Cruce? V’lane was Cruce?
I glanced around the cavern. Everyone looked as stupefied as I felt, staring between V’lane and the dreamy-eyed guy.
When I’d stood at Darroc’s side, watching the Seelie and Unseelie armies face off in a snowy Dublin street, I’d been awed by the mythic proportions of the event.
Now, according to the dreamy-eyed guy who was really the Unseelie King, the Seelie who’d been masquerading as V’lane for hundreds of thousands of years was really the legendary Cruce, aka War—the final and most perfect Unseelie ever sung into existence.
And he was facing off with his maker.
Cruce was staring down the Unseelie King.
It was the stuff of million-year-old legends. I looked from one to the other. You could have heard a pin drop in the cavern.
I glanced at Barrons, who had both brows raised in an expression of complete shock. For a change, there was something he hadn’t known, either. Then his eyes narrowed on the dreamy-eyed guy.
“He’s the king? That frail old geezer?”
“Geezer? You mean the pretty French woman,” Jo said. “She’s a waitress at Chester’s.”
“French woman? It’s the Morgan Freeman lookalike from the bar on the seventh level at Chester’s,” Christian said.
“No,” Dageus said, “ ’tis the ex-groundskeeper from Edinburgh castle who took on a bussing job at Ryodan’s pub when the walls fell.”
And I saw a young, dreamy-eyed college guy. He winked at me again. We all saw something different when we looked at him.
I stared back at V’lane … er, Cruce.
How had I not known? How had I been so completely duped? It had never been a Seelie Prince facing an Unseelie Prince that night in the snowy Dublin street but two Unseelie Princes. If War’s brother had recognized him, he’d never given it away.
V’lane was Cruce.
V’lane was War.
I’d walked hand in hand with him on a beach. I’d kissed him. More times than I could count. I’d had his name in my tongue. I’d trembled with orgasm after orgasm in his arms. He’d given me Ashford back. Had he taken it to begin with?
War. Of course. He’d turned my world on itself. He’d set armies against each other and sat back watching the chaos he’d created. He’d even gotten out in it and fought with us. No doubt laughing inside, enjoying the added chaos, being in the thick of the fight, watching his handiwork up close and personal.
Was he behind it all? Had he been nudging Darroc for millennia, priming him to defy the queen? And when Darroc was made mortal, had Cruce whispered in a few Unseelie ears, maybe planted key information, and helped him bring down the walls from far behind the scenes? Had he been watching, waiting for the day he might get close enough to the Sinsar Dubh to steal the king’s knowledge and kill the current queen and take her magic?
Did Fae really possess such patience?
He’d killed all the princesses and secreted the queen away to kill at the right time.
He’d turned the Seelie and Unseelie courts against each other, using our world as their battlefield.
We were all pawns on his chessboard.
I had no doubt he was after the ultimate power. The nerve of him, the arrogance—he was the one who’d told me it could be done and how! He was the one who’d recounted the legend to begin with. Unable to resist bragging? When I’d asked him about Cruce, he’d gotten irritated, saying: One day you will wish to talk of me. He’d been jealous of himself, angry that he couldn’t reveal his true majesty. He’d said, Cruce was the most beautiful of all, although the world will never know it—a waste of perfection to never have laid eyes upon one such as he. How it must have chafed him to have to hide his true face for so long.
I’d tanned in a silk chaise, lying next to him. I’d dipped my toes in the surf, holding hands with War. I’d admired an Unseelie Prince’s naked body. Wondered what it would be like to have sex with him. I’d conspired with the enemy and never even guessed it. All the while he’d been touching and adjusting things, nudging us this way and that.
And it had worked.
He’d gotten exactly what he’d wanted. Here he was: standing over the king’s Book, absorbing the deadly knowledge, with the unconscious queen lying at his feet so he could kill her and take the True Magic of their race, too. He’d put her on ice in the Unseelie prison to keep her under control and alive until he was certain he was the most powerful male among them all. The king had given up his dark knowledge. Once Cruce had it, would he really be stronger than the king?
