Burned Read online

  Fortunately, my disembodied laugh gets swallowed up in the general din of the club.

  I melt into the crowd, ducking and dodging as I go. I’m beginning to get the hang of this invisibility stuff.

  I sort and discard various destinations. I don’t trust myself to go spy on the Unseelie Princes. I’d be tempted to use my spear, and although I pretty much think any humans stupid enough to go there deserve to die, I have no guarantee my resultant killing spree would be confined to the grounds of the Escheresque gothic mansion.

  I could head out to the abbey, slip in and eavesdrop. Go down below and check on Cruce.

  I shudder. No thank you.

  Search Chester’s?

  I’ve had enough of Chester’s for one day. My brain is on overload, and there’s really only one person I want to spy on now. He deserves it. I won’t feel one ounce of guilt for invading his privacy. He invaded the fuck out of mine.

  I slip from the club amid a cluster of drunken revelers and navigate the surprisingly busy streets back to the place I call home: Barrons Books & Baubles.

  I find Jericho Barrons sitting in his study at the back of the bookstore watching a video on his computer. He exudes tall, dark, and dangerous, even dressed casually in faded jeans, an unbuttoned black shirt, and boots with silver chains. His hair is wet from a recent shower and he smells like clean, damp, deliciously edible man. His chest is nearly covered with tattoos, black and crimson runes and designs that look like ancient tribal emblems, his rock-hard six-pack abs on full display. His sleeves are rolled back over thick, powerful forearms, and the cuff that matches the one Ryodan wears glints in the low light, reminding me they are brothers, reminding me of Jada/Dani’s cuff. There’s something anciently elegant poured over the beast that is Barrons, Old-World-Mediterranean-basted barbarian. The interior lights are set to a soft amber glow and he sits in the darkness, all hot, sexy coiled muscle and aggression and, oh God, I need to have sex.

  I shove that thought from my mind because it’s highly unlikely in the near future. No point in torturing myself when the world’s been so busy doing it for me. I wonder what Barrons watches. Action/adventure? Spy movies? Horror? Bewitched?

  Porn?

  The sounds coming from the monitor are base, guttural. I ease into the study, walking like an Indian in the quiet, stealthy way Daddy once taught me on a camping trip: heel to toe, heel to toe.

  Barrons touches the screen, tracing an image, dark gaze unfathomable.

  As I move around the desk and glimpse the monitor, I bite back a soft, instinctive protest.

  He’s watching a video of his son.

  The child is in human form, naked on the floor of his cage. He’s in the throes of hard convulsions and there’s blood on his face, ostensibly from having bitten his own tongue.

  This isn’t what Barrons’s son looked like the only time I ever met him. Then, he seemed a lovely, helpless, innocent, and frightened child, and although it was but an act to lure me close enough to attack, it was one of very few times in his tortured existence he’d looked normal. I still remember the anguish in Barrons’s voice when he asked me if I’d seen him as a boy, not the beast.

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  As I watch, his son begins to change back into his monstrous form, and it’s a violent, excruciating transformation, even more torturous to watch than when Barrons turns back into a man.

  The beast his son is becoming on-screen makes the rabid beast-form of Barrons that stalked me on a cliff in Faery look like a playful puppy.

  Shortly after his son tried to eat me, Barrons told me he used to keep cameras on the boy at all times, reviewing them endlessly for a single glimpse of him as the child he’d fathered. Over the millennia, he saw him that way on only five occasions. Apparently this was one of them.

  Why is he watching it now? It’s over. We freed him. Didn’t we? Or did the oddly malleable universe in which I seem to find myself lately find some way to reshape that, too?

  The tips of his fingers slide from the screen. “I wanted to give you peace,” he murmurs. “Not erase you from the cycle forever. Now I wonder if it was my pain or yours I sought to end. ”

  I wince and close my eyes. My life hasn’t been completely blithe and carefree. When I was sixteen, my adopted paternal grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer that metastasized to his liver and brain. Daddy’s grief cast a palpable shadow over the Lane household for months. I’ll never forget the crippling headaches Grandpa suffered, the nausea from chemo and radiation. I watched Daddy wrestle with decision after decision, ultimately withholding IV antibiotics to treat the pneumonia that took Grandpa more quickly and far more gently.

