Текст книги "Shadowfever"

Автор книги: Karen Marie Moning

Соавторы: Karen Marie Moning,Karen Marie Moning
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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

6

The Dani Daily—102 Days AWC …

I glare down at the sheet of paper, but ’cept for the title of my rag and the date, nothing’s coming. Nothing’s been coming for a feckin’ hour.

Here I sit in the abbey’s dining hall, in the middle of this brainless feckin’ herd of sidhe-sheep that are so easily led they should wear feckin’ halters and waggle fluffy sheep asses, and the words just ain’t coming. And they got to. I gotta take up the slack ’til Mac gets back. Stupid sheep are back to obeying Ro and she’s yanked ’em back in line again, got ’em all busy trying to clear the feckin’ Shades from the abbey.

News flash dudes, I keep telling you, they’re reproducing. They eat, they grow, they split. Like feckin’ amoebas. I been tracking ’em. I been watching ’em so hard I can tell ’em apart now. ’Times I play with ’em, mess with the lights, see how close they can really get to me. That’s how I know so much about ’em, but nobody listens to me. Only time I’m heard is when they read my paper. They don’t talk ’bout it, but everybody’s using the Shade-Busters now. Anybody say thanks?

Nope. Not a single “good job, Mega,” not even the teeniest little acknowledgment that I invented ’em.

I need Mac. Been nearly a month and I’m starting to worry that she’s … Nah, ain’t going there.

But where the feck is she? Ain’t seen her since we broke into the Forbidden Libraries together. She in Faery again? She don’t know it, but I read her journal when she was locked up in that cell, Pri-ya, and nobody was paying attention to her stuff ’cept Ro. She read it, too. But I took it back. Had to know what Ro knew. It’s one of my hang-ups: I gotta know everything Ro knows and figure out where she’s going ’fore she goes there. If I can do that, dude, I can run this place!

I know time spent in Faery don’t move the same way as time in the real world, so I ain’t as worried about Mac as I might be. See, V’lane’s gone, too, so I figure she’s with him.

Weird thing is, I keep stopping by BB&B and it looks like Barrons is gone, too!

Tried to get in to Chester’s last night to ask about him, but the stupid feckin’ feckers bounced me at the door.

Me. The Mega!

I grin and swagger a little in my seat.

It took six of ’em! Six of Barrons’ freaky fecks had to work their arses off to keep me out, and we went at it for over an hour.

I wouldn’ta given up at all but that kinda freeze-framing starves me, and I didn’t have enough candy bars crammed in my pockets. Got hungry. Had to eat. Said screw it and left. One of ’em followed me to Dublin’s edge, like he thought he was throwing me outta the city—as if! I’ll try again soon.

Still, I’m getting a little worried.…

Where the feck did everybody go? Why ain’t nobody talking about the LM anymore? Where’s the Sinsar Dubh?

’S been quiet, way too quiet, and that creeps the feck outta me. Only other time things got this quiet … yeah, well—dude—the past ain’t me.

What’s already happened is for has-beens.

I’m all about the future. Tomorrow’s my day.

Today sure as feck ain’t. I ain’t never had it before, but s’pect I got writer’s block. S’pect it’s ’cause I been sitting here watching a couple hundred sidhe-sheep do the equivalent of knit. Got an assembly line set up in the dining hall, making iron bullets. But get this—not for us!

For Jayne and his Guardians.

Don’t know how Ro managed to make ’em all scared of their shadows again, but she did. Little things she says make ’em doubt themselves. Only took her two weeks after Mac disappeared to convince ’em all Mac was dead and to give up on her.

Sheep, I tell ya! Takes everything I got not to stand up, waggle my ass, and yell: Baaaaa!

But I guess the sheep shit’s too deep in here for me to move, ’cause I sit and chew on my pen and wait for inspiration.

While I’m biding time, I watch Jo. Used to be friends with her. Thought she had a mind of her own. She’s smart, real smart. Puts things together the other sheep don’t.

