But I couldn’t look. I couldn’t focus, because whatever was beyond that mirror had been calling me all my life.

I knew the Silver wouldn’t kill me. I knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

“I’m sorry. I have to go.”

His hands tightened on my shoulders and tried to turn me away. “Walk away from it, Mac. Let it go. Some things don’t need to be known. Isn’t your life enough as it is?”

I laughed. The man who always insisted I see things as they were was now urging me to hide? On the rug behind him, the concubine laughed, too. Her head arched, her chin tipped up, as if she was being kissed by an invisible lover.

He had to be the king. I slid my hand down his arm, twined my fingers with his. “Come with me,” I said, and ran for the Silver.

26

I was surprised by the ease with which I slid through the black membrane. I was stunned senseless by the cold that knifed into me.

My brain issued an order to gasp. My body failed to obey it. I was crusted from head to toe with a thin sheet of glittering ice. It cracked as I took a step, tinkled to my feet, and I was instantly re-coated again.

How was I supposed to breathe here? How had the concubine breathed?

Ice coated the insides of my nose, my mouth and tongue and teeth, all the way down to my lungs, as all the parts of my body I needed to process air were sheathed in an impenetrable layer. I stumbled backward, seeking the other side of the mirror, where there was white and light and oxygen.

I was so cold that I could barely move. For a moment, I wasn’t sure I would make it back through the Silver. I was afraid I would die in the Unseelie King’s bedchamber, repeating history, only this time I’d have left no note.

When I finally slid through the dark membrane, warmth hit me like a blast oven, and I stumbled, went flying across the room, and slammed into the wall. The concubine stretched on the rug paid me no heed. I sucked in air with a greedy screech.

Where was Jericho? Could he breathe on the other side? Did he need to breathe, or was it his natural environment? I glanced back at the mirror, expecting to see him moving darkly on the other side, scowling at me for having forced him to reveal his true identity.

I staggered and nearly went down.

I’d been so certain I was right.

Barrons was collapsed on the floor, at the boundary of light and dark—on the white side of the room.

Only two in all existence could ever travel through that Silver: the Unseelie King and his concubine, Darroc had told me. Any other that touches it is instantly killed. Even Fae.

“Jericho!” I ran for him, dragged him away from the mirror, and sank to the floor beside him. I rolled him over. He wasn’t breathing. He was dead. Again.

I stared down at him.

I stared into the darkness of the mirror.

The Silver hadn’tkilled me. But it had killed him. I didn’t like what that meant one bit.

It meant I was indeed the concubine.

It also meant that Jericho wasn’t my king.

NOW.

The command was enormous, irresistible, Voice to the nth degree. I wanted to stay with Jericho. I couldn’t have stayed if my life had depended on it. And I was pretty sure it did.

“I can’t breathe over there.”

You do not live on this side of the Silver. Alter your expectations. Forgo breath. Fear, not fact, impedes you.

Was that possible? I wasn’t buying it. But apparently it didn’t matter whether I bought it, because my hands were pushing me up and my feet were moving me straight into the dark Silver.

“Jericho!” I cried as I felt myself being forced away.

I hated this. I hated everything about it. I was the concubine but Jericho wasn’t the king, and I couldn’t deal with that—not that I was sure how well I would have dealt with it if he had been the king. Now I was being summoned to a place where I couldn’t breathe, where I didn’t really live according to my disembodied tormentor, and I had no choice but to leave him, dead again, by himself.

I suddenly had no desire to learn anything else about myself. This was enough. I was sorry I’d been so hell-bent on knowing to begin with. He’d been right. Wasn’t he always? Some things just didn’t need to be known.

“I’m not doing this. I’m not playing your stupid games, whatever they are, whoever you are. I’m going back to my life now. That would be Mac’s life,” I clarified. There was no reply. Only an inexorable pull into the darkness.

I was once again puppet to an invisible puppet master. I had no choice. I was being dragged through and there was nothing I could do about it.

Struggling, gritting my teeth, resisting every step of the way, I stepped over Jericho’s body and pushed back into the Silver.

27

It was pure instinct to fight for breath.

I was encased in ice again the moment I slid through the Silver.

Passing through the dark mirror peeled back a curtain, exposing more forgotten childhood memories. Abruptly, I recalled being four, five, six, finding myself stuck in this alien dreamscape nightly. No sooner did I say my prayers, close my eyes, and drift off to sleep than a disembodied command would infiltrate my slumber.

I recalled waking from those nightmares, gasping and shivering, running for Daddy, crying that I was freezing, suffocating.

I wondered what young Jack Lane had made of it—his adopted daughter who’d been forbidden to ever return to the country of her birth, who was tormented by terrifyingly cold, airless nightmares. What horrors had he decided I must have suffered to be scarred in such ways?