I shoot a dark look at Ryodan. “I thought you knew what was going on out here.”
“It would seem there are a few things my sources neglected to mention.”
“Why wouldn’t your men tell you?” I fish.
“My men are not my sources.”
That was half of what I wanted to know. “Who is?”
His slants me a silent, Nice try. Not.
I get back in the Hummer.
On the driver’s side.
And lock the door.
He laughs. “Ah, Mac, I don’t think so.”
I lunge across the wide console, fling open the passenger door, slam it into gear, and start rolling forward.
Fast.
Ryodan curses and does exactly what I would have done, lopes alongside and explodes in, managing to dwarf the cavernous interior. “Strip my gears, woman, you’re dead.”
I shoot him a derisive look. “I haven’t stripped gears since I was ten.” I step on it and shift rapidly.
“Big Wheels don’t count,” Ryodan mocks.
“My daddy’s sixty-four-and-a-half Mustang.” After that debacle, Mom and Dad no longer left any keys hanging by the garage door. Sherriff Bowden brought me home. I’d made it a half a mile of screeching, jerking stops and starts that apparently the entire town of Ashford was witnessing out their nosy windows. The pillows I’d packed in to help me reach the pedals and steering wheel had worked as air bags when I hit the telephone pole.
It had been a while before Daddy got over that one.
Then he’d done what any wise parent would have: taught me to drive.
Give me raw, testy, ferocious power any day of the week.
I can find the sweet spot in my sleep.
I park outside the elaborate new gate on the enormous new stone wall that wasn’t there two months ago.
Ryodan intuits my thoughts. It’s not difficult, given my mouth is slightly ajar. Again. I don’t know why I bother with preconceptions anymore. Even simple ones like expecting that when I close a door the room on the other side still exists, with drywall and carpet and ceiling lights, neatly intact. For all I know, it doesn’t and never has. Perhaps it vanishes until I want it again, stored away on some cosmic zip drive to conserve quantum energy.
“It wasn’t here last month either. Bloody hell, that wall wasn’t here three weeks ago. And she said nothing of it. It seems our headmistress has been keeping secrets.”
“Along with your inept sources.” I’d really like to know who they are. I’d like them working for me. I’d insist on better info.
Right. If you’d wanted better info, my conscience pricks, you could have come out here any time. Maybe listened when she asked for help. Did you really think it was over? Did you honestly delude yourself for even one minute that Cruce would lie dormant?
Has Kat, like Rowena before her, been seduced by the evil that slumbers a thousand feet of stone beneath her pillow? I shiver. Not Kat. But where is she? And why did she tell us none of this?
“Perhaps a different caste of Seelie have settled nearby in large numbers and are affecting the environment,” I propose as an alternative, which would still be problematic. I don’t want any Fae anywhere near the abbey.
“Cruce seduced her,” Ryodan says flatly.
“You don’t know that,” I defend.
“It began the night we laid the Book to rest. He came to her while she slept.”
I look at him incredulously. “You know that for a fact? And you waited until now to say something? If not me, you could have at least told Barrons.”
“I believed she had things under control.”
“The great Ryodan, wrong?” I say in mock astonishment. “The world must be ending.” Why didn’t she tell me? Was that why she’d asked me to come out, so I could see firsthand the power he was using on her, on the abbey, and understand the battle she was fighting? Did she hold her silence because, like me, she feared condemnation and hoped to fix it before anyone else had to know?
Ryodan says irritably, “Bit busy hunting Dani and trying to patch a black hole beneath my club. While you and Barrons were MIA doing unknown things for unknown reasons with the Unseelie King’s personal valets that stalk you for yet more unknown reasons, all of which you could explain anytime now. And yes, if we don’t find a way to fix it, it is.”
End-of-the-world talk doesn’t make me as nervous as it once did. I often wake up in the morning surprised to find myself still here. I consider it icing on the cake if I’m still where I recall falling asleep.
A black SUV with dark-tinted windows pulls up. The Keltar have arrived. They get out, a small army of powerfully built, dark-haired, dark-skinned men. There’s Dageus’s twin, Drustan, a more thickly muscled version of his minutes-younger brother, with shorter hair—although it still falls halfway down his back—and a cool silver gaze, in contrast to Dageus’s gold tiger-eyes. He’s followed by Cian, an enormous Highlander with loads of tattoos and the thousand-yard stare of a man who’s done hard time somewhere; then Christopher, the only one of the lot that looks remotely civilized, a forty-five-year-old version of Christian.
As we get out and join them, Dageus growls, “No’ quite what it looked like last time. Place reeks of Fae.”
Ryodan angles his head back and looks up at the barbed wire strung atop the walls. He breaks a twig off a nearby tree and tosses it high. The branch spits and crackles when it hits, then falls to the ground, scorched.