Dude, it’s an Unseelie! There’s always a catch.

I zip around the corner to my first pole, grocery cart rattling.

When I see one of my papers from last week still hanging up, gleaming pinkish-white in the rosy moonlight, it surprises me. Folks always take them down, and take them home, wherever that is. Darn few get left behind.

As I get closer, I realize it’s not my paper.

What the feck? What’s on my pole? Folks know to leave me notes at the General Post Office.

I slip into fast-mo, get nose-to-nose with it.

I’m so flabbergasted my jaw about hits the pavement.

The Dublin Daily

May 20, 1 AWC

YOUR ONLY SOURCE FOR CREDIBLE NEWS IN AND AROUND NEW DUBLIN BROUGHT TO YOU BY WECARE WE BRING YOU ALL THE NEWS THAT MATTERS.

WE WILL HELP YOU SURVIVE!

WECARE

“Gah, dudes! Plagiarize much?” I pluck the offending matter from my pole and almost drop the thing, my eyeballs are so freaked out. “The Dublin Daily not The Dani Daily? Like, maybe they could have an original thought? Holy mimicking monkeys, they aped my intro! Hardly even changed any fecking words!”

I scan it, quick-like.

Don’t be fooled by IMITATION dailies. The Dublin Daily is the ONLY daily you’ll ever need. We can help you TURN YOUR POWER AND WATER BACK ON!!!

Join us now!

Unlike IMITATION dailies, WeCARE delivers all the important news direct to your door, no matter how difficult your “door” is to reach.

DON’T subject yourself to terrible threats in the streets in order to read OVERINFLATED JUVENILE BOASTS that advise you to indulge in DANGEROUS fireworks and battles!

WeCARE will come to YOU.

WeCARE will fight your battles FOR YOU.

WeCARE will keep you safe and IN THE LIGHT.

Who cares about you? WE do.

WeCARE.

“Buh!” It’s all I can come up with. “Buh!” I say again. I can’t even stand to keep reading. I ball it up and crush it into a tiny hard wad. Finally I manage, “Imitation?” I’m so perturbed I can’t even cuss. I can barely talk. “Overinflated? Who’s writing this drivel?”

I been keeping Dublin safe and in the light since last October! Months of delivering food and supplies to folks too scared to leave their hidey-holes. Months of fighting monsters, of finding and collecting little kids that got orphaned on Halloween when their folks were out celebrating and never came home because they got devoured by Shades or some other Unseelie. Months of rounding up people and taking them to Inspector Jayne so they could learn to fight.

Nobody else ever bothered to step forward and help folks survive.

Now this?

I’m getting dissed by some paper that’s pretending I’m the pretender?

“There is some serious ass-kicking going to happen,” I mutter. As soon as I find out who the feck We-the-feck-Care is.

I spend the next few hours whizzing around my city, tearing the stupid things off my posts and putting up The Dani Daily.

They used my posts. Couldn’t even find their own places to put them up.

Reaching out to MY market by taking MY posts. Stupid fecking copycats. I’m so mad, I’m steaming. If anybody was watching from above, all they’d see is a blur of motion leaving two plumes of pure pissed-offedness trailing out of my ears.

I figure tomorrow’s got to be a better day.

Lately, it seems all I ever figure is wrong.

TEN

“Cat scratch fever”

Four nights he’s come to me, murmuring my name.

Kat, he says and he makes of that one syllable an exquisite melody with which not even the divine orchestral choir of all the angels in heaven could compete.

He chimes my name in the language of the Unseelie and it makes my ears ring until my mind is emptied of all thought, until my eyes are incapable of beholding any vision other than him. He is so beautiful that merely looking at him makes me weep, and when I brush tears from my cheeks, my hands come away tainted red by blood.

He wakes me but doesn’t wake me.

He takes me to a place that is so perfect and serene and free of worry that I want to stay there forever.

Kat, he says, my name is Cruce. Not V’lane. I was so weary of wearing his golden shining face. He was never half the Fae I am. I have you in the Dreaming, is it not beautiful? Do you not feel divine here with me? You need not fear me. I am not what I seem.

I am in danger.

Terrible danger.

And I cannot tell a soul because they are all looking to me to lead, to be strong and show them the way.

I am their hope.

I am afraid “their hope” will soon be beyond all hope.

They judged Rowena so harshly! They have no idea what she faced. God knows how many years she withstood similar torment before she succumbed! Who knows what caliber of person she was before the Sinsar Dubh tampered with her mind. Did it happen to her every night like it does to me? Did the darkness beneath our stone fortress beeline straight for her head, her heart, her bed, the moment she lay down and tried to relinquish for a few stolen hours the heavy mantle of rule?

I cannot help but wonder if this hasn’t been going on for millennia. If the Unseelie king knew when he interred his deadly alter ego beneath our sacred ground and charged us with guarding it then infused our blood with his own to make us strong—or is it that very kiss of evil in our veins that makes us weak?—how much hell on earth he was going to cause. How many women’s lives he would ruin. How many humans would one day die.

I wonder if thousands of times before me a woman stepped into the position I occupy, assumed leadership of our Order, and was instantly subjected to the harshest test of will imaginable: besieged by the insidious seduction of the Sinsar Dubh.

Take me, free me, be invincible, save the world.

Oh, the siren song of power. Even I who care nothing for power am not immune.

I do not believe it was ever quiet down there. Not for a moment!

I do not believe any Grand Mistress was ever spared.

Remarkable we kept it hidden so long!

He came to me that first night the Unseelie king imprisoned him beneath our home. I slept, and while I was vulnerable, he came to me in my dreams. He has come to me each night since.

I tried sleeping pills. They only drugged me, rendering me more vulnerable to the pleasures of temptation.

He shows himself to me, in all his glory. He shows me how much more beautiful Cruce is and always was. V’lane was a pale imitation of the real thing. Cruce is black and white and brilliant and hard and strong and perfect. He wraps velvet wings around me and makes me feel things I’ve never imagined.