Hollowness filled her body. Gods, she missed her father so much. Her thoughts strayed to the book in the safe. Her fingers itched to pull it out, utter the words, call him.
But it was selfish to want that. She shouldn’t want it. Her father was . . . wherever he was, and she shouldn’t call him back. He was where he was supposed to be, doing whatever it was they did in the Netherworld. It couldn’t be right to call him.
Could it?
The frustrating part was that she simply didn’t know and had no one to ask. No one here to confide in. Here, she could never be the person she was born to be. She would never meet her full potential magickally, never have a greater purpose for her life. She’d never truly fit in.
In the Black, she just might.
Never, ever, would that thought have occurred to her before she’d met Gabriel. He’d completely changed her life.
It didn’t take her long to finally come to the decision she’d been toying with all week. All the same—even knowing somewhere deep within she would finally make the decision to leave—it felt impulsive. Reckless.
The hollow feeling in her stomach turning leaden, she packed a bag. Her money was in a bank in Piefferburg. She would always have that and could buy new clothes and items she needed once she relocated. So she took only the most valuable and sentimental things from her apartment. Jewelry, the gown and lingerie Gabriel had given her, photographs, and the book.
She wrote a note to Carina with the intention of slipping it under her door on the way out. No sense in allowing people to worry about her. Despite the queen’s current displeasure with her, she wouldn’t go to arms against the Black Tower if Aislinn defied her wishes and left the Rose for the Black. The note was just extra insurance—Aislinn needed the queen to know she’d left of her own free will and hadn’t been taken. No one needed a fae war on their hands.
Taking one long last look at her former life, she closed the front door of her apartment and walked down the corridor toward a new one.
GIDEON
concentrated on a small patch of the warding around Piefferburg, just the tiniest bit, not big enough for any of the Phaendir to notice. Collectively, the Phaendir maintained the power mesh warding in a pocket of their twilight subconscious mind, a pocket that was a hive mind—forming a seamless net that imprisoned the fae. Since Piefferburg had been created, this had been the way, power passing from father to son.
No female children had ever been born of Phaendir couplings with human or fae women, not since the dawn of their time. No muddy half-blood genetic messes, either. Phaendir blood ran strong and true, eclipsing weak human and fae DNA.
So it had been decreed by the one and true God, Labrai, just one more symbol that the Phaendir were the special ones, the chosen people.
The only exception were the two sons born of a Phaendir and wilding woman mating, Ronan and Niall Quinn. No one knew why those two men had turned out such an odd mix of fae and druid. No Phaendir wanted to examine it too closely. They hated that the two mages had certain skills beyond a Phaendir’s scope, because didn’t that make them superior in a way?
Gideon was the only one who wanted to examine it more closely. A lot more closely. If it were up to him, he’d kill them both and put an end to that bastard genetic line before either of them had a chance to procreate.
He leaned down and examined his work. Yes, this little rip and repair would go unnoticed. At least, he hoped so. Gideon knew he was taking a risk, but drastic times called for drastic measures. The space was only large enough to admit one man. One man at a time. If worse came to worst—and it was looking like it might—he would send more than one man in for the book.
But not himself.
He would never enter Piefferburg, but he would send his minions. Men he could trust and who were loyal to him. Men who supported the True Path—
his
vision for the future of the Phaendir. Men who believed Brother Maddoc coddled the fae, made their existence far too comfortable. Men who believed—as he did—that the fae shouldn’t
exist
at all, comfortably or not.
Gideon knew he might be sending his minions to their death. Any Phaendir discovered within the territory of Piefferburg would be torn limb from limb and possibly digested if there were any goblins around. But sacrifices had to be made. In order for Gideon to gain control of the Phaendir, he needed to make Maddoc look incompetent. Finding the Book of Bindings before Maddoc did would make that happen. Gideon would take Maddoc’s place, institute the True Path, and even get the girl—Emily.
