Her hands curled into fists.
“Ryodan, we’ve got problems. Mac’s gone. She tried to save us from the Sweeper by using the Sinsar Dubh. When she took a spell from it, the Book possessed her. I can’t find Barrons. I don’t know if Mac is still in there somewhere. I do know the Book will destroy everything it comes in contact with.” She paused then said flatly, “Logic dictates I kill her at the earliest opportunity.”
Which, technically, had passed.
She’d taken Mac’s spear before she’d undone her restraints, erring on the side of caution. She should have attacked the moment the Book revealed itself with its nightshade-toxic gaze. She was faster and the Book had been having obvious acclimation problems, struggling to get off the table, swaying slightly as it found footing. She could have stabbed it with the spear, cleaved it in half with her sword, ensuring the body that held the Sinsar Dubh would rot and die.
Mac’s body.
Eventually.
Slowly and horrifically.
For a woman who lived by the motto carpe momentum et cetera sequentur, she’d never wanted to seize a moment less.
She knew why and told the unconscious man heatedly. “Because friends don’t give up on friends. They never give up.”
The body on the mattress shivered but said nothing.
Lost in the Silvers versus lost in the Book: Jada didn’t perceive the odds of rescue as substantially disparate. The fallout, however, could be catastrophically different: one girl, never to be seen again, versus the earth’s total domination and destruction. Assuming the black holes didn’t destroy it first.
“Lor told me you didn’t know where I’d gone,” she told the silent room. “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t Mac’s either. People need to stop thinking they’re responsible for my actions. It wasn’t like I needed to be rescued. I’ve never needed to be rescued.” She’d always found a way to save herself.
Still, she knew intimately the despair of day after day passing, followed by nights cold, hungry, alone; of belief dying bit by bit.
Mac had sacrificed herself, to ensure Jada’s survival. If Mac hadn’t opened the Sinsar Dubh and used a spell to save them, the Sweeper would have sent horribly “fixed” versions of Mac and Jada out into the world, which might have been every bit as deadly as the Book being unleashed on it. And who could say the Sweeper’s work on Mac’s brain wouldn’t have freed the Sinsar Dubh anyway? There’d been no easy, good choices tonight, only the lesser of evils—two women destroyed or one.
Over her dead body was Mac waiting for a rescue that never came.
As she stood and moved toward the door, Ryodan muttered something too garbled for even her acute hearing to decipher.
She glanced back. “You shouldn’t be trying to talk. Rest. Heal. Get back on your feet.”
He muttered again, jerking with such violence that several pieces of spelled cloth protecting his skin fell away. When she moved to the mattress and knelt to replace them, he blew the cloth from his face and went into instant convulsions from the effort.
She didn’t tell him to stop trying to speak. Ryodan made his own decisions. Whatever he wanted to say, he badly wanted her to hear.
When he was still again, she bent near his mouth. His once beautiful face was a charred, monstrous mask, eyelids blistered, lips burned to a raw gash.
She’d done this to him. Her meltdown. Her heart the Sweeper had deemed flawed. She’d always excelled at the pretending game. But she’d taken it too far this time. She’d lost sight of what was imaginary and what wasn’t. And it had cost them all, those she hated caring about yet had never been able to stop caring about.
He spoke carefully then passed out so hard he no longer shivered. It had taken all his strength to murmur a single sentence.
Jada gently replaced the spelled cloth, eyes shining, torn between hushed awe and a fierce desire to snicker.
He’d said, Holy psychotic PCs, Robin, we’ve a murderous MacBook on the loose!
“Batman,” she said, hoping he was in a place of no pain. “This time around, I’m wearing the cape.”
She took the stairs three at a time to Mac’s room on the fourth floor.
It wasn’t there.
A room still occupied the location; it just wasn’t the same one she’d been in earlier. The cozy, messy bedroom had been supplanted in her absence by a parlor with a red crushed-velvet sofa, a faded Persian rug, crystal lamps, and a cheery fire burning in an enameled hearth.
She walked back out into the stairwell and glanced up, eyes narrowed.
When she’d left earlier to follow Mac, the stairwell hadn’t continued past the fourth floor. There’d been only a ceiling with elaborate crown molding where now a dizzying staircase ascended.
From years Silverside, Jada was accustomed to shifting spatial dimensions. Barrons Books & Baubles housed at least one powerful, distorting Silver, if not more; a mystery to be explored when time permitted. She found the Nine’s secrets intriguing to an obsessive-compulsive degree.
She located the bedroom on the sixth floor, on the left side of the corridor, not the right, shrugged out of her coat, stripped off her shirt and swapped it for one of Mac’s. Her clothing was stained with dried blood, entrails, and dusted with the pungent yellow residue of the zombie-eating-wraith straitjacket she’d briefly worn. The combined stench was overwhelming her sense of smell, diluting it. After wiping her face with a damp towel, she scrubbed down her pants and boots as well.