Pity for him, I suffer none. Reading me is impossible. His scales can’t weigh the stuff of which I’m made.

“How is Dani—er, Jada? Is she all right?”

I left her alive. There are the unworthy who will die sooner, and the worthy audience/interesting prey who will die later. Existence without mirrors, without games, is an endless yawn. “She’ll be all right. Ow!” I say, clutching suddenly at an eye. “Ow,” I exclaim again.

“What’s wrong, Mac?”

“Dratted wind! I think a splinter of wood flew into my eye. Can you look?”

“It’s too bloody dark out here to see anything.”

Above us, clouds roll, crash together, and the sudden booming is like knives in my ears. “Well, try. It feels like a blasted boulder. Christian, help me!” I tilt my head back and squint up at him, resisting the desire to clap my hands over my ears. He moves in, puts his hand on my face, and that’s when I strike.

I reach inside my jacket for my spear, my lovely, lovely spear that is my most prized and loathed possession, treasured because it will slay all those that must die so I may achieve my true destiny, despised because it could rot me from the inside with the tiniest of pricks, and yank it from my—

“Mac, hold still. I can’t do anything with you twisting and turning like that.”

I still beneath his touch, not because he proposed it, but because I’m rendered motionless by rage.

That bitch! That clever fucking bitch! She’s ruined everything! EVERYTHING!

I recall Jada’s hands on me before I was fully fused into my new skin, touching me everywhere, undoing my ankle restraints first. Had she not freed my feet before patting other places, I’d have paid more attention. She’d lulled me with deception. Tricked me! Thighs. Breasts. Side of my ribs. “Fuck!” I explode. She freed my hands last, once she’d taken what was not hers to take.

The one thing I require to achieve my aims.

“I know it hurts but you’ve got to hold still, Mac,” Christian snaps.

He has no idea how it hurts. She took advantage of that first moment in which I wasn’t fully cocked and loaded. It wasn’t fair. I’d just been born.

I’d been as certain of the spear’s presence on my body, its weight in the shoulder holster beneath my jacket, as I was loath to touch it while acclimating to my new skin, so I’d not reached for it until now.

Only to find a gun tucked inside—not my spear at all.

I allow the useless weapon to slip from my fingers and drop to the ground, close my eyes, and summon a spell. Mouth working soundlessly, I call forth one of my favorites.

“I can hardly get the damn thing out if you don’t—Mac, what the bloody hell are you—”

My hand is on his mouth, but not my hand alone. He speaks no more, his lips stitched by the greedy needles of a bloody crimson rune I summoned from my glassy lake, not hers. She never found hers. I made sure of it, keeping hers hidden through illusion and sleight of hand, subtle manipulation of her neural circuitry.

He stumbles, tries to back away, but I fling rune after rune at him. They latch hungrily to his neck, his arms, onto his wings, those beautiful, majestic wings that should be mine, which he didn’t deserve and doesn’t honor.

Clawing at himself, he crashes to the ice-dusted ground.

A dozen more runes fly from my hands as I murmur quietly. I sling them onto his body, where they leech to his clothing and skin, spread and grow, until the Unseelie prince is immobilized by the same parasitic magic that fortified the Unseelie prison walls, runes nourished by the victim’s attempt to fight them, growing stronger and larger with the least resistance. In no time at all the Highlander will be cocooned in a bloody, inescapable prison.

I’ll give him something to brood about and a hellish eternity in which to do it. Cretin. Idiot.

“But I wanted to kill you,” I whisper as I lick his face in all its bloody, suffering goodness. “I wanted to watch you die. I’ve not killed in this form. I want to know how it feels.” I permit my essence to fully animate my face, backlight my eyes.

He stares at me with horror. He gets it, belatedly, who Mac really is. Who I am.

I AM.

I plaster him with more runes, putty them gently over his eyes, his forehead, plug his nose, then shove him to the ground. Perhaps I kick him a few times for good measure. I don’t know, I don’t care, my mind has already moved on. I may not have the spear—at the moment—but I will gather my enemies and store them until I do.

I pick him up and drag him behind the pile of rocks. I’ll collect him before I leave the abbey, take him with me to my lair.

Perhaps I’ll play with him before he dies.

It is in breaking things that you understand them.

I’ve always been a curious sort.

As I enter the demolished abbey from the rear, I keep my ears on the voices of sidhe-seers beyond the tumbled walls and my eyes focused for random opportunity.

It’s everywhere.

Here, I scrape ice from a box of rat poison used to protect the fortresses’ larders. There, I find a half-standing pantry containing ice-slicked, corked jugs of water from their artesian well. The two meet in a lovely drink of hemorrhagic death. No guarantee it will be imbibed or that enough will be drunk. But there’s a possibility it will. It’s enough to entertain.

I move carefully over piles of slippery stone and splintered beams. Slip east, then down, knowing the way because my erstwhile host walked this path while I siphoned impressions from the leaky sieve of her mind.