“Uh, Barrons, we have a meeting. I thought you’d go afterward.”

“Ryodan canceled it,” he said around teeth much too large for his mouth. “He’s tattooing Dani. Jada.”

“She’s letting him?” I said incredulously.

“She asked.”

I narrowed my eyes, mulling that over. “You were inking Ryodan. Same kind of tats you wear. I never saw those on him before.” And I’d seen him naked. “Is he giving her a phone? Will he be able to find her like you found me?”

“Speaking of,” he growled, twisting sideways with a series of painful-sounding crunches, “you do still carry the cell, Ms. Lane.”

“Always,” I assured him.

“I’ll find this thing you seek, but when I return it’s imperative I finish my own tattoos.”

“Oh, God,” I said slowly. “When you’re reborn all your tats are gone. Even the ones that bind us together.”

“And until I replace them, IYD won’t work. That, Ms. Lane, is the only reason I wanted you to remain in Chester’s the other day. Until I finish them.”

IYD—a contact in my cellphone that was short for If You’re Dying—was a number I could call that would guarantee Barrons would find me, no matter where I was. “I’m not completely helpless, you know,” I said irritably. Dependence on him makes me nuts. I want to be able to stand so completely on my own one day that I feel like I measure up to being with Jericho Barrons.

“Head for the basement. I’ll see you there. This won’t take long.” He turned and dropped to all fours, loping off into the night, black on black, hungry and wild and free.

One day I want to run with him. Feel what he feels. Know what it’s like in the skin where the man I’m obsessed with feels most completely at home.

For now, however, I’m not running anywhere. I’m flying on the back of an icy Hunter to the house on the outskirts of Dublin where I once spent months in bed with Jericho Barrons.

—

Dreams are funny things. I used to remember all of mine, wake up with the sticky residue of them clinging to my psyche, the slumbering experience so immediate and intense that if I was in my cold place, I’d wake up freezing. If I was hearing music, I’d come to singing beneath my breath. My dreams are often so vivid and real that when I first open my eyes I’m not always sure that I have awakened and wonder if “reality” isn’t really on the other side of my lids.

I think dreaming is our subconscious way of sorting through our experiences, tying them into a cohesive narrative, and filing like with like in a metaphorical way—so in the waking we can function with a tidily organized past, present, and future we barely have to think about in the moment. I think PTSD occurs when something so shattering happens that it blows everything that’s stored neatly into complete chaos, disorganizing your narrative, leaving you drifting and lost where nothing makes sense, until you eventually find a place to store that horrible thing in a way you can make sense of. Like, someone trying to kill you, or discovering you’re not who you thought you were all your life.

I have houses in my dreams, rooms filled with similar pieces of mental “furniture.” Some are crammed with acres of lamps, and when I dream I’m looking at them, I’m reliving each of the moments that illuminated my life in some way. My daddy, Jack Lane, is in there: a solid, towering pillar of a lamp made from a gilded Roman column with a sturdy base. My mom is in that room, too, a graceful wrought-iron affair with a silk shade, dispersing in her soft rays all the gentle words of wisdom she tried to instill in Alina and me.

I have rooms with nothing but beds. Barrons is in those rooms pretty much everywhere. Dark, wild, sitting sometimes on the edge of a bed, head down, gazing up at me from beneath his eyebrows with that look that makes me want to evolve, or perhaps devolve into something just like him.

I also have basements and subbasements in my dream houses wherein lurk many things I can’t see clearly. Sometimes those subterranean chambers are lit by a pallid gloom, other times corridors of endless darkness unfold before me and I hesitate, until my conscious mind inserts itself into the dream and I don my MacHalo and stride boldly forward.

The Sinsar Dubh lives in my basements. I’ve begun to wonder endlessly about it, feeling like a dog with a thorn deep in my paw that I just can’t chew out. It manifests often when my subconscious plays.

Tonight, waiting for Barrons to bring the Alina-thing to me, I stretched out and fell asleep on silk sheets in the ornate Sun King four-poster bed in which Barrons fucked me back to sanity.

And I dreamed the Sinsar Dubh was open inside me.

I was standing in front of it, muttering beneath my breath the words of a spell that I knew I shouldn’t use but couldn’t leave lying on the gleaming golden page because my heart hurt too damned much and I was tired of the pain.

I awakened, drenched by an abject sense of horror and failure.

I stood abruptly, scraping the residue from my psychic tongue. In my dream the words I’d muttered had been so clear, their purpose so plain, yet awake, I didn’t have one memory of the blasted spell.

And I wondered as I had so many times in recent months if I could be tricked into opening the forbidden Book in a dream.

Like I said—I don’t know the rules.

I looked around, eyes wide, filling them with reality, not shadows of fears.

The Christmas tree winked in the corner, green and pink and yellow and blue.

The walls had been plastered—by Barrons months ago—with blow-up pictures of my parents, of Alina and me playing volleyball with friends on the beach back home. My driver’s license was taped to a lamp shade. The room held virtually every hue of pink fingernail polish ever made, and now I knew why I couldn’t find half the clothing I’d brought with me to Dublin. It was here, arranged in outfits. God, the lengths he’d gone to in order to reach me. There were half-burned peaches-and-cream candles—Alina’s favorite—strewn on every surface. Fashion and porn magazines littered the floor.

Best cave indeed, I thought. The room, with the hastily plumbed shower I was certain he’d had to force my sex-obsessed ass into on frequent occasions, smelled like us.

I frowned. What a terrible place to bring the facsimile of my sister. Surrounded by memories of who I was, who she was, how integral a part of my life she’d been.