Shadowfever

45

I knew the moment he began to reconsider.

I could feel the tension in his body, see the tightening around his eyes, which meant he was thinking hard and not liking the topic. “It’s not enough of a plan,” he said finally, and got out of bed.

It was nearly impossible to make myself move. I wanted to stay in bed forever. But until this was over, no one I cared about was safe and I wasn’t going to be able to relax and get on with life. I pushed up, tugged on my jeans, buttoned the fly, and yanked my shirt over my head.

“What do you suggest? That we get everyone together and make them all hold the amulet? See if it responds to anyone else? What if it lights up for someone like, say, Rowena?”

He glared at me as I slipped the amulet around my neck and tucked it beneath my shirt, where it lay cool against my skin. I could see the strange dark light of it through my shirt. I tugged my leather jacket on over it and belted it.

It didn’t flare with blue-black light for him. I knew if it had, and he’d known what the second prophecy said, he’d have gone after the Book long ago.

“I don’t like this one bit.”

Neither did I, but I didn’t see any alternative. “You helped make this plan.”

“That was hours ago. Now we’re about to walk out into the streets and you’re going to pick the bloody thing up, believing in some prophecy scribbled by a mad washerwoman who used to work at the abbey, with no concrete idea what to do, trusting that the amulet will help you deceive it into submission. It’s the ultimate in seductive evil, and you expect to wing it. The plan stinks. That’s all there is to it. I don’t trust Rowena. I don’t trust—”

“Anyone,” I finished. “You don’t trust anyone. Except yourself, and that’s not trust, that’s ego.”

“Not ego. Awareness of my abilities. And the limitless nature of them.”

“You got killed on a cliff by Ryodan and me. Classic case of a time when a little trust might have gone a long way.”

His eyes were black and bottomless. I was just about to look away when something moved in them. I trust you.

I felt like he’d handed me the keys to the kingdom. That sealed it: I could do anything. “Prove it. You’ve been training me since the moment I got here to make me strong enough, smart enough, tough enough to do whatever has to be done. I’ve been through hell and back and survived. Look at me. What is it you say? See me. You made me a fighter. Now let me fight.”

“I fight the battles.”

“You are fighting this battle. We’re going after it together.”

“Watching. Who’s driving this motorcycle and who’s in the bloody sidecar? I don’t ride in the sidecar. I wouldn’t even own a pussy bike with a sidecar.” He looked aggrieved to the bottom of his soul.

“More than watching. Keeping me tethered, like you did when I was Pri-ya and couldn’t find my way back. I never would have made it without you, Jericho. I was lost, but I could feel you there, grounding me, holding my kite string.” He’d stalked into hell for me, sat down on my sprung sofa in my insane place, and kept me from being stuck there forever. He’d dragged me out by sheer force of will. He always would. “I need you,” I said simply.

A haze of crimson stained his eyes. He pulled a sweater over his head, muscles flexing, tattoos rippling. “It’s not too late,” he said roughly. “We can let the world go to hell. There are other worlds. Plenty of them. We can even take your parents. Whoever you want.”

I searched his eyes. He meant it. He’d leave with me, go through the Silvers, and live somewhere else. “I like this world.”

“Some prices are too high. You aren’t invincible. Merely long-lived and hard to kill.”

“You can’t protect me forever.”

He gave me a look that said, Are you crazy? Of course I could.

You would ask me to live that way?

Key word there being: live.

Don’t put me in a cage. I expect better from you.

He smiled faintly. Touché.

“We could see if it works for Dageus. He’s inhabited, too, or so they say.”

“Funny girl, aren’t you? Over my dead body.”

“Then stop tilting at windmills. You can’t use the amulet. That leaves me, with you at my side. It’s the only choice. You can’t die—I mean, you can, but you’ll always come back. And we know it won’t kill me. We’re perfect for this.”

“Nobody’s perfect for battling evil. It’s seductive. When we find it, it’s going to come at you with everything it’s got.”

I was braced for it. I knew it would. I took a deep, slow breath, filling my lungs, squaring my shoulders. “Jericho, I feel like my whole life has been pushing me toward this moment.”

“That’s it. Fate’s a fickle whore. We’re not going. Take your clothes off and get back in my bed.”

I laughed. “Come on, Barrons. When have you ever run from a fight?”

“Never. And others paid for it. I won’t have the same happen to you.”

“I don’t believe this,” I said with mock horror. “Jericho Barrons is vacillating. Will wonders never cease?”

The rattle moved in his chest. “I’m not vacillating. I’m … ah, fuck.”

Barrons doesn’t lie to himself. He was vacillating and he knew it.

“The moment I laid eyes on you, I knew you were trouble.”

“Ditto.”

“I wanted to drag you between the shelves, fuck you senseless, and send you home.”

“If you’d done that, I never would have left.”

“You’re still here anyway.”

“You don’t have to sound so sour about it.”

“You’re upsetting my entire existence.”

“Fine, I’ll leave.”

“Try and I’ll chain you up.” He glowered at me. “That’s vacillating.” He sighed.

After a moment, he held out his hand.

I slipped mine into his.

The Silver in Barrons’ study belched me out. I went flying across the room and slammed into the wall.

I was tired of the mirrors not liking me. When this was over, I wanted Cruce’s curse lifted. In my free time, I might like exploring the White Mansion.

I frowned. But then again, I might not. Maybe I needed to cut all my ties with my past.

Barrons glided out behind me, looking urbane and unruffled as usual, dark hair and brows frosted, skin icy. “Stop,” he ordered instantly.

My feet rooted to the floor. “What?”

“People on the roof. Talking.” He stood still so long that the frost began to slide in droplets down his cheeks and neck. “Ryodan and others. The Keltar are near. They’re waiting for—what the hell was that noise?” He strode past me and stalked from the study.

He pushed through the door that joined the rear, private residence part of the bookstore to the public portion.

I followed, hot on his heels. It was dark outside, drizzly with a light fog beyond the tall windows, and the interior was lit only by the soft amber glow of the recessed lights I left on all the time so the store would never be fully dark.

“Jericho Barrons,” an elegantly cultured voice said.

“Who the fuck are you?” Barrons demanded.

I caught up with Barrons just in time to see a man step from the shadows in the rear conversation area.

He walked toward us, offering his hand. “I am Pieter Van de Meer.”

Long and lean, with the impeccable posture of a man trained in martial arts, he was in his mid to late forties. Blond hair framed a Nordic face with deep-set pale-green eyes. He had the quietly watchful air of a snake, coiled but not about to strike unless he had to.

“Take one more step and I’ll kill you,” Barrons said.

The man paused, looking surprised and impatient. “Mr. Barrons, we don’t have time for this.”

“I’ll decide what we have time for. What are you doing here?”

“I’m with the Triton Group.”

“So?”

“Let us not play games. You know who we are,” the man chided.

“You own the abbey, among other things. I don’t like your kind.”

“Our kind?” Pieter Van de Meer afforded a small smile. “We have watched you for centuries, Mr. Barrons. We are not a ‘kind.’ You are.”

“And why am I not killing you now?” Barrons purred.

“Because ‘my kind’ is often useful, and you’ve long sought a way to infiltrate our ranks. You never succeeded. You are curious about us. I’ve brought something for the girl. It’s time for the truth.”

“What would anyone in the Triton Group know of truth?”

“If you will not hear me out with any degree of objectivity, perhaps you will listen to someone else.”

“Get out of my store right now and I’ll let you live. This time. There won’t be another.”

“We can’t do that. You’re on the cusp of making a grave mistake, and we have been forced to show our hand. It’s her choice. Not yours.”

“Who is us?” I’d been alternately eyeing Pieter and peering into the dimly lit conversation area, keeping a careful watch on the other figure seated there. There wasn’t enough light to make out her features, but there was enough that I knew it was a woman. I had butterflies in my stomach and a strong sense of foreboding.

Pieter’s pale-green eyes drifted from Barrons to me. His features softened.

I was instantly uneasy. He was looking at me like he knew me. I didn’t know this man. I’d never seen him before in my life.

“MacKayla,” he said gently. “How lovely you are. But I knew you would be. Letting you go was the hardest thing we ever did.”

“Who the hell are you?” I didn’t like him. Not one bit.

He extended a hand toward the person on the sofa.

She rose and stepped into the light.

I gaped.

Although time had worked delicate changes on her face, softening the jaw, brushing creases at the corners of the eyes and mouth, and her hair was much shorter now, barely brushing her shoulders, there was no doubt who she was.

Blond hair, blue eyes, beautiful. I’d seen her, twenty years younger, standing guard in a warded corridor at the abbey. She’d said: You do not belong here. You are not one of us.

I was looking at the last known leader of the Haven, Alina’s mother.

Isla O’Connor.

“How—what—” I stammered.

“Please forgive me.” The plea was soft in her words, anguished in her eyes. “You must know it was necessary. I had no choice.”

Barrons said, “You died. I saw you. You were in a coma. I went to your funeral.”

I jerked. He’d just confirmed it. She was Isla O’Connor. I didn’t know why I cared. She wasn’t my mother. Alina had been her only child. I was the Unseelie King.

“It’s a long story,” she said.

Barrons shook his head. “And one we’re not listening to.”

“But you must. Or you’ll make a terrible mistake,” Pieter said grimly. “And MacKayla will pay for it.”

“He’s right. We need to talk now, before it’s too late.” Isla didn’t seem to be able to take her eyes off me. “You want to hear it, don’t you?”

I shook my head. I didn’t trust myself to speak. How did I keep getting so brutally blindsided by life? When we’d walked into the Silver, I’d fully expected to walk out the other side, get in a car, and go driving around, hunting for the Sinsar Dubh.

Not for one moment had I entertained the possibility that Isla O’Connor might be waiting for us in the bookstore, long black limousine parked out front, a wide-shouldered chauffeur by the passenger doors, scanning the street up and down. I was willing to bet that beneath that dark uniform I’d find a gun or two. What was the Triton Group, besides the company that owned the abbey? Why did Barrons dislike them so much? What was Isla—one more person who was supposed to be dead but wasn’t—doing here?

Her fine-boned features crumpled and tears spilled down her cheeks. “Oh, darling, giving you up was the hardest thing I ever did. If you will hear nothing else from me, hear that. You were my baby. My sweet, helpless baby, and they said you were going to doom the world. They would have killed you if they’d known about you! Both my daughters were in danger. We all knew about the prophecy. Knew it had been foretold that sisters would be born to one of the most potent bloodlines. Rowena was watching me. She’d hated me since the day my talents began to manifest. She wanted her daughter, Kayleigh, to become Haven Mistress, wanted the O’Reillys to run the abbey forever. She never forgave Nana for turning her back on the order. She would have done anything to get rid of me. If she’d known I was pregnant again … I had no choice. I had to give you up and go away, pretend to be dead.”

“You weren’t pregnant when I helped you leave the abbey,” Barrons said coolly.

“Nearly five months. I carried well and dressed to hide it. It was a miracle my baby wasn’t injured when I escaped. I was so afraid I would lose her.” More tears spilled.

I was still shaking my head. I didn’t seem to be able to stop.

“Oh, MacKayla! It was torture every day, knowing you were out there, being raised by someone else, knowing that I could never see you or Alina again without putting you in danger. But you’re here now, and you’re about to do something that would have terrible consequences. It’s time for the lies to stop. You need to know the truth.”

I shoved my fists in my pockets and turned away.

“Don’t turn your back on me,” she cried. “I’m your mother!”

“Rainey Lane is my mother.”

“Unkind and unfair,” Pieter said. “You aren’t even giving her a chance.”

“Why do you care?” I said irritably.

“Because I’m her husband, MacKayla. And your father.”

46

I had brothers: Pieter, Jr., who was nineteen, and Michael—everyone called him Mick—who was sixteen. They showed me pictures. We looked alike. Even Barrons seemed rattled.

“We staged your mother’s death, cremated a Jane Doe, and smuggled the two of you from the country. Took you to the States and did our best to find you a good home far from danger.” Pieter took Isla’s hand and clasped it between his own. “Your mother nearly didn’t survive it. She didn’t speak for months afterward.”

“Oh, Pieter, I knew it had to be done. It was just—”

“Hell,” he said flatly. “It was absolute hell giving them up.”

I jerked. They were saying all the things I wanted to hear. It was breaking my heart. I had parents. Brothers. I’d been born. I belonged. I only wished Alina had lived to see this day. It would have been perfect.

“You said you had something important to tell her. Say it and get out,” Barrons ordered.

I looked at Barrons, torn. Part of me wanted to tell him to be quiet so I could hear more, and part of me wanted them to go away and never come back. I’d just gotten my head wrapped around one reality. Now they wanted me to abandon that reality and embrace a new one. How many times was I supposed to decide who I knew and what I was, only to learn I was wrong? I was no longer feeling bipolar, I was feeling schizophrenic, with multiple personalities.

“If I’m your daughter, then why do I have memories that belong to the Unseelie King?”

