Whatever.
Like Barrons, I was pissed.
If Ryodan broke rules with impunity, how was I supposed to figure out where to draw my own lines? What were lines really worth if you just crossed them whenever you felt like it?
My role models sucked.
I circled the desk and perched on Ryodan’s chair, staring up at the LED screens lining the perimeter on the opposite wall, wishing I could read lips.
Dageus convulsed and collapsed to the floor. He shuddered and jerked as his beast tried to claw its way from inside his skin in a vicious battle for control of the vessel they shared. It wasn’t lost on me that Dani and I waged a similar war—she against Jada, I against a Book. I wondered if that was just what happened to people who served on the front line of the world’s battles, who as Dani would say lived large: they got taken by some kind of a demon eventually. I’d seen my share of Veterans back home in Georgia that had that look in their eyes, the one I saw in my own lately. Was it inevitable for people who walked too long in the dark night beyond fences? Maybe that was the price for not staying with the sheep. Maybe that was why the stupid sheep stayed.
Maybe they weren’t so stupid after all.
Then again, what happened to me occurred before I’d even been born. It wasn’t as if I’d had any say in the matter. Psychopaths were born every day, too. Perhaps inner demons were nothing more than the luck of the draw. I also drew Barrons, the best wild card a woman could hold in her hand. Inasmuch as that man could be held.
After what seemed an interminable spell of painful morphing, Dageus crawled back to the shadows, dragged himself up onto a stone ledge and lay there shaking violently.
I wondered what he was in for. Were the Nine like vampires, consumed by mindless bloodlust when first transformed into whatever the hell they were? I wondered if he was even capable of thought or if his body was undergoing such traumatic changes that he was a blank slate like me. I wondered how they planned to explain this to the other MacKeltar, to Dageus’s wife. Then I realized they obviously didn’t intend to since they sent the Highland clan home with what must have been someone else’s body to bury.
What a mess. I didn’t see any way this situation could turn out good. Well, except maybe for Chloe, if she was eventually reunited with her husband. I had no problem with Barrons’s inner beast. In fact, the more I saw of it, the more I liked it. More than the man at this moment, because he hadn’t come back to me first but at least now I understood why.
The door to the office whisked open and Lor stood framed in the entry. I glanced down to make sure the chair I was sitting in was actually visible and swallowed a sigh of relief. Apparently it was substantial enough that my sitting in it didn’t make it vanish. I eased out of it carefully, so slowly it made the muscles in my legs burn, as I tried to keep it from squeaking or shifting even slightly and betraying my presence. I inched around the side and backed against a wall.
Belatedly I realized the two previously hidden panels on Ryodan’s desk were now in plain view and the monitors that had been showing public parts of the club were showing things I wasn’t sure Lor knew. Private was too mild a word for Barrons and Ryodan. Stay-the-fuck-out-of-my-business was their shared surname. I had no idea if they’d told Lor I was currently invisible, but if they hadn’t I meant to keep it that way.
Lor glanced over his shoulder, up and down the hall, to ascertain whether he was unobserved, then stepped quickly into the office as the door whisked closed behind him.
I raised a brow, wondering what he was up to.
He walked straight for the desk but drew up short when he saw the hidden panel had slid out.
“What the fuck, boss?” he murmured.
He headed for the chair and drew up short again when he saw the panel behind the desk was also exposed. “Christ, you’re getting sloppy. What the fuck sent you outta here so fast you couldn’t close things up?”
His assumption worked for me.
Shaking his head, Lor dropped into Ryodan’s chair and slid the hidden panel out farther than I knew it went, revealing two small remotes. I eased near, peering over his shoulder, then drew back sharply when he dropped the chair back into recline and kicked his boots up on the desk with a wolfish grin. He fiddled with the remote, seemingly unaware that the monitors he was preparing to watch were already on.
I inched forward again.
He hit Rewind for a few seconds, punched Play, then looked straight up at the monitor I’d watched him and Jo having sex on no more than ten minutes ago.
Was he kidding me? He’d come up here to watch the sex he just had with Jo? Freaking men!
