“I’ll. Be. On. Time. Next time.”

“Good. Next time you won’t have to sit in my office all night.”

I shoot up from the chair. “Awesome, let’s go!”

He pushes me back down. “But tonight you screwed up. So, tonight you do.”

Seven hours later it occurs to me that Lor might be right. I might be breakable. Seven hours of boredom and I’m a puddle of willingness, ready to do virtually anything guaranteed to result in a change of scenery. Chains I can deal with. Boredom, no way. My brain gets ahead of my feet and I don’t like to think about where I’m going. I just go.

At six A.M. on the dot Ryodan looks up and says, “Tonight at eight, Dani.”

I glare murder at him and head for the door. It doesn’t open. I glare at it. A whole night wasted. More seconds ticking by as I wait for my jailer to set me free.

There aren’t many crimes in my book. Not many sins either.

But top on both of those lists is killing time. Have fun with it, make something cool, play video games, work hard if you feel like it, but do something. Killed time is an abortion, life that never gets lived, gone, just gone. A cage and a collar killed way too much of mine.

Just when I’m about to blow, he does something and the door retracts into the smooth glass wall.

As I storm out I hear him say, “You wasted my time, Dani. I wasted yours.”

I whirl on him, fists at my waist. “That’s bullshit! It wasn’t even proportionate!”

“It rarely will be.”

“Thirty little fecking minutes cost me nine and a half hours?”

“The way you treat me is the way I will treat you. Since I’m bigger and older, I imagine it will always be worse.”

“Oh, now you get all proportionate. If you’re going to be as much of a dickhead as you are big and old, dude, that’s some serious dickheadedness. That’s not fair. You can’t be totally disproportionate one minute and then all quid pro quo the next.”

“I can be anything I want.”

“Oh, whose fecking comic book is this?” I explode. “That’s my line.”

He laughs and his face changes. All the sudden he doesn’t look so old. He looks happy. Free. Totally different. I see lines around his eyes from laughing that I never noticed before. My mind flashes straight back to level four and I see him behind that woman again and he groans like he did that night, then he laughs, and I feel almost sick to my stomach remembering. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I wish I’d never fecking gone down to level four! I stand there and gape at him.

The door slides shut in my face.

“You’re early.”

I give him a mutinous look. Of course he thinks my being early is about him. It’s not. Mac was at Chester’s last night at eight. I think she’s hunting me. Since I can’t be late to avoid her, I have to be early. “Watch broke. Thought I was on time.”

“You don’t wear a watch.”

“See? I knew I had a problem. I’ll just dash out and get one. Be back tomorrow. On time.” Jewelry gets caught on things in battle. The only concession I make is a bracelet Dancer gave me that I wear snug on my arm. Besides, without him around, giving orders, I might actually some make progress in the investigation.

“Don’t even think about it.”

I drop into a chair in his office, dangle a leg over the side. “What are we doing tonight?” I say just like him. No inflection at the end.

“Ah, Dani, if only you took instruction in all things so well.”

“You’d be bored.”

“So would you. There are three other iced places in Dublin.”

“Three!” I sit up straight in my chair. “Are they all yours?”

“Local places. Unrelated to me in any way.”

Bugger, there goes my theory about him being the target, along with my hope that Chester’s might die a slow death. “Casualties?”

“About fifty between the three.”

“Humans or Fae?”

“Humans.”

“All humans?”

He nods.

I let out a low whistle. Fifty more people dead. The human race just keeps getting hammered with blow after blow. “Then why do you care? It didn’t happen on your turf. Nothing of yours was damaged or destroyed.”

“I have other reasons for wanting it stopped.”

“Like what? You move fast like me. You can outrun anything. You can steal more stuff to replace what got iced. So what’s the deal?” What motives does a dude like him have?

“The walls between our realms were destroyed on Halloween. Since then things have changed. Human laws of physics are no longer laws, they’re wishful thinking. It’s possible parts of Faery are manifesting spontaneously, bleeding through into our reality. It’s possible it’s happening randomly, instantly, and without warning. I didn’t see surprise on anyone’s face at either of my properties. Put the big picture together, even for people who can move like you and me.”

I snap up straight to full attention, both feet on the floor, not liking that at all. “You mean if it happened in the place I was standing, I’d be alive one second, dead the next. I wouldn’t even know it. I’d just be gone!” My hands fist. I’m so freaked I want to fight something right now.

“Exactly. Instant death. No warning. No awareness. I don’t know about you, but that offends the fuck out of me.”

No blaze of glory, no epic battle! I’d die a totally meaningless death. Worse, I wouldn’t even get to experience it. How much would that suck, to go through my whole life waiting to die, and then not even know it happened? I think Death is like the final stage of a video game. And if what Ryodan is saying is true, and I get iced, I’ll never reach that final stage. I’ll get wiped right out of existence on the second-to-last level. I want to play that last level when it’s time. I want to taste it all, even the dying.

I’m suddenly one hundred and ten percent invested in solving this mystery. Fifty more folks dead coupled with the possibility of a completely meaningless death is powerful motivation. You don’t get a big write-up in the history books unless you go out in a big way. I crunch thoughts and regurgitate them. “Well, first of all, the humans in your subclub were a little preoccupied with things like getting tortured and dying so it’s understandable if they didn’t notice that they were about to die in some other unexpected and surprising way, and second, I can’t say for certain what surprise looks like on an Unseelie’s face but I got a great idea: I’ll go downstairs and kill a few right now and we’ll collect some empirical data.” I don’t bother to mention I already hunted and killed half a dozen different kinds this morning after I left but I still couldn’t decide what their expressions meant. Their faces just don’t work like ours.