Shadowfever

YOU WISH TO KNOW ME?

POSIT YOURSELF AS THE PINPOINT CENTER OF ONE OF YOUR KALEIDOSCOPES, AND GRASP TIME AS THE COLORFUL FRAGMENTS ERUPTING FROM YOU IN A MULTITUDE OF DIMENSIONS THAT CONSTANTLY EXPAND OUTWARD IN AN EVER-WIDENING, EVER-SHIFTING, INFINITE ARRAY. SEE THAT YOU CAN CHOOSE AND EXPAND FROM ANY OF THOSE UNCOUNTABLE DIMENSIONS AND THAT, WITH EACH CHOICE, THOSE DIMENSIONS WIDEN AND SHIFT AGAIN. INFINITY COMPOUNDED EXPONENTIALLY. UNDERSTAND THAT THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS REALITY: THE FALSE GOD YOUR RACE WORSHIPS WITH SUCH BLIND DEVOTION. REALITY IMPLIES A SINGLE POSSIBLE.

YOU ACCUSE ME OF ILLUSION. YOU—WITH YOUR ABSURD CONSTRUCT OF LINEAR TIME. YOU FASHION FOR YOURSELF A PRISON OF WATCHES, CLOCKS, AND CALENDARS. YOU RATTLE BARS FORGED OF HOURS AND DAYS, BUT YOU’VE PADLOCKED THE DOOR WITH PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE.

PUNY MINDS NEED PUNY CAVES.

YOU CANNOT GAZE UPON TIME’S TRUE FACE ANY MORE THAN YOU CAN BEHOLD MINE.

TO APPREHEND YOURSELF AS THE CENTER, TO SIMULTANEOUSLY PERCEIVE ALL COMBINATIONS OF ALL POSSIBLES, SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO MOVE IN ANY DIRECTION—“DIRECTION” BEING A VERY LIMITED METHOD OF ATTEMPTING TO CONVEY A CONCEPT FOR WHICH YOUR RACE HAS NO WORD—THAT IS WHAT IT IS TO BE ME.

—CONVERSATIONS WITH THE SINSAR DUBH

1

Hope strengthens. Fear kills.

Someone really smart told me that once.

Every time I think I’m getting wiser, more in control of my actions, I go slamming into a situation that makes me excruciatingly aware that all I’ve succeeded in doing is swapping one set of delusions for a more elaborate, attractive set of delusions—that’s me, the Queen of Self-Deception.

I hate myself right now. More than I’d ever have thought possible.

I squat on the cliff’s edge, screaming, cursing the day I was born, wishing my biological mother had drowned me at birth. Life is too hard, too much to handle. Nobody told me there’d be days like these. How could nobody tell me there’d be days like these? How could they let me grow up like that—happy and pink and stupid?

The pain I feel is worse than anything the Sinsar Dubh has ever done to me. At least when the Book is crushing me, I know it’s not my own fault.

This moment?

Mea culpa. Beginning to end, all the way, I own this one, and there will never be any hiding from that fact.

I thought I’d lost everything.

How ignorant I was. He warned me. I had so much more to lose!

I want to die.

It’s the only way to stop the pain.

Months ago, on a hellishly long night, in a grotto beneath the Burren, I wanted to die, too, but it wasn’t the same. Mallucé was going to torture me to death, and dying was the only chance I had of denying him that twisted pleasure. My death had been inevitable. I saw little point in drawing it out.

I’d been wrong. I’d given up hope and nearly died because of it.

I would have died—if not for Jericho Barrons.

He’s the one who taught me those words.

That simple adage is master of every situation, every choice. Each morning we wake up, we get to choose between hope and fear and apply one of those emotions to everything we do. Do we greet the things that come our way with joy? Or suspicion?

Hope strengthens …

Not once did I permit myself to feel any hope about the person lying facedown in a pool of blood. Not once did I use it to strengthen our bond. I let the onus of our relationship rest on broader shoulders. Fear. Suspicion. Mistrust drove my every action.

And now it’s too late to take any of it back.

I stop screaming and begin to laugh. I hear the madness in it.

I don’t care.

My spear sticks up, a cruel javelin, mocking me. I remember stealing it.

For a moment, I’m back in the dark, rain-slicked Dublin streets, descending into the sewer systems with Barrons, breaking into Rocky O’Bannion’s private cache of religious artifacts. Barrons is wearing jeans and a black T-shirt. Muscles ripple in his body as he casts aside the sewer lid with the ease of a man tossing a Frisbee in the park.

He’s disturbingly sexual, to men and women alike, in a way that sets your teeth on edge. With Barrons, you aren’t sure if you’re going to get fucked or turned inside out and left a new, unrecognizable person, adrift with no moorings, on a sea with no bottom and no rules.

I was never immune to him. There were merely degrees of denial.

My respite is too brief. The memory vanishes and I am again confronted with the reality that threatens to shatter my hold on sanity.

Fear kills …

Literally.

I can’t say it. I can’t think it. I can’t begin to absorb it.

I hug my knees and rock.

Jericho Barrons is dead.

He lies on his stomach, motionless. He hasn’t moved or breathed in the small eternity that I’ve been screaming. I can’t sense him in his skin. On all other occasions, I’ve been able to feel him in my vicinity: electric, larger than life, vastness crammed into a tiny container. Genie in a bottle. That’s Barrons: deadly power, stopper corking it. Barely.

I rock back and forth.

The million-dollar question: What are you, Barrons? His answer, on those rare occasions he gave one, was always the same.

The one that will never let you die.

I believed him. Damn him.

“Well, you screwed up, Barrons. I’m alone and I’m in serious trouble, so get up!”

He doesn’t move. There’s too much blood. I reach out with my sidhe-seer senses. I sense nothing on the cliff’s edge but me.

I scream.

No wonder he told me never to call the number on my cell that he had programmed as IYD—If You’re Dying—unless I really was. After a time I begin to laugh again. He’s not the one who screwed up. I am. Was I played or did I orchestrate this fiasco all by myself?

I thought Barrons was invincible.

I keep waiting for him to move. Roll over. Sit up. Magically heal. Cut me one of those hard looks and say, Get a grip, Ms. Lane. I’m the Unseelie King. I can’t die.

That was one of my biggest fears, whenever I was indulging in any of a thousand about him: that he was the one who’d created the Sinsar Dubh to begin with, dumping all his evil into it, and he wanted it back for some reason but couldn’t trap it himself. At one point or another, I’d considered everything: Fae, half Fae, werewolf, vampire, ancient cursed being from the dawn of time, perhaps the very thing he and Christian had tried to summon on Halloween at Castle Keltar—key part there being immortal, as in unkillable.

“Get up, Barrons!” I scream. “Move, damn you!”

I’m afraid to touch him. Afraid if I do, his body will be cooling noticeably. I’ll feel the fragility of his flesh, the mortality of Barrons. “Fragility,” “mortality,” and “Barrons” all packed together in the same thought feels about as blasphemous as stalking through the Vatican hammering upside-down crosses on the walls.

I squat ten paces from his body.

I stay back, because if I get close I’ll have to roll him over and look in his eyes, and what if they’re empty like Alina’s were?

Then I’ll know he’s gone, like I knew she was gone, too far beyond my reach to ever hear my voice again, to hear me say, I’m sorry, Alina, I wish I’d called more often; I wish I’d heard the truth beneath our vapid sister talk; I wish I’d come to Dublin and fought beside you, or raged at you, because you were acting from fear, too, Alina, not hope at all, or you would have trusted me to help you. Or maybe just apologize, Barrons, for being too young to have my priorities refined, like you, because I haven’t suffered whatever the hell it is you suffered, and then shove you up against a wall and kiss you until you can’t breathe, do what I wanted to do the first day I saw you there in your bloody damned bookstore. Disturb you like you disturbed me, make you see me, make you want me—pink me!—shatter your self-control, bring you crashing to your knees in front of me, even though I told myself I’d never want a man like you, that you were too old, too carnal, more animal than man, with one foot in the swamp and no desire to come all the way out, when the truth was that I was terrified by what you made me feel. It wasn’t what guys make girls feel, dreams of a future with babies and picket fences, but frantic, hard, raw loss of self, like you can’t live without that man inside you, around you, with you all the time, and it only matters what he thinks of you, the rest of the world can go to hell, and even then I knew you could change me! Who wants to be around someone that can change them? Too much power to let another person have! It was easier to fight you than admit that I had undiscovered places inside me that hungered for things that weren’t accepted in any kind of world I knew, and the worst of it is that you woke me up from my Barbie-girl world and now I’m here and I’m wide awake, you bastard, I couldn’t be more awake, and you left me—

I think I’ll scream until he gets up.

He was the one who told me not to believe anything was dead until I’d burned it, poked around in its ashes, then waited a day or two to see if anything rose from them.

Surely I’m not supposed to burn him.

I don’t think there are any circumstances under which I could do that.

I’ll squat.

I’ll scream.

He’ll get up. He hates it when I’m melodramatic.

While I wait for him to revive, I listen for sounds of scrabbling at the cliff’s edge. I half-expect Ryodan to drag his broken, bloody body up over the edge. Maybe he’s not really dead, either. After all, we’re in Faery, maybe, or at least within the Silvers—who knows what realm this is? Might the water here have rejuvenating powers? Should I try to get Barrons to it? Maybe we’re in the Dreaming and this terrible thing that has happened is a nightmare, and I’ll wake up on a couch in Barrons Books and Baubles and the illustrious, infuriating owner will raise a brow and give me that look; I’ll say something pithy, and life will be lovely, chock-full of monsters and rain again, just the way I like it.

I squat.

No scrabbling in the stones and shale.

The man with the spear in his back doesn’t move.

My heart is full of holes.

He gave his life for me. Barrons gave his life for me. My self-serving, arrogant, constant jackass was the constant rock beneath my feet, willing to die so I could live.

Why the hell would he do that?

How do I live with that?

A terrible thought occurs to me, so awful that for a few moments it eclipses my grief: I would never have killed him if Ryodan hadn’t appeared. Did Ryodan set me up? Did he come here to kill Barrons, who was never invincible, merely difficult to kill? Maybe Barrons could be killed only in his animal form, and Ryodan knew he’d have to be in it to protect me. Was this an elaborate ruse that had nothing to do with me? Was Ryodan working with the LM, and they wanted Barrons out of the way so I’d be easier to deal with, and the abduction of my parents was mere sleight of hand? Look over there while we kill the man who threatens us all. Or maybe Barrons had been cursed to live out some hellish sentence and could be slain only by someone he trusted, and he’d trusted me. Beneath all the cold arrogance, the mockery, the constant pushing, had he given over that most private part of himself to me—a confidence I’d never earned, as I couldn’t have proven any more surely than if I’d stabbed him in the back?

Oh, gee, wait, I did. On Ryodan’s word alone, I’d turned on him.

The accusation of betrayal in the beast’s gaze hadn’t been an illusion. It had been Jericho Barrons in there, staring at me from behind that prehistoric brow, baring his fangs, reproach and hatred blazing in his feral yellow eyes. I’d broken our unspoken pact. He’d been my guardian demon and I’d killed him.

Had he despised me for not seeing through the hide of the beast he’d worn to the man within?

See me. How many times had he said that to me? See me when you look at me!

When it mattered most, I’d been blind. He’d been dogging my every step, treating me with that characteristic Barrons’ combination of aggression and animal possessiveness, and I’d never once recognized him.

I’d failed him.

He’d come to me in a barbaric, inhuman form, to keep me alive. He’d set himself up as IYD regardless of what it might cost him, knowing he would be turned into a mindless, raging beast capable only of slaughtering everything in his immediate vicinity but for one thing.

Me.

God, that look!

I cover my face with my hands, but the image won’t go away: beast and Barrons, his dark skin and exotic face, its slate hide and primal features. Those ancient eyes that saw so much and asked only to be seen in return burn with scorn: Couldn’t you have trusted me just once? Couldn’t you have hoped for the best, just once? Why did you choose Ryodan over me? I was keeping you alive. I had a plan. Did I ever let you down?

“I didn’t know it was you!” I gouge my palms with my nails. They bleed for a brief moment, then heal.

But the beast/Barrons in my mind isn’t done torturing me. You should have. I took your sweater. I smelled you and granted you passage. I killed fresh, tender meat for you. I pissed around you. I showed you in this form, as in any other, that you are mine—and I take care of what is mine.

Tears blind me. I double over. It hurts so bad I can’t breathe, can’t move. I hunch over, curl in on myself, and rock.

Beyond the pain, if there is such a place, I know things.

Things like: According to Ryodan (if he’s not a traitor, and if he is and somehow still alive, I’ll kill him as dead as we killed Barrons), I have a brand on the back of my skull placed there by the Lord Master, who probably still has my parents, because Barrons is here, so obviously he never got through to Ashford.

Unless … time passes differently in the Silvers and he did have time to get to Ashford before I punched IYD, summoning him here to the seventh dimension I’ve been in since entering the Lord Master’s slippery pink corridor back in Dublin.

I have no idea how long I was in the Hall of All Days or how much time passed in the real world while I sunned with Christian by the lake.

Once, courtesy of V’lane, I spent a single afternoon on a beach in Faery, with an illusion of my sister, and it cost me an entire month in the human world. When I returned, Barrons was furious. He’d chained me to a beam in his garage. I’d been wearing a hot-pink string bikini.

We fought.

I close my eyes and embrace the memory.

He stands there, furious, surrounded by needles and dyes, about to tattoo me—or, more accurately, pretend to tattoo me where he’s already tattooed me but I haven’t discovered it yet—so he can track me if I ever decide to do something as stupid as agree to stay in Faery for any period of time again.

I tell him if he tattoos me, we’re through. I accuse him of never feeling anything more than greed and mockery, being incapable of love. I call him a mercenary, blame him for losing his temper when he couldn’t find me and trashing the store, and, while I scathingly concede that he might get an occasional hard-on, it’s undoubtedly for something like money, an artifact, or a book—never a woman.

I remember every word of his reply: Yes, I have loved, Ms. Lane, and although it’s none of your business, I have lost. Many things. And, no, I am not like any other player in this game and I will never be like V’lane, and I get a hard-on a great deal more often than occasionally. Sometimes it’s over a spoiled little girl, not a woman at all. And, yes, I trashed the bookstore when I couldn’t find you. You’ll have to choose a new bedroom, too. And I’m sorry your pretty little world got all screwed up, but everybody’s does, and you go on. It’s how you go on that defines you.

In retrospect, I see through myself with pathetic ease.

There I am, chained to a beam, nearly naked, alone with Jericho Barrons, a man who is so far beyond my comprehension, but, God, he excites me! He plans to work slowly and carefully on my naked skin for hours. His hard, tattooed body is an unspoken promise of initiation into a secret world where I could feel things I can’t begin to imagine, and I want him to work on me for hours. Desperately. But not to tattoo me. I goad him to the best of my naїve, sheltered abilities. I want him to take from me what I lack the courage to offer.

What a complicated, ridiculous, self-destructive feeling! Afraid to ask for what I want. Afraid to own up to my own desires. Driven by circumscription of nurture, not nature. I’d come to Dublin wearing shackles on my bonds. I’d been all nurture.

He was all nature—trying to teach me to change.

Like I said: degrees of denial.

He’d leaned into me, in that garage, sex and barely leashed violence, and when I’d felt his hard-on, it made me feel so alive and wild inside that later I’d had to peel off my bikini and take care of myself in the shower again and again, fantasizing a very different outcome in his garage. One that had taken all night.

I’d told myself it was because I’d spent the day in close proximity to a death-by-sex Fae. Another lie.

He’d unchained me and let me go.

If I were chained to that beam now, I’d have no problem telling him exactly what I wanted. And it wouldn’t involve unchaining me. At least not at first.

I focus through my tears.

Grass. Trees. Him.

He lies facedown. I need to go to him.

The earth is wet, muddy from last night’s rain, from his blood.

I need to clean him. He shouldn’t be messy. Barrons doesn’t like to be messy. He’s meticulous; a sophisticated, exquisite dresser. Although I’ve straightened his lapel a few times, it was only for the excuse of touching him. Stepping into his personal space. Exercising familiarity to underscore that I had the right. Unpredictable as a hungry lion, he might be feared by everyone else, but he never ripped out my throat, only licked me, and, if his tongue was a little rough sometimes, it was worth it to walk beside the king of the jungle.

My heart is going to explode.

I can’t do this. I just went through this with my sister. Regret upon regret. Missed opportunities. Bad decisions. Grief.

How many more people will have to die before I learn how to live? He was right. I’m a walking catastrophe.

I fumble in my pocket for my phone. First thing I do is dial Barrons’ cell. The call doesn’t go through. I press IYCGM. Call doesn’t go through. I hit IYD and hold my breath, watching Barrons intently. The call doesn’t go through.

Like the man himself, all lines are down.

I begin to shake. I don’t know why, but the fact that the cell phones don’t work convinces me more than anything else that he’s beyond my reach.

I flip my head down, scrape my hair forward, and, although it takes me a few tries to get the angle right, I take a shot of my nape. Sure enough, two tattoos. Barrons’ brand is a dragon with a Z in the center that shimmers with faint iridescence.

To the left of his tattoo is a black circle crammed with strange symbols I don’t recognize. It seems Ryodan was telling the truth. If the tattoo was put there by the LM, it explains a lot: Why Barrons so heavily warded the basement where he dragged me back from being Pri-ya, how the LM found me at the abbey once the wards had been painted over, how he found me again at the house Dani and I squatted in, and how he’d tracked me to my parents’ in Ashford.

I pull out the small dirk I lifted from BB&B.

My hand trembles.

I could end my pain. I could curl up and bleed out next to him. It’d be over so quickly. Maybe I’d get another chance some other time, some other place. Maybe he and I would be reincarnated like in that movie, What Dreams May Come, that Alina and I hated so much because the kids and husband died, then the wife committed suicide.

I love that movie now. I get it, the whole idea of willingly going to hell for someone. Living there, insane if you have to, because you’d rather be insane with them than endure life without them.

I stare at the blade.

He died so I would live.

“Damn you! I don’t want to live without you!”

It’s how you go on that defines you.

“Oh, shut up, would you? You’re dead, shut up, shut up!”

But a terrible truth is shredding my heart.

I’m the girl that cried “wolf.”

I’m the one that pressed IYD. I’m the one that didn’t think I could survive the boar on my own. And guess what?

I did.

I’d driven it away and already been safe by the time Barrons appeared and blasted into it.

I hadn’t really been dying after all.

He died for me and it hadn’t been necessary.

I overreacted.

And now he’s dead.

I stare at the dirk. Killing myself would be a reward. I deserve only punishment.

I stare at the snapshot of the back of my head. If the Lord Master found me right now, I’m not sure I would fight for my life.

I consider attempting surgery on my own skull, then realize I am not in the best frame of mind for that. I might not stop cutting. It’s close to my spinal column. Easy way out.

I slam the blade into the dirt before I can turn it on myself.

What would that make of me? That I got him killed, then killed myself? A coward. But it’s not what it would make of me that bothers me. It’s what it would make of him—a wasted death.

The death of a man like him deserves more than that.

I bite back another scream. It’s trapped inside me now, stuffed down into my belly, burning the back of my throat, making it painful to swallow. I hear it in my ears even though my mouth makes no sound. It’s a silent scream. The worst kind. I lived with this once before, to keep Mom and Dad from knowing that Alina’s death was killing me, too. I know what comes next, and I know it’s going to be worse than last time. That I’m going to be worse.

Much, much worse.

I remember the scenes of slaughter Barrons showed me in his mind. I understand them now. Understand what might drive a person to it.

I kneel beside his naked, bloody body. The transformation from man to beast must have shredded his clothing, exploded the silver cuff from his wrist. Nearly two thirds of his body is inked with black and crimson protection runes.

“Jericho,” I say. “Jericho, Jericho, Jericho.” Why did I ever begrudge him his name? “Barrons” was a stone wall I erected between us, and if a hairline fracture appeared, I hastily mortared it with fear.

I close my eyes and steel myself. When I open them, I wrap both hands around the spear and try to pull it from his back. It doesn’t come out. It’s lodged in bone. I have to fight for it.

I stop. I start again. I weep.

He doesn’t move.

I can do this. I can.

I work the spear free.

After a long moment, I roll him over.

If there was any doubt in my mind that he was dead, it vanishes. His eyes are open. They are empty.

Jericho Barrons is no longer there.

I open my senses to the world around me. I can’t feel him at all.

I am on this cliff, alone.

I’ve never been so alone.

I try everything I can think of to bring him back to life.

I remember the Unseelie flesh we crammed into my backpack what seems a lifetime ago, back in the bookstore when I was getting ready to face the Lord Master. Most of it is still there.

If only I’d known then what I know now! That the next time I saw Jericho Barrons, he’d be dead. That the last words I would ever hear him say were “And the Lamborghini,” with that wolf smile and promise that he would always be at my back, breathing down it, keeping it covered.

The wriggling, chopped-up Rhino-boy flesh is still neatly trapped in baby-food jars. I force it between his swollen, bloodied lips and hold his mouth shut. When it crawls out the jagged gash in his neck, my trapped scream nearly deafens me.

I’m not thinking clearly. Panic and grief ride me. Barrons would say: Useless emotions, Ms. Lane. Rise above them. Stop reacting and act. There he is, talking to me again.

What wouldn’t I do for him? Nothing is too disgusting, too barbaric. This is Barrons. I want him whole again.

Ryodan had flayed him from gut to chest, before he slit his throat. I carefully peel back the meat of his tattooed abdomen and stuff Unseelie into his exposed, sliced stomach. It crawls out. I consider trying to sew the stomach up, so his body would be forced to digest the flesh of the dark Fae, and wonder if it would work, but I lack needle, thread, or any other means of repairing his torn flesh.

I attempt to put his entrails back into his body, arrange them in some semblance of order, dimly aware that this is perhaps not a normal, sane thing to do.

Once he said: Get inside me, see how deep you can go. With my hands on his spleen, I think, Here I am. Too little, too late.

I use my newfound proficiency in Voice and command him to rise. He told me once that student and teacher develop immunity to each other. I’m almost relieved. I was afraid Voice might raise a zombie, reanimated but not truly revived.

I prop his mouth open with a stick, slit my wrist, and drip blood into it. I have to slice deep to get a few drops and keep slicing because I keep healing. It only makes him bloodier.

I search my sidhe-seer place for magic to heal him. I have nothing of such consequence inside me.

I am suddenly furious.

How could he be mortal? How dare he be mortal? He never told me he was mortal! If I’d known, I might have treated him differently!

“Get up, get up, get up!” I shout.

His eyes are still open. I hate that they’re open and so empty and blank, but closing them would be an admission, an acceptance I don’t have in me.

I will never close Jericho Barrons’ eyes.

They were wide open in life. He would want them open in death. Rituals would be wasted on him. Wherever Barrons is, he would laugh if I tried something as mundane as a funeral. Too small for such a large man.

Put him in a box? Never.

Bury him? No way.

Burn him?

That, too, would be acceptance. Admission that he was dead. Never going to happen.

Even in death he looks indomitable, his big black-and-crimson-tattooed body an epic giant, felled in battle.

I settle on the ground, gently lift his head, maneuver my legs beneath it, and cradle his face in my arms. With my shirt and hot tears that won’t stop falling, I bathe away dirt and blood and clean him tenderly.

Harsh, forbidding, beautiful face.

I touch it. Trace it with my fingers, over and over, until I know the subtlest nuances of every plane and angle, until I could carve it out of stone even if I were blind.

I kiss him.

I lie down and stretch out next to him. I press my body to his and hold on.

I hold him like I never permitted myself to hold him when he was alive. I tell him all the things I never said.

For a time, I have no idea where he ends and I begin.

2

It’s funny the things people say when someone dies.

He’s in a better place.

How do you know that?

Life goes on.

That’s supposed to comfort me? I’m excruciatingly aware that life goes on. It hurts every damned second. How lovely to know it’s going to continue like this. Thank you for reminding me.

Time heals.

No, it doesn’t. At best, time is the great leveler, sweeping us all into coffins. We find ways to distract ourselves from the pain. Time is neither scalpel nor bandage. It is indifferent. Scar tissue isn’t a good thing. It’s merely the wound’s other face.

I live with the specter of Alina every day. Now I will live with Barrons’ ghost, too. Walk between them: one on my right, one on my left. They will talk to me incessantly. I’ll never escape, bridged between my greatest failures.

The day is cooling by the time I’m able to force myself to move. I know what that means. It means night is about to come slamming down on me with the finality of steel shutters on the glass façade of an upscale shop in a rundown neighborhood. I try to disentangle myself from him. I don’t want to. It takes half a dozen attempts to make myself sit up. My head aches from crying; my throat burns from screaming. When I sit up, only the shell of my body moves. My heart is still lying on the ground next to Jericho Barrons. It beats one more time, then stops.

Peace at last.

I cross my legs beneath me and stiffly push myself up. I stand like I’m a hundred years old, creaking in every bone.

If the Lord Master is hunting me, I’ve sat on this cliff’s edge for a dangerously long time.

The Lord Master, Darroc, leader of the dark Fae, bastard that tore down the walls on Halloween and turned the Unseelie hordes loose on my world.

The son of a bitch that started it all: seduced and either killed Alina or got her killed; had me raped by the Unseelie Princes, lobotomized, and turned into a helpless slave; abducted my parents and forced me into the Silvers; and drove me to this cliff’s edge, where I murdered Barrons.

If not for one ex-Fae hell-bent on regaining his lost grace and exacting retribution, none of this would have happened.

Revenge will never be enough. Revenge would be over too quickly. It wouldn’t satisfy the complexity of the needs of the creature I became while I was lying here, holding him.

I want it all back.

Everything that was taken from me.

A geyser of rage explodes in me, seeping into all the nooks and crannies my grief occupies. I welcome it, encourage it, genuflect to my new god. I baptize myself in its steaming, hissing fury. I give myself over. Claim me, take me, own me, I am yours.

Sidhe-seer is only a few letters away from Ban-sidhe: my birth country’s harbinger of death, that shrieking mythic creature driven by fury.

I seek that dark glassy lake in my mind. I stand on the black-pebbled beach. Runes float on the shiny ebon surface, glistening with power.

I bend, trail my fingers through the black water, scoop up two fistfuls, and offer the bottomless loch a deep bow of gratitude.

It’s my friend. I know that now. It has always been.

My fury is too vast for nooks and crannies.

I don’t try to contain it. I let it build into a dark, dangerous melody. I throw my head back, making room for it as it rises. It swells, blasts up my throat, puffs out my cheeks. When it erupts from my lips, it’s an inhuman cry that soars above the trees, rips into the air, and shatters the tranquillity of the forest.

Wolves startle awake in their dens, howling in mournful chorus; boars squeal; and creatures I cannot name scream. Our concert is deafening.

The temperature drops and the forest around me is abruptly encased in a thick silvery coating of ice, from smallest blade of grass to highest bough.

Birds flash-freeze and die, beaks parted, feeding their babies.

Squirrels ice, mid-leap, and drop like stones to the ground, where they shatter.

