Feverborn

12

Barrons and I landed a safe distance away from the cordoned-off black hole suspended in the air near the underground entrance to Chester’s nightclub.

Jayne and the Guardians had been busy, commandeered by Ryodan to secure each and every black hole in Dublin. I glanced over my shoulder at it and shivered. They disturbed me on a cellular level, even with my sidhe-seer senses muted. Murder was now alarmingly easy: just shove someone into a floating black sphere, no evidence remained. Not that anyone was prosecuting murders at the moment, or even caring, too busy trying to stay alive themselves. The endless line of patrons waiting to get into the club angled sharply away from the roped-off area, apparently liking it no more than I did.

Barrons slid from the Hunter’s back and dropped gracefully to the pavement. It never ceased to amaze me how such a large, massively muscled man could move so lightly, half vanishing into shadow without even seeming to try.

He reached up to help me down, as if my accompanying him was a foregone conclusion.

I had no doubt he planned to head off with Ryodan to do whatever they were going to do about the Dageus situation I’d still not been told about, and I’d be stuck alone at some subclub, sandwiched between black holes above and below, killing time all day, watching various soap operas unfold, waiting for “my man” to come get me and lead me like a dutiful puppet to our next activity.

Not.

Being a woman raised in a rural area of the Deep South—although my mother urged both Alina and me to be independent—I had a tendency to get swept along by a strong man.

Being Barrons, sprung from whatever cataclysm sprung him, he had a tendency to sweep things along without asking—humans falling neatly into the category of “things.”

But I’ve come to understand the difference between nurture and nature, and my nature is vastly different than I once believed. More rigid. Less malleable. More solitary. Less social. It would be easier to embrace what I suspect my true nature is if not for the dark squatter within making me second- and tenth-guess myself.

I’d been invisible and inactive too long. In the streets, I was a target for anyone who’d seen the blasted Dublin dailies. I was considerably less of a target high above them, where those hunting me wanted only to smother me in noxious yellow dust, not control or kill me.

“Go on without me. I want to be in the sky, Barrons.” The morning was aglow with the faint pastel promise of a dazzling Fae-kissed sunrise.

“I want you inside Chester’s.”

“Because you want to keep me safe. The Unseelie king wanted the concubine safe, too. Built a hell of a cage for her.” I would feel useless and aggravated in Chester’s. I would feel stupendously alive high above Dublin. No contest.

He went still, and for a moment I nearly lost track of him, standing right there in front of me. Big, dark man turned transparent shadow. “I’m not the Unseelie king,” he said tightly.

“And I’m not the concubine. Glad we figured that out.” There’d been a time I’d vacillated between thinking we were both one or the other.

“You’re being hunted, Ms. Lane.”

“What’s new?”

“Feeling invincible because you ate a little Unseelie?” Barrons said sardonically.

Feeling alive because sex with him had reminded me who I was, deep down at the core, glued me back together in some intangible way, but I was not about to tell the arrogant beast that. Boundaries were necessary for a successful relationship. Most relationships aborted in the boundary-defining stage. Not because people demanded what they needed. But because they didn’t, then got resentful about it.

I wanted to walk beside this man for a long time, and to do that I’d have to be able to be completely myself. I was still discovering what that was. I couldn’t say that I’d ever call us a “couple.” But we were together. Committed to that togetherness as best as we were both able. I wondered what my rules were. Wondered who the woman was that had once been this man’s sun, moon, and stars. If he’d tried to curtail her activities.

“Stay the fuck out of my head, Ms. Lane.”

I blinked. I hadn’t even been aware I was pressing.

“She was her own woman,” he said. “You are, too.”

“That’s what I wanted to know.”

“Ask next time,” he said coolly.

I snorted. “You’ll answer?”

He turned and walked away. Over his shoulder, he tossed, “Try to stay alive, Ms. Lane.”

“You, too, Barrons,” I said softly, as the great beast between my legs flapped its wings and rose, carrying us into the rainbow-streaked morning.

—

If someone had told me, a year and a day ago when I’d stepped off the plane from Ashford after countless, exhausting layovers, that I would one day be flying above Dublin, breathing in the crisp, briny air, on the back of an icy dragon-like creature that wasn’t from our world, taking stock of my city, I’d have laughed and pointed them in the direction of the nearest psychiatric facility.

I’d have been really wrong.

I’d been really wrong about a lot of things back then.

The lure of watching the sunrise on a Hunter had been impossible to resist. As we sluiced through wet clouds, I nestled close to the frigid base of its wings, with the hot brimstone of its breath drifting past my face. Clamping the bony ridge between my thighs, I threw my arms wide and trailed my gloved fingertips through crimson, orange, and pink mist. Head thrown back, gazing up at the dawn, I experienced a moment of uncomplicated bliss.

I was just Mac. Not someone’s daughter or lover or sister or walking time bomb. Flying alone in the vast morning, I felt connected to everything, simple and good. Sky above, earth below, fire within.

Although I despised the Fae on my world, I had to admit, their presence made it more beautiful. And therein was the deadliness of their race: seduction via beauty, magic, and the power to grant wishes.

Rays of sun slanted intermittently down as we pierced banks of fantastically colored fog, until the Hunter, perhaps intuiting my innate desire to enjoy the sun at any opportunity, soared straight up and broke the dense cover to float lazily above rainbow-hued cumulus and nimbus stretching as far as the eye could see, granting me a clear view of the star I so worship, whose undiluted presence is so rare in rainy Dublin.

For a time, I stretched out, ignoring the ice beneath my back, soaking up the golden rays on my front, basking like a cat at a warm hearth. Who needed a Fae trip to the beach when I could sunbathe in the sky? But it wasn’t long before the clouds swirled once again in my mind and I reluctantly refocused, urging my ride to take us low again so I could get a Hunter’s-eye view of the city.

We plummeted through mist, dropping down and down until at last I glimpsed rooftops and streets and gas lamps dotting the overcast, cloudy morning that was a typical day in Dublin.

People were out, heading off to help rebuild in exchange for supplies. Street vendors were once again hawking wares at portable stands, including food and drinks. Guardians stood by the fours near each vendor, reminding me it was far from a safe city yet.

Still, I felt a fierce flash of pride and optimism. The walls had fallen. We’d gotten back up. The ice monster had come. We’d survived and the city had recovered. Now we had black holes. We would figure it out.

“Lower,” I urged. I wanted a closer look at certain parts of town. I wanted to know if any of the Shades had returned, if there were new castes of Unseelie in town, if we had more black holes of considerable size to worry about. I would have gone on a focused hunt for all the black holes, but apparently Ryodan had been keeping track of them for some time now. No point in duplicating our efforts.

As we flew through a whiteout of fog above the docks, circling wide to turn back over the city, I suddenly gasped, “No! Stop! Turn the other way!” A flock of my dreaded stalkers had just materialized directly ahead of us, streaking out from behind a bank of low-slung clouds.

But my outcry came too late. We dove straight into the center of the clutch and I squeezed my eyes shut—remnant of some absurd ostrich instinct that if I couldn’t see them maybe they couldn’t see me—bracing myself for their sudden cloying presence on all sides.

Nothing.

I sniffed cautiously. No awful stench, no rustle of leathery cloaks, no creepy chittering.

I opened my eyes a slit.

I was still alone on the Hunter’s back.

I opened them wide and glanced over my shoulder. My ghoulish stalkers were vanishing rapidly behind us.

“Didn’t they see me?” I exclaimed. Was I so small and unexpected astride a Hunter that they’d not noticed me? I nudged the icy beast to get its attention. “Do you know what those things you just flew through are?”

Minions. It spoke in my mind. To one nearly as ancient as I.

“One what? A Hunter?”

Collector.

“Collector of what?”

Powerful, broken things. It presumes to fix them. It once tried to fix the one you call Unseelie king. It rumbled with soft laughter.

I couldn’t imagine anything trying to “fix” the Unseelie king. What would it change? Where would it even begin? And how powerful was this “collector” if it could actually tinker with something as omnipotent as the King of the Dark Fae? “I take it that didn’t go well.”

Subjective.

“Was one of the things we flew through the collector?”

That one does not appear until it has decided. Dispatches minions to assess. Not all things are deemed fixable.

I bristled. For months now I was being assessed by something’s minions? There was an ancient thing out there that had decided I was “broken” and wasn’t sure whether it wanted to fix me? That was offensive on too many levels for me to count. I had yet another enemy out there and didn’t even know what it looked like.

But it had been watching me.

All this time, through countless hooded eyes. Pressing close to me, sleeping beside me in Chester’s, monitoring my every move. And when I’d killed its minions, it had simply dispatched more. Always watching. Until the Book made me invisible and the collector had apparently lost the ability to keep track of me.

I snatched a hasty glance at my hand, fearing the worst. But no, I was still visible. Then why hadn’t they noticed me?

“Does it have a name?” I wanted something concrete to call my unknown enemy. Something to research, ask around about. Ryodan had once said my ghouls had attended the Unseelie king in his private quarters. Now I knew why. They’d scouted him, too, in a time long past.

Sweeper.

A simple word but I had sudden chills at the base of my spine. I’d heard it before. The Dreamy-Eyed Guy, one of the Unseelie king’s many skins, had recently said, “ ’Ware the Sweeper, BG. Don’t talk to its minions either.” The damn king had known all along I was being hunted by it. And that was all the warning he gave me?

“I really hate the Unseelie king,” I muttered.

You are.

“Am not,” I groused. I’d laid that to rest. I might have been contaminated by the peculiar half-mad being but I wasn’t him.

Were you not, you would not fly.

“Tell me about the Sweeper,” I said. “Tell me everything.”

It said nothing.

“Have you seen it?”

The Hunter moved its great head from side to side, mouth open, straining wind through its teeth.

“Do you know anyone who knows more about it?”

Perhaps the one that inhaled the child.

“K’Vruck!”

It rumbled again, laughing at me. Name this. Name that.

“Do you know where K’Vruck is?”

Nightwindflyhighfree.

“Could you find him?”

I do not hunt for you. Not-king.

I sighed. “If you see him, will you tell him I’m looking for him?”

Again there was no reply. I made a mental note to be more circumspect in the future about telling the Hunters I wasn’t the king. If they sensed something in me, they accorded respect, I wanted that respect. And cooperation.

I leaned forward over the Hunter’s back. Something had just caught my eye, a thing I couldn’t believe we’d forgotten.

“Fly low and land there.” I pointed to the center of the city’s largest Dark Zone.

Months ago, V’lane/Cruce had rebuilt the dolmen at 1247 LaRuhe in order to help the Keltar free Christian from the Unseelie prison. And there it stood, towering and ominous, behind the uncharacteristically formal house, smack in the middle of the crater left when Cruce had destroyed the warehouse it once occupied. The Highlanders had either neglected to dismantle the stone gate to the prison when they were done with it, or it had been rebuilt again.

I shivered. I’d walked the Unseelie prison. It hadn’t been empty. There’d been things lurking in blue-black crevices, terrible things that hadn’t ventured forth despite having been granted their freedom.

All portals between my world and Faery: bad.

And if I were successful, I’d have the Hunter fly me to the abbey, where I’d knock down those stones, too. Perhaps I’d be able to convince my ride to assist, lend a massive wing or perhaps char them with its smoky breath.

Nor do I perform tricks for you, it said in my mind.

The Hunter touched down in a wide intersection, flapping debris into funnel clouds with its giant leathery wings, showering the cobbled streets with black ice.

“Stay here until I get back.” I stripped off the gloves I was wearing, checked to make sure my spear was tucked into the makeshift holster I’d created with my scarf, and hurried down the street toward what had once been the Lord Master’s house.

—

The estate at 1247 LaRuhe was exactly the same as it had been last time I saw it, extravagant, forgotten, and as out of place in the casually dilapidated, industrial neighborhood as slender Kat had looked in powerful, forbidding Kasteo’s subterranean gym.

The first time I’d come here, I was following my sister’s last clue, chiseled as she lay dying. I believed it would lead me to the Book she’d wanted me to find, and instead discovered her boyfriend, learned he was the Big Bad ushering Unseelie into our world, and was nearly killed by one of his bloodthirsty companions. Six months later, I’d visited the house again, because Darroc had taken my parents captive and I was hell-bent on freeing them.

It hadn’t gone as planned, but few of my ventures in this city had.

Today my plan was simple.

I would skirt the house and head straight for the giant stones of the dolmen to see if my Unseelie-flesh-enhanced strength was considerable enough that, with a chain or rope purloined from a nearby building, I might be able to send the whole thing crashing to the ground.

Or perhaps I’d find one of those little bobcats in a nearby warehouse I could use to push it over. I could drive anything if there was gas in it.

One less portal.

My plan was not to go inside the tall, fancy brick house with the ornate facade and the blacked-out mullioned windows that made me feel as if the bone-pale structure was a bleached skull with creepy shuttered eyes that might pop open at any moment, insanity blazing within.

As I stood at the wrought-iron gate, one hand resting between pointy posts, the dense cloud cover gusted lower, shrouding the eaves, dispatching wispy tendrils down the sides to ghost across the barren yard.

I drew my jacket closer and turned up the collar. No sun penetrated the fog, and the abandoned property abruptly seemed painted in shades of the Unseelie prison, harsh whites, gunmetal grays, and eerie blues.

This particular Dark Zone in heavy fog was not one of my better memories of Dublin.

I shook off my chill, opened the gate, and stepped briskly onto the long curved walkway. As I hurried past skeletal trees, the gate screeched shut behind me and latched with an audible clack.

One year ago I’d followed the elegant walkway straight to the door and brazenly slammed the ornate knocker against burnished wood.

I’d let myself in and rummaged around, astonished to discover signs of my sister’s presence mingled with that of an urbane, Old World man with lavish Louis XIV taste in decor and strikingly Barronsesque taste in clothing.

