I frowned. She and I had lived in the same household for two decades and she’d never sensed anything wrong with me then. She hadn’t puked every time I’d walked in the room. Was it possible the Sinsar Dubh inside me had needed to be acknowledged by me to gain power? That perhaps, before I’d come to Dublin, it had lay dormant within and quite possibly would have remained that way forever if I’d not awakened it by returning to a country I was forbidden to enter? Had Isla O’Connor known that the only way to keep my inner demon slumbering was to keep me off Irish soil? Or was there something more going on? Had there really never been any Fae in Ashford because it was so boring while we’d been growing up? Or had my birth mother somehow spelled our sidhe-seer senses shut, never to awaken unless we foolishly returned to the land of our blood-magic?

Oh yeah, feeling that matrixlike skewed sense of reality again.

Why was I even speculating such nonsense? This thing was not my sister!

It raised its head and peered at me with Alina’s tear-filled eyes. “Jr., I’m so sorry! I never meant for you to come here! I tried to keep you away! And it got you! Oh, God, it got you!” It dropped its head and began to cry again.

“Fuck,” I said. It was all I could think of. After a long moment I said, “What are you? What’s your purpose?”

It lifted its head and looked at me like I was crazy. “I’m Mac’s sister!”

“My sister died. Try again.”

It peered at me through the dimly lit basement, then, after a moment, got up on all fours and backed away, pressing itself against a crate of guns, drawing its knees up to its chest. “I didn’t die. Why aren’t you doing something bad to me? What game are you playing?” it demanded. “Is it because Mac won’t let you hurt me? She’s strong. You have no idea how strong she is. You’re never going to win!”

“I’m not playing a game. You’re the one playing a game. What the hell is it?”

It drew a deep shuddering breath and wiped a trickle of foamy spit from its chin. “I don’t understand,” it finally said. “I don’t understand anything that’s happening anymore. Where’s Darroc? What happened to all the people? Why is everything in Dublin so damaged? What’s going on?”

“Ms. Lane,” a deep voice slid from the shadowy stairs. “It’s not Fae.”

“It’s not?” I snapped. “Are you certain?”

“Unequivocally.”

“Then what the hell is it?” I snarled.

Barrons stepped into the light at the bottom of the stairs, fully clothed, and I realized he must store caches of clothing all over the city, in case he needed to transform unexpectedly.

He swept the Alina look-alike with a cold, penetrating gaze.

Then he looked at me and said softly, “Human.”

25

“Inside these prison walls, I have no name…”

The first time the Unseelie-king-residue came to the white, bright half of the boudoir in which he’d left her trapped by magic beyond her comprehension, the Seelie queen melted back against the wall, turned herself into a tapestry, and watched silently as a graphic scene of coupling unfolded before her unenthusiastic but eventually reluctantly fascinated gaze.

Hers was the court of sensuality, and he had once been considered king of it for good reason. Passion drenched the chamber, saturating the very air in which her tapestry hung, draping another bit of sticky, sexually charged residue on her weft and weave.

A visitor would have seen no more than a vibrant hunt scene hung upon the wall of the boudoir, and at the center, before the slab upon which the mighty white stag was being sacrificed, a slender, lovely woman with pale hair and iridescent eyes, standing, staring out from the tapestry and into the room.

She’d cut her queenly teeth on legends of the enormously brilliant, terrifyingly powerful, wild, half-mad godlike king that had nearly destroyed their entire race, and certainly condemned it to eternal struggle, with his obsession over a mortal.

She despised the Unseelie king for locking her away. For killing the original queen before the song had been passed on. For dooming them to striking alliances with weaker beings in order to survive, limping along with only a hint of their former grandeur and power.

She despised herself for not seeing through her most trusted advisor, V’lane, and being locked away by him as well, in a frozen prison, trapped in a casket of ice, scarcely daring to hope the seeds she’d planted long ago among the Keltar and O’Connor and various others might come to fruition and she would live. Carry on to try to survive the next test she’d also foreseen.

This—spelled into a chamber with memory residue—was not living. Buried in another coffin of sorts while her race suffered who knew what horrors.

The Unseelie prison walls were down. Even frozen in her casket, diminishing, being leeched of her very essence by the void-magic of the Unseelie prison, she’d felt the walls around her collapse, had known the very moment the ancient, compromised song had winked out.

She, more than any of the Seelie, understood the danger her race now faced. She was the one who’d used imperfect song, fragments she’d found hither and yon through the ages, to bind the Fae realms to the mortal coil. She’d only been able to secure her imperiled court by marrying it to the human planet.

Irretrievably.

And if that coil were devoured by the black holes, so, too, would be all the Seelie realms.

With the king, she’d pretended to know none of this, yet it had been precisely why she’d urged him to take action.