When I finish, there are no pieces larger than my fist.

I’m shaking, gasping, covered with bits of flesh and gray matter from smashing their skulls.

Feed ussh again! they’d demanded.

I double over and hit the pavement, puking. I puke until I dry-heave, then I dry-heave until my ears ring and my eyes are stinging.

I don’t have to look behind me to know she’s long gone.

I finally got what I came to Dublin for.

I know who killed my sister.

The girl I’d begun to think of as my sister.

I curl in a tight ball on the cold pavement and cry.

37

As I stepped out of the shower, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. It wasn’t pretty.

In all the time I’d been in Dublin, with all the horrors I’ve encountered, I’ve never seen quite this expression on my face.

I look haunted. Haunted is all about the eyes.

I feel haunted.

I came here for revenge. I brace my palms on either side of the bathroom sink and lean close into the mirror, studying myself.

Who’s in there, behind my face? A king that wouldn’t think twice about killing a fourteen-year-old girl I love? Loved. Hate her now. She took my sister to an alley, gave her to monsters that slaughtered her.

I can’t even think things like why? It doesn’t seem to matter. She did it. Res ipsa loquitur as Daddy would say. The thing speaks for itself.

I don’t have the emotional energy to dry my hair or put on makeup. I dress and drift downstairs where I slump on the sofa in the rear seating area, as thunder rolls in the leaden sky. The day is so thick with rain that it looks like dusk at noon. Lightning crashes.

I’ve lost so much. And gained precious little.

I’d had Dani in the gains column.

Finding out who killed Alina made the pain of her death fresh again. It made it all too visual for me. I’d told myself she died instantly and whatever had been done to her had happened postmortem. I knew better now. While they’d slowly drained her, she lay there scratching a clue into the pavement for me. I sat, torturing myself with thoughts of her torture, as if that might accomplish something useful, besides torturing myself.

Leftover cake mocked me on the coffee table. Unopened presents teetered nearby. I’d baked a cake for my sister’s murderer. I’d wrapped presents. I’d painted her nails. I’d sat and watched movies with her. What kind of monster was I? How could I have been so blind? Were there clues I’d never noticed? Had she ever slipped? Revealed knowledge of Alina she shouldn’t have had but I hadn’t been paying enough attention?

I dropped my head in my hands and squeezed, rubbing my temples, tugging my hair.

The journal pages!

“She has Alina’s journal,” I said, incredulous. The journal pages that had shown up for a brief timehad made no sense to me. They’d never really told me anything and they’d appeared at the strangest times. Like the day Dani had brought my mail in and there’d been one in the stack. In a thick, fine envelope, just the kind a corporation like Rowena’s might use.

But why would she have given me those entries? They’d pretty much just been about …

“How much Alina loved me.” Tears stung my eyes.

The bell over the door tinkled.

I rose in a half crouch and waited. Who was here in the middle of the day?

My muscles stayed tense, and my gut tightened with anticipation. I eased back down to the sofa.

I responded that way to only one man. Jericho Barrons.

I was lost in grief and fury and hated being alive. And still I wanted to stand up, stripping as I went, and have sex with him right here on the bookstore floor. Was that the sum total of my existence? I didn’t get the erudition of I think therefore I am. Instead, I got I am, therefore I want to fuck Jericho Barrons.

“Got a little messy in my back alley, Ms. Lane.” His voice floated around bookcases, preceding him.

Not nearly as messy as I’d’ve liked. I wished I had those Unseelie bastards alive right now to kill all over again. How was I going to do what I was supposed to do?

Maybe I could just take her to an alley and give her to some monsters to die. She would be hard to catch, but my dark, glassy lake was stirring, whispering, offering all kinds of assistance, and I knew that I had more than enough juice to catch the kid. To do anything I wanted. There was something very cold inside me. Always had been. I wanted to welcome it now. Let it chill my blood and frost all my emotions until there was nothing left in me that was haunted because there was nothing left in me.

“The rain’ll clean it up.”

“I don’t like messes on my—”

“Jericho.” It was plea, lament, and benediction.

He stopped speaking instantly. He appeared around the last bookcase and stared at me. “You can say it that way anytime, Mac. Especially if you’re naked and I’m on top of you.” I could feel his gaze on me, searching, trying to understand.

I didn’t understand myself. The plea had been to not pick on me right now. Sarcasm would undo me. The lament had been a sharing of my pain, because I knew he understood pain himself. The benediction was the part I couldn’t explain. As if he was sacred to me. I looked up at him. He’d been with my alleged mother the night she’d left the abbey, the night the Book had escaped, and never told me. How could I revere him? I didn’t have the energy to confront him. Learning that Dani had killed Alina had left me feeling like a popped balloon.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” he said finally.