SEVENTEEN
I don’t know where dreams come from. Sometimes I wonder if they’re genetic memories, or messages from something divine. Warnings perhaps. Maybe we do come with an instruction booklet but we’re too dense to read it, because we’ve dismissed it as the irrational waste product of the “rational” mind. Sometimes I think all the answers we need are buried in our slumbering subconscious, in the dreaming. The booklet’s right there, and every night when we lay our heads down on the pillow it flips open. The wise read it, heed it. The rest of us try as hard as we can upon awakening to forget any disturbing revelations we might have found there.
I used to have a recurring nightmare when I was a child. A dream of four distinct, subtly varied tastes. Two of them weren’t entirely unpalatable. Two of them were so vile I would wake up choking on my own tongue.
I tasted one of the vile ones now.
It saturated my cheeks and tongue, made my lips draw back from my teeth, and I finally understood why I’d never been able to put a name to it. It wasn’t the taste of a food or drink. It was the taste of an emotion: regret. Profound, exquisite sorrow that bubbles from the wellspring of the soul over the mistakes we’ve made, over the actions we should or shouldn’t have taken, long after it’s too late and nothing can be done or undone.
I was alive.
But that wasn’t my regret.
Barrons was bending over me.
That wasn’t my regret, either.
It was the look on his face that told me more frankly than a doctor’s prognosis that I wasn’t going to make it. I was alive, but not for long. My rescuer was here, my knight-errant had arrived to save the day, but I’d blown it.
It was too late for me.
I could have survived—if only I’d not given up hope.
I wept. I think. I couldn’t feel my face much.
What was it he’d said to me, that night we’d robbed Rocky O’Bannion? I’d listened. I’d even thought it had sounded terribly wise. I just hadn’t understood it. A sidhe-seer without hope, without an unshakable determination to survive, is a dead sidhe-seer. A sidhe-seer who believes herself outgunned, outmanned, may as well point that doubt straight at her temple, pull the trigger, and blow her own brains out with it. There are really only two positions one can take toward anything in life: hope or fear. Hope strengthens, fear kills.
I got it now.
“Are you…r-real?” My mouth had been badly lacerated by my teeth. My tongue was thick with blood and regret. I knew what I was trying to say. I wasn’t sure it was intelligible.
He nodded grimly.
“It was…Mallucé…not dead,” I told him.
Nostrils flared, eyes narrowed, he hissed, “I know, I smell him in here, everywhere. This place reeks of him. Don’t talk. Bloody hell, what did he do to you? What did you do? Did you piss him off on purpose?”
Barrons knew me too well. “He t-told me you…weren’t…coming.” I was cold, so cold. Other than that, there was oddly little pain. I wondered if that meant my spinal cord was damaged.
He glanced wildly about as if looking for something, and if he’d been any other man, I would have called his emotional state frantic. “And you believed him? No, don’t answer that. I said don’t talk. Just be still. F*ck. Mac. F*ck.”
He’d called me Mac. My face hurt too bad to smile, but I did inside. “B-Barrons?”
“I said don’t talk,” he snarled.
I put all my energy into getting this out. “D-Don’t let me…die…down here.” Die…down here, echoed weakly back at me. “Please. Take me…to the…sunshine.” Bury me in a bikini, I thought. Lay me next to my sister.
“F*ck,” he exploded again. “I need things!” He was standing, looking around the cavern again, with that frantic air. I wondered what things he thought he might find here. Splints wouldn’t help this time. I tried to tell him that but nothing came out. I also tried to tell him I was sorry. That didn’t come out either.
I must have blinked. His face was close to mine. His hand was in my hair. His breath was warm on my cheek. “There’s nothing here that I can use, Mac,” he said hollowly. “If we were somewhere else, if I had certain things, there are…spells I could do. But you won’t live long enough for me to get you there.”
A long silence ensued, or he was speaking and I just wasn’t hearing him. Time had no relevance. I was floating.
