Burned (6 page)

Christian. The Hag. Cripes, I got some cleanup work to do.

When he showed me the hidden portal in the wall that’s really a secret passageway into the ancient mirrors the Fae once used to travel between worlds, I’d committed the precise, unremarkable spot of bricks to memory. All weapons and escape routes—good. Not even Ryodan with his stupid contract on me can track me Fae-side. I figured if the city ever got too hot for me, I could always ditch it for a while.

It’s feeling way too hot right now.

“Dani, don’t!” Mac cries.

I leap into the brick. It’s weirdly spongelike, then so am I, then I’m standing in a large, windowless, doorless room with blank white walls and a white floor and ten enormous mirrors of varying shapes and sizes suspended in the air. They hang without visible means of support, some motionless, others twirling lazily. No surprise there. Fae stuff, animate and not, rarely give a wink and sure as heck no nod to human physics. It’s why Dancer’s so fascinated by them. Some of the mirrors have intricately carved frames, while others have thin edges of welded chain-link. A few of the looking glasses within the frames are as black as night, some milky white, and others crammed with shadows you don’t want to look at hard.

It’s a good thing I know which mirror to take—second Silver on the right plops you smack inside the infinite, a-fecking-mazing White Mansion. I been itching to explore it anyway. If they follow me through, I’ll use the labyrinthine corridors to lose them or unstopper another distraction because Rule Number One in the Mega O’Malley Handbook is and will always be: survival first, damage control second. Which is only logical. You can’t do damage control dead.

If they don’t follow me in, all I have to do is wait long enough for my superpowers to return, then come back because
it’ll be a couple days, if not a couple weeks later in Dublin. When Christian and me went through last time, we lost almost a month! Time doesn’t pass the same in Fae realms. No way they’ll sit in the White Room 24/7 waiting for me. I hate losing Dublin-time that I could be using to help my city but I can’t help my city at all if I’m not alive.

Mac explodes through the wall behind me like she was shot by a cannon, slams into my back and nearly pushes me into the wrong mirror, and all I can think is what a disaster that would have been. I got no clue where the other ones go. Might be a world without air, a direct path into the Unseelie prison, or a galaxy filled with Hunters, or Shades, or gray women! I got a special hate on for the gray-folk caste of Unseelie. One of them almost killed me and forced Mac to make a promise she shouldn’t have made.

I shove her off me and she stumbles back, nearly crashing into Barrons, who just entered the room with his usual stalky animal grace.

Jericho Barrons is an unshakable, undestroyable constant. He’s the cornerstone of my universe. Or maybe together they are. I don’t know. I only know as long as the two of them and BB&B still stand, some part of me that never used to feel okay, does.

I can’t help myself—I watch them a sec. I love watching them together. I slow-mo it to absorb every detail.

Mac draws up short to keep from slamming into Barrons, and her blond hair swings back over her shoulder, brushing his face as it does, and my hearing is so good I catch the rasp of it chafing the shadow stubble on his jaw, then one of his hands grazes her breast and his eyes narrow when he looks at what he touched in a hungry way I want a man to look at me like
one day and, as they continue to recover from the near-collision, their bodies move in a graceful dance of impeccable awareness of precisely where the other is at all times that is unity, symbiosis, partnership I only dream of, wolves that chose to pack up and hunt together, soldiers who will always have each other’s backs no matter what, no sin, no transgression too great, ’cause don’t we all transgress sometimes and it fecking slays me, because once I got a little taste of what that was like, and it was heaven and they’re so beautiful standing there, the best of the best, the strongest of the strong, that they practically glow to me, on fire with all I ever wanted in my life—a place to belong and someone to belong there with.

Together they mean to kill me and go on living, all happy, like I didn’t even mean anything. They’ll eat and have sex and adventures and I’ll be nothing but six feet under in dirt—assuming anyone even bothers to bury me. Gone. Over. Finis. Done. Quit. Before I ever even got the chance to live.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been hap—

I terminate that idiotic train of thought. As soon as my
sidhe
-seer gifts come back, I’ll get over this wimpy little emotional meltdown I’m having. Losing the superpowers that make me special plus seeing Mac up close and personal for the first time since she found out what I did is temporarily messing with my head. Key word there, temporarily.

