I cocked my head, listened intently with the last day of my Unseelie-flesh-heightened senses.

Footsteps above, something being dragged, sounds of protest, heated yelling, no male answer. The beast was dragging the imposter of my sister to the stairs. I guessed she’d gotten the screaming out of her system. But then again, if it were a Fae masquerading as my sister, it wouldn’t have screamed. There would have been some kind of magic battle. I was interested to learn how and where he’d found it, if it had put up a fight.

I pushed up from the bed and braced myself for the coming confrontation.

—

The screaming started in the basement, loud and anguished, beyond the closed door. “No! I won’t! You can’t make me! I don’t want it!” it shrieked.

I kicked open the door, stood framed in the opening and glared at the imposter. It was near the bottom of the stairs, with Barrons blocking the stairwell, it was trying to clamber back up on its hands and knees.

Was it going to pull the same stunt it had at 1247 LaRuhe? Pretend to be so terrified of me that I couldn’t possibly interrogate it?

I stalked closer and it curled into a ball and began to sob, clutching its head.

I moved closer still and it suddenly puked violently, whatever it had in its stomach spewing explosively on the wall.

Barrons loped to the top of the stairs, shut and locked the door. I knew what he was doing. Transforming back into the man in private. He would never let anyone besides me see him morphing shapes. Especially not a Fae.

I studied the sobbing form of my sister, filled with grief for what I’d lost and hate for the reminder, and love that wanted to go somewhere but knew better. Such a screwed-up mixture, so poisonous. It lay curled on the floor now, holding its head as if its skull might explode as violently as its stomach just had.

I narrowed my eyes. Something about it was so familiar. Not its form. But something about the way it looked, laying there curled, clutching its skull as if it was—

“What the hell?” I whispered.

Surely it hadn’t studied me that closely! Surely it wasn’t playing such a deep psychological game.

I began stepping backward, moving away, never taking my eyes off it. Five feet. Ten. Then twenty between us.

The thing that was impersonating my sister slowly removed its hands from its head. Stopped retching. Began to breathe more evenly. Its sobs quieted.

I strode briskly forward ten feet and it screamed again, high and piercing.

I stood frozen a long moment. Then I backed away again.

“You’re pretending you can sense the Book in me,” I finally said coldly. But of course. Alina—my dead sister, not this thing—had been a sidhe-seer and OOP detector like me. If my sister had stood near the Sinsar Dubh, like me, might it (me) have made her violently sick?

I frowned. She and I had lived in the same household for two decades and she’d never sensed anything wrong with me then. She hadn’t puked every time I’d walked in the room. Was it possible the Sinsar Dubh inside me had needed to be acknowledged by me to gain power? That perhaps, before I’d come to Dublin, it had lay dormant within and quite possibly would have remained that way forever if I’d not awakened it by returning to a country I was forbidden to enter? Had Isla O’Connor known that the only way to keep my inner demon slumbering was to keep me off Irish soil? Or was there something more going on? Had there really never been any Fae in Ashford because it was so boring while we’d been growing up? Or had my birth mother somehow spelled our sidhe-seer senses shut, never to awaken unless we foolishly returned to the land of our blood-magic?

Oh yeah, feeling that matrixlike skewed sense of reality again.

Why was I even speculating such nonsense? This thing was not my sister!

It raised its head and peered at me with Alina’s tear-filled eyes. “Jr., I’m so sorry! I never meant for you to come here! I tried to keep you away! And it got you! Oh, God, it got you!” It dropped its head and began to cry again.

“Fuck,” I said. It was all I could think of. After a long moment I said, “What are you? What’s your purpose?”

It lifted its head and looked at me like I was crazy. “I’m Mac’s sister!”

“My sister died. Try again.”

It peered at me through the dimly lit basement, then, after a moment, got up on all fours and backed away, pressing itself against a crate of guns, drawing its knees up to its chest. “I didn’t die. Why aren’t you doing something bad to me? What game are you playing?” it demanded. “Is it because Mac won’t let you hurt me? She’s strong. You have no idea how strong she is. You’re never going to win!”

“I’m not playing a game. You’re the one playing a game. What the hell is it?”

It drew a deep shuddering breath and wiped a trickle of foamy spit from its chin. “I don’t understand,” it finally said. “I don’t understand anything that’s happening anymore. Where’s Darroc? What happened to all the people? Why is everything in Dublin so damaged? What’s going on?”

“Ms. Lane,” a deep voice slid from the shadowy stairs. “It’s not Fae.”

“It’s not?” I snapped. “Are you certain?”

“Unequivocally.”

“Then what the hell is it?” I snarled.

Barrons stepped into the light at the bottom of the stairs, fully clothed, and I realized he must store caches of clothing all over the city, in case he needed to transform unexpectedly.

He swept the Alina look-alike with a cold, penetrating gaze.

Then he looked at me and said softly, “Human.”

25

“Inside these prison walls, I have no name…”

The first time the Unseelie-king-residue came to the white, bright half of the boudoir in which he’d left her trapped by magic beyond her comprehension, the Seelie queen melted back against the wall, turned herself into a tapestry, and watched silently as a graphic scene of coupling unfolded before her unenthusiastic but eventually reluctantly fascinated gaze.

Hers was the court of sensuality, and he had once been considered king of it for good reason. Passion drenched the chamber, saturating the very air in which her tapestry hung, draping another bit of sticky, sexually charged residue on her weft and weave.

A visitor would have seen no more than a vibrant hunt scene hung upon the wall of the boudoir, and at the center, before the slab upon which the mighty white stag was being sacrificed, a slender, lovely woman with pale hair and iridescent eyes, standing, staring out from the tapestry and into the room.