I watched the spells scribed in the Sinsar Dubh slide off the page, move up his fingers into his hands, arms, shoulders, and vanish beneath his skin. He was almost done. Why wasn’t the king stopping him?
“Begun. Can’t be stopped. Think I’d leave part of the Book in two places when they couldn’t even guard one?” the king said.
Barrons and the rest of the men were back to slamming the walls, trying to tear them down to get to Cruce.
But it was too late. He had only a few pages left to go.
I stood, shivering, looking between the king and Cruce, hoping the king knew what he was doing.
Cruce turned the last page.
As the final spell vanished, the Book collapsed into a thin pile of gold dust and a handful of winking red gemstones on the slab.
The Sinsar Dubh had finally been destroyed.
Too bad it now lived and breathed inside the most powerful Unseelie Prince ever created.
The transition was seamless.
One moment I was in the cavern with everyone else. The next I was standing on a giant grassy swell of a hill with Cruce and the king.
An enormous moon obliterated the horizon. Welling up from behind the planet, it blocked out the night sky entirely but for a smattering of stars against a cobalt palette above it.
The rounded pasture climbed gently for miles, vanishing into the moon and making it seem like, if I walked to the top of the ridge, I might hop the pine-board fence and bridge planet to moon with a single leap. The air hummed with a low-level charge, and in the distance, thunder rolled. Black megaliths jutted like the fingers of a fallen giant poking into the cool, unblinking eye of the moon.
We stood between towering stones—Cruce facing the king, me at midpoint between them.
The queen was slumped at Cruce’s feet.
I backed out and away for a wider view. I wondered who’d brought us here and left all the others behind. Cruce or the king? Why?
Wind whipped my hair into a tangle. The breeze was rich with spice and the fragrance of night-blooming jasmine. Hunters glided past the moon, gonging deep in their chests, and the moon answered.
I had no idea what world I was on, what galaxy I was in, but some part of me—my inner king—knew this place. We’d chosen the hill of Tara for the resemblance, but Tara was a pale imitation. On Earth, the moon was never so near as it was here, and there was only one, not three, in the night sky. Power pulsed in this planet’s rocky core and mineral veins, earth’s magic had been bored to death by humans long ago.
“Why the three of us?” I said.
“Children,” the king replied.
I didn’t like what his answer seemed to imply. War was so not my brother.
“MacKayla,” Cruce said softly.
I gave him a cool look. “Did you think it was funny? You lied to me over and over. You used me.”
“I wanted you to accept me as I was, but—how is it you say?—my reputation preceded me. Others filled your head with lies about Cruce. I endeavored to correct them, open your eyes.”
“By telling me more lies? V’lane didn’t kill Cruce the day the king and queen fought. You switched places with V’lane.”
“With the three amulets the king never believed good enough, I deceived them all. Together they are strong.” He touched his neck, a smug glint in his eyes, and although I couldn’t see them, I knew he wore them still. He’d used them to maintain his flawless glamour of Seelie Prince. I’d seen it flicker only a few times, when he’d been near the abbey’s wards.
“That day I called you to help me defeat the guardian in the abbey, the day you hissed and vanished—”
“It was a truth ward made of blood and bone. It sensed me as Unseelie. Had I stayed, I would have been unable to maintain the glamour. But you could not pass it, either. Why is that?”
I didn’t answer. “The queen killed V’lane with her sword, and never even knew it. You’ve been impersonating him ever since.”
“He was a fool. After I had my audience with the queen, it was V’lane she dispatched to confine me in her bower. I took his face and gave him mine. He was not half the Fae I am. He knew nothing of true illusion, could not have created an amulet capable of such if he’d lived a million years. Then I took him to her to kill. He was pathetic. Pleaded his innocence. Whimpered at the end and made a mockery of my name. The other Unseelie Princes tried their hand at a curse and blamed that on me, as well.”
