That’s okay. It’s done. The Sinsar Dubh is contained and can no longer harm anyone.
Not true, sweet thing, it purrs. I have YOU and an eternity to punish you for what you’ve done. Before, I was alone beneath the abbey. Now, I have a TOY. And I WILL break free again. It’s only a matter of time. And tiiiiiiiiiiiime, it croons with guttural glee, is on my side, YES IT IS!
It resurrects the images it fed me before, slamming them into my brain in gruesome detail.
I have no idea if I did the things it shows me, if I really killed Jo so horrifically, causing her such hellish pain, while she believed it was me, or if everything is merely an illusion the Sinsar Dubh feeds me.
But here and now, it’s irrelevant.
I know what it’s doing. Trying to distract me while it searches for the True Magic inside us, in hopes of using it to quell me, and break free of our prison.
But it’s too late.
I’ve already found it.
Legs splayed, arms folded, I stand atop the shining vault of power the queen passed us, blazing with purpose and power.
I will never let the Book touch it.
It’s in my kingdom.
That makes it mine.
MACKAYLA, it says in a singsong voice. I KNOW YOU’RE IN HERE. OLLY OLLY OXEN FREE! COME OUT COME OUT WHEREVER YOU ARE! STOP BEING SO TIRESOME. YOU WILL NEVER DEFEAT ME. ALL YOU DID WAS TEMPORARILY SUSPEND EMOTION. THAT DOESN’T MAKE YOU MY EQUAL. YOU CAN NEVER BE MY EQUAL. I AM SUPERIOR IN EVERY WAY.
No, it’s not. I may have turned off my emotion but I can turn it back on.
It has no emotion to turn on. That is its two-dimensional, flat, miserable, unsatisfying existence.
I’m fully formed, missing nothing, needing nothing to leech onto. I have worlds of possibility inside me. It has none. It’s empty, so empty that it tries desperately to fill itself by stealing from others.
The Sinsar Dubh is the true cardboard cutout, empty, flat, and flawed, with its parasitic needs scribbled on its face for all to see.
I HAVE NO NEEDS, BITCH! IT IS YOU WHO ARE FLAWED!
It’s nothing but need. Empty, greedy, black-hole-sucking need. And it knows it, so it tells itself lie after lie, weaves an elaborate illusion of superiority, in hopes of escaping the horrific awareness that it is fatally, damningly flawed, missing something of the divine the rest of us have.
An epiphany takes gentle root within me.
The Sinsar Dubh has no hold on me.
The only hold it ever had was that it managed to latch onto me when I was unaware, innocent and young, and didn’t know such monsters existed.
I’m no longer unaware, innocent, or young.
I don’t need to evict it.
I can simply walk away.
When I rise from the chair, those in the boudoir panic and begin to roar at one another.
But not Barrons.
He stands motionless, searching my eyes through the crackling blue-black wall, and slowly, very slowly, the corner of his mouth ticks up in a smile.
I smile back as I move toward the perimeter of the prison that can’t contain me, wasn’t designed to do so, because I’m not the Sinsar Dubh and never was.
I have an unfortunate hitchhiker.
It’s time to kick it out of the car.
As I step into the containment field, the Sinsar Dubh screams, DON’T YOU DARE LEAVE ME! DON’T YOU KNOW YOU CAN’T EXIST WITHOUT ME? I LOVE YOU, MACKAYLA! I’M THE ONLY ONE THAT LOVES YOU! I’M NOT DONE WITH YOU! I WILL KILL YOU! GET BACK HERE! I WILL DESTROY—
I’m beyond the containment field of the stones.
I’m free.
I can no longer hear the Sinsar Dubh’s threats and taunts.
And never will again.
Lingering in the ether, the Unseelie King retrieved the small scroll tied with a lock of his lover’s hair from where he carried it near his heart. He rolled the tiny thing in his enormous palm.
He knew now.
She’d left him by choice.
He’d suspected the Elixir of Remembering had only a nominal chance of success. He’d created it when he realized he was losing memories to the relentless march of time. He’d wanted to keep each moment of his existence alive, vivid in detail, visceral and immediate. Imbibed on a daily basis, the elixir conferred the result he’d desired.
