Essentially, a person could turn back time.
Erase anything they didn’t like.
Replace those things they couldn’t bear to have lost, including people they couldn’t stand to live without.
I’d torn myself away from Barrons’ body with one purpose.
To get the Sinsar Dubh, and when I did, I wasn’t turning it over to anyone. It was going to be mine. I would study it. Grief had focused me like a laser. I could learn anything. Nothing would stand in my way. I would rebuild the world the way I wanted it.
“Come.” I smile. “Join me.” My face radiates only warmth, invitation, pleasure at his presence. I am the last thing he expected. He believed he would find a terrorized, hysterical girl.
I’m not and never will be again.
He motions the princes back and takes a casual step forward, but I see the studied grace in the movement. He is wary of me. He should be.
Coppery Fae eyes meet mine. How did Alina fail to see that those eyes were not human, no matter how human his body appeared?
The answer is simple: She did. She knew. That was why she lied to him, told him that she didn’t have any family, that she was an orphan. Protected us from the very first. She knew there was something dangerous about him, and she wanted him anyway, wanted to taste that kind of life.
I don’t blame her. We are flawed. We should have been banned from Ireland for everyone’s good.
He assesses me. I know he passed Barrons’ body. He’s trying to figure out what happened but is unwilling to ask. I suspect nothing could have convinced him more surely than seeing Barrons dead that the MacKayla he thought he was dealing with wasn’t home anymore. His gaze drops to the thin, jagged-edged silvery runes on the ground encircling me, bathing me in cool, eerie light. His eyes widen again as he scans them, and, for the briefest of instants, he looks rattled.
“Nice work.” His gaze flicks between the runes and my face. “What are they?”
“You don’t recognize them?” I counter. I sense deception. He knows what they are. I don’t. I’d like to.
The next thing I know, his copper eyes lock with mine and a vibrant blue-black light blazes from his fist. I hadn’t even seen him reach inside his shirt for the Hallow.
“Step out of the circle now,” he commands.
He’s not using Voice. He’s holding the amulet, one of the four Unseelie Hallows, an ornate necklace that houses a fist-sized stone of inexplicable composition. The king created it for his concubine to enable her to bend reality to her whim. The amulet reinforces an epic person’s will. Months ago, I sat at a very exclusive auction in an underground bomb shelter and watched an old Welshman pay in excess of eight figures for it. He’d had stiff competition. Mallucé had murdered the old man and taken it before Barrons and I had been able to steal it. But the wannabe vamp couldn’t use it.
Darroc can. I believe I could, too—if I can get it from him.
I held it once, and it responded to me. But, like many things Fae, time imbued it with a degree of sentience and it had sought something from me—a binding, or pledge. I’d not understood—or, if I had, hadn’t been willing to make it, afraid of what it would cost me. I’d lost the Hallow to Darroc when he’d Voiced me into turning it over, before I learned to use Voice myself. I’d have no compunction about exploring the amulet’s desires now. No price is too high.
I feel the blue-black power it radiates, lacing his command with compulsion. The pressure is immense. I want to leave the circle. I could breathe, eat, sleep, live without pain forever, if only I would leave the circle.
I laugh. “Throw me the amulet now.” Voice explodes from me.
The heads of the Unseelie Princes swivel and they regard me. It’s hard to tell with them, but I think they suddenly find me very interesting.
A chill runs up my spine. There is no fear, no terror left inside me, yet those … things … those icy, unnatural aberrations … they still manage to affect me. I have not looked directly at them yet.
Darroc’s hand tightens on the blazing amulet. “Step out of the circle!”
The pressure is crushing. It can be eased only by obeying.
“Throw me the amulet!”
He flinches, raises his hand, snarls, and jerks it back down.
For the next few minutes, he and I each try to bend the other to our will, until we are finally forced to concede that we are at an impasse. My Voice does not work on him. Neither amulet nor Voice works on me.
We are matched. Fascinating. I am his equal. My, what a creature I’ve become.
He circles me, and I turn with him, a faint smile curving my lips, my eyes alight. I am charged. I am exhilarated. I’m pumped on the power of my runes and myself. We study each other as if confronting a new species.
