He lifted the staff and pointed at me. The envelope of essence on it shimmered, and Teutonic runes blazed whitely along its length. An arc of yellow essence hissed through the air and hit my ledge. It jerked away from the wall, sliding off its support rods with an ear-piercing whine. It bent under my weight. I rolled to my stomach and clutched at whatever exposed beams I could reach. The wall began to slump like wet clay. The building shook violently, and the whole front of it fell into the street. I slid to the edge, my feet swinging out into the open space. The concrete beneath me became pliant and malleable. It welled between my fingers, locking my hands in place. Something hit me in the back, thrusting my face against the remains of the floor. The air vibrated with so much essence, my vision blurred. The ledge sagged, dropping like soft wax. I dangled in the air as the last connection to the wall stretched thinner and thinner. The concrete became a thing alive, a viscous flow that filled my mouth and my nose. It oozed around me like wet clay. I felt one final wrenching jolt as my weight finally pulled the ledge free.

I fell. Smoke and flame swirled around me as I plummeted. I tumbled four stories through the remains of the building. Just before I hit the ground, I heard a scream.

16

I could hear the soft sound of a slack tide on the shore, and below that, the incessant pounding of my head. My body felt like deadweight. With an effort, I dragged my eyelids open and closed them immediately against the light. I tried again more slowly. My eyes burned and itched as I stared at a whitewashed, pitted cement wall. I wasn’t outside. The air smelled of dry stone and bacon. Someone rustled papers nearby. Closing my eyes, I rolled onto my back. I heard the sound of newspaper being folded and dropped. I didn’t move as I sensed a dwarf move toward me.

“I know you’re awake. You snore on your back, you know. I’ve been rolling you over for hours.” The voice sounded muffled. I opened my eyes. Banjo stood over me—well, barely—his thick arms crossed over his chest. He wore his characteristic black hoodie with the yellow bandana.

“You do wash those clothes, don’t you?” I asked.

He snorted. “I smell better than you do.” He turned and stepped out a door on the other side of the room. I sniffed. He had a point.

I curled up into a sitting position, every muscle in my body protesting with ache. The saliva in my mouth felt thick and pasty. Something shifted in my throat, and I coughed. Something grainy came up. I spat out what looked like sand.

Wrapped in a tangled sheet, I was sitting on a wide couch. My clothes, obviously laundered, hung neatly over the back of a chair next to me. My torso was covered with streaks of black and gray grit. I brought my hand to my chin and mouth, rubbed a dry film I found there. I had apparently been puking up dust. The large square room had no windows, a brightly lit space laid out for entertainment. Against the far wall, a large-screen TV played one of those mood DVDs of a long stretch of southern beach, all soft white sand and glittering ocean. Two leather recliners faced the TV, one huge, the other normal size. A pool table took up space on the other end of the room. A very expensive stereo system was racked on the wall next to the door. The oversize chairs made it clear enough what lived there, and my ability sensed an essence that confirmed the who. How the hell I fell to my death and landed in Moke’s living room was probably an interesting tale.

Banjo returned with a tray and placed it on the coffee table. A water pitcher, two glasses—one with water, one with something foul—a bowl of what smelled like chicken soup and a chocolate bar. “Drink the water first,” he said. I didn’t need an invitation. I felt desiccated. Banjo walked over to the normal-size recliner, picked up a newspaper from the floor, sat down, and leaned back. After a moment, he pulled out a pair of reading glasses. I drank the water, watching him ignore me as he read the paper. I could see the date, so unless he was behind on the news, I had fallen to my death the night before. I refilled the glass, drank it down, and refilled it. The room-temperature water tasted like the best damned thing I ever had.

I felt Moke before I saw him. He came into the room wearing the largest pair of jeans I had ever seen, a tailored button-down shirt, and an expensive cardigan sweater. His hair was washed and combed. He was still troll-ugly.

“I’m either hallucinating or in some bizarre version of hell,” I said. Moke smiled, his yellow teeth somehow not as offensive when he was cleaned up. “Naw, it’s just our cave.”

“If this is a cave, it’s the nicest one you’ve ever had, Moke,” Banjo said without looking up. A deep laugh chortled up from Moke. “Heh, he gets to complaining about anything. He hates to stay under the bridge. Too cold, too cold, he says.”

He stood over me, the smile still on his lips. Sitting naked except for the sheet, my head pounding like a drum set, I felt a little vulnerable. I stared up at him and sipped more water. He reached his massive hands out and cupped my head completely. I didn’t move. I felt a short pulse of essence, an odd shifting in my head, followed by a loud pop. A trickle of sand poured out of my ears, and the sounds in the room became clearer.

Moke brushed his hands together and sat down. “How ya feel?”

“Like I fell four stories on my head.”

He nodded. “You’re fine. I worked the stone. Banjo, he gave the timing of it, he did. A good job that.”

The dwarf looked at me over the tops of his glass, smiled, and went back to reading.

“I thought C-Note was melting the stone to kill me,” I said.

“Nah. He wanted the wood maid. Don’t know why. Skinny little thing, not much meat.” He gestured to the foul-smelling glass. “Drink that now. Ya need to drink.”

I picked it up. “What is it?”

Moke rumbled a laugh. “A little this, a little that. Clean the good earth from yer gut.”

“And how did the earth get into me?”

“Like I says, I worked the stone. Made ya a nice slurry to slow ya down, keep ya from crackin’ yer head. Then I wrapped ya in earth and pulled ya down below. Spelled earth gets in all nooks and crannies. Ya gonna die if ya don’t drink that.”

“Maybe I should go to Avalon Memorial.”

Moke shrugged and laughed again. “Ya could. They never get the sulfur right. Burn ya gut, they will. Burn for years.”

I looked at the yellow-tinged liquid. If Moke were going to kill me, he would have by now. I took a deep breath and downed it. It felt hot going down, but not burning. I drank more water.

“Why did you save me?”

Moke grinned wider. “Banjo sees many times, many days to come. The ones ya die, not so good for me.”

I looked over at the dwarf. Now I understood the sharp pains I had at Carnage. “He was scrying.”

Moke smiled. “Banjo best far-seer scryer ya ever meet, I says. He picked time. I grabbed ya.”

My chest tightened. He said building collapse. “How many died?’

Moke shrugged, a great shifting of the hunch on his back. “No one died that I know. Lots hurt, though. Yer gun cop friend screamed his head off that the building was on fire. Banjo started a fight, too, and everyone run like crazy. Stupid TruKnights. It was kinda funny to watch, though.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. You take your chances in the Tangle, but the building would still be standing if I hadn’t gone in. I looked at Banjo. “Thank you. Sorry I thought you were a traitor.”

He didn’t look up. “Cops aren’t the only ones who work undercover, you know.”

I pulled the sheet up around me and slid back against the wall surveying the room. Moke watched me. He cocked his head at the TV. “Pretty, no? The night is beauty, but light is, too. I like TV. Better life here.”

I smiled. I bet he liked game shows. “You were right, Moke. C-Note’s trouble.”

Moke nodded. “C-Note thinks yer dead now. He’s not very good troll. Didn’t even know I was there.”

“I need to get out of here,” I said.

Moke stood. “Give it an hour. The bathroom’s right out that door. Ya can take a bath if you wanna. Banjo don’t like smells, so’s he keeps sweet stuff in there.” He turned to Banjo. “I’m gonna go up and sleep, ’kay?”

“Do not bring any cats back.” Banjo looked at him sternly.

Moke laughed again. “I said ya could cook them next time.”

He went to the door. “Moke?” He turned. “I’m sorry about Croda.”

A wistful expression came over his face, his long, twisted nose almost quivering. “I knowed Croda a long time. She was a fine-looking woman, that one. Ya know, us trolls and ogres and giants are all the same. People of the Berg. We’s not like those crazy elveses and flittery kinds. The bones of the earth are all one. Croda was a strong woman.” He sighed and pounded his chest with a nod. “I still feel her strength. Her heart’s gone, but she died brave.” He strode away.

“Wipe your feet when you come back,” Banjo yelled. He settled back against the recliner and focused on his newspaper again, a pen poised in his hand. “What’s a seven-letter word for ‘mask’?”

The potion took that moment to demonstrate its effect. I ran for the bathroom. After a half hour, I could see why Moke recommended waiting. I finally showered, the water sluicing trails of grime off me and onto the glass tile floor. Reaching up to turn the shower faucet off made me smile at the strangeness of standing in an oversize shower room. When I dressed, I went back into the living room to find Banjo asleep in front of the TV.

I shook him. “Sorry, got to go.”

He frowned and shifted himself out of the recliner. He led me past the bathroom where a long hall ran on for several dozen feet with a series of closed doors. I could smell Moke more strongly. Banjo didn’t go any farther than the second door, which led to a stark utility tunnel.

“So, what likely potential future did you see me in?” I asked to the back and top of his head. He didn’t turn. “I get paid good money for answers like that.”

“But it’s good, right?”

He didn’t answer right away. We turned a corner and began ascending a flight of stone stairs. Every so often another hallway would branch off, or the stairs would split in different directions. “I wasn’t looking for your future. Moke asked me to do a little looky at C-Note. All I know is, with you dead, business didn’t look good for us. With you not dead, it looked fifty-fifty.”

Moke dealt drugs. He made money on other people’s needs, sure, but that didn’t always mean the same thing as trading on addictions. Whatever his dietary habits or his line of work, I wasn’t going to complain that keeping me alive kept him in business. I was willing to cut him some slack. This time, at least. The great oxymoron of scrying is its unpredictability. Dwarves were good at it, though druids would debate that. Seeing into the future had complications and ramifications. You never see exactly whatwill happen, but whatcould happen, based on certain circumstances. The most you could do with a particular vision was to make a choice to try to set it in motion. But the moment you made that choice, new permutations arose that did not necessarily lead where you’d hoped. For that reason, it was nearly impossible for the scryer to see his or her own future. “What did you see?”

He shrugged over his shoulder. “It wasn’t about you. I only figured out you were the wild card at Carnage by what was going on around you. There was something odd about you in the visions. They slipped around you like they didn’t know you were there. Never saw anything like that.”

That gave me a cold feeling. Several months earlier, Briallen had done a scry and failed to see anything. A disaster almost occurred. Whatever was dancing around in my head liked to keep its secrets when it came to me and the future.

Banjo stopped on a wide landing and pointed up another long flight of stairs, dimly lit. “This is as far as I’m going. I have to start dinner; otherwise, he’s going to eat something that’s bad for him. Up there, through the door, and you’re out. It closes behind you. Make sure you’re on the other side when it does,

’cause I’m only priming it for one opening, and if I have to come let you out again, I ain’t gonna be happy.”

I nodded. Angry dwarves are almost as bad as angry trolls. “Thanks. I don’t plan on hanging around.”

He tapped his forehead and bowed. “Nice working with you.”

I went up, and he went down. At the top of the flight, I came to a standard wooden door that opened into a small vestibule. I could feel a warding spell snap into place as soon as the door closed behind me. I opened another door opposite the first and found myself standing under a flight of brownstone stairs, daylight streaming in from the sides. I stepped out from under the steps onto the sidewalk in front of a boarded-up building.

A prickling sensation swept over me. I held up my hand to see fine swirls of earth-toned particles radiating essence. I rubbed the back of my hand, feeling a resistance layered over the skin. I allowed my sensing abilities to open to check it out. I didn’t have much experience with stonework, but I recognized silica and calcium embedded into my hands. I pushed my body essence at it, and the layer moved. I pushed harder, and a fine layer of dust rippled up on my hands. Moke’s spell had wrapped me in stone at Carnage, and I could see how it worked now by attracting stone particles to bond with my own essence.

I recognized Fargo Street, just south of the Tangle. It wasn’t a long walk from my apartment. As I started up the street, Joe appeared so close to my face with his sword drawn that I jumped. His fierce look quickly turned to relief. “Where the hell were you?” he asked.

“I went underground. Literally.”

He narrowed his eyes and hovered in close. “Are you okay? You’ve got troll essence all over you.”

I nodded. “It’s a long story.”

He looked up and down the street like he expected a horde of Visigoths to charge at him. Seeing none, he sheathed the sword.

Where are you?Burst into my mind so sharply I stumbled. “Tell Meryl I’m fine, Joe. Is she okay?”

He paused a moment. “She says you owe her a new pair of Doc Martens.”

I smiled. Whether she realized it or not, I could tell she was concerned enough to be upset. “Tell her I said ‘deal.’ Where did you go last night, Joe?”

Joe looped and dipped around me as I walked. “I couldn’t get in. They had awesome security on that place. Tell me what happened.”

He circled around me as I gave him the rundown, peering at passersby with suspicion. His head whipped around to face me as I got to the end of the story. “You took a shower in a troll’s bathroom?”

“Uh, Joe, did you miss what I said? I met a drys, almost died, and found out C-Note is going to attack the Guild.”

