Part 35 (1/2)

Fortunately, my disembodied laugh gets swallowed up in the general din of the club.

I melt into the crowd, ducking and dodging as I go. I'm beginning to get the hang of this invisibility stuff.

I sort and discard various destinations. I don't trust myself to go spy on the Unseelie Princes. I'd be tempted to use my spear, and although I pretty much think any humans stupid enough to go there deserve to die, I have no guarantee my resultant killing spree would be confined to the grounds of the Escheresque gothic mansion.

I could head out to the abbey, slip in and eavesdrop. Go down below and check on Cruce.

I shudder. No thank you.

Search Chester's?

I've had enough of Chester's for one day. My brain is on overload, and there's really only one person I want to spy on now. He deserves it. I won't feel one ounce of guilt for invading his privacy. He invaded the f.u.c.k out of mine.

I slip from the club amid a cl.u.s.ter of drunken revelers and navigate the surprisingly busy streets back to the place I call home: Barrons Books & Baubles.

I find Jericho Barrons sitting in his study at the back of the bookstore watching a video on his computer. He exudes tall, dark, and dangerous, even dressed casually in faded jeans, an unb.u.t.toned black s.h.i.+rt, and boots with silver chains. His hair is wet from a recent shower and he smells like clean, damp, deliciously edible man. His chest is nearly covered with tattoos, black and crimson runes and designs that look like ancient tribal emblems, his rock-hard six-pack abs on full display. His sleeves are rolled back over thick, powerful forearms, and the cuff that matches the one Ryodan wears glints in the low light, reminding me they are brothers, reminding me of Jada/Dani's cuff. There's something anciently elegant poured over the beast that is Barrons, Old-World-Mediterranean-basted barbarian. The interior lights are set to a soft amber glow and he sits in the darkness, all hot, s.e.xy coiled muscle and aggression and, oh G.o.d, I need to have s.e.x.

I shove that thought from my mind because it's highly unlikely in the near future. No point in torturing myself when the world's been so busy doing it for me. I wonder what Barrons watches. Action/adventure? Spy movies? Horror? Bewitched?

p.o.r.n?

The sounds coming from the monitor are base, guttural. I ease into the study, walking like an Indian in the quiet, stealthy way Daddy once taught me on a camping trip: heel to toe, heel to toe.

Barrons touches the screen, tracing an image, dark gaze unfathomable.

As I move around the desk and glimpse the monitor, I bite back a soft, instinctive protest.

He's watching a video of his son.

The child is in human form, naked on the floor of his cage. He's in the throes of hard convulsions and there's blood on his face, ostensibly from having bitten his own tongue.

This isn't what Barrons's son looked like the only time I ever met him. Then, he seemed a lovely, helpless, innocent, and frightened child, and although it was but an act to lure me close enough to attack, it was one of very few times in his tortured existence he'd looked normal. I still remember the anguish in Barrons's voice when he asked me if I'd seen him as a boy, not the beast.

As I watch, his son begins to change back into his monstrous form, and it's a violent, excruciating transformation, even more torturous to watch than when Barrons turns back into a man.

The beast his son is becoming on-screen makes the rabid beast-form of Barrons that stalked me on a cliff in Faery look like a playful puppy.

Shortly after his son tried to eat me, Barrons told me he used to keep cameras on the boy at all times, reviewing them endlessly for a single glimpse of him as the child he'd fathered. Over the millennia, he saw him that way on only five occasions. Apparently this was one of them.

Why is he watching it now? It's over. We freed him. Didn't we? Or did the oddly malleable universe in which I seem to find myself lately find some way to reshape that, too?

The tips of his fingers slide from the screen. ”I wanted to give you peace,” he murmurs. ”Not erase you from the cycle forever. Now I wonder if it was my pain or yours I sought to end.”

I wince and close my eyes. My life hasn't been completely blithe and carefree. When I was sixteen, my adopted paternal grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer that metastasized to his liver and brain. Daddy's grief cast a palpable shadow over the Lane household for months. I'll never forget the crippling headaches Grandpa suffered, the nausea from chemo and radiation. I watched Daddy wrestle with decision after decision, ultimately withholding IV antibiotics to treat the pneumonia that took Grandpa more quickly and far more gently.

