CONTENTS

Pas

Copyright

About

Glossary

Title Page

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

Epilogue

PAS

Book Four of

War of the Alphas

SM REINE

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

This book is sold DRM-free so that it can be enjoyed in any way the reader sees fit. Please keep all links and attributions intact when sharing. All rights reserved.

Cover model photos sourced from Taria Reed at The Reed Files.

Copyright © SM Reine 2015

Published by Red Iris Books

1180 Selmi Drive, Suite 102

Reno, NV 89512

SERIES BY SM REINE

The Descent Series

The Ascension Series

Seasons of the Moon

The Cain Chronicles

Preternatural Affairs

Tarot Witches

War of the Alphas

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ABOUT PAS

Deirdre Tombs is a Beta without her Alpha. Everton Stark is missing, just days in advance of the election to replace Rylie Gresham as leader of all North American shifters.

She can’t control his allies anymore. She also can’t win the election without him.

Everything will be lost unless Deirdre can become a better monster than Stark.

OMEGA

The weakest shapeshifter in the pack.

BETA

The right hand to the pack’s leader.

ALPHA

A gifted shifter with the power to control other shifters.

PAS

A Greek word meaning “all kinds of men.”

I

The riots were miles away now, but Deirdre Tombs still felt the pulse of violence within the city. There were no windows left to shatter, no more screaming, and nothing left to burn, but anger flowed through the gaean neighborhoods in a constant undercurrent.

Rage had been scarred into the face of the city. It showed in the tags spray-painted on the walls—phrases like, “YOUR SANCTUARY, YOUR SELFISHNESS.” People had posted fake election posters of Rylie Gresham with the eyes blacked out and bullet holes in her forehead. There was still glass in the gutters. The smell of melted rubber lingered in the air.

Nothing was going to alleviate that anger except the election for a new Alpha. It was only hours away now. The clock hands turned, winding tension tighter and tighter throughout New York City, throughout North America, within Deirdre’s chest.

Something was going to snap.

“Steady,” Deirdre said. “Wait for my mark.”

“I heard you the first seventeen times,” Lucifer said. The vampire lord was using a Walkie Talkie from the opposite rooftop. She could make out his dark figure moving against the stormy black night. “When’s your mark gonna happen? I’m bored.”

She didn’t dignify that with an answer. Lucifer might have thought they were on bantering terms, but she wasn’t in the mood.

Deirdre turned her binoculars on the street-level windows of the building across the way. People were moving inside even though it was far too late for humans to be at work. These wouldn’t be phlebotomists or nurses, but guards. Human guards armed with standard bullets and wooden stakes.

They should have been carrying silver, but they hadn’t thought they would need to guard a blood bank against an attack from a shifter like Deirdre.

A vampire among her party leaned in to whisper in her ear. “Two o’clock.”

Her gaze snapped to the position he indicated. There was an unmarked white van coming around the corner. It didn’t need a logo for identification with all the antennas thrusting from the hood toward the violet sky.

January Lazar had arrived.

Deirdre pressed the talk button on her Walkie Talkie. “Mark.”

She stepped off the edge of the roof.

Her trench coat billowed around her as she fell, baring legs encased in leather and a man’s combat boots. She struck the sidewalk in a crouch. It didn’t even hurt to fall six stories anymore. Her body didn’t burn with the faintest hint of healing fever.

Vampires landed around her, graceful in the night, pallid and silent.

January Lazar was already out of her van, camera shouldered with a mounted spotlight that was currently turned off. The mundane woman was her own reporter and crew, a one-woman news station. It had nothing to do with secrecy and everything to do with pride. There would be nobody for her to share the credit with.

She was flushed with excitement as her camera tracked Deirdre across the street.

They didn’t speak to each other. Their agreement was one that Deirdre felt best left undiscussed.

Deirdre had discovered the private email address that Stark had used to contact January among his possessions at Chadwick Hawfinch’s high-rise. In the past week, Deirdre had sent the reporter details for three different promotional opportunities. Three different raids on three different types of facilities. And there had been three news reports promoting Stark’s agenda to the preternatural population of North America.

But they never discussed it.

January still believed she was in touch with Stark. She didn’t realize she had anything to talk about with Deirdre.

The woman who approached the blood bank wasn’t merely Deirdre Tombs anymore, though. She was Stark’s Beta. His potential Alpha mate. Representative of the cause that they both stood for, the election they needed to win, the gaeans they must save.

Deirdre was an idea.

Her booted heel slammed into the front door of the blood bank. The handle shattered. The door swung open.

She entered, flanked by a vampire named Stoker on one side and Vidya on the other—the only non-vampire she had brought, solely for the impression she gave with razor-blade wings spread.

Guards in ill-fitting security uniforms moved forward to greet the assault. They were independent contractors without any OPA training or battle magic. Not a real threat.

“Get on the floor!” Deirdre roared in a voice that wasn’t hers, lifting her Ruger LCP .380 in one hand and a Glock in the other.

She swept the room with the muzzles, aiming at the people who approached. Between the two guns, she had twenty-four bullets, and her aim was great.

If she emptied her magazines, no guards would survive.

They knew that. They could do the math.

More than that, they recognized her.

It didn’t take a single bullet or vampire bite to drop the three guards in the waiting room. Two of them hit their knees instantly, batons falling from their hands. The third crumpled when Vidya pistol-whipped him.

“Secure them.” Deirdre didn’t have to specify whom she was ordering at this point; she had already made it clear who would be in charge of restraining hostages, and Lucifer’s vampires swept in with zip ties.

She lingered long enough to make sure the vampires handled the guards gently. There would be blood spilled that night, but if she had her way, none of it would come from living bodies.

Lucifer’s people were careful.

One of the guards was weeping, gazing at Deirdre as though she were Death walking in a human body.

She headed back into the lab.

The green glow of the exit sign reflected off of the glass walls, the shiny metal equipment. It tinted the reclining chairs a sickly shade of brown.

More guards moved through the rear of the room. They emerged from the storage area and drew their batons.

“Four of them,” Stoker said.

These ones didn’t surrender. Whether it was because they’d had more warning or because they didn’t recognize their attackers didn’t really matter.

Deirdre met the first of them by driving her elbow into his gut, slamming his head into a cabinet, kneeing him to the ground.

A second mundane tried to get at her while she was distracted.

She swung her Ruger under the opposite arm and fired from the armpit, planting a bullet in his kneecap.

Vidya shrieked as she flared her wings. The strangeness of the sound paused the other two guards mid-step, giving the vampires enough time to move in from behind.

A short scuffle, and they too went down.

“Humans!” Stoker laughed. He fist-bumped another vampire, whose name Deirdre hadn’t bothered to learn.

They were smiling, enjoying the assault. The vampires always had fun when Deirdre took them on field trips. She wished that she could have been so relaxed.

“Check the other rooms,” Deirdre said.

Vidya did. She returned a moment later. “We’re clear.”

Just like that, they had taken the blood bank, with so little resistance from the existing staff that they might as well have not been there at all.

It was frightening how easy this was becoming: the ability to knock down government installations, even though she didn’t even have Stark’s strategic mind or his ability to compel other shifters.

Deirdre only had a vision, two handguns, and an authoritative voice.

Apparently that was all it took.

She popped the Walkie Talkie off her belt. “Bring her in.”

Lucifer escorted January Lazar into the blood bank. He walked her past the disabled guards slowly enough that she could record everything. It would be streaming the feed to her computer at home, saving each second of video as she filmed it.

They had lost almost all the footage from an earlier raid when a guard cast a magical EMP and wiped out January’s solid-state drive, so now they weren’t taking that risk.

Stark’s message—Deirdre’s message—would reach the masses, no matter what the opposition tried to pull against them.

Deirdre turned to one of the female vampires, who had identified herself as Shaniqua. “How do I look?” Deirdre asked, patting down her jacket and headscarf.

“You look like you just raided a blood bank,” Shaniqua said. She was too busy eyeballing the blood bags other vampires were loading into coolers to care how the Beta looked.

Niamh would have cared. She would have dropped everything to help primp.

Deirdre leaned in close to the reflective side of a refrigerator for a few quick adjustments. Shaniqua was right. The night on a rainy rooftop had done no favors for her hair or clothes, and she wanted to look artfully ruffled, not sloppy.

Then January was there, and the lights were on Deirdre.

“What do you want to say this time?” January asked. “I’m rolling, so start whenever you’re ready.”

Deirdre was ready for the question. She’d been practicing with notecards all day when she should have been sleeping.

“It’s in a vampire’s nature to drink human blood. There are no substitutes, artificial or animal, that are nutritionally complete. More importantly, nothing satisfies a vampire’s instincts nearly as well. Vampires are hunters. They need to be able to hunt. They need to be able to eat.” Hadn’t she written something paralleling vampire instincts to shifter instincts? She couldn’t remember now. She skipped ahead, trying not to blink in the brightness of the lights. “Once Everton Stark is Alpha, all gaeans will be allowed to follow their instincts—including vampires.”

She paused to take a breath, but in that heartbeat of silence, January turned off the camera.

The reporter was done filming.

Deirdre tried to conceal her surprise. “I had more to say.”

“No, that was good, you’re great.” January took the light off of the top of her camera.

Was it really that good? She’d barely said anything at all.

The vampires were watching Deirdre. They weren’t a large enough faction to be worthy of courting—they would barely have any impact on the election. But she needed Lucifer’s people to provide support to her personally. She had promised them this blood bank raid, and coverage from January Lazar, to help legitimize their problems.

For the moment, they were happy to be emptying the refrigerators of blood bags, and distracted trying to guard the guards. They hadn’t noticed that Deirdre’s statement had been cut short.

She checked the time. It was still early—at least for vampires. “We can probably hit another blood bank tonight. Get more blood and more footage.”

“I don’t think so.” January yawned and stuffed the light into her padded case.

“What do you mean, you don’t think so?” Deirdre tried not to sound irritated by January’s resistance. Stark had always managed to be civil to the reporter regardless of her behavior, so he obviously thought it was important to treat January well.

“Following you around doesn't generate good ratings anymore.” January shuffled around for the batteries, inventorying her equipment. “It’s not interesting when nothing goes wrong. I’m not going to say it would be better if a few of your people got staked, but…well, it would be easier to justify giving you a prime time slot.”

“You said you’d give us coverage up until the election,” Deirdre said.

“And the election’s almost here.” She tucked the padded case under her arm. “Give yourself the day off, huh? Kick back, take it easy, don’t worry about the polls. Nothing exciting is going to happen between now and whenever people start entering the voting booths.”

Deirdre’s irritation got the better of her. She grabbed January’s equipment case. “But we’re still polling several points behind Rylie Gresham. You have to keep documenting this.”

January’s eyes sparked with anger. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Someone shouted from the other room.

“Stop!”

And that word was punctuated by a shrill scream.

A human scream.

Deirdre bolted to the doorway.

Chaos rocked the blood bank’s waiting room, difficult to distinguish with the lights turned off. Deirdre could only see one person crouched on top of another, holding the lower body by the shoulders.

She didn’t have to look behind her to know that January had already unpacked her camera and started recording again, faster than should have been possible. The reporter was good. She could switch from cool disinterest to recording within instants, like she had a sixth sense for drama.

Deirdre approached the people struggling on the floor. “Someone tell me what’s going on!”

Lucifer blocked her path. “One of the guards tried to cast this at my vamps while our backs were turned.” He lifted a spellpage marked with a jagged rune. Clearly something that was intended to cause significant damage—probably something fiery, which would have been instantly fatal to vampires. “My boy took her down.”

Now Deirdre could see them. She could see the witch’s legs thrashing as a vampire buried his fangs deep into her jugular.

It almost looked like an intimate position, the way that they embraced each other. They could have been making love.

But the witch was gurgling wetly. She was dying.

January Lazar’s spotlight turned on them. Where the light touched, vivid color flooded the scene. The blood became vibrant crimson rather than black. The woman’s pale, panicked face was pink.

Fear surged within Deirdre. She didn’t dare show it. She only allowed herself to show anger. “I said no casualties!”

Lucifer grabbed her when she attempted to pass him, fingers digging into her sleeve. “You also said that we should be allowed to follow our instincts. That’s a big part of Stark’s platform. He wants us to be able to do exactly this.”

January was filming Deirdre again. The spotlight was so bright that Deirdre could barely make out the reporter’s excited expression behind the camera.

This would be great for ratings.

Worse, Deirdre had said that vampires should be able to follow their instincts. But that was political bluster, whereas her insistence that there be no casualties was her preference.

There was no time to hesitate. She couldn’t stand around debating whether it was better to allow the vampire to feed, and demonstrate the platform that she was promoting, or punish him for disobeying her. Vampires were easy to kill. She could deliver swift justice before anyone thought to stop her.

If Stark had been there, he would have known what to do, and he would have done it swiftly.

The witch’s eyes rolled around to focus on Deirdre. She pleaded silently for help over the vampire’s shoulder.

January was filming.

They were still ten points behind Rylie in the polls.

Deirdre was numb from her lips to her toes as she faced the camera. January had her framed so that the attack on the floor illustrating her words would be visible behind her. “Gaeans should be able to obey their instincts.” It felt like Stark’s voice coming out of her body. “When Everton Stark is Alpha, the laws will change. And all gaeans will be free.”

“Good,” January muttered. “So good.”

The vampire dropped the guard. She fell to the floor, boneless and limp.

Others among the murder swarmed. There was a lot of blood in a single person, more than enough to give everybody a taste.

Deirdre stepped back to give the reporter room to film it.

“This is going to be great for the polls,” Lucifer said, standing back from the others. A vampire lord was better than his instincts. He wouldn’t join the frenzy. But that was easy for him; he had been snacking on Niamh, which meant he wasn’t starving as badly as his followers. “If this doesn’t close the gap, nothing will.”

“Great,” Deirdre said.

It didn’t sound like her voice at all.

Through the clustered bodies of the vampires, Deirdre saw the witch guard’s eyes sliding closed.

II

The early hours of morning brought velvety silence upon New York’s streets.

By that time, Deirdre was already home—at least, what currently passed for home at Chadwick Hawfinch’s high-rise—accompanied by a dozen satiated vampires and coolers filled with blood bags.

There would be a party to celebrate the night’s victory. They loved parties, those vampires. They loved to crawl under clouds of lethe and vibrating bass to forget how badly they were starving. They loved to share blood while clinging to one another, bodies twisted with rapture.

They loved to pretend they weren’t dead.

Normally, Deirdre helped entertain them. It was good for their alliance. It was what Stark would have done.

With the dead witch’s eyes in her mind, she couldn’t bring herself to linger.

She went upstairs.

Just a couple of months earlier, Deirdre had been invited to Everton Stark’s room at the asylum for the first time. She had been surprised to find that he’d lived in the same squalor that the rest of the pack did—the same kind of tiny, water-stained, concrete box that his Omega had slept in.

At the time, Deirdre had attributed his choice of living environment to a sense of equality with the people who obeyed him. Psychopathic or not, she had believed that Stark was truly a man of the people.

Now she knew that it had nothing to do with equality.

She knew so many more things than she used to.

Deirdre had followed Stark’s lead when choosing one of Chadwick Hawfinch’s apartments for herself. It was as sparse as those that the vampires occupied throughout the rest of the building, and positioned directly above the lobby celebration. The floor was thin. She could hear them carousing in the way that only vampires flush with blood would.

At other times, the vampires would be quiet, sullen, low-energy, and miserable. Always on the brink of starvation, never capable of dying because they had already passed on from the lives they used to know. But tonight, they had fresh blood. Some of them had even sipped it from the veins of the guard before she died. A rare pleasure.

They were happy.

Deirdre could hear their happiness below her as she bolted the door to her apartment.

When she flicked on the bedside lamp, cockroaches scattered.

She’d been itchy ever since taking that apartment. Deirdre wasn’t sure if it was something she imagined because of the cockroach infestation or if there were bedbugs. She healed lesions too quickly to tell if she were really being chewed upon.

Chances were good she imagined the itchy sensations.

She wasn’t imagining the constant skittering of insect legs within the walls or the drip-drip-drip of leaking rain.

The mattress whined as she sat. The brown stains on the exposed, flattened pillow top could have been perceived as coffee spills if she’d been feeling optimistic. She hadn’t even kicked off her boots before climbing up. What was one more stain among a thousand others?

Deirdre clamped the intake bracelet on her wrist.

The bite of metal teeth didn’t hurt anymore. The sting must have been followed by healing fever, but she didn’t feel that either.

Vampires thudded downstairs while she took a cube of lethe from a wooden box on her bedside table. The faint glow of blue turned her latte-brown skin a sickly gray. When she rolled the cube between the pad of her forefinger and thumb, the lethe within swirled silvery-slick, like oil on the surface of the ocean tossed by a hurricane.

A sound that wasn’t celebration caught her ear. She nudged the broken blinds up an inch, peering down at the street through a crack between the boards nailed on the other side.

Movement swirled over the dark street, punctuated by the flashlights on cell phones, some lighters, a flashlight or two. Some kind of citizen patrol. Wouldn’t be long before that front of the storm smashed into an OPA patrol and turned into violence.

Didn’t matter to Deirdre. The election was coming. There’d be a new Alpha by the time the sun rose again twice, and there’d be nothing worth rioting over anymore.

That was the theory, anyway.

She let the blinds fall back into place. Closed her fist around the cube of lethe.

Someone screamed downstairs.

Probably Niamh.

The vampires laughed.

They’d been enjoying the harpy as their toy ever since Stark left them. Taking turns drinking her blood. Sharing it by the milliliter.