He nodded. “No, I heard that. How bad did it smell?”

“What?”

“The bathroom.”

I decided not to argue. “Actually, it didn’t. It was very clean.”

He nodded in puzzled consideration. “Really. I wouldn’t’ve thought. Were there dead things?”

We turned onto D Street and made for Summer. “Not obvious, though I did smell something not very fresh as I was leaving.”

Murdock cruised up on the left and stopped. I cocked an eyebrow at Joe. “Just how many people did you do a sending to?”

He smiled. “Just two. We thought you were dead, you know. Meryl saw you fall before the whole building went down. That woman should go into demolition. You should have seen her tear into the place looking for you.”

I had a recollection of someone screaming when I fell. “She did?”

He nodded. “I had to force her to leave. I couldn’t see you at all. I thought you were dead, but she didn’t.”

I opened the car door and tossed a paperback novel and some newspapers off the passenger seat and sat down next to Murdock. Joe fluttered into the backseat and began rummaging through the mess. “Hi,”

I said.

Murdock pulled away from the curb. “So you’re not dead,” he said.

“You either.”

He smirked. “I run fast.”

I smirked back. “I fall slow. What happened to you?”

“I ran to get Meryl, but we couldn’t get back up because the whole back of the building was in flames. Then it started falling apart.”

“Your essence got pretty strong in there,” I said.

He turned onto Summer Street. “I don’t feel any different.”

“Murdock, think about the other night at Yggy’s. Didn’t you notice how fast you were moving? Hell, you laid out an elf with one punch.”

He pursed his lips. “I guess I did. I still don’t feel any different.”

He might not feel anything, but I did. I had met very few fey whose essence oscillated in strength like Murdock’s did. It cycled from slightly elevated human normal to wildly strong to, like now, somewhere in the middle. “What’s themidach say?”

“Nothing. Meryl insisted I get checked out this morning. I was at AvMem when Joe called me. Where are we going?”

I considered a moment. “The Guildhouse. I need to talk to Keeva.”

Murdock goosed the accelerator. “What happened after I took off?”

“He met a drys, almost died, and learned C-Note’s evil plans,” Joe’s voice came from somewhere under a pile of papers.

“Oh, be quiet,” I said.

He snickered. “I told you I was paying attention.”

I gave Murdock a few more details than Joe had. A curious look came over his face. “Explain the drys.”

“It’s like I said last night. They’re legends. The belief is that real entities are obligated to keep the flows of essence balanced. A drys is a keeper of the wood and is the source of Power that druids tap. When a druid asks for a blessing, he’s asking the drys.”

“A goddess,” he concluded.

I stole a look at him, but couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not. Murdock’s Roman Catholicism is one of the wonderful contradictions about our friendship. He is a believer who wants to understand the crazy pagans. “Not quite. More an extension of a goddess.The Goddess, if that’s where your belief lies.”

“Is that what you believe?”

I paused, not expecting the question. What did I believe? If he had asked me the day before, I would have talked a lot about energy and reason. I knew what I was supposed to believe as a druid, but my rational mind always resisted. Essence was just there. I could tap it like an energy source. Whether I believed it was the extension of some higher power seemed beside the point. And yet, standing in the Bosnemeton, in a grove of oak with my brothers, I did feel Something. Feeling the purity of essence that Hala generated when I had held her, I felt Something. I knew what I was supposed to believe, even wanted to believe it, but I still hovered on the edge of that precipice, suspicious of taking that leap of faith. Maybe that was the missing key to my problem. Maybe allowing the old beliefs to become real in my mind was the step I needed to take to heal the darkness in my head.

“Let’s just say I hope all of this has a reason,” I said finally.

He nodded. “Hope is the beginning of faith.”

I laughed. “I thought I was the one who just had a near-death experience.”

Murdock shrugged. “Trust me. When you have a building collapsing on your ass, you find time for faith.”

He leaned over and pulled a manila folder out of the glove compartment. “I had a busy day.”

I flipped the file open to a sheaf of notes with a photocopy of a store receipt for orange Nike running shoes. “You traced the Nikes?”

He nodded. “They were brand-new. I’d never seen them before, so I figured it might be easy to track them down. Newbury Street, of all places.”

I shook my head. A poor kid from the wrong side of Southie ends up dead while wearing shoes from the most expensive stretch of pavement in Boston.

“They were bought with a credit card, so I ran the number,” he said. I turned the page and froze. I looked at Murdock. “Is this a joke?”

He had a sly smile on his face. “You wanted a connection to Kruge. We just got another one.”

I held the credit card report, staring at it, still wondering if it were a joke. “Why would Keeva buy Dennis Farnsworth running shoes?”

Murdock pulled his chin in and looked at me from under his brow. “Well, don’t get your hopes up yet. We’ve had this kind of thing blow up in our faces before. No one at the store remembers who bought the shoes. I have someone running the surveillance tape. It could be a big fat coincidence.”

I knew Keeva well enough to know something was up. “Orange shoes are a coincidence? You know Keeva. She wouldn’t be caught dead with someone wearing orange running shoes.”

“It might explain why nothing’s happening with her investigation, though,” he said. I slouched in my seat. I was at a loss. Other than Guild work, I could not think of a single reason Keeva would be involved with Kruge. Eagan and Gerin put me onto macGoren, not her. But they clearly had their curiosities about her; otherwise, they would have asked her some direct questions about her new beau. As much as Keeva and I had our differences, I had a hard time picturing her in a murder plot. We made our way through downtown streets and turned toward Park Square. The Guildhouse sat like a fort under siege. Pedestrian traffic threaded through a narrow barricaded path, while concrete Jersey barriers restricted traffic in front to a single lane. Security agents flew overhead, running their random patterns, while brownie foot security patrolled the perimeter of the building. Murdock pulled over to let me out. Joe flew nonchalantly around me, pretending he wasn’t pulling bodyguard duty.

“You need to get the force on high alert,” I said.

He nodded. “It’s already done. You don’t have to go in there, Connor.”

“Yes, I do.”

“We know C-Note did the Farnsworth murder. I sent Keeva the report this morning. You’re done. Let the Guild handle the rest. If they convict, maybe the city court will hear the case, too.”

“The Guild is tangled in its own politics. They’re focused on the wrong thing, and I can’t sit back and watch it fall apart.”

“Why not?”

I shrugged. “Because shit happens no matter what. That doesn’t mean I have to let it. I’m not giving up no matter what Nigel Martin thinks.”

Murdock leaned back in his seat and smiled. “They made a mistake when they kicked you out.”

He eased the car back into traffic and drove off. I joined the crowd of people on the sidewalk, trying not to push anyone as I made my way toward the front of the Guildhouse. Joe remembered his innate shyness and hung on to the collar of my jacket. He hadn’t latched on to me like that since I was kid, only back then he was making sure I didn’t run off into traffic.

“Move along!” one of the brownie patrols ordered as I stepped around the barricade. I flashed him my Guild badge, looking worn from wear. He examined it suspiciously before stepping back and letting me through.

I felt a tug at my neck. “Ow!” said Joe.

He hovered a few feet behind me. His eyes twitched in all directions, his hands spread with a slight glow.

“What’s wrong, Joe?”

“Security barrier. It’s not letting me in. They’re doing something new.”

I opened myself to the barrier, felt its invisible presence. It had the feel of the Grove about it, but different, a modification I hadn’t seen before. Gerin’s work layered over the usual Guildhouse barrier. I could feel the difference, the way it would let certain people through and not others. Flits had a higher ratio of essence to their mass than other species. Given everyone’s fear that they would spy, they were usually the first species to be guarded against.

“Let him in,” I said to the patrol.

The brownie seemed about to object, so I held up my badge again to remind him who he was talking to. I cringed inwardly. In less than a week with a piece of laminated paper in my hand, I had managed to get very comfortable pulling rank. I felt a tingle as the brownie opened a small space for Joe. He flew in and clutched my collar again, looking back at the brownie with a tough face. When I pushed through the main doors, the central lobby appeared startlingly empty to me. The usual receptionists were gone, replaced by yet more brownie security. I had no problem inside getting through the checkpoint and took an elevator up. The Community Liaison floor hummed with activity. Up and down the halls, people either rushed in and out of offices or clustered in small groups. Dressed in their most formal attire, diplomatic envoys from both Seelie Court and the Teutonic Consortium kept pointedly apart, whispering among themselves while casting wary glances at each other. I turned the corner toward Keeva’s office, only to be stopped by two security guards.

One held up his hand. “Appointments only, sir.”

“I need to see Keeva macNeve,” I said.

“Director macNeve is busy, sir. Please make an appointment with the desk,” one of them said. The other let some essence trickle obviously into his hands until they glowed. He didn’t move, just stood in my path as a warning.

I held up my board meeting pass without speaking.

“I’m sorry, Director Grey. We have orders from the Guildmaster.”

“I don’t have time for this. I have important information she needs to hear now.”

I didn’t push forward. I had worked with these guys enough to know that would end with me knocked on my ass. Glow bees zipped back and forth above our heads. I didn’t have any on me. The guard held a hand palm up and gestured back the way I had come. “Please, sir.”

Joe flew up to the guard and poked his finger at the face-shield. “Let us through or I will peel that helmet off your head and shove it up…”

“Joe!” I said.

He looked at me. I pointedly tilted my head toward the glow bees, and his gaze followed. He looked back down to my face, somehow managing to make all his features look like flat lines of annoyance. “I am not a gl—”

I cut him off before the security guards could hear him. “Tell her you’ve breached the Guildhouse security, and if she doesn’t see me immediately, you will have every flit you know swarming the place in five minutes.”

He crossed his arms. “You better pick up the tab next time.”

That was a recipe for poverty. I smiled my best I’m-lying-through-my-teeth smile. “Promise.”

He blinked out. The guards didn’t flinch. Moments dragged by. I glanced behind me at the various courtiers. Most of them seemed happy for the distraction from whatever political games they were plotting. The first security guard cocked his head and stepped aside. “Director macNeve will see you now.”

I strode past him, just as Keeva sent me my own sending.This better be good. She practically threw it at me, it hit so hard. A swarm of glow bees hovered outside Keeva’s door, Joe in the midst of them. “She’s cranky,” he said.

I entered the office. Keeva was already dressed for the funeral in a green wool coat that matched her pants. She wore a black blouse intricately embroidered with apple blossoms. “You look lovely,” I said. She pointed at Joe. “Lives are at stake, Connor. I want to know how he breached security, and I want to know now.”

I twisted my head to see Joe. “Did you tell her that?”

Joe shook his head in exasperation and threw his hands in the air. “I’m just a glow bee. I say what I’m told.”

I faced Keeva. “He didn’t breach. I signed him in.”

She lifted a cup of tea and leaned back, sipping. “You have two minutes. Make them good.”

“A troll named C-Note is behind these attacks. He wants to take down the Guild. Good enough?”

Keeva arched an eyebrow. “You’ve been busy. What proof do you have?”

“A witness in protective custody and a ward stone recording. Murdock heard the threat to the Guild. C-Note controls the gangs with a compulsion drug called Float. It’s spreading beyond the Weird. I know it’s infected the druid Grove. It’s made from the essence of a drys.”

Her jaw dropped, and she laughed. “A drys? You expect me to believe that?”

“Murdock saw her.”

She pulled her lower lip in. “Connor, no one’s seen a drys in decades. Murdock is not credible on fey and, frankly, with your conspiracy theory habits, neither are you. The Guild is convinced the Consortium is behind this.”

“The Guild or Nigel?”

“Both.” She looked down at her desk, shifted her eyes to the computer monitor and back to me. I could practically feel her running scenarios in her head, trying to figure what she needed to do to get the job done while figuring out how to present herself in the best light. I’ve seen it before. It’s how she works.

“We have security at the funeral. Gerin’s shielding Forest Hills Cemetery for the ceremony. Nigel’s coordinating with Manus and the diplomatic envoys. I’m not worried about the funeral. I’m worried about the Weird. I’m trying to seal it down so no one can move in or out without my knowing about it.”

“I did.”

She glared at me. “Connor, bring me your proof, and maybe then I will contradict Gerin Cuthbern and Nigel Martin. Until then, I run things my way.”

I decided it was time to shake Keeva’s cage a little. “You haven’t made any progress in your Kruge investigation.”

She looked honestly startled. Looks aren’t everything. “What the hell are you talking about? I’ve been looking for Croda. You know trolls are difficult to trace.”

“Dennis had distinctive new running shoes on. Easy to trace. Your credit card bought a pair.”

She leaned over her desk toward me. “What are you talking about?”

I stared her down. “Ryan macGoren has known where Croda is from the night of the murder. You bought Dennis’s running shoes. I don’t think it’s me and Murdock with the credibility problem.”

She jumped to her feet and pointed at the door. “Out.”

I’d definitely struck a nerve, but it was time to go. I stood, but before I left, I gave her a last warning. “If the Guild is using Kruge’s murder to provoke a confrontation with the Consortium, I’ll expose you.”

