I’ve been listening with my gut the entire time I’ve been questioning her. She hasn’t uttered a single lie. Of course, she hasn’t told me a damn thing of use, either. I decide to take a different approach, ask peripheral questions and see if I get anywhere. I want to know if someone lets her out, and if so, who. “How do you organize the library when it’s outside the bottle and you’re inside it? Why didn’t you know I was moving your things?”

  “The organizing I do inside my bottle, in the replica Library, rearranges the real one. Apparently moving the real one doesn’t rearrange my replica.” Her eyes narrow and she bristles. “But you broke my bottle and destroyed my replica Library, so now the only way I can restore order to the collection is if you allow me to work with the real one. And clearly my original bottle had a significant design flaw,” she seethes. “I resent that someone can be disheveling my Library and I have no way of knowing. Why even put me in charge of it? Apparently, I have no control over anything. Not even my Library.”

  “Who put you in charge of it?”

  She shoots me a mutinous look and says nothing.

  “Let me guess, that’s also forbidden to speak of,” I say dryly.

  “Yes.”

  “You obey an unknown Fae.”

  She says nothing.

  “You can’t even tell me what species you obey? Fae, old earth god, maybe the Unseelie king himself?”

  “I don’t know if I could if I wanted to, and I don’t. You’re not nice and don’t motivate me to cooperate. Something might prevent me from saying things I’m not allowed to say. Or maybe it is preventing me and just making me think it’s my decision. Or maybe something awful would happen to me if I tried. More awful than living in a bottle for eternity and never having a single choice about anything at all.”

  Again, I read nothing but truth in her words, and suddenly I’m feeling sorry for her. I’d be irritable, too, were I trapped in a flask and so completely controlled. She’s someone’s imprisoned servant. And she’s never had sex. Life indenture for a Fae is very, very long.

  She glances at me sharply when I say nothing, and I look back, and an unexpected undercurrent passes between us; we both feel it.

  She looks surprised then says wonderingly, “You feel compassion for me.”

  “You irritate the fuck out of me.”

  “Still, you understand that I’m in an impossible and terribly unpleasant situation.”

  Irritably, I nod. Fae are notorious for trying to put each other in unpleasant situations. With her, someone succeeded.

  “I think empathy means you like me. Do you feel kindly toward me?” she says hopefully.

  “I’m not giving you sex,” I retort flatly.

  She’s quiet a moment then says, “I can accept that. For now. Perhaps, one day, you’ll choose to give me sex. In the meantime, could we be friends? I’ve never had one. I’d like to. Friends watch out for you and help you and are nice to you.”

  I close my eyes and grit my teeth. My gut is screaming, no, no, no, yet my Highlander heart is bleeding for this woman. I read her as without guile, highly intelligent, self-possessed, socially inept, book-worldly yet life-innocent. If she’s telling me the truth, and I’m ninety-nine point nine percent certain of my truth-telling skills, everything she knows about life she learned from books. She certainly behaves as if that’s the case. Still, I need to know what her true form is. That’s nonnegotiable. If she wants trust from me, she’s going to have to fully reveal herself.

  “Please don’t put me back in a bottle. Not just yet. Let me live a little. Please,” she pleads softly. “I’m begging you. I’d settle for just a tiny slice of life. I can’t even imagine it. I’ve dreamed of it for so long.”

  I open my eyes and think, I am so fucked because now I can’t possibly make her go back into a bottle. If I force her in and cork her off, returning her to her miserable existence without even the solace of her Library, I’ll feel like the biggest shit in my kingdom, and I rather enjoy Sean owning that role. “Will you obey me if I let you stay out of it?”

  Pure mutiny flashes across her features, and I nearly order her back into a bottle right then and there. I don’t need any more problems on my hands, and, regardless of how downtrodden by fate she seems, she’s a willful woman who’s never had the right to exercise that will, a Cat-5 hurricane forming off my coast. The question isn’t whether the storm will come hammer my kingdom, but when, and how catastrophic it will be. Knowing my luck, as catastrophic as is possible. I no longer even spend much time brooding about catastrophe. I plan for it. It’s my life.

