Burned (25 page)

The scenery has changed. Drastically. Here, just ten minutes from the abbey, spring has been at work, not with gentle brushes, but wild splashes from the vats of a painter gone mad.

“Back up,” I demand, but he’s already doing it.

We find the line of demarcation, similar to the one the Shades left outside Dublin, an eighth of a mile back.

I leap from the Hummer and straddle the line, one booted foot on each side. My ghouls pack in beside me, behind me. I tune them out, a thing I’m getting better at the more smelly, dusty time we spend together.

To my left is a thin covering of grass and weeds. To my right is a carpet of grass too tall and dense to be cut by anything but perhaps a strong man with a scythe. Fat poppies bob, black and velvety in the moonlight, and atop willowy stands of tall reeds, shadowy lilies sway.

On my left are newly budded trees with young, tender leaves.

On my right enormous, ancient live oaks, massive branches stretching skyward, others reaching low to sweep the earth, explode with greenery, draped with lush vines.

Here, a weak cricket chirps, wakened from the unexpected and brutal winter to a paltry meal.

There, birds trill an exotic aria, tree frogs sing, and the heavily draped limbs rustle as small creatures leap from one vine-fringed branch to the next.

Foreboding fills me.

If you’ll just come to the abbey
, Kat had said,
you’ll see what I mean. This thaw … I thought when the fire-world threatening our home was gone … och, but then it didn’t and it turns out it wasn’t …

She was trying to tell me. She was asking for my help. Engrossed in my own problems, I’d heard none of it.

There’s another thing I’d like to be discussing with you, if you’ve the time. About Cruce. Seeing how you know more about Fae princes than any of us …

She’d told me his cage was still holding.

Was it a lie? What else could explain this?

I shoot a dark look at Ryodan. “I thought you knew what was going on out here.”

“It would seem there are a few things my sources neglected to mention.”

“Why wouldn’t your men tell you?” I fish.

“My men are not my sources.”

That was half of what I wanted to know. “Who is?”

His slants me a silent,
Nice try. Not
.

I get back in the Hummer.

On the driver’s side.

And lock the door.

He laughs. “Ah, Mac, I don’t think so.”

I lunge across the wide console, fling open the passenger door, slam it into gear, and start rolling forward.

Fast.

Ryodan curses and does exactly what I would have done, lopes alongside and explodes in, managing to dwarf the cavernous interior. “Strip my gears, woman, you’re dead.”

I shoot him a derisive look. “I haven’t stripped gears since I was ten.” I step on it and shift rapidly.

“Big Wheels don’t count,” Ryodan mocks.

“My daddy’s sixty-four-and-a-half Mustang.” After that debacle, Mom and Dad no longer left any keys hanging by the garage door. Sherriff Bowden brought me home. I’d made it a half a mile of screeching, jerking stops and starts that apparently the entire town of Ashford was witnessing out their nosy windows. The pillows I’d packed in to help me reach the pedals and steering wheel had worked as air bags when I hit the telephone pole.

It had been a while before Daddy got over that one.

Then he’d done what any wise parent would have: taught me to drive.

Give me raw, testy, ferocious power any day of the week.

I can find the sweet spot in my sleep.

I park outside the elaborate new gate on the enormous new stone wall that wasn’t there two months ago.

Ryodan intuits my thoughts. It’s not difficult, given my mouth is slightly ajar. Again. I don’t know why I bother with preconceptions anymore. Even simple ones like expecting that when I close a door the room on the other side still exists, with drywall and carpet and ceiling lights, neatly intact. For all I know, it doesn’t and never has. Perhaps it vanishes until I want it again, stored away on some cosmic zip drive to conserve quantum energy.

“It wasn’t here last month either. Bloody hell, that wall wasn’t here three weeks ago. And she said nothing of it. It seems our headmistress has been keeping secrets.”

“Along with your inept sources.” I’d really like to know who they are. I’d like them working for me. I’d insist on better info.

Right. If you’d wanted better info
, my conscience pricks,
you could have come out here any time. Maybe listened when she asked for help. Did you really think it was over? Did you honestly delude yourself for even one minute that Cruce would lie dormant?