Isla gasped. “You do?”

I nodded.

“I told you she might do it,” Pieter reminded.

“Who?” I demanded. “Do what?”

“The Seelie Queen came to see us shortly after the Book escaped, before we left Dublin. She said she would do everything in her power to help recover it,” Pieter said.

“She was very interested in you,” Isla said grimly. “You were barely three months old. I remember like it was yesterday. You had on a pink dress with tiny flowers and a rainbow hair ribbon. You couldn’t stop looking at her. You kept cooing and reaching for her. The two of you seemed fascinated by each other.”

“We were afraid then that the queen had meddled with you. She’s notorious for that. She looks to the future and tries to adjust minuscule events, nudging here and there to achieve her ends,” Pieter said. “A few times I was almost certain someone had been in your nursery moments before I walked in.”

“And you think she planted memories of the Unseelie King? How would she have any to plant? I thought she drank from the cauldron. It would have erased everything she knew.”

“Who could say with her?” Isla shrugged. “Perhaps they were false memories, cleverly crafted, or lifted from another. Perhaps she never truly drank from cauldron. Some say she pretends.”

“Who gives a fuck? What did you come here for?” Barrons said impatiently.

Isla looked at him as if he must be crazy. “You’ve been taking care of her, and for that we can’t thank you enough, but we’ve come to take her home.”

“She is home. And she’s got a world to save.”

“We’ll take care of that,” Pieter said. “It’s what we do.”

“Bang-up job you’ve been doing so far.”

Pieter gave him a look of rebuke. “Not as if you’ve been doing any better. We’ve been directing the majority of our efforts to hunting the amulet. The true one.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Why?”

“The Triton Group has been searching for it for centuries for various reasons. But recently it became critical that we find it, because we’ve discovered it’s the only way to re-inter the Book,” Pieter said. “A representative from our company heard—too late—about the auction where it was sold. We arrived at the Welshman’s castle shortly after Johnstone’s massacre. But the Goth punk seemed to vanish into thin air.”

“Thick rock,” I muttered. I would never forget my hellish incarceration beneath the Burren.

“We had no idea where it was for months. We suspected Darroc had it but couldn’t get any of our people close enough. He had no tolerance for humans. Then we received reports that MacKayla had infiltrated his camp and was at his right hand.” His gaze glowed with pride. “Well done, darling! You are as brilliant and resourceful as your mother.”

“You said ‘the true one,’ ” I said.

“According to legend, the king made many amulets,” Isla replied. “All capable of sustaining varying degrees of illusion. Used together, they are formidable. But only the last one he made can deceive the king himself. The Book has grown too powerful to be stopped by any other means. Illusion is the only weapon that will work against it.”

“We were right!” I exclaimed, looking at Barrons.

“The prophecy is clear. The one who was inhabited must use the amulet to seal it away.”

“Already on it,” Barrons said coolly.

“It’s not your fight,” Pieter said gently. “We started this. We will end it.”

I sat forward on the edge of the sofa, elbows on my knees. “What are you saying?”

“Your mother is the one who has to do it. Although if you’re anything like her, darling, you think it’s your problem. That’s what we were worried about, why we rushed here tonight. Isla is ‘the inhabited.’ Twenty-three years ago, when the Book escaped, it possessed her, inhabited her. She knows it. She has been it. She understands it. And she’s the only one who can lay it to rest.”

“It never leaves a human alive,” Barrons said flatly.

“It left Fiona alive,” I reminded.

“She’d been eating Unseelie. She was different.”

“Isla was able to wrest it from her body,” Pieter said. “She is the only one we know of that has ever been able to resist to the point where it jumped from her while she was still alive and took another, more complacent host.”

Barrons didn’t look remotely convinced. “But not before it made her kill most of the Haven.”

“I never said it was easy,” Isla said softly, eyes dark with remembered grief. “I despise what it made me do. I live with it every day.”

“But it’s been tracking me,” I protested.

“Sensing your bloodline, looking for me,” Isla said.

“But I’m epic,” I said numbly. Wasn’t I? I was so tired of not knowing my place in things.

Was I going to doom the world? Was I the concubine? Was I the Unseelie King? Was I even human? Was I the person who was supposed to re-inter the Book?

The answer was no to all of the above. I was just Mac Lane, bumbling around, getting in the way a lot, and making stupid decisions.

“You are, darling,” Isla said. “But this isn’t your battle.”

“Your destiny is another day,” Pieter said. “This is only the first of many battles we’ll be called upon to fight. There are dark times ahead. Even with the Book contained, there’s still the matter of the walls between realms. They can’t be rebuilt without the Song of Making. We have our work cut out for us.” He smiled. “Your brothers have their talents, too. They can’t wait to meet you.”

“Oh, MacKayla, we’ll be a family again!” Isla said, and began to cry. “It’s all I ever wanted.”

I looked at Barrons. He wore a grim expression. I looked back at Pieter and Isla. It was all I’d ever wanted, too. I wasn’t the king. I’d been born. I was a person with a family. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. But my heart was already trying.

Family reconciliations aside, Barrons didn’t like the change in the game plan, and neither did I.

We’d spent months building to this moment, and now, on the eve of battle, in walked my biological parents, telling us we were no longer necessary. They would fight the war and finish it.

It chafed.

“Can you track it?” Barrons demanded.

Pieter answered. “Isla can. But it can sense her, as well, which made it too dangerous for her to be in Dublin until we were certain MacKayla had the amulet.”

“How did you know I had it?” I said.

“Your mother said she felt you connect with it tonight. We came at once.”

“I thought I felt you connect with it once before, at the beginning of October last year,” Isla said, “but the feeling was gone almost as suddenly as it came.”

I blinked. “I did touch it last October. How did you know that?”

“I have no idea,” she said simply. “I felt the joining of two great powers. Both times I felt you, MacKayla. I felt my daughter!” Her face crumpled. “I felt Alina once, too.” She looked away, stared into the cold fireplace for a long moment, then shivered. “She was dying. Could we please have a fire?”

“Of course,” Pieter said immediately. He rose and moved to the fireplace, but Barrons beat him there.

He glared at Pieter. You may be trying to claim the woman, his eyes said, but make no mistake, she and the fucking fireplace are mine.

After a long moment, Pieter shrugged and moved back to the sofa.

“We’ll sleep on it,” Barrons said. “Leave now. We’ll be in touch tomorrow.”

Pieter snorted. “We can’t leave, Barrons. This has to end here, tonight, one way or another. There’s no time to waste.”

I couldn’t stop looking at Isla. There was something about her face. Looking at her made me think of Rowena. I guess because the old woman had persecuted us for so long. “Why does it have to end tonight?”

Isla gave me an odd look. “MacKayla, don’t you feel it?”

“Feel wh—” I broke off. I hadn’t been trying to feel it. I’d been keeping my sidhe-seer volume all the way down for so long it had become instinct. “Oh, God, the Sinsar Dubh is heading straight for us.” I opened my senses as far as I could. “It’s … different.” I looked at Isla, who nodded. “It’s more intense. Like it’s all pumped up and ready. It’s been waiting for this.” My eyes widened. “It’s got a suicide bomber again, and it’s going to blow us all to hell if we don’t stop it!”

“It knows I’m here,” Isla said. Her face was pale, but her eyes were narrowed with determination that I recognized. I’d seen it in my own face. “It’s all right,” she said with a tight smile. “I’m ready, too. It may have stolen my children and torn my family apart twenty-three years ago, but tonight we’re putting it back together.”

Pieter and Isla excused themselves for a moment and stepped away, talking in hushed, urgent tones.

I sat on the chesterfield with Barrons, watching them. This was all so surreal. I felt as if I’d stepped through the Silver into an alternate reality, one with a happily-ever-after. This was exactly what I’d wanted: a family, a safe haven, no responsibility to save the day.

Then why did I feel so deflated and off kilter?

Out there in the night, I could feel the Book coming. It had slowed for some reason, nearly stopped. I wondered if it was swapping “rides.” Maybe it had found a better one.

In spite of myself, despite my love for Jack and Rainey, looking at my biological parents was doing something funny to me. Knowing that they hadn’t wanted to give me up had released a knot of tension I hadn’t even known I’d been carrying. I guess some part of me had felt like the devil-child that everyone was afraid of, who’d been banished only because no one had wanted to kill a baby. But all these years my real parents had been out there, missing Alina and me, longing for us. They’d hated giving us up and had done so only for our own safety. We were connected by a mother–daughter bond. We were going to be a family again. I had so many questions!

“I don’t trust a bloody thing about them,” Barrons said. “This is bullshit.”

Barrons was perfectly paranoid. Perfect awareness, he called it. It was exactly what I expected him to say. “It is hard to believe,” I murmured.

“Then don’t.”

“Look at her, Barrons. She’s the woman that warded me out at the abbey, the last leader of the Haven. The woman you picked up that night. For heaven’s sake, we look alike!” When I’d first arrived in Dublin, we hadn’t. I’d been soft and curvy and still holding on to a smidge of baby fat in my face. Now I was like her, older, leaner, my face less round, my features more distinct.

He glanced between us. “She could be a cousin.”

“She could also be my mother,” I said drily. “And if she is, I’m not the Unseelie King.” There went the weight of countless sins from my shoulders. Believing I was the ultimate villain, responsible for so many twisted births and billions of deaths, had been a crushing load to carry. “Maybe they’re right, Barrons. Maybe this never was my battle. Maybe Alina and I just got caught in the crossfire. The Book sensed us as part of her bloodline and harassed us, screwed up our lives.”

“Dani killed Alina,” he reminded sharply.

Why did he have to remind me of that now? I turned to scowl at him.

Face contorted, he was staring at me, dark eyes wild, roaring Rowena’s name so loud I was surprised the windows didn’t shatter.

I blinked. He was just Barrons again. Looking at me strangely.

“Are you okay?”

“What did you just say?”

“I said, are you okay?”

“No, what did you say before that?”

“I said Dani killed Alina because of Rowena, never doubt it. What’s wrong? You’re white as a sheet.”

I shook my head, embarrassed. Then I jerked and my head whipped toward the window. “Oh, no!” The Sinsar Dubh had begun moving again, rapidly.

“It’s coming!” Isla cried at the same moment.

“How long?” Pieter demanded.

“Three minutes, maybe less. It’s in a car,” Isla said.

I needed to know we were both sensing it in the same general vicinity. With two of us, we would be harder to deceive. I’d be damned if what had happened the last time we’d tried to corner it was happening again. “Where do you sense it?”

“Northwest of the city. Three miles at the most.”

I was relieved. That was exactly where I felt it, too.

“What part of this place is most securely warded?” Isla asked Barrons.

He gave her a look. “All of it.”

“What’s the plan?” I said.

“You must give your mother the amulet,” Pieter said.

I touched the chain around my neck and looked at Barrons. He took a slow breath and opened his mouth. It stretched wide on a soundless roar.

I blinked and looked again. He was composed and urbane as ever.

“It’s your call,” he said. “You have to decide this one.”

I felt so strange. Mac 1.0, bartender, daydreamer, and professional sun worshipper, would have wanted nothing more than to pass off any and all responsibility to someone else. To be taken care of. Not to be the one taking care. I no longer knew that woman. I liked making the hard decisions and fighting the good fight. Getting to lay down responsibility no longer felt like relinquishing a burden—it felt like being shut out of the most important parts of my life.

“MacKayla, time is of the essence,” Pieter said softly. “You don’t have to fight anymore. We’re here now.”

I looked at Isla. Her blue eyes shimmered with unshed tears. “Listen to your father,” she said. “You’ll never be alone again, darling. Give me the amulet. Release your burden and let me carry it for you. It was never meant to be yours.”

I looked back at Barrons. He was watching me. I knew him. He wouldn’t force my hand.

I did a double take. Who was I kidding? Of course Barrons would try to force my hand on this. He wanted the spell of unmaking to end his son’s life. He’d been hunting it for nearly his entire existence. He would stomp and argue and roar. He’d never get this close only to back off and give me space to make my own decisions.

“Don’t do it,” he snarled. “You promised.”

“The Sinsar Dubh has entered the city,” Isla said simply. “You must decide.”

I could feel it, too, rushing toward us, as if it knew that if it hurried, it could catch us with our pants down, me undecided, all of us exposed by my inability to commit.

I moved toward Isla, playing the chain through my fingers. How could I accept that I didn’t have to fight this battle? I’d been preparing for it. I was ready. Yet here she stood, telling me I didn’t need to worry. I wouldn’t doom the world, and I didn’t need to save it. Others had been preparing for the same moment and were more qualified.

That surreal feeling was back. And what was that buzzing at my ear? I kept thinking I was hearing Barrons roaring, but every time I looked at him, he wasn’t saying a word. “I need a spell from the Book,” I said.

“Once it’s locked up, we can get anything you need. Pieter knows the First Language. It’s how your father and I met, working on ancient scrolls.”

