Her face changed as if she was seeing me for the first time. “Well then,” she murmured, “at least I don’t have to keep hating you. I hate hating people.”

“Good to know. So what the bloody hell is it that I don’t know about Dancer?” I ground out between clenched teeth.

She smiled, but it was a terrible, sad smile. “Dani—Jada—whatever it is you’re calling yourself these days—our lad has a bad heart. He came that way. I thought you knew.”

MAC

I opted for no makeup, swiped balm on my lips because they were so dry, stepped back and studied my reflection in the bathroom mirror.

Even with the lights off I could tell my eyes were red and it was obvious I’d been crying, but I could blame that on any number of things and be believed.

I’d curled on the floor of the shower, sobbing for a long time, wondering if all the images the Sinsar Dubh had forced on me were true. Had I done every one of those terrible things? Killed so many, with such chilling brutality and barbarism? I’d laid on the tile floor, reliving each detail the Book had showed me. Owning every bit of it. Jo’s death had been the truth. That told me they very likely all were. I’d done unforgivable things I could never undo. My choice to take a spell from the Sinsar Dubh to save Dani’s life had cost the lives of many others, and there was no way I could make my books on those accounts balance. Not just cost the lives, let us be perfectly precise—my hands, my body, had killed them.

I wallowed in shame and grief.

I shuddered, wept, and screamed.

Then I forced myself to stop, collected the savage murder of Jo and the other unforgivable crimes I’d committed, put them in a box and shut the lid.

I despised using one of the Sinsar Dubh’s tactics but it was effective, and hating myself for my sins would have to wait. As was whatever act of atonement I would eventually make. Not that there was any act of atonement that would mean a thing to those I’d killed.

Putting them away didn’t mean the pain was gone. I carried it. I would always carry it. But because I’d been given the queen’s power, my state of mind was too critical to everyone’s survival for me to let myself fall apart now. It simply wasn’t an option.

It occurred to me, while lying on the floor, that grief’s drink recipe is two parts tribute to the person you loved and four parts feeling sorry for yourself because you lost them. Or, in the case of Jo and the others, four parts extreme self-loathing.

Either way, grief was self-indulgent, and that was something I had no right to be. If we survived, I’d have oodles of time to hate myself all I wanted.

Currently, I was the only one who could wield the Song of Making. And that meant I didn’t get to be anything less than one-hundred-percent focused on our situation. I was a soldier on the front line, and soldiers don’t get the luxury of addressing their issues until the war is over and everyone’s safe.

I began to turn away from the mirror then narrowed my eyes and glanced back. Something about me was different. What was it? I’d dried my hair upside-down as usual, and my eyes were green, not black. My teeth were almost blindingly white since I’d brushed them about a hundred times, trying to not to think about what had been lodged between them.

Frowning, I fumbled behind me for the light switch and flipped it on.

“Holy hell I look like the Khaleesi!” I exploded, jumping back from the mirror. I’d showered and dried my hair in the dark, in no mood to see myself clearly. The streaks of crimson paint were gone and my hair was blonder than I’d ever seen it, nearly white. I tucked my chin down and peered at my part—yep, all the way to the roots. I gathered a handful of it, examining the length, trying to remember how long it had been a few days ago. It sure seemed to be a few inches longer now than I recalled.

The Seelie Queen’s hair had spilled past her waist in a thick platinum fall.

Christian’s hair had turned from rich chestnut to inky black.

Was I turning Seelie? Would the True Magic actually transform me into a Fae? Cripes. First a sidhe-seer, with the blood of the Unseelie King in my veins, then the Sinsar Dubh, now a full-on Faery queen. It was beginning to look like being “just Mac” had never been in the cards for me.

I narrowed my eyes. Maybe my changes would only go partway like Christian’s. He’d managed to arrest, even reverse, his transformation to a degree. Then again, this wasn’t a transformation I could afford to resist. I needed all the juice she’d given me. No matter the price.

After a moment I growled at my platinum-haired reflection, “Well, buck up, little buckaroo,” in my best John Wayne voice.

What I looked like, even whatever I might eventually become due to the gift Aoibheal had given me—and it was a gift because it could save our world—didn’t mean shit.

The only thing that mattered was what I did with it.

I hurried down the stairs, entering my paint-stained, wrecked store from the rear. I paused in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, studying it. The critical factor now was: we needed the song. But an equally critical factor was: assuming we got it, what power had I been given and how was I supposed to use it? I had no idea how Fae magic worked.

I remembered standing in the street, at the head of Darroc’s army of Unseelie, watching as V’lane made Dree’lia’s mouth disappear. Unlike when he’d sealed the door to the boudoir with a steel gate, he’d not said a word when he altered her face. He hadn’t even glanced at her. So what had he done? Was it based on the power of mere thought, the higher the caste of Fae, the stronger the power?

I studied the room with dried spray paint streaked everywhere, the shattered bookcases, the broken lamps and magazines and chairs. I’d only managed to clean a third of the smaller debris out the last time I’d worked on it.

I closed my eyes and painstakingly began to create a mental image of the way it had looked the day I first stumbled from the Dark Zone through the front door, so damned naïve, and met Barrons for the first time.

When I’d opened the tall diamond-paned door to the seemingly modestly sized four-story building and discovered the cavernous bookstore within, I’d fallen in love with every inch of the elegant Old World place with its antique rugs, sumptuous Chesterfields, enameled gas fireplaces, acres of books, even the old-fashioned cash register.

I lavished detail on the room I was building in my mind.