On the day she’d been chosen to become the fading queen’s successor, the nearly transparent matriarch had summoned Aoibheal to her boudoir, pressed both palms to her breast and passed the True Magic into her body, where it had expanded and settled. Aoibheal had been immobilized for several long minutes, unable to speak or move while her consort, V’lane, stood at her side, guarding her during that period of vulnerability.
She’d had to acquaint herself with her newfound power.
Young queens were not powerful queens. Time was necessary to sort through and study the many legends, myths, and magic at her disposal. It had been human decades before she’d come into her own.
The elixir worked quite differently. She’d thought her memories had been stolen. They hadn’t. They’d been faded to mere shadows without substance, outlines with no content, and as the golden liquid permeated her essence, those shadows solidified, took shape and became accessible again.
Perhaps because she’d once known the memories, each and every one, they were easier to absorb than foreign, heretofore unknown facts. There was no sudden rigidity as an enormous amount of information was reanimated in her consciousness, no sense of being accosted or overwhelmed; on the contrary, she felt made whole again. At peace in a way she’d not known in her entire existence as a Fae. As if she’d been walking around with her most important parts amputated, then suddenly they were restored, melding effortlessly back into her body again.
Fire to his ice, frost to her flame.
No! She had no desire to see those memories yet.
She wanted her origins first. She wanted to access that time in her life before he’d come into it, the carefree, wild years during which the memory secreted in the king’s towering Silver had told her she’d been happy and free.
Ah, there she was.
Zara, witch and healer, connected to all, chestnut-skinned and barefoot, she raced across a field of flowers toward her home. Her hair was long, dark, spiraling in glossy curls to her waist. Her eyes flashed with ebony fire and her short shift was the many bold colors of T’murra wings. The tattoos of her clan curved up her legs, fanned across her shoulders and down her spine.
She had family, four generations beneath a simple yet expansive roof: grandparents and parents, siblings and nieces, though no children of her own. Although mortal, they were a long-lived people, surviving well into their hundredth year. As the first memory the king had given her insinuated, she’d loved her life, known and treasured every inch of her small world.
She’d even loved him. That, she now knew without doubt.
But her restored memories were absolutely identical to the True Magic in a single, cruel way.
She could visit and study each one.
But she couldn’t feel them at all.
She’d acquired facts, void of context. It was like reading a human novel about a fictional character’s life. It was why the Fae had no books, didn’t write things down. They derived no sensation from reading.
She had her answer. The loss of who she’d once been was permanent because she had become Fae. Once, she’d lived vibrantly. Now she could only do the equivalent of read about it and wonder how such passion had felt. Knowing that she’d had it and never would again.
What point was there in the king pushing her to restore her memory? She could never be Zara, never be the woman he’d loved to distraction and destruction. That woman was gone, dead, could not be reanimated.
As she’d feared, as the Fae queen with or without the full complement of her memory, the end result was the same.
“Bitterness,” she said and sighed.
“Awk! Bitterness!” the T’murra perched on her shoulder agreed.
JADA
She erupted from the slipstream at top speed and nearly crashed into one of the pillars in the alcoved entrance of Barrons Books & Baubles.
Reconvene at the bookstore, Barrons had ordered before vanishing from Chester’s.
She’d raced through Dublin faster than she ever managed to navigate the slipstream before, but Barrons, Lor, and Fade still beat her there and were pacing impatiently before the door.
As she skidded to a halt inches from a column, Barrons growled, “About damn time.”
She bristled. “It’s not my fault you haven’t taught me how to move as fast as you. Barrons, we have to summon—”
“Don’t say it!” he hissed. “I told you, we don’t fucking need him.”
“But we don’t know where she’s going. Plan ‘We may have just gotten lucky’ was a total bust. That means his plan”—she was careful not to say Cruce’s name—“is back on the table.”
“I know where the Book is going,” Barrons said coolly. “Fae fuck thought he was being clever. He wasn’t. Come.” He whirled and stalked down the alley to the rear of BB&B. She loped to catch up, with Lor and Fade bringing up the rear.
“Where?” she demanded.
Barrons tossed over his shoulder, “Analyze: sifting inside the place is impossible, the stones can’t be sensed there, the quarters are too tight for an army, it’s near enough that Cruce believed we could get there from Chester’s before Mac could arrive there from Mallucé’s—an assumption he should never have made—and therein lies a way to summon the Seelie Queen.”
Jada slapped the criteria up on her mental bulletin board.
“Substitute ‘concubine’ for Seelie Queen,” Barrons suggested.
She hissed, disgusted she hadn’t riddled it out sooner, “The White Mansion.”