“Epic?” I said helpfully.
He laughed. “In every possible way. I dreamed about this. Prayed that I’d live long enough and you’d live long enough that you’d grow up and see me as a man. You’re the most fearless, brilliant, incredible woman I’ve ever met. What did I do to deserve you? Are you sure you want me to be your first?” he said, like he couldn’t believe it. “Mega, I’m just a guy and you’re…well, you’re everything.”
His beautiful eyes were so honest and earnest, it melted me. I took his hand and drew it to my body, put his palm against my stomach and slid it up to my breast, shivering when he grazed my nipple with his thumb. “You’re not just anything, and never could be, and you did everything to deserve me. You listen to me and let me breathe and talk and teach me things. You’re brilliant. And you’re kind and good and constant. And you’re epic, too. Yes, I’m definitely absolutely one hundred percent certain I want you to be my first. There’s no one else, Dancer. It’s you.”
Just like that, I banished Ryodan’s ghost from between us.
He inhaled sharply, then his hands were moving on my skin, sliding to cup my breasts gently, then hungrily, and for the first time since I’d met him, he looked at me and did nothing to disguise the lust and desire he felt for me, and I gasped. It was staggering. He wanted me so much! I loved seeing that in his eyes! I felt everything his hands were doing as intensely as I feel all my emotions, like the cells in his body were sinking into the cells of my body, touching me all the way to the place where my soul used to be.
It wasn’t like in movies where everything goes flawlessly and the lighting is all fuzzy soft focus and the music is just right.
That’s illusion. Reality is two people who care deeply about each other, getting to know each other as intimately as possible, and it’s full of sounds and awkward movements and occasional strained laughter. It took us a bit to get past the shaky, nervous part, but when we did, we found that our bodies moved together as easily, hungrily, and passionately as our minds.
When I used to daydream about losing my virginity, I always thought I’d put on a show when I had sex for the first time, be the femme fatale, dazzling, wild, and most definitely on top. I’d rock his world and not think about mine. I’d impress because that’s what I do, I impress because I’m never sure people will like me otherwise.
None of that mattered with Dancer.
He was already impressed with me and I got to be just who I was, and it was slow and easy and beautiful. And it was clumsy at times and so damned personal and vulnerable and he slid his long length over my body and rocked himself into me gently and with exquisite care, cradling my head, staring into my eyes the entire time.
And when we found our rhythm and he moved inside me, I started to cry and couldn’t stop.
Not sloppy.
Just silent tears rolling down my cheeks.
I stared up at him and he looked down and he started to cry, too, and without saying a word, we both understood why the other was crying.
No matter how much time we had with each other, it would be too short, because he could die or I could die, or we could both live a century and it still wouldn’t be long enough. He was just good, and with him, so was I, and life lost all its sharp, dangerous edges when we were together.
I cried because I’d never felt so much emotion in my life. I cried for my mom, who never once felt safe and maybe never knew this kind of moment. She knew the other kind, the ones that demean and leave you emptier than you began. I cried for everything I’d lost. I cried for his heart and the world. I touched the tears glittering in his long dark eyelashes, caught and kissed them then kissed him with the salty tang of both our tears on our tongues.
Then neither of us was crying but our eyes were locked, wide with wonder, as he moved faster and deeper and my body trembled around him and my orgasm made a kaleidoscope inside my skull. I didn’t just come with my body, the explosion of so much sensation did something to my head, too. As if it was injecting an incredible chemical into my brain and suddenly I was no longer shorted out and I started to vibrate and we both looked at each other, startled, then he started to growl and I realized what my vibrating was doing to him and I started to laugh and so did he, but he was growling and gasping, too, and he shook on top of me and threw his head back and groaned and sort of roared and it was the best sound I’ve ever heard—Dancer, free and happy and totally alive.
I held him afterward, cradling his head to my chest, smiling because I had some really cool tricks I could do and I couldn’t wait to explore all of them with him.
I drifted a bit then and so did he, and as I was floating in that dreamy place he said softly against my ear, “I see you, Yi-yi.”
“I see you, too, Dancer.”
We killed the clocks that night.
It stretched impossibly long, as if, just for us, time stood still. We made love over and over, trying anything and everything during those long hours of him kissing me all over, touching me with just the right amount of reverence and lust, and some part of me was reborn. Something I hadn’t even understood had died a long, long time ago. It was young and new and would need nurturing but it was there.
Deep in my core, that nameless thing found a way to be, shifted and settled into place like a bone wrenched from its socket long ago. I had no idea what it was but I’d figure it out eventually.
No thinking tonight. Just feeling. While my long-held suspicion about brainy men was proved true. Dancer had the inventive imagination of a geek, zero inhibitions, and the lusty hunger of a man that lived each day with full awareness of his own mortality.
Brainy is the new sexy.
When I woke to the mid-morning sun slanting in the windows across our bed, his breathing was rough and labored and he was gasping in his sleep.
This was what he’d never let me see.
The bad times.
These were the days he’d overtaxed his heart, gone into hiding from me so I would never know that he thought he wasn’t man enough for me.
