He knew what my ass looked like in every possible position. He knew what my face looked like when I came and that I swallow. That night, grieving and alone in a city I didn’t know, a city that had been hostile and unwelcoming since the moment I stepped foot in it, I’d become a wild thing, scrapped all my inhibitions, had sex like I’d never had it before, tried everything I’d ever wanted to try with enormous enthusiasm and not one ounce of self-consciousness.
It was no wonder he was always looking at me like he wanted to have sex. We’d had sex and he wanted it again. And I couldn’t blame him. It had been rock-your-Id-to-its-hedonistic-core phenomenal. Raw. Dirty. Mind-blowing. Addictive. I’d painted that dilapidated room with pain and passion, used sex like a bandage for the jagged wound Alina’s death had sliced into my soul.
As if that little secret exploding out of my subconscious isn’t enough to deal with, the new sidhe-seers have one among them that is my worst nightmare. The willowy brunette in army-green camo pants and tank is like me: she can sense the Sinsar Dubh. Not only am I not unique anymore, I’ve been outed.
Oh yeah, I need to run.
My feet are roots.
The third thing is perhaps the most stupefying.
I just saw Dani three weeks ago. She was fourteen. A cocky, swaggering kid.
And I’m supposed to believe this grown-up, controlled, beautiful woman is the rambunctious, sparkling-eyed teenager I chased into the Hall of All Days?
“Impossible,” I whisper, peering at her, searching for some trace of the effusive, laughing, brilliant, funny girl I know. The one I love.
It’s not there.
If it’s her, I should be relieved that she’s back and alive.
If it’s her, I’m so not.
This woman is about twenty and absolutely frigid. She doesn’t look as if she’s laughed a single day in her life.
Besides, this “Jada” has supposedly been in Dublin for a few weeks. In black leather pants, a fitted top (with a plunging neckline, and if those are Dani’s boobs life isn’t fair), and black leather jacket, she looks composed and cold as a colonel. When she runs a hand over her perfect (straight, not one ounce of curl) red hair in its perfect high ponytail that swishes her waist as she moves, I catch a quick flash of silver and gold at her wrist, the only adornment she wears. It’s not like she needs much. In addition to being stone-cold, she’s that kind of beautiful, too, with startlingly high cheekbones and arched brows above glittering eyes. Is this really Dani’s pixieish face grown up, matured from delicate with a sharply pronounced jaw to sophisticated, sculpted, and cool?
Is it possible Dani lost years in the Hall of All Days, and returned a mere week of our time later, this much older? And immediately began collecting sidhe-seers to form a small army?
Anything is possible in post-wall Dublin, and certainly in the fickle hall. Running the sidhe-seers is precisely what a grown-up Dani would try to do. Dublin and her sidhe-seer sisters always came first to her.
Still, I don’t see a trace of the “Mega” in this icy woman.
Ryodan begins to pace a slow circle around her, reminding me of the way Barrons stalked me that night he decided I had no right to something that was indisputably mine.
She stands still, completely at ease with something like him behind her back.
That seals it. It’s definitely not Dani. She would never let Ryodan behind her. She would spin with him. Like I did with Barrons.
The women on the floor begin to push up, but Jada gestures to them and commands, “They’ll only take you back down. Remain on the floor. I won’t have any of you injured by them.”
“We’re better fighters than you’re giving us credit for,” Green Camo who outed me growls.
“These are two of the Nine I discussed with you earlier. Remain down.”
Green Camo may be my enemy but I totally get the look of fury and frustration that flashes across her face. Accept that you’re outgunned? Stay on the floor and don’t even try to fight? What kind of life is that?
Ryodan suddenly kicks up into that way of moving that’s a blur, then Jada is a blur and there’s a small whirlwind of commotion in the middle of the study accompanied by a ferocious smudge of sound that could be raised voices or just plain snarling. I feel like I’m watching a cartoon featuring two Tasmanian devils, then suddenly Jada and Ryodan reappear, facing each other: he’s spitting savagery, she’s pure ice.
“Don’t touch me again,” she says with arctic frost. “Men have died for less. Even men who aren’t men.”
“You cut it off,” Ryodan explodes. “That’s why I couldn’t get a lock on you last week at Chester’s. You fucking cut my tattoo off. And you mutilated yourself in the process.”
“I’ve never had a tattoo on the back of my neck.”
“I didn’t say it was on the back of your neck.”
“That’s where you touched me.”
“I touched other places, too.”
“And will pay for it. Sleight of hand. A diversionary tactic. Intent infuses action. You’re easy to read.”
“Redundant much, Dani. Should have left it at sleight of hand.”
“I’m not Dani. Nor have I ever had a tattoo. But if someone thought to place a mark on me I neither wanted nor approved, I would certainly cut it out. I’m no cattle to be branded.”
I rub the tattoo on the back of my skull and shoot Barrons a pissed look. “Moo,” I say frostily.
“Don’t even start,” he says. “It saved your life repeatedly.”
“It was for your protection,” Ryodan says.
“Precisely,” Barrons clips.
“I don’t need protection nor have I ever,” Jada says. “I protect. I hunt. I am the predator, not the prey. Leave now and I will permit you to go. We will, however, meet again.”
I slant a look up. “Precisely.”
“ ‘Permit,’ ” Ryodan mocks. “Explain your ability to move in hyperspeed. Dani.”
“If this ‘Dani’ is to be identified on the basis of a single attribute, one might propose anyone — even you — are this person upon whom you seem so fixated, as you, too, share that talent.”
Jada is suddenly gone and I feel her touching me, patting me down at light speed, looking for the Book, finding nothing. By the time Barrons blurs into motion to blast her away, she is standing near the desk again.
Ryodan told me Dani could move fast enough to give him a run for his money. When she chose. I frown. He also said there were things Dani didn’t know. Exactly what kind of things?
The women on the floor stare up, watching, awaiting the next command from their leader.
“She’s not carrying it,” Jada informs Green Camo.
Green Camo says, “I feel two. One where it should be. The other coming from her.”
“Of this you are certain.”
“Unequivocally.”
“You will leave now,” Jada informs Ryodan and Barrons. “But she,” Jada looks at me, “will remain.”
Was that a flicker in those icy emerald eyes? I narrow my eyes, staring back, searching for some hint of Dani O’Malley. It isn’t there.
“She,” Barrons growls, “is not remaining anywhere but with me.”
“Maybe I want to stay here with them,” I say, not meaning a word of it. “At least the sidhe-seers only tried to kill me. Not steal pieces of my mind.”
“I didn’t steal anything. I merely kicked it beneath a rock until you could deal with it. It’s not my bloody fault it took you so long. Had I wished to excise it completely I could have.”