“I made new mistakes this time. I will not make those, either. ”
I shook my head. “Where is my spear?”
“It will be returned to you when you leave. ”
“Really?” Why would he return a Fae-killing Hallow fashioned by his race to me, knowing I would use it to kill more Fae?
“Consider it a gesture of our goodwill, MacKayla. ”
“Our?”
“The queen and I. ”
“Barrons needs me,” I said again.
“If you insist I prematurely terminate our hour because you feel I have dishonored it, I will not return you to Wales, and you will still be of no use to him. Stay or go, you won’t be with him. And MacKayla, I believe your Barrons would tell you he needs no one. ”
That much was true. I wondered how he knew Barrons. I asked him. They must have trained with the same master of evasion because he said only, “It rains in Dublin incessantly. Look. ”
A small square in the tropical vista opened before me, as if he’d peeled back the sky and palms, and torn a window open onto my world. I saw the bookstore through it. The streets were dark, wet. I would be alone there.
“It is raining now. Shall I return you, MacKayla?”
I looked at the tiny bookstore, the shadowy alleys to either side of it, Inspector Jayne sitting across the street beneath a streetlamp watching it, and shivered. Was that the dim outline of my private Grim Reaper down the block? I was so tired of the rain and the dark and enemies at every turn. The sun felt heavenly on my skin. I’d almost forgotten the feel of it. It seemed my world had been wet and gloomy for months.
I glanced away from the depressing view, and up at the sky. Sun has always made me feel strong, whole, as if I get more than vitamins from it; its rays carry something that nourishes my soul. “Is it real?” I nodded up at the sun.
“As real as yours. ” The window closed.
“Is it mine?”
He shook his head.
“Are we in Faery?”
He nodded.
For the first time since I’d so unceremoniously arrived, I examined my surroundings. The sand was radiantly white and soft as silk beneath my bare feet, the ocean azure, and the water so clear I could see entire cities of rainbow-colored coral beneath it with tiny gold and pink fish swimming the reefs. A mermaid danced on a crest of a wave before disappearing beneath the sea. The tide tossed sand to the beach in a surf of glittering silver foam. Palm trees rustled in the breeze, dropping lush scarlet blossoms on the shore. The air smelled of rare spices, exotic flowers, and salt sea spray. I bit my lip on the verge of saying It’s so beautiful here. I would not compliment his world. His world was screwing up mine. His world didn’t belong on our planet. Mine did.
Still…the sun has always been my drug of choice. And if he would play fair—meaning not try to rape me again—who knew what I might learn? “If you touch me, or in any way try to affect my will, our time together stops. Got it?”
“Your will, my command. ” His lips curved with victory.
I took off my shades and glanced briefly at the sun, hoping to sear the devastating beauty of that smile from my retinas, scorch it from my memory.
I had no idea who or what V’lane really was, but I knew this: He was a Fae, and an immensely powerful one. In this battle where knowledge was so evidently power, where information could keep me alive, where Barrons pretty much ruled his far-reaching world because of how much he knew, I couldn’t afford to pass up a chance to interrogate a Fae, and it looked like V’lane, for whatever reason, might just let me.
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Perhaps he would lie. Perhaps he wouldn’t about some things. I was getting better at sorting through what people told me. Learning to hear the truth in their lies and the lies in their truth.
“Have you really been alive for eighty-two thousand years?”
“Longer. That was merely the last time I used glamour to seduce a woman. Sit and we will talk. ”
After a moment’s hesitation, I perched stiffly on the edge of the chaise.
“Relax, MacKayla. Enjoy the sun. It may be your last chance to see it for some time. ”
I wondered what he meant by that. Did he consider himself a weather prognosticator? Or could he actually control it, make it rain? Against my better judgment, I stretched out my legs and lay back. I stared at the sapphire sea, watched graceful alabaster birds pluck fish from the waves. “So, how old are you?”
“That,” he said, “is anyone’s guess. In this incarnation, I have lived one hundred and forty-two thousand years. Are you aware of our incarnations?”
