I’d had to rest for five solid minutes before I could push up from the floor, leaving the shattered, collapsing club behind. I wasn’t about to let anyone pick me up and carry me out. Although I no longer felt the exhilarating, terrifying wild voltage inside me, I was taking no chances.
While I’d gathered my strength, Lor had picked through the rubble, searching for my shoes, but they were nowhere to be found, which pissed me off because I loved those shoes. I’d worn them once. The others had remained in beast form, in case the Fae decided to try to circle back for another attack, which I found highly improbable. They’d gone two years without a single threat, and we’d just killed a hundred of them, if not more. The possibility of death is something Fae avoid like humans avoid Ebola. I wanted to ponder the ramifications of our actions tonight, but at the moment all I could think about was myself.
My confusion had abated but I was still shaky and weak. Ryodan, meticulous planner that he is, had snacks stashed in the Ferrari and I’d inhaled candy bars, one after the other, before shoving half a bag of chips in my mouth.
I glanced at the mirror and raised a brow thinking, wryly, Aha that’s why they were all staring at me like that.
Blackness had taken more of my pale Irish skin. Not only was my left arm a thorny black glove, the stain had spread further into my flesh.
Exotic black flames arced up the left side of my neck, curving over my jaw, my cheek, to my temple and into my left brow. The pointed tip of one of those flames ended a mere inch from my mouth. The mouth that was suddenly acutely aware it hadn’t done nearly enough kissing.
The Nine had closed in protectively around me as we walked to the car, which I found hysterically funny, given what I’d just done. Killed a prince without using the sword, destroyed a club.
Ryodan had argued with me all the way back to Sanctuary, demanding I return to Chester’s with him. Demanding we talk.
Lacking the energy to argue, I’d looked at him and said simply, Please, I very much need to be alone right now.
I know Ryodan. Had I argued, he’d have debated me forever. But my quiet plea had taken the bite out of the wolf and, bristling with barely restrained testosterone and anger, he’d parked and escorted me to my door, saying tightly, If you need me, call. Text. Throw up a bloody Bat signal. If I don’t hear from you first thing in the morning, I’ll be on your fucking doorstep, beating down the door.
Only after I promised had he growlingly conceded to leave.
I stepped back and assessed my naked body in the mirror. I like my body. It’s strong and lean and suits me. I should be horrified by what was happening to me but I couldn’t help but think I looked kind of…beautiful. My entire left arm was covered with lovely dark thorns. I had no idea why I thought they were lovely but I did. They weren’t ugly or scary looking. They were as gently curved as the thorns on a rose, larger with slightly blunted tips. I ran my hand over them lightly and shivered. They were cold but extraordinarily sensitive, as if entire clusters of nerve-endings were nestled at the tips.
The barbs ended just beneath my shoulder but the inky blackness had seized territory on the left side of my torso as well, from beneath my armpit to my waist, shooting more of those ebony flames across my stomach and breasts. On someone else, I’d have found it wicked cool, an otherworldly tattoo, Woman of Obsidian Fire.
On me, although it was stunning, not so much.
Unless it went away, I would never again feel a man’s hands touch my breasts. Unless it went away, I would never again taste Ryodan’s kiss. Faces touch when you kiss. There was no way a man could get near my mouth with more than a chaste peck and I’m not a chaste peck kind of woman, as I’d amply demonstrated this morning.
God, that felt like a lifetime ago.
I’d have kissed him harder, longer, better, if I’d known this was going to happen by nightfall.
I forced my thoughts to focus, turned from the mirror and began to tally what I knew.
Fact: I stabbed a Hunter when I was fourteen and my hand turned black for days.
Fact: It kept happening over the years.
Fact: I’d recently developed an extraordinary superpower, the ability to shoot highly destructive bolts of lightning from my hand, capable of blowing structures apart and killing Fae royalty. I smirked a little. Ha, take that, the Nine! I’m as badass as you!