I offer my hand, an invitation to step to my side.
He looks down at the runes. “I am not that great a fool.” His voice is deep, musical. He is beautiful. I understand why my sister wanted him. Tall, golden-skinned, there is an otherworldly eroticism to him that being made mortal by his queen did not eradicate. The scar on his face draws the eye, begs the finger to trace it, to learn the story behind it.
I cannot ask how great a fool, because it would betray that I don’t know what my runes are.
“What happened to Barrons?” he says after a time.
“I killed him.”
He searches my face, and I know he is trying to come up with any scenario that might explain the way Barrons was mutilated and killed. If he examined the body, he saw the spear wound, and he knows I carry it. He knows I stabbed him at least once.
“Why?”
“I wearied of his incessant boorishness.” I wink. Let him think me mad. I am. In every sense of the word.
“I didn’t think he could be killed. The Fae have long feared him.”
“Turns out the spear was his weakness. It’s why he never wanted to touch it.”
He absorbs my words, and I know he’s trying to decide why a Fae weapon could kill Jericho Barrons. I’d like to know, too. Was it the spear that dealt the killing blow? Would he have died of that wound eventually regardless of whether Ryodan had slit his throat?
“Yet he armed you with it? You expect me to believe that?”
“Like you, he thought I was all fluff and no teeth. Too stupid to be worth suspicion. ‘Lamb to the slaughter’ was how he liked to phrase it. Little lamb killed the lion. Guess I showed him, huh?” I wink again.
“I burned his body. There is nothing left but ash.” He watches my face carefully.
“Good.”
“If there was any way he might rise, he never will now. The princes scattered his ashes to a hundred dimensions.” His gaze is piercing now.
“I should have thought of that myself. Thank you for finishing it so well.” My mind is on the new world I plan to create. I’ve said good-bye to this one.
Copper eyes narrow, glittering with scorn. “You didn’t kill Barrons. What happened? What are you playing at?”
“He betrayed me,” I lie.
“How?”
“It’s none of your business. I had my reasons.” I watch him watch me. He wonders if the rape of the Unseelie Princes and my time in the Hall of All Days has unhinged me. He wonders if I’m unbalanced enough to have gone crazy and actually killed Barrons for pissing me off. When he glances down at the runes again, I know he thinks I have enough juice to have pulled it off.
“Step out of the circle. I have your parents and will kill them if you don’t obey me.”
“I don’t care.” I scoff.
He stares. He heard the truth in my words.
I don’t care. An essential part of me is dead. I don’t mourn it. This is no longer my world. What happens here doesn’t matter. In this reality, I’m already on borrowed time. I will rebuild a new one or die trying.
“I’m free, Darroc. I’m really, truly free.” I shrug my shoulders, toss my head, and laugh.
He sucks in a sharp breath when I say his name and laugh, and I kn
ow that I’ve reminded him of my sister. Did she say those words to him once? Does he hear joy in my laughter, as he once heard in hers?
He stalks a tight circle around me, eyes narrowed. “What changed? In the days since I abducted your parents and today, what happened to you?”
“What happened to me started happening a long time ago. You should have kept Alina alive. I hated you for that.”
“And now?”
I look him up and down. “Now is different. Things are different. We are different.”
His eyes search mine, left to right and back again, rapidly. “What are you saying?”
“I see no reason we cannot be … friends.”
He tries the word. “Friends?”
I nod.
He contemplates the possibility that I am sincere. A human would never entertain the notion. Fae are different. No matter how much time they spend among us, they just can’t nail the subtleties of human emotion. It’s that difference I’m counting on. When I left Barrons, all I wanted was to lay in wait for Darroc, use my runes and my newfound dark glassy friend to kill him the moment he appeared.
I exorcised it swiftly.
This ex-Fae turned human knows more about both the Seelie and Unseelie courts, and the Book that I am determined to possess, than anyone. When he has told me everything he knows, I’ll relish killing him. I’d considered allying myself with V’lane—and when I’m done taking everything I need from Darroc, I still may. After all, I’ll need the fourth stone. But V’lane doesn’t seem to have any real knowledge about the Book, aside from a few old legends.
