“You are difficult to please.”
“Are you covered?”
“I am,” she says tightly.
I turn back and suggest just as tightly, “Perhaps you could get smoky and indistinct again.”
“Perhaps you aren’t the only being that requires a mouth to communicate. If you prefer me smoky, do not expect replies to your queries.”
A niggling thought takes root in the back of my mind. “How long ago did the Unseelie king create you to manage his library?”
She cocks her head, her eyes go eerily distant, then, “I have been in existence for seven hundred seventeen thousand three hundred and twenty two years, four months, and seventeen days.”
“How do you even know that? What are you, a walking cosmic clock?”
“Perhaps I possess an internal device that records the passage of time.”
The potential ramification of her lengthy existence sinks into my brain. If the king created these two forms for his librarian three quarters of a million years ago, how then does one explain Mac and Dani? Precisely how deviously—and intimately—did the Unseelie king tinker with his caste of sidhe-seers? Mac and Dani’s birth mothers are known sidhe-seers, but no one has any idea who sired them. Is this why the Sinsar Dubh was able to settle so comfortably within Mac as an unborn fetus? Why Dani possesses such a diverse array of powers, unlike most of her kind? Why, perhaps one of the Hunters, the king’s preferred steeds, selected her to transform into one of their species?
Was the bloody Unseelie king Mac and Dani’s father? Had he predetermined both their eventual birth and forms eons ago? Cruce was a master planner. The king was Cruce on steroids from hell.
I voice my suspicion about Mac and Dani’s parentage aloud, to which the draped Dani replies, “There are no references to a ‘Mac’ or ‘Dani’ of which I am aware in the king’s Library. I’m unable to answer your query.”
“Did the Unseelie king have any children?”
She sweeps a derisive gaze over me from head to toe, end to end of my still extended black wings and arches a brow.
“I meant through the actual act of procreation,” I clarify coolly.
“I have little familiarity with that word.”
Because Fae don’t procreate. Well, allegedly they don’t. And to think this day had begun swimmingly well. At least, once I’d gotten rid of the bat.
“Shift back to Mac.” I find her more bearable, although neither form is comfortable to me, especially nude. One woman is intimately bound to Barrons, the other to Ryodan. And although I thoroughly enjoy pissing off the Nine on occasion, this is not one of the ways I’d select to do it.
She complies, but the moment she shifts to her other form, the dark fabric slips from her shoulders.
She’s Mac again.
And naked again.
As luck would have it, that’s when Kat walks in.
6
I am immortal
I have inside me blood of kings
JERICHO BARRONS
MacKayla Lane, her given name.
Just-Mac, as she stood nose to nose with me, in the flesh, in my bookstore for the first time, demanding information about the Sinsar Dubh. I’d relive that day ten thousand times. The woman from my mural had finally walked in; a formidable darkness feathered in deceptively bright plumage, radioactive with vengeance, passion, and hunger.
She couldn’t see herself then. But I could.
Rainbow Girl, ah…that one gets me every time.
Beautiful monster, beast to my beast, capable of doffing every last vestige of her humanity to do what must be done.
Queen of the Fae, unwilling successor but no less committed for it.
The woman who sifts into Barrons Books & Baubles is all of those things to me, and more. I see her in every shade of who she is, has been, and will ever be.
Patterns have begun to shift. Our future is uncertain.
Not whether we will remain together.
I will destroy civilizations, raze worlds, turn back time, shatter the very fabric of existence to assure that.
But how we will remain.
7
Nothing compares to you
MAC
“Who’s in danger?” I demand as I materialize in the bookstore.
Barrons surges up from the chesterfield and stalks toward me, a ripple of dark, tattooed muscle, midnight eyes glittering bloodred as he rakes a feral gaze from my face to my feet and back again. Primitive energy charges the air between us; his beast is close to the surface. Dangerously close. There are times I adore him this way, especially in bed.
But not like this. Never like this. His beast is devouring him from the inside out, with cruel fangs of starvation. The trousers of his impeccable Armani suit are rumpled and hang loose on his hips, his jacket is wadded on the floor, shirt unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, tie lying in a shredded heap. An ancient silver cuff is slack on his wrist.
Whatever he is—Basque, Mediterranean, an ancient unknown race of immortal beings—his skin is pale, stretched taut, and I know, if I press my ear to his chest, I’ll hear no heartbeat. His cheekbones are blades in his chiseled face, and when he speaks, I glimpse fangs. He needs to eat. Now.
“Travails occur. And will be dealt with,” he growls. “What is this moment?”
Time, space, problems disappear as I savor the joy of seeing him again, of being alive one more day, at his side. The first time I’ve laid eyes on you in God knows how long. Time, during which, he’d patiently, devotedly stood guard, my eternal bastion, starving to death. What the man wants from me, the man can have.
Act like it, flashes in his savage face, if only for a moment.
Between the difficult past and the uncertain future resides the only moment we have any power over: now. We can make that moment ugly or beautiful. We can lose it to fear, or strengthen it with hope. And sometimes, we can only shore ourselves with bracing moments to strengthen ourselves for the brutal ones to come.
I lunge for him, taking him down to the chesterfield beneath me. We meet in a kiss of such ferocity and hunger that his fangs pierce my lower lip, filling both our mouths with the coppery taste of blood.