Burned (28 page)

“Bloody. Fucking. Hell,” Ryodan says.

Women lunge up, straight for me.

Barrons moves in front of me like my personal shield. “Over my dead body.”

“It happened before,” Jada says tonelessly. “I’m certain it will again. And again. But that’s how it works with your kind, isn’t it.”

“Bloody. Fucking. Hell,” Ryodan says again.

“I can’t believe you did that to me,” I say numbly.

“Dani,” Ryodan whispers.

“For fuck’s sake, now isn’t the time. Either of you. I said we’ll discuss it later, Ms. Lane. And Ryodan, we’ll find her.” Barrons snarls, “Focus on the moment.”

“I am,” I clip stiffly. “Forgive the fuck out of me if this moment got tangled up with the one you stole from me.”

“Easy to thieve that of which one was so eager to be quit,” he barks, harsh and rapid as hostile fire.

Ryodan says carefully, “We just did.”

“Did what?” I snap, not following him at all. Things are happening too fast. My brain is rubber cement, sticky and nonabsorptive.

I should run. I’m in the abbey. They know what I am. They’re going to lock me up. Imprison me next to Cruce.

“Find Dani,” Ryodan says.

“What the fuck are you nattering about?” Barrons practically shouts.

“Who even
says
words like ‘natter’?” I know the answer. Men who steal people’s memories.

“I don’t natter.”

“Spell it the fuck out,” Barrons snarls.

“Jada,” Ryodan says tightly, “is. Dani.”

      Part II      

I go inside my head and become that other me, the one I don’t tell anybody about.

The observer.

She can’t feel hunger in her belly or cramped muscles from being in a cage for days on end.

She isn’t Dani.

She can survive anything. Feel nothing.

See what’s in front of her for exactly and only what it is.

Her heart doesn’t break a little every time her mom leaves.

And she holds no price too high for survival.

I don’t let go of myself and seek her often because once I got stuck there and she took over and the things she did …

I live in terror that one day I won’t get to be Dani again.

—From the journals of Danielle O’Malley

      22      

“I have lived behind walls that have made me alone”

KAT

In the five days since Ryodan interred me beneath his nightclub, I have neither heard voice nor experienced another’s emotion.

I should worry. I should care. I should be hammering on the door, demanding to be freed, but in these rooms I have experienced the first peace of my existence.

The entry room is unfurnished but the rest are not. There are four others: a bedroom with a soft pillow-top mattress so uniformly surfaced I know it was never used prior to my arrival; a bathroom with a large, gentle rain shower; and a kitchen stocked with food and beverages that tell me as surely as condemning words that Ryodan had been planning this for me, perhaps for quite some time.

The fourth and final room is the largest, walled with mirrors, housing a state-of-the-art gym.

Kasteo has not spoken a word.

Nor have I.

I’ve spent five days and nights simply feeling myself, my unborn child, without the constant drone of interference I’ve endured my entire life.

Kasteo lies on the floor.

He gets up and works out.

Occasionally he showers.

He doesn’t speak and I haven’t seen him eat. Perhaps he cooks while I’m asleep. I’ve seen no dirty dishes.

I, on the other hand, am voracious. Eating for two with an appetite I’ve never known before.

I’ve become a hedonist, sleeping ten hours at a time, taking long indulgent showers behind a locked bathroom door, making myself meals of meat and potatoes and more meat, which I’ve not had in months.

Nothing, no one, disturbs me here. No emotion, no voice, no seductive dark prince.

These five days and nights have been transformative.

I’ve realized, during this brief, unexpected, only vacation I’ve ever had from the world, what my problem is.

I’ve never been able to fully block the emotions of others because I didn’t know what silence felt like. I found it impossible to strive for a goal I couldn’t fathom, to re-create a thing of which I’d no knowledge, like a blind man trying to paint a picture of sky and clouds and sun.

I now know a stillness in my center, that it exists and where to find it, and I’m certain I can locate it again amidst the boisterous din of Dublin, the abbey, even the desperate and dangerous shark tank of Chester’s.