I glance at my hands. They are stained black, my palms cup silvery runes.

I know now where Barrons ends and I begin.

When Barrons ended, I began.

Me.

Mac O’Connor.

Sidhe-seer that a certain Seelie Prince said the world should fear.

I kneel and kiss Barrons a final time.

I do not cover him or perform any ritual. It would be for me, not him. There is only one thing left that I will do for me.

Soon, none of this will matter anyway.

I had to be ripped in half to stop feeling so torn in two. Divided, never knowing who to trust.

I’m now a woman with a single ambition.

I know exactly what I’m going to do.

And I know how I’m going to do it.

3

After leaving Barrons’ body, I travel in the direction my guardian demon had been herding me. I believe he must have wanted me to go this way for a reason.

I trust him in death like I never did in life.

What a piece of work I am.

I follow the river for miles. As he disappears behind me, so, too, do I. With each step I take, I strip off another piece of myself. The weak parts. The parts that won’t help me accomplish my goals. And if they are the so-called human parts, oh, well. I can’t feel and still survive what I’ve got to get through.

When I am certain I am ready, I stop and wait for my enemy.

He does not disappoint.

“I thought you’d never get here,” I say, my voice husky from screaming. It hurts to talk. I savor the pain. It’s what I deserve.

The LM is still some distance away, concealed in the forest, but I see the shadows that move too sinuously to be cast by any tree.

“Come out.” I lean back against a tree, one hand in a pocket at my cocked hip, the other at my waist. “I am what you want, aren’t I? What you came here for. What all this is about. Why hesitate now?”

My spear is in the holster beneath my arm, my dirk in my waistband. The black-leather rune-covered pouch holding the three stones the LM wants—three-quarters of what we all hope will form some kind of cage for the Sinsar Dubh—are tucked securely in my backpack, which hangs over my shoulder.

Shapes glide from the darkness: the LM and the last two Unseelie Princes.

Jack and Rainey Lane are not with them.

That would disturb me, except the Mac who loves her parents was in those pieces I left behind with Barrons’ body. Barrons is dead. It’s my fault. I have no parents. No love. No weaknesses. There’s not a single shaft of sunshine in my soul.

I feel immeasurably lighter, stronger.

Darroc—I will no longer call him the LM; even the abbreviation of his smug-ass title implies superiority—has been eating a great deal of Unseelie flesh. Power is thick in the air between us. I’m not sure what comes from him and what is rolling off me. I wonder how his minions feel about him cannibalizing their own. Perhaps what is an abomination to the Light Court is a common vice at the Dark Court, an acceptable hazard of being Unseelie.

As he approaches the circle of silvery light in which I stand, his eyes widen infinitesimally.

I laugh, a throaty purr. I know what I look like. I washed after leaving Barrons and prepared myself with care. My bra is in my backpack. My hair is softly curled and wild around my face. It took time to get the black stain off my palms. There is nothing about me that is not a weapon, an asset, something to use to get what I want, including my body. I’ve learned a thing or two from Barrons: Power is sexy. It shapes my spine, infuses my beckoning hand.

I have not been devastated by Barrons’ death. The alchemy of grief has forged a new metal.

I have been transformed.

There’s only one way I can make his death okay. Undo it.

And, while I’m at it, undo Alina’s, too.

Every person I’ve met who’s known something about the Sinsar Dubh was cryptic about it. No one has been willing to tell me exactly what’s in it. The only thing everyone kept telling me was that it was imperative I find it, and quickly, because it could be used to keep the walls from crashing.

Well, the walls are down now. It’s too late.

Considering that I’ve been hunting this Book with single-minded dedication for months, it’s startling how little thought I’ve given to its contents. I swallowed what I was told and obediently chased it.

I suspect now that everyone was keeping me tightly focused on the goal of finding it in order to keep the walls up, so I’d never get around to thinking too hard about other possible uses for the Sinsar Dubh.

There I was, hunting an object of unspeakable power, surrounded by people that wanted it for reasons of their own, and never once did I think: Wait a minute—what might it do for me?

Darroc told me that with the Sinsar Dubh he could bring Alina back. He said he wanted it to reclaim his Fae essence and exact revenge.

V’lane told me that the Dark Book holds all the Unseelie King’s knowledge, every last damnable bit of it. He said he wants it for the Seelie Queen, so she might use it to restore their race to their former glory and to re-imprison the Unseelie. He believes it contains fragments of the Song of Making, lost to their race so long ago, and that the queen will be able to use them to re-create the ancient melody. I don’t know exactly what the Song of Making is or does, but it seems to be the ultimate in Fae power.

It was Barrons that told me the most. He said the Sinsar Dubh contained spells to make and unmake worlds. Something to do with those fragments of the Song. He never would tell me why he wanted it. Said he was a book collector. Right. And I’m the Unseelie King.

Lying there, holding Barrons’ body, I’d contemplated the Sinsar Dubh’s potential uses, for the first time, in a very personal way.

Especially the part about making and unmaking worlds.

It had all become perfectly clear to me.

With the Sinsar Dubh, a person could create a world with a different past—and a different future.

Essentially, a person could turn back time.

Erase anything they didn’t like.

Replace those things they couldn’t bear to have lost, including people they couldn’t stand to live without.

I’d torn myself away from Barrons’ body with one purpose.

To get the Sinsar Dubh, and when I did, I wasn’t turning it over to anyone. It was going to be mine. I would study it. Grief had focused me like a laser. I could learn anything. Nothing would stand in my way. I would rebuild the world the way I wanted it.

“Come.” I smile. “Join me.” My face radiates only warmth, invitation, pleasure at his presence. I am the last thing he expected. He believed he would find a terrorized, hysterical girl.

I’m not and never will be again.

He motions the princes back and takes a casual step forward, but I see the studied grace in the movement. He is wary of me. He should be.

Coppery Fae eyes meet mine. How did Alina fail to see that those eyes were not human, no matter how human his body appeared?

The answer is simple: She did. She knew. That was why she lied to him, told him that she didn’t have any family, that she was an orphan. Protected us from the very first. She knew there was something dangerous about him, and she wanted him anyway, wanted to taste that kind of life.

I don’t blame her. We are flawed. We should have been banned from Ireland for everyone’s good.

He assesses me. I know he passed Barrons’ body. He’s trying to figure out what happened but is unwilling to ask. I suspect nothing could have convinced him more surely than seeing Barrons dead that the MacKayla he thought he was dealing with wasn’t home anymore. His gaze drops to the thin, jagged-edged silvery runes on the ground encircling me, bathing me in cool, eerie light. His eyes widen again as he scans them, and, for the briefest of instants, he looks rattled.

“Nice work.” His gaze flicks between the runes and my face. “What are they?”

“You don’t recognize them?” I counter. I sense deception. He knows what they are. I don’t. I’d like to.

The next thing I know, his copper eyes lock with mine and a vibrant blue-black light blazes from his fist. I hadn’t even seen him reach inside his shirt for the Hallow.

“Step out of the circle now,” he commands.

He’s not using Voice. He’s holding the amulet, one of the four Unseelie Hallows, an ornate necklace that houses a fist-sized stone of inexplicable composition. The king created it for his concubine to enable her to bend reality to her whim. The amulet reinforces an epic person’s will. Months ago, I sat at a very exclusive auction in an underground bomb shelter and watched an old Welshman pay in excess of eight figures for it. He’d had stiff competition. Mallucé had murdered the old man and taken it before Barrons and I had been able to steal it. But the wannabe vamp couldn’t use it.

Darroc can. I believe I could, too—if I can get it from him.

I held it once, and it responded to me. But, like many things Fae, time imbued it with a degree of sentience and it had sought something from me—a binding, or pledge. I’d not understood—or, if I had, hadn’t been willing to make it, afraid of what it would cost me. I’d lost the Hallow to Darroc when he’d Voiced me into turning it over, before I learned to use Voice myself. I’d have no compunction about exploring the amulet’s desires now. No price is too high.

I feel the blue-black power it radiates, lacing his command with compulsion. The pressure is immense. I want to leave the circle. I could breathe, eat, sleep, live without pain forever, if only I would leave the circle.

I laugh. “Throw me the amulet now.” Voice explodes from me.

The heads of the Unseelie Princes swivel and they regard me. It’s hard to tell with them, but I think they suddenly find me very interesting.

A chill runs up my spine. There is no fear, no terror left inside me, yet those … things … those icy, unnatural aberrations … they still manage to affect me. I have not looked directly at them yet.

Darroc’s hand tightens on the blazing amulet. “Step out of the circle!”

The pressure is crushing. It can be eased only by obeying.

“Throw me the amulet!”

He flinches, raises his hand, snarls, and jerks it back down.

For the next few minutes, he and I each try to bend the other to our will, until we are finally forced to concede that we are at an impasse. My Voice does not work on him. Neither amulet nor Voice works on me.

We are matched. Fascinating. I am his equal. My, what a creature I’ve become.

He circles me, and I turn with him, a faint smile curving my lips, my eyes alight. I am charged. I am exhilarated. I’m pumped on the power of my runes and myself. We study each other as if confronting a new species.

I offer my hand, an invitation to step to my side.

He looks down at the runes. “I am not that great a fool.” His voice is deep, musical. He is beautiful. I understand why my sister wanted him. Tall, golden-skinned, there is an otherworldly eroticism to him that being made mortal by his queen did not eradicate. The scar on his face draws the eye, begs the finger to trace it, to learn the story behind it.

I cannot ask how great a fool, because it would betray that I don’t know what my runes are.

“What happened to Barrons?” he says after a time.

“I killed him.”

He searches my face, and I know he is trying to come up with any scenario that might explain the way Barrons was mutilated and killed. If he examined the body, he saw the spear wound, and he knows I carry it. He knows I stabbed him at least once.

“Why?”

“I wearied of his incessant boorishness.” I wink. Let him think me mad. I am. In every sense of the word.

“I didn’t think he could be killed. The Fae have long feared him.”

“Turns out the spear was his weakness. It’s why he never wanted to touch it.”

He absorbs my words, and I know he’s trying to decide why a Fae weapon could kill Jericho Barrons. I’d like to know, too. Was it the spear that dealt the killing blow? Would he have died of that wound eventually regardless of whether Ryodan had slit his throat?

“Yet he armed you with it? You expect me to believe that?”

“Like you, he thought I was all fluff and no teeth. Too stupid to be worth suspicion. ‘Lamb to the slaughter’ was how he liked to phrase it. Little lamb killed the lion. Guess I showed him, huh?” I wink again.

“I burned his body. There is nothing left but ash.” He watches my face carefully.

“Good.”

“If there was any way he might rise, he never will now. The princes scattered his ashes to a hundred dimensions.” His gaze is piercing now.

“I should have thought of that myself. Thank you for finishing it so well.” My mind is on the new world I plan to create. I’ve said good-bye to this one.

Copper eyes narrow, glittering with scorn. “You didn’t kill Barrons. What happened? What are you playing at?”

“He betrayed me,” I lie.

“How?”

“It’s none of your business. I had my reasons.” I watch him watch me. He wonders if the rape of the Unseelie Princes and my time in the Hall of All Days has unhinged me. He wonders if I’m unbalanced enough to have gone crazy and actually killed Barrons for pissing me off. When he glances down at the runes again, I know he thinks I have enough juice to have pulled it off.

“Step out of the circle. I have your parents and will kill them if you don’t obey me.”

“I don’t care.” I scoff.

He stares. He heard the truth in my words.

I don’t care. An essential part of me is dead. I don’t mourn it. This is no longer my world. What happens here doesn’t matter. In this reality, I’m already on borrowed time. I will rebuild a new one or die trying.

“I’m free, Darroc. I’m really, truly free.” I shrug my shoulders, toss my head, and laugh.

He sucks in a sharp breath when I say his name and laugh, and I know that I’ve reminded him of my sister. Did she say those words to him once? Does he hear joy in my laughter, as he once heard in hers?

He stalks a tight circle around me, eyes narrowed. “What changed? In the days since I abducted your parents and today, what happened to you?”

“What happened to me started happening a long time ago. You should have kept Alina alive. I hated you for that.”

“And now?”

I look him up and down. “Now is different. Things are different. We are different.”

His eyes search mine, left to right and back again, rapidly. “What are you saying?”

“I see no reason we cannot be … friends.”

He tries the word. “Friends?”

I nod.

He contemplates the possibility that I am sincere. A human would never entertain the notion. Fae are different. No matter how much time they spend among us, they just can’t nail the subtleties of human emotion. It’s that difference I’m counting on. When I left Barrons, all I wanted was to lay in wait for Darroc, use my runes and my newfound dark glassy friend to kill him the moment he appeared.

I exorcised it swiftly.

This ex-Fae turned human knows more about both the Seelie and Unseelie courts, and the Book that I am determined to possess, than anyone. When he has told me everything he knows, I’ll relish killing him. I’d considered allying myself with V’lane—and when I’m done taking everything I need from Darroc, I still may. After all, I’ll need the fourth stone. But V’lane doesn’t seem to have any real knowledge about the Book, aside from a few old legends.

It’s a better bet that the Unseelie know more about the Dark Book than the Seelie Queen’s right hand. Maybe even where to find the prophecy. Like Barrons, Darroc has actually seen pages of the arcane tome. I was forced to concede that hunting the Sinsar Dubh was an exercise in futility until I discovered how to control it. But Darroc has never stopped his search. Why? What does he know that I don’t?

The sooner I pry his secrets from him, the sooner I learn to contain and use the Sinsar Dubh, the sooner I can stop living in this agonizing reality that I will have no hesitation about destroying to replace with my world. The right one. Where everything ends happily ever after.

“Friends work toward common goals,” he says.

“Like hunting books,” I agree.

“Friends trust each other. They don’t barricade each other out.” He looks at my feet.

The runes came from within me. I am my circle. He doesn’t know this. I kick them aside. I wonder if he has forgotten my spear. As heavily laced with Unseelie as he is, a single prick would sentence him to the same slow, gruesome death that Mallucé suffered.

When I step out, he slowly looks me up and down.

I see the thoughts that flash through his eyes as they travel over my body: kill her/fuck her/assault and bind her/explore her uses? It takes a lot to make a man kill a beautiful woman he has not yet slept with. Especially if he enjoyed her sister.

“Friends don’t try to coerce each other,” I say with a pointed look at the amulet.

He inclines his head and slips it back inside his shirt.

I offer my hand with a smile. Barrons taught me well. Keep your friends close …

Darroc takes it, leans down to place a light kiss upon my lips. The tension between us is a palpable thing. One sudden move from either of us and we’ll be all over each other, trying to kill each other, and we know it. He keeps his body pliant. I infuse my limbs with languor. We are two scorpions with coiled tails, trying to mate. It is no more than I deserve, the punishment of letting him touch me like this. I sentenced Barrons to death.

I part my lips beneath his, but demurely, teeth standing guard. I exhale a soft whisper of a breath into his mouth. He likes it.

… and your enemies closer.

Behind us, the Unseelie Princes begin to chime softly like dark crystal. I remember that sound. I know what it precedes. I tighten my hand on his. “Never them. Never again.”

Darroc turns to them and barks a harsh command in a language that hurts my ears.

They vanish.

The moment I no longer know where they are, whether they might be closing in on me, I reach for my spear. It is gone, too.

The Unseelie Princes cannot sift within the Silvers with any predictability. Darroc tells me it’s a crapshoot every time they try. Cruce’s curse again, screwing things up.

I tell him the stones are no better, that whatever dimension I’m in tries to expel them once uncovered, in an effort to return the rune-covered blue-black stones to the cliffs of the icy Unseelie prison from whence they were chiseled.

I’m surprised he doesn’t know this and tell him so.

“You do not understand what life is like at the Seelie court, MacKayla. Those with true knowledge, true memories of our past, guard it zealously. There are as many versions of the Old Days and conflicting tales of our origins as there are dimensions to choose from within the hall. The only Unseelie we ever saw were those we battled the day the king and queen fought and the king slew our queen. Since then, we have drunk from the cauldron countless times.”

He moves along the cliff’s edge with unnatural fluidity and grace. Fae move like sleek, kingly predators, born of the sure knowledge that they can never die—or at least very rarely and only under special circumstances. He hasn’t lost that arrogance, or perhaps he’s reclaimed it, from all the Unseelie he’s been eating. He’s not wearing the crimson robes that once terrified me. Tall, gracefully muscled, he’s dressed like an outdoorsman in a Versace ad, with a long fall of moon-silvered hair secured at his nape. He’s undeniably sexy. In his power and confidence, he reminds me of Barrons.

I don’t ask why they drink. I understand. If I found the cauldron and drank from it, it would erase all pain and allow me to start life over, a blank slate. I couldn’t grieve for what I didn’t remember ever having. That they drink implies that on some level the Fae feel. If not pain, at least significant discomfort.

“So how are we going to get out of here?” I ask.

His reply gives me a sudden chill, a sense of something more vast and incomprehensible than déjà vu—an inevitability finally manifesting.

“The White Mansion.”

4

The night the walls came crashing down, I cowered in a belfry, my only goal to survive until dawn.

I had no idea if the world would survive with me.

I thought it was the longest night of my life. I was wrong.

This is the longest night of my life, walking side by side with my enemy, mourning Jericho Barrons, drowning in my own complicity.

It stretches on and on. I live a thousand hours in a handful. I count from one to sixty beneath my breath, over and over, ticking away the minutes I make it through, thinking if I put enough of them between me and his death, the immediacy of the pain might dull and I will be able to catch a breath without a knife stabbing through my heart.

We do not pause to eat or sleep. He keeps Unseelie flesh in a pouch and periodically chews it while we travel, which means he can keep going far longer than I. At some point, I’ll be forced to rest. The thought of relinquishing consciousness in his presence is not a pleasant one.

I have weapons in my arsenal that I’ve not yet tried on him. I have no doubt he is concealing armaments, too. Our truce is a floor of eggshells and we’re both wearing combat boots.

“Where is the Unseelie King?” I ask, hoping distraction might make the minutes move faster. “It’s his book on the loose out there. I heard he wants it destroyed. Why isn’t he doing something about it?” I may as well embark on an Unseelie fishing expedition, casting my nets for anything I can use. Until I know how powerful Darroc is and better understand what I have in my dark glassy lake, subtlety is the name of my game. I will make no rash moves that jeopardize my mission. Barrons’ resurrection depends on it.

He shrugs. “He vanished long ago. Some say he’s too insane to care. Others believe he cannot leave the Unseelie prison and lies encased in a tomb of black ice, slumbering eternally. Still others claim the prison never contained him to begin with and that remorse for the death of his concubine was the only bond he ever permitted.”

“That implies love. Fae don’t.”

“Debatable. I recognize myself in you and find it … compelling. It makes me less alone.”

Translation: I serve as a mirror and the Fae enjoy their own reflection. “Is that desirable to a Fae—to be less alone?”

“Few Fae can endure solitude. Some posit that energy cast into an ethos that fails to reflect or rebound it permits that energy to dissipate until nothing remains. Perhaps it is a flaw.”

“Like clapping for Tinker Bell,” I mock. “A mirror, validation.”

He gives me a look.

“Is that what the Fae are made of? Energy?”

He gives me another look that reminds me of V’lane, and I know that he will never discuss what the Fae are comprised of with me or any human. His superiority complex has in no way been diminished by time as a mortal. Rather, I suspect it has grown. He knows both sides now. This gives him a tactical advantage over other Fae. He understands what makes us tick and is more dangerous because of it. I file the energy idea away for further contemplation. Iron affects the Fae. Why? Are they some kind of energy that could be “shorted out”?

“You admit to flaws?” I press.

“We are not perfect. What god is? Examine yours. According to your mythos, he was so disappointed with his initial efforts creating your race that he tried again. At least we imprisoned our mistakes. Your god permits his to roam free. At a mere few thousand years old, your creation myths are far more absurd than ours. Yet you wonder why we can’t recall our origins, from a million or more years in the past.”

We have drawn closer to each other while speaking and both realize it at the same time. We glide back in instant retreat, regaining enough distance between us that we would see an attack from the other coming. Part of me finds this amusing.

The princes have not yet reappeared. I am grateful. Although they no longer impact me sexually, they have a profoundly terrible presence. They leave me feeling oddly two-dimensional, minus something essential, guilty, betrayed in a way I can’t understand and don’t want to. I don’t know if I feel this because I was once beneath them, with my entire sense of self being stripped from my skin and bones, or if they are fundamentally anathema to all humans. I wonder if the “stuff” of which they were made by the Unseelie King is so alien and horrific to us that they are the equivalent of a psychic black hole. That they are unspeakably beautiful only makes it worse. Their exquisiteness is the event horizon from which there is no escape. I shiver.

I remember.

I will never forget. Three of them and an invisible fourth, moving over me, in me.

Because Darroc commanded it. That, too, I will never forget.

I thought being raped by them was terrible, that it had carved me in deep places, changed my innate makeup. I’d known nothing of pain, of transforming change. I do now.

We clear the forest, and the terrain begins to slope downward. With the moon lighting our way, we hike through dark meadows.

I give up my fishing expedition for now. My throat is raw from screaming, and putting one foot in front of the other while keeping an impassive expression on my face takes all my concentration. I slog through a lifetime of hell in the interminable darkness before dawn.

I replay the scene on the cliff through my head a thousand times, pretending it ended some other way.

Thick grass and slender flat rushes rustle at my waist and brush the undersides of my breasts. If there are animals in the dense thicket, they keep their distance. If I were an animal, I would keep my distance from us, too. The climate grows more temperate; the air warms with the perfume of exotic night-blooming jasmine and honeysuckle.

As abruptly as night falls here, dawn breaks. The sky is black one moment, pink, then blue. Three seconds, night to day.

I made it through the night. I draw a shallow, careful breath.

When my sister was killed, I discovered that the light of day has an irrational leavening effect on grief. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s just to shore us up so we can survive the lonely, bleak night again.

I didn’t know we were on a high plain until we were suddenly at the edge of the plateau, and I am startled by the valley dropping sharply away before me.

Across that valley, on an oceanic swell of hill, it looms. It soars. It sprawls for miles in every direction.

The White Mansion.

Again I get that uncanny feeling of inevitability that, one way or another, life would have deposited me here, that in any reality I would have made the same choices that drove me to its door.

Home to the Unseelie King’s beloved concubine for whom he killed the Seelie Queen, it is so enormous it boggles the mind. I turn my head from side to side, up and down, trying to take it all in. One could hope to behold its entirety only from miles away, as we are now. Was this where Barrons had been trying to lead me? If so, why? Had Ryodan been lying when he found me on the cliff’s edge and told me that the way back to Dublin was through an IFP, an Interdimensional Fairy Pothole, as I’d dubbed the slivers of Fae reality that splintered our world now that the walls were down?

The walls are alabaster, reflecting the sun, and blaze with such brilliance that I narrow my eyes to slits. The sky beyond the House—I cannot think of it without a capital; it is far more than a mere residence—deepens to a dazzling blue that exists only in Faery, a shade that will never be seen in the human world. There are certain Faery colors that have dimension, are comprised of myriad seductive subtleties upon which the eye could linger for time uncounted. The sky is nearly as addictive as the golden floor in the Hall of All Days.

I force my gaze back to the White Mansion. I explore its lines, foundation to rooftop, terrace to tower, garden to fountain to turret. A Möbius strip of tiered structures on an Escher-esque landscape, it turns back on itself here and there, continuous and unbroken, ever-changing and unfolding. It strains the eye, tests the mind. But I’ve seen Fae in their true form. I find it … soothing. In my dead black heart, I feel something. I don’t understand how anything could stir in there, but it does. Not a full-blown feeling, but an echo of an emotion. Faint yet undeniable.

Darroc watches me. I pretend not to notice.

“Your race has never built a thing of such beauty, complexity, and perfection,” he says.

“Nor has my race ever created a Sinsar Dubh,” I parry.

“Small creatures create small things.”

“Large creatures’ egos are so big they don’t see the small things coming,” I murmur. Like traps, I don’t say.

He intuits it. He laughs and says, “I will remember the warning, MacKayla.”

After he found the first two Silvers at an auction house in London, Darroc tells me, he had to learn to use them. It took him dozens of tries to establish a static link into the Fae realms, then, once he was inside the Silvers, it took him months to find a way to the Unseelie prison.

There’s pride in his voice as he speaks of his trials and triumphs. Stripped of his Fae essence, he not only survived when his race didn’t believe he would, but he accomplished the goal he’d been pursuing as a Fae, the very thing for which he’d been banished. He feels superior to others of his kind.

I listen, analyzing everything he tells me, looking for chinks in his armor. I know Fae have “feelings” such as arrogance, superiority, mockery, and condescension. Listening to him, I add pride, vengeance, impatience, gloating, and amusement to the list.

We’ve been making small talk for some time, watching each other intently. I’ve told him about growing up in Ashford, my first impressions of Dublin, my love of fast cars. He has told me more about his fall from grace, what he did, why he did it. We compete to disarm each other with trivial confidences that betray nothing of importance.

As we cross the valley, I say, “Why go to the Unseelie prison? Why not the Seelie court?”

“And give Aoibheal the opportunity to finish me off for good? The next time I see the bitch, she dies.”

Was that why he’d taken my spear—to kill the queen? He’d lifted it without my awareness, just like V’lane had. How? He wasn’t Fae anymore. Had he eaten so much Unseelie that he was now a mutant with unpredictable abilities? I recall being in the church, sandwiched between Unseelie Princes, turning the spear on myself, throwing it, striking the pedestal of a basin, holy water splashing, steam hissing. How had he made me throw it away then? How had he taken it from me now?

“Is the queen at the Seelie court right now?” I cast my net again.

“How would I know? I have been banished. Assuming I found a way in, the first Seelie that saw me would kill me.”

“Don’t you have allies at the Seelie court? Isn’t V’lane your friend?”

He snorts disdainfully. “We sat on her High Council together. Though he gives lip service to Fae supremacy and speaks of walking the earth freely again without the odious Compact governing us—us, as if humans could govern their gods!—when it comes to action, V’lane is Aoibheal’s lapdog and always has been. I am now human, according to my fairer brethren, and they despise me.”

“I thought you said they worshipped you as a hero for tearing the walls down and freeing them.”

His eyes narrow. “I said they will. Soon, I will be heralded as the savior of our race.”

“So you went to the Unseelie prison. That was risky.” I prod to keep him talking. As long as he’s talking, I can focus on his words, on my goals. Silence isn’t golden, it’s deadly. It’s a vacuum that fills up with ghosts.

“I needed the Hunters. As a Fae, I could summon them. As a mortal, I had to physically seek them.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t kill you on sight.” Hunters hate humans. The black-skinned, winged demons have no love for anything but themselves.

“Death is not a Hunter’s delight. Too final.”

A memory flickers through his eyes, and I know that when he found them, they did things to him that made him scream for a long time.

“They agreed to help me in exchange for permanent freedom. They taught me to eat Unseelie. After tracking weaknesses in the prison walls, where Unseelie had escaped before, I patched them.”

“To make yourself the only game in town.”