Fact: Each time I used the power, more of me turned black and icy.
I frowned. Inaccurate. The blackness hadn’t expanded when I killed Bridget. Nor when I used it to break the paralysis spell. Or had it—just not where I could see it? Staining deeper beneath my skin, opposed to wider. Were my bones black now?
Fact: When I used the power, it drained me to a degree that appeared to be increasing with use, or perhaps with the magnitude of use.
Fact: If anyone touched the black part of me, they would die. I would kill them.
“Poison Ivy much?” I muttered. That wasn’t who I’d planned to be when I grew up. She was Batman’s nemesis. I was supposed to be the Bat, only with superpowers.
Fact: If I kept using those incredible lightning bolts, it seemed highly probable I would turn entirely black. I wondered if it would affect my hair, too. Would my eyes turn black? I tried to envision myself all black. Pretty odd.
I stepped into the shower and stood under the spray pondering whether, as Shazam had suggested, I might be able to make it go away. Maybe if I never used it again the stain would retreat and I’d return to normal. It had retreated once, early on, to beneath my elbow. Was it cumulative somehow? Was its mysterious endgame inevitable and irreversible once it had begun?
I toweled my hair dry, tugged on sweats and a tee, grateful Shazam was impervious. At least I had that.
Assuming I survived whatever was happening to me, I was going to become that strange Hel-Cat lady, eccentric and alone.
It could be worse, I mused, as I headed back to the bedroom. I might not even have Shazam.
I, who at best had never known more than a tenuous connection to the world, was becoming even more cut off, more isolated. By my own skin. I’d always been dangerous. Now I was lethal to the touch.
My first year in a cage, my mother had showered me with affection. Before she’d left in the morning, and again each night when she got home. She’d washed and dried me, brushed my hair. We’d held hands through the bars. She’d rubbed moisturizer into my skin and tickled my back, and I’d known we were going to make it. That OLDER and OUTSIDE were a guarantee. I’d known it from her touch. You can feel love in someone’s hands.
It hadn’t stayed that way long. Her affection became more and more infrequent until, finally, she’d stopped touching me at all. Then, not long after, she’d begun to stop seeing me, too.
When I could no longer remember the feel of her hands on my body, my hair, of soft kisses pressed through bars; when those kisses had become a hazy memory that belonged to another life, some other child, I’d lain in my cage and hugged myself, turning my head from side to side, kissing my shoulders, my arms.
My small body had ached for touch. For comfort, for love.
As it did now.
I hoisted our mattress back up onto the box springs, stretched out on my back and opened my arms.
Shazam flung himself at me, landing squarely on my chest.
“Ow!”
Rumbling, eyes gleaming, he head-butted me with delight, then snuggled into my killing embrace.
And, as I’d done so often Silverside, I squeezed my eyes shut to hold back tears, and held onto him with all my might.
The rusted chains of prison moons are shattered by the sun
“FIRST, KAT,” CHRISTIAN SAID, “a summary of pertinent history. Try to hold your questions till the end. The timeline I’m giving you is approximate. The Fae aren’t glued to the concept of time; they have an infinity of it to squander. I had
to plug bits and pieces of history together with few points of reference.”
“Understood,” I said. We encountered the same problem with the texts we translated. Points of reference were vague at best, like tying our historical events to whatever TV shows were popular at the time and someone trying to figure it out millennia later. If he possessed an overview, I very much wanted it.
“The first significant mention of the Fae appears approximately one million years ago, although they existed long before that. Originally there was a single Light Court of Four Seasons. The Light King became dissatisfied with life at court, left and declared himself the Dark or Unseelie King. Sometime after that he met his mortal concubine, became obsessed with her and sought to make her immortal like him. Since the Song of Making was a matriarchal power, he had to petition the Light Queen to transform his lover. It was when the queen refused that everything began to go to hell.
