Still, I prefer frail toys to nothing. I’ve had an abundance of nothing.
Nothing is Hell. Nothing is where MacKayla is now.
It’s in breaking things that you understand them.
It’s in understanding them that you control them.
The Unseelie tremble before me.
As will the world.
CHRISTIAN MACKELTAR
Arlington Abbey. Despite my efforts, the fortress has fallen.
Although the deadly icefire no longer burns, I was unable to prevent the citadel’s destruction. The roof has collapsed and blackened timbers jut skyward, broken ribs of a once-great beast. Walls slump in graves of chalky ash and tumbled stone. The ancient sanctuary, built first on a shian, pagan temple, then church, is a ruin.
An inch of ice coats the lawn and the now cold bones of the abbey. Drawing moisture from the sky—Dublin has a veritable flood rain eternally waiting to fall, as if, on the day of creation, a vengeful god suspended an airborne ocean above the Emerald Isle—I’d shaped it with my wrath into a killing frost, and soared over the fortress, extinguishing the unnatural blue-black flames.
My efforts were not without price. I may be Fae but my back and shoulders burn from prolonged flight, and my gut spasms, somehow still flawed from my repeated disembowelment on a cliff.
Beneath the fallen bastion is a labyrinthine underground city that houses a prison containing Cruce. As he has not yet exploded from the bowels of the earth, it’s a fair guess the subterranean stronghold still stands. Perhaps the surviving sidhe-seers can go to ground. At least the wall of the abbey directly above Cruce’s prison no longer teeters dangerously near the black hole, threatening the voracious anomaly’s exponential growth. I collapsed that wall inward with an airborne kick; now it’s dust, a good distance from the event horizon.
Shouts split the air as the sidhe-seers cry out the names of their dead and summon aid for those still alive.
I fly over the abbey, a dark-winged shadow in a sky of forbidding thunderclouds, watching through narrowed eyes for movement on the battlefield. Those of Ryodan’s men who fought in human or beast form to save the abbey now patrol the perimeter of the estate’s great wall, prepared for the next attack. Though this assault has ended, another will come. The campaign to free Cruce has just begun.
I catch a shiver of stealthy movement in the corner of my eye. An Unseelie slithers beneath a mound of ice-covered, decapitated corpses. When it surges up into the path of a sidhe-seer seeking survivors, I drop like stone, slash and maim until it moves no more.
When the sidhe-seer is safe, I cease my midair attack and, wings beating hard against the wind that came wed to the ice I called, drive myself up into the sky. After several more sweeps over the grounds in which I spy nothing of concern, I land in the midst of the battlefield, angling my wings back and up, close to my body so I won’t have to spend hours scrubbing blood and guts from the infernal things before I sleep.
As I collect the corpse of a sidhe-seer who looks a mere child in death and may well have been, I stumble over an ice-covered, decapitated Unseelie, distracted by what remains of the many dead around me. Not their bodies. Something else. The dying leave a psychic imprint when they go; the body shits, the soul expels a ghastly fart of one’s strongest emotions, fears, and desires. Residue everywhere. I’m sticky with it. I feel their rage, hear screams no one else can, echoing in the air around me. I live with one foot in a world no one else can see.
Women shiver in the unnaturally cold, gusty air, clustered around a growing pile of their fallen sisters, watching me warily as I approach, stealing glances, looking hastily away. My faded jeans, hiking boots, and gray fisherman’s sweater only make me look a wolf stalking near, wearing half a sheepskin, covering none of the frightening parts. I see myself as they do: an enormous man with a distant, wintry gaze that calls a price if engaged, majestic black-velvet wings, frosted torque, and tattoos slithering like dark snakes beneath my skin as they always do when I’m aroused by lust—murderous or otherwise—cradling a young, fair-haired girl. Looking, no doubt, as if I’m the one that killed her. My face appears more feral in a mirror than it feels on my bones. We could not be more incongruous together, the corpse and I. Yet we fit together perfectly. The only girl I’ll ever take into my arms will either already be dead or soon end up that way.
One of the women stares too hard, meeting my gaze.
