Someone closes a hand on my shoulder from behind. I knock the hand off and whirl, wings lifting, rustling in warning. Around my neck, my torque writhes, flares with a cold blue-black light. No one touches me. I say who. I say when.

“Hey,” says the sidhe-seer who stared too long.

I give her a look. It says, Shut up and go away. And do it right now or die.

She arches a brow. “Would it kill you to say ‘hey’ back?”

Her voice is beautiful, husky with a knife-edge rasp and a sexy French accent. “Ah, a scintillating conversationalist,” I say sarcastically. “What will you dazzle me with next? A witty ‘What’s up?’ ”

“You made the ice that put out the fire,” she says.

I let my eyes fill with the strangeness of what I’ve become, silently daring her to look again, but she keeps her gaze fixed on my sternum. “I’m not a man for small talk. Say something that matters or leave.”

She stands her ground, unfazed by my efforts to drive her away. “I hear you’ve got a problem.”

“What would that be?” I’ll go see Mac, check on Dageus, then go home alone where I stay alone until there’s something for me to do that proves me more man than monster.

“When you have sex with a woman, she dies. Yet you need it like you need to breathe. I hear you won’t do it anymore because you don’t want to kill anyone. How’s that working out for you?”

What makes her think she can walk up to an Unseelie prince and instigate a glib conversation about sex? Who knows I’m not having sex and talks about me to sidhe-seers? “Where did you hear that?”

“Colleen. Your sister worries about you.”

Her hands form casual fists at her waist. This one has a cocky swagger and a bit of a death wish. Bloody Colleen, dishing with her bloody friends about her bloody brother. She and I are going to have a talk. “And you think you can help me with that?”

“It’s no more complicated than anything else in life. It takes discipline and I know discipline. I cut my teeth on it.”

She looks like she did, lean and long, with a strut of a walk and the clear definition of a six-pack beneath her torn, bloodstained tank. Beneath a shredded jacket, half-empty ammo belts crisscross her chest. Unlike the others, if she feels the biting wind I called to this meadow, she doesn’t shiver.

An F2000 assault rifle rests on a frayed strap over her arm, blood-crusted knives are tucked into her waistband, her boots. Her right cheek is bruised and split, her knuckles are raw, and her lower lip is spattered with dried blood. She moves closer to me and leans in. I drop my head forward and breathe smoke and battle-sweat, blood and woman. I catch the hint of heather soap. Colleen says they make it the old way at the abbey. It reminds me of the Highlands, of Tara, of innocence offered and taken, and death.

“Kiss me,” she says, staring at my mouth. “You know you want to. I saw how you looked at me.”

My gaze rests on her blood-spattered lips. Lush, pink, her mouth is Eros crusted with Thanatos. I miss kissing. I need now, more than ever before, to release the storm of sexual and emotional energy inside me. “I want to do much more than that.”

“I won’t let you.” She shifts her weight, swinging her rifle behind her back. “Not yet.”

“You can’t stop me.” No one can. And there’s the rub. A kiss would lead to a fuck and it would be her last because I can’t control myself. I drain a woman of life in bed. It’s odd to stare into eyes that never meet yours. It’s enough to give a man a God-complex. Her pupils dilate, widen then narrow again, with a shimmer of banked fire. Not deterred—intrigued. This one likes dancing on a high wire.

She wets her lips, tastes the dried blood and scrubs it away with the back of her hand. It doesn’t work, just smears more blood on her face. “A single kiss. Then walk away. Discipline begins. You think I have nothing to teach you. You think no one does. I thought that once, too. Maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe you’re a coward. Try the kiss.”

Dark eyes meet mine in level challenge. The message is clear. She’ll stare at me until she bleeds again.

“You want to measure your power by the power of those with whom you play. It turns you on.” I sneer.

“Am I supposed to be turned on by mediocrity?”

“You’re supposed to be turned on by a human. Get your bloody kicks somewhere else.” Twin drops of crimson appear in the corners of her eyes. I pivot and turn away.

“Right. Go on then,” she flings at my back. “Sure, you’ll never fail—if you never try. Hell of a life, that. When you’re ready to put on your big-boy pants, you know where to find me.”

“My pants and what’s in them are already too big for you,” I say coolly. She wants to tempt me, lead me down a dark path that will end with me carrying the sin of yet another woman’s death on my conscience, all because she wants to play with the big, powerful, dangerous man. It’s not about me. It’s about her. She needs to pull her head out of her ass.

She laughs and walks off, confident, sexy, sure-footed on the slippery ice, like she expects me to turn and look. I know, because I turn and look, unwillingly appreciating the fluid, aggressive grace of her spine, the lean muscle of her legs, the curve of her ass.

Then I lope across the frost-covered grass to find Mac, in a foul mood. Once I’m turned on, I stay that way for a long time. Though pumped by a human heart, my blood runs Unseelie prince, twisted and unquenchable.

I slam a fist to my chest directly above that chambered beast and remind myself it was born Highlander and Highlander it will remain.

“Christian!” Mac’s voice is an urgent whisper.

I hurry to join her. We will face whatever our next battle is together.

MAC

It’s dark. I can’t breathe. I can’t see.

Blind, I exist in a void, a tightly compressed Mac-in-the-box, waiting for someone to crank my handle.

The body I don’t have tries frantically to gulp air.

Though I no longer have a mouth, somehow I scream and scream.

MacKayla’s memory is mine. Not all, but enough; those ways in which she interacted with the physical world.

I know where Barrons keeps his car keys and that the mirror in the study on the first floor of the bookstore is the booby-trapped passage to his underground lair. I know how to navigate it; I once helped her gain entry. I know exactly how she takes her coffee, applies her makeup, does her hair, the way she greets and speaks with her adopted mother, her false father. I understand every nuance of what to say and do to pass myself off as Barrons’s Rainbow Girl.