Карен Монинг - Burned

Gleaming bookshelves line the perimeter walls from base to cove molding. Behind elegant banisters, narrow passages permit access, and polished ladders slide on oiled rollers from one section to the next.

As I gaze down, to the right is the magazine rack, fully stocked with last October’s editions near more freestanding bookcases. To the left, the old-fashioned cash register sits waiting to ring up a sale, silver bell tinkling, and there’s my pink iPod on a Bose SoundDock ready to play “Bad Moon Rising” or “Tubthumping” or “It’s a Wonderful World.”

Or maybe “Good Girl Gone Bad.”

When the Unseelie Princes enter, flanked by Barrons and Ryodan, I inhale sharply and go rigid.

CRUSH THEM DESTROY THEM IMPALE THEM ON POLES , my inner Sinsar Dubh trumpets.

I close my eyes and dredge up one of the tricks I’ve learned. Occupy my head so thoroughly with something else that the Book can’t get through.

When I was young Daddy used to read poems to me. The more lyrical and musical, the more I’d enjoyed them, and I guess I always had a morbid bent, and he must have, too, because he’d indulged me, on soft summer evenings in the kitchen while Mom did dishes and listened, shaking her head at our choices. I’d understood little of the meaning, just liked the way the words flowed. “The Cremation of Sam McGee” had charmed me. I’d found “A Dream Within a Dream” hypnotic, “The Bells” mesmerizing, I’d obsessed over T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” and in seventh grade recited “The Raven” for a school project, briefly earning for myself the label of nerd until I’d taken extreme fashion measures to change that. Now, looking back, I can see it was a grim choice, but at the time, grief and brutality had possessed the cartoonish proportions of childhood. It had taken weeks to commit the many complex stanzas to my brain.

Remember what the princes did to you, sweet thing, how they ripped you apart and turned you into a mindless animal . As if I could ever forget, the Sinsar Dubh slams me with images so graphic they give me an instant headache.

I block them, focusing instead on how Daddy taught me to break down the poem to memorize it: eighteen stanzas of six lines each, most comprised of eight syllables with a hypnotic placement of stressed syllables followed by unstressed. Trochaic octameter was what he’d called it. I only knew it was fun to say and he was proud of me for learning it, and I’d have done pretty much anything to make Jack Lane proud.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

Break them , the Book demands, force them to their knees before you, make them call you Queen .

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door .

The rhythm of the poem captivates me as it always did, and I feel like a child again, whole and good and loved.

“ ’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door — only this and nothing more.”

Unlike Poe, I don’t have to open the door. I can slide the dead bolt.

I keep reciting until at last there’s blessed silence. Only then do I open my eyes.

“What on earth?” Kat murmurs beside me, staring down.

Gone are the wild, naked, primitive princes, with kaleidoscope tattoos rushing beneath their skin and mad, iridescent eyes.

They’ve civilized themselves.

In their place stand two black-haired, dark-eyed males that exude power, lust, and otherworldly magic. Torques of the royal Unseelie House glitter like diamond-crusted obsidian at their necks. I know how icy those torques are to the touch, how they vibrate with a hypnotic guttural cacophony, while the torques of the Seelie House croon an irresistible, complex symphony.

No longer do their heads swivel in an eerie, inhuman fashion; they have adopted human mannerisms and movements right down to the smallest nuance. The black wings I felt closing around my naked body as I died a thousand deaths beneath them are gone, concealed by glamour.

“I thought they were at war with each other,” I say.

Kat says, “I thought they were insane, terrifying and revolting. We were both wrong. They recently joined forces. I hear the Crimson Hag has them worried.”

“Christian,” I murmur, and try hard not to think of what he must be enduring.

“He saved us, you know. Possibly the world. Dani was hesitating, trying to decide between her sidhe -seer sisters and the Hoar Frost King. It would have destroyed her to carry the deaths of our entire abbey on her conscience. His sacrifice spared her that horror. We owe him a tremendous debt.”

“Any word on Christian’s whereabouts?”

“His uncles are searching. All of us at the abbey are eager to help mount a rescue, if they find him.”

Although it horrified me that he’d given himself up to the Hag, it also relieved me because it meant the man I knew was still in there, despite the madness. Deep down, he still cared about the world around him. I made a mental note to ask Barrons to aid in the search. He could lean on Ryodan to enlist some of the Nine to go scouting. We couldn’t just leave Christian out there, being tortured and killed over and over. We owed him rescue for the sacrifice he’d made. What he was suffering in the Hag’s sadistic hands would only drive him deeper into Unseelie madness. We needed to save him before he lost all trace of his fundamental humanity.

The princes ascend the stairs, identical but for a few inches’ height difference. I realize I’m looking directly at them without weeping blood. I glance at Kat to see if it’s just me or if she, too, can regard them directly. She can. And is — with fascination.

“They’ve fed enough to gain control of themselves,” I say softly. When they first arrived in Dublin they were like rabid animals from long confinement and starvation, and flat-out terrifying. “They’re studying us, learning from us.” I get it: pacify the sheep before the slaughter. A panicked kill makes for a soured stew. These two, the worst of the Unseelie, are now the ultimate bad boys. Women will flock to them, lemmings on a suicide march over a cliff.

These are my rapists, the ones that turned me inside out, ripped my mind from my body and shredded it. They are also, unfortunately, hot as hell.

I want them dead.

Yes, yes, yes, KILL , the Book surges to life again.

Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December; and each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor .

The rhythm takes over. I roll the many internal rhymes and dazzling alliteration over my tongue silently while I assess the princes, building the syllables, brick by brick, into a mental wall.

My rapists are dressed like Barrons. Sleek. Masculine. Sexy. It pisses me off.

“Son of a bitch,” Kat says softly. Kat doesn’t curse. “Do you know how my girls will react to them? Cruce is bad enough.”

“Son of a bitch,” I agree.

Behind the balustrade, four long cherry tables make a square.

The Unseelie Princes take one side.

Barrons, Kat, and I take the opposite.

It’s all I can do to not lunge across the space separating us and attack them. Two things stay my hand: Barrons wants them alive, and I’m afraid I’ll black out again. Kat is vulnerably human.

After a few moments, Ryodan drops into a chair beside us, sandwiching Kat and me between a gentle hum of power. He pushes a hand through thick, dark hair, cut close at the sides, and assesses me with that clear, analytical gaze of his. I meet it impassively. His chiseled features are untouched by lines, and I’d guess him frozen in time, however he stopped aging, at about thirty, plus however many thousands of years he’s actually lived.