“Let’s imitate reality—insanity…”

Spear, check.

Unseelie flesh in my blood, check.

Attitude, check.

I silently ascended the porch stairs and pressed my hand to the door.

Damn. Sidhe-seer senses, not a check.

I had no way of knowing if what was within was Fae, human, or perhaps even something else entirely. I took nothing for granted anymore. Whatever it was, it wanted light for some reason. I couldn’t envision an Unseelie flipping a switch or yanking a chain. They liked the dark. They’d lurked in it so long their eyes were well-accustomed to gloom.

I tested the knob, turning slowly.

Unlocked.

I took a fortifying breath and nudged the door open as quietly as possible, just far enough to steal a glimpse inside the house.

Nothing. But then, I couldn’t see much from this point of view.

I listened intently. Thanks to my heightened senses, I was able to discern soft footfalls upstairs on thick carpet. One set. There was a single entity moving inside.

I waited, listening to see if more footfalls joined them.

After a solid minute of hearing the sound of only one person/Fae/whatever, I eased open the door, slipped quickly inside and closed it behind me.

I inhaled deeply, mining for clues about the intruder. I untangled various elements: mildew of an old, unoccupied house; an acrid mold from the eternal rain with no heat running in the colder months and no air when it was warmer; something sulfurous that was no doubt escaping from one of the damned mirrors; a touch of wine spilled long ago—perhaps my sister having a drink with Darroc that had ended in impassioned lovemaking and forgotten wineglasses.

A doughnut.

I inhaled again, deeply. Sure enough. I smelled a doughnut. And coffee. The scent of yeast and something sugary was enormously enticing. I marveled that somewhere in Dublin someone was making doughnuts again. My stomach rumbled loudly. I made a mental note to find that vendor. Food had been in short supply for so long I could only give kudos to the black market if they were managing to obtain baking ingredients.

I moved quietly into the foyer, across black and white marble floors, beneath an elaborate crystal chandelier, my gaze focused tightly ahead, skirting a large round table with a dusty vase of silk flowers and pausing at the foot of an elegant, spiraling staircase.

Soft footfalls directly above.

The sound of a drawer sliding open. A muffled curse.

I couldn’t make out much. The walls and floors were of solid, hundred-year-old construction and served as sound insulation.

I cocked my head, listening, trying to fathom who might come here and search the premises. Besides me. For a moment I wondered if that was what I might find, should I ascend those curving stairs, if I’d somehow gotten trapped in a time loop, if the Sinsar Dubh was playing games with me.

If I doggedly mounted these carpeted risers, was it me I’d find up there?

Like I said, I take nothing for granted anymore. Not a damned thing.

Darroc? Had he truly died?

Some other sidhe-seer, dispatched by Jada, to reconnoiter the house?

Nah. Sidhe-seers worked in twos or more, not alone. Jada and I were the oddity, not the norm.

I eased my foot onto the first riser, placing it squarely in the middle because stairs always squeak when you’re trying to climb them silently. Sure enough, it let out a sullen squeal.

Biting my lip, I eased up, foot sideways, attempting to distribute my weight evenly, moving cautiously.

Above me a door banged shut and I heard another muffled curse, followed by an angry, “Where are you?”

I froze. Sniffed the air. Faint, but there. So faint I’d not caught it, but then I hadn’t expected to.

Squaring my shoulders, I marched up the stairs, determined to lay this particular bullshit to rest once and for all.

Another door banged, footfalls approached. I stiffened and stopped halfway up the stairs as the intruder burst from one of the bedrooms and stormed toward the very stairs I was on.

No. No. No.

This was wrong. This was so bloody wrong.

Alina stood at the top of the stairs, emotion flooding her beautiful features.

Shock. Astonishment. Joy.

Tears trembling in eyes I knew as well as my own. Better. I’d looked at her much more than I’d looked at myself in a mirror.

“Mac?” she breathed. “Holy crap, is it you, Jr.? Oh my God, oh my God!” she squealed. “When did you get here? What are doing in this house? How did you even know to look—Oh! Ahhhhh!”

She froze, mid-sentence, her joy morphing to pure horror.

I froze, too, midway up two more stairs, boot in the air.

She began to back away, doubling over, hands going to her head, clutching it. “No,” she moaned. “No,” she said again.

“You are not my sister,” I growled, and continued bounding up the stairs. I was confronting it this time. Staring it down cold. Proving the truth to myself, even without my sidhe-seer senses. My bastard Book, or Cruce, or whoever the hell was behind this was not playing this game with me.

Never this game.

The Alina-thing whirled and ran, hunched in on herself, clutching her stomach as if she, too, felt as kicked in the gut as I did.

“Get back here, whatever you are!” I roared.