She was angry enough now that a little fey light glowed in her eyes. She pointed at the door. “I said

‘out.’”

I moved to the hallway. “Keeva, if you don’t increase security, you won’t have to worry about finding a troll. One’s going to find you.”

17

The Guild had replaced my apartment door. The security agent remained posted outside at the end of the hall, though. While they had done a great job on the door, even fixing an old squeak, unfortunately they hadn’t brought a housekeeper with them. My place looked like a gang of elves and fairies had run amok. Which, of course, was exactly what had happened.

I pulled two bottles of Guinness out of the fridge, popped one, and left the other on the counter to warm. The bottled stuff is nowhere near as good as tap, but it’s better than the can. Or nothing. I slunk into my desk chair and called Meryl. She picked up on the first ring, and I smiled. Someone was worried. “I saw you buried by a pile a rubble.” The genuine concern in her voice felt oddly pleasurable.

“Believe it or not, Moke saved me. Are you okay?”

“Tired, but fine. What happened?”

I took a swig of beer and booted up the laptop. “Long story. I have to be at the funeral. Want to be my date?”

“Ooooo, a funeral. Sounds fun,” she said.

“The service starts at sunset. Can you drive?”

She sighed. “Fine.”

“Oh, and wear green. It’s the elven color for mourning.”

“Gee, thanks, I didn’t know that,” she said sarcastically. “Oh, and Grey?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not a date.” And she hung up.

Joe busied himself with cookies while I changed. I had very little to work with but stumbled on a dark green shirt I’d forgotten I owned. Even given the formality of an elven funeral, I wasn’t about to wear green pants. As I pulled on my boots, I could hear Joe laughing in my study.

“Now I get it,” he said, his voice oddly hollow.

“Get what?” I called back.

The Guild security helmet I had retrieved from Croda’s murder scene came floating into the room. Two bare feet dangled out of it. “How the Guild is keeping flits out lately. They’re letting in only essence they expect, not blocking what they don’t want.”

I stopped myself from commenting. That’s an old druid trick, a modification of the shield on a grove. Gerin and Nigel must have adapted it for the Guildhouse. As much as I’d trusted Joe, he had a tendency to talk before he thought, and who knows who would hear him. “Tricky,” I said. He circled around the living room, landed on the coffee table, and rolled the helmet off. “Not really. I can think of ten ways to get through now.”

Downstairs,Meryl sent, and I startled. When most people do a sending, a subtle warning happens in your head that one’s coming. The person you’re sending may be anywhere, so the sending itself tends to travel in a thin envelope of essence. The envelope is part of the searching and touches your mind moments before the actual message. Not Meryl’s. Her sendings are incredibly focused to the point where they find you and arrive instantaneously. It’s like someone jumping out of a closet and saying “boo!”

“Are you coming?” I asked Joe.

He swung his legs back and forth from the edge of the coffee table. “Maybe later. I’ve got some business.”

I smiled. “Be careful.” I’m sure Joe’s business entailed testing his new ideas at the Guildhouse. If there’s one thing a flit despises, it is being told to keep out.

I passed three security agents on my way out. I jumped in the immaculate passenger seat of Meryl’s Mini Cooper, reveling in the refreshing change of pace from Murdock’s car.

“We look like catalog models for the goth professional,” she said. She wore a body-hugging leather jumpsuit and knee-high leather combat boots with lots of heel and buckles. Not a bit of it was green. In fact, the only green about her was her hair. She slipped on a pair of fingerless calfskin gloves and put the car in gear.

“Myhair’s not dyed,” I said.

She flipped her hand through her hair. “Do you like it? I have it on good authority it was Alvud Kruge’s favorite shade.”

“It’s perfect. For you.” I smiled to keep it amusing.

She zipped around the block and coasted over the Old Northern Avenue bridge. “We’ve got a tail. Want me to lose them?”

I peered up through the structural beams of the bridge. Two security agents followed. “Nah. They’d be stupid not to know where we’re going. Can we make a pit stop?”

“Sure, I’ll keep the meter running,” she said.

“I need to go to Avalon Memorial.”

She looked askance at me. “Anything wrong?”

“No. Just need to visit a sick friend,” I said.

Rather than deal with the street restrictions in place downtown, Meryl scooted up on the highway to loop around to Storrow Drive along the river. “You know you have troll essence all over you?”

I nodded. “It’s a residual effect from Moke pulling me through stone. He said it has to clear through my system. Look at this.” I held up my left hand, letting the light pick up a tracery of faint patterns across the back. “That’s stone. I keep picking up ambient dust, and it bonds with my skin.”

Meryl glanced back and forth from the road to my hand. “Does it hurt?”

I shook my head. “No. It uses my body as an anchor, pulling stuff to me like a body shield. Can’t even feel it unless I focus on it. Now watch this.” I mentally visualized the essence coursing over my body, sensed the difference between my own essence and the ambient troll essence, felt for the bonded stone, and pushed. It separated from my skin and slid off my hand like fine dust.

“You’re getting my car dirty,” Meryl said.

I wiped my hand on my pants. “Sorry.”

She pulled up in front of Avalon Memorial. Guild security guards hovered in the air, with more brownie security on the street. They must have recognized Meryl because they let her park without a word.

“I shouldn’t be long,” I said.

“Don’t be. I only have one CD in the car,” she said.

I found macGoren lying on his side in his room surrounding by ward stone amplifiers. Two bowls of infusions sat at the end of the bed. My nose twitched on the betony and a hint of basil. MacGoren’s left wing fluttered with a rippled texture and a few jagged holes. Danann wings didn’t have the physical property of skin. They didn’t have true nerves for that matter, so pain registered very differently. Regardless, the damage looked painful. The ward stones generated a field that amplified macGoren’s own essence as well as the simply pure air essence that Danann fairies had a natural affinity to. The herbals soothed the spirit with a protective spell working against infection. MacGoren overall looked hardly worse for wear. He languished on the bed in his blue silk pajamas reading a magazine. When he saw me, he tossed aside the magazine and stretched onto his stomach.

“Ah, good. Company. Gillen Yor says I can’t have my cell phone because it will disrupt the wards. I think he’s just saying that to irritate me.”

“You look like you’re recovering well,” I said.

He smirked with amusement. “I’m just here because I’ll heal faster. I assume this isn’t a social call.”

“And why’s that?”

He grinned. “No flowers. No candy.”

“Why were you fighting a troll in the Tangle the night of Kruge’s murder?”

He gave me a long measured look. “You found the helmet.”

I nodded. “I found the helmet.”

MacGoren shrugged. “You know I wanted a piece of land Kruge owned. He didn’t want to sell. I thought I’d get on his good side by helping with the drug problem down there. A nightclub was the epicenter. It burned down last night as a matter of fact.”

“Yeah, I heard about it,” I said dryly.

MacGoren nodded. “This drug Float was the problem. I analyzed it and found druid essence. I brought it to Kruge.”

“For which he was extremely grateful,” I said.

MacGoren shrugged again. “Actually, he didn’t believe me. But he was worried if that were true, then Gerin Cuthbern would try to cover it up to protect the Grove. Then he was afraid if he told Manus ap Eagan, Eagan would think he was maneuvering against Cuthbern and use it against him politically. So, he asked me to help, figuring since both the Guildmaster and I are Danann, Manus naturally wouldn’t think anything suspicious of my motives.”

It was my turn to smirk. “Naturally.”

MacGoren ignored the dig. “Anyway, Kruge came up with the idea of recording the drug analysis and sending a sample to Manus via courier. I was supposed to meet the courier on Summer Street and take the evidence to the Guildhouse.”

A piece of the puzzle fell into place. Fairies, in general, were good weather workers. Some Dananns specialized in it. “He was supposed to meet you up on Summer Street. You pulled the weather trick to drive away any witnesses and give Dennis Farnsworth safe passage through three gang territories.”

MacGoren nodded. “Correct. When the courier didn’t show up, and Kruge didn’t answer my sendings, I went looking. I found Kruge. I don’t know how the troll found out, but that wasn’t part of the plan that I knew.”

I could see what Keeva found attractive about him. She liked a good schemer. MacGoren paused, and the superior tone finally left his voice. “Then I saw something incredible, Grey. I saw a troll, in broad daylight,flying . Scared the living hell out of me. He had the courier, so I went after him.”

“That was brave.”

The idea clearly surprised him. “Yes, I guess you could look at it that way. I didn’t find the ward stone at Kruge’s, so I figured the kid had it. I took the troll by surprise. I lost the helmet in the tussle but managed to get the kid. The troll chased me almost to Summer Street. I felt a compulsion to drop the boy. It was like I had no choice.”

“Why didn’t you tell someone?”

He shrugged again. “With Kruge dead, I didn’t have the evidence. If that troll could kill Alvud Kruge, he could kill me. I thought if I kept quiet, he would leave me alone. I didn’t see any percentage in coming forward. Didn’t seem to help in the end, though.”

I shook my head. “People died, and you didn’t see a percentage in coming forward?”

MacGoren frowned with a condescending look. “Please, Grey. Don’t be naïve. If it wasn’t this, it would have been something else.”

“Naïve?You helped start a gang war. Maybe worse now.”

He sighed as if bored. “It’s all the same, Grey. They’re all gangs. Xeno and elf thugs. The fey and humans. Seelie Court and the Consortium. They look for any excuse to play their games. I didn’t cause anything they wouldn’t have found a way to cause themselves.”

“And you make a buck in the process,” I said.

He nodded. “I always look for the percentage.”

I didn’t say anything. Despite what macGoren thought, I wasn’t naïve. I knew there were people like him, people who single-mindedly pursue a goal and damn the consequences. I knew them. I knew myself. In another life, I was well on the way down that road. I don’t know if I would have gone as far as macGoren. The fact that I didn’t know, couldn’t emphatically deny it, gave me a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“Keeva’s been looking for the troll that died. Why didn’t you tell her where she was?”

“Because I would have had a lot of things to explain that I wasn’t interested in explaining. Keeva’s good at what she does. She’ll find the troll.”

“I know she will,” I said.

“So, am I being charged with something?” he asked.

“I’ll have to think about it. I know you’re only talking because you know I’ll have a hard time finding something to stick. For now, I’ll keep thinking about it.”

A shrewd look came over him. “Hold it over my head, eh? A Guild director for less than a week, and already you’re playing games.”

I didn’t show how much he hit the target with that. “You could say that, macGoren. Remember one thing, though: I don’t play by anyone else’s rules.”

I strode out of the room before he had a chance to respond. As I walked out of the hospital, I felt a dull depression settle over me. Everything that had happened in the past few days could have been avoided if macGoren had just opened his mouth. But he hadn’t. Why bother when the only people hurt were the outcast and the shunned? Why bother when it would just make more headlines supporting his development project? Turf, land, territory. The hood. Whatever you called, Eorla Kruge was right. It was all about who had what piece of it and how they used it. It was always about control and power and greed.

I opened the passenger door to Meryl’s Mini and let out a roar of rock music. She lowered the volume as I dropped into the seat.

I could tell by the look on her face that Meryl knew I wasn’t happy. “Everything all right?”

“Yeah, I just confirmed Ryan macGoren is an ass.”

She laughed as she started up the car. “I could have told you that, ya big silly.”

I didn’t say anything as we pulled back onto the riverside drive. Bone white trees stood guard over the thin strip of park. It was beautiful and empty. I stared and watched it go by.

“So you really met a drys?” Meryl asked, nudging me out of my brooding.

“Yeah, I did,” I said. “She was…I don’t know. Beautiful seems like such a lame word. I could feel the purity of essence in her. It was like the stories they told us when we were kids. She’s what we strive to be, Meryl.”

She nodded. “I’ve met a couple a long time ago. I don’t think we can ever be that. They’re more than human, Grey. We’re just flawed vessels for essence. Theyare essence.”

“That’s why I’m going to the funeral. C-Note’s tampering with essence on a fundamental level. He’s torturing that drys. If he shows up, we have to get that staff away from him.”

She sighed. “He said ‘we.’”

A small flush of anger swept over me. “You have a problem with that?”

She shrugged and cut someone off. “No. You just assume I’m jumping on this bandwagon.”

Sometimes Meryl’s flipness grated on me. “Is anything important to you?”

She frowned. “You know, when people say that, what they really mean is why isn’t what’s important to me important to you? Yeah, Grey, things are important to me. I hate to break it to you, but I get to decide what those things are.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She cut the wheel hard to make the off-ramp. “Sure it is. Pick me up here. Get me this. Hide this chick. Help me get out of here. I live by the moon, Grey. That doesn’t make me your satellite.”

I clenched my jaw and didn’t respond. A drys was the female aspect of the oak. As a druidess, she should be the one fired up over what C-Note had done even more than I was. “It’s adrys , Meryl.”

