He studied me a moment then said carefully, “Assuming that’s true, it’s not only the Unseelie that would cease to exist but also anything the Sinsar Dubh created. The Book was made of imperfect song, containing only spells of imperfect song.”
I whispered, “Alina. You’re saying she’d be unmade, too.”
“Possibly everything turning Unseelie as well.”
My gaze flew to Christian.
“Bloody great,” Christian said irritably, “and the fuckage of Christian MacKeltar reaches a new all-time high.”
“But Christian isn’t made from imperfect song,” Jada disagreed. “He’s a human that began to turn Fae. I think it’s equally possible he would be turned back into a normal man.”
“That works for me,” Christian said darkly. “Although given the way my life has been going, I suspect it would be the former, not the latter.”
“It’s possible the song would destroy us as well,” Ryodan said. “Depending on precisely what constitutes imperfection and who the fuck is judging it.”
I stared at him. “Are you Fae in some way?”
“No.”
“They why would it affect you?”
“It could be argued we are…anathema to Nature,” he said cryptically.
“Great. So assuming the impossible happens, and I manage to sing the song, I’ll kill half the people I love.” I rubbed my eyes. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Cruce will never give me his half. He dies either way. He despises the Seelie. As far as he’s concerned they don’t deserve to exist. He’s hated the Light Court for his entire existence. If his choices are to die alone or die taking his enemies with him, it’s a no-brainer.”
“The king could sing it,” Christian said.
“Good luck finding the bastard,” I said darkly. “Even if we did, he wasn’t willing to sing it for his concubine. He’d never sing it to save the First Queen’s race. Face it, the two beings capable of saving us never will.” I frowned. “There is one possibility…” I trailed off, not liking it. But willing nonetheless.
“What?” Jada said.
“I could go back into the White Mansion and—”
“No,” Barrons said flatly.
“—take the Sinsar Dubh back into me—”
“No,” Barrons said again.
“—because it knows the True Names of all the Unseelie,” I pressed on. “I could summon Cruce and try to compel him.”
“First, by the time you got in there and back out,” Barrons growled, “a month or more will have passed. Second, you have no guarantee you could compel Cruce, even if you were able to summon him.”
“Do we have any other options?”
“How would you compel Cruce?” Barrons demanded. “What leverage do you have over a walking dead man?”
I scowled at him. None, and I knew it. The only leverage one can have with a walking dead man is the power to commute his death sentence, and I didn’t possess that.
“Don’t fixate on something that won’t work, Mac. That’s a fool’s game. If you have something you could use to force his hand, that’s one thing. But if you don’t, it’d be a pure waste of time. Got something?”
I shook my head, reluctantly. I wanted to do something, anything. But summoning Cruce without leverage would accomplish nothing. He’d simply refuse me and vanish again.
I sat up straight, eyes widening. Maybe I didn’t need to summon him by name. Maybe I could sift to him. “Hang on a sec,” I said, and focused on Cruce, willing myself to wherever he currently lurked. “Ow! Shit!” I exploded, clutching my head.
Barrons cocked a questioning brow.
“He’s got some kind of repelling ward between us. I can’t even get a lock on him. All I got was an instant headache.”
“Dageus,” Christian said suddenly.
“What?” I said. “Do you think he knows something that could help us?”
Ryodan said tersely, “Not a bloody thing. I’ve already questioned him.” Barrons cut him a long hard look and Ryodan snapped, “So what if I did? You fucks kept wandering off and the Highlander was the right material.”
I smiled faintly. So, Barrons had been right. Ryodan kept Dageus from dying because he’d wanted to expand his family.
“That’s not why I brought him up,” Christian said tightly. “I’m taking him home. Tonight.”
“The fuck you are,” Ryodan said instantly.
“The world is ending. He’ll no’ be spending his last days in a cage beneath your bloody club. He’s got himself under control. Mostly. As much as I do, for fuck’s sake. He has the right to leave this world and colonize a new one with his clan. With his wife. He has a family.”
I winced inwardly. Christian had no idea what fate awaited Dageus if we failed to save our world. But then again, no one seemed to have clued in about my fate either, and I wasn’t about to bring it up. I was the Seelie Queen now. Even if I went off world, the moment the Earth died and all Fae ceased to exist, I would, too. Not that I had any intention of leaving Barrons’s side to begin with. But the way I saw it, I was going to die whether I stayed or went, and I sure as hell wasn’t dying without him, not to mention in front of my parents, for heaven’s sake.
Barrons’s gaze whipped to mine and his eyes glittered with crimson sparks.
You did not just hear that, I said with narrowed gaze.
Your emotion was so palpable, I suspect even Ryodan heard you. You will transfer the queen’s power to another Fae and leave this world if all appears to be lost. You will not die here. Or there. Or anywhere.
We’ll discuss this later.
His nostrils flared and he ducked his head, looking up at me from beneath his brows, like a bull preparing to charge, in that familiar constant jackass way that told me I was in for a long, heated battle later. I arched a brow at him. Fine with me. We always had long heated makeups afterward, too.
