One day, I vowed, grabbing my pack to take it downstairs so I could restock it with fresh supplies later, I would no longer be afraid of who and what I was. One day I would be unified, suffer no crippling doubts, and make decisions fearlessly.

One day, like the day I first met Jericho Barrons in this very store and refused to give him my last name, I’d be “Just Mac” again. No hitchhikers, no screwed-up hair, and no dead sister look-alikes.

—

At seven o’clock that evening I deposited my umpteenth box of debris near a wobbly stack of broken furniture by the back door and rummaged for my cellphone to shoot Barrons a text that I needed the Hunter back in twenty minutes to make our meeting on time.

Given Barrons’s endlessly surprising resources, I had no doubt he might have coerced one Fae or another to help me restore my store, but I didn’t want a magical solution. There was something cathartic about cleaning BB&B myself. No magic. No trade-offs or threats. Good, simple, hard work. Besides, I figured I had another twenty-four hours of Unseelie flesh high and could accomplish a great deal with the extra strength and energy until then.

However, I mused, glancing back through the doorway at the commerce portion, when it came to the floors and furniture, I was definitely going to need assistance. Barter with some local woodworkers, if any had survived the fall of the walls and subsequent ice, learn to run a power sander, stain properly, and make everything gleaming and new again. I liked the idea of refinishing my bookcases, a satisfying nesting task that could be completed without any woo-woo elements.

In the meantime I’d managed to stack an enormous pile of debris in the alley behind BB&B and had no aversion to asking Barrons to somehow make the trash outside disappear. It wasn’t as if we had trash pickup anymore.

I opened the back door to toss my last box of junk on the pile and froze. With the funnel cloud whirling around the eight-block circumference of BB&B, the day had been unnaturally quiet. Very little penetrated to the eye of the storm.

Yet now I heard something odd approaching: whirring and clanking, ponderous and large, coming from my left, from deep in the adjacent Dark Zone.

I eased the door shut to the tiniest of slivers, wondering if we’d trapped some gruesome Unseelie inside our funnel cloud with us. Even armed to the gills, I had no intention of bursting out into the deepening gloom of dusk in Dublin, which can slam down hard and fast, to confront whatever it was. I’d let it come to my turf, where lights blazed into the alley from the top of BB&B, and assess it before taking action.

It wasn’t long before the thing lumbered into view.

I narrowed my eyes, trying to understand what I was seeing through the gloom.

An awkwardly ambulating trash heap?

I glanced at my newly mounded pile. It didn’t appear as if anything had arisen from it.

I glanced back at the bizarre thing.

It whirred and clanked and shuddered its way toward me, made of gears and cogs, wheels and gray hoses and shiny steel boxes and blades. And other things—wet mucosal things that looked like external intestines, looping around it and through it. No discernible face. No mouth or eyes. Fifteen maybe twenty feet tall, it seemed haphazardly slapped together from bits of gristle and guts and odds and ends from a dump.

With a deafening grinding of cogs and wheels, it rolled and clattered my way.

When it passed directly in front of me, within a mere fifteen feet, I froze. I didn’t back up, I didn’t shut the door. I just went motionless. It wasn’t a choice. My body simply stopped obeying all commands issued by my brain. Once before, I’d felt raw, stupefying terror as I cowered before the beast form of the Sinsar Dubh, enduring the most excruciating pain of my life, pain I’d not believed it possible to survive. The mere presence of this pile of refuse incited similar terror, and like a deer shocked by blinding headlights, I was incapable of fighting or fleeing.

Run, hide, draw your spear. But I was able to do none of those things. Gripped by panic, I prayed the walking refuse/guts pile never noticed me, and I didn’t even know why.

Only that I wanted to pass beyond this thing’s regard forever.

I stood, not breathing, not sure I could breathe again if it chose to remain in close proximity, while it clattered past my own junk heap, which I’d created that afternoon, rattling like an ancient, badly made machine.

I had no idea if it was alive or fabricated, sentient or programmed. Only that if it had purpose—it was one I never wanted to know.

I gasped softly, finally managing a breath.

Still, I stood motionless in the doorway, trying to shake off the body-numbing terror, until at last it disappeared and my Hunter arrived.

Part III

I shiver. What I need to see is right here in front of me. I can feel it. I’m just not looking with the right eyes, the clear eyes that suffer no conflicts. I need a brain like mine and eyes like Ryodan’s. I focus on the backs of my lids, take the grayness of them and cocoon it around me. I make a bland womb where I can begin the process of erasing myself, detaching from the world; the one where I exist and I’m part of reality and everything I see is colored by my thoughts and feelings. I strip away all that I know about myself and sink into a quiet cavern in my head where there is no corporeality. And no pain.

—From the journals of Dani “the Mega” O’Malley

I know that no matter what fecked-up things Ryodan does, he’ll never forget me. He’s meticulous. There’s a lot to be said for detail-oriented. ’Least in my world there is. Especially when I’m one of the details.

—From the journals of Dani “the Mega” O’Malley

21

“All my tears have been used up on another love…”

THE JADA JOURNAL

August 5 AWC

NEW DUBLINERS BEWARE!

The Hoar Frost King—the Unseelie that recently iced Dublin and froze people to death—left areas of great danger in our city. These spots appear to be round black spheres, suspended in the air, anywhere from five to twenty feet above the ground.

THEY ARE LETHAL!

Do NOT TOUCH the spheres or disturb them in any way.

The Guardians have been cordoning them off to keep you safe. If you see one of these black spheres that hasn’t been cordoned off please

REPORT IT to the Guardians at DUBLIN CASTLE.

These spheres will GROW if you toss anything in,

and pose a GRAVE THREAT to our world if they get bigger.

PROTECT YOURSELVES. PROTECT OUR WORLD.