“I know that. That’s why I’m driving to the cemetery. But it’s my choice, Grey, not yours. I decide for myself whether I help or not. You don’t get to judge that. You haven’t earned it.”

I dropped my head back and closed my eyes. Counted to ten. Shooed arrogant and controlling personality traits back into the closet. Smiled. “You’re right. I did it again. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” she said, and pulled into a line of cars waiting to get into the cemetery. I gave her a big-eyed smile. “That was our first fight.”

She rolled her eyes. “No. Our first fight was about five years ago when you forgot to do some research and tried to cover your ass by telling people I lost the request form.”

I patted her hand on the stick shift. “No. I meant as a couple.”

She turned and looked at me, keeping her face completely blank. “If you don’t move your hand, I will gnaw my own off at the wrist.”

I did move it. “You will succumb to my charms eventually.”

She smirked. “Let me know when you have some.”

“I will never have the last word, will I?”

She parked the car and smiled. “Not my style.”

18

The street swarmed with activity. A high-profile fey dying, never mind murdered, simply did not happen often. Everyone from street kids to ranking politicos roamed about, checking out the crowd and trying to get in the background of the live-TV camera shots. Meryl and I skirted around the rubberneckers and walked up the driveway to the cemetery.

Forest Hills Cemetery covers almost three hundred acres in the city of Boston. If there’s one thing the old Brahmins did well, it was die in style. Fine landscaping, rolling hills, public art, and even a lake with an island. The trust that ran the place even encouraged the public to use the grounds as long as the graves were respected. I liked the attitude of life and death coexisting.

We went through the first security checkpoint at the main gate. I didn’t know what Keeva’s criteria were for access, but Guild members and guests were all allowed through with no questions. Once inside, the volume of curiosity seekers went down considerably. At a turn off the main path, the Boston P.D. had its own checkpoint for humans. Murdock strolled out from behind a van.

“I have some seats for us,” he said as he fell into step with us.

“You’re not on duty?” I asked.

He smiled. “I’m always on duty. They’re only letting bodyguards into the main site. I said I was yours.”

“Who’s going to protect you from him?” Meryl asked.

He grinned at her. “I thought that’s why you came.”

“Don’t go there,” I said. Meryl jabbed me in the side.

He checked his watch. “Almost dark. The ceremony’s going to start soon.”

We walked briskly along the tidy lanes as dusk fell. Monuments stared at us with solemn gravity, growing luminous in the fading light. The essence of a cemetery is a strange thing. It’s tinged with melancholy, of course, but also an unsettling amount of want and even rage. Not everyone goes gentle into the good night, and they leave a resonance behind them. I couldn’t sense individual essence like Joe apparently did. It’s more like a stew of emotion, each new voice adding to it, changing it, inflecting it. Ultimately, getting lost in it. Because that’s how we end. Lost in the mix. The mix ramped up as we came around a curve in the path and walked through an essence barrier. Murdock didn’t feel it. From our brief passing, I could tell it had a sensory ability, registering the essence of everyone who passed through. Whoever was monitoring the shield must have been puzzled by a high-powered druidess, a human normal who felt fey, and a druid who reeked of troll traveling together. The path rose between two oaks. With all the members of the Grove wandering through, the trees gave off a low hum, their essence glowing with the Power of the wood. I looked up at a majestic white oak, its many limbs branching and tangling, its thick roots gnarling into the ground, and thought of Hala, trapped in the last living bit of a tree, confined to nothing more than a sliver of a memory. The crowd thickened over the rise. All manner of fey had come to pay homage to Kruge, a fitting final tribute to a man who had advocated unity. If anything summed up the difference between Seelie Court and the Teutonic Consortium, their approach to death did. Fairies dimmed their wings and walked, eyes downcast, as if acknowledging that even in their immortality, death was always hovering in the shadows. The elves, though, they strode forward, heads up, singing dirges, honoring life and defying death. Brownies and dwarves were not as dramatic as their more powerful cousins, but brought their own drama to the party.

A surprising assortment of solitary fey haunted the edges the crowd. Usually they avoid being noticed, fearing the domination games that go on among them. In the gathering shadows beneath the trees, I could see them furtively moving, their limbs glistening silver or red or green. Most solitaries make people uncomfortable. To human eyes, they resemble the stuff of nightmares, long-snouted faces and horned heads, hairy coats instead of skin or oddly jointed arms and legs that spoke of birds or lizards. Some wore smiles that sent chills and others held such sadness that no comfort could touch. Their eyes glittered in the dark, streaks of red and yellow as they moved among the graves, clawed fingers leaving white lines on tombstones.

Human normals make the mistake of thinking all solitaries are Unseelie, standing in opposition to High Queen Maeve. It’s more complicated than just that. The Unseelie Court exists, but it shifted alliances more often than the weather, with solitaries moving in and out as the wind blew. Only when they all stood together did they form a true Court, and when they did, wars broke out. Of all the fey, they enjoyed Convergence most, if only because Seelie and the Consortium were too involved with each other to bother them. Kruge’s unity message had to have rung deeply with them. Torches lined the final path to the burial site, their flames edged in white and blue. Not ordinary fire, but druid-fire. They enhanced the ambient light and gave off a comforting heat as night fell, no small feat on a cool October evening.

People stood to the sides of the lane watching us pass with odd resentment. We shuffled behind others as one by one they passed two druids, one on each side of the path. Beyond them, I sensed an enormous shield barrier, extending up and to either side. Murdock passed through without stopping. As Meryl followed, one of the druids held up a hand. “The High Druid mandates the ladies of the Grove join a reinforcement circle outside theairbe druad .”

Meryl peered at the man’s hand as if it were a dead bird and not one she wanted. She looked back at the druid’s face. “Tell Gerin that Meryl Dian said she’s no lady.”

His mouth dropped in surprise, as she swept by him. “Oh. It let her through. I guess that’s okay then,”

he said.

He eyed me suspiciously as I approached and held up his hand. “I’m sorry. There’s something not right about you.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Meryl called back.

I ignored her and took out my Guild badge. He held it for a moment, testing the essence on it, then looked at me. “You feel right, but have you had any encounters with trolls lately? We’re supposed to look for troll essence.”

“Yeah, I did. It’s hard to get the smell off.”

He nodded sagely. “Yes, I’ve heard that.” He handed the badge back. “Don’t be surprised if someone else gives you trouble.”

“I never am,” I said.

The mass in my head spasmed as I moved through the barrier. Essence shields don’t usually bother my head. They either let me in or they don’t. Curious, I opened my sensing ability and found a web of essence forming an intricate net. From the inside, I could see that it formed an enormous dome laced with druid essence, a sparkling white of lines against the deepening violet sky. It was the largest hedge I’d ever seen.

“That thing has to be covering a hundred acres,” I said.

Meryl, of course, could see it, too. “It’s huge. Gerin must have dozens of people powering it.”

Murdock looked up. “I don’t see it. We were told it was like the one druids use on the Grove. No one can get in without permission.”

Meryl caught my eye. “Yeah, good luck with that.”

We came to a wide shallow bowl ringed with ancient oak trees. Among them, fire pits had been dug and filled with more druid-fire. Down in the center of the clearing, an earthen ramp led into a freshly dug pit. Chairs fanned out like an amphitheater around the grave, most already filled with Consortium and Seelie Court representatives. A small section reserved for state and local human politicians sat near the edge of the field. Murdock led us to seats in an upper row that gave a view of the proceedings. Down near the pit, Keeva paced. She kept tapping the side of her head in a way that told me she was wearing an earpiece. I could imagine she was sending just as much as listening to the earpiece. She probably had a multitasking nightmare on her hands. Not far from her, Gerin Cuthbern stood in a cluster of druids, but his eyes were more interested in the gathering crowd than anyone near him.

“Anyone see Nigel?” I asked.

“He’s at the Guildhouse. He and Gerin were concerned that the entire Guild leadership in one place was a security risk.” How Murdock manages to find out these details, I’ll never know. Farther along the section of seats where Gerin stood, I could see several high-level Guild administrators, but not the Guildmaster. “What about Manus?”

Murdock came through again. “Too ill to travel. Gerin’s going to do the tribute for the Guild.”

Among the human normals, ranking politicians ranged around the state governor and Boston’s mayor like moths. A few men who were obviously police out of uniform, but not many. “Why so few Boston P.D.?”

“Will you relax? I’ve seen the plans. This place is locked down tight.” Murdock was a helluva lot more confident than I was.

I cocked an eyebrow at him. “What could possibly go wrong, right?”

He smiled and shook his head.

At full dark, music began playing, a mournful dirge filtering down from beyond the druid-fires, Celtic pipes weaving in and out of the sad strings of dulcimers. People took their seats to watch the royal dignitaries from both sides of the fey world process in a wave of green mourning finery. High Queen Maeve’s envoy stepped delicately along the main aisle, a ridiculous fop wearing an ornate brocade tunic over green leathers, his hair and wings fluttering around him like a peacock fan. His melodramatic expression of sorrow was priceless. A long line of courtiers followed him, intently aware of their spectators, as they moved with mincing steps behind the envoy. Next to the envoy, the Elven King’s ambassadors strode, a male and a female, both dressed in battle armor painted green. They trooped in formation ahead of a company of archers and infantry. The male ambassador held a broken spear, while the woman walked with an unstrung bow and empty quiver. The two contingents separated as they reached the center of the clearing, winding their way into seats that faced each other across the open grave.

Horns blew and everyone stood. A solemn drumroll began as four elves in dark green livery pulled a cart along the ridge of the bowl. They turned onto the earthen ramp and eased the cart down into the pit. As they came even with us, I could see Kruge’s remains, a linen-wrapped form wearing ceremonial battle armor. Someone had had the dubious honor of putting his body back together. His arms were crossed on his chest, and a ceremonial sword lay grasped in his hands, blade down. The cart bristled with weapons, an accumulation of years, part of the ritual burial of a warrior. The liverymen marched out of the pit and stationed themselves at the top of the ramp. More attendants appeared and placed a small wooden bench at the top of the pit ramp.

Eorla Kruge approached from the ridge, resplendent in her widow’s weeds, a long tunic coat embedded with small gems that flickered in the light of the druid-fire. She wore a small diadem of gold and a long sheer veil draped over her head, a gossamer net of faint green that trailed across the ground behind her. In her hands, she held another diadem, plain and large. With careful steps she entered the pit, placed the large diadem on Kruge’s chest. She removed one of her rings and tucked it into his hands. Everyone watched respectfully as she stood solemnly, her hands on his in final good-bye. She returned up the ramp. When she reached the wooden bench, she turned to face the grave and sat. The drumroll stopped. A woman cloaked in dark blue stepped up to the opposite side of the pit from Eorla. With no introduction, she began to sing the Teutonic death ritual. Sitting between Murdock and me, Meryl groaned. “Wake me when she’s done.”

I suppressed a laugh. Teutonic priestesses had put more than one person to sleep with their songs. True to form, this one launched into a mind-numbing aria on life in High Elven German. Meryl squirmed. As the priestess sang, servants brought a vat of mead before her, and she blessed it with her song. The servants ladled the drink and passed the cups into the crowd.

Murdock’s hand went to his ear. He leaned across Meryl. “Fighting at the outer perimeter. I have to go.”

As Murdock hustled his way out of the aisle, I watched security agents, both elf and fairy, reposition themselves along the ridge. Keeva leaned toward Gerin Cuthbern to speak to him. Gerin rose from his seat, bowed to Eorla, and walked up the ramp.

The ceremony continued uninterrupted. Word of the fighting outside must have filtered through the crowd because I could feel body shields activating around me. The calling of so much essence in such a confined area made my head ache. I could see it, my own body activating my sensing abilities instead of its almost useless body shield. Essence of all colors glowed around me like small lanterns of light. The mead reached the last row of seating and made its way toward us. Distracted by more security, I took the cup from my neighbor and began to sip.

Meryl’s hand came up suddenly and grabbed my arm. “Wait!”

I looked at her curiously, and she took the cup from my hand. She peered inside, consternation on her face as she swirled the dregs. She inhaled and blanched, her body shields coming up so quickly she shuddered.

“It’s Float,” she hissed under her breath.

As soon as she said it, I caught another wave of essence rolling over the gathering. It tickled into my nose, laden with the spell I had felt at Carnage. I tried to shake my head to clear it, but only felt dizzy. My vision blurred suddenly, then my sensing abilities went into overdrive. All around me, essence crystallized sharply in my vision, a disconcerting overlay of color outlining everything. I could see the spells working in the druid-fires, the glamours that people wore, their innate body essence marking them by strength and species. And marking everyone was a malevolent green essence that matched the glow coming from the vat of mead.

It was just like when I held the drys, her essence boosting my ability to its greatest potential, but twisted by the compulsion spell C-Note had put on it. As essence materialized more distinctly around me, I realized why.

“I can feel the drys. C-Note is here, Meryl.”

