She was being hunted.
She’d passed small clusters of angry, armed humans, clutching papers with her picture. Mostly men, determined to gain power and ensure a degree of stability in this brutally unstable city by capturing the legendary Sinsar Dubh.
Fools. They felt nothing more than a brisk wind as she passed, on her way to her sacred place. Her bird’s-eye view. The water tower where she’d once crouched in a long black leather coat, sword in her hand, and belly-laughed, drunk on the many wonders of life.
As she pulled herself up the final rung and vaulted onto the platform, the smell of coffee and doughnuts slammed into her, and although her face betrayed nothing, inside she scowled.
She dropped down from the slipstream to tell Ryodan to get the hell off her water tower. They weren’t supposed to meet for another few hours and this was her turf.
But it was Mac she saw, sprawled out on the ledge as if she was perfectly at home, slung low in the old bucket car seat Jada had dragged up there herself, ball cap angled over her badly highlighted hair to shadow her face. She was dressed nearly identical to Jada, in jeans, combat boots, and a leather jacket.
“What are you doing on my water tower?” Jada demanded.
Mac looked up at her. “I don’t see your name on it anywhere.”
“You know it’s my water tower. I used to talk about it.”
“Sorry, dude,” Mac said mildly.
“Don’t fecking ‘dude’ me,” Jada said sharply, then inhaled long and slow. “There are plenty of other places for you to be. Find your own. Have an original thought.”
“I watched the Unseelie princess kill one of the Nine about an hour ago,” Mac said, as if she hadn’t even heard her. “She’s carrying human weapons now. Marching with a small army. They shot the shit out of Fade. Started to rip his body apart.”
“And?” Jada said, forgetting her irritation that Mac was here. She’d tried to strike an alliance with the Unseelie princess but the powerful Fae had chosen Ryodan instead, striking a deal for three of the princes’ heads. Apparently that alliance was over, if she was now killing the Nine.
“He disappeared. The princess saw it happen.”
Jada went still. She knew the Nine returned. Somehow. She didn’t know the nuts and bolts of it but she certainly wanted to. “Why are you telling me this? Your loyalties are with them, not me.”
“They’re not mutually exclusive. My loyalties are to you as well. Coffee?” Mac nudged a thermos toward her.
Jada ignored it.
“Got doughnuts, too. They’re soggy, but hey, it’s sugar. It’s all good.”
Jada turned to leave.
“I saw Alina the other night.”
Her feet rooted. “Impossible,” she said.
“I know. But I did.”
Jada relaxed each muscle by section of her body, starting with her head and working down. Opponents tended to focus at eye level, so she always eradicated signs of obvious tension there first. She didn’t want to talk about this. She didn’t think about this anymore. “I watched her die,” she said finally.
“Did you? Or did you leave before it was over?” Mac held out a doughnut.
Jada ate it in two bites, wondering if this was some kind of twisted joke Mac was playing on her. Then, in a single swallow, she tossed back the little plastic cup of coffee Mac had offered.
“Fuck,” she exploded. “That was hot.”
“Duh. It’s coffee,” Mac said, arching a brow.
“Give me another doughnut. Where did you find them?”
“Little vendor a few blocks from BB&B. And I didn’t.” She frowned. “I had to ask Barrons to go get breakfast, and believe me, every time I ask for anything, I get this freaking lecture on how he’s not my fetch-it boy. I have to slink through the damn streets to go anywhere, hiding from everyone. They’re hunting me.”
“Despite my paper retracting the accusation, they’re hunting me, too,” Jada admitted. “We had a small mob at the abbey yesterday.”
“What did you do?”
“I wasn’t there. My women told them none of the accusations were true. Although they didn’t believe it, my sidhe-seers are formidable and the mob’s numbers were small. They’ll be back in greater force at some point,” she said, not certain why she was even having a conversation.
But sliding through dawn over Dublin this morning, for the first time since she’d returned, she’d felt…something…something to do with being here, home, back, and that maybe, just maybe, everything would work out all right. She’d find a place for herself and Shazam here.
She took the second doughnut Mac was holding out. “They’re not bad,” she admitted, eating slowly enough to taste it this time.
“Better than protein bars. I hear music coming from the black holes. Do you hear it?”