TWENTY-NINE
“In the white room”
One night when Mac and me were killing Unseelie back-to-back, she had a kind of meltdown and started crying and yelling while she sliced and diced. She said that she was going to send them all straight back to hell because they stole everything from her that mattered. She said she used to know her sister, everything about her, and that was where love was, in the knowing and sharing, but it turned out Alina had a boyfriend she’d never mentioned and a whole other life she knew nothing about, and not only didn’t Alina love her, her entire existence to date had been one great big fat lie. Her parents weren’t her parents, her sister probably wasn’t her sister, nobody was what they seemed, not even her.
In Rowena’s stash of journals chronicling her nasty, evil reign, I found Mac’s sister’s diary. I have over four hundred journals locked away with the Grand Mistresses emblem emblazoned on dark green kidskin leather. She was eighty-eight when she died, though she didn’t look a day over sixty. She had a Fae she’d been nibbling on for decades locked in a vault beneath the abbey. I killed it when I found out about it.
When I discovered Alina’s diary, I tore out pages and got them to Mac on the sly, trying to make up for silencing her sister’s voice and show her she’d meant everything in the world to Alina.
“Why the feck are we here?” I say crossly. I wouldn’t even be thinking about Mac if we weren’t. Christian’s been sifting me around the city, helping me plaster my Dailies on lampposts. I been letting him touch my pinky finger to do it. He keeps trying to put his arms around me. His last sift deposited us catty-corner to Barrons Books & Baubles, with the street between us.
I feel like puking.
I ain’t been here since the night Mac found out the truth about me. The night she baked me a cake and painted my fingernails and saved me from the Gray Woman, only to end up ready to kill me herself a few minutes later.
In the middle of a ruined city, Barrons Books & Baubles stands untouched. I think a silent benediction: May it always. There’s something about this place. As if its mere existence means the world will always have hope. I can’t explain why I feel that way but all the folks I know that have ever visited it, all the other sidhe-seers, feel the same. There’s something different, something extraordinary on this island, in this city, on this street, in this precise spot. It feels almost like once, a very long ago time, something terrible nearly happened here at this longitude and latitude, and somebody put BB&B on the gash to keep the possibility from ever occurring again. As long as the walls stand and the place is manned, we’re okay. I snicker, picturing it looking just like it does right here and now, in prehistoric times. It doesn’t seem so improbable.
To the left and right the cobbled street is swept clean. There’s no riot-detritus outside Barrons’s establishment. No husks left from Shades gorging. No trash. Planters line the cobbled street, and there are small plants trying to grow in them, valiantly fighting the uncommon chill. The entry to the tall, deep brick building is drenched in dark cherry and brass and polished to a high gloss. The place is Old World and urbane as the dude himself, with pillars and wrought-iron latticework and a great big heavy door with fancy sidelights and a transom that I used to bang through, and sometimes I’d go in and out, in and out, just to hear the bell above the door tinkle. It sounded really cool in fast-mo, used to crack me up.
A hand-painted shingle hangs perpendicular to the sidewalk, suspended by an elaborate brass pole bolted into the brick above the door alcove, swaying in a light breeze.
Amber lights glow behind glass panes tinged with a hint of green.
It’s all I can do not to go banging in that door, say, “Dude, what’s up?”
I’m never going to bang in that door again.
“Get us out of here,” I say crossly.
“Can’t. This is where we need to be. And what the bloody hell is up with that?”
I look at him. He’s looking up at the roof of BB&B, where dozens of enormous floodlights shine down into the street. I have to back up a few steps to see past them and see what he’s seeing because I’m so much shorter. I gape. “What the feck are ZEWs doing here?” The entire roof of BB&B is covered with Zombie Eating Wraiths. Hulking anorexic vultures, with creepily hunched bodies and a gaunt grimness that defies description, they huddle in their voluminous black robes, dusted with dirt and cobwebs, unmoving. Carrion-eaters, packed shoulder-to-shoulder, they’re as fixedly still as a deathwatch. I’m not sure I would have even noticed them if Christian hadn’t pointed them out. They’re not chittering and it’s somehow worse that they’re silent. “Why they hanging out on Mac’s roof like that?”
“How the fuck would I know? Sorry, lass. I mean, how would I know?”
“You can say ‘fuck’ around me. Everybody does. And you’d know because you’re Unseelie.”
