“You’re not physically damaged.”

  “Then why did you look so horrified?”

  “You flickered out then you were back, flat on the floor, white, stiff, and still as death. You felt dead to me for a brief moment,” he says grimly. “I could no longer sense you.”

  A chill slithers up my spine. The brand that connects us springs from dark, blood magic, the most potent kind. It allows us to feel the constant, quiet burn of each other’s existence—and it was completely shorted out by the ward for a split second. That’s deeply alarming. “Good God, what did I hit? Who has so much power?”

  “Me. Old gods. Some Fae.”

  “Sorry, but in comparison to what I just encountered, your wards are mere suggestions. That was a perfectly impenetrable barrier.”

  His nostrils flare and his eyes narrow. “I employ necessary force. Key word there being ‘necessary.’ Not one iota more. The Fae are egotistical, megalomaniac show-offs. Restraint, Ms. Lane, is the true measure of power. The deadliest among us conceal it.”

  Uh-oh, I’m Ms. Lane again, and his diction is getting stuffy and precise. On the rare occasions Barrons’s ego gets bent, I can’t help but laugh, and I’d have snickered now but I’m too busy obsessing over which Fae of mine is capable of erecting such potent, destructive, immutable wards that leave an immobilizing residue.

  I was incapacitated.

  Roadkill in the truest sense of the word. Rendered helpless, lying flat on my back, unable to defend myself. If someone or something had followed me back—and I’ve heard sifting can be traced by a rare few—I was a sitting duck, easy prey. Who among my court has the power to do that to their queen?

  I consider trying to assail the ward again. Now that I know it’s there, I’m prepared. Perhaps I can feel my way around it, slip through it, blast it to smithereens.

  Barrons intuits my thoughts and says flatly, “I forbid it. We don’t know for sure who has her or exactly what you’ll be smashing up against. Perhaps they felt you. Perhaps they set a second ward or trap of some kind.”

  Forbidding doesn’t work any better on me than it works on him. However, one of the courtesies we learned to grant each other while dodging my many enemies in Faery is we pull together and employ the less risky idea (assuming it’s not a significant time suck) and only if that fails attempt the riskier one. I concede attempting the ward again carries a higher degree of risk.

  I know who’s behind it. He’s the only one unconvinced.

  Pushing to my feet, I hold out my hand and, when he takes it, lace our fingers together in preparation to sift. “Fine. We’ll start at the Winter Court.” I’m certain she’s the one who has my mother. From what Kat told me about Elyreum, and our fallen sidhe-seer sisters who’d sacrificed sanctity, sanity, and life to infiltrate their ranks, attending the club, even sleeping with the enemy, Winter is my most powerful adversary, the one most inclined to prey on humans and challenge my right to rule. I can feel her presence out there; her icy, bottomless hunger to seize my crown, almost as if one of the many perks of wearing the crown is that the scent of pending betrayal gets gusted straight to the Faerie queen on a magic-infused breeze.

  Years ago, Barrons and I toured Faery, meeting the various castes, inspecting the courts (before they began trying to kill me, while they were still playing nice). I know exactly where the decrepit, fallen-to-ruin castle of Winter is, as well as Spring, Summer, and Autumn, the High Court, and the queen’s bower. I also know where the queen’s secret aerie is; which none of her court knows exists. Years ago, so much about Faery was foreign to me, but I’ve been studying files on it for a few hundred years, suspended in a timeless chamber, and now possess a powerful advantage: The Light Court drinks from the Cauldron repeatedly, which means I know more about the history and powers of the Fae than they do. The queen’s files are passed from one to the next. I have the most complete history of the Fae that exists with the exception of the Unseelie king.

  As we sift out, I deposit a small indoor conservancy in the center of the third floor, with young trees, grasses, and rocks draped with tender mosses and delicate berries to feed the lemurs while we are away. As a hasty afterthought, I add a circular, stone-ringed pool of water and remove all rugs. Poop is easier to clean off hardwood.

  * * *

  The Kingdom of Winter is no longer derelict.

