I get to live another day just as I am and, if I have my way, I will never become the Unseelie king.

  Spreading my wings, I raise the scythe at my reflection in a sort of dark toast to the future and smile.

  Being the end of all Fae, specifically Cruce, is quite enough for me.

  44

  It’s three o’clock in the morning

  Baby I just can’t treat you right

  MAC

  I stand on a balcony, beyond a pair of glass French doors, staring out at the dark city beyond, holding a book crammed with the exploits of the Seelie prince V’lane, just a little light reading for a narcissistic Unseelie prince. He’s probably stocked his entire castle with volumes attesting to the numerous feats and greatness of his alter ego.

  I lost consciousness when his web closed around me and woke to find myself in a bedchamber, in a castle high on a hill, that looks down over a city of night. My door is locked and, although there’s no longer a hint of cobweb on my skin, I still can’t sift. I can’t do anything, not even manifest a crimson rune. I don’t know how he’s done it, but Cruce has stolen my powers.

  I searched every inch of the bedchamber, looking for my cellphone or spear, anything that I could use as a weapon, while keeping an eye out for wards or runes that I might try to break.

  Not only did I find no hint of weapon or ward, I’m unable to summon a single object. My queenly powers appear to have been stripped away. According to the king, that’s not possible, but while I was unconscious, it seems Cruce found a way to do it.

  God knows if there’s a loophole, he finds and exploits it.

  Further adding to my concerns, inside the cover of the leather volume I’m holding, Lyryka penned a note.

  I think my father plans to kill me by interring me in the Unseelie prison. I have the worst feeling of déjà vu.

  Sighing heavily, I try not to admire the view beyond the balcony, but it’s difficult because Cruce replicated Dublin in his midnight kingdom, wherever we are. I know we’re underground. I hate being underground and can feel tons of earth pressing down on me.

  Though this is a city of night, the streets glow with the soft amber of gas streetlamps, identical to those in Dublin above. The windows of the houses and pubs are brightly lit, music spills from open doors, and the colors of the neon signs reflecting in puddles are the most beautiful, ethereal Fae hues I’ve ever seen.

  It’s a Dublin evening on steroids, lovelier than what lies above. From my high vantage, I can see Trinity College and the Guinness Storehouse, the Gate Theatre, the sprawl of the Temple Bar District, Dublin Castle, and Kilmainham Gaol, Ha’penny Bridge, and St. Stephen’s Green.

  Above, stars glitter like diamonds cast on a cloak of black velvet, and the sky is hung with the fiery lanterns of planets, three moons, and kissed with the kaleidoscopic stain of distant nebulae.

  I can’t fault his artistry.

  Cruce likes beautiful things.

  Mentally, I tally my problems: my father is dying and my mother is undoubtedly at Chester’s by now; Dani is being held prisoner in a cage in space with Shazam; the Seelie court is raging out of control, I have no idea where the Elixir of Life is, or any of my other (ex?) queenly possessions; Rae and Sean are being held somewhere by the same monster currently holding me; Lyryka may, at this very moment, be dying in the Unseelie prison (entombed because I don’t believe Cruce can use the spear, given it’s a Seelie hallow and he’s not king yet—I hope—and only the queen and kings can touch all the hallows) and I’m staring out at an entire kingdom of new Unseelie that sidhe-seers can’t sense.

  And I seem to have lost my powers.

  And there are Unseelie spiderwebs all over our world.

  The past few days were a blur of frantic discoveries, each more daunting than the last. Cruce, and the Seelie, pummeled me with one attack after the next the instant I left my chamber.

  Cruce excels at sowing chaos, to gaslight and confuse. I now suspect he released Lyryka primarily to distract us. I wonder if he somehow sowed discord at the Seelie courts, inducing their battles. I wouldn’t put it past him. With his spiderwebs, he always knew what we were doing. I wonder if he steered my mother into an IFP. I wonder, too, if he pilfered the queen’s possessions, stole the Elixir so the Seelie couldn’t drink again, perhaps tinkered with the Cauldron to keep them incapacitated by memories. I put nothing past him.

