IYD-a contact in my cellphone that was short for If You're Dying-was a number I could call that would guarantee Barrons would find me, no matter where I was. "I'm not completely helpless, you know," I said irritably. Dependence on him makes me nuts. I want to be able to stand so completely on my own one day that I feel like I measure up to being with Jericho Barrons.

"Head for the basement. I'll see you there. This won't take long." He turned and dropped to all fours, loping off into the night, black on black, hungry and wild and free.

One day I want to run with him. Feel what he feels. Know what it's like in the skin where the man I'm obsessed with feels most completely at home.

For now, however, I'm not running anywhere. I'm flying on the back of an icy Hunter to the house on the outskirts of Dublin where I once spent months in bed with Jericho Barrons.

- Dreams are funny things. I used to remember all of mine, wake up with the sticky residue of them clinging to my psyche, the slumbering experience so immediate and intense that if I was in my cold place, I'd wake up freezing. If I was hearing music, I'd come to singing beneath my breath. My dreams are often so vivid and real that when I first open my eyes I'm not always sure that I have awakened and wonder if "reality" isn't really on the other side of my lids.

I think dreaming is our subconscious way of sorting through our experiences, tying them into a cohesive narrative, and filing like with like in a metaphorical way-so in the waking we can function with a tidily organized past, present, and future we barely have to think about in the moment. I think PTSD occurs when something so shattering happens that it blows everything that's stored neatly into complete chaos, disorganizing your narrative, leaving you drifting and lost where nothing makes sense, until you eventually find a place to store that horrible thing in a way you can make sense of. Like, someone trying to kill you, or discovering you're not who you thought you were all your life.

I have houses in my dreams, rooms filled with similar pieces of mental "furniture." Some are crammed with acres of lamps, and when I dream I'm looking at them, I'm reliving each of the moments that illuminated my life in some way. My daddy, Jack Lane, is in there: a solid, towering pillar of a lamp made from a gilded Roman column with a sturdy base. My mom is in that room, too, a graceful wrought-iron affair with a silk shade, dispersing in her soft rays all the gentle words of wisdom she tried to instill in Alina and me.

I have rooms with nothing but beds. Barrons is in those rooms pretty much everywhere. Dark, wild, sitting sometimes on the edge of a bed, head down, gazing up at me from beneath his eyebrows with that look that makes me want to evolve, or perhaps devolve into something just like him.

I also have basements and subbasements in my dream houses wherein lurk many things I can't see clearly. Sometimes those subterranean chambers are lit by a pallid gloom, other times corridors of endless darkness unfold before me and I hesitate, until my conscious mind inserts itself into the dream and I don my MacHalo and stride boldly forward.

The Sinsar Dubh lives in my basements. I've begun to wonder endlessly about it, feeling like a dog with a thorn deep in my paw that I just can't chew out. It manifests often when my subconscious plays.

Tonight, waiting for Barrons to bring the Alina-thing to me, I stretched out and fell asleep on silk sheets in the ornate Sun King four-poster bed in which Barrons fucked me back to sanity.

And I dreamed the Sinsar Dubh was open inside me.

I was standing in front of it, muttering beneath my breath the words of a spell that I knew I shouldn't use but couldn't leave lying on the gleaming golden page because my heart hurt too damned much and I was tired of the pain.

I awakened, drenched by an abject sense of horror and failure.

I stood abruptly, scraping the residue from my psychic tongue. In my dream the words I'd muttered had been so clear, their purpose so plain, yet awake, I didn't have one memory of the blasted spell.

And I wondered as I had so many times in recent months if I could be tricked into opening the forbidden Book in a dream.

Like I said-I don't know the rules.

I looked around, eyes wide, filling them with reality, not shadows of fears.

The Christmas tree winked in the corner, green and pink and yellow and blue.

The walls had been plastered-by Barrons months ago-with blow-up pictures of my parents, of Alina and me playing volleyball with friends on the beach back home. My driver's license was taped to a lamp shade. The room held virtually every hue of pink fingernail polish ever made, and now I knew why I couldn't find half the clothing I'd brought with me to Dublin. It was here, arranged in outfits. God, the lengths he'd gone to in order to reach me. There were half-burned peaches-and-cream candles-Alina's favorite-strewn on every surface. Fashion and porn magazines littered the floor.

Best cave indeed, I thought. The room, with the hastily plumbed shower I was certain he'd had to force my sex-obsessed ass into on frequent occasions, smelled like us.

I frowned. What a terrible place to bring the facsimile of my sister. Surrounded by memories of who I was, who she was, how integral a part of my life she'd been.

I cocked my head, listened intently with the last day of my Unseelie-flesh-heightened senses.

Footsteps above, something being dragged, sounds of protest, heated yelling, no male answer. The beast was dragging the imposter of my sister to the stairs. I guessed she'd gotten the screaming out of her system. But then again, if it were a Fae masquerading as my sister, it wouldn't have screamed. There would have been some kind of magic battle. I was interested to learn how and where he'd found it, if it had put up a fight.

