Текст книги "Burned"
Автор книги: Karen Marie Moning
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 27 страниц)
Nobody wants you. Your own mother locks you in a cage, leaves and forgets you. Just die. It’ll end everyone’s misery, including your own. Maybe then she can have a life. One of you should.
I can’t believe I just said I deserve to die. Maybe I’m possessed. Maybe I got one of those sneaky, diaphanous Unseelie Grippers inside me but it’s only fecking with me sometimes (’cause I’m so super it can’t possess me all the time!), making me say things I don’t really feel and shorting out my powers. And maybe that Gripper has some kind of bizarre obsession with Ryodan. Weirder things have been happening in Dublin lately.
Mac shakes her head, giving me a totally fake compassionate look. “Oh, Dani—”
“I’m not falling for this so just shut up! Leave me alone or I’ll kill you like I killed your sister. I swear I will. I’ll kill you and then I’ll kill everybody you care about. That’s what I do. I kill people. I kill and kill and kill. That’s who I am. That’s who she made me.” I used to daydream Barrons found me in the cage that day, instead of Ro, and imagine what I’d have turned out to be then, but he didn’t. She did. It is what it is.
I run.
She follows faster than I would have thought possible. I wonder if Barrons did something to her, maybe that thing Ryodan said he would do for me. Is she as unkillable as them now? Is that where her balls are coming from? If so, I’m seriously pissed and even more jealous.
I leap snowbanks, dash down alleys, double back around, leading her on a merry chase through Temple Bar, and still she manages to stay hot on my arse. I keep testing every couple of seconds to see if I can freeze-frame but my superpowers have taken the same vacation my conscience went on years ago.
She’s yelling stuff but I don’t listen. I hum my favorite playlist to tune out her and the racket of her creepy army.
I don’t realize my feet have taken me to Barrons Books & Baubles until it looms up in front of me, only holy place I’ve ever known: amber lights and polished wood and diamond-paned windows and endless possibilities. Deep in a limestone arch, fancy columns and sidelights and brass sconces and a stained-glass transom frame the door I used to go banging through a million miles a minute, and just above it on a shiny brass pole hangs that colorful hand-painted shingle that might as well have once said Welcome Home but never would again for me.
I love this place more than any other. Gas fireplaces and big comfy couches you can really stretch out on and magazines and books you can read and dream about all the places in the world you’re gonna see one day, and wicked-cool antique weapons and kick-ass modern ones, and killer muscle cars and cakes and presents and friends you thought you had. The hours I spent there are filed away in my storage vaults in superhigh-gloss Technicolor, brighter than any other memories. Sometimes I pull one out and relive it real slow, savoring it down to the last morsel. I love Mac. I miss her so bad. I wish—
Wishes aren’t horses and I don’t get to ride. ’Scool. I got feet that are usually superhero grade.
The bell on the door tinkles.
A man steps out.
Strong. Brilliant. Controlled.
Predator.
Unbreakable. Feck, to be so unbreakable!
He’s everything I admire plus things I can’t even begin to put into words.
I crush on Jericho Barrons violently.
My brain almost shuts down every time I see him and that’s a lot of gray matter to stupefy.
Used to be, if I couldn’t fall asleep I’d fantasize all kinds of ways I’d impress Barrons by killing monsters or saying something really smart or saving the world, and he’d see me as a grown-up woman and I’d glow just from the expression on his face, like that time I killed the Unseelie Prince in Mac’s cell and he looked at me like he really saw who I was. Most folks don’t. They fence me in with teenage rules that don’t hold me for shit, seeing how I grew up. You can kill but don’t cuss. Break any rule necessary to save the world but don’t watch porn or even think about having sex. How do they come up with this stuff – hold parental powwows for brainstorming diametrically opposed ethics? Then Ryodan began popping into my Barrons fantasies like he had some kind of business being there, and he’d look all, well … like … Ryodan, and he’d laugh and do that husky groan thing he did on level four, so I terminated that happy little exercise in somnolence.