A collective gasp went up from the crowd. Heads that had been nodding with boredom shot to attention. At the top of the low ridge, C-Note leaned on his black staff. Keeva leaped to her feet before anyone else and moved into the aisle. Brownie and druid security materialized from the crowd and surrounded C-Note in moments. Eorla angrily rose from her seat as Consortium agents closed ranks around her.

“So much for security,” Meryl muttered.

C-Note raised his staff. “Look at you, facing each other across the corpse of unity. You speak to unity, but you still plot against each other. Even now, some among you seek revenge for age-old grievances.”

Surprised murmurs rippled through the audience as more people got to their feet. Keeva made her way up the ramp toward C-Note. He waved the staff, and she froze in place. Not a good sign. More people stood to watch the confrontation. The Teutonic ambassadors began to push their way up the ramp. Not to be outdone, the Seelie envoy led his own security closer.

“How the hell did he get through,” I muttered.

Around us, the druid-fires flickered and smoked. My head buzzed with surging essence. Keeva should have been backing the crowd out. Trolls are tough to move physically, but she didn’t even seem to be trying to break the spell on her. A few feet in front of her, the druids and brownies had an essence shield around C-Note, a nice piece of joined spell-working meant to hold him in place, presumably until the bigger guns showed up to cart him off.

C-Note was still talking, but the noise of the spectators drowned him out. Angry, rapt faces surged forward. The Guild security guards should have been down on the ground by now. They responded directly to Keeva via sendings, and she had to be calling them. Instead, they remained hovering along the periphery, white blazes of essence ringed above us. Something wasn’t right. I searched the crowd, but could see nothing other than people boosting their body shields. I paused as my eye slid over a trough of druid-fire near me. I could see the essence that powered it, but behind the normal flame, it seemed to be drawing essence from the trees around us instead of being powered by people. Anger swept over me. That wasn’t how you worked a Grove shield. You didn’t draw directly from the oak It was an insult to the spirits of the trees to use them for such a utilitarian purpose. My head ached as I watched lines of essence from the druid-fires crawl across the gravesite. So much essence was in the air, it actually fed into my ability, amplifying it beyond what I normally could sense. The dark mass in my head seemed to ripple in my mind, pushing the bands of Power away from it like it did when I tried to call essence on my own.

Color cascaded in my sight, tangles of light like a multi-colored ball of fraying yarn. I could see links had formed among all the druid-fires around the clearing. The lines entwined, forming a dense spiral of Power that began to funnel down toward Kruge’s grave. The spiral pulsed and grew as the heart essence of the oaks fed it. The druid-fires pulsed brighter as they fed more essence into the spiral. A huge pulse rolled along the lines, swirling along the spiral as it tightened into a nexus. Not at the grave. At C-Note’s feet. He planted the staff on its very center and a shimmering barrier flowed up to meet the pulse. It was a hedge spell. C-Note was sealing off the entire clearing.

I grabbed Meryl’s arm in alarm. This couldn’t be good. “Get everybody out! Get them to run! Do it now, Meryl!”

I had to give her credit. Having just slammed me for telling her what to do, Meryl responded with trust. Without hesitation, she shouted a spell that sent a burst of primal fear into the crowd. Terrified without knowing why, people who had been gathering around C-Note suddenly spun away and ran up the slope. The few who didn’t run, hardened their body shields in battle mode and reached for weapons. The pulse reached C-Note. He absorbed the energy into his staff and slammed it on the ground. Bolts of yellow fire shot out and enveloped the brownies and druids around him. In unison, they turned away from him and started firing essence into the crowd. Keeva sailed up into the night sky in a radiant halo of white fire, a look of ecstasy on her face.

As the exchange of fire heated up, I pulled Meryl behind a large burial monument. We could see the whole of the clearing below us as a confusion of people turned on each other with weapons and essence-fire.

The Seelie Court ambassador took a blast of druid-fire full in the chest. Blood sprayed from his back as he soared through the air with the force of the blow. Chairs scattered as his body tumbled roughly through them. When his body finally came to rest, his essence wavered and vanished. At the same moment, the Guild agents above began firing at the Consortium ambassadors. With a guttural moan, Meryl lurched forward, grabbing her waist. I sank to my knees as pain screamed through my head. Essence ricocheted around me, blinding my vision with red pain. I could feel myself losing consciousness, the pain increasing until I thought my mind would burst under the strain. Just when I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, I felt a cool static flow over me, blocking it. I opened my eyes with a relieved gasp, realizing Meryl held my arm, her body shield forming an envelope of protection around the both of us.

Meryl was breathing heavily. “The essence is tainted. I can’t touch it without his spell grabbing me.”

I lifted my head, shaking off the subsiding pain. I couldn’t believe that in the space of a few moments, fighting had broken out in all directions. Essence-fire sparked from their hands and chests as they struggled, groups scattering into the cemetery, taking their fights with them. Shouts and screams surrounded us as essence meant to kill tore through the air.

Down near the grave, bodies lay prone everywhere, with no visible essence emanating from them. Dead. Dozens dead from both Seelie Court and the Consortium. In the center of it all stood C-Note, using his staff to draw more essence from the Power spiral he was creating.

One lone figure remained before him, tall and defiant. Eorla Kruge’s torn veil rippled in the wind as she held her head high. She had an enormous body shield around her. “What the hell is she doing?” I started to get up, but Meryl pulled me to the ground.

“I can’t protect you down there, Grey. We have to get out of here.”

Eorla thrust one hand into the air. “Enough,” she commanded.

C-Note peered down at her and grinned. “You’re too late. I’ve lit the spark. I control the flame.”

A wave of light spilled from Eorla as she shouted again. The light rolled off her and hit C-Note full on. He staggered back as her essence struck. C-Note held his black staff out, absorbing the blow. The image of an oaken staff flickered into view for a moment before resuming its black appearance. It had done the same thing at Carnage when it flew from my hands to his.

Eorla’s eyes blazed with emerald light. “You’re no troll.”

He laughed with bitter scorn. “Nothing is ever as it appears to be, Eorla.”

She drew a ball of essence from the air and threw it at him. It shattered on C-Note, grappling with his body shield. Impressively, it broke through. The level of Power I had sensed in her when we first met was not mistaken. C-Note’s body shimmered, became a blur of color, and the glamour he wore slipped away.

Gerin Cuthbern leaned on the oak staff, staring at Eorla with a malevolent white light in his eyes. 19

“If you expect me to be surprised you did that, Eorla, you will be disappointed. I have never underestimated your Power,” Gerin said.

She raised a hand glowing green with light. “You killed my husband.”

Gerin nodded. “Which is regrettable. He was forcing my hand before I was ready, but his death became quite useful.”

Eorla drew her hand up to cast her spell. Gerin smiled. “I killed your husband, Eorla. Nigel and Manus are dead now, too. I will kill you, too, if necessary. You were right about one thing: The fey need to be unified. The only way to do that is take away their Power.”

Her hand wavered, whether in fear or consideration, I couldn’t tell. “This is madness, Gerin,” she said.

“Mad? You mean like Maeve and Donor, locked in their ancient grievances? You mean like you and Manus, bickering over a directorship? You think I am mad? Faerie is gone, Eorla. The old ways are all gone. Seelie Court and the Consortium play word games with each other, while the humans plan to destroy us. Do you not see it coming? To ignore that,that is madness.”

Eorla did not say anything for a long moment. Incredibly, she dropped her hand. She turned a troubled face to the carnage around her. “You’re killing people, Gerin.”

He shook his head. “They’re killing each other. I’m just pushing them to do what they want.” He raised the staff. It glowed with white light. Teutonic runes floated in the essence. “Essence is mine to give or take now. The spell I have created is pulling it all to me. I will only allow those who share my goal to use it.”

She turned back to him with a start. “That’s not possible. No one has that ability.”

“No? Look around you. Tell me it’s not possible.”

He was right. Essence revolved around him like a vortex, feeding into the staff. He held it with his body like a wild animal on a leash.

She balled her hands into fists. “You are starting a war you can’t win.”

“You can only fight me with essence, and if you use essence, you will be mine. Your choice is simple: Fade and die or bow to my will.”

Eorla turned and looked down into the grave pit.

Gerin leaned forward on the staff. “Stand beside me, Eorla. Together we can remake this world. We can take the Power that the Seelie Court and the Consortium squander. You were born to rule. You know that. Be who you are. Be my queen, Eorla.”

Eorla dropped her hand and crossed her arms.

“I don’t believe this. She’s considering it. Can you do anything, Meryl?” I started to move forward, uncertain how I could convince Eorla she had to resist.

Meryl grabbed my sleeve and held me back. “This is too big for me to handle alone, Grey. Every time I drop my shield to tap more essence, I get nauseated. We need to get help.”

Eorla turned back to Gerin. “I cannot.”

He smiled. “You will. I will have you by my side.”

“I will not do it,” she said. She raised her arms.

He shook his head. He thrust the staff forward. A shock of light burst out. Eorla threw out her arms, but she was too late. The light spun around her in a web of white-tinged green. I could feel Hala in that light, the direct Power of her essence binding Eorla with its strands. Living light swirled around her, and she became locked in a cage of essence.

“Watch, Eorla. See my Power. You will change your mind.” Gerin smiled and dropped his head back, and the essence of the spiral pulsed into the staff and from the staff to him. A shimmering barrier of white light began to grow around him.

A blast of essence exploded in front of me. Instinctively, I held Meryl to the ground behind the monument, as another bolt landed near us. On the other end of the gravesite, two elves aimed bows loaded with elf-shot at us.

I smiled apologetically down at her. “I’m thinking run.”

Meryl batted her eyes at me. “My hero.”

Another shot chipped the stone in front of us. I grabbed Meryl’s hand, and we dodged between stones to the top of the ridge. The elves kept shooting, but the essence spiral that Gerin had created was warping their aim. We dove through a yew hedge and landed in a circle of small mausoleums. Meryl pointed vaguely west. “Gate’s that way.”

We ran among the graves, avoiding the lanes. All around us, we could hear the constant concussion of essence striking and the sounds of screams. Halfway to the gate, Guild security flew overhead. Keeva must have called in more airborne. We stumbled through yet another set of bushes and into the middle of a group of druids and brownies. They spun toward us, eyes glowing with essence, then relaxed when they apparently sensed that we were druid.

Meryl and I backed slowly in the opposite direction.

“Where are you going?” someone called. They all stared at us, waiting for an answer. Meryl and I exchanged looks. She shrugged, and we joined them in the lane. A brownie walked with us, her eyes glowing an unnatural yellow.

“I’m, like, so bad with directions. Is this the way to the gate?” said Meryl in fair imitation of an airhead. A brownie looked at her with narrowed eyes. “Don’t you hear it? He’s calling us back.”

Meryl scrunched up her shoulders and stuck her fingers in her ears. “An elf hit me in the head. I can’t hear a thing.”

The brownie stared at her, then spoke to a druid next to her. They glanced at us repeatedly as we followed along behind them.

I poked Meryl in the ribs. “We’re trying to blend here.”

She wrinkled her nose. “What do you want me to do, a zombie shuffle?”

Elves swept suddenly down the slope to the left. They moved in a fluid unison, chanting great bursts of essence at us. The druids and brownies ran for cover, returning fire. Meryl and I backpedaled and took the opportunity to make for the gate again. We turned a corner, and another group of elves blocked the path. We backed away as they moved forward.

“I hate when this happens,” said Meryl.

“Can you take them out?”

She nodded. “But then I’ll be worthless until I recover. I only have my own body essence to work with, remember? You’ll have to leave me.”

I shook my head. “Not an option.”

The elves began to work a binding spell.

“I’m going to do it,” Meryl said.

“No.”

We backed against an oak. Meryl lifted her arms and began to chant. I felt a surge of essence behind me and something grabbed my head. An arm slithered around and grabbed Meryl’s face. The oak tree became pliant, its bark slipping roughly over us as something yanked us inside it. My vision went gray. I felt dizzy with a strange twisting in my stomach and head. Then I was coughing on the cold ground beside Meryl. Off in the distance, I could hear fighting. We were in another part of the cemetery. I got to my feet and helped Meryl up.

“We’re dying,” a voice said.

I turned to face the oak tree. Molded into the surface of the bark was a small woman, pale ivory skin, long silvery hair covering most of her nude body. “Hala?”

She ignored me, looking at Meryl instead. “I do not have much time. The druid is distracted. He strikes at the heart of the oak. He devours my sisters. We have nowhere to hide, little one. You are called.”

“What do you want me to do?” Meryl asked.

“You are the only pure vessel left. We call on you for help,” said Hala.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

Meryl waved me off. “Shhh. This is girl talk.” She turned back to the oak. “I’m only one person.”

“You are strong. Remember your vow,” Hala said in that same matter-of-fact tone she had used with me back at Carnage. It’s hard to resist, even if she isn’t pushing a little essence on you when she does it. Meryl stared down at the ground.