I pushed up from the bed and braced myself for the coming confrontation.

- The screaming started in the basement, loud and anguished, beyond the closed door. "No! I won't! You can't make me! I don't want it!" it shrieked.

I kicked open the door, stood framed in the opening and glared at the imposter. It was near the bottom of the stairs, with Barrons blocking the stairwell, it was trying to clamber back up on its hands and knees.

Was it going to pull the same stunt it had at 1247 LaRuhe? Pretend to be so terrified of me that I couldn't possibly interrogate it?

I stalked closer and it curled into a ball and began to sob, clutching its head.

I moved closer still and it suddenly puked violently, whatever it had in its stomach spewing explosively on the wall.

Barrons loped to the top of the stairs, shut and locked the door. I knew what he was doing. Transforming back into the man in private. He would never let anyone besides me see him morphing shapes. Especially not a Fae.

I studied the sobbing form of my sister, filled with grief for what I'd lost and hate for the reminder, and love that wanted to go somewhere but knew better. Such a screwed-up mixture, so poisonous. It lay curled on the floor now, holding its head as if its skull might explode as violently as its stomach just had.

I narrowed my eyes. Something about it was so familiar. Not its form. But something about the way it looked, laying there curled, clutching its skull as if it was- "What the hell?" I whispered.

Surely it hadn't studied me that closely! Surely it wasn't playing such a deep psychological game.

I began stepping backward, moving away, never taking my eyes off it. Five feet. Ten. Then twenty between us.

The thing that was impersonating my sister slowly removed its hands from its head. Stopped retching. Began to breathe more evenly. Its sobs quieted.

I strode briskly forward ten feet and it screamed again, high and piercing.

I stood frozen a long moment. Then I backed away again.

"You're pretending you can sense the Book in me," I finally said coldly. But of course. Alina-my dead sister, not this thing-had been a sidhe-seer and OOP detector like me. If my sister had stood near the Sinsar Dubh, like me, might it (me) have made her violently sick?

I frowned. She and I had lived in the same household for two decades and she'd never sensed anything wrong with me then. She hadn't puked every time I'd walked in the room. Was it possible the Sinsar Dubh inside me had needed to be acknowledged by me to gain power? That perhaps, before I'd come to Dublin, it had lay dormant within and quite possibly would have remained that way forever if I'd not awakened it by returning to a country I was forbidden to enter? Had Isla O'Connor known that the only way to keep my inner demon slumbering was to keep me off Irish soil? Or was there something more going on? Had there really never been any Fae in Ashford because it was so boring while we'd been growing up? Or had my birth mother somehow spelled our sidhe-seer senses shut, never to awaken unless we foolishly returned to the land of our blood-magic?

Oh yeah, feeling that matrixlike skewed sense of reality again.

Why was I even speculating such nonsense? This thing was not my sister!

It raised its head and peered at me with Alina's tear-filled eyes. "Jr., I'm so sorry! I never meant for you to come here! I tried to keep you away! And it got you! Oh, God, it got you!" It dropped its head and began to cry again.

"Fuck," I said. It was all I could think of. After a long moment I said, "What are you? What's your purpose?"

It lifted its head and looked at me like I was crazy. "I'm Mac's sister!"

"My sister died. Try again."

It peered at me through the dimly lit basement, then, after a moment, got up on all fours and backed away, pressing itself against a crate of guns, drawing its knees up to its chest. "I didn't die. Why aren't you doing something bad to me? What game are you playing?" it demanded. "Is it because Mac won't let you hurt me? She's strong. You have no idea how strong she is. You're never going to win!"

"I'm not playing a game. You're the one playing a game. What the hell is it?"

It drew a deep shuddering breath and wiped a trickle of foamy spit from its chin. "I don't understand," it finally said. "I don't understand anything that's happening anymore. Where's Darroc? What happened to all the people? Why is everything in Dublin so damaged? What's going on?"

"Ms. Lane," a deep voice slid from the shadowy stairs. "It's not Fae."

"It's not?" I snapped. "Are you certain?"

"Unequivocally."

"Then what the hell is it?" I snarled.

Barrons stepped into the light at the bottom of the stairs, fully clothed, and I realized he must store caches of clothing all over the city, in case he needed to transform unexpectedly.

He swept the Alina look-alike with a cold, penetrating gaze.

Then he looked at me and said softly, "Human."

25.

"Inside these prison walls, I have no name..."

The first time the Unseelie-king-residue came to the white, bright half of the boudoir in which he'd left her trapped by magic beyond her comprehension, the Seelie queen melted back against the wall, turned herself into a tapestry, and watched silently as a graphic scene of coupling unfolded before her unenthusiastic but eventually reluctantly fascinated gaze.

Hers was the court of sensuality, and he had once been considered king of it for good reason. Passion drenched the chamber, saturating the very air in which her tapestry hung, draping another bit of sticky, sexually charged residue on her weft and weave.

A visitor would have seen no more than a vibrant hunt scene hung upon the wall of the boudoir, and at the center, before the slab upon which the mighty white stag was being sacrificed, a slender, lovely woman with pale hair and iridescent eyes, standing, staring out from the tapestry and into the room.