I refused to watch it twice. Once had been bad enough. I closed my eyes, waiting for him to notice what was playing on the monitors next to the one he was watching. It didn’t take long.
“What the bloody fuck?” he said in a near-whisper. I heard the sound of something breaking, bits of plastic hitting the floor.
Yep. He definitely didn’t know.
“Fuck,” he barked, staccato sharp.
After a moment, he growled, “Fuuuu-uuuck.”
Then, “Aw, fuck, fuck, FUCK.”
Lor seemed to have gotten stuck on the word he likes the most. No surprise there.
I opened my eyes. He was standing behind the desk, ramrod straight, legs spread, arms folded, muscles bulging, tense from head to toe. The remote was on the floor in pieces.
“Bloody fucking fuck, are you fucking crazy? Have you lost your motherfucking mind?”
I’d been wondering the same thing.
“We don’t do this shit. That’s rule the fuck number one in our motherfucking universe. Not even you can get away with it, boss!”
While I found it oddly reassuring to know there were repercussions, I found it equally disconcerting. The last thing our world needed on top of all its other problems was war breaking out among the Nine. Rather, now…the Ten.
“Sonofamotherfuckinggoddamnbitch! JaysustittyfuckingChrist!”
That was Lor. Man of few words.
He seized the second remote, punched a button, and the office was filled with harsh groans of pain. The Highlander was curled in a tight ball on the stone ledge. I glanced at Barrons and Ryodan, now sitting in stony silence, watching the Highlander. Apparently they were done arguing. Figured once we had volume they were no longer speaking to each other.
My gaze lingered on Barrons, savage, elegant, despotic, and enormously self-contained. I recognized that shirt, open at the throat, cuffs rolled back. I knew the pants, too, so dark gray they were nearly black, and his black and silver boots. Last time I’d seen him, he’d been gutted on a frigging cliff again—me, Barrons, and cliffs are a proven recipe for disaster—and his clothes were bloody and torn, which meant at some point he’d stopped at his lair behind the bookstore for a change of clothing. Tonight, after I’d left? Or days ago, while I’d tossed and turned on the chesterfield in a fitful sleep? Had he walked through the store? How long had he been back? His senses were acute. He knew I was invisible. If he’d bothered walking through the store while I slept, he’d have seen my indent on the sofa. Had he looked for me at all?
“You fucking turned him,” Lor growled. “What the fuck is so special about him? And you killed me just for getting a little uninterrupted time in the sack and fucking Jo!” He snorted. “Aw, man, this is gonna go tribunal. You should have let him die. You know what the fuck happens!”
What was tribunal? I knew what the word meant but couldn’t fathom who might serve as the Nine’s court of law. Did this mean they’d turned humans in the past? If so, what had the tribunal done with them? It wasn’t as if they could be killed. At least not until recently. Now there was K’Vruck, the ancient icy black Hunter whose killing blow had laid Barrons’s tortured son to rest. Would they locate him and try to get him to kill Dageus? Would they expect me to help coax the enormous deadly Hunter near? Had Dageus been saved from one death only to die a more permanent soul-eclipsing one?
Barrons spoke and I shivered. I love that man’s voice. Deep, with an untraceable accent, it’s sexy as hell. When he speaks, all the fine muscles in my body shift into a lower, tighter, more aggressive gear. I want him all the time. Even when I’m mad at him. Perversely, maybe even more so then.
“You violated our code. You created an untenable liability,” Barrons growled.
Ryodan gave him a look but said nothing.
“His loyalties will always be first and foremost to his clan. Not us.”
“Debatable.”
“Our secrets. Now his. He’ll talk.”
“Debatable.”
“He’s a Keltar. They’re nice. They champion the underdog. Fight for the common good. As if there is such a bloody thing.”
Ryodan smiled faintly. “Nice is no longer one of his shortcomings.”
“You know what the tribunal will do.”
“There will be no tribunal. We’ll keep him hidden.”
“You can’t hide him forever. He won’t agree to stay hidden forever. He has a wife, a child.”
“He’ll get past it.”
“He’s a Highlander. Clan is everything. He won’t ever get past it.”
