played, the power I felt listening to it, and wondered if it might just be. This was the thing I’d been so studiously avoiding contemplating for even a second, grateful it was in the White Mansion, far away from me and my Sinsar Dubh, even as I grew increasingly certain we might need it. I hadn’t realized how critical our state of affairs was until two days ago when Ryodan pointed out that the black holes could ultimately destroy the Nine.
And here it was. Staring right at me.
I closed my eyes, searching my memory, drifting back to that day in the concubine’s house, trying to methodically re-create my steps. My time in there was so vivid, like all my time in Fae, as overblown and sensually saturating as the Fae themselves. And so surreal. Each time I’d been inside the mansion, I’d felt an intense bipolarity. I now understood it was because of the Book’s/king’s memories inside me, amplified by the residue of their consuming love in the psychically sticky house. It had seemed I’d been the Unseelie king himself, dancing with his concubine, whirling her around the boudoir, clutching her gown. I’d wandered through her private chambers in a daze, found one of her favorite bracelets, the special seeing glasses I (the king!) had crafted for her.
My eyes snapped open. Bloody hell, I had picked all three of those things up. Then completely forgotten I’d done it, obsessed with my quest to bring Barrons back to life.
If the music box did contain the colossal song, dare I risk touching it again, knowing the enormous evil I carried inside me? What if the Book took me over like it had the day I killed the Guardian, and destroyed the song?
Could it?
I stood, torn between wanting to tuck the music box into my pack so I could protect it and show it to Barrons, and not wanting it on my person, in case my high wore off and the Sinsar Dubh caught on to me.
Although…I mused, I’d toted it out of the mansion, which meant the Book had been in close proximity to it once before. And done nothing. But then, we hadn’t needed the song back then either. Might it try to hold my soul hostage for it now that we did? Insist I capitulate or it would destroy it? Could it do any of those things?
Why the hell wasn’t my Book talking to me anymore?
I cursed. I knew nothing about the Sinsar Dubh’s abilities or limits and I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to go poking around trying to discover something. And since I knew nothing for sure, not wanting to underestimate it, I tended to pack that abyss of the unknown with fears of potentially greater power than it had. Or not.
I sighed, waffling in indecision. After a moment’s deliberation, I stooped and pried up the loose floorboard where I’d stashed my journals, hoping Barrons—the man has an uncanny knack for discovering my innermost secrets—would never find them, grabbed a shirt, used it to pick up the box, tucked it beneath the floor, and replaced the board. Then I scooted a rug over it for good measure.
I’d bring Barrons back to see it later. I’d trust it to him, like the amulet, far sooner than I’d trust myself. Dani—I corrected myself mentally, Jada—and Dancer could investigate it. See if we might really get so bizarrely lucky. The king had been meddling in my life since childhood. I’d never forgotten that my grade school principal and high school gym coach were two of the king’s many skins. The Seelie queen was, too. Who could ever guess what Fae were up to?
One day, I vowed, grabbing my pack to take it downstairs so I could restock it with fresh supplies later, I would no longer be afraid of who and what I was. One day I would be unified, suffer no crippling doubts, and make decisions fearlessly.
One day, like the day I first met Jericho Barrons in this very store and refused to give him my last name, I’d be “Just Mac” again. No hitchhikers, no screwed-up hair, and no dead sister look-alikes.
—
At seven o’clock that evening I deposited my umpteenth box of debris near a wobbly stack of broken furniture by the back door and rummaged for my cellphone to shoot Barrons a text that I needed the Hunter back in twenty minutes to make our meeting on time.
Given Barrons’s endlessly surprising resources, I had no doubt he might