Has Kat, like Rowena before her, been seduced by the evil that slumbers a thousand feet of stone beneath her pillow? I shiver. Not Kat. But where
is
she? And why did she tell us none of this?

“Perhaps a different caste of Seelie have settled nearby in large numbers and are affecting the environment,” I propose as an alternative, which would still be problematic. I don’t want
any
Fae anywhere near the abbey.

“Cruce seduced her,” Ryodan says flatly.

“You don’t know that,” I defend.

“It began the night we laid the Book to rest. He came to her while she slept.”

I look at him incredulously. “You know that for a fact? And you waited until now to say something? If not me, you could have at least told Barrons.”

“I believed she had things under control.”

“The great Ryodan, wrong?” I say in mock astonishment. “The world must be ending.” Why didn’t she tell me? Was that why she’d asked me to come out, so I could see firsthand the power he was using on her, on the abbey, and understand the battle she was fighting? Did she hold her silence because, like me, she feared condemnation and hoped to fix it before anyone else had to know?

Ryodan says irritably, “Bit busy hunting Dani and trying to patch a black hole beneath my club. While you and Barrons were MIA doing unknown things for unknown reasons with the Unseelie King’s personal valets that stalk you for yet more
unknown reasons, all of which you could explain anytime now. And yes, if we don’t find a way to fix it, it is.”

End-of-the-world talk doesn’t make me as nervous as it once did. I often wake up in the morning surprised to find myself still here. I consider it icing on the cake if I’m still where I recall falling asleep.

A black SUV with dark-tinted windows pulls up. The Keltar have arrived. They get out, a small army of powerfully built, dark-haired, dark-skinned men. There’s Dageus’s twin, Drustan, a more thickly muscled version of his minutes-younger brother, with shorter hair—although it still falls halfway down his back—and a cool silver gaze, in contrast to Dageus’s gold tiger-eyes. He’s followed by Cian, an enormous Highlander with loads of tattoos and the thousand-yard stare of a man who’s done hard time somewhere; then Christopher, the only one of the lot that looks remotely civilized, a forty-five-year-old version of Christian.

As we get out and join them, Dageus growls, “No’ quite what it looked like last time. Place reeks of Fae.”

Ryodan angles his head back and looks up at the barbed wire strung atop the walls. He breaks a twig off a nearby tree and tosses it high. The branch spits and crackles when it hits, then falls to the ground, scorched.

Beyond the gate the abbey is lit as if by a thousand interior lights. An acre of fountain that also didn’t previously exist shoots water into the sky before spilling into a rippling pool of silver and gold. The gardens are surreal, vast bed after bed of spicy, jewel-toned blossoms I’ve seen only one other place. There’s no longer any question in my mind what egotistical Picasso painted this voluptuous summer atop the canvas of Dublin’s anorexic spring.

Beyond the gate a new
sidhe
-seer holds the prison that
contains—or appears to be rather spectacularly failing to contain—the greatest evil the world has ever known (well, besides me) in the body of the most powerful prince the Unseelie King created. I should have known it wouldn’t work. Cruce probably had a contingency plan all along; the equivalent of a paper clip tucked in his pocket to work his handcuffs loose, or a shoulder that conveniently pops out of its socket.

“Has it broken free, lass?” Dageus asks, looking at me.

Cautiously, I reach out for the Book entombed, hoping the one inside me doesn’t explode into violent life.

KILL THE PRINCE CRUSH HIM DEVOUR HIM DESTROY HIM MAKE HIM BURN!!!!!

I grit my teeth to keep from clutching my head and groaning out loud. Yes, it’s still beneath the abbey, and apparently, much as the king despises his book, my book despises the king’s book. Whatever happened to the good old days when books just got along, cozied up together on bookshelves, hanging out, waiting to be read?

“It’s still beneath the abbey where we left it.”

“Has anything changed?” Christopher demands.

“I can’t tell that from here. We’ll have to see it.” And I won’t. I’ll find a way to refuse. The last time I stood in that cavernous chamber, I didn’t know I had a copy of the Book inside me. I’d still believed it was a lie the
Sinsar Dubh
had told me to make me doubt myself. Since that night, I’ve had far too many nightmares about getting imprisoned next to Cruce.