I’d sat on the bottom stair inside the silent, luxurious home and pored over pictures of Alina I’d taken from an upstairs bedroom. Thumbed through photos of her with her mysterious, handsome lover. I’d glimpsed my first unusual mirrors here, although I’d not understood what they were at the time.

The mirrors. I smacked myself in the forehead. Shit.

I paused a few steps from the porch, wondering if anyone had bothered to smash them, if perhaps Barrons had spelled them shut after I shoved into one six months ago, planning to step out in Georgia, only to end up lost in the Hall of All Days, where—like Dani—I had stared at billions of mirrors, wondering if I would ever be able to find my way home again.

I didn’t like the idea of anything I’d glimpsed within those hellish Silvers having access to our world. We had enough problems as it was.

I sighed. There was no way I was leaving today without closing all portals at this location.

I took a step forward. Aware I was trudging a little. There were reminders of my sister here. I didn’t want to go inside. But want and responsibility are rarely boon companions.

I took another step.

And froze.

One window on the house had not been blacked out.

The stained-glass transom above the lavishly carved front door.

And somewhere inside that abandoned house, a light had just come on.

13

Spear, check.

Unseelie flesh in my blood, check.

Attitude, check.

I silently ascended the porch stairs and pressed my hand to the door.

Damn. Sidhe-seer senses, not a check.

I had no way of knowing if what was within was Fae, human, or perhaps even something else entirely. I took nothing for granted anymore. Whatever it was, it wanted light for some reason. I couldn’t envision an Unseelie flipping a switch or yanking a chain. They liked the dark. They’d lurked in it so long their eyes were well-accustomed to gloom.

I tested the knob, turning slowly.

Unlocked.

I took a fortifying breath and nudged the door open as quietly as possible, just far enough to steal a glimpse inside the house.

Nothing. But then, I couldn’t see much from this point of view.

I listened intently. Thanks to my heightened senses, I was able to discern soft footfalls upstairs on thick carpet. One set. There was a single entity moving inside.

I waited, listening to see if more footfalls joined them.

After a solid minute of hearing the sound of only one person/Fae/whatever, I eased open the door, slipped quickly inside and closed it behind me.

I inhaled deeply, mining for clues about the intruder. I untangled various elements: mildew of an old, unoccupied house; an acrid mold from the eternal rain with no heat running in the colder months and no air when it was warmer; something sulfurous that was no doubt escaping from one of the damned mirrors; a touch of wine spilled long ago—perhaps my sister having a drink with Darroc that had ended in impassioned lovemaking and forgotten wineglasses.

A doughnut.

I inhaled again, deeply. Sure enough. I smelled a doughnut. And coffee. The scent of yeast and something sugary was enormously enticing. I marveled that somewhere in Dublin someone was making doughnuts again. My stomach rumbled loudly. I made a mental note to find that vendor. Food had been in short supply for so long I could only give kudos to the black market if they were managing to obtain baking ingredients.

I moved quietly into the foyer, across black and white marble floors, beneath an elaborate crystal chandelier, my gaze focused tightly ahead, skirting a large round table with a dusty vase of silk flowers and pausing at the foot of an elegant, spiraling staircase.

Soft footfalls directly above.

The sound of a drawer sliding open. A muffled curse.

I couldn’t make out much. The walls and floors were of solid, hundred-year-old construction and served as sound insulation.

I cocked my head, listening, trying to fathom who might come here and search the premises. Besides me. For a moment I wondered if that was what I might find, should I ascend those curving stairs, if I’d somehow gotten trapped in a time loop, if the Sinsar Dubh was playing games with me.

If I doggedly mounted these carpeted risers, was it me I’d find up there?

Like I said, I take nothing for granted anymore. Not a damned thing.

Darroc? Had he truly died?

Some other sidhe-seer, dispatched by Jada, to reconnoiter the house?

Nah. Sidhe-seers worked in twos or more, not alone. Jada and I were the oddity, not the norm.

I eased my foot onto the first riser, placing it squarely in the middle because stairs always squeak when you’re trying to climb them silently. Sure enough, it let out a sullen squeal.

Biting my lip, I eased up, foot sideways, attempting to distribute my weight evenly, moving cautiously.

Above me a door banged shut and I heard another muffled curse, followed by an angry, “Where are you?”

I froze. Sniffed the air. Faint, but there. So faint I’d not caught it, but then I hadn’t expected to.

Squaring my shoulders, I marched up the stairs, determined to lay this particular bullshit to rest once and for all.

Another door banged, footfalls approached. I stiffened and stopped halfway up the stairs as the intruder burst from one of the bedrooms and stormed toward the very stairs I was on.

No. No. No.

This was wrong. This was so bloody wrong.

Alina stood at the top of the stairs, emotion flooding her beautiful features.

Shock. Astonishment. Joy.

Tears trembling in eyes I knew as well as my own. Better. I’d looked at her much more than I’d looked at myself in a mirror.

“Mac?” she breathed. “Holy crap, is it you, Jr.? Oh my God, oh my God!” she squealed. “When did you get here? What are doing in this house? How did you even know to look—Oh! Ahhhhh!”

She froze, mid-sentence, her joy morphing to pure horror.

I froze, too, midway up two more stairs, boot in the air.

She began to back away, doubling over, hands going to her head, clutching it. “No,” she moaned. “No,” she said again.

“You are not my sister,” I growled, and continued bounding up the stairs. I was confronting it this time. Staring it down cold. Proving the truth to myself, even without my sidhe-seer senses. My bastard Book, or Cruce, or whoever the hell was behind this was not playing this game with me.

Never this game.

The Alina-thing whirled and ran, hunched in on herself, clutching her stomach as if she, too, felt as kicked in the gut as I did.

“Get back here, whatever you are!” I roared.

“Leave me alone! Oh, God, I’m not ready. I don’t know enough,” she cried.

“I said get the hell back here! Face me!”

She was sobbing now, dashing through the house, stumbling into walls and crashing through doors. Slamming them behind her and locking them.

“Alina!” I shouted. Even though I knew it wasn’t her. I didn’t know what else to call the monster. Was my Book projecting an image? Or was the worst I’d feared for so many months now true?

Had I really never stepped out of the illusion that night we’d “allegedly” defeated the Sinsar Dubh?

Had it suckered me so completely that I only “believed” I’d been the victor but was in truth living in a matrixlike cocoon, my body in stasis, under complete dominion of the Book, merely dreaming my life? And I could either dream good things or have nightmares?

For months now I’d been crippled by that debilitating fear.

I didn’t trust one damned thing about my so-called reality.

“Alina!” I roared again, crashing into a locked door, blasting my way through it. Hall after hall. Door after door.

Until finally she was trapped. She’d locked herself in one of the back bedrooms, one door between us and no way out for her. I could hear her sobbing on the other side.

What the hell was the Book playing at?

I kicked the door in with perhaps more violence than was strictly necessary.

She screamed and wrapped both arms around her head. Rolled over and puked violently.

I took a step closer and she screamed again, as if in soul-rending pain.

I stood and stared, trying to make some sense out of what was happening.

“Please,” she whimpered. “Please. I don’t…want you. I’m not…looking for…you. I’ll…go home. I’ll…leave.”

What the hell?

“We’re ending this now,” I snarled.

“Please,” she cried. “No!” She unwound one arm from her head, raised it, shaking as if to ward me off. “Darroc!” she screamed. “I need you!”

“Darroc is dead,” I said coldly. “And so are you.”

On the floor, huddled in a ball, my sister screamed and screamed.

—

I ended up leaving.

I couldn’t take it one more second. What was I going to do? Kill the illusion of my sister?

I spun on my heel and stomped down the stairs, hands thrust into my pockets, head down. With the scent of lavender Snuggle sheets in my nostrils.

I grabbed the doughnut on the way out. It was in a bag, sitting near the vase of dusty flowers on the table.

I took the coffee next to it, too.

With the coral-pink lipstick on the rim, precisely the shade my sister wore: Summer Temptress.

I figured I might as well enjoy the happy parts of my madness if I had to stomach the bad.

Munching a soggy cruller (they may have gotten the right supplies but certainly weren’t professional bakers—then again, if this was all an illusion, why wasn’t my doughnut stellar? Was I so self-sabotaging I screwed up even my own illusory treats?), I ignored the mirrors I passed and forgot entirely about the blasted dolmen until I was nearly back to the intersection where I’d left the Hunter.

Of course, it wasn’t there.

I tapped my foot irritably, cracking the thin layer of black ice sheeting the pavement.

And felt utterly lost.

I’d just seen the impossible. Confirming my fear that I might truly be stuck in an illusion I’d never escaped.

But other details, like the imperfect doughnut, the half-warm coffee (with heavy cream, no sugar, just the way my sister liked it), the sheet of ice on the pavement, all hinted at a cohesive reality.

This was what I’d been doing for months now, constantly assessing everything around me, trying to ferret out the Ultimate Truth.

Had Barrons really shouted me out of my illusion that night in Barrons Books & Baubles when (I believed) I’d seen through the projection of Isla to the reality that Rowena, possessed by the Sinsar Dubh, was trying to trick me into giving her/the Book my amulet by masquerading as my biological mom? Perhaps the illusion the Book had woven for me that night had never stopped.

Had I really helped lay the Sinsar Dubh to rest in the abbey, then watched it get absorbed by Cruce, then seen Cruce locked up?

Or had I never escaped the Book’s clutches?

That was the motherfucking question.

The worm in my apple.

Something had happened to me that night that made me begin to deeply question the nature of my reality. Being deceived so thoroughly—even if only for a finite time—made me wonder if I was still being deceived. Somedays I got by fine. Accepted that I’d made it. Saw only consistency in the world around me.

But some nights, especially those nights I dreamed the hellish song I’d been hearing lately, I wondered if something was trying to break out of my subconscious into my conscious mind that I couldn’t quite bring to the surface and it—whatever it was—existed on the opposite side of an illusion the Book had woven for me.

Plans kept me sane. Obsessively hunting the Unseelie king to get him to remove his Book had kept me focused.

Focus prevented me from stretching out on a sofa somewhere and just giving up because I couldn’t decide upon a satisfactory way to prove to myself that the reality I was living was real.

My fake mom and dad, Pieter and Isla, had seemed utterly real, too.

Now Alina.

But the Alina situation was odd.

With all kinds of wrong details. The glittering diamond on her wedding finger. Sobbing, hiding from me. Screaming if I got too close. Crying out for Darroc.

Alive.

Not.

I pressed my fingers to my temples and rubbed. “Focus, focus, focus,” I muttered. “Do not take a single illusion as a sign that everything is. That doesn’t necessarily follow. You’re in the right reality. You defeated the Sinsar Dubh. Alina is the only illusion.”

But why?

Having something inside me that was capable of weaving the convincing illusion the external Book had crafted, then having it go suddenly silent, was worse than it taking jabs at me and me snapping Poe back at it. At least our inane and bizarrely harmless spats had been something concrete I could hold on to. I’d been almost relieved when it made me kill Mick O’Leary.

Because at least then I’d been able to say: Oh, so that’s its game. I’ll just never use my spear again. I’m in my reality. This is it. I understand.

I’d told Barrons none of this. I’d hidden it from everyone.

I’d been grateful to vanish.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that even if I was in the right reality, the Book was even now spreading nooses around me everywhere, and the first misstep I made, it would jerk that rope tight.

I stared down the empty street, littered with debris and dehydrated human husks blowing like sad tumbleweeds across the cobblestones.

“Not wishing,” I growled. “I don’t want to be invisible.”

I wanted to feel like myself again. I desperately craved certainty in my soul. I was appalled to realize I’d almost given up. Withdrawing from Barrons, rarely pausing in my search for the king those weeks after I’d killed (or had I?) Rowena, not even to have sex, detaching from my parents.

But Barrons and Unseelie flesh had stirred fire in my belly again. Fire I needed.

I resolved to eat Rhino-boy and fuck constantly until I figured out this crisis of faith.

Toward that end, I needed a sifter.

Where the bloody hell was I going to find a sifting Fae?

—

“Christian,” I said, smiling. “I thought I’d find you here.”

“Mac,” he said, without lifting his eyes from the cut-crystal glass of whiskey in his hand.

I dropped down on a stool next to him at what had once been the Dreamy-Eyed Guy’s bar, then mine for a time.

The Sinatra club in Chester’s was one of the quieter ones, where human males gathered to discuss business and, on rare occasion, some freakish Unseelie took a table for a time. This subclub drew a more refined clientele, and the Fae were all about the unrefined. The more brassy, sexual, and desperate tended to catch their eye.

I gave him a once-over. Hot, sexy Highlander with strange eyes I was grateful were currently brooding into his drink, not turned on me. Something was different. He looked awfully…normal. “Where are your wings?” I asked.

“Glamour. Bloody women in this place go nuts if I show them.”

“You can sift, can’t you?”

“Aye. Why?”

“I was hoping you’d take me somewhere.”

“I’m not moving from this stool. That fuck Ryodan lied. He said he tried to bring Dageus’s body back to us but he didn’t. He doesn’t know that I know the man he brought us was from Dublin, not the gorge at all. He must have snatched a bit of plaid from our rooms upstairs and bloodied it up. Why would he give us someone else’s body, Mac?”

I rapped the counter sharply, ordering a drink. I raised my whiskey when it came as if to make a toast. “Sounds like you have a mystery. I’ve got one of my own. What do you say you help me solve mine and I’ll see what I can do about solving yours?”

He turned his head slowly and looked at me.

I dropped my gaze instantly.

He laughed softly. “That bad, Mac?”

