As the moonlight touched him his hair turned white and his cloak became a gown of the palest silver. Her lips gleamed like sapphires and her eyes were ice flecked with mirror-dust. “And what do you offer me in return for this knowledge?” asked the Queen of Winter.
Chances were, she wouldn’t accept my coat.
“What would you ask?” Tara had settled back into the pack-alpha space. Shit, I hoped I hadn’t screwed her on this one.
I’d screwed her on this one, hadn’t I? “Wait a minute,” I said. “This was my idea, if anybody’s making dodgy faery bargains it’s me.”
The Queen of Winter turned her imperious gaze in my direction. “I do not make bargains, child.” She swept past me and pressed her back against the tree, the shadows transforming her once more. “But if I did”—he gave me a cruel smile—“I doubt you would have much to offer.”
“Come into the light,” I insisted.
“Come into the dark.”
Okay, that was what we called an impasse. “Look, I know how these things work. You’ll ask me for something seemingly innocent and then I get home and discover you’ve taken my daughter instead.”
“You don’t have a daughter.” I wasn’t going to ask how he knew that.
“Tell me if Sebastian Douglas was behind this.”
Tara took me by the elbow. “We should go, Kate. We have nothing to trade, and he isn’t going to tell you anything for free.”
“He was,” said the King of Shadows.
With only a slightly smug look on my face, I gave Tara a nod.
“He joined forces with an old servant of mine,” he continued. “To take vengeance against those who defied him.”
My smug look vanished. There was one place I’d tried really hard to stop my mind going and this was it. If Douglas was doing this to punish the wolves for standing up to him, then—“Fuck, this is all my fault.”
“He’s playing mind games with you.” Tara’s yanking at my elbow got more insistent. “He wants something.”
The King of Shadows stepped into the light, inches from me, and the Queen of Winter stared down as I stood trying my hardest not to tremble. “You bring ruin, little one,” she said. “What would you give me to make it stop?”
I like to think that she was using some kind of faery mind control on me, and it wasn’t only that I’ve always been a sucker for a woman in a sparkly dress, but I was this close to saying “anything” when Tara’s golden-furred wolf-form barrelled past me and knocked the Queen of Winter back into the darkness. I felt something cold and calculating fall away from what I tentatively called my mind and backed the fuck up. It was good to know I could count on Tara to take the straightforward approach to telepathic bullshit but, still, she was in no state to take a faery lord one on one. If we were lucky, all we needed to do was buy ourselves enough time to make an escape. If we were unlucky we were fucked. For the second time I decided to risk starting a subsidiary war amongst the fair folk and called on the Deepwild, throwing myself onto the King of Shadows and digging my fingers as best I could into the amorphous, shifting mass of darkness he called a body.
He flowed past me, a pale hand closing around my throat and raising me up, my eyes coming level with his. “You offend your host, creature of the wild.”
I headbutted him and ran, Tara running beside me. I noticed that she’d left my fucking coat behind but I wasn’t going to hold that against her given that she’d probably just saved me from spending eternity as a bauble in the collection of the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter. We kept going flat out until we felt the cold-water rush of passing between worlds, and maintained a frankly intense pace all the way back to Safernoc Hall.
It wasn’t until we were safely back in Tara’s room that she returned to her human shape and the two of us collapsed onto the bed exhausted and, from where I was standing at least, only about three steps this side of completely fucking terrified. Despite the very naked, exercise-flushed, heavily-breathing lycanthropic lingerie model beside me, I stared fixedly at the ceiling. Then I covered my face and thought hard about crying but didn’t quite manage it.
“I fucked everything up,” I told the insides of my hands. “Nim, Elise, most of Nim’s court, fucking