THIRTEEN
“The very worst part of you is me”
I’m on the roof of a building, across the street from the pile of concrete, twisted metal, and broken glass that once was Chester’s. The club is deep underground now. Usually there’s a line for blocks, but it’s four in the morning and everyone who wanted to be inside got inside about an hour ago. I guess that means enough people died to open up additional standing room because I didn’t see anyone come out.
A black Humvee pulls up.
It’s what I’ve been waiting for.
I used to hate being up high, which is ironic, considering I’m a Highlander. Or I was.
I’m getting used to heights. The view’s better. You see more and you might as well be invisible. People don’t look up much, not even in times like these, when they should because you never know what’s in the sky above you, getting ready to feed on you, maybe a Hunter, or a Shade. Or me.
I watch her get out of the Humvee. She’s bouncing from foot to foot between steps, moving sideways and forward at the same time, eating a candy bar. I’ve never seen anyone with so much energy. Her hair is auburn fire in the moonlight. Her skin is luminous. She has sweet young curves and long legs. Her features are bone china fine, and expressions rush across her skin like my new Unseelie tattoos rush beneath mine.
But it’s the heart of the girl that gets me.
He’s big and towers over her. Hard face. Hard body. Hard walk. They look so wrong together. They’re talking. She keeps looking up at him like he gets on her last nerve. Good. Her hand hovers near the hilt of her sword and I know what she’s thinking. She despises Chester’s. She can barely stand to be in the same place with Fae without killing them. She hates them. All of them.
It’s a category that will soon include me.
The owner of Chester’s looks up.
I’m deep in shadows on the roof, throwing a light glamour, a new power I’ve been testing, trying to make my face more palatable to her.
I focus on projecting a general blanket of night and emptiness so he can’t see me.
His gaze stops right where I am and he gets a smug-ass look on his face, but that’s his look most of the time. I’ve nearly decided that while he might sense a disturbance in the night up here, he can’t actually see me when he inclines his head in that arrogant, imperial way so characteristic of the dickhead.
Rage washes over me, thick and intense and smothering, and for a few seconds I drift in a black place where everything’s icy and wasted and evil and I like it. I’m glad I’m going Unseelie prince. I say bring on the power.
I say let there be war.
I throw back my head and slide a mane of hair over my shoulders. Cutting it doesn’t do a bloody thing. I sleep, I wake up, it’s there again. I turn my face up to the moon and inhale greedily. I want to drop to all fours and bay like a wild thing drunk on being hungry and strong, a beast that could fuck for days without cease if I could only find something that could take it as hard and long as I can give it. I want to chime to the moon in Unseelie, and hear it chime back. I can smell death in the city, everywhere, and it’s intoxicating. I can smell need and sex and hunger and it’s so bloody sweet—humanity ripe for the plucking and playing and eating! I shift my dick in my jeans. It’s painfully hard. And the Earth is round.
I look back down, my eyes narrow. My boots are crusted with ice. The roof has gone white in a circle of snow and glittering ice in a fifteen-foot radius around me. I lope lightly along the edge of the roof, crunching snow, following as they go around back. This is going to be so much easier when I don’t have to use my feet.
He isn’t what he’s pretending to be with her.
I watch him all the time. I’m going to be there when he stops pretending. I’m going to be her bulletproof vest, her shield, her fallen fucking angel whether she wants one or not. He’s pretending he’s almost human. He’s no more human than me. He’s pretending to be nice, like he’s safe to be around, like he doesn’t have fangs for a reason. He’s pretending the term the “Gavel Effect” wasn’t coined about him, meaning you’re fine with him. Right up until you’re not.
Right up until you’re dead.
The devil in a businessman’s suit, he bides his time, gathers information, processes it, and when he makes a decision, the gavel falls and everyone that pissed him off or offended him or just breathed wrong dies.
She won’t be given a stay of execution. No one gets one. The only things that matter to him are others of his kind.
She thinks he’s not an animal like Barrons. That he’s more civilized. She’s right, he is more polished. But it only makes him more dangerous. With Barrons you expect to get fucked up royally. With Ryodan you don’t see it coming.
He’s treating her like she’s fourteen and he’s a normal adult, acting like he’s taken her under his wing. Like he needs her detecting skills, same as Barrons did to Mac, and she’s falling for it, same as Mac. He’s lining up his dominoes, so they fall more easily when he feels like pushing them over, conserving energy so he doesn’t have to hunt her when he’s ready to kill her.