I inhaled deeply and snatched a quick glance from beneath my lashes. I’d seen this look before, times a thousand, as I rolled in the Unseelie king’s great wings. I lowered my gaze again and steeled myself. Then looked up and straight at him, right in the eyes.

For about two seconds.

“Not bad, Christian,” I said, looking down at my drink. “Just different. Intense. Like looking up at stars. We’ll get used to it.” I paused then added, “You know I can get into more places in this nightclub than you can. I can keep an eye out. Go poking around later tonight, see if I can learn anything about your uncle.”

I had no intention of telling him. My loyalty is one hundred percent to Barrons. Period. The end. That is one of the few things I’m absolutely certain about anymore. Our bond. Our two-person religion. But I would certainly see if I could get Barrons to get Ryodan to consider letting Christian know. At some point. I knew what it felt like to lose family. I’d blamed myself a dozen different ways for all the things I hadn’t done that might have saved Alina. I could only imagine how badly Christian was blaming himself for his uncle’s death.

After a measured pause, he clinked his glass to mine. “Perhaps we can be of use to each other. You should know, lass, I’m far from a pro at it. It was easier before my stay on those cliffs.”

“Because you didn’t turn full Unseelie?”

“Aye. I suspect. I can do it, but it’s more difficult. I tend to give myself a wide margin. Where is it you’re wanting to go?”

14

Ashford, Georgia: population 3,979, covering 8.9 square miles, boasting over 100 original antebellum homes, housing 964 families. It’s nestled in the prettiest part of down-Dixie I’ve ever seen.

Of course, I may be biased.

I love every nook and cranny of my town.

I’d not only toured all the historic homes decorated from pillars to eaves at Christmastime—Alina and I loved the holidays—but we’d practically lived in those atmospheric old homes on sultry afternoons and weekends, hanging out with our friends on bead-board-ceilinged porches with slow paddling fans, on white wicker swings, drinking sweet tea and believing nothing would ever change.

I’d eaten in every quaint restaurant and partied in every bar. I’d attended prom at the local high school and gone to concerts on the square. I knew every shop owner, and was evenly moderately acquainted with the politics of the region.

Given the size of my town, one would think it boring, filled with average people living moderately, but with its rich history, expensive, sprawling historic homes, and easy access to Atlanta, Ashford drew a lot of high-powered transplants from large, exciting cities—like my parents, who were seeking a simpler way of life yet enjoyed the finer things.

Mom and Dad bought a 1905 neoclassical revival mansion that had fallen into disrepair, surrounded by old, enormous wax-blossomed magnolia trees, and had lovingly restored it over the years. It boasted a typically southern, generous front porch, palatial white columns, an expansive yet warm and cozy sunroom off the back, and, of course, the pool I’d so enjoyed in the backyard. It was an idyllic, happy, safe place to grow up. Crime was virtually nonexistent in our town.

The Ashford cemetery occupied twenty-two acres, with a large Confederate memorial full of unknown soldiers, a few smallish mausoleums, manicured gardens, well-maintained walkways, and a tiered fountain.

It seconded as a park for the locals, with its gently sloping hills, flowering bushes, and crisp, cool lake on the back acreage. On the weekends you could find half the parents in town power-walking through gravestones. Divided into sections: the old cemetery, the new, and the memorial, we’d had Alina interred on the south side, in the modern portion, with a lovely marble marker.

It was late afternoon when Christian and I arrived in Ashford, or rather near Ashford. It had taken me hours to sneak back to Chester’s dodging every person and Fae I saw, ducking into doorways to avoid Guardians, once, reduced to hiding in a trash Dumpster. Between my recent shock and my face plastered everywhere around the city, I’d been in no mood for confrontation. Near Chester’s, though, I’d been unable to avoid it and tested my skill at Voice that Barrons had taught me, for the first time on strangers. It worked beautifully. They obeyed me instantly, turning around and heading the other way. My hastily shouted, And don’t breathe a word about seeing me to anyone. Forget everything about this day forever! hadn’t necessarily been the wisest choice of words, but I was operating on the fly. I hated the thought of people walking around out there with a whole day missing from their memory. I knew what it felt like to lose time, Pri-ya, to question your own mental faculties, and resolved to be more precise in the future.

Christian had been telling the truth about his sifting abilities. I think part of the problem was he’d never been to the States before. The other Unseelie hadn’t exactly volunteered information about his new powers. He was an outsider to both races. Everything for him was trial and error. He frankly admitted he had no clue how he was “supposed” to sift. Places he’d been were the easiest. He hadn’t yet figured out tracking by person but heard he was capable of it.

We’d had to stop first at BB&B, an easy sift for him, where I rummaged for a map in the wreckage and showed him where I wanted him to take me. As there was no detailed topography of the town—it was far too small for that—we ended up smack in the middle of a cornfield and had to walk twenty minutes to get to the cemetery. By the time we arrived, I was dripping sweat. Just another hot August day in Georgia: sun scorching, humidity thick.

He’d offered to try to sift us closer but we materialized alarmingly near a colossal live oak dripping Spanish moss—as in half an inch from the massive trunk. While he might survive manifesting in the middle of solid wood, I wasn’t so sure about myself, so I’d opted to use my feet from there. I had a good deal of nervous energy to burn off anyway.

“Why are we here again?” he said.

“I want to check on something,” I muttered. I hadn’t bothered to tell him that I planned to dig up a grave. I wasn’t entirely certain he would have complied with my request for transport.

I glanced over my shoulder. He was trailing behind, looking at everything.

“Christ,” he said, sounding disgusted, “everything is so new here.”

I would have laughed if I hadn’t been in such a pissy mood. I’d always thought my town dripped history but ours was a few hundred years old, and in Scotland his was a few thousand. I guess when you grow up with prehistoric standing stones in your backyard, American towns seemed prepubescent.

I was pleased to see that V’lane/Cruce’s protection of Ashford when the walls had fallen had indeed kept it remarkably unchanged. Lights glowed in windows, there were no wrecked cars blocking the streets or signs of random rioting and carnage. No Dark Zones, no Unseelie lurking in the alleys, not one husk of the dead tumbling down desolate streets.

I supposed it was pretty much the way it had been before the walls fell—my town was too provincial and unexciting to draw the Fae.

It was as if the war between our races had given the place as wide a berth as Sherman’s armies when the troops made the devastating march from Atlanta, after burning it to the ground. Although Ashford hadn’t been torched by Sherman’s marauding army determined to “make Georgia howl,” half the town center burned to ash in the late 1890s, and they’d rebuilt it with a plan for revenue, planting a large number of shops and restaurants arranged around an enormous, beautifully landscaped square.

We passed the Brickyard where I used to bartend.

I barely spared it a glance.

My head was jam-packed with images of my dead sister, curled on the floor, screaming. Afraid of me. Crying out for Darroc.

It was too much to deal with. It was one thing to see an illusion of my dead sister, another to see her apparently terrified of me for some reason. That moment when her joy had turned to horror was scorched into my brain, eclipsing all my good mental photographs of her.

What sadistic game was the Book playing?

“See that hardware store?” I said to Christian, pointing. It was open for business, I supposed on the barter system, but I was in no mood to see anyone I knew. “Can you sift in and grab me a shovel?”

He shot me a look that couldn’t have more plainly said, What the bloody hell do you think I am? Your little fetch-it boy?

“Please,” I added. “And make it two.”

One brow arched. “You think I’m going to dig?”

“I was hoping.”

“You do know I can simply make the earth move, Mac. Even as a mere druid, I had that much skill. What do you want moved?”

“Silly me,” I said dryly. I’d not even considered that Christian was the Bewitched I’d teased Barrons about being. Truth was, I’d rather been looking forward to some physical labor. That damn steam I needed to burn off.

“Come on,” I said, sighing. “The cemetery’s this way.”

“Great. A bloody cemetery,” he said, and matched my sigh. “I’m never going to get away from Death.”

—

There were no flowers on my sister’s grave. My town puts plastic bouquets everywhere in the cemetery, which is attractive from a distance but I always thought was kind of gruesome close up. Embalmed blossoms for embalmed people.

I paused at the foot of her grave and closed my eyes. It was over a year ago I’d stood here in the pouring rain, matching it tear for drop, trying to make sense of my life, trying to envision a future—any kind of future—for myself without her.

If I’d known back then how much worse it was going to get, I might have stretched on her grave and never gotten up.

I opened my eyes and read the inscription on her headstone, although I had no need. My parents had been too distraught to think, nodding blankly as all their friends murmured sadly and too many times to count, while clutching their children close, No parent should outlive their child.

I’d made all the funeral decisions.

Alina McKenna Lane. Beloved Daughter and Sister. And beneath it, in flowing calligraphy: If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever.

Beside me, Christian snorted. “You want to dig up your sister’s grave?”

“Yes,” I said flatly.

“Why, lass?”

“I want to see her body.”

“That’s twisted, even for you.”

“Says the man who’s stalking his uncle’s corpse. You said you could move the dirt. Can you raise her casket?” I glanced around the cemetery. “And somehow glamour us so those people walking over there, staring at us, don’t see what we’re doing?”

“Bloody hell, you better find me solid information on my uncle, Mac.”

“Do all Fae get testy when humans ask them to perform minor tasks?”

“I’m not Fae,” he growled, and moved to stand beside me.

“Ow!” I snapped. “What did you just do?” I’d felt a sharp tug on my hair, as if a cluster of strands had been yanked out at the roots.

“Sorry, lass. My wings. I’m not always certain where they are. Looks like some of that red stuff in your hair is still sticky.”

I rubbed my head where it stung. I didn’t feel any paint.

Then I forgot all about my hair when the ground in front of me began to tremble and churn, as if something enormous was rising from the bowels of the earth. It shook and shivered and dirt poured up and tumbled away from the burial plot as the casket emerged from the ground.

Christian was pretty darned handy.

“I don’t know why you’re bothering, Mac,” he said irritably.

“I need to see that she’s dead.”

He gave me a strange look with those strange eyes. “There’s nothing dead in there, lass.”

“I put something dead in there,” I snapped. “And it had damn well better still be there.”

“Whatever.” He shrugged.

When the casket settled next to the gaping hole in the earth, I stepped close and ran my hands over the lid.

Cool wood. My sister’s home now.

I dusted it lovingly, brushing away clods of dirt.

Months ago I’d stood with Christian near another casket, both determined to open it and dreading it, just like today. But that had been a coffin of ice, containing the concubine/Seelie queen.

This casket was mortal, not Fae. I remembered the day I’d chosen it, the fancy one with the elaborate inlaid burl, the elegant pin-striped cream silk. Funny how you obsessed over funeral details when you lost someone you loved, as if they might somehow see all the care you were putting into the last things you would ever be able to do for them. I’d chosen the one with the many hidden compartments, into which I tucked treasure after treasure, so she could take them out in Heaven and smile. I know, foolish to an extreme. Assuming there was a Heaven and assuming she went, I highly doubted the coffin went, too. It had been a time of madness. It had cost a fortune. I hadn’t cared. Only the best for Alina.

I remembered closing the lid myself, I’d even insisted on turning the crank to seal it. I’d tucked the key into my pocket for some absurd reason. As if I might someday visit her, dig her up, and talk to her or something. That key was in a jewelry box in my bedroom, a mile away.

“I need you to break the seal,” I told Christian. “Make it open.”

The casket exhaled a soft plosive and the lid shifted slightly.

I stood there every bit as woodenly as I’d stood there a little over a year ago, feeling as cold and hard as her new home. Tears spilled from my eyes.

With shaking hands, I raised the embossed upper panel of the casket.

I shouldn’t have been surprised.

By this time I’d thought myself beyond all surprise.

There was nothing inside.

I’d lost my sister.

Now I’d lost her corpse, too.

15

I stalked into Chester’s in a shit of a mood, leaving Christian at the Sinatra club with yet another whiskey in his hand. He’d declined my invitation to join our meeting. Said he had more immediate problems than the fate of the world and he was sure we’d figure it out, considering how controlling and micromanaging Ryodan was about everything he owned—and as he believed he owned the entire world and everything in it, and could play with it all like his personal chess set—the bastard would surely find a way to patch things up to his liking. He’d added that at least we were now both in the same boat, with missing corpses, and maybe I should ask Ryodan about mine.

I wasn’t sure who was pissier, him or me. He was certainly more loquacious about it.

I pushed through the crowd, grateful for the first time that Chester’s was off the grid in terms of morality and legality. Although many eyes in the crowd observed me with shock and a good bit of fear, no one tried to mess with me.

I was almost sorry about that.

My sister’s casket was empty.

I knew for a fact that I’d buried her.

I knew for a fact it was her.

I knew every inch of my sister. The barely-there stretch marks on the sides of her hips that she’d hated whenever she wore a bathing suit after having lost twenty-five pounds rapidly when she caught mono, then gaining it back again. The birthmark so similar to mine. The funny shape of her second toe, longer than the big one. The fingernail on her right hand that never grew right because she’d gotten her finger slammed in a car door and the nail had darkened with a blood blister and fallen off.

I’d buried Alina.

If I hadn’t, nothing in my entire existence was certain.

I slapped my palm to the wall of Ryodan’s office and stormed in.

“Ms. Lane,” Barrons said.

“I need to talk to you,” I snapped. “Alone. Now.”

Ryodan said, “We’re having a meeting—”

“I. Don’t. Give a damn.” I said to Barrons, “Now.” I forced myself to add, “Please?”

He was on his feet before I even added the please. I turned and stormed back out, down the stairs, through the club, feeling him behind me all the way. I stopped only when I reached the corridor that led to the server’s wing. Then I spun sharply to face him. “Do you know where there’s a private closet?” I demanded with a touch of hysteria.

“I’m not sure I know the difference between a private closet and a public one, Ms. Lane,” he said dryly.

“Someplace there are no bloody cameras!”

