I woke up shivering, stood under a scalding shower until the hot water ran out. Bundled in blankets, I set up my laptop and tried to answer e-mails from my friends, but I couldn’t relate to anything they’d written about. Parties and Jell-O shots, and who was sleeping with who, and he-said/she-said just didn’t compute in my brain right now.
I slept. I dreamed again of the cold place. I repeated the scalding shower to thaw myself. I glanced at the clock. It was Monday, nine A.M. I could stay in bed all day and hide or I could lose myself in the solace of routine.
I opted for routine. Sometimes it’s dangerous to stop and think. Sometimes you just have to keep going.
I forced myself to groom. Exfoliated, masked, and shaved. I nicked my knee in the shower and smeared it with toothpaste when I got out, a trick Alina had taught me when I’d first begun shaving and butchered my ankles more than a few times. As the blood welled in the pale blue gel, tears threatened. At that moment, if I’d had the ability to slip into Faery and spend time with her again, I might have been too weak.
Blood welled in the pale blue gel.
I stared at it.
I was bleeding. I wasn’t healing. Why? I scraped the toothpaste off my wound. It bled freely, pooling in the trickles of water on my still-wet leg.
Frowning, I made a fist and punched the doorjamb. “Ow!”
Stunned, disbelieving, I punched it again. It hurt again, and my abraded knuckles began to bleed, too.
My superhuman strength was gone! And I was not regenerating!
My thoughts whirled. Mallucé had talked as if he’d eaten Unseelie constantly, even before I’d stabbed him. I’d assumed it was because it was somehow addictive.
Now I knew how: If you didn’t keep eating it, you reverted to your natural human state. Of course, Mallucé hadn’t been willing to let that happen.
I stared in the mirror, watching myself bleed. It made me think of another time I’d stood in front of this mirror, examining myself. Of crimson I’d glimpsed on myself once before.
It’s hard to say what causes things to come together in a startling flash of clarity but images suddenly bombarded me—
Splint dropping from my arm, smudges of crimson and black ink on my skin; tattoos on Barrons’ torso, Mallucé screaming that he’d left the cuff in the alley, demanding to know how Barrons had tracked us; me chained to a beam in the garage, tattooing implements nearby—
—and I had a small epiphany.
“You bastard,” I breathed. “It was all a ruse, wasn’t it? Because you were afraid I’d find out that you’d already done it.” Games within games, true Barrons form.
I began examining every inch of my skin in the mirror. I’d planned to hide it, he’d said.
I poked, I prodded. I looked beneath my breasts. I checked between the cheeks of my behind with a hand mirror and heaved a huge sigh of relief. I looked in my ears. I checked behind my ears.
I found it on the nape of my neck, high up in the slight indentation of my skull, nearly invisible beneath my hair.
It was an intricate pattern of black and red ink with a faintly luminescent Z in the middle, a mystical bar code, a sorcerous brand.
He must have done it the night he brought me out of the Dark Zone, the night he’d splinted and healed me. The night he’d told me to sleep and kissed me. I’d been unconscious for a long time.
Then something must have made him begin to worry that I’d find it. Worry that if I did, it might push me too far. He was right, it would have. So when I’d returned from Faery, he’d seized the perfect opportunity to insist on tattooing me for my own good. No doubt he would have just touched up the old one, perhaps added something nefarious to it.
When I’d made it plain that if he trespassed against my boundaries so egregiously I’d leave, he must have been in a double bind. Unwilling to push, because I’d leave—knowing if I found out what he’d already done, I’d leave.
He’d branded me without my knowledge and consent, like a piece of property. His property. There was a fecking Z on the back of my skull.
I traced the pads of my fingers over the tattoo. It was warmer than the skin around it. I remembered lying in the hellish grotto, regretting with every ounce of my being that I hadn’t let him tattoo me.
If he hadn’t tattooed me, I’d be dead now.
Ironically, the very thing I’d been determined to leave him over if he’d done it to me was the only thing that had kept me alive.
I stared at myself in the mirror, wishing that anything in my life were one-tenth as clear as my reflection.
Rowena was wrong. She was so wrong. There are only shades of gray. Black and white are nothing more than lofty ideals in our minds, the standards by which we try to judge things, and map out our place in the world in relevance to them. Good and evil, in their purest form, are as intangible and forever beyond our ability to hold in our hand as any Fae illusion. We can only aim at them, aspire to them, and hope not to get so lost in the shadows that we can no longer aim for the light.
Power is. If you don’t use it, someone else will. You can either create with it or destroy. Creation is good. Destruction is evil. That’s my bottom line.
I could sense the spear behind me, quietly chafing my sidhe-seer senses.
I could sense OOPs again. I had only normal human strength and healing abilities again. I was me. One hundred percent MacKayla Lane, for better or for worse.
I was back—and I was glad. I hoped the dark flesh had passed through me and left no mark.
Life is not black and white. The closest we ever get to either of those colors is wearing them.
I got dressed, went downstairs, and opened my store for business.
It was a busy day. A little rainy but not too bad.
I found the cell phone Mallucé had dumped in the alley when he’d abducted me lying on the counter next to the cash register, beside my boots, jacket, and purse; Barrons must have gone searching for me and found them. It had two bars so I plugged it in to recharge it; I don’t take my cell phone responsibilities lightly anymore. I will forever be haunted by the reminder of one floating in a sky blue swimming pool, and the spoiled young woman I used to be.
I threw the boots and jacket in the Dumpster out back, along with everything else I’d been wearing during my interment beneath the Burren. Mallucé had touched them; they stank of him and I would never wear them again.
The cuff was not on the counter.