What is the deal with so many cobwebs lately? One might expect to see hordes of spiders rushing to and fro, given the sheer number of webs on everything.

  And that one! Holy hell, that can’t be a spiderweb, I think, stunned as I hurry down the street.

  It’s enormous! From the roof, it drapes in a silken fall nearly to the ground and vanishes around the side of the house.

  As I hurry around the corner, I skid to an abrupt halt, a chill kissing my spine.

  Stretching from one house on the east side of the street all the way over to another house on the west side of the street, a glistening, silvery spiderweb, bedecked with fat pearls of rain, spans the roadway, some sixty feet in diameter.

  I know spiderwebs. I found them fascinating as they sparkled in the early morning sun, shimmering on the exterior of the windows of our sunroom in Ashford, garnished with pearls of dew. This one is an elaborate, standard orb web fashioned of wheel-shaped, concentric outlines with spokes extending from the center and, at the very core of it, unusual geometric designs. It’s so enormous it completely blocks passage down the street, unless one is willing to push through the billowy, ropy web, and the mere thought causes an atavistic shudder to ripple across my skin.

  I may love spiderwebs, but I’m not fond of their denizens. My brain gets that wolf spiders eat cockroaches, but that doesn’t stop my gut from responding with primitive terror when I find one nested in the bed linens in the closet. And don’t get me started on the abundance of brown recluses and black widows in the Deep South!

  Spiderwebs means spiders, and a web of this size means I’m looking for a spider that couldn’t possibly have originated on Earth, and I wonder—did Cruce create a caste of spider-Fae?

  I nearly smack myself in the forehead as a lightbulb goes off in my head.

  Papa Roach was Ryodan’s brilliant technique of eavesdropping, infiltrating hard-to-reach places, using creatures that survive masterfully in the smallest of crevices and are capable of swiftly scurrying back through the tiniest of cracks, bearing a full report of all that the nearly indestructible cockroaches saw and heard.

  I know Cruce. He’s the ultimate plagiarist, copying what others do if it proves successful and putting his own spin on it, which really pisses me off, because it’s far more difficult to come up with the original idea than steal someone else’s and spruce it up a bit.

  But I’d stake my life that, taking a page from Ryodan’s book, Cruce created a caste of Fae spiders, and that’s why the sticky concoctions are everywhere. And those arachnid bastards have been lurking in our corners and cracks, spying on everything we do. That’s how Cruce has always managed to stay ten steps ahead of us. The logic of my theory is inescapable. We never had a cobweb problem before. He creates new Unseelie and suddenly we do.

  They’re even in my bookstore, on the mirror, the cash register, in the elevator. More, in the conference room at Chester’s, even in my father’s bedroom, on the posters of his bed. I both admire and despise Cruce’s cleverness.

  I yank out my phone and fire off a furious text to Barrons, detailing what I’ve discovered along with a photo of the web, urging him to crush every spider he sees and destroy their silken traps.

  Then I shove my phone back in my pocket, realizing, miserably, the only way to get rid of them is to roam Dublin tracking down spiders and stabbing them with my spear.

  How will I ever get anything done if I have to hunt Unseelie spiders? How many of them did Cruce make? Are they recent arrivals? Are they preying on humans or is that yet to come?

  I frown. Will my spear even kill them?

  The devious prince of War created new Unseelie that sidhe-seers can’t even detect. Who’s to say the Hallows work on them?

  Tamping down escalating panic and frustration, wondering how my world got so freaking out of control, I inch cautiously nearer, keeping a sharp eye out for the spider. I have to find the oversize Fae-arachnid and kill it. Quickly. I can’t leave a huge, undoubtedly lethal, venomous spider wandering our streets. From the enormity of the web, it’s got to be the size of a small car.

  When I’m ten feet away from it, a sudden breeze gusts a delicious scent into my face, and I marvel (and get seriously pissed, because kids are going to flock to these bloody things) that Cruce managed to drench the web of his new eavesdropping caste of Unseelie with the precise intoxicating aroma of crispy funnel cakes from the state fair, piping hot off the griddle, and smothered in confectioner’s sugar.

