Burned, стр. 81

“Irrelevant and maudlin. I asked you a question. Answer it.”

“Yes. She could have anticipated the Hag’s movements better,” I say flatly. “Dani has a fire you lack. Her gut instincts are flawless, she is brilliant.”

Jada’s eyes narrow and her nostrils flare. “I’m flawless. I’m brilliant.”

“Give me my spear.”

She cocks her head as if holding an internal debate, then slips the cuff of Cruce from her arm and holds it in the general direction of my voice. “Logic dictates a different course.”

Oh no, it doesn’t. Logic dictates she keeps both. Not give away something she isn’t required to relinquish. Interesting.

“Take the cuff,” Jada insists. “It makes sense.”

“How does letting you keep my spear make sense?”

Emerald eyes bore into the space where I stand, as if she’s trying to hammer me into her desired shape with the sheer intensity and implacability of her gaze. “I kill. It’s what I do. It’s who I am. It’s who I’ve always been. I will never change. Stay out of my way. Or your free passage will be rescinded.”

The cuff tinkles to the cobbled pavement at my feet.

Jada is gone.

39

“What are you waiting for?” the Seelie Queen demands, trying but failing to conceal her fear behind an imperious facade. “Seal our pact and attend Dublin.”

She dreads kissing him.

Once, she couldn’t kiss him enough.

The Unseelie King completes the complex process of reducing himself, compressing fragments into various, new human forms those who live in Dublin have not seen him wearing.

He never attends a world twice in the same human bodies once they’ve been identified. Humans recall him, bring petitions, crucify him with incessant, foolish demands. Give us laws, chisel them in stone, tell us how to live!

Absurd, floundering humanity, spreading from planet to planet like a plague, colonizing the stars, he finds it astounding how long they have managed to persist.

Once, he told them the truth.

Chiseled a single commandment upon a slab of stone: That is how to live: in the choosing. There are no rules but those you make for yourself.

The man to whom he’d entrusted the tablet promptly shattered it, chiseled ten precise commands upon two stone slabs and carried them down a mountain with the pomp and circumstance of a prophet.

Religious wars ravaged that world ever since.

It is possible that day, those tablets, are why he feels an unwelcome twinge of responsibility for that planet. He should never have chiseled.

He shakes off his brood and looks down at the concubine. He made himself taller and wider than she, and is now appropriate for her size, sporting the same visage he wore the day they met, nearly a million years ago.

She recalls no detail of their time together. He remembers enough for both of them. He wears the same attire.

He pushes open her cloak, closes his hands on her waist, and transports them through space and time to another location where he swiftly erects barricades and walls and seals off the prison in which he will leave her while he pretends to try to save a world beyond saving.

He inhales deeply of memory-residue on the air, the scent of sex on skin, of wings glossed with sweat, of sheets damp with passion. He has not been here in a long time.

Once their boudoir of light and shadows, of fire and ice, was the only place he wanted to be.

Till the day he found her dead inside their sacred place and madness claimed him.

Against a frosted crystalline wall, the white half of the chamber features a round bed on a diamond-crusted dais, draped in silks and snowy ermine throws. Fragrant ivory petals are scattered across the furs, perfuming the air. The floor is covered with plush white carpets before an enormous alabaster hearth filled with white and gold logs from which dazzlingly bright flames pop and crackle. Thousands of tiny diamond-bright lights float lazily on the air, twinkling. Her half is bright, joyous, a sunny day at high altitudes, the ceiling of her chamber a brilliant blue sky.

He turns his head and looks beyond the enormous gilt-framed mirror, the first Silver he ever created.

His chamber is the size of a human sports arena, draped in black velvet and furs, filled with darkly spiced ebony petals. Between sheer slabs of dark ice, a bed stretches. On one wall, a blue-black fire sends exotic flames licking up to the ceiling where they terminate in dark stars amid fantastic nebulae shimmering with blue vapors.

For a moment he sees her there, on his bed, falling back on the dark, glossy furs, laughing, dusky ice frosting her hair, a handful of velvety petals fluttering down to land on her bare breasts.

Sorrow fills him.

He had so many ambitions.

She had but one.

To love.

“What is this place? Why have you brought me here?” she demands.

He doesn’t tell her it is here he spent the finest hours of his existence.

He will leave her soon, trapped in the memory-residue of the place, a spider in a web sticky with his love.

Here, she will watch them. Laugh and dream and fuck and create. Here, she will taste their passion, know their joy.

If, after seeing it, she still insists upon her freedom, he may consider granting it. May consider her lost to him forever.

But most likely not.

He does not tell her any of that.

She inhales sharply. “You would let me go?”

“Finest hours,” he says. “You must have heard that part, too.”

“I heard also that you believe this world you claim you can save is doomed.”

He does not answer, merely stands, enjoying the warmth of her body near his, the sweetness of her breath on his face.

She disparages, “You would deceive me for a single kiss.”

“I would raze worlds for a single kiss.”

“Try saving one, for far more than that.”

“The fabric of their Universe is damaged. Without the song, it is not possible.”

She says, “You are the Unseelie King. You will find a way.”

“That sounds suspiciously like faith in me,” he mocks.

“You see faith where only a challenge has been issued. Will you fail?”

He lowers his head again, until their lips are nearly touching. “Kiss me as if you remember me. Inspire this wild god as once you did. Incite poetry and fire with your passion and perhaps I’ll find a way.”

She looks up at him and shivers, then places her small, lovely hands on his face and it’s his turn to shudder. She’s touching him. Of her own volition. Music dances on his skin, translating from her palms into his very being. A stolen touch can never compete with a voluntary touch of hunger, passion, desire. The aria of choice is joyous, the cacophony of force brutal, ugly, and cold.

She kisses him reluctantly, barely brushing her warm lips to his icy ones.

This time, unlike so many others, he doesn’t take charge, or seek to deepen the kiss. Merely stands after the agony of half a million years of grieving this woman, basking in his first moment free of pain. Breathes it, inhales it, allows the particles of his being the chance to become for a single glorious moment something other than drawn in tightly upon himself in a frozen, eternal shudder of denial and crushing loss. Regret is poison that kills the soul.

She cries out against his lips, draws back and looks up at him. “Such grief! It is too much. I cannot endure it!”

“If you believe nothing else I tell you, my queen, believe my pain. Consider the cause.”

Then he is gone.

40

Five days later, a full eight days since Barrons was killed on the top of the mountain, he’s still not back and I’m edgy as hell and only a minor part of it is due to being in the full throes of Unseelie-flesh withdrawal. The fact that I know he always comes back doesn’t mean I can’t still think of a gazillion reasons to worry.