He nods. “If my dark brethren were going to be freed, they would be thanking me for it. I discovered how to link Silvers and created a passage to Dublin through the White Mansion.”

“Why here?”

“Of all the dimensions I explored, this one remains the most stable, aside from a few … inconveniences. It seems Cruce’s curse had little effect on this realm, other than to splinter dimensions that are easily avoided.”

I call them IFPs but I do not tell him this. It made Barrons smile. Little made Barrons smile.

I think I’m under control, that I’ve stripped away all weaknesses. That committing to my mission has made me impervious. I’m wrong. The thought of Barrons smiling brings other thoughts.

Barrons naked.

Dancing.

Dark head thrown back.

Laughing.

The image doesn’t “gently swim up in my mind” in a dreamy sort of way, like I’ve seen in movies. No, this one slams into my head like a nuclear missile, exploding in my brain in graphic detail. I suffocate in a mushroom cloud of pain.

I can’t breathe. I squeeze my eyes shut.

White teeth flashing in his dark face: I get knocked down but I get up again. You’re never gonna keep me down.

I stagger.

But he didn’t get up, the bastard. He stayed down.

With my spear in his back. How am I supposed to find my way each day without him here to help me? I don’t know what to do, how to make decisions.

I can’t survive this grief! I stumble and go down on one knee. I clutch my head.

Darroc is at my side, helping me stand. His arms are around me.

I open my eyes.

He is so close that I see gold speckles in his coppery eyes. Wrinkles crease the corners. Faint lines bracket his mouth. Has he laughed so often in his time as a mortal? My hands curl into fists.

His hands are gentle on my face when he pushes my hair back. “What happened?”

Neither image nor pain is gone from my brain. I cannot function in this state. In moments, I will be on my knees, screaming with grief and fury, and my mission will go straight to hell. Darroc will see my weakness and kill me, or worse. Somehow I have to survive. I have no idea how long it will take me to find the Book and learn how to use it. I wet my lips. “Kiss me,” I say. “Hard.”

His mouth tightens. “I am not a fool, MacKayla.”

“Just do it,” I snarl.

I watch him weigh the idea. Two scorpions. He is skeptical. He is fascinated.

When he kisses me, Barrons vanishes from my head. The pain recedes.

On the lips of my enemy, my sister’s lover, my lover’s killer, I taste the punishment I deserve. I taste oblivion.

It makes me cold and strong again.

I have dreamed of houses all my life. I have an entire neighborhood in my subconscious that I can get to only while sleeping. But I can’t control my nocturnal visits any more than I’ve ever been able to avoid my Cold Place dreams. Sometimes I’m granted passage and sometimes I’m not. Certain nights the doors open easily, while others I stand outside, denied entrance, longing for the wonders that lie within.

I don’t understand people who say they can’t recall their dreams. With the exception of the Cold Place dream, which I began blocking long ago, I recall all the others. When I wake in the morning, they’re floating through my mind in fragments, and I can either spring out of bed and forget them or gather up the pieces and examine them.

I read somewhere that dreams about houses are dreams of our souls. In those dwellings of our psyche, we store our innermost secrets and desires. Perhaps that’s why some people don’t remember them—they don’t want to. A girl I knew in high school once told me she dreamed of houses, too, but they were always pitch black and she could never find the light switch. She hated those dreams. She wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box.

My houses are endless, filled with sunshine and music, gardens and fountains. And for some reason there are always a lot of beds. Big beds. Way more than any house needs. I don’t know what the deal is with that, but I think it might mean I think about sex a lot.

Sometimes I worry that there’s not enough room in my brain for both my dreams and reality, that I’m a hard drive with limited gigabytes and one day I won’t be able to maintain the firewall between them. I wonder if that’s what senility is.

Over the years, I’ve begun to suspect that all the houses of which I’ve been dreaming are just different wings of the same great house.

Today I realize it’s true.

Why have I been dreaming of the White Mansion all these years?

How could I possibly have known it existed?

Now that I’m a little over the edge anyway, I can admit something: My whole life, I’ve secretly been afraid that beneath my fiercely focused grooming and accessorizing, I’m, well … psychotic.

Never underestimate a well-dressed bimbo.

The real thinkers of the world aren’t the best dressed. Staying on top of the latest fashions, accessorizing, and presenting oneself is time consuming. It takes a lot of effort, energy, and concentration to be incessantly happy and perfectly groomed. You meet somebody like that—ask yourself what they’re running from.

Back in high school, I began to suspect I was bipolar. There were times when, for no good reason at all, I felt downright, well … homicidal was the only word for it. I learned that the busier I stayed, the less time I had to feel it.

I sometimes wonder if before I was born someone showed me the script or filled me in on the highlights. It’s déjà vu to the worst extreme. I refuse to believe I would have auditioned for this role.

As I stare at the White Mansion and I know what parts of it look like inside—and I know there’s no way I could know those things—I wonder if I’m a serious nutcase. If none of this is happening, because I’m really locked up in a padded cell somewhere, hallucinating. If so, I hope they change my drugs soon. Whatever I’m on isn’t working.

I don’t want to go in there.

I want to go in there and never leave.

Duality is me.

The House has countless entrances, through elaborately manicured gardens.

Darroc and I enter one of the gardens. It’s so lovely it’s almost painful to look at. Paths of glistening gold pavers unfurl through exotic, perfumed bushes and circle clusters of willowy silver-leafed trees. Dazzling pearl benches offer respite from the sun beneath lacy leaves, and silk chaises dot outdoor rooms of billowing chiffon. Flowers bend and sway in a light, perfect breeze, the precise degree of sultry—not too hot or moist but warm and wet, like sex is warm and wet.

I have dreamed of a garden like this. Small differences but not many.

We pass a fountain that sprays rainbows of shimmery water into the air. Thousands of flowers in every dazzling shade of yellow circle it: velvety buttercups and waxy tulips, creamy lilies and blossoms that do not exist in our world. For a moment I think of Alina, because she loves yellow, but that thought reeks of death and brings other thoughts with it, so I turn away from the beauty of the fountain and focus on the hated face and voice of my companion.

He begins to give me instructions. He tells me we’re looking for a room with an ornate gilt-framed mirror that is approximately ten feet tall by five feet wide. The last time he saw the room, it was empty of all furnishings, save the mirror. The corridor off which the room opened was light, airy, and had a floor of unbroken white marble. The walls of the corridor were also white and adorned with brilliant murals between tall windows.

Keep an eye out for white marble floors, he instructs me, because only two of the wings—as of the last time he was here—have them. The floors in other wings are gold, bronze, silver, iridescent, pink, mint, yellow, lavender, and other pastels. The rare wing is crimson. If I see a black floor, I am to turn back immediately.

We enter a circular foyer with a high glass ceiling that collects the sunny day. The walls and floor are translucent silver and reflect the sky above in such vivid detail that, when a cream-puff cloud scoots overhead, I feel as if I’m walking through it. What a clever design! A room in the sky. Did the concubine create it? Did the Unseelie King design it for her? Could a being capable of creating such horrors as the Unseelie also create such delights? Sunlight bathes me from above, bounces back at me from the wall and floors.

Mac 1.0 would have hooked up an iPod and stretched out here for hours.

Mac 5.0 shivers. Not even this much sun can warm the part of her that has gone cold.

I realize I’ve forgotten my enemy. I tune him back in.

Assuming, of course, Darroc is saying, that the room we seek still opens off one of those white-marbled halls.

That gets my attention. “Assuming?”

“The mansion rearranges itself. One of those inconveniences I mentioned.”

“What is with you fairies, anyway?” I explode. “Why does everything have to change? Why can’t things just be what they are? Why can’t a house be a normal house and a book a normal book? Why does it all have to be so complicated?” I want to get back to Dublin now, find the Book, figure out what needs to be done, and escape this damned reality!

He doesn’t answer, but I don’t need him to. If a Fae were to ask me why an apple eventually rots or humans eventually die, I would shrug and say it was the nature of human things.

Change is the nature of Fae things. They are always becoming something else. That’s a critical thing to remember when dealing with anything Fae, as I learned from the Shades. I wonder how much further they’ve evolved since I last saw them.

“Sometimes it rearranges itself on a grand scale,” Darroc continues, “while other times it merely swaps a few things around. Only once did it take me several days to find the room I seek. I usually find it more quickly.”

Days? My head swivels and I stare. I could be stuck in here with him for days?

The sooner we get started, the better.

A dozen halls open off the foyer, some well lit, others soothingly dim. Nothing is frightening. The House exudes a sense of well-being and peace. Still, it is a grand labyrinth, and I wait for him to choose our path. Although I have long been dreaming of this place, I do not know this foyer. I suspect the House is so large that an entire human life of dreams would not be enough to explore it all.

“There are several rooms in the mansion that house Silvers. The one we seek holds a single mirror.” He gives me a sharp look. “Avoid the other mirrors if you stumble upon them. Do not gaze into them. I am not forbidding you knowledge, merely trying to protect you.”

Right. And the White Mansion is really black. “You make it sound as if we’re splitting up.” I’m surprised. He worked so hard to get me at his side. Now he’s letting me go? Have I been so convincing? Or does he have an ace up his sleeve I don’t know about?

“We cannot afford to waste time here. The longer I’m here, the more chance there is for someone else to find my book.”

“My book,” I correct.

He laughs. “Our book.”

I say nothing. My book—and he’s dead the moment I’ve got it and know how to use it. Sooner, if he’s no longer useful.

He leans back against the wall and crosses his arms over his chest. In this room of sky, he is a golden angel, shoulders propped against a cloud. “We can both have everything we want, MacKayla. With you and I allied, there are no limits. Nothing and no one can stop us. Do you realize that?”

“I get to use it first.” He won’t exist to use it by the time I’m done with it. No, wait, unmaking him would be too easy a death.

I want to murder him.

“We have plenty of time to decide who does what with it first. But, for now, are we friends or not?”

It is on the tip of my tongue to mock him, to tell him words mean nothing. Why does he ask me absurd questions? I can so easily lie. He should judge my actions, but I don’t share advice with the enemy. “We are friends,” I say easily.

He gestures for me to take the nearest corridor on my right, one with a dusky-rose floor, and turns for the first one on his left, which gleams deep bronze.

“What do I do if I find it?” I ask. It’s not like we have cell phones programmed with nifty little acronyms.

“I branded you at the base of your skull. Press your fingers to the mark and call for me.”

He has already turned away and begun walking down his hall. I hiss at his back. The day will come, and soon, when I remove his brand, if I have to scrape my skull down to bare bone. I’d do it now, except I don’t want to run the risk of damaging Barrons’. It’s all I have left of him. His hands were on me there, gentle, possessive.

There is a smile in Darroc’s voice when he warns, “If you find the Silver and return to Dublin without me, I will hunt you.”

“Right back at you, Darroc,” I say in the same light, warning tone. “Don’t even think of leaving without me. I may not have a mark on you, but I’ll find you. I’ll always find you.” I mean it. The hunter is now the hunted. I have him in my sights and will keep him there. Until I decide to pull the trigger. No more running. From anything.

He stops and glances over his shoulder at me. The tiny gold flecks in his eyes flare brighter, and he inhales sharply.

If I know Fae as well as I think I do, I just turned him on.

I slap the latest edition of my rag to the streetlamp and pound in a nail. I tell ’em what’ll work for me and don’t tell ’em what won’t. ’Times you gotta lie.

I cram a candy bar in my mouth and freeze-frame to the next streetlamp on my route. I know my rags are getting to the peeps. I been seeing results. Couple sidhe-seers ditched the abbey already. I’m taking over where Mac left off—shit-stirrer extraordinaire, bucking Ro’s rules and regs, all the while telling her whatever she wants to hear.

Two candy bars and a protein pack later, I’m done with my route and burning up the pavement for my fave place. I got hours for myself now and gonna spend ’em all circling Chester’s, slicing and dicing everything that comes within a ten-block radius of it.

I swagger down the street.

Ry-O and his men are in there—least I think they are. Ain’t seen none in a while but keep hoping. See, ’cause they piss me off. They threatened me.

Nobody threatens the Mega.

I snicker. Pub ain’t no good if patrons can’t get in. I can’t keep ’em out all night, ’cause I hunt with the Guardians and kill what they trap, but I do ’nuff damage during the day. Jayne caught me one afternoon, said they’ll kill me for it. He’s heard tales of ’em, steers clear. Says they’re no more human than the Fae.

Told ’em the pricks can just try to mess with me. See, ’nother thing I didn’t tell nobody is, when I stabbed the Hunter, something weird happened: The dark came all the way up my sword and got into my arm a little. Infected me like a splinter. For a couple days, my hand had black veins and was icy like it was dead. Had to wear a glove to hide it. Thought I might lose it, hafta learn to fight right-handed.

Looks okay now.

Ain’t in no hurry to kill a Hunter again.

But I think I’m faster. And Ro’s orders don’t seem to make me feel near as conflicted as they used to.

Think Ry-O and his dudes maybe got nothing on me, and I’d like to test it. Like to show Mac, but it’s been more than three whole weeks since I saw her last. Since we broke into the libraries.

Barrons ain’t ’round neither.

I don’t worry. Ain’t my nature. I live. Leave the worrying for the warts.

But I sure wish she’d show up. Any time now’d be real good.

Sinsar Dubh’s been all over this city past few days. Took out a dozen of Jayne’s men in one night, like it was playing with us. Kept dividing us, picking us off.

Kinda starting to wonder if it’s looking for me.

5

In the House, away from my enemy, I find solace for a time. Grief, loss, pain melt away. I wonder if they cannot exist inside these walls.

The weight of my spear in the holster beneath my arm is back, heavy against my side. Like V’lane, Darroc has some way of taking it from me, but when we are apart he returns it. Perhaps so I can defend myself. I can’t imagine needing to in a place such as this.

There has never been and will never be another place in any realm, in any dimension, that holds me in such thrall as the White Mansion. Not even the bookstore competes for dominance in my soul.

The House is mesmerizing. If, deep down inside where I feel psychotic, I am angered by this, I’m too lulled by whatever drug it feeds me to focus on it for long.

I wander the rose-floored corridor, absorbing it in a dreamy daze. Windows line the right side of the hall, and, beyond the crystal-edged panes, dawn blushes over gardens filled with pink roses, wreathed heads nodding sleepily in the gentle morning breeze.

The rooms that open off this corridor are decorated in hues of morning sky. The colors of the hall, the day beyond, and the rooms complement one another perfectly, as if, from every angle, this wing was designed as an outfit, flawlessly accessorized, to be donned depending on the mood.

When the rose floor ends and a sudden turn in the corridor sets me on a lavender path, violet dusk clings to the windows. Nocturnal creatures frolic in a forest glade beneath a moon rimmed with brilliant cerulean. The rooms in this corridor are furnished in shades of twilight.

Yellow and reflective floors open onto sunny days and sunnier rooms.

Bronze corridors have no windows, only tall arched doors that lead into enormous, high-ceilinged, kingly rooms—some for dining, some filled with books and comfortable chairs, others for dancing, and still more for what I think are forms of entertainment I don’t understand. I imagine I hear echoes of laughter. Lit by candles, the rooms off bronze corridors are masculine and smell of spice. I find the scent intoxicating, disturbing.

I walk and walk, looking into this room and that, delighted by the things I find, the things I recognize. In this place, every hour of day and night is always available.

I have been here many times before.

There’s the piano I played.

Here is the sunroom where I sat and read.

There’s the kitchen where I ate truffles smothered in cream and filled with delicate fruits that don’t exist in our world.

Here, a flute lies on a table, beside an open book, next to a teapot decorated with a pattern as familiar to me as the back of my own hand.

There’s the rooftop garden, high atop a turret where I’ve gazed through a telescope at an azure sea.

Here, a library of endless rows of books, where I’ve passed time uncounted.

Each room is a study in beauty, each item in it adorned with intricate detail, as if its creator had infinity in which to work.

I wonder how long the concubine was here. I wonder how much of this house is her creation.

I taste forever in this place, but, unlike in the Hall of All Days, forever here is exquisite, gentle. The House promises a blissful eternity. It does not terrify or cow. The House is time as it was meant to be: endless, serene.

Here—a room of thousands of gowns! I dash through row after row, my arms spread wide, my hands fanning the fabulous fabrics. I love these gowns!

I pluck one from its hanger and spin around, dancing with it. Faint strains of music drift upon the air and I lose track of time.

Here’s a curio cabinet housing items I cannot name but nonetheless recognize. I pocket a few of the smaller trinkets. I open a music box and listen to a song that makes me feel I am drifting in space, enormous and free, more right in my skin than I’ve ever been, poised on the brink of all possibles. I forget everything for a time, lost in joy that is larger than the mansion itself.

In room after room, I find something familiar, something that makes me happy.

I see the first of many beds. As in my dreams, there are so many that I lose count after a time.

I wander sumptuous room after room, see bed after bed. Some of the rooms have nothing but beds.

I begin to feel … uneasy. I don’t like looking at these beds.

The beds disturb me.

I turn my head away, because they make me feel things I don’t want to feel.

Need. Desire. Alone.

Empty beds.

Don’t want to be alone anymore. So tired of being alone. Tired of waiting.

After a time, I stop looking in the rooms.

I was wrong when I thought it might not be possible to feel negative things inside the White Mansion.

Grief wells up inside me.

I’ve lived so long. Lost so many things.

I force myself to focus. I remind myself that I’m supposed to be looking for something. A mirror.

I love that mirror.

I shake my head. No, I don’t. I just need it. I don’t have any emotions about it!

It brings me such pleasure! It brings us together.

White marble, Darroc said. I need to find white-marble floors. Not crimson, not bronze, not pink, and especially not black.

I envision the mirror as he described it: ten feet tall, five feet wide.

Gilt-framed, like the ones at 1247 LaRuhe.

The mirror is a part of the vast Unseelie Hallow that is the network of Silvers. I can sense Hallows. I can sense all Fae OOPs—Objects of Power. It is perhaps my greatest advantage.

I reach out with my sidhe-seer senses, expand and search.

I sense nothing. It didn’t work in the Hall of All Days, either. Impossible, I suppose, to sense a Silver while inside the Silvers.

My feet turn me, and I begin walking in a new direction with complete confidence. I’m suddenly certain I have seen the mirror I need many times and I know exactly where it is.

I’ll find the way out long before Darroc does. And although I will not leave without him—I have much use for him—it will please me to best him.

I hurry down a mint corridor, turn without hesitation onto an iridescent path, and rush down a pale-blue hall. A corridor of silver turns to blush wine.

The mirror is ahead. It draws me. I can’t wait to get to it.

I’m focused, so focused that the crimson hallway barely makes a dent in my awareness.

I’m focused—so focused on my goal that, by the time I realize what I’ve done, it’s too late.

I don’t know what makes me look down, but something does.

I freeze.

I’m at a crossroads, the intersection of two halls.

I can go east, west, north, or south—if such directions exist in the House—but whichever way I choose, the floor is the same color.

Black.

I stand uncertainly, berating myself for screwing up again, when suddenly a hand slips into mine.

It is warm, familiar. And much too real.

I close my eyes. I’ve been played with in Faery before. Who am I to be tortured with now? What is my punishment to be? Which ghost will nip at me now with needles for teeth?

Alina?

Barrons?

Both?

I fist my other hand so nothing can hold it.

I know better than to think if I keep my eyes closed my ghost will go away. It doesn’t work that way. When your private demons decide to mess with you, they demand their pound of flesh. It’s best to pay it and get it over with.

Then I can focus on finding my way off the black floor. I brace myself for how bad it’s going to be. I speculate that if golden floors in the Hall of ALL Days were bad, black floors in the White Mansion will be … forgive the pun … beyond the pale.

Fingers twine with mine. I know the hand as well as my own.

Sighing, I open my eyes.

I jerk away and scramble back frantically, boots slipping on the shiny black surface. I sprawl flat on my back with such a jolt that I bite my tongue.

I begin to hyperventilate. Does she see me? Does she know me? Is she there? Am I?

She laughs, a silvery sound, and it makes my heart hurt. I remember laughing like that once. Happy, so happy.

I don’t even try to get up. I just lay there and watch her. I’m bewildered. I’m hypnotized. I’m carved in two by a sense of duality I cannot reconcile.

Not Alina. Not Barrons.

At the juncture of east, west, north, and south, she stands.

Her.

The sad, beautiful woman who haunts my dreams.

She is so dazzling it makes me want to weep.

But she’s not sad.

She’s so happy that I could hate her.

She glows radiantly, she smiles, and it curves lips of such soft, divine perfection that mine part instinctively to receive her kiss.

Is this her—the Unseelie King’s concubine? No wonder he was obsessed!

When she begins to glide away down one of the corridors—the blackest of the four, the one that absorbs the light cast by candles in sconces—I push myself up.

Moth to a flame, I follow.

According to V’lane, the concubine was mortal. In fact, her mortality was the first domino in a long, convoluted line that toppled out of control and led to this moment.

Nearly a million years ago, the Seelie King asked the original Seelie Queen—since her death, many queens have risen, only to be ousted by another who achieved greater power and support—to turn his concubine Fae, to make her immortal so he could keep her forever. When the queen refused, the king built his concubine the White Mansion inside the Silvers. He secreted his beloved away from the vindictive queen, where she could live without aging until he was able to perfect the Song of Making and turn her Fae himself.

If only the queen had granted his one simple request! But the leader of the True Race was controlling, jealous, and small.

Unfortunately, the king’s efforts to duplicate the Song of Making—the mystical stuff of creation, a power and right that the queen of their matriarchal race selfishly hoarded—created the Unseelie, imperfect half-lives that he couldn’t bear to kill. They lived. They were his sons and daughters.

He created a new realm, the Court of Shadows, where his children could play while he continued his work, his labor of love.

But the day came when he was betrayed by one of his own children and found out by the Seelie Queen.

They clashed in a battle to end all battles. Seelie struck down their darker brethren, who sought only the right to exist.

The dominoes fell, one after another: the death of the Seelie Queen at the hands of the king; the suicide of the concubine; the act of “atonement” in which the Seelie King created the deadly Sinsar Dubh.

He rechristened himself the Unseelie King—never again would he be associated with the petty viciousness of the Seelie; henceforth he would be Unseelie, literally meaning not of the Seelie. He no longer called his home the Court of Shadows, in which he hid to perform his labor of love. It became simply Unseelie court.

By then, however, the court was a prison for his children, a macabre place of shadows and ice. The cruel Seelie Queen’s last act had been to use the Song of Making—not for creation, not to make his beloved immortal!—but to destroy, trap, and torture for all eternity any who had dared disobey her.

And the dominoes fell …

The book containing the Unseelie King’s knowledge, all his darkness and evil, somehow ended up in my world, being protected by humans. It was set loose in a manner that I have yet to determine, but of this I am certain: Alina’s murder, my screwed-up life, and Barrons’ death—all are the result of a chain of Fae events that began a million years ago over a single mortal.

My world, we humans, we’re just pawns on an immortal chessboard.

We got in the way.

Jack Lane, attorney extraordinaire, would put the Unseelie King, not Darroc, on trial and make a persuasive case against the concubine for guilt by association.

Because the unthinkable occurred and the original queen died before she had the chance to pass on the Song of Making to one of the princesses as her successor, the Fae race began to decline. Many princesses rose to the Seelie throne, but few lasted long before another wrested away her power. Queens were killed, others merely deposed and banished. Infighting grew and coups became more frequent. The Fae race became limited. All that was already was all that could ever be.

No new things could be made. Old powers were lost, and, over the eons, ancient magic was forgotten, until one day the current queen was no longer capable of reinforcing the weakening walls between realms and retaining control of the deadly Unseelie.

Darroc exploited this weakness and brought the walls between our worlds crashing down. Now Fae and human vie for control of a planet that is too small, too fragile, for both races.

All because of a single mortal—the domino that started all the others falling.

I follow the woman who I suspect is that mortal—in a not-quite-really-there kind of way—down the inky corridor.

If she is the concubine, I can summon no anger toward her, try though I might.

On their immortal chessboard, she was a pawn, too.

She is lit from within. Her skin shimmers with a translucent glow that illuminates the walls of the tunnel. The hall grows darker, blacker, stranger with each step we take. In contrast, she is holy, divine: an angel gliding into hell.

She is warmth, shelter, and forgiveness. She is mother, lover, daughter, truth. She is all.

Her pace quickens and she races down the tunnel, passing soundlessly over obsidian floors, laughing with joy.

I know that sound. I love that sound. It means her lover is near.

He is coming. She feels his approach.

He is so powerful!

It is what first drew her to him. She’d never encountered anyone like him.

She was awed that he chose her.

She is awed every day that he continues choosing her.

The stuff of him explodes through from the Court of Shadows, telling her he comes, filling her home (prison) where she lives a fabulous life (a sentence not of her choosing) surrounded by everything she wants (illusions, she misses her world, so far away and all of them long dead) and waits for him with hope (ever-growing despair).

He will carry her to his bed and do things to her until his black wings open wide, so wide, eclipsing the world, and when he is inside her, nothing else will matter but the moment, their dark, intense lust, the endless passion they share.

No matter what else he is—he is hers.

What is between them is without blame.

Love knows no right or wrong.

Love is. Only is.

She (I) rushes down the dark, warm, inviting hall, hurrying to his (my) bed. We need our lover. It has been too long.

In her chamber, I behold the duality of which I am carved.

Half the concubine’s boudoir is dazzlingly white, brilliantly illuminated. The other half is a dense, seductive, welcoming blackness. It is split evenly down the middle.

Light and the absence of light.

I savor both. Neither disturbs me. I suffer no conflict over things upon which a simpler mind would be forced to bestow labels such as Good and Evil or embrace madness.

Against one frosted crystalline wall of the white half of the room is a huge round bed on a pedestal, draped in silks and snowy ermine throws. Alabaster petals are scattered everywhere, perfuming the air. The floor is carpeted with plush white furs. White logs, from which silvery-white flames pop and crackle, blaze in an enormous alabaster hearth. Tiny diamonds float lazily on the air, sparkling.

The woman hurries for the bed. Her clothing melts away and she (I) is naked.

But no! This is not his pleasure, not this time! His needs are different, deeper, more demanding tonight.

She spins and we gaze, lips parted, at the black half of the room.

Draped in black velvet and furs, covered with soft ebony petals that smell of him, that crush so softly beneath our skin, it is all bed.

From wall to wall.

He needs it all. (Wings unfolding, no mortal can see past them!)

He is coming. He is near.

I am naked, wild, ready. I need. I need. This is why I live.

She and I stand, staring at the bed.

Then he is there and he gathers her up—but I can’t see him. I feel enormous wings closing around us.

I know he’s there, she’s enveloped in energy, in darkness, wet and warm like sex is wet and warm, and I’m breathing lust. I am lust and I strain to see him, strain to feel him, when suddenly—

I am a simple beast, on crimson sheets with Barrons inside me. I cry out, because even here in this boudoir of duality and illusion, I know it is not real. I know I have lost him. He is gone, forever gone.