His face was over me again, a dark angel. Basque and Pict, he’d told me. Criminals and barbarians, I’d mocked. A beautiful face, for all that savagery. “You can’t die, Mac.” His voice was flat, implacable. “I won’t let you.”
“So…stop…me,” I managed, although I wasn’t sure the irony I meant carried through in my tone. My voice was weak, reedy. At least my sense of humor wasn’t gone. And at least Mallucé hadn’t gotten to turn me into a monster before I died. That was a silver lining. I hoped my dad would take good care of my mom. I hoped someone would take care of Dani. I’d wanted to get to know her better. Beneath all that bristle I’d sensed a kindred soul.
I hadn’t avenged Alina. Now who would?
“This isn’t what I wanted,” Barrons was saying. “This isn’t what I would have chosen. You must know that. It’s important you know that.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. There was a kernel of something gnawing at the back of my mind. Something I needed to think about. A choice to be made.
I felt his fingers on my eyelids. He eased them closed.
But I’m not dead yet, I wanted to tell him.
His hand was a warm pressure on my neck. My head lolled to the side.
D-Don’t let me…die…down here, was echoing back at me again in my head. I was astonished by how weak and stupid I sounded. How helpless. All fluff and no steel. I was pathetic with a capital P.
I tasted the second vile taste in my mouth. It drew tight the insides of my cheeks, and saliva pooled in my mouth. I examined the taste, rolling it on my tongue like spoiled wine. This time I recognized the poison before I drank it: cowardice.
I was still making the same mistake. Giving up hope before the fight was over.
My fight wasn’t over. I might not like my choices—in fact, I might despise my choices—but my fight wasn’t over.
It gave me power in the black arts, Mallucé had said of eating Unseelie, the strength of ten men, heightened my senses, healed mortal wounds as quickly as they were inflicted.
I could pass on the black arts. I’d take the strength and heightened senses. I was especially interested in the healing mortal wounds part. I may have blown one chance to live tonight. I would not blow another. Barrons was here now. The cell was open. He could get to the Fae on the slab, feed it to me.
“Barrons.” I forced my eyes open. They felt heavy, weighted by coins.
His face was in my neck and he was breathing hard. Was he grieving me? Already? Would he miss me? Had I, in some tiny way, come to matter to this enigmatic, hard, brilliant, obsessed man? I realized he’d come to matter to me. Good or evil, right or wrong, he mattered to me.
“Barrons,” I said again, this time more strongly, infusing it with everything I had left which wasn’t much, but enough to get his attention.
He raised his head. His face was all harsh planes and angles in the torchlight, his expression bleak. His dark eyes were windows on a bottomless abyss. “I’m sorry, Mac.”
“Not your…fault,” I managed to get out.
“My fault in more ways than you could possibly know, woman.”
Woman, he’d called me. I’d grown up in his eyes. I wondered what he’d think of me soon.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come for you. I shouldn’t have let you walk home alone.”
“L-Listen,” I said. I would have clutched urgently at his sleeve, but I couldn’t move either arm.
He bent nearer.
“Unseelie…slab?” I asked.
His brows drew together. He glanced over his shoulder, looked back at me. “It’s there, if that’s what you mean.”
My voice was terrible when I said, “Bring…it…me.”
He raised a brow and blinked. He glanced at the twitching Unseelie and I could see his mind working. “You—what—was Mallucé—” He broke off. “Exactly what are you saying, Mac? Are you telling me you want to eat that?”
I was beyond speaking. I parted my lips.
“Bloody hell, have you thought this through? Do you have any idea what it might do to you?”
I strove for one of our wordless conversations. I said, Pretty good one. Like make me live.
“I meant the downside. There’s always a downside.”
I told him a bigger one would be being dead.
“There are worse things than death.”
This isn’t one. I know what I’m doing.
“Even I don’t know what you’re doing, and I know everything,” he snapped.
I would have laughed if I’d been capable of it. His arrogance knew no bounds.
“It’s dark Fae, Mac. You’re planning to eat Unseelie. Do you get that?”
I’m dying, Barrons.
