He shoved me up so hard and fast, I went tumbling head over heels down his black and blood tunnel, where I wasted precious seconds trying to figure out how to shift out of his mode of travel and into my own. I finally regained my balance and kicked into my long starry passageway then shifted abruptly down into freeze-frame, stripping off my left glove and yanking my sword from my back with my right as I went.
I thrust my sword into the first Fae I saw, with a long-overdue roar of satisfaction.
One down, a thousand to go, I thought fiercely.
I plunged into the carnage. The bastards thought to kill Mac, thought to take our world, had been torturing and killing our people for two long years unchecked.
In the periphery of my vision I could see The Nine slashing their way toward Winter-born, leaving slaughtered Fae in their wake. She was precisely who we needed to kill, to buy time before another princess would be born, and I knew what Ryodan was thinking: kill her before she became lethal to me. The Sidhbha-jai is my kryptonite. If turned on me at full force, it shorts me out, renders me helpless. We’d had no idea new royalty were being born. Not a bloody clue. We’d been cut off for too long.
I spun, I stabbed, I whirled, I battled. I came back to life in Elyreum, being what I needed to be, doing what I was born to do.
Fae after Fae fell beneath my blade. Then Ryodan was behind me and we moved into flawless formation, fighting back to back.
“I told you to get the fuck out of here,” he growled over his shoulder.
“Tell the sun to leave the sky,” I growled back.
“It does when night moves in. I’m night.”
“Scientifically untrue. The sun remains, you just don’t see it.”
“We’ve accomplished our objectives. Retreat.”
“Not the boss of me.”
“Bloody hell, don’t I know that. Something’s wrong. The bitch is losing Fae left and right and doesn’t care. She’s waiting for something. I’m pulling the plug. Now.”
But it was too late. I’d argued too long.
The debilitating, soul-searing burn of the Sidhbha-jai slammed into me and charred my insides to useless ash. “J-Jayne,” I stuttered. “He m-must be h-here s-s-somewhere. F-Find him. K-Kill him!” That bastard! He wasn’t in hiding with his family. He’d been working for the Winter Court, likely offered amnesty, if he brought them my sword!
“I will. Get out!” Ryodan roared.
But I couldn’t. Nothing was working right. I thudded down into slow-mo and crashed to my knees. Then Ryodan had me and was flinging me over his shoulder.
“Don’t touch my left hand!” I screamed, rearing up on his back like a cobra, desperate to keep the ungloved, lethal appendage away from him.
A prince sifted in directly behind us, blasting me with staggering sexuality and, as he reached for me (I ached to go to him, burned to be his slave, hungered to worship my master!) I managed to retain a grip on a single shred of my mind, smiled sweetly at him with utter adoration and offered him my left hand, silently begging him to seize me from Ryodan’s shoulder and take me to Paradise.
Dark, unholy promise burned in his gaze. Blood pooled in mine as I proffered my deadly hand. Take me, take me, I willed.
He accepted my submission as his royal due and reached.
As our fingertips met, an explosion of high voltage stabbed up into my head, shot down into my body, and as it flared to lethal life, the Fae prince exploded into a thousand fragments of pale white flesh and paler, sharp bone.
Bits of him rained down on the club and, as the killing grip of the Sidhbha-jai released my mind, I caught a glimpse of Winter-born’s pale, incredulous face in the crowd.
Then Fae began to scream and trample each other in their haste to escape.
I kicked up, launching myself like a rocket from Ryodan’s shoulder, vaulting high into the air, desperate to get away from him because the voltage was still arcing and crackling inside me.
Off-balance, I missed the slipstream entirely, slammed into the floor, rolled and sprang to my feet.
Whatever I’d set free inside me wasn’t done yet, not nearly exhausted, it was still building, building, and I had no idea how to control it.
“Dani, get back here!” Ryodan roared.
I had to do something with it before he grabbed me again. Before I sent it shooting into him. I was not killing Ryodan. I’d done it twice before and hated it both times.
I spun on Winter-born and flung my hand at her, at the precise instant she thrust two pale, slender, icy hands at me.
Bolts of lightning exploded from my fingertips, one after the next, shattering her ice-summoned weapons, blasting a path through them, as I sent my power gunning for her—
Holy hell, she sifted out! I’d missed!
Furious, I slammed more bolts into the walls, into the floor. If I couldn’t kill her at least I could obliterate their horrific club from the face of our earth. I dumped energy from my body in powerful surges of lightning, then, abruptly, I was—
Sailing in space, crystal clear and cool, surrounded by an infinity of stars on a nebula-painted canvas of black velvet sky.
It was vast but I was enormous. It was ancient but I was, too. It was timeless but I was without end.
There was wind here. Gusting, swirling waves of it buffeting my body. It felt as if I might catch one and go shooting up higher, higher, before channeling the borrowed velocity to dive beneath a moon, perhaps go ricocheting out around a star.
I’d always thought space was still but it wasn’t, it was living and flowing, ebbing and changing. Not emptiness here but some kind of…dark matter that defied understanding, the stuff of the Cosmos, rife with possibility, as if all the hopes and dreams and desires that had ever been and would ever be were nestled deep within superdense molecules of darkness we could never comprehend, and, every now and then, something came along whose wings, or melody, rippled against that dark matter, stirring it up with lightning and song, with bolts of extreme high voltage, changing, waking, beginning something new, stitching things together in ways that defied comprehension, making connections, forging patterns and symmetry from chaos.
I felt a great breeze then and turned whatever head I had into the wind. An enormous black Hunter sailed along beside me, head rocking gently as it buffeted the waves, lips pulled back as it chuffed softly and turned its gargantuan head to fix me with a single glowing orange eye. Ready?
I frowned. For what?
I fly.
I see that.
You fly, too.
What was it saying? That I might remain here with it, flying through the greatest unexplored territory of all? Discover the secrets of the Cosmos, behold its ancient mysteries?
All of that and more.
But my people. This wasn’t my world. Mine was in danger once more, and probably always would be. My world needed me. I had a job to do.
I closed my eyes, willing it all to go away.
When I opened them again, I stood blinking repeatedly, blinded by the sudden, harsh light, the jarring transition.
I was in the club but things had changed while I’d drifted in the cosmic vision. The surviving Fae had vanished; sifted, flown or run away, leaving behind only the dead, the Nine and me.
“Dani.” Ryodan’s voice seemed to come from a great distance.