Kingdom of Shadow and Light Page 3
Sean’s an unkillable prince.
If I summon power today and fail, only bats will suffer. I can’t continue living as a fractured entity, drenched in darkness, cut off from human contact, eternally at war with myself, searching books for mystical answers that may not even exist.
I quiet my mind and open my druid senses, warily at first then wider. Such a profusion of power blazes at the core of the planet; it’s staggering, dazzling, humbling, and I’m part of it! We all are, but few have such a direct connection.
As I invite the abundance to enter me, it slams into my body with such force I nearly go flying backward off the pile of books. Regaining my balance, I relish the sensation of being blazingly, intensely alive, intimately bound to the planet. I missed this, the boons of my druid heritage. I vibrate with energy, bristle electric with it. I fear I might explode from so much pent—
Bloody hell, I know what I did wrong that day in the pub. It’s so bloody simple I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.
Pent. Meaning trapped. When I’d subconsciously drawn energy that day, I’d done nothing with it. I’d not even really understood that I’d absorbed it. Then I’d strolled into a pub, with every atom of my being saturated with volatile power.
It had to go somewhere.
I hadn’t chosen what to do with it. I’d offered it no outlet, no purpose. Nor had I returned it to the earth. Invited yet undirected, it did what any power would do, what it will do again, if I fail a second time.
Explode from me in my purest form—Death.
Gritting my teeth, rigid with the effort of containing the primal force that knows no bounds and obeys no laws once summoned but for those imposed upon it, I tip back my head and gaze upward.
The bat is calm, settled on a timber near a broken pane of stained glass.
Meticulously, I shape the earth-power, aim a tightly channeled gust of frigid air upward while simultaneously inviting a rush of warm wind in through the shattered window, giving the little guy purpose and direction. Bats don’t like extreme cold. As the icy current encroaches from below, it does precisely what any heat-seeking creature would, flaps through the aperture into the warmth I’ve created beyond.
I touch its mind as it leaves. Tell your kind to avoid my castle. Make it legend.
Castledemonbadbadbad.
Yes, I murmur in its mind.
I break contact and instantly shunt the bulk of excess power back to the soil.
As it fades from my body and settles seamlessly into the earth, I laugh out loud—och, bloody hell, what a rush! Finally, I understand what I am and how to control my terrible potency.
Fae and druid are not so different as I thought. Both draw power from nature. Now I must learn to summon only the amount of power necessary for whatever I choose to do. Guileless as a child tasting ice cream for the first time, I’d gorged that day in the Highlands before I’d walked into the pub. I’d nearly gorged again now. Lesson learned.
I push up from the stack of books and stalk across the room to a mirror draped in dark cloth that’s covered with cobwebs. Like the bats, spiders have overtaken my castle, draping their sticky webs everywhere. The maids give me an earful about them, too.
I rip away the covering and stare at my reflection. A towering, dark skinned, raven-haired Unseelie prince with ancient, cold eyes, black wings that unfurl to an eighteen-foot span and trail majestically to the floor stares back at me, torso bare, clad in faded, torn jeans and combat boots.
I’ve wearied of slicing shirts and sweaters, wear little in the privacy of my keep. Tattoos slither restlessly beneath my skin, a torque writhes like a living snake around my throat, and eyes that once flashed iridescent fire settled some time ago into a distant, wintry gaze that glitters in shards of black, blue, and crystalline ice, a cruelly arctic landscape beneath a frosted, sapphire dusk. My eyes don’t match my heart. I ken why people fear me.
This time, instead of trying to summon internal energy to cast glamour, I beckon a dash of power from the soil to restore me to the man I once was. Gently. An invitation, as I was druid-trained. We work together, the earth and druids. We don’t seize or steal.
The young Scot, Christian MacKeltar, is reflected in the glass.
I glance down at my body, marveling—both in the mirror and without, I’m me again! It was that simple. There’s that killer smile the lasses used to love, void of actual death, the eternal five-o’clock shadow on my jaw unless I shave twice a day, the dark hair gathered in a thong at my nape. No longer inhumanly tall, I’m six foot three, lean, muscled, sporting a six-pack and amber tiger-eyes. Christ, I haven’t seen this man in years. No one has.
I reach back to touch my glamoured wings. They aren’t there.
You still haven’t figured out how to cast a glamour that temporarily displaces your wings, allowing you to sit comfortably, have you? Mac said to me not long ago.
“I have now.” I can’t stop smiling. It took me years to figure this out. Knowledge is power. For the first time since I transformed into an Unseelie prince, I feel strong, alive, centered and radiate none of the lethal sexuality of a Fae prince.
I blink at my reflection, dazed. None of the lethal sexuality of a Fae prince. Glamoured like this, I’m a normal man—at least, as normal as a walking, lie-detecting druid can be—with a man’s normal impact on women. A long forbidden fruit is no longer poisoned for me—I can fuck again! No longer will I kill any woman I touch. I can unleash a raging hell of celibacy on a woman. Or ten. I’d begun to think I’d never live to see this day. My mind races, as I try to decide where I might find the nearest warm, willing—
Och, Christ, what is that?
