Burned (31 page)

And let you take over and kill them all? Not a chance
.

I quit moving, lean back against the wall and sigh, thinking
it’s funny how things change so quickly. Last season I was Dublin’s MVP, the hunter, and everybody wanted me on their team. This season I’m the hunted, a liability that kills innocent people, and now the world wants to neutralize me.

The
sidhe
-seers know my secret. They’re going to stalk me as relentlessly as I stalked the
Sinsar Dubh
.

End goal: put Mac down.

If Jada really
is
Dani, she’ll publish a cool, accusatory
Jada Journal
and post it all over the city long before the sun is up, outing me to the world. There’ll be no place I can hide unless I pack up and leave this planet for good with Barrons—

I’m not even talking to Barrons at the moment.

My mom and dad will know what I’ve been concealing from them for months. One daughter dead, the other damned.

The snarling blurs accelerate, darting this way and that. Brigitte goes slamming into a wall and I wince in sympathy. My bones have already begun to heal. She doesn’t have the same gift.

Gift? Longevity could be used against me just like it was against Barrons’s son. For Cruce to be influencing the environment, he must be cognizant in his icy prison in the cold stone chamber deep below the earth, aware his body is frozen, that he’s trapped. Do the minutes creep like hours? Immortal, does he tally the seconds as they tick by, stretching to hellish infinity?

You will soon know
, the
Sinsar Dubh
reminds silkily.

As will you
.

Fight, you fucking fool
.

You
. I dig in my mental heels, determined to outwait it, wagering my humanity against its psychopathy, betting its survival instincts will kick before mine, if only by a split second.

Make me do it, sweet thing, you won’t like it
.

I’ll like it better than I’ll like killing all these people. They already think I’m the enemy. If I release the
Sinsar Dubh
and slaughter these women to free myself, I’ll have proved myself the enemy to anyone left alive. Including me. The rest of the abbey will come after me in force, for good reason. But I won’t even know that. I’ll be a straitjacketed bookworm burrowed into the binding of an insane, homicidal book, staring helplessly out from the pages of my own life, as they’re writ by someone else, and I’d commit atrocities that would damn a saint’s soul.

Suddenly Brigitte appears and collapses in a battered heap. I study the blurs, concluding Jada now has the stones and is trying to place them.

As they whiz around the room like small tornadoes, furniture flies, lamps topple, and bulbs shatter. Rowena’s stately study has become a shambles of trashed furniture and demolished decor.

A jolt of energy suddenly hits me and I flinch. The sensation is familiar. The night we interred the
Sinsar Dubh
, I had to reach both of my hands into the field generated by the stones to remove the crimson runes from the cover and felt instantly lethargic, nauseated. I’d assumed it was just another facet of my
sidhe
-seer senses. Now I realize how lucky I was that we’d warded the Book on top of an altar. If I’d had to actually step
inside
the energy field that night, I would have ended up as trapped as the
Sinsar Dubh
.

On the east end of the study, flush to the wall, a line of blue-black flickers and solidifies. Two of the stones have connected. They flare and begin to emit a chilling chime.

Assuming Barrons and Ryodan defeat Jada and the next
two stones don’t get positioned, assuming I don’t feel the third stone flare to life and suddenly develop psychopathic tendencies of my own—where do I go from here?

Do I leave with Barrons and trust him to protect me? I can’t protect myself. I can’t use the spear with any certainty that I won’t kill again. I can’t outrun Jada. My ineffectualness chafes. God, does it chafe.

Last season’s MVP vanishing into obscurity.

Oh, yeah, I feel invisible.

I jerk again.

The third stone just connected with the other two, and I watch a second line form at the perimeter of the north wall of the study.

If the last stone is placed, two more blue-black lines will appear on the south and west ends, squaring me in, and I’ll be trapped in Cruce’s hellish, conscious stasis. They’ll collect the stones, gather them close around me as we did with the Book, then carry me down, deep into the earth where I really hate being. No crimson runes are necessary to seal the cover of my Book; my body is lock enough. It’s not like anyone can pry open my skin and read it. The brilliant wards and runes on the towering walls of the cavern will connect to the field of the stones, and intensify it.