I’m not back there in that basement with him, still Pri-ya but beginning to surface enough to know that he just asked me what I wore to my prom, and shutting it all down, racing from reality back into my madness, so I don’t have to face what happened to me or deal with what I’m beginning to suspect I might have to do.

I’m not standing there a few days later, looking back at his bed with those fur-lined handcuffs, contemplating climbing back in and pretending I hadn’t recovered so I could keep doing it—every raw, animal thing we’d done in my sexually insatiable state—fully aware of what I was doing and who I was doing it with.

Dead. Dead. I’ve lost so much.

If only I’d known then what I know now …

The king lifts the concubine. I see her sliding down a body I cannot discern in the darkness, and (I straddle Barrons and slam him home inside me; God, it feels so good!) the concubine strains, arches her neck, and makes a sound that doesn’t come from our world (I laugh as I come, I’m alive, so alive), and when his vast wings spread wide, when they fill the blackness of his boudoir and pass beyond, he knows more joy in this moment than he has ever known in his entire existence, and the bitch queen would deny him this? (And I know more joy in this moment than I’ve ever known, because there is no right, no wrong, only now.)

But, wait—Barrons is vanishing!

Moving away from me, melting into the darkness. I will not lose him again!

I lunge to my feet, get tangled in sheets for a moment, then I am hurrying to catch him.

It grows colder, my breath ices the air.

Ahead I see only black, blue, and a white that is bled of all light.

I run toward the black as fast as my feet will carry me.

But hands are on my shoulders, turning me, forcing me away, fighting me!

They are too strong! They drag me down a black corridor, and I beat at the body that dares interrupt us!

No others are allowed here!

This is our place! The intruder will die! If only for gazing upon us!

Cruel hands push me, slam me into a wall. My ears ring from the impact. I am dragged, shoved again, and again. I bounce off wall after wall, until finally it stops.

I shudder and begin to weep.

Arms band me, hold me tightly. I press my face to the warmth of a hard, muscled chest.

I am too small a vessel to survive on a sea of such emotion! I grip his collar and cling. I try to breathe. I am raw, aching with need, and I am empty, so empty.

I lost it all, and for what?

I can’t stop trembling.

“What part of ‘if you see a black floor, turn back immediately’ didn’t you understand?” Darroc growls. “For fuck’s sake, you went straight to the blackest of them all! What’s with you?”

I lift my head from his chest, but barely. For a moment, all I can do is stare down. The floor is pale pink. He has dragged me all the way back to one of the dawn-themed wings. I fumble for my spear. It is gone again.

Awareness returns in slow degrees.

I shove him away.

“I warned you,” he says coolly, offended by my anger.

Well, bully for him; I’m offended by him, too. “You didn’t tell me enough, just to stay away! You should have told me more!”

“I do not explain Fae matters to humans. But since you clearly will not obey otherwise—black floors are his wings. Never enter them. You are not strong enough to survive there. The residue of all that once transpired there still walks those wings. It can trap you. You forced me to come in after you, putting us both at risk!”

We glare at each other, breathing hard. Although he is pumped on Unseelie flesh and far stronger because of it than I am, I gave him a hell of a fight. It hadn’t been easy getting me out of there.

“What were you doing, MacKayla?” he says finally, softly.

“How did you find me there?” I counter.

“My brand. You were in extreme distress.” The tiny gold flecks in his eyes glitter. “You were also extremely aroused.”

“You can sense my feelings from your brand?” I am incensed. He subjects me to violation after violation.

“Only intense ones. The princes pinpointed your precise location. Be glad they did. I found you just in time. You were rushing for the black half of the boudoir.”

“So?”

“The line that divides the two halves of that chamber is no line. It is a Silver. The largest ever made by the king. It is also the first and most ancient of them, unlike any of the others. When needed, it was used for punishment, to execute. You were running for the Silver that leads straight into the Unseelie King’s bedchamber, in the fortress of black ice, deep in the Unseelie prison. In a few more of your human seconds, you would have been dead.”

“Dead?” I choke out. “Why?”

“Only two in all existence could ever travel through that Silver: the Unseelie King and his concubine. Any other that touches it is instantly killed. Even Fae.”

6

The Dani Daily—102 Days AWC …

I glare down at the sheet of paper, but ’cept for the title of my rag and the date, nothing’s coming. Nothing’s been coming for a feckin’ hour.

Here I sit in the abbey’s dining hall, in the middle of this brainless feckin’ herd of sidhe-sheep that are so easily led they should wear feckin’ halters and waggle fluffy sheep asses, and the words just ain’t coming. And they got to. I gotta take up the slack ’til Mac gets back. Stupid sheep are back to obeying Ro and she’s yanked ’em back in line again, got ’em all busy trying to clear the feckin’ Shades from the abbey.

News flash dudes, I keep telling you, they’re reproducing. They eat, they grow, they split. Like feckin’ amoebas. I been tracking ’em. I been watching ’em so hard I can tell ’em apart now. ’Times I play with ’em, mess with the lights, see how close they can really get to me. That’s how I know so much about ’em, but nobody listens to me. Only time I’m heard is when they read my paper. They don’t talk ’bout it, but everybody’s using the Shade-Busters now. Anybody say thanks?

Nope. Not a single “good job, Mega,” not even the teeniest little acknowledgment that I invented ’em.

I need Mac. Been nearly a month and I’m starting to worry that she’s … Nah, ain’t going there.

But where the feck is she? Ain’t seen her since we broke into the Forbidden Libraries together. She in Faery again? She don’t know it, but I read her journal when she was locked up in that cell, Pri-ya, and nobody was paying attention to her stuff ’cept Ro. She read it, too. But I took it back. Had to know what Ro knew. It’s one of my hang-ups: I gotta know everything Ro knows and figure out where she’s going ’fore she goes there. If I can do that, dude, I can run this place!

I know time spent in Faery don’t move the same way as time in the real world, so I ain’t as worried about Mac as I might be. See, V’lane’s gone, too, so I figure she’s with him.

Weird thing is, I keep stopping by BB&B and it looks like Barrons is gone, too!

Tried to get in to Chester’s last night to ask about him, but the stupid feckin’ feckers bounced me at the door.

Me. The Mega!

I grin and swagger a little in my seat.

It took six of ’em! Six of Barrons’ freaky fecks had to work their arses off to keep me out, and we went at it for over an hour.

I wouldn’ta given up at all but that kinda freeze-framing starves me, and I didn’t have enough candy bars crammed in my pockets. Got hungry. Had to eat. Said screw it and left. One of ’em followed me to Dublin’s edge, like he thought he was throwing me outta the city—as if! I’ll try again soon.

Still, I’m getting a little worried.…

Where the feck did everybody go? Why ain’t nobody talking about the LM anymore? Where’s the Sinsar Dubh?

’S been quiet, way too quiet, and that creeps the feck outta me. Only other time things got this quiet … yeah, well—dude—the past ain’t me.

What’s already happened is for has-beens.

I’m all about the future. Tomorrow’s my day.

Today sure as feck ain’t. I ain’t never had it before, but s’pect I got writer’s block. S’pect it’s ’cause I been sitting here watching a couple hundred sidhe-sheep do the equivalent of knit. Got an assembly line set up in the dining hall, making iron bullets. But get this—not for us!

For Jayne and his Guardians.

Don’t know how Ro managed to make ’em all scared of their shadows again, but she did. Little things she says make ’em doubt themselves. Only took her two weeks after Mac disappeared to convince ’em all Mac was dead and to give up on her.

Sheep, I tell ya! Takes everything I got not to stand up, waggle my ass, and yell: Baaaaa!

But I guess the sheep shit’s too deep in here for me to move, ’cause I sit and chew on my pen and wait for inspiration.

While I’m biding time, I watch Jo. Used to be friends with her. Thought she had a mind of her own. She’s smart, real smart. Puts things together the other sheep don’t.

But she got weird a few months back. Started hanging all the time with Barb and Liz and never had time for me anymore. Used to be she was the only one didn’t treat me like a baby. Used to be they all treated me like a kid. Now they hardly treat me at all. Nobody sits at my table.

Good feckin’ thing, too! Ain’t no room for sheep at my table.

Jo’s sittin’ real quiet, watching Liz. Watching her hard.

I wonder if she turned lezbo or somethin’ and that explains why she changed. Came out of her closet and moved on, maybe got herself a ménage twat with Liz and Barb. I snicker at my joke. Dude, if ya can’t crack yourself up, ain’t never gonna crack anybody else up.

At first, the gunshots are so faint that even my superhearing don’t register what they are. Then, when I do, I sorta figure Barrons’ dudes musta come back for some reason and, like last time, they’re firing warning shots. Even though we got a shitload of Uzis and other guns, we got no use for ’em here. Only in Dublin. They don’t work on Shades. We don’t bring our guns into the abbey. We leave ’em on the bus.

Dawning on me quick now how stupid that is.

Later, I find out it started at the west end of the abbey. Started where Mac slept when she stayed here, where I been sleeping lately, in the Dragon Lady’s Library.

When the screaming begins, I freeze-frame into motion but with caution: Automatic gunfire is something I gotta factor in to my superspeed equation.

I’m fast, but, dude, the rat-a-tat-tat of that kinda spray is feckin’ fast, too. Tough to dodge. And what I’m hearing is constant.

I’m in one of the corridors, heading for the screams, but suddenly everything is as dark as it must be where Rowena’s head is—straight up her ass. I snicker again. I’m cracking myself up tonight.

I stop, plaster against the wall, and start moving like a Joe. Watching, straining to see down the dark corridor. I ain’t got my ’Halo, but I got a couple flashlights in my pockets. I pull one out, click it on.

We ain’t never got all the Shades outta the abbey. Nobody puts on their boots without shining flashlights in ’em and shaking ’em out real good first. And then only in broad daylight.

Nobody—but nobody—walks down dark halls here.

So why’s it dark and who the feck is doing all that shooting?

Lots of moaning. Lots of wounded. Ain’t warning shots. This is the real deal.

I take a Joe step forward, quiet as I can. Glass crunches beneath my high-tops, and I know why it’s dark. Shooter took out the lights.

I hear a soft, awful laugh that makes my blood run cold. I shine my flashlight down the dark hall, and the darkness kinda absorbs it.

I hear somebody breathing fast.

I hear more glass crunching and it ain’t me.

Pretty sure the shooter’s headed straight for me!

I flex my fingers, curl ’em tight around my sword. Ro tried to take it away. Told her I’d be her own personal guard if she let me keep it. I stand watch while she sleeps. I’m learning about tradeoffs.

What the feck is moving down the hall at me?

Later, when I tell the story, I don’t tell the whole truth.

Truth is, the unthinkable happened. I got scared in that dark hall. I felt something coming and it freaked me.

I say I never got to the corridor.

Never admit I backed out with my tail tucked between my legs, retreated to the light, and then freeze-framed back to the dining hall.

The shooting starts again and so does the screaming and we all run, but there’s only one way out and that’s the way in, so we’re knocking over tables and scrambling behind ’em.

Jo and me, we end up behind the same table. Long as she doesn’t try any funky lezbo stuff on me, I don’t mind sharing my spot. I tap the table. It’s thick, made of solid wood. Might hold up, depending on bullets and distance.

More screams. I wanna hold my ears.

I’m cowering. I disgust myself.

I gotta look. I gotta know what the feck is doing this to us!

Jo and I move for opposite ends of the table at the same time and crack heads. She glares at me.

“Like it’s my fault,” I hiss defensively. “You moved, too.”

“Where’s Liz?” she hisses back.

I shrug. On my hands and knees, I waggle my ass. Whole abbey’s falling apart and she’s worried about her little girlfriend. “Baaaaa,” I say.

She looks at me like I’m nuts. Then we’re both poking our heads around the table.

Bullets are ripping across the room, ricocheting off walls and wood. Blood’s spraying everywhere, gory as feck, and the screams keep coming. The shooter is framed in the door of the dining hall.

Jo gasps and I just about fall over choking.

It’s Barb!

What the feck’s this all about?

She’s draped in rounds, toting the biggest Uzi I ever seen. White-faced, she’s screaming curses at us, taking us down like sitting ducks. I gape. “Barb?” I mutter. Don’t make no sense.

Weird thing is, Jo looks stunned and bursts out, “I thought it was Liz!”

I stare down the table at her. All I can see is her head, but she kinda shrugs it. “Long story.”

I assess the room, the scene. We’re at the back of the hall. We’ll be last to die. What the feck do I do? Why is Barb shooting us?

I look at Jo. She’s no help. Looks blank as the page I was writing The Dani Daily on.

Dude, I wish Mac was here! What would she do? Should I freeze-frame in while Barb’s shooting everybody and try to take her gun? Am I fast enough? I don’t wanna die today. Tomorrow’s gonna be my day. And I just know it’s gonna be a good one, too! ’Sides, I got too much to do. Somebody’s gotta keep an eye on Ro.

But we’re dropping like flies! Holy feckin’ crikey, Barb’s wiping us out!

I cram a candy bar in my mouth whole, chew it just enough to get it in my gut. I’m gonna need every ounce of energy I got to pull this off. I gotta do something. Barb ain’t gonna run outta bullets for a long time. The Mega can’t cower behind a table and do nothing.

I poke my head out from behind the table, take a snapshot of the scene, and lock it down hard in my head. I map where every person, table, chair, and obstacle is.

Problem is Barb. She’s the unknown. She’s moving and spraying fire so erratically, I can’t slam a grid of possibles down over my mental map.

Feck!

I stare, trying to pick up some kinda pattern.

I duck back behind the table as a shot zings by. Poke my head out again. Ain’t no pattern.

I pump breaths superfast, puffing my cheeks in and out, kicking my adrenaline up. I ease my head out, lock the grid down best I can, and am about to give my feet wings, when Barb goes kinda fuzzy around the edges and the room gets so fecking cold my breath comes out white.

Jo makes a strangled sound.

We both see it at the same time.

What’s shooting at us ain’t Barb at all.

Well … it is, and she’s screaming, but not like the psycho-rage-bitch-from-hell I thought she was.

She’s screaming in horror.

She’s fighting for control of the gun and failing. She forces it down and sprays the floor, but it comes up again. She tries to swing it left, toward the wall. It yanks back to the right. Her finger’s tight on the trigger the whole time.

She blurs again.

She’s just Barb.

No, she ain’t! She’s—dude—what the feck is that? She’s got too many heads, too many teeth! She’s some kinda monster! And it ain’t no Shade!

It’s Barb again.

Being forced to kill us.

Behind her, a shadow climbs the wall. It’s huge! It towers, it expands, and when it laughs, my blood clots up in my veins and can’t get to my brain, ’cause it’s got so many ice chunks in it.

“Where is the Grand Bitch?” it roars. “I want her fucking heeeeeeead!”

Jo and I look at each other.

We get it.

We both know what’s got her, what’s really firing those rounds, and it gets driven home like a spike through my skull that I ain’t nearly The Shit Mac thinks I am.

Me and Jo ooze real slow back behind the table.

Just two brave little sheep.

Hiding from a book.

The Book.

The one we been hoping to find. Talking real big about locking it down again. Yeah, right, just what the feck did we think we were gonna do with it?

The nerve of it. It came here. Here, where it was trapped for so long. It must feel pretty feckin’ invincible. Pisses me off so bad I’m shaking. It came here. Gah—that’s so feckin’ wrong!

I read Mac’s journal. I know how it works. Makes folks pick it up. Me and Barb and Jo and about fifteen others went into Dublin this morning for supplies. We didn’t stick together the whole time. Split up and went off after different things.

It musta got Barb alone and made her pick it up.

I get a creepy chill that goes all the way up my spine so fast I get brain freeze when it hits my head.

Feckin’ A! The Sinsar Dubh rode back to the abbey with us this morning! Right there on our bus!

I was sitting on the same bus with the Unseelie King’s Book and didn’t even know it!

I sort through my options. I ain’t impervious to bullets. Dying today ain’t gonna do nobody no good, ’specially not me. Don’t know how to stop it. Ain’t beating myself up for that. Nobody knows how to stop it.

Don’t dare get close enough to let it take me.

Riding me, it could wipe out the entire abbey in record time.

I swallow. I’d been starting to wonder if it was looking for me. Guess it was looking to get any sidhe-seer alone, so it could take us down from the inside and gain revenge for its captivity.

They’re dying. They’re all dying out there, beyond my table. It’s killing me that they’re dying.

And I can’t come up with one feckin’ thing to do about it.

Got one chance, and it ain’t to stop it. I grab Jo and freeze-frame outta there.

Ro’s face is pale, bloodless. I ain’t never seen her like this. She looks like she’s aged twenty years in a single day. One hundred eighteen sidhe-seers were killed before Barb shot her way out of the abbey, took our bus with all our weapons, and disappeared.

A hundred more were wounded.

The Sinsar Dubh paid us a visit, gave us a little look-see, thumbed its beast nose at us, flipped us the motherfeckin’ bird of all birds.

Jo and me, we sit across the desk from Ro.

“You didn’t even try to stop it,” she finally says. She’s been letting us stew. She likes to do that. Potatoes and carrots, they turn to mush if they stew long enough. Time was, I did, too. But I don’t cook down so fast anymore.

I didn’t need to hear Ro say it. I been staring at the accusation blazing in her fierce blue eyes for the past five minutes. I don’t answer. I’m done answering her. She shoulda told us. She shoulda warned us. I never ever imagined the Sinsar Dubh could pull a stunt like that. She ain’t training us. She’s keeping us small. Afraid. Just like Mac said. What—I shoulda died so she could say, Dani tried? Feck that noise. Ain’t dying just so she can feel better ’bout things.

Jo says, “Grand Mistress, it looked like Barb was fighting it. From the information Jayne and his men gathered about the Book, we were pretty sure what that meant.”

“Och, and now you’re trusting Jayne? I teach you! I train you!”

Jo turns her face away a moment, and I remember that Barb was one of her best friends. But Jo, she surprises me with a little steel. When she turns back and starts talking again, her voice is steady. “She was going to kill herself soon, Rowena. Our first goal was to keep the Book from getting a new body. If Dani had gone near it, it could have taken a virtually unstoppable body.”

Ro cuts me a scathing glance. “Ever the liability, are you not, Danielle?”

I make a face, can’t help it. She’s always blaming me for something. Done trying to blow smoke up her ass. Sick of pretending to be things I’m not. “D’pends on how you look at it, Ro,” I say coolly. “And you’re always looking at it wrong.”

Jo sucks in a sharp breath.

I’ve gone too far, and I’m about to go farther. I don’t care. Ever since Mac disappeared, Ro’s made it plain she’d take me back into her good graces if I’d cooperate the tiniest bit. I been skirting around the subject, flirting with appeasing her just enough to keep her guessing, thinking I’ll come to heel.

But that ain’t never gonna happen.

I just watched a hundred of my sisters—so what if they’re sheep? They’re still my sisters—get butchered. And this old woman stands and glares at me? At least I own up to my sins. I go to sleep with ’em every night. Wake up with ’em every morning. See ’em in the mirror, staring right back at me. And I say, dude, get over yourself already.

“How’d the Book get loose, Ro?” I’m on my feet, sword in my hand. “Why’n’tcha ever tell us that? Cause maybe you fell asleep on the job? ’S that it?”

Her voice is tight and she’s even paler when she looks at Jo and snaps, “You will escort that child to her room now! And lock her in!”

As if that’s gonna happen. Nobody here can control me. Ever since I killed that Hunter, I been feeling like the dude that shot a giant with his slingshot. Ro can’t feck with my head like she used to.

“All I did is say what everybody’s been thinking but been too afraid to say. I ain’t afraid of you no more, Ro. I saw the Sinsar Dubh tonight. I know what I’m afraid of.” I back-kick my chair so hard it slams into the wall behind me. “I’m leaving. I’m done here.” I mean it. I really am. Used to think I was at least a little safe in the abbey, but we got Shades in the shadows, and now the Book snuck in, and fact o’ the matter is, I can make myself a safer place than this in a feckin’ Dark Zone!

’Sides, nobody here’ll even notice if I’m gone. Maybe I’ll check out Jayne, hang with the Guardians for a while.

“You will go to your room this very instant, Danielle Megan!”

Gah, I hate that name! Sissy name. Sissy girl.

“What would your mother think of you?” she snaps.

“What would my mother think of what you made me?” I snap back.

“I made you a proud and true weapon for the right.”

“Guess that’s why I feel like my sword most of the time. Cold. Hard. Bloody.”

“Ever the melodrama with you, isn’t it? Grow up, Danielle O’Malley! And sit down.”

“Feck you, Ro.”

I freeze-frame out.

The chilly Irish air blasts me, and if a couple places on my cheeks are especially cold, I ignore ’em. I ain’t crying. I never cry.

I miss my mom sometimes, though.

The world’s big.

So am I.

Dude—I’m homeless!

I swagger into the night.

Free at last.

7

Why did you hang a Silver to Dublin in one of the white wings, when you know the House rearranges itself? Why didn’t you put it somewhere more stable and easily accessible?” I resume my questions as we walk.

That bipolar feeling from my high school days is back with a vengeance. He’s everything I despise. I want to kill him so badly that I have to keep my hands in my pockets, balled into fists.

He’s also the person who was intimate with my sister during the final months of her life, the only one who can answer all those questions no one else can—and who can seriously shorten the amount of time I have to spend in this wasteland of a reality.

Did you take her journal? Did she know Rowena or any of the sidhe-seers? Did she tell you about the prophecy? Why did you kill her? Was she happy? Please tell me she was happy before she died.

“No rooms in the White Mansion ever get completely dark, not even where night falls. I erred the first time I opened a Silver. I hung it in a place that did. A creature I believed securely imprisoned—one I did not ever intend to free from the Unseelie prison—escaped.”

“What creature?” I demand. This man who looks like a Versace ad, who walks and talks like a human, isn’t. He’s worse than someone possessed by a Gripper—one of those dainty, beautiful Unseelie that can slip inside a person’s skin and take over. He is one hundred percent Fae in a body that should never have been his. He’s a cold-blooded killer, responsible for butchering billions of humans, hundreds of thousands of them in Dublin on a single night, without a second thought. If there was a creature in the icy Unseelie hell that he never intended to set loose, I want to know why, exactly what it is, and how to kill it. If it worries him, it terrifies me.

“Watch the floors, MacKayla.”

I look at him. He’s not going to answer me. Pressing would only make me appear weak.

We’ve resumed the search together. He’s unwilling to leave me on my own. I’m in no hurry to be on my own again. I’m still raw from what happened to me in the black wing. I’d gotten cemented in memories, and if Darroc hadn’t busted me out, I might never have escaped.

Chasing Barrons, I might not have wanted to escape. I remember the bones in the Hall of All Days. I think of the beach in Faery with Alina. If I’d chosen to stay with her then, would I have eventually died from eating food with no substance, drinking water that was no more real than my sister?

Damn Faery with its killing illusions!

I push memories of sex with the king, with Barrons, away. I distract myself with hatred for the man who killed my sister.

Was Alina happy? It’s on the tip of my tongue again.

“Very,” he fires back at me, and I realize I’ve not only said it aloud but it seems he’s just been waiting for me to ask.

I’m appalled that I’ve been so weak. Offering my enemy the opportunity to lie to me! “Bullshit!”

“You are impossible.” Disdain etches his handsome face. “She was nothing like you. She was open. Her heart was not sealed away behind walls.”

“Look what that got her. Dead.”

I stalk off ahead, down a brilliant yellow corridor. The windows open on exactly the kind of summer day Alina and I always loved. I can’t get away from her ghost! I quicken my pace.

We hurry down a hall of mint, then one of indigo with French doors that open onto a turbulent stormy night, before turning onto a path of pale pink, and finally there it is—a towering arched entrance into a white marble hall. Beyond the elegant entrance, windows open onto a dazzling winter day, ice-encased trees sparkling like diamonds in the sun.

Peace settles over me. I’ve been here in my dreams. I loved this wing.

Once, long ago on her world, a sunny day in spring was her favorite, but now a sunny day in winter delights her more. It is the perfect metaphor for their love.

Sunshine on ice.

She warms his frost. He cools her fever.

“You said Alina called you,” Darroc says behind me. “You said she was crying on the phone, that she was hiding from me. Did she make that phone call the day she died?”

He startles me from my reverie and, without thinking, I nod.

“What exactly did she say?”

I toss him a look over my shoulder that says, You really think I’m going to tell you that? If anyone is going to be answering questions about her, it’s going to be him answering to me. I step into the white marble corridor.

He follows me. “All you accomplish by persisting in your inane and erroneous belief that I killed Alina is guaranteeing that you will never find her true murderer. Humans have an animal of which you remind me. The ostrich.”

“My head is not buried in the sand.”

“No, it’s up your ass,” he snaps.

I whirl on him.

We glare at each other, but his words give me pause. Am I being an ostrich? Do I deny myself the opportunity to avenge my sister, because I’m stuck in a rut I refuse to get out of? Will I let my sister’s real murderer get away, because I can’t open my mind to see beyond my preconceptions? Barrons warned me from the beginning to not so blithely assume Darroc was definitely her killer.

A muscle works in my jaw. Each time I remember something about Barrons, I hate Darroc more for taking him from me. But I remind myself why I’m here and why I haven’t already killed him.

To accomplish my goal, there are certain answers I need.

I eye him speculatively. There are others I just want.

And once I get the Book in my hands and change things, I’ll never have another chance to ask. He’ll be gone. I’ll have killed him. Here and now is my one shot.

“She said she was going to try to come home but she was afraid you wouldn’t let her leave the country,” I say stiffly. “She said I had to find the Sinsar Dubh. Then she sounded terrified and said you were coming.”

“Me? By name? She told you ‘Darroc’ was coming?”

“She didn’t have to. What she said earlier made it clear.”

“And what was that? What so thoroughly incriminated me?”

I still have her message memorized. I dream it sometimes, word for word. “She said, I thought he was helping me, but—God, I can’t believe I was so stupid! I thought I was in love with him and he’s one of them, Mac! He’s one of them! Who else could that have been? You keep telling me she loved you. Was there someone else she was involved with that she thought she—”

“No! There was only me. She would never have sought another. I gave her everything.”

“Then you understand why I believe you killed her.”

“I do not, and did not. There are holes larger than Hunters in your puny human logic!”

“Who else could it have been? Who else did she fear?”

He turns and paces to one of the windows, where he stands gazing out at the dazzling winter day. Ice-crusted trees sparkle like they’ve been diamond-dipped. Drifts of powdery snow shimmer in the sunlight. The scene seems lit from within, like the concubine herself.

But there is only darkness inside me. I feel it growing.

“You are certain that the day you had this conversation with her was the day she died?”

It wasn’t a conversation, but I don’t tell him that. “Although the Garda didn’t find her body for two days, they estimated her time of death at about four hours after she called me. The coroner in Ashford said it was possible she died as much as eight to ten hours after she made the call. She said it was difficult to estimate exact time of death due to the way her body had been savaged.” I refuse to say “chewed on.”

Still staring out the window, his back to me, he says, “One morning after I left, she followed me to the house on LaRuhe.”

I catch my breath. These are words I’ve been waiting to hear since the day I identified my sister’s body. To learn what she did the last day she was alive. Where she went. How it came to such a bitter end.

