Burned Read online

  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.

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  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.

  I thought turning Unseelie Prince was the most difficult battle I would ever face.

  I was wrong. I thought I was in Hell. Then I found out what Hell really was. It’s enough to wrench a laugh from my cracked lips at the sheer absurdity of it.

  Pain stabs through my abdomen, sears and rips and gnaws with tiny razor teeth right down into my groin as I’m flayed alive. I scream again, flee back to the Highlands, and see the …

  Bonfires.

  The crisp air smells of roast pig and gently charring peppers and potatoes. We’re about to walk the livestock between the twin fires, twins like Colleen and me, like my uncles Dageus and Drustan, before driving them out to the summer pastures. We’ll relight the doused fires in our castles from the sacred, protective flames of Beltane. We’ll feast and my family and friends will dance and life will seem like one perfect, long dream from which I plan to never awaken.

  I have no idea how long I’ve been staked to the side of a cliff. I’ve recounted every day that I can recall, relived it in extraordinary detail.

  It has kept me from falling.

  It has kept me from going mad.

  Unexpectedly, it has also silenced the monster I was becoming.

  I no longer loathe and fear what was happening to me, because so much worse has happened to me. Perspective is a funny thing. You think your back is to the wall, then something worse corners you, and the first threat looks puny in comparison.

  There is only me now, a Keltar who’s been mutated with immense power and perhaps will always be, but each time I’ve died on this cliff and held my own, maintained my sanity, reminded myself of my heritage, who I was born to be, the madness of the Unseelie Prince faded a little more. Strengthened by my ordeal, staked to the side of this bloody godforsaken cliff, the prince overtaking me was overtaken.

  I am not a man that was once a Highlander, who got swallowed alive by the depravity and homicidal mania of a death-by-sex Fae.

  I am a Keltar druid who now happens to possess Unseelie power and a bloody enormous sex drive. Not sure that last part’s much of a change.

  My head sags forward, blood gushes from my cracked lips. She’s at it again, needling away, yanking out my entrails and knitting feverishly on a gown that will never be complete.

  The cruelty of it is intolerable. My entire body is on fire with pain.

  Fires.

  The Highlands.

  Beltane.

  I recall this particular night of my fourteenth year for three reasons.

  It was the first night I was recognized as a Keltar druid. Heady stuff for a young lad.

  It was also the night Uncle Dageus warned me, made me suspect my happy dream would end before I was ready.

  Like Tara.

  Like I won’t let it for Dani.

  When Da and the others place the sacred chalice and staff on the slab, Uncle Dageus moves close and puts a hand on my shoulder, pulls me aside and gazes down. Golden eyes so like my own stare into mine.

  Fire purifies and distills, he says. Fire transforms. You must remember that when the time comes it seems only to ravage and destroy.

  So, too, does pain.

  One day you will walk through flames, lad.

  Of the Beltane fires? I ask curiously. This was not a tradition with which I was familiar, but many of our more complex druid rituals were cloaked in secrecy until certain ages.

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  Flames of another kind. Hellfire. You will believe you canna possibly endure the agony.

  At ten and four, I shiver, startled by the solemnness and sorrow in his eyes. There’s gravity in his low voice that makes me more than uneasy; a young man that prides himself on his courage, I taste the sudden ash of fear.

  I canna prevent it. The stones are closed to us now. I would spare you if I could.

  Are you foretelling my future? I ask warily. Do I lose my virginity this year? I add quickly. I’d pose that question to none other of my uncles, but Dageus was different. The eyes of women follow him everywhere. I want to be like him one day, lady killer (but not a lady murderer) with the same slow, sexy smile that melts my (pretty darned hot, she’s only ten years older than me) aunt Chloe every time.

  I’m ready. I want Tara to be the one.

  He smiles sadly.

  It’s whispered among my clan that Dageus has glimpsed moments in the years to come. That when he traveled through time—before the Seelie Queen took away our power to navigate the centuries in hours of need—he saw hours, even days, of our lives. He’s never spoken of it, but we’ve always suspected. He has a canny sense of premonition that’s proved invaluable on more than one occasion.

  I doona ken the how and when it happens, so I doona ken how to prevent it, short of locking you away and that’s no’ a life. Time is tricky. It may or may not come to pass, but if it does it will test you beyond imagining. If that hour comes, you must hold on to one thing.

  I shiver again. What?

  Love. You can only be broken without it. So long as the smallest spark of love, pure, protective, and good, exists within you, that which is Keltar in you will survive. You will return.

  Return.

  I know a harsh truth.

  So long as I stay in the magnif
icent Highlands of my mind I will never return.

