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Page 37


  “Him, who?’ I practically shouted.

  “Her fucking kid genius,” he hissed.

  I couldn’t help but smile. She was with Dancer. That was the epic I’d wanted for the woman she’d started to become. For Dani “the Mega” O’Malley epic could only be the one thing she’d never had: normal. Then my heart sank as I remembered the condition of Dancer’s heart. I got lost in my thoughts a moment, hoping she didn’t…well, surely she wouldn’t be too…vigorous. Dani was super strong, she vibrated when she got excited. Oh, I really needed to stop thinking about this. I shook my head to scatter images and said to Ryodan, “You did the right thing. You should never have been her first.”

  He looked at me like I was absolutely insane. “Of course I shouldn’t.” Then his face hardened and something I couldn’t define stirred in his ancient eyes. “I’m going to be her last.”

  Without another word, Ryodan shifted into the beast and was gone.

  DELETED SCENE FROM HIGH VOLTAGE:

  Before I began writing the novel, I needed to see the decision Ryodan made to leave, to fully understand the emotion and motives behind it. I wrote this scene between him and Barrons to flesh it out in my mind…

  “What are you waiting for?” Ryodan demanded.

  Jericho Barrons paced the flagstones with such violence, his boots kicked up stone dust with each step. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

  Ryodan said coolly, “I didn’t ask you to think. Just do it.”

  “And if we need you?” Barrons whirled on him so sharply that the fabric of his long coat cracked like a whip.

  “It’s five years.” The corner of Ryodan’s mouth lifted in a mocking smile. “Surely you can muddle through without me for so short a time. In Faery with Mac, it may pass as a mere month or two for you.” Time crawled in that liminal place where the ancient Fae held formal court.

  “And if something goes wrong? You haven’t thought this through,” Barrons snarled.

  Ryodan arched a brow. He’d never been accused of that before. He considered every detail, often looking centuries ahead, patiently recalibrating. Linchpin theory was his specialty. He who knew how to destroy a thing, a person, a society, controlled it. “Have you forgotten who you’re talking to?”

  “I’m talking to the bloody idiot who thinks something like this is a viable option,” Barrons snapped.

  “I’ve taken precautions. Dani will be safe.”

  “She’s not our only concern. There’s also Dageus—”

  “Lor will get word to you if he scents wind of the Tribunal. You know where to find me.” Time also seemed to move more slowly in that strange, terrible place the Tribunal dwelled; a lair they’d never been able to find. It might be decades before retribution came slamming down. He’d sometimes entertained the notion that the Tribunal deliberately took their time, allowing the offending member of the Nine to think they’d gotten away with taking a human, so when that person was stolen from him, it cut deeper. Then again, it might be never. There had always been ten of them. The Tribunal had only ever come when that number was exceeded. With Barrons’s son dead, they might never come.

  “This bloody well isn’t the answer, Ryodan,” Barrons said impatiently.

  “I killed for no reason and not to feed. I don’t take life without a reason. There may be little to distinguish us from the Fae, but that’s one of the defining characteristics.”

  “You had reason. I’d have done no less.”

  Ryodan smiled mirthlessly. “And scatter a trail of bodies behind her?”

  “She doesn’t look back.”

  “There is that. But one day she will. And hate me for it. She protects the innocents. She doesn’t kill them because something pisses her off.”

  “You don’t know he was innocent.”

  “He wasn’t. But according to her rulebook, he didn’t deserve to die.”

  “You didn’t kill Dancer.”

  Ryodan’s gaze shuttered. That was different. She’d loved Dancer. Tenderness had accompanied the erotic images bombarding him through their bond, soothing his beast just enough that he’d been able to get himself locked in a cell beneath Chester’s, barricaded in, with Lor, Fade, and Kasteo standing guard beyond.

  Dani hadn’t felt emotion for the man he’d ripped to pieces, just a hunger in her bones to not be alone. To have a man’s arms around her and pretend, with eyes closed, he was the one who’d died in her bed. To feel what Dancer had made her feel: cherished.

  It hadn’t worked. The man hadn’t returned what that woman was capable of giving. Elysian passion had been met by dumb, plebian lust. And then when she’d stopped, the bastard tried to take what he hadn’t deserved in the first place.

  She left emptier and more alone than she’d gone in, and the grief she’d suffered deep in her soul had decimated the chains on his beast.

  He refused to litter her life with corpses.