“Did you know?” I demand.

“I eat Unseelie.”

He knew. Of course he knew. It amps up all the senses, hearing, sight, taste, touch. It’s what makes it so addictive—and the super-sized strength is icing on the cake. You feel alive, incredibly alive. Everything is more vivid.

“We’d been in bed all night, fucking—”

“T-the-fuck-M-I,” I snarl.

“You think I don’t know what that means. Alina used to say it. Too much information. It disturbs you to hear of the passion your sister and I shared.”

“It sickens me.”

When he turns, his gaze is cool. “I made her happy.”

“You didn’t keep her safe. Even if you didn’t kill her, she died on your watch.”

He flinches almost imperceptibly.

I think, Nice, real nice, got that fake emotion down real well.

“I thought she was ready. I believed what she felt for me would win in one of your idiotic human battles of morality. I was wrong.”

“So she followed you. Did she confront you?”

He shakes his head. “She saw me through the windows at LaRuhe—”

“They’re painted black.”

“They weren’t yet. I did that later. She watched me meet with my Unseelie guard and overheard our conversation about freeing more of the Dark Court. She heard them call me Lord Master. After my guard left and I was alone, I waited to see what she would do, if she would come in, if she would give us a chance. She didn’t. She fled, and I followed, at a distance. She spent hours walking around Temple Bar, crying in the rain. I waited, gave her space, time to clarify her thoughts. Humans do not think as quickly as Fae. They struggle with simple concepts. It is astounding your species ever managed to—”

“Spare me your condescending judgments and I’ll spare you mine,” I cut him off, in no mood to listen to him condemn my race. His race already did that. Billions dead. All because of their petty power struggles.

He inclines his head imperiously. “I went to her apartment later that day. I found her in the bedroom, climbing out the window, onto the fire escape.”

“See? She was afraid of you.”

“She was terrified. It made me angry. I had given her no reason to fear me. I dragged her back in. We fought. I told her she was human, stupid and small. She called me a monster. She said I tricked her. That it was all a lie. It was not. Or, rather, it was at first but then it wasn’t. I would have made her my queen. I told her that. And that I still would. But she wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t even look at me. Finally I left. But I did not kill her, MacKayla. Like you, I do not know who did.”

“Who trashed her apartment?”

“I told you we fought. Our anger was as intense as our lust.”

“Did you take her journal?”

“I went back for it after I learned she was dead. It was not there. I took photo albums. It was then, when I found her calendar book, that I discovered her ‘friend’ Mac was really her sister. She lied to me. I was not the only one who was duplicitous. I have lived among your kind long enough to know this means she knew from the beginning something about me was not what it seemed. And wanted me anyway. I believe that if she had not been murdered, in time she would have come to me, chosen me of her own free will.”

Yes, I think, she would have come to you. With a weapon in her hand, just like I will.

“I needed to know if you shared her unique talents. Had you not arrived in Dublin when you did, I would have had you brought to me.”

I absorb that and am furious. It’s very important to me to pinpoint the exact moment my life started going wrong. Especially now.

It goes back further than I’d realized.

The moment Alina left for Dublin and began heading toward the day she would encounter him, there’d been no hope of my life turning out any other way. Events had been set in motion that trapped me. I would have embarked upon exactly the same path, through a different door. If I’d not disobeyed my parents and flown to Ireland to investigate Alina’s murder, would he have sent the Hunters after me? The princes? Maybe dispatched the Shades to devour my town and drive me out?

One way or another, I would have ended up here, with him, in the middle of this mess.

“Because of your sister, I resisted harming you.”

More than anything he has ever said, those words stun me. I stand half dazed as they echo through my brain, knocking loose conflicting thoughts, nudging them to where they no longer oppose. Without warning, my convictions shift and settle into a new position. I’m startled by where they end up, but they moved with such logic and simplicity that I can’t deny the veracity.

Darroc did care about Alina.

I believe him.

There was something I’d never been able to explain to my own satisfaction: I’d wondered why Darroc hadn’t been more aggressive, more brutal with me from the very first. It had made no sense to me. He’d seemed almost lackadaisical in his efforts to abduct me and had kept offering me the chance to come willingly. What kind of world-destroying villain did that? It was certainly not what I’d expected from my sister’s murderer. Mallucé had been far deadlier, far more ruthless. Of the two, I’d been much more terrified of the wannabe vamp when I’d first arrived.

Occam’s razor: The simplest explanation that accommodates all variables is most likely the truth. Darroc had resisted harming me because of Alina. He’d restrained himself because he’d cared about my sister.

Just how much—and how much I could use it against him—remained to be seen.

“My deference undermined my efforts, and the Hunters began to question my conviction.”

“So you had me raped and turned Pri-ya,” I say bitterly. How quickly he’d gone from deference to murder, because that’s what turning me Pri-ya had been tantamount to. Until Barrons had pulled me back, no one had ever recovered from being made a mindless Fae sex slave. They died from it.

“I needed to solidify my position. Then I lost you before I even had the chance to begin using you.”

“Who was the fourth, Darroc? Why don’t you just tell me?” He’d stood there watching as the Unseelie Princes destroyed me. He’d seen me naked on the ground, helpless, weeping. I calm myself by imagining the many ways I might kill him when the time comes.

“I have told you before, MacKayla, there was no fourth. The last prince of the Court of Shadows that the king created was the first dark prince to die. Cruce was killed in the ancient battle between the king and queen. Some claim it was the queen herself who killed him.”

“Cruce was the fourth Unseelie Prince?” I exclaim.

He nods. Then he frowns and adds, “If a fourth being was at the church, neither I nor my princes were capable of seeing it.”

He seems as disturbed by that thought as I am.

“I repeatedly offered you an alliance. I need the Book. You can track it. Some believe you can corner it. Some believe you are the fourth stone.”

I bristle. There’s little I’m certain of lately, but this much I’d bet the bank on. “I am not a stone.” I was pretty sure V’lane had the fourth and final one.

“Fae things change. They become other things.”

“Not people,” I scoff. “Look at me. I wasn’t carved from the cliffs of the Unseelie hell! I was born to a human woman!”

“You know that for a certainty? My sources say you and Alina were adopted.”

I say nothing, wondering who his sources are.

He laughs. “No one knows what the king truly did after he went mad. Perhaps he made one of the stones different, the better to hide it.”

“Stones don’t become people!”

“It’s what the Sinsar Dubh is trying to do.”

I narrow my eyes. Was Ryodan right? Was that what this was all about—the Book taking on a corporeal, sentient form? Interesting that both he and Darroc believed this, as if perhaps they had discussed it while forming other plans—plans such as killing Barrons and getting him out of the way! After all, it was Barrons that brought me back from the Pri-ya state where I could have so easily been used. Damned inconvenient for them.

“But the people it takes over keep killing themselves,” I say.

“Because the Book has not found the one strong enough to endure the merging.”

“What do you mean, ‘endure the merging’? Are you saying the right person could pick up the Sinsar Dubh without killing themselves?”

“And control it,” he says smugly.

I inhale sharply. This is the first I’ve heard of anything like this. And he sounds so confident, so certain. “Use it rather than being used?”

He nods.

I’m incredulous. “Just pick it up and open it? No harm, no foul?”

“Absorb it. All the power.”

“How? Who is this ‘right person’?” I demand. Was it me? Was that why I could track it? Was that why everyone was really after me?

He gives me a mocking smile. “Oh, trifling human, such delusions of grandeur you suffer. No, MacKayla. It has never been you.”

“Then who?”

“I’m the one.”

I stare at him. He is? I look him up and down. Why? How? What does he know that I don’t know? That Barrons didn’t know? “What’s so special about you?”

He laughs and gives me a look that says, You really think I’m going to tell you that? I hate it when people throw my own looks back in my face.

“But I did tell you. I answered your questions.”

“Trivial questions.”

My eyes narrow. “If you know how to merge with it, why did you insist I bring the stones into the tunnel with me when you took my parents captive? Why are you so interested in them?”

“It is said the stones can immobilize it. I have had little success getting near it. If I cannot get close enough on my own, I may need to use them. I have you to track it, the stones to corner it, and I can do the rest.”

“Is it because you eat Unseelie? Is that why you’d be able to do it?” I can slice, dice, and devour with the best of them. See Mac gorge.

“Hardly.”

“Is it something you are? Something you did? Something you know how to do?” I hear the franticness in my voice and it appalls me, but if he has some way of bypassing the whole absurdity of getting the fourth stone from V’lane, gathering the five Druids—Barrons seemed pretty sure one of them was Christian, and he’s still lost in the Silvers—figuring out the prophecy, and performing some complicated ceremony, I want to know what it is! If there’s a shortcut, any chance I can reach my goal in a matter of hours or days rather than trying to live through agonizing weeks or even months, I want it! The less time I have to spend in this hellish reality, the better.

“Look at you, MacKayla, all flushed and glowing, salivating over the idea of merging with the Book.” The gold flecks in his eyes begin to glitter again.

I’d know that look on any man’s face.

“So like Alina,” he murmurs, “yet so unlike her.”

It’s a difference he seems to appreciate. “What is it about you? Why will you be able to merge with it?” I demand. “Tell me!”

“Find the Book, MacKayla, and I will show you.”

When we finally locate the room with the Silver in it, it’s just as Darroc described: empty of furnishings, save a single mirror, five feet by ten.

The mirror appears to have been inserted seamlessly into whatever the walls are made of in the House.

But my mind’s not on the Silver at all. I’m still reeling from what Darroc told me.

Another piece of the puzzle that had been giving me fits clicks into place. I’d been perplexed by his determination to get the Book, when none of us knew how to touch it, move it, corner it, do a single damned thing with it, without getting taken over, turned evil, then killed, after being forced to kill everyone around us.

Along with wondering why Darroc hadn’t been more brutal, I’d wondered why he was hunting it when he’d never be able to use it, when even Barrons and I had been forced to admit that chasing the thing was pointless.

Yet Darroc had never relented. He’d kept his Unseelie scouring Dublin for it incessantly. The whole time I’d been stumbling in the dark, trying to figure out the four, and the five, and the prophecy, Darroc had been following a much easier path.

He knew a way to merge with the Sinsar Dubh—and control it!

There’s no question in my mind that Darroc’s telling the truth. I have no idea how or where he got this information, but he definitely knows how to use the Sinsar Dubh without being corrupted.

I need that knowledge!

I watch him through narrowed eyes. I’m no longer in a hurry to kill him. Fact is, I’d kill to protect the bastard at this point.

I mentally refine my mission. I don’t need the prophecy, stones, or Druids. I’ll never need to ally myself with V’lane in the future.

I need one thing: to uncover Darroc’s secret.

Once I have it, I can corner the Book myself. I don’t have any problems getting near it. It likes to play with me.

My hands tremble with excitement that’s difficult to contain. Trying to fulfill the absurd conditions of the prophecy would have taken forever. My new plan could be achieved in a matter of days, bringing my grief to a swift end.

“Why did you bring Unseelie through the dolmen in the warehouse at LaRuhe when you had a Silver you could have used instead?” I employ small questions to lull him. Get him off guard. Then I’ll sneak a big one in. Like most men-who-would-be-king, he likes to hear himself talk.

“Low-caste Unseelie are distracted by anything upon which they might feed. I needed a short passage, void of life, through which to herd them. I would never have gotten them out of this world and into yours. Besides, many of them would not have fit through such a small opening.”

I remember the horde of Unseelie—some wispy and diminutive, others fleshy and enormous—that had poured through the giant dolmen the night I’d caught my first glimpse of the crimson-robed Lord Master and realized, much to my horror, that he was my sister’s boyfriend. The night that Mallucé had nearly killed me and would have, if Barrons hadn’t miraculously appeared and saved me. I try to evict the memory, but it’s too late.

I’m in the warehouse, trapped between Darroc and Mallucé …

Barrons drops down next to me, long black coat fluttering.

Now that was just stupid, Ms. Lane, he says, with that mocking smile of his. They would have figured out who you were soon enough.

We battle Darroc and his minions. Mallucé injures me badly. Barrons carries me back to his bookstore, where he heals me. It’s the first time he ever kisses me. Like nothing I’ve ever felt before.

Once more he saved me—and what did I do when he needed me?

Killed him.

The silent scream is back, welling up inside me. Biting it down takes all the strength I possess.

I stumble.

Darroc catches my arm and steadies me.

I shake him off. “I’m fine. Just hungry.” I’m not. My body has shut down. “Let’s get out of here.” I step into the Silver. I expect to meet resistance, because I always have in the past when entering a Silver, so I duck my head and push forward a little. The silvery surface is thick, gluey.

I explode out the other side into a headlong sprawl. I scramble to my feet and whirl on him, as he glides from the mirror with smooth grace. “What did you do? Push me?”

“I did no such thing. Perhaps it is the Silver’s way of saying ‘good riddance’ to the stones,” he mocks.

I’d not considered the effect they might have. Tucked away in the rune-covered leather pouch in my backpack, I’d forgotten them. My sidhe-senses don’t seem to work in the Silvers. I don’t feel their cold, dark fire in the pit of my brain.

He smirks. “Or perhaps it’s saying good riddance to you, MacKayla. Give them to me. I will carry them through the next Silver and we will see what happens to you then.”

The next Silver? Only then do I realize we’re not back in Dublin but in another white room which has ten mirrors hanging on the wall. He’s made it difficult for anyone to follow him. I wonder where the other nine go.

“As if that’s going to happen,” I mutter. I adjust my backpack and dust myself off.

“You do not wish to know. Are you human or are you stone?” he goads. “If I carry them, and the mirror expels you with such force again, we’ll have our answer.”

I’m not a stone. “Just tell me which mirror goes to Dublin.”

“Fourth from the left.”

I push in, but warily this time, in no mood for another fall. This Silver is strange. It takes me into a long tunnel where I move through one brick wall after the next, as if he has stacked Tabh’rs, like the one in Christian’s desert that was inside a cactus, only these are concealed in brick walls.

But where?

I catch a blurred glimpse of a street at night through the next Silver and am buffeted by a chilly breeze. Then I’m blasted so hard across a cobbled alley into a brick wall that it stuns me. This one is solid and impenetrable.

I’d know my city blindfolded. We’re back in Dublin. I hug the wall, determined to stay standing. I’ve been on my ass enough today.

I might be shaky on my feet—but at least I’m on them when my sidhe-seer senses kick in with a vengeance, as if awakening after a long, resented sleep enforced by being in the Silvers. Alien energy slams into my brain: The city is teeming with Fae.

Objects of Power and Fae used to make me feel sick to my stomach, but continued exposure has changed me. Their presence no longer incapacitates me. Now I get a dark, intense adrenaline rush from them. I’m shaky enough already from lack of food and sleep. I don’t care where the Unseelie are, and I’m not about to start looking for the Book. I close my eyes and concentrate on turning down my “volume” until it goes silent.

Then Darroc’s arms are around me, pulling me to him, holding me up. For a moment, I forget who I am, what I feel, what I’ve lost, and know only that strong arms support me.

I smell Dublin.

I’m in a man’s arms.

He turns me around, drops his head to mine, holds me like he’s sheltering me, and for a moment I pretend he’s Barrons.

He presses his lips to my ear. “You said we were friends, MacKayla,” he murmurs, “yet I see none of that in your eyes. If you give yourself to me, completely give yourself, I will not ever—how did you say it?—let you die on my watch. I know you are angry about your sister, but together we could change that … or not, if you wish. You have attachments to your world, but could you not see a place for yourself in mine? You are even less like other humans than Alina. You do not belong here. You never did. You were meant for more.” His melodious voice deepens seductively. “Do you not feel it? Have you not always felt it? You are … larger than others of your kind. Open your eyes. Take a good look around. Are these petty, breeding, warring humans worth fighting for? Dying for? Or would you dare to taste forever? Eternity. Absolute freedom. Walk among others that are also larger than a single mortal life.”

His hands cup my head, cradle my face. His lips move against my ear. His breath is harsh, shallow, and fast, and I feel the hard press of him against my thigh. My own breath quickens.

I pretend again that he is Barrons and suddenly he feels like Barrons, and I’m fighting to keep my head clear. Images flash through my mind, those long, incredible hours spent in a sex-drenched bed.

I smell Barrons on my skin, taste him on my lips. I remember. I will never forget. The memories are so vivid. I swear I could reach out and touch those crimson silk sheets.

He sprawls on the bed, a dark tattooed mountain of man, arms folded behind his head, watching me as I dance naked.

Manfred Mann plays an old Bruce Springsteen cover on my iPod: I came for you, for you, I came for you …

He did. And I killed him.

I would give my right arm to be back there, for just one day. Live it again. Touch him again. Hear those sounds he makes. Smile at him. Be tender. Not be afraid to be tender. Life is so fragile, exquisite, and short. Why do I keep realizing that too late?

The brand on the back of my skull burns, but I can’t tell if it’s Darroc’s mark that scalds my scalp or Barrons’ brand that burns me because Darroc is touching it.

“Abandon your vows to drag me down and destroy me, MacKayla,” he whispers against my ear. “Ah, yes, I see it in your eyes every time you look at me. I would have to be blind not to see it. I have lived for hundreds of thousands of years in the Court of Grand Illusion. You cannot deceive me. Decry your pointless quest for vengeance, which will only end up destroying you, not me. Let me raise you up, teach you to fly. I will give you everything. And you I will not lose. That is a mistake I will not make again. If you come to me knowing what I am, there need be no fear, no mistrust between us. Take my kiss, MacKayla. Accept my offer. Live with me. Forever.”

His lips move from my ear; he brushes kisses across my cheek. But he stops and waits for me to turn my head that last inch. To choose.

I turn to vomit hatred all over him. He claims feelings for my sister and tries to seduce me, too! Can what he felt for Alina be so easily betrayed? I hate him for seducing her. I hate him for not being faithful to her memory.

Neither of those emotions is anything Barrons would have called “useful.” I have a memory to live up to. Two ghosts to bring back to life.

I focus on the here and now. What can be used. What can’t.

Beyond his shoulder, I see where we are. If I felt anything anymore, I’d double over, fist in my stomach.

Clever, clever ex-Fae. The bastard.

We’re in the alley, catty-corner to Barrons Books and Baubles. He hid a Silver in the brick wall of the first building in the Dark Zone across from my bookstore.

It was right out back, all this time. In my backyard. He was always watching me. Us.

When I was last here, even though I knew I was leaving to walk straight into a trap, there was buoyancy in my step. Barrons had just told me that when I came out, with Darroc dead and my parents alive, he was going to give me BB&B, deed and all.

I’d had no doubt that I was going to get that deed. I was so cocky, so sure of myself.

Darroc watches me carefully.

The games here are treacherously deep. Always were. I just never saw things as clearly as I do now.

He has called me on my hatred of him and done something probably only a being that had been Fae for a small eternity could do—he has accepted it and offered a full pardon. He has proposed far more than a mere business arrangement and waits for my response. I understand his game. He has studied my race with his coldly analytical Fae mind and knows us well.

By agreeing to be intimate with him, I expose myself on two levels: physically I get close enough to him that he could harm me, and emotionally I run the risk that every woman runs when she’s intimate with a man—where the body goes, a tiny piece of the heart tries to follow.

Fortunately for me, I have no heart left. I’m safe on that score. And I’ve grown damned tough to injure.

My ghosts whisper to each other across me, but I can’t hear them. There’s only one way I’ll ever be able to hear them again.

I turn my head for Darroc’s kiss.

As his lips close over mine, the duality inside me threatens to tear me in half, and if it succeeds, I will lose my best chance at accomplishing my mission.

I hurt.

I need punishment for my sins.

I bury my hands in his hair and channel all those feelings into passion, pour them into my touch, kiss him hard, violently, with explosive feeling. I turn us both around and slam him up against the wall, kissing him like he’s all that ever existed, kissing him with a full measure of humanity. It’s a thing a Fae can never feel, no matter the form they wear—humanity. It’s why they crave us in bed.

He staggers for a moment, draws back, and stares down at me.

My eyes are wild. I feel something inside me that terrifies me, and I just hope I can hang on to the edge of this cliff I’m on. I make a sound of impatience, wet my lips, and shove at him. “More,” I demand.

When he kisses me again, the last part of me that could stand myself dies.

8

It took me a bloody fucking month to get back.

I died three times.

It was worse than the 1800s when I had to book passage on a steamer to cross the bloody ocean.

Fragments of Fae reality everywhere, took down every plane I took up.

I consider the possibility that, by the time I return, he will have caught her, cut my brand off her skull, and made her impossible to track.

Then I begin to feel her.

She is alive. She still wears my mark.

But what I sense is incongruent with her situation. I expect grief. The woman killed me and, in humans, familiarity breeds a certain emotional bond.

But lust? On the heels of murdering me, who does she lust for?

I entertain myself with thoughts of searing my brand from her skull.

When I finally arrive at the bookstore, what do I see in the alley behind it?

The woman that summoned me to save her, then stabbed me in the back at the first opportunity, isn’t lost in the Silvers, in need of saving.

She’s standing in my alley, kissing the bastard that had her raped and turned her Pri-ya.

No, let us be perfectly precise: She’s grinding herself against him and shoving her tongue halfway down his throat.

My monster rattles its cage.

Violently.

9

“Mac! Hey, Mac! Din’t’cha hear me? I said, ‘What the blimey feck you doing?’ ”

I stiffen. I’m drifting in a dark place where I feel nothing, because if I did, I’d kill myself. No right, no wrong. Just distraction. “Ignore her,” Darroc growls against my mouth.

“Mac, it’s me! Dani. Hey, who the feck you kissing?”

I feel her zinging from side to side behind me, stirring my hair with the breeze she creates, trying to see who I’ve got up against the wall.

She’s seen him twice before and would recognize him. The last thing I need is her carrying news back to the abbey: Mac’s teamed up with the Lord Master, just like her sister! Just like Ro said! Feckin’ traitor—must run in the feckin’ blood!

Rowena would exploit it ruthlessly, send every sidhe-seer she has to get in my way and try to take me down. The narrow-minded bitch would put more effort into hunting me than she’d ever spent hunting Fae.

A sudden gust ruffles my shirt, and my hair flies straight up in the air.

“That ain’t Barrons!” Dani snaps indignantly.

The name goes through me like a knife. No, it ain’t Barrons and, unless I’m convincing, it never will be again.

“It ain’t V’lane, neither!” Anger mixes with bafflement in her voice. “Mac, what’cha doing? Where the feck you been? I been looking all over for you. Been a month. Maaac!” she wails the last part plaintively. “I got scoop! Pay attention to me!”

“Shall I get rid of her?” Darroc murmurs.

“She’s a little tough to shake,” I murmur back. “Give me a minute.”

I step back, smiling up at him. No one can accuse the Fae of lacking in the lust department. It blazes in his not-quite-human eyes. Banked in that heat, I see surprise he tries but fails to mask. I suspect my sister was a little more … refined than I am.

“I’ll be right back,” I promise, and turn slowly, buying time to brace myself for dealing with Dani. I’m going to have to hurt her to get rid of her.

Her face is bright, eager. Her unruly mass of auburn curls is tamed beneath a black bike helmet, lights ablaze. She has on a long black leather coat and high-top black sneakers. Somewhere under that coat is the Sword of Light, unless Darroc sensed it and took it, too. If it’s still there, I wonder if I could draw it swiftly enough to impale myself before she managed to stop me.

I have goals. I focus on them. No time to indulge my guilty conscience and even less point. When I’m done with what I plan to do, everything that happens in this alley tonight will never have taken place, so it doesn’t matter that I hurt this Dani, because she won’t have to live through it in the future I create.

The enormity of freedom that grants me makes me suddenly breathless. Nothing I do from this moment forth will ever come back to bite me in the ass. I’m in a penalty-free zone. I have been since the moment I decided to remake it all.

I study Dani with strange detachment, wondering how much I should change for her. I could keep her mother from being killed. Give her a life that would never harden her, that would let her be open, soft. Let her have fun like Alina and me, play on a beach, not be out in the streets hunting and killing monsters by the tender age of … however old she was when Rowena turned her into a weapon. Eight? Ten?

Now that she has my attention, she beams, and when Dani beams her whole face lights up. She bounces from foot to foot, burning off excited energy. “Where you been, Mac? I missed you! Dude—I mean, man,” she corrects hastily, with a gamine grin, before I can make good on a threat I made in what feels like another lifetime that I would call her by her full name if she ever “duded” me again. “You ain’t never gonna believe what’s been going on! I invented Shade-Busters, and the whole abbey’s been using ’em—even though they ain’t saying nothing about how brilliant I am, like I musta accidentally stumbled onto it or something, when those stupid sidhe-sheep never woulda in a gazillion years,” she mutters sourly. But then she brightens again. “And you’re never gonna believe it—even I can’t hardly—but I kicked a Hunter’s ass and killed the fecker!” She frowns and looks a little irritated. “Well, maybe Jayne helped some, but I’m the one that killed it. And, feckin’ A, you ain’t never gonna guess this one—dude!” She begins bouncing from foot to foot so quickly and agitatedly that she becomes a black leather smudge in the night. “The feckin’ Sinsar Dubh came to the abbey and it—”

Abruptly, she’s no longer bouncing but standing still, looking at me, mouth hanging open, but nothing’s coming out.

She stares past me, at me, then past me again. Her lips tighten and her eyes narrow. Her hand flashes inside her coat.

I can tell by the look on her face that it encounters emptiness where her sword should be. But she doesn’t back up, not Dani. She stands her ground. If I had anything left inside me, I’d smile. Thirteen and she’s got the heart of a lion.

“Something going on here I ain’t getting, Mac?” she says tightly. “I’m standing here, see, trying to think of a reason, any ol’ reason at all, you might be kissing that fecker, but I ain’t finding none.” She glares at me. “Thinking this is a little worse than me watching porn. Dude.”

Oh, yes, she’s upset. She just unapologetically “duded” me. I steel myself. “Lot going on here you ain’t getting,” I say coolly.

She searches my face, wondering if I’m playing double agent or something, undercover with the enemy. I need to convince her, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I’m not. I need her to go away and stay away. I can’t afford a superspeedy supersleuth interfering with my plans.

I also don’t want her around long enough for Darroc to realize she could cause serious problems for us if she felt like it. Penalty-free zone or not, there’s no reality in which I could kill Dani or watch her be killed by anyone else. Family isn’t always born; sometimes it’s found.

She said the Book was at the abbey. I need to know when. Until I discover how Darroc plans to merge with the Sinsar Dubh and am certain I can do it myself, I’m not getting him anywhere near it. I’m going to play the same game with Darroc that I played with V’lane and Barrons—only now for a very different reason—called “Dodge the Dark Book.”

“Like what, Mac?” She props her fists at her waist. She’s so upset she’s vibrating, shivering so fast that her edges are getting blurry. “Prick tore down the walls, killed billions, wiped out Dublin, had you gang-raped—I’m the one that saved you, ’member? And now you’re sucking on”—she grimaces and shudders—“the feckin’ tongue of an Unseelie-eater! What the feck?”