I stared into the face so like my own but older, wiser, more mature. I wanted to say it, needed to do this, at least once. I might never get the chance again. “Mother,” I tried the word on my tongue.

A tremulous, radiant smile curved her lips. “My dear, sweet MacKayla!” she exclaimed.

I wanted to touch her, be in her arms, breathe in the scent of my mother, and know I belonged. I focused on my only memory of her, deeply buried until this moment. I focused on it hard, thinking about how treasured it was. How I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten it all these years. How my child’s mind had taken a single snapshot: Isla O’Connor and Pieter staring at me with tears in their eyes. They’d been standing by a blue station wagon, waving good-bye to us. It was pouring rain, and someone had held a bright pink umbrella with green cartoon flowers above my baby carriage, but the wind had whisked a chill mist beneath it. I’d flailed my tiny fists, cold and crying, and Isla suddenly broke away from Pieter to tuck the blanket more securely around me.

“Oh, darling, it was the hardest thing I ever did that day in the rain, letting you go! When I tucked you in, I wanted so desperately to snatch you up and keep you with us forever!”

“I remember the umbrella,” I said. “I think it must be where I got my love of pink.”

She nodded, eyes shining. “It was bright pink with green flowers.”

Tears stung my eyes. I stared at her a long moment, memorizing her face.

Isla opened her arms. “My daughter, my beautiful little girl!”

Bittersweet emotion flooded me as I moved into my mother’s arms. When they closed warm and comforting around me, I began to cry.

She stroked my hair and whispered, “Hush, darling, it’s all right. Your father and I are here now. You don’t need to worry about a thing. It’s all right. We’re together again.”

I cried harder. Because I could see the truth. Sometimes it’s there in the flaws.

And other times it’s there in too much perfection.

My mother’s arms were around my neck. She smelled good, like Alina, of peaches-and-cream candles and Beautiful perfume.

And I didn’t have a single memory of this woman.

There’d been no blue station wagon. No pink umbrella. No day in the rain.

I slid the spear from my holster and drove it up between our bodies.

Straight into Isla O’Connor’s heart.

47

Isla inhaled, sharp with pain, and went stiff in my arms, clutching at my neck.

“Darling?” Blue eyes stared into mine, blank and confused. She was Isla.

“You stupid little bitch!” Blue eyes stared into mine, fiercely intelligent, furious, hard with rage. She was Rowena.

“How could you do this to me?” Isla cried.

“If only I’d killed you that night in the pub!” Blood-tinged spittle sprayed from Rowena’s lips.

“MacKayla, my darling, darling daughter, what have you done?”

“Och, and ’tis because of you all this happened!” Rowena spat. “You bloody damned O’Connors, bringing naught but trouble and misfortune to us all!”

I felt her legs buckle, but she caught herself on my shoulders and didn’t go down. She was one tough old woman.

I shuddered. I’d never been talking to Isla. It was Rowena all along, carrying the Sinsar Dubh, possessed by it. But now she was dying, and the Book’s ability to maintain a convincing illusion was dying with her. She was flashing back and forth between the illusion of Isla and the reality of Rowena.

“Did you kill my sister?” I shook the old woman so hard her hair spilled loose from its tight bun.

“Dani killed your sister. And the two of you were always cozying up. Och, and I imagine you feel differently about her now!” She cackled.

I used Voice. “Did you order her to do it?”

She writhed, mouth contorting. She didn’t want to answer me. She wanted me to suffer. “Yesss!” the word exploded in an unwilling hiss. I hoped it hurt.

“Did you use your mental coercion to make her do it?”

Her jaw locked and her eyes narrowed to slits. I repeated the question, rattling the windows in the study with the multilayered thunder of compulsion.

“Yesss! ’Twas my right. ’Tis why I was given such gifts! And the cleverness to use them. It requires the layering of many subtle commands, knowing precisely where to nudge. No other could have done it.” She gave me a smug stare, proud of herself.

I grimaced and looked away, stilled by the horror of it.

Here it was at last—the truth of my sister’s murder. I finally knew what had happened to Alina.

The day she’d discovered Darroc was the Lord Master, the same day she’d called me, crying, and left a message, was the day she’d been killed—but not at all for the reasons I’d thought. If it hadn’t been for Rowena, Alina would have lived through that day.

I’d have gotten a new phone, called her in a few days, and she’d have answered. Life would have gone on for the two of us. She and Darroc would probably have gotten back together, and who knew how things might have turned out? Her message had been misleading from the beginning, but she’d had no idea this old woman was her enemy.

This bitch, this meddling tyrant who believed it was her right to use her “gifts” to force a child to kill, had ordered Dani to take Alina to a dark alley to be murdered.

My hands trembled. I wanted to kill her the same way.

Had Rowena specified the monsters Dani should find and leave Alina with? Had she insisted Dani stay and watch the deed be done? Had Alina begged? Had they both wept, knowing the wrongness of it? I’d been forced to want sex. Dani had been forced to murder. My sister. At thirteen. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to watch yourself kill someone you didn’t want to kill. Had Dani known Alina? Liked her? And been compelled to kill her anyway?

“And I tried to kill you in your cell when you were a mindless whore, but you wouldn’t die! I slit your throat. I suffocated you. I gutted you, I poisoned you! Still you came back. Finally I painted over the wards to let them take you and destroy you!”

“You painted over the—you were going to give me back to the princes?” I was flabbergasted. She had tried to kill me. I hadn’t just dreamed it. I shoved both thoughts from my mind. I wanted answers and, from the look of her, she wasn’t going to last long. Voice echoed out of me, reverberating off the walls. “Why did you kill Alina?”

“Are you daft? She consorted with the enemy! My spies followed her to his house and saw him with Unseelie! ’Twas reason enough. Then there was the prophecy! I’d’ve killed her at birth if I could’ve. If I’d known she was still alive, I’d’ve hunted her!”

“Did you know who she was when you killed her? Did you know she was Isla’s daughter?”

“Och, of course,” she sneered. “I had Dani lure her to us when my girls told me they’d spotted an untrained sidhe-seer, same as I sent her to you! Alina Lane, she called herself, but I knew the instant I saw her who she was. Isla, all over again, plain as day! And my Kayleigh dead because of her mother!”

I wanted to strangle her with my bare hands, choke the breath out of her. Over and over.

“Did you know who I was when you saw me that first night?”

A troubled look creased her brow. “ ’Tis impossible. You can’t be. You weren’t born. I’d have known were Isla pregnant! Women talk. They never spoke of it!”

“How did the Book get out?” I demanded.

A crafty light entered her eyes. “You think I let it out. I did no such thing. I do the work of angels! An angel came to me and warned me that the spells holding it had weakened. It bid me enter the forbidden chamber and strengthen the runes. Only I could do it. I had to be brave! I had to be strong! I was both. I see, serve, and protect! I have always been there for my children!”

I caught my breath. The Book seduced. I was willing to bet there had been no angel. The old woman charged with protecting the world from the Sinsar Dubh hadn’t strengthened the runes. She’d erased them.

“I did as the angel instructed. ’Twas your mother who let it out!”

“What happened the night the Book escaped? Tell me everything!”

“You are an abomination. The doom of us all.” The light in her eyes was matched by a craftier smile. “I’ll die here, well I ken it, but I’ll not be giving the likes of you any peace. Isla was a traitor and a whore, and you’re more of the same.” She grabbed my hand and thrust her small frame forward on the spear, twisting it as she went. “Ahhhh!” she cried. Blood gushed from her mouth.

She died sudden, mouth open, eyes wide.

Disgusted, I dropped her and stepped back, watched her fall to the floor. The Sinsar Dubh whumped to the floor. I stepped back hastily.

Behind me, Barrons was roaring. I glanced over my shoulder. He was hammering at an invisible barrier, his eyes wild, shouting.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “I have it under control. I saw through it.” I was trembling, cold and hot and nauseated. It had all been so real. It felt as if I’d killed my mother, even though my brain knew I hadn’t. For a short time, I’d believed the lies. And my heart hurt as if I’d lost a family I’d never had.

I looked back at Rowena. She stared up at the ceiling, eyes empty, mouth slack.

The Sinsar Dubh lay between us, closed, seemingly inert, a massive black tome with many locks.

I had no doubt it had chosen Rowena for her knowledge of wards so she could carry it past Barrons’ protective spells, straight into the heart of our heavily warded world.

I thought back, isolating the moment the illusion had begun. From the instant I’d stepped out of the Silver tonight, nothing had been real.

Rowena and the Sinsar Dubh had been waiting to ambush me in the bookstore the moment I’d appeared. It had skimmed my mind, picking out the details I would find most convincing.

I’d never left the study, never followed Barrons into the rear conversation area, or sat on the couch, or met my mother. It had “tasted me” on many occasions. It knew me. And it had played me like a virtuoso, sawing away at one heartstring after the next.

Creating a “father” for me had been a masterstroke. It had married memories to longings and given me what I wanted most: family, safety, freedom from crushing choices.

All to get me to hand over the amulet, to con me into placing the one thing capable of deceiving both of us into Rowena’s hands.

And if I had—oh, God, if I had! I would never have known from that moment forward what was real and what wasn’t.

I’d been so close to doing it, but the Book had made two mistakes. I’d fed it a thought about Barrons and it had immediately altered him to bring him in line with my expectations. Then I’d fed it a false memory, amplified it with the amulet, and it had played it right back at me.

I had no doubt the real Barrons had been walled off from me the entire time. The Barrons who had stood beside me in the bookstore had been an illusion the Book had constantly tweaked, according to the feedback it had been getting from me.

Almost had you … it purred.

“Almost only counts in hand grenades and horseshoes.” I stared down at the Sinsar Dubh, with its black cover and many complicated locks. But something wasn’t right. It had never looked right to me.

I consulted my memories. I remembered the day the Unseelie King had created it. This was not what he’d made. “Show me what is true,” I murmured.

When the Sinsar Dubh’s true form was revealed, I gasped. Sung into existence from slabs of purest gold and shards of obsidian, it was exquisite. I’d summoned crimson stones from one of the galaxies the Hunters liked to fly that housed tiny dancing flames. And although I’d put locks on my Book, top and bottom, they were decorative, never meant to secure it. My encryption was protection enough.

Or so I’d thought.

I’d made it lovely. I’d hoped the beauty of its binding might temper the horror of its contents.

I smiled sadly. For a brief time I’d believed I was Isla’s daughter. No such luck. I was the Unseelie King. And it was long past time for my battle with my darker half to end. According to the prophecy as I understood it, I’d triumphed over my “monster within.” It had been my hunger for illusion, to lose myself in a life I’d never had.

I fisted my hand around the amulet. It blazed with blue-black light. I was epic. I was strong. I had created this horror and I would destroy it. I would not be defeated.

Not defeat, MacKayla. I want you to come home.

“I am home. My bookstore.”

Is nothing. I will show you wonders beyond your imagining. Your body is strong. You will hold me and we will live. Dance. Fuck. Feast. It will be grand. We will K’Vruck the world.

“I’m not holding you. Ever.”

You were made for me. I for you. Two for tea and t-t-t-tea for two.

“I’ll kill myself first.” If I thought it might come to that, I would.

And let me win? You would die and let me rule? Allow me to encourage you.

“That’s not what you want, and you know it.”

What do you think I want, sweet MacKayla?

“You want me to forgive you.”

I have no need of absolution.

“You want me to take you back.”

In, sweet thing, take me in. Warm and wet like sex is warm and wet.

“You want to be the king. You want to turn us evil again.”

Evil, good, create, destroy. Puny minds. Puny caves. Time, MacKayla. Time absolves.

“Time does not define the act. Time is impartial; it neither condemns nor absolves. The action contains intent, and intent is where the definition lies.”

Bore me with human law.

“Enlighten you with universal law.”

You convict me of evil intent?

“Unequivocally.”

In your eyes I am a monster?

“Absolutely.”

I should be—how do you say?—put down?

“That’s what I’m here for.”

What, then, does that make you, MacKayla?

“A repentant king. I eviscerated my evil, imprisoned you once before, and I will again.”

How you amuse.

“Laugh all you want.”

You believe you are my maker.

“I know I am.”

My sweet MacKayla, you are such a fool. You did not make me. I made you.

A chill slid down my spine. Its voice oozed satisfaction and mockery, as if it were watching me head straight toward a train wreck and enjoying every minute of it. My eyes narrowed. “Not falling for the chicken/egg discussion. Your evil didn’t make me the king. I was the king, and I turned evil. I wised up and dumped my evil into a book. You were never supposed to live. And I plan to rectify that.”

Not chickens and eggs. A human woman. And you—a tiny little embryo.

My mouth opened on a retort, but I hesitated.

Of all the lies it had woven so far, this one held a startling ring of truth. Why?