And Deirdre let them.

Gage wouldn’t have let them, but he wasn’t there. She’d killed him. He’d forced her to do it. And then Stark had left too, and Deirdre was alone.

She sank against the headboard, shutting her eyes.

Gods, she hurt all over. It wasn’t even cold in her apartment, not like it was outside—she’d found a couple of space heaters and kept them on high all the time—but Deirdre felt miserable.

She slipped the cube into the intake bracelet. The drug heated in her veins.

The emptiness didn’t leave, but it numbed. It didn’t hurt as much. It was a veil between her and the high-rise, the vampires six feet deep, the sense that she was becoming Stark breath by breath.

Yeah. Deirdre knew a lot of new things about Stark these days.

Too many things.

Election day arrived without fanfare.

Midnight found Deirdre and Geoff near the polling station in Chelsea. She’d posted teams of her allies around the city, stretching them as thin as she dared, trying to provide protection against the attacks to come.

And there would definitely be attacks.

Deirdre watched the election unfold through the scope of a sniper rifle.

The sun crawled overhead, shadows tracked between the buildings, and people streamed through the elementary school. They entered the auditorium through the street and exited on the playground.

While people were inside the polling station, she couldn’t see what was happening, but she could imagine it easily.

The gaean voters would write their names on the log at the entry table. Volunteers would give them a sticker proudly declaring “I Voted for the Alpha!” Then the voters would enter curtained booths, touch the name of the faction they supported, and leave with the pride of having performed their civic duty.

Hopefully they’d get home safely after that. Hopefully there wouldn’t be more riots catching people on their way back to their jobs, lives, and families.

Deirdre didn’t put much stock in hope. That was why she had the sniper rifle.

But the morning of the election was quiet. She was tense at midnight, remaining watchful through the dawn hours. After a little while, watching the voters through the scope got tedious.

Nothing happened.

There were fewer voters during the daytime hours. Many gaeans had normal jobs at that time, and the vampires couldn’t venture outside without getting burned.

Nobody broke into fights. A few loud arguments on the street? Sure. But no blows were exchanged. The riots didn’t resurge on the surrounding block, and there wasn’t a single glimmer of sidhe magic, unseelie or otherwise.

It was surprisingly boring.

When the sun started to dip below the horizon again, Deirdre exchanged positions with Geoff, one of the few surviving asylum shifters. She had picked him to back her up in Chelsea because he seemed unlikely to stab her in the back.

So far, so good.

Once he took the sniper rifle, she tried to rest. She should have slept, but she couldn't let her guard down to close her eyes. Instead, she watched the exit polls on a news website.

“The race is currently too close to call,” January Lazar said, voice piped from a speaker on the back of the tablet. She was looking even more carefully groomed than usual. This was a historic day, and the nation’s most ambitious reporter of preternatural politics intended to go down in history looking perfect. “The unseelie faction is making strides in polls along the West Coast, but has yet to close the twenty-point gap between them and the independent faction, led by Everton Stark.”

“Melchior,” Deirdre murmured, letting the tablet fall facedown on her stomach.

He was supposed to be the representative of the unseelie, but he hadn’t participated in the last few days of campaigning. Yet, like Stark, Melchior had people on his behalf working to promote his agenda—specifically, Pierce and Jaycee Hardwick. They were a photogenic couple. The gossip blogs loved them. And they had been working Iowa hard, making visits to Florida, and even kissing a baby or two. The poor babies.

The unseelie were doing pretty well in the polls without an actual Alpha to lead them. They would have done even better if Melchior had shown up on the campaign trail himself.

Too bad a dead man couldn’t campaign.

No matter how hard Deirdre and Rhiannon fought for their factions, Rylie was still leading in the polls. She had a six-point lead over Stark.

It was disgusting to think that after everything she had done to people, after all the pain Rylie had caused, people were still voting for the incumbent.

Why? Because she had the best name recognition? Because the idea of a changed government was frightening? Because people were complacent sheep who just wanted to be led by the wolf they knew best?

Deirdre wanted to believe that it couldn’t be that bad. No precincts were reporting yet, so there were no hard numbers.

This early in the day, anyone could win.

She hoped that didn’t mean that the gaean people were going to lose.

Midnight approached. Deirdre and Geoff swapped positions a few more times, alternating between napping and watching the elementary school.

Once the night grew black enough, most gaeans disappeared. Someone turned off the lights in the gymnasium and vampires emerged to take their turns voting. It made it impossible to monitor activity inside the school. But there didn’t seem to be a need. Everything was quiet.

“Come on,” Geoff muttered under his breath. “Someone needs to give me an excuse to shoot them.”

“Down, boy.” Deirdre was stretched out on the catwalk under a rooftop billboard advertising Synth-O-Neg pods for the Behexed—fake blood in a flavor meant to be universally appealing. Her boot dangled over the side. There was nothing between her kicking foot and the street two dozen stories down.

Geoff eased back from the rifle. “I was hyped up for today to be a disaster. What a buzzkill.” He made a face at Deirdre. “Aren’t you worried about falling?”

“Nope.” She rolled onto her side so that she could see him through the catwalk’s latticed metal. Beyond the edge of the building, she could see vampire voters moving around the street. There was a lone news crew—not January Lazar’s—interviewing people under red light to keep from offending their nocturnal eyes. “Are you?”

“Hell yeah I am,” Geoff said. “That’s why I’m standing on the roof like a sane person while you’re up there doing your best Batman impression.”

“More like Daredevil,” Deirdre said. “I’m not rich enough to be Batman.”

He scoffed. “Marvel. You’re sick.”

Joking about comic books took Deirdre uncomfortably close to thoughts about Niamh, who would be waiting back at the high rise to receive Lucifer’s voters.

Deirdre pushed the harpy out of her mind.

“This calm is almost worse than having fights to shoot at,” Geoff said. “It makes me think that the unseelie aren’t taking the election seriously. If they thought that this presented a threat to them, there would be magic dropping left and right.” He mimed bombs falling from the sky with his hands, making dramatic whistling and exploding noises.

Deirdre wanted to believe it was because the participants in the election had some integrity, but she knew that Geoff was right.

If Rhiannon wasn’t attacking, then it was because she didn’t need to attack.

She swung down from the catwalk. Deirdre landed on the roof beside Geoff.

“It should be fine. There’s no way to subvert the oath that’s binding the Alphas together. As soon as midnight hits…” She checked her watch. It was later than she’d realized. “In about fifteen minutes, all the voting booths are going to relay the votes to the witch who organized this. The magical tally will be instantaneous. There’s no way to get it wrong, defraud it, or duck the responsibility of winning.”

“Sure, that’s what they say on the news, but do you really trust them?” Geoff asked.

Deirdre didn’t need to trust them. She knew the all-powerful witch who had designed the spell—Marion Garin, a terrifying fourteen year old girl who was half-angel—and Deirdre had no doubt that it would work exactly the way it was supposed to.

But her unpleasantly close personal relationship with Marion, the Office of Preternatural Affairs, and all things Rylie Gresham wasn’t common knowledge among Stark’s people. She didn’t plan on allowing that to change any time soon. Her authority was tenuous enough without Stark’s presence.

If they found out that she was a traitor, she’d be ripped apart by vampires.

Deirdre and Geoff spent the remaining moments in uncomfortable silence. She kept turning the tablet on and then off again. She couldn’t bear the tension of watching reporters predict the election’s outcome.

She didn’t have to be watching the news when midnight hit.

Cries drifted above the city. They started a few blocks away and rippled through the nearby buildings.

Deirdre had expected the building storm of rage to end once the election ended. Instead, it felt like it was reaching a new fever pitch. The screaming—she hadn’t heard anything like it in weeks.

“What the hell?” Geoff asked.

Deirdre went for the tablet. Geoff got there first. He picked it up, hit the power button, and propped it against the wall where both of them could see.

They caught January Lazar’s statement mid-sentence.

“—close of polls, the unseelie have won the election,” January said. “The results are indisputable. The new Alpha for all North American gaeans will come from the unseelie faction.”

III

Deirdre didn’t need to summon Stark’s people back to the high-rise. They were already waiting for her there when she returned, converging from the shadows of night.

The vampires beat her there, anyway. There was no sign of the shifters yet. Once night fell, few things moved faster than vampires.

Walking into the high-rise’s lobby to face a sea of bloodless faces made Deirdre stop dead in her tracks.

Lucifer stood in front of them all, arms folded.

An admonishment hung on Deirdre’s lips. She wanted to scorn them for failing to stay outside, where they could have been doing crowd control. They should have been trying to stop the riots. They should have been saving lives.

“You said we’d win,” Lucifer said. “Stark was going to put us into power.”

Deirdre didn’t dare watch the vampires surrounding her, even though they were stepping forward to enclose her in a circle. She couldn’t make herself look weak in front of them, even if there was no reason to be afraid. They were vampires, dry and dusty, and she was a phoenix, a creature of flame.

She was stronger than them. All of them.

That was the theory, anyway.

In reality, she couldn’t summon her flames and the vampires had numbers on their side.

She wasn’t confident Gianna and the shifters would back her up if the murder attacked.

Deirdre put on her most authoritative voice. “We didn’t have reason to think that Stark would lose, much less that he would lose to the unseelie. Nobody has even seen Melchior for days.”

“Nobody has seen Stark in days, either.” Lucifer didn’t have to make the accusation outright. Deirdre knew what he was asking. It was the same thing that the packs had been asking ever since Deirdre took over Stark’s affairs in his absence.

Where is Everton Stark?

“Stark’s got better things to do than deal with you.” Deirdre was getting good at the steely voice and dead eyes, inviting Lucifer to challenge her authority. She’d sure been using that attitude enough recently to try to keep the vampires in line.

It didn’t seem to be working anymore.

Lucifer stepped up to her, almost close enough to bump chests. His red eyes glimmered with murder. “I made a deal with Stark because I thought he could give us what we need. I’m not feeling very confident in his abilities now.”

“You don’t have to be confident. You just have to obey.”

“Why? So that we can let him hand our people over to Melchior and Rhiannon?”

The vampires were closing in around them. It was strange how their bodies radiated no heat. That many vampires should have made the lobby feel stuffy, but Deirdre couldn’t feel them at all.

When the vampires moved, Deirdre could hear a faint slithering sound, like leather dragged over desert sand. It was the dry, raspy way the husks of their dead bodies moved. Slow, but not sluggish. They moved like predators as much as the shifters did, though it was far less animal and distinctly more alien.

Gianna and her wolves appeared at the edge of the lobby. It gave her no confidence. Deirdre didn’t trust them to have her back if the vampires attacked.

They didn’t look happy about the election’s outcome, either.

“This isn’t over until it’s over,” Deirdre said, letting her gaze sweep over the vampires, resting briefly on Gianna’s shifters, before moving back to Lucifer. She imagined herself a dictator speaking from the pulpit. She tried to radiate cool confidence. “Melchior hasn’t taken Rylie Gresham’s job yet. The magic isn’t in place. Those bastards cheated to close a twenty-point gap, and I’m going to find out how.”

“You’re not good enough,” Lucifer said. “I want Stark.”

Deirdre surprised herself by laughing. “You want Stark? You want Stark?” She funneled all of her frustration into making herself sound as disdainful as possible. “Your wants don’t matter, vampire. Remember who you are. Remember who you work for.” She closed the final inch between them, bumping him back. Deirdre was tall for a woman, a solid five foot eight without the boots. She made sure that Lucifer felt every inch of her height. “You’ll hear from Stark when he decides you deserve to hear from him.”

Lucifer’s tongue darted out to slide over his lower lip. There was no glisten of saliva. No hint of moisture in his body. He wasn’t cold like the Winter Court was cold, but room temperature. Void of life.

“That’s not good enough,” he said softly, flashing elongated canines. “We’re hungry. The blood from the bank was only enough to feed us all once, and we’ll need to feed again soon. When do we get more blood?”

“Soon,” Deirdre said.

“It better be soon. Because if you don’t feed us, then I’ll start to think that Stark only wanted to ‘help’ us for an election ad. And now that he’s failed, he won’t have a thing to do with the people who helped.”

It was meant to be a threat, but Deirdre relaxed at his words.

Lucifer didn’t think Stark was missing. He just thought that the Alpha was being dismissive of them.

“Take more juice from Niamh,” Deirdre said.

“She doesn’t have much more to give,” Lucifer said.

“Take whatever she has. Take her to the brink.” If that was what it took to keep the peace with the vampires for a few more hours… “In the meantime, I’m going to figure out how Melchior cheated. I’ll have answers soon. Answers, and a plan from Stark.”

“We’ll drink. We’ll wait. But our patience isn’t infinite.”

“Your loyalty will be rewarded,” Deirdre said.

Those were Stark’s words, Stark’s voice, Stark’s ruthlessness.

Who cared about one betraying harpy? Deirdre had done worse to keep the vampires happy. She’d already given them the life of a witch.

When the vampire lord finally turned away from Deirdre, a sigh passed through the room, sucking away all the tension. The shifters along the walls relaxed. The vampires moved back.

They let Deirdre walk to the elevators without stopping her, forming a corridor with their bodies.

The vampires were so close. Staring at her. Looking for a hint of weakness so that they’d be able to penetrate her armor, expose her as a fraud, and then attack.

She showed nothing.

Only when the elevator doors slid shut behind Deirdre did she finally sag against the wall and begin to shake.

They’d lost the election.

Dear gods, they’d lost.

There was no celebration outside Deirdre’s apartment that night. Only arguments from the vampires in the lobby, an occasional scream from Niamh, and shouting from the street outside.

Within Deirdre’s apartment, there was only lethe.

She could have crawled into one of those cubes, submersing herself in cascades of shimmering blue, and never emerged again.

Not even to breathe.

She wasn’t certain she was breathing now.

It had started raining outside again. She could tell because the window was leaking in a steady drip-drip-drip. Runoff spattered the floor and spread in a damp stain across the carpet.

The stain spread too quickly. Too darkly.

It wasn’t water.

Deirdre shut her eyes as she slipped the fourth cube into the intake bracelet.

Her eyelids seemed to be transparent. She could still see the too-dark fluids covering the carpet in a wash of black. It crept over her toes, surged around her ankles, and dragged Deirdre under its chilly tide.

It was hard to believe that lethe used to fill her with euphoria. It was the drug that had given her the confidence to wear a miniskirt into Original Sin and kiss Melchior as Stark watched. Now it only made her want to crawl into a sarcophagus and never emerge.

More lethe.

That was what she needed. More, always more.

Another cube slipped into place.

Deirdre opened her eyes. Or maybe she didn’t. Stark was sitting in the chair in the corner, veiled in shadow with a wooden box on the table beside him.

He was waiting for her. Offering to feed her more drugs. He would have opened a vein for her and poured everything from his body into hers.

Gage stood beyond him, eyes silently imploring. He said, “No, Deirdre. Stop.” Or something like that.

They were her conscience warring with her darkest urges. The shoulder angel and the shoulder devil.

The devil was so much more tempting.

Deirdre was out of lethe again. She had taken all that remained in her room and it still wasn’t enough to bring that warm buzz upon her.

She was cold.

Everything was cold.

The vampires were draining Niamh, taking her to the brink. Rioters crawled outside. Blood lapped at Deirdre’s knees. Blood from a witch security guard that she had allowed vampires to kill, blood from the queen of the unseelie sacrificing herself to the sluagh, blood from the dragon shifter that she had stabbed with the Ethereal Blade.

All that frozen blood was going to drain her.

Deirdre stood. She was pretty sure that she stood, anyway. She walked toward the corner where Stark was sitting.

“This is your fault,” she said.

He didn’t react. He didn’t even look at her, the bastard. After everything he’d done, he couldn’t even dignify her accusation with a glance.

“I hate you!”

She tried to take a swing at him.

Her fist passed through nothing. Her knuckles rattled the mini-blinds covering her window.

Neither Stark nor Gage were there. Deirdre wasn’t even standing near the corner.

Deirdre rested her forehead on the wall, seeking some sense of reality. Lethe’s disorientation didn’t seem worth it without the associated high, but it was too late to take the drugs out of her veins again. Even if she had, she would have only felt worse.

She needed more. Whatever it took to get the euphoria back.

At least it didn’t sound like it was raining outside anymore.

There were boards on her window, positioned between glass and blinds. She had clumsily barricaded it herself when she picked the room. The placement was sloppy, and it allowed her to peer between the cracks to the street outside.

She should have seen the damp street and angry rioters when she peered through those cracks.

Instead, she saw a gray brick wall only inches away. Close enough that she could have reached out the window and touched it.

Another lethe hallucination.

That was all.

It was as much a hallucination as the feeling that Gage stood over her shoulder, smelling like bear fur as it burned in the asylum’s incinerator.

Except that she wasn’t sure she could have hallucinated the runes stamped onto the brick in such vivid detail. The magic looked authentic. It also looked familiar.

She had seen that gray brick wall before.

“I took too much lethe,” Deirdre said aloud. The words echoed.

Why else would she be hallucinating the Holy Nights Cathedral? It wasn’t in New York City. It was in some canyon out in the mountains, hours of driving away.

Her cell phone rang.

Deirdre fumbled for her pockets and pulled it out. There was a number flashing on the screen. Someone was calling her, even though it should have been impossible. The phone was a burner, something she’d only had for two days so she could make calls to other people. She hadn’t used it yet. Nobody should have had the number.

She wasn’t sure if she was hallucinating or not when she answered the call.

“Hello?” she asked.

