You will soon know, the Sinsar Dubh reminds silkily.
As will you.
Fight, you fucking fool.
You. I dig in my mental heels, determined to outwait it, wagering my humanity against its psychopathy, betting its survival instincts will kick before mine, if only by a split second.
Make me do it, sweet thing, you won’t like it.
I’ll like it better than I’ll like killing all these people. They already think I’m the enemy. If I release the Sinsar Dubh and slaughter these women to free myself, I’ll have proved myself the enemy to anyone left alive. Including me. The rest of the abbey will come after me in force, for good reason. But I won’t even know that. I’ll be a straitjacketed bookworm burrowed into the binding of an insane, homicidal book, staring helplessly out from the pages of my own life, as they’re writ by someone else, and I’d commit atrocities that would damn a saint’s soul.
Suddenly Brigitte appears and collapses in a battered heap. I study the blurs, concluding Jada now has the stones and is trying to place them.
As they whiz around the room like small tornadoes, furniture flies, lamps topple, and bulbs shatter. Rowena’s stately study has become a shambles of trashed furniture and demolished decor.
A jolt of energy suddenly hits me and I flinch. The sensation is familiar. The night we interred the Sinsar Dubh, I had to reach both of my hands into the field generated by the stones to remove the crimson runes from the cover and felt instantly lethargic, nauseated. I’d assumed it was just another facet of my sidhe-seer senses. Now I realize how lucky I was that we’d warded the Book on top of an altar. If I’d had to actually step inside the energy field that night, I would have ended up as trapped as the Sinsar Dubh.
On the east end of the study, flush to the wall, a line of blue-black flickers and solidifies. Two of the stones have connected. They flare and begin to emit a chilling chime.
Assuming Barrons and Ryodan defeat Jada and the next two stones don’t get positioned, assuming I don’t feel the third stone flare to life and suddenly develop psychopathic tendencies of my own—where do I go from here?
Do I leave with Barrons and trust him to protect me? I can’t protect myself. I can’t use the spear with any certainty that I won’t kill again. I can’t outrun Jada. My ineffectualness chafes. God, does it chafe.
Last season’s MVP vanishing into obscurity.
Oh, yeah, I feel invisible.
I jerk again.
The third stone just connected with the other two, and I watch a second line form at the perimeter of the north wall of the study.
If the last stone is placed, two more blue-black lines will appear on the south and west ends, squaring me in, and I’ll be trapped in Cruce’s hellish, conscious stasis. They’ll collect the stones, gather them close around me as we did with the Book, then carry me down, deep into the earth where I really hate being. No crimson runes are necessary to seal the cover of my Book; my body is lock enough. It’s not like anyone can pry open my skin and read it. The brilliant wards and runes on the towering walls of the cavern will connect to the field of the stones, and intensify it.
I’ll lie upon a slab, staring up at the ceiling far above (unless adding insult to injury, they put me facedown, God, that would suck), trapped in waking paralysis, a spelled Sleeping Beauty longing for the kiss of a prince (just not Cruce!).
Am I really going to stand here and let them imprison me? Become the Disney heroine that can’t save herself?
Accept that you’re outgunned? the Sinsar Dubh mocks. Stay on the floor and don’t even try to fight? What kind of life is that? It’s now or never, sweet thing.
For the first time since the moment I withstood the temptation to take the spell and free Barrons’s son, I seriously consider opening the godforsaken book and doing whatever I must to walk out of here alive. This time, however, Barrons isn’t in my head to offer counsel and strength.
This time it’s only me facing the greatest test in my twenty-three years. What am I willing to do to survive? What price am I willing to pay?
Evil isn’t a state of being, Barrons once said to me. It’s a choice.
My life flashes before my eyes: who I was, who I am now, what I might become. Whether I can live with myself assuming I one day claw my way back to control. The casualties on my conscience, the ashes I might find myself standing in. I remember the Book killing in the streets of Dublin, remember the Beast it became as it exploded upward, terrifyingly powerful even in amorphous form.
My body would give it corporeality. Nearly immortal corporeality.
I know what the Book did the last time it walked Dublin’s streets. Killed with unadulterated psychotic glee.
The stakes are simple: me or the world.
Can Barrons save me if I let the sidhe-seers trap me? Will Barrons save me?
A strange calm settles over me as I realize it’s irrelevant.
The bottom line is we choose our epitaphs.
Every moment of every day we decide upon the actions that define us—or so a wise man that wasn’t wise enough not to steal my memory once told me—it’s all about what we can live with and what we can’t live without.
I can’t live with being the woman who freed the Sinsar Dubh to save her own ass, butchering who knows how many people in the process, and who knows how many more before I’m stopped. That’s not going to be chiseled on my Urn. No grave, I’m not getting stuck beneath the ground for freaking perpetuity. And if I have to have a bloody Urn, at least I’m going to choose the inscription.
Heroes fight, the Book derides my decision. Victims give up. Barrons is right, you’re a walking victim, a lamb in a city of wolves. You deserve to die.
I don’t reply. Sometimes the most heroic action you can take looks a lot like inaction to the rest of the world. Sometimes the hardest, longest walk is the one the white-hat takes offstage.
They’ll think they outsmarted you, trapped you. They’ll never believe you chose it. Your “noble” sacrifice will be for nothing because they won’t see it that way, the Book goads.
Totally sucks. And is perfectly probable. Whether or not they understand what I did has no impact on the value of my action. Either I decimate this place and stalk out, probably to destroy the entire world—but hey, I’ll be alive—or I let them put me on ice and trust that those who love me will find a way to rescue me.
While accepting that I may never be rescued.
It may not be the best way for me.
But it’s the right way.
Sadness fills me. I don’t want to be done yet.
I hope Mom and Dad figure it out. I want them to be proud of me. And I hope Barrons—God, I’m so pissed at him right now I can’t even complete the thought! Tears press at the back of my eyes but I refuse to let them flow.
The fourth stone explodes from the blur of motion, skitters across the floor, sliding toward that fourth corner, sliding …
I brace myself for what’s about to happen.
I accept that it’s necessary.
I’m afraid. I hate being afraid.
I won’t get paralyzed looking that way. I square my shoulders, straighten my spine, tuck in my stomach and angle my head, notch my chin slightly upward. What’s that saying? Die young and leave a pretty corpse.
I wish I were as invisible as this battle raging around me makes me feel, fought by opponents with whom I can’t hope to compete because at least then I’d be able to—
About fucking time, the Sinsar Dubh growls. Your wish. My command.
Then it roars, RUN.