Burned (22 page)

Our worries about rebuilding, parceling out districts, and reinstating currency now seem insignificant, but Ryodan insists we carry on. Barrons agrees that not only must we pursue an illusion of normalcy, but conceal from the general populace the danger the world is in. They contend if people believe the world might be ending, it’ll be the riots of Halloween all over again.

Oh, yeah. Politicians R Us.

I seriously doubt we’re going to be able to hide it long. If they’re still too small to spot, it’s only a matter of time before they’re not. People will start seeing them, messing with them, vanishing.

I half expected Barrons and Ryodan to say: screw it, pack
up, we’re leaving. They’re immortal and there are countless worlds. There’s nothing to stop them from circling their wagons and heading off for the universe’s vast, untamed Wild West.

Yet, they stay and I’m glad they do because there’s no way I’m giving up on my world. This is what we’ve been fighting about since the dawn of time when the Fae first arrived on our planet and began messing with it. Earth is ours. I’m not letting them have it. I’m not letting them destroy it.

Not on my watch.

Too bad I have no idea how I’m going to back up my ballsy position, but I’ve been in impossible situations before and got out of them.

My brain processes what I just watched happen. Apparently I couldn’t keep my eyes off the pathetic excuse for a bartender and turned back toward him at some point without realizing it. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, you just ruined that drink! Who taught you to pour?”

“Fuck you, bitch. Ain’t your bar.”

I stand and hurry around the counter. My flock rustles in behind me. “It is now. Get out. I’m taking over.” I can’t let him tarnish my profession anymore. He just served a smoked martini that had begun promisingly, with gin and a dash of single malt Scotch—then apparently forgot what he was doing and added vermouth, and insult to injury, an olive, pimento intact, instead of a lemon twist. Yellow was Alina’s favorite color and I used to take my time making my lemon twists as complex and pretty as they could be, little origami fruit peels. My mouth puckers in sympathy for the silver-haired gentleman sipping the drink. It’s no wonder the world no longer knows what martinis are.

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” the bleary-eyed bartender snarls drunkenly as I approach. “This is
my
bar. Get your ass back on that stool and buy a drink or leave, you stupid cunt. And get those smelly fucks out of here!”

I see red. Like I’d drink anything he poured. And I really hate the c-word. No clue why. It just doesn’t work for me. Seems I have my own event horizon: inactivity, worry, and frustration have devoured my patience, sucked it away into a deep dark hole from which it may never return.

I walk straight for him and pop him in the face with my fist. Not too hard. Just hard enough to get him to go away.

His nose spurts blood—

YES BLOOD YES!
the Book explodes.
Kill him, worthless piece of human trash! Take this bar and take the club and we will K’VRUCK THEM ALL!

I rummage for my seventh-grade performance—where did I leave off? I remember being eleven. I was happy then, in a much simpler world. Or so I thought.

Bloodred like the blood of Mick O’Leary, the man you RIPPED to pieces with your bare hands then CHEWED—

For a second I can’t find my place, the word “chewed” throws me off so badly, and instead of focusing I wonder if I had blood in my mouth that day and didn’t notice. Panicked, I plunge into my recitation at the first place I can think of and shout, “ ‘Prophet!’ said I, ‘thing of evil, prophet still, if bird or devil! Whether tempter sent or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore—’ ”

The bartender clutches his nose and stares at me like I have three heads. I toss him the positively filthy bar towel he’d been using to dry clean glasses. Well, as clean as they could be considering the water in the sink behind the bar is disgustingly
black with weak gray soapy suds. I realize I’m still spouting poetry and terminate mid-twelfth stanza.

“You’re off your fucking rocker!”

“You have no idea. I don’t have a rocker anymore. I don’t even have a fucking porch to put it on. And there certainly aren’t slow paddling fans or magnolia trees blossoming above aforementioned missing chair.” God, I get homesick for the South sometimes. A sunny day. A polka-dot bikini and a swimming pool. One day I’m going back to Ashford. I’ll walk around and pretend I’m a normal person. Just for a day or two. “I’ll punch you again. So move.” I crowd him with my body and force him to walk backward through my throng of Unseelie, out from behind the lovely bar I realize I’m really looking forward to tending.

