High Voltage Read online

  Unbreakable.

  I wanted to be him. I wanted to run with him. I wanted to run away from him and never look back.

  Just before I lost sight of him, I thought I heard him murmur, “Until the day you’re willing to stay.”

  My blood type’s Krylon, technicolor type A

  I WANDERED THE CEMETERY, KEEPING an eye out for Shazam, without calling for him in case he was hunting dinner. We’d agreed that he could eat like any wild creature, taking a single kill a night, as long as it was something he could catch and devour in his current form. No turning into the genocidal version of himself, capable of devouring civilizations. Despite his sentience and ability to talk, he was still a hot-blooded beast that relished the hunt. I understood that.

  Besides, I’d reasoned, it was possible the exercise might slim him down. Although I loved every inch of his cuddly girth, being awakened in the morning by a fifty-pound pounce on a full bladder was brutal.

  Not, however, as brutal as Ryodan and the rest of the Nine packing up and leaving Dublin. My city was starting to feel like a ghost town despite the hordes of people immigrating from all over the world. There weren’t many cities as fully functional as ours. People came drawn by our technology, supplies, and the relative safety and order we’d managed to achieve.

  Years ago, before I got lost Silverside and ended up with no idea how old I am—which is somewhere between nineteen and twenty-one—my world was pretty much perfect for a short spell. Well…before Mac found out I was the assassin who’d killed her sister. Then things got a bit dicey.

  Point is, I’d had a small group of people I thought of as mine. Some of them I’d liked better than others, depending on the day of the week, but after our last adventure together saving the world, my group of sharp-edged, brilliant, deeply committed friends had become my family.

  Now, most of them were gone, I still had Kat, Enyo, and the sidhe-seers, and I thought I still had Christian MacKeltar, although I hadn’t seen him in a while. But Mac, Barrons, Ryodan, and Lor, they were like me: powerful, strong, invested in doing their best to understand their ever-changing place in an ever-changing world. Though I was reluctant to admit it, each of them was, in their own way, a role model of sorts, a challenge I’d relished to get stronger, smarter, faster, better.

  “I can’t believe they even trust me by myself,” I muttered. There was a time they wouldn’t have. “I shouldn’t be left alone and unsupervised. They know that.” But trying to make light of things to conceal my true feelings no longer worked as well as it once had, so I did what I always do if I can’t change anything about what’s bothering me—partition off a quiet place in my mind and tuck it away. Don’t pick at it. Go on with life. Time had a funny way of teasing out the most complicated knots.

  While part of me wanted to mull over the things Ryodan had said, particularly what I’d thought I heard him say at the last, I refused to indulge myself. Assuming I drew any conclusions, what good would it do?

  He was gone. For years. I refused to allow the bastard to consume my brain in his absence. He’d like that.

  Ergo, open box. Shove in. Close box.

  When he returned, I’d open the box again.

  Dancer, however, I left rattling around in my head. He hadn’t left by choice. I would work through the grief. It would change me, but I knew I’d like the woman I’d be by the time I was through, and Dancer would, too.

  Meanwhile, I needed a mystery to take my mind off things. Finding one in Dublin, AWC—after the wall crash—and ATS—after the Song—should be as simple as heading back to the city.

  Shazam would catch up with me as soon as he’d eaten—he can find me anywhere—so I glanced up to set my bearings by the stars. After wasting so many years staring at a TV from behind bars, I spent a lot of time looking up now. I’m obsessed with the sky, especially at night. It has a way of making me feel utterly irrelevant while part of a vast, timeless whole. I’ll never forget my first week free of the cage. At night I slept on the ground in the middle of wide-open fields, drifting off with my arms behind my head, marveling at the immensity of it all; a child whose entire universe had, until then, been forty-two square feet.

  Position noted, I hurried to the drive to circumvent gravestones before kicking up into the slipstream. During that perilous first instant or two before I enter the higher dimension in which I’ve learned to move, I can still crash into things. Once I’m up, I’m flawless. Coming down is even trickier than going up, and how I get most of my bruises.

