Shadowfever

I AM NOT EVIL.

Then why do you destroy?

CLARIFY.

You do heinous things.

EXPOUND.

You kill.

THOSE THAT ARE KILLED BECOME ANOTHER THING.

Yes, dead! Destroyed.

DEFINE DESTROY.

To demolish, damage, ruin, kill.

DEFINE CREATE.

To give rise to, fashion something from nothing, take raw material and invent something new.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS NOTHING. ALL IS SOMETHING. WHERE DOES YOUR “RAW MATERIAL” COME FROM? WAS IT NOT SOMETHING BEFORE YOU FORCED IT TO BECOME SOMETHING ELSE?

Clay is just a lump of clay before an artist molds it into a beautiful vase.

LUMP. BEAUTIFUL. OPINION. SUBJECTIVE. THE CLAY WAS SOMETHING. PERHAPS YOU WERE AS UNIMPRESSED WITH IT AS I AM BY HUMANS, YET YOU CANNOT DENY IT WAS ITS ESSENTIAL SELF. YOU SMASHED IT, STRETCHED IT, PULLED IT, SMELTED IT, DYED IT, AND FORCED IT TO BECOME SOMETHING ELSE. YOU IMPOSED YOUR WILL UPON IT. AND YOU CALL THIS CREATION?

I TAKE A BEING AND MAKE ITS MOLECULES REST. HOW IS THAT NOT CREATION? IT WAS ONE THING AND IS ANOTHER. ONCE IT ATE, NOW IT IS EATEN. DID I NOT CREATE SUSTENANCE FOR ANOTHER WITH ITS NEW STATE? CAN THERE BE ANY ACT OF CREATION THAT DOES NOT FIRST DESTROY? VILLAGES FALL. CITIES RISE. HUMANS DIE. LIFE SPRINGS FROM THE SOIL WHEREIN THEY LIE. IS NOT ANY ACT OF DESTRUCTION, SHOULD TIME ENOUGH PASS, AN ACT OF CREATION?

—CONVERSATIONS WITH THE SINSAR DUBH

36

“Happy birthday!” I cried, as I opened the front door of BB&B. When Dani stepped inside, I stuck a pointy party hat on her head, snapped the elastic string beneath her chin, and handed her a party horn.

“Gotta be kidding me, Mac. It was months ago.” She looked embarrassed, but I saw the sparkle in her eyes. “V’lane said you wanted me. Gotta love that, dude—a Fae prince comes looking for the Mega! What’s up? Ain’t seen you for a while.”

I led her to Party Central in the back of the bookstore, where a fire leapt, music played, and I’d piled wrapped packages on a table.

Her eyes widened. “This all for me? Ain’t never had a party.”

“We’ve got potato chips, pizza, cake, cookies, and candy, and all the sweets are triple chocolate fudge, chocolate mousse, or chocolate chip. We’re going to be total couch potatoes, open presents, gorge, and watch movies.”

“Like you and Alina used to?”

“Just like.” I put my arm around her shoulder. “But first things first. Sit down and stay right there.”

I hurried back to the front of the store, removed the cake from the fridge, stuck fourteen candles on it, and lit them.

I was proud of my cake. I’d taken my time icing it, with swoops and swirls, then decorated it with shavings of bittersweet chocolate.

“You’ve got to make a wish and blow out the candles.” I placed it on the coffee table in front of her.

She stared down at the cake with a dubious expression, and for a moment all I could think was, Please don’t smash it into the ceiling. It had taken me all afternoon and three tries to bake one that had finally turned out well.

She looked at me, squeezed her eyes shut, and screwed her face into a pucker of fierce determination.

“Don’t hurt yourself, honey. It’s just a wish,” I teased.

But she wished like she did everything else: one hundred fifty percent. She stood there so long I was beginning to suspect she had a little bit of an attorney in her and was adding codicils and caveats.

Then her eyes popped open and she flashed me that cocky grin. She nearly blew the icing off the cake. “Means it’ll hafta come true, right? Cause I blew ’em out?”

“Haven’t you had a birthday cake before, Dani?”

She jerked her head.

“From this day forward, there will be at least one birthday cake for Dani Mega O’Malley each year,” I proclaimed solemnly.

She beamed, cut the cake, and plunked two huge wedges on plates. I added cookies and a handful of candy.

“Dude,” she said happily, licking the knife, “what are we gonna watch first?”

Since I came to Dublin, there haven’t been many moments in my life when I’ve been able to sit back, relax, and forget.

Tonight was one of them. It was bliss. For a stolen evening, I was Mac again. Eating good food, enjoying good company, pretending I didn’t have a care in the world. One thing I’ve learned is that the harder your life gets, the gentler you have to be with yourself when you finally get some downtime, or you can’t be strong when you need to be.

We watched a dark comedy and laughed our petunias off, while I painted her stubby fingernails black.

“What’s this?” I said, noticing her bracelet.

Her cheeks pinked. “Ain’t nothing. Dancer gave it to me.”

“Who’s Dancer? You have a boyfriend?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Ain’t like that.”

“What’s it like?”

“Dancer’s cool, but he ain’t … he’s got … just a friend.”

Yeah, right. The Mega had blushed. Dancer was more than a friend. “How’d you meet him?”

She wriggled uncomfortably. “We watching this movie or being sissies?”

I picked up the remote and hit the pause button. “Sisters, not sissies. Spill, Dani. Who’s Dancer?”

“You never tell me nothing about your sex life,” she said crossly. “Bet you and Alina talked about sex all the time.”

I sat up straight, alarmed. “Are you having a sex life?”

“Nah, man. Ain’t ready yet. Just saying. Wanna talk like sisters, gotta do more than read me the riot act.”

I breathed again. She’d been forced to grow up so fast. I wanted some part of her life to unfold slowly, perfectly, with roses and romance. Not in the heat of the moment, with the console of a Camaro digging into the small of her back and some guy she barely knew on top of her, but in a way that she’d remember forever. “Remember when I said we were overdue for a talk?”

“And here comes the lecture,” she muttered. “Dude, ears up, they didn’t tell us all the important stuff about the prophecy. Left out a lot.”

She sprang it on me out of the blue, derailing me completely, as she’d known she would.

“And you’re just now telling me this?”

She poked out her bottom lip. “Was getting around to it. You’re the one that wanted to talk stupid stuff while I was trying to be professional-like. Just heard it myself. Ain’t been hanging around the abbey much. Moved out long time ago.”

I’d assumed she’d moved back in! One day I’d learn to quit making assumptions. “Where have you been staying? With Jayne at Dublin Castle?”

She crossed her arms over her chest, preening. “Pop by to kill the Fae fecks they catch, but got my own digs. Call it Casa Mega.”

Dani was living on her own? And she had a boyfriend? “You just turned fourteen.” I was horrified. The boyfriend part was fine—well, maybe, depending on what he was like, how old he was, and if he was good enough for her—but the living on her own part of things was going to have to change, fast.

“I know. Long overdue, huh?” She flashed me that gamine grin. “Got a couple o’ places for different moods. ’S all there for the picking. Even got a crotch rocket!” She waggled her fingers. “Five-finger discount. I was made for this world.”

Who would take care of her if she got the flu? Who would talk to her about birth control and STDs? Who would bandage her cuts and scrapes and make sure she ate right?

“ ’Bout the prophecy, Mac. There’s a whole ’nuther part they didn’t tell us.”

I shelved parental concerns for the moment. “Where did you hear that?”

“Jo told me.”

“I thought Jo was loyal to Rowena.”

“Think Jo’s got stuff going on the side. She’s part of Ro’s Haven, but don’t think she likes her none. Said Ro wouldn’t let ’em tell you the whole truth and they kept it from me ’cause they don’t trust me neither. Think I tell you everything.”

“So, spill,” I urged.

“Prophecy has a whole buncha other parts, more deets about peeps and the ways things’ll happen. Says the one who dies young is gonna betray the human race and hook up with those that made the Beast.”

I shifted uneasily. A thousand years before Alina had even been born, it had been foretold that she would join Team Darroc?

“Says the one who longs for death, the one that’s gonna hunt the Book—that’s you, Mac—ain’t human, and the two from the ancient bloodlines ain’t got a snowball chance in hell o’ fixing our mess, ’cause they ain’t gonna want to.”

I shaped my mouth around words but nothing came out.

“Says the whole gig’s got ’bout twenty percent chance o’ working, and, if it don’t, the second prophecy has about two percent odds.”

“Who writes prophecies with such sucky odds?” I said irritably.

She cracked up. “Dude—I said the same thing!”

“Why didn’t they tell me? They made it sound like I was virtually insignificant.” I’d liked it that way. I had enough problems to deal with.

Dani shrugged. “Whole thing about Ro never telling us we might be an Unseelie caste—said if you knew, it might be like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I say you gotta know what’cha are, know? Look in the mirror, eyes gotta meet eyes or quit looking.”

“What else?” I demanded. “Was there more?”

“There’s like this whole other … sub-prophecy. Says if the two from the ancient bloodlines are killed, things’ll play out different and the odds of success’ll be higher. Younger they’re killed, the better.”

A chill slid up my spine. That was brutal and to the point. Who would go how far to skew the odds more strongly in favor of the human race? I was surprised we hadn’t been killed at birth. Assuming I’d had one.

“So I was thinking that’s prolly why you and Alina got gave up. Somebody didn’t wanna kill you guys as little kids, so they sent you away.”

Of course. And we’d been forbidden to return. But Alina had wanted to go to Dublin to study abroad, and Daddy had never been able to deny us anything.

One decision, one tiny decision, and the world as we knew it began to fall apart.

“What else?” I pressed.

“Jo said they been talking to Nana O’ behind Ro’s back. Said the old woman was at the abbey the night the Book got out. Saw things. Sidhe-seers ripped to pieces, hacked apart. Said they only found little pieces of some. Others, they never found.”

“Nana was there when the Book got out?” She hadn’t mentioned a word of it the night Kat and I had talked to her at her cottage by the sea. Short of calling me Alina, telling us that her granddaughter, Kayleigh, had been Isla’s best friend and fellow Haven member, and that she’d felt dark stirrings in the soil, she’d told us little else.

Dani shook her head. “Showed up after. Said her bones told her her daughter’s immortal soul was in peril.”

“You mean her granddaughter, Kayleigh.”

“I mean her daughter.” Dani’s eyes sparkled. “Ro.”

My mouth shaped a silent O. “Rowena is Nana’s daughter?” I finally managed. Rowena was Kayleigh’s mother? How much more had Nana O’Reilly neglected to tell me?

“Old woman despises her. Won’t claim her. Kat and Jo searched Nana’s cottage while she slept and found things—pictures and baby books and stuff. Nana thinks Ro’s part of how the Book got out. Said Kayleigh told her they’d created a backup mini-Haven that Ro knew nothing about, with a leader that didn’t even live at the abbey. Name was Tessie or Tellie or something funny like that. Case something happened to the Haven members that lived at the abbey.”

My head was spinning. They’d been keeping me completely out of the loop. If I’d postponed celebrating Dani’s birthday, I never would have learned any of this. Here was the mysterious Tellie that Barrons and my father had both mentioned! She’d been leader of a secret Haven. She’d helped my mother escape. I needed to find her. Have you located Tellie yet? I’d overheard Barrons saying. No? Get more people on it. It seemed Barrons had once again beat me to the punch and had his men out hunting for her already. Why? How did he know about the woman? What had he learned that he hadn’t told me? “And?”

“Said your m—well, supposedly you ain’t human, so I guess she ain’t your mom—Isla got out alive. Nana O’ saw her leaving that night. Ain’t never gonna guess with who!”

I didn’t even trust myself to speak. Rowena. And the old bitch had probably killed her. Whether she was my mom or not, I still felt tied to her, protective of her.

“Aw, c’mon, you gotta guess!” She was getting blurry around the edges with excitement.

“Rowena,” I said flatly.

“Guess again,” she said. “This one’s gonna fry your mind. Nana never woulda known, ’cept you stopped by with him. Well, she don’t call him a him, she calls him an it.”

I stared at her. “Who?” I demanded.

“Saw Isla getting in a car with something she calls the Damned. Dude that drove off twenty-some years ago with the only survivor of the abbey’s Haven was Barrons.”

I was so wound up after everything Dani told me that there was no way I was going to be able to do something as lethargic as curl on a sofa and watch a movie. Plus, I had so much sugar running through my system I was nearly vibrating like Dani.

After she dropped the Barrons’ bomb, she hit play and began cracking up again. The kid is resilient.

I sat and stared at the screen, not seeing a thing.

Why would Barrons keep from me that he’d been at the abbey when the Book escaped twenty-odd years ago? Why hide from me that he’d known Isla O’Connor, my sister’s mother? I could relinquish a mother I’d never had, but I couldn’t give up my sister. Whether she was mine or not, that was how I was thinking of her, period. The end.

I remembered coming down the back stairs, catching him talking to Ryodan on the phone, hearing him say, After what I learned about her the other night. Had he been referring to the night we’d gone to the cottage? Had he been as surprised as I was to hear Nana tell me the woman he’d left the abbey with two decades ago had supposedly been my mother?

Had he taken her to this Tellie woman, who’d then helped Alina and me find an adoptive home in America? If Isla had left the abbey alive, why, how, when had she died? Had she even made it to Tellie, or had the woman agreed in advance to get her children out if anything happened to her? What part had Barrons been playing in all this? Had he killed Isla?

I shifted restlessly. He’d seen the cake. He knew I had a birthday party planned. He hated birthdays. There was no way he’d show his face tonight.

I picked at a piece of chocolate mousse icing. I stared around the bookstore. I contemplated the mural on the ceiling and fiddled with the cashmere throw. I plucked crumbs from the corner of the sofa and lined them up on my plate.

Rowena was Nana’s daughter. Isla and Kayleigh had practically grown up together. Isla had been the Haven Mistress. They’d felt it necessary to form a Haven behind Ro’s back. One that didn’t even live at the abbey. Isla had run the formal one, and the mysterious Tellie had run the secret one. All these years my mom—Isla—had been taking the blame for the Book escaping, and now it looked like it had been Rowena behind things.

She’d let us all take the blame: first Isla, then Alina, then me.

… the two from the ancient bloodlines ain’t got a snowball chance in hell o’ fixing our mess, cause they ain’t gonna want to.

I sighed. When I’d overheard my mom and dad in Ashford that night, talking about how I might doom the world, I’d felt condemned. Then Kat and Jo had showed me the prophecy—what I now knew was an abbreviated version—and I’d felt absolved.

Now I was back to feeling condemned. It was more than a little disturbing to hear that the sooner my sister and I got killed, the better off the human race would be.

If she’d lived, would Alina have chosen Darroc? In a fit of grief, I’d wanted to unmake this world for a new one with Barrons in it. Were we both fatally flawed? Instead of having been smuggled from the country for our own good, had we been exiled for the sake of the world? Was that why the DEG had given me THE WORLD card? To warn me that I was going to destroy it if I wasn’t careful? That I needed to look at it, see it, choose it? Who was he, anyway?

When I’d first arrived in Dublin and begun finding things out about myself, I’d felt like a reluctant hero, questing on an epic journey.

Now I just hoped I wouldn’t end up screwing things up too much. Big problems demanded big decisions. How could I trust my own judgment when I wasn’t even sure who I was?

I crossed my legs. Uncrossed them and raked a hand through my hair.

“Dude—you watching or doing couch calisthenics?” Dani complained.

I gave her a stark look. “You want to go kill something?”

She beamed. She had a chocolate ice-cream mustache. “Man, I thought you’d never ask!”

Each time Dani and I have fought back-to-back is a golden memory I’ve tucked away in the scrapbook of my mind.

I can’t help but think it’s what things would have been like if Alina had trusted me and we’d gotten to fight together. Knowing that you’ve got somebody watching your back, you’re a team, you’d never leave each other behind, you’d break each other out of enemy camps, is one of the greatest feelings in the world. Knowing that no matter how bad the trouble is you’ve gotten yourself into, that person will come for you and go on with you—that’s love. I wonder if Alina and I were weak because we let ourselves get divided, separated by an ocean. I wonder whether she’d still be alive if we’d stayed together.

I may never know where I came from, but I can choose my family from here on out, and Dani’s a non-negotiable part of it. Jack and Rainey are going to love her when they finally meet her.

We blasted through the rain-slicked streets, killing Unseelie with a vengeance. With each one I stabbed, I grew more convinced I wasn’t the king. I would have felt something if I had been: remorse, guilt, something. The king had been unwilling to give up his shadow children. I felt no pride of creation, no misguided love. I felt nothing but satisfaction at ending their immortal, parasitic existences and saving human lives.

We ran into Jayne and the Guardians and helped them out of a tight spot with a couple of sifters. We saw Lor and Fade on the prowl. I thought I glimpsed a Keltar on a rooftop, but he vanished so quickly I was left only with the impression of sleek tattooed muscle in the darkness.

Near dawn, we ended up a little too close to Chester’s and I decided we should probably call it quits for the day. I was finally tired enough to sleep and I wanted to be at my best to track the Sinsar Dubh.

Tonight, it would finally end. Tonight we would seal the Book away forever. Then I would pick up the pieces of my life and begin rebuilding it, starting with my mom and dad. I would continue with my missions to find out who’d killed Alina and who I was, but once the Book was locked down again, I’d finally be able to breathe a little easier. Take more time like tonight for myself, time to live … and love.

“Let’s head back to the bookstore, Dani.”

A strangled sound was the only reply.

I spun and sucked in a screech of breath. I didn’t think. I just lunged and slammed my palms into her to Null the bitch.

The Gray Woman froze, but I was too late.

I stared in horror. While I’d been lost in my own thoughts, the lesion-covered, beauty-sucking Gray Woman had sifted in, grabbed Dani unaware, and begun devouring her. Right behind me, and I hadn’t even noticed!

All I could think was, But this isn’t her MO—the Gray Woman devours men!

Dani tried to shake her off but couldn’t. “Dude, how bad’m I?”

I looked directly at her and nearly lost it. Bad. I gaped. This was not happening. This was unacceptable. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t lose Dani. I felt something wild and dark stir inside me.

