It should not have been this way.
I scan his army. Not with the assessing gaze of an opponent, rather, covetously. There—in the back, draped in a doorway—is one of the gossamer caste I didn’t see until it was too late or, rather, didn’t understand what I was seeing. Behind the king are two of his princes, massive black wings concealing a structure far stronger and more lethal than barbed titanium, capable of enfolding tenderly or crushing in an Iron Maiden embrace.
His Dark Court is a night symphony sung into existence from notes of satin, dreamy midnight, motifs of surreal slumber and dark stars. They are seductive and beautiful with no abominations among them. Focused and fiercely intelligent, they make many of my court seem simpletons. Even the most inventively lethal of the Unseelie are exquisite, commanding the eye to linger as they approach. And all the more deadly for it. Humans were unable to turn away. Compelled to look while Death stalked ever nearer, yet it was not his army—
I terminate that thought, too. “Recall your ice,” I hiss.
“I am not the one that needs to get a grip on that element.”
“My court is fire, heat, life.”
“MacKayla Lane was fire. You are colder than ice. Emptier than a void, you birth only illusion. Blossoms may spring forth as you walk, but in your wake you leave destruction.”
I suffer a moment of disconcerting duality where I’m myself yet I’m also an ancient queen, hearing precisely the same accusation from a different king and I wonder why it keeps ending this way. We had the added bonus of knowing the potential mistakes.
Still, we made them.
“Have you come to gloat? I will never grovel before you. None of us will.” It’s a lie and we both know it. His power vastly exceeds mine. If he demands, we will comply. We have no choice.
Perhaps I never did. Perhaps it was all chiseled in stone, long before my birth, painted on the ceiling of a bookstore that was erected as a bastion, to keep the monsters at bay.
Instead it birthed one.
His gaze shifts and flickers, filled with nuances beyond my understanding. He makes to speak, once, twice, yet says nothing. Starry shadows rush in his eyes, a muscle flexes in his jaw. For a time, I think we might stand and stare at each other in silence for all eternity. I wonder what he sees in my eyes. I wonder if there’s anything in them at all.
I spin and walk away.
Or try to.
My feet remain rooted to the ground.
I wait, gaze locked with his, spine infused with an inexplicable tension, inhabited by a prayer I don’t understand and have no idea how to voice.
He exhales heavily and extends a hand toward me. Slowly, aware the tiniest wrong move might incite battle. His hand is open, palm up, framed by long, strong, elegant fingers. Once, I dropped kisses in it. Felt it cradling my head, my jaw, spanning my waist, resting in the small of my back. “Take it. Let me show you the way back.”
I don’t say back where. The implication is “all the way.”
As if I would trust him.
Could he really do that? Return me to where this all began? Before it went so terribly wrong? Envy is a razor poisoning me as it cuts—that he has such power to move us through time and possibles. I don’t possess it. Suspicion poisons me further. His offer is illogical. I would not make such an offer in his position. He’s goading me to trust.
What is trust but expectation one will behave in keeping with one’s past actions?
God knows I didn’t. Why would he?
I wonder, with what tatters of bitterness and pale shreds of emotion yet remain, why hope springs eternal; that stubborn element that exists within us—despite being carved and mutilated, twisted and maimed, brutalized and stripped of all we hold dear—some shred of our being that insists on clinging to the belief that there’s a way back, or a redemptive way forward, or that it will all have been worth it somehow, even when we know full well we’re clinging to nothing more substantial than a hope of a memory of a dream we can no longer feel and that may not have ever even been real.
How do we get so lost?
One infinitesimal misstep here.
One seemingly inconsequential decision there.
Often so simple as: If only I’d lingered to brush my hair, gone to the bathroom, delayed to make a phone call. If I’d chosen to walk forward instead of turning left that day in the foggy Dark Zone. If I’d not met with the enemy, accepted a glass of tainted wine, believing peace between us possible.
Staggering that the fate of worlds can hang upon such incremental, seemingly innocuous moments!
Staggering that one’s very soul can be stripped away by such moments, leaving the pain (which will all too soon be dulled beyond recalling) of the loss of a way of being I will never know again.
I gaze at him in frosty silence.
He searches my eyes for a taut, suspended spell of time, and, when finally he speaks, emotion infuses his words with complexity I no longer fathom yet feel the vibration of—a nearly forgotten bass in my gut, a resonance where once my heart beat red-hot and true.
I endeavor to disdain it as the weakness it is, but some part of me suspects I’m fooling no one, not even myself. He has all the power.
And kept himself, too.
Jericho Barrons is, as ever, indomitable.
“Ah, Mac,” he says roughly, “you’ve forgotten everything.”
Not everything, I don’t say.
I remember enough to wish I’d never been born.
1
I had a dream
I got everything I wanted
CHRISTIAN
There’s a bat in my belfry.
It darts erratically in the cramped timber housing four stories above me, swooping between bells, offending me on a figurative level because there was a time the phrase “bats in the belfry” suited me, and literally because I’ve been chasing the bloody bugger through my castle for the past twenty minutes.
The few maids willing to work on my blustery, forbidding estate consent to do so only if I keep the fortress free of the furry winged fellows that invade Draoidheacht as if it’s connected by some mystic portal to a densely populated bat cave they’re avid to escape. It’s entirely possible—given my uncles’ many raids on the king’s unpredictable library in the White Mansion—we’ve introduced a number of disguised ingresses into the stronghold. The sprawling keep began as a peculiar place and has become only more eccentric of late. It’s changing, restoring parts of itself, expanding others.
Personally, I don’t mind the little guys. They’re liminal creatures like me, mammals that can fly, existing on the fringes, living in the darkest, hidden reaches, feared and mistrusted, and, as I was soaring through the vaulted rooms chasing it, I had to laugh, considering the situation from the creature’s perspective, which surely believes itself hunted by some enormous mythical god/demon of vampire bats.