He glanced up and down the warding, using his second sight to see past the haze of it to the other side. This part of the Piefferburg Boundary Lands was largely uninhabited. A distance away lay quiet brackish waterways where some water fae lived.
Feeling the thread of power pull on his body as he sewed the last bit of the hole up, loosely for future use, Gideon snapped off the tendrils with a few uttered words of Old Maejian and stepped back.
If those under his power did as they were told, he wouldn’t have to use it. If he did, he felt sure he would emerge victorious.
Labrai loved him best among his peers. He would see him through.
IT
was when she passed the statue of Jules Piefferburg, in that twilight area of Piefferburg Square, that things got dark.
Her footsteps faltered on the cobblestones just a little once she made it past that point. She may have cast a backward glance once or twice and cursed herself for not being stronger or more courageous. She didn’t stop, though, not even when she passed a group of dark fae—a cluster composed of half-breed creatures who looked human, yet not quite—who stared at her hooded figure and her white hand clutching her suitcase and snickered as she passed. Not even when she glimpsed a bedraggled boggart covered in old newspaper sleeping against a wall, or passed by a beautiful and deadly Hu Hsien—a Chinese woman who could take the form of a fox with poisoned fangs—sipping a drink on the patio of a nocturnal café.
Gods, was she doing the right thing?
If she returned now, she could take back the note from Carina in the morning and no one would ever know she’d tried this. Things could go back the way they had been yesterday . . . the same way they’d been three weeks ago, five years . . . two decades . . .
She walked on.
The shiny black tower loomed above her as she reached the double front doors. Behind her the Rose Tower gleamed in the moonlight where the rain clouds had parted. It seemed miles away, not just on the other side of the square.
Tall gray goblins guarded the thick wooden doors of the Black Tower. One on each side. Her steps faltered once again and her heart rate ratcheted into the stratosphere. She’d seen them before, of course, just never so close. The goblins resided in Goblin Town, away from the rest of the fae because their culture was so alien. Mostly they kept to themselves, unless they were called to battle by the Shadow King—then they were ruthless, brutal killers who ate their enemy even while it screamed for mercy.
They peered at her curiously with slitted pig eyes as she approached. For all their tendency toward the unspeakable in battle, when they were given a set of rules they believed in, they would defend them to the death. They were loyal as well. For these reasons they made good guards as long as their liege was able to inspire them and hold their loyalty, a thing the Shadow King had been able to do for hundreds of years.
She halted before them and clutched the handle of her suitcase so hard her hand went bloodless. “I am Aislinn Christiana Guinevere Finvarra, formerly of the Seelie, come to seek audience with the Shadow King.”
CARINA
ripped through Aislinn’s closet, pushing shoe boxes from shelves and pulling clothing from hangers. “Where is it? Where did you hide it, Aislinn?”
Gods, she’d waited too long to do this. The book was nowhere to be found. Maybe Aislinn had never had it and they had been wrong.
No, they were never wrong. It had to be here somewhere.
She pulled everything out of her drawers, then she checked under the bed and everywhere in the palatial bathroom.
Nothing.
Carina made a loud sound of frustration and slid down the bathroom wall to sit on the floor opposite the huge spa tub. Surely Aislinn hadn’t put it in a safe somewhere. Aislinn would’ve had no idea of the book’s worth so she wouldn’t have bothered.
Danu
, they would have Carina’s skin if she couldn’t produce it. It was the one task they’d set for her and she’d managed to mess it up.
Worse, they’d have Drem’s skin.
As soon as she’d picked up the note from beneath her door that morning, she’d known there was no hope of finding the book. She’d searched Aislinn’s place three times and had never found it. Why should this time be any different? And now Aislinn was gone and Carina’s hope of finding the book had gone with her.
She’d befriended Aislinn almost two years earlier. Even getting close to her had been difficult. Aislinn was more of an introvert than an extrovert and she didn’t share much—not about her life, anyway. Plus, she’d had Bella, who had been Aislinn’s confidant in all things—the position for which Carina had been competing.