  The Lane antebellum in Ashford, Georgia, is still downtrodden as hell, but, by God, Winter is restored.

  That’s just bullshit.

  You might want to turn that off. Barrons gestures to my feet.

  I glance down. The ice-crusted snow has melted in a ten-foot circumference around my boots, leaving sodden earth dressed with a brilliant carpet of bloodred snow blossoms.

  I resent losing my home. I resent that Winter reclaimed hers, so I began taking it without even thinking about it. Fae emotion affects the climate.

  Stealth is an advantage. Leaving bread crumbs as you hunt is not.

  Point made. Retracting my emotions, I stuff them in a box and, as the flowers vanish, snow reclaims the land.

  The kingdom of Winter is a diamond-crusted study of beautiful cruelties, lovely and inimically dangerous, for each alluring facet contains a hidden weapon or terror.

  It’s brutally cold—we ice where we stand—so I adjust our body temperatures by erecting a slice of warmer climate around us, and ice sloughs off us in great, melting sheets.

  I sifted us in about a half mile from the castle proper, partially hidden behind a frozen and sometimes horrifically animated hedge that is part of a shoulder-high, statue-studded labyrinth; the better to assess our surroundings as I have no idea how many courtiers she might have in attendance or whether she’ll have posted guards.

  Last I was here, Winter was a desolate, iced landscape with drift blasting across the terrain, fogging the air white, tumbles of stone and ice and statues barely visible. Today it’s clear, if not sunny. Sun doesn’t exist in Winter; there lurks only an intermittently glimpsed frost-bitten orb of wan blue.

  Beyond the labyrinth, four spires explode up from the castle, alabaster ice splintering the leaden sky. Each tower sports a circular walk at the apex, but there are no guards manning them. The castle is enormous, a fair chunk of the White Mansion, but the bulk of it is concealed behind forty-foot-high walls of silvery, metal-laced ice. With the exception of the slopes of snow-drifted roofs, flying buttresses, and the currently empty promenade that crowns the main hall, I can see none of the enormous courtyard I’ve read about in my files which is capable of comfortably accommodating tens of thousands of Fae. Last time I was here, the walls had collapsed and the castle was a dripping, icicle-drenched ruin, abandoned for millennia; all of it little more than a misshapen sloe of ice.

  Frosted, low-hanging clouds gust across the arctic terrain, driven by a metallic-scented breeze, hovering a few feet from the ground, and, as one of them passes, I glimpse razor-sharp edges on the minuscule snowflakes of which the cloud is comprised. Getting caught in one would tear me up far worse than being stuck in a southern burr-bush patch and leave me bloody and tainted by some delicate (short-lasting) poison. It wouldn’t kill me, but would certainly be a painful, irritating distraction.

  It’s too quiet, Barrons growls.

  I concur. The hush that accompanies a once-in-a-century snowstorm, when the world is so densely carpeted with feet and feet of drifts that it mutes all acoustics and makes you feel like you might be the only person alive, muzzles the land.

  I frown, glancing at the ice-coated forest to the south. Though the wind is blowing and knife-edged boughs scrape against one another, there isn’t a hint of the tortured groaning/chiming sound they were making the last time I was here. To the west, the frozen river that gurgles and leaps beneath two feet of ice and shrieks with the voices of countless tortured humans who were abducted over millennia and sealed beneath the surface, their all-too-aware frozen souls permanently entombed, is as silent as the dead should be.

  It’s almost as if all sound has been forbidden, Barrons muses.

  I glance at him sharply.

  Yes, I say and abruptly realize what I was too distracted to notice before. Since we’ve arrived, Barrons hasn’t spoken a single word aloud. Every bit of our conversation was passed between us in silence along the private communication channels of our brand.

  I open my mouth to state the obvious, but no sound comes out. Eyes flashing, I growl, Something is very wrong in Winter, Barrons.

  Nodding grimly, he takes my hand, and we begin the trek across the treacherous terrain to the frozen fortress ahead.