But she got weird a few months back. Started hanging all the time with Barb and Liz and never had time for me anymore. Used to be she was the only one didn’t treat me like a baby. Used to be they all treated me like a kid. Now they hardly treat me at all. Nobody sits at my table.

Good feckin’ thing, too! Ain’t no room for sheep at my table.

Jo’s sittin’ real quiet, watching Liz. Watching her hard.

I wonder if she turned lezbo or somethin’ and that explains why she changed. Came out of her closet and moved on, maybe got herself a ménage twat with Liz and Barb. I snicker at my joke. Dude, if ya can’t crack yourself up, ain’t never gonna crack anybody else up.

At first, the gunshots are so faint that even my superhearing don’t register what they are. Then, when I do, I sorta figure Barrons’ dudes musta come back for some reason and, like last time, they’re firing warning shots. Even though we got a shitload of Uzis and other guns, we got no use for ’em here. Only in Dublin. They don’t work on Shades. We don’t bring our guns into the abbey. We leave ’em on the bus.

Dawning on me quick now how stupid that is.

Later, I find out it started at the west end of the abbey. Started where Mac slept when she stayed here, where I been sleeping lately, in the Dragon Lady’s Library.

When the screaming begins, I freeze-frame into motion but with caution: Automatic gunfire is something I gotta factor in to my superspeed equation.

I’m fast, but, dude, the rat-a-tat-tat of that kinda spray is feckin’ fast, too. Tough to dodge. And what I’m hearing is constant.

I’m in one of the corridors, heading for the screams, but suddenly everything is as dark as it must be where Rowena’s head is—straight up her ass. I snicker again. I’m cracking myself up tonight.

I stop, plaster against the wall, and start moving like a Joe. Watching, straining to see down the dark corridor. I ain’t got my ’Halo, but I got a couple flashlights in my pockets. I pull one out, click it on.

We ain’t never got all the Shades outta the abbey. Nobody puts on their boots without shining flashlights in ’em and shaking ’em out real good first. And then only in broad daylight.

Nobody—but nobody—walks down dark halls here.

So why’s it dark and who the feck is doing all that shooting?

Lots of moaning. Lots of wounded. Ain’t warning shots. This is the real deal.

I take a Joe step forward, quiet as I can. Glass crunches beneath my high-tops, and I know why it’s dark. Shooter took out the lights.

I hear a soft, awful laugh that makes my blood run cold. I shine my flashlight down the dark hall, and the darkness kinda absorbs it.

I hear somebody breathing fast.

I hear more glass crunching and it ain’t me.

Pretty sure the shooter’s headed straight for me!

I flex my fingers, curl ’em tight around my sword. Ro tried to take it away. Told her I’d be her own personal guard if she let me keep it. I stand watch while she sleeps. I’m learning about tradeoffs.

What the feck is moving down the hall at me?

Later, when I tell the story, I don’t tell the whole truth.

Truth is, the unthinkable happened. I got scared in that dark hall. I felt something coming and it freaked me.

I say I never got to the corridor.

Never admit I backed out with my tail tucked between my legs, retreated to the light, and then freeze-framed back to the dining hall.

The shooting starts again and so does the screaming and we all run, but there’s only one way out and that’s the way in, so we’re knocking over tables and scrambling behind ’em.

Jo and me, we end up behind the same table. Long as she doesn’t try any funky lezbo stuff on me, I don’t mind sharing my spot. I tap the table. It’s thick, made of solid wood. Might hold up, depending on bullets and distance.

More screams. I wanna hold my ears.

I’m cowering. I disgust myself.

I gotta look. I gotta know what the feck is doing this to us!

Jo and I move for opposite ends of the table at the same time and crack heads. She glares at me.

“Like it’s my fault,” I hiss defensively. “You moved, too.”

“Where’s Liz?” she hisses back.

I shrug. On my hands and knees, I waggle my ass. Whole abbey’s falling apart and she’s worried about her little girlfriend. “Baaaaa,” I say.

She looks at me like I’m nuts. Then we’re both poking our heads around the table.

