Kingdom of Shadow and Light Read online

  There is nothing for me there.

  Dublin will never again be what I remember.

  Nor will I.

  There is a final act to which I will attend tonight before turning my attention to matters of Court. The soil cannot reclaim a certain bookstore fast enough for me. I don’t trust that the Cauldron of Forgetting will completely eradicate Barrons Books & Baubles from the deepest catacombs of my memory should the earth fail to swallow it and should I, one day, encounter it.

  This city, this planet is void of human life.

  I am the only trace of humanity left, and I am but a memory of a vestige of a shadow of that complex, elusive quality. Less than a whisper. I cannot hear it and would not know what it means.

  Mankind has been scourged from the planet. The old gods are dead, leaving the Fae sole owners of a coveted magic-rich world. The Nine are— I terminate that thought.

  A distant part of my mind engages a struggle to understand how I got here, how this came to pass, but I cannot put the pieces together. They exist beyond, in a place I sort of remember though not really, where, once, I was a very different being.

  A daughter. Sister. Friend. Lover to a dark and ravenous beast.

  But I can’t feel what I can’t feel.

  There lurk only distant, vague shapes, nebulous things that chafe at my mind, oddly familiar yet void of meaningful substance.

  I lack context. A complete and utter dearth of it exists within me.

  I apprehend existence in terms of stasis and change.

  Beyond that, there is only today.

  There is a single way this type of today can be endured.

  If it amuses.

  * * *

  As I near the entrance to Temple Bar and approach the stone archway draped in blossoms that scent the air with exquisite, poisonous-to-all-but-Fae, night-blooming jasmine, a sharp-edged frost that refracts a thousand shades of sapphire slips down alabaster petals, rushes along vines to the street.

  Ice encases the pavement and explodes toward me, licking at my feet. I invoke a carpet of crimson snow blossoms to shatter his ice as the ghost of a mirthless smile curves my lips. A ghost because the possibilities for us, once so ripe with limitless, thrilling possibility, are something I will be forever haunted by, yet never know.

  “Mac.” The greeting floats from the impenetrable shadows the Unseelie king has donned as a cloak. He walks the night as the night. Not even I can pry elements from Fae to reveal his true nature. He will remain unseen unless he wishes to be otherwise. His power is staggering.

  “Your queen now,” I parry.

  “Never my queen. You chose,” the darkness thrusts.

  I didn’t, I don’t say. Let him think I did. Preferable to the truth. There was a time I demanded truth, no matter the price. Now I pursue the mercy of illusion with the fervency of a terminal sinner seeking absolution.

  He doffs his shadow cloak and reveals himself in a pool of cobalt light that streaks his black wings indigo as they ruffle, shift, and settle. I shiver and draw my cloak more snugly about me. Though I am immune to the Sidhba-jai, I am not immune to the Unseelie king’s allure. He’s lust incarnate. Sexual in a set-your-teeth-on-edge kind of way that can make a woman who needs nothing comprehend the meaning of primitive, mind-consuming, addictive desire. Every nuance of darkness heaped upon every fist and blade of power, he is magnificent, nearly omnipotent and eternal. Explosive carnality saturates the air around him, charging the atoms between us with a wordless, erotic, irresistible compulsion that I yield to him in any manner he seeks. I wonder, with a catch in my breath: Am I still his weakness? Is he still unable to say no to me?

  He possesses all those things the Light Court should have had. Might he bequeath those gifts upon us? Would he be willing? Could I, Queen of Illusion, Queen of Fire, seduce him into it? Even were I to fail, at least I’d share his bed. A shared bed is oft parlayed into concessions.

  “Never.” The words are soft. His gaze is not.

  The king, who should have been my greatest ally, my lover, my consort, is my greatest enemy. But “should” means nothing to the Unseelie king.

  “Should” is a false god that skews your aim before you even act, someone once said to me. “Should have” is a devil that devours your soul once you’ve acted. Desire, Ms. Lane, is the only acceptable motivation. What do you want?

  I want my king.

  And he will never be mine.

  He will never forgive the things I’ve done.

  Were I capable of caring, it would explode my heart. We were—are—the twin faces of a Janus head. Born to rule, side by side, day by night, sun beside black star.

  When his dark court sifts in to assume position behind him, the ice of his nocturnal kingdom surges forward again, crashing into the flame of my day court. Tiny, fiery volcanoes meet geysers of glittering ice in the street between us, blazing radioactive, freezing, blazing again, as our powers battle without involvement from either of us. A hairline fracture splinters the ground between us and might widen into a planet-shattering chasm if we are fools.

  Our very existence is at odds.

  To merely stand facing each other is to war.

  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 t
he 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.

  Black wings unfurled to a majestic wingspan, then tucked swiftly to spiral behind the flying mammal through narrow, winding stone corridors, that’s rather what I look like.