A bastard like him has one use for women. And she’s not old enough. Yet. I can’t decide which would be worse, if he killed her before she was old enough or waited and made her one of his endless string of women.
She’s not that kind of girl, the endless string type. You get a shot at something like her once in a lifetime. And if you screw it up there’s a special place in hell for you.
She breaks away from him suddenly and stomps off ahead. She’s pissed. I smile.
I pull out my knife, twist my arm over my shoulder and scratch my back with it. Blood trickles. I sigh with relief, but it doesn’t last long. Sleeping is a real bitch. My back itches all the time and human drugs don’t work on me. I twist to get a better scratch.
My blade hits bone with a dull clunk. I saw at it with the serrated tip of the blade but can’t get the angle right. I don’t have any friends that are glad to see me, nobody to lend a helping hand. I tried to get Dad to cut them out of my back. He said they’re attached to my spine and it would kill me. I don’t believe that. Nothing kills me. They itch. I want them gone almost as much as I’m beginning to want them.
Fucking wings.
Funny how things work out. Dani killed an Unseelie prince to save Mac, and I end up turning into the replacement for the prince Dani killed. But it’s not the lass’s fault. It’s Mac’s. For needing saving. Later, for forcing me to eat something I would never have eaten if I’d been in my right mind.
I wonder if my wings will get as big as Cruce’s. I wonder what it would feel like to fly the night sky with him and the other two. I see a vision in my head sometimes of the four of us, swooping down over the city, black wings beating air, filling the sky, owning the world. I can hear the sound we make as the four of us chime deep in our bodies. There’s a special, bloodcurdling song the Unseelie princes sing, sometimes it plays in my head while I sleep. The call to the Wild Hunt burns in my blood.
I back up to the corner of a small brick building on the roof that houses heat pumps, lean against it and drag my back from side to side across the edge, scratching, watching as they move toward a metal door in the ground.
He catches up with her and they walk together again.
She glides through the night. He punches into it, a boxing glove with razor blades for knuckles. When she passes, the world is a better place. He leaves bloody footprints in a graveyard of bones.
He lifts the door, light blazes up from a hole in the ground, and she descends, my angel into a sordid hell.
He squats at the edge and watches her go and, for a split second, I see an unguarded expression on his face.
It chills even a creature as cold as me.
I know that look. I’ve seen it on my own face.
Then the son of a bitch looks up at me and, this time, there’s no question in my mind that he sees me. He looks straight at me and inclines his head with a mocking smile. I return it coolly. My nod says, “Yes, yes, I see you, too. Be very careful.”
I can’t decide if what he just let me see was real—or another of his games. They don’t call him the master of manipulation for nothing. Barrons breaks heads. Ryodan turns them inside out. Barrons fucks you up. Ryodan makes you fuck yourself up. He pushes buttons and rearranges things according to his own private, coolly sociopathic plan.
I liked it better when I thought he was going to kill her.
I stop scratching.
I want those wings. They’ll make the fight that’s coming easier.
He’s a walking dead man.
If he wasn’t serious about what he just showed me, and he’s gaming me, he gamed the wrong Unseelie prince. I’ll kill him long before he gets around to killing her. I know how men like him work. I’m becoming one.
If he was serious about what he just showed me, he showed it to the wrong Unseelie prince. Because what he showed me is that he sees the same things in her I do.
He knows she’s worth waiting for.
And when it’s time, he intends to be the one. That’s why he’s keeping her close. To those of us who live forever, a few years isn’t long to wait.
Not for something worth waiting for. Not for a once-in-a-lifetime girl.
A few years are a mere blink of an eye to men like us, for whom women crush sweetly like rotting pumpkins after Halloween. Sex isn’t easy for me anymore. I’m always holding back. Human women are breakable.
Not this one.
He sees her like I do: at seventeen, twenty, thirty. Superimposed over the fourteen-year-old, he sees the woman she’ll become.
And he’s staking his claim.
Over my. Dead. Fucking. Body.
And I can’t die.
But I know one of his kind that recently did, and I know how. I hear there’s a Hunter up there in the night sky that likes Unseelie royalty.
Soon I’ll have the wings to find him.