Bullets are ripping across the room, ricocheting off walls and wood. Blood’s spraying everywhere, gory as feck, and the screams keep coming. The shooter is framed in the door of the dining hall.

Jo gasps and I just about fall over choking.

It’s Barb!

What the feck’s this all about?

She’s draped in rounds, toting the biggest Uzi I ever seen. White-faced, she’s screaming curses at us, taking us down like sitting ducks. I gape. “Barb?” I mutter. Don’t make no sense.

Weird thing is, Jo looks stunned and bursts out, “I thought it was Liz!”

I stare down the table at her. All I can see is her head, but she kinda shrugs it. “Long story.”

I assess the room, the scene. We’re at the back of the hall. We’ll be last to die. What the feck do I do? Why is Barb shooting us?

I look at Jo. She’s no help. Looks blank as the page I was writing The Dani Daily on.

Dude, I wish Mac was here! What would she do? Should I freeze-frame in while Barb’s shooting everybody and try to take her gun? Am I fast enough? I don’t wanna die today. Tomorrow’s gonna be my day. And I just know it’s gonna be a good one, too! ’Sides, I got too much to do. Somebody’s gotta keep an eye on Ro.

But we’re dropping like flies! Holy feckin’ crikey, Barb’s wiping us out!

I cram a candy bar in my mouth whole, chew it just enough to get it in my gut. I’m gonna need every ounce of energy I got to pull this off. I gotta do something. Barb ain’t gonna run outta bullets for a long time. The Mega can’t cower behind a table and do nothing.

I poke my head out from behind the table, take a snapshot of the scene, and lock it down hard in my head. I map where every person, table, chair, and obstacle is.

Problem is Barb. She’s the unknown. She’s moving and spraying fire so erratically, I can’t slam a grid of possibles down over my mental map.

Feck!

I stare, trying to pick up some kinda pattern.

I duck back behind the table as a shot zings by. Poke my head out again. Ain’t no pattern.

I pump breaths superfast, puffing my cheeks in and out, kicking my adrenaline up. I ease my head out, lock the grid down best I can, and am about to give my feet wings, when Barb goes kinda fuzzy around the edges and the room gets so fecking cold my breath comes out white.

Jo makes a strangled sound.

We both see it at the same time.

What’s shooting at us ain’t Barb at all.

Well … it is, and she’s screaming, but not like the psycho-rage-bitch-from-hell I thought she was.

She’s screaming in horror.

She’s fighting for control of the gun and failing. She forces it down and sprays the floor, but it comes up again. She tries to swing it left, toward the wall. It yanks back to the right. Her finger’s tight on the trigger the whole time.

She blurs again.

She’s just Barb.

No, she ain’t! She’s—dude—what the feck is that? She’s got too many heads, too many teeth! She’s some kinda monster! And it ain’t no Shade!

It’s Barb again.

Being forced to kill us.

Behind her, a shadow climbs the wall. It’s huge! It towers, it expands, and when it laughs, my blood clots up in my veins and can’t get to my brain, ’cause it’s got so many ice chunks in it.

“Where is the Grand Bitch?” it roars. “I want her fucking heeeeeeead!”

Jo and I look at each other.

We get it.

We both know what’s got her, what’s really firing those rounds, and it gets driven home like a spike through my skull that I ain’t nearly The Shit Mac thinks I am.

Me and Jo ooze real slow back behind the table.

Just two brave little sheep.

Hiding from a book.

The Book.

The one we been hoping to find. Talking real big about locking it down again. Yeah, right, just what the feck did we think we were gonna do with it?

The nerve of it. It came here. Here, where it was trapped for so long. It must feel pretty feckin’ invincible. Pisses me off so bad I’m shaking. It came here. Gah—that’s so feckin’ wrong!

I read Mac’s journal. I know how it works. Makes folks pick it up. Me and Barb and Jo and about fifteen others went into Dublin this morning for supplies. We didn’t stick together the whole time. Split up and went off after different things.

It musta got Barb alone and made her pick it up.

