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  “What’s your other theory?” Damon asked next.

  “It isn’t inconceivable that the spell was cast by someone who is alive now… and has the ability to traverse time.”

  “Holy shit,” muttered Damon Chroi as he ran a hand through his raven hair. Coming from a man who was wearing a form-fitting gray tee-shirt with a great big Pinkie Pie on it, that was saying something.

  Roman had to agree with the sentiment. The first option was confusing. The second was terrifying.

  “Come to think of it,” said Caliban suddenly, “there may be a third possibility. It’s conceivable this spell was not directed at Avery at all. But at his queen.”

  “Why?” asked Roman and Damon at the same time.

  “That would be the question,” said Caliban. He finished laying his spells, dropped his arms and moved past the others, smoothing his hand down the front lapels of his suit as he made his way to the door.

  Roman understood his sense of urgency, and he could feel it coming off the Unseelie King like uncomfortable, slightly spiky waves of dark matter, if such a thing could possibly be described. Caliban had his own issues to tend to… his own queen to win. And if she were in danger, if the spell had really been directed at Selene Trystaine and not Avery, then that urgency was all the more palpable. Roman could empathize.

  The Unseelie King paused at the outer door to the chamber. “One more thing bears mentioning,” he said, turning to regard them. “If this spell caster had any interest in all of the queens in general, it stands to reason that they would have intervened with the finding and mating of each of the four who have been located up to this point. Yet, they did not.”

  Again, Roman and Damon went silent as they considered Caliban’s words.

  “You think this really is personal, at least in as much as it has to do with either Avery or Selene,” said Roman. As an afterthought, he added, “Or Selene and her sister. The attack on Avery had nothing to do with Kamon, and nothing to do with my brother.”

  “Whatever the case,” sighed Damon, “I guess we’re lucky he or she would choose this exact moment in time to attack, when we’re battling Kamon, and the queens are suddenly coming out of the woodwork. Because, if the kings are ever going to be prepared to defend themselves or take precautions, it’s going to be now, when all of this is going down. After all, Avery did use a knight today. It’s what saved his life.”

  Caliban’s lips twitched. “I’m aware.”

  Roman could tell the Unseelie King was as frustrated by the lack of answers as they were, if not more so. But he hid it well. Darkness hid a lot of things well. That was its blessing.

  Caliban moved through the door and out into the dark hallway beyond, but looked at the men over his shoulder. His gaze glowed in the darkness, the way a cat’s eyes reflect light at night, but speckled with the magic that ran rampant through his bloodstream. He straightened, his eerie, powerful gaze skirting to the bouldered tomb behind them. “If he wakes up, call me. You will need all the help you can get.”

  He smiled in a way that would have no doubt turned good girls bad – and vanished like a mist in the shadows.

  *****

  She could call her sister. But then what? What would she say? “Minnie, I just saw a white reindeer in Christ Church Meadows. But that was after the white cat that wanted me to follow it, though. Oh, and everyone disappeared. And then this guy bumped into me and actually said sorry and everyone minded their own business. It was wild.”

  She shook her head and walked in a bit of a daze in the general direction of her apartment.

  But she stopped just after she’d rounded the last corner that would take her to her own street and almost slammed her hand against her forehead. “Crap,” she muttered. She was supposed to go to the grocery store.

  With all that had happened, and with thoughts of the past being what they were… she’d forgotten.

  She took a deep breath, in through the nose and out through the mouth, but nonetheless, frustration started to ride her again, made worse by the incessant heat and smoke that were fraying her nerves like a spiritual cheese grater.

  She had no choice but to turn around and head back to a grocery store. The nearest one that had everything she, her sister, and her parents needed was not within walking distance. She would need to take the bus. The bus stop was four blocks away.

  Selene pinched the bridge of her nose and then rubbed her temples with her fingertips. It wasn’t only her head that ached though. Her heart throbbed, for some reason harder today than it had on this day over the last few years.

  I’m losing my mind.

