The king’s eyes were sad. “In more ways than you know, if it were true. But another stands in your way.” He glanced at me.

My eyes widened and I shook my head instantly. “What are you trying to do? Get him to kill me? I’m not in his way.”

“Our magic prefers a woman. I believe it would choose you.”

“I have the Sinsar Dubh,” Cruce said. “She does not.”

The king laughed. “You think to become me. She becomes her. Not the only possible.”

I was horrified. I thought I understood what he was saying and didn’t like it one bit.

“Perhaps Barrons becomes Cruce. Who, then, would cry judgment?” the king said.

“Barrons wouldn’t become War,” I said instantly.

“Or me. Depends on the nuances.” The king looked at the concubine in Cruce’s grasp. “Irrelevant, all of it. I’m not done yet.”

She was gone.

“What the—?” Cruce’s hands were suddenly empty. He lunged forward and slammed into an invisible barrier. His eyes narrowed and he began to chant in a voice that made my blood ice, chiming like the full-blooded Unseelie Prince he was.

The king waved a hand and Cruce stopped chiming.

Cruce sketched a complicated symbol in the air, eyes narrowed on the king. Nothing happened. He began to chime again. The king silenced him.

Cruce conjured a rune and flung it at the king. It hit the invisible barrier and dropped. He flung a dozen more. They all did the same. It was like watching a man and a woman fight, where the man was simply trying to keep the woman from hurting herself too much.

Cruce rocked back on his heels and his wings began to open, black velvet and enormous, framing a nude, muscled body of such perfection that my cheeks were suddenly wet. Long black hair streamed down his shoulders; brilliant colors rushed beneath his bronze skin.

I touched my face and my fingers came away bloody.

I was awed by the dark majesty of him. I knew why War was as often revered as feared. I knew what it felt like to be cradled in those wings while he moved inside me.

The Unseelie King watched him, paternal pride glittering in his eyes.

Cruce was trying to destroy him, and he was proud of him.

Like a parent watching his child kick off the training wheels and take off down the drive for the first time without help.

And I knew that Cruce had never stood a chance, so long as the king cared to exist.

The danger would never be whether the king was powerful enough—he was and always would be the strongest of them all.

The true danger would always only be whether he cared enough.

He saw existence completely differently from everyone else. What we might view as defeat and destruction, he saw—like the Book he’d created—far down the arrows of time, as an act of creation.

Who knew? Maybe it was.

But I liked existing here and now, and I’d fight for it. I didn’t have a bird’s-eye view and didn’t want it. I liked padding around on dog paws, kicking up fall leaves and digging in spring dew, sniffing up scents on the ground, and living a life. I was only too happy to leave the flying for those with wings.

I reached for my spear. It was in my holster. And I realized it always had been whenever “V’lane” was around. It was part of the complex illusion he’d maintained. As an Unseelie, he’d never been able to touch it yet could have been killed by it, so whenever we were together, he’d fed me the glamour that it was no longer in my holster. Just as the Unseelie Princes had fed me an illusion that I’d been turning it on myself there in the church.

I never had. I’d chosen to throw it away because I’d believed the glamour. I could have killed them that night, if I’d been able to see through it. The power had always been right here, inside me, if I’d just known it.

I would kill him now.

“Don’t even think about it,” the Unseelie King said.

“He took your concubine. He faked her death. He raped me!”

“No harm, no foul.”

“Are you kidding me?”

He looked at his concubine. “Today amuses.”

Abruptly, the moon and megaliths were gone. We were back in the cavern.

Cruce chimed, his wings open to their full majestic glory, eyes blazing with righteous fury, lips peeled back in a snarl.

The king iced him like that.

A nude, avenging angel, encased in clear crystal. Blue-black bars shot up from the floor, framing his prison.

I should have told the king to put clothes on him.

Make the ice cloudy so no one could see him. Hide those stunning velvety wings. Tone down the golden halo around him.

Make him look less … angelic, sexual, erotic. But you know what they say about hindsight.

The king said to Kat, “He is your Sinsar Dubh now.”

“No!” Kat exclaimed. “We don’t want him!”

“Your fault it got out. Contain it better this time.”

I heard Barrons say, “McCabe? What the fuck are you doing here?”

People began to appear in the cavern, sifting in. The white-suited McCabe from Casa Blanc was joined by the leprechaun-like reservations clerk from my first night at the Clarin House and by the news vendor from the street who’d given me directions to the Garda, the one who’d called me a hairy jackass.

“Liz?” Jo said. “Where did you come from?”

Liz said nothing, simply moved, as they all did, to join the Unseelie King.

“He’s too big for one body,” I said numbly.