Now, I count sheep.
Lately even those buggers look like Ryodan, with clear, cold eyes and some weird kind of hypnotic hold on me.
Fecker.
I’m beginning to think I’m going to have to figure a way to kill him, permanent-like, just to get him out of my head.
“Dani.”
I shiver. He has that effect on folks, throws off some kind of charge, supersaturates the space in his vicinity. All his dudes do, but Jericho Barrons has it in spades. I play it real cool. Shove a hand in my pocket, thumb out. Cock my hip at a jaunty angle. “Barrons.”
Time was, I planned on growing up and giving him my virginity. Or V’lane. It’s a big deal to me, the divesting of it. One of the few things I got left that’s gonna be my choice: the who, the how, the when. It’s gonna be Epic with a capital E!
But the Seelie Prince V’lane turned out to be the Unseelie Prince Cruce. And Barrons is Mac’s as much as something like him is ever anyone’s, a fact that’s never going to change, and I don’t want it to.
A piece of paper flaps on the column behind his head. I get a bad feeling and take a sec to scan it.
“Gah! Are you fecking kidding me?” How the heck did they get something printed already? Even in hyperspeed, I couldn’t have gotten a rag out this fast! But there it is, waving in the air like a great big slap in my face.
The Dublin Daily
June 26, 1 AWC
YOUR ONLY SOURCE FOR CREDIBLE NEWS IN AND AROUND NEW DUBLIN
BROUGHT TO YOU BY WECARE
GOOD PEOPLE OF NEW DUBLIN, THE ICE MONSTER THAT WAS FREEZING OUR CITY IS DEAD!
WeCARE was at the scene, fighting the good fight!
WeCARE will always have your back
UNLIKE
I can’t read any more. I know they’re getting ready to dis me. But my traitorous eyeballs sneak another peek and sure enough there it is!
… a certain bragging teenager that JEOPARDIZED the mission and was single-handedly responsible for getting many good, innocent people KILLED and taken CAPTIVE!
“Buh! Who is writing this drivel?” I was the hero tonight! I saved the fecking day with my winning combination of brains and skills. They even made the font size bigger on the slander about me! I know the tricks of the trade. Talk about your biased press! I feel my face getting hot and red. It pisses me off so much I’d rupture a gonad if I had one. WeCare sure as feck has them out the wazoo!
“Stop her!” Mac shouts.
I don’t stand a chance against both of them. Heck, I don’t stand a chance against Barrons by himself. He’s like Ryodan. I can’t compete on my best day.
Yet.
I fist my hands and take rapid deep breaths, clearing my head of the Wemightcarebutsureasfeckdon’ttellthetruth bull-crap. It takes me a sec to analyze possibilities and figure out how I’m getting myself out of this one. The answer is so simple it takes my breath away. I’m wired to survive on a gut level. My subconscious brought me exactly where I needed to be.
I duck past him and totally catch him off guard – or more likely he decides not to chase me for some mysterious reason, because there’s no way I can outrun Barrons, not even in freeze-frame – then can’t help myself and dart back and snatch the slanted scrap o’ crap from the column and wad it up ’cause I sure as heck ain’t letting it hang there, then I’m back behind the bookstore, hurrying to the first building on the left side of the Dark Zone.
Last time I was here was the night me and Christian searched the Unseelie King’s library, the night the words in the Boora Boora books crawled off the pages and stung me like fire ants, and I accidentally set the Crimson Hag free.
Christian. The Hag. Cripes, I got some cleanup work to do.
When he showed me the hidden portal in the wall that’s really a secret passageway into the ancient mirrors the Fae once used to travel between worlds, I’d committed the precise, unremarkable spot of bricks to memory. All weapons and escape routes – good. Not even Ryodan with his stupid contract on me can track me Fae-side. I figured if the city ever got too hot for me, I could always ditch it for a while.
It’s feeling way too hot right now.
“Dani, don’t!” Mac cries.
