“Gotta go,” said Mason suddenly, as if the roof hadn’t just been dropped on them all. He pushed out his chair and stood to his full six-foot-three height. His gray and gold ringed eyes glinted as hard as steel and amber when he nodded respectfully to Roman and then stepped back from the table. He snapped his fingers, creating a sound like two boulders being slammed against one another.
There was a brief cloud of talcum-like dust, and the Gargoyle King was gone. A trickling sound, such as you’d hear from a faucet into a bathtub, drifted away as the cloud settled.
Once he’d departed, the others began to follow suit, each leaving in their own dramatic manners, except for the Time King, who simply used the door, until Roman was once more alone with Evelynne, and the unusually quiet Lalura Chantelle.
This was the first meeting the High Witch had ever attended in which she hadn’t had her fair share of things to say. She’d simply listened and watched. And now her silent, contemplative visage was fixed intently on something behind Roman. As was Evie’s.
Roman frowned and turned around to face the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the Chicago night beyond. A cat was on the other side of the glass, on the 65th floor of the Sears Tower.
It was a large ginger cat with short hair, one white spot on its shoulder, and one white foot. It was balancing expertly and impossibly on the thin ledge that wrapped around the centers of the windows hundreds of feet in the air. There was a stiff wind out there, Roman knew. But the feline seemed untouched by it. It simply sauntered across the window until it reached the edge. There, it stopped, sat back on its haunches on a ledge that should not have been wide enough to sustain it, and turned to look into the room.
Roman’s gaze met the cat’s. Piercing yellow-gold eyes seared into his brain, and then into his soul. Something inexplicable moved between them, as if there were waves connecting them, and a transmission had traversed the space.
And then the cat looked away, got back on its paws, and continued around the corner.
Out of sheer curiosity, probably, Evie very quickly stood up and raced to the adjacent windows and craned her neck.
“He’s gone,” she said softly.
“He was never there to begin with,” said Lalura.
*****
There were times in life when there were so many things to say, your only real choice was to say nothing. If you tried to do otherwise, then all of the words belonging to all of the questions would all come spilling out at once and it would be like verbal vomit. Nothing would make sense. Speaking would be pointless, and probably embarrassing, and quite possibly irrevocably damaging. So it was best to just remain quiet.
Now was one of those times for Minerva.
It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to handle adversity. She’d been handling it all her life, in a manner of speaking. No, she wasn’t beaten as a child, she’d never been raped, and she didn’t have cancer – but in a way, she had been beaten as a child, she had been raped, and she was deathly ill. Because for some reason, she’d felt these agonies when they’d occurred to others as if they were her own. No one could comprehend this, no psychologist, no therapist, no psychiatrist. Everyone she’d ever confided in about this strange pain simply assumed she was acting or that she was faultingly far too sensitive, or that she simply wanted attention, and usually a combination of all three.
But now she knew. She knew they were all wrong. She knew the emotions, and even sometimes the accompanying physical pain, were very real. And she even knew why.
It was all very real to her because she was a Wisher. She had no choice in the matter. Anger was to be her life’s blood. And she supposed that over time, a soul just got used to sucking up nasty surprises and dealing with them the best it knew how, because that was what she felt her soul doing now. It was going over the new knowledge she’d acquired and dealing with it. Processing it. Accepting it. She was a pro at this.
The one kink on her experience, the one contingency her soul could not fit into its practiced scheme – was the man who sat across the room from Minerva, in a large leather wing-backed chair that was part of the luxurious décor of a bedroom in an enormous jet that at that moment soared high over the United States of America.
He was beautiful. And she knew why, too. She knew who he was, with his six-foot-whatever tall and supernaturally strong frame and his slightly accented voice that automatically reminded her of evil men dressed in black with master plans. Minerva’s knowledge of the fae world was now as vast as it would have been had her Wisher mother raised her and her twin sister in the fae worlds from the get-go. She had both worlds in her repertoire now.
The man sitting across from her, taking oddly tentative bites of the rainbow cake, but clearly enjoying it if the look on his gorgeous face was any indication, was no other than the Unseelie King.
What she didn’t know, what she couldn’t figure out, was why the hell he was there with her now. Why was he bothering with her at all? Of the two realms, the Unseelie was definitely more work to rule over. The unseelie, or Leanan, as they were sometimes called amongst their own, were an unruly bunch. Not motley – just unruly, in the strictest sense of the term. They were beautiful, they were powerful, and they were selfish. They were talented, secretive, devious, and deadly.
Their king was supposed to be the worst. He was also the single man capable of uniting such a world under a single sovereign and his rules. It must have been like one rider taming a million wild horses. Yet somehow, he managed to do this.
It left little time for other pursuits. So the fact that he’d focused upon Minerva, a single fae amongst countless, was confounding.
Maybe he was terrified of her. The fae tended to feel that way toward Wishers. That was why they’d wiped out her kind thousands of years ago.
Maybe he wanted to wipe her out too. And her sister.
The thought made Minerva’s chewing slow. She looked down at her own slice of pastel rainbow layered cake and considered this.