What I told you before was true. I took Isla to escape the abbey. And she was pregnant. I did not expect to find you in her. I did not know how humans replicated. As I used her to kill the other humans who had dared to restrain me—ME, locked in a cold stone vacuum for an eternity of nothingness, have you any idea the HELL?—there you were. The wonder. Unformed life in her body. Mine for the taking. I marveled at the beauty of you. Unshaped, unfettered by scruple, unhampered by human weaknesses. Your race and its obsession with sin! You chain yourselves to the whipping post because you fear the sky. It is those chains, those limits, that make the bodies I take so fragile, tear them apart so soon after I possess them.

But you were different. You hungered, you slept, you dreamed, but you were pure. You knew no right or wrong; you were empty. You did not resist me. You were open. I filled you. I nestled down inside you, replicated myself and left it there. You are my child. You suckled at my breast, MacKayla. I was your mother’s milk; I gave you your defenses against the world. On that day, before your body could sustain itself separately, before you ever had the chance to do something so stupid and small as become human, I claimed you. I gave birth to you. Not Isla.

“You’re lying. I’m the king,” I said flatly.

You seek truth? Can you face it?

I said nothing.

The truth is within you. It always has been. It is there in the one place you refuse to go.

I narrowed my eyes. Perhaps I’d been congratulating myself on subduing my inner monster too soon. Don’t talk to it, beautiful girl, the dreamy-eyed guy had said, long ago in Chester’s, long before I’d met the fear dorcha. Never talk to it. I wondered if he’d meant the Sinsar Dubh then. Too late. I was waist-deep in quicksand. Struggling would only hasten my descent.

You have only ever taken what I offered, what I floated to the surface. Dive in, MacKayla. Graze the bottom of your lake. You will find me down there, shining in all my glory. Lift my lid. Know the truth of your existence. If I am evil, we are evil. If I should be “put down,” so must you. There is no sentence you can cry upon me that you must not carry out upon yourself. There is no point in fighting me. You are me. Not a king. Me. Always have been. Always will be. You can’t eviscerate me. I am your soul.

“Those runes I found are my sidhe-seer gifts.”

From the walls of the Unseelie prison? The universe abhors a boring liar. Flamboyance, MacKayla. Get some if you wish to spend an eternity with me.

“It’s because I’m the king. The good part of him. I have his memories to prove it.”

We possess memories from a portion of his existence. It was impossible for him to dump his knowledge without imbuing my pages with the essence of the being that created them. I was sentient from the moment he finished scribing my pages. Do you recall anything that happened before the day the queen denied the king his concubine’s immortality?

I turned inward, searching.

There was nothing. A white expanse of emptiness. It was as if life began that day.

It did. It was the day he wrote his first spell of creation, performed the first of his experiments. We know his life from that day on. We know nothing of his existence before then. And we know little of his life since—only when I tracked and glimpsed him. You are not the king. You are my child, MacKayla. I am mother, father, lover, all. It is time to come home.

Was it possible that it was telling me the truth? I wasn’t the concubine, wasn’t the king? I was just a human who’d been touched by evil before birth?

More than touched. As the king poured himself into me, I am in you. Your body grew around me like a tree absorbs a nail and now waits to be reunited. You miss me. You are hollow without me. Haven’t you always known it? Felt empty, hungry for more? If I am evil, so are you. That, my sweet MacKayla, is your monster within. Or not.

“If you made me, where have you been for the past twenty-three years?”

Waiting for the mewling infant to grow strong before we reunited.

“You needed me to flip. That’s why you tried to kill the people I loved.”

Pain distills. The clarifying emotion.

“You screwed up. You came too soon. I can deal with pain, and I haven’t flipped.”

Lift my cover and embrace your dreams. You want Alina back? Snap of a finger. Isla and your father? They are yours. Dani as a young, innocent child with a bright future? One word can make it so. The walls back up? We will do it immediately. Walls are no hindrance to us. We pass through them.

“It would all be a lie.”

Not a lie, a different path, equally real. Embrace me and you will understand. Do you want the spell to unmake his child? Is that what you want? The key to releasing Jericho Barrons from the eternal hell of watching his son suffer? He has been tortured for so long. Has it not been long enough?

I caught my breath. Of all the things it might say, this was the one thing that tempted me.

I am not without mercy, MacKayla, the Sinsar Dubh said gently. Compassion is not beyond me. I see it in you. I learn. I evolve. Perhaps you do have the good parts of the king in you after all. Perhaps your humanity will temper me. You will make me kinder, more forgiving. I will make you stronger, less breakable.

Memories swarmed through my mind. I knew the Book was sifting through them, manipulating me. It had found the images Barrons showed me in the desert of the child dying in our arms. It embellished upon what Barrons had told me about his enemies, nearly drowned me in images of barbaric men torturing and killing the child again and again.

Behind those images, a father stalked through eternity, hunting for a way to release his son and grant him peace.

And gain it himself.

He gave you everything and has never asked you for a thing in return. Until this. He will die for you over and over. And all he wants you to do is free his son.

There was nothing it had just said that I could argue with.

Open me, MacKayla. Embrace me. Use me for good, out of love. How could a thing given from love be bad? You said it yourself—it is the intention that defines the action.

And there it was in a nutshell, the ultimate temptation: to pick up the Book, crack it open, and read it, looking for the spell so Barrons could unmake his child, because I would be doing it for all the right reasons. Even Barrons had said evil wasn’t a state of being, it was a choice.

The Unseelie King had not trusted himself to retain the power contained within the pages of the Sinsar Dubh. How could I?

I stared at it, debating.

Irony, perfect definition: Barrons had said, that for which I want to possess it, I would no longer want once I possessed it.

If I picked it up—even with the most merciful of reasons in my heart—would I still care about releasing the child once I raised the cover? Would I care about Jack and Rainey, about the world, about Barrons himself?

Foolish fears, my sweet MacKayla. You have free will. I am only a chisel. You are the sculptor. Use me. Shape your world. Be a saint if you wish: Plant flowers, save children, champion small animals.

Was it that easy? Could it be true?

I could make the world perfect.

It’s an imperfect world, Mac, I could almost hear Barrons roaring.

It was. Royally screwed up. Packed with injustices that needed to be righted, bad people and hard times. I could make everyone happy.

You have the amulet. With it you will always have control over me. You will always be stronger than I. I am merely a book. You are alive.

It was just a book.

Take me, use me. It is as Barrons has always told you—it is how you go on that defines you. You make the choices. His child suffers. There is so much suffering in this world. You can make it all go away.

I stared at it, hands flexing. That was the hard thing. The pain. He and his son suffered endlessly and would continue to do so every day, eternally. Unless I could get the spell of unmaking I’d promised him.

I have such a spell. We will lay the child to rest together. You will be his savior. We will free him now, this very night. Open me, MacKayla. Open yourself. I have been unguided. You will teach me.

I bit my lip, frowning. Could I guide the Sinsar Dubh? Would my humanity give me the edge I needed? I turned inward, searching my heart, my soul. What I found there straightened my spine and squared my shoulders.

“I can,” I said. “I can change you. I can make you better.”

Yes, yes, do it now. Take me, hold me, open me, it whispered. Love you, MacKayla. Love me.

I couldn’t wait another moment. I reached for the Sinsar Dubh.

48

The Book was icy beneath my hands, but the flames in the rubies warmed my soul.

I was touching the Sinsar Dubh.

The contact took my breath away. We were twins separated at birth, rejoined. I’d been waiting for it all my life. With it in my hands, I was complete. I hugged it to my chest, shivering, trembling with emotion. A dark song began to build inside me. The Book was a finger and I was the wine-damp rim of a fine crystal goblet. It slid round and round, playing a melody that came from deep within my compromised soul.

I ran my hands lovingly over the jeweled cover.

I felt the immense power it contained. It inflated me, swelled inside me, made me drunk on it, giddy. The baby I’d once been, who’d known no right or wrong, was still in there. Unborn, we have yet to develop morality. I suspect there’s some part of us that remains that way until death.

We choose. That’s what it’s all about.

When I stopped embracing it, held it away to admire it, the crimson rune that had been hidden in one of my palms pulsed wetly, expanded, and latched tiny suckers onto it, binding the covers closed.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING! the Sinsar Dubh screamed.

“Making you better.” I began to cry as I scooped another bloody rune from the glassy black surface of my lake. I wanted the Book like I wanted to breathe. Now I knew why it had hunted me. I was its perfect host. We were made for each other. With it, I would never fear anything. Rejecting it was the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life. More bitter still was the knowledge that with each rune I pressed into the boards and binding, I was condemning Jericho and his son to continue living in an eternal hell.

HOW DARE YOU DECEIVE ME?

“The nerve of me.” I wanted to tear the runes off, crack open the Book, take my spell of unmaking. I didn’t dare. If I opened the gold, black, and crimson cover the tiniest sliver, its dark song would rush out and consume me.

She would doom the world, they’d said.

I’d been tempted, so tempted. I wanted Alina back. I wanted the walls up. I wanted Dani to be innocent and young and not my sister’s killer. I wanted to be Jericho Barrons’ hero. I wanted to release him from endless pain. See him walk into the future with hope and maybe even smile every now and then.

YOU SAID THE WORLD WAS IMPERFECT!

“It is.” I pressed another dripping rune into the cover.

But it was my world, filled with good people, like my father and mother, patient Kat, and Inspector Jayne, who were always doing their parts to make it a better place. Unseelie might be overrunning our planet, but we’d been long overdue for a threat to unify us as a race and turn our petty angers away from one another.

There was pain, but there was also joy. It was in the tension between the two that life happened. Imperfect as it was, this world was real. Illusion was no substitute. I’d rather live a hard life of fact than a sweet life of lies.

I flipped the Book over and pressed a rune into its back.

Its voice was muffled, growing weaker.

He will hate you!

That was the crushing blow. I’d been a breath away from what Barrons had devoted his entire existence to getting, and I’d turned my back on it. I’d promised him. I’d told him we would find a way, and I’d failed him. There was no way to lift a single spell of such power from the Sinsar Dubh. It would never have floated it to the surface and given it to me willingly. Even now it was regretting that it had ever floated anything to the surface for me, but it had taken calculated risks, tempting me to look deeper. It had given me what I’d needed to stay alive, to keep me heading toward merging with it, taking it in, letting it have my body and have control. It knew what I wanted now and would never give it up unless I merged with it completely. If I’d raised that lid—even a scant inch, just for a quick peek—looking for the spell, it would have been all over. It would have taken up squatter’s rights and obliterated me. Perhaps some tiny part of me would have remained cognizant, screaming in eternal horror, but not enough to matter.

Ryodan had been right. The Sinsar Dubh was after a body, and it had wanted mine. If I believed its story, it had prepped me to be possessed since before I was born. Waited until I’d become the perfect host. But it hadn’t waited quite long enough. Or maybe it had waited too long. Evil is a completely different creature, Mac, Ryodan had said. Evil is bad that believes it’s good.

I hadn’t understood what he was saying at the time. I did now.

I pressed another rune onto the binding.

I would never lay Barrons’ child to rest now. Never free the man.

Destroy you, bitch! Not the end. Never the end!

Four more runes and the Sinsar Dubh was silent.

I sat back on my heels. My hands were shaking, I was exhausted, and my cheeks were wet.

I was about to lay my hand against the cover to confirm what I sensed, that it was contained—at least as well as it could be until we got it to the abbey—when the invisible barrier restraining Jericho evaporated.

Then I was in his arms and he was kissing me, and all I could think was that I’d done it, I’d survived, but at what cost?

From the day I’d met him, he’d been after one thing and one thing only. He’d been hunting it for thousands of years with singleminded focus.

I was a woman he’d known for a few months. What could I possibly mean to him compared to that?

49

Shocked by the news that Rowena was dead, the surviving members of the Haven took one look at Drustan MacKeltar carrying the Book, identified themselves—and, yes, Jo was one of them—then removed the wards and opened the corridor to allow access to the chamber in which the Sinsar Dubh had originally been interred.

I was thrilled Drustan was carrying it. I wanted nothing more to do with it. I never wanted to touch it again. If I did, I’d have to think about the spell Barrons wanted, how close it was, and how all I’d have to do was lift that cover and …

I shook my head, forcing the thought away.

I’d done my part. It was here, and now it was their responsibility. I’d ridden in the Hummer with the Keltar clan to the abbey as a precaution. It was hard to believe it was almost over. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the other shoe hadn’t dropped yet. In movies, the villain always twitched one last time, and my nerves were a wreck, waiting for it.

Jo and the other Haven members led our procession into the bowels of the stone fortress, followed by Ryodan and the others. The Keltar Druids were next. Barrons and I followed, with Kat and half a dozen more sidhe-seers bringing up the rear. V’lane and his Seelie were due to sift in at any moment.

I kept a careful eye on the Book as Drustan carried it down the corridor, past a now silent image of Isla O’Connor that I could barely look at, into an underground chamber, down more stairs, into another chamber, and down still more stairs.

I quit counting after a dozen flights. It was deep. I was once again underground.