“Meryl? What is she talking about?”

She looked at me, her face set grimly. “Looks like I’m it.” Her eyes were haunted, resigned as someone on death row. It was a look I’d seen a few times, one I didn’t like seeing on someone who was beginning to mean something to me.

I grabbed her shoulders, a little afraid of what she was saying. “What do you mean?”

She shrugged out of my hands and stepped away from me. “Get out, Grey. Find someone who can help.”

“Dammit, Meryl, you’re freaking me out. What are you going to do?”

She looked at me, still resolved, but with a touch of fear in her eyes. “I have a duty. I need to save the drys.” She looked off toward the glow of Kruge’s grave, and her voice became low. “Whatever’s left of them.”

I stepped closer to her again. “How?”

She held up her hands and backed away shaking her head. “No time, Grey. You can’t do this with me.”

“Meryl, talk to me! I don’t like the sound of whatever it is you’re about to do,” I said. She bowed her head, then looked at me. “Stay safe,” she said. With a blinding flash of essence, she dove at the oak tree.

“Meryl! No!” I reached after her, but she was too fast. Black spots danced in front of my eyes, and she was gone. Hala had vanished, too. Desperate, I spun in place, but they were nowhere to be seen. Meryl had disappeared into the oak.

I pounded on the tree. “Meryl!”

This sound came out of me, a strangled outburst of frustration. She didn’t answer. I had no idea what she had just done, but it scared me somehow.

The sensation of a new essence nearby brought me back to the immediate situation. My skin prickled as something moved in the darkness around me.“Alone,” it whispered. Dim yellow eyes gleamed around me. Another whisper, sibilant and menacing.“Taste.” I turned again. More eyes. Something darted out of the shadows, small and dark. It snapped at my hand and fled back. A dark shape dropped out of the tree from above me. It clung to my back and clawed at my head. I threw myself to the ground and rolled. It screeched and jumped away. Taller figures moved forward. Solitaries. Dozens of them gathered around me.

“Bright, bright.”A raspy chant.

I crouched, placing my hand on the ground. I could feel a wrongness there, felt the effect Gerin was having on essence. Even if I wanted to fight the pain of drawing it, he would have me. I slipped my dagger out of my boot. It burned in my hand with an almost unbearable heat. I tried to imagine it growing, lengthening into a sword. I had seen it do that once, but I didn’t know how to make it happen. Even as a dagger, though, it was still a blade with a sharp edge. I launched myself off the ground, slashing at the nearest solitary, a tall bark-skinned thing with sharp teeth. It howled in pain, and I knocked it back. I charged forward, small hairy-faced figures scrambling out of my way. I ran. A howl went up. The sound of bare feet slapping pavement and tearing at the earth followed me. My heart pounded as I ran. I leaped over tombstones, the wild shouts of the solitaries filling the air.

“Run! Run!”a high-pitched voice taunted.

I ran like hell. Some came right beside me, strange brittle fingers pinching and poking, then falling back with laughter. Adrenaline surged through me as I dodged among the sleeping dead. I began to pull ahead of them, but they kept coming, screaming and laughing behind me. I came out of a line of trees to a wide lake. I knew where I was now, the center of the cemetery. As I pounded along the path, more solitaries joined the pursuit, forcing me away from the path to the gate. Herding me back to Gerin. A spiraling tower of essence glowed ahead, marking Kruge’s gravesite like a beacon. I topped the hill and kept running down into the bowl. Still trapped in the chrysalis of essence, Eorla stood transfixed before Gerin. In the midst of the white tower of light, Gerin held his staff, its base planted firmly in the spiral of essence, drawing more and more power into himself. A drys revolved around him screaming. She spun faster and faster, funneling in toward Gerin. In a last surge of speed, the staff sucked her in. Another drys came sailing out of the trees, screaming as the essence spiral caught her in its vortex. The shouts of the solitaries became louder, and I spun back toward the slope. They had reached the crest of the ridge, poised to descend on me, when the entire horde hesitated. They seemed confused. I could feel something coming with them, something huge. And it felt angry. A blaze of crimson essence seeped into the sky. The solitaries backed away from it, as the essence built behind them. They turned and swept down the slope toward me, madness in their eyes.

A cold feeling gripped my gut. I couldn’t hold them off, not all of them. I brought the dagger up as the first of them reached me. If I was going to be trampled, I was taking a few of them with me. I slashed at the first of them, just as a chilling scream rent the air. A spiderlike solitary spun limply through the air as a blaze of blood red essence crested the hill. Then another solitary went flying, and another, tossed like leaves in the wind. The horde became a tangled knot of panic as they chittered and screamed, scattering from the gravesite. As the path up the slope cleared, my jaw dropped in disbelief. Murdock strode toward me in an enormous cloud of crimson essence, the strength of it blotting everything around him. By some trick of the light, the essence amplified his size, and his skin literally rippled with Power. His eyes glowed with a feral glow as he closed in on me, glaring like he didn’t know me. He stopped abruptly, his breath ragged. Recognition slowly came into his face, and he smiled. “I thought I’d find you in the middle of everything.”

Amazed, it took a moment for me to speak. “What the hell happened to you, Murdock?”

He just shook his head. “I brought an old friend of yours.”

Nigel Martin stepped from behind him, strolling out of Murdock’s essence as if he were just coming back from a walk.

Relief swept over me. “Nigel! Gerin said you were dead.”

Nigel tilted his head at me as if I had just explained the obvious. “I think it should come as no surprise to you today that Gerin is wrong about many things.” Typical Nigel. He stepped around me and approached Eorla. I could see the power of a spell wind out of his hands as he held them up to the essence surrounding Eorla. He nodded. Turning to Murdock, he reached out a hand. “You seem to have clean essence in abundance, Detective. May I?”

Murdock shrugged and held out his hand. Nigel gripped it hard, then plunged his free hand into the cocoon surrounding Eorla. He convulsed with the shock of contact. Murdock gasped as essence flowed down his arm. Nigel pushed the stream of essence into Eorla. The illusion of Murdock’s massive frame slowly shrank until he was the man I knew. The cocoon around Eorla flared brightly and went out. Dazed, she swayed on her feet. Nigel held her arm to steady her. She shivered violently and looked up with clear eyes. “You live,” she said, her voice soft but not surprised.

“As do you, Eorla,” he said.

She gazed up at the towering cone of light. Still holding her arm, Nigel guided her forward as though leading her onto a dance floor. As they neared the light hiding Gerin, Nigel spoke intently into Eorla’s ear. She shook her head once. He kept speaking. She looked him in the face then, her eyes glittering. At last, she nodded and faced Gerin.

Nigel looked back at me and smiled. “Learn to heal yourself, Connor. If this doesn’t work, the world will need all the help it can find.”

He clasped Eorla’s hand. The air shimmered in front of them as they approached. Eorla began to sing as Nigel held out his hand. They glowed with essence and stepped through the shimmering air. For a moment, we could see the three of them. Then a flare pulsed outward, wrapping them in a dome of white light.

“Connor, I think we have another problem,” Murdock said quietly.

I looked up. Several hundred fey ranged around the ridge of the bowl. To one side, elves waited in chant phalanxes, wedges focusing power to the point. Their bows were drawn with the green blaze of elf-shot. Druids and brownies spanned the opposite ridge, essence blazing yellow and white in their eyes, Danann fairies in Guild security uniforms hovering above them. In a mixture of confused alliance, solitaries scattered throughout both sides. High overhead, Keeva hovered, her red hair and wings flaming against the night sky.

I nodded in agreement at Murdock’s mastery of under-statement. “We’re fucked.”

The green trail of a single elf-bolt streamed overhead. All hell broke loose. I grabbed Murdock’s arm and threw us into Kruge’s grave. We landed hard beside the cart as a storm of essence raged over our heads. Murdock rolled to his feet and drew his gun. I reached into the cart and lifted a longsword from Kruge’s cache.

“How many bullets do you have?” I asked.

Murdock glanced down at his gun. “Fifteen.”

I smiled. “Good. For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble.”

He chuckled under his breath, keeping his eye on the battle. I took up position with my back to him. Murdock’s essence might be spiking like crazy, but he had no true ability. Neither did I. The only defense I could think of was not to get noticed.

That plan lasted five minutes before an elf jumped down in the pit. I don’t think we were his target. He seemed genuinely surprised to see us. Before he had a chance to move, I hit him hard in the face with the sword pommel, stepping back with the blade pointed at his throat. He fell dazed against the side of the pit.

“We have no quarrel, but I will kill you before you breathe a word,” I said. It was a gamble. The elf probably could sense I was a druid, but he had no way of knowing I had no ability. I tried to look so confident I could take him with the sword that I didn’t even need to bother with essence. With the back of his hand, he wiped the blood from his nose. Without a word, he flipped himself backward out of the pit.

“I believed you,” said Murdock.

“I wasn’t bluffing,” I said. I would have killed him. It’s what you do when you have no other option. War cries and death screams filled the air. High above, Guild security agents kept firing at the Consortium side of the fight. Gerin must have been working on Keeva a long time for her to go along with this.

Something dark fluttered overheard, then dove at us screeching. Murdock reacted instantly and fired his gun. The bullet tore through a leathery wing, and the thing pinwheeled away.

“Nice restraint,” I said.

“I was trying to kill it,” he said without taking his eyes away from the sky. Pink light flashed between us. Murdock aimed his gun at it, and I swung my sword up. A shocked Joe blanched and held up his hands. “Whoa! I brought help!”

“Sorry, Joe. Things are a little touchy,” I said.

Murdock turned back to the fight. “It’s your brother,” he said.

“Are you kidding me?” I peered over the edge of the grave. Trying to cut a path at the top of the bowl, Callin fought like a man possessed. A second after I saw him, I felt a new welling of essence behind him, wild and unrestrained. The Cluries poured out of the trees, manipulating the warped essence around them. The Clure himself stood back-to-back with Cal, a ridiculous smile on his face.

“Not bad,” said Murdock.

“They’re in their element in this mess,” I said. As chaos-casters, they knew how to use the unpredictable. It’s why they function so well when they’re drunk.

Guild agents swept down at them, shooting streaks of essence that bounced wildly in all directions. They didn’t touch the Cluries, but it kept them pinned at the tree line. As Keeva moved into view overhead, the guards increased their attacks.

“Joe, Keeva’s controlling the guards. Can you take her out?” I asked. He looked up at her and sighed. “Oh, great, she already doesn’t like me.”

I looked at him from under my brow. “Joe, please.”

He pulled his sword and winked out. A moment later, I saw a flash of pink near Keeva. She shot a bolt of white lightning at him. He vanished and reappeared behind her, hitting her with a blast from his sword. As she turned to face him, he vanished again, repeating his attack strategy over and over. The Guild security guards hovered in confusion as she focused her attention on Joe. He vanished again, longer this time, as Keeva whirled in place looking for him. It would have been amusing under different circumstance. A brilliant flash of pink appeared above Keeva. Joe dove with his sword point down and plunged it into her head. I felt the blow in my stomach.

Keeva tumbled senselessly through the air as Guards raced up. They caught her before she hit and rushed away with her body. Joe popped in next to me.

He reappeared right in my face. “She said hi.”

“Dammit, Joe, I think you killed her,” I snapped.

“Oh, calm down. I didn’t use the blade. I gave her a head shock. She’ll wake up in a week or two,” he said.

It worked, though. Without Keeva, the Guild agents seemed to come to their senses. They moved up higher and began deflecting essence instead of firing it. It wasn’t enough, though. The agents and the Cluries were too outnumbered to stand their ground against everyone else. The malignant green veining of Gerin’s spell contaminated the essence around me, radiating from the dome. It infected everything—the ground, the trees, and each and every fighter. Gerin hadn’t lied. No one could tap essence without becoming thrall to his spell.

A deep rumbling built around us as the ground vibrated.

“Now what,” I muttered.

The trees shook in a frenzy as a gale wind came up. The tremor increased. Dirt cascaded into the pit as Murdock and I scrambled up the ramp. Trees toppled as the earth heaved upward. The fighting slowed as people felt the effects. The shaking became more severe, and I lost my balance. I grabbed at a tombstone to steady myself. My sensing ability kicked in as a wave of essence flowed over me. A misty halo rose above the ridge, pure essence flickering in a viridian arc across the sky. I could hear a voice raised in song, chanting words I didn’t recognize, a deep language resonant with the Power of the wild oak

The light above the ridge grew brighter and a spray of rock and earth shot into the air as more trees fell. Everything stopped. The wind. The tremoring. Everything but the song of Power. Dust hung in the eerie gray light, outlining a diminutive shape.

On an upthrusting of bedrock, Meryl glowed with preter-natural light. My chest ached at the sight of her, her face taut, her eyes roiling with light. She was still alive. I couldn’t believe how beautiful she looked. And terrifying.

