I move near, tip back my head, and wet my lips.

When he steps forward, mouth descending, arms extending, I slam both hands into his chest, plastering handfuls of dripping crimson runes to his skin, preventing him from sifting, freezing him in place.

His eyes flare and he roars with rage, struggling against the runes, which of course only makes them stronger, faster.

I slap a rune onto his mouth, stitching it closed.

Moving with the heightened speed that eating Unseelie flesh bestowed on my vessel, I slam rune after rune onto his body, cover his mouth, then use one of my knives to hack his wings from his body and fillet them into tiny bits. Like the day I dismembered the Gray Woman, I slice and slash in a frenzied rush of power and the mighty Cruce falls before me. Despite his superior form, no one is superior to me. He is nothing. With MacKayla’s body, I can carve reality into whatever shape I desire.

I AM.

I slice, sever. Blood runs. Ebon feathers fall. The bird in the bush may not be mine but I can cripple and break it.

I strip the three amulets from his neck, drop them around mine, summon more runes and finish spinning his bloody cocoon.

Slowly. Bit by carefully chosen bit. To make absolutely certain he’s aware of everything that has happened, and is happening. I watch his eyes, drink his despair, blot his vision last. His suffering is exquisite.

WE ARE DESIRE, LUST, GREED, AND THE PATH WE CHOOSE TO SUPREMACY.

Not one thing less. Not one thing more.

Those that conquer.

Take notes. Once you truly, deeply, intimately understand what I’m saying, you’re that much harder to victimize.

Then the game, for me, becomes that much more fun.

BETRAYED

* * *

When my mother first discovered I could freeze-frame—which isn’t nearly as cool as teleporting, it just means I can move so fast no one can see me, and they feel only a breeze as I whiz by—she began tying me to stuff to keep me close to her.

When I was really little just about anything worked: a chair, a table, the sofa where she would park me to watch cartoons while she’d frown over job ads in the paper.

I don’t know how she supported us in those early years but somehow we got by. Times got leaner, though. Food was mostly canned beans and potted meat; there was no more of that sweet creamed corn I so loved.

One day I figured out I could untie myself. Mom always said I was too smart for my own good, walking early, picking up big words and talking way before I should.

She bought a dog leash the next morning, a pretty one with pink rhinestones. It must have cost much more than she could afford to spend, but it was for her daughter, not a dog.

I snapped it within a week.

She fetched thick rope and became an expert at tying complicated knots.

But I was strong and fast and the rope frayed and split in no time. She’d say with an exasperated laugh—“Danielle Megan O’Malley, my little darling, you’re going to be as strong as ten men one day! What on earth did I give birth to, a superhero?”—and I’d preen.

She had a lot of rules for me. The world was a bad place, she said, full of bad things that hunted for little girls like me. I was special and she had to protect me, and keep me hidden.

Top on her list was no freeze-framing beyond the house. I was never to go out any of the windows or doors. OUTSIDE was a country I wasn’t allowed to visit until I was OLDER—both magical words that I heard capitalized and the color of warm butterscotch when she said them. To discourage it, she kept the shades tightly drawn, shutting out all the interesting things to see.

But I’d peek when she wasn’t watching and OUTSIDE was irresistible—there were children and puddles to splash around in and sunshine and fog and flowers and bikes and things happening, and everything was always changing, like you were living in a TV show and you got to discover the plot as you went along, even make it up and shape it yourself.

I wasn’t always great with her rules. She caught me in the yard more than a few times.

One day after she found me sitting on the front stoop, watching girls jumping rope in the yard next door, she tied me to the fridge then went and bought a thick chain and screwed a heavy bolt into the sofa. She padlocked the chain around my waist.

An hour later I smashed the lumpy green couch to smithereens, dragging it behind me, trying to freeze-frame through the doorway to the kitchen.

She stood at the kitchen counter making dinner and I giggled and giggled because I thought it was so funny to see the couch all crooked and skewed with the stuffing poking out, but she got angry and said things I never wanted to hear her say again so, for a while that felt like years to me but was probably weeks, I stayed wherever she put me until she told me I could move.

It was inevitable OUTSIDE would get me again; sneaking a peek behind the curtains, spying an ice cream vendor pushing his cart with dozens of children crowded around, licking their cones and spooning up their gooey sundaes and allowed to be OUTSIDE, and I knocked them over like little bowling pins, snatched up a whole tub of chocolate fudge caramel for myself and was back inside the house before Mom even knew I was gone. All the vendor saw was kids falling all over the sidewalk and maybe noticed a tub of ice cream missing but I’d already figured out that when grown-ups couldn’t explain something, they pretended it hadn’t happened.

I almost got away with it.

I would have gotten away with it. I even had a plan for how to get rid of the empty tub.

She brought my lunch into the living room.

I shoved the tub of ice cream behind a chair but she stayed and talked to me while I ate my beans and the ice cream melted and puddled out and she said those angry things again and I cried so hard I thought my tummy would split.