I kept waiting for the Book to somehow sense it was approaching the place where it had been caged for so long and make a final, deadly gambit for my soul. Or body.

I looked at Barrons. “Do you feel like—”

“The fat lady hasn’t sung?”

I love that about him. He gets me. I don’t even have to finish my sentences.

“Ideas?” I said.

“Not a one.”

“Are we being paranoid?”

“Possibly. Hard to say.” He looked at me. Although his eyes were empty of conversation, I knew he wanted to know everything that had happened while I’d been battling the Book but wouldn’t ask until we were alone. The entire time the Sinsar Dubh had been playing its head games with me, all he’d been able to see was me standing in silence with Rowena, me killing Rowena, then me standing in silence near the Book. The illusions it had woven for me had taken place only in my head. The battle had been invisible to the naked eye, but the hardest ones are.

He’d been a silent mountain of barely contained hostility the entire way out here. Since the moment the barrier restraining him had evaporated, he hadn’t stopped touching me. I was sucking it up. Who knew how he’d feel soon.

I couldn’t get to you, he’d exploded when he’d finally stopped kissing me long enough to speak.

But you did, I’d told him. I heard you roaring. It was what tipped me off. You got through.

I couldn’t save you. His expression had been stark, furious.

I couldn’t save him, either. And I was in no hurry to tell him that.

Did you get it? The spell of unmaking?

Ancient eyes had stared at me, filled with ancient grief. And something more. Something so alien and unexpected that I’d almost burst into tears. I’d seen many things in his eyes in the time that I’d known him: lust, amusement, sympathy, mockery, caution, fury. But I had never seen this.

Hope. Jericho Barrons had hope, and I was the reason for it.

Yes, I lied. I got it.

I would never forget his smile. It had illuminated him from the inside out.

I blew out a breath and focused on my surroundings. There was a small underground city beneath the abbey. Even Barrons was beginning to look impressed. Wide streetlike tunnels intersected neatly; narrower alleys ran off them in dizzying slopes. We passed an enormous hive of catacombs that Jo told us held the remains of every Grand Mistress that had ever lived. Somewhere among those labyrinthine tunnels, hidden in row after row of mausoleums, was the crypt of the first leader of the first Haven. I wanted to find it, run my fingers over the inscription, know the date our order had been founded. There were secrets down here entrusted to only the initiate, and I wanted to know them all.

Kat, too, was a member of the Haven, a secret she’d not betrayed.

“Rowena would have shut me out if I’d told you, and I’d have had no control over the inner doings of our order. It wasn’t a risk I could take. You did well tonight, Mac. She was wrong about you. With both prophecies against you, still you came through for us.” Serene gray eyes searched mine. “I can’t begin to imagine what you went through.” The look on her face told me she’d like to know and that she wouldn’t be waiting long to ask me in detail. “We can’t thank you enough.”

“Sure you can.” I gave her a tired smile. “Never let it get out again.”

There was a sudden commotion ahead of us.

The Seelie had just sifted in, minus V’lane, in close proximity to Ryodan, Lor, and Fade.

I wasn’t sure who was more disgusted. Or more homicidal.

Velvet hissed. “You have no right to be here!”

“Kill it,” Ryodan said flatly.

“Don’t you dare!” I heard Jo snap.

“Fucking fairies,” Lor muttered.

“Touch one of them and I’ll—”

“What, human?” Ryodan barked at Jo. “Just what will you do to stop me?”

“Don’t push me.”

“Stop it,” Drustan said quietly. “ ’Tis a Fae Book and they’ve come to see it contained, as is their right.”

“They’re the reason it got out in the first place,” Fade said.

“We are Seelie, not sidhe-seers. The sidhe-seers let it out.”

“You made it.”

“We did not. The Unseelie made it.”

“Seelie, Unseelie—you’re all fairies to me,” Lor grumbled.

“I thought there was no sifting in this part of the abbey,” I said.

“We had to drop all the wards to let everyone in. There’s too much diversity in …”

“Everyone’s DNA?” I said drily.

Kat smiled. “For lack of a better word. The Keltar are one thing, Barrons and his men another, the Fae yet another.”

And me? I wanted to ask, but didn’t. Was I human? Had the Book told me any of the truth? Did I really have the Sinsar Dubh inside me? Had it stamped its imprint, word for word, into my defenseless infant psyche? Over the years, had I always sensed it—something fundamentally wrong with me—and done my best to wall it off or submerge it in a dark glassy lake to protect myself?

If I did have the entire Book of dark magic inside me, and Kat found out about it, would they try to lock me up down here, too?

I shivered. Would they hunt me like we’d hunted the Sinsar Dubh?

Barrons looked down at me. What is it?

Just cold, I lied. If I did have the Sinsar Dubh inside me, did that mean the spell I’d walked away from was in my glassy lake? There at the bottom, like the Book had said? What was the difference, then? Had I really subdued the monster, or was it still inside me? Was the monster temptation, and I’d defeated it?

“Where’s V’lane?” I asked, desperate for concretes.

“He is collecting the queen,” Velvet said.

That started another fight.

“If you think we’re going to let her come here and open the Sinsar Dubh, you’re wrong.”

“How do you expect her to rebuild the walls without it?” Dree’lia demanded.

“We don’t need walls. You die as easy as any humans,” Fade said.

“Is she even conscious?” I asked.

“We need the walls,” Kat said quietly.

“She surfaces but is still mostly out of it,” Ryodan said. “Point is, if anybody’s reading that damned Book, it’s not going to be a fairy. They started this fucking mess.”

Everyone was still arguing ten minutes later when we reached the cavern that had been designed to contain the Sinsar Dubh.

As we approached the doors, Christian glanced back at me and I nodded. I knew what he was thinking. We’d seen doors like this before, at the entrance to the Unseelie King’s fortress of black ice, however these were much smaller. Kat pressed a hand to a pattern of runes on the door and they swung open silently.

The blackness beyond was so enormous and complete that the thin beams of our flashlights were swallowed a few feet in.

I heard a match being struck, then Jo lit an oil torch mounted in a silver sconce on the wall. It flared into life, fed into the next and the next, until the cavern was brilliantly illuminated.

A hush fell over us.

Chiseled of milky stone, the cavern soared to an impossibly high ceiling with no visible means of support. Every inch of it—floors, walls, ceiling—was covered with silver runes that glittered as if they’d been branded into stone with diamond dust. The torchlight danced off the runes, making the chamber almost too bright to see. I squinted. Figured the only place in Dublin I’d ever need my sunglasses was underground.

The cavern was easily as large as the Unseelie King’s bedchamber. Between the doors and the size of the place, I wondered how much credence there was to the theory that the king was the one who’d founded our order, who’d originally brought his cursed Book here to be entombed.

In the center was a slab laid across two stones. It was also covered with glittering symbols, but these moved constantly, sliding up and across the slab like the tattoos that moved beneath the Unseelie Princes’ skin. They disappeared over the edge and began again at the floor.

“Seen runes like these before, Barrons?” Ryodan said.

“No. You?” Barrons said.

“New to me. Could be useful.”

I heard the sound of a phone taking pictures.

Then I heard the sound of a phone being crushed against rock.

“Are you out of your mind?” Ryodan said disbelievingly. “That was my phone.”

“Possibly,” Jo said. “But no one records anything here.”

“Crush something of mine again, I’ll crush your skull.”

“I weary of you,” Jo said.

“I weary of your ass, too, sidhe-seer,” Ryodan growled.

“Leave her alone,” I said. “It’s their abbey.”

Ryodan shot me a look. Barrons intercepted it and Ryodan looked away—but only after a long, tense moment.

“You must place the Book on the slab,” Kat instructed. “Then the four stones must be positioned around it.”

“Then, MacKayla, you must remove the runes from the binding,” V’lane said.

“What?” I exclaimed, whirling to face him as he sifted in. “I’m not taking those runes off!”

Barrons said, “I thought you were bringing the queen.”

“I am making certain it is safe for her first.”

V’lane scanned the chamber, studying each person, Fae and Druid. I could tell he wasn’t comfortable with the risk. His gaze rested on Velvet for a moment, who nodded. Then he looked at me. “I apologize, but it is the only way to protect her. I cannot be two of me at once without halving my abilities.”

“What are you talking about?”

He didn’t answer.

My parents were suddenly there. My mom and dad—here with the Sinsar Dubh—in the last place I would ever have brought them. And supposedly I was going to have to remove the runes, but we’d see about that.

My dad had the Seelie queen in his arms, heavily wrapped in blankets. She was so well swaddled that all I could see of her were a few strands of silvery hair and the tip of her nose. My mom was pressed close to my dad’s side, and I understood why V’lane had apologized. He should have.

He had my parents protecting the queen with their bodies.

“You’re using my parents as her shield?”

“It’s all right, baby. We wanted to help,” Jack said.

Rainey agreed. “You’re so much like your sister, facing everything alone, but you don’t have to. We’re family. We face things together. Besides, if I have to stay one more moment in that glass cage, I’ll lose my mind. We’ve been stuck in there for months.”

Barrons jerked his head, and Ryodan, Lor, and Fade closed in around my parents, shielding them.

“Thank you,” I said softly. He was always protecting me and mine. God, I sucked.

V’lane was still eyeing all the occupants of the room. “I had no choice, MacKayla. Someone kidnapped her. At first I believed it must be one of my race. Now I wonder if it was not one of yours.”

“Let’s just get this over with,” I said tightly. “Why do I have to remove the runes?”

“They are unpredictable parasites and you have placed them directly on a sentient being. On walls, on a cage, they are useful. On a living, thinking entity, they are unbelievably dangerous. In time, it and they will transmogrify. Who knows what kind of monster we will be dealing with then?”

I blew out a breath. It made perfect Fae sense. I’d applied something Unseelie and alive to something else Unseelie and alive. Who could say whether it would ultimately make the Book stronger, maybe even give it whatever it needed to free itself?

“It must be re-interred precisely as it was before. Without the runes.”

“She’s not removing them,” said Barrons. “It’s too dangerous.”

“It is too dangerous if she does not.”

“If it becomes something else, we’ll deal with it then,” said Barrons.

“You may no longer be around,” V’lane replied coolly. “We cannot always count on Jericho Barrons to save the day.”

“I’ll always be around.”

“The runes on the walls, ceiling, and floor make them obsolete. They will contain it.”

“It escaped before.”

“It was carried out,” Kat said. “Isla O’Connor carried it out. She was the leader of the Haven and the only one with the power to carry it past the wards.”

I was quiet, thinking. The truth of what V’lane had said resonated deep inside me. I feared the crimson runes myself. They were potent; they’d been given to me by the Sinsar Dubh, which in itself was enough to make them suspect. Was this another of its patient gambits? Had I sealed it with precisely what it needed to one day break free again?

Everyone was looking at me. I was tired of making all the decisions. “I see both sides. I don’t know the answer.”

“We’ll vote,” Jo said.

“We’re not voting on something this important,” Barrons said. “This isn’t a fucking democracy.”

“Would you prefer a tyranny? Who would you place in charge?” V’lane demanded.

“Why isn’t it a democracy?” Kat said. “Everyone here is present because they are useful and important. Everyone should have a say.”

Barrons cut her a hard look. “Some of us are more useful and important than others.”

“My ass, you are,” Christian growled.

Barrons folded his arms. “Who let the Unseelie in here?”

Christian lunged for him. Dageus and Cian were on him in an instant, restraining him.

The muscles in the young Highlander’s arms bulged as he shook his uncles off. “I have an idea. Let’s subject Barrons to a little lie-detector test.”

I sighed. “Why don’t we subject everyone to one, Christian? But who’s going to test you? Will you be judge and jury of us all?”

“I could,” he said coldly. “Got a few secrets you don’t want to get out, Mac?”

“Gee, look who’s talking, Prince Christian.”

“Enough,” Drustan said. “No one of us is any better qualified to make the choice alone. Let’s take the bloody vote and be done with it.”

The Fae voted to remove the crimson runes and trust V’lane, naturally. As longtime Druids to the Fae, the Keltar did, too. Ryodan, Lor, Barrons, Fade, and myself voted against it. The sidhe-seers were split down the middle, with Jo for removing them and Kat against. I could barely see the tip of my father’s head between Lor, Fade, and Ryodan, but my parents weighed in on my side. Smart parents.

“They shouldn’t count,” Christian said. “They’re not even part of this.”

‘They’re protecting the queen with their lives,” Barrons said flatly. “They count.”

We still lost.

Drustan placed the Book on the slab. Barrons took the stones from Lor and Fade and placed the first three around it. V’lane laid the final stone in place. As soon as the four were positioned, they began to glow an eerie blue-black and emit a soft, constant chime.

The entire top of the slab was bathed in blue-black light.

“Now, MacKayla,” V’lane said.

I bit my lower lip, hesitating, wondering what would happen if I refused.

“We voted,” Kat reminded.

I sighed. I knew what would happen. We’d still be down here tomorrow and the next day and the next, arguing about what to do.

