High Voltage

  Fly? As in hold onto him for hours?

  “Try not to radiate abject fucking misery, Kat,” he said tightly. “I’m one of the good guys.”

  “How certain of that are you?” she asked warily.

  “Utterly,” he said with finality. “And it was a bitch of a battle, I’ll tell you that.”

  Unseelie. And one of the good guys. She wanted to believe that. “We should leave before Enyo arrives. She’ll have a similar reaction.”

  She’d deliberately chosen her fiercest warrior to babysit in her absence. And asked Duff and Decla to be stationed beyond the door. Three women capable of extreme kindness. And extreme violence. Able to shift between the two in a heartbeat.

  “I can sift us to the perimeter of the estate but we’ll have to fly from there. Come, lass. And if it helps, close your eyes and think of Sean. He, too, looks like me. You’ll need to be prepared for that. Revulsion could push him over the steep edge he’s already perched on. But,” he added softly, as I moved uneasily into the circle of his arms, “you might be surprised by how beautiful you’ll find the sky at night. We’ll fly above the mist that obscures the terrain, where the moon kisses the tops of clouds, turning them to silvery puddles it seems you might dance upon. You’ll see the dark, glassy lochs and the grass turned to fine-spun metallic thread. The night creatures are different than those of the day, rarer to see. You might spy great snowy owls soaring, hooting, wolves frolicking as they woo their mates, you may even see a playful wildcat or two.”

  I realized he was trying to set me at ease, distract me from the intimacy I would have to endure. It worked. As he’d spoken, I heard the truth of the pleasure in his words. He loved to fly at night, he loved the land, and Cruce would never have noticed a single bloody thing on the ground, no bird, nor animal; too power hungry and driven to see past his own ambitions.

  I snatched a last, quick glance at my daughter and murmured that I loved her, as footsteps approached beyond my bedroom door.

  “It sounds lovely Christian,” I said as he drew me to his chest.

  “It is,” he promised, as we sifted out.

  * * *

  π

  Lovely was an inadequate word. Once I got over the sheer terror of being held and flown, and the fear that he might drop me, I was dazzled by the night beneath my toes.

  “I won’t drop you, quit digging your nails into my shoulders,” he growled.

  I was counting on that. If he’d wanted me dead, he could have killed me in my room.

  Eventually, I relaxed, still holding tightly to his shoulders, cradled in his arms. Distracting myself from the presence of an Unseelie prince by watching the world unfurl beneath us, pondering the blessing his presence implied—the promise that darkness within did not necessarily equate darkness without.

  I would never be able to read his eyes, one of the easiest ways to take the measure of a person’s soul—and I often wonder if anyone else can see the many nuances in an iris that I do—but I could feel him with my gift, with my heart.

  Deep inside Christian, so deep I’d almost missed it, nestled an evil black pearl within a tightly closed, blindingly white clamshell.

  But it wasn’t a small pearl. It was gargantuan, filling every atom of his being, and he’d compressed it somehow. He’d taken an inconceivably vast, twisted, terrifying abyss of darkness that churned within him and turned it into a zip-file of sorts, buttoned it up and locked it down. A darkness that could swallow whole, obliterate. A darkness that seethed with ambition, hunger, mind-boggling sexuality and need.

  He’d managed to contain an infinity of evil within a tiny glowing white shell in which I couldn’t spy even a hairline crack. “How?” I asked, as we passed over Belfast, soaring toward the ocean.

  I’ve felt the capacity for such evil in only two other vessels: the Sinsar Dubh and Cruce. I’ve never seen such enormous darkness contained. Locked so completely away, I couldn’t even get a feel for what it was. There was something, a subtle flavor of him that identified him as the prince he was…

  “Death is my kingdom. As the Light Court is one of dreams and illusions, the Dark Court is one of realities and nightmares. The Seelie have Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. We have Death, War, Famine, and Pestilence. But hold your questions, lass. It takes energy to maintain that control, and yet more to mute the Sidhbha-jai. So long as I’m diverting power, the most taxing of my abilities are challenging. We’ll stop in the Highlands to rest and I’ll tell you what I can. For now, enjoy the view.”