“I don’t like this idea.”
Got a better one?
He inhaled sharply. I didn’t understand the things that flashed across his face then—thoughts too complex, beyond my grasp—thoughts he discarded. But he hesitated a few seconds too long, before jerking his head in a single, violent negation, and I knew that he’d had some other idea, and had deemed it worse than this one. “No better ideas.”
There was a knife in his hand. He gave me a tight, mocking smile as he moved to the slab. “Wing or a thigh? Ah, I’m afraid we don’t have any thighs left.” He sliced into the Fae.
They didn’t have wings either, but I appreciated the humor, black as it was. He was trying to lessen the terrible reality of my impending meal.
I didn’t want to know what parts of it I was eating so I closed my eyes when he raised the first slice of Unseelie flesh to my lips. I couldn’t look at it. It was bad enough that it crunched in places and continued to move the entire time I chewed it. And the entire time I swallowed it. The tiny pieces fluttered in my stomach.
Unseelie flesh tasted worse than all four of my nightmare tastes combined. I guess our instruction booklets only cover this world, not Faery, which is fine with me. I’d hate to have to dream all the bad tastes of their world, too.
I chewed and gagged, gagged and swallowed.
MacKayla Lane, bartender and glam-girl, was screaming at me to stop, before it was too late. Before we could never again go back to being the uncomplicated, happy young southern girl we’d been. She didn’t get that it was already way too late for that.
Savage Mac was squatting in the dirt, stabbing her spear into the ground, nodding and saying, Yesss, finally, some real power! Bring it on!
Me—the one who tries to mediate between the two—wondered what price I was going to pay for this. Were Barrons’ concerns founded? Would eating dark Fae do something terrible to me, make me dark, too? Or do you only turn dark if you have the seeds of darkness in you to begin with? Perhaps eating it a single time wouldn’t change me at all. Mallucé had eaten it constantly. Perhaps frequency was the killer. There were many drugs a person could do a few times without paying too high a price. Perhaps the living flesh of a dark Fae would heal me, make me strong, and do little else of consequence.
Perhaps it didn’t matter, because the bottom line was that I’d made the mistake today—or tonight, or whatever it was—of giving up hope too soon, and I wasn’t about to make it again. I would fight to live with whatever means I had at my disposal, and pay whatever price I had to pay without complaining. I would never again accept death. I would battle it until the last second, no matter the horrors confronting me. I was ashamed of myself for giving up hope.
You can’t go forward if you’re looking backward, Mac, Daddy always said. You run into walls that way.
I dropped my regrets, a burdensome piece of baggage. Looking forward, I opened my mouth.
He sliced off another piece of flesh and fed it to me, and another. I chewed more strongly, swallowed more vigorously. A chilling heat suffused me and I trembled, as if in the grip of a brutal fever. After several more pieces, I felt my body begin the painful process of knitting itself back together. It was not pleasant. I cried out. Barrons covered my mouth with his hand, wrapped his arms around me, and crushed me against him while I thrashed and moaned. I guessed his efforts to keep me quiet meant Mallucé was somewhere nearby, or some of his minions were.
When the worst of it had passed, I ate more, and endured the brutal cycle again and again. Against his hot skin, I healed. Bracketed by his arms, I shuddered and writhed, and grew back together. The lacerations on the inside of my mouth faded into smooth, unbroken skin. Bones straightened and fused, tendons and torn flesh knitted itself, contusions melted. It was an agony. It was a miracle. I could feel the living Unseelie flesh doing things to me. I could feel it changing my innate structure, affecting it on a cellular level, infusing me with something ancient and powerful. Healing every ill, taking it farther, past perfect mortal health, into the realm of the extraordinary.
A slow, sweet rush of euphoria began to build inside me. My body was young, stronger than it had ever been, stronger than anything could be!
I stretched, gingerly at first, then with growing elation. There was no pain left in my body. As I moved, my muscles bunched with coiled power. My heart thundered, flooding my brain with potent, Fae-spiked blood.