I’d never once asked where he’d gone or why, telling myself friends didn’t ask questions because they required answers and requirements were cages. Told myself he’d just wanted time alone. Like me.
But now I knew all those days I’d been freeze-framing around the city, burning off my boundless energy and steam, he’d been lying in a bed somewhere, trying to gather enough strength just to get back out of it. Alone or with those friends he’d permitted to know about his problem and see him that way. Perhaps Caoimhe had been with him, bringing him food, making sure he survived.
I drew reassurance from those times, because it meant it had been happening for a while. And that meant it could continue to happen. And maybe he would live a whole life this way and I could deal with that. But I sure wasn’t going to be having sex with him five times in a single night anymore. We were going to have to pace ourselves. And maybe I shouldn’t vibrate either.
I placed my palms gently against his chest and tried to will some of my strength into him. I closed my eyes and imagined beams of light bathing his heart in healing.
But the power to heal isn’t one of my super strengths, and he woke up, sat up, and leaned back against the headboard. We sat together and held hands and waited for him to feel better.
I wanted to ask him if there was medicine he could take. I wanted to know if there was some kind of surgery that could be done, assuming we could find a heart surgeon.
I said none of those things because Dancer was brilliant and he loved being alive and if there had been anything he could have done, he would have by now.
The only gift I could give him was the one that wouldn’t make me feel better but would make him feel okay.
So, I pretended it was nothing, and we didn’t talk about the elephant in the room as it tossed its mighty head and swung its trunk, threatening to break all fragile things in its way, and I cleaned last night’s pizza off the floor and cabinets while he made us powdered eggs with dried
salmon and cream cheese on toast.
Then we headed out into the city, holding hands, young and in love, eager to see what the day might bring.
ZARA
The man who called himself Rain found her a house with a large walled garden on the outskirts of Dublin, and she spent her days outside, whether rain or shine, weeding and spreading seeds he’d brought her for the animals, talking to her T’murra but not to him at all.
She had no idea why he was taking care of her, unless he found her beautiful and helpless and, like so many men, liked beautiful, helpless women, far more than they liked strong queens.
Were she mortal, perhaps she’d have spent a life with him because, for the most part, he left her alone.
Sometimes she’d catch him watching her when he thought she was lost in a reverie. Sometimes she thought she saw sadness in his eyes, but attributed that to an odd trick of shadow and light.
He seemed to be waiting for something. She didn’t know what, and frankly, didn’t care.
She was waiting to die.
She could no longer feel the earth except in a far dimmer, more muted version than Zara once had. Diluted by her Fae essence, cut off from the True Magic, she had only a shallow connection to the world around her, yet she forged on, by rote performing those actions that had once given her joy.
She was grateful the earth was dying and would soon take her, because living in such fashion wasn’t living at all. As queen of the Fae, power, care for her race, and immortality had been her compensation. As a powerless immortal that couldn’t experience sensation, there was no benefit.
If he’d wanted to make love to her, she would have done it. If he’d wanted her to sleep or eat or dance, she would have done it. It didn’t matter what she did or didn’t do anymore.
When, one day, he took her hand and said he wanted to take her somewhere, she went because there was no difference between staying and going.
Life was long and blank and tiring.
MAC
I’ve watched night fall many different ways since I came to Dublin.
When I first arrived, it often snuck up on me, subtly turning a darker shade of slate and fog, leaving no clear line of demarcation between afternoon and night.
For a girl from hot, sunny southern Georgia, it had been beyond depressing. Impossible to say “Oh, wasn’t that a nice sunset?” when you hardly ever saw the damn thing. The sky simply occupied itself all day muddying and glooming, rolling with thick thunderclouds, and the next thing you knew it was night, as if there’d been much bloody difference.
Other times it had come slamming down so hard it frightened me, one instant the sky blue agate, the next I was virtually blind, navigating Shades in alleys of pitch and monsters with the lights of my MacHalo blazing.
And yet other times, once the Fae were fully established in our world, night had fallen in infinitesimal degrees with breathtaking beauty; splashing a dazzling rainbow across the horizon for a half hour or more, painting a fat crimson halo to stain the moon, as kaleidoscopic hues of Faery kissed everything from the neon signs shimmering on wet pavement to the amber gas lamps, coloring Dublin exquisite shades of pink, purple, orange, and gold never before seen by humans.
Tonight, as I made my way back to BB&B from dinner with my family, the sky treated me to one of those slow, extraordinary sunsets, and with the True Magic binding me to the Earth, it touched my soul so deeply, I stopped and stood in the street, staring up at the sky, and cried. I stood there with tears rolling down my cheeks for a good half hour, watching night descend.
Our world was sick, so diseased.
And so damned beautiful.
And there was nothing I could do to save it. I’d come so far, defeated the Sinsar Dubh not once, but twice, by quirk of happenstance become the Fae queen’s successor, solved the riddle of the music box, and acquired half of the legendary song. But it was like having half a car, or half a gun or half a child.
Useless.
The prophecy hadn’t been quite right. I wasn’t going to destroy the world.