  I paused on the pavement, glanced around to lock down the many variables on my mental grid—and froze, a chill of horror licking up my spine. Not many things do that to me.

  “What the—” I bit off the hushed curse and went as still as one of the corpses in the ground, adjusting my breath to minute, shallow inhales. I’m not here, I’m not here, I willed.

  What I was seeing was impossible.

  The Song of Making had been sung. The Unseelie had been destroyed by it. All of them. I no longer carried flashlights or a MacHalo.

  The life-sucking Shades were gone.

  Nonetheless, I was surrounded by them, hemmed in by countless inky shadows rising from the earth, bursting from graves, exploding from headstones, ghosting out windows of crumbling mausoleums, even clawing their ghastly passage through pavement.

  Dozens—no, a hundred or more!—filled the cemetery.

  One fought its way free of the blacktop five feet from my left; another hovered a few feet in front of me; there were three of the lethal things to my right.

  I didn’t dare glance behind me because they hadn’t seemed to notice me yet. Perhaps they’d gorge on grass, flowers, and trees and move on, sated, if I held very, very still.

  I locked down my limbs but my mind raced: it had been nearly four months since the new queen of the Fae sang the exquisite, dangerous melody that repaired the rifts in the fabric of our world. It was common knowledge that nothing Unseelie could survive that Song, and nothing Unseelie had been seen since.

  I’ve always been massively suspicious of common knowledge, clearly with good reason. The cemetery was packed with Shades, nearly as many as had broken free of the poisoned D’Jai Orb on Halloween when the wall between the worlds of Fae and Man had been destroyed.

  How did they survive the Song? What else had survived it?

  Amorphous vampires, Shades live in the darkness and suck the life from anything or anyone foolish enough to stumble across their path. Not that I’d been doing any stumbling, nor had I been foolish in thinking I no longer needed a bloody MacHalo. I had every reason to toss my bike helmet adorned with dozens of LED lights onto a shelf. The Unseelie were dead.

  Not.

  When Shades dine on humans, they leave behind small sundaes of papery husks, garnished with shiny fillings, watches, implants, and other oddities. They suck even the sap and insects from trees, strip the soil so clean not a speck of bacteria remains. My sword is useless against them. All weapons are. Shades can’t be killed and the only thing that can save you from a gruesome death is light. If you have enough, you can hold them at bay.

  My cellphone wouldn’t cast enough light to protect even one of my hands.

  Take that, Ryodan. You leave, I die. May you be crushed by a mountain of guilt.

  I slammed the lid of that box back down.

  The Shades were moving, swarming, drifting near, slithering away. The cloud of darkness directly in front of me listed nearer, and hovered ten inches from my left boot. No way I could try to kick up into the slipstream. It was too close; I’d collide with it before escaping to the higher dimension. If I’d been High Fae, I could have sifted. But freeze-framing—what I do—is clumsier, slower, and not nearly as elegant. Fae can blink out and reappear half a world away. I’m far more limited.

  There was no way I was calling for Shazam. I wouldn’t put him in dange
r. I wasn’t sure how powerful he was against something like this, and losing him would positively gut me.

  My cellphone was in my back pocket. I calculated the odds of getting it out, pressing it on and managing to thumb up IISS before the nearest Shade devoured my foot.

  Not good.

  I went for it anyway. Some folks suffer a delusion that life is about making the right choices, implying there is a right choice in every situation. I don’t know what kind of life they live but in mine the only course of action is often a bad one. I die doing something or I die doing nothing. Although I loathed calling Ryodan for help, I loathed the idea of dying more and I deeply despised that I hadn’t been able to manage life on my own for an entire ten minutes after he’d gone.

  My hand cleared my side, slid beneath my sword and plunged into my back pocket.

  The Shade swallowed my left boot.

  I gaped down in horror as I fumbled my phone from my pocket and thumbed up the contacts, furious at the epic waste the tattoo Ryodan inked on my skin had already proved to be. Who had time to search through their phone contacts when they were being attacked by Shades?

