Текст книги "Shadowfever"

Автор книги: Karen Marie Moning

Соавторы: Karen Marie Moning,Karen Marie Moning
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Текущая страница: 35 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

50

Well, okay, so maybe the cheers weren’t deafening, but they felt deafening to me, because I was cheering, too, and louder than most. The reality of the situation was that the sidhe-seers cheered, Mom and Dad hooted, Drustan whooped, Dageus and Cian grunted, Christopher looked worried, Christian turned and began to walk away in silence, Barrons scowled as did the rest of his men, and the Seelie glared.

Then the fighting broke out. Again.

I sighed gustily. They really needed to get with the program and learn to celebrate the good times a little longer before dwelling on the problems. I’d been walking around under the sentence of a prophecy that I would doom or save the world and I’d … well, technically, I hadn’t done either. I hadn’t doomed it. But I couldn’t see any way I’d saved it. Unless I’d saved it simply by not dooming it. But, still, I knew the importance of celebrating every now and then to alleviate the stress.

“We cannot restore the walls without the Song,” V’lane was saying.

“Who says we need the walls back up?” Barrons demanded. “You’re roaches, we’re Raid. We’ll get rid of you eventually.”

“We. Are. Not. Insects,” Velvet said tightly.

“I was talking about the Unseelie. I figured you prancing fairy bastards would get off our world voluntarily after helping eradicate your skulking half.”

“I do not prance.” Dree’lia was insulted. “You would do well to recall the delights found in our arms.”

I glanced at Barrons disbelievingly. “You had sex with her?”

He rolled his eyes. “It was a long time ago and only because she pretended to know something about the Book.”

“Lies, ancient one. You panted around behind me—”

“Barrons has never panted around behind anyone,” I said.

His dark gaze shimmered with amusement. Unexpected, but thanks for the defense.

Well, you haven’t. Not even me.

Debatable. Ryodan would disagree with you.

Sleep with another fairy and I’ll turn into V’lane’s personal Pri-ya.

His eyes were murderous, but he kept his tone light. Jealous much?

What’s mine is mine.

He went very still. Is that how you think of me?

Time seemed to stand still while we looked at each other. The arguing receded. The cavern emptied and it was just him and me. The moment stretched between us, pregnant with possibility. I hate moments like this. They always demand you lay something on the line.

He wanted an answer. And he wasn’t moving until he got one. I could see it in his eyes.

I was terrified. What if I said yes and he came back with a mocking retort? What if I got dewy and emotional and he left me hanging all exposed? Worse yet, what was going to happen when he found out I hadn’t gotten the spell to free his son? Would he take down my sign, batten up my beloved store, steal off with his child in the dark of night, burning off like mist in the morning sun, and I would never see him again?

I’d learned a thing or two.

Hope strengthens. Fear kills.

Bet your ass you’re mine, bud, I shot at him. I was staking my claim and I’d fight for it—lie, cheat, and steal. So I hadn’t gotten the spell. Yet. Tomorrow was another day. And if that was all he’d wanted me for, he didn’t deserve me.

Barrons tossed his head back and laughed, teeth flashing in his dark face.

Only once before had I ever heard him laugh like that: the night he caught me dancing to “Bad Moon Rising,” wearing the MacHalo, leaping small couches in a single bound, slaying pillows and slashing air. I caught my breath. Like Alina’s laugh, which used to make my world brighter than the hot afternoon sun, it held joy.

The rest of the occupants faded back in. They’d all gone silent and were staring at Barrons and me.

He stopped laughing instantly and cleared his throat. Then his eyes narrowed. “What the fuck is he doing? We haven’t made a decision.”

“I was trying to tell you,” Jack said. “But you didn’t hear a thing I said. You were looking at my daughter like—”

“Get away from the Book, V’lane,” Barrons growled. “If anyone’s going to be looking at it, it’ll be Mac.”

“Mac’s not touching it,” Rainey said instantly. “That terrible thing should be destroyed.”

