“If you want me to find out more, I could ask for an audience with Niall,” Keenan suggested. “Unless you want to invite War into our home….”

“No.” Aislinn could still taste the smoke in the air when Bananach had spun her illusion in the park. “If we are on the edge of violence, I don’t want her here. I’m trying to find a way to be the queen our faeries deserve, and bringing her to their haven is not the way. I can’t just sit here doing nothing. She must know something.”

“So what do you want, Aislinn?” Keenan looked wary. “Do you really want to put yourself in harm’s way? Is that going to help? He wasn’t happy. If he went with her, got ensnared in the temptations of—”

“Can we go to Bananach?” Aislinn thought she was out of tears, but she felt the sting in her eyes as she tried not to cry. “If she hurt him—”

“We don’t know if Seth was there socially or if it was something else. Let me—”

“If she hurt him”—Aislinn began again—“I won’t ignore it. If she’d injured Donia or me, you wouldn’t ignore it.”

Keenan sighed. “I can’t risk our court over a single mortal, Aislinn.”

“It’s my court too,” she reminded him.

“Even if she took him, you can’t attackWar .”

“Have you ever tried?”

“No.”

“Then don’t tell me I can’t,” she said. If Bananach had taken Seth and killed him, Aislinn would figure out how to exact revenge. She had eternity.

“You’d risk our court for this?” he asked.

“Yes. For someone I love? Without a doubt.”

Keenan sighed, but he didn’t continue his objections. “Let’s go to the lion’s den, my Queen.”

Accompanied by a full platoon of guards, the Summer King and Queen made their way to Bananach. After the way Aislinn had fallen during her visit to Donia and the way she and Keenan were both debilitated the last time they confronted Niall, Aislinn wondered if they needed still more. Entering the Dark Court, the court of nightmares—the home of the Gabriel Hounds, of the carrion crow—no matter how she phrased it, it sounded like an unwise plan.

But Bananach might have answers.

Aislinn didn’t ask how Keenan knew where to find Bananach; she was too frightened to think beyond the possibility that she was walking into the court of a faery who was decidedly hostile toward their court—and into the presence of the epitome of war and bloodshed.

Keenan led her across Huntsdale to a condemned ruin with blacked-out windows. This wasn’t a bright, airy loft like their home or an aging mansion like Donia’s. Even the air outside the building felt dirty. It made her cringe, like being na**d in front of a crowd of lecherous strangers.

Fear. Pure, raw fear.They were in the right place.

As they walked up to the door, Keenan scowled. He didn’t pause or knock. He slid the door open and strode inside. He looked ready to strike someone.

Rage.

“Keenan!” She grabbed his arm. “We need to talk to them. Remember? That—”

“Ash-girl, you’ve finally come calling.”

Aislinn looked upward. Bananach was perched on a rafter like a nightmarish vulture. Her feathers were expanding as she sat there, building themselves into sweeping wings that would span two body lengths if they were spread wide. With a crackling sound, she fluttered those wings, stretching them.

“You are good to me,” Bananach crowed. She dropped to the floor in front of them. “Come now. The Dark King will be irritating if I keep you to myself.”

Aislinn started, “We’re here to see you. I need to know—”

Bananach’s hand clamped over Aislinn’s mouth before the sentence was finished. “Shhh. Mustn’t ruin my fun. No more speaking from you if you want speech of mine.”

Aislinn nodded, and Bananach pulled her hand away, scratching furrows into her cheek in the process.

They followed Bananach into a gutted concrete abyss. A sickly smell, like burned sugar and musky bodies, lingered in the air. The floor was sticky underfoot, so that each step was accompanied by a squelching sound. Aislinn had the almost irrepressible urge to run. She kept her arms close to her body in an attempt not to touch anything or anyone. They weren’t all misshapen, but many of the faeries seemed ill made. Others looked closer to what she was accustomed to but were equally frightening.

Red-palmed Ly Ergs grinned, too wide, gleeful in the funereal atmosphere. Vilas turned their gray gazes on Aislinn and Keenan. Jenny Greenteeth and her cluster of nightmarish kin spoke softly, like gossips at the gate. Spreading a cloud of fear, the Gabriel Hounds moved like sentinels throughout the crowd.

Aislinn looked back at their own guards. They were fine for individual skirmishes, but a full-out war would be devastating. The Summer Court wasn’t ready for fighting, not truly. The Dark Court was wrought of violence, among other things. This was their domain.

“Do you like it?” Bananach whispered. “How they want to eat you alive? You took away the last king’s mortal. You make the new king mourn for both of his mortals.”

“Hismortals? Seth is my—” Aislinn started.

But Bananach crowed. Her shadow-wings stretched out behind her and she dragged her talons over Aislinn’s arm in a feigned caress. “Pitiful little ash-girl. I wonder if he mourns falsely. Pretending to blame you for taking the boy?”

In front of them, Aislinn saw a shadowed tableau. Unlike in the park when the image had looked real, this was an obvious illusion hanging in front of them. A battlefield spread out of the image. The ground was ravaged. Faeries lay broken and bloodied. Shades of the dead drifted in the smoke from funeral pyres. Mortals were tangled in the mix—horror-stricken and mad, dead and empty.

In the center of the carnage was a table of sun-bleached bone. Skulls were stacked high for legs; ribs and arms and spines were woven together with sinew to make the flat of the table. Bananach sat at the head of the table—and Seth was stretched out on it in front of her.