Cognizant of my position at the abbey, I avert my gaze from the iced prince and sedately walk the circumference of his cage, head straight, shoulders squared.
I turn the corner. “Margery,” I say. She is directly opposite where, moments ago, I stood. Had she made no sound, I would have left none the wiser.
“Kat.”
Hostility buffets me in hot waves. The emotions of others have temperature and color, and when intense, texture as well.
Margery is red, fevered, and complexly crafted as a honeycomb, with hundreds of tiny deceits and angers and resentments tucked into each small nook. I know a thing about resentment: it is a poison you drink yourself, expecting others to die.
I’ve been classifying emotions into categories all my life. Navigating the hearts of those around me is a minefield. There are people I stand near a single time and skirt forevermore. Margery’s emotions are deeply conflicted, dangerous.
I wonder if I could feel my own, I would also be hot, red, a honeycomb of lies and resentments. But I do not want to lead! my soul is crying.
“I was wondering if we overlooked something about the grid,” she says. “I fear he is not securely contained.”
“As was I. As do I.”
“Great minds.” She offers a tight smile. Her hands clench the bars, white-knuckled.
I do not add the cued “think alike” because she and I do not. She hungers for power. I long for simplicity. I would have made a fine fisherman’s wife, in a cottage by the sea, with five children, cats and dogs. She would make a grand Napoleon.
We assess each other warily.
Does he visit her?
Does he make love to her?
I cannot ask if she is dreaming of him and if that is what has brought her down here on this rainy, cold morning. Whether she is or not, she will claim she is not then tell the entire abbey that I am, that I am being corrupted and must be replaced.
She will use anything against me to take control of the abbey. At the very core of my first cousin Margery Annabelle Bean-McLaughlin is a great, sucking need. It was there when we were children, playing together, and she broke the knees of my dolls and stole small treasures from me. I have never understood it. I observe her white knuckles. She clenches the bars of his cage as if she is squeezing the life from something. “Your thoughts?”
She moistens her lower lip, looks as if she’s about to speak, then stops. I wait and after a moment she says, “What if the King took the book? I mean, took it from Cruce before he iced him.”
“Do you think that’s possible?” I say, as if it’s a perfectly reasonable question. As if I don’t know in that instant we are both being fed the same lies.
She looks at Cruce then back at me. Her eyes are billboards, advertising her emotions. She regards Cruce with tender, private communion. She looks at me as if I could not possibly begin to understand the first thing about her, him, or the world we live in. “You are not gifted,” she hissed at me when we were nine and she heard her parents praising me for saving the family from a traitor in the endless plots and plans and betrayals that were our life. My parents used to take me to “business” meetings with Dublin’s seediest, and watch me carefully to see who made me most uncomfortable. “You are cursed and flawed and no one is ever going to love you!”
All these years later I see the same taunt in her eyes. Oh, yes, he is attending her nightly, too.
I am not only an adulteress, I am a cheap one. I shape that realization into a brick around my heart and slather it with mortar so it is ready for the next brick I can use. It will be in his way when he comes tonight. My Sean will be in bed beside me.
She shrugs. “Perhaps we don’t know what really happened down here that night. What if the king tricked us?”
“Why would he do that?” I say.
“How could I presume to divine his motives?”
I need to know how deep her corruption goes. “Are you thinking perhaps we should free Cruce?”
A hand floats to her chest as if in alarm. “Do you think we should?” A crafty gleam enters her eye. “Do you know how?”
She has always been weaker than me. He is merely a blacker stain in her already corrupt blood.
“I think we need to figure out how to get the grid the Unseelie King created back up and functioning. I think the chamber should be filled with concrete, the grid reactivated, the doors closed, and the entire city beneath our abbey filled with lead.”
I nearly stagger from the crippling fury of her emotional reply, although her lips shape sweetly the lie, “You are right, Katarina. As always, as everyone knows, you are right.”
I offer my hand and she takes it as she did when we were children, lacing our fingers together. When we jumped rope, she would always pull it short. She had strong conflicting emotions about me when she was young that made her hard to read. I chipped four teeth before I stopped thinking the next time she would be different.
We walk from the chamber hand in hand, as if strengthening one another with love instead of keeping the enemy close.
Twenty-One
“I’m a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride. I’m wanted …”
I ain’t afraid of nothing. Never have been.
But there are some things that would be plain stupid to do. Got nothing to do with fear. It’s all about logic and practicality. You look at the world, assess your odds of survival in light of current circumstances, and choose the course that offers the best chance for whatever it is you want.
Like, say, continuing to breathe.
I stand outside Chester’s, staring up at a streetlamp in the scant light of dawn. The sky is one big bank of thunderclouds. It’s going to be a dismal, wet day. Happy fecking May in Dublin. Cold, too. I’m starting to wonder if summer’s ever going to get here.
Hanging on the side of the streetlamp is a poster. At first when I walked out of the club, I thought We-the-feck-Care had posted another paper in the few hours I spent cleaning up then sitting in Ryodan’s office doing a great big fat nothing but glaring at the top of his head while he worked, trying not to think about what stupid purpose his stupid desk served so recently — like, did he disinfect it or what? Whole time I was there he wouldn’t even look at me. Not even when he finally told me I could leave. I know I look bizarre in the clothes Lor gave me after my shower, but c’mon, get over it already. He didn’t have to not look at me the whole time and make me feel even more stupid than I already do.
Back to the poster … despite what I’m wearing and despite not having my sword, I was going to freeze-frame around the city and tear them all down.
Except WTFC didn’t post this paper.
Something worse did.
The flyer tacked on the lamppost is poster quality. Staring out from it, my face looks back at me in living color, full frontal and profile.
And I think: when did they take pictures of me? I study it, trying to remember the last time I wore that shirt. I think it was four or five days ago. There’s no mistaking who it is. Anybody would recognize me in a heartbeat. They were either really close to me and I somehow didn’t know it, which is inconceivable, or someone else took the pictures for them, or they had one heck of a good lens. I look pretty good. Well, except for the black eye and cut-up lip, but I hardly see those kinds of things on my face anymore. I’m used to the terrain, who notices trees in the forest? I squint. “Bugger. You kidding me?” There were guts in my hair whenever it was. I sigh. One day I’m going to have clean hair and no bruises. Right. And one day Ryodan will apologize for being such a total dickhead all the time.
The message is direct and to the point.
Alive
If you are human immortality