And I will see her reaction.

  And I’ll know.

  I inhale deeply, exhale slowly, and reach out a hand that trembles only slightly to open the tower door.

  When we step inside the drafty, icy stone tower, Sean is nowhere to be seen. After a puzzled moment, I catch a flicker of motion beyond what rippled green glass remains, jagged and broken in the window frame, the flash of black feathers, a hint of dark skin, tattoos racing across the surface.

  He’s outside on the roof, perched on the gargoyle-adorned parapet, brooding down at the blackened estate below.

  Sean rarely flies. Christian says learning to savor their wings and the gift of flight is a big step toward attaining peace with what they’ve become.

  I wonder if Sean is flying more, if he’s trying, or if he’s as surly and defeated as ever.

  “Sean, would you mind coming in?” I call through the shattered glass.

  “I’m not in the mood for a visit today, Kat,” he replies heavily.

  He’s never in the mood. “Please. I’d like to show you something.”

  Rae squeezes my hand and whispers, “He hurts, Mommy. I can feel it. “

  My empathic daughter. “I know,” I whisper back.

  “I’ll cheer him up,” she says, dark eyes round and serious.

  I hear a gusty sigh then another flicker of movement, then he’s nearly to the door that opens onto the walk, and my heart is hammering like a drum, and he’s moving into the opening.

  “Mommy, you’re squeezing my hand too hard!” Rae says.

  I relax my grip then he’s there, framed in the doorway, the sullen light glancing off his tall, dark Unseelie prince form.

  Will he terrify her? Will he make her smile?

  This is it.

  The moment of truth.

  Sean’s gaze barely grazes me, but flies instantly to Rae with her black Irish, curly, dark hair and lovely gold skin that tans so easily, her dark eyes so much like his used to be. His alien, iridescent gaze clouds with rage and fear and something else I can’t identify. He’s muted himself, as he always does when I come, so my eyes don’t bleed, shielding Rae as well.

  For a moment, the three of us stand frozen, and I can’t make myself glance down at my daughter.

  When I finally manage it, my heart sinks heavy as a stone to the bottom of a terrifyingly dark loch of fear and revulsion and…och, so much love it doesn’t matter whose she is!

  Rae is mine and I love her more than life itself.

  Her face is as radiant as a new dawn, her eyes shimmering with delight as she drops my hand and races across the tower toward him.

  Sean stiffens. “Get her out of here,” he cries hoarsely.

  But it’s too late.

  Rae flings her arms around Sean’s legs and hugs him, laughing.

  Then she tips back her head and smiles adoringly up at him. “Daddy, you’re here!”

  27

  Understand she’s a force of nature

  DANI

  As I regain consciousness in slow degrees, enormously grumpy and discombobulated, I think that I really, really hate that there is someone or something in the universe that can knock me out without me even knowing it, until I wake up again. That’s Supreme Bullshit with capital letters.

  Grumpy and discombobulated is how I’ve greeted ninety-nine percent of the mornings of my life. I’m cranky, cross, and confused for at least five minutes after I open my eyes. Which is odd, given my eternal optimism that tomorrow will always be the best day of my life.

  Mom used to say it’s because I expend so much energy freeze-framing while I’m awake that it’s impossible for me to ever get enough sleep. I think it’s simpler than that. I just resent sleeping. It’s time killed, countless aborted minutes strung into hours, during which you could be doing something bodacious and amazing. I wake up every single morning to the sobering and chafing awareness that I’ve wasted hours of time. Now that I’m nearly immortal, I feel no different. Sleep is a massive pain in my ass, doubly so when I’m keelhauled without warning into the murky waters of slumber.

  Sprawled on my back on a hard floor, I stretch, and my spirits are swiftly buoyed by the discovery that I’m no longer sore. They plummet again as I contemplate just how much enforced slumber that must have taken.

  Who’s captured me? Who even could capture someone like me who can hear people approaching half a mile away?

