Destroy them now. You know you can, my dark companion purrs. They humiliated and used you, made you feel powerless—you who possess more raw power than they could ever hope to achieve. Remind these pigs that the Fae have always been ruled by a woman.

Sure, toss me a few crimson runes, I mutter at it. I’d kill to get my hands on those again, the strange binding runes it shared with me at critical moments, believing I would never figure out that I could also use them to seal the physical Sinsar Dubh’s cover closed. Until Cruce tricked me into removing them. I knew I shouldn’t have pulled the damned things off down there in the cavern the night we sealed it on the stone slab. Or at least held onto a few for future use, rather than let Velvet sift them away.

I’d love to see if they’d also work on my inner copy somehow, but although the Sinsar Dubh goads endlessly, even saddled and rode me today, it offers me no runes or spells to use without price as it did before. A once-robbed John, it won’t remove its wallet from its trousers again until it gets the action it paid for.

Nice try, sweet thing. NOT.

I pick up with my mental chant where I left off last time, muttering the fourth, fifth, and sixth stanzas of “The Raven.” Beneath the table, I feel Barrons’s hand move to my thigh, and in the strength of his fingers is his commitment to destroy them with me, the reminder to be patient. It cools my blood enough that I retain my impassive stare.

The Unseelie Princes hold a sidhe-seer Pri-ya. I wonder what her talent is, if they exploit it. I worry about her soul. She has no Barrons to rescue her. Inside me, the Sinsar Dubh falls silent. “Tell me about these sidhe-seers,” I say to Ryodan.

“They’re black-ops trained and militarily focused, led by a woman they seem willing to follow to death. Word is they connected after the walls fell. Some were soldiers, stationed in Iraq, others hail from Asia, skilled in martial arts.”

“We want them all dead,” Rath growls.

Before I can say it, Kat asks, “Have you met their leader?”

Ryodan says, “We’ve been tracking her but no luck so far. They speak her name like she’s some bloody damned mystical warrior, protected by the elements. Their home was destroyed; they want a new one and intend to make it here.”

I feel Kat’s tension. I say, “You are in charge at the abbey. She won’t take it from you. If we must enforce it, we will.”

“I’m not so sure I’d be entirely sorry to see it go,” she murmurs.

I look at her, startled, wondering if I heard her right. She’s looking at Sean, her expression bleak. I ponder the irony that she denounced her mafia parents years ago to escape this very fate, yet now sits with us making barbarous laws in a barbarous time, enforcing them without mercy.

Black-ops trained. Mystical warrior. Lovely. Probably sporting egos the size of K’Vruck. Who knows what gifts they possess? It’s possible that one of them, like me, can sense the Sinsar Dubh and she’ll follow its siren song straight to my front door.

Distantly, I hear Ryodan and Barrons agreeing the princes may do whatever they want with any sidhe-seers who invade their walls, but those who steer clear are to be left alone.

I don’t think this city is big enough for us all.

9

“Oh, Death, you come to sting with your poison and your misery”

JADA

When she enters Chester’s, both men and women pause in conversation to turn and watch her pass. It might be the body. It might be the walk.

It’s definitely the attitude.

An enormous palace of chrome and glass, the underground club is a hot mess of humans and Fae, reeking of sex, spices, and cigarette smoke, divided into countless subclubs where anything can be obtained for the right price.

Music breaks over her in waves as she transitions from one club to the next.

She could find her own personal Jesus on the matte black cement floors where hundreds of meaty, tusked Unseelie that resemble rhinoceroses stamp the floor with hooves and indulge their taste for voluptuous women and Marilyn Manson; or do it her way, which is all she does anyway, where Sinatra croons from speakers mounted on the polished wood of a stately, old-fashioned bar presided over by three enormously fat Unseelie females with multiple breasts; or acknowledge that she is, in fact, Titanium, as Sia belts out above a mirrored dance floor that pulses with flashing neon lights, crammed with young, mostly naked men and women, attended in air and on foot by golden, sparkling Seelie.

She scans bodies and faces, seeking the one she desires: the more beautiful, the better.

She would select one of the mysterious Nine that work behind the scenes of this club, but the monster she hunts may find them too barbaric or perhaps too dangerous to take the bait. Their formidable reputation precedes them into distant lands.