“Aw, man, get her off me!” she cried.

I tried. I couldn’t. Dani tried, too, but the Gray Woman’s hands created an unbreakable suction, fusing her victim to her until she chose to release it. I kept hitting her with my palms to keep her frozen, running a constant Null effect on her, trying to clear my head and figure out what to do. I kept stealing sideways glances at Dani. What was left of her hair was no longer auburn. Big bald patches showed, and lesions had formed on her scalp. Her eyes were sunken holes in a bloodless face. She was covered with sores and looked like she’d lost fifty pounds, and she couldn’t have weighed more than twice that soaking wet.

“Shoulda known,” Dani said miserably. “She hangs here. Likes Chester’s. I been hunting her. Guess she knew it. Ow!” She touched her mouth.

Her lips were cracked, oozing. It looked as if her teeth were about to start falling out.

Tears stung my eyes. I slammed my palms into the frozen Gray Woman. “Get off her, get off her!” I shouted.

“Too late, Mac. Ain’t it? That’s what I’m seeing in your eyes.”

“Never too late.” I pulled my spear out and pressed it to the Gray Woman’s throat. “Do what I say, Dani. Don’t move. Just let me handle this. I’m going to let her unfreeze.”

“She’ll finish me!”

“No, she won’t. Trust me. Hang on.” I closed my eyes and opened my mind. I stood on the black beach and stared at the dark waters. Deep down, something stirred, whispered welcome, greeted me with affection. Missed you, it said. Take these, they are all you need. But come back soon, there is so much more. I knew that. I could feel it. The lake was like the padlocked box in which I kept thoughts I couldn’t face. There were chains to break, a lid to lift. The runes I gathered seeped out cracks. But one day I was going to have to open that dark place of power and look deep. I scooped crimson runes from the black waters. I opened my eyes and pressed one into the Gray Woman’s oozing cheek, another into her leprous chest.

I waited.

The instant she unfroze, she tried to sift, but as my dark lake had promised, the runes prevented her. The more she resisted, the brighter they pulsed. I realized this was the Song of Making ingredient Barrons had told me about, the one that had added the punch to of the prison walls. The more powerful the Fae that tried to push through, the more resistant the walls became.

She exploded away from Dani and began trying to tear the runes from her skin, shrieking. They seemed to burn. Good.

Dani whooshed to the ground like a sheet of paper, thin, white, and badly crumpled.

I kicked the Gray Woman. Hard. Again and again. “Fix her.”

She rolled over and hissed up at me.

I raised a fist, dripping blood and runes, flung a third one at her.

She screamed and curled in on herself.

“I said fix her!”

“It is impossible.”

“I don’t believe you. You sucked it out. You can give it back. And if you can’t, I will trap you in your own leprous skin and torture you for eternity. You think you’re hungry now? You have no idea what hunger is. I’ll show you pain. I’ll keep you in a box and make it my personal mission in life to—”

With a snarl of rage and pain, she rolled over and clamped her oozing hands to Dani’s face. “Free passage!” Bloody spittle flew from her lips.

“What?”

“You will not kill me if I do this. You and I will have—how do they say?—détente. We will be comrades. You will owe me.”

“I will give you your life. That’s all you get.”

“I can take hers before you can take mine.”

“Feck that noise,” Dani cried. “Kill the bitch. You ain’t owing her nothing, Mac.”

There was something bothering me. This had the feel of a personal attack. “You don’t kill females. Why did you come after Dani?”

“You killed my mate!” she snarled.

“The Gray Man?”

“He was the only other. Now I hurt you. Get them out of me!”

“Give her back what you took. Make her like she was before and I’ll remove them. Otherwise, I’ll skin you in them.”

She writhed on the pavement.

“By the count of three, bitch. One, two …”

She held up a thin, sucker-covered, oozing hand. “Make oath with me. Free passage or she dies.” She laughed bitterly. “We were separated when we escaped. We were going to hunt together, feed together. Who knows? In this world, perhaps we might have had young. I never saw him alive again.” Her lips peeled back. “Choose. I weary of you.”

“Feck her,” Dani seethed.

“I want more than her life. You will never harm any of mine. I won’t waste my breath explaining to you who is mine. If you think there’s even a minuscule possibility that I might know the person you’re thinking about feeding on, don’t, or our truce ends. Understand?”

“Neither you nor any you consider yours will ever hunt me. Understand?”

“You will leave no trace of your foul touch on her.”

“You will grant me a favor one day.”

“Agreed.”

“No, Mac!” Dani cried.

I pressed my palm to the Gray Woman’s. I felt the sting of a single sucker mouth as it bled me and we made the oath.

“Fix her,” I said. “Now.”

“Can’t fecking believe you did that,” Dani muttered for the tenth time.

Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes sparkling, her curly auburn hair more lustrous than ever. She even looked a little plumper, as if she had an extra layer or two of collagen beneath her skin.

“Think she gave you a little extra back, Dani,” I teased. But I wasn’t entirely certain the Gray Woman hadn’t. Dani glowed, her skin shimmered translucent, her eyes were so green they were mesmerizing. Ruby lips pursed in a pretty moue.

“Think my boobs are bigger,” she said with a smirk. Then she sobered. “Shoulda let her kill me, and you know it.”

“Never gonna happen,” I said.

“ ’Stead you went and made some kinda devil deal with the creepy feck.”

“And I’d do it again in a heartbeat. We’ll figure it out when it becomes a problem. You’re alive. That’s all that matters.”

Dani keeps it cool, all the time. On the rare occasions she lets you see a feeling, it’s one she’s chosen to paste on her face and let you see. She has a vast arsenal of scowls and disgruntled sneers, she’s nailed every nuance of saucy grins and cocky swaggers known to man, and I suspect she perfected the Look of Death by five.

Her face is naked now, wide open. Unadulterated adoration blazes in her eyes. “This is the best birthday ever! Ain’t never had nobody do something like that for me,” she said wonderingly. “Not even Mom—” She broke off, clamping her lips in a thin line.

“Peas in the Mega pod,” I said, tousling her curls, as we headed down the alley behind the bookstore. “Love you, kid.”

She jerked but quickly slapped an insouciant grin over her shock. “Dude, I’m even gonna let you get away with calling me kid. Really think I’m prettier? Not that I care or nothing, just wanna know what kinda pain in the ass it’s gonna be when I’m even hotter than I was before, and Dancer gets a good—”

“Brought ussh tasshty to drink, fassht one? Lassht one wassh sshweeeeet.”

I whirled, spear up. They’d either sifted in or been hiding in the shadows, motionless, and we’d been so caught up in relief at our near escape that we’d been oblivious.

A pair of Unseelie I’d never seen before stood by the trash dumpster by the rear door of BB&B. They were identical, each with four arms and four slender, tubular legs, three heads apiece, and dozens of mouths on their flat, horrific faces, with tiny, needle-sharp teeth. At the corners of the many mouths were pairs of much longer thin teeth, and I knew, without knowing how I knew, that they used them as straws.

My sister had been missing the marrow in her bones, her endocrine glands had been drained, her eyeballs were collapsed, and she’d had no spinal fluid. The coroner had been at a complete loss.

I wasn’t. Not anymore.

I knew what caste had killed Alina. What had gnawed and ripped and torn at her flesh to slowly and carefully remove all her inner fluids as if they were gourmet delights.

What they’d said penetrated, belatedly.

Brought us tasty to drink, fast one? Last one was sweet.

I froze, horrified. Surely that didn’t mean what it sounded like it meant. Dani was the fast one. What—Why—My brain turned to sludge.

They were staring behind me with hopeful expressions. “She issh ourssh, assh well?” Six mouths spoke as one. “You mussht take her sshpear for ussh. You mussht make her helplessh, like you did other blondie. Leave in alley with ussh again.”

Dani. I open my mouth. I can’t seem to make a sound.

I hear a choking noise behind me, a strangled sob.

“Do not go, fassht one!” Six mouths cry, gazes fixed behind me. “Come back, feed ussh again! We are ssho hungry!”

I turn and stare at Dani.

Her eyes are enormous, her face pale. She’s backing away from me.

If she draws her sword, it’ll make everything easy.

She doesn’t.

“Draw your sword.”

She shakes her head and takes another step backward.

“Draw your fucking sword!”

She bites her lower lip and shakes her head again. “Ain’t doing it. I’m faster. Ain’t killing you.”

“You killed my sister. Why not me?” The dark lake in my head begins to boil.

“Ain’t like that.”

“You brought her to them.”

Her face screws up with anger. “You don’t know a fecking thing ’bout me, you stupid fecking fecker! You don’t know nothing!”

I hear rustles behind me, leathery wet sounds, and I whirl. The freaks that killed my sister are taking advantage of the distraction and trying to leave.

Not a chance in hell. This is what I’ve been living for. This moment. My revenge. First them, then her.

I lunge for them, screaming my sister’s name.

I slice and rip and tear.

I begin with my spear and end with my bare hands.

I fall on the pair like the beast form of Barrons. My sister died in an alley with these monsters working on her, and now I know it wasn’t fast. I can see her, white-lipped with pain, knowing she’s going to die, scratching a clue into the pavement. Hoping I’ll come, afraid I’ll come. Believing I could succeed where she failed. God, I miss her! Hatred consumes me. I devolve into vengeance, I embrace it, I become it.

When I finish, there are no pieces larger than my fist.

I’m shaking, gasping, covered with bits of flesh and gray matter from smashing their skulls.

Feed ussh again! they’d demanded.

I double over and hit the pavement, puking. I puke until I dry-heave, then I dry-heave until my ears ring and my eyes are stinging.

I don’t have to look behind me to know she’s long gone.

I finally got what I came to Dublin for.

I know who killed my sister.

The girl I’d begun to think of as my sister.

I curl in a tight ball on the cold pavement and cry.

37

As I stepped out of the shower, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. It wasn’t pretty.

In all the time I’d been in Dublin, with all the horrors I’ve encountered, I’ve never seen quite this expression on my face.

I look haunted. Haunted is all about the eyes.

I feel haunted.

I came here for revenge. I brace my palms on either side of the bathroom sink and lean close into the mirror, studying myself.

Who’s in there, behind my face? A king that wouldn’t think twice about killing a fourteen-year-old girl I love? Loved. Hate her now. She took my sister to an alley, gave her to monsters that slaughtered her.

I can’t even think things like why? It doesn’t seem to matter. She did it. Res ipsa loquitur as Daddy would say. The thing speaks for itself.

I don’t have the emotional energy to dry my hair or put on makeup. I dress and drift downstairs where I slump on the sofa in the rear seating area, as thunder rolls in the leaden sky. The day is so thick with rain that it looks like dusk at noon. Lightning crashes.

I’ve lost so much. And gained precious little.

I’d had Dani in the gains column.

Finding out who killed Alina made the pain of her death fresh again. It made it all too visual for me. I’d told myself she died instantly and whatever had been done to her had happened postmortem. I knew better now. While they’d slowly drained her, she lay there scratching a clue into the pavement for me. I sat, torturing myself with thoughts of her torture, as if that might accomplish something useful, besides torturing myself.

Leftover cake mocked me on the coffee table. Unopened presents teetered nearby. I’d baked a cake for my sister’s murderer. I’d wrapped presents. I’d painted her nails. I’d sat and watched movies with her. What kind of monster was I? How could I have been so blind? Were there clues I’d never noticed? Had she ever slipped? Revealed knowledge of Alina she shouldn’t have had but I hadn’t been paying enough attention?

I dropped my head in my hands and squeezed, rubbing my temples, tugging my hair.

The journal pages!

“She has Alina’s journal,” I said, incredulous. The journal pages that had shown up for a brief time had made no sense to me. They’d never really told me anything and they’d appeared at the strangest times. Like the day Dani had brought my mail in and there’d been one in the stack. In a thick, fine envelope, just the kind a corporation like Rowena’s might use.

But why would she have given me those entries? They’d pretty much just been about …

“How much Alina loved me.” Tears stung my eyes.

The bell over the door tinkled.

I rose in a half crouch and waited. Who was here in the middle of the day?

My muscles stayed tense, and my gut tightened with anticipation. I eased back down to the sofa.

I responded that way to only one man. Jericho Barrons.

I was lost in grief and fury and hated being alive. And still I wanted to stand up, stripping as I went, and have sex with him right here on the bookstore floor. Was that the sum total of my existence? I didn’t get the erudition of I think therefore I am. Instead, I got I am, therefore I want to fuck Jericho Barrons.

“Got a little messy in my back alley, Ms. Lane.” His voice floated around bookcases, preceding him.

Not nearly as messy as I’d’ve liked. I wished I had those Unseelie bastards alive right now to kill all over again. How was I going to do what I was supposed to do?

Maybe I could just take her to an alley and give her to some monsters to die. She would be hard to catch, but my dark, glassy lake was stirring, whispering, offering all kinds of assistance, and I knew that I had more than enough juice to catch the kid. To do anything I wanted. There was something very cold inside me. Always had been. I wanted to welcome it now. Let it chill my blood and frost all my emotions until there was nothing left in me that was haunted because there was nothing left in me.

“The rain’ll clean it up.”

“I don’t like messes on my—”

“Jericho.” It was plea, lament, and benediction.

He stopped speaking instantly. He appeared around the last bookcase and stared at me. “You can say it that way anytime, Mac. Especially if you’re naked and I’m on top of you.” I could feel his gaze on me, searching, trying to understand.

I didn’t understand myself. The plea had been to not pick on me right now. Sarcasm would undo me. The lament had been a sharing of my pain, because I knew he understood pain himself. The benediction was the part I couldn’t explain. As if he was sacred to me. I looked up at him. He’d been with my alleged mother the night she’d left the abbey, the night the Book had escaped, and never told me. How could I revere him? I didn’t have the energy to confront him. Learning that Dani had killed Alina had left me feeling like a popped balloon.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” he said finally.

“I know who killed Alina.”

“Ah.” The single word said more than most people can say in entire paragraphs. “Beyond a shadow?”

“Black and white.”

He waited. He didn’t ask. And I suddenly understood that he wouldn’t. This was part of who he was. Barrons did feel, and when he felt most strongly, he spoke the least, asked the fewest questions. Even from here I could feel the tension in his body as he waited to see if I would tell him more. If I didn’t, he would continue walking through the store and vanish as silently as he’d glided into view.

But if I spoke? What if I asked him to make love to me? Not fuck me hard, but make love.

“It was Dani.”

He said nothing for so long that I began to think he hadn’t heard me. Then he released a long, weary-sounding breath. “Mac, I’m sorry.”

I looked up at him. “What do I do?” I was appalled to hear my voice crack.

“You’ve done nothing yet?”

I shook my head.

“What do you want to do?”

I laughed bitterly and nearly began sobbing. “Pretend I never found out and go on like it never happened.”

“Then that’s what you do.”

I tipped my head back and looked up at him in disbelief. “What? Barrons, the great hand of vengeance, is telling me to forgive and forget? You never forgive. You never walk away from a fight.”

“I like to fight. You do, too, sometimes. But in this case, it doesn’t sound like it.”

“It’s not that I—I mean … it’s … God, it’s so complicated!”

“Life is. Imperfect. Royally fucked up. How do you feel about her?”

“I—” felt like a traitor answering him.

“Let me rephrase that: How did you feel about her before you found out she’d killed Alina?”

“—loved her,” I whispered.

“Do you think love just goes away? Pops out of existence when it becomes too painful or inconvenient, as if you never felt it?”

I looked at him. What did Jericho Barrons know of love?

“If only it did. If only it could be turned off. It’s not a faucet. Love’s a bloody river with level-five rapids. Only a catastrophic act of nature or a dam has any chance of stopping it—and then usually only succeeds in diverting it. Both measures are extreme and change the terrain so much you end up wondering why you bothered. No landmarks to gauge your position when it’s done. Only way to survive is to devise new ways to map out life. You loved her yesterday, you love her today. And she did something that devastates you. You’ll love her tomorrow.”

“She killed my sister!”

“With malice? Spite? Out of cruelty? Hunger for power?”

“How would I know?”

“You love her,” he said roughly. “That means you know her. When you love somebody you see inside them. Use your heart. Is Dani that kind of person?”

Jericho Barrons was telling me to use my heart. Could life get any stranger?

“Think maybe somebody told her to do it?”

“She should have known better!”

“Humans, in their infancy, tend to be infants.”

“Are you making excuses for her?” I snarled.

“There is no excuse. I’m merely pointing out what you want me to point out. How has Dani treated you since the day you met?”

It hurt to even say the words. “Like a big sister she looked up to.”

“Has she been loyal to you? Taken your side against others?”

I nodded. Even when she’d thought I’d hooked up with Darroc, she’d have remained at my side. Followed me into hell.

“She must have known you were Alina’s sister.”

“Yes.”

“Coming to see you would have felt like facing the firing squad, every time.”

I’d told her we were like sisters. And sisters, I’d told her, forgive each other everything. I’d caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror after I’d said it, when she hadn’t known I was looking. Her expression had been bleak, and now I understood why. Because she’d been thinking, Yeah, right. Mac’s gonna kill me if she ever finds out. Yet she’d still kept coming. When I thought about it, I was astonished she hadn’t hunted down and killed those Unseelie, removing the damning evidence from the face of the earth.

He was silent a long moment, then, “Did she actually kill Alina? With her hands? A weapon?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Everything has degrees.”

“You think some ways of killing are better?”

“I know they are.”

“Death is death!”

“Agreed. But killing is not always murder.”

“I think she took her somewhere she knew she’d be killed.”

“Now you don’t sound certain she killed her.”

I told him what had happened last night, what the Unseelie had said, how Alina’s body had looked, how Dani had vanished.

He nodded in silent agreement when I was finished.

“So, what do I do?”

“Are you asking me for advice?”

I braced myself for a sarcastic comment. “Don’t snap my head off, okay? I had a bad night.”

“Wasn’t going to.” He sat down on his heels in front of me and looked into my eyes. “This one got you. Worse than all the other things that happened to you. Worse than being turned Pri-ya.”

