My window was broken. The room would be freezing in no time.
I reached for my holster, strapped it on over my pajama top, slid the spear beneath my arm, grabbed a coat from the chair, and headed for the stairs.
I had a small epiphany on the way down.
My spear would kill the Fae parts of Fiona, granting her the ultimate demise she wished, but very slowly. It had taken months for Mallucé to die. When I stabbed a Fae, it was entirely Fae and died swiftly. But when a human eats Unseelie, it laces the human’s body with pockets and threads of immortal flesh, and there’s no way to stab each and every thread or pocket, so the wound works instead like a slow poison. I wonder if whoever created the immortal-slaying weapons deliberately designed them that way, to carry out a horrific punishment for a horrific crime.
However, there was another potential method of execution that would either kill her instantly—or answer a question I badly wanted answered.
The entire time I’d been fighting tonight, I’d been thinking about it.
I wanted to test the Silver in the White Mansion.
Maybe lots of people and Fae could go through it.
I’d been considering taking an Unseelie captive and forcing it into the Silver.
Now I didn’t have to. I had a volunteer.
And, even better, she was mostly human.
If Fiona could pass through the king’s Silver without dying, that would mean the legend was a bluff.
It killed Barrons.
I shrugged. That might have been an anomaly. Barrons defied the laws of physics. Maybe humans could pass through it just fine. Maybe the Unseelie King hadn’t warded it as well as he thought he had. Maybe humans from our planet were different from his mortal concubine, and how could you ward against something you didn’t even know existed? All I knew was I wasn’t the king, and here was my chance to prove it. I hated losing more time, but my peace of mind was worth losing time for.
I stepped into the alley and moved slowly toward her. “Hood up.”
She made a sound that was almost laughter but made no move to lift it.
“Do you want to die? If so, hood up.”
Eyes hot with hate, moving stiffly and with painstaking care, she adjusted the fabric to shadow her face.
As she put her arms back down, a gust of wind blew the stench of her straight into my nostrils. I gagged. She smelled of blood and decaying flesh with a strong medicinal odor, as if she was eating painkillers by the handful.
“Follow me.”
“Where?”
“The spear will kill you, but it will do so slowly. I might have a way to kill you instantly.”
The hood turned toward me as if she was searching my face to divine my motives.
Daddy told me once that we believe others are capable of the worst we ourselves are capable of. Fiona was wondering if I might be as cruel to her as she’d have been to me in the same position.
“It will be hell for you to have to walk there. But I think you’d rather spend twenty minutes getting there to die than the weeks or even months it could take to die from the spear wound. Because of the Unseelie you’ve been eating, you’ll die slowly.”
“Spear … not instant?” There was shock in her voice.
“No.”
I knew the moment she accepted it. When I turned and headed for the Silver in the brick wall, she followed. I heard the soft swish of her cloak behind me.
“There’s a price, though. If you really want to die, you’re going to have to tell me everything you know about—”
“I can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I?” Barrons said. “Where the hell do you think you’re going this time, Ms. Lane? And who is that with you?”
The three of us went in together.
It was one of the most awkward, uncomfortable walks I’ve taken.
I had one of those outside-my-skin-watching-from-above moments. Eight months ago, when I’d first ducked into BB&B, seeking sanctuary from my first encounter with a Dark Zone, I’d never have imagined this moment: pushing into a brick wall behind the bookstore—I mean, really, a brick wall!—with the badly skinned and heavily narcotized woman who’d run BB&B with Barrons, who was waiting for me to put him in a good mood again with sex and who turned into a nine-foot-tall beast on occasion, all so I could find out if I was the king and creator of the monsters that had overtaken my world. If I’d thought my life would come to this, I’d have marched straight for the airport that day and flown back home.
Fiona hadn’t uttered a syllable since Barrons had appeared in the alley. She’d drawn her hood tightly around her face. I couldn’t imagine what she had to be feeling as she marched to her suicide between the man she’d loved to her own destruction and the woman she believed had taken him from her.
At first, Barrons had disagreed with my plan vehemently.
He’d wanted to use the spear and kill her without going back into the Silvers and wasting weeks, possibly months, doing it. But after I pulled him aside and explained that she was the perfect test, he’d reluctantly agreed, and I realized that he, too, hoped the legend was an erroneous myth.
Why? He thought I was the concubine. Considering what I was afraid I was, the concubine didn’t seem like such a bad thing to be.
Unless he’d concluded that, if I was the concubine, the king himself was destined to come for me at some point, and that was one foe he might not be able to take on, even in beast form. Perhaps he worried that the king would take his OOP detector, and then where would he be?
But if you ask her one thing about me, Ms. Lane, he’d murmured against my ear, I’ll kill her where we stand, and you won’t get your little test.
I glanced at him from the corner of my eye. Could he? In the same way he killed Fae, whatever it was? Yet he didn’t offer it as mercy. I wondered what he was feeling as we moved down a rosy corridor. Did he mourn her, this woman who’d run his store for years, this woman he’d trusted with more of his secrets than he’d ever entrusted to me? He hadn’t offered to kill her swiftly, to end her suffering. He’d used it only as a threat to keep me from prying into his business.
His face was set in hard, cold lines. He looked down at the top of Fiona’s head and his face changed; then he saw me looking at him and it was again a mask of stone.
He did mourn her—not her suffering or death but that she’d chosen the path that had led her here. I suspected that he would never have stopped caring for her, and taking care of her, if she hadn’t turned on me. But that action had sealed her fate.