It’ll feel like old times, soothe me. Ground me to the real Mac Lane again.

“I’m telling the boss, you freaky bitch!”

“You do that. Tell him the name’s Mac when you talk to him and see how well that goes over. Now get out. And stay out.”

I turn to the gentleman who’s completely unfazed by our bizarre altercation—this
is
Chester’s—and is currently studying his awful martini as if trying to decide what went so wrong with it, and pluck the glass from his hand. It wasn’t even the right glass.

“Smoked?”

He nods.

“Be right up.”

I pull the drain on the filthy water, rummage beneath the bar for clean towels, wash my hands, grab a chilled glass, and stir a perfectly proportioned smoked martini. I’m so used to dealing
with my wraiths, I slide smoothly through them.

When he tastes it, he smiles appreciatively and the ground beneath my feet solidifies just like that. Familiar routine is balm to a fragmented soul.

I begin rearranging the liquor on my shelves the proper way, humming beneath my breath.

Inside me a book
whumps
closed. For the time being. Looks like I’ve learned one more way to temporarily shut it up. Poems and bartending. Who’d have thought? But Band-Aids for my disease aren’t what I’m after. I want a surgeon to perform an operation that leaves a deep incision where something nasty used to be, followed by a scar to remind me every day that it’s over and I survived.

And for that I need a half-mad king. Not getting any closer to finding the spell stuck in this place.

“Hey, Mac,” Jo says, dropping onto a stool. “What’s with all the Unseelie behind your bar?”

“Don’t ask. Just don’t even go there.”

She shrugs. “Have you seen Dani lately?”

That question has become a stake through my heart. One of these days I’m just going to snap,
Yes, and I’m the jackass that chased her into the Hall of All Days, so crucify me and put me out of my misery
.

I give my standard, noncommittal reply.

“How about Kat?”

“Not for a few days.”

Beneath a cap of short dark hair, shimmering with blond and auburn highlights, Jo’s delicate face is pale, her eyes red from crying. I shake my head and debate saying something about what I saw this morning.

My brain vetoes the idea. My mouth says, “I saw what you
did this morning,” proving my suspicion that the road between the two is as bad as the highways around Atlanta, under eternal, hazardous construction.

“What do you mean?” she says warily.

“Ryodan nodded and you turned away. You dumped him.”

She inhales sharply and holds it a moment, then, “I suppose you think I’m crazy.”

“No,” I say. “I think you’re beautiful and smart and talented and deserve a man that can feel with something besides his dick.”

She blinks and looks surprised, and it pisses me off because she should know all of that.

“I understood from the beginning what he was, Mac,” she says tiredly. “What
it
was between us. But he has such … and I never felt … and I started wanting to believe even though I knew better. Began telling myself all kinds of lies. So I moved on before he did. Pride was all I had left to salvage.”

“Doesn’t make it any easier though, does it?” I say sympathetically. I feel my bartending skills blossoming: the pouring, listening, steering away from complete anesthetization with alcohol toward something that might actually help, change the person’s life, shake it up in a good way.

“I don’t think I’m strong enough to stay away from him, Mac. I’m going to quit working here. I can’t see him every day. You know what they’re like. He may not have taken anyone else up those stairs this morning, but he will. I’m going to ask Kat if I can move back to the abbey.”

“Know the best way to forget a man?”

“A frontal lobotomy?”

I snort, thinking of that song we used to play back home in the Brickyard that went,
I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
. “No. With two men.”

She smiles but it fades swiftly. “I’m afraid I’d be needing ten to clear my head of that man.”

“Or perhaps,” I say, “a single incredible one.” Stupendous sex is a drug, addictive, consuming. I know from personal experience.

“Sounds like you have someone in mind. I’m so not in the mood, Mac. He’d only pale in comparison.”

“Maybe not.” I lean across the counter and speak softly into her ear.

When she leaves, wearing a thoughtful expression, I ponder the seed I planted, hoping it yields healthy fruit. I think it will. I think it’s exactly what she needs to buffer her heart, cleanse her body from craving the touch of a man we both know she can never hold.

