“You felt that? But I wasn’t in control of it then!”
“Your rage was enormous and told me what I needed to know. You were in there, fighting. Later the Book tried to pretend it was shifting back and forth between you and it, and I played along but I could sense only the Book at that time. The only other time I felt you was when I came to you.”
“And told me to become it.”
His dark eyes gleamed. Which you did superbly. My little monster.
I gasped. “You could feel me when I was like that—stripped of all emotion?”
You were a woman who knew her own strength. Powerful. Resolute. Beautiful.
I dropped my head back down into the hollow of his neck, glowing inside. Beneath me lay the only man that could probably ever understand what I’d become at that moment, and could admire it. It would have terrified most men, to watch a woman strip away everything that made her human in order to get the job done. He found my strength beautiful. My monster and his beast; they liked each other.
“We have to make plans to move humans off world, Jericho.” I turned my mind away from myself and toward our many problems. “This planet may die, but that doesn’t mean the end of the human race. They can live on another world, colonize.”
“Ryodan and I are already on it. Years ago we mapped paths in the Silvers to worlds that could sustain human life. We knew this world might one day become more hostile than we desired.” He was silent a moment, then added, “Still, we failed to consider it might one day cease to exist entirely. We’ve never faced the risk of permanent death until recently. Now all of us face the threat of complete annihilation.”
Or eternal hell. Reborn in a black hole to die again and again. I traced my fingers down the sharp angle of his jaw, touched his lips, vowing silently that I would never let that happen.
He caught my hand and kissed each finger then said, “When you think of the lives your opening the Sinsar Dubh cost, think also that if you had not, you would not have become the Fae queen, thereby gaining the only magic that may save this world.”
“You think the lives of the few are worth the lives of the many.”
“The universe works in mysterious ways. When you live long enough, you begin to see a grander purpose and pattern, larger than any of us.”
“The only way that grander purpose works for me is if I manage to save the Earth. I don’t know what I have or how to use it.”
“We’ll figure it out. But if it looks like we can’t, you’re going off world, too.”
I drew back and looked at him. The old me would have bristled, snapped an angry denial. The new me simply kissed him then drew back and said gently, “No, I’m not.” I would live and die beside this man. But I would never leave him.
He smiled then, white teeth flashing in his dark face, rolled me beneath him and stretched his body over mine and unleashed a storm of passion on my body while above us thunder rolled and lightning cracked as an end-of-days deluge broke loose over Dublin.
MAC
When I woke up, Barrons was gone. I amused myself with the thought that I’d so thoroughly exhausted him that he’d had to go eat to regain his strength. I’d tried to exhaust him. I was the one who’d ended up passing out on the Chesterfield. No surprise there.
Last night had been incredible, worth the horrors I’d endured, to end up here, now, the way I was.
I rolled over onto my back and mouthed a silent thank-you at the ceiling for putting me through my recent ordeal. I’d known, the night we’d defeated the corporeal Book, that there was a serious imbalance of power and personal fortitude between me and Barrons, and it had eaten at me. It was an imbalance I no longer felt.
A scrabbling at the front door jarred me from my thoughts. Sighing, I pushed my hair out of my face—holy crap, it was nearly to my waist!—poked my head up and peered over the back of the sofa.
I narrowed my eyes and tried to process what I was seeing.
Little fairies were stuck like colorful tree frogs to every rain-soaked inch of glass on the front of the bookstore.
Peering in at me.
I peered back.
We did that for a few minutes. I had no idea what they were thinking but I was pretty much just thinking, What are these sparkly little spotted and striped things and why are they decorating my store? It was a type of Fae I’d never seen before; diminutive and dainty like the death-by-laughter Fae but less flashy, earthier.
I finally pushed myself up, walked to the window and touched my hand to the glass, tracing the shape of a small, delicate female with sandy spots and tawny hair.
She shivered and began to chirp excitedly.