My gift, if you can call it that, is an empathetic heart. I began crying the moment I was born and wept until I was five years, three months, and seventeen days old — the afternoon Rowena came to my parents’ house and began teaching me to shield myself from the constant barrage of others’ emotions.
I often think I’ve learned nothing, except how to stop crying, don a mask, and pretend the world isn’t too much for me to bear.
I know how fragile we are, how biased the war that rages on this planet where the angels are made of glass and the demons of concrete. All you have to do is drop one of us and we shatter.
Last night I watched Sean across the dangerous expanse of a treaty table and realized our love is glass, too. I must become diamond dust to strengthen the mix.
In the days preceding the Hoar Frost King’s defeat, Margery enlisted Ryodan’s aid to tether a dangerous, drifting fragment of Faery that was about to demolish our abbey, and the price Ryodan called due from me the night I went to pay our debt was Sean filling in as a waiter at Chester’s for a time.
So the dominos began to fall.
Sean can’t bear to watch people suffering any more than I, and confronted by those in need, he became their provider. It’s a strength I admire with all my heart.
Yet it’s also the same treacherous foundation upon which both our families were built. Our fathers possessed an enormous sense of responsibility for their own. And their own came to them with problems and requests, each more difficult to address, to satisfy, than the last.
Over time, it corrupted them. The lime of murder, the viscosity of revenge, cemented the blood in their hearts until they, too, were poured of concrete.
I move through the dance floors of Chester’s with purpose, my shields as high as I can raise them, yet I cannot block the immense loneliness of this densely crowded place, the hunger and despair, desperation and need. So many angels, so many cracks. They don’t even require dropping, a fair jostle would do the trick.
I have the care of two hundred seventy-one women in Dublin. The eldest, Tanty Anna, my wise, gentle, ancient advisor whose eyes seemed to stare straight into heaven, is a month dead, murdered by the Crimson Hag. Christian paid the ultimate price for our freedom that night and I’m powerless to help save him. One of my younger charges, Dani, enormously gifted and enormously impulsive, has been missing for weeks now, and I fear the worst. Margery seethes and plots daily to take the reign I would gratefully relinquish, just not to her.
My soul mate has assumed charge of the black market and put himself in direct competition with two Unseelie Princes and a ruthless male that defies quantifying.
Now there are new sidhe-seers in Dublin, led by a woman not even Ryodan has been able to track. I’ve never felt so inept in my life. I want to rebuild my abbey. I want to fill the walls a thousand strong again. I want the strength of concrete without the price of it.
When I came here months ago, seeking Ryodan to repay my debt, he said a thing I’ve been unable to stop thinking about: Drop your blinders and raise the sewer to eye level; admit you’re swimming in shit. If you don’t acknowledge the turd hurtling down the drain toward you, you can’t dodge it.
I’ve come to get out of the toilet bowl and become the commode that flushes the shit.
The fragment of a Faery fire-world I prayed was responsible for the grass that grows tall and green beyond my bedroom window, directly above Cruce’s icy prison, is gone now, yet the meadow is more verdant than before, exploding with poppies, red, fat, bobbing, opium-drenched blossoms that drug my senses on warm evenings when the projection of a great, black-winged prince circles my bed.
I have warded him out of my tangle of linens with blood-magic, an art I’d sworn never to practice, a line I wouldn’t cross.
But it is no longer only myself I must protect.
Elaborate golden trellises have pushed up from the earth all over the abbey’s grounds, draped with black roses that reek of exotic spices and far-off lands.
Dozens of standing stones have appeared in the gardens, etched with symbols I can’t read. A pair of megaliths awaits a cover stone to become a dolmen. It makes me shiver when I pass.
Pearl benches frame a vast, brilliant, many-tiered fountain in which water sparkles as turquoise as a Caribbean sea.
Animals I’ve never seen before peek at me from trees fringed with lacy vines that grow strange beyond our walls, shedding brown bark for ivory threaded with silver, sprouting low-hanging canopies of sapphire leaves.
The floors in my section of the abbey are changing from stone to polished gold.
At night I hear male laughter echoing down our halls and corridors. The lights within our walls glow soft gold day and night, without electricity to source them. Our fires blaze, without wood to feed them. Our generators run only a small number of lamps. We removed the bulbs. Still they glow. Something unholy powers the rest.
Cruce is changing our home, taking it over, and I know it’s only a matter of time before the jailer is evicted by the jailed, Paradise lost.
We talk of it amongst ourselves but so far have said nothing to outsiders. This is our home, for many of us the only good one we’ve known. If we do not find a way to stop the transformation, we will be forced to leave.
Soon.
We are not yet ready to admit defeat.
If we are driven forth, who will watch the abbey? Will we sit idly beyond its walls, praying the prisoner never breaks free?
I cradle my belly with one hand protectively. I’ve not yet begun to show. I devote most of my energy to shielding it. I must secure our future.
When I reach the bottom of the glass stairs in the glass house that the concrete demon Ryodan calls home, he is waiting for me.
But of course.
“Why did you lie about Sean?” I ask him.
“I didn’t lie. You sewed my words into a cloth of your choosing. If you’ll recall, I urged you to talk to him that night. Had you heeded my advice, you would have known, soul mates and all, confiding everything.”
“Don’t mock me.”
“Don’t make it so easy.”
“You said you were collecting my debt from him.”
“I said I was willing to accept the replacement of a missing server as full payment, and let you off the hook.”
“And put me on another.”
“You chose to become the worm. A little conversation goes a long way, Katarina. You’ve still not told Sean that Cruce fucks you in your dreams.”
I say nothing and he laughs.
“Yet here you are. Seeking me again. Come for more answers to which you won’t listen. I only waste my breath once. Leave.” I remain where I am.
He sweeps me with that cool silver gaze and arches a brow. “Be very certain you know what you’re doing, Katarina,” he warns softly. “If you ask something of me, I will not stop until I feel the request has been satisfied. As I deem fit.”
I fix on two words he uttered. “You do not feel.”
“It’s you, my ever-serene cat, that fails to feel, denying at your own peril the hunger of your heart.”
“Nor do you know anything of the heart, mine or any others.”
“State your cause. I have pressing matters to attend.”
I stare up into the face of the man that does not exist, that according to my empathic senses is not even standing there, and choose my words with care. I can proceed with nothing less than one hundred percent commitment to my course, and am fully aware this path will make or break me. I wish I could predict which one it will be, but I’m untested, unproven.
I resist the urge to cradle my abdomen. I must not telegraph in front of this man. I must become something else. He has a bold hand and a sharp chisel. The clay has chosen the sculptor. This male, whatever he is, possesses power beyond my humble skills. He and his men know what I do not: how to protect what is theirs. They are ruthless and hard. And successful.