I can’t read any more. I know they’re getting ready to dis me. But my traitorous eyeballs sneak another peek and sure enough there it is!
… a certain bragging teenager that JEOPARDIZED the mission and was single-handedly responsible for getting many good, innocent people KILLED and taken CAPTIVE!
“Buh! Who is writing this drivel?” I was the hero tonight! I saved the fecking day with my winning combination of brains and skills. They even made the font size bigger on the slander about me! I know the tricks of the trade. Talk about your biased press! I feel my face getting hot and red. It pisses me off so much I’d rupture a gonad if I had one. WeCare sure as feck has them out the wazoo!
“Stop her!” Mac shouts.
I don’t stand a chance against both of them. Heck, I don’t stand a chance against Barrons by himself. He’s like Ryodan. I can’t compete on my best day.
Yet.
I fist my hands and take rapid deep breaths, clearing my head of the Wemightcarebutsureasfeckdon’ttellthetruth bull-crap. It takes me a sec to analyze possibilities and figure out how I’m getting myself out of this one. The answer is so simple it takes my breath away. I’m wired to survive on a gut level. My subconscious brought me exactly where I needed to be.
I duck past him and totally catch him off guard—or more likely he decides not to chase me for some mysterious reason, because there’s no way I can outrun Barrons, not even in freeze-frame—then can’t help myself and dart back and snatch the slanted scrap o’ crap from the column and wad it up ’cause I sure as heck ain’t letting it hang there, then I’m back behind the bookstore, hurrying to the first building on the left side of the Dark Zone.
Last time I was here was the night me and Christian searched the Unseelie King’s library, the night the words in the Boora Boora books crawled off the pages and stung me like fire ants, and I accidentally set the Crimson Hag free.
Christian. The Hag. Cripes, I got some cleanup work to do.
When he showed me the hidden portal in the wall that’s really a secret passageway into the ancient mirrors the Fae once used to travel between worlds, I’d committed the precise, unremarkable spot of bricks to memory. All weapons and escape routes—good. Not even Ryodan with his stupid contract on me can track me Fae-side. I figured if the city ever got too hot for me, I could always ditch it for a while.
It’s feeling way too hot right now.
“Dani, don’t!” Mac cries.
I leap into the brick. It’s weirdly spongelike, then so am I, then I’m standing in a large, windowless, doorless room with blank white walls and a white floor and ten enormous mirrors of varying shapes and sizes suspended in the air. They hang without visible means of support, some motionless, others twirling lazily. No surprise there. Fae stuff, animate and not, rarely give a wink and sure as heck no nod to human physics. It’s why Dancer’s so fascinated by them. Some of the mirrors have intricately carved frames, while others have thin edges of welded chain-link. A few of the looking glasses within the frames are as black as night, some milky white, and others crammed with shadows you don’t want to look at hard.
It’s a good thing I know which mirror to take—second Silver on the right plops you smack inside the infinite, a-fecking-mazing White Mansion. I been itching to explore it anyway. If they follow me through, I’ll use the labyrinthine corridors to lose them or unstopper another distraction because Rule Number One in the Mega O’Malley Handbook is and will always be: survival first, damage control second. Which is only logical. You can’t do damage control dead.
If they don’t follow me in, all I have to do is wait long enough for my superpowers to return, then come back because it’ll be a couple days, if not a couple weeks later in Dublin. When Christian and me went through last time, we lost almost a month! Time doesn’t pass the same in Fae realms. No way they’ll sit in the White Room 24/7 waiting for me. I hate losing Dublin-time that I could be using to help my city but I can’t help my city at all if I’m not alive.
Mac explodes through the wall behind me like she was shot by a cannon, slams into my back and nearly pushes me into the wrong mirror, and all I can think is what a disaster that would have been. I got no clue where the other ones go. Might be a world without air, a direct path into the Unseelie prison, or a galaxy filled with Hunters, or Shades, or gray women! I got a special hate on for the gray-folk caste of Unseelie. One of them almost killed me and forced Mac to make a promise she shouldn’t have made.
I shove her off me and she stumbles back, nearly crashing into Barrons, who just entered the room with his usual stalky animal grace.
Jericho Barrons is an unshakable, undestroyable constant. He’s the cornerstone of my universe. Or maybe together they are. I don’t know. I only know as long as the two of them and BB&B still stand, some part of me that never used to feel okay, does.
I can’t help myself—I watch them a sec. I love watching them together. I slow-mo it to absorb every detail.
Mac draws up short to keep from slamming into Barrons, and her blond hair swings back over her shoulder, brushing his face as it does, and my hearing is so good I catch the rasp of it chafing the shadow stubble on his jaw, then one of his hands grazes her breast and his eyes narrow when he looks at what he touched in a hungry way I want a man to look at me like one day and, as they continue to recover from the near-collision, their bodies move in a graceful dance of impeccable awareness of precisely where the other is at all times that is unity, symbiosis, partnership I only dream of, wolves that chose to pack up and hunt together, soldiers who will always have each other’s backs no matter what, no sin, no transgression too great, ’cause don’t we all transgress sometimes and it fecking slays me, because once I got a little taste of what that was like, and it was heaven and they’re so beautiful standing there, the best of the best, the strongest of the strong, that they practically glow to me, on fire with all I ever wanted in my life—a place to belong and someone to belong there with.
Together they mean to kill me and go on living, all happy, like I didn’t even mean anything. They’ll eat and have sex and adventures and I’ll be nothing but six feet under in dirt—assuming anyone even bothers to bury me. Gone. Over. Finis. Done. Quit. Before I ever even got the chance to live.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been hap—
I terminate that idiotic train of thought. As soon as my sidhe-seer gifts come back, I’ll get over this wimpy little emotional meltdown I’m having. Losing the superpowers that make me special plus seeing Mac up close and personal for the first time since she found out what I did is temporarily messing with my head. Key word there, temporarily.
Fourteen blows.
Hormones suck.
I wish I’d just grow the hell up in a hurry and everything would even out and start to make sense and folks would stop seeing me as a kid and I could finally—
Bugger it all! What am I waiting for?
I close my hand on the hilt of my sword and dive headfirst into the mirror, laughing as I go. I always crack up when I leap into the unknown. It’s cotton-candy fuel, there’s a big-top tent full of carnival magic in a good belly laugh.
Next grand adventure here I come!
The last thing I hear is Mac shouting, “Oh, God, no, Dani, not that one! We moved them! That one goes to—”