I watch it clatter to a stop against the façade of the hearth, relieved. I can die. Not that I want to right now. I just like options. As long as I have the spear, I have options. I’m never getting rid of that thing. It’s my date with a gravestone, and I’m human. I want to die one day.

“But he can’t.” It’s the first complete sentence I speak since I was attacked. “Your son can’t die, can he? No matter what. Ever.”

43

If I’d never eaten Unseelie, healing miraculously would have messed with my head.

As it was, I pretended I had eaten Unseelie. I couldn’t deal with the whole elixir-that-prolongs-life scenario. It made me want to kill Darroc all over again. Violently. Sadistically. With lots of torture.

He’d not only turned me Pri-ya, he’d planned for me to live that way eternally. I’d softened when I saw those pictures of him with Alina, imagining a different outcome for them, but now all softness vanished. If Barrons hadn’t saved me—I couldn’t even begin to imagine the horrors. I didn’t want to. I would have been pathologically insane in a very short time. What if he’d locked me away, refused to give me what I needed? Kept me somewhere small and dark and—

I shuddered.

“Stop thinking about it,” Barrons said.

I shivered. I couldn’t help it. There really were worse things than dying.

“It didn’t happen. I got you out and brought you back. It all worked out in the end. You’re tough to kill. I’m glad.”

I’d bled out, according to Barrons, several times. Too much of my throat had been torn away for my body to repair me quickly enough. While I’d been dead—or at least no longer breathing—my body had continued repairing itself. I’d regain consciousness, only to bleed out again. Eventually enough of me had been restored that I’d remained conscious for the rest of the process. I was covered with blood, crusted with it.

Barrons picks me up and is carrying me again. We pass through luxurious rooms, down stairs and more stairs, and I realize there are more than three levels beneath his garage. He has a whole world down here. I usually hate being underground. But this is different. There’s a sensation of expansiveness, of space not being quite what it seems. I suspect he has more Silvers in here, many ways in and out. It’s the ultimate survivalist fantasy. The world could be nuked, and life would go on down here, or we could pass through to some other world. With Barrons, I suspect, no catastrophe is ever final. He always goes on.

Now, so will I.

I don’t like that. I’ve been reprogrammed, changed in so many ways. This one is going to be the hardest to deal with. It makes me feel less human, and I was already feeling detached. Am I part of the Unseelie King, now nearly immortal? I wonder if this is a loop. Arewe reborn over and over again, to repeat the same cycles?

“Would it be so bad?”

“Are you reading my mind?”

“You’re thinking with your eyes.” He smiles.

I touch his face, and the smile vanishes. “Do it again.”

“Don’t be a jackass.”

I laugh. But there’s no amusement left in his face. It was swiftly erased.

He looks at me with cold, hard eyes. I see what’s in them now. To the rest of the world, they might seem empty. I remember thinking a few times myself that they were void of all humanity, but that’s simply not true.

He feels. Rage. Pain. Lust. So much emotion, electric beneath his skin. So much volatility. Man and beast, always at war. I know now it’s never easy for him. The battle he fights is nonstop. How does this man go on every day?

He stops and lowers me to my feet. He moves through the shadows, turns on a gas fire, and begins to light candles.

We are in his bedroom. It’s like the Unseelie King’s lair: opulent, luxurious, with an enormous bed, draped in black silk, black furs. I can’t see past it. All I can see is myself there, naked with him.

I’m trembling.

I’m awed that I’m here. That he wants me.

He lights more candles near the bed. He picks up pillows and pushes them into a pile I remember from being Pri-ya.

In that long-ago basement, he mounded them beneath my hips. I sprawled over them with my head on the bed and my ass in the air. He would rub himself back and forth between my legs until I was begging, then push slowly into me from behind.

He places the last pillow on the pile, and looks at me. He jerks his head toward the pile of pillows.

“I watched you die. I need to fuck you, Mac.”

The words slam into me like bullets, taking my knees out. I lean back against a piece of furniture—an armoire, I think. I really don’t care. It holds me up. It wasn’t a request. It was acknowledgment of a requirement to make it from this moment to the next, like I need a transfusion, my blood has been poisoned.

“Do you want me to?” There is no purr, or coyness, or seduction in his voice. There is a question that needs an answer. Bare bones. That’s what he’s after. That’s what he offers.

“Yes.”

He strips his shirt over his head and I catch my breath, watching those long, hard muscles ripple. I know how his shoulders look, bunched, when he’s on top of me, how his face gets tight with lust, as he eases inside me. “Who am I?”

“Jericho.”

“Who are you?” He kicks off his boots, steps out of his pants. He’s commando tonight.

My breath whooshes out of me in a run-on word: “Whogivesafuck?”