I’m good in hand-to-hand combat. Assuming I don’t black out.

My cards in this poker game suck. I need a redeal. Or at least a few wild cards.

I’m itching to meet the supposedly legendary sidhe-seer leader, stand in front of her and take her measure. I wonder about the women she commands, what their talents are, whether one of them might be like me, able to sense the Sinsar Dubh. I try to assure myself the likelihood is slim.

But if the Unseelie King really did make us to serve as prison guards for his dark disaster, it seems logical he’d also have made more like me, in case it ever got out.

I heave a conflicted sigh and decide I’m being paranoid. The sidhe-seers told me no one in their entire history at the abbey was ever able to sense the Book like Alina and me, none of them are Nulls, and considering we come from the mother house in the originating homeland where it was interred by the king himself, I sincerely doubt the “away teams” were likewise gifted. In fact, they’re probably diluted from millennia of living in far-off lands, divorced from their heritage. Good military fighters but little more.

“Christ, stop sighing, you’ll blow us off the fucking road. Something you want to talk about, Mac.”

I look over at Ryodan, inscrutable as ever in the dim light from the dashboard.

I doubt my threat to quit “protecting” him was motivation. Ryodan pursues his own agenda. “Why did you agree to help free the abbey? You never do anything unless there’s something in it for you.”

“I want their new leader off the streets. She and her followers are killing Fae. Bad for business.”

“What are you going to do with her? Kill her?” I don’t like that thought. Though I, too, intend to see her deposed, I want her neutralized, not dead. There’s been too much death in Dublin.

“Perhaps she can be recalibrated into a useful weapon. If not, then yes.”

“What happened when you and Dageus met with R’jan?” Dageus had insisted on privacy for the meeting in Ryodan’s office. I’d loitered outside, wishing I still had his cell phone with the handy eavesdropping Skull & Crossbones app. “Did he agree to send an army to hunt the Hag?”

“In exchange for an additional seat at our table.”

“Who? There are no other princes.” I wonder about that. Where are the replacements? Are they trapped somewhere, like Christian was in the Unseelie prison, becoming? Did eating Unseelie really hasten his transformation?

“An advisor whose vote will tie his with those of the Unseelie.”

“And you allowed it?”

He says nothing, but I don’t need him to. Of course he did. “The Unseelie and Seelie will always vote against each other out of sheer, stupid principle, canceling each other out, giving you the permanent upper hand.”

When he still says nothing, I resume staring out at the scenery. And jerk. “What the hell?” I exclaim.

Ryodan looks over at me, then out the window beyond me. He slams the brakes so hard my ghouls catapult from the roof and explode in a tangle of chittering black robes on the road in front of us. “Fuck, I didn’t even notice.”

The scenery has changed. Drastically. Here, just ten minutes from the abbey, spring has been at work, not with gentle brushes, but wild splashes from the vats of a painter gone mad.

“Back up,” I demand, but he’s already doing it.

We find the line of demarcation, similar to the one the Shades left outside Dublin, an eighth of a mile back.

I leap from the Hummer and straddle the line, one booted foot on each side. My ghouls pack in beside me, behind me. I tune them out, a thing I’m getting better at the more smelly, dusty time we spend together.

To my left is a thin covering of grass and weeds. To my right is a carpet of grass too tall and dense to be cut by anything but perhaps a strong man with a scythe. Fat poppies bob, black and velvety in the moonlight, and atop willowy stands of tall reeds, shadowy lilies sway.

On my left are newly budded trees with young, tender leaves.

On my right enormous, ancient live oaks, massive branches stretching skyward, others reaching low to sweep the earth, explode with greenery, draped with lush vines.

Here, a weak cricket chirps, wakened from the unexpected and brutal winter to a paltry meal.

There, birds trill an exotic aria, tree frogs sing, and the heavily draped limbs rustle as small creatures leap from one vine-fringed branch to the next.

Foreboding fills me.

If you’ll just come to the abbey, Kat had said, you’ll see what I mean. This thaw … I thought when the fire-world threatening our home was gone … och, but then it didn’t and it turns out it wasn’t …

She was trying to tell me. She was asking for my help. Engrossed in my own problems, I’d heard none of it.

There’s another thing I’d like to be discussing with you, if you’ve the time. About Cruce. Seeing how you know more about Fae princes than any of us …

She’d told me his cage was still holding.

Was it a lie? What else could explain this?

I shoot a dark look at Ryodan. “I thought you knew what was going on out here.”

“It would seem there are a few things my sources neglected to mention.”

“Why wouldn’t your men tell you?” I fish.

“My men are not my sources.”

That was half of what I wanted to know. “Who is?”

His slants me a silent, Nice try. Not.

I get back in the Hummer.

On the driver’s side.

And lock the door.

He laughs. “Ah, Mac, I don’t think so.”

I lunge across the wide console, fling open the passenger door, slam it into gear, and start rolling forward.

Fast.

Ryodan curses and does exactly what I would have done, lopes alongside and explodes in, managing to dwarf the cavernous interior. “Strip my gears, woman, you’re dead.”

I shoot him a derisive look. “I haven’t stripped gears since I was ten.” I step on it and shift rapidly.

“Big Wheels don’t count,” Ryodan mocks.

“My daddy’s sixty-four-and-a-half Mustang.” After that debacle, Mom and Dad no longer left any keys hanging by the garage door. Sherriff Bowden brought me home. I’d made it a half a mile of screeching, jerking stops and starts that apparently the entire town of Ashford was witnessing out their nosy windows. The pillows I’d packed in to help me reach the pedals and steering wheel had worked as air bags when I hit the telephone pole.

It had been a while before Daddy got over that one.

Then he’d done what any wise parent would have: taught me to drive.

Give me raw, testy, ferocious power any day of the week.

I can find the sweet spot in my sleep.

I park outside the elaborate new gate on the enormous new stone wall that wasn’t there two months ago.

Ryodan intuits my thoughts. It’s not difficult, given my mouth is slightly ajar. Again. I don’t know why I bother with preconceptions anymore. Even simple ones like expecting that when I close a door the room on the other side still exists, with drywall and carpet and ceiling lights, neatly intact. For all I know, it doesn’t and never has. Perhaps it vanishes until I want it again, stored away on some cosmic zip drive to conserve quantum energy.

“It wasn’t here last month either. Bloody hell, that wall wasn’t here three weeks ago. And she said nothing of it. It seems our headmistress has been keeping secrets.”

“Along with your inept sources.” I’d really like to know who they are. I’d like them working for me. I’d insist on better info.

Right. If you’d wanted better info, my conscience pricks, you could have come out here any time. Maybe listened when she asked for help. Did you really think it was over? Did you honestly delude yourself for even one minute that Cruce would lie dormant?

Has Kat, like Rowena before her, been seduced by the evil that slumbers a thousand feet of stone beneath her pillow? I shiver. Not Kat. But where is she? And why did she tell us none of this?