  I nearly nabbed it twice, but as it flaps circles above me in quarters too tight for my width, I concede, it’s outmaneuvered me. For the moment.

  I drop down on a pile of the Unseelie king’s mammoth books, prop my chin on a fist, and stare irritably up at it, aware of the portrait I paint; a savage, winged Unseelie prince thwarted by a tiny flying rodent. One would think, as Fae royalty—notably the prince known as Death, for fuck’s sake—I might point a finger in a general upward direction and delete it from existence or, at the very least make it have a heart attack and topple to my feet.

  One would be wrong.

  I’ve spent most of my tenure as the lethal prince struggling to keep myself from inadvertently using the power I possess. I’ve no idea what I’m capable of until the dark magic erupts from me in some horrifying way.

  The bat finally settles, clinging to a timber upside down, membranous forelimbs folded about its body, swaying gently. I’ve gone motionless. As long as I remain still, the creature may decide the malevolent god/demon has flown the coop and venture into the open so our ludicrous chase might begin anew: What does Death do all day? Chase bats. Christ. Hardly the life one envisions for such an entity.

  As I wait, I glance about the ancient domed chapel. Like the rest of the castle, it’s stuffed to overflowing with goods purloined from the Unseelie king’s true library, and still we’ve barely made a dent in transporting the collection from within the White Mansion’s halls. Jars and chests, artifacts, tomes, and scrolls litter the pews of the long-unused oratory and are strewn haphazardly across the flagstone floor. Larger relics are propped against the walls. I’ve learned a great deal about the Fae, yet precious little about the part I play in it. I need a card catalog for the king’s eclectic collection. Not that it would help at this point. Assuming the library was ever arranged in some semblance of order upon those physics-defying shelves that careened vertically, horizontally, and diagonally, and soared to heights even I hadn’t reached with my wings, those items we’ve removed certainly aren’t now. It’s chaos.

  The problem, I fume, is that I really don’t want to kill the bat. Each creature has its place in the balance of things. Bats pollinate, eat insects, consume roach dung; they’re a necessary part of the cycle.

  I frown, realizing I may have been going about it wrong. Perhaps it’s not Death that needs to contend with the bat. I summoned the necessary elements to extinguish the ice-fire at the abbey without negative repercussions. Granted, that was before the Song of Making was sung and the Fae restored to our inimical, ancient power.

  I tip my head back and stare up, open my senses, try to access the furry, winged life above me, sink into it, become it. Ah…there it is. Tiny heart hammering, a dangerously overworked drum accelerated by fear. And yes, it does think me a demon. I taste the fog of panic in its brain. It hovers on the verge of cardiac arrest from terror and frantic flight. I did that to it. It mortifies the Highlander-druid in me, raised to protect. It’s but a wee bat doing wee bat things. Having a fine life.

  Until. Me.

  I withdraw, sink into my heart, and waft a tendril of the love I hold for my land and kin upward, envision it cocooning the creature, soaking into its sleek body. The mammal’s heartbeat instantly slows, and the fog lifts from its alien, simple mind.

  Relinquishing my constant, tiring grip on the Sidhba-jai—the lethal sexuality exuded by royals, both dark and light—I open my druid senses and tunnel down through the floor of the chapel,
past the dungeon, sink beyond the stone slab foundation of the castle, to the fertile soil and deeper, penetrating layers of rock to touch the bountiful, magnificent energy of the—

  Stop, my gut roars, there’s danger here!

  I abort the connection and slam my walls back up.

  What the bloody hell was I thinking? I know better. The last time I permitted myself to absorb the power of the earth as it seeped up through the soles of my boots, I walked into the Cock and Crown and killed every man, woman, and child within. One hundred forty-two people died that day, exploding into clouds of black dust. Had I gone home, I’d have murdered my entire clan instead.

  I banished the druid part of myself that afternoon, locked him away and never reached outward with my Keltar senses again, concluding the druid part of me had absorbed the earth-power without realizing it, and the uncontrollable Unseelie part of me had seized it, using it to lash out with massive, destructive force. A grand “fuck you, can’t touch me” reminding me just who’s in control. And not.

  Still…what if I’d concluded wrong?

  I narrow my eyes, rolling the subtleties of what I just tasted in the earth over my tongue, forcing myself to analyze it void of emotion. I’d long tried to divine how Cruce managed to subdue the Sidhba-jai and glamour himself so effortlessly. How he’d done everything so easily. Having just felt the enormity of power available to me, I’m willing to bet he was never using his own will but siphoning the elemental energy of nature, which is boundless and eternally replenishing. Willing to bet it was the source of power for all he did.

  Which means it’s the source of mine as well—and I cut myself off from it after one accidental misuse of power. Granted, one with terrible consequences, but there might never be a better time to try again.