It’s a better bet that the Unseelie know more about the Dark Book than the Seelie Queen’s right hand. Maybe even where to find the prophecy. Like Barrons, Darroc has actually seen pages of the arcane tome. I was forced to concede that hunting the Sinsar Dubh was an exercise in futility until I discovered how to control it. But Darroc has never stopped his search. Why? What does he know that I don’t?

The sooner I pry his secrets from him, the sooner I learn to contain and use the Sinsar Dubh, the sooner I can stop living in this agonizing reality that I will have no hesitation about destroying to replace with my world. The right one. Where everything ends happily ever after.

“Friends work toward common goals,” he says.

“Like hunting books,” I agree.

“Friends trust each other. They don’t barricade each other out.” He looks at my feet.

The runes came from within me. I am my circle. He doesn’t know this. I kick them aside. I wonder if he has forgotten my spear. As heavily laced with Unseelie as he is, a single prick would sentence him to the same slow, gruesome death that Malluce suffered.

When I step out, he slowly looks me up and down.

I see the thoughts that flash through his eyes as they travel over my body: kill her/fuck her/assault and bind her/explore her uses? It takes a lot to make a man kill a beautiful woman he has not yet slept with. Especially if he enjoyed her sister.

“Friends don’t try to coerce each other,” I say with a pointed look at the amulet.

He inclines his head and slips it back inside his shirt.

I offer my hand with a smile. Barrons taught me well. Keep your friends close …

Darroc takes it, leans down to place a light kiss upon my lips. The tension between us is a palpable thing. One sudden move from either of us and we’ll be all over each other, trying to kill each other, and we know it. He keeps his body pliant. I infuse my limbs with languor. We are two scorpions with coiled tails, trying to mate. It is no more than I deserve, the punishment of letting him touch me like this. I sentenced Barrons to death.

I part my lips beneath his, but demurely, teeth standing guard. I exhale a soft whisper of a breath into his mouth. He likes it.

… and your enemies closer.

Behind us, the Unseelie Princes begin to chime softly like dark crystal. I remember that sound. I know what it precedes. I tighten my hand on his. “Never them. Never again.”

Darroc turns to them and barks a harsh command in a language that hurts my ears.

They vanish.

The moment I no longer know where they are, whether they might be closing in on me, I reach for my spear. It is gone, too.

The Unseelie Princes cannot sift within the Silvers with any predictability. Darroc tells me it’s a crapshoot every time they try. Cruce’s curse again, screwing things up.

I tell him the stones are no better, that whatever dimension I’m in tries to expel them once uncovered, in an effort to return the rune-covered blue-black stones to the cliffs of the icy Unseelie prison from whence they were chiseled.

I’m surprised he doesn’t know this and tell him so.

“You do not understand what life is like at the Seelie court, MacKayla. Those with true knowledge, true memories of our past, guard it zealously. There are as many versions of the Old Days and conflicting tales of our origins as there are dimensions to choose from within the hall. The only Unseelie we ever saw were those we battled the day the king and queen fought and the king slew our queen. Since then, we have drunk from the cauldron countless times.”

He moves along the cliff’s edge with unnatural fluidity and grace. Fae move like sleek, kingly predators, born of the sure knowledge that they can never die—or at least very rarely and only under special circumstances. He hasn’t lost that arrogance, or perhaps he’s reclaimed it, from all the Unseelie he’s been eating. He’s not wearing the crimson robes that once terrified me. Tall, gracefully muscled, he’s dressed like an outdoorsman in a Versace ad, with a long fall of moon-silvered hair secured at his nape. He’s undeniably sexy. In his power and confidence, he reminds me of Barrons.

I don’t ask why they drink. I understand. If I found the cauldron and drank from it, it would erase all pain and allow me to start life over, a blank slate. I couldn’t grieve for what I didn’t remember ever having. That they drink implies that on some level the Fae feel. If not pain, at least significant discomfort.

“So how are we going to get out of here?” I ask.

His reply gives me a sudden chill, a sense of something more vast and incomprehensible than deja vu—an inevitability finally manifesting.

“The White Mansion.”

The night the walls came crashing down, I cowered in a belfry, my only goal to survive until dawn.

I had no idea if the world would survive with me.

I thought it was the longest night of my life. I was wrong.

This is the longest night of my life, walking side by side with my enemy, mourning Jericho Barrons, drowning in my own complicity.

It stretches on and on. I live a thousand hours in a handful. I count from one to sixty beneath my breath, over and over, ticking away the minutes I make it through, thinking if I put enough of them between me and his death, the immediacy of the pain might dull and I will be able to catch a breath without a knife stabbing through my heart.

We do not pause to eat or sleep. He keeps Unseelie flesh in a pouch and periodically chews it while we travel, which means he can keep going far longer than I. At some point, I’ll be forced to rest. The thought of relinquishing consciousness in his presence is not a pleasant one.

I have weapons in my arsenal that I’ve not yet tried on him. I have no doubt he is concealing armaments, too. Our truce is a floor of eggshells and we’re both wearing combat boots.

“Where is the Unseelie King?” I ask, hoping distraction might make the minutes move faster. “It’s his book on the loose out there. I heard he wants it destroyed. Why isn’t he doing something about it?” I may as well embark on an Unseelie fishing expedition, casting my nets for anything I can use. Until I know how powerful Darroc is and better understand what I have in my dark glassy lake, subtlety is the name of my game. I will make no rash moves that jeopardize my mission. Barrons’ resurrection depends on it.

He shrugs. “He vanished long ago. Some say he’s too insane to care. Others believe he cannot leave the Unseelie prison and lies encased in a tomb of black ice, slumbering eternally. Still others claim the prison never contained him to begin with and that remorse for the death of his concubine was the only bond he ever permitted.”

“That implies love. Fae don’t.”

“Debatable. I recognize myself in you and find it … compelling. It makes me less alone.”

Translation: I serve as a mirror and the Fae enjoy their own reflection. “Is that desirable to a Fae—to be less alone?”

“Few Fae can endure solitude. Some posit that energy cast into an ethos that fails to reflect or rebound it permits that energy to dissipate until nothing remains. Perhaps it is a flaw.”

“Like clapping for Tinker Bell,” I mock. “A mirror, validation.”

He gives me a look.

“Is that what the Fae are made of? Energy?”

He gives me another look that reminds me of V’lane, and I know that he will never discuss what the Fae are comprised of with me or any human. His superiority complex has in no way been diminished by time as a mortal. Rather, I suspect it has grown. He knows both sides now. This gives him a tactical advantage over other Fae. He understands what makes us tick and is more dangerous because of it. I file the energy idea away for further contemplation. Iron affects the Fae. Why? Are they some kind of energy that could be “shorted out”?