I get a creepy chill that goes all the way up my spine so fast I get brain freeze when it hits my head.

Feckin’ A! The Sinsar Dubh rode back to the abbey with us this morning! Right there on our bus!

I was sitting on the same bus with the Unseelie King’s Book and didn’t even know it!

I sort through my options. I ain’t impervious to bullets. Dying today ain’t gonna do nobody no good, ’specially not me. Don’t know how to stop it. Ain’t beating myself up for that. Nobody knows how to stop it.

Don’t dare get close enough to let it take me.

Riding me, it could wipe out the entire abbey in record time.

I swallow. I’d been starting to wonder if it was looking for me. Guess it was looking to get any sidhe-seer alone, so it could take us down from the inside and gain revenge for its captivity.

They’re dying. They’re all dying out there, beyond my table. It’s killing me that they’re dying.

And I can’t come up with one feckin’ thing to do about it.

Got one chance, and it ain’t to stop it. I grab Jo and freeze-frame outta there.

Ro’s face is pale, bloodless. I ain’t never seen her like this. She looks like she’s aged twenty years in a single day. One hundred eighteen sidhe-seers were killed before Barb shot her way out of the abbey, took our bus with all our weapons, and disappeared.

A hundred more were wounded.

The Sinsar Dubh paid us a visit, gave us a little look-see, thumbed its beast nose at us, flipped us the motherfeckin’ bird of all birds.

Jo and me, we sit across the desk from Ro.

“You didn’t even try to stop it,” she finally says. She’s been letting us stew. She likes to do that. Potatoes and carrots, they turn to mush if they stew long enough. Time was, I did, too. But I don’t cook down so fast anymore.

I didn’t need to hear Ro say it. I been staring at the accusation blazing in her fierce blue eyes for the past five minutes. I don’t answer. I’m done answering her. She shoulda told us. She shoulda warned us. I never ever imagined the Sinsar Dubh could pull a stunt like that. She ain’t training us. She’s keeping us small. Afraid. Just like Mac said. What—I shoulda died so she could say, Dani tried? Feck that noise. Ain’t dying just so she can feel better ’bout things.

Jo says, “Grand Mistress, it looked like Barb was fighting it. From the information Jayne and his men gathered about the Book, we were pretty sure what that meant.”

“Och, and now you’re trusting Jayne? I teach you! I train you!”

Jo turns her face away a moment, and I remember that Barb was one of her best friends. But Jo, she surprises me with a little steel. When she turns back and starts talking again, her voice is steady. “She was going to kill herself soon, Rowena. Our first goal was to keep the Book from getting a new body. If Dani had gone near it, it could have taken a virtually unstoppable body.”

Ro cuts me a scathing glance. “Ever the liability, are you not, Danielle?”

I make a face, can’t help it. She’s always blaming me for something. Done trying to blow smoke up her ass. Sick of pretending to be things I’m not. “D’pends on how you look at it, Ro,” I say coolly. “And you’re always looking at it wrong.”

Jo sucks in a sharp breath.

I’ve gone too far, and I’m about to go farther. I don’t care. Ever since Mac disappeared, Ro’s made it plain she’d take me back into her good graces if I’d cooperate the tiniest bit. I been skirting around the subject, flirting with appeasing her just enough to keep her guessing, thinking I’ll come to heel.

But that ain’t never gonna happen.

I just watched a hundred of my sisters—so what if they’re sheep? They’re still my sisters—get butchered. And this old woman stands and glares at me? At least I own up to my sins. I go to sleep with ’em every night. Wake up with ’em every morning. See ’em in the mirror, staring right back at me. And I say, dude, get over yourself already.

“How’d the Book get loose, Ro?” I’m on my feet, sword in my hand. “Why’n’tcha ever tell us that? Cause maybe you fell asleep on the job? ’S that it?”

Her voice is tight and she’s even paler when she looks at Jo and snaps, “You will escort that child to her room now! And lock her in!”