The man who isn’t there brought me to the blessedly silent
lair of another man who isn’t there and gave me the greatest gift I’ve ever received: the time and space to take a deep breath and explore my inner terrain, comprehend the strengths I have to work with and the weaknesses that have crippled me.

I can’t begin to imagine why he did it. It seems a kindness from a man I would never have counted kind.

He has shown me that goal which always eluded me. That sacred inner place that is mine, and no one else’s, the eye in the storm where I can stand unharmed by the chaos whirling around me with jagged sharp edges and bulk enough to knock me from my feet.

Rather than locking me away to torment me, he did it to show me a thing I was desperate to find.

It confounds me. I find myself questioning everything I thought I knew about Ryodan. Running prior conversations through my mind, realizing the man I believed moderately intelligent and highly manipulative of others—to their own detriment and destruction—is in fact highly intelligent and enormously manipulative of others, but I’ve begun to suspect it’s because he’s trying to fix what he perceives as the things they want fixed but don’t know how. He sees the bird’s-eye view and takes the hard, catalytic actions. Unsettling, disturbing to those of us that don’t, makes it easy to call him bastard, heartless.

But why would he bother?

There are only two possibilities: either he wants whatever goal he will achieve by altering that person, or, unfathomable as it is, he cares about the world he pretends to scorn, and the people in it.

Then why run a den of such depravity as Chester’s?

Unless … where better to sort the wheat from the chaff?

Even I know it’s impossible in times of war to save everyone. For the love of Mary, it’s impossible in times of peace. Is the nightclub his distillery where he sorts the vintages and tucks into his personal cellar the most complex, interesting wines, the most potent and impressive whiskeys?

And he considers me of value.

Easier to believe he wants something of me, although I cannot imagine what.

I’m eager to test myself, experience emotional commotion. See if I can maintain my newfound balance.

Yet I’ve developed a grudging respect for the man who brought me here.

You’ll remain with him until I decide you’ve gotten what you came for
, he said.

So I remain. I came for the strength of concrete without the price of it. If Ryodan is true to his word, I will leave with it.

I’d stay here a very long time to reach that goal.

Before I sought him out that night, I’d already admitted to myself I wasn’t good for the abbey. I knew I wasn’t the one to replace her, a mere week after Rowena died. But there was Margery and she was toxic, and the
Sinsar Dubh
was stirring and my women were in need, so I stayed and battled to the best of my ability, without weapon, without the strength of sometimes-necessary deceit and sleight of hand.

I was unfit to lead.

So I don’t hammer the door, I don’t shout for salvation.

My salvation is currently stretched on his back on the floor, staring up at the coffered ceiling, wearing black camouflage pants, tattooed and hard and silent.

Ryodan brought me here to give me silence.

I wonder, clever man that he is, if he brought me here also to somehow give this man words.

What could make someone stop speaking a thousand years ago? I can barely grasp, much less accept that anyone has lived so long.

How would it feel, if you cared for such a person, to watch his complete retreat? To see him day in and out, yet never converse again? To know that he
could
speak to you if he chose to, but won’t? Day in, day out, your brother in arms, in your reach yet completely unreachable.

Ryodan has ordered this mute, dark man to be my teacher.

Will he obey?

I need instruction to cement my newfound center. I need training, discipline, and strength. I’m not leaving without it.

I lean back against the wall and study him, as I have for nearly a week now. He’s not catatonically withdrawn. He simply doesn’t interact with anyone around him at all.

“Kasteo,” I say. “I’ve stopped feeling the pain of the world. Help me learn to control my environment. Teach me to fight.” To one who stopped living a millennium ago, I say, “Show me how to live.”

The man who has stared at little but the ceiling for nearly a week, who has not so much as once acknowledged my presence, slowly turns his head to the side and looks across the floor at me.

Then stares back at the ceiling.

