Besides, if I hadn’t opened his eyes tonight and forced him to see what was going on, he’d have ended up dead in a matter of days. He’d been nosing around too much. He’d have spotted an abandoned car down some back alley and walked into a Dark Zone at night, or whoever’d slit O’Duffy’s throat to silence him would have slit Jayne’s next.

He’d been a walking dead man. Now, at least, he had a chance.

THREE

I’d die for him.

There’s nothing else to say.

I’d give the last breath in my body and the last hope in my heart to keep him alive. When I thought I was crazy, he came to me and made sense of it all. He helped me understand what I was, showed me how to hunt and hide. He taught me that there are necessary lies. I’ve been learning a lot about those lately. Every time Mac calls I get more practice. I’d die for her, too.

He’s made me see myself differently. He lets me be the woman I always wanted to be. Not the perfect daughter and honor student who feels like she has to do all the right things to make Mom and Dad proud, or the perfect big sister who always tries to set a shining example for Mac, and keep the nosy neighbors from ever turning their sharp, gossipy tongues our way. I hate small town busybodies! I always wanted to be more like Mac. She doesn’t do anything she doesn’t feel like doing. When people call her lazy and selfish, she doesn’t care, she’s happy. I wonder if she knows how proud of her I am for that?

But things are different now.

Here, in Dublin with him, I can be anyone I want to be. I’m no longer trapped in a small town in the Deep South, forced to be the good girl. I’m free!

He calls me his Queen of the Night. He shows me the wonders in this incredible city. He encourages me to find my own way, and to choose what I think is right or wrong.

And the sex, God, the sex! I never knew what sex was until him! It’s not soft music and candlelight, a choice, a deliberate action.

It’s as involuntary as breathing, and as impossible not to do. It’s slammed up against a wall in a dark alley, or flat on my back on cold concrete because I can’t stand one more second without him. It’s on my hands and knees, dry-mouthed, heart-in-my-throat, waiting for the moment he touches me, and I’m alive again. It’s punishing and purifying, velvet and violent, and it makes everything else melt away, until nothing matters but getting him inside me and I wouldn’t just die for him—I’d kill for him, too.

Like I did tonight.

And when I see her tomorrow.

I hated him.

Oh, I’d hated my sister’s murderer before, but now I hated him even more.

Here, in my white-knuckled hand, was proof that the Lord Master had used his dark powers on Alina, turned her into someone she wasn’t, before killing her: A page torn from her journal, penned in the beautiful, gently sloping hand she’d begun perfecting before I’d even learned to read.

A page so unlike Alina that it couldn’t have been more obvious he’d brainwashed her, done that Voice thing to her he’d done to me the other night in the caves beneath the Burren, when he’d demanded I give him the amulet and come with him, and I’d been unable to resist or deny him. With the power of a few mere words, he’d turned me into a mindless automaton. If not for Barrons, I would have trundled off behind him, enslaved. But Barrons, too, was skilled in the Druid power of Voice, and had freed me from the Lord Master’s spell.

I knew my sister. She’d been happy in Ashford. She’d loved being the person she was: bright, successful, and fun, idolized by me and most everyone else in town, the one whose smiling face was always in the newspaper for some honor or another, the one who did everything right.

He calls me his Queen of the Night.

“Queen of the Night, my petunia.” My sister had never wanted to be queen of anything, but if she had, it certainly wouldn’t have been the night. It would have been something festive, like Ashford’s annual Peach & Pumpkin Parade. She would have worn a shiny orange ribbon and a silver tiara, and been on the front page of the Ashford Journal-Constitution the next day.

I always wanted to be more like Mac. She’d never once said she wished she was more like me! When people call her lazy and selfish, she doesn’t care. Had people really said that about me? Had I been deaf back then, or just too dumb to care?

And what she’d written about sex was definitely not my sister. Alina didn’t like it doggie-style. She’d considered it demeaning. On your hands and knees, babe. Yeah, right, she’d say, and laugh. Up yours.

“See, not Alina,” I told the page.