Shadowfever

“Stop it,” Drustan said quietly. “ ’Tis a Fae Book and they’ve come to see it contained, as is their right.”

“They’re the reason it got out in the first place,” Fade said.

“We are Seelie, not sidhe-seers. The sidhe-seers let it out.”

“You made it.”

“We did not. The Unseelie made it.”

“Seelie, Unseelie—you’re all fairies to me,” Lor grumbled.

“I thought there was no sifting in this part of the abbey,” I said.

“We had to drop all the wards to let everyone in. There’s too much diversity in …”

“Everyone’s DNA?” I said drily.

Kat smiled. “For lack of a better word. The Keltar are one thing, Barrons and his men another, the Fae yet another.”

And me? I wanted to ask, but didn’t. Was I human? Had the Book told me any of the truth? Did I really have the Sinsar Dubh inside me? Had it stamped its imprint, word for word, into my defenseless infant psyche? Over the years, had I always sensed it—something fundamentally wrong with me—and done my best to wall it off or submerge it in a dark glassy lake to protect myself?

If I did have the entire Book of dark magic inside me, and Kat found out about it, would they try to lock me up down here, too?

I shivered. Would they hunt me like we’d hunted the Sinsar Dubh?

Barrons looked down at me. What is it?

Just cold, I lied. If I did have the Sinsar Dubh inside me, did that mean the spell I’d walked away from was in my glassy lake? There at the bottom, like the Book had said? What was the difference, then? Had I really subdued the monster, or was it still inside me? Was the monster temptation, and I’d defeated it?

“Where’s V’lane?” I asked, desperate for concretes.

“He is collecting the queen,” Velvet said.

That started another fight.

“If you think we’re going to let her come here and open the Sinsar Dubh, you’re wrong.”

“How do you expect her to rebuild the walls without it?” Dree’lia demanded.

“We don’t need walls. You die as easy as any humans,” Fade said.

“Is she even conscious?” I asked.

“We need the walls,” Kat said quietly.

“She surfaces but is still mostly out of it,” Ryodan said. “Point is, if anybody’s reading that damned Book, it’s not going to be a fairy. They started this fucking mess.”

Everyone was still arguing ten minutes later when we reached the cavern that had been designed to contain the Sinsar Dubh.

As we approached the doors, Christian glanced back at me and I nodded. I knew what he was thinking. We’d seen doors like this before, at the entrance to the Unseelie King’s fortress of black ice, however these were much smaller. Kat pressed a hand to a pattern of runes on the door and they swung open silently.

The blackness beyond was so enormous and complete that the thin beams of our flashlights were swallowed a few feet in.

I heard a match being struck, then Jo lit an oil torch mounted in a silver sconce on the wall. It flared into life, fed into the next and the next, until the cavern was brilliantly illuminated.

A hush fell over us.

Chiseled of milky stone, the cavern soared to an impossibly high ceiling with no visible means of support. Every inch of it—floors, walls, ceiling—was covered with silver runes that glittered as if they’d been branded into stone with diamond dust. The torchlight danced off the runes, making the chamber almost too bright to see. I squinted. Figured the only place in Dublin I’d ever need my sunglasses was underground.

The cavern was easily as large as the Unseelie King’s bedchamber. Between the doors and the size of the place, I wondered how much credence there was to the theory that the king was the one who’d founded our order, who’d originally brought his cursed Book here to be entombed.

In the center was a slab laid across two stones. It was also covered with glittering symbols, but these moved constantly, sliding up and across the slab like the tattoos that moved beneath the Unseelie Princes’ skin. They disappeared over the edge and began again at the floor.

“Seen runes like these before, Barrons?” Ryodan said.

“No. You?” Barrons said.

“New to me. Could be useful.”

I heard the sound of a phone taking pictures.

Then I heard the sound of a phone being crushed against rock.

“Are you out of your mind?” Ryodan said disbelievingly. “That was my phone.”

“Possibly,” Jo said. “But no one records anything here.”