“Don’t decorate the goddamn room with it,” Ryodan fires back.
“As if you’re not doing some decorating of your own. You’re just pissed that my argument with Barrons derailed your argument with Dani.”
“Mac can decorate anything she bloody well pleases. With anything she pleases,” Barrons says tightly. “Her business, your blood, half your fucking face, who gives a fuck.”
“Nice defense, Jericho. Not. He can’t push me around, but you can?” Frosted sugar coats my words.
“Merely trying to keep us on point,” Ryodan clips.
I say, “I’m dead on point. The point is—”
“That I am not Dani,” Jada interrupts coolly. “The point is the three of you are dysfunctional, volatile, inefficient, and in my way. Not to mention—” She pierces me with that emerald ice stare.“—a grave threat to our world.”
“Oh, I’m dysfunctional, Ms. Alter Ego? Really? Pot meet kettle.” The second I say it, I wish I hadn’t. If Jada really is Dani, her current state is my fault.
Someone enters the foyer behind me, boots tapping smartly on the floor, and Jada stares past me at the new arrival.
“I couldn’t find Clare and Sorcha,” the woman behind me says.
“No matter. You will place them as I instructed you. Quickly.”
The look on Jada’s face chills me. It tells me she believes she’s won.
Place them? What “them”? I frenziedly sort and discard possibilities, racing to a terrifying conclusion: if Jada actually is Dani, she knows how to immobilize the Sinsar Dubh—with the four stones we placed on the slab in the cavern. The same stones Kat retrieved from the cavern and tucked away for safekeeping. Once the Sinsar Dubh was no longer on the slab, they were unnecessary and we worried about leaving coveted objects of power lying around the cavern since we couldn’t close the doors. Jada’s been in residence long enough to have found them.
I’m always blocking lately, with the exception of my constant antenna for the Unseelie Princess. Now, I cautiously open my sidhe-seer senses.
And gasp.
I feel them! The pulsing blue-black binding presence of the stones is here in the room with me!
Lock you up, lock you down, make you sleep beneath the ground, the Sinsar Dubh coos.
Make you sleep, too, I retort silently.
“She brought the stones,” I say to Barrons. “Stop her!”
He’s on it before I finish speaking. There’s a blur of motion as he lunges for the woman Jada called Brigitte, but Jada blocks him and they collide with such force that they both go flying backward to opposite sides of the room and crash against the walls.
Then Barrons and Ryodan are rushing Brigitte, who’s already placed one of the stones in the far corner, but they slam into Jada, who manages to get there a split second before them. She grabs Brigitte and freeze-frames her to place the next stone but collides with Barrons and one of the stones goes flying, smashes into a painting on the wall and drops to the floor. The painting crashes down on top of it. I lunge for it, determined to get at least one of the damn things so they can’t box me in, but the others beat me to it by a mile.
I leap for it again and get slammed into a wall by a blur. I pursue the stone obsessively for a good thirty seconds but all I get for my effort is a bloody nose and three broken fingers.
I finally back off and watch the three blurs whiz around the room as they fight a battle I can’t even track, much less get in on, feeling bizarrely invisible.
Jada’s women are doing the same thing, with the exception of Brigitte, who’s being used as a hockey puck by three players who aim for and block goals at the speed of light. She’s bloodier every time she surfaces for a split second before vanishing again.
I sidle toward the door. If I’m not in the room, they can’t trap me.
Every sidhe-seer in the room moves to stop me. Their expressions are icy, easy to decipher.
I am the target.
I am the enemy.
Green Camo gives me a condemning look that makes me want to throttle the bitch. I’ve subdued the Book this long, and done a bang-up job with one small exception. I’d like to see how well she would handle being possessed by the Unseelie King’s darkest demons.
Draw your spear, the Sinsar Dubh purrs. Destroy them. You know you can.
And let you take over and kill them all? Not a chance.
I quit moving, lean back against the wall and sigh, thinking it’s funny how things change so quickly. Last season I was Dublin’s MVP, the hunter, and everybody wanted me on their team. This season I’m the hunted, a liability that kills innocent people, and now the world wants to neutralize me.
The sidhe-seers know my secret. They’re going to stalk me as relentlessly as I stalked the Sinsar Dubh.
End goaclass="underline" put Mac down.
If Jada really is Dani, she’ll publish a cool, accusatory Jada Journal and post it all over the city long before the sun is up, outing me to the world. There’ll be no place I can hide unless I pack up and leave this planet for good with Barrons—
I’m not even talking to Barrons at the moment.
My mom and dad will know what I’ve been concealing from them for months. One daughter dead, the other damned.
The snarling blurs accelerate, darting this way and that. Brigitte goes slamming into a wall and I wince in sympathy. My bones have already begun to heal. She doesn’t have the same gift.
Gift? Longevity could be used against me just like it was against Barrons’s son. For Cruce to be influencing the environment, he must be cognizant in his icy prison in the cold stone chamber deep below the earth, aware his body is frozen, that he’s trapped. Do the minutes creep like hours? Immortal, does he tally the seconds as they tick by, stretching to hellish infinity?
You will soon know, the Sinsar Dubh reminds silkily.
As will you.
Fight, you fucking fool.
You. I dig in my mental heels, determined to outwait it, wagering my humanity against its psychopathy, betting its survival instincts will kick before mine, if only by a split second.
Make me do it, sweet thing, you won’t like it.
I’ll like it better than I’ll like killing all these people. They already think I’m the enemy. If I release the Sinsar Dubh and slaughter these women to free myself, I’ll have proved myself the enemy to anyone left alive. Including me. The rest of the abbey will come after me in force, for good reason. But I won’t even know that. I’ll be a straitjacketed bookworm burrowed into the binding of an insane, homicidal book, staring helplessly out from the pages of my own life, as they’re writ by someone else, and I’d commit atrocities that would damn a saint’s soul.
Suddenly Brigitte appears and collapses in a battered heap. I study the blurs, concluding Jada now has the stones and is trying to place them.
As they whiz around the room like small tornadoes, furniture flies, lamps topple, and bulbs shatter. Rowena’s stately study has become a shambles of trashed furniture and demolished decor.
A jolt of energy suddenly hits me and I flinch. The sensation is familiar. The night we interred the Sinsar Dubh, I had to reach both of my hands into the field generated by the stones to remove the crimson runes from the cover and felt instantly lethargic, nauseated. I’d assumed it was just another facet of my sidhe-seer senses. Now I realize how lucky I was that we’d warded the Book on top of an altar. If I’d had to actually step inside the energy field that night, I would have ended up as trapped as the Sinsar Dubh.