“Come outside,” said a masculine voice.

He hung up.

Come outside. Why not?

The stairway swirled around her as she climbed it with leaden legs and a spinning mind. There were faces painted into the drywall that leered at her, judging her for failure, blaming her for everything that had happened ever since the day Rylie Gresham entered her life.

Deirdre couldn’t be sure if she was obeying a hallucination or the real orders that someone had issued to her.

Certainly, if she’d been in better mental condition, she wouldn’t have obeyed those orders at all.

Fresh air slapped her in the face when she reached the rooftop. The cold was almost too much for her muddied senses. She gripped her intake bracelet in the opposite hand, squeezing it harder into her flesh so that the pain would wake her up.

Awake or asleep, it didn’t matter. She saw the same thing beyond the edge of the high rise’s roof.

She saw a cathedral’s steeple ringed by stone gargoyles, all of who were looking directly at Deirdre.

Rain pattered against their rigid hides, drenching them in darker shades of gray. What color would gargoyles bleed? Did they have veins through which blood could flow?

Deirdre leaped onto the tiled roof of the cathedral.

She landed on something solid, so it must have really been there. The Holy Nights Cathedral had materialized on a New York City street hundreds of miles from where she had last seen it.

When she crossed the peak of the roof, the gargoyles tracked her movements with their eyes.

She never saw them move, though.

Deirdre climbed into the bell tower. It was definitely the same room with the metal bars ringing the room, providing roosts for the gargoyles to stand upon. The windows looked out onto skyscrapers rather than trees. A familiar room in an unfamiliar location.

She climbed down the stairs.

The musty cathedral smelled of myrrh, and it was lit only by flickering tea lights along the back wall. The yellow flames illuminated a mural of a man and a woman, black-haired and pale, who gazed blankly upon the altar.

Brother Marshall was waiting for her there, a new sidhe staff tucked under his arm.

He was accompanied by one gargoyle. It seemed like it shouldn’t have fit within the confines of the cathedral, like its presence bent physics around it to make the room. It was entirely possible. Gargoyles were the product of unseelie magic, and they only obeyed physics in the very loosest sense of the term.

Or it might have been Deirdre’s perception skewed by the lethe again.

“How’d you do this?” she asked. “Stark broke your staff. You’re not unseelie.”

“One of my brothers gave me his staff to use,” Brother Marshall said.

She giggled. She didn’t know why—it wasn’t funny. But she couldn’t help herself. “What do you want?”

Brother Marshall must have noticed something was off, but he didn’t remark on it. He wasn’t Stark. He didn’t care how messed up Deirdre was.

Stark didn’t care, either. If he’d cared, he would have been there.

“You have to see this.” He handed her a photograph.

She tilted it forty-five degrees to the right and then to the left, trying to understand what she was seeing.

It was a picture of one of the voting booths for the election. Not one of the ones at the elementary school in Chelsea, but somewhere else—somewhere Deirdre didn’t recognize.

Brother Marshall had photographed the Hardwick Industries logo on the back of the voting booth.

“What about it?” Deirdre set the photograph on the altar before it could melt through her fingers.

“Hardwick Industries was a medical technology company. They’re best known for inventing the antidote to silver poisoning. The CEO of the company is a man named—”

“Pierce Hardwick,” she interrupted. “He was changed into an unseelie sidhe by Genesis.”

“I’m going to take the fact you don’t sound surprised to mean that you know something I don’t,” Brother Marshall said.

“Those booths were donated by Hardwick Industries, but they didn’t have anything to do with the design of the magical vote tallying.”

“They didn’t?” He hefted a piece of unremarkable plywood out of the pews. It was almost as tall as he was, though the bottom had been broken off. “This is a segment of a voting booth that I took from one of the polling stations. Watch.”

He set it down in the center aisle. Then Brother Marshall stepped back and lifted his staff.

The tide of unseelie magic surged, lifting to fill Holy Nights Cathedral with swirling neon light. That unremarkable piece of plywood was no longer nondescript and plain—it was covered in an elaborate, tangled paragraph of runes, breathtakingly elegant and unimaginably complex. Deirdre couldn’t follow the lines with her eyes.

“This might be hard for you to follow, but I’ll make it as easy as possible.” Brother Marshall waved with his staff again, and the runes separated into a three-dimensional diagram hovering between them.

The runes were connected to sky and earth, sending lines out that extended far into the world beyond Holy Nights Cathedral.

He gave a sigh and gestured vaguely at the magic.

“All right. Here’s what we’ve got. This bright stuff, all the white lines—that’s the work the mage girl did, and that’s supposed to be there.” Brother Marshall plucked at a few of the lines, dismissing them piece by piece. The magical webbing connecting the runes to the sky vanished. “This sorta yellow stuff was set up by OPA witches to validate the integrity of the magecraft. Whatever.” Those pieces were ugly and clunky in comparison to what Marion had created, and he waved them away, too.

Once they were gone, there was still pale blue magic lingering in smudges on the wood, like frost trimming a lake on the darkest of nights.

“What’s that?” Deirdre asked.

“Give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.” Brother Marshall waved his staff to enlarge the remaining runes. As they brightened, she realized that they resembled the style of the runes on his staff, like different letters in the same alphabet. “The OPA looked for magical tampering before election day, but unseelie stuff is hard to spot. I only found it because I was looking within the wood, and because I’ve got unseelie spells myself.”

“Did you check other voting booths? Are they all like this?”

“Every one that I probed, yeah,” he said.

Spiders of nausea scrabbled within her gut. Deirdre tried to swallow the feelings down, but it made her feel like she needed to vomit even more.

Stark hadn’t lost.

Rhiannon had cheated.

“Take this to Rylie,” Deirdre said. “Take this to Friederling.”

Brother Marshall’s mouth pressed into a grim line. “I did. They said it would just create more violence. It’d undermine everything that they’d been fighting for by creating the election in the first place.”

The truth of it settled into Deirdre.

He’d shown this same thing to them, and they’d done nothing.

Fury choked her. “Letting Rhiannon cheat to win undermines everything we’ve been fighting for!”

“Preacher, meet the choir.” Brother Marshall waved his staff. The runes collapsed, splashing into nothingness. Darkness settled over the cathedral. Only the mural behind him still seemed to glow faintly. “Figured you’d want to know. Figured you’d want to do something about it.”

Brother Marshall was right.

She did.

IV

Green screen. Hot lights. Video camera.

Action.

Deirdre stared unblinkingly into the lens of a handheld camcorder. It wasn’t intended for shooting this kind of video, but it had been cheap, and that was Deirdre’s priority. Stark’s old equipment had been lost in the asylum when the unseelie attacked. Brother Marshall might have been able to make his cathedral appear out of nowhere, but she couldn’t make money do the same trick.

She was struggling to remember the words she wanted to say. The face behind the camcorder—Niamh’s face—had blanked everything from her mind.

Deirdre had grabbed more lethe out of the storage closet before trying to shoot the video. She needed nerves of steel to pull off this feat of Stark-like propaganda. But she couldn’t seem to plug enough lethe into her veins to find the euphoria it used to give her. Not anymore.

At least she didn’t have to worry about hunger. That was something.

“A rally,” Deirdre finally said. “Tomorrow. Thursday. In Times Square. I want you to be there with me.” She licked her lips, swallowed hard. “Everything you thought you knew about the election—our worst fears—it’s all true. No.” Shit. That’s not right.

She dropped her head into her hands, massaging her eyes.

“I can make cue cards,” Niamh suggested.

“Shut up,” Deirdre said. “Don’t talk.”

The harpy obeyed. It didn’t take any compulsion. This was the first time that Niamh had been away from the vampires since escaping Rhiannon, and she seemed eager to give Deirdre no excuses to send her back.

If the video took a thousand takes to shoot, Niamh would probably be thrilled.

Deirdre grabbed the napkin off of her side table, which rested beside a token that Brother Marshall had given her. It was a flat disc the size of her palm. It would get her in touch with him instantly if she needed to talk about the election, or so Brother Marshall had claimed.

She didn’t need him right now. She needed to gather her senses.

She’d jotted a few notes down on the napkin while her anger at Brother Marshall’s news was still fresh, but they weren’t significantly more coherent than her current thoughts. Rally, Thursday, Times Square. Election. She balled the napkin in her fist and dropped it to the water-stained floor.

Gods, but her head hurt.

“Five minutes,” Deirdre said. “Check the lights. I don’t think they’re angled right. They’re hurting my eyes.”

They were fine. Niamh set the camcorder down to mess with them anyway. They’d been crammed into the tiny apartment Deirdre was occupying, taking up the narrow space around the bare bed. The apartment was too small for such bright, hot lights. Deirdre liked heat, but even this was too hot.

Where had she put that intake bracelet?

Deirdre found it under the lumpy, sweat-stained pillow. Her hands shook as she clamped it over her wrist.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Niamh asked.

“I told you not to talk.” Deirdre wiped away a trickle of blood that escaped the edge of the intake bracelet. “Besides, you’re one to talk. You used to use lethe as a dieting aid.”

“I’m talking about the video.”

“You’re talking about nothing because I don’t want to hear your voice.” It came out even harsher than Deirdre had intended, and she meant it to be pretty harsh.

Guilt raced through her, right behind the twist of anger.

Gods. My head.

Deirdre opened the wooden box on the side table. There was only one cube of lethe left. She’d have to venture back to the storeroom again if she wanted to get more. That didn’t sound appealing. The room was being supervised by some of her shifters and some of Lucifer’s vampires, and about as tense as the border between warring countries.

She pushed it into her bracelet, braced against the sting that never came.

There was no high, either.

Not enough. Need more.

But later, after she finished the video. That mild buzz that made her vision blur was going to have to be enough to get her through it.

Deirdre slapped her cheeks lightly, trying to wake herself up.

“Our worst fears about the election have come true,” she said, facing the boarded window. Holy Nights Cathedral was no longer waiting on the other side. It had vanished as soon as she left, and there had been no sign that it had ever been there, not even a dry patch on the street. “I’m holding a rally tomorrow night after sundown, Thursday, in Times Square. Times Square. Tomorrow, Thursday, Times.” She twisted her mouth around the words to try to limber her tongue the way that January Lazar did.

“What are you announcing at the rally?” Niamh asked. She had lowered one of the lights a fraction of an inch.

The lethe might have given Deirdre a better buzz than she’d realized. The harpy’s voice didn’t make her feel stabby. “Election fraud. Rhiannon shouldn’t have won.”

“Who should have?” Niamh asked.

She hadn’t thought to ask Brother Marshall. He probably didn’t know the results anyway. “Stark should have.”

“Then why isn’t Stark making the statement?”

“He’s got better things to do,” Deirdre said.

That was what she’d been telling everyone lately.

It wasn’t exactly a lie. As far as he was concerned, hunting Rhiannon down was something better to do.

Niamh’s knowing eyes said that she knew Deirdre was telling half-truths. She hadn’t been there the night that Stark left. She didn’t know where he’d gone. But she seemed to guess that he wasn’t coming back, and that Deirdre was getting desperate.

“There’s no way that the OPA will let you get away with this,” Niamh said.

Friederling had agreed not to arrest Deirdre once she made a statement on Stark’s behalf, so he’d left her alone even as she raided blood banks and other government facilities under Stark’s name.

But this? He wasn’t going to ignore this.

Neither would Rylie.

“Good,” Deirdre said. “They shouldn’t have let the election get this bad in the first place. It’s their fault.”

Niamh twirled a curl around her finger, studying Deirdre. She was paler and thinner than ever before. The bandages on her throat didn’t conceal all the needle marks. She looked like she was about to die, but she still got that expression that said she was judging Deirdre’s slipshod appearance.

“You know,” Niamh said, “you’d look better on camera with a little more makeup.”

It was an olive leaf, a peace offering. Deirdre and Niamh used to spend so many nights doing one another’s hair and makeup as though they were sisters. It had been fun, mindless, an escape from the drudgery of reality.

Being able to relax while Niamh’s soft fingers spread powder over Deirdre’s eyelids, cool and gentle, sounded like close to heaven. She could even do Deirdre’s hair again. Give it a good flat-ironing. All the moisture in the air had been making it frizz, so she’d been keeping it under a scarf since she didn’t have the time to fix it.

Nobody knew how to do Deirdre’s hair as well as Niamh did.

Nobody else had stabbed her in the back with a silver knife, either.

Deirdre felt Stark’s personality sinking into her as she sat on the stool in front of the green screen again. “I told you not to talk to me,” she said. “Get filming.”

Niamh picked up the camcorder.

The red light on the front blinked.

“Our worst fears about the election have come true,” Deirdre said. “I need New York City’s gaeans to come together and stand with me tomorrow, Thursday, in Times Square. I have an announcement to make. And I’m going to need your help to make the Office of Preternatural Affairs listen…”

Deirdre didn’t get any sleep before the rally.

She’d tried, sure. She had crawled into bed, hugged the sheets around herself, and forced herself to keep her eyes shut. For hours, she’d tossed on a sea of tormented hallucinations, like she was having nightmares without any of the rest of sleep.

Deirdre had given up around nine in the morning.

She had a rally to organize.

While the sun was still high, she arrayed shapeshifters around Times Square, finding places for them to hide. Deirdre was worried that they would need to clear mundanes out of the area before they could use it for her rally. But that didn’t turn out to be the case. By the time noon rolled around, Deirdre couldn’t spot a single mundane from her vantage point in a nearby hotel.

Ordinary humans were smart to stay out of the way. All the rioting, and the dozens of victims, had taught those people a painful lesson.

That wasn’t to say that Times Square was empty, though. Far from it. People filtered in slowly, their species betrayed by the preternatural grace of their movements.

They were shifters, mostly. The people who were likeliest to be searching for new videos from Deirdre, who would be angriest about the election. But there were witches, too. Even a few sidhe.

Sunset approached.

It was almost showtime.

Deirdre headed to the walkway leading between buildings. Her people had been setting up a stage for her at the far end of Times Square and she wanted to emerge directly on the rear of the stage. She’d have to jump right down. If she took the time to walk across Times Square, there would be too much opportunity for attack—and she was confident that Rhiannon would attack.

In fact, she hoped that the would-be queen of the unseelie was on her way. It would give them an opportunity to confront one another publicly. And if Rhiannon did, then maybe Stark would be close behind.

“The OPA has been sighted moving in,” Geoff said, speeding his pace to match hers as she moved down the hallway. “They’ve got helicopters nearby.”

Deirdre kept going without pause. “Okay.”

“Aren’t you worried?”

“No,” she said curtly.

She would have been worried if they hadn’t seen the OPA anywhere.

They certainly had the technology, magic, and coordination to break up the rally without ever being seen. They were disgustingly good at covert operations. If Geoff had spotted them, then it meant that the OPA wanted to be spotted. They were playing at security theater. That was all.

There was no way they could suspect the bomb she was about to drop on their defrauded election. If they’d known, then Deirdre probably would have already been dead.

“Vampires will be out as soon as the sun goes down,” Gianna said. “We’ve got them positioned in these two buildings.” She showed Deirdre a map of Times Square, pointing to the NYPD substation and a Foot Locker in turn. It would keep them concealed from sunlight but give them the ability to move in swiftly.

“Spread them out a little more,” Deirdre said, handing the map back to her. “Can you get a few of them to the north end?”

“Why? Want them to look out for the OPA?”

“I’m more concerned about riots,” she said. “There’s been a lot of activity by the theater lately. If there’s going to be any civilian action against us, it’ll come from there.”

“Think that’s likely?” Gianna asked.

“I don’t know,” Deirdre said honestly. The rioters weren’t aligned with any single political orientation. It wasn’t like they were all Stark’s supporters, or Rylie’s supporters. They were all over the place. That was part of the problem. It was entirely possible that she could get caught between supporters of the seelie and of the establishment and get ripped in half by the fight.

Gianna nodded. “I’ll talk to Lucifer. See what I can do.”

The shifter vanished.

Deirdre reached the windows at the end of the hallway. The congregation below had tripled in size since the last time she checked on them. Obviously her video announcement was getting around.

It was like Dick Clark’s New Years Rockin’ Eve, but populated entirely by gaeans. They filled the streets as far as she could see.

She shouldn’t have bothered sending Gianna out to rearrange the vampires. If these people rioted, then no amount of allies was going to keep things under control.

The bitter taste of acid climbed her throat.

This wasn’t what Deirdre was meant to do. Six months earlier, she had been a debt collector for a nightmare demon. She had lived in a drafty old townhouse with a lone vampire and only two pairs of jeans, both of which had been purchased from a thrift store down the street.

Now she was here, preparing to break news to an entire nation that could tear apart the gaean populations.

This should have been Stark.

“You could fly away,” Geoff said. “If you’re having second thoughts, just whip out your wings and…whoosh.”

Deirdre didn’t look at him. She pressed her forehead against the glass, watching the sun drop below the buildings.

Bodies seethed below. Some of those people were going to get hurt when she broke the news. Maybe a lot of those people.

But what was the alternative? What if she did fly away?

Rhiannon would be handed the Alpha position.

If Deirdre didn’t do something about it, nobody would. Stark certainly wasn’t going to fix this.

It was starting to drizzle rain again. “Damn,” Deirdre whispered. Her breath fogged on the glass.

“Here.” Geoff nudged her side with something hard. He offered a tray of lethe cubes to her, like the kind that they’d been serving to the vampires during their nightly parties.

She flashed a grateful smile at him before grabbing a handful of the little cubes. She counted them out on her palm. Four cubes. Deirdre picked out two more and started inserting.