Her thoughts are clear but I’m not the one to defuse her battle-lust with aggressive sex behind abbey hedges. Bloody fool, I tell her with my eyes, staring back. Look away. Never look back.
Blood trickles from the corners of her eyes before she closes them and presses a hand to her temple.
I hope I gave her a headache. She’ll not lock eyes with me again.
My first name is Death. My last, Keltar. My middle: Celibate.
I move into the small crowd. Women inhale sharply and pull back, making a wide corridor for me. There are a few among them, however, including the one who stared, that dart furtive glances my way. Though Unseelie, I fought beside them, put out the fire, so they rewrite my myth in their minds, romanticizing, domesticating the transmogrified Highlander. I keep my gaze fixed on the corpse I carry, my movements rigid and aloof, damning them for considering for even one mad moment the idea of having sex with an Unseelie prince.
I understand it, though.
War is funny like that. Adrenaline begets a need for more adrenaline until we’re all junkies, until only when we’re in danger do we feel no pain, only when we’re locking jaws with Death do we feel alive. Battle-hardened soldiers understand how to save the imperiled day.
But we will never again understand how to live the normal ones.
I gently deposit the dead girl’s body on the pile. As I straighten from releasing my slight burden, I go motionless, sensing a newcomer. MacKayla Lane is near. I know her scent; it’s sunshine on skin, the nearly intangible whiff of chlorine from a summer pool, and something too muddy and complex to be named. She’s always smelled that way to me; the promise of a hot new girlfriend that might just be a nut job.
I push through the sidhe-seers, circle the frozen fountain, and head into the gloomy, dark morning, making for the south wing. The sky is so dense with thunderclouds, it’s little better than twilight on the grounds. Mac’s down somewhere beyond an iced, toppled pile of stones, although I can’t fathom why she remains alone when her sisters are here. Her allegiance was unquestionable tonight, to the abbey, to Dani, to the human race. She belongs with them. Unlike me.
Someone closes a hand on my shoulder from behind. I knock the hand off and whirl, wings lifting, rustling in warning. Around my neck, my torque writhes, flares with a cold blue-black light. No one touches me. I say who. I say when.
“Hey,” says the sidhe-seer who stared too long.
I give her a look. It says, Shut up and go away. And do it right now or die.
She arches a brow. “Would it kill you to say ‘hey’ back?”
Her voice is beautiful, husky with a knife-edge rasp and a sexy French accent. “Ah, a scintillating conversationalist,” I say sarcastically. “What will you dazzle me with next? A witty ‘What’s up?’ ”
“You made the ice that put out the fire,” she says.
I let my eyes fill with the strangeness of what I’ve become, silently daring her to look again, but she keeps her gaze fixed on my sternum. “I’m not a man for small talk. Say something that matters or leave.”
She stands her ground, unfazed by my efforts to drive her away. “I hear you’ve got a problem.”
“What would that be?” I’ll go see Mac, check on Dageus, then go home alone where I stay alone until there’s something for me to do that proves me more man than monster.
“When you have sex with a woman, she dies. Yet you need it like you need to breathe. I hear you won’t do it anymore because you don’t want to kill anyone. How’s that working out for you?”
What makes her think she can walk up to an
Unseelie prince and instigate a glib conversation about sex? Who knows I’m not having sex and talks about me to sidhe-seers? “Where did you hear that?”
“Colleen. Your sister worries about you.”
Her hands form casual fists at her waist. This one has a cocky swagger and a bit of a death wish. Bloody Colleen, dishing with her bloody friends about her bloody brother. She and I are going to have a talk. “And you think you can help me with that?”
“It’s no more complicated than anything else in life. It takes discipline and I know discipline. I cut my teeth on it.”
She looks like she did, lean and long, with a strut of a walk and the clear definition of a six-pack beneath her torn, bloodstained tank. Beneath a shredded jacket, half-empty ammo belts crisscross her chest. Unlike the others, if she feels the biting wind I called to this meadow, she doesn’t shiver.
