Карен Монинг - Burned

He cuts me a hard look. See Mac cower. See Mac die .

“Are you trying to piss me off?” I growl.

He gives me the ocular equivalent of a yawn. Only Barrons can pull off such a thing and still look menacing. It’s not as if there are any repercussions to consider. You wouldn’t kill a scorpion if it was stinging your ass .

I study my nails. There’s a speck of blood beneath one. I don’t know if it’s Mick O’Leary’s or mine from scrubbing so hard. He’s wrong about that. I look up at him. “You have no idea what I’m dealing with.”

Ah, such as a beast within? he mocks.

“Your beast is different.” I continue talking aloud, refusing to accept the intimacy of a wordless conversation. We’ve had this argument. We’ll continue having it until the day the king frees me. Neither of us will capitulate. I’m not sure either of us can even spell that word.

Perhaps not so very .

“Yes, but mine is more powerful,” I say irritably. Powerful enough to fool even me — someone intimately acquainted with its seductive, evil ways.

His dark eyes glitter with challenge. Care to test that, woman?

The look he gives me sends shivers down my spine, and I feel it slip it into a gentler curve that achieves down-and-dirty doggie-style with sure, supple grace. There is no battlefield I prefer to the one I’ve found in this man’s bed. We fight. It’s what we do. I feel so much more intensely alive around him than I’ve ever felt with anyone else.

I’m obsessed and addicted and ripped-down-raw in love with Jericho Barrons.

Of course, I don’t tell him that. Barrons isn’t a pillow talk man. Sleeping with him, acknowledging our feelings for each other, has changed everything.

And nothing.

In bed, we’re one couple.

Out of bed, we’re another.

In bed, I steal moments of tenderness when sex has finally exhausted me to the point where I’m too bone weary to fret anymore about the enormous capacity for evil that’s taken up squatter’s rights inside me. I touch him, put all those things I don’t say into my hands as I trace the red and black tattoos on his skin, the sharp planes and hollows of his face, bury my hands in his dark hair. He watches me in silence when I do, eyes dark, unfathomable.

I sometimes wake up to find he’s pulled me close to him and is holding me, spooned into my back with his face in my hair, and those hands that don’t speak like mine don’t speak move over my skin and tell me I’m cherished, honored, seen.

Out of bed we’re islands.

Ms. Lane and Barrons.

The first time he retreated into distance, it hurt. I felt rejected.

Until I realized I’d done it, too. It wasn’t just him. Our boundaries seem sewn to our clothes; we can no more put one on without the other than take them off separately.

I sometimes wonder if our passion is so obsessive and enormous that we need distance between the bonfires. I’m a moth to his flame and it frightens me how willingly I’d burn my wings off for him. Destroy the world. Follow him to Hell. It’s scary to feel like you can’t breathe without someone. That a man has so much power over you because you love him as much as, if not more than, you care for yourself.

So I fly away for a while — maybe just to know I can — and he vanishes to do whatever Barrons does for whatever reasons he does it.

I always come back. He does, too. Actions speak.

I shift restlessly and change the subject. “You invite my enemy here. That’s bullshit.”

A Day in the Life: You search manuscripts for a spell that may not exist. You paint your nails. You clip your nails. Ah, let us not forget you examine your nails .

I scowl. “I do more than that. And leave my nails out of this.”

You don’t visit your parents. You don’t go to the abbey. You’re barely eating, and your clothes—

I cut him off by pretending to examine my nails again. This week they alternate black diamond, white ice, black diamond, white ice. The color scheme comforts me, as nothing else in my life is so tidily delineated. I’m acutely aware of the sorry state of my recent outfits and have no desire to hear what he thinks of them. It’s difficult to care when you’re always covered with yellow dust. He’s silent so long I finally glance warily up to find him regarding me with an expression women have been on the receiving end of since time immemorial, as if I’m a species he simply can’t fathom.

Do you think I can’t protect you should you persist with your idiotic passivity?

Idiotic passivity, my ass. As today proved, activity is far more idiotic, and deadly. Is that why he arranged this meeting? To force me to be involved? “Of course not.” I change the subject.

It’s time . He says his next words aloud and there’s a gentleness to them that undoes me. “You’re not living anymore, Rainbow Girl.”

I melt when he calls me that. There’s something in the way he says those two words that makes it seem he’s said a thousand and they all make me glow. It says he sees the pretty-in-pink Mac I was when I first arrived, the black, kick-ass Mac I’ve become (unless covered with Unseelie fleas), plus every incarnation in between, and he wants them all.

I know I’m not living anymore. No one could be more excruciatingly aware of that fact. It’s driving me bugfuck. Passivity isn’t my nature and I’m choking on it, drowning in it, my balls held firmly hostage by a Book.

I stare up at him and tell him the words I can’t bring myself to say out loud.

I killed the Gray Woman today .

A corner of his sexy mouth lifts. “Banner fucking day. About time.”

I also killed one of the Guardians .

“Ah, he got in the way.”

I have no idea what happened. I blacked out .

A human would be shocked, horrified, demand to know what happened. Barrons’s gaze doesn’t change and he asks no questions. He tallies debits and credits. “You took two lives and saved thousands.”

Bottom line it all you want, the end doesn’t justify the means , I say silently, pissed that he elevated the conversation I don’t want to be having to a verbal level.

“Debatable.”

I lost control of myself. It took me over and made me kill. Said I’m the car and it’s the driver . The unspoken words hang like knives in the air anyway, cutting me.

“We train harder.”

I hate mys—

“Never say that.”

“I didn’t,” I mutter. Not technically.

“You are what you are. Find a way to live with it.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Someone told you life was easy. You believed them,” he mocks.

“I just don’t see why they all have to come here. Why not hold this little powwow at Chester’s?” I change the subject swiftly.

Like a verbal dancer, he follows my lead, and I know why: as far as he’s concerned the discussion is over anyway. He has the blood of countless victims on his hands, while I’m having a hard time dealing with one. To him, this day is no different than any other: I’m possessed by a malevolent demon and I sinned. Tomorrow I’ll try again. I might sin again. I might not. But tomorrow always comes. For me and the demon. Despite my screwup, my action will ultimately save countless lives. Barrons has the thousand-yard stare and conscience of an immortal. I’m not there yet. I don’t know if I’ll ever be there. I ended a life before its time today. A family man. A good man. I must find a way to atone.

“I have wards in my bookstore that neutralize the princes’ power while within my walls,” he reminds me.

“You’re inviting my rapists into my home.” I toss the dual reminder that he wasn’t there to save me the night the Unseelie Princes captured me in the church, and that it’s my bookstore, without inflection, still it detonates in the room.