  Barrons eyed him stonily across the room. Ryodan stared impassively back. He knew how much it cost his older half brother to be here; he’d sworn to never set foot in this place again. After an interminable length of silence during which both realized they would sit there for a small eternity before either broke eye contact, Barrons spun away and fired over his shoulder, “There’s another option. Tell her what—”

  “No,” Ryodan snarled. “It’s not her problem. It’s mine. She needs to breathe, live on her own terms, define herself. Not in opposition but from choice. No boundaries. No limits. Not one bloody cage.” He knew Dani. If he told her, she would either curtail her activities to accommodate it or cut the tattoo off—again—as she had in the Silvers. Neither was acceptable. Freedom was something she’d never known. He wanted her drunk on it.

  “But Dani asked you to tattoo her.”

  “She didn’t know what she was asking. I offered it as a weapon, a shield. She wanted protection, nothing more.” A pause, then, silver eyes icy, Ryodan said, “I’ll kill again. That’s my problem. Not hers.” Long ago, they’d run as beasts, obeyed no code, known no laws. They’d been a breath away from becoming no better than the immortally bored, monstrous Fae. Barrons had pulled them back from that edge. Shaped them into savages with a code that kept them south of monstrosity. On the rare occasions one of them slipped, Barrons and Ryodan did whatever was necessary to reclaim him. Divided, they were quick to abandon the canon that functioned as a conscience, protected their secrets, and ensured their prosperity. Barrons enforced the law; Ryodan kept them together. None of them had violated their code in recent centuries. But Ryodan had butchered unprovoked, goaded by primal, uncontrollable rage at a situation, not the man he’d killed.

  He could carve the tattoo from Dani’s skin. He hungered to escape the brutal intimacy of their bond. An intimacy she was unaware of, didn’t realize worked the way it did.

  Yet, if he sliced it from her flesh, he wouldn’t be able to find her if she got lost.

  He’d sworn to her that he’d never let her be lost.

  He’d sworn it to himself. Their bond was his guarantee that she would never face danger by herself again.

  Dani O’Malley had been alone in all the wrong ways and none of the right ones. Imprisoned as a child, she’d been unable to choose even the simplest elements of her day-to-day survival. He’d micromanage the hell out of her if he remained in his current imbalanced state. He’d do irreparable harm. She’d done her time in a cage. He’d do his.

  “If she does get lost?” Barrons said finally.

  Ryodan said nothing, just leaned back against the bars and folded his arms behind his head. Barrons knew if Dani used the spell etched into her phone and flesh, nothing could stop Ryodan from being sent to her, not even what his brother was about to do to him. He’d also given him instructions that if she called him at all, which would mean she was ready, Barrons was to s
et him free.

  “You’ll starve down here,” Barrons goaded.

  “I’ll slaughter up there.”

  “The years will bring madness.”

  “I’ll deal with it.”

  “You’ll still feel it all.”

  Again Ryodan said nothing. There was nothing to say. It was true. He would. But he wouldn’t kill again.

  “You could get trapped in the beast’s skin. Be unable to change back.” Barrons pushed, his eyes sparking crimson as he recalled another day, another time.

  “Unlike you, I prefer my human skin. I’ll find my way back.”

  “It’s dark. Underground.”

  Barrons knew his past. “That was a very long time ago,” Ryodan parried with soft menace.

  “It’ll be hell.”

  “I know what hell is, Barrons. It’s not this.” A small slice of hell, however, was taking a man’s life merely because Dani had taken him to her bed. A larger slice of hell was knowing he’d do it again and again. The fairest portion of hell would be the contempt in her eyes. “Do it,” he told Barrons. “You owe me.” Before he started to lose control again and decided he was fine killing them all. Before he convinced himself the active caring and concern for the well-being of another person’s body and soul, as she’d once informed him love was, scorn and fire flashing in her eyes, justified eliminating all intimacy but his.

  After a long silence, Barrons murmured, “When we first transcribed that spell, we knew the mere placing of it would call a high price. It’s not your fault. You gift her with the greatest protection you can give—the willingness to abandon everything, to turn into the killing machine she needs, any time she needs it. You accept sacrificing your sanity and life each time she summons you. You grant her immense control over you and open yourself to a bond that can be pure poison for us. And the mere placement of that mark loosens the restraints on your beast. It’s an unavoidable side effect.”

