And who’d saved me?

Dani. A thirteen-year-old kid. A girl.

She’d blasted in, plucked me right out of the LM’s grasp, and whisked me to safety.

No, not safety. Not quite.

She’d taken me to Rowena, who locked me in a cell and left me alone, hellishly alone.

To die?

There were memories from the time of my capture by the LM and my early incarceration at the abbey that weren’t accessible. They were in me. I could feel them, deep, dark, secreted away in a mind that had been impressionable but uncomprehending. They weren’t exactly memories, because memory is stored by a brain that functions and mine hadn’t during those traumatic hours. More like imprints. Photographs snapped but not understood. Conversations overheard. Things seen. It would take work to dredge them from the muck at the bottom of my psyche.

But I would.

The LM hadn’t expected me to ever escape.

Rowena hadn’t expected me to live.

“Surprise,” I purred. “I did.”

I tossed back the sheet and pushed up from the bed. My body felt good. It was sleeker, stronger than I remembered it being. I stretched and glanced down, then blinked, admiring myself.

Gone was all softness, save my breasts and butt. My calves, thighs, arms, stomach—all were toned, shaped by smooth, sleek muscle. I flexed a bicep. I had one. Long fingernails dug into my palms. I studied them. On Samhain, they’d been cut to the quick.

Just how long had I been having sex with Jericho Barrons? How long did it take to resculpt a body like mine had been into—Savage Me was pleased to note—this much more useful new shape? What had we been doing? Constant sexual gymnastics?

I shut down that thought. I had a few too many memories that weren’t remotely blurry, and they gave rise to impossibly conflicting emotions.

Like: Thanks for saving me, Barrons—too bad I’m going to have to kill you for doing those things to me and seeing me like that.

I’d had sex with Jericho Barrons.

Not just sex. Incredibly raw, intensely intimate, completely uninhibited sex.

I’d done everything a woman could do with a man. I’d pretty much worshipped every inch of him. And he’d let me.

Oh, no, much more than that—he’d enthusiastically participated. He’d egged me on. He’d plunged right into my animalistic frenzy with me, met me move for move in that dark lust-crazed cave where I’d been living.

I turned to stare at the big silk-sheeted bed. It was exactly the kind of bed I’d expect Barrons to sleep in. Sun King ornate, four-postered, draped in silk and velvet; a sensual masculine lair.

There were fur-lined handcuffs on the bedposts. I got knotted up in that memory for a minute before I managed to extricate myself.

My breathing was shallow and my hands were fists. “Oh, yes, I’m going to have to kill you, Barrons,” I said coolly. Partly because, for the most minuscule sliver of an instant, while looking at those handcuffs, I’d imagined myself climbing back into bed and pretending I wasn’t cured yet.

And I’d thought interacting with Barrons had been difficult before. Since the day we’d met, we’d maintained a careful wall of non-intimacy between us and rarely slipped. I was Ms. Lane. He was Barrons. That wall had been blasted to dust, and I hadn’t had anything to say about it. We’d fast-forwarded from formal and testy most of the time to See Mac Bare All/Body & Soul, without a single ounce of relationship progression along the way. He’d seen me at my absolute worst, my most vulnerable, while he’d been in complete control, and I still didn’t really know a damned thing about him.

We’d gotten as close as two human beings—well, overlooking the fact that he wasn’t one—possibly could. Now, in addition to wondering whether he’d spiked the Orb of D’Jai with deadly Shades before he’d given it to me to give to the sidhe-seers and whether he’d sabotaged the ritual at the MacKeltars’ on Halloween because he wanted the walls down between Fae and human realms, I knew that killing aroused him. Turned him on. I hadn’t forgotten that enlightening little detail I’d found poking around inside his skull. It cast a harsh new light on the moment I’d watched him walk out of an Unseelie mirror carrying the savaged, very dead body of a young woman.

Had he killed her just for fun?

My intuition wasn’t buying it.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure what my intuition was worth where he was concerned. If there was one thing I’d learned about Barrons, it was that speculating about him was as pointless as tap-dancing on quicksand, with no solid ground in sight.

Speaking of solid ground …

I glanced around. I was below it. I can feel belowground in my bones. I hate being there. I hate confined, windowless spaces. Yet, for a time, this space belowground had been my harbor in a brutal storm.

What had happened to Dublin while I’d been Pri-ya, clawing my way back to sanity? What had happened to the world?

How was Ashford? Were Mom and Dad okay? Had anyone gotten the Book? What was happening out there with all the Unseelie free? Was Aoibheal, Queen of the Seelie, okay, or had the Unseelie gotten to her, too, on Halloween? She was the only one with any hope of ever reimprisoning them. I needed her to be alive. Where was V’lane? Why hadn’t he come for me? Was he dead? I felt a moment of pure panic. Maybe he’d tried to rescue me after all and that was one of those confused imprints, and the LM had taken my spear and—

My fingers clenched on emptiness. Oh, God, where was my spear? The ancient Spear of Destiny was one of only two weapons known to man that was capable of killing an immortal Fae. I remembered throwing it away. I remembered it hissing and steaming at the foot of a basin of holy water.

Where had it gone from there?

Was it possible it was still lying there, in the church? Could I be so lucky?

I needed it back.

Once I had it, I could get to work on other things. Like figuring out how the Unseelie Princes had managed to turn it against me at the critical moment. True to Fae lore—which held that the Unseelie couldn’t touch any of the Seelie Hallows, and vice versa—they hadn’t been able to physically take it from me, but they’d managed to coerce me into turning it on myself, forcing me to choose between stabbing myself with it or tossing it, putting me completely at their mercy.

I not only needed my spear back—I needed to learn how to control it.

Then I was going to kill every Unseelie I could get my Nullifying hands on, slaughtering my way straight up the chain of command, not stopping until I’d taken out all the Unseelie Princes, the LM, and maybe even the Unseelie King himself. And the Seelie, too, with the exception of those I needed to restore order to our world. I was sick of the terrifying, inhumanly beautiful, homicidal interlopers. It had been our planet first and, although V’lane didn’t seem to think that should count for much, it was all that mattered to me. They were scavengers who’d damaged their own world so badly that they’d had to go find another one—and now they were doing the same thing to ours. They were arrogant immortals who’d created an immortal abomination—the Unseelie court, the dark mirror of their race—and they’d lost control of them on our planet. And who was paying the highest price for all their mistakes?

Me. That’s who.

I was going to get tougher, smarter, faster, stronger, and spend the rest of my life killing Fae, if that was what it took to put my world back the way it used to be.

I might not have a spear at the moment, but I was alive and I was … different. Something irrevocable had changed inside me. I could feel it.

I wasn’t entirely certain what it was.

But I liked it.

I ransacked the room before I left it, looking for weapons. There were none.

Apart from what looked like a hastily plumbed shower in a corner of the room, the rest of it was filled with my belongings that I’d kept at the bookstore.