I leap into the brick. It’s weirdly spongelike, then so am I, then I’m standing in a large, windowless, doorless room with blank white walls and a white floor and ten enormous mirrors of varying shapes and sizes suspended in the air. They hang without visible means of support, some motionless, others twirling lazily. No surprise there. Fae stuff, animate and not, rarely give a wink and sure as heck no nod to human physics. It’s why Dancer’s so fascinated by them. Some of the mirrors have intricately carved frames, while others have thin edges of welded chain-link. A few of the looking glasses within the frames are as black as night, some milky white, and others crammed with shadows you don’t want to look at hard.
It’s a good thing I know which mirror to take – second Silver on the right plops you smack inside the infinite, a-fecking-mazing White Mansion. I been itching to explore it anyway. If they follow me through, I’ll use the labyrinthine corridors to lose them or unstopper another distraction because Rule Number One in the Mega O’Malley Handbook is and will always be: survival first, damage control second. Which is only logical. You can’t do damage control dead.
If they don’t follow me in, all I have to do is wait long enough for my superpowers to return, then come back because it’ll be a couple days, if not a couple weeks later in Dublin. When Christian and me went through last time, we lost almost a month! Time doesn’t pass the same in Fae realms. No way they’ll sit in the White Room 24/7 waiting for me. I hate losing Dublin-time that I could be using to help my city but I can’t help my city at all if I’m not alive.
Mac explodes through the wall behind me like she was shot by a cannon, slams into my back and nearly pushes me into the wrong mirror, and all I can think is what a disaster that would have been. I got no clue where the other ones go. Might be a world without air, a direct path into the Unseelie prison, or a galaxy filled with Hunters, or Shades, or gray women! I got a special hate on for the gray-folk caste of Unseelie. One of them almost killed me and forced Mac to make a promise she shouldn’t have made.
I shove her off me and she stumbles back, nearly crashing into Barrons, who just entered the room with his usual stalky animal grace.
Jericho Barrons is an unshakable, undestroyable constant. He’s the cornerstone of my universe. Or maybe together they are. I don’t know. I only know as long as the two of them and BB&B still stand, some part of me that never used to feel okay, does.
I can’t help myself – I watch them a sec. I love watching them together. I slow-mo it to absorb every detail.
Mac draws up short to keep from slamming into Barrons, and her blond hair swings back over her shoulder, brushing his face as it does, and my hearing is so good I catch the rasp of it chafing the shadow stubble on his jaw, then one of his hands grazes her breast and his eyes narrow when he looks at what he touched in a hungry way I want a man to look at me like one day and, as they continue to recover from the near-collision, their bodies move in a graceful dance of impeccable awareness of precisely where the other is at all times that is unity, symbiosis, partnership I only dream of, wolves that chose to pack up and hunt together, soldiers who will always have each other’s backs no matter what, no sin, no transgression too great, ’cause don’t we all transgress sometimes and it fecking slays me, because once I got a little taste of what that was like, and it was heaven and they’re so beautiful standing there, the best of the best, the strongest of the strong, that they practically glow to me, on fire with all I ever wanted in my life – a place to belong and someone to belong there with.
Together they mean to kill me and go on living, all happy, like I didn’t even mean anything. They’ll eat and have sex and adventures and I’ll be nothing but six feet under in dirt – assuming anyone even bothers to bury me. Gone. Over. Finis. Done. Quit. Before I ever even got the chance to live.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been hap—
I terminate that idiotic train of thought. As soon as my sidhe-seer gifts come back, I’ll get over this wimpy little emotional meltdown I’m having. Losing the superpowers that make me special plus seeing Mac up close and personal for the first time since she found out what I did is temporarily messing with my head. Key word there, temporarily.
Fourteen blows.
Hormones suck.
I wish I’d just grow the hell up in a hurry and everything would even out and start to make sense and folks would stop seeing me as a kid and I could finally—
Bugger it all! What am I waiting for?