As if that’s gonna happen. Nobody here can control me. Ever since I killed that Hunter, I been feeling like the dude that shot a giant with his slingshot. Ro can’t feck with my head like she used to.

“All I did is say what everybody’s been thinking but been too afraid to say. I ain’t afraid of you no more, Ro. I saw the Sinsar Dubh tonight. I know what I’m afraid of.” I back-kick my chair so hard it slams into the wall behind me. “I’m leaving. I’m done here.” I mean it. I really am. Used to think I was at least a little safe in the abbey, but we got Shades in the shadows, and now the Book snuck in, and fact o’ the matter is, I can make myself a safer place than this in a feckin’ Dark Zone!

’Sides, nobody here’ll even notice if I’m gone. Maybe I’ll check out Jayne, hang with the Guardians for a while.

“You will go to your room this very instant, Danielle Megan!”

Gah, I hate that name! Sissy name. Sissy girl.

“What would your mother think of you?” she snaps.

“What would my mother think of what you made me?” I snap back.

“I made you a proud and true weapon for the right.”

“Guess that’s why I feel like my sword most of the time. Cold. Hard. Bloody.”

“Ever the melodrama with you, isn’t it? Grow up, Danielle O’Malley! And sit down.”

“Feck you, Ro.”

I freeze-frame out.

The chilly Irish air blasts me, and if a couple places on my cheeks are especially cold, I ignore ’em. I ain’t crying. I never cry.

I miss my mom sometimes, though.

The world’s big.

So am I.

Dude—I’m homeless!

I swagger into the night.

Free at last.

7

Why did you hang a Silver to Dublin in one of the white wings, when you know the House rearranges itself? Why didn’t you put it somewhere more stable and easily accessible?” I resume my questions as we walk.

That bipolar feeling from my high school days is back with a vengeance. He’s everything I despise. I want to kill him so badly that I have to keep my hands in my pockets, balled into fists.

He’s also the person who was intimate with my sister during the final months of her life, the only one who can answer all those questions no one else can—and who can seriously shorten the amount of time I have to spend in this wasteland of a reality.

Did you take her journal? Did she know Rowena or any of the sidhe-seers? Did she tell you about the prophecy? Why did you kill her? Was she happy? Please tell me she was happy before she died.

“No rooms in the White Mansion ever get completely dark, not even where night falls. I erred the first time I opened a Silver. I hung it in a place that did. A creature I believed securely imprisoned—one I did not ever intend to free from the Unseelie prison—escaped.”

“What creature?” I demand. This man who looks like a Versace ad, who walks and talks like a human, isn’t. He’s worse than someone possessed by a Gripper—one of those dainty, beautiful Unseelie that can slip inside a person’s skin and take over. He is one hundred percent Fae in a body that should never have been his. He’s a cold-blooded killer, responsible for butchering billions of humans, hundreds of thousands of them in Dublin on a single night, without a second thought. If there was a creature in the icy Unseelie hell that he never intended to set loose, I want to know why, exactly what it is, and how to kill it. If it worries him, it terrifies me.

“Watch the floors, MacKayla.”

I look at him. He’s not going to answer me. Pressing would only make me appear weak.

We’ve resumed the search together. He’s unwilling to leave me on my own. I’m in no hurry to be on my own again. I’m still raw from what happened to me in the black wing. I’d gotten cemented in memories, and if Darroc hadn’t busted me out, I might never have escaped.

Chasing Barrons, I might not have wanted to escape. I remember the bones in the Hall of All Days. I think of the beach in Faery with Alina. If I’d chosen to stay with her then, would I have eventually died from eating food with no substance, drinking water that was no more real than my sister?

Damn Faery with its killing illusions!

I push memories of sex with the king, with Barrons, away. I distract myself with hatred for the man who killed my sister.

Was Alina happy? It’s on the tip of my tongue again.

“Very,” he fires back at me, and I realize I’ve not only said it aloud but it seems he’s just been waiting for me to ask.

I’m appalled that I’ve been so weak. Offering my enemy the opportunity to lie to me! “Bullshit!”

