Point is, I’d had a small group of people I thought of as mine. Some of them I’d liked better than others, depending on the day of the week, but after our last adventure together saving the world, my group of sharp-edged, brilliant, deeply committed friends had become my family.
Now, most of them were gone, I still had Kat, Enyo, and the sidhe-seers, and I thought I still had Christian MacKeltar, although I hadn’t seen him in a while. But Mac, Barrons, Ryodan, and Lor, they were like me: powerful, strong, invested in doing their best to understand their ever-changing place in an ever-changing world. Though I was reluctant to admit it, each of them was, in their own way, a role model of sorts, a challenge I’d relished to get stronger, smarter, faster, better.
“I can’t believe they even trust me by myself,” I muttered. There was a time they wouldn’t have. “I shouldn’t be left alone and unsupervised. They know that.” But trying to make light of things to conceal my true feelings no longer worked as well as it once had, so I did what I always do if I can’t change anything about what’s bothering me—partition off a quiet place in my mind and tuck it away. Don’t pick at it. Go on with life. Time had a funny way of teasing out the most complicated knots.
While part of me wanted to mull over the things Ryodan had said, particularly what I’d thought I heard him say at the last, I refused to indulge myself. Assuming I drew any conclusions, what good would it do?
He was gone. For years. I refused to allow the bastard to consume my brain in his absence. He’d like that.
Ergo, open box. Shove in. Close box.
When he returned, I’d open the box again.
Dancer, however, I left rattling around in my head. He hadn’t left by choice. I would work through the grief. It would change me, but I knew I’d like the woman I’d be by the time I was through, and Dancer would, too.
Meanwhile, I needed a mystery to take my mind off things. Finding one in Dublin, AWC—after the wall crash—and ATS—after the Song—should be as simple as heading back to the city.
Shazam would catch up with me as soon as he’d eaten—he can find me anywhere—so I glanced up to set my bearings by the stars. After wasting so many years staring at a TV from behind bars, I spent a lot of time looking up now. I’m obsessed with the sky, especially at night. It has a way of making me feel utterly irrelevant while part of a vast, timeless whole. I’ll never forget my first week free of the cage. At night I slept on the ground in the middle of wide-open fields, drifting off with my arms behind my head, marveling at the immensity of it all; a child whose entire universe had, until then, been forty-two square feet.
Position noted, I hurried to the drive to circumvent gravestones before kicking up into the slipstream. During that perilous first instant or two before I enter the higher dimension in which I’ve learned to move, I can still crash into things. Once I’m up, I’m flawless. Coming down is even trickier than going up, and how I get most of my bruises.
I paused on the pavement, glanced around to lock down the many variables on my mental grid—and froze, a chill of horror licking up my spine. Not many things do that to me.
“What the—” I bit off the hushed curse and went as still as one of the corpses in the ground, adjusting my breath to minute, shallow inhales. I’m not here, I’m not here, I willed.
What I was seeing was impossible.
The Song of Making had been sung. The Unseelie had been destroyed by it. All of them. I no longer carried flashlights or a MacHalo.
The life-sucking Shades were gone.
Nonetheless, I was surrounded by them, hemmed in by countless inky shadows rising from the earth, bursting from graves, exploding from headstones, ghosting out windows of crumbling mausoleums, even clawing their ghastly passage through pavement.
Dozens—no, a hundred or more!—filled the cemetery.
One fought its way free of the blacktop five feet from my left; another hovered a few feet in front of me; there were three of the lethal things to my right.
I didn’t dare glance behind me because they hadn’t seemed to notice me yet. Perhaps they’d gorge on grass, flowers, and trees and move on, sated, if I held very, very still.
I locked down my limbs but my mind raced: it had been nearly four months since the new queen of the Fae sang the exquisite, dangerous melody that repaired the rifts in the fabric of our world. It was common knowledge that nothing Unseelie could survive that Song, and nothing Unseelie had been seen since.
I’ve always been massively suspicious of common knowledge, clearly with good reason. The cemetery was packed with Shades, nearly as many as had broken free of the poisoned D’Jai Orb on Halloween when the wall between the worlds of Fae and Man had been destroyed.
How did they survive the Song? What else had survived it?
Amorphous vampires, Shades live in the darkness and suck the life from anything or anyone foolish enough to stumble across their path. Not that I’d been doing any stumbling, nor had I been foolish in thinking I no longer needed a bloody MacHalo. I had every reason to toss my bike helmet adorned with dozens of LED lights onto a shelf. The Unseelie were dead.
Not.
When Shades dine on humans, they leave behind small sundaes of papery husks, garnished with shiny fillings, watches, implants, and other oddities. They suck even the sap and insects from trees, strip the soil so clean not a speck of bacteria remains. My sword is useless against them. All weapons are. Shades can’t be killed and the only thing that can save you from a gruesome death is light. If you have enough, you can hold them at bay.
My cellphone wouldn’t cast enough light to protect even one of my hands.
Take that, Ryodan. You leave, I die. May you be crushed by a mountain of guilt.
I slammed the lid of that box back down.
The Shades were moving, swarming, drifting near, slithering away. The cloud of darkness directly in front of me listed nearer, and hovered ten inches from my left boot. No way I could try to kick up into the slipstream. It was too close; I’d collide with it before escaping to the higher dimension. If I’d been High Fae, I could have sifted. But freeze-framing—what I do—is clumsier, slower, and not nearly as elegant. Fae can blink out and reappear half a world away. I’m far more limited.
There was no way I was calling for Shazam. I wouldn’t put him in danger. I wasn’t sure how powerful he was against something like this, and losing him would positively gut me.
My cellphone was in my back pocket. I calculated the odds of getting it out, pressing it on and managing to thumb up IISS before the nearest Shade devoured my foot.
Not good.
I went for it anyway. Some folks suffer a delusion that life is about making the right choices, implying there is a right choice in every situation. I don’t know what kind of life they live but in mine the only course of action is often a bad one. I die doing something or I die doing nothing. Although I loathed calling Ryodan for help, I loathed the idea of dying more and I deeply despised that I hadn’t been able to manage life on my own for an entire ten minutes after he’d gone.