Shadowfever

Why do you hurt me?

I LOVE YOU.

You’re incapable of love.

NOTHING EXCEEDS MY ABILITIES. I AM ALL.

You’re a book. Pages with binding. You weren’t born. You don’t live. You’re no more than the dumping ground for everything that was wrong with a selfish king.

I AM EVERYTHING THAT WAS RIGHT WITH A WEAK KING. HE FEARED POWER. I KNOW NO FEAR.

What do you want from me?

OPEN YOUR EYES. SEE ME. SEE YOURSELF.

My eyes are open. I’m good. You’re evil.

—CONVERSATIONS WITH THE SINSAR DUBH

15

I never told anyone, but when I first arrived in Dublin, I had a secret fantasy that kept me from buckling during the worst times.

I’d pretend that we’d all been fooled, that the body sent home to Ashford wasn’t really Alina’s but some other blond coed that looked amazingly like her. I staunchly refused to acknowledge the dental records Daddy had insisted on comparing, a perfect match.

As I’d walked the streets of Temple Bar, hunting her killer, I’d pretended that any minute I was going to turn a corner and there she’d be.

She’d look at me, startled and thrilled, and say, Junior, what’s up? Are Mom and Dad okay? What are you doing here? And we’d hug each other and laugh, and I’d know that it had all been a nightmare but it was over. We’d have a beer, go shopping, find a beach somewhere on Ireland’s rocky coast.

I wasn’t prepared for death. Nobody is. You lose someone you love more than you love yourself, and you get a crash course in mortality. You lie awake night after night, wondering if you really believe in heaven and hell and finding all kinds of reasons to cling to faith, because you can’t bear to believe they aren’t out there somewhere, a few whispered words of a prayer away.

Deep down, I knew it was just a fantasy. But I needed it. It helped for a while.

I didn’t permit myself a fantasy with Barrons. I let rage take me because, as Ryodan astutely observed, it’s gasoline and makes great fuel. My fury was plutonium. In time, I would have mutated from radiation poisoning.

The worst part about losing someone you love—besides the agony of never getting to see them again—are the things you never said. The unsaid stalks you, mocks you for thinking you had all the time in the world. None of us do.

Here and now, face-to-face with Barrons, my tongue wouldn’t move. I couldn’t form a single word. The unsaid was ash in my mouth, too dry to swallow, choking me.

But worse than that was the realization that I was being played, again. No matter how real this moment seemed, I knew it was nothing but more illusion.

The Sinsar Dubh still had me.

I’d never really left the street where it had killed Darroc.

I was still standing, or probably lying in a heap, in front of K’Vruck, being distracted with fantasy while the Book was doing whatever it liked to do to me.

This was no different than the night Barrons and I tried to corner it with the stones and it had made me believe I was crouched on the pavement reading it, when all the while it had been crouching at my shoulder, reading me.

I should fight it. I should dive deep into my lake and do what I did best—blunder ahead in a generally forward direction, no matter how bad things got. But as I stared at the perfect replica of him, I couldn’t dredge up enough energy to drive the mirage away. Not yet.

There were worse ways to be tortured than with a vision of Jericho Barrons naked.

I would seek my sidhe-seer center and shatter it in a minute. Or ten. I leaned back against the fireplace with a faint smile, thinking: Bring it on.

The Barrons illusion rose from his half lunge and stood in a ripple of muscle.

God, he was beautiful. I looked up and down. The Book had done an amazingly accurate job, right down to his more generous attributes.

But it had gotten his tattoos wrong. I knew every inch of that body. The last time I saw Jericho Barrons naked, he’d been covered with red and black protection tattoos, and later his arms had been sheathed in them from biceps to wrist. Now the only tattoos he had were on his abdomen.

“You screwed up,” I told the Book. “But nice try.”

The fake Barrons tensed, knees bending slightly, weight shifting forward, and for a moment I thought he was going to launch himself at me and attack.

“I screwed up?” the Barrons figment snarled. He began to stalk toward me. It was difficult to look at his face when there was so much bouncing around at eye level.

“Which word didn’t you understand?” I said sweetly.

“Stop staring at my dick,” he growled.

Oh, yes, it was definitely an illusion. “Barrons loved me staring at his dick,” I informed it. “He would have been happy if I’d stared at his dick all day long, composing odes to its perfection.”

In one fluid motion, he had me by my collar and was yanking me to my feet. “That was before you killed me, you fucking imbecile!”

I was unfazed. Standing toe-to-toe with him was a drug. I needed it. I craved it. I couldn’t end this charade for anything. “See, you admit you’re dead,” I parried smoothly. “And I’m not an imbecile. An imbecile would be fooled by you.”

“I am not dead.” He slammed me back against the wall, pinning me with his body.

I was so delighted at being touched by Barrons-esque hands, so thrilled to be staring into the illusion of his dark eyes, that I hardly even felt my head smack into the wall. This was far more realistic than my brief moments with the memory of him in the black wing of the White Mansion. “Are, too.”

“Am not.”

His mouth was so close. Who cared if it wasn’t really him? It had his lips. His parts. Was one fake kiss too much to ask? I wet my lips. “Prove it.”

“You expect me to prove I’m not dead?” he said disbelievingly.

“I don’t think it’s so much to ask. After all, I did stab you.”

He braced his palms against the wall on either side of my head. “A wiser woman would stop reminding me of that.”

I inhaled his scent, spicy, exotic, a cherished memory that made me feel alive. The electric current that always charged the air between us sizzled on my skin. He was naked and I was up against a wall, and even though I knew I was being played by the Book, I could barely focus on his words. It felt so real. Except for those missing tattoos. The Book knew how big his dick was but couldn’t get the tattoos right. A small oversight.

“I’m impressed,” I murmured. “I really am.”

“I don’t give a bloody fucking hell if you’re impressed, Ms. Lane. I care about one thing and one thing only. Do you know where the Sinsar Dubh is? Did you find it for that bloody fucking half-breed bastard?”

“Oh, that’s just rich.” I snorted with laughter. The Sinsar Dubh had created an illusion of a person, and that extension of the Sinsar Dubh was asking me where the Sinsar Dubh was. “Infinite-regress much?”

“Answer me or I’m going to rip your head off.”

Barrons would never do that. The Sinsar Dubh had just made another mistake. Barrons had vowed to keep me alive, and he’d stayed true to that vow until the very end. He’d died to save me. He would never hurt me and certainly wouldn’t kill me. “You don’t know a thing about him,” I sneered.

“I know everything about him.” He cursed. “About me.”

“Do not.”

“Do, too.”

“Bull!”

“Not!”

“Too,” I spat.

“Not!” he fired back, then exhaled explosively. “Bloody hell. Ms. Lane, you drive me bloody fucking crazy.”

“Right back at you, Barrons. And you can lose all the ‘bloodys’ and ‘fuckings’ anytime now. You’re overdoing it. The real Barrons never cursed that much.”

“I bloody fucking know exactly how many bloody fuckings Barrons would use. You don’t know him as well as you think you do.”

“Stop pretending to be him!” I shoved at his chest. “You’re not and you never will be!”

“Besides, that was before you killed me and decided to replace me with Darroc in less than a month! Grieve much, Ms. Lane?”

Oh, how dare he? Grief was all I was. Grief and revenge, walking. “For the record, you’ve been dead for three days. And I am so not doing this. Get out of here. Go. Away.” I knocked his hands away from my head and stormed past him. “I’m not defending my reasons for doing what I did to you, when you aren’t even really here. That’s too psychotic, even for me.”

He grabbed me and swung me back around. “You’d better believe I’m here, Ms. Lane, and you’d better believe I’ll kill you. You could not have proved your loyalties—or lack thereof—any more completely. You jumped on me the second Ryodan said I was a threat and took me out without an instant’s hesitation—”

“I hesitated! I hated killing my guardian beast! Ryodan told me I had to! I didn’t know it was you!” Great. Now I was arguing with the Sinsar Dubh’s fake Barrons about killing him. Why would it want to do this to me? What could the Book possibly gain from making me live this fight?

“You should have known!” he exploded.

I knew I should end it, stop the illusion now, but I couldn’t.

Being around Barrons has always made me fire on all pistons, and it didn’t seem to matter a bit that I knew this Barrons was a mirage. Some people bring out the worst in you, others bring out the best, and then there are those remarkably rare, addictive ones who just bring out the most. Of everything.

They make you feel so alive that you’d follow them straight into hell, just to keep getting your fix.

“How should I have known? Because you’ve always been so honest with me? Because sharing information is what Jericho Barrons does best, where he really shines? No, because you’d bothered to warn me what might happen if I pressed IYD. Wait, I have it: I should have known because you’d confided in me—in the same trusting and open way we’ve shared so many confidences—that sometimes you turn into a nine-foot-tall, horned, insane monster!”

“I am not insane. I was sane enough to piss circles around you. I killed food for you. I picked up your things. Who else do you know that would have done that? V’lane doesn’t have dick enough to piss with. Your little MacKeltar doesn’t have the balls to own his actions. He certainly isn’t capable of doing what it takes to own a woman!”

“Own? You think women can be owned?”

He gave me a look that said, Oh, honey, of course they can. Have you forgotten so quickly?

“I was Pri-ya!”

“And I liked you much better then!” His eyes narrowed as if he’d only finally processed something I’d said earlier. “I’ve been dead for you for only three bloody days? And you already had Darroc up against my wall out back two nights ago? You waited one fucking day to line up my replacement? I spent weeks worrying about whether he would scrape my brand off your skull and I wouldn’t be able to track you in the Silvers. The entire time I was trying to get back to save your ass from him, you were giving him a piece of it!”

“I didn’t give Darroc a piece of anything!” Get back from what, where? Being dead?

“A woman doesn’t rub herself up against a man like that unless she’s fucking him.”

“You don’t know the first thing about what I was and wasn’t doing. Ever heard of going undercover? Sleeping with the enemy?”

“ ‘I think you should be king, Darroc,’ ” he mocked in falsetto, “ ‘and if you want me, I would be honored to be your queen.’ ”

I gaped.

“Isn’t that what you said?”

“What were you doing—spying on me? And if you’re Barrons, you know better than to believe words.”

“Because your actions speak so well of you, do they? Where did you sleep last night, Ms. Lane? It wasn’t here. My bookstore was wide open. Your bedroom was upstairs waiting. So was your fucking honor.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Honor? Barrons was flinging the word “honor” at me? Er … actually, the Sinsar Dubh was. I couldn’t decide which was more anachronistic. I frowned. There was something wrong here. Something was very, very off. Although “Barrons” and “honor” weren’t two words I’d think to use together in a sentence, I couldn’t come up with a single reason for the Sinsar Dubh to pull this kind of stunt. It had never inflicted such a prolonged and detailed illusion on me before. I could see nothing it might gain by doing it.

“Do you know why I was in the street with you and Darroc tonight?” When I didn’t reply, he snarled, “Answer me!”

I shook my head.

“I wasn’t there to spy on you and your little boyfriend. Speaking of which, what’s it like to slurp down your sister’s sloppy seconds?”

“Oh, fuck you,” I said instantly. “That’s low even for you.”

“You haven’t seen anything yet. I came to kill him tonight. I should have done it a long time ago. But I didn’t get that pleasure. The Sinsar Dubh beat me to it,” he said bitterly.

“Enough already. You are the Sinsar Dubh!”

“Hardly. But I’m every bit as deadly. We can both destroy you. Nothing can save you from me if I turn on you.”

It was past time for this illusion to end. The only reason I’d let it go on this long was because it had begun enjoyably and I’d kept hoping it might turn around. But whatever bizarre game the Book was playing, it wasn’t going to play nice, and this icy, sneering Barrons wasn’t the man I wanted to remember.

“Time for you to go now,” I muttered.

“I’m not going anywhere. Ever. If you think for one minute I’ll let you flip sides mid-game, you’re wrong. I’m invested. You’re in too deep. You owe me. I will chain you up, tie you down, leash you with magic, whatever I have to do, but you will help me get that Book. And when I’ve got it, I might let you live.”

“You’re the Sinsar Dubh,” I said again, but my protest was weak. While he’d been talking, I’d sought my sidhe-seer center—that all-seeing eye that can rip away illusion and reveal the truth beneath it—and I’d focused it like a laser on the mirage.

Nothing had happened. No bubble had burst, no mirage had fractured. My hands were shaking. I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs.

It wasn’t possible.

I’d killed him.

And when I’d realized what I’d done, I’d channeled my grief into a weapon of mass destruction. I’d made a plan, with a set-in-cement past and a concrete future.

This … this … inexplicability didn’t fit anywhere in my understanding of reality. Not with any of my goals, not with what I’d become.

“But then again, I might not,” he said. “Unlike some people, I don’t do sloppy seconds.”

I inhaled sharply. I was growing dangerously light-headed. It couldn’t be. He was not actually standing there.

Was he?

It looked like Barrons, felt like Barrons, smelled and sounded like Barrons, and certainly had his attitude.

Screw my sidhe-seer center. I needed juice. And I knew where to find it. I let my gaze drift out of focus and frantically sucked raw power from my glassy lake.

Refocusing again, I turned everything I had on the figment.

“Show me the truth,” I commanded, and blasted it to bits.

“You wouldn’t know the truth if it bit you in the ass, Ms. Lane. Case in point: It just did.” He gave me that wolf smile, but it didn’t hold an ounce of charm. It was all teeth, reminding me of fangs against my skin.

My knees gave out.

Jericho Barrons was still standing there.

Towering, naked, and pissed off as hell, hands fisted as if he was about to beat the crap out of me.

Puddled on the floor, I stared up at him. “You’re n-not d-dead.” My teeth were chattering so hard I could barely force the words past my lips.

“Sorry to disappoint.” If looks could kill, the one he shot me would have sunk me six feet deep in scorpions. “Oh, wait a minute. No, I’m not.”

It was too much. My head was spinning and my vision began to go dark.

I fainted.

16

Consciousness returned in slow degrees. I came to on the floor of the bookstore in the dark.

I always thought fainting showed an inherent weakness of character, but I understood it now. It was an act of self-preservation. Confronted by emotion too extreme to handle, the body shuts down to keep from running around like a chicken with its head cut off, potentially injuring itself.

The realization that Barrons was alive had been more than I could deal with. Too many thoughts and feelings had tried to coalesce at once. My brain had tried to process that the impossible was possible, make words for all I was feeling, and I’d silently imploded.

“Barrons?” I rolled over onto my back. There was no reply. I was gripped by the sudden fear that it had all been a dream. That he wasn’t really alive, and I was going to have to come to terms with that unbearable fact—again.

I shot up to a sitting position, and my heart sank.

I was alone. Had it all been a cruel illusion, a dream? I glanced wildly around, seeking proof of his existence.

The bookstore was a wreck. That much hadn’t been a dream. I began to stand and stopped, realizing there was a sheet of paper taped to my coat. Dazedly, I pulled it off.

If you leave this bookstore and make me track you, I will make you regret it to the end of your days. ~Z

I began to laugh and cry at the same time. I sat, clutching the paper to my chest, elated.

He was alive!

I had no idea how it was possible. I didn’t care. Jericho Barrons lived. He walked this world. That was enough for me.

I closed my eyes, shuddering as a crushing weight slipped from my soul. I breathed, really breathed for the first time in three days, filling my lungs greedily.

I hadn’t killed him.

I wasn’t to blame. I’d somehow been granted with Barrons what I’d never gotten with my sister—and I hadn’t even had to demolish the world for it: a second chance!

I opened my eyes, read the note again, and laughed.

He was alive.

He’d ruined my bookstore. He’d written me a letter. A lovely, lovely letter! Oh, happy day!

I stroked the sheet upon which he’d scrawled his threat. I loved this sheet of paper. I loved his threat. I even loved my wrecked shop. It would take time, but I would restore it. Barrons was back. I would rebuild the shelves, replace the furniture, and one day in the future I would sit on my sofa and stare into a fire and Barrons would walk in, and he wouldn’t even have to say anything. We could just sit in companionable or—who cared?—grumpy silence. Whatever bizarre scheme he came up with, I’d go along with it. We’d squabble over what car to take and who got to drive. We’d kill monsters and hunt artifacts and try to figure out how to capture the Book. It would be perfect.

He was alive!

As I moved to stand again, something slipped from my lap and I dropped back down to the floor to retrieve it.

It was the picture of Alina that I’d left in my parents’ mailbox the night V’lane had taken me to Ashford to show me that he’d restored my hometown and was keeping my family safe. The night Darroc had tracked me by the brand on my skull and later abducted my mom and dad.

This was the calling card Darroc had tacked to the front door of BB&B, demanding I come to him through the Silvers if I valued their lives.

That Barrons had left it for me now told me one thing: He had rescued my mom and dad before I’d IYD’d him into the Silvers.

But he hadn’t given me the picture as a present or to make me feel better. He’d left it for the same reason Darroc had. To make the same point.

I have your parents. Don’t fuck with me.

Okay, so he was a little pissed off at me. I could deal with that. If he’d killed me, I’d be a little pissed off, too, no matter how irrational it was. But he would get over it.

I couldn’t have asked for more. Well, I could have, like Alina back and all the Fae dead, but this was good. This was a world I wanted to live in.

My parents were safe.

I clutched the letter and photo. I hugged them to my chest. I hated that he’d stormed off and left me lying on the floor, but I had proof of his existence and I knew he’d be back.

I was the OOP detector and he was the OOP director. We were a team.

He was alive!

I wanted to stay awake all night, basking in the glow that Jericho Barrons wasn’t dead, but my body had other ideas.

The moment I stepped into my bedroom, I nearly collapsed. If there’s one thing I’ve learned since Alina’s death, it’s that grief is more physically draining than running a marathon every day. It wipes you out and leaves you bruised, body and soul.

I managed to wash my face and brush my teeth, smiling like an idiot at myself in the mirror, but flossing and moisturizing was beyond me. Too much effort. I wanted to puddle in a brainless heap, curl up in the comforting arms of the knowledge that I hadn’t killed him. I wasn’t guilty. He wasn’t dead.

I was sorry he hadn’t waited around. I wished I knew where he was. I wished I had a cell phone.

I would have told him all the things I’d never said. I would have confessed my feelings. I wouldn’t have been afraid to be tender. Losing him had clarified my emotions, and I wanted to shout them from the rooftop.

But not only didn’t I have any idea where he went at night, I could barely move. Pain had been the glue keeping my will strong and my bones together. Without it, I was limp.

Tomorrow was another day.

And he was going to be alive in it!

I stripped and crawled into bed.

I passed out while I was still pulling the covers up and slept like a woman who’d hiked through hell without food or rest for months.

My dreams were so vivid, I felt like I was living them.

I dreamed I was watching Darroc die again, enraged that his death was being stolen from me so anticlimactically, my revenge snatched away, in the pinch of a Hunter’s talons. I dreamed I was back in the Silvers, searching for Christian but never finding him. I dreamed I was at the abbey, on the floor of the cell, and Rowena came in and slit my throat. I felt the lifeblood gurgle out of me, turning the dirt floor to mud. I dreamed I was in the Cold Place, chasing the beautiful woman that I couldn’t catch up with, and then I dreamed I’d actually done it—destroyed the world and replaced it with one I wanted. Afterward, I flew over my new world, astride the mighty, ancient K’Vruck. His great black wings whipped my hair into a tangle, and I laughed like a demon while the dissonant, haunting notes of Pink Martini’s remix of “Qué Sera Sera” tinkled like a harpsichord from hell.

I slept for sixteen hours.

I needed every minute of it. The past three days were a surreal nightmare and had exhausted me.

The first thing I did when I woke up was pull Barrons’ note out from under my pillow and read it again to reassure myself he was alive.

Then I dashed down the stairs so fast I slid down the last five steps on my pajama-clad ass, desperate for confirmation that the bookstore was indeed still trashed.

It was. I did a celebratory dance in the debris.

Because it was afternoon and Barrons rarely came around until early evening, I went back upstairs and took a long, hot shower. I conditioned, exfoliated, and shaved.

I leaned back against the wall, stretched out my legs, and watched water splash over the spear strapped to my thigh, letting my mind go blank while I relaxed.

Unfortunately, my mind wouldn’t stay blank and my body wouldn’t relax. The muscles in my legs kept tensing, my neck and shoulders were tight, and my fingers tapped a fast staccato on the shower floor.

Something was bothering me. A lot. Beneath my happy surface, a dark storm was brewing.

How could anything be bothering me? My world was blue skies all the way, despite Dublin’s constant rain. How could I not be blissfully happy at this moment? It was a good day. Barrons was alive. Darroc was dead. I was no longer stuck in the Silvers, fighting myriad monsters and dodging illusions.

I frowned, realizing that was exactly the problem.

At this moment, there was nothing wrong, besides the usual fate of the world stuff I’d become mostly inured to.

I couldn’t deal with that. I’d been compressed, gripped in a painful vise. I’d gotten used to it.

It was things being wrong that had given me shape and purpose and kept me going.

But in the past twenty-four hours, I’d gone from being one hundred percent consumed by grief and rage to having every single reason for feeling those emotions stripped away.

Barrons was alive. Grief—poof!

The man I’d believed had murdered my sister, the one I’d been so committed to killing, was dead. The infamous Lord Master was gone.

That chapter of my life was over. He would never again lead the Unseelie, wreak havoc in my world, or hunt and hurt me. I didn’t have to constantly watch over my shoulder for him anymore. The bastard who’d turned me Pri-ya was beyond my vengeful grasp. He’d gotten his just deserts. Well … he was dead, anyway. His just deserts would have been a whole lot worse if I’d been in charge of doling them out.

Regardless, he’d been my raison d’être for the longest time. And he was gone.

What did that leave me? Revenge—poof!

I’d always envisioned a final showdown between the two of us, and I would kill him.

Who was my villain now? Who would I hate and blame for Alina’s death? It wasn’t Darroc. He’d had a genuine weakness for her. He hadn’t killed her and, if he’d been somehow responsible for her death, he hadn’t known it. Six months in Dublin, and I was no closer to uncovering my sister’s murderer.

With Barrons alive and Darroc dead, there went my all-consuming focus on revenge.

My parents were safe and in Barrons’ care. There was no one I needed to save.

I had no urgent purpose, no express deadline. I felt lost. Directionless.

Sure, I had most of the same primary goals I’d had before I’d gone into the Silvers and everything had gone so terribly wrong, but grief had poured me into a tight box and those walls had shaped me. Now that the box was gone, I could feel myself collapsing into a shapeless blob.

What was next? Where to from here? I needed time to absorb the sudden changes in my reality and recalibrate my emotions. Confusing me even more, beneath the joy I felt that Barrons was alive, I was … well, angry. Furious, actually. There was something seething inside me. And I didn’t even know what. But deep down, underneath it all, I was working up a major temper and feeling … stupid. Like I’d leapt to conclusions that didn’t hold water.

I got out of the shower, thoroughly disgruntled, and picked through my clothes, dissatisfied with them all.

Yesterday I would have known exactly what to wear. Today I had no idea. Pink or black? Maybe it was time for a new favorite color. Or maybe no favorite color at all.

Rain pattered against the window while I dithered. Dublin was once again gray.

I pulled on a pair of gray capri sweats with JUICY stamped across my ass, a zip-up sweatshirt, and flip-flops. If Barrons still wasn’t around, I would start cleaning up downstairs a little.

After all, I’d done what he’d asked.

My parents were free, I was alive, Darroc was dead, and I had the stones tucked securely away in the heavily runed bedroom of a penthouse.

According to my understanding of the law, that made it my bookstore now.

That meant it was also my Lamborghini. My Viper, too.

“It wasn’t my fucking idea, either,” I heard Barrons growl as I descended the rear stairs.

The door to his study was open a few inches, and I could hear him moving around in there, picking things up and putting them back down.

I stopped on the last step and smiled, reveling in the simple pleasure of hearing his voice again. Until he’d been gone, I hadn’t understood how empty the world was without him.

My smile faded. I shifted from foot to foot on the stairs.

My mood might be sunshine glinting off water, but there was a dark undertow beneath the placid surface.

I’d gone further off the deep end than I liked to think about, with the whole decimate-the-universe kick I’d been on. I’d been one hundred percent committed to wresting whatever dark knowledge I’d needed from the Book, no matter the cost to myself or anyone else. I’d been willing to do anything it could teach me in order to replace this world with a new one. All because I’d believed Jericho Barrons was dead.

I hadn’t even had a concrete plan, except to get the Book and wing it, believing I could master whatever spells of making and unmaking it had to offer. Looking back on my behavior, I was stymied by it. Rabid ambition, insane focus.

Alina’s death hadn’t done that to me.

I pushed my hands into my hair and tugged as if the gentle pain might clarify my thoughts. Shed light on my recent temporary insanity.

It must have been the betrayal aspect of it all that had made me so crazy. If only it hadn’t been me who’d stabbed him, I never would have cracked like I had. Sure, my grief at losing Barrons had been intense, but it was the guilt that had crushed me. I’d turned on my protector, and my protector had turned out to be Barrons.

Shame, not grief, had fueled my need for revenge. That was it. Guilt had turned me into a woman obsessed, willing to consider erasing one world to create a new one. If I’d been the one who’d stabbed Alina, if I’d participated in killing her, I would have felt exactly the same way and considered doing the same thing. It wouldn’t have even been love motivating me as much as a desperate need to erase my own complicity.

Now that grief wasn’t a fist around my heart, I knew I would never have gone through with it.

Re-create the world just for Jericho Barrons? The thought was ridiculous.

I’d lost Alina and hadn’t turned into a world-destroying banshee, and I’d loved her all my life.

I’d known Barrons only a few months. If I was going to re-create the world for anyone, it would have been my sister.

Okay, that was resolved. I hadn’t betrayed Alina by not going all Mad Max over her.

So why did I still feel something dark, twisting and turning inside me, trying to get to the surface? What was eating at me?

“Bloody hell, Ryodan, we’ve been over this a thousand times!” Barrons exploded. “The whole bloody way back we talked about it. We had a plan, you deviated. You were supposed to get her to safety. She was never supposed to know it was me. It’s your fault she knows we can’t die.”

I froze. Ryodan was alive, too? I watched him get ripped to shreds and be flung down a hundred-foot ravine. I frowned. He’d said “can’t die.” What did that mean? As in never? No matter what?

He was quiet for a moment and I realized he was on the phone.

“You knew I’d fight. You knew I’d win. I always win. That’s why you were supposed to separate us and shoot me, so she wouldn’t know I was dead. Bring more ammo next time. Try a rocket launcher. Think maybe you could manage to hit me with that?” he said sarcastically.

A rocket launcher? Barrons would survive that?

“You’re the one that fucked up. She watched us die.”

Indeed, I did. So why weren’t they dead? There was another pause. I held my breath, listening.

“I don’t give a shit what they think. And don’t give me this vote crap. Nobody voted. Lor doesn’t even know what century it is, and Kasteo hasn’t said a word in a thousand years. You’re not killing her and neither are they. If anyone is going to kill her, it’s me. And that’s not happening right now. I need the Book.”

I stiffened. He’d said “right now,” strongly implying that there might be another time it was happening. And the only reason he wasn’t killing me was because he needed the Book.

This was the jackass I’d been grieving? Whose return I’d been celebrating? I didn’t ponder the “thousand years” comment. I’d work on that later.

“If you think I’ve hunted it this long to kill the best chance I’ve got, you don’t know shit about me.”

There it was again, the phrase Fiona had used the night he’d stabbed her to shut her up. I was his “best chance.” At what?

“Bring it on. You. Lor. Kasteo, Fade. Whoever wants to get in my way. But if I were you, I’d back the fuck off. Don’t give me a reason to make you live to regret it. Is that what you want? A pointless, eternal war? You want us at each other’s throats?”

Silence.

“I never forget my loyalties. You’ve forgotten your faith. Keep her parents alive. Follow my orders. It’ll be over soon.”

I fisted my hands. What exactly was going to be over?

“That’s where you’re wrong. One world isn’t just as good as any other. Some worlds are better. We’ve known she’s a wild card since the beginning. After what I learned about her the other night, I have to let this hand play out. Have you located Tellie yet? I need to question the woman. Assuming she’s still alive. No? Get more people on it.”

What did he mean by after what he’d learned about me? That I’d teamed up with Darroc? That according to him I’d been willing to betray him? Or was there something else? Who was Tellie and what did he need to question her about?

“Darroc is dead. She’ll tell V’lane she made it up. No one will believe the kid.” Another long pause. “Of course she’ll do what I say. I’ll take V’lane out myself if I have to.” He paused. “The fuck you could.”

The silence stretched so long that I realized he must have terminated the call.

Hand on the door frame, I stood, eyeing the stairs.

“Get your ass in here, Ms. Lane. Now.”

“I heard—” I began.

“I let you hear,” he cut me off.

I shut my mouth, closed the door, and leaned back against it. The corners of his lips turned up as if at some private amusement, and for a moment I thought we were having one of those silent conversations.

You think it’s safe to close yourself in with the Beast?

If you think I’m afraid of you, you’re wrong.

You should be afraid.

Maybe you should be afraid of me. Go ahead, piss me off, Barrons. See what happens.

Little girl thinks she’s all grown up now.

His mouth moved into a smile that I’ve grown familiar with over the past few months, shaped of competing tensions: part mockery, part pissed off, and part turned on. Men are so complicated.

“Now you know what they think of you. I’m all that stands between you and my men,” he said.

That and a very deep glassy lake. I’d dive to the bottom if I had to. Even though he was alive again, even though I now understood I never would have destroyed this world to resurrect him, I was no longer the woman I’d been before I’d helped kill him and never would be again.

The transformation I’d undergone had done permanent damage. The emotions I’d felt, believing he was dead, had cut deep, leaving my heart battle-scarred, my soul changed. The grief might be over, but the memory of those days, the choices I’d made, the things I’d almost done, would be a part of me forever. I suspected some part of me was still slightly numb and might be for a long time.

My gaze strayed to his neck. It was as if his throat had never been cut. There was no wound, no scar. He was completely healed. I’d seen him naked last night and knew there were no scars on his torso, either. His body bore no evidence of the violent death he’d endured.

I glanced back at his face. He was staring at my newly dyed hair. I pushed it back, tucked it behind my ears. From the hostility in his gaze, I knew if I opened my mouth again, he’d just cut me off, so I waited, enjoying the view.

One of the things I realized when I’d been grieving him was how attractive I find him. Barrons is … addictive. He grows on you until you can’t begin to imagine anyone you’d like to look at more. He wears his dark hair slicked back from his face, sometimes cut, sometimes long, as if he can’t be bothered to regularly get it trimmed. I now know why, at well over six feet of long, hard muscle, he moves with such animal grace.

He’s an animal.

His forehead, nose, mouth, and jaw bear the stamp of a gene pool that died out long ago, blended with whatever it is that makes him the beast. Though symmetrical, with strong planes and angles, his face is too primitive to be handsome. Barrons might have evolved enough to walk upright, but he never relinquished the purity and unapologetic drives of a born predator. The aggressive ruthlessness and bloodlust of my demon guardian is his inherent nature.

When I first arrived in Dublin, he terrified me.

I inhale deeply, inflating my lungs with a long, slow breath. Though ten feet and a wide desk separate us, I can smell him. The scent of his skin is one I will never forget, no matter how long I live. I know the taste of him in my mouth. I know the smell we make together. Sex is a perfumery that creates its own fragrance, takes two people and makes them smell like a third. It’s a scent neither person can make alone. I wonder if that third smell can become a drug of blended pheromones that can be generated only by the mixture of those two people’s sweat, saliva, and semen. I’d like to shove him back on the desk. Straddle him. Dump a storm of emotion across his body with mine.

I realize he’s staring at me, hard, and that my thoughts might have been a bit transparent. Desire’s a hard thing not to telegraph. It changes the way we breathe and subtly rearranges our limbs. If you’re attuned to someone, it’s impossible not to notice.

“Is there something you want from me, Ms. Lane?” he says very softly. Lust stirs in his ancient eyes. I remember the first time I glimpsed it there. I’d wanted to run, screaming. Savage Mac had wanted to play.

The answer to his question was a resounding yes. I wanted to launch myself across his desk and expel something violent from my system. I wanted to beat him, punish him for the pain I’d suffered. I wanted to kiss him, slam myself down on him, reassure myself that he was alive in the most elemental way I could.

If anyone is going to kill her, he’d said moments ago, it’s me.

God, how I’d grieved him!

He speaks of killing me so casually. Still not trusting me. Never trusting me. Those dark currents gurgle, begin to gush. I am furious. With him. He deserves a dose of grief himself. I wet my lips. “As a matter of fact there is.”

He inclines his head imperiously, waiting.

“And only you can give it to me,” I purr, arching my back.

His gaze drops to my breasts. “I’m listening.”

“It’s long overdue. I haven’t been able to think about anything else. It nearly drove me crazy today, waiting for you to get here so I could ask for it.”

He stands up and rakes me with a scathing look.

Sloppy seconds, his eyes say.

You had it first, I counter silently. I think that means he got the leftovers.

I push away from the door, circle the desk, trailing my fingertips lightly over his Silver as I pass it. He watches my hand and I know he’s remembering how I once touched him.

I stop a few inches from him. I’m humming with energy. He is, too. I can feel it.

“I’ve become obsessed with getting it, and if you say no, I’ll just have to take it.”

He inhales sharply. “You think you can?” Challenge stirs in his dark gaze.

I have a sudden vision of the two of us having an all-out fight from end to end of the bookstore, culminating in fierce, no-holds-barred sex, and my mouth goes so dry I can’t swallow for a moment.

“It might take me a while to … get my hands on exactly what I want, but I have no doubt I could.”

His eyes say: Bring it on. But you’ve got a lot to pay for.

He hates me for teaming up with Darroc. He believes we were lovers.

And he’d have sex with me in a heartbeat. Against his better judgment, with no tenderness at all, but he’d do it. I don’t get men. If I thought he’d betrayed me with … say, Fiona, a day after he’d helped kill me, I’d make him suffer for a good long time before I slept with him again.

He believes that I had sex with my sister’s lover the day after I stabbed him, that I forgot all about him and moved on. Men are wired different. I think for them, it’s about stamping out all trace, all memory, of their competitor as quickly and completely as possible. And they feel that the only way they can do it is with their body, their sweat, their semen. As if they can re-mark us. I think sex is so intense for them, they can be so easily ruled by it, that they think we can, too.

I look up at him, into those dark, bottomless eyes. “Can you die—ever?”

For a long moment he doesn’t speak. Then he moves his head once, in silent negation.

“As in: never? No matter what happens to you?”

I get that silent slice to the left and back to the middle again.

The bastard. Now I understand the anger I’ve been feeling beneath the elation. Some part of my brain had already put this together:

He’d let me grieve.

He never told me he was a beast that couldn’t be killed. He could have spared me all the pain I’d endured with one tiny little truth, one small confession, and I’d never have felt so violent and dark and broken. If he’d only just said: Ms. Lane, I can’t be killed. So if you ever see me die, don’t sweat it. I’ll be back.

I’d lost myself. Because of him. Because of his idiotic need to keep everything about himself secret. There was no excuse for it.

But even worse was this: I’d thought he’d given his life to save me, when all he’d really done was the equivalent of take a little nap. What did “dying” for someone mean when you knew you couldn’t die? Not a damn thing. An inconvenience. IYD hadn’t been a big deal after all.

I’d wept, I’d mourned. I’d built a massive and utterly undeserved Monument to Barrons, The Man Who’d Died So I Could Live, in my head. I’d thought he’d made the ultimate sacrifice for me, and it had milked my emotions brutally. I’d let it consume me, take me over, turn me into someone I couldn’t believe I’d been capable of becoming.

And he’d never been willing to die so I could live. It had been business as usual—Barrons keeping his OOP detector alive and functioning, coolly impersonal, focused on his goals. So what if he was the one who would never let me die? It didn’t cost him anything. He wanted the Book. I was the way to get it. He had nothing to lose. I finally understood why he was always so fearless.

I’d thought he’d cared about me so much he’d been willing to give up his life. I’d romanticized it and gotten swept away in a misguided fantasy. And if he’d stayed here last night, I’d have made a complete fool of myself. I’d have confessed feelings to him that I’d felt only because I’d thought he’d given his life for mine.

Nothing had changed.

There was no deeper level of understanding or emotion between us.

He was Jericho Barrons, OOP director, pissed off at me because he thought I’d taken up with the enemy, irked that he’d had to endure an inconvenient death, but still not telling me a thing, using me to achieve his mysterious ends.

He bristles with impatience. I feel the lust rolling off him, the violence beneath it.

“You said you wanted something. What is it, Ms. Lane?”

I smile coolly. “The deed to my bookstore, Barrons. What else?”

17

“Turn right, here,” I said.

Barrons shot me a look that pretty much said, Fuck off and die.

I returned it. “I left the stones at Darroc’s penthouse.”

He yanked the wheel of the Viper to the right so hard, I nearly ended up in his lap. I knew what a mistake that would be. Since our sexually charged incident back at the bookstore, he hadn’t spoken a single word.

I’d never seen him so angry. And I’ve seen Barrons angry a lot.

When I’d delivered my frosty coup de grâce, he regarded me with such contempt that, if I’d been a lesser woman, I’d have withered up and died. I’m not lesser. He deserved it.

Then he’d stalked away from me and stood staring into the Silver for long moments. When he’d finally turned back, he raked a glance from my tousled blond hair to my wedge flip-flops, then shot a look at the ceiling, telling me as clearly as if he’d spoken aloud to go change into something a grown woman would wear, because we were leaving.

When I’d come back down, he herded me into the garage without touching me. I’d felt tension ebbing and flowing like a violent surf beneath his skin, the same way the colors had crashed ceaselessly beneath the skin of the Unseelie Princes.

He’d chosen the Viper from his collection and slid into the driver’s seat. I knew he’d done it to provoke me. To remind me that nothing was mine. Everything was his.

“This is bullshit, and you know it,” I snapped. I couldn’t fight about what was really pissing me off, so I’d work with the material at hand. “Mom and Dad are out, I’m alive, and Darroc is dead. You never specified who had to do what or how it had to happen. You only demanded an end result. Your terms were met.”

The Viper rumbled down the street, and I felt a flash of envy. I knew the thrill of the exhaust pipe’s heat in the driver’s compartment, the sleek pleasure of the gear stick in my hand, the rush of massive muscle idling hungrily, waiting for my next command. I sighed and looked out the window, watching the darkness slide by.

I didn’t have to give Barrons directions. He knew exactly where I’d stayed two nights ago. He turned right, then left, twelve blocks to the east, and seven to the south.

The city was as silent as he was. Although I sensed a great number of Fae, they weren’t out in the streets. I wondered if they were having a Fae summit somewhere, planning their next moves. I wondered if the Unseelie nation had been unsettled by the loss of their liberator and leader and if they were meeting to choose a new one. I wondered who would step up to take over. One of the Unseelie Princes?

In a way, Darroc hadn’t been a bad choice to have leading the Dark Court. He’d wanted our world intact, because he’d wanted to rule it alongside the Fae realm. He’d liked his human pleasures and had intended to continue them. His years among us had increased his appetite for mortal women and mortal luxuries; ergo, he’d have preserved them.

But there was no guarantee that whoever stepped up to the plate next would feel the same. In fact, there was little likelihood that the new Unseelie leader would feel anything even remotely human.

If one of the dark princes took over—say, Death or Pestilence—they’d have no long-term goals, no restraint. They’d indulge until there was nothing left to devour. We’d actually been lucky to have an ex-Seelie leading the Unseelie. I knew what the princes were made of: emptiness darker and vaster than the night sky. Their appetites were boundless, insatiable.

I’d seen what had happened in the street between the Seelie and Unseelie when they’d faced off. The ground had begun to split. If the two courts clashed on a grand scale, if they went at each other en masse, they would destroy our world.

While they could move on to a new planet, we couldn’t.

The human race would die out.

I’d thought I had no pressing obligations, no express deadlines. But I did. The longer the Book was loose and the Fae battled each other, the greater the danger of total human annihilation.

I wondered if Barrons realized any of this. I wondered if he even cared. Whatever he was could probably survive any fallout, nuclear or Fae. Would he simply hook up with the other immortals on our planet and move on with them? I needed to know where he stood. “We’ve got serious problems, Barrons.”

He slammed the brakes so hard I got whiplash. If I hadn’t had my seat belt on, I’d have gone through the windshield. I’d been so lost in thought that I hadn’t realized we’d arrived.

“Mortal over here!” I said irritably, rubbing my neck. “You might try remembering tha—ack, what the—Barrons!” I was yanked out of the car by my arm so hard, it nearly popped out of socket.

I hadn’t even seen him get out and come around to my side. Then I was over the curb, up on the sidewalk, and flattened against the brick wall of a building.

He leaned into me, trapping my legs with his, completing the cage with his arms.

I braced my palms against his chest to hold him at bay. His rib cage rose and fell beneath my hands, pumping like bellows. He was rock hard against my thigh, much bigger than I’d ever felt him. Too big. I heard the sound of ripping fabric.

I looked up at his face and did a double take. His skin was the color of mahogany, darkening by the second. He was taller than he should be, and sparks of crimson glittered in his eyes. When he snarled, I caught the flash of long black fangs in the moonlight.

He was changing. His hair was getting longer, thicker, matting around his face. He dropped his head close and sharp fangs grazed my ear.

“Never. Use sex. As a weapon. Against me. Again.” The words were guttural, misshapen by teeth too large for a human mouth, but I understood them perfectly.

I shrugged.

“Don’t give me a fucking shrug!” he snarled. His cheek was against mine and I could feel the planes of it sharpening, broadening. Again, I heard cloth ripping.

“I was angry.” I’d had every right to be.

“So am I. You don’t see me playing head games.”

“You manipulate me all the time.”

“Am I ruthless? Yes. Do I keep my own counsel? Sure. Do I push you sometimes to get you to say something you want to say anyway? Certainly. But I never mind-fuck you.”

“Look, Barrons, what do you want from me? It was …” I searched for the right word and didn’t like what I found. “Immature. Okay? But you aren’t blameless. You were talking about killing me.”

The rattlesnake moved in his throat.

“You owe me an apology, too,” I snapped.

“For what?” Something grazed my ear, tore the tender skin, and I felt a warm rush of blood, then his tongue touched my skin.

“For not telling me you couldn’t die. Do you have any idea what watching you die did to me?”

“Ah. Let’s see. Yes. Made you fuck Darroc within hours.”

“Jealous, Barrons? Sounds like it.” There was no way I was explaining myself. He hadn’t given me any explanations. Because he hadn’t, I’d assumed all kinds of things and very nearly made a grand ass of myself in front of him last night.

Air hissed between his fangs as he shoved away from the wall. I hadn’t realized how cold the night was until the heat of his body was gone. He stood in the middle of the street with his back to me, hands fisted at his sides, long talons sliding through monstrous fingers, shuddering, snarling.

I leaned against the wall, watching him. He was fighting for control over which form was going to achieve dominance and, although I was pissed off at both of them at the moment, I preferred the man. The beast was more … emotional, if that word could be applied to Barrons in any form. It made me feel confused, conflicted. I would never get the image of stabbing it out of my head.

When I’d been provoking him, it hadn’t occurred to me that this might be the outcome. Barrons was always so controlled, disciplined. I’d thought his transformation into the beast had been a conscious one. That, like everything else in his world, it happened if he willed it to, or it didn’t happen at all.

I remembered the first time I’d ever heard the strange rattle in his chest, the night he and I had gone after the Book with the three stones and failed. He’d carried me back to the bookstore and I’d wakened on the sofa to find him staring at the fire. I remembered thinking that Barrons’ skin might be a slipcover for a chair I never wanted to see. I’d been right. Beneath his human form was an utterly inhuman one. But why? How? What was he?

Not once had he lost control like this around me. Was his ability to contain his animal nature getting weaker?

Or was I more deeply rooted beneath that changeable skin?

I smiled, but it held no mirth. I liked that thought. I wasn’t sure who that made more screwed up: him or me.

I stayed against the wall, and he stayed in the street with his back to me, for a good three or four minutes.

Slowly, with what looked like a great deal of pain, he changed back, shuddering, snarling all the while. I understood why I’d thought I killed him with my runes last night. The transformation from beast to man appeared to be intensely painful.

When he finally turned around, there was no trace of crimson in his dark gaze. No stump of horns erupting from his skull. He grimaced as he stepped up on the curb, as if his limbs hurt, teeth flashing white and even in the moonlight.

He was once again a powerfully built man of thirty or so, wearing a long coat that was ripped at the shoulders and split down the back.

“You mind-fuck me again, I’ll fuck you back. But it won’t be with my mind.”

“Don’t threaten me.” I was tempted to do it right then and there and see if he’d really follow through. I was furious at him. I wanted him. I was a mess where Barrons was concerned.

“I didn’t. I warned you.”

A sharp retort was on the tip of my tongue.

He shamed it into silence with “I expect better from you, Ms. Lane.” Then he turned for the door and entered the building.