“Not completely, not yet and not originally. That’s a lot of nots. And just because the rest of the men in this city are pigs doesn’t mean I am. There’s another ‘not’ for you. I’m bloody well made of nots tonight. I’m not the monster being hunted either.”
I give him a look. His eyes are wild. This is a dude on serious edge, teetering, arms pinwheeling. “So, what are we doing here?” I try to bring some focus back to the conversation.
He doesn’t answer me. Just stalks off, straight toward the bookstore, and right when I’m about to freeze-frame it out of there because there’s no way I’m going inside, even if nobody’s home, he turns sharp and heads down the alley between BB&B and the neighboring Dark Zone.
“If you want to stop the Hoar Frost King, you’ll have to come with me, lass. I’m taking you to the Unseelie King’s library. If there are answers to be had, they’ll be found there.”
The Unseelie King’s library! “Holy borrowing bibliophile, let’s book!” I take one last look up at the ZEWs and freeze-frame to catch up. If Mac’s in the bookstore, she won’t notice the blur that just passed her door. I shiver as I chase after him. It’s fecking cold tonight. I more than want to stop the Hoar Frost King. I’ve got to. It’s getting downright frigid in Dublin and I got a terrible feeling it’s going to get a lot worse.
When Christian pushes into the brick wall of the building catty-corner to the rear of BB&B—first left on the Dark Zone side—and disappears, I melt down in a fit of the giggles. I toss a rock at the spot where he vanished. It bounces off the brick and clatters to the cobblestone. I’m feeling twenty shades of Harry Potter’s train station, especially when he pokes his head back out of the wall and says impatiently, “Come on, lass. This is hardly my favorite place to be.”
I approach the wall and study it, trying to decide if I’d be able to find the spot again without knowing exactly where it was. His head disappears. I wouldn’t. I want to chalk a big X on it, in case I need it again, but that would betray its location to everyone else, too, being as “X marks the spot” and all, so I back up partway down the alley and lock the scene down on my mental grid, permanent-like. I got that kind of memory. If I deliberately file something, I can always find it again. Hard part is remembering to deliberately file it. I’m usually so excited by the life I’m living I forget to take pictures.
Then I follow him in. Dude! I step into a brick wall! It’s the freakiest thing I’ve ever felt. Like it’s a sponge and I’m a sponge and for a second there all our sponge parts are one and I don’t just have square pants, everything about me is squarish because I’m part of a wall, then I’m me again and the wall kind of squirts me out on the other side in a completely white room.
White floor, white ceiling, white walls. Inside the white room are ten mirrors. Just like that. Standing there, in thin air. You can circle all the way around them. Nothing is holding them up that I can see. They’re all different sizes and shapes, in different frames. Some of the glass surfaces are dark as pitch and you can’t see a thing. Others swirl with silver fog but the things that move in their cloudy shadows are too fast and strange to define.
“Good,” he says. “They’re where I left them.”
“Where else would they be?”
“They used to hang on the wall. I shuffled them around so if anyone else knew where they went, they’d lose track. Used to be the one we’re taking was fourth from the left. Now it’s second from the right.”
I take one last look around, I don’t know, maybe looking for tired starlings, but there aren’t any, and push into the mirror behind him. I get all spongy again and this time it’s like I pass through a lot of things and just when I’m starting to get a little tense about it, wondering if all my parts are definitely going to come back together, I squirt out into Christian’s back. “Ooof! What are you doing, standing there blocking the mirror?”
“Hush, I thought I heard something.”
I perk up my superhearing. “I don’t hear nothing and I can hear everything.”
“There are things in here,” he says. “You never know what you might find.”
“Bad things?”
“Depends on your definition. And who you are. Being a prince has its advantages.”
I look around. “Where are we?”
“The White Mansion.”
“Duh, like I might never have figured that out,” I say, because we’re in yet another white room. “Is the whole place this boring? Don’t the Fae ever use paint, maybe a little wallpaper?”
He chimes softly.
“Dude, you’re ringing like a bell.”
He stops abruptly and I realize he was laughing. I’m beginning to understand how to interact social-like with an Unseelie prince.
“The White Mansion isn’t boring, lass. Never boring. It’s the grand demesne the Unseelie King built for his concubine. It’s a living, breathing love story, testament to the brightest passion that ever burned between our races. You can follow the scenes through if you’ve time enough and are willing to risk getting lost for a few centuries.”
