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“They’ve been busy elsewhere. You’re not their current focus. In truth, I doubt they even care you exist anymore.”
“Why?”
“You’re no threat to us. We’ve become what we once were. So, what if you can identify us? We’ll crush you. I don’t mean that personally. But that’s how they feel.”
Kat drew a deep breath, willing her mind and heart to calm. Then she fired off several rapid texts. Regardless of whether Sean needed her or not, Christian had information—and clearly a great deal of it—they didn’t possess and needed to. As well as the ability to help them re-ward the abbey. She inclined her head. “Where are we going?”
“Scotland.”
She cringed inwardly. “You mean to sift me?” That meant she had to touch him, and he reminded her far too much of Cruce.
He smiled again, that haunted and haunting dark smile. “Sorry, lass, it won’t be that easy. We’ll need to fly.”
Fly? As in hold onto him for hours?
“Try not to radiate abject fucking misery, Kat,” he said tightly. “I’m one of the good guys.”
“How certain of that are you?” she asked warily.
“Utterly,” he said with finality. “And it was a bitch of a battle, I’ll tell you that.”
Unseelie. And one of the good guys. She wanted to believe that. “We should leave before Enyo arrives. She’ll have a similar reaction.”
She’d deliberately chosen her fiercest warrior to babysit in her absence. And asked Duff and Decla to be stationed beyond the door. Three women capable of extreme kindness. And extreme violence. Able to shift between the two in a heartbeat.
“I can sift us to the perimeter of the estate but we’ll have to fly from there. Come, lass. And if it helps, close your eyes and think of Sean. He, too, looks like me. You’ll need to be prepared for that. Revulsion could push him over the steep edge he’s already perched on. But,” he added softly, as I moved uneasily into the circle of his arms, “you might be surprised by how beautiful you’ll find the sky at night. We’ll fly above the mist that obscures the terrain, where the moon kisses the tops of clouds, turning them to silvery puddles it seems you might dance upon. You’ll see the dark, glassy lochs and the grass turned to fine-spun metallic thread. The night creatures are different than those of the day, rarer to see. You might spy great snowy owls soaring, hooting, wolves frolicking as they woo their mates, you may even see a playful wildcat or two.”
I realized he was trying to set me at ease, distract me from the intimacy I would have to endure. It worked. As he’d spoken, I heard the truth of the pleasure in his words. He loved to fly at night, he loved the land, and Cruce would never have noticed a single bloody thing on the ground, no bird, nor animal; too power hungry and driven to see past his own ambitions.
I snatched a last, quick glance at my daughter and murmured that I loved her, as footsteps approached beyond my bedroom door.
“It sounds lovely Christian,” I said as he drew me to his chest.
“It is,” he promised, as we sifted out.
* * *
p
Lovely was an inadequate word. Once I got over the sheer terror of being held and flown, and the fear that he might drop me, I was dazzled by the night beneath my toes.
“I won’t drop you, quit digging your nails into my shoulders,” he growled.
I was counting on that. If he’d wanted me dead, he could have killed me in my room.
Eventually, I relaxed, still holding tightly to his shoulders, cradled in his arms. Distracting myself from the presence of an Unseelie prince by watching the world unfurl beneath us, pondering the blessing his presence implied—the promise that darkness within did not necessarily equate darkness without.
I would never be able to read his eyes, one of the easiest ways to take the measure of a person’s soul—and I often wonder if anyone else can see the many nuances in an iris that I do—but I could feel him with my gift, with my heart.
Deep inside Christian, so deep I’d almost missed it, nestled an evil black pearl within a tightly closed, blindingly white clamshell.
But it wasn’t a small pearl. It was gargantuan, filling every atom of his being, and he’d compressed it somehow. He’d taken an inconceivably vast, twisted, terrifying abyss of darkness that churned within him and turned it into a zip-file of sorts, buttoned it up and locked it down. A darkness that could swallow whole, obliterate. A darkness that seethed with ambition, hunger, mind-boggling sexuality and need.
He’d managed to contain an infinity of evil within a tiny glowing white shell in which I couldn’t spy even a hairline crack. “How?” I asked, as we passed over Belfast, soaring toward the ocean.
I’ve felt the capacity for such evil in only two other vessels: the Sinsar Dubh and Cruce. I’ve never seen such enormous darkness contained. Locked so completely away, I couldn’t even get a feel for what it was. There was something, a subtle flavor of him that identified him as the prince he was…
“Death is my kingdom. As the Light Court is one of dreams and illusions, the Dark Court is one of realities and nightmares. The Seelie have Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. We have Death, War, Famine, and Pestilence. But hold your questions, lass. It takes energy to maintain that control, and yet more to mute the Sidhbha-jai. So long as I’m diverting power, the most taxing of my abilities are challenging. We’ll stop in the Highlands to rest and I’ll tell you what I can. For now, enjoy the view.”
