Finally she straightened, wiped her mouth with her hand, and backed away, eyes closed.

It was done. It was the right thing to do, the smart thing. And doing it at that precise moment without warning had prevented unnecessary suffering. Sometimes waiting for a bad thing to happen could be just as unpleasant as the bad thing happening.

It had, also, conferred the added boon of shutting him the fuck up.

It felt like shit.

I want to see you rise.

She shook the echo of his words out of her head, backed into the frame of the door and leaned against it, waiting to stop feeling so sick. After fiddling a moment with the door handle and finding no simple push-button lock, she pulled out the cellphone Ryodan programmed, not about to use magic she’d learned Silverside to spell the door shut. Spelling anything that belonged to Jericho Barrons wasn’t something she was in a hurry to do. Knowing him, it had some subtle magic etched into it already and anything she tried would backfire or morph into something else. However, she couldn’t just leave Ryodan’s decapitated corpse behind a mere closed door for someone to stumble on. She might not know all his secrets but she’d protect the ones she did.

She sent Barrons a text. Or tried to. Her hands were trembling. She inhaled deep, held it, exhaled slow. Steady fingers danced over the keypad.

RYODAN ASKED ME TO KILL HIM SO HE COULD HEAL FASTER. SECURE YOUR STUDY.

Her screen flashed with a reply almost instantly.

All caps make it look like you’re shouting at me. Don’t. It pisses me off.

Scowling, she pulled a protein bar from her pocket and ate it in two bites. She couldn’t afford to vomit energy. Everything pissed Barrons off. He lived on the razor’s edge of eternal irritation. No doubt because he had to put up with mere mortals who thought too much when a good massacre would not only be more effective but much more fun. Leave it to Barrons to respond to such an abnormal text with a critique of her texting etiquette. She’d texted, like never before in her life. A text reached a single person. Her Dani Daily had reached the entire city.

Her fingers flew over the letters again. She omitted the puke factor. Damned if she was sticking around to clean it up. She had no clue how to turn off the caps lock. She had no clue how she’d turned it on, and mastering social etiquette didn’t compute.

HE’S DEAD AND IT’S MESSY. SECURE IT.

He replied instantly:

I’M BUSY. YOU SECURE IT. OR DON’T. IT WON’T MATTER FOR LONG ANYWAY. I HAVE THE STONES AND CHRISTIAN. GET YOUR ASS TO CHESTER’S.

She snorted as she stepped from the room and closed the door. He was right.

It did feel like being shouted at.

MAC

Rage gets me nowhere. I spin in circles of nothing, full of wild energy with no target to aim it at.

After a time—although that word means nothing to me here—I go still (another word that technically means nothing to me yet somehow does) and turn my thoughts to my captor.

Barrons said recently, You think of the Sinsar Dubh as being an actual book inside you. I doubt it’s either open or closed. Stop thinking of it so concretely.

I’d felt a glimmer of understanding at his words. You mean it’s embedded in me, inseparably, and my ethical structure is the proverbial cover? I’d replied.

The previous time the Sinsar Dubh had taken control of my body, I’d been furious at my clipped wings, my inability to do something, anything, to positively impact my world. I’d let that anger and frustration rip through me and explode out in a burst of violence.

I’d felt badass.

But maybe there’d been no “ass” in that moment at all; just a mother lode of “bad.”

Here, in this silent dark place, without distraction, I apprehend my actions on that day more clearly. I’d broken my chains of doubt and fear with an act of savagery, telling myself since the Gray Woman was one of the bad guys, destroying her made me good.

Evil, Ryodan once told me, is bad that believes it’s good.

Killing her hadn’t been the wrong thing.

It was why I’d killed her that had been wrong. While I’d told myself I was killing her to protect Dublin, the truth was, I’d done it to make myself feel better, to assuage my feelings of impotence. That it would save potential victims had only been the icing on my selfish cake.

I’ve been in Dublin for a year. Although I met Jericho Barrons shortly after I arrived, more of those twelve months were lost in Faery, or spent in the Silvers, or passed mindlessly as a woman turned Pri-ya, than had ever been spent getting to know Barrons. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten to know him. I’ve just gotten to know that I always want him around. And maybe one day I will get to know him.

Still, in those few months I spent with him on a mostly daily basis, I came to admire his system of ethics, unwavering focus, and commitment to those few people and causes he’s selected as his own.

And while part of me wants to wail—why didn’t he save me from this somehow?—another part of me, that clearer part, finally understands that this is what he was trying to get me to see all along; he couldn’t save me and he knew it. He’d told me once that fear was more than a wasted emotion, it was the ultimate set of blinders; that if I couldn’t face the truth of my reality, I could never control it, and would be subject to the wishes of anyone whose will was stronger than mine. He knew too well, from battling his own inner monster, what I’ve come to fathom only here and now.

The most critical, defining battles we wage in life, we wage alone.

Against ourselves.

It might be getting past an abusive childhood, struggling every day to regain belief in your own worth. Or being overweight and accepting that you don’t have to look like whatever the ideal woman currently is to be loved. Maybe it’s quitting drugs or giving up cigarettes. No one can do any of those things for you.

I’ve been divided all my life.

It’s time for that to stop.

The Sweeper was right in wanting to fix my brain; there can’t be two of us in here.

I didn’t ask to be a sidhe-seer. I didn’t ask to be in the wrong place at the wrong time as a fetus, and I certainly didn’t ask to be dicked with by the Seelie Queen and Unseelie King all my life.

Yet this is the war my life has been shoving me toward since my mother carried me in her womb.