  You must face the fire. I doona ken how long you must endure. You must hold on, remain aware. You must be prepared when your opportunity arises, or it will fail. Uncle Dageus laughs softly. Every man’s time comes eventually. It will not, however, be yours. With luck, you’ll live forever.

  I’d stare up at him, rejecting it, refusing to believe he had any powers of prophecy. Telling myself no one lives forever (not knowing I’d turn Unseelie Prince) and his rambling only made him half mad, likely from the constant chatter of the thirteen dead Draghar within him. Then I’d torn from his grip, raced off, and refused to speak to him for days.

  Now I wish I’d asked him questions, now I wish I knew what he saw, what my opportunity is because I sure as hell don’t see one.

  Love?

  Can I even feel it anymore?

  I’ve hated everyone and everything around me since the moment I began to change. I ran from those who cared about me. I concede it’s possible my hatred hastened the changes, fed the wrong things, starved the right ones. But love? To feel it here and now? I’m not sure it’s even possible.

  Och, but of course it is.

  It’s what I’ve been doing all along. Like my da and all my clan before us, the Highlands are our greatest love. I was shielding myself without understanding the nuts and bolts of it. I’m not a man that could wed a woman, follow her to another country and live there. I’m wedded to my motherland, to the very soil of Scotland.

  I add to those mountains and valleys the faces of those I ache for and would protect, etch them in vivid detail on the backs of my eyelids, my mother and father, my siblings Colleen and Cara and Cory, and Tara, och, my sweet, sweet Tara—the third reason I recall that evening so clearly, she took my virginity that starry night on a mossy bed near the loch and bloody hell did I love her for it, and love doesn’t die just because the person does, although it would be infinitely easier if it did—my friends and villagers and the lovely, brilliant, risk-taking, cocky Danielle O’Malley who conceals her broken heart behind a gamine grin, and I roll them all up into one ball of light and hold on.

  I take a final look at my clan, inhale the scent of roast pig and potatoes, whisper a farewell to my long-dead Tara, shove away from my blessed retreat and force myself to embrace awareness.

  I will be ready when my chance for escape comes.

  I open my eyes and stare into the hideous face of the Crimson Hag as she slices my gut open.

  Again.

  24

  “And I’m gone, I’m gone, you know it”

  MAC

  I have a small psychotic break, overwhelmed by too many shocks to process. My brain pulls the plug on my body.

  I should run. I should figure out how to make my feet move. At the moment they are neither attached to my ankles nor controlled by conscious thought.

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  I flip channels, my remote stuck on three train-wreck movies I can’t stop watching: IhadsexwithBarronsandhetookmymemory/theyknowI’mtheSinsarDubh/JadaisDani/WTF?

  Barrons and I had sex the first night I met him. And he removed that memory like a thief in the night, as if he had every right to, when he had none. For months before I ended up in his bed (again!), he was walking around with a graphically detailed memory of every intimate carnal thing we’d done that night—and oh God was it graphic and intimate and carnal!—while I’d recalled none of it.

  He knew what my ass looked like in every possible position. He knew what my face looked like when I came and that I swallow. That night, grieving and alone in a city I didn’t know, a city that had been hostile and unwelcoming since the moment I stepped foot in it, I’d become a wild thing, scrapped all my inhibitions, had sex like I’d never had it before, tried everything I’d ever wanted to try with enormous enthusiasm and not one ounce of self-consciousness.

  It was no wonder he was always looking at me like he wanted to have sex. We’d had sex and he wanted it again. And I couldn’t blame him. It had been rock-your-Id-to-its-hedonistic-core phenomenal. Raw. Dirty. Mind-blowing. Addictive. I’d painted that dilapidated room with pain and passion, used sex like a bandage for the jagged wound Alina’s death had sliced into my soul.

  As if that little secret exploding out of my subconscious isn’t enough to deal with, the new sidhe-seers have one among them that is my worst nightmare. The willowy brunette in army-green camo pants and tank is like me: she can sense the Sinsar Dubh. Not only am I not unique anymore, I’ve been outed.

  Oh yeah, I need to run.

  My feet are roots.

  The third thing is perhaps the most stupefying.

  I just saw Dani three weeks ago. She was fourteen. A cocky, swaggering kid.

  And I’m supposed to believe this grown-up, controlled, beautiful woman is the rambunctious, sparkling-eyed teenager I chased into the Hall of All Days?

  “Impossible,” I whisper, peering at her, searching for some trace of the effusive, laughing, brilliant, funny girl I know. The one I love.

  It’s not there.

  If it’s her, I should be relieved that she’s back and alive.

  If it’s her, I’m so not.

  This woman is about twenty and absolutely frigid. She doesn’t look as if she’s laughed a single day in her life.

