It gave me power in the black arts, Mallucé had said of eating Unseelie, the strength of ten men, heightened my senses, healed mortal wounds as quickly as they were inflicted.

I could pass on the black arts. I’d take the strength and heightened senses. I was especially interested in the healing mortal wounds part. I may have blown one chance to live tonight. I would not blow another. Barrons was here now. The cell was open. He could get to the Fae on the slab, feed it to me.

“Barrons.” I forced my eyes open. They felt heavy, weighted by coins.

His face was in my neck and he was breathing hard. Was he grieving me? Already? Would he miss me? Had I, in some tiny way, come to matter to this enigmatic, hard, brilliant, obsessed man? I realized he’d come to matter to me. Good or evil, right or wrong, he mattered to me.

“Barrons,” I said again, this time more strongly, infusing it with everything I had left which wasn’t much, but enough to get his attention.

He raised his head. His face was all harsh planes and angles in the torchlight, his expression bleak. His dark eyes were windows on a bottomless abyss. “I’m sorry, Mac.”

“Not your…fault,” I managed to get out.

“My fault in more ways than you could possibly know, woman.”

Woman, he’d called me. I’d grown up in his eyes. I wondered what he’d think of me soon.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come for you. I shouldn’t have let you walk home alone.”

“L-Listen,” I said. I would have clutched urgently at his sleeve, but I couldn’t move either arm.

He bent nearer.

“Unseelie…slab?” I asked.

His brows drew together. He glanced over his shoulder, looked back at me. “It’s there, if that’s what you mean.”

My voice was terrible when I said, “Bring…it…me.”

He raised a brow and blinked. He glanced at the twitching Unseelie and I could see his mind working. “You—what—was Mallucé—” He broke off. “Exactly what are you saying, Mac? Are you telling me you want to eat that?”

I was beyond speaking. I parted my lips.

“Bloody hell, have you thought this through? Do you have any idea what it might do to you?”

I strove for one of our wordless conversations. I said, Pretty good one. Like make me live.

“I meant the downside. There’s always a downside.”

I told him a bigger one would be being dead.

“There are worse things than death.”

This isn’t one. I know what I’m doing.

“Even I don’t know what you’re doing, and I know everything,” he snapped.

I would have laughed if I’d been capable of it. His arrogance knew no bounds.

“It’s dark Fae, Mac. You’re planning to eat Unseelie. Do you getthat?”

I’m dying, Barrons.

“I don’t like this idea.”

Got a better one?

He inhaled sharply. I didn’t understand the things that flashed across his face then—thoughts too complex, beyond my grasp—thoughts he discarded. But he hesitated a few seconds too long, before jerking his head in a single, violent negation, and I knew that he’d had some other idea, and had deemed it worse than this one. “No better ideas.”

There was a knife in his hand. He gave me a tight, mocking smile as he moved to the slab. “Wing or a thigh? Ah, I’m afraid we don’t have any thighs left.” He sliced into the Fae.

They didn’t have wings either, but I appreciated the humor, black as it was. He was trying to lessen the terrible reality of my impending meal.

I didn’t want to know what parts of it I was eating so I closed my eyes when he raised the first slice of Unseelie flesh to my lips. I couldn’t look at it. It was bad enough that it crunched in places and continued to move the entire time I chewed it. And the entire time I swallowed it. The tiny pieces fluttered in my stomach.

Unseelie flesh tasted worse than all four of my nightmare tastes combined. I guess our instruction booklets only cover this world, not Faery, which is fine with me. I’d hate to have to dream all the bad tastes of their world, too.

I chewed and gagged, gagged and swallowed.

MacKayla Lane, bartender and glam-girl, was screaming at me to stop, before it was too late. Before we could never again go back to being the uncomplicated, happy young southern girl we’d been. She didn’t get that it was already way too late for that.

Savage Mac was squatting in the dirt, stabbing her spear into the ground, nodding and saying, Yesss, finally, some real power! Bring it on!

Me—the one who tries to mediate between the two—wondered what price I was going to pay for this. Were Barrons’ concerns founded? Would eating dark Fae do something terrible to me, make me dark, too? Or do you only turn dark if you have the seeds of darkness in you to begin with? Perhaps eating it a single time wouldn’t change me at all. Mallucé had eaten it constantly. Perhaps frequency was the killer. There were many drugs a person could do a few times without paying too high a price. Perhaps the living flesh of a dark Fae would heal me, make me strong, and do little else of consequence.

Perhaps it didn’t matter, because the bottom line was that I’d made the mistake today—or tonight, or whatever it was—of giving up hope too soon, and I wasn’t about to make it again. I would fight to live with whatever means I had at my disposal, and pay whatever price I had to pay without complaining. I would never again accept death. I would battle it until the last second, no matter the horrors confronting me. I was ashamed of myself for giving up hope.