“You drink from the cauldron. ”
He nodded.
How long, I wondered, did it take to go mad? My short twenty-two years were sorely testing me. It seemed forgetting might be a comfort. I considered the ramifications of divesting memory, and realized why a Fae might put it off. If he’d spent fifty or a hundred thousand years watching, learning, building alliances, making enemies, the moment he divested memory he would no longer even know who those enemies were.
But they would know who he was.
I wondered if any Fae had ever been forced to drink by others of their race, to rescue them from the vast, desolate steppes of insanity. Or perhaps for more nefarious reasons.
I wondered, considering V’lane had known exactly where I was and what I’d been doing, if he’d been responsible for the massacre at the Welshman’s estate.
“Did you steal the amulet?”
He laughed. “Ah, so that was what you were after. I wondered. It amplifies the will, MacKayla. ”
“Your point?”
“I have no use for it. My will needs no amplifying. My will shapes worlds. The amulet was fashioned for one like you with no will of which to speak. ”
“Just because we can’t manipulate reality with our thoughts doesn’t mean we don’t have will. Maybe we do shape reality, just on a different scale, and you don’t see it. ”
“Perhaps. The queen suspects such might be the case. ”
“She does?”
“That is why she sent me to help you, so that you may help us, and together we may ensure the survival of both our races. Have you learned anything about the Sinsar Dubh?”
I thought about that a moment. Should I tell him? What should I tell him? Perhaps I could use it as leverage. “Yes. ”
The palm trees stopped swaying, the waves froze, the birds halted mid-dive. Despite the sun, I shivered. “Would you please start the world again?” It was creepy frozen. Things moved once more.
“What have you learned?”
“Did you know my sister?”
“No. ”
“How could that be? You knew about me. ”
“We learned of you because we were watching Barrons. Your sister, who we’ve since become aware of, did not know Barrons. Their paths never crossed, ergo nor did ours. Now, tell me of the Sinsar Dubh. ”
“Why were you watching Barrons?”
“Barrons needs watching. The book, MacKayla. ”
I wasn’t done yet. The book was big information, surely worth more of an exchange. “Do you know the Lord Master?”
“Who?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No. Who is this Lord Master?”
“He’s the one bringing the Unseelie through. He’s their leader. ”
V’lane looked astonished. No more so than I felt. He and Barrons both knew so much yet were missing chunks of essential information. They were so smart in some ways, and so blind in others.
“Is he Fae?” he demanded.
“No. ”
He looked incredulous. “How can that be? A Fae would not follow a human. ”
I hadn’t said he was human. He was something more than that. But the way V’lane had just sneered the word human—as if a life-form just couldn’t get any lower—pissed me off so I didn’t b
other correcting him. “You’re the one who’s supposed to be all-knowing. ”
“Omnipotent not omniscient. We are frequently blinded by how much we see. ”
“That’s absurd. How can you be blinded by vision?”
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“Consider being able to see the atomic structure of everything around you, MacKayla, past, present, and part of the future, and exist within that skein. Consider possessing awareness of infinite dimensions. Imagine being able to comprehend infinity—only a handful of your race has yet achieved such awareness. Consider seeing the possible ramifications of each minute action you might make, from your slightest exhalation upon the breeze, in all realities, but you cannot piece them together into a guaranteed finale because every living thing is in constant flux. Only in death is there stasis and even then, not absolute. ”
I had a hard enough time functioning on my tiny little nearsighted human level. “So, what you’re saying in a nutshell,” I distilled, “is that for all your superiority and power, you’re no smarter or better off than we are. Perhaps worse. ”
A heartbeat stretched into half a dozen. Then he smiled coolly. “Mock me if you will, MacKayla. I’ll sit at your deathbed and ask you then if you would rather be me. Where is this human fool that fancies himself master of anything?”
“1247 LaRuhe. Warehouse behind it. Huge dolmen. He brings them through there. Would you mind squashing it for me?”
“Your wish, my command. ” He was gone.