I heard of the White Mansion from eavesdropping but never paid much attention to the talk. I was always more interested in the Sinsar Dubh. “What do you mean, you can follow the scenes through?”
“Their residue is still here. They loved so intensely that moments of their life have been etched into the very fabric of the mansion. Some say the king designed it that way, so if one day he lost her he could come live with her residue. Some say the mansion was built of memory-tissue and is a living creature, with a great brain and heart hidden somewhere in the house. I’ve no wish to believe it’s true because that would mean the White Mansion can be killed, and she must never die. The record of the greatest love in the history of History would be lost, along with countless artifacts from myriad universes that could never be collected together again. This place is home, love story, and museum all in one.”
“So, where’s the library?”
“You see, lass,” he says tenderly, like I never even just opened my mouth, like I’m looking for a lesson in love, and I ain’t, “the Unseelie King fell in love with a mortal woman. She was his reason for being. His every defining moment occurred because of her, and only in her presence did he know peace. She was his brightest shining star. She made him a better man, and to men who know how fundamentally and deeply they’re flawed, such a woman is irresistible. The idea that she would live less than a single century was more than he could bear, so he resolved to make her Fae like himself that they might live forever together. While he worked in his laboratory, trying to perfect the Song of Making, he needed to keep her safe and alive. He knew it might take him eons to learn to wield the power of creation.”
If he was human I might call that funny glint in Christian’s iridescent eyes speculative as it rests on me. I can’t look too long trying to decide because one short lock with his gaze and my eyes are already leaking blood. Dude’s getting more potent by the minute. And weirder. Like he’s thinking him and me are like the Unseelie King and his concubine, some kind of star-crossed lovers. “And where did you say the library was?”
“He built his beloved a playground of infinite proportions, tucked away in a safe pocket of reality where she could stay for all time, unchanging. Unaging. She would be safe. Nothing and no one could ever hurt her. He would never have to worry that he might lose her.” His voice sinks to a whisper, as if he’s forgotten I’m even here. “They would be together always. Soul mates. He would never be alone. Never get lost in madness, for she would never fail to find him and bring him back.”
“Dude, your story’s fascinating and all, but where’s the library? Time’s wasting. We got the Hoar Frost King to stop.”
“If you stayed here, Dani, my light o’ love, you’d never die. I’d never have to worry about anyone hurting you. Ever.”
“Yeah, and I’d, like, be fourteen forever. I’d kind of like to grow a few more inches,” I say irritably. In more than a few places. He tries to keep me here out of some lunatic thought that I’m his queen, we’ll be staining this place with a whole new residue: it’ll be war in the White Mansion.
“I’d forgotten that.” He sighs. “Come, lass. Shall we go find the library?”
“Dude, thought you’d never ask.”
We exit the white room on white marble floors and enter a sparkling white hallway with floor-to-ceiling windows that stretch to domed ceilings forty feet high. There I see my first residue. Beyond tall windows is a beautiful woman in a snowy garden, silken folds of a bloodred gown spilling over a white marble bench. Face pressed into her hands, she weeps.
“It’s the king’s concubine,” he says.
“I thought you said they were crazy in love. Why is she crying?”
“She wearied of being alone while the king labored at his experiments. She waited hundreds of thousands of years for him, alone except for those few creatures he trusted with her, and his occasional visits.”
Christian tells me the rest of the story while we twist and turn down hallways and corridors. I’m riveted in spite of myself. Who’d have ever thought such fantastical places existed side by side with our world, accessible through hidden portals and mirrors? My life is so fecking interesting I almost can’t stand it!
We pass over lemon marble floors in sunny wings with tall windows that frame brilliant summer days, down rose quartz floors that reflect violet hues of the sunset beyond, across bronze tiles that wind through rooms that have no windows, only stately, enormous, kingly chairs and couches and beds. There are fireplaces here as tall as a small house, with ceilings higher than the spires on cathedrals.
“How big is this place?”
“Some say it goes on forever, that the king created a house that constantly grows itself.”
“How do you find anything?”
“Och, and there’s the rub, lass. It’s difficult. Things move. It doesn’t help that the king created decoys. To better protect his dangerous journals, he seeded multiple libraries within the house. Barrons thinks he found the true repository. He didn’t. I saw the books he pilfered. They came from the king’s Green Study.”
“How do you know where the true library is?”