*’Times the cherry bomb blows before the Shade eats it. Some of ’em are stupid enough to eat the next one you throw in.

LEGAL DISCLAIMER!

The Dani Daily (TDD, LLC) and affiliates are NOT responsible for collateral blast damage or injury!

2

It’s funny the things people say when someone dies.
He’s in a better place.

How do you know that?

Life goes on.

That’s supposed to comfort me? I’m excruciatingly aware that life goes on. It hurts every damned second. How lovely to know it’s going to continue like this. Thank you for reminding me.

Time heals.

No, it doesn’t. At best, time is the great leveler, sweeping us all into coffins. We find ways to distract ourselves from the pain. Time is neither scalpel nor bandage. It is indifferent. Scar tissue isn’t a good thing. It’s merely the wound’s other face.

I live with the specter of Alina every day. Now I will live with Barrons’ ghost, too. Walk between them: one on my right, one on my left. They will talk to me incessantly. I’ll never escape, bridged between my greatest failures.

The day is cooling by the time I’m able to force myself to move. I know what that means. It means night is about to come slamming down on me with the finality of steel shutters on the glass façade of an upscale shop in a rundown neighborhood. I try to disentangle myself from him. I don’t want to. It takes half a dozen attempts to make myself sit up. My head aches from crying; my throat burns from screaming. When I sit up, only the shell of my body moves. My heart is still lying on the ground next to Jericho Barrons. It beats one more time, then stops.

Peace at last.

I cross my legs beneath me and stiffly push myself up. I stand like I’m a hundred years old, creaking in every bone.

If the Lord Master is hunting me, I’ve sat on this cliff’s edge for a dangerously long time.

The Lord Master, Darroc, leader of the dark Fae, bastard that tore down the walls on Halloween and turned the Unseelie hordes loose on my world.

The son of a bitch that started it all: seduced and either killed Alina or got her killed; had me raped by the Unseelie Princes, lobotomized, and turned into a helpless slave; abducted my parents and forced me into the Silvers; and drove me to this cliff’s edge, where I murdered Barrons.

If not for one ex-Fae hell-bent on regaining his lost grace and exacting retribution, none of this would have happened.

Revenge will never be enough. Revenge would be over too quickly. It wouldn’t satisfy the complexity of the needs of the creature I became while I was lying here, holding him.

I want it all back.

Everything that was taken from me.

A geyser of rage explodes in me, seeping into all the nooks and crannies my grief occupies. I welcome it, encourage it, genuflect to my new god. Ibaptize myself in its steaming, hissing fury. I give myself over. Claim me, take me, own me, I am yours.

Sidhe-seer is only a few letters away from Ban-sidhe: my birth country’s harbinger of death, that shrieking mythic creature driven by fury.

I seek that dark glassy lake in my mind. I stand on the black-pebbled beach. Runes float on the shiny ebon surface, glistening with power.

I bend, trail my fingers through the black water, scoop up two fistfuls, and offer the bottomless loch a deep bow of gratitude.

It’s my friend. I know that now. It has always been.

My fury is too vast for nooks and crannies.

I don’t try to contain it. I let it build into a dark, dangerous melody. I throw my head back, making room for it as it rises. It swells, blasts up my throat, puffs out my cheeks. When it erupts from my lips, it’s an inhuman cry that soars above the trees, rips into the air, and shatters the tranquillity of the forest.

Wolves startle awake in their dens, howling in mournful chorus; boars squeal; and creatures I cannot name scream. Our concert is deafening.

The temperature drops and the forest around me is abruptly encased in a thick silvery coating of ice, from smallest blade of grass to highest bough.

Birds flash-freeze and die, beaks parted, feeding their babies.

Squirrels ice, mid-leap, and drop like stones to the ground, where they shatter.

I glance at my hands. They are stained black, my palms cup silvery runes.

I know now where Barrons ends and I begin.

When Barrons ended, I began.

Me.

Mac O’Connor.

Sidhe-seer that a certain Seelie Prince said the world should fear.

I kneel and kiss Barrons a final time.

I do not cover him or perform any ritual. It would be for me, not him. There is only one thing left that I will do for me.

Soon, none of this will matter anyway.

I had to be ripped in half to stop feeling so torn in two. Divided, never knowing who to trust.

I’m now a woman with a single ambition.

I know exactly what I’m going to do.

And I know how I’m going to do it.

3

After leaving Barrons’ body, I travel in the direction my guardian demon had been herding me. I believe he must have wanted me to go this way for a reason.

I trust him in death like I never did in life.

What a piece of work I am.

I follow the river for miles. As he disappears behind me, so, too, do I. With each step I take, I strip off another piece of myself. The weak parts. The parts that won’t help me accomplish my goals. And if they are the so-called human parts, oh, well. I can’t feel and still survive what I’ve got to get through.

When I am certain I am ready, I stop and wait for my enemy.

He does not disappoint.