Karen Moning - Shadowfever

By then, however, the court was a prison for his children, a macabre place of shadows and ice. The cruel Seelie Queen’s last act had been to use the Song of Making—not for creation, not to make his beloved immortal!—but to destroy, trap, and torture for all eternity any who had dared disobey her.

And the dominoes fell …

The book containing the Unseelie King’s knowledge, all his darkness and evil, somehow ended up in my world, being protected by humans. It was set loose in a manner that I have yet to determine, but of this I am certain: Alina’s murder, my screwed-up life, and Barrons’ death—all are the result of a chain of Fae events that began a million years ago over a single mortal.

My world, we humans, we’re just pawns on an immortal chessboard.

We got in the way.

Jack Lane, attorney extraordinaire, would put the Unseelie King, not Darroc, on trial and make a persuasive case against the concubine for guilt by association.

Because the unthinkable occurred and the original queen died before she had the chance to pass on the Song of Making to one of the princesses as her successor, the Fae race began to decline. Many princesses rose to the Seelie throne, but few lasted long before another wrested away her power. Queens were killed, others merely deposed and banished. Infighting grew and coups became more frequent. The Fae race became limited. All that was already was all that could ever be.

No new things could be made. Old powers were lost, and, over the eons, ancient magic was forgotten, until one day the current queen was no longer capable of reinforcing the weakening walls between realms and retaining control of the deadly Unseelie.

Darroc exploited this weakness and brought the walls between our worlds crashing down. Now Fae and human vie for control of a planet that is too small, too fragile, for both races.

All because of a single mortal—the domino that started all the others falling.

I follow the woman who I suspect is that mortal—in a not-quite-really-there kind of way—down the inky corridor.

If she is the concubine, I can summon no anger toward her, try though I might.

On their immortal chessboard, she was a pawn, too.

She is lit from within. Her skin shimmers with a translucent glow that illuminates the walls of the tunnel. The hall grows darker, blacker, stranger with each step we take. In contrast, she is holy, divine: an angel gliding into hell.

She is warmth, shelter, and forgiveness. She is mother, lover, daughter, truth. She is all.

Her pace quickens and she races down the tunnel, passing soundlessly over obsidian floors, laughing with joy.

I know that sound. I love that sound. It means her lover is near.

He is coming. She feels his approach.

He is so powerful!

It is what first drew her to him. She’d never encountered anyone like him.

She was awed that he chose her.

She is awed every day that he continues choosing her.

The stuff of him explodes through from the Court of Shadows, telling her he comes, filling her home (prison) where she lives a fabulous life (a sentence not of her choosing) surrounded by everything she wants (illusions, she misses her world, so far away and all of them long dead) and waits for him with hope (ever-growing despair).

He will carry her to his bed and do things to her until his black wings open wide, so wide, eclipsing the world, and when he is inside her, nothing else will matter but the moment, their dark, intense lust, the endless passion they share.

No matter what else he is—he is hers .

What is between them is without blame.

Love knows no right or wrong.

Love is . Only is.

She (I) rushes down the dark, warm, inviting hall, hurrying to his (my) bed. We need our lover. It has been too long.

In her chamber, I behold the duality of which I am carved.

Half the concubine’s boudoir is dazzlingly white, brilliantly illuminated. The other half is a dense, seductive, welcoming blackness. It is split evenly down the middle.

Light and the absence of light.

I savor both. Neither disturbs me. I suffer no conflict over things upon which a simpler mind would be forced to bestow labels such as Good and Evil or embrace madness.

Against one frosted crystalline wall of the white half of the room is a huge round bed on a pedestal, draped in silks and snowy ermine throws. Alabaster petals are scattered everywhere, perfuming the air. The floor is carpeted with plush white furs. White logs, from which silvery-white flames pop and crackle, blaze in an enormous alabaster hearth. Tiny diamonds float lazily on the air, sparkling.

The woman hurries for the bed. Her clothing melts away and she (I) is naked.

But no! This is not his pleasure, not this time! His needs are different, deeper, more demanding tonight.

She spins and we gaze, lips parted, at the black half of the room.

Draped in black velvet and furs, covered with soft ebony petals that smell of him, that crush so softly beneath our skin, it is all bed.

From wall to wall.

He needs it all. (Wings unfolding, no mortal can see past them!)

He is coming. He is near.

I am naked, wild, ready. I need. I need. This is why I live.

She and I stand, staring at the bed.

Then he is there and he gathers her up—but I can’t see him. I feel enormous wings closing around us.

I know he’s there, she’s enveloped in energy, in darkness, wet and warm like sex is wet and warm, and I’m breathing lust. I am lust and I strain to see him, strain to feel him, when suddenly—

I am a simple beast, on crimson sheets with Barrons inside me. I cry out, because even here in this boudoir of duality and illusion, I know it is not real. I know I have lost him. He is gone, forever gone.

I’m not back there in that basement with him, still Pri-ya but beginning to surface enough to know that he just asked me what I wore to my prom, and shutting it all down, racing from reality back into my madness, so I don’t have to face what happened to me or deal with what I’m beginning to suspect I might have to do.

I’m not standing there a few days later, looking back at his bed with those fur-lined handcuffs, contemplating climbing back in and pretending I hadn’t recovered so I could keep doing it—every raw, animal thing we’d done in my sexually insatiable state—fully aware of what I was doing and who I was doing it with.

Dead. Dead. I’ve lost so much .

If only I’d known then what I know now …

The king lifts the concubine. I see her sliding down a body I cannot discern in the darkness, and (I straddle Barrons and slam him home inside me; God, it feels so good!) the concubine strains, arches her neck, and makes a sound that doesn’t come from our world (I laugh as I come, I’m alive, so alive), and when his vast wings spread wide, when they fill the blackness of his boudoir and pass beyond, he knows more joy in this moment than he has ever known in his entire existence, and the bitch queen would deny him this? (And I know more joy in this moment than I’ve ever known, because there is no right, no wrong, only now.)

But, wait—Barrons is vanishing!

Moving away from me, melting into the darkness. I will not lose him again!

I lunge to my feet, get tangled in sheets for a moment, then I am hurrying to catch him.

It grows colder, my breath ices the air.

Ahead I see only black, blue, and a white that is bled of all light.

I run toward the black as fast as my feet will carry me.

But hands are on my shoulders, turning me, forcing me away, fighting me!

They are too strong! They drag me down a black corridor, and I beat at the body that dares interrupt us!