End goal: put Mac down.

If Jada really is Dani, she’ll publish a cool, accusatory Jada Journal and post it all over the city long before the sun is up, outing me to the world. There’ll be no place I can hide unless I pack up and leave this planet for good with Barrons—

I’m not even talking to Barrons at the moment.

My mom and dad will know what I’ve been concealing from them for months. One daughter dead, the other damned.

The snarling blurs accelerate, darting this way and that. Brigitte goes slamming into a wall and I wince in sympathy. My bones have already begun to heal. She doesn’t have the same gift.

Gift? Longevity could be used against me just like it was against Barrons’s son. For Cruce to be influencing the environment, he must be cognizant in his icy prison in the cold stone chamber deep below the earth, aware his body is frozen, that he’s trapped. Do the minutes creep like hours? Immortal, does he tally the seconds as they tick by, stretching to hellish infinity?

You will soon know, the Sinsar Dubh reminds silkily.

As will you.

Fight, you fucking fool.

You. I dig in my mental heels, determined to outwait it, wagering my humanity against its psychopathy, betting its survival instincts will kick before mine, if only by a split second.

Make me do it, sweet thing, you won’t like it.

I’ll like it better than I’ll like killing all these people. They already think I’m the enemy. If I release the Sinsar Dubh and slaughter these women to free myself, I’ll have proved myself the enemy to anyone left alive. Including me. The rest of the abbey will come after me in force, for good reason. But I won’t even know that. I’ll be a straitjacketed bookworm burrowed into the binding of an insane, homicidal book, staring helplessly out from the pages of my own life, as they’re writ by someone else, and I’d commit atrocities that would damn a saint’s soul.

Suddenly Brigitte appears and collapses in a battered heap. I study the blurs, concluding Jada now has the stones and is trying to place them.

As they whiz around the room like small tornadoes, furniture flies, lamps topple, and bulbs shatter. Rowena’s stately study has become a shambles of trashed furniture and demolished decor.

A jolt of energy suddenly hits me and I flinch. The sensation is familiar. The night we interred the Sinsar Dubh, I had to reach both of my hands into the field generated by the stones to remove the crimson runes from the cover and felt instantly lethargic, nauseated. I’d assumed it was just another facet of my sidhe-seer senses. Now I realize how lucky I was that we’d warded the Book on top of an altar. If I’d had to actually step inside the energy field that night, I would have ended up as trapped as the Sinsar Dubh.

On the east end of the study, flush to the wall, a line of blue-black flickers and solidifies. Two of the stones have connected. They flare and begin to emit a chilling chime.

Assuming Barrons and Ryodan defeat Jada and the next two stones don’t get positioned, assuming I don’t feel the third stone flare to life and suddenly develop psychopathic tendencies of my own—where do I go from here?

Do I leave with Barrons and trust him to protect me? I can’t protect myself. I can’t use the spear with any certainty that I won’t kill again. I can’t outrun Jada. My ineffectualness chafes. God, does it chafe.

Last season’s MVP vanishing into obscurity.

Oh, yeah, I feel invisible.

I jerk again.

The third stone just connected with the other two, and I watch a second line form at the perimeter of the north wall of the study.

If the last stone is placed, two more blue-black lines will appear on the south and west ends, squaring me in, and I’ll be trapped in Cruce’s hellish, conscious stasis. They’ll collect the stones, gather them close around me as we did with the Book, then carry me down, deep into the earth where I really hate being. No crimson runes are necessary to seal the cover of my Book; my body is lock enough. It’s not like anyone can pry open my skin and read it. The brilliant wards and runes on the towering walls of the cavern will connect to the field of the stones, and intensify it.

I’ll lie upon a slab, staring up at the ceiling far above (unless adding insult to injury, they put me facedown, God, that would suck), trapped in waking paralysis, a spelled Sleeping Beauty longing for the kiss of a prince (just not Cruce!).

Am I really going to stand here and let them imprison me? Become the Disney heroine that can’t save herself?

Accept that you’re outgunned? the Sinsar Dubh mocks. Stay on the floor and don’t even try to fight? What kind of life is that? It’s now or never, sweet thing.

For the first time since the moment I withstood the temptation to take the spell and free Barrons’s son, I seriously consider opening the godforsaken book and doing whatever I must to walk out of here alive. This time, however, Barrons isn’t in my head to offer counsel and strength.

This time it’s only me facing the greatest test in my twenty-three years. What am I willing to do to survive? What price am I willing to pay?

Evil isn’t a state of being, Barrons once said to me. It’s a choice.

My life flashes before my eyes: who I was, who I am now, what I might become. Whether I can live with myself assuming I one day claw my way back to control. The casualties on my conscience, the ashes I might find myself standing in. I remember the Book killing in the streets of Dublin, remember the Beast it became as it exploded upward, terrifyingly powerful even in amorphous form.

My body would give it corporeality. Nearly immortal corporeality.