I wondered what made the Fae decide a nearly immortal existence without children or pain—but very little pleasure either—was worth it, suddenly apprehending them not as a vastly more powerful race, but cowards. I’d rather roll the dice, play the lottery, enjoy an unpredictable and sometimes scary eternity of passion and pain than the fate they’d chosen to embrace.

Regardless, the elixir was not the answer for Dancer.

The bell above my door tinkled as it opened and closed. My head lifted.

And my heart sank.

Lor stalked into the bookstore, an enormous blond Viking dressed in black leather pants, boots, and a Woodstock tee that looked like it might actually be an original. “Hey, Mac.”

“Barrons isn’t here,” I said hastily.

He sliced his head to the left. “Not looking for him. I came to see you.”

Well, shit. He was pretty much the last person I wanted to see. I couldn’t look at him without my box that contained thoughts of Jo threatening to explode.

When he dropped onto the couch, the frame protested the impact of his weight. Lor, like the rest of the Nine, stood well over six feet and was massively muscled and badly scarred. With thick blond hair and chiseled good looks, he was the fun-loving caveman, the hardcore rock-and-roll partier that burned through bombshell blondes yet somehow managed to leave them in an adoring stupor when he moved on. He had a soft spot for women and children and had been Dani’s shadow for years, without her ever knowing it.

I’d sent Jo to him. After she broke up with Ryodan, I’d taken one look into her red-rimmed, wounded eyes and known instantly that she was never going to be able to toe that line. One way or another, if she didn’t move forward to the next thing, she’d end up trying to go back.

And Ryodan would never take her back.

Only thing worse than dumping a boyfriend you deep down wanted to keep but shouldn’t for one reason or another was backsliding, and getting dumped yourself.

I did that once. Choosing to leave had made me feel empowered. Going back and getting rejected had screwed with my head for a quite a while. Once you walked away, you had to keep walking and never look back.

My brain had put two facts together that day at the bar: fun-loving Lor who never had relationships and allegedly was a mind-blowing, enthusiastic fuck, and Jo needing a distraction to keep her from backsliding. It had seemed like the perfect solution. Harmless. With potential for good. Lor gets his world rocked, Jo moves on. No way they’d ever repeat it. Lor didn’t do do-overs.

I’d never once thought it would turn out to be anything more for Jo than a stepping-stone to a new life.

But they’d sparked off each other. I’d seen it. There’d been something building.

And I’d killed her.

“What’s up?” I said briskly. “I was just about to head out,” I lied.

“Hear about Jo?”

I nodded. Cleared my throat. “I’m so sorry, Lor.” In more ways than he knew.

“I had plans for that one,” he murmured. “Ah, did I ever. Crazy bitch. Thought she didn’t wanna fuck me, and anybody could see plain as day she loved fucking me.”

Yep. Twist that knife.

He stared at me a long, unreadable moment. Finally he said, “I can’t talk to those fucks about her. Can’t talk to anybody. Figured you’d listen ’cause you were friends with her. Hell, you’re the one sent the little spitfire to me.”

And I was endlessly sorry I had.

“I got a rule, see. Never fuck a brunette. Know why?”

Nope, but I could see he was going to tell me. I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak. All I could see was me shattering Jo’s skull. Eating her. I thrust the images away. There was danger here. The Nine were far too capable of skimming minds.

“I had a wife once. Long time ago.”

Let me guess. She was a brunette. “You know,” I said quickly, “I’m not supposed to know about any of this, remember? What would Ryodan do if he heard you were talking to me?”

“Fuck Ryodan. Bastard had her longer than I did.” His face darkened and all trace of playful, caveman Lor vanished, leaving the hard-planed visage of a virtual stranger.

I realized I was seeing the real Lor for the first time. Brutal, cold, every bit as much a beast as the rest of them. Bonecrusher. The word floated into my mind but I had no idea why.

“You got any fucking clue what it’s like to outlive everyone? At first you think it’s the greatest goddamn party you coulda been invited to. You fuck and feast and do every goddamn thing you want and think you got the world by the balls. Then you realize every bloody person you like hanging with is gonna die. You know how many musicians I watched go before they even hit thirty? And the women, shit. How many times can you care? How long till you start to hate? Despise. Motherfucking revile.”

His eyes bored into mine and I inhaled shallowly. A series of disjointed images flashed through my mind, and I knew he was feeding them to me. Once, Lor had been a completely different man. The worst of them. The Bonecrusher. He’d befriended Genghis Khan and run with the Mongols, he’d warred with Attila the Hun, slaughtered with Caligula, rampaged with Nero, laughed with Ivan the Terrible, been executioner for Robespierre, drank blood from the skulls of their enemies with Vlad the Impaler. For a thousand years he’d sought war after war, killing endlessly. He’d abjured his own clan, until one night they’d shown up in force, led by Ryodan, captured him and dragged him away.

“You fucks’d call it an intervention,” he said with cold, dead eyes.

“You loved Jo,” I whispered.

“Nope,” he said succinctly. “But the woman made me sorta start to feel like maybe I would put up with that shit again, watch her grow old, die, deal with it. And now she’s fucking gone.”

Of all the people I could have killed, it had to be Jo. “Why are you telling me this?”

“She’s already been forgotten. So much going on, nobody’s even talking about her anymore. By the time we got back, she’d been dead for over a month. I just heard. The scraps of her body got dumped in a grave. Gonna go dig ’em up, sniff out the Unseelie that did it. Torture that fuck to death a hundred different ways.”

A chill went up my spine. “You could do that? Smell who killed her from her remains?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s easy shit. I dropped by to let you know. Seeing as you’re Fae queen and all, letting you know there’s gonna be a fuck lot of Unseelie dying tonight. Not just the one that did it. I’m gonna take down the whole caste, every goddamn last one.”