  Again Ryodan said nothing. Civilized for eons, disciplined, iron-willed, he’d believed he could handle it. Nothing rattled him.

  But that woman.

  “We suffer incarceration no better than the Fae. It’ll hurt. Worse than being burned alive,” Barrons snapped.

  “Pain is relative.”

  “What if five years isn’t long enough?”

  “It had better be—she’s mortal.” Five years wasted. Five years of her life Ryodan would never get to see. And it would be the second five years of her life he’d lost. A decade, total. He inhaled sharply, going rigid as curved black talons exploded from his fingertips. He slammed his hands into the floor, gouging deep gashes in the stone. His skeleton was suddenly too large for his body, his muscles shifting and elongating.

  She was on fire inside, angry about something, and he felt it. He felt everything she felt, that was the problem. He wanted her to taste all the world had to offer. Gorge on it.

  Then choose him.

  Because he was the best the world had to offer.

  To the most lawless of men, choice was golden: it didn’t matter what you were, it mattered what you did with it.

  “Do. It. Now.”

  Barrons sighed, acknowledging this was one of those exceedingly rare arguments he wasn’t going to win. “Our cuffs connect us. You have but to demand I release you should you change your mind.”

  And because of their cuffs, Barrons would feel his pain, bear it in silence and never speak of it. Ryodan dropped back on powerful black-skinned haunches with a low guttural growl.

  “Ah, brother.” Barrons muttered a string of curses in a language long dead, but inclined his head and closed his eyes. When he opened them again they were bloodred pools. Intricate tattoos slithered and moved beneath his skin as he chanted the words of an ancient spell.

  Ryodan began to scream.

  But the day came when the only sound that filled that hellish place was the tortured baying of a half-mad, starved beast in endless pain.

  PEOPLE

  SIDHE-SEERS

  SIDHE-SEER (SHEE-SEER): A person on whom Fae magic doesn’t work, capable of seeing past the illusions or “glamour” cast by the Fae to the true nature that lies beneath. Some can also see Tabh’rs, hidden portals between realms. Others can sense Seelie and Unseelie objects of power. Each sidhe-seer is different, with varying degrees of resistance to the Fae. Some are limited; some are advanced, with multiple “special powers.” For thousands of years the sidhe-seers protected humans from the Fae that slipped through on pagan feast days when the veils grew thin, to run the Wild Hunt and prey on humans.

  MACKAYLA LANE (O’CONNOR): Main character, female, twenty-three, adopted daughter of Jack and Rainey Lane, biological daughter of Isla O’Connor. Blond hair, green eyes, had an idyllic, sheltered childhood in the Deep South. When her biological sister, Alina, was murdered and the Garda swiftly closed the case with no leads, Mac quit her job bartending and headed for Dublin to search for Alina’s killer herself. Shortly after her arrival she met Jericho Barrons and began reluctantly working with him toward common goals. Among her many skills and talents, Mac can track objects of power created by the Fae, including the ancient, sentient, psychopathic Book of magic known as the Sinsar Dubh. At the end of Shadowfever we learn that twenty years before, when the Sinsar Dubh escaped its prison beneath the abbey, it briefly possessed Mac’s mother and imprinted a complete copy of itself in the unprotected fetus. Although Mac succeeds in reinterring the dangerous Book, her victory is simultaneous with the discovery that there are two copies of it; she is one of them and will never be free from the temptation to use her limitless, deadly power.

  ALINA LANE (O’CONNOR): Female, deceased, older sister to MacKayla Lane. At twenty-four went to Dublin to study at Trinity College and discovered she was a sidhe-seer. Became lovers with the Lord Master, also known as Darroc, an ex-Fae stripped of his immortality by Queen Aoibheal for attempting to overthrow her reign. Alina was killed by Rowena, who magically forced Dani O’Malley to trap her in an alley with a pair of deadly Unseelie.

  DANIELLE “THE MEGA” O’MALLEY: Main character. An enormously gifted, genetically mutated sidhe-seer with an extremely high IQ, superstrength, speed, and sass. She was abused and manipulated by Rowena from a young age, molded into the old woman’s personal assassin, and forced to kill Mac’s sister, Alina. Despite the darkness and trauma of her childhood, Dani is eternally optimistic and determined to survive and have her fair share of life plus some. In Shadowfever, Mac discovers Dani killed her sister, and the two, once as close as sisters, are now bitterly estranged. In Iced, Dani flees Mac and leaps into a Silver, unaware it goes straight to the dangerous Hall of All Days. We learn in Burned that, although mere weeks passed on Earth, it took Dani five and a half years to find her way home, and when she returns, she calls herself Jada.

