“As you wish, my liege.” Masdann turned, melting with inhuman grace from table to wall to door, nearly unseen.
As he closed the door, Cruce smiled, but it vanished swiftly as pleasure at Masdann’s delight in the world above turned to rage at his own creator. King to a court of his making, Cruce had found the act of creation illuminating, understood more about his ex-liege than ever before.
He despised him all the more for it.
Creation was a kingly right, but it was accompanied by responsibility for what one created. The ex-king’s Unseelie were lab rats first, children only much later, by default. He’d created ugliness when he might have spawned beauty. He’d made hundreds of thousands of horrific Unseelie, knowing they would be abhorred by the world. He’d made them rapacious, insatiable, and incapable of ever being sated. To live in such a fashion wasn’t life at all. The Song of Making had been a mercy for the Unseelie destroyed, laid at long last to rest.
Toward the last, the ex-king had fashioned his four princes: Famine, Pestilence, Death, and War, and, while he’d made them superior to the rest of his castes in countless ways, possessing both emotion and the intellectual capability to govern it, Cruce’s three brothers had been barren-minded fools governing barren domains. Death alone held a realm Cruce coveted, and he had no intention of letting the Highlander pup survive long enough to learn the true extent of his power.
Unlike his ex-liege, Cruce had chosen to elevate his royalty, gifted them powers to create, not destroy (although they could destroy, in inventive and horrific ways if they chose—point being: they had a choice), fashioning the princes of Dreams, Fire, Water, and Air; each lording power over a unique realm and, while he’d granted them staggering sensuality, he’d not hobbled their potential for evolution with the lethal Eros of the Fae. He’d taken the best of all he’d beheld in three quarters of a million years and blended it into forms capable of withstanding the tests of time, resilient, adaptive, ferociously intelligent, majestic. He’d not made princesses for his Royal Houses, deemed them unnecessary, liabilities, vying for power against his princes. His royal caste would have the right to select their own consorts.
He’d birthed a Shadow Court of fierce survivors, as brilliant as the stars, as elegant and imaginative as the cosmos, as potentially deadly as the vacuum of space. He’d succeeded in all the areas his king had failed. He’d created a court of entities that could thrive on any world, walk in the warmth and sunlight, in the open day, welcomed. At least those who were visible. Some of his children were too clever for the eye to spy.
The king had abdicated his throne years ago yet still hadn’t chosen a successor. Occasionally the great dark cloud of kingly power would come and hover above Cruce, watching as he worked.
Then simply vanish. Leave, as if unconvinced, as if the choice of his correct successor wasn’t as fucking obvious as the fucking sun in the sky.
He’d proven himself the superior king. What the bloody hell was the old fool’s problem?
Although his court addressed him as their ruler, it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough until the bastard ex-king acknowledged that Cruce was the better king and conferred all his power upon him.
He never betrayed you, Cruce, one of the king’s many skins had said. He betrayed none of his children. He gave up what he held most dear for them.
Meaning that, although the king had, unbeknownst to all, completed the Song of Making, once he’d realized using it to make his concubine Fae would destroy the Court of Shadows, he’d chosen not to use it.
Cruce snorted. “Too little, too late, old man.” One benevolent act did not an immortal lifetime of torment unmake.
Here, in this arena beyond time, where he’d labored for nearly as long as MacKayla had quarantined herself in a similar place, sorting through her new power—he knew because his laboratory afforded a private view of hers—he’d birthed a dark court beyond reproach, and bestowed upon them a gift of immortality far superior to that which the prior court had been given.
So many things the old half-mad king might have done, but he’d created his court only to find a way to save his concubine. Cruce had created his court for the pleasure of creation.
Motive defined results. Flawed motive, flawed results.
A sudden, unexpected motion in his periphery jarred him from his thoughts.
Cruce turned his head and watched through the shadowy, burnished glass that joined their chambers as, at long last, MacKayla Lane moved for the first time in several centuries, if one counted the way time moved in their suspended arenas. Slowly, she rose from the sofa, raised her arms above her head and stretched, long, lean, and lovely. In her dimly lit chamber, she shimmered with Fae radiance as she turned, twisted, and bent. Platinum hair swept the backs of her thighs. Green eyes shimmered with otherworldly luminescence. Deep within them glittered the fire of her Summer Court, the ice of her wintry realm. Like him, she was thesis and antithesis, fire and ice, equal capacity for beauty and horror. The high temper and passion of a mortal in the body of a Fae queen, nearly immortal herself, thanks to the elixir he’d given her at an intimate, uncomprehending moment. The concubine had drunk the queen’s elixir, which eventually scorched her soul to ash. The elixir Cruce gave MacKayla had no such side effect. It left her soul—and immense passion—intact. Just one more way Shadow Court ways were superior to the Light Court.
Once, he’d had her beneath him. He had buried himself inside her, felt her essence to his core. Her power and potential were intoxicating; she was his equal in nearly every way. She’d been unaware of him then, despised him for taking her against her will. In his book, that time didn’t count. He would erase it from hers.
If I’d met you first, she’d once offered.
You might have loved me, he’d finished for her. And if you’d loved me, he’d stopped and waited.
You might have changed, she’d said softly.
He’d seen truth in her eyes. He’d gifted her his half of the Song of Making, he—Prince Cruce of the Tuatha De Danann—had saved the world for a single kiss, a kiss that evoked the finest in him, that told him, had events played out differently, she might have chosen him over Barrons. Of course she would have. The playing field between him and Barrons had never been level. That would change.
I am not your Barrons and will never be, he’d told her. Nor would I wish to. I am Cruce of the Tuatha De Danann, High Prince of the Court of Shadows. And you are MacKayla Lane-O’Connor, Queen of the Court of Light. Convince me on another day you would have chosen me as your consort.
She’d convinced him—and kept her word to grant him four hours before she released the melody. Four hours to inter himself far beyond the Song’s lethal reach, with aid of the bracelet he’d demanded in exchange for the contract they’d signed.