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I toweled my hair dry, tugged on sweats and a tee, grateful Shazam was impervious. At least I had that.
Assuming I survived whatever was happening to me, I was going to become that strange Hel-Cat lady, eccentric and alone.
It could be worse, I mused, as I headed back to the bedroom. I might not even have Shazam.
I, who at best had never known more than a tenuous connection to the world, was becoming even more cut off, more isolated. By my own skin. I’d always been dangerous. Now I was lethal to the touch.
My first year in a cage, my mother had showered me with affection. Before she’d left in the morning, and again each night when she got home. She’d washed and dried me, brushed my hair. We’d held hands through the bars. She’d rubbed moisturizer into my skin and tickled my back, and I’d known we were going to make it. That OLDER and OUTSIDE were a guarantee. I’d known it from her touch. You can feel love in someone’s hands.
It hadn’t stayed that way long. Her affection became more and more infrequent until, finally, she’d stopped touching me at all. Then, not long after, she’d begun to stop seeing me, too.
When I could no longer remember the feel of her hands on my body, my hair, of soft kisses pressed through bars; when those kisses had become a hazy memory that belonged to another life, some other child, I’d lain in my cage and hugged myself, turning my head from side to side, kissing my shoulders, my arms.
My small body had ached for touch. For comfort, for love.
As it did now.
I hoisted our mattress back up onto the box springs, stretched out on my back and opened my arms.
Shazam flung himself at me, landing squarely on my chest.
“Ow!”
Rumbling, eyes gleaming, he head-butted me with delight, then snuggled into my killing embrace.
And, as I’d done so often Silverside, I squeezed my eyes shut to hold back tears, and held onto him with all my might.
The rusted chains of prison moons are shattered by the sun
“FIRST, KAT,” CHRISTIAN SAID, “a summary of pertinent history. Try to hold your questions till the end. The timeline I’m giving you is approximate. The Fae aren’t glued to the concept of time; they have an infinity of it to squander. I had
to plug bits and pieces of history together with few points of reference.”
“Understood,” I said. We encountered the same problem with the texts we translated. Points of reference were vague at best, like tying our historical events to whatever TV shows were popular at the time and someone trying to figure it out millennia later. If he possessed an overview, I very much wanted it.
“The first significant mention of the Fae appears approximately one million years ago, although they existed long before that. Originally there was a single Light Court of Four Seasons. The Light King became dissatisfied with life at court, left and declared himself the Dark or Unseelie King. Sometime after that he met his mortal concubine, became obsessed with her and sought to make her immortal like him. Since the Song of Making was a matriarchal power, he had to petition the Light Queen to transform his lover. It was when the queen refused that everything began to go to hell.
“The Unseelie King retired to his dark kingdom, vowing to re-create the Song and make his lover immortal himself. The Unseelie or Dark Court was born as a result of his endless experiments. As far as I can tell, he spent roughly a quarter of a million years working on it. Again, approximate, I believe Cruce was born three-quarters of a million years ago, and was one of the last remaining Dark Court the king created.
“As you know, Cruce betrayed the king to the queen and told her what the king had been doing, about five hundred thousand years ago. Cruce wanted the Unseelie Court to roam freely in the world, mingling with the Seelie, which was forbidden by the king. The king knew what the queen would do if she discovered he’d created a Dark Court of his own, especially if she learned that the mortal lover she so despised was still alive, secreted away in a realm beyond time to keep her from aging.
“When the queen learned of the Dark Court’s existence, it started a war to end all wars. When Seelie and Unseelie clashed, they destroyed their own planet, splitting it down the middle. The unthinkable happened: the Unseelie King killed the Seelie Queen, before she was able to pass the Song of Making to her successor.
“The Song was all that kept the Fae powerful. They, alone, possessed that ancient melody of life.”
“No doubt, stolen somehow,” I said, unable to resist the acerbic comment. No god I believed in would have entrusted a thing of such power and beauty to such a shallow, power-hungry, ruthless race.
“As you’ve seen, the Song seeps into reality and replenishes fading magic. Once they lost the ancient melody, the Fae were doomed. Over time they would have grown weaker, until they vanished on the wind, with only legends of them remaining.”
“But when Mac used the Song to heal our world they were restored,” I said grimly.
“Precisely. What the melody didn’t destroy, it made stronger. As happened long ago in the mists of Time, the Song sank deep into the fabric of all things and crooned ‘Awaken.’ Another of Mac’s double-edged swords. That woman does tend to wreak havoc from time to time.”
I began to protest but he waved it away.
“I ken it, lass. She had no choice but to use the Song or the Cosmos itself would have been destroyed by the black holes. We’re lucky she was able to wield it, and I’m grateful. But no action is without consequence. Indeed, there are times the most desirable, correct, necessary action results in catastrophic consequences. We’re facing them now.
“Back to the timeline: Subsequent queens moved the Light Court from world to world, draining yet more power from the court each time they moved, desperately seeking a planet richly steeped in magic. They knew they were diminishing, bit by bit. Many of them drank from the Cauldron of Forgetting, to forget how powerful they’d once been, how weak they were becoming.