I half-expected there to be Unseelie guards on the top floor, but either Darroc had been too arrogant to bother leaving any or, since he’d been killed, his army saw no point in protecting his hideouts anymore.

Once inside, Barrons went straight for the bedroom suite Darroc had occupied. I followed him, because it was the one place I’d not gotten the chance to search. I stood in the doorway, watching him ransack the opulently furnished room, pushing chairs and ottomans out of his way, overturning the dresser and kicking through the contents, before he turned to the bed. He ripped the blankets and sheets from it, flung the mattress from the frame, pulled out a knife, and gutted it, searching for anything hidden inside, then stopped and breathed deeply. After a moment, he cocked his head and inhaled again.

I got it instantly. Barrons has extremely heightened senses. Being in touch with your inner animal has its advantages. He knows my scent, and he couldn’t smell me on Darroc’s bed.

I knew the second he decided we’d probably done it on the kitchen table, or in the shower, or bent over the couch, or on the balcony, or maybe just had an orgy with all the Rhino-boys and guards watching.

I rolled my eyes and left him to finish searching Darroc’s bedroom by himself. He could believe whatever he wanted to believe. I hoped he drowned in images of me having sex with Darroc. He might not feel emotions about me, but he certainly had the territorial instincts of an animal. I hoped the idea of somebody else playing on his turf drove him nuts.

I hurried to the suite I’d slept in. My runes were still throbbing crimson at the threshold and in the walls. They were larger, pulsating more brightly. I didn’t linger. I’d searched the place thoroughly the other night. I grabbed my pack, hurried out into the living room, and began stuffing the photo albums of Alina into my pack. They were mine now, and when this was all over, I was going to sit down and lose myself in them for days, maybe weeks, and tell myself the happy part of her story.

I heard Barrons in the den, knocking over lamps and chairs and tossing things around. I walked in and watched books fly, papers explode into the air. He had his beast under control, but he wasn’t bothering to try to control the man. He’d swapped his torn coat for one of Darroc’s. It was too small for him, but at least it covered the rest of his shredded clothes.

“What are you looking for?”

“Allegedly, he knew a shortcut, or I’d have killed him long ago.”

“Who told you about the shortcut?” Was there anything Barrons didn’t know?

He shot me a look. “I didn’t need anyone to. Prima facie, Ms. Lane. Facts speak. Didn’t you wonder why he kept tracking it, even though he had none of the stones and would have been corrupted the moment he picked it up?”

I shook my head, disgusted with myself. It had taken me months to get around to wondering that. What a great sleuth I was.

“You think he left notes?”

“I know he did. The limits of his mortal brain posed problems for him. He was accustomed to the memory capabilities of a Fae.”

So, Barrons knew there was a shortcut, too, and had been seeking it for some time.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“They’re called shortcuts for a reason. The shorter they are, the more they usually cut. Nothing is without price, Ms. Lane.”

Didn’t I know it. I knelt and began scanning sheets of paper on the floor. Darroc hadn’t written in notebooks; he’d used thick, expensive vellum sheets and written on them in fancy calligraphy, as if he’d expected his work to one day be memorialized: documents from Darroc, liberator of the Fae, displayed like we showcase the Constitution, in a museum somewhere. I looked back up at Barrons. He was no longer throwing things; he was sorting through papers and notebooks. There was no trace of temperamental beast or angry man. He was icy, impervious Barrons again.

“Didn’t anybody ever tell him about laptops?” I muttered.

“Fae can’t use them. They fry them.”

Maybe there was something to my energy theory. As more sheets rained down, I gathered them up and examined them. Under the watchful eyes of Darroc’s guards, I hadn’t been able to snoop through his personal documents. It was fascinating stuff. This particular cache of notes was about the different Unseelie castes—their strengths, weaknesses, and unique tastes. It was jarring to realize he’d had to learn about the Unseelie, just like we had. I folded the pages and began stuffing them in my backpack. This was useful information. Sidhe-seers need to be passing it down, one generation to the next. We could put together a set of Fae encyclopedias from his notes.

When I ran out of room in my pack, I began stacking the pages up to return for them later.

Then I saw a page that was different from the rest, filled with scribbled bits of thoughts, bulleted lists, circled comments, and arrows pointing from one note to another.

Alina’s name was on it, along with Rowena’s and dozens of others. Scribbled next to their names were their special “talents.” There were lists of countries, addresses, and names of companies I assumed were the foreign branches of Poste Haste, Inc., the courier service that was our front. One bulleted list contained the six Irish bloodlines of our sect, plus another I’d never heard of: O’Callaghan. Was it possible there were more bloodlines than we knew about? What if another Fae got their hands on this information? They could wipe us all out!

I continued scanning and gasped. Rowena had a touch of mental coercion? Kat had the gift of emotional telepathy? How the hell had Darroc figured these things out? According to him, Jo was in the now-secret Haven! Dani’s name was also on the page, heavily underlined and punctuated with a question mark. I wasn’t on the list, which meant he’d written it before he’d become aware of me, last fall.

At the bottom of the page was a short bulleted list:

Sidhe-seers—sense Fae.

Alina—senses Sinsar Dubh, Fae Hallows, and relics.

Abbey—Sinsar Dubh

Unseelie King—sidhe-seers?

I blinked at it, trying to make sense of it. Was Darroc saying that it hadn’t been the Seelie Queen, as Nana O’Reilly had claimed, who’d delivered the Dark Book to the abbey so long ago? Had the Unseelie King himself brought it to us, because we could sense Fae, and Fae Hallows, and that made us the perfect guardians for it?

Suddenly Barrons was behind me, looking over my shoulder. “Makes you think about yourself a little differently, doesn’t it?”

“Not really. I mean, who cares who brought it to the abbey? Point is, we’re the guardians.”

“Is that what you get from his notes, Ms. Lane?” he purred.

I glanced up at him. “What do you get from them?” I said defensively. I didn’t like his tone any more than I liked the amused glitter in his dark gaze.

“It’s said the king was horrified when he realized that his act of atonement had resulted in the birth of his most powerful abomination yet. He chased it from one world to the next, for eons, determined to destroy it. When he finally caught up with it, their battle lasted centuries and reduced dozens of worlds to ruins. But it was too late. The Sinsar Dubh had become fully sentient, a dark force of its own. When the king first created the Sinsar Dubh, he was greater, and the Book was lesser. It was a repository for the king’s evil, but without drive and intent. Yet while it roamed, it evolved, until it became all the king was, and more. The creation—abandoned by its creator—learned to hate. The Sinsar Dubh began to pursue the king.” He paused and gave me one of his wolf smiles. “So what else might the dark king have created? Perhaps an entire caste that could track his greatest enemy, contain it, and keep it from destroying him? Are you going to tell me you never once considered that?”

I stared. We were the good guys. Human to the core.

“Sidhe-seers: watchdogs for the U.K.,” he mocked.

I was chilled by his words. It had been bad enough to discover I was adopted and the parents who’d raised me weren’t my biological parents. Now what was he implying? That I’d had no parents?

“That’s the biggest pile of BS I’ve ever heard.” First Darroc had suggested I was a stone. Now Barrons was proposing that the sidhe-seers were a secret caste of Unseelie.

“If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.”

“I am not a duck.”

“Why does it offend you so much? Power is power.”

“The Unseelie King didn’t make me!”

“The idea frightens you. Fear is more than a wasted emotion. It’s the penultimate set of blinders. If you can’t face the truth of your reality, you can’t be a part of it, can’t control it. You may as well throw in the towel and yield to the whims of anyone with a stronger will. Do you like being helpless? Is that what you get off on? Is that why the moment I was gone you turned to the bastard that had you raped?”

“So, what are you and your men?” I countered coldly. “Another of the Unseelie King’s secret castes? Is that what you are, Barrons? Is that why you know so much about them?”

“None of your fucking business.”

He turned away and resumed his search.

I was trembling, and there was a sour taste in my mouth. I pushed the papers away, got up, and walked to the balcony, where I stood staring out at the night.

Barrons had shaken me deeply with his suggestion that the sidhe-seers were a caste of Unseelie. I had to admit that Darroc’s notes could certainly be construed that way.

And just the other night, I’d stood between two Fae armies, thinking how glad I was to be like the Unseelie, strengthened by pain, less frivolous and breakable.

Then there was that dark glassy lake in my head, that had so many inexplicable “gifts” to offer, like runes that an ex-Fae had recognized, that had given him pause, runes that the Unseelie princes had disliked intensely.

I shivered. I had a new question to be obsessed with besides what was Jericho Barrons?

What was I?

18

When we left, I snatched a Dani Daily from the lamppost outside the building, slid into the passenger’s seat of the Viper, and began to read it. Her birthday was coming up. I smiled faintly. Figured she’d tell the whole world. She’d make it a national holiday if she could.

I wasn’t surprised to learn she’d been in the street last night and had seen the Hunter kill Darroc. Dani didn’t take orders from anyone, not even me. Had she been there to try to kill Darroc herself? I wouldn’t put it past her.

As I fastened my seat belt, I wondered whether she hadn’t stuck around long enough to see that the Hunter had been possessed by the Sinsar Dubh, or if she’d decided to omit that bit of news. If she had stuck around, what did she make of the beast that blasted into me and carried me off? Probably figured it was some other kind of Unseelie she hadn’t seen before.

Although I was shocked to realize so much time had passed while I was in the Silvers and it was the middle of February, I should have known today was Valentine’s Day.

I glanced sourly over at Barrons.

I’d never had a happy one. They’d been various shades of sucky since kindergarten, when Chip Johnson ate too many iced cookies and threw up all over my new dress. I’d been drinking fruit punch, and when his puke hit me, I had an involuntary sympathetic response and spewed punch everywhere. It had set off a chain reaction of five-year-olds vomiting that I still couldn’t think about without getting queasy.

Even back in second and third grade, Valentine’s Day had been a stressful experience for me. I’d wake up dreading school. Mom always got Alina and me cards for everyone in our class, but a lot of moms weren’t as sensitive. I’d sit at my desk and hold my breath, praying someone besides Tubby Thompson or Blinky Brewer would remember me.

Then, in middle school, we had the Sadie Hawkins dance, where the girls had to ask the guys to go, putting on even more pressure. Adding insult to injury on what was supposed to be the most romantic day of the year, I was forced to risk rejection by asking out the guy of my dreams and praying that, by the time I got my nerve up, there’d be someone left besides Tubby and Blinky. In eighth grade, I waited too long and nobody popular was left, so I’d blow-dried my forehead on the high-heat setting, spritzed my sheets with water, and faked the flu that morning. Mom made me go anyway. The scorch mark on my forehead gave me away. I’d hastily cut bangs to try to cover it and had ended up at the dance dateless, miserable, with a painful burn and a bad haircut.

High school brought along a whole new set of problems. I shook my head, in no mood to relive teenage horrors. Bright side was, this Valentine’s Day could have been a whole lot worse. At least I’d get to sleep tonight with the comforting knowledge that Barrons was alive.

“Where to now?” I asked.

He stared straight ahead. The rattlesnake moved in his chest.

We pulled up at 939 Rêvemal Street, in front of the demolished entrance to Chester’s, the club that had once been Dublin’s number-one hotspot for the jaded rich and beautiful bored, until it was destroyed on Halloween. I stared at him disbelievingly.

He parked and turned off the engine.

“I’m not going in Chester’s. They want me dead in there.”

“And if they smell fear on you, they’ll try to kill you.” He opened the door and got out.

“Your point?”

“If I were you, I’d try to smell like something else.”

“Why do I have to go in?” I groused. “Can’t you visit your buddies by yourself?”

“Do you want to see your parents or not?”

I leapt out, slammed the door, and ran after him, skirting rubble. I had no idea why he was offering—certainly not because he was trying to be nice—but I wasn’t about to miss the opportunity. As unpredictable as my life was, I wasn’t going to miss a single chance to spend time with the people I loved.

As if he’d read my thoughts, he tossed over his shoulder, “I said see them. Not visit with them.”

I hated the thought of my parents being held in the belly of the seedy Unseelie hangout, but I had to concede that underground, in the middle of Barrons’ men, was probably the safest place for them. They couldn’t go back to Ashford. The Unseelie Princes knew where we lived.

The only other possibilities were the abbey, the bookstore, or with V’lane. Not only were there Shades in the abbey still, the Sinsar Dubh had paid a deadly visit, and I didn’t trust Rowena with a butter knife. I certainly didn’t want them hanging around me, seeing what a mess I’d become. And V’lane—with his dim understanding of humans—might decide to tuck them away on a beach with an illusion of Alina, which my dad could handle, but it would definitely push my mom over the edge. We might never get her out of there.

Chester’s it was.

The club had once been the most popular place in the city, accessible by invitation only, with marble pillars that framed an ornate entrance into the three-story club, but lavish French-style gas lamps had been ripped from the concrete and used as battering rams against the façade. Fallen roof supports had crushed a world-renowned hand-carved bar and shattered elegant stained-glass windows. The club sign dangled in pieces above the entrance, chunks of concrete blocked the door, and the building was heavily covered with graffiti.

The new entrance to the club was around back, secreted beneath an inconspicuous, battered metal door in the ground, close to the crumbling foundation. If you didn’t know about the club, you wouldn’t give a second thought to what appeared to be a forgotten cellar door. The dance floors were so far underground and so well soundproofed that, unless you had Dani’s superhearing, you’d never know there was a party going on.

“I can’t be part of an Unseelie caste,” I told him as he opened the door. “I can touch the Seelie spear.”

“Some say the Unseelie King created the sidhe-seers with his imperfect Song. Others say he had sex with human women to found the bloodlines. Perhaps your blood is diluted enough that it poses no such problem.”

Typical Barrons. He had an answer for all the things I didn’t want to know but none for the things I did.

After descending a ladder, pushing open another door, and going down a second ladder, we arrived at the real entrance to the club, an industrial foyer with tall double doors.

Since I’d last been here, someone had hired a decorator and replaced the tall wood doors with new ones that were black and glossy, the height of urban chic, so highly polished that I could see the couple who’d followed us down reflected in them. She was dressed like me in a long slim skirt, high-heeled boots, and a fur-trimmed coat. He stood near, his body angled in on her, like a walking shield.

I jerked. No couple had followed us down. I hadn’t recognized myself. It wasn’t that my hair was blond again—the black doors reflected only shape and movement, not color—it was that I looked like someone else. I stood differently. Gone was the last vestige of baby softness I’d brought with me to Dublin last August. I wondered what Mom and Dad would think of me. I hoped they could see past the changes to the Mac I still was somewhere beneath it all. I was excited and nervous to see them.

He pushed the doors open. “Stay close.”

The club hit me like a blast of overblown sensuality, cool in chrome and glass, black and white, the height of industrial muscle dressed in Manhattan posh. The décor promised uninhibited eroticism, pleasure for pleasure’s sake, sex worth dying for. The enormous interior was terraced with dance floors, each served by their own bars on a dozen different sublevels. The mini-clubs within the club had their own themes, some elegant on polished floors, others heavy on tattoos and urban decay. The bartenders and servers reflected the theme of their sub-club, some in topless tuxes, others in leather and chains. On one terrace, the extremely young servers were dressed like uniformed schoolchildren. On another—I turned sharply away. Not looking, not thinking about that one. I hoped Barrons was keeping my parents somewhere far from all this debauchery.

Although I’d mentally prepared myself to see humans and Unseelie mingling, flirting, and pairing off, I’m never ready for it. Chester’s is anathema to everything I am.

Fae and human were not meant to mix. The Fae are immortal predators, with no regard for human life, and those humans foolish enough to think for one moment that their tiny inconsequential lives matter to the Fae … well, Ryodan says those humans deserve to die, and when I see them in a place like Chester’s, I have to agree. You can’t save people from themselves. You can only try to wake them up.

The static of so many Unseelie crowded into one place was deafening. Grimacing, I turned off my sidhe-seer volume.

Music spilled from one level to the next, overlapping. Sinatra dueled with Manson; Zombie flipped off Pavarotti. The message was clear: If you want it, we’ve got it, and if we don’t, we’ll create it for you.

Still, there was one theme the whole place shared: Chester’s had been decorated for Valentine’s Day.

“This is just wrong,” I muttered.

Thousands of pink and red balloons dangling silken cords drifted through the club, emblazoned with messages that ranged from sweet to cheeky to horrifying.

At the entrance to every mini-club was a huge golden statue of Cupid holding a bow that sported dozens of long golden arrows.

The human contingent of Chester’s clientele was chasing the balloons from one level to the next, climbing stairs, perching on stools, yanking them lower, and popping them with their arrows, which I didn’t get at all until I watched a folded bit of paper explode from one, and then a dozen women piled up in a heap of fighting, clawing wildcats, determined to get whatever the prize was.

When one woman finally broke free from the mess, clutching her treasure, three others ganged up on her, stabbed her with their arrows, and took it away. Then they turned on one another with shocking brutality. A man rushed in, snatched the wad of paper, and ran.

I looked around for Barrons, but we’d gotten separated in the crowd. I shoved dangling silk cords from my face.

“Don’t you want one?” a redhead chirped, as she snatched the cord of one I’d just pushed away.

“What’s in them?” I said warily.

“Invitations, silly! If you’re lucky! But there aren’t many! If you get one, they’ll let you in to the private rooms to dine upon the sanctified flesh of the immortal Fae for the whole night!” she twittered rapturously. “Others have gifts!”

“Like what?”

She stabbed at the balloon with a delicate golden arrow, and the balloon popped, raining green goo mixed with tiny bits of writhing flesh.

“Jackpot!” people screamed.

I scrambled out of the way just in time to avoid being trampled.

The redhead shrieked, “See you in Faery!” Then she was on her hands and knees, licking the floor and fighting for pieces of Unseelie.

I looked around for Barrons again. At least I didn’t smell like fear. I was too disgusted and angry. I pushed through the press of sweaty, jostling bodies. This was my world? This was what we’d come to? What if we never got the walls back up? Was this what I was going to have to live with?

I began to shove people out of the way.

“Watch where you’re going!” a woman snapped.

“Chill, bitch!” some guy snarled.

“Are you asking for an ass-kicking?” a man threatened.

“Hey, beautiful girl.”

My head whipped around. It was the dreamy-eyed guy that had worked with Christian at the Ancient Languages Department at Trinity College, then had taken a bartending job at Chester’s when the walls fell.

The last time I’d seen him, I had a creepy experience, looking at his reflection in a mirror. But here he stood, behind a black-and-white bar walled with mirrors, tossing glasses and pouring shots with smooth, showy flair, and both he and his reflection looked every inch the perfectly normal young, gorgeous guy with dreamy eyes that melted me.

Though I was eager to see my parents, this guy kept showing up and I no longer believed in coincidences. My parents were going to have to wait.

I pulled up a stool next to a tall, gaunt man in a pin-striped suit and top hat, who was shuffling a deck of cards with skeletal hands. When he turned to look at me, I jerked and looked away. I did not look back again. Beneath the brim of his hat, there was no face. Shadows swirled like a dark tornado.

“Divine your future?” it said.

I shook my head, wondering how it spoke without a mouth.

“Ignore him, beautiful girl.”

“Show you who you are?”

I shook my head again, silently willing it to go away.

“Dream me a song.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Sing me a line.”

I angled my body away from it.

“You show me your face, I’ll show you mine.” Cards snapped together as it shuffled.

“Look, buddy, I have no desire to see—”

I broke off, physically unable to say another word. I opened my mouth and closed it, like a fish gasping for water, but I was gasping for words. It was as if all the sentences that I had been born with, enough to last a lifetime, had been sucked from me, leaving me utterly blank, silenced. The shape of my thoughts, the way I would phrase them, had been taken. Everything I’d ever said, everything I ever would say, it held now. I felt a terrible pressure inside my head, as if my brain was being vacuumed clean of who I was. I had the crazy thought that, in moments, I would be as blank behind my face as it was beneath its hat, leaving only a dark tornado, ceaselessly whirling, inside my skull. And maybe, just maybe, once it had everything it wanted from me, a fragment of a face would appear beneath its brim.

Terror gripped me.

I shot a frantic look at the dreamy-eyed guy. He turned away and poured a shot. I mouthed a silent plea at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

“I keep telling you not to talk to things,” the reflection of the dreamy-eyed guy said.

He poured and served, moving from one customer to the next, while my identity was erased.

Help me, my eyes screamed in the mirror.

The dreamy-eyed guy finally turned back to me. “She is not yours,” he told the tall, gaunt man.

“She spoke to me.”

“Look deeper.”

After a moment, “My mistake,” the card-shuffling thing said.

“Don’t repeat it.”

As abruptly as they’d vanished, I had words again. My brain was full of thoughts and sentences. I was a person, complete with ideas and dreams. The vacuum was gone.

I fell off my stool and stumbled away from the faceless man. On shaky legs, I tottered three stools down, hoisted myself back up, and clutched the counter.

“He will not bother you again,” the dreamy-eyed guy said.

“Whiskey,” I croaked.

He slid a shot of top-shelf whiskey down the counter. I slammed it back and demanded another. I gasped as fire exploded inside me. Though I wanted nothing more than to put a mile between myself and the card-shuffling monster, I had questions. I wanted to know how the dreamy-eyed guy could command something like that. For that matter, what was the faceless thing?

“The fear dorcha, beautiful girl.”

“Reading my mind?”

“Don’t have to. Question’s all over your face.”

“How does it kill?” I’m obsessed with the many ways the Fae dole out death. I make meticulous notes in my journal on the various castes and their methods of execution.

“Death is not its goal.”

“What is?”

“It seeks the Faces of Humanity, beautiful girl. Got one to spare?”

I said nothing. I had no desire to know more. Chester’s was a Fae safety zone. On my last visit to the club, it was made abundantly clear to me that if I killed anything on the premises, I would be killed. Since Ryodan and his men already wanted me dead, tonight probably wasn’t the best night to test my luck. If I learned more about it, or the killing weight of my spear in my shoulder holster grew any heavier, I might do something rash.

“Some things can’t be killed that easy.”

I glanced, startled, at the dreamy-eyed guy. He was looking at my hand inside my coat. I hadn’t even realized I’d reached for it.

“It’s Fae, right?” I said.

“Mostly.”

“So, how can it be killed?”

“Does it need to be killed?”

“You’d stick up for it?”

“You’d stick a spear in it?”

I raised a brow. Apparently, a prerequisite for working at Chester’s was that you had to like the Fae and be willing to put up with their unique appetites.

“Haven’t seen you in a while.” He changed the subject smoothly.

“Haven’t been around to be seen,” I said coolly.

“Almost weren’t just now.”

“Funny guy, aren’t you?”

“Some think so. How you been?”

“Good. You?”

“All in a day’s work.”

I smiled faintly. Barrons had nothing on the dreamy-eyed guy’s evasive answers.

“Gone light again, beautiful girl.”

“In the mood for a change.”

“More than the hair.”

“Suppose.”

“Looks good on you.”

“Feels good.”

“May not be useful. Times like these. Where you been?” He tossed a glass into the air and I watched it tumble lazily, end over end.

“In the Silvers, walking around the White Mansion, watching the concubine and the Unseelie King have sex. But I spend most of my days trying to figure out how to corner and control the Sinsar Dubh.”

The name of the Unseelie King’s Book seemed to hiss sibilantly through the air, and I felt a breeze as every Unseelie head in the club turned toward me in unison.

For a split second the entire club was silent, frozen.

Then sound and motion resumed with the tinkle of crystal as the wineglass the dreamy-eyed guy had been tossing hit the floor and shattered.

Three stools down, the tall, gaunt thing made a choking sound and his deck of cards sprayed the air, raining down on the counter, my lap, the floor.

Ha, I thought, got you, dreamy-eyes. He was a player in all this. But who was he and which team was he playing for?

“So, who are you really, dreamy-eyed guy? And why do you keep popping up?”

“Is that how you see me? In another life, would you take me to the prom? Home to meet the parents? Kiss me good night on the stoop?”

“I said, ‘Stay close,’ ” Barrons growled behind me. “And don’t talk about the bloody Book in this bloody place. Move your ass, Ms. Lane, now.” He took my arm and pulled me from the stool.

Cards spilled from my lap as I stood up. One had slipped inside the fur collar of my coat. I removed it and began to toss it away but at the last moment stopped and looked at it.

The fear dorcha had been shuffling a tarot deck. The card I held was framed in crimson and black. In the center, a Hunter flew over a city at night. The coast was a dark border for the silver sheen of the ocean in the distance. On the Hunter’s back, between great, dark flapping wings, was a woman with a soft tousle of curls blowing around her face. Between strands of hair, I could see her mouth. She was laughing.

It was the scene from my dream the other night. How could I be holding a tarot card with one of my dreams on it?

What was on the rest of the cards?

I glanced down at the floor. Near my feet was the Five of Pentacles. A shadowy woman stood on a sidewalk, peering through the window of a pub, watching a blond woman inside who was sitting at a booth, laughing with her friends. Me watching Alina.

On Strength, a woman sat cross-legged in a church, naked, staring at the altar as if praying for absolution. Me after the rape.

The Five of Cups showed a woman who looked startlingly like Fiona, standing in BB&B, crying. In the background I could see—I bent and peered closer—a pair of my high heels? And my iPod!

On the Sun were two young women sprawled in bikinis—one lime green, the other hot pink—soaking up the rays.

There was the Death card, a hooded grim reaper, scythe in hand, standing over a bloody body, female again. Me and Mallucé.

There was one with an empty baby carriage abandoned near a pile of clothing and jewelry. One of those parchment-like husks the Shades left behind protruded from the carriage.

I ran my hands through my hair, pushing it back as I stared down.

“Prophecies, beautiful girl. Come in all shapes and sizes.”

I glanced up at the dreamy-eyed guy, but he was no longer there. I looked to my right. Mr. Tall, Pin-striped, and Gaunt was also gone.

On the bar, beside a freshly filled shot and a Guinness, another tarot card had been placed with care, facedown, black-and-silver side up.

“Now or never, Ms. Lane. I don’t have all night.”

I tossed back the shot and chased it, then picked up the card and slipped it into my pocket for later.

Barrons steered me to a chrome staircase that was guarded at the bottom by the same two men that had escorted me to the top floor to see Ryodan the last time I was here. They were enormous, dressed in black pants and T-shirts, with heavily muscled bodies and dozens of scars on their hands and arms. Both carried snub-nosed automatics. Both had faces that drew the eye but, the moment you saw them, made you want to look away.

As we approached, they swung their weapons toward me.

“What the fuck is she doing here?”

“Get over it, Lor,” Barrons said. “When I say jump, you say how high.”

The one that wasn’t Lor laughed, and Lor slammed him in the gut with the butt of his gun. It was like hitting steel. The guy didn’t even flinch.

“The fuck I jump. In your dreams. Laugh again, Fade, and you’ll be eating your balls for breakfast. Bitch,” Lor spat in my general direction. But he didn’t look at me, he looked at Barrons, and I think that’s what pushed me over the edge.

I glanced between the two guards. Fade stared straight ahead. Lor glared at Barrons. I stepped away from Barrons and walked directly in front of them. Their gazes never wavered. It was as if I didn’t exist. I had no doubt I could stand there and do a dance, naked, and they’d still stare at anything but me.

I grew up in the Deep South, in the heart of the Bible Belt, where there are still a few men who refuse to look at a woman that isn’t a relative. If a woman is with a man they need to speak with—whether it’s her daddy, boyfriend, or husband—they’ll look at the man the entire time. If the woman asks a question and they bother answering at all, they direct their reply to the man. They even turn to the side a little, as if catching a glimpse of her in their periphery might condemn them to eternal damnation. The first time it happened to me, I was fifteen, and dumbfounded. I kept asking question after question, trying to get old man Hatfield to look my way. I’d begun to feel invisible. Finally I’d moved to stand right in front of him. He’d stomped off in the middle of a sentence.

Daddy had tried to explain to me that the old man considered it a kind of respect he was paying. That it was a courtesy given to the man the woman belonged to. I hadn’t been able to get past the words “the man the woman belonged to.” It was a property thing, pure and simple, and apparently Lor—who, according to Barrons, didn’t even know what century it was—was still living in a time when women had been owned. I hadn’t forgotten his comment about Kasteo, who hadn’t spoken in more than a thousand years. How old were these men? When, how, where had they lived?

Barrons took my arm and turned me toward the staircase, but I shook him off and turned back to Lor. I was getting way too much bad press. I wasn’t a stone. I hadn’t been created by the Unseelie King. And I wasn’t a traitor.

One of those things I could have a satisfying fight about.

“Why am I a bitch?” I demanded. “Because you think I slept with Darroc?”

“Shut her up before I kill her,” Lor told Barrons.

“Don’t talk to him about me. Talk to me about me. Or do you think I’m not worthy of your regard because, when I believed Barrons was dead, I hooked up with the enemy to accomplish my goals? How terrible of me,” I mocked. “I guess I should have just laid down and died with a whimper. Would that have impressed you, Lor?”

“Get the bitch out of my face.”

“I guess taking up with Darroc makes me pretty … well”—I knew what word Barrons hated, and I was in the mood to try it out on Lor—“mercenary, doesn’t it? You can blame me for that if you want to. Or you can pull your head out of your ass and respect me for it.”

Lor turned his head and looked at me then, as if I’d begun to speak his language. Unlike Barrons, the word didn’t seem to bother him. In fact, it seemed he understood, even appreciated it. Something flickered in his cold eyes. I’d interested him.

“Some people wouldn’t see a traitor when they looked at me. Some people would see a survivor. Call me anything you like—I sleep fine at night. But you will look at me when you say it. Or I’ll get so far in your face you’ll be seeing me with your eyes closed. You’ll be seeing me in your nightmares. I’ll scorch myself on the backs of your eyelids. Get off my back and stay off it. I’m not the woman I used to be. If you want a war with me, you’ll get one. Just try me. Give me an excuse to go play in that dark place inside my head.”

“Dark place?” Barrons murmured.

“As if you don’t have one,” I snapped. “Your cave makes mine look like a white beach on a sunny day.” Shouldering past them, I pushed up the stairs. I thought I heard a rumble of laughter behind me and glanced over my shoulder. Three men stared at me with the dead, emotionless gazes of executioners.

But, hey—they were all looking.

Behind a chrome balustrade, the upper floor stretched: acres of smooth dark-glass walls without doors or handles.

I had no idea how many rooms were up here. From the size of the downstairs, there could be fifty or more.

We walked along the glass walls until some tiny detail I couldn’t discern signified an entrance. Barrons pressed his palm to a dark-glass panel, which slid to the side, then he pushed me into the room. He didn’t step in with me but continued moving down the hall to some other destination.

The panel slid closed behind me, leaving me alone with Ryodan in the room that was the guts of Chester’s. It was made entirely of glass—walls, floor, and ceiling. I could see out, but no one could see in.

The perimeter of the ceiling was lined with dozens of small LED screens fed by cameras that panned every room in the club, as if you couldn’t see enough of what was going on merely by looking down past your feet. I stayed where I was. Every step you take on a glass floor feels like a leap of faith when the only solid floor you can see is forty feet below.

“Mac,” said Ryodan.

He stood behind a desk, couched in shadow, a big man, dark in a white shirt. The only light in the room came from the monitors above our heads. I wanted to launch myself across the room and attack him, claw his eyes out, bite him, punch him, stab him with my spear. I was astonished by the depth of hostility I felt.

He’d made me kill Barrons.

High on that cliff, the two of us had beaten, cut, and stabbed the man who’d been keeping me alive almost since the day I arrived in Dublin. And I’d wondered for days that had felt like years if Ryodan had wanted Barrons dead.

“I thought you tricked me into killing him. I thought you’d betrayed him.”

“I kept telling you to leave. You didn’t. You were never supposed to see what he was.”

“You mean what you all are,” I corrected. “All nine of you.”

“Careful, Mac. Some things don’t get talked about. Ever.”

I reached for my spear. He could have told me the truth on the cliff, but, like Barrons, he’d let me suffer. The more I thought about how both of them had withheld a truth from me that would have spared me so much agony, the angrier I got. “I was just making sure that when I stab and kill you, you’ll come back so I can do it again.”

The spear was in my hand, but suddenly my hand was in a huge fist, and the tip was pointed at my own throat.

Ryodan could move like Dani, Barrons, and the others. So fast I couldn’t defend myself. He stood behind me, arm snaked around my waist.

“Never make that threat. Put it away, Mac. Or I’ll take it for good.” He jabbed me with the tip of the spear in warning. “Barrons wouldn’t let you do that.”

“You might be surprised what Barrons would let me do.”

“Because he thinks I’m a traitor.”

“I saw you with Darroc myself. I heard you in the alley last night. When deeds and words align, the truth is plain.”

“I believed both of you were dead. What did you expect? The same survival instinct you admire in each other offends you in me. I think it worries you. Makes me more unpredictable than you’d like.”

He guided my hand to the holster and tucked the spear back in. “ ‘Unpredictable’ is the key word there. Did you flip, Mac?”

“Do I look like I flipped?”

He brushed hair from my face, tucked it gently behind an ear. I shivered. He bristled with the same kind of energy Barrons did—heat, muscle, and danger. When Barrons touches me, it turns me on. But when Ryodan stands behind me, locking me in place with an arm of steel, touching me tenderly—it scares the hell out of me.

“Let me tell you something about flipping, Mac,” he said softly against my ear. “Most people are good and occasionally do something they know is bad. Some people are bad and struggle every day to keep it under control. Others are corrupt to the core and don’t give a damn, as long as they don’t get caught. But evil is a completely different creature, Mac. Evil is bad that believes it’s good.”

“What are you saying, Ryodan? That I flipped and I’m too stupid to know it?”

“If the shoe fits.”

“It doesn’t. Point of curiosity: Which camp are you and Barrons in? Corrupt to the core and don’t give a damn?”

“Why do you think the Book killed Darroc?”

I knew where this was going. Ryodan’s theory was that I wasn’t tracking the Sinsar Dubh; it kept finding me. He was about to tell me that it had killed Darroc to further its goal of getting closer to me. He was wrong. “It killed Darroc to stop him. It told me no one was going to control it. It must have learned from me that Darroc knew a shortcut to containing and using it, and it killed him to prevent me or anyone else from discovering it.”

“How did it learn that from you? A cozy chat over tea?”

“It found me the night I stayed at Darroc’s penthouse. It … skims my mind. Tasting me, knowing me, it says.”

His arm tightened painfully around my waist.

“You’re hurting me!”

His arm relaxed minutely. “Did you tell Barrons this?”

“Barrons hasn’t exactly been in a talkative mood.”

Ryodan was no longer standing behind me. He was at his desk again. I rubbed my stomach, relieved he was no longer touching me. He was so much like Barrons that his body against mine was disturbing on multiple levels. I couldn’t make out much of his face in the shadows, but I didn’t need to. He was so furious that he didn’t trust himself not to harm me if he remained close.

“The Sinsar Dubh can pick thoughts out of your mind? Have you considered the potential ramifications of that?”

I shrugged. It wasn’t as if I had much time to consider anything. I’d been so busy jumping from the frying pan into the fire and back into the frying pan again that reflection upon the various possibles wasn’t top on my list of priorities. Who could worry about potential ramifications when the real ones kept kicking you in the teeth?

“It means that it knows about us,” he said tightly.

“First of all, why would it care? Second, I hardly know anything about you at all, so it couldn’t have gotten much.”

“I’ve killed for less.”

Of that I had no doubt. Ryodan was stone cold and suffered no conflicts about it. “If it even bothered skimming for information about you, the only thing it knows is that I thought the two of you were dead and you’re not.”

“Not true. You know a great deal more than that, and that the Book might know about us at all should have been the first thing you told Barrons the moment he changed back and you knew he was alive.”

“Well, forgive the fuck out of me for being shocked senseless when I realized he wasn’t dead. Why didn’t you tell me he was the beast, Ryodan? Why did we have to kill him? I know it’s not because he can’t control himself when he’s the beast. He controlled himself last night when he rescued me from the Book. He can change at will, can’t he? What happened in the Silvers? Does the place have some kind of effect on you, make you uncontrollable?”

I almost slapped myself in the forehead. Barrons had told me that the reason he tattooed himself with black and red protection runes was because using dark magic called a price due, unless you took measures to protect yourself against the backlash. Did using IYD require the blackest kind of magic to make it work? Would it grant his demand to magically transport him to me no matter where I was but devolve him into the darkest, most savage version of himself as the price?

“It was because of how he got there, wasn’t it?” I said. “The spell you two worked sent him to me like it was supposed to, but the cost was that it turned him into the lowest common denominator of himself. An insane killing machine. Which he figured was all right, because if I was dying, I’d probably need a killing machine around. A champion to show up and decimate all my enemies. That was it, wasn’t it?”

Ryodan had gone completely still. Not a muscle twitched. I wasn’t sure he was breathing.

“He knew what would happen if I pressed IYD, and he made plans with you to handle it.” That was Barrons, always thinking, always managing risks where I was concerned. “He tattooed me so he would sense his mark on me and not kill me. And you were supposed to track him—that’s why you both wear those cuffs, so you can find each other—and kill him so he’d come back as the man form of himself, and I’d never be any wiser. I’d get rescued and have no clue it was Barrons who’d done it or that he sometimes turns into a beast. But you screwed up. And that’s what he was mad at you about this morning on the phone. It was your failure to kill him that let the cat out of the bag.”

A tiny muscle twitched in his jaw. He was pissed. I was definitely right.

“He can always circumvent the price of black magic,” I marveled. “When you kill him, he comes back exactly the same as he was before, doesn’t he? He could tattoo his whole body with protection runes and, when he ran out of skin, kill himself so he could come back with a clean slate, to start all over.” That was why his tattoos weren’t always the same. “Talk about your ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card! And if you hadn’t botched the plan, I would never have known. It’s your fault I know, Ryodan. I think that means it’s not me you should kill, it’s yourself. Oh, gee, wait,” I said sarcastically, “that wouldn’t work, would it?”

“Did you know that when you were in the Silvers, the Book paid a visit to the abbey?”

I winced. “Dani told me. How many of the sidhe-seers were killed?”

“Irrelevant. Why do you think it went to the abbey?”

Irrelevant, my ass. Being unable to die—I was still having a hard time wrapping my brain around that and was certain I could come up with some creative ways to test it—had given him a Fae share of arrogance and disdain for mortals. “Let me guess,” I said tartly. “This is somehow my fault, too?”

Ryodan pressed a button on his desk and spoke into an intercom. “Tell Barrons to leave them where they are. They’re safer there. I’ll bring her to them. We’ve got a problem. A big one.” He released the button. “Yes,” he said to me, “it is. I think that when it couldn’t find you, it went to the abbey, hunting for you, trying to get a lead on you.”

“Do the others believe this, too, or is it your personal delusion? Perspective, Ryodan. Get some.”

“I’m not the one that needs it.”

“Why do you hate me?”

“I have no emotion about you at all, Mac. I take care of my own. You are not my own.” He moved past me, pressed his palm to the door, and stood waiting for me to exit. “Barrons wants you to see your parents so as you go about your business you will remember they are here. With me.”

“Lovely,” I muttered.

“I suffer them to live, against my better judgment, as a favor to Barrons. He’s running out of favors. Remember that, too.”

19

“You put them in a glass room? Can’t you give them a little privacy?” I stared at my parents through the wall. Although comfortably furnished with rugs, a bed, a sofa, a small table, and two chairs, the room was made of the same kind of glass as Ryodan’s office, only in reverse. Mom and Dad couldn’t see out, but everyone else could see in.

I glanced to the left. The shower had an enclosure of sorts; the toilet didn’t. “Do they know people can see in?”

“I spare their lives and you ask for privacy. This isn’t for you. Or them. It’s insurance for me,” Ryodan said.

Barrons joined us. “I told Fade to bring up sheets and duct tape.”

“For what?” I was horrified. Were they going to roll my parents up in sheets and duct-tape them?

“They can tape sheets to the walls.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks,” I muttered. I was silent a moment, watching them through the glass. Dad was sitting on the sofa, facing my mom, holding her hands, talking softly. He was robust and handsome as ever, and the extra silver in his hair only made him look more distinguished. Mom had that glazed look she got whenever she couldn’t deal, and I knew he was probably talking about normal, everyday things to ground her in a reality she could face. I had no doubt he was assuring her everything was going to be okay, because that was what Jack Lane did: exuded safety and security, made you believe he could deliver on anything he promised. It was what made him such a great lawyer, such a wonderful father. No obstacle had ever seemed too large, no threat too scary with Daddy around. “I need to talk to them.”

“No,” Ryodan said.

“Why?” Barrons demanded.

I hesitated. I’d never told Barrons that I’d gone to Ashford with V’lane, or admitted that I’d overheard a conversation between my parents in which they’d been discussing the circumstances of our adoption, or that Daddy had mentioned a prophecy about me—one in which I supposedly ended up dooming the whole world.

Nana O’Reilly—the ninety-seven-year-old woman whom Kat and I visited in her house by the sea—had mentioned two prophecies: one that promised hope, the other warning of a blight upon the earth. If I genuinely was part of either one, I was determined to fulfill the former. I wanted to know more about the latter so I could avoid it.

I wanted the names of the people Daddy had spoken to all those years ago when he’d gone to Ireland to dig into Alina’s medical history when she was sick. I wanted to know exactly what they’d told him.

But there was no way I could ask him about any of it in front of Barrons and Ryodan. If they got the smallest whiff of some prophecy in which I supposedly doomed the world, they might just lock me up and throw away the key.

“I miss them. They need to know I’m alive.”

“They know. I videoed you walking in, and Barrons showed them the clip.” Ryodan paused, then added, “Jack insisted on it.”

I glanced sharply at Ryodan. Was that a faint smile on his face? He liked my father. I’d heard it in his voice when he called him Jack. He respected him. I glowed inside. I’m always proud of my daddy, but when somebody like Ryodan likes him … Even though I couldn’t stand the owner of Chester’s, I took it as a compliment.

“Too bad you’re not really his daughter. He comes from strong blood.”

I gave him a look I learned from Barrons.

“But nobody’s sure exactly where you came from, are they, Mac?”

“My biological mother was Isla O’Connor, leader of the Haven for the sidhe-seers,” I informed him coolly.

“Really? Because I did some digging when Barrons told me what the O’Reilly woman said, and it turns out Isla had only one child, not two. Her name was Alina. And she’s dead.”

“Obviously you didn’t dig deep enough,” I retorted. But I suddenly felt uneasy. So that was why Nana had called me Alina. “She must have had me later. Nana just didn’t know about it.”

“Isla was the only member of the Haven who survived the night the Sinsar Dubh was set free from its prison.”

“Where are you getting your information?” I demanded.

“And there was no ‘later’ for her.”

“How do you know that? What do you know about my mother, Ryodan?”

Ryodan glanced at Barrons. The look they exchanged spoke volumes, but unfortunately I had no idea what language they were speaking.

I glared at Barrons. “And you wonder why I don’t confide in you? You don’t tell me anything.”

“Leave it alone. I’m handling this,” Barrons told Ryodan.

“I suggest you do a better job.”

“And I suggest you go fuck yourself.”

“She didn’t tell you that the Book visited her the other night at Darroc’s. It skims her mind, picks up her thoughts.”

“I think it only picks up the surface ones,” I said hastily. “Not everything.”

“It killed Darroc because it learned from her that he knew a shortcut. Wonder what else it learned.”

Barrons’ head whipped around and he stared at me. You said nothing of this to me?

You said nothing to me about my mother? What do you know about her? About me?

His dark gaze promised retribution for my oversight.

So did mine.

I hated this. Barrons and I were enemies. It confused my head and hurt my heart. I’d grieved him as if I’d lost the only person who mattered to me, and now here we were, adversaries again. Were we destined to be eternal enemies?

One of us is going to have to trust the other, I told him.

You first, Ms. Lane.

That was the whole problem. Neither of us would take the risk. I had a lengthy list of reasons why I shouldn’t, and they were sound. My daddy could take the case all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing my side. Barrons didn’t inspire trust. He didn’t even bother trying.

When hell freezes over, Barrons.

Same bloody page, Ms. Lane. Same bloody—

I turned my gaze away in the middle of his sentence, the ocular equivalent of flipping him the bird.

Ryodan was watching us, hard.

“Butt out,” I warned. “This is between him and me. All you need to do is keep my parents safe and—”

“Little hard to do when you’re such a fucking loose cannon.”

The door burst open, and Lor and two others stalked in. Tension rolled off them, so thick it seemed to suck the oxygen right out of the room.

Fade followed behind them, carrying a pile of sheets and a roll of duct tape.

“You’re never going to believe what just walked into the club,” Lor told Ryodan. “Tell me to change. Say the word.”

My eyes narrowed. Did Lor need Ryodan’s permission? Or was it a courtesy in his club?

“The Sinsar Dubh, right?” Ryodan gave Barrons a pointed look. “Because it skimmed Mac’s mind and now it knows where to find us.”

