Still … could I really walk away now and never know what all this had been about? Live with unresolved bipolarity shaping all my choices? Did I want to live that way—a conflicted, screwed-up, half-afraid existence of someone who’d chickened out at the critical moment?
Safety is a fence, and fences are for sheep, I’d told Rowena.
Were it put to the test, she’d replied tartly, I wonder where you would truly stand.
This was the test.
I cracked the ice, shook it from my skin, and headed for the top of the ridge.
28
In that moment, just before I could see over the crest, a final memory I’d been suppressing surfaced, a last desperate bid to get me to tuck tail and run.
It nearly worked.
Once I topped the ridge, there would be a coffin chiseled of the same blue-black ice from which the four stones had been carved, standing in the center of a snow-covered dais, surrounded by sheer cliffs.
A chilling, bitter wind would gust down and tangle my hair. I would stand, debating, before moving to the sepulchre.
The lid would be elaborately carved with ancient symbols. I would press my hands to the runes at ten and two, slide the lid away, and look inside.
And I would scream.
My steps faltered.
I closed my eyes, but, try as I might, I couldn’t see what was inside the coffin that made me scream. Apparently I was going to have to actually perform the deed to know how my recurring nightmare ended.
I squared my shoulders, marched to the top, and stopped, startled.
There was the icy tomb, elaborately carved and embellished, precisely as I’d just pictured it. It certainly didn’t look big enough to hold the king.
But who was he?
This was a new twist. In all my nightmares, there’d never been anyone else here but me and whoever was inside that tomb.
Tall, beautifully formed, ice-white, and smooth as marble, with long jet hair, he sat on a bank of crusted snow beside the coffin, face buried in his hands.
I stood at the top of the ridge, staring. Wind gusted down from high cliffs and tangled my hair. Was he a residue? A memory? There was none of that fading at the edges, no transparency.
Was he my king?
As soon as I thought the question, I knew he wasn’t.
Then who was he?
What I could see of his ivory skin—a hand on his cheek, one sleek, strong white arm—raced with dark shapes and symbols.
Was it possible there were five Unseelie Princes? This wasn’t one of the three who’d raped me, and he had no wings, which meant he wasn’t War/Cruce, either.
So who was he?
“It’s about bloody damned time,” he tossed over his shoulder, without turning. “Been waiting weeks.”
I jerked. He’d spoken in that awful chiming and, while my mind understood it, my ears would never get used to it. That was only part of what made me jerk, though. Needing to crack my ice was another part of it. But the majority was horror at the realization of who I was looking at.
“Christian MacKeltar,” I said, and grimaced. I was speaking the language of my enemies, a language I’d never learned, with a mouth incapable of shaping it. I couldn’t get back to my side of the mirror soon enough. “Is that you?”
“In the flesh, lass. Well … mostly.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant it was mostly him or mostly flesh. I didn’t ask.
He raised his head and shot me a savage look over his shoulder. He was beautiful. He was wrong. His eyes were full black. He blinked and had whites again.
In another life, I would have gone crazy over Christian MacKeltar. Or at least I would have gone nuts for the Christian I met back in Dublin. He was so different now that, if he hadn’t spoken to me, I’m not sure how long it might have taken me to figure out who he was. The good-looking college student with the great body, Druid heart, and killer smile was gone. As I watched shapes and symbols move under his skin, I wondered: If we weren’t inside the prison that leached color from everything, would his tattoos still be black or kaleidoscopic?
I stood still too long and was suddenly staring at him through a thin sheeting of ice. He’d been sitting still and was ice-free. Why? Then there was that short-sleeved shirt he was wearing. Wasn’t he cold? When I cracked it, he spoke.
“The majority of what happens here is in your mind. Whatever you permit yourself to feel intensifies.” The words were dark bells hammered on a bent xylophone. I shuddered. I could hear the hint of Scots brogue in the chiming, and the element of humanity in the inhuman tongue made it all the more disturbing.
“You mean if I don’t think about icing, I won’t?” I said. My stomach growled and I was suddenly frosted with thick, creamy blue icing.