  She says tartly, “If I must always obey a man, and never have any choice about my life, then yes, I’d rather obey one while outside the bottle than inside it. And perhaps if I’m an obedient little pet, I’ll get a treat,” she adds, eyes flashing.

  I say defensively, “We don’t know each other. I don’t trust you. If the day comes that I trust you—”

  “You’d listen to me? Like I’m a real person and everything?” she cuts me off excitedly.

  “You’re going to have to figure out how to show me your true form, to have a snowball’s chance in hell of that.”

  She sighs forlornly.

  Och, Christ. This woman. She gets to me. “Impress me with how well you obey the limits I give you. I’ll endeavor to give you only the necessary ones.” My gut is screaming again. This isn’t going to go well, I just know it.

  Still, I seem to be stuck on a runaway train, barreling down the track despite all warnings that I’m about to jump it and either crash into something horrific or end up in a no-man’s-land without a compass. My damned Highlander heart. I’m an Unseelie prince with Keltar chivalry in my blood that will never cease governing my actions so long as my heart beats. No woman, no person should ever have to live without choices, without control over their life.

  “What’s your name?” she says then. “You know mine.”

  “Christian.”

  “No, I mean your Fae name,” she clarifies. “Which Unseelie prince are you?”

  I hate introducing myself this way. It makes me sound melodramatic and full of myself. “I’m Death.”

  She stares at me blankly a moment, then absence of expression morphs into pure terror.

  Abruptly, she explodes into a cloud of kaleidoscopic mist, splintering into thousands of iridescent fireflies that swirl in frantic disarray above my head. After a few moments, she manages to reassemble herself into a cohesive mist that darts instantly into another of my empty beer bottles then sits quaking gently on top of one of the Unseelie King’s metal-banded trunks I was using as a coffee table.

  Sighing, I retrieve the bottle and speak into it, “I’m not going to hurt you, Lyryka.”

  “But you could, O great Death,” floats up from inside the bottle with terror that holds a smidgen of a sneer in it.

  Still irritable and defiant, despite her fear. She’s a piece of work. “That’s a risk we’re both taking. We don’t know each other. Do you really want to stay in the bottle?”

  “For now,” she says tightly, “I think so, yes.”

  “Fine. Have it your way. If you come out, you must come directly to me, and I will set the parameters you must obey. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  “If you disobey—”

  “There’s no need to threaten me, you overbearing brute,” the bottle hisses, trembling with anger.

  Whatever. I place her on a high shelf and leave the chapel, taking pains to close the door gently behind me. I’ve already broken two things in the past twenty-four hours and have no desire to release any more problems into my little corner of the world.

  As I stalk down the damp stone corridor in a perfectly foul mood, still unlaid and raging with testosterone, fully aware that I probably just made a deal with some kind of devil or someone controlled by some kind of devil, Ryodan appears around the corner, stalking toward me, and I’m beyond offended because my perimeter alarms didn’t go off, and I specifically warded against the Nine. He looks furious, which for him means a muscle twitches beneath his eye.

  He’s the bloody reason I have another of my problems: Thanks to him, Uncle Dageus is immortal and a beast while his wife is mortal and not a beast, which really crapped in all the Keltar Wheaties. We Keltar druids bond for life and beyond. Which means, for both my aunt and uncle, the “beyond” part is going to be—figuratively, at least—a long and lonely hell.

  I tuck my chin and charge bullishly toward him, not about to yield an inch of my corridor in my castle in my kingdom. He has his own bloody kingdom. It’s called Chester’s, and he’s a tyrant there. “What?” I growl. “If you’re pissed at me, take a ticket and get into a very long line.” Sean currently hates me, the librarian thinks I’m a controlling brute and is terrified of me; even Kat was casting me worried, doubtful glances after I failed so completely at trying to teach Sean to control his power. I’ve done nothing right all day with the exception of encouraging the bat to leave.