  It was the logical conclusion… if crazy people thought logically. She felt like crying. The pressure had been there, in her chest and behind her eyes, all day. And she was seeing things. Like seriously seeing things. If that stag hadn’t been real, which it absolutely could not have been, then it meant her hallucination had lasted full minutes.

  Or maybe it was like a dream and it felt like minutes but was only seconds?

  Either way, her sanity was all but gone. She’d blown up at some guy on the street. And then she’d imagined that he’d actually cared and had apologized – and then she’d imagined that everyone around her had stopped gawking. Which just wouldn’t happen.

  Oh god. I’m doubting everything.

  Dealing with the grocery store was the last thing she wanted just then.

  “I just need a maid,” she muttered as she turned around and began heading back down the street toward the bus stop. If she could just get some sleep and catch up on her work and stop worrying about her parents….

  Selene had gone two blocks and was looking through her purse for an Excedrin when a woman moved past her and exhaled a mouthful of smoke just as she passed by her face. The gray toxins swirled around Selene, and this time, within that moving cloud, Selene imagined she saw things sparkling – like lightning in a storm.

  I wish she would choke, Selene thought as she stared into that crackling, stinking cloud and held her breath. I wish they would all start choking on their poison crap. All of them. As if they’d never taken a lung-full of it before and this was their first and they hated it as much as I did. Or worse.

  As she thought these things, her hands continued their blind search for the pop-out packet of headache medicine. Her mind raged and her gaze was narrowed and her lungs were fighting the instinct to inhale as she punched out a pill, popped it into her mouth, and then dry swallowed it. It scraped on the way down; she wasn’t any good at dry swallowing pills. But she ignored the discomfort, turned away from the woman and her cigarette, and continued down the street the way she’d been going.

  There was an entrance to a mall a few store fronts away. She decided to duck into this in order to bypass the dirty air outside for a few blocks. A rush of semi-cooler air washed over her like a blessing as the doors closed behind her, and she headed directly to the first shop that sold bottled water.

  Back out on the street, far from her perception or sight, a man dropped his cigarette mid-step, leaving it smoldering and smoking on the ground behind him. But before his next stride, he froze, suddenly uncertain. His expression changed, melting from nonchalance to anxiety. Then pain.

  His hand encircled his throat, at first gripping lightly, then clutching and clawing with desperation.

  Ten feet away, a woman mirrored his actions, gripping her own neck. Up and down the sidewalk, men, women, and teenagers stopped walking, stopped talking, and began choking.

  Cigarettes hit the ground one after another, red-tipped, burning, and forgotten.

  Within minutes, sirens wailed in the distance.

  Chapter Eight

  Amusing, he thought. His brother had blocked his access to the mortal world. However, in his rush to lock Avery in, Caliban concentrated all of his energy on that particular door and nothing else. It wasn’t like the Unseelie King to err so carelessly. He must have been distracted.

  No doubt, Avery thought, his inner voice ch
uckling. He was very aware of just what, or who, it was that would have the other Sidhe King in such a distracted state. Caliban was most likely on his way to her side at that very moment, despite the knights and the danger that had already presented itself.

  Existence was like a house, not a doorstep. There may be a barrier preventing Avery from stepping into humanity… but most houses had back doors. And windows. He may not be able to travel to Earth without wasting too much of his own magic in a battle against Caliban’s. But there were other places to go. And once there, all he had to do was find another doorway back into the mortal world.

  Avery smiled to himself in a way the Seelie King had never before smiled as he opened a rainbow-colored portal and slipped on through.

  *****

  Something had rotted inside the refrigeration section for cheese and milk. It sometimes happened; one of the containers would come open and milk or cream or something equally dairy and spoil-able would slip down into the refrigeration vents and even onto the floor below where nothing could reach it to clean it up. Then, over time, despite the refrigeration, it would rot.

