All were offered.

You tried out.

You chose. Live or die. Understudy or star.

“You knew this was here. You were waiting for me,” I said. “Since before I ever walked into your store.”

“Yes.”

“Who painted it?”

He shrugged a shoulder. “No idea. It was here when I bought the place. But the building has morphed over time.”

I saw things so clearly now. How he’d taught me, helped me evolve, gave and withheld information, even misled at times so I could find my own path, sought to level the playing field so we would be equals, and tried to avoid the Unseelie King’s mistakes. I remembered the night he’d nearly repeated a significant one, when he thought I was dying in Mallucé’s lair deep beneath the Burren. He’d growled that it wasn’t what he would have chosen, as he’d poised on the brink of changing me into a creature like him to keep me alive with him forever.

“You could have told me. Saved me from worrying that I was you.”

“Some things can’t be told. Only learned. Or not.”

“Then it was destined.” The idea chafed.

“Never destined. And still not written in stone. Merely possible. As are many other outcomes.”

I glanced back up at the man and woman in the mural on the ceiling of Barrons Books & Baubles.

His wings.

Her crown.

Barrons’s face.

Mine.

I studied them, the happiness in their eyes, the promise of a tomorrow I embraced. “Maybe we’ll do better.”

He laughed. “Ah, the unquenchable human hope.” Then, “Mac,” he said, and held out his hand.

It was so much more than a hand he was offering: it was nights of love so consuming it burned, days of grief that chilled, a kingdom of black ice and a mansion of alabaster. It was all possible mistakes and every imaginable success.

We would do better. What was painted above me was no more than an invitation for a future. We could accept it or turn away. The Fae were starfish, regenerating, as old ones passed, new ones arose. One thing I did know was whatever path we chose to go down, we’d do it together.

I took his hand. “Jericho.”

Fire to his ice.

Frost to my flame.

Forever.

Great, dark wings trailed behind him as Cruce moved deeper into the laboratory.

He’d felt the precise moment the king had abdicated. Like the Seelie Queen’s magic, the Fae power of the Seelie/Unseelie King had to pass to another.

It hadn’t come to him.

Yet.

Nor, however, had it gone somewhere else. It hovered in the distance, apparently undecided.

He intended to help it decide.

Cruce stood at the king’s mixing table, blending a dash of this with a bit of that, according to the spells he’d taken from the Sinsar Dubh, and in short order created his first child.

Rules. Malleable, said the one who’d spoken for the king, yet claimed not to be him.

They certainly were.

The Court of Shadows was already being reborn.

THE END