Or maybe it knew something I didn’t, and I really could die and was about to kill myself by slicing a necessary vein.

Whatever the reason, I was abruptly visible.

I gazed down at my body, so happy to see myself that I didn’t move for a few seconds. Then I stretched a leg and admired it. Flexed my toes. Examined my fingernails. They were a mess. Short, ragged, and unpolished. Criminy. I needed to trim. And my skin was dry. How could my skin be dry when it rained all the time here?

Okay, so maybe I was postponing my barbaric surgery a bit by reveling in the lovely vision of my badly groomed body. I’d missed me.

God, it was good to be back!

I studied my thigh clinically, with a complete absence of fear, pain, or really any kind of concern at all, made a deep surgical slice and started digging around. Blood pooled, evaporated, pooled.

Wow, it was rather interesting in there. I’d never looked at myself on the inside before. What a miracle the body was. What a shame the composition was organic and stamped with such a finite expiration.

But not me, I marveled as I dug. For the first time since learning I’d been tampered with via an unidentified Fae elixir, I felt a small flush of pleasure at the prospect of a longer life. Hated the things that might be done to me in my enhanced condition, loved the idea of more sunrises, more nights with Barrons, more time to try to figure life out.

“Focus, Mac,” I muttered. The bullets were only my most immediate problem. I had a whole list of others, the least of which was discovering who’d ratted out all my secrets.

My skin was already trying to close around the blade. With Unseelie flesh in me, I was healing even faster than I had before. I realized I had to keep slicing while I had the knife in there, moving the blade back and forth. It was curiously like operating on someone else’s body. I barely felt it.

It took me two tries to get the bullet out of my thigh. Three to get the one in my arm out.

Of course, that’s how he found me.

Sprawled on the floor with a couple of chunks of misshapen metal nestled in the valley between my leg and hip, a switchblade in one hand, alcohol which I hadn’t had time to use in another, a feral look of triumph on my face. I might have even been laughing a little.

Butt-ass naked.

6

“Remember when I moved in you and the holy dove was moving, too…”

I felt drugged. I was drugged, high on my victory over the bullets, blood pounding with immortal strength, stamina, and lust.

My mind registered Barrons, my body said: Let’s get down and dirty. I’m in the perfect condition for it. Last time I’d eaten Unseelie flesh, he’d been killed a few minutes later. I’d suffered both the high and withdrawal alone. Had endured most of the high getting home from Germany, trying not to think or feel too much.

How long had it been since we’d devolved into an animalistic, no holds barred fuck-fest? What in the world had been wrong with me?

I knew the answer to that question. It was the thing I was keeping to myself, cocooned inside, a voracious worm in the rotten apple that was MacKayla Lane O’Connor.

Now, with the impunity and belligerence of an Unseelie-flesh high riding me, Barrons standing there looking half savage, half man, and no immediate threats to my existence, I had a single imperative. I was clarified—the Mac I used to be, back in more ways than one. Maybe this was what I needed to do to get through the days until I’d sorted out my many messes. Become an addict.

I’d never had sex with Barrons while I was amped up on Unseelie but I’d enormously wanted to. The small taste I’d gotten in Mallucé’s grotto had infiltrated my dreams, tantalized me, goaded me to indulge again. Pri-ya was horrific. It made you mindlessly insatiable, little better than a puppet.

But an Unseelie-flesh high was fully aware unquenchable lust—with an unbreakable body. If we fucked too hard, so what? My skin would heal even as we were doing it, letting me have more and more. We could do that thing I loved to do so much, that drove Barrons absolutely bugfuck crazy, with no repercussions.

I shivered with lust, suddenly understanding the See-you-in-Faery girls more than I wanted to.

Our eyes locked and I jerked.

Fucking river of blood in my House.

I actually saw the capital H in his eyes and knew Barrons’s House was whatever he’d claimed as his own, and nobody, but nobody, shit in it. There would be hell to pay, and I wasn’t certain I wouldn’t steer him in Brody’s direction before the night was through. I’ve learned a thing or two during my time in Dublin: when you let the bad guy walk, he comes back. Until you don’t let him walk.

Paint, I corrected. But his primal senses had told him that before he’d even walked in the front door. The man could smell if I was having my period. Or even just close to starting it.

Barrons snarled, black fangs flashing, and I realized walking through the bookstore in its current condition must have awakened a memory from another time when he’d stalked a battlefield of blood, wondering what he would find. Most likely discovering everyone he knew—with the exception of his immortal companions—dead. I wondered how long he’d had to live before he quit letting himself have one ounce of interest in a human. How it must have felt to lose everyone around him like I’d lost Alina. Oh, yes, easier not to care. To ultimately let oneself revile.

Barrons’s beast is always close to the surface. I sometimes wonder if one day he won’t simply change, lope away, and never walk as a man again. Go be pure in the form that makes the most sense to him, on some other world, in a skin that’s much harder to kill and, for him, much easier to live in.