Burned - Moning Karen Marie - Страница 9

Jericho Barrons is an unshakable, undestroyable constant. He’s the cornerstone of my universe. Or maybe together they are. I don’t know. I only know as long as the two of them and BB&B still stand, some part of me that never used to feel okay, does.

I can’t help myself — I watch them a sec. I love watching them together. I slow-mo it to absorb every detail.

Mac draws up short to keep from slamming into Barrons, and her blond hair swings back over her shoulder, brushing his face as it does, and my hearing is so good I catch the rasp of it chafing the shadow stubble on his jaw, then one of his hands grazes her breast and his eyes narrow when he looks at what he touched in a hungry way I want a man to look at me like one day and, as they continue to recover from the near-collision, their bodies move in a graceful dance of impeccable awareness of precisely where the other is at all times that is unity, symbiosis, partnership I only dream of, wolves that chose to pack up and hunt together, soldiers who will always have each other’s backs no matter what, no sin, no transgression too great, ’cause don’t we all transgress sometimes and it fecking slays me, because once I got a little taste of what that was like, and it was heaven and they’re so beautiful standing there, the best of the best, the strongest of the strong, that they practically glow to me, on fire with all I ever wanted in my life — a place to belong and someone to belong there with.

Together they mean to kill me and go on living, all happy, like I didn’t even mean anything. They’ll eat and have sex and adventures and I’ll be nothing but six feet under in dirt — assuming anyone even bothers to bury me. Gone. Over. Finis. Done. Quit. Before I ever even got the chance to live.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been hap—

I terminate that idiotic train of thought. As soon as my sidhe-seer gifts come back, I’ll get over this wimpy little emotional meltdown I’m having. Losing the superpowers that make me special plus seeing Mac up close and personal for the first time since she found out what I did is temporarily messing with my head. Key word there, temporarily.

Fourteen blows.

Hormones suck.

I wish I’d just grow the hell up in a hurry and everything would even out and start to make sense and folks would stop seeing me as a kid and I could finally—

Bugger it all! What am I waiting for?

I close my hand on the hilt of my sword and dive headfirst into the mirror, laughing as I go. I always crack up when I leap into the unknown. It’s cotton-candy fuel, there’s a big-top tent full of carnival magic in a good belly laugh.

Next grand adventure here I come!

The last thing I hear is Mac shouting, “Oh, God, no, Dani, not that one! We moved them! That one goes to—”

2

“—the Hall of All Days!”

If not infinite, the ancient Fae “airport” that serves as hub for a nexus of Silvers is so vast it isn’t worth splitting hairs over.

Fashioned of gold from floor to ceiling, the endless corridor is lined with billions of mirrors that are portals to alternate universes and times and exudes a chilling spatial-temporal distortion that makes you feel utterly inconsequential — think dust mote in a galaxy-sized barn.

Time isn’t linear in the hall, it’s malleable and slippery and you can get permanently lost in memories that never were and dreams of futures that will never be.

One moment you feel terrifyingly alone, the next as if an endless chain of paper-doll versions of yourself is unfolding sideways, holding cutout construction-paper hands with thousands of different feet in thousands of different worlds, all at the same time.

Compounding the many dangers of the hall, when the Silvers were damaged by Cruce’s curse (a thing he tried to blame on his Unseelie brothers, in typical Cruce fashion), the mirrors were corrupted and the image they now present is no guarantee of what’s on the other side. A lush rain forest may lead to a parched, cracked desert, a tropical oasis to a world of ice, but you can’t count on total opposites either. No handy Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is propped on a convenient foyer table, near a cool beverage and tasty snack inside those time-tortured walls.

Barrons steps between the mirror and me, folds his arms across his chest, and spreads his legs wide. He’s a tall, dark mountain of man I can’t push my way through or around. I meet his implacable gaze and we have one of our wordless discussions.

But we have to—

No we don’t.

But we can’t—

Yes we can.

But she doesn’t—

She’ll figure it out.

But it’s—

Not your fault and not your problem.

But I’m the one—

Bloody hell, Ms. Lane, how many “buts” are you going to throw at me besides the only one I want? He rakes a hungry gaze over my ass and I shiver.

After all we’ve been through together, he still calls me Ms. Lane, with one exception: when I’m in his bed. Or on the floor, or some other place where I’ve temporarily lost my mind and become convinced I can’t breathe without him inside me.

“Sometimes I don’t know why I even bother talking to you.”

He lifts a brow an infinitesimal amount in a silent makes two of us.

Barrons thinks words are pointless and dangerous. If I played it his way, we’d rarely speak, ocular or otherwise. Funny thing is, the more time I spend around him, the more I understand why he feels that way.

“But she’s in the hall. It’s a terrible place. I’ve been there. People don’t escape.” During my brief time in those ancient corridors, the glossy, seductive floors had been littered with skeletons. I’d nearly become one of them. In those mindbending halls, you could live any reality you chose, die on the floor believing you were living a genuine, happy life somewhere real. The place is a consummate mind-fuck.

“You did,” he says aloud.

“That’s different. I’m the exception. To a lot of things.”

A corner of his mouth lifts. “Modest, too. So is she.”

“I had the stones.” Chiseled from the Unseelie King’s realm, they’d reacted to each portal I went through, changing the way the environment behaved and working ultimately to expel me.

“If you follow her through, you will only force her to take the nearest escape route. Any door, any Silver. She’s not going to stop running from you. What if she chooses a world that has no air or is too close to a sun? She needs time to use that powerful brain of hers. You made it out. She will, too. Drop it. There are other things you need to be focused on. Besides,” his gaze locks on mine, then I feel like he’s sweeping my eyeballs aside and sifting through my mind, analyzing, discarding, hunting, “ah, yes, I thought as much. You’re not ready yet. You will leave her alone until you are.”

Autocratic has a picture of Barrons next to it in the dictionary. Unfortunately so does addictive. I poke Unseelie on both sides with my elbows and change the subject. “Haven’t you found a way to get rid of them yet? It’s been months.”

One after another black-cloaked, chittering wraiths continue to pop through the portal behind me. I have no idea why they’ve chosen me to stalk. I’m swiftly becoming the only human in an Unseelie sardine can, and just as smelly. It’s bad enough they stalk me, but where they brush against me they leave a greasy, pungent yellow dust on my clothes. That’s the least of the reasons I want them gone.

With rare exceptions — like tonight, when they inexplicably decided to roost up high — they make it impossible to fight. I can’t get to my enemy without first slaughtering a few dozen of the ones smothering me. By the time I slice and stab my way clear, whatever I really wanted to kill has disappeared. My sidhe-seer talent, nulling, or freezing them in place for a few seconds, doesn’t work on them.