11
I stand on a balcony, staring out at the darkness. Snow swirls around my face, lands in my hair. I catch a few flakes in my hand and study them. Growing up in the Deep South, I didn’t get to see a lot of snow, but what I did see didn’t look like this.
These flakes have complex crystalline structures, and some are tinged with faint color at the outer edges. Green, gold, dirty like ash. They don’t lose cohesion on the warmth of my skin. They’re tougher than the average snowflakes, or I’m colder than the average human. When I close my hand to melt them, one of the flakes cuts into my palm with sharp edges.
Lovely. Razor snow. More Fae changes in my world. Time for a new one.
Time.
I ponder the concept. Ever since I arrived in Dublin at the beginning of August, time has been a strange thing. I have only to look at a calendar to confirm what my brain knows—six months have passed.
But of those six months, I lost the entire month of September to a single afternoon in Faery. The months of November, December, and part of January were calendar pages torn from my life while I was in a mindless, sex-crazed oblivion. And now part of January and February had flashed by in a few days, while I was in the Silvers.
All told, in the last six months, four of them whizzed past, with me virtually unaware of the passage of time, for one reason or another.
My brain knows it’s been six months since Alina died.
My body doesn’t believe a word of it.
It feels like I found out my sister was murdered two months ago. It feels like I was raped on Halloween ten days ago. It feels like my parents were kidnapped four days ago, and I stabbed Barrons and watched him die thirty-six hours ago.
My body can’t catch up with my brain. My heart has jet lag. All my emotions are raw because everything feels as if it took place over a short period of time.
I push my damp hair back from my face and breathe deeply of the cold night air. I’m in a bedroom suite at one of Darroc’s many strongholds in Dublin. It’s a penthouse apartment, high above the city, furnished in the same opulent Louis XIV Sun King style of the house at 1247 LaRuhe. Darroc certainly likes his luxuries. Like someone else I know.
Knew.
Will know again, I correct.
Darroc told me he keeps dozens of such safe houses and never stays more than one night in any of them. How am I ever going to find them all to search for clues? I dread the thought of remaining with him long enough for him to take me to each for a night.
I fist my hands. I can handle this. I know I can. My world depends on it.
I unclench my hands and rub my sides. Even hours after the Unseelie Prince touched me, my skin is still chilled in the shape of its handprints. I turn away from the cold, snowy night, close the French doors, and scatter my remaining runes at the threshold, where they pulse like wet crimson hearts on the floor. My dark lake promised I would sleep safely if I pressed one into each wall and warded the thresholds and sills with them.
I turn and stare at the bed, in the same daze I’ve been functioning in for the past several hours. I shuffle past it to the bathroom, where I splash cold water on my face. My eyes feel swollen and gritty. I look in the mirror. The woman that looks back frightens me.
Darroc wanted to “talk” when we arrived. But I know what it was really about. He was testing me. He showed me pictures of Alina. Made me sit and look at them with him and listen to his stories, until I thought I might go insane.
I close my eyes, but my sister’s face is burned into the backs of my eyelids. And there, standing next to her, are my mom and dad. I said I didn’t care what happened to them in this reality, because I’m going to make a new one, but the truth is I’d care in any reality. I’ve just been blocking it.
I will not ask Darroc what happened to my parents after I was swept off to the Hall of All Days, and he doesn’t offer the information.
If he told me they were dead, too, I don’t know what I’d do.
I suspect this is another of his tests. I will pass it.
That’s my girl, Daddy encourages in my mind. Chin up; you can do it. I believe in you, baby. Sis-boom-bah! he says, and smiles. Even though he hadn’t wanted me to pursue cheerleading, he’d still driven me to tryouts, and when I’d made the first cut, he’d had one of his clients at Petit Patisserie bake me a special cake shaped like a pair of pink and purple pom-poms.
I double over like I’ve been kicked in the stomach, and my mouth wrenches wide on a sob that makes no sound because I inhale it at the last second.
Darroc is out there with the princes. I don’t dare betray grief. I don’t dare make a sound that they might hear.
Daddy was my greatest cheerleader, always telling me wise things I rarely listened to and never understood. I should have taken the time to understand. I should have spent more time focused on who I was inside and less on who I was outside. Hindsight, 20/20.
Tears run down my face. As I turn away from the mirror, my knees go out from under me and I collapse to the bathroom floor in a heap. I curl into a ball, silently heaving.
I’ve held it at bay as long as I can. Grief crashes over me, drowning me. Alina. Barrons. Mom and Dad, too? I can’t bear it. I can’t keep it all in.
I cram a fist in my mouth to stop my screams.
I can’t let anyone hear. He would know I’m not what I pretend to be. What I must be to fix my world.
There I sat on the couch with him, looking at my sister in all those pictures. And each one reminded me how, when we were little, in every single picture taken of us together, her arm was around me, protecting me, watching out for me.
She was happy in the pictures Darroc showed me. Dancing. Talking with friends. Sightseeing. He’d taken so many of her photo albums from her apartment. Left us with hardly any. As if the paltry few months he’d spent with her gave him more right to her possessions than me—who’d spent my whole life loving her!
I hadn’t been able to trace my fingers over her face in front of him because it would have betrayed emotion, weakness. I’d had to lavish all my attention on him. He’d watched me the entire time with those glittering copper eyes, absorbing every detail of my reaction.
I knew it would be a deadly mistake—and the last I ever made—to underestimate the ancient, brilliant mind behind those cold metallic eyes.
After what seemed like years of torture, he finally began to look tired, yawning, even rubbing his eyes.
I forget his body is human, subject to limits.
Eating Unseelie doesn’t keep you from needing sleep. Like caffeine or speed, it wires you hard but, when you crash, you crash just as hard. I suspect that’s a large part of the reason he never sleeps more than one night in the same place. It’s when he’s most vulnerable. I imagine it must chafe, to have a human body that needs sleep after having been Fae and not needing anything for eternity.
I decide that’s when I’ll kill him. When he’s sleeping. After I’ve gotten what I want. I’ll wake him and, while he’s still feeling humanly muddled, I’ll smile and drive my spear through his heart. And I’ll say, “This is for Alina and for Jericho.”
My fist isn’t keeping my sobs down.
They’re beginning to leak around it in soft moans. I’m lost in pain, fragments of memories crashing over me: Alina waving good-bye at the gate the day she left for Dublin; Mom and Dad tied to chairs, gagged and bound, waiting for a rescue that never came; Jericho Barrons, dead on the ground.
Every muscle in my body spasms and I can’t breathe. My chest feels hot, tight, crushed beneath a massive weight.
I fight to keep the sobs in. If I open my mouth to breathe, they’ll come out, but I’m waging a hopeless battle: Sob and breathe? Or don’t sob and suffocate?
My vision starts to dim. If I lose consciousness from holding my breath, at least one great cry will explode from me.
Is he at my door, listening?
I dredge my mind for a memory to banish the pain.
When I recovered from being Pri-ya, I was horrified to realize that, although my time with the princes and afterward at the abbey was blurred, I retained every single memory of what Barrons and I had done together in bed in graphic detail.
Now I’m grateful for them.
I can use them to keep myself from screaming.
You’re leaving me, Rainbow Girl.
No—that’s the wrong one!
I rewind, fast.
There. The first time he came to me, touched me, was inside me. I give myself over to it, replaying every detail in loving memory.
In time, I’m able to remove my fist. The tension in my body eases.
Warm in memories, my body shivers on the cold marble bathroom floor.
Alina’s cold. Barrons is cold.
I should be cold, too.