“This Dani appears to matter to you.”
“Always.”
“Perhaps you had a funny way of showing it.”
“How would you know.”
“I’ve heard.”
“You’ve heard, my ass. I know you. I saw you when Dani was ten. Jada. You looked right back at me. We fought that night. I won her back from you and I will again. I’ve seen you other times as well. You may wear a woman’s body now but it belongs to Dani. You have no right to be here.”
I gape at Ryodan. Is he saying what I think he’s saying? Not only did Dani leave and come back older, but she came back someone else? There’s a word for it … I rummage for what remains scattered around my brain from the entry-level psychology course I took … aha! Dissociative disorder. Is he saying she’s fragmented? And he knew this? No way. I would have seen it. Wouldn’t I?
Jada trains her emerald gaze on me. “She is who doesn’t belong here. Faulty logic imprisons one Sinsar Dubh while the other is permitted to roam Dublin. It is what it is regardless of the vessel.”
“Oh, you should so talk,” I snap. “Dani.”
“I. Am. Jada.”
“Whoever the fuck you are,” Barrons growls, “you’re not touching Mac.”
“Well, you’re not touching me either,” I growl up at him.
“Deal with it, Ms. Lane.”
“Deal with it?” I say incredulously. “Ms. Lane, my bloody ass. You called me Mac that very night, that first night we met and screwed our brains out, and what do I get ever since? I’ll tell you what I—”
“During. You changed. You became the woman after. A stiff blindered horse that spooked on new terrain. I expected better—”
“Oh, and because your expectations weren’t met—”
“They were bloody well exceeded, which is why the after—”
“You think you have the right to just strip the entire experience from one party to the—”
“—was such a grand disappointment, and if—”
“—event as if they—”
“It wasn’t an ‘event.’ It was a motherfucking revelation.”
“—don’t even have the right to remember whatever the hell mistake they—”
“Which is precisely why I did it. You thought it was a mistake, then you—”
“—chose to make, just like they might choose to keep the memory, because after all, they were there and it was theirs and possession is nine-tenths of—”
“—started getting all tight-lipped and pissy and I knew if—”
“—law.”
“I am the law.”
“Apparently. Heil.” I click my heels together and salute.
“Can’t you two find a better fucking moment for this,” Ryodan says tightly.
“Really,” Green Camo agrees.
“Stay the hell out of my business,” I snap at both of them.
“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 goal: 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?