We completed the drive in the same strained silence it had begun.
“Hold this,” said Barrons, as he turned to lock the door on the garage. He had an alarm system on it now, and punched some numbers in on the keypad.
It was nearly dawn. I could see the Shades out of the corner of my eye, down at the edge of the Dark Zone, moving as restlessly and desperately as flies stuck on flypaper.
I accepted the delicate glass ball. Eggshell thin and fragile, it was an impossible color, the ever-changing hues of V’lane’s robes on the beach that day in Faery. I handled it carefully, aware of my heightened strength. I’d bent the door of the Maybach when I’d shut it too hard. Barrons was still pissed about it. Nobody likes a door-slammer, he’d growled.
“What is it?” I asked.
“The D’Jai Orb. A relic from one of the Seelie Royal Houses.”
“Can’t be. It’s not an OOP,” I told him.
He looked at me. “Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s not,” I said. “I know these things, remember?”
“Yes,” he repeated carefully, “it is.”
“No, it’s not.”
For a moment I thought we were going to get into a “is to/is not” squabble. We glared at each other, resolute in our opinions.
Then his eyes widened as if with a startling thought. “Remove the spear from the box, Ms. Lane,” he snapped.
“I hardly see the point, and I’d really rather not.” I never wanted to touch it again. I was excruciatingly aware of the Unseelie flesh inside me, and that I had no idea how profoundly eating it had changed me, and until I understood what my new limits were, I meant to studiously avoid anything capable of damaging a Fae.
“Then just open it,” he gritted.
I could do that, although I still didn’t see the point. I slipped it from beneath my arm and lifted the lid. I looked at the spear. It took a moment to sink in.
I couldn’t sense it.
At all.
In fact, I realized, I hadn’t sensed it back in Mallucé’s boudoir. I’d merely seen it, lying there in the box.
I focused on it, hard. I wasn’t getting the faintest tingle. My sidhe-seer sense was dead. Not numb. Not tired. Gone. Stricken, I cried, “What’s wrong with me?”
“You ate Fae. Do the math.”
I closed my eyes. “A Fae can’t sense Fae OOPs.”
“Precisely. And do you know what that means? That means, Ms. Lane, that you can no longer find the Sinsar Dubh. Bloody hell.” He turned sharply on his heel and stalked into the bookstore.
“Bloody hell,” I echoed. It also meant that Barrons no longer had any use for me. Nor did V’lane. For all my superhuman abilities, I suddenly wasn’t so special at all.
There’s always a downside, he’d warned.
This was one hell of a downside.
I’d lost everything I was to become part Fae with a fatal weakness.
I stayed in bed all day Sunday, slept for most of it. The horrors I’d endured had drained me. It seemed my rapid, preternatural healing had taken a toll as well. The human body wasn’t meant to nearly die and regenerate. I couldn’t begin to comprehend what had happened to me on a cellular level. Despite my exhaustion, the Fae inside me kept me feeling on edge, aggressive, like I was bristling with tiny soldiers inside my skin.
Fitfully, I dozed, I dreamed. They were nightmares. I was in a cold place from which there was no escape. Towering walls of ice surrounded me, hemmed me in. Creatures had carved out caverns in the stark, sheer cliffs above me, and were watching me. Somewhere there was a castle, a monstrous fortress of black ice. I could feel it drawing me, knew if I found it and entered those forbidding doors I would never be the same again.
I woke up shivering, stood under a scalding shower until the hot water ran out. Bundled in blankets, I set up my laptop and tried to answer e-mails from my friends, but I couldn’t relate to anything they’d written about. Parties and Jell-O shots, and who was sleeping with who, and he-said/she-said just didn’t compute in my brain right now.
I slept. I dreamed again of the cold place. I repeated the scalding shower to thaw myself. I glanced at the clock. It was Monday, nine A.M. I could stay in bed all day and hide or I could lose myself in the solace of routine.
I opted for routine. Sometimes it’s dangerous to stop and think. Sometimes you just have to keep going.
I forced myself to groom. Exfoliated, masked, and shaved. I nicked my knee in the shower and smeared it with toothpaste when I got out, a trick Alina had taught me when I’d first begun shaving and butchered my ankles more than a few times. As the blood welled in the pale blue gel, tears threatened. At that moment, if I’d had the ability to slip into Faery and spend time with her again, I might have been too weak.
Blood welled in the pale blue gel.
I stared at it.
I was bleeding. I wasn’t healing. Why? I scraped the toothpaste off my wound. It bled freely, pooling in the trickles of water on my still-wet leg.
Frowning, I made a fist and punched the doorjamb. “Ow!”
Stunned, disbelieving, I punched it again. It hurt again, and my abraded knuckles began to bleed, too.
My superhuman strength was gone! And I was not regenerating!
My thoughts whirled. Mallucé had talked as if he’d eaten Unseelie constantly, even before I’d stabbed him. I’d assumed it was because it was somehow addictive.
Now I knew how: If you didn’t keep eating it, you reverted to your natural human state. Of course, Mallucé hadn’t been willing to let that happen.
I stared in the mirror, watching myself bleed. It made me think of another time I’d stood in front of this mirror, examining myself. Of crimson I’d glimpsed on myself once before.
It’s hard to say what causes things to come together in a startling flash of clarity but images suddenly bombarded me—
Splint dropping from my arm, smudges of crimson and black ink on my skin; tattoos on Barrons’ torso, Mallucé screaming that he’d left the cuff in the alley, demanding to know how Barrons had tracked us; me chained to a beam in the garage, tattooing implements nearby—
— and I had a small epiphany.
“You bastard,” I breathed. “It was all a ruse, wasn’t it? Because you were afraid I’d find out that you’d already done it.” Games within games, true Barrons form.
I began examining every inch of my skin in the mirror. I’d planned to hide it, he’d said.
I poked, I prodded. I looked beneath my breasts. I checked between the cheeks of my behind with a hand mirror and heaved a huge sigh of relief. I looked in my ears. I checked behind my ears.
I found it on the nape of my neck, high up in the slight indentation of my skull, nearly invisible beneath my hair.
It was an intricate pattern of black and red ink with a faintly luminescent Z in the middle, a mystical bar code, a sorcerous brand.
He must have done it the night he brought me out of the Dark Zone, the night he’d splinted and healed me. The night he’d told me to sleep and kissed me. I’d been unconscious for a long time.
Then something must have made him begin to worry that I’d find it. Worry that if I did, it might push me too far. He was right, it would have. So when I’d returned from Faery, he’d seized the perfect opportunity to insist on tattooing me for my own good. No doubt he would have just touched up the old one, perhaps added something nefarious to it.
When I’d made it plain that if he trespassed against my boundaries so egregiously I’d leave, he must have been in a double bind. Unwilling to push, because I’d leave—knowing if I found out what he’d already done, I’d leave.
He’d branded me without my knowledge and consent, like a piece of property. His property. There was a fecking Z on the back of my skull.