  Ryodan continues stalking, looming large in the dimly lit corridor. The Nine don’t give an inch either. “I’m not pissed at you. I don’t know who I’m pissed at, and I need to know so I can skin the bastard and roast him alive. Dani and I were in bed—”

  “No.” I draw to an abrupt halt and cut him off, “Just fucking no. I don’t want to hear anything about it. Not now. Not ever.” I feel guilty every time “sex” and “Dani” happen together in a sentence. Does he know I saw her naked today, sort of? Is he reading my mind? Mentally, I mutter blah, blah, blah, over and over.

  “Shut the hell up and listen to me. We were in bed and she vanished. There one instant, then gone. Taken from inside Chester’s, which is impossible. I’ve got the club so heavily warded, even I have a difficult time getting past them, in beast form.”

  “Bloody hell, Dani’s missing now, too?”

  “That’s not all. Lor just texted me that Jack Lane is gone as well. He left him alone for all of five minutes in one of the most heavily warded suites at Chester’s,” Ryodan says grimly as he stops and we stand facing each other. “The fuck did someone get past my security.” It’s not a question, but a statement of the impossible. I can smell the fury rolling off him. My own is rising. I feel like the librarian. Nothing is in my control.

  Well, there’s one thing that is…

  Deliberately, I employ what was long one of Dani’s favorite words, which I know irritates him. I’m spoiling for a fight to dump aggression, and we’re both unbreakable. “Dude. Clearly, you need to work on your wards. Fail much?”

  Silver eyes blaze.

  I get the brawl I wanted.

  15

  All the good girls go to hell

  MAC

  We edge warily around the warring Fae—some fifty thousand of them—prepared to sift out in an instant, while I struggle to make sense of what I’m seeing.

  What could drive immortals as egotistical, icy, and self-serving as the Seelie to turn against one another with such sadism? It isn’t their nature. They’re pleasure seekers who loathe even the mild discomfort of rain. Yes, they’re also vicious, nasty, petty beings, but they turn that cruelty against other species, not their own.

  The four Light Courts obey an elaborate hierarchy of internal courtesies; each caste knows its place, what it can and can’t do without instigating a feud that might last centuries. Forever is a long time to have to watch your back. The Seelie prefer to watch other beings suffer.

  This is all-out war. They’ve already hideously disfigured one another yet they continue to attack and maim, as if driven by some inexplicable external force to self-genocide.

  Watch out! Barrons growls, as a heap of limbs with no discernible face breaks from battle, lurches within inches of me, and collapses to the ground where it lays, shuddering.

  I bend and study the misshapen heap of parts—its melody is lower royalty, not a prince or princess but a courtier—and spy a yellow eye peering blearily from beneath a toenail, an upper lip with no gash for a mouth embedded in a shoulder that now resides where a knee might have been. The eye no longer shimmers with iridescent fire but is bleary, flat, and regarding me blankly. Unlike the statues in the labyrinth, it evidences no recognition of who I am. Understandably, for its brain is in quarters, embedded pulsating and bloody on the outside of its body.

  It’s almost as if we’re invisible to them, even the ones with eyes intact, I murmur as I rise. The Winter Court tirelessly hunted us for a nightmarish eternity, yet here we are—and not one of them seems to care.

  Don’t count on it.

  I stare at the raging chaos of Fae, eyes narrowed, fighting nausea. There’s no such thing as an ugly Seelie. From the surreal, sense-distorting beauty of the highest castes to the lowliest among them, they are staggeringly, inhumanly beautiful.

  Yet only abominations stalk, shamble, hulk, and scrabble through the Winter courtyard, most missing limbs, some split wide open like overripe, weeping plums, others turned inside out, wearing entrails for skin, blind eyes, deaf ears, and silenced mouths cocooned within, lying in raw, oozing heaps on the ground.

