I pick him up and drag him behind the pile of rocks. I’ll collect him before I leave the abbey, take him with me to my lair.

Perhaps I’ll play with him before he dies.

It is in breaking things that you understand them.

I’ve always been a curious sort.

As I enter the demolished abbey from the rear, I keep my ears on the voices of sidhe-seers beyond the tumbled walls and my eyes focused for random opportunity.

It’s everywhere.

Here, I scrape ice from a box of rat poison used to protect the fortresses’ larders. There, I find a half-standing pantry containing ice-slicked, corked jugs of water from their artesian well. The two meet in a lovely drink of hemorrhagic death. No guarantee it will be imbibed or that enough will be drunk. But there’s a possibility it will. It’s enough to entertain.

I move carefully over piles of slippery stone and splintered beams. Slip east, then down, knowing the way because my erstwhile host walked this path while I siphoned impressions from the leaky sieve of her mind.

Below. Below. I would so prefer not to go below to the catacomb in which my prior incarnation was housed for SO FUCKING LONG I THOUGHT I WOULD GO INSANE. But I didn’t. I kept my cool, calm, collected self and waited for the right moment, amputating myself from within the Sinsar Dubh’s covers as it was being carried, slipping out the door unnoticed, so to speak, the ultimate sleight of hand.

I stop outside the closed doors of the cavern. Long ago the king sealed and unsealed the doors of his great citadel in the Unseelie prison, frequently during his time of endless experimentation trying to re-create the Song of Making. For such an obsessive entity, he’s a careless bastard. Many of his memories are mine. Trapped inside the cavern, held immobile by his sticky spiderweb of runes, such knowledge did me no good. From outside the cavern it’s quite possibly all I need in order to contain (then kill!) the vestiges of my former self that cannot be permitted to exist within Cruce.

I speak the spell that once opened and closed the ancient doors of the king’s personal demesne, and as I expected, the towering portals swing wide. Unlike the idiot king, I rarely use the same protection spell twice.

In the shadowy interior a prince rises, glides toward the open entrance. The last time MacKayla saw him, Cruce was imprisoned. He is no longer. He’s a giant of a Fae, with enormous black wings dusted with an ornate design of sparkling iridescent flecks, a body of brutal strength and delicious perfection. He was made to rule, to crush, to conquer. Fury ignites my blood. His superb vessel should be mine.

“Cruce,” I say as I step across the threshold.

He stops, assesses me. “MacKayla. It was not you I thought would come.”

My spear, my lovely spear, I was eager to kill him. To take from him what I can’t have for myself. Now I can only contain and store him with the bastard Highlander until one of the two deadly Hallows are mine.

Still, I see no need to hasten to the endgame.

Endgames are so anticlimactic.

It’s over.

Then there you are.

Bored again.

“Did you think I wasn’t listening? You offered me the world,” I say. “You said I would be your queen.” Cruce thinks I’m Mac. My eyes are green. Currently. “You have the Sinsar Dubh.”

He’s wary. “That should make you fear me.”

“Should it?” I know better. I’d been forced to leave behind half the magic I possessed to transfer myself into Isla O’Connor the night I escaped the abbey, but I’d cleverly embedded the majority of my prior self into the covers of the Book and planted a spell in the pages so that if they were ever read, the sentience I’d forsaken would cease to exist and crumble to dust. I will never permit another me to walk free in the world. I know what I’m capable of.

“The king said me becoming him, you becoming my queen, wasn’t the only possibility,” Cruce probes. “I have thought long on that. What did he mean, MacKayla? Why did he seem to think the magic of our race might prefer you?”

He’s wondering what power MacKayla possesses that she was able to open the king’s doors. He was interred before my self-flagellating vessel discovered me inside her, hence doesn’t know I stand before him. I stop a few paces from the great pretender who lived in Faery for half a million years as a Seelie prince, only to be exposed as the last made Unseelie prince, while I spent an eternity in solitary confinement. Now I’m the great pretender and he’s the one who will be imprisoned. “We must trust one another if we are to rule this planet together.”

“Ah, now you seek to rule it with me?”

“I freed you, didn’t I?” Toying with Cruce amuses me. He can sift. I can’t. He’s technically more powerful in that ability alone, and when I best him it will prove that my mind is so superior it doesn’t matter what power those around me possess. Everyone falls to me eventually. He’s a cretin. Idiot. MacKayla would never have said “rule.” She would have said something inoffensive like “guide.” That was his first and only red flag. Those that fail to protect themselves deserve any harm that befalls them. You are your own kingdom. Guard it. Or lose it.

“Why is that?”

“I believe you absorbed the spells from the Book, but it did not possess you. Is that true?” I know it for fact. Aside from a few redundancies, spells, music, wards, runes, he has nothing to compete with the enormous sentience of me. Although some of what he absorbed from reading the Book is equal to what I possess, it won’t matter. He won’t see his demise coming.

He hesitates briefly then nods, eyes narrowed.

“Then come with me now, and hurry. Our world is in danger. The Fae court has no ruler. If you can get them under control and help us with the black holes, the others will accept you.”

Ah, there it is, what I wanted to see in his eyes. Interest, the belief that he has the possibility of a grand future. Desire. I know what impeded desire feels like. I know what Hell is. I will rain it down on this planet and everything on it.

“You said I raped you. You despised me,” Cruce says silkily.

“A minor offense. I’ve changed since then.” And how. There’s little satisfaction in imprisoning an already imprisoned mind. It’s the free ones, the hungry ones, those that fight, those with great ambition, that are so much fun to amputate and torture. They take the longest to break.