A dry chittering above pressed her back into the shadows of a nearby doorway. Tipping her chin upward, she peered with narrowed eyes, wondering if they, too, could be slain. Analyzed potential methods of trapping them. Mac’s stalkers had ceased trailing her for some reason, and although Jada had never seen them harm anyone, she knew they were neither benevolent nor benign.
A flock of a hundred or more carrion wraiths flew overhead, streaking across the crimson-ringed moon, cloaks trailing like ghastly skeletal black fingers beneath wispy low-hanging clouds. Their faces glinted with metallic adornments, and she shivered, an atavistic response. She recognized the flocking pattern: they were hunting. But what? Mac was visible again, and though the teenager she’d once been would have wondered about the hows and whys of that, the woman she’d become wondered about nothing that didn’t further her purposes.
Only when the zombie eating wraiths—the ZEWS—had passed did she slide back up into the slipstream and head for Chester’s.
Three days, he’d said. That was how long it would take him to complete his tattoo.
And Jada would have the final weapon she needed.
The great and powerful Ryodan on a leash.
—
“Goddamn it, do you know what you just did?” Ryodan growled when she burst into his office.
Jada dropped into a chair, tossed her legs over the side and folded her arms behind her head. She had no doubt he’d watched her dramatic entrance on one of his endless monitors. Stretching lean, she shot him a cool look. “Walked through the club.” And patrons had parted around her as if she were carrying the Black Plague. Peeled away from the icy killing machine.
“Drenched in Unseelie guts,” he clipped.
“Blood, too,” she said lightly.
“You go slaughtering Fae, then come sauntering into my club wearing pieces of them. My employees serve Fae here.”
“Perhaps they should be on the menus, not in the booths.” He was as angry as she’d ever seen him. Good. Maybe he’d work faster to get rid of her tonight. She and Dancer could investigate the black holes without him. Once she had the map. “Have the rules changed and I didn’t get the memo? Last I heard, I wasn’t supposed to kill on your turf. I didn’t.”
He moved so quickly she didn’t see him coming. And she had a moment of sudden insight: not only did he move faster in the slipstream, he accessed it more quickly. She’d never tried to streamline her time entering, only her time within. She added a new challenge to her list.
He towered over her. “Don’t play games with me, Jada. Belligerence is beneath you.”
She neither shifted position nor acknowledged his criticism. “I didn’t have time to change.”
“Then you’ll make it now. I’m not working on you with that much death on your skin.” He raked her with a cool glance. But deep in those silver eyes there was something hot. Excited by the carnage she wore. She narrowed her eyes, expanded her senses, wondering for the umpteenth time about this man’s secrets.
She realized they were both breathing shallowly and instantly altered her pattern, lengthening her inhales and exhales. She didn’t need a mirror to know what she looked like.
Savage. Eyes much too bright, hot and cold at the same time.
Blood and guts on her face, in her hair. Covered with it, boots, jeans, skin. Body thrumming with barely harnessed energy.
Hungry, even after so much killing, to lash out, to do something to balance the scales inside her that felt so impossibly out of kilter. “You want me to waste time leaving to take a shower when we have—Don’t touch me!” She was on her feet, yanked to them. Her hands went up and out, blocking, knocking his hands away.
They stood like that, a foot apart, and she thought for a moment he was going to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, but he didn’t. Merely let his hands fall. Good thing. She would have kicked his ass across the office.
He said coldly, “You tell yourself you’ve learned the right things to turn on and off inside you. You haven’t. You killed tonight with fury. I smell it on you. And you lied to yourself while doing it. You killed from the pain of not knowing how the fuck to live in this world. Get used to it. A superhero doesn’t flaunt his kills. He slides in, takes the lives he came for, and slides back out, wearing shadow.”
“How would you know? You’re the villain of the piece.”
“Not tonight, Jada. Tonight it was you. How many did you kill?”
She said nothing. She had no idea.
“How many were human?”
Again she said nothing.
“And you’re certain they deserved to die. Certain you’re thinking coolly enough to pass that judgment.”
She could stand in silence a long time.
“I’ll say it one more time. Jada. Let me teach you.”
“The only thing I’ll let you do is tattoo me.”
“You’re brittle.”
“I’m steel.”
“Brittle snaps.”
“Steel bends.”
“Christ, you’re so close.” He shook his head in disgust.
“To what?” she said derisively. “To the way you think I should be? Isn’t that what you’ve always been doing? Like Rowena? Experimenting on me? Determined to make me what you want?”
He went still, assessing her intently. “You know what Rowena did.”
“I live inside my own head. I’m brilliant.”
He didn’t speak for a moment, as if debating what to say and what not to say, and she wondered what he thought he knew that she didn’t. Measuring her. Deeming her, if she could read the look in his eyes, on the verge of an explosion. She wasn’t. She had herself completely under control. To prove it, she once again adjusted her breathing. Deepening it. She wasn’t entirely certain how it had gotten so shallow again.
He stepped back then, as if giving a cornered, wild animal room so it wouldn’t spook. “Rowena wanted you to be what she wanted you to be,” he said finally. “I want you to be what you want you to be. And it’s not this.”
“You don’t know what I want. Your inferences are incorrect. Tattoo me or I leave.”
Another measured look. “Wash and I’ll tattoo you.”
“Fine. Where’s the nearest lav?” She wanted that tattoo.
Without bothering to reply, he turned for the door.
She followed, chafed that he had something she wanted badly enough that she would follow. Chafed that she was so wired her hand trembled as she swept her sword back to pass through the door.
Chafed that he was right.
She had killed with fury tonight.
She’d played Death like a lover, seeking release. If she’d really wanted to help Dublin the most logical and efficient way possible, she’d have gone to Inspector Jayne, forged a new alliance, and cleaned out his overflowing cages so the Guardians could capture more. Let a hundred Guardians net for her so she could slay even greater numbers. But efficient killing hadn’t appealed to her, standing there, methodically slicing off the heads of dull-eyed, defeated enemies. There was something about the heat of the hunt she’d craved.
She had no desire to analyze motives that had been so clear at the last full moon, now splintered, impaling her every way she turned.
She followed him in silence. She would put up with anything, do virtually anything, to get her tattoo finished.