like a bitch.
Barrons and Ryodan are suddenly gone. I sometimes forget they can do that, become virtually invisible, melt into the current terrain, and reappear without warning.
Shots go off, guns fly and smash into walls, and ducking the whine of dangerous ricochets, I nestle into my worker bees. Between their hooded heads I watch a brief brawl that ends with four women unconscious on the floor and Barrons pushing the door open.
As I step over them, the black-haired woman uncoils cobra-fast, grabs my leg and yanks it out from under me.
Barrons is on her instantly but I go down backward, hard.
The strangest thing happens as I fall. I get a sudden weird flash of my room at the Clarin House, time slows to a snail’s crawl and I’m suddenly living two different events superimposed.
I’m falling backward at the abbey.
Yet I’m also falling forward in my cramped room at the inn.
Barrons is looking down at me here, subduing my attacker and trying to catch me.
But at the same time we’re at the inn, and he’s the one who just dumped me on the floor.
I’m clothed here.
At the Clarin House I’m missing my jeans, the air is cool on my skin and I’m butt-ass naked.
I hit the abbey floor hard enough to make my teeth clack, and blink, shaking my head.
WTF?
Reality rearranges itself into a single vision.
I’m in the abbey, only the abbey.
Frowning, I push myself up and watch Barrons and Ryodan drag the women down the hall and dump them into a room.
“Time to meet
Jada
.” Barrons growls her name the same way I feel it, irritably and accompanied by a death wish.
I stand up, eyeing him uneasily, trying to decide what just happened. The only time Barrons was ever in my room at the Clarin House was that night he came to bully me into going home. We’d argued, he grabbed me at one point and got physical, but then he left. The next day I’d hurt from head to toe.
My frown deepens.
I recall thinking the bruises were odd, more around the sides of my rib cage than across my front where he’d actually had his arm banded beneath my breasts. I didn’t wear a bra for days. And I’d hurt all over, not just my ribs. My thighs had ached, the muscles deep in my butt had been sore. I’d just figured the interminable flight over had taken a toll. I’d never flown that far before, or sat so long in between flights on hard airport benches. I scratch my head, staring at him, feeling like I’m trying to put together a puzzle minus half the pieces, with no picture on the box to guide me.
He gives me a look. “Are you hurt? What is it?”
I search his face, searching my memory, trying to reconcile what I just saw with some version of reality I recall.
There is none.
“Get a fucking move on, Mac,” Ryodan snaps.
At a complete loss to explain what just happened, for a novel change, I silently obey him. “Don’t get used to it,” I mutter.
We enter the spartan waiting room, move to the second set of double doors, and I’m on the verge of proposing we pause and listen a few seconds to get a feel for what’s on the other side when Barrons kicks the door open so hard it flies back, slams into the wall, and splits down the middle.
Women shout in alarm but I can’t see past Barrons’s and Ryodan’s backs.
I shut my mouth and step into the room, feeling uncomfortably … obsolete. I may have unique
sidhe
-seer gifts and there’s no question that without my wraiths hemming me in I’m a seriously badass street fighter, but Barrons and his men are faster, stronger, and more ruthless.
Before, one of my most valuable assets was that I could sense the
Sinsar Dubh
, but that skill is no longer in demand. Before, I could slay Unseelie better than the best, but now I’m afraid to draw my spear and give my inner demon the opportunity to manifest. Which begs the questions: what makes me any more special than the average
sidhe
-seer? Enforced passivity has me pondering that question too much of late.
Me. You could crush them in your sleep
, said inner demon purrs.
I opt, instead, to crush the twinge of insecurity that invited the Book’s commentary, resuming my silent recitation with a sigh.
Exasperated that I can’t see, I push between them and am rewarded with a quick glimpse of a dozen armed women grouped around a central figure standing in front of Rowena’s ornate desk, but Barrons pushes me back and growls, “Stay there.”
His guttural words spark that freaky collision of dual realities again.
Stay there
, he’s growling, back in my room at the Clarin House,
I want you that way
.
But you said I could—
Your turn next
.
This is about me, remember. That’s what you said. I want what I want
now.
I catch my breath and hold it. Something’s trying to kick up from my subconscious through murky waters and it’s having a hard time, weighted at the ankles by stones; a swimmer trapped in a dark cave where it was meant to remain forever.
Unless … somehow … the boulder blocking the entrance got jostled … nudged aside, freeing fragments of memory like tadpoles desperate to break the placid surface of my mind.
“She said she’s not receiving visitors,” a woman snaps.
“Put down that fucking gun or you’ll be eating it,” Barrons orders.
“Retreat and we’ll let you live,” she counters. “Don’t move another inch.”
“Try to stop me.”
Try
echoes in my mind. In my alternate reality, I hear him saying,
Try, Ms. Lane, just try
.
