2. Dispatch scouts into the Silvers and find a world humans can survive on. Start making plans to relocate them. They’ll have to be fully settled on the planet, not in the Silvers, because I don’t know what will happen to the Silvers if our planet dies.

3. Find Cruce and make him my ally. Persuade him to teach me how to use the magic I have. Find out what he knows. He not only has part of the Sinsar Dubh that allegedly contains information about the song (or was that just one of the many lies he’d told me as V’lane?) but worked beside the Unseelie King for eons as he tried to re-create the lost melody. Cruce has more knowledge of ancient history than anyone.

4. Find out what’s going on with the Fae: Seelie and Unseelie. Figure out how to organize them and unite humans and Fae together toward the goal of finding the song.

I chewed on my pen and thought, yeah, that was going to be a challenge. Like they were going to accept me—a human—as their leader and queen. I knew what the Fae were like. They responded to threats and displays of power, and so far the only thing I’d figured out how to do was clean up my bookstore.

I’d spent the past few hours sitting on the couch in front of a lightly hissing gas fire, doing the closest thing to meditating I’d ever done, trying to fathom what was inside me now. It had all seemed so clear, so pure, the power so tangible and understandable when I was standing on the hill beneath three moons. But I’d been translucent and ethereal then, and I was no longer. I was solid and human again, and although I could feel power rippling beneath my skin, I didn’t know how to access and direct it. I supposed this was how Christian felt, with no brotherly prince to help him understand what he was.

I scribbled another one down.

5. Go to the abbey and rebuild it the way I did the bookstore, restore the sidhe-seers’ home so they can gather all the lore they have and begin searching it. (Do I have the power to re-create things that got burned, like books? How am I supposed to rebuild the abbey? I don’t know what each room looked like. Do I need to?)

6. Talk to Barrons about talking to Dageus to see what he knows.

PERSONAL GOALS:

1. Find my parents and spend time with them. Bring them up-to-date so they can help.

2. Find out if Alina still exists.

I stopped writing and sighed. I had serious doubts on that score. After watching the Book create multiple versions of me with substance, I’d concluded that was all Alina had ever been. And what had I done with my chance to spend time with her again, even as an illusion? I’d driven her away repeatedly, interrogated and bullied her. Only at the end had I finally accepted her, made plans to have coffee and breakfast—a date I’d never gotten to keep. I shoved the tangle of emotion into another handy box and resumed writing.

3. Talk to Dani about Shazam. Determine if he’s real, and if so, figure out how to help her. If he’s not real, figure out how to help her times ten.

4. Barrons.

I didn’t elucidate on the Barrons personal goal. It was purely selfish, as were all my personal goals, but since the world might cease to exist in the very near future, I intended to spend at least some time with the people I loved.

The bell on the door tinkled as it opened and banged shut again.

My body tightened with familiar tension and I smiled.

Barrons was there, behind me, reading over my shoulder in silence. After a moment he said, “Ah. So I’m a personal goal of yours.”

“Something like that.”

“Care to elaborate?”

I did. Tossing aside my notebook, I turned around on the sofa, knelt on the cushions and looked up at him. I’d intended to pull his head down and kiss him but I ended up just sitting there, gazing at him.

What a creature you’ve become. His dark eyes gleamed.

I know, right?

Nice hair, Mac.

Thanks. What happened to “Ms. Lane”? I’m not dying, I don’t think you’re about to kill me, and we’re not having sex.

She doesn’t live here anymore.

She doesn’t? Was he throwing me out? Would he do that? Tell me I had to go live with the Fae now?

It’s nice to meet you. Finally. Mac. His eyes glittered with unguarded appreciation and passion.

I stared up at him then shook my head with a wry smile, resisting the urge to slap a hand to my forehead. It was so simple, so clear, and had mystified me for so long. I’d told myself it was just the way we were, preferring a persona of distance in public and another, intimate, sacred one in private.

But that had never been it at all. Or at least not all of it.

I might never know if it was the Sinsar Dubh’s presence inside me that kept me so conflicted about everything for so long and, once it was gone, I finally gained that long-sought clarity of being, or if it had been through the very process of standing my ground and defeating it that I’d achieved such clarity. But it didn’t matter. The end result was the same.

Some shadowy, self-destructive, confused place no longer existed inside me. I was of a single, clear mind. There were goals, and there were methods to attain them. There were my chosen responsibilities and those things I was willing to do to honor them. There were the things I was willing to live with and the things I wasn’t willing to live without. There was a quiet, deep abiding love of myself—flaws and all, and I had plenty—and the world around me, and it had plenty, too.

My eyes shimmered, and later Barrons would tell me they’d glowed with iridescent fire. It’s nice to meet you, too, Jericho.

I pulled his head down and kissed him.

SINSAR DUBH

My enemies underestimate me.

Encumbered by emotion, their faulty brains fail to apprehend the altered variables, particularly the new one introduced by MacKayla walking away from me.

WALKING AWAY FROM ME WILL NEVER BE PERMITTED! SHE IS MY HORSE TO BREAK AND ALWAYS WILL BE!

The force field erected by the stones was designed to hold my essence, doubly trapped: first by the covers of the spelled tome, second by the field. Or first by a body, second by the field. Without the primary barrier, I exceed the prison’s capacity to contain me.

Although it takes time to divine the method and is perilous—for an instant I nearly dissipate into a storm of black dust shaped like a cube—my will is equal to the task.

A small, dark cloud, I hover above the cocooned Unseelie princess.