It was almost show time. She’d need to be on her best game.

I’m the only one who can save them now.

As the sun vanished, its last rays consumed by steely clouds, lethe flooded her with heat. Her stomach grew heavy. Her head spun.

“What are you doing, Deirdre?” asked another man.

She glanced over her shoulder at Geoff again. His face looked different. Not like the shifter she’d befriended at the asylum, but like a young berserker with tortured eyes.

They were in the forest. They were standing atop a waterfall. Deirdre was about to jump.

“It’s time,” someone said.

She slid the last cube through the intake bracelet. Warmth flushed her. She was so warm that she thought she should have been on fire, but there was no hint of the phoenix’s flaming feathers.

“Open the window,” she said.

Self-doubt had been replaced with giddy surety. This was what a savior must have felt before delivering her people from the shackles of a dictatorship.

This was what a martyr felt like.

Geoff unlocked the window and cranked it open. Cold air gusted around Deirdre, and she shut her eyes to inhale the sickening scent of rain, imagining that it was blood. Imagining that she was in the courtyard at the center of the asylum, not alone, but with a berserker who treated her with kindness.

She climbed onto the ledge.

“Sun’s down,” Geoff said, checking his cell phone. “Vampires are coming out. And January Lazar is heading on stage…now.”

Deirdre leaned over the side to look down. The reporter greeted the crowd, and they responded with thunderous cheers.

January had volunteered to be part of the rally when Deirdre announced it, communicating through the email that she believed to still be under Stark’s control. She had offered to warm up the crowd for the announcement—which Deirdre had warned her was likely to create a violent reaction. That hadn’t been a problem for the reporter.

“Here I come,” Deirdre said.

She jumped.

Deirdre landed on the stage with no sense of having fallen through the air. She was on the window, and then she was standing beside January Lazar, who looked startled to have Deirdre fall beside her.

After her days campaigning, Deirdre was as recognizable as Stark. The crowd erupted at the sight of her. They cheered, shouted, screamed. She couldn’t tell if they were happy or angry. Every single one of them looked like Gage and Stark, Gage and Stark, every last one of them Gage and Stark, from the edge of the makeshift stage to 42nd Street.

There was a microphone waiting for her. She was confident that microphone was real. It wasn’t Jacek’s viper form coiled around a metal pole, waiting to sink his fangs into her wrist.

Through the frame of buildings, she saw approaching spotlights. Helicopters. The OPA was coming.

They needed to make a show of a military presence. They wouldn’t do a damn thing against her.

“Where is he?” January whispered in a low tone, quietly enough that nobody off-stage would hear her. Deirdre had said in her emails that Stark would be at their rally. She had lied.

Deirdre’s lips moved. “He’s got better things to do.” She stepped forward to grab the microphone. It didn’t bite.

She realized that she hadn’t removed the intake bracelet. She jerked the sleeve down to hide it. Didn’t want this on camera on such a historic day. The historic rally that ruined the historic election.

“My fellow Americans,” Deirdre said.

Her voice echoed throughout Times Square. She flinched at the sound.

It wasn’t Stark’s voice coming out of her. That was Deirdre’s voice. Just Deirdre.

January Lazar’s camera was a couple feet away, off to the right, filming Deirdre’s face as she spoke to an angry public who probably expected a concession speech from Stark.

Everyone would watch this speech. Not just the people she hoped would see it—like Secretary Friederling and Rylie Gresham—but people she wished would have no clue that she had gotten in so deep. Old classmates. Jolene. Gutterman.

The only people who weren’t going to see it were Gage and Stark.

“My fellow Americans,” Deirdre said. “As you know, we had an election yesterday. I fought hard to make this election happen for my sake, for your sake, for all of us. Everton Stark and I had a vision of democracy—a government in the hands of the people. We agreed that the election was the best way to make that happen.”

Lies, hissed the serpent coiled around the microphone stand. Jacek thrashed in her fist as bloody tears dripped from the sky. You agreed on nothing. You broke Stark’s trust and he’ll kill you once he finds out.

Words tumbled from Deirdre. “We relied on an oath arranged by Rylie Gresham to maintain the honesty of this election. We strove to get everyone involved—even candidates among the sidhe known for their lack of integrity.”

Lies, lies, lies.

“We should have realized that our trust was in vain, and that Rylie Gresham, who hurt our country in so many painful ways, wouldn’t be able to pull off an honest election.”

The sea of faces was stirring. They were turning away from Deirdre to look at the far end of Times Square. At her height, she could see beyond them to hulking black BearCats as they moved in. Those were OPA assault vehicles, armored against attack. They had been a common sight before Genesis, but the OPA had stopped bringing them out as frequently.

Secretary Friederling was trying to put on a really good show.

Unless it wasn’t a show at all.

Deirdre pushed on, speaking faster. “Hardwick Industries donated the voting booths—the same Hardwicks who have been campaigning for the unseelie. Disassembly and analysis of the magic on these booths showed unseelie tampering. That’s why Rhiannon and Melchior ‘won’ the election despite being so far behind in the polls. Because they didn’t win at all. They cheated.”

The crowd practically imploded with screams.

Simultaneously, a floodlight bore down on Deirdre.

It was so bright, too bright for her to see what it was mounted on, but she knew one of the helicopters had moved in.

The storm of angry gaeans surged. Thousands of vampires, witches, and shifters who looked like Gage and Stark. They raged, they climbed onto the stage, they crashed over her.

Bodies struck Deirdre’s, but they weren’t trying to hurt her. They were throwing things at the helicopter.

“This is the Office of Preternatural Affairs. You’re holding an illegal public gathering. Disperse immediately or face penalties.” The words boomed throughout Times Square.

“Illegal public gathering? Demonstrations are an American right!” She shouted that last bit at the helicopter she couldn’t see, and her voice was repeated by the others who had climbed onto the stage.

Firm hands gripped her arms. “We have to go.” It wasn’t Vidya—the valkyrie was nowhere in sight. This was Niamh, wearing the black leather collar that Lucifer had affixed to her throat, which highlighted her fang scars rather than concealed them.

“No!” Deirdre pushed against the harpy. “They have to know the truth!”

“You’re going to be arrested!”

She elbowed her former friend away. “They won’t arrest me. They can’t touch me!”

Shifters were climbing the nearby buildings, dragging their bodies up the vertical faces like Deirdre had when she was doing parkour. But this wasn’t a tribute to Deirdre. They were using their preternatural strength to help haul witches a few stories higher, giving them superior vantage points from which they could hurl magic at the OPA helicopters.

The nearest chopper lifted, getting out of the way.

The BearCats inched slowly but surely toward the stage. They parted the crowd as Moses once parted the Red Sea. People had no choice but to move or get run over—and Deirdre was certain she saw a few of them falling under the wheels.

That didn’t seem right. They should have stopped. Rylie wouldn’t have let the OPA hurt anyone.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

Nobody heard her. The sound system had been unplugged and January Lazar had vanished. People in black combat gear kicked over the towering speakers.

Deirdre searched for Vidya and spotted metal wings flashing as she lifted the reporter to safety.

At least someone would escape to get the word out.

“We really have to go,” Niamh said.

One of the BearCats stopped at the edge of the stage. Rioters leaped onto its roof as OPA agents emerged, magic frothing around their fists.

Times Square seethed with violence and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

So much anger. So much pain.

Everyone looked like Gage.

Agents climbed onto the stage. Niamh moved to confront them, screaming a battle cry that sounded feeble in comparison to Vidya’s.

They kicked her down as easily as they’d kicked the speakers over. The frail, anemic redhead offered no real resistance.

“Stop this!” Deirdre shouted, lifting her hands over her head. “Stop hurting people! You can have me!”

“This isn’t a negotiation,” the nearest OPA agent said. She approached with a black bag and a pair of silver handcuffs. “The Alpha wants to see you.”

“Then take me to her,” Deirdre said.

The bag was jerked over her head.

Deirdre didn’t know what happened after that.

All the sounds seemed to indicate violence. The thunder of magic, the popping gunfire, the screams—people had seen Deirdre’s arrest, and they were furious. But then she was inside the BearCat, pushed into a leather chair, her ankles and wrists cuffed.

A door slammed shut. The vehicle’s armor muffled every sound.

Even in the darkness of the hood, she saw Gage and Stark everywhere.

Everything was bleeding.

This wasn’t how she’d hoped the rally would go. Deirdre had just wanted people to know. She wanted change.

The BearCat drove slowly at first, and then faster. They must have cleared the chaos at Times Square.

“Did you get the others?” one agent muttered to another.

“We got the vampire guy and the valkyrie,” someone else replied. “That’s everyone the Alpha wanted.”

“Great. She’ll be happy to hear it.”

Deirdre wasn’t happy to hear it. The OPA had arrested Lucifer and Vidya—two people who had no relationship with Rylie, and therefore no protection.

The OPA agents kept the bag over Deirdre’s head while transporting her, allowing her to experience only confusing, jumbled sensory information without the benefit of eyesight to help her interpret it. She heard bodies moving around her. Felt hands on her arms, the top of her head, her waist. They grabbed her like she was meat being taken to a butcher shop.

After some indeterminate length of time, the bag was whipped off of Deirdre’s head. She sucked in air that wasn’t poisoned by her own carbon monoxide. Her vision spun, allowing the OPA offices at the United Nations to come into vivid focus.

And she found a pair of legs right in front of her.

Deirdre’s eyes tracked from strappy ballet flats up the curve of calves to a cobweb skirt draped over broad hips. A leather corset was cinched tightly to form an hourglass shape where there would have ordinarily been a much boxier figure. Small breasts were emphasized by leather and lace, cleavage framed by a choker dangling with leather straps, chains, and a glittering sapphire.

Then the face.

That wasn’t Rylie’s face.

“What the hell?” Deirdre asked.

“Don’t look so surprised,” Rhiannon Stark said. “You wanted my attention with your stupid rally, didn’t you? Well, congratulations. You have it.”

V

“Where’s Rylie?” Deirdre asked.

Mirth lingered around the corners of Rhiannon’s lips. “The former Alpha?”

Former.

It was all too much.

The failed rally.

Being arrested by Rhiannon.

Seeing Rhiannon taking over the OPA offices at the United Nations building.

And now calling Rylie the “former” Alpha?

“Not until the inauguration,” Deirdre snarled. “You’re not Alpha until the unseelie leader takes over and declares you his mate!”

“Yes, but transition is a long process. I’m getting everything set up for my mate, the king of the unseelie, to take over for Rylie Gresham.” She said the name in a coldly dismissive way, as though naming a centuries-dead President of the United States. Someone old and irrelevant.

“The king of the unseelie. You mean the dragon I skewered like an olive in a martini? That king of the unseelie?”

“The king,” Rhiannon said calmly. “The unseelie faction won. People didn’t vote for a specific Alpha. They voted for a faction.”

“You’re not eligible to be Alpha. You’re not even sidhe.”

Rhiannon didn’t rise to take the bait. She made no confessions or denials. She just stood there, as calm as could be, and spread frost throughout Secretary Friederling’s office.

“You wouldn’t be confessing to murder, would you?” Rhiannon asked.

“I don’t know. Why don’t you come closer and we’ll chat about it?” Deirdre twisted in her bonds. “I want to talk with you without having to shout.”

“You’re not in a position to make demands.” Rhiannon actually took a step backward, not from fear, but because she was taunting her. “You’re not in a position to do anything except make peace with whatever gods you might believe in. Your death is scheduled for an hour from now. You might want to get started on praying.”

Deirdre’s spine stiffened. “My death?”

“Your public execution. I’d like to have set it up further in advance to that so we could get a bigger audience, but you’ve made powerful friends. I can’t give people an opportunity to organize a rescue.”

She took a few deep breaths, trying to slow her pounding heart. The threat was enough to shock cold reality through her buzz. There probably wasn’t enough lethe in the universe to keep Deirdre from feeling afraid at that threat, especially from someone who so obviously meant it.

Rhiannon couldn’t execute Deirdre. She was a phoenix. She’d just come right back.

A public execution—no. It wasn’t happening.

“Where are my people?” Deirdre asked.

“If you’re referring to the creatures who joined you at the rally…” Rhiannon turned a tablet on Secretary Friederling’s desk so she could read it. “The vampire lord, a mercenary code-named Lucifer, and the valkyrie named Vidya—they’ll be executed with you. Publicly. In an hour.”

“You can’t kill me,” Deirdre said. The words quavered. She swallowed hard, but it was too late to take back the show of weakness. For all the time that she’d spent pretending to be a bad guy at the asylum, and for the many days she’d spent running Stark’s pack in his absence, she still wasn’t such a good actress that she could pretend she wasn’t afraid of dying.

“I probably can’t,” Rhiannon agreed. “But I don’t need to do it myself.”

She flicked her fingers.

A shadowy form loomed by the windows, a ghost of a monster with a thousand tentacles, a million skeletal hands, bleeding silvery fluid across the floor.

The sluagh.

A deadly unseelie assassin that crawled the ley lines and devoured souls.

Deirdre jerked, but she couldn’t go anywhere—not with her arms and legs bound.

She didn’t need to escape. The sluagh vanished within moments.

It wasn’t real. It was just illusion.

“Ofelia destroyed it,” Deirdre said. “The real unseelie queen wiped that thing off the face of the Earth the same night that I killed your so-called mate.”

“Ofelia could destroy the sluagh about as easily as she could destroy Death himself,” Rhiannon said. “You can remove it from this world, send it back to its nest, and force it to regrow. But you can’t destroy it.” How could she say that without a quiver of fear in her voice? Didn’t it scare her to know that something that could kill either of them was invulnerable? “It’s waiting for the execution, Deirdre Tombs. It’s waiting for you. I’ve had it taken down to the courtyard in its cage.”

“Cage? You’ve caged the sluagh?” That monster was so deadly that Rhiannon had banished it from the Winter Court in order to keep it from devouring her—and it had recently slaughtered the true unseelie queen. The idea of caging such an elemental force was ridiculous. And horrifying.

“I am the Queen of the Winter Court,” she said regally. “It’s my beast. I can cage it if I want.”

“If you think you’re in control of the sluagh—you’re stupid. You’re just plain stupid. Crazy to boot.”

“I’ve sent it after you, Beta. Its only purpose is to hunt you. The instant it’s released from that cage, it will not stop until you’re dead.” Rhiannon seized Deirdre by the wrists, forcing her to her feet. She couldn’t move her legs enough to walk. She all but hopped with Rhiannon to the window. “If you don’t believe me, you can see for yourself.”

Deirdre gazed down the length of the glimmering white United Nations building to the courtyard far below, which was usually roped off to prevent tourists from drawing too close.

That rope was gone now, and there was a crowd packing the courtyard for the execution to come.

A huge circle of power had been painted on the ground there, marked with a million runes too small for Deirdre to distinguish at that distance. It looked a lot like the magic that had protectively encircled Ofelia’s cocoon at Original Sin, but a thousand times more complex. The magic it took to contain a creature as powerful as the sluagh must have been incredible.

And that definitely was the sluagh down there. Its seething mass, skeletal hands, and tentacles were impossible to mistake.

The illusion that Rhiannon had briefly summoned of the sluagh was nothing in comparison to the reality of the thing.

It was waiting to kill her.

Deirdre pulled back from the window, afraid it would see her and break free of the circle. Rhiannon held her tightly. “You’re insane. If you attack any rivaling faction before the inauguration, you’ll lose all protection from the oath.”

“Not if you attack me first.” Rhiannon tossed Deirdre to the floor again.

“You can’t make me.”

“I don’t need to. Stark didn’t take the oath. It doesn’t apply to you. But nobody knows that, do they? The public believes we’re all under that oath, and the public, as you’ve demonstrated, is susceptible to suggestion.” Rhiannon turned Friederling’s desktop monitor around. There was a video playing on silent loop.

She had filmed Deirdre stabbing Melchior with a sword in Original Sin.

Deirdre should have known there would be footage. They had filmed her in the Summer Court, too.

And it sure made it look like she’d broken the oath.

“You’re going to let everyone know that Melchior’s dead? But he’s your Alpha! Without him, the unseelie can’t take over!”

“Nobody will recognize the Ethereal Blade. They won’t know what it is or what it does. All they will know is that Deirdre Tombs, Beta of the independent faction, won’t be protected by the oath anymore. They’ll understand why you have to die.” She turned the monitor back around.

Deirdre’s knees wobbled. She sat down hard on the tile. “I’m popular. There will be more rioting. They’ll never accept your control if you hurt me.”

“If you think that a few galvanized sects of the community mean that people care about who’s in charge of the gaeans, then you’re stupid. They don’t care. They just want to keep collecting benefits checks and don’t care who is at the top of the food chain.” She sauntered to the window, gazing down upon the sluagh. “People will forget that they were angry once you’re gone. They will go back to being complacent sheep. There will be no resistance.”

“People aren’t complacent. They care. I’ve seen it.”

Rhiannon just laughed.

The sound made Deirdre angrier. Lethe and fire burned through her veins. “You won’t be able to hold out against them without sidhe magic. You’re nothing. You’re just a damn witch!”

“No sidhe magic?” Rhiannon’s nose wrinkled. “I’m not just anything.”

She flung her hands out.

Ice erupted from her fingertips. It sparkled with strange green power—not the glimmering blue that Deirdre had seen in the Winter Court with Melchior, but something else. Deirdre had never seen the likes of it.

But it was definitely sidhe magic.

It encased Secretary Friederling’s desk, expanding to crawl up the walls, dripping with flakes of snow.