“You hid among the Seelie all this time.”
“Never drinking from the cauldron. Watching. Waiting for the perfect convergence of events. The Book was missing for an eternity. The old fool hid it. Twenty-three years ago I felt it and knew the time was right. But enough about me. What are you, MacKayla?”
“You set Darroc up.”
“I encouraged where encouragement was useful.”
“You want to be king,” I said.
Cruce’s iridescent eyes flashed. “Why would I not? Someone needs to take over. He turned his back on his children. We were an accident of creation he sought to contain and hide. He fears power? I do not. He refuses to lead our people? I will champion them as he never did.”
“And when they weary of your rule?” the king said. “When you realize you can never please them?”
“I will make them happy. They will love me.”
“So all gods think. At first.”
“Shut up, old man.”
“Still you wear V’lane’s face. What do you fear?” the king said.
“I fear nothing.” But his gaze lingered on me a long moment. “I fight for my race, MacKayla. I have since I was born. He would conceal us in shame and condemn us to a half life. Remember that. There are reasons for all I have done.”
Abruptly his golden mane was raven, his gold-velvet skin bronzed.
Iridescent eyes emptied. A torque threaded with silver slithered around his neck. Beneath his skin, kaleidoscopic tattoos crashed like waves in a turbulent sea. He was beautiful. He was horrifying. He was soul-destroying. A nimbus of gold surrounded his body.
And his face, oh, God, his face, I knew that face. I’d seen that face. Bending over me. Holding my head in his arms. Cradling me.
While he moved inside me.
“You were the fourth at the church!” I cried. He’d raped me. With his other dark brethren, he’d turned me into a mindless shell of a person, left me shattered and naked in the street. And I would have remained broken forever, except that Barrons had come charging in after me with men and guns, taken me away, and put me back together again.
The Unseelie Prince cocked his head, looking every bit as unnatural as his brothers. Sharp teeth gleamed white against the dark skin of his face. “They would have killed you. They had never had a human woman. Darroc underestimated their ardor.”
“You raped me!”
“I saved you, MacKayla.”
“Saving me would have been getting me out of there!”
“You were already Pri-ya when I found you. Your life was ending. I gave you my elixir—”
“Your elixir?” the king said mildly.
“—to stem your wounds.”
“You didn’t have to have sex with me to do it!”
“I desired you. You refused me. I wearied of your protests. You wanted me. You thought about it. You were not even there. What difference?”
“You think that makes it okay?”
“I do not understand your objections. I did nothing that had not already been done by others. Nothing you had not considered. And I did it better.”
“What exactly did you give me?”
“I do not exactly”—he imitated my tone perfectly—“know. I have never given it to a human before.”
“Was it the queen’s elixir?”
“It was mine,” the king said.
“I improved it. You are the past,” Cruce said. “I am the future. It is time for you to be unmade.”
He was going to unmake the king? Was it possible?
“Kids. Pain in the ass. Don’t know why I ever made them. Hell on relationships.”
“You have no idea,” Cruce said. “Getting the queen to kill V’lane was not the first illusion I wove and left for you, old fool, although it was the first you saw. This was.” He bent and grabbed a fistful of the queen’s hair, raising her by it. As he did, her blankets fell away.
The king went perfectly still.
In his eyes I saw the black-and-white boudoir, void of all but empty memories, the endless barren years, the eternal grieving. I saw loneliness as vast and all-encompassing as his wings. I knew the joy of their union and the despair of their separation.
I no longer trusted anyone’s face. I sought my sidhe-seer center, reinforced it with the amulet, and demanded to be shown what was true.
She was still the concubine. The king’s mortal beloved, the one he’d gone insane over, created the Sinsar Dubh because of, walked away from his entire race for.
“As the current queen, her death will grant me the True Magic of our race. I saved her to kill in front of you before I unmake you. But this time when you see her dead, it will be no illusion.”
