All of MacKayla’s knowledge of the world around her is mine. Her names for things come easily to me. My existence within her has been far more vivid than anything I experienced from within the covers of the Book that once incarcerated me. Three of my forty-ninth-made caste—those she calls Rhino-boys—have a woman in the alley, willing sacrifice to partake of their flesh. They play with her for momentary pleasure, beady eyes, beady minds, puny shadows flickering in puny caves.

Much of the Unseelie King’s knowledge is mine as well. I sprang into existence from the spells he created to birth his Dark Court and know the True Names of the Unseelie, which grants me control over them. Unfortunately there are those Unseelie recently born, such as the Highlander prince, whose names are yet unknown or I would simply summon him and slay him now. Then there is Cruce, currently bound by the king’s chamber magic, impossible to summon. I will eliminate my most challenging enemies first.

I chime in the First Language and three tusked heads swivel. I command them to worship me, to offer the flesh that will grant me Jada’s strength and speed. The woman is abandoned as my children stumble, snuffle, and fall to their knees, heads bowed, shaking with fear and subservience. A simple caste. Not my finest work.

The Fae have long hungered for someone to lead them, make the decisions they fear, the bold ones that bring chaos, death, and war. I’m momentarily incensed by their limits—these frail toys that are all with which I have to play. These things that aren’t real like me.

Still, I prefer frail toys to nothing. I’ve had an abundance of nothing.

Nothing is Hell. Nothing is where MacKayla is now.

It’s in breaking things that you understand them.

It’s in understanding them that you control them.

The Unseelie tremble before me.

As will the world.

CHRISTIAN MACKELTAR

Arlington Abbey. Despite my efforts, the fortress has fallen.

Although the deadly icefire no longer burns, I was unable to prevent the citadel’s destruction. The roof has collapsed and blackened timbers jut skyward, broken ribs of a once-great beast. Walls slump in graves of chalky ash and tumbled stone. The ancient sanctuary, built first on a shian, pagan temple, then church, is a ruin.

An inch of ice coats the lawn and the now cold bones of the abbey. Drawing moisture from the sky—Dublin has a veritable flood rain eternally waiting to fall, as if, on the day of creation, a vengeful god suspended an airborne ocean above the Emerald Isle—I’d shaped it with my wrath into a killing frost, and soared over the fortress, extinguishing the unnatural blue-black flames.

My efforts were not without price. I may be Fae but my back and shoulders burn from prolonged flight, and my gut spasms, somehow still flawed from my repeated disembowelment on a cliff.

Beneath the fallen bastion is a labyrinthine underground city that houses a prison containing Cruce. As he has not yet exploded from the bowels of the earth, it’s a fair guess the subterranean stronghold still stands. Perhaps the surviving sidhe-seers can go to ground. At least the wall of the abbey directly above Cruce’s prison no longer teeters dangerously near the black hole, threatening the voracious anomaly’s exponential growth. I collapsed that wall inward with an airborne kick; now it’s dust, a good distance from the event horizon.

Shouts split the air as the sidhe-seers cry out the names of their dead and summon aid for those still alive.

I fly over the abbey, a dark-winged shadow in a sky of forbidding thunderclouds, watching through narrowed eyes for movement on the battlefield. Those of Ryodan’s men who fought in human or beast form to save the abbey now patrol the perimeter of the estate’s great wall, prepared for the next attack. Though this assault has ended, another will come. The campaign to free Cruce has just begun.

I catch a shiver of stealthy movement in the corner of my eye. An Unseelie slithers beneath a mound of ice-covered, decapitated corpses. When it surges up into the path of a sidhe-seer seeking survivors, I drop like stone, slash and maim until it moves no more.

When the sidhe-seer is safe, I cease my midair attack and, wings beating hard against the wind that came wed to the ice I called, drive myself up into the sky. After several more sweeps over the grounds in which I spy nothing of concern, I land in the midst of the battlefield, angling my wings back and up, close to my body so I won’t have to spend hours scrubbing blood and guts from the infernal things before I sleep.

As I collect the corpse of a sidhe-seer who looks a mere child in death and may well have been, I stumble over an ice-covered, decapitated Unseelie, distracted by what remains of the many dead around me. Not their bodies. Something else. The dying leave a psychic imprint when they go; the body shits, the soul expels a ghastly fart of one’s strongest emotions, fears, and desires. Residue everywhere. I’m sticky with it. I feel their rage, hear screams no one else can, echoing in the air around me. I live with one foot in a world no one else can see.

Women shiver in the unnaturally cold, gusty air, clustered around a growing pile of their fallen sisters, watching me warily as I approach, stealing glances, looking hastily away. My faded jeans, hiking boots, and gray fisherman’s sweater only make me look a wolf stalking near, wearing half a sheepskin, covering none of the frightening parts. I see myself as they do: an enormous man with a distant, wintry gaze that calls a price if engaged, majestic black-velvet wings, frosted torque, and tattoos slithering like dark snakes beneath my skin as they always do when I’m aroused by lust—murderous or otherwise—cradling a young, fair-haired girl. Looking, no doubt, as if I’m the one that killed her. My face appears more feral in a mirror than it feels on my bones. We could not be more incongruous together, the corpse and I. Yet we fit together perfectly. The only girl I’ll ever take into my arms will either already be dead or soon end up that way.