Ryodan and Barrons exchanged a look, then Barrons said to Christian, “You may take him home.”
Ryodan snapped, “That’s not what I just said.”
“I don’t care. I said he could,” Barrons said softly. “And you and I will do battle over this one. If there was ever a time for a man to be with his clan, it’s now.” To Christian, he said, “Get the hell out of here.”
Christian vanished.
MAC
When people have absolutely no control over the things that really matter to them, they tend to do one of three things: devolve into animals and prey on others, indulging their base instincts (wolves); huddle in herds for comfort and safety from the chaos (sheep); or invoke a rigid daily routine, effecting control over those few things they can while endeavoring to change what seems an inevitable fate (sheepdogs).
Over the next few weeks our world split neatly into those camps. There were more killings of armed guards and mass suicides at the black holes, making still more work for those of us that fell into the sheepdog category. Violent crimes escalated: rapes, murders, thefts, vandalism. People ripped out recently planted trees and drove utility vehicles through flower beds in public commons in a kind of “Well, if I’m going, by God, I’m taking the world with me” attitude that was beyond my ability to comprehend. I share my mother’s mentality about some things—I’d have planted new flowers right up to the moment of extinction. Barrons says that’s because some people can’t stop creating, even lacking both audience and canvas. They create because they must, not for the world but themselves.
Fortunately, the sheep were up to the challenge of tackling a new, more orderly world and went through the Silvers by the hundreds of thousands to one of seven suitable worlds. They came from all over the globe, drawn by word there was a way off planet. Christian had been sifting to various surrounding countries, alerting people to what was happening in Dublin and telling them to get there as quickly as they could, then sifting out farther and bringing people back with him. The last time I’d seen him, he was stumbling, nearly incoherent, from repeatedly sifting with passengers in tow. The N
ine, meanwhile, divided their time between excavating the black holes to keep them from touching the earth, and forming troops of colonies with governing bodies and supplies, and escorting them through.
The “sheep,” as I call them, are the backbone of society, and as some of them stepped up to the portals, they shook off their stupor and got downright excited, alive and alert, and I realized sheep could morph into sheepdogs, under the right circumstances.
As I watched them entering the Silvers via portals Ryodan and Barrons established with stacked mirrors, I felt enormous hope for our race. This world was dying. But seven more were being born. The sky was the limit for the future of our children out there among the stars.
The joy I felt at the possibilities for mankind, however, was brutally overshadowed by the fact that if (and it was looking more like “when”) the Earth died, so many of us would, too. Not just those in my inner circle, but billions that simply wouldn’t make it here in time. We had the weight of the world on our shoulders, literally.
On a personal level, it was a complete and total clusterfuck. If, by some miracle, I were able to sing the Song of Making and heal the world, it would unmake everything made by imperfect song: all the Unseelie, Alina, and possibly Christian, Barrons, the Nine, and Dageus would die.
If I failed to sing it and the world ended, destroying the seat of the Fae race’s power, all Fae, Seelie and Unseelie, Barrons, and the rest of the Nine would definitely die, as well as potentially Christian and the other hybrids among us. I would also die. But Alina would live. At least my parents would get to keep one daughter. So long as I didn’t sing it, Alina would enjoy a natural life span. She wasn’t Fae, she was a human resurrected by imperfect song.
You might think I’d spent all my time exhaustively searching my inner files. I did. For exactly two days.
Then Barrons and Ryodan pointed out the unarguable fact that if the queen had possessed the song, she would have used it and not doomed their race by binding their power to the Earth. If she’d possessed any useful clues, she would have pursued them. There was nothing in my files that could save our world and I was of greater use meeting with Dancer, sharing every note of otherworldly music I’d ever heard inside my head, trying to finish the second half of the song. We worked day and night on it.
To no avail.
According to Dancer, what we were trying to do was impossible, and he didn’t use that word lightly. We had no parameters. No idea if the second half was shorter, as long, or longer than the first. No clue if entirely new motifs developed in it. Art, he said, which song is, is a purely subjective thing, not a mathematical formula. It’s up to the artist, and no one else’s vision can ever be identical.
Eventually, I had no more music to share, so I matched Christian sift for sift, racing to get as many people through the portals and off this planet as we could.
Our situation grew more perilous with each passing day.
There were two holes we could no longer even excavate: the one near Chester’s, and the one near the church. Their ergospheres had become so powerfully distorting that no one could get within twenty paces without being sucked in. We’d tried tunneling up from beneath the street, working from within the underground caverns and tunnels carved long ago by the River Liffey, but the moment we began to break through, the ergosphere inhaled everything we’d loosed and grew exponentially, forcing us to concede defeat.
Ryodan tried to send my parents through to another world with the first wave of colonists, but they refused to leave until the last minute.
Then came even worse news: along with the decline of our planet, the True Magic was declining, too. Using it became perilously inaccurate and we could no longer sift to gather humans to save. At times the power inside me was a radioactive radiance, at other times it ebbed to a faint glow. I’d tried repeatedly to return to the planet where I passed my initiation to ask the vast sentience questions, but I wasn’t able to complete the journey there.