I ignore all of it. “When was the Book at the abbey?” I don’t ask if people were hurt. The woman who is willing to ally herself with Darroc doesn’t care. Besides, I won’t let it happen in my new and improved version of the future.

“Gonna try this again, Mac. What the feck?” she fires.

I fire back, “Gonna try this again, Dani. When?”

She stares a long moment, then her jaw pokes out stubbornly and she crosses her skinny arms over her chest. She glares at Darroc, then back at me. “You Pri-ya or something again, Mac? Only without the being-naked-and-horny-all-the-time part? What’d he do to you?”

“Answer the question, Dani.”

She bristles. “Barrons know what’s going on? Think he needs to. Where’s Barrons?”

“Dead,” I say flatly.

Her slender body jerks and she stops vibrating. She had a major crush on Barrons. “No, he ain’t,” she protests. “Whatever he is ain’t killable. Least not easy.”

“Wasn’t easy,” I say. It took two of the people he trusted most in the world, a spear in the back, a gutting, and a slit throat. I wouldn’t call that easy.

She stares at me hard, searching my gaze.

I focus on dripping scorn.

She gets it and stiffens. “What happened?”

Darroc moves in behind me and slips his arms around my waist. I lean back into him.

“MacKayla killed him,” he says bluntly. “Now answer her question. When was the Book at the abbey? Is it still there?”

Dani sucks in a breath. She’s vibrating again. She won’t look at Darroc, only me. “This ain’t funny, Mac.”

I agree. It’s not. It’s hell. But it’s necessary. “He had it coming,” I lie coldly. “He betrayed me.”

She puffs up, fists at her waist. “Barrons ain’t the betraying kind. He never betrayed you! He wouldn’t do that!”

“Oh, grow up and pull your head out! You didn’t know shit about Barrons! You’re not old enough to know shit about anything!”

She goes still, brilliant green eyes narrowing. “I left the abbey, Mac,” she says finally. She gives a hollow laugh. “Think I kinda burned my bridges, ya know?” She searches my face. And I feel another blade in my heart. She burned them because of me. Because she believed that I was out there somewhere and we had each other.

I console myself with the thought that at least she won’t be rushing back to Rowena to tell her I’m sleeping with the enemy and I won’t have a pack of rabid sidhe-seers on my tail.

“Thought we were friends, Mac.”

I see in her eyes that all I have to do is say, “We are,” and she’ll find some way to deal with what she’s looking at right now. How dare she put so much faith in me? I never asked for it, never deserved it.

“You thought wrong. Now answer the question.” I’m the only one who never treated her like a child. She hates being called “kid” more than anything. “Kid,” I say. “Then get the hell out of here. Take your toys and go play somewhere else.”

Her brows climb her forehead and her mouth pulls down. “What did you just say?”

“I said, kid, answer my question and go away! We’re a little busy here, can’t you see?”

She’s bouncing from foot to foot again, a smudge of darkness in the dark. “Feckin’ grown-ups,” she bites out through clenched teeth. “All the feckin’ same. Feckin’ glad I feckin’ left the feckin’ abbey. You can just go to hell!” She shouts the last words, but they catch a little as they come out, like they get tangled up on a sob she’s forcing back down.

I don’t even see the blur of black move away. There’s a burst of light from her MacHalo as she flashes into motion like the Enterprise entering warp speed, then an empty alley.

I’m startled to realize that I think she’s just the tiniest bit faster. Is she eating Unseelie? I’m going to kick her ass all over Dublin if she’s eating Unseelie.

“Why didn’t you stop her, MacKayla? You could have exploited her trust in you to get information about the Book.”

I shrug. “Kid always got on my nerves. Let’s go hunt ourselves a sidhe-seer. If we can’t find one, Jayne’s men are bound to know what’s going on.”

I turn away from Barrons Books and Baubles toward what used to be the biggest Dark Zone in Dublin. It’s a wasteland now, not a single Shade left. When Darroc brought the walls crashing down on Halloween and Dublin went dark, the amorphous vampires escaped their prison of light and slithered on to greener pastures.

Hurting Dani took all my energy. I’m in no mood to walk past BB&B. I’d have to confront the obvious—that, like the man, the store is big, silent, and dead.

If I walk past it, I’ll have to force myself not to stare hungrily at it. Have to ignore that, in this reality, I’ll never enter those doors again.

He’s gone. He’s really, truly gone.

My bookstore has been lost to me as completely and irrevocably as if the Dark Zone had finally swallowed it up.

I’ll never own it. I’ll never open those diamond-paned cherry doors for business again.

I’ll never hear my cash register’s tiny bell ring or curl up with a cup of cocoa and a book, warmed by a cozy gas fire and the promise of Jericho Barrons’ eventual return. I’ll never banter with him, practice Voice, or be tested against pages of the Sinsar Dubh. I’ll never steal hungry glances when I think he’s not looking at me, or hear him laugh, or climb the back stairs to my bedroom that’s sometimes on the fourth floor and other times on the fifth, where I might lie awake and practice things to say to him, only to end up discarding them all because Barrons doesn’t care about words.

Only actions.

I’ll never drive his cars. I’ll never know his secrets.

Darroc takes my arm. “This way.” He turns me around. “Temple Bar.”

I feel his eyes on me as he guides me back toward the bookstore.

I stop and look up at him. “I thought there might be things you needed from the house on LaRuhe,” I say casually. I really don’t want to walk past BB&B. “I thought we should rally your troops. We’ve been gone a long time.”

“There are many places I keep supplies, and my army is always near.” He makes a slicing gesture in the air and murmurs a few words in a language I don’t understand.

The night is suddenly twenty degrees cooler. I don’t have to look behind me to know the Unseelie Princes are there, in addition to countless other Unseelie. The night is suddenly thick with dark Fae. Even with my “volume” muted, there are so many, so close to me, that I feel them in the pit of my stomach. Does he keep a contingent of them a mere sift away at all times? Have the princes been hovering all this time, listening for his call, a half dimension beyond my awareness?

I’ll need to remember that.

“I am not walking around Dublin with the princes at my back.”

“I said I will not let them harm you, MacKayla, and I meant it.”

“I want my spear back. Give it to me now.”

“I cannot permit that. I saw what you did to Mallucé with it.”

“I said I won’t harm you, Darroc, and I meant it,” I mock. “See how that feels? Little hard to swallow, isn’t it? You insist that I trust you, but you won’t trust me.”

“I cannot take the risk.”

“Wrong answer.” Should I force the issue and try to take the spear? If I succeed, will he trust me less? Or respect me more?

When I seek the bottomless lake in my head, I don’t bother closing my eyes to do it. I just let them go a little out of focus. I need power, strength, and I know where to find both. With almost no effort at all, I’m standing on a black-pebbled beach. It has always been there for me. It always will be.

Distantly, I hear Darroc speaking to the princes. I shiver. I can’t bear the thought of them behind me.

Deep in its cavernous depths, the black water churns and begins to bubble.

Silvery runes like the ones I encircled myself with on the cliff’s edge break the surface, but the water keeps boiling, and I know it’s not yet done. There’s something more … if I want it. I do. After a few moments, it pushes up a handful of crimson runes that pulse on the inky water like slender deformed hearts. The bubbling stops. The surface is once again as smooth as black glass.

I bend and scoop them up. Dripping blood, they flutter in my fists.

Distantly, I hear the Unseelie Princes begin to chime, but not softly. It’s the sound of broken, jagged crystal scraping against metal.

I don’t turn to look at them. I know all I need to know: Whatever gift I’ve been given, they don’t like it.

My gaze refocuses.

Darroc looks at me, then down at my hands, and goes still. “What are you doing with those? What were you doing in the Silvers before I found you? Did you enter the White Mansion without me, MacKayla?”

Behind me, the princes chime louder. It’s a cacophony that slices into the soul like a razor, severs tendon, and chips bone. I wonder if that’s what comes of being fashioned from an imperfect Song of Making, a melody that can unmake, unsing, uncreate at a molecular level.

They hate my crimson runes, and I hate their dark music.

I won’t be the one to yield.

“Why?” I ask Darroc. Is that where the runes I’ve scooped up came from? What does he know about them? I can’t ask him without betraying that, while I have power, I have no idea what it is or how to use it. I raise my fists and open them, palms up. My hands drip thick red liquid. Slender tubular runes twist on my palms.

Behind me, the princes’ jagged chiming becomes a hellish shriek that even Darroc looks rattled by.

I have no idea what to do with the runes. I was thinking of the Unseelie Princes, that I needed a weapon against them, and they appeared in my mind. I have no idea how I translated them from that dark glassy lake into existence. I understand no more about these crimson symbols than I did about the silvery ones.

“Where did you learn to do that, MacKayla?” Darroc demands.

I can barely hear him over the princes. “How do you plan to merge with the Book?” I counter. I have to raise my voice to a near yell to make myself heard.

“Do you have any idea what those things are capable of?” he demands. I read his lips. I can’t hear him.

The shrieking behind me rises to an inhuman pitch that pierces my eardrums like ice picks. “Give me my spear and I’ll put them away,” I shout.

Darroc moves closer, trying to hear me. “Impossible!” he explodes. “My princes will not remain and protect us if you have the spear.” His gaze slides with distaste over the runes in my hands. “Nor with those present.”

“I think we can take care of ourselves!”

“What?” he shouts.

“We don’t need them!” The ice picks in my ears have begun drilling into my brain. I’m on the verge of a massive migraine.

“I do! I am not yet Fae again. My army follows me only because Fae princes lead at my back!”

“Who needs an army?” We’re inches apart, shouting at each other, and still the words are nearly lost in the din.

He rubs his temples. His nose has started to bleed. “We do! The Seelie are amassing, MacKayla. They, too, have begun hunting the Sinsar Dubh. Much has changed since you were last here!”

“How do you know?” I hadn’t seen any handy newsstands in the Silvers while I was in there.

He grabs my head, pulls it to his. “I stay informed!” he snarls against my ear.

The chiming has become an unbearable orchestra of sounds that the human ear was never meant to hear. My neck is wet. I realize my ears are bleeding. I’m mildly surprised. I don’t bleed easily anymore. Haven’t ever since I ate Unseelie.

“You must obey me in this, MacKayla!” he shouts. “If you wish to remain at my side, dispose of them. Or is it war you wish between us? I thought it was an alliance you sought!” He wipes blood from his lips and cuts a sharp look at the princes.

Blissfully, blessedly, the chiming stops. The ice picks through my eardrums vanish.

I inhale deeply, gulping clean, fresh air greedily, as if it might wash my cells clean of the stain from the princes’ horrific symphony.

My relief is short-lived, however. As abruptly as the hellish music stopped, my shoulders and arms are freezing, and I think sheets of ice might crack and drop away if I move.

I don’t need to turn my head to know that the princes have sifted into position, one on my left, one on my right. I feel them there. I know their inhumanly beautiful faces are inches from mine. If I turn my head, they will look into me with those piercing, mesmerizing, ancient eyes that can see beyond where the human soul is, that can see into the very matter that comprises it—and can take it apart piece by piece. Regardless of how much they despise my runes, they’re still ready to take me on.

I look at Darroc. I’d wondered what his reaction would be if I tried to take the spear. I see a look in his eyes now that was not there a short time ago. I am both a greater liability than he knew and a greater asset—and he likes it. He likes power: both having it and having a woman who has it.

I despise walking with Unseelie Princes at my back. But his comment about the Seelie amassing armies, my ignorance about the runes I hold in my hands, and the icy dark Fae sandwiching me make compelling arguments.

I tilt my head, toss my dark curls from my eyes, and look up at him. He likes it when I use his name. I think it makes him feel like he’s with Alina again. Alina was soft and Southern to the core. We Southern women know a thing or two about men. We know to use their name often, to make them feel strong, needed, as if they have the final say even when they don’t, and to always, always keep them believing they won the best prize in the only competition that will ever matter on the day we said, “I do.”

“If we get into a battle, Darroc, will you promise to return my spear so I can use it to help defend us? Will you permit that?”

He likes those words: “help defend us” and “permit.” I see it in his eyes. A smile breaks across his face. He touches my cheek and nods. “Of course, MacKayla.”

He looks at the princes and they are no longer beside me.

I’m uncertain how to return the runes. I’m not sure they can be returned.

When I toss them over my shoulders at the princes, they make sounds like exploding crystal goblets, as they sift hastily to avoid them. I hear the runes steam and hiss as they hit pavement.

I laugh.

Darroc gives me a look.

“I am behaving,” I reply sweetly. “You can’t tell me they didn’t have that coming.”

I’m getting better at reading him. He finds me amusing. I wipe my palms on my leather pants, trying to get rid of the bloody residue from the runes. I try my shirt. But it’s no use; the red discoloration has set.

When Darroc takes my hand and leads me down the alley between Barrons Books and Baubles and Barrons’ garage, which houses the car collection I used to covet, I don’t look to either side. I keep my gaze trained straight ahead.

I’ve lost Alina, failed to save Christian, killed Barrons, am becoming intimate with my sister’s lover. I hurt Dani to drive her away, and now I’ve teamed up with the Unseelie army.

Eyes on the prize, there’s no turning back.

10

Snow begins to fall, carpeting the night in a soft white hush. We march across it, a stain of Unseelie, stomping, crawling, slithering toward Temple Bar.

There are castes behind me that I’ve seen only once before—the night Darroc brought them through the dolmen. I have no desire to inspect them any more closely than I did that night. Some of the Unseelie aren’t so bad to look at. The Rhino-boys are disgusting, but they don’t make you feel … dirty. Others … well, even the way they move makes your skin crawl, makes you feel slimy where their eyes linger.

As we pass a streetlamp, I glance at a flyer, drooping limply on it: The Dani Daily, 97 days AWC.

The headline brags that she killed a Hunter. I put myself in Dani’s head, to figure out the date. It takes me a minute, but I get it—after the walls crashed. I perform a rapid calculation. The last day I was in Dublin was January 12.

Ninety-seven days from Halloween—the night the walls crashed—is February 5.

Which means I’ve been gone at least twenty-four days, probably longer. The flyer was faded, worn by the elements. Much more snow and I’d never have seen it.

However long I’ve been gone, Dublin hasn’t changed much.

Although many of the streetlamps that were ripped from the concrete and destroyed have been replaced and the broken lights repaired, the power grids are still down. Here and there, generators hum, dead giveaways of life barricaded in buildings or holed up underground.

We pass the red façade of the Temple Bar, of the bar district. I glance in. I can’t help myself. I loved the place BWC—before the walls crashed.

Now it’s a dark shell, with shattered windows, overturned tables and chairs, and papery husks of human remains. From the way they’re piled, I know the patrons were crammed inside, huddled together when the end came.

I remember the way the Temple Bar looked the first time I saw it, brightly lit, with people and music spilling from open doors into the cobbled streets of the corner beyond. Guys had whistled at me. I’d forgotten my grief over Alina for a blessed second or two. Then, of course, hated myself for forgetting.

I can almost hear the laughter, the lilt of Irish voices. They’re all dead now, like Alina and Barrons.

I remember spending the long week before Halloween walking the streets of Dublin for hours on end, from dawn ’til dusk, feeling helpless, worthless, for all my supposed sidhe-seer skills. I wasn’t sure any of us would survive Halloween, so I’d tried to cram as much living into those last days as possible.

I’d chatted up street vendors and played backgammon with toothless old men who spoke a version of English so heavily distorted by dialect and gums that I’d understood only every fifth word, but it hadn’t mattered. They’d been delighted by a pretty girl’s attention, and I’d hungered for paternal comfort.

I’d visited the famous tourist hot spots. I’d eaten in dives and slammed back shots of whiskey with anyone who’d do them with me.

I’d fallen in love with the city I couldn’t protect.

After the Unseelie had escaped their prison and savaged her—dark, burned, and broken—I’d been determined to see her rebuilt.

Now I longed only to replace her.

“Do you sense it, MacKayla?” Darroc asks.

I’ve been keeping my sidhe-seer senses as closed as possible. I’m tired and have no desire to find the Sinsar Dubh. Not until I know everything he knows.

I open my senses warily and turn the “volume” up to a two on a scale of one to ten. My sidhe-seer senses are picking up the essence of countless things Fae, but none of them is the Sinsar Dubh. “No.”

“Are there many Fae?”

“The city is crawling with them.”

“Light or Dark Court?”

“It doesn’t work like that. I can only pick up Fae, not their allegiance or caste.”

“How many?”

I adjust the volume to three and a half. A tenth this much Fae in close proximity used to have me holding my stomach and trying not to puke. Now I feel charged by it. More alive than I want to be. “They’re on all sides of us, in twos and threes. They’re above us, on the rooftops and in the skies. I don’t get the feeling that they’re watching us, more that they’re watching everything.” Are they, too, hunting my Book? I’ll kill them all. It’s mine.

“Hundreds?” he presses.

“Thousands,” I correct.

“Organized?”

“There is one group to the east that is considerably larger than the others, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Then east we go,” he says. He turns to the princes and barks a command. They vanish.

I voice a growing suspicion. “They’re not really gone, are they? They never are when you send them away.”

“They remain close, watching but unseen. A sift away, with more of my army.”

“And when we find this group of Fae?” I press.

“If they are Unseelie, they are mine.”

“And if they’re Seelie?”

“Then we will drive them from Dublin.”

Good. The less Fae in my way, the better.

Few have ever seen the Seelie, save the rare mortal stolen away and kept at the Fae court and, of course, Barrons, who once spent a great deal of time there, sleeping with a princess, before killing her and pissing off V’lane for all eternity.

I’ve seen thousands of Unseelie, but until now even I—sidhe-seer extraordinaire—have seen only a single Seelie.

I’d begun to wonder why.

In the dark hours of the night, I’d wondered if maybe he was the only one left, if he was hiding something, if perhaps he wasn’t Seelie at all, despite evidence supporting his claim.

Seeing him as he is now, all my doubts evaporate.

Here are the Seelie.

They’ve finally gotten off their asses and started paying attention to the mess they’ve made of my world. I guess they couldn’t be bothered before now.

Even filled as I am with hatred for all Fae, I can’t deny that V’lane looks like an avenging angel, charging down from heaven to set my world back on its axis and clean this whole mess up. Radiant, golden, and mesmerizing, he leads an army of angels.

Tall, gracefully muscled, they stand shoulder to shoulder with him, filling the street. Stunning, velvety-skinned, dusted with gold, they are so chillingly exquisite that I have a hard time looking at them—and I’m immune from having been Pri-ya, a Fae sex addict. They are otherworldly, divine.

There are dozens of V’lane’s caste, male and female. They possess a terrifying eroticism that makes them deadly to humans. If a scientist managed to get his hands on one to study, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn their skin exudes a pheromone we crave.

The perpetual promise of a smile hovers on irresistible lips, below ancient, iridescent, alien eyes. Despite all I’ve suffered at their hands, I want to rush forward and fall to my knees before them. I want to slide my palms over their flawless skin, discover if they taste as amazing as they smell. I want to be gathered into a Fae embrace, yield my memories, my mind, my will, and be carried off to a Faery court where I could stay forever young, cocooned by illusion.

Flanking V’lane’s caste—which I assume is the highest ranking by how the other castes seem to protect it—are the stuff of fairy tales. There are rainbow-colored, delicate Fae that dart like hummingbirds on gossamer wings; silvery nymphs that dance on dainty feet; and others that I can’t even see, except for blinding trailers of light they leave behind as they move. They’re so brilliant and fiery, they could only be earthbound stars.

I scoff at the delicacy of his army. It’s ethereal, born to wisp about, seduce, and be served.

Mine is earthy, solid. Born to gorge, kill, and rule.

We stalk toward one another, down a snow-filled street.

Where Seelie feet touch the earth, the snow melts with a hiss. Steam rises and flowers push up through cracks, blooming brilliantly, anointing the air with the scents of jasmine and sandalwood. The Seelie end of the street is bathed in golden light.

Where my army’s hooves and scaled bellies pass over the stones, a crust of black ice forms. The night embraces us; stealthy shadows, we ooze forward from the blackness.

Only once before have Seelie and Unseelie met like this—and on that day the Seelie Queen died. This is the stuff of legends, never seen by humans, except perhaps in our dreams.

Deformed monsters and hideous demons stare with baleful, hate-filled eyes at their perfect golden counterparts.

Angels glare with disdain at abominations that should never have been born, who blemish the perfection of the Fae race, tarnish their existence simply by being.

I wonder what Darroc is thinking, bringing them together like this.

We stop a dozen paces apart.

Ice and heat slam together in the street.

My breath frosts the air, then turns to steam as it passes an invisible demarcation. Eddies swirl on the pavement between us, gathering the indigestible rinds of people the Shades left behind, and tiny tornadoes begin to form.

I realize that whoever began the fairy tale that Fae don’t feel was selling pure bullshit. They feel the entire range of human emotion. They just handle it differently: with patience born of eternity. Schooled in courtly manners, they don masks of impassivity because they have forever to play out their games.

As we study each other through the rapidly growing tornadoes, I remember V’lane telling me that they destroyed their own world by fighting. It cracked from end to end. Was this why? Will the weather disturbance that’s being generated by the clash of these two mighty courts continue to grow if they fight and tear this world apart, too? Not that I’d particularly mind, since I intend to re-create it with the Book, but I need the Book before this world is destroyed.

Which means this stormy posturing really needs to stop.

“Enough with the melodrama, V’lane,” I say coolly.

His eyes are those of a stranger. He regards me with the same expression he turns on the monsters at my back. I’m a little irritated to realize he doesn’t look at Darroc. His gaze slides over him as if he’s not even there. He’s the fallen Fae, traitor to their race, the one responsible for tearing the walls down. I’m just a sidhe-seer trying to survive.

The gold-dusted Greek god standing on V’lane’s right sneers, “That … thing … is the human you said we need to protect? She consorts with abominations!”

The gilt-skinned goddess to his left growls, “Destroy her now!”

Hundreds of Seelie, walking, dancing, and flying, begin to clamor for my death.

Without taking my eyes off them, I snap at Darroc, “I could really use my spear right now.” I assume he still has it, that V’lane hasn’t somehow plucked it from him the same way he takes it from me.

As the tiny, dainty Fae begin proposing methods for my execution, each one slower and more painful than the last, the god and goddess bracketing V’lane hammer him.

“She is human and has chosen the dark ones! Look at her! She wears their colors!”

“You said she worshipped us!”

“And she would obey us in all things!”

“They have touched her! I smell it on her skin!” The god looks revolted—and aroused. Iridescent eyes glitter with gold sparks.

“They have used her!” the goddess snarls. “She is soiled. I will not suffer her at court!”

“Silence!” V’lane thunders. “I lead the True Race for our queen. I speak for Aoibheal!”

“This is unacceptable!”

“Outrageous!”

“Beyond bearing, V’lane!”

“You will do as I say, Dree’lia! I decide her fate. And only I will carry it out.”

I mutter at Darroc, “You need to make a decision, and fast.”

“They always overreact,” Darroc murmurs. “It is one of the many things I despised at court. A session in High Council could go on like this for several human years. Give them time. V’lane will bring them to heel.”

One of the tiny, winged Seelie breaks formation and darts straight for my head. I duck, but it whizzes around me.

I’m startled to hear myself burst out laughing.

Two more of them break rank and begin to zip tight circles around my head.

As they buzz past me, my laughter takes on a hysterical edge. There’s nothing funny about what’s happening—still, I hoot and snort. I can’t help it. I’ve never been so amused in my entire life. I hold my sides and double over, chortling, guffawing, choking on sobs of forced gaiety, as they weave closer and closer around me. I’m appalled by the sounds coming out of my mouth. I’m horrified at the uncontrollable nature of it. I hate the Fae and their way of stripping away my will.

“Stop laughing,” Darroc growls.

Hilarity has me on the edge of hysterics and it hurts. I manage to raise my head from my knees just enough to shoot him a dirty look. I’d love to stop laughing. But I can’t.

I want to tell him to make the damned things go away, except I can’t breathe, I can’t even close my lips long enough to grit consonants. Whatever these lovely little Seelie monsters are, their specialty is death-by-laughter. What a hellish way to go. After only a few minutes, my sides ache from heaving, my gut burns, and I’m so breathless I’m light-headed. I wonder how long it takes to die of forced mirth. Hours? Days?

A fourth tiny Fae takes up the game, and I brace myself to dive inward, to find a weapon in my dark, lake-filled cave, when suddenly a long tongue, dripping venom, whizzes past my ear and plucks the dainty Seelie straight from the air.

I hear crunching noises behind me.

I snicker helplessly.

“V’lane!” the golden goddess shrieks. “That thing, that awful thing, it ate M’ree!”

I hear another snap, followed by more crunching noises, and a second one is gone. I cackle madly.

The remaining two retreat, shaking tiny fists and screaming in a language I don’t understand. Even angry, the sound they make is more beautiful than an aria.

My laughter loses its forced edge.

After a long moment, I’m able to relax and I stop making crazed sounds of amusement. Peals fade to moans to silence. I release my sides and gulp cool, soothing air.

I stand, suddenly furious, and this emotion is all mine. I’m sick of being vulnerable. If I’d had my spear, those nasty little death-by-laughter fairies would never have dared approach me. I’d have skewered them midair and made Fae kebabs out of them.

“Friends,” I hiss at Darroc, “trust each other.”

But he doesn’t. I see it in his face.

“You said you would give it to me so I could defend us.”

He smiles faintly, and I know he’s remembering how Mallucé died: slowly, gruesomely, rotting from the inside out. The spear kills all things Fae, and because Darroc has been eating so much Unseelie, he’s laced with veins of Fae. One tiny little prick of the tip of my spear would be a death sentence. “As yet, we are not under attack.”

“Who are you talking to, human?” the goddess demands.

I look at Darroc, who shrugs. “I told you the first Seelie that saw me would try to kill me. Hence they do not see me. My princes keep me concealed from their vision.”

Now I understand why V’lane’s gaze slid over him like he wasn’t there. He’s not. “So it looks like I’m the only one standing here? They think I’m running your army!”

“Never fear, sidhe-seer,” V’lane says coldly. “I smell the foulness of what was once Fae and now cannibalizes our race. I know who leads this army. As for his being your friend, the one you so unwisely walk with has no friends. He has always served only his own purposes.”

I tilt my head. “Are you my friend, V’lane?”

“I would be. I have offered you my protection repeatedly.”

The goddess gasps. “You offered our protection and she refused? She chose those … things over us?”

“Silence, Dree’lia!”

“The Tuatha Dé Danann do not offer twice!” she fumes. “I said, ‘Silence!’ ” V’lane snaps.

“Clearly you do not under—”

I gape.

Dree’lia has no mouth. There is only smooth skin where her lips used to be. Delicate nostrils flare beneath ancient, hate-filled eyes.

The golden god moves to embrace her. She rests her head in the hollow of his neck and clutches him. “That was unnecessary,” he tells V’lane stiffly.

I’m struck by the absurdity of the moment. Here I stand, between opposing halves of the most powerful race imaginable. They are at war with each other. They despise each other and are vying for the same prize.

