34
I walked through Temple Bar with a spring in my step. I’d woken early, taken one look at the sunshine shafting in through my bedroom window, dressed, and headed out to run errands.
The fridge was empty, I had two birthdays I was determined to celebrate before they got any more belated, and I was going to have to do some serious improvising with ingredients to bake a cake. Since Halloween, butter, eggs, and milk were a scarce commodity, but a Southern woman could do a lot with shortening, condensed milk, and powdered eggs. I was going to bake a chocolate cake with thick, creamy double-chocolate fudge icing if it was the last thing I did. Dani and I would watch movies and paint our fingernails. It would be like old times with Alina.
I turned my face up to the sun as I hurried down the street. After what seemed an interminable hiatus, spring had returned to Dublin.
The season of sunshine and rebirth was overdue for me. Though I’d managed to avoid miserable months of cold weather, busy in Faery or the Silvers, it had still been the longest winter of my life.
Spring didn’t look any different than winter, but you could feel it in the air—the kiss of warmth on the breeze, the scent blowing off the ocean that carried the promise of buds and blossoms, if not here, somewhere else in the world. I’d never thought I’d miss flies and insects, but I did. There wasn’t a single thing growing in Dublin—and that meant no moths, butterflies, birds, or bees. Not a single flower bloomed, no shoots pushed out from young limbs, not a blade of grass grew. The Shades had decimated the city on their way out, before slamming the door shut with a bang last Halloween. The soil was barren.
I was no horticulturalist, but I’d been doing some research. I was pretty sure if we reintroduced the right nutrients into the soil, in time, we’d be able to grow things again.
We had a lot to reclaim. Trees to remove and replace. Planters and flower boxes to fill. Parks to redesign. I planned to start small, haul dirt back from the abbey, grow a few daisies, buttercups, maybe some petunias and impatiens. Fill my bookstore with ferns and spider plants and begin taking back the night in my own space before spilling over onto the rooftop garden and beyond.
One day Dublin would live and breathe again. One day all these husks of what had once been people would be swept up and buried in a memorial ceremony. One day, tourists would come to see ground zero and reminisce about the Halloween when the walls fell—maybe even mention in passing a girl who cowered in a belfry before helping save the day—then head off to one of six hundred newly restored pubs to celebrate that the human race had taken back what was theirs.
Because we would. No matter who or what I was, I was determined to capture and reinter the Book, then get to work figuring out a way to put the walls back up. Along the way, I’d find proof that I wasn’t the king, just a human woman with a lot of memories someone else had planted for reasons that would make sense when I finally knew them. I wasn’t the fulcrum of a prophecy that would either save or doom the human race. I was merely the person who’d been pre-programmed by the queen—or who knew? Maybe the king—to track the Book in case it escaped, just like the Keltar had been manipulated: one small part of the equation for sealing it away again, forever this time.
As I sauntered through the morning, I tried to slip back into the mind of the young woman who’d stepped off the plane, taken a cab through Temple Bar, and checked in to the Clarin House late last summer, bemused by the thick accent of the leprechaun-like old man behind the reservations desk. Starving. Scared and grieving. Dublin had been so huge, and I’d been so small and clueless.
I looked around, absorbing the silent shell of a city, remembering the hustle and bustle. The streets had been crammed with craic—vibrant life that took itself entirely for granted.
“Morning, Ms. Lane.” Inspector Jayne moved into step with me.
I assessed him quickly. He wore tight khaki-colored jeans with a plain white T-shirt stretched over his barrel chest and military boots laced up outside his pants. He was draped in ammo, pistols in his waistband and arm holster, Uzi over his shoulder. No place for an evil Book to hide. Months ago he’d had the start of a paunch. It was no longer there. He was rangy with muscle, long limbed, and walking like a man who had his feet planted firmly on the ground for the first time in years.
I smiled, genuinely pleased to see him, but it was all I could do not to reach for my spear. I hoped he wasn’t still after it or holding grudges.
“Fine morning, isn’t it?”
I laughed. “I was thinking the same thing. Is there something wrong with us? Dublin’s a shell, and we look ready to burst into a cheery whistle.” The Unseelie-spiked-tea-drinking inspector and I had certainly come a long way.
“No paperwork. I used to hate paperwork. Didn’t know how much of my life it was eating up.”
“New world.”
“Bloody strange one.”
“But good.”
“Aye. The streets are quiet. Book’s laying low. Haven’t seen a Hunter in days. We Irish know to make the most of the times of plenty, for sure enough they’ll be famine again. Made love to my wife last night. Children are healthy and strong. It’s a good day to be alive,” he said matter-of-factly.
I nodded in complete understanding. “Speaking of Hunters, you’ll be seeing at least one in the skies soon.” I filled him in on the outline of our plan—that I would be scouring the streets by Hunter, looking for the Sinsar Dubh. “So don’t shoot me down, okay?”
His eyes narrowed shrewdly. “How do you control it? Can you force it to take you to its lair? We could wipe out the lot of them if we could only find the den.”
