Burned (50 page)

F
EAR
D
ORCHA
: One of the Unseelie King’s earliest creations, this seven-foot-tall, gaunt Unseelie wears a dark pinstriped tailcoat suit that is at least a century out of date and has no face. Beneath an
elegant, cobwebbed black top hat is a swirling black tornado with various bits of features that occasionally materialize. Like all the Unseelie, created imperfectly from an imperfect Song of Making, he is pathologically driven to achieve what he lacks—a face and identity—by stealing faces and identities from humans. The Fear Dorcha was once the Unseelie King’s personal assassin and traveling companion during his liege’s time of madness after the concubine’s death. In
Fever Moon
, the Fear Dorcha is defeated by Mac when she steals his top hat, but it is unknown if the Dorcha is actually deceased.

H
OAR
F
ROST
K
ING
(G
H
’
LUK
-
RA D
’J’
HAI
): (aka HFK) Villain introduced in
Iced
, responsible for turning Dublin into a frigid, arctic wasteland. This Unseelie is one of the most complex and powerful the king ever created, capable of opening holes in space-time to travel, similar to the Seelie ability to sift but with catastrophic results for the matter it manipulates. The Hoar Frost King is the only Unseelie aware of its fundamental imperfection on a quantum level, and like the king, was attempting to re-create the Song of Making to fix itself by collecting the necessary frequencies, physically removing them from the fabric of reality. Each place the Hoar Frost King fed, it stripped necessary structure from the universe while regurgitating a minute mass of enormous density, like a cat vomiting cosmic bones after eating a quantum bird. Although the HFK was destroyed in
Iced
by Dani, Dancer, and Ryodan, the holes it left in the fabric of the human world can only be fixed with the Song of Making.

G
RAY
M
AN
: Tall, monstrous, leprous, capable of sifting, he feeds by stealing beauty from human women. He projects the glamour of a devastatingly attractive human man. He is lethal but prefers his victims left hideously disfigured and alive to suffer. In
Darkfever
, Barrons stabs and kills the Gray Man with Mac’s spear.

G
RAY
W
OMAN
: The Gray Man’s female counterpart, nine feet tall, she projects the glamour of a stunningly beautiful woman and lures human men to their death. Gaunt, emaciated to the point of starvation,
her face is long and narrow. Her mouth consumes the entire lower half of her face. She has two rows of sharklike teeth but prefers to feed by caressing her victims, drawing their beauty and vitality out through open sores on her grotesque hands. If she wants to kill in a hurry, she clamps her hands onto human flesh, creating an unbreakable suction. Unlike the Gray Man, she usually quickly kills her victims. In
Shadowfever
, she breaks pattern and preys upon Dani, in retaliation against Mac and Barrons for killing the Gray Man, her lover. Mac makes an unholy pact with her to save Dani.

R
HINO
-B
OYS
: Ugly gray-skinned creatures that resemble rhinoceroses with bumpy, protruding foreheads, barrel-like bodies, stumpy arms and legs, and lipless gashes of mouths with jutting underbites. Lower-caste Unseelie thugs dispatched primarily as watchdogs and security for high-ranking Fae.

P
APA
R
OACH
: Made of thousands and thousands of roachlike creatures clambering up on top of one another to form a larger being. The individual bugs feed off human flesh, specifically fat. Consequently, post-wall, some women allow them to enter their bodies and live beneath their skin to keep them slim, a symbiotic liposuction. Papa Roach, the collective, is purplish-brown, about four feet tall with thick legs, a half-dozen arms, and a head the size of a walnut. It jiggles like gelatin when it moves as its countless individual parts shift minutely to remain coalesced. It has a thin-lipped beaklike mouth and round, lidless eyes.

S
HADES
: One of the lowest castes, they started out barely sentient but have been evolving since they were freed from their Unseelie prison. They thrive in darkness, can’t bear direct light, and hunt at night or in dark places. They steal life in the same manner the Gray Man steals beauty, draining their victims with vampiric swiftness, leaving behind a pile of clothing and a husk of dehydrated human matter. They consume every living thing in their path from the leaves on trees to the worms in the soil.

SEELIE

A
OIBHEAL
,
THE
S
EELIE
Q
UEEN
: (see also the
Concubine
) Fae queen, last in a long line of queens with an unusual empathy for humans. In
Shadowfever
, it is revealed the queen was once human herself, and is the Unseelie King’s long-lost concubine and soul mate. Over half a million years ago, the Unseelie Prince Cruce drugged her with a cup stolen from the Cauldron of Forgetting, erased her memory and abducted her, staging it so the Unseelie King believed she was dead. Masquerading as the Seelie Prince V’lane, Cruce hid her in the one place he knew the king of the Unseelie would never go—the Seelie Court. Prolonged time in Faery transformed Aoibheal and she became what the king had desperately desired her to be: Fae and immortal. She is now the latest in a long line of Seelie Queens. Tragically, the original Seelie Queen was killed by the Unseelie King before she was able to pass on the Song of Making, the most powerful and beautiful of all Fae magic. Without it, the Seelie have changed.