“You are so frigging paranoid, Ryodan. Why would it even want to find you?” I said.

“Maybe,” one of the other men said, “we’d make a damned good ride for it, and we don’t like being used.”

“Have you taught her nothing of strategy?” Ryodan fired at Barrons.

“I haven’t had all that much time,” Barrons said.

“A Seelie. A fucking prince,” Lor said. “He’s got a couple hundred more Seelie from a dozen different castes waiting outside. Threatening war. Demanding you shut the place down, stop feeding the Unseelie.”

I gasped. “V’lane?”

“You told him to come!” Ryodan accused.

“She knows him?” Lor exploded.

“It’s her other boyfriend,” Ryodan said.

“Besides Darroc?” one of the other men demanded.

Lor glared at Barrons. “When are you going to wise up and shut this bitch down for good?”

The testosterone level was rising to a dangerous high. I suddenly worried they might all transform into beasts. I’d be stuck in the middle of a pack of snarling monsters with talons and fangs and horns, and I didn’t think for one minute Barrons’ brand would protect me from the other five. I wasn’t even sure it would work on him.

“You think it’s the Seelie you need to be worrying about?” said Fade.

“What the fuck do you think we should be worrying about?” Barrons said impatiently.

Fade swung his gun up and pumped a half dozen rounds into Barrons before anyone even managed to move. “Me.”

20

The only reason it worked was because Fade caught him off guard. Barrons can move so fast that shooting him isn’t the easiest way to kill him.

But he didn’t expect Fade to shoot him, and Fade is as fast as Barrons.

I don’t know what Barrons and the others are, but until someone tells me otherwise, I’m going to assume they’re all the same. They have heightened senses: smell, vision, and hearing. Barrons has the strength of ten men, and his bones are extremely resilient. I imagine they have to be, so he can transform the way he does. I’ve watched Barrons drop thirty feet and land on his feet, as light as a cat.

Fade surprised them all. He managed to gun down Ryodan, too, before the others attacked him and took his gun away.

Fade stumbled back against the wall, and I thought how strange it was that he’d lost his weapon but was still hanging on to the sheets.

“What the fuck, Fade?” Lor snarled. “Forget your meds again?”

Fade looked at me. “Your parents are next,” he purred. “I will destroy everything you love, MacKayla.”

I sucked in a horrified breath. Ryodan wasn’t paranoid. He’d been right. The Sinsar Dubh had skimmed me, lifted information about them from my mind, and acted on it swiftly.

It was right here—in the room with me!

It had learned about Chester’s and had come to take a look around, see what it might see.

I’d been out of the Silvers for three days—and this was the third day in a row it had found me!

Was it really my fault that it had gone to the abbey because it hadn’t been able to find me in Dublin? Was I indirectly responsible for all the sidhe-seers who’d died that night? How long had it been here, moving from person to person, working its way closer to me all the while?

Long enough to have discovered my parents—

“It’s in the sheets,” I cried. “Get the sheets!” I regretted the words the instant I said them. Whoever touched it would also be possessed, and the other men still had guns. “No, don’t touch the sheets!” I screamed.

Fade flashed into motion and was gone.

The others followed, leaving me alone.

I dashed for the door, but it slid shut before I could get there, and I had no clue how to open it. I pressed my palm frantically to half a dozen places, with no success.

I whirled, staring into the other room. If the Sinsar Dubh got to my parents … if Fade carried it in there … if it killed them …

I couldn’t bear to think about it.

My parents were standing up, looking at me, but I knew they couldn’t see me. They were merely staring in the direction from which the gunfire had come.

The door hissed open and closed behind me.

“I have to get you out of here,” Lor growled.

I spun around, spear in my fist. “How do I know you’re not the Book?”

“Look at me. Where could I hide it?”

His pants and shirt clung to his muscular body like a second skin. I checked his shoes. Boots. “Take them off.”

He kicked them off. “Now you. Lose the coat.”

I slipped out of it.

“Skirt, too.”

“We don’t have time for this,” I snapped. “My parents—”

“Fade left the club. They’re safe for now.”

“That’s not good enough!”

“We’ll take precautions. We’re on guard now. Someone has to carry it in. No one will enter the upper levels of the club or your parents’ cell with clothes on.”

My brows shot up. That was going to be a real shocker for my mom.

“I said lose the skirt.”

“How could Fade have passed it to me?”

“Minuscule possibility. I take no chances.”

Sighing, I unzipped and dropped it. My sweater was snug. I had on a black thong. My boots clung to the shape of my legs. No place to hide a book. “Happy?”

“Hardly.”

As I zipped my skirt back up, I took a last longing glance at my parents and turned away. My gaze hitched as it passed over Barrons’ crumpled body, and I flinched violently.

Here I was with Barrons dead. Again.

I knew he wasn’t really dead, or at least he wouldn’t be for long, but my grief was too fresh and my emotions too complicated.

“How long until he—” I broke off, horrified to hear the catch of a sob in my voice.

“Why do you give a fuck?”

“I don’t, I mean, I just—shit!” I turned and beat at the wall with my fists. I didn’t care that my parents could hear the dull thud or that the wall shuddered beneath my blows. I didn’t care what Lor thought of me. I hated Barrons being dead. Hated it. Beyond reason. Beyond my understanding.

I punched until Lor caught my bloody fists and pulled me away.

“How long?” I demanded. “I want to know! Answer me or else!”

He grinned faintly. “What, you gonna feed me bloody runes?”

I scowled. “Do you guys tell each other everything?”

“Not everything. Pri-ya sounded pretty fucking fascinating to me. Never did get all the details.”

“How long? Answer me.” I used Voice to force him.

“Not sure this time. But it won’t be as long as last time. And if you ever try to Voice me again, woman, I’ll kill your parents myself.”

21

“What must a prince do to get a Valentine’s Day kiss, MacKayla?”

The words floated out of the darkness, Eros skittering across my skin, pricking me with a hundred tiny little Cupid bows. Even with Pri-ya-induced immunity, I still thrill to the musical, sensual sound of V’lane’s voice. I no longer begin stripping when he appears, but deep down inside me there’s a summer girl who never stops wanting to, especially when he’s being playful, seductive.

How many Valentine’s Days in my life had ended with a kiss?

I could count them on two fingers.

And those had been decent kisses, not great ones. Certainly nothing to rock a woman’s world.

I paused with my hand on the doorknob of Barrons Books and Baubles. Barrons had changed the locks on the garage and the back door, so I’d had to park the Viper in the alley and walk around to the front. It had been a difficult night. I was ready for it to end. I wanted covers over my head and deep, dreamless sleep.

Mere hours ago I’d been consoling myself that, even though Barrons was furious with me, at least I would be going to sleep tonight with the comforting knowledge that he was alive.

Right. Happy Valentine’s Day to me.

“I believe human males present flowers.”

I was abruptly wreathed in the delicate scent of roses. A bouquet appeared, tucked into my arm. Petals tickled my nose. The ground at my feet was strewn with them. Dewy, lush, they gave off an otherworldly, spicy scent.

I leaned my forehead against the diamond-paned cherry door. I could see my demolished shop through it. “Did you come here to accuse me of being a traitor, too?” It would be just like a Fae to shower me with gifts while threatening me. I was through justifying myself. Seeing Barrons’ lifeless eyes again had nearly put me back on the cliff’s edge. I had no idea why I hated seeing him dead so much, when I knew he wasn’t really. Lor had assured me he would be back, although he couldn’t say when. Why couldn’t he say when? Did Barrons’ body have to heal, and certain injuries took longer than others?

I couldn’t get the image out of my mind. Now I had two visions of Barrons to torture myself with: gutted and shot. On top of that, I was terrified for my parents. Terrified by how easily the Book had infiltrated those closest to me. First the abbey, then Darroc, Barrons, and now a threat to my parents. I could no longer dispute Ryodan’s conviction that the Book was finding me. Playing with me. But why not just kill me and get it over with? Did it really think I would—as Ryodan said—“flip”? Nothing about the Sinsar Dubh made sense. Sometimes it gave me a splitting, crushing headache and I could sense it coming a mile away. Other times, like tonight, I didn’t have a clue it was in the same room with me.

It killed everyone else it came into contact with. But not me. It hurt me, but it always left me alive. Why?

I’d demanded Lor remove Mom and Dad from Dublin. He’d refused to even consider it. Said nobody would lift a finger unless Barrons told them to. So much for their demands for my head—apparently Barrons had the final say about everything.

I could always persuade V’lane to sift in, get them, and whisk them somewhere safe, except … well, maybe it was the sidhe-seer in my blood, but I just couldn’t trust my parents to a Fae.

“I am not a fool, MacKayla. You were playing Darroc. My only question is why.”

A weight slid from my shoulders. It was about time somebody believed in me. Figured it would be V’lane. “Thank you,” I said simply.

I turned around and my eyes widened appreciatively. V’lane is always a vision. He’d muted himself, donned his “human” form, but it did little to diminish his otherworldly allure. In black pants, boots, and a black cashmere sweater, with his long hair spilling down his back and his velvety skin dusted with gold, he looked like a fallen archangel.

Tonight, he was even more majestic than ever. I wondered if leading a Seelie army had given him purpose he’d lacked, if he was no longer an immortal riddled with ennui and petty desires but was becoming a true leader of his people. He would have his hands full trying to lead the Seelie court. Perhaps if Jayne and the Guardians shot and caged enough of them, they’d pull their heads out. A little hardship and suffering would do the Seelie a world of good.

“You never doubted me? Even when I was standing there in the street with the Unseelie army?”

“I know the woman you are, MacKayla. Were you Fae, you would belong to my court.” He studied me with ancient, iridescent eyes. “My army is not as discerning as I. They believe you are his ally. We will persuade them otherwise.” A smile touched the corners of his lips. “If nothing else, your claim that Barrons was dead gave you away. I saw him tonight with you at Chester’s.” He paused. “I am uncertain how you managed to deceive the Unseelie Princes. They were convinced he was dead.”

He delivered the statement so blandly that I almost missed the question, and the threat. Lacing his silken words was steel. Beneath his playfulness, V’lane was in a dangerous mood. But why? I knew he’d been at Chester’s. Had something happened after Lor had whisked me out and dumped me at the Viper? Did he know the Sinsar Dubh had also been there?

“Just a little trick I learned,” I evaded.

“Barrons was never dead? Was he … incapacitated for a time?”

V’lane and Barrons hate each other, something to do with Barrons killing V’lane’s princess a long time ago. Instinct deeper than I could fathom made me lie. “You’re kidding, right? Barrons is unkillable.”

“I would know how you deceived the Unseelie Princes, MacKayla.” There was the steel again, lacing the silk. It was not a question. It was a command.

He moved into the alcove with me, and the intoxicating fragrance of the Fae court, of jasmine and sandalwood, perfumed the delicate spice of the purple petals crushing beneath his boots. Danger stepped in with him.

I cocked my head, studying him. I suddenly knew where his anger was coming from. He was on a dangerous edge not because he thought I had managed to deceive the dark princes but because he was worried they’d known all along that Barrons wasn’t dead and had somehow managed to deceive him.

V’lane sat on the queen’s High Council. He’d been handpicked by the leader of their race to see through court intrigue to the truth of matters. And he’d failed. His inability to discern truth from lie—from an Unseelie, no less—had shaken him. I understood that. It’s debilitating to realize you can’t trust your own judgment.

However, in this case he hadn’t been wrong. Barrons really had been dead, and the Unseelie Princes hadn’t deceived V’lane. But I wasn’t about to tell him that. Not only had Barrons insisted I lie to V’lane, it seemed I was programmed with an unshakable imperative to keep Barrons’ secret.

Knowing him, he’d probably tattooed it on me somewhere.

Still, I could give V’lane some of the truth. “Remember when you said that I had only begun to discover what I was?”

His gaze sharpened and he nodded. He touched my hair. “I am pleased you restored it, MacKayla. It is lovely.”

Yeah, well, Barrons hadn’t seemed to think so. “You were right. I’ve recently become aware of a place inside me where I know things that I can’t explain knowing. I find things I don’t understand.”

He inclined his head, waiting.

“I found runes that the princes didn’t like. I used them with a combination of others to create an illusion that Barrons was dead,” I lied.

He processed my words: The Unseelie hadn’t duped him. I’d duped the Unseelie. Faint lines of tension eased in his face.

“You convinced Darroc and the princes that Barrons was dead so Darroc would believe you genuinely sought an alliance with him?”

“Exactly.”

“Why?”

I hesitated.

“MacKayla, can we not finally trust each other?” he said softly. “What must I do to convince you? Command me, I am yours.”

I was so tired of lying and being lied to, of not trusting and not being trusted. “He knew a shortcut to controlling the Sinsar Dubh. It’s why the Book killed him.”

“It is true, then, what we heard,” he murmured. “It was not a Hunter after all.”

I nodded.

“And what is this shortcut?”

“I wasn’t able to get it out of him before he died.”

He studied me. “Deceiving the princes so thoroughly would have required immense power.” He began to say something, then seemed to change his mind and stopped. After a moment he said carefully, “These runes you used, what color were they?”

“Crimson.”

He went still, regarding me as if he wasn’t entirely sure what he was looking at. It made me extremely uncomfortable. Then he said, “Did they beat like small human hearts?”

“Yes.”

“Impossible!”

“Would you like me to summon them now?”

“You could, with such ease?”

I nodded.

“That will not be necessary. I accept your word, MacKayla.”

“What are they? Darroc wouldn’t tell me.”

“I imagine he was even more interested in you after he saw them. Tremendous power, MacKayla. Parasites—they graft onto anything they touch, grow, and spread like a human disease.”

Great. I remembered how they’d seemed larger in the bedroom at Darroc’s penthouse. Had I inadvertently loosed another Unseelie evil on the world?

“Used with the Song of Making, they can form an impenetrable cage,” he said. “I have never seen them myself, but our histories tell us they were employed on occasion by the first Seelie Queen for punishment and were one of the ingredients used in the walls of the Unseelie prison.”

I jerked. “How could I possibly know anything about runes used to build the Unseelie prison walls?”

“That is precisely what I would like to know.”

I sighed and rubbed my eyes. More questions. They were beginning to gnaw at my sanity.

“You are weary,” he said softly. “On this night for lovers, where would you sleep, MacKayla? In a silken hammock tied between palm trees, swaying over tropical surf, with a devoted Fae lover to attend your every desire? Would you share a Fae prince’s bower? Or would you climb the stairs in a ruined bookstore to sleep alone in the building of a man who has never trusted you and never will?”

Ouch.

He touched my jaw, slid a finger beneath my chin, and tipped my face back. “What a lovely woman you’ve become. You are no longer the child that arrived here months ago. You have been tempered. You display strength and determination, conviction and purpose. But are you wise? Or are you ruled by a heart that foolishly imprinted on the wrong man? Like most humans, are you incapable of change? Change requires an admission of error. Your race devotes itself to justifying its errors, not correcting them.”

“My heart hasn’t imprinted on anyone.”

“Good. Then it may yet be mine.” He lowered his head and kissed me.

I closed my eyes and melted into his body. It was a novel change to have someone believe in me, answer my questions when I asked them, just plain be nice to me, and there was no denying his erotic allure. When his Fae name eased gently into my mouth, teasing, offering, waiting for me to invite it to settle, I breathed into his kiss and he breathed back. Consonants I would never be able to pronounce, with vowels comprised of delicate arias, began to pierce the meat of my tongue, causing my entire body to flush with sensual pleasure.

I inhaled the scent of Fae prince and the intoxicating aroma of spiced roses into my lungs. Not a bad Valentine’s Day kiss, not bad at all.

He took his time giving me his name, letting the impossible syllables work tenderly, slowly, into me, until at last they settled and I exploded, shuddering against him. I stood in the alcove of BB&B, kissing him long after his name was mine again.

I was still glowing when I climbed the stairs and fell across my bed.

“Dude, what happened in here?”

I leaned my broom against a fallen bookcase and turned to see Dani framed in the open door of BB&B, cramming a protein bar in her mouth. Her eyes narrowed as she absorbed the destruction. Morning sunlight shafted into the alcove, framing her auburn curls with a halo of fire. Though the day was bright, nearly windless—a whopping sixty degrees after the recent snow—I couldn’t get warm, even with both gas fireplaces on.

“Close the door, will you?” I said. I’d dreamed of the Cold Place all night. Repeatedly, I’d been jarred to near-waking by some fright—a slip into a treacherous drift, a nameless terror stalking me—but each time the nightmare had sucked me back down.

I’d scaled icy cliffs, searching for the beautiful, sad woman, calling out, certain I would find her just over the next ridge. But at the crest of each summit, the only thing I’d found were dozens of hourglasses, with fine black sand rapidly trickling to the lower half. I’d raced from one to the next, frantically turning them over, but they’d kept emptying again in seconds.

Moments before I’d awakened for the final time, I realized the reason I couldn’t find her was because I’d waited too long. Time had been of the essence and I was too late. She was gone. Hope, like the fine grains of trickling black sand, had vanished, too.

I’d blown it.

I’d showered and dressed, failure weighing heavy on my bones. Desperate to make progress, to see accomplishment of any kind, I’d attacked the debris in the demolished bookstore with a broom and a vengeance. I’d been at it for hours, beating sawdust and splinters from Barrons’ rugs, sweeping broken glass into neat piles.

Dani swaggered in and closed the door. “V’lane said you wanted to see me. Don’t know what for, but seeing I ain’t too busy this morning, figured I’d give you a listen. But it better be different kinda stuff, ’cause last time I saw you, you weren’t talking like no friend of mine.” She preened. “He brought me chocolate. Dude—like I’m his Valentine or something. Me and him, we had a talk. Told him I’m almost fourteen and I’m gonna give him my virginity one day.”

I groaned. She’d actually told him that? Before I’d sent him for her, I’d made him swear to turn off the lethal eroticism. “We’re going to have a long discussion about your virginity and V’lane, as soon as things calm down.”

“News flash, Mac, they ain’t never calming. World is. What it is. This is life now.” Despite her casual swagger, her flippant tone, her eyes were cold. Wary.

Tough words. Tougher truth to swallow. I never would. “It’s not staying this way, Dani. We’re not going to let it.”

“What can we do ’bout it? World’s too big. ’Sides, ain’t so bad. ’Til you go and get all pissy. Thought you and me were, like, peas in the Mega pod and there ain’t no other veggies on the plate. Then you go playacting you’re humping the Lord Monster. Pissing me off.” She shot me a glare crammed full of the words she would never say: You abandoned me. Left me alone. I’m here, but this better be good. She pulled an apple out of her pocket and began munching it.

Last night, before V’lane left, I’d asked him to find her this morning and tell her Barrons had never been dead, that I’d been undercover, and I was sorry for the deception. But no apology-by-proxy could replace the real thing. She needed to hear it from me. And I needed to say it.

“I’m sorry, Dani. I hated hurting you.”

“Dude, get over yourself. Didn’t hurt me. It’d take way more than that. Figured you were PMS’ing. No big. Just wanted to hear you say you were a dick.”

“I was a dick. And it may not have bothered you, but it drove me crazy. Forgive me?”

She jerked and gave me an uncomfortable look. The precocious, gifted teen had been treated one of two ways at the abbey: ordered around or ignored. I doubted anyone had ever bothered to apologize to her for anything.

“Saying you’re a dick was ’nuff, already, jeez. Getting all touchy-feely like a grown-up. Gah!” She stepped around the wreck of the cashier’s counter and tried to flash me a grin, but it came out lopsided. “So, what gives? Mini-tornado blow through?”

“Lose the coat,” I evaded. I could hardly say, After I killed Barrons, he was so pissed off at me that he trashed the bookstore.

“Right. Forgot.”

She shrugged out of it, left it in a puddle of black leather on the floor. Beneath it, she had on skintight black low-ride jeans, a tight sweater, and black high-tops. Her green eyes sparkled.

“With the Book hitching rides, hiding on people, guess we’re all going to be dressing like skanks for a while, huh? Skintight or skin. Dude, everybody’s everything’s gonna be hanging out, and some o’ those fat chicks at the abbey are gonna gross my eyeballs right outta my head. Muffin tops and camel toes, gah!”

I bit my lip, trying not to laugh. That was Dani. Not an ounce of tact. Like the world around her, she was what she was, no holds barred. “Not everybody has superspeed metabolism,” I said drily. And what I wouldn’t give for it. I’d eat chocolate for breakfast, pastries for lunch, and pie for supper.

She polished off the apple and tossed it into a pile. “Looking forward to seeing Barrons, though,” she said enthusiastically. “You? Nah, guess you don’t care. You seen him naked for, what, like—months, din’t’cha?”

There were times I seriously wished she’d bar some of those holds. I was suddenly in a basement again, watching Barrons walk naked across the room, telling him he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.

I changed the subject hastily. “What’s going on at the abbey? I know you left, but what were things like before you did?”

Her face darkened. “Bad, Mac. Real bad. Why? You thinking of going back? Gotta tell you, don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Good idea or not, I had no choice. According to Nana, when the Sinsar Dubh had escaped the abbey twenty-some years ago, my mother was Haven Mistress. According to Ryodan, the entire Haven had been wiped out that night, with the exception of my mom.

Nana had called me Alina.

According to Ryodan, Alina was the only child Isla ever had. Not only would trying to interrogate Ryodan be an exercise in futility, given how tight-lipped he was, but he was currently dead and I had no idea for how long.

That left Nana or the abbey.

The abbey was closer, and the occupants weren’t nearly a century old and prone to nodding off in the middle of a sentence.

The original members of the Haven might all be dead, but some of my mom’s peers had to be alive still, even after the Book’s recent massacre. Others, besides Rowena, had known my mother. Others knew something—if only rumors—about what happened that night.

And there were those libraries I needed to get into. The ward I’d not been able to pass, the one that had given even V’lane fits. Speaking of which, I’d forgotten to ask him about what had happened to him that day when I’d summoned him to the abbey. I made a mental note to follow up.

I was also toying with the idea of confronting Rowena and trying to force truth from her. I wondered if the power of mental coercion Darroc believed the old woman possessed was a match for the power I’d recently discovered in myself. One of the things holding me back from testing it was that I knew if I did, I’d not only be burning a bridge, I’d be torching the ground I stood on with all sidhe-seers. Whether or not they agreed with Rowena’s decisions, the majority of the sidhe-seers were intensely loyal to her. Another thing holding me back was that I wasn’t sure where that power came from and was reluctant to betray anything the Grand Mistress might use against me. Besides, what if all the runes I had were parasites of some kind that could inflict further damage on our world?

Still, there was another weapon at my disposal I could try. I’d become proficient at Voice and could easily explain it away as a Druid art Barrons had taught me.

“I need answers, Dani. You with me?”

“Ro’ll blow a gasket if she catches us,” she warned. Her eyes sparkled, and she was beginning to blur with excitement.

I smiled. I loved this kid. We were okay with each other again. One more pain in my heart was gone. “Oh, she’s definitely going to catch us. I intend to have a few words with that old woman.” If things went south, I’d keep my power in check and let Dani whiz us out, or I’d summon V’lane. “Want to come along?”

“You’re kidding, right? Wouldn’t miss this gig for the world!”

22

Even with Dani whizzing us in at superspeed, they found us in the south wing in less than three minutes.

Ro must have laid new wards, to sense us and tip her off if we entered the abbey. I wondered how she did it, if it was like witchcraft and required a pinch of hair, blood, or nail. I could too easily see the old woman standing over a bubbling cauldron, dropping items in, stirring away, cackling with delight.

However she’d accomplished it, a group of sidhe-seers led by Kat confronted us at the intersection of two corridors before we were even halfway to the Forbidden Library I’d broken into the last time I was here. I’d left a group searching it while I tried to get past a holographic guardian down yet another seemingly “dead-end” hall in the abbey.

Like us, they wore snug clothes no Book could hide under. I imagined that, between the Shades and the Sinsar Dubh’s visit, things were pretty tense at the abbey.

“What’s in the bag?” Kat demanded.

I opened the translucent plastic grocery bag I’d brought and showed her there was no Book inside it. Once they were assured I wasn’t carrying concealed, they got right to the point.

“The Grand Mistress said you were dead, she did,” Jo said.

“Then she said you weren’t, but we were to be thinking of you as dead because you’d taken the Lord Master’s side, just like Alina,” accused Clare.

“But you aren’t Alina’s sister at all, are you, now?” Mary demanded.

“After we visited Nana O’Reilly,” Kat said, “I spoke with Rowena, and she confirmed what Nana told us about the Haven Mistress being an O’Connor. But she said Isla died a few nights after the Book escaped, and it was believed Alina died as well, although the girl’s body was never found. Regardless, Alina was her only child. So, Mac, who are you?”

Dozens of sidhe-seers stared at me, waiting for my answer.

“She don’t hafta answer to you,” Dani said belligerently. “Buncha sheep can’t even see what’s in fronta your own eyes.”

“Sure we can. We see a sidhe-seer that supposedly doesn’t exist. Worries us some, as it should,” Kat said. “Then there’s you, so determined to defend her. Why would you be doing that?”

Dani compressed her lips into a thin line and folded her skinny arms over her chest. She tapped a foot and stared up at the ceiling. “Just saying, things ain’t always bad just ’cause you don’t understand ’em or ain’t like ’em. That’s like thinking anybody who’s smarter or faster is dangerous just ’cause they got more brains or quicker feet. Ain’t fair. Peeps can’t help how they’re born.”

“We’re standing here, waiting to understand.” Kat turned her level gray gaze on me. “Help us, Mac.”

“Is it true?” I said, point-blank. “Is emotional telepathy your sidhe-seer gift?”

Suddenly self-conscious, Kat tucked her shirt in and smoothed her hair. “Where did you hear that?”

I withdrew Darroc’s notes from the grocery bag, stepped forward, and offered them to her, but she was going to have to meet me halfway to take them.

I hadn’t brought all of what I’d crammed into my pack, just enough for a gesture of good faith. I didn’t give a rat’s ass what Rowena thought of me, but I wanted in with the sidhe-seers. Part of me hated this abbey, where Rowena tightly controlled the sidhe-seers’ power yet had failed to control the greatest responsibility she’d had. Part of me still wanted to belong. My bipolar was showing again.

“I found these when I was undercover,” I stressed the word, “with Darroc. I searched his penthouse. He had notes on everything, including Unseelie I’ve never heard of or seen. I thought you might want to add them to your libraries. They’ll be useful when you encounter new castes. I don’t know how he got the scoop on what happens inside these walls, but he must have had someone on the inside. Perhaps he still has.” Dani had told me someone had sabotaged the wards outside my cell when I was Pri-ya. “You might find it interesting that he says Rowena’s gift is mental coercion,” I said pointedly.

“How do we know these papers aren’t some load of malarkey you’ve been making up yourself?” Mary demanded.

“You decide. I’m through defending myself.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” Kat said. “Who are you, Mac?”

I met her serene gray gaze. Kat was the only one that I trusted to think things through and make a wise decision. The slender brunette was tougher than she looked, levelheaded, calm in times of stress, and I hoped one day she would replace Rowena as Grand Mistress of the abbey. The position didn’t require the most powerful sidhe-seer, like the Haven did, but the wisest, a woman with long-term goals and vision. Kat exuded quiet capability, an almost complete lack of ego, a quick mind, and a solid heart. She had my vote all the way.

If she was indeed emotionally telepathic, she would sense my sincerity when I told her as much of the truth as I knew myself.

“I don’t know who I am, Kat. I really did believe I was Alina’s sister. I’m still not convinced I’m not. Nana said I looked like Isla. Apparently enough that I looked the way she expected Alina to appear grown up. However, like you, I’ve heard that Isla didn’t have a second child. If you think that upsets you, imagine what it does to me.” I gave her a bitter smile. “First I find out I’m adopted, then I find out I don’t exist. But here’s a shocker for you, Kat: According to Darroc’s notes, he knew the origin of the sidhe-seers. Supposedly—”

Three shrill blasts of a whistle split the air, and sidhe-seers snapped to attention.

“Enough!” Rowena commanded, as she sailed up behind them, dressed in a smart, fitted suit of royal blue, her long white hair braided in a regal crown around her head. There were pearls at her ears and throat and tiny seed pearls on the chain that draped from her glasses. “That will be all! Restrain the traitor and bring her with me. And Danielle Megan O’Malley, if you think for one bloody moment to whisk her away, think twice. Be very, very careful, Danielle.” Turning to Kat, she said, “I gave an order. Obey it now!”

Kat looked at Rowena. “Does she speak the truth? Is your gift mental coercion?”

Rowena’s brows drew together over her fine, pointed nose. Blue eyes blazed. “You would believe her lies about the claims of an ex-Fae over what I have told you? Och, and I thought you wise, Kat. Perhaps the wisest of all my daughters. You have never failed me. Do not disappoint me now.”

“My gift is emotional telepathy,” Kat said. “He was right about that.”

“The best liar knows to salt his deception with an occasional truth, to lend the flavor of credibility. I have not coerced my daughters. I never will.”

“I say it’s time for truth all around, Grand Mistress,” Jo said. “There are only three hundred fifty-eight of us left. We weary of losing our sisters.”

“We’ve lost more than our sisters,” Mary said. “We’re losing hope.”

“I agree,” said Clare. “Yes,” murmured Josie and the rest.

Kat nodded. “Tell us what Darroc believed about the origin of our order, Mac.”

Rowena glared down her nose at me. “Don’t you dare!”

I felt it then—a subtle pressure on my mind—and I wondered if she’d been using it on me whenever I’d been around her since the night we’d met. Regardless, it was no threat to me now. I’d learned to resist Voice, and the pressure coming from her was nothing compared to that. I’d been on my knees, cutting myself, with Barrons. I’d had a hell of a teacher.

I ignored Rowena and addressed the sidhe-seers. “Darroc believed it was not the Seelie Queen who brought the Sinsar Dubh to the abbey to be interred so long ago—”

Rowena shook her head. “Don’t do this. They need faith. They’ve precious little else. It is not your place to take it from them. You’ve no confirmation of his claims.”

I felt the subtle pressure grow stronger as she tried to cow me. “You knew. You’ve always known. And, like so many other things, you never told them.”

“If you believe a seed of evil exists within you, it may consume you.” She searched my face. “Och, surely you understand that.”

“One might also argue that if you believe a seed of evil exists within you, you have the opportunity to learn to control it,” I countered.

“One might also argue ignorance is safety.”

“Safety is a fence, and fences are for sheep. I would rather die at twenty-two, knowing the truth, than live in a cage of lies for a hundred years.”

“You sound so certain of that. Were it put to the test, I wonder where you would truly stand.”

“Illusion is no substitute for life,” I said.

“Allow them their sacred history,” Rowena said.

“What if it’s not so sacred?” I said.

“Tell us,” Clare demanded. “We have the right to know.”

Rowena turned her head away and looked at me from the side, down her nose, as if I were too distasteful to regard directly. “I knew from the moment I saw you that you would try to destroy us, MacKayla—or whoever you are. I should have put you down then.”

Kat inhaled sharply. “She’s a person, not an animal, Rowena. We don’t put people down.”

“Right, Ro,” Dani said tightly, “we don’t put peeps down.”

I glanced at Dani. She was staring at Rowena, eyes narrowed and filled with hatred. Oh, yes, it was long past time for truth in these walls, whether we liked those truths or not. Maybe Darroc was wrong. Maybe what he’d written was mere conjecture. But we couldn’t question something we refused to face. And unquestioned suspicions had a nasty tendency to grow. Didn’t I know; One was expanding exponentially in my head, in my heart, even now.

“Rowena has a point,” I conceded. “I don’t know whether or not Darroc was right. But you should know that Barrons suspects it, too.”

“Tell us,” Kat demanded.

I drew a deep breath. I knew how this had affected me, and I hadn’t spent my entire life indoctrinated into the sidhe-seer credo. I’d skimmed Darroc’s notes again before I’d brought them. Farther into the pages, he’d written it not as a bulleted supposition but as a fact: The Unseelie King created the sidhe-seers. “Darroc believed it was the Unseelie King himself who trapped the Sinsar Dubh and created a prison for it, here, on our world. He believed the king also created prison guards.” I hesitated, then added grimly, “Sidhe-seers. According to Darroc, it was the last caste of Unseelie the dark king created.”

You could have heard a pin drop. Nobody said anything. Nobody moved.

Now that that was out, I turned my attention to Rowena. I had no doubt she knew what I needed to know. “Tell me what the prophecy says, Rowena.”

She sniffed and turned away.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

“Ballocks, child. We won’t be doing this at all.”

“Tell me what the prophecy says, Rowena,” I said again, and this time I used Voice to command her. It resonated, echoing back at me off the abbey’s stone walls. Sidhe-seers rustled and murmured.

Eyes bulging, hands fisted, Rowena began to spit out words in a language I didn’t understand.

I was about to order her to speak in English, when Kat cleared her throat and moved forward. Her face was pale, but her voice was calm and determined when she said, “Don’t do this, Mac. You needn’t coerce her. We found the book containing the prophecies in the Forbidden Library you opened. We can tell you all you need to know.” She held out her hand for the papers I’d brought. “May I?”

I gave them to her.

She searched my gaze. “Do you believe Darroc was right?”

“I don’t know. I could Voice Rowena and see what she knows. I could interrogate her thoroughly.”

Kat looked back at Rowena, who was still speaking. “It’s Old Irish Gaelic,” she told me. “Took a bit of time, but we’ve translated it. Come with us. But hush her, will you?” She shivered. “It’s not right, Mac. It’s like what you did to Nana. Our wills must be our own.”

“You can say that, knowing she’s probably been using coercion on all of you for years?”

“Her power doesn’t begin to compare to yours. There is seduction and there is rape. Some of us suspected she had … compelling leadership abilities. Still, she made wise and fair decisions.”

“She lies to you,” I said. Kat was far more forgiving than I was.

“Withholds. A small but important difference, Mac. She was right about faith. Had we been told as children we might be Unseelie, we may have walked a very different path. Release her. I’m asking you.”

I looked at Kat a long moment. I wondered if she had something besides emotional telepathy, a kind of emotional balm she could apply if she chose. As I looked into her eyes, my anger at Rowena seemed to diminish. And I could see a grain of truth in what Kat had said. Alina and Christian had called them “necessary lies.” I wondered if someone had told me when I was, say, nine or ten that I was Unseelie, if I would have thought I was destined to be bad and never even tried to be good. Would I have thought: What’s the point?

I sighed. Life was so complicated. “Forget the prophecy, Rowena,” I commanded.

Instantly, she stopped speaking.

Kat raised a brow and looked amused. “Is that truly what you wished her to do?”

I winced. “Don’t forget it! Just stop talking about it!”

But it was too late. I’d Voiced her to forget it, and I could tell by the look of disdain on the old woman’s face that every word of it had been wiped from her mind.

“You are a danger to us all,” she said haughtily.

I raked my hands through my hair. Voice was tricky.

“My daughters will tell you of the prophecy I no longer recall thanks to your ineptitude at Druid arts. They will tell you freely, without coercion. But you will consent to my terms: You work with our order and no one else. If I recall the shape of it, we know what we need. You will track it. We will do the rest, with …” She trailed off, rubbing her forehead.

“The five Druids and the stones,” Kat supplied.

“You found the prophecy and it actually tells us what to do?” I said.

Kat nodded.

“I want to see it.”

We gathered in the Forbidden Library, a small, windowless room that had failed to impress me when I’d first found it, spoiled as I was by Barrons Books and Baubles. Dozens of lamps were positioned around the low-ceilinged stone room, bathing it in a soft amber glow, bright enough to keep Shades at bay but diffuse enough to minimize damage to ancient fading pages.

Now, as I glanced around, it affected me differently than it had the first time. In my absence, sidhe-seers had organized the dusty chaos, dug old tomes out of trunks, carried in bookcases, and arranged things for easy access and cataloging.

I love books, they’re in my blood. I wandered the dry stone room, stopping here and there to pass my hands over fragile covers I longed to touch but wasn’t willing to risk harming.

“We’re copying and updating everything,” Kat said. “For millennia, only the Haven was permitted access to these histories and records. In a few more centuries many of them would have been dust.” She gave Rowena a look of gentle rebuke. “Some of them already are.”

“Och, and if you one day carry the scepter of my position, Katrina,” Rowena said sternly, “you’ll come to appreciate the limits of a single lifetime and the difficult choices that must be made.”

“The prophecy,” I said impatiently.

Kat motioned us all to a large oval table. We pulled out chairs and tucked in around it.

“We translated as best we can.”

“Some of the words aren’t Old Irish Gaelic,” Jo said, “but appear to have been invented by a person self-schooled.”

“Jo’s our translator,” Dani said, with equal measures of pride and disdain. “She thinks research is fun. As fecking if.”

“Language!” Rowena snapped.

I blinked at her. She was still on that kick? I’d gotten so inured to “fecking” that it hardly even seemed like a cussword to me anymore.

“Ain’t your problem no more. You ain’t the boss of me.” Dani gave Rowena a hard stare.

“Och, and you’re so happy on your own, are you, Danielle O’Malley? Your mam would rise from her grave were she to ken her daughter left the abbey, consorts with a Fae prince and others of dubious blood, and takes orders from none at the tender age of ten and three.”

“Don’t give me no tender-age bunk,” Dani growled. “ ’Sides, I’m gonna be ten and four soon.” She beamed around the table. “February twentieth, don’t forget. I like chocolate cake. Not yellow. Hate fruit in my cakes. Chocolate on chocolate, the more the better.”

“If you two can’t be quiet, leave,” I said.

The book Kat opened was surprisingly small, thin, clad in dull brown leather, and tied with a worn leather cord. “Moreena Bean lived in these walls a bit over a thousand years ago.”

“A sidhe-seer whose gift was vision?” I guessed.

Kat shook her head. “No, a washerwoman for the abbess. They called her Mad Morry for her ramblings, ridiculed her insistence that dreams were as real as those events we lived. Mad Morry believed life was not a thing shaped of past or present but possibles. She believed that every moment was a new stone tossed into a loch, causing ripples that those ‘revered among women’ for whom she toiled were too dull of mind to see. She claimed to behold the entire loch, each and every stone. She said she was not mad, merely overwhelmed.” Kat smiled faintly. “Much of what she’s written makes no sense whatsoever. If it has come to pass, we can’t tie it to current times or understand her signs. If all she penned in these pages is supposed to pass in order, we are only at the beginning of her predictions. A mere twenty pages in, she tells of the escape of the Sinsar Dubh.”

“She actually calls it that?”

“Nothing in here is ever that clear. She writes of a great evil that slumbers beneath our abbey, that will escape, aided by ‘one in the highest circle.’ ”

“A washerwoman knew of the Haven?” I exclaimed.

“Like as not, she eavesdropped on her betters,” Rowena pronounced.

I rolled my eyes. “Elitist to the core, aren’t you?”

Kat removed a sheet of yellow legal pad upon which Jo had scribbled a translation and handed it to me.

“There’s a great deal of rambling before she gets to the point,” Jo told me. “This was a washerwoman circa 1000 A.D., who’d never seen a car, a plane, a cell phone, an earthquake, and had no words to describe things. She goes on and on about ‘in the day of,’ in an effort to define when this event would take place. I focused on translating only what pertained to the Sinsar Dubh itself. I’m still working on the rest of her predictions, but it’s slow going.”

I scanned it, eager to find proof of my heroic role, or at least no proof of a villainous one.

The Beast will break free and scourge the earth. It cannot be destroyed. It cannot be damaged. An unholy tree, it will grow new leaves. It must be woven. (Walled? Caged?) From the mightiest bloodlines come two: If the one dies young, the other who longs for death will hunt it. Jewels from icy cliffs laid to the east, west, north, and south will make the three faces one. Five of the hidden barrier will chant as the jewels are laid, and one who burns pure (burned on a pyre?) will return it to the place from which it escaped. If the inhabited … possessed (not sure of this word … transformed?) seals it in the heart of darkness, it will slumber, with one eye open.

“Dude—sucky! Who writes that kinda drivel?” Dani exclaimed over my shoulder.

Jo sniffed. “I did the best I could what with the woman not spelling a single word the same way twice.”

“Would it’ve killed her to be a little more specific?” Dani groused.

“She probably thought she was being specific,” I said. The nuances of language changed constantly, especially dialect and lingo. “Really, Dani, who’d be able to translate ‘dude—sucky’ a thousand years from now?”

But it wasn’t only language that compounded things. Communicating a dream was difficult. I’d been so troubled by my Cold Place dreams in middle school that I’d finally told Daddy I was having a recurring nightmare. He’d encouraged me to write it down, and together we’d tried to decide what it meant.

Logical, pragmatic Jack Lane believed the brain was like a vast computer, and dreams were the conscious mind’s way of backing up and storing the day’s events in the subconscious, filing away memories and organizing lessons. But he’d also believed that if a dream kept recurring, it suggested the mind or heart was having a problem dealing with something.

He’d proposed that my dream reflected a child’s natural fear of losing her mother, but even at ten, that hadn’t quite rung true for me. Now I wondered if Daddy had secretly worried that the recurring dream had something to do with the biological mother I’d lost, that perhaps I’d been trapped somewhere cold, forced to watch her die.

That was what I’d been thinking, too, until my recent experience in the White Mansion with the concubine and king, when I’d realized she was the woman from my dreams, coupled with my latest dream, where watching her die felt like I had perished. Now I was troubled by an entirely different possibility.

Regardless, when I’d attempted to write down my Cold Place dream, it had come out looking a lot like this prophecy: vague, dreamy, and confusing as hell.

“Besides, we think we have it sorted out,” Jo said. “The word ‘Keltar’ means magic mantle. The clan of the Keltar, or MacKeltar, served as Druids to the Tuatha Dé Danann thousands of years ago, when the Fae still lived among us. When the Compact was negotiated and the Fae retired from our world, they left the Keltar in charge of honoring the Compact and protecting the old lore.”

“And we’ve learned there are five male Druids living,” said Mary.

“Dageus, Drustan, Cian, Christian, and Christopher,” Jo said. “We’ve already dispatched a message to them, asking them to join us here.”

Unfortunately, Christian was going to be a problem.

“You said you knew where the four stones are,” Kat said.

I nodded.

“So all we need is you to tell us where the Book is, one of the Keltar to pick it up and bring it here, the four stones laid around it, and the five of them to re-inter it with whatever binding song or chant they know. It sounds like one of them will know whatever needs to be done at the end. I spoke to one of their wives, and she seemed to understand what was meant by ‘the inhabited or possessed.’ ”

“Re-inter it where?” I demanded, watching Rowena closely. It looked as if my only role in the entire matter was to track it. This entire time I’d been feeling as if I had to do it all, but my part in the prophecy was really very small. There was nothing in the prophecy about me that was bad. Just that Alina might die and I would long for death—been there, done that. I felt a huge weight slip from my shoulders. There were five other people responsible for the bulk of it. It was all I could do not to punch the air with a fist and shout, Yes!

“Where it was before,” she said coolly.

“And where’s that?”

“Down the corridor Dani said you couldn’t pass,” Jo said.

The Grand Mistress shot her a quelling look.

“Can you get past the woman who guards it?” I asked Rowena.

“Don’t fash yourself with my business, girl. I’ll do my part. You do yours.”

“V’lane couldn’t get past it, either,” I fished, wondering why.

“No Fae can.” Smugness dripped from her words, and I knew she’d had something to do with that.

“Who is the woman that guards the hall?”

Jo answered, “The last known leader of the Haven.”

Rowena’s current Haven was cloaked in secrecy. “You mean my mother?”

“Isla was not your mother! She had only one child,” Rowena snapped.

“Then who am I?”

“Precisely.” She managed to try, convict, and execute me with the single word.

“The prophecy said there were two of us. One dies young, the other longs for death.” Had she and I been alone, I wasn’t sure how far I would have gone to force answers from her, but I knew this much: I wouldn’t have liked myself when it was over.

“Like as not, a washerwoman ate a bad bit of fish, had dreams on an uneasy stomach, and declared herself a prophet. The word is bloodlines. Plural.”

“Her spelling was appalling. There are extra letters in many words,” Jo said.

“You’ll need to neutralize those particular wards,” I said coolly.

“There will be no Fae present when we seal the abomination away!”

“V’lane won’t give me the stone,” I told her. “There’s no way he’ll just hand it over.”

“Spread your legs for another Fae and whore it out of him,” she said flatly. “Then you will turn them all over to us. There is no need for you to be present when the ritual is performed.”

My cheeks pinked, and it infuriated me. This old woman got under my skin like nobody else could. I wondered if my mother—Isla, I corrected hastily—had felt the same. I’d been so elated to discover the identity of my biological mother, and now, with everyone telling me she’d had only one child, I felt as if not only my mother had been stolen away from me but maybe even my sister as well. I’d never felt so alone in all my life.

“Feck you, old woman,” I said.

“Don’t waste it on me,” she retorted. “I’m not the one with the stone.”