  Barrons is voicing the legitimate question of anyone who’s ever agreed not to resuscitate, to cease life-sustaining measures for a loved one, to accept a Stage 4 cancer patient’s decision to refuse more chemo, or euthanize a beloved pet. Throughout the caretaker experience, your loved one’s presence is intense and exquisitely poignant and painful, then all the sudden they’re gone and you discover their absence is even more intense and exquisitely poignant and painful. You don’t know how to walk or breathe when they’re no longer there. And how could you? Your world revolved around them.

  I should have seen this coming. At least I have the comfort of believing Alina is in heaven. That maybe someday I’ll gaze into a child’s eyes and see a piece of my sister’s soul in there, because the fact is I do believe we go on. Then again, maybe I’ll never see a trace of her, but I still feel her. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s as if she’s only a slight shift of reality away from me sometimes, in what I think of as the slipstream, and if I could only slip sideways, too, I could join her. And one day I think I will slip sideways and get to see her again, if only as ships passing on our way to new destinations in the same vast, magnificent sea.

  Perhaps it’s a sentimental delusion to which I cling so I don’t drown in grief.

  I don’t think so.

  Barrons says softly, “Eternal agony or nothing. I’d have chosen agony. I gave you nothing. You weren’t cognizant. You couldn’t make the choice. ”

  What do we crave for those terrible decisions we’re forced to make in the course of an average lifetime?

  Forgiveness. Absolution.

  There’s no possibility Barrons will get it, in this lifetime or any other.

  We K’Vrucked his son to grant him rest. We didn’t merely kill him, we annihilated his very being. As the Sinsar Dubh put it, a good K’Vrucking is more final than death, it’s complete eradication of all essence, of what humans like to think of as a soul.

  I don’t know that I believe in souls, but I believe in something. I think each of us has a unique vibration that’s inextinguishable, and when we die it translates into the next phase of being. We may come back as a tree, or a cat, perhaps a person again, or a star. I don’t think our journey is limited. I look up at the sky, ponder the enormity of the universe and simply know that the same well of joy that birthed so much wonder gave us more than a single chance to explore it.

  Not so with his son. The child is no longer in pain because he is no longer. No heaven, no hell. Just gone. As Barrons said, erased. Unlike me always sort of sensing Alina out there, Barrons can’t feel him anymore.

  Who knows how long he took care of his child, searched for the way to free him, sat in his subterranean cave watching him, cultivating the hope that he would one day find the right spell, or ritual or god or demon powerful enough to change his son back.

  A few months ago the never-ending ritual that had shaped his existence for thousands and thousands of years ended.

  As did the hope.

  And the true, long overdue grief began.

  I know a simple truth: mercy killing doesn’t hold one fucking ounce of mercy for those that live.

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  I wonder how many times he’s caught himself walking toward his son’s stone chamber, as I caug
ht myself walking down the hall to Alina’s bedroom with something I just had to tell her, this very moment, on the tip of my tongue. The hundredth time I did it, I realized it was either go join Dad in his black hole of depression, drink myself quietly to death at the Brickyard and die by the age of forty from liver disease—or fly to Dublin and channel my grief into a search for answers. Death is the final chapter in a book you can’t unread. You keep waiting to feel like the person you were before that chapter ended. You never will.

  I open my eyes. Barrons is staring at the screen in silence. There’s no sound in the bookstore. Not a drip of water from the distant bathroom sink in the hall, no white noise from an air vent, no soft hiss of gas from the fireplace. Grief is a private thing. I respect that and I respect the man.

  I begin to ease out of the room slowly.

  When I back into the ottoman I forgot was there, the legs scrape across the polished wood of the floor.

  Barrons’s head whips up and around, pinpoints the precise spot in which I stand.

