“Young,” he corrects. “Sometimes the young surprise you.”

“Young is boring. She never understood you. I do.” Were he to doff his circumscribing ethics, we might raze galaxies together. I would fuck him. Discover what my body has to offer me in the way of pleasure. Lust speaks its hungry native tongue when I look at him, demanding satiety. There will be time for that. Later.

“Bullshit. She knows me. You don’t.”

“I know you far better than MacKayla did, steeped in all that grand insecurity. She couldn’t make up her mind about shit. That’s why it was so easy for me to make it up for her.”

“She’s getting there. I’m a patient man.”

“Your love for her is your greatest weakness. Pity. You could have been so much more.” He could have been like me. His monster demands he be like me. He muzzles the finest part of himself. MacKayla may pretend she doesn’t know what he eats, but we do. We know what he is. We just don’t talk about it.

“What do you want?” he demands.

“I have what I want. You have nothing to offer me.”

“Try me. Bargain. Let me find you another body.”

“Do you have one in mind?” I say, interested. I never underestimate my prey. Perhaps he knows something MacKayla and I don’t.

“Mine,” he says flatly.

I’m silenced by the unexpected offer. I assess his splendid body from head to toe, pondering how delicious his black-skinned beast would be to ride. Possessing him, I would gain access to all his secrets, his enviable powers. I’d be able to kill Fae without needing spear or sword. I’d acquire millennia of druidry and skills in the black arts. He would go so far to save her—yield his exquisite existence for an illusion called love? The fool is more deluded than I believed. Desire, greed, lust to possess his powerful, changeable, impervious skin saturate my every cell. If I were able to complete transference to his body, and my enormity burned him up like all the others, I’d come back again and again, forever. I’d only have to maintain my hold on my form through the dying and rebirth, and I’ve held my form against far more formidable foes. The Unseelie King himself tried to strip me out of the corporeal Book he’d made once he realized what he’d done.

And failed.

Perhaps, at the moment of his dying, I might evict the tatters of his sentience. He doesn’t deserve the vessel he inhabits. My will is supreme. No other has my focus, my hunger.

He is up to some trick or he would never offer. Barrons is no sacrificial lamb. Besides, there is another, more certain way. I will fuck him. Then kill him. Once my goals are attained. “You think you stand a better chance against me than she does, because you have a beast within. You think you’re stronger and would take on her battle for her, like you always do because she’s such a pathetic victim. Your beast,” I say silkily, “would be a mere mouse in my house. You chain it. Hobble it with your fucking morality; even those few shreds you possess.”

“Try me,” he says just as silkily. “If you’re so certain of that. Take my body. Let hers go. Hers is fragile. It can die. You know mine can’t. Logic dictates you take mine. If you can,” he taunts. “Ah, but you’re not sure you can, are you?”

Rage floods me. He’s the bird in the bush. I crave his skin but am uncertain I could seize it. “MacKayla’s body is all I desire. I’ve such fun and games planned for it.” He deserves to be tortured. He impedes my desires. I make my face go slack, rearrange my features into a soundless shriek. Black eyes pale to green, then black then green again.

I pretend to be his Rainbow Girl beneath the gore, frothy, fragile, and fatally flawed. I fall to my knees, clutching my head. “Barrons,” I scream, “help me! Oh, God, help me! I’m in here. Get it out of me! Please, Barrons, help me!” I infuse my cry with desperation, knowing he’ll hear it in nightmares.

I shake myself violently, flood my eyes black again, toss my head back and snarl. “She is beyond your help.”

“Mac, I’m here. I’m not losing you,” he says roughly. “You’ve got to fight it. You can do it! Fight!”

Rah-rah fucking cheerleader. All he’s missing are fluffy pink pom-poms. It’s all I can do not to shake my head in disgust.

I make my eyes go green/black/green/black, body shuddering as if I’m weak and fighting for control.

“Barrons,” I scream. “It hurts! It’s killing me! Please, you’ve got to save me! I don’t have much time!”

He lunges forward, checks himself and stops.

His pain is my pleasure. “You can’t defeat me.” I let my eyes go full black again. “She’s mine and I will never release her.” I push myself up and saunter toward him, swaying my hips, jiggling my breasts, a blatant reminder of the potent bond they share. And perhaps can again—my walk suggests. I wet my lips and smile. My body is hot, parts of it ache in a way that’s sinfully delicious. It’s an ache I understand. LUST. GREED. Dominate him. Chain him. Use and abuse him. I have plans for this one.

He mutters beneath his breath and a silvery wall appears in the air between us.

I saunter closer, stopping inches from his hastily erected and not nearly fortified enough to keep the likes of me out druid wall.

“The Fae taught the druids,” I purr. “And not very well. We always withhold information.” I reach for the three lesser amulets I took from Cruce that hang around my neck, enclose them in a fist and murmur softly, weaving a spell of illusion that will convince Barrons to drop his druid wall and become lamb to my slaughter.

The druid wall remains.

I chant louder and my amulets glow with blue-black fire.

The corners of his mouth lift in a smile and he says smugly, “The lesser three don’t work on me. Only the king’s does and I have that one. Mac doesn’t know what I’m capable of. You don’t either. You’ll learn my limits. By discovering their lack.”

It offends me that he possesses an amulet that should be mine, offends me more that yet another thing that should unfold in my favor doesn’t. I go motionless, banking the embers of my rage with images of his destruction. I will torture him to the brink of death over and over. I will take him with me, my prisoner when I leave this world. I will make him beg for death until the black holes I plan to feed so they will grow rapidly out of control devour the earth and trap him as I was.