“Can’t be, Mom. It doesn’t work that way.”

While everyone was fighting and Barrons and I were absorbed in a wordless conversation, V’lane had taken the bundled queen/concubine from my daddy and was now standing near the slab, looking down at the Sinsar Dubh.

“Don’t open it,” Kat warned him. “We need to talk. Make plans.”

“She’s right,” Dageus said. “ ’Tis no’ a thing to be undertaken lightly, V’lane.”

“There are precautions that must be observed,” Drustan added.

“There has been enough talk,” V’lane said. “My duties to my race are clear. They always have been.”

Barrons didn’t waste any breath. He moved like the beast, too fast to see. One moment he was a few feet from me, the next he was—

–slamming up against a wall and bouncing off it, snarling.

Clear crystal walls erupted around V’lane. Lined with blue-black bars, they extended all the way up to the ceiling.

He didn’t even turn. It was as if he’d tuned us out. He placed the unconscious body of the queen on the ground next to the slab and reached for the Sinsar Dubh.

“V’lane, don’t open it!” I cried. “I think it’s inert, but we don’t have any idea what will happen if you—”

It was too late. He’d opened the Book.

Arms spread, hands splayed on either side of it, head down, V’lane began to read, his lips moving.

Barrons flung himself at the wall. He bounced off.

V’lane had shut us out.

Ryodan, Lor, and Fade joined him, and moments later all five Keltar and my dad were at it, too, pounding on the walls, blasting into it with their shoulders and fists.

Me, I just stood, staring, trying to make sense of it, thinking back to the day I’d met V’lane. He’d told me he served his queen, that she needed the Book in order to have any chance at re-creating the lost Song. At the time, the only thing I’d been worried about was finding Alina’s murderer and keeping the walls up. I’d very much wanted the queen to find that Song and reinforce them.

However, he’d also told me it was legend that if there were no contenders for the queen’s magic at the time of her death, all the matriarchal magic of the True Race would go to the most powerful male.

Surely he wouldn’t have told me that if he’d planned all along to be the one. Would he? Was he that stupid?

Or so arrogant that he’d given me all the clues, laughing the entire time, as the “puny human” failed to put them together?

If he read the entire Sinsar Dubh, would that make him—unquestionably—the most powerful male, stronger even than the Unseelie King?

I hadn’t seen a single Unseelie Princess. Not one. All the Seelie Princesses were—according to V’lane—missing or dead.

What if he finished reading the Book and killed the queen?

He would have all the dark knowledge of the Unseelie King and all the magic of the queen. He would be unstoppable.

Was he the player who’d been manipulating events, biding time, waiting for the perfect moment?

I felt for my spear in the holster. It wasn’t there. I inhaled, nostrils flaring. How long ago had it disappeared? Had he taken it to kill the queen? Would he even need it? Once he’d absorbed the Book, could he simply unmake her?

Was I being totally paranoid?

This was V’lane, after all. He was probably just looking for the fragments of the Song for his queen and once he’d found them he would close the deadly tome.

I sidled in for a better view.

The men were blasting the walls with everything they had. Christopher and Christian were doing some sort of chant, while the others hammered at it. Nothing they did was having the slightest effect.

Peering between them, I suddenly got a clear look at V’lane. Unruffled by the assault on the walls he’d erected, he stood, head thrown back, eyes closed. His hands weren’t spread on each side of the Book as I’d thought.

They were on it, a palm pressed to each page.

How was he touching an Unseelie Hallow? The pages were entrancingly beautiful, each made of hammered gold, embellished with gems, covered with a strikingly bold, dynamic script that rushed across the pages like ceaseless waves. The First Language was as fluid as the original queen had been static.

V’lane wasn’t reading the Sinsar Dubh.

The spells scribed upon the gold pages were vanishing from the Book, passing up his arms, into his body, leaving the pages empty. He was draining it. Absorbing it. Becoming it.

