Mercenary to the core. Sounded like the man I knew. “What is he?”
“Consider instead what he is not. He is not the one that hunted me down for what I did to you. Doesn’t that tell you enough, MacKayla? You are a tool to him. His tool works again. He is satisfied.”
“How did pages get torn from the Sinsar Dubh?” I changed the subject swiftly. If I ignored the knife he’d just driven through my heart, maybe it would go away.
He shrugged. He had no idea. They’d served their purpose. Now he needed the real thing. He’d continued collecting power wherever it could be found. The Hunters taught him to eat lesser Unseelie, to protect his fragile mortal existence.
“Why would they help you?”
“I promised them freedom. And I gave it to them.” He was an Unseelie hero, he told me, and soon the Seelie would recognize him as such, too. Yes, he had disobeyed his queen. So had many others, who’d never been punished so harshly. Had the crime he’d committed merited a death sentence? There were other Seelie who felt as he did, who wanted a return to the Old Ways. His only crime had been trying to bring about what many of them secretly longed for. He should have been rewarded for standing up for his brethren. Even humans resisted doling out such a horrific punishment, and their blink-of-an-eye lives were so comically short they were worthless. He’d lost eternity, for a single broken rule. He wanted it back. Was that so wrong?
I made a hand gesture when he paused.
“I have not seen that one before,” he said.
“Miniature record player, playing ‘My Heart Bleeds for You.’ I should care about this why? You made me Pri-ya.” I narrowed my eyes, studying him. Had he been the fourth? Had this monster touched me?
“You made you Pri-ya. I gave you other options. You refused them.”
“Do you really think the Unseelie will continue to obey you now that they’re no longer imprisoned?”
“I freed them. I am their king now.”
“So, what’s keeping one of them from killing you and going after the Book, himself?”
“They’re too drunk on freedom to see beyond the moment. They feast. They fuck. They don’t think.”
“You never know. One of them might snap out of it. Rulers get toppled all the time. Look at what you were trying to do to your queen.”
“I have Cruce’s amulet. They fear it.”
“How long do you expect that to last? You’re not even Fae.”
“I will be again, as soon as I get the Book.”
“Assuming one of them doesn’t kill you first.”
He waved a dismissive hand. “The Unseelie do not wish to rule. After an eternity in hell they wish only to be free to indulge their hungers.” His face went hard and cold as marble. “But I will not explain my race to a mere human.”
At that moment, I could clearly see the icy, imperious Fae he’d once been and would be again, given half a chance. He claimed to have been changed by his experience with mortality. If, indeed he had—and there was plenty of doubt in my mind on that score—I could too easily see him changing back, in a heartbeat. “You’re pretty ‘mere’ yourself right now, bud. Cannibalizing your own race. I’ve heard the Seelie court has a special, horrific punishment for that.”
“Then you’d better hope they don’t find out about you, Mac -Kayla,” he said coolly.
We stared at each other a long moment, then he tossed his long hair and flashed me a smile meant to charm. In another time and place, had I not known who and what he was, it probably would have worked. He was a beautiful, cultured, powerful man, and the jagged scar on his face made him all the more intriguing. I imagined Alina must have found him utterly fascinating when they’d first met. There wasn’t anything remotely like him in Ashford, Georgia.
As if he’d somehow picked up on my thoughts of her, he said, “I came to Dublin because I learned the Sinsar Dubh had been sighted in the city. That was when I met your sister.”
I went still inside. I wanted to hear about Alina, even if it came from him. I was starved to know about my sister’s last days.
“How did you meet?”
He’d walked into a pub where she was sitting with friends. She looked up, and he felt as if everyone else in the bar had melted away, just vanished into the background, leaving only him and her. She’d later told him she felt the same thing.
They’d spent the afternoon together. And the night. And the next and the next. They’d been inseparable. He discovered she wasn’t like other humans, that she, too, was struggling with a new state of being she didn’t understand and had no idea how to handle. They learned together. He’d found an ally in his quest for the Book, in his quest to restore his Fae nature. They’d been fated for each other.
“You lied to her. You pretended you were a sidhe-seer,” I accused. “She’d never have helped you otherwise.”
“So you say. I think she might have. But she was skittish, and I was unwilling to take chances. She made me feel things I did not understand. I made her feel things she’d longed for all her life. I set her free. The way she laughed.” He paused, and a faint smile curved his mouth. “When she laughed, people would turn to stare. It was so … Humans have a word. Joy. Your sister knew it.”
I hated him for having heard her laugh, for knowing she knew joy, for ever having touched her, this monster who’d arranged to have me raped, body and soul, and my eyes must have burned with it, because his smile faded.