If he wanted to kill me, he would have done so already, she thought. Because he’d certainly had the opportunity, and she knew he had more than enough power. But instead of using a spell of death against her in the streets of Oxford, he’d transported her away. And rather than destroy her when she’d been about to attack him again in that forest next to the bonfire he’d created, he’d simply put her to sleep. He could have killed her then, too. When she was defenseless.
But here she was, sitting alive and well, and eating cake of all things – on his bed, in his personal, private jet.
Okay, so he doesn’t want to kill me.
What, then? Did he somehow feel responsible for her? Did he consider her a dark fae and under his rule? An unseelie? It had never really been determined which realm the Wishers belonged in. They were empathetic, sensitive creatures, and that would have lent them more toward the seelie end of the spectrum. But their capacity for such deadly and severe magic would have tilted the scale and slid them more toward the unseelie end.
They’d all been murdered before anything was decided once and for all.
Minerva put down her fork and took in a deep, slow breath. The “release” she’d experienced in Oxford was a mixed blessing. She’d never felt so much pain, and the culmination of it all at once was the trigger that had set her transformation in motion. But now… as she stared down at her half-eaten cake and tasted the remnants of it on her tongue and felt a little thirsty, she realized a lot of the pain had subsided, going as quickly as it had come.
Her adoptive parents were dead. But they hadn’t been young, and her father had been sick, and her mother had been suffering more from that sickness than he had.
There was something else, too. They’d decided to come back to Oxford at exactly this time. The decision had confused Minerva and her sister. But now Minnie wondered whether they’d known, whether they’d made the choice to return to where Minerva and Selene had been adopted because they’d wanted her to learn about her birth mother.
r /> Because they’d known they were going to die.
Did people know sometimes? Minerva felt that they did. Sometimes.
It must have been a salve on Minerva’s emotional nerve endings, because most of the pain was gone just then. More than anything, she was now curious. A little cautious. And a good bit afraid. She glanced up at the dark, powerful man across from her.
He met her gaze.
And she quickly looked away. She couldn’t help it. Being trapped in that gaze was like… it felt like drowning in shadows filled with pixie dust and powdered sugar and bubbles like the ones from The Labyrinth. She could lose herself forever in those eyes.
And she wasn’t ready to do that just yet.
But at least she finally knew what she wanted to say to him. Her brain seemed to focus, calm itself down, and slip into some discernable pattern. She licked her lips and asked, “What am I doing here?” It was best to just be straight-forward with her questions, she’d decided. Hopefully his answers would be as much so. “What do you want with me?”
Chapter Seven
Caliban could scarcely believe how good the cake was. In all honesty, he rarely ate sweets. He was a busy man, and he didn’t need to consume mortal food to survive anyway, so he did the things required to keep up appearances – the occasional glass of wine or brandy, the shared beer or cup of coffee, the appetizer snippets at a formal dinner, and that was about it. Still, he had lived a very long time, and given enough piled-on days, he was bound to have tried just about every kind of food on a planet.
So it was with some surprise that he realized he’d never before tried this. This rainbow cake deal or whatever it was she’d called it. It was even more surprising that he enjoyed it as thoroughly as he did.
The Hollow Box didn’t just give you the food you asked for; it read your mind and re-created what you truly imagined and desired. So whether rainbow cake normally tasted this good, Cal couldn’t be sure. But what Minerva imagined it tasting like was really damned good. It exploded with a variety of harmonious flavors in his mouth, melted a little like ice cream upon his tongue, and was just creamy enough to leave him craving the next bite.
He was shoveling another large bite between his lips when Minerva’s soft, sweet voice broke the humming silence in the room and stilled him mid-bite.
“What am I doing here? What do you want with me?”
Caliban’s entire body froze up. It was a rare thing for him to be taken by surprise, and this slip of a woman with hair like snow and eyes like night had been doing it left and right.
What do I want with you?
He swallowed hard.
And then the plane bucked several feet, and Minerva gasped. Caliban rose to his feet and set his plate aside. His instincts sharpened, his hearing honed, and his magic unfurled itself, reaching out on unseen arms like antennae.
The plane bucked again, this time dropping a dozen feet before it caught itself once more. The sudden dip sent Minerva sprawling across the bed, where she gripped the headboard. Fortunately, it was attached to the wall. Caliban automatically steadied himself, his magic wrapping itself around him as it always did, and easing him gently off the ground until the jet had once more righted itself.
“Take my hand,” he said, striding across the room to the bed and offering Minerva his outstretched hand. Something was terribly wrong. The pilot was dead; he could sense this. The plane only flew now because Cal was controlling it with his own power.
Whatever had taken the pilot’s life was laced with familiar energy; Cal recognized it because it was so similar to his own. It was dark. That was enough. That dark energy permeated the cockpit, and was growing. There was no telling how strong it would become.
Caliban was the most powerful man in the Unseelie Realm, but he was neither so arrogant nor naïve as to believe there might not be a magic out there stronger than his own. There was Minerva, after all. As his queen, she was almost certain to become more powerful than he was.
It was entirely possible the energy in the cockpit would overpower his own strength any moment now. Then Caliban would not be able to protect himself or his mate. His only option was to transport out of the plane and then destroy it himself before it could hit the ground and harm anyone else.