An F2000 assault rifle rests on a frayed strap over her arm, blood-crusted knives are tucked into her waistband, her boots. Her right cheek is bruised and split, her knuckles are raw, and her lower lip is spattered with dried blood. She moves closer to me and leans in. I drop my head forward and breathe smoke and battle-sweat, blood and woman. I catch the hint of heather soap. Colleen says they make it the old way at the abbey. It reminds me of the Highlands, of Tara, of innocence offered and taken, and death.
“Kiss me,” she says, staring at my mouth. “You know you want to. I saw how you looked at me.”
My gaze rests on her blood-spattered lips. Lush, pink, her mouth is Eros crusted with Thanatos. I miss kissing. I need now, more than ever before, to release the storm of sexual and emotional energy inside me. “I want to do much more than that.”
“I won’t let you.” She shifts her weight, swinging her rifle behind her back. “Not yet.”
“You can’t stop me.” No one can. And there’s the rub. A kiss would lead to a fuck and it would be her last because I can’t control myself. I drain a woman of life in bed. It’s odd to stare into eyes that never meet yours. It’s enough to give a man a God-complex. Her pupils dilate, widen then narrow again, with a shimmer of banked fire. Not deterred—intrigued. This one likes dancing on a high wire.
She wets her lips, tastes the dried blood and scrubs it away with the back of her hand. It doesn’t work, just smears more blood on her face. “A single kiss. Then walk away. Discipline begins. You think I have nothing to teach you. You think no one does. I thought that once, too. Maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe you’re a coward. Try the kiss.”
Dark eyes meet mine in level challenge. The message is clear. She’ll stare at me until she bleeds again.
“You want to measure your power by the power of those with whom you play. It turns you on.” I sneer.
“Am I supposed to be turned on by mediocrity?”
“You’re supposed to be turned on by a human. Get your bloody kicks somewhere else.” Twin drops of crimson appear in the corners of her eyes. I pivot and turn away.
“Right. Go on then,” she flings at my back. “Sure, you’ll never fail—if you never try. Hell of a life, that. When you’re ready to put on your big-boy pants, you know where to find me.”
“My pants and what’s in them are already too big for you,” I say coolly. She wants to tempt me, lead me down a dark path that will end with me carrying the sin of yet another woman’s death on my conscience, all because she wants to play with the big, powerful, dangerous man. It’s not about me. It’s about her. She needs to pull her head out of her ass.
She laughs and walks off, confident, sexy, sure-footed on the slippery ice, like she expects me to turn and look. I know, because I turn and look, unwillingly appreciating the fluid, aggressive grace of her spine, the lean muscle of her legs, the curve of her ass.
Then I lope across the frost-covered grass to find Mac, in a foul mood. Once I’m turned on, I stay that way for a long time. Though pumped by a human heart, my blood runs Unseelie prince, twisted and unquenchable.
I slam a fist to my chest directly above that chambered beast and remind myself it was born Highlander and Highlander it will remain.
“Christian!” Mac’s voice is an urgent whisper.
I hurry to join her. We will face whatever our next battle is together.
MAC
It’s dark. I can’t breathe. I can’t see.
Blind, I exist in a void, a tightly compressed Mac-in-the-box, waiting for someone to crank my handle.
The body I don’t have tries frantically to gulp air.
Though I no longer have a mouth, somehow I scream and scream.
MacKayla’s memory is mine. Not all, but enough; those ways in which she interacted with the physical world.
I know where Barrons keeps his car keys and that the mirror in the study on the first floor of the bookstore is the booby-trapped passage to his underground lair. I know how to navigate it; I once helped her gain entry. I know exactly how she takes her coffee, applies her makeup, does her hair, the way she greets and speaks with her adopted mother, her false father. I understand every nuance of what to say and do to pass myself off as Barrons’s Rainbow Girl.
Her body memory is also mine. Driving a car presented no challenge. Navigating the icy terrain is different but not difficult. The cold, however, is unpleasant and makes me shiver. I share her distaste for inclement weather and snow.
