A third one glided into the church.

What had Christian said? Myth equates the heads of those four houses, the dark princes, with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Pestilence joined Death and Famine in God’s house. Now only War remained unaccounted for. I hoped he would stay that way.

They closed in on me, a circle of three, morphing from one shape to the next as they came. Shifting shapes, colors, and . . . something else that might have been a dimensional nature. I see 3-D, not 4 or 5. My eyes couldn’t explain to my brain what they were seeing so they just settled for pretending they weren’t seeing it. V’lane said the Fae have never revealed their true face to us. That may have been what I glimpsed.

Swallowing my fear of the only weapon I had to use against them, I jerked out the spear, dropped the harness, and pivoted in a threatening circle.

“Stay back!” I commanded. “This is a Seelie Hallow. It can kill even princes! Just try me!” I stabbed at the nearest one. He paused, regarded the spear then raised incandescent eyes to mine. He swiveled his head upon his neck, and glanced at the others, then back at the spear in a way that made me look, too.

I discovered with horror that my hand was turning it toward me, slowly, slowly, until the tip, the deadly, flesh-rotting tip was pointing straight at me. I tried to turn it away, to point it at him, but I couldn’t move. My brain was issuing orders my body refused to obey.

Rape was horrific enough. There was no way I was going to die like Mallucé afterwards.

When the tip was a mere quarter inch from my skin, I tried to fling the spear away, hoping I could, and they’d just forget about it. My release mechanism worked as my override had not—a thing that would make sense to me one day—and the spear clattered across the floor, through the door into the chapel. It crashed into the base of the pedestal of holy water with such impact that water sloshed over the side, and hissed and steamed when it hit the spear.

The princes adopted static form, became males so unutterably beautiful that looking at them was a moment of such exquisite perfection that it hurt my soul, and I gibbered wordlessly. They were naked except for glistening black torques that writhed like liquid darkness around their necks. Their supple, golden-skinned bodies were tattooed in brilliant, complicated patterns that rushed over their skin, kaleidoscopic storm clouds across a gilded sky. Lightning flashed in their glittering eyes.

Deep within me, I felt answering thunder.

I couldn’t look at them. They were too much. I turned away but they were there again, forcing me to gaze upon their frightening, fantastic faces. My eyes widened, widened still.

I wept tears of blood that scaled my cheeks. I scrubbed at them with my fingers, and they came away seared, crimson.

Then the princes’ mouths were on my fingertips, with tongues of soothing coolness, and fangs of licking ice, and a beast far more primitive than Savage Mac, and far beyond my control, yawned and stretched her arms above her head, and awakened with a delicious sense of anticipation.

This was what she’d been born for. What she’d been waiting for all this time. Here. Now. Them.

Sex that was worth dying for.

I kicked off my boots. They peeled away my jeans and underwear, and turned me between them, kissing, tasting, licking, taking, feeding from the passion they fed in me, slamming it back at me, taking it, returning it again, and with each transfer between us it grew into something bigger than me, bigger than them, into a beast of its own.

With some distant part of my mind I recognized the horror of what was happening to me. I tasted on their perfect lips the emptiness within them, and understood that beneath the flawless, velvety, golden skin, far beneath the waves of Eros I was drowning in . . . there was nothing but . . . an ocean of . . . me.

I glimpsed, even as I surrendered to it, the true nature of the Unseelie princes. They are voids of what they are not, and crave most: passion, desire, the fire of life, the capacity to feel.

Some essential component in them had been lost long ago, or perhaps frozen out of them by seven hundred thousand years of icy incarceration, or perhaps they’d come into being via the king’s imperfect Song, equally imperfect and empty. Whatever the cause, the most intensely they could feel was through sex. They were maestros of lust, eternally denied music in their realm, surrounded by others also void, without a human’s body to play the melody upon.

But with a human, so long as she felt, so did they, and they would gorge on her song, until the concert hall fell silent, the passion turned to ash, and she died, her body gone as cold as that place inside them where life could never be fully realized.