I wanted to ask him if there was medicine he could take. I wanted to know if there was some kind of surgery that could be done, assuming we could find a heart surgeon.

I said none of those things because Dancer was brilliant and he loved being alive and if there had been anything he could have done, he would have by now.

The only gift I could give him was the one that wouldn’t make me feel better but would make him feel okay.

So, I pretended it was nothing, and we didn’t talk about the elephant in the room as it tossed its mighty head and swung its trunk, threatening to break all fragile things in its way, and I cleaned last night’s pizza off the floor and cabinets while he made us powdered eggs with dried salmon and cream cheese on toast.

Then we headed out into the city, holding hands, young and in love, eager to see what the day might bring.

ZARA

The man who called himself Rain found her a house with a large walled garden on the outskirts of Dublin, and she spent her days outside, whether rain or shine, weeding and spreading seeds he’d brought her for the animals, talking to her T’murra but not to him at all.

She had no idea why he was taking care of her, unless he found her beautiful and helpless and, like so many men, liked beautiful, helpless women, far more than they liked strong queens.

Were she mortal, perhaps she’d have spent a life with him because, for the most part, he left her alone.

Sometimes she’d catch him watching her when he thought she was lost in a reverie. Sometimes she thought she saw sadness in his eyes, but attributed that to an odd trick of shadow and light.

He seemed to be waiting for something. She didn’t know what, and frankly, didn’t care.

She was waiting to die.

She could no longer feel the earth except in a far dimmer, more muted version than Zara once had. Diluted by her Fae essence, cut off from the True Magic, she had only a shallow connection to the world around her, yet she forged on, by rote performing those actions that had once given her joy.

She was grateful the earth was dying and would soon take her, because living in such fashion wasn’t living at all. As queen of the Fae, power, care for her race, and immortality had been her compensation. As a powerless immortal that couldn’t experience sensation, there was no benefit.

If he’d wanted to make love to her, she would have done it. If he’d wanted her to sleep or eat or dance, she would have done it. It didn’t matter what she did or didn’t do anymore.

When, one day, he took her hand and said he wanted to take her somewhere, she went because there was no difference between staying and going.

Life was long and blank and tiring.

MAC

I’ve watched night fall many different ways since I came to Dublin.

When I first arrived, it often snuck up on me, subtly turning a darker shade of slate and fog, leaving no clear line of demarcation between afternoon and night.

For a girl from hot, sunny southern Georgia, it had been beyond depressing. Impossible to say “Oh, wasn’t that a nice sunset?” when you hardly ever saw the damn thing. The sky simply occupied itself all day muddying and glooming, rolling with thick thunderclouds, and the next thing you knew it was night, as if there’d been much bloody difference.

Other times it had come slamming down so hard it frightened me, one instant the sky blue agate, the next I was virtually blind, navigating Shades in alleys of pitch and monsters with the lights of my MacHalo blazing.

And yet other times, once the Fae were fully established in our world, night had fallen in infinitesimal degrees with breathtaking beauty; splashing a dazzling rainbow across the horizon for a half hour or more, painting a fat crimson halo to stain the moon, as kaleidoscopic hues of Faery kissed everything from the neon signs shimmering on wet pavement to the amber gas lamps, coloring Dublin exquisite shades of pink, purple, orange, and gold never before seen by humans.

Tonight, as I made my way back to BB&B from dinner with my family, the sky treated me to one of those slow, extraordinary sunsets, and with the True Magic binding me to the Earth, it touched my soul so deeply, I stopped and stood in the street, staring up at the sky, and cried. I stood there with tears rolling down my cheeks for a good half hour, watching night descend.

Our world was sick, so diseased.

And so damned beautiful.

And there was nothing I could do to save it. I’d come so far, defeated the Sinsar Dubh not once, but twice, by quirk of happenstance become the Fae queen’s successor, solved the riddle of the music box, and acquired half of the legendary song. But it was like having half a car, or half a gun or half a child.

Useless.

The prophecy hadn’t been quite right. I wasn’t going to destroy the world.

I was going to fail to save it.

Dublin was a ghost town. We’d been sending people off world as soon as they arrived, and as the city had emptied, the Fae, too, began to disappear. With humans vanishing, they’d had no reason to remain in our town and repaired to Faery.

Now they huddled, panicked, trapped at court, no more able to sift back out than I could sift in. I could feel them, this race I was supposed to save, their shallow fear and unrest. Their impatience and mistrust as they waited for their new queen to move their seat of power from a dying world, unaware it was impossible.

I’d not told them. Apparently Cruce hadn’t either. Only the prior queen had known their fate was irrevocably bound to the planet. Cruce’s silence on that score was a blessing for which I was grateful. If he’d been feeling vengeful (and God knows, he’d looked vengeful when I’d last seen him), he could have told both Courts the truth and led them to war against us, spitefully wiping out as much of the human race as he could, preventing us from escaping off world.