“You are impossible.” Disdain etches his handsome face. “She was nothing like you. She was open. Her heart was not sealed away behind walls.”

“Look what that got her. Dead.”

I stalk off ahead, down a brilliant yellow corridor. The windows open on exactly the kind of summer day Alina and I always loved. I can’t get away from her ghost! I quicken my pace.

We hurry down a hall of mint, then one of indigo with French doors that open onto a turbulent stormy night, before turning onto a path of pale pink, and finally there it is—a towering arched entrance into a white marble hall. Beyond the elegant entrance, windows open onto a dazzling winter day, ice-encased trees sparkling like diamonds in the sun.

Peace settles over me. I’ve been here in my dreams. I loved this wing.

Once, long ago on her world, a sunny day in spring was her favorite, but now a sunny day in winter delights her more. It is the perfect metaphor for their love.

Sunshine on ice.

She warms his frost. He cools her fever.

“You said Alina called you,” Darroc says behind me. “You said she was crying on the phone, that she was hiding from me. Did she make that phone call the day she died?”

He startles me from my reverie and, without thinking, I nod.

“What exactly did she say?”

I toss him a look over my shoulder that says, You really think I’m going to tell you that? If anyone is going to be answering questions about her, it’s going to be him answering to me. I step into the white marble corridor.

He follows me. “All you accomplish by persisting in your inane and erroneous belief that I killed Alina is guaranteeing that you will never find her true murderer. Humans have an animal of which you remind me. The ostrich.”

“My head is not buried in the sand.”

“No, it’s up your ass,” he snaps.

I whirl on him.

We glare at each other, but his words give me pause. Am I being an ostrich? Do I deny myself the opportunity to avenge my sister, because I’m stuck in a rut I refuse to get out of? Will I let my sister’s real murderer get away, because I can’t open my mind to see beyond my preconceptions? Barrons warned me from the beginning to not so blithely assume Darroc was definitely her killer.

A muscle works in my jaw. Each time I remember something about Barrons, I hate Darroc more for taking him from me. But I remind myself why I’m here and why I haven’t already killed him.

To accomplish my goal, there are certain answers I need.

I eye him speculatively. There are others I just want.

And once I get the Book in my hands and change things, I’ll never have another chance to ask. He’ll be gone. I’ll have killed him. Here and now is my one shot.

“She said she was going to try to come home but she was afraid you wouldn’t let her leave the country,” I say stiffly. “She said I had to find the Sinsar Dubh. Then she sounded terrified and said you were coming.”

“Me? By name? She told you ‘Darroc’ was coming?”

“She didn’t have to. What she said earlier made it clear.”

“And what was that? What so thoroughly incriminated me?”

I still have her message memorized. I dream it sometimes, word for word. “She said, I thought he was helping me, but—God, I can’t believe I was so stupid! I thought I was in love with him and he’s one of them, Mac! He’s one of them! Who else could that have been? You keep telling me she loved you. Was there someone else she was involved with that she thought she—”

“No! There was only me. She would never have sought another. I gave her everything.”

“Then you understand why I believe you killed her.”

“I do not, and did not. There are holes larger than Hunters in your puny human logic!”

“Who else could it have been? Who else did she fear?”

He turns and paces to one of the windows, where he stands gazing out at the dazzling winter day. Ice-crusted trees sparkle like they’ve been diamond-dipped. Drifts of powdery snow shimmer in the sunlight. The scene seems lit from within, like the concubine herself.

But there is only darkness inside me. I feel it growing.

“You are certain that the day you had this conversation with her was the day she died?”

It wasn’t a conversation, but I don’t tell him that. “Although the Garda didn’t find her body for two days, they estimated her time of death at about four hours after she called me. The coroner in Ashford said it was possible she died as much as eight to ten hours after she made the call. She said it was difficult to estimate exact time of death due to the way her body had been savaged.” I refuse to say “chewed on.”

Still staring out the window, his back to me, he says, “One morning after I left, she followed me to the house on LaRuhe.”