When the king said nothing, Cruce said impatiently, “Do you not wish to know how I did it, you stubborn old fuck? No? You never would speak up when it mattered. The day you went to battle the queen, I took the concubine another of your famous elixirs, but this time it was no potion: It was a cup stolen from the cauldron of forgetting. She stood in your boudoir while I erased all memory of you. When she was a blank slate, I bent her over your bed and fucked her. I hid her from you where I knew you would never look. The Seelie court. I took V’lane’s place and pretended she was a human I’d become enamored of. Over time, as the courtiers drank from the cauldron and forgot, as Seelie Princesses rose to power and were deposed, she became one of us. I achieved what your potions never did. Time in Faery, our potions, and our way of life made her Fae. Is it not ironic? The day came when she was so powerful she became our queen. She was always there—alive—but you never even looked. I kept her in the one place I knew the arrogant Un-Seelie King would not go. Bedding down with your grudges while I bedded your bitch. Your concubine became my lover, my queen. And now her death will make me you.”
The king’s eyes were sad. “In more ways than you know, if it were true. But another stands in your way.” He glanced at me.
My eyes widened and I shook my head instantly. “What are you trying to do? Get him to kill me? I’m not in his way.”
“Our magic prefers a woman. I believe it would choose you.”
“I have the Sinsar Dubh,” Cruce said. “She does not.”
The king laughed. “You think to become me. She becomes her. Not the only possible.”
I was horrified. I thought I understood what he was saying and didn’t like it one bit.
“Perhaps Barrons becomes Cruce. Who, then, would cry judgment?” the king said.
“Barrons wouldn’t become War,” I said instantly.
“Or me. Depends on the nuances.” The king looked at the concubine in Cruce’s grasp. “Irrelevant, all of it. I’m not done yet.”
She was gone.
“What the—?” Cruce’s hands were suddenly empty. He lunged forward and slammed into an invisible barrier. His eyes narrowed and he began to chant in a voice that made my blood ice, chiming like the full-blooded Unseelie Prince he was.
The king waved a hand and Cruce stopped chiming.
Cruce sketched a complicated symbol in the air, eyes narrowed on the king. Nothing happened. He began to chime again. The king silenced him.
Cruce conjured a rune and flung it at the king. It hit the invisible barrier and dropped. He flung a dozen more. They all did the same. It was like watching a man and a woman fight, where the man was simply trying to keep the woman from hurting herself too much.
Cruce rocked back on his heels and his wings began to open, black velvet and enormous, framing a nude, muscled body of such perfection that my cheeks were suddenly wet. Long black hair streamed down his shoulders; brilliant colors rushed beneath his bronze skin.
I touched my face and my fingers came away bloody.
I was awed by the dark majesty of him. I knew why War was as often revered as feared. I knew what it felt like to be cradled in those wings while he moved inside me.
The Unseelie King watched him, paternal pride glittering in his eyes.
Cruce was trying to destroy him, and he was proud of him.
Like a parent watching his child kick off the training wheels and take off down the drive for the first time without help.
And I knew that Cruce had never stood a chance, so long as the king cared to exist.
The danger would never be whether the king was powerful enough—he was and always would be the strongest of them all.
The true danger would always only be whether he cared enough.
He saw existence completely differently from everyone else. What we might view as defeat and destruction, he saw—like the Book he’d created—far down the arrows of time, as an act of creation.
Who knew? Maybe it was.
But I liked existing here and now, and I’d fight for it. I didn’t have a bird’s-eye view and didn’t want it. I liked padding around on dog paws, kicking up fall leaves and digging in spring dew, sniffing up scents on the ground, and living a life. I was only too happy to leave the flying for those with wings.
I reached for my spear. It was in my holster. And I realized it always had been whenever “V’lane” was around. It was part of the complex illusion he’d maintained. As an Unseelie, he’d never been able to touch it yet could have been killed by it, so whenever we were together, he’d fed me the glamour that it was no longer in my holster. Just as the Unseelie Princes had fed me an illusion that I’d been turning it on myself there in the church.