  Besides, this “Jada” has supposedly been in Dublin for a few weeks. In black leather pants, a fitted top (with a plunging neckline, and if those are Dani’s boobs life isn’t fair), and black leather jacket, she looks composed and cold as a colonel. When she runs a hand over her perfect (straight, not one ounce of curl) red hair in its perfect high ponytail that swishes her waist as she moves, I catch a quick flash of silver and gold at her wrist, the only adornment she wears. It’s not like she needs much. In addition to being stone-cold, she’s that kind of beautiful, too, with startlingly high cheekbones and arched brows above glittering eyes. Is this really Dani’s pixieish face grown up, matured from delicate with a sharply pronounced jaw to sophisticated, sculpted, and cool?

  Is it possible Dani lost years in the Hall of All Days, and returned a mere week of our time later, this much older? And immediately began collecting sidhe-seers to form a small army?

  Anything is possible in post-wall Dublin, and certainly in the fickle hall. Running the sidhe-seers is precisely what a grown-up Dani would try to do. Dublin and her sidhe-seer sisters always came first to her.

  Still, I don’t see a trace of the “Mega” in this icy woman.

  Ryodan begins to pace a slow circle around her, reminding me of the way Barrons stalked me that night he decided I had no right to something that was indisputably mine.

  She stands still, completely at ease with something like him behind her back.

  That seals it. It’s definitely not Dani. She would never let Ryodan behind her. She would spin with him. Like I did with Barrons.

  The women on the floor begin to push up, but Jada gestures to them and commands, “They’ll only take you back down. Remain on the floor. I won’t have any of you injured by them. ”

  “We’re better fighters than you’re giving us credit for,” Green Camo who outed me growls.

  “These are two of the Nine I discussed with you earlier. Remain down. ”

  Green Camo may be my enemy but I totally get the look of fury and frustration that flashes across her face. Accept that you’re outgunned? Stay on the floor and don’t even try to fight? What kind of life is that?

  Ryodan suddenly kicks up into that way of moving that’s a blur, then Jada is a blur and there’s a small whirlwind of commotion in the middle of the study accompanied by a ferocious smudge of sound that could be raised voices or just plain snarling. I feel like I’m watching a cartoon featuring two Tasmanian devils, then suddenly Jada and Ryodan reappear, facing each other: he’s spitting savagery, she’s pure ice.

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  “Don’t touch me again,” she says with arctic
frost. “Men have died for less. Even men who aren’t men. ”

  “You cut it off,” Ryodan explodes. “That’s why I couldn’t get a lock on you last week at Chester’s. You fucking cut my tattoo off. And you mutilated yourself in the process. ”

  “I’ve never had a tattoo on the back of my neck. ”

  “I didn’t say it was on the back of your neck. ”

  “That’s where you touched me. ”

  “I touched other places, too. ”

  “And will pay for it. Sleight of hand. A diversionary tactic. Intent infuses action. You’re easy to read. ”

  “Redundant much, Dani. Should have left it at sleight of hand. ”

  “I’m not Dani. Nor have I ever had a tattoo. But if someone thought to place a mark on me I neither wanted nor approved, I would certainly cut it out. I’m no cattle to be branded. ”

  I rub the tattoo on the back of my skull and shoot Barrons a pissed look. “Moo,” I say frostily.

  “Don’t even start,” he says. “It saved your life repeatedly. ”

  “It was for your protection,” Ryodan says.

  “Precisely,” Barrons clips.

  “I don’t need protection nor have I ever,” Jada says. “I protect. I hunt. I am the predator, not the prey. Leave now and I will permit you to go. We will, however, meet again. ”

  I slant a look up. “Precisely. ”

  “ ‘Permit,’ ” Ryodan mocks. “Explain your ability to move in hyperspeed. Dani. ”

  “If this ‘Dani’ is to be identified on the basis of a single attribute, one might propose anyone—even you—are this person upon whom you seem so fixated, as you, too, share that talent. ”

  Jada is suddenly gone and I feel her touching me, patting me down at light speed, looking for the Book, finding nothing. By the time Barrons blurs into motion to blast her away, she is standing near the desk again.

  Ryodan told me Dani could move fast enough to give him a run for his money. When she chose. I frown. He also said there were things Dani didn’t know. Exactly what kind of things?

  The women on the floor stare up, watching, awaiting the next command from their leader.

  “She’s not carrying it,” Jada informs Green Camo.

  Green Camo says, “I feel two. One where it should be. The other coming from her. ”

  “Of this you are certain. ”

  “Unequivocally. ”

  “You will leave now,” Jada informs Ryodan and Barrons. “But she,” Jada looks at me, “will remain. ”