  We flew out over the angry, frothy, whitecapped ocean pounding at the shore, then farther still where the swells gentled for miles into dark starry glass.

  When we passed over the lowlands, he swooped beneath the clouds to graze clearings where night creatures leapt and played, then soared again for the bird’s-eye view of patterned acreage, field and stream.

  When we finally arrived in the Highlands, the beauty took my breath away. Mountains soared to majestic peaks before plunging sharply to carpeted vales, lush and burgeoning with life. The Song had awakened Scotland as vibrantly as Ireland, transforming the plants, shrubs, and trees to a verdant sprawl, giving rise to a population boom in the animal kingdom.

  “Nessie’s back,” he said dryly. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things that have returned.”

  “Such as the old gods?” I said.

  “You know about them.”

  I swept a tangle of hair from my face. “A bit. We could certainly use more information.”

  “Almost there, lass. I’ve a favorite peak. We’ll talk soon.”

  I returned my gaze to the heather tumbling in lush profusion over the hillsides, the silvered grasses, the flowers that bloomed between every crack in every stone.

  I’d never been to Scotland. I’d never left Ireland. I would bring Rae to see this. I wouldn’t let her grow up as sheltered as me. I wanted her to see the world, experience every wonder, know them intimately, the better to love them.

  We touched down on a large flat rock atop a whitecapped ben. As he lowered me to the ground, I stumbled, unaccustomed to having my feet on the ground, and he set me steady again.

  “What did you think?” he asked and, in that moment, I heard only a Highlander, proud of his country, seeking a compliment from a tourist.

  “Scotland is enchanting. And now I know why angels have wings. It’s their reward.”

  He smiled, pleased, and waved a hand. “Pull a cushion near the fire, Kat. There’s a chill up this high.”

  I glanced where he’d gestured. A crackling fire leapt and blazed in a stone pit that hadn’t been there before. A cushion and a blanket waited nearby. “How did you do that?”

  “Small things are easy. I encourage matter to shift forms, become what I want it to be.”

  “This?” I reached for the cozy throw of purple and black tartan.

  “The Keltar colors. Fashioned from a carpet of moss beyond the rocks.”

  “The fire?”

  “A thought. Stones become logs, a combustion of air, an invitation of heat.”

  “I thought Fae magic was mostly illusion.”

  “Aye, for the Seelie. They favor form over function, beauty over value. Transforming matter takes more energy than sketching illusion, and they’re lazy fucks. Still, you’d do well to never underestimate them. The moment I assume it’s an illusion, I end up trapped in it.”

  “Then you’ve had dealings with them.” I settled on the large flat cushion near the fire.

  He dropped down to a boulder near the flames and laughed darkly. “That I have, lass. They’ve been trying to capture Sean and me for quite some time. When that failed, they began to offer various enticements. We’re enemy number three. Mac’s enemy number one. I hear Jayne is enemy number two. But I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s much I need to tell you.”

 
Wrapping myself in the woolen throw, I drew nearer to the fire to listen.

  In a gadda da vida, baby

  ELYREUM IN “FAE” LOOSELY means “the forbidden garden” or “dark paradise,” depending on who you ask, and it was overload.

  The only thing about the club that wasn’t in-your-face erotic, enhanced by opulent illusion, was the exterior, faking normal in a faking-normal city.

  Once you passed through those tall gold and alabaster doors, reality fell away and the dream began. The music was surreal, sensual, erotic, with a rhythmic, driving beat that made me think of an old Enigma CD blended with Puscifer.

  The club was an anachronistic mix of exotic natural beauty and ultrasleek technology. Blossoms tumbled from stately urns, scenting the air with night-blooming jasmine, amaryllis, lily, and winter hazel. Lush vines bursting with black and red poppies twined around grand Romanesque columns. The place smelled of verdant forest, steamy tropical hothouse, and sex.