  For a moment I consider trying to be his son’s ghost for him. Give him what he’d think was a sign, ease his pain with as kind and white a lie as they come.

  I know better.

  Barrons is all about purity. If he ever learned the truth—and Barrons has a way of always learning the truth—he’d despise me for it. I’d have given him a gift, only to snatch it away again, and counter to mainstream cliché, for some of us it’s kinder to never have a thing at all than to have it and lose it.

  Some of us love too hard. Some of us don’t seem to be able to hold that vital piece of ourselves back.

  His nostrils flare as he inhales, cocks his head, and listens. He presses the Off button on the monitor. “Ms. Lane. ”

  Though he can’t see me, I scowl at him. “You don’t know that for certain. You guessed. I’ve been hanging around you a lot today and you didn’t know it. ”

  “The Sinsar Dubh protected you at the last minute. You were going to let the sidhe-seers take you rather than risk killing them. ”

  “Uh-huh. ”

  “I believed it had sifted you elsewhere, and it was taking time for you to get back. ”

  “Nope. Just made me invisible and told me to run. ”

  Pleasantries exchanged, I search for something to say that is about anything but his son. I know Barrons. Like me, he’d prefer I’d never seen him grieving.

  He’ll sit and stare at his computer screen however many times he must, just as I indulge the OCD facets of my grief and, with each month that goes by, find there are three or four, sometimes as many as five additional days between those upon which I am compelled to drag out my photo albums and brood. At some point there will be ten, twenty, then thirty. Time will scar my wound and I’ll emerge from my fugue tougher, if not healed.

  I decide to bitch. That’ll take his mind off things.

  “You know, I just don’t get it. Every time I solve a problem, the universe lobs another one at me. And it’s always bigger and messier than the last. Am I being persecuted?”

  He smiles faintly. “If only it were that personal. Life fucks you anonymously. It doesn’t want to know your name, doesn’t give a shit about your station. The terrain never stops shifting. One minute you think you’ve got the world by the balls, the next minute you don’t know where the fuck the world’s balls are. ”

  “Sure I do,” I say irritably. “Right next to the world’s big fat hairy asshole, upon which I seem to be stuck in superglue lately, waiting for it to have its next case of explosive diarrhea. ”

  He laughs. A bona-fide laugh, and I smile, grateful to have lifted a bit of sorrow from that dark, forbidding countenance. Then he says, “Move. ”

  “Huh? Why? You can’t even see me. ”

  “Off the asshole. ”

  “Easy for you to say. How am I supposed to do that?”

  “Study the terrain. If you can’t move yourself, find something that moves the world. ”

  “Tall order. Isn’t it easier to move myself?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes not. ”

  I think about it a moment. “If Cruce was free, I’d become a secondary concern. He’d be on the asshole. ”

  “Which would put pretty much the entire world on the asshole with him. ”

  “But I’d be out of the way. ”

  He shrugs. “Do it. ”

  “You don’t mean that. ” I’m not so certain he doesn’t. Barrons would probably just go along for the ride, finding no end of things to enjoy along the way. Move the world. How can I move the world? “Make me like you,” I say. “Then I wouldn’t mind being visible again because I wouldn’t have to worry about them catching me. ”

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  “Never ask me that. ”

  “Jada—Dani is like you. ”

  “Dani is a genetically mutated human. Not like us at all. There’s a price for what we are. We pay it every day. ”

  “What kind of price?”

  He doesn’t reply.

  I try a side approach. “Why does it take you so much longer than Ryodan to transform from beast back to man?”

  “I enjoy the beast. He enjoys the man. The beast has little desire to resume human form, resists it. ”

  “Yet you live mostly as a man. Why?”

  Again he doesn’t reply. I resume pondering my position on the asshole and how to get off it.

  “Fuck me,” he says softly.

