Shadowfever

I glanced unwillingly where he pointed. It was a door that was much smaller than the others. There was an inscription above the arch. It was a powerful ward. The king had kept things in there he’d never wanted loosed on the world. The ward had been broken long ago. Great. I just hoped they weren’t on my world. I resumed walking, staring straight ahead, retracing my earlier steps. Unlike Christian, I didn’t want to see a damned thing.

“You’ll have time to look around when I’m gone,” I said.

“I’ll need to stay close to the Silver to know when you return.”

“Well, move a little faster, okay? We have no idea how time’s passing out in the real world. You slow it down, I speed it up.”

“Maybe we’ll split the difference.”

“Maybe.” Would enough time have passed that Barrons would be alive again? Standing at the mirror, waiting for me? Or had so much time passed that he’d have given up? Moved on to other tasks?

I’d know in a few minutes.

“She’s not breathing,” he said.

“Neither are we,” I said drily.

“But I think she’s alive. I can … feel her.”

“Good. We need her. Through here,” I said.

Moments later I stepped into the comforting darkness of the Unseelie King’s boudoir, where the dark maker of the Court of Shadows had rested—he’d never slept—and fucked, and dreamed.

Jericho wasn’t dead on the other side of the mirror, nor was he waiting for me. I assumed that meant we’d been gone a good long time as humans counted it.

Christian made it easy for me.

I couldn’t have asked for more.

He laid her on the king’s bed, close to the Silver, and tucked furs around her.

“She’s so cold. You’ve got to hurry, Mac. We need to get her warm. In my travels, I heard that during the battle between the king and original queen, some of the Seelie were taken captive before the prison walls went up. The Unseelie planned to torture them for all eternity, but legends say the Seelie prisoners died because this place is the antithesis of all they are and drains their life essence.” He gave me a grim look. “I think someone brought the Seelie Queen here, put her in that coffin, and left her to die slowly. Uncle Cian said she wasn’t really there when she came to see him but was a projection of herself. As if she was trapped somewhere, focusing all her effort and energy on sending a vision of herself to nudge events around so we would save her when the time was right. Someone wanted revenge. I think she’s been here a long time.”

And V’lane was looking like the prime suspect, considering that he’d been lying to me about where she’d been since day one. But how could any of this be? Why would V’lane have had this woman to begin with? How had she ended up in the Seelie court?

The truth was, I was standing in the middle of so many lies—some of them hundreds of thousands of years old—that I didn’t know where to begin trying to untangle them. If I pulled on one thread, ten others would unravel, and I saw little point in trying to make sense of anything now.

All I could do was what had to be done. Get them both out of here. The sooner the better. Especially her. Not because she was the queen but because Christian’s legend resonated with me and I knew it to be true. A Seelie could survive only a finite space of time in here. I doubted a human would survive half that long. And I wasn’t entirely sure which she really was.

She was dangerously weak. The slight form on the bed barely made a hump. Masses of silvery hair cloaked a body that had deteriorated to that of a slender, undeveloped child. My dreams had been trying to warn me. I’d waited too long. I’d almost been too late.

“Look over there,” I exclaimed, pointing to the far side of the bed. “What’s that on the wall? I think I’ve seen those symbols before.”

He was halfway across the bedchamber before that sixth sense of his made him look back over his shoulder. I know, because I was looking over mine.

It was too late.

I’d already scooped her up and pushed into the Silver. She was oddly insubstantial, as if she’d donned physical form to contain the energy of which she was made and, as her life essence evaporated, so did the physicality holding her. Was she beyond saving?

I know what he thought.

I was the traitor.

I was trying to finish the job of killing the queen by forcing her through a mirror only the king and his concubine could pass through. A mirror that killed all other life, including Fae.

But that wasn’t it at all.

I wasn’t trying to kill the queen. I knew she wouldn’t die. I knew she could go through the mirror.

Because the woman in my arms wasn’t Aoibheal, queen of the Fae.

She was the concubine.

30

That was why I’d screamed. I’d been having a hard enough time dealing with the thought that I was the concubine.

As I’d stared into the coffin and recognized her from the White Mansion, it had taken me only a moment to process that, if the concubine was lying in the coffin and I could pass through the king’s Silver, I had a serious problem.

The scream had been instinctive, denial from the very marrow in my bones clawing its way up my throat and past my lips.

If she was the concubine, and I could go though the Silver, too, there was only one other … person—and I was using that term very loosely—I could be.

“And it’s not the concubine, that’s for sure,” I muttered as I pushed through the Silver and slammed into the wall. I’d expected resistance like in every other Silver, but this one—the first ever created—was untainted by Cruce’s curse. I turned at the last moment, cradling her in my arms, taking the brunt of the impact on my shoulder. Not a damned thing about this made sense.

“Mac, what are you doing?” Christian roared, storming toward the mirror.

“Don’t touch it!” I cried. “It will kill you!” I didn’t want him to think for a minute that it wouldn’t and try to come through. It had killed Barrons. I had no doubt it would destroy Christian, and he didn’t have a get-out-of-death-free card. At least not that I knew of. But as had just become painfully apparent to me, I didn’t know much of anything, so maybe he had a whole deck of them. Maybe everyone did but me. Still, I wasn’t going to count on it. I needed him. More than ever before, I needed the Sinsar Dubh contained, and he was one of the five necessary to do it. I understood why it played with me now.