The day he told me the history of the Unseelie king and his concubine, minus many critical details, such as his part in it.

  The night he returned me to Ashford, Georgia, and I stood outside our house listening as my parents discussed the prophecy about me.

  Our encounters go whirling by, faster and faster…

  The many times he kissed me, embedding his true name in my tongue so I might summon him.

  The day he lied, claiming he was with Aoibheal, protecting her while I was being raped by four Unseelie princes when, in truth, he was one of my rapists.

  Beneath the abbey, the night he mocked the king for not figuring out Cruce stole his concubine, wiped her memory with a cup from the Cauldron, then hauled her off to Faery, a blank slate of a long-abused mortal woman, where they both lived concealed among the Light Court for hundreds of thousands of years, and the king went quietly mad, believing she’d killed herself to escape him.

  The moment the king iced Cruce, imprisoning him beneath Arlington Abbey in the precise spot he once imprisoned the Sinsar Dubh so long ago. His two most dangerous creations, entombed in the same place, entrusted to the protection of sidhe-seers who twice failed to contain his disasters, but why would he expect them to succeed, when he himself hadn’t?

  The afternoon I kissed Cruce, convincing him, at another time, under different circumstances, I might have chosen him, and he might have changed for the better, in exchange for his half of the Song.

  Barrons lingers long on that memory, eyes dark and intense, likely because of the guilt I feel about it. Of course, my subconscious would keep Barrons there, studying every damned nuance. I’d had to compartmentalize and box so many parts of myself that day that the woman who kissed Cruce hadn’t been me at all. Merely the necessary version of me, who would save the world, no matter the cost.

  I’d gotten the job done.

  Then the Unseelie king is in my dreams, rising up enormous and dark, made of starry stuff, planets and nebulae rolling like tiny pearls in his gigantic wings, obliterating all else, sweeping away Barrons and Cruce, tiny dust motes caught on the straw broom of his gargantuan will. They leave unwilling but they leave.

  Then it’s just the king and me, and my dream is so bloody lucid, I’m once again standing on the first world, gazing up at the half-mad creator of so much beauty and ugliness, of truth and lie, of clarity and confusion, that I hear mighty Hunters gonging deep in their chests as they glide, wings barely flapping, past the moon, smell the lush perfume of the night-blooming jasmine, as I dwindle to minuscule inconsequentiality in the enormity of his presence.

  Unlike other Fae, the king feels to me like a force of nature, sprung from the very fabric of the cosmos itself, as elemental and primitive and necessary as space between stars, the stars themselves, the thunder, the lightning, the sun, the passage of time.

  I have no idea what he is, but he’s not Fae.

  I wake with a violent start that sends me sprawling from sofa to floor, cracking my head on the coffee table as I go down.

  The residue of Barrons, Cruce, and the king clings darkly to me, thick and viscous, and I know the taste and feel of this dream, like my cold-place nightmare, will stalk me throughout the day.

  The words the king spoke to me in that split second before awakening blaze supernova bright in my mind.

  You seek a loophole. The rules governing Fae compacts pertain only to the original Light Court. Cruce is not.

  I’ve long believed dreams are a subconscious method of collating the facts and events of our daily lives, where like is stored with like and conclusions are drawn that elude the cluttered miasma of our conscious brains.

  On the heels of this powerful, revelatory dream, I know it’s true.

  Somewhere in the queen’s files, I must have noticed something that made me suspect that which governed the Light Court was applicable only to the Light Court. Perhaps drawn from an amalgamation of many parts of many files, never fully spelled out, but implicitly understood.

  As my dream king had pointed out, Cruce is not Light Court.

  Boo-yah. Got him.

  Murmuring a silent thank-you to the cosmos for showing me what I needed to see, I push up, grab my notepad and pen, and dash off in search of Barrons.

  * * *

  “I want to try sifting to Dad and Dani,” I told him.

