Shadowfever

“Thick rock,” I muttered. I would never forget my hellish incarceration beneath the Burren.

“We had no idea where it was for months. We suspected Darroc had it but couldn’t get any of our people close enough. He had no tolerance for humans. Then we received reports that MacKayla had infiltrated his camp and was at his right hand.” His gaze glowed with pride. “Well done, darling! You are as brilliant and resourceful as your mother.”

“You said ‘the true one,’ ” I said.

“According to legend, the king made many amulets,” Isla replied. “All capable of sustaining varying degrees of illusion. Used together, they are formidable. But only the last one he made can deceive the king himself. The Book has grown too powerful to be stopped by any other means. Illusion is the only weapon that will work against it.”

“We were right!” I exclaimed, looking at Barrons.

“The prophecy is clear. The one who was inhabited must use the amulet to seal it away.”

“Already on it,” Barrons said coolly.

“It’s not your fight,” Pieter said gently. “We started this. We will end it.”

I sat forward on the edge of the sofa, elbows on my knees. “What are you saying?”

“Your mother is the one who has to do it. Although if you’re anything like her, darling, you think it’s your problem. That’s what we were worried about, why we rushed here tonight. Isla is ‘the inhabited.’ Twenty-three years ago, when the Book escaped, it possessed her, inhabited her. She knows it. She has been it. She understands it. And she’s the only one who can lay it to rest.”

“It never leaves a human alive,” Barrons said flatly.

“It left Fiona alive,” I reminded.

“She’d been eating Unseelie. She was different.”

“Isla was able to wrest it from her body,” Pieter said. “She is the only one we know of that has ever been able to resist to the point where it jumped from her while she was still alive and took another, more complacent host.”

Barrons didn’t look remotely convinced. “But not before it made her kill most of the Haven.”

“I never said it was easy,” Isla said softly, eyes dark with remembered grief. “I despise what it made me do. I live with it every day.”

“But it’s been tracking me,” I protested.

“Sensing your bloodline, looking for me,” Isla said.

“But I’m epic,” I said numbly. Wasn’t I? I was so tired of not knowing my place in things.

Was I going to doom the world? Was I the concubine? Was I the Unseelie King? Was I even human? Was I the person who was supposed to re-inter the Book?

The answer was no to all of the above. I was just Mac Lane, bumbling around, getting in the way a lot, and making stupid decisions.

“You are, darling,” Isla said. “But this isn’t your battle.”

“Your destiny is another day,” Pieter said. “This is only the first of many battles we’ll be called upon to fight. There are dark times ahead. Even with the Book contained, there’s still the matter of the walls between realms. They can’t be rebuilt without the Song of Making. We have our work cut out for us.” He smiled. “Your brothers have their talents, too. They can’t wait to meet you.”

“Oh, MacKayla, we’ll be a family again!” Isla said, and began to cry. “It’s all I ever wanted.”

I looked at Barrons. He wore a grim expression. I looked back at Pieter and Isla. It was all I’d ever wanted, too. I wasn’t the king. I’d been born. I was a person with a family. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. But my heart was already trying.

Family reconciliations aside, Barrons didn’t like the change in the game plan, and neither did I.

We’d spent months building to this moment, and now, on the eve of battle, in walked my biological parents, telling us we were no longer necessary. They would fight the war and finish it.

It chafed.

“Can you track it?” Barrons demanded.

Pieter answered. “Isla can. But it can sense her, as well, which made it too dangerous for her to be in Dublin until we were certain MacKayla had the amulet.”

“How did you know I had it?” I said.

“Your mother said she felt you connect with it tonight. We came at once.”

“I thought I felt you connect with it once before, at the beginning of October last year,” Isla said, “but the feeling was gone almost as suddenly as it came.”