I sat up. I sat up! I’d been on the brink of death and now I was whole again! Better than whole. Wonderingly, I ran my hands over my face and body.
Barrons sat up with me. He was staring at me as if waiting for me to suddenly sprout a second, monstrous head. His nostrils flared; he ducked his face to my skin and inhaled. “You smell different,” he said roughly.
“I feel different. But I’m fine,” I assured him. “In fact, I feel amazing!” I laughed. “I feel fantastic. I feel better than I’ve ever felt in my life. This is incredible!”
I stood, stretched out my arm, and flexed my hand. I fisted it and punched the stone wall. I hardly even felt it. I punched it again, hard. The skin on my knuckles tore—and healed instantly. Blood scarcely had the time to well before it was gone. “Did you see that?” I exclaimed. “I’m strong. I’m like you and Mallucé, I can kick ass now!”
His expression was grim as he rose and moved away. He worried too much. I told him so.
“You don’t worry enough,” he retorted.
It was hard to worry when I’d just been knocking on Death’s door and now felt like I was going to live forever. I’d been jerked between the two, a badly weighted pendulum, jarringly fast. I’d ricocheted from the depths of despair to euphoria, from pulverized to stronger than ever before, from terrorized to the one capable of terrorizing. Who could hurt me now? No one!
I finally felt like being a sidhe-seer had some perks. Better than Dani’s astounding speed, I had superhuman strength. I couldn’t wait to test myself, discover what I could do. I was giddy with fearlessness. I was drunk on power, on how good it was to be me!
I danced on light boxer’s feet over to Barrons. “Punch me.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Come on, punch me, Barrons.”
“I’m not punching you.”
“I said, punch—Ow!” He’d decked me. Bones vibrating, my head snapped back. And forward again. I shook it. No pain. I laughed. “I’m amazing! Look at me! I hardly even felt it.” I danced from foot to foot, feinting punches at him. “Come on. Punch me again.” My blood felt electrified, my body impervious to all injury.
Barrons was shaking his head.
I punched him in the jaw and his head snapped back.
When it came back down his expression said I suffer you to live. “Happy now?”
“Did it hurt?”
“No.”
“Can I try again?”
“Buy yourself a punching bag.”
“Fight me, Barrons. I need to know how strong I am.”
He rubbed his jaw. “You’re strong,” he said dryly.
I laughed, delighted. This southern belle was a force to be reckoned with! It was amazing. I had power. I was a player. Once I had my spear again, I’d be even better. The playing field against evil had just been leveled.
Speaking of leveling, I wanted Mallucé. Dead. Now. The bastard had shattered my will to live. He was a living, breathing reminder of my shame.
“Did you happen to see Mallucé on the way in? Speaking of the way in, how did you find me? He lied about the cuff, didn’t he?”
“I didn’t see him, but I was more concerned with finding you. The cave system beneath the Burren is vast. I’ll lead you out.” He glanced at his watch. “With luck, we’ll be out of here in an hour.”
“After we kill Mallucé.”
“I’ll come back and take care of Mallucé.”
“I don’t think so,” I said icily. I shot him a look that dared him to argue. I was pumped up, flying on adrenaline. There was no way I was letting someone else fight this battle for me. It was mine. I’d paid for it in blood.
“Give a woman a little power,” he said dryly.
“He broke me, Barrons.” My voice shook.
“Anyone worth knowing breaks once. Once. No shame, no foul, if you survive it. You did.”
“Did you break once?” Who, what could have broken Jericho Barrons?
He stared at me through the dimly lit cavern. The torchlight flickered across his dark face, hollowing out his cheeks, making flame-filled coals of his eyes. “Yes,” he said finally.
Later I would ask how, who. Now all I wanted to know was “Did you kill the bastard?”
I wasn’t sure that twist of his mouth was a smile, but I didn’t know what else to call it. “With my bare hands. After I killed his wife.” He waved his hand at the door of the cell. “You lead, Ms. Lane. I’ve got your back.”