“What was it you said to me once? Wait—I remember.” I used Voice at the full extent of my power when I said, “Haud yer whist, Rowena.”

“Mac,” Kat warned.

“She’s allowed to call me names but I can’t tell her to shut up?”

“Sure, and you can, on equal ground, without compulsion. You rely on such powers in times of no need, you run the risk of losing what makes you human. You’ve a hot temper and a hotter heart. You need to cool them both.”

“You may speak, Rowena.” Voice had never sounded so pissy when Barrons used it.

“Your loyalty must be first to us, the sidhe-seers,” she said instantly.

“Do you want the walls back up, Rowena?” I demanded.

“Och, and of course I do!”

“Then the Seelie will have to be involved. Once the Book is re-interred, the queen will need to come search it for the Song of Making—”

“The Song of Making is in the Sinsar Dubh?” she exclaimed.

“The queen believes fragments of it are, and from them she can re-create the entire Song.”

“And so certain you are you wish that to happen?”

“You don’t want the Unseelie locked away again?”

“Aye, I do. But they’ve been without the Song of Making since long before we encountered them. If the Fae regain that ancient melody, their power will once again be limitless. Have you any idea what those times might have been like? Are you so certain the human race would survive it?”

I blinked at her in startled silence. I’d been so focused on getting the Unseelie reimprisoned and sending the Seelie back to their court that I’d not deeply examined the possible repercussions of restoring the Song of Making to the Fae. It must have shown on my face, because Rowena’s tone softened when she said, “Och, so you’re not a complete fool.”

I gave her a look. “I’ve had a lot on my plate. And I sure learned Voice fast, didn’t I? But we have other, more-immediate problems: I know Christian MacKeltar, and he’s missing. He’s been trapped inside the Silvers since Halloween. We can’t do a thing until we find him.”

“In the Silvers?” Kat exclaimed. “We can’t go in the Silvers! None can!”

“I was there myself recently. It can be done.”

Rowena appraised me. “You’ve been in the Silvers?”

“I stood in the Hall of All Days,” I said, and was surprised to hear a touch of pride in my voice. I finally allowed myself to ask the question that had been gnawing at me ever since I’d heard there were two prophecies and, in one of them, I supposedly doomed the world. Was it really about me? Or was it as vague as this one? “I heard there were two prophecies. Where’s the other one?”

Kat and Jo exchanged uneasy glances.

“The washerwoman rambled ’til the end of the page about how many stones there were to throw into a loch at any given moment and that some were more possible than others,” Jo said. “She claimed she dreamed of dozens such stones, but only two seemed likely. The first could save us. The second was far more likely to doom us.”

I nodded impatiently. “I know. So what’s the second prophecy?”

Kat handed me the slim volume. “Turn the page.”

“I can’t read Old Irish Gaelic.”

“Just turn it.”

I did. Because the ink she’d used had stained through the sheets of vellum bound into the thin journal, Mad Morry had written on only one side of the page. The next page was missing. Small pieces of parchment and torn threads protruded from the binding. “Someone tore it out?” I said disbelievingly.

“A good while ago. This is one of the first volumes we cataloged once you removed the wards protecting the library. We found it open, on a table, with this page and several others missing. We suspect it was whoever destroyed the wards outside your cell when you were Pri-ya,” Kat said.

“There’s a traitor in the abbey,” Jo said. “And whoever it is either translates as well as me or took random pages.”

“To have bypassed my wards and gained access to this library,” Rowena added grimly, “it could only have been one of my trusted Haven.”

23

I parked the Viper behind the bookstore and sat staring down into what was once the city’s biggest Dark Zone—crammed full of Shades, with one giant amorphous life-sucker in particular that had seemed to enjoy threatening me as much as I’d enjoyed threatening it.

I wondered where it was now. I hoped I would get the chance to hunt it and try out some of my newfound runes, destroy it once and for all, because as large as it had been before it escaped on the night the lights went out in Dublin, I imagined it could devour small towns in a single swallow now.

I glanced at the garage. I looked at the bookstore. I sighed.

I missed him. Ironically, now that I’d become obsessed with wondering who and what I was, I was less worried about who and what he was. I was beginning to understand why he’d always insisted I judge him by his actions. What if the sidhe-seers really were Unseelie? Did that make us innately bad? Or did that just mean we—like the rest of the human race—had to choose whether to be good or evil?

I got out of the car, locked it, and turned for the bookstore.

“Barrons say you can drive his Viper?” Lor said behind me.

Hand on the doorknob, I turned, dangling the key ring from my finger. “Possession. Nine-tenths of the law.”

The corners of his mouth twitched. “You been around him too much.”

“Where’s Fade? Did you catch him?”

“Book left him dead.”

“And just when do you expect him back?” I said sweetly.

“Report. What did you learn at the abbey?”

“You think I’m reporting to you now?”

“Until Barrons gets back and takes control of you again.”

“Is that what you think? He takes control of me?” My temper flared.

“You’d better hope so, because if he doesn’t, we kill you.” The threat was delivered tonelessly, with utter disinterest. It was chilling. “We don’t exist. That’s the way it always has been. That’s the way it always will be. If people find out about us, we kill them. It’s not personal.”

“Well, excuse the hell out of me if you try to kill me and I decide to take it pretty damned personally.”

“We’re not trying to. At the moment. Report.”

I snorted and turned to enter the store.

He was behind me, his hand on my hand on the doorknob, his face in my hair, lips close to my ear. He inhaled. “You don’t smell like other people, Mac. I wonder why. I’m not like Barrons. Ryodan is downright civilized. I don’t suffer Kasteo’s problems, and Fade is still having fun. Death is my morning coffee. I like blood and the sound of bones breaking. It turns me on. Tell me what you learned about the prophecy and, next time, bring me the seer’s book. If you want your parents to remain … intact, you will cooperate only with us. You will lie to everyone else. We own you. Don’t make me give you a lesson. There are things that can break you. You wouldn’t believe the madness certain kinds of pain can induce.”

I turned to face him. For a moment he didn’t let me, made me push against his body and struggle to move. His body was every bit as electric as Barron’s and Ryodan’s. And I knew he was enjoying it, quite possibly on a level of primitive carnality I didn’t understand.

There are things that can break you, he’d said. I almost laughed. He had no idea the thing that had broken me most completely was my belief that Barrons was dead.

One look at Lor’s eyes and I decided I would wait until Barrons was back before pressing any issues with him. “You think Barrons has a weakness for me,” I said. “That’s what worries you.”

“It is forbidden.”

“He despises me. He thinks I slept with Darroc, remember?”

“He cares that you slept with Darroc.”

“He cared that I burned his rug, too. He gets a little pissy about those things he likes to think of as his property.”

“You two drive me bug-fuck. Prophecy. Talk.”

He interrogated me for nearly half an hour before he was satisfied. I let myself into my fourth-floor bedroom, weary to the bone. My room was a mess—protein-bar wrappers, empty water bottles, and clothes everywhere. I washed my face, brushed my teeth, slipped into pajamas, and was about to crawl into bed, when I remembered the tarot card from last night that the dreamy-eyed guy had given me.

I dug in the pocket of my coat and pulled it out. The back of it was black, covered with silver symbols and runes that looked a lot like the silver etchings I’d glimpsed on one of the three forms of the Sinsar Dubh—the one of an ancient black tome with heavy locks.

I turned it over. THE WORLD was inscribed at the top.

It was a beautiful card, framed in crimson and black. A woman stood in profile on a white landscape tinged with blue that looked icy, forbidding. Against the backdrop of a starry sky, a planet revolved in front of her face, but she was looking away—not at the world at all but staring off into the distance. Or was she looking at someone who wasn’t on the card? I had no idea what THE WORLD card was supposed to mean in a tarot reading. I’d never had my cards read. Mac 1.0 had considered having your future divined through tarot cards as ridiculous as trying to dial up a dead relative on a Ouija board. Mac 5.0 would happily take any help she could get from any source. I studied it. Why had the dreamy-eyed guy left it for me? What was I supposed to learn from it? That I needed to look at the world? That I was distracted by other things and people and not seeing clearly? That I really was the person holding the fate of the world in my hands?

No matter how I looked at it, the card implied way too much responsibility. The prophecy had made it clear that my involvement wasn’t much at all. I tucked it between the pages of the book on my bed stand, got into bed, and pulled the covers over my head.

Once again, I dreamed of the sad, beautiful woman and, once again, I had the oddest sense of duality, seeing from her eyes and mine, feeling her sorrow and my confusion. Come, you must hurry, you must know.

Urgency gripped me.

Only you can. No other way in … Her words echoed off the cliffs, growing fainter with each rebound. Trying to … for so long … so hard …

Then an Unseelie Prince was there beside her (us).

But he was not one of the three I knew, one of the three that had raped me. It was the fourth. The one I’d never seen.

In that strange way of knowing things in dreams, I knew it was War.

Run, hide! she screamed.

I couldn’t. My feet were rooted to the ground, my eyes locked on him. He was far more beautiful than the other Unseelie Princes and far more terrifying. Like the others, he looked into me, not at me, and his gaze felt like razors slicing through my most private hopes and fears. I knew that War’s specialty was not merely to turn opposing factions, races, or populations upon one another but to find sides within a person and turn them upon themselves.

Here was the ultimate trickster, the destroyer.

And I understood that Death wasn’t the one to be feared. War was the one that laid waste to lives. Death was just the cleanup guy, the janitor, the final act.

Though the same black torque writhed around War’s neck, it was threaded with silver. Though kaleidoscopic colors rushed beneath his skin, a nimbus of gold surrounded him, and, at his back, I glimpsed the flash of black feathers. War was winged.

You are too late, he said.

24

I was jarred awake the next morning by an unaccustomed noise and sat up, looking around. Twice more I heard the sound before I figured out what it was. Someone was throwing a rock against my window.

I rubbed my eyes and stretched. “Coming,” I groused, and tossed back the covers. I figured it was Dani. Since cell phone service still wasn’t back up and the store had no doorbell, it was the only way she could get my attention, short of breaking in.

I pushed aside the drape and glanced out into the alley.

V’lane reclined on the hood of Barrons’ Viper, leaning back against the windshield. Though supposedly the car wasn’t mine (we’d see about that), I instantly assessed V’lane for rivets or any other abrasive elements that might mar the paint job. I love sports cars. All that muscle just does it for me. I decided it was a safe bet the soft white towel knotted loosely at his waist wasn’t going to scratch anything. His perfect body was dusted gold, and his eyes were sunshine sparkling on diamonds.

I pushed the window up. Chilly air wafted in. The temperature had dropped, low-hanging clouds had moved in. It was once again cold and gloomy in Dublin.

He lifted a cup of Starbucks. “Good morning, MacKayla. I brought you coffee.”

I eyed it with equal parts suspicion and longing. “You found an open Starbucks?”

“I sifted to a store in New York. I ground the beans and made it myself. I even … how do you say? Frothed the milk.” He held up some packets. “Splenda or raw sugar?”

My mouth watered. Raw sugar and caffeine in the morning. Only sex could make it better.

“Is Barrons around?” he said.

I shook my head.

“Where is he?”

“Busy for the day,” I lied.

“Anything pressing on your agenda?”

I narrowed my eyes. V’lane wasn’t talking like he normally did. Usually he spoke with great formality. Today he sounded almost … human. I eyed the towel, trying to decide if there might be a Book beneath it. It was possible. “Could you swap that towel for something like, well, skintight shorts?”

He was suddenly nude.

Definitely no Book. “Put your towel back on,” I said hastily. “Why are you talking funny?”

“Am I? I endeavor to learn from humanity, MacKayla. I thought you would find me more appealing. How am I doing? No, wait. I am appropriating human contractions. How’m I doing?”

He was still nude. “Towel. Now. And you contracted the wrong words. ‘I am’ becomes ‘I’m.’ ‘How am’ does not become ‘how’m.’ But, really, it’s okay. Contractions don’t sound right coming out of your mouth anyway.”

He flashed me a dazzling smile. “You like me as the prince I am. That is promising. I came to take you for a day at the beach. Tropical surf and sandbars. Coconuts and palm trees. Sand and sun. Come.” He offered a hand. It wasn’t the only part of him extended in my direction.

I’m surrounded by intensely sexual men at every turn. “Towel,” I demanded. I bit my lower lip. I shouldn’t. I had no right. I had the weight of the world on my shoulders. I even had the tarot card to prove it.

“I do not know why you do not enjoy seeing me nude. I enjoy seeing you nude.”

“Do you want me to go to the beach with you or not?”

His iridescent eyes were brilliant. “You have accepted my invitation. I see it in your eyes. They have taken on a languorous sheen. I find it arousing.”

“But not to a beach in Faery,” I said. “No illusion. Can you sift us to somewhere like Rio, in the human world, where only human hours will pass?”

“Command me, I am yours, MacKayla. We shall spend a finite number of human hours, to be specified by you.”

I was fatally flawed. I couldn’t say no. “I’ll take that coffee now.” I reached out the window for it, expecting him to float it up or something.

“I am unable to oblige. The paranoid one’s wards are still active. They keep me several feet from the building.”

“But not off his car,” I said, a smile tugging at my lips. Barrons would go nuts if he knew V’lane had touched his Viper. And stretched out on it nude? He’d have an aneurysm.

“It is all I can do not to sear my name into the paint. I am afraid you will have to come down for your coffee. It is hot; make haste.”

I ran a brush through my hair, splashed water on my face, slipped into shorts, a tank, and flip-flops and, ten minutes later, I was in Rio.

I can’t be on a beach without thinking of Alina. I keep telling myself that, when all this is over, I’ll ask V’lane to give me an illusion of her again and we’ll spend a day playing volleyball together, listening to tunes, and drinking Corona and lime. I’ll say good-bye, once and for all. I’ll let go of the pain and the anger, tuck the wonderful parts of the life we shared into a sacred corner of my soul, and accept living without her.

If Barrons had truly been dead, and enough time had passed, would I have eventually accepted living without him? I was afraid I never would have.

I turned my attention to the Seelie Prince walking beside me. I was glad he’d come to find me this morning. If he hadn’t, I would have summoned him with the sensual sting of his name through my tongue. My dreams last night had unsettled me deeply. I had questions, and he was the only one who might have the answers.

We walked a short distance down the powdery beach to a pair of silken chaises sunk in white sand, close to the salty spray of the sea. My clothes melted away and were replaced by a hot-pink string bikini and a gold belly chain adorned with fiery stones. The beach was deserted. I had no idea if there were no people left or if V’lane had sent them away for privacy.

“What’s with the belly chain?” He seemed to have a fondness for them.

“When I have sex with you from behind, I will use it to pull you closer, push in deeper.”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. I was the idiot that had asked.

“And now whenever you see the gold of it glinting in the sun, you will think about fucking me.”

I sank into the chair and tipped my head back, watching birds fly overhead. The soft rush of waves soothed my soul. “Baseball cap and sunglasses, please.”

He reached over and tucked a cap on my head, propped sunglasses on my nose. I looked at him. He was nude again, towel mounded between his legs.

“I have found it burns. It is most unpleasant.”

“Is your skin real?”

He removed the cloth. “Touch it.” When I made no move to do so, he said, “I regret that you are immune to me. Human seduction of one such as you may take an eon. Yes, MacKayla, in this form my skin is every bit as real as yours.”

A drink appeared in my hand, a creamy blend of pineapple, coconut, and spiced rum.

“Tell me about Cruce,” I said.

“Why?” V’lane said.

“He interests me.”

“Why?”

“It seems he was somehow different from the other Unseelie Princes. The others didn’t have names. Why did Cruce? When I first met you, you offered me the cuff of Cruce. Why was it called that? How did Cruce learn to curse the Silvers? There seems to be so much more history about him than any of the other princes.”

V’lane sighed, in perfect human mimicry. “One day you will wish to talk of me. You will have as many questions of my existence and my place in Fae history. It is majestic, far more so than Cruce’s. He was a fledgling prince. I have more to offer.”

I tapped my fingers, waiting.

He ran his hand along my arm, wove his fingers with mine. His hand was warm and strong and felt just like a real man’s. He was seriously putting on the human today.

“I have already told you more about ancient Fae history than any human has ever known.”

“And I still know only the barest sketch of events. You say you want me to see you as a man, to trust you, but trust comes from sharing knowledge and finding common ground.”

“If others of my race were to discover how much I tell you …”

“I’ll take that chance. Will you?”

He stared out at the sea, as if seeking wisdom in the turquoise waves. Finally he said, “As you wish, MacKayla, but you must never reveal your knowledge to another Fae.”

“I understand.”

“Once the Unseelie King was satisfied that he had sufficiently improved upon the initial, imperfect efforts of his experiments that resulted in the lesser castes of Unseelie, he began to replicate the Seelie hierarchy. He created four royal houses, dark counterparts to the Seelie royal lines. The house of Cruce was the final one he made. Cruce himself was the last Unseelie ever brought into existence. By the time the king began to work on the fourth royal house, he was a virtuoso at bringing into being his half-life children, even without the Song of Making. Though with their raven hair, black torques, and haunting melodies, they would never pass for Seelie, they were still a match in beauty, eroticism, and majesty for the highest-ranking light Fae. Some say the king stopped with Cruce because he knew if he made even one more of his ‘children’—much like in your own mythologies—the child would kill the father and usurp his kingdom.”

I nodded, remembering my Oedipus from college.

“In the beginning, the king rejoiced in Cruce and shared his knowledge freely. He had found a worthy companion, one to work with in his efforts to make his beloved concubine Fae. Cruce was clever, learned quickly, and invented many things. The cuff was one of his first creations. He made it as a gift for the king to give his concubine, so that when she desired his presence, she had only to touch the cuff and think of him to make it so. It also protected her from certain threats. The king was delighted with the token. Together they forged several amulets to grant her the gift of weaving illusion. The king alone created the final one he bestowed upon his beloved. Some say she could deceive anyone with illusions woven from it, even him. He gave Cruce greater access to his studies, his libraries and laboratories.”

“But how did you get Cruce’s cuff?”

“My queen gave it to me.”

“How did she get it?”

“I assume it was taken from Cruce when he was killed, then passed from queen to queen to be protected.”

“So, while the king was trusting Cruce with everything he knew, the prince decided to overthrow him and steal his concubine?” I said. I couldn’t keep the note of condemnation out of my voice.

“From whom did you hear that?”

I hesitated.

“Trust must be reciprocal, MacKayla,” he chided.

“I saw Christian in the Silvers. He said he’d learned that Cruce hated the king, wanted his concubine, and cursed the Silvers to keep the king away from her. He told me Cruce planned to take the king’s woman and all the worlds inside the Silvers for himself.”

V’lane shook his head, tawny hair shimmering in the sun. “It was not so simple. Things rarely are. To use a human word, Cruce loved the king, first and above all. The creator of the Unseelie is a being of unbearable perfection. If he is indeed Fae, he is from the most ancient, most pure line that ever existed. Some say he is the Father of All. Some say he had outlived hundreds of queens before the time of the queen he slew. Many of the forms he can take are beyond even Fae ability to absorb. He has been described as having enormous black wings that can enfold the entire Unseelie Court. Were he to attempt to take human form, he would have to occupy multiple bodies and divide facets of himself. He is too vast to be contained in a single mortal vessel.”

I shivered again. I’d seen the hint of those wings in the White Mansion. I’d felt the concubine’s awareness of them, had empathically shared her fascination with their feathery touch on her naked skin. “I thought the queen was the most powerful of your race.”

“The queen is heir to the magic of our people. It is a different thing. That magic has never accepted a male of the True Race, although …”

“Although what?”

He gave me a sideways look from beneath his lids. “I tell you too many things.” He sighed. “And enjoy it too much. It has been a long time since I knew another worthy of confidences. There is an ancient myth that, should all the contenders for the matriarchal throne be no more, the magic would likely gravitate toward the most dominant male of our race. Some say our rulers are your Janus head, your yin and yang: The king is the strength of our people; the queen is wisdom. Strength draws from brute force, wisdom draws from true power. In harmony, the king and queen lead a united court. Opposed, we war. We have been opposed since the day the king killed the queen.”

“But other queens came along. Couldn’t the king make peace?”

“He did not try. Again, he abandoned his children. Upon finding his concubine dead, through his act of atonement he did what he had sworn never to do. By pouring all his dark knowledge into the pages of an ensorcelled tome, he inadvertently created his most powerful ‘child’ yet. Then he vanished. It is rumored among Seelie and Unseelie alike that he has been trying to—as you humans would say about a lame horse—put it down ever since. The Hunter that killed Darroc was allegedly the king’s own for hundreds of thousands of years. It carried him from world to world, hunting his nemesis. The king, like any Fae, loves nothing so much as his own existence. As long as the Book is free, he knows no peace. I suspect the Sinsar Dubh was amused to take the king’s steed. I also suspect that if the king is no longer using that Hunter, and that Hunter is here in your city, then the king is, too.”

I gasped. “You mean in Dublin?”

V’lane nodded.

“In human form?”

“Who could say? There is no predicting one such as he.”

He would have to occupy multiple bodies. I thought of Barrons and his eight. I shook my head, rejecting the thought. “Back to Cruce,” I said hastily.

“Why this fascination with Cruce?”

“I’m trying to understand the chronology. So the king trusted Cruce, worked with him, taught him, and Cruce betrayed him. Why?”

V’lane’s eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared with cool disdain. “The king’s devotion to his concubine was unnatural. It is an aberration in our race. Humans prize monogamy because they have a mere blink of an eye to suffer each other. You are born beneath the shadow of death. It makes you crave unnatural bondage. We do not spend more than a century, perhaps two, with a partner. We drink from the cauldron. We change. We go on. The king did not.”

“Speaking of which, how do you know any of this?”

“We have scribes and written histories. As one of the queen’s High Council, it is my duty to recount our past, on those occasions she passes an edict. She insists I be able to recite any part at any time.”

“So the king was faithful, and fairies don’t like that.”

He gave me a look. “Spend a thousand years with another and tell me it is not unnatural. At the very least, tedious.”

“Apparently the king didn’t think so.” I liked the king for that. I liked the idea of true love. Maybe, just maybe, some people were lucky enough to find their other half, the one that completed them, like a Janus head.

“The king had become a danger to his children. His court began to talk. They decided to test him. Cruce would seduce the king, turn his obsession from the concubine, make him abandon his singleminded focus on the mortal.”

“Is the king bisexual?”

V’lane gave me a blank look.

“I thought the Fae were gender-specific.”

“Ah, you refer to who fucks whom and are we—how do you say it—monosexual?”

“Heterosexual,” I said. Hearing V’lane say the word “fuck,” in his musical, sensual voice, was foreplay in and of itself. I took a sip of my drink, hung my leg over my chair, and cooled a toe into the surf.

“When I speak of Fae seduction, it is different from human lust. It is the captivation of another’s …” He seemed to be struggling for words. “Humans do not have an appropriate word. Very psyche? That which is all one is? Cruce was to become the king’s favored, replacing the mortal with whom he’d so long been obsessed, who was not even of our kind. Cruce was to make the king once again enamored of our race. When the king returned his attention to the Court of Shadows, he would raise them to their rightful place in the light with the others of their race. His halflings were weary of hiding. They wanted to meet their brethren. They wanted to taste the life their counterparts enjoyed. They wanted the king to fight for them, make the queen accept them, to unify the courts into one. They felt all was as it should be. The queen was the wise and true leader of the Seelie, the king was the strong and proud leader of the Unseelie. They were a Janus head, complete, if only the king and queen would let them live together as one.”

“Did the Seelie feel the same?” I couldn’t imagine they did.

“The Seelie were completely unaware the Unseelie existed.”

“Until someone betrayed the king to the queen.”

“Betrayal is in the eye of the beholder,” V’lane said sharply. He closed his eyes a moment. When he opened them again, the angry gold glints were gone. “I shall rephrase that properly for you: Someone should have told the queen the truth long before she learned it. The queen is to be obeyed in all things. The king disobeyed her repeatedly. When the king refused Cruce, the Unseelie knew he would never stand up for them. They spoke of mutiny, civil war. To avoid it, Cruce went to the queen to speak on his dark brothers’ behalf. While he was away, the other princes designed a curse to be cast into the Silvers. If the king would not give up his mortal, they would forbid him access to her, by blocking him from entering the Silvers and ever seeing her again.”

“So it wasn’t Cruce who corrupted the network of the Silvers?”

“Of course not. Among my race, the name Cruce has become synonymous with one of your humans … I believe his name was Murphy and a certain edict was passed? If something goes wrong, it is blamed on Murphy. It is the same with Cruce. If Cruce had indeed cast the curse into the Silvers, it would not have corrupted their primary function. It simply would have prevented the king from entering. Cruce studied with the king himself; he was far more adept than his brethren.”

“What did the queen say when he went to her?” I asked. It almost seemed that Cruce was a renegade hero. Really, although the Unseelie were vile, so were most of the Seelie I’d met. As far as I was concerned, they deserved each other. They should have reunited in one court, policed their own, and stayed the hell out of our world.

“We will never know. Upon hearing what he had to say, she confined him to her bower. She then summoned the king and they met in the sky that very day. Although I possess no memory of it, according to our histories it was me she sent for Cruce, and when I brought him to her, she lashed him to a tree, took up the Sword of Light, and killed him before the king’s eyes.”

I gasped. It was so strange to realize V’lane had been alive during that time. That he’d had firsthand experience of it all yet recalled none of it. He’d had to read about it in written histories to recall what he’d willingly forgotten. I wondered: What if whoever wrote Fae histories, like our humans, distorted things a bit? Knowing their penchant for illusion, I couldn’t see any Fae telling the whole truth. Would we ever really know what had happened back then? Still, I imagined V’lane’s version was the closest I might ever get to it. “And war broke out.”

He nodded. “After the king killed the queen and returned to his court, he found his concubine dead. According to the princes, when she learned of the battle and discovered that the king had begun to slaughter his own race in her name, she stepped from the Silvers, lay down in his bed, and killed herself. They say she left him a note. They say he carries it still.”

What ill-fated lovers! It was such a sad story. I’d felt their love on those obsidian floors in the White Mansion, even though both of them had been deeply unhappy: the king because his beloved was not Fae like him, and the concubine because she was trapped, waiting alone, for him to make her “good enough” for him—that was how she’d felt, inferior. She would have loved him as she was, one small mortal life, and been happy. Still, there’d been no question of their love. They were all each other wanted.

“The next we heard of the Sinsar Dubh, it was loose in your world. There are those among the Seelie that have long coveted the knowledge in its pages. Darroc was one of them.”

“How does the queen plan to use it?” I asked.

“She believes that the matriarchal magic of our race will enable her.” He hesitated. “I find that you and I trusting each other appeals to me. It has been long since I had an ally with power, vitality, and an intriguing mind.” He seemed to be assessing me, weighing a decision, then he said, “It is also said that any who knows the First Language—the ancient language of … I believe the only human word that suffices is ‘Change,’ in which the king scribed his dark knowledge—would be able to sit down and read the Sinsar Dubh, once it was contained, page after page, absorbing all his forbidden magic, all the king knew.”

“Did Darroc know this language?”

“No. I know that for a certainty. I was there when he last drank from the cauldron. Had any of our race known the Sinsar Dubh had been rendered inert beneath your abbey before they’d drunk from the cauldron so many times that the ancient language was lost in the mists of their abandoned memories, they would have razed your planet to get to it.”

“Why would they want the knowledge the king had so regretted acquiring that he’d banished it?”

“The only thing my race loves as much as itself is power. We are drawn to it without reason, much as the mind of a human man can be so numbed by a stunningly sexual woman that he will follow her to his own destruction. There is that moment you call ‘before,’ in which a man—or Fae—can consider the consequences. It is brief, even for us. Besides, while the king chose to do foolish things with his power, another of us might not. Power is not good or evil. It is what it is in the hands of the wielder.”

He was so charming when he was open, speaking freely about the shortcomings of his race, even comparing his people to ours. Maybe there was hope that one day Fae and human could learn to—I shook my head, terminating that thought. We were too different, the balance of power between us too exaggerated.

“Repay my trust, MacKayla. I know you went to the abbey. Have you learned how the Book was originally contained?”

“I believe so. We found the prophecy that tells us the basics of what to do to re-inter it.”

He sat up and removed his sunglasses. Iridescent eyes searched my face. “And this is the first you think to mention it?” he said incredulously. “What must we do?”

“There are five Druids that have to perform some kind of binding ceremony. Supposedly they were taught it long ago by your race. They live in Scotland.”

“The Keltar,” he said. “The queen’s ancient Druids. So that is why she has long protected them. She must have foreseen that such events might transpire.”

“You know them?”

“She has … meddled with their bloodline. Their land is protected. No Seelie or Hunter can sift within a certain distance of it.”

“You sound upset about that.”

“It is difficult to see to my queen’s safety when I cannot search all places for the tools I need to do so. I have wondered if they guard the stones.”

I appraised him. “Since we’re trusting each other, you do have one, right?”

“Yes. Have you had any success locating any of the others?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“All three.”

“You have the other three? We are closer than I had dared hope! Where are they? Do the Keltar have them, as I suspected?”

“No.” Technically, I had them at the moment, safely warded away, but I felt more comfortable letting him believe Barrons did. “Barrons does.”

He hissed, a Fae sound of distaste. “Tell me where they are! I will take them from him, and we will be done with Barrons for good!”

“Why do you despise him?”

“He once slaughtered a broad path through my people.”

“Including your princess?”

“He seduced her, to learn more about the Sinsar Dubh. She became temporarily enamored of him and told him many things about us that should never have been revealed. Barrons has been hunting it a long time. Do you know why?”

I shook my head.

“Nor do I. He is not human, he can kill our kind, and he seeks the Book. I will kill him at the earliest opportunity.”

Good luck with that, I thought. “He will never give up the stones.”

“Take them from him.”

I laughed. “Not possible. You don’t steal from Barrons. It doesn’t work.”

“If you find out where they are, I will help you obtain them. We will do this, just the two of us. Of course, the Keltar are also necessary to restrain it, but no others, MacKayla. When you and I have secured it for the queen, she will reward you richly. Anything you wish can be yours.” He paused a moment, then said delicately, “She could even restore to you things you have lost and grieve.”

I stared out at the sea, trying not to be tempted by the carrot at the end of that stick: Alina. Rowena was insisting I work only with the sidhe-seers. Lor was demanding I work only with Barrons and his men. Now V’lane wanted me to ally myself with him and shut everyone else out.

I trusted all of them about as far as I could throw them.

“Since the day I arrived in Dublin, everyone has been trying to force me to choose sides. I won’t. I’m not going to choose any of you over the others. We’ll do this together or not at all, and when we do, I want the sidhe-seers to watch, so if anything ever goes wrong again in the future, we know how to stop it.”

“Too many humans involved,” he said sharply.

I shrugged. “Then bring some of your Seelie if it makes you feel better.”

The balmy day suddenly cooled. He was deeply displeased. But I didn’t care. I felt that we finally had a solid plan, one that would work. We had the stones and the prophecy; we just needed Christian. I refused to worry about what we would do once the Book was secured, if the queen should be permitted to read it. I could tackle only one seemingly insurmountable obstacle at a time, and I had no idea how we were going to locate Christian in the Silvers. Too bad Barrons hadn’t branded him, too.

I had one more question. It had been gnawing at me the entire time we’d been talking. I couldn’t help but feel there was something about myself I needed to know, a truth that would make clear the dreams I’d been having all my life. “V’lane, what did Cruce look like?”

He lifted a shoulder and let it drop, then folded his arms behind his head and tipped his face to the sun. “The other Unseelie Princes.”

“You said they kept getting better as the king made them. Was Cruce different in any way?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Just something one of the sidhe-seers said,” I lied.

“When do you plan to attempt to fulfill the terms of the prophecy?”

“The moment we can get all the Keltar together and I locate it.”

He looked at me. “Soon, then,” he murmured. “It will be very soon.”

I nodded.

“It must be as soon as possible. I fear for the queen.”

“I asked you about Cruce,” I reminded.

“So many questions about an insignificant prince who ceased to exist hundreds of thousands of years ago.”

“And?” Was that petulance in his voice?

“Were he not dead, I might feel … what is it you humans are so often driven by? Ah, I have it, jealousy.”

“Humor me.”

After a long moment, he gave another of those perfectly imitated human sighs. “According to our histories, Cruce was the most beautiful of all, although the world will never know it—a waste of perfection to never have laid eyes upon one such as he. The torque of his royal line was threaded with silver, and his visage was said to radiate pure gold. But I suspect the reason the king felt such kinship to him—before he permitted his love for a mortal to destroy all they could have been—was because Cruce was the only one of the king’s children to bear a paternal resemblance. Like the king himself, Cruce had majestic black wings.”

25

Shortly after midnight, I was pacing the alley behind Barrons Books and Baubles, arguing with myself and getting nowhere.

Barrons still wasn’t back, which was driving me crazy. I planned to have it out with him the moment he showed up. Knock-down, drag-out, air all the dirty laundry between us. I wanted to know exactly how long I could anticipate him being gone if he got killed again. I was on constant edge, waiting, half afraid he might never come back. I wouldn’t be satisfied that he was really alive until I saw him with my own eyes.

Every time I’d closed my eyes tonight, I slipped into my Cold Place dream. It had been waiting to ambush me the moment I’d relaxed. I’d flipped endless hourglasses of black sand; I’d scoured miles and miles of ice, with increasing urgency, for the beautiful woman; I’d repeatedly fled the winged prince we both feared.

Why did I keep dreaming the damned dream?

Ten minutes ago, when I’d woken from it for the fifth time, I’d been forced to accept that I simply wasn’t going to get any sleep without having it—and that was no sleep at all. The fear and anguish I felt in the dream were so draining that I kept waking up feeling even more exhausted than when I’d closed my eyes.

I stopped pacing and stared at the brick wall.

Now that I knew it was there, I could feel it—the hidden Tabh’r in the brick, the Silver Darroc had carefully camouflaged within the wall catty-corner to the bookstore.

All I had to do was press into it, follow the brick tunnel to the room with the ten mirrors, and pass through the fourth one from the left to get back into the White Mansion. I’d have to hurry, because time passed differently inside the Silvers. I would just take a quick look around. See if there was anything I’d missed the first time.

“Like maybe a portrait of myself hanging on the wall, arm in arm with the Unseelie King,” I muttered.

I closed my eyes. There it was, out in the open. I’d voiced my fear. Now I had to deal with it. It seemed to be the only thing that explained all the loose ends that wouldn’t connect.

Nana had called me Alina.

Ryodan said Isla had only one child (which Rowena confirmed, unless she was lying) and she was dead, and there’d been no “later” for the woman I wanted to believe was my mother.

Nobody knew who my parents were.

Then there was my lifelong feeling of bipolarity, of things repressed just beneath the surface. Memories of another life? When I’d been walking around in the White Mansion with Darroc, it had all been so familiar. I’d recognized things. I’d been there before and not just in my dreams.

Speaking of dreams—how could my slumbering mind conjure up a fourth prince that I’d never seen? How could I have known Cruce had wings?

I could sense the Sinsar Dubh. It kept finding me, liked to play with me. Why? Because in an earlier incarnation—when it had been the Unseelie King, not a book of the banished knowledge—it had loved me? Did I sense it because I’d loved the earlier incarnation of it?

I buried my hands in my hair and tugged, as if the pain might clarify my thoughts or perhaps fortify my will.

See me, Barrons kept saying.

And, more recently, If you can’t face the truth of your reality, you can’t control it.

Ryodan had been right: I was a loose cannon, but not for the reason he thought.

I didn’t know the truth of my reality. And until I did, I was a wild card, something that could flip. The question keeping me awake at night wasn’t whether or not sidhe-seers were an Unseelie caste. That was small compared to my problem. The question that kept me from sleeping was much more alarming.

Impossible as it seemed, was I somehow the Unseelie King’s concubine? Reincarnated and brought back to life in a new body? Fated for her inhuman lover, destined to a tragic cycle of rebirth?

And just what were Barrons and his eight? My ill-fated lover split into nine human vessels? That was a doozy of a thought. No wonder the concubine had found the king insatiable. How could one woman handle nine men?

“What are you doing, Ms. Lane?” As if my thoughts had conjured him, Barrons’ voice slid out of the darkness behind me.

I looked at him. I’d flipped on the exterior lights outside BB&B, powered by the store’s immense generators, but the light was at his back and he was heavily shadowed. Still, I would have known it was him even if I were blind. I could feel him on the air; I could smell him.

He was furious with me. I didn’t care. He was back. He was alive. My heart did a flip-flop. I thrilled to his presence. I would anywhere, anytime, under any circumstances. No matter what he was, what he’d done. Even if he was one-ninth of the Unseelie King who’d begun it all.

“Something’s seriously wrong with me,” I said, half under my breath.

“Just now figuring that out, are you?”

I gave him a look. “Good to see you alive again.”

“Good to be alive.”

“Do you really mean that?” He’d made comments about death in the past, which now made sense to me. Apparently he would never experience it, and at times he’d seemed almost … envious.

“Nice tan. You just can’t stay away from the Fae when I’m gone, can you? Did V’lane take you to the beach again? Did you get a sand burn when he fucked you?”

“Are you the Unseelie King, Barrons? Is that what you and your eight are? Different facets of you, crammed into human form, while you search Dublin for your missing Book?”

“Are you the concubine? The Book certainly seems enamored of you. Can’t stay away. Kills everyone else. Plays with you.”

I blinked. He was always way ahead of me, and he didn’t even know about my dream of the winged prince or my déjà vu experience in the mansion. We’d been thinking the same things about each other. I’d had no idea he’d been wondering if I was the allegedly dead concubine.

“There’s one way to find out. You keep telling me to see you, to face the truth. I’m ready.” I held out my hand.

“If you think I’m letting you into my head again, you’re wrong.”

“If you think you could stop me if I wanted to, you’re wrong.”

“Aren’t you full of yourself?” he mocked.

“I want you to come somewhere with me,” I said. Did Barrons know full well what he was and would just never admit to it? Was it possible the king could subdivide himself into human parts and forget who he was? Or had he been tricked into human form, his individual facets forced to drink from the cauldron, and now the most feared of the Unseelie walked the earth with no greater clue to what he was than his oblivious concubine?

One way or another, I wanted answers. I was sure enough of the truth about myself to run the gauntlet. If I was wrong about him, he didn’t have much to lose, just the equivalent of a few days’ “nap.” And somehow I knew that wouldn’t be the case. I was right about this one. I had to be.

He stared at me in silence.

“C’mon, Barrons. What’s the worst that can happen? I lead you into some trap and you die for however long it is you go away? Not that I’m going to,” I added hastily.

“It’s hardly pleasant, Ms. Lane. It’s also highly inconvenient.”

Inconvenient. That’s what dying for me back on the cliff had been. An inconvenience. And I’d been ready to wipe out a world for him. “Fine. Do what you want. I’m going.”

I turned and pushed into the wall.

“What the fuck do you think you’re—get your ass out of—Ms. Lane! Fuck! Mac!”

As I vanished into the wall, I felt his hand close on my coat, and I laughed. He’d called me Mac, and I wasn’t even dying.

“Which mirror now, Ms. Lane?” He glanced around the white room, scanning the ten mirrors.

“Fourth from the left. Jericho.” I was sick of him calling me Ms. Lane. I picked myself up off the white floor. Once again the Silver had spit me out with entirely too much enthusiasm, and I didn’t even have the stones on me. I didn’t have anything but the spear in my holster, a protein bar, two flashlights, and a bottle of Unseelie in my pockets.

“You don’t have the right to call me Jericho.”

“Why? Because we haven’t been intimate enough? I’ve had sex with you in every possible position, killed you, fed you my blood in the hopes that it would bring you back to life, crammed Unseelie into your stomach, and tried to rearrange your guts. I’d say that’s pretty personal. How much more intimate do we have to get for you to feel comfortable with me calling you Jericho? Jericho.”

I expected him to pounce on the sex-in-every-possible-position comment, but he only said, “You fed me your—”

I pushed into the mirror, cutting him off. Like the first one, it resisted me, then grabbed me and squirted me out on the other side.

His voice preceded his arrival. “You bloody fool, do you never stop to consider the consequences of your actions?” He barreled out of the mirror behind me.

“Of course I do,” I said coolly. “There’s always plenty of time to consider the consequences. After I’ve screwed up.”

“Funny girl, aren’t you, Ms. Lane?”

“Sure am. Jericho. It’s Mac. I’m Mac. No more fake formality between us. Get with the program or get the hell out of here.”

His dark eyes flared. “Big talk. Ms. Lane. Try to enforce it.” Challenge burned in his gaze.

I sauntered toward him. He watched me coldly and I was reminded of the other night, when I’d pretended to be coming on to him, because I was angry. He thought I was doing it again. I wasn’t. Being in the White Mansion with him was doing something strange to me. Unraveling all my inhibitions, as if these walls had no tolerance for lies, or within them there was no need.

Then he was staring past me. “I don’t believe it. We’re in the White Mansion. You just casually lead me in here like you’re running errands to the drugstore. I’ve been looking for this bloody place forever.”

“I thought you’d been everywhere.” He’d never been here? Or did he not remember being here, long ago, in another incarnation?

He turned in a slow circle, absorbing the white marble floors, the high arched ceilings, the columns, the sparkling windows opening on a brilliant, frosted winter’s day. “I knew where it was supposed to be, but the White Mansion shows itself only when and to whom it chooses. This is incredible.” He walked to the window and stared out. Then he turned on me. “Have you found the libraries?”

“What libraries?” I was having a hard time looking at him, mesmerized by the glittering winter day beyond his shoulder. How many times had I sat in that snowy garden, surrounded by dazzling ice sculptures and frozen fountains, waiting for him?

Fire to his chill. Ice to her flame.

I loved this wing. As I stared out the window, the concubine was suddenly there, but she was faint around the edges, a little misty, a partially realized memory.

She sat on a stone bench, in a dress of blood-red and diamonds, through which I could see snow and iced branches. The light was strange, as if everything but her was painted in halftones.

I jerked. The fourth Unseelie Prince, the winged War/Cruce, had just appeared. He was also semi-transparent, a residue from a time long past. At his wrist glinted a wide silver cuff, and around his neck was an amulet, very different from the one Darroc had worn.

I watched with astonishment as the concubine rose and greeted him with a kiss on both marble-white cheeks. There was affection between them. Once, long ago, the beautiful woman in my dream hadn’t been afraid of him. What had changed? The raven-winged prince carried a silver tray, upon which sat a single teacup and an exquisite black rose. She laughed up at him, but her eyes were sad.

Another of his potions to change me?

War/Cruce murmured something I couldn’t catch.

She accepted the cup. Perhaps I do not want his salvation. But she drank deeply, until the cup was empty.

“The king kept all his notes and journals on his experiments in the White Mansion, to prevent those in his Dark Court from stealing his knowledge.” Barrons’ voice jarred me.

I blinked, and the memory was gone.

“You sure do know a lot about the king.” I was going to say more, but I suddenly felt as if a rubber band attached to my belly button had contracted, yanking me toward the other end. I’d been too far away, gone too long.

Without another word, I turned and ran down the corridor, away from him. Gone was all desire to fight with him. I was being summoned. Every fiber in my being was drawn, the same way it was the last time I was here.

“Where are you going? Slow down!” he called behind me.

I couldn’t have slowed if I’d wanted to, and I didn’t. I’d come here for a reason, and that reason was where I was being pulled. The black floors of the Unseelie King were calling me. I wanted to be in that boudoir again. I wanted to see him this time, to see the king’s face. Assuming he had one.

I passed over rose marble, skidded onto bronze floors, dashed through turquoise corridors, and flew through halls of yellow, until I felt the sultry warmth of the crimson wings. I could feel Barrons behind me. He could have caught me if he’d wanted to. He was fast like Dani, like all his men. But he let me run, and he followed.

Why? Because he suspected the same things I did? Because he wanted it out in the open? My heart was pounding with fear and anticipation to have it finally over, to know what I was, what he was.

Barrons was suddenly beside me. I glanced over at him, and he gave me a look that was equal parts fury and lust. He was really going to have to get over that fury part. It was beginning to piss me off. I had just as much to be mad at him about.

“I didn’t have sex with Darroc.” I was mad all over again, itching for physical contact. “Not that I should have to explain myself to you. It’s not like you ever explain yourself to me. But even if I did, even if I was the traitor you’re determined to believe I am, he’s dead, so according to the philosophy of Barrons, who cares? Here I am, with you again. Actions speak, right? You got the action you wanted. OOP detector back under control, tightly leashed. Lead me around by the collar, why don’t you? Isn’t that when you’re happiest? Ruff-ruff,” I mock-barked, seething.

“You haven’t fucked me since you were Pri-ya. There’s an action for you. Says pretty much all there is to say.”

It burned him. Good. It was burning me, too. “This is some kind of pissing contest? Darroc got laid but you didn’t? That’s the only reason you’re mad?” What did he think it said? That I would touch him only if I was sex-starved? Or if the alternative was dying a mindless animal?