“The Unseelie King retired to his dark kingdom, vowing to re-create the Song and make his lover immortal himself. The Unseelie or Dark Court was born as a result of his endless experiments. As far as I can tell, he spent roughly a quarter of a million years working on it. Again, approximate, I believe Cruce was born three-quarters of a million years ago, and was one of the last remaining Dark Court the king created.
“As you know, Cruce betrayed the king to the queen and told her what the king had been doing, about five hundred thousand years ago. Cruce wanted the Unseelie Court to roam freely in the world, mingling with the Seelie, which was forbidden by the king. The king knew what the queen would do if she discovered he’d created a Dark Court of his own, especially if she learned that the mortal lover she so despised was still alive, secreted away in a realm beyond time to keep her from aging.
“When the queen learned of the Dark Court’s existence, it started a war to end all wars. When Seelie and Unseelie clashed, they destroyed their own planet, splitting it down the middle. The unthinkable happened: the Unseelie King killed the Seelie Queen, before she was able to pass the Song of Making to her successor.
“The Song was all that kept the Fae powerful. They, alone, possessed that ancient melody of life.”
“No doubt, stolen somehow,” I said, unable to resist the acerbic comment. No god I believed in would have entrusted a thing of such power and beauty to such a shallow, power-hungry, ruthless race.
“As you’ve seen, the Song seeps into reality and replenishes fading magic. Once they lost the ancient melody, the Fae were doomed. Over time they would have grown weaker, until they vanished on the wind, with only legends of them remaining.”
“But when Mac used the Song to heal our world they were restored,” I said grimly.
“Precisely. What the melody didn’t destroy, it made stronger. As happened long ago in the mists of Time, the Song sank deep into the fabric of all things and crooned ‘Awaken.’ Another of Mac’s double-edged swords. That woman does tend to wreak havoc from time to time.”
I began to protest but he waved it away.
“I ken it, lass. She had no choice but to use the Song or the Cosmos itself would have been destroyed by the black holes. We’re lucky she was able to wield it, and I’m grateful. But no action is without consequence. Indeed, there are times the most desirable, correct, necessary action results in catastrophic consequences. We’re facing them now.
“Back to the timeline: Subsequent queens moved the Light Court from world to world, draining yet more power from the court each time they moved, desperately seeking a planet richly steeped in magic. They knew they were diminishing, bit by bit. Many of them drank from the Cauldron of Forgetting, to forget how powerful they’d once been, how weak they were becoming.
“Eventually, around two hundred thousand years ago, they discovered our world, which still pulsed with considerable magic. But it was already occupied by both gods and ancient man. It was a peaceful time on our planet before the Fae arrived. The gods were mostly benign and, although they occasionally warred among themselves, they cared for and tended the mortals who worshipped them and there was a strong bond between them.
“The Fae, deceitful bastards that they are, feigned far less power than they had, and begged sanctuary from the gods, claiming their world had been destroyed through no fault of their own. The gods, sensing no threat, gave the Fae a fair amount of land, and things were peaceful for a time.
“But the Fae were busy gathering intelligence, desperate to seize and rule our magic-rich world. They covertly studied the gods, seeking weaknesses. Their attack was patient, stealthy, and a shining example of slanted press on a global scale. They abducted the gods one by one, used their Fae glamour to impersonate them, and began punishing, torturing, and killing humans. To humans, it seemed their gods had turned on them.
“In kind, humans turned on their gods, and the gods that remained turned on their humans for betraying them—for refusing to listen when they tried to explain what the Fae had done. Then, the great, benevolent Fae finally stepped in to ‘rescue’ humans.
“The gods realized the Fae had been concealing their true power all along, but gods can’t penetrate the glamour of the Fae, and the Fae gathered up and killed most of the deities on our world, leaving a scattered handful of those too powerful to kill, or those who devised ways to elude their clutches.
“I’ve no idea how many remain but I’d wager a few hundred or so. Those gods they couldn’t figure out how to kill—unlike Fae, all gods can’t be killed by two commonly known weapons, each has one unique way they can die and it’s a tightly guarded secret—they captured and entombed them in the earth. They relinquished one of their most powerful shians or Fae mounds to use as a prison.