“Do you know what’s most pathetic about America’s gaeans?” Rhiannon asked. She punched her fist in the air again. Spikes of ice bloomed on the ground in front of Deirdre, who threw herself away from them with a cry. “When I begin to freeze the country, they won’t do anything about it. They won’t fight me. They’ll complain, they’ll share angry status updates on their social networks, they’ll put on a few extra layers of sweaters. But they won’t do anything.”

She gestured again. Ice whipped around Deirdre, encircling her as the sluagh was encircled in magic.

It was so cold.

“How?” Deirdre asked. She had seen the red blood. Rhiannon shouldn’t have been able to use sidhe magic at all.

Rhiannon sank to her knees, skirt billowing around her. Her fingernails dug into Deirdre’s jaw as she gripped her chin. Rhiannon’s eyes were so cruel. Worse, they were filled with frigid intelligence.

“You must be exceptional if my husband likes you,” Rhiannon said. “He only fixates on exceptional women.” She tilted Deirdre’s head roughly to either side, as though searching for some physical indication of what made her special.

“Jealous?” Deirdre asked, squeezing the word out between her lips.

Rhiannon backhanded her.

The room erupted into stars. Deirdre slammed into the floor, unable to catch herself with her arms still tied behind her back. She tasted blood.

Rhiannon panted from exertion, shaking out her hand. She couldn’t deliver casual blows with preternatural strength the way that her husband could. But she made up for it with her viciousness.

Deirdre tried to squirm away from Rhiannon’s next strike. The woman slammed the spiked heel of her shoe into Deirdre’s cheek.

Bone snapped.

“Jealous?” she asked. “Jealous? I’m the one who left Ever. He’s wasted his whole life looking for me. Why do you think I’d be jealous?”

Blood dribbled from the corner of Deirdre’s mouth. She couldn’t see out of her left eye. But the healing fever swept over her, quickly mending the damage inflicted by Rhiannon. “It must take an insecure bitch to pretend to be some crappy unseelie sidhe. Why don’t you try shooting higher? You could have at least pretended to be a shifter.”

Rhiannon strode to her ice-encrusted desk, heels clicking. “I was wrong. You’re not exceptional at all. Ever’s just gone crazy. Or else he likes your tits.” She picked something up. Metal scraped against wood.

Deirdre didn’t see what it was until Rhiannon brought it closer to her face.

Pliers.

She had seen Stark rip the teeth out of enough of his followers to know what Rhiannon might want to do with that. It seemed that he had learned all of his cruelest tricks from her.

Deirdre squeezed her lips shut, but Rhiannon pried her jaw open, shoving fingers that were encrusted with silver rings into Deirdre’s mouth so that she couldn’t bite down.

Metal clamped on an upper incisor.

Snap.

The pain lanced all the way through her sinuses, behind her eye, into her brain. Fresh blood flooded her mouth.

“I only brought you here so I could see what had Ever so interested,” Rhiannon said, frighteningly calm even as she dropped Deirdre’s tooth to the floor. “I wasn’t planning on punishing you before killing you. After all, you’re hardly significant in the grand scheme of things. But I’ve decided that I don’t like you. So here we are, and here you are.”

Deirdre refused to make a sound. She refused to shut her eyes. Healing fever swept through her, but she didn’t give one damn reaction.

The pliers clamped down on another of Deirdre’s teeth.

She had lost every single one of her teeth when she’d shapeshifted into her phoenix at Melchior’s command—every single one—but it hadn’t been painful like this. It hadn’t left her gums painful and throbbing.

It hadn’t made her scream.

Two teeth gone.

A door whispered open. Shiny black loafers entered Deirdre’s vision. The shoes could have belonged to anyone, but she recognized that limp.

“Friederling.” Blood sprayed over Deirdre’s bottom lip when she lisped his name.

Rhiannon turned to greet him. “Secretary, what a pleasure. How can I help you?” She still gripped one of Deirdre’s bloody teeth in the pliers.

“You know that the OPA has rooms without cameras where you can torture people, don’t you?” Friederling asked.

“Since when do I need to keep freelance dental work a secret?” Rhiannon asked.

“Gods, I hate you people,” Deirdre said, letting her eyes fall closed. Her jaw was throbbing, and the pain radiated throughout her entire skull. “Rhiannon cheated. She’s not eligible to win the Alpha position.”

“Rhiannon didn’t win,” Friederling agreed, way too amiable considering what he had walked in on. “The unseelie did. Melchior is in charge of the unseelie, and as Melchior’s mate, she does have most of the same rights that he does.” He held a hand out. After a moment, Rhiannon handed him the pliers.

“Melchior’s dead.” Deirdre propped herself up on an elbow, fixing Friederling with a hard look. “I stuck the Ethereal Blade into his scaly hide. There’s no body, but Melchior’s dead. He won’t be able to show up at the inauguration.”

“I already showed him the footage. He knows you attacked. He knows you’re unprotected by his oath.” Rhiannon kicked her in the face.

Deirdre sprawled to the floor again.

The kick didn’t hurt that much. Not in comparison to having her teeth removed. But the indignity of it was too much—and the fact that Friederling did nothing to help her only made it worse.

The man stood there, one hand on his cane, the other cupping the pliers, and he did nothing.

“It’s an interesting claim that Ms. Tombs is making,” Friederling said. “Unfortunately, as nobody has seen Melchior for days, it really is a case of her word against yours, Rhiannon.”

“My mate, the leader of the unseelie sidhe, will be at the inauguration as scheduled,” Rhiannon said. “I guarantee it.”

“That’s good enough for me. It has to be, doesn’t it? After all, the unseelie won the election, and you’re in control of the Winter Court.” He set Deirdre’s tooth on his desk and helped Deirdre off of the floor. “You’re executing Stark’s Beta in less than an hour, Rhiannon. I don’t think it’ll do any favors for your budding administration if she shows up looking like you’ve run her through a meat grinder.”

“Freelance dentistry,” Rhiannon said helpfully.

Yeah, Deirdre really hated her.

Friederling helped Deirdre sit on a few inches of desk that weren’t covered in ice crystals. He whipped a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket, dipped it into a glass of ice water, and offered it to her. “Clean up, Ms. Tombs.”

“Screw you.” She dropped the handkerchief to the floor.

“Try to be nice to someone, and you see what they do?” Friederling asked, speaking to nobody in particular.

Rhiannon plucked Deirdre’s tooth off of the table, sliding it down the bodice of her dress, like some kind of romantic keepsake. “I need to return to the Winter Court. I have a date with my mate.” The way she said that made Deirdre feel all kinds of suspicious, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it. There was no way Melchior had survived getting stabbed by the Ethereal Blade. None at all. “I look forward to January Lazar’s report on your execution, fire-blood.”

She strolled out of the office, hips swaying, cobweb skirt swirling around her. Every click of her heels against the floor sounded like wind chimes.

The woman was powerful all right. More powerful than anyone had any right to be.

But she wasn’t unseelie, and she wasn’t powerful enough to control the sluagh.

“You can’t let her feed me to that thing down there,” Deirdre said as soon as the door swung shut. “She’s not going to be able to hold it for long. You’re lucky you people aren’t all dead already.”

“Frankly, Rhiannon can do anything she wants with gaeans right now. Marion’s oath has made sure of that. And so have you, with all of your feisty defense of the election. She’s been elected. She won the war. Isn’t this what you wanted?”

Deirdre’s aching jaw dropped. “So you’re going to let her kill me and all the people I’m working with?”

“You’re criminals,” Friederling said. “Enemies of the Alpha who attempted to assassinate him.”

He snapped his fingers.

The door opened and OPA agents stepped in. They had silver handcuffs.

They were going to take Deirdre to the sluagh.

“Democracy in action. It’s beautiful,” Friederling said, settling into his chair. “Congratulations. You’ve gotten everything you ever wanted.”

VI

Deirdre had to wait a half an hour for her execution. The longest half-hour of her life.

The agents held her near a window so that she could watch the dreary weather. The fact that it was pouring rain seemed like the final, deliberate insult to Deirdre.

She was going to be fed to the sluagh, along with allies who were very nearly friends. And it had the nerve to be raining so she would die cold and wet and soggy.

Deirdre couldn’t find any humor in it. She certainly couldn’t think of an escape plan.

All she felt was panic.

From her vantage point, she could see more than the rain. She could see the sluagh in its magical cage. It looked to be pissed off, if the way it frothed and thrashed was any indication. Who could tell? It was a shadowy organism comprised of a thousand cursed souls. For all Deirdre knew, the thrashing could have been a happy jig.

At least someone would be happy.

The weirdest part was that Deirdre wasn’t exactly unhappy. She should have been petrified knowing that she was about to be fed to the sluagh, but she’d taken too much lethe.

She was going to be devoured with a reflexive smile on her face and an itching wrist.

Of all the undignified ways to go out…

The hour struck. An agent jabbed her in the back.

“Move,” he said.

She moved.

The first thing that struck Deirdre when the OPA agents pulled her out of the United Nations building was the noise.

The noise.

In the time she had been waiting to die, the crowd had grown even larger than the one that had been at the rally. The bodies stretched as far as she could see all the way down to the docks. They were on the roofs of nearby buildings, on the beach, even in the water.

Everyone was there to watch her die.

She wanted to scream at them to run. To escape. To get away before the sluagh broke free of its pathetic chains.

So many innocent lives waiting for the slaughter.

This wasn’t what Deirdre had wanted to happen. She had wanted to help people. She wanted to save them from the horrible conditions that they lived in, not make them vulnerable to having their souls devoured by some unholy beast.

Run, she wanted to say.

But she couldn’t.

Rhiannon was truly a sadist: she had disassembled the stage that Deirdre constructed in Times Square and reassembled it in front of the United Nations building.

She was going to die on a platform she had built herself.

The irony didn’t escape her.

Lucifer was slouching on one end of the stage, looking miserable and disgruntled, but Vidya stood tall, shoulders back, charcoal hair blowing in the wind. She was defiant and beautiful and unafraid. She would face death without fear. But even Vidya couldn’t break free of the OPA’s charms that kept her wings at bay, and there was no escape for her. No escape for any of them.

This was Stark’s fault. He had left Deirdre with a mess, chasing his wife into the Winter Court when she obviously wasn’t even there.

And now Deirdre was going to die for it.

They forced her up the steps, nearer to the thrashing sluagh within its cage. She locked her knees. Dug in her heels. But the OPA agents were collectively stronger than a shifter.

Once she was on stage, they pulled off her gag. Her lips burned. She worked her mouth around, trying to moisten her tongue, but that only made her jaw hurt worse. She still tasted blood from having her teeth yanked out.

“Where’s Stark?” Lucifer hissed when they shoved Deirdre to his side.

She twisted her wrists in the silver cuffs. The metal sizzled against her tender forearms. “He’s busy.”

“Better things to do?” he asked dryly.

Deirdre’s eyes stung. “Apparently.” Rain matted her headscarf to her scalp. Inside her rubber-heeled boots, her toes were cold and shriveled. She couldn’t remember ever feeling so miserable before.

Voices clamored around them. People pressed against the stage, held back only by magic and a line of OPA agents.

She could make out a few voices here and there.

“Let them go!”

“You cheated! You’re cheating us all!”

“Burn them!”

A lot of people wanted to see them dead. A lot of others wanted to see them released.

None of their opinions mattered, just like their votes hadn’t mattered.

The screen hanging to the left of the stage, sheltered from the rain by a small tarp, flickered to life. Rhiannon’s face appeared. She was regal, long-necked, and handsome, with black lipstick and a diadem that she hadn’t been wearing when Deirdre last saw her. This was a prerecorded message.

It looked like she was standing in Niflheimr, the palace of ice in the Winter Court, judging by the multifaceted silver ice in the background. But Deirdre doubted it. It was probably a special effect. It was hard to use recording devices in the other Middle Worlds.

The video was so huge. Her face was easily four times as tall as Deirdre.

“Good evening, my fellow Americans,” Rhiannon said, the introduction a cruel mockery of Deirdre’s speech at the rally. “And to all the others who are watching today, welcome.” She bowed her head fractionally, the video unresponsive to the chorus of boos that greeted her visage.

“I’m honored to have been elected by my people to lead all gaeans in North America,” she said. “Already I have been granted the authority to create rules and enforce them. I appreciate Rylie Gresham and Secretary Friederling’s compliance in allowing me to begin structuring our world to meet my vision.”

Voices rose in angry shrieks. Magic flashed along the barriers.

The sluagh thrashed within its cage.

Deirdre flinched away from the boundary of magic. Even knowing that Rhiannon had cast an invisible wall separating the stage from the sluagh’s mass, she was afraid. Its tentacles snapped toward her and it was all too easy to imagine the way they would wrap around her body.

No rebirth from her ashes. Never to fly again. The country shattered in her death.

It was all about to end.

“These people are in alliance with Deirdre Tombs, who has violated the oath surrounding the election,” Rhiannon continued. “Behold, my people—the betraying Beta.”

The footage changed to show Deirdre attacking Melchior.

She didn’t need to see it again, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away.

There she was: a small human figure standing up against Melchior’s massive, glimmering dragon form. Somehow, it made her look like she was as much a threat as the beast she fought. This wasn’t a heroic David facing down Goliath. This was video of a murderer slaying a beautiful beast.

The Ethereal Blade had been replaced digitally. Someone had edited the video so that it looked like an ordinary sword.

“You jackhole,” Deirdre whispered.

On the video, enlarged a dozen times, Deirdre thrust the blade into Melchior’s chest.

It looked so bad taken out of context. There was no footage of Melchior trying to kill Ofelia, the true unseelie queen. It didn’t show Niamh’s ex-boyfriend trying to kill Deirdre, or the rest of the fight against the sidhe. All it showed was Stark’s Beta attacking Rhiannon’s Alpha.

Renewed shouts swept through the crowd. At this point, it was impossible to tell if they approved or disapproved of Deirdre’s actions.

The screen returned to Rhiannon’s face.

“Because she’s violated that oath, they’re no longer protected by it. I have respected the terms of the election. I have refrained from taking action against those who would see me fail out of respect for you, the American people, but these conspirators would see your democracy shattered in its infancy. We can’t stand for such behavior. It’s wrong. It’s un-American. And that is why they must come to justice.”

Screams erupted through the crowd.

It took Deirdre a moment to realize that it wasn’t the normal cheering, but actual screams—people shouting from honest-to-gods terror, who thought that they were about to die.

When she turned, it felt like she was in slow motion, her body moving through sludgy molasses.

She knew that she was going to see the sluagh reaching for her.

But its circle hadn’t broken. It wasn’t free, and it wasn’t about to kill her.

A different kind of attack was moving in from the edges of the crowd, dropping off of the nearby rooftops. They plunged to the street from windows of office buildings. When each of them hit the pavement, their bodies gave a faint thud. It was an unforgettable sound, like knuckles connecting with a slab of meat hanging from a butcher’s freezer.

That kind of sound should have meant death.

Yet once they landed, the bodies kept moving. The force of them pushing through the crowd caused the tides to surge and shift. Deirdre glimpsed pale skin.

Vampires.

Lucifer’s vampires.

Rhiannon was still speaking, unaffected by her surroundings. “I don’t want to be a cruel leader. My only goal is to protect the people and the good of the many must always outweigh the good of the few. These deaths aren’t intended to be a punishment. I’m merely protecting you, the public, from those outliers who would hurt you.”

She was nearing the end of her speech, and that meant that the execution was meant to happen.

“Blessed be the merciful gods,” Rhiannon said. “And my blessings upon all of you.”

The towering screen switched from footage of her face to footage of Deirdre—live footage. There was a camera mounted on the edge of the stage, focusing on the people who were meant to be executed.

Magic snapped through the air. It stank of ozone, like a lightning strike.

The wards holding the sluagh broke.

“No!” Deirdre cried.

The crowd surged forward.

OPA agents opened fire. Automatic gunfire peppered the air, snapping through Deirdre’s skull like nails driven into her temples.

Screams.

Bodies falling.

The magical barrier surrounding the sluagh sparked and frayed as its tentacles lashed through the air.

A vampire launched out of the crowd with preternatural strength, landing smoothly on the stage. Deirdre recognized Stoker, one of Lucifer’s closest generals. He wasn’t a handsome man, nor was he impressive, but he didn’t seem to register any pain as the OPA agents opened fire on him. He also didn’t bleed as the bullets opened holes in his chest.

He was a vampire, not a shifter. Silver did nothing against him.

Stoker’s eyebrows furrowed as he walked forward, pushing directly into the gunfire as though it were no worse than a hard wind. He clamped his fists together and swung them toward the nearest OPA agent.

His knuckles connected. The agent went flying off the stage and vanished into the crowd.

“Free my hands!” Lucifer roared.

Deirdre pushed him aside. “No, Vidya! Free Vidya!”

A body slammed into hers. She smashed into the stage, unable to control her fall. She wasn’t sure if it was Lucifer or an agent who had hit her—she wasn’t sure of anything.

There was so much motion, so much chaos.

The magic from the sluagh’s cage was fraying faster. Skeletal hands scraped at the sky. They were enlarged, so much bigger than the hands of a dead body, so big that they seemed like they should have been able to crash shut on the United Nations building.

It was beyond Deirdre’s comprehension, this bizarre unseelie thing. It didn’t belong in the mundane world. It belonged in the strange dream of the Middle Worlds, where everything was fabricated from imagination and nothing made sense. The edges of its foggy image blurred into the clouds and the ocean and the ethereal architecture.

She couldn’t tell how close it was to her, but she knew that she would be its first target.