I had a really bad feeling about this. But I’d had really bad feelings before that had amounted to nothing more than a case of nerves and, after everything I’d been through, I could understand how I might feel dread merely being in the Book’s presence.

I looked at V’lane. He nodded encouragingly.

I looked at Barrons. He was so inhumanly still that I almost missed him. For a moment, he looked like someone else’s shadow in the bright cavern. It was a neat trick. I knew what that kind of stillness meant. He didn’t like it, either, but had come to the same conclusions as me. Ours was a volatile group. It had voted. If I went against that vote, all hell would break lose. We’d turn on one another, and who knew how ugly things might get?

My parents were here. Did I remove the runes and potentially expose them to risk? Or refuse and potentially expose them to risk?

There were no good choices.

I reached into the blue-black light and began to peel the first rune from the spine. As I pried it away, it pulsed like a small angry heartbeat and left a lesion that pooled with black blood before vanishing.

“What am I supposed to do with them?” I held it in the air.

“Velvet will sift them away as you remove them,” V’lane said.

One by one, I tugged them away and they popped out of existence.

When there was only one left, I stopped and pressed both my hands to the cover. It felt inert. Were the runes on the inside of these walls really enough to hold it? I was about to find out.

I tugged the final one from the binding of the book. It came away reluctantly, squirming like a hungry leech, and tried to attach to me once I’d broken the bond.

Velvet sifted it out.

I held my breath as the crimson rune vanished. After about twenty seconds, I heard a small explosion of gusty exhales. I think we all expected it to morph into the Beast and rain down the end of days on us.

“Well?” V’lane said.

I opened my sidhe-seer senses, trying to feel it.

“Is it contained?” Barrons demanded.

I reached with everything I had, stretching, pushing that part of me that could sense OOPs as far as it could go, and for a brief moment I felt the entire interior of the cavern and understood the purposes of the runes.

Each had been meticulously chiseled into the stone interior so that if lines were drawn connecting them, from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, they would reveal an intricate tight grid. Once the Book had been positioned on the slab and the stones arranged around it, the runes had begun to activate. They now crisscrossed the room with a gigantic invisible spiderweb. I could almost see the tensile silvery strands shooting past my head, feel them slicing through me.

Even if the Book somehow got off the slab, it would be instantly stuck in the first of countless sticky compartments. The harder it fought, the more the web would twist around it, eventually cocooning it.

It was over. It was really over. There was no other shoe that was going to drop.

There was a time I’d thought this day would never come. The mission had seemed too difficult, the odds too strongly stacked against us.

But we’d done it.

The Sinsar Dubh was shut down. Locked up. Caged. Imprisoned. Put to rest. Neutralized. Inert.

So long as nobody ever came down here and set it free again.

We were going to need better locks on the door. And I was going to make a motion that no one in the Haven got to have a key this time around. I wasn’t sure why they’d been able to get in to begin with. There was no reason anyone should enter this cavern. Ever.

Relief flooded me. I was having a hard time processing that it was really, truly over and comprehending all that meant.

Life could begin again. It would never be as normal as it used to be, but it would be a lot more normal than it had been for a long time. With the biggest, most immediate threat out of the way, we could focus our efforts on reclaiming and rebuilding our world. I could get some pots and dirt and start a rooftop garden at the bookstore.

I’d never have to walk down a dark street and be afraid the Book might be waiting for me, ready to crush me with a bone-deep migraine, set my spine on fire, or tempt me with illusion. It would never again possess one of us, never slaughter its way through our midst or threaten the people I loved.

I didn’t have to strip when I went to Chester’s anymore! Skintight clothing was a fad whose time had passed.

I turned around. Everyone was looking at me expectantly. They looked so wired and anxious, I suspected they’d jump out of their skins if I said, Boo. And for a moment I was tempted.

But I didn’t want anything to detract from the joy of the moment. I spread my hands and shrugged, smiling. “It’s over. It worked. The Sinsar Dubh is just a book. Nothing more.”

The cheers were deafening.

50

Well, okay, so maybe the cheers weren’t deafening, but they felt deafening to me, because I was cheering, too, and louder than most. The reality of the situation was that the sidhe-seers cheered, Mom and Dad hooted, Drustan whooped, Dageus and Cian grunted, Christopher looked worried, Christian turned and began to walk away in silence, Barrons scowled as did the rest of his men, and the Seelie glared.

Then the fighting broke out. Again.

I sighed gustily. They really needed to get with the program and learn to celebrate the good times a little longer before dwelling on the problems. I’d been walking around under the sentence of a prophecy that I would doom or save the world and I’d … well, technically, I hadn’t done either. I hadn’t doomed it. But I couldn’t see any way I’d saved it. Unless I’d saved it simply by not dooming it. But, still, I knew the importance of celebrating every now and then to alleviate the stress.

“We cannot restore the walls without the Song,” V’lane was saying.

“Who says we need the walls back up?” Barrons demanded. “You’re roaches, we’re Raid. We’ll get rid of you eventually.”

“We. Are. Not. Insects,” Velvet said tightly.

“I was talking about the Unseelie. I figured you prancing fairy bastards would get off our world voluntarily after helping eradicate your skulking half.”

“I do not prance.” Dree’lia was insulted. “You would do well to recall the delights found in our arms.”

I glanced at Barrons disbelievingly. “You had sex with her?”

He rolled his eyes. “It was a long time ago and only because she pretended to know something about the Book.”

“Lies, ancient one. You panted around behind me—”

“Barrons has never panted around behind anyone,” I said.

His dark gaze shimmered with amusement. Unexpected, but thanks for the defense.

Well, you haven’t. Not even me.

Debatable. Ryodan would disagree with you.

Sleep with another fairy and I’ll turn into V’lane’s personal Pri-ya.

His eyes were murderous, but he kept his tone light. Jealous much?

What’s mine is mine.

He went very still. Is that how you think of me?

Time seemed to stand still while we looked at each other. The arguing receded. The cavern emptied and it was just him and me. The moment stretched between us, pregnant with possibility. I hate moments like this. They always demand you lay something on the line.

He wanted an answer. And he wasn’t moving until he got one. I could see it in his eyes.

I was terrified. What if I said yes and he came back with a mocking retort? What if I got dewy and emotional and he left me hanging all exposed? Worse yet, what was going to happen when he found out I hadn’t gotten the spell to free his son? Would he take down my sign, batten up my beloved store, steal off with his child in the dark of night, burning off like mist in the morning sun, and I would never see him again?

I’d learned a thing or two.

Hope strengthens. Fear kills.

Bet your ass you’re mine, bud, I shot at him. I was staking my claim and I’d fight for it—lie, cheat, and steal. So I hadn’t gotten the spell. Yet. Tomorrow was another day. And if that was all he’d wanted me for, he didn’t deserve me.

Barrons tossed his head back and laughed, teeth flashing in his dark face.

Only once before had I ever heard him laugh like that: the night he caught me dancing to “Bad Moon Rising,” wearing the MacHalo, leaping small couches in a single bound, slaying pillows and slashing air. I caught my breath. Like Alina’s laugh, which used to make my world brighter than the hot afternoon sun, it held joy.

The rest of the occupants faded back in. They’d all gone silent and were staring at Barrons and me.

He stopped laughing instantly and cleared his throat. Then his eyes narrowed. “What the fuck is he doing? We haven’t made a decision.”

“I was trying to tell you,” Jack said. “But you didn’t hear a thing I said. You were looking at my daughter like—”

“Get away from the Book, V’lane,” Barrons growled. “If anyone’s going to be looking at it, it’ll be Mac.”

“Mac’s not touching it,” Rainey said instantly. “That terrible thing should be destroyed.”

“Can’t be, Mom. It doesn’t work that way.”

While everyone was fighting and Barrons and I were absorbed in a wordless conversation, V’lane had taken the bundled queen/concubine from my daddy and was now standing near the slab, looking down at the Sinsar Dubh.

“Don’t open it,” Kat warned him. “We need to talk. Make plans.”

“She’s right,” Dageus said. “ ’Tis no’ a thing to be undertaken lightly, V’lane.”

“There are precautions that must be observed,” Drustan added.

“There has been enough talk,” V’lane said. “My duties to my race are clear. They always have been.”

Barrons didn’t waste any breath. He moved like the beast, too fast to see. One moment he was a few feet from me, the next he was—

—slamming up against a wall and bouncing off it, snarling.

Clear crystal walls erupted around V’lane. Lined with blue-black bars, they extended all the way up to the ceiling.

He didn’t even turn. It was as if he’d tuned us out. He placed the unconscious body of the queen on the ground next to the slab and reached for the Sinsar Dubh.

“V’lane, don’t open it!” I cried. “I think it’s inert, but we don’t have any idea what will happen if you—”

It was too late. He’d opened the Book.

Arms spread, hands splayed on either side of it, head down, V’lane began to read, his lips moving.

Barrons flung himself at the wall. He bounced off.

V’lane had shut us out.

Ryodan, Lor, and Fade joined him, and moments later all five Keltar and my dad were at it, too, pounding on the walls, blasting into it with their shoulders and fists.

Me, I just stood, staring, trying to make sense of it, thinking back to the day I’d met V’lane. He’d told me he served his queen, that she needed the Book in order to have any chance at re-creating the lost Song. At the time, the only thing I’d been worried about was finding Alina’s murderer and keeping the walls up. I’d very much wanted the queen to find that Song and reinforce them.

However, he’d also told me it was legend that if there were no contenders for the queen’s magic at the time of her death, all the matriarchal magic of the True Race would go to the most powerful male.

Surely he wouldn’t have told me that if he’d planned all along to be the one. Would he? Was he that stupid?

Or so arrogant that he’d given me all the clues, laughing the entire time, as the “puny human” failed to put them together?

If he read the entire Sinsar Dubh, would that make him—unquestionably—the most powerful male, stronger even than the Unseelie King?

I hadn’t seen a single Unseelie Princess. Not one. All the Seelie Princesses were—according to V’lane—missing or dead.

What if he finished reading the Book and killed the queen?

He would have all the dark knowledge of the Unseelie King and all the magic of the queen. He would be unstoppable.

Was he the player who’d been manipulating events, biding time, waiting for the perfect moment?

I felt for my spear in the holster. It wasn’t there. I inhaled, nostrils flaring. How long ago had it disappeared? Had he taken it to kill the queen? Would he even need it? Once he’d absorbed the Book, could he simply unmake her?

Was I being totally paranoid?

This was V’lane, after all. He was probably just looking for the fragments of the Song for his queen and once he’d found them he would close the deadly tome.

I sidled in for a better view.

The men were blasting the walls with everything they had. Christopher and Christian were doing some sort of chant, while the others hammered at it. Nothing they did was having the slightest effect.

Peering between them, I suddenly got a clear look at V’lane. Unruffled by the assault on the walls he’d erected, he stood, head thrown back, eyes closed. His hands weren’t spread on each side of the Book as I’d thought.

They were on it, a palm pressed to each page.

How was he touching an Unseelie Hallow? The pages were entrancingly beautiful, each made of hammered gold, embellished with gems, covered with a strikingly bold, dynamic script that rushed across the pages like ceaseless waves. The First Language was as fluid as the original queen had been static.

V’lane wasn’t reading the Sinsar Dubh.

The spells scribed upon the gold pages were vanishing from the Book, passing up his arms, into his body, leaving the pages empty. He was draining it. Absorbing it. Becoming it.

“Barrons,” I shouted to be heard over the roars and grunts as bodies imploded with an unyielding barrier, “we’ve got a serious problem!”

“Same page, Mac. Same bloody word.”

51

When I was fifteen, Dad taught me how to drive. Mom was terrified to let me behind the wheel. I hadn’t been that bad. I remember swerving wide around a bend, narrowly missing a mailbox, and asking Daddy, But how do you stay on the road? What keeps people from just running off it? It’s not like we’re on rails.

He’d laughed. Ruts in the road, baby. They aren’t really there, but if you keep doing it over and over, eventually you begin to feel them, and a sort of autopilot kicks in.

Life is like that. Ruts in the road. My rut was that V’lane was one of the good guys.

But be careful, Jack had added, because autopilot can be dangerous. Drunk driver might come at you head on. The most important thing to know about ruts is how and when to get out of them.

I was immobilized by indecision. Was V’lane really one of the bad guys? Was he really trying to usurp all Fae power and rule? Was I supposed to intervene? What could I do?

As my mom and I watched, Kat, Jo, and the other sidhe-seers joined the assault on the walls. I was about to step in myself when my mom said, “Who’s that handsome young man? He wasn’t here be—” She froze, mid-word.

So did everyone in the cavern.

The Keltar stopped chanting. Barrons and my daddy were frozen mid-lunge. Even V’lane was affected, but not completely. The spells moving up his arms slowed from a fast-moving river to a stream.

I looked where my mother had been pointing and lost my breath.