  12

  You can have my isolation

  you can have the hate that it brings

  CHRISTIAN

  Before I began turning into an Unseelie prince, I was an ordinary Highlander with a healthy sex drive, you know, that kind of constant male background music of sex-sex-sex, find-it-have-it-drown-in-it-before-more-perfectly-good-sperm-die playing to an easy, sensuous beat in my head.

  While every now and then a woman came along that made that music ratchet up to a hard-core version of NIN’s “Closer,” rendering me a bit dense when it came to the finer nuances of our relationship (those women were usually whacked; don’t ask me why nut jobs are so much hotter in bed), nothing in my life prepared me for falling victim to the sexual appetites of an Unseelie prince, burdened with a killing lust.

  I slake my lust, the woman dies.

  Who even dreams up that kind of shit? What the bloody hell was the Unseelie king thinking when he created his royal caste? Did Death really have to be the death of anyone he fucked? Did the half-mad king sit around and cackle about that particular bit of nastiness? Did he even care?

  I suppose the original Death must have instinctively known how to mute his killing Sidhba-jai, or learned in time to control it, or simply hadn’t cared that he killed while slaking his needs.

  Then again, confined to the Unseelie prison, perhaps he never got to slake his needs, which would go a long way toward explaining how rabid the Unseelie princes were when the walls finally came tumbling down. I know I’d be mad as a hatter after three quarters of a million years of celibacy, whether hobbled by a Fae sex drive or an average dose of male testosterone.

  I wasted the rest of the day after Mac left, tamping down my raging desire to find the nearest willing woman and passing it, instead, with Kat and Sean, trying to teach the black Irish nephew of Dublin’s most notorious, deceased crime mobster, Rocky O’Bannion, what I’d learned about how to control our power.

  Sean and I walked the final paltry acres of grass in my kingdom, over and over, and bloody well over again, as I endeavored to instruct him on how to sense the earth beneath his boots and draw power from it without scorching the ground to charred ruin.

  Over and over again, growing increasingly hostile as he went, he blackened the earth, drawing with the magnet of his rage the storm of the bloody century to my demesne. Worms screamed in anguish as they burned. Moles, disturbed from slumber, whimpered once then crumbled to ash. I suffered the soft implosion of larvae not yet formed enough to rue the beauty they were losing; subterranean life in all its dark, earthy grandeur. The occasional burrowing snake hissed defiance as it was seared to death.

  Sean O’Bannion walks—the earth turns black, barren, and everything in it dies, a dozen feet down. Hell of a princely power. Again, what the fuck was the Unseelie king thinking? Was he?

  Incensed by failure, Sean insisted hotly, as we stood in the bloody deluge—it wasn’t raining, that scarce-restrained ocean that parked itself above Ireland at the dawn of time and proceeded to leak incessantly, lured by the siren-song of Sean’s broodiness decamped to Scotland and split wide open—that I was either lying or it didn’t work the same for each prince. Patiently (okay, downright pissily, but, for fuck’s sake, I could be having sex again and gave that up to help him), I explained it did work the same for each of us but, because he wasn’t druid-trained, it might take time for him to understand how to tap into it. Like learning to meditate. Such focus doesn’t come easy, nor does it come all at once. Practice is key.

  He refused to believe me. He stormed thunderously and soddenly off, great ebon wings dripping rivers of water, lightning bolts biting into the earth at his heels, Kat trailing sadly at a safe distance behind.

  I was raised from birth to be in harmony with the natural world. Humans are the unnatural part of it. Animals lack the passel of idiotic emotions we suffer. I’ve never seen an animal feel sorry for itself. While other children played indoors with games or toys, my da led me deep into the forest and taught me to become part of the infinite web of beating hearts that fill the universe, from the birds in the trees to the insects buzzing about my head, to the fox chasing her cubs up a hillside and into a cool, splashing stream, to the earthworms tunneling blissfully through the vibrant soil. By the age of five, it was hard for me to understand anyone who didn’t feel such things as a part of everyday life. As I matured, when a great horned owl perched nightly in a tree beyond my window, Uncle Dageus taught me to cast myself within it (gently, never usurping) to peer out from its eyes. Life was everywhere, and it was beautiful.