  The smell was at odds with the extreme cold of the refrigeration, especially as it competed with the humid heat from outdoors. Selene couldn’t believe how cold it always was in these aisles. It could be ninety degrees Fahrenheit outside with ninety percent humidity, and right here, in the dairy and milk aisle of this express Tesco, it felt around forty. Perhaps lower. It was so cold, it was actually difficult for her to concentrate on what she needed.

  Why can’t people just pick a good temperature and stick with it? her distracted mind ranted.

  She reached for the single bottle of unsweetened soy milk remaining on the shelf and moved through the section as quickly as she could. If she was forgetting anything, so be it. She would ask Minerva to come back later.

  She didn’t have a cart or a basket. The trick to grocery shopping when you didn’t have a car and had to walk ten blocks home was to only purchase what you could relatively comfortably carry in your arms. Otherwise, the walk became very difficult at six blocks, and downright agonizing at nine. Then, inevitably, the groceries were dropped, expletives were loudly declared, and the bags were half-dragged, half-kicked the rest of the way home.

  She had a bag of Chili Heatwave Doritos, a carton of milk, a package of whole wheat pasta, a bag of fresh tomatoes, and a six-pack of Diet Fanta and was getting ready to call it quits when she caught the odd sound of water trickling.

  She stopped in the aisle where toilet paper was on one side and cleaning supplies were on the other, and cocked her head, listening more closely.

  It was unmistakable. It was definitely trickling water, rather like one of those sound machine fountains left on in dentists’ offices to calm the patients. Sort of like a babbling brook.

  She moved back into the milk aisle, wondering if she’d accidentally knocked something down and now it was leaking. But the closer she got to the middle of the aisle, the fainter the trickling sound became, until once more, there was nothing but the hum of the refrigerators, the overhead intercom music, and the noise of the cash registers.

  Imagining things, remember? her inner voice chastised.

  Selene shook her head, moved back down the aisle, and turned the corner.

  But when she did, the sound was back – and this time, when she looked down, it was to find the floor wet. The dirty and scuffed white tile seemed to bend in toward the center of the aisle, and there it had been flooded to half an inch or so.

  Selene’s brow furrowed. Just as she’d followed the white cat, she found herself following the flooded water trail down another aisle. The trickling sound grew louder. She caught the scent of something floral and fresh. The air around her became lighter and cleaner.

  Distantly, Selene realized that she should be terrified. A hallucination of a white stag was one thing. But this hallucination was auditory. It had scent. And she could feel it against her skin and in her nostrils. Despite this distant realization, she felt oddly at peace with the strangeness.

  A scuffling sound made her look up toward the cereal boxes. A Weetabix container wobbled momentarily before tipping over and tumbling to the wet floor. It made a dull flappp sort of sound, and ripples of water rode away from its edges.

  Selene just stared at it, utterly at a loss as to what to think or feel – until another scuffling sound brought her attention back to the cereal boxes on the shelf.

  She gasped.

  A small pair of bright, rainbow-hued eyes gazed out at her from the shadows behind one of the box stacks. It blinked curiously. A moment of disbelief passed before the small creature scurried back out of sight, knocking over several other boxes as it fled.

  One after another, the containers splashed onto the floor. Selene realized that the sound was much more wet than it had been the first time. She looked down to find the water had climbed well past the edges of her boots and was soaking into the black leather. She should have been worried about that. She liked these boots.

  But it was almost the farthest thing from her mind.

  Absently, Selene spared her boots by stepping to the side where the floor was raised and not quite as wet. She stood there – and listened. The intercom music had stopped. The distant hum of the refrigerators was gone, as was the busy buzz of conversation and money exchange at the registers.

  The smell of rotten milk had been replaced with something sweet and foreign, like an alien flower. The air was no longer too cold. Nor was it too hot. It was perfect.

  As if in a dream, Selene moved down the aisle, sticking to the metal shelves to stay dry. Further down the stacks, she noticed what looked like vegetation sticking out from in-between the packets of oatmeal. She pushed one of them aside, and a small, curling green vine gently unwound from behind it to dangle over the lip of the shelf.

