I stoop and quickly clap my hand to the jagged, broken neck of the flask, but brilliantly colored mist leaks through my fingers, seeps around my palm, as my blood mixes with sparkling smudges of pink and green, orange, violet, yellow, and blue.
Cursing, I drop it, cracking the bell-shaped carafe as well, and back warily away. I just added Unseelie prince blood to the damned thing. Lovely. I wipe my hand on my jeans as if to dispel all trace of whatever mystical creature is about to appear.
The day Dani O’Malley unstoppered a flask in the Unseelie king’s treacherous library she released Crimson Hag, the entrails-collecting, ghoulishly knitting Unseelie. In that rabid bitch’s venomous hands I died a thousand deaths, lashed to the side of a cliff, disemboweled over and over. I’ve no love for the king’s unholy beakers.
Tendrils of kaleidoscopic mist spiral up from the shattered flask, hover in the air, solidifying and dissipating, darting to and fro, assembling and reassembling in a manner that seems to imply whatever was contained within spent so long in non-corporeal form, it can’t quite puzzle out its original shape.
As if we didn’t already have enough problems. Old gods walking the earth; the Fae more powerful than ever before; the High Queen in absentia; the acrid, unmistakable stench of sulfur and brimstone growing ever more pungent on the wind, heralding the dawn of a terrible war.
Just then, my perimeter alarm booms: Katarina McLaughlin has entered your kingdom.
Great. I altered my wards to permit her passage so she might visit Sean when I wasn’t about. So continues the fuckage of my plans to get laid.
No longer buoyed by my recent discoveries, chafed by the onslaught of unexpected events, I drop glamour and become Death in all my towering darkness and savagery, wings wide, teeth bared, as I wait to discover just what the bloody hell I’ve unleashed on our world.
2
Killing me softly with his song
Ixcythe, Princess of Winter, manifested in the sacred Grove of Creation where no living being could die an unnatural death, where not even a High Queen could kill a Fae with one of the two Seelie hallows. Both of which, she brooded, as she pushed back the hood of her ermine cloak and rearranged her iced, silvery hair, were in the hands of mortals.
As was the True Magic of their race, sequestered within MacKayla Lane’s breast by the human-turned-queen, Aoibheal, who’d been secretly planted among them by the Unseelie prince Cruce while masquerading as V’lane.
The Seelie had been deceived and betrayed over and again.
Once, the lush, eternally blooming Grove of Creation had teemed with Fae nestled beneath gnarled roots, frolicking in the sky, roosting in a vast aerie of limbs, even dwelling symbiotically within the ancient towering trees planted at the dawn of time by the sacred goddess herself.
The grove was an enchanted paradise shaped by She Who Sang the Song that beckoned all things into existence—eons before the Tuatha De Danann had been born—and upon choosing to depart from this realm to planes unknown had bequeathed the divine melody of creation to the First Queen of the Tuatha De.
The First Queen had infrequently used parts of the Song, but there had never been a need to release the entire melody again.
Until recently.
Though the grove was not part of Faery, the Seelie recently regained their long-erased knowledge of it, along with countless other memories. They’d lived here once, during an all too brief golden hour in their existence. During the between of what they’d been and what they’d become.
Ixcythe tipped back her head, staring up at colossal trees ten times the size of the largest sequoias on earth, lush and green, vine-draped and rustling with jewel-toned birds and plush-pelted creatures, wishing memory of that peaceful era had never been restored.
When she sensed the disturbance of Azar, Prince of the Autumn Court, sifting in, followed by Severina, Princess of Summer, she stiffened. The two royals had answered her summons. If they, like her, were suffering similar debilitating effects, these next moments were fraught with peril.
Inspector Jayne, a human–turned–Spring Court prince, was one she would never summon. She wanted him dead and the rightful power of the royal line restored to a full-blooded Seelie. The other princes and princesses had been slain and not yet replaced. Now they might never be, given the curse afflicting their race.
It was but the three of them. It would have to be enough.
Digging sharp nails into her palms to distract from the cacophony of emotions raging in her frozen breast, Ixcythe bared her teeth in a glacial smile, noting, despite the fact that no Fae could be killed within the hallowed grove, the others had chosen to sift in at a considerable distance from her, forming a cautious royal triangle within the clearing beneath the vast canopy of branches.
We trust no one. Not even ourselves.
But they were going to have to, or they were doomed.
The Song of Making had been sung on the world to which the seat of their power was bound. Unforgivably, Aoibheal had tethered the Fae to a planet. And never in the history of time had they been in such proximity to the entirety of the powerful melody as it was released.
It changed them.
Slowly at first and welcomed by all, restoring powers, reinvigorating their essence. Enhancing pleasure, a thing Ixcythe should have pondered more deeply, intuiting what the resurgence of satisfaction implied.
In Aoibheal’s absence, the Seelie had quickly dispersed from the High Court where the queen had forced them to reside for too long and ruled them too tightly. They’d reclaimed their singular kingdoms and ways of life, indulging their desires, roaming freely between Fae and mortal realms.
For a time, existence was all they might have wished. She’d sculpted her castle a thousand glittering shades of shadow and pain, returning her demesne to its long-lost grandeur, lavishing her lakes and streams with exquisitely frosted patterns, adorning the silvery labyrinth with the iced sculptures of her enemies. The Autumn and Summer kingdoms had also been restored to their unique elemental majesty. Not the Spring kingdom, though. Jayne wasn’t fool or capable enough to try to seize it.
But the changes to their race continued. Slowly at first.
Then escalating.
Enacting a hellish transformation.
The Unseelie king’s Song had undone what the Cauldron of Forgetting had accomplished.
Restored their memories.
All of them. Including their origin, this grove, and She Who Sang the Song.
It had restored something else as well, thus the need to pierce flesh through to bone to maintain composure.
At least, that’s what had happened within the Winter Court’s boundaries. Ixcythe sought to know if all of Faery had suffered the same or if it was her kingdom alone. Yet she feared—yes feared—to leave her castle and walk out in the open to discover it for herself.