*
It‘s hard to say what makes the mind piece things together in a sudden lightning flash. I‘ve come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit, too, has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows when the harm is too much to bear. If it deems the injury too great, the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it. For some people, that time never comes. Some stay fractured, forever broken. You see them on the street, pushing carts. You see them in the faces of the regulars at a bar.
My cocoon was that room.
After Barrons left—I later realized he often left while I slept—I dreamed. Some say dreaming is another place we go. That we don‘t know it as such because it‘s not a physical realm we recognize. It exists in another dimension, which mankind has not yet discovered and to which it attributes no credence.
I dreamed my life back.
Alina and I playing, laughing, running hand in hand, chasing butterflies with nets, but we don‘t catch them, because who wants to trap a butterfly in a net? Too fragile, too delicate. You don‘t want to break their wings. Like sisters and love. You have to be vigilant with precious things. I fell asleep on my watch. I wasn‘t vigilant. I didn‘t hear the undercurrents in her voice. I was lazy and ignorant in my happy pink world. A cell phone dropped into a pool. Ripples spreading on the surface. Everything changed forever.
I am grief.
I dream my parents, but they‘re not. Alina and I were born to others, but I have no memory of them, and I wonder for the first time if someone took those memories from me. I am betrayed.
I dream Dublin and the first Fae I ever saw and that nasty old woman, Rowena, who told me to go die somewhere else if I couldn‘t protect my bloodline, then left me alone without offering me the smallest bit of help.
I am anger. I didn‘t deserve that.
I dream Barrons and V‘lane, and I am lust wed to suspicion, and those two emotions together are poison.
I dream the Lord Master, my sister‘s murderer, and I am vengeance. But no longer hot. I am cold vengeance, the lethal kind.
I dream the Book that is a beast, and it speaks my name and calls me kindred. I am not.
I dream Mallucé‘s lair. I eat the flesh of immortal beings and I am changed. I dream Christian and Dani and the abbey of sidhe-seers. O‘Duffy, Jayne, Fiona, and O‘Bannion, the Hunters, and the monsters invading my streets. Then the dreams come darker and faster, blows from a world-class boxer bruising my brain, pulping my heart.
Dublin goes dark! The Wild Hunt! The smell of spice and sex!
I am in the narthex of the church, and there are Unseelie Princes all around me, and they slice me open and rip out my insides and scatter them all over the street, leaving a shell of a woman, a bag of skin and bones, and the horror of it, God, the horror of watching yourself from the outside as everything you know about yourself gets stripped away and demolished, not just the loss of power over your body but power over your mind, rape in the deepest, most hellish sense of the word, but wait—
There‘s a spark.
Inside that hollowed-out woman, there‘s a place they can‘t touch. There‘s more to me than I thought there was. Something that no one and nothing can take away from me. They can‘t break me. I won‘t cease. I‘m strong. And I am never going to go away until I‘ve gotten what I came for.
I might have been lost for a while, but I was never gone.
Who the fuck are you?
With an explosive inhalation, I snap upright in bed, and my eyes fly open—like coming alive after being dead and interred in a coffin.
I am Mac.
And I‘m back.