I trembled. He was going to touch me. Oh, God, he was going to touch me.

Over the course of my many encounters with V’lane, I would attempt repeatedly to describe him in my journal. I would use words like: terrifyingly beautiful, godlike, possessing inhuman sexuality, deadly eroticism. I would call him lethal, I would call him irresistible, I would curse him. I would lust for him. I would call his eyes windows to a shining heaven, I would call them gates to Hell. I would fill entries with scribblings that would later make no sense to me, comprised of columns of antonyms: angelic, devilish; creator, destroyer; fire, ice; sex, death—I’m not sure why those two struck me as opposites, except perhaps sex is both the celebration of life and the process whereby we create it.

I would make a list of colors, of every shimmering shade of bronze, gold and copper, and amber known to man. I would write of oils and spices, scents from childhood, scents from dreams. I would indulge in lengthy thesaurus-like entries trying to capture the sensory overload that was Prince V’lane of the Fae.

I would fail at every turn.

He is so beautiful that he makes a part of my soul weep. I don’t understand those tears. They aren’t like the ones I cry for Alina. They aren’t made of water and salt. I think they’re made of blood.

“Turn. It. Off.” I gritted.

“I am doing nothing.” He stopped in the sand next to me, towered above me. The parts of him I needed, those perfect, incredible parts I burned to have inside me, slaking my terrible, inhuman lust, were within arm’s reach. I fisted my hands. I would never reach. Not for a Fae. Never. “Liar.”

He laughed and I closed my eyes, lay shuddering on the soft white sand. The fine grains against my skin were the hands of a lover, the breeze at my nipples a hot tongue. I prayed the ocean wouldn’t begin to lap at any part of me. Would I come apart? Would my cells lose the cohesion necessary to maintain the shape of my humanity? Would I scatter to the far reaches of the universe, flakes of dust borne off on a fickle Fae wind?

I rolled so my nipples pressed against the beach. As I turned, my thigh grazed the tender, aching flesh of my mons. I came, violently. “You bastard…I…hate…you,” I hissed.

I was standing again. Fully clothed in my clingy catsuit, spear in hand. My body was cool, remote; not one ounce of passion stirred in what had an instant ago been enflamed loins. I was master of my will.

I lunged for him without hesitation.

He vanished.

“I sought only to remind you of what you and I might share, MacKayla,” he said behind me. “It is extraordinary, is it not? As befits an extraordinary woman.”

I spun and lunged again. I knew he would only vanish once more, but I couldn’t help myself.

“What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand? The n or the o? No is not maybe. It is not I like to play rough. And it is never, never, never yes.”

“Permit me to tender my apologies.” He was in front of me again, clothed in a robe that was a color I’d never seen before and couldn’t describe. It made me think of butterfly wings against an iridescent sky, backlit by a thousand suns. His eyes, once molten amber, burned the same strange hue. He could not have looked more alien.

“I’ll permit you nothing,” I said. “Our hour is up. You dishonored our deal. You promised you wouldn’t sex me up. You broke that promise.”

He regarded me a long moment and then his eyes were molten amber, and he was the tawny Fae prince again. “Please,” he said, and from the way he said it, I knew there was no such word in the Fae tongue.

To the Tuatha Dé there is no difference between creating and destroying, Barrons had said. There is only stasis and change. Nor to these inhuman beings was there any such thing as apologizing. Would the ocean apologize for covering the head and filling the lungs of the man who fell in it?

He’d used the word for me. Perhaps learned it for me. He’d used it in supplication. It gave me pause, as he’d meant it to do.

“Please,” he said again. “Hear me out, MacKayla. Once more I have erred. I am trying to understand your ways, your wants.” If he’d been human I would have said he looked embarrassed. “I have never before been refused. I do not suffer it well.”

“You don’t give them the chance to refuse. You rape them all!”

“That is untrue. I have not used the Sidhba-jai on an unwilling woman in eighty-two thousand years.”

I stared. V’lane was eighty-two thousand years old?

“I see I have made you curious. That is good. I am curious about you as well. Come. Join me. Let us talk of ourselves.” He stepped back and waved a hand.

Two chaise longues appeared between us. A wicker table between them offered a plate with a pitcher of sweet tea and two ice-filled glasses. There was a bottle of my favorite suntan oil stuck in the sand next to the chair closest me, near a pile of thick pastel towels. Sheets of brilliantly striped silk wafted from nowhere, billowed once in the breeze and draped themselves over the chairs.

Salt air kissed my skin. I glanced down.

My catsuit was gone and I was again spearless. I was wearing a hot pink string bikini, with a gold belly chain from which dangled two diamonds and a ruby.

I blinked.

A pair of designer sunglasses appeared on the bridge of my nose.

“Stop it,” I hissed.

“I am merely trying to anticipate your needs.”

“Don’t. It’s offensive.”

“Join me for an hour in the sun, MacKayla. I will not touch you. I will not…as you say…sex you up. We will talk, and at our next encounter, I will not make the same mistakes again.”

“You said that last time.”

“I made new mistakes this time. I will not make those, either.”

I shook my head. “Where is my spear?”

“It will be returned to you when you leave.”

“Really?” Why would he return a Fae-killing Hallow fashioned by his race to me, knowing I would use it to kill more Fae?

“Consider it a gesture of our goodwill, MacKayla.”

“Our?”

“The queen and I.”

“Barrons needs me,” I said again.

“If you insist I prematurely terminate our hour because you feel I have dishonored it, I will not return you to Wales, and you will still be of no use to him. Stay or go, you won’t be with him. And MacKayla, I believe your Barrons would tell you he needs no one.”

That much was true. I wondered how he knew Barrons. I asked him. They must have trained with the same master of evasion because he said only, “It rains in Dublin incessantly. Look.”

A small square in the tropical vista opened before me, as if he’d peeled back the sky and palms, and torn a window open onto my world. I saw the bookstore through it. The streets were dark, wet. I would be alone there.

“It is raining now. Shall I return you, MacKayla?”

I looked at the tiny bookstore, the shadowy alleys to either side of it, Inspector Jayne sitting across the street beneath a streetlamp watching it, and shivered. Was that the dim outline of my private Grim Reaper down the block? I was so tired of the rain and the dark and enemies at every turn. The sun felt heavenly on my skin. I’d almost forgotten the feel of it. It seemed my world had been wet and gloomy for months.

I glanced away from the depressing view, and up at the sky. Sun has always made me feel strong, whole, as if I get more than vitamins from it; its rays carry something that nourishes my soul. “Is it real?” I nodded up at the sun.

“As real as yours.” The window closed.

“Is it mine?”

He shook his head.

“Are we in Faery?”

He nodded.

For the first time since I’d so unceremoniously arrived, I examined my surroundings. The sand was radiantly white and soft as silk beneath my bare feet, the ocean azure, and the water so clear I could see entire cities of rainbow-colored coral beneath it with tiny gold and pink fish swimming the reefs. A mermaid danced on a crest of a wave before disappearing beneath the sea. The tide tossed sand to the beach in a surf of glittering silver foam. Palm trees rustled in the breeze, dropping lush scarlet blossoms on the shore. The air smelled of rare spices, exotic flowers, and salt sea spray. I bit my lip on the verge of saying It’s so beautiful here. I would not compliment his world. His world was screwing up mine. His world didn’t belong on our planet. Mine did.