Burned, стр. 50

He smiles sadly.

It’s whispered among my clan that Dageus has glimpsed moments in the years to come. That when he traveled through time — before the Seelie Queen took away our power to navigate the centuries in hours of need — he saw hours, even days, of our lives. He’s never spoken of it, but we’ve always suspected. He has a canny sense of premonition that’s proved invaluable on more than one occasion.

I doona ken the how and when it happens, so I doona ken how to prevent it, short of locking you away and that’s no’ a life. Time is tricky. It may or may not come to pass, but if it does it will test you beyond imagining. If that hour comes, you must hold on to one thing.

I shiver again. What?

Love. You can only be broken without it. So long as the smallest spark of love, pure, protective, and good, exists within you, that which is Keltar in you will survive. You will return.

Return.

I know a harsh truth.

So long as I stay in the magnificent Highlands of my mind I will never return.

You must face the fire. I doona ken how long you must endure. You must hold on, remain aware. You must be prepared when your opportunity arises, or it will fail. Uncle Dageus laughs softly. Every man’s time comes eventually. It will not, however, be yours. With luck, you’ll live forever.

I’d stare up at him, rejecting it, refusing to believe he had any powers of prophecy. Telling myself no one lives forever (not knowing I’d turn Unseelie Prince) and his rambling only made him half mad, likely from the constant chatter of the thirteen dead Draghar within him. Then I’d torn from his grip, raced off, and refused to speak to him for days.

Now I wish I’d asked him questions, now I wish I knew what he saw, what my opportunity is because I sure as hell don’t see one.

Love?

Can I even feel it anymore?

I’ve hated everyone and everything around me since the moment I began to change. I ran from those who cared about me. I concede it’s possible my hatred hastened the changes, fed the wrong things, starved the right ones. But love? To feel it here and now? I’m not sure it’s even possible.

Och, but of course it is.

It’s what I’ve been doing all along. Like my da and all my clan before us, the Highlands are our greatest love. I was shielding myself without understanding the nuts and bolts of it. I’m not a man that could wed a woman, follow her to another country and live there. I’m wedded to my motherland, to the very soil of Scotland.

I add to those mountains and valleys the faces of those I ache for and would protect, etch them in vivid detail on the backs of my eyelids, my mother and father, my siblings Colleen and Cara and Cory, and Tara, och, my sweet, sweet Tara — the third reason I recall that evening so clearly, she took my virginity that starry night on a mossy bed near the loch and bloody hell did I love her for it, and love doesn’t die just because the person does, although it would be infinitely easier if it did — my friends and villagers and the lovely, brilliant, risk-taking, cocky Danielle O’Malley who conceals her broken heart behind a gamine grin, and I roll them all up into one ball of light and hold on.

I take a final look at my clan, inhale the scent of roast pig and potatoes, whisper a farewell to my long-dead Tara, shove away from my blessed retreat and force myself to embrace awareness.

I will be ready when my chance for escape comes.

I open my eyes and stare into the hideous face of the Crimson Hag as she slices my gut open.

Again.

24

I have a small psychotic break, overwhelmed by too many shocks to process. My brain pulls the plug on my body.

I should run. I should figure out how to make my feet move. At the moment they are neither attached to my ankles nor controlled by conscious thought.

I flip channels, my remote stuck on three train-wreck movies I can’t stop watching: IhadsexwithBarronsandhetookmymemory/theyknowI’mtheSinsarDubh/JadaisDani/WTF?

Barrons and I had sex the first night I met him. And he removed that memory like a thief in the night, as if he had every right to, when he had none. For months before I ended up in his bed (again!), he was walking around with a graphically detailed memory of every intimate carnal thing we’d done that night — and oh God was it graphic and intimate and carnal! — while I’d recalled none of it.

He knew what my ass looked like in every possible position. He knew what my face looked like when I came and that I swallow. That night, grieving and alone in a city I didn’t know, a city that had been hostile and unwelcoming since the moment I stepped foot in it, I’d become a wild thing, scrapped all my inhibitions, had sex like I’d never had it before, tried everything I’d ever wanted to try with enormous enthusiasm and not one ounce of self-consciousness.

It was no wonder he was always looking at me like he wanted to have sex. We’d had sex and he wanted it again. And I couldn’t blame him. It had been rock-your-Id-to-its-hedonistic-core phenomenal. Raw. Dirty. Mind-blowing. Addictive. I’d painted that dilapidated room with pain and passion, used sex like a bandage for the jagged wound Alina’s death had sliced into my soul.

As if that little secret exploding out of my subconscious isn’t enough to deal with, the new sidhe-seers have one among them that is my worst nightmare. The willowy brunette in army-green camo pants and tank is like me: she can sense the Sinsar Dubh. Not only am I not unique anymore, I’ve been outed.

Oh yeah, I need to run.

My feet are roots.

The third thing is perhaps the most stupefying.

I just saw Dani three weeks ago. She was fourteen. A cocky, swaggering kid.

And I’m supposed to believe this grown-up, controlled, beautiful woman is the rambunctious, sparkling-eyed teenager I chased into the Hall of All Days?

“Impossible,” I whisper, peering at her, searching for some trace of the effusive, laughing, brilliant, funny girl I know. The one I love.

It’s not there.

If it’s her, I should be relieved that she’s back and alive.

If it’s her, I’m so not.

This woman is about twenty and absolutely frigid. She doesn’t look as if she’s laughed a single day in her life.

Besides, this “Jada” has supposedly been in Dublin for a few weeks. In black leather pants, a fitted top (with a plunging neckline, and if those are Dani’s boobs life isn’t fair), and black leather jacket, she looks composed and cold as a colonel. When she runs a hand over her perfect (straight, not one ounce of curl) red hair in its perfect high ponytail that swishes her waist as she moves, I catch a quick flash of silver and gold at her wrist, the only adornment she wears. It’s not like she needs much. In addition to being stone-cold, she’s that kind of beautiful, too, with startlingly high cheekbones and arched brows above glittering eyes. Is this really Dani’s pixieish face grown up, matured from delicate with a sharply pronounced jaw to sophisticated, sculpted, and cool?

Is it possible Dani lost years in the Hall of All Days, and returned a mere week of our time later, this much older? And immediately began collecting sidhe-seers to form a small army?

Anything is possible in post-wall Dublin, and certainly in the fickle hall. Running the sidhe-seers is precisely what a grown-up Dani would try to do. Dublin and her sidhe-seer sisters always came first to her.

Still, I don’t see a trace of the “Mega” in this icy woman.

Ryodan begins to pace a slow circle around her, reminding me of the way Barrons stalked me that night he decided I had no right to something that was indisputably mine.