“She’s conscious?” I exclaimed.
“—briefly before she went under again.”
“Why does it always take you so long to tell me the important things?”
“While the queen was lucid, Jack had the presence of mind to ask her who sealed her in the coffin.”
Expectancy straightened my spine. “And?”
“She said it was a Fae prince she’d never seen before. He called himself Cruce.”
I stared, stunned. “How is that possible? Is anyone who’s supposed to be dead actually dead?”
“Doesn’t seem like it.”
“Did he have wings?”
He gave me a look. “Why?”
“Cruce does.”
“How do you—ah. Memories.”
“Does it bother you? That I’m …” Not the Concubine. I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“No more human than I? On the contrary. You’ve either lived a very long time or you prove reincarnation. I’d like to know which it is, so we’d know whether you can die. Eventually the Unseelie King will come looking for you. He and I are overdue for a talk.”
“What do you want the Book for, Barrons?”
He smiled. Well, he showed me his teeth, anyway. “One spell, Ms. Lane. That’s all. Don’t worry your pretty little head.”
“Don’t talk down to me. It used to shut me up. Doesn’t work anymore. A spell for what? To change you back to whatever you were before? To let you die?”
His eyes narrowed and the rattlesnake stirred in his chest. He looked at my face closely, as if reading the tiniest nuances of the way my nostrils flared on each breath, the shape of my mouth, the movement of my eyes.
I raised a brow, waiting.
“Is that what you need to think of me? That I want to die? Must you dress me up in chivalry to find me palatable? Chivalry demands a suicidal bent. I don’t have one. I can’t get enough of life. I get off on waking up every day for infinity. I like being what I am. I got the best end of the deal. I’ll be here while it’s happening. I’ll be here when it ends. And I’ll stand up from the ashes and do it all over when it begins again.”
“You said somebody beat me to damning you.”
“Melodrama. Did it curry favor? You kissed me.”
“You don’t feel damned?”
“God said, Let there be light. I said, Say please.”
He was gone. No longer standing in front of me. The bookstore seemed empty and I looked around, wondering where he’d gone so quickly and why. Had he melted up against a bookcase, faded into a drape, wrapped himself around a pillar?
Suddenly there was a fist in my hair, behind me, pulling my head back, arching my spine up from the sofa.
He closed his mouth over mine and pushed his tongue in, forcing my teeth wide.
I grabbed his arm, but as sharply as he had my head pulled back, all I could do was steady myself.
He wrapped his other hand around my neck, forcing my chin higher, kissing me more deeply, harder, keeping me from resisting.
Not that I wanted to.
Heart slamming in my chest, my legs moved apart. There are different kinds of kisses. I’d thought I’d experienced them all, if not prior to coming to Dublin, certainly after months of being Pri-ya, in bed with this man.
This was a new one.
All I could do was hold on to his arm and survive.
“Kiss” wasn’t the right word at all.
He fused us together—my jaws so wide, I couldn’t even kiss him back. I could only take what he was doing to me. I felt the sharp slide of fangs over my tongue as he sucked it into his mouth.
I knew then—as he’d never let me see in our bed in that basement—that he was far more animal than man. Maybe he hadn’t always been, but he was now. Maybe, long ago, in the beginning, he’d missed being a man—if, in fact, he’d been one to begin with. But he didn’t anymore. He’d gone native.
I was kind of astonished by it: What a man he’d chosen to be! He could easily have gone feral. He was the strongest, fastest, smartest, most powerful creature I’d ever seen. He could kill everything and everyone, including Fae. He could never be killed. Yet he walked upright and lived in Dublin and he had a bookstore and great cars and collected rare things of beauty. He bitched when his rugs got burned and got pissy when somebody messed with his clothes. He took care of some people, whether he seemed to like doing it or not. And he had a sense of honor that wasn’t animal.
“Honor is animal. Animals are pure. People are fucked up. Quit fucking thinking.” He let go of my mouth long enough to speak, then I couldn’t breathe again.