Rhiannon had made sure of that.

Deirdre needed to escape.

She jerked her knees to her chest, twisted her arms, and arched her back. She grimaced as she slid her bound wrists underneath her feet so that her hands would be in front.

A boot connected with her skull. Her head bounced off the stage.

It wasn’t a deliberate attack, an attempt to keep her down—there were just so many people on the platform now, both OPA witches and Lucifer’s vampires, that nobody could see where they were going.

Deirdre tried to shove people away, struggling to stand.

She was knocked over again.

Have to escape.

More gunfire. Deirdre looked through the legs of the people surrounding her to see blood in the audience, rioters who had been struck by bullets.

Gods, this wasn’t what she had wanted to do.

“Deirdre!”

Vidya wrenched her off of the stage. It was a short fall, only a few feet.

Someone had untied the valkyrie’s hands. And when they had unleashed those limbs, they had also released the magic that prevented her from unfurling her wings. With swift gestures of razor-sharp feathers, she sliced through the silver cuffs burning stripes into Deirdre’s wrists.

Her muscular arms wrapped around Deirdre. “Hold my neck,” Vidya said. She flapped her wings, beginning to lift her from the ground.

“We can’t go!” Deirdre cried, kicking wildly. “The sluagh—the protestors—”

“You can’t do anything for them.” Vidya took off, kicking away the agents who reached for her. Bullets pinged off of her wings.

From above, Deirdre saw the sluagh’s deadly limbs snapping closed on a handful of civilians who had come for the execution. It bundled them into a bouquet of limbs. They shrieked as they were dragged into its core.

Other tentacles shattered the posts holding up the stage. They smashed into the screen, which had once shown Rhiannon’s face. They slithered free of the circle—and they came for Deirdre in the air.

Vidya was right. There was nothing Deirdre could do for the rioting crowd.

She wrapped her arms tightly around the valkyrie’s neck, and they flew, abandoning vampires and OPA agents to the sluagh’s nonexistent mercy.

VII

They couldn’t return to the high-rise. When Vidya flew overhead, they found it crawling with OPA personnel—people who worked for Rhiannon, whether they knew it or not.

Vidya wasn’t daunted by their supposed safe house and its bounty of lethe being swarmed by enemies. She spiraled back around to head in the opposite direction without missing a single beat of her wings.

They alighted in a courtyard at the center of an abandoned complex.

“The asylum,” Deirdre said softly, releasing her grip on the valkyrie’s shoulders. Her boots splashed into a muddy slurry that was overgrown with weeds. “We’re back at the asylum.” She hadn’t been there since she’d been reborn from the ashes in the incinerator—the same incinerator where Gage’s body had burned.

Little had changed in the ensuing weeks. Nobody had attempted to repair the shattered walls and windows, nor had anyone tended the garden. There were still scorch marks from sidhe magic and blood splatters.

It was quiet. So quiet.

It was also probably the safest place for Deirdre in New York City at the moment. Who would expect her to return to a known hideout?

“When Lucifer and I discussed contingency plans, we agreed that Rhiannon would be unlikely to look for us here,” Vidya said

Deirdre wandered between two trees. She brushed her fingers over the trunk. There were so many memories in that miserable place. Memories that she had been happy to leave behind.

She swallowed down saliva that tasted like blood, tonguing the gaps in her teeth where Rhiannon had performed amateur dentistry. New teeth were already growing back. Soon that pain would be nothing but miserable memories, too.

“Have you and Lucifer been talking about plans without me very much?”

“Only a little. These kinds of logistics didn’t seem worthy of your time and attention. You’ve been distracted.” Vidya’s tone was bland.

“Good idea,” she said.

Deirdre stepped over the rubble to enter the asylum—or at least, what used to be the asylum. She had blown the roof apart using Melchior’s triple-barreled revolver. More of the roof had collapsed since then. What had once been home to Stark’s terrorist organization was now little more than four half-walls and a lot of bricks.

Footsteps shuffled among the debris.

Vidya was beside Deirdre in an instant, wings flaring, fists lifted.

But the man who stepped out of the dust wasn’t Jacek—an insane idea that had only fleetingly crossed Deirdre’s mind. It was Lucifer, his arm slung over Niamh’s shoulder. The harpy didn’t look happy to be carrying him.

“You,” he snarled, pushing Niamh away. She stumbled among the bricks.

Deirdre pulled a cloak of confidence around her as Lucifer approached. “Good to see you here. We need to regroup and—”

“Shut your mouth, bitch,” Lucifer said. “I don’t want to hear another word from you until I talk to Stark. I made my deal with him. Not you. Where is he?” She opened her mouth, but he continued before she could say anything. “If you tell me he has better things to do after we were nearly subject to a public execution, I will rip out your throat.”

“I’d like to see you try,” she said.

He slammed his fist into her gut. She didn’t see it coming and failed to dodge. The breath blasted from her lungs.

She was so dizzy from the instant lack of oxygen that she didn’t retaliate against his vampire-speed uppercut, either.

Vidya kicked Lucifer in the face. It drove him back, but he didn’t seem to care. His point had already been made: He might not be able to tear Deirdre’s throat out, but it wouldn’t exactly be an easy fight, either. Especially now that other vampires were emerging from the rubble, crimson eyes glimmering in the night.

Their glowing eyes were the only way that Deirdre could tell they were approaching. They were so quiet, like rats clawing through sewer tunnels. The night was their domain.

Deirdre made a quick count. A dozen, two-dozen, three.

Lucifer, vampire lord and mercenary, had been followed by all of his people. But Stark’s people—the remaining shifters, like Gianna and Geoff—weren’t there to back Deirdre up.

She could probably beat Lucifer, but could she beat his entire murder with nobody at her back but Vidya?

“Calm down, guys,” Niamh said softly. She hadn’t bothered getting off the ground. She looked so pale and weak. “We’re friends here.”

“I’ll decide if that’s still the case,” Lucifer said. “Where is Everton?”

When Deirdre swallowed, it felt like she was trying to get one of Vidya’s razor feathers down her throat. “He’s hunting in the Winter Court.”

“Have you been communicating with him?”

“We’ve spoken.”

“Recently?”

Deirdre balled her hands into fists. “Look, he made me his Beta. I’m in charge when he’s gone, and—”

The vampire seized her throat. It felt like being in the grip of a frozen spider. His strength was even more shocking than his speed, too.

He closed her airway. Squeezed hard.

“Everton left us,” he said. “I knew it. He left us.”

“Yeah, all of us,” Deirdre said. “But I’m still here.”

“Stark’s fallen through on his end of this deal,” Lucifer said. “And I don’t have any deal with you. We’re gone.”

Deirdre wrenched him away from her throat. “You can’t leave now, not when we’re so close to—”

“To what?” he interrupted. “We’ve lost the election. Rhiannon and Melchior are going to put North America under eternal winter. Where do you think vampires will fall under her new hierarchy?”

“It’s not too late if we work together,” Deirdre said.

Lucifer wrapped his fingers around hers. They were tangled together, all hands squeezing, testing the strength of the phoenix shifter against the strength of the dead. A man with no nerves, no sense of pain, nothing to hold him back.

She only needed a single flame to make an example of him. Just a little fire, and poof—he’d be permanently dead. It would show the vampires who was boss. It might even be enough to bring the rest of them to heel.

It was what Stark would have done.

Yet Deirdre, cold and wet in the ruins of the asylum, couldn’t summon so much as a flicker.

The vampires slipped into the shadows. Their glowing crimson eyes disappeared one pair at a time, like ghosts vanishing into the ether.

She was losing them.

“We have to fight back!” Deirdre said. “Rhiannon is a fraud and we can’t let her take control! There are still things we can do!”

Stoker sneered over Lucifer’s shoulder. “We’re going to greener pastures.”

“There won’t be any such thing if we don’t stop her!”

He’d already faded into shadow.

Of all his people, only Lucifer remained.

“I almost admire you for trying to hold everything together after Stark abandoned us.” He hooked a finger in Niamh’s collar and pulled her upright. “But you’ve wasted my time when we could have been running.” He tugged on Niamh. “I’m taking this with me. I’m keeping her. And we’ll call it even.”

“Wait,” Deirdre said. She wasn’t certain if she was telling him not to take Niamh or if she was just asking him to stay.

He stepped backward. Shadow slithered up his jeans, making his feet disappear, his hips, his stomach. Niamh’s round, helpless eyes kept gazing at Deirdre as she was drawn inexorably into darkness with him.

“If you were smart, you’d run too,” Lucifer said.

And the vampires were gone.

Deirdre had lost Stark’s allies.

If he didn’t kill her for defying him, then he would certainly kill her for that.

She tried not to panic. Panic was a sanity killer, something that would do her no favors now when the crap was hitting the fan. She needed to be clear headed if she wanted to figure out some way to defeat Rhiannon.

But she was standing in the shattered ruins of the asylum with the sky dumping rain upon her, and all she could wonder was how long it would take the sluagh to find her now that it was out of its cage again.

Rhiannon had said it wouldn’t stop until she was dead.

“We need Stark,” Vidya said, giving voice to the words that Deirdre hadn’t been willing to contemplate.

She was right.

They couldn’t do anything about Rhiannon without support. Unfortunately, Lucifer’s loyalties, pathetic as they were, rested with Everton Stark himself. The only way to get the vampires and shifters back together was to have Stark make an appearance.

Which meant that the only way that they were going to be able to defeat Rhiannon and keep her away from the inauguration was with Stark’s intercession.

If Deirdre could get him out of the Winter Court.

“He’ll kill me if he comes back to Earth,” Deirdre said. “With everything I’ve done since he left, he’s not going to see any alternative.”

“Stark’s sentimental,” Vidya said. “He might show mercy.”

“Sentimental? Mercy? Are we talking about the same Stark here?” Deirdre rubbed her jaw. Her teeth still hadn’t grown back in completely since Stark’s wife ripped them out. Would a merciful man fall in love with a woman like that?

“He can be very merciful. I’ve known him a long time,” Vidya said.

“Not long enough.”

“He’s not like you. Everything he does comes from the heart, not from the mind. There isn’t an objective molecule in his body.”

“Are you saying I’m objective?”

“You’re uniquely focused. And Stark is focused on you. We need him to achieve your goals, so let’s get him.”

Vidya spoke with near-robotic calmness, which was strangely soothing. The valkyrie didn’t care that they had almost been publicly executed, devoured by the sluagh. She didn’t care that the OPA had opened fire on the masses, or that they had lost Stark’s allies.

She was focused on the battles to come.

Deirdre needed that kind of pragmatism desperately.

She slipped a hand into her pocket, feeling the hard disc that Brother Marshall had given her at their last meeting. It looked unremarkable, its magic passive, so the agents hadn’t taken it from her when she’d gone into OPA custody.

Deirdre squeezed it. “Brother Marshall?”

The rainy courtyard beyond the collapsed windows vanished, replaced by a towering gray brick face that was covered in runes.

Holy Nights Cathedral didn’t fit into the dimension right. There was no way a cathedral that size could have occupied the same space as the asylum. Yet its four walls were snugly sitting within the courtyard, as though it had been built there all along. As long as Deirdre didn’t try to look at it too hard, trying to understand its dimensions, it looked normal.

Vidya stepped up to the stained-glass window. The candlelight from within reflected on her razor feathers, casting her damp flesh in shades of orange and red. “Unseelie magic. Cool.”

Deirdre edged into the courtyard. The overhang of the cathedral’s roof sheltered her from the rain. She could hear it tapping against the stone bodies of the gargoyles high above.

She managed to reach the door, fitting just barely between the cathedral’s wall and the asylum’s wall.

The door swung inward, and there he was: Brother Marshall backed by one of his biggest gargoyles, which tracked her movements up the aisle as she approached.

“I need your help,” she began.

But then another person stepped out from behind the gargoyle.

It was a short, thin man—more of a boy, really—with dusky skin and black eyes. He wore ill-fitting jeans and a t-shirt with holes in it.

He looked so unassuming that Deirdre immediately mistrusted him.

She stopped a few rows back, and Vidya flanked her, as ready to fight as she always was. “Who’s that?” Deirdre asked sharply. “I expected you to be alone, Brother.”

“Oh, gosh.” The boy’s voice was surprisingly high and feminine. “I forgot.” He touched his face, as though checking the arch of his nose, the dimple in his chin, the shape of his cheekbones. “It’s me. I’m in disguise to make it harder for Rhiannon to follow me. Marion made this. Looks pretty good, huh?”

Deirdre still didn’t understand. Not until the boy slid his thumbs underneath the skin on his jaw and lifted it like a hood.

Rylie Gresham’s face appeared underneath.

The Alpha herself.

Anger blazed within Deirdre. “You. This is your fault! You almost got me killed!”

“You almost got yourself killed,” Rylie said. “You can’t challenge Rhiannon publicly. An execution was the inevitable outcome.” She let the magical mask fall back over her features again, concealing her golden eyes and pink lips.

“It might have been the inevitable outcome for me, but not for you,” Deirdre said. “You knew there’d been election fraud. Brother Marshall told you. And you did nothing!”

“I told Brother Marshall not to tell you,” Rylie said.

She shot a look at the monk, who only shrugged. The gesture wasn’t embarrassed or even apologetic. “Yup,” he said.

“What Brother Marshall did is not the problem here,” Deirdre said. “The problem is your cowardice.”

“The oath might render me immune to Rhiannon for the time being, but it doesn’t spare all of my loved ones. Not everyone I care about is part of my pack. My son, Benjamin—he’s mundane. The oath wouldn’t have protected him. I couldn’t risk Rhiannon retaliating against him.”

“So you decided you’d give Rhiannon the whole country to save one boy?”

“I decided that direct confrontation would be a bad idea, yes,” Rylie said.

“Cowardice.”

“Practicality. I know you think that you can change the world by crossing your fingers and wishing hard enough, but there are real lives on the line, real people who matter, and people who need me to protect them.”

“Gaeans need you to protect them! Thousands of other peoples’ vulnerable sons and daughters,” Deirdre said. “If you couldn’t subvert her safely, then you should have gone big. Gone public. She’s the one whose head should have been on the chopping block for cheating.”

“She won,” Rylie said tightly. “Fairly or not, she won. Brother Marshall’s evidence isn’t enough. This is complicated, Deirdre, so much more complicated than you understand. We have to handle it delicately.”

“It didn’t seem real delicate when Rhiannon had me and Vidya hauled on stage to be publicly devoured by the sluagh.”

“Who do you think rallied the vampires to rescue you?” Rylie asked.

“They rallied themselves to save Lucifer.”

Brother Marshall gave a dry laugh. “Vampires couldn’t rally themselves to play a game of dodge ball.” He jerked a thumb at Rylie. “She got them together to save you. And she did it in secret. Delicately, you might say.”

Deirdre supposed that she should have thanked Rylie for it, but her well of gratitude seemed to have run dry.

The Alpha wasn’t going to do anything about Rhiannon. She was too busy playing politics, pulling strings like some damn puppet master hidden backstage while everyone risked their lives in her stead.

She was just as bad as Stark in her own way.

Deirdre was starting to think that they were all as bad as Stark.

“Forget it,” Deirdre said. “I need a way into the Winter Court. I summoned you so that you could take us there, Brother Marshall. And don’t give me any crap about it. I put myself in a lot of danger to present your evidence to the public, and you owe me for it.”

His eyes flicked between Deirdre and Vidya. “I can’t get into the Winter Court. When the sluagh was unleashed, I shut down my access to the ley lines leading between Middle Worlds.”

“So open it again,” Deirdre said.

“Sure, I could do that. But I’ll have to get to the Winter Court to reopen my access points, which means someone over there will have to let me in first.”

“You’ve gotta have unseelie allies over there. Ask them to drag us over.”

“You know that the Summer and Winter Courts are at war, right?” Brother Marshall asked. “All my unseelie contacts are in hiding. I can’t reach anyone.”

Rylie stepped forward, still cloaked in her disguise. “I have a plan. I’m not going to let Rhiannon hurt people. You have to step back and let me handle things before you make it so much worse.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t trust you,” Deirdre said. “You’ve made your priorities clear, and that’s your own damn skin, not the people.” She thumped her fist on her chest. “I’m the only one who cares about them. I’m the only one who’s gonna fix this. And nothing you say can stop me.”

“Or me,” Vidya said.

That was a slightly more intimidating threat, what with the razor feathers.

Rylie sighed, massaging her temples. “There might be another way into the Winter Court. The unseelie wanted to have Stark assassinated while he was still on Earth, and they got in touch with anyone they thought might give him safe haven. They gave them ways to open portals to the Middle Worlds.”

“Like Chadwick Reynolds,” Deirdre said. He’d had a gift from the unseelie when they had killed him.

Rylie frowned. “Who?”

“Never mind. So you mean we have to figure out who among Stark’s former allies would have also sold him out to the unseelie, track them down, and take their portal-opening-device-thing?”

“Actually, I already found one person,” Rylie said. “You can go there directly. It’s near Cumberland.”

“Give me an address,” Vidya said.

Rylie did. The valkyrie’s eyes went blank as she absorbed the information, taking it in with the same chilling calm that came over her when she was acquiring new targets.

“Okay, let’s go,” Deirdre said, grabbing Vidya’s arm. She didn’t want to spend another moment in that cathedral with those people.

“I might as well go with you and see what I can do about my access points to the Winter Court.” Brother Marshall followed them down the aisle. The gargoyle lurched into motion, leaning on its knuckles as it loped behind him, showering granite dust on the runner between the pews.