  Scent is memory, and attending the Georgia State Fair with mom and dad when Alina and I were kids, holding hands, wandering through the carnival-like atmosphere, holds countless comforting we’re-a-family-and-deeply-loved memories. The aroma of the delicious confection is an invitation to lean in and inhale deeply.

  Which I do.

  After all, there’s no spider to be seen, and I’m doing reconnaissance, and I’m about to tear down the web anyway. Force the spider to start all over again whenever it comes back, if only to make it waste time building a new web.

  I never learn.

  Assuming makes an ass out of me.

  But some things are so deeply ingrained that we reflexively rely upon them without even realizing we’re doing it, because what we’re thinking is normal, logical, and true. It’s the way the world works.

  In the human realm.

  Spiderwebs mean your enemy is a spider, right?

  Not when you’re dealing with the Fae.

  The giant web drops with the suddenness of a thunderbolt from the sky and wraps around me with lightning-fast reflexes, cocooning me completely in its steely, inescapable embrace before I even realize what’s happening.

  No silken ropes here, they sear painfully where they touch my skin and bind as tightly as 550-pound braided fishing line. The web enfolds me, tighter and tighter, trapping my arms at my sides, preventing me from reaching for my spear, which I’m not even entirely certain can kill it.

  I sift instantly to Chester’s.

  Or try.

  Some element of Cruce’s new creation is neutralizing even that power, keeping me from sifting and, as it continues to constrict, compressing my ribs, it forces the breath to explode from my lungs in a great whoosh of air.

  Tighter, tighter, crushing me.

  Horrified comprehension dawns, in that last instant before I pass out from lack of oxygen, that Cruce didn’t create a new caste of Unseelie spiders to spy on us.

  Playing on our all-too-human assumptions, baiting his trap with a well-beloved human scent, that wily fuck created a new caste of spiderwebs.

  40

  No exit

  IXCYTHE

  Ixcythe stepped back, regarding her work with satisfaction.

  Here, too, in the kingdom of Summer, she’d muted sound, but only beyond the castle walls. The din of battle was getting on her last nerve, reminding her of the savaged, broken Winter Court she’d failed, but more important, it was competing with her ability to thoroughly savor the intoxicating sounds of Severina’s bloodcurdling screams.

  Once, the dim-witted, treacherous princess of Summer had been more powerful than she, but that began to change when the Song was sung, restoring Ixcythe’s more ancient magic, undoing the damage done during five hundred hellish years of torture, alone in a cold, dark mountain. Torture she hadn’t deserved, as Severina and Azar well knew.

  The day the queen finally released her, Ixcythe no longer possessed awareness such a day might come, and she’d stumbled, confused, blinded by the onslaught of long-denied light, back to court, gibbering mad, drooling, less than half corporeal, her magic drained beyond repair. She’d clawed at the insides of a mountain for too long, seeking escape with every ounce of power she possessed, gouging deep, useless chasms in millions of tons of solid rock, even causing minor earthquakes at first.

  But not for long. Her power was eroded by isolation as swiftly as morning dew evaporating beneath a desert sun.

  She’d never regained it. Full recovery from such a punishment could not be achieved. That was why the queen did it. To weaken those who stood against her, yet keep them present in Faery as eternal reminders to others at court.

  But once the ancient melody began restoring them, undoing changes all the way back to the beginning, it had also undone the loss of power she’d suffered and, since she was one hundred seventy-three thousand years older than Severina, her magic was now stronger, a fact she’d been concealing, even from Azar. Who, unfortunately, was older than both she and Severina, which made it a very good thing he wasn’t around.

  Once, he’d chosen Severina over her, and she would never forgive either of them. Immortal, or condemned to die in five or six centuries, she would spend the rest of whatever time was left to her refining Severina’s constant torment, tweaking it to ever-increasing heights of pain.