“Barrons,” I shouted to be heard over the roars and grunts as bodies imploded with an unyielding barrier, “we’ve got a serious problem!”

“Same page, Mac. Same bloody word.”

51

When I was fifteen, Dad taught me how to drive. Mom was terrified to let me behind the wheel. I hadn’t been that bad. I remember swerving wide around a bend, narrowly missing a mailbox, and asking Daddy, But how do you stay on the road? What keeps people from just running off it? It’s not like we’re on rails.

He’d laughed. Ruts in the road, baby. They aren’t really there, but if you keep doing it over and over, eventually you begin to feel them, and a sort of autopilot kicks in.

Life is like that. Ruts in the road. My rut was that V’lane was one of the good guys.

But be careful, Jack had added, because autopilot can be dangerous. Drunk driver might come at you head on. The most important thing to know about ruts is how and when to get out of them.

I was immobilized by indecision. Was V’lane really one of the bad guys? Was he really trying to usurp all Fae power and rule? Was I supposed to intervene? What could I do?

As my mom and I watched, Kat, Jo, and the other sidhe-seers joined the assault on the walls. I was about to step in myself when my mom said, “Who’s that handsome young man? He wasn’t here be—” She froze, mid-word.

So did everyone in the cavern.

The Keltar stopped chanting. Barrons and my daddy were frozen mid-lunge. Even V’lane was affected, but not completely. The spells moving up his arms slowed from a fast-moving river to a stream.

I looked where my mother had been pointing and lost my breath.

He was by the door. No, he was behind me. No, he was right in front of me! When he smiled at me, I got lost in his eyes. They expanded until they were enormous and I was swallowed up in darkness, drifting between supernovas in space.

“Hey, beautiful girl,” the dreamy-eyed guy said.

“Butterfly fingers,” I managed finally. “You.”

“Finest surgeon,” he agreed.

“You helped.”

“Told you not to talk to it. You did.”

“I survived.”

“So far.”

“There’s more?”

“Always.”

I couldn’t stop staring. I knew who he was. And now that I knew, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before.

“Never let you, small thing.”

“Let me now.”

“Why?”

“Curiosity.”

“Dead cats.”

“Nine lives,” I countered.

He smiled and his head swiveled in a distinctly Unseelie manner. I was also seeing, superimposed on a space of air that couldn’t exist—at least not in this realm—an enormous darkness regarding me. Its head didn’t swivel: It grated like stone on stone. It was as if the king was so vast that no single realm could contain him, around him dimensions splintered, overlapped, shifted. His eyes locked with mine, opening wider and wider until they swallowed the entire abbey, and I went spinning, head over heels, into them, with the abbey tumbling beside me.

I was wrapped in enormous black velvet wings, taken into the heart of darkness that was the Unseelie King.

He was so far beyond my comprehension that I couldn’t begin to absorb it. “Ancient” didn’t come close, because he was newborn in each moment, as well. Time didn’t define him. He defined time. He wasn’t death or life, or creation or destruction. He was all possibles and none, everything and nothing, a bottomless abyss that would look back at you if you gazed into it. He was a truth of existence: Once you’d been exposed to him, you’d never be the same. Like a contagion that infected the blood and brain, he forced new neural pathways to develop merely to handle the brief contact. That or you went nuts.

For a split second, drifting in his vast, ancient embrace, I understood everything. It all made sense. The universes, the galaxies—existence was unfolding precisely as it should, and there was a symmetry, a pattern, a stunning beauty to the structure of it.

