Burned, стр. 47

“Try to stop me.”

Try echoes in my mind. In my alternate reality, I hear him saying, Try, Ms. Lane, just try.

“Move away from her,” Barrons growls. “Show yourself, Jada.”

“You move,” the woman counters. “What’s behind you? Show us now!”

Move, you bastard, I’m snarling at the Clarin House.

“You will leave, immediately,” a new voice says in a cool monotone.

Barrons laughs. “I’ll leave when I’m bloody well ready.”

When I’m ready echoes, and in my cramped, rented room, Barrons closes his hands on my ribs.

“Jada, it’s here. They brought it with them!” one of the women cries.

“You aren’t welcome here. I don’t interfere with your world. Don’t interfere with mine. You’ll regret it,” that same cool monotone says.

In both realities my ribs suddenly hurt. Between Barrons’s and Ryodan’s backs, I glimpse a beautiful woman, long hair pulled back in a high ponytail that falls to her waist.

She dwindles as a peculiar tunnel vision overtakes me, then I’m seeing only Barrons’s back.

Then his face, as he stretches his big, hard body over me.

Images smash into me, one brick to my head after another, and I grimace, closing my eyes …

Barrons popping the buttons on my fly.

He makes me a deal: If I’m not wet, we won’t have sex.

If I am, we will.

I’m wet. I’m so damn wet. I’ve never been wet like this before.

He was right. With Billy James’s older brother, and all the boys before him, when it was over, I wondered what the fuss was about.

He was right: If it’s perfectly good, it’s not good enough.

And I knew that night, staring up at him, that touching this man would change my soul, alter me forever, that sex with him would blow my fucking mind.

My sister was dead.

My heart was in pieces.

I was useless and my life was meaningless.

I wanted my mind blown.

Then I’m on the floor, and his big, hard, beautiful body is on me and I’m in a rage of passion I didn’t know I was capable of feeling, grabbing his waistband, busting the zipper, feeling him shove into me, throwing back my head and roaring.

Alive. So damned alive.

“Oh, my God,” I breathe. “I had sex with you that night. All night. I didn’t even know you. I didn’t even like you.”

Barrons mutters, “Ah, fuck. Not now.”

“Jada, they set it free!”

“Are you certain?” the cool monotone says.

“Yes, wait … no it’s — wait, yes … what the hell?”

Ryodan thunders, “I want to see Jada. Get out of my way.”

Out of my way echoes. At the Clarin House, Barrons is saying, I’ll give you until nine P.M. tomorrow to get the bloody hell out of this country and out of my way. Then he bends over me and begins to speak in a voice that sounds like a thousand voices, muttering ancient words.

Here, in the abbey, I freeze.

He didn’t.

He wouldn’t.

Some things are sacred. Until you act like they’re not.

“You used Voice on me.” My lips feel numb, my tongue thick. “You took my memory away.”

“Now is not the time for it, Ms. Lane,” Barrons says tersely.

“The time for it,” I echo incredulously. “It was never the time for it.”

“Yes, Jada, I’m certain,” a woman says urgently. “They set it free!”

“Brigitte, collect the items and return with them immediately,” the cool monotone orders. “Bring Sorcha and Clare.”

“We bloody well did not,” Barrons snaps. “And I said, Ms. Lane, we will discuss this later.”

Barrons and Ryodan disappear then reappear in the middle of the group of armed sidhe-seers and guns go flying. Finally my line of vision is unobstructed! From within a blur of motion, I hear thuds of fists landing and savage female grunts. Then I see a dozen women sprawled on the floor, some holding bleeding noses, others squinting through rapidly swelling eyes, one clutching an arm to her chest that’s obviously broken. Their guns are gone, in a broken pile near the far wall.

Ryodan is standing motionless in the middle of the fallen sidhe-seers, as if he’s carved of stone, staring at the woman that must be Jada. He makes a sound like a soft implosion, a noise I’ve never heard before from any of the Nine, a ragged gasp of pure astonishment and … anguish?

Unable to fathom what could possibly elicit such a reaction from the cold, controlled man, I repress all I’m feeling — betrayal, shock, horror, bewilderment, and no small amount of fury — and move forward for a better look at the focus of his attention.

My age or slightly younger, tall, with a killer body that’s long and lean and muscled and curvy in all the right places, it’s the eyes that get me. They’re emerald ice. They lock with mine for a long, frigid moment. Stone-cold eyes, they chill me, and I’m not easily chilled.

I look down, around me, and realize all the women in the room, including Jada, are staring at me.

Belatedly, I process the comments that were being made while my world was unraveling.

Guess the “away team” ain’t so “diluted” after all. So much for my “rare” ability to sense the Book. One more way I’m no longer quite so special.

“Shit, shit, shit,” I mutter.

“She has the Sinsar Dubh!” a brunette in green camo cries, pushing herself up. “Get her!”

“Bloody. Fucking. Hell,” Ryodan says.

Women lunge up, straight for me.

Barrons moves in front of me like my personal shield. “Over my dead body.”

“It happened before,” Jada says tonelessly. “I’m certain it will again. And again. But that’s how it works with your kind, isn’t it.”

“Bloody. Fucking. Hell,” Ryodan says again.

“I can’t believe you did that to me,” I say numbly.

“Dani,” Ryodan whispers.

“For fuck’s sake, now isn’t the time. Either of you. I said we’ll discuss it later, Ms. Lane. And Ryodan, we’ll find her.” Barrons snarls, “Focus on the moment.”

“I am,” I clip stiffly. “Forgive the fuck out of me if this moment got tangled up with the one you stole from me.”

“Easy to thieve that of which one was so eager to be quit,” he barks, harsh and rapid as hostile fire.

Ryodan says carefully, “We just did.”

“Did what?” I snap, not following him at all. Things are happening too fast. My brain is rubber cement, sticky and nonabsorptive.

I should run. I’m in the abbey. They know what I am. They’re going to lock me up. Imprison me next to Cruce.

“Find Dani,” Ryodan says.

“What the fuck are you nattering about?” Barrons practically shouts.

“Who even says words like ‘natter’?” I know the answer. Men who steal people’s memories.

“I don’t natter.”

“Spell it the fuck out,” Barrons snarls.

“Jada,” Ryodan says tightly, “is. Dani.”

Part II

22

In the five days since Ryodan interred me beneath his nightclub, I have neither heard voice nor experienced another’s emotion.