      23      

“The nights go on waiting for a light that never comes”

CHRISTIAN

I’m fourteen, finally old enough to enter the circle of standing stones for the first time. Ban Drochaid—the White Bridge, as these stones are called—was once a bridge through time, for the right Keltar for the right reasons. But my clan abused the gift, and the Fae queen who’d granted it took it away.

Still, the stones hold ancient power. Only one avenue was closed to us.

I stand with my da and uncles between the dual bonfires of our great May celebration, and prepare with solemn pride to help them usher in the season of rebirth with ritual and chant.

Our women, no less strong than our men, gather round, clad in the old ways, with brightly colored skirts, laced blouses, and bare feet, in honor of the coming feast, which will be attended by the entire village that thrives in the valley below our mountain.

The night sky is black and crystal clear, with thousands of glittering stars scattered like diamonds on a cloak of mink. Diamonds.

I want a girl with a mind like a diamond …

“Dani,” I whisper through lips that are cracked from dehydration. I taste blood, it bubbles in my throat, choking me. Pain lances my ribs, my gut, my groin.

Focus
.

The heather has not yet begun to bloom, and although the grass is still recovering from April’s unexpectedly frosty kiss, yellow May flowers have blossomed and are strewn everywhere, on doors and windows, on the livestock, around the necks and in the hair of our women, scattered around the stones.

My da and uncles awe me, tease me, push me, teach me. I want to be like them when I am a man: wide-shouldered, with a ready laugh, a spine of steel, and courage beyond compare.

Was she worth this? Dying over and over? You gave yourself up so she could fight for those sheep. Fuck sheep. You’re not a sheepdog anymore. You’re a rabid wolf
.

I gave myself up to watch her shine. Because I knew what the massacre of so many people that she loved would do to her. Steal the light from her eyes. I wanted to watch her save the world, and feel on top of it.

I inhale sharply. I just stumbled as I passed between my uncles, took an inadvertent elbow in my stomach, nothing more.

There’s Tara, our housekeeper’s daughter and Colleen’s best friend. Later tonight a group of us will go for a midnight swim in the loch and shriek from the icy slap as we plunge deep. I’ll try hard not to stare at Tara’s wet blouse when she gets out,
but och, the lass is growing in all the right places and I stare in spite of myself. She always spots me, tosses her head of fiery curls, catches the tip of her pretty pink tongue between her lips and smiles, eyes shining.

Near her stand Jamie, Quinn, and Jonah, the elderly, impoverished MacBean’s grandsons, orphaned when their parents died last year in a car crash. This is their first Beltane without them. They join us nearly every evening for supper, lonely but not alone, as food is more plentiful in our household than theirs. Old MacBean was injured a decade ago, walks with a cane and has only the food he can harvest from the land.

I look around, smiling, filled with plans. I will one day be laird, as my da before me. I’ll live in a mighty old rambling wonderful stone castle filled with history and tradition, take a bonny lass to wife—

Dani is unprotected and that bastard Ryodan is—

Pain rips through my entrails and I scream.

I know why I’m obsessed with her. She’s the innocence I’ve lost. As I was going dark, she was getting nothing but brighter. She’s the ready smile of a fourteen-year-old that believes the world is one long, incredible adventure. Her dreams are still intact. She’s everything I’m not anymore. She tackles life with abandon, lives in the moment, never gives up.

She reminds me of Tara, dead three years now, of a rare bone disease. I wept at the funeral for the girl who smiled all the way through her brief but brutal decline, to the twilight that came too soon.

I see the ghosts in Dani’s eyes. You’d have to be blind not to.

I want to chase them, as nothing can chase mine.

I want to keep her from ever changing into something so terrible as I’ve become.

I want to shelter her from the hard truth that life takes from you, whittles away at your hope and scrapes the flesh from your bone and leaves you so changed you can’t even recognize yourself in the mirror anymore.

I want her to always be Dani, as she is now, but the thing I was becoming got so fucked up about it. I hope the last action I chose to make as a free man cancels some of it out.