7
Why did you hang a Silver to Dublin in one of the white wings, when you know the House rearranges itself? Why didn’t you put it somewhere more stable and easily accessible?” I resume my questions as we walk.
That bipolar feeling from my high school days is back with a vengeance. He’s everything I despise. I want to kill him so badly that I have to keep my hands in my pockets, balled into fists.
He’s also the person who was intimate with my sister during the final months of her life, the only one who can answer all those questions no one else can—and who can seriously shorten the amount of time I have to spend in this wasteland of a reality.
Did you take her journal? Did she know Rowena or any of the sidhe-seers? Did she tell you about the prophecy? Why did you kill her? Was she happy? Please tell me she was happy before she died.
“No rooms in the White Mansion ever get completely dark, not even where night falls. I erred the first time I opened a Silver. I hung it in a place that did. A creature I believed securely imprisoned—one I did not ever intend to free from the Unseelie prison—escaped.”
“What creature?” I demand. This man who looks like a Versace ad, who walks and talks like a human, isn’t. He’s worse than someone possessed by a Gripper—one of those dainty, beautiful Unseelie that can slip inside a person’s skin and take over. He is one hundred percent Fae in a body that should never have been his. He’s a cold-blooded killer, responsible for butchering billions of humans, hundreds of thousands of them in Dublin on a single night, without a second thought. If there was a creature in the icy Unseelie hell that he never intended to set loose, I want to know why, exactly what it is, and how to kill it. If it worries him, it terrifies me.
“Watch the floors, MacKayla.”
I look at him. He’s not going to answer me. Pressing would only make me appear weak.
We’ve resumed the search together. He’s unwilling to leave me on my own. I’m in no hurry to be on my own again. I’m still raw from what happened to me in the black wing. I’d gotten cemented in memories, and if Darroc hadn’t busted me out, I might never have escaped.
Chasing Barrons, I might not have wanted to escape. I remember the bones in the Hall of All Days. I think of the beach in Faery with Alina. If I’d chosen to stay with her then, would I have eventually died from eating food with no substance, drinking water that was no more real than my sister?
Damn Faery with its killing illusions!
I push memories of sex with the king, with Barrons, away. I distract myself with hatred for the man who killed my sister.
Was Alina happy? It’s on the tip of my tongue again.
“Very,” he fires back at me, and I realize I’ve not only said it aloud but it seems he’s just been waiting for me to ask.
I’m appalled that I’ve been so weak. Offering my enemy the opportunity to lie to me! “Bullshit!”
“You are impossible.” Disdain etches his handsome face. “She was nothing like you. She was open. Her heart was not sealed away behind walls.”
“Look what that got her. Dead.”
I stalk off ahead, down a brilliant yellow corridor. The windows open on exactly the kind of summer day Alina and I always loved. I can’t get away from her ghost! I quicken my pace.
We hurry down a hall of mint, then one of indigo with French doors that open onto a turbulent stormy night, before turning onto a path of pale pink, and finally there it is—a towering arched entrance into a white marble hall. Beyond the elegant entrance, windows open onto a dazzling winter day, ice-encased trees sparkling like diamonds in the sun.
Peace settles over me. I’ve been here in my dreams. I loved this wing.
Once, long ago on her world, a sunny day in spring was her favorite, but now a sunny day in winter delights her more. It is the perfect metaphor for their love.
Sunshine on ice.
She warms his frost. He cools her fever.
“You said Alina called you,” Darroc says behind me. “You said she was crying on the phone, that she was hiding from me. Did she make that phone call the day she died?”
He startles me from my reverie and, without thinking, I nod.
“What exactly did she say?”
I toss him a look over my shoulder that says, You really think I’m going to tell you that? If anyone is going to be answering questions about her, it’s going to be him answering to me. I step into the white marble corridor.
He follows me. “All you accomplish by persisting in your inane and erroneous belief that I killed Alina is guaranteeing that you will never find her true murderer. Humans have an animal of which you remind me. The ostrich.”
“My head is not buried in the sand.”
“No, it’s up your ass,” he snaps.
I whirl on him.
We glare at each other, but his words give me pause. Am I being an ostrich? Do I deny myself the opportunity to avenge my sister, because I’m stuck in a rut I refuse to get out of? Will I let my sister’s real murderer get away, because I can’t open my mind to see beyond my preconceptions? Barrons warned me from the beginning to not so blithely assume Darroc was definitely her killer.
A muscle works in my jaw. Each time I remember something about Barrons, I hate Darroc more for taking him from me. But I remind myself why I’m here and why I haven’t already killed him.
To accomplish my goal, there are certain answers I need.
I eye him speculatively. There are others I just want.
And once I get the Book in my hands and change things, I’ll never have another chance to ask. He’ll be gone. I’ll have killed him. Here and now is my one shot.