A silence fell, a thick heavy pause as though for breath, while the light around Meryl grew even brighter. She threw back her head and screamed. Wind roared as essence cycloned out of her, tearing up everything in its path. A thick, rushing wave of it tore through the fighters, knocking them away like specks of insignificance.

Bolts of essence leaped from her hands, raking across the ground, while above her it fanned into a blaze of flaming emerald. With methodical precision, the lines of Power sought out the taint from Gerin’s spell. Incandescent flashes burst out everywhere as Meryl’s attack burned through the green veining. It gave way before her, retreating into the glowing dome of light. And then she stopped, her voice cutting off abruptly.

In the unnerving quiet of the aftermath, Meryl stood alone facing us from the top of the slope, a fierce white light still glowing in her eyes. My chest ached with astonishment at what she had done. Wherever her essence wave touched, it purged Gerin’s spell until the entire clearing was devoid of his Power. As I got to my feet, the sword felt awkward in my hand. Granite from the tombstone had flowed over my skin. I could see the troll residue clearly now, an azure haze over my body. With pain stabbing in my head, I forced my essence to push the stone off me. It crumbled into dust. Murdock stood next to me, his gun clenched in his hand, breathing heavily. He didn’t say a word but nodded at me.

Behind us, the dome rumbled and groaned. In a tumult of color, it expanded with a deep shudder. A wave of dizziness came over me as I felt a pull at my chest. Essence flowed under my feet like the undertow of surf. It streamed into the dome, leaving nothing but dead earth behind it. Truly dead, without a spark of life or essence in it. The dome pulsed and bulged, lightning crackling on its surface. We backed up the slope away from it.

“A harrowing,” Joe said, his voice thick with horror.

I didn’t realize he was still with us. He hovered behind me, his face white with fear. For a moment, I thought a trick of the light made him appear transparent. Then I realized it was no trick. Joe was fading.

“Get out, Joe. Get out before it kills you!” I shouted. He brought his hands in front of his face. I could see through them, saw his eyes widen. The dome was pulling his essence out of him, sucking up his life force with frightening speed. Without another word, he winked out.

Essence coursed past us in ribbons of color. Murdock and I backed away as the dome ground closer. A new wind came up, and we pressed against it to the top of the ridge. Meryl stood alone now, still glowing with enormous Power. Everyone else had fled.

“What the hell is a harrowing?” he asked.

“An essence storm.” It was Meryl’s voice, but unlike the way I had ever heard her. She had came down from the spire of rock and stood next to us. “It sucks up everything in its path. I’ve never heard of one getting this big. I could only force back Gerin’s spell, but he’s unleashed more Power than I can stop. It’s over. We’ve lost.”

Before I could say anything to her, Murdock gasped and staggered away from me. He grabbed his chest and crumpled to the ground. I crouched by him. He was unconscious, his essence caught in the flow of the harrowing. It leached off him in rivulets, merging with the streams rushing down into the dome. Meryl looked over at us, her face uncomfortably calm with the power of the drys still within her. “Lay him on stone. It will protect him for a brief time.” As quickly as I could, I dragged Murdock past her and lifted him onto the stone vault of an exposed grave. Above the vault, its monument readAS THE BONES

OF MAN JOIN THE BONES OF EARTH, THE CIRCLE IS COMPLETE .

I hoped Murdock wouldn’t take it as a bad omen when he woke up. If he woke up. Standing on the granite soothed the pain in my head. My own essence was trying to release, but the mass in my head kept it in check. For once I was grateful for it.

I looked over my shoulder to Meryl, who was facing away from me. “Are you okay, Meryl?”

She didn’t look at me. When she spoke, she sounded almost like herself again, only with a note of despair that tore at me. “I tried to save the drys, Grey, but we’ll never get out of here in time. There’s no anchor to the harrowing. It’s out of control.”

“The drys are inside you, aren’t they? That’s what Hala meant by vessel.”

She just nodded, staring into the dome. Except for the dome, darkness surrounded us. From my vantage point, I could see off into the cemetery toward the city, everything dead and devoid of essence. The darkness spread as I watched, an ugly black stain moving faster and faster as more essence drained into the harrowing.

A discharge went off like thunder. The dome moved closer, covering several acres now. It pulled at my essence, but the mass of darkness in my head resisted, not letting any leave my body. Just like it did when I tried to use essence, it resisted and pulled it back. I started to laugh. I’d been wishing the darkness in my head would go away, and now it was the one thing saving what little ability I had left.

“It’s going to explode. I can feel it,” Meryl said.

We didn’t speak, watching it all end. A cold sensation came up my legs. The granite from the tomb was trying to bond with the troll essence on me. Standing next to Meryl was enhancing it. I shook the stone off. As I did, I felt the pull of the harrowing even more strongly. The granite flowed up again. I was about to shake it off, but paused as my eye caught the epitaph again.

I looked down at it for a long moment, then back at the glowing heart of the dome. Stone acted as an anchor for essence. It’s what made ward stones do what they do. The thing in my head resisted the dome. It fought the pull of the harrowing.

I looked at the epitaph again and thought of Virgil’s cryptic comments about bones and circles.

“Dammit, Virgil, I hope like hell you didn’t mean hide inside a tomb,” I muttered under my breath. I stopped fighting against the troll essence. The remains of Moke’s spell still clung to me. All the ambient essence seemed to have stabilized it instead of letting it dissipate like Moke said it would. As soon as I relaxed my body shield, the spell began to bond with my body essence. It catalyzed the spell even more, drawing the stone around me like it had done at Carnage. The granite softened under my feet, then flowed like water, sliding over my body. It ran up my legs, spreading up my back. I shuddered at the cold sensation of stone oozing around my chest, encasing my torso, seeping over my groin. Tendrils crept up my neck, curled over the back of my head and down over my face. I could feel it even in my eyes. I held my hands up as the last of my skin vanished beneath the stone. I was completely encased now. “Meryl?”

She looked back at me and gaped, the color draining from her face. “What the hell have you done, Grey?”

“I think I can stop it,” I said.

She made as if to touch my arm but then drew her hand back. “How?”

I smiled, feeling the oddness of the stone forming the familiar expression. “Turn myself into a living ward stone. I’m going to try and anchor it.”

She looked doubtful. “It’ll suck the essence out of you before you even reach the barrier. You saw what was happening to Joe.”

I shrugged. “I have to try. We’re going to die anyway. You can give me some breathing space, though. Charge me with everything you’ve got.”

Her face set with resistance. “That could kill you.”

I shook my head. “I’m hoping not. Not with this thing inside my head. It won’t let me tap my own essence, but it’s not bothering with the troll essence. I just need a boost to get me through the barrier.”

Anguish crossed her face as she tried to decide. At least she had an advantage over me when she took the drys inside herself. She probably knew it wouldn’t kill her. We both knew we had no idea whether my idea would work.

“I’m asking, Meryl. You don’t have to do it. Either way, I’m going,” I said. She breathed heavily as she held back emotion. Tears welled up in her eyes. “Damn the Wheel,” she said, her voice sharp with a bitterness that surprised me.

The Power of the oak surged within her, and her eyes turned a pure white. Stepping up to me, she pulled my head down to her face. Instead of letting her essence flow through her hands, she pressed her lips against mine, holding me tightly. I wrapped my arms around her as essence flooded over me. The Power of the drys rushed into me, my body humming as the granite absorbed it. Still Meryl held on, refusing to end the kiss. At last, she slumped against my chest unconscious. I caught her in my arms and lowered her gently next to Murdock.

The dome trembled closer. I debated whether to wait, but decided the inevitable was inevitable. I felt the harrowing pull at me while the mass in my head pulled in the opposite direction. I took a deep breath and stepped up to the dome. The essence from Meryl’s charge clawed at it with razor shards of lightning. The last of the drys essence tore a jagged opening in the barrier. I stepped into the light. Everything

went

white

20

White.

Sound stopped. The howling wind. The groaning oaks. Gone.

Whiteness filled my vision. I paused for several long moments, but nothing changed. The white remained, all encompassing. I looked behind me expecting to see Meryl and Murdock lying like the dead on the tomb, but I saw only more white.

Above me. Around me. Below. White simply was. A mass of dense essence that emanated purity. I had the impression of solid ground beneath me, yet my feet did not rest on anything. With nothing to orient myself in the space, a sensation of weightlessness made me dizzy.

The essence had a current. I could feel it flowing around me but not through me. The stone protected me. The thing in my head held me together. Radiant waves streamed over me with a magnetic-like pull. It all flowed in the same direction, and I followed. I put one foot in front of the other but could not perceive any forward motion. I began to doubt I was even moving. The more I walked, nothing changed, but I pushed forward anyway.

A humming pricked at my ears, a low bass tone. Once I noticed it, I realized I had been hearing it for some time, growing louder, vibrating in my chest. In my groin. In my head. It came from the direction the essence was flowing.

A core of white light, whiter against the white, towered ahead. I couldn’t tell if I were seeing it with my eyes or sensing it with my druidic ability. The dark mass in my head shifted, a literal, physical movement of wrenching pain worse than anything I had ever experienced.

I hunched forward, nausea ripping through my gut. A shock of white essence burst from my eyes, a sensation I hadn’t had in a long, long time. It hurt. It felt good. But it wasn’t me. I didn’t do it, and I had no control over it. It was just the thing in my head, adjusting to wherever I was, releasing essence like a pressure valve as it realigned itself in my head. The mass clenched again, and the essence stopped flowing out of me.

I staggered in confusion as a darkness flickered across my mind, like a lid had come down and shut out all thought, then lifted off again. Like a blink inside my head.

I looked around. Everything was white. Something tugged at my memory. I had been here before. I remember being angry and running and falling into a bright white light of essence. I turned slowly in place, trying to remember why, trying to remember what this place was.

My mind blinked again.

I jerked my head up, feeling like I had passed out. People surrounded me, staring at me. Some I recognized, and some I didn’t. Their faces held a multitude of expressions—fear and horror and sadness. Then the screams began.

My mind blinked.

Everything around me was white. I lay on my back staring into a nothingness of white. I was here again. This place. Above me, I could see two vast shadow shapes. Powerful shapes speaking with words I couldn’t understand. They moved closer.

My mind blinked.

My mind blinked.

My mind blinked.

I didn’t know where I was. Everything around me was white. Facing me, a core of white essence burned like a star. I moved toward it. Near its base, the white seemed—darker—not as brilliant. I kept moving toward it. The darker white faded to gray, then the first hints of color. The color began to resolve into three figures standing around the column. I remembered them. I remembered why I walked here. I remembered who these people were.

Nigel, Eorla, and Gerin faced each other in a loose circle. They all reached toward the center, gripping Gerin’s staff of oak. None of them moved. I could see their faces now, their expressions frozen in a rictus of agony, their eyes white in their sockets. Gerin held the staff with both hands, his head thrown back. White essence smoked from his eyes and open mouth.

The staff hummed with power. Teutonic runes spiraled around it, incandescent green glows against the shining white essence of the wood. I could feel the drys trapped inside it. I could feel Hala there. She had hidden in Meryl and then me. Then I used her to break through the dome. The spell had pulled her back in. More drys were with her. I could feel them, too, their Power caught in Gerin’s spell. I could feel Nigel and Eorla, their focus on the staff, forcing themselves against what was left of Gerin’s mind. They had come close, pushing his will back, stopping his control. They had achieved only a kind of equilibrium. But they had only stopped Gerin, not the spell. I could feel nothing from the High Druid. He had lost control of the spell and had lost the fight with Nigel and Eorla. His mind had dissipated. He had lost his mind. Literally. Into the white.

I saw what Nigel and Eorla had tried. They had joined their essences, joined their knowledge, into a counterspell. They had wrenched control away from Gerin but did not gain it for themselves. Like Gerin, they could not both fight their adversary and the spell. In achieving the stalemate, the spell had broken loose, guideless, mindless. They did not have the Power to contain the essence and reverse its course. I could feel the spell’s hunger, a massive maw sucking in essence. Running free, it had no equilibrium to achieve, nothing to anchor or contain it. It would just continue to feed itself, devouring more and more essence until it exploded, exploding with an energy never seen before, obliterating everything in its path. Maybe never stopping. Maybe exploding forever. Maybe.

I looked down at my hands. They were stone, sheathed in granite. I remembered this happening, remembered doing this to myself. I looked up at the essence running free. It had no anchor. I remembered someone saying something about an anchor. Something about a harrowing needing an anchor. Something to ground its energies and interrupt the spell. Stone. It needed a ward stone. I remembered why I had come here. I reached out my hand.

My mind blinked.

I was surrounded by white. One moment I was running, and the next there was white. I turned. Bergin Vize had been standing behind me, a look of fevered hope on his face. His youth surprised me, his almost black hair worn long for an elf, fanning out as though filled with static. I had thought him older. He held his hands out in front him about a foot apart. A gold ring hovered between them, pulsing with essence, revolving around a shaft of light.