I was “Ms. Lane” again. Apparently I was only Mac when gravely injured or dying. We’d talk about that later, too.
“He’s mine, Barrons. Don’t interfere.”
“Unless you can’t handle him.”
“I’ll handle him,” I vowed.
The cave system was vast. I wondered how Barrons had ever found me. Carrying torches we’d lifted from the wall, we ascended and descended through tunnels and caverns without apparent rhyme or reason. I’d seen pictures of the tourist parts of the Burren. They were nothing like these parts. We were much deeper beneath the ground and way off the beaten path, in the unexplored parts of the labyrinthine cave system. I imagined that if any foolhardy potholers ever found their way here, Mallucé simply removed the problem by eating them.
I never would have found my way out.
Although I was barefoot, either the rocks weren’t cutting my feet, or they were healing as quickly as they were being damaged. Under normal circumstances I found both darkness and confined spaces highly disturbing, but the Unseelie I’d eaten had done something to me. I felt no fear. It was exhilarating. My senses were extraordinary. I could see in the dim, flickering torchlight as well as daylight. I could hear creatures burrowing in the earth. I smelled more scents than I could identify.
Mallucé had moved in. He’d brought many of the Victorian furnishings I’d seen at his house into the caves. In a chamber he’d converted into a sumptuous Goth boudoir, I found my brush on a table, near a bed covered by a stained satin spread. Next to the brush was a black candle, a few of my hairs, and three small vials.
Barrons opened a vial, sniffed. “He was spying on you, projecting himself. Did you ever feel you were being watched?”
I told him about the specter. I shoved the brush in my back pocket. I hated touching what he’d touched but I was leaving no part of me here, beneath the earth, in his hellish domain.
“And you never told me this?” he exploded. “How many times did you see it?”
“I threw a flashlight through it. I thought it wasn’t real.”
“How can I keep you alive if you don’t tell me everything?” he snapped.
“How can you expect me to tell you everything when you never tell me anything? I don’t know the first thing about you!”
“I’m the one that keeps saving your life. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“Yes, but why? Because you need me. Because you want to use me.”
“For what other reason would you have me save you? Because I like you? Better to be useful than liked. Like is an emotion. Emotions”—he raised a hand, made a fist, clenched it tightly—“are like holding water. You open your hand, there’s nothing there. Better to be a weapon than a woman.”
Right now I was both. And I wanted Mallucé. “You can chew my petunia later. I’ve got an earful for you, too.”
We found the spear in a velvet-lined box, near his laptop. I wondered how a laptop could possibly be working down here, until I realized all the lights on it were that strange blue-black shade of cold light the amulet had given off. Mallucé was powering it with black magic.
“Wait.” Barrons punched in a few commands, brought up the screen. A page of text was visible for a split second before icy sparks erupted from the computer and it went dead.
“Did you catch any of that?”
“He had multiple bidders on the spear. I saw two of the names.” He glanced at his watch again. “Get the spear and let’s move.”
I reached for the spear, nestled in velvet, and was just about to remove it from the box when I drew up short, struck by a sudden terrible thought.
I snapped the lid shut. When I picked up the box and tucked it beneath my arm, Barrons gave me a strange look. I shrugged and we moved on.
We left the boudoir, and entered another cavern, crammed with books and boxes and jars with contents that defied description. From the look of things, Mallucé had been dabbling in black magic since long before he’d met the Lord Master. There were boyhood treasures scattered among the vampire’s collection of potions, powders, and brews. I could almost see the young British child, invisible in the shadow of his prominent, powerful father, hating it. Rebelling. Becoming fascinated with the Goth world, so different from his. Studying black magic. Planning his parents’ murder at twenty-four. Mallucé had been a monster long before he’d rechristened himself.
The storage cavern opened into a long, wide tunnel lit by torches. There was a steel door in the wall. It was locked. Neither Barrons nor I could kick it in. He placed both palms against it. After a long moment, he said, “Ah,” and muttered a swift string of unintelligible words. The door swung open, revealing a long, narrow cave that looked to be a quarter of a mile long. It contained cell after cell of Unseelie. Here was Mallucé’s personal larder. I wondered how he’d trapped them all.
