If I had a body, I would draw my first deep breath since the moment it evicted me. I understand now. I know what I have to do. Anger was never the answer. It was the precise wrong approach.

I stop looking out from behind eyes I can’t blink, detach from limbs I can’t control, and retreat into myself, eliminating all distraction so I can give one hundred percent focus to my aim. I sink deep into the belly of my body, draw in, small and fetal.

It can make itself invisible.

I can, too.

I believe myself undetectable to the Sinsar Dubh. I devote all my will to that thought then get down to ferreting out and stripping away my emotion, peeling myself down to only those things that are ferocity, power, and will.

Distantly, the Book continues to taunt me but I tune it out. I can’t stop it, so there’s no point in paying attention to it. I must do my work, and return ready.

It takes time, it’s slow going at first, but the more I butcher myself, the simpler it becomes.

I focus like a laser, slicing away every ounce of compassion and mercy I possess. I obliterate kindness, love, laughter, and joy. I scorch doubt and fear from my being. Every shade of terror, anger, frustration, and rage gets burned away. I gouge out confusion, which is so frequently an emotional state, not a mental one. I eradicate guilt, shame, even mild consternation.

I go even further.

I char hope into ash. I don’t need it. Hope postulates a tomorrow. There is only this moment, and the one that focuses most fully on this moment will win.

I singe even desire from my essence, as that, too, could be used against me.

I hack ruthlessly at the finest parts of me, those things that make me feel, those things that make me alive—something the Book can never be, and it knows it and it frustrates it to be so empty, so it tortures and destroys everyone around it—until I, too, am cold and dead: savagery wed to resolution.

I find it startlingly…pleasant…to strip myself down to this unfeeling core as if it’s always been there, waiting for me. I have a skeleton inside my skeleton and it’s made of pure titanium.

I know what it is, where it came from: the rape of the Unseelie princes. They’d made me feel powerless, helpless, a useless piece of trash to be desecrated and crushed beneath their heel when they were finished amusing themselves with me. As if I were a plastic Barbie doll to be violated and broken and tossed away. And, as I’d laid there in the gutter, seeing myself through their eyes, as the complete irrelevance they’d considered me, I’d hungered to be the predator they were. The one standing. The one destroying.

I’d thought they’d destroyed me.

They hadn’t.

They’d made me stronger. A beast of pure instinct and savagery had been born in that gutter that day.

I’d been afraid of it. I was no longer.

Barrons was right.

There is a monster inside me.

And she’s beautiful.

AOIBHEAL

The Elixir of Remembering worked in similar fashion to the passing of the True Magic from the Fae queen to her successor, with three significant differences: one, the elixir restored memories, while the passage of the matriarchal power contained no memories, just magic and lore; two, the elixir didn’t immobilize the recipient while it was fully absorbed; and three, the memories from the elixir were integrated far more quickly and seamlessly than the queenly power.

On the day she’d been chosen to become the fading queen’s successor, the nearly transparent matriarch had summoned Aoibheal to her boudoir, pressed both palms to her breast and passed the True Magic into her body, where it had expanded and settled. Aoibheal had been immobilized for several long minutes, unable to speak or move while her consort, V’lane, stood at her side, guarding her during that period of vulnerability.

She’d had to acquaint herself with her newfound power.

Young queens were not powerful queens. Time was necessary to sort through and study the many legends, myths, and magic at her disposal. It had been human decades before she’d come into her own.

The elixir worked quite differently. She’d thought her memories had been stolen. They hadn’t. They’d been faded to mere shadows without substance, outlines with no content, and as the golden liquid permeated her essence, those shadows solidified, took shape and became accessible again.

Perhaps because she’d once known the memories, each and every one, they were easier to absorb than foreign, heretofore unknown facts. There was no sudden rigidity as an enormous amount of information was reanimated in her consciousness, no sense of being accosted or overwhelmed; on the contrary, she felt made whole again. At peace in a way she’d not known in her entire existence as a Fae. As if she’d been walking around with her most important parts amputated, then suddenly they were restored, melding effortlessly back into her body again.

Fire to his ice, frost to her flame.

No! She had no desire to see those memories yet.

She wanted her origins first. She wanted to access that time in her life before he’d come into it, the carefree, wild years during which the memory secreted in the king’s towering Silver had told her she’d been happy and free.

Ah, there she was.

Zara, witch and healer, connected to all, chestnut-skinned and barefoot, she raced across a field of flowers toward her home. Her hair was long, dark, spiraling in glossy curls to her waist. Her eyes flashed with ebony fire and her short shift was the many bold colors of T’murra wings. The tattoos of her clan curved up her legs, fanned across her shoulders and down her spine.

She had family, four generations beneath a simple yet expansive roof: grandparents and parents, siblings and nieces, though no children of her own. Although mortal, they were a long-lived people, surviving well into their hundredth year. As the first memory the king had given her insinuated, she’d loved her life, known and treasured every inch of her small world.

She’d even loved him. That, she now knew without doubt.

But her restored memories were absolutely identical to the True Magic in a single, cruel way.

She could visit and study each one.

But she couldn’t feel them at all.

She’d acquired facts, void of context. It was like reading a human novel about a fictional character’s life. It was why the Fae had no books, didn’t write things down. They derived no sensation from reading.

She had her answer. The loss of who she’d once been was permanent because she had become Fae. Once, she’d lived vibrantly. Now she could only do the equivalent of read about it and wonder how such passion had felt. Knowing that she’d had it and never would again.