“He’ll get past it.”
Barrons mocked, “Repetition of erroneous facts—”
“Fuck you.”
“And because he won’t get past it, you know what they’ll do to him. What we’ve done to others.”
How many others? I wondered. What had they done?
“Yet you have Mac,” Ryodan said.
“I didn’t turn Mac.”
“Only because you didn’t have to. Someone else extended her life. Giving you the easy way out. Maybe our code is wrong.”
“There are reasons for our code.”
“That’s a fucking joke, coming from you. You said yourself, ‘Things are different now. We evolve. So does our code.’ Either there are laws or there aren’t. And if there are laws, like everything in the universe, they exist to be tested.”
“That’s what you’re after? Establishing new case precedence? Never going to happen. Not on this point. You want to turn Dani. Assuming she’s ever Dani again.”
“Nobody’s turning my fucking honey,” Lor muttered darkly.
“You took the Highlander, as your test case,” Barrons said.
Ryodan said nothing.
“Kas doesn’t speak. X is half mad on a good day, bugfuck crazy on a bad one. You’re tired of it. You want your family back. You want a full house, like the old days.”
Ryodan growled, “You’re so fucking shortsighted, you can’t see past the end of your own dick.”
“Hardly short.”
“You don’t see what’s coming.”
Barrons inclined his head, waiting.
“Have you considered what will happen if we don’t find a way to stop the holes the Hoar Frost King made from growing.”
“Chester’s gets swallowed. Parts of the world disappear.”
“Or all.”
“We’ll stop it.”
“If we can’t.”
“We move on.”
“The kid,” Ryodan said with such contempt that I knew he was talking about Dancer, not Dani, “says they’re virtually identical to black holes. At worst, consuming all objects within to oblivion. At best, from which there is no escape. When we die,” he carefully enunciated each word, “we come back on this world. If this world doesn’t exist, or is inside a black hole…” He didn’t bother finishing. He didn’t need to.
Lor stared at the monitor. “Shit, boss.”
“I’m the one who’s always planning,” Ryodan said. “Doing whatever’s necessary to protect us, ensure our continued existence while you fucks live like tomorrow will always come.”
“Ah,” Barrons mocked, “the king wearies of the crown.”
“Never the crown. Only the subjects.”
“What does this have to do with the Highlander?” Barrons said impatiently.
Exactly what I was wondering.
“He’s a sixteenth-century druid that was possessed by the first thirteen druids trained by the Fae—the Draghar.”
“I heard he was cured of that little problem,” Barrons said.
“I heard otherwise from a certain walking lie detector who told Mac his uncle never managed to exorcise them completely.”
I scowled, pressing my fingers to my forehead, rubbing it as if to agitate my memory and recall exactly where I’d been when Christian told me that—and if there had been any damned roaches around. That was the problem with roaches: they were small and could wedge themselves into virtually any crack to eavesdrop unseen.
“You know what Christian told Mac when you weren’t present?” Barrons said softly.
Ryodan said nothing.
“If I ever see roaches in my bookstore…” Barrons didn’t bother finishing the threat.
“Roaches?” Lor muttered. “What the fuck’s he talking about?”
“The Seelie queen is missing,” Ryodan said. “The Unseelie don’t give a shit if this world is destroyed. They aren’t bound to this planet like we are. Fae magic is destroying the world. It may be the only thing that saves it. The Highlander wasn’t supposed to die on that mountain. It wasn’t part of my plan. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my fucking vagina to be inside a black hole.”
That was certainly a visual.
“Me neither,” Lor muttered. “I like my vaginas pink and smaller. Much smaller,” he added. “Like way the fuck tight.”
I rolled my eyes.
Ryodan said, “This could be the end of us.”
The end of the Nine? I’d always kept in the back of my mind that if things got really bad on this world, I’d just grab everyone I love, along with everyone else we could round up, and travel through the Silvers to another planet. Colonize, start fresh. Unfortunately, erroneously, I’d only been thinking if things on this world got “really bad,” assuming there would still be a dangerous planet the Nine would certainly be able to battle their way off of again. I’d never considered that there might be a time this planet didn’t even exist. I knew the black holes were a serious problem but I hadn’t fully absorbed what the small tears in the fabric of our universe really signified and what they might do long term. I’d overlooked the ramifications of the Nine being reborn on Earth.
