She grabbed Mac’s black leather biker jacket and began transferring her many weapons, protein bars, and last remaining energy pod. While strapping on the sword and tucking the spear into a thigh holster, she spotted the cuff she’d given Mac on the table by the bed.
She had no idea why Mac had taken it off but she wasn’t about to leave it lying around. She’d risked a great deal to take it. Crossing the room in a few long-legged strides, she shoved the cuff onto her wrist and pushed it up under the sleeve of her jacket.
A charred stuffed animal, wedged between pillows on the bed, stuffing-guts spilling from its slashed belly, watched her every move with round, shiny, reproachful black eyes.
I see you, Shazam.
She shook herself briskly. Emotion was deadly. Plans and objectives, clarifying.
She tucked the stuffing back in, tugged the edges closed and gently placed the teddy bear on a high shelf.
Then she turned, dashed down the stairs and burst out the back door, into the gloomy Dublin dawn.
She used her left hand, her sword hand, to trace the same spell she’d etched earlier to pass through the whirling tornado surrounding Barrons Books & Baubles. Black veins flared beneath her skin, licked up into her wrist, and her hand went ice cold. Many years ago she’d stabbed a Hunter with the Sword of Light and something had seemed to seep through her weapon into her fingers. She’d learned Silverside that her left hand cast better, stronger spells. It often itched and tingled, and sometimes at night she’d wake up to find her hand cold and black. Shazam had professed a special fondness for being scratched behind his ears with her left hand, claiming it felt different, but when pressed for more information, the grumpy, cranky beast had merely flashed a Cheshire smile and refused further discourse.
Shazam. Her heart hurt. Grief was a silenced wail that had no beginning or end, just a long, agonizing middle.
Inhaling deeply, she focused on her city.
She’d not seen a single person since leaving the warehouse with the exception of Ryodan, and suspected Barrons was out searching for Mac, perhaps for her as well. The streets were empty, silent, glistening gray beneath a bank of dense thunderclouds. Were it a normal morning—if there was such a thing anymore—there’d have been both Fae and humans milling in the street, but any human who’d seen the Fae gathering en masse last night had either joined up and been killed or gone to ground, fearing a death march similar to the one on Halloween when the walls between worlds had been destroyed.
As she passed the church where she’d nearly frozen to death, she scanned the black hole suspended over the rubble, assessing size and circumference. It was larger by nearly a third, exuding a gentle pull of distortion. Mac had told her she could hear music coming from the black holes, but even with her extraordinary hearing Jada couldn’t detect the faintest vibration.
She considered her current problems: Black holes devouring the world, the Song of Making lost, nearly half her sidhe-seers injured or dead, another attack on the abbey imminent until Cruce was freed or destroyed, the Unseelie King and former queen absent, Mac possessed by the Sinsar Dubh.
Banner day in Dublin. No time to print a daily.
It occurred to her that if they could find a way to control Mac/the Sinsar Dubh, it might not be entirely a bad thing that she’d opened the Book. If they didn’t hurry up and find a way to patch the black holes on their world, or at least find a way to stop them from growing, the human race had no future, and allegedly the Sinsar Dubh, scribed by the Unseelie King, contained information about the legendary Song of Making. She’d pondered that allegation at length, not certain she believed it was possible because, according to all the myths she’d uncovered about the history of the Fae royals, including the many oral stories she’d collected Silverside, the king had never succeeded in re-creating it—so how could anything about it possibly be in his Book? Maybe the Book contained clues? Bits and pieces the king had collected hinting at the true nature of the song that, with Dancer’s help, might be analyzed and improved upon? Speaking of Dancer, she had to somehow get word to him that Mac had gone postal. She wondered if he still checked their hidden cubby at the O’Connell Street Post Office, and made a mental note to drop him a message there, assuming she didn’t run into him before then. He had the uncanny knack of showing up whenever she thought really hard about him.
She eased up into the slipstream and vanished. In that higher dimension, the world slid by without friction. Buildings, people, their many messy emotions, disappeared beyond a beautiful, starry tunnel. If only she could eat enough to maintain the metabolism to fuel it, she’d live in the slipstream and never come down—a superhero, protecting her world, unseen, untouched.
She was nearly to Chester’s when she crashed into a brick wall she’d not sensed—which meant one of the Nine—and dropped back down.
Scent came before sight: Jericho Barrons. She ricocheted off his chest and went flying. With those lightning-fast reflexes that could pluck her out of freeze-frame, he grabbed her arm and stopped her from careening violently down the street.
“Dani,” he said.
She tipped her head back and stared up into eyes black as midnight, a dark, savage face. Every hair on her body stood up on end, as if charged by a sudden surge of electricity. He threw off the same kind of primal energy as Ryodan. She’d once crushed on Jericho Barrons violently. Before she realized he and Mac belonged together like earth and sky, night and day, fire and ice. She’d found tatters of legends about the Nine on some of the worlds she’d traveled Silverside, but never managed to find an origin myth, only songs and tales of nine merciless warriors who battled for gain and, despite dying, came back again and again. Unkillable, unstoppable, unbreakable, she hungered to be those many “uns” herself. No matter the price. She snatched her hand away and smoothed her hair. “It’s Jada.”