Burned Read online

  I love this place more than any other. Gas fireplaces and big comfy couches you can really stretch out on and magazines and books you can read and dream about all the places in the world you’re gonna see one day, and wicked-cool antique weapons and kick-ass modern ones, and killer muscle cars and cakes and presents and friends you thought you had. The hours I spent there are filed away in my storage vaults in superhigh-gloss Technicolor, brighter than any other memories. Sometimes I pull one out and relive it real slow, savoring it down to the last morsel. I love Mac. I miss her so bad. I wish—

  Wishes aren’t horses and I don’t get to ride. ’Scool. I got feet that are usually superhero grade.

  The bell on the door tinkles.

  A man steps out.

  Strong. Brilliant. Controlled.

  Predator.

  Unbreakable. Feck, to be so unbreakable!

  He’s everything I admire plus things I can’t even begin to put into words.

  I crush on Jericho Barrons violently.

  My brain almost shuts down every time I see him and that’s a lot of gray matter to stupefy.

  Page 13

  Used to be, if I couldn’t fall asleep I’d fantasize all kinds of ways I’d impress Barrons by killing monsters or saying something really smart or saving the world, and he’d see me as a grown-up woman and I’d glow just from the expression on his face, like that time I killed the Unseelie Prince in Mac’s cell and he looked at me like he really saw who I was. Most folks don’t. They fence me in with teenage rules that don’t hold me for shit, seeing how I grew up. You can kill but don’t cuss. Break any rule necessary to save the world but don’t watch porn or even think about having sex. How do they come up with this stuff—hold parental powwows for brainstorming diametrically opposed ethics? Then Ryodan began popping into my Barrons fantasies like he had some kind of business being there, and he’d look all, well … like … Ryodan, and he’d laugh and do that husky groan thing he did on level four, so I terminated that happy little exercise in somnolence.

  Now, I count sheep.

  Lately even those buggers look like Ryodan, with clear, cold eyes and some weird kind of hypnotic hold on me.

  Fecker.

  I’m beginning to think I’m going to have to figure a way to kill him, permanent-like, just to get him out of my head.

  “Dani. ”

  I shiver. He has that effect on folks, throws off some kind of charge, supersaturates the space in his vicinity. All his dudes do, but Jericho Barrons has it in spades. I play it real cool. Shove a hand in my pocket, thumb out. Cock my hip at a jaunty angle. “Barrons. ”

  Time was, I planned on growing up and giving him my virginity. Or V’lane. It’s a big deal to me, the divesting of it. One of the few things I got left that’s gonna be my choice: the who, the how, the when. It’s gonna be Epic with a capital E!

  But the Seelie Prince V’lane turned out to be the Unseelie Prince Cruce. And Barrons is Mac’s as much as something like him is ever anyone’s, a fact that’s never going to change, and I don’t want it to.

  A piece of paper flaps on the column behind his head. I get a bad feeling and take a sec to scan it.

  “Gah! Are you fecking kidding me?” How the heck did they get something printed already? Even in hyperspeed, I couldn’t have gotten a rag out this fast! But there it is, waving in the air like a great big slap in my face.

  The Dublin Daily

  June 26, 1 AWC

  YOUR ONLY SOURCE FOR CREDIBLE NEWS IN AND AROUND NEW DUBLIN

  BROUGHT TO YOU BY WECARE

  GOOD PEOPLE OF NEW DUBLIN, THE ICE MONSTER THAT WAS FREEZING OUR CITY IS DEAD!

  WeCARE was at the scene, fighting the good fight!

  WeCARE will always have your back

  UNLIKE

  I can’t read any more. I know they’re getting ready to dis me. But my traitorous eyeballs sneak another peek and sure enough there it is!

  … a certain bragging teenager that JEOPARDIZED the mission and was single-handedly responsible for getting many good, innocent people KILLED and taken CAPTIVE!