But as he’d feared, drinking it hundreds of thousands of years after the Cauldron of Forgetting had done its damage restored only the details, none of the context or associated feelings. She was Zara, yet possessed none of the spectacular passion and fire that had so ensorcelled him. As icy as the First Queen had ever been, she wanted nothing more from him than her freedom.
He’d been a fool to believe he’d been given a second chance.
Dropping the scroll, he ground it to dust beneath his heel then vanished, seeking solitude where old gods do, among the stars.
MAC
You know those movies where lovers have been separated with no idea whether they’ll ever see each other again and, when they finally do, after harrowing trials and tribulations, they dash madly toward one another, and the filmmaker shoots the scene in slow motion so the viewers get to revel in that long, drawn out moment of anticipation, waiting breathlessly for their first passionate embrace?
That’s so not what happened with me and Barrons.
Neither of us moved. We just stood there looking at each other. His dark eyes gleamed with…I had no idea what because I couldn’t currently feel and had no way of identifying emotion. But I chose to believe it was satisfaction, respect, and a “bloody good job, Ms. Lane.”
No one else in the boudoir moved either. They were all staring past me.
I turned and glanced back at the containment field.
Inside a blue-black cage, a dark, angry tornado twisted and darted, flinging itself repeatedly at the walls.
To no avail.
I’d walked away from it. I’d left the Sinsar Dubh behind, trapped forever, in its own private hell.
I was unsatisfied with the outcome. I would only be satisfied when it was destroyed.
“You did it, Mac!” Jada exploded fiercely, punching the air.
I had indeed. But I was still remote and emotionless, and although a part of me almost yearned to stay that way, a bigger part didn’t.
I wanted to feel again, to drink in the moment, the dawning of a new day. I wanted to savor my hard-won freedom. There was so much future ahead of us, if we could manage to save our world. I calculated the odds at slightly better than they had been.
I could feel the unfamiliar presence of the True Magic smoldering inside me. And while part of me thought, Gee, great, now I have another uninvited thing inside me I have to deal with, most of me was thinking how extraordinary it was that by an unexpected twist of fate I’d become the one woman who could wield the Song of Making.
That was a serious plus in our column. Cruce possessed at least some part of the Sinsar Dubh. Dageus was alive with the souls of thirteen ancient Draghar inside him. We had Dani’s and Dancer’s quirky, brilliant minds and Barrons’s and Ryodan’s vast experience with magic and the black arts.
Yes, our odds were definitely better than they had been, with the Fae queen missing, and me possessed.
I slanted my eyes half closed, sank within and embraced all that made me human; the good, the bad, the pretty and not so pretty, and as emotion rekindled, I stared past the Sinsar Dubh’s prison, through the shadows of the king’s ancient, towering Silver to the woman who stood on the other side of it, a dazzling bird perched on her shoulder.
She met my gaze and I thought I detected the faintest trace of sorrow in her lovely, iridescent eyes. I could recognize emotion again.
Then she turned and glided to the now open door on the king’s side of the boudoir and exited through it without a word, vanishing into the White Mansion.
The door swung shut behind her with such force that the floor shuddered and the king’s enormous mirror abruptly went coal black.
> The mirror shivered violently then—gilt frame and all—simply popped out of existence, leaving a smooth white wall where once it had hung.
The concubine’s boudoir no longer connected to the king’s.
The tiny flames flickering in the diamonds floating on the air around us abruptly went out, leaving cold, opaque crystals that clattered to the floor, amid petals that no longer smelled spicy but now emitted a strong whiff of decay.
The residue of the concubine vanished from the bed.
The fire in the hearth died.
The chamber was just a chamber, void of all trace of the opulent beauty, passion, and sensuality that had saturated it.
Although I had no idea what had transpired between the legendary lovers, I knew what these events signified: the epic love affair between the Unseelie King and his concubine was over.
Inexpressible sorrow filled me.