It’s a better bet that the Unseelie know more about the Dark Book than the Seelie Queen’s right hand. Maybe even where to find the prophecy. Like Barrons, Darroc has actually seen pages of the arcane tome. I was forced to concede that hunting the Sinsar Dubh was an exercise in futility until I discovered how to control it. But Darroc has never stopped his search. Why? What does he know that I don’t?
The sooner I pry his secrets from him, the sooner I learn to contain and use the Sinsar Dubh, the sooner I can stop living in this agonizing reality that I will have no hesitation about destroying to replace with my world. The right one. Where everything ends happily ever after.
“Friends work toward common goals,” he says.
“Like hunting books,” I agree.
“Friends trust each other. They don’t barricade each other out.” He looks at my feet.
The runes came from within me. I am my circle. He doesn’t know this. I kick them aside. I wonder if he has forgotten my spear. As heavily laced with Unseelie as he is, a single prick would sentence him to the same slow, gruesome death that Mallucé suffered.
When I step out, he slowly looks me up and down.
I see the thoughts that flash through his eyes as they travel over my body: kill her/fuck her/assault and bind her/explore her uses? It takes a lot to make a man kill a beautiful woman he has not yet slept with. Especially if he enjoyed her sister.
“Friends don’t try to coerce each other,” I say with a pointed look at the amulet.
He inclines his head and slips it back inside his shirt.
I offer my hand with a smile. Barrons taught me well. Keep your friends close …
Darroc takes it, leans down to place a light kiss upon my lips. The tension between us is a palpable thing. One sudden move from either of us and we’ll be all over each other, trying to kill each other, and we know it. He keeps his body pliant. I infuse my limbs with languor. We are two scorpions with coiled tails, trying to mate. It is no more than I deserve, the punishment of letting him touch me like this. I sentenced Barrons to death.
I part my lips beneath his, but demurely, teeth standing guard. I exhale a soft whisper of a breath into his mouth. He likes it.
… and your enemies closer.
Behind us, the Unseelie Princes begin to chime softly like dark crystal. I remember that sound. I know what it precedes. I tighten my hand on his. “Never them. Never again.”
Darroc turns to them and barks a harsh command in a language that hurts my ears.
They vanish.
The moment I no longer know where they are, whether they might be closing in on me, I reach for my spear. It is gone, too.
The Unseelie Princes cannot sift within the Silvers with any predictability. Darroc tells me it’s a crapshoot every time they try. Cruce’s curse again, screwing things up.
I tell him the stones are no better, that whatever dimension I’m in tries to expel them once uncovered, in an effort to return the rune-covered blue-black stones to the cliffs of the icy Unseelie prison from whence they were chiseled.
I’m surprised he doesn’t know this and tell him so.
“You do not understand what life is like at the Seelie court, MacKayla. Those with true knowledge, true memories of our past, guard it zealously. There are as many versions of the Old Days and conflicting tales of our origins as there are dimensions to choose from within the hall. The only Unseelie we ever saw were those we battled the day the king and queen fought and the king slew our queen. Since then, we have drunk from the cauldron countless times.”
He moves along the cliff’s edge with unnatural fluidity and grace. Fae move like sleek, kingly predators, born of the sure knowledge that they can never die—or at least very rarely and only under special circumstances. He hasn’t lost that arrogance, or perhaps he’s reclaimed it, from all the Unseelie he’s been eating. He’s not wearing the crimson robes that once terrified me. Tall, gracefully muscled, he’s dressed like an outdoorsman in a Versace ad, with a long fall of moon-silvered hair secured at his nape. He’s undeniably sexy. In his power and confidence, he reminds me of Barrons.
I don’t ask why they drink. I understand. If I found the cauldron and drank from it, it would erase all pain and allow me to start life over, a blank slate. I couldn’t grieve for what I didn’t remember ever having. That they drink implies that on some level the Fae feel. If not pain, at least significant discomfort.