“For a long time the gods slumbered in the soil, faded to mere wisps of their former selves, but when the ancient Song was sung again, it awakened and released them from those tombs. The gods had learned from their mistakes. They came back weak, as mere shadows, and bided time as stealthily as the Fae once had, laying low, absorbing power from the newly reinvigorated Earth, until they were once again powerful. Only recently have they begun to show themselves.”
I murmured, “And they despise the Fae more than ever and plot their destruction.”
“Worse than that, Kat. They despise humans, too. They loathe both races and want both gone, and the odds aren’t quite so against them now. The first time the gods and Fae battled, sidhe-seers didn’t exist. The Fae weren’t on our world and there was no need for them. But now they do exist and the gods have an enormous advantage they once lacked. Before, they couldn’t have seen a Fae standing right next to them if it was glamoured as a human. With sidhe-seer watchdogs, they can.”
I shuddered. Was that where our twelve sidhe-seers had gone—abducted by gods? I knew better than to assure him that our sidhe-seers wouldn’t help them. Dole out enough torture, eventually someone will cooperate. “Have you discovered when our order was born?” Our roots were a mystery to us, I was fascinated by our origins. I knew the why of it; to protect the Sinsar Dubh.
“Aye, again approximately. As you know, after the Unseelie King killed the queen, Cruce stole his beloved concubine and made the king believe she was dead. In an act of atonement, the king dumped all the formidable power of his dark magic into the Sinsar Dubh, and cast it out into the world. But as Fae things do, it evolved and, furious with the king, obsessed with him, the dark doppelganger began to stalk the Unseelie King, wreaking havoc wherever it went. The two played a game of cat and mouse for hundreds of thousands of years.”
“Wait a minute, I have to ask this: we were led to believe the Sinsar Dubh was nearly a million years old. It’s only a half a million?”
“Depends on how you look at it. The Sinsar Dubh is commonly regarded as a million years old because it contains the Unseelie King’s knowledge from the time he began creating his dark court, nearly a million years ago, until the time he divested himself of it, over half
a million years later. Technically, it is only half a million years old. Again, this is all only approximate.”
I nodded. “Go on.”
“When the king finally managed to capture his dangerous alter-ego, roughly one hundred fifty thousand years ago, he needed a secure place to contain it with guards. Conveniently, there already existed a shian on a planet, rich in magic, laced with the proper elements, the perfect place to entomb it; a place the Seelie would never go because they’d already buried their ancient enemy there and abandoned it.”
I gasped. “Are you kidding me? Are you saying…” I trailed off in disbelief.
He cut me a dark smile. “Aye. The Unseelie King paid a visit to our world, and hid the Sinsar Dubh beneath what is now Arlington Abbey, above the entombed gods, then created the sidhe-seers as his final Unseelie caste, to serve as his watchdogs. He gave your order the power to penetrate Fae glamour, the ability to ward your land against Fae, and various gifts to fight them if they came.”
I shook my head, dazed by the thought. “The gods have been slumbering beneath our abbey this entire time?”
“Och, lass, from the hints I’ve gathered here and there, your abbey perches atop many powerful things. I’d like to explore the Underneath if you’d permit it. Soon. We’ve a mess on our hands and require every advantage we can find.”
I nodded. We would find a way to work together.
“Back to the timeline. The war between gods and Fae had ravaged the earth. Queen Aoibheal, who’d once been mortal herself, had watched too many planets destroyed. Eventually, and I can’t pin that event to a time, she forcibly removed the Fae to a separate realm, fabricating walls by tapping into the power of the Unseelie prison walls, striking a Compact with a clan called the Keltar, and trained them as druids to uphold it. Here’s where it gets complicated. I’m going to try to explain the realm of “Faery” to you in a nutshell.