He went motionless, swept my body with that dark, inscrutable gaze, and the shape of his mouth changed. “Ah, Ms. Lane, did you pull me out of there to fuck?”

“You bet your ass I did.”

“Bloody hell. I don’t know what happened to you—”

“I don’t want to talk about it! Are you going to cooperate or not?” I snarled.

“—but goddamn woman. I like you this way.”

He shoved me back against a wall, palmed open a door I hadn’t even noticed, backed me in, spun me around, and crushed me against the wall, kicking the door shut behind us.

Then my jeans were down and he was inside me with a rough growl, and I was ready for him because I’m always ready for him, pushing deep and hard, and I was flattened against the wall with my hands over my head, shoving back with my ass, and that was all I needed to find a lifeline, to connect, to remain sane.

—

When we returned to Ryodan’s office, I felt remarkably better. I could think again. I wasn’t a raw mass of pain and confusion and fear. I’d dumped all that on Barrons’s big hard body. I’d turned the savagery I was feeling toward myself and the world on him. I’d nipped and fought and fucked and cleansed.

God, I love that man.

He’d understood exactly what I was doing. No words. No discussion. No pointless questions or offering of empty platitudes about whatever was bothering me.

He’d assessed.

I was pain and violence.

He’d given his body as a Band-Aid for the wound.

I suspected there would be times he would seek the same from me, and I made a promise to myself in that wonderful, fantastic, lovely closet that if I ever sensed in him what I felt myself tonight, I’d rise to his need as willingly and intensely as he’d risen to mine.

He’d taken and given, encouraged and incited…and finally soothed my wildness.

Sex is so damned healing.

“Better?” Ryodan said dryly after we walked back in.

My hair was a mess. Barrons’s shirt collar was askew. And Ryodan never missed a trick.

“Much, thanks. You?” I said just as dryly.

“Not as good as you,” he murmured, silver gaze cool.

“Where’s Da—Jada and Dancer?” I said, looking around. I could smell that they’d recently been there. We must have just missed them.

“I saw no reason to waste their time simply because you were wasting mine.”

I arched a brow. “And that means?”

“That he sent them off to do something else because he wants to talk to you without them around,” Barrons said.

I stiffened, dropping my leg from the arm of the chair where I’d tossed myself in a fairly relaxed position. Sat up straight and folded my arms. Ryodan wanting to talk to me in semiprivate is never a good thing. Private would worry the hell out of me.

“We need to talk about the Sinsar Dubh, Mac,” said Ryodan.

I blew out a gusty sigh. Recent sex aside, this was not turning out to be a banner day in Dublin. “What about it?” I was irritable all over again.

“Dancer has a theory. He thinks the Hoar Frost King inadvertently deposited the components of a Song of Destruction. He thinks the only thing that will stop the black holes from taking over this world entirely is a Song of Making.”

That made two of us. I said nothing.

“The Sinsar Dubh allegedly contains parts of that song.”

“Allegedly,” I underscored. “The truth is, none of us know a damn thing about the Book. It’s all legend and myth and supposition.”

“Which is precisely why we need you to tell us what’s actually in it. Unless you’d rather we try Cruce,” Ryodan said evenly.

Surely not even Ryodan was arrogant enough to try to interrogate Cruce in his prison. “You think you could question a psychopathic Book?”

“I suspect that’s not what he is.”

“What do you mean?”

“In the past, the Book possessed whoever touched it. That’s not what happened with him. He knew the First Language and was able to read it. The spells traveled up his arms, into his body. Did you ever see that happen before when someone handled it?”

I shook my head. It had always seized control of the person, taken them over completely. Never had the Book itself been destroyed.

Yet only a thin pile of gold dust and a handful of red, winking gemstones had remained of the Sinsar Dubh on the slab.

“The sentient Book crumbled once he was finished. Legend holds there are two parts to the Sinsar Dubh. A Book of words, spells on a page. And a second facet, the thing that evolved into a living, intelligent, hate-obsessed being with far more power than the words it contained. It appeared the sentient Sinsar Dubh was destroyed that night, and Cruce merely absorbed the knowledge.”

“Oh, God,” I breathed. “You could be right.” That prick. Had he gotten all the power without any of the price? That would make him pretty much…well, nearly the Unseelie king. I narrowed my eyes. “We don’t know that for certain.”

“But if it’s true, we wonder if you could do the same.”

“Can you tell us anything, Ms. Lane?” Barrons said.

I swiveled my head to look at him. I’d been “Mac” mere minutes ago. “Why do you do that?”

His eyes said, Do you really want to call me Jericho?

I thought about it a minute and was rather startled to realize I didn’t. Jericho was…intimate. Jericho and Mac were a completely different entity than Ms. Lane and Barrons. They existed in a different place. A freer environ, a sacred one. And I liked that difference. I nodded, smiling faintly. His dark eyes gleamed with something appreciative, and I practically preened.

You continue to evolve, his eyes said. Keep fucking me instead of worrying.

“Tell me about the Book,” Ryodan said. “I want to understand how it’s in you.”

I sighed and tried to figure out how to explain it. “I’ve got this place inside me. I don’t know how to say quite where, I think it must be in my head. It’s a deep, glassy black lake but it’s more than that, too. There are caverns and pebbled shores. Who knows, maybe I’ve got a whole bloody country inside me. I think the lake is my sidhe-seer place. But it was altered by something else inside me and now it’s…different. If there were boundaries, I can’t tell where they are anymore.”

“The Book,” Ryodan said.

I looked at Barrons. I don’t know why. Maybe just to make sure he was there, as he’d been there the single time I dived to the bottom of my dark glassy lake and beheld the Sinsar Dubh in all its shining, tempting glory. Just in case talking about it made it do something evil, I wanted to know he was nearby.

“It’s there,” I said peevishly. “At the bottom of the lake. But I have to swim all the way down to get to it. It’s in a black cavern, on a pedestal. Closed.” I glared at him. “For good reason.” I’d closed it that afternoon, months ago with Barrons. Whumped it firmly shut.

“Have you gone inside your head and looked at it recently,” said Ryodan.

“Nope.” Not about to either. Knowing my luck, it would be open to an extremely useful spell that I’d begin to think I might want, or need, or possibly not be able to live without.

“I want you to,” Ryodan said.

“Are you on board with this?” I fired at Barrons.

His dark eyes flashed. We all have our inner beasts.

And you think you can manage mine? I shot back.

I think I do a damn fine job. Images of what we’d just done surfaced in his eyes.

That’s different.

We control ours. It took time.

How much time?

We made mistakes, was all he said.

You want me to look.

I want this world. I want you. It may be the only way. I see no other alternatives at present. If there’s a way inside you to stop the black holes from destroying Earth, we need it.

I want you. Those three simple words. They undo me. Melt me. Forge me into steel stronger than I am. Barrons’s belief in me is pure titanium.

Over millennia, searching for the spell to free my son, I never once caught wind of anything reputed to contain part of the Song of Making aside from the Book I hunted.

Millennia, he’d said. Barrons had lived for thousands of years. It was one thing to suspect it, another to hear him admit it. My lover was thousands of years old. I was twenty-three. No wonder we had issues.

I frowned, recalling something else I knew about that might be of use to us now. A thing I’d seen in the White Mansion when I was hunting with Darroc for the Silver back to Dublin.

But I’d been stoically refusing to think about it ever since I realized what I had inside me, unwilling to let my inner beast catch wind of it, if it hadn’t already.

I sighed. “I’ll take a look. But if I go batshit crazy down there, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Go?” Ryodan said, his inflection clearly implying he thought I was already there.

I wrinkled my nose at him. “If I’m going to do this, I need a drink first.”

“I’ll have one sent up,” Ryodan said. “Name your poison.”

“I want to get it myself,” I said coolly, aware I was only trying to stave off the inevitable. But I wanted to walk somewhere of my own volition, feel alive and free for a few more minutes before I risked body and soul.

“We’ll all get one,” he said, pushing up from behind his desk.

When I walked down the chrome and glass stairs with Barrons on my left, Ryodan on my right, I could have been slain by the daggers of envy shot my way, from every subclub below.

If only they knew.

—

I would have opted for the Sinatra club but Ryodan saw Christian looming darkly at the bar and steered us away.

To the kiddie subclub where Jo worked, wearing a short, kicky plaid skirt, white blouse, and baby doll heels, looking pretty, her short dark hair highlighted with gold and blond. She came to wait on us with a wary look when Ryodan gestured, but he only ordered three glasses of Macallan, Rare Cask, with the blandest of expressions. As she hurried away to fill the order, I sensed a stir in the crowd on the dance floor.

I looked around, trying to decide what was causing it, and realized the crowd was parting for some reason, allowing someone or something’s passage.

Jo deposited two fingers of rare cask scotch in front of me. I picked it up, swirled it and sipped appreciatively. I watched, waiting, and finally a woman came into view, heads turning as she passed.

Jada.

Abso-frigging-lutely stunning in a red dress and heels. Bare-legged, hair scraped back high from that beautiful face, ponytail nearly brushing her ass as she walked. Her skin was smooth and creamy, her face smoother, her eyes flashing banked heat. I could make out Dancer’s head behind her, taller than her, even with her wearing heels. Unlike one of the Nine, he wasn’t shadowing her every move, using his body to lead and block. He merely walked with her.

Dani was all grown up, wearing a dress that fit her like a second skin. And that walk! Graceful, long-legged power and heat. Awareness that she was gorgeous.

Dani didn’t swagger anymore.

She strutted. She prowled. She stalked, owning the ground she walked on.

And she was setting the men on fire as she passed. Humans and Fae alike watched her go, coveting, lusting. She shined. Even though she wasn’t our Dani anymore, there was something utterly brilliant about her, almost luminous. Oh, there was still fire within. I’d bet my sanity on it. Well, wait, that wasn’t necessarily a solid bet. I’d bet my right arm.

She wasn’t oblivious to the attention. She simply didn’t care.

I glanced at Ryodan. I don’t know why. I guess I’m always mining for gold where there is none. His face was as smooth as Jada’s.

But those eyes, those cool silver eyes, were flashing with a similar banked heat. He looked up. Down. Up again. Lingered. Then sharply away.

I thought for a moment Jada and Dancer were coming to see us but they detoured and went right instead of straight.

“Odd way to dress for an investigation,” Barrons murmured.

“She’s not Dani anymore,” Ryodan clipped.

“Would you rather she had on jeans and sneakers?” I said.

“I’d rather she had on a fucking suit of armor,” Ryodan said coolly.

And a chastity belt, if I could read the look in a man’s eyes. And I could. “She’s a woman, Ryodan,” I said softly. “Get used to it. Dancer was right. We need to accept her.”

“Don’t tell me what to get used to, Mac. I’m the one that breaks all the rules, remember.”

I stared at him.

“This morning, with Christian at the abbey, you were thinking about when you watched us down in the dungeon. You were in my office, watching my monitors.”

“Stay the hell out of my head!” I barked. Or had there been a roach or three, lurking beneath his desk, reporting back?

“Don’t give it away so easily. You saw the forbidden.”

“You did the forbidden,” I said flatly. “And believe me, I keep quiet about a lot of things I see.”

He looked at Barrons. “She knows about the Highlander.”

Barrons said, “Yet said nothing and could have.”

“Did you skim it from my head, too?” I asked Barrons sourly.

“I accord you greater respect. And henceforth, Ryodan will, too.” It was a warning.

Ryodan said to me, “If you turn invisible again, I’ll ward you from my club. Permanently.” To Barrons, he said, “I’ll break as many rules as you do, brother.”

I supposed he also knew somehow that I was aware they were brothers, since he was no longer hiding it from me.

None of us said anything then. I sipped my drink and glanced back at Jada, but she was gone. “Speaking of the Highlander,” I couldn’t help but meddle, “you should tell Christian. He may be able to help.” I should have left it there, because the only thing that would motivate Ryodan was if there was something in it for him, but I couldn’t help adding, “Besides, it’s his family. He deserves to know.”

“Be wise, Mac. Never mention to me that you know again.”

“Fine,” I said irritably. Then, “Shit!” The Alina-thing was on the dance floor, turning in a circle, standing tall as if to peer over the sea of heads. Looking for someone. Looking as distraught and worried as she had the first time I’d seen her. Looking as if she’d been crying her eyes out. Looking so achingly like my sister that I wanted to burst into tears myself.

Beside me, Barrons tensed. I glanced at him. He was staring where I’d been staring.

“That woman looks like she could be your sister, Ms. Lane.”

He could see the Alina-thing, too?

I was so flabbergasted for a moment that I couldn’t draw breath to speak. “Wait, how do you know what my sister looks like?”

“Your albums. The photo you put in your parents’ mailbox, Darroc later hung on my door.”

Ah, I’d forgotten about that.

“Perhaps a Fae throwing a glamour?” he said, assessing me.

I hadn’t thought of that. If he could see her, too…well, I’d positively cotton to the idea if I hadn’t opened an empty casket in Ashford earlier today.

But…maybe it was a Fae and the same Fae had stolen her body just to play some kind of sick trick on me. Both Seelie and Unseelie could cast flawless glamour. And so long as I had Unseelie flesh in me, I couldn’t use my sidhe-seer senses to see past it.

Well, damn. That was a darned plausible explanation.

Except, I realized glumly, the first night I’d seen the illusion had been before I’d partaken of forbidden fruit.

I had no idea what to think.

Barrons could see my illusion.

Did Ryodan see it, too? I turned to look at him. He was staring directly at her. “Lovely woman,” he murmured.

“Stay away from her,” I snapped before I could stop myself. Whatever this thing was, I simply wouldn’t be able to stand seeing Ryodan get it on with something that looked like my sister. “I mean,” I added hastily, “because we have more important things to do.”