I shrugged. “I got to have sex nonstop, no blame, no shame. You kidding me? Compared to the rest of my life, that was a joy.”

He didn’t say anything for a long time. Then, “But not something you’d care to repeat in full possession of your senses.”

“It was …” I searched for words to explain.

He was motionless, waiting.

“Like Halloween. When people rioted. They loot. Do crazy things.”

“You’re saying Pri-ya was a blackout.”

I nodded. “So what do I do?”

“You pull your fucking—” He bared his teeth on a silent snarl and looked away. When he looked back again, his face was a cool mask of urbanity. “You choose what you can live with. And what you can’t live without. That’s what.”

“You mean can I live with killing her? Can I stand myself if I don’t kill her?”

“I mean can you live without her. You kill her, you snuff her life forever. Dani will never be again. At fourteen, she’ll be done. She had her chances, she fucked up, she lost. Are you ready to be her judge, jury, and executioner?”

I swallowed and dropped my head, shielding myself with hair as if I could hide behind it and not have to come out. “You’re saying I won’t like myself.”

“I think you’d deal with it fine. You find places to put things. I know how you work. I’ve seen you kill. I think O’Bannion and his men were the hardest for you because they were your first humans, but after that, you took to it with a bit of stone cold. But this would be a chosen killing. Premeditated. It makes you breathe different. To swim in that sea, you have to grow gills.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying. Are you telling me to kill her?”

“Some actions change you for the better. Some for the worse. Be sure which one it is and accept it before you do anything. Death, for Dani, is irrevocable.”

“Would you kill her?”

I could tell he was uncomfortable with the question, but I didn’t know why.

After a strained silence, he said, “If that’s what you want, yes. I’ll kill her for you.”

“That’s not what I—no, I wasn’t asking you to kill her for me. I was asking if you would in my shoes.”

“The shoes you wear are beyond my ability to fathom. It’s been too long.”

“You’re not going to tell me what to do, are you?” I wanted him to. I didn’t want any of the responsibility for this. I wanted someone to blame if I didn’t like how it turned out.

“I respect you more than that.”

I almost fell off the couch. I parted my hair and looked up at him, but he was no longer squatting in front of me. He’d stood and moved away.

“Are we, like, having a conversation?”

“Did you just, like, ask me for advice and listen with an open mind? If so, then yes, I would call this a conversation. I can see how you might not recognize it, considering all I usually get from you is attitude and hostility—”

“Oh! All I ever get from you is hostility and—”

“And here we go. She’s bristling and my hackles go up. Bloody hell, I feel fangs coming on. Tell you what, Ms. Lane,” he said softly, “anytime you want to have a conversation with me, leave the myriad issues you have with wanting to fuck me every time you look at me outside my cave, come on in, and see what you find. You might like it.”

He turned and began moving toward the entrance to the rear part of the store.

“Wait! I still don’t know what to do about Dani.”

“Then that’s your answer for now.” He stopped at the door and glanced back at me. “How much longer will you dissemble?”

“Who uses words like dissemble?”

He leaned back against the door and folded his arms. “I won’t wait much longer. You’re on your last chance with me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” What was he saying? Would Barrons walk away from me? Me? He never walked away from me. He was the one who would always keep me alive. And always want me. I’d come to count on those things like I counted on air and food.

“During a blackout, people do what they’ve wanted to do all along but have repressed, afraid of the consequences. Worried what others might think of them. Afraid of what they’ll see in themselves. Or simply unwilling to get punished by the society that governs them. You don’t care what other people think anymore. Nobody’s going to punish you. Which raises the question: Why are you still afraid of me? What haven’t you wrapped your head around yet?”

I stared at him.

“I want the woman I think you are. But the longer you dissemble, the more I think I made a mistake. Saw things in you that weren’t there.”

I fisted my hands and bit down a protest. He made me feel so conflicted. I wanted to shout, You didn’t make a mistake. I am her! I wanted to cut my losses and run before the devil owned more of my soul.

“There was purity in that basement. That’s the way I live. There was a time I thought you did, too.”

I did, I wanted to say. I do.

“Some things are sacred. Until you act like they’re not. Then you lose them.”

The door swung silently shut.

38

“You okay, Mac?” Kat sounded worried. “You don’t look so good.”

I forced myself to smile. “I’m fine. Little nervous, I guess. I just want everything to go right and get this over with. You?”

She smiled but it didn’t reach her eyes, and too late I remembered her touch of emotional telepathy. She could feel how badly off balance I was.

I felt doubly betrayed, first by Dani, then by Barrons for telling me he wouldn’t wait forever. And ashamed for things I didn’t understand. But it went all the way back to believing he was dead, then finding out he was alive, and it had something to do with my sister. No, it went back farther than that, to the end of my being Pri-ya. I sighed. I couldn’t pin it down.

“Last night I found the Unseelie that killed Alina,” I told Kat, figuring that would get her off my back.

The sharp focus of her gaze softened. “Did you have your revenge, then?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

“But it failed to ease your pain as you expected it would.” She was silent a moment. “When the walls came down, Rowena didn’t tell us about eating Unseelie. I lost both my brothers to Shades. I’ve killed dozens of them since. It never makes me feel better. If only revenge would bring them back, but it doesn’t. It adds to the body count.”

“Wise as ever, Kat.” I smiled. But inwardly I seethed.

I didn’t want wise. I wanted blood. Crushed bones. Destruction. My dark lake had rippled into crashing waves last night, with a dark wind blowing hard across it.

I am here, it was saying. Use me. What are you waiting for?

I had no answer for it.

I continued to march toward O’Connell and Beacon, checking my watch. It was ten to nine. Kat had fallen into step with me a few blocks back.

“Where’s Jo?”

“Food poisoning. Bad can of beans. Thought about bringing Dani but couldn’t find her. Brought Sophie instead.”

Hearing Dani’s name impacted me hard. Kat looked at me sharply. I squared my shoulders and marched on. At the intersection, V’lane and his Seelie waited, on the opposite side of the street from Rowena and her sidhe-seers.

My dark lake boiled at the sight of her, hissed and steamed: Think she doesn’t know Dani did it? She knows everything. Did she order it? I locked my jaw down and fisted my hands.

I would take care of my personal vendettas later. First things first. If I was the Unseelie King, I needed the Book locked away, the sooner the better. If I wasn’t the Unseelie King, I still needed it locked away, because, for whatever reason, it kept coming for me and those I loved. My parents and I would never be safe, as long as it was loose.

All I had to do was play my small part. I would fly the Hunter over the city—supplied courtesy of Barrons, dampened and controlled—and help them corner it. Once it was contained, I would join them on the ground.

Just to be on the safe side, I planned to keep my distance. I didn’t want any more surprises in my life.

My body tensed with sexual awareness.

“Mac,” Ryodan said coolly as he pushed past me.

The sexual tension heightened to a painful state, and I knew Barrons was behind me. I waited for him to pass.

Kat walked by, Lor passed, and then they were all at the intersection. Still I stood, waiting for Barrons to get out from behind me.

Then his hand was on the nape of my neck and I felt the hardness of him against my ass. I inhaled sharply and leaned back against him, pushing for him with my hips.

He was gone.

I swallowed. I hadn’t seen him all afternoon, since he’d told me I could lose him.

“Ms. Lane,” he said coolly.

“Barrons.”

“The Hunter is landing in …” He looked up. “Three … two … now.”

It flapped down into the center of the intersection, wings churning black ice crystals in the air. It settled with a soft whuff of breath, swung its head low, and glared at me with fiery eyes. It was subdued—and pissed as hell about it. I felt for it with my mind. It was seething, rattling the bars of whatever cage Barrons was capable of creating with his mysterious runes and spells.

“Good hunting,” he said.

“Barrons, I—”

“You’ve got rotten timing.”

“You two gonna stand there fucking each other with your eyes all night, or can we get on with it?” Christian demanded.

The Keltar had arrived. Christopher, Drustan, Dageus, and Cian stalked from a nearby alley.

“Get on your demon horse, girl, and fly. But remember,” Rowena shook a warning finger at me, “we’re watching you.”

And although I knew now why she was so convinced I was a threat—since Dani had told me about the real prophecy—I still consoled myself with the thought of deposing and killing her.

This Hunter was larger than the last one Barrons had “charmed.” It took Barrons, Lor, and Ryodan to help me get up on its back. I was glad I’d remembered to bring gloves and to dress warmly. It was like sitting on an iceberg with sulfur breath.

Once I was settled between its icy wings, I looked around.

This was it.

The night we were going to take down the Sinsar Dubh.

At the meeting yesterday, no one had even raised the question: What then?

Rowena hadn’t said: The Seelie won’t be permitted anywhere near it! It will be ours to guard, and we will keep it under lock and key forever!

As if anybody’d believe that. It had gotten out once.

And V’lane hadn’t said: Then I will take my queen to Faery, with the Book, where she will recover and search it for fragments of the Song of Making, so she can reimprison the Unseelie and re-create the walls between our worlds.

I wouldn’t have believed that, either. What made them so certain fragments of the Song were in the Book? Or that the queen could even read it? The concubine might have once known the First Language, but she’d obviously drunk from the cauldron too many times to remember it now.

And Barrons hadn’t said: Then I will sit down and read it, because somehow I know the First Language, and once I get the spell I’m after, you all can do whatever the fuck you want. Fix the world or destroy it, I don’t care.

And Ryodan hadn’t said: Then we’re killing you, Mac, because we don’t trust you and you’ll no longer be necessary.

Unfortunately, I believed the last two.

The tension I felt was unbearable. I hadn’t realized how much I took Barrons for granted until he’d made it plain earlier today that his time with me had an expiration date.

I could lose him.

Maybe I didn’t know what I wanted from him, but at least I knew I wanted him around. That had always seemed to be enough for him.

Unfair as hell and you know it, a small voice inside me said.

At my hip, my radio squawked. “Check, Mac.”

I pressed a button. “Check, Ryodan.”

We tested the radios all around.

“What are you waiting for, girl?” Rowena barked. “Get up there and find it!”

I nudged the Hunter with muscles and mind and watched her dwindle beneath me, as great black wings powerfully churned the night air. I wanted to squash her with my thumb like the infuriating speck she was.

Then I forgot her in the pleasure of the moment.

This was a rush.

This felt … good.

Familiar.

Free.

We rose higher and higher into the sky. Rooftops receded beneath us.

In front of me was the silvery coastline. Behind me, open country.

The air was crisp with a tang of salt. Lights beneath us were few and far between. I laughed out loud. This was amazing. I was flying.

I’d done it before, with Barrons, but this was different. It was just me and my Hunter and the night. I felt wide open with possibilities. The world was my oyster. No, the worlds were my oysters.

Damn, it was good to be me!

I suddenly knew something about Hunters—maybe it fed it to me with its mind. Not only were the massive icy dragons sifters, they made the Silvers obsolete. They weren’t Fae. They never had been. They were amused by us. Aloofly entertained. They hung out with the Unseelie because they found it … interesting to pass time in such a fashion. They’d never been imprisoned.

No one owned them.

No one ever could.

In fact, we didn’t even begin to understand what they really were. (Not alive the way we thought. Was I flying on a huge breathing meteor through the sky? Carved from that of which the universe had begun?)

I reached out for the Hunter’s mind. You can sift worlds!

It turned its head and fixed me with a fiery orange eye, as if to say, How stupid are you? You knew that.

No, I didn’t.

It snorted a tendril of smoky fire back at me, scorching my jeans.

“Ow!” I clapped a hand over my knee.

Don’t need blinders. Wipe off his marks. Interfere with my vision. That one should be terminated. He plays with the instruments of gods.

“Barrons? What marks?”

On my wings, the back of my head. Wipe them off.

“No.”

It was disappointed but fell silent, accepting my decision.

I opened my sidhe-seer senses. Or was it that part of me that was the Unseelie King? I gasped.

I knew where the Sinsar Dubh was. It was outside Barrons Books and Baubles. Looking for me.

“East,” I said into my radio. “It’s at the bookstore.”

They crept around it, draping a net of stones chiseled from the cliffs of its home, closing in slowly but surely, with my guidance.

It could sense me near. It wasn’t sure where. But it didn’t seem to be able to sense them.

I listened to chatter on my radio.

Rowena had begun with her demands that the Seelie not be allowed to see the Book once it was sealed away, although Kat tried desperately and diplomatically to curb her imperious attitude.

The Seelie were growing more incensed by the moment. And getting more imperious by the moment.

Drustan was trying to run interference, but the other Keltar began bickering among themselves about the role of the Seelie and the role of the sidhe-seers, insisting their part to play was more important.

Barrons was getting angrier with each passing minute, and Lor had just threatened to drop the stone and leave if everyone didn’t shut the fuck up.

“Two blocks west of you, V’lane,” I said. He was walking, not sifting. Said the Book would sense his presence if he did.

“It’s moving again, fast,” I cried. It had just shot three blocks in a matter of seconds. “It has to be in a car. Whoever it’s got is driving it. I’m going to try to get closer for a better look.”

“Don’t you dare!” Rowena said. “You stay up there, far away from it, girl!”

I scowled. A Hunter-sized bowel movement on her head would go a long way toward making me feel better. For now. I was afraid killing her might be all that would satisfy me long term.

“Get off my back, old woman,” I muttered, and turned the voice function of my radio off so I could hear them but they couldn’t hear me.

I didn’t want anyone to pick up on the whoosh-whoosh of the wings that had abruptly appeared beside me—which were much too massive to belong to the Hunter I was on.

I stared down the leathery wing of my Hunter at the one that was flying tandem with us.

K’Vruck.

Nightwindflyhighfreeeeeee.

I hastily checked my internal radar. It was hardly a typical Sinsar Dubh thought, but I couldn’t be too safe. Only when I was certain the Book was still on the ground did I breathe easily again.

What was K’Vruck doing here if the Book hadn’t brought him? Its thought had been less words and more an observation of the moment.

Was K’Vruck … happy?

It turned its head sideways and gave me a toothy, leathery-lipped grin. The tips of its wings worried my Hunter’s span, making it rear in alarm.

“What are you doing?”

What are you?

“Huh?”

I fly.

I looked at it blankly. It had emphasized the word “I.”

Used to ride me, it chuffed with reproach. Old friend.

I stared at it, nonplussed.

My eyes narrowed. It was clearly part of some conspiracy to make me think I was the Unseelie King. That was one load of crap I wasn’t buying. “Go away.” I swatted at it like a fly. “Shoo. Get out of here.” I was shooing finality more final than death.

I was dimly aware of Barrons shouting on my radio.

It turned its leathery smile forward and sailed serenely along, barely moving its enormous wings, surfing a breeze. It was five times the size of my Hunter, several houses of leathery wings and hooves and enormous oven eyes and whatever held all that icy blackness together. As it passed through the dark sky, the breeze that sloughed off its titanic body steamed like dry ice.

“Go!” I snarled.

“Mac, where the hell is the Book?” Ryodan’s voice sounded tinny on the radio. We were higher than I’d meant to be. “Where are you? I can’t see you up there. I see a couple of Hunters flying together, but I don’t see you. Fuck, is that one enormous or what?”

Great, just what I needed. Somebody to look up and catch me flying side by side with the Unseelie King’s favorite Lamborghini. I thumbed my volume back on. “I’m here. In a cloud. Hang on. You’ll see me in a few minutes,” I lied.

“There aren’t any clouds up there, Mac,” Lor said.

Christian snapped, “Lie, MacKayla. Try again. Who are you flying with?”

“Where’s the Book?” V’lane demanded.

“It’s—Oh, there it is! Damn! Now it’s four blocks to the west, down by the docks. I’m going down for a closer look.”

When I nudged my Hunter into a dive, K’Vruck dove with us.

“Ms. Lane,” Barrons demanded, “what are you doing flying with the Hunter that killed Darroc?”

39

They refused to let me land.

I couldn’t exactly blame them.

It wasn’t so much that I had my own Satanic wing man—there wasn’t anybody on the ground that night who hadn’t dipped a toe into something dark at one point or another—as that they worried the Book would grab K’Vruck somehow and then we’d all be, well … K’Vrucked.

I couldn’t shake him. The Hunter who called himself something more final than death simply would not leave my side. And a secret part of me was a little thrilled by it.

I flew over Dublin with Death.

Heady stuff for a bartender from small-town Georgia.

I had to watch from the air as the debacle unfolded. And it was a debacle.

They cornered it, hemmed it in with stones, whittled in and down until they finally had it penned on the steps of the church where I’d been raped. I had to wonder if it somehow knew that and was trying to mess with my head.

I kept waiting for it to speak in my mind, but it didn’t. Not once. Not a word. It was the first time I’d ever been in its vicinity that it hadn’t tried to mess with me somehow. I figured the stones and the Druids had a dampening effect.

As I watched, they moved the four stones—east, west, north, and south—in closer and closer until they formed the corners of a box, ten feet by ten feet around it.

A soft blue light began to emanate between the stones, as if forming a cage.

Everyone backed away.

“What now?” I whispered, circling over the steeple.

“Now it’s mine,” Drustan said calmly. The Keltar Druids begin to chant, and the silver-eyed Highlander moved forward.

I had a sudden vision of him, broken and dead on the church steps. The Book morphing into the Beast, towering over them all, laughing. Taking out one after the next.

“No,” I cried.

“No, what?” Barrons said instantly.

“Stop, Drustan!”

The Highlander looked up at me and stopped.

I studied the tableau below. Something wasn’t right. The Sinsar Dubh was lying on the steps, an innocuous hardcover. No towering Beast, no chain-saw-toothed O’Bannion, no skinned Fiona.

“When did it get out of the car?” I demanded.

Nobody answered me.

“Who was driving it? Did anyone see the Book get out of the car?”

“Ryodan, Lor, speak up!” Barrons snapped.

“Don’t know, Barrons. Didn’t see it. Thought you did.”

“How did it end up on the steps?”

V’lane hissed. “It is an illusion!”

I groaned. “It’s not really there. I must have lost track of it. I wondered why it wasn’t messing with me. It was. Just not the way it usually does. I screwed up. Oh, shit—V’lane—look out!”