“You couldn’t begin to understand.”

“Try me.” If he’d ever just admit to one little feeling about me, I might admit to one about him.

“Don’t push me, Ms. Lane. This place is getting to me. You want the beast on your hands?”

I glanced at him. His eyes were sparking crimson and he was breathing hard, but not from exertion. I knew him. He could run for hours. “You want me, Jericho. Admit it. A lot more than once or twice. I’m under your skin. You think about me all the time. I keep you awake at night. Go ahead, say it.”

“Fuck you, Ms. Lane.”

“Is that your way of saying it?”

“That’s my way of saying grow up, little girl.”

I skidded to a halt, slipping and sliding on the black marble floor. The instant I stopped running, he did, too, as if we were bound by the same tether.

“If I’m a little girl, then that makes you a serious pervert.” The things we did together … I shot him a graphic reminder with my eyes.

Oh, so you’re finally ready to talk about them, his dark gaze mocked. Maybe I don’t want to now.

Too bad. You were always slapping me in the face with reminders. Turnabout’s fair play. But it sure wasn’t a little girl back in that bed, Jericho. It’s not a little girl you’re messing with now.

I poked him in the chest with my finger. “You died in front of my eyes and let me believe it was real, you bastard!” I felt like I was being torn in half—pulled toward the boudoir by destiny, rooted in place by the need to air my grievances.

He knocked my finger away. “Do you think it was fun for me?”

“I hated watching you die!”

“I hated doing it. It hurts every damned time.”

“I grieved!” I shouted. “I felt guilty—”

“Guilt isn’t grief,” he snapped.

“And lost—”

“Get a fucking road map. Lost isn’t grief, either.”

“And—and—and—” I broke off. There was no way I was telling him all the things I’d really felt. Like destroying the world for him.

“And what? What did you feel?”

“Guilt,” I shouted. I punched him, hard.

He shoved me, and I stumbled back against the wall.

I shoved him back. “And lost.”

“Don’t tell me you grieved me when you were really just pissed off about the mess you’d gotten yourself into. I died and you felt sorry for yourself. Nothing more.” His gaze flickered to my lips. I got that. He was once again furious with me and once again perfectly ready to have sex with me. The conundrum that was Barrons. Apparently it was impossible for him to feel anything as far as I was concerned without getting angry about it. Did anger make him want to have sex with me? Or was it that he always wanted to have sex with me that made him so angry?

“I was grieving more than that. You don’t know the first thing about me!”

“And you should have felt guilty.”

“So should you!”

“Guilt is wasted. Live, Ms. Lane.”

“Oh! Ms. Lane! Ms. Frigging Lane! There it is again. You tell me to feel guilty, then you tell me it’s wasted. Make up your mind! And don’t tell me to live. That’s exactly what I was doing that you’re so pissed about. I went on!”

“With the enemy!”

“Do you care how I went on, as long as I did? Isn’t that the lesson you’ve been trying to teach me? That adaptability is survivability? Don’t you think it would have been easier for me to lay down and quit once I thought you were dead? But I didn’t. You know why? Because some overbearing prick taught me that it was how you go on that matters.”

“The word that was supposed to be emphasized there was how. As in honorably.”

“What place does honor have in the face of death? And, please, did you honorably kill that woman you carried out of the Silver in your study?”

“You couldn’t possibly understand that, either.”

“That’s your answer for everything, isn’t it? I couldn’t possibly understand, so you’re not going to bother telling me. You know what I think, Jericho? You’re a coward. You won’t use words, because you don’t want anyone to hold you accountable,” I accused. “You won’t tell the truth, because then somebody might judge you, and God—”

“—has nothing to do with this and—”

“—forbid you actually get personal with me—”

“—I don’t give a damn about being judged—”

“—and I don’t mean try to have sex with me—”

“—I wasn’t trying to have sex with you—”

“—I didn’t mean at this precise moment. I meant—”

“—and it would have been impossible, anyway, because we’ve been running. I don’t have any bloody idea why we’ve been running,” he said irritably, “but you’re the one who started it and you’re the one that stopped.”

“—like knock down a few walls between us and see what happens. No, you’re such a coward that the only time you can call me by my name is when you’re either pretty sure I’m dying or you think I’m so out of my mind that I won’t notice. Seems like a hell of a wall to erect between yourself and someone you don’t like.”

“It’s not a wall. I merely endeavor to help you keep our boundaries straight. And I didn’t say I didn’t like you. ‘Like’ is such a puerile word. Mediocre people like things. The only question of any significant emotive content is: Can you live without it?”

I knew the answer to that question where he was concerned, and I didn’t like it one bit. “You think I need help understanding where our boundaries are? Do you understand where our boundaries are? Because they seemed pretty damned mysterious and movable to me!”

“You’re the one arguing about the names we call each other.”

“What do you call Fiona? Fio! How charming. Oh, and what about that twit at Casa Blanc the night I met that bizarre man McCabe? Marilyn!”

“I can’t believe you remember her name,” he muttered.

“You called her by her full first name, and you didn’t even like her. But not me. Oh, no. I’m Ms. Lane. In bloody frigging perpetuity.”

“I had no idea you had such a hang-up about your name, Mac,” he snarled.

“Jericho,” I snarled back, and pushed him.

He manacled both my wrists with one hand so I couldn’t hit him again. It infuriated me. I head-butted him.

“I thought you died for me!”

He shoved me against the wall and braced his forearm across my throat so I couldn’t head butt him again. “For fuck’s sake, is that what this is about?”

“You didn’t die. You lied to me. You took a little nap and left me on that cliff thinking I’d killed you!”

He searched my face, dark eyes slitted. “Ah, I see. You thought it meant something that I died for you. Did you dress it up in romance? Compose sonnets memorializing my great sacrifice? Did it make you like me better? Did I have to be dead to get you to see me? Wake the fuck up, Ms. Lane. Dying is overrated. Human sentimentality has twisted it into the ultimate act of love. Biggest load of bullshit in the world. Dying for someone isn’t the hard thing. The man that dies escapes. Plain and simple. Game over. End of pain. Alina was the lucky one. Try living for someone. Through it all—good, bad, thick, thin, joy, suffering. That’s the hard thing.”

Alina was the lucky one. I’d thought that, too, and had been ashamed of myself for thinking it. I punched him so hard, he stumbled on the slick black floor, and as he went down, I felt sudden horror at seeing him stumble. I never wanted to see him stumble, so I grabbed him and we both went down to our knees on the black floors. “Damn you, Jericho!”

“Too late, Rainbow Girl.” He grabbed a fist of my hair. “Somebody beat you to it.” He laughed, and when he opened his mouth over mine, fangs grazed my teeth.

Yes, this was what I needed, what I’d needed since the day I woke up in that basement and left his bed. His tongue in my mouth, his hands on my skin. The burn of his body against mine. I grabbed his head with both hands and ground my mouth against his. I tasted my own blood from a nick on his teeth. I didn’t care. I couldn’t get close enough. I needed rough, hard, fast sex, followed by hours and hours of slow and intimately thorough fucking. I needed weeks in bed with him. Maybe if I had willing, cognizant sex with him long enough, I’d get over him already.

Somehow I doubted that.

He hissed. “Fucking fairy in your mouth. You have me in your mouth, you don’t get anybody else. Or you don’t get me.” He sucked on my tongue, hard, and I could feel V’lane’s name unraveling from the center of it. He spat it out like an unfastened piercing. I didn’t care. There hadn’t been enough room in my mouth for them both anyway. I pressed into his body, rubbing desperately against him. How long had it been since I’d had him inside me? Too long. I grabbed the sides of his shirt and ripped, sent buttons flying. I needed skin to skin.

“Another of my favorite shirts. What is it with you and my wardrobe?” He pushed his hands up my shirt and unhooked my bra. When his hands rasped over my nipples, I jerked.

Come, you must hurry …

Shut up, I snarled silently. I’d left that voice back in Dublin, where it had been torturing me in my bedroom.

All will be lost.… It must be you.… Come.

I growled. Couldn’t she leave me alone? She hadn’t spoken in my head for the past forty-five minutes. Why now? I wasn’t asleep. I was awake, wide awake, and I needed this. I needed him. Go away, I willed. “Please,” I groaned.

“Please what, Mac? You’ll have to ask for it this time, spell it out in graphic detail. I’m done giving you everything you want without making you ask for it.”

“Right. Words mean nothing to you, but now you insist on them,” I said against his mouth. “You are such a hypocrite.”

“And you’re bipolar. You want me. You always do. You think I can’t smell it?”

“I’m not bipolar.” Sometimes he struck way too close to home. I popped the button on his pants, unzipped them, and shoved my hands inside. He was rock hard. God, he felt good.

He stiffened, air hissing between clenched teeth.

Make haste … He comes.…

“Leave me alone,” I snapped.

“Over my dead body,” he said roughly. “You’ve got my dick in your hands.” He told me where it was going to be next and my bones turned to water, tried to spill my body across the floor and let him do anything he wanted to me.

“Not you. Her.”

“Her who?”

A hand tugged at the sleeve of my jacket, and I knew without looking that it wasn’t his. “Kiss me and she’ll go away.” I needed him inside me so badly I hurt from it. I was hot and wet and nothing mattered but this moment, this man.

“Who?”

“Kiss me!”

But he didn’t. He pulled back and looked past me, and I knew from the look on his face that I wasn’t the only one who could see her.

“I think she’s me,” I whispered.

He looked at me, back at her, and at me again. “Is that a joke?”

“I know this house. I know this place. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

“Impossible.”

It is nearly too late. Come NOW.

It was no longer a wisp of a plea. It was a command, and the hand was implacable on my arm. I could not disobey, no matter how badly I wanted to stay here and lose myself in sex, no matter how desperately I needed him inside me again, needed to feel we were joined in the most primal way, that I was in Jericho Barrons’ arms and mouth and under his skin.

And, God, did I need it! So much that I resented it. I never wanted to want a man this much—so much that not having him was physical pain. I never wanted to feel that any man had so much control over me and my life.

I pushed up from my knees and shoved past him.

He grabbed the sleeve of my coat; it ripped as I pulled away. “We need to talk about this! Mac!”

I dashed down the corridor, running after her like a dog chasing its own tail.

The concubine’s white half of the boudoir was carpeted in dewy petals and lit by a thousand candles. The winking diamonds that floated on the air were tiny fiery stars. Those few that passed through the enormous mirror to the dark king’s side were instantly extinguished, as if there wasn’t oxygen enough to support flame, or the darkness there was too dense to permit light.

The concubine sprawled nude on piles of snowy ermine before the white hearth.

In the shadows on the far side of the bedchamber, darkness moved. The king watched her through the mirror. I could feel him there, immense, ancient, sexual. She knew he was watching. She stretched languidly, slid her hands up her body into her hair, and arched her back.

I’d expected to find the other end of the rubber band here, ending with the concubine, but it tugged me still. It stretched invisibly on, through the massive black Silver that divided their bedchamber in half.

I wanted to step through and join that immense ancientness.

I never wanted to step one foot closer to those shadows.

Was the king himself summoning me? Or was part of the king standing behind me, even now? I had to know. I’d called Jericho a coward but could too easily be accused of the same.

I need … the voice summoned.

I understood that. I did, too. Sex. Answers. An end to my fears, one way or another.

But the voice hadn’t come from the woman on the rug.

It had come from the dark side of the boudoir, which was all bed because he required that much bed. It was a command I couldn’t refuse. I would slip through the mirror and Barrons would lay me back on the Unseelie King’s bed and cover me with lust and darkness. And we would know who we were. It would be okay. It would all be out in the open finally.

As I stared into the Silver that I knew was a killing mirror for anyone who wasn’t the king or his concubine, I was suddenly five again. More details of my Cold Place dream crashed over me and I realized there were many I still didn’t remember.

I’d always had to pass through this chamber first: half white, half dark, half warm, half cold. But numbed and frightened out of my childhood wits by the nightmarish things that followed, I’d always forgotten how the dream had begun. It had always been here.

And it had always been so hard to force myself to go through the enormous black Silver, because I’d wanted nothing more than to stay in the warm white half of this chamber forever, to lose myself in endlessly replaying scenes of what had once been but was now lost to me and I could never have again, and grief—oh, God, I’d never really known grief at all! Grief was walking these black halls and knowing they would be haunted for eternity with the residue of lovers too foolish to savor what time they’d had. Memories stalked these corridors, and I stalked those memories like a sad ghost.

Still, wasn’t illusion better than nothing?

I could stay here and never have to face that my existence was empty, that emptiness was all my life had ever been about: dreams, seduction, glamour.

Lies. All lies.

But here I could forget.

Come NOW.

“Mac.” Jericho was shaking me. “Look at me.”

I could see him distantly, through sparkling diamonds and ghosts of times past. And behind him, through the mirror, I could see the monstrous dark shape of the Unseelie King, as if he was casting Jericho as his shadow on the other side, on the white half of the room. I wondered if the concubine’s shadow was different, too, through the king’s Silver. Did she become like him on his half? Large and complex enough to mate with whatever the king was? Over there, in the blessed, comforting, sacred dark, what was she? What was I?

“Mac, focus on me! Look at me, talk to me!”

But I couldn’t look. I couldn’t focus, because whatever was beyond that mirror had been calling me all my life.

I knew the Silver wouldn’t kill me. I knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

“I’m sorry. I have to go.”

His hands tightened on my shoulders and tried to turn me away. “Walk away from it, Mac. Let it go. Some things don’t need to be known. Isn’t your life enough as it is?”

I laughed. The man who always insisted I see things as they were was now urging me to hide? On the rug behind him, the concubine laughed, too. Her head arched, her chin tipped up, as if she was being kissed by an invisible lover.

He had to be the king. I slid my hand down his arm, twined my fingers with his. “Come with me,” I said, and ran for the Silver.

26

I was surprised by the ease with which I slid through the black membrane. I was stunned senseless by the cold that knifed into me.

My brain issued an order to gasp. My body failed to obey it. I was crusted from head to toe with a thin sheet of glittering ice. It cracked as I took a step, tinkled to my feet, and I was instantly re-coated again.

How was I supposed to breathe here? How had the concubine breathed?

Ice coated the insides of my nose, my mouth and tongue and teeth, all the way down to my lungs, as all the parts of my body I needed to process air were sheathed in an impenetrable layer. I stumbled backward, seeking the other side of the mirror, where there was white and light and oxygen.

I was so cold that I could barely move. For a moment, I wasn’t sure I would make it back through the Silver. I was afraid I would die in the Unseelie King’s bedchamber, repeating history, only this time I’d have left no note.

When I finally slid through the dark membrane, warmth hit me like a blast oven, and I stumbled, went flying across the room, and slammed into the wall. The concubine stretched on the rug paid me no heed. I sucked in air with a greedy screech.

Where was Jericho? Could he breathe on the other side? Did he need to breathe, or was it his natural environment? I glanced back at the mirror, expecting to see him moving darkly on the other side, scowling at me for having forced him to reveal his true identity.

I staggered and nearly went down.

I’d been so certain I was right.

Barrons was collapsed on the floor, at the boundary of light and dark—on the white side of the room.

Only two in all existence could ever travel through that Silver: the Unseelie King and his concubine, Darroc had told me. Any other that touches it is instantly killed. Even Fae.

“Jericho!” I ran for him, dragged him away from the mirror, and sank to the floor beside him. I rolled him over. He wasn’t breathing. He was dead. Again.

I stared down at him.

I stared into the darkness of the mirror.

The Silver hadn’t killed me. But it had killed him. I didn’t like what that meant one bit.

It meant I was indeed the concubine.

It also meant that Jericho wasn’t my king.

NOW.

The command was enormous, irresistible, Voice to the nth degree. I wanted to stay with Jericho. I couldn’t have stayed if my life had depended on it. And I was pretty sure it did.

“I can’t breathe over there.”

You do not live on this side of the Silver. Alter your expectations. Forgo breath. Fear, not fact, impedes you.

Was that possible? I wasn’t buying it. But apparently it didn’t matter whether I bought it, because my hands were pushing me up and my feet were moving me straight into the dark Silver.

“Jericho!” I cried as I felt myself being forced away.

I hated this. I hated everything about it. I was the concubine but Jericho wasn’t the king, and I couldn’t deal with that—not that I was sure how well I would have dealt with it if he had been the king. Now I was being summoned to a place where I couldn’t breathe, where I didn’t really live according to my disembodied tormentor, and I had no choice but to leave him, dead again, by himself.

I suddenly had no desire to learn anything else about myself. This was enough. I was sorry I’d been so hell-bent on knowing to begin with. He’d been right. Wasn’t he always? Some things just didn’t need to be known.

“I’m not doing this. I’m not playing your stupid games, whatever they are, whoever you are. I’m going back to my life now. That would be Mac’s life,” I clarified. There was no reply. Only an inexorable pull into the darkness.

I was once again puppet to an invisible puppet master. I had no choice. I was being dragged through and there was nothing I could do about it.

Struggling, gritting my teeth, resisting every step of the way, I stepped over Jericho’s body and pushed back into the Silver.

27

It was pure instinct to fight for breath.

I was encased in ice again the moment I slid through the Silver.

Passing through the dark mirror peeled back a curtain, exposing more forgotten childhood memories. Abruptly, I recalled being four, five, six, finding myself stuck in this alien dreamscape nightly. No sooner did I say my prayers, close my eyes, and drift off to sleep than a disembodied command would infiltrate my slumber.

I recalled waking from those nightmares, gasping and shivering, running for Daddy, crying that I was freezing, suffocating.

I wondered what young Jack Lane had made of it—his adopted daughter who’d been forbidden to ever return to the country of her birth, who was tormented by terrifyingly cold, airless nightmares. What horrors had he decided I must have suffered to be scarred in such ways?

I loved him with all my heart for the childhood he’d given me. He’d anchored me with the day-to-day routines of a simple life, crammed it full of sunshine and bike rides, music lessons and baking with Mom in our bright, warm kitchen. Perhaps he’d let me be too frivolous, in an effort to counter the pain of those nightmares. But I couldn’t say I’d have done any differently as a parent.

The inability to breathe had been only the first of many things my child’s mind had found so terrifying. As I’d gotten older, strengthened by the cocoon of parental love, I’d learned to suppress those nocturnal images and the bleak emotions the Cold Place engendered. By my teens, the recurring nightmare had been buried deep in my subconscious, leaving me burdened with an intense dislike of the cold and a vague sense of bipolarity I was finally beginning to understand. If occasionally images that made no sense to me slipped through a crack, I attributed them to some horror movie I’d flipped through on TV.

Do not be frightened. I chose you because you could.

I remembered that now, too. The voice that had demanded I come had tried to comfort me and promised I was capable of the task—whatever it was.

I’d never believed it. If I was capable, I wouldn’t have dreaded it so much.

I shook myself hard, cracking the ice. It dropped away, but I immediately re-iced.

I repeated the shaking, the re-icing. I did it four or five more times, terrified all the while that if I didn’t keep cracking it, it would build up so thick that I would end up staying right here where I stood forever, a statue of a woman, frozen and forgotten, in the Unseelie King’s bedchamber.

When Barrons came back to life, he would stand and stare through the mirror at me and try to roar me back to my senses and into motion, but there I’d be—right in front of his eyes, eternally out of his reach, because nobody but me and the Unseelie race’s mysterious creator could enter the king’s boudoir. And who knew where the king was?

For that matter, who knew who the king was?

And I really wanted to, which meant I had to find a way to move around in his natural habitat. I’d done it before, long ago, in another life, as his lover, so surely I could figure out how to do it again. It seemed I’d left clues for myself.

Fear, not fact, impedes you.

I was supposed to alter my expectations and do without breath.

When I re-iced again, I remained still and let the ice cover me, instead of resisting and struggling to breathe. I tried to imagine it as a comfort, a soothing coolness to a high fever. I made it all of thirty seconds before I panicked. Silvery sheets rained from me and shattered on the obsidian floor as I moved jerkily.

I made it an entire minute the second time.

By my third try, it dawned on me that I hadn’t actually drawn a breath since I’d passed through the mirror. I’d been so busy fighting the ice that I hadn’t realized I was no longer breathing. I would have snorted but I couldn’t. There literally was no breath on this side of the Silver. My physicality was a different thing here.

Here I stood, fighting for something I didn’t even need, driven by a life of conditioning.

Could I talk on this side? Wasn’t voice comprised of breath to drive it?

“Hello.” I flinched.

I’d chimed like one of the dark princes, only on a different scale, high and feminine. Although my greeting had been comprised of English syllables, without breath to drive it the notes sounded as if slide-hammered on a hellish xylophone.

“Is anyone here?” I iced again, frozen in place by sheer astonishment at the bizarre sound. I spoke in shades of tubular bells.

Assured that I wasn’t going to suffocate, that I could talk, sort of, and that, as long as I kept moving, the ice would keep cracking, I began to jog in place and took a look around.

The king’s bedchamber was the size of a football stadium. Walls of black ice towered overhead to a ceiling too high to see. Spicy black petals from some exquisite, otherworldly rose garden swirled at my feet as I bounced lightly from foot to foot. Clusters of frost that were trying to form on my skin rained down to join them. I was mesmerized a moment by the sparkling crystals against the black floor and flowers.

Falling back, laughing, ice in her hair, a handful of velvety petals fluttering down to land on her bare breasts …

Never cold here.

Always together.

Sadness overwhelmed me. I nearly choked on it.

He had so many ambitions.

She had one. To love.

Could have learned from her.

The tiny diamonds from the concubine’s—I couldn’t bring myself to say my, especially not standing so close to the king’s bed—side of the bedchamber hadn’t been extinguished at all. They’d become something else when they passed through and now shimmered on the dark air, midnight fireflies winking with blue flame.

The bed was draped with black curtains that fluttered around piles of silky black furs and filled up a third of the chamber, the portion visible from the other side. I moved to it, slid my hand over the furs. They were sleek, sensual. I wanted to stretch out naked and never leave.

It wasn’t the white warm place I found so comforting and familiar, but there was beauty here, too, on the far side of the mirror. Her world was the bright, glorious summer day that held no secrets, but his was the dark, glittering night where anything was possible. I tipped my head back. Was that a black ceiling painted with stars so high above me or a night sky sliced from another world and brought here for my pleasure?

I was in his bedchamber. I remembered this place. I’d come. Would he? Would I finally see the face of my long-lost lover? If he was my beloved king, why was I so afraid?

Hurry! Almost here … Come quickly!

The command came from beyond a giant arched opening far across the bedchamber. The summons was beyond my ability to deny. I broke into a run, following the voice of my childhood pied piper.

Once the king had held the Seelie Queen above all others, but somewhere down the eons, things had changed. He had puzzled over it for thousands of years, studying her, challenging her with subtle tests, in an effort to divine if the problem lay within her or within him.

He was comforted on the day he realized it was through no fault of theirs but that the two who were the eternal glue of their race were coming apart because she was Stasis and he was Change. It was their nature. The oddity was how long they had remained together.

He could not have prevented his evolution any more than she could have prevented her stagnation. All that the queen was at that very moment was all she would ever be.

Ironically, the mother of their race—she who wielded the Song of Making, she who could enact the mightiest acts of all creation—was no Creator. She was power without wonder, satisfaction without joy. What was existence without wonder, without joy? Meaningless. Empty.

And she thought he was dangerous.

He began to slip off more frequently, exploring worlds without her, hungering for things he could not name. The bright, silly court he once found harmlessly entertaining became to him a place of empty pursuits and jaded palates.

He built a fortress on a world of black ice because it was the antithesis of all the queen had chosen. Here, in his dark, quiet castle, he could think. Here, where there were no garish chaises or brilliantly clad courtiers, he could feel himself expanding. He was not drowned by incessant tinkling laughter, in constant petty disputes. He was free.

Once, the queen sought him in his ice castle, and it amused him to see her horror at being leeched of all her bright plumage by the strange light on the world he had chosen, which cast everything black, white, or blue. It suited his need for Spartan surroundings while he sorted through the complexity of his existence and decided the next thing he would be. It was after he had found his concubine, long after he had realized he was no longer capable of tolerating his own people for more than a few short hours at a time, but before he’d begun his efforts to make his beloved Fae like himself.

The queen had been seductive, she had been full of guile, she had been scornful. She had finally tried to use a small part of the Song against him, but he had been prepared for that because, like her, he looked into the future as far as it would permit and foreseen this day.

They held each other at bay with weapons for the first time in the history of their race.

As the imperious, unforgiving matriarch of their race stormed from his fortress, he padlocked his doors against her, vowing that until she gave him what he wanted—the secret to immortality for his beloved—no Seelie would ever again walk his icy halls. Only the queen could dispense the elixir of life. She kept it hidden in her private bower. He wanted that, and more: enough to make the concubine his equal in every way.

I shook myself hard and stopped running. I iced instantly, but it didn’t terrify me. I waited a few moments before taking a step and cracking it.

The memories on the king’s side of the Silver didn’t play out before my eyes like the residue of times past on the concubine’s side. Here they seemed to slide directly into my brain.

It was as if I’d just been two people: One had been running down enormous halls of black ice, and the other had stood in a kingly reception hall, watching the first Fae queen fight with a mighty darkness, probing for weaknesses, manipulating, always manipulating. I knew every detail of her being, what she looked like in her true form and her preferred guises. I even knew the look on her face as she’d died.

Come to me …

I began to run again, down floors of obsidian. The king hadn’t been much for decorating. No windows opened onto the world outside his walls, although I knew they once did, in those early days before the queen turned his planet into a prison. I also knew that once there were simple yet regal furnishings, but now the only embellishments were elaborately carved designs in the ice itself, lending the place a certain austere majesty. If the queen’s court was a gaily painted whore, the king’s was a strange but natural beauty.

I knew every hall, every twist and turn, every chamber. She must have lived here, before he’d made the Silvers for her. Me.

I shivered.

So where was he now?

If I genuinely was his concubine reincarnated, why wasn’t he waiting for me? It seemed I’d been programmed to end up here, one way or another. Who was summoning me?

I am dying.…

My heart constricted. If I’d thought I couldn’t breathe before, it was nothing compared to what those three simple words had just made me feel—that I would give my right arm, my eyeteeth, maybe even twenty years of my life to prevent that from happening.

I skidded to a halt before the gigantic doors to the king’s fortress and stared up. Chiseled of ebon ice, they had to be a hundred feet tall. There was no way I could open them. But the voice was coming from beyond them—out there in the dreaded, icy Unseelie hell.

Elaborate symbols decorated the high arch into which the doors were set, and I suddenly understood there was a pass code. Unfortunately, I couldn’t reach any of the symbols to press them, and there was no convenient hundred-foot ladder propped nearby.

I felt him then.

Almost as if he rose up behind me.

I heard a command come out of my own mouth, words I was incapable of uttering with a human tongue, and the enormous doors swung silently open.

The icy prison was exactly as I’d dreamed it, with a single significant difference.

It was empty.

In my nightmares, the prison had always been inhabited by countless monstrous Unseelie who had squatted high on cliffs above me, hurling chunks of ice down the ravine as if they were bowlers from hell and I was the pin. Others darted low, taking stabs at me with giant beaks.

The moment I’d stepped through the king’s mighty doors, I braced myself for an attack.

It didn’t come.

The stark arctic terrain was a great empty hull of a prison with rusted-out bars.

Even devoid of those once incarcerated, despair clung to every ridge, blew down from mountainous cliffs, and seeped up from bottomless chasms.

I tilted my head back. There was no sky. Cliffs of black ice stretched up farther than the eye could follow. A blue glow emanated from the cliffs—the only light in the place. Blue-black fog gusted from crevices in the cliffs.

The moon would never rise here, the sun would never set. Seasons would not pass. Color would never splash this landscape.

Death in this place would be a blessing. There was no hope, no expectation that life would ever change. For hundreds of thousands of years, the Unseelie had abided in these chilling, killing, sunless cliffs. Their need, their emptiness, had stained the very stuff from which their prison was fashioned. Once, long ago, it had been a fine if strange world. Now it was radioactive to the core.

I knew that if I remained long on this barren terrain, I would lose all will to leave. I would come to believe that this arctic wasteland, this frozen oubliette of misery, was all that existed, all that had ever existed and, worse—was exactly what I deserved.

Was I too late? Was I supposed to have answered this summons long before the prison walls fell? Was that why I kept seeing all those hourglasses with black sand running out?

But I kept hearing the voice in my dreams—and now, when I was awake. That had to mean there was still time.

For what?

I scanned the many caves cut into the sheer façade of jagged black cliffs, frigid homes the Unseelie had clawed into the unforgiving landscape. Nothing stirred. I knew without even looking I would find no creature comforts within. Those without hope didn’t feather nests. They endured. I was startled by a sudden deep sorrow that they’d been reduced to such straits. What a vindictive act on the queen’s part! They might have been brethren to the Light Court, not forced to shiver for eternity in the cold and dark. On sunny beaches, in tropical climes, perhaps they would have become something less monstrous, evolved as the king had. But, no, the vicious queen hadn’t been satisfied with imprisoning them. She’d wanted them to suffer. And for what crimes? What had they done to deserve it, other than be born without her consent?

I was disturbed by the turn of my thoughts. I was feeling pity for the Unseelie and thinking the king had evolved.

It had to be this place’s memory residue.

I crunched over iced drifts, scaled jagged outcroppings, and turned down a narrow pathway between cliffs that were hundreds of feet high. The thin fissure through which I passed was another of my childhood terrors. Barely two and a half feet wide, the narrow passage made me feel crushed, claustrophobic, yet I knew my route went this way.

With each step I took, my feelings of bipolarity grew.

I was Mac, who hated Unseelie and wanted nothing more than to see the prison walls restored, the monstrous killers contained.

I was the concubine, who loved the king and all of his children. I even loved this place. There had been happy moments here before the bitch queen broke everything in those final seconds before she died.

Speaking of dying, I should have. I wasn’t breathing. I had no blood flow. No oxygen. I should have been mortally frostbitten the moment I’d passed through the Silver. There was no plausible way I could be walking through these conditions, yet I was.

I was so cold that dying would have been a welcome relief. It was easy to see why my child’s mind had thrilled to the poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” The notion of being warm again was nearly beyond my comprehension.

Half a dozen times I considered aborting my unwanted mission. I could turn around, go back to the mansion, slip through the Silver, find Jericho, resume our plans, and pretend none of this had ever happened. He’d never tell. He had a few dark secrets of his own to keep.

I could forget I was the concubine. Forget that I’d ever had a past existence. I mean, really, who wanted to be in love with someone they’d never even met—at least not in this lifetime? The thought of the Unseelie King was a big messy knot of emotions inside me that I preferred to leave tangled and unexamined.

Hurry! You must!

Razor-edged snow began to fall. Deep in caves, things chimed horrible, grating sounds. Jericho had told me that there were creatures so twisted and monstrous in the Unseelie prison that they’d stay even if the walls came down, because they liked their home. How was I supposed to have made it through if the place had still been fully populated? For that matter, how was I supposed to have found my way here to begin with? How had things been orchestrated to bring me here, to this moment, in this way—and, more importantly, by whom? Whose puppet was I? I resented being here. I couldn’t have turned back for anything.

I have no idea how long I trudged through despair and futility so palpable that every step felt like slogging through wet cement. Temporal divisions did not exist in this place. There were no watches or clocks, no minutes or hours, no night or day, no sun or moon. Just relentless black and white and blue matched by relentless misery.

How many times had I walked this path while I slept? If I’d been having the dream since birth—more than eight thousand.

Repetition had made every step instinctual. I skirted dangerously thin ice that I couldn’t have known was there. I intuited the location of bottomless drifts. I knew the shape and number of the entrances in the caves in the black walls high above my head. I recognized landmarks too insignificant to be noticed by anyone who hadn’t walked this path countless times.

If my heart could have pounded, it would have. I had no idea what awaited me. If I’d ever gotten to the end of my journey in my dreams, I’d blocked it thoroughly.

It had always been a woman’s voice commanding me, ordering me to obey. Had my inner concubine been taking over every time I’d fallen asleep and fed me dreams, trying to force me to remember and make me do something?

Darroc had told me that some said the Unseelie King was entombed in black ice, slumbering in his prison eternally. Had he been tricked into a trap and he’d been reaching out to me in the Dreaming to teach me all I needed to know to free him? Was that what my whole life had been about?

Despite the love I knew he and the concubine shared, I resented that my mortal existence had been used up without regard for what it might have been, what I might have been. Hadn’t she lived long enough once before, waiting for him to wake up, to pull his head out and live?

It was no wonder I’d always felt so psychotic in high school! I’d been walking around since childhood with the suppressed memories of another fantastical lifetime embedded in my subconscious!

I suddenly found everything about myself suspect. Did I really love sunshine so much, or was it a leftover feeling from her? Was I really crazy about fashion, or was I obsessing over the concubine’s closet of a thousand stunning gowns? Was I truly enthralled by beautifying my surroundings, or was it an outlet for her need to change the face of her confinement while she waited for her lover?

Did I even like the color pink?

I tried to remember how many of her dresses had been some shade of rose.

“Ugh,” I said. It came out as a deep, booming gong.

I didn’t want to be her. I wanted to be me. But, as far as I knew, I hadn’t even been born.

A terrible thought occurred to me. Maybe I wasn’t the concubine reincarnated; maybe I was the concubine and somebody had forced me to drink from the cauldron!

“Right, then sent me to a plastic surgeon and re-created my face?” I muttered. I didn’t look anything like the concubine.

My head was spinning with fears, each more disturbing than the last.

I stopped, as if a homing beacon that had been beeping faster and faster inside me had abruptly become a single long sound.

I was there. Wherever “there” was supposed to be. Whatever fate awaited me, whatever, whoever had brought me here, was just over the next ridge of black ice, some twenty feet away.

I stood still so long that I iced again.

Despair filled me. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to top the ridge. What if I didn’t like what I found? Had I blocked this memory because I was going to die here?

What if I was too late?

The prison was empty. There was no point in going on. I should just give in, turn to ice permanently, and forget. I didn’t want to be the concubine. I didn’t want to find the king. I didn’t want to stay in Faery or be his forever love.

I wanted to be human. I wanted to live in Dublin and Ashford and love my mom and dad. I wanted to fight with Jericho Barrons and run a bookstore one day when our world was rebuilt. I wanted to watch Dani grow up and fall in love for the first time. I wanted to replace that old woman at the abbey with Kat and take tropical vacations on human beaches.

I stood, torn by indecision. Go greet my destiny, like a good little automaton? Freeze and forget, as the overwhelming stain of futility in this place was trying to convince me to do? Or turn and walk away? That thought appealed to me a lot. It smacked of personal will, of choosing to set sail on my own course and terms.

If I never crested that ridge and never discovered the end of this dream that had been plaguing me all my life, would I be free of it?

There was no higher power forcing me to go on, no divine being charging me with tracking the Book and getting the walls back up. Just because I could track it didn’t mean I had to. I didn’t have to fight the Fae. I was a free agent. I could leave right now, move far away, shirk responsibility, look out for myself, and leave this mess to somebody else. It was a strange new world. I could stop resisting, adapt, and make the best of it. If I’d proved nothing else to myself over the past few months, I was good at adapting and figuring out how to go on when things weren’t remotely what I’d thought they were.

Still … could I really walk away now and never know what all this had been about? Live with unresolved bipolarity shaping all my choices? Did I want to live that way—a conflicted, screwed-up, half-afraid existence of someone who’d chickened out at the critical moment?

Safety is a fence, and fences are for sheep, I’d told Rowena.

Were it put to the test, she’d replied tartly, I wonder where you would truly stand.

This was the test.

I cracked the ice, shook it from my skin, and headed for the top of the ridge.

28

In that moment, just before I could see over the crest, a final memory I’d been suppressing surfaced, a last desperate bid to get me to tuck tail and run.

It nearly worked.

Once I topped the ridge, there would be a coffin chiseled of the same blue-black ice from which the four stones had been carved, standing in the center of a snow-covered dais, surrounded by sheer cliffs.

A chilling, bitter wind would gust down and tangle my hair. I would stand, debating, before moving to the sepulchre.

The lid would be elaborately carved with ancient symbols. I would press my hands to the runes at ten and two, slide the lid away, and look inside.

And I would scream.

My steps faltered.

I closed my eyes, but, try as I might, I couldn’t see what was inside the coffin that made me scream. Apparently I was going to have to actually perform the deed to know how my recurring nightmare ended.

I squared my shoulders, marched to the top, and stopped, startled.

There was the icy tomb, elaborately carved and embellished, precisely as I’d just pictured it. It certainly didn’t look big enough to hold the king.

But who was he?

This was a new twist. In all my nightmares, there’d never been anyone else here but me and whoever was inside that tomb.

Tall, beautifully formed, ice-white, and smooth as marble, with long jet hair, he sat on a bank of crusted snow beside the coffin, face buried in his hands.

I stood at the top of the ridge, staring. Wind gusted down from high cliffs and tangled my hair. Was he a residue? A memory? There was none of that fading at the edges, no transparency.

Was he my king?

As soon as I thought the question, I knew he wasn’t.

Then who was he?

What I could see of his ivory skin—a hand on his cheek, one sleek, strong white arm—raced with dark shapes and symbols.

Was it possible there were five Unseelie Princes? This wasn’t one of the three who’d raped me, and he had no wings, which meant he wasn’t War/Cruce, either.

So who was he?

“It’s about bloody damned time,” he tossed over his shoulder, without turning. “Been waiting weeks.”

I jerked. He’d spoken in that awful chiming and, while my mind understood it, my ears would never get used to it. That was only part of what made me jerk, though. Needing to crack my ice was another part of it. But the majority was horror at the realization of who I was looking at.

“Christian MacKeltar,” I said, and grimaced. I was speaking the language of my enemies, a language I’d never learned, with a mouth incapable of shaping it. I couldn’t get back to my side of the mirror soon enough. “Is that you?”

“In the flesh, lass. Well … mostly.”

I wasn’t sure if he meant it was mostly him or mostly flesh. I didn’t ask.

He raised his head and shot me a savage look over his shoulder. He was beautiful. He was wrong. His eyes were full black. He blinked and had whites again.

In another life, I would have gone crazy over Christian MacKeltar. Or at least I would have gone nuts for the Christian I met back in Dublin. He was so different now that, if he hadn’t spoken to me, I’m not sure how long it might have taken me to figure out who he was. The good-looking college student with the great body, Druid heart, and killer smile was gone. As I watched shapes and symbols move under his skin, I wondered: If we weren’t inside the prison that leached color from everything, would his tattoos still be black or kaleidoscopic?

I stood still too long and was suddenly staring at him through a thin sheeting of ice. He’d been sitting still and was ice-free. Why? Then there was that short-sleeved shirt he was wearing. Wasn’t he cold? When I cracked it, he spoke.

“The majority of what happens here is in your mind. Whatever you permit yourself to feel intensifies.” The words were dark bells hammered on a bent xylophone. I shuddered. I could hear the hint of Scots brogue in the chiming, and the element of humanity in the inhuman tongue made it all the more disturbing.

“You mean if I don’t think about icing, I won’t?” I said. My stomach growled and I was suddenly frosted with thick, creamy blue icing.

“Thought about food, did you now, lass?” Amusement leavened the tubular tones, made it slightly more bearable. He stood up but made no move toward me. “You’ll find you do that a lot here.”

I thought about turning the icing to ice. It was that simple. When I stepped forward, it shattered from my skin. “Does this mean if I think of a warm, tropical beach—”

“No. The fabric of this place is what it is. You can make it worse, but you can never make it better. You can only destroy, not create. That was a bit of added nastiness on the queen’s part. I suspect it’s not icing on you but flakes of frost creamed with the innards of a thing you’d rather not look at too closely.”

I glanced at the sepulchre. I couldn’t help it. It hulked, dark and silent, the boogeyman of twenty years of bad dreams. I’d been trying to ignore it but couldn’t. It gnawed at my awareness.

I would stand beside it.

I would open it, look inside, and scream.

Right. Not in a hurry to do that.

I looked back at Christian. What was he doing here? Whatever had brought me to this place had consumed all my nightly hours for most of my life. I was entitled to a few minutes of my own before whatever was fated happened.

If they were indeed my own.

It didn’t escape me that I’d just found exactly what I needed. How lucky to find the fifth of the five Druids necessary to perform the ritual right here, next to whatever it was I’d been led to!

Too bad I didn’t believe in luck anymore.

I felt bitterly manipulated. But by whom and why?

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“Och, what happened to me?” Laughter screeched like metal spikes across chalkboard bells. “That would be you, lass. You happened to me. You fed me Unseelie.”

I was appalled. This was what feeding him the flesh of dark Fae had done to him? Whatever transformation Christian had begun back on that world where we’d dried our clothes by the loch had continued at breakneck speed.

He looked half human, half Fae, and in this place of shadows and ice, he was leaning toward the Unseelie, not their light brethren. With a few finishing touches, he’d look just like one of the princes. I bit my lip. What could I say? I’m sorry? Does it hurt? Are you turning into a monster inside, too? Maybe he’d look better once he was out in the real world, where there were other colors besides black, white, and blue.

He gave me a darker version of that killer smile, white teeth flashing against cobalt lips in a white-marble face. “Och, your heart weeps for me. I see it in your eyes,” he mocked. The smile faded, but the hostility in his gaze grew. “It should. I’m beginning to look like one of them, aren’t I? No handy mirrors around here. Don’t know what my face looks like and doubt I want to.”

“Eating Unseelie did this to you? I don’t understand. I’ve eaten Unseelie. So did Mallucé and Darroc, Fiona and O’Bannion. Then there’s Jayne and his men. Nothing like this happened to me or any of them.”

“I suspect it began happening on Halloween. I wasn’t runed well enough.” The smile morphed from killer to murderous. “I blame your Barrons for that. We’ll be seeing who’s the finer Druid now. We’ll be having words when we meet again.”

From the expression on that white chiseled face, I doubted they would be words. “Was Jericho the one who tattooed you?”

He raised a brow. “So, it’s ‘Jericho,’ is it? No, my uncles Dageus and Cian did the work, but he should have checked me when I was finished, and he didn’t. He let me go into the ritual unprotected.”

“And just how pissy would your uncles have gotten if he’d tried?” It was instinct to defend him.

“He still should have. He knew more about protection runes than we did. His knowledge is older than ours, which is bloody inconceivable to me.”

“What happened that night in the stones, Christian?” Neither he nor Barrons had ever told me.

He rubbed his face with a hand, skin rasping over blue-black stubble. “I suppose it doesn’t matter who knows now. I thought to hide my shame, but it looks as if I’ve ended up wearing it.”

He began to walk a slow circle around the black coffin, ice crunching beneath his boots. It was a well-worn path. He’d been here awhile.

I tried to focus on him, but my gaze kept sliding unwillingly to the tomb. The ice was thick, but if I stared, I could see a shape through the frosted sides. The lid was thinner than the rest of the coffin.

Was that the blurred outline of a face through the smoky ice?

I yanked my gaze to Christian’s too-white face. “And?”

“We tried to summon the ancient god of the Draghar, a sect of dark sorcerers. They’d worshipped it long before the Fae came to town. It was our only hope to counter Darroc’s magic. We succeeded in raising it. I felt it come alive. The great stones that weighted it deep beneath the earth fell away.” He paused, letting the echo of his chiming bounce off the walls in ever-diminishing decibels until the icy mountains fell silent. “It came for me. Straight for me. Gunning for my soul. Ever play chicken, Mac?”

I shook my head.

“I lost. It’s a wonder it didn’t decimate Barrons. I felt it blast past me and into him. Then it was just … gone.”

“So how was that responsible for what’s happening to you?”

“It touched me.” He looked repulsed. “It … I don’t want to talk about it. Then you gave me the blood of dark Fae, and that, coupled with the three years I’ve been in here—”

“Three years?” The words exploded from me in a cacophony of such dissonance that I was surprised the chiming didn’t start an avalanche. “You’ve been in the Unseelie prison for three years?”

“No, I’ve been in this place for only a few weeks. But I’ve been in the Silvers for three years by my count.”

“But less than a month has passed on the outside since I saw you last!”

“So it’s passing faster for me in here,” he murmured.

“Which is exactly the opposite of what usually happens. Usually a few hours in here are days out there.”

He shrugged. Muscle and tattoos rippled. “Things don’t seem to be working right where I’m concerned. I’ve become a wee bit unpredictable.” His smile was tight. His eyes were full black again.

It was on the tip of my tongue to apologize, but I was more pragmatic than I used to be and I was getting tired of being blamed for things. “When I found you in that desert, you were dying. Would you rather I’d buried you in the Silvers?”

The corners of his mouth twisted. “Aye, there’s the rub, isn’t it? I’m glad I’m alive. And you’ve no idea what that does to me. I used to be part of a clan that protected against the Fae, upheld the Compact, and kept the truce between us and them. Now I’m turning into one of the bloody buggers. I used to think the Keltar were the good guys. Now I don’t believe there are good guys.”

