Shauna says, “Kat did a fine job keeping us together in the present. But Jada can lead us into the future.”
I glance at Barrons. He’s motionless, processing, assessing. We came here to roust a conqueror and received instead an unarmed welcome coupled with news that the abbey has embraced their conqueror.
Wants to keep her.
Likes her better than Kat.
Whoever this Jada is, I don’t trust her one bit.
“You will bring her to us now,” Barrons says.
Josie tips her head back and says down her nose to him, “We will inform Jada you’ve requested an audience. After Mac and her Unseelie leave our home.”
Seven men blast past her so fast her short platinum hair flies straight up in the air, and one of them must have caught her with his elbow or fist—I’d bet blood it was Barrons—because she crashes back into a couch, goes tumbling over the side, and slams into the floor.
Grimly, me and my cavalcade of whatever they are follow the men.
By the time we reach the wing that houses Rowena’s chambers—I have no doubt that’s where “Jada” has decided to squat, like the Oval Office, mere occupancy confers power—our group has dwindled to Barrons, Ryodan, and me.
The Highlanders insisted on going underground to check on Cruce’s prison after first making a detour to the Red Library to collect Colleen. Ryodan, who trusts no one, insisted Fade accompany them. Clare and Sorcha, who’d caught up with us by then, insisted we ask Jada before going beneath the abbey, and when the men stalked past them, looked impossibly torn before storming off after them. I remained silent the entire time, prepared to lie through my teeth about anything and everything if they tried to make me go down there where I might get caught in the sticky spiderweb of the powers that hold or are failing to hold Cruce.
As we approach Rowena’s chambers, the stone floor changes from pale gray to stone that glitters faintly, as if sprinkled by silver dust, to solid gold etched with elaborate symbols, inlaid near the walls with glittering gems that wink with dark fire.
Ryodan stops abruptly.
“What is it?”
“Getting a read on anything, Mac.”
I expand my sidhe-seer senses, reaching, searching. “Like what?”
“I feel the same thing I felt at the club the night you were supposed to kill the Unseelie Princess.”
“You didn’t expressly tell me to kill her,” I remind crossly. “And you’re not a sidhe-seer, so how could you possibly be feeling anything?” I glance up at Barrons. “Do you feel something?”
He slices his head once to the left and looks at Ryodan, who stands motionless a long moment then says, “It’s nothing. Forget it.”
But he doesn’t look like he’s forgotten it. He looks deeply disturbed by something. I expand my senses again, searching, but still get nothing. I cock my head thoughtfully and eye my stalkers, crowded close, left, right, and behind.
Absolutely nothing. In any direction, with the exception of what’s beneath the abbey. So what the hell are they, then?
Rowena’s chambers are composed of half a dozen rooms: a bedroom, an ornate, regal study, two libraries, an enormous, lovely bathroom with a huge old claw-foot tub, and a stark, uncomfortable waiting room similar to one at a doctor’s office. I snooped through her suite once, but not as thoroughly as I’d like. I suspect there are more secrets tucked away in there, behind warded panels and floorboards, than grains of sand in an hourglass. More than once Dani and I burst through twin sets of French doors and forced our way into her chambers only to find the scowling headmistress had anticipated our arrival.
No such luck making an unannounced entrance today. As we turn the final corner, four armed women stand at the end of the hall, outside the closed doors.
They’re impressive. I can see why our abbey embraced them; it was that or die. Rowena didn’t train her sidhe-seers. She suppressed them, deliberately kept them weak and needy. Jada’s women are draped in ammo, clutch automatic weapons, and stare stonily at us as we approach, military training apparent in their strong bodies and stronger expressions.
I’d like them if I met them on the street. I’d like them a lot. I have enormous respect for our military men and women, the everyday heroes who provide the security the rest of us enjoy.
I don’t like them in front of that door.
Kat belongs inside those chambers, not some outsider whose loyalty and objectives are uncertain.
They scan us, taking in the Unseelie at my back but making no comment. If they crossed continents to get here, they’ve seen stranger things. Criminy, if they served overseas, they’ve seen a small slice of hell.
They raise their rifles in sleek unison, targeting us.
“She’s not taking visitors,” clips a tall woman with short black hair tipped blond at the ends.
I fall back into my hive of Unseelie, a protected queen bee. The body shield idea works for me. I practically cuddle the smelly things. I may be tough to kill, even survived having my throat ripped out, but I don’t need to experience a spray of automatic bullets to know it would hurt like a bitch.
Barrons and Ryodan are suddenly gone. I sometimes forget they can do that, become virtually invisible, melt into the current terrain, and reappear without warning.
Shots go off, guns fly and smash into walls, and ducking the whine of dangerous ricochets, I nestle into my worker bees. Between their hooded heads I watch a brief brawl that ends with four women unconscious on the floor and Barrons pushing the door open.
As I step over them, the black-haired woman uncoils cobra-fast, grabs my leg and yanks it out from under me.
Barrons is on her instantly but I go down backward, hard.
The strangest thing happens as I fall. I get a sudden weird flash of my room at the Clarin House, time slows to a snail’s crawl and I’m suddenly living two different events superimposed.
I’m falling backward at the abbey.
Yet I’m also falling forward in my cramped room at the inn.
Barrons is looking down at me here, subduing my attacker and trying to catch me.
But at the same time we’re at the inn, and he’s the one who just dumped me on the floor.
I’m clothed here.
At the Clarin House I’m missing my jeans, the air is cool on my skin and I’m butt-ass naked.
I hit the abbey floor hard enough to make my teeth clack, and blink, shaking my head.
WTF?
Reality rearranges itself into a single vision.
I’m in the abbey, only the abbey.
Frowning, I push myself up and watch Barrons and Ryodan drag the women down the hall and dump them into a room.
“Time to meet Jada.” Barrons growls her name the same way I feel it, irritably and accompanied by a death wish.
I stand up, eyeing him uneasily, trying to decide what just happened. The only time Barrons was ever in my room at the Clarin House was that night he came to bully me into going home. We’d argued, he grabbed me at one point and got physical, but then he left. The next day I’d hurt from head to toe.
My frown deepens.
I recall thinking the bruises were odd, more around the sides of my rib cage than across my front where he’d actually had his arm banded beneath my breasts. I didn’t wear a bra for days. And I’d hurt all over, not just my ribs. My thighs had ached, the muscles deep in my butt had been sore. I’d just figured the interminable flight over had taken a toll. I’d never flown that far before, or sat so long in between flights on hard airport benches. I scratch my head, staring at him, feeling like I’m trying to put together a puzzle minus half the pieces, with no picture on the box to guide me.
He gives me a look. “Are you hurt? What is it?”
I search his face, searching my memory, trying to reconcile what I just saw with some version of reality I recall.
There is none.
“Get a fucking move on, Mac,” Ryodan snaps.