Tall, beautifully formed, ice-white, and smooth as marble, with long jet hair, he sat on a bank of crusted snow beside the coffin, face buried in his hands.
I stood at the top of the ridge, staring. Wind gusted down from high cliffs and tangled my hair. Was he a residue? A memory? There was none of that fading at the edges, no transparency.
Was he my king?
As soon as I thought the question, I knew he wasn’t.
Then who was he?
What I could see of his ivory skin—a hand on his cheek, one sleek, strong white arm—raced with dark shapes and symbols.
Was it possible there were five Unseelie Princes? This wasn’t one of the three who’d raped me, and he had no wings, which meant he wasn’t War/Cruce, either.
So who was he?
“It’s about bloody damned time,” he tossed over his shoulder, without turning. “Been waiting weeks.”
I jerked. He’d spoken in that awful chiming and, while my mind understood it, my ears would never get used to it. That was only part of what made me jerk, though. Needing to crack my ice was another part of it. But the majority was horror at the realization of who I was looking at.
“Christian MacKeltar,” I said, and grimaced. I was speaking the language of my enemies, a language I’d never learned, with a mouth incapable of shaping it. I couldn’t get back to my side of the mirror soon enough. “Is that you?”
“In the flesh, lass. Well … mostly.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant it was mostly him or mostly flesh. I didn’t ask.
He raised his head and shot me a savage look over his shoulder. He was beautiful. He was wrong. His eyes were full black. He blinked and had whites again.
In another life, I would have gone crazy over Christian MacKeltar. Or at least I would have gone nuts for the Christian I met back in Dublin. He was so different now that, if he hadn’t spoken to me, I’m not sure how long it might have taken me to figure out who he was. The good-looking college student with the great body, Druid heart, and killer smile was gone. As I watched shapes and symbols move under his skin, I wondered: If we weren’t inside the prison that leached color from everything, would his tattoos still be black or kaleidoscopic?
I stood still too long and was suddenly staring at him through a thin sheeting of ice. He’d been sitting still and was ice-free. Why? Then there was that short-sleeved shirt he was wearing. Wasn’t he cold? When I cracked it, he spoke.
“The majority of what happens here is in your mind. Whatever you permit yourself to feel intensifies.” The words were dark bells hammered on a bent xylophone. I shuddered. I could hear the hint of Scots brogue in the chiming, and the element of humanity in the inhuman tongue made it all the more disturbing.
“You mean if I don’t think about icing, I won’t?” I said. My stomach growled and I was suddenly frosted with thick, creamy blue icing.
“Thought about food, did you now, lass?” Amusement leavened the tubular tones, made it slightly more bearable. He stood up but made no move toward me. “You’ll find you do that a lot here.”
I thought about turning the icing to ice. It was that simple. When I stepped forward, it shattered from my skin. “Does this mean if I think of a warm, tropical beach—”
“No. The fabric of this place is what it is. You can make it worse, but you can never make it better. You can only destroy, not create. That was a bit of added nastiness on the queen’s part. I suspect it’s not icing on you but flakes of frost creamed with the innards of a thing you’d rather not look at too closely.”
I glanced at the sepulchre. I couldn’t help it. It hulked, dark and silent, the boogeyman of twenty years of bad dreams. I’d been trying to ignore it but couldn’t. It gnawed at my awareness.
I would stand beside it.
I would open it, look inside, and scream.
Right. Not in a hurry to do that.
I looked back at Christian. What was he doing here? Whatever had brought me to this place had consumed all my nightly hours for most of my life. I was entitled to a few minutes of my own before whatever was fated happened.
If they were indeed my own.
It didn’t escape me that I’d just found exactly what I needed. How lucky to find the fifth of the five Druids necessary to perform the ritual right here, next to whatever it was I’d been led to!
Too bad I didn’t believe in luck anymore.
I felt bitterly manipulated. But by whom and why?
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“Och, what happened to me?” Laughter screeched like metal spikes across chalkboard bells. “That would be you, lass. You happened to me. You fed me Unseelie.”
I was appalled. This was what feeding him the flesh of dark Fae had done to him? Whatever transformation Christian had begun back on that world where we’d dried our clothes by the loch had continued at breakneck speed.
He looked half human, half Fae, and in this place of shadows and ice, he was leaning toward the Unseelie, not their light brethren. With a few finishing touches, he’d look just like one of the princes. I bit my lip. What could I say? I’m sorry? Does it hurt? Are you turning into a monster inside, too? Maybe he’d look better once he was out in the real world, where there were other colors besides black, white, and blue.
He gave me a darker version of that killer smile, white teeth flashing against cobalt lips in a white-marble face. “Och, your heart weeps for me. I see it in your eyes,” he mocked. The smile faded, but the hostility in his gaze grew. “It should. I’m beginning to look like one of them, aren’t I? No handy mirrors around here. Don’t know what my face looks like and doubt I want to.”
“Eating Unseelie did this to you? I don’t understand. I’ve eaten Unseelie. So did Mallucé and Darroc, Fiona and O’Bannion. Then there’s Jayne and his men. Nothing like this happened to me or any of them.”
“I suspect it began happening on Halloween. I wasn’t runed well enough.” The smile morphed from killer to murderous. “I blame your Barrons for that. We’ll be seeing who’s the finer Druid now. We’ll be having words when we meet again.”
From the expression on that white chiseled face, I doubted they would be words. “Was Jericho the one who tattooed you?”
He raised a brow. “So, it’s ‘Jericho,’ is it? No, my uncles Dageus and Cian did the work, but he should have checked me when I was finished, and he didn’t. He let me go into the ritual unprotected.”