*
When I finally sleep, the cold invades my dreams. I pick my way through jagged-edged ravines gouged into cliffs of black ice. I know this place. The paths I walk are familiar, as if I’ve walked them a hundred times before. Creatures watch me from caverns chiseled into the frozen walls.
I catch glimpses of the beautiful, sad woman slipping barefoot across the snow, just ahead. She’s calling to me. But each time she opens her mouth, an icy wind steals her words. You must—I catch, before a gust carries the rest of her sentence away.
I cannot—she cries.
Make haste! she warns over her shoulder.
I run after her in my dreams, trying to hear what she’s saying. Stretching out my hand to catch her.
But she stumbles at the edge of an abyss, loses her footing, and is gone.
I stare, stunned and horrified.
The loss is unbearable, as if I myself have died.
I awaken violently, snapping up from the floor, gasping.
I’m still trying to process the dream when my body jerks and begins to move like a pre-programmed automaton.
I watch in terror as my legs make me rise, force me to leave the bathroom. My feet carry me across the room, my hands open the balcony doors. My body is propelled by an unseen power into the darkness, beyond the protection of my crimson ward line.
I’m not functioning of my own volition. I know it, and I can’t stop myself. I’m completely unprotected where I stand. I don’t even have my spear. Darroc took it away before the prince sifted me out.
I stare out at a shadowy outline of rooftops, awaiting, dreading whatever command might come next. Knowing I won’t be able to refuse subsequent orders any more than I could this one.
I’m a puppet. Someone is yanking my strings.
As if to underscore that point, or perhaps merely to make a mockery of me, my arms suddenly shoot straight up into the air, flail wildly above my head before dropping limply back to my sides.
I watch my feet as they shuffle a cheery two-step. I wish I could believe I’m dreaming, but I’m not.
I dance on the balcony, soft-shoeing it faster and faster.
Just as I begin to wonder if I’m going to be the fairy-tale girl that danced herself to death, my feet go still. Panting, I curl my fingers tightly around the wrought-iron railing. If my unknown puppet master decides I’m to fling myself off the balcony next, it’s in for a hell of a fight.
Is it Darroc? Why would he do this? Can he do this? Does he have so much power?
The temperature drops so sharply that my hands ice to the railing. When I jerk them away, ice shatters and falls into the night below, tinkling against pavement. Small patches of skin from my fingertips remain on the railing. I back up, determined not to commit forced suicide.
Never hurt you, Mac, the Sinsar Dubh croons in my mind.
I inhale sharply. The air is so bitterly cold it burns my throat and lungs.
“You just did,” I grit.
I feel its curiosity. It doesn’t understand how it hurt me. Skin heals.
That was not pain.
I stiffen. I don’t like its tone. It is too silky, too full of promise. I try desperately to get to my dark lake in time to arm myself against it, to defend myself, but a wall erupts between me and my watery abyss, and I can find no way around or through it.
The Sinsar Dubh forces me to my knees. I strain against it every inch of the way, teeth clenched. It whips me around and I collapse onto my back. My arms and legs fly out as if I’m making snow angels. I’m pinned to cold metal girders.
This, Mac, the Sinsar Dubh purrs, is pain.
I drift in agony. I have no idea how long it tortures me, but the entire time I’m excruciatingly aware of one thing: Barrons isn’t going to save me.
He isn’t going to roar me back to reality like he did the last time the Book crushed me in the street, the last time it “tasted me.”
He isn’t going to carry me back to the bookstore when it’s over, make me cocoa and wrap me in blankets. He isn’t going to make me laugh by demanding to know what I am or later cause me to weep when I steal a memory from his head and see him shattered by grief, holding a dying child.
While the Book keeps me spread-eagled against the cold steel of the balcony floor, while every cell in my body is charred, and every bone is systematically crushed one by one, I cling to memories.
I can’t get to my lake, but I can get to the outer layers of my mind. The Sinsar Dubh is there, too, examining my thoughts, probing. “Learning me,” as it said once before. What is it looking for?
I tell myself I just have to survive it. That it isn’t really harming my body. It’s only playing with me. It came for me tonight. I hunt it. And for some reason beyond my fathoming, it hunts me. The Book’s idea of a macabre joke?
It’s not going to kill me. At least not today. I guess I amuse.
It will only make me wish I was dead, and, hey—I know that feeling. Been walking around with it for a while.
After an indefinite, endless length of time, the pain finally eases and I’m yanked to my feet.
My hands grab the railing, and my upper body is contorted over it.
I curl my fingers tightly. I lock my legs down. I summon every ounce of energy I have to make my bones whole and strong again. I stare out at the rooftops, fortifying my will.
I will not die.
If I die tonight, the world will stay the way it is right now, and that’s unacceptable. Too many people have been killed. Too many people will continue to die if I’m not here to do something about it. Fueled by the need to defend something greater than myself, I gather my will and launch myself like a missile for the lake inside my head.
I slam into the wall the Sinsar Dubh has erected between me and my arsenal.
A hairline fracture appears.
I don’t know who’s more startled, me or the Sinsar Dubh.
Then suddenly it’s angry.
I feel its fury, but it’s not angry because I cracked the wall it erected. It’s angry for some other reason.
It’s as if I, personally, have pissed it off somehow.
It’s … disappointed in me?
I find that inexpressibly disturbing.
My head is ratcheted around on my spine and I’m forced to stare down.
A person stands below me, a dark splash against the brilliant snow, a book tucked beneath its arm.
The person tilts its head back and looks up.
I chomp back a scream.
I recognize the hooded cloak that swirls softly back, teased by a light breeze. I recognize the hair.
But I don’t recognize anything else because—if it really is Fiona, Barrons’ ex-storekeeper and Derek O’Bannion’s mistress—she’s been skinned alive. The horror of it is that, because O’Bannion taught her to eat Unseelie, she hasn’t died from it.
Instinct makes me reach for my spear. Of course it’s not there.
“Mercy!” Fiona screams. Her skinned lips bare bloodied teeth.
And I wonder: Do I have any mercy left in me? Did I reach for my spear because I pity her?
Or because I hate her for having had Jericho Barrons before me, and for longer?
The Book’s anger with me grows.
I feel it spilling out, filling the streets. It’s immense, barely contained.
I’m baffled.
Why does it hold itself in check? Why not destroy everything? I would, if it would just hold still long enough to let me use it. Then I’d re-create it all the way I wanted it.
Suddenly it morphs into the Beast, a shadow blacker than blackness. It expands, soars, towers up and up, until it is eye level with me.
It hangs there in the air, flashing back and forth between its own terrible visage and the meat of Fiona’s flayed face.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
When I open them again, I’m alone.