“And just how did they die?” Barrons said.

V’lane sighed. “They vanished when she did.” He looked at me again.

I blinked. His gaze held sorrow—and a promise that we would talk soon.

“Convenient for you, fairy.”

V’lane cut Barrons a look of disdain. “Look beyond the tip of your mortal nose. The Unseelie Princes are easily as powerful—if not more so—than I. And the Unseelie King himself is far stronger than us all. The magic would most certainly go to him, wherever he is. I have nothing to gain by harming my queen and everything to lose. You must let me have her. If she was in the Unseelie prison the entire time that she has been missing, she may be very close to death. You must permit me to take her to Faery, to regain her strength!”

“Never going to happen.”

“Then you will be responsible for killing our queen,” V’lane said bitterly.

“And how do I know that’s not what you’ve been after all along?”

“You despise us all. You would allow the queen to die to satisfy your own petty vengeances.”

I wanted to know what Barrons’ petty vengeances were. But I was feeling that damned duality again. What was unfolding here wasn’t remotely what anyone thought. Only I knew the truth.

This was not the queen they were fighting over. It was the concubine from hundreds of thousands of years ago, who’d somehow ended up becoming the Seelie Queen. Had the king finally gotten what he’d hoped for? Had protracted time in Faery made his beloved Fae? Had the balance that the world “listed” toward, as the dreamy-eyed guy proposed, turned a mortal into a replacement queen, as it would ultimately turn Christian into a replacement prince?

If I was the king, why didn’t that elate me? The concubine was finally Fae! I shook my head. I couldn’t think that way. It just didn’t work for me. “Mac,” I muttered. “Just be Mac.”

Barrons cut me a hard look that said, Shelve it for later, Ms. Concubine.

“Look, boys,” I said. Four ancient sets of eyes skewered me, and I blinked at the two Scotsmen. “Oh, you two aren’t at all what you seem to be, are you?”

“Is anyone in this room?” Barrons said irritably. “What’s your point?”

“She’s safest here,” I said succinctly.

“That’s what I’ve been saying all along,” Barrons growled. “This level is warded the same way the bookstore is. Nothing can sift in—”

V’lane hissed.

“—or out. Nothing Seelie or Unseelie can get to her. We don’t let anyone enter the room clothed. Rainey is nursing—”

“You put her in with my parents?” I said incredulously. “People are visitingnaked?”

“Where else would I put her?”

“The queen of the Faery is in that glass room with my mom and dad?” My voice was rising. I didn’t care.

He shrugged. His eyes said, Not really, and we both know that. You aren’t even from this world.

Mine said, I don’t give a shit who I might have been in another lifetime. I know who I am now.

“It takes time and resources to ward a place as well as the room where Jack and Rainey are. We’re not duplicating our efforts,” he said.

“Castle Keltar was warded by the queen herself,” Dageus said. “Far from Dublin, where the Sinsar Dubh seems inclined to prowl, ’tis the better choice.”

“She stays. Not open to discussion. You don’t like that, try to take her,” Barrons said flatly, and in his dark eyes I saw anticipation. He hoped they would. He was in the mood for a fight. Everyone in the room was. Even me, I was startled to realize. I had a sudden, unwanted appreciation of men. I had a problem I couldn’t fix. But if I could create a manageable problem, like a fistfight, and kick the shit out of it, it sure would make me feel better for a while.

“If she stays, we stay,” Dageus said flatly. “We guard her here or we guard her there. But we guard her.”

“And if they stay, I stay, too.” V’lane’s voice dripped ice. “No human will protect my queen so long as I exist.”

“Simple solution to that, fairy. I make you stop existing.”

“The Seelie are not our enemy. You touch him, you take us all on.”

“You think I couldn’t, Highlander?”

For a moment the tension in the room was unbearable, and in my mind’s eye I saw us all going for one another’s throats.

Barrons was the only one of us that couldn’t be killed. I needed the Scotsmen to perform the re-interment ritual and V’lane and his stone to help corner the Book. A fight right now was a very bad idea.

“And that’s settled,” I chirped brightly. “Everyone’s staying. Welcome to the Chester’s Hilton! Let’s get some beds made up.”

Barrons looked at me as if I’d gone mad.

“Then let’s go out and find some things to kill,” I added.

Dageus and Cian growled assent, and even V’lane looked relieved.

32

I stepped out of the shower and looked at myself in the mirror. Since dragging my aching body up the back stairs of BB&B to my bedroom twenty minutes ago, my bruises had faded by forty percent. I traced my fingers across a particularly bad one on my collarbone. I’d thought I heard a crack and was worried something had broken, but it was only a hot, swollen contusion and was healing remarkably fast.