  I sink inward, trying to access power, any power.

  I’m relieved to find the great golden vault of the True Magic still stands within me. Unfortunately, I can’t access it. He couldn’t take it, but he managed to neutralize it somehow, seal it tightly away from me.

  We were right. He cloistered himself in a chamber beyond time, where he spent centuries building his court and kingdom, putting his plans into motion.

  And I realize Cruce knew, when he made me kiss him and convince him I might have loved him in another time and place, that giving me his half of the Song would cost him nothing, because he knew there were chambers beyond time in which he would be safe.

  He always planned to give me his half of the Song. He just wanted to make me stroke his ego and work for it.

  But why am I here? Does he plan to kill me, too?

  The moment I think it, I know he doesn’t.

  He’s fixated on me in the same way the king fixated on the concubine, except the king genuinely loved his concubine. Cruce is incapable of loving.

  Still, therein lies power.

  He thinks he loves me.

  In this chamber void of useful objects, his delusion is my only weapon.

  “MacKayla.” Cruce is behind me then. Power rolls off him in dark, coursing waves, and I almost gasp but stifle it, abruptly certain the king’s power is going to choose him. How could it not? I feel the stuff of which he’s made, and it’s staggering. Old court Unseelie, he can still be detected by my sidhe-seer power and, oh, God, how his magic has grown.

  I half expect to turn and find the mad king regarding me, but when I spin, tipping my head back to meet his gaze, he’s not yet the king.

  Still, his eyes are starry and strange, and he seems vast and mysterious and oh, so damned strong.

  If he gets the king’s power, we’re doomed.

  “Cruce,” I reply.

  “What do you think of my kingdom?”

  I turn to stare back out over the city. “It’s breathtaking,” I admit. “The Unseelie I’ve seen in the streets are beyond compare. You didn’t create a single thing that isn’t lovely. What powers did you give them?”

  He laughs, pleased with my reply, and the interest I’m taking in his new court, and thereby him. “I bequeathed my children elemental powers similar to the Light Court, connected not to the Seasons, but facets of Nature in all her grandeur. You recently met my Damhan-allaidh. Clever and stunning, are they not? You should see how they move. Like silken ghosts in the night, they weave the most marvelous designs where they choose to dwell. Unlike the last Shadow Court, my children are not destroyers, but creators.”

  “I’d like to meet each of your splendid castes.” And I would. Because when I get out of here alive, and Cruce is dead, these Fae, too, will be mine as queen to rule.

  “In time. Everything for you, in time, MacKayla.”

  I turn again, meeting his gaze levelly. I am immune to Sidhba-jai; still, Cruce’s sexuality is blatant, carnal, and electrifying. Not Jericho Barrons quality, yet immense and impossible not to feel. He’s a prince at the full height of his power. How am I to kill him? My fingers itch for my spear. Old court, he would die were I able to stab him, regardless of the drastic increase in his strength and power. Should he become king, however, I’m not so sure it would work. I don’t believe the king can be killed by anything. Long ago, Cruce glamoured my spear to keep me from knowing I had it. If that’s what he’s doing to me now, his glamour is beyond my ability to penetrate. I think of Barrons, a walking Fae-killer. He’s the weapon I need.

  “You will forget him,” Cruce says with such unequivocal certainty that I shiver. Abruptly, I recall another of those waking nightmares I had while confined in my chamber. I think I suppressed it because it was so hellishly wrong.

  I was trapped in a dream I believed was reality, and in that dream, I loved Cruce, was his willing consort and co-ruler but no longer the queen. We’d destroyed the Earth, imprisoning the Nine in limbo forever, where they were continually reborn only to die in the instant of rebirth, eternally aware of that single moment of life to death and back again.

  We exterminated the Light Court, long before they would have died out, with inventive cruelty, as he’d meted out yet more vengeance for his countless eternal grudges.

  We’d rebirthed my sister and her lover, Darroc. The four of us ruled the midnight kingdom.

