“Some changes are better than others.”

“Expound.”

“If you stop him, the changes will be much more interesting.”

“Opinion. Subjective.”

“So is yours,” I said indignantly.

His starry eyes glinted with amusement. “If he replaces me, I will become something else.”

I could almost hear the Sinsar Dubh saying, Is not any act of destruction, should time enough pass, an act of creation? The apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

“I don’t want you replaced. I like you as you are.”

“Flirting with me, beautiful girl?”

I tried to breathe and couldn’t. The Unseelie King was touching me, kissing me. I could feel his lips on my skin, and I—I—I—

“Breathe, BG.”

I could breathe again.

“Please, stop him.” I wasn’t above begging. I’d get on my knees. If V’lane succeeded in gaining ultimate power, I didn’t want to live in this world. Not with him in charge. With a spell of unmaking he could kill Barrons, and he’d made it clear, every chance he got, that he wanted to. He had to be stopped. I wasn’t losing any of my people. My parents were going to live to a ripe old age. Barrons was going to live forever. Me? Well. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do. But I planned on having a long, full lifetime. “It would mean a lot to me.”

“You would owe me. Like you owe my Gray Woman.”

Was there anything he didn’t know? Deals with devils … Barrons would have said, if he hadn’t been frozen. “Deal.”

He winked. “I’d planned to, anyway.”

“Ooh! Then why did you—”

“Pretty girl and all. Asking. Gotta love that. Stuff of heroes. Don’t get the role often.”

He was gone. He reappeared near the slab, staring at V’lane through crystal walls.

I was horrified to realize V’lane was more than halfway through the Sinsar Dubh.

But it was going to be okay. The king was going to stop him, crush him like a bug. V’lane would take one look at who’d come after him and sift out with his tail tucked, whimpering with fear. The king would reseal the cavern, and all would be well. No one would have any spells of unmaking. Barrons would continue to be unkillable. That was a constant, eternal rock beneath my feet that I needed.

“—fore. Where on earth do you think he came from?” My mother finished her sentence. She frowned. “And where did he go?”

Time resumed and everyone in the cavern began moving again.

V’lane’s head dropped down and his eyes slid open.

His reaction wasn’t at all what I expected.

His mouth ticked up in a cool smile. “About fucking time you showed your face, old man.”

“Ah,” said the Unseelie King. “Cruce.”

52

Cruce? V’lane was Cruce?

I glanced around the cavern. Everyone looked as stupefied as I felt, staring between V’lane and the dreamy-eyed guy.

When I’d stood at Darroc’s side, watching the Seelie and Unseelie armies face off in a snowy Dublin street, I’d been awed by the mythic proportions of the event.

Now, according to the dreamy-eyed guy who was really the Unseelie King, the Seelie who’d been masquerading as V’lane for hundreds of thousands of years was really the legendary Cruce, aka War—the final and most perfect Unseelie ever sung into existence.

And he was facing off with his maker.

Cruce was staring down the Unseelie King.

It was the stuff of million-year-old legends. I looked from one to the other. You could have heard a pin drop in the cavern.

I glanced at Barrons, who had both brows raised in an expression of complete shock. For a change, there was something he hadn’t known, either. Then his eyes narrowed on the dreamy-eyed guy.

“He’s the king? That frail old geezer?”

“Geezer? You mean the pretty French woman,” Jo said. “She’s a waitress at Chester’s.”

“French woman? It’s the Morgan Freeman lookalike from the bar on the seventh level at Chester’s,” Christian said.

“No,” Dageus said, “ ’tis the ex-groundskeeper from Edinburgh castle who took on a bussing job at Ryodan’s pub when the walls fell.”

And I saw a young, dreamy-eyed college guy. He winked at me again. We all saw something different when we looked at him.

I stared back at V’lane … er, Cruce.

How had I not known? How had I been so completely duped? It had never been a Seelie Prince facing an Unseelie Prince that night in the snowy Dublin street but two Unseelie Princes. If War’s brother had recognized him, he’d never given it away.