I felt as if I’d lost something. I’d liked believing in their immortal love. I’d once lived their passion in these rooms, and the depth of their commitment to each other had been as powerful and seemingly eternal as the Unseelie King himself. Their tortured affair had been wild and romantic, inspiring me, filling me with wonder and no small measure of desire for a similar enduring love. Minus the tortured part.
I frowned, not liking the implications of what I’d just seen.
The Unseelie King had shut the door and turned out the lights. The lights he’d kept burning for hundreds of thousands of years. If the king no longer cared for the boudoir to exist as perpetual testament to his life’s love and obsession, then the king no longer cared. And his interest in human problems had always been fleetingly whimsical at best.
The concubine/Fae queen who might have helped me learn to use the powers she’d transferred to me had just stalked out and slammed the door behind her.
I didn’t need a genius IQ to figure out what their departures meant: no divine aid to humankind would be forthcoming.
Our world was dying.
Months, at best, the concubine had said.
And we were on our own.
MAC
The others began to bicker.
Cruce started it. No surprise there.
Jada was merely proposing we take further measures to secure the Sinsar Dubh in the chamber when he launched into a haughty diatribe about how no one was going anywhere until MacKayla “got her human ass over here,” put her hands on his chest and passed the True Magic of the Fae race to the rightful heir—the only Fae in the room, thereby entitled, no, owed…blah blah blah.
Lor pointed out that there was a second Fae in the room, the cocooned Unseelie princess, and as far as he was concerned, if the True Magic was going anywhere and it wasn’t as matriarchal power, it would clearly go to her.
Barrons snarled that I was never going to be getting my human ass anywhere near Cruce, not now, not ever, and then Fade jumped in, pointing out that whether or not I even was still human was open to significant debate.
Jada and I looked at each other in disbelief.
“Shut up, all of you!” I thundered.
The silence was instantaneous. Four pairs of eyes jerked my way. Even Jada looked mildly startled, and I realized my voice had come out larger than it used to, with an unmistakable note of authority.
“Time moves differently while we’re in here,” I reminded them. “The concubine said we had mere months at best before the black holes devoured our world. How long have we been in here?”
“Fuck,” Barrons exploded, his gaze darting instantly between the imprisoned Sinsar Dubh and the door. “We can’t just leave it like this. If someone finds their way in and moves a single stone, it’ll be free again.”
I could see that happening all too easily. People were insatiably curious. Fae were insatiably power hungry, prone to overestimating their abilities to handle it. More than a few would be tempted to see if they could control the Sinsar Dubh. Cruce and Darroc had both tried. Hell, I’d been tempted when I thought I’d killed Barrons.
“And who knows what it’s capable of in that form,” Jada said. “It might be like that movie, Fallen, with Denzel Washington where Azazel could jump from body to body. Mac may have inadvertently left it in a form that makes it even easier for it to possess people.”
“And thank you for pointing that out,” I said caustically, irritated with myself. I wanted the thing gone, dead, destroyed, dust, not existing in an even more dangerous form that might be able to whiz through the air, entering and exiting humans as if they were convenient revolving doors, possessing hundreds, even thousands, if it escaped. To Barrons, I said, “Can you ward the door?”
“For fuck’s sake, it’s not a mere twinkle of a nose. Wards take time.”
To Cruce, I said, “What can you do quickly to fortify this chamber?”
He folded his arms over his chest and regarded me with open hostility. “You are the one who is so all-powerful now. You do something. Or transfer the power to me and I will.”
A muscle leapt in my jaw. “Did you somehow miss the point of what the concubine said? If our planet dies, your race dies, too. Secure the damn door, Cruce,” I said flatly.
Barrons stalked out and we followed him.
Jaw clenched, Cruce joined us, closed the door and murmured softly.
An enormous steel gate appeared, barring entry, heavily bolted into the walls on sides and top, and sunk deep into the floor.
“But a Fae could get past that, couldn’t it?” I said.
“Fae are not ‘its,’ MacKayla, we are ‘hes’ and ‘shes,’ ” he said tightly. “And technically you are one of us now.” But he palmed a faintly pulsing blue-black rune and embedded it in the center bar of the gate. “This will do. For the time being.”