  While she stared at it, a butterfly flitted past her right ear and landed on one of the uncurling tendrils. Its wings stopped flapping, settling down into an open position to reveal its vibrant and intricate colors and design, the likes of which Selene had never before seen.

  Like a zombie no longer fully in control of her body, Selene straightened back up and turned around.

  The shelf across from her, where coffees and teas had once been stacked, was now completely overgrown with fine green grasses, bright, enormous flowers, and vines that wound in curlicues and draped to the wet floor below.

  At the end of the aisle, a tree had taken root – and continued to take root even as she watched. Its bark stretched, knotting and growing, its branches climbing and extending, its leaves popping out of buds before her very eyes.

  The trickling sound of water had become a gentle roar, and here the tiles of the floor had all but disappeared beneath the water, and what looked like either moss or lichen that was growing between them and spreading over their faces.

  Another few steps, some of which splashed, and Selene turned one final corner.

  Up above, the fluorescent lights that normally glared from their metal casings were gone. The entire ceiling was gone, in fact. In its place was a sky the most pure, crisp shade of blue.

  Below, where there had once stood a busy, overcrowded express grocery store, there stretched before Selene a magnificent, impossible garden. It defied description, reminding her at once of the chocolate room in Willie Wonka’s factory… and of dreams she’d had as a child. Of impossible places with impossible things like cotton candy clouds and bubble gum trees and butterflies with crystal wings and mushrooms that were striped like zebras and elephants the size of kittens…. Of other places, hidden in the imaginations of children or geniuses, tucked safely between the pages of fanciful books, sometimes glimpsed for just sheer moments on movie screens – but never fully.

  Never like this.

  The wonderland before her was dissected by a rainbow of different trails, each hewn of some precious or semi-precious stone and polished to a perfect, flat, smooth and unbroken surface.

&nb
sp; Maybe she should have fought it, or maybe she should have worried about having finally gone ‘round the bend. But instead, Selene felt as if she weighed nothing, had no problems in the world, and as if not a thing in the universe any longer mattered. She moved forward onto the nearest trail, one that looked to have been created of amethyst, and walked away from the world she’d left behind to take her first steps into a better one.

  Chapter Nine

  “I… can… fix… that…!” Diana sobbed the words, stretching each out in the ridiculous agony she felt in that moment. She’d just finished watching the movie “Holes,” and though she’d read the book before, the movie had, for some unknown reason, reached in and ripped a hole in her chest. Which was fitting.

  “Diana?”

  Damon knocked gently, with that concerned and delicate touch that husbands took on when they would soon be fathers… because if they didn’t, their hormonal wives would eviscerate them.

  “Go away!” Diana responded. She furiously wiped at her eyes, regardless of the fact that it was useless because she was in the shower. She would have blown her nose too, but toilet paper in pouring hot water was never a good idea, even in extreme emergencies.

  All she could think about was that heart-rending scene in which Kissing Kate Barlow was dying in the desert, and there upon her dying breaths, she sees Sam, the man she loved in life. He’d been murdered by the very same men she’d spent the latter years of her own life taking revenge upon: It’s hot, Sam, she says. But I’m so cold.

  I can fix that.

  “Oh God!” Diana cried, sobbing helplessly. “He can fix that!”

  Okay, maybe she had an inkling of why it had reached in and ripped out her heart. Hell, she could practically feel the babies inside her crying right along with her. All three of them.

  The door had been locked, but there was no lock in the realm that could hold back the Goblin King. Damon twisted the knob and entered the massive room in their castle that could only be called a bathroom.

  Like everything in the fae realms, the construction of the Goblin Castle defied logic. It was immeasurably vast, composed of precious materials and gemstones, and magical enough to confuse the most talented labyrinth dweller. The bathroom of the palace was no different, but Diana had insisted on a few personal, mortal touches, just for her own comfort’s sake.