I glide across the wintry, windy abbey grounds, moving more surely inside my flawed bag of muscle and bone with each step. I’d like to sink within, pry open Mac’s box and murder her after a splendid afternoon of tea and torture for taking this vessel so for granted that she abused, neglected, and risked it at every turn. The vessel that was meant to be mine from the moment I inhabited it. It’s not strong enough. She should have done better. Because of her frailties, I embark on life handicapped.
The first of my victims hurries toward me through the gloom, another broody conflicted fool that reviles the gift of power he was given. The power I would strip from him if I could.
“Christian.” I infuse my whisper with urgency.
When he appears from behind the rubble of charred, ice-dusted stone, I’m struck by the keen desire to possess his body. The undeserving prick’s vessel is superior to mine. Might I, like my former incarnation—the corporeal copy of the Sinsar Dubh that has since crumbled to dust on a slab—possess another’s skin via physical contact? Might I dump myself within and hold it? Might Christian be capable of containing the enormity that I am without rapidly deteriorating to the point of uselessness?
The body I have is certain yet flawed.
Christian’s is not flawed yet not certain.
MacKayla would call it the old bird-in-the-hand or bird-in-the-bush adage.
I giggle at the thought of MacKayla. She has neither birds nor bushes. She’s in Hell and I put her there. Through desire, lust, greed, and supremacy.
Christian looks at me strangely, wings rustling in the cold breeze. “Mac?”
“Nervous laugh. I always think I’ll get used to how you look.” He accepts the excuse, too consumed by self-loathing to be focused on the world. And why wouldn’t he die tonight? He believes the world populated by obvious monsters. The most dangerous of us are the least obvious. He relies on his skill as a lie detector, reading and judging the conflicting emotions of others.
Pity for him, I suffer none. Reading me is impossible. His scales can’t weigh the stuff of which I’m made.
“How is Dani—er, Jada? Is she all right?”
I left her alive. There are the unworthy who will die sooner, and the worthy audience/interesting prey who will die later. Existence without mirrors, without games, is an endless yawn. “She’ll be all right. Ow!” I say, clutching suddenly at an eye. “Ow,” I exclaim again.
“What’s wrong, Mac?”
“Dratted wind! I think a splinter of wood flew into my eye. Can you look?”
“It’s too bloody dark out here to see anything.”
Above us, clouds roll, crash together, and
the sudden booming is like knives in my ears. “Well, try. It feels like a blasted boulder. Christian, help me!” I tilt my head back and squint up at him, resisting the desire to clap my hands over my ears. He moves in, puts his hand on my face, and that’s when I strike.
I reach inside my jacket for my spear, my lovely, lovely spear that is my most prized and loathed possession, treasured because it will slay all those that must die so I may achieve my true destiny, despised because it could rot me from the inside with the tiniest of pricks, and yank it from my—
“Mac, hold still. I can’t do anything with you twisting and turning like that.”
I still beneath his touch, not because he proposed it, but because I’m rendered motionless by rage.
That bitch! That clever fucking bitch! She’s ruined everything! EVERYTHING!
I recall Jada’s hands on me before I was fully fused into my new skin, touching me everywhere, undoing my ankle restraints first. Had she not freed my feet before patting other places, I’d have paid more attention. She’d lulled me with deception. Tricked me! Thighs. Breasts. Side of my ribs. “Fuck!” I explode. She freed my hands last, once she’d taken what was not hers to take.
The one thing I require to achieve my aims.
“I know it hurts but you’ve got to hold still, Mac,” Christian snaps.
He has no idea how it hurts. She took advantage of that first moment in which I wasn’t fully cocked and loaded. It wasn’t fair. I’d just been born.
I’d been as certain of the spear’s presence on my body, its weight in the shoulder holster beneath my jacket, as I was loath to touch it while acclimating to my new skin, so I’d not reached for it until now.
Only to find a gun tucked inside—not my spear at all.
I allow the useless weapon to slip from my fingers and drop to the ground, close my eyes, and summon a spell. Mouth working soundlessly, I call forth one of my favorites.
“I can hardly get the damn thing out if you don’t—Mac, what the bloody hell are you—”