I stare at her through the dim light, assessing, fixing my gaze on her neck. It looks tender and full of blood. Perhaps blood will strengthen me. “Come,” I suggest softly, “let’s secure these below, then we’ll take a few jugs to the sidhe-seers.”

I collect two of them and she follows me like a fucking idiotic puppy who thinks the world is a good, safe place to explore, full of happy people with hands outstretched in kindness, bearing gifts of food and toys to the demolished entry to the underground city. As I mount the rubble at the top of the stairs, I freeze.

Cruce’s body is gone. How could Cruce’s body be gone? I’m momentarily blank, unable to divine a possibility that encompasses this anomaly. No one else has been here. I would have heard someone creep up the stairs and drag him back down. I would have picked up some small sound if he’d somehow managed to escape the runes (IMPOSSIBLE!) and slipped off.

I can’t explain this. Something has transpired for which I am unable to account. That means I have an enemy. A clever, clever one. Someone tampers with my work. WHO IS INTERFERING WITH MY PLANS AND HOW? I consider attempting to employ the same temporal spell MacKayla used, see if it would work on me to shuttle me back a few minutes in time, where I might warn my other self as I top the stairs to watch for an enemy and identify it, but it’s possible duplicate versions of myself could split my power, and if one version of me was destroyed in the temporal conflict, so too would be whatever power it possessed. I remember too well what happened when I amputated myself from the corporeal version of the Book. I’d had to leave parts of myself behind. Important parts. They’d served as a distraction, kept all eyes on the Book, not Isla, but I’d never stopped ruing the loss. Some of my more powerful spells had been sacrificed that day. LIMITS. LIMITS EVERYWHERE! Fury floods my veins. My body trembles with it, weak thing that it is. Not only don’t I have the spear, now one of my cocoons is missing. My meticulously crafted swift surgical strike is being undermined at every turn!

Incensed, I whirl on Jo, all subtlety and plans for leisure gone, and grab her by the shoulders. I need an outlet. Now.

“What’s wrong, Mac?” she gasps, startled, staring at me wide-eyed. Doe eyes. Dumb, trusting eyes.

I grip her tightly with one hand, digging my fingers into her back, my thumb into the soft flesh beneath her collarbone, and slam her in the face with a fist, using every ounce of my Unseelie-flesh-enhanced strength.

With the first blow, Jo’s nose explodes, her right jaw fractures, and her eyes roll back into her head.

She staggers for footing. “My God, Mac, what—”

With the second blow, I unhinge both jaws completely and she doesn’t speak again. Choking on blood, strangled screams gurgle from her throat.

I punch her again and again and again, shattering the bones of her eye sockets, her brow, blinding her, splintering her skull, incensed that I have an enemy I know nothing about.

A clever, clever enemy who has stolen something that is mine. Two things now have been unfairly thieved from me!

Terrified, broken mewling sounds leak from the broken, bloodied hole of Jo’s face. She was too wounded by my first blow to mount a defense. I release my hold on her and she melts to the ground, trying with the vestiges of her dying will to curl into a protective ball, but there’s no protection from me.

I am ceaseless, relentless, hungry as a tsunami.

My will is stronger, my aim unencumbered, my desires greater.

I always win.

I kick her hard, again and again, splintering ribs, exploding organs.

I fall on her and punch her head until brains glisten wetly in her bloodied hair then I tear into the side of her neck with my teeth and begin to eat.

JADA

She raised a hand to shield her eyes against the glare of sunlight reflected off a mirror of white sand. She stood on a wide sunny beach beneath a cloudless, dazzlingly blue sky. Palm trees rustled in a tropical breeze and azure waves lapped at a sandy shore. Brightly colored hammocks swayed between trees. Paradise.

Not.

She squinted at the Unseelie prince standing a dozen paces away. He’d transformed himself with glamour and was now the Seelie prince V’lane. She suspected he’d donned a familiar form to conceal the mutilation of his wings, unwilling to let others see him in a weakened condition. His current incarnation was that of an exquisitely beautiful, deadly, erotic Fae of the royal line, capable of reducing a woman to a state of mindless, sexual need.

She focused her sidhe-seer gifts and peeled back the glamour revealing his darker form. V’lane was tall, but Cruce was a giant, well over seven feet tall, more densely muscled, his face less classic, the lines sharper, more savage, chiseled by an angry, defiant god. Kaleidoscopic tattoos slithered beneath his dusky skin. In both forms he wore a flowing iridescent robe that shimmered in the brilliant sun, more blinding than the reflective sand. His face was drawn with pain, his eyes half closed. He was far more taxed by the Sinsar Dubh’s assault than he wanted her to know. In either incarnation, weak or strong, he was still a Death-by-Sex Fae. Yet she wasn’t feeling that will-destroying desire she’d felt too many times in the past. Nor was she sensing the twisted, psychopathic presence of the Sinsar Dubh. She let his true form recede from her sidhe-seer vision and refocused on the golden illusion.

“Give me the cuff, sidhe-seer,” Cruce snarled, “or the next world I take you to will not be so hospitable. You will die there.”

She rested the hand on the hilt of her sword. “As will you.”

“You will never get that close to me.”

“Try me.” Jada accessed the slipstream and reappeared directly in front of him, the tip of her blade beneath his chin.

He vanished.

“Cruce,” she said, and he reappeared a half a dozen feet away, scowling. He backed up and they stood measuring each other across three meters of powdery sand. She assessed the situation quickly: here before her stood the most ancient of the Unseelie princes, who possessed enormous knowledge and power and had proven himself a brilliant strategist, patient, cunning, controlled. The Sinsar Dubh was their primary enemy. They were each other’s secondary enemy.

The enemy of her primary enemy was her friend. “I’d call this an impasse. Are you ready to negotiate?”

“I do not negotiate with humans.”

“A human just hacked off your wings and sealed you in a cocoon from which you would never have escaped; a human that’s far more powerful than you, and clearly doesn’t like you. When she learns you’ve been freed, do you think she’ll just forget about you?”