I was going to fail to save it.
Dublin was a ghost town. We’d been sending people off world as soon as they arrived, and as the city had emptied, the Fae, too, began to disappear. With humans vanishing, they’d had no reason to remain in our town and repaired to Faery.
Now they huddled, panicked, trapped at court, no more able to sift back out than I could sift in. I could feel them, this race I was supposed to save, their shallow fear and unrest. Their impatience and mistrust as they waited for their new queen to move their seat of power from a dying world, unaware it was impossible.
I’d not told them. Apparently Cruce hadn’t either. Only the prior queen had known their fate was irrevocably bound to the planet. Cruce’s silence on that score was a blessing for which I was grateful. If he’d been feeling vengeful (and God knows, he’d looked vengeful when I’d last seen him), he could have told both Courts the truth and led them to war against us, spitefully wiping out as much of the human race as he could, preventing us from escaping off world.
But he hadn’t. He’d vanished and we’d not heard a peep nor seen a sign of him since.
What power Cruce had! He held the fate of an entire race and a planet in his hands. Bitter over the queen’s choice of me as successor, harboring no love for humans and even less for Seelie, what was he doing now?
No doubt hunting for a way to cheat death, seeking some object of power or loophole.
I sighed. If dying would save the Unseelie, I believed Cruce might actually do it. But save the Seelie? What did he care if they died, along with so many humans we couldn’t get off world in time?
Like Cruce and the Seelie, the Unseelie, too, had vanished. I had no idea if he’d taken them off somewhere or they’d decided to flee our dying world while they could still sift, lumber, slither, or crawl into the Silvers.
My parents had finally agreed to leave and go off world tomorrow night but only because I’d promised to join them in two days.
That was never going to happen. Barrons could handle me dying in front of him. I would never do that to my parents. Parents should never have to watch their children die.
I couldn’t shake the feeling there was still something I could do.
But what?
Even the sidhe-seers had given up searching through the old lore, and had either already gone off world or were spending their last days with people they loved, enjoying time on our planet until they were forced off.
I had half a song, Cruce had the other half. And never the twain would meet.
“Ms. Lane.” A man fell into step beside me as I walked slowly toward the brilliant lights of BB&B. Busy admiring my last days of looking at my store, my home, I absently murmured, “Jayne.” Then, “Inspector Jayne!” I whirled in the street to gape at him. If I’d seen him before I’d heard his voice, I wouldn’t have recognized him.
Now I knew why Dani had given me a funny look when Enyo had told us Jayne was dead or missing in action, but she’d never gotten around to telling me he’d turned Seelie prince. “Everyone believes you’re dead or MIA,” I exclaimed.
He smiled faintly. “I left before the transformation became too obvious. They’d not have followed me. I’d trained them to kill the Fae.”
Now he was as Fae as me. The tall, robust Liam Neeson look-alike had become a muscled, younger version of himself with the characteristic Fae long tawny hair, iridescent eyes, and a degree of smoldering sensuality that was disturbing. Like all Fae, he was beautiful.
“The wife’s not complaining,” he said with a soft snort.
“I’m sure she’s not,” I murmured.
“Says it’s like the old days, when we first met. My wee ones think it’s the finest sort of thing. Though I’ve lost the ability to sift. You?”
“A few days back was the last time it worked.”
“We’re dying, aren’t we? Not just the world but you and I.”
I nodded and told him what
I hadn’t told most people, cautioning him if he hadn’t already moved his family off world, he needed to see to their safety. Say his goodbyes because even if he left, he wouldn’t survive and his children might end up watching him die.
“Do you know what will happen? Will we simply blip out of existence? Or will we actually die somehow?”
“I have no idea.” I’d wondered that myself.
“I remember the day you fed me your tea and sandwiches. You opened my eyes, showed me what was happening. And you just opened my eyes again. I thank you for that. I’d have died last year, blundered into some alley, probably lost my family, too. I’ll send them through when I must. How long do we have?”
“There’s no telling. A week at best before…” I trailed off, trying to think of a way to explain what I sensed. Not that a black hole was going to touch the Earth but that the distortion they were causing was going to do something wholly new and catastrophic beyond belief. “I’d send them tomorrow night. That’s when my parents are leaving.”
He nodded. “So, you’re the Fae queen now.”
“And you’re a Seelie prince.”
“What the fuck,” he said softly.
“Probably all the Unseelie we ate.”
“No,” he said, tipping his head back and staring up at the stars, “I mean, how can this world be so bloody beautiful and just end? How can we let it?”
I’d admired this man even though he’d driven me batshit crazy at times. He had a good heart. I admired him even more now. Though he was going to die, at the end his sorrow wasn’t for himself but for this incredible planet of ours, this wonderful, magnificent ball spinning in space filled with deserts and mountains, valleys and plains, rivers and caves, glaciers and oceans, animals of every kind that we couldn’t get off world. So many rare and precious species would be extinct in a matter of days.
He looked back down at me and tears glinted in his glowing, quixotic eyes. “How can we lose the Earth, Mac? Is there nothing we can do?”