I stared at the empty chaise. Had he really gone to destroy the dolmen through which the Unseelie were being brought? Would he kill the Lord Master, too? Would my vengeance be achieved so anticlimactically? And without me there as witness? I didn’t want that. “V’lane!” I shouted. But there was no reply. He was gone. And I was going to kill him if he killed my sister’s killer without me. The dark fever I’d caught that first night I’d set foot in Dublin had turned into a fever of a different kind: a bloodfever—as in I wanted blood, spilled for my sister. Spilled by my hand. That savage Mac inside me still hadn’t found an audible voice, still wasn’t speaking with my tongue, but we spoke the same language, she and I, and agreed on critical things.
We would kill my sister’s killer together.
“Junior?” said a soft, lilting voice. A voice I’d never expected to hear again.
I shuddered. It had come from my right. I stared out at the waves. I would not look. I was in Faery. Nothing could be trusted.
“Junior, come on, I’m over here,” my sister coaxed, and laughed.
I nearly doubled over from the pain of it. It was exactly Alina’s laugh: sweet, pure, full of endless summer and sunshine and the sure knowledge that her life was charmed.
I heard the slap of a palm on a volleyball. “Baby Mac, let’s play. It’s a perfect day. I brought the beer. Did you get the limes from the bar?”
My name is MacKayla Evelina Lane. Hers is Alina MacKenna Lane. I was Junior on two levels. Sometimes she’d called me Baby Mac. I used to pilfer limes from the condiment tray at The Brickyard on Saturdays. Cheap, I know. I never wanted to grow up.
Tears burned my eyes. I gulped deep breaths and forced air in and out of my lungs. I fisted my hands. I shook my head. I stared out at the sea. She was not there. I did not hear the thud of a ball hitting sand. I did not smell Beautiful perfume on the breeze.
“The sand’s perfect, Junior. It’s powder. Come on! Tommy’s coming today,” she teased. I’d had a crush on Tommy for years. He was dating one of my best friends so I pretended I couldn’t stand him, but Alina knew.
Don’t look, don’t look. There are ghosts and there are worse things than ghosts.
I looked.
Behind the volleyball net, buffeted by a gentle tropical breeze, my sister stood, smiling, waiting to play. She was wearing her favorite neon lime bikini, and her blond hair was pulled back in a bouncy ponytail through the flap of the faded Ron Juan ball cap she’d gotten in Key West on spring break two years ago.
I began to cry.
Alina looked stricken. “Mac, honey, what’s wrong?” She dropped the volleyball, ducked under the net, and hurried across the sand to me. “What is it? Did somebody hurt you? I’ll kick their frogging petunias. Tell me who. What did they do?”
My tears turned into sobs. I stared up at my sister, trembling from the violence of my grief.
She dropped to her knees next to me. “Mac, you’re killing me. Talk to me. What’s wrong?” Her arms went around me, and I was crying against her neck, lost in a cloud of peach shampoo, Beautiful perfume, Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil, and the bubble gum she’d always chewed on the beach to hide the smell of beer on her breath from Mom.
I could feel her warmth, the silkiness of her skin.
I was touching her.
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I buried my fingers in her ponytail and sobbed.
I missed her hair. I missed mine. I missed her. I missed me.
“Tell me who did this to you,” she said, and she was crying, too. We’d never been able to stand each other’s tears. We’d always ended up crying with each other. Then made pacts that we would stand up for each other forever, take care of each other forever. Pacts that I now knew we’d started making when she was three and I was one, and we’d been left in a world that wasn’t ours—to hide us, I’d begun to suspect.
“Is it really you, Alina?”
“Look at me, Junior. ” She pulled away, and used one of the towels to dry my tears, then dried her own. “It’s me. It’s really me. Look, I’m here. God, I’ve missed you!” She laughed again and this time I laughed with her.
When you lose someone you love abruptly, without warning, you dream of getting the chance to see them, just one more time, please God, one more time again. Every night after her funeral I’d lay awake in my bedroom, down the hall from hers, and call good night, even though I knew it would never be answered again.