Suddenly I sensed him, a maelstrom of decay and fury, gusting down the tunnels toward us.
“He’s coming this way,” I told Barrons. “I think he needs food. He said he has to eat constantly.”
Barrons gave me a sharp look.
I knew exactly what he was thinking. “Not because it’s addictive,” I defended, “but because parts of him had turned Fae from eating Unseelie and the spear poisoned those parts.”
Barrons stared at me. “Parts of him had turned Fae? And the spear poisoned him? And you knew this before you ate Unseelie?”
“Bear in mind the alternative, Barrons.”
“That’s why you left the spear in the box and tucked it beneath your arm. You’re afraid to carry it now, aren’t you?”
“Before, I had a weapon. Now I am a weapon.” I turned and stalked from the cavern, not about to reveal how deeply it disturbed me that I might have gained the power of a Fae—and the weakness of one. I never wanted to touch the spear again. If I accidentally pricked myself, would I, too, begin to rot? What had I become? Kin to my enemy in how many ways? “He’s on the way,” I tossed over my shoulder. “I’d rather he didn’t eat again.”
Barrons stepped through behind me and closed the door. He slipped a vial from his pocket and I realized he’d been pilfering some of the vampire’s things. He splashed a few drops on the door and spoke again in that language I didn’t understand. He glanced around, and I could tell he didn’t like what he saw. “A good soldier chooses the terrain of his battle. You’ve shared the same flesh with him. If you can sense him, I’ll bet he can sense you. He’ll follow.”
“What are we looking for?”
“A place with no way out. I want this over with fast.”
The cavern we chose was small, narrow, and spiked with stalactites and stalagmites. There was a single entrance that Barrons planned to bar once Mallucé had entered. I handed him the box with the spear. He gestured for me to conceal it behind a fall of rubble. There was no way I was giving Mallucé the opportunity to use the weapon against me. Besides, I’d already established that it only killed parts of him, and parts weren’t enough. I wanted all of him dead.
“How do I kill a vampire?” I asked Barrons.
“Hope he’s not.”
“I really don’t like that answer.”
He shrugged. “It’s the only one I have to offer, Ms. Lane.”
I could feel Mallucé approaching. Barrons was right, somehow the meal we’d shared had linked us. I had no doubt he could sense me as clearly as I could him.
The vampire was incensed…and hungry. He’d been unable to enter his larder. Whatever Barrons had done had successfully sealed the entrance. I told you my inscrutable host has a bottomless bag of tricks. I’m really beginning to wonder where he gets them.
He was near. My body hummed with anticipation.
Mallucé stepped into the opening. His hood was down and his smile was beyond gruesome. “You’re still no match for me, bitch.”
He was framed in the doorway, backlit by torchlight, his dark robes rustling, and I could smell the emotions wafting from his rotted flesh. He smelled as fearless as I felt. He believed what he’d just said. I would prove him wrong. I narrowed my eyes, assessing him. He might think himself my superior, but my escape bothered him and he wasn’t going to step into the cavern until he knew how I’d managed it.
I taunted, “Come and get me then.”
“How did you get out of your cell?”
“You left it unlocked,” I lied.
He considered that a moment. “There’s no way you could have moved. I broke both your legs. And your arms. How did you get the Unseelie?”
“The same way I spelled your little ‘refrigerator’ down there. I did a good job, didn’t I? You couldn’t get in. I know a little black magic of my own. You underestimated me.”
He studied me. He knew how powerful the spell on his larder was, and if I was capable of performing black magic to that degree, I was capable of a great deal. I felt him relax infinitesimally. “This makes things much more interesting. You know, I toyed with this idea. Now we’ll rot together. I’ll feed you more and stab you with your own f*cking spear.”
Obviously he didn’t know it was missing yet. “Bring it on,” I purred.