  “But not me?” Azar says quietly behind her.

  Ixcythe whirls. “Begone, you fool! This has nothing to do with you. You saw what she tried to do to me. If I’d taken her alleged ‘Elixir of Life,’ it would have burned me alive on the inside, forever. Incessant, inescapable agony. There is no antidote. It cannot be undone. That patch of grass in the Grove will blaze for all eternity, even in her hallowed realm.”

  She turns back to Severina with a cruel smile. “I’m merely returning the favor, doing to her what she tried to do to me.” The Summer princess was bolted to the wall of her own garishly bright ballroom by lances of razor-sharp ice, through her feet, her hands, her gut, her head. Her once-lovely face was an eruption of ragged flesh and bone around a five-inch diameter icy spear. Ixcythe had been careful to drive it through the top of her head only, so her mouth might continue to scream and scream.

  Then she’d begun to ice her, bit by bit, every inch of her stripped bare, bleeding flesh, with the cruelest, deepest, most burning ice she was capable of summoning. Working it up her thighs, driving icepicks deep into her womb, the cheating bitch who seduced Azar! She could listen to the music of Severina’s screams forever. Hum along with the divine melody. Add inventive leitmotifs of whimpers and begging to the guttural, flesh-rending cries. Back off a bit, make Severina think the pain might end.

  Never.

  Slam it back into her again in entirely new ways.

  “Once, you painted the world in very different hues,” Azar says quietly. “Do you remember what they called you in the Winter kingdom, before I betrayed you, when we were young?”

  How could she forget? That was part of the problem, too. Memories. Wed to emotion. Irreparably bound to mortality. She knew who she’d once been, before they’d savaged her, the two she’d loved most. Azar, her lover, and Summer, her dearest friend. She and the golden princess had been fascinated by each other’s differences, drawn to their opposite.

  Gh’luk-sya drea. Tiny snow blossom, winter’s beloved flower.

  They’d called her that because she walked the kingdom, painting it beautiful with her growing power, carpeting it with delicate blossoms, tweaking the sky from cool slate to brilliant blue with sun refracting off dazzling drifts of snow. She’d wandered the forests, singing to herself, frosting limbs with delicate, lacy ice, enameling heavy pine boughs with diamond-faceted crystals.

  “You killed the snow blossom, Azar. You and Severina did that together,” she says bitterly.

  “I know,” he says sadly. “And there is neither excuse nor forgiveness. But, Ix, have you considered what our future might hold?”

  “Every possible incarnation of it. And in them all I will torture this bitch forever.”

  “The queen will never give us the Elixir. She has no intention of using it for her father. She will allow him to die before permitting him to become like us.” He’s silent a moment then says, “I can’t say that I blame her. As time passed, my passion for you dimmed. Power was the only thing that made me feel anymore. I’d tasted everything. I could no longer feel anything but the most violent of sensation. All that was left were games. We became driven by a nagging, unquenchable hunger for something, anything. But now, I remember how we once used to be, how I felt about you, us.”

  When he lapses into another long silence, she wants to clap her hands to her ears, scream at him to stop talking. She doesn’t want to hear another word.

  Yet she also feels as if she’s been waiting to hear words such as these for half an eternity.

  He says, “I don’t want to lose it again.”

  She turns on him, disbelieving and horrified. “You would willingly remain as we are?”

  “No. If possible, I would be immortal again. But not empty as we were. I never loved her, Ix. I wasn’t capable of it by then. She was nothing more than a stone on a path I wish I’d never trod. And now, would never tread again.”

  “Are you asking me to forgive you?” she says incredulously.

  “I’m merely saying that if the queen doesn’t give us the Elixir, and she won’t, there are only three of us left. You, me, and Severina. All our subjects are mad. We have no one but each other for the next five to six centuries. Is this how you wish to spend the remainder of your time?”

