Big and powerful, radiating primal hunger. His eyes are blades, slicing into you: dark, ancient, glittering with predatory intensity. He moves like a beast even in his human skin. A woman takes one look at him, her stomach drops like a stone and she runs like hell.
Which direction she goes is the defining point: she’ll run away—or toward him—depending on her ability to be honest with herself, her hunger for life and willingness to pay any price at all to feel so damned alive. “What? Why are you smiling?” I said.
He bit my finger. “Stop fishing for compliments. I give you enough.”
“Never enough. Not when it comes to you. Do you think I used it? Do you think I brought Alina back from the dead?”
“I think neither of those questions signify. You’re alive. You’re neither insane nor psychotic. Life goes on, and in the going, reveals itself. Quit being so impatient.”
I pushed my hands into his thick dark hair. “I love how you simplify me.”
“You need it. You, Ms. Lane, are a piece of work.”
“I’ll show you work. I want this.” I leaned forward and murmured into his ear. “Right now. Exactly that way. And this and this. And I want you to keep doing it until I’m begging you to stop. But don’t stop then. Make me take it a little longer.” I wanted to feel no responsibility. No control.
“And bloody hell, woman, there you go, asking me for things again.” He stood and tossed me over his shoulder, one big hand clamped possessively on my bare ass, to take me to that place we sometimes went when I had a serious kink in my already seriously kinked chain.
“Hard life, Barrons.”
“I’ll show you hard.”
Of that I had no doubt. Every possible way.
Damn, it was good to be alive.
—
Much later with a voice that was raw from—well, let’s just leave it at raw—I said to him when I was fairly certain he was meditating deeply enough that he wouldn’t hear me, “I should have gone after her.”
“Dani,” he murmured.
Well, shit. He was aware after all.
“Always.”
“Yes, Dani,” I said.
“Analyze the odds. You know she’d have kept running.”
“But Barrons, she made it out, losing virtually zero Earth-time. Maybe I could have caught up with her, somehow. Maybe she would have gone to a safer world if I’d chased her through, with a quicker way home. Maybe she wouldn’t have had to be alone in there the whole time and she and I would have battled our way back to Dublin together.”
“Maybes are anchors you chain to your own feet. Right before you leap off the boat into the ocean.”
“I’m just saying. I think I know what I did wrong.”
“What’s that?”
“I didn’t believe in magic. I’m living in a city of it, jam-packed with dark magic, evil spells, twisted Fae, and I have absolutely no problem believing in all of them. But somehow I stopped believing in the good magic.” I prodded him in the ribs, where black and red tattoos stretched across his hard stomach and trailed down to his groin. “Like Bewitched. Or The Wizard of Oz—”
“An untrained witch and a charlatan,” he said irritably. “Did you just bloody poke me in the bloody ribs?”
“Okay, or Dumbledore, he’s the real thing. My point is you can’t believe only in Voldemort. You have to believe in Dumbledore, too.”
“Or you could just believe in me.” He caught my hand and put it exactly where he wanted it.
I smiled. I excelled at that.
—
Hours later I was holding my cellphone in that hand, staring at my recently created contact.
The good magic, including those possibilities that weighed in on the side of the positive, not the negative, was heavy on my mind.
Barrons was gone, back to Chester’s, where we would meet soon. I bit my still-swollen lower lip and worried it as I punched the Call button. It rang only once and she was on the line.
“Mac?” Alina said quickly. “Is that you?”
Fuck. Instant pain. How many times had I sat in my room in Dublin, dialing her damned number to listen to her recording, wishing just one more time to hear her answer? More times than I cared to count. Yet here it was. I could get addicted to this alone. Merely being able to call and hear something that sounded like my sister answering. I wondered where she was. Where Barrons had no doubt set her up, probably warding the place to keep her alive, too.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey, Jr.” She sounded happy to hear