“That is untrue. I have not used the Sidhba-jai on an unwilling woman in eighty-two thousand years.”
I stared. V’lane was eighty-two thousand years old?
“I see I have made you curious. That is good. I am curious about you as well. Come. Join me. Let us talk of ourselves.” He stepped back and waved a hand.
Two chaise longues appeared between us. A wicker table between them offered a plate with a pitcher of sweet tea and two ice-filled glasses. There was a bottle of my favorite suntan oil stuck in the sand next to the chair closest me, near a pile of thick pastel towels. Sheets of brilliantly striped silk wafted from nowhere, billowed once in the breeze and draped themselves over the chairs.
Salt air kissed my skin. I glanced down.
My catsuit was gone and I was again spearless. I was wearing a hot pink string bikini, with a gold belly chain from which dangled two diamonds and a ruby.
I blinked.
A pair of designer sunglasses appeared on the bridge of my nose.
“Stop it,” I hissed.
“I am merely trying to anticipate your needs.”
“Don’t. It’s offensive.”
“Join me for an hour in the sun, MacKayla. I will not touch you. I will not…as you say…sex you up. We will talk, and at our next encounter, I will not make the same mistakes again.”
“You said that last time.”
“I made new mistakes this time. I will not make those, either.”
I shook my head. “Where is my spear?”
“It will be returned to you when you leave.”
“Really?” Why would he return a Fae-killing Hallow fashioned by his race to me, knowing I would use it to kill more Fae?
“Consider it a gesture of our goodwill, MacKayla.”
“Our?”
“The queen and I.”
“Barrons needs me,” I said again.
“If you insist I prematurely terminate our hour because you feel I have dishonored it, I will not return you to Wales, and you will still be of no use to him. Stay or go, you won’t be with him. And MacKayla, I believe your Barrons would tell you he needs no one.”
That much was true. I wondered how he knew Barrons. I asked him. They must have trained with the same master of evasion because he said only, “It rains in Dublin incessantly. Look.”
A small square in the tropical vista opened before me, as if he’d peeled back the sky and palms, and torn a window open onto my world. I saw the bookstore through it. The streets were dark, wet. I would be alone there.
“It is raining now. Shall I return you, MacKayla?”
I looked at the tiny bookstore, the shadowy alleys to either side of it, Inspector Jayne sitting across the street beneath a streetlamp watching it, and shivered. Was that the dim outline of my private Grim Reaper down the block? I was so tired of the rain and the dark and enemies at every turn. The sun felt heavenly on my skin. I’d almost forgotten the feel of it. It seemed my world had been wet and gloomy for months.
I glanced away from the depressing view, and up at the sky. Sun has always made me feel strong, whole, as if I get more than vitamins from it; its rays carry something that nourishes my soul. “Is it real?” I nodded up at the sun.
“As real as yours.” The window closed.
“Is it mine?”
He shook his head.
“Are we in Faery?”
He nodded.
For the first time since I’d so unceremoniously arrived, I examined my surroundings. The sand was radiantly white and soft as silk beneath my bare feet, the ocean azure, and the water so clear I could see entire cities of rainbow-colored coral beneath it with tiny gold and pink fish swimming the reefs. A mermaid danced on a crest of a wave before disappearing beneath the sea. The tide tossed sand to the beach in a surf of glittering silver foam. Palm trees rustled in the breeze, dropping lush scarlet blossoms on the shore. The air smelled of rare spices, exotic flowers, and salt sea spray. I bit my lip on the verge of saying It’s so beautiful here. I would not compliment his world. His world was screwing up mine. His world didn’t belong on our planet. Mine did.
Still…the sun has always been my drug of choice. And if he would play fair—meaning not try to rape me again—who knew what I might learn? “If you touch me, or in any way try to affect my will, our time together stops. Got it?”
“Your will, my command.” His lips curved with victory.
I took off my shades and glanced briefly at the sun, hoping to sear the devastating beauty of that smile from my retinas, scorch it from my memory.
I had no idea who or what V’lane really was, but I knew this: He was a Fae, and an immensely powerful one. In this battle where knowledge was so evidently power, where information could keep me alive, where Barrons pretty much ruled his far-reaching world because of how much he knew, I couldn’t afford to pass up a chance to interrogate a Fae, and it looked like V’lane, for whatever reason, might just let me.
Perhaps he would lie. Perhaps he wouldn’t about some things. I was getting better at sorting through what people told me. Learning to hear the truth in their lies and the lies in their truth.
“Have you really been alive for eighty-two thousand years?”
“Longer. That was merely the last time I used glamour to seduce a woman. Sit and we will talk.”
After a moment’s hesitation, I perched stiffly on the edge of the chaise.
“Relax, MacKayla. Enjoy the sun. It may be your last chance to see it for some time.”
I wondered what he meant by that. Did he consider himself a weather prognosticator? Or could he actually control it, make it rain? Against my better judgment, I stretched out my legs and lay back. I stared at the sapphire sea, watched graceful alabaster birds pluck fish from the waves. “So, how old are you?”
“That,” he said, “is anyone’s guess. In this incarnation, I have lived one hundred and forty-two thousand years. Are you aware of our incarnations?”
“You drink from the cauldron.”
He nodded.
How long, I wondered, did it take to go mad? My short twenty-two years were sorely testing me. It seemed forgetting might be a comfort. I considered the ramifications of divesting memory, and realized why a Fae might put it off. If he’d spent fifty or a hundred thousand years watching, learning, building alliances, making enemies, the moment he divested memory he would no longer even know who those enemies were.