“We’re ending this now,” I snarled.
“Please,” she cried. “No!” She unwound one arm from her head, raised it, shaking as if to ward me off. “Darroc!” she screamed. “I need you!”
“Darroc is dead,” I said coldly. “And so are you.”
On the floor, huddled in a ball, my sister screamed and screamed.
—
I ended up leaving.
I couldn’t take it one more second. What was I going to do? Kill the illusion of my sister?
I spun on my heel and stomped down the stairs, hands thrust into my pockets, head down. With the scent of lavender Snuggle sheets in my nostrils.
I grabbed the doughnut on the way out. It was in a bag, sitting near the vase of dusty flowers on the table.
I took the coffee next to it, too.
With the coral-pink lipstick on the rim, precisely the shade my sister wore: Summer Temptress.
I figured I might as well enjoy the happy parts of my madness if I had to stomach the bad.
Munching a soggy cruller (they may have gotten the right supplies but certainly weren’t professional bakers—then again, if this was all an illusion, why wasn’t my doughnut stellar? Was I so self-sabotaging I screwed up even my own illusory treats?), I ignored the mirrors I passed and forgot entirely about the blasted dolmen until I was nearly back to the intersection where I’d left the Hunter.
Of course, it wasn’t there.
I tapped my foot irritably, cracking the thin layer of black ice sheeting the pavement.
And felt utterly lost.
I’d just seen the impossible. Confirming my fear that I might truly be stuck in an illusion I’d never escaped.
But other details, like the imperfect doughnut, the half-warm coffee (with heavy cream, no sugar, just the way my sister liked it), the sheet of ice on the pavement, all hinted at a cohesive reality.
This was what I’d been doing for months now, constantly assessing everything around me, trying to ferret out the Ultimate Truth.
Had Barrons really shouted me out of my illusion that night in Barrons Books & Baubles when (I believed) I’d seen through the projection of Isla to the reality that Rowena, possessed by the Sinsar Dubh, was trying to trick me into giving her/the Book my amulet by masquerading as my biological mom? Perhaps the illusion the Book had woven for me that night had never stopped.
Had I really helped lay the Sinsar Dubh to rest in the abbey, then watched it get absorbed by Cruce, then seen Cruce locked up?
Or had I never escaped the Book’s clutches?
That was the motherfucking question.
The worm in my apple.
Something had happened to me that night that made me begin to deeply question the nature of my reality. Being deceived so thoroughly—even if only for a finite time—made me wonder if I was still being deceived. Somedays I got by fine. Accepted that I’d made it. Saw only consistency in the world around me.
But some nights, especially those nights I dreamed the hellish song I’d been hearing lately, I wondered if something was trying to break out of my subconscious into my conscious mind that I couldn’t quite bring to the surface and it—whatever it was—existed on the opposite side of an illusion the Book had woven for me.
Plans kept me sane. Obsessively hunting the Unseelie king to get him to remove his Book had kept me focused.
Focus prevented me from stretching out on a sofa somewhere and just giving up because I couldn’t decide upon a satisfactory way to prove to myself that the reality I was living was real.
My fake mom and dad, Pieter and Isla, had seemed utterly real, too.
Now Alina.
But the Alina situation was odd.
With all kinds of wrong details. The glittering diamond on her wedding finger. Sobbing, hiding from me. Screaming if I got too close. Crying out for Darroc.
Alive.
Not.
I pressed my fingers to my temples and rubbed. “Focus, focus, focus,” I muttered. “Do not take a single illusion as a sign that everything is. That doesn’t necessarily follow. You’re in the right reality. You defeated the Sinsar Dubh. Alina is the only illusion.”
But why?
Having something inside me that was capable of weaving the convincing illusion the external Book had crafted, then having it go suddenly silent, was worse than it taking jabs at me and me snapping Poe back at it. At least our inane and bizarrely harmless spats had been something concrete I could hold on to. I’d been almost relieved when it made me kill Mick O’Leary.
Because at least then I’d been able to say: Oh, so that’s its game. I’ll just never use my spear again. I’m in my reality. This is it. I understand.
I’d told Barrons none of this. I’d hidden it from everyone.
I’d been grateful to vanish.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that even if I was in the right reality, the Book was even now spreading nooses around me everywhere, and the first misstep I made, it would jerk that rope tight.