“So how are we going to get out of here?” I ask.
His reply gives me a sudden chill, a sense of something more vast and incomprehensible than déjà vu—an inevitability finally manifesting.
“The White Mansion.”
4
The night the walls came crashing down, I cowered in a belfry, my only goal to survive until dawn.
I had no idea if the world would survive with me.
I thought it was the longest night of my life. I was wrong.
This is the longest night of my life, walking side by side with my enemy, mourning Jericho Barrons, drowning in my own complicity.
It stretches on and on. I live a thousand hours in a handful. I count from one to sixty beneath my breath, over and over, ticking away the minutes I make it through, thinking if I put enough of them between me and his death, the immediacy of the pain might dull and I will be able to catch a breath without a knife stabbing through my heart.
We do not pause to eat or sleep. He keeps Unseelie flesh in a pouch and periodically chews it while we travel, which means he can keep going far longer than I. At some point, I’ll be forced to rest. The thought of relinquishing consciousness in his presence is not a pleasant one.
I have weapons in my arsenal that I’ve not yet tried on him. I have no doubt he is concealing armaments, too. Our truce is a floor of eggshells and we’re both wearing combat boots.
“Where is the Unseelie King?” I ask, hoping distraction might make the minutes move faster. “It’s his book on the loose out there. I heard he wants it destroyed. Why isn’t he doing something about it?” I may as well embark on an Unseelie fishing expedition, casting my nets for anything I can use. Until I know how powerful Darroc is and better understand what I have in my dark glassy lake, subtlety is the name of my game. I will make no rash moves that jeopardize my mission. Barrons’ resurrection depends on it.
He shrugs. “He vanished long ago. Some say he’s too insane to care. Others believe he cannot
leave the Unseelie prison and lies encased in a tomb of black ice, slumbering eternally. Still others claim the prison never contained him to begin with and that remorse for the death of his concubine was the only bond he ever permitted.”
“That implies love. Fae don’t.”
“Debatable. I recognize myself in you and find it … compelling. It makes me less alone.”
Translation: I serve as a mirror and the Fae enjoy their own reflection. “Is that desirable to a Fae—to be less alone?”
“Few Fae can endure solitude. Some posit that energy cast into an ethos that fails to reflect or rebound it permits that energy to dissipate until nothing remains. Perhaps it is a flaw.”
“Like clapping for Tinker Bell,” I mock. “A mirror, validation.”
He gives me a look.
“Is that what the Fae are made of? Energy?”
He gives me another look that reminds me of V’lane, and I know that he will never discuss what the Fae are comprised of with me or any human. His superiority complex has in no way been diminished by time as a mortal. Rather, I suspect it has grown. He knows both sides now. This gives him a tactical advantage over other Fae. He understands what makes us tick and is more dangerous because of it. I file the energy idea away for further contemplation. Iron affects the Fae. Why? Are they some kind of energy that could be “shorted out”?
“You admit to flaws?” I press.
“We are not perfect. What god is? Examine yours. According to your mythos, he was so disappointed with his initial efforts creating your race that he tried again. At least we imprisoned our mistakes. Your god permits his to roam free. At a mere few thousand years old, your creation myths are far more absurd than ours. Yet you wonder why we can’t recall our origins, from a million or more years in the past.”
We have drawn closer to each other while speaking and both realize it at the same time. We glide back in instant retreat, regaining enough distance between us that we would see an attack from the other coming. Part of me finds this amusing.
The princes have not yet reappeared. I am grateful. Although they no longer impact me sexually, they have a profoundly terrible presence. They leave me feeling oddly two-dimensional, minus something essential, guilty, betrayed in a way I can’t understand and don’t want to. I don’t know if I feel this because I was once beneath them, with my entire sense of self being stripped from my skin and bones, or if they are fundamentally anathema to all humans. I wonder if the “stuff” of which they were made by the Unseelie King is so alien and horrific to us that they are the equivalent of a psychic black hole. That they are unspeakably beautiful only makes it worse. Their exquisiteness is the event horizon from which there is no escape. I shiver.
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