And if Earth was no longer…
“We’ve got to fix those fucking holes,” Lor growled.
I nodded vehement agreement.
“Your plan?” Barrons said.
“We conceal his existence,” Ryodan said. “We push him through the change. Get the best minds on the problem and fix it. Once it’s resolved, the tribunal can do whatever the bloody hell they want. Like give me a fucking medal and the free rein I deserve.”
“Jada,” Barrons said.
“And the kid because he gets physics, which, while no longer accurate, may help us understand what we’re dealing with. Mac. She’s got the bloody Book. Between her and the Highlander, we may just have more Fae lore than the Fae.”
But I can’t read it, I wanted to protest. What the hell good was it?
I shivered again, this time with a much deeper chill. I knew something with sudden, absolute certainty.
They were going to want me to.
“Fuck.” Lor was back to his one-word assessment of life, the universe, and everything.
Fuck, I agreed silently.
2
“Seasons don’t fear the Reaper…”
Inverness, Scotland, high above Loch Ness.
Christian had once believed he’d never set foot there again except in half-mad dreams.
Tonight was madness of another kind.
Tonight, beneath a slate and crimson sky, he would bury the man who’d died to save him.
The entire Keltar clan was gathered in the sprawling cemetery behind the ruined tower, near the tomb of the Green Lady, to return the remains of Dageus MacKeltar to the earth in a sacred druid ritual so his
soul would be released to live again. Reincarnation was the foundation of their faith.
The air was heavy and humid from a nearby storm. A few miles to the west, lightning cracked, briefly illuminating the rocky cliffs and grassy vales of his motherland. The Highlands were even more beautiful than he’d painstakingly re-created them in his mind, staked to the side of a cliff, dying over and over. While he’d hung there, the long killing season of ice had passed. Heather bloomed and leaves rustled on trees. Moss crushed softly beneath his boots as he shifted his weight to ease the pain in his groin. Parts of him were not yet healed. He’d been flayed too many times to regenerate properly; the bitch had scarcely let him grow new guts before taking them again.
“The body is prepared, my lord.”
Christopher and Drustan nodded while nearby, huddled in Gwen’s embrace, Chloe wept. Christian was amused to realize he, too, had nodded. Say “my lord” and every Keltar male in the room nodded, along with a few of the females. Theirs was a clan of all lairds, no serfs.
It seemed a century ago he’d walked these bens and valleys, exhilarated to be alive, riveted by his studies at university and his more private agenda in Dublin: keeping tabs on the unpredictable, dangerous owner of Barrons Books & Baubles while hunting an ancient Book of black magic. But that was before the Compact the Keltar had upheld since the dawn of time had been shattered, the walls between man and Fae had fallen, and he himself had become one of the Unseelie.
“Place the body on the pyre,” Drustan said.
Chloe’s weeping turned to quiet sobs at his words, then a wild guttural keening that flayed Christian’s gut as exquisitely as had the Crimson Hag’s lance. Dageus and Chloe had fought impossible odds to be together, only to end with Dageus’s pointless death on a cliff. Christian alone bore the blame. He didn’t know how Chloe could stand to look at him.
Come to think of it, she hadn’t. She’d not once focused on him since they brought him home. Her swollen, half-dead gaze had slid repeatedly past him. He wasn’t sure if that was because she hated him for causing her husband’s death or because he no longer looked remotely like the young human man she’d known, but the worst of the dark Fae. He knew he was disconcerting to look at. Although his mutation seemed to have become static, leaving him with long black hair, strangely muted tattoos, and, for fuck’s sake, wings—bloody damned wings, how the hell was a man supposed to live with those?—there was something about his eyes that even he could see. As if a chilling, starry infinity had settled there. No one held his gaze, no one looked at him for long, not even his own mother and father. His sister, Colleen, was the only one who’d spoken more than a few words to him since his return.