  The Shade swallowed my left knee.

  There went my right knee.

  I’d vanished from mid-thigh down.

  Even if I were able to dial IISS now—and I couldn’t because I had a lot of numbers in my cellphone and couldn’t find the bloody thing—even if he arrived instantly and somehow managed to do the unthinkable and kill it, my legs were already gone.

  I wasted a fraction of a second wondering whether I wanted to live without legs.

  There it was—IISS!

  My thumb paused slightly above it, refused to move.

  I could feel my legs. They were icy but there.

  I peered down. The Shade was motionless, an inky, oily sleeve around my lower body.

  I frowned. This wasn’t how Shades behaved. When Sorcha, a fellow sidhe-seer died, Clare had seen it happen, and said Sorcha vanished into her own boot as she pulled it on, thanks to a Shade tucked in the darkness within. This particular caste of Unseelie devoured their prey instantly and with one swift inhalation, then belched a small pile of crumbs. Or in her case, left them in her shoe.

  Was it possible it wasn’t a Shade? If so, what was it? I realized with a distant part of my brain that my legs weren’t the only part of me that was cold. My left hand was freezing. And itching. I glanced at it. It was completely black, with dark veins crisscrossing my pale wrist. It was the hand I’d used to stab the Hunter with years ago when something of the ancient beast seemed to slither up my sword, infecting me.

  The Shade was on the move again, inching upward.

  I had no idea what might happen—if anything at all—but I sliced my cold black hand down into the inky cloud as if it were a blade.

  The Shade recoiled violently and reared away. It stopped a dozen or so feet from me and hung suspended in the air. I was struck by the sudden certainty that it was assessing me. I could feel a sentient mind taking my measure, evaluating me, determining what to do next.

  I glanced around. All the Shadelike things in the cemetery had gone still, and I deduced, from the slight lean of their amorphous forms, that they were peering at my attacker, as if listening. What the bloody hell was this? A collective swarm of evolved Shades? The thought was terrifying.

  The cellphone was still in my hand, the screen lit, waiting for me to press IISS.

  I thumbed it off. I was not calling for help. He’d left me on my own? I’d handle it myself.

  “Get out of here!” I roared, lunging for whatever-it-was.

  The shadowy shape recoiled again, vanishing on a sudden gust of wind then resolidifying in the same spot. More breezed over to join it, settling on either side, until I stood glaring at a nearly solid wall of blackness fifty feet wide.

  I gestured threateningly with my left hand. “I’ll destroy you. You picked the wrong woman to mess with on the wrong bloody night. I was already in a bad enough mood!” I snarled. I paused and did that thing I used to do when I was young, when I was still killing with hate in my heart, enough to Kevlar all the Garda in Dublin. I embraced my rage at the injustice and hypocrisy of the world, welcomed it, let it fill my body, shape my limbs, backlight my eyes. I knew what I looked like when I let it happen—Ryodan on his worst day.

  There was steel in my spine and death in my eyes when I swaggered toward the menacing wall. “You have two choices,” I said in a terrible voice, my left hand raised high. “Leave. Or die.”

  The wall vanished.

  I blinked, murmuring, “Well,” mildly surprised and majorly skeptical. I knew I could be intimidating, but I was a single person and there were hundreds of them.

  I stood for several long moments, scanning the cemetery, unwilling to act rashly, from a misguided belief they were gone. The monsters that stalk our world are devious, patient, and sly. So are a lot of the humans.

  While I waited I evened out my breath. It was a constant reminder of how I lived: Bold, Ruthless, Energy, Action, Tenacity, Hunger; B-R-E-A-T-H. I wanted to kick up into the slipstream and rush to the nearest pool of light but I don’t run from the things I fear anymore. They chase you, gaining substance and power the longer you run.

