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
“Life inside the music box ain’t easy…”
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 mu
sic 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 st
ore, 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.
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