I close my hand on the hilt of my sword and dive headfirst into the mirror, laughing as I go. I always crack up when I leap into the unknown. It’s cotton-candy fuel, there’s a big-top tent full of carnival magic in a good belly laugh.
Next grand adventure here I come!
The last thing I hear is Mac shouting, “Oh, God, no, Dani, not that one! We moved them! That one goes to—”
2
“There’s bullet holes where my compassion used to be …”
MAC
“—the Hall of All Days!”
If not infinite, the ancient Fae “airport” that serves as hub for a nexus of Silvers is so vast it isn’t worth splitting hairs over.
Fashioned of gold from floor to ceiling, the endless corridor is lined with billions of mirrors that are portals to alternate universes and times and exudes a chilling spatial-temporal distortion that makes you feel utterly inconsequential – think dust mote in a galaxy-sized barn.
Time isn’t linear in the hall, it’s malleable and slippery and you can get permanently lost in memories that never were and dreams of futures that will never be.
One moment you feel terrifyingly alone, the next as if an endless chain of paper-doll versions of yourself is unfolding sideways, holding cutout construction-paper hands with thousands of different feet in thousands of different worlds, all at the same time.
Compounding the many dangers of the hall, when the Silvers were damaged by Cruce’s curse (a thing he tried to blame on his Unseelie brothers, in typical Cruce fashion), the mirrors were corrupted and the image they now present is no guarantee of what’s on the other side. A lush rain forest may lead to a parched, cracked desert, a tropical oasis to a world of ice, but you can’t count on total opposites either. No handy Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is propped on a convenient foyer table, near a cool beverage and tasty snack inside those time-tortured walls.
Barrons steps between the mirror and me, folds his arms across his chest, and spreads his legs wide. He’s a tall, dark mountain of man I can’t push my way through or around. I meet his implacable gaze and we have one of our wordless discussions.
But we have to—
No we don’t.
But we can’t—
Yes we can.
But she doesn’t—
She’ll figure it out.
But it’s—
Not your fault and not your problem.
But I’m the one—
Bloody hell, Ms. Lane, how many “buts” are you going to throw at me besides the only one I want? He rakes a hungry gaze over my ass and I shiver.
After all we’ve been through together, he still calls me Ms. Lane, with one exception: when I’m in his bed. Or on the floor, or some other place where I’ve temporarily lost my mind and become convinced I can’t breathe without him inside me.
“Sometimes I don’t know why I even bother talking to you.”
He lifts a brow an infinitesimal amount in a silent makes two of us.
Barrons thinks words are pointless and dangerous. If I played it his way, we’d rarely speak, ocular or otherwise. Funny thing is, the more time I spend around him, the more I understand why he feels that way.
“But she’s in the hall. It’s a terrible place. I’ve been there. People don’t escape.” During my brief time in those ancient corridors, the glossy, seductive floors had been littered with skeletons. I’d nearly become one of them. In those mindbending halls, you could live any reality you chose, die on the floor believing you were living a genuine, happy life somewhere real. The place is a consummate mind-fuck.
“You did,” he says aloud.
“That’s different. I’m the exception. To a lot of things.”
A corner of his mouth lifts. “Modest, too. So is she.”
“I had the stones.” Chiseled from the Unseelie King’s realm, they’d reacted to each portal I went through, changing the way the environment behaved and working ultimately to expel me.
“If you follow her through, you will only force her to take the nearest escape route. Any door, any Silver. She’s not going to stop running from you. What if she chooses a world that has no air or is too close to a sun? She needs time to use that powerful brain of hers. You made it out. She will, too. Drop it. There are other things you need to be focused on. Besides,” his gaze locks on mine, then I feel like he’s sweeping my eyeballs aside and sifting through my mind, analyzing, discarding, hunting, “ah, yes, I thought as much. You’re not ready yet. You will leave her alone until you are.”
Autocratic has a picture of Barrons next to it in the dictionary. Unfortunately so does addictive. I poke Unseelie on both sides with my elbows and change the subject. “Haven’t you found a way to get rid of them yet? It’s been months.”
