“The answer is no.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I tap my foot hyperfast, hoping maybe I’ll crack his stupid floor.

He doesn’t say anything. Just keeps working on whatever it is he works on.

“You know what, dude? If you don’t help me get my sword back, you and me are through! You solve the ice mystery yourself,” I bluff, not about to give it up. “I’m not working for you. You don’t help me, I don’t help you.”

“Jo.” He doesn’t even raise his head. Just murmurs her name.

“I don’t care if you keep boinking her! Just get me my sword back! And don’t be making any more deals with folks about me behind my back!”

“That’s not our arrangement. You signed a contract. Jo’s life is only one of many prices should you renege. There are repercussions for your actions. You can’t walk away from me, Dani. Not tonight. Not ever. You’re not the one calling the shots. Sit down.” He’s standing again, and again I didn’t see him move. He kicks a chair at me. “Now.”

Sometimes I think everybody else in the world knows something I don’t know. Like they’re all in on some kind of conspiracy and if I just knew that one secret thing, too, the things adults do that baffle me would make perfect sense.

Other times I think I know something extra that the whole rest of the world doesn’t know and that’s why nothing they do makes sense. ’Cause they don’t know it and all their actions stem from flawed logic. Unlike mine.

I told Mac that once and she said it wasn’t something everyone else knew; the missing ingredient was that I didn’t yet understand my own emotions. They were new and I was just learning them for the first time. She said I was never factoring other people’s feelings into things, so of course everything grown-ups did seemed mysterious and weird.

I said, dude, you just said I don’t understand them, so how can I factor them in?

She said you can’t, so just accept that teenage years are a great big clusterfuck of insecurity and confusion and hunger. Try to survive them without getting yourself killed.

A-fecking-men to that. Except for the insecurity part. Well, without my sword, plus the insecurity part.

As soon as I sit down, Ryodan says, “Get out of here.”

“Bipolar much?”

“Go take a shower and change your clothes.”

“I don’t smell that bad,” I say crossly.

He writes something, then turns the page in whatever-the-heck-stupid-thing he’s reading.

“Dude, where do you want me to go? I can’t go anywhere without my sword. I can’t outrun the sifters. Every Fae in your club has a hard-on for killing me. You want me dead? Just do it yourself and get it over with.”

He stabs a button on his desk. “Lor, get in here.”

Lor blows in like he was plastered to the other side of the door.

“Escort the kid to clean the fuck up and get that stench off her.”

“Sure thing, boss.” He scowls at me.

I scowl right back.

Lor points through the glass floor. “See that blonde down there with the big tits? I was about to get laid.”

“One, I’m too young to hear that kind of stuff, and two, I don’t see you carrying a club to knock her over the head with, so how were you going to accomplish that?”

Behind me, Ryodan laughs.

“You’re ruining my night, kid.”

“Ditto. Ain’t life at Chester’s grand.”

TWENTY

“I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier”

I am not the Sinsar Dubh, Kat. He has tricked all of you. You will need me to save you.

Each night Cruce has taken me into the Dreaming, he has made the same claim. His lies hold the polish and consistency of truth. If my emotional empathy works on Fae—a test I’ve not yet had the opportunity to perform to my satisfaction—I get such conflicting signals from him that my gift is of no avail.

Now, wide-awake after another night of diabolical dreams, I pass through double doors a hundred feet tall, several feet thick, with unfathomable tonnage, but do not afford them a second glance. My eyes are only for him. It does not seem odd to me we cannot close such doors. The oddity is that we were ever able to open them: tiny mortals tampering with chariots of the gods.

I find myself in the position the Meehan twins recently occupied, hands fisted on the glowing bars of Cruce’s cage, staring in at the iced vision.

He is War. Divisiveness. Brutality. Heinous crimes against humanity. As an event on the battlefield, and the personification of it in a cage, he is all that and more. How many humans fell before the murderous hooves of this sly horseman of the apocalypse?

Nearly half the world’s population, by last count.

Cruce brought down the walls between our races. If not for him, it would never have happened. He arranged the players, nudged them where and when necessary, set the game in motion, then galloped about the board in the guise of an avenging angel, agitating here and stirring up there, until World War III began.

I should not be here with him.

Yet I am.

I told myself white lies as I made my way beneath the abbey, deep into our hidden city, picking through a misleading maze of corridors and crypts and dead-end and pigtailing tunnels. I told myself I must ascertain the cage is secure and he is still in it. That I will see him and realize he is but a pale imitation of my dreams; that I will gaze upon him and scoff at the thrall in which his dream-self holds me. That somehow coming down to check on him might set not him—but me—free.

My knees tremble. Desire parches my mouth and thickens my tongue.

There is no freedom for me here.

This close to him, I long to strip where I stand, dance wildly around his cage and keen the notes of an inhuman melody I do not even know how I know. This close to him I must bite my tongue to prevent myself from moaning with need.

This close to him I feel like an animal.

I stare at my hands on the bars, pale and white, with slender fingers clutching the glowing columns, and in my mind’s eye I can only see them wrapped around that part of Cruce that has made of me an adulteress. Curled as they were last night and the night before and the night before. I see the curve of my lips as I smile. I see the soft roundness of my mouth as I take him inside it.

I find my fingers dancing lightly over the pearl buttons of my blouse and snatch them away. I see a shameful vision of my girls discovering their new Grand Mistress cavorting naked around Cruce’s cage. It is erotic. It is horrific.