Holy water splashing, hissing on steel.

A church.

I shut down. Walls slam in my heart, my mind. I will not go there. There is/was/will never be a church in my existence.

I look up at him.

I know him. I do not trust him. Or is it me I do not trust?

“You are my lover,” I say.

He sighs and rubs his jaw. “Mac, we have to leave this room. It’s bad out there. It’s been months. I need you back.”

“I am right here.”

“What happened at the”—he breaks off, his nostrils flare, and a muscle works in his jaw—”church?”

It seems he does not want to hear about what happened at this church any more than I want to know about it. If we are in agreement on this, why does he push?

“I do not know that word,” I say coolly.

“Church, Mac. Unseelie Princes. Remember?”

“I do not know those words.”

“They raped you.”

“I do not know that word!” My hands are fists; my nails hurt me.

“They took your will. They took your power. They made you feel helpless. Lost. Alone. Dead inside.”

“You should have been there!” I snarl, but I have no idea why. I was never at a church. I am shaking violently. I feel like I might explode.

He drops to the floor on his knees in front of me and grabs my shoulders. “I know I should have!” he snarls back. “How the fuck many times do you think I’ve relived that night?”

I beat at him with my fists, hard. I punch him and punch him. “Then why weren’t you?” I shout.

He does not resist my blows. “It is complicated.”

“‘Complicated’ is just another word for ‘I screwed up and am making excuses!’” I yell.

“Fine. I screwed up!” he yells back. “But I only ended up stuck in Scotland because you asked me to go help the bloody damned MacKeltars!”

“And there you go making excuses!” I stare at him, furious, betrayed, and I do not know why.

“How was I supposed to know? Do I look omniscient?”

“Yes!”

“Well, I’m not! You were supposed to be at the abbey. Or back in Ashford. I tried to send you home. I tried to get you to go to Scotland. You never do what I tell you to do. Where the fuck was your fairy little prince? Why didn’t he save you?”

“I do not know those words—fairy, prince.” They burn my tongue. I hate them.

“You do, too! V’lane. Remember V’lane? Was he there, Mac? Was he at the church? Was he?” He shakes me. “Answer me!”

When I say nothing, he repeats in that strange multilayered voice he sometimes uses, “Was V’lane there when you were raped?”

V’lane failed me, too. I needed him and he did not come. I shake my head.

His grip on my shoulders relaxes. “You can do this, Mac. I’m here. You’re safe now. It’s okay to remember. They can never hurt you again.”

Oh, yes, they could. I will not remember, and I will never leave this room.

Here there are things that keep the monsters away.

I need those things. Right now.

His body. His lust. Erases it all.

I push him back on the floor, frantic with need. He responds savagely. We explode at each other, grabbing fistfuls of hair, kissing, grinding our bodies together. Rolling across the floor. I want to be on top, but he flips me over and pushes me forward, spreading me. Licks and tastes me until I come and come, then carries me to the bed and covers me with his body. When he pushes himself inside me, in my anger I push, push, push back at him with that magic place inside my head, because I am sick of him stirring up things inside me. It is my turn to stir things up inside him, and

—we are in his body, both of us, and we are killing violently, and our cock is hard while we do it. It never felt good to kill before. It never felt bad, either, but now it exhilarates. Now it is power, it is lust, it is being alive. The children are dead, the woman cold, the man dying. Bones crunch, blood sprays—

He knows I am there. He shoves me out with such violence that it flattens my magic completely. I am awed by his strength. It excites me.

Our sex is primitive.

It exhausts me. I sleep. I do not know who I am anymore.

I thought I was an animal.

I am no longer so sure.

* * *

It’s hard to say what makes the mind piece things together in a sudden lightning flash.

I’ve come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit, too, has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows when the harm is too much to bear. If it deems the injury too great, the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it. For some people, that time never comes. Some stay fractured, forever broken. You see them on the street, pushing carts. You see them in the faces of the regulars at a bar.

My cocoon was that room.

After Barrons left—I later realized he often left while I slept—I dreamed.

Some say dreaming is another place we go. That we don’t know it as such because it’s not a physical realm we recognize. It exists in another dimension, which mankind has not yet discovered and to which it attributes no credence.

I dreamed my life back.

Alina and I playing, laughing, running hand in hand, chasing butterflies with nets, but we don’t catch them, because who wants to trap a butterfly in a net? Too fragile, too delicate. You don’t want to break their wings. Like sisters and love. You have to be vigilant with precious things. I fell asleep on my watch. I wasn’t vigilant. I didn’t hear the undercurrents in her voice. I was lazy and ignorant in my happy pink world. A cell phone dropped into a pool. Ripples spreading on the surface. Everything changed forever.