March willingly into the abbey, down into the prison, beside the very
sidhe
-seers and Keltar druids that possess enough power between them to imprison me?

Never.

I feel Barrons behind me before he speaks. My cloak of
wraiths retreat, and like a supercar that’s sat too long in the garage and is in desperate need of a hot, hard run to blow out its engine, my body fires on all pistons.

“Ah, fuck.” He moves in, standing close without touching. He doesn’t need to. I sometimes think our atoms are so glad to see each other that they send little messengers back and forth, ferrying desire, strength, and love between the islands we are. “I knew we should have moved it,” he growls.

“At least pumped it full of concrete,” I agree.

“The others,” Ryodan says to him.

“Fade was the only one with me when I got your call.”

While I’m trying to decide just how Ryodan managed to reach Barrons in Faery, Fade glides from the shadows, tall, packed with muscle and scarred like the rest. He’s prowling in that half-invisible way Barrons moves only in private. If you’ve not seen it before, it’s eerie and impossible to mistake for human.

The Highlanders close ranks on themselves.

Fade laughs, fangs gleaming white in the moonlight.

Two of the Highlanders move their hands to ancient, odd knives in sheaths at their waist. I wonder if they have mythic properties like my spear.

Ryodan shoots Fade a look he rebounds with a snarl, but he settles into moving like the rest of us.

Our army is small yet impressive. In two groups we stand, Barrons, Fade, Ryodan, and I, near Dageus, Drustan, Cian, and Christopher, preparing to meet our unknown foe.

And a known one that’s somehow stirring, despite the ice and bars.

Provided war doesn’t break out between us—which could easily happen with this much testosterone in such close quarters—I
put our odds of reclaiming the abbey from at least one of our enemies tonight at reasonably good.

The new
sidhe
-seers didn’t just take an abbey—they took a radioactive one.

I’m no longer certain what worries me more: the danger beneath Chester’s, the one beneath the abbey, or the one inside me. I’d like them all to go away. Reverse order would be just swell. “Do you think things will ever get back to normal?”

Barrons gives me a look. “They were normal? Did I miss that century?”

Ryodan says, “Fuck normal. Give me a good war any day.”

“No shit, boss,” Fade agrees.

Drustan snorts. “You’re daft, the lot of you. I’d give my left nut for a century of peace.”

The rest of the Keltar heartily agree, adding various body parts to the mix.

Surrounded by alpha males that know more magic than all the teachers at Hogwarts, I’m about to ask who’s going to do what to get us through the gate, when it becomes a moot point.

Powered by an unseen hand, it begins to move slowly open.

      21      

“This house doesn’t burn down slowly to ashes”

MAC

I used to know precisely where I was headed and how I’d handle things when I got there.

Before any event, I’d ponder the possible variables and decide what I’d say or do, if X or Y happened, or maybe Z. Although something as exotic as Z almost never happened in small-town Georgia. We closed schools and held parades when it did.

It’s how I used to prepare for dates in high school: when Billy James asks me out will I say yes the first time or make him wait; will I wear the low-cut top or something flirty and sweet; when he tries to kiss me, will I let him; if he takes me to the less popular party at Amy Tanhauser’s house instead of the party of the year at Heather Jackson’s, will I dump him; if he wants to have sex, am I ready?

Ah, my long-lost shallow life.

Back then, things unfolded so predictably. I wore flirty and sweet, I dumped him when he took me to the wrong party, and I didn’t have sex with Billy but I did have sex with his older brother later that summer.

My careful prep doesn’t work so well anymore.

Each time I think I’m braced for any possible scenario, gravity changes, my trajectory shifts, rocket fuel gets dumped into my gas tank and I end up hurtling at inconceivable speeds at some entirely new crash site I’d never considered, a big, fat nasty planet I didn’t even know existed that explodes on the horizon so suddenly no amount of frantic braking can save you from impact.

How do you brace yourself for a collision with the unimaginable?

The closer we get to the abbey, the more sultry the clime. On both sides of the drive, mist steams from the lush lawn. I feel like we’re taking a bad trip down a yellow brick road, but what waits for us behind that curtain is no charlatan, rather an enormously powerful, staggeringly dangerous wizard of chaos.