“It’s not cold here. And you haven’t groomed me all day. It was a long day. I was alone the whole time. Because you make me stay in here.”

“You would attract too much attention out there.”

“I would stay in a higher dimension.”

“Until you thought you might get some attention.”

“I like attention.”

“I don’t.”

“Did you ever like attention?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You’re ashamed of me. Because I’m fat. That’s why you don’t want them to see me.”

She slit her eyes open just barely, lids heavy. “I’m not ashamed of you. And you’re not fat.”

“Look at my belly,” he said tearfully, clutching it with both paws and jiggling.

She smiled. “I like your belly. I think it’s a perfectly wonderful belly, all soft and round.” Yesterday, he’d been convinced his ears were too big. The day before that it had been something wrong with his tail.

“Maybe you’re ashamed of yourself. You should be. The fur behind my ears is getting matted.”

“You’re beautiful, Shazam. I’ll groom you tomorrow,” Jada said sleepily.

“It’s already tomorrow.”

She sighed and stretched out her hand. Shazam head-butted it ecstatically.

Jada worked her fingers into the long fur behind his ears and began gently detangling. It was beyond her how he got so matted all the time when he slept most of the day and rarely left the bed.

He turned his face up, eyes slanting half closed with bliss and rumbled in his broad chest. “I see you, Yi-yi.”

Yi-yi was what he’d named her that day long ago on Olean when she’d named him. He’d been saying the same words to her every time she awakened or fell asleep for four years, and wouldn’t rest until she said it back.

“I see you, too, Shazam.”

Sometime later they curled together and slept as they had on so many worlds, Shazam’s head nestled on a pillow of her hair in the hollow between her neck and shoulder, one paw wrapped around her arm, one leg sticking straight up in the air, twitching as he dreamed.

Part II

the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth

the drowned face always staring

toward the sun

the evidence of damage

worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty

the ribs of the disaster

curving their assertion

among the tentative haunters.

—Adrienne Rich

The legend of a monster is invariably

worse than the monster.

Unfortunately the monster is usually

quite bad enough.

—The Book of Rain

12

“Yet it was there I felt the crossroads of time…”

Barrons and I landed a safe distance away from the cordoned-off black hole suspended in the air near the underground entrance to Chester’s nightclub.

Jayne and the Guardians had been busy, commandeered by Ryodan to secure each and every black hole in Dublin. I glanced over my shoulder at it and shivered. They disturbed me on a cellular level, even with my sidhe-seer senses muted. Murder was now alarmingly easy: just shove someone into a floating black sphere, no evidence remained. Not that anyone was prosecuting murders at the moment, or even caring, too busy trying to stay alive themselves. The endless line of patrons waiting to get into the club angled sharply away from the roped-off area, apparently liking it no more than I did.

Barrons slid from the Hunter’s back and dropped gracefully to the pavement. It never ceased to amaze me how such a large, massively muscled man could move so lightly, half vanishing into shadow without even seeming to try.

He reached up to help me down, as if my accompanying him was a foregone conclusion.

I had no doubt he planned to head off with Ryodan to do whatever they were going to do about the Dageus situation I’d still not been told about, and I’d be stuck alone at some subclub, sandwiched between black holes above and below, killing time all day, watching various soap operas unfold, waiting for “my man” to come get me and lead me like a dutiful puppet to our next activity.

Not.

Being a woman raised in a rural area of the Deep South—although my mother urged both Alina and me to be independent—I had a tendency to get swept along by a strong man.

Being Barrons, sprung from whatever cataclysm sprung him, he had a tendency to sweep things along without asking—humans falling neatly into the category of “things.”

But I’ve come to understand the difference between nurture and nature, and my nature is vastly different than I once believed. More rigid. Less malleable. More solitary. Less social. It would be easier to embrace what I suspect my true nature is if not for the dark squatter within making me second- and tenth-guess myself.

I’d been invisible and inactive too long. In the streets, I was a target for anyone who’d seen the blasted Dublin dailies. I was considerably less of a target high above them, where those hunting me wanted only to smother me in noxious yellow dust, not control or kill me.

“Go on without me. I want to be in the sky, Barrons.” The morning was aglow with the faint pastel promise of a dazzling Fae-kissed sunrise.

“I want you inside Chester’s.”

“Because you want to keep me safe. The Unseelie king wanted the concubine safe, too. Built a hell of a cage for her.” I would feel useless and aggravated in Chester’s. I would feel stupendously alive high above Dublin. No contest.

He went still, and for a moment I nearly lost track of him, standing right there in front of me. Big, dark man turned transparent shadow. “I’m not the Unseelie king,” he said tightly.

“And I’m not the concubine. Glad we figured that out.” There’d been a time I’d vacillated between thinking we were both one or the other.

“You’re being hunted, Ms. Lane.”

“What’s new?”

“Feeling invincible because you ate a little Unseelie?” Barrons said sardonically.

Feeling alive because sex with him had reminded me who I was, deep down at the core, glued me back together in some intangible way, but I was not about to tell the arrogant beast that. Boundaries were necessary for a successful relationship. Most relationships aborted in the boundary-defining stage. Not because people demanded what they needed. But because they didn’t, then got resentful about it.

I wanted to walk beside this man for a long time, and to do that I’d have to be able to be completely myself. I was still discovering what that was. I couldn’t say that I’d ever call us a “couple.” But we were together. Committed to that togetherness as best as we were both able. I wondered what my rules were. Wondered who the woman was that had once been this man’s sun, moon, and stars. If he’d tried to curtail her activities.

“Stay the fuck out of my head, Ms. Lane.”

I blinked. I hadn’t even been aware I was pressing.

“She was her own woman,” he said. “You are, too.”

“That’s what I wanted to know.”

“Ask next time,” he said coolly.

I snorted. “You’ll answer?”

He turned and walked away. Over his shoulder, he tossed, “Try to stay alive, Ms. Lane.”

“You, too, Barrons,” I said softly, as the great beast between my legs flapped its wings and rose, carrying us into the rainbow-streaked morning.

—

If someone had told me, a year and a day ago when I’d stepped off the plane from Ashford after countless, exhausting layovers, that I would one day be flying above Dublin, breathing in the crisp, briny air, on the back of an icy dragon-like creature that wasn’t from our world, taking stock of my city, I’d have laughed and pointed them in the direction of the nearest psychiatric facility.

I’d have been really wrong.