We are definitely not having sex so I must be dying. He called me Mac. “Music,” I grit through clenched teeth. “That … damned … music!”
“You hear music down here?” Dancer sounds incredulous.
My only response is a whimper.
Distantly, through the pain, I’m aware Barrons is carrying me back onto the elevator.
“Get a picture of it,” Ryodan says to Dancer.
“Already got a dozen, other places.”
“When I tell you to do something, don’t think. Don’t talk. Don’t breathe.”
“Reality check, thinking and breathing, necessary to take pictures. Otherwise I might end up with shots of—”
“Fucking do it.”
“—your nose hairs, or mine, or—”
“You won’t have a fucking nose left, you keep talking.”
I hear a cell phone camera snapping.
Whatever it is, I want to see it for myself. I didn’t make the miserable trek belowground and suffer this pain to leave without getting a good look at whatever our latest problem is. I drag my pounding head from Barrons’s chest and peer into the darkness beyond.
Ryodan shines the wide beam of a powerful flashlight out the door. My stalkers have begun popping into the corridor.
Halfway down the hall, I see a low-hanging round black globe. Not because Ryodan’s flashlight has illuminated it, but because the beam has lit everything but the circular area suspended in the air.
One of the Unseelie sifts in close to it, and as more arrive, it glides back to make room, and inadvertently brushes the black globe.
The instant it touches it, the ghoul contorts, is stretched long and thin into a tatter of black-skinned robe and bones, and screams with such terror that the skin all over my body prickles in goose flesh. As its hood elongates impossibly, I catch a glimpse of something shiny, metallic, where I think its face should be.
The black globe swallows it whole. Which is impossible, given the globe doesn’t have a twentieth the mass of the Unseelie.
My ghouls jostle and shove in panic. Each one that brushes the globe suffers the same fate. Stretched long and thin, then gone. The screaming is deafening, far worse than the hideous chittering. Some sift out. Others stand frozen.
The elevator doors close.
“Now do you get it?” Dancer says.
I’d shake my head but it would explode. I peer at him with pain-blurred eyes and whisper, “No.”
“When the Hoar Frost King bit chunks of frequency from our world, it created a cosmic deficit. The fabric of our universe began to unravel. That alone was problematic enough, but compounding it, at each site where it fed it also deposited something, like an overfed scavenger, regurgitating unwanted bones. Whatever it expelled possesses astronomically compact mass and density.” He pauses. When a lightbulb doesn’t instantly brighten over my head, he says with elaborate patience, “It’s. Deforming. Space-time.”
“Are you saying what I just saw is a black hole?” I manage. The farther we get from the globe, the less pain I feel.
Dancer says, “I lack the ability to perform the tests I’d like to run. Speculation aside, I can only observe these facts: they share certain similar characteristics to black holes, they were no larger than pinpricks at first, they absorb everything they come in contact with, and they’re growing. The one we just saw is the largest I’ve seen at any of the sites.”
“It’s the first place that got iced,” Ryodan says.
“You didn’t tell me any of this,” I mutter crossly to Barrons. Barrons shoots me a dry looks that says, Far be it from me to disrupt your brood. You might be motivated to do something and then I wouldn’t know who you were anymore.
I wrinkle my nose at him and don’t dignify it with a response.
“I didn’t know you had one in the club,” Dancer says. “I thought the one out front would get the honors. Dude, Chester’s is going to be swallowed from the inside!”
“Dude me one more time and you’re dead.”
We ride the rest of the way up the shaft in silence.
16
The Unseelie King settles into what passes as an enormous red crushed-velvet chair in what might loosely be called a theater room before a stage so vast the edges furl out into night skies filled with stars. On the left, the Milky Way shimmers. To the right, a nebula stains the sky rainbow-bright.
He rests his head of sorts on a hand of sorts and broods.
His woman retains no memory of him at all.
She knows him only as the Seelie Queen’s greatest enemy and believes that since the Unseelie Prince was unable to kill her, the king himself came to finish the job.
Though she conceals it with defiance, she is terrified of him.
To see his beloved gaze upon him with fear … there are no words. Neither split into dozens of humans, as he must be in order to walk among the tiny, strange, absurdly determined creatures who face such futile odds, nor as a god.
The joy that burned inside him upon seeing her again is ash.
He changes a channel of sorts with a remote of sorts and one of the more interesting cities on one of his more interesting worlds takes the limelight.
It is dying, as he suspected.
No matter, another will come.
But another of her will not come. In all this time, no one has touched him as she has. To have her back again and not have her at all is almost worse than believing her gone. It is as if a replication has risen from the dead, a perfect mirror image, nothing within. Should he take her into the White Mansion? Confront her with the residue of their love?