―What?‖ I demanded. I didn‘t like the way he was looking at me. Fascination in a Fae‘s eyes is never a good thing.
―Behold me. I believe you can.‖ Was that grudging respect in his voice? He shimmered and was suddenly something else.
I‘d seen a vision similar to the one he showed me now that morning at the church, when the three Unseelie Princes had circled around me, morphing from shape to shape. My brain hadn‘t been able to process what I‘d been seeing, and I‘d guessed it was a complex state of being that had more dimensions than humans could comprehend.
Unlike the Unseelie Princes, however, V‘lane didn‘t continue moving from form to form. He adopted a static one. At least, I think it was static. It wasn‘t change. Stasis and change are how the Fae define everything. For example, if a human dies—or, as they say, ―ceases to exist‖—they don‘t perceive the loss of life at all, they merely perceive ―change.‖ They‘re cold bastards. My eyes could see V‘lane, but my brain couldn‘t define him. We‘ve invented only words we‘ve had need of, and we‘ve never seen anything like this. Energy—but multidimensional? I don‘t understand the first thing about dimensions, just the little I learned in school about space, time, and matter. My mind strained to grasp what was before my eyes … expanded … nearly tore itself in two trying to reconcile the image with some frame of reference I understood. I couldn‘t find one, and the more I searched and failed, the more frantic I felt, which in turn made me keep trying to find one, which in turn made me more frantic. It was a backfeed loop, escalating quickly. Stop fighting it, I told myself, stop trying to define and simply see. The strain eased. I stared.
―You apprehend me in my true form. Mortals cannot do so and retain a unified mind. It fractures. Well done, MacKayla. Was it not worth it? Would you not do it all over again?‖
Bile rose in my throat. At the cost of a piece of my soul? That‘s what he thought? That if I‘d been given the choice, I would have chosen to go through what had happened on Samhain? That I would have chosen Dublin falling, the walls coming down, the Unseelie getting freed, being raped and turned into an animal that‘d had to be rescued first by Dani, then by Barrons? ―I would never have chosen it!‖ It wasn‘t just me who had suffered. How many humans had been slaughtered that night and since?
He was back in his human form. ―Really? For such power? You are immune to me—a Fae Prince. Impervious to sexual glamour. You can gaze upon my true form without your mind fracturing. You can walk through wards. I wonder what else you can do now. What a creature you are becoming.‖
―I‘m not a creature. I‘m a human and proud of it.‖
―Ah, MacKayla, only a fool would still call you human now.‖ He vanished, but his voice lingered. ―Your spear is at the abbey … Princess.‖ Laughter danced on the air.
―I‘m not a princess, either,‖ I snapped, then frowned. ―And how do you know where my spear is?‖
―Barrons approaches.‖ The words were nearly indistinguishable from the chilly morning breeze. A breath of sultry warm air, in sharp contrast to the frigid wintry day, gusted down my shirt and caressed the tops of my breasts.
I yanked my coat shut and buttoned it. ―Stay out of my clothes, even as the hot air you are, V‘lane.‖
More laughter. ―Unless you wish to see the one that exploited you at your weakest, perhaps even made you so, go southeast, MacKayla, and quickly.‖
A snapshot from late last night flashed behind my eyes: me, nude, straddling Barrons‘ face. I went.
Certain dates are stuck in my head, permanently scarred there.
July 5: the day Alina called my cell phone and left a frantic message that I ended up not hearing until weeks later. She was murdered mere hours after she placed that call. August 4: the afternoon I stumbled into a Dark Zone for the first time and ended up on the front steps of Barrons Books and Baubles.
August 22: the night I had my first skull-splitting encounter with the Sinsar Dubh. October 3: the day Barrons fed me Unseelie to bring me back to life and I experienced the intoxicating effects of dark Fae power.
October 31: yeah, well, enough said. It had been an insane few months. Today I had no idea what the date was, so I couldn‘t etch it into my memory just yet, but I knew I would never forget a single detail of it.
The entirety of Dublin had been devoured by Shades, turned into a wasteland. If there was another person alive in the city besides myself, they were in deep hiding. I walked for hours through eerily silent districts. Not one blade of grass remained, not a shrub, bush, or tree. I knew I shouldn‘t waste time, especially if Barrons was nearby, but I needed to see this.
I collected snapshots of the city like bricks, and I stacked and mortared them into a wall of determination: I would live to see this affront to humanity undone.
What few newspapers were left on the stands were dated October 31, the last day Dublin had functioned. The city had fallen that night and never gotten back up.
Storefronts were bashed in, windows broken out. There was glass everywhere, cars abandoned, some on their sides, others burned.