40

“Do you hear that?” It was driving me nuts.

“What?”

“You don’t hear someone playing a xylophone?”

Barrons gave me a look.

“I swear I hear the faint strains of ‘Qué Sera Sera.’ ”

“Doris Day?”

“Pink Martini.”

“Ah. No. Don’t hear it.”

We walked in silence. Or, rather, he did. In my world, trumpets were blaring and a harpsichord was tinkling and it was all I could do not to go spinning in wide-armed circles down the street, singing: When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother, “What will I be? Will I be pretty, will I be rich?” Here’s what she said to me …

The night had been an abysmal failure on all fronts.

The Sinsar Dubh had tricked us, but I was the one to blame. I was the one who could track it. I’d had a tiny part to play and hadn’t been able to get it right. If I hadn’t clued in at the last minute, it would have gotten V’lane and probably killed us all—or at least everyone that could be killed. As it was, I’d given V’lane just enough warning that he’d been able to sift out before it could turn the full brunt of its evil thrall on him and get him to take it from the hand of the sidhe-seer who’d been standing there offering it to him.

It had conned Sophie into picking it up right under our noses, while we’d all been focused on where it was making me think it was.

It had been walking along with us for God only knew how long, working its illusions on me, and I had misled them. Very nearly to a mass slaughter.

We’d run like rats from a sinking ship, scrambling over one another to get away.

It had been something to see. The most powerful and dangerous people I’ve ever known—Christian, with his Unseelie tattoos; Ryodan and Barrons and Lor, who were secretly nine-foot-tall monsters that couldn’t die; V’lane and his cohorts, who were virtually unkillable and had mind-boggling powers—all running from one small sidhe-seer holding a book.

A Book. A magical tome that some idiot had made because he’d wanted to dump all his evil from himself so he could start life over again as patriarchal leader of his race. I could have told him that trying to shirk personal responsibility never works out well in the end.

And somewhere out there tonight or tomorrow, though nobody would go looking for her or try to save her, Sophie would die.

Along with who knew how many others? V’lane had sifted to the abbey to warn them she was no longer one of them.

“What was going on with the Hunter up there, Ms. Lane?”

“No clue.”

“Looked like you had a friend. I thought maybe it was the concubine’s Hunter.”

“I hadn’t thought of that!” I forced myself to exclaim, as if stunned.

He gave me a dry look. “I don’t need a Keltar Druid to know when you’re lying.”

I scowled. “Why is that?”

“I’ve been around a long time. You learn to read people.”

“Exactly how long?”

“What did it say to you?”

I blew out a breath, exasperated. “It said I used to ride it. It called me ‘old friend.’ ” One nice thing about talking to Barrons was that I didn’t have to mince words.

He burst out laughing.

I’ve heard him laugh openly so few times that it kind of hurt my feelings that he was laughing now. “What’s funny about that?”

“The look on your face. Life hasn’t turned out like you thought it would, has it, Rainbow Girl?”

The name slid through my heart like a dull blade. You’re leaving me, Rainbow Girl. Then it had been laced with tenderness. Now it was merely a mocking appellation.

“Clearly I was misled,” I said stiffly. That damned harpsichord was back, the trumpets swelled.

When I grew up and fell in love, I asked my sweetheart, “What lies ahead? Will there be rainbows, day after day?” Here’s what my sweetheart said …

“You don’t really believe you’re the Unseelie King, do you?”

The trumpets warbled, the harpsichord fell silent, and the needle screeched as it was abruptly yanked from the record. Why did I even bother talking? “Where did you get that idea?”

“I saw the queen in the White Mansion. I couldn’t think of any reason for her memory residue to be there. Occam’s razor. She’s not the queen. Or she wasn’t then.”

“So who am I?”

“Not the Unseelie King.”

“Give me another explanation.”

“It hasn’t presented itself yet.”

“I need to find a woman named Augusta O’Clare.”

“She’s dead.”

I stopped walking. “You knew her?”

“She was Tellie Sullivan’s grandmother. It was to their home Isla O’Connor asked me to take her the night the Book escaped from the abbey.”

“And?”

“You’re not surprised. Interesting. You knew I was at the abbey.”

“How well did you know my moth—Isla?”

“I met her that night. I visited her grave five days later.”

“Did she have two children?”

He shook his head. “I checked later. She had only one daughter. Tellie was babysitting her that night. I saw the child at her house when I took Isla there.”

My sister. He’d seen Alina at Tellie’s. “And you think I’m not the Unseelie King?”

“I think we don’t have all the facts.”

I felt like crying. The day I’d set foot on the Emerald Isle, the slow erosion of me had begun. I’d arrived, the beloved daughter of Jack and Rainey Lane, sister of Alina. I’d accepted being adopted. I’d been elated to discover I had Irish roots. But now Barrons had just confirmed that I wasn’t an O’Connor. He’d been there when Isla died and she’d had one child. No wonder Ryodan had been so sure. There was nothing to identify me at all but a lifetime of impossible dreams, an oubliette of impossible knowledge, and an evil Book and a ghastly Hunter with a disturbing fondness for me.

“What happened that night at the abbey? Why were you there?”

“We’d gotten wind of something. Talk in the countryside. Old women gossiping. I’ve learned to listen to old women, read them over a newspaper anytime.”

“Yet you made fun of Nana O’Reilly.”

“I didn’t want you to go back and dig deeper.”

“Why?”

“She would have told you things I didn’t want you to know.”

“Like what you are?”

“She would have given you a name for me.” He stopped, then chewed out the next words. “Inaccurate. But a name. You needed names then.”

“You think I don’t now?” The Damned, she’d called him. I wondered why.

“You’re learning. The abbey was the focus of the talk. I’d been watching it for weeks, trying to devise a way in without setting off their wards. Clever work. They sensed even me, and nothing senses me.”

“You said ‘we’d’ gotten wind. I thought you worked alone. Who is we?”

“I do. But dozens have hunted it over time. It’s been the Grail for a certain type of collector. A sorcerer in London that ended up with copies of pages that night. Mobsters. Would-be kings. Following the same leads, we glimpsed one another now and then, gave each other a wide berth as long as we thought the other might one day provide a valuable lead, although I never saw the Keltar. I suspect the queen cleaned up after them, kept her ‘hidden mantle’ well hidden.”

“So, you were outside the abbey?”

“I had no idea anything was going on inside. It was a quiet night, like any other I’d watched it. There was no commotion. No shouting, no disturbance. The Book slipped out into the night unnoticed, or bided its time and left later. I was distracted by a woman climbing out a window in the rear of the abbey, holding her side. She’d been stabbed and was badly injured. She headed straight for me, as if she knew I was there. You must get me out of here, she said. She told me to take her to Tellie Sullivan in Devonshire. That the fate of the world depended on it.”

“I didn’t think you gave a rat’s petunia about the fate of the world.”

“I don’t. She’d seen the Sinsar Dubh. I asked if it was still at the abbey and she said it had been but was no longer. I learned that night that the damned thing had been practically beneath my nose for the past thousand years.”

“I thought it was always there, since the dawn of time, long before it was an abbey.” I wasn’t above prying into his age.

“I’ve been in Ireland only for the past millennia. Before that, I was … other places. Satisfied, Ms, Lane?”

“Hardly.” I wondered why he’d chosen Ireland. Why would a man like him stay in one place? Why not travel? Did he like having a “home?” I supposed even bears and lions had dens.

“She said it killed everyone in the Haven. I had no idea what the Haven was at the time. I tried to Voice her, but she was slipping in and out of consciousness. I had nothing with which to stem her injuries. I thought she was my best bet to track it, so I put her in my car and took her to her friend. But by the time we got there, she was in a coma.”

“And that’s all she ever told you?”

“Once I realized she wasn’t coming out of it, I moved on, unwilling to let the trail cool. I had competition to eliminate. For the first time since man learned to keep written archives, the Sinsar Dubh had been sighted. Others were after it. I needed to kill them while I still knew where they were. By the time I returned to Devonshire, she was dead and buried.”

“Did you dig—”

“Cremated.”

“Oh, isn’t that just convenient. Did you question Tellie? Voice her and her grandmother?”

“Look who’s all ruthless now. They were gone. I’ve had investigators hunting for them off and on ever since. The grandmother died eight years ago. The granddaughter was never seen again.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Yes, it stinks. That’s one of many reasons I don’t believe you’re the king. Too many humans went to too much effort to conceal things. I don’t see humans doing that for any Fae, especially not sidhe-seers. No, there was something else going on.”

“You said one of many reasons.”

“The list is endless. Do you remember what you were like when you first came here? Do you really think he’d wear pink? Or a shirt that said I’m a JUICY Girl?”

I looked at him. The corners of his lips were twitching.

“I just don’t see the most dreaded of the Fae wearing a matching thong and bra with little pink and purple appliqué flowers.”

“You’re trying to make me laugh.” My heart hurt. Thoughts of what to do about Dani, fury at Rowena, anger at myself for having misled everyone tonight—there was a knot of emotions inside me.

“And it’s not working,” he said, as we stepped into the alcove of Barrons Books and Baubles. “How’s this?” He drew me back out into the street and cupped my head with his hands. I thought he was going to kiss me, but he tipped my head back so I was looking up.

“What?”

“The sign.”

The placard swaying on a polished brass pole read: MACKAYLA’S MANUSCRIPTS AND MISCELLANY.

“Are you kidding me?” I exploded. “It’s mine? But you just said I was on my last chance with you!”

“You are.” He released my head and moved away. “It can be removed as easily as it was hung.”

My sign. My bookstore. “My Lamborghini?” I said hopefully.

He opened the door and stepped inside. “Don’t push it.”

“What about the Viper?”

“Not a chance.”

I moved in behind him. Fine, I could deal without the cars. For the moment. The bookstore was mine. I was feeling choked up. MINE with all capital letters, just like the sign. “Barrons, I—”

“Don’t be trite. It’s not you.”

“I was just going to thank you,” I said crossly.

“For what? Leaving? I changed the sign because I don’t plan to be here much longer. It has nothing to do with you. What I want is nearly within reach. Good night, Ms. Lane.”

He vanished out the back. I don’t know what I expected.

Actually, I do. I expected him to try to get me into bed again.

Barrons has been predictable in his treatment of me since the day I met him. Initially he used references to sex to shut me up. Then he used sex to wake me up. After I was no longer Pri-ya, he’d returned to using references to sex to keep me on edge. Forcing me to remember how intimate we once were.

Like everything else about him, I’d begun to count on it.

Innuendo and invitation. Eternal as the rain in Dublin. I was the one the dangerous lion licked. And I liked it.

Tonight, when we’d walked back to the bookstore, talking, sharing information freely, I felt something warm and new blossom between us. When he’d shown me the sign, I melted.

Then he’d splashed ice water on me.

For what? Leaving? I changed the sign because I don’t plan to be here much longer.

He’d walked off without making innuendo or extending an invitation.

He’d just left.

Giving me a tiny taste of what it felt like. Barrons walking off, leaving me alone.

Would he really go away for good when this was done? Vanish without saying good-bye the moment he had his spell?

I trudged into my fifth-floor bedroom and threw myself across my bed. I usually pretend there’s nothing strange about sometimes finding my room on the fourth floor and sometimes on the fifth. I’ve become so inured to “weird” that the only thing that worries me much anymore is the possibility that my bedroom might one day disappear entirely. What if I’m in it when it goes? Will I go, too? Or be stuck in a wall or floor as it makes its grand exit, yelling my head off? As long as it’s still somewhere in the store, I feel reasonably secure with my parameters. After the way my life has turned out, if it does disappear, I’ll probably just sigh, gear up, and go hunting for it.

It’s hard to lose the things you’ve come to think of as yours.

Was all this going to be over soon? Sure, we’d screwed up tonight, but I wouldn’t screw up next time. We were meeting at Chester’s tomorrow to make a new plan. We had our team; we’d keep trying. Conceivably, we could have the Sinsar Dubh stowed securely away in a matter of days.

And what would happen then?

Would V’lane and the queen and all the Seelie leave our world and go back to their court? Would they manage to get the walls back up somehow and scrape the Unseelie blight from my world?

Would Barrons and his eight close up Chester’s and disappear?

What would I do, with no V’lane, no Unseelie to fight, no Barrons?

Ryodan had made it clear that no one was allowed to know about them and live. They’d been hiding their immortal existence among us for thousands of years. Would they try to kill me? Or just leave and remove all trace of evidence that they’d ever been here?

Could I search the world over and never find any of them again? Would I age and begin to wonder if I’d imagined those crazy, passionate, dark days in Dublin?

How could I age? Who would I marry? Who would ever understand me? Would I live out the rest of my life alone? Become as cantankerous and cryptic and strange as the man who’d made me this way?

I began to pace.

I’d been so worried about my problems—who he was, who I was, who Alina’s killer was—that I’d never looked into the future and tried to project the likely outcome of events. When you’re fighting every day simply for the chance to have a future, it’s kind of hard to get around to imagining what that future might be like. Thinking about how to live is a luxury enjoyed by people who know they’re going to live.

I didn’t want to be alone in Dublin when this was all over!

What would I do? Run the bookstore, surrounded by memories for the rest of my life as those of us who remained painstakingly rebuilt the city? I couldn’t stay here if he didn’t. Even if he left, he’d still be here, everywhere I looked. It would almost be worse than him dying. Barrons’ residue would stalk this place as vividly as the concubine and the king lived in the White Mansion’s inky corridors. I’d know he was out there, forever beyond my reach. Glory days: achieved and gone by twenty-three, like a has-been high school football player sitting in his double-wide, chugging beer with his friends at thirty, two kids, a nagging wife, a family van, and a grudge against life.

I slumped down on my bed.

Everywhere I turned, I’d see ghosts.

Would Dani’s ghost haunt me in the streets? Would I make that happen? Would I go that far? Premeditated murder of a girl who was little more than a child?

You choose what you can live with, he’d said. And what you can’t live without.

It had never occurred to me that the outcome of my time in Dublin might be a future of living in a bookstore without Barrons ever again, walking the streets filled with my—

“Oh, feck it, she was my sister,” I growled, punching my pillow. I didn’t give a damn if we weren’t born to each other: Alina had been my best friend, my heart-sister, and that made us sisters any way I looked at it.

“Where was I?” I muttered. Ah, yes, streets filled with my sister’s ghost, compounded by the ghost of the teenager I’d come to think of as my little sister, who’d been involved with killing my sister. Would I walk the streets with those phantoms every day?

What an awful, empty life that would be!

“Alina, what should I do?” God, I missed her. I missed her like it was yesterday. I heaved myself up from bed, grabbed my backpack, dropped cross-legged on the floor, pulled out one of her photo albums, and opened the sunny yellow cover.

There she was with Mom and Dad at her college graduation.

There we were, at the lake with a group of friends, drinking beer and playing volleyball like we were going to live forever. Young, so damned young. Had I ever really been that young?

Tears slipped down my cheeks as I turned the pages.

There she was on the green at Trinity College, with new friends.

Out in the pubs, dancing and waving to the camera.

There was Darroc, watching her, his gaze possessive, hot.

There she was looking up at him, completely unguarded. I caught my breath. Goose bumps rose on my arms and neck.

She had loved him.

I could see it. I knew my sister. She’d been crazy about him. He’d made her feel what Barrons made me feel. Bigger than I could possibly be, larger than life, on fire with possibilities, ecstatic to be breathing, impatient for the next moment together. She’d been happy in those last months, so alive and happy.

And if she’d lived?

I closed my eyes.

I knew my sister.

Darroc had been right. She would have gone to him. She would have found a way to accept it. To love him anyway. We were so fatally flawed.

But what if … what if her love might have changed him? Who could say it wouldn’t have? What if she’d gotten pregnant and there was suddenly a baby Alina, helpless and pink and cooing? Might love have softened his edges, his need for revenge? It had worked greater miracles. Maybe I shouldn’t think of her as flawed but as a wrench in the works in a good way, who might have changed the outcome for the better. Who could say?

I turned the page and my cheeks flamed.

I shouldn’t look. I couldn’t help it. They were in bed. I couldn’t see Alina. She had the camera. Darroc was naked. From the angle, I knew Alina was on top of him. From the look on his face, I knew he was coming when she took it. And I could see it in his eyes.

He’d loved her, too.

I dropped the album and sat staring into space.

Life was so complicated. Was she bad because she’d loved him? Was he evil because he’d wanted to reclaim what had been taken from him? Hadn’t the same motives driven the Unseelie King and his concubine? Didn’t the same motives drive humans every day?

Why hadn’t the queen just let the king have the woman he loved? Why couldn’t the king be happy with one lifetime? What might have happened to the Unseelie if they’d never been imprisoned? Might they have turned out like the Seelie court?

And what about my sister and me? Would we really doom the world? Nurture or nature: What were we?

Everywhere I looked, I could see only shades of gray. Black and white were nothing more than lofty ideals in our minds, the standards by which we tried to judge things and map out our place in the world in relevance to them. Good and evil, in their purest form, were as intangible and forever beyond our ability to hold in our hand as any Fae illusion. We could only aim at them, aspire to them, and hope not to get so lost in the shadows that we could no longer see the light.

Alina had been aiming for the right thing to do. So was I. She hadn’t made it. Would I fail? Sometimes it was hard to know what the right thing to do was.

Feeling like the worst kind of voyeur, I reached for the photo album, pulled it back on my lap, and began to turn the page.

That’s when I felt it. The pocket was too thick. There was something behind the photo of Darroc staring up at Alina like she was his world, coming inside her.

I slid the photo out with trembling hands. What would I find secreted away here? A note from my sister? Something that would give me more insight into her life before she’d died?

A love letter from him? From her?

I withdrew a piece of old parchment, unfolded it, and gently smoothed it open. There was writing on both sides. I turned it over. One side was covered from upper margin to lower. The other side had only a few lines on it.

I recognized the paper and script on the full side instantly. I’d seen Mad Morry’s writings before, although I didn’t read Old Irish Gaelic.

I turned it over, holding my breath. Yes, he’d translated it!