He was by the door. No, he was behind me. No, he was right in front of me! When he smiled at me, I got lost in his eyes. They expanded until they were enormous and I was swallowed up in darkness, drifting between supernovas in space.

“Hey, beautiful girl,” the dreamy-eyed guy said.

“Butterfly fingers,” I managed finally. “You.”

“Finest surgeon,” he agreed.

“You helped.”

“Told you not to talk to it. You did.”

“I survived.”

“So far.”

“There’s more?”

“Always.”

I couldn’t stop staring. I knew who he was. And now that I knew, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before.

“Never let you, small thing.”

“Let me now.”

“Why?”

“Curiosity.”

“Dead cats.”

“Nine lives,” I countered.

He smiled and his head swiveled in a distinctly Unseelie manner. I was also seeing, superimposed on a space of air that couldn’t exist—at least not in this realm—an enormous darkness regarding me. Its head didn’t swivel: It grated like stone on stone. It was as if the king was so vast that no single realm could contain him, around him dimensions splintered, overlapped, shifted. His eyes locked with mine, opening wider and wider until they swallowed the entire abbey, and I went spinning, head over heels, into them, with the abbey tumbling beside me.

I was wrapped in enormous black velvet wings, taken into the heart of darkness that was the Unseelie King.

He was so far beyond my comprehension that I couldn’t begin to absorb it. “Ancient” didn’t come close, because he was newborn in each moment, as well. Time didn’t define him. He defined time. He wasn’t death or life, or creation or destruction. He was all possibles and none, everything and nothing, a bottomless abyss that would look back at you if you gazed into it. He was a truth of existence: Once you’d been exposed to him, you’d never be the same. Like a contagion that infected the blood and brain, he forced new neural pathways to develop merely to handle the brief contact. That or you went nuts.

For a split second, drifting in his vast, ancient embrace, I understood everything. It all made sense. The universes, the galaxies—existence was unfolding precisely as it should, and there was a symmetry, a pattern, a stunning beauty to the structure of it.

I was tiny and naked, lost in black velvet wings so lush, rich, and sensual that I never wanted to leave. His darkness wasn’t frightening. It was verdant, teeming with life on the verge of becoming. There were shiny pearls of worlds tucked into his feathers. I rolled between them, laughing with delight. I think he rolled with me, watching my reaction to him, learning me, tasting. I tumbled among planets, constellations, stars. They hung from his quills, suspended, trembling with growing pains. Waiting for the day he would unfasten them, bat them off into the ballpark, and see what they might do. A home run—hey, batter, batter! Fly ball, watch out! That ball sucks, didn’t stitch it tight enough … coming apart at the seams …

I saw us through his eyes: dust motes floating in a shaft of sunlight that stabbed through the rusted-out roof of a barn. He was as likely to swipe his hand through us and watch us scatter as he was to turn and walk away from this particular hole-in-the-roof byproduct. Or maybe sneeze us all into the great outdoors, where we would go whirling off in a dozen different directions, lost in lonely oblivion, never to come together again.

By our standards, he was mad. Utterly and completely mad. But every now and then, he surfaced and walked a fine line of sanity. It never lasted long.

By his standards, we were paper dolls, flat and one-dimensional. Barking mad as far as he was concerned. But every now and then, one of us walked a fine line of sanity. It never lasted long.

Still, all was well. Life was, and change happened.

Me. He thought I was relatively sane. I laughed until I cried, rolling around in his feathers. Because of his imprint inside me? If I was a shining example of my race, we should all be shot.

He showed me things. Took my hand and escorted me into an enormous theater, where I watched an endless play of light and shadows from a prime seat in the front row. He watched me, chin on a fist, from a red crushed-velvet chair in a box near the stage.

“Never did get it all out.” His voice came from every speaker: huge, melodic.

“The Book?”

“Can’t eviscerate essential self.”

“Playing doctor again?”

“Trying. You listening this time?”

“He’s stealing your Book. You listening?”

The dreamy-eyed guy’s head swiveled away from the stage, and suddenly the theater was gone and we were back in the cavern.

Wings no longer cradled me.

I was cold and alone. I missed his wings. I yearned for him. It hurt.

“It will pass,” he said absently. “You will forget the pain of separation. They always do.” His eyes narrowed on V’lane. “Yes. He is.”

“Aren’t you going to stop him?”

“Que sera, sera.”

I was being stalked by a song, haunted by the calliope from hell. “It’s your responsibility. You should take care of it.”

“Should is a false god. No fun there.”

“Some changes are better than others.”

“Expound.”

“If you stop him, the changes will be much more interesting.”

“Opinion. Subjective.”

“So is yours,” I said indignantly.

His starry eyes glinted with amusement. “If he replaces me, I will become something else.”

I could almost hear the Sinsar Dubh saying, Is not any act of destruction, should time enough pass, an act of creation? The apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

“I don’t want you replaced. I like you as you are.”

“Flirting with me, beautiful girl?”

I tried to breathe and couldn’t. The Unseelie King was touching me, kissing me. I could feel his lips on my skin, and I—I—I—

“Breathe, BG.”

I could breathe again.

“Please, stop him.” I wasn’t above begging. I’d get on my knees. If V’lane succeeded in gaining ultimate power, I didn’t want to live in this world. Not with him in charge. With a spell of unmaking he could kill Barrons, and he’d made it clear, every chance he got, that he wanted to. He had to be stopped. I wasn’t losing any of my people. My parents were going to live to a ripe old age. Barrons was going to live forever. Me? Well. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do. But I planned on having a long, full lifetime. “It would mean a lot to me.”

“You would owe me. Like you owe my Gray Woman.”

Was there anything he didn’t know? Deals with devils … Barrons would have said, if he hadn’t been frozen. “Deal.”

He winked. “I’d planned to, anyway.”

“Ooh! Then why did you—”

“Pretty girl and all. Asking. Gotta love that. Stuff of heroes. Don’t get the role often.”

He was gone. He reappeared near the slab, staring at V’lane through crystal walls.

I was horrified to realize V’lane was more than halfway through the Sinsar Dubh.

But it was going to be okay. The king was going to stop him, crush him like a bug. V’lane would take one look at who’d come after him and sift out with his tail tucked, whimpering with fear. The king would reseal the cavern, and all would be well. No one would have any spells of unmaking. Barrons would continue to be unkillable. That was a constant, eternal rock beneath my feet that I needed.

“—fore. Where on earth do you think he came from?” My mother finished her sentence. She frowned. “And where did he go?”

Time resumed and everyone in the cavern began moving again.

V’lane’s head dropped down and his eyes slid open.

His reaction wasn’t at all what I expected.

His mouth ticked up in a cool smile. “About fucking time you showed your face, old man.”

“Ah,” said the Unseelie King. “Cruce.”

52

Cruce? V’lane was Cruce?

I glanced around the cavern. Everyone looked as stupefied as I felt, staring between V’lane and the dreamy-eyed guy.

When I’d stood at Darroc’s side, watching the Seelie and Unseelie armies face off in a snowy Dublin street, I’d been awed by the mythic proportions of the event.

Now, according to the dreamy-eyed guy who was really the Unseelie King, the Seelie who’d been masquerading as V’lane for hundreds of thousands of years was really the legendary Cruce, aka War—the final and most perfect Unseelie ever sung into existence.

And he was facing off with his maker.

Cruce was staring down the Unseelie King.

It was the stuff of million-year-old legends. I looked from one to the other. You could have heard a pin drop in the cavern.

I glanced at Barrons, who had both brows raised in an expression of complete shock. For a change, there was something he hadn’t known, either. Then his eyes narrowed on the dreamy-eyed guy.

“He’s the king? That frail old geezer?”

“Geezer? You mean the pretty French woman,” Jo said. “She’s a waitress at Chester’s.”

“French woman? It’s the Morgan Freeman lookalike from the bar on the seventh level at Chester’s,” Christian said.

“No,” Dageus said, “ ’tis the ex-groundskeeper from Edinburgh castle who took on a bussing job at Ryodan’s pub when the walls fell.”

And I saw a young, dreamy-eyed college guy. He winked at me again. We all saw something different when we looked at him.

I stared back at V’lane … er, Cruce.

How had I not known? How had I been so completely duped? It had never been a Seelie Prince facing an Unseelie Prince that night in the snowy Dublin street but two Unseelie Princes. If War’s brother had recognized him, he’d never given it away.

V’lane was Cruce.

V’lane was War.

I’d walked hand in hand with him on a beach. I’d kissed him. More times than I could count. I’d had his name in my tongue. I’d trembled with orgasm after orgasm in his arms. He’d given me Ashford back. Had he taken it to begin with?

War. Of course. He’d turned my world on itself. He’d set armies against each other and sat back watching the chaos he’d created. He’d even gotten out in it and fought with us. No doubt laughing inside, enjoying the added chaos, being in the thick of the fight, watching his handiwork up close and personal.

Was he behind it all? Had he been nudging Darroc for millennia, priming him to defy the queen? And when Darroc was made mortal, had Cruce whispered in a few Unseelie ears, maybe planted key information, and helped him bring down the walls from far behind the scenes? Had he been watching, waiting for the day he might get close enough to the Sinsar Dubh to steal the king’s knowledge and kill the current queen and take her magic?

Did Fae really possess such patience?

He’d killed all the princesses and secreted the queen away to kill at the right time.

He’d turned the Seelie and Unseelie courts against each other, using our world as their battlefield.

We were all pawns on his chessboard.

I had no doubt he was after the ultimate power. The nerve of him, the arrogance—he was the one who’d told me it could be done and how! He was the one who’d recounted the legend to begin with. Unable to resist bragging? When I’d asked him about Cruce, he’d gotten irritated, saying: One day you will wish to talk of me. He’d been jealous of himself, angry that he couldn’t reveal his true majesty. He’d said, Cruce was the most beautiful of all, although the world will never know it—a waste of perfection to never have laid eyes upon one such as he. How it must have chafed him to have to hide his true face for so long.

I’d tanned in a silk chaise, lying next to him. I’d dipped my toes in the surf, holding hands with War. I’d admired an Unseelie Prince’s naked body. Wondered what it would be like to have sex with him. I’d conspired with the enemy and never even guessed it. All the while he’d been touching and adjusting things, nudging us this way and that.

And it had worked.

He’d gotten exactly what he’d wanted. Here he was: standing over the king’s Book, absorbing the deadly knowledge, with the unconscious queen lying at his feet so he could kill her and take the True Magic of their race, too. He’d put her on ice in the Unseelie prison to keep her under control and alive until he was certain he was the most powerful male among them all. The king had given up his dark knowledge. Once Cruce had it, would he really be stronger than the king?

I watched the spells scribed in the Sinsar Dubh slide off the page, move up his fingers into his hands, arms, shoulders, and vanish beneath his skin. He was almost done. Why wasn’t the king stopping him?

“Begun. Can’t be stopped. Think I’d leave part of the Book in two places when they couldn’t even guard one?” the king said.

Barrons and the rest of the men were back to slamming the walls, trying to tear them down to get to Cruce.

But it was too late. He had only a few pages left to go.

I stood, shivering, looking between the king and Cruce, hoping the king knew what he was doing.

Cruce turned the last page.

As the final spell vanished, the Book collapsed into a thin pile of gold dust and a handful of winking red gemstones on the slab.

The Sinsar Dubh had finally been destroyed.

Too bad it now lived and breathed inside the most powerful Unseelie Prince ever created.

The transition was seamless.

One moment I was in the cavern with everyone else. The next I was standing on a giant grassy swell of a hill with Cruce and the king.

An enormous moon obliterated the horizon. Welling up from behind the planet, it blocked out the night sky entirely but for a smattering of stars against a cobalt palette above it.

The rounded pasture climbed gently for miles, vanishing into the moon and making it seem like, if I walked to the top of the ridge, I might hop the pine-board fence and bridge planet to moon with a single leap. The air hummed with a low-level charge, and in the distance, thunder rolled. Black megaliths jutted like the fingers of a fallen giant poking into the cool, unblinking eye of the moon.

We stood between towering stones—Cruce facing the king, me at midpoint between them.

The queen was slumped at Cruce’s feet.

I backed out and away for a wider view. I wondered who’d brought us here and left all the others behind. Cruce or the king? Why?

Wind whipped my hair into a tangle. The breeze was rich with spice and the fragrance of night-blooming jasmine. Hunters glided past the moon, gonging deep in their chests, and the moon answered.

I had no idea what world I was on, what galaxy I was in, but some part of me—my inner king—knew this place. We’d chosen the hill of Tara for the resemblance, but Tara was a pale imitation. On Earth, the moon was never so near as it was here, and there was only one, not three, in the night sky. Power pulsed in this planet’s rocky core and mineral veins, earth’s magic had been bored to death by humans long ago.

“Why the three of us?” I said.

“Children,” the king replied.

I didn’t like what his answer seemed to imply. War was so not my brother.

“MacKayla,” Cruce said softly.

