Burned

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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