  But Barrons still existed somewhere far away, and was roaring at me, trying to wake me from my nightmare. Insisting none of it was true.

  I narrow my eyes, wondering: Am I awake?

  Or still cocooned in a silken web, deeply unconscious, dreaming Cruce’s meticulously guided dream?

  45

  I’m on the hunt,

  I’m after you

  CHRISTIAN

  When I sift into Ryodan’s office, brandishing my death scythe, Barrons and Ryodan surge to their feet, staring at me.

  “What?” I growl irritably. “I don’t look that different. I mean, my eyes may be a bit, well…wintry again but—”

  “It’s not what you look like,” Barrons growls back, nostrils flaring as if he’s sniffing me like the beast he is. “It’s what we feel. What happened?”

  I tell them what Lyryka told me, about the spell and what it did, what my scythe is capable of doing.

  Then, as the great dark cloud of the Unseelie king’s power begins to seep into Ryodan’s glass castle in the sky of the nightclub, we all stare up at it, and Ryodan laughs.

  “It almost chose you, didn’t it?” he says. “What stopped it?”

  I scowl. “I made it clear I have no fucking desire to be king. Ever. Apparently that matters. I’m wondering if the key to being chosen doesn’t lie in wanting it more ferociously than the other contenders.”

  Barrons cuts a hard look at Ryodan. They begin some convoluted nonverbal communication that I ignore completely because I have more pressing matters on my mind. “How the bloody hell do I get into the Unseelie prison, with the Silvers behind your bookstore broken?”

  “Why do you want to get into the Unseelie prison?” Barrons demands.

  “I think Cruce has taken Lyryka there.” I tell them what she told me about the punishment with which he threatened her, that the place he imprisoned her possessed only three colors (with which I’m all too familiar, having spent a small eternity there), and that the instant I came into my full power, Cruce felt it. Sean must have, too. It’s as if we’re linked to each other somehow.

  “Mac’s missing,” Barrons says. “She vanished a few hours ago. I can no longer feel her in the mortal realm. She wouldn’t have returned to Faery, not with her father dying and her mother coming in. That means Cruce took her.”

  “And we’ve yet to find a bloody Hunter anywhere in this city,” Ryodan says.

  “So?” I demand of Barrons, because that fuck’s backup plans have backup plans to an exponential degree. “How do I get into the prison?”

  “If you ever try to return where I’m going to take you now—”

  “Try. Just try,” I snarl.

  The corner of Barrons’s mouth twitches as if he’s trying not to laugh, and it offends.

  “Seriously? You’re going to laugh at me? I’m Death. I can kill the Fae. I’m as lethal a weapon as the spear and sword. I think I’m pretty damned impressive for a Highlander from Inverness.” I bristle with indignation. These two bristly beasts don’t have so much on me anymore.

  Now Ryodan looks like he’s about to burst out laughing. Furious, I snap, “What the bloody hell is so funny?”

  Barrons reaches out and pinches something from my shoulder and holds it up. It’s a hostile sentence, badly bent and hissing, reaching desperately for me.

  “The Boora Boora books,” Barrons murmurs. “Have you any idea what those sentences do when released?”

  I shake my head. “I thought I brushed them all off me.”

  He snorts. “How many did you release?”

  I shrug. “A bookful.”

  There goes the corner of his mouth again as he says, “Well. Good luck with that then.”

  “What do they do?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  I say irritably, “I was in a hurry.”

  “Clearly,” Ryodan says dryly, as he, too, reaches out, and plucks something from my left wing. I’m beginning to feel as if I’m decorated with castle lint. I sifted from Draoidheacht to Chester’s in such a hurry that I kicked up a small storm on my way out. Ryodan regards what he retrieved and cuts a look of dark amusement at Barrons. “Isn’t that cute,” he mocks. “Lyryka’s got a crush on Death. For fuck’s sake, she drew a little heart above the ‘i’ in his name.”

  Now both sides of Barrons’s mouth are twitching.