D
ARROC
, L
ORD
M
ASTER
: (Seelie turned human) Once Fae and trusted advisor to Aoibheal, he was set up by Cruce and banished from Faery for treason. At the Seelie Court, Adam Black (in the novel
The Immortal Highlander
) was given the choice to have Darroc killed or turned mortal as punishment for trying to free Unseelie and overthrow the queen. Adam chose to have him turned mortal, believing he would quickly die as a human, sparking the succession of events that culminates in
Faefever
when Darroc destroys the walls between the worlds of Man and Fae, setting the long-imprisoned Unseelie free. Once in the mortal realm, Darroc learned to eat Unseelie flesh to achieve power and caught wind of the
Sinsar Dubh
’s existence in the mortal realm. When Alina Lane came to Dublin, Darroc discovered she was a
sidhe
-seer with many talents and, like her sister, Mac, could sense and track the
Sinsar Dubh
. He began by using her but fell in love with her. After Alina’s death, Darroc learned of Mac and attempted to use her as well, applying various methods of coercion, including abducting her parents. Once Mac believed
Barrons was dead, she teamed up with Darroc, determined to find the
Sinsar Dubh
herself and use it to bring Barrons back. Darroc was killed in
Shadowfever
by K’Vruck, allegedly at the direction of the
Sinsar Dubh
, when the Hunter popped his head like a grape.

S
EELIE
P
RINCES
: There were once four princes and four princesses of the royal
Sidhe
. The Seelie Princesses have not been seen for a long time and are presumed dead. V’lane was killed long ago, Velvet (not his real name) is recently deceased, R’jan currently aspires to be king, and Adam Black is now human. Highly sexual, golden-haired (except for Adam who assumed a darker glamour), with iridescent eyes and golden skin, they are extremely powerful sifters, capable of sustaining nearly impenetrable glamour, and affect the climate with their pleasure or displeasure.

V’
LANE
: Seelie Prince, Queen of the Fae’s high consort, extremely sexual and erotic. The real V’lane was killed by his own queen when Cruce switched faces and places with him via glamour. Cruce has been masquerading as V’lane ever since, hiding in plain sight.

V
ELVET
: Lesser royalty, cousin to R’jan. He was introduced in
Shadowfever
and killed by Ryodan in
Iced
.

D
REE
-
LIA
: Frequent consort of Velvet, was present when the
Sinsar Dubh
was reinterred beneath the abbey.

R
’
JAN
: Seelie Prince who would be king. Tall, blond, with the velvety gold skin of a light Fae, he makes his debut in
Iced
when he announces his claim on the Fae throne.

A
DAM
B
LACK
: Immortal Prince of the D’Jai House and favored consort of the Seelie Queen, banished from Faery and made mortal as punishment for one of his countless interferences with the human realm. Has been called the
sin siriche dubh
or blackest Fae, however undeserved. Rumor holds Adam was not always Fae, although that
has not been substantiated. In
The Immortal Highlander
, he is exiled among mortals, falls in love with Gabrielle O’Callaghan, a
sidhe-
seer from Cincinnati, Ohio, and chooses to remain human to stay with her. He refuses to get involved in the current war between Man and Fae, fed up with the endless manipulation, seduction, and drama. With Gabrielle, he has a highly gifted and unusual daughter to protect.

THE KELTAR

An ancient bloodline of Highlanders chosen by Queen Aoibheal and trained in druidry to uphold the Compact between the races of Man and Fae. Brilliant, gifted in physics and engineering, they live near Inverness and guard a circle of standing stones called Ban Drochaid (the white bridge) that was used for time travel until the Keltar breached one of their many oaths to the Queen and she closed the circle of stones to other times and dimensions. Current Keltar druids: Christopher, Christian, Cian, Dageus, Drustan
.

Druid: In pre-Christian Celtic society, a druid presided over divine worship, legislative and judicial matters, philosophy, and education of elite youth to their order. Druids were believed to be privy to the secrets of the gods, including issues pertaining to the manipulation of physical matter, space, and even time. The old Irish “Drui” means magician, wizard, diviner
(Irish Myths and Legends).

C
HRISTOPHER
M
AC
K
ELTAR
: Modern-day laird of the Keltar clan, father of Christian MacKeltar.

C
HRISTIAN
M
AC
K
ELTAR
: (turned Unseelie Prince) Handsome Scotsman, dark hair, tall, muscular body and killer smile, he masqueraded as a student at Trinity College, working in the Ancient Languages Department, but was really stationed there by his uncles to keep an eye on Jericho Barrons. Trained as a druid by his clan, he participated in a ritual at Ban Drochaid on Samhain meant to reinforce the walls between the worlds of Man and Fae. Unfortunately the ceremony went badly wrong, leaving Christian and Barrons trapped in the Silvers. When Mac later finds Christian in the Hall of All Days, she feeds him Unseelie flesh to save his life, unwittingly
sparking the chain of events that begins to turn the sexy Highlander into an Unseelie Prince. He loses himself for a time in madness, and fixates on the innocence of Dani O’Malley while losing his humanity. In
Iced
, he sacrifices himself to the Crimson Hag to distract her from killing the
sidhe
-seers, determined to spare Dani from having to choose between saving the abbey or the world. Currently staked to the side of a cliff above a hellish grotto, being killed over and over again.

C
IAN
M
AC
K
ELTAR
: (
Spell of the Highlander
) Highlander from the twelfth century, traveled through time to present day, married to Jessica St. James. Cian was imprisoned for one thousand years in one of the Silvers by a vengeful sorcerer. Freed, he now lives with the other Keltar in current-day Scotland.

D
AGEUS
M
AC
K
ELTAR
: (
The Dark Highlander
) Keltar druid from the sixteenth century who traveled through time to present day, married to Chloe Zanders. He is inhabited by the souls of thirteen dead Draghar, ancient druids who used black sorcery. Long black hair nearly to his waist, dark skin, and gold eyes, he is the sexiest and most sexual of the Keltar.

D
RUSTAN
M
AC
K
ELTAR
: (
Kiss of the Highlander
) Twin brother of Dageus MacKeltar, also traveled through time to present day, married to Gwen Cassidy. Tall, dark, with long brown hair and silver eyes, he is the ultimate chivalrous knight and would sacrifice himself for the greater good if necessary.