High Voltage (Fever #10)(82)

“There are now two Light Court princes that are full-blooded Fae,” Barrons told us. “They conceal their presence from you.”

“One,” I corrected. “I killed one last night.”

Barrons arched a brow. “You ignored Mac’s decree.”

“We had no choice. You left and never sent word. We had no idea if you were even still alive,” I said flatly.

“No thanks to the Fae. They demanded she come to court, rolled out the bloody red carpet. For a few days they played nice, feigning willingness to accept her. Gratitude that she’d repaired the world and destroyed the Unseelie. But their ancient powers were being reinvigorated by the Song. After four days in Faery, meeting with every caste, giving Mac no time to try to learn how to access the power the queen passed to her, the attacks began. Forty-two attacks on her life in twelve hours,” he growled, dark eyes flashing.



“They came after her even though she has the spear and you at her side?” I said incredulously. “Are they nuts?”

“Stealth attacks in large numbers, trying to separate us. They were willing to die to see one of them take her place. We needed time. A queen who can’t use her power is no queen at all. We returned to Dublin, I stacked Silvers, and took her to a chamber I know in the White Mansion; the first room the Unseelie King built for his concubine, long before the White Mansion came to be. A chamber where time moves so slowly it doesn’t even crawl. A day in our world is decades there. Best guess, she’s been sitting in that room for nearly a century.”

“And you? How long have you been sitting here?” Ryodan demanded.

“Irrelevant.”

“Why are you here, if she’s in the White Mansion?” I asked. Barrons would never leave Mac alone, unguarded.

“She’s not. She moved things. I was in the White Mansion, outside the chamber, keeping guard. Abruptly, I found myself in the bookstore with her chamber connected to it by a door that didn’t exist before.” He gestured over his shoulder, at a door to the right of the enameled fireplace in the rear conversation area. “Perhaps she sensed a threat approaching and moved us. Then things began to appear, change. Be glad you didn’t come the day she turned everything pink. If you never see a bloody, tufted pink Chesterfield, count yourself lucky. She’s testing her powers. Seeing what she can do. The lemur should vanish soon. Most of it does.”



“Is she eating, drinking? Doing anything?” I asked. God, I just wanted to see her. So many times over the past few years, I’d hungered to talk to her. Now especially, with Ryodan back. Me and Mac are a lot alike yet at the same time couldn’t be more different. She gets emotion but doesn’t always get logic. We’re yin-yang and good for each other that way.

“No. Not only does time pass very differently there, I doubt she needs to anymore. She’s turning Fae. I opened the door. Once. The temporal clash nearly killed me.”

“When’s the last time you ate?” Ryodan demanded.

“Too long.”

“Go. I’ll remain.”

Barrons sliced his head in negation.

“You don’t look good.”

“We make our own choices, don’t we? We don’t listen to the counsel of others. How did that work out for you?”

“For fuck’s sake, let it go. We argued about it then. It seemed the wisest option at the time and you know it,” Ryodan said coolly.

“Time. That’s always the problem, isn’t it?”

I had no idea what they were talking about once again, but silently I agreed. Not enough time with Dancer. Now, not enough with Ryodan before my body had become lethal to the touch.

Ryodan glanced at me. I didn’t even need him to open his mouth to know what he was going to say. “Just go,” I said irritably, “have your alpha Nine catch-up time. I need to do some research anyway.” To Barrons, I said, “Books on the old Earth gods, point me to them.”



He did, and as they headed back to Barrons’s office, I loped upstairs in the general direction of the lemur who’d just swung up over the balustrade, to educate myself on our new, ancient enemies.



* * *





π

They say that those who forget their past are condemned to repeat it. What, then, are those who erase their past condemned to do?

Be devoured by it?

Destroy all hope of a future?

Because that’s pretty much what had happened to our past—a giant eraser had been taken to it.

The Celts were known for not writing things down, ours was an ancient, oral tradition.

Then the Romans had come along and plastered their god names over ours, and if that hadn’t obfuscated our origins enough, Christianity stormed in and pasted yet more names, images, and legends over our gods until we were left with little more than the likes of leprechauns, diminutive, mischievous fairies, and trolls.

We’re a stubborn people, we Irish. We don’t go down easily. The only way Christianity had been able to eradicate our history so completely was by erecting churches on our sacred sites, obscuring their origin and purpose, and renaming our pagan feast days, transforming them into Christian celebrations with none of our traditions behind them.

Our gods were a hot mess of slanted, rewritten press.