  Some are deeply charred, skin bubbling with noxious blisters and erupting boils, others wizened with age, wrinkled as prunes and ugly as ancient crones.

  All are afflicted.

  All are horrific as Unseelie.

  If not for my ability to hear the ancient melody of their individual castes, I would think the Unseelie have somehow returned from the dead.

  As a horrifying thought slams into my brain, I stumble and nearly go down on top of a badly burned Fae, but catch myself on Barrons’s arm.

  It’s merely an amputated hand, he says, mistaking the cause for my alarm, as he kicks the oozing thing off my boot.

  Not that. My mother.

  I never had the luxury of time. I was never waiting on a message from Winter before mom’s clock began to run.

  If these monstrous, horrific, insane immortals have Rainey Lane, I’m too late.

  She’s already dead.

  You don’t know that, Barrons growls.

  Or worse. Like one of them, she’s been turned inside out but is still horrifically alive.

  Fear kills, Ms. Lane. Pull it together.

  Rage bubbles up inside me, cold, clear, and as psychotic as the carnage unfolding before my eyes.

  Not cold, clear, and psychotic, Barrons says flatly. You’re hot, muddy, and enraged, and about to be completely out of control just like—

  He breaks off, and I gasp as, abruptly, what we’re seeing makes perfect sense.

  Just like them, he was about to say.

  The Seelie aren’t fighting like Fae.

  They’re fighting like humans.

  As another severed limb scrabbles by, Barrons says, Can you restore them? We need at least one of them with a functioning brain and mouth. Try one of the higher castes.

  He’s right, we’ll get no answers from these mutilated forms, and even if I’m successful at restoring one, we’ll get answers only by lip-reading, given the unnatural silence blanketing the land and all inhabitants. I consider the things I’ve restored in the past: the bookstore, my yard in Ashford, Arlington Abbey. It’s the last that makes me believe I can, and illuminates the path.

  The abbey was massive, complicated, and detailed beyond anyone’s ability to fully know and repair, particularly with the Underneath largely uncharted. That was the day I learned the planet holds a long and meticulous record of everything that has ever happened, and all that has ever existed.

  I didn’t re-create the abbey from my recollection, but from the earth’s elephantine memory. I might just as easily have restored the abbey to the church that once stood there, or the shian that predated it. It wasn’t my knowing that reconstructed the fortress but the timeless knowing of the cosmos, as if I merely invited a different time to exist again, replacing the current one. Not altering time, but elevating a moment to exist once more.

  Gaze drifting out of focus, I clear my mind and commune with the power pulsing in Faery as strongly as it does in mortal soil, petitioning it to return the Winter Court to its former state and realize with a soft gasp that something fundamental to the universe hungers for order to be restored. It doesn’t want disorder. It doesn’t like destruction. It lists toward evolution, not devolution.

  I couldn’t possibly know—at least not yet, give me a few thousand more years—each and every Winter Court Fae, but the earth bore the intimate imprint of their beings, had resonated with their footsteps for millennia. I lift that memory, beckoning, adding my power to it, suggesting they be whole again.

  Well done, Barrons says quietly.

  Even though I felt the precise moment things shifted back into balance, I’m still astonished when I refocus and behold the beauty of the Winter Court, teeming by the thousands, whole and unharmed in the courtyard.

  You can unfreeze them now, Barrons says.

  I didn’t freeze them. Yet they stand motionless.

  For about five seconds. Staring as if stupefied.

  Then they explode with rage and fall upon one another all over again, a battlefield of slathering, rabid dogs, casting curses, beating and slashing. In a matter of moments, they’re disfigured and dismembered again.

  It’s lunacy.

  I refocus, restore them again.

  We get a four-second lull before they begin attacking.

  Three more times I restore my court. By the third try, there’s no lull at all between restoration and war. Fae are fast learners. Even insane ones. There’s no point in trying to get answers. The Seelie are single-mindedly focused on destruction to their own self-destruction.