And the Seelie—who have enjoyed absolute freedom and power their entire existences—are squabbling among themselves over trivialities, while the Unseelie—who’ve been imprisoned, starved, and tortured for hundreds of thousands of years—patiently hold formation and wait for Darroc’s orders.

And I can’t help but see myself in them. The Seelie are who I was before my sister died. Pink, pretty, frivolous Mac. The Unseelie are who I’ve become, carved by loss and despair. Black, grungy, driven Mac.

The Unseelie are stronger, less breakable. I’m glad I’m like them.

“I will speak with the sidhe-seer alone,” V’lane says.

“He will not,” Darroc growls at my side.

V’lane extends his hand when I don’t move. “Come, we must speak privately.”

“Why?”

“What subtle nuance of the word ‘private’ do you not understand?”

“Probably the same subtle nuance of the word ‘no’ you never understand. I’m not sifting anywhere with you.”

The god at his right gasps at my disrespect of his prince, but I see a small smile shape the corners of V’lane’s mouth.

“Consorting with Barrons has changed you. I think he will approve.”

The name is poison in my veins, from which I will die a slow death every minute I have to spend in this world without him. I’ll never be on the receiving end of one of those looks again. Never see that infamous mocking smile. Never have one of those wordless conversations in which we said so much more with our eyes than either of us ever was willing to say with our mouths. Jericho, Jericho, Jericho. How many times did I actually ever speak his name? Three? “Barrons is dead,” I say coolly.

The Seelie rustle, murmur disbelievingly.

V’lane’s eyes narrow. “He is not.”

“He is,” I say flatly. And I’m the queen bitch from hell that’s going to make them all pay. The thought makes me smile.

He searches my eyes a long moment, lingers on the curve of my lips. “I do not believe you,” he says finally.

“Darroc burned his body and scattered the ash. He’s dead.”

“How was he killed?” he demands.

“The spear.”

The soft murmurs swell and V’lane snarls, “I must have confirmation of this. Darroc, show yourself!”

My sides are suddenly icy. I am flanked by Unseelie Princes.

V’lane stiffens. The entire Seelie army goes still. And I think, Darroc may have just started a war.

How many hundreds of thousands of years ago did Seelie and Unseelie royalty last look each other in the face?

I hate looking at the Unseelie Princes. They mesmerize, they seduce, they obliterate. But there is something happening here that no human has ever seen. My curiosity is morbid and deep.

I position myself for a better view to see them both at once.

The Unseelie Prince stands beside me, stunningly naked. Of the four—who have been so aptly compared to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—I wonder which two remain. Pestilence, Famine, War? I hope I stand next to Death.

I want to walk with Death, bring it crashing down on this immortal, arrogant race.

The dark powerful body, capable of such soul-rending pleasure, is exquisite. I examine every inch with macabre fascination. Even hating the princes as I do, it … excites. It thrills. Which makes me hate it even more. It turned me inside out. I remember the kaleidoscopic tattoos rushing beneath its skin. I remember the black torque slithering around its neck. Its face has a savage beauty that obsesses even as it terrifies. Its lips are drawn back, baring sharp white teeth. And its eyes … oh, God, those eyes!

I force my gaze to V’lane. Then I widen my view to absorb them both, being careful to avoid the Unseelie Prince’s eyes.

Thesis and antithesis. Matter and antimatter.

They stand like statues, neither moving nor seeming to breathe. They study each other, assess, measure.

Prince of Consuming Night. Prince of Glorious Dawn.

The air between them is so charged that I could power all of Dublin if only I could figure out how to plug into it.

Black ice rushes forward from the Unseelie Prince’s feet, encompassing the cobblestones.

It is met halfway by a bed of brilliantly colored blossoms.

The ground shudders beneath my feet. There is a thunderous crack, and suddenly the cobbled pavement splits jaggedly between them, revealing a narrow, dark fissure.

“What are you doing, Darroc?” I demand.

“Tell him,” Darroc orders, and the prince opens his mouth to speak.

I clamp my hands to my ears to shut out the hellish sound.

V’lane uses language to communicate with me. All the Seelie have been using my language in my presence. I realize it has been a great concession.

The Unseelie Princes grant no concessions. Their language is a dark melody that the human ear was not made to hear. Once, I was forced to listen helplessly as they crooned to me, and it drove me mad.

By the time the Unseelie Prince stops speaking, V’lane is regarding me with an expression of faint astonishment.

Warily, I remove my hands from my ears but keep them close in case the UP decides to start “talking” again.

“He claims you killed Barrons, sidhe-seer. Why?”

It hasn’t escaped me that V’lane won’t use my name. I suspect that, if he did, those of his race would think him weak.

“Who cares? He’s dead. Gone. Out of both of our ways. It’s not like you didn’t want him dead, too.” I wonder if they really burned his body. I will never ask.

“And it was the spear that killed him?”

I nod. I have no idea, but it’s simplest to agree. The less time I spend thinking about Barrons, the better.

He looks from me to the prince at my side. “And after you killed Barrons, you decided your enemy was your friend?”

“A girl needs friends.” I’m bored. Tired of this posturing. I need to sleep. I need to be alone. “Look, V’lane, the Seelie are immortal, and the Unseelie are immortal. What are you going to do? Waste everyone’s time beating each other up all night? As far as I know, there’s only one weapon here tonight that kills Fae, and I’ve got it.”

“You do not.”

“You do,” Darroc corrects.

Just like that, my spear is heavy in my holster. I jerk a hard look his way. “About damned time.” I guess he finally feels the threat level has risen sufficiently. Or maybe he’s bored, too.

I slip my hand inside my jacket and close my fingers around the hilt. I love my spear. I’m going to keep it in the new world I create, even though it will be a world without Fae.

“You do not,” V’lane says.

“I thought you couldn’t see or hear him.”

“I smell the stench of him.”

My spear is gone.

My spear is there.

Gone again.

I look from V’lane to Darroc. V’lane is staring in Darroc’s general direction. Darroc is staring hard at the Unseelie Princes. They’re having a silent battle over me and my weapon, and it infuriates me that I have no control. One instant, V’lane takes my spear; the next, Darroc gives it back. It flickers in my fingers, solid then gone, solid then gone.

I shake my head. This could go on all night. They can play their silly games. I have more important things to do—like get enough sleep that I’m sharp enough to be on the hunt. I’m dangerously exhausted. I no longer feel numb. I’m brittle, and brittle can crack.

I’m preparing to turn and walk away from it all, when the sound of automatic gunfire shatters the night.

The Seelie hiss, and all those capable of sifting vanish—including V’lane—leaving roughly a third of them still standing in the street. They turn on their attacker, snarling. As the bullets hit them, some of the lesser castes flicker and stumble. Others turn toward us and launch themselves into the Unseelie to escape.

I hear the voices of Jayne and his men, shouting to each other, closing in behind them. I catch the glint of a rifle up on the rooftop a block down and know snipers are moving in.

Good. I hope they take down hundreds of Fae tonight, cart them off and imprison them with iron. I hope Dani makes rounds and kills the ones they catch.

But I’m not about to die from friendly fire in this screwed-up reality. I have a whole new world waiting for me in the future.

I turn to the Unseelie Prince to command it to sift me out of here. My enemy, my salvation.

Darroc barks a harsh order.

The prince’s hands are on me and it’s sifting before I even manage to get the words out.

TIME IS THE ONLY TRUE GOD, AND I AM FOREVER. THEREFORE, I AM GOD.

Your logic is flawed. Time is not forever. It is always. Past, Present, and Future. There was a time in the past when you did not exist. Therefore, you are not God.

I CREATE. I DESTROY.

With the whimsy of a spoiled child.

YOU FAIL TO DIVINE THE MASTER DESIGN. EVEN THAT WHICH YOU CALL CHAOS HAS PATTERN AND PURPOSE.

—CONVERSATIONS WITH THE SINSAR DUBH

11

I stand on a balcony, staring out at the darkness. Snow swirls around my face, lands in my hair. I catch a few flakes in my hand and study them. Growing up in the Deep South, I didn’t get to see a lot of snow, but what I did see didn’t look like this.

These flakes have complex crystalline structures, and some are tinged with faint color at the outer edges. Green, gold, dirty like ash. They don’t lose cohesion on the warmth of my skin. They’re tougher than the average snowflakes, or I’m colder than the average human. When I close my hand to melt them, one of the flakes cuts into my palm with sharp edges.

Lovely. Razor snow. More Fae changes in my world. Time for a new one.

Time.

I ponder the concept. Ever since I arrived in Dublin at the beginning of August, time has been a strange thing. I have only to look at a calendar to confirm what my brain knows—six months have passed.

But of those six months, I lost the entire month of September to a single afternoon in Faery. The months of November, December, and part of January were calendar pages torn from my life while I was in a mindless, sex-crazed oblivion. And now part of January and February had flashed by in a few days, while I was in the Silvers.

All told, in the last six months, four of them whizzed past, with me virtually unaware of the passage of time, for one reason or another.

My brain knows it’s been six months since Alina died.

My body doesn’t believe a word of it.

It feels like I found out my sister was murdered two months ago. It feels like I was raped on Halloween ten days ago. It feels like my parents were kidnapped four days ago, and I stabbed Barrons and watched him die thirty-six hours ago.

My body can’t catch up with my brain. My heart has jet lag. All my emotions are raw because everything feels as if it took place over a short period of time.

I push my damp hair back from my face and breathe deeply of the cold night air. I’m in a bedroom suite at one of Darroc’s many strongholds in Dublin. It’s a penthouse apartment, high above the city, furnished in the same opulent Louis XIV Sun King style of the house at 1247 LaRuhe. Darroc certainly likes his luxuries. Like someone else I know.

Knew.

Will know again, I correct.

Darroc told me he keeps dozens of such safe houses and never stays more than one night in any of them. How am I ever going to find them all to search for clues? I dread the thought of remaining with him long enough for him to take me to each for a night.

I fist my hands. I can handle this. I know I can. My world depends on it.

I unclench my hands and rub my sides. Even hours after the Unseelie Prince touched me, my skin is still chilled in the shape of its handprints. I turn away from the cold, snowy night, close the French doors, and scatter my remaining runes at the threshold, where they pulse like wet crimson hearts on the floor. My dark lake promised I would sleep safely if I pressed one into each wall and warded the thresholds and sills with them.

I turn and stare at the bed, in the same daze I’ve been functioning in for the past several hours. I shuffle past it to the bathroom, where I splash cold water on my face. My eyes feel swollen and gritty. I look in the mirror. The woman that looks back frightens me.

Darroc wanted to “talk” when we arrived. But I know what it was really about. He was testing me. He showed me pictures of Alina. Made me sit and look at them with him and listen to his stories, until I thought I might go insane.

I close my eyes, but my sister’s face is burned into the backs of my eyelids. And there, standing next to her, are my mom and dad. I said I didn’t care what happened to them in this reality, because I’m going to make a new one, but the truth is I’d care in any reality. I’ve just been blocking it.

I will not ask Darroc what happened to my parents after I was swept off to the Hall of All Days, and he doesn’t offer the information.

If he told me they were dead, too, I don’t know what I’d do.

I suspect this is another of his tests. I will pass it.

That’s my girl, Daddy encourages in my mind. Chin up; you can do it. I believe in you, baby. Sis-boom-bah! he says, and smiles. Even though he hadn’t wanted me to pursue cheerleading, he’d still driven me to tryouts, and when I’d made the first cut, he’d had one of his clients at Petit Patisserie bake me a special cake shaped like a pair of pink and purple pom-poms.

I double over like I’ve been kicked in the stomach, and my mouth wrenches wide on a sob that makes no sound because I inhale it at the last second.

Darroc is out there with the princes. I don’t dare betray grief. I don’t dare make a sound that they might hear.

Daddy was my greatest cheerleader, always telling me wise things I rarely listened to and never understood. I should have taken the time to understand. I should have spent more time focused on who I was inside and less on who I was outside. Hindsight, 20/20.

Tears run down my face. As I turn away from the mirror, my knees go out from under me and I collapse to the bathroom floor in a heap. I curl into a ball, silently heaving.

I’ve held it at bay as long as I can. Grief crashes over me, drowning me. Alina. Barrons. Mom and Dad, too? I can’t bear it. I can’t keep it all in.

I cram a fist in my mouth to stop my screams.

I can’t let anyone hear. He would know I’m not what I pretend to be. What I must be to fix my world.

There I sat on the couch with him, looking at my sister in all those pictures. And each one reminded me how, when we were little, in every single picture taken of us together, her arm was around me, protecting me, watching out for me.

She was happy in the pictures Darroc showed me. Dancing. Talking with friends. Sightseeing. He’d taken so many of her photo albums from her apartment. Left us with hardly any. As if the paltry few months he’d spent with her gave him more right to her possessions than me—who’d spent my whole life loving her!

I hadn’t been able to trace my fingers over her face in front of him because it would have betrayed emotion, weakness. I’d had to lavish all my attention on him. He’d watched me the entire time with those glittering copper eyes, absorbing every detail of my reaction.

I knew it would be a deadly mistake—and the last I ever made—to underestimate the ancient, brilliant mind behind those cold metallic eyes.

After what seemed like years of torture, he finally began to look tired, yawning, even rubbing his eyes.

I forget his body is human, subject to limits.

Eating Unseelie doesn’t keep you from needing sleep. Like caffeine or speed, it wires you hard but, when you crash, you crash just as hard. I suspect that’s a large part of the reason he never sleeps more than one night in the same place. It’s when he’s most vulnerable. I imagine it must chafe, to have a human body that needs sleep after having been Fae and not needing anything for eternity.

I decide that’s when I’ll kill him. When he’s sleeping. After I’ve gotten what I want. I’ll wake him and, while he’s still feeling humanly muddled, I’ll smile and drive my spear through his heart. And I’ll say, “This is for Alina and for Jericho.”

My fist isn’t keeping my sobs down.

They’re beginning to leak around it in soft moans. I’m lost in pain, fragments of memories crashing over me: Alina waving good-bye at the gate the day she left for Dublin; Mom and Dad tied to chairs, gagged and bound, waiting for a rescue that never came; Jericho Barrons, dead on the ground.

Every muscle in my body spasms and I can’t breathe. My chest feels hot, tight, crushed beneath a massive weight.

I fight to keep the sobs in. If I open my mouth to breathe, they’ll come out, but I’m waging a hopeless battle: Sob and breathe? Or don’t sob and suffocate?

My vision starts to dim. If I lose consciousness from holding my breath, at least one great cry will explode from me.

Is he at my door, listening?

I dredge my mind for a memory to banish the pain.

When I recovered from being Pri-ya, I was horrified to realize that, although my time with the princes and afterward at the abbey was blurred, I retained every single memory of what Barrons and I had done together in bed in graphic detail.

Now I’m grateful for them.

I can use them to keep myself from screaming.

You’re leaving me, Rainbow Girl.

No—that’s the wrong one!

I rewind, fast.

There. The first time he came to me, touched me, was inside me. I give myself over to it, replaying every detail in loving memory.

In time, I’m able to remove my fist. The tension in my body eases.

Warm in memories, my body shivers on the cold marble bathroom floor.

Alina’s cold. Barrons is cold.

I should be cold, too.

When I finally sleep, the cold invades my dreams. I pick my way through jagged-edged ravines gouged into cliffs of black ice. I know this place. The paths I walk are familiar, as if I’ve walked them a hundred times before. Creatures watch me from caverns chiseled into the frozen walls.

I catch glimpses of the beautiful, sad woman slipping barefoot across the snow, just ahead. She’s calling to me. But each time she opens her mouth, an icy wind steals her words. You must—I catch, before a gust carries the rest of her sentence away.

I cannot—she cries.

Make haste! she warns over her shoulder.

I run after her in my dreams, trying to hear what she’s saying. Stretching out my hand to catch her.

But she stumbles at the edge of an abyss, loses her footing, and is gone.

I stare, stunned and horrified.

The loss is unbearable, as if I myself have died.

I awaken violently, snapping up from the floor, gasping.

I’m still trying to process the dream when my body jerks and begins to move like a pre-programmed automaton.

I watch in terror as my legs make me rise, force me to leave the bathroom. My feet carry me across the room, my hands open the balcony doors. My body is propelled by an unseen power into the darkness, beyond the protection of my crimson ward line.

I’m not functioning of my own volition. I know it, and I can’t stop myself. I’m completely unprotected where I stand. I don’t even have my spear. Darroc took it away before the prince sifted me out.

I stare out at a shadowy outline of rooftops, awaiting, dreading whatever command might come next. Knowing I won’t be able to refuse subsequent orders any more than I could this one.

I’m a puppet. Someone is yanking my strings.

As if to underscore that point, or perhaps merely to make a mockery of me, my arms suddenly shoot straight up into the air, flail wildly above my head before dropping limply back to my sides.

I watch my feet as they shuffle a cheery two-step. I wish I could believe I’m dreaming, but I’m not.

I dance on the balcony, soft-shoeing it faster and faster.

Just as I begin to wonder if I’m going to be the fairy-tale girl that danced herself to death, my feet go still. Panting, I curl my fingers tightly around the wrought-iron railing. If my unknown puppet master decides I’m to fling myself off the balcony next, it’s in for a hell of a fight.

Is it Darroc? Why would he do this? Can he do this? Does he have so much power?

The temperature drops so sharply that my hands ice to the railing. When I jerk them away, ice shatters and falls into the night below, tinkling against pavement. Small patches of skin from my fingertips remain on the railing. I back up, determined not to commit forced suicide.

Never hurt you, Mac, the Sinsar Dubh croons in my mind.

I inhale sharply. The air is so bitterly cold it burns my throat and lungs.

“You just did,” I grit.

I feel its curiosity. It doesn’t understand how it hurt me. Skin heals.

That was not pain.

I stiffen. I don’t like its tone. It is too silky, too full of promise. I try desperately to get to my dark lake in time to arm myself against it, to defend myself, but a wall erupts between me and my watery abyss, and I can find no way around or through it.

The Sinsar Dubh forces me to my knees. I strain against it every inch of the way, teeth clenched. It whips me around and I collapse onto my back. My arms and legs fly out as if I’m making snow angels. I’m pinned to cold metal girders.

This, Mac, the Sinsar Dubh purrs, is pain.

I drift in agony. I have no idea how long it tortures me, but the entire time I’m excruciatingly aware of one thing: Barrons isn’t going to save me.

He isn’t going to roar me back to reality like he did the last time the Book crushed me in the street, the last time it “tasted me.”

He isn’t going to carry me back to the bookstore when it’s over, make me cocoa and wrap me in blankets. He isn’t going to make me laugh by demanding to know what I am or later cause me to weep when I steal a memory from his head and see him shattered by grief, holding a dying child.

While the Book keeps me spread-eagled against the cold steel of the balcony floor, while every cell in my body is charred, and every bone is systematically crushed one by one, I cling to memories.

I can’t get to my lake, but I can get to the outer layers of my mind. The Sinsar Dubh is there, too, examining my thoughts, probing. “Learning me,” as it said once before. What is it looking for?

I tell myself I just have to survive it. That it isn’t really harming my body. It’s only playing with me. It came for me tonight. I hunt it. And for some reason beyond my fathoming, it hunts me. The Book’s idea of a macabre joke?

It’s not going to kill me. At least not today. I guess I amuse.

It will only make me wish I was dead, and, hey—I know that feeling. Been walking around with it for a while.

After an indefinite, endless length of time, the pain finally eases and I’m yanked to my feet.

My hands grab the railing, and my upper body is contorted over it.

I curl my fingers tightly. I lock my legs down. I summon every ounce of energy I have to make my bones whole and strong again. I stare out at the rooftops, fortifying my will.

I will not die.

If I die tonight, the world will stay the way it is right now, and that’s unacceptable. Too many people have been killed. Too many people will continue to die if I’m not here to do something about it. Fueled by the need to defend something greater than myself, I gather my will and launch myself like a missile for the lake inside my head.

I slam into the wall the Sinsar Dubh has erected between me and my arsenal.

A hairline fracture appears.

I don’t know who’s more startled, me or the Sinsar Dubh.

Then suddenly it’s angry.

I feel its fury, but it’s not angry because I cracked the wall it erected. It’s angry for some other reason.

It’s as if I, personally, have pissed it off somehow.

It’s … disappointed in me?

I find that inexpressibly disturbing.

My head is ratcheted around on my spine and I’m forced to stare down.

A person stands below me, a dark splash against the brilliant snow, a book tucked beneath its arm.

The person tilts its head back and looks up.

I chomp back a scream.

I recognize the hooded cloak that swirls softly back, teased by a light breeze. I recognize the hair.

But I don’t recognize anything else because—if it really is Fiona, Barrons’ ex-storekeeper and Derek O’Bannion’s mistress—she’s been skinned alive. The horror of it is that, because O’Bannion taught her to eat Unseelie, she hasn’t died from it.

Instinct makes me reach for my spear. Of course it’s not there.

“Mercy!” Fiona screams. Her skinned lips bare bloodied teeth.

And I wonder: Do I have any mercy left in me? Did I reach for my spear because I pity her?

Or because I hate her for having had Jericho Barrons before me, and for longer?

The Book’s anger with me grows.

I feel it spilling out, filling the streets. It’s immense, barely contained.

I’m baffled.

Why does it hold itself in check? Why not destroy everything? I would, if it would just hold still long enough to let me use it. Then I’d re-create it all the way I wanted it.

Suddenly it morphs into the Beast, a shadow blacker than blackness. It expands, soars, towers up and up, until it is eye level with me.

It hangs there in the air, flashing back and forth between its own terrible visage and the meat of Fiona’s flayed face.

I squeeze my eyes shut.

When I open them again, I’m alone.

12

“Stupid feckin’ stupid feckers!” I kick a can down the alley. It whizzes into the air, hits a brick wall, and flattens into it. And—dude—I mean “into” it. Couple inches deep. I snicker, knowing somebody’ll walk by one day and be like: Dude, how the feck did that can get embedded in the wall?

Just one more Mega O’Malley Mystery! City’s full of ’em.

I leave traces of me all over Dublin. My way of saying “I was here!” I been marking it up for years, ever since Ro started sending me out on my own to do stuff for her. Used to stick with little things, like bending sculptures in front of the museum just enough that I knew they were different but nobody else would prolly notice. But since the walls came down, it don’t matter no more. I embed things in brick and stone, rearrange chunks o’ rubble to spell out MEGA, hammer lampposts into twisty Ds for “Dani” and “Dangerous” and “Dude.”

I put a little swagger in my step.

Superstrength is me.

I scowl. “Stupid feckin’ feckers,” I mutter.

Hormonal is me. Up one minute, down the next. My moods change quick as my feet fly. One minute I can’t wait to grow up and have sex; the next I hate people, and men are people; and, dude—isn’t semen about the most disgusting thing you ever seen? Like, eew, who wants some dude to squirt snot in their mouth?

Been on my own for a couple days now, and it’s swee-eeeet! Nobody telling me what to do. Ain’t gotta go to bed. Nobody telling me what to think. Just me and my shadow—and we are two cool fecks. Who wouldn’t wanna be me?

Still … I worry about those stupid sheep at the abbey.

Feck, no, I don’t! If they don’t wanna pull their heads outta their asses, ain’t my trubs!

Too bad some peeps don’t know to take me seriously. Gonna have to mess up their world to get ’em to see me.

Been at Chester’s again.

Took seven of the slithery fecks to keep me out this time. Kept telling ’em I needed to talk to Ry-O, ’cause I think he’s their leader when Barrons ain’t around.

And Barrons ain’t around.

Hunted high and low for him last night after my eyeballs got grossed out by Mac swapping nasties with the Lord Monster.

Dude—what’s with that? She could have V’lane or Barrons! Who’d wanna swap spit with an Unseelie-eater? ’Specially the one that caused this whole fecking mess! Where’d she go for so long? What happened to her?

They wouldn’t let me into Chester’s. A-fecking-gain! Getting old, real old, it is. Ain’t like I wanna drink or nothing. Stuff’s poison. Just wanted to clue ’em in.

Finally told ’em to tell Ry-O I think Mac’s in trouble. Hanging out with Darroc. Two princes protecting him.

Think he’s brainwashed her or something. Gotta get her back again. Wanted backup to cover me while I take ’em all out. Ain’t got my sidhe-sheep behind me. Since leaving the abbey, I’m Persona Non Grovel, and groveling’s the only way you get anything from Ro and her herd. Even Jo wouldn’t leave the abbey. Said it’s too late for Mac.

That’s where Ry-O was s’posed to come in. Told his freaks I was taking the Lord Monster out tonight and they could help if they wanted.

Or not.

Don’t need nobody. Not me.

Mega on the move! Faster than the wind! Leaps tall buildings in a single bound!

Dude!

Zzzoooom!

I study myself in the mirror with cold detachment. A smile curves the lips of the woman looking back.

The Sinsar Dubh paid me a visit last night. It reminded me of its crushing power, treated me to a taste of its sadism. But, far from being cowed by it, I’m more resolved than ever.

It must be stopped, and the person who knows how to accomplish that most quickly is sitting in the adjoining room, laughing at something one of his guards just said.

So many people are dead because of him. And he’s out there laughing. I realize now that Darroc was always more dangerous than Mallucé.

Mallucé looked horrific and behaved like a monster, but he rarely killed those in his enclave of worshippers.

Darroc is attractive, charming, affectionate, and he can orchestrate the annihilation of three billion humans without batting an eye, without losing an ounce of that charm. On the heels of mass homicide, he can smile at me and tell me how much he cared about my sister, show me pictures of them “having fun” together. Then kill three billion more if he gets his hands on the Book?

Merged with it, what would he be capable of? Would he stop at anything? Is he using me as detachedly as I’m trying to use him and the moment he gets what he wants I’m a dead woman?

We’re locked in mortal combat. It’s a war I will do anything to win.

I smooth my dress, turn to the side, point a toe, and admire the line of my leg in heels. I have new clothes. After wearing functional clothing, being pretty feels strange, frivolous.

But necessary for the monster of frivolous appetites out there.

Last night after the Book vanished, I’d tried to sleep but had succeeded only in getting tangled up in half-awake nightmares. I was at Darroc’s mercy, being raped by the princes again; then the unseen fourth was there, turning me inside out; then I felt the sting of needles at my nape as he tattooed my skull; then the princes were on me again; and then I was at the abbey, shivering with unquenchable lust on the floor of the cell, my bones melting, fusing to each other, my need for sex was pain beyond imagining; then Rowena was looming over me, and I clung to her, but she crushed a funny-smelling cloth to my face. I fought, I kicked, I clawed, but I was no match for the old woman and, in my nightmare, I’d died.

I’d not tried to sleep again.

I’d stripped, stood in the shower, and let the scalding spray punish my skin. Sun worshipper to the core, I’ve never been cold so often in my life as I have these past few months in Ireland.

After scrubbing myself pink and as clean as I was going to ever be again, I’d toed my pile of black leather with distaste.

I’d been wearing the same underwear for too long. My leather pants had been soaked, dried, shrunk, stained. It was the outfit I’d killed Barrons in. I wanted to burn it.

