“But Fae hate iron.”

“I know. That’s what makes me wonder if it’s drawing it somehow. I’m not saying it’s coming to iron because it likes it. Maybe it’s trying to destroy the iron by icing it. Maybe one of the Fae summoned it to destroy the only means we have of imprisoning them. Maybe trying to understand something that can open a multidimensional portal, sail across the sky, open another portal and vanish, is as much an exercise in futility as trying to divine the motives of God.”

“You believe in God?”

“Dude. Only God could have created physics.”

I snicker. “Or Pop-Tarts.”

He grins. “See. There you are. Proof of the divine. All in the chocolate smudge around your mouth.”

“I got chocolate on my face?”

“Kind of hard to see with all those ziplock lines but yeah.”

I sigh. Someday I’m going to be around Dancer with no guts in my hair, no weird clothes on, no black eyes or blood, and no food on my face. He probably won’t recognize me. “But what about those two places in Faery?” I say.

“What about them?”

“There’s no way there’s iron in Faery.”

“Assumption. Potentially erroneous. The walls came down. Everything got fractured and Faery has been bleeding through to our world. Maybe parts of our world are bleeding through to Faery, and there are railroad ties or bells in those parts. We need samples from Faery.”

“And how the feck are we going to get those? Why don’t we just try to lure it with iron and see what happens?”

“That’s plan B. Let’s try to get samples first and I’ll keep analyzing this stuff. There’s something I’m missing. I can feel it in my gut. I need more time with the evidence. Besides, even if we got it to come, what would we do with it then? We need to know what draws it and how to stop it. You get the samples. I’ll work on the rest. If there’s no iron in Faery, we know we’re back at square one without having to round up tons of iron and find a place to stack it all up where nobody will get hurt.”

I push up and head for the door.

As I’m leaving, he says, “Don’t go to Faery yourself, Mega. Make a sifter do it for you. We can’t lose another month. I got a bad feeling about these iced places.”

“ ’Cause they keep exploding?”

He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “No. Like there’s something worse about them. A lot worse. I can’t explain. It’s just a hunch.”

I know Dancer. When he gets a hunch, what that really means is his subconscious is seeing something he hasn’t wrapped his conscious brain around yet. Every time he’s ever told me he had a hunch, he’s worked his way around an epiphany. I trust him like I never trusted anybody. If he wants samples and more time, he’s got it.

I head up and out into the Dublin night. A light snow is falling. The moon has a blood red ring.

There’s one sure place to find a sifting Fae. Conveniently, it’s also the third place we need a sample from. With luck, I’ll be back here in a few hours with the final three ziplocks to complete our evidence chain.

My luck ain’t been so good lately.

Chester’s. Feckin-A, I hate this place even more than I used to. The line outside tonight is nuts. It’s zero degrees in Dublin, snow’s begun to fall in earnest, there’s a killer wind kicking up and still five blocks of folks are shivering outside, bundled in layers of clothing, huddled together waiting to get in.

I blast past them in fast-mo, skidding on an icy spot, whiz around one of Ryodan’s human bouncers who’s got his hands too full controlling the crowd to stop me, jump the ladder down to the main entrance and explode through tall black doors into the club.

It’s rocking tonight same as always: music thumping, lights flashing, folks partying up a storm. We got something icing our city, killing innocents everywhere, turning it into an arctic zone in June, and this is what folks are doing about it. Dancing, laughing, getting drunk, getting laid, acting like the walls didn’t fall, the world didn’t lose half the human race, and nothing’s changed.

I stand on the platform inside the door that overlooks it all for a sec, scowling, blowing on my hands, trying to warm them up. I need gloves. And a scarf and earmuffs. The scowl doesn’t last long because I get distracted from being pissed by the song that’s playing. It’s one of my oldie faves from a few decades back, heavy on bass, and it’s so loud it vibrates the soles of my combat boots, all the way up my legs and into my belly. My bones rumble with resonance. I love music because it’s so fecking brilliant. Music is math, and math is the structure of everything and pretty much perfect. Before everything got so crazy, Dancer was teaching me stuff about math that dazzled me.

My scowl comes back.

Jo’s in the kiddie subclub, dressed all sexy, laughing at something some skanky waitress said, moving sleek and pretty with the music as she goes from table to table, chatting up the customers and occasionally looking around, like she’s keeping an eye on things in general, or watching for someone. She’s still got those highlights and sparkly boobs. I’ll be real glad when that stuff’s gone and she’s the Jo I know again.

I’m going to make her quit tonight. We don’t owe a dead man anything, and if the other dudes think to try to enforce our contracts, well, we’re walking out anyway and they can just try.

I groan and roll my eyes, realizing I can’t make her quit tonight because I can’t tell her he’s dead. I can’t tell nobody he’s dead. Only me, Christian, and whoever moved their bodies — assuming it wasn’t Christian — know they got killed. It’s only been three days. Folks might not decide he’s dead for a while yet. Knowing her, she’ll stick around for weeks, hoping he comes back!

I feel a little perturbed. I been gone almost a month and she doesn’t look sad at all. Didn’t she miss me? Worry about me?

I shove that thought away and look up at the ceiling, eyeing the girders, wondering what kind of metal was used in the construction of Chester’s. If this place is as old as it seems, I’d think it’d have to be iron because I don’t think the method of making steel was figured out till recent times. Well, recent in terms of how old this place is. Then I wonder how old iron is. Then I wonder if Ryodan and his dudes just spelled the whole mess together. Or maybe they created their own kind of metal or brought it with them from whatever planet they were born on.

I wonder who’s in charge now that I killed Barrons and Ryodan. Lor?

As if my thoughts conjured him, I hear him say behind me, real close to my ear: “Aw, honey, you got some nerve coming here.”

I turn around to say suspiciously, “What do you mean by that?” but he’s not there by the time I complete my rotation. I wonder if I imagined him, a product of my guilty conscience. Then I decide if I really did hear him say what I thought he said, he was only referring to how Ryodan’s been looking for me for a month and now I waltz in like I never been gone, and he thinks Ryodan’s going to toast my ass for missing work so long. Because, like, he doesn’t know Ryodan’s dead either.

This is exactly why I hate lies. The second you tell one, you know something everybody else doesn’t know and you have to constantly keep reminding yourself to behave like you don’t know it, so they don’t decide you’re acting weird and figure out you know something they don’t. If they do, they’ll back you against a wall and demand to know why you’re acting weird and you’ll say something stupid and they’ll use it to trip you up with. Then everything comes spilling out and you’re in ten kinds of trouble! It’s so much easier not to tell any lies to begin with.

This is going to be a tough pretending gig. Reminders of Ryodan are everywhere in here. Heck, Ryodan is Chester’s! It’s, hands-down, the hardest place to pretend he’s not dead that I could possibly be. But I need those samples. The HFK is icing something practically every day, and Dancer thinks things are going to get worse.