“I assume you’re ready to look in that lake,” Ryodan said, tossing back the last of his drink.

I was only too happy to escape the apparently visible-by-all illusion on the dance floor before we collided again, further wrecking my tenuous grasp on reality. Alina was dead. I knew it in my bones. I knew it with utter and complete certainty. And if she wasn’t dead, nothing I thought I knew could be trusted. Not one damn thing. Easier to turn away from the illusion than confront it.

I tossed back my drink and stood.

Why not? I thought acerbically. Could things get any worse?

16

“What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive…”

I should never think that.

I know better.

Still, I persist, and every damned time the universe seizes the challenge on bullish horns, stomps its hoof, and snorts, “Hey, MacKayla Lane just said she doesn’t think things can get worse. We’ll show her!”

Ryodan took us to the dungeon level I’d glimpsed yesterday on his office monitors. Not to Dageus’s cell but to a small stone room down a narrow passageway.

I trailed my fingers along the cool damp stone of the corridor, skimming a marbling of brightly colored moss on the walls. Apart from the nearly iridescent algae staining a strangely luminous skein on the stone, it was gloomy, gray, and cold in the subterranean chamber.

I despise being underground. I wondered if anyone was with Dageus or if they’d left him alone to deal with his transformation. Although I listened intently, I heard no sound, no anguished baying, no tortured groans.

“Uh, Barrons, why are we in the dungeon?” I asked, looking around for ancient manacles bolted into the stone or something of the like, perhaps an iron maiden or a few bloodstained racks.

“Precaution. Nothing more. If you go, as you call it, batshit crazy, there are fewer people to kill down here.”

“I’d still leave through the club.” Meaning I could still destroy everyone within it. “Maybe we should go out into the middle of a field. Far from any town.”

He slanted me a look. You’re not going to lose it. You’re not going to open the Book tonight. We merely want to get the lay of your inner landscape.

I heaved an audible sigh of relief. “Then let’s get on with it.” I shot Ryodan a look as he closed us in the narrow stone cell. “Since you know I know everything, what the heck is the deal with Kat and Kasteo?”

“Another thing a wiser woman wouldn’t mention.”

“I’m only mentioning it to you, not anyone else,” I said. “So, what gives?”

He kicked a straight-backed chair toward me. “Sit.”

I clamped my mouth shut on I prefer to stand. No point in wasting energy just to vent my dissatisfaction with the current state of my life on everyone around me.

I sat. After a moment I let my lids flutter closed, although I didn’t need to. I remembered all too well, during that time I’d been a darker version of myself, letting my eyes go only slightly out of focus to drift into the place of power I called my dark glassy lake. Scooping up runes floating on the surface, power I’d naïvely believed my birthright, some part of my sidhe-seer heritage, only to learn they’d been temptations strewn by the Sinsar Dubh, gifts to seduce and entice.

Never mine at all.

I wondered, for perhaps the first time with my intellect, precisely where my inner lake actually was. Talking about it to Ryodan made me perceive it differently. Instead of seeming normal, I’d found it peculiar.

Why did I have a lake inside me? Did every sidhe-seer? Was it simply my chosen visualization of an inner power source, different for all of us? With constant calamity around me, I’d never gotten time to sit down with the sisters of my bloodline to ask questions, compare notes.

I frowned. Now that I’d added my brain to the mix, trying to pinpoint the metaphysical coordinates of my dark glassy lake—as if I might establish some quantum latitude and longitude—was difficult. The place proved abruptly elusive.

I inhaled deep, exhaled slow, willing myself to relax. Sink, sink, don’t think, I murmured in my mind.

Nothing.

Not even a puddle in sight anywhere.

I opened my eyes, thinking I needed to refocus and try again. Barrons gave me a look. “Hang on,” I said, “give me a minute.”

“Don’t play games with me, Mac,” Ryodan warned.

“I’m not,” I said. “It’s not easy. I’ve spent months trying to stay away from the place and now you expect me to dive right in. I’ve trained myself to never even think about it.” Although I didn’t always succeed.

Letting my gaze shift slightly out of focus, I mentally envisioned a giant lake, glassy and deep. I paid careful attention to the details, the pebbled shore, the faint light from what seemed to be a distant sky. I lavished attention on the sleek black surface. Told myself I couldn’t wait to swim, climbed up on a large rock, and when I’d gotten the scene exactly right, closed my eyes, leapt into the air, and dove.

I crashed into the ground, hard.

Not one bloody drop of water anywhere.

“Fuck,” I snapped, rubbing my head. It hurt, as if I’d actually hit a rock with it. And my arms felt bruised. I looked at Barrons. “I can’t find it.”

“Try again,” Ryodan ordered.

I did.

And again.

And again and again.

Driving us all crazy with repeated failure.

“You’re too tense,” Ryodan growled. “For fuck’s sake, you don’t stalk an orgasm, you enjoy its arrival.”

“Bloody talk about bloody orgasms with your own bloody woman not mine,” Barrons said tightly. “You don’t know a thing about her orgasms and never will.”

Ryodan shot him a dark look. “It was a metaphor.”

“I never stalk an orgasm. I don’t have to with Barrons,” I said.

“Too the fuck much information, Mac,” Ryodan said.

“You’re the one who brought up orgasms.”

“And he never will again,” Barrons said pointedly.

“Everybody shut up. I’m trying to concentrate.” Now I was thinking about orgasms. I considered Ryodan’s advice. Maybe I was trying too hard.

An hour later I was dripping sweat, my head was pounding, and my arms felt like I’d been delivering karate chops to brick walls.