Burned (21 page)

My ghouls jostle and shove in panic. Each one that brushes the globe suffers the same fate. Stretched long and thin, then gone. The screaming is deafening, far worse than the hideous chittering. Some sift out. Others stand frozen.

The elevator doors close.

“Now do you get it?” Dancer says.

I’d shake my head but it would explode. I peer at him with pain-blurred eyes and whisper, “No.”

“When the Hoar Frost King bit chunks of frequency from our world, it created a cosmic deficit. The fabric of our universe began to unravel. That alone was problematic enough, but compounding it, at each site where it fed it also deposited something, like an overfed scavenger, regurgitating unwanted bones. Whatever it expelled possesses astronomically compact mass and density.” He pauses. When a lightbulb doesn’t instantly brighten over my head, he says with elaborate patience, “It’s. Deforming. Space-time.”

“Are you saying what I just saw is a black hole?” I manage. The farther we get from the globe, the less pain I feel.

Dancer says, “I lack the ability to perform the tests I’d like to run. Speculation aside, I can only observe these facts: they share certain similar characteristics to black holes, they were no larger than pinpricks at first, they absorb everything they come in contact with, and they’re growing. The one we just saw is the largest I’ve seen at any of the sites.”

“It’s the first place that got iced,” Ryodan says.

“You didn’t tell me any of this,” I mutter crossly to Barrons. Barrons shoots me a dry looks that says,
Far be it from me to disrupt your brood. You might be motivated to do something and then I wouldn’t know who you were anymore
.

I wrinkle my nose at him and don’t dignify it with a response.

“I didn’t know you had one in the club,” Dancer says. “I thought the one out front would get the honors. Dude, Chester’s is going to be swallowed from the inside!”

“Dude me one more time and you’re dead.”

We ride the rest of the way up the shaft in silence.

      16      

The Unseelie King settles into what passes as an enormous red crushed-velvet chair in what might loosely be called a theater room before a stage so vast the edges furl out into night skies filled with stars. On the left, the Milky Way shimmers. To the right, a nebula stains the sky rainbow-bright.

He rests his head of sorts on a hand of sorts and broods.

His woman retains no memory of him at all.

She knows him only as the Seelie Queen’s greatest enemy and believes that since the Unseelie Prince was unable to kill her, the king himself came to finish the job.

Though she conceals it with defiance, she is terrified of him.

To see his beloved gaze upon him with fear … there are no words. Neither split into dozens of humans, as he must be in order to walk among the tiny, strange, absurdly determined creatures who face such futile odds, nor as a god.

The joy that burned inside him upon seeing her again is ash.

He changes a channel of sorts with a remote of sorts and one of the more interesting cities on one of his more interesting worlds takes the limelight.

It is dying, as he suspected.

No matter, another will come.

But another of
her
will not come. In all this time, no one has touched him as she has. To have her back again and not have her at all is almost worse than believing her gone. It is as if a replication has risen from the dead, a perfect mirror image, nothing within. Should he take her into the White Mansion? Confront her with the residue of their love?

“Is that Dublin?”

Her voice is beautiful. She had names for him, endearments she called him. He would raze worlds to hear them again.

She stands behind him. Close enough that if she chose she could place a hand on his shoulder, were he not the size of a skyscraper and she the size of a pea. Once, she wore a glamour that met him size for girth, wing for wing, crown for crown. He does not bother to answer. Temple Bar is red, the River Liffey silver. She has eyes. She knows this world.

“Am I prisoner here?”

“You are.” He was never letting her go. He would not turn and gaze fifty floors of wing and blackness down at her. He was uncertain what he might do if he did.

“What are you doing to Dublin? It ails. I feel it.”

He doesn’t want to see that beneath a cloak of ermine fur she’s wearing a diaphanous gown of white that does nothing to conceal her exquisite body, her hair bound in a platinum braid. He would commit genocide on a dozen planets to see her in a gown of bloodred, pale hair spilling to her ankles, joy in her eyes, a smile of greeting.

