“Hey, beautiful girl,” the dreamy-eyed guy said.

“Butterfly fingers,” I managed finally. “You.”

“Finest surgeon,” he agreed.

“You helped.”

“Told you not to talk to it. You did.”

“I survived.”

“So far.”

“There’s more?”

“Always.”

I couldn’t stop staring. I knew who he was. And now that I knew, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before.

“Never let you, small thing.”

“Let me now.”

“Why?”

“Curiosity.”

“Dead cats.”

“Nine lives,” I countered.

He smiled and his head swiveled in a distinctly Unseelie manner. I was also seeing, superimposed on a space of air that couldn’t exist—at least not in this realm—an enormous darkness regarding me. Its head didn’t swivel: It grated like stone on stone. It was as if the king was so vast that no single realm could contain him, around him dimensions splintered, overlapped, shifted. His eyes locked with mine, opening wider and wider until they swallowed the entire abbey, and I went spinning, head over heels, into them, with the abbey tumbling beside me.

I was wrapped in enormous black velvet wings, taken into the heart of darkness that was the Unseelie King.

He was so far beyond my comprehension that I couldn’t begin to absorb it. “Ancient” didn’t come close, because he was newborn in each moment, as well. Time didn’t define him. He defined time. He wasn’t death or life, or creation or destruction. He was all possibles and none, everything and nothing, a bottomless abyss that would look back at you if you gazed into it. He was a truth of existence: Once you’d been exposed to him, you’d never be the same. Like a contagion that infected the blood and brain, he forced new neural pathways to develop merely to handle the brief contact. That or you went nuts.

For a split second, drifting in his vast, ancient embrace, I understood everything. It all made sense. The universes, the galaxies—existence was unfolding precisely as it should, and there was a symmetry, a pattern, a stunning beauty to the structure of it.

I was tiny and naked, lost in black velvet wings so lush, rich, and sensual that I never wanted to leave. His darkness wasn’t frightening. It was verdant, teeming with life on the verge of becoming. There were shiny pearls of worlds tucked into his feathers. I rolled between them, laughing with delight. I think he rolled with me, watching my reaction to him, learning me, tasting. I tumbled among planets, constellations, stars. They hung from his quills, suspended, trembling with growing pains. Waiting for the day he would unfasten them, bat them off into the ballpark, and see what they might do. A home run—hey, batter, batter! Fly ball, watch out! That ball sucks, didn’t stitch it tight enough … coming apart at the seams …

I saw us through his eyes: dust motes floating in a shaft of sunlight that stabbed through the rusted-out roof of a barn. He was as likely to swipe his hand through us and watch us scatter as he was to turn and walk away from this particular hole-in-the-roof byproduct. Or maybe sneeze us all into the great outdoors, where we would go whirling off in a dozen different directions, lost in lonely oblivion, never to come together again.

By our standards, he was mad. Utterly and completely mad. But every now and then, he surfaced and walked a fine line of sanity. It never lasted long.

By his standards, we were paper dolls, flat and one-dimensional. Barking mad as far as he was concerned. But every now and then, one of us walked a fine line of sanity. It never lasted long.

Still, all was well. Life was, and change happened.

Me. He thought I was relatively sane. I laughed until I cried, rolling around in his feathers. Because of his imprint inside me? If I was a shining example of my race, we should all be shot.

He showed me things. Took my hand and escorted me into an enormous theater, where I watched an endless play of light and shadows from a prime seat in the front row. He watched me, chin on a fist, from a red crushed-velvet chair in a box near the stage.

“Never did get it all out.” His voice came from every speaker: huge, melodic.

“The Book?”

“Can’t eviscerate essential self.”

“Playing doctor again?”

“Trying. You listening this time?”

“He’s stealing your Book. You listening?”

The dreamy-eyed guy’s head swiveled away from the stage, and suddenly the theater was gone and we were back in the cavern.

Wings no longer cradled me.

I was cold and alone. I missed his wings. I yearned for him. It hurt.

“It will pass,” he said absently. “You will forget the pain of separation. They always do.” His eyes narrowed on V’lane. “Yes. He is.”

“Aren’t you going to stop him?”

“Que sera, sera.”

I was being stalked by a song, haunted by the calliope from hell. “It’s your responsibility. You should take care of it.”

“Should is a false god. No fun there.”

“Some changes are better than others.”

“Expound.”

“If you stop him, the changes will be much more interesting.”

“Opinion. Subjective.”

“So is yours,” I said indignantly.

His starry eyes glinted with amusement. “If he replaces me, I will become something else.”

I could almost hear the Sinsar Dubh saying, Is not any act of destruction, should time enough pass, an act of creation? The apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

“I don’t want you replaced. I like you as you are.”

“Flirting with me, beautiful girl?”

I tried to breathe and couldn’t. The Unseelie King was touching me, kissing me. I could feel his lips on my skin, and I—I—I—

“Breathe, BG.”

I could breathe again.

“Please, stop him.” I wasn’t above begging. I’d get on my knees. If V’lane succeeded in gaining ultimate power, I didn’t want to live in this world. Not with him in charge. With a spell of unmaking he could kill Barrons, and he’d made it clear, every chance he got, that he wanted to. He had to be stopped. I wasn’t losing any of my people. My parents were going to live to a ripe old age. Barrons was going to live forever. Me? Well. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do. But I planned on having a long, full lifetime. “It would mean a lot to me.”