  Does the Sweeper have me again? Did he learn from the last time he abducted me that he has to keep me unconscious or I’ll escape? Still, how is he knocking me out? I have no memory of zombie-eating wraiths straitjacketing me.

  Bloody hell! Is Mac here somewhere in a similar cage?

  I never got comfortable with the Sweeper simply vanishing and never trying to fix us again. It felt as if we got off too easy. If I were a writer, I’d have made that demon bite my characters in the ass at least one more time, you know, like the dead serial killer who comes back from the puddle of blood on the floor the moment you believe he’s out of the picture; my life consistently unfolds as bizarrely and traumatically as movies and books.

  Arguably, though, Mac’s and my problems were shortly thereafter rectified. Her inner Sinsar Dubh was defeated, unifying her brain, and Shazam and Ryodan unified my heart, merging Jada and Dani into a woman as fearless in love as life in general. We’re no longer divided like we used to be, ergo, nothing to fix, not that there was in the first place, and now I’m even grumpier, thinking about how that awkwardly ambulating heap of junk actually dared think itself superior to me. My hands clench, and I growl softly, thinking when I get out of here I’m going to hunt down that clattering pile of rubbish and—

  “Yi-yi?” comes a tremulous whisper from the darkness.

  My heart thuds and stops beating and, only when I force myself to breathe slow and deep several times, does it resume.

  One of my few consolations in this cage is that, at least, it’s only me mired in this mystifying mess. I can handle being caged. I’ll get out. I always do.

  Goodbye consolation.

  I whisper, “Shazzy-bear?”

  He vaults through the darkness and lands on my stomach like a ton of bricks, and my bladder is full, as usual. With another groan, I wrap my arms around him, hugging him close while he nuzzles his face into my neck and begins to sprinkle me with copious amounts of tears.

  I hate that he’s here. I love him more than life. He—and Y’rill—is my best friend/playmate and the mother I never had.

  He cries like me, dramatically and violently, with lots of snot, gulping, snuffling, and occasionally choking because he gets so worked up, despite me stroking his fur and murmuring reassurances.

  As Y’rill, she’s the one taking care of me; making sure I don’t crash into a meteor as I push my flying skills to the limit, or go spinning off in a zero-gravity somersault straight into the incinerating atmosphere of a sun. As Shazam, I’m the one taking care of him; making sure he doesn’t eat entire civilizations or abduct other species to mate with.

  We’re a match made among the stars. Literally.

  “Nothing is going to harm you, Shaz-ma-taz. I promise. I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” I tell him, over and over.

  “Can’t promise!”

  “Just did.”

  “Can’t keep. Bars on our cage. Both stuck now!” he wails.

  “Good thing I’m a pro at getting out of cages. I’ll get us out of this one, too.”

  “Not!” Shazam cries, anguished. “Nobody can get out of this cage! Too powerful!”

  Frowning, I say, “Shazam, do you know something about this cage? Do you know where we are?”

  He yowls so loudly and piteously that the hair at my nape stands up on end. I’ve heard Shazam make pretty much every sound possible for a morbidly morose Hel-Cat, yet never one quite so packed with fear and finality. He genuinely believes we have no chance at escape. Yes, he’s pessimistic in his Hel-Cat form, yes, he’s overblown and wildly emotional, but there’s something…different this time. I feel it in my bones. And I don’t like it one bit.

  “Shazzy, where are we?” I demand.

  He melts into a puddle of fatness and futility against me and whimpers incoherently.

  “Shazam Mega-Hel-Cat O’Malley, you will answer me this minute!” I order sternly. “Who is holding us here?”

  “Will not.”

  “Who?” I snarl.

  He snuffles and burrows deeper into my arms. Finally he sniffs and hisses, “Hunters!”

  Okay, that’s not what I expected. “Why on earth would other Hunters put us in a cage?”

  “Because there’s a price!”

  “For what?”

  “Meddling,” he says in a muffled voice, as he rubs his face against my skin, cleansing snot and tears from his fur.