I catch my breath. These are words I’ve been waiting to hear since the day I identified my sister’s body. To learn what she did the last day she was alive. Where she went. How it came to such a bitter end.

“Did you know?” I demand.

“I eat Unseelie.”

He knew. Of course he knew. It amps up all the senses, hearing, sight, taste, touch. It’s what makes it so addictive—and the super-sized strength is icing on the cake. You feel alive, incredibly alive. Everything is more vivid.

“We’d been in bed all night, fucking—”

“T-the-fuck-M-I,” I snarl.

“You think I don’t know what that means. Alina used to say it. Too much information. It disturbs you to hear of the passion your sister and I shared.”

“It sickens me.”

When he turns, his gaze is cool. “I made her happy.”

“You didn’t keep her safe. Even if you didn’t kill her, she died on your watch.”

He flinches almost imperceptibly.

I think, Nice, real nice, got that fake emotion down real well.

“I thought she was ready. I believed what she felt for me would win in one of your idiotic human battles of morality. I was wrong.”

“So she followed you. Did she confront you?”

He shakes his head. “She saw me through the windows at LaRuhe—”

“They’re painted black.”

“They weren’t yet. I did that later. She watched me meet with my Unseelie guard and overheard our conversation about freeing more of the Dark Court. She heard them call me Lord Master. After my guard left and I was alone, I waited to see what she would do, if she would come in, if she would give us a chance. She didn’t. She fled, and I followed, at a distance. She spent hours walking around Temple Bar, crying in the rain. I waited, gave her space, time to clarify her thoughts. Humans do not think as quickly as Fae. They struggle with simple concepts. It is astounding your species ever managed to—”

“Spare me your condescending judgments and I’ll spare you mine,” I cut him off, in no mood to listen to him condemn my race. His race already did that. Billions dead. All because of their petty power struggles.

He inclines his head imperiously. “I went to her apartment later that day. I found her in the bedroom, climbing out the window, onto the fire escape.”

“See? She was afraid of you.”

“She was terrified. It made me angry. I had given her no reason to fear me. I dragged her back in. We fought. I told her she was human, stupid and small. She called me a monster. She said I tricked her. That it was all a lie. It was not. Or, rather, it was at first but then it wasn’t. I would have made her my queen. I told her that. And that I still would. But she wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t even look at me. Finally I left. But I did not kill her, MacKayla. Like you, I do not know who did.”

“Who trashed her apartment?”

“I told you we fought. Our anger was as intense as our lust.”

“Did you take her journal?”

“I went back for it after I learned she was dead. It was not there. I took photo albums. It was then, when I found her calendar book, that I discovered her ‘friend’ Mac was really her sister. She lied to me. I was not the only one who was duplicitous. I have lived among your kind long enough to know this means she knew from the beginning something about me was not what it seemed. And wanted me anyway. I believe that if she had not been murdered, in time she would have come to me, chosen me of her own free will.”

Yes, I think, she would have come to you. With a weapon in her hand, just like I will.

“I needed to know if you shared her unique talents. Had you not arrived in Dublin when you did, I would have had you brought to me.”

I absorb that and am furious. It’s very important to me to pinpoint the exact moment my life started going wrong. Especially now.

It goes back further than I’d realized.

The moment Alina left for Dublin and began heading toward the day she would encounter him, there’d been no hope of my life turning out any other way. Events had been set in motion that trapped me. I would have embarked upon exactly the same path, through a different door. If I’d not disobeyed my parents and flown to Ireland to investigate Alina’s murder, would he have sent the Hunters after me? The princes? Maybe dispatched the Shades to devour my town and drive me out?

One way or another, I would have ended up here, with him, in the middle of this mess.

“Because of your sister, I resisted harming you.”

More than anything he has ever said, those words stun me. I stand half dazed as they echo through my brain, knocking loose conflicting thoughts, nudging them to where they no longer oppose. Without warning, my convictions shift and settle into a new position. I’m startled by where they end up, but they moved with such logic and simplicity that I can’t deny the veracity.