IF THE BEAST OF THREE FACES IS NOT CONTAINED BY THE TIME THE FIRST DARK PRINCE DIES THE FIRST PROPHECY SHALL FAIL FOR THE BEAST SHALL HAVE GORGED ON POWER AND CHANGED. ONLY BY ITS OWN DESIGN WILL IT FALL. HE WHO IS NOT WHAT HE WAS SHALL TAKE UP THE TALISMAN AND WHEN THE MONSTER WITHIN IS DEFEATED SO SHALL BE THE MONSTER WITHOUT.

I read it again. “What talisman?” How accurate was his translation? He’d written, He who is not what he was. Had Darroc really been the only one who could merge with the Book? Dageus wasn’t what he was. I was willing to bet Barrons wasn’t, either. Really, who of us was? What a nebulous statement. I’d hardly call that definitive criteria. Daddy would have a heyday in court with such a vague phrase.

By the time the first dark prince dies … It was already too late, if that was true. The first dark prince was Cruce, who couldn’t possibly be alive. At least once in the past seven hundred thousand years, he would have shown his face. Someone would have seen him. But even if he was alive, the moment Dani had killed the dark prince who came to my cell at the abbey, it had been too late for the first prophecy to work.

The shortcut was a talisman. And Darroc had had it.

Something nagged at my subconscious. I grabbed my backpack and began to rummage through it, hunting for the tarot card. I dumped out the contents, picked up the card, and studied it. A woman stared off into the distance while the world spun in front of her.

What was the point? Why had the DEG—or the fear dorcha, as he’d claimed—given me this particular card?

I took painstaking note of the details of her clothing and hair, the continents on the planet. It was definitely Earth.

I examined the border of the card, looking for concealed runes or symbols. Nothing. But wait! What was around her wrist? It looked like a fold in her skin until I looked closer.

I couldn’t believe I’d missed it.

It had been worked into the border, cleverly concealed as a sort of pentacle, but I knew the shape of the cage that housed the stone. Around the woman’s wrist was the chain of the amulet Darroc had stolen from Mallucé.

The dreamy-eyed guy had been trying to help me.

The talisman from the prophecy was the amulet. The amulet was Darroc’s shortcut!

It had been within my reach the night the Sinsar Dubh popped Darroc’s head like a grape. I’d touched it. It had been so close. Then the next thing I knew I was over a shoulder and it was gone.

I smiled. I knew where to find it.

As a man, Barrons collected antiquities, rugs, manuscripts, and ancient weapons. As a beast, he’d collected everything I touched. The pouch of stones, my sweater.

No matter his form, Barrons was a ferret after shiny baubles that smelled good to him.

There was no way he’d walked away from it that night. I’d touched it.

I slipped the parchment, translation, and tarot card in my pocket and stood up.

It was long past time to find out where Jericho Barrons went when he left the bookstore.

He didn’t go far.

In all the time I’d known him, I was willing to bet he never had.

When I reached the bottom step, I smelled him. The faint hint of spice hung in the air outside his study. The study where he kept his Silver.

The entire time I was Pri-ya, I’d never seen him sleep. I would drift off, but each time I’d wake, he’d be there, lids heavy on glittering dark eyes, watching me as if he’d been laying there just waiting for me to roll over and ask him to fuck me again. Always ready. As if he lived for it. I remembered the look on his face when he’d stretch himself over me.

I remembered how my body had responded.

I’d never done Ecstasy or any of the drugs some of my friends had tried. But if it was like being Pri-ya, I couldn’t imagine wanting to do it willingly.

A part of my brain had still been aware, in a dim sort of way, while my body was out of my control.

If he’d brush a hand over my skin, I’d nearly scream from needing him inside me. I would have done anything to get him there.

Being Pri-ya was worse than being raped by the princes.

It had been hundreds of rapes over and over again. My body had wanted. My mind had been vacant. Yet some part of the essential me had still been there, fully aware that my body was completely out of my control. That I wasn’t choosing. All my choices had been made for me. Sex should be a choice.

Only one had been left to me: more.

When he’d push inside me and I’d feel him begin to penetrate, it had turned me into a wild thing—hot, wet, and desperate for more of him. With every kiss, every caress, every thrust, I’d just needed more. He’d touched me, I went nuts. The world dwindled down to one thing: him. He really had been my world in that basement. It was too much power for one person to have over another. It could put you on your knees, begging.

I had a secret.

A terrible secret that had been eating me alive.

What did you wear to your senior prom, Mac?

That had been the last thing I’d heard, Pri-ya.

Everything from that moment on had really happened.

I’d faked.

I’d lied to him and myself.

I stayed.

And it hadn’t felt any different.

I’d been just as insatiable, just as greedy, just as vulnerable. I’d known exactly who I was, what had happened at the church, and what I’d been doing for the past few months.

And every time he’d touched me, my world had dwindled down to one thing: him.

He was never vulnerable.

I’d hated him for that.

I shook my head, scattered the broody thoughts.

Where would Barrons go to be alone, relax, maybe sleep? Beyond the reach of anyone. Inside a heavily warded Silver.

With the scent of him still hanging in the air, I ransacked his study.

I was feeling ruthless and tired of playing by rules. I didn’t know why there should be any rules between us, anyway. It seemed absurd. He’d been in my space since the moment I’d met him, larger than life, electrifyingly present, shaking me up and waking me up and making me just this side of insane.

I grabbed one of his many antique weapons and pried open the locked drawers of his desk.

Yes, he’d see that I broke into it. No, I didn’t care. He could just try to take his anger out on me. I had a fair share of my own.

He had files on me, on my parents, on McCabe, on O’Bannion, people I’d never heard of, even his own men.

There were bills for dozens of different addresses in many different countries.

In the bottom drawer, I found pictures of me. Stacks and stacks of them.

At the Clarin House, stepping out into the dewy Dublin morning, tan legs gleaming beneath the short hem of my favorite white skirt, long blond hair swinging in a high ponytail.

Walking across the green at Trinity College, meeting Dani for the first time, by the fountain.

Coming down the back steps of Alina’s apartment, exiting into the alley.

Slinking down the back alley, looking at O’Bannion’s abandoned cars, the morning I’d realized that Barrons had turned out all the lights and let the Shades take the perimeter, devouring sixteen men to kill a single one who was a threat to me. There was shock, horror, and something unmistakably relieved in my eyes.

Fighting back-to-back with Dani, sword and spear blazing alabaster in the darkness. There was a whole series of those shots, taken from a rooftop angle. I was on fire, face shining, eyes narrowed, body made for what I was doing.

Through the front window of the bookstore, hugging Daddy.

Curled on the sofa in the rear conversation area of BB&B, sleeping, hands tucked against my chest. No makeup. I looked seventeen, a little lost, completely unguarded.

Marching into the Garda station with Jayne. Heading back to the bookstore, without flashlights. I’d never been in danger that night. He’d been there, making sure I survived whatever came my way.

No one had ever taken so many pictures of me before. Not even Alina. He’d caught my subtlest emotions in each shot. He’d been watching me, always watching me.

Through the window of a crofter’s cottage, I was touching Nana’s face, trying to push into her thoughts and see my mother. My eyes were half closed, my features drawn with concentration.

Another rooftop shot. I had my palm on the Gray Woman’s chest, demanding she restore Dani.

Was there anything he didn’t know?

I let the photos fall back into the drawer. I was feeling light-headed. He’d seen it all: the good, the bad, and the ugly. He never asked me any questions, unless he thought I needed to figure out the answers. He never decked me out in convenient labels and tried to stuff me in a box. Even when there were plenty of labels to stick to me. I was what I was at that moment and he liked it, and that was all that mattered to him.

I turned and stared into the mirror.

The reflection of a stranger stared back.

I touched my face in the reflection. No, she wasn’t a stranger. She was a woman who’d stepped out of her comfort zone in order to survive, who’d become a fighter. I liked the woman I saw in the looking glass.

The surface of the mirror was icy beneath my fingers.

I knew this Silver. I knew all the Silvers. They had something of … K’Vruck in them. Had the king selected an ingredient of their creation from the Hunter’s home world?

As I gazed into it, I sought that dark, glassy lake and told it I wanted in.

Missed you, it steamed. Come swim.

Soon, I promised.

Alabaster runes popped up from the black depths, shimmering on the surface.

It was that easy. I asked, it gave. Always there, always ready.

I scooped them up and pressed them, one after another, to the surface of the Silver.

When the final one was in place, the surface began to ripple like silvery water. I trailed my fingers through it and the waters peeled back, receded to the black edges of the mirror, leaving me staring down a fog-filled path through a cemetery. Behind tombstones and crypts, dark creatures slithered and crept.

The Silver belched a gust of icy air.

I stepped up, into the mirror.

As I suspected, he’d stacked Silvers to form a gauntlet no intruder would make it through alive, protecting his underground abode.

Nine months ago, if I’d been able to figure out how to get in, I’d have gotten killed within the first few feet. I was attacked the instant I stepped inside. I didn’t have time to draw my spear. When the first volley of teeth and claws came at me, my lake instantly offered and I accepted without hesitation.

A single purple rune glowed in my palm.

My attackers fell back. They hated it, whatever it was.

I swirled through fog to my waist, absorbing the barren landscape. Skeletal trees glowed like yellow bones in the sickly moonlight. Crumbling headstones listed at acute angles. Mausoleums hulked behind wrought iron gates. It was brutally cold here, almost as frigid as the Unseelie prison. My hair iced, my brows and nose hairs frosted. My fingers began to numb.

The transition from this Silver to the next was seamless. All of them were. Barrons was far more adept at stacking Silvers than Darroc had been and even more skilled, it seemed, than the Unseelie King.

I didn’t even see the change in my environment coming. I suddenly had one foot in an icy cemetery and the other in a stifling desert of black sand, sun beating down on me. I glided forward into the searing heat and was instantly parched. Nothing attacked me on this scorched terrain. I wondered if the sun alone would keep certain trespassers out. The next mirror gave me fits. Abruptly, I was underwater. I couldn’t breathe. I panicked and tried to back out.

But I hadn’t been able to breathe in the Unseelie prison, either.

I stopped fighting it and half-swam, half-walked on the ocean floor of some planet—not ours, because we didn’t have fish that looked like small underwater steamboats with whirling wheels of teeth.

My glassy lake offered a bubble of sorts, sealed it around me, and everything that came at me bounced off.

I was beginning to feel downright indestructible. Cocky. I put a little swagger in my rolling steps.

By the time I passed through half a dozen more “zones,” I was beyond cocky. Every threat that came at me, my dark lake had an answer for. I was getting drunk on my own power.

From a landscape that would have been called “Midnight on a Far Star” if it had been a painting, I burst into a dimly lit room and blinked.

It was Spartan, Old World, and smelled good. Deep, drugging spices. Barrons. My knees felt soft. I smell him, I think of sex. I’m a hopeless case.

I knew instantly where I was.

Beneath the garage behind Barrons Books and Baubles.

41

I wanted to explore. I would have explored, except for the child crying.

Of all the things I expected Barrons to have secreted away from the world and protected so well, a child wasn’t on my list.

Clues to his identity? Surely.

A luxurious home? Definitely.

A kid? Never.

Bemused, I followed the sound. It was faint, coming from below. The child was sobbing as if its world was ending. I couldn’t tell if it was a girl or a boy, but the pain and sorrow it felt was soul-shredding. I wanted to make it stop. I had to make it stop. It was breaking my heart.

I moved through room after room, barely noticing my surroundings, opening and closing doors, looking for a way down. I was distantly aware that the true jewels of Barrons’ collection were here, in his underground lair. I passed things that I’d seen in museums and now knew had been copies. Barrons didn’t mess with copies. He loved his antiquities. The place hummed with OOPs somewhere. I would find them eventually.

But, first, the child.

The sound of it crying was killing me.

Did Jericho Barrons have children? Maybe he’d had one with Fiona?

I hissed, then realized how Fae I’d sounded and pretended I hadn’t just done that. I stopped and cocked my head. As if he’d heard my tight-lipped exhalation, the crying got louder. Saying, I’m here, I’m near, please find me, I’m so scared and alone.

There had to be stairs.

I stalked through the place, yanking open door after door. The crying was getting on my last maternal-instinct nerve. I finally found the right door and stepped inside.

He’d taken serious precautions.

I was in a fun-house room of mirrors. I could see stairs in a dozen different places, but I had no way of distinguishing between reflection and reality.

And knowing Barrons as well as I did, if I went for the reflection, something very nasty would happen to me. He obviously cared a great deal about the protection of the child.

My dark lake offered, but I didn’t need it.

“Show me what is true,” I murmured, and the mirrors fell dark, one after the next, until a chrome staircase gleamed in the low light.

I moved silently down it, drawn by the siren lure of the child’s sobs.

Once again, my expectations were shot.

The crying was coming from behind tall doors that were chained, padlocked, and engraved with runes. I shouldn’t have been able to hear it at all. I was astonished I’d ever been able to hear Barrons roaring this far underground.

It took me twenty minutes to break the chains, wards, and runes. He obviously wanted this child protected to the hilt. Why? What was so important? What was going on?

When I pushed open the doors, the crying stopped abruptly.

I stepped into the room and looked around. Whatever I’d expected, it wasn’t this. There was no opulence here, no treasure or collectibles. This was little better than Mallucé’s grotto beneath the Burren.

The room was hewn from stone, a cave cleared out in the bedrock of the earth. A small stream ran through, appearing in the east wall, disappearing beyond the west. There were cameras mounted everywhere. He would know I’d been here, even if I walked back out right now.

In the center of the room was a cage that was twenty by twenty, made of massive iron bars, closely spaced. Like the doors, it was heavily runed. It was also empty.

I moved toward it.

And stopped, stunned.

It wasn’t empty as I’d thought. A child lay in the cage, curled on its side, naked. He looked about ten or eleven.

I hurried to him. “Honey, are you all right? What’s wrong? Why are you in there?”

The child looked up. I staggered and went to my knees on the stone floor, stupefied.

I was looking at the child from the vision I’d shared with Barrons.

Every detail of it was crystal clear in my head, as if I’d lived it yesterday—a rare glimpse into Barrons’ heart. I could close my eyes and be back there again with him, that easily. We were in a desert.

It’s dusk. We hold a child in our arms.

I stare into the night.

I won’t look down.

Can’t face what’s in his eyes.

Can’t not look.

My gaze goes unwillingly, hungrily down.

The child stares up at me with utter trust.

“But you died!” I protested, staring at him.

The boy moved toward me, came to stand at the edge of the cage and wrapped his small hands around the bars. Beautiful boy. Dark hair, gold skin, dark eyes. His father’s son. His eyes are soft, warm.

And I’m Barrons, staring down at him …

His eyes say, I know you won’t let me die.

His eyes say, I know you will make the pain stop.

His eyes said, Trust/love/adore/youareperfect/ you willalwayskeepmesafe/youaremyworld.

But I didn’t keep him safe.

And I can’t make his pain stop.

We’d been in the desert holding this child, this very boy in our arms, losing him, loving him, grieving him, feeling his life slip away …

I see him there. His yesterdays. His today. The tomorrows that will never be.

I see his pain and it shreds me.

I see his absolute love and it shames me.

He smiles at me. He gives me all his love in his eyes.

It begins to fade.

No! I roar. You will not die! You will not leave me!

I stare into his eyes for what seems a thousand days.

I see him. I hold him. He is there.

He is gone.

But he’s not gone. He’s right here with me. The boy presses his face to the bars. He smiles at me. He gives me all his love in his eyes. I melt. If I could be someone’s mother, I would take this child and keep him safe forever.

I push to my feet, moving as if I’m in a trance. I’ve held this child, inside Barrons’ head. As Barrons, I loved him and I lost him. In sharing that vision, it became my wound, too.

“I don’t understand. How are you alive? Why are you here?” Why had Barrons experienced his death? There was no question that he had. I’d been there. I’d tasted it, too. It was reminiscent of the regrets I’d felt about Alina …

Come back, come back, you want to scream … just one more minute. Just one more smile … one more chance to do things right. But he’s gone. He’s gone. Where did he go? What happens to life when it leaves? Does it go somewhere or is it just fucking gone?

“How are you here?” I say wonderingly.

He speaks to me, and I don’t understand a word of it. It’s a language dead and forgotten. But I hear the plaintive tones. I hear a word that sounds like Ma-ma.

Choking back a sob, I reach for him.

As I slip my arms through the bars and gather his small, naked body into my arms, as his dark head floats into the hollow where my shoulder meets my neck, fangs puncture my skin, and the beautiful little boy rips out my throat.

42

I die for a long time.

Much longer than I think it should take.

Figures I’d die slow and in pain. I pass out several times and am surprised that I regain consciousness. I feel fevered. The skin of my neck is numb, but the wound burns like I’ve been injected with venom.

I think I left half of my neck in the child’s impossibly expandable jaws.

He began to change the moment I took him in my arms.

I managed to tear myself from his preternaturally strong grasp and stumble from the cage before he completed the transformation.

But it was too late. I’d been a fool. My heart had wed Barrons to a sobbing child and embraced sentimentality. I’d seen the chains, padlocks, and wards as Barrons’ way of keeping a child safe.

What they’d really been was his way of keeping the world safe from the child.

I lie on the floor of the stone chamber, dying. I lose awareness again for a time, then am back.

I watch the child become the night version of Barrons’ beast. Black skin, black horns and fangs, red eyes. Talk about homicidally insane. He makes the beast Barrons was in the Silvers seem downright genial and calm.

He bays continuously while he changes, head whipping from side to side, spraying me with his spittle and my blood, staring at me with feral crimson eyes. He wants to sink his teeth into me, shake me, and crush every last drop of blood from my body. The mark Barrons placed on my skull doesn’t do a thing to defuse his bloodlust.

I am food and he can’t reach me.

He rattles the bars of the cage and he howls.

He morphs from four to ten feet tall.

This is what I heard beneath the garage. This is what I listened to while looking at Barrons across the roof of a car.

This child, caged down here, forever imprisoned.