I was tiny and naked, lost in black velvet wings so lush, rich, and sensual that I never wanted to leave. His darkness wasn’t frightening. It was verdant, teeming with life on the verge of becoming. There were shiny pearls of worlds tucked into his feathers. I rolled between them, laughing with delight. I think he rolled with me, watching my reaction to him, learning me, tasting. I tumbled among planets, constellations, stars. They hung from his quills, suspended, trembling with growing pains. Waiting for the day he would unfasten them, bat them off into the ballpark, and see what they might do. A home run—hey, batter, batter! Fly ball, watch out! That ball sucks, didn’t stitch it tight enough … coming apart at the seams …

I saw us through his eyes: dust motes floating in a shaft of sunlight that stabbed through the rusted-out roof of a barn. He was as likely to swipe his hand through us and watch us scatter as he was to turn and walk away from this particular hole-in-the-roof byproduct. Or maybe sneeze us all into the great outdoors, where we would go whirling off in a dozen different directions, lost in lonely oblivion, never to come together again.

By our standards, he was mad. Utterly and completely mad. But every now and then, he surfaced and walked a fine line of sanity. It never lasted long.

By his standards, we were paper dolls, flat and one-dimensional. Barking mad as far as he was concerned. But every now and then, one of us walked a fine line of sanity. It never lasted long.

Still, all was well. Life was, and change happened.

Me. He thought I was relatively sane. I laughed until I cried, rolling around in his feathers. Because of his imprint inside me? If I was a shining example of my race, we should all be shot.

He showed me things. Took my hand and escorted me into an enormous theater, where I watched an endless play of light and shadows from a prime seat in the front row. He watched me, chin on a fist, from a red crushed-velvet chair in a box near the stage.

“Never did get it all out.” His voice came from every speaker: huge, melodic.

“The Book?”

“Can’t eviscerate essential self.”

“Playing doctor again?”

“Trying. You listening this time?”

“He’s stealing your Book. You listening?”

The dreamy-eyed guy’s head swiveled away from the stage, and suddenly the theater was gone and we were back in the cavern.

Wings no longer cradled me.

I was cold and alone. I missed his wings. I yearned for him. It hurt.

“It will pass,” he said absently. “You will forget the pain of separation. They always do.” His eyes narrowed on V’lane. “Yes. He is.”

“Aren’t you going to stop him?”

“Que sera, sera.”

I was being stalked by a song, haunted by the calliope from hell. “It’s your responsibility. You should take care of it.”

“Should is a false god. No fun there.”

“Some changes are better than others.”

“Expound.”

“If you stop him, the changes will be much more interesting.”

“Opinion. Subjective.”

“So is yours,” I said indignantly.

His starry eyes glinted with amusement. “If he replaces me, I will become something else.”

I could almost hear the Sinsar Dubh saying, Is not any act of destruction, should time enough pass, an act of creation? The apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

“I don’t want you replaced. I like you as you are.”

“Flirting with me, beautiful girl?”

I tried to breathe and couldn’t. The Unseelie King was touching me, kissing me. I could feel his lips on my skin, and I—I—I—

“Breathe, BG.”

I could breathe again.

“Please, stop him.” I wasn’t above begging. I’d get on my knees. If V’lane succeeded in gaining ultimate power, I didn’t want to live in this world. Not with him in charge. With a spell of unmaking he could kill Barrons, and he’d made it clear, every chance he got, that he wanted to. He had to be stopped. I wasn’t losing any of my people. My parents were going to live to a ripe old age. Barrons was going to live forever. Me? Well. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do. But I planned on having a long, full lifetime. “It would mean a lot to me.”

“You would owe me. Like you owe my Gray Woman.”

Was there anything he didn’t know? Deals with devils … Barrons would have said, if he hadn’t been frozen. “Deal.”

He winked. “I’d planned to, anyway.”

“Ooh! Then why did you—”

“Pretty girl and all. Asking. Gotta love that. Stuff of heroes. Don’t get the role often.”

He was gone. He reappeared near the slab, staring at V’lane through crystal walls.

I was horrified to realize V’lane was more than halfway through the Sinsar Dubh.

But it was going to be okay. The king was going to stop him, crush him like a bug. V’lane would take one look at who’d come after him and sift out with his tail tucked, whimpering with fear. The king would reseal the cavern, and all would be well. No one would have any spells of unmaking. Barrons would continue to be unkillable. That was a constant, eternal rock beneath my feet that I needed.