“Leave me alone! Oh, God, I’m not ready. I don’t know enough,” she cried.

“I said get the hell back here! Face me!”

She was sobbing now, dashing through the house, stumbling into walls and crashing through doors. Slamming them behind her and locking them.

“Alina!” I shouted. Even though I knew it wasn’t her. I didn’t know what else to call the monster. Was my Book projecting an image? Or was the worst I’d feared for so many months now true?

Had I really never stepped out of the illusion that night we’d “allegedly” defeated the Sinsar Dubh?

Had it suckered me so completely that I only “believed” I’d been the victor but was in truth living in a matrixlike cocoon, my body in stasis, under complete dominion of the Book, merely dreaming my life? And I could either dream good things or have nightmares?

For months now I’d been crippled by that debilitating fear.

I didn’t trust one damned thing about my so-called reality.

“Alina!” I roared again, crashing into a locked door, blasting my way through it. Hall after hall. Door after door.

Until finally she was trapped. She’d locked herself in one of the back bedrooms, one door between us and no way out for her. I could hear her sobbing on the other side.

What the hell was the Book playing at?

I kicked the door in with perhaps more violence than was strictly necessary.

She screamed and wrapped both arms around her head. Rolled over and puked violently.

I took a step closer and she screamed again, as if in soul-rending pain.

I stood and stared, trying to make some sense out of what was happening.

“Please,” she whimpered. “Please. I don’t…want you. I’m not…looking for…you. I’ll…go home. I’ll…leave.”

What the hell?

“We’re ending this now,” I snarled.

“Please,” she cried. “No!” She unwound one arm from her head, raised it, shaking as if to ward me off. “Darroc!” she screamed. “I need you!”

“Darroc is dead,” I said coldly. “And so are you.”

On the floor, huddled in a ball, my sister screamed and screamed.

I ended up leaving.

I couldn’t take it one more second. What was I going to do? Kill the illusion of my sister?

I spun on my heel and stomped down the stairs, hands thrust into my pockets, head down. With the scent of lavender Snuggle sheets in my nostrils.

I grabbed the doughnut on the way out. It was in a bag, sitting near the vase of dusty flowers on the table.

I took the coffee next to it, too.

With the coral-pink lipstick on the rim, precisely the shade my sister wore: Summer Temptress.

I figured I might as well enjoy the happy parts of my madness if I had to stomach the bad.

Munching a soggy cruller (they may have gotten the right supplies but certainly weren’t professional bakers—then again, if this was all an illusion, why wasn’t my doughnut stellar? Was I so self-sabotaging I screwed up even my own illusory treats?), I ignored the mirrors I passed and forgot entirely about the blasted dolmen until I was nearly back to the intersection where I’d left the Hunter.

Of course, it wasn’t there.

I tapped my foot irritably, cracking the thin layer of black ice sheeting the pavement.

And felt utterly lost.

I’d just seen the impossible. Confirming my fear that I might truly be stuck in an illusion I’d never escaped.

But other details, like the imperfect doughnut, the half-warm coffee (with heavy cream, no sugar, just the way my sister liked it), the sheet of ice on the pavement, all hinted at a cohesive reality.

This was what I’d been doing for months now, constantly assessing everything around me, trying to ferret out the Ultimate Truth.

Had Barrons really shouted me out of my illusion that night in Barrons Books & Baubles when (I believed) I’d seen through the projection of Isla to the reality that Rowena, possessed by the Sinsar Dubh, was trying to trick me into giving her/the Book my amulet by masquerading as my biological mom? Perhaps the illusion the Book had woven for me that night had never stopped.

Had I really helped lay the Sinsar Dubh to rest in the abbey, then watched it get absorbed by Cruce, then seen Cruce locked up?

Or had I never escaped the Book’s clutches?

That was the motherfucking question.

The worm in my apple.

Something had happened to me that night that made me begin to deeply question the nature of my reality. Being deceived so thoroughly—even if only for a finite time—made me wonder if I was still being deceived. Somedays I got by fine. Accepted that I’d made it. Saw only consistency in the world around me.

But some nights, especially those nights I dreamed the hellish song I’d been hearing lately, I wondered if something was trying to break out of my subconscious into my conscious mind that I couldn’t quite bring to the surface and it—whatever it was—existed on the opposite side of an illusion the Book had woven for me.

Plans kept me sane. Obsessively hunting the Unseelie king to get him to remove his Book had kept me focused.

Focus prevented me from stretching out on a sofa somewhere and just giving up because I couldn’t decide upon a satisfactory way to prove to myself that the reality I was living was real.

My fake mom and dad, Pieter and Isla, had seemed utterly real, too.

Now Alina.

But the Alina situation was odd.