“Can’t you just teleport the whole cathedral to Cumberland?” Deirdre asked.

“I could, but then we’d be taking Rylie and my brothers there as well.”

And Brother Marshall didn’t want to risk the people he was protecting.

All these people were prioritizing those they cared about above everyone else. Their judgment was fogged with emotion, making them weak and vulnerable.

Didn’t they know that the people they cared about could turn on them at any moment? It wasn’t that long ago that Deirdre would have protected people like Gage and Niamh, but Gage had forced her to kill him, and Niamh had turned around to kill her. Even Stark, strange and twisted as their relationship was, had left her for his ex-wife at the first opportunity.

Rylie would learn soon enough. Life had a way of teaching its ugliest lessons with brutal surety.

Love meant nothing. Trust meant nothing.

Yeah, they’d learn soon.

Brother Marshall tucked his staff under one arm, then reached up to grab the gargoyle’s bicep. It lifted him onto its back, where he sat comfortably between the wings.

Vidya scooped Deirdre into her arms as though she weighed nothing.

“Hey, Deirdre,” Rylie said, lingering by the altar. It seemed like the people painted on the mural had fixed their cool gazes upon the Alpha, though they hadn’t actually moved an inch. “I know you don’t trust me. I don’t blame you. But I want you to know that I am going to fix this. I won’t let her win by cheating.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Deirdre said as Vidya carried her through the doorway.

The last thing she saw from Rylie was the disguised Alpha turning to the mural, as if praying to the couple behind the altar.

VIII

Vidya was as good as a preternatural GPS. She had once confessed to Deirdre that a valkyrie could track a butterfly across tundra if she had reason to kill that butterfly. She zeroed in on the location near Cumberland with ease.

Not for the first time, Deirdre felt grateful that Vidya had decided they should be friends rather than enemies.

Vidya must have been able to read the signs from the air. She never looked away from the street, not for a moment. They cut through the wet sky, carving a path toward the address that Rylie had given them—a path to Stark.

Over the valkyrie’s shoulder, Deirdre watched Brother Marshall following on his gargoyle mount. The magic rippling from the staff cloaked them in shreds of night. She could only occasionally see the sweep of broad stone wings through the clouds.

Vidya pitched, arms tightening on Deirdre.

They spiraled toward the earth.

Their destination was well north of New York, but the rain seemed to have followed them there. The grass they landed on was spongy. Damp haloes ringed the lights of the manor beyond the gate where Vidya had alighted.

It was an impressive house, like the kind of thing that Deirdre had seen in movies about rich people. She didn’t even know the words for the fancy windows and pillars. Gables? Something like that.

Instead of a yard, the house had pastures. There was also a barn. Some stables. Lots of places for animals to hide, since it was currently too wet for them to be outside.

Brother Marshall and his gargoyle landed. “We should try to be all discreet-like. There’s not a lot of magic around here. I think this place is full of humans.”

“Discreet,” Vidya echoed, looking down at her bare chest. She pulled her wings in tight against her back, but there was no concealing her nudity—normal for shifters, but shocking for mundanes.

“I’m gonna hide Dale Junior in the trees,” Brother Marshall said. “Come with me. I’ll give you my robes.”

“Dale Junior?” Deirdre asked.

Brother Marshall patted the gargoyle’s shoulder.

He didn’t look like a Dale Junior.

They moved into the trees, giving Deirdre time to study the gate, searching for a way to open it up. This was something she knew well. She might not have been able to fly around of her own volition, but she’d broken into a lot of places before.

It looked like there was a security box on the inside. She could climb the wall and let the others through.

Deirdre dried her hands on the hips of her jeans, prepared to scale the bars. But then she noticed the sign.

The house was so fancy, it had a damn name.

Deirdre had to step right up to read the sign for the manor in the gloom. She slid her fingers over the engraved letters.

Stark Estates.

“What…?”

“Excuse me! We’re not open yet!”

She turned to see a man jogging across the pastures. He was lean, wearing a polo shirt and khaki slacks.

The last time that she’d seen him, he was wearing a ball cap, which had effectively distracted from his strong features and cutting gaze.

Only now did she realize how much he resembled Everton Stark.

“You’re related,” she said, unable to conceal her surprise.

He stopped a few feet away. “Excuse me? Who are you?”

It was the man that Stark had given Chadwick Reynolds’s surviving horses to. Deirdre had seen Stark giving the sickly victims of the blood factory to this man, along with a rather large wad of cash to take care of them.

This guy ran a charity where he took care of animals rescued from inhumane farming conditions, and judging by his age and eyes, he shared close genetics with Everton Stark.

“I’m Deirdre Tombs,” she said, thrusting her hand at him through the bars of the fence. “I’m Beta to your...cousin?”

“My brother. Ever is my brother.” He hesitated, and then shook her hand. His grip was weak. His muscle wasn’t preternatural, but the kind of strength that came from a mundane man toiling at an animal preserve. “You’re his…his Beta? Is he here?”

“No, he’s not,” she said.

He relaxed visibly. “Oh. Okay. How can I help you?”

“I’d like to talk.” Deirdre shook the fence’s bars lightly.

His eyebrows pinched. “Okay.” The man pressed something on the other side and the gate swung open. “I’m Sascha Stark. Pleasure to meet you.” That seemed to be a formality rather than a genuine expression of emotion. Sascha was not happy to meet someone closely aligned with Stark—not happy at all.

The brothers might have sold horses to each other, but they weren’t friends.

“I’m not here to visit your charity,” Deirdre said. “I was sent here because…” She trailed off, remembering what Rylie had said.

Sascha must have sold Stark to the unseelie if he had a device that could create a portal to the Winter Court.

She swallowed around a sudden lump in her throat. “I was hoping you could give me more information about Stark. He’s missing.”

Vidya and Brother Marshall emerged from the trees, the gargoyle nowhere in sight. The valkyrie had donned the monk’s robes, leaving him wearing nothing but jeans and a white t-shirt. Together, they almost passed for normal.

“I’m sure you know him better than I do,” Sascha said. “We don’t speak anymore.”

“You speak enough that he recently gave you horses.”

Sascha flinched. “Ah.”

“Yeah,” Deirdre said. “Can we go inside and talk?”

He nodded stiffly, but he didn’t lead them to the manor. He took them into the stables.

The horses from Chadwick Reynolds’s high-rise occupied most of the stalls, though Deirdre wouldn’t have recognized them if not for the dappled patterns of their hides. In the short time that they had been under the care of Sascha Stark, they had developed a new layer of fat under their skin and much shinier hair.

“I need to do some work while we talk, if you don’t mind,” Sascha said. “The early morning hours are when I get the most done with the animals. I’m scheduled to be in meetings all day.”

“Be my guest,” she said.

Sascha filled a trough with water. It didn’t escape Deirdre’s notice that he stood on the other side of the equipment, as far from them as he could get without obviously trying to escape.

“Do I know you?” he asked, staring hard at Vidya.

“If you attended Stark’s graduation from boot camp, then you might recognize me.” Vidya slipped Brother Marshall’s robe off of her shoulder to expose a tattoo of the Marines seal. “I was there with him, before Genesis. Me, Stark, and—”

“Melchior,” Sascha said. “I didn’t think any of you survived the skirmish in Bahrain.”

“I’m difficult to kill,” Vidya said.

While they spoke, Deirdre wandered through the stables, examining the horses and their surroundings. She knew that the sluagh could show up at any moment, yet she’d found herself at an estate with Everton Stark’s family name on it. She was with Stark’s brother. She could have answers to every question that had ever crossed her mind about him.

There was no way in heck she’d rush out of there.

“He’s rich,” Deirdre said, startling herself. She hadn’t meant to say that aloud.

“We’ve done well,” Sascha said. He almost looked embarrassed. “Our parents got lucky in the dot com boom.”

“You’ve got an estate.”

“And we attended private schools, with private tutors, and we have trust funds. I’m determined to use my wealth to give back.”

“Your brother uses his wealth to run a rebellion,” Deirdre said.

“It takes more than similar blood to be family with someone,” he said.

There was no mystery as to why Sascha might have given his brother up to the unseelie. He didn’t think much of Stark’s terrorist proclivities. He wanted to save horses and chickens and fluffy little lambs while Stark traveled the country compelling people to acts of murder.

Deirdre didn’t expect to be disgusted by the idea of using his money for charity. Saving animals should have made her happy. But Sascha Stark could have done more with his money—more to help gaeans.

He didn’t need to, though. Genesis had left him mundane.

“I’m guessing Stark joined the Marines so he wouldn’t feel indebted to you people,” Deirdre said.

“Actually, it was because of her.” Sascha turned off the water to the trough. He stroked the neck of a horse as it drank deeply. His hands were so much gentler than his brother’s.

“Vidya?”

“Rhiannon,” he said. “He got tangled up with her. That piece of trash.”

Deirdre didn’t even like the woman, but her hackles lifted at a man referring to her as trash. This rich man in his manor surrounded by beautiful pastures with so much money he could throw it at animals and still feed himself. “How did he meet her?”

“She was entrenched with the local gangs. Mafia. Something like that, I don’t know. I stayed away from her. She came to us for an internship, but we rejected her because of her ties to a crime syndicate. Ever, though—he was entranced. He followed Rhiannon when she left the interview and never came back. Getting him enlisted in the military seemed like the fastest way to get him away from her.”

“They threatened to take his trust fund if he didn’t enlist,” Vidya added.

“We thought we were saving his life,” Sascha said.

“Did you think that summoning the unseelie if he tried to hide out at home with you would save his life, too?” Deirdre asked.

Sascha took a few steps back, until the mass of his body was hidden behind the horse’s. It didn’t make her think any better of him, that he would use a vulnerable creature as cover against an unidentified shapeshifter like Deirdre. “I thought it might save mine.”

Brother Marshall glanced out the window at the dark sky. “We don’t have much time. Give it to me.” He extended a hand toward Sascha. “You know what I’m talking about.”

Sascha pulled boxes of medicine and tools out of cabinets against the wall, then fished a sphere out from behind them. It was marked with sidhe runes. Deirdre recognized them because they’d taken an identical artifact off of Chadwick Reynolds.

She snatched it out of his hand.

“I hope you feel good about yourself,” Deirdre said. She lobbed the sphere to Brother Marshall, who caught it easily.

“You didn’t see what Ever used to do under Rhiannon’s influence. You’d make the same choices I have if you did,” Sascha said.

“Like the fact that he ordered someone to hide his daughters?”

His eyes filled with burning intensity. “The girls. Do you know where they are?”

“No. Do you?”

“Of course I don’t,” he said. “I wish I did. My parents and I want nothing more than to bring them home to us so we can take care of them.”

“I thought it took more than similar blood to be family,” Deirdre said.

“It does,” Sascha said. “But they deserve the chance to become part of ours. They deserve better than Rhiannon and Ever.”

“This is interesting and all, folks, but I’m not here for family drama. I’m gonna go ahead and change this so that it will take us directly to Stark.” Brother Marshall wedged his fingernails into the runes on the sidhe stone. “It’s keyed in to him already. It won’t be difficult. And I can use the pieces I break off to make a tool that will bring us back as well.”

“Then do it,” Deirdre said.

“If you bring the girls back to me, we can take care of them,” Sascha said. “We can keep them safe.”

She turned from Sascha, unable to bring herself to respond. The sight of him made her so angry. But why? Because he reminded her of his brother, whom she already felt so angry at? Because he had betrayed Stark? Because he was another reminder that there were people in this world living in paradise—people who were no different from Deirdre aside from a stroke of luck that had birthed them into a higher class?

Stark had come from that higher class, too. Yet he’d been reborn a gaean. A shifter. And not one of Rylie’s privileged beings, but one of the dregs of society.

He knew both perspectives, and he’d chosen to side with the lower class for justice.

That had to mean something.

Deirdre needed to believe that the man she had chosen to follow into the depths of Hell was still inside of Stark. She needed to believe he’d started the revolution because he believed in it, just as she did, and that he would come back to Earth once he realized how much they suffered without him.

She needed to believe in Everton Stark.

Brother Marshall hunkered down with the sidhe stone, and Deirdre paced, watching the windows. Watching for the attack she knew was coming.

The horses balked when Deirdre passed them, sensing the animal within her. They nickered. Whinnied.

“I think that’s part of what drove him nuts in the end,” Sascha said. “That reaction. It killed him that he couldn’t ride his horses after Genesis.”

That got Deirdre’s attention. “Stark? Everton Stark? He likes to ride horses?”

“He did dressage. Look…” Sascha took a photo off of one of the higher shelves, blowing dust off of the glass. He gave it to Deirdre.

The younger Everton Stark had no beard. He was a short, lean man on horseback, every inch the wealthy gentleman. His Andalusian had its knees lifted in the photograph, caught mid-dance. “Ever loved the control, the relationship with the horse. He prided himself on that. He stopped when Rhiannon entered his life and became this thing I couldn’t even recognize.”

Deirdre opened the back of the frame. She took the photo out. “This is mine now.” She wasn’t sure why she wanted it. She just felt like it was important.

“You might as well have it. Our parents have gotten rid of every other picture of him by now. Everything that survived Genesis—which wasn’t much.”

“You and your family shun him, and you act surprised when he goes rogue,” Deirdre said.

“He’s a murderer. What would you have done?”

“Incoming,” Vidya said. She stood in the open doors to the pastures, looking out at the dark evening. She whipped Brother Marshall’s robes off over her head, exposing her bare chest and emerging wings.

It was darker than it should have been, even at this time of morning. There were more than clouds on the horizon. There was a deep blackness that slid toward them, making the grass vanish.

Deirdre flashed back to Genesis. To the black void that had devoured her elementary school and everyone inside it. To the shadows that consumed her while she screamed under the blackberry bushes.

This wasn’t the Genesis void.

If possible, it was something even worse.

“Sluagh.” She whirled on Brother Marshall. “We have to go. Open a hole to the Middle Worlds.”

“It’s not ready yet,” he said. “It’s not easy for me to manipulate sidhe magic without destroying it. Hold the sluagh off for a few minutes.”

“Hold it off? Hold it off?” He might as well have asked her to hold a hurricane at bay. Deirdre shoved Sascha toward the rear of the stables. “Run. Get out of here.”

He hesitated. “What is it?”

“Death,” Deirdre said. “Worse than death. You can’t do anything about it.”

“The horses,” he said.

“Would you rather die with them?”

Sascha didn’t need more prompting. He ran through the rear doors of the stable, leaving them swinging open in the wind as he sprinted for the manor.

The sluagh didn’t roar as it approached like the Genesis void had. It screamed. Deirdre could hear the wailing echoing over the pastures, and she wondered how many souls it had added to its morass since the failed execution. How many were members of the OPA? How many were innocent gaeans?

So many people damned because of Rhiannon and Deirdre.

Deirdre gazed at it helplessly through the window. The grass was dying under the icy spray of the sluagh’s fluids. Sascha’s horses weren’t going to have anything to graze on soon, assuming they survived.

Another scream shattered the air. It was louder than the ones that came out of the sluagh, and far closer.

A mass of feathers slammed into the window just inches from Deirdre. The whole wall shook.

“Oh my gods,” Deirdre said, jerking back.

Niamh shoved the window open from the outside, using her free hand to strip the harpy skin off. “I’m sorry, I tried to get here as fast as I could.” She scrambled into the stables. “The sluagh found me with the vampires at the asylum—it ate a bunch of the murder. Lucifer wasn’t watching me. I thought I could get away and warn you.”

Deirdre helped her through the window, despair swelling within her belly. “You should have escaped!”

Niamh all but collapsed in her arms. The flight to Stark Estates had worn her out, leaving her papery-pale flesh looking downright vampiric. “I had to warn you.”

“But you can’t do anything here except die!”

“Isn’t that what you’d want anyway?” Niamh asked. Her voice was so faint, Deirdre wasn’t sure that’s what she’d really heard.

Stupid harpy.

“I’ve got the portal!” Brother Marshall announced.

The stable wall broke open.

Lashing tentacles smashed through the stables, slinging icy blood across the stables. The screaming horses banged inside their stalls.

The sluagh was even more terrifying a presence for the animals than the shifters were.

Deirdre couldn’t blame them. Staring into its massive body, she felt pretty damn terrified herself. It seemed to have grown to twice the size it had been outside the United Nations earlier that night, glutted on gaean souls. The skeletons within the darkness were clawing at themselves. Writhing in ultimate misery.

The one thing that could definitely kill a phoenix for good.

But the sheer size of the sluagh was their saving grace at the moment. It could only reach a few limbs into the stable, unable to squeeze its body through the wall. It would need to open a bigger gap to reach them.

Hundreds of tentacles and bony hands beat at the siding, ripping it away.

Vidya extended her wings and leaped in to engage it. She moved like a tornado, whirling through the air to slice the sluagh apart.

She severed its limbs easily, but the sluagh wasn’t deterred. It didn’t even try to fight back. It just kept tearing at the stables, faster and faster, peeling it apart like it was trying to reach the rotten core of an onion.

Deirdre dragged Niamh toward Brother Marshall. “Where’s the portal?”

He pointed at an empty patch of air behind him. “There.”

She couldn’t see anything, but that seemed to be typical of sidhe portals.

“Come on, Vidya!” she shouted. “Let’s go!”

“I haven’t made the thing to help us return yet,” Brother Marshall said.

“There’s no time,” Deirdre said. “Make it on the other side. We have to go. Now.”

“I won’t be able to work unseelie magic on the other side.”

“What?”