Barrons is voicing the legitimate question of anyone who's ever agreed not to resuscitate, to cease life-sustaining measures for a loved one, to accept a Stage 4 cancer patient's decision to refuse more chemo, or euthanize a beloved pet. Throughout the caretaker experience, your loved one's presence is intense and exquisitely poignant and painful, then all the sudden they're gone and you discover their absence is even more intense and exquisitely poignant and painful. You don't know how to walk or breathe when they're no longer there. And how could you? Your world revolved around them.

I should have seen this coming. At least I have the comfort of believing Alina is in heaven. That maybe someday I'll gaze into a child's eyes and see a piece of my sister's soul in there, because the fact is I do believe we go on. Then again, maybe I'll never see a trace of her, but I still feel her. I don't know how to explain it. It's as if she's only a slight s.h.i.+ft of reality away from me sometimes, in what I think of as the slipstream, and if I could only slip sideways, too, I could join her. And one day I think I will slip sideways and get to see her again, if only as s.h.i.+ps pa.s.sing on our way to new destinations in the same vast, magnificent sea.

Perhaps it's a sentimental delusion to which I cling so I don't drown in grief.

I don't think so.

Barrons says softly, ”Eternal agony or nothing. I'd have chosen agony. I gave you nothing. You weren't cognizant. You couldn't make the choice.”

What do we crave for those terrible decisions we're forced to make in the course of an average lifetime?

Forgiveness. Absolution.

There's no possibility Barrons will get it, in this lifetime or any other.

We K'Vrucked his son to grant him rest. We didn't merely kill him, we annihilated his very being. As the Sinsar Dubh put it, a good K'Vrucking is more final than death, it's complete eradication of all essence, of what humans like to think of as a soul.

I don't know that I believe in souls, but I believe in something. I think each of us has a unique vibration that's inextinguishable, and when we die it translates into the next phase of being. We may come back as a tree, or a cat, perhaps a person again, or a star. I don't think our journey is limited. I look up at the sky, ponder the enormity of the universe and simply know that the same well of joy that birthed so much wonder gave us more than a single chance to explore it.

Not so with his son. The child is no longer in pain because he is no longer. No heaven, no h.e.l.l. Just gone. As Barrons said, erased. Unlike me always sort of sensing Alina out there, Barrons can't feel him anymore.

Who knows how long he took care of his child, searched for the way to free him, sat in his subterranean cave watching him, cultivating the hope that he would one day find the right spell, or ritual or G.o.d or demon powerful enough to change his son back.

A few months ago the never-ending ritual that had shaped his existence for thousands and thousands of years ended.

As did the hope.

And the true, long overdue grief began.

I know a simple truth: mercy killing doesn't hold one f.u.c.king ounce of mercy for those that live.

I wonder how many times he's caught himself walking toward his son's stone chamber, as I caught myself walking down the hall to Alina's bedroom with something I just had to tell her, this very moment, on the tip of my tongue. The hundredth time I did it, I realized it was either go join Dad in his black hole of depression, drink myself quietly to death at the Brickyard and die by the age of forty from liver disease-or fly to Dublin and channel my grief into a search for answers. Death is the final chapter in a book you can't unread. You keep waiting to feel like the person you were before that chapter ended. You never will.

I open my eyes. Barrons is staring at the screen in silence. There's no sound in the bookstore. Not a drip of water from the distant bathroom sink in the hall, no white noise from an air vent, no soft hiss of gas from the fireplace. Grief is a private thing. I respect that and I respect the man.

I begin to ease out of the room slowly.

When I back into the ottoman I forgot was there, the legs sc.r.a.pe across the polished wood of the floor.

Barrons's head whips up and around, pinpoints the precise spot in which I stand.

For a moment I consider trying to be his son's ghost for him. Give him what he'd think was a sign, ease his pain with as kind and white a lie as they come.

I know better.

Barrons is all about purity. If he ever learned the truth-and Barrons has a way of always learning the truth-he'd despise me for it. I'd have given him a gift, only to s.n.a.t.c.h it away again, and counter to mainstream cliche, for some of us it's kinder to never have a thing at all than to have it and lose it.

Some of us love too hard. Some of us don't seem to be able to hold that vital piece of ourselves back.

His nostrils flare as he inhales, c.o.c.ks his head, and listens. He presses the Off b.u.t.ton on the monitor. ”Ms. Lane.”

Though he can't see me, I scowl at him. ”You don't know that for certain. You guessed. I've been hanging around you a lot today and you didn't know it.”

”The Sinsar Dubh protected you at the last minute. You were going to let the sidhe-seers take you rather than risk killing them.”