Vize’s eyes locked with me, and he smiled. “One door opens; another closes,” he said. I reached for the ring.

My mind blinked.

My hand was extended toward the staff. My hand wore stone. My body wore it. Like a ward stone. I was a living ward stone. The dark mass in my head held me back for a moment. But only a moment. Pain cut through my mind as I reached forward and closed my hand around the staff. A hot, searing jolt coursed through me. I screamed as the thing in my head tore open and everything

went

white

21

The odor of scorched earth tickled my nose. I opened my eyes and stared at the night sky. The air felt cool on my skin, but the ground felt warm. Pinprick sensations danced all over my body. I sat up slowly, every muscle aching.

A crater surrounded me, charred and deep. Nigel and Eorla lay nearby, still and pale. I winced as I opened my senses. Their essences glowed feebly. They were alive, but barely. I pulled myself painfully to my feet, staring around me in confusion.

At the center of the crater stretched a blackened body. I breathed through my mouth to avoid the rank odor of burnt flesh as I stood over the corpse. Gerin Cuthbern was unrecognizable, but I knew it was him. Even in death, he clutched the oaken staff in his gnarled hands. Ash shivered and flaked off the staff in the light breeze. No essence emanated from it. Without the last vestige of her tree, Hala had dissipated—died, I guess. The realization made me ache inside, knowing that I had come so close to something so sacred. I touched the staff, and it crumbled away from my fingers. After everything that had happened, that made a lump form in my throat.

“That was a fine party,” someone said.

I turned to see the Clure sitting on the edge of the crater, his feet planted in the dirt, elbows propped on his knees. He toasted me with a flask and took a deep drink. Someone was lying next to him and, as I mounted the slope, I realized it was my brother. He looked beaten and worn. But he lived. I could see he lived.

“Is he all right?” I asked when I reached the rim.

The Clure looked down as if surprised to see someone lying next to him. He patted Cal on the chest.

“Cal? He’s just fine. More knocks to the head than usual, is all.” He held out the flask. “You look like you could use a drink.”

I took a slug. Smooth, amber whiskey. I smiled. “How’d you know I like Jameson’s?”

The Clure looked at me in shock. “People don’t?”

I laughed as I looked around me. Kruge’s gravesite was gone, replaced by the crater. Dark lines of char spiraled down to the center where Gerin lay. Guild security agents flew over and down to Nigel and Eorla. Across the way, I could see two bodies lying on a grave.

“Tell Cal I said ‘thank you,’ Clure,” I said.

“Will do.” He nodded, sipping from the flask.

I made my way around the crater as more security descended to help. By their essence, I knew the bodies were Meryl and Murdock before I reached them. They lay side by side as if asleep. Alive, though. Thankfully alive. Relieved, I eased myself down beside Meryl and watched as Nigel and Eorla were flown out of the pit on litters.

Meryl sat up. She rubbed her face, looking down at Murdock first, then over at me. I held my hand out to her. “Are you all right?”

She nodded groggily as she took my hand and swung her feet around to sit next to me. “Yeah. I was just trying to remember the last time I woke up in a graveyard with two guys.”

“What happened?” I asked.

Disbelief etched itself across her face. “You don’t know?”

I cocked my head sideways to try to read her face better. “Did I do something?”

Confused emotions played across her face, as she searched for an answer. “Uh, yeah, you did.”

I looked down at Gerin. “The last thing I remember is you showing up.”

If possible, her eyebrows rose higher. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

She gave me a strange look. “You don’t remember anything after I stopped the fighting?”

I shook my head. A sick, frustrated feeling crawled into my chest. How was I going to deal with the frustration of not remembering again? “Dammit, Meryl, why can’t I remember?”

Meryl gave my arm a squeeze. “Don’t worry about it now. You will.”

“What if I don’t?”

She looked up at me with a small smile. “Then we’ll never know why you’re bald.”

I ran my hand over my head and discovered why the air felt so cold. Smooth skin met my touch. Even my eyebrows had vanished. I pursed my lips. “I guess I missed more than a few things.”

Meryl hopped off the vault. She stooped and picked up something. Her face became still, then stricken. She turned away abruptly, and I realized she was crying. I slid off the vault and wrapped my arms around her. She actually let me. I kissed the top of her head. “What is it?” I asked. She leaned her head against my chest. “I couldn’t save the drys. I made a choice, and they died because of it.”

I knew Hala was gone, but now I realized that I only felt Meryl’s own essence inside her, not all the drys she had held within when she purged Gerin’s spell. I didn’t know how many there had been. I couldn’t even begin to fathom the loss. “What choice?” I said.

She wiped her nose with the sleeve. “It doesn’t matter. It had to be done.”

She held her hand out to show me a small silvered acorn resting in her palm. “Seed of an oak.”

“The promise of the Grove,” I added. Even without touching it, I could feel that spark of essence within it, the potential for new life.

Meryl let it fall from her hand into the crater. It rolled down into the barren remains of what had happened there, a hope awaiting the right moment to become something more. We didn’t say anything for the longest time.

Meryl looked up at me. “Want a lift?”

I grinned. “I didn’t want to ask.”

We wound our way through the gathering police and Guild agents and slipped in among the trees. As we walked into the silence of the graveyard, Meryl slipped her arm through mine. “Just so you know, Connor, this date totally kicked ass.”

“Not a date,” I said. She jabbed me in the ribs.

As I dozed listening to the steady rhythm of the heart monitor, I scratched my head for the umpteenth time. A week’s worth of growth made a good stubble, but it itched like hell under a knit cap. At least I had some eyebrows back.

“Where’s Ryan?”

I lifted my head and smiled. “He’ll be here soon. I told him I would wait.”

Keeva looked at me from her hospital bed, eyes dim, face pale. “Gerin?”

“Dead.”

“Good,” she said. She pushed herself up into a sitting position. “How long have I been out?”

“About a week. You took a nasty hit to the head,” I said. Joe had made me promise not to stell her. He hated when someone didn’t like him.

“I can’t believe what I did,” she said.

I stretched in the chair. “You weren’t yourself. Gerin was apparently poisoning you for weeks. We found Float all over your office.”

She stared at the ceiling. “This puts the Guild in a shambles, which probably makes you happy.”

“Don’t blame me. I just pointed out the cracks. You guys didn’t bother to fill them,” I said.

“How’s Manus?” she asked.

“Fine. His house was attacked, but they managed to fight it off.” I was glad Tibbet considered me a friend. I had never seen her go boggart. The reports I had read said it was not pretty when she was done.

“Nigel?” Keeva asked.

I nodded. “Recovering.”

“You’re awake,” Ryan macGoren said as he came through the door with the kind of flower bouquet hotel lobbies used. He set it on the nightstand and leaned down to kiss Keeva. She smiled up at him. I considered how frightening it was that the two of them had found each other. I stood. “I’m going to go. Get better, Keeva. You’ve got a Guild to rebuild.”

Keeva sighed, then grimaced at some pain. “Thanks.”

I paused at the door. “Oh, and macGoren? Call the Office of the City Medical Examiner and speak to Janey Likesmith. Donate any equipment she asks for.”

He arched an eyebrow. “Is that my penance for being bad?”

I smiled as coldly as I knew how. “It’s just a start.”

I found Nigel’s room two flights up. He lay in a stone crèche that was highly charged with essence. He smiled when he saw me. “I wondered if you’d stop in.”

“Thought I’d return the favor.” I couldn’t resist the dig.

He nodded, the smile slipping. “I deserved that, I guess. Gillen Yor tells me you remember nothing.”

“Again,” I said. I leaned against the wall just outside the field generated by the crèche. He nodded. “Bad habit, that.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“I remember Eorla and me entering the field of Gerin’s spell. He was already lost. Eorla and I stabilized it, but we couldn’t control it.”

“How did you convince Eorla to help?”

He rubbed the edge of the sheet that lay across him. “I appealed to her nature and her desire. Eorla and I have the same goals. We’re just on opposite sides of the debate,” he said. I frowned. “In other words, you made a deal.”

He quirked his lips with a cagey smile. “Compromise, Connor. That’s how we get things done.”

I didn’t want to get into that particular conversation. “You’ll need all the compromising you can get. Gerin set back Seelie/Consortium relations fifty years.”

Nigel nodded. “Maybe not a bad thing. The Consortium needed a slap down.”

“So did the Guild,” I said.

It was his turn to frown. “I wish you wouldn’t take what happened between you and the Guild so personally, Connor. It’s shortsighted.”

I laughed. “Really? You guys didn’t seem to be very long-viewed when you were attacking each other.”

“There are matters of weight you know nothing about, Connor. Truly important matters that are more than just one man’s problem.” He used that superior tone he has when he’s lecturing the ignorant. I’d heard it often during my training. It didn’t intimidate me anymore. Exasperated, I shook my head. “I’ve been thinking about what to say to you for a week, Nigel. Sometimes I thought I’d let it go, and sometimes I thought I was being petty. But you know what? I can’t let it go.

“Look at you. And the Guild. And the Consortium. Some of the most powerful fey in the world, who think they know better than anyone else, and one man was able to bring it all crashing down.”

I ticked off the list with my hands. “Gerin knew just how to manipulate each and every one of you. He waited until Briallen was away because he knew she would have sensed the drys in his staff. He turned Keeva into the good soldier because he knew her ambitions. He played Manus’s fear of competition to distract him. And you, Nigel, he laid little crumbs that led to the Consortium, because he knew your obsession with beating them. And you know what? A dead human boy and a druid with no ability wrecked everything for him. Not the ones with so-called ability.”

He shifted uncomfortably in the crèche. “That’s simplifying things a bit.”

“Is it? You’ve said to me on more than one occasion that I’ve left the path. Let me give you a bit of wisdom, Nigel. When you pick one path and never reconsider, you never know when you’re lost. That’s what’s happened to the fey.”

He pursed his lips. “If that’s what makes you feel better over the loss of your abilities, Connor, then you really are lost.”

I shook my head and smiled. “Here’s something else I’m starting to learn, Nigel. Ability isn’t just what you can do with essence. You’ve let your fey ability define you and your world. Without it, you’re the one who’s lost. Ability is a state of mind, too. If you consider nothing else, consider this: Somehow I succeeded against Gerin where you failed.”

One side of his mouth dipped down in anger. “Happenstance.”

I shrugged. “Call it what you like. Luck. Fate. Whatever. The Wheel of the World turns as it will, Nigel. You don’t turn It. One of these days you’ll figure that out. And when you do? That’s when you’ll really start learning.”

And then I just left. Didn’t wait for him to respond. Didn’t wait for his permission to leave. I just left. As I passed through the door, I felt oddly elated. I meant every word I said. Better yet, I believed every word I said. Life gave me things, then took them away. It gave me a chance to reconsider everything. Luck or not, I was on a new path, one I didn’t hate so much anymore. Not after finally understanding where and how I learned my arrogance and what it could do to twist you. Guild security agents were hovering high overhead, still on high alert, as I left the hospital. Down in Back Bay, their Consortium counterparts patrolled the streets. Both the Guildhouse and the Consortium consulate were armed camps until who killed whom and why got sorted out, if it ever did. Even the Boston mayor had gotten into the act, declaring wide swathes of the city as no-fey zones to ease the human fears that it wasn’t safe to be around the fey. Temporary, he says. We’ll see. No one would rest easy for a while. Gerin’s spell had damaged essence, twisting it here, erasing it there, and weakening it everywhere. Uncertain tomorrows weighed on the minds of the great and the small. Deep-seated desires for power and control cluttered everything. The Consortium feared Seelie Court. Seelie Court feared the Consortium. They nursed angry grievances over Convergence and blamed each other for it happening. Humans fear the fey, and the fey fear the humans. And every night, everywhere, they all go to bed, fearing the dawn, tossing restlessly as they plot or worry about the new day, their sleep disrupted by unquiet dreams of power and hope and fear. Not a one of them knows what will happen. Some people look forward to that. Some dread it.

Joe flashed into the air next to me. “You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. You?”

He put on quite the show of considering the answer. “Actually, I’m feeling a little faint.”

He somersaulted in the air, screaming with laughter. We had been doing this routine all week.

“You know, Joe, you’re obviously hiding your fear of death with jokes.”

He stopped and looked at me doe-eyed. “Am I that transparent?”

I smiled. “I can see right through you, buddy.”

He squealed and did loops. I glanced up at Avalon Memorial, grateful that for once I wasn’t lying inside. As we turned in the direction of the Weird, I shook my head at the turns my life had taken. Things change. The Wheel of the World turns the way It will. I had to get up in the morning, had to face the day and hope for the best. That’s just the way it is. One door closes; another opens. A shiver went through me.

about the author

Mark Del Franco lives with his partner, Jack, in Boston, Massachusetts, where the orchids tremble in fear since Mark killed Jack’s palm plants. Please visit his website at www.markdelfranco.com for more information about the Convergent World.

About this Title

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