I’d been really wrong about a lot of things back then.
The lure of watching the sunrise on a Hunter had been impossible to resist. As we sluiced through wet clouds, I nestled close to the frigid base of its wings, with the hot brimstone of its breath drifting past my face. Clamping the bony ridge between my thighs, I threw my arms wide and trailed my gloved fingertips through crimson, orange, and pink mist. Head thrown back, gazing up at the dawn, I experienced a moment of uncomplicated bliss.
I was just Mac. Not someone’s daughter or lover or sister or walking time bomb. Flying alone in the vast morning, I felt connected to everything, simple and good. Sky above, earth below, fire within.
Although I despised the Fae on my world, I had to admit, their presence made it more beautiful. And therein was the deadliness of their race: seduction via beauty, magic, and the power to grant wishes.
Rays of sun slanted intermittently down as we pierced banks of fantastically colored fog, until the Hunter, perhaps intuiting my innate desire to enjoy the sun at any opportunity, soared straight up and broke the dense cover to float lazily above rainbow-hued cumulus and nimbus stretching as far as the eye could see, granting me a clear view of the star I so worship, whose undiluted presence is so rare in rainy Dublin.
For a time, I stretched out, ignoring the ice beneath my back, soaking up the golden rays on my front, basking like a cat at a warm hearth. Who needed a Fae trip to the beach when I could sunbathe in the sky? But it wasn’t long before the clouds swirled once again in my mind and I reluctantly refocused, urging my ride to take us low again so I could get a Hunter’s-eye view of the city.
We plummeted through mist, dropping down and down until at last I glimpsed rooftops and streets and gas lamps dotting the overcast, cloudy morning that was a typical day in Dublin.
People were out, heading off to help rebuild in exchange for supplies. Street vendors were once again hawking wares at portable stands, including food and drinks. Guardians stood by the fours near each vendor, reminding me it was far from a safe city yet.
Still, I felt a fierce flash of pride and optimism. The walls had fallen. We’d gotten back up. The ice monster had come. We’d survived and the city had recovered. Now we had black holes. We would figure it out.
“Lower,” I urged. I wanted a closer look at certain parts of town. I wanted to know if any of the Shades had returned, if there were new castes of Unseelie in town, if we had more black holes of considerable size to worry about. I would have gone on a focused hunt for all the black holes, but apparently Ryodan had been keeping track of them for some time now. No point in duplicating our efforts.
As we flew through a whiteout of fog above the docks, circling wide to turn back over the city, I suddenly gasped, “No! Stop! Turn the other way!” A flock of my dreaded stalkers had just materialized directly ahead of us, streaking out from behind a bank of low-slung clouds.
But my outcry came too late. We dove straight into the center of the clutch and I squeezed my eyes shut—remnant of some absurd ostrich instinct that if I couldn’t see them maybe they couldn’t see me—bracing myself for their sudden cloying presence on all sides.
Nothing.
I sniffed cautiously. No awful stench, no rustle of leathery cloaks, no creepy chittering.
I opened my eyes a slit.
I was still alone on the Hunter’s back.
I opened them wide and glanced over my shoulder. My ghoulish stalkers were vanishing rapidly behind us.
“Didn’t they see me?” I exclaimed. Was I so small and unexpected astride a Hunter that they’d not noticed me? I nudged the icy beast to get its attention. “Do you know what those things you just flew through are?”
Minions. It spoke in my mind. To one nearly as ancient as I.
“One what? A Hunter?”
Collector.
“Collector of what?”
Powerful, broken things. It presumes to fix them. It once tried to fix the one you call Unseelie king. It rumbled with soft laughter.
I couldn’t imagine anything trying to “fix” the Unseelie king. What would it change? Where would it even begin? And how powerful was this “collector” if it could actually tinker with something as omnipotent as the King of the Dark Fae? “I take it that didn’t go well.”
Subjective.
“Was one of the things we flew through the collector?”
That one does not appear until it has decided. Dispatches minions to assess. Not all things are deemed fixable.
I bristled. For months now I was being assessed by something’s minions? There was an ancient thing out there that had decided I was “broken” and wasn’t sure whether it wanted to fix me? That was offensive on too many levels for me to count. I had yet another enemy out there and didn’t even know what it looked like.