Burned
Page 115

“I’ll contend with Cruce. Barrons and Ryodan are enough to contend with you.”
“You’re granting me free passage.” I choose my words carefully, using the same words I spoke the night I made a pact with the Gray Woman to save her life, the night I discovered what she’d done with Alina, probing to see if I can elicit an emotional response.
“For now,” she says tonelessly.
Still, she stands in the street looking at me as if she’s waiting for something. I can’t fathom what.
“Have you seen Dancer since you’ve been back?” I take another shot at provoking emotion.
“I don’t know Dancer.”
“Yes you do. Dani was crazy about him.”
“You could have ended your second sentence after the initial three words.”
Okay, now she’s starting to piss me off, insulting the tenacious, brilliant teen that battled tirelessly for our city. “What do you want, Jada?” I say flatly. “Why are you still standing here?”
She wrinkles her nose as if her next words leave a foul taste on her tongue. “Do you believe Dani could have anticipated the Hag’s movements better than I could?”
I catch my breath. There it is. Why she remained. She despises asking me, yet can’t resist. Apparently Ryodan’s criticism has been burning like sullen fire in her gut ever since he leveled it at her. Who better to ask to confirm or deny it than me? I knew Dani better than most. That she even asks it shocks me. Jada has opened herself to an opinion. My opinion.
I don’t like this question. I don’t want Dani harboring more guilt or self-recrimination. I’ve not forgotten, and will never be able to forget, her cry that she deserved to die. I wonder what happened to her when she was young, what Ryodan knows about her, what “kryptonite” she carries in her head that he believes could destroy her. I wonder if he’s wrong, and Dani actually knows it and was relieved to turn the reins over to a remote, unfeeling part of herself. I wonder what happened to her in the Silvers, what she endured that made her transform fully into this icy other.
I study Jada in silence, realizing her question might be a small crack in the dominant personality’s facade. Then again, it might merely be a desire to reconfigure herself into the most efficient weapon possible. I don’t know much about dissociative disorder, but between trying to figure out how to stop the black holes that threaten our world, hunt the Unseelie King to get rid of this Book, and find Barrons because I need him like a bandage to my wounds, I intend to learn.
I wonder how Jada subdued Dani so completely. Similar to the way I subdue the Book? Does Dani whisper daily, struggling to break free, or is she imprisoned somewhere deep inside, in a small dark cell, her exuberant, passionate voice echoing in a tight vacuum, not heard even by Jada? Worse, has she given up?
“Are you still there?” Jada says.
“I don’t blame you for killing my sister, Dani,” I say softly. “I forgive you.” My heart feels abruptly, enormously lighter. Saying those words released an awful compressed knot behind my breastbone. I clear a throat suddenly thick with unshed grief, for the loss of Dani, for Dageus, for the way things turned out. I wish I’d been able to say these things before I chased her through the portal. “I love you,” I tell Jada, hoping somehow my Dani hears me. “I always will.”
“Irrelevant and maudlin. I asked you a question. Answer it.”
“Yes. She could have anticipated the Hag’s movements better,” I say flatly. “Dani has a fire you lack. Her gut instincts are flawless, she is brilliant.”
Jada’s eyes narrow and her nostrils flare. “I’m flawless. I’m brilliant.”
“Give me my spear.”
She cocks her head as if holding an internal debate, then slips the cuff of Cruce from her arm and holds it in the general direction of my voice. “Logic dictates a different course.”
Oh no, it doesn’t. Logic dictates she keeps both. Not give away something she isn’t required to relinquish. Interesting.
“Take the cuff,” Jada insists. “It makes sense.”
“How does letting you keep my spear make sense?”
Emerald eyes bore into the space where I stand, as if she’s trying to hammer me into her desired shape with the sheer intensity and implacability of her gaze. “I kill. It’s what I do. It’s who I am. It’s who I’ve always been. I will never change. Stay out of my way. Or your free passage will be rescinded.”
The cuff tinkles to the cobbled pavement at my feet.
Jada is gone.
39
“What are you waiting for?” the Seelie Queen demands, trying but failing to conceal her fear behind an imperious facade. “Seal our pact and attend Dublin.”
She dreads kissing him.
Once, she couldn’t kiss him enough.
The Unseelie King completes the complex process of reducing himself, compressing fragments into various, new human forms those who live in Dublin have not seen him wearing.
He never attends a world twice in the same human bodies once they’ve been identified. Humans recall him, bring petitions, crucify him with incessant, foolish demands. Give us laws, chisel them in stone, tell us how to live!
Absurd, floundering humanity, spreading from planet to planet like a plague, colonizing the stars, he finds it astounding how long they have managed to persist.
Once, he told them the truth.
Chiseled a single commandment upon a slab of stone: That is how to live: in the choosing. There are no rules but those you make for yourself.