He, who had once been whole, was halved, without hope of ever being complete again. And when you’ve known that kind of love, to endure the creeping passage of time without it is to live a half-life where nothing ever feels real.

He fabricated their reunion in countless illusions, slipping in and out of insanity, talking to her as if she were beside him, answering.

He’d lived lie after lie to escape the unbearable truth: she’d left him by choice, killed herself to escape him.

She’d left him a poisoned barb of a note that to this day infected him still: You have become a monster. There is nothing left of the man I love.

He carried it still, a small scroll tied with a lock of her hair. Despite Cruce’s confession, he would carry it until the day she told him she was not its author.

The king stirred from his reverie and stared down at the unconscious female in his wings. It had been half a million years since he’d found her lying, lifeless, in their chamber. Since he’d dumped all the forbidden, arcane magic he’d used for his experiments into an ensorcelled tome, thinking to be free of that which she’d so despised.

Since he’d last held her. Touched her.

It was no illusion. She was here. She was real. Joy, that elusive, priceless commodity, was once again his.

He inhaled. She smelled the same as she had on the day he’d met her, of sunshine on bare skin, moonlight on silver oceans and enormous, sky-no-limit dreams. He closed his eyes and opened them.

She was still there.

After an eternity of grief and regret, he held the only thing he’d ever wanted as much as he wanted to be God.

A second chance.

Gazing down at her now, he found it simple to pardon Cruce for stealing her, forcing her to drink from the cauldron and erasing all memory of their time together, because somehow his soul mate was at long last the very thing he’d struggled to make her: Fae, immortal unless killed in one of a very small number of ways. He would eradicate those ways in short order.

He was whole again.

The Unseelie King bent his head and brushed his lips to hers. Lightly. Reverently. He’d sliced open his being and bled it out over memories of the woman he would never kiss again.

If there was anything divine in the Cosmos besides him, it was this moment, occupying space with her, the frequency of the vibration of her fundamental essence and his combined. Deep in his chest thunder rolled.

Lashes fluttered. She opened her eyes.

He drew back and stared down at her, unable to speak. Creator of worlds, God, Devil, he who toyed with the very matter of galaxies, words failed him now. His black wings shuddered with the intensity of his emotion. He shifted and resettled them.

There was wonder in her gaze as she stared up at him: a moment of precious, preconscious dawn where all is dew and promise and anything at all might bloom.

Beginnings are fragile things.

Was it as he hoped? Was the power of true love greater than the power of the Cauldron of Forgetting? Did the body recall, despite the damage done to the mind—memory, carved into gray matter, never obliterated? What would she say? What would her first words to him be?

Time ground to a halt and, as a human might hold his breath, the Unseelie King held his existence in silence, occupying the frozen moment with the study of tiny miracles: the silver-blond waterfall of her hair, the blush of her lips, the elegance of her bones.

Was that a flicker of confusion? Of duality preceding recognition? He knew her face intimately, had never forsaken a nuance, yet these were expressions he’d had no cause to learn.

After all she’d been through—eternities about which he knew nothing and might have contained any number of atrocities spent as they were at the Seelie Court with Cruce but more recently kidnapped, interred in a tomb of ice, and nearly killed by the power-hungry prince—he sought to reassure her by simplifying himself, reducing his essence again and again until it was small enough to string word to word and form sentences: alien to the stuff of which he was made but so necessary for finite beings.

“My love, you are safe. I have you now.” He paused, to lend emphasis to his next words, a pledge he would keep until the end of time, which he was fairly certain he was in some fashion or another. “And I will never let you go again.”

Envisioning their joyous future together as immortals, he waited for the first sound of her voice in half a million years.

She screamed.

1

“It’s easier to run.
Replacing this pain with something numb”

DANI

So I’m blowing through the streets of Dublin—after ditching Ryodan’s Humvee, giving him one less excuse to come looking for me, not that he seems to need any, other than because he likes to piss all over my day—trying to prioritize my plans for the future.

At the top of my list is figuring out how to save Christian from the Crimson Hag, publishing a much-needed Dani Daily to let folks know the latest scoop, rescuing folks stranded by the killer ice storm, while simultaneously devising stellar new ways to irritate the owner of Chester’s.

After that are a few dozen subgoals I’m having a hard time putting in the right order, like getting in the know with the new Haven at the abbey, testing Dancer’s Papa Roach weapon, figuring out who’s stockpiling supplies and where so I can raid them, setting up new hidey-holes no one can find, and putting the big kibosh on Jo and Ryodan.

Problem is, I want to make breaking up Jo and Ryodan number one on my list, which is stupid because there’s nothing but personal satisfaction I’d gain from it, and while I’m all about personal satisfaction, I’m beginning to see a pattern: jumping on the short-term-gratification train always seems to wreck me off the rails somehow. But criminy, he doesn’t deserve her! And they’re not even in the same league, and seeing them do that campfire-cuddle thing tonight about made the top of my head pop off!