“Mac’s headed for the abbey,” Barrons said.

Jada filed thoughts of Alina away for later perusal. They were entangled with far too many emotions to be entertained at the moment. They went into the same box that held so many other things that she would get to…one day.

By the time they got to Chester’s and climbed into a big black armored military Humvee, she was operating with her usual machine-like efficiency despite her many recent shocks and unhealed wounds.

Past was past. Tidying up one’s internal landscape was a luxury of the safe.

Safe was something she’d never been.

MAC

I force myself to stop screaming.

The silence is absolute.

I’m in a vacuum.

No, that’s not quite it. I’m drifting in space, blind, with no radio. Though my initial impression was of being stuffed inside a tiny box and I know somewhere there are walls, I feel as if I’m floating without friction in a vast darkness.

I’m aware of absolutely nothing but my own awareness of absolutely nothing.

It borders on madness.

Hell isn’t other people, as Jean-Paul Sartre claimed; it’s being trapped somewhere dark and silent with only your own thoughts, forever.

Terror wells inside…whatever I now am.

A disembodied consciousness?

Do I still exist? Am I in a box inside my body, or something worse? Am I dead? Is this being dead? Would I know?

Fear threatens to obliterate me. Here, in hell, I want to be obliterated. I want the horror of the hellish awareness of only my own awareness to stop.

I’m screwed.

Barrons may have punched into my head once to save me from the Sinsar Dubh, but back then I still controlled my body and the Book was locked away, unopened. There’s no way he’s getting in here now, past the psychopath that imprisons me. I felt the power of the Sinsar Dubh. It was incomprehensible. Ugly, sick, twisted, hungry, and enormous as the Unseelie King. It scraped me out of every nook and cranny of my body and stole it from me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. In those brief moments of contact I’d felt I, too, was a psychopath; its touch had been so palpably evil, so saturating, that I’d been contaminated by its mere presence. It was bigger than me. More focused, driven by such an enormity of rage and malevolence that it, too, was enormous. I’d felt a mere mouse in its house.

I remember the night the corporeal Book almost made Barrons pick it up. It was the only time I ever saw Jericho Barrons back down. He’d raced through rainy Dublin streets, away from the enemy.

My sensory deprivation is absolute. It’s as if the world doesn’t even exist. For all I know, it doesn’t. For all I know, the Sinsar Dubh has already K’Vrucked it. Using my body.

Terror is a voracious thing, devouring the darkness around me. In moments it will devour me, too.

Whatever I am, I make my essence…pause. If I were physical, I’d be a woman going still, eradicating emotion, focusing pure intellect on a problem. Even stripped of my body—I exist. That’s enough. That’s a starting point. I’m beginning to think that all the bad things that happened to me in the past year were simply the universe’s crash course in waking me the fuck up so I could face this moment. Talk about condensed training. What haven’t I already survived?

This is just one more problem. Each one has always seemed bigger and more insurmountable than the last. That’s nothing new.

I will not cede the crumbs of my existence to mindless panic. Here, where there is nothing, I have something, and it’s enough: choice.

I will choose anything over fear.

Rage is fuel. Rage is gasoline. And Ryodan wasn’t completely right—because rage, wielded as a weapon, with focus, purpose, and skill, is also massively useful energy. Anger can refine, distill, clarify.

Besides, there’s nothing left to burn in here but myself.

And if I incinerate my body in the process—good.

I encounter a sidhe-seer in the underground city.

We nearly crash into each other as we round a corner from opposite directions. I carry neither light nor torch. Shadows soothe my newborn eyes.

“Mac!” the woman gasps.

I access my meticulous files, attach neural impulses to visual stimuli: her name is Margery, she’s power-hungry and fancies herself clever.

I drop the feet of the body I’m dragging behind me, coughing lightly to conceal the thud. She sweeps the beam of her flashlight over me. I blink and hide myself before the blinding glare hits my eyes, to reveal serene green.

I blink several more times. The light is brutal. “Get that bloody light off me,” I growl. I see bright spots on the dark walls, on her shirt, even after she turns it away.

“What are you doing down here?” she says.

“I was checking on Cruce. You?”

“I thought to do the same,” she replies stiffly. “What with the fire and the attack, I feared he might have escaped.”

“And what were you going to do if he had? Raise a hue and cry? Scream? Would you scream, Margery?” I purr.

Her eyes narrow. “Mac, are you all right?”

“Never been better,” I tell her, stepping closer, but it’s not true. Something happened to me while I was destroying the slab in the cavern that once housed Cruce and me, smashing and stomping it so it could never be used again, that cold, hated stone. My body began to tremble. Walking had become a wobbly affair and I’d had to sit for a time.

“Well, then,” Margery says, “let’s go check on him together, shall—”

I punch my fist through shirt, flesh, and bone and rip out her heart.

I clench it in my fist and crush. Blood drips. Muscle explodes. Bits plop to the floor. Interesting. That’s what gives them life. How fragile. Inconsequential.

Margery’s body teeters and slumps to the floor.

Life to death in an instant. Not with a bang. Not even a whimper.

It wasn’t nearly as satisfying as I’d thought it would be.

Disappointed, I grab Cruce’s ankle, bump over the body, and continue down the corridor.

I go up and up, winding my way through the many levels beneath the abbey, dragging my prisoner who grows heavier with each step.

I wonder if I should have eaten Margery’s heart.

Perhaps I weaken because my body requires food. I never paid attention to how often MacKayla ate or what. I consider when she last fed her body. It was quite some time ago.