I’d lay there clutching photographs, re-creating her face in my mind in exacting detail, as if—if I got it exactly perfectly right—I could take it into my dreams, and use it as a road map to lead me to her.
Some nights, I couldn’t see her face and I cried, begged her to come back. I offered all kinds of deals to God—He doesn’t make them, by the way. In my despair, I offered deals to anyone or anything that would listen.
Something had heard me. Here was my chance to see her again. I didn’t care how. I didn’t care why. I absorbed every detail.
There was the mole high on her left cheek. I touched it. There were the freckles on her nose that drove her crazy, the tiny scar on her lower lip from where I’d accidentally bashed her in the mouth with a guitar when we were kids. There were those sunny green eyes, like mine but with more gold flecks. There was the long blond hair, so much like mine used to be.
She was wearing the tiny sterling silver heart earrings I’d saved for six months to buy her from Tiffany’s for her twenty-first birthday.
This was Alina, right down to her toenails painted her favorite summer shade, Cajun Shrimp. It clashed horribly with her lime bikini and I told her so.
She laughed and took off across the sand. “Come on, Junior, let’s play. ”
I sat, frozen for a long moment.
I can’t tell you all the thoughts that went through my head then: This isn’t real, it can’t be. Maybe it is. Maybe it’s dangerous. Could this be my sister in another dimension, another version of her, but Alina all the same? Hurry up and ask her questions about her journal and the Lord Master and what happened in Dublin. Don’t ask her questions; she might disappear. All those thoughts passed swiftly and left a single directive in their wake: Play with your sister right here, right now. Take it for what it is.
I stood and ran across the sand, kicking up white powder with my heels. My legs were long, my body strong, my heart complete.
I played volleyball with my sister. We
drank Coronas in the sun. I hadn’t brought the limes, of course, but we found a margarine bowl of them in the cooler, and squeezed them into the bottles, pulp slipping down the frosty sides. A beer would never taste so good again as it did that day with Alina in Faery.
Eventually, we sprawled on the sand and soaked up the sun, toes teasing the edge of the surf. We talked about Mom and Dad, we talked about school, we talked about the hot guys that walked by and tried to coax us into another game of volleyball.
We talked about her idea of moving to Atlanta, and how I would quit my job and go with her. We talked about me getting serious about life finally.
It was that thought that sobered me. I’d always been planning to get serious about life and here I was, being exactly who I’d been back then, taking the path of least resistance, the easy way out, doing what made me feel good right now, consequences be damned.
I rolled over and looked at her. “Is this a dream, Alina?”
She turned toward me and smiled. “No. ”
“Is it real?”
She smiled again, sadly. “No. ”
“Then what is this?”
She bit her lip. “Don’t ask me, just enjoy the day. ”
“I need to know. ”
“It’s a gift from V’lane. A day on the beach with me. ”
“An illusion,” I said. Water to a man stranded for two and a half days in the desert without a drink. Beyond refusing, even if it was poisoned. I knew better but it didn’t stop me from trying: “So if I were to ask how you met the Lord Master, or where to find the Sinsar Dubh?”
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She shrugged. “I don’t know those things. ”
I wasn’t surprised. V’lane must have lifted her from my memories, which meant she would know only what I knew, and made questions about anything other than experiences I recalled, or my current situation, pointless. “How long have I been here?” As V’lane’s creation, she should know that.
She shrugged again.
“Longer than a human hour?”
“Yes. ”
“Can I leave?”
“Yes. ”
“Could I choose to stay?”
“And have anything you wanted, MacKayla. Forever. ”
Alina never called me MacKayla. In fact, neither did my parents or any of my friends. Only V’lane did. Was he behind those sunny eyes? And still, I wanted to stay here, lose myself on this beach, in this sun, live this day over and over again for the rest of my life. Forget the rain and the fear, the pain and my uncertain future. I could die happily on a hammock in the sun, seventy years from now, surrounded by lost dreams.
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