I stared into his eyes, those madness-inducing Unseelie prince eyes, and was startled by the transparency therein. He wasn’t lying. If I agreed to his terms he would do everything he could to save our world, then once I transferred the queen’s power to him, he would take his race away and leave us in peace. Forever.

It wasn’t a bad deal.

In all honesty, after my encounter with the Spyrssidhe that morning, I didn’t want to be queen of the Tuatha De Danann. I still harbored hope that one day I might be “just Mac” again; undoubtedly a new and vastly improved Mac—but one without four feet of hair and the crushing responsibility for an entire race. When would I ever have time to see Barrons or my family and friends? Where would I live? In Faery half the time, a reluctant Persephone dividing her days between Heaven and Hell?

“Who better to rule them than me, MacKayla? There is no stronger, more powerful, ancient, and wise Fae than I. You heard the queen. She, herself, was considering me. We both know you do not wish to be one of us. You bear no favor for my people. I will aid you unstintingly, withholding nothing that is necessary to achieve the health and well-being of your world. Grant me the right to lead my race. It is all I have ever sought, indeed, all I have ever desired. I spoke the truth when I told you, as V’lane, that Cruce’s sole aim was to free my brethren and ensure the future of the Fae. At this moment both our races are in danger of extinction.”

“Actually, that’s not true. The queen may have irrevocably bound the power of the Fae to this planet, and your race will definitely die if the planet does, but humans can go live anywhere. Our existence isn’t dependent on magic buried inside a world. My race can be moved to another one,” I pointed out.

His nostrils flared and he hissed, “If you would leave my people to die after having been entrusted with the True Magic of my race, after having been accepted by it, you are no better than you accuse me of being. Although I have never felt it, I have heard it is a power of great benevolence. I am willing to subject my desires and goals for my people to its scrutiny, and believe it will deem me worthy to lead them. Prove yourself the queen I believe you to be. The queen the True Magic thinks you are.”

He vanished.

I was instantly drenched.

Rolling my eyes, I popped open my umbrella and resumed sloshing through puddles toward Trinity College.

Fade was standing outside the door to the physics lab when I puddled in. Ryodan had dispatched him late last night, he told me, with orders to protect Dancer so long as the music box was in his possession.

Stepping into the lab, I propped my umbrella against the wall, grabbed paper towels off a counter, and dried my face, then hurried to join Dancer where he sat with headphones on, staring at a computer in the rear of the lab.

After exchanging greetings, I removed the music box from my backpack and handed it to him.

Fiddling with the unopened box, turning it this way and that, Dancer told me, “Gottfried Leibniz said that music is the secret exercise of the arithmetic of the soul, unaware of its act of counting.” He looked up at me and beamed. “Don’t you just love that? The relationship between math and music is sublime. I was picking up a lot of distortion from the box last night, so I set up equipment to cancel it out. I want to focus on the notes and chords, which I’ll convert to numbers and play with.”

“How?” I asked curiously. I loved music and had given a lot of thought to what made certain songs appeal to me more than others. I thought of songs as minibooks, with their own beginning, middle, and end and sometimes prefaces that established expectations. All had a story to tell. I responded to pattern repetition, motif that was recurrent, recombinant, and easily subjected to intriguing transformation. Although I adored happy one hit wonders, I could achieve the same buoyancy of mood from a number of classical pieces.

“There are eight notes in any given major scale that can be assigned numbers,” he said. “If you start with middle C as one, D becomes two and E becomes three and so on. You can also assign numbers to chords in the same fashion. As an example, you can do a musical interpretation of pi. A guy named Michael Blake did a fantastic interpretation of pi to thirty-one decimal places at a tempo of one hundred fifty-seven beats per minute, which, interestingly, is 314/2. When it was up on YouTube, I downloaded it because I liked it. Have a listen.” He pulled up the video on his laptop and hit PLAY.

After a few moments I said, “It’s beautiful. It makes me feel happy.”

“Yeah,” he grinned, “the nuts and bolts of the universe tend to be that way.”

I loved that Dancer saw so much beauty in the world. We needed more people like him. Could I heal his heart? Did I have such power? Should I try to find the legendary elixir and give it to him? Would he want it? I wasn’t sure I would.

“Here’s my version of pi,” he told me. “I took it more classic rock.” He opened an MP3 and hit PLAY.

It was different, but equally uplifting.

He said, “You can do all kinds of interpretations of pi but it’s just one of many mathematical equations that convert brilliantly to song. I want to break down the music in the box and study it. It makes sense to me that since sound is vibration is frequency, and the Hoar Frost King was devouring frequency from the fabric of our world, it would be another sound/vibration/frequency that would repair it. We just have to isolate it. I can’t compute it with the information we currently have because the Hoar Frost King removed those chunks of complex frequency. While I was able to determine that it was drawn to the flatted-fifth, there were multiple frequencies occurring at each scene that got iced. The Devil’s tritone may have been only one of many frequencies he stripped from those locations. I’ve tried playing all kinds of music to the black holes repeatedly, but nothing I’ve played has had any effect.”

I smiled faintly, envisioning him sitting near a black hole with a boom box. None of what he’d said explained why I heard the symphony of my dreams coming from the box while he heard a nightmarish melody. “Any idea why you and I hear it so differently?”

He shook his head. “But let me play with it and I’ll text you when I’ve got something.”

“You’ll text me?”

He grinned. “Barrons gave me a phone loaded with numbers and said he programmed my number into yours.”

Figured. After showing him how to open the music box, I said goodbye and headed for the door. I had a lengthy list of goals to accomplish today.