  “Buh! Who is writing this drivel?” I was the hero tonight! I saved the fecking day with my winning combination of brains and skills. They even made the font size bigger on the slander about me! I know the tricks of the trade. Talk about your biased press! I feel my face getting hot and red. It pisses me off so much I’d rupture a gonad if I had one. WeCare sure as feck has them out the wazoo!

  “Stop her!” Mac shouts.

  I don’t stand a chance against both of them. Heck, I don’t stand a chance against Barrons by himself. He’s like Ryodan. I can’t compete on my best day.

  Yet.

  I fist my hands and take rapid deep breaths, clearing my head of the Wemightcarebutsureasfeckdon’ttellthetruth bull-crap. It takes me a sec to analyze possibilities and figure out how I’m getting myself out of this one. The answer is so simple it takes my breath away. I’m wired to survive on a gut level. My subconscious brought me exactly where I needed to be.

  I duck past him and totally catch him off guard—or more likely he decides not to chase me for some mysterious reason, because there’s no way I can outrun Barrons, not even in freeze-frame—then can’t help myself and dart back and snatch the slanted scrap o’ crap from the column and wad it up ’cause I sure as heck ain’t letting it hang there, then I’m back behind the bookstore, hurrying to the first building on the left side of the Dark Zone.

  Last time I was here was the night me and Christian searched the Unseelie King’s library, the night the words in the Boora Boora books crawled off the pages and stung me like fire ants, and I accidentally set the Crimson Hag free.

  Christian. The Hag. Cripes, I got some cleanup work to do.

  Page 14

  When he showed me the hidden portal in the wall that’s really a secret passageway into the ancient mirrors the Fae once used to travel between worlds, I’d committed the precise, unremarkable spot of bricks to memory. All weapons and escape routes—good. Not even Ryodan with his stupid contract on me can track me Fae-side. I figured if the city ever got too hot for me, I could always ditch it for a while.

  It’s feeling way too hot right now.

  “Dani, don’t!” Mac cries.

  I leap into the brick. It’s weirdly spongelike, then so am I, then I’m standing in a large, windowless, doorless room with blank white walls and a white floor and ten enormous mirrors of varying shapes and sizes suspended in the air. They hang without visible means of support, some motionless, others twirling lazily. No surprise there. Fae stuff, animate and not, rarely give a wink and sure as heck no nod to human physics. It’s why Dancer’s so fascinated by them. Some of the mirrors have intricately carved frames, while others have thin edges of welded chain-link. A few of the looking glasses within the frames are as black as night, some milky white, and others crammed with shadows you don’t want to look at hard.

  It’s a good thing I know which mirror to take—second Silver on the right plops you smack inside the infinite, a-fecking-mazing White Mansion. I been itching to explore it anyway. If they follow me through, I’ll use the labyrinthine corridors to lose them or unstopper another distraction because Rule Number One in the Mega O’Malley Handbook is and will always be: survival first, damage control second. Which is only logical. You can’t do damage control dead.

  If they don’t follow me in, all I have to do is wait long enough for my superpowers to return, then come back because it’ll be a couple days, if not a couple weeks later in Dublin. When Christian and me went through last time, we lost almost a month! Time doesn’t pass the same in Fae realms. No way they’ll sit in the White Room 24/7 waiting for me. I hate losing Dublin-time that I could be using to help my city but I can’t help my city at all if I’m not alive.

  Mac explodes through the wall behind me like she was shot by a cannon, slams into my back and nearly pushes me into the wrong mirror, and all I
can think is what a disaster that would have been. I got no clue where the other ones go. Might be a world without air, a direct path into the Unseelie prison, or a galaxy filled with Hunters, or Shades, or gray women! I got a special hate on for the gray-folk caste of Unseelie. One of them almost killed me and forced Mac to make a promise she shouldn’t have made.

  I shove her off me and she stumbles back, nearly crashing into Barrons, who just entered the room with his usual stalky animal grace.

  Jericho Barrons is an unshakable, undestroyable constant. He’s the cornerstone of my universe. Or maybe together they are. I don’t know. I only know as long as the two of them and BB&B still stand, some part of me that never used to feel okay, does.