She'd cut her queenly teeth on legends of the enormously brilliant, terrifyingly powerful, wild, half-mad godlike king that had nearly destroyed their entire race, and certainly condemned it to eternal struggle, with his obsession over a mortal.

She despised the Unseelie king for locking her away. For killing the original queen before the song had been passed on. For dooming them to striking alliances with weaker beings in order to survive, limping along with only a hint of their former grandeur and power.

She despised herself for not seeing through her most trusted advisor, V'lane, and being locked away by him as well, in a frozen prison, trapped in a casket of ice, scarcely daring to hope the seeds she'd planted long ago among the Keltar and O'Connor and various others might come to fruition and she would live. Carry on to try to survive the next test she'd also foreseen.

This-spelled into a chamber with memory residue-was not living. Buried in another coffin of sorts while her race suffered who knew what horrors.

The Unseelie prison walls were down. Even frozen in her casket, diminishing, being leeched of her very essence by the void-magic of the Unseelie prison, she'd felt the walls around her collapse, had known the very moment the ancient, compromised song had winked out.

She, more than any of the Seelie, understood the danger her race now faced. She was the one who'd used imperfect song, fragments she'd found hither and yon through the ages, to bind the Fae realms to the mortal coil. She'd only been able to secure her imperiled court by marrying it to the human planet.

Irretrievably.

And if that coil were devoured by the black holes, so, too, would be all the Seelie realms.

With the king, she'd pretended to know none of this, yet it had been precisely why she'd urged him to take action.

She knew their situation was worse even than that. She'd sought the mythic song herself, striving to restore that colossal magic from which their race had sprung. She'd studied the legends. She knew the truth. The song called an enormous price from imperfect beings, and they all were, to varying degrees. There was no easy way forward. It would cost her many things.

But she knew something else, too: a thing not even the Unseelie king knew. If she were able to manipulate and seduce him into saving Dublin, thereby her court, the price demanded would be levied most harshly against him.

The tapestry she'd become rippled and shuddered as she watched the residue of the Unseelie king's lies. For if she believed them, it was her on that pile of lush furs and bloodred rose petals, as diamonds floated lazily on the air, illuminating the chamber with millions of tiny twinkling stars.

If she believed him, she had once been mortal, and once been in love with the slaughterer of their race, the maker of the abominations, the one who'd cared nothing for the former queen to whom he'd been trothed, and less for the court he'd abandoned.

Cruce forced a cup from the cauldron of forgetting on you, the king had said before he left.

She'd never drunk from the cauldron. The queen was not allowed.

Before you were queen. When you were mine.

She didn't believe him. Refused to believe him. And even if she had-how could it matter? She was what she was now. The Seelie queen, leader of the True Race. She'd spent her entire existence as that. Had no memory of his lies. Wanted none.

And yet, she could divine no purpose for this charade.

He needed nothing from her. He was the Unseelie king. He was an it, an entity, a state of existence, enormously beyond any of their race's comprehension. He needed nothing from no one. Legend was too complex and contradictory to unravel his origins. Or theirs.

She narrowed her fibrous eyes, the threads of the tapestry rippling. How could such a being as the mad king fabricate such depth of emotion as she was now seeing?

Emotion was alien to their race in this, its purest essence. They felt but facsimiles of it, enhanced by living with the primitive race she'd chosen to settle her people among, for that very reason. To expand their pale existence, to amplify their wan desires in order to sate them more amply.

Yet on the great round dais, a woman that looked and moved identically to her, gazed down at the being she'd taken inside her body, inside her very soul, and laughed as Aoibheal had never known laughter. Touched as she herself had never touched. Was moved by the king she loathed far more intimately and with greater sensation than she had ever believed possible.

Forget your foolish quest, the woman on the bed said, sobering suddenly. Run away with me.

The king residue was abruptly angry. She could feel it, even as a tapestry. We had this conversation. We will never have it again.

It doesn't matter to me. I don't need to live forever.

You won't be the one left behind when you die.

Make yourself human with me, then.

Aoibheal narrowed her eyes further. A Fae make itself human for a human? Never. Only one, Adam Black, had ever insisted on such an absurd, devaluing action, and there were reasons for his madness that were her fault entirely.

The king displayed the proper Fae response.

Revulsion.

Refusal to abandon the glory that it was to be of the Old Race, the honored ones, the First Race. Perhaps in his case even-the First One. Still...the song had not been entrusted to him. Rather to a female. For good reason. Women were not blinded by passion. They were clarified by it.

As the king rose and towered over the woman he claimed Aoibheal was, she felt what the woman on the bed felt and it was chafing and uncomfortable: tired of fighting for something she knew she would never attain. Weary of trying to make the blind see. Knowing her lover had passed beyond her ability to reach.

But the woman on the bed felt something else Aoibheal could not understand at all.

That love was the most important thing in the universe. More so even than the song. That without love and without freedom, life was worth nothing.

The woman on the bed wept after the king was gone.