  I stare at him through the dim light as instant lust eclipses anger, will, time, place. My knees weaken in anticipation of ceasing their function, ready to drop me back on the floor so I can wrap my legs around Barrons when he spreads his big hard body over me. Master to slave: when he says “Fuck me,” my body softens and I get wet. It’s visceral. Inescapable. I love the way he says “Fuck me,” as if his body will explode if I don’t touch him, slam down on him and take him inside me, meld our flesh together in that place we both find the only peace we ever know. Out of bed, we’re a storm. In bed, we find the eye. The detritus of our world, of our complex and difficult personalities, gets swept up into the various supercells eternally raging around us and vanishes.

  I want to. Especially after what I just saw. But that he suffers doesn’t absolve him for an action he shouldn’t have taken. “Why?” I say pissily. “So you can erase my memory again?”

  “And there it is. Go ahead, Ms. Lane. Air your grievances. Tell me what a big bad bastard I am that I tucked away a truth you couldn’t face and gave you time to come to terms with it. But reflect on this: it wasn’t the only time. You did the same when you were Pri-ya. Twice I got under your skin, and both times you couldn’t shut me out fast enough. ”

  “Bullshit. You don’t get to cast it in some sunny, kind light when there’s nothing sunny and kind about it. ” I don’t acknowledge his second comment because he has a somewhat valid point and this is about my irritation, not his.

  “I didn’t say it was sunny and kind. It was self-serving, as is all I do. One would think by now you know who I am. ”

  “You had no right. ”

  “Ah, the morally outraged cry of the weak: You’re not ‘allowed’ to do that. One is allowed to do anything one can get away with. Only when you understand that will you know your place in this world. And your power. Might is right. ”

  “Ah,” I mock, “the morally bankrupt howl of the predator. ”

  “Guilty as charged. I’m not the only one that howled that night. ”

  “You don’t know for certain that I wouldn’t have—”

  “Bullshit,” he cuts me off impatiently. “You don’t get to pretend you would have done anything but despise me. It was already there in your eyes. You were young, so bloody young. Untouched by tragedy until your sister’s death. You came to Dublin, avenging angel, and what’s the first thing you did? Fucked the devil. Oops, shit, eh? You felt more alive with me that night than you’ve ever felt in your life. You were fuc
king born in that run-down rented room with me. I watched it happen, saw the woman you really are tear her constrictive, circumscribing skin right down the middle and strip it off. And I’m not talking about fucking. I’m talking about a way of existence. That night. You. Me. No fear. No holds barred. No rules. Watching you change was an epiphany. How did it feel to come alive in the city that killed your sister? Like the biggest fucking betrayal in the world?”

  I snarl like an enraged animal. Yes, yes, and yes. It abso-fucking-lutely did. Alina was cold in a grave and I was on fire. I was glad I’d come to Dublin, glad I’d gotten lost and stumbled into his bookstore, because something in me that had slumbered all my life was waking up. How can you be glad you came to the city that killed your sister? How can you feel exhilarated to be alive when she’s dead? How could I let anything ever make me feel good again?

  “You couldn’t deal with it, and you couldn’t despise yourself any more than you already did, so you turned it on me. You want to hate me for taking that memory and stashing it away for a while, go ahead. ”

  I snap, “I don’t want to hate you for it. I want to find a way to forgive you for it. And that’s what scares me. You took my memory, my choice to deal with or refuse to deal with what happened. You took a slice of my reality. ”

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  “I’ll say this one more fucking time: I couldn’t have taken it if you hadn’t been so willing to throw it away. The brain is a complex thing. It inscribes, it etches, it’s bloody well sticky. The memory was always there, that’s how you found it. I merely kicked it beneath a rock. You put the entire force of your will behind my kicking it. You helped me hide it. I relieved you of what you considered a despicable stain in your mind. Best fucking night of my existence. ” He laughs and shakes his head. “And you couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. I didn’t want to hide the memory from you. I wanted to cram it down your goddamn throat. I wanted to force you to face it, to want it, to want me, to be willing to fight for what was possible between us with the same single-minded devotion as you fucked. Well, Ms. Lane, you’ve got your precious memory back. Will you throw me away now?”