“I do nothing. They do it themselves.”

“Attend it,” she says imperiously. “My druids are there.”

“Give me an incentive.”

“My druids are there.”

“That is not one.” He doesn’t bother to conceal his bitterness. Should he take her beneath him? Discover if that makes her recall, if memory can be forced to return?

“You will not coerce intimacy where none is granted,” she says sharply.

He goes very still. “I did not say that.”

“You did.”

She can still hear him. She may not remember him or the epic love they share but she hears his desires, as she always has.

“I would never.”

“You would. You are the Unseelie King. You slew the one who ruled before me. You care for nothing and never have. You think you create but you destroy. That is all of which you are capable.”

Anger and something deeper ruffles his wings. Her words are too similar to the note he still carries. “That is untrue.”

“Show me. Help my druids.”

“God does not step in and adjust minute details on a whim.”

“You are not God. You are the Unseelie King, once the true queen’s consort. You built an army of monstrosities and took them to war against my people. And destroy is precisely what you do.”

Once, she helped shelter his monstrosities. Believed they deserved the light. That they could be perfected, freed. “For you, my love.”

“I am not your love. I am Aoibheal, queen of the Fae. Return me to my court. I am needed there.”

“Return you for what? You can do nothing to repair the rift between your world and theirs, the many rifts in them both. Abandon it and abandon your foolish, petty court.” Choose
me, he doesn’t say. Not that insignificant world. Not those tiny, inconsequential beings.

“To live with a foolish, petty king?”

She thinks him a fool and petty. He will not acknowledge the arrow shot as a question. She calls him a destroyer. She sees nothing of his glory, recalls no details of the worlds they once made together, so beautiful they often rested on a nearby star for time uncounted to watch them bloom.

“You say you love me,” she says. “Show me. Restore Dublin. Heal their world and mine.”

“Why have you always cared so much about these tiny worlds?”

“Why have you never?”

He had once. When she’d cared about him. He’d made himself small for her and walked in her manner, tending small things. But being small was so much more complicated than being God. “If I do this for you, will you share my bed of your own volition?”

He feels her anger, her instant denial.

On stage, he weaves for her a brutal, horrific glamour of what’s to come. Dublin falling, the Earth dying, the lovely blue and white planet blinking out then gone. Attached to it by a planetary umbilical cord, the Fae realm also goes black and disappears.

Behind him, she gasps then says stiffly, “That is your price?”

“That is my price.”

“And you will fix our worlds?”

“I will.”

“And you can?”

“I can.”

“One time only,” she says tightly.

“I specify the duration.”

“It is limited to a single human fortnight. Then you will never come to me again. You will not seek me. You will never cross my path.”

“Before.”

“When it is done. That is non-negotiable.”

“Everything is negotiable if the correct pressure is applied.”

The look she gives him is venom and ice.

He will concede for her. Always only for her.

“Say it,” he demands.

“Yes,” she hisses.

She said yes. Even spat with fury, the single word is an aria to once deafened ears. None has ever been sweeter on her lips. He will taste her assent before, like her memory, it too vanishes.

“Your tithe to this compact between us will be a kiss.” He begins reducing himself to make it so. He will turn and touch her, take her in his arms.

He doesn’t tell her that it’s too late.

He will have, at the very least, a single kiss.

Without the Song of Making—which she has never known and he turned his back on long ago—none can save either world: Fae or human.

      17      

“I’d rather have a bottle in front of me”

MAC

I’m an aimless, trapped barfly, stalked by Unseelie ghouls who have once again replenished their numbers, confined to Chester’s by Ryodan’s insistence that I guard against a threat that isn’t the threat he thinks it is, while driving myself crazy worrying about a genuine threat of cataclysmic proportions.

There’s a black hole, or its close approximation, growing beneath my feet, and who knows how many more forming beyond the club’s walls. There were numerous icings in Dublin, more outside the city, and according to Ryodan, hundreds in various countries around the world.