  The walls, ceiling, and floor of the foyer were giant, borderless LED screens smeared with Fae/mortal porn unfolding in graphic detail, (God, I so did not need to see that) in off-putting, larger-than-life format, with Fae-enhanced color, texture, and sound.

  As I stalked across the anteroom, two enormous, stunning Fae males having sex with seven humans ground and pumped beneath my feet and, I swear, both Fae turned their heads in the floor to look up my dress. When I stomped sharply on one of their eyes, the bastard laughed.

  Exiting the foyer into the second anteroom beyond brought us out on a balustrade draped with yet more vines and drugging blossoms from which we could view the entire club. They’d further taken a page from Chester’s by dividing Elyreum into numerous, individually themed subclubs, staged around a single, central dance floor that was packed with humans and Fae gyrating, grinding, having sex.

  I’d never seen so many castes of Seelie before, vibrantly etched in the dazzling, seemingly Photoshop-enhanced shades of the Four Courts: the blush and rose of Spring threaded with metallic green; the dazzling, countless golds of Summer; Autumn’s copper and crimson fire; a thousand frosted shades of Winter’s ice. Tall, tiny, large, dainty, some flew, some glided, all hunted.

  I narrowed my eyes. I’d dialed back the volume on my sidhe-seer senses the moment we stalked into the club, muting the cacophony of so many Fae clustered in close quarters.

  Mac told me she hears the individual castes as melodies, pieces of song that play inside her head. I do, too, but my perception of the various castes is heavy on the percussion, a kind of Godsmack’s battle of the drums meets Roisin Murphy’s “Ramalama (Bang Bang).” There’s some serious dissonance for you.

  Tonight I was getting something else, too, a thing I’d never noticed before…or never heard. There was a low, annoying buzzing sound beneath it somewhere. A sort of distracting static on my channel.

  Something about the dance floor wasn’t quite right. I nudged my volume up a hair, to no avail. I dialed it higher, and still nothing. I cranked it even higher until the presence of so many Fae was deafening, charring a hole in my gut. With supreme force of will, gritting my teeth against the savage onslaught of primitive drums beating in my blood, telling me to Kill, kill, I punched it up yet one more notch, going wider open than I’d ever before been. I’d never needed to.

  Oh!

  There wasn’t a single person on that dance floor.

  It was empty. I could see that now.

  But no other human could. Holy insidious illusions, the Fae had gotten better at glamour! The Shedon needed to know about this!

  Like the foyer, the dance floor was fashioned of brilliantly lit LED screens, featuring still more graphic images of humans having sex with Fae streaming across the surface.

  I dialed my volume higher, wincing as the presence of so many Fae crashed and banged inside my head with the storm and thunder of the “Ride of the Valkyries” meets the worst, most bone-chilling parts of “The Requiem.”

  Oh, God. There were no Fae having sex with humans in a TV screen at all!

  It was only humans. And they weren’t images on the surface of an LED screen, they were real live people.

  Trapped beneath it.

  Some were clawing at the bottom side of the floor, trying to escape. Others…oh, God, others were dead. There was a tangled, seething mass of humanity, some fucking, some fighting to escape, amid hundreds of corpses.

  What was this? If you stepped on that treacherous dance floor, were you abruptly sucked below, never to be released again? Forced to make the choice of either dying trying hopelessly to escape or dying doing something that felt good, while the icy Fae sat by, soulless, emotional vampires feeding off the passion of human suffering, savoring each morsel of torment? I’d thought only the Unseelie were so depraved!

  Was this what happened when the Light Court ran unchecked by a queen? They devolved to the worst possible version of themselves, like the worst of humans cut loose when the world went to hell, and indulged their basest urges to riot, loot, and pillage? How many people had we lost over the past two years in this damned club?

  I dialed my volume back down, to see the club the way humans did. Above us, a starry sky twinkled at the high domed ceiling, around us four courts decorated as the seasons beckoned. It was utterly lovely, seductive and pain-free and utterly false.

  I turned it up again, blasting my channel wide open.

