I dismissed him and weighed Barrons’s words for truth. “Your tribunal would take him? It could take him from you?”

“Yes. And yes,” Barrons said levelly.

“Truth. Fuck.”

“He must always remain hidden. You uncle died in that gorge,” Ryodan said.

“Chloe.”

Barrons said, “Perhaps in time. She, like Mac, would have reason enough to protect his secret. If she passes our tests.”

“You would test my aunt.” I was incensed.

“You should hope they would,” Mac said. “No point in giving him back only for her to lose him again.”

“My entire clan can be trusted.”

Barrons and Ryodan snorted.

Mac said, “Save your demands for another day, Christian. Deal with today.”

I turned to look at Dageus, shuddering on the stone slab. Finally, I said, “What is he going through?”

Ryodan said to Barrons, “I’ll take the Highlander from here. Get her out of here.” He jerked his head at Mac.

“Oh, come on!” Mac protested. “Don’t you trust me by now?”

“Need-to-know basis, Mac. And you don’t. But he,” Ryodan jerked his head at Christian, “might just prove a grand babysitter while we figure out how to save the world.”

Babysitter, my arse.

Mac and Barrons vanished down the hall.

When Ryodan opened the door, I followed him inside, unable to shake the feeling he might just have intended the evening to end this way all along.

19

“It’s time to begin, isn’t it…”

“Have you located the other Unseelie princes?” Cruce asked.

The roach god had to finish molding his many roach parts into the stumpy-legged shape of a human dwarf before he had the mouth to reply.

“All but one have been slain,” he said, when he’d completed his tongue. He craned his neck to stare up at the tall prince, roaches scuttling to shift position with his movement. It was complicated to function in this form. It required incessant readjustments, yet it was this mimicry of those around him that had enabled him to strike his first alliance long ago. The more he donned it, the more he despised its limitations, envied those who suffered none.

“Which one remains?”

“He was once a Highlander, now mutated.” He shifted slightly, settling the remaining stragglers into place, reinforcing his knees.

“Useless. Who killed my brethren?”

“Ryodan and Barrons.” He observed his new ally closely. “I was there, beneath the desk when they placed their heads on it.”

The winged prince demonstrated no weakness of rage at the news. He absorbed and moved on. The roach god’s satisfaction with his choice of allies increased. Success did not grace the stupidly violent, but the patient, the unseen, those who lurked and bided and seized the correct moment.

“The Seelie princes?” Cruce demanded.

“Dead as well. The last of them slain by the same two.”

“The concubine? The female that was in this cavern the night they imprisoned me,” Cruce clarified. “The one with the Unseelie king. You were there that night, were you not?”

“Ryodan bade me scatter my parts through the abbey that night, while the wards were down, listen and learn. He misses no opportunity. I’ve seen no sign of that woman.”

“And the Unseelie king?” Cruce said.

He shook his head, masses of roaches swaying and churning, but not one of them slipped. In his upright form, he was cohesive enough to do a few things. Far too gelatinous to do most. He resented that deeply. He was tiny, weak, in a world of giants who crushed him beneath their heels, drenched him with sticky hair spray or canned poisons that made him sick, sick, sick, even flushed him down a toilet as if he were excrement.

“No one leads my race. They are lost. Who do they follow?” Cruce said.

“They scatter, establishing small strongholds, warring among themselves. Most do nothing but feed and slaughter.”

Cruce shook his head. “The depths to which my race has descended.”

The roach god had studied the world carefully for eons. When the Fae began to walk openly, he had finally been able to show his face, too, as the powerful entity he was. He that knew the world’s best-kept secrets could rule it. He suffered no delusion of being king himself. But he intended to be the one who stood beside the king, granted every liberty.

In his estimation, the recently freed Unseelie and the Seelie who now had no ruler were primed to follow any powerful, focused Fae. He told the prince this. “Still,” he grated, “I have no way to open this chamber.” He measured his next words carefully. “There is an Unseelie princess on this world. She was the one who bargained for the prince’s deaths. She would see you slain as well if she knew you existed.”

“Is that a threat?” Ice flared out across the floor, instantly freezing his many feet to the hard, cold surface.

He’d not spoken carefully enough. “Of course not. A warning among allies.”

Cruce was silent for a time. Eventually the ice beneath the roach god’s feet warmed enough that he could shift and free himself. Then the prince murmured, “I believed the bitches destroyed long ago by the king himself. Is there only one?”

“I have only seen one. I’ve heard of no others.”

The prince thought about this, then said, “It must be risked, and if it draws her attention, so be it. How solid is the form you now wear?”

The burn of it. Not nearly solid enough. He’d walked among men long enough to have adopted their expressions, mimicking them when he mimicked their form. Roaches rearranged into a sour look with downturned mouth and narrowed eyes. He couldn’t imagine how smoothly such things would occur in a cohesive body.

Cruce read the answer on his face. He stood and plucked a single feather from an enormous black wing, gilded iridescent blue and silver. “Can you carry this out when you leave?”

The roach god nodded, thousands of hard shiny brown shells rustling to perform the simple task.

The prince asked him many more questions about things he would have deemed insignificant, much like Ryodan, but the kind that knit together a much vaster, cohesive view than the roach with his divided parts and eyes. The roach god answered them fully, omitting no detail, however minor, from the recent rash of papers hung on every street corner, to the strange black spheres and the talk he’d overheard about them, to the terror-inspiring walking trash heap he’d seen the other day.