  I can’t help myself—I watch them a sec. I love watching them together. I slow-mo it to absorb every detail.

  Mac draws up short to keep from slamming into Barrons, and her blond hair swings back over her shoulder, brushing his face as it does, and my hearing is so good I catch the rasp of it chafing the shadow stubble on his jaw, then one of his hands grazes her breast and his eyes narrow when he looks at what he touched in a hungry way I want a man to look at me like one day and, as they continue to recover from the near-collision, their bodies move in a graceful dance of impeccable awareness of precisely where the other is at all times that is unity, symbiosis, partnership I only dream of, wolves that chose to pack up and hunt together, soldiers who will always have each other’s backs no matter what, no sin, no transgression too great, ’cause don’t we all transgress sometimes and it fecking slays me, because once I got a little taste of what that was like, and it was heaven and they’re so beautiful standing there, the best of the best, the strongest of the strong, that they practically glow to me, on fire with all I ever wanted in my life—a place to belong and someone to belong there with.

  Together they mean to kill me and go on living, all happy, like I didn’t even mean anything. They’ll eat and have sex and adventures and I’ll be nothing but six feet under in dirt—assuming anyone even bothers to bury me. Gone. Over. Finis. Done. Quit. Before I ever even got the chance to live.

  I’m not sure I’ve ever been hap—

  I terminate that idiotic train of thought. As soon as my sidhe-seer gifts come back, I’ll get over this wimpy little emotional meltdown I’m having. Losing the superpowers that make me special plus seeing Mac up close and personal for the first time since she found out what I did is temporarily messing with my head. Key word there, temporarily.

  Page 15

  Fourteen blows.

  Hormones suck.

  I wish I’d just grow the hell up in a hurry and everything would even out and start to make sense and folks would stop seeing me as a kid and I could finally—

  Bugger it all! What am I waiting for?

  I close my hand on the hilt of my sword and dive headfirst into the mirror, laughing as I go. I always crack up when I leap into the unknown. It’s cotton-candy fuel, there’s a big-top tent full of carnival magic in a good belly laugh.

  Next grand adventure here I come!

  The last thing I hear is Mac shouting, “Oh, God, no, Dani, not that one! We moved them! That one goes to—”

  2

  “There’s bullet holes where my compassion used to be …”

  MAC

  “—the Hall of All Days!”

  If not infinite, the ancient Fae “airport” that serves as hub for a nexus of Silvers is so vast it isn’t worth splitting hairs over.

  Fashioned of gold from floor to ceiling, the endless corridor is lined with billions of mirrors that are portals to alternate universes and times and exudes a chilling spatial-temporal distortion that makes you feel utterly inconsequential—think dust mote in a galaxy-sized barn.

  Time isn’t linear in the hall, it’s malleable and slippery and you can get permanently lost in memories that never were and dreams of futures that will never be.

  One moment you feel terrifyingly alone, the next as if an endless chain of paper-doll versions of yourself is unfolding sideways, holding cutout construction-paper hands with thousands of different feet in thousands of different worlds, all at the same time.

  Compounding the many dangers of the hall, when the Silvers were damaged by Cruce’s curse (a thing he tried to blame on his Unseelie brothers, in typical Cruce fashion), the mirrors were corrupted and the image they now present is no guarantee of what’s on the other side. A lush rain forest may lead to a parched, cracked desert, a tropical oasis to a world of ice, but you can’t count on total opposites either. No handy Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is propped on a convenient foyer table, near a cool beverage and tasty snack inside those time-tortured walls.

  Barrons steps between the mirror and me, folds his arms across his chest, and spreads his legs wide. He’s a tall, dark mountain of man I can’t push my way through or around. I meet his implacable gaze and we have one of our wordless discussions.

  But we have to—

  No we don’t.

  But we can’t—

  Yes we can.

  But she doesn’t—

  She’ll figure it out.

  But it’s—

  Not your fault and not your problem.

  But I’m the one—

  Bloody hell, Ms. Lane, how many “buts” are you going to throw at me besides the only one I want? He rakes a hungry gaze over my ass and I shiver.