I gave him a cool look. “Did you think it was funny? You lied to me over and over. You used me.”

“I wanted you to accept me as I was, but—how is it you say?—my reputation preceded me. Others filled your head with lies about Cruce. I endeavored to correct them, open your eyes.”

“By telling me more lies? V’lane didn’t kill Cruce the day the king and queen fought. You switched places with V’lane.”

“With the three amulets the king never believed good enough, I deceived them all. Together they are strong.” He touched his neck, a smug glint in his eyes, and although I couldn’t see them, I knew he wore them still. He’d used them to maintain his flawless glamour of Seelie Prince. I’d seen it flicker only a few times, when he’d been near the abbey’s wards.

“That day I called you to help me defeat the guardian in the abbey, the day you hissed and vanished—”

“It was a truth ward made of blood and bone. It sensed me as Unseelie. Had I stayed, I would have been unable to maintain the glamour. But you could not pass it, either. Why is that?”

I didn’t answer. “The queen killed V’lane with her sword, and never even knew it. You’ve been impersonating him ever since.”

“He was a fool. After I had my audience with the queen, it was V’lane she dispatched to confine me in her bower. I took his face and gave him mine. He was not half the Fae I am. He knew nothing of true illusion, could not have created an amulet capable of such if he’d lived a million years. Then I took him to her to kill. He was pathetic. Pleaded his innocence. Whimpered at the end and made a mockery of my name. The other Unseelie Princes tried their hand at a curse and blamed that on me, as well.”

“You hid among the Seelie all this time.”

“Never drinking from the cauldron. Watching. Waiting for the perfect convergence of events. The Book was missing for an eternity. The old fool hid it. Twenty-three years ago I felt it and knew the time was right. But enough about me. What are you, MacKayla?”

“You set Darroc up.”

“I encouraged where encouragement was useful.”

“You want to be king,” I said.

Cruce’s iridescent eyes flashed. “Why would I not? Someone needs to take over. He turned his back on his children. We were an accident of creation he sought to contain and hide. He fears power? I do not. He refuses to lead our people? I will champion them as he never did.”

“And when they weary of your rule?” the king said. “When you realize you can never please them?”

“I will make them happy. They will love me.”

“So all gods think. At first.”

“Shut up, old man.”

“Still you wear V’lane’s face. What do you fear?” the king said.

“I fear nothing.” But his gaze lingered on me a long moment. “I fight for my race, MacKayla. I have since I was born. He would conceal us in shame and condemn us to a half life. Remember that. There are reasons for all I have done.”

Abruptly his golden mane was raven, his gold-velvet skin bronzed.

Iridescent eyes emptied. A torque threaded with silver slithered around his neck. Beneath his skin, kaleidoscopic tattoos crashed like waves in a turbulent sea. He was beautiful. He was horrifying. He was soul-destroying. A nimbus of gold surrounded his body.

And his face, oh, God, his face, I knew that face. I’d seen that face. Bending over me. Holding my head in his arms. Cradling me.

While he moved inside me.

“You were the fourth at the church!” I cried. He’d raped me. With his other dark brethren, he’d turned me into a mindless shell of a person, left me shattered and naked in the street. And I would have remained broken forever, except that Barrons had come charging in after me with men and guns, taken me away, and put me back together again.

The Unseelie Prince cocked his head, looking every bit as unnatural as his brothers. Sharp teeth gleamed white against the dark skin of his face. “They would have killed you. They had never had a human woman. Darroc underestimated their ardor.”

“You raped me!”

“I saved you, MacKayla.”

“Saving me would have been getting me out of there!”

“You were already Pri-ya when I found you. Your life was ending. I gave you my elixir—”

“Your elixir?” the king said mildly.

“—to stem your wounds.”

“You didn’t have to have sex with me to do it!”

“I desired you. You refused me. I wearied of your protests. You wanted me. You thought about it. You were not even there. What difference?”

“You think that makes it okay?”

“I do not understand your objections. I did nothing that had not already been done by others. Nothing you had not considered. And I did it better.”

“What exactly did you give me?”

“I do not exactly”—he imitated my tone perfectly—“know. I have never given it to a human before.”

“Was it the queen’s elixir?”

“It was mine,” the king said.

“I improved it. You are the past,” Cruce said. “I am the future. It is time for you to be unmade.”

He was going to unmake the king? Was it possible?

“Kids. Pain in the ass. Don’t know why I ever made them. Hell on relationships.”

“You have no idea,” Cruce said. “Getting the queen to kill V’lane was not the first illusion I wove and left for you, old fool, although it was the first you saw. This was.” He bent and grabbed a fistful of the queen’s hair, raising her by it. As he did, her blankets fell away.

The king went perfectly still.

In his eyes I saw the black-and-white boudoir, void of all but empty memories, the endless barren years, the eternal grieving. I saw loneliness as vast and all-encompassing as his wings. I knew the joy of their union and the despair of their separation.

I no longer trusted anyone’s face. I sought my sidhe-seer center, reinforced it with the amulet, and demanded to be shown what was true.

She was still the concubine. The king’s mortal beloved, the one he’d gone insane over, created the Sinsar Dubh because of, walked away from his entire race for.

“As the current queen, her death will grant me the True Magic of our race. I saved her to kill in front of you before I unmake you. But this time when you see her dead, it will be no illusion.”

When the king said nothing, Cruce said impatiently, “Do you not wish to know how I did it, you stubborn old fuck? No? You never would speak up when it mattered. The day you went to battle the queen, I took the concubine another of your famous elixirs, but this time it was no potion: It was a cup stolen from the cauldron of forgetting. She stood in your boudoir while I erased all memory of you. When she was a blank slate, I bent her over your bed and fucked her. I hid her from you where I knew you would never look. The Seelie court. I took V’lane’s place and pretended she was a human I’d become enamored of. Over time, as the courtiers drank from the cauldron and forgot, as Seelie Princesses rose to power and were deposed, she became one of us. I achieved what your potions never did. Time in Faery, our potions, and our way of life made her Fae. Is it not ironic? The day came when she was so powerful she became our queen. She was always there—alive—but you never even looked. I kept her in the one place I knew the arrogant Un-Seelie King would not go. Bedding down with your grudges while I bedded your bitch. Your concubine became my lover, my queen. And now her death will make me you.”

The king’s eyes were sad. “In more ways than you know, if it were true. But another stands in your way.” He glanced at me.

My eyes widened and I shook my head instantly. “What are you trying to do? Get him to kill me? I’m not in his way.”

“Our magic prefers a woman. I believe it would choose you.”

“I have the Sinsar Dubh,” Cruce said. “She does not.”

The king laughed. “You think to become me. She becomes her. Not the only possible.”

I was horrified. I thought I understood what he was saying and didn’t like it one bit.

“Perhaps Barrons becomes Cruce. Who, then, would cry judgment?” the king said.

“Barrons wouldn’t become War,” I said instantly.

“Or me. Depends on the nuances.” The king looked at the concubine in Cruce’s grasp. “Irrelevant, all of it. I’m not done yet.”

She was gone.

“What the—?” Cruce’s hands were suddenly empty. He lunged forward and slammed into an invisible barrier. His eyes narrowed and he began to chant in a voice that made my blood ice, chiming like the full-blooded Unseelie Prince he was.

The king waved a hand and Cruce stopped chiming.

Cruce sketched a complicated symbol in the air, eyes narrowed on the king. Nothing happened. He began to chime again. The king silenced him.

Cruce conjured a rune and flung it at the king. It hit the invisible barrier and dropped. He flung a dozen more. They all did the same. It was like watching a man and a woman fight, where the man was simply trying to keep the woman from hurting herself too much.

Cruce rocked back on his heels and his wings began to open, black velvet and enormous, framing a nude, muscled body of such perfection that my cheeks were suddenly wet. Long black hair streamed down his shoulders; brilliant colors rushed beneath his bronze skin.

I touched my face and my fingers came away bloody.

I was awed by the dark majesty of him. I knew why War was as often revered as feared. I knew what it felt like to be cradled in those wings while he moved inside me.

The Unseelie King watched him, paternal pride glittering in his eyes.

Cruce was trying to destroy him, and he was proud of him.

Like a parent watching his child kick off the training wheels and take off down the drive for the first time without help.

And I knew that Cruce had never stood a chance, so long as the king cared to exist.

The danger would never be whether the king was powerful enough—he was and always would be the strongest of them all.

The true danger would always only be whether he cared enough.

He saw existence completely differently from everyone else. What we might view as defeat and destruction, he saw—like the Book he’d created—far down the arrows of time, as an act of creation.

Who knew? Maybe it was.

But I liked existing here and now, and I’d fight for it. I didn’t have a bird’s-eye view and didn’t want it. I liked padding around on dog paws, kicking up fall leaves and digging in spring dew, sniffing up scents on the ground, and living a life. I was only too happy to leave the flying for those with wings.

I reached for my spear. It was in my holster. And I realized it always had been whenever “V’lane” was around. It was part of the complex illusion he’d maintained. As an Unseelie, he’d never been able to touch it yet could have been killed by it, so whenever we were together, he’d fed me the glamour that it was no longer in my holster. Just as the Unseelie Princes had fed me an illusion that I’d been turning it on myself there in the church.

I never had. I’d chosen to throw it away because I’d believed the glamour. I could have killed them that night, if I’d been able to see through it. The power had always been right here, inside me, if I’d just known it.

I would kill him now.

“Don’t even think about it,” the Unseelie King said.

“He took your concubine. He faked her death. He raped me!”

“No harm, no foul.”

“Are you kidding me?”

He looked at his concubine. “Today amuses.”

Abruptly, the moon and megaliths were gone. We were back in the cavern.

Cruce chimed, his wings open to their full majestic glory, eyes blazing with righteous fury, lips peeled back in a snarl.

The king iced him like that.

A nude, avenging angel, encased in clear crystal. Blue-black bars shot up from the floor, framing his prison.

I should have told the king to put clothes on him.

Make the ice cloudy so no one could see him. Hide those stunning velvety wings. Tone down the golden halo around him.

Make him look less … angelic, sexual, erotic. But you know what they say about hindsight.

The king said to Kat, “He is your Sinsar Dubh now.”

“No!” Kat exclaimed. “We don’t want him!”

“Your fault it got out. Contain it better this time.”

I heard Barrons say, “McCabe? What the fuck are you doing here?”

People began to appear in the cavern, sifting in. The white-suited McCabe from Casa Blanc was joined by the leprechaun-like reservations clerk from my first night at the Clarin House and by the news vendor from the street who’d given me directions to the Garda, the one who’d called me a hairy jackass.

“Liz?” Jo said. “Where did you come from?”

Liz said nothing, simply moved, as they all did, to join the Unseelie King.

“He’s too big for one body,” I said numbly.

“I knew there was something wrong with her!” Jo exclaimed.

The king had been watching the sidhe-seers and Barrons. He’d posed as one of the players hunting his own Book. He’d been watching me all this time. Since the day I’d come to Dublin. He’d checked me into the Clarin House.

“Before that, beautiful girl.” The king slanted me a look that horrified me. Pride glittered in his starry eyes.

My high school gym coach joined him. When my grade school principal appeared, I locked my jaw and gave the king a mutinous glare. Since the beginning. “Little help might have been nice.”

The king cradled the concubine tenderly to his chest. “What would you change?”

“You must give her to us,” Dree’lia demanded. “We need her. Without V’lane, who will lead us?”

“Find a new queen. She is mine.”

Velvet bristled. “But there is no one—”

“Grow a pair, Velvet,” the king snapped.

“We don’t want Cruce. You take him,” Kat was insisting.

“What the bloody hell is going on? You can’t take the queen. We work for her,” Drustan was saying.

“What about the Compact?” Cian said. “We need to renegotiate it!”

“Change me back!” Christian demanded. “I ate only one bite. That’s not enough to do this to me. Why am I being punished?”

The king only had eyes for the woman in his arms.

“You can’t leave until you put the bloody walls back up,” Dageus was growling. “We’ve no idea how to go about—”

“You’ll figure it out.”

Skins began to drop to the floor, empty shells of the king’s parts. For a moment, I was worried my own might fall off, but it didn’t.

Barrons had pulled me back from being Pri-ya. I had no doubt the king would find his concubine, too. Wherever she was, in whatever cave of amnesia she was trapped, he would join her. Tell her stories. Make love to her. Until one day they both got up and walked out of it.

The dreamy-eyed guy began to change, absorbing the shadows that passed from the skins.

He stretched and expanded until he towered over us like the Sinsar Dubh’s beast, but without the malevolence, and when his wings spread wide, eclipsing the chamber in night, stars and worlds dangling from his quills, I felt his joy.

The thought that she’d left him by choice had driven him mad.

But she hadn’t. She’d been taken.

He’d loved her for all time.

Before she was made.

After he’d believed she was gone.

Sunshine to his ice. Frost to her fever.

I wished them forever.

You, too, beautiful girl.

The Unseelie King was gone.