Mega O’Malley croaks like a Joe!

No fecking way.

Just when I’m getting light-headed, he slams a fist into my back and I spit out a mangled mouthful. Can’t breathe for a minute. Then screech it in. Air ain’t never been sweeter.

He smiles. His teeth are normal. I stare at him. Mind playing tricks? I been watching too many movies.

“Got a job for you.”

“No way,” I say instantly. Ain’t falling in with his crowd. Got the feeling you don’t get to fall back out. You just fall. ’Til you hit bottom. Ain’t going that low. Got trubs of my own.

“Didn’t ask, kid.”

“Don’t work for nobody calls me kid.”

“Let her go.”

I screw my face up in a scowl. “Who sent the party invites for my water tower?” I’m pissed. Whatever happened to a little privacy?

One of the Keltars oozes from the shadows. Only seen him from a distance. Don’t know how either of ’em got so close to me without me knowing. Freaks me. I got supersenses and they snuck up on me.

Scot laughs. But he don’t look like a Scot no more. He looks sorta like … I whistle and shake my head sympathetically. He’s going Unseelie Prince.

They forget me. Busy looking at each other. Ry-O folds his arms. The Scot does the same.

I take advantage of the moment. Ain’t sticking around to find out what job Ry-O has in mind for me. Never wanna know. And if some dude turned dark side thinks he’s gonna score redemption playing avenging angel for me, I got news for him. I don’t want it.

My ticket to hell’s already been punched, bags on board, steam whistle blowing.

I’m fine with it. Like knowing ’zactly where I stand.

I freeze-frame out.

No night. No day. No time.

We get lost in each other.

Something happens to me down there in the underground. I’m reborn. I feel peaceful for the first time in my life. I’m no longer bipolar. There’s nothing I’m hiding from myself.

Being afraid is debilitating. I’ll take truth over fear of it any day.

I am the Unseelie King. I am the Unseelie King.

I say it over and over in my mind.

I accept it.

I don’t know how or why and may never, but at least now I’ve looked hard at the darkest part of me.

It really was the only explanation all along.

It’s almost funny in a way. The whole time I was so worried about what everyone around me might be, I was the biggest bad of all.

That dark, glassy lake I’ve got is him. Me. Us. That’s why it always terrified me. Somehow I managed to partition my psyche and store him away. Me. The parts of me that weren’t born twenty-three years ago, if I actually was born.

I can’t think of any scenario that explains how I came to be what I am. But the truth of my memory is indisputable.

I did stand in that laboratory, nearly a million years ago. I did create the Hallows and I did love the concubine and I did give birth to the Unseelie. That was all me.

Maybe that’s why Barrons and I can’t resist each other. We both have our monsters. “You really think evil is a choice?” I ask.

“Everything is. Each moment. Each day.”

“I didn’t sleep with Darroc. But I would have.”

“Irrelevant.” He moves inside me. “I’m here now.”

“I was going to seduce the shortcut out of him so I could get the Book. Then I was going to unmake this world and replace it with another, so I could have you back.”

He freezes. I can’t see his face. He’s behind me. It’s part of why I can say it. I don’t think I could say it to his face and see myself reflected in his eyes.

I wasn’t going to unmake the world for my sister. I’d loved her all my life. I’d known him for only a few short months.

“Might have been a bit strenuous for your first attempt at creation,” he says finally. He’s trying not to laugh. I tell him I would have doomed mankind for him, and he tries not to laugh.

“It wouldn’t have been my first attempt. I’m a pro. You were wrong. I am the Unseelie King,” I tell him.

He begins moving again. After a while, he pulls me around and kisses me. “You’re Mac,” he says. “And I’m Jericho. And nothing else matters. Never will. You exist in a place that is beyond all rules for me. Do you understand that?”

I do.

Jericho Barrons just told me he loves me.

“What was your plan?” I ask much later. “When we got the Book locked down, how were you going to get the spell you wanted?”

“The Unseelie have never drunk from the cauldron. All of them know the First Language. I made a few deals, set things in motion.”

I shake my head, frowning at myself. Sometimes I miss the most obvious things.

“But now I have you.”

“I’ll be able to read it.” That was creepy. Now at least I knew why I had such a strong negative reaction to the Sinsar Dubh. All my sins were trapped between its covers. And the damn thing just wouldn’t go away. I’d tried to escape culpability, and my culpability had had the nerve to take on a life of its own and hunt me.

I understood why it stalked me. Once it had become sentient—a mind with no feet, no wings, no method of locomotion and nothing else in all of existence quite like it, except me, and I’d obviously despised it—it must have hated me. And since it was me, it loved me, too. The Book I’d written had become obsessed with me. It wanted to hurt me, not kill me.

Because it wanted my attention.

So many things made sense now that I’d accepted I was the king.

I’d wondered why the Silvers had always been so hard for me to get in and out of. “Cruce’s” curse, which had really been cast by the other Unseelie Princes, had sensed me and tried to keep me out. Of course I knew my way around the black fortress and the Unseelie hell. It had been my home. Every step had been instinctive because I’d walked those icy paths millions of times, called greetings to the cliffs, wept for the cruel confinement of my sons and daughters. I understood why the concubine’s memories had played out before my eyes but the king’s had sort of slid into my brain. I knew now why I’d known the command to open the doors to the king’s fortress.

I might be the king, but at least I was the “good” king. I preferred to think of myself as the Seelie King, because I’d eradicated all my evil. The obsessed maniac who’d done experiments on anything and everything to achieve his ends was out there in Book form, not inside me, and that was no small comfort. I’d chosen to get rid of my evil—I’d made a choice, like Barrons had said—and I’d been trying to destroy those blackest parts of me ever since.

Barrons was speaking. I’d forgotten we were talking.

“I’m counting on you being able to read it. Makes everything simpler. We just have to figure out how to capture it with three stones and no Druids. I’m damned if I’m letting those fucks near it again.”

I looked down at the silver and gold chain, the stone housed in the ornate gilt cage. Did I even need the stones or the Druids to trap my Book, or was the amulet what I’d been hunting for all along? I certainly fit into the “inhabited” or “possessed” category. I was the king of the Fae inside a female human’s body.

I wondered how the concubine had lost the amulet. Who had taken it from her, betrayed me? Had someone abducted her, faked her death, then whisked her off to the Seelie court while I’d been insane with grief, busy divesting myself of my sins?

She never would have taken it off willingly, yet here it was, in the world of man. If someone had come for her, might she have cast it off rather than let it fall into the wrong hands, patiently sowing clues, taking her chances that one day events would align, I would remember, and we would escape whatever had been done to us and be together again? Too bad I didn’t want to be with her.

She’d always hated illusion. When she’d planted gardens and added on to the White Mansion, she’d done it in the old ways. The Faery court reverted to nothingness if the Fae attending it failed to maintain it. The White Mansion had been fashioned differently and would stand the test of time with or without her, apart from anyone.