“You made time for it.”

“A Fae?” Barrons prompted again. Prompting was an unusual demonstration of interest on his part. Uh-oh.

“Who knows? Could be.” I shrugged. “Then again, don’t they say everyone has a doppelganger somewhere?”

Barrons gave me a level look. Something you want to talk about?

Nope. Not a thing, I said lightly.

Another thing I love about the man: he dropped it. That was going to be a hard favor for me to return when it was time.

“I assume you’re ready to look in that lake,” Ryodan said, tossing back the last of his drink.

I was only too happy to escape the apparently visible-by-all illusion on the dance floor before we collided again, further wrecking my tenuous grasp on reality. Alina was dead. I knew it in my bones. I knew it with utter and complete certainty. And if she wasn’t dead, nothing I thought I knew could be trusted. Not one damn thing. Easier to turn away from the illusion than confront it.

I tossed back my drink and stood.

Why not? I thought acerbically. Could things get any worse?

16

I should never think that.

I know better.

Still, I persist, and every damned time the universe seizes the challenge on bullish horns, stomps its hoof, and snorts, “Hey, MacKayla Lane just said she doesn’t think things can get worse. We’ll show her!”

Ryodan took us to the dungeon level I’d glimpsed yesterday on his office monitors. Not to Dageus’s cell but to a small stone room down a narrow passageway.

I trailed my fingers along the cool damp stone of the corridor, skimming a marbling of brightly colored moss on the walls. Apart from the nearly iridescent algae staining a strangely luminous skein on the stone, it was gloomy, gray, and cold in the subterranean chamber.

I despise being underground. I wondered if anyone was with Dageus or if they’d left him alone to deal with his transformation. Although I listened intently, I heard no sound, no anguished baying, no tortured groans.

“Uh, Barrons, why are we in the dungeon?” I asked, looking around for ancient manacles bolted into the stone or something of the like, perhaps an iron maiden or a few bloodstained racks.

“Precaution. Nothing more. If you go, as you call it, batshit crazy, there are fewer people to kill down here.”

“I’d still leave through the club.” Meaning I could still destroy everyone within it. “Maybe we should go out into the middle of a field. Far from any town.”

He slanted me a look. You’re not going to lose it. You’re not going to open the Book tonight. We merely want to get the lay of your inner landscape.

I heaved an audible sigh of relief. “Then let’s get on with it.” I shot Ryodan a look as he closed us in the narrow stone cell. “Since you know I know everything, what the heck is the deal with Kat and Kasteo?”

“Another thing a wiser woman wouldn’t mention.”

“I’m only mentioning it to you, not anyone else,” I said. “So, what gives?”

He kicked a straight-backed chair toward me. “Sit.”

I clamped my mouth shut on I prefer to stand. No point in wasting energy just to vent my dissatisfaction with the current state of my life on everyone around me.

I sat. After a moment I let my lids flutter closed, although I didn’t need to. I remembered all too well, during that time I’d been a darker version of myself, letting my eyes go only slightly out of focus to drift into the place of power I called my dark glassy lake. Scooping up runes floating on the surface, power I’d naïvely believed my birthright, some part of my sidhe-seer heritage, only to learn they’d been temptations strewn by the Sinsar Dubh, gifts to seduce and entice.

Never mine at all.

I wondered, for perhaps the first time with my intellect, precisely where my inner lake actually was. Talking about it to Ryodan made me perceive it differently. Instead of seeming normal, I’d found it peculiar.

Why did I have a lake inside me? Did every sidhe-seer? Was it simply my chosen visualization of an inner power source, different for all of us? With constant calamity around me, I’d never gotten time to sit down with the sisters of my bloodline to ask questions, compare notes.

I frowned. Now that I’d added my brain to the mix, trying to pinpoint the metaphysical coordinates of my dark glassy lake—as if I might establish some quantum latitude and longitude—was difficult. The place proved abruptly elusive.

I inhaled deep, exhaled slow, willing myself to relax. Sink, sink, don’t think, I murmured in my mind.

Nothing.

Not even a puddle in sight anywhere.

I opened my eyes, thinking I needed to refocus and try again. Barrons gave me a look. “Hang on,” I said, “give me a minute.”

“Don’t play games with me, Mac,” Ryodan warned.

“I’m not,” I said. “It’s not easy. I’ve spent months trying to stay away from the place and now you expect me to dive right in. I’ve trained myself to never even think about it.” Although I didn’t always succeed.

Letting my gaze shift slightly out of focus, I mentally envisioned a giant lake, glassy and deep. I paid careful attention to the details, the pebbled shore, the faint light from what seemed to be a distant sky. I lavished attention on the sleek black surface. Told myself I couldn’t wait to swim, climbed up on a large rock, and when I’d gotten the scene exactly right, closed my eyes, leapt into the air, and dove.

I crashed into the ground, hard.

Not one bloody drop of water anywhere.

“Fuck,” I snapped, rubbing my head. It hurt, as if I’d actually hit a rock with it. And my arms felt bruised. I looked at Barrons. “I can’t find it.”

“Try again,” Ryodan ordered.

I did.

And again.

And again and again.

Driving us all crazy with repeated failure.

“You’re too tense,” Ryodan growled. “For fuck’s sake, you don’t stalk an orgasm, you enjoy its arrival.”

“Bloody talk about bloody orgasms with your own bloody woman not mine,” Barrons said tightly. “You don’t know a thing about her orgasms and never will.”

Ryodan shot him a dark look. “It was a metaphor.”

“I never stalk an orgasm. I don’t have to with Barrons,” I said.

“Too the fuck much information, Mac,” Ryodan said.

“You’re the one who brought up orgasms.”

“And he never will again,” Barrons said pointedly.

“Everybody shut up. I’m trying to concentrate.” Now I was thinking about orgasms. I considered Ryodan’s advice. Maybe I was trying too hard.

An hour later I was dripping sweat, my head was pounding, and my arms felt like I’d been delivering karate chops to brick walls.

“I can’t get there,” I finally said wearily. “I don’t know why.”

Ryodan regarded me through narrowed eyes. “You said you thought it was a sidhe-seer place.”

I inclined my head, waiting.

“Barrons said you ate—”

“Aha! Unseelie flesh!” I pounced on the excuse, enormously relieved. “So it is a sidhe-seer place and that’s why I can’t find it! I can’t possibly see my lake right now!” I’d begun to fear the Sinsar Dubh was so quiet of late because it had been stealthily rearranging my internal furniture, hiding things I might want to use, planting booby traps. Could it do that?

Ryodan rolled his eyes. “Outstanding. Meet Mac, the junkie.”

“I am not.”

“How many times have you eaten it in the past week,” he demanded.

“Twice. But I had to the first time because I was going down the cliff, and the Guardians were shooting at me the second time,” I defended.

“I’m sure you’ll ‘have to’ the next time, too.”

“I am not an addict.”

“How the bloody hell long does the high last anyway,” Ryodan growled.

I shrugged. “Dunno exactly. Three days or so. I should be myself again in a couple of days.” Immensely irritable and tired but myself.

He looked at Barrons. “Don’t let her eat it again.”

“She makes her own decisions,” he said. But he shot me a look: We need information, Ms. Lane. I would prefer you refrain for a time.

Great. One of my two ball-fortifying techniques that were keeping me strong—sex with Barrons and eating Unseelie flesh—was now lost.

I was just thinking what an anticlimactic night this was turning out to be when Ryodan opened the door.

Christian MacKeltar stood on the other side.

17

Three hours earlier…

Jada didn’t have to wear the red dress.

It was a choice.

Men on every planet, in every realm, Fae or human, shared inherent characteristics.

They didn’t like to kill a beautiful woman.

At first.

They wanted other things. At first.

Beauty was one of many weapons.

It was why she’d abandoned her ragged haircut to grow it long again. But curly and wild, it had been far too easy for an opponent to grab a fistful, a liability in any battle. She’d learned to scrape it back, high, out of her face. Sometimes tuck a low braid into the collar of her shirt.

She didn’t have to dance either.

That, too, was a choice.

But when she walked into Chester’s, one of the Nine caught her eye across the dance floor and beckoned with such in-your-face enthusiasm and happiness to see her that she couldn’t resist.

Lor.

The man was a beast. A primitive caveman who loved being what he was. Blunt, blatantly sexual, with a voracious appetite for rock and roll, brawls, and hot blondes, he was prone to proposition a woman by saying, “Hey, wanna fuck?” and scored a ridiculous amount of the time with his Viking good looks and that hint of something dirty-kinky-raw just beneath the surface, locked, loaded, and ready to blast a woman’s inhibitions to dust.

They’d had something when she was younger.

Not that kind of something.

A bond that had been innocent yet knowing. An awareness that they were two people who were precisely what they were, no apologies, no excuses.

He’d appreciated who she’d been then, and from the look on his face, he was willing to appreciate her now.

He’d once brought her steak and potatoes. Had trailed her, making sure she stayed safe. He’d offered advice the night Ryodan dragged her off, after she’d defied him and slaughtered half the patrons in one of his subclubs. Helped her escape the room upstairs when the boss locked her in.

He’d encouraged her impulsiveness and belligerence, and for that reason alone, she should avoid him. She’d turned her back on those character flaws years ago.

But the music was seductive and the song playing was one of her favorites, and despite the icy facade she projected, she knew the heat she had inside. She didn’t deny it. Denying would have made her weaker.

Heat was strength. It was resilience. She channeled it, shaped it into purpose, like everything else.

Sexuality, too, was power.

Lor moved toward her, pushing through the crowd, completely ignoring the many hot blondes looking his way, his grin wide and only for her.

She approached him, allowing herself a faint smile. They met in the middle of the dance floor.

“Hey, kid,” he purred. “Looking good, honey. Nice to see you back.”

“You, too, Lor.” She could count on two fingers those who’d been happy to see her.

“Fuck, I always look good. I was born looking good. Dance?”

With Hozier inviting his lover to take him to church, she moved into Lor’s body with effortless grace, following the tempo of his hips, the muscle of his powerful torso. He danced from the groin, as most powerful, centered men did, easy to match.

On one of the worlds she’d briefly visited, nature itself had danced, sinuous vines, draping from trees, moving to a rhythm she’d not been able to hear. At first she was wary, regarding them as threats, but after nearly a week on that world, she’d seen a slender trailing plant heal a wounded animal with its dance.

And one night, under three full moons, she’d taken off her clothes and gone native, pretended to be part of the vegetation, imitating the sensual undulations until she finally found the rhythm with her body.

It had healed her, too. The wounds on her back had closed, expelling the infection, leaving only scars.

Now, she half closed her eyes and followed the lead of Lor’s hips, dropped her head back, arched her neck, and gave herself over completely to the music. The body had needs that couldn’t be ignored. It needed to run, to fight, to eat, to breathe, to move. There were other needs, too, which now that she was back on this world, surrounded by so many people with complicated feelings, had been making their presence known. She wasn’t yet ready to deal with them.

Nothing, no one, had touched her for a long time. It was difficult to process Lor’s body so close to hers, moving in tandem with her own.

So she pretended he was a vine and she was dancing in a great, dark forest, safer than most places because there were no upright creatures on that world, and the dance was only for her, to let her soul breathe, to revel in being alive one more day. In her mind, moonlight kissed her skin, a gentle, fragrant breeze rippled her hair. Abandoned to the moment, the beat, the freedom of thinking no further ahead or back than now.

“Aw, honey, keep dancing like that, you’re gonna get me killed,” Lor said close to her ear.

“I doubt that,” she said dryly.

“Figure it’s worth dying for. If only to get off on the look on that fuck’s face.”

She didn’t dissemble. Didn’t ask who. She knew who, and he knew she did. Lor was a hammer. He called it like he saw it, pounded words like nails into conversation and didn’t care what anyone thought of him. “And what is the look on ‘that fuck’s face’?” she murmured. “He’s behind me. I can’t see him.”

Lor laughed and spun them so she could see Ryodan standing on the edge of the dance floor, tall, powerful, dressed in dark slacks and a white shirt, sleeves rolled back, cuff glinting. Watching, thunderclouds in his eyes.

Once she’d seen him laugh.

Once she’d watched him fuck. A lifetime ago.

Their eyes locked. He took two steps toward her and she flared her nostrils, cut him a cool look.

He stopped.

Lor slid an arm around her waist, turned her away.

“Then why didn’t he find me?” she said. She wanted to know how hard he’d searched. How he’d reacted. If he’d mounted a rescue and how extensive it had been. She’d had no one to ask that wouldn’t promptly report back to him.

Lor wouldn’t carry the tale. They’d shared secrets in the past.

“Aw, kid, he tried. As soon as he heard you were missing. We didn’t know you were gone for a coupla weeks. Mac didn’t tell Ryodan right away.”

Jada cultivated fluidity, resisting the urge to tense. “Mac didn’t tell you right away that I went into the hall?”

Lor shook his head.

She was momentarily breathless. She’d believed they were all out hunting for her. Worrying. Moving mountains to find her. She’d waited. Living by WWRD: What Would Ryodan Do.

“Boss said Mac was chompin’ at the bit to go after you but Barrons vetoed it. Said if she followed you through you’d just keep running.”

True, she acknowledged. She’d been running as if the hounds of Hell were on her heels that night, determined to outrun everything, especially herself. She wouldn’t have stopped if Mac had followed her. She’d have leapt into the nearest mirror in the hall. But truth, the pernicious bitch, didn’t make her feel better. “Why didn’t she tell Ryodan?”

“Dunno. You gotta ask her that. But, honey, it’s not like those two get along real well. They sure weren’t spending any time together. Maybe she was giving you time to find your way out. Maybe she had her own problems.”