Barrons suspected we had a week left, at most. Then one of the two black holes would touch the Earth, and when it did, we would find out the hard way what was going to happen.
When you only have one week to live, the pressing question becomes: how do you want to live it?
JADA
I slow-mo-Joed into Chester’s after parking my bike out front. The place was dark, the chairs were up on the tables, and it was so silent I could hear the faint hum of the geothermal power that fueled Ryodan’s demesne.
“Closing Time” started playing in my head. I’d always loved that song. I watched a couple of Semisonic concerts on TV when I was a kid and by then the families on the different series I’d binged on started to feel like my family. You took it where you could find it. So I’d watched them growing up, going to clubs, and having dates, and thinking about how it was going to be when I finally got let out into the world. School, dates, prom, those ideas had all seemed so exotic and out of the ordinary, mysterious, and thrilling to me. I’d wondered if I would ever be like normal people. Sometimes it seemed I felt so much more, yet in other places had voids where feelings should be.
I glanced at the dance floor and smiled faintly, remembering dancing with Lor, wearing a red dress. How Ryodan had looked at me. People on many of the worlds had found me attractive but his eyes said: Beautiful by any standards, in any century, on any world, woman.
He’d seemed so much larger than life when I was a kid, and even now I still felt young around him. But I also often felt he might be the only person who ever really understood me.
Dancer—who I’d been spending the last few weeks with, working on the song, going for insanely fast motorcycle rides, freeze-framing him around town—saw me through a filter. He polished me up where I had no shine. I loved that about him.
Ryodan’s cool, clear eyes had no filters where I was concerned. I didn’t need any with him.
I’d had no intention of stopping at Chester’s today, but each time I’d blown past the club in the past few weeks, on my way back from the abbey, I felt such an irresistible urge to park my bike and walk inside, I’d finally realized he’d put some kind of spell on me again.
He could do that. So, today when I felt it, I decided to call him on it. Tell him to quit using his black arts on me and leave me alone. No more Dani-come-hither spells. I was surprised he hadn’t hunted me down like he used to, except I’d been sleeping at Dancer’s every night.
Not that kind of sleeping. Each night, when we buttoned up the day and returned to his penthouse, I’d gone cautiously further with him, absorbing each new sensation. Dancer gave me no pressure, easing off whenever I wanted to, happy for the intimacy we shared. These past few weeks had been exotic for me, filled with deep, easy friendship, more hugs, kisses, and physical affection than I’d ever known, and a sense of belonging. All that affection was messing with my head. Changing me.
The nights had been incredible, stretched out next to my best friend who turned me on with his quiet genius and long, lean body. We did everything, made out like the world was ending (which it was) and ground against each other with red-hot desire and young, hungry bodies. But each time his hand slid down to unbutton my jeans, I caught and held it, started a conversation, talked to him about anything and everything until he finally fell asleep. As long as my jeans stayed on I felt safe.
Then I’d lie awake next to him, listening to him breathing, staring at the ceiling, wondering what was holding me back.
I wanted Dancer to be my first. And I wanted to get rid of whatever was stopping me.
I trusted him. He made no demands. Never asked where I was going or when I’d be back. He had his own life and interests and they wholly engrossed him, and we went our separate ways and had separate adventures but came back together and shared our new parts, then had more adventures together. Being with him was as easy and natural as breathing. And we were learning so much from each other!
From the day I found him, I’d considered Dancer mine. That was why I’d been s
o shocked to discover he’d had his own world all along that hadn’t included me, with friends and girls who crushed on him hard.
I loved him. I hadn’t wanted to, but I did, and it was too late to change because once my heart went somewhere, I couldn’t pull it back. It’s a glitch in my wiring.
I’d decided Ryodan was somehow keeping me from going all the way with Dancer. Didn’t want me losing my virginity to somebody that might die. Not that Ryodan knew I was a virgin. But it would be a totally Machiavellian thing to do: a kind of “Don’t let Dani care too much about Dancer because when he dies, it might screw her head up, and she won’t be nearly as productive.”
I was so irritated by the time I got to his office, thinking about how he was messing up my life—again—that I blasted inside in full freeze-frame, and my vibrations at twenty-something are far more impressive than they were at fourteen. I no longer merely ruffle papers and hair; at high velocity I can shake the glass in walls.
His entire office rattled and shuddered as I stood there, peering at him from the slipstream. Then he was up in it with me, standing close.
“What?” he demanded.
“What do you mean, ‘What?’ ” I growled.
“You only blast in here like this when you’ve gotten yourself worked into a tizzy about something. Get it out and over with. I have things to do.”
“Like paperwork? As if you were ever actually doing that. Is your tattoo screwing me up, or is it something else you’ve done?” I got right to the point.
“Screwing you up how?”
“Every blasted time I pass your club, your little compulsion spell tries to suck me inside. Get it off me.” He dropped down instantly and I followed him into slow-mo then stabbed him in the chest with a finger. “If you want to talk to me about something, text me. Don’t use magic on me. I’ve had enough of that kind of manipulation in my life.”