I don’t blame her. We are flawed. We should have been banned from Ireland for everyone’s good.

He assesses me. I know he passed Barrons’ body. He’s trying to figure out what happened but is unwilling to ask. I suspect nothing could have convinced him more surely than seeing Barrons dead that the MacKayla he thought he was dealing with wasn’t home anymore. His gaze drops to the thin, jagged-edged silvery runes on the ground encircling me, bathing me in cool, eerie light. His eyes widen again as he scans them, and, for the briefest of instants, he looks rattled.

“Nice work.” His gaze flicks between the runes and my face. “What are they?”

“You don’t recognize them?” I counter. I sense deception. He knows what they are. I don’t. I’d like to.

The next thing I know, his copper eyes lock with mine and a vibrant blue-black light blazes from his fist. I hadn’t even seen him reach inside his shirt for the Hallow.

“Step out of the circle now,” he commands.

He’s not using Voice. He’s holding the amulet, one of the four Unseelie Hallows, an ornate necklace that houses a fist-sized stone of inexplicable composition. The king created it for his concubine to enable her to bend reality to her whim. The amulet reinforces an epic person’s will. Months ago, I sat at a very exclusive auction in an underground bomb shelter and watched an old Welshman pay in excess of eight figures for it. He’d had stiff competition. Mallucé had murdered the old man and taken it before Barrons and I had been able to steal it. But the wannabe vamp couldn’t use it.

Darroc can. I believe I could, too—if I can get it from him.

I held it once, and it responded to me. But, like many things Fae, time imbued it with a degree of sentience and it had sought something from me—a binding, or pledge. I’d not understood—or, if I had, hadn’t been willing to make it, afraid of what it would cost me. I’d lost the Hallow to Darroc when he’d Voiced me into turning it over, before I learned to use Voice myself. I’d have no compunction about exploring the amulet’s desires now. No price is too high.

I feel the blue-black power it radiates, lacing his command with compulsion. The pressure is immense. I want to leave the circle. I could breathe, eat, sleep, live without pain forever, if only I would leave the circle.

I laugh. “Throw me the amulet now.” Voice explodes from me.

The heads of the Unseelie Princes swivel and they regard me. It’s hard to tell with them, but I think they suddenly find me very interesting.

A chill runs up my spine. There is no fear, no terror left inside me, yet those … things … those icy, unnatural aberrations … they still manage to affect me. I have not looked directly at them yet.

Darroc’s hand tightens on the blazing amulet. “Step out of the circle!”

The pressure is crushing. It can be eased only by obeying.

“Throw me the amulet!”

He flinches, raises his hand, snarls, and jerks it back down.

For the next few minutes, he and I each try to bend the other to our will, until we are finally forced to concede that we are at an impasse. My Voice does not work on him. Neither amulet nor Voice works on me.

We are matched. Fascinating. I am his equal. My, what a creature I’ve become.

He circles me, and I turn with him, a faint smile curving my lips, my eyes alight. I am charged. I am exhilarated. I’m pumped on the power of my runes and myself. We study each other as if confronting a new species.

I offer my hand, an invitation to step to my side.

He looks down at the runes. “I am not that great a fool.” His voice is deep, musical. He is beautiful. I understand why my sister wanted him. Tall, golden-skinned, there is an otherworldly eroticism to him that being made mortal by his queen did not eradicate. The scar on his face draws the eye, begs the finger to trace it, to learn the story behind it.

I cannot ask how great a fool, because it would betray that I don’t know what my runes are.

“What happened to Barrons?” he says after a time.

“I killed him.”

He searches my face, and I know he is trying to come up with any scenario that might explain the way Barrons was mutilated and killed. If he examined the body, he saw the spear wound, and he knows I carry it. He knows I stabbed him at least once.

“Why?”

“I wearied of his incessant boorishness.” I wink. Let him think me mad. I am. In every sense of the word.

“I didn’t think he could be killed. The Fae have long feared him.”

“Turns out the spear was his weakness. It’s why he never wanted to touch it.”

He absorbs my words, and I know he’s trying to decide why a Fae weapon could kill Jericho Barrons. I’d like to know, too. Was it the spear that dealt the killing blow? Would he have died of that wound eventually regardless of whether Ryodan had slit his throat?

“Yet he armed you with it? You expect me to believe that?”

“Like you, he thought I was all fluff and no teeth. Too stupid to be worth suspicion. ‘Lamb to the slaughter’ was how he liked to phrase it. Little lamb killed the lion. Guess I showed him, huh?” I wink again.

“I burned his body. There is nothing left but ash.” He watches my face carefully.

“Good.”

“If there was any way he might rise, he never will now. The princes scattered his ashes to a hundred dimensions.” His gaze is piercing now.

“I should have thought of that myself. Thank you for finishing it so well.” My mind is on the new world I plan to create. I’ve said good-bye to this one.

Copper eyes narrow, glittering with scorn. “You didn’t kill Barrons. What happened? What are you playing at?”

“He betrayed me,” I lie.

“How?”

“It’s none of your business. I had my reasons.” I watch him watch me. He wonders if the rape of the Unseelie Princes and my time in the Hall of All Days has unhinged me. He wonders if I’m unbalanced enough to have gone crazy and actually killed Barrons for pissing me off. When he glances down at the runes again, I know he thinks I have enough juice to have pulled it off.

“Step out of the circle. I have your parents and will kill them if you don’t obey me.”

“I don’t care.” I scoff.

He stares. He heard the truth in my words.

I don’t care. An essential part of me is dead. I don’t mourn it. This is no longer my world. What happens here doesn’t matter. In this reality, I’m already on borrowed time. I will rebuild a new one or die trying.

“I’m free, Darroc. I’m really, truly free.” I shrug my shoulders, toss my head, and laugh.

He sucks in a sharp breath when I say his name and laugh, and I know that I’ve reminded him of my sister. Did she say those words to him once? Does he hear joy in my laughter, as he once heard in hers?

He stalks a tight circle around me, eyes narrowed. “What changed? In the days since I abducted your parents and today, what happened to you?”

“What happened to me started happening a long time ago. You should have kept Alina alive. I hated you for that.”

“And now?”

I look him up and down. “Now is different. Things are different. We are different.”

His eyes search mine, left to right and back again, rapidly. “What are you saying?”

“I see no reason we cannot be … friends.”

He tries the word. “Friends?”

I nod.

He contemplates the possibility that I am sincere. A human would never entertain the notion. Fae are different. No matter how much time they spend among us, they just can’t nail the subtleties of human emotion. It’s that difference I’m counting on. When I left Barrons, all I wanted was to lay in wait for Darroc, use my runes and my newfound dark glassy friend to kill him the moment he appeared.

I exorcised it swiftly.

This ex-Fae turned human knows more about both the Seelie and Unseelie courts, and the Book that I am determined to possess, than anyone. When he has told me everything he knows, I’ll relish killing him. I’d considered allying myself with V’lane—and when I’m done taking everything I need from Darroc, I still may. After all, I’ll need the fourth stone. But V’lane doesn’t seem to have any real knowledge about the Book, aside from a few old legends.