I narrow my eyes, staring into the mirror, opening my senses, but I can only see it, not feel it. It exists…beyond…inaccessible to both the Fae and druid parts of me.
Behind my reflection, a dense black cloud hovers, begins to ooze slowly near. As wide as my wingspan, roughly four or five feet tall, it’s not a Shade; they were all destroyed when the Song was sung. Nor is it a Fae; my wards are powerful and none can enter my kingdom.
I whirl to confront it, but the amorphous, inky cloud rears back and up, retreating to the ceiling. Though it possesses neither form nor face, I feel oddly as if it’s…assessing me. Taking my measure.
As suddenly as it appeared, it vanishes.
I wait for it to reappear. When it doesn’t, I dismiss it. Present problems are problems. I refuse to entertain absent ones. Today is a banner day. I’m no longer at war with myself. No longer must I hide in my dark and stormy castle. I can have sex again. The agony of immortal life without intimacy had been making me feel far less human than turning Unseelie ever did. Dark prince I could deal with. Never taking a woman to my bed would have eventually turned me into the monster I resemble. Isolation dehumanizes. All of us, hero and villain alike, crave intimacy, connection.
I shrug off thoughts of the brief apparition. Draoidheacht is an odd place. Perhaps something I brought here from the king’s capricious library contained this entity, and, if so, it will come again. I’ll discover its nature and deal with it.
At the moment, there’s a single thing on my mind. As I turn hastily for the door to find the nearest willing woman, I catch a stack of books and relics with the toe of my boot; tomes go sliding, artifacts topple, I hear the tinkle of breaking glass and freeze.
Glancing down to confirm my suspicions, I snarl.
I’ve shattered a flask, one that shouldn’t have even been there. I’m careful to store the pernicious beakers on high shelves, well out of the way. But there it is, and I’ve splintered the narrow neck, yet not the voluminous carafe, within which rainbow-hued gems glitter and flit about like thousands of tiny luminous fireflies, as if suddenly agitated.
Or excited by the prospect of freedom.
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.
Hence this clandestine meeting.
She glanced first at Azar, his skin the color of autumn sun glancing off chestnuts, eyes glittering with the saffron and mandarin of twin Samhain fires, then at her summery antithesis, the voluptuous, gilt-skinned Severina, with her ankle-length golden hair and molten gaze.
She would never be able to glean truth from their faces, nor they from hers. Royalty were the most obdurate of the Sidhe, capable of concealing and withstanding much. Unless—Ixcythe shuddered imperceptibly at the thought—their condition continued to deteriorate.
“Why have you summoned us here?” Azar demanded imperiously.
“How,” Ixcythe countered icily, waving a hand to banish her long white ermine cloak, too warm for the sultry grove, “did you know where here was?”
Memories erased by the Cauldron, they’d long ago forgotten they’d once lived in the empyrean orchard. That they’d been able to find it told her much of what she wanted to know, and she felt a flash of spiteful satisfaction that their memor
ies, too, were restored. Suffering was so much more bearable when it was done with company.
Her query was met with silence.
“It happened to you as well. Your memories have returned.” Memories too long, too burdensome to tolerate. Ixcythe had stolen the Cauldron from Aoibheal’s kingdom and tested it on several of her subjects, hoping it might restore order from calamity. It hadn’t worked. It was broken, useless. Old feuds had reawakened, and there were countless ancient quarrels among the race of immortals, endless grudges, eternal grievances. “As has emotion,” she added flatly.
Azar said coolly, “I have no idea what—”
“I’ve shown you my hand,” Ixcythe snapped. “Dare you disrespect the honor?” Royalty observed rigid formalities. They were too powerful to behave otherwise. To eschew courtesies was to incite war.
After a long moment, he inclined his head and said stiffly, “It is as you claim, both memory and emotion have returned.”
Following suit, Severina nodded. “The Summer Court is…” She trailed off, compressing her lips to a thin metallic line.
“Chaos,” Ixcythe finished coldly. “They can’t kill, so they indulge in other amusements, using their powers against each other in horrific ways.” The inhabitants of the Winter Court had become abominations, better suited to the Unseelie prison. If either memory or emotion alone had been restored, the effects wouldn’t have been so catastrophic. And if only memory had returned, they’d have learned to deal with it. It was the emotion fueling their actions that was so deadly. The two combined were toxic to beings that had suffered neither for an eternity.
Azar was silent a moment then said tightly, “I’ve had to seal my castle against them. My own court refuses to hear, much less obey, me.”
It was a damning admission for him to make, that he feared his subjects; an olive branch offered by a desperate prince. No less desperate, Ixcythe accepted it. “I’ve done the same.” She could raise no army against humans, rally no troops, enforce no orders. Her court had devolved into mindless, emotional savages that she could no longer bear to hear or watch. If not for the strength innate to those who ruled the royal houses, she’d be in that dreadful courtyard herself, at this very moment, as gruesome as her subjects.