“Have you seen Mac?” he said.

That was Barrons. No small talk. She appreciated it and answered in kind. “She’s been possessed by the Sinsar Dubh.”

Barrons went so still she lost him in the early morning gloom. Just when she’d decided he’d left, his disembodied voice murmured, “So, that’s why I can no longer feel her.” Then he was there again, morphing out of the brick wall that had been behind him. He could be a perfect chameleon when he chose. “Are you certain?” he said so softly that she shivered, because she knew what soft meant from this hard, implacable man. It meant every ounce of his energy had just been diverted and channeled into a mother lode of a nuclear missile that was locked, loaded, and targeted on whatever had just offended him, and that he would expend no more energy than was strictly necessary to speak.

“Yes.”

His eyes darkened, eerie shadows swirled in his irises, and a muscle worked in his jaw. “How certain?”

“Unequivocally.”

“What happened?” he said, a bare whisper.

She tightened her ponytail, pulling it up higher. Her hair was curling again, or trying to. She hated it curly. It made her feel like Dani, out of control. Those at the abbey didn’t know the Sinsar Dubh was once again roaming Dublin, and she had little time to fortify what was left of the fortress against the next attack, whether instigated by those trying to free Cruce or Mac herself. “We have to get to the abbey, Barrons. We can talk on the way.”

He pulled out his cellphone, thumbed up a contact, and held the phone to his ear. “Do you feel the Sinsar Dubh?”

Jada heard a woman’s frantic voice carrying clearly from his phone. She knew that voice. She heard it in nightmares, crying, begging, and finally screaming. She shivered, reached for another protein bar and wolfed it down.

“Barrons, I’ve been trying to call you! I felt it about an hour ago! Here. In Dublin. What’s going on? You said it was locked up. How did it get out?”

“Where is it right now?”

“It headed north, into the country, then I lost it. Where are you? Where’s Mac? I’m coming with you.”

“No you’re not. Find your parents. Stay with them until you hear from me.”

“But M-Mom and D-Dad d-don’t know I’m alive,” Alina stammered.

“Fix that. And if you feel the Sinsar Dubh approaching, take Jack and Rainey to Chester’s and call me. If you can’t get to the club, go to ground wherever you can.”

“What’s going on?” Alina demanded. “I have a right—”

“Do what I said.” Barrons hung up.

Jada listened to the exchange with narrowed eyes, realizing the woman Mac had said was walking around Dublin looking and acting like her sister somehow was on Barrons’s autodial. He seemed to believe it really was Alina and, like Mac, the woman could sense the Sinsar Dubh. But he didn’t trust her entirely. Either that or he didn’t want one more liability to worry about.

“Mac’s headed for the abbey,” Barrons said.

Jada filed thoughts of Alina away for later perusal. They were entangled with far too many emotions to be entertained at the moment. They went into the same box that held so many other things that she would get to…one day.

By the time they got to Chester’s and climbed into a big black armored military Humvee, she was operating with her usual machine-like efficiency despite her many recent shocks and unhealed wounds.

Past was past. Tidying up one’s internal landscape was a luxury of the safe.

Safe was something she’d never been.

MAC

I force myself to stop screaming.

The silence is absolute.

I’m in a vacuum.

No, that’s not quite it. I’m drifting in space, blind, with no radio. Though my initial impression was of being stuffed inside a tiny box and I know somewhere there are walls, I feel as if I’m floating without friction in a vast darkness.

I’m aware of absolutely nothing but my own awareness of absolutely nothing.

It borders on madness.

Hell isn’t other people, as Jean-Paul Sartre claimed; it’s being trapped somewhere dark and silent with only your own thoughts, forever.

Terror wells inside…whatever I now am.

A disembodied consciousness?

Do I still exist? Am I in a box inside my body, or something worse? Am I dead? Is this being dead? Would I know?

Fear threatens to obliterate me. Here, in hell, I want to be obliterated. I want the horror of the hellish awareness of only my own awareness to stop.

I’m screwed.

Barrons may have punched into my head once to save me from the Sinsar Dubh, but back then I still controlled my body and the Book was locked away, unopened. There’s no way he’s getting in here now, past the psychopath that imprisons me. I felt the power of the Sinsar Dubh. It was incomprehensible. Ugly, sick, twisted, hungry, and enormous as the Unseelie King. It scraped me out of every nook and cranny of my body and stole it from me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. In those brief moments of contact I’d felt I, too, was a psychopath; its touch had been so palpably evil, so saturating, that I’d been contaminated by its mere presence. It was bigger than me. More focused, driven by such an enormity of rage and malevolence that it, too, was enormous. I’d felt a mere mouse in its house.

I remember the night the corporeal Book almost made Barrons pick it up. It was the only time I ever saw Jericho Barrons back down. He’d raced through rainy Dublin streets, away from the enemy.