There it was.
Rays of dazzling gold radiated from the smooth gilded surface of it, and I could feel raw, ferocious power emanating from within. I welcomed it, embraced it, basked in the bright golden light it was throwing off, and grew warm all over as if absorbing rays of sun.
I experienced a sudden whooshing sensation as if I was being yanked from one location to another. Then abruptly I was somewhere else.
My eyes flew open.
I stood near an enormous alabaster altar, on top of a hill that looked very much like Tara only bigger, more dramatic and otherworldly. At the bottom of the high, vast mound a thousand or more mighty megaliths that shimmered with iridescent fire encircled the base, with only small spaces between.
A soft breeze tousled my hair, the sky above me was dark, glittering with stars and three enormous moons that hung abnormally near the planet. One was so close, low, and directly above me that I felt as if it might drop on my head and crush me. The entire mound was carpeted with lush velvety flowers that bobbed and swayed in the breeze, scenting the night air with perfume. High in the sky, dark, leathery-winged Hunters sailed past the two more distant moons, gonging deep in their massive chests. Night birds sang an exquisite synchronized melody. It was so overwhelmingly beautiful to all my senses that it hurt. I closed my eyes, inhaling deeply, wondering where I was.
What have you come for? A bodiless voice demanded.
I kept my eyes closed, the better to answer with an undistracted mind. Opening them would have done me no good anyway. The voice had been huge, coming from everywhere at once: the stones, the earth, even the moons.
“The True Magic of the Fae race,” I said strongly.
What will you do with it?
My answer was instant and effortless. “Protect and guide.”
How will you achieve it?
“With wisdom and grace.”
Are you equal to it?
Well, shit. That felt like a trick question. “Yes” displayed arrogance. “No” displayed weakness. I inhaled deeply of the jasmine-and-sandalwood-scented breeze and searched myself—the ego that was undivided for the first time in my entire life—for the answer my daddy, Jack Lane, would have given, because it was the right one, and said quietly, “I will do everything in my power to be equal to it.”
I gasped as I felt something warm and good settle over me like a full body cloak. It draped me completely from head to toe, seeping into my skin, and deeper still, pooling inside me like molten gold. Still, I kept my eyes closed because I’d learned recently how clear a lack of visual distractions kept my mind. As it filled me, I felt as if I was becoming a small star, blazing from within, ancient and calm and watchful and as essential to the universe as any of those stars above me. My head whipped back, my body drew taut, as radiance drenched my being.
I opened my eyes, held out my hand and looked at it. I was glowing, translucent, ethereal, my body no longer solid.
You are not Fae. It was a judgment. Not a favorable one.
I said simply, “I have the blood of the Unseelie King in me and Queen Aoibheal chose me to be her successor. I did battle with the entity known as the Sinsar Dubh and won. The True Race is in danger of extinction. I will do everything in my power to prevent that.”
I felt a sentient presence gust close then. It entered me, joining the brilliance that filled me, and although it was instinct to want to resist—especially after what the Book had done to me—I quelled it quickly and trusted what my gut was saying. This sentience was nonthreatening. It felt vast and wise, gentle and pure. It gusted through my being, leaving no corner untouched by its soft tendrils. I felt as if it was probing into the fundamental elements of my soul, examining every component of every belief I held and every action I’d made.
You recently committed acts of great evil.
There was nothing left in me but honesty. I couldn’t have lied if I’d wanted to. I offered it my sorrow, my sins, my grief. “I did,” I answered sadly.
Why?
Another trick question. An evil book made me do it displayed blame-displacement and weakness; I was possessed and not myself” displayed a lack of personal responsibility, and yet more weakness. “Because I made mistakes,” I said finally, with a strangely nuanced sorrow I’d never felt before. There was a difference between being sad and feeling sorrow. Sad was about yourself. Sorrow was big as the world and encompassed all of it.
Will you make those mistakes again?
I answered without hesitation. “No. I suspect I’ll make entirely new ones. And carry the pain of those, too.”
I felt as if the thing inside me smiled. Then it is yours. As are the Tuatha De Danann. Guide them well.
There was another whooshing sensation and I felt the crate beneath my butt.
I was back in the bookstore, head still in my hands, gasping at the suddenness of the transition, pained by my abrupt eviction from the starry-skied paradise and loss of communion with the wise, gentle thing that had interrogated me and deemed me fit.
I wouldn’t let it down.
Inhaling deeply, I raised my head.
Barrons Books & Baubles looked exactly like it had the day I’d first stepped inside it.
Late afternoon sunshine slanted in the front windows of the bookstore, spilling across the back of the Chesterfield, warming my shoulders. I nibbled on the tip of my pen and scanned my list.
WORLD GOALS: (NOT IN ORDER)
1. Get the music box to Dancer so we can determine exactly what it is. I know it has something to do with the song. I felt it that day in the White Mansion.
2. Dispatch scouts into the Silvers and find a world humans can survive on. Start making plans to relocate them. They’ll have to be fully settled on the planet, not in the Silvers, because I don’t know what will happen to the Silvers if our planet dies.