“There’d better be good guys. I need five of them to perform the ritual.” My gaze slid to the coffin again. I shook myself and looked away. Assuming I got out of here with my sanity and life.

“See for yourself and decide. I’ll fit in with them now just fine. Uncle Dageus once opened himself up to thirteen of the most evil Druids that ever existed and still can’t exorcise parts of them.”

So Dageus was the “inhabited or possessed” that the prophecy had mentioned!

“And Uncle Cian was trapped in a Silver for nearly a thousand years, as if he wasn’t enough of a barbarian to begin with. He thinks all power is good and would do anything he had to in order to keep himself and his wife alive and happy. Then there’s Da, who’ll be useless to you. He took one look at the two of them when they showed up and swore off Druid arts forever.”

“That’s unacceptable,” I said flatly. “I need all five of you.”

“Good luck with that.”

We looked at each other in silence. He smiled thinly after a moment. “I knew someone would come. I just didn’t expect it to be you. I thought my uncles would find this place so I’d better stick close. I couldn’t find the bloody way out, anyway.”

“What have you been eating?”

“Same as we’re breathing. It’s part of hell. No food, no breath. But hunger, ah, the hunger never goes away. Your stomach gnaws at itself constantly. You just don’t die from it. And sex. Och, Christ, the need!” The look he raked over me chilled. It wasn’t nearly as bottomless as a prince’s, but it wasn’t human, either. “You lust in this place, but you can’t jack off. Nothing comes of it but greater lust. I lost a few days to a bad spot there, nearly lost my fucking mind. If you and I had sex—”

“Thanks but no,” I said swiftly. My life was already too complicated, and if it hadn’t been, this wasn’t the place I’d choose to complicate it more.

“I suspect it wouldn’t work anyway,” he finished drily. “Am I that revolting, lass?”

“Just a little … scary.”

He looked away.

“Still sexy as hell, though,” I added.

He looked back, flashed me a smile.

“There’s the Christian I know,” I tried to tease. “You’re still in there.”

“Once I get out of the Silvers, I’m hoping it won’t be like this. I won’t be like this.”

That would make two of us who hoped things would go back to normal, in a hurry, once we left this place behind.

I glanced at the sepulchre. I was going to have to open it sometime. Face it and get it over with. Was it the king? Did he terrify me? Why? What could possibly be in there that would make me scream?

He followed my gaze. “So now you know why I’m sitting here. Why are you here? How did you find this place?”

“I’ve been dreaming about it every night since I was a child, as if I was programmed to come here.”

His mouth twisted. “Aye, she does that. Fucks with us.”

“She? Who?”

He nodded at the coffin. “The queen.”

I blinked. “What queen?” This wasn’t making any sense.

“Aoibheal, Queen of the Seelie.”

“That’s who’s in the coffin?”

“Who were you expecting to find?”

All hesitation gone, I moved to the side of the tomb and stared through the lid.

Beneath smoky ice and runes, I could see the hint of pale skin, golden hair, a slight form.

“We’ve got to get her out of here, and fast,” he said, “if she’s even still alive. I can’t tell through the ice. I tried to open it but couldn’t budge it. A few times, I thought she moved. Once, I could have sworn she made a sound.”

I barely heard him. Why would the queen be here of all places? V’lane said he was keeping her safe in Faery.

V’lane had lied.

What else had he lied about?

Had he brought her here? If not, who had? Why? And why would opening the lid make me scream? I raked my hair back from my face with both hands and tugged on it, staring down. Something was eluding me.

“Are you absolutely certain it’s the queen of the Seelie in this coffin?” Why would the queen have been summoning me—the concubine? How did she even know who I was, once I’d been reincarnated? It wasn’t as if I still looked like the concubine. It was absurd to think she’d accidentally chosen me. None of this made sense. I couldn’t think of any reason seeing the queen of the Seelie would make me scream.

“Aye, I’m certain. My ancestors have been painting her for millennia. I’d know her anywhere, even through the ice.”

“But why would she call me? What do I have to do with any of this?”

“My uncles say she has meddled with our clan for thousands of years, preparing us for the moment of her greatest need. Uncle Cian saw her four or five years back, standing behind the balustrade of our Great Hall, watching us. He said she came to him later, in sleep, and told him that she’d been killed in the not-so-distant future and needed us to perform certain tasks to prevent it—and the destruction of the world as we knew it—from coming to pass. She foretold that the walls would come down. We did our best to keep them up. He said that even in the Dreaming, she seemed hunted, weak. I suspect now she was projecting herself from her tomb here in this prison somehow. She said she would return to tell him more but never did. It sounds like she must have meddled with your family, as well.”

She’d used me. The queen of the Fae had figured out who I was and used me, and I resented it. Though I knew she was a far-distant successor, not the original queen who had refused to make me—the concubine, I amended—Fae and grant the king’s wish, and despite that she wasn’t actually the bitch who’d sown hatred and revenge when she might have used her vast power for good, how dare any queen of the Seelie use me to rescue her? Me, the concubine! I hated her without even seeing her.

Would it never end? Would I eternally be a pawn on their chessboard? Would I just keep getting reborn, or forced to drink from the cauldron, or whatever had happened to me to screw up my memories, and used over and over again?

I turned away, bile rising.

“What’s important now is that we get her out of here. I can’t go back the way I came. The Silver that dumped me was two stories up, in the side of a cliff. I was stunned by the fall and can’t find the bloody thing again. Where’d you come in, lass?”

I dragged my gaze from the coffin to him. How to get him out of here was an entirely new problem I hadn’t even thought about. “Well, you certainly can’t go out the way I came in,” I muttered.

“Why the bloody hell not?”

I wondered how much he’d learned about Fae lore in this place. Maybe my sources were wrong and Barrons had died from some other coincidental cause, not because of the mirror at all. Maybe Christian would hear my answer, laugh at me, and tell me my version was a bunch of baloney, that lots of people and Fae could use that mirror, or that Cruce’s curse had messed it up. “Because I came in through the Silver in the king’s bedchamber.”

He was silent a moment. “Not funny, lass.”

I didn’t say anything, just looked at him.

“Not possible, either,” he said flatly.

I pushed my hands into my pockets and waited for him to deal with it.

“That legend is famous on every world I visited. There are only two who can pass through the king’s Silver,” he said.

“Maybe Cruce’s curse changed it.”

“The king’s Silver was the first he ever made and of a completely different composition. It was unaffected. It continued to be used as a method of execution long after Cruce’s time.”

Damn. I’d really been hoping he wouldn’t say that. I turned my back on him and moved to the side of the coffin. The queen of the Fae would make me scream. I wondered why. I was sick of wondering. It was time for truth.

Behind me, Christian was still talking. “And, duh—you’re neither of those.”

“Doona be duh-ing me, laddie,” I mocked something he’d said to me once, taking a stab at humor before my life got totally wrecked by whatever I was about to discover.

I pressed my hands to the runes at ten and two. Something clicked. There was a soft hiss of air as the lid raised beneath my hands. I could feel the spring in it. All I had to do now was push it aside.

“Only the Unseelie King and his concubine can use that mirror.” Christian was still talking.

I slid the lid away and looked down.

I was silent for a long moment, absorbing it.

Then I screamed.

29

To my credit, I didn’t scream for long.

But the short burst in their hellish language was enough to disturb precariously packed snow and ice. My chiming scream echoed off sheer cliffs. Unlike an echo, however, it grew louder with each rebound and I heard a rumble that could presage only one thing: an avalanche.

My head whipped around. “Grab her!”

Christian shook his head, cursing. “Christ, you open your bag of stones. You feed me Unseelie. You scream. You’re a walking—”

“Just grab her and run! Now!”

He raced to the coffin, then stood, hesitating.

“What’s wrong with you? Pick her up!”

“She’s the queen of the Fae.” Awe tinged his voice. “It’s forbidden to touch the queen.”

“Fine, then stay here with her and get buried alive,” I snapped.

He scooped her up.

She was so frail, so wasted by … whatever wastes fairies, that I could have carried her myself, but I had no desire to touch her. Ever. Which was really kind of funny in a dark and disturbing way, if I thought about it. So I didn’t.

Ice cracked and rumbled high above, showering crystals across the dais.

We needed no further encouragement. We slipped and slid down the frozen ridge and fled the way I’d come, heading for the narrow fissure between cliffs. It was going to be a close race and a tight squeeze with Christian’s shoulders and with an avalanche chasing us.

“Why’d you scream, anyway?” he shouted at me over the rumbling.

“She startled me, is all,” I shouted back.

“Bloody great. Next time put a sock in it, would you?”

Neither of us said anything then, focused on trying to outrun being buried alive. I bounced between the walls of the cliffs like a Ping-Pong ball. Twice I lost my footing and went down. Christian went flying over the top of me but somehow managed to hang on to the frail queen. The avalanche chased us, growling like dark thunder, crashing from ravine to canyon, spraying the deep fissure with snow.

We finally cleared the claustrophobic path through the cliffs, slid on our asses down a steep hill, then raced across the canyon for the towering fortress of black ice.

“The Unseelie King’s castle!” Christian marveled as we dashed through the towering doors. He looked up, down, and around. “I grew up on tales of this place, but I never imagined I’d see it. I thought the closest I’d get to one of the legendary Tuatha Dé was standing next to a portrait. And here I am, holding the Seelie Queen, in the Unseelie King’s fortress.” He gave a bitter laugh. “And turning into one of them.”

I murmured the same soft command that had opened the tall doors and heaved a sigh of relief when they slid silently closed on the thundering rush of snow beyond. Would the avalanche I’d started reach the castle? Pile up outside the doors, sealing us in here more securely than any bolt? I waited for Christian to demand to know how I’d shut them, but he was so engrossed in his surroundings, he’d not even noticed.

“What now?” His fascinated gaze kept sliding between the frail woman in his arms and the interior of the dark fortress.

“Now we head for the Silver in the king’s boudoir,” I said.

“Why? I can’t go through and neither can she.”

“I can. And I can get help and bring them back to the mirror to talk to you. We’ll make plans to get you out, figure out how and where to meet.”

He cocked his head and studied me a moment. “There’s a thing you should know, lass. My truth sensor works just fine here in the Unseelie prison.”

“So?”

“What you just said wasn’t truth.”

“I’m going to go through the mirror. Truth?” I said impatiently.

He nodded.

“And I’m going to get help and bring them back for you. Truth?”

He nodded again.

“Then what the hell is the problem?” I had a lot on my mind. Delays were untenable. Standing still, my mind began to think. I needed to keep moving. I couldn’t bear to look at the woman in his arms. Couldn’t handle thinking what looking at her made me think.

His eyes narrowed. They were full black again. There was a time when it would have made me nervous, but I doubted anything would make me nervous ever again. I was beyond stress, beyond fear, beyond reach.

“Tell me you plan to save me,” he ordered.

That was easy. With each passing day, I understood Jericho better. People didn’t ask the right questions. And if you answered enough of their wrong ones, by the time they ever got around to a right one, you could just snap their head off and shut them up. How many times had he done that to me? I was developing a grudging respect for his tactics. Especially now that I had something to hide.

“I plan to save you,” I said, and I didn’t need a truth detector to hear the ring of sincerity in my voice. “And I will do it as quickly as possible. It will be my priority to get you out of here.” It would. I needed him. More than I’d ever understood.

“Truth.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I don’t know. Something.” He shifted the queen in his arms.

She wore a sparkling white gown. I knew that dress. Who’d selected it for her? Had she chosen it? How and why? I refused to look at her. I snapped my gaze from her dress to Christian’s face.

“Tell me again why you screamed,” he fished.

He was getting too close for comfort. But I knew this game. Barrons had taught me well. “I was frightened.”

“Truth. Why?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Christian, I told you already! Are we going to stand here all day while you interrogate me, or are we going to get out of here?” Beyond the fortress, the avalanche crashed and roared. It was nothing like the roar I felt building in me. “She wasn’t what I expected, okay?” That was certainly the truth! “Even though you told me it was her in the coffin, I expected it to be the Unseelie King,” I tossed, to get him off the scent.

There was just enough sincerity in what I’d said to appease him. But barely. “If you’re somehow lying to me …” he warned.

He’d do what? By the time he figured out what I was doing, it’d be too late. Besides, I really wasn’t someone he wanted to be threatening, no matter who he was turning into or how powerful he was becoming. I’d just found out I was way more terrifying than anything he could possibly be turning into.

“The king’s bedchamber is this way,” I said coolly. “And don’t threaten me. I’m sick of being used and pushed around.”

Christian dallied. There was no other word for it. He was fascinated by the Unseelie King’s fortress, and his Keltar duties as Fae lorekeeper had been bred into him since birth, despite any misgivings he might have about what was happening to him. He took detailed mental notes on everything he saw, to pass on later to his clan. I was glad he didn’t have pen or paper, or I might never have gotten him to the mirror. “Look at this, Mac! What do you think it means?”

I glanced unwillingly where he pointed. It was a door that was much smaller than the others. There was an inscription above the arch. It was a powerful ward. The king had kept things in there he’d never wanted loosed on the world. The ward had been broken long ago. Great. I just hoped they weren’t on my world. I resumed walking, staring straight ahead, retracing my earlier steps. Unlike Christian, I didn’t want to see a damned thing.

“You’ll have time to look around when I’m gone,” I said.

“I’ll need to stay close to the Silver to know when you return.”

“Well, move a little faster, okay? We have no idea how time’s passing out in the real world. You slow it down, I speed it up.”

“Maybe we’ll split the difference.”

“Maybe.” Would enough time have passed that Barrons would be alive again? Standing at the mirror, waiting for me? Or had so much time passed that he’d have given up? Moved on to other tasks?

I’d know in a few minutes.

“She’s not breathing,” he said.

“Neither are we,” I said drily.

“But I think she’s alive. I can … feel her.”

“Good. We need her. Through here,” I said.

Moments later I stepped into the comforting darkness of the Unseelie King’s boudoir, where the dark maker of the Court of Shadows had rested—he’d never slept—and fucked, and dreamed.

Jericho wasn’t dead on the other side of the mirror, nor was he waiting for me. I assumed that meant we’d been gone a good long time as humans counted it.

Christian made it easy for me.

I couldn’t have asked for more.

He laid her on the king’s bed, close to the Silver, and tucked furs around her.

“She’s so cold. You’ve got to hurry, Mac. We need to get her warm. In my travels, I heard that during the battle between the king and original queen, some of the Seelie were taken captive before the prison walls went up. The Unseelie planned to torture them for all eternity, but legends say the Seelie prisoners died because this place is the antithesis of all they are and drains their life essence.” He gave me a grim look. “I think someone brought the Seelie Queen here, put her in that coffin, and left her to die slowly. Uncle Cian said she wasn’t really there when she came to see him but was a projection of herself. As if she was trapped somewhere, focusing all her effort and energy on sending a vision of herself to nudge events around so we would save her when the time was right. Someone wanted revenge. I think she’s been here a long time.”

And V’lane was looking like the prime suspect, considering that he’d been lying to me about where she’d been since day one. But how could any of this be? Why would V’lane have had this woman to begin with? How had she ended up in the Seelie court?

The truth was, I was standing in the middle of so many lies—some of them hundreds of thousands of years old—that I didn’t know where to begin trying to untangle them. If I pulled on one thread, ten others would unravel, and I saw little point in trying to make sense of anything now.

All I could do was what had to be done. Get them both out of here. The sooner the better. Especially her. Not because she was the queen but because Christian’s legend resonated with me and I knew it to be true. A Seelie could survive only a finite space of time in here. I doubted a human would survive half that long. And I wasn’t entirely sure which she really was.

She was dangerously weak. The slight form on the bed barely made a hump. Masses of silvery hair cloaked a body that had deteriorated to that of a slender, undeveloped child. My dreams had been trying to warn me. I’d waited too long. I’d almost been too late.

“Look over there,” I exclaimed, pointing to the far side of the bed. “What’s that on the wall? I think I’ve seen those symbols before.”

He was halfway across the bedchamber before that sixth sense of his made him look back over his shoulder. I know, because I was looking over mine.

It was too late.

I’d already scooped her up and pushed into the Silver. She was oddly insubstantial, as if she’d donned physical form to contain the energy of which she was made and, as her life essence evaporated, so did the physicality holding her. Was she beyond saving?

I know what he thought.

I was the traitor.

I was trying to finish the job of killing the queen by forcing her through a mirror only the king and his concubine could pass through. A mirror that killed all other life, including Fae.

But that wasn’t it at all.

I wasn’t trying to kill the queen. I knew she wouldn’t die. I knew she could go through the mirror.

Because the woman in my arms wasn’t Aoibheal, queen of the Fae.

She was the concubine.

30

That was why I’d screamed. I’d been having a hard enough time dealing with the thought that I was the concubine.

As I’d stared into the coffin and recognized her from the White Mansion, it had taken me only a moment to process that, if the concubine was lying in the coffin and I could pass through the king’s Silver, I had a serious problem.

The scream had been instinctive, denial from the very marrow in my bones clawing its way up my throat and past my lips.

If she was the concubine, and I could go though the Silver, too, there was only one other … person—and I was using that term very loosely—I could be.

“And it’s not the concubine, that’s for sure,” I muttered as I pushed through the Silver and slammed into the wall. I’d expected resistance like in every other Silver, but this one—the first ever created—was untainted by Cruce’s curse. I turned at the last moment, cradling her in my arms, taking the brunt of the impact on my shoulder. Not a damned thing about this made sense.

“Mac, what are you doing?” Christian roared, storming toward the mirror.

“Don’t touch it!” I cried. “It will kill you!” I didn’t want him to think for a minute that it wouldn’t and try to come through. It had killed Barrons. I had no doubt it would destroy Christian, and he didn’t have a get-out-of-death-free card. At least not that I knew of. But as had just become painfully apparent to me, I didn’t know much of anything, so maybe he had a whole deck of them. Maybe everyone did but me. Still, I wasn’t going to count on it. I needed him. More than ever before, I needed the Sinsar Dubh contained, and he was one of the five necessary to do it. I understood why it played with me now.

He stopped inches from the mirror and peered at me through it. “Why didn’t it kill her? I’ll know the truth,” he warned.

I adjusted her in my arms, scooped up a mass of her hair, and draped it over my shoulder so it didn’t trail the floor and trip me. I stared back through the mirror at him. “Because she’s the concubine. That’s why I really screamed. I recognized her.”

“But I thought you were the conc—” He gave me a fast once-over. “But you went through the—But that would mean—Mac?”

I shrugged. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“How do you know she’s the concubine?” he demanded.

“The memory residue of the king and the concubine walks these halls. It’s hard not to get lost in them. But I imagine you won’t have quite as hard a time as I had, seeing how you aren’t quite so … personally involved,” I said bitterly. “I have no doubt you’ll see her while I’m gone.” I still wouldn’t look at her. It was too disconcerting. She was frighteningly light, delicate, and very, very cold. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

We stared at each other.

“I won’t believe it,” he said finally.

“It makes too much sense not to be true. There’s no record of me being born, Christian. The Book … it hunts me. I hear it always has.”

“Not buying it.”

“Give me another explanation.”

“Maybe the legends are wrong. Maybe a lot of people can step through the Silver. Maybe it’s all bluff, to keep people from trying.”

My heart lurched when he took a step forward. “No, don’t! Christian, listen to me. I can’t tell you who, but I know you can hear the truth in what I’m saying. I watched the Silver kill someone already.”

He cocked his head, then nodded. “Aye, lass. I hear truth in that, but why can’t you tell me who?”

“It’s not my secret to tell.”

“You’ll tell me one day.”

I didn’t reply.

“I’m still not buying it.”

“Find me an alternative. Any alternative. I’ll happily believe it.”

“Maybe you’re … I don’t know … Maybe you’re their child somehow,” he offered.

“Seven-hundred-thousand-plus years later?” I’d already considered and discarded that thought. Not only didn’t it resonate with my gut feelings, but “It doesn’t begin to explain all the things I know and feel and remember, or why the Book plays with me,” I said. I couldn’t explain how I knew it, but I wasn’t the progeny of the Unseelie King and his concubine. My feelings were far too personal. Far too sexual and possessive. Not a child’s feelings at all. But a lover’s.

He shrugged. “I’ll remain here. But hurry back.”

“Promise me you won’t try to come through, Christian.”

“I promise, Mac. But hurry. The longer I’m in here, the more I feel myself … changing.”

I nodded. As I turned away with the queen/concubine/woman I’d apparently destroyed worlds for, I couldn’t help but wonder where my other parts were.

31

I stared through the front door of Barrons Books and Baubles, uncertain what surprised me more: that the front seating cozy was intact or that Barrons was sitting there, boots propped on a table, surrounded by piles of books, hand-drawn maps tacked to the walls.

I couldn’t count how many nights I’d sat in exactly the same place and position, digging through books for answers, occasionally staring out the windows at the Dublin night, and waiting for him to appear. I liked to think he was waiting for me to show.

I leaned closer, staring in through the glass.

He’d refurnished the bookstore. How long had I been gone?

There was my magazine rack, my cashier’s counter, a new old-fashioned cash register, a small flat-screen TV/DVD player that was actually from this decade, and a sound dock for my iPod. There was a new sleek black iPod Nano in the dock. He’d done more than refurnish the place. He might as well have put a mat out that said WELCOME HOME, MAC.

A bell tinkled as I stepped inside.

His head whipped around and he half-stood, books sliding to the floor.

The last time I’d seen him, he was dead. I stood in the doorway, forgetting to breathe, watching him unfold from the couch in a ripple of animal grace. He crammed the four-story room full, dwarfed it with his presence. For a moment neither of us spoke.

Leave it to Barrons—the world melts down and he’s still dressed like a wealthy business tycoon. His suit was exquisite, his shirt crisp, tie intricately patterned and tastefully muted. Silver glinted at his wrist, that familiar wide cuff decorated with ancient Celtic designs he and Ryodan both wore.

Even with all my problems, my knees still went weak. I was suddenly back in that basement. My hands were tied to the bed. He was between my legs but wouldn’t give me what I wanted. He used his mouth, then rubbed himself against my clitoris and barely pushed inside me before pulling out, then his mouth, then him, over and over, watching my eyes the whole time, staring down at me.

What am I, Mac? he’d say.

My world, I’d purr, and mean it. And I was afraid that, even now that I wasn’t Pri-ya, I’d be just as out of control in bed with him as I was then. I’d melt, I’d purr, I’d hand him my heart. And I would have no excuse, nothing to blame it on. And if he got up and walked away from me and never came back to my bed, I would never recover. I’d keep waiting for a man like him, and there were no other men like him. I’d have to die old and alone, with the greatest sex of my life a painful memory.

So, you’re alive, his dark eyes said. Pisses me off, the wondering. Do something about that.

Like what? Can’t all be like you, Barrons.

His eyes suddenly rushed with shadows and I couldn’t make out a single word. Impatience, anger, something ancient and ruthless. Cold eyes regarded me with calculation, as if weighing things against each other, meditating—a word Daddy used to point out was the larger part of premeditation. He’d say, Baby, once you start thinking about it, you’re working your way toward doing it. Was there something Barrons was working his way toward doing?

I shivered.

“Where the fuck’ve you been? It’s been over a month. Pull a stunt like that again without telling me what you’re doing first, and I’m chaining you to my bed when you get back.”

Was that supposed to be a deterrent or an incentive? I pictured myself sprawled on my back, his dark head moving between my legs. I imagined Mac 1.0, knowing what I knew now: that in a few months Barrons would be doing everything a man could do to a woman in bed. Would she have run screaming or torn off her clothes right then and there?

As he stepped around the high-back chesterfield, he spotted the slight woman in my arms, her silvery hair trailing the floor. He looked incredulous, which, for Jericho, meant his head took on a slight cant and his eyes narrowed. “Where the hell did you find her?”

I shoved the fragile body into his arms. I’d touched her all I ever wanted to. My feelings were too complex to sort out. “In the Unseelie prison. In a tomb of ice.”

“V’lane, that fuck—I knew he was a traitor!”

I sighed. That meant Jericho thought she was the queen, too. And he should know. He’d spent time at her court. But I knew she was the concubine. So, who had actually died in the Unseelie King’s boudoir eons ago? Had anyone? The concubine hadn’t killed herself. How had she gotten from the Silvers into Faery and ended up one day becoming the current queen? Had V’lane lied to me? Or had they all drunk from the cauldron so many times that the Fae didn’t have one bit of their own history right? Maybe someone had sabotaged their written records.

“How did you get her out of there? The Silver should have killed her.”

“Apparently the queen has the same kind of immunity to the Silver that she has to the Sinsar Dubh.” I was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly I lied. Barrons has a sharp nose for deceit. “She can touch both. It looks like the king and queen can’t cast spells that the other can’t break.” The best lies are solidly cemented in known exceptions to the rule, and by her very nature as matriarch and ruler of both courts, the queen was the universal exception to every rule that bound the lessers of the Fae court. I wasn’t above exploiting it to secure my cover until I knew beyond all shadow of a doubt what to make of myself. In his dark gaze, I saw the moment he accepted the logic of my lie.

How could I be the Unseelie King? I didn’t feel like the king. I felt like Mac, with a bunch of memories I couldn’t explain. Well, that wasn’t the entire truth. There was also that place in my head where I had nifty little things like parasitic runes of ancient origin and—I terminated that line of thought. I didn’t feel like taking a tally of all the things I couldn’t explain about myself. The list was miserably long.

He took her to the sofa, tucked blankets around her, and shoved the sofa closer to the fire and turned it on. “She’s freezing. I’ve half a mind to take her back and let the place finish her off,” he said darkly.

“We need her.”

“Maybe.” He sounded unconvinced. “Fucking fairies.”

I blinked and he was no longer by the couch—he was nose-to-nose with me. My breathing quickened. It was the first time he’d ever put his preternatural speed to full use in front of me.

He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, trailed his fingers down my cheek. He traced the shape of my lips, then let his hand fall away.

I wet my lips and looked up at him. The lust I felt when standing so close to him was almost unbearable. I wanted to lean into him. I wanted to pull his head down and kiss him. I wanted to strip, and shove him back, and be his reverse cowgirl, ride him hard until he made raw, sexy, rough sounds as he came.

“How long have you known you were the Unseelie King’s concubine?” Though his voice was soft, his words were too precise. Tension shaped his mouth. I knew every nuance of that mouth. Fury was gnawing at him and needed an outlet. “You shoved through that Silver with no doubt you’d make it through.”

My laughter held a note of hysteria. Oh, if only that was the extent of my problems!

Was I a woman, obsessed with the woman on the couch?

Or was I the male king of the Fae, obsessed with Jericho?

I consider myself open-minded about gender preference—love is love, and who’s to say how the body follows the heart?—but both of those scenarios were hard for me to accept for myself. Neither fit me like a glove, and sexuality should. When it’s right, it feels good on you, like your own skin, and the only thing that felt like skin to me was woman to man. Then there was the whole Oh, gee, I’m the screwup responsible for this whole mess. No more blaming the Unseelie King for making so many bad decisions and messing up my world. Was I the one who’d messed up theirs? If so, I bore an unbearable amount of guilt.

I raked my hair back from my face with both hands. If I kept thinking about it, I was going to lose it.

I’m not the concubine, Jericho. I’m afraid I must be some part of the Unseelie King in human form. “Not very long,” I lied. “I recognized things in the White Mansion, and I kept having dreams that made sense only if I was her. I knew there was a way to test it.”

“You bloody fool, if you’d been wrong it would have killed you!”

“But I wasn’t wrong.”

“Obtuse and illogical!”

I shrugged. Apparently I’d been a lot worse than that.

“You will never do such an idiotic thing again,” he said, muscles bunching in his jaw.

Given my track record, I was pretty sure I would. I mean, really, if I was the Unseelie King—the most powerful Fae ever—I’d somehow ended up human and clueless. That meant I was not only evil, obsessed, and destructive, I was inexcusably stupid.

He began to circle me, looking me up and down like an exotic in a zoo. “And you thought I was the king. That’s why you tried to drag me through it with you. You just can’t get enough of killing me, can you? What’s the last thing you said to me?” He mocked in falsetto: “What’s the worst that can happen? I lead you into some trap and you die for however long it is you go away?”

I said nothing. I saw little point in trying to justify myself anymore.

“I imagine it got all your little romantic notions atwitter again, didn’t it?”

“Is ‘atwitter’ even a word?”

“Did you think we were star-crossed lovers, Ms, Lane? Did you need that excuse?”

He gave me that wolf smile and I thought, Right, star-crossed lovers with a double-edged sword. Because that’s what this man was. Sharp, edgy, dangerous. With no safe side. And, yes, actually, I had thought we were star-crossed lovers. But I wasn’t about to tell him that.

I turned to circle with him, meeting that dark, hostile gaze. “I thought we resolved this in the mansion, Jericho. It’s Mac.”

“It’s Mac when I’m fucking you. The rest of the time, it’s Ms. Lane. Get used to it.”

“Boundaries, Barrons?”

“Precisely. Where’s the king, Ms. Lane?”

“You think he calls me to check in? Says, Honey, I’ll be home for dinner tonight at seven? How the hell should I know?” Which was technically the truth. Even Christian would have had a hard time with that one. I didn’t know where all his parts were.

The concubine made a faint sound and we turned to look at her.

His eyes narrowed. “I’ve got to get her out of here. I won’t have the entire Fae race trying to get past my wards. I suppose we’ll have to protect her.” His distaste couldn’t have been more evident. If given a choice between having a razor-blade enema and protecting a Fae—had it been any other Fae than the all-powerful queen—Barrons would have willingly died a few times from internal bleeding.

But she was the one Fae he wasn’t willing to sacrifice—yet.

I was definitely up for moving her somewhere else; the farther from me, the better. I’d been worried that he might try to keep her at the bookstore and had been prepared to argue that, no matter how formidable his wards were, with the two of us coming and going constantly, she’d be left alone too much to guarantee her safety. “What do you have in mind?” I said.

Half a Dani Daily flapped on a streetlamp in the chilly night breeze. I plucked it off, scanned it for the date AWC, and did some hasty calculations. If it had been posted today—which it probably hadn’t, considering its condition—the date was March 23. Maybe a week later.

I read it and smiled faintly. She’d taken the bull by the horns while I was gone. The kid feared nothing.

The bottom half had been torn off, but I didn’t need to see any more. I’d really just wanted to know the date. I’d missed her birthday. Chocolate on chocolate, she’d said. I’d planned to make her a cake myself. I’d throw a belated party for her, even if it was just the two of us.

Hardly something the Unseelie King would think about: birthday parties for humans.

“You might have all night, but some of us don’t,” Barrons growled over his shoulder.

I stuffed the paper in my pocket and hurried to catch up. We’d parked the Viper a block away. The queen wore a hooded cloak and was wrapped in blankets.

“You have all night tonight and tomorrow night and all eternity for that matter. So how long were you dead this time?” I asked, needling him.

The rattle moved in his throat.

I took a perverse pleasure in irritating him. “A day? Three? Five? What does it depend on? How badly you’re injured?”

“If I were you, Ms. Lane, I’d never bring that up again. You think you’re suddenly a major player because you went through that Silver—”

“I left Christian at the mirror. I found him in the prison,” I cut him off.

His mouth snapped shut, then, “Why the fuck does it always take you so long to tell me the important things?”

“Because there are always so many important things,” I said defensively. “Her hair’s dragging again.”

“Pick it up. My hands are full.”

“I’m not touching her.”

He shot me a look. “Issues much, Ms. Concubine?”

“She’s not even the real queen,” I said irritably. “Not the one that ruined the concubine’s life. I just don’t like Fae. I’m a sidhe-seer, remember?”

“Are you?”

“Why are you so pissed at me? It’s not my fault who I am. The only thing that’s my fault is what I choose to do with it.”

He gave me a sidelong glance that said, That might be the only intelligent thing you’ve said tonight.

I looked past him to the wrecked façade of Chester’s ahead, and for a moment it looked eerily like a ruin of standing stones, black against a blue-black sky, from a faraway time and another place. A full moon hung above it, wearing a halo of crimson, round fat face splattered with craters of blood. More Fae changes in our world.

“When you get inside, go to the stairs and one of them will escort you up. Go directly to the stairs,” he said pointedly. “Try not to get in trouble or cause a riot on the way.”

“I don’t think that’s a fair statement. Life isn’t always chaotic around me.”

“Like when isn’t it?”

“Like when I’m …” I thought a minute. “Alone,” I finished pissily. “Or asleep.” I didn’t ask about my parents. It felt … wrong, as if I no longer had any right to ask questions about Jack and Rainey Lane. It made my heart hurt. “Where are you going?”

“I’ll meet you inside.”

“Because if I knew whatever secret back entrance you’re about to use,” I said sarcastically, “I might broadcast it to all the Fae, is that it?” He trusted me even less now that he thought I was the king’s mortal lover. How would he treat me if he thought I was the Big Bad himself?

“Move it, Ms. Lane,” was all he said.

I descended into the belly of the whale to find it crammed to the gills with humans and Unseelie—standing room only at Chester’s tonight.

I couldn’t be the king. These would be my “children.” I didn’t feel remotely paternal. I felt homicidal. That sealed it. I was human. I had no idea why the mirror had let me through, but eventually I’d figure it out.

I glanced around, shocked. Things had changed while I’d been gone. The world just kept morphing into something new without me.

There were Seelie in Chester’s now, too. Not many, and it didn’t look like they were getting the warmest welcome from the Unseelie, but I’d already spotted a dozen, and the humans were going crazy over them. Two of those horrid little monsters that made you laugh yourself to death were dive-bombing the crowd, clutching tiny drinks that sloshed over the rims as they flew. Three of those blinding-light trailers were whizzing through the masses. In a cage suspended from the ceiling, naked men danced, writhing in sexual ecstasy, fanned by ethereal, gossamer-winged nymphs.

I continued scanning the club and stiffened. On an elevated platform, in the sub-club that catered to those with a taste for very young humans, stood the golden god who’d comforted Dree’lia when V’lane had taken her mouth away.

It was all I could do not to march over there, stab him with my spear, and denounce V’lane as a traitor.

Then I had a better idea.

I pushed through the crowd, pulled myself up next to him, and said, “Hey, remember me?”

He ignored me. I imagined he heard that a lot if he’d been coming here awhile. I stood beside him, looking out over the sea of heads.

“I’m the woman that was with Darroc the night we met in the street. I need you to summon V’lane.”

The golden god’s head swiveled. Disdain stamped his immortal features. “Summon. V’lane. Those two words do not go together in any language, human.”

“I had his name in my tongue until Barrons sucked it out. I need him. Now.” This golden god might have disconcerted me once, but I had a spear in my holster and a black secret in my heart, and nothing disconcerted me anymore. I wanted V’lane here, now. He had a few things to answer for.

“V’lane did not give you his name.”

“On multiple occasions. And his fury with you will know no bounds if he learns I asked you to get him for me and you refused.”

He regarded me in stony silence.

I shrugged. “Fine. Your call. Just remember what he did to Dree’lia.” I turned and walked away.

He was in front of me.

“Hey, what the fuck ya think ya doing? No sifting in the club!” someone cried. The golden god jerked and disentangled himself from the arm that he’d materialized around. It seemed to slide from his body, as if the section containing it had abruptly become energy, not matter.

The guy the arm belonged to was young, with a faux-hawk, a petulant expression, and twitchy, restless eyes. He clutched his offended appendage, rubbing it as if it had gone to sleep. Then he seemed to see what had just sifted in next to him and his eyes rounded almost comically.

A drink appeared in the golden god’s hand. He offered it to the guy with a murmured regret. “I did not mean to break the rules of the club. Your arm will be fine in a moment.”

“S’cool, man,” the guy gushed as he accepted the drink. “No worries.” He stared up at the Fae worshipfully. “What can I do for ya?” he said breathlessly. “I mean, man, I’d do anything, ya know? Anything at all!”

The golden god bent down, leaning close. “Would you die for me?”

“Anything, man! But will you take me to Faery first?”

I leaned in behind the golden god and pressed my mouth to his ear. “There’s a spear in a holster beneath my arm. You broke a rule and sifted. I bet that means I can break a rule, too. You want to try it?”

He made that hissing Fae sound of distaste. But he eased away and stood straight.

“Be a good little fairy,” I purred, “and go get V’lane for me.” I hesitated, weighing my next words. “Tell him I have some news about the Sinsar Dubh.”

Laughter and all voices died; the club fell silent.

Movement ceased.

I glanced around, absorbing it. It was as if the entire place had been freeze-framed by the mere mention of the Sinsar Dubh.

Though the club was a bubble frozen in time, I swore I felt eyes resting heavily on me. Was there some kind of charm cast over this place so that if someone uttered the name of the king’s forbidden Book, everyone but the person who’d spoken the words and the person who’d laid the spell would momentarily freeze?

I scanned the sub-clubs.

Air hissed between my teeth. Two tiered dance floors down, a man in an impeccable white suit was holding frozen court in a kingly white chair, surrounded by dozens of white-clad attendants.

I hadn’t seen him since that night long ago, when Barrons and I had searched Casa Blanc. But, like me, he wasn’t frozen.

McCabe nodded to me across the sea of statues.

Just as suddenly as everything had frozen, life resumed.

“You have offended me, human,” the golden god was saying, “and I will kill you for the slight. Not here. Not tonight. But soon.”

“Sure, whatever,” I muttered. “Just get him here.” I turned away and began shoving my way through the crowd, but by the time I reached the kingly white chair, McCabe was gone.

I had to pass the sub-club where the dreamy-eyed guy tended bar to get to the stairs. “Directly,” construed as a geographical command, didn’t preclude stopping along the way and, since I was parched and had a few questions about a tarot card, I rapped my knuckles on the counter for a shot.

I could barely remember what it felt like to mix drinks and party with my friends, jam-packed with ignorance and shiny dreams.

Five stools down, a top hat gauzed with cobwebs was a dark, unused chimney badly in need of sweeping. Strawlike hair swept shoulders that were as bony as broomsticks in a pin-striped suit. The fear dorcha was hanging with the dreamy-eyed guy again. Creepy.

Nobody was sitting next to it. The top hat rotated my way as I took a seat, four empty stools away. A deck of tarot cards was artfully arranged in its suit pocket, a natty handkerchief, cards fanned. Knobbed ankles crossed, displaying patent-leather shoes with shiny, pointy toes.

“Weight of the world on your shoulders?” it called like a carny selling chances at a booth.

I stared into the swirling dark tornado beneath the brim of the top hat. Fragments of a face—half a green eye and brow, part of a nose—appeared and vanished like scraps of pictures torn from a magazine, momentarily slapped up against a window, then torn off by the next storm gust. I suddenly knew the debonair and eerie prop was as ancient as the Fae themselves. Did the fear dorcha make the hat, or did the hat make the fear dorcha?

Because my parents raised me to be polite and old habits die hard, it was difficult to hold my tongue. But the mistake of speaking to it was not one I’d make twice.

“Relationships got you down?” it cried, with the inflated exuberance of an OxiClean commercial. I half-expected helpful visual aids to manifest in midair as he hawked his wares—whatever they were.

I rolled my eyes. One could certainly say that.

“Might be just what you need is a night on the town!” it enthused in a too-bright voice.

I snorted.

It unfolded itself from the stool, proffering long bony arms and skeletal hands. “Give us a dance, luv. I’m told I’m quite the Fred Astaire.” It tapped out a quick step and bent low at the waist, thin arms flamboyantly wide.

A shot of whiskey slid down the counter. I tossed it back swiftly.

“See you learned your lesson, beautiful girl.”

“Been learning a lot lately.”

“All ears.”

“Tarot deck was my life. How’s that?”

“Told you. Prophecies. All shapes.”

“Why’d you give me THE WORLD?”

“Didn’t. Would you like me to?”

“You flirting with me?”

“If I was?”

“Might run screaming.”

“Smart girl.”

We laughed.

“Seen Christian lately?”

“Yes.”

His hands stilled on the bottles and he waited.

“Think he’s turning into something.”

“All things change.”

“Think he’s becoming Unseelie.”

“Fae. Like starfish, beautiful girl.”

“How’s that?”

“Grow back missing parts.”

“What are you saying?”

“Balance. World lists toward it.”

“Thought it was entropy.”

“Implies innate idiocy. People are. Universes aren’t.”

“So if an Unseelie Prince dies, someone will eventually replace it? If not a Fae, a human?”

“Hear princesses are dead, too.”

I gagged. Would human women be changed by eating Unseelie and end up becoming them in time? What else would the Fae steal from my world? Well, er, actually, what would I and my—I changed the subject swiftly. “Who gave me the card?”

He jerked a thumb at the fear dorcha.

I didn’t believe that for a minute. “What am I supposed to get from it?”

“Ask him.”

“You told me not to.”

“That’s a problem.”

“Solution?”

“Maybe it’s not about the world.”

“What else could it be about?”

“Got eyes, BG, use them.”

“Got a mouth, DEG, use it.”

He moved away, tossing bottles like a professional juggler. I watched his hands fly, trying to figure out how to get him to talk.

He knew things. I could smell it. He knew a lot of things.

Five shot glasses settled on the counter. He splashed them full and slid them five ways with enviable precision.

I glanced up into the mirror behind the bar that angled down and reflected the sleek black bar top. I saw myself. I saw the fear dorcha. I saw dozens of other patrons gathered at the counter. It wasn’t a busy bar. This was one of the smaller, less popular sub-clubs. There was no sex or violence to be found here, only cobwebs and tarot cards.

The dreamy-eyed guy was absent in the reflection. I saw glasses and bottles sparkling as they flipped in the air but no one tossing them.

I glanced down at him, pouring high and flashy.

Back up. There was no reflection.

I tapped my empty shot glass on the counter. Another one clinked into it. I sipped this one, watching him, waiting for him to return.

He took his time.

“Look conflicted, beautiful girl.”

“I don’t see you in the mirror.”

“Maybe I don’t see you, either.”

I froze. Was that possible? Was I missing in the mirror?

He laughed. “Just kidding. You’re there.”

“Not funny.”

“Not my mirror.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not responsible for what it shows. Or doesn’t.”

“Who are you?”

“Who are you?”

I narrowed my eyes. “Somehow I got the idea you were trying to help me. Guess I was wrong.”

“Help. Dangerous medicine.”

“How?”

“Hard to gauge the right dose. Especially if there’s more than one doctor.”

I sucked in a breath. The dreamy-eyed guy’s eyes were no longer dreamy. They were … I stared. They were … I caught my lower lip with my teeth and bit down. What was I looking at? What was happening to me?

He was no longer behind the counter but sitting on a bar stool beside me, to my left, no—to my right. No, he was on the stool with me. There he was—behind me, mouth pressed to my ear.

“Too much falsely inflates. Too little underprepares. The finest surgeon has butterfly fingers. Airy. Delicate.”

Like his fingers on my hair. The touch was mesmerizing. “Am I the Unseelie King?” I whispered.

Laughter as soft as moth wings filled my ears and muddied my mind, stirring silt from the dregs of my soul. “No more than I.” He was back behind the bar. “The cantankerous one comes,” he said, with a nod toward the stairs.

I looked to see Barrons descending. When I looked back, the dreamy-eyed guy was no more visible than his reflection.

“I was coming,” I said irritably. Fingers handcuffed around my wrist, Barrons dragged me toward the stairs.

“What part of ‘directly’ didn’t you understand?”

“Same part of ‘play well with others’ you never understand, O cantankerous one,” I muttered.

He laughed, surprising me. I never know what’s going to make him laugh. At the oddest moments, he seems to find humor in his own bad temper.

“I’d be a lot less cantankerous if you admitted you wanted to fuck me and we got down to it.”

Lust ripped through me. Barrons said “fuck” and I was ready. “That’s all it would take to put you in a good humor?”

“It’d go a long way.”

“Are we having a conversation, Barrons? Where you actually express feelings?”

“If you want to call a hard dick feelings, Ms. Lane.”

A sudden commotion at the entrance to the club, two levels above us, caught his attention. He was taller than me and could see over the crowd. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” His face hardened as he stared up at the balconied foyer.

“What? Who?” I said, bouncing on my tiptoes to try to see. “Is it V’lane?”

“Why would it be—” He glared down at me. “I stripped his name from your tongue. There hasn’t been an opportunity for you to get it back again.”

“I told one of his court to go get him. Don’t look at me like that. I want to know what’s going on.”

“What’s going on, Ms. Lane, is that you found the Seelie Queen in the Unseelie prison. What’s going on—given the condition she’s in—is that V’lane’s obviously been lying about her whereabouts for months now, and that can mean only one thing.”

“That it was impossible for me to permit the court to know that the queen was missing, and has been missing for many human years,” V’lane said tightly behind us, his voice hushed. “They would have fallen apart. Without her reining them in, a dozen different factions would have assaulted your world. There has long been unrest in Faery. But this is hardly the place to discuss such matters.”

Barrons and I turned as one.