Jada did the math. She’d been gone five and a half years and they hadn’t even started looking for her until two weeks after she’d gotten back. She’d spent those weeks coldly combing the country, amassing her wandering army of sidhe-seers who’d come to Dublin for one reason or another, inspiring their loyalty with her strength and laser focus, implementing the plans she’d made wandering through Hell, trying to figure out how to regain what she’d lost by coming home. Years that felt like centuries had passed for her. It had been a single week for those she’d counted friends.

She closed her eyes, finding her center. The place where she felt no pain, only purpose. When she’d fixed herself firmly there, she opened her eyes, kissed Lor lightly on the cheek and thanked him for the dance.

Then she turned to find Ryodan, deliberately late for their meeting.

He was gone.

—

“I thought we were having a meeting,” Jada said as she entered Ryodan’s office.

“We are,” he said, not taking his eyes from the monitor he was watching beyond her head.

“I’d hardly call the two of us a meeting.”

“What would you call us?”

Us, he’d said. With interrogative inflection. As if there was an “us.” Once, she’d thought them Batman and Robin, two superheroes, saving the world. “Was that a bona-fide question with proper punctuation?” she mocked.

“Dani needed things to fight. I was the logical choice. Even something so small as improper punctuation kept her distracted.”

“What are you saying? That you’re not really endlessly irritating—you just irritated me endlessly to keep me occupied?”

“No need to go hunting dragons when the one right next to you keeps yanking your chain. And you had so very many chains to yank back then.”

She stared at him, but he still wasn’t looking at her. That was exactly what he’d done, kept her racing from one thing to the next, provoking her so incessantly that even when she wasn’t with him, she’d been fuming about how much he annoyed her, planning how to one-up him the next time.

Or impress him.

Get him to look at her with respect, admiration.

God, she’d hero-worshipped this man! Constructed endless fantasies around him.

He looked at her then. Sharply. Hard. And she belatedly remembered his ability to skim minds, hoped she hadn’t thought that last part loud and on the top of her brain.

On the off chance she had, she tossed him something to throw him off course.

“I hated you,” she said coolly.

“You were an explosion of unchecked desires.”

“You were a complete void of them.” Not always, though. Just around her.

“Now you’re an implosion of repressed passion. Find the middle ground.”

You’re not the boss of me, rose to the tip of her tongue, and she bit it off so hard she drew blood, hating that a mere month in this world could unravel her so much, send her sliding down the slipperiest of slopes right back into who and how she’d once been.

“Never tell me how you think I should be,” she said. “You don’t know a thing about who I am now. You don’t know what I lived through and you don’t know the choices I had to make.”

He inclined his head, waiting.

“Oh, that’s not happening. I’m never going to tell you,” she said.

“Never is a long time. I’ll be here at the end of it.” He stood up, reached in his drawer, pulled out an object, and offered it to her.

She arched a brow. “A phone?”

“I can’t track you on other worlds. If you allow me to tattoo you again, and carry the phone always, you will never get lost anywhere I can’t find you.”

Lost. That was how she’d felt. So damned lost. She’d fallen off the face of her earth. The worlds had been so strange, many of them hostile, with so little food that she’d often had to crawl her way through a Silver to her next hope of a world, too hungry, too fevered, to have a whisper of a prayer of accessing the slipstream, Shazam hovering over her anxiously, cursing, weeping, for a novel change giving up his incessant predictions of doom, to urge her on. “You mean if I’d had this phone and hadn’t cut off the tattoo…” she trailed off. “Even in the hall?”

“I’d have come for you the moment you called.”

“Anywhere?”

“Yes.”

“Without limitation at all?” She took pains to mask her incredulity. He was that powerful?

He inclined his head.

“Why the bloody hell didn’t you give it to me back then?”

“Would you have carried it?”

Honesty with herself was now part of her spine, her fundamental structure. At fourteen, she’d carried her own cell only for the music and games. She’d have seethed at the mere idea of carrying a phone for Ryodan, considered it just one more way for him to track and control her, another chain draped around her shoulders by adults who didn’t understand her—and she’d have laughed from the belly as she flung it in the trash. Then kicked the trash can for good measure and laughed some more.

“Let me tattoo you.” He was silent a long moment then said, “Jada.”

She went utterly still, not liking him this way, not trusting this at all. He was being direct, noncaustic. Treating her as if she was exactly what she was—a woman who’d been through hell and made it back by sheer force of will and the skin of her teeth. He was calling her by her chosen name. Asking her to “allow” him to do something. No longer berating her for not being who he wanted her to be. Offering his protection. No longer jabbing at her or giving her anything to fight.

She didn’t know how to deal with this man without fighting him. “No,” she said.

“At least carry the phone.”

She regarded it as if it were a snake that would bite her the instant she reached for it. “It’s a little late to start worrying about me.”

“I always worried about you.”

The door behind her whisked open.

“Hey, guys.” Dancer stepped in to join them. He looked at her, did a double take, and said, “Wow. You look amazing, Jada.”

She felt suddenly nonplussed, a thing she’d not experienced in years. The faint heat of a blush was trying to stain her skin and she willed her capillaries to constrict and deny it. Once before Dancer had seen her in a skirt and heels, the night Ryodan made her change because her clothes smelled like Christian. She’d felt just as off-kilter with the way he’d looked at her then, with a soft stirring of butterflies in her stomach.

Sometimes she felt as split as they thought she was: a young girl hungry to spend time with a young man that was smart and good and real, a grown woman hungry for a grown man with edges sharp enough to cut herself on.

But hunger, like emotion, could drive a person to do stupid things. And the stupid didn’t survive. “It’s just a dress,” she deflected.

“It’s not the dress, Mega,” Dancer said quietly. “It’s the woman in it.”

He smiled at her and she felt herself smiling faintly back. Mega. She should correct him. How young, how naïve, she’d been all those years ago.

She’d had a crush on Dancer. The older, brilliant boygenius she’d idolized. She hadn’t known what to do with it. Hadn’t been ready for that kind of thing. She’d had so little childhood that she’d been determined to preserve what remained as long as possible. Sex was an irretrievable step into adulthood. She’d missed him in the Silvers. Had longed for his inventive, brilliant mind and way of making it seem it was the two of them against the world and that was more than enough, because they would win every battle.

She narrowed her eyes, studying him. He looked older now, especially without his glasses. He had beautiful eyes, flecked with every shade of green and blue, like a tropical sea, with thick, long dark lashes. And he was dressing differently than he used to. She was startled to realize he had a man’s body beneath his jeans and leather jacket, a man’s eyes. Perhaps he’d been dressing younger when she was young, matching her style. Perhaps her fourteen-year-old eyes simply hadn’t been able to see the parts of him she’d not been ready to deal with.

She saw them now.

Ryodan dropped the phone back into the drawer and slid it shut. “I want the two of you to gather every bit of information you have on the anomalies and bring it by tomorrow evening.”

“Already got it,” Dancer said, waving a packet of papers. “Right here.”

“I have other things to do tonight.”

Jada looked at Ryodan but his gaze was shuttered, distant, as if they’d never spoken before Dancer had arrived.

“You said you had a current map of all the black holes,” Jada said. “I want it.”

“I’ll have copies for you tomorrow night.”

“Time is of the essence,” she said coolly. Why didn’t he want to give her the map? Because he didn’t trust she’d come back once she had it?

Dancer said, “The first hole appeared more than two months ago, Jada. They’re growing slowly. I can’t see that another day will make much of a difference. Besides, the map isn’t the most important thing. Knowing their location doesn’t tell us how to fix them. I’ve been working on some other ideas about that.”

“Out. Now,” Ryodan said flatly.

Once, she would have insisted, argued, perhaps blasted up into the slipstream and raised a ruckus to get what she wanted. Or at least put on one hell of a show trying.

Now, she simply turned for the door, refusing to glance over her shoulder, although she could feel his gaze resting heavily on her.

Still, she heard Ryodan’s voice inside her head as clearly as if he’d spoken aloud.

Change your mind, Jada. Don’t be a fool. It won’t cost you anything. Let me be your anchor. I’ll never let you be lost again.

She’d always hated the doors in Chester’s.

They couldn’t be kicked open and they couldn’t be slammed shut.

18

I lied to Mac.

Fortunately she isn’t capable of detecting lies as well as the Highlander/Fae prince/druid/lie detector that I am.

Besides, she’d been so obsessed with digging up her sister’s empty grave that she’d scarcely paid any attention to my small theft. She’d shrugged off the momentary tug she felt at her scalp, embracing my glib excuse and forgetting it.

I know precisely how to sift to a human’s location.

I need part of their physical person in my hand to track them, parting space like so many vines hanging from trees obscuring my vision as I isolate the hunted.

Such as the strands of paint-stained blond hair in the pocket of my jeans.

I know where her loyalties lie.

With Barrons.

With all of the Nine. Far more so than with me and my clan.

I don’t judge her for that. I understand clan and she’s chosen hers. Clan is necessary in times like these.

And so I played performing pony to get close enough to yank out a few long strands of her hair, then sat at the bar and sipped my whiskey, patiently waiting for a sign that something was going on in the bowels of Chester’s, wagering she was indeed in the innermost part of their circle.

Easier than trying to get some of that bastard’s hair, which, frankly, I’m not sure would even work. Although I can truth-detect with the Nine, if I try to apprehend any one of them as a singular entity, they simply aren’t there.

I know death intimately. I know life as well. The Nine register as neither. An hour ago, when Mac had risen, with Barrons and Ryodan flanking her, a severe expression on her face, I’d known something was afoot.

I’d sifted to follow her at a distance, wanting access but desiring not to be seen. I’d cloaked myself in glamour, spreading like moss along the walls, moss she’d touched, causing me to shiver. Moss that had peeled from the walls and coalesced once they entered the room at the far end of the corridor, re-forming as the Unseelie prince/Highlander that I am.

I’d stalked every inch of the dungeon, endless and sprawling. Empty. Utterly empty but for one corridor.

A false corridor.

A wall where in truth there was none. I could feel the invalidity of that stone barricade in every atom of my body.

Still, I couldn’t penetrate it. The bastard had powerful wards, designed to repel both human and Fae, and I was both, therefore blocked.

I’d planned to storm the room into which they vanished, thinking perhaps my uncle’s body was in that small cell and they were trying to perform some bizarre ritual with his potent druid remains.

It, too, was warded against Fae and human.

I stood outside, waiting for them to emerge with the long patience of an immortal.

Finally, the narrow door swung open.

“Where the fuck is my uncle?” I demanded.

Ryodan said coolly, “I already answered your questions, Highlander. As I’m sure you’ve seen, there’s nothing down here.”

I sifted his answer into grains: truth or lie. It told me nothing and made me wonder if somehow the prick had known I’d come hunting and deliberately left parts of the dungeon unguarded, wagering I wouldn’t be able to detect the illusionary wall in the north corridor. “Your false wall. Tear it down. Then I’ll believe you,” I said.

Ryodan’s eyes briefly flickered, and I knew I was right. For some reason, my uncle’s body was behind that wall.

“Tear it down,” I told him, “or I’ll destroy every inch of this bloody nightclub, killing everyone within.” I summoned the elements, drew them to me, beckoned like a lover, exhaled long and slow, and ice crackled down the walls, erupted on the floor, glazing the stone with thick, slippery black. “Then I’ll bring thunder and fire from the sky and burn this place to ash.”

Ryodan vanished.

I’d expected no less.

I sifted out, reappearing down the hall. Keeping a careful distance between us. The Nine can kill the Fae. No idea how. No plans to ever let one of them close enough to find out.

Ryodan vanished again.

I sifted and reappeared standing near Mac, with one arm around her throat. She twisted and kicked and growled. She was strong but I’m stronger. She smelled like me, and I knew she’d been eating my race again. I might have squeezed her neck a bit harder than I should have, but bloody hell, her cannibalism needs to stop.

“Let go of me!” she cried.

Barrons vanished.

I sifted out with a struggling Mac, reappeared in the air above them, wings open. “We can do this all bloody night,” I said. One more sift and I’d vacate the club for a while. Let them stew in the juice of knowing I had Mac with me, beyond their reach.

Barrons snarled.

“You won’t hurt Mac,” Ryodan said.

“But I will destroy your club.”

I dropped lightly to my feet and re-created what I’d watched Cruce do down in the cavern the night we’d interred the Sinsar Dubh. I’d felt his spell, absorbed the taste and texture of it, his methods. Gone seeking information in the king’s old library. I’d only recently embraced my power. Now, I used it to erect an impenetrable wall around Mac and me. One I’d seen them fail repeatedly to breach, standing in the cavern below the abbey.

“Aye, you could kill me, if you could catch me,” I acknowledged the unspoken threat blazing in both their dark gazes. “But you’ll never touch me.” I smiled faintly and without mirth.

Nor, likely, would anyone else. I hadn’t risked fucking since the cliffs, fucking I needed like I needed to breathe. But I had no taste for killing another woman. Such things threatened my Highlander’s heart, blackened it.

“Barrons,” Mac said urgently, “forge an alliance. We don’t want a war with Christian. You’ve pushed his back to the wall. The two of you would do no less than he’s doing, under the same circumstances.”

“Alliance, my ass,” Ryodan clipped.

“She’s right,” I said. “We can be enemies or allies. Choose carefully.”

Barrons looked at Ryodan. “He could be useful.”

I snorted. “There will be many conditions if I agree to be allies. The first is that you return my uncle’s remains.”

In my arms, Mac sighed and went supple. “I told you that you should tell him,” she said to Ryodan.

I angled my head to look at her. “Tell me what?”

“I told them they should trust you. That you had a right to know.”

Truth. I relaxed my grip on her and she straightened in my arms but didn’t try to break free.

