Until they hunt me, time is my ally. I possess the weapon to accomplish all my goals. I prize the spear, I loathe it. It might damage me. Its weight beneath my arm both reassures and repulses.
Singing softly beneath my breath—one of MacKayla’s favorites, “Sh-boom, sh-boom, life could be a dream sweetheart”—I move down an alley, around a corner, proceeding to my first objective. My map of Dublin, once an amalgam of neural currents, now has visual latitude and longitude. While MacKayla wandered aimless, I did not. I was paying attention.
What a sorry experiment she was. I desired so much more.
Unwavering laser-focus on one’s goals is power. Humans rarely achieve it, infesting their garden with the cultivated parasites of empathy, compassion, mercy, nurturing the grubs of guilt and penance, heaping emotional fertilizer on every acre of arable, marchable, conquerable land until nothing remains but the sky-high, sickly weeds of their stunted vision. A blind gardener reaps no crop, escapes no predator.
We are desire, lust, greed, and the path we choose to supremacy.
Humans romanticize this truth. Fact: they desire sex. Fact: they desire limiting that vessel from having sex with others. Fact: they create a ritual called marriage and an illusion called love to validate their greed and bid for supremacy over the object of their lust.
WE ARE DESIRE, LUST, GREED, AND THE PATH WE CHOOSE TO SUPREMACY. Take notes. Cretins. Idiots. Call it what it is. Then go forth and fucking conquer.
There are currently two Unseelie princes and one princess living. They will die. I permit none between my throne and me.
My body is human, not prince. Pity. A Fae form would eradicate irksome limitations. But there were no princes available the night I seized the opportunity for escape. I lack wings to soar into the sky, slash Death’s throat with my spear and douse the fire below with his blood.
But my first victim knows MacKayla and will come to her unaware she is me.
I giggle. “Surprise,” I murmur, envisioning the moment.
I spy the first of my children, offspring of the spells I am as I exit the Dark Zone. They are more my seed than they ever were the penitent king’s. Oxymoron that. A true king knows no penitence, bows to nothing and no one.
All of MacKayla’s knowledge of the world around her is mine. Her names for things come easily to me. My existence within her has been far more vivid than anything I experienced from within the covers of the Book that once incarcerated me. Three of my forty-ninth-made caste—those she calls Rhino-boys—have a woman in the alley, willing sacrifice to partake of their flesh. They play with her for momentary pleasure, beady eyes, beady minds, puny shadows flickering in puny caves.
Much of the Unseelie King’s knowledge is mine as well. I sprang into existence from the spells he created to birth his Dark Court and know the True Names of the Unseelie, which grants me control over them. Unfortunately there are those Unseelie recently born, such as the Highlander prince, whose names are yet unknown or I would simply summon him and slay him now. Then there is Cruce, currently bound by the king’s chamber magic, impossible to summon. I will eliminate my most challenging enemies first.
I chime in the First Language and three tusked heads swivel. I command them to worship me, to offer the flesh that will grant me Jada’s strength and speed. The woman is abandoned as my children stumble, snuffle, and fall to their knees, heads bowed, shaking with fear and subservience. A simple caste. Not my finest work.
The Fae have long hungered for someone to lead them, make the decisions they fear, the bold ones that bring chaos, death, and war. I’m momentarily incensed by their limits—these frail toys that are all with which I have to play. These things that aren’t real like me.
Still, I prefer frail toys to nothing. I’ve had an abundance of nothing.
Nothing is Hell. Nothing is where MacKayla is now.
It’s in breaking things that you understand them.
It’s in understanding them that you control them.
The Unseelie tremble before me.
As will the world.
CHRISTIAN MACKELTAR
Arlington Abbey. Despite my efforts, the fortress has fallen.
Although the deadly icefire no longer burns, I was unable to prevent the citadel’s destruction. The roof has collapsed and blackened timbers jut skyward, broken ribs of a once-great beast. Walls slump in graves of chalky ash and tumbled stone. The ancient sanctuary, built first on a shian, pagan temple, then church, is a ruin.
An inch of ice coats the lawn and the now cold bones of the abbey. Drawing moisture from the sky—Dublin has a veritable flood rain eternally waiting to fall, as if, on the day of creation, a vengeful god suspended an airborne ocean above the Emerald Isle—I’d shaped it with my wrath into a killing frost, and soared over the fortress, extinguishing the unnatural blue-black flames.