“Velvet told me you required my presence, MacKayla,” V’lane continued, “but he said your news was of the Book, not of our liege.” He searched my face with a coolness I hadn’t seen since I’d first met him. I supposed my method of summoning him had offended. Fae are so prickly. “Have you truly found her? Is she alive? In every spare moment, I have searched for her. It has prevented me from attending you as I wished.”

“Velvet is a Fae name?”

“His true name is unpronounceable in your tongue. Is she here?”

I nodded.

“I must see her. How does she fare?”

Barrons’ hand shot out and closed around V’lane’s throat. “You lying fuck.”

V’lane grabbed Barron’s arm with one hand, his throat with the other.

I stared, fascinated. I was so discombobulated by recent developments that I hadn’t even realized Barrons and V’lane were standing face-to-face on a crowded dance floor for what was probably the first time in all eternity—close enough to kill each other. Well, close enough for Barrons to kill V’lane. Barrons was staring at the Fae prince as if he’d finally caught a fire ant that had been torturing him for centuries while he’d lay spread-eagled on the desert, coated in honey. V’lane was glaring at Barrons as if he couldn’t believe he’d be so stupid.

“We have larger concerns than your personal grievances,” V’lane said with icy disdain. “If you cannot remove your head from your ass and see that, you deserve what will happen to your world.”

“Maybe I don’t care what happens to the world.”

V’lane’s head swiveled my way, cool appraisal in his gaze. “I have permitted you to retain your spear, MacKayla. You will not let him harm me. Kill him—”

Barrons squeezed. “I said shut up.”

“He has the fourth stone,” I reminded Barrons. “We need him.”

“Keltars!” V’lane said, staring up at the foyer. He hissed through his teeth.

“I know. Big fucking party tonight,” said Barrons.

“Where? Is that who just came in?” I said.

Barrons leaned closer to V’lane and sniffed him. His nostrils flared, as if he found the scent both repulsive and perfect for a fine, bloody filet.

“Where is she?” a man roared. The accent was Scottish, like Christian’s but thicker.

V’lane ordered, “Shut him up before his next question is, ‘Where is the queen,’ and every Unseelie in this place discovers she is here.”

Barrons moved too fast for me to see. One second, V’lane was his usual gorgeous self, then his nose was crushed and gushing blood. Barrons said, “Next time, fairy,” and was gone.

“I said, where the bloody hell is the—”

I heard a grunt, then the sound of fists and more grunts, and all hell broke loose at Chester’s.

“I doona give a bloody damn what you think. She’s our responsibility—”

“And a hell of a job you’ve done with her—”

“She’s my queen and she’s not going anywhere with—”

“—so far, losing her to the fucking Unseelie.”

“—and we’ll be taking her back to Scotland with us, where she can be watched o’er properly.”

“—a pair of inept humans, she belongs in Faery.”

“I’ll send you back to Faery, fairy, in a fucking—”

“Remember the missing stone, mongrel.”

I looked from the Scotsman, to Barrons, to V’lane, watching the three of them argue. They’d been covering the same ground with no new developments for the past five minutes. V’lane kept demanding she be turned over to him, the Scot kept insisting he was taking her back to Scotland, but I knew Barrons. He wasn’t going to let either of them have her. Not only did he trust no one, the queen of the Fae was a powerful trump card.

“How the fuck did you even know she was here?” Barrons demanded.

V’lane, whose nose was once again perfect, said, “MacKayla summoned me. As I walked up behind you, I heard you, as anyone else might have. You jeopardize her life with your carelessness.”

“Not you,” Barrons growled. “The Highlander.”

The Scot said, “Nearly five years past, she visited Cian in the Dreaming, telling him she would be here this eve. The queen herself ordered us to collect her, from this address on this night. We have irrefutable claim. We are the Keltar and wear the mantle of protection for the Fae. You will turn her over to us now.”

I almost laughed, but something about the two Scots made me think twice about it. They looked like they’d been traveling hard through rough terrain and hadn’t showered or shaved in days. Words like “patience” and “diplomacy” were not in their vocabulary. They thought in terms of objectives and results—and the fewer things between the two, the better. They were like Barrons: driven, focused, ruthless.

Both were shirtless and heavily tattooed—Lor and another of Barrons’ men I hadn’t seen before had made all of us strip down to clothing that couldn’t conceal a book, before permitting us access to the upper level of the club. Now the five of us stood, partially dressed, in an unfurnished glass cubicle.

The one arguing, Dageus, was all long, smooth muscle, with the fast, graceful movements of a big cat and cheetah-gold eyes. His black hair was so long it brushed his belt—not that he needed one, in hip-slimming black leather pants. He sported a cut lip and a shiner on his right cheek from the skirmish that had begun at the door and spread like a contagion through several sub-clubs. It had taken five of Barrons’ men to get things back under control. Being able to move like the wind gave them a tremendous advantage. They didn’t warn the patrons to stop fighting—they simply appeared and killed them. Once humans and Fae figured out what was happening, the outbreak of violence ended as quickly as it had begun.

The other Scot, Cian, had yet to speak a word and had escaped the brawl without a mark, but with all the red and black ink on his torso, I’m not sure I would have noticed blood. He was massive, with bunched short muscles, the kind a man gets from weight training in a gym or working off a long prison sentence. His shoulders were enormous, his stomach flat; he had piercings, one of his tattoos said JESSI. I wondered what kind of woman could make a man like him want to tattoo her name on his chest.

These were the uncles Christian had talked about, the men who’d broken into the Welshman’s castle the night Barrons and I had tried to steal the amulet, the ones who’d performed the ritual with Barrons on Halloween. They were nothing like any uncles I’d ever seen. I’d expected time-softened relatives in their late thirties or forties, but these were time-hardened men of barely thirty, with a dangerous, sexy edge. Both had an unfocused distance in their eyes, as if they’d seen things so disturbing that only by refocusing with everything slightly out of focus could they gaze on the world and bear it.

I wondered if my own eyes were beginning to look like that.

“One thing’s for certain: She doesna belong with you,” Dageus said to Barrons.

“How do you figure, Highlander?”

“We protect the Fae and he is Fae, which gives both of us greater claim than you.”

I felt someone staring at me, hard, and looked around. V’lane was watching me, eyes narrowed. So far everyone had been so busy arguing about what to do with the queen that no one had bothered asking how I’d found her or how I’d gotten her out of the prison. I suspected that was what V’lane was wondering now.

He knew the legend of the king’s Silver. He knew only two could pass through it—unless I’d serendipitously stumbled on a truth with my lie and whoever was the current queen was immune to the king’s magic, which I doubted. The one person the king would have wanted to protect the concubine from the most would have been the Seelie Queen. He’d barred his castle against the original, vindictive queen the day she’d come to his fortress and they’d argued. He’d forbidden any Seelie from ever entering it. I had no doubt he’d used the same spells or worse on the Silver that connected his boudoir to the concubine’s. V’lane had to be wondering if he had any idea who their queen really was, who I really was, or if maybe their entire history was as suspect and inaccurate as ours. Regardless, V’lane knew something about me wasn’t what it seemed.

Besides myself, only Christian knew the queen was really the concubine. And only I knew of this duality inside me that could be neatly explained away if I was the other half of their royal equation.

After a long, measuring moment, he gave me a tight nod.

What the hell did that mean? That for now he would keep his silence and not raise any questions that might further muddy already-muddied waters? I nodded back as if I had some clue what we were nodding about.

“You couldn’t even perform the bloody ritual to keep the walls up and you want me to trust you with the queen? And you,” Barrons turned on V’lane, who was maintaining a careful distance, “will never get her from me. As far as I’m concerned, you put her in the coffin she was found in.”

“Why don’t you ask the queen yourself?” V’lane suggested coolly. “It was not I, as she will tell you.”

“Conveniently for you, she’s not talking.”

“Is she injured?”

“How would I know? I don’t even know what you fucks are made of.”

“Why would anyone put her in the Unseelie prison?” I said.

“ ’Tis a slow but certain way to kill her, lass,” Dageus said. “The Unseelie prison is the opposite of all she is and, as such, leaches her very life essence.”

“If someone wanted her dead, there are quicker ways,” I protested.

“Maybe whoever took her couldn’t get the spear or sword.”

That ruled out V’lane. He took it from me regularly, like now. Darroc did, too. Whoever had taken the queen captive had to have been powerful enough to take her but not powerful enough to get the spear or sword, two conditions that seemed mutually exclusive. Was it possible her kidnapper had a reason to want to kill her slowly?

“V’lane told me all the Seelie Princesses are dead,” I said. “There’s a Fae legend that says if all successors to the queen’s power are dead, the True Magic of their race would be forced to pass to their most powerful male. What if someone was trying to time taking possession of the Sinsar Dubh with killing all the female royalty, ending with Aoibheal herself, so when the queen died, he would end up with not only the power of the Unseelie King but the True Magic of the queen, making him the first patriarchal ruler of their race? Who is the most powerful male?”

All heads swiveled toward V’lane.

“What do you humans say? I have it: Oh, please,” he said drily. The look he gave me was equal parts anger and reproach. As if to say, I’m sitting on your secrets, don’t turn on me. “It is a legend, nothing more. I have served Aoibheal for my entire existence and I serve her now.”

“Why did you lie about her location?” Dageus demanded.

“I have been masking her absence for many human years to prevent a Fae civil war. With the princesses dead, there is no clear successor.”

Many human years? It was the second time he’d said as much, but the ramifications only now penetrated. I stared at him. He’d told me far more than just one lie. On Halloween, he’d told me he had been otherwise occupied, carrying his queen to safety. Where had he really been that night when I’d so desperately needed him? I wanted to know right now, demand answers, but there was already too much going on here, and when I interrogated him, it would be on my terms, my turf.

“And just how did they die?” Barrons said.

V’lane sighed. “They vanished when she did.” He looked at me again.

I blinked. His gaze held sorrow—and a promise that we would talk soon.

“Convenient for you, fairy.”

V’lane cut Barrons a look of disdain. “Look beyond the tip of your mortal nose. The Unseelie Princes are easily as powerful—if not more so—than I. And the Unseelie King himself is far stronger than us all. The magic would most certainly go to him, wherever he is. I have nothing to gain by harming my queen and everything to lose. You must let me have her. If she was in the Unseelie prison the entire time that she has been missing, she may be very close to death. You must permit me to take her to Faery, to regain her strength!”

“Never going to happen.”

“Then you will be responsible for killing our queen,” V’lane said bitterly.

“And how do I know that’s not what you’ve been after all along?”

“You despise us all. You would allow the queen to die to satisfy your own petty vengeances.”

I wanted to know what Barrons’ petty vengeances were. But I was feeling that damned duality again. What was unfolding here wasn’t remotely what anyone thought. Only I knew the truth.

This was not the queen they were fighting over. It was the concubine from hundreds of thousands of years ago, who’d somehow ended up becoming the Seelie Queen. Had the king finally gotten what he’d hoped for? Had protracted time in Faery made his beloved Fae? Had the balance that the world “listed” toward, as the dreamy-eyed guy proposed, turned a mortal into a replacement queen, as it would ultimately turn Christian into a replacement prince?

If I was the king, why didn’t that elate me? The concubine was finally Fae! I shook my head. I couldn’t think that way. It just didn’t work for me. “Mac,” I muttered. “Just be Mac.”

Barrons cut me a hard look that said, Shelve it for later, Ms. Concubine.

“Look, boys,” I said. Four ancient sets of eyes skewered me, and I blinked at the two Scotsmen. “Oh, you two aren’t at all what you seem to be, are you?”

“Is anyone in this room?” Barrons said irritably. “What’s your point?”

“She’s safest here,” I said succinctly.

“That’s what I’ve been saying all along,” Barrons growled. “This level is warded the same way the bookstore is. Nothing can sift in—”

V’lane hissed.

“—or out. Nothing Seelie or Unseelie can get to her. We don’t let anyone enter the room clothed. Rainey is nursing—”

“You put her in with my parents?” I said incredulously. “People are visiting naked?”

“Where else would I put her?”

“The queen of the Faery is in that glass room with my mom and dad?” My voice was rising. I didn’t care.

He shrugged. His eyes said, Not really, and we both know that. You aren’t even from this world.

Mine said, I don’t give a shit who I might have been in another lifetime. I know who I am now.

“It takes time and resources to ward a place as well as the room where Jack and Rainey are. We’re not duplicating our efforts,” he said.

“Castle Keltar was warded by the queen herself,” Dageus said. “Far from Dublin, where the Sinsar Dubh seems inclined to prowl, ’tis the better choice.”

“She stays. Not open to discussion. You don’t like that, try to take her,” Barrons said flatly, and in his dark eyes I saw anticipation. He hoped they would. He was in the mood for a fight. Everyone in the room was. Even me, I was startled to realize. I had a sudden, unwanted appreciation of men. I had a problem I couldn’t fix. But if I could create a manageable problem, like a fistfight, and kick the shit out of it, it sure would make me feel better for a while.

“If she stays, we stay,” Dageus said flatly. “We guard her here or we guard her there. But we guard her.”

“And if they stay, I stay, too.” V’lane’s voice dripped ice. “No human will protect my queen so long as I exist.”

“Simple solution to that, fairy. I make you stop existing.”

“The Seelie are not our enemy. You touch him, you take us all on.”

“You think I couldn’t, Highlander?”

For a moment the tension in the room was unbearable, and in my mind’s eye I saw us all going for one another’s throats.

Barrons was the only one of us that couldn’t be killed. I needed the Scotsmen to perform the re-interment ritual and V’lane and his stone to help corner the Book. A fight right now was a very bad idea.

“And that’s settled,” I chirped brightly. “Everyone’s staying. Welcome to the Chester’s Hilton! Let’s get some beds made up.”

Barrons looked at me as if I’d gone mad.

“Then let’s go out and find some things to kill,” I added.

Dageus and Cian growled assent, and even V’lane looked relieved.

32

I stepped out of the shower and looked at myself in the mirror. Since dragging my aching body up the back stairs of BB&B to my bedroom twenty minutes ago, my bruises had faded by forty percent. I traced my fingers across a particularly bad one on my collarbone. I’d thought I heard a crack and was worried something had broken, but it was only a hot, swollen contusion and was healing remarkably fast.

What was with me? I might have suspected it was something to do with my being … well, Not the Concubine, but I’d never healed like this when I was a kid. I’d run around with skinned knees constantly.

Was McCabe one of my parts? Was that why he hadn’t frozen, too? Could the dreamy-eyed guy be a part? Who else? How many parts did Not the Concubine have?

“I am not the king,” I said out loud. “There’s some other explanation.” There had to be. I simply wouldn’t accept it.

Tonight had been a rush. We’d run into Jayne, his guardians, and Dani near Fourteenth and cut a wide swath through the city. Dageus, Cian, and V’lane had pummeled; Dani and I had sliced and diced. Barrons had done whatever it was he did, but he’d done it too fast for me to see. After a time I’d stopped trying, too lost in my own bloodlust.

When I’d finally quit counting, the death toll had been in the hundreds.

How could it feel so good to kill Unseelie if I was their creator?

“See? More proof I’m not,” I told myself in the mirror with a nod. My reflection nodded sagely back. I selected the medium heat setting on my dryer and began to blow-dry my hair.

The Unseelie had retreated. Word of us had spread through the streets and they’d withdrawn from combat, flapped, sifted, and slithered away. I guess after being locked up for their entire existence, they were in no hurry to die now that they were free. I’d left Barrons, the two Keltar, and V’lane looking remarkably unsatisfied and about to fall at one another’s throats. I’d been tired, sore, and beyond caring. If they were stupid enough to kill each other, they deserved the resultant problems it would create.

As I slipped into pajamas, a pebble rattled against my bedroom window.

I was so not in the mood for V’lane right now. Yes, I had questions, but tonight was not the night to ask them. I needed rest and a clear head. I kicked away the backpack, crawled in bed and pulled the covers over my head to block out the blazing light from five lamps. The Shades were supposedly gone. “Supposedly” isn’t a word I live with well.

Another pebble.

I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for it to stop.

Five minutes of incessant pebbles later, a stone crashed through my window, spraying glass and scaring the hell out of me.

I shot up in bed and glared at the mess on the floor. I couldn’t even march over and snap his head off. I had to dig around for shoes first.

A chilly breeze flapped the curtains.

I tugged on boots and crunched to the window. “I’m not talking to you until you fix the damned glass, V’lane,” I snapped. Then, “Oh!”

A cloaked, hooded figure stood in the alley below, and for a moment it reminded me of Mallucé. Dark robes swirled in a gossamer cloud as the figure moved jerkily forward, as if every step was agony. The exterior spotlights gleamed across the cloak, and I saw it was fashioned of frothy light chiffon.

My first thought was of the Sinsar Dubh, hiding somewhere beneath those many secretive folds.

“Drop the cloak. I want to see hands, everything.”

I heard a sharp inhalation, a wheeze of agony. Arms moved with arthritic carefulness, loosening a brooch at the throat. The hood fell and the cloak rustled to the ground.

I nearly vomited. I bit back a scream. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. It was Fiona, in the badly mutilated flesh.

“Merssseee.” Skinned lips parted on a sibilant hiss.

I turned away from the window and leaned back against the sill, hand over my mouth. My eyes were closed, but there was no escape. I could see her on the backs of my lids.

She’d tried to kill me, in what seemed another lifetime. She’d taken up with Derek O’Bannion, then Darroc.

All because she loved Jericho Barrons.

The night the Book had brought her to my balcony, skinned alive, I’d wondered if all the Unseelie she’d eaten would keep her from dying. Eating Unseelie has remarkable healing properties. But apparently growing a new human skin—or maybe healing from any magical injury the Sinsar Dubh had inflicted—was beyond its ability.

“I thought the Book killed everyone it possessed,” I said finally. My words rang out in the hushed night.

“It has … different appetites for … us … who eat Unseelie.” Her pained voice floated up.

“It killed Darroc. He ate Unseelie.”

“Silencing … him. For what … he knew.”

“Which was?”

“If only … I knew. I would …” She made a garbled sound, and I assumed from the wheezes and moans that she was stooping to retrieve her cloak. I tried to imagine what would hurt worse on flayed flesh—the cold night breeze or clothes. Both would be a walking hell. I couldn’t imagine how she stood the pain.

I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.

“Try it … myself,” she finally continued, “pray it … killed me … too.”

“Why are you here?” I turned and stared down at her. Although she’d put her cloak back on, she’d left the hood down.

“Can’t heal.” Gray eyes shimmered with constant pain in bloody sockets. Even her lids were gone. “Can’t die. Tried … everything.”

“Still eating Unseelie?”

“Dulls … pain.”

“It’s probably what’s keeping you alive.”

“Too … late.”

“You mean you think you’ve been eating it so long that even if you stopped now you might not die?”

“Yesss.”

I considered that. Depending on how much she’d eaten, it was possible. Mallucé had been marbled with Fae like a steak with fat. Maybe even if she stopped entirely, she would never be fully human again. I’d eaten it only twice in my life and hoped it had passed from my body forever.

“Can’t find …” Her gaze drifted to the abandoned Dark Zone, and I understood that she’d hunted for a Shade to kill her. But they’d moved on long ago to greener pastures, literally, and she didn’t look capable of walking very far. I couldn’t imagine her driving a car, sitting on that flayed flesh. I shuddered. “Only spear … sword … will—”

“—make the Fae parts quit keeping you alive,” I finished. I looked away, stared out over the roof of Barrons’ garage at the hundreds of dark roofs beyond. “You want me to kill you.” There was a terribly irony here.

“Yesss.”

“Why not try Dani? Don’t you think you might have better luck there?”

“Said no.”

I blinked. She’d actually known about Dani, found her, and Dani had refused?

“Said … you had to …”

“And you think I have mercy?”

“Can’t … look … at me.”

I jerked my gaze back to her skinned face. “I can ignore you for the rest of my life.” But it wasn’t true. And she knew it.

“Merssseee,” she hissed again.

I punched the ledge of the window.

There were no easy choices anymore. I didn’t want to go down there and look at her. I didn’t want to stab her. I couldn’t possibly let her go on suffering if I could do something about it, and I could.

I gazed longingly at my bed. I wanted nothing more than to crawl back in.

My window was broken. The room would be freezing in no time.

I reached for my holster, strapped it on over my pajama top, slid the spear beneath my arm, grabbed a coat from the chair, and headed for the stairs.

I had a small epiphany on the way down.

My spear would kill the Fae parts of Fiona, granting her the ultimate demise she wished, but very slowly. It had taken months for Mallucé to die. When I stabbed a Fae, it was entirely Fae and died swiftly. But when a human eats Unseelie, it laces the human’s body with pockets and threads of immortal flesh, and there’s no way to stab each and every thread or pocket, so the wound works instead like a slow poison. I wonder if whoever created the immortal-slaying weapons deliberately designed them that way, to carry out a horrific punishment for a horrific crime.

However, there was another potential method of execution that would either kill her instantly—or answer a question I badly wanted answered.

The entire time I’d been fighting tonight, I’d been thinking about it.

I wanted to test the Silver in the White Mansion.

Maybe lots of people and Fae could go through it.

I’d been considering taking an Unseelie captive and forcing it into the Silver.

Now I didn’t have to. I had a volunteer.

And, even better, she was mostly human.

If Fiona could pass through the king’s Silver without dying, that would mean the legend was a bluff.

It killed Barrons.

I shrugged. That might have been an anomaly. Barrons defied the laws of physics. Maybe humans could pass through it just fine. Maybe the Unseelie King hadn’t warded it as well as he thought he had. Maybe humans from our planet were different from his mortal concubine, and how could you ward against something you didn’t even know existed? All I knew was I wasn’t the king, and here was my chance to prove it. I hated losing more time, but my peace of mind was worth losing time for.

I stepped into the alley and moved slowly toward her. “Hood up.”

She made a sound that was almost laughter but made no move to lift it.

“Do you want to die? If so, hood up.”

Eyes hot with hate, moving stiffly and with painstaking care, she adjusted the fabric to shadow her face.

As she put her arms back down, a gust of wind blew the stench of her straight into my nostrils. I gagged. She smelled of blood and decaying flesh with a strong medicinal odor, as if she was eating painkillers by the handful.

“Follow me.”

“Where?”

“The spear will kill you, but it will do so slowly. I might have a way to kill you instantly.”

The hood turned toward me as if she was searching my face to divine my motives.

Daddy told me once that we believe others are capable of the worst we ourselves are capable of. Fiona was wondering if I might be as cruel to her as she’d have been to me in the same position.

“It will be hell for you to have to walk there. But I think you’d rather spend twenty minutes getting there to die than the weeks or even months it could take to die from the spear wound. Because of the Unseelie you’ve been eating, you’ll die slowly.”

“Spear … not instant?” There was shock in her voice.

“No.”

I knew the moment she accepted it. When I turned and headed for the Silver in the brick wall, she followed. I heard the soft swish of her cloak behind me.

“There’s a price, though. If you really want to die, you’re going to have to tell me everything you know about—”

“I can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I?” Barrons said. “Where the hell do you think you’re going this time, Ms. Lane? And who is that with you?”

The three of us went in together.

It was one of the most awkward, uncomfortable walks I’ve taken.

I had one of those outside-my-skin-watching-from-above moments. Eight months ago, when I’d first ducked into BB&B, seeking sanctuary from my first encounter with a Dark Zone, I’d never have imagined this moment: pushing into a brick wall behind the bookstore—I mean, really, a brick wall!—with the badly skinned and heavily narcotized woman who’d run BB&B with Barrons, who was waiting for me to put him in a good mood again with sex and who turned into a nine-foot-tall beast on occasion, all so I could find out if I was the king and creator of the monsters that had overtaken my world. If I’d thought my life would come to this, I’d have marched straight for the airport that day and flown back home.

Fiona hadn’t uttered a syllable since Barrons had appeared in the alley. She’d drawn her hood tightly around her face. I couldn’t imagine what she had to be feeling as she marched to her suicide between the man she’d loved to her own destruction and the woman she believed had taken him from her.

At first, Barrons had disagreed with my plan vehemently.

He’d wanted to use the spear and kill her without going back into the Silvers and wasting weeks, possibly months, doing it. But after I pulled him aside and explained that she was the perfect test, he’d reluctantly agreed, and I realized that he, too, hoped the legend was an erroneous myth.

Why? He thought I was the concubine. Considering what I was afraid I was, the concubine didn’t seem like such a bad thing to be.

Unless he’d concluded that, if I was the concubine, the king himself was destined to come for me at some point, and that was one foe he might not be able to take on, even in beast form. Perhaps he worried that the king would take his OOP detector, and then where would he be?

But if you ask her one thing about me, Ms. Lane, he’d murmured against my ear, I’ll kill her where we stand, and you won’t get your little test.

I glanced at him from the corner of my eye. Could he? In the same way he killed Fae, whatever it was? Yet he didn’t offer it as mercy. I wondered what he was feeling as we moved down a rosy corridor. Did he mourn her, this woman who’d run his store for years, this woman he’d trusted with more of his secrets than he’d ever entrusted to me? He hadn’t offered to kill her swiftly, to end her suffering. He’d used it only as a threat to keep me from prying into his business.

His face was set in hard, cold lines. He looked down at the top of Fiona’s head and his face changed; then he saw me looking at him and it was again a mask of stone.

He did mourn her—not her suffering or death but that she’d chosen the path that had led her here. I suspected that he would never have stopped caring for her, and taking care of her, if she hadn’t turned on me. But that action had sealed her fate.

Barrons was one of the most complicated men I’d ever met and at the same time one of the simplest: You were with him, or you were against him. Period. End of story. You got only one chance with him. And if you betrayed him, you ceased to exist in his world until he got around to killing you.

Fiona had ceased to exist when she’d let Shades into the bookstore to devour me while I was sleeping—thereby stealing his only chance at something he wanted very badly, whatever it was—and the only thing he felt now was a twinge of wishing it hadn’t turned out this way, a whisper of a regret. Not so long ago he’d put a knife through her heart, and if she hadn’t been eating Unseelie, it would have killed her. He’d been ready to kill her in the alley, and not mercifully.

I stole another look at him, realizing the full extent of what I’d just been mulling over.

He thought I’d betrayed him by taking up with Darroc when I’d believed he was dead. But he hadn’t excised me from his life. Whatever he wanted from the Sinsar Dubh, he wanted very badly.

And according to my own assessment of him, once he had it, he would kill me.

He must have felt my gaze, because he looked at me.

Something wrong, Ms. Lane?

My gaze mocked, Is there anything right about this situation?

He smiled without humor. Besides the obvious.

I shook my head.

You’re looking at me as if you expect me to kill you.

I jerked. Was I that easy to read?

You’re wondering what kind of man I am and how I feel about all this.

I stared.

You think you betrayed me and one day I will kill you for it.

I’m not sure why I even bother talking. My eyes flashed with temper. I hated being so transparent.

That you allied with Darroc to attain your goals did not betray me. I’d have done the same.

Then why are you so pissy?

That you fucked him will be forgiven once you fuck me. Another woman might run headlong toward absolution.

I put an end to our discussion by staring straight ahead.

It was slow going. Fiona couldn’t move very quickly. We proceeded at a snail’s pace through rose halls, to sunshine, to bronze.

“The libraries,” Barrons said as we passed. “We’ll stop on the way back, since we’re in here anyway. I want another look around.”

I felt a sudden tension in the cloaked figure next to me as the dark hood turned my way.

I didn’t need to be able to see her face to sense the bitterness of her gaze or divine the morbid turn of her thoughts.

His comment had driven home that he and I would be walking out of here together and she would be dead. And I knew she thought we would be having a fabulous time, dancing and fighting, having sex and living, while her existence would be over, extinguished as if she’d never been born, unmourned, unmissed.

I felt hatred emanating from beneath that cloak, malevolent and dark, and was glad to see black floors ahead.

I felt like we were prison guards, taking the long, slow, hellish walk to the electric chair. The convict between us would have done anything to escape her sentence, but fate had left her no choice but to crave oblivion.

“How?” she whispered, as we entered the black tunnel.

I looked at Barrons and he looked at me. Once we’d stepped onto the black floors, I’d begun to feel the sexual tension this part of the castle inevitably stirred. One glance at his face confirmed he was feeling it, too.

I was horrified to realize that Fiona must be feeling it, too.

Barrons replied tightly, “There is a Silver that divides the chamber of the Unseelie King and the concubine’s. Only those two can step through it. All others die instantly.”

“Even … you?”

So she knew he could die. And come back.

“Yes.”

There was that awful wet sound, laughter but not. “She … knows now.”

Barrons gave me a look that clearly said, Shut her up or I’ll end it now.

“Yes. I know all of it, Fiona,” I lied.

She moved forward, silent once again.

Christian was asleep in the Unseelie King’s big bed, long black hair a silken fan across a pillow.

If Fiona hadn’t been skinned and in so much pain, I would have pushed her across the white half of the boudoir into the mirror to get it over with, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch her.

“Who the—What the fuck?” Barrons stalked across snowy furs, through diamond-studded air, to the enormous Silver, staring at the male in the bed.

I glanced at the fireplace, expecting to see the concubine, trying to figure out how I would explain things to Barrons if the queen’s memory residue was stretched out there, but the furs were empty, the fire banked to low white embers.

His voice startled Christian awake; the young Scot rolled over and sprang to his feet.

Silk sheets dripped from his body, leaving him nude and visibly aroused. For a moment I thought he’d gotten rid of the tattoos, but they appeared, moving up his legs, his groin, and his abdomen, then around the side of his chest, before vanishing again.

I joined Barrons at the edge of the mirror, trying not to stare, but gorgeous naked men are gorgeous naked men.

I wondered if memories of the king and queen’s lovemaking had been affecting him the way they’d got to me. His eyes glittered with lazy sensuality, and I could too well imagine the bent of his dreams. He might be difficult to pry out of the chamber when the time came.

He stood on the dark side of the boudoir and looked at me. “I must be dreaming. Bring that sweet ass over here and I’ll show you what God made women and well-hung Scotsmen for.”

“Who the bloody hell is that?” Barrons demanded.

“Christian MacKeltar.”

“That’s not Christian MacKeltar!” Barrons exploded. “That’s Unseelie royalty!”

“Ah, fuck me.” Christian ran his hands through his long, dark hair, muscles rippling in his shoulders. “Is that really what I look like, Mac?”

I almost said, I don’t know, I can’t stop looking at your—

Fiona pushed me.

The bitch actually shoved me from behind.

I was so flabbergasted, I didn’t even gasp. I was speechless. I’d come here on a mission of mercy and she’d tried to kill me again!

She’d concluded from what Barrons had told her that I would die if I touched the Silver, too, and her final act had been to try to take me with her.

She pushed me hard enough that I shot straight through the unresisting Silver and crashed squarely into Christian, knocking him backward onto the bed. We got tangled up in each other, trying to get out.

Behind me, Barrons roared.

On top of me, Christian made a raw, horny sound and ground himself against me.

I sucked air between my teeth. Every instinct in my body wanted to have sex, here, now, with anyone. This place was dangerous. “Christian, it’s the chamber. It makes sex—”

“I know, lass. Been here awhile.” He raised one of his arms that was pinning me to the bed. “Get out from under me. Move your ass!” he gritted.

When I didn’t react instantly, he snarled, “Now! I won’t be able to say it again!”

I looked at him. His eyes were out of focus, fixed on some point inside me, like a Fae prince. I shot out from beneath him and scrambled from the bed.

He crouched there a moment on his hands and knees, balls heavy, erection huge and flat to his stomach, then he lunged to his feet, trying to cover himself, his hand a hopelessly inadequate shield. He tried to yank a sheet from the bed, but the black silk was king-sized, for acres of bed. Cursing, he began digging among pillows and furs, looking for his clothes, while I tried not to watch and failed miserably.

“Mac!” Barrons thundered.

My heart was pounding. I wanted Barrons, not Christian, but the man I wanted was on the other side of the mirror, and this damned half-white, half-black boudoir was Ecstasy on steroids with a shot of adrenaline, and it made things so dreamy and confused …

It was the awful sound of Fiona’s laughter that broke the spell.

I turned to see her standing right next to the mirror, looking up at Barrons, her hood down.

She spoke the longest sentence she’d said tonight.

“How does it feel to want someone more than they want you, Jericho?” Her voice dripped venom. “If she went through that mirror, she belongs to the king. I hope wanting her eats you alive. I hope he takes her from you. I hope you suffer for all eternity!”

Barrons said nothing.

“You should have left me to die where you found me, you bastard,” she said bitterly. “All you did was give me a life that made me want things I couldn’t have.”

I would have told her it wasn’t like that at all. Barrons didn’t feel that way about me, or about anyone, but before I could say a word, Fiona threw herself at the mirror.

I braced myself for her to slam into me.

I was that sure I wasn’t the Unseelie King.

I was ready for the stench of her to assault my nostrils, her mutilated body to slam into mine. I would deflect her toward the bed, where I would stab her and put us all out of her misery, once and for all.

Fiona fell over dead the instant she touched the mirror.

“Hello, Ms. Concubine,” Barrons mocked.

Oh, if he only knew.

But Christian didn’t tell him before we left, and neither did I.

33

CONS: Why I’m not the king

1. I was a baby twenty-three years ago. I saw pictures of me, and I remember growing up. (Unless someone planted false memories.)

2. I don’t even like the concubine. (Unless I fell out of love with her a long time ago.)

3. I don’t feel like I’m split into multiple human parts, and I’ve never been attracted to women. (Unless I’m repressing.)

4. I hate Fae, and especially Unseelie. (Am I overcompensating?)

5. If I were the king, wouldn’t the Unseelie Princes have known me and not raped me? Wouldn’t somebody … recognize me or something?

6. Where have I been for six or seven hundred thousand years? And how could I not know about it? (Okay, so maybe somebody forced me to drink from the cauldron.)

PROS: things that make it look like I could be

1. I knew what the White Mansion looked like inside. I also knew every step I walked in the Unseelie prison. Same with knowing that Cruce had wings. I have a ton of knowledge I can’t explain having. (Maybe somebody planted memories. If they can plant false ones, why not real ones?)

2. I’ve been dreaming of the concubine all my life and, even though she was unconscious, she managed to summon me. (Maybe she was manipulating me in the Dreaming like she did the Keltars.)

3. I can conjure runes that are supposedly part of what was used to reinforce the Unseelie prison walls. (Not sure which column this goes in. Why would the king have helped?) (Maybe it’s part of my sidhe-seer gifts.)

4. The Book hunts me and plays with me like a cat worrying a mouse. (Can’t think of a way out of this one. There’s obviously something different about me.)

5. K’Vruck poked at me mentally, then said, “Ah, there you are.” (WTF????)

6. I can go through the mirror that only the king and concubine can go through, and the queen is the concubine. Barrons can’t. Fiona couldn’t.

7. When I was in the White Mansion, I could see the concubine but not the king, which makes perfect sense if it was the king’s memories I was living, because when you’re remembering something, you don’t see yourself in the memory, you see who else was there and what happened around you.

I dropped my pen and snapped my journal shut. Daddy could have used those last two PROs to get me life without parole.

I needed to perform more experiments with the Silver. That was all there was to it. Once I proved someone else could go through, I could quit driving myself nuts.

“Right,” I muttered. “More experiments. Sound like someone else we know?” Like maybe an obsessed king that had experimented an entire race of monsters into being. There was no getting around a brutal fact: If my tests failed, my test subjects would die. Was I so desperate to exonerate myself that I was willing to become a murderer? Sure, I’d killed a lot in the past few months, but in the heat of the fight, not premeditated, and Fiona had wanted to die.

A pure human would be the best test.

I could probably find someone hanging out at Chester’s who was in love with dying. Or too drunk to—

Was I losing my humanity? Or had I always been a little short to begin with?

I clutched my head and groaned.

Suddenly every muscle in my body tensed as if standing up in greeting, even though I didn’t move. “Barrons.” I dropped my hands and raised my head.

“Ms. Lane.” He took a chair across from me with such eerie grace that I wondered how I’d ever believed he was human. He poured himself into the brocade wing chair, like water over stone, before settling into sleek muscle. He moved as if he knew where everything in the room was, in precise measurements. He didn’t walk, stalk, or prowl; he glided with flawless awareness of all other atoms in relation to his. It made it easy for him to conceal himself behind inanimate objects and to assume a similar … structure or something.

“Have you always moved like that in front of me and I just never noticed? Was I oblivious?”

“No and yes. You were oblivious. Head up that tight pink ass. But I never moved this way in front of you.” His look dripped sexual innuendo. “I might have moved this way a time or two behind you.”

“Not hiding anything from me anymore?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“What does someone like you conceal?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” His glittering eyes raked me with a hard once-over.

It had been nearly a week since we’d killed Fiona in the Silvers, and my wardrobe was giving me more fits than ever. I was wearing distressed black leather pants with a tattooed gray grunge element and my favorite baby-doll pink tee that said I’m a JUICY girl across the front and had chiffon cap sleeves. I’d tied a Goth scarf around my blond curls and had on a pair of Alina’s dangling heart earrings. My fingernails had grown out and I’d done a French manicure on my hands, and but I’d painted my toenails black. The dichotomy didn’t end there. I had on a black lace thong and a pink-and-white-striped cotton bra. I was having issues.

“Identity crisis, Ms. Lane?”

There was a time when I’d have fired back a pithy retort. But I was drunk on the moment: sitting in my bookstore, sipping hot cocoa, staring across a coffee table at Barrons by candle and firelight, with my journal and iPod handy and the assurance that my parents were well and my world was mostly fine except for my own little personality crisis. Friends and loved ones were safe. I breathed. So did the people that mattered to me. Life was good.

Not long ago, I’d thought I would never step foot in this place again. Never see the faint, sexy lift of his lips that told me he was amused but still waiting to be really wowed. Never bicker and banter and argue and plan. Never bask in the knowledge that, so long as the previous owner of this establishment was alive, this place would stand bastion in far more than mere latitude and longitude, keeping Dark Zones, fairies, and monsters at bay. It was the place of last defense in my heart.

Although I hated him for letting me grieve, I couldn’t be more grateful that he was unkillable, because it meant I would never have to grieve him again.

I could never be broken about Barrons. Nothing could hurt me where he was concerned, because he was as certain as the nightfall, he would recur as eternally as the dawn. I still had questions about what he was and concerns about his motives, but they could wait. Time might sort things out in ways pushing and prying never could. “I don’t have any idea what to wear anymore, so I tried to cover all bases.”

“Try skin.”

“Little chilly for that.”

We looked at each other across the coffee table.

His eyes didn’t say, I’d heat you up, and mine didn’t say What are you waiting for? His didn’t reply, Fuck if I’m making the first move, so I was careful not to say, I wish you would, because I can’t, because I’m … and he didn’t snap … choking on your pride?!

“As if you aren’t.”

“Excuse me?”

“Really, Barrons,” I said drily. “I’m not the only one who didn’t just not have that conversation, and you know it.”

There was the faint, sexy lift of his lip. “You’re a piece of work, Ms. Lane.”

“Right back at you.”

He changed the subject. “The Keltar moved their wives and children into Chester’s.”

“When?”

Our sojourn in the White Mansion had cost us nearly five weeks, Dublin time. We’d stopped in the libraries on the way out and taken as many of the Unseelie King’s books as we’d been able to wrap up and carry out along with Fiona’s body. I’d not only missed Dani’s birthday, I’d missed my own, on May 1. Time sure did fly.

“About three weeks ago. Long enough that they’ve settled in. They refuse to leave until we give them the queen.”

“Which will be never,” I said.

“Precisely.”

“How many kids?” I tried to picture Chester’s with families living on the cool chrome-and-glass top floor. Towheaded tots carrying blankets and sucking their thumbs, walking along the balustrade. It seemed terribly wrong—and laughably right. Maybe it could eradicate some of the fundamental badassness of the place.

“The four Keltar Druids brought their wives and children. They breed like it’s their personal mission to populate their country in case somebody attacks again, as if anybody wants the bloody place. There were dozens of them. Everywhere. It was total chaos.”

“Ryodan must be losing his mind.” I had to bite my lip not to laugh. Barrons sounded downright consternated.

“A child followed us on our way to see the queen. Wanted Ryodan to fix a toy or something.”

“Did he?”

“He got upset because it wouldn’t shut up and tore its head off.”

“The child?” I gasped.

He looked at me like I was crazy. “The bear. The battery was dying and the audio file was looping. It was the only way to make it stop.”

“Or put a new battery in.”

“Child screamed bloody murder. Army of Keltars came running. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”

“I want to see my parents. I mean, visit with them.”

“V’lane agreed to help the Keltar get Christian out of the Unseelie prison. He has them rebuilding the dolmen at LaRuhe he crushed for you.” He shot me a look that said, Too bad you didn’t think before you did that one; would have saved time. “He believes that once it’s complete he can reestablish the connection and bring him out.”

So V’lane was playing nice, batting hard for the team. We had serious unfinished business, but I no longer had his name in my tongue and I suspected he was avoiding me. I’d been in no mood for confrontations in the past week. Confronting myself was hard enough. “If you don’t arrange it, I’ll go by myself.” We’d have Christian soon! The moment I’d returned from Fiona’s mercy killing, I’d begun lobbying to get Christian out of the Unseelie prison. I would have begun my campaign sooner, but finding out I was Not the Concubine had thrown me for a wicked, mind-numbing loop. “When will he be back?”

“Your pretty college boy isn’t so pretty anymore.”

“He isn’t my pretty college boy.”

Our gazes locked.

“But I still think he’s pretty pretty,” I said, just to antagonize him.

See you in bed with him like I saw in the Silvers, I’ll kill him.

I blinked. I did not just see that in Barrons’ eyes.

He evaporated from the chair and reappeared five feet away, standing in front of the fire, his back to me.

“They expect to have him back any day now.”

I wanted to be there when they got Christian out, but the Keltar had made it clear they didn’t want me around. I should never have told them I’d fed their nephew Fae flesh. I wasn’t sure if they found it cannibalistic, sacrilegious, or both, but it had certainly offended them. I’d gone light on details about what it had done to him. They’d find out soon enough.

I shivered. The time was approaching. We would be doing the ritual soon. “We need to have a meeting with everyone. Keltar, sidhe-seers, V’lane. Iron out the details.” What would happen when we finally had the Book under lock and key? How did Barrons think he was going to use it once it was contained? Did he know the First Language? Was he that old? Had he learned it over time, or been taught? Did he plan to let us re-inter it at the abbey again, then sit down and read it?

And do what with the knowledge?

“Why don’t you just tell me what you want the Sinsar Dubh for?”

No longer staring into the fire, he faced me.

“Why do you keep moving like that? You never used to do it before.” It was unnerving.

“Does it unnerve you?”

“Not at all. It’s just … hard to follow.”

A haze of red slithered through his eyes. “Doesn’t faze you at all?”

“Not a bit. I only want to know what changed.”

He shrugged. “Concealing my nature requires effort.” But his eyes said, Think you accepted the beast? Stare at it, day in, day out.

Not a problem.

“The queen came to—”

“She’s conscious?” I exclaimed.

“—briefly before she went under again.”

“Why does it always take you so long to tell me the important things?”

“While the queen was lucid, Jack had the presence of mind to ask her who sealed her in the coffin.”

Expectancy straightened my spine. “And?”

“She said it was a Fae prince she’d never seen before. He called himself Cruce.”

I stared, stunned. “How is that possible? Is anyone who’s supposed to be dead actually dead?”

“Doesn’t seem like it.”

“Did he have wings?”

He gave me a look. “Why?”

“Cruce does.”

“How do you—ah. Memories.”

“Does it bother you? That I’m …” Not the Concubine. I couldn’t finish the sentence.

“No more human than I? On the contrary. You’ve either lived a very long time or you prove reincarnation. I’d like to know which it is, so we’d know whether you can die. Eventually the Unseelie King will come looking for you. He and I are overdue for a talk.”

“What do you want the Book for, Barrons?”

He smiled. Well, he showed me his teeth, anyway. “One spell, Ms. Lane. That’s all. Don’t worry your pretty little head.”

“Don’t talk down to me. It used to shut me up. Doesn’t work anymore. A spell for what? To change you back to whatever you were before? To let you die?”

His eyes narrowed and the rattlesnake stirred in his chest. He looked at my face closely, as if reading the tiniest nuances of the way my nostrils flared on each breath, the shape of my mouth, the movement of my eyes.

I raised a brow, waiting.

“Is that what you need to think of me? That I want to die? Must you dress me up in chivalry to find me palatable? Chivalry demands a suicidal bent. I don’t have one. I can’t get enough of life. I get off on waking up every day for infinity. I like being what I am. I got the best end of the deal. I’ll be here while it’s happening. I’ll be here when it ends. And I’ll stand up from the ashes and do it all over when it begins again.”

“You said somebody beat me to damning you.”

“Melodrama. Did it curry favor? You kissed me.”

“You don’t feel damned?”

“God said, Let there be light. I said, Say please.”

