Barrons made the rooms more bearable for me as we went, by going ahead, entering them first, draping the bodies with sheets or blankets, and when none were available, stowing them behind furniture. Only after he’d “secured” a room, did he exit it and send me in alone, the better to focus on my search, he said.
While I appreciated his efforts, I’d already seen too much and frankly, it was hard not to glance behind a sofa or a chair, at the bodies he hadn’t covered. They exerted the same gruesome hold over me as the husks left by the Shades, as if some wholly irrational part of me thought by staring long and hard enough, immersing myself in the horror of it, I might learn something that would help me avoid the same fate.
“They have no defensive wounds, Barrons,” I said, exiting another room.
He was leaning up against the wall a few doors down, arms crossed over his chest. He was getting bloody from moving the bodies. I focused on his face, not the stains on his hands, or the dark, wet splotches on his clothes. His eyes were intensely bright. He seemed harder, larger, more electric than ever. I could smell the blood on him, the metallic tinge of old pennies. When our gazes locked, I jerked. If there was a man behind those eyes, I was a Fae. Jet, bottomless pools regarded me; on those glossy obsidian surfaces tiny Macs stared back at me. His gaze dropped, raked over my clingy catsuit, then worked back up very slowly.
“They were unconscious when they were slaughtered,” he said finally.
“Then why kill them?”
“It would appear for the pleasure of it, Ms. Lane.”
“What kind of monster does that?”
“All kinds, Ms. Lane. All kinds.”
We continued our search. Whatever fascination the house might once have held for me was gone. I hurried through an art gallery that would have made any major metropolitan museum curator swoon with envy, and felt no more than the bitterness of the man who’d been driven to acquire the spectacular collection only to hang it in a windowless, vaultlike room where none but him could ever see it. I passed over a solid gold floor, and saw only the blood.
Barrons found the old man—who’d paid over a billion dollars for the amulet, blissfully ignorant that he’d not only not postponed his death, but had just spent an obscene amount of money to hasten it—dead in his bed, his head half ripped off from the force with which the amulet had been torn from his neck, chain marks scored into the shredded skin of his throat. So much for longevity; by trying to cheat death, he’d succeeded only in expediting it.
Our search was fruitless. Whatever had once been housed there—the amulet, perhaps other OOPs—was gone. Someone had beaten us to it. The Unseelie Hallow was out there in the world, amplifying the will of a new owner, and we were back at square one. I’d really wanted that amulet. If it was capable of impacting reality, and I could figure out how to use it…well, the possibilities were endless. At the least, it could protect me; at best it could help me get my revenge.
“Are we done here, Barrons?” I asked, as we descended the rear stairs. I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t get out of the marble mausoleum fast enough.
“There’s a basement, Ms. Lane.”
We turned at the bottom of the final flight, and began walking toward a set of doors in the wall past the base of the stairwell.
At that very moment, they began to swing open.
Abruptly, I was no longer in the house at all, but standing on a white powder beach with a warm, salty breeze tangling my hair.
The sun was shining. Alabaster birds swooped low, gliding along lapis lazuli waves.
And I was naked.
ELEVEN
V ’lane!” I snarled.
I was naked—he was near.
“It is time for our hour, MacKayla,” said a disembodied voice.
“Put me back right now! Barrons needs me!” How had he so cleanly swapped one reality for the next? Had he moved me, or worlds? Had I just been “sifted”? But I hadn’t even seen him, or felt him touch me, or anything!
“At the time of my choosing was our deal. Will you dishonor it? Should I undo my part of it as well?”
Could he do that? Rewind time and dump me back into the Shade-infested bookstore, crouching before my enemy with too few matches left? Or did he mean to let the Shades back in right now, and when I got home from Wales, I’d have to clear it again, this time, without his help? I had no desire to face either. “I’m not dishonoring it. You are. Give me my clothes back!”
“We discussed nothing of attire in our bargain. We are on equal footing, you and I,” he purred, behind me.
I whirled, fury in my eyes, murder in my heart.
He was naked, too.
All thought of Barrons and basement doors opening and potential dangers behind them vanished. Nor did it matter how I’d gotten here. I was here.
My knees turned to ash. I collapsed to the sand.
I looked away but my eyes didn’t. My central nervous system was currently serving another master and had no interest in will. Will? What was will? Papers you signed in case you died, that was it. Nothing to do with my current situation. All I needed to do now was entrust my body to the Maestro before me who would play it like no other, stroking it to unimaginable crescendos, plucking chords no man had ever sounded before, or would ever match again.
A Fae prince naked is a vision that renders all other men eternally inadequate.
He stepped toward me.
I trembled. He was going to touch me. Oh, God, he was going to touch me.
Over the course of my many encounters with V’lane, I would attempt repeatedly to describe him in my journal. I would use words like: terrifyingly beautiful, godlike, possessing inhuman sexuality, deadly eroticism. I would call him lethal, I would call him irresistible, I would curse him. I would lust for him. I would call his eyes windows to a shining heaven, I would call them gates to Hell. I would fill entries with scribblings that would later make no sense to me, comprised of columns of antonyms: angelic, devilish; creator, destroyer; fire, ice; sex, death—I’m not sure why those two struck me as opposites, except perhaps sex is both the celebration of life and the process whereby we create it.
I would make a list of colors, of every shimmering shade of bronze, gold and copper, and amber known to man. I would write of oils and spices, scents from childhood, scents from dreams. I would indulge in lengthy thesaurus-like entries trying to capture the sensory overload that was Prince V’lane of the Fae.
I would fail at every turn.
He is so beautiful that he makes a part of my soul weep. I don’t understand those tears. They aren’t like the ones I cry for Alina. They aren’t made of water and salt. I think they’re made of blood.
“Turn. It. Off.” I gritted.
“I am doing nothing.” He stopped in the sand next to me, towered above me. The parts of him I needed, those perfect, incredible parts I burned to have inside me, slaking my terrible, inhuman lust, were within arm’s reach. I fisted my hands. I would never reach. Not for a Fae. Never. “Liar.”
He laughed and I closed my eyes, lay shuddering on the soft white sand. The fine grains against my skin were the hands of a lover, the breeze at my nipples a hot tongue. I prayed the ocean wouldn’t begin to lap at any part of me. Would I come apart? Would my cells lose the cohesion necessary to maintain the shape of my humanity? Would I scatter to the far reaches of the universe, flakes of dust borne off on a fickle Fae wind?
I rolled so my nipples pressed against the beach. As I turned, my thigh grazed the tender, aching flesh of my mons. I came, violently. “You bastard…I…hate…you,” I hissed.