“You admit to flaws?” I press.

“We are not perfect. What god is? Examine yours. According to your mythos, he was so disappointed with his initial efforts creating your race that he tried again. At least we imprisoned our mistakes. Your god permits his to roam free. At a mere few thousand years old, your creation myths are far more absurd than ours. Yet you wonder why we can’t recall our origins, from a million or more years in the past.”

We have drawn closer to each other while speaking and both realize it at the same time. We glide back in instant retreat, regaining enough distance between us that we would see an attack from the other coming. Part of me finds this amusing.

The princes have not yet reappeared. I am grateful. Although they no longer impact me sexually, they have a profoundly terrible presence. They leave me feeling oddly two-dimensional, minus something essential, guilty, betrayed in a way I can’t understand and don’t want to. I don’t know if I feel this because I was once beneath them, with my entire sense of self being stripped from my skin and bones, or if they are fundamentally anathema to all humans. I wonder if the “stuff” of which they were made by the Unseelie King is so alien and horrific to us that they are the equivalent of a psychic black hole. That they are unspeakably beautiful only makes it worse. Their exquisiteness is the event horizon from which there is no escape. I shiver.

I remember.

I will never forget. Three of them and an invisible fourth, moving over me, in me.

Because Darroc commanded it. That, too, I will never forget.

I thought being raped by them was terrible, that it had carved me in deep places, changed my innate makeup. I’d known nothing of pain, of transforming change. I do now.

We clear the forest, and the terrain begins to slope downward. With the moon lighting our way, we hike through dark meadows.

I give up my fishing expedition for now. My throat is raw from screaming, and putting one foot in front of the other while keeping an impassive expression on my face takes all my concentration. I slog through a lifetime of hell in the interminable darkness before dawn.

I replay the scene on the cliff through my head a thousand times, pretending it ended some other way.

Thick grass and slender flat rushes rustle at my waist and brush the undersides of my breasts. If there are animals in the dense thicket, they keep their distance. If I were an animal, I would keep my distance from us, too. The climate grows more temperate; the air warms with the perfume of exotic night-blooming jasmine and honeysuckle.

As abruptly as night falls here, dawn breaks. The sky is black one moment, pink, then blue. Three seconds, night to day.

I made it through the night. I draw a shallow, careful breath.

When my sister was killed, I discovered that the light of day has an irrational leavening effect on grief. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s just to shore us up so we can survive the lonely, bleak night again.

I didn’t know we were on a high plain until we were suddenly at the edge of the plateau, and I am startled by the valley dropping sharply away before me.

Across that valley, on an oceanic swell of hill, it looms. It soars. It sprawls for miles in every direction.

The White Mansion.

Again I get that uncanny feeling of inevitability that, one way or another, life would have deposited me here, that in any reality I would have made the same choices that drove me to its door.

Home to the Unseelie King’s beloved concubine for whom he killed the Seelie Queen, it is so enormous it boggles the mind. I turn my head from side to side, up and down, trying to take it all in. One could hope to behold its entirety only from miles away, as we are now. Was this where Barrons had been trying to lead me? If so, why? Had Ryodan been lying when he found me on the cliff’s edge and told me that the way back to Dublin was through an IFP, an Interdimensional Fairy Pothole, as I’d dubbed the slivers of Fae reality that splintered our world now that the walls were down?

The walls are alabaster, reflecting the sun, and blaze with such brilliance that I narrow my eyes to slits. The sky beyond the House—I cannot think of it without a capital; it is far more than a mere residence—deepens to a dazzling blue that exists only in Faery, a shade that will never be seen in the human world. There are certain Faery colors that have dimension, are comprised of myriad seductive subtleties upon which the eye could linger for time uncounted. The sky is nearly as addictive as the golden floor in the Hall of All Days.

I force my gaze back to the White Mansion. I explore its lines, foundation to rooftop, terrace to tower, garden to fountain to turret. A Möbius strip of tiered structures on an Escher-esque landscape, it turns back on itself here and there, continuous and unbroken, ever-changing and unfolding. It strains the eye, tests the mind. But I’ve seen Fae in their true form. I find it … soothing. In my dead black heart, I feel something. I don’t understand how anything could stir in there, but it does. Not a full-blown feeling, but an echo of an emotion. Faint yet undeniable.

Darroc watches me. I pretend not to notice.

“Your race has never built a thing of such beauty, complexity, and perfection,” he says.

“Nor has my race ever created a Sinsar Dubh,” I parry.

“Small creatures create small things.”

“Large creatures’ egos are so big they don’t see the small things coming,” I murmur. Like traps, I don’t say.

He intuits it. He laughs and says, “I will remember the warning, MacKayla.”

After he found the first two Silvers at an auction house in London, Darroc tells me, he had to learn to use them. It took him dozens of tries to establish a static link into the Fae realms, then, once he was inside the Silvers, it took him months to find a way to the Unseelie prison.

There’s pride in his voice as he speaks of his trials and triumphs. Stripped of his Fae essence, he not only survived when his race didn’t believe he would, but he accomplished the goal he’d been pursuing as a Fae, the very thing for which he’d been banished. He feels superior to others of his kind.

I listen, analyzing everything he tells me, looking for chinks in his armor. I know Fae have “feelings” such as arrogance, superiority, mockery, and condescension. Listening to him, I add pride, vengeance, impatience, gloating, and amusement to the list.

We’ve been making small talk for some time, watching each other intently. I’ve told him about growing up in Ashford, my first impressions of Dublin, my love of fast cars. He has told me more about his fall from grace, what he did, why he did it. We compete to disarm each other with trivial confidences that betray nothing of importance.

As we cross the valley, I say, “Why go to the Unseelie prison? Why not the Seelie court?”

“And give Aoibheal the opportunity to finish me off for good? The next time I see the bitch, she dies.”

Was that why he’d taken my spear—to kill the queen? He’d lifted it without my awareness, just like V’lane had. How? He wasn’t Fae anymore. Had he eaten so much Unseelie that he was now a mutant with unpredictable abilities? I recall being in the church, sandwiched between Unseelie Princes, turning the spear on myself, throwing it, striking the pedestal of a basin, holy water splashing, steam hissing. How had he made me throw it away then? How had he taken it from me now?

“Is the queen at the Seelie court right now?” I cast my net again.

“How would I know? I have been banished. Assuming I found a way in, the first Seelie that saw me would kill me.”

“Don’t you have allies at the Seelie court? Isn’t V’lane your friend?”

He snorts disdainfully. “We sat on her High Council together. Though he gives lip service to Fae supremacy and speaks of walking the earth freely again without the odious Compact governing us—us, as if humans could govern their gods!—when it comes to action, V’lane is Aoibheal’s lapdog and always has been. I am now human, according to my fairer brethren, and they despise me.”