And I understand, as my lifeblood seeps out, that this is why he was bringing the dead woman out of the Silver.

The child had to be fed.

He held this child, watched him die. I try to think about it, wrap my brain around it. The child has to be his son. If Barrons didn’t feed him, the child suffered. If he did feed him, he had to look at this monster. How long? How long had he been caretaker for this child? A thousand years? Ten? More?

I try to touch my neck, feel the extent of my wounds, but I can’t raise my arms. I’m weak, dreamy, and I don’t really care. I just want to close my eyes and sleep for a few minutes. Just a short nap, then I’ll wake up and get busy finding something in my lake to help me survive this. I wonder if there are runes that can heal torn-out throats. Maybe there’s some Unseelie in here somewhere.

I wonder if that’s my jugular gushing. If so, it’s too late, way too late for me now.

I can’t believe I’m going to die like this.

Barrons will come in and find me here.

Bled out on the floor of his bat cave.

I try to summon the will to search my lake, but I think I lost too much blood too fast. I can’t care, no matter how I try. The lake is curiously silent. Like it’s watching, waiting to see what happens next.

The roaring in the cage is so loud, I don’t hear Barrons roaring, too, until he’s scooping me up into his arms and carrying me from the room, slamming doors behind him.

“What the fuck, Mac? What the fuck?” He keeps saying, over and over. His eyes are wild, his face white, his lips thin. “What were you thinking coming down here without me? I’d’ve brought you if I thought you’d be so stupid. Don’t do this to me! You can’t fucking do this to me!”

I look up at him. Shades of Bluebeard, I muse dreamily. I opened the door on his slaughtered wives. My mouth won’t shape words. I want to know how the child is still alive. I feel numb. He’s your son, isn’t he?

He doesn’t answer me. He stares at me as if memorizing my face. I see something move deep in his eyes.

I should have made love to this man. I was always afraid to be tender. I’m bemused by my own idiocy.

He flinches.

“Don’t you think for a fucking minute you can put all that in your eyes, then die. That’s bullshit. I’m not doing this again.”

Got any Unseelie? I half-expect him to race aboveground to hunt one and bring it back. But I don’t have that much time and I know it.

“I’m not good, Mac. Never have been.”

What—true-confession time? my eyes tease. Don’t need it.

“I want what I want and I take it.”

Is he warning me? What could he possibly threaten me with now?

“There’s nothing I can’t live with. Only things I won’t live without.”

He stares at my neck, and I know it’s a mess from the look in his eyes. Savaged and shredded. I don’t know how I’m still breathing, why I’m not dead. I think I can’t talk because I no longer have intact vocal cords.

He touches my neck. Well, at least I think he does. I see his hand beneath my chin. I can’t feel anything. Is he trying to rearrange my internal parts like I once did to his, in the early-morning sun on the edge of a cliff, as if I could put him back together by sheer force of will?

His eyes narrow and his brows draw together. He closes his eyes, opens them again, and frowns. He shifts me in his arms and studies me from a different angle, glancing between my face and neck. Comprehension smooths his brow, and his lips twist in the ghastly smile people give you right before they tell you they have good news and bad news—and the bad news is really bad. “When you were in Faery, did you ever eat or drink anything, Mac?”

V’lane, I say silently. Drinks on beach.

“Did they make you sick?”

No.

“Did you drink anything at any time that made you feel like your guts were being ripped out? You’d want to die. From what I hear, it would have lasted about a day.”

I think a moment. The rape, I finally say. He gave me something. The one I couldn’t see. I felt pain for a long time. Thought it was from the princes being inside me.

His nostrils flare, and when he tries to speak, only a deep rattle comes out. He tries twice more before he gets it right. “They would have left you like that forever. I’m going to slice them into tiny pieces and feed them to one another. Slowly. Over centuries.” His voice is as calm as a sociopath’s.

What are you saying?

“I wondered. You smelled different afterward. I knew they’d done something. But you didn’t smell like the Rhymer. You were like him but different. I had to wait and see.”

Staring up at him, I take a fresh mental assessment of myself. I am beginning to feel my neck again. It burns like hell. But I can swallow.

Not dying?

“They must have been afraid they’d kill you with their—” He looks away, muscles working in his jaw. “An eternity of hell. You would have been Pri-ya forever.” His face is tight with fury.

What did they do to me? I demand.

He resumes walking, carries me through room after room, finally stopping in a chamber nearly identical to the rear seating cozy in BB&B: rugs, lamps, chesterfield, fluffy throws. Only the fireplace is different: enormous, with a stone hearth a man can stand in. Gas logs. No wood smoke seeping out somewhere to give him away.

He props pillows against the arm and places me gently on the sofa. He moves to the fireplace and turns it on.

“The Fae have an elixir that prolongs life.”

They gave it to me.

He nods.

Is that what happened to you?

“I said prolongs. Not turns you into a nine-foot-tall horned insane monster.” He watches my neck. “You’re healing. Your wounds are closing. I know a man that was given this elixir. Four thousand years ago. He smells different, too. As long as the Rhymer is never stabbed by the spear or sword, he lives, un-aging. He can only be killed in the ways a Fae can be killed.”

I stare up at him. I’m immortal? I can move my arms again. I touch my neck. I feel thick ridges as the skin fuses back together. It’s like when I ate Unseelie. I’m healing beneath my hands. I feel things crunching, moving in my neck, growing new and strong.

“Think of it as long-lived and hard to kill.”

Four thousand years long-lived? I stare at him blankly. I don’t want to live four thousand years. I think about that Unseelie, badly mutilated, left in my back alley. Immortality is terrifying. I just want my small lifetime. I can’t even conceive of four thousand years. I don’t want to live forever. Life is hard. Eighty or a hundred years would be just perfect. That’s all I ever wanted.

“You might want to seriously reconsider carrying that spear. In fact, I may decide to destroy it. And the sword.” He unbuckles the holster from my shoulder and throws it to the floor, near the fireplace.

I watch it clatter to a stop against the façade of the hearth, relieved. I can die. Not that I want to right now. I just like options. As long as I have the spear, I have options. I’m never getting rid of that thing. It’s my date with a gravestone, and I’m human. I want to die one day.

“But he can’t.” It’s the first complete sentence I speak since I was attacked. “Your son can’t die, can he? No matter what. Ever.”

43

If I’d never eaten Unseelie, healing miraculously would have messed with my head.

As it was, I pretended I had eaten Unseelie. I couldn’t deal with the whole elixir-that-prolongs-life scenario. It made me want to kill Darroc all over again. Violently. Sadistically. With lots of torture.

He’d not only turned me Pri-ya, he’d planned for me to live that way eternally. I’d softened when I saw those pictures of him with Alina, imagining a different outcome for them, but now all softness vanished. If Barrons hadn’t saved me—I couldn’t even begin to imagine the horrors. I didn’t want to. I would have been pathologically insane in a very short time. What if he’d locked me away, refused to give me what I needed? Kept me somewhere small and dark and—

I shuddered.

“Stop thinking about it,” Barrons said.

I shivered. I couldn’t help it. There really were worse things than dying.

“It didn’t happen. I got you out and brought you back. It all worked out in the end. You’re tough to kill. I’m glad.”

I’d bled out, according to Barrons, several times. Too much of my throat had been torn away for my body to repair me quickly enough. While I’d been dead—or at least no longer breathing—my body had continued repairing itself. I’d regain consciousness, only to bleed out again. Eventually enough of me had been restored that I’d remained conscious for the rest of the process. I was covered with blood, crusted with it.

Barrons picks me up and is carrying me again. We pass through luxurious rooms, down stairs and more stairs, and I realize there are more than three levels beneath his garage. He has a whole world down here. I usually hate being underground. But this is different. There’s a sensation of expansiveness, of space not being quite what it seems. I suspect he has more Silvers in here, many ways in and out. It’s the ultimate survivalist fantasy. The world could be nuked, and life would go on down here, or we could pass through to some other world. With Barrons, I suspect, no catastrophe is ever final. He always goes on.

Now, so will I.

I don’t like that. I’ve been reprogrammed, changed in so many ways. This one is going to be the hardest to deal with. It makes me feel less human, and I was already feeling detached. Am I part of the Unseelie King, now nearly immortal? I wonder if this is a loop. Are we reborn over and over again, to repeat the same cycles?

“Would it be so bad?”

“Are you reading my mind?”

“You’re thinking with your eyes.” He smiles.

I touch his face, and the smile vanishes. “Do it again.”

“Don’t be a jackass.”

I laugh. But there’s no amusement left in his face. It was swiftly erased.

He looks at me with cold, hard eyes. I see what’s in them now. To the rest of the world, they might seem empty. I remember thinking a few times myself that they were void of all humanity, but that’s simply not true.

He feels. Rage. Pain. Lust. So much emotion, electric beneath his skin. So much volatility. Man and beast, always at war. I know now it’s never easy for him. The battle he fights is nonstop. How does this man go on every day?

He stops and lowers me to my feet. He moves through the shadows, turns on a gas fire, and begins to light candles.

We are in his bedroom. It’s like the Unseelie King’s lair: opulent, luxurious, with an enormous bed, draped in black silk, black furs. I can’t see past it. All I can see is myself there, naked with him.

I’m trembling.

I’m awed that I’m here. That he wants me.

He lights more candles near the bed. He picks up pillows and pushes them into a pile I remember from being Pri-ya.

In that long-ago basement, he mounded them beneath my hips. I sprawled over them with my head on the bed and my ass in the air. He would rub himself back and forth between my legs until I was begging, then push slowly into me from behind.

He places the last pillow on the pile, and looks at me. He jerks his head toward the pile of pillows.

“I watched you die. I need to fuck you, Mac.”

The words slam into me like bullets, taking my knees out. I lean back against a piece of furniture—an armoire, I think. I really don’t care. It holds me up. It wasn’t a request. It was acknowledgment of a requirement to make it from this moment to the next, like I need a transfusion, my blood has been poisoned.

“Do you want me to?” There is no purr, or coyness, or seduction in his voice. There is a question that needs an answer. Bare bones. That’s what he’s after. That’s what he offers.

“Yes.”

He strips his shirt over his head and I catch my breath, watching those long, hard muscles ripple. I know how his shoulders look, bunched, when he’s on top of me, how his face gets tight with lust, as he eases inside me. “Who am I?”

“Jericho.”

“Who are you?” He kicks off his boots, steps out of his pants. He’s commando tonight.

My breath whooshes out of me in a run-on word: “Whogivesafuck?”

“Finally.” The word is soft. The man is not.

“I need a shower.”

His eyes glitter, his teeth flash in the darkness. “A little blood never bothers me.” He glides toward me, in that way that barely displaces air. A velvet shadow in the darkness. He is the night. He always has been. I used to be a sunshine girl.

He circles me, looking me up and down.

I watch him, holding my breath. Jericho Barrons is walking naked circles around me, looking at me like he’s going to eat me alive—in a good way, not like his son. As I watch him, emotion staggers me and I realize that I never completely thawed from what I’d done to myself back there on the cliff, when I’d believed he was dead. I’d stripped away so much of me in order to survive. When I’d realized he was alive, there were so many other things going on and I was angry because he hadn’t told me, and I’d shoved the messy tangle away, refused to look at it. I’d walked through the past few months refusing to let any of what was happening really touch me. Refusing to accept the woman I’d become, denying that I’d even become it.

Now I thaw. Now I stand and look at him and realize why I never turned it all back on.

I would have destroyed the world for him.

And I couldn’t face that. Couldn’t stand what it said about me.

I want to slow this moment down. Once before, I ended up in bed with him inside me, but I was Pri-ya—it happened so quickly and without conscious choice that it was over before it began. I want this to happen in slow motion. I want to live every second like it’s my last. I’ve chosen this. It feels incredible. “Wait.”

His demeanor changes instantly, his eyes haze with crimson. “I haven’t waited long enough?” His chest rattles. His hands are at his sides, curling, flexing. He breathes hard and fast.

In the flickering light, his skin begins to darken.

I stare at him. Just like that, lust to fury. I think he might launch himself on me, take me down, shredding my clothes as we go, and shove inside me before we even hit the floor.

“I’d never take it.” His eyes narrow. Crimson stains the white, bleeds into them with tiny rivers. Suddenly his eyes are black on red, no whites at all. “But I won’t tell you I haven’t thought about it.”

I inhale deeply.

“You’re here. In my bedroom. You have no fucking idea what that does to me. If a woman comes to this place, she dies. If I don’t kill her, my men do.”

“Has a woman ever come to this place?”

“Once.”

“Did she find her own way in? Or did you bring her?”

“I brought her.”

“And?”

“I made love to her.”

I jerk, turning with him, staring into his eyes. That he says those words about another woman makes me feel like launching myself at him, tearing off my clothes, and slamming him home inside me before we reach the floor. Erasing her. He wants to fuck me. He made love to her.

He’s watching me closely. He seems to like what he sees.

“And?”

“When I was done I killed her.”

He says it without emotion, but I see more in his eyes. He hated himself for killing her. He believed he had no choice. He succumbed to a moment of wanting someone in his bed, in his home, in his world. He wanted to feel … normal for a night. And she paid for it with her life.

“I’m not the hero, Mac. Never have been. Never will be. Let us be perfectly clear: I’m not the antihero, either, so quit waiting to discover my hidden potential. There’s nothing to redeem me.”

I want him anyway.

It’s what he wanted to know.

I exhale impatiently and shove hair from my face. “Are you going to talk me to death or fuck me, Jericho Barrons?”

“Say it again. The last part.”

I do.

“They’ll try to kill you.”

“Good thing I’m hard to kill.” Only one thing concerned me. “Will you?”

“Never. I’m the one who will always watch over you. Always be there to fuck you back to your senses when you need it, the one who will never let you die.”

I pull my shirt over my head and kick off my shoes. “What more could a woman ask?” I skinny out of my jeans but get a foot tangled up trying to get out of my underwear. I stumble.

He’s on me before I hit the floor.

Since the moment I laid eyes on Jericho Barrons, I wanted him. I wanted him to do things to me that pink and clueless MacKayla Lane was shocked and appalled and … okay, yeah, well, utterly fascinated to find herself thinking about.

I admitted none of it to myself. How could a peacock lust for a lion?

I’d been as fancy as one of the proud males, in my useless plumage. I’d strutted around, stealing glances at the king of the jungle, denying what I felt. I’d assessed my tail and his killing claws and understood that if the lion were ever to lay down with the peacock—it would only be on a nest of bloody feathers.

It hadn’t stopped me from wanting him.

It made me grow claws.

As I fall to the floor beneath him, I think, here I am now: a featherless peacock with claws. My lovely tail lost, in one ordeal or the other. I look in the mirror and have no idea what I am. Don’t care. Perhaps I’ll grow a mane.

Relief floods me when his body slams into mine. Barrons moves like a sudden dark wind. He’s not only on me but pushing in me before we hit the floor.

Oh, God, yes, finally! My head slams back into wood but I barely feel it. My neck and back arch, my legs spread. My ankles are on his shoulders and I suffer no conflicts. There is only need and the answer to it all shoving inside me—sleek, hard, animal dressed up in the skin of a man.

I look up at him and he’s part beast. His face is mahogany, his fangs are out. His eyes are Barrons. The look in them isn’t. It makes me wild. I can be whatever I want to be with him. No inhibitions. I feel him growing harder, longer inside me.

“You can do that?” I gasp. The beast was bigger than the man.

He laughs, and it is definitely not a human sound.

I moan, I whimper, I writhe. It’s incredible. He’s filling me up, gliding deep and deliciously inside me where I’ve never felt a man before. Oh, God! I come. I explode. I hear someone roaring.

It’s me. I laugh and keep coming. I think I scream. I use my claws and he bucks in me, sudden and rapid. He makes that sound in the back of his throat I’m so crazy about. I love that sound.

I’d walk through hell and back, smiling, as long as he was beside me. As long as I could glance over at him and our eyes would meet and we’d share one of those wordless looks.

“You haven’t lost your feathers.” His words are strange, guttural, forced out around fangs.

I’d snort, but then his tongue is in my mouth, my jaws are wide, and I can’t breathe, and he’s right. One day you do meet a man who kisses you and you can’t breathe around it and you realize you don’t need air. Oxygen is trivial. Desire makes life happen. Makes it matter. Makes everything worth it. Desire is life. Hunger to see the next sunrise or sunset, to touch the one you love, to try again.

“Hell would be waking up and wanting nothing,” he agrees. He knows what I’m thinking. Always. We’re connected. The atoms between us ferry messages back and forth.

“Harder. Deeper. Come on, Barrons. More.” I feel violent. I am unbreakable. I am elastic around him. Insatiable. His hand is on the side of my neck, around my throat, half cupping my face. His eyes bore into mine. He watches every nuance, every detail of every expression, as if his existence depends on it. He fucks with the single-minded devotion of a dying man hunting God.

As he fills me, I wonder if—in the same way that sex makes its own unique perfume—we don’t really “make” love. As in create, manufacture, evoke an independent element in the air around us, and if enough of us did it really well, for real, not just for the hell of it, we could change the world. Because when he’s in me, I feel the space around us changing, charging, and it seems to set off some kind of feedback loop, where the more he touches me, the more I need him to. Having sex with Barrons sates my need. Then feeds it. Sates, then feeds. It’s a never-ending cycle. I get out of bed with him, frantic to be back in it again. And I—

“—hated you for it,” he says gently.

That was my line.

“I never get enough, Mac. Drives me bug-fuck. I should kill you for what you make me feel.”

I understand perfectly. He is my vulnerability. I would become Shiva, the world-eater, for him.

He withdraws and I nearly scream from the emptiness.

Then he’s lifting me into his arms and I’m on the bed, and he’s spreading me over the mound of pillows, nudging my legs wide, and when he pushes into me from behind, I sob with relief. I’m whole, I’m alive, I’m—

I close my eyes and ride the mindless bliss. It’s all I can do. Be. Feel. Live.

I’m Pri-ya again.

I always will be with this man.