He unfastened his robe and let it drop to the floor. His frothy lace shirt was badly stained. He was wearing stiff, tight leather pants, I suspected for the same reason he wore the stiff gloves. I needed him inside the cavern. Then Barrons would spell the exit and there would be no way out.
I did my boxer dance. “Come on, Johnny, let’s play.”
He lunged through the entrance with inhuman speed, and closed one of his stiff-gloved hands around my throat. I saw Barrons loom up behind him and shot him a wordless command: Don’t interfere.
I grabbed Mallucé’s wrist and kneed him in the groin with the strength of ten men. The flesh between his legs was too soft. My knee slid a few inches into his body.
“No feeling there, bitch,” he spat.
“What about here?” I punched him in the ear with all my strength. Blood spurted from his skull, and he reeled sideways and staggered. I watched the wound heal as quickly as it had opened. Would I do that?
I found out soon enough. He broke my nose. It reassembled itself. I nearly tore his arm from his shoulder. It dangled uselessly for a few moments then he punched me with it again, strong as ever.
“When I finish with you, bitch, I’m going to Ashford. Remember your little confession?” he taunted. “Telling me you had a mother there? Maybe I’ll keep you alive long enough to see what I do to her.”
I pummeled his hated face into a mass of bloody flesh. It would end here, now. Mallucé was never walking out of these caves again if I had to stay down here for all eternity killing him. He tried to rip my ear off. I almost bit him but thought twice, not exactly clear on vampire rules. I didn’t want his blood anywhere near my mouth. I kicked him in the knee. When it shattered and he went down I fell on him, kicking, punching, snarling.
I felt something inside me de-evolving, and I liked it.
Time lost all meaning to me. We were virtually indestructible machines. We beat each other senseless, long past the point of reason. I existed for one thing: to make him go down, stay down, and never move again. I no longer knew who he was. I no longer cared who I was. Things had deconstructed to the basest terms. Mallucé no longer even had a name or a face. He was Enemy. I was Destroyer. I understood only the imperative of battle, the appetite to kill.
I slammed him into the cavern wall. He smashed me into a man-sized stalagmite. It crumbled from the impact. I picked myself up and we crashed together again, punching, kicking, grunting.
Suddenly Barrons was between us, forcing us apart.
I turned on him, snarling, “What the hell are you doing?”
“You!” Mallucé looked stunned. “How did you get here? I left the cuff in the alley! There’s no way you tracked me!”
I stared at Barrons. How had he found me? “Stay out of this, Barrons! It’s my fight.”
Barrons caught me completely off guard with half a dozen rapid-fire punishing blows to my head and stomach.
I doubled over, dazed.
Mallucé laughed.
I was bent low, ribs cracking and rehealing for several seconds. My chest burned like a lung had been pierced.
Mallucé stopped laughing, with a strangled sound.
When I shot up, Barrons had Mallucé by an arm around his neck. He hit me again and I went right back down. Barrons had held back when he’d punched me before. Given me a love tap compared to what he was dishing out now.
The bastard did it to me three more times; each time I straightened, his fist pistoned into my face before I could even get all the way up. It felt like my brain was rattling in my skull.
The fifth time I rose, Mallucé was on the ground, unmoving. I could see why. His head was no longer attached to his shoulders. He’d killed him! Barrons had stolen my revenge, cheated me of the pleasure of destroying the one who’d nearly destroyed me!
I whirled on him. He was spattered with blood, breathing hard, head down, eyes narrowed, and fury was rolling off him in thick, dangerous waves. How dare he be furious with me? I was the wronged party! My battle was interrupted, bloodlust was bottled up inside me, a turbo engine revved to redline.
“The vamp was mine, Barrons!”
“Inspect his teeth, Ms. Lane,” he said tightly. “They were cosmetic enhancements. He was no vampire.”
I punched him lightly in the shoulder. “I don’t care what he was! It was my fight, you bastard!”
He punched me back with the same light, warning force. “You were taking too long to finish it up.”
“Who are you to decide how long is too long?” I gave him another tap in the shoulder.
