“No, MacKayla.”
“I don’t believe you.” I would not be lulled into stupidity again, into believing something that wasn’t true, so it could be used against me.
“I would not have believed it, either. No human has ever come back from being made Pri-ya, and, although I am pleased that you have recovered from what was done to you, I am not pleased that I must now compete for you with no glamour, without the glory of my birthright. They were Unseelie, MacKayla, the foulest of the foul, the darkest of my race, the abominations. I am Seelie, and we are vastly different. I had hoped that one day, when you trusted me, you would let me share with you the ecstasy of being with one like me. With no pain, MacKayla, and no price. Now that can never be. You have no idea how exquisite the experience might have been and now never will.”
“Bullshit,” I said. Games within games. That was all my life was anymore. Was he lying just so he could ambush me when I least expected it?
“You suffered the full, undampened power of three Unseelie Princes. They were inside you. It is impossible to predict all it might have done to you.”
“Four,” I snarled. “And don’t remind me where they were. I’m acutely aware of it.”
His eyes narrowed to slits and sparked with inhuman fire. “Four? There were four? Who was this fourth? Was it Barrons? Tell me!”
I flinched. The thought had never occurred to me. The fourth one who had kept himself concealed from me had been the fourth Unseelie Prince. Hadn’t he? The fourth was Fae. Wasn’t he? All my sidhe-seer abilities had been completely deadened from eating Unseelie flesh the night before, to gain Fae-heightened strength to escape the riots and make it to safety. In all honesty, I couldn’t swear the fourth was Fae. I could only say he’d been intensely sexual.
Why had he kept his face hidden? All I’d ever seen of him was a glimpse of skin, muscle, tattoo.
Tattoo.
“It couldn’t have been Barrons. He was in Scotland that night.”
V’lane’s anger iced the air. The temperature dropped so sharply that my next inhalation burned my lungs. “Not the entire night, MacKayla. The Keltar ritual to maintain the walls between realms was sabotaged. The circle of stones in which the sacred rites have been performed since the day the Compact was negotiated between my queen and your human Keltar was destroyed, supplanted by a Fae realm. Barrons was last seen at midnight on Samhain. He could easily have been in Dublin before dawn.”
Ouch! Then why hadn’t he come for me immediately? Why hadn’t he tracked me by the brand he’d stamped at the base of my skull and saved me? For that matter, how long had it taken for him to rescue me from my hell at the abbey? My memory of those early days was badly blurred. “Barrons doesn’t hang out with the Unseelie or the LM. They don’t like him any more than you do.”
“Indeed.” V’lane’s iridescent eyes were mocking.
“Remind me,” I said with acid sweetness, “why is that, again?” He’d never told me, and I didn’t think he would now. But I would find out, one way or another. I was going to find out everything, one way or another.
I had to consider what V’lane was saying. In my unpredictable, frequently inexplicable world, I had to consider everything. Not only did Barrons have some kind of agreement with the Shades, he knew a tremendous amount about the never-before-seen-by-humans-because-they’d-always-been-incarcerated Unseelie half of the Fae race. He was much older than a human could be, and I’d recently caught him stepping out of the Unseelie Silver he kept in his study at the bookstore, carrying a woman who’d been brutally killed.
What possible reason might Barrons have to turn me Pri-ya, then bring me back? For the opportunity to play the hero? To storm in and save the day, in hopes of securing my blind faith once and for all? Not only hadn’t it worked, but why wouldn’t he just keep me Pri-ya and use me? He could have stopped in his efforts to restore my mind halfway through, left me hanging in a mentally impaired yet functional Pri-ya state indefinitely, and I’d have done anything he’d asked, to keep getting sex. I’d have traipsed all over the world, hunting the Dark Book, slave to his every command.
But he hadn’t. He’d brought me all the way back. Freed me.
“What does Barrons want, MacKayla?” V’lane said softly.
Same thing as V’lane and everyone else I’d met since I’d arrived in Dublin: the Sinsar Dubh. But neither Barrons nor I could touch it. I could track it, and he believed I had the potential to get my hands on it eventually, with the right training.