  Animals, unlike humans, can’t lie.

  We humans are pros at it, especially when it comes to lying to ourselves.

  I counseled myself to patient, repeated attempts despite Sean’s pissy attitude. I had the advantage of being druid-trained; still, it took me years to figure out that the earth is the seat of my power, and how to nuance and finesse it.

  Sean’s lost in an inner darkness of his own creation and can see nothing—wants to see nothing—beyond it. He believes on some level he deserves to be lost in despair. I was in that desperate, bleak hell for a long time, too. I hated everyone and everything, blamed everyone and everything.

  And as long as I felt that way, I made no progress.

  We’re fools to think injury or bad luck occurs from a single happenstance, or can ever truly be blamed on anyone or thing. We own our fates, we choose to get up in the morning, we choose to go out into the world and live, so we’re always at least one part complicit. That doesn’t mean we’re at fault for what befalls us, merely that we must own what’s befallen us, in order to continue forward in a meaningful way. Regardless of what hand life deals us, we are what we are, and railing against it makes not one bloody iota of difference and only keeps us trapped where we don’t want to be and, honestly, don’t belong.

  You must be meticulous about the thoughts you send out into the universe. It’s listening. Argue for your limits and, sure enough, they’re yours. You have to argue for your dreams.

  Speaking of dreams…I fold my arms behind my head and luxuriate in the bliss of sprawling flat on my back in bed for the first time in years, without the encumbrance of wings. I’ve always been a back sleeper, and since I didn’t get to fuck today and it’s now too late for me to find a woman that wouldn’t require coin in exchange (that chivalrous Keltar romantic still beats powerfully in my heart), I’ve no doubt I’ll be dreaming about sex for the paltry few hours I drift. I don’t need to sleep anymore, but the human part of me enjoys it and keeps trying. My window of slumber, however, continues to shrink and grow more elusive.

  Mac says princes don’t sleep at all. If that’s true, I’m not looking forward to completing the transformation. What is life without dreams?

  * * *

  I suspect since my last thought before falling asleep was about Mac’s comment that princes don’t sleep at all, I end up dreaming about her, which makes me paranoid Barrons might catch wind of it in the dreaming, and somehow black-magic his way into my subconscious and kill me—he’s a prickly, territorial bastard. If anyone can pull off such a stunt, it’s him.

  Mac is sexy in ways I can’t put into words. A fascinating darkness lurks beneath all that bubblegum pinkness she exudes that makes a man wonder just how flat-out ferocious and kinked she is in bed. Like I said, duality is my poison.

  So I’m dreaming she’s standing at the foot of my four-poster, spectacularly naked, and I’m so bloody aroused looking at her that it hurts so bad in all the good places, when she begins moving toward me, catching her lower lip in her teeth before flashing me a killer-hot smile that somehow manages to be equal parts innocence wed to a total lack of inhibition and tells me I’m in for one hell of a ride.

  She’s the stuff of dreams, lean and strong with a terrific ass. Her hair is—wait, why am I dreaming about the pre-royalty version of Mac, the one with shorter, sunnier hair?

  An alarm goes off in my sex-befuddled brain as I dimly process that she has other hair, too, in places most women don’t. Mac made it clear today she’s a trimmer.

  Fuck.

  I’m dreaming about the sarcastic, flippant, irritating librarian.

  Seriously? Why not someone else? Anyone else. Like Enyo Luna, with her dark, flashing eyes, dusky skin, and swaggering warrior’s walk, who’s scorching hot and been dying to make a battlefield out of my bed—or a convenient spot on the ground, or behind any semiprivate corner in the abbey, or in the middle of the street if I’d just agree—for the past few years.

  But, no, I chose, for some unfathomable reason, to dream about a snarky genie in a bottle who insulted me repeatedly today and refused to cooperate with the queen, openly hostile, no doubt secretly traitorous.

  “By the Goddess, you’re everything the books said and more. So much more beautiful than the pictures,” the librarian/Mac gushes, as she climbs onto my bed, straddles my thighs, and closes both of her hands around my—