“You wouldn’t have done what you did,” Mac said to Ryodan pointedly, “if you hadn’t been willing to live with the essential makeup of the one you did it to for a very long time. That, more than anything, is a testament to what you think of the Keltar clan. Trust Christian. Make him an ally, not an enemy. We have more than enough enemies out there already.”

Ryodan looked at Mac for a long moment then smiled faintly. “Ah, Mac, sometimes you do surprise me.”

“I take that as one hell of a compliment,” she said dryly. “My point is, yes, you can keep trying to kick Christian’s ass. Yes, you could hunt him and, if one day you catch him, kill him. You could all stalk around for a small eternity being the testosterone-laden brutes you all sometimes are.”

Barrons and Ryodan shot her a nearly identical look of disgruntlement, and I laughed softly.

She ignored them. “But consider the power he has. Do you really want that turned against us? You, Ryodan, more than most, have the ability to clear a logical path through dense emotions. Think about the potential if you become allies. Think about the grand waste if you become enemies. Three incredibly powerful men stand in this corridor. If you want to brawl, make an alliance, then beat the shit out of each other. With limits. No killing. Ever.”

Ryodan growled, “You fucking Highlanders. I knew the moment I laid eyes on you that you’d be trouble.”

“Friend or foe?” I said.

Ryodan stared at me, unmoving for a long moment. Finally, “There are times I could use a sifter,” he allowed.

“You think I would let you that close to me?” I snorted.

“For you to take someone like Dancer or Jada to inspect various places.”

I inclined my head. That was easy enough. “There are times I may need assistance as well.”

“Such as the cliff we just dragged your ass off of,” Ryodan said flatly.

“See how well you’ve been working together already?” Mac said brightly.

“You will never speak of what you learn tonight,” Barrons said.

“I won’t agree to that,” I said.

“Then destroy my club,” Ryodan said coldly. “And I, and all my men, will hunt you until the end of time. Enemy or ally, Highlander. We’d make stupendous ones, either way.”

“Pledge your alliance to me. Tell me you will never try to kill me. Say it,” I demanded. So I could take fair measure of it. These were men of honor, in the same way I was. Corrupted as we are, there must be a solid core or we become the villains. If Ryodan spoke and it rang true, he would adhere to the letter of the law he’d chosen. As would I.

“I can’t guarantee I can make that claim sound like truth,” Ryodan warned. “There’s a part of me that obeys no one and nothing. And if you focus on that part, no words of mine will ever sound like truth to you.”

“Then we’ll be enemies. I suggest you convince me.”

Ryodan glanced at Barrons and they exchanged a long look. Then Ryodan glanced away as if consummately chafed. “We are allies,” he said.

“And we will protect each other and fight together against common foes. Say it.”

He repeated it coolly.

I waited.

He looked at me, I at him. I wasn’t asking. He knew what I wanted.

“And we will never turn on each other.” His words dripped ice. It didn’t matter. He’d said them.

I looked at Barrons, who then repeated the same. Both of their voices held the knell of a sacred pledge. Smacked of truth.

Sauntering close to the walls I’d thrown up, locking gazes with me, Ryodan said with silky menace, “And we will guard each other’s secrets as our own.”

Fucker, I thought. But I knew he’d not seal the alliance without it. And I knew we’d be at an impasse forever if I didn’t. Truth was, I preferred them as allies, not enemies. The Unseelie sure as hell didn’t have my back.

Barrons echoed it.

“Now you, Mac,” I said.

She looked at me, startled, but repeated the entire oath.

I said it with her. All the way through. Right down to guarding each other’s secrets as our own. Then I withdrew a blade and cut my wrist.

Barrons and Ryodan exchanged another of those inscrutable glances.

“Blood,” I demanded. “Yours with mine. It’s a pact ancient and binding, made to an Unseelie prince.”

“He’s one demanding fuck,” Ryodan murmured to Barrons.

Barrons said to me, “Magic doesn’t bind us.”

“I’ve heard some does,” I said. I’d caught wind of Lor getting chained up by the Unseelie princess in Ryodan’s office.

Barrons gave me a dark-edged smile that disturbed me more than a little. “Have you any bloody idea what you’re doing, Highlander?”

“I’ve no doubt sharing blood with the two of you will screw with me in ways unimaginable and uncounted. Nevertheless, we’re doing it.” I dropped my walls and released Mac. Moved forward slowly.

The four of us came together in the middle of the corridor, meeting warily.

Only when each of us had smears of all of our blood mixed together on our arms, above an open vein, Mac, too—and she was a bit of a challenge, as quickly as she kept healing—did I relax.

I could see the magic of our sworn oath shimmering on the air around us. Performed properly, by a high druid, oaths have enormous power. It wasn’t just the Unseelie blood in me they should worry about.

Barrons was at Mac’s side, shooting me a killing look that said clearly, Never threaten my woman again.

Those two. Christ.

“Come.” Ryodan turned and walked away.

—

I followed him to the north corridor, my wings canted up behind me, so not to have my feathers serve as a bloody broom and attract every bit of dust and slosh of ice on the floor.

At the wall that wasn’t a wall but had been as impenetrable as those of the Unseelie prison, Ryodan stopped and pressed his hands to the air, as if there were indeed a surface there. He murmured softly, touching various places, then traced runes in the air.

A corridor was revealed before us.

From the far end, terrible sounds echoed.

I stiffened. What the bloody hell was down there? But I held my tongue and trod in silence, boots echoing on the stone floors, barely audible above the din.

Ryodan stopped outside a cell, one with a small window and bars in the door. The baying became deafening then abruptly ceased.

I moved forward to join him, wondering what the bloody hell they were doing with my uncle’s body. Had they fed it to some creature, thinking it might assuage torture beyond imagining? In olden days, the blood and flesh of a druid was considered sacred, reputed to have enormous healing properties, especially the heart.

“Think before you react,” Ryodan warned, stepping aside so I could look in.

I looked.

I blinked and stared.

I shivered and drew thunder from the sky without even thinking. Far above me, it rolled and lightning crashed, followed by screams and something enormous falling, exploding into rubble. I knew it to be a concrete chunk of Chester’s ceiling far above, in one of the many subclubs.

“I said bloody think before you react! If you intend to be allies, get a goddamn grip on yourself,” Ryodan snarled. “And you will fix that later.”

I turned slowly from the door. Feeling carved of marble, as I once had in the icy prison. Feeling a storm brewing in me, a storm that could rip and crack and tear asunder.

But Ryodan was right. I had to think before I reacted. With my power, I always have to think first. I won’t become wanton destruction like my brothers, my dead brothers who will no doubt rise again, inside some other tortured human male. I made that choice on the cliff, dying over and over, carved it into the flesh of my Highlander-druid heart. The heart that I’d refused to let freeze and decay to blackened Unseelie flesh. A heart I’d kept beating with force of will and memory of love. In large part because of the one who lay shuddering beyond the bars of that small window.

With a sigh and enormous inward focus, I filled my veins with the unending summer of the Seelie court. Beckoned into my body a peaceful day, grass rippling, no clouds in the sky.

Not a hint of thunder.

When I had it under control, I opened my eyes and said, “What the bloody hell did you do to my uncle? What is that…thing in there?”

Ryodan said stiffly, “Dageus is one of us now.”

“You fucking turned him into a…what the fuck are you anyway?”

“He was dying. There was no other option. Of all possible future scenarios, if I saved him, fifty-two percent of them were favorable,” Ryodan said.

“Fifty-two bloody percent? And you thought that was good? Forty-eight percent of the outcomes weren’t? Christ, I’d hate to know what a sick fuck like you considers ‘unfavorable.’ ”

“You would,” Ryodan agreed.

“So, what was your plan? Send us home with someone else’s body and never tell us?” I said.

“He will be incapable of speech for some time. No telling how long,” Ryodan said.

“But then—when he could talk—you were going to tell us?”

Ryodan’s gaze was shuttered. “If there had been an opportunity that was…opportune.”

“Christ,” I said again, disgustedly. “You weren’t even going to let us know he was alive. How the bloody hell did you plan to keep Dageus from telling us? Were you planning to keep him caged down here forever?” Thunder began to grow in me again. I inhaled deeply, fisted my hands, exhaled slowly, and opened them.

“We were working on that,” Barrons said.

“Dageus would never give up Chloe,” I said.

I glanced in the door again. Glanced sharply away. My uncle was in the same kind of pain I’d been on those bloody cliffs.

And not human. Not entirely.

Never again entirely.

Changing. Becoming something else. Bile flooded the back of my throat. Now, Dageus, too, was something else, something more. And he’d already been complicated to begin with. “You had no right—”

“Your uncle is alive,” Ryodan snapped. “Would you prefer he wasn’t? Would Chloe prefer he wasn’t? I broke every goddamn code we live by to save that bastard’s life. And will pay an enormous price if I’m betrayed.”

“Good,” I snarled.

“You’re being an ass,” Mac growled. “And you know it. Ryodan saved your uncle’s life. Dageus is here. He’s not the same as he was before and he’s messed up right now, but in time he’ll be just like Barrons and Ryodan.”

“Now there’s a horrible thought,” I said flatly.

She snorted. “That’s not what I meant. He’ll be capable of living again.”

“And what else will he be?” I looked at Ryodan. “What price will he pay for his miraculous second life?”

“He’ll live forever,” Mac said heatedly. “So will you. That means you’ll always have family. That’s priceless.”

“And the other prices? The ones that cut into flesh and bone? I’m not daft, lass. This kind of thing always has consequences. Terrible ones.”

“Perhaps he will choose to discuss them with you. If so, we’ll probably have to kill you,” Ryodan said.

“We made a pact,” I reminded him.

“Does it matter, Christian?” Mac said. “Your uncle isn’t at the bottom of a gorge or buried in the ground. One day you’ll be able to talk to him again. He didn’t die for you. That must be a weight off your shoulders.”

“My clan has the right to know.”

“If you tell your clan, the tribunal will hear of it and you’ll lose him,” Barrons warned.

“What is this tribunal?” I demanded.

Mac perked up beside me, suddenly all ears.

Barrons shot me a look, something ancient and feral moving in his dark eyes. “None of your bloody business. There are terms, Highlander. You may know he’s alive. You may be of help to him through what lies ahead. But no one else may know. If word of his existence gets out, you’ll only be giving him back to your clan to lose him again. Permanently.”

“Our secrets. Yours now. And yours, ours,” Ryodan reminded.

“You don’t know my secrets.”

He smiled faintly. “You might be surprised. We shared blood.” His eyes said he knew what that meant. In a druid sense. And that maybe I didn’t know what that meant in a whatever-the-fuck-he-was sense. That I was as bound to him as he was to me. And I wondered for the second time if he’d not left most of the dungeon unprotected for a reason. If he’d not perhaps arranged this very scenario, wanting me bound to them. What better way to get help with my uncle, draw another Keltar into the fold? Was he that diabolical?

I dismissed him and weighed Barrons’s words for truth. “Your tribunal would take him? It could take him from you?”

“Yes. And yes,” Barrons said levelly.

“Truth. Fuck.”

“He must always remain hidden. You uncle died in that gorge,” Ryodan said.

“Chloe.”

Barrons said, “Perhaps in time. She, like Mac, would have reason enough to protect his secret. If she passes our tests.”

“You would test my aunt.” I was incensed.

“You should hope they would,” Mac said. “No point in giving him back only for her to lose him again.”

“My entire clan can be trusted.”

Barrons and Ryodan snorted.

Mac said, “Save your demands for another day, Christian. Deal with today.”

I turned to look at Dageus, shuddering on the stone slab. Finally, I said, “What is he going through?”

Ryodan said to Barrons, “I’ll take the Highlander from here. Get her out of here.” He jerked his head at Mac.

“Oh, come on!” Mac protested. “Don’t you trust me by now?”

“Need-to-know basis, Mac. And you don’t. But he,” Ryodan jerked his head at Christian, “might just prove a grand babysitter while we figure out how to save the world.”

Babysitter, my arse.

Mac and Barrons vanished down the hall.

When Ryodan opened the door, I followed him inside, unable to shake the feeling he might just have intended the evening to end this way all along.

19

“Have you located the other Unseelie princes?” Cruce asked.

The roach god had to finish molding his many roach parts into the stumpy-legged shape of a human dwarf before he had the mouth to reply.

“All but one have been slain,” he said, when he’d completed his tongue. He craned his neck to stare up at the tall prince, roaches scuttling to shift position with his movement. It was complicated to function in this form. It required incessant readjustments, yet it was this mimicry of those around him that had enabled him to strike his first alliance long ago. The more he donned it, the more he despised its limitations, envied those who suffered none.

“Which one remains?”

“He was once a Highlander, now mutated.” He shifted slightly, settling the remaining stragglers into place, reinforcing his knees.

“Useless. Who killed my brethren?”

“Ryodan and Barrons.” He observed his new ally closely. “I was there, beneath the desk when they placed their heads on it.”

The winged prince demonstrated no weakness of rage at the news. He absorbed and moved on. The roach god’s satisfaction with his choice of allies increased. Success did not grace the stupidly violent, but the patient, the unseen, those who lurked and bided and seized the correct moment.

“The Seelie princes?” Cruce demanded.

“Dead as well. The last of them slain by the same two.”

“The concubine? The female that was in this cavern the night they imprisoned me,” Cruce clarified. “The one with the Unseelie king. You were there that night, were you not?”

“Ryodan bade me scatter my parts through the abbey that night, while the wards were down, listen and learn. He misses no opportunity. I’ve seen no sign of that woman.”

“And the Unseelie king?” Cruce said.

He shook his head, masses of roaches swaying and churning, but not one of them slipped. In his upright form, he was cohesive enough to do a few things. Far too gelatinous to do most. He resented that deeply. He was tiny, weak, in a world of giants who crushed him beneath their heels, drenched him with sticky hair spray or canned poisons that made him sick, sick, sick, even flushed him down a toilet as if he were excrement.