Minerva looked down at his hand, and showing a good deal more intelligence and instinct than fear, she reached out to take it. But as she did, the engines in the plane began to roar, the nose dove downward, and Minerva’s body slammed up against the bedroom wall.
Though he couldn’t hear it, Cal could tell she cried out as the metal headboard of the bed no doubt bruised her ribs, and her grip on the upper bar slipped. She lost control as the plane then began to tailspin, and loose objects in the room went flying, including the Hollow Box.
Cake splattered against the ceiling, and containers of tea and wine spun, sending their wet contents sailing in a painter’s montage across the room. The sound of glass plates and mugs shattering was drowned out by the monstrous whine of the plane’s twin engines, as was Minerva’s scream as her body floated upward.
Cal now acted entirely on instinct, making the only choices he could in a desperate situation. He transported from where he was standing to the back of the bed, popping back into existence directly behind Minerva. His arm slid around her waist, he pulled her tightly against him, and transported once more, instantly taking them both out of the jet plane.
A moment later, they both reappeared standing on the hard baked sand of a desert ground. Caliban was accustomed to such fast transportations; his shiny black dress shoes were planted firmly on the earth, and his narrowed gaze glared upward at the falling jet plane that was merely more than blinking lights and a shining surface in the reflection of a quickly setting sun.
But Minerva had a few thousand more transports to go before she would be used to it. The scream she had begun in the jet plane now continued, but much more audibly. She was still grasped firmly in the steel coil of Caliban’s right arm, and he could feel the air leave her lungs beneath his tightly gripping fingertips. Little by little, the scream faded away, and she began to tremble. The sensation of this beneath his touch did odd things to Cal, and he found himself looking down, away from the jet.
With a wide, bewildered gaze, he watched the top of her head as she slowly looked up, following his former gaze. A popping sound, far enough away to be muted, but loud enough to be felt, forced him to look up once more. He found the plane just as its real tail spin began. One of the craft’s engines had exploded, and the other was going to follow closely on its heels.
Caliban took a deep breath, releasing the woman in his arms. She took an unsteady step away from him and turned to face him. He met her gaze, but said nothing.
Then he concentrated.
What he needed to do next would take a good deal of his strength, and the need for it couldn’t have come at a worse time. He closed his eyes. The ground beneath his feet began to light up with the glow of fae power. The air around him changed, filling up with something thicker, but invisible. If it could be seen by mortal eyes, humans would liken it to an incandescent fog of black, shimmering and mesmerizing. Within its depths would be lightning bolts, fissures of incredible heat, as magic met magic and exploded.
This unseen force expanded exponentially within split seconds, moving outward in an ever-widening circle of unseelie influence.
He heard Minerva gasp as that black wave slammed over her, sliding lightning-fast across her skin like electrified silk, touching her in a way that no man would ever dare. He knew the effect it would ultimately have upon her – and the distraction of that thought didn’t help him any.
To him, it felt like a short lifetime as the strength it took to manipulate the physical nature of the world drained him so thoroughly, he almost swayed on his feet. But in actuality, it was mere seconds before the spinning, smoldering, out-of-control aircraft a mile above them began to disintegrate.
Little by little, like a 3-D rendered pixelated drawing
on an animator’s screen, the airplane dissolved into thin air from its nose to its tail. Until, at last, there was nothing left of it but the bizarre, inexplicable smoke trail it had left behind it.
The Airbus 319 Corporate Jet vanished with the last of the sun, winking out of existence just as the massive star slipped past the final boundaries of Earth’s horizon and cast the Nevada desert into darkness.
For a moment, he and Minerva simply stood there in that fresh, quiet night, gazing up at the newly blackened sky and its quickly diminishing trail of vapor and smoke. A cool breeze touched Caliban’s hair; he saw it whisper through a lock of Minerva’s, making it dance like spider’s silk. The stars above them winked at them as if keeping their secrets. They’d seen what the Unseelie King had done. They seemed to find it amusing.
Somewhere in the not-too-far distance, a coyote yipped, and a few more joined in. Something scuttled in a Russian Thistle bush a few feet away.
The night was all-encompassing, all-consuming.
Until, at last, Minerva Trystaine turned around to face him.
Caliban tried to remain standing tall. The disintegration spell had drained him horribly. Causing things to un-exist was as difficult as conjuring something from nothing. Physically impossible, magically improbable, and highly taxing. He was hungry now, deep down in his soul.
Minerva licked her lips. “I couldn’t do anything,” she aid. “I froze up.” Her voice was unbelievably steady for what she had just gone through. But he could tell it was a façade. Her arms, she had crossed over her chest. Her teeth were clenched to keep from chattering, and her words were spoken through gritted teeth. “All the power in the world, I’m supposed to have. And all I could do was scream.”
Caliban shook his head. He wanted to console her. He understood fully why she’d done what she’d done. The downside of being a Wisher was a sensitivity most people could not fathom. And one of the many problems with sensitivity was that fear could grip you harder and tighter than it could anyone else. It could make you breathless. It could squeeze your heart right out of your chest and into your throat.