I saw you after the Book had. There’s no question you did it.

The others I killed?

He shook his head. I wasn’t there. I did, however, see a few disturbing things on the way to the White Mansion. I terminated each of them. Quickly.

I inhaled sharply and tears sprang to my eyes. He’d cleaned up after me. When I’d first returned to Dublin this morning I’d wanted desperately to find those terrible things the Book had shown me: the inside out twins, the castrated man, the child, but I’d realized it had been thirty-five days, and although they surely lingered in agony, it had likely been a matter of hours or days and it was far too late for me to be merciful. Barrons had prevented them from suffering. Been the mercy killer for me. I drew back and looked at him through the tears, wondering if this was what he had meant about the grain of sand. “Your feelings about whatever you’d done that was unforgivable got polished into mercy.”

Mercy from a beast like me? he mocked.

Yes, from you.

He said nothing but I knew it was true.

The silence stretched, then he lightly touched his hands to my temples and drew my head into the hollow of his neck.

Suddenly I was in another place and time, a desert of sand, a hot wind gusting over me, tangling my hair. Watching Barrons toss his son up onto a horse. The beautiful little boy laughed with excitement as his father stared impatiently up.

I made him come with me that day because I was in a hurry. I didn’t want to waste the few minutes it would have taken to return him to his mother. There was no reason to hurry. Those few minutes cost him his entire life, condemned him to an eternity of hell.

I swallowed.

The thing that ate at me the most about containing you with the stones was that it appeared my choices were: don’t do it and let you destroy the world; do it and lock you away in Culsan’s chamber, incurring the risk that the world got destroyed by the black holes anyway, leaving you to suffer there forever because I would be gone and unable to come back and free you; or kill you so you would never suffer my son’s fate. I can’t tell you if it appeared the world would end, I’d not have done the latter.

“Thank you,” I said simply.

He inclined his head gravely.

“Was I horrific when the Book was in possession of me?”

“No worse than many humans I’ve known. Where the corporeal Book was a vast, philosophical, brilliant homicidal maniac with enormous power of illusion, the one within you seemed a smaller, egotistical psychopath. Cruce postulated that the Book didn’t copy itself, it had to split, thereby lost many of its parts in the process. I suspect the twenty-some years it lived inside you changed it further. Its time inside your body must have been the most visceral, tangible experience it had ever had, connected to your senses.”

“You think I humanized it.”

“To a degree.”

“Did you know I was in there?”

He smiled faintly. “I felt you early on. You were furious.”

“You felt that? But I wasn’t in control of it then!”

“Your rage was enormous and told me what I needed to know. You were in there, fighting. Later the Book tried to pretend it was shifting back and forth between you and it, and I played along but I could sense only the Book at that time. The only other time I felt you was when I came to you.”

“And told me to become it.”

His dark eyes gleamed. Which you did superbly. My little monster.

I gasped. “You could feel me when I was like that—stripped of all emotion?”

You were a woman who knew her own strength. Powerful. Resolute. Beautiful.

I dropped my head back down into the hollow of his neck, glowing inside. Beneath me lay the only man that could probably ever understand what I’d become at that moment, and could admire it. It would have terrified most men, to watch a woman strip away everything that made her human in order to get the job done. He found my strength beautiful. My monster and his beast; they liked each other.

“We have to make plans to move humans off world, Jericho.” I turned my mind away from myself and toward our many problems. “This planet may die, but that doesn’t mean the end of the human race. They can live on another world, colonize.”

“Ryodan and I are already on it. Years ago we mapped paths in the Silvers to worlds that could sustain human life. We knew this world might one day become more hostile than we desired.” He was silent a moment, then added, “Still, we failed to consider it might one day cease to exist entirely. We’ve never faced the risk of permanent death until recently. Now all of us face the threat of complete annihilation.”

Or eternal hell. Reborn in a black hole to die again and again. I traced my fingers down the sharp angle of his jaw, touched his lips, vowing silently that I would never let that happen.

He caught my hand and kissed each finger then said, “When you think of the lives your opening the Sinsar Dubh cost, think also that if you had not, you would not have become the Fae queen, thereby gaining the only magic that may save this world.”

“You think the lives of the few are worth the lives of the many.”

“The universe works in mysterious ways. When you live long enough, you begin to see a grander purpose and pattern, larger than any of us.”

“The only way that grander purpose works for me is if I manage to save the Earth. I don’t know what I have or how to use it.”

“We’ll figure it out. But if it looks like we can’t, you’re going off world, too.”