  After all we’ve been through together, he still calls me Ms. Lane, with one exception: when I’m in his bed. Or on the floor, or some other place where I’ve temporarily lost my mind and become convinced I can’t breathe without him inside me.

  “Sometimes I don’t know why I even bother talking to you. ”

  He lifts a brow an infinitesimal amount in a silent makes two of us.

  Barrons thinks words are pointless and dangerous. If I played it his way, we’d rarely speak, ocular or otherwise. Funny thing is, the more time I spend around him, the more I understand why he feels that way.

  “But she’s in the hall. It’s a terrible place. I’ve been there. People don’t escape. ” During my brief time in those ancient corridors, the glossy, seductive floors had been littered with skeletons. I’d nearly become one of them. In those mindbending halls, you could live any reality you chose, die on the floor believing you were living a genuine, happy life somewhere real. The place is a consummate mind-fuck.

  “You did,” he says aloud.

  “That’s different. I’m the exception. To a lot of things. ”

  A corner of his mouth lifts. “Modest, too. So is she. ”

  “I had the stones. ” Chiseled from the Unseelie King’s realm, they’d reacted to each portal I went through, changing the way the environment behaved and working ultimately to expel me.

  “If you follow her through, you will only force her to take the nearest escape route. Any door, any Silver. She’s not going to stop running from you. What if she chooses a world that has no air or is too close to a sun? She needs time to use that powerful brain of hers. You made it out. She will, too. Drop it. There are other things you need to be focused on. Besides,” his gaze locks on mine, then I feel like he’s sweeping my eyeballs aside and sifting through my mind, analyzing, discarding, hunting, “ah, yes, I thought as much. You’re not ready yet. You will leave her alone until you are. ”

  Page 16

  Autocratic has a picture of Barrons next to it in the dictionary. Unfortunately so does addictive. I poke Unseelie on both sides with my elbows and change the subject. “Haven’t you found a way to get rid of them yet? It’s been months. ”

  One after another black-cloaked, chittering wraiths continue to pop through the portal behind me. I have no idea why they’ve chosen me to stalk. I’m swiftly becoming the only human in an Unseelie sardine can, and just as smelly. It’s bad enough they stalk me, but where they brush against me they leave a greasy, pungent yellow dust on my clothes. That’s the least
of the reasons I want them gone.

  With rare exceptions—like tonight, when they inexplicably decided to roost up high—they make it impossible to fight. I can’t get to my enemy without first slaughtering a few dozen of the ones smothering me. By the time I slice and stab my way clear, whatever I really wanted to kill has disappeared. My sidhe-seer talent, nulling, or freezing them in place for a few seconds, doesn’t work on them.

  As if that’s not bad enough, every time Ryodan sees me he grills me about why an Unseelie caste is following me around, and when that man gets a bone he strips the gristle with his teeth and gnaws until the marrow is gone, so I’ve stopped going to Chester’s or anywhere in public that I might run into him or his men, which is pretty much everywhere given the close watch they keep on Dublin and the surrounding districts. I’m bookstore-bound most days and nights, and me, cooped up, bored, gets riskier with each passing hour—idle hands make the devil’s work and all.

  Not the devil, beautiful girl. Angel. Your angel.

  Yet another voice I pretend not to hear.

  You wish to be rid of them? Your wish. My command.

  Oh, yeah, fully deaf now.

  I killed the first fifty or so Unseelie when they began stalking me, but it didn’t matter how many I slayed, more appeared. Compounding my disgust, they release a huge cloud of that stinking yellow dust as they die, coating me and making me sneeze my head off. I haven’t seen them feed on any humans, and as their only offense seems to be stalking me and ruining my clothes, I no longer kill them. It’s pointless and disturbing.

  I shoot Barrons a look. He has a full five feet of personal space around him in all directions. I, on the other hand, am a human dog with Unseelie fleas. “So, can you get rid of them or not?”

  “I’m working on it. ”

  “Can’t you tattoo me or something?”

  “Now she wants me to tattoo her. Will wonders never cease. ”