Fourteen blows.

Hormones suck.

I wish I’d just grow the hell up in a hurry and everything would even out and start to make sense and folks would stop seeing me as a kid and I could finally—

Bugger it all! What am I waiting for?

I close my hand on the hilt of my sword and dive headfirst
into the mirror, laughing as I go. I always crack up when I leap into the unknown. It’s cotton-candy fuel, there’s a big-top tent full of carnival magic in a good belly laugh.

Next grand adventure here I come!

The last thing I hear is Mac shouting, “Oh, God, no, Dani, not
that
one! We moved them! That one goes to—”

      2      

“There’s bullet holes where my compassion used to be …”

MAC

“—the Hall of All Days!”

If not infinite, the ancient Fae “airport” that serves as hub for a nexus of Silvers is so vast it isn’t worth splitting hairs over.

Fashioned of gold from floor to ceiling, the endless corridor is lined with billions of mirrors that are portals to alternate universes and times and exudes a chilling spatial-temporal distortion that makes you feel utterly inconsequential—think dust mote in a galaxy-sized barn.

Time isn’t linear in the hall, it’s malleable and slippery and you can get permanently lost in memories that never were and dreams of futures that will never be.

One moment you feel terrifyingly alone, the next as if an endless chain of paper-doll versions of yourself is unfolding sideways, holding cutout construction-paper hands with thousands
of different feet in thousands of different worlds, all at the same time.

Compounding the many dangers of the hall, when the Silvers were damaged by Cruce’s curse (a thing he tried to blame on his Unseelie brothers, in typical Cruce fashion), the mirrors were corrupted and the image they now present is no guarantee of what’s on the other side. A lush rain forest may lead to a parched, cracked desert, a tropical oasis to a world of ice, but you can’t count on total opposites either. No handy
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
is propped on a convenient foyer table, near a cool beverage and tasty snack inside those time-tortured walls.

Barrons steps between the mirror and me, folds his arms across his chest, and spreads his legs wide. He’s a tall, dark mountain of man I can’t push my way through or around. I meet his implacable gaze and we have one of our wordless discussions.

But we have to—

No we don’t
.

But we can’t—

Yes we can
.

But she doesn’t—

She’ll figure it out
.

But it’s—

Not your fault and not your problem
.

But I’m the one—

Bloody hell, Ms. Lane, how many “buts” are you going to throw at me besides the only one I want?
He rakes a hungry gaze over my ass and I shiver.

After all we’ve been through together, he still calls me Ms. Lane, with one exception: when I’m in his bed. Or on the floor,
or some other place where I’ve temporarily lost my mind and become convinced I can’t breathe without him inside me.

“Sometimes I don’t know why I even bother talking to you.”

He lifts a brow an infinitesimal amount in a silent
makes two of us
.

Barrons thinks words are pointless and dangerous. If I played it his way, we’d rarely speak, ocular or otherwise. Funny thing is, the more time I spend around him, the more I understand why he feels that way.

“But she’s in the
hall
. It’s a terrible place. I’ve been there. People don’t escape.” During my brief time in those ancient corridors, the glossy, seductive floors had been littered with skeletons. I’d nearly become one of them. In those mindbending halls, you could live any reality you chose, die on the floor believing you were living a genuine, happy life somewhere real. The place is a consummate mind-fuck.

“You did,” he says aloud.

“That’s different. I’m the exception. To a lot of things.”

A corner of his mouth lifts. “Modest, too. So is she.”

“I had the stones.” Chiseled from the Unseelie King’s realm, they’d reacted to each portal I went through, changing the way the environment behaved and working ultimately to expel me.

“If you follow her through, you will only force her to take the nearest escape route. Any door, any Silver. She’s not going to stop running from you. What if she chooses a world that has no air or is too close to a sun? She needs time to use that powerful brain of hers. You made it out. She will, too. Drop it. There are other things you need to be focused on. Besides,” his gaze locks on mine, then I feel like he’s sweeping my eyeballs aside and sifting through my mind, analyzing, discarding,
hunting, “ah, yes, I thought as much. You’re not ready yet. You will leave her alone until you are.”