I’ll lie upon a slab, staring up at the ceiling far above (unless adding insult to injury, they put me facedown, God, that would suck), trapped in waking paralysis, a spelled Sleeping Beauty longing for the kiss of a prince (just not Cruce!).

Am I really going to stand here and let them imprison me? Become the Disney heroine that can’t save herself?

Accept that you’re outgunned?
the
Sinsar Dubh
mocks.
Stay on the floor and don’t even try to fight? What kind of life is that? It’s now or never, sweet thing
.

For the first time since the moment I withstood the temptation to take the spell and free Barrons’s son, I seriously consider opening the godforsaken book and doing whatever I must to walk out of here alive. This time, however, Barrons isn’t in my head to offer counsel and strength.

This time it’s only me facing the greatest test in my twenty-three years. What am I willing to do to survive? What price am I willing to pay?

Evil isn’t a state of being, Barrons once said to me. It’s a choice.

My life flashes before my eyes: who I was, who I am now, what I might become. Whether I can live with myself assuming I one day claw my way back to control. The casualties on my conscience, the ashes I might find myself standing in. I remember the Book killing in the streets of Dublin, remember the Beast it became as it exploded upward, terrifyingly powerful even in amorphous form.

My body would give it corporeality. Nearly immortal corporeality.

I know what the Book did the last time it walked Dublin’s streets. Killed with unadulterated psychotic glee.

The stakes are simple: me or the world.

Can Barrons save me if I let the
sidhe
-seers trap me?
Will
Barrons save me?

A strange calm settles over me as I realize it’s irrelevant.

The bottom line is we choose our epitaphs.

Every moment of every day we decide upon the actions that define us—or so a wise man that wasn’t wise enough not to steal my memory once told me—it’s all about what we can live with and what we can’t live without.

I can’t live with being the woman who freed the
Sinsar Dubh
to save her own ass, butchering who knows how many people
in the process, and who knows how many more before I’m stopped. That’s not going to be chiseled on my Urn. No grave, I’m not getting stuck beneath the ground for freaking perpetuity. And if I have to have a bloody Urn, at least I’m going to choose the inscription.

Heroes fight
, the Book derides my decision.
Victims give up. Barrons is right, you’re a walking victim, a lamb in a city of wolves. You deserve to die
.

I don’t reply. Sometimes the most heroic action you can take looks a lot like inaction to the rest of the world. Sometimes the hardest, longest walk is the one the white-hat takes offstage.

They’ll think they outsmarted you, trapped you. They’ll never believe you chose it. Your “noble” sacrifice will be for nothing because they won’t see it that way
, the Book goads.

Totally sucks. And is perfectly probable. Whether or not they understand what I did has no impact on the value of my action. Either I decimate this place and stalk out, probably to destroy the entire world—but hey, I’ll be alive—or I let them put me on ice and trust that those who love me will find a way to rescue me.

While accepting that I may never be rescued.

It may not be the best way for me.

But it’s the right way.

Sadness fills me. I don’t want to be done yet.

I hope Mom and Dad figure it out. I want them to be proud of me. And I hope Barrons—God, I’m so pissed at him right now I can’t even complete the thought! Tears press at the back of my eyes but I refuse to let them flow.

The fourth stone explodes from the blur of motion, skitters across the floor, sliding toward that fourth corner, sliding …

I brace myself for what’s about to happen.

I accept that it’s necessary.

I’m afraid. I hate being afraid.

I won’t get paralyzed looking that way. I square my shoulders, straighten my spine, tuck in my stomach and angle my head, notch my chin slightly upward. What’s that saying? Die young and leave a pretty corpse.

I wish I were as invisible as this battle raging around me makes me feel, fought by opponents with whom I can’t hope to compete because at least then I’d be able to—

About fucking time
, the
Sinsar Dubh
growls.
Your wish. My command
.