Are innocent people, like the Unseelie ghouls, accidently brushing up against them and dying? How large are the other globes? Was Ryodan’s really the first or has the Hoar Frost King been in our realm longer than we know? Perhaps it started in China, or Australia, or even America. How solid is our information? How soon can we send scouts to learn more?

How close have I walked to one of those quantum pinpricks, not realizing Death was right there in the street with me, a misstep away?

Tired of wandering from one dance floor to the next, growing increasingly aggravated by the patrons, I decide to stake out the Sinatra subclub. The old world elegance appeals to me and it’s mostly empty—or at least it was before me and my dark, smelly army arrived. “Get off those stools!” I try to shoo them. They resettle with what I imagine are scornful looks beneath voluminous hoods. I recall the metallic flash I glimpsed as one of them was devoured by an impossibly dense globe of corrupted space-time and wonder what would happen if I tried to yank back one of their cowls to see a face.

I decide against it. I’d rather not know just how hideous my second skins are. I have enough nightmares.

I perch on a leather bar stool between them and begin watching an obviously inebriated bartender in a dirty, wrinkled tux that looks like he slept in it make the worst martinis I’ve ever seen.

Clubs call pretty much anything a martini now, and there’s no question he got his credentials at the school of life. He should be ashamed. I rummage in my purse, pop an aspirin in my mouth, and crunch it to dispel headache residue.

Barrons went through the Silvers to join the rest of the Nine, hunting for Dani. I prefer him there than wandering around the city without me. Though I’ve not gotten the faintest tweak from my inner antenna, it won’t be long before the princess resurfaces somewhere. And it’s
not
going to be on top of Barrons.

Dancer says we need Dani now more than ever. She was the one who figured out what the Hoar Frost King was doing, and he hopes their brains combined hold the key to relocking the
doors that are opening in great yawning black holes all over our world.

If it can even be done.

According to physics, what we seek is impossible but since the walls came down between Man and Faery, human laws of physics no longer apply. I wonder if the fragments of Faery worlds I call IFPs are contributing to the black-hole problem. The boundaries of our world are a mess and have been for a while, creating a highly unstable environment where pretty much anything could go wrong, as it did eons ago in the ancient Hall of All Days and the Silvers. I wonder that we didn’t see something like this coming.

I munch an olive to get the taste of aspirin out of my mouth.

“Hey, you didn’t order a drink! Stay the fuck outta my condiment tray!” the bartender barks, hostile, and a little slurry.

Whatever happened to pretty girls getting free drinks? Or at least one damn olive.

I peer up at my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. There I am, blond hair, blue eyes, terrific white teeth (thanks Mom, Dad, and braces!), a nice mouth with a generous lower lip, clear skin. I think I’m pretty.

“And you guys”—the bartender snaps at my ghouls, and I think, Good luck with that—“order drinks or get off my stools!”

“You’ve been grazing on candied cherries for the past ten minutes,” I tell him. “You’ve eaten half a jar. Stow it.” People are starving in Dublin but Chester’s has condiments.

He flips me off with both hands and rotates the birds around each other.

I turn sideways on the stool so I don’t have to see him and resume my brood. The city I love is finally coming back to life,
and although I have personal problems, they are slightly more manageable—or at least a little less urgent at the moment—than our newfound global issues.

My dark companion attempts to seize the moment.

Read me, open me, I possess the answers you seek
, it lies.
I will show you how to heal this world
.

Again with the been-there-done-that. I don’t believe the Unseelie King dumped any knowledge about how to patch holes in worlds into his book of dark magic. It’s another fake carrot at the end of the
Sinsar Dubh
’s endless profusion of sticks.

Besides, it wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about saving this world. It would leave and find another. And another. Ad infinitum. I’ve not forgotten it once said to me:
Can there be any act of creation that does not first destroy? Villages fall. Cities rise. Humans die. Life springs from the soil wherein they lie. Is not any act of destruction, should Time enough pass, an act of creation?