“Let’s get the Book off the streets first. Then we’ll help you hunt, I promise.”
“A promise I’ll be holding you to. I don’t like using the girl, but she insists. That one’s had a hard enough life. She should be home, somebody watching out for her. Kills like she was born to it. Makes me wonder how long she’s been—”
“MacKayla,” V’lane said.
Jayne was frozen, mouth ajar, mid-step. Not iced. Just immobilized.
I stiffened and reached for my spear.
“We need to talk.”
“Understatement. You need to explain.” I spun in a circle, spear up. For whatever reason, I still had it.
“Sheathe the spear.”
“Why haven’t you taken it?”
“I offer you a show of good faith.”
“Where are you?” I demanded. I could hear his voice, but he wasn’t visible and the source of his voice kept moving.
“I will appear when you have given me your show of good faith.”
“Which is?”
“I choose to let you keep it. You choose to sheathe it. We will honor each other with trust and confidence.”
“Not a chance in hell.”
“I am not the only one that has some explaining to do. How did you bring the queen out through the king’s mirror?”
“Let me tell you what I don’t understand. Last Halloween I got raped by Unseelie Princes. You told me you were busy carrying your queen to safety on human feet. But now I know the queen had been in the Unseelie prison for—how did you word it?—many human years. Where were you really that night, V’lane?”
He materialized in front of me, a dozen feet away.
“I did not lie to you. Not entirely. I told you I could not be in two places at once, and that much was true. However, I misspoke when I said I was carrying my queen to safety. Instead, I was taking advantage of those hours, searching for her in Darroc’s Silvers. I was certain he was behind her disappearance. I believed he had imprisoned her in one of the stolen mirrors at LaRuhe, but I could not search those Silvers until the magic of the realms was neutralized. When I crushed his dolmen for you—which we rebuilt, and I succeeded in retrieving Christian only last night, or I would have come to explain myself sooner—I endeavored to search them then. But Darroc had learned much from journals stolen from the White Mansion, and I was unable to break his wards.”
“You spent the night I was getting raped searching his house and finding nothing?”
“A regrettable decision only because it did not yield fruit. I was certain she was there. If she had been, it would have been worth it. As it was, when I discovered what had transpired, I felt …” He lowered his lids over his eyes, leaving only a thin band of silver glittering beneath his lashes. “I felt.” His mouth shaped a bitter smile. “It was untenable. Fae do not feel. Certainly not the queen’s first prince. I tasted envy of my dark brethren for knowing you in a way I never would. I choked on rage that they harmed you. I grieved the loss of something of incomparable measure I could never have again. Is that not human regret? I felt …” He inhaled slow and deep, then blew it out. “Shame.”
“So you say.”
The smile twisted. “For the first time in my existence, I wanted to experience a temporary oblivion. I was unable to make my thoughts obey me. They wandered of their own accord to matters that were hellish to suffer. I was unable to make them stop. It made me want to stop. Is that love, MacKayla? Is that what it does to you? Why, then, do humans long for it?”
I jerked, remembering a moment when I’d considered stretching on the ground next to Barrons and bleeding out next to him.
“I am tired of being in impossible positions. For an eternity, my first allegiance has been to my queen. Without her, my race is doomed. There is no successor to her throne. There is none worthy or capable of leading my people. I could not choose to help you over attempting to recover her. My emotions, to which I had no right, could not be permitted to interfere. For too long I have been all that stands between peace and war.” He locked gazes with me. “Unless …”
“Unless what?”
“Still you point that spear at me.”
I stalked toward him, drawing my spear arm back.
He vanished.
He spoke behind me. “Could it be you are becoming like us?”
I whirled, eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Are you becoming Fae, in the way some long ago were born? I suspect the young Druid also suffers birth pains. It is a most unexpected development.”
“And unwelcome.”
“That remains to be seen.”
Was that his breath at my ear, his lips against my hair?
“It’s unwelcome to me! I’m not going to become one of you. Get it out. I don’t want it.”
I felt his hands on my waist, sliding lower, over my ass. “Immortality is a gift. Princess.”
“I’m not a princess and I’m not turning Fae.”
“Not yet perhaps. But you are something, are you not? I wonder what. I weary of watching Barrons piss circles around you. I tire of waiting for the day you will finally look at me and see that I am so much more than a Fae and a prince. I am a male. With hunger for you that knows no bottom. You and I, more than anyone else in the universe, are perfect for each other.”
He was half a dozen feet away, facing me, looking down into my eyes.
“I do not wish to continue like this. I am divided and know no peace. Pride has prevented me from speaking plainly. No more.”
He vanished and reappeared right in front of me, so close I could see a shimmer of rainbows in his iridescent eyes.
The spear was between us.
I tightened my hand on the hilt. He closed his over mine, pointed the spear at his chest, and leaned into me. I could feel him, rock hard and ready, against me. He was breathing fast and shallow, eyes glittering.
“Accept me or kill me, MacKayla. But choose. Just fucking choose.”