“—fore. Where on earth do you think he came from?” My mother finished her sentence. She frowned. “And where did he go?”

Time resumed and everyone in the cavern began moving again.

V’lane’s head dropped down and his eyes slid open.

His reaction wasn’t at all what I expected.

His mouth ticked up in a cool smile. “About fucking time you showed your face, old man.”

“Ah,” said the Unseelie King. “Cruce.”

52

Cruce? V’lane was Cruce?

I glanced around the cavern. Everyone looked as stupefied as I felt, staring between V’lane and the dreamy-eyed guy.

When I’d stood at Darroc’s side, watching the Seelie and Unseelie armies face off in a snowy Dublin street, I’d been awed by the mythic proportions of the event.

Now, according to the dreamy-eyed guy who was really the Unseelie King, the Seelie who’d been masquerading as V’lane for hundreds of thousands of years was really the legendary Cruce, aka War—the final and most perfect Unseelie ever sung into existence.

And he was facing off with his maker.

Cruce was staring down the Unseelie King.

It was the stuff of million-year-old legends. I looked from one to the other. You could have heard a pin drop in the cavern.

I glanced at Barrons, who had both brows raised in an expression of complete shock. For a change, there was something he hadn’t known, either. Then his eyes narrowed on the dreamy-eyed guy.

“He’s the king? That frail old geezer?”

“Geezer? You mean the pretty French woman,” Jo said. “She’s a waitress at Chester’s.”

“French woman? It’s the Morgan Freeman lookalike from the bar on the seventh level at Chester’s,” Christian said.

“No,” Dageus said, “ ’tis the ex-groundskeeper from Edinburgh castle who took on a bussing job at Ryodan’s pub when the walls fell.”

And I saw a young, dreamy-eyed college guy. He winked at me again. We all saw something different when we looked at him.

I stared back at V’lane … er, Cruce.

How had I not known? How had I been so completely duped? It had never been a Seelie Prince facing an Unseelie Prince that night in the snowy Dublin street but two Unseelie Princes. If War’s brother had recognized him, he’d never given it away.

V’lane was Cruce.

V’lane was War.

I’d walked hand in hand with him on a beach. I’d kissed him. More times than I could count. I’d had his name in my tongue. I’d trembled with orgasm after orgasm in his arms. He’d given me Ashford back. Had he taken it to begin with?

War. Of course. He’d turned my world on itself. He’d set armies against each other and sat back watching the chaos he’d created. He’d even gotten out in it and fought with us. No doubt laughing inside, enjoying the added chaos, being in the thick of the fight, watching his handiwork up close and personal.

Was he behind it all? Had he been nudging Darroc for millennia, priming him to defy the queen? And when Darroc was made mortal, had Cruce whispered in a few Unseelie ears, maybe planted key information, and helped him bring down the walls from far behind the scenes? Had he been watching, waiting for the day he might get close enough to the Sinsar Dubh to steal the king’s knowledge and kill the current queen and take her magic?

Did Fae really possess such patience?

He’d killed all the princesses and secreted the queen away to kill at the right time.

He’d turned the Seelie and Unseelie courts against each other, using our world as their battlefield.

We were all pawns on his chessboard.

I had no doubt he was after the ultimate power. The nerve of him, the arrogance—he was the one who’d told me it could be done and how! He was the one who’d recounted the legend to begin with. Unable to resist bragging? When I’d asked him about Cruce, he’d gotten irritated, saying: One day you will wish to talk of me. He’d been jealous of himself, angry that he couldn’t reveal his true majesty. He’d said, Cruce was the most beautiful of all, although the world will never know it—a waste of perfection to never have laid eyes upon one such as he. How it must have chafed him to have to hide his true face for so long.

I’d tanned in a silk chaise, lying next to him. I’d dipped my toes in the surf, holding hands with War. I’d admired an Unseelie Prince’s naked body. Wondered what it would be like to have sex with him. I’d conspired with the enemy and never even guessed it. All the while he’d been touching and adjusting things, nudging us this way and that.