“Um, guys, we forgot the princess,” Jada said.
“She’s bound in the cocoon, now doubly trapped,” Barrons replied grimly. “Every minute counts. Multiplied exponentially in this bloody place. Run.”
We ran.
MAC
We returned to a completely different New Dublin, one run with near-militant efficiency by Ryodan.
Our stay in the White Mansion had cost us thirty-five days, Earth time.
When Ryodan returned from wherever he was reborn, he discovered the six of us, Barrons, Jada, Fade, Lor, Cruce, and I, had been missing for a week. With no idea what had happened to us or where we’d gone, he turned his attention to our pressing problem: the black holes that continued to expand slowly but relentlessly, growing inexorably nearer to the ground.
No one had any idea what would happen if one of the black holes made contact with the soil. We didn’t fully understand the physics of the black holes we’d discovered in space and no one knew if ours were even the same kind of thing. Dancer was convinced they were a total wild card, differing widely from naturally occurring black holes. Some people theorized it would eat slowly away at the soil, some contended it would instantly devour a large area, while others insisted the entire Earth would be destroyed at a fairly rapid pace until it formed an accretion disk around the black hole, allowing the hole to consume it at its leisure.
Since the Fae queen had a profound connection to the Fae power nestled deep in the earth, I was certain her estimate of mere months was correct. And considering we’d been gone more than a month of those “mere months,” I was grateful Ryodan had thrown himself into the issue of the black holes with the same intense focus he turned on everything.
In our absence he’d befriended Dancer, or rather commandeered the young genius to report to him daily about the progress being made at Trinity College, where a crew of thirty of the finest minds Dancer and Caoimhe had been able to gather struggled with theoretical physics and music theory, in an effort to fathom our problem and define the essence of the Song of Making.
“Ryodan’s been spending hours a day with them,” said Enyo, the tough, young French-Lebanese sidhe-seer who’d stepped up to the plate at the abbey in Jada’s absence. She’d banged in the door
of the bookstore about one minute after Jada and I arrived, as I’d been on my way upstairs to peel off my jeans and change into something sans guts, blood, and gray matter. Sighing, I’d gone right back down, and now sat in the middle of the wrecked bookstore, listening as Enyo brought us up to date. “Absorbing their theories, posing challenging questions, pushing their minds even further outside the box. Dancer’s opinion of Ryodan has certainly changed.”
Ryodan had also turned the focus of his meticulous gaze, Enyo told us, to the other side of the city, dispatching men to the abbey where they labored day and night displacing rubble in hopes of uncovering and salvaging as much of the abbey’s libraries as possible. The sidhe-seers searched whatever tomes were found, seeking useful Fae lore. He’d dispatched RVs and tour buses to the heavily damaged fortress, to afford temporary living quarters.
He’d also done the unthinkable: Chester’s was closed for business. The sleek, modern chrome and glass-walled dance floors of the biggest postwall nightclub in Dublin had gone as dark as the king’s boudoir. Nobody was partying on his watch, when the Earth was in imminent danger of extinction. The streets of New Dublin were patrolled day and night by dozens of troops of the Guardians, an order that had grown enormously in our absence, attracting men and women from all over the world as the influx of immigrants to the city continued unabated. Enyo informed us they were under new leadership, as Inspector Jayne had mysteriously disappeared and was presumed dead.
I received the news of the good inspector’s death with sorrow. I’d liked Jayne. He’d toed a hard line from day one, but it had been a necessary line, guided by a good heart. I glanced at Jada to see how she was taking the news. She locked gazes with me and shook her head minutely. Tell you later, she mouthed when Enyo wasn’t looking.
Each and every black hole on Ryodan’s map, Enyo told us, had been secured, not merely by orange ropes cordoning them off, but heavily armed guards, in our country as well as those in England, Scotland, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Romania, Greece, Morocco, and Norway. Fortunately, there weren’t nearly as many in other countries as there were in Ireland.