I never had. I’d chosen to throw it away because I’d believed the glamour. I could have killed them that night, if I’d been able to see through it. The power had always been right here, inside me, if I’d just known it.
I would kill him now.
“Don’t even think about it,” the Unseelie King said.
“He took your concubine. He faked her death. He raped me!”
“Are you kidding me?”
He looked at his concubine. “Today amuses.”
Abruptly, the moon and megaliths were gone. We were back in the cavern.
Cruce chimed, his wings open to their full majestic glory, eyes blazing with righteous fury, lips peeled back in a snarl.
The king iced him like that.
A nude, avenging angel, encased in clear crystal. Blue-black bars shot up from the floor, framing his prison.
I should have told the king to put clothes on him.
Make the ice cloudy so no one could see him. Hide those stunning velvety wings. Tone down the golden halo around him.
Make him look less … angelic, sexual, erotic. But you know what they say about hindsight.
The king said to Kat, “He is your Sinsar Dubh now.”
“No!” Kat exclaimed. “We don’t want him!”
“Your fault it got out. Contain it better this time.”
I heard Barrons say, “McCabe? What the fuck are you doing here?”
People began to appear in the cavern, sifting in. The white-suited McCabe from Casa Blanc was joined by the leprechaun-like reservations clerk from my first night at the Clarin House and by the news vendor from the street who’d given me directions to the Garda, the one who’d called me a hairy jackass.
“Liz?” Jo said. “Where did you come from?”
Liz said nothing, simply moved, as they all did, to join the Unseelie King.
“He’s too big for one body,” I said numbly.
“I knew there was something wrong with her!” Jo exclaimed.
The king had been watching the sidhe-seers and Barrons. He’d posed as one of the players hunting his own Book. He’d been watching me all this time. Since the day I’d come to Dublin. He’d checked me into the Clarin House.
“Before that, beautiful girl.” The king slanted me a look that horrified me. Pride glittered in his starry eyes.
My high school gym coach joined him. When my grade school principal appeared, I locked my jaw and gave the king a mutinous glare. Since the beginning. “Little help might have been nice.”
The king cradled the concubine tenderly to his chest. “What would you change?”
“You must give her to us,” Dree’lia demanded. “We need her. Without V’lane, who will lead us?”
“Find a new queen. She is mine.”
Velvet bristled. “But there is no one—”
“Grow a pair, Velvet,” the king snapped.
“We don’t want Cruce. You take him,” Kat was insisting.
“What the bloody hell is going on? You can’t take the queen. We work for her,” Drustan was saying.
“What about the Compact?” Cian said. “We need to renegotiate it!”
“Change me back!” Christian demanded. “I ate only one bite. That’s not enough to do this to me. Why am I being punished?”
The king only had eyes for the woman in his arms.
“You can’t leave until you put the bloody walls back up,” Dageus was growling. “We’ve no idea how to go about—”
“You’ll figure it out.”
Skins began to drop to the floor, empty shells of the king’s parts. For a moment, I was worried my own might fall off, but it didn’t.
Barrons had pulled me back from being Pri-ya. I had no doubt the king would find his concubine, too. Wherever she was, in whatever cave of amnesia she was trapped, he would join her. Tell her stories. Make love to her. Until one day they both got up and walked out of it.
The dreamy-eyed guy began to change, absorbing the shadows that passed from the skins.
He stretched and expanded until he towered over us like the Sinsar Dubh’s beast, but without the malevolence, and when his wings spread wide, eclipsing the chamber in night, stars and worlds dangling from his quills, I felt his joy.
The thought that she’d left him by choice had driven him mad.
But she hadn’t. She’d been taken.
Before she was made.
After he’d believed she was gone.
Sunshine to his ice. Frost to her fever.
I wished them forever.
You, too, beautiful girl.
The Unseelie King was gone.