If he’d wanted to make love to her, she would have done it. If he’d wanted her to sleep or eat or dance, she would have done it. It didn’t matter what she did or didn’t do anymore.

When, one day, he took her hand and said he wanted to take her somewhere, she went because there was no difference between staying and going.

Life was long and blank and tiring.

MAC

I’ve watched night fall many different ways since I came to Dublin.

When I first arrived, it often snuck up on me, subtly turning a darker shade of slate and fog, leaving no clear line of demarcation between afternoon and night.

For a girl from hot, sunny southern Georgia, it had been beyond depressing. Impossible to say “Oh, wasn’t that a nice sunset?” when you hardly ever saw the damn thing. The sky simply occupied itself all day muddying and glooming, rolling with thick thunderclouds, and the next thing you knew it was night, as if there’d been much bloody difference.

Other times it had come slamming down so hard it frightened me, one instant the sky blue agate, the next I was virtually blind, navigating Shades in alleys of pitch and monsters with the lights of my MacHalo blazing.

And yet other times, once the Fae were fully established in our world, night had fallen in infinitesimal degrees with breathtaking beauty; splashing a dazzling rainbow across the horizon for a half hour or more, painting a fat crimson halo to stain the moon, as kaleidoscopic hues of Faery kissed everything from the neon signs shimmering on wet pavement to the amber gas lamps, coloring Dublin exquisite shades of pink, purple, orange, and gold never before seen by humans.

Tonight, as I made my way back to BB&B from dinner with my family, the sky treated me to one of those slow, extraordinary sunsets, and with the True Magic binding me to the Earth, it touched my soul so deeply, I stopped and stood in the street, staring up at the sky, and cried. I stood there with tears rolling down my cheeks for a good half hour, watching night descend.

Our world was sick, so diseased.

And so damned beautiful.

And there was nothing I could do to save it. I’d come so far, defeated the Sinsar Dubh not once, but twice, by quirk of happenstance become the Fae queen’s successor, solved the riddle of the music box, and acquired half of the legendary song. But it was like having half a car, or half a gun or half a child.

Useless.

The prophecy hadn’t been quite right. I wasn’t going to destroy the world.

I was going to fail to save it.

Dublin was a ghost town. We’d been sending people off world as soon as they arrived, and as the city had emptied, the Fae, too, began to disappear. With humans vanishing, they’d had no reason to remain in our town and repaired to Faery.

Now they huddled, panicked, trapped at court, no more able to sift back out than I could sift in. I could feel them, this race I was supposed to save, their shallow fear and unrest. Their impatience and mistrust as they waited for their new queen to move their seat of power from a dying world, unaware it was impossible.

I’d not told them. Apparently Cruce hadn’t either. Only the prior queen had known their fate was irrevocably bound to the planet. Cruce’s silence on that score was a blessing for which I was grateful. If he’d been feeling vengeful (and God knows, he’d looked vengeful when I’d last seen him), he could have told both Courts the truth and led them to war against us, spitefully wiping out as much of the human race as he could, preventing us from escaping off world.

But he hadn’t. He’d vanished and we’d not heard a peep nor seen a sign of him since.

What power Cruce had! He held the fate of an entire race and a planet in his hands. Bitter over the queen’s choice of me as successor, harboring no love for humans and even less for Seelie, what was he doing now?

No doubt hunting for a way to cheat death, seeking some object of power or loophole.

I sighed. If dying would save the Unseelie, I believed Cruce might actually do it. But save the Seelie? What did he care if they died, along with so many humans we couldn’t get off world in time?

Like Cruce and the Seelie, the Unseelie, too, had vanished. I had no idea if he’d taken them off somewhere or they’d decided to flee our dying world while they could still sift, lumber, slither, or crawl into the Silvers.

My parents had finally agreed to leave and go off world tomorrow night but only because I’d promised to join them in two days.

That was never going to happen. Barrons could handle me dying in front of him. I would never do that to my parents. Parents should never have to watch their children die.

I couldn’t shake the feeling there was still something I could do.

But what?

Even the sidhe-seers had given up searching through the old lore, and had either already gone off world or were spending their last days with people they loved, enjoying time on our planet until they were forced off.

I had half a song, Cruce had the other half. And never the twain would meet.

“Ms. Lane.” A man fell into step beside me as I walked slowly toward the brilliant lights of BB&B. Busy admiring my last days of looking at my store, my home, I absently murmured, “Jayne.” Then, “Inspector Jayne!” I whirled in the street to gape at him. If I’d seen him before I’d heard his voice, I wouldn’t have recognized him.

Now I knew why Dani had given me a funny look when Enyo had told us Jayne was dead or missing in action, but she’d never gotten around to telling me he’d turned Seelie prince. “Everyone believes you’re dead or MIA,” I exclaimed.

He smiled faintly. “I left before the transformation became too obvious. They’d not have followed me. I’d trained them to kill the Fae.”

Now he was as Fae as me. The tall, robust Liam Neeson look-alike had become a muscled, younger version of himself with the characteristic Fae long tawny hair, iridescent eyes, and a degree of smoldering sensuality that was disturbing. Like all Fae, he was beautiful.

“The wife’s not complaining,” he said with a soft snort.

“I’m sure she’s not,” I murmured.

“Says it’s like the old days, when we first met. My wee ones think it’s the finest sort of thing. Though I’ve lost the ability to sift. You?”

“A few days back was the last time it worked.”

“We’re dying, aren’t we? Not just the world but you and I.”