And it had worked.

He’d gotten exactly what he’d wanted. Here he was: standing over the king’s Book, absorbing the deadly knowledge, with the unconscious queen lying at his feet so he could kill her and take the True Magic of their race, too. He’d put her on ice in the Unseelie prison to keep her under control and alive until he was certain he was the most powerful male among them all. The king had given up his dark knowledge. Once Cruce had it, would he really be stronger than the king?

I watched the spells scribed in the Sinsar Dubh slide off the page, move up his fingers into his hands, arms, shoulders, and vanish beneath his skin. He was almost done. Why wasn’t the king stopping him?

“Begun. Can’t be stopped. Think I’d leave part of the Book in two places when they couldn’t even guard one?” the king said.

Barrons and the rest of the men were back to slamming the walls, trying to tear them down to get to Cruce.

But it was too late. He had only a few pages left to go.

I stood, shivering, looking between the king and Cruce, hoping the king knew what he was doing.

Cruce turned the last page.

As the final spell vanished, the Book collapsed into a thin pile of gold dust and a handful of winking red gemstones on the slab.

The Sinsar Dubh had finally been destroyed.

Too bad it now lived and breathed inside the most powerful Unseelie Prince ever created.

The transition was seamless.

One moment I was in the cavern with everyone else. The next I was standing on a giant grassy swell of a hill with Cruce and the king.

An enormous moon obliterated the horizon. Welling up from behind the planet, it blocked out the night sky entirely but for a smattering of stars against a cobalt palette above it.

The rounded pasture climbed gently for miles, vanishing into the moon and making it seem like, if I walked to the top of the ridge, I might hop the pine-board fence and bridge planet to moon with a single leap. The air hummed with a low-level charge, and in the distance, thunder rolled. Black megaliths jutted like the fingers of a fallen giant poking into the cool, unblinking eye of the moon.

We stood between towering stones—Cruce facing the king, me at midpoint between them.

The queen was slumped at Cruce’s feet.

I backed out and away for a wider view. I wondered who’d brought us here and left all the others behind. Cruce or the king? Why?

Wind whipped my hair into a tangle. The breeze was rich with spice and the fragrance of night-blooming jasmine. Hunters glided past the moon, gonging deep in their chests, and the moon answered.

I had no idea what world I was on, what galaxy I was in, but some part of me—my inner king—knew this place. We’d chosen the hill of Tara for the resemblance, but Tara was a pale imitation. On Earth, the moon was never so near as it was here, and there was only one, not three, in the night sky. Power pulsed in this planet’s rocky core and mineral veins, earth’s magic had been bored to death by humans long ago.

“Why the three of us?” I said.

“Children,” the king replied.

I didn’t like what his answer seemed to imply. War was so not my brother.

“MacKayla,” Cruce said softly.

I gave him a cool look. “Did you think it was funny? You lied to me over and over. You used me.”

“I wanted you to accept me as I was, but—how is it you say?—my reputation preceded me. Others filled your head with lies about Cruce. I endeavored to correct them, open your eyes.”

“By telling me more lies? V’lane didn’t kill Cruce the day the king and queen fought. You switched places with V’lane.”

“With the three amulets the king never believed good enough, I deceived them all. Together they are strong.” He touched his neck, a smug glint in his eyes, and although I couldn’t see them, I knew he wore them still. He’d used them to maintain his flawless glamour of Seelie Prince. I’d seen it flicker only a few times, when he’d been near the abbey’s wards.

“That day I called you to help me defeat the guardian in the abbey, the day you hissed and vanished—”

“It was a truth ward made of blood and bone. It sensed me as Unseelie. Had I stayed, I would have been unable to maintain the glamour. But you could not pass it, either. Why is that?”

I didn’t answer. “The queen killed V’lane with her sword, and never even knew it. You’ve been impersonating him ever since.”

