“Who was your first?” Failure, I didn’t add.

It snorted. “Leave it to you to remind me of that. LDL.”

Limp-dick-Luke. The town jock had remained a virgin much longer than most high school guys for a reason. He hadn’t wanted word to get out that the powerhouse on the football field wasn’t in bed. The loss of her virginity had been an epic failure. He’d never managed to get hard enough to break her hymen. But Alina had never told. Only me, and we’d christened him LDL. I’d never told either.

If my sister wasn’t dead, what had I been fighting for? Grieving? Avenging? If my sister wasn’t dead, where the hell had she been for a year?

Dani carried the blame for her death. If my sister wasn’t dead, what really happened that night in the alley?

“Rightie?” I looked at Barrons. I so didn’t want this thing—or anyone for that matter—checking out that man’s package, but there were things, intimate things, Alina and I had shared. Such as eyeing a man’s crotch and deciding which side he tucked his dick down. Alina used to say, “if you can’t tell where it is, Jr., you don’t want to know any more about it.” Because it wasn’t big enough to be noticeable.

Barrons stood, legs wide, arms folded, blocking the stairs, watching us with dispassionate calm, studying, analyzing, mining this unfolding madness for validity.

Its eyebrows rose as it looked at him. “Goodness. Serious leftie.”

Barrons shot me a lethal look.

I ignored it. I wished I could figure out something to ask the fraud that I didn’t know the answer to, because if this was some kind of projection, the Book inside me could very well have access to all the information I did. Might have “skimmed my mind” like the corporeal one for every last detail. But if I didn’t know the answer, I couldn’t confirm it. Complete catch-22.

You’re thinking with your brain, Ms. Lane. It’s not your most discerning organ.

What is? I snapped silently.

Your gut. Humans complicate everything. The body knows. Humans censor it. Ask. Listen. Feel.

I blew out an angry breath and shoved my hair back. “Tell me about your childhood,” I said again.

“How do I know you’re not the Sinsar Dubh, playing games with me?” it said.

“Ditto,” I said tightly. “Maybe what’s inside me is merely projecting you.” And I was lost in a vortex of illusions.

Understanding manifested in its eyes as it absorbed what I’d said. “Oh, God, neither of us know for sure. Shit, Jr.!”

“You never used to say—”

“I know, fudge-buckets, petunia, daisies, frog. We made up our own cuss words.” It snorted and we both blurted at the same time, “Because pretty women don’t have ugly mouths.”

It laughed.

I bit my tongue. Hating that I’d spoken with the imposter. The inflection so much the same. Cant of head nearly identical. I refused to laugh. Refused to share one moment of camaraderie with a thing that simply couldn’t exist.

“How is the Book inside you? I don’t understand,” it said. “And why hasn’t it taken you over? I heard it corrupted anyone that touched it.”

“I’m the one asking the—”

“And exactly why is that? If you really are Mac, with the Book inside you somehow, and you aren’t corrupted, and I really am your older sister”—it emphasized its seniority just like Alina would have—“and I’m not dead, don’t I deserve a little understanding?” It frowned. “Mac, is Darroc really dead? I can’t find him anywhere.” Its face seemed to tremble for a moment, threaten to collapse into tears, then it stiffened. “Seriously. Tell me about Darroc and what the heck happened to Dublin, and I’ll tell you about my childhood.”

I sighed. If this was somehow magically my sister, she was as stubborn in her own way as I was. If it wasn’t, I still obviously wasn’t going to get anywhere unless I bartered a bit.

So, I filled it in on Darroc’s pointless death when the Book had popped his head like a grape and gave it a scant sketch of recent events. Then I folded my arms and leaned back against the wall.

“Your turn,” I said to the softly weeping woman.

27

“Ya’ll oughta stop talking

start trying to catch up motherfucker…”

Jada knifed into the night, sharp, hard, and deadly.

This she understood. Killing made her feel alive.

She chose to believe she’d been born the way she was—not mutated as Rowena’s journals had implied with endless self-aggrandizement—and this was her gift to her beloved city: cleansing the streets of those who would prey on innocents.

It didn’t signify if her victims were Fae or human.

If they destroyed, they were destroyed. She knew a thing about human monsters: they were often the worst kind.

Killing those who killed was clean, simple, a calling. It distilled her, burned her down to fierce white light inside. Few had the taste for it. It was messy. It was violent. It was personal, no matter how impersonally she dealt the death blow, because at some point, whether Fae or human, their eyes met, and psychopaths and monsters also had plans, goals, investment in their existence, and resented dying, hated it, flung slurs and curses, sometimes begged with fear-slicked eyes.

She’d once thought she and Mac were the perfect pair. Mac could kill as coldly and competently, though not as quickly.

Each rabid dog Jada put down saved the lives of countless good people, normal people unlike her, those who cared and could make the world a better place for the children, for the old ones, for the weaker ones who should be protected. She knew what she was and wasn’t, never a daily need filler, but a big-picture woman.