“No one leads my race. They are lost. Who do they follow?” Cruce said.

“They scatter, establishing small strongholds, warring among themselves. Most do nothing but feed and slaughter.”

Cruce shook his head. “The depths to which my race has descended.”

The roach god had studied the world carefully for eons. When the Fae began to walk openly, he had finally been able to show his face, too, as the powerful entity he was. He that knew the world’s best-kept secrets could rule it. He suffered no delusion of being king himself. But he intended to be the one who stood beside the king, granted every liberty.

In his estimation, the recently freed Unseelie and the Seelie who now had no ruler were primed to follow any powerful, focused Fae. He told the prince this. “Still,” he grated, “I have no way to open this chamber.” He measured his next words carefully. “There is an Unseelie princess on this world. She was the one who bargained for the prince’s deaths. She would see you slain as well if she knew you existed.”

“Is that a threat?” Ice flared out across the floor, instantly freezing his many feet to the hard, cold surface.

He’d not spoken carefully enough. “Of course not. A warning among allies.”

Cruce was silent for a time. Eventually the ice beneath the roach god’s feet warmed enough that he could shift and free himself. Then the prince murmured, “I believed the bitches destroyed long ago by the king himself. Is there only one?”

“I have only seen one. I’ve heard of no others.”

The prince thought about this, then said, “It must be risked, and if it draws her attention, so be it. How solid is the form you now wear?”

The burn of it. Not nearly solid enough. He’d walked among men long enough to have adopted their expressions, mimicking them when he mimicked their form. Roaches rearranged into a sour look with downturned mouth and narrowed eyes. He couldn’t imagine how smoothly such things would occur in a cohesive body.

Cruce read the answer on his face. He stood and plucked a single feather from an enormous black wing, gilded iridescent blue and silver. “Can you carry this out when you leave?”

The roach god nodded, thousands of hard shiny brown shells rustling to perform the simple task.

The prince asked him many more questions about things he would have deemed insignificant, much like Ryodan, but the kind that knit together a much vaster, cohesive view than the roach with his divided parts and eyes. The roach god answered them fully, omitting no detail, however minor, from the recent rash of papers hung on every street corner, to the strange black spheres and the talk he’d overheard about them, to the terror-inspiring walking trash heap he’d seen the other day.

When he was finished, Cruce said, “Find an Unseelie who calls himself Toc.” He described him to the roach god. “Tell him Cruce is on this planet and would see the Unseelie united, see them rule. Then tell him this…” The winged prince bent low and spoke at length, and the roach god nodded and committed his instructions to his very long memory.

“Before they come,” Cruce finished, “I need you to bring the ingredients I’ve instructed you to ask Toc to prepare. With it, I will make icefire. Once I’ve finished, you will conceal it where I instruct.”

“Will I be able to carry it?”

“That is why I chose it. One drop of Toc’s blood added to each drop of icefire will cause flames to explode, which no water can extinguish. It spreads rapidly. How fare you in fire?”

The roach god smiled. He’d survived nuclear fallout. Fire was nothing to him. “Do you really believe this will work? That you’ll be free in mere days?” He licked his lips with anticipation, rustling roach against roach. Freedom. So near. He would never be controlled again. And perhaps this new ally could force the gift he sought from his prior master.

Before this great winged prince crushed the arrogant prick like a bug.

Cruce laughed softly. “Not at all. But it will topple the first of many dominos. And once they begin to fall, my freedom is assured. Go find Toc and do as I’ve told you. And remember, when you next report to Ryodan, you must henceforth omit those areas of information I detailed.”

The roach god relaxed and let his body scatter into a horde of shining, virtually indestructible insects. He dispatched several parts of himself to collect the feather that had drifted to the floor of the cavern and scuttled off with it, tugging it into the unseen crack beneath the door.

20

I raked a hand through my hair, stared at my reflection and snorted.

The paint was still visible after multiple oil and shampoo treatments. I’d even tried a stale jar of peanut butter. I’d had no luck salvaging Barrons’s rugs either. The problem was the same with both items: employ a chemical harsh enough to remove the oil paint—destroy the wool or hair.

I have a strong desire to not be bald.

After trying for over an hour to lift the crimson from my blond, I conceded defeat. It would go away eventually, and I was in no mood to go dark again. I didn’t even like the phrase “go dark.”

I blew my hair dry the rest of the way, shrugged out of my bathrobe, and glanced around my sixth-floor bedroom for something to wear. The room was a wreck. I hadn’t cleaned it in months.

Although it had moved floors again, it had a penchant to remain on the backside of BB&B, overlooking the back alley and the garage where Barrons stored his cars, and beneath which he and I often rested and fucked and lived. When Barrons isn’t around, I can’t get to our subterranean home beneath the garage. The only access to those lower levels is through the dangerous stacked Silver in his study, and I don’t have the power to survive the many traps with which he mined the path. Once, the Book helped me navigate that deadly terrain, but my inner demon no longer offers help.

Ergo, showering upstairs. At least when my bedroom spontaneously relocates, it does so in toto, with all my belongings in it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t clean itself in the process.

I rummaged for jeans and a tee-shirt in a pile of clothes I was reasonably certain had been laundered at some point, then preloaded my spear in its holster before positioning it beneath my left arm. Given the amount of Unseelie flesh in my body, I preferred to err on the side of caution.

I’d opted for a double shoulder harness, so I could carry my 9mm PPQ with its sixteen-cartridge magazine beneath my left arm, and tucked an extra magazine in my waistband. I slid dirks into both boots and my Ruger LCP .380 crimson trace—with an eight-pound trigger so I was less likely to shoot myself in the ass—into my rear pocket. I pushed Cruce’s cuff farther up my arm so it was snug, then eased a lightweight jacket over it all, zipping it at the bottom. I pocketed two more bottles of Unseelie flesh (for emergency only!) and reached for my backpack, to eliminate the useless and outdated and then restock it with fresh supplies.

When I was invisible I hadn’t worried about any of this. Now that I was back to being hunted by most of Dublin, countless creepy wraiths, an entity called the Sweeper that wanted to “fix” me (and I didn’t think that meant neuter my female parts, although I did wonder exactly what the hell it did mean), and haunted by something that looked like my sister, I wanted all weapons all the time.

I’d left Barrons and Ryodan back in the office at Chester’s, bottles of red and black ink on the desk, needles gleaming in trays nearby. I’d never seen Ryodan sporting the same unusual tats as Barrons, but when I’d left, Barrons had been tracing exactly those outlines on Ryodan’s back.

Expecting trouble? I’d shot over my shoulder.

They’d raised their heads and given me such an identical look of You’re still here/what-the-fuck, is she asking questions again?/Christ, woman, go home for a while, that I’d wondered how I could possibly not have realized they were related long before I overheard them talking about it.

After making plans to meet later that night, I’d taken the Hunter that Barrons had summoned back to BB&B and into the funnel cloud. The man has some seriously neat tricks. The Hunters might tolerate me, even cede a degree of respect, but I’d had no luck calling one myself, staring up into the sky.

I dumped the contents of my backpack on the bed. My little pink carry iPod fell out first and I smiled. How long had it been since I listened to a few hours of happy one-hit wonders? I connected it to my dock, only to discover the battery was dead. While I waited for it to draw enough juice to boot up, I rummaged through the other items in my pack, tossing out old water bottles, stale protein bars, dead batteries from my MacHalo I’d not wanted to further litter the streets with, tucked a music box up high on one of my shelves along with a glittering bracelet with iridescent stones and a small pair of jewel-encrusted binoculars, turned to throw my spare-change set of blood-and-goo-stained clothing into what I thought was the dirty laundry pile in the corner—

Music box?

I spun back around and stared at it, nestled on my shelf, stunned. The sides were elaborate gold filigree, the lid a lustrous pearl encrusted with gems, each winking with a tiny inner flame. It squatted on ornate legs, half the size of a shoe box. More gems were embedded in the sides and each held a small swaying fire. The lid was attached with diamond-crusted hinges. There were no locks, and I somehow knew it had other ways of protecting itself.

How long had it been since I’d completely emptied this backpack?

Bracelet? Binoculars?

Had I ever?

How the hell had the music box gotten in there?

The dirty clothes dropped unheeded from my hands.

I narrowed my eyes, thinking, trying to recall the last time I’d used this particular pack. I hadn’t carried it since the night I discovered Barrons had a son, the night I forced my way into his hidden lair and got my throat ripped out by a beautiful young boy. I’d been rummaging for a tarot card the Dreamy-Eyed Guy had given me, remembered touching something that made me shiver, but I was totally OCD that night about finding the card and had ignored the alert of proximity to an OOP. Hadn’t bothered to see what it was. I’d had far bigger problems on my mind.

Had I been up here again since then, for longer than to grab something or take a quick shower and hurry back out?

I frowned, thinking that even if I had, I might not have sensed the music box’s presence. I almost always had at least one OOP on me somewhere (Cruce’s cuff, the most recent acquisition). I sleep and shower with my spear, I keep my sidhe-seer senses on low volume pretty much constantly. I wouldn’t have picked up on anything else in the room with me unless I’d been actively hunting for it.

Had I really pilfered this OOP that dreamy, numb day in the White Mansion, months ago? I’d thought I left it there on the shelf of the crystal curio cabinet, but I had a dim memory of pocketing various trinkets, objects I’d been certain I simply couldn’t live without.

I stared at it on the shelf, horrified that it was here, so close to me when I’d been so strenuously avoiding thinking about it lest the Sinsar Dubh catch wind of what I suspected it might be.

I hadn’t felt a thing when I touched it this time, but with my current high, no object of power out there could penetrate my deadened senses.

I nosed cautiously around inside myself for my evil inner Book.

Nothing.

When I hunted for my lake last night, I’d not been able to spy even a drop of those still glassy waters. The lake was as gone from me right now as all my sidhe-seer gifts.

Did that mean the Book, too, would prove impossible for me to reach and conversely and more importantly, that it couldn’t reach me right now?

Was I looking at the box that held the Song of Making?

Could the solution to our problem of the black holes be so simple? Had someone, long ago, tucked the all-powerful melody away and concealed it directly beneath the future Seelie queen’s nose? If so, why? Assuming the original queen, who’d been alive at the same time as the concubine, wanted to pass the song along, she certainly wouldn’t have given it to the king’s mistress she’d so despised! Was this the result of some twisted Fae sense of humor? Had the queen concealed that very thing the king had so desperately wanted in the same house with the woman he’d wanted it for?

I scowled. The idea that this box might contain the song seemed suspiciously serendipitous. The universe didn’t work that way. At least not for me. The things that got tucked away in my curio cabinets were psychopaths, not all-powerful songs.

Yet time and again I’d recalled the melody it had played, the power I felt listening to it, and wondered if it might just be. This was the thing I’d been so studiously avoiding contemplating for even a second, grateful it was in the White Mansion, far away from me and my Sinsar Dubh, even as I grew increasingly certain we might need it. I hadn’t realized how critical our state of affairs was until two days ago when Ryodan pointed out that the black holes could ultimately destroy the Nine.

And here it was. Staring right at me.

I closed my eyes, searching my memory, drifting back to that day in the concubine’s house, trying to methodically re-create my steps. My time in there was so vivid, like all my time in Fae, as overblown and sensually saturating as the Fae themselves. And so surreal. Each time I’d been inside the mansion, I’d felt an intense bipolarity. I now understood it was because of the Book’s/king’s memories inside me, amplified by the residue of their consuming love in the psychically sticky house. It had seemed I’d been the Unseelie king himself, dancing with his concubine, whirling her around the boudoir, clutching her gown. I’d wandered through her private chambers in a daze, found one of her favorite bracelets, the special seeing glasses I (the king!) had crafted for her.

My eyes snapped open. Bloody hell, I had picked all three of those things up. Then completely forgotten I’d done it, obsessed with my quest to bring Barrons back to life.

If the music box did contain the colossal song, dare I risk touching it again, knowing the enormous evil I carried inside me? What if the Book took me over like it had the day I killed the Guardian, and destroyed the song?

Could it?

I stood, torn between wanting to tuck the music box into my pack so I could protect it and show it to Barrons, and not wanting it on my person, in case my high wore off and the Sinsar Dubh caught on to me.

Although…I mused, I’d toted it out of the mansion, which meant the Book had been in close proximity to it once before. And done nothing. But then, we hadn’t needed the song back then either. Might it try to hold my soul hostage for it now that we did? Insist I capitulate or it would destroy it? Could it do any of those things?

Why the hell wasn’t my Book talking to me anymore?

I cursed. I knew nothing about the Sinsar Dubh’s abilities or limits and I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to go poking around trying to discover something. And since I knew nothing for sure, not wanting to underestimate it, I tended to pack that abyss of the unknown with fears of potentially greater power than it had. Or not.

I sighed, waffling in indecision. After a moment’s deliberation, I stooped and pried up the loose floorboard where I’d stashed my journals, hoping Barrons—the man has an uncanny knack for discovering my innermost secrets—would never find them, grabbed a shirt, used it to pick up the box, tucked it beneath the floor, and replaced the board. Then I scooted a rug over it for good measure.

I’d bring Barrons back to see it later. I’d trust it to him, like the amulet, far sooner than I’d trust myself. Dani—I corrected myself mentally, Jada—and Dancer could investigate it. See if we might really get so bizarrely lucky. The king had been meddling in my life since childhood. I’d never forgotten that my grade school principal and high school gym coach were two of the king’s many skins. The Seelie queen was, too. Who could ever guess what Fae were up to?

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An awkwardly ambulating trash heap?

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

I glanced back at the bizarre thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I gasped softly, finally managing a breath.

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