I raked a hand through my hair, trying to push the wild mess out of my face, and succeeded only in getting my fingers tangled in knots matted with spray paint. I gave up and shoved it to one side. We were both smeared with oil-based lacquer and if I wasn’t…enhanced, and he wasn’t…whatever he was, I’d worry about all those nasty chemicals on our skin. We’d slipped and slid all over the store, thrown each other around in the wreckage, painted our skin crimson, not all of it paint, some of it blood.

We were currently wedged between half a shot-up broken chesterfield and a shattered bookcase, I had hard-cornered books digging into my ass, was using a crushed lamp shade as a pillow, and one of the many baubles in the store was gouging the small of my back.

I felt incredible. Released. Open. I made a mental note to jump on him the next time I found myself feeling uncertain or shutting down. Barrons is antitoxin for the venom poisoning me.

I tipped my head back and looked around the room.

If the bookstore hadn’t been completely decimated before, it certainly was now. Something bizarre had happened to us while we were fighting and fucking, taking out everything we felt on each other’s bodies because words don’t work for either of us anymore. As if possessed by a unified prime directive, we’d abruptly stopped having sex and devoted our focus to finishing what the men had started. We smashed, slashed, and crushed.

Those few things the Guardians had left unbroken we’d destroyed ourselves. My iPod had actually still been working in the sound dock. It wasn’t now, ground to smithereens beneath a heel. The rugs shredded by Barrons’s talons. Bookcases that had been standing were now on the floor, contents dumped across the garishly stained floors.

I understood on an intuitive level. Someone else had desecrated our home. By participating in its destruction, we’d said goodbye to its current incarnation. We’d given the bookstore a proper burial. We’d grieved in fury. We’d torn down the Phoenix to ash so it could rise again.

We would start over. Barrons and I would always start over. Longevity requires it.

As I lay there, considering how I would redecorate—and yes, I still love decorating, as a brilliant, half-mad king likes to say more often than I like to hear it: can’t eviscerate essential self—my eye was caught by the piece of paper I’d been stooping to collect outside the bookstore when I’d been shot. It had traipsed in stuck to someone’s boot, evidenced by a large red heel print and was stuck by yet more paint to the broken arm of the chesterfield.

I reached over Barrons to snag it. Smoothed it out and turned it over.

Between splatters of paint, my name screamed from the page.

I began to read. Stopped. Cursed. Read and cursed some more.

The Dublin Daily

August 2 AWC

EMERGENCY ALERT!

BREAKING NEWS GOOD PEOPLE OF NEW DUBLIN!

MACKAYLA LANE

is under control of the deadly Book of black magic known as the Sinsar Dubh and is on a rampage in New Dublin! She’s been committing HORRIFIC MURDERS of INNOCENTS and will DESTROY OUR CITY if she isn’t KILLED immediately! Her latest victim was a good man who worked for the New Guardians in a tireless effort to PROTECT us! Mick O’Leary was ripped to pieces by the SAVAGE ANIMAL MACKAYLA LANE.

See photo of Lane below! She usually has blond hair but may color it, don’t be deceived by one of her SLEAZY disguises!

If you see her, DO NOT approach! She’s a KILLER, PSYCHOTIC, and EXTREMELY DANGEROUS!!!

Notify WeCare with any news of her location!

She used to reside at BARRONS BOOKS & BAUBLES but hasn’t been spotted there for some time.

It’s rumored the Book can make her INVISIBLE, exponentially increasing the DANGER she presents!

Help us PROTECT New Dublin!

Join WeCare today!

Sleazy. I scowled, offended. There was nothing sleazy about me. Well, recent activity aside and that wasn’t sleazy. That was freedom.

I smiled grimly. “Jada” hadn’t needed to raise a finger against me. All she’d had to do was rat out my Sinsar Dubh–compromised state, my invisibility, and location to WeCare to place me squarely in the crosshairs of every vigilante, Fae, and nut job in Dublin. Thanks to Dani’s past papers, in which she’d kept the city informed of every detail of the threats she deemed important, including the Sinsar Dubh, the world was fully aware of the astronomical power it contained. Some would hunt me to kill me, others with the futile hope of controlling the iconic, deadly Book. Rather than telling WeCare I was the Book, she’d made them think I had a copy, which made hunting me all the more desirable for those who wanted to possess its power.

I wasn’t psychotic and she knew it. I was holding my own pretty damned well. I’d only killed a single person. By accident. And I regretted the hell out of it. Would give a great deal to be able to undo it.

I was fuming again, all that lovely hostility I’d managed to vent on Barrons’s body flooding right back into my veins like someone had turned on the mother lode of spigots inside me.

This was bullshit. I’d been betrayed to the entire city and I was visible. There would be no more sneaking through the streets to get where I wanted to go. No more evading the searching ghouls in tonight’s sky. It struck me as incalculably odd they’d been hunting for me on the precise night I’d become visible again. Could they sense me so easily?

Not that I wanted to be invisible again, I appended mentally, hastily. If the Sinsar Dubh was listening, and I was sure it was, I was not making wishes. No wishes. Not a single one. “You hear that?” I muttered. “This is me, Mac. Not wishing.”

There was no answer but apparently we were on the outs, the Book and I. Or it was merely intensely occupied doing something nefarious, underhanded, and evil that was requiring all its attention, the results of which would soon bite me in the ass with vicious little teeth. I may as well enjoy the silence and lack of teeth in my ass. Occupy my time with something much nicer in it.

I glanced hungrily at Barrons. Sex on an Unseelie-flesh high was every bit as phenomenal as I’d thought it would be. Eating Fae makes a normal human existence seem a shadow of what life really should be. It enhances all your senses, taste, touch, sound, smell. Sex had been even more mind-blowing than usual with Barrons, each nerve exquisitely sensitive. My orgasms had gone on and on, one barely sputtering out before the next had set me on fire. Oh, yeah, eating Unseelie twice in eight days was probably a really bad idea.