“I’m leaving for Inverness tomorrow and won’t be back for a week. There are . . . things at home I need to take care of. Come and see me next Thursday. I believe you and I can help each other.” He paused then said, “I believe we may need to help each other, Mac. I think our purposes may be tied together.”

I nodded as we walked out, although I had my doubts. I’d been turning into a real bottom-liner lately and, regardless of how much Christian might know, or his involvement in maintaining the walls between realms, or how much I might enjoy his company, the bottom line was he was a man who couldn’t see the Fae, and that meant, in a fight, he’d be a liability, one more person I’d have to worry about keeping alive, and lately, I was having a hard enough time keeping myself alive.

I shouldered past tourists, wound my way between Rhino-boys and assorted Unseelie, and was a few blocks from the bookstore, passing one of the countless pubs that characterize Temple Bar, when I glanced in the window, and there she was.

Alina.

Sitting with a group of friends in a low-backed corner snug, tipping back a bottle of beer. Lowering it and laughing at something the guy next to her had just said.

I closed my eyes. I knew what this was, and he needed to get some new tricks. I opened them and glanced down at myself. At least I wasn’t naked. “V’lane,” I said. Did I ever have a bone to pick with him!

“MacKayla.”

Ignoring the reflection of the tall, erotic golden creature behind my shoulder, I focused that ancient, alien, sidhe-seer place inside my brain on the illusion: Show me what is true, I demanded. The vision of Alina ruptured with the suddenness of a bubble bursting, revealing a group of boisterous rugby players toasting their latest victory.

I turned and was slammed upside the head with death-by-sex Fae.

My knees got soft, my nipples got hard, and I wanted sex on the sidewalk, sex bent over that nearby car, sex up against the wall of the pub, and who cared if my naked petunia got smashed up against the window for all to see in the process?

V’lane is a prince from one of the four Seelie Royal Houses, and it’s difficult to look at him directly when he’s in high glamour. He’s gold and bronze, velvet and steel, and his eyes blaze with the stellar grandeur of a wintry night sky. He is so unearthly beautiful that it makes a part of my soul weep. When I look at him, I hunger for things I don’t understand. I ache to be touched by him. I’m terrified of his touch. I think sex with him might undo my essential cellular cohesion, and shatter me into fragments of a woman that could never be pieced back together again.

If V’lane were a signpost, it would read Abandon All Personal Will, Ye Who Tread Here, and while I never thought much about will back home in Ashford, here I’ve begun to think it’s all I really have to call my own.

I tried regarding him with slightly peripheral vision. It didn’t help. My clothing was painfully constricting, and I battled the overwhelming urge to remove it.

Fae princes drip such raw eroticism that it provokes a woman’s senses beyond anything she was meant to experience, turning her into an aroused animal, willing to do anything for sex. While that might sound like it promises the kinkiest escapades and most incredible orgasms of your life, Fae don’t grasp basic human concepts like death. Time has no meaning to them, they don’t need to eat or sleep, and their sexual appetite for human women is enormous, all of which leads to one inevitable outcome: A woman caught in a Fae prince’s spell usually gets fucked to death. If she survives it, she’s Pri-ya: an addict, a void of insatiable sexual need that exists for one purpose, to serve her Master—and that’s determined by whoever is currently giving her sex.

The first few times I encountered V’lane I’d begun stripping where I stood. I was getting better at resisting, because I was catching my hand every time it moved to the hem of my sweater, before I began pulling it off over my head. Still, I wasn’t sure how long I could keep it up.

“Mute it,” I demanded.

A slow smile curved his lips. “I am muted. Whatever you feel is not coming from me.”

“You’re lying.” I briefly visited Christian’s charge that I was thinking of having sex with someone. V’lane was not a someone. He was a something.

“I am not. You have made it clear you will not abide my . . . sexing you up. Perhaps you are . . . how do you humans say it . . . in heat?”

“We say that about animals, not people.”

“Animals, people, what difference?”

“Seelie, Unseelie, what difference?”

Silvery flakes crystallized in the air between us, icing the night with royal displeasure. “The difference is too vast for your puny mind to comprehend.”

“Ditto.”

“You are not naked, on your hands and knees, offering me your pretty little ass, MacKayla, which is what you do when I use the Sidhba-jai on you. Would you like a reminder?”

“Try it and I’ll kill you.”

“With what?”

I yanked my hand from the button at the back of my skirt and went for the spear holstered beneath my arm, but it was gone. He’d taken it the last time we’d met, too. I wanted to know how he was doing it. I had to find a way to stop him.

He paced a circle around me. By the time he’d completed it, his gaze was as chill as the night air. “What have you been up to, sidhe-seer? You smell different.”

“I’ve been using a new moisturizer.” Could he smell my recent cannibalization of his race? Though I no longer suffered the dramatic effects of it, did a residue stain my skin, as it had tarnished another, less tangible part of me? I’d eaten Unseelie, not Seelie; would that make a difference to him? I doubted it. The bottom line was I’d eaten Fae to steal the power of the Fae. And I’d just fed it to another human. And I would never admit either of those facts to any Fae. “Like it?” I said brightly.

“You are powerless to defy me, yet stand before me dripping defiance. Why?”

“Maybe I’m not as powerless as you think.” What would a bite of Seelie royalty do to me? I’d find out if I had to. Surely I could Null him long enough to sink my teeth in somewhere. The thought was a little too tempting. All that power . . . mine in one tiny bite. Or ten. I wasn’t certain exactly how much I had to eat to get superstrength, when I wasn’t mortally wounded to begin with.