He was gone. No longer standing in front of me. The bookstore seemed empty and I looked around, wondering where he’d gone so quickly and why. Had he melted up against a bookcase, faded into a drape, wrapped himself around a pillar?

Suddenly there was a fist in my hair, behind me, pulling my head back, arching my spine up from the sofa.

He closed his mouth over mine and pushed his tongue in, forcing my teeth wide.

I grabbed his arm, but as sharply as he had my head pulled back, all I could do was steady myself.

He wrapped his other hand around my neck, forcing my chin higher, kissing me more deeply, harder, keeping me from resisting.

Not that I wanted to.

Heart slamming in my chest, my legs moved apart. There are different kinds of kisses. I’d thought I’d experienced them all, if not prior to coming to Dublin, certainly after months of being Pri-ya, in bed with this man.

This was a new one.

All I could do was hold on to his arm and survive.

“Kiss” wasn’t the right word at all.

He fused us together—my jaws so wide, I couldn’t even kiss him back. I could only take what he was doing to me. I felt the sharp slide of fangs over my tongue as he sucked it into his mouth.

I knew then—as he’d never let me see in our bed in that basement—that he was far more animal than man. Maybe he hadn’t always been, but he was now. Maybe, long ago, in the beginning, he’d missed being a man—if, in fact, he’d been one to begin with. But he didn’t anymore. He’d gone native.

I was kind of astonished by it: What a man he’d chosen to be! He could easily have gone feral. He was the strongest, fastest, smartest, most powerful creature I’d ever seen. He could kill everything and everyone, including Fae. He could never be killed. Yet he walked upright and lived in Dublin and he had a bookstore and great cars and collected rare things of beauty. He bitched when his rugs got burned and got pissy when somebody messed with his clothes. He took care of some people, whether he seemed to like doing it or not. And he had a sense of honor that wasn’t animal.

“Honor is animal. Animals are pure. People are fucked up. Quit fucking thinking.” He let go of my mouth long enough to speak, then I couldn’t breathe again.

I didn’t play nice. I wasn’t feeling nice. I was plastered at an awkward angle against the couch, completely in his control unless I wanted to try to break my own neck to get free. I wanted to know what spell he wanted, though, so I drew in on myself and volleyed into his head.

Crimson silk sheets.

I’m in her and she’s looking at me like I’m her world. The woman undoes me.

I flinch. I’m having sex with me, seeing myself from his eyes. I look incredible naked—is that how he sees me? He doesn’t see any of my flaws. I’ve never looked half as good to myself. I want to pull out. It feels perverse. I’m fascinated. But this was not what I was hunting for at all …

Where are the handcuffs? Ah, grab her fucking head, she’s going down on me again. She’ll make me come. Tie her up. Is she back? How much longer do I have?

He senses me there.

Get out of my HEAD!

I deepen the kiss, bite his tongue, and he is violent with lust. I take advantage, diving deep. There’s a thought he’s shielding. I want it.

Nobody home but She for Whom I Am the World. Can’t go on like this, can’t keep doing it.

Why couldn’t he go on? What couldn’t he keep doing? I’m having sex with him, any way he wants me, while I stare up at him with utter worship. Where was the problem there?

Weariness suddenly crashes over me. I’m in his body, and I’m coming beneath him, and I’m checking my eyes warily.

What the fuck am I doing here?

He knew what he was, what I was.

He knew we came from different worlds, didn’t belong together.

Yet for a few months there’d been no lines of demarcation between us. We’d existed in a place beyond definitions, where no rules had mattered, and I wasn’t the only one who’d reveled in it. But the entire time I’d been lost in sexual bliss, he’d been aware of time passing, of everything that was happening—that I was mindless, I wasn’t willing, and when I snapped out of it I’d blame him.

Keep hoping to see the light in her eyes. Even knowing it’ll mean she’s saying good-bye.

I had. Irrational or not, I’d held it against him. He’d seen me naked, body and soul, and I hadn’t seen him at all. I’d been blinded by helpless lust that hadn’t been for him. I had been lust, and he’d been there.

Just one time, he’s thinking as we watch my glazed eyes go even emptier.

One time, what? Instead of pushing, I try a stealth attack. I pretend to retreat, let him think he’s won, and at the last minute turn around. Instead of lunging for his thoughts, I stay very, very still and listen.

He pushes my hair out of my face. I look like an animal. There’s no sentience in my gaze. I’m a cavewoman, with a minuscule, prehistoric brain.

When you know who I am. Let me be your man.

He blasts me from his skull with such force that I nearly pass out. My ears ring and my head hurts.

I’m sucking air. He’s gone.

34

I walked through Temple Bar with a spring in my step. I’d woken early, taken one look at the sunshine shafting in through my bedroom window, dressed, and headed out to run errands.

The fridge was empty, I had two birthdays I was determined to celebrate before they got any more belated, and I was going to have to do some serious improvising with ingredients to bake a cake. Since Halloween, butter, eggs, and milk were a scarce commodity, but a Southern woman could do a lot with shortening, condensed milk, and powdered eggs. I was going to bake a chocolate cake with thick, creamy double-chocolate fudge icing if it was the last thing I did. Dani and I would watch movies and paint our fingernails. It would be like old times with Alina.

I turned my face up to the sun as I hurried down the street. After what seemed an interminable hiatus, spring had returned to Dublin.

The season of sunshine and rebirth was overdue for me. Though I’d managed to avoid miserable months of cold weather, busy in Faery or the Silvers, it had still been the longest winter of my life.

Spring didn’t look any different than winter, but you could feel it in the air—the kiss of warmth on the breeze, the scent blowing off the ocean that carried the promise of buds and blossoms, if not here, somewhere else in the world. I’d never thought I’d miss flies and insects, but I did. There wasn’t a single thing growing in Dublin—and that meant no moths, butterflies, birds, or bees. Not a single flower bloomed, no shoots pushed out from young limbs, not a blade of grass grew. The Shades had decimated the city on their way out, before slamming the door shut with a bang last Halloween. The soil was barren.

I was no horticulturalist, but I’d been doing some research. I was pretty sure if we reintroduced the right nutrients into the soil, in time, we’d be able to grow things again.

We had a lot to reclaim. Trees to remove and replace. Planters and flower boxes to fill. Parks to redesign. I planned to start small, haul dirt back from the abbey, grow a few daisies, buttercups, maybe some petunias and impatiens. Fill my bookstore with ferns and spider plants and begin taking back the night in my own space before spilling over onto the rooftop garden and beyond.

One day Dublin would live and breathe again. One day all these husks of what had once been people would be swept up and buried in a memorial ceremony. One day, tourists would come to see ground zero and reminisce about the Halloween when the walls fell—maybe even mention in passing a girl who cowered in a belfry before helping save the day—then head off to one of six hundred newly restored pubs to celebrate that the human race had taken back what was theirs.

Because we would. No matter who or what I was, I was determined to capture and re-inter the Book, then get to work figuring out a way to put the walls back up. Along the way, I’d find proof that I wasn’t the king, just a human woman with a lot of memories someone else had planted for reasons that would make sense when I finally knew them. I wasn’t the fulcrum of a prophecy that would either save or doom the human race. I was merely the person who’d been pre-programmed by the queen—or who knew? Maybe the king—to track the Book in case it escaped, just like the Keltar had been manipulated: one small part of the equation for sealing it away again, forever this time.

As I sauntered through the morning, I tried to slip back into the mind of the young woman who’d stepped off the plane, taken a cab through Temple Bar, and checked in to the Clarin House late last summer, bemused by the thick accent of the leprechaun-like old man behind the reservations desk. Starving. Scared and grieving. Dublin had been so huge, and I’d been so small and clueless.

I looked around, absorbing the silent shell of a city, remembering the hustle and bustle. The streets had been crammed with craic—vibrant life that took itself entirely for granted.

“Morning, Ms. Lane.” Inspector Jayne moved into step with me.

I assessed him quickly. He wore tight khaki-colored jeans with a plain white T-shirt stretched over his barrel chest and military boots laced up outside his pants. He was draped in ammo, pistols in his waistband and arm holster, Uzi over his shoulder. No place for an evil Book to hide. Months ago he’d had the start of a paunch. It was no longer there. He was rangy with muscle, long limbed, and walking like a man who had his feet planted firmly on the ground for the first time in years.

I smiled, genuinely pleased to see him, but it was all I could do not to reach for my spear. I hoped he wasn’t still after it or holding grudges.

“Fine morning, isn’t it?”

I laughed. “I was thinking the same thing. Is there something wrong with us? Dublin’s a shell, and we look ready to burst into a cheery whistle.” The Unseelie-spiked-tea-drinking inspector and I had certainly come a long way.

“No paperwork. I used to hate paperwork. Didn’t know how much of my life it was eating up.”

“New world.”

“Bloody strange one.”

“But good.”

“Aye. The streets are quiet. Book’s laying low. Haven’t seen a Hunter in days. We Irish know to make the most of the times of plenty, for sure enough they’ll be famine again. Made love to my wife last night. Children are healthy and strong. It’s a good day to be alive,” he said matter-of-factly.

I nodded in complete understanding. “Speaking of Hunters, you’ll be seeing at least one in the skies soon.” I filled him in on the outline of our plan—that I would be scouring the streets by Hunter, looking for the Sinsar Dubh. “So don’t shoot me down, okay?”

His eyes narrowed shrewdly. “How do you control it? Can you force it to take you to its lair? We could wipe out the lot of them if we could only find the den.”

“Let’s get the Book off the streets first. Then we’ll help you hunt, I promise.”

“A promise I’ll be holding you to. I don’t like using the girl, but she insists. That one’s had a hard enough life. She should be home, somebody watching out for her. Kills like she was born to it. Makes me wonder how long she’s been—”

“MacKayla,” V’lane said.

Jayne was frozen, mouth ajar, mid-step. Not iced. Just immobilized.

I stiffened and reached for my spear.

“We need to talk.”

“Understatement. You need to explain.” I spun in a circle, spear up. For whatever reason, I still had it.

“Sheathe the spear.”

“Why haven’t you taken it?”

“I offer you a show of good faith.”

“Where are you?” I demanded. I could hear his voice, but he wasn’t visible and the source of his voice kept moving.

“I will appear when you have given me your show of good faith.”

“Which is?”

“I choose to let you keep it. You choose to sheathe it. We will honor each other with trust and confidence.”

“Not a chance in hell.”

“I am not the only one that has some explaining to do. How did you bring the queen out through the king’s mirror?”

“Let me tell you what I don’t understand. Last Halloween I got raped by Unseelie Princes. You told me you were busy carrying your queen to safety on human feet. But now I know the queen had been in the Unseelie prison for—how did you word it?—many human years. Where were you really that night, V’lane?”

He materialized in front of me, a dozen feet away.

“I did not lie to you. Not entirely. I told you I could not be in two places at once, and that much was true. However, I misspoke when I said I was carrying my queen to safety. Instead, I was taking advantage of those hours, searching for her in Darroc’s Silvers. I was certain he was behind her disappearance. I believed he had imprisoned her in one of the stolen mirrors at LaRuhe, but I could not search those Silvers until the magic of the realms was neutralized. When I crushed his dolmen for you—which we rebuilt, and I succeeded in retrieving Christian only last night, or I would have come to explain myself sooner—I endeavored to search them then. But Darroc had learned much from journals stolen from the White Mansion, and I was unable to break his wards.”

“You spent the night I was getting raped searching his house and finding nothing?”

“A regrettable decision only because it did not yield fruit. I was certain she was there. If she had been, it would have been worth it. As it was, when I discovered what had transpired, I felt …” He lowered his lids over his eyes, leaving only a thin band of silver glittering beneath his lashes. “I felt.” His mouth shaped a bitter smile. “It was untenable. Fae do not feel. Certainly not the queen’s first prince. I tasted envy of my dark brethren for knowing you in a way I never would. I choked on rage that they harmed you. I grieved the loss of something of incomparable measure I could never have again. Is that not human regret? I felt …” He inhaled slow and deep, then blew it out. “Shame.”

“So you say.”

The smile twisted. “For the first time in my existence, I wanted to experience a temporary oblivion. I was unable to make my thoughts obey me. They wandered of their own accord to matters that were hellish to suffer. I was unable to make them stop. It made me want to stop. Is that love, MacKayla? Is that what it does to you? Why, then, do humans long for it?”

I jerked, remembering a moment when I’d considered stretching on the ground next to Barrons and bleeding out next to him.

“I am tired of being in impossible positions. For an eternity, my first allegiance has been to my queen. Without her, my race is doomed. There is no successor to her throne. There is none worthy or capable of leading my people. I could not choose to help you over attempting to recover her. My emotions, to which I had no right, could not be permitted to interfere. For too long I have been all that stands between peace and war.” He locked gazes with me. “Unless …”

“Unless what?”

“Still you point that spear at me.”

I stalked toward him, drawing my spear arm back.

He vanished.

He spoke behind me. “Could it be you are becoming like us?”

I whirled, eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“Are you becoming Fae, in the way some long ago were born? I suspect the young Druid also suffers birth pains. It is a most unexpected development.”

“And unwelcome.”

“That remains to be seen.”

Was that his breath at my ear, his lips against my hair?

“It’s unwelcome to me! I’m not going to become one of you. Get it out. I don’t want it.”

I felt his hands on my waist, sliding lower, over my ass. “Immortality is a gift. Princess.”

“I’m not a princess and I’m not turning Fae.”

“Not yet perhaps. But you are something, are you not? I wonder what. I weary of watching Barrons piss circles around you. I tire of waiting for the day you will finally look at me and see that I am so much more than a Fae and a prince. I am a male. With hunger for you that knows no bottom. You and I, more than anyone else in the universe, are perfect for each other.”

He was half a dozen feet away, facing me, looking down into my eyes.

“I do not wish to continue like this. I am divided and know no peace. Pride has prevented me from speaking plainly. No more.”

He vanished and reappeared right in front of me, so close I could see a shimmer of rainbows in his iridescent eyes.

The spear was between us.

I tightened my hand on the hilt. He closed his over mine, pointed the spear at his chest, and leaned into me. I could feel him, rock hard and ready, against me. He was breathing fast and shallow, eyes glittering.

“Accept me or kill me, MacKayla. But choose. Just fucking choose.”

35

The last time I talked with my mom in person was on August 2, the day I said good-bye and caught a plane for Dublin. We’d fought bitterly about my going to Ireland. She hadn’t wanted to lose a second daughter to what she’d called “that cursed place.” At the time, I thought she was being melodramatic. Now I know she had reason to believe she should never have let Alina go and was terrified to see me follow. I’ve hated that our last words spoken face-to-face were harsh. Although I’ve spoken to her on the phone since then, it’s not the same.

I saw Daddy three weeks later, when he came to BB&B looking for me. Barrons Voiced him to make him go home and planted subliminal commands to prevent him from returning to Ireland. They worked. Daddy went to the airport several times to come back for me but couldn’t make himself get on a plane.

I saw them both again two weeks after Christmas, when I’d surfaced from being Pri-ya and V’lane had taken me to Ashford to show me that he’d helped restore my hometown and was keeping my folks safe.

I hadn’t talked to them then. I’d crouched in the bushes behind my house and watched them on the lanai, talking about me and how I was supposedly going to doom the world.

I’d seen them both when Darroc was holding them captive. They’d been gagged and bound.

Then I’d seen them here, at Chester’s, on the night the Sinsar Dubh took control of Fade and killed Barrons and Ryodan, but that was only through a glass pane.

Chronologically, it had been nine months since they’d seen me. With the time I’d lost in Faery, being Pri-ya, and in the Silvers, it felt more like three months to me, albeit the longest, most crammed-full three months of my life.

I wanted to see them. Now. Although I hadn’t accepted V’lane the way he’d wanted me to, I hadn’t stabbed him, either, which turned out to be fortuitous, because he’d finally gotten around to telling me that we were all supposed to meet at Chester’s today at noon to iron out our plans to capture the Book. He’d been dispatched as a sifting messenger to round everyone up.

I decided my errands could wait. Knowing that we were so close to making a serious attempt at capturing the Book had filled me with urgency to see Mom and Dad before the big meeting. Before the ritual. Before anything else in my life could go wrong. Personal identity crisis aside, they were my parents and always would be. If I’d lived before as someone or something else, that life had paled in comparison to this one.

I blasted into Chester’s, sailed coolly through the bars, which were depressingly packed so early in the day, and headed for the stairs. I had no desire to talk to any of the cryptic denizens of the club.

At the foot of the stairs, Lor and a massively muscled man with long white hair, pale skin, and burning eyes moved together, blocking my way.

I was debating what I might have in my deep glassy lake to use—Barrons had slurped down my crimson runes like truffles—when Ryodan called down, “Let her up.”

I tipped my head back. The urbane owner of the largest den of sex, drugs, and exotic thrills in the city stood behind the chrome balustrade, big hands closed on the chrome railing, thick wrists cuffed by silver, features darkened by a convenient shadow. He looked like a scarred Gucci model. Whatever kind of life these men had lived before they’d become whatever they were, it had been violent and hard. Like them.

“Why?” Lor demanded.

“I said so.”

“Not time for the meeting yet.”

“She wants to see her parents. She’s going to insist.”

“So?”

“She thinks she has something to prove. She’s feeling pushy.”

“Gee, this is nice. I don’t even have to talk,” I purred. I was feeling pushy. Ryodan brought out the worst in me. Like Rowena, he’d prejudged me.

“You ooze emotion today. Emotional humans are unpredictable, and you’re more unpredictable than most to begin with. Besides,” Ryodan sounded amused, “Jack’s building up immunity to Barrons’ Voice. He’s been demanding to see you. Said he’ll take the queen hostage if we don’t bring you to him. I don’t worry about the queen’s safety. Rainey likes her, and Jack likes anything Rainey likes. But I have concerns he might debate us to death.”

I smiled faintly. If anyone could win, it was my daddy. I pushed past Lor, clipping him with my shoulder. His arm shot out like a bar across my neck and stopped me.

“Look at me, woman,” Lor growled.

I turned my head and met his gaze coolly.

“If he tells you anything about us, we’ll kill you. Do you understand that? One word, you die. So if you’re walking around feeling cocky and protected because Barrons likes to fuck you, think again. The more he likes to do you, the more likely it is that one of us will kill you.”

I looked up at Ryodan.

The owner of Chester’s nodded.

“Nobody killed Fiona.”

“She was a doormat.”

I pushed the arm away from my neck. “Get out of my way.”

“I would suggest you cure him of his little problem if you want to survive,” Lor said.

“Oh, I’ll survive.”

“The farther away from him you get, the safer you are.”

“Do you want me to find the Book or not?”

Ryodan answered. “We don’t give a fuck if the Book is out there. Or that the walls are down. Times change, we go on.”

“Then why are you helping with the ritual? V’lane said Barrons asked you and Lor to handle the other stones.”

“For Barrons. But if he breathes one word about himself, you’re dead.”

“I thought he was the boss of you guys.”

“He is. He made the rules we live by. We’ll still take you from him.”

Take you from him. Sometimes I was so dense. “And he knows that.”

“We’ve had to do it before,” Lor said. “Kasteo hasn’t said a word to us since. I say get over it already. It’s been a thousand fucking years. What’s a woman worth?”

I inhaled slow and deep as the full ramifications of what they’d just told me sunk in. This was why Barrons never answered any of my questions and never would. He knew what they would do to me if he told me—whatever they’d done to Kasteo’s woman a thousand years ago. “You don’t need to worry about it. He hasn’t told me anything.”

“Yet,” Lor said.

“But more importantly,” I said, looking up at Ryodan, “I won’t ask. I don’t need to know.” I realized it was true. I was no longer obsessed with having a name and an explanation for Jericho Barrons. He was what he was. No name, no reasons, would alter anything about him. Or how I felt.

“So every woman has said at some point. Are you familiar with the tale of Bluebeard?”

Sure. He’d asked only one thing of his wives: that they never look in the forbidden room upstairs—where he kept the bodies of all the wives before them, whom he’d killed for looking in the forbidden room upstairs. “Bluebeard’s wives didn’t have a life.” I studied him. They were all so controlled, so hard and ruthless. “How many have you taken from one another? So many that you hate the sight of one another? Has the merry band of brothers become a walking, talking, immortal Cold War?”

His face hardened. “Strip if you’re coming up.”

I gave him a look. “I have on skintight clothes.”

“Non-negotiable. All of it. Nothing but skin.”

Lor folded his arms, leaned back against the staircase, and laughed. “She’s got a great ass. If we’re lucky, she’s wearing a thong.”

The white-haired man rumbled with laughter.

“You’ve never made anyone strip before,” I said.

“New rules.” Ryodan smiled.

“I’m not—”

“Seeing your parents if you don’t,” he cut me off.

“I don’t want to see them if I have to be naked. My mother would never recover.”

He held up a short robe.

“You planned this.” The prick.

“Told you. New rules. Can’t be too careful with the queen here.”

He didn’t think I’d do it. He was wrong.

Bristling, I kicked off my shoes, tugged my shirt over my head, skinned off my jeans, popped my bra, and stripped off my thong. Then I put my shoulder holster back on, tucked my spear into it, and walked up the stairs naked. I put a little jiggle in my walk and held his gaze the whole time.

At the top, Ryodan practically accosted me with the short robe. I looked back at Lor and the other guard. They were both staring at me. Neither of them was laughing anymore.

The second floor of Chester’s smelled good. I cocked my head, sniffing. Perfume and … cooking? Was there a kitchen up here?

Three women popped out of a wall, talking and laughing, carrying covered dishes, then vanished behind another hissing panel. I was piqued. They knew how to open and close the doors and I didn’t.

Ryodan thrust my clothes at me. “The Keltar women are out of control. They cook. They chatter. They laugh. Idiots.”

I looked at him. He was already stalking away. It was all I could do not to laugh. I stepped to the side of the hall and dressed as I watched him disappear into one of the glass-paneled rooms.

When I began walking again, Lor moved into step beside me. I didn’t like the way he was looking at me—with the hot, fixed gaze of an intensely sexual man who’d seen me naked and jiggling and wasn’t about to forget it soon.

“Jack and Rainey are down here.” He turned left in the honeycomb of glass and chrome, down a hallway I hadn’t even realized was there. The reflective glass walls created a hall-of-mirrors illusion. Chester’s was even larger on the second floor than I’d thought.

“You moved them.”

“Needed a place we could ward better, with the queen here.”

Ahead, Drustan and Dageus were standing in the hallway, talking to a—I stared. Fae? I wasn’t getting a Fae read off him. What was he? Long black hair, gold-dust skin, loads of charisma. Fae but not Fae.

As we approached, I heard Dageus say impatiently, “All we’re asking is that you confirm she’s truly Aoibheal. You were her favorite for five thousand years, Adam. You know her better than any of us. She’s wasted and weak and, though we’re fair certain it’s her, we’d be resting easier if we heard it from one who was once her right hand.”

“I’m mortal, Gab’s pregnant, and I’m not dying in a bloody Fae war. This isn’t my battle. This isn’t my life anymore.”

“We’re only asking you confirm it’s her. We’ll have V’lane sift you out of here—”

“You tell that fuck I’m here, you won’t get a thing from me. No one is to know I’m in Ireland. Not a single Fae. Got it?”

“You believe they’d still hunt you?”

“They have long memories, the queen is weak, and I was never their favorite. Some of them don’t drink from the cauldron as often as I’d like. One look. I’ll confirm it for you, but then I’m out of here. Don’t come looking for me again.”

Dageus said coolly, “You had the chance to kill Darroc. You made him mortal instead.”

Adam’s dark eyes glittered. “I knew one of you bastards would try to blame me for what happened. I let him live. Humans let Hitler live. I’m not responsible for the destruction of a third of the world’s population.”

“Be damned glad none of the casualties were Keltar, or we’d be hunting you ourselves.”

“Don’t threaten me, Highlander. I wasn’t called the sin siriche du for nothing, and I didn’t go native without taking precautions. I still have a few tricks up my sleeve. I’ve got my own clan to protect.”

I stared at him as we passed. Suddenly his head whipped around and he stared straight back at me, eyes narrowed. His gaze followed me until I’d passed.

“Who’s she?” I heard him ask.

“One of the queen’s chosen, it seems. She can track the Book.”

“I bet she can,” Adam murmured.

I looked sharply over my shoulder and began to turn around. I wanted to know why he’d said that.

Lor’s hand clamped around my arm. “Keep walking. Visiting hours at Chester’s … well, for you, there aren’t any.”

He stopped at the far end of the hall in front of a smooth wall of glass that was heavily painted with smoky runes and pressed his palm to the panel. As the door slid aside, I looked down and saw that the floor was covered with more runes.

“If you tire of Barrons.” His cold eyes fixed on my face. “Assuming you survive.”

I shot him a look of mock astonishment. “Will wonders never cease? Lor’s idea of a proposition. Somebody catch me while I swoon.”

“Charm takes energy better spent fucking. I prefer a club over the head.” He turned and began to walk away.

I rolled my eyes and, squaring my shoulders, stepped over the runes.

Or rather I tried to step over the runes.

They repelled me violently, and every alarm in the building went off.

“I’m not carrying the Book! You saw me naked. Get off me!”

Lor’s arm was around my throat, crushing my windpipe. A bit more pressure and I’d pass out from lack of oxygen.

“What happened?” Ryodan demanded, storming up.

“She tripped the wards.”

“Why is that, I wonder, Mac?”

“Get this prick off me,” I said.

“Let her go.” Barrons had joined Ryodan in the hall. “Now.”

Ryodan looked at Barrons and something passed between them, and I realized they’d been expecting this. They’d known at some point I would demand to see my parents. The only reason Ryodan had let me up was to subject me to this test. But what had it proved?

“Doesn’t change anything,” Barrons said finally.

“No,” Ryodan agreed.

“What?” I demanded.

“The wards recognize you as Fae,” Barrons said.

“Impossible. We all know I’m not. It must be picking up that I’ve eaten Fae.”

“You’ve eaten Fae?” Adam sounded disgusted.

“Do you recognize her? You looked at her oddly when she passed,” Lor said.

“Only that she’s Fae-touched,” Adam replied. “Somewhere in her bloodline. Royal. Don’t know the house. Not mine.”

They were all staring at me. “You guys should talk. None of you is human. Well, maybe Cian and Drustan, but there’s that whole chosen-by-the-queen, trained-as-her-Druids thing. So don’t be staring at me like I’m the freak du jour. Maybe any sidhe-seer would set it off. Supposedly the UK had a hand in making us. I never set off the alarms at the abbey that were designed to keep Fae out.”

Or had I? Each time I’d gone there, I’d been found remarkably quickly. Then there was the blond woman who’d barred the corridor with her implacable You are not permitted here. You are not one of us. What wasn’t I? A sidhe-seer? A Haven member? A human?

“I want to see my parents,” I said coolly.

Barrons and Ryodan exchanged a look again, then Ryodan shrugged. “Let her. Set them up in the room next door.”

“Mac!” Jack exclaimed, rushing me the moment I stepped in the door. “Oh, God, we’ve missed you, baby!”

I disappeared into a bear hug that smelled of peppermint and aftershave. They say scent is the strongest memory association we possess. The smell of my daddy’s hug peeled away the months like calendar pages tossed into a trash can.

I wasn’t Fae, I wasn’t possibly the Unseelie King, I wasn’t going to doom the world. I was safe, protected, right, loved. I was his little girl. Always would be.

“Daddy!” I pressed my nose to his shirt. “And, Mom,” I choked out, burying my face in her shoulder. The three of us clung to one another, hugging like there was no tomorrow.

I pulled back and looked at them. Jack Lane was tall, handsome, and composed as ever. Rainey was smiling radiantly.

“You guys look fantastic. And, Mom, look at you!” There was no trace of grief or fear in her gently lined face. Her eyes were clear, her fine features glowing.

“Doesn’t she look great?” Jack said, giving her hand a squeeze. “Your mom’s a changed woman.”

“What happened?”

Rainey laughed. “Living in a glass room with the queen of fairies might have something to do with it. Then there’s the music coming up through the floors at all hours. And let’s not forget all the naked people dropping by.”

Dad growled.

I smiled. I’d wondered how my parents were handling that. Mom was getting a crash course in bizarreness. “Welcome to Dublin,” I told her.

“Not that we’ve gotten to see much of it.” She shot a pointed look at the glass, as if she knew exactly where Ryodan was standing. “Anytime now would be nice.” She glanced back at me. “Don’t get me wrong. I had a difficult time when we first got here. Your father had his hands full. But one morning I woke up and it was as if all my fears had melted away while I slept. They never came back.”

“Because so much was weird that fear didn’t have any place anymore?” I asked.

“Exactly! None of the rules that I’d lived by for so long applied. Things were so far outside my box, I had to either go crazy or throw the box away. I’m excited to be alive in a way I haven’t felt since you girls were little, since before I began to worry about you and your sister all the time. Now the only thing I’ve been worried about was when I might get to see you again, and here you are and you look amazing, and, Mac, I love your hair! The shorter look is perfect on you. But you’ve lost weight, honey. Too much. Are you eating? I don’t think you’re eating. You can’t be eating enough and be so thin. What did you have for breakfast?” she demanded.

I looked at Daddy and shook my head. “Is she still making cheese grits and pork chops for breakfast? Are they letting her in the kitchen here?”

“Lor sneaks her in every now and then.”

“Lor?”

“He likes her hoecakes.”

I blinked. Lor snuck my mother into the kitchen to make hoecakes?

“Your Barrons prefers my apple pie,” Rainey said, beaming.

“He’s not my Barrons, and there’s no way that man eats apple pie.” Barrons and apple pie were as wrong together as … well, vampires and puppies. It was hard to even hold them in the same thought.

“But no ice cream. He hates ice cream.”

My mother knew more about Barrons’ eating habits than I did. Unless one counted all the animal scraps he’d left when he was in beast form. I knew he didn’t like the paws, and the only bones he chewed on were marrow-filled. The hearts were always gone, even if he ate nothing else.

“I hear they plan to try the ritual soon,” Jack said.

“Do they tell you guys everything?” I said, exasperated. They trusted my parents but not me? That was just wrong.

“The Keltar men talk,” Rainey said. “Their wives visit.”

“And we might pry a little.” Daddy winked. I wondered how long it would take the Keltar wives to realize all that flattering, focused attention Jack Lane could turn on at the drop of a hat that made you feel like the most special and interesting person in the world was a cover for his interrogations. That he was methodically turning them inside out, looking for admissible—and nonadmissible—evidence. He’d pulled more confessions out of his charmed, disarmed prey than any attorney in Ashford and the surrounding nine counties.

“Speaking of talk,” I said, “I have a confession to make.”

“You came to see us in January but you didn’t stay,” Rainey said. “We know. You left us a picture of Alina. We were surprised you put it in the mailbox. We might never have looked there. We found it only because your father went after a nest of wasps that had taken up residence in the milk can that holds the post.”

The simplest things elude me. “Duh. There’s no mail running.”

“They kept it up for a while, but too many postal workers were getting killed in those dimensional shifts or attacked by Unseelie. Nobody’s willing to run the routes,” Jack said.

“We found it the day that man came and abducted us,” Rainey said.

“That’s not when I left it, though.” I looked at Daddy. “I was there one night when you and Mom were out back on the lanai, talking. About me.”

Jack searched my eyes, left to right, rapidly. “I think I remember that night.”

“You and Mom were talking about how there were things you guys had never told me.” That was nice and innocuous. I knew Ryodan and Barrons were outside, listening to every word we said. I wanted to know about the prophecy but not enough to ask up front. Considering I’d just set off the wards, I was worried that if we said anything about me dooming the world, I’d get shut out of the ritual. And I needed to be there. I wasn’t going to be excluded from the big showdown. I had a part to play. A good, wholesome part. All I had to do was fly the Hunter and point at the evil Book.

“Yes,” Jack said, watching me, “we were. You always think of things you’d wish you’d said when you’re afraid you might never get another chance. We weren’t sure we’d ever see you again.”

“Well, here I am,” I said brightly.

“And we missed you so much, baby,” Jack said.

I knew he’d gotten the message.

We all got a little teary-eyed then, hugged some more, and made small talk. They told me about Ashford, who’d lived and who’d died. They told me the Shades had tried to take over (they’d known only because of the husks), then the Rhino-boys had come, but “that handsome fairy prince who is utterly infatuated with you, and you could certainly do worse than a prince, honey, and you know it, he could protect you and keep you in style and safety,” according to my mom, had arrived and saved my hometown single-handedly.

I encouraged her to gush unabashedly about V’lane, hoping it would drive Barrons and Ryodan away. Or at least nuts.

The time went much too quickly. Before I knew it, nearly half an hour had passed and someone was rapping on the glass, barking that it was quarter to twelve and my time was up.

I hugged them both on the way out and got teary-eyed again. “I’ll be back to see you again as soon as I can. I love you, Mom.”

“Love you, too, honey. Hurry back.” I clung to her for a moment, then turned to Daddy, who wrapped me in a bear hug.

“Love you, too, Mac.” Against my ear he whispered, “The crazy woman was Augusta O’Clare from Devonshire. Had a granddaughter named Tellie she said helped your mother get the two of you out of the country. You’re sunshine and light, baby. There’s not a damned thing wrong with you, and don’t you ever forget that.” He pulled away and smiled down at me. Love and pride blazed in his eyes.

Tellie. It was the same name Barrons had mentioned in his phone conversation with Ryodan the morning after I’d discovered he was alive. He’d wanted to know if Ryodan had located Tellie yet and instructed him to get more people involved in the search.

“Get on with saving the world, baby.”

I nodded, lower lip trembling. I could hunt monsters. I could have sex with men who turned into beasts. I could kill in cold blood.

And Daddy could still make me cry just by believing in me.

“I won’t have her on the ground with us,” Rowena was saying fifteen minutes later. “There’s no reason for it. We’ll have our radios. She need only fly overhead, spot the Book, talk us into position with the stones, then fly off on her demon steed.” She shot me a look full of venom that said no sidhe-seer alive would ride a Hunter, and there was all the proof she needed of my treason. “The Keltar will chant and carry it to the abbey, where they will teach my girls to re-inter it. There is no purpose for her presence.”

I snorted. The air was so thick with tension, I was getting light-headed from lack of oxygen. I’d never stood in a room packed with so much distrust and aggression as I was standing in today. That Ryodan had made everyone strip and have their clothes searched before returning them at the top of the stairs had only added to their bad tempers. I knew why he’d done it. It wasn’t about new rules. It was about throwing everyone off balance, establishing from the get-go that they weren’t in control of anything, not even their person. Being naked in front of clothed guards makes anyone feel intensely vulnerable.

I surveyed the room. On the east wall of the glass room, five heavily tattooed Keltar hulked in tight pants and shirts.

On the south wall, Rowena, Kat, Jo, and three other sidhe-seers—all dressed in drab, snug pantsuits—stood at attention, minus Dani. I was surprised Rowena hadn’t brought her, but I guessed she’d decided her risks outweighed her benefits—the most risky of her flaws being that she liked me.

On the north wall, V’lane, Velvet, Dree’lia—who once again had a mouth but was wisely keeping it closed—and three other Seelie of the same caste posed arrogantly, draped in see-through short shifts, their flawless faces matched by flawless genitalia.

Barrons, Lor, Ryodan, and myself occupied the west wall, closest to the door.

Rowena glared at the five Scots lined shoulder-to-shoulder like the Falcons’ defense. “You do know how to seal it away, do you not?” she demanded.

Oozing varying degrees of hostility, they glared back at her.

The Keltar were not the kind of men a woman ordered around, especially not an old woman like Rowena, who hadn’t been bothering to exercise an ounce of diplomacy or charm since she’d been escorted, blindfolded, into one of the glass rooms on the top floor of Chester’s.

Perversion and decadence, she’d snapped the moment they’d removed her blindfold. You condone this … this … consorting? The flesh of human and Fae mix in this place. Och, and you’ll be the damnation of the human race! she’d hissed at Ryodan.

Fuck the human race. You’re not my problem.

I’d almost laughed at the expression on her face, but I wasn’t laughing now. She’d been trying to shut me out of the ritual. Acting like I was a pariah that shouldn’t even be allowed in the room where this meeting was taking place.

“Och, and of course we ken it.” The speaker was Drustan, the Keltar who would be picking up the Sinsar Dubh and carrying it to the abbey. According to his brother, he’d been burned on a pyre of sorts and had an incorruptible heart. I didn’t believe it for a minute. Nobody has an incorruptible heart. We all have our weaknesses. But I had to admit that the man who looked out from those silvery eyes exuded some kind of … serenity, at utter odds with his appearance. He looked like a man who would have been more comfortable centuries in the past, stomping around the Highlands with a club in one hand and a sword in the other. They all did, except for Christopher, who strongly resembled Drustan, without the throwback gene. But Drustan had presence. He had a way with words and a voice that was deep, full of command, yet gentle. He spoke more softly than any of the other Keltar, but he was the one I found myself trying hardest to hear when they were all talking at once, which was pretty much all the time.

I looked at Christian and gave him a faint smile, but his expression didn’t defrost one bit.

It was only last night that V’lane and the Keltars had succeeded in reconnecting the dolmen at 1247 LaRuhe to the Unseelie prison, then stormed the king’s fortress to retrieve him. He’d been out roughly sixteen hours and didn’t look much better than he had inside the Silvers. He was no longer a study in marble, cobalt, and jet but he was … well, it made no sense, but he gave the fleeting impression of those colors. If I looked directly at his hair, I could pick out strands of copper and even a hint or two of sun-burnished gold in the dark ponytail, but if I caught it from the corner of my eye, it looked ebony and longer than it was. His lips were pink and utterly kissable, unless I turned my head suddenly. Then for a moment I’d swear they were blue with cold and lightly frosted. His skin was golden, smooth, and touchable, but if I glanced sharply his way he would glow like backlit ice.

His eyes were changed, too. Lie detector extraordinaire, he now seemed to be looking right through everything around him, as if he was seeing the world completely different than the rest of us.

His father, Christopher, studied him when he thought Christian wasn’t paying attention. Somebody needed to tell him there was never a time his son wasn’t paying attention. Christian might seem to check out for a few moments, but if you were looking straight into his eyes, you could see that he was even more intensely focused on his surroundings—so focused that he’d gone still and seemingly absent, as if opening an inner ear that demanded absolute concentration.

“Lie,” he said now.

Drustan scowled at Christopher. “I told you to make sure he’d haud his bloody whist.”

“He’s not hauding his whist for anyone anymore,” Christian said flatly.

“What do you mean—lie?” Rowena demanded.

“They don’t know for certain that their chant will work. The old texts stored in Silvan’s tower had deteriorated, leaving them no choice but to improvise.”

“And we’re bloody good at it. We got you out, didn’t we?” Cian growled.

“It’s his fucking fault I ended up in there to begin with.” Christian jerked his head toward Barrons. “I don’t even know why he’s here.”

“He’s here,” Barrons said coolly, “because he has three of the stones necessary to corner the Book.”

“Hand ’em over and get the fuck out.”

“It’s not my fault you’re turning into a fairy.”

V’lane said stiffly, “Fae. Not fairy.”

“You knew my tats weren’t protection enough—”

“I’m not your babysitter—”

Christopher hissed, “You should have checked him—”

“For the love of Mary,” Rowena snapped. “I’ve a plague of barbarians and fools!”

“—and it wasn’t my job to tattoo you. Pack your own fucking parachute. It wasn’t even my job to try to keep the—”

Drustan said softly, “We should have checked him—”

Dageus snarled, “Doona be acting like ’twas some bloody favor you did—”

“You didn’t try to get me out of the Silvers. Did you even tell anyone I was there?”

“—but the hour grew late,” Drustan said, “and time can no longer be undone.”

“—for the human race, when you’re part of it,” Dageus finished.

“—walls up. And it was a bloody favor, though you wouldn’t know by the bloody thanks I’ve gotten, and don’t be lumping me in the same gene pool as you, Highlander.”

“Oh, shut up, all of you,” I said, exasperated. “You can fight later. Right now we have work to do.” To the Keltar, I said, “How certain are you of the parts you improvised?”

No one spoke for a moment as they finished the battle in silence, with glares and wordless threats.

“As certain as we can be,” Dageus finally said. “We’re not new to this. We’ve been the queen’s Druids since before the Compact was negotiated. We sat with them in the Old Days, when the great hill of Tara had yet to be built, and learned their ways. Plus we’ve a few other … bits of arcane lore at our disposal.”

“And we all know how well that turned out for you last time,” Barrons said silkily.

“Mayhap you weren’t helping but hindering, Old One,” Dageus growled. “We ken you’ve your own agenda. What is it?”

“Stop it, all of you!” Rowena snapped.

The tension swelled.

“Barrons and his men will place three of the stones.” I tried to get things back on track.

“He will give them to my sidhe-seers,” Rowena said sternly. “We will place the stones.”

Barrons gave her an incredulous look with the subtle arch of a brow. “In whose fucking reality do you think that’s going to happen?”

“You have no business being involved.”

“Old woman, I don’t like you,” Barrons said coldly. “Be careful around me. Be very, very careful.”

Rowena closed her mouth, perched her glasses on her nose, and pursed her lips.

I looked at V’lane. “Did you bring the fourth stone?”

He looked at Barrons. “Did he bring his three?”

Barrons bared his teeth at V’lane.

V’lane hissed.

The Keltar growled.

And so it went.

Forty-five minutes later, when we all stalked from the room, two of the walls were shattered and the floor was cracked.

But we’d nailed down the nuances of our plan.

I would fly a Hunter over the city and locate the Sinsar Dubh, radioing back the location.

Barrons, Lor, Ryodan, and V’lane would close in with the four stones, while the Keltar began the binding spell to seal its covers so it could be moved.

Drustan would pick it up.

Barrons, Rowena, Drustan, V’lane, and I would ride together in Barrons’ Hummer to the abbey (because no one trusted V’lane or any other Fae to sift him with the Book there and wait for everyone else to arrive).

Rowena would drop the wards, and all of us who were in the room today would enter the underground tomb that had been created eons ago to contain the Sinsar Dubh.

Dageus would complete the binding spell that would seal its pages closed and—according to their lore—turn the keys in the locks, which would silence it in a vacuum of eternal awareness, alone forever. A hellish thing, to be sure, he’d said grimly.

And something he’d seemed to know a thing or two about.

There’s no reason for her to be there, Rowena had continued to protest, giving me the gimlet eye, even as they were blindfolding her and the sidhe-seers. Ryodan didn’t want them seeing his club or knowing the back way in.

There’s no reason for you to be there, either, old woman, Barrons had said. Once you drop the wards, we don’t need you.

You’re not necessary, either.

You think only Dageus should go in, with Drustan and the Book? I’d said acerbically.

She’d fumed the entire way out.

As I stepped into the overcast afternoon, I shivered. All trace of spring had vanished. The day was dark as dusk again, heavy with rain. Tomorrow night we would meet at O’Connell and Beacon.

And, with luck, by dawn the next day the world would be a safer place.

In the meantime, I was desperate for some downtime away from all the men in my life. I needed a girl’s night and the comforts of normalcy.

I turned to V’lane and touched his arm. “Can you find Dani for me and ask her to come to the bookstore tonight at eight?”

“Your wish, my command, MacKayla.” He smiled. “Shall we spend tomorrow at the beach together?”

Barrons moved beside me. “She’s busy tomorrow.”

“Are you busy tomorrow, MacKayla?”

“She’s working on old texts with me.”

V’lane gave me a pitying look. “Ah. Old texts. A banner day at the bookstore.”

“We’re translating the Kama Sutra,” Barrons said, “with interactive aids.”

I almost choked. “You’re never around during the day.”

“Why is that?” V’lane was the picture of innocence.

“I’ll be around tomorrow,” Barrons said.

“All day?” I asked.

“The entire day.”

“She will be naked on a beach with me.”

“She’s never been naked in a bed with you. When she comes, she roars.”

“I know what she sounds like when she comes. I have given her multiple orgasms merely by kissing her.”

“I’ve given her multiple orgasms by fucking her. For months, fairy.”

“Are you still fucking her?” V’lane purred. “Because she does not smell like you. If you are, you are not marking her enough. She is beginning to smell like me. Like Fae.”

“Unbelievable,” I heard Christian mutter behind me.

“She toops them both?” I heard Drustan ask.

“And they permit it?” Dageus sounded baffled.

I looked between V’lane and Barrons. “This isn’t even about me.”

“You’re wrong about that.” Barrons reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. “You know how to find me if you want me.” He was walking away.

“More nifty acronyms?”

He was gone.

“And you know how to find me, as well, Princess.” V’lane turned me toward him and closed his mouth over mine.

“Mac, what the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?” Christian demanded.

I staggered a little when V’lane released me. His name was once again coiled in my tongue.

“You know what?” I said irritably. “You can all just butt out of my business. I don’t have to answer to any of you.”

There was definitely too much testosterone in my life.

A girl’s night in was just what I needed.