Much later, I look up at him. He’s on top of me, barely inside me. I’m swollen, hot, and fiercely alive. My hands are over my head. He likes to tease, an inch, maybe two, until I’m crazy with need, then drive it home hard. It undoes me every time.

I know part of what turns me on so hard, makes me so violent with lust, is that he’s dangerous. I fell for the bad guy. I’m crazy about the one who’s trouble. The alpha that doesn’t play well with others and doesn’t take orders from anyone.

What else would I expect? It’s possible I’m part of the ancient creator of the Unseelie race.

He’s kissing me. V’lane’s name is long gone from my tongue. There’s only him, and he’s right: No other man would fit.

“Maybe there’s nothing wrong with you at all, Mac,” he says. “Maybe you’re exactly what you’re supposed to be, and the only reason you feel so conflicted about it is that you keep trying to bat for the wrong team.” He thrusts deep, rocks his hips forward with a muscle I’d be willing to bet no human man had.

I arch my back. “Are you saying you think I’m evil?”

“Evil isn’t a state of being. It’s a choice.”

“I don’t think—”

My mouth is suddenly busy. By the time I get around to finishing my sentence, I have no idea what I was going to say.

We end up in the shower, an enormous affair of Italian marble and shower heads on all walls. A dozen feet long, six feet wide, it has a bench that’s just the right height. I think we stay in there for days. He brings in food and I eat in the shower. I wash him, slide my hands over his beautiful body.

“When you die, do your tattoos disappear?” Wet, his hair is darker, glossy, his skin a deep bronze. Water runs over muscle, sprays off his erection. He’s always hard.

“Yes.”

“That’s why they were different.” I frown. “Do you come back exactly how you were when you died the first time?”

“Were you Pri-ya the entire time?”

I gasp and try to duck my head so he can’t see my eyes. My eyes betray me sometimes, no matter how hard I try, especially when my feelings are intense.

He grabs my head and holds it with two fistfuls of my hair, forcing me to look at him.

“I knew it—you weren’t!” His mouth is on mine, he has me against the wall. I can’t breathe and I don’t care. He is exultant. “How long?” he demands.

“What happens when you die?” I counter.

“I come back.”

“Duh, obviously. How? Where? Do you eventually just stand up from your ashes again or something?”

I hear a rattle and suddenly he’s on the floor, head back, muscles rippling, fighting to remain a man. He’s losing the battle. He has talons. Black fangs slide from his mouth, gouging into his skin. I can tell he doesn’t want to turn, but something I asked him has made him frenzied.

I can’t stand watching him struggle. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to help Barrons. I answer, talk to him to keep him grounded in the here and now. “I knew what was happening from the moment you asked me what I wore to the prom.” I drop to my knees beside him, take his head in my arms and cradle him at my breast. His face is half beast, half man. “I began to surface. It was like I was there but trying not to be there. I’m here, Jericho. Stay with me.”

Later we sleep. Or I do. I don’t know what he does. I’m exhausted and warm and feel safe for the first time in a long time, drifting off in Barrons’ underground world, next to the king of beasts.

I wake to him pushing into me from behind. We’ve had sex so many times, so many ways, I can barely move. I’ve come so many times I think it’s impossible for me to even want to come again, but then he’s inside me and my body tells a different story. I need so badly I ache. I slip my hand down and, as soon as I touch myself, I come. He shoves into me deep, rocking into my climax. I’m on my side. He’s tucked me into his body, spooned close. His arms are around me, his lips on my neck. Teeth graze my skin. When I stop shuddering, he pulls out and immediately I want him again. I push back with my rump and he’s back. He goes slow, so slow it’s torture. He thrusts, I clench. He withdraws, I lay tense, waiting. Neither of us says a word. I barely breathe. He stops and stays perfectly still for a while but not to tease. He likes being hard inside me. Connected, we lie there in silence. I don’t want the moment to end.

But it does, and when we’re separate, we don’t speak for a long time. I watch the shadows flickering on a famous painting on the wall. He’s not asleep. I can feel him back there, aware.

“Do you ever sleep?”

“No.”

“That must be hell.” I love sleeping. Curling up, napping, dreaming. I need to dream.

“I dream,” he says coolly.

“I didn’t mean—”

“Never pity me, Ms. Lane. I like what I am.”

I roll over in his arms, touch his face. I let myself be tender. Trace his features, slide my fingers into his hair. He seems both put off and entranced by the way I’m touching him. I rearrange my head to accommodate the advantages of never sleeping. There are a lot. “How do you dream if you don’t sleep?”

“I drift. Humans need to shut down to let go. Meditation accomplishes the same thing, lets the subconscious play. That’s all you need.”

“What happened to your son?”

“Aren’t you question girl?” he mocks.

“He’s why you want the Sinsar Dubh.”

I feel the sudden violence in his body. It gusts like a sirocco, and just like that I’m inside his head and we’re in a desert and I wonder with a strange sense of duality in which I am him and I am me why it always seems to come back to this place for him. Then …

I’m Barrons, and I’m on my knees in the sand.

The wind is kicking up; the storm comes.

I was stupid, so stupid.

Death for hire. I laughed. I drank. I fucked. Nothing mattered. I swaggered through life, a god. Grown men screamed when they saw me coming.

I was born today. I opened my eyes for the first time.

It all looks so different now that it’s too late. What a grand fucking joke on me. I should never have come here. This is one battle-for-hire I should never have taken.

I hold my son and I weep.

The sky opens, letting the storm free. Sand comes, so thick it turns day into night.

One by one, my men fall around me.

I curse the heavens as I die. They curse me back.

There is black. Only black. I wait for the light. The Old Ones say there is light when you die. They say to run for it. If it goes away, you drift the earth forever.

No light comes to me.

I wait all night in the dark.

I’m dead yet I can feel the desert beneath my corpse, the abrasion of sand on my skin, up my nostrils. Scorpions sting my hands, my feet. Open, dead eyes crusted with sand watch the night sky as the stars pop and vanish, one by one. The darkness is absolute. I wait and wonder. The light will come. I wait, I wait.

The only light that comes for me is dawn.

I stand up, and my men stand up and we stare uneasily at one another.

Then my son stands up and I don’t care. I spare no thought for the strange night that shouldn’t have been. The universe is a mystery. The gods are fickle. I am and he is and that is enough. I toss him on my horse and leave my men behind.

“My son was killed two days later.”

I open my eyes, blinking. I can still taste sand, feel the grit in my eyes. Scorpions crawl at my feet.

“It was an accident. His body disappeared before we could bury it.”

“I don’t understand. Did you die in the desert or not? Did he?”

“We died. It was only later that I pieced it together. Things rarely make sense while they’re unfolding. After my son died the second time, he died many more times, simply trying to get back to me and come home. He was deep in the desert without conveyance or water.”

I stare. “What are you saying? That every time he died, he came back in the same place he’d died that first time with you?”

“At dawn the next day.”

“Over and over? He would try to make it out, die of heatstroke or something, then have to start all over again?”

“Far from home. We didn’t know. None of us died for a long time. We knew we were different, but we didn’t know about the dying. That came later.”

I watch him and wait for him to speak again. This is the crux of Barrons. I want to know. I won’t push.

“That wasn’t the end of his hell. I had rivals who rode the desert, too. Death for hire. Many were the times we’d thinned each other’s pack. One day, they found him walking the sands. They played with him.” He looks away. “They tortured and killed him.”

“How do you know this?”

“Because when I finally put things together, I tortured and killed a few of them and they talked while they died.” His lips smile; his eyes are cold, merciless. “They set up camp not too far from where he was reborn every dawn and found him the next day. Once they realized what was happening, they believed he was demon spawn. They tortured and killed him over and over. The more he came back, the more determined they were to destroy him. I don’t know how many times they killed him. Too many. They never let him live long enough to change. They didn’t know what he was, nor did he. Just that he kept coming back. One day another band attacked, and they didn’t have time to kill him. He was left alone, tied up in a tent for days. He got hungry enough that he turned. He never turned back. It was a year before we were hired to hunt the beast that was scouring the country, ripping out the throats and hearts of men.”

I was horrified. “They killed him every day for a year? And you were hired to kill him?”

“We knew it was one of us. We’d all changed. We knew what we’d become. It had to be him. I hoped.” His mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “I actually hoped it was my son.” There was naked hunger in his eyes. “How long was he a child tonight? How long did you see him before he attacked you?”

“A few minutes.”

“I haven’t seen him like that in centuries.” I could see him remembering the last time. “They broke him. He can’t control his change. I’ve seen him as my son only five times, as if for a few moments he knew peace.”

“You can’t reach him? Teach him?” Barrons could teach anyone.

“Part of his mind is gone. He was too young. Too frightened. They destroyed him. A man might have withstood it. A child had no chance. I used to sit by his cage and talk to him. When technology afforded, I recorded every moment, to catch a glimpse of him as my son. The cameras are off now. I couldn’t watch the recordings, looking for him. I have to keep him caged. If the world ever found him, they would kill him, too. Over and over. He’s feral. He kills. That’s all he does.”

“You feed him.”

“He suffers if I don’t. Fed, sometimes he rests. I’ve killed him. I’ve tried drugs. I learned sorcery. Druidry. I thought Voice might make him sleep, even die. It seemed to hypnotize him for a time. He’s highly adaptable. The ultimate killing machine. I studied. I collected relics of power. I drove your spear through his heart two thousand years ago, when I first heard of it. I forced a Fae princess to do her best. Nothing works. He’s not in there. Or if he is somewhere, he is in constant, eternal agony. It never ends for him. His faith in me was misplaced. I can never—”

Save him, he doesn’t say, and I don’t, either, because if I’m not careful I’m going to start crying, and I know it would only make things worse for him. He’s thousands of years past tears. He just wants release. Wants to lay his son to rest. Tuck him in and say good night forever, one last time.

“You want to unmake him.”

“Yes.”

“How long has this been going on?”

He says nothing.

He will never tell me. And I realize a number doesn’t really matter. The grief he felt in the desert has never abated. I understand now why they would kill me. It’s not just his secret. It’s theirs, too. “All of you return to the place you first died every time you die.”

He is instantly violent. I understand.

They kill to keep anyone from doing to them what was done to his son. It is their only vulnerability: wherever they come back at dawn the next day. An enemy could sit there, waiting for them, and kill them over and over again.

“I don’t want to know where that is. Ever,” I assure him, and mean it. “Jericho, we’ll get the Book. We’ll find a spell of unmaking. I promise. We’ll put your son to rest.” I feel suddenly vicious. Who had done this to them? Why? “I swear it,” I vow. “One way or another, we’ll make it happen.”

He nods, folds his arms behind his head, stretches back on a pillow, and closes his eyes.

As the moments pass, I watch the tension leave his face. I know he’s in that place where he meditates, where he controls things. What extraordinary discipline.

How many thousands of years has he been taking care of his son, feeding him, trying to kill him and ease his agony, if only for a few moments?

I’m back in the desert again, not because he takes me there but because I can’t get the look on his son’s face out of my head.

His eyes say, I know you will make the pain stop.

Barrons has never been able to. It never ended. For either of them.

The child, whose death destroyed him, has destroyed him every single day since. By living.

Dying, Barrons said, is easy. The man who dies escapes, plain and simple.

I’m suddenly glad Alina is dead. If the light comes for anyone, it came for her. She rests somewhere.

But not his son. And not this man.

I press my cheek to his chest, to listen to his heart beating.

And for the first time since I met him, I realize it isn’t. Have I never heard his blood rush before? His heart pound? How could I not have noticed?

I look up at him to find him staring down his chest at me, an unfathomable expression in his eyes. “I haven’t eaten lately.”

“And your heart stops beating?”

“It becomes painful. Eventually I would change.”

“What do you eat?” I say carefully.

“None of your fucking business,” he says gently.

I nod. I can live with that.

He moves differently down here. He doesn’t try to conceal anything. Here, he is himself and moves in that way that seems one with the universe, smooth as silk, flowing noiselessly from room to room. If I forget to pay attention to where he is, I misplace him. I discover he’s leaning against a column—when I’d thought he was the column—arms folded, watching me.

I explore his underground lair. I don’t how long he’s lived, but it’s clear he has always lived well. He was a mercenary once, in another time, another place, who knows how long ago. He liked fine things then, and his taste hasn’t changed.

I find his kitchen. It’s a gourmet chef’s dream—stainless-steel top-of-the-line everything. Lots of marble and beautiful cabinets. Sub-Zero fridge and freezer well stocked. Wine cellar to die for. As I devour a plate of bread and cheese, I imagine him here all those nights when I trudged up to my fourth- or fifth-floor bedroom and slept alone. Did he pace these floors, cook himself dinner, or maybe eat it raw, practice dark arts, tattoo himself, go for a drive in one of his many cars? He was so close all that time. Down here, naked on silk sheets. It would have driven me crazy if I’d known then what I know now.

He peels a mango while I wonder how he managed to get his hands on fruit in post-wall Dublin. It’s so ripe it drips down his fingers, his arms. I lick the juice from his hands. I push him back and eat the pulp off his stomach, lower, then end up with my bare ass on the cool marble of the island and him inside me again, my legs locked around his hips. He stares down at me, as if he’s memorizing my face, watches me like he can’t quite believe I’m here.

I sit on the island while he makes me an omelet. I’m ravenous, body and soul. Burning off more calories than I can eat.

He cooks naked. I admire his back and shoulders, his legs. “I found the second prophecy,” I tell him.

He laughs. “Why does it always take you so long to tell me the important things?”

“You should talk,” I say drily.

He slides the plate in front of me and hands me a fork. “Eat.”

When I finish, I say, “You have the amulet, don’t you?”

He catches his tongue in his teeth briefly and gives me a full-on smile. It says: I’m the biggest baddest fuck and I have all the toys.

We go back to his bedroom and I get the page from Mad Morry’s notebook and the tarot card from my pocket.

He looks at the card. “Where did you say you got this?”

“Chester’s. The dreamy-eyed guy gave it to me.”

“Who?”

“The good-looking college-age guy that bartends.”

His head moves funny, like a snake drawing back to strike. “How good-looking?”

I look at him. His gaze is cool. If you want that kind of life, get the fuck out of my house now, his eyes say.

“Nothing like you, Barrons.”

He relaxes. “So, who is he? Have I ever seen him?”

I tell him when and where and describe him, and he looks puzzled. “I’ve never seen the kid. I saw an elderly man with a heavy Irish accent pouring drinks a few times when I came to get you, but no one like you’re describing.”

I shrug. “Point is, it’s too late for the first prophecy to work.” I hand him the page. “Darroc was convinced he was the one who could use the amulet. But I read his translation and it sounds like it could be you or Dageus. Or any number of men.”

Barrons takes the parchment from me and scans it. “Why would he think it was him?”

“Because it says he who is not what he was. And he used to be Fae.”

He turns it over, looks at Darroc’s translation, then flips back to Mad Morry’s prophecy.

“Darroc didn’t speak Old Irish when I trained him and, if he picked it up since then, he didn’t learn it very well. His translation is wrong. It’s a rare dialect and gender neutral. It says the one that is possessed … or inhabited.”

“That’s what the first prophecy said.”

He looks at me and raises a brow. It takes me a moment to interpret his expression.

“You think it’s me.” Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. As if some part of me always knew it was going to come down to this in the end: me against the Sinsar Dubh, winner take all. It smacks of fate. I hate fate. I don’t believe in her. Unfortunately, I think the bitch believes in me.

He moves to a vault behind the painting I’d been watching candlelight flicker over earlier and removes the amulet. It’s dark in his hands. The moment he approaches me, it pulses faintly.

I reach for it. It blazes when I touch it. It feels right in my hands. I’ve wanted it since the moment I first saw it.

“You’re the wild card, Mac. I’ve thought that since the beginning. This thing thinks you’re epic. So do I.”

Quite a compliment. I cup the amulet in my hands. I know this piece. I turn inward, hunting, searching. I’ve learned so much tonight, about him, about myself. In this place, I feel fearless. Nothing can touch me, nothing can do too much damage to me. I feel calmer than I’ve felt in a long time. If I can use this, I can find the spell to unmake his son. I can end their suffering.

Show me what is true, I say, and shake off my blinders. I quit trying to force myself on the truth to reshape it, and I let the truth force itself on me. What have I been hiding from? What monsters have been stalking me, waiting patiently for me to look at them?

I close my eyes and open my mind. Fragments of times forgotten flash past me so fast I see only blurs of color. I trust my heart to take me where I need to go and tell me when to stop.

The images slow, become static, and I am in another place, another time. It’s so real, I can smell the scent of spiced roses nearby. I love the smell because it makes me think of her. I keep the roses everywhere. I look around.

I am in a laboratory.

Cruce is gone.

I watched him leave.

He loves me, but he loves himself more.

I finish the fourth amulet without him. The first three were imperfect. This one does what I want it to do.

Balances the scales between us.

She will shine as brilliantly in the night sky as do I. Giants mate with giants or not at all.

I will take it to my beloved myself.

I cannot make her Fae, but I will give her all our powers in other ways.

Perhaps I am a fool to give her an amulet capable of weaving illusion that could seduce even me, but my faith in my love knows no bounds.

My wings trail the floor as I turn. I am enormous. I am singular. I am eternal.

I am the Unseelie King.

44

Dusk comes hard-edged and violet.

Dancer’d like that thought. He’s a poet, brilliant cool with words. Wrote a piece the other day ’bout murdering clocks ’cause they feck us up, keep us stuck in the past and keep us from living the day. Used to have this thing in my past riding me all the fecking time, but now she knows, and I say, fine, get the monkey off my back.

I shift, restless, staring down at BB&B. There’s a limo out front. Pulled up hours ago, ain’t moved since. Couldn’t see who got out. Somebody changed the sign. I think it musta been Mac, and it cracks me up but I don’t laugh from the belly like I used to. Swallow it instead.

Ain’t like she ain’t gonna try to kill me.

And I ain’t gonna die, so.

There we are.

Guess somebody’s gonna bite it.

Been watching the place off and on for days. Watching the watchers. Everybody’s nervous. Chewing each other’s heads off.