  ROWENA O’REILLY: Grand Mistress of the sidhe-seer organization until her death in Shadowfever. Governed the six major Irish sidhe-seer bloodlines but rather than training them, controlled and diminished them. Fiercely power-hungry, manipulative, and narcissistic, she was seduced by the Sinsar Dubh into freeing it. She ate Fae flesh to enhance her strength and talent, and kept a lesser Fae locked beneath the abbey. Dabbling in dangerous black arts, she experimented on many of the sidhe-seers in her care, most notably Danielle O’Malley. In Shadowfever she is possessed by the Sinsar Dubh and used to seduce Mac with the illusion of parents she never had, in an effort to get her to turn over the only illusion amulet capable of deceiving even the Unseelie King. Mac sees through the seduction and kills Rowena.

  ISLA O’CONNOR: Mac’s biological mother. Twenty-some years ago Isla was the leader of the Haven, one of seven trusted advisors to the Grand Mistress in the sacred, innermost circle of sidhe-seers at Arlington Abbey. Rowena (the Grand Mistress) wanted her daughter, Kayleigh O’Reilly, to be the Haven leader, and was fu
rious when the women selected Isla instead. Isla was the only member of the Haven who survived the night the Sinsar Dubh escaped its prison beneath the abbey. She was briefly possessed by the Dark Book but not turned into a lethal, sadistic killing machine. In the chaos at the abbey, Isla was stabbed and badly injured. Barrons tells Mac he visited Isla’s grave five days after she left the abbey, that she was cremated. Barrons says he discovered Isla had only one daughter. He later tells Mac it is conceivable Isla could have been pregnant the one night he saw her and a child might have survived, given proper premature birth care. He also says it is conceivable Isla didn’t die, but lived to bear another child (Mac) and give her up. Barrons theorizes Isla was spared because the sentient evil of the Sinsar Dubh imprinted itself on her unprotected fetus, made a complete second copy of itself inside the unborn Mac, and deliberately released her. It is believed Isla died after having Mac and arranging for her friend Tellie to have both her daughters smuggled from Ireland and adopted in the States, forbidden ever to return to Ireland.

  AUGUSTA O’CLARE: Tellie Sullivan’s grandmother. Barrons took Isla O’Connor to her house the night the Sinsar Dubh escaped its prison beneath Arlington Abbey over twenty years ago.

  KAYLEIGH O’REILLY: Rowena’s daughter, Nana’s granddaughter, best friend of Isla O’Connor. She was killed twenty-some years ago, the night the Sinsar Dubh escaped the abbey.

  NANA O’REILLY: Rowena’s mother, Kayleigh’s grandmother. Old woman living alone by the sea, prone to nodding off in the middle of a sentence. She despised Rowena, saw her for what she was, and was at the abbey the night the Sinsar Dubh escaped more than twenty years ago. Though many have questioned her, none have ever gotten the full story of what happened that night.

  KATARINA (KAT) MCLAUGHLIN (MCLOUGHLIN): Daughter of a notorious crime family in Dublin, her gift is extreme empathy. She feels the pain of the world, all the emotions people work so hard to hide. Considered useless and a complete failure by her family, she was sent to the abbey at a young age, where Rowena manipulated and belittled her until she became afraid of her strengths and impeded by fear. Levelheaded, highly compassionate, with serene gray eyes that mask her constant inner turmoil, she wants desperately to learn to be a good leader and help the other sidhe-seers. She turned her back on her family Mafia business to pursue a more scrupulous life. When Rowena was killed, Kat was coerced into becoming the next Grand Mistress, a position she felt completely unfit for. Although imprisoned beneath the abbey, Cruce is still able to project a glamour of himself, and in dreams he seduces Kat nightly, shaming her and making her feel unfit to rule, or be loved by her longtime sweetheart, Sean O’Bannion. Kat has a genuinely pure heart and pure motives but lacks the strength, discipline, and belief in herself to lead. In Burned, she approaches Ryodan and asks him to help her become stronger, more capable of leading. After warning her to be careful what she asks him for, he locks her beneath Chester’s in a suite of rooms with the silent Kasteo.