“You, too, baby. To the moon and back.”
As I sift out, I shake off the uneasy feeling those might be the last words we ever say to each other.
I know better. I’m just feeling vulnerable because the Seelie have my mom.
Nothing more.
8
There’s truth in your lies, doubt in your faith
CHRISTIAN
“Barrons is going to bloody well kill you,” Kat finally manages to say, after an interminable silence during which her gaze darts from me to imposter-Mac and back again. “Repeatedly and slowly, making what you suffered at the Crimson Hag’s hands seem a holiday in comparison.”
I bristle. “But he wouldn’t kill Mac? Don’t you think when a woman cheats she’s every bit as much to blame as the man she cheats with?” I wonder why I’m arguing the idiotic moot point, given it isn’t Mac standing there naked, and we weren’t having sex, but double standards offend me, and my mood grows increasingly foul with each new obstacle that arises between me and getting laid. “Besides, this isn’t what you think it is,” I say, even more irked that Kat hasn’t noticed she’s meeting my gaze without blood trickling from her eyes, or how effortlessly I muted the dangerous aspects of my Unseelie form the instant she walked in, summoning a smidge of earth-power, locking my Highlander glamour in place, to remain until I release it.
Shadows flicker in her gray eyes. “Did she use the Sidhba-jai on you, Christian?” she asks quietly then frowns. “Is that even possible—for the queen to overpower and use an Unseelie prince for sex against his will?”
“It would never be against his will,” naked not-Mac says. “Sex is sex. All beings seek to mate.”
“It would, too, be against my will,” I growl, glad I’m the only lie detector in the room.
“Sex is not just sex,” Kat says in a low voice. “Sometimes it’s rape.”
Naked not-Mac says, “Among mortals, perhaps.”
“She’s not Mac,” I tell Kat.
Kat cuts me a look of bafflement. “Then who is she?”
I sense a disturbingly powerful displacement of time and space a split second before someone sifts in behind Kat, and I curse vehemently, as Mac—the real one—manifests in the chapel. “You’ve got to bloody be kidding me,” I explode. What did I do to deserve such a lousy continuation of my so auspiciously begun day? Clearly, there’s a sadistic force at work in the universe that delights in saying, Gee, look down there, Christian MacKeltar’s finally having a decent day. Let’s shit all over it.
Mac gapes at her nude self. “No, you’ve got to bloody be kidding—” She breaks off, skirting Kat, approaching her duplicate, and looks her up and down.
The librarian stares back, regarding her with an equal blend of wariness and fascination.
“That’s not what I look like,” Mac says finally.
“We strongly resemble each other,” naked not-Mac disagrees.
“I haven’t been native down there in years. And the rest of her is what I looked like when I first arrived in Dublin.” Mac scans the duplicate’s hair, her hands and feet. “She’s natural everywhere. I can’t believe you got me so wrong.” She appraises me a moment, hard, then nods and says, “You’ve changed. Well done, Christian.”
I was so discombobulated by seeing first Mac nude, then Dani, that I hadn’t registered that it was pre-royalty Mac who’d drifted from the bottle. Queen Mac has platinum hair that hangs past her hips, and power crackles electric in the air around her. The librarian has shorter, sunnier hair and not a hint of royalty sizzling about her form. “I didn’t make this woman, Mac. She came from one of the king’s flasks. What do you mean ‘well done’?” I probe. I know I’ve changed, but is she sensing something more with her queenly powers?
“Later. Still opening them, eh? What is she? And why does she look like me?”
“I have no idea, and I didn’t open it on purpose. The bloody flask broke.”
“All by itself?” Kat says dryly.
I shoot her a dark look. “I tripped on it, but it shouldn’t have been there in—” I break off and snap, “Yes I broke the bloody thing, okay? But it wasn’t there this morning. I have no clue how it ended up on the floor. I always keep the beakers put away.” To Mac, I say, “Is she Seelie or Unseelie?”
“She can’t be Unseelie,” Kat says. “They were all destroyed by the Song.”
Was that a fleeting look of shock on the librarian’s face?
“It’s possible, sealed in a bottle, she might have escaped destruction. We don’t know exactly how the Song worked,” Mac muses and frowns, studying her. “It eludes me,” she says finally.
“How is that possible? You’re queen. If she’s Fae, you must know whether she’s Shadow or Light Court.”
“I’ve not encountered the melody she emits. It’s…” Her eyes drift closed. When she opens them again, she says, “Confounding.”
“Beautiful? Ugly?” I press.
“Different than anything I’ve heard. Yet…familiar.”
“A singularity?” Kat offers. “But don’t only the Unseelie have those?”
Mac paces a circle around the woman, examining her. “Perhaps a Seelie contained so long in the White Mansion, she changed. Which still doesn’t explain why she looks like me.”
“But wouldn’t time in the Unseelie kingdom have killed her, as Cruce intended with Aoibheal?” Kat says.
“The White Mansion isn’t the Unseelie kingdom,” Mac replies.
I frown. Mac’s eyes don’t look good. Beneath lucent green, shards of ice glitter. Something is wrong. And whatever it is has nothing to do with the unknown entity in my castle. I decide to wait until later to tell her that the bottle-dweller has two forms, and Dani is the other.
The librarian is no longer looking at Mac but standing perfectly still, staring past her into the distance, as if trying to be invisible. Unfortunately she isn’t, and she’s still disturbingly naked. I growl, “For fuck’s sake, whatever you are, put some blasted clothes on.”
Instantly, the creature from the flask is no longer naked.