  Her eyes narrow, and she gouges sharpened nails through palms, inhaling sharply. By D’Anu—he’s right! What cruel fate would leave her alone at the end with those she despises most?

  But yes, yes, and a thousand times yes, spending it like this, torturing Severina until the end, will be her masterwork.

  Azar says, “It’s rather like that piece penned by a mortal playwright, what was his name?”

  “I have no idea,” Ix growls. “You always enjoyed the mortal dramas more than I.” She preferred the Fae ones, the tragedies in which she dealt out revenge after revenge.

  “Jean-Paul Sartre. Huis Clos. Three humans trapped in a room forever providing more than enough torment to serve as their eternal damnation. Hell is other people. That’s us, Ix. That’s all we have now. The three of us. But it could be different.”

  “Not so long as that bitch lives and breathes!” She jerks her gaze back to Severina.

  “Let me spend the next five hundred years making up for those you lost in the mountain.”

  “You are weak and pathetic, and I despise you!”

  Suddenly, he’s behind her, closing his hands tightly around her waist. Then, they’re elsewhere.

  He’s sifted her to the Winter Kingdom.

  “Get your hands off me!” She whirls on him, roaring, with such fury, thunder explodes in the sky, booming and rattling, bones on chains, and a thick, frosty snow begins to fall.

  Azar brushes his hand against her hair. “I once told you the snow was a veil of diamonds made by Nature to adorn you, because nothing fashioned by Fae or man could ever hope to compete with the beauty of your hair.”

  “I said, don’t touch me!”

  He doesn’t listen, merely slips his hands back to her waist and spins her in the opposite direction, facing the courtyard beyond the open gates.

  She gasps. Her court has been restored. Each subject is again whole and unharmed, suspended in battle.

  They’re no longer suffering. Merely frozen in the moment before striking or being struck, no longer in pain.

  And, if Azar is right, they will all die precisely the way they are, five or six hundred years from now.

  “Did you do this?” she breathes. Is he so powerful now? Surely not!

  “The queen did.”

  She opens her mouth, closes it, then finally demands incredulously, “But why would she do such a thing? It makes no sense! What is her game? Explain this to me!” The torment of her court, the lovely wintry subjects within her care, had been eating at her. She’d warred for eons uncounted to gain the right to wear the Winter Crown, provide for and protect her subjects.

  And she’d failed them.

  “I don’t understand,” she protests. “I didn’t honor our bargain. I gave her nothing. I sought to destroy her soul. I sentenced her father to a slow and hellish death.”

  Azar replies, “She wasn’t willing to allow your subjects to suffer for your actions. A wise decision. Emotion, Ix. The thing we gave up. It’s necessary.”

  “Never. I will find a way to undo what has been done, and restore us all to what we once were. Even if I must do it alone.”

  “Count me out, then. I won’t drink again, even if you find it.”

  Stunned, Ixcythe turns and stares up at him, searching his gaze, trying to decide if he could possibly be telling the truth, or if this is but another cruel ploy in yet another endless Fae game. The kind she would play forever, if left to her own devices.

  “I rage at the loss of my immortality,” he tells her. “But I now know the price I paid to gain it. We lost emotion in such slow degrees that we scarcely felt what we were losing. Bit by bit, we numbed, grew more hollow, incapable of being filled. I want two things of life, however much of that remains to me. To feel all emotions again, not merely the shallow impressions we manage to achieve thorough increasingly convoluted machinations. Genuine emotion, no matter how torturous or seemingly unbearable.”

  “And the second thing you want?” She has no idea why she asked. She hates him and always will.

  He brushes a strand of hair from her face, and says softly, “To one day watch the Gh’luk-sya drea carpet her kingdom with flowers and etch young limbs with crystalline ice again, singing softly, as she passes beneath their boughs. Then I’ll know, Ixcythe, that although you will never forgive me, the damage I did to the snow blossom has been undone.”

  41

  There’s nothing in the world that feels like coming home