With all kinds of wrong details. The glittering diamond on her wedding finger. Sobbing, hiding from me. Screaming if I got too close. Crying out for Darroc.

Alive.

Not.

I pressed my fingers to my temples and rubbed. “Focus, focus, focus,” I muttered. “Do not take a single illusion as a sign that everything is. That doesn’t necessarily follow. You’re in the right reality. You defeated the Sinsar Dubh. Alina is the only illusion.”

But why?

Having something inside me that was capable of weaving the convincing illusion the external Book had crafted, then having it go suddenly silent, was worse than it taking jabs at me and me snapping Poe back at it. At least our inane and bizarrely harmless spats had been something concrete I could hold on to. I’d been almost relieved when it made me kill Mick O’Leary.

Because at least then I’d been able to say: Oh, so that’s its game. I’ll just never use my spear again. I’m in my reality. This is it. I understand.

I’d told Barrons none of this. I’d hidden it from everyone.

I’d been grateful to vanish.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that even if I was in the right reality, the Book was even now spreading nooses around me everywhere, and the first misstep I made, it would jerk that rope tight.

I stared down the empty street, littered with debris and dehydrated human husks blowing like sad tumbleweeds across the cobblestones.

“Not wishing,” I growled. “I don’t want to be invisible.”

I wanted to feel like myself again. I desperately craved certainty in my soul. I was appalled to realize I’d almost given up. Withdrawing from Barrons, rarely pausing in my search for the king those weeks after I’d killed (or had I?) Rowena, not even to have sex, detaching from my parents.

But Barrons and Unseelie flesh had stirred fire in my belly again. Fire I needed.

I resolved to eat Rhino-boy and fuck constantly until I figured out this crisis of faith.

Toward that end, I needed a sifter.

Where the bloody hell was I going to find a sifting Fae?

“Christian,” I said, smiling. “I thought I’d find you here.”

“Mac,” he said, without lifting his eyes from the cut-crystal glass of whiskey in his hand.

I dropped down on a stool next to him at what had once been the Dreamy-Eyed Guy’s bar, then mine for a time.

The Sinatra club in Chester’s was one of the quieter ones, where human males gathered to discuss business and, on rare occasion, some freakish Unseelie took a table for a time. This subclub drew a more refined clientele, and the Fae were all about the unrefined. The more brassy, sexual, and desperate tended to catch their eye.

I gave him a once-over. Hot, sexy Highlander with strange eyes I was grateful were currently brooding into his drink, not turned on me. Something was different. He looked awfully…normal. “Where are your wings?” I asked.

“Glamour. Bloody women in this place go nuts if I show them.”

“You can sift, can’t you?”

“Aye. Why?”

“I was hoping you’d take me somewhere.”

“I’m not moving from this stool. That fuck Ryodan lied. He said he tried to bring Dageus’s body back to us but he didn’t. He doesn’t know that I know the man he brought us was from Dublin, not the gorge at all. He must have snatched a bit of plaid from our rooms upstairs and bloodied it up. Why would he give us someone else’s body, Mac?”

I rapped the counter sharply, ordering a drink. I raised my whiskey when it came as if to make a toast. “Sounds like you have a mystery. I’ve got one of my own. What do you say you help me solve mine and I’ll see what I can do about solving yours?”

He turned his head slowly and looked at me.

I dropped my gaze instantly.

He laughed softly. “That bad, Mac?”

I inhaled deeply and snatched a quick glance from beneath my lashes. I’d seen this look before, times a thousand, as I rolled in the Unseelie king’s great wings. I lowered my gaze again and steeled myself. Then looked up and straight at him, right in the eyes.

For about two seconds.

“Not bad, Christian,” I said, looking down at my drink. “Just different. Intense. Like looking up at stars. We’ll get used to it.” I paused then added, “You know I can get into more places in this nightclub than you can. I can keep an eye out. Go poking around later tonight, see if I can learn anything about your uncle.”

I had no intention of telling him. My loyalty is one hundred percent to Barrons. Period. The end. That is one of the few things I’m absolutely certain about anymore. Our bond. Our two-person religion. But I would certainly see if I could get Barrons to get Ryodan to consider letting Christian know. At some point. I knew what it felt like to lose family. I’d blamed myself a dozen different ways for all the things I hadn’t done that might have saved Alina. I could only imagine how badly Christian was blaming himself for his uncle’s death.

After a measured pause, he clinked his glass to mine. “Perhaps we can be of use to each other. You should know, lass, I’m far from a pro at it. It was easier before my stay on those cliffs.”

“Because you didn’t turn full Unseelie?”

“Aye. I suspect. I can do it, but it’s more difficult. I tend to give myself a wide margin. Where is it you’re wanting to go?”