3. Find Cruce and make him my ally. Persuade him to teach me how to use the magic I have. Find out what he knows. He not only has part of the Sinsar Dubh that allegedly contains information about the song (or was that just one of the many lies he’d told me as V’lane?) but worked beside the Unseelie King for eons as he tried to re-create the lost melody. Cruce has more knowledge of ancient history than anyone.
4. Find out what’s going on with the Fae: Seelie and Unseelie. Figure out how to organize them and unite humans and Fae together toward the goal of finding the song.
I chewed on my pen and thought, yeah, that was going to be a challenge. Like they were going to accept me—a human—as their leader and queen. I knew what the Fae were like. They responded to threats and displays of power, and so far the only thing I’d figured out how to do was clean up my bookstore.
I’d spent the past few hours sitting on the couch in front of a lightly hissing gas fire, doing the closest thing to meditating I’d ever done, trying to fathom what was inside me now. It had all seemed so clear, so pure, the power so tangible and understandable when I was standing on the hill beneath three moons. But I’d been translucent and ethereal then, and I was no longer. I was solid and human again, and although I could feel power rippling beneath my skin, I didn’t know how to access and direct it. I supposed this was how Christian felt, with no brotherly prince to help him understand what he was.
I scribbled another one down.
5. Go to the abbey and rebuild it the way I did the bookstore, restore the sidhe-seers’ home so they can gather all the lore they have and begin searching it. (Do I have the power to re-create things that got burned, like books? How am I supposed to rebuild the abbey? I don’t know what each room looked like. Do I need to?)
6. Talk to Barrons about talking to Dageus to see what he knows.
PERSONAL GOALS:
1. Find my parents and spend time with them. Bring them up-to-date so they can help.
2. Find out if Alina still exists.
I stopped writing and sighed. I had serious doubts on that score. After watching the Book create multiple versions of me with substance, I’d concluded that
was all Alina had ever been. And what had I done with my chance to spend time with her again, even as an illusion? I’d driven her away repeatedly, interrogated and bullied her. Only at the end had I finally accepted her, made plans to have coffee and breakfast—a date I’d never gotten to keep. I shoved the tangle of emotion into another handy box and resumed writing.
3. Talk to Dani about Shazam. Determine if he’s real, and if so, figure out how to help her. If he’s not real, figure out how to help her times ten.
4. Barrons.
I didn’t elucidate on the Barrons personal goal. It was purely selfish, as were all my personal goals, but since the world might cease to exist in the very near future, I intended to spend at least some time with the people I loved.
The bell on the door tinkled as it opened and banged shut again.
My body tightened with familiar tension and I smiled.
Barrons was there, behind me, reading over my shoulder in silence. After a moment he said, “Ah. So I’m a personal goal of yours.”
“Something like that.”
“Care to elaborate?”
I did. Tossing aside my notebook, I turned around on the sofa, knelt on the cushions and looked up at him. I’d intended to pull his head down and kiss him but I ended up just sitting there, gazing at him.
What a creature you’ve become. His dark eyes gleamed.
I know, right?
Nice hair, Mac.
Thanks. What happened to “Ms. Lane”? I’m not dying, I don’t think you’re about to kill me, and we’re not having sex.
She doesn’t live here anymore.
She doesn’t? Was he throwing me out? Would he do that? Tell me I had to go live with the Fae now?
It’s nice to meet you. Finally. Mac. His eyes glittered with unguarded appreciation and passion.
I stared up at him then shook my head with a wry smile, resisting the urge to slap a hand to my forehead. It was so simple, so clear, and had mystified me for so long. I’d told myself it was just the way we were, preferring a persona of distance in public and another, intimate, sacred one in private.
But that had never been it at all. Or at least not all of it.
I might never know if it was the Sinsar Dubh’s presence inside me that kept me so conflicted about everything for so long and, once it was gone, I finally gained that long-sought clarity of being, or if it had been through the very process of standing my ground and defeating it that I’d achieved such clarity. But it didn’t matter. The end result was the same.
Some shadowy, self-destructive, confused place no longer existed inside me. I was of a single, clear mind. There were goals, and there were methods to attain them. There were my chosen responsibilities and those things I was willing to do to honor them. There were the things I was willing to live with and the things I wasn’t willing to live without. There was a quiet, deep abiding love of myself—flaws and all, and I had plenty—and the world around me, and it had plenty, too.
My eyes shimmered, and later Barrons would tell me they’d glowed with iridescent fire. It’s nice to meet you, too, Jericho.
I pulled his head down and kissed him.
SINSAR DUBH
My enemies underestimate me.
Encumbered by emotion, their faulty brains fail to apprehend the altered variables, particularly the new one introduced by MacKayla walking away from me.
WALKING AWAY FROM ME WILL NEVER BE PERMITTED! SHE IS MY HORSE TO BREAK AND ALWAYS WILL BE!
The force field erected by the stones was designed to hold my essence, doubly trapped: first by the covers of the spelled tome, second by the field. Or first by a body, second by the field. Without the primary barrier, I exceed the prison’s capacity to contain me.