  Barrons is sitting in Ryodan’s office, shirt slung over a chair, while Ryodan tattoos his back with obsidian and crimson runes that will protect him against the high price due for dabbling in black arts.

  “You realized it was the IFP you hit earlier, not a ward,” Barrons says.

  “Yes.” Mental note to self, never try to sift into an IFP again. Barrons was right, the fractured state of the fragment of Fae reality had drained me, as if it was trying to seize my power to restore itself. “I may be able to get inside Winter’s castle. I gave up too easily. Ward Chester’s more securely or rescue Dad and Dani?” I present the options. I know what I consider top priority.

  Barrons snorts. Ryodan tosses his knife on the desk, shoves aside the tray of ink, and says, “Fuck Chester’s. I’m in.”

  “You should stay here,” I say to Ryodan. “We’ll lose time again, even though it’s not as much as it used to be. What if Dani’s not there? What if Shazam comes looking for you? What if something happens with Mom, or Cruce shows up?”

  He regards me in silence, silvery eyes icy, bristling. I feel impatience and fury shivering beneath his skin, hunger for vengeance, hunger for battle. Someone took Dani, and he’s seeing red.

  But he’s also seeing black and white and gray, because Ryodan always sees the big picture and will work his way past emotion to the coldly logical, most effective move at this moment. His man, the king, the ruler, the consummate chess player, is more dominant than the beast. Barrons’s beast is more dominant than the man.

  “Fuck,” Ryodan says finally. Then, “Fuck,” again as he slams his fist into the desk.

  “Christian opened a portal, slid a message through, losing zero mortal-time doing it. If you need to contact us, use Christian. I’ll send you a message the same way, and let you know when we find her.” If we find her, but I didn’t add that.

  Ryodan nods, tightly. “Go. Before I change my fucking mind.”

  * * *

  I focus on my dad, constructing a rich memory. The first time he put me behind the wheel of a car to teach me how to drive. Mom almost had a conniption fit. She’d have made me wait until I was sixteen, but I’d been helping Dad detail his car for a couple of years, and he’d seen the hunger in my eyes. I was born loving muscle cars.

  The 1970 Ford Mustang Boss 302, V-8, had a grabber orange exterior, black interior. Rear-wheel drive, perfect to play on snow-free southern roads. I adored every muscular inch of it. I can still feel Dad’s hand on mine as he guides me through the gears and teaches me to feel the transmission hit the sweet spot. The interior of the car is filled with the smell of the peppermints he so loves, the light scent of his aftershave, the brimstone smell of exhaust. The sun dapples the windshield, the drugging scent of summer in the deep South blows in the open windows, ruffling my hair.

  Winter’s ward is a bitch. But not insurmountable. I had given up too easily. We go slamming into it hard enough that it knocks the breath out of me, but we don’t bounce away, back to Chester’s. Instinctively, I go limp, don’t fight it. Instead, I embrace the power rippling around the castle, open myself to it, greet it as High Queen of the Fae, honoring its power, offering to blend and merge and leave it a bit richer for having passed through.

  It’s that easy, merely required an offering of my energy, no counter-ward, rune, or spell necessary. I’m beginning to suspect the reason the queen is the most powerful is she simply has the most generous connection to the earth-magic, and as the Fae hierarchy descends, each lesser Fae has a less potent connection. My rule is ascertained merely by the fact that I hold the ability to draw more power than any other Fae.

  We manifest inside the North Tower. Winter stands with her back to us, facing the window, unaware of our invasion. She’s a study of glittering ice, long, silvery hair crusted, dress dripping; the skin of her long, thin hands white, blue-veined, and frosty with long iced talons.

  I drag my gaze away, scan the circular room, and spy my father, bound to a chair sculpted of ice, head lolling forward, skin bloodless and pale except for where it’s crusted with frozen blood. He’s badly injured. Dani is nowhere to be seen.

  Daddy! I scream silently.

  The enforced silence ratchets my fury to an unbearable pitch. I’m denied the simple release of screaming.

