“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.
I no longer trusted anyone’s face. I sought my sidhe-seer center, reinforced it with the amulet, and demanded to be shown what was true.
She was still the concubine. The king’s mortal beloved, the one he’d gone insane over, created the Sinsar Dubh because of, walked away from his entire race for.
“As the current queen, her death will grant me the True Magic of our race. I saved her to kill in front of you before I unmake you. But this time when you see her dead, it will be no illusion.”
When the king said nothing, Cruce said impatiently, “Do you not wish to know how I did it, you stubborn old fuck? No? You never would speak up when it mattered. The day you went to battle the queen, I took the concubine another of your famous elixirs, but this time it was no potion: It was a cup stolen from the cauldron of forgetting. She stood in your boudoir while I erased all memory of you. When she was a blank slate, I bent her over your bed and fucked her. I hid her from you where I knew you would never look. The Seelie court. I took V’lane’s place and pretended she was a human I’d become enamored of. Over time, as the courtiers drank from the cauldron and forgot, as Seelie Princesses rose to power and were deposed, she became one of us. I achieved what your potions never did. Time in Faery, our potions, and our way of life made her Fae. Is it not ironic? The day came when she was so powerful she became our queen. She was always there—alive—but you never even looked. I kept her in the one place I knew the arrogant Un-Seelie King would not go. Bedding down with your grudges while I bedded your bitch. Your concubine became my lover, my queen. And now her death will make me you.”
The king’s eyes were sad. “In more ways than you know, if it were true. But another stands in your way.” He glanced at me.
My eyes widened and I shook my head instantly. “What are you trying to do? Get him to kill me? I’m not in his way.”
“Our magic prefers a woman. I believe it would choose you.”
“I have the Sinsar Dubh,” Cruce said. “She does not.”
The king laughed. “You think to become me. She becomes her. Not the only possible.”
I was horrified. I thought I understood what he was saying and didn’t like it one bit.
“Perhaps Barrons becomes Cruce. Who, then, would cry judgment?” the king said.
“Barrons wouldn’t become War,” I said instantly.
“Or me. Depends on the nuances.” The king looked at the concubine in Cruce’s grasp. “Irrelevant, all of it. I’m not done yet.”
She was gone.
“What the—?” Cruce’s hands were suddenly empty. He lunged forward and slammed into an invisible barrier. His eyes narrowed and he began to chant in a voice that made my blood ice, chiming like the full-blooded Unseelie Prince he was.
The king waved a hand and Cruce stopped chiming.
Cruce sketched a complicated symbol in the air, eyes narrowed on the king. Nothing happened. He began to chime again. The king silenced him.
Cruce conjured a rune and flung it at the king. It hit the invisible barrier and dropped. He flung a dozen more. They all did the same. It was like watching a man and a woman fight, where the man was simply trying to keep the woman from hurting herself too much.
Cruce rocked back on his heels and his wings began to open, black velvet and enormous, framing a nude, muscled body of such perfection that my cheeks were suddenly wet. Long black hair streamed down his shoulders; brilliant colors rushed beneath his bronze skin.
I touched my face and my fingers came away bloody.
I was awed by the dark majesty of him. I knew why War was as often revered as feared. I knew what it felt like to be cradled in those wings while he moved inside me.
The Unseelie King watched him, paternal pride glittering in his eyes.
Cruce was trying to destroy him, and he was proud of him.
Like a parent watching his child kick off the training wheels and take off down the drive for the first time without help.
And I knew that Cruce had never stood a chance, so long as the king cared to exist.
The danger would never be whether the king was powerful enough—he was and always would be the strongest of them all.
The true danger would always only be whether he cared enough.
He saw existence completely differently from everyone else. What we might view as defeat and destruction, he saw—like the Book he’d created—far down the arrows of time, as an act of creation.
Who knew? Maybe it was.
But I liked existing here and now, and I’d fight for it. I didn’t have a bird’s-eye view and didn’t want it. I liked padding around on dog paws, kicking up fall leaves and digging in spring dew, sniffing up scents on the ground, and living a life. I was only too happy to leave the flying for those with wings.