Autocratic
has a picture of Barrons next to it in the dictionary. Unfortunately so does
addictive
. I poke Unseelie on both sides with my elbows and change the subject. “Haven’t you found a way to get rid of them yet? It’s been months.”

One after another black-cloaked, chittering wraiths continue to pop through the portal behind me. I have no idea why they’ve chosen me to stalk. I’m swiftly becoming the only human in an Unseelie sardine can, and just as smelly. It’s bad enough they stalk me, but where they brush against me they leave a greasy, pungent yellow dust on my clothes. That’s the least of the reasons I want them gone.

With rare exceptions—like tonight, when they inexplicably decided to roost up high—they make it impossible to fight. I can’t get to my enemy without first slaughtering a few dozen of the ones smothering me. By the time I slice and stab my way clear, whatever I
really
wanted to kill has disappeared. My
sidhe
-seer talent, nulling, or freezing them in place for a few seconds, doesn’t work on them.

As if that’s not bad enough, every time Ryodan sees me he grills me about why an Unseelie caste is following me around, and when that man gets a bone he strips the gristle with his teeth and gnaws until the marrow is gone, so I’ve stopped going to Chester’s or anywhere in public that I might run into him or his men, which is pretty much everywhere given the close watch they keep on Dublin and the surrounding districts. I’m bookstore-bound most days and nights, and me, cooped up, bored, gets riskier with each passing hour—idle hands make the devil’s work and all.

Not the devil, beautiful girl. Angel
. Your
angel
.

Yet another voice I pretend not to hear.

You wish to be rid of them? Your wish. My command
.

Oh, yeah, fully deaf now.

I killed the first fifty or so Unseelie when they began stalking me, but it didn’t matter how many I slayed, more appeared. Compounding my disgust, they release a huge cloud of that stinking yellow dust as they die, coating me and making me sneeze my head off. I haven’t seen them feed on any humans, and as their only offense seems to be stalking me and ruining my clothes, I no longer kill them. It’s pointless and disturbing.

I shoot Barrons a look. He has a full five feet of personal space around him in all directions. I, on the other hand, am a human dog with Unseelie fleas. “So, can you get rid of them or not?”

“I’m working on it.”

“Can’t you tattoo me or something?”

“Now she wants me to tattoo her. Will wonders never cease.”

“It’d be better than walking around with these … these … these bloody flipping odiferous gnats!”

“Have yet to find one that works.”

“Well, whatever’s keeping them out of the bookstore should keep them away from me, right? Can’t you just do to me what you did to it?” Inside those walls and beneath his garage are the only places I have any privacy.

“I’ve not isolated the precise element responsible. And no, I can’t do all of that to you. You’re animate. You might not be when I was done. I prefer you animate. Most of the time.”

Most?
I bristle but refuse to be distracted. “Just how many elements are involved in protecting a bookstore? Five? Ten? A hundred?” When he betrays nothing of his secret protection
spell—not that I expected him to, Butt-the-fuck-out-of-my-business is his middle name—I press, “Have you considered asking the Keltar if they can help? They’ve been druids to the Fae for thousands of years and maybe—”

This time the look he cuts me holds a glitter of crimson and I shut up. I’ve seen that flash when he’s on top of me, hands bracketing my head, eyes dark with lust. I’ve seen it when he’s killing. I know what it promises: primal passion or primal destruction. Hard as it is to believe, I’m in the mood for neither at the moment. My problems have bred entire subsets of problems, which are no doubt having birth pains to spawn yet more problems, even as I pause to brood about them. Mentioning the clan of sexy Highlanders to Barrons is never a good idea, which I would have remembered if I’d not been distracted by the sudden realization that I’m wearing the last clean outfit I own and will have to do laundry tonight. Again.

I’m sick of hiding. Tired of washing clothes. Fed up with sitting back and doing nothing to help my city, my people, myself. Arguably the most powerful person in Dublin, possibly on the planet—with the exception of one currently frozen prince—I lay low so no one discovers the psychopathic, homicidal embryo I carry inside me—a complete copy of the
Sinsar Dubh
, the most dangerous, twisted, evil book of black magic ever created.