“He was a fool. After I had my audience with the queen, it was V’lane she dispatched to confine me in her bower. I took his face and gave him mine. He was not half the Fae I am. He knew nothing of true illusion, could not have created an amulet capable of such if he’d lived a million years. Then I took him to her to kill. He was pathetic. Pleaded his innocence. Whimpered at the end and made a mockery of my name. The other Unseelie Princes tried their hand at a curse and blamed that on me, as well.”

“You hid among the Seelie all this time.”

“Never drinking from the cauldron. Watching. Waiting for the perfect convergence of events. The Book was missing for an eternity. The old fool hid it. Twenty-three years ago I felt it and knew the time was right. But enough about me. What are you, MacKayla?”

“You set Darroc up.”

“I encouraged where encouragement was useful.”

“You want to be king,” I said.

Cruce’s iridescent eyes flashed. “Why would I not? Someone needs to take over. He turned his back on his children. We were an accident of creation he sought to contain and hide. He fears power? I do not. He refuses to lead our people? I will champion them as he never did.”

“And when they weary of your rule?” the king said. “When you realize you can never please them?”

“I will make them happy. They will love me.”

“So all gods think. At first.”

“Shut up, old man.”

“Still you wear V’lane’s face. What do you fear?” the king said.

“I fear nothing.” But his gaze lingered on me a long moment. “I fight for my race, MacKayla. I have since I was born. He would conceal us in shame and condemn us to a half life. Remember that. There are reasons for all I have done.”

Abruptly his golden mane was raven, his gold-velvet skin bronzed.

Iridescent eyes emptied. A torque threaded with silver slithered around his neck. Beneath his skin, kaleidoscopic tattoos crashed like waves in a turbulent sea. He was beautiful. He was horrifying. He was soul-destroying. A nimbus of gold surrounded his body.

And his face, oh, God, his face, I knew that face. I’d seen that face. Bending over me. Holding my head in his arms. Cradling me.

While he moved inside me.

“You were the fourth at the church!” I cried. He’d raped me. With his other dark brethren, he’d turned me into a mindless shell of a person, left me shattered and naked in the street. And I would have remained broken forever, except that Barrons had come charging in after me with men and guns, taken me away, and put me back together again.

The Unseelie Prince cocked his head, looking every bit as unnatural as his brothers. Sharp teeth gleamed white against the dark skin of his face. “They would have killed you. They had never had a human woman. Darroc underestimated their ardor.”

“You raped me!”

“I saved you, MacKayla.”

“Saving me would have been getting me out of there!”

“You were already Pri-ya when I found you. Your life was ending. I gave you my elixir—”

“Your elixir?” the king said mildly.

“—to stem your wounds.”

“You didn’t have to have sex with me to do it!”

“I desired you. You refused me. I wearied of your protests. You wanted me. You thought about it. You were not even there. What difference?”

“You think that makes it okay?”

“I do not understand your objections. I did nothing that had not already been done by others. Nothing you had not considered. And I did it better.”

“What exactly did you give me?”

“I do not exactly”—he imitated my tone perfectly—“know. I have never given it to a human before.”

“Was it the queen’s elixir?”

“It was mine,” the king said.

“I improved it. You are the past,” Cruce said. “I am the future. It is time for you to be unmade.”

He was going to unmake the king? Was it possible?

“Kids. Pain in the ass. Don’t know why I ever made them. Hell on relationships.”

“You have no idea,” Cruce said. “Getting the queen to kill V’lane was not the first illusion I wove and left for you, old fool, although it was the first you saw. This was.” He bent and grabbed a fistful of the queen’s hair, raising her by it. As he did, her blankets fell away.

The king went perfectly still.

In his eyes I saw the black-and-white boudoir, void of all but empty memories, the endless barren years, the eternal grieving. I saw loneliness as vast and all-encompassing as his wings. I knew the joy of their union and the despair of their separation.