When Bella had been banished from the Rose, Carina had thought she’d had a real shot. But her personality was the opposite of Aislinn’s—loud where Aislinn was quiet and strong, outspoken where Aislinn was thoughtful and honest, more self-serving and shallow where Aislinn was compassionate. Carina knew her own shortcomings as well as her strengths. She and Aislinn had never quite meshed, never totally connected. She’d never managed to get close enough to Aislinn to coax her to tell her all her secrets . . . specifically the one about the book they thought she had.
She’d miscalculated. If she’d known then what she knew now, she would have skipped the soft stuff and gone straight for the hard core. But now it was too late to take another course. She was running out of time.
What would they do to her? What would they do to Drem?
A tear rolling down her cheek, she pushed up from the floor of the bathroom and went to gaze out the window in the living room. The Black Tower gleamed shiny and imposing in the bright midmorning sunlight. Aislinn was there chasing Gabriel right now, no doubt.
Never in all her days had Carina ever thought Aislinn would hare off to the Unseelie. What was in her head? She had everything a pure-blood Tuatha Dé Sídhe could want: a beautiful apartment, high social status, money. Why give all that up to go and live with monsters? It just didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t as though Aislinn had Unseelie blood in her. All her magick was white, harmless.
How could they hold Carina responsible for Aislinn’s flighty, completely unpredictable behavior? How could she have known that Gabriel would turn down the Summer Queen’s invitation? It was completely unheard of! It was even more amazing that the incubus had managed to keep his head after doing so.
Still staring at the tower in the distance, she pulled her cell phone from the pocket of her jeans and punched in the charmed, masked number she tried so very hard never to dial.
“Hello?” she queried once someone picked up.
Silence on the other end. Only breathing. Then, finally: “Why are you calling me?” His voice was a low, magick-laced rasp that made her backbone go cold and bowels want to let loose. She didn’t know his name. She only knew he was high up in the Phaendir power structure, though not quite at the top.
She licked her lips and steeled herself. “Aislinn’s gone. I’ve searched her apartment and . . . the book is nowhere to be found.” She paused to gather her courage. “Maybe she never even had it.”
“She has it.”
“She went to the Black. Maybe she took it with her.”
Silence.
Magick coursing from the other end of the line made her fingers and ear tingle. A low static sound filled her head. Her breath caught painfully in her throat as she wondered if this would be her end.
“S-sir?”
“I will give you one last opportunity to right this wrong. Find the book.”
Click
. The line went dead.
She lowered the cell to her side, marveling that it was only the line that was dead. Drem! They’d threatened his life. It was how they’d snared her into this in the first place. Clutching the phone in her hand, she ran out of the apartment and back to her quarters, heart in her throat, straight into her husband’s arms.
“Oh, thank you.
Danu
, thank you,” she sobbed into the curve of Drem’s collar. She held him tight, tight enough that no one could take him from her.
“What’s wrong, my love?” Drem murmured into her ear. He stroked her hair and kissed her head, holding her close. “It’s okay. I’m fine. I’m here.”
She shivered and shook, unable to form words. Tears wet his shirt as she clung to him.
He pushed her back at arm’s length to study her face. “Carina, tell me what’s wrong.”
“I-I love you, Drem.” She wiped her cheeks and tried to smile. “I want you to know that I love you more than anyone in this world and I would do anything for you.
Anything
.”
“Okay.” He looked bewildered.
She melted into his arms and they sank to the carpeted floor, clinging to each other as if in rough seas.
Because they were.
Oh, how they were.
THE
Shadow King was a very good-looking man. Pale like a winter moon, but his features were chiseled and handsome. His hair was striking in its length and in its graduation of color from silver-blond at his crown to bloodred at the tips. Amazing that he only looked to be in his early thirties. The Sídhe were a long-lived species, but they did age. By all accounts, the Shadow King was one of the oldest fae around, equaled in years to only a few of the wildings. The Shadow Amulet had given him immortality, locking his age in at whatever age he’d first put it on.