“Move away from her,” Barrons growls. “Show yourself, Jada.”
“
You
move,” the woman counters. “What’s behind you? Show us now!”
Move, you bastard
, I’m snarling at the Clarin House.
“You will leave, immediately,” a new voice says in a cool monotone.
Barrons laughs. “I’ll leave when I’m bloody well ready.”
When I’m ready
echoes, and in my cramped, rented room, Barrons closes his hands on my ribs.
“Jada, it’s here. They brought it with them!” one of the women cries.
“You aren’t welcome here. I don’t interfere with your world. Don’t interfere with mine. You’ll regret it,” that same cool monotone says.
In both realities my ribs suddenly hurt. Between Barrons’s and Ryodan’s backs, I glimpse a beautiful woman, long hair pulled back in a high ponytail that falls to her waist.
She dwindles as a peculiar tunnel vision overtakes me, then I’m seeing only Barrons’s back.
Then his face, as he stretches his big, hard body over me.
Images smash into me, one brick to my head after another, and I grimace, closing my eyes …
Barrons popping the buttons on my fly.
He makes me a deal: If I’m not wet, we won’t have sex.
If I am, we will.
I’m wet. I’m so damn wet. I’ve never been wet like this before.
He was right. With Billy James’s older brother, and all the boys before him, when it was over, I wondered what the fuss was about.
He was right: If it’s perfectly good, it’s not good enough.
And I knew that night, staring up at him, that touching this man would change my soul, alter me forever, that sex with him would blow my fucking mind.
My sister was dead.
My heart was in pieces.
I was useless and my life was meaningless.
I
wanted
my mind blown.
Then I’m on the floor, and his big, hard, beautiful body is on me and I’m in a rage of passion I didn’t know I was capable of feeling, grabbing his waistband, busting the zipper, feeling him shove into me, throwing back my head and
roaring
.
Alive. So damned alive.
“Oh, my God,” I breathe. “I had sex with you that night. All night. I didn’t even know you. I didn’t even
like
you.”
Barrons mutters, “Ah, fuck. Not now.”
“Jada, they set it free!”
“Are you certain?” the cool monotone says.
“Yes, wait … no it’s—wait, yes … what the hell?”
Ryodan thunders, “I want to see Jada. Get out of my way.”
Out of my way
echoes. At the Clarin House, Barrons is saying,
I’ll give you until nine
P.M
. tomorrow to get the bloody hell out of this country and out of my way
. Then he bends over me and begins to speak in a voice that sounds like a thousand voices, muttering ancient words.
Here, in the abbey, I freeze.
He didn’t.
He wouldn’t.
Some things are sacred. Until you act like they’re not.
“You used Voice on me.” My lips feel numb, my tongue thick. “You took my memory away.”
“Now is not the time for it, Ms. Lane,” Barrons says tersely.
“The time for it,” I echo incredulously. “It was
never
the time for it.”
“Yes, Jada, I’m certain,” a woman says urgently. “They set it free!”
“Brigitte, collect the items and return with them immediately,” the cool monotone orders. “Bring Sorcha and Clare.”
“We bloody well did not,” Barrons snaps. “And I said, Ms. Lane, we will discuss this later.”
Barrons and Ryodan disappear then reappear in the middle of the group of armed
sidhe
-seers and guns go flying. Finally my line of vision is unobstructed! From within a blur of motion, I hear thuds of fists landing and savage female grunts. Then I see a dozen women sprawled on the floor, some holding bleeding noses, others squinting through rapidly swelling eyes, one clutching an arm to her chest that’s obviously broken. Their guns are gone, in a broken pile near the far wall.
Ryodan is standing motionless in the middle of the fallen
sidhe
-seers, as if he’s carved of stone, staring at the woman that must be Jada. He makes a sound like a soft implosion, a noise I’ve never heard before from any of the Nine, a ragged gasp of pure astonishment and … anguish?
Unable to fathom what could possibly elicit such a reaction from the cold, controlled man, I repress all I’m feeling—betrayal, shock, horror, bewilderment, and no small amount of fury—and move forward for a better look at the focus of his attention.
My age or slightly younger, tall, with a killer body that’s long and lean and muscled and curvy in all the right places, it’s the eyes that get me. They’re emerald ice. They lock with mine for a long, frigid moment. Stone-cold eyes, they chill me, and I’m not easily chilled.
I look down, around me, and realize
all
the women in the room, including Jada, are staring at me.
Belatedly, I process the comments that were being made while my world was unraveling.
Guess the “away team” ain’t so “diluted” after all. So much for my “rare” ability to sense the Book. One more way I’m no longer quite so special.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I mutter.
“She has the
Sinsar Dubh
!” a brunette in green camo cries, pushing herself up. “Get her!”