Rowena’s chambers are composed of half a dozen rooms: a bedroom, an ornate, regal study, two libraries, an enormous, lovely bathroom with a huge old claw-foot tub, and a stark, uncomfortable waiting room similar to one at a doctor’s office. I snooped through her suite once, but not as thoroughly as I’d like. I suspect there are more secrets tucked away in there, behind warded panels and floorboards, than grains of sand in an hourglass. More than once Dani and I burst through twin sets of French doors and forced our way into her chambers only to find the scowling headmistress had anticipated our arrival.
No such luck making an unannounced entrance today. As we turn the final corner, four armed women stand at the end of the hall, outside the closed doors.
They’re impressive. I can see why our abbey embraced them; it was that or die. Rowena didn’t train her sidhe-seers. She suppressed them, deliberately kept them weak and needy. Jada’s women are draped in ammo, clutch automatic weapons, and stare stonily at us as we approach, military training apparent in their strong bodies and stronger expressions.
I’d like them if I met them on the street. I’d like them a lot. I have enormous respect for our military men and women, the everyday heroes who provide the security the rest of us enjoy.
I don’t like them in front of that door.
Kat belongs inside those chambers, not some outsider whose loyalty and objectives are uncertain.
They scan us, taking in the Unseelie at my back but making no comment. If they crossed continents to get here, they’ve seen stranger things. Criminy, if they served overseas, they’ve seen a small slice of hell.
They raise their rifles in sleek unison, targeting us.
“She’s not taking visitors,” clips a tall woman with short black hair tipped blond at the ends.
I fall back into my hive of Unseelie, a protected queen bee. The body shield idea works for me. I practically cuddle the smelly things. I may be tough to kill, even survived having my throat ripped out, but I don’t need to experience a spray of automatic bullets to know it would hurt like a bitch.
Barrons and Ryodan are suddenly gone. I sometimes forget they can do that, become virtually invisible, melt into the current terrain, and reappear without warning.
Shots go off, guns fly and smash into walls, and ducking the whine of dangerous ricochets, I nestle into my worker bees. Between their hooded heads I watch a brief brawl that ends with four women unconscious on the floor and Barrons pushing the door open.
As I step over them, the black-haired woman uncoils cobra-fast, grabs my leg and yanks it out from under me.
Barrons is on her instantly but I go down backward, hard.
The strangest thing happens as I fall. I get a sudden weird flash of my room at the Clarin House, time slows to a snail’s crawl and I’m suddenly living two different events superimposed.
I’m falling backward at the abbey.
Yet I’m also falling forward in my cramped room at the inn.
Barrons is looking down at me here, subduing my attacker and trying to catch me.
But at the same time we’re at the inn, and he’s the one who just dumped me on the floor.
I’m clothed here.
At the Clarin House I’m missing my jeans, the air is cool on my skin and I’m butt-ass naked.
I hit the abbey floor hard enough to make my teeth clack, and blink, shaking my head.
WTF?
Reality rearranges itself into a single vision.
I’m in the abbey, only the abbey.
Frowning, I push myself up and watch Barrons and Ryodan drag the women down the hall and dump them into a room.
“Time to meet Jada.” Barrons growls her name the same way I feel it, irritably and accompanied by a death wish.
I stand up, eyeing him uneasily, trying to decide what just happened. The only time Barrons was ever in my room at the Clarin House was that night he came to bully me into going home. We’d argued, he grabbed me at one point and got physical, but then he left. The next day I’d hurt from head to toe.
My frown deepens.
I recall thinking the bruises were odd, more around the sides of my rib cage than across my front where he’d actually had his arm banded beneath my breasts. I didn’t wear a bra for days. And I’d hurt all over, not just my ribs. My thighs had ached, the muscles deep in my butt had been sore. I’d just figured the interminable flight over had taken a toll. I’d never flown that far before, or sat so long in between flights on hard airport benches. I scratch my head, staring at him, feeling like I’m trying to put together a puzzle minus half the pieces, with no picture on the box to guide me.
He gives me a look. “Are you hurt? What is it?”
I search his face, searching my memory, trying to reconcile what I just saw with some version of reality I recall.
There is none.
“Get a fucking move on, Mac,” Ryodan snaps.
At a complete loss to explain what just happened, for a novel change, I silently obey him. “Don’t get used to it,” I mutter.
We enter the spartan waiting room, move to the second set of double doors, and I’m on the verge of proposing we pause and listen a few seconds to get a feel for what’s on the other side when Barrons kicks the door open so hard it flies back, slams into the wall, and splits down the middle.
Women shout in alarm but I can’t see past Barrons’s and Ryodan’s backs.
I shut my mouth and step into the room, feeling uncomfortably … obsolete. I may have unique sidhe-seer gifts and there’s no question that without my wraiths hemming me in I’m a seriously badass street fighter, but Barrons and his men are faster, stronger, and more ruthless.