Family reconciliations aside, Barrons didn’t like the change in the game plan, and neither did I.
We’d spent months building to this moment, and now, on the eve of battle, in walked my biological parents, telling us we were no longer necessary. They would fight the war and finish it.
It chafed.
“Can you track it?” Barrons demanded.
Pieter answered. “Isla can. But it can sense her, as well, which made it too dangerous for her to be in Dublin until we were certain MacKayla had the amulet.”
“How did you know I had it?” I said.
“Your mother said she felt you connect with it tonight. We came at once.”
“I thought I felt you connect with it once before, at the beginning of October last year,” Isla said, “but the feeling was gone almost as suddenly as it came.”
I blinked. “I did touch it last October. How did you know that?”
“I have no idea,” she said simply. “I felt the joining of two great powers. Both times I felt you, MacKayla. I felt my daughter!” Her face crumpled. “I felt Alina once, too.” She looked away, stared into the cold fireplace for a long moment, then shivered. “She was dying. Could we please have a fire?”
“Of course,” Pieter said immediately. He rose and moved to the fireplace, but Barrons beat him there.
He glared at Pieter. You may be trying to claim the woman, his eyes said, but make no mistake, she and the fucking fireplace are mine.
After a long moment, Pieter shrugged and moved back to the sofa.
“We’ll sleep on it,” Barrons said. “Leave now. We’ll be in touch tomorrow.”
Pieter snorted. “We can’t leave, Barrons. This has to end here, tonight, one way or another. There’s no time to waste.”
I couldn’t stop looking at Isla. There was something about her face. Looking at her made me think of Rowena. I guess because the old woman had persecuted us for so long. “Why does it have to end tonight?”
Isla gave me an odd look. “MacKayla, don’t you feel it?”
“Feel wh—” I broke off. I hadn’t been trying to feel it. I’d been keeping my sidhe-seer volume all the way down for so long it had become instinct. “Oh, God, the Sinsar Dubh is heading straight for us.” I opened my senses as far as I could. “It’s … different.” I looked at Isla, who nodded. “It’s more intense. Like it’s all pumped up and ready. It’s been waiting for this.” My eyes widened. “It’s got a suicide bomber again, and it’s going to blow us all to hell if we don’t stop it!”
“It knows I’m here,” Isla said. Her face was pale, but her eyes were narrowed with determination that I recognized. I’d seen it in my own face. “It’s all right,” she said with a tight smile. “I’m ready, too. It may have stolen my children and torn my family apart twenty-three years ago, but tonight we’re putting it back together.”
Pieter and Isla excused themselves for a moment and stepped away, talking in hushed, urgent tones.
I sat on the chesterfield with Barrons, watching them. This was all so surreal. I felt as if I’d stepped through the Silver into an alternate reality, one with a happily-ever-after. This was exactly what I’d wanted: a family, a safe haven, no responsibility to save the day.
Then why did I feel so deflated and off kilter?
Out there in the night, I could feel the Book coming. It had slowed for some reason, nearly stopped. I wondered if it was swapping “rides.” Maybe it had found a better one.
In spite of myself, despite my love for Jack and Rainey, looking at my biological parents was doing something funny to me. Knowing that they hadn’t wanted to give me up had released a knot of tension I hadn’t even known I’d been carrying. I guess some part of me had felt like the devil-child that everyone was afraid of, who’d been banished only because no one had wanted to kill a baby. But all these years my real parents had been out there, missing Alina and me, longing for us. They’d hated giving us up and had done so only for our own safety. We were connected by a mother–daughter bond. We were going to be a family again. I had so many questions!
“I don’t trust a bloody thing about them,” Barrons said. “This is bullshit.”
Barrons was perfectly paranoid. Perfect awareness, he called it. It was exactly what I expected him to say. “It is hard to believe,” I murmured.
“Then don’t.”
“Look at her, Barrons. She’s the woman that warded me out at the abbey, the last leader of the Haven. The woman you picked up that night. For heaven’s sake, we look alike!” When I’d first arrived in Dublin, we hadn’t. I’d been soft and curvy and still holding on to a smidge of baby fat in my face. Now I was like her, older, leaner, my face less round, my features more distinct.
He glanced between us. “She could be a cousin.”
“She could also be my mother,” I said drily. “And if she is, I’m not the Unseelie King.” There went the weight of countless sins from my shoulders. Believing I was the ultimate villain, responsible for so many twisted births and billions of deaths, had been a crushing load to carry. “Maybe they’re right, Barrons. Maybe this never was my battle. Maybe Alina and I just got caught in the crossfire. The Book sensed us as part of her bloodline and harassed us, screwed up our lives.”
“Dani killed Alina,” he reminded sharply.
Why did he have to remind me of that now? I turned to scowl at him.
Face contorted, he was staring at me, dark eyes wild, roaring Rowena’s name so loud I was surprised the windows didn’t shatter.
I blinked. He was just Barrons again. Looking at me strangely.
“Are you okay?”
“What did you just say?”
“I said, are you okay?”
“No, what did you say before that?”