The worst part of it was the dried husks—I quit counting after a while—blowing down the streets, tumbleweeds of human remains, that part of us that Shades find indigestible. I would have wept, but I didn‘t seem to have tears left in my body. I gave the bookstore wide berth. I couldn‘t bear to see if it had been destroyed. I preferred to keep my second-to-last image of it in mind, the way it had looked the afternoon of Halloween: Everything in its place, waiting for me to return, push open the door, pick up the mail, straighten the magazines people were always riffling through, start a fire, curl up on the chesterfield with a good book, and wait for that first customer of the day.
Every streetlamp I passed had been smashed, many ripped right out of their concrete bases, twisted and flung, as if by raging giants. Shades have no physical form, so I assumed some other caste of Unseelie must have done this to ensure that, if we somehow managed to get our grids back up and running, there‘d be no lamps to route the power to.
Almost as bad as the husks—I cringed every time I stepped on one and it crunched beneath my feet—were the piles of clothing, cell phones, jewelry, dental devices, implants, and wallets. Each was a sacred burial mound in my mind.
Still, it didn‘t keep me from picking up a few things.
An open switchblade caught the cold morning light, and my attention. I suspected its owner had been trying to stab the unstabbable when the Shade devoured him. ―I‘ll put it to good use,‖ I told the pile of black leather topped by a necklace of metal skulls. ―I promise.‖ I retracted the blade and slid it into my boot.
My next scavenged prize was a chunk of living Unseelie flesh I found flopping in the street. I had no idea where it had come from, how or why, but it sure might come in handy. Ingesting Fae flesh not only made the average human able to see the Fae—including the innately invisible Shades—as well as any sidhe-seer, it also bestowed superstrength and heightened senses, the ability to dabble in the black arts, and miraculous healing powers.
I used my new switchblade to dice it, then stopped in a ransacked drugstore, where I pilfered baby-food jars, washed them out, and presto—I had a new stash of Unseelie sushi, if I needed it. Assuming, of course, I got into a situation dire enough that I would A: be willing to sacrifice my sidhe-seer talents, which seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds; B: let myself be vulnerable to my own spear again, which I fully intended to have back by the end of the day, come hell or high water; and C: ever be willing to put any part of anything Unseelie in my mouth again. I‘d had more than my unwilling fill.
I shuddered. Interestingly, I seemed to have been cured of my burgeoning addiction to eating Unseelie flesh. I eyed the baby-food jars and their squirming contents with revulsion. Still, weapons are weapons, and all weapons are good weapons.
A short time later, I was in a slightly dented Range Rover Sport. I‘d swept the husks from it, trying not to look too hard at the tiniest husk as I‘d unbelted and gently placed the car seat, along with a fluffy pink teddy bear and a shirt that said I ? Daddy, beneath a leafless oak tree. I headed for the abbey, mostly alongside the road because so much of it was clogged with abandoned cars. I munched a couple of protein bars as I drove and paused periodically at petrol stations and convenience stores, stocking the back of the Rover with water, food, batteries, and, at one of my stops, plastic containers of gas I‘d discovered already pumped, much to my mixed emotions. I needed it and was grateful for it. But there‘d been no way to miss the pile of rugged work pants, hip implant, Irish fisherman‘s sweater, and boots next to the three containers. Had a father come out, too close to dusk, for gas to keep his family‘s generator running? Did they still wait somewhere, cowering in the darkness?
About an hour after I‘d left the city, I saw the strangest thing. Initially, from a distance, I mistook it for a very large, very low-flying bizarre plane. But as I drew closer, I could see that it was an Unseelie Hunter and some other kind of Fae that I‘d never seen before locked in battle, beating air with their massive wings, tearing at each other with teeth and talons. Were Unseelie fighting themselves, or was this a Seelie fighting an Unseelie? Were the Hunters once again keepers of Fae law, as they‘d been an eternity past?
I didn‘t know, I didn‘t care. I just wanted to pass unnoticed beneath their radar. Hunters hunt sidhe-seers. Was I giving off a betraying scent? It was too late to go back and I needed to go forward, so I held my breath and muttered prayers to every deity I could think of that the Fae were too engrossed in their fight to look down.
One of the pagan gods must have heard me, because I passed beneath them without incident, holding my breath and watching as the battle vanished to a pinpoint in my rearview mirror. I sucked down air greedily and pretended my hands weren‘t shaking. ―My kingdom for a spear,‖ I muttered.
About thirty minutes from the abbey, I got another surprise: Dirt gave way to wintered grass. For whatever reason, the Shades had stopped here.
Perhaps it was the farthest they‘d gotten and they were hunkered in a dark culvert or had slithered beneath a fallen tree for the day, where they impatiently awaited the night to resume eating their way toward the abbey. Perhaps the soil in this part of the country didn‘t taste good, salted with so many centuries of sidhe-seers living on it. Perhaps Rowena and her merry band had done something to halt their progress. Who knew? I was just glad to see something besides dirt.