“Why can’t I feel them?”
“Woof, woof,” was Cruce’s cool reply. “Embrace it. Or soon even they will surpass you. Like sharks, we circle when we smell blood. Get hungry. Or get eaten.”
MAC
Here, drifting in nothing, my thoughts sparkle like diamonds, translucently clear.
Perhaps it’s because I have no physical distractions. Perhaps it’s because, for the first time since I was a fetus, I’m completely alone, free from the ever-present influence and malevolent manipulation of the Sinsar Dubh.
Out there, beyond my box, in the world, the Book is walking around, controlling my body, doing God knows what with it (I refuse to indulge that train of thought, I can’t do anything to stop it, and the horrific things I might imagine would only dilute my clarity), but once it was trapped. For twenty-three years.
I simply have to replicate its path to freedom.
But first I have to figure out what it did; what I did, that enabled it to take control of my body away from me. Barrons says possession is nine-tenths of the law. So what did I do that allowed the Book to exploit its one-tenth possibility?
I understand how it got me the day I killed the Gray Woman but I don’t understand how it evicted me this time.
Something about the moment I used one of its spells gave it the ability to overpower me, but what?
I turn my thoughts back to the instant it gained control and sift through my motives. Unlike that gloomy day I’d killed the Gray Woman, I hadn’t been trying to make myself feel better, nor had I been seeking to improve my life.
At the moment I reached for the spell, all I’d been thinking of was Dani, that I wanted her to live out loud and in every color of the rainbow, unchanged, unaltered by a dispassionate entity that believed itself so superior that it could re-create her according to its own design—and who the hell was it to judge? I’d been thinking that I’d do anything to see her happy, hear her belly-laugh again, snicker, crack herself up, maybe fall in love and—who knows, if Shazam was really real, she’d save him and they’d swagger around Dublin, doing superhero things together. I’d even gone so far as to imagine her having children of her own someday, thinking how brilliant and amazing they’d be and what a terrific mother she’d make. I’d wanted her to get up off that fucking table, unchanged, unharmed. She’d already been through so much in her life.
My motives had been pure, as altruistic as I believed possible. I hadn’t been thinking about myself at all. I’d made the decision with a strangely detached calm, a serene “Fine, take me, just let her live.” I refuse to believe doing something out of pure love makes us weaker.
Then how had such good intentions landed me here?
I consider the question from every angle, finally able to draw a single conclusion: They hadn’t.
There was something else, some other nuance that tipped the scales in favor of the Sinsar Dubh.
I peel myself like an onion, seeking the pearly core, determined to isolate precisely what had been in my mind at the moment I’d made the decision to open the Book. I shuck vanity, pride, ego, lay my heart bare and study it.
At the moment I’d opened the Book—as if it was something that could even be opened or closed or anything that implied corporeality—I’d been thinking that I believed in good magic, that even if the Book’s power stemmed from an evil source, I could use it for the right reasons, without price.
Wait. Not exactly.
There was something deeper, beneath that thought.
Oh, God, I’d still been afraid.
I’d been saying I believed in the good magic but in my heart lurked the insidious fear that I would lose control again like I had the day I killed the Gray Woman. Only things would go much worse this time.
Hope builds a stairway to Heaven. Fear opens an abyss to Hell. We stand in front of those two possible apertures at all times; choose which one to go through.
Was it possible the only thing that had given the Book control over me in that moment—was me?
I’m stupefied by my next thought: What if the war between us has always been nothing more than a battle of will? And it knows it. I’m the only one that doesn’t. That would give it one hell of an advantage over me; all the advantage it needed. The corporeal Sinsar Dubh had trafficked in guile and sleight of hand. My internal one would be no different. Since the moment I learned of the Book, I’d heard nothing but tales of how all-powerful it was, how its will was impossible to resist, and damn it all, I’d believed it. Despite Barrons trying to make me see that the legend of a thing was often far greater than the thing.
Picture this: Two people are in a room. One’s a sociopath, one’s not. Who has the advantage?
The sociopath. Because it knows it’s a sociopath. The empath doesn’t. The empath thinks they’re playing by the same rules. They aren’t. They aren’t even playing the same game.
There are no rules with a sociopath. There’s only—