  How did Winter suppress sound? There’s a flatness to the air, a feeling of two-dimensionality, as if the spell she employed stripped out the very molecules that enable resonance.

  Again, operating on instinct, since it worked with the ward, I take a similar approach, but instead of offering power to the spell itself, I offer a gift of my energy to the emptiness of the air, encouraging it to restore itself.

  As I open myself, I realize the air is hungry. It wants substance back. It doesn’t like being flat and two-dimensional.

  Power rushes from my body into the circular tower, into the air beyond it, farther, into the too-silent kingdom and, abruptly, the sound of my scream is exploding from my lungs, echoing off the frozen walls.

  Winter whirls from the window, snarling with rage.

  I’m horrified to realize I just fucked up. Massively.

  Offering power isn’t without a price, especially not when you send it out to an entire kingdom of empty air.

  I’m drained.

  I’m not even certain I can muster the energy to sift us out of there. It’s all I can do not to droop on myself and slump to the floor. I barely have the strength to stand.

  Buck the fuck up, Ms. Lane, Barrons sends silently along our bond, and perhaps next time, consider attacking the actual spell, not restoring Nature itself with your bounty, which is clearly not boundless.

  I’m still learning.

  But his admonishment rams steel up my spine. I draw myself up straight, thrust back my shoulders, and return Winter’s snarl.

  Kindness and cruelty, Barrons reminds.

  How long until my power returns?

  No bloody clue. Although I suspect it would help if you planted your bare feet on soil. That’s where your power comes from.

  My cruelty would have been a direct attack on Winter herself.

  My kindness, restoring her court.

  Unfortunately, at the moment, staring into the eyes of my enemy, a woman who currently has far more power than I do and holds captive my father, who’s clearly dying, I’m not capable of doing either of those things.

  26

  If I could through myself set your spirit free

  KAT

  The last time I went to Draoidheacht to visit Sean I didn’t text Christian to ask him to sift me from the abbey to his drafty castle. Rather, I made the journey from Ireland to Scotland the long, hard way, ten hours of driving and two hours on a ferry.

  I’d been craving time alone to think, and gotten it in spades.

  This time, however, I’ve a more profound motivation for packing Rae into the car and making the trip, which isn’t without risk, given old gods roaming the land and IFPs drifting about.

  I don’t want my daughter to see an Unseelie prince for the first time until she sees Sean.

  As we enter Christian’s fifty-thousand-acre Highland estate, crossing the ward makes me shiver, and Rae exclaims, “What was that, Mommy? Are we there yet?”

  If I never have to hear the words “are we there yet” again in my life, I’ll count myself a blessed woman. Still, buckled securely into her safety seat, Rae has handled the long trip well, with a few brief naps and her customary bright-eyed enthusiasm. She was riveted by the scenery, the changing sky and land, the ferry ride, and babbled happily most of the way, making up stories about everything we passed.

  I decided shortly after her birth that my daughter would not be raised sheltered. I want her to see everything, taste and try everything, know she can be whatever she wants to be, and whatever she chooses to be (so long as it’s not evil) is perfectly perfect and all I could want for her.

  I will see my daughter happy. Loved. Fulfilled. Eyes wide open, heart whole and strong.

  The night she told me her daddy visited her in dreams, I let her fall asleep without further questioning—not because I’m a good mother and knew she needed rest more than I needed answers, but because at that particular moment, I was a coward.

  I didn’t want to know if “daddy” had great black wings.

  It had taken me a week to work my way around to being ready to find that out. A week during which I’d not questioned her and she’d not mentioned her father again. A week Rhiannon spent slowly regaining the strength to get out of bed, during which we’d dispatched scouts, trying to locate a glimpse of a Spyrssidhe without success. Rae was right. The diminutive, spritely garden Fae were missing, their homes hastily abandoned.

