The best I could do was wobble forward in a crawl. I don’t even know how I found the booth where Feish and Suzy were, only that one minute I was on the floor, the next Suzy was pulling me onto the bench. “What happened, are you hurt?”

“Sparkle juice,” I whispered.

“Why would you drink that? It’s not for us!” Feish squeaked. “Come on, I can carry her. You two girls, so weak!”

I didn’t care, I only knew that I couldn’t keep my eyes open, even when Feish slung my arm over one of her shoulders and started hauling ass. “Not the door, they will be waiting there,” I mumbled.

Feish didn’t so much as give me a one-word answer. Suzy held my other arm and my legs went numb as we pushed our way through the mass of people who were heaving this way and that. Only they weren’t really people. They were something else. “People masks,” I said. Or I think I said. There were monsters in here. Was I one of them? I glanced at Suzy, seeing the siren in her clearly. Beautiful and terrible all at once.

The doorway we’d come through loomed in front of us. “Why aren’t people freaking out?” Suzy asked. “The lights and music stopped suddenly, but they all seem pretty calm.”

“I can’t say,” Feish answered. Again I wondered if it was that she wasn’t allowed or she didn’t know. She was good at answers like that.

Suzy reached for the door. I wanted to tell her not to open it—those men in black were going to be right there—but I couldn’t gather my thoughts in time. Before I knew it, they were carrying me through it onto Factors Row.

“They are gone,” Jinx said from the shadows across from us. “You were in there a solid eighteen hours. I hope you had a good time.”

I still couldn’t feel my legs. “I can’t feel my legs,” I mumbled.

At least the words came out. Feish snapped her fingers at Jinx. “Don’t tell him.”

“Oh, being sworn to secrecy is the most fun, but what will you give me for my silence?” Jinx leaned in close and Suzy squeaked. I couldn’t blame her.

I did however hold up a fist, the drink still thick in my veins and making me brassy as hell. “A knuckle sandwich is what you’ll get! Or another boot to the lady parts!”

Jinx’s too-many eyes blinked rapidly. “I don’t like to eat humans. You taste awful. Sour. But I do not relish another kick to my lady bits either. I will stay quiet should he ask me anything.”

Feish dragged me away, and I barely registered that it was very early morning. Eighteen hours. “We missed training.”

“You’re forgetting that we don’t train there anymore,” Suzy said, “which is maybe good, because if we had been training, the rest of the Hollows could have run into the idiots in black too. And if we’re all spelled like you think, who knows what would have happened?”

I snickered. “Idiots in black.” I was pretty sure that it wasn’t really as funny as I thought it was in that moment, but my brain was stuck on that sparkling giggle juice. “Giggle juice.”

“Terrible, this is terrible. I need to get tea into her,” Feish said. “Fae and their sparkling drinks.”

I’m pretty sure I blacked out because between one blink and the next we were inside Gran’s house, and I was being laid out on my bed, in my old room. The canopy was the same, there wasn’t even any dust on it.

“Here, tip her head,” Feish said, and Suzy tipped my head up.

“Only mostly dead,” I whispered. Neither of them so much as batted an eye at me. Apparently I was the only one who’d seen The Princess Bride.

Before I could say “you killed my father, prepare to die,” scalding hot tea filled my mouth. I wanted to yell at them to stop, only Feish plugged my nose and I had no body control, which meant I had a choice to swallow or choke to death on tea.

I swallowed.

The tea burned a hot path down my insides, and not in the pleasant way that whiskey does. No, this was a true burn that left my tongue and the inside of my mouth aching. Which meant the next mouthful hurt even more.

“Drink. You have to drink, or it will be bad,” Feish said.

Gran hovered over me. “What did she drink?”

“Potion.” Feish shrugged. “I don’t know what kind. Fae sparkling drink can be many things. Most not suitable for humans.”

Gran tsked at me. “Really? You drank an obvious magical drink and didn’t ask what it was?”

“Only one way out with it,” Feish whispered. “Sorry.”

I looked up at her and then at the tea. “Oh no.”

My insides were suddenly on fire in a way that I had never experienced since the food poisoning incident of ’99. On the plus side, my body was my own again. I lurched out of bed and ran for the nearest bathroom, where I didn’t throw up the tea or the potion. Nope, I was not so lucky.

Feish had finally given me her special tea, and it was burning as badly as if I’d chowed down on candy made of ghost peppers and cayenne.