  “In what exactly?” What have we done this time?

  “Helped you become.”

  “So?”

  “Told you. Not allowed!”

  I ponder that a moment, then say, “If they must, they can turn me back into a human. No foul, no penalty,” I offer. I’ll hate being just human again. And I’ll have to find another way to become immortal. But I’ll get used to it, and there will be no punishing or penalizing or even rebuking Shazam on my watch. He/she did what he/she did out of love. Motive matters.

  “Not all they do.” He collapses in great hiccupping sobs, tail frantically thumping the floor.

  “Shazzy, it’s going to be okay.”

  “Is not!” he cries.

  “What else do they do?” I repeat patiently.

  “I meddled with time when I threw your star,” he mutters.

  “We’ll apologize and promise never to do it again,” I say firmly.

  He exhales a gusty sigh that ends in a whimper. “Not that easy, tiny red. There are rules.”

  The old me would have said, “Feck rules, they’re made to be broken!” The mature me says instead, “Rules need to be tested and redefined as beings evolve.”

  “Not for Hunters. Rules are. Unbreakable. Irrefutable. There is always a price.”

  “Spell it out exactly, Shaz. What’s the price?”

  “A small one,” he says weakly. “Because I am now a small thing, never to be Hunter again! I can no longer shift. They took it from me.” He flings himself from my arms and sprawls on the floor next to me, belly up, covering his eyes with both paws, shaggy-furred body shaking with sobs. “Hug me! Hold me! I hurt everywhere!”

  God, I love him. He says aloud the things I used to think but never vocalized. How many times I lay in my cage as a kid thinking: Hug me, hold me, I hurt everywhere. Mom. Please. Let me out. Until I learned to turn it off. Shazam can’t turn it off. He is the way he is, needy and loving and fragile and strong and perfect in my eyes. I gather him into my arms, thinking, I can deal with that. Again, it’s not my preference, but I love Shazzy in any shape or form and I’ll be happy as long as I get to keep him with me, always. “Not a problem. We’ll take care of each other. It’ll be like old times. We’ll be Dani and Shaz again. We had a great life. Remember? Shaz the mighty fur-beast lived up in the…” I begin to sing but trail off hastily because it’s insult to injury at this point, since he won’t be living up in the air anymore, and now I’m going to have to rewrite our Shaz-tastic theme song, which really pisses me off because it’s catchy as hell. Why can’t they just leave us alone?

  “Won’t,” Shazam moans.

  “Won’t what?”

  “Have a life.”

  “Why not?”

  “They will return you to Earth when it’s done.”

  My blood ices. “When what’s done?” I ask, very quietly.

  He’s silent a long moment then says, “When I’m dead, tiny red. Price is my life, and you watch them kill me. Punish us both. I knew when I did it. Told them I’d do it again. I see you, Yi-yi. I don’t want to die and never see you again. I can’t bear it!”

  I hug him close, snarling, sounding like a Hel-Cat myself. How dare the Hunters? Who are they to take a life just because a few rules were broken? Overreact much? Don’t they know the meaning of the word “proportionate”; as in the punishment should fit the crime, not one iota more?

  Killing someone for breaking rules that hurt no one is not proportionate. I might be able to get my head around them returning us to our original state; that feels more like an eye for an eye, but a whole life for an eye? Hunters are a highly evolved species, beholders of the universe’s complex patterns, seers of how it all interconnects, weavers of the epic red threads that link together destinies.

  Shazzy loves me. And if there’s one thing I know about love, it’s that it makes you break rules. And if there’s one thing I know about rules, it’s that they need to be revisited and questioned or they become rote, outdated mandates and laws that applied to a society that once existed, but exists no longer because it evolved.

  Ergo rules must evolve, too. The universe, and everything in it, is in a constant state of flux. When’s the last time anybody challenged the Hunters’ rules?

