Well, damn. That was a darned plausible explanation.
Except, I realized glumly, the first night I’d seen the illusion had been before I’d partaken of forbidden fruit.
I had no idea what to think.
Barrons could see my illusion.
Did Ryodan see it, too? I turned to look at him. He was staring directly at her. “Lovely woman,” he murmured.
“Stay away from her,” I snapped before I could stop myself. Whatever this thing was, I simply wouldn’t be able to stand seeing Ryodan get it on with something that looked like my sister. “I mean,” I added hastily, “because we have more important things to do.”
“You made time for it.”
“A Fae?” Barrons prompted again. Prompting was an unusual demonstration of interest on his part. Uh-oh.
“Who knows? Could be.” I shrugged. “Then again, don’t they say everyone has a doppelganger somewhere?”
Barrons gave me a level look. Something you want to talk about?
Nope. Not a thing, I said lightly.
Another thing I love about the man: he dropped it. That was going to be a hard favor for me to return when it was time.
“I assume you’re ready to look in that lake,” Ryodan said, tossing back the last of his drink.
I was only too happy to escape the apparently visible-by-all illusion on the dance floor before we collided again, further wrecking my tenuous grasp on reality. Alina was dead. I knew it in my bones. I knew it with utter and complete certainty. And if she wasn’t dead, nothing I thought I knew could be trusted. Not one damn thing. Easier to turn away from the illusion than confront it.
I tossed back my drink and stood.
Why not? I thought acerbically. Could things get any worse?
16
“What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive…”
I should never think that.
I know better.
Still, I persist, and every damned time the universe seizes the challenge on bullish horns, stomps its hoof, and snorts, “Hey, MacKayla Lane just said she doesn’t think things can get worse. We’ll show her!”
Ryodan took us to the dungeon level I’d glimpsed yesterday on his office monitors. Not to Dageus’s cell but to a small stone room down a narrow passageway.
I trailed my fingers along the cool damp stone of the corridor, skimming a marbling of brightly colored moss on the walls. Apart from the nearly iridescent algae staining a strangely luminous skein on the stone, it was gloomy, gray, and cold in the subterranean chamber.
I despise being underground. I wondered if anyone was with Dageus or if they’d left him alone to deal with his transformation. Although I listened intently, I heard no sound, no anguished baying, no tortured groans.
“Uh, Barrons, why are we in the dungeon?” I asked, looking around for ancient manacles bolted into the stone or something of the like, perhaps an iron maiden or a few bloodstained racks.
“Precaution. Nothing more. If you go, as you call it, batshit crazy, there are fewer people to kill down here.”
“I’d still leave through the club.” Meaning I could still destroy everyone within it. “Maybe we should go out into the middle of a field. Far from any town.”
He slanted me a look. You’re not going to lose it. You’re not going to open the Book tonight. We merely want to get the lay of your inner landscape.
I heaved an audible sigh of relief. “Then let’s get on with it.” I shot Ryodan a look as he closed us in the narrow stone cell. “Since you know I know everything, what the heck is the deal with Kat and Kasteo?”
“Another thing a wiser woman wouldn’t mention.”
“I’m only mentioning it to you, not anyone else,” I said. “So, what gives?”
He kicked a straight-backed chair toward me. “Sit.”
I clamped my mouth shut on I prefer to stand. No point in wasting energy just to vent my dissatisfaction with the current state of my life on everyone around me.
I sat. After a moment I let my lids flutter closed, although I didn’t need to. I remembered all too well, during that time I’d been a darker version of myself, letting my eyes go only slightly out of focus to drift into the place of power I called my dark glassy lake. Scooping up runes floating on the surface, power I’d na?vely believed my birthright, some part of my sidhe-seer heritage, only to learn they’d been temptations strewn by the Sinsar Dubh, gifts to seduce and entice.
Never mine at all.
I wondered, for perhaps the first time with my intellect, precisely where my inner lake actually was. Talking about it to Ryodan made me perceive it differently. Instead of seeming normal, I’d found it peculiar.