I WILL NOT LOSE CONTROL OF THIS VESSEL AGAIN!

I’d smile if I had a face. Yes. That’s it. You will. You will lose and I will win.

Something is happening to the Book, changing its circumstances, and whatever it is threatens its ability to hold my body. Is it me? Is my growing understanding weakening its hold? I expand my awareness and get slammed by a wave of bone-deep exhaustion. It’s the first sensation I’ve felt since the Book turned me into a Mac-in-the-box. Is something cranking my handle?

Oh, God, I know what’s happening! It needs to sleep. With its consciousness tethered to my physicality, it will eventually pass out. It has to. It can’t run my body around forever, or it would die. Bodies pass out when overexerted. What will happen to it then? What will happen to me?

I’m the constantly vigilant one now. I suffer no weariness, no need for slumber. I’m hyperalert, as clear as Ryodan’s castle of glass in which everything is visible and can be studied.

It speaks again, three words weakly.

Did. Someone. Poison.

I wait, stretching, craning, pressing outward with all my will.

Abruptly, the sensation of walls confining me vanishes and I feel like I’m being sucked out of my box by a hydraulic vacuum cleaner, decompressing, expanding, growing.

For a long, terrible moment I feel as if my consciousness is being torn in half, as if something is struggling to hold me in my box but I’m kicking and flailing, trying to break free. The tension becomes unbearable.

Abruptly, pain slams into me.

Pain everywhere! I’m staggered by it.

I open my eyes, desperate to see what’s causing the pain—

Holy shit.

I.

Open.

My eyes.

AOIBHEAL, QUEEN OF THE FAE

“You asinine fool, let me out of here!” Aoibheal shook her fist at the ceiling of the candlelit, flower-strewn boudoir in which she was trapped. Sparkling diamonds, illuminated from within by tiny twinkling fireflies, scattered around her fist and spiraled away through the air.

Her words, like all the others she’d spoken, threatened and cajoled, fell on deaf ears—if the uncaring Unseelie King was even listening. If he hadn’t wandered off, distracted by some amusement, fickle bastard that he was. She’d even tried telling the ceiling that she remembered who she was and she loved him again, but if the king was eavesdropping, her lie had been unconvincing.

Even here, trapped within a portion of the Silvers, Aoibheal could feel the turmoil of her court; the bitter acrimony among her castes with the deaths of the princes; the rising of new princes; and the suffering deep within the planet.

She felt, too, the birth of the massive, malevolent power inside the O’Connor sidhe-seer upon whom she’d so heavily relied. The Sinsar Dubh was no longer contained and now roamed Dublin, more aware, more dangerous than its prior incarnation. Moving with intent, purpose, and a plan. She knew she was targeted in its crosshairs, yet had no idea how upcoming events might unfold. This world and all its occupants had fallen off the grid of her projected possibles.

She closed her eyes and sighed. She’d failed to secure her race’s future. Had they been doomed from the moment the song was lost? Or had it begun before that, on that fateful day the ancient queen refused to turn the concubine Fae for the king? Had the First Queen not rejected his request, she would never have been killed, the two deadly Sinsar Dubhs would not have come into existence, and Aoibheal wouldn’t now be trapped inside the boudoir of a dead woman, because the mad king was determined to believe she was his long lost love.

Their planet would not be dying, their race poised on the verge of extinction.

Before the First Queen had died, she’d done two things: the first from spite, the second from duty. She’d wasted precious time using the song to sing into existence the walls of the Unseelie prison, as punishment for the king’s defiance.

Then she’d transferred the power of the Fae court, unearthing it from deep within their own fractured world, hurling it across the light-years and galaxies, to be buried within another one. The seat of their power had been moved again to yet more worlds by other queens, but long before Aoibheal took the crown it had been entombed in the planet Earth.

Each and every Fae in existence drew their magic from the roiling cyclone of power at the planet’s core.

Without the song, Aoibheal was forced eons ago to irrevocably bind their power to this planet in order to sustain their race. If the Earth died so, too, would all Fae die, the instant their individual tethers no longer connected to its source.

If only she had the song, she could break the bonds and release the power of her court, to be moved again!

They could leave this world, not care what fate befell it!

She opened her eyes, gaze drawn unwillingly back to the translucent, slender form of the concubine where she rolled with her dark lover on a bed of white ermine and lushly scented flower petals.

The woman was identical to Aoibheal in every way.

But she was not Fae. The concubine was mortal.

Yet…still…Aoibheal felt an inexplicable connection to her. The passion of the residue-lovers had somehow touched her, stirring something in her essence, not quite a memory, but the shadowy images of what seemed a long-forgotten dream. Trapped in this chamber, watching them argue as heatedly as they loved, she’d started to fear she was losing her mind. Their idiotic argument had begun to consume her thoughts. She’d become…interested in their problems. Had wanted to step in and tell them to stop being foolish. Urge the king to let his woman go. Let her live and die as she wanted and love her while he could.