Paramount to my plans is the spear. I refine my goals, making it my priority.
I push myself up from the bloody remains of Jo in which I squat, becoming aware of eyes on me. I can feel them. Someone is watching me. Is it my clever, clever enemy? How is someone anticipating me? There is no one with my clarity, my focus, my resolve.
I stand motionless, curious to know the face of my foe.
Jericho Barrons steps from behind a tumbled wall.
For a moment I stare, consumed by jealousy. I had to be born a fucking woman in a world where men are physically superior. Christian. Cruce. Now Barrons. He exudes ferocity, power, hunger, his presence saturates the air with palpable, electrifying energy. Even the Fae fear him. Shades slink away when he passes. He has killed Fae royals—sifters! His vessel is wide-shouldered, big-boned, muscled and powerful as a lion. Undestroyable. I despise him for it.
“Mac,” he says roughly, and I know what he sees: his precious little Mac, all blond and bouncy, defiled and vile—it doesn’t escape me that VILE becomes EVIL becomes LIVE, more proof my supremacy was destined—drenched in blood, hair matted with it, face crimson, black feathers stuck to the congealed mass, bits of Jo’s brains on his pretty girl’s hands, under her nails.
He sweeps the remains with a dark gaze, trying to identify them; impossible, as her head is a glistening, bloody omelet, garnished with the broken eggshells of her skull.
“Jo,” I tell him, enjoying the moment. “I ate her. Savage enough for you yet, Barrons?”
“Mac was savage enough for me as she was.”
“She was weak.” Is. Hate the bitch. Stupid, guilt-riddled cunt.
“Young,” he corrects. “Sometimes the young surprise you.”
“Young is boring. She never understood you. I do.” Were he to doff his circumscribing ethics, we might raze galaxies together. I would fuck him. Discover what my body has to offer me in the way of pleasure. Lust speaks its hungry native tongue when I look at him, demanding satiety. There will be time for that. Later.
“Bullshit. She knows me. You don’t.”
“I know you far better than MacKayla did, steeped in all that grand insecurity. She couldn’t make up her mind about shit. That’s why it was so easy for me to make it up for her.”
“She’s getting there. I’m a patient man.”
“Your love for her is your greatest weakness. Pity. You could have been so much more.” He could have been like me. His monster demands he be like me. He muzzles the finest part of himself. MacKayla may pretend she doesn’t know what he eats, but we do. We know what he is. We just don’t talk about it.
“What do you want?” he demands.
“I have what I want. You have nothing to offer me.”
“Try me. Bargain. Let me find you another body.”
“Do you have one in mind?” I say, interested. I never underestimate my prey. Perhaps he knows something MacKayla and I don’t.
“Mine,” he says flatly.
I’m silenced by the unexpected offer. I assess his splendid body from head to toe, pondering how delicious his black-skinned beast would be to ride. Possessing him, I would gain access to all his secrets, his enviable powers. I’d be able to kill Fae without needing spear or sword. I’d acquire millennia of druidry and skills in the black arts. He would go so far to save her—yield his exquisite existence for an illusion called love? The fool is more deluded than I believed. Desire, greed, lust to possess his powerful, changeable, impervious skin saturate my every cell. If I were able to complete transference to his body, and my enormity burned him up like all the others, I’d come back again and again, forever. I’d only have to maintain my hold on my form through the dying and rebirth, and I’ve held my form against far more formidable foes. The Unseelie King himself tried to strip me out of the corporeal Book he’d made once he realized what he’d done.
And failed.
Perhaps, at the moment of his dying, I might evict the tatters of his sentience. He doesn’t deserve the vessel he inhabits. My will is supreme. No other has my focus, my hunger.
He is up to some trick or he would never offer. Barrons is no sacrificial lamb. Besides, there is another, more certain way. I will fuck him. Then kill him. Once my goals are attained. “You think you stand a better chance against me than she does, because you have a beast within. You think you’re stronger and would take on her battle for her, like you always do because she’s such a pathetic victim. Your beast,” I say silkily, “would be a mere mouse in my house. You chain it. Hobble it with your fucking morality; even those few shreds you possess.”