Then it roars,
RUN
.

      Part III      

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

—Sun Tzu,
The Art of War

      25      

“No one sees my face, sees me coming”

MAC

After the walls fell last Halloween (and I was no longer Pri-ya), with most of Dublin’s inhabitants dead or gone, I got to indulge one of my greatest teenage fantasies: I walked into Brown & Taylor and shoplifted everything I wanted.

An Alexander McQueen scarf of black skulls on pink leopard silk, a pair of totally come-fuck-me Christian Louboutin heels adorned with silver spikes that perfectly complemented the black dress I snatched off a Chanel rack, a classic Burberry raincoat lined with checked silk, a glamorous smoky faux-fur stole. A Louis Vuitton limited edition satchel, Prada wallet and purse, Dolce & Gabbana python boots, lingerie to die for!

Then I went next door and raided Estée Lauder’s makeup counter, before moving on to Lancôme. I’d crammed my backpack with all those expensive moisturizers I’d never been able to afford and filled another with foundation and blush, eye shadow and mascara.

I’d commandeered two rooms on the fourth floor of Barrons Books & Baubles (last time I saw them they’d decamped to the fifth and switched sides) and set up my own private store stocked with feminine essentials: nail polish and remover, cotton balls and lotions, makeup and perfume and insanely expensive jewelry. (Over time, I added three diamond-crusted Rolexes I found lying in the streets to my hoard.)

I’d packed four enormous closets full of boxes of tampons and those invaluable skinny liner pads for heavy days when a tampon isn’t enough. I’d lugged home crates of vitamin D, aspirin, cold medicine, and soap. Then I went back for more and piled mountains of toilet paper in the second room. I raided three pharmacies and stashed away antibiotics and various medicinal supplies and ten years of birth control and condoms. At that point I figured I’d be lucky if I lived that long.

But there’s a second fantasy I never got to indulge that I’m fairly certain I won’t outgrow: wanting to go places I’m not allowed to go so I can see things I’m not supposed to see.

I can now.

I’m invisible.

I’M FREAKING INVISIBLE!

It’s incredibly difficult having something inside you that’s sentient and pretty much brilliant, and not at all nice, that can skim your mind to an uncertain degree, observe everything you do, study and analyze you, and wait forever for the perfect moment to seize the upper hand.

It’s worse than sleeping with the enemy, it’s living with a parasite inside you that is pathologically obsessed with a single goal: take you over, annihilate your will, and do whatever it chooses with what used to be your body. We’re conjoined
twins, forced to share blood and oxygen, battling daily, sneakily to be the one who controls the supply.

Last night, when I stood in Rowena’s study bluffing the Book, outwaiting it, trying to force its hand to save us, that’s all I was initially doing.

Bluffing.

But my bluff became conviction, and the moment it did, the Book stepped in and saved our asses by turning me invisible.

Not just invisible—undetectable!

I’m no longer stalked by suffocating, smelly wraiths. Last night, they vanished, and I haven’t seen them in eighteen blissful hours.

I’m still corporeal—that was the first thing I tested after I dashed from the study, a split second before the fourth stone was placed. I didn’t look back. I ran faster than a demon from Hell breaking out with Cerberus snapping at its heels. I ran until I burst through the front doors of the abbey, into the steamy, nearly tropical night beyond, where I’d stood in the driveway, gasping for breath. I’d looked down and seen nothing but two small indentations in the grass where I was fairly certain my feet were.

I’d headed straight for the fountain, scooped up a handful of water, and heaved a sigh of relief when it worked. Although the warm water had turned invisible the moment I cupped it, I’d felt its wetness, been able to dribble it from my hand and watch it become visible again. For a moment I was afraid I was a ghost. I’d hastened to one of the large standing stones and forced myself to place a hand against its eerie, obsidian coolness. It, however, had not vanished. Apparently only small things did.