The fire in the hearth died.

The chamber was just a chamber, void of all trace of the opulent beauty, passion, and sensuality that had saturated it.

Although I had no idea what had transpired between the legendary lovers, I knew what these events signified: the epic love affair between the Unseelie King and his concubine was over.

Inexpressible sorrow filled me.

I felt as if I’d lost something. I’d liked believing in their immortal love. I’d once lived their passion in these rooms, and the depth of their commitment to each other had been as powerful and seemingly eternal as the Unseelie King himself. Their tortured affair had been wild and romantic, inspiring me, filling me with wonder and no small measure of desire for a similar enduring love. Minus the tortured part.

I frowned, not liking the implications of what I’d just seen.

The Unseelie King had shut the door and turned out the lights. The lights he’d kept burning for hundreds of thousands of years. If the king no longer cared for the boudoir to exist as perpetual testament to his life’s love and obsession, then the king no longer cared. And his interest in human problems had always been fleetingly whimsical at best.

The concubine/Fae queen who might have helped me learn to use the powers she’d transferred to me had just stalked out and slammed the door behind her.

I didn’t need a genius IQ to figure out what their departures meant: no divine aid to humankind would be forthcoming.

Our world was dying.

Months, at best, the concubine had said.

And we were on our own.

MAC

The others began to bicker.

Cruce started it. No surprise there.

Jada was merely proposing we take further measures to secure the Sinsar Dubh in the chamber when he launched into a haughty diatribe about how no one was going anywhere until MacKayla “got her human ass over here,” put her hands on his chest and passed the True Magic of the Fae race to the rightful heir—the only Fae in the room, thereby entitled, no, owed…blah blah blah.

Lor pointed out that there was a second Fae in the room, the cocooned Unseelie princess, and as far as he was concerned, if the True Magic was going anywhere and it wasn’t as matriarchal power, it would clearly go to her.

Barrons snarled that I was never going to be getting my human ass anywhere near Cruce, not now, not ever, and then Fade jumped in, pointing out that whether or not I even was still human was open to significant debate.

Jada and I looked at each other in disbelief.

“Shut up, all of you!” I thundered.

The silence was instantaneous. Four pairs of eyes jerked my way. Even Jada looked mildly startled, and I realized my voice had come out larger than it used to, with an unmistakable note of authority.

“Time moves differently while we’re in here,” I reminded them. “The concubine said we had mere months at best before the black holes devoured our world. How long have we been in here?”

“Fuck,” Barrons exploded, his gaze darting instantly between the imprisoned Sinsar Dubh and the door. “We can’t just leave it like this. If someone finds their way in and moves a single stone, it’ll be free again.”

I could see that happening all too easily. People were insatiably curious. Fae were insatiably power hungry, prone to overestimating their abilities to handle it. More than a few would be tempted to see if they could control the Sinsar Dubh. Cruce and Darroc had both tried. Hell, I’d been tempted when I thought I’d killed Barrons.

“And who knows what it’s capable of in that form,” Jada said. “It might be like that movie, Fallen, with Denzel Washington where Azazel could jump from body to body. Mac may have inadvertently left it in a form that makes it even easier for it to possess people.”

“And thank you for pointing that out,” I said caustically, irritated with myself. I wanted the thing gone, dead, destroyed, dust, not existing in an even more dangerous form that might be able to whiz through the air, entering and exiting humans as if they were convenient revolving doors, possessing hundreds, even thousands, if it escaped. To Barrons, I said, “Can you ward the door?”

“For fuck’s sake, it’s not a mere twinkle of a nose. Wards take time.”

To Cruce, I said, “What can you do quickly to fortify this chamber?”

He folded his arms over his chest and regarded me with open hostility. “You are the one who is so all-powerful now. You do something. Or transfer the power to me and I will.”

A muscle leapt in my jaw. “Did you somehow miss the point of what the concubine said? If our planet dies, your race dies, too. Secure the damn door, Cruce,” I said flatly.

Barrons stalked out and we followed him.

Jaw clenched, Cruce joined us, closed the door and murmured softly.

An enormous steel gate appeared, barring entry, heavily bolted into the walls on sides and top, and sunk deep into the floor.

“But a Fae could get past that, couldn’t it?” I said.

“Fae are not ‘its,’ MacKayla, we are ‘hes’ and ‘shes,’ ” he said tightly. “And technically you are one of us now.” But he palmed a faintly pulsing blue-black rune and embedded it in the center bar of the gate. “This will do. For the time being.”

“Um, guys, we forgot the princess,” Jada said.

“She’s bound in the cocoon, now doubly trapped,” Barrons replied grimly. “Every minute counts. Multiplied exponentially in this bloody place. Run.”

We ran.

MAC

We returned to a completely different New Dublin, one run with near-militant efficiency by Ryodan.

Our stay in the White Mansion had cost us thirty-five days, Earth time.

When Ryodan returned from wherever he was reborn, he discovered the six of us, Barrons, Jada, Fade, Lor, Cruce, and I, had been missing for a week. With no idea what had happened to us or where we’d gone, he turned his attention to our pressing problem: the black holes that continued to expand slowly but relentlessly, growing inexorably nearer to the ground.

No one had any idea what would happen if one of the black holes made contact with the soil. We didn’t fully understand the physics of the black holes we’d discovered in space and no one knew if ours were even the same kind of thing. Dancer was convinced they were a total wild card, differing widely from naturally occurring black holes. Some people theorized it would eat slowly away at the soil, some contended it would instantly devour a large area, while others insisted the entire Earth would be destroyed at a fairly rapid pace until it formed an accretion disk around the black hole, allowing the hole to consume it at its leisure.