My sensory deprivation is absolute. It’s as if the world doesn’t even exist. For all I know, it doesn’t. For all I know, the Sinsar Dubh has already K’Vrucked it. Using my body.

Terror is a voracious thing, devouring the darkness around me. In moments it will devour me, too.

Whatever I am, I make my essence…pause. If I were physical, I’d be a woman going still, eradicating emotion, focusing pure intellect on a problem. Even stripped of my body—I exist. That’s enough. That’s a starting point. I’m beginning to think that all the bad things that happened to me in the past year were simply the universe’s crash course in waking me the fuck up so I could face this moment. Talk about condensed training. What haven’t I already survived?

This is just one more problem. Each one has always seemed bigger and more insurmountable than the last. That’s nothing new.

I will not cede the crumbs of my existence to mindless panic. Here, where there is nothing, I have something, and it’s enough: choice.

I will choose anything over fear.

Rage is fuel. Rage is gasoline. And Ryodan wasn’t completely right—because rage, wielded as a weapon, with focus, purpose, and skill, is also massively useful energy. Anger can refine, distill, clarify.

Besides, there’s nothing left to burn in here but myself.

And if I incinerate my body in the process—good.

I encounter a sidhe-seer in the underground city.

We nearly crash into each other as we round a corner from opposite directions. I carry neither light nor torch. Shadows soothe my newborn eyes.

“Mac!” the woman gasps.

I access my meticulous files, attach neural impulses to visual stimuli: her name is Margery, she’s power-hungry and fancies herself clever.

I drop the feet of the body I’m dragging behind me, coughing lightly to conceal the thud. She sweeps the beam of her flashlight over me. I blink and hide myself before the blinding glare hits my eyes, to reveal serene green.

I blink several more times. The light is brutal. “Get that bloody light off me,” I growl. I see bright spots on the dark walls, on her shirt, even after she turns it away.

“What are you doing down here?” she says.

“I was checking on Cruce. You?”

“I thought to do the same,” she replies stiffly. “What with the fire and the attack, I feared he might have escaped.”

“And what were you going to do if he had? Raise a hue and cry? Scream? Would you scream, Margery?” I purr.

Her eyes narrow. “Mac, are you all right?”

“Never been better,” I tell her, stepping closer, but it’s not true. Something happened to me while I was destroying the slab in the cavern that once housed Cruce and me, smashing and stomping it so it could never be used again, that cold, hated stone. My body began to tremble. Walking had become a wobbly affair and I’d had to sit for a time.

“Well, then,” Margery says, “let’s go check on him together, shall—”

I punch my fist through shirt, flesh, and bone and rip out her heart.

I clench it in my fist and crush. Blood drips. Muscle explodes. Bits plop to the floor. Interesting. That’s what gives them life. How fragile. Inconsequential.

Margery’s body teeters and slumps to the floor.

Life to death in an instant. Not with a bang. Not even a whimper.

It wasn’t nearly as satisfying as I’d thought it would be.

Disappointed, I grab Cruce’s ankle, bump over the body, and continue down the corridor.

I go up and up, winding my way through the many levels beneath the abbey, dragging my prisoner who grows heavier with each step.

I wonder if I should have eaten Margery’s heart.

Perhaps I weaken because my body requires food. I never paid attention to how often MacKayla ate or what. I consider when she last fed her body. It was quite some time ago.

I decide to eat the next human I see.

As I drag Cruce up the final flight of steps, my breathing grows labored. I pause at the top to catch my breath. For so long, I desired corporeal form. It was my sole focus. But like killing, my new body disappoints. Eons ago, before the bastard king trapped me beneath the abbey, I traveled galaxies the same way my prior incarnation traveled this world, luring host after host into picking me up, possessing them. I’d not found a single animate form I was able to possess that hadn’t rapidly decomposed, until MacKayla. But while she doesn’t come apart at a level of cellular cohesion, her body has its share of weaknesses. I must find a way to temporarily strengthen the bird in my hand besides eating the flesh of my children until I become fully, untouchably immortal.

Beyond the half-crumbled wall that once concealed the stairwell, I hear the crush of stone beneath shoes. Someone is near.

Abandoning Cruce’s body, I skirt debris and hoist myself up and into the demolished room beyond.

And smile.

There’s a pretty, delicate thing searching the ice-covered rubble for supplies. Perhaps pretty, delicate things, like strong, arrogant things, are more satisfying to kill. Margery was stout, dour, and dull, and died so quickly.

“Full of fun and games and slowly,” I murmur. Then I’ll eat. Or perhaps I’ll eat while she’s still alive. Perhaps living flesh better nourishes.

MacKayla never ate a human, bound by scruple, chained by morals, but it’s conceivable that human flesh, like Unseelie, may confer some power.

It’s a theory worth testing.

MacKayla knows this woman well.