Burned (7 page)

I know where to find the spell to be rid of the Unseelie that stalk me. I even know where to find the magic to hunt and destroy whatever has been freezing people and icing our city. In the pages of a book I don’t dare ever open, not even for one tiny peek inside. The dark book possesses anyone that reads it, takes them over and corrupts them completely. I’m carrying a lethal bomb around inside me. As long as I don’t touch it, I
won’t blow up into the greatest evil mankind has ever known.

For the first week after I refused to take the spell to lay Barrons’s son to rest, the
Sinsar Dubh
was silent. For eight and a half blissful days I believed I’d gotten my happily-ever-after, and could settle down to a peaceful life of killing Unseelie, rebuilding Dublin, gardening with Mom, driving supercars with my dad, fortifying the abbey, bonding with my sister
sidhe
-seers, and having phenomenal fights and even better sex with Barrons. All I had to do was ignore the
Sinsar Dubh
. Never open it. Never use the limitless power at my disposal. Easy, right?

Not.

Temptation isn’t a vice you triumph over once, completely, and then you’re free. Temptation slips into bed with you each night and helps you say prayers. It wakes you in the morning with a friendly cup of coffee, and knows just the way you take it, heavy on the sin.

Every blasted day it’s that afternoon outside the bookstore all over again, only instead of refusing the spell to save one man’s son, I’m refusing to save an entire city.

It took me all of five minutes suffering the
Sinsar Dubh
’s goading to devise a plan of action.

Get rid of it.

Before someone finds out or I lose control and rain down death and destruction on everyone I care about. I’m not living this battle every day for the rest of my Fae-elixir-enhanced life. And hopefully the stalkers that impede my ability to move at every turn will vanish along with it.

While our city has been fighting the ice monster, Barrons and I, trailed by my ghouls, have been wasting weeks at a time making trips into the ever-changing White Mansion, sorting
through endless libraries, scouring old manuscripts and scrolls, hunting for a ghost of a whisper of a legend: an infamous spell to summon the Unseelie King back to Dublin, so he can strip his damned book out of me.

Barrons thinks it’s wasted effort and is getting impatient. He spent countless millennia searching ancient books for spells—and now I have him searching ancient books for a spell again. He says even if we manage to get his attention, the half-mad king will simply laugh, vanish as quickly as summoned.

I refuse to believe that. The king is my only hope. Besides, he has a soft spot for me. Sort of. I think. That’s about as conclusive as one can be with the entity that calls himself Unseelie King.

“You will obey me, Ms. Lane. You will not follow her. That is all.”

Jericho Barrons turns in a ripple of muscle and beautifully tailored Armani and stalks through the portal, leaving me alone with too many questions, two few choices, and a hundred-odd Unseelie.

That is all, my ass. I’m my own woman. I’m Death walking. I’m the possibility for Complete and Total World Destruction. I can sure as hell make my own decisions.

I ponder the Silver, eyes narrowed.

I know Barrons.

If I follow Dani, he’ll follow me, as will my confederacy of Unseelie. I imagine the parade we make: pretty blonde with the scary eyes followed by big, dark, tattooed man with the
really
scary eyes, trailed by a hundred eerily gliding, cobweb-dusted, black-cloaked, stinking wraiths. Hell,
I’d
take one look at us and run, even if I didn’t know we had good reason to be pissed at me.

Barrons is right. Dani will only keep fleeing, anywhere, any way, possible.

And it’s not our bizarre cavalcade causing it.

It’s me.

You’re not ready yet
, he said.

It’s my fault she went through the Silver. I’m getting better at recognizing pivotal moments, and there was one back in the alley where I might have been able to reach her, stop her from running. Or at least not drive her into Faery.

It didn’t escape my notice that Dani hadn’t attempted to use one ounce of superstrength in our absurdly normal mean-girl scuffle, nor had she freeze-framed out, which made it clear how desperately she hoped I would forgive her.

I’d pulled my punches, too, wishing desperately to forgive her. Turn back time to half-past innocence. But that clock’s lying on its side, hour hand spinning wildly, in a dirty Dublin alley near a gold makeup pouch half concealed by trash, and an address carved in stone by a dying woman.

Broken.

You can’t count on Dani remaining in normal-speed for long—there’s no telling what might startle her up—so when she stumbled and the opportunity presented itself, I’d swung my spear to slice the straps on her pack, take her food, and eliminate the possibility.

I swear that was all I was after. Her food. Nothing more.

But the moment I raised my spear, I flashed back over all the evil I’ve been fighting and I saw my sister dead in that alley, and Mallucé torturing me to death, and the Unseelie Princes raping me, and Rowena slitting my throat in the cell beneath the abbey, and the
Sinsar Dubh
’s endless games, and for a moment I despised the world because I used to know who I
was, and I used to be good, with no bad in me, or at least that’s what I thought and there really is a degree of bliss and charmed innocence in ignorance. But when you fight evil every day, stare it in the face, engage it, learn to think like it, you face a choice: Be defeated by the limits of your own morality, or summon a beast in yourself that obeys none.

That I have such a beast, plus my psychotic hitchhiker, keeps me as frozen as my compatriot prince, but while Cruce was imprisoned against his will, I’ve chosen my useless stasis.

Either way, we’re both iced.

I do nothing. And my self-contempt grows.

Lines are thin. So easy to cross.

Impossible to uncross.

It had taken every ounce of willpower I possessed to pull my swing just enough to slice only nylon not flesh and bone, and if I had to do it all over again, I’m not sure I could.

I love my sister. I loved Dani.