Sometime later, I stumbled out of the bathroom, sure that I had to have lost fifteen pounds right there. I’d stripped off my clothing and necklace, and showered to wash away the sweat as well as any residual . . . well, residue. Though I was clean, my butt was still on fire and I wanted to sit it on a block of ice to ease the burn, not that it would work.

Grimacing, I stood next to the bed as I pulled my wet hair back into a messy braid. Feish and Suzy were downstairs now, and it was just me and Gran. Daylight streamed in through the window.

“That should learn you,” Gran said without a hint of malice in her voice. I sighed.

“I just . . .” I didn’t want to explain to her that I’d seen Crash fawning over two beautiful young women, less than half my age and probably less than half my weight, and it had stung. That was the truth of it, it had stung. And the worst part was that I’d gone and shown my hand to him. He knew I liked him.

I sighed. “I was stupid.”

“Yes, but what were you running from?”

At first I thought she meant my feelings for Crash. Then I realized she likely meant the idiots in black.

I took a step, grimaced at the way my body felt—particularly that awful hot spot that kept puckering in pain—and started moving toward the stairs. Down I went, gripping the banister for dear life. “Doesn’t matter.”

“I think it does,” Gran said, following me. “And those two won’t tell me.”

I made it to the kitchen, where Suzy and Feish were baking together, Eric overseeing them. It smelled like apple pie to me. My stomach griped that it hadn’t eaten in a long time, but the exit area tightened against the thought of expelling anything else.

“You need toast.” Feish was already on it, steering me away from the pie I’d smelled. “Come here. I make it.”

Damn, she was probably right, but that pie smelled amazing.

Suzy glanced at me. “I called Corb, let him know we were okay. I mean, he’d only left a dozen messages on my phone.”

“Did he freak out?” I grimaced as I sat on one of the kitchen chairs, adjusting myself gingerly. Gran’s house had been sold with all the original furniture still in it, which meant nothing had changed from when I’d lived in Savannah over twenty years before. The seats were still as hard as they’d ever been. I needed a donut to sit on.

Eric handed me a plate of toast. “Here.” Feish glared at him as if he’d stolen her thunder.

I ignored them both and motioned for Suzy to go on.

“After he yelled at me for like five minutes straight, he seemed okay.” Suzy cut a piece off the apple she was holding and popped it in her mouth.

Five minutes of yelling? That was not okay. I cringed at the thought of how much he was going to yell at me and then straightened my back. He was not my husband. Or my boyfriend. And really, he wasn’t even family anymore. Which meant he had no say over me, other than the fact that he was a mentor of sorts. Or had been. We’d been fired.

Damn, my head really didn’t want to wrap around that. I’d spent years thinking of change as a bad thing, something to be avoided, and that kind of hardwiring didn’t just go away. Which was why I’d stuck it out with Alan for so long. Far longer than was good for either of us.

A pang from my nether regions made me wince, and I stood up to finish my toast on my feet rather than sitting.

Suzy waved around a second piece of apple, cutting through my minor epiphany. “He said we should head to the Hollows early tonight, plead our case to the other mentors. He thinks they’ll reinstate us.”

But I wasn’t so sure I wanted that anymore. And before I agreed to do anything else, I needed to find out from Kinkly what was happening with the fairy ring. I’d missed two nights in a row, which meant I was out two enormous gems. I needed that money.

Especially now. But how did I contact her? I looked at Eric. “Hey, can you get a hold of Kinkly for me?”

He froze and his face flushed red. “Me? Why? I mean, I could try, but maybe she wouldn’t want to talk to me.” The words spluttered out of him, and I ducked my head so he couldn’t see me smile. He really had it bad for her.

“I just need to talk to her. If you could contact her?” I asked again.

His bowtie bobbed as he swallowed. “Yes, well, I could ask her.”

Gran hovered and I just stood there and ate my toast. Neither Feish nor Suzy said anything about the night before, or going through the doorway to what was basically a porn club, or the men in black, nothing. Eric was quiet now too after spluttering about contacting Kinkly.

“Eric,” I said, drawing his attention to me, “you know a lot about the shadow world, being a counsellor to shadow creatures. What would happen if Suzy and I broke away from the Hollows Group? Do you think we could make it on our own?”

Suzy sucked in a sharp breath but said nothing, waiting as we looked to Eric. Not because he was a man, but because he was smart. We needed smart. He touched his bowtie and then his glasses.