Nothing happened.
I sighed. Extreme emotion and extreme arousal can short out my sidhe-seer powers, and it always happens at the worst possible times. I’d been working on the extreme emotion flaw and had made progress with it. It wasn’t quite as easy to master the other fault: I had to get aroused to work on it and…well, that hadn’t happened in a while. I cast rapidly about for another option, finding only one. It was a long shot.
“Give it to me now,” AOZ commanded, “and I’ll kill him with it. The Faerie permit only slaves to live and demand worship. We aren’t and don’t.”
As Jayne’s glamour continued to fall by slow degrees—still allowing me time to hand it over willingly—I glanced down to where both of my hands were wrapped tightly around the hilt of my sword. I shuddered as his inhuman sexuality began nudging the edges of my mind, looking for a sweet spot, an easy way in. He was trying to do as little damage as possible. For the moment.
Shivering violently, teeth chattering, I ground out, “Y-You’re w-w-willing to sh-shatter my m-mind for it?” What do you think your queen will do to you? my eyes blazed. I felt tears slip from them as I met his gaze, and didn’t need a mirror to know I was weeping blood.
He said sadly, “Ah, Dani, she will most certainly kill me. But she will have the sword. I’m willing to die to protect our race and yours from these vermin.”
He’d said “our race,” and “yours.” There it was. I knew it. His allegiance was to the Fae, not us. I closed my eyes, grinding my teeth together against the cruel teeth of power now tearing aggressively into the edges of my mind. When I was younger, I experienced a Fae prince’s compulsion twice. And survived. I was older and wiser now.
I took my long shot, focused on the ice in my hand. I welcomed it, beckoned it to spread throughout my body, course through my veins with absolutely no idea what I was embracing. In a battle for your life, your sanity, your race, the weapon you have is the one you use.
I felt a sudden prick of pins and needles through my entire body, a buzzing deep in my flesh as if my limbs were waking up from a long time of being numb. My skin cooled and shivered on my bones, feeling strangely elastic and supple. Blood thunder crashed in my head, slamming against the confines of my skull, as whatever the Hunter had left beneath my skin responded.
And flexed.
And grew.
A wave of dizziness took me and I nearly stumbled as sudden stars exploded behind my eyes and I had a fleeting glimpse of a vast, nebula-drenched nightscape superimposed in the air in front of me. Then it was gone and the inside of my head felt calm and cool and silent as the deepest reaches of space.
I didn’t have time to analyze it. Didn’t think. Just opened my eyes and flung my left hand at Inspector Jayne.
The prince sifted out a mere fraction of a second before the bolt of pale blue lightning exploded in the precise spot he’d been standing. The crackling energy struck the south wall of the room, blowing it apart from floor to ceiling. Plaster exploded, wood splintered, and bricks tumbled away, leaving a gaping hole where the wall had been.
My dresser listed dangerously on the edge then plunged four floors to the street below.
Snarling, I whipped my gaze to AOZ.
He dematerialized instantly into a cloud of murky green fog that compacted, narrowed down to a tight stream, and shot out through the opening blasted in the room.
I stood there a moment, leveling my breath, waiting, while the energy surging through my arm ebbed, until at last it was gone. My legs felt like noodles and my hands were trembling.
So much for my warding abilities. They’d failed to keep out both old god and Fae. Push come to shove, I might end up having to sleep on the heavily warded private residence levels of Chester’s, and I so didn’t want to do that. Then again, I had no idea if they were warded against gods.
I pushed the sleeve of my tee up and inspected myself. My arm was black all the way up to my shoulder, with thin tentacles of dark veins spreading across my left collarbone.
I let the sleeve drop and looked out over my bed into the pale morning beyond where a sea of rooftops stretched, and farther out, the whitecaps of a slate gray ocean. A heavy drizzle had begun to fall, and a sudden breeze gusted rain in, soaking my fluffy white comforter.
I rolled my eyes. My bedroom had been through hell in the past few hours.
But every rain cloud really did have a silver lining.
At least it didn’t smell so bad anymore.
When I was nine years old, Rowena told me a dangerous caste of Fae had infiltrated our city. Slender, diaphanous, beautiful, with a cloud of gossamer hair and dainty features, they were capable of slipping inside a human, and taking over their limbs and lives completely.
Once they assumed a human “skin,” they were no longer detectable to sidhe-seers and, thus camouflaged, vanished forever beyond our reach to prey endlessly upon our race.
This made them a most deadly threat to our order, she told me in a hushed voice, who could possess her charges at the abbey at any time; in fact, she confided, they had.
But—and there was always a but with the old bitch—she had a special charm that she, and she alone as Grand Mistress of sidhe-seers, could employ to see inside a person to the despicable, life-stealing Fae within.
At nine, nothing seemed far-fetched to me. I’d fully expected to find the world beyond my cage as densely populated by superheroes and villains as my world on the telly.
For nearly a year Rowena steered me down the corridors of our abbey as she inspected her girls, guided me out into the streets and alleys and businesses, where we hunted the dastardly villains, a secret team of two tasked with a great, secret mission that made me feel important and good.
And when she’d identify a Gripper with the charm that never worked for me, we’d return to her office at the abbey where, with great gravity and ceremony, she’d place the luminous Sword of Light across my upturned palms and command me to save our order, perhaps even our world.
She taught me to be quick and stealthy about it. She told me how and where to stab and slice and kill. No one suspects a child, not even when they carry a sword. Most thought it a toy. I rarely needed to employ extreme velocity to complete my mission. It was easy to get close. Adults fret over lost, crying children.
Do whatever you must to save our world: no deceit or ploy unjust, she’d taught me. The end justifies the means.
I’ve come to understand the means define you.
Although they are exceedingly rare, Grippers exist.
That wasn’t a lie.
There is, however, no charm that allows anyone to see them.
I took twenty-three lives that year and I don’t know why. Mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, I carved holes in their families, shattering their hearts and their worlds. Perhaps they crossed her in business dealings. Perhaps they looked at her wrong at the post office. Regardless, none of them had been possessed. In one of her journals that I didn’t find until I was older, chronicling her own greatness with chilling narcissism, Rowena had penned: “The child was sent to Me to address my grievances and right those wrongs done Me, controlled by a penurious toy I purchased from a street vendor.”
I don’t know why she stopped either. Perhaps there were only twenty-three names on her most-hated list. Perhaps so many murders by sword garnered too much attention from the Garda and she’d not wanted me caught and placed behind bars. Though she’d instructed me to hide the corpses, many were eventually found. The universe has a way of betraying those secrets we endeavor to hold near.
The day I learned what I’d done, I decided there were only three courses of action open to me.
Kill myself because I was a monster, too.
Live the rest of my life hating myself, unable to ever atone, consumed by a heart of darkness that would cast no light into a world that badly needed some.
Or lock the past up in a box with those other murders and carry a heart—as pure as it had once been—into the present, determined to do better, inscribing the Latin motto on the tatters of my soul: Actus me invito factus non est meus actus. Acts done by my body against my will are not my acts.
I knew each of my victim’s names and was able to locate most of their families.
I protect them still.
High voltage, the unforgettable sound
I PARKED MY MOTORCYCLE IN front of the abbey, grabbed the backpack that held a change of clothing for later, and loped into the front entrance of the ancient fortress wearing ripped jeans, boots, and a white tank top that did nothing to conceal what was wrong with my arm. I wasn’t going to hide whatever was happening to me; isolated soldiers are a sniper’s favorite target. My sword was slung over my back, knives in my boots, but in deference to the children on the estate, I carry no guns inside those walls. I can’t bear the thought of an innocent coming to harm as a result of my carelessness.