Some things the gut distills to their essence no matter how hard you try to factor in compassion and mercy and understanding.

One of them killed the other.

And there is violence in my heart.

I couldn’t blame this one on the
Sinsar Dubh
’s seductive whispering. This one was all me. I’d failed to convince Dani that I didn’t want revenge.

I hadn’t convinced myself.

      3      

“Got an angel on my shoulder and Mephistopheles”

The Dublin Daily

July 17, 1 AWC

YOUR ONLY SOURCE FOR CREDIBLE NEWS IN AND AROUND NEW DUBLIN
BROUGHT TO YOU BY WECARE

Summer is here!

There’s no better time than now to take the WHITE!

Step up to help rebuild a stronger greener New Dublin!

YOU can make A DIFFERENCE!

Now is the time to show YouCARE

Join

WeCARE

Today!

MAC

I crumple the paper without bothering to read past the propaganda for more of their slanted journalism. I despise that this flyer is where I get my news about the city. Once I
was
the news about the city because I was out there, fighting and making a difference, calling the shots … or at least having a clue what the shots were.

I want to see a
Dani Daily
flapping on a pole in the breeze. I want to read her bragging about her most recent kill. I want to know what the latest Unseelie threat is, in all the entertaining, flamboyant detail she liked to tell it. I’m still in no frame of mind to actually see
her
, but I sure would like to know she’s okay.

That it was from WeCare’s button-pushing rag I discovered what happened at the abbey the night the Hoar Frost King was destroyed offends me endlessly. I toss the wadded paper into a battered trash can.

I should have been at the abbey but we’d been in the Silvers again, had gotten back that very night, about an hour after the big showdown took place. We hadn’t even known it was happening. If I’d gone, maybe no one would have died. I might have been able to save Christian from the Crimson Hag. I miss the sexy young Scotsman with the killer smile that I met during my early days in Dublin. I refuse to believe he’s lost to us now. They say he’s turned full Unseelie Prince. I hear his uncles have been hunting him but no luck so far.

They say.

I hear.

The voice of my news is as passive as I’ve become.

Hunting for Christian is yet another mission I should be on. He holds me responsible for the fix he’s in from feeding him Unseelie to save his life. That, combined with whatever went wrong with the Keltar ritual Barrons attended at the circle of stones in the Highlands on Samhain, seemed to have sealed his fate. He blames Barrons and me equally for his transformation. Which is total bullshit. I stood in the Hall of All Days and
chose
to go through to the desert world with four radioactive suns on which he was stranded, risking my own life to save his. Little thanks I’ve gotten for it.

I shove my hair back with both hands, prelude to tearing it out in frustration.

It’s been twenty-one days since Dani dove through the Silver into the Hall of All Days, and I have no idea if she’s dead or alive. I’ve been searching the city, entourage in tow, risking exposure, seeking any sign of her return. Standing in the alley, eyeing that damn spot of brick with increasing frequency, questioning everything I believe about myself.

I’ve discovered that, like the Fae, Ryodan and his men aren’t as active on the streets between the afternoon hours of one and five, which gives me another hour to continue searching for a flamboyant new
D
carved into the cobblestone at the site of one of her more impressive kills, a note in the General Post Office that she’s answered, or maybe I’ll run into her friend Dancer. It’s not as if she’s going to let me know when she gets back.

I step up my pace. Behind me, beside me, my chittering troop doesn’t miss a beat. I nudge them away with my elbows. It works for a few seconds, then I’m smothered in dusty, smelly Unseelie again. I brush cobwebs off my sleeves. Dani was right, they are gruesome.

They shall be your priests, MacKayla. Command them
.

I had no desire to know that.

I do something Barrons taught me, mentally envision a shining gold and obsidian book, slam it shut and lock it, adding cartoonish touches for levity: dust exploding from its cover, an eye on the gilded face of the book closing as if euthanized. I finish by flushing it down a giant toilet.

It’s right. I could conduct my search far more efficiently if I dispatched a hundred Unseelie to look for her. I could send them into the hall.

Not.

Despite the fruitlessness of my endeavor, it’s been good to get out of the bookstore. Dublin is coming back to life, thanks to my mom and her New Dublin Green-Up group. Once the Hoar Frost King was destroyed, the ice melted dangerously quickly, the city flooded, and most people holed up indoors to wait it out.

But not Rainey Lane. She attacked on multiple fronts, organizing teams to sandbag and protect while dispatching others to truck fertilizer, agriculture, and rare livestock from outlying areas not decimated by the vampiric Shades. The moment it was dry enough, she mobilized yet more teams to remove abandoned cars that have blocked the streets since last Halloween, when the walls fell and riots ripped through Dublin.

When the streets were cleared of the largest debris, Mom got down to work in earnest, overseeing the fertilizing and sowing of grass, bushes, and trees. The new bloom on Dublin restored hope, motivating others to join up and begin repairs. The famed flags on the Oliver St. John Gogarty were rehung, the boxes above Quay’s are overflowing with flowers, and it looks as if someone’s planning to reopen Temple Bar.

My daddy, Jack Lane, settles what civil disputes don’t end in brutality first (which doesn’t leave him many cases to hear) and supervises one of the teams restoring power and getting street sweepers out again. The streetlamps now wink on at dusk and blink out at dawn, the civic centers are offering shelter to the homeless. What few doctors remain have set up a makeshift hospital at Dublin Castle, with Inspector Jayne and the ex-Garda that are now the NDG: New Dublin Guardians. Dad says soon we’ll be fully up and running and generators will no longer be necessary. Seems Ireland had its fair share of engineers and hackers and they weathered the fall of our city better than most.