Shadowfever

I didn’t know we were on a high plain until we were suddenly at the edge of the plateau, and I am startled by the valley dropping sharply away before me.

Across that valley, on an oceanic swell of hill, it looms. It soars. It sprawls for miles in every direction.

The White Mansion.

Again I get that uncanny feeling of inevitability that, one way or another, life would have deposited me here, that in any reality I would have made the same choices that drove me to its door.

Home to the Unseelie King’s beloved concubine for whom he killed the Seelie Queen, it is so enormous it boggles the mind. I turn my head from side to side, up and down, trying to take it all in. One could hope to behold its entirety only from miles away, as we are now. Was this where Barrons had been trying to lead me? If so, why? Had Ryodan been lying when he found me on the cliff’s edge and told me that the way back to Dublin was through an IFP, an Interdimensional Fairy Pothole, as I’d dubbed the slivers of Fae reality that splintered our world now that the walls were down?

The walls are alabaster, reflecting the sun, and blaze with such brilliance that I narrow my eyes to slits. The sky beyond the House—I cannot think of it without a capital; it is far more than a mere residence—deepens to a dazzling blue that exists only in Faery, a shade that will never be seen in the human world. There are certain Faery colors that have dimension, are comprised of myriad seductive subtleties upon which the eye could linger for time uncounted. The sky is nearly as addictive as the golden floor in the Hall of All Days.

I force my gaze back to the White Mansion. I explore its lines, foundation to rooftop, terrace to tower, garden to fountain to turret. A Möbius strip of tiered structures on an Escher-esque landscape, it turns back on itself here and there, continuous and unbroken, ever-changing and unfolding. It strains the eye, tests the mind. But I’ve seen Fae in their true form. I find it … soothing. In my dead black heart, I feel something. I don’t understand how anything could stir in there, but it does. Not a full-blown feeling, but an echo of an emotion. Faint yet undeniable.

Darroc watches me. I pretend not to notice.

“Your race has never built a thing of such beauty, complexity, and perfection,” he says.

“Nor has my race ever created a Sinsar Dubh,” I parry.

“Small creatures create small things.”

“Large creatures’ egos are so big they don’t see the small things coming,” I murmur. Like traps, I don’t say.

He intuits it. He laughs and says, “I will remember the warning, MacKayla.”

After he found the first two Silvers at an auction house in London, Darroc tells me, he had to learn to use them. It took him dozens of tries to establish a static link into the Fae realms, then, once he was inside the Silvers, it took him months to find a way to the Unseelie prison.

There’s pride in his voice as he speaks of his trials and triumphs. Stripped of his Fae essence, he not only survived when his race didn’t believe he would, but he accomplished the goal he’d been pursuing as a Fae, the very thing for which he’d been banished. He feels superior to others of his kind.

I listen, analyzing everything he tells me, looking for chinks in his armor. I know Fae have “feelings” such as arrogance, superiority, mockery, and condescension. Listening to him, I add pride, vengeance, impatience, gloating, and amusement to the list.

We’ve been making small talk for some time, watching each other intently. I’ve told him about growing up in Ashford, my first impressions of Dublin, my love of fast cars. He has told me more about his fall from grace, what he did, why he did it. We compete to disarm each other with trivial confidences that betray nothing of importance.

As we cross the valley, I say, “Why go to the Unseelie prison? Why not the Seelie court?”

“And give Aoibheal the opportunity to finish me off for good? The next time I see the bitch, she dies.”

Was that why he’d taken my spear—to kill the queen? He’d lifted it without my awareness, just like V’lane had. How? He wasn’t Fae anymore. Had he eaten so much Unseelie that he was now a mutant with unpredictable abilities? I recall being in the church, sandwiched between Unseelie Princes, turning the spear on myself, throwing it, striking the pedestal of a basin, holy water splashing, steam hissing. How had he made me throw it away then? How had he taken it from me now?

“Is the queen at the Seelie court right now?” I cast my net again.

“How would I know? I have been banished. Assuming I found a way in, the first Seelie that saw me would kill me.”

“Don’t you have allies at the Seelie court? Isn’t V’lane your friend?”

He snorts disdainfully. “We sat on her High Council together. Though he gives lip service to Fae supremacy and speaks of walking the earth freely again without the odious Compact governing us—us, as if humans could govern their gods!—when it comes to action, V’lane is Aoibheal’s lapdog and always has been. I am now human, according to my fairer brethren, and they despise me.”

“I thought you said they worshipped you as a hero for tearing the walls down and freeing them.”

His eyes narrow. “I said they will. Soon, I will be heralded as the savior of our race.”

“So you went to the Unseelie prison. That was risky.” I prod to keep him talking. As long as he’s talking, I can focus on his words, on my goals. Silence isn’t golden, it’s deadly. It’s a vacuum that fills up with ghosts.

“I needed the Hunters. As a Fae, I could summon them. As a mortal, I had to physically seek them.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t kill you on sight.” Hunters hate humans. The black-skinned, winged demons have no love for anything but themselves.

“Death is not a Hunter’s delight. Too final.”

A memory flickers through his eyes, and I know that when he found them, they did things to him that made him scream for a long time.

“They agreed to help me in exchange for permanent freedom. They taught me to eat Unseelie. After tracking weaknesses in the prison walls, where Unseelie had escaped before, I patched them.”

“To make yourself the only game in town.”

He nods. “If my dark brethren were going to be freed, they would be thanking me for it. I discovered how to link Silvers and created a passage to Dublin through the White Mansion.”

“Why here?”