Besides, there’s a possibility it will piss Ryodan off, in a territorial sort of way, which will still further ease the sting to Jo’s wounded heart.

Heaven knows the man I pointed her at won’t mind.

I smile and line a few choice bottles up on my counter, and try my hand at pouring high and flashy. Patrons love a good show.

When I glance up to greet a couple of new customers, I inhale sharply and stare right past them, staggered by the vision I see, unable to process my abrupt change in fortune. Talk about tall, dark, and utterly unexpected.

Time grinds to a halt and everything goes still around me, the thronging patrons receding beyond the edges of my periphery, leaving only one: the Dreamy-Eyed Guy, wearing an amused expression, is standing three clubs away, watching me toss my bottles flamboyantly, and I recall a night I watched him do the same.

He inclines his head, dark eyes starry.
Nice show
.

The Unseelie King is back in town, wearing his old skins again!

We’ve been scouring ancient books and scrolls for months, trying to find the spell to summon him, and the surgeon I need just arrived out of the blue! The one with butterfly fingers who creates and destroys worlds and can surely remove this great staining darkness inside me!

I didn’t think he’d
ever
come back willingly, off with his concubine somewhere, rekindling her memory and reclaiming her love.

Elation floods me. I can get my life back, and while I’m at it, get rid of my smelly Unseelie, too. Approach the queen about the Song of—I swiftly terminate that thought and repadlock it.

I vault the counter, sending glasses flying and shoving startled patrons off their stools, but by the time my feet hit the floor, the Dreamy-Eyed Guy is gone.

      18      

“When life pushes me I push harder. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”

MAC

The next few days pass in the closest thing to hopeful peace I’ve known in months. Even surrounded by the debauchery of Chester’s, my inner book remains silent. I don’t know if seeing the king made it shut up for some reason, if familiar routine makes me that much stronger, or if it thinks it has me trapped in the cesspool of life here at Chester’s and my capitulation is only a matter of time.

I tend bar amid my Unseelie coven, watch for the various forms of the king, keep an eye out for princesses, and await Barrons’s return, hopefully with Dani in tow. I can’t wait to tell him the king is back and we can quit losing time in the Silvers.

When the ruler of the dark Fae took an interest in Dublin before, his various incarnations often came to the club. The Unseelie King is too vast to walk among humans in a single
human body. He has to divide himself into multiple skins, and when he does, not everyone sees him the same way. Where I saw a young, hot guy with gorgeous eyes, Barrons saw a frail old man, Christian saw a Morgan Freeman look-alike, Jo saw a pretty French woman. It’s only a matter of time before we see one of them again, or I hear of a McCabe sighting or run into the old news vendor on the streets. I’ll be faster next time because I won’t be struck dumb and motionless by his unexpected return.

The thought of living divided like this, tempted every day by power I can’t use, tortured by thoughts of what my inner monster might be able to make me do if I’m not vigilant one hundred percent of the time, is more than I can stand.

Can’t eviscerate essential self
, the king once said. But this copy of the Book
isn’t
my essential self. It’s his.

And I’ll be damned if I’m keeping it.

At least now I can stop considering a risky plan B. The king came to Dublin once before because his book escaped. It seems logical if Cruce escaped, the king would return and re-ice him and I could demand he free me. Unfortunately I’m not entirely convinced the king would (a) return or (b) give a shit about any of it. His priorities spring of stars and infinity, not the tiny moments that span a human life. And there we’d be, with Cruce loose.

Dicey plan.

Humming beneath my breath, I finish polishing my bar. It’s eleven in the morning and I’ve just opened my subclub for business. The glasses sparkle, so clean they squeak. Ice is stocked, glasses frosted, condiments fresh, liquor replenished.

I’m bent over, reaching in the fridge to pull out lemons and start making my twists, when I hear a deep baritone say, “Laprhoaig. No ice.”

The accent is Scottish, the voice one I’ve heard before. I glance up into eyes strikingly similar to Christian’s, before he began turning Unseelie. They bore into mine, cheetah-gold, assessing. Same five o’clock shadow, chiseled features, and beautiful dark skin. Serious power rolls off the man.