He returned the blow with equal force. “You were enjoying it!”
“I was not!”
“You were smiling, bouncing on the balls of your feet, egging him on.”
“I was trying to end the fight!” I punched his shoulder, hard this time.
“You were way past trying to end it,” he snapped, punching me back. I nearly fell over. “You were prolonging it. You were glorying in it.”
“You don’t know what the feck you’re talking about!” I shouted.
“I couldn’t tell the difference between the two of you anymore!” he roared.
I smashed my fist into his face. Lies roll off us. It’s the truths we work hardest to silence. “Then you weren’t looking hard enough! I’m the one with boobs!”
“I know you’re the one with boobs! They’re in my f*cking face every f*cking time I turn around!”
“Maybe you need to get a grip on your libido, Barrons!”
“F*ck you, Ms. Lane!”
“You just try. I’ll kick the shit out of you!”
“You think you could?”
“Bring it on.”
He grabbed a fistful of my T-shirt, and dragged me up against him until our noses touched. “I’ll bring it on, Ms. Lane. But remember you asked for it. So don’t even think about trying to tap out on the mat and quit the fight.”
“You hear anybody crying ‘Uncle’ here, Barrons? I don’t.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
He swapped the fistful of my shirt for one in my hair, and ground his mouth against mine.
I exploded.
I shoved at him, and clawed him closer. He shoved me back, and yanked me tighter to his body. I pulled his hair. He pulled mine. He didn’t fight fair. Actually, he fought exactly fair. He didn’t extend courtesies, not a single one.
I bit his lip. He tripped me and pushed me down to the stone floor of the cavern. I punched him. He straddled me.
I ripped his shirt down the front, left it hanging in tatters from his shoulders.
“I liked that shirt,” he snarled. He rose over me, a dark demon, glistening in the torchlight, dripping sweat and blood, his torso covered with tattoos that disappeared beneath his waistband.
He grabbed the hem of my shirt, tore it straight up to my neck, and inhaled sharply.
I punched him. If he punched me back, I was past feeling it. His mouth was on mine again, the hot silk of his tongue, the sharp, deliberate abrasion of his teeth, the exchange of breath and the small, desperate sounds of need. A tsunami of lust—no doubt amplified by the Fae in my blood—crashed into me, knocking me from my feet, and dragging me out to a dangerous sea. There was no lifeboat here in these deep, killing waters, not even a lighthouse, marking the way back to shore with its soft amber promise. There was only the storm of Barrons and the one I seemed to be, and if there were dark shapes moving in the waters beneath my feet that I should probably take a good hard look at and possibly reconsider trying to swim here, I didn’t care.
He fitted himself to me and began a driving, erotic, rhythmic bump and grind. A lonely boy. A lone man. Alone in a desert beneath a blood-red moon. War everywhere. Always war. A breath-stealing sirocco sweeping down over treacherously sifting sands. A cave in a cliff wall. Sanctuary? No sanctuary left anywhere. Barrons’ tongue was inside my mouth, and somehow I was inside Jericho Barrons. The images were his.
We both heard the noise at the same time and exploded away from each other as quickly as we’d come together, scrambling to opposite sides of the small cavern.
Panting, I stared at him. He was breathing hard, his dark eyes narrowed to slits.
Is it still spelled? I mouthed, meaning the entrance to the cave.
To contain only. Not to expel.
Well, spell it again!
Isn’t that easy.
He melted into the shadows behind a stalagmite.
I focused my attention on the door, tried to sense what was coming, and stiffened.
Fae…but not Fae. Followed by at least ten Unseelie.
I stared past Mallucé’s body at the entrance, tensed to spring. A glint of gold and silver caught my eye in the flickering torchlight.
The amulet! How could I have forgotten? It was pooled in a pile of chain, between his body and the door. It must have fallen off when Barrons had beheaded him.
The footsteps drew nearer.
I sprang for the Hallow.
A booted foot came down on it just as I reached it.
I stared up the leg and looked straight into the eyes of my sister’s murderer.