  When several minutes passed without any of the shadows reappearing, I shoved the cellphone back in my pocket and turned to walk through the cemetery, eyes peeled for clues. I stumbled smack into a gravestone, tripped over it, rolled, sprang up and stood motionless, running a rapid internal assessment. I felt oddly shaky, weak as if my legs might go out from under me if I moved suddenly. Brushes with death usually invigorate me but this one had rattled me more than I’d realized. On the off chance I was simply hungry—a far more palatable conclusion to both tongue and ego—I crammed a protein bar in my mouth and resumed walking, taking careful mental notes about the locations from which the unknown entities had come, their shapes and sizes, their actions, and filed it all neatly away in my mental vaults.

  I’d wanted a distraction.

  I’d certainly gotten one. A mystery wrapped in an enigma, topped with a bow of suspense and danger.

  I was whistling a cheery tune by the time Shazam bounded out of the night to join me, blood on his furry muzzle, delight in his violet eyes. We moved together and I rested my hand on his shaggy head as we padded into the night.

  Still, I made a mental note to be a bit more careful about the things I asked the universe for in the future.

  NOW

  All men have limits.

  They learn what they are and learn not to exceed them.

  I ignore mine.

  —BATMAN

  Great spirits have long suffered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

  —EINSTEIN

  What they said.

  —DANI O’MALLEY, STILL AS MEGA AS EVER

  The roads are fragile food for city crooks on a starry night

  DUBLIN

  TWO YEARS, FIVE MONTHS ATS

  “ANOTHER THREE OF THEM, Dani?” Rainey Lane exclaimed as she threw open the door of the townhouse.

  The light from the cozily furnished home spilled into the night, glistening on cobblestones damp from a recent rain. Backlit, the fifty-four-year-old woman looked like the radiant, matronly angel of mercy she’d proven to be since I’d brought the first of the orphans to her.

  “Four,” I corrected, motioning to the eldest of the children huddled behind me. Her name was Sara Brady, she’d told me grudgingly, and she was eleven years old. Her brother, Thomas, was seven, the girl holding his hand was five, and the baby a mere ten months.

  As I reached behind Sara to unfasten the satchel that held her sleeping sister, she tensed, rising to the balls of her feet, and knocked my arm away, thin shoulders trembling. Poised to run, her eyes darted nervously as she considered he
r odds: the chilly, dangerous night or the warm, inviting light.

  “You agreed to come here with me,” I reminded. “You’ll be safe and well cared for.”

  “How long have they been on their own?” Rainey asked quietly.

  “Nearly two months. Like most, they’ve no idea what happened to their parents.”

  “I do. The Faerie took them,” the boy blurted. “I saw it, I did, with my own—”

  Sara’s mouth thinned to a line as she kicked him sharply in the shins. “Hush Thomas, you’re not to be speaking of that!”

  The boy began to cry, tears trickling down grimy cheeks. He rubbed his eyes with his fists then shook one at her. “But it’s true! I saw it! It was one of the Faerie! You know it’s true, Sara! You—”

  When she kicked him again, harder, I moved between them and drew one to each side, resting my hands on their thin, knobby shoulders. “You’ll be safe here. This is Rainey Lane. She helps run the foster center.”

  “Where they’ll split us up!” Sara hissed, pulling away from me.

  Rainey spoke swiftly. “We never separate siblings. If we’re unable to find a good home for the four of you, you may stay in the center as long as you like.”

  That was one of the things I’d been counting on when I’d brought Rainey the first of the abandoned children I’d discovered, half dead in the streets. Her adopted daughters were biological sisters: Alina and MacKayla Lane. Family was everything to her. Still, it wouldn’t be long before the recently formed center became too full to continue offering such an alternative.

  Sara Brady squinted up at Rainey through damp, tangled hair, hostility blazing in her eyes. Silently, I applauded her bravado. The terrified eleven-year-old had managed to take care of her infant sister and her young siblings for nearly two months, without the many sidhe-seer gifts I’d had at her age. She was a fighter. But she was an eighty-pound-dripping-wet fighter, and Dublin, AWC, was no city for lightweights.