Book went nuts the other day. Turned some guy into a suicide bomb, walked him right into Chester’s. Lots o’ peeps died getting him outta there, blown up when it blew. They’re paranoid out at the abbey. Think it’s gonna be next. Ain’t nobody can track the thing, ’cause Mac’s gone missing.

So’s Barrons.

Without ’em, we’re stuck. Ain’t nobody can sense the Book ’til it’s on top of us. Dancer thinks it’ll make a nuke one day. End us all. He says we gotta put it down fast.

I watch, knees up, arms around, perched on a water tower. Nobody looking this high.

I been shut out. Ro won’t let me near none o’ the action. Kat and Jo keep me in the loop. They don’t know I killed Alina. Mac don’t know, ’cause I just found out, but there’s a third prophecy. Something ’bout mirror images and sons and daughters and monsters within being monsters without. Jo wasn’t done translating yet but she was worried big-time. Seems the longer the Book’s loose, the worse the odds get.

I heard Ry-O telling that white-haired dude with the freaky eyes that Mac’s gotta die. But not before the Book gets shut down. Pissed him off real bad that it came into his club and tried to blow it. You don’t mess with Ry-O.

He’s got dudes on top of the bookstore. They move funny.

Jo’s hanging on a roof a few buildings over, with Kat and her trusty little group of sidhe-sheep. “Baaaaa,” I say under my breath. They’re staring through binocs. Never look my way. Only see what they ’spect to see. What she tells ’em to see. Dickheads. Pull your heads out, I think. Smell the sheep shit.

The things I know.

The Scots are on top of a five-story in the Dark Zone. They got binocs, too.

These eyeballs of mine don’t need no help seeing. I’m supercharged, superwired, super-D! All-seeing, all-hearing, all-jamming, all the time.

I smell V’lane. Spice on the wind. Dunno where he is. Somewhere near.

Five days Mac and Barrons been gone. Since the night they tried to trap the Book.

Ro’s blaming it all on Mac. First, she was glad Mac was gone. Said we didn’t need her, didn’t want her. But she came to her senses when it strolled into Chester’s. See, she was there when the Book paid its little visit wearing a corset of dynamite, and ain’t nothing Ro likes better than her own wrinkly ass. Gah. That’s a visual I coulda done without.

Ry-O’s blaming the Druids. Saying they must’ve got the chant wrong.

The Scots are blaming Ry-O. Saying evil can’t trap evil.

Ry-O laughs and asks what the feck they are.

V’lane’s pissed at everybody. Says we’re all inept, puny mortals.

I snicker. Dude, got that right. I sigh, dreamy-like. Think V’lane’s got the hots for me. Wanna ask Mac what she—

I rip open a protein bar and munch it, scowling. What was I thinking? As if I’m ever gonna ask Mac anything again. I shoulda hunted those feckers that killed Alina. Shoulda got rid of ’em. She never woulda known. I smile, thinking about killing ’em. I scowl, thinking about how I didn’t.

“Dither much, kid?”

Voice like knives. I stiffen and try to freeze-frame out, but the feck’s got my arm and he ain’t letting go.

“G’off me,” I spit around a mouthful of chocolate and peanut, thinking, Who uses words like that? But I know who it is, and he worries me ’bout as much as the Book does. “Ry-O,” I say, real cool.

He smiles like I think Death must smile, all fangs and hard eyes that ain’t never held an ounce of—

I breathe in sharp-like without meaning to, ’stead of swallowing, and choke on peanuts. Throat squinches up, can’t breathe, start thumping my chest.

He dressing for Halloween? Ain’t here yet.

Pounding my sternum ain’t gonna work and I know it. I need the Heimlich but can’t do it on myself ’less he lets go of me so I can slam myself into the ledge. I use superstrength to yank my arm free, practically pull it outta the socket.

He’s still got me. Ain’t goin’ nowhere.

He manacles my wrist with long fingers and studies me. Watching me choke. Cold fecker. Watching me foam, my eyes get wild. I’m drooling! Dude—this is so not cool.

Gonna die up here on a water tower, choking on a fecking protein bar. Topple off, splat to the pavement. Everybody’s gonna see.

Mega O’Malley croaks like a Joe!

No fecking way.

Just when I’m getting light-headed, he slams a fist into my back and I spit out a mangled mouthful. Can’t breathe for a minute. Then screech it in. Air ain’t never been sweeter.

He smiles. His teeth are normal. I stare at him. Mind playing tricks? I been watching too many movies.

“Got a job for you.”

“No way,” I say instantly. Ain’t falling in with his crowd. Got the feeling you don’t get to fall back out. You just fall. ’Til you hit bottom. Ain’t going that low. Got trubs of my own.

“Didn’t ask, kid.”

“Don’t work for nobody calls me kid.”

“Let her go.”

I screw my face up in a scowl. “Who sent the party invites for my water tower?” I’m pissed. Whatever happened to a little privacy?

One of the Keltars oozes from the shadows. Only seen him from a distance. Don’t know how either of ’em got so close to me without me knowing. Freaks me. I got supersenses and they snuck up on me.

Scot laughs. But he don’t look like a Scot no more. He looks sorta like … I whistle and shake my head sympathetically. He’s going Unseelie Prince.

They forget me. Busy looking at each other. Ry-O folds his arms. The Scot does the same.

I take advantage of the moment. Ain’t sticking around to find out what job Ry-O has in mind for me. Never wanna know. And if some dude turned dark side thinks he’s gonna score redemption playing avenging angel for me, I got news for him. I don’t want it.

My ticket to hell’s already been punched, bags on board, steam whistle blowing.

I’m fine with it. Like knowing ’zactly where I stand.

I freeze-frame out.

No night. No day. No time.

We get lost in each other.

Something happens to me down there in the underground. I’m reborn. I feel peaceful for the first time in my life. I’m no longer bipolar. There’s nothing I’m hiding from myself.

Being afraid is debilitating. I’ll take truth over fear of it any day.

I am the Unseelie King. I am the Unseelie King.

I say it over and over in my mind.

I accept it.

I don’t know how or why and may never, but at least now I’ve looked hard at the darkest part of me.

It really was the only explanation all along.

It’s almost funny in a way. The whole time I was so worried about what everyone around me might be, I was the biggest bad of all.

That dark, glassy lake I’ve got is him. Me. Us. That’s why it always terrified me. Somehow I managed to partition my psyche and store him away. Me. The parts of me that weren’t born twenty-three years ago, if I actually was born.

I can’t think of any scenario that explains how I came to be what I am. But the truth of my memory is indisputable.

I did stand in that laboratory, nearly a million years ago. I did create the Hallows and I did love the concubine and I did give birth to the Unseelie. That was all me.

Maybe that’s why Barrons and I can’t resist each other. We both have our monsters. “You really think evil is a choice?” I ask.

“Everything is. Each moment. Each day.”

“I didn’t sleep with Darroc. But I would have.”

“Irrelevant.” He moves inside me. “I’m here now.”

“I was going to seduce the shortcut out of him so I could get the Book. Then I was going to unmake this world and replace it with another, so I could have you back.”

He freezes. I can’t see his face. He’s behind me. It’s part of why I can say it. I don’t think I could say it to his face and see myself reflected in his eyes.

I wasn’t going to unmake the world for my sister. I’d loved her all my life. I’d known him for only a few short months.

“Might have been a bit strenuous for your first attempt at creation,” he says finally. He’s trying not to laugh. I tell him I would have doomed mankind for him, and he tries not to laugh.

“It wouldn’t have been my first attempt. I’m a pro. You were wrong. I am the Unseelie King,” I tell him.

He begins moving again. After a while, he pulls me around and kisses me. “You’re Mac,” he says. “And I’m Jericho. And nothing else matters. Never will. You exist in a place that is beyond all rules for me. Do you understand that?”

I do.

Jericho Barrons just told me he loves me.

“What was your plan?” I ask much later. “When we got the Book locked down, how were you going to get the spell you wanted?”

“The Unseelie have never drunk from the cauldron. All of them know the First Language. I made a few deals, set things in motion.”

I shake my head, frowning at myself. Sometimes I miss the most obvious things.

“But now I have you.”

“I’ll be able to read it.” That was creepy. Now at least I knew why I had such a strong negative reaction to the Sinsar Dubh. All my sins were trapped between its covers. And the damn thing just wouldn’t go away. I’d tried to escape culpability, and my culpability had had the nerve to take on a life of its own and hunt me.

I understood why it stalked me. Once it had become sentient—a mind with no feet, no wings, no method of locomotion and nothing else in all of existence quite like it, except me, and I’d obviously despised it—it must have hated me. And since it was me, it loved me, too. The Book I’d written had become obsessed with me. It wanted to hurt me, not kill me.

Because it wanted my attention.

So many things made sense now that I’d accepted I was the king.

I’d wondered why the Silvers had always been so hard for me to get in and out of. “Cruce’s” curse, which had really been cast by the other Unseelie Princes, had sensed me and tried to keep me out. Of course I knew my way around the black fortress and the Unseelie hell. It had been my home. Every step had been instinctive because I’d walked those icy paths millions of times, called greetings to the cliffs, wept for the cruel confinement of my sons and daughters. I understood why the concubine’s memories had played out before my eyes but the king’s had sort of slid into my brain. I knew now why I’d known the command to open the doors to the king’s fortress.

I might be the king, but at least I was the “good” king. I preferred to think of myself as the Seelie King, because I’d eradicated all my evil. The obsessed maniac who’d done experiments on anything and everything to achieve his ends was out there in Book form, not inside me, and that was no small comfort. I’d chosen to get rid of my evil—I’d made a choice, like Barrons had said—and I’d been trying to destroy those blackest parts of me ever since.

Barrons was speaking. I’d forgotten we were talking.

“I’m counting on you being able to read it. Makes everything simpler. We just have to figure out how to capture it with three stones and no Druids. I’m damned if I’m letting those fucks near it again.”

I looked down at the silver and gold chain, the stone housed in the ornate gilt cage. Did I even need the stones or the Druids to trap my Book, or was the amulet what I’d been hunting for all along? I certainly fit into the “inhabited” or “possessed” category. I was the king of the Fae inside a female human’s body.

I wondered how the concubine had lost the amulet. Who had taken it from her, betrayed me? Had someone abducted her, faked her death, then whisked her off to the Seelie court while I’d been insane with grief, busy divesting myself of my sins?

She never would have taken it off willingly, yet here it was, in the world of man. If someone had come for her, might she have cast it off rather than let it fall into the wrong hands, patiently sowing clues, taking her chances that one day events would align, I would remember, and we would escape whatever had been done to us and be together again? Too bad I didn’t want to be with her.

She’d always hated illusion. When she’d planted gardens and added on to the White Mansion, she’d done it in the old ways. The Faery court reverted to nothingness if the Fae attending it failed to maintain it. The White Mansion had been fashioned differently and would stand the test of time with or without her, apart from anyone.

How had she become the Seelie Queen? Who had kidnapped her, interred her in a tomb of ice, and left her to a slow death in the Unseelie hell? What games were being played, what agenda was being pursued? I knew the patience of immortality. Who among the Fae had been biding their time, waiting for the perfect moment, the ultimate payday?

The timing would have to be flawless.

All the Seelie and Unseelie Princesses would have to be dead and the queen killed at the precise moment—there could be no contenders to the throne of matriarchal power—once whoever it was had merged with or acquired all the knowledge from the Book.

All the power of the Seelie Queen and the Unseelie King would be deposited in a single vessel.

I shuddered. That could never be permitted to happen. Anyone with that much power would be unstoppable by anyone, by any means. He or she would be undefeatable, uncontrollable, unkillable. In a word: God. Or Satan, with the home court advantage. We would all be doomed.

Did they believe me dead? Gone? Apathetic? Think I would just stand by and let this happen? Was this unknown enemy responsible for the condition I was currently in—human and confused?

My power and the queen’s magic. Who was behind this? One of the dark princes?

Perhaps it had been Darroc all along, and the Book had popped that plan like the grape his head had been. Perhaps Darroc had only been taking advantage of someone else’s cunning, riding on the coattails, so to speak, of a more clever and dangerous foe.

I shook my head. The magic wouldn’t have gone to him, and he’d known it. Eating Fae wasn’t enough. The successor to Fae magic had to be Fae.

The concubine had awakened and said a Fae prince she’d never seen before, who had called himself Cruce, had entombed her.

According to V’lane, he’d brought Cruce to the original Queen of the Seelie (the bitch) and she’d killed him in front of my eyes.

Did I possess that memory?

I turned inward, searching.

I clutched my head as images slammed into me. Cruce had not died easily or well. He raged and ranted, was ugly at the end. Denied being the one, denied having betrayed me to the queen. I was ashamed of his death.

But who’d faked my concubine’s death?

How had I been deceived?

Deceived.

Was that the key?

ONLY BY ITS OWN DESIGN WILL IT FALL, the prophecy said.

Limited in form, what was the Book’s design? How did it get around and accomplish its ends?

Its currency was illusion. It deceived people into seeing what it wanted them to see.

Was that why the fear dorcha—who was probably one of my good friends if I had time to pick through all my memories—had given me the tarot card, pointing me toward the amulet?

The amulet could deceive even me.

I’d worried about giving it to the concubine for that very reason. What enormous love, what dangerous trust.

The Book was only a shadow of me.

I was the real thing, the king who’d made the Book.

And I had the amulet capable of creating illusions that could deceive us.

It was simple. In a contest of wills, I was the guaranteed victor.

I felt almost giddy with excitement. My deductions had the ring of truth to them. All arrows pointed north. I knew what had to be done. Today, I could put the Book down once and for all. Not inter it to slumber with one eye open, like the first prophecy had said, but defeat the monster. Destroy it.

After I’d gotten a spell of unmaking for Barrons. Ironic: I’d given all my spells over to a Book to get rid of them, and now I needed one back from it.

Once I had it, I would roust the traitor, kill him or her, restore the concubine to being the Seelie Queen (because I sure didn’t want her, and she didn’t remember anything, anyway), where she would grow strong enough to lead again. I would walk away, leaving the Fae to their own petty devices.

I would return to Dublin and become just-Mac.

That couldn’t happen soon enough for me.

“I think I know what to do, Jericho.”

“What would you want if you were the Book and it was the king?” Barrons asked later.

“I thought you didn’t believe I was the king.”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe. The Book seems to.”

“K’Vruck does, too,” I reminded him. Then there was the dreamy-eyed guy. When I’d asked him if I was the Unseelie King, he’d said, No more than I. Was he one of my parts?

“Have an identity crisis later. Focus.”

“I think it wants to be accepted, absolved—prodigal son and all. It wants me to welcome it back into me, say I was wrong, and become one again.”

“That’s what I think, too.”

“I’m a little worried about the part where it says once the monster within is defeated, so shall be the monster without. What monster within?”

“I don’t know.”

“You always know.”

“Not this time. It’s your monster. Nobody can know another person’s monster, not well enough to cage it. Only you can do that yourself.”

“Speculate,” I demanded.

He smiled faintly. He finds it amusing when I throw his own words back at him. “If you are the Unseelie King—and note the word ‘if’ there, I remain unconvinced—one might speculate that you have a weakness for evil. Once you acquire the Sinsar Dubh, it’s conceivable that you would feel tempted to do what it wants. Instead of trying to lock it away, you might choose to relinquish human form and restore yourself to your former glory—take all the spells you dumped into it back and become the Unseelie King again.”

Never. But I’ve learned never to say never. “What if I am?”

“I’ll be there, talking you out of it. But I don’t think you’re the king.”

What other possible explanation was there? Occam’s razor, my daddy’s criteria for conviction, and my own logic concurred. But with Barrons there to shout me back and my determination to live a normal human life, I could do it. I knew I could. What I wanted was here, in the human world. Not in an icy prison with a pale silvery woman, caught up in eternal court politics.

“I’m more concerned about what your inner monster might be if you’re not the king. Any ideas?”

I shook my head. Irrelevant. He might be having a hard time accepting what I was, but he didn’t know everything I knew, and there wasn’t time to explain. Every day, every hour, that the Sinsar Dubh was free, roaming the streets of Dublin, more people would die. I had no illusions about why it kept going to Chester’s. It wanted to take my parents from me. Wanted to strip away everything I cared about, leaving only it and me. As if it could force me to care about it. Force me to welcome its darkness back into my body and be one again. I now believed Ryodan had been right all along: It had been trying to get me to “flip.” The Book thought if it took enough from me, made me angry and hurt enough, I wouldn’t care about the world, only about power. Then it would conveniently appear and say, Here I am, take me, use my power, do whatever you want.

I inhaled sharply. That was exactly the frame of mind I’d been in when I’d thought Barrons was dead. Hunting the Book, ready to pick it up and merge with it and unmake the world. Believing I would be able to control it.

But I was on guard now. I’d experienced that grief once. Besides, I had Darroc’s shortcut in my hand. I had the key to controlling it. I wasn’t going to flip. Barrons was alive. My parents were well. I wouldn’t even be tempted.

I was suddenly impatient to get it over with. Before anything could go wrong.

“I need to be certain you can use the amulet.”

“How?”

“Deceive me,” he said flatly. “And convince me of it.”

I fisted my hand around the amulet and closed my eyes. Long ago, in Mallucé’s grotto, it had not been willing to work for me. It had wanted something, had waited for what I’d thought was a tithe, as if I needed to spill blood for it or something.

I knew now it was much simpler than that. It had flared with blue-black brilliance for the same reason the stones did, because it recognized me.

The problem was I hadn’t recognized myself.

I did now.

I am your king. You belong to me. You will obey me in all things.

I gasped with pleasure as it blazed in my fist, brighter than it had ever burned for Darroc.

I looked around the bedroom. I remembered the basement where I had been Pri-ya. I would never forget any of the details.

I re-created it now for us, down to the last detail: pictures of Alina and me, crimson silk sheets, a shower in the corner, a Christmas tree twinkling, fur-lined handcuffs on the bed. For a time, it had been the happiest, simplest place I’d ever known.

“Not exactly incentive to get me out of here.”

“We have to save the world,” I reminded.

He reached for me. “The world can wait. I can’t.”