The contrary bitch didn't.
He— who'd never before suffered the passage of time— now felt it acutely, as it stretched too long.
"Damn it, Aoibheal, fix me!" he thundered, lunging to his feet. "Give me back my powers! Make me immortal again!"
Nothing. Time spun out.
"A taste," he assured himself. "She's just giving me a taste of this, to teach me a lesson."
Any moment now she would appear. She would rebuke him. She would subject him to a scathing account of his many transgressions. He would nod, promise never to do it again, and all would be made right. Just like the thousands of other times he'd disobeyed or angered her.
An hour later nothing was right.
Two hours later and Chloe Zanders was gone, leaving him alone in the silent, dusty tombs. He almost missed her wailing. Almost.
Thirty-six hours later and his body was hungry, thirsty, and— a thing nearly incomprehensible to him— tired. The Tuatha Dé did not sleep. His mind, customarily razor-sharp and lightning fast, was getting muddled, sluggish, shutting down without his consent.
Unacceptable. He'd be damned if any part of him was doing a single thing without his consent. Not his mind. Not his body. It never had and never would. A Tuatha Dé was always in control. Always.
His last thought before unconsciousness claimed him was that he was bloody well certain he'd rather be anything else: stuck inside a mountain for a few hundred years, turned into a slimy, three-headed sea beast, forced to play the court fool again for a century or two.
Anything but... so... disgustingly... pathetically... uncontrollably... hum—
Cincinnati, Ohio
Several months later ...
1
Summer. Gabrielle O'Callaghan brooded— always her favorite season— had absolutely sucked this year.
Unlocking her car, she got in and slipped off her sunglasses. Shrugging out of her suit jacket, she nudged off her heels and took slow, deep breaths. She sat collecting herself for a few moments, then tugged free the clip restraining her hair and massaged her scalp.
She was getting the start of a killer headache. And her hands were still shaking. She'd nearly betrayed herself to the Fae.
She couldn't believe she'd been so stupid, but, God, there were just too many of them this summer! She hadn't spotted a fairy in Cincinnati for years, but now, for some bizarre reason, there were oodles of them.
Like Cincinnati was some kind of great place to hang out— could a city be more boring? Whatever their unfathomable reason for choosing the Tri-State, they'd appeared in droves in early June, and had been ruining her summer ever since.
And pretending she didn't see them never got any easier. With their perfect bodies, gold-velvet skin, and shimmering iridescent eyes, they were a little hard to miss. Drop-dead gorgeous, impossibly seductive, dripping pure power, the males were a walking temptation for a girl to—
Brusquely she shook her head to abort that treacherous thought. She'd survived this long and was darned if she was going to slip up and get caught by one of the erotic— exotic, she corrected herself impatiently— creatures.
But sometimes it was so hard not to look at them. And doubly difficult not to react. Especially when one caught her off guard like the last one had.
She'd been having lunch with Marian Temple, senior partner at the law firm of Temple, Turley and Tucker, at a posh downtown restaurant; a very critical lunch, during which she'd been interviewing for a postgraduate position.
A soon-to-be-third-year law student, Gabby was serving a summer internship with Little & Staller, a local firm of personal injury attorneys. It had taken her all of two days on the job to realize she was not cut out for representing pushy, med-bill-inflating plaintiffs who were firmly convinced their soft-tissue injuries were worth at least a million dollars per ache.
At the opposite end of the legal spectrum was Temple, Turley and Tucker. The most prestigious firm in the city, it catered to only the most desirable clients, specializing in business law and estate planning. What carefully selected criminal cases they chose to represent were renowned, precedent-setting ones. Ones that made a difference in the world, protecting fundamental rights and addressing intolerable injustices. And those were the cases she hungered to get her hands on. Even if she had to slave away for years, doing research and fetching coffee to get to them.
She'd been stressed all week, anticipating the interview, knowing that TT&T hired only the cream of the crop. Knowing she was competing against dozens of her classmates, not to mention dozens more from law-schools around the country, in a cutthroat bid for a single opening. Knowing Marian Temple had a reputation for demanding nothing less than high-gloss sophistication and professional perfection.