I reached for my spear. It was in my holster. And I realized it always had been whenever “V’lane” was around. It was part of the complex illusion he’d maintained. As an Unseelie, he’d never been able to touch it yet could have been killed by it, so whenever we were together, he’d fed me the glamour that it was no longer in my holster. Just as the Unseelie Princes had fed me an illusion that I’d been turning it on myself there in the church.
I never had. I’d chosen to throw it away because I’d believed the glamour. I could have killed them that night, if I’d been able to see through it. The power had always been right here, inside me, if I’d just known it.
I would kill him now.
“Don’t even think about it,” the Unseelie King said.
“He took your concubine. He faked her death. He raped me!”
“No harm, no foul.”
“Are you kidding me?”
He looked at his concubine. “Today amuses.”
Abruptly, the moon and megaliths were gone. We were back in the cavern.
Cruce chimed, his wings open to their full majestic glory, eyes blazing with righteous fury, lips peeled back in a snarl.
The king iced him like that.
A nude, avenging angel, encased in clear crystal. Blue-black bars shot up from the floor, framing his prison.
I should have told the king to put clothes on him.
Make the ice cloudy so no one could see him. Hide those stunning velvety wings. Tone down the golden halo around him.
Make him look less … angelic, sexual, erotic. But you know what they say about hindsight.
The king said to Kat, “He is your Sinsar Dubh now.”
“No!” Kat exclaimed. “We don’t want him!”
“Your fault it got out. Contain it better this time.”
I heard Barrons say, “McCabe? What the fuck are you doing here?”
People began to appear in the cavern, sifting in. The white-suited McCabe from Casa Blanc was joined by the leprechaun-like reservations clerk from my first night at the Clarin House and by the news vendor from the street who’d given me directions to the Garda, the one who’d called me a hairy jackass.
“Liz?” Jo said. “Where did you come from?”
Liz said nothing, simply moved, as they all did, to join the Unseelie King.
“He’s too big for one body,” I said numbly.
“I knew there was something wrong with her!” Jo exclaimed.
The king had been watching the sidhe-seers and Barrons. He’d posed as one of the players hunting his own Book. He’d been watching me all this time. Since the day I’d come to Dublin. He’d checked me into the Clarin House.
“Before that, beautiful girl.” The king slanted me a look that horrified me. Pride glittered in his starry eyes.
My high school gym coach joined him. When my grade school principal appeared, I locked my jaw and gave the king a mutinous glare. Since the beginning. “Little help might have been nice.”
The king cradled the concubine tenderly to his chest. “What would you change?”
“You must give her to us,” Dree’lia demanded. “We need her. Without V’lane, who will lead us?”
“Find a new queen. She is mine.”
Velvet bristled. “But there is no one—”
“Grow a pair, Velvet,” the king snapped.
“We don’t want Cruce. You take him,” Kat was insisting.
“What the bloody hell is going on? You can’t take the queen. We work for her,” Drustan was saying.
“What about the Compact?” Cian said. “We need to renegotiate it!”
“Change me back!” Christian demanded. “I ate only one bite. That’s not enough to do this to me. Why am I being punished?”
The king only had eyes for the woman in his arms.
“You can’t leave until you put the bloody walls back up,” Dageus was growling. “We’ve no idea how to go about—”
“You’ll figure it out.”
Skins began to drop to the floor, empty shells of the king’s parts. For a moment, I was worried my own might fall off, but it didn’t.
Barrons had pulled me back from being Pri-ya. I had no doubt the king would find his concubine, too. Wherever she was, in whatever cave of amnesia she was trapped, he would join her. Tell her stories. Make love to her. Until one day they both got up and walked out of it.
The dreamy-eyed guy began to change, absorbing the shadows that passed from the skins.
He stretched and expanded until he towered over us like the Sinsar Dubh’s beast, but without the malevolence, and when his wings spread wide, eclipsing the chamber in night, stars and worlds dangling from his quills, I felt his joy.
The thought that she’d left him by choice had driven him mad.
But she hadn’t. She’d been taken.
He’d loved her for all time.
Before she was made.
After he’d believed she was gone.
Sunshine to his ice. Frost to her fever.
I wished them forever.
You, too, beautiful girl.
The Unseelie King was gone.