I dumped the contents of my backpack on the bed. My little pink carry iPod fell out first and I smiled. How long had it been since I listened to a few hours of happy one-hit wonders? I connected it to my dock, only to discover the battery was dead. While I waited for it to draw enough juice to boot up, I rummaged through the other items in my pack, tossing out old water bottles, stale protein bars, dead batteries from my MacHalo I’d not wanted to further litter the streets with, tucked a music box up high on one of my shelves along with a glittering bracelet with iridescent stones and a small pair of jewel-encrusted binoculars, turned to throw my spare-change set of blood-and-goo-stained clothing into what I thought was the dirty laundry pile in the corner—

Music box?

I spun back around and stared at it, nestled on my shelf, stunned. The sides were elaborate gold filigree, the lid a lustrous pearl encrusted with gems, each winking with a tiny inner flame. It squatted on ornate legs, half the size of a shoe box. More gems were embedded in the sides and each held a small swaying fire. The lid was attached with diamond-crusted hinges. There were no locks, and I somehow knew it had other ways of protecting itself.

How long had it been since I’d completely emptied this backpack?

Bracelet? Binoculars?

Had I ever?

How the hell had the music box gotten in there?

The dirty clothes dropped unheeded from my hands.

I narrowed my eyes, thinking, trying to recall the last time I’d used this particular pack. I hadn’t carried it since the night I discovered Barrons had a son, the night I forced my way into his hidden lair and got my throat ripped out by a beautiful young boy. I’d been rummaging for a tarot card the Dreamy-Eyed Guy had given me, remembered touching something that made me shiver, but I was totally OCD that night about finding the card and had ignored the alert of proximity to an OOP. Hadn’t bothered to see what it was. I’d had far bigger problems on my mind.

Had I been up here again since then, for longer than to grab something or take a quick shower and hurry back out?

I frowned, thinking that even if I had, I might not have sensed the music box’s presence. I almost always had at least one OOP on me somewhere (Cruce’s cuff, the most recent acquisition). I sleep and shower with my spear, I keep my sidhe-seer senses on low volume pretty much constantly. I wouldn’t have picked up on anything else in the room with me unless I’d been actively hunting for it.

Had I really pilfered this OOP that dreamy, numb day in the White Mansion, months ago? I’d thought I left it there on the shelf of the crystal curio cabinet, but I had a dim memory of pocketing various trinkets, objects I’d been certain I simply couldn’t live without.

I stared at it on the shelf, horrified that it was here, so close to me when I’d been so strenuously avoiding thinking about it lest the Sinsar Dubh catch wind of what I suspected it might be.

I hadn’t felt a thing when I touched it this time, but with my current high, no object of power out there could penetrate my deadened senses.

I nosed cautiously around inside myself for my evil inner Book.

Nothing.

When I hunted for my lake last night, I’d not been able to spy even a drop of those still glassy waters. The lake was as gone from me right now as all my sidhe-seer gifts.

Did that mean the Book, too, would prove impossible for me to reach and conversely and more importantly, that it couldn’t reach me right now?

Was I looking at the box that held the Song of Making?

Could the solution to our problem of the black holes be so simple? Had someone, long ago, tucked the all-powerful melody away and concealed it directly beneath the future Seelie queen’s nose? If so, why? Assuming the original queen, who’d been alive at the same time as the concubine, wanted to pass the song along, she certainly wouldn’t have given it to the king’s mistress she’d so despised! Was this the result of some twisted Fae sense of humor? Had the queen concealed that very thing the king had so desperately wanted in the same house with the woman he’d wanted it for?

I scowled. The idea that this box might contain the song seemed suspiciously serendipitous. The universe didn’t work that way. At least not for me. The things that got tucked away in my curio cabinets were psychopaths, not all-powerful songs.

Yet time and again I’d recalled the melody it had played, the power I felt listening to it, and wondered if it might just be. This was the thing I’d been so studiously avoiding contemplating for even a second, grateful it was in the White Mansion, far away from me and my Sinsar Dubh, even as I grew increasingly certain we might need it. I hadn’t realized how critical our state of affairs was until two days ago when Ryodan pointed out that the black holes could ultimately destroy the Nine.

And here it was. Staring right at me.

I closed my eyes, searching my memory, drifting back to that day in the concubine’s house, trying to methodically re-create my steps. My time in there was so vivid, like all my time in Fae, as overblown and sensually saturating as the Fae themselves. And so surreal. Each time I’d been inside the mansion, I’d felt an intense bipolarity. I now understood it was because of the Book’s/king’s memories inside me, amplified by the residue of their consuming love in the psychically sticky house. It had seemed I’d been the Unseelie king himself, dancing with his concubine, whirling her around the boudoir, clutching her gown. I’d wandered through her private chambers in a daze, found one of her favorite bracelets, the special seeing glasses I (the king!) had crafted for her.