For the first time in my life, I feel only me.

I didn’t even know what I felt like.

For the first time in my life, I can hear myself think.

15

“I’m just a crack in this castle of glass”

MAC

I hear music in my dreams. I heard such exquisite melodies during my teens that one day I decided I was fated to be a brilliant composer, put songs to paper, and share them with the world. I joined the band that very day. I even signed up for extra classes and asked Mom and Dad to hire a tutor to help me learn to read and write sheet music. I plunged into the world of an aspiring musician with enormous enthusiasm, certain of my predestined success.

In less than a month my tutor stalked out of our house and refused to come back, and the high school band director asked me to please do the entire band a favor: quit.

I have no musical talent.

My clarinet sounded like an apoplectic yak. For the brief days I blew the trumpet, a hostile-sounding pig snorted along in jerky fits and starts with the rest of the irritated band. I never knew when a sound was actually going to come out of the horn and it always startled me when it did. My violin unleashed a trio of enraged, tone-deaf banshees, and I couldn’t blow the flute well enough to make any more sound than with my lower lip on a soda bottle. Something about the pucker eluded me. The drums turned my arms into a pretzel-prison from which there was no escape. I would have given the tambourine a try—I really think I might have excelled at the hip-bump—but sadly the instrument wasn’t offered at my school. I think that’s why I love my iPod so much. I have music in my soul and can’t get it out.

This morning, like the two before it, the melody of my subconscious has been different. Three mornings in a row I’ve awakened with the strains of a symphony fading from my mind that is beyond horrific. Last night was the worst yet, as if I’m becoming attuned to it, hearing it louder, feeling it more intensely.

My psyche is bruised, my spine hot, and my stomach cramped. The new song is unlike any of the others I’ve heard in my dreams. It doesn’t leave me glowing, feeling uplifted and free, nor do I see dreamy, fantastic images while it plays.

I can use none of my usual vocabulary to describe it. I lie in bed with my head under the covers, trying to figure out what was so disturbing about the melody that I woke with pillows clenched to my ears, arms aching from the strain of having held them there half the night.

I search for words: scary? No. Worse.

Depressing? No. Worse.

Capable of making me insane if I had to listen to it too long?

Worse.

Is there worse than insane?

I roll over and poke my head from beneath the mound of pillows and blankets. I’m alone in bed, which I often am, at least while I’m sleeping, since Barrons doesn’t require it.

However, I am not alone in the room.

Without the wards on the bookstore to keep them at bay—Barrons said it would take weeks to collect more of the necessary ingredients—my grim stalkers huddle close, pressed to three sides of the bed, on the fourth roosting atop the headboard, bony shoulders hunched upward, swallowing their heads and necks. Two crouch on the bed right next to me. My pajamas have cobwebs on them. I’ve been sleeping in pj’s, not about to risk being unconscious, nude around any Unseelie.

Needless to say, sex hasn’t been happening here. Although when Barrons is touching me, or even just next to me, I enjoy the same wide berth they grant him, I don’t get off on being an exhibitionist, at least not to Unseelie.

Not only am I bitchy, bored, and too powerful for my own good, I don’t get to vent on Barrons’s big, hard body, and I’m massively overdue for it. I’m beginning to think it’s all some part of the universe’s conspiracy to see just what it takes to make MacKayla Lane snap.

Like a wake of vultures, every last one of them is facing me, peering down.

Well, in as much as they might face me, peering down, considering I’ve never seen beneath those voluminous hoods and can’t even say whether they have faces or eyes. I used to think they were clothed. They’re not. The dusty, cobwebbed, cowled cloaks they wear have the texture of black chicken skin and are part of them.

Ryodan said they were the caste that once attended the king in his private chambers. Do they stalk me—not because the Book within me deliberately summoned them—but because, like K’Vruck, they sense me as part of the king they once served? If so, when the king takes the Book out of me, they should vanish, too.

At the moment they’re mute. Not a chitter, not a rustle.

I find their silence nearly as disturbing as the dark symphony of my dreams. Had it gotten so loud they could hear it in my head? Did it button the lips of even my loquacious tormentors?

I wonder if, like the vultures they resemble, they, too, have highly corrosive stomach acid that makes them capable of digesting putrid carcasses infected with bacteria and parasites dangerous to their species.

At least they don’t vomit like vultures when threatened or urinate straight down their legs to cool themselves and kill the bacteria they pick up wading through rotting corpses.

Good the fuck morning to me.

It’s a broody one, as usual.

“Back up, you bastards,” I mutter, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed.

They don’t. They brush against my pajama bottoms, leaving it covered with cobwebs and yellow dust.

I can’t get back to BB&B fast enough. At least there I slept in peace, got to have sex, and woke in a room free of vermin.