  Once, I stabbed Y’rill, and it immobilized her for a time. I’ll stab them all if I have to in order to—

  Bloody hell, I don’t have my sword. Or clothes. Or food.

  Ryodan will find us. He’ll walk in with Mac and the Nine. We’ll kick ass ten ways to Sunday, it’ll be epic and badass, and we’ll stalk out of here.

  Unless we’re, like, on a planet several galaxies and a gazillion light-years from the Earth, interred at the heart of a dark star, surrounded by countless black holes, guarded by an army of K’Vrucks, which is entirely possible given the nature of Hunters. That could present a smidgen of a problem.

  No worries. I’ll get us out of here.

  My lips curve, but it’s not the kind of smile a sane person would return.

  It’s the smile of a woman who survived a hellish childhood, was brainwashed by a monster of a headmistress, defied and irritated Ryodan for years and got away with it, was nearly frozen to death, defeated the Hoar Frost King, emerged stronger from five long years lost in the most dangerous of worlds within the nexus of the Silvers, killed two Unseelie princes, rescued Mac from all four of them, withstood the loss of Dancer, destroyed Balor, and became a mighty Hunter who sails the stars.

  I am a bloody motherfucking force of Nature herself.

  Allow the Hunters to kill Shazam?

  Never. Going. To. Happen.

  28

  In da Gadda da vida

  MAC

  “Restore my court, and I will tell you how to save your father,” Winter commands imperiously. “I’ve poisoned him. You must follow me if you want answers.” When she sifts out, her venomous smile lingers after the rest of her body is gone, and mocking laughter echoes off the frosted walls.

  “Can you follow her?” Barrons says grimly.

  I can’t take my eyes off my father. Both arms are hanging at unnatural angles, his skin crusted with bloody ice. All his fingers are twisted, some backward. The bitch broke his arms and crushed his hands. No doubt slowly and painfully. Rushing to his side, I drop to the floor and press my fingers to his wrist, which yields nothing, then his jugular. Five seconds tick by before I feel a heartbeat, seven more seconds until the next. His pulse is sluggish and weak but there. If she poisoned him—and I have no reason to think she’d lie—I don’t dare lose her. If Winter is convinced I can follow wherever she sifted, I possess that power, and hopefully I have just enough mojo left to get me and Barrons there. Gently, I lift my father’s head to see his face. He’s been badly beaten with two black eyes and many lacerations. “I think so. Can you heal him, Barrons?”

  “I can speed the repair of his broken bones.” He presses his hands to the sides of my father’s skull and begins to chant softly. When he finally stops, he says, “He will remain in a suspended state for a period of time. I have no idea how long the spell will last in Faery.”

  Tears roll down my cheeks, freeze into crystals, and tinkle to the snow-drifted floor. “What about the poison? Was she telling the truth?”

  Barrons scrapes a few crystals of iced blood from my father’s arm, where it’s broken so badly I can barely stand to look at it. Bone is protruding from jagged, frosted flesh. He rolls the crystals across his tongue a moment before murmuring, “I don’t recognize it. With memory restored, their knowledge predates mine.”

  “Can you neutralize it?”

  “No.”

  “What is it doing to him?”

  “The toxin is targeting a single organ, his heart.”

  That bitch! Jack Lane’s heart is the finest thing about him, and he’s made of only fine things. “What does that mean?”

  “In time, it will harden and cease beating.”

  And my father will die. “How long does he have?”

  “I am unable to gauge that.”

  I stare up at him, equal parts fury, grief, and entreaty blazing in my eyes.

  “You don’t want me to,” he growls.

  “Dageus looks fine to me,” I say stiffly.

  “And Chloe? Is she also fine? How will Dageus fare when Chloe dies?”

  I flinch. If Barrons turns him into one of the Nine, my father would live forever. My mother would die. Alina and I never lacked for love, always felt treasured and cherished, but we also knew the love mom and dad felt for each other was soul mate love, eclipsing all else, and they wanted both of us to know that kind of love.