  “Give me that!” I snatch the note from his hand and slip it carefully into the pocket of my jeans. “It’s not funny. It’s bloody well sweet. I’ll ask you one more time—”

  “Come.” Barrons turns for the door. “We all want something from Cruce. We’re all going to the prison.”

  I glance at Ryodan. “What about Dani?”

  Silver eyes glittering with crimson sparks, all trace of mirth gone, he says coldly, “New plan.”

  46

  I’m gonna walk before they make me run

  DANI

  It occurs to me, as I sprawl in the darkness of my cage that, although the Hunters reverted Shazam to his original Hel-Cat form, since I’ve never been able to shift into that enormous, leathery skin, and Shazam said the Hunters plan to return me to my original state, that means they haven’t done so yet.

  They don’t consider me a risk. They think I can’t shift.

  Underestimate me, I think with a smile, that’ll be fun.

  Running from something isn’t always a cowardly thing to do. Not when it buys you time to figure out how to defeat what’s threatening you. Sometimes, running is just plain smart. A mad dash to safety is a critical part of my plan, my reason for prodding them to revert Shazam to Y’rill.

  But I have a bad feeling the Hunters aren’t going to agree with my logic, although it’s inescapable and airtight. They’re going to force a lonely, emotional, needy Hel-Cat to try to justify the actions of a Hunter. Which is impossible. The two beings don’t think the same.

  Since Plan A is unlikely to work, it’s time to get busy with Plan B.

  If they refuse to allow Shazam to shift, my only other option is to shift myself.

  If I can transform, my increased size will blow the cage to smithereens, freeing me. Then I grab Shazam’s cage with my talons and make a mad dash for the border.

  Who knows—perhaps I can add my gift of freeze-framing to the gift of Hunter wings. I’ve never tried. I’m still a small Hunter, which I suspect makes me more agile, and we spent months perfecting my flying skills. I may not be able to effortlessly hover yet, but I’m a pro at dangerous, tight maneuvers, zooming so snugly around sudden obstacles that I nearly give Y’rill a heart attack. Expeditious velocity is my drug of choice and my OODA loop—Observe/Orient/Decide/Act processor—is even faster as a Hunter than it was as a human.

  I have no doubt I can give those ancient Hunters a run for their money. I bet they never even practice flying technique anymore. I bet they live in their stuffy old heads, complacent and as rigidly settled in their ways as they are their laws. Which is one more reason they need to bring in the fresh blood of youth. Without maximizing the gifts of one’s fiery, fearless generation, a society stagnates.

  By crikey, after countless failures, I will not fail this time.

  Stretching out on my back, I fold my arms behind my head, close my eyes, and go inward with a cocky, Hello, brain. Let’s get inventive, try out some new stuff. I got big ideas this time.

  I greet each section of my brain, lobe by lobe. I’ve always been able to feel my brain inside my head and picture it in vivid detail. I don’t understand folks who can’t.

  I can drift from region to region of it, choose to lightly skim the ridges and valleys of my cerebellum—which sizzles with constant lightning—or sink deep within, targeting any lobe: frontal, parietal, occipital, or temporal.

  I can settle deeper still, into my ventricles, thalamus, hypothalamus, hippocampus, pons, medulla, and, finally, the most intriguing part of all—my amygdala.

  When I was a kid, I used to concentrate on centering my heartbeat in the various parts of my brain as a sort of meditation, figuring why not feed it more blood and see if it grows? It’s not as if I had much else to do. Whenever I stumbled on what seemed to be a light switch of any kind, I flipped it on, repercussions be damned. My brain was all I had to play with, and there was an undiscovered country in there.

  I sink deep into my limbic region. It’s quiet here, rich, dark, and fertile. I peel away the uncus and behold my amygdala, the many visceral inputs feeding it.

  Fascinating.

  This is where I always sensed the most significant anomaly in my genetic makeup. Something about my limbic region, specifically my amygdala, is different than most humans. I suppose thanks to Rowena’s tampering plus the blood of the Unseelie king in my veins. I don’t know precisely how my amygdala varies, I know only it does.