  We were in a living Hell. The interior was completely undecorated but for the LED panels. Concrete walls. Concrete floors. And I’d been wrong, there was only one Seelie Court in attendance at Elyreum, the iciest of them all. The others were illusion.

  Winter had claimed our city.

  “We’re going to kill every last one of them one day,” I gritted.

  “Agreed. For now, objectives and get the fuck out.”

  “Agreed.”

  We glided into motion and began to descend the staircase together. Before we even reached the bottom, heads whipped our way, conversation stopped, and a tight, suspended hush fell over the club.

  The silence had fallen so abruptly, I scanned the subclubs, certain the Fae had killed their human partners. They hadn’t. They’d immobilized them somehow.

  They’d known we were here the moment we stepped inside the club. They’d permitted us to walk in, been waiting for us.

  This was not what I’d envisioned happening. I’d imagined a small skirmish, with the majority of Fae otherwise occupied. A bit of bear-baiting. We’d saunter off. Laugh. Having stirred up enough shit to get some answers about what was going on in Faery.

  As it was, we were the sole focus of a thousand Winter Court Fae, rising, approaching, closing in on us. From below, from above, behind the balustrade and the foyer beyond. They surged in a glittering, icy wave, moving with predatory, inhuman grace.

  The power they radiated was exponentially greater than I’d ever felt coming from a court sans royalty, and with my sense wide open, I could tell there wasn’t a single prince or princess anywhere in the club. Royalty’s melody is unmistakable, drums from hell, seductive, hypnotizing, mind-stealing.

  The Fae had changed. Even their gazes were different, no longer shimmering a uniform, swirling iridescence. Lethal as razors, they sliced into you, each a unique color, for lack of a better word, though I’d be hard-pressed to name the shade: here, a tint of immortal decay, rot, and graveyards; there, the precise nuance of toxic nuclear war without end; here, the hue of rabid, bone-stripping hunger; there, the stain of madness galloping down on you with thundering hooves.

  I used to mock them, these strutting, beautiful, but relatively innocuous Fae without royal blood. They’d struck me as poseurs who weren’t what they pretended to be, bidding us believe they possessed far greater power than they did.

  Now your average Winter Court Fae was—I had to force my brain to accept the truth—viscerally terrif
ying.

  Objective one accomplished. We knew our enemy was far more powerful than they’d ever been. “The Song definitely changed them, Ryodan,” I murmured as we drew to a halt halfway down the stairs.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” he agreed.

  In spite of the gravity of our current situation, I smiled.

  It was about damned time he’d finally gotten our roles right.

  I would give everything I own

  IF DANCER HAD LIVED.

  There’s a rabbit hole I’ve fallen down a few times.

  Sometimes reluctantly, other times, on dark nights, Shaz snoring beside me, one of his downy legs kicking restlessly in dreams, unable to sleep, I’ve walked deliberately to the dirt-crusted edge and plunged down. Gone exploring that fantastical, killing wonderland of madness, monsters, and maybe.

  His brains, my superpowers: what kind of babies would we have made?

  If Dancer’s heart had been whole, if, say, he’d taken the Elixir of Life, what daring feats of bravery and brilliance might we have accomplished together on behalf of the world?

  Batman didn’t have a single superpower, unless you count his inner darkness. Dancer definitely didn’t have that. But maybe inner lightness is a superpower, too, and he had that in spades.

  Shazam could have babysat.

  NOT.

  He might have eaten them. But still, Shaz is the ultimate kid’s best friend. The children we didn’t have would have flat-out adored him, bragged about him to all their friends, and Shaz would have loved that. And if they’d zoomed around, we’d have moved somewhere I could have zoomed along with them and we’d have feared nothing.

  I don’t even know if my ovaries work. I don’t know everything Rowena did to me. There were chronological gaps in her narcissistic journals that implied oodles of missing volumes.

  Another rabbit hole: I have no idea who my father is. I’m not sure I even had one. All I do know is every journal of the old bat’s I ever found contained zero mention of my patriarchy. Such a complete omission on such a critical topic is, to my brain, completely damning.