“No, the king did not,” he said, and such exquisite pain lanced through me that I doubled over, holding my sides. “There’s a price to sing that song.”

“But you couldn’t have sung it. You’re not the queen,” I protested.

He turned his star-filled, apocalyptic gaze to Cruce and smiled faintly. “Rules. Malleable. He could have. He chose not to.” His expression changed to one of paternal pride. “Your turn to choose.”

“Why are you looking at Cruce? I thought I was supposed to sing the song.”

His head swiveled back to me and I got tangled in his enormous regard, stuck like a fly on sticky tape, unable to move. “You will owe me three boons,” he intoned.

I nodded instantly. Refusal was not an option.

“At the time I come to you next. You will obey without question.”

I nodded again.

“The music box contained half. The other half was concealed within the Sinsar Dubh.”

“It was not,” Cruce growled. “You never finished it. Admit it, you fuck. It was beyond you. I would have known.”

I said to the DEG, “You mean, I could merge with the part I left behind—”

“It was not in the part that split off and entered you.”

“So, who’s supposed to sing it, me or Cruce? Our world is ending!”

“Worlds do.”

“What the fuck is your game, old man?” Cruce demanded.

“Will you gift MacKayla your half?” the DEG said.

“To save my race? Yes. I have always been willing to lead them. As a true king should.”

“But it won’t,” the DEG said. “Save your race. It will doom it. The price of perfect song”—his dark, starry gaze encompassed both of us, and suddenly Cruce and I were standing shoulder-to-shoulder; he’d moved us together with a mere gaze—“is the death of all sprung into existence from imperfect song.”

I processed his words. “Oh, God, you mean…” I trailed off, looking up at Cruce with horror. Then I whirled on the Dreamy-Eyed Guy. “Shut up,” I snarled. “Stop speaking right now!”

But he didn’t. He continued driving his point home with utter clarity and finality, ringing the death knell for my world. “The moment the song is sung, the Unseelie race will cease to exist, from the humblest to the most magnificent of his creations. He never betrayed you, Cruce. He betrayed none of his children. He gave up what he held most dear for them.” The DEG smiled with faint bitterness. “And in the end, she left him anyway.”

“You didn’t have to tell him that,” I said furiously. “At least not until after he gave me the song! You could have lied.”

“No fun there,” the DEG murmured.

Cruce stood motionless for a small eon. My heart grew heavier the longer his silence stretched. Finally he said, bitterly, “You did this on purpose, you twisted fuck. You found a way to box me in. If I refuse to give my half to MacKayla, I die. If I give it to MacKayla, I die. I die either way.”

“But the Seelie live,” the Dreamy-Eyed Guy said mildly. “You’re the one that wanted to be king.”

“Fuck the Seelie, I have always despised them! Dead is not king!”

The DEG shrugged. “Never said it was easy.”

Abruptly the DEG was gone and we were back in the bookstore.

Everyone was talking at once, demanding to know what had happened, but my mind was whirling and I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach because I knew Cruce didn’t have an altruistic bone in his body and he despised the Seelie and his entire motivation for his entire existence had been to free his Dark Court.

Not kill it.

And himself in the process.

My gaze whipped to Cruce and I stared at him imploringly while time spun out.

I found my answer in the implacable depths of his sociopathic, self-serving gaze. It was beyond him to suicide. He simply wasn’t put together that way. He was a walking fundamental lack, made from imperfect song.

The Unseelie were driven by endless, consuming hunger to steal that which they lacked in a blind, voracious quest to complete themselves. The Seelie were merely hollowed out by immortality, driven by hunger to experience emotion I was beginning to suspect they’d once known.

The Seelie could evolve. The Unseelie never could, trapped in a flawed, limited, self-serving existence.

Cruce, give me his half of the song?

Never. Going. To. Happen.

He knew I’d found my answer in his gaze and flashed me a glacial smile. “Fuck you and your world, MacKayla. If I am doomed,” he said, his eyes narrowing to slits of iridescent ice—and suddenly I was staring straight into the eyes of the psychopathic Sinsar Dubh—“so are you. Along with every Seelie in existence. I’ll never permit those bastards to outlive my race.”

He vanished.

“Summon him back!” I cried to Jada. I whirled on Barrons. “And seize him when he gets here!”

“I can’t, Mac. My cuff. It’s gone!”

“So the king said he actually succeeded in re-creating the song but didn’t use it?” Jada said after I filled them in on what had transpired when the DEG whisked us off to the First World.

I sank down on the couch, sighing. “Yes. I mean no, not the king. The Dreamy-Eyed Guy kept talking about him in third person, as if he wasn’t actually the king.”

“Then who is he?” Christian demanded.

“I don’t know. Perhaps some part of the king. Whoever he is, he has a great deal of power.” He’d felt like the king to me. He’d taken me to the same planet the king once did.

“And he put half the song in the music box and the other half in the Sinsar Dubh?” Jada pressed.

I nodded.

“But not in the version of the Sinsar Dubh that possessed you?”

I shook my head. “The DEG said it couldn’t be replicated. Cruce got it. I didn’t.”

“And now Cruce is gone,” she said, scowling. “The cuff vanished from my wrist the instant he sifted out. Now I know why he kept changing the terms of every agreement I tried to make with him. He was never bound to me. He played us, pretending the cuff controlled him so he could stay close and keep an eye on everything we did.”

“Typical Cruce/V’lane move,” I agreed. “They don’t call him the Great Deceiver for nothing.”