I reached for my spear. It was in my holster. And I realized it always had been whenever “V’lane” was around. It was part of the complex illusion he’d maintained. As an Unseelie, he’d never been able to touch it yet could have been killed by it, so whenever we were together, he’d fed me the glamour that it was no longer in my holster. Just as the Unseelie Princes had fed me an illusion that I’d been turning it on myself there in the church.

I never had. I’d chosen to throw it away because I’d believed the glamour. I could have killed them that night, if I’d been able to see through it. The power had always been right here, inside me, if I’d just known it.

I would kill him now.

“Don’t even think about it,” the Unseelie King said.

“He took your concubine. He faked her death. He raped me!”

“No harm, no foul.”

“Are you kidding me?”

He looked at his concubine. “Today amuses.”

Abruptly, the moon and megaliths were gone. We were back in the cavern.

Cruce chimed, his wings open to their full majestic glory, eyes blazing with righteous fury, lips peeled back in a snarl.

The king iced him like that.

A nude, avenging angel, encased in clear crystal. Blue-black bars shot up from the floor, framing his prison.

I should have told the king to put clothes on him.

Make the ice cloudy so no one could see him. Hide those stunning velvety wings. Tone down the golden halo around him.

Make him look less … angelic, sexual, erotic. But you know what they say about hindsight.

The king said to Kat, “He is your Sinsar Dubh now.”

“No!” Kat exclaimed. “We don’t want him!”

“Your fault it got out. Contain it better this time.”

I heard Barrons say, “McCabe? What the fuck are you doing here?”

People began to appear in the cavern, sifting in. The white-suited McCabe from Casa Blanc was joined by the leprechaun-like reservations clerk from my first night at the Clarin House and by the news vendor from the street who’d given me directions to the Garda, the one who’d called me a hairy jackass.

“Liz?” Jo said. “Where did you come from?”

Liz said nothing, simply moved, as they all did, to join the Unseelie King.

“He’s too big for one body,” I said numbly.

“I knew there was something wrong with her!” Jo exclaimed.

The king had been watching the sidhe-seers and Barrons. He’d posed as one of the players hunting his own Book. He’d been watching me all this time. Since the day I’d come to Dublin. He’d checked me into the Clarin House.

“Before that, beautiful girl.” The king slanted me a look that horrified me. Pride glittered in his starry eyes.

My high school gym coach joined him. When my grade school principal appeared, I locked my jaw and gave the king a mutinous glare. Since the beginning. “Little help might have been nice.”

The king cradled the concubine tenderly to his chest. “What would you change?”

“You must give her to us,” Dree’lia demanded. “We need her. Without V’lane, who will lead us?”

“Find a new queen. She is mine.”

Velvet bristled. “But there is no one—”

“Grow a pair, Velvet,” the king snapped.

“We don’t want Cruce. You take him,” Kat was insisting.

“What the bloody hell is going on? You can’t take the queen. We work for her,” Drustan was saying.

“What about the Compact?” Cian said. “We need to renegotiate it!”

“Change me back!” Christian demanded. “I ate only one bite. That’s not enough to do this to me. Why am I being punished?”

The king only had eyes for the woman in his arms.

“You can’t leave until you put the bloody walls back up,” Dageus was growling. “We’ve no idea how to go about—”

“You’ll figure it out.”

Skins began to drop to the floor, empty shells of the king’s parts. For a moment, I was worried my own might fall off, but it didn’t.

Barrons had pulled me back from being Pri-ya. I had no doubt the king would find his concubine, too. Wherever she was, in whatever cave of amnesia she was trapped, he would join her. Tell her stories. Make love to her. Until one day they both got up and walked out of it.

The dreamy-eyed guy began to change, absorbing the shadows that passed from the skins.

He stretched and expanded until he towered over us like the Sinsar Dubh’s beast, but without the malevolence, and when his wings spread wide, eclipsing the chamber in night, stars and worlds dangling from his quills, I felt his joy.

The thought that she’d left him by choice had driven him mad.

But she hadn’t. She’d been taken.

He’d loved her for all time.

Before she was made.

After he’d believed she was gone.

Sunshine to his ice. Frost to her fever.

I wished them forever.

You, too, beautiful girl.

The Unseelie King was gone.

53

The sign was heavy, but I was determined.

Although Barrons’ strength would have made things a lot easier, I managed without him. I wasn’t in the mood for an argument.

As I unscrewed the last bracket suspending the gaily painted sign from the brass pole bolted into the brick above the door of the bookstore, it slipped from my hands, fell to the sidewalk, and cracked down the middle.

MACKAYLA’S MANUSCRIPTS AND MISCELLANY bit the dust before a single customer ever looked up and saw the sign.

I was okay with that. It didn’t have the right ring to it. Although I’d loved seeing my name up there, I’d never have gotten comfortable with it. This place was … well, MM&M just didn’t roll off the tongue.

I had no intention of giving him back the bookstore.

I was keeping it forever. And I planned to keep the name, too. I’d never be able to think of it as anything else.

Twenty minutes later, the original sign was restored.

I dusted off my hands, propped the ladder against a column, and stepped back to view my work.

The four-story—I looked up. It was five stories tonight. The five-story building was officially BARRONS BOOKS AND BAUBLES again. Owned by one MacKayla Lane. He’d given me the deed last night.

I walked out into the middle of the street and assessed my bookstore with a critical eye. It was mine to take care of, and I wasn’t yielding one inch of it to vandals or the elements. It had weathered the storm of Unseelie better than most places in the city, protected by wards and a man who could never die.