I’d wrapped myself in a sheet and stepped into the living room of the penthouse, where dozens of Darroc’s crimson-clad Unseelie were standing guard. I’d given them detailed instructions on where to go and what to get for me.

When they’d moved toward another bedroom suite to wake Darroc to obtain permission, I’d snapped, He doesn’t let you make your own decisions? He freed you only to dictate your every move and breath? One or two of you can’t go run a few simple little errands for me? Are you Unseelie or lapdogs?

The Unseelie are chock-full of emotion. Unlike the Seelie, they’ve not learned to conceal it. I got what I wanted—bags and boxes of clothing, shoes, jewelry, and makeup.

All weapons, good.

Now, as I admire myself in the mirror, I’m grateful I was born pretty. I need to know what he responds to. What his weaknesses are. How much weakness I can get him to feel for me. He used to be Seelie. It is what he is at the core, and I got an intimate look at what the Seelie are like last night.

Imperious. Beautiful. Arrogant.

I can be that.

I have little patience. I want answers and I want them quickly.

I finish my makeup with care, dusting extra bronzer across my cheeks and the upper curves of my breasts, mimicking the gold-dusted skin of the Fae.

My yellow dress clings to a body toned to perfection by marathon sex with Barrons. My shoes and accessories are gold.

I will look every inch his princess.

When I kill him.

He stops talking when he sees me and looks at me for a long moment. “Your hair was once blond like hers,” he says finally.

I nod.

“I liked her hair.”

I turn to the nearest guard and tell him what I need to change my hair. He looks at Darroc, who nods.

I toss my head. “I ask for simple things, yet they question me. It’s infuriating! Can you not give me two of your guards for my own?” I demand. “Am I to have nothing for myself?”

He’s looking at my legs, long and sleekly muscled, and my feet, pretty in high heels. “Of course,” he murmurs. “Which two do you wish?”

I wave a hand dismissively. “You choose. They’re all the same.”

He assigns a pair to carry out my wishes. “You will obey her as you would obey me,” he tells them. “Instantly and without question. Unless her orders conflict with mine.”

They will become accustomed to obeying me. His other guards will become accustomed to seeing them obey me. Tiny gains, tiny erosions.

I join him for breakfast and smile as I choke down food that tastes of blood and ashes.

The Sinsar Dubh is rarely active during the day.

Like the rest of the Unseelie, it prefers the night. Those who were so long imprisoned in ice and darkness seem to find the sunlight jarring, painful. The longer I walk around with this grief inside me, the more I understand that. It’s as if sunshine is a slap in the face that says, Look, the world’s all bright and shiny! Too bad you’re not.

I wonder if that’s why Barrons was rarely around during the day. Because he, too, was damaged like us and found comfort in the secrecy of shadows. Shadows are wonderful things. They hide pain and conceal motives.

Darroc leaves for the day with a small contingent of his army and refuses to take me with him. I want to push, I feel like a caged animal, but he has lines that I know better than to cross if I want him to trust me.

I pass the afternoon in his penthouse, fluttering around like a bright butterfly, picking up things, flipping through books and looking in cabinets and drawers, exclaiming over this or that, searching the place under guise of curiosity, beneath the watchful eyes of his guards.

I find nothing.

They refuse to let me in his bedroom.

Two can play that game. I refuse to let anyone in mine. I beef up my protection runes to keep my backpack and stones safe. I’ll get into his bedroom one way or another.

Late in the afternoon, I color my hair, blow it dry, and style it into a tousle of big, loose curls.

I’m blond again. How strange. I remember Barrons calling me a perky rainbow. It makes me long for a white miniskirt and pink camisole.

Instead, I slip into a blood-red dress, high-heeled black boots that hug my legs all the way up to mid-thigh, and a black leather coat with fur at the collar and cuffs, which I belt snugly at my waist to show off my curves. Black gloves, a brilliant scarf, and diamonds at my ears and throat complete my ensemble. With most of Dublin dead, shopping is a dream. Too bad I don’t care anymore.

When Darroc returns, I know by the look in his eyes that I’ve chosen well. He thinks I picked black and red for him, the colors of his guard, the colors he has told me he selected for his future court.

I chose black and red for the tattoos on Barrons’ body. Tonight I wear my promise to him that I will make things right.

“Isn’t your army coming with us?” I ask as we step from the penthouse. The night is cool and clear, the sky glittering with stars. The snow melted during the day, and the cobblestone streets are dry for a novel change.

“Hunters abhor the lesser castes.”

“Hunters?” I echo.

“How did you expect to search for the Sinsar Dubh?”

I’ve ridden one before, with Barrons, the night we tried to corner the Book with three of the four stones. I wonder if Darroc knows this. With his clever mirror hidden in the back alley of Barrons Books and Baubles, there’s no telling how much he knows about me. “And if we find it tonight?”

He smiles. “If you find it for me tonight, MacKayla, I will make you my queen.”

I give him a once-over. He’s dressed richly, in Armani tweed, cashmere, and leather. He carries nothing. Is the key to merging with the Book knowledge? A ritual? Runes? An object? “Do you have what you need to merge with it?” I ask point-blank.

He laughs. “Ah, it’s to be the full frontal attack tonight. With that dress,” he says silkily, “I had hoped for seduction.”

I lift a shoulder and let it fall in a carefree shrug that matches my smile. “You know I want to know. I don’t see any point in pretending otherwise. We are what we are, you and I.”

He likes that I classify us in the same category. I see it in his eyes.

“And what is that, MacKayla? What are we?” He turns slightly to the side and bites out a sharp command in an alien tongue. One of the Unseelie Princes appears, listens, nods, and vanishes.

“Survivors. Two people who won’t be ruled, because we were born to rule.”

He searches my face. “Do you really believe that?”

The street cools and my coat is abruptly dusted with tiny shimmering crystals of black ice. I know what that means. A Royal Hunter has materialized above us, black leathery wings churning the night air. My hair stirs in an icy breeze. I glance up at the scaled underbelly of the caste specially designated to hunt and kill sidhe-seers.

A great Satanic dragon, it tucks its massive wings close to its body and drops heavily to the street, narrowly missing the buildings on either side.

It’s enormous.

Unlike the smaller Hunter that Barrons managed to bend to his will and “dampen” the night we flew across Dublin, this one is one hundred percent undiluted Royal Hunter. I get a sense of immense ancientness. It feels older than anything I’ve seen or sensed flying the night sky. The hellish cold it exudes, the sense of despair and emptiness it radiates, is intact. But it doesn’t depress me or make me feel futile. This one make me feel … free.

It takes a delicate mental jab at me. I sense restraint. It doesn’t have power, it is power.

I jab back with my glassy lake’s help.

It chuffs a soft noise of surprise.

I return my attention to Darroc.

Sidhe-seer? the Hunter says.

I ignore it.

SIDHE-SEER? The Hunter blasts into my mind so hard it gives me an instant headache.

I whip my head around. “What?” I snarl.

A great black shape, it crouches in the shadows. Head low, the underside of its chin brushes the pavement. It shifts its weight from taloned foot to foot, as its massive tail sweeps the street clean of long-unused trash cans and husks of human remains. Fiery eyes blaze into mine.

I feel it pressing at me mentally, carefully. Fae legend says that the Hunters either aren’t Fae or aren’t entirely Fae. I have no idea what they are, but I don’t like them inside my head.

After a moment it says, Ahhhh, and settles onto its haunches. There you are.

I don’t know what that means. I shrug. It’s out of my head, and that’s all I care about, I turn back to Darroc, who resumes our conversation where it left off. “Do you really believe what you said about being born to rule?”

“Have I ever asked you where my parents are?” I counter with a question that it hurts my heart to ask, hurts my soul to even think, but I’m in an all-or-nothing mood. If I can get what I want tonight, I’m out of here. My pain and suffering will end. I can stop hating myself. By morning, I could be talking to Alina again, touching Barrons.

His gaze sharpens. “When you first saw that I was holding them captive, I thought you weak, ruled by maudlin attachment. Why have you not asked?”

I understand now why Barrons was always insisting I stop asking him questions and judge him by his actions alone. It’s so easy to lie. What’s even worse is how we cling to those lies. We beg for the illusion so we don’t have to face the truth, don’t have to feel alone.

I remember being seventeen, thinking I was head over heels in love, asking my date at the senior prom—tight-end hot-Rod McQueen—Katie didn’t really see you kissing Brandi in the hall outside the bathroom, did she, Rod? And when he said, No, I believed him—despite the smudge of lipstick on his chin that was too red to be mine and the way Brandi kept looking at us over her date’s shoulder. Two weeks into summer, no one was surprised when he was her boyfriend, not mine.

I stare into Darroc’s face and I see something in his eyes that elates me. He’s not kidding about making me his queen. He does want me. I don’t know why, perhaps because he imprinted on Alina and I’m the closest thing that remains. Perhaps because he and my sister discovered who they were together, and what they were capable of, and conjoined self-discovery is a powerful bond. Perhaps because of my strange dark glassy lake or whatever it is that makes the Sinsar Dubh like to play with me.

Perhaps it’s because part of him is human, and he hungers for the same illusions the rest of us do.

Barrons was a purist. I get him now. Words are so dangerous.

I say, “Things change. I adapt. I cut away what is unnecessary as my circumstances change.” I reach up and caress his face, brush my index finger to his perfect lips, trace his scar. “And often I find my circumstances have not worsened, as I initially thought, but improved. I don’t know why I refused you so many times. I understand why my sister wanted you.” I say it all so simply that it rings of truth. Even I am startled by how sincere I sound. “I think you should be king, Darroc, and if you want me, I would be honored to be your queen.”

He sucks in a sharp breath, his copper eyes glittering. He cups my head and buries his hands in my hair, playing the silky curls through his fingers. “Prove that you mean those words, MacKayla, and I will deny you nothing. Ever.”

He angles my head and lowers his mouth to mine.

I close my eyes. I open my lips.

That’s when it kills him.

13

I’ve had a few paradigm shifts since the day my plane landed in Ireland and I began hunting Alina’s killer—big ones, or so I thought—but this one takes the cake.

There I stand, eyes closed, lips parted, waiting for the kiss of my sister’s lover, when suddenly something wet and warm slaps my face, drips from my chin, drenches my neck, and runs into my bra. More splatters my coat.

When I open my eyes, I scream.

Darroc is no longer about to kiss me, because his head is gone—just gone—and you’re never ready for that, no matter how cold and hard and dead you think you are inside. Being sprayed by the blood of a headless corpse—especially someone you know, whether you like him or not—gets you on a visceral level. Doubly so when you were about to kiss that person.

But even more upsetting is that I don’t know how to merge with the Book.

All I can think is: His head is gone and I don’t know how to merge with the Book. He eats Unseelie. Can I put his head back on? If I do, can he talk? Maybe I can patch him up and torture it out of him.

I fist my hands, furious at this turn of events.

I was a kiss away—okay, maybe a few nights of sleeping with the enemy and despising myself more than I ever thought possible—from getting what I wanted. But it was going to happen. I was gaining his trust. I’d seen it in his eyes. He was going to confide in me. He was going to tell me all his secrets and I was going to kill him and fix the world.

And now his head is no longer on his body, and I don’t know what I needed to know, and I can’t live in this hellish reality for the months it could take me to get the four, the five, and the prophecy.

My entire mission was distilled to one goal—and now that goal is tottering, decapitated, in front of me!

It’s a total bust.

I let him touch me for nothing.

I stare at the bloody stump of his neck as his body staggers in a small circle without a head. I’m astounded he’s still moving. It must be the Unseelie in his veins.

He stumbles and collapses to the ground. Somewhere nearby, I hear garbled sounds. Oh, God, his head is still talking.

Good! Can he form sentences? I’m in a strong bargaining position. Tell me what I want, and I’ll put your head back on.

I frown. Where are the princes? Why didn’t they protect him? Wait a minute! Who did this to him?

Am I next?

I glance wildly around.

“Whuh,” I manage. I can’t process it.

Sidhe-seer, the Hunter purrs in my mind.

I stare blankly. The Hunter that Darroc summoned for us to ride is crouched a dozen paces away, dangling Darroc’s head by the hair, swinging it from a taloned claw.

If Hunters smile, this one is. Leathery lips crack on saber teeth, and it oozes amusement.

Its … hand, for lack of a better word, is the size of a small car. How did it so tidily rip off Darroc’s head?

Did it pinch it off with its talons? It happened absurdly fast.

Why would it kill him?

Darroc was allied with the Hunters. It was the Hunters that taught him to eat Unseelie. Did they—as I once warned him they would—tire of him and turn on him?

I reach for my spear. It’s back. Great, the princes are definitely gone. But before I can pull it out, the Hunter laughs, dry and dusty, in my mind, and I am assaulted by a sense of age that defies time, of sanity that was forged down a long path of madness. It was muting itself before. This one is very different from the other Hunters.

I wouldn’t be surprised to discover it was the granddaddy of them all.

It calls itself K’Vruck. Humans have no word for it. It means a state beyond death. Death is small compared to K’Vruck.

“Huh?” I stammer. The voice was in my mind.

K’Vruck is so much more complete than death. It is the reduction of matter to a state of utter inertness, from which nothing can ever rise again. It is less than nothing. Nothing is something. K’Vruck is absolute. Your species would postulate the loss of soul to try to wrap their puny brains around it.

I stiffen. I know this voice. This mockery. My spear will be no use against it. If I kill the Hunter, it would probably just hop a ride on me.

I will tell you a secret, it says silkily. You do go on. Humans. Unless you are—it laughs softly—K’Vrucked.

I suck in a ragged breath.

MacKayla, I permit none to control me. Darroc will never use his shortcut, and you will never learn it.

The Hunter pops Darroc’s head like a grape. Hair and bone slap to the pavement. And now that I’m no longer transfixed by the gory sight, I see what the Hunter holds in its other hand. Had been holding all along.

I back away faster.

There was never any chance that Darroc and I would soar up into the night, and hunt the Sinsar Dubh.

It beat us to the punch.

It hitched a ride on our Hunter and came to us.

And here I am, helpless. I have no stones, my spear is useless—

The amulet! When the Hunter ripped Darroc’s head off, it stayed on his body! I feint a wild glance around, trying hard to look at nothing in particular and everything, to keep from telegraphing my intentions.

Where the hell are the princes? They could sift me out of here! What did they do—vanish the moment Darroc was killed? Cowards!

It’s there! When Darroc’s body collapsed to the ground, the amulet slid off the stump of his neck. Silver and gold, it’s lying in a pool of blood, a dozen feet from me! I have power in my glassy lake. With the amulet to reinforce me, is it enough to hold my own?

I turn inward to step onto my black-pebbled beach, but that damned wall springs up before I can get there. The Sinsar Dubh laughs. I fractured this wall last night. I’ll do it tonight or die trying.

Power is earned, and you have not.

I don’t need to look to know it’s rising, separating from the Hunter, soaring up, becoming the towering Beast form of the Book, getting ready to crush me with pain.

Or, who knows this time? Maybe worse. Maybe it’s going to K’Vruck me.

I lunge forward and grab. My fingers brush the chain. I’ve got it! I’m pulling it toward me!

Then suddenly something slams into my side, and the amulet is knocked from my grasp and gone. My arm is caught at a bad angle, extended mid-reach, and I hear it snap as I’m pushed into a long, helpless slide on my side, scraping pavement. My head hits the ground and my forehead drags. I feel skin ripping away.

Then I’m being picked up and tossed into the air. I glance wildly around but don’t see the amulet anywhere. As I come down, someone flings me over their shoulder. My hair is in my face, my arm dangles limply, and my forehead is bleeding into my eyes. I nearly scalped myself on the pavement.

Everything is moving so fast it’s a blur.

Superstrength. Superspeed. I feel motion sickness coming on.

“Dani?” I gasp. Did she come to save me, even though I was such a bitch and drove her away?

“Dani, no! I need the amulet!”

I hang upside down, watching pavement whiz by.

“Dani, stop!”

But she doesn’t. I hear snarling receding rapidly behind us.

The Hunter roars.

Bloodcurdling howls shatter the night.

I jerk. I know those sounds. I’ve heard them before.

“Take me back, take me back!” I scream, but for an entirely different reason now. Who are they—these beasts that sound like Barrons? I need to know!

“Dani, you have to take me back!”

But she doesn’t. She keeps running. Doesn’t listen to a word I say. She runs me straight to the one place I never want to see again.

Barrons Books and Baubles.

14

My first suspicion that it wasn’t Dani carrying me reared its head when we blasted through the front door of the bookstore.

Or, rather, that suspicion turned its head and licked blood from the back of my thigh.

Unless Dani had some serious issues I didn’t know about, this wasn’t her shoulder I was over.

It licked me again, dragging its tongue across my leg, just beneath the curve of my ass. My dress was hitched up, trapped between my stomach and its shoulder. It bit me. Hard.

“Ow!”

With fangs. Not deep enough to draw blood but enough to sting. I wiped my sleeve across my face, scrubbing blood from my eyes with the fur cuff.

I was dazed by Darroc’s abrupt murder and my shock over K’Vruck being the Book. If I’d been thinking clearly, I’d have known from the first that I was much too high from the ground for it to have been Dani. Several feet too high.

The shoulder I was over was massive, as was the rest of it, but it was too dark to see clearly. Rooftop spotlights no longer illuminated the exterior of the bookstore, nor did the customary amber glow bathe the interior. There was only the light of a three-quarter moon, spilling in through tall windows.

What had me? An Unseelie? Why had it brought me here? I never wanted to see this place again! I hated BB&B. It was dark and empty and ghosts were everywhere. They perched with sad eyes on my cash register, drooped along my book aisles, and draped, paper-thin and defeated, on my sofas, shivering before fireplaces that would never be lit again.

I wasn’t prepared to be flung from its shoulder. I went flying backward through the air, slammed into the chesterfield in the rear seating cozy, bounced off it, crashed into a chair, got tangled in one of Barrons’ expensive rugs, and skidded across the polished floor. My head smacked into the enameled fireplace.

For a moment, all I could do was lie there. Every bone in my body was bruised. Blood was crusted on my face and in the corners of my eyes.

With a moan of pain, I rolled over and propped myself up on an elbow to assess the damage. At least my arm wasn’t broken, as I’d thought it was.

I pushed my hair from my face.

And froze. Standing in the dim light of the bookstore was a shape that was devastatingly familiar. “Come out of the shadows,” I said.

A low growl was the only reply.

“Please, can you understand me? Come out.”

It hulked near a bookcase, panting. It was enormous, at least nine feet tall. Silhouetted against the moonlight filtering through a window behind it, it had three sets of sharp, curved horns spaced at even intervals along two bony ridges that spanned the sides of its head.

I’d seen horns like that before. My pouch of stones had been tied to similar ones. Horns I’d watched melt away when the beast wearing them resumed its human form.

In the Silvers, Barrons had been slate gray with yellow eyes during the day and black-skinned with crimson eyes at night. This one was in full night mode, velvety black in the darkness but for the glint of feral eyes. I’d heard more of these beasts back in the street, before this one had carried me off. Where had they come from?

My hands began to tremble. I pushed gingerly into a sitting position, acutely aware of every stretched tendon and strained muscle. I leaned back against the fireplace, drew my knees up and hugged them. I didn’t trust myself to stand. This creature was the same kind of beast Barrons had been and was a connection to the man I’d lost.

What was it doing here? Was he still somehow protecting me, even in death? Had he assigned others of his kind to guard me if the worst happened and he was killed?

The thing in the shadows suddenly turned and smashed a taloned fist into the bookcase. Tall shelves rocked on floor bolts. With a metallic screeeech, the ornate case ripped from the floor and began to fall. It crashed into the one next to it, and the one next to that, taking them down like dominoes, making a complete wreck of my bookstore.

“Stop it!” I cried.

But if it could understand, or even hear me over the noise, it didn’t care. It turned on the magazine rack and shattered it next. Dailies and monthlies flew in a storm of pages and splinters of shelving. Chairs slammed into the walls. My TV was stomped. My fridge crushed. My cash register exploded in a tinkle of bells.

It raged through the store, trashing the entire first floor, decimating everything I loved, reducing my cherished sanctuary to ruins.

All I could do was huddle and stare.

When there was nothing left to smash or break, it whirled on me.

Moonlight silvered its ebony skin and glinted off crimson eyes. Veins and tendons stood out on its arms and neck, and its chest pumped like a bellows. Bits of debris were stuck to its horns. It shook its head violently, and bits of plaster and wood sprayed the air.

It stared at me from a prehistoric face, through long hanks of matted black hair, with hate-filled eyes.

I stared back, afraid to breathe. Had it saved me to kill me? It was no more than I deserved, really.

It was a walking reminder of what I’d had—and lost. What I’d never seen clearly—and killed. It was so much like my creature in the Silvers, yet so different. Barrons had been uncontrollably homicidal, unable—or unwilling—to prevent himself from slaughtering everything in sight, no matter how small or helpless. Back on that cliff’s edge, in Barrons’ eyes, I’d glimpsed madness.

This beast was a killing machine, too, but not a mindless one. There was no insanity in its eyes, only fury and bloodlust.

It was Barrons … but it wasn’t.

I closed my eyes. Looking at it hurt my soul.

It growled deep in its chest, much closer than it had been a moment ago.

My eyes snapped open.

It stood a half dozen feet away, towering over me, brimming with unspent rage. Feral eyes were fixed on my neck, taloned hands opened and closed as if it wanted nothing more than to wrap them around it and squeeze.

I rubbed the base of my skull, grateful for Barrons’ mark. Apparently it was still protecting me, because the creature hadn’t harmed me, although it wanted to. I wondered if his mark protected me from the entire “pack” of Barrons-like creatures. He’d said he’d never let me die. It seemed he’d taken measures to continue his protection if something happened to him. Like Ryodan and me and a spear.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

My words seemed to enrage it. It lunged for me, grabbed me by the collar of my coat, raised me in the air, and shook me like a rag doll. My teeth clacked together and my bones rattled.

Perhaps the mark wasn’t protecting me after all.

I wasn’t dying here tonight. The itinerary of my mission might have changed, but my goal had not. As I dangled, toes skimming the floor, I let my gaze go unfocused, sought my lake, and summoned my crimson runes. They’d kept the Unseelie Princes at a standoff, and the Fae princes were far more deadly and powerful than this beast.

Other things floated on the surface of my lake, but I ignored them. There would be plenty of time—more time than I wanted, I was sure—in my future to explore all that was concealed beneath those dark, still waters. I cupped my hands, scooped up what I’d come for, and snapped out of it, fast.

The beast was still shaking me. Staring into its narrowed eyes, I realized I might need to revise my earlier assessment that it wasn’t as insane as Barrons had been.

I raised my fists, dripping blood. The ebon-skinned beast shook its horned head and roared.

“Put me down,” I commanded.

It moved so fast that it had my entire hand in its mouth before I could even gasp. The word “down” hadn’t even left my lips when my hand was gone and sharp black fangs were locked around my wrist.

But it didn’t rip my hand off, as I expected. It sucked. Its tongue was wet and warm on my fingers, working delicately between them.

As suddenly as it had swallowed my hand, it dropped it. My fist was empty.

I stared blankly at it. Runes that the most deadly of the Fae feared, this thing ate? Like a succulent appetizer? It licked its lips. Was I the main course? In a blur of motion, my other fist disappeared.

Wet pressure on my skin, the silky precision of a tongue, a scrape of fangs against my wrist and that fist, too, was empty.

It dropped me. I landed unevenly on my feet, bumped into the wreck of the chesterfield, and steadied myself.

Still licking its lips, it began to back away.

When it stopped in a milky pool of moonlight, my eyes narrowed. Something was … wrong. It didn’t look right. In fact, it looked … pained.

I had a terrible thought. What if it was a simpleminded beast and I’d just fed it something deadly and it hadn’t known better than to eat anything it saw that was bloody—like a dog that couldn’t walk away from poisoned hamburger?

I didn’t want to kill another of these creatures! Like Barrons, it had saved me!

I stared at it in horror, hoping it would survive whatever I’d done to it. I’d just wanted to get away from it, to find someplace to regroup and summon my strength to forge on. I had a finite number of weapons at my disposal. I had to make good use of them.

It staggered.

Damn it! When would I learn?

It stumbled and dropped heavily to its haunches with a deep, shuddering groan. Muscles began to twitch beneath its skin. It flung its head back and bayed.

I clamped my hands to my ears but, even muffled, it was deafening. I heard answering cries in the distance, joining in mournful concert.

I hoped they weren’t loping straight for the bookstore to join their dying brother and tear me to pieces. I doubted I could trick them all into eating poison runes.

The beast was on all fours now, tossing its massive head from side to side, clearly in its death throes—jaws wide, lips peeled back, fangs bared.

It bayed and bayed, a cry of such desolation and despair that it drove a spike through my heart.

“I didn’t mean to kill you!” I cried.

Crouching on the floor, it began to change.

Oh, yes, I’d killed it. This was exactly what had happened when I’d killed Barrons.

Apparently dying forced them to transform.

I was transfixed, unable to look away. I would own this sin like I owned all my others. I would wait until he changed and would commit his face to memory so, in the new world I created with the Sinsar Dubh, I could do something special for him.

Perhaps I could save him from becoming what he was. What man breathed inside this beast’s skin? One of the other eight Barrons had brought to the abbey the day he’d broken me out? Would I recognize him from Chester’s?

Its horns melted and began to run down the sides of its face. Its head became grossly misshapen, expanded and contracted, pulsed and shrank before expanding again—as if too much mass was being compacted into too small a form and the beast was resisting. Massive shoulders collapsed inward, straightened, then collapsed again. It gouged deep splinters of wood from the floor as it bowed upon itself, shuddering.

Talons splayed on the floor, became fingers. Haunches lifted, slammed down, and became legs. But they weren’t right. The limbs were contorted, the bones didn’t bend where they were supposed to—rubbery in some places, knobbed in others.

Still it bayed, but the sound was changing. I removed my hands from my ears. The humanity in its howl chilled my blood.

Its misshapen head whipped from side to side. I caught a glimpse through matted hair of wild eyes glittering with moonlight, of black fangs and spittle as it snarled. Then the tangled locks abruptly melted, the sleek black fur began to lighten. It dropped to the floor, spasming.

Suddenly it shot up on all fours, head down. Bones crunched and cracked, settling into a new shape. Shoulders formed—strong, smooth, bunched with muscle. Hands braced wide. One leg stretched back, the other bent as it tensed in a low lunge.

A naked man crouched in the moonlight.

I held my breath, waiting for him to lift his head. Who had I killed with my careless idiocy?

For a moment there was only the sound of his harsh breathing, and mine.

Then he cleared his throat. At least I think he did. It sounded more like a rattlesnake shaking its tail somewhere deep in the back of his mouth. After another moment, he laughed, but it wasn’t really a laugh. It was the sound the devil might make the day he came to call your contract due.

When he raised his head, raked the hair from his face, and sneered at me with absolute contempt, I melted silently, bonelessly, to the floor.

“Ah, but my dear, dear Ms. Lane, that’s precisely the point. You did,” Jericho Barrons said.