V’lane, I say silently. Drinks on beach.

“Did they make you sick?”

No.

“Did you drink anything at any time that made you feel like your guts were being ripped out? You’d want to die. From what I hear, it would have lasted about a day.”

I think a moment. The rape, I finally say. He gave me something. The one I couldn’t see. I felt pain for a long time. Thought it was from the princes being inside me.

His nostrils flare, and when he tries to speak, only a deep rattle comes out. He tries twice more before he gets it right. “They would have left you like that forever. I’m going to slice them into tiny pieces and feed them to one another. Slowly. Over centuries.” His voice is as calm as a sociopath’s.

What are you saying?

“I wondered. You smelled different afterward. I knew they’d done something. But you didn’t smell like the Rhymer. You were like him but different. I had to wait and see.”

Staring up at him, I take a fresh mental assessment of myself. I am beginning to feel my neck again. It burns like hell. But I can swallow.

Not dying?

“They must have been afraid they’d kill you with their—” He looks away, muscles working in his jaw. “An eternity of hell. You would have been Pri-ya forever.” His face is tight with fury.

What did they do to me? I demand.

He resumes walking, carries me through room after room, finally stopping in a chamber nearly identical to the rear seating cozy in BB&B: rugs, lamps, chesterfield, fluffy throws. Only the fireplace is different: enormous, with a stone hearth a man can stand in. Gas logs. No wood smoke seeping out somewhere to give him away.

He props pillows against the arm and places me gently on the sofa. He moves to the fireplace and turns it on.

“The Fae have an elixir that prolongs life.”

They gave it to me.

He nods.

Is that what happened to you?

“I said prolongs. Not turns you into a nine-foot-tall horned insane monster.” He watches my neck. “You’re healing. Your wounds are closing. I know a man that was given this elixir. Four thousand years ago. He smells different, too. As long as the Rhymer is never stabbed by the spear or sword, he lives, un-aging. He can only be killed in the ways a Fae can be killed.”

I stare up at him. I’m immortal? I can move my arms again. I touch my neck. I feel thick ridges as the skin fuses back together. It’s like when I ate Unseelie. I’m healing beneath my hands. I feel things crunching, moving in my neck, growing new and strong.

“Think of it as long-lived and hard to kill.”

Four thousand years long-lived? I stare at him blankly. I don’t want to live four thousand years. I think about that Unseelie, badly mutilated, left in my back alley. Immortality is terrifying. I just want my small lifetime. I can’t even conceive of four thousand years. I don’t want to live forever. Life is hard. Eighty or a hundred years would be just perfect. That’s all I ever wanted.

“You might want to seriously reconsider carrying that spear. In fact, I may decide to destroy it. And the sword.” He unbuckles the holster from my shoulder and throws it to the floor, near the fireplace.

I watch it clatter to a stop against the façade of the hearth, relieved. I can die. Not that I want to right now. I just like options. As long as I have the spear, I have options. I’m never getting rid of that thing. It’s my date with a gravestone, and I’m human. I want to die one day.

“But he can’t.” It’s the first complete sentence I speak since I was attacked. “Your son can’t die, can he? No matter what. Ever.”

43

If I’d never eaten Unseelie, healing miraculously would have messed with my head.

As it was, I pretended I had eaten Unseelie. I couldn’t deal with the whole elixir-that-prolongs-life scenario. It made me want to kill Darroc all over again. Violently. Sadistically. With lots of torture.

He’d not only turned me Pri-ya, he’d planned for me to live that way eternally. I’d softened when I saw those pictures of him with Alina, imagining a different outcome for them, but now all softness vanished. If Barrons hadn’t saved me—I couldn’t even begin to imagine the horrors. I didn’t want to. I would have been pathologically insane in a very short time. What if he’d locked me away, refused to give me what I needed? Kept me somewhere small and dark and—

I shuddered.

“Stop thinking about it,” Barrons said.

I shivered. I couldn’t help it. There really were worse things than dying.