34

“The silicon chip inside her head gets switched to overload…”

“Christ, Mac, what the bloody hell do you and Barrons do in this place?” Lor said as he walked in the front entrance of BB&B.

He stood looking around the room, at the broken furniture I hadn’t been strong enough to move, the crimson paint sloshed everywhere, and the small area of organization in the rear I’d set up for myself with a love seat and a table that looked like a very small eye in a very large storm. He whistled low and shook his head.

I knew what it looked like. A battlefield.

“Never mind,” he said. “I don’t wanna know. Guess there’s a reason Barrons keeps you around. So, where’s my little honey?”

“Upstairs. In my room,” I told him. We’d brought Jada and Ryodan back to BB&B, with Barrons working more of his Bewitched magic to get us through the funnel cloud. “How’d you get in through the storm?” I wondered if they all knew the same spells. I’d somehow gotten the impression Barrons was by far the most proficient, that Ryodan had some degree of skill but preferred to leave the heavy lifting to Barrons, and I’d assumed Lor was mostly oblivious to…well, everything but blondes with big boobs. And recently, Jo.

“There’s a way,” he evaded.

“Then why haven’t I been using it?” I said pissily. Sometimes I almost wanted to be one of them. Almost. The Hunter wasn’t willing to fly me anymore. I was going to be even more dependent on Barrons in the future. Or have to give up coming home for a while. A sudden chill kissed my spine, and I wondered if for some reason, soon, I wouldn’t be here much at all. I shook it off as exhausted brooding.

The owner of Chester’s had insisted on returning to his club, but Barrons had flatly vetoed it, saying BB&B was more heavily warded, and besides, Jada couldn’t go far if she decided to try, with the Fae-tornado surrounding the area. Both men seemed to think she’d run the second she was coherent again.

She’d been unconscious since the abbey. I’d tucked her into my bed upstairs, pulled the covers up to her chin, and sat beside her for a long time, trying to understand what was going on with her, touched and troubled by how fragile she looked, young and vulnerable.

It was sometimes hard to remember Jada was only somewhere between nineteen and twenty years old. If she were a normal girl, in a normal world, she might be a sophomore in college. She presented a facade that packed the presence of a woman of thirty. But she wasn’t. She’d been a fourteen-year-old who’d had to grow up too fast. Now she was a nineteen-year-old that had grown up even more, faster and harder. I smiled bitterly, remembering one of Dani’s favorite mottos: Bigger, Better, Faster, Harder, More. She’d always been voracious for life, hungry to experience it all.

Why on earth had she raced back into the abbey, into a killing Fae fire, just to save a stuffed bear, sliced down the middle with its innards falling out?

“She sleeping?” Lor said.

“I can’t tell. I don’t know if she’s sleeping or…something else.” Exhausted to the point of collapse, as if she’d been holding herself together with sheer force of will for a long time.

I’d held her hand. It was limp, as if all the life had been drained from her body. I was frantic to know what had happened, but Ryodan, too, had passed out shortly after arguing with Barrons about where to go.

Half the Nine had remained behind at the abbey, standing guard for when the Fae came back. We’d left Christian soaring over the burning fortress. I fervently hoped he could save some of it. I even more fervently hoped the blaze didn’t burn it all the way down into the ground, freeing Cruce from the cavern. Criminy, we had a mess on our hands.

Will Ryodan die? I’d asked Barrons on the way back to BB&B. And come back whole? I hadn’t added.

Not a chance, he’d replied grimly. He’s fighting it. He won’t leave her like this. The bloody idiot will stay here and heal the long way.

But he will heal? I’d pressed. I couldn’t even bear to look at him. It was seeing the man in that movie, The English Patient, but with no bandages to hide the horror.

He’ll heal. You would consider it rapidly. He won’t. And it’ll be hell.

I’d pondered having the ability to simply kill yourself if you were badly wounded, so you could swiftly end your suffering and come back perfect again. It had been beyond my comprehension. What a leap of faith to bleed yourself out. I decided they must have died so many times that they either had implicit trust they would always come back or didn’t care.

He’d shot me a look. You used the spear tonight. You didn’t lose control.

I know, I’d replied. I don’t know what was different. It may have helped that I’d stabbed my first one instinctively before I realized what I’d done. And once I realized it, I’d known I could do it and it had been easy from there. I’d figured it was one of three things: the Book was neutralized inside me somehow; it was open and I was using it without being corrupted; or it was cooperating, for whatever reason.

You’re coming into your own.

I’d kept my silence. I still couldn’t shake the feeling that the universe had two really nasty evil shoes and only one of them had dropped.

We’d put Ryodan in Barrons’s study on a mattress he’d dragged down from upstairs.

You could put him in the bedroom next to Jada, I’d suggested.

He won’t want her to see him like this.

I don’t think she’s seeing much of anything, I’d pointed out.

I don’t think she has been for a while. He’d glanced pointedly at the heavily smoked stuffed animal I was holding on my lap as we headed back for Dublin in one of the Nine’s Hummers.

I’d tucked it into her arms as I’d tucked her into my bed.

And I’d seen the only faint signs of life in her as she sighed and curled herself tightly around it. She muttered something then that sounded like, “I see you, yee-yee.”

My heart had felt raw and inflamed inside my chest, on the verge of rupturing, as I’d watched her. Mea culpa. I hated myself even more than I had before for chasing her into the Silvers that day. I was only now beginning to fully understand what those years had cost her.

And I’d thought then, staring down at her, what if Alina isn’t really dead? That would mean I’d chased Dani into the hall—and she hadn’t even killed my sister.