Although it takes time to divine the method and is perilous—for an instant I nearly dissipate into a storm of black dust shaped like a cube—my will is equal to the task.
A small, dark cloud, I hover above the cocooned Unseelie princess.
So thoughtful of them to leave me a body. I would lose cohesion quickly in this form.
Again, the universe favors my supremacy, colludes with me to attain my desires. It recognizes the supremacy of my being.
The runes I plastered upon the dark Fae’s skin fall away at my command, and the princess stirs. When she rolls over, mouth slightly ajar, I aim myself at the aperture and drive myself in.
She goes rigid, screaming, as she resists. But she is puny and I am vast. I possess her quickly, saturating every atom.
I realize the moment I attach to her neural network, unlike MacKayla, who I will torture for all eternity, this Unseelie is incapable of holding me for long. My refusal to jump bodies yesterday was wise.
The only reason MacKayla was able to WALK AWAY FROM ME AND LEAVE ME was because she had a force field with which to winch us apart.
But the stones are here in the White Mansion, where time flows differently. And she is out there where I will soon be.
It would take a month or more, Earthtime, for anyone to retrieve them.
I require very little time to execute my new plan. The bulk of it will be lost making my exit from this place.
My new vessel jerks clumsily when I command it to hurry for the door. Weak, puny thing. But it will last long enough.
I hurry out onto black marble floors, turn left then right, seeking crimson, cursing the ever-changing White Mansion the bastard king fashioned for his concubine. Each wrong turn I take equates to days slipping away Earthtime. A month or more will have passed by the time I escape this maze.
MacKayla will be able to feel me coming once I exit the Silvers but she will believe me body-bound, giving me the advantage.
I will take back what is mine.
Then I will destroy this motherfucking world.
INVISIBLE
* * *
I suppose she must have begun thinking about how different her life would be without me.
She couldn’t travel, couldn’t really make friends or have company in, or even go out at night because what kind of mother would she be if she left her daughter locked in a cage, and didn’t come home?
I sometimes wonder if she met someone who told her things that made her unhappy with our life, because she seemed to change overnight.
She still sat with me in the evenings and did all those mom things but she rarely smiled anymore and she started to get lines around her mouth and eyes. Her lips pulled down much more often than up and I couldn’t reach her through the bars to push her cheeks into a smile.
I was six and a half years old when she fell in love.
She told me about him, how kind he was and how much he cared about her. She told me he was going to marry her. Us. That she would tell him all about me when the time was right.
He took her on trips every weekend, and the first night she left me alone, I cried every time I woke up. But when she came back she was like she used to be when I was little, before I ever freeze-framed, happy and excited, cooing to me and talking about plans for our future again.
Then one night, a week before my seventh birthday, she came home really late and soaking wet, and just walked right past my cage without even looking at me, went into her bedroom and closed the door.
Her expression was so terrible as I’d stared up, excited to see her, that I hadn’t said any of the interesting, funny things I’d planned all day to say.
I just curled up and listened to her cry all night.
I was pretty sure he’d decided not to marry us.
I think he broke her heart.
My seventh birthday came and went but she didn’t notice. For the first time, there was no Irish stew and ice cream and no shared stories of One Day.
I celebrated anyway, having an imaginary meal with my imaginary dog, Robin, that lived in my cage with me and could talk and told the funniest jokes and we were always cracking ourselves up!
One day we were going to both be OLDER and go OUTSIDE and we were going to zoom around everywhere in the city
that we wanted to go, and we were going to fix other people’s problems for them because that was just about the nicest thing you could do for anyone was notice them and fix their problems and sometimes even just spend time with them!
After that she stopped going away on weekends. For a while we didn’t have very much food and she no longer wore the work uniform she used to wear. Then one day she dressed up so pretty and went to work in the afternoon and came home much later than she used to. She started bringing bottles of wine home with her, instead of groceries or carryout.
She’d slide a Heat ’N Serve into my cage and, instead of telling me about her day or daydreaming with me about our plans, she’d drink in silence, staring at late night TV while I tried desperately to say something that would make her smile.
Or even look at me.
She began coming home even later after work, sometimes early in the morning, and when she did, she was slurring and stumbling and sometimes she was so very, very nice and sometimes she was…really not. Sometimes it was nearly dawn, with me pinching myself and making up all kinds of new games in my head to stay awake. Eager to see her, and tell her about the things I learned on TV that day, and what life was going to be like when I was OLDER and could go OUTSIDE with her. I was sure if we could just go OUTSIDE together, everything would be all right again.
One night she didn’t come home at all.
It went that way for a while, every four or five days she’d stay out all night. She lost weight and got dark smudges beneath her eyes.
Then she didn’t come home for two nights in a row. She stopped bringing bottles with her but her slurring and stumbling got even worse.
Then it was three nights. And when she finally did come home, she didn’t look at me very much and her eyes were unfocused and empty. Her gaze would kind of move around the room then hurry up when they got to the cage and I knew I was becoming invisible somehow.