One after another black-cloaked, chittering wraiths continue to pop through the portal behind me. I have no idea why they’ve chosen me to stalk. I’m swiftly becoming the only human in an Unseelie sardine can, and just as smelly. It’s bad enough they stalk me, but where they brush against me they leave a greasy, pungent yellow dust on my clothes. That’s the least of the reasons I want them gone.
With rare exceptions – like tonight, when they inexplicably decided to roost up high – they make it impossible to fight. I can’t get to my enemy without first slaughtering a few dozen of the ones smothering me. By the time I slice and stab my way clear, whatever I really wanted to kill has disappeared. My sidhe-seer talent, nulling, or freezing them in place for a few seconds, doesn’t work on them.
As if that’s not bad enough, every time Ryodan sees me he grills me about why an Unseelie caste is following me around, and when that man gets a bone he strips the gristle with his teeth and gnaws until the marrow is gone, so I’ve stopped going to Chester’s or anywhere in public that I might run into him or his men, which is pretty much everywhere given the close watch they keep on Dublin and the surrounding districts. I’m bookstore-bound most days and nights, and me, cooped up, bored, gets riskier with each passing hour – idle hands make the devil’s work and all.
Not the devil, beautiful girl. Angel. Your angel.
Yet another voice I pretend not to hear.
You wish to be rid of them? Your wish. My command.
Oh, yeah, fully deaf now.
I killed the first fifty or so Unseelie when they began stalking me, but it didn’t matter how many I slayed, more appeared. Compounding my disgust, they release a huge cloud of that stinking yellow dust as they die, coating me and making me sneeze my head off. I haven’t seen them feed on any humans, and as their only offense seems to be stalking me and ruining my clothes, I no longer kill them. It’s pointless and disturbing.
I shoot Barrons a look. He has a full five feet of personal space around him in all directions. I, on the other hand, am a human dog with Unseelie fleas. “So, can you get rid of them or not?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Can’t you tattoo me or something?”
“Now she wants me to tattoo her. Will wonders never cease.”
“It’d be better than walking around with these … these … these bloody flipping odiferous gnats!”
“Have yet to find one that works.”
“Well, whatever’s keeping them out of the bookstore should keep them away from me, right? Can’t you just do to me what you did to it?” Inside those walls and beneath his garage are the only places I have any privacy.
“I’ve not isolated the precise element responsible. And no, I can’t do all of that to you. You’re animate. You might not be when I was done. I prefer you animate. Most of the time.”
Most? I bristle but refuse to be distracted. “Just how many elements are involved in protecting a bookstore? Five? Ten? A hundred?” When he betrays nothing of his secret protection spell – not that I expected him to, Butt-the-fuck-out-of-my-business is his middle name – I press, “Have you considered asking the Keltar if they can help? They’ve been druids to the Fae for thousands of years and maybe—”
This time the look he cuts me holds a glitter of crimson and I shut up. I’ve seen that flash when he’s on top of me, hands bracketing my head, eyes dark with lust. I’ve seen it when he’s killing. I know what it promises: primal passion or primal destruction. Hard as it is to believe, I’m in the mood for neither at the moment. My problems have bred entire subsets of problems, which are no doubt having birth pains to spawn yet more problems, even as I pause to brood about them. Mentioning the clan of sexy Highlanders to Barrons is never a good idea, which I would have remembered if I’d not been distracted by the sudden realization that I’m wearing the last clean outfit I own and will have to do laundry tonight. Again.
I’m sick of hiding. Tired of washing clothes. Fed up with sitting back and doing nothing to help my city, my people, myself. Arguably the most powerful person in Dublin, possibly on the planet – with the exception of one currently frozen prince – I lay low so no one discovers the psychopathic, homicidal embryo I carry inside me – a complete copy of the Sinsar Dubh, the most dangerous, twisted, evil book of black magic ever created.
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.