  “That, my love,” I tell Rae, “was a ward. A powerful protection spell that—”

  “I know what wards are,” she says and rolls her eyes. “The teachers talk about all kinds of stuff at school. I just never felt one like that before. The ones at the abbey are different.”

  I make a mental note to plan an impromptu visit to Rae’s day care in the near future to find out just what her little pitcher ears are overhearing. She’s a voracious sponge, soaking up everything, putting together facts in alarming and often insightful ways. “We’re nearly there.”

  “I love adventuring with you,” she says, beaming. “Can we do this all the time, Mommy?”

  “Yes,” I say, and it’s a vow I will keep. I want to show my daughter the world. I want to watch her face light with joy as she discovers the many wonders.

  “Why is all the grass burnt?” she asks a short time later, after we’ve parked and I’m helping her out of the car.

  “There’s a man here who has a power he’s having a difficult time learning to control.” I try to tell Rae the truth, as much as possible. I won’t shield her. I won’t grant her the grace of hiding, like I did this past week.

  “But why does he burn the grass?”

  “He has so much power that when he merely walks across the earth, it scorches, deep into the soil.”

  “But what about the worms? Do they die?”

  “Yes, Rae, they do.”

  “I don’t like that. He doesn’t sound like a very nice man to me.”

  Oh, dear God, what was I doing bringing them together like this? Escorting Rae into a room with an Unseelie prince who couldn’t control his power and—if Rae’s dreams were true and Cruce was alive and he wasn’t lying—a prince who wasn’t even her father?

  “He’s the very best of men,” I tell her quietly. “We grew up together. He protected me and watched out for me. But one day, he inherited a power he never wanted and has been having a hard time dealing with it.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “Very much.”

  “Then I’ll love him, too,” Rae says matter-of-factly, tucking her hand into mine. “But he must stop killing the worms,” she says earnestly. “All things like living. Even the things that frighten us.”

  My wise little daughter.

  I delay, of course. I can’t help myself. If we walk into Sean’s tower room and she recognizes the dark, winged figure of an Unseelie prince—which she’s never glimpsed before—I’ll know Cruce is somehow still alive and is her father.

  If she walks into that room and doesn’t respond in a familiar way to Sean, I’ll be able to breathe again properly for the first time in a very long and difficult week. I’ll be able to tell myself she’s been having mere dreams, not visitations.

  It’s not possible Sean has been visiting Rae in her dreams. Not only does he lack control of his power—assuming he possesses the ability to infiltrate the Dreaming—but he wouldn’t bother to do so. Since our first meeting at Draoidheacht, he’s not once asked to see her, never mentioned her again. We scrupulously avoid the topics of Cruce, Rae, paternity tests, anything but the weather, the castle, and the like.

  We’ve not made love since we got back together, and I’m not even sure we are back together. I visit. He tolerates it. We fail to learn to control his power. Rinse and repeat. That’s our life together. The man has walls around himself that are insurmountable, even for me. There’ve been times I’ve grown angry with him, although I conceal it, that he can’t find it within himself to control his power but somehow found the power to wall out the greatest empath in Ireland.

  I weary of loving so hard and being unmet. I weary of hoping, always hoping.

  I stroll Rae through the castle at a leisurely pace, showing her the various weirdness and wonders as we take the long, dallying way to Sean’s aerie in the sky. Rae’s enchanted by the gloomy, strange castle, ducking inside hearths big enough to hold five tall men standing upright, dashing up and down stairs, growing impatient as I snatch back her hand time and again when she tries to touch one of the many inexplicable things in Christian’s eclectic collection of artifacts.

  But finally, holding hands, we ascend the dusty, circular stone stairs to the tower in the old, ruined part of the castle that Sean calls home.

  “Brrr! It’s chilly up here!” Rae exclaims.

  I remove my scarf, wrap it around her neck, and button her little jacket. “The man you’re going to meet is a bit different than most,” I caution her. I’ve never permitted her to lay eyes upon Christian. I warned him off years ago. Today, for the first time, Rae will see an Unseelie prince.