“I said Dani killed Alina because of Rowena, never doubt it. What’s wrong? You’re white as a sheet.”
I shook my head, embarrassed. Then I jerked and my head whipped toward the window. “Oh, no!” The Sinsar Dubh had begun moving again, rapidly.
“It’s coming!” Isla cried at the same moment.
“How long?” Pieter demanded.
“Three minutes, maybe less. It’s in a car,” Isla said.
I needed to know we were both sensing it in the same general vicinity. With two of us, we would be harder to deceive. I’d be damned if what had happened the last time we’d tried to corner it was happening again. “Where do you sense it?”
“Northwest of the city. Three miles at the most.”
I was relieved. That was exactly where I felt it, too.
“What part of this place is most securely warded?” Isla asked Barrons.
He gave her a look. “All of it.”
“What’s the plan?” I said.
“You must give your mother the amulet,” Pieter said.
I touched the chain around my neck and looked at Barrons. He took a slow breath and opened his mouth. It stretched wide on a soundless roar.
I blinked and looked again. He was composed and urbane as ever.
“It’s your call,” he said. “You have to decide this one.”
I felt so strange. Mac 1.0, bartender, daydreamer, and professional sun worshipper, would have wanted nothing more than to pass off any and all responsibility to someone else. To be taken care of. Not to be the one taking care. I no longer knew that woman. I liked making the hard decisions and fighting the good fight. Getting to lay down responsibility no longer felt like relinquishing a burden—it felt like being shut out of the most important parts of my life.
“MacKayla, time is of the essence,” Pieter said softly. “You don’t have to fight anymore. We’re here now.”
I looked at Isla. Her blue eyes shimmered with unshed tears. “Listen to your father,” she said. “You’ll never be alone again, darling. Give me the amulet. Release your burden and let me carry it for you. It was never meant to be yours.”
I looked back at Barrons. He was watching me. I knew him. He wouldn’t force my hand.
I did a double take. Who was I kidding? Of course Barrons would try to force my hand on this. He wanted the spell of unmaking to end his son’s life. He’d been hunting it for nearly his entire existence. He would stomp and argue and roar. He’d never get this close only to back off and give me space to make my own decisions.
“Don’t do it,” he snarled. “You promised.”
“The Sinsar Dubh has entered the city,” Isla said simply. “You must decide.”
I could feel it, too, rushing toward us, as if it knew that if it hurried, it could catch us with our pants down, me undecided, all of us exposed by my inability to commit.
I moved toward Isla, playing the chain through my fingers. How could I accept that I didn’t have to fight this battle? I’d been preparing for it. I was ready. Yet here she stood, telling me I didn’t need to worry. I wouldn’t doom the world, and I didn’t need to save it. Others had been preparing for the same moment and were more qualified.
That surreal feeling was back. And what was that buzzing at my ear? I kept thinking I was hearing Barrons roaring, but every time I looked at him, he wasn’t saying a word. “I need a spell from the Book,” I said.
“Once it’s locked up, we can get anything you need. Pieter knows the First Language. It’s how your father and I met, working on ancient scrolls.”
I stared into the face so like my own but older, wiser, more mature. I wanted to say it, needed to do this, at least once. I might never get the chance again. “Mother,” I tried the word on my tongue.
A tremulous, radiant smile curved her lips. “My dear, sweet MacKayla!” she exclaimed.
I wanted to touch her, be in her arms, breathe in the scent of my mother, and know I belonged. I focused on my only memory of her, deeply buried until this moment. I focused on it hard, thinking about how treasured it was. How I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten it all these years. How my child’s mind had taken a single snapshot: Isla O’Connor and Pieter staring at me with tears in their eyes. They’d been standing by a blue station wagon, waving good-bye to us. It was pouring rain, and someone had held a bright pink umbrella with green cartoon flowers above my baby carriage, but the wind had whisked a chill mist beneath it. I’d flailed my tiny fists, cold and crying, and Isla suddenly broke away from Pieter to tuck the blanket more securely around me.
“Oh, darling, it was the hardest thing I ever did that day in the rain, letting you go! When I tucked you in, I wanted so desperately to snatch you up and keep you with us forever!”
“I remember the umbrella,” I said. “I think it must be where I got my love of pink.”
She nodded, eyes shining. “It was bright pink with green flowers.”
Tears stung my eyes. I stared at her a long moment, memorizing her face.
Isla opened her arms. “My daughter, my beautiful little girl!”
Bittersweet emotion flooded me as I moved into my mother’s arms. When they closed warm and comforting around me, I began to cry.
She stroked my hair and whispered, “Hush, darling, it’s all right. Your father and I are here now. You don’t need to worry about a thing. It’s all right. We’re together again.”
I cried harder. Because I could see the truth. Sometimes it’s there in the flaws.
And other times it’s there in too much perfection.
My mother’s arms were around my neck. She smelled good, like Alina, of peaches-and-cream candles and Beautiful perfume.
And I didn’t have a single memory of this woman.
There’d been no blue station wagon. No pink umbrella. No day in the rain.
I slid the spear from my holster and drove it up between our bodies.
Straight into Isla O’Connor’s heart.