The roof buckled, showering pieces of the roof over the stalls. Niamh tore free of Deirdre to throw herself at the horses, opening the doors one by one, allowing them to escape.

Deirdre hung beside Brother Marshall’s portal, hesitating. It was only visible because of the absence of debris where it hovered, making the wall behind it shimmer faintly. But she could feel it. The frigid air blasted her, and she knew that the cold was coming.

Gods, but Deirdre hated the cold.

A scream drew her gaze over her shoulder. Niamh had ripped one of the posts off of a stall with preternatural strength and swung it at the sluagh like a club. An icy tentacle had closed around it, and now frost crawled over her hands.

Was she stupid? Why wasn’t she running?

“Brother Marshall?” Deirdre asked, edging closer to the portal.

“Almost done,” he said. He had squeezed himself against the wall, as far from the sluagh as possible. His fingers rushed over the glimmering sidhe stone. It illuminated his face from underneath, revealing worry, but not panic.

Vidya dodged an attack from the sluagh, putting herself within Deirdre’s reach.

“Get to the Winter Court!” Deirdre shouted, shoving the valkyrie hard. Vidya’s mouth opened in a cry of protest, but she tipped through the portal and vanished before any sound could come out.

The sluagh punched into the stables.

It was only inches away now.

Deirdre was pinned between it and the portal—no longer capable of running in any direction but the Winter Court.

The wild flailing of its hands snatched at a horse Niamh had been trying to free. Niamh threw herself back from another lashing tentacle. It caught her ankle. Wrapped around her leg.

This was the person who had betrayed Deirdre. She shouldn’t have cared if the sluagh killed her. But the thought of Niamh getting dragged into the belly of the sluagh was unbearable—a fate worse than death.

Even Niamh didn’t deserve that.

Deirdre drew her gun. “Get off of her!”

She fired into the tentacle. It snapped free of the sluagh’s greater mass, spurting icy fluid from the wound. It splattered on Deirdre’s pants. It was so cold that it stung through the cloth.

But Niamh was free.

“Run,” the harpy said. She was kicking one leg against the floor, but the other was immobile, numbed by the sluagh’s grip.

Deirdre gripped Niamh under both arms and hauled her back.

The sluagh smashed through the wall. A skeletal hand snapped onto one of the nearest horses, and hooves flailed wildly in the air as the murky darkness crawled over its flesh, devouring its entire body.

“Deirdre!” Brother Marshall roared. The gargoyle, Dale Junior, had appeared behind him. It was about to spirit him away from the stables to safety. But the monk was lingering, holding something aloft—a fragment of the stone sphere. It was a small, flat crescent that glowed with unseelie magic.

The monk had done it. Despite being human, he had reassembled a sidhe artifact, and created a way for Deirdre to bring Stark back from the Winter Court.

But there were about a dozen stalls and a dozen tentacles between them.

Deirdre lifted one hand. “Throw it to me!”

He hurled it like a baseball.

Brother Marshall was strong. His form was great.

The teleportation device soared toward her.

Then one of the sluagh’s deadly hands slapped it out of the air. Another hand reached for Deirdre.

There was no time to search for Brother Marshall’s tool. Not if she wanted Niamh to survive—and not if she wanted to keep from getting eaten as well.

Deirdre threw herself backwards, holding the harpy, and they both plunged into the Winter Court with no way back.

IX

Deirdre plummeted into a snowdrift that was at least ten feet deep. It closed around her body, consuming her with chilly frost. At first, everything melted when it contacted her Maine-temperature skin, but she quickly grew colder.

“Damn!”

She scrabbled at the snow, which closed like a blue-tinged sarcophagus over her face. Her hands punched through the surface. Chilly wind bit at her panicked fingertips.

A body struck against hers. “Dee? Dee, where are you?” Niamh’s voice was muffled by the snow.

“I’m here!”

Deirdre gripped her wrists. Together, they reached the top of the drift, heads erupting from the surface. Snow stuck to Niamh’s feathery curls. Her lips were already turning blue.

They were in a deep valley between two hills, which were carpeted in the same dead forest that Deirdre had seen when she visited with Melchior. The branches shimmered with sapphire ice crystals, just a few shades darker than the stars in the velvety sky beyond. From a distance, looking at a picture of it, the cold forest might have been beautiful. Being submerged in the center of it was horrifying.

“I’ve got you.” Vidya appeared from between the trees, flapping her wings with more fervor than usual to keep herself above the snow. There wasn’t enough wind to hold her aloft.

She stretched an arm down. Deirdre took it, and the valkyrie lifted her from the snow. Niamh clung to her legs.

The faint wind was agonizingly cold. Deirdre wished she would numb to it. Anything to keep from feeling like knives were stabbing her in the cheeks and chin and lips.

Vidya’s wings slowed. They drooped in the air.

“I’m landing somewhere that looks firm,” she said.

A half-second later, Deirdre and Niamh hit the nearest hilltop.

She wrapped her arms around the trunk of a tree to hold herself up, trying not to sink into the snow. But even the tree was cold. Maybe colder than the air itself.

“Did you catch the doohickey?” Niamh asked. “The thing Brother Marshall made to get us back to Earth?”

Deirdre squeezed her eyes shut, envisioning how close it had come to her hand. “No,” she said.

Niamh shivered harder. “How are we going to get back? Are we trapped?”

“No,” Deirdre said again, sharper than before.

“What about Brother Marshall himself?” Niamh asked.

“He’s got Dale Junior,” Deirdre said. “He’ll be fine. We need to worry about Stark.” The words came out jilted, trembling. Her jaw shook so hard that she nearly bit her tongue. “B-brother Marshall said he’d send us to Stark d-directly.”

“I can look for him.” But Vidya stood unsteadily nearby, wings wrapped around her bare torso for some scrap of warmth. She didn’t look eager to fly again.

Deirdre never would have expected to miss Melchior, but she did.

She didn’t need a dragon, though. She was a phoenix. Fire flowed through her veins as surely as it did through his. She could save them from the cold if only she could harness her anger the way that Melchior had described.

There were plenty of things to be angry about.

But Deirdre was so tired of trying to work up her rage, her fury. She had plunged into the coldest place in the Middle Worlds without any way back to search for a man who didn’t even want to return, and she mostly just felt like she was going to burst into tears.

She didn’t dare allow that to happen. She was afraid that her eyelids would freeze shut.

“There’s got to be a path to Niflheimr nearby, right?” Niamh hugged her arms tightly around herself as she hunkered down between Deirdre’s legs and the tree. “If we can get to the castle, we can make it. I just need to figure out where we are.”

“You shouldn’t have come at all,” Deirdre said. “What were you thinking, standing up to the sluagh like that? There wasn’t a damn thing you could do to it. I told you to run!”

“I wanted to help you,” Niamh said.

Gods, she sounded so heartbreakingly pathetic.

There was Deirdre’s anger.

But the anger didn’t bring on the flame of the phoenix. It faded into regret too quickly, and something that might have been sympathy.

Niamh had been trying so desperately to make amends for her betrayal that she almost died for it. Multiple times. Yeah, she was crazy, but she was crazy for Deirdre.

She dropped to Niamh’s side, hoping to warm her with proximity, even if she couldn’t summon the fire. “Can you fly?” she asked Vidya. “Stark must be nearby. He must be. If you can get up in the air again, we should be able to spot him, wherever he is.”

“I think I can,” the valkyrie said stiffly. But still, she didn’t move.

Everyone was rapidly freezing, and they were only there because of Deirdre. Because they had followed her into the Winter Court to help, trusting that Deirdre would have had a plan.

She should have been able to protect them.

Yeah, even Niamh.

“I’m so sorry,” Deirdre said. “I want to be able to keep you warm. I should be able to, but… Oh.”

Flames flickered over her arms.

She lifted her hands to look at the fire dancing along her fingers.

It didn’t start out all that warm. It started out cool and red, and then tinted orange as it heated, becoming brighter and brighter. As she warmed, the chill of winter receded.

Had she finally harnessed her anger?

But Deirdre didn’t feel angry at all. It made no sense.

She was too grateful for the break from the cold to care. Deirdre drew back from Niamh, mindful of the way that she had incinerated Chadwick Reynolds.

Snow melted around her body, soaking her clothes and then evaporating within moments. Like Melchior had done before, she cleared the ground around them. She made space for Vidya and Niamh to stand.

“How are you doing that?” Niamh asked. “What happened to being an Omega?”

“I’ve learned a few things,” Deirdre lied.

She trudged up the hill, clearing a path for her companions to walk behind her. They progressed slowly. Even though Deirdre was warm enough to melt the snow, she was fighting against eternal winter. A fledgling phoenix was nothing in comparison to that.

“I hear something,” Vidya said.

Deirdre paused, perking her ears.

All she could hear was the wind whistling through the tree branches.

“What is it?” she asked.

Vidya’s cheeks flushed with fever that had nothing to do with proximity to Deirdre. “Battle.”

She flapped her wings a few times, as if to test them, and then took off. She made a quick spiral above the hill.

Whatever she saw, it got her excited. She vanished beyond the trees.

“Damn,” Deirdre said.

She picked up her pace, and Niamh ran behind her, using the path she carved over the dead grass. They weaved through the black forest, which thinned toward the top of the hill.

“I think we’ve found him,” Niamh said.

Deirdre followed her gaze to the valley beyond the next hill.

What she had initially believed to be a denser copse of black trees wasn’t forest at all—the ground was actually bare of flora in that area.

They were bodies.

She dimmed her flame to help her eyes adjust to the darkness in the valley. Once she did, she could see the splatters of emerald and sapphire that heralded sidhe blood. There were broken limbs, scorch patterns where magic had blazed into the earth, and spears of ice thrusting from the snow.

There were dozens of bodies. Maybe a hundred.

And they formed a trail leading deeper into the hills.

“Damn,” Deirdre said again.

They’d found Stark all right.

At least, they’d found signs of the one thing that Stark did best.

She slid down the embankment, Niamh close behind her. The harpy put her feet where Deirdre put hers, walking in the melted areas and trying to remain as close to her warmth as possible.

Vidya dropped down to join them a few moments later. She was shivering, wings stiff with ice. “They’re all dead.” She sounded disappointed. Deirdre doubted that it was mourning—more like regret that she hadn’t arrived at the battle soon enough to get a piece of it.

The trail of dead led further than Deirdre had first seen. They were seelie and unseelie, clearly factions at war, but they hadn’t killed each other. Their throats were ripped open. Claw marks gashed open their guts. A few of them had been dismembered.

These were signs of death from a very angry bear wolf.

“Do you hear that?” Vidya asked.

Deirdre shook her head. “More battle?”

“Oh yes.”

Vidya raced ahead of them. Her body had warmed enough from proximity to Deirdre to fly again, and she shot across the snow, dodging between swells of earth.

Deirdre was only a few seconds behind, her pace slowed by the effort it took to melt her surroundings.

She stopped dead when she rounded the hill.

Sapphire magic sizzled through the air, smashing into a snowdrift with a muffled whumph. She dodged it in time to miss the bulk of the energy. But the splash damage struck her.

Deirdre flared as she whirled on her attacker. He wasn’t even looking in her direction. He hadn’t been trying to kill Deirdre—he was a seelie sidhe, bundled in magic and furs as defense against the cold, and he had lobbed that magic at a different shifter. A huge, monstrous beast that didn’t look like it belonged on Earth.

Everton Stark.

He pounced on the sidhe instants after the magic hit the hillside. Magic flared between their bodies. The faerie screamed wetly as his throat shredded in the jaws of the bear wolf, splattering glittering gem-blood on the snow.

Another sidhe leaped at Stark from behind. Her magic was colder, brighter—unseelie.

Stark’s presence had stopped the sidhe from fighting one another. He had given them a common enemy.

It wasn’t enough to save them.

Vidya smashed into the unseelie. Her momentum carried both of them into the trees. Deirdre assumed that the valkyrie killed her, but she didn’t get to see—another pair of unseelie attacked at that moment. Deirdre hadn’t even seen them coming. They were just suddenly there, warping the Winter Court around her, making the trees swirl like wine dribbled down white silk sheets.

Deirdre wasn’t surprised by the way that they distorted reality anymore. But it made them hard to track.

She drew her guns and fired.

Deirdre glimpsed one of the unseelie collapsing. Deirdre had shot her in the throat.

The other one was building a new ball of electricity between her hands.

Deirdre fired on the second unseelie, and she knew by the pulse of magic that her shot had hit home.

No life remained between Deirdre and Stark. Just bodies. A lot of bodies. He’d already done most of the damage.

The bear wolf rounded on her, lips peeled back in a snarl.

Deirdre hadn’t seen him fully shapeshifted in a long time. He was majestic and terrifying, as intimidating as Melchior’s dragon form in his own way.

He would have been able to swallow her in a single bite.

But when he lunged toward her, she pulled her arm back and slapped him in the muzzle. It was hard enough to stagger him.

But not so hard that he shouldn’t have gotten up again.

He collapsed in the snow, flank heaving, frothy saliva gathered on the tip of his nose. His eyes were unfocused. He hadn’t really been trying to attack Deirdre—he’d just been trying to kill anything that moved.

Sidhe magic had burned his back open, deep enough to expose spine. His paws were frozen. The skin was black without blood flow.

And he was no longer healing.

It had taken the loss of hundreds of sidhe lives, but Everton Stark had finally been knocked down.

Deirdre almost didn’t check for a pulse. She almost walked away. But she thought of Lucifer taking the murder of vampires into the shadows, and Rhiannon at the United Nations, and she went to his side. Deirdre buried her hands in the fur around his neck and held her breath.

Stark’s heart beat slowly but surely.

Defeated, but not dead.

And Deirdre hated herself for feeling such dizzying relief.

Deirdre built a fire at the end of the valley using clothes stripped from the sidhe bodies for kindling, and Vidya spread her massive wings to help contain the heat. It trapped enough warmth that Deirdre could begin to thaw Stark’s frosty fur.

He was limp as Deirdre tried to massage blood flow into appendages blackened by frostbite. He must have been frozen to near-death and healed a thousand times before becoming too depleted of energy to go on.

But he still had Alpha healing. All he needed was warmth, a break from the fighting, and a little rest.

His body began to knit.

Niamh curled into a ball on the opposite side of the fire, hugging her knees to her chest. It was strange to see the confident harpy so diminished. It wasn’t the cold making her so pale. She wasn’t an Alpha, and she was going to need a lot more time to heal from what she’d suffered at the hands of the vampires.

“You awake?” Deirdre asked. The harpy startled at being addressed. She nodded silently. “How do we get to Niflheimr from here?”

“I don’t know where ‘here’ is,” Niamh said. “I could fly. I could take a look around.”

“Great. Do that.”

Niamh stood, tugging the harpy skin out from under her shirt. She must have stitched it back together in secret while held by the vampires; it was ratty, barely more than a few shreds. “I’ll be right back.”

“Wait.” Deirdre set down one of Stark’s legs, rubbing her flaming hands on her pants to extinguish them. The fire didn’t burn her clothes. “What are you doing?”

“You told me to look around.”

“That’s not what I mean. All this stuff you’re doing—this sudden contrition. Why? I’ve let the vampires drain you for days. You’ve gotta be mad at me. I know you, or at least, I thought I did. You should be pissed.”

Niamh flipped the skin over her shoulders. The magic rippled around her. “I’m pissed.”

“Then what’s with all the obedience and self-sacrifice and all that crap?”

Stark groaned, shifting on the ground.

Niamh’s harpy form took over. With a few hurried flaps of her wings, she escaped the circle of firelight and climbed out of Vidya’s protective aura.

Stark’s eyes opened.

Deirdre tried not to feel too relieved.

After all, they weren’t friends. They weren’t lovers. And as soon as he realized that Deirdre was immune to his compulsion, they were going to have serious problems.

But dammit, it was so good to see him and his stupid rugged jaw and even the spark of brutal intensity in his golden eyes.

He was a leader. A man who took charge, for better or for worse.

Having Stark back meant that Deirdre wasn’t solely responsible for everything.

He didn’t allow her to help him sit up. He did that on his own, biceps flexing as he pushed himself upright.

Deirdre had saved a few shreds of loose robes from some of the seelie sidhe, who had been dressed warmly to help tolerate the depths of winter. She handed these to him. Stark draped them over his broad shoulders and furred chest.

“Impressive,” he said.

He wasn’t talking about the clothes. He was looking at Deirdre’s glowing flesh.

Deirdre steeled herself against the warmth she felt at his praise. Not friends. Not lovers. Not mates. I just need him, that’s all.

“How do you feel? Will you be able to walk soon?” she asked.

He considered himself. “If I eat.”

“We’ve got kibble,” Vidya said.

She fished a small packet of jerky out of her pocket. It was barely enough to fill Stark’s mouth, but he took his time chewing it, rolling the meat around in his mouth. It must have been the first meal he’d had since entering the Winter Court.

Niamh landed, rejoining them. “I know where we are,” she said. “I can get us to Niflheimr.”

Stark’s reaction to her arrival was almost as chilly as the wind itself. “What are you doing here, Tombs? And with her.”

“You’re hunting in the wrong place,” Deirdre said. “Rhiannon’s been on Earth.”

“I know,” he said.

Her flames flickered. “You do?”

“She moves freely between the worlds. But she will need to come back here. This is where I will find her, and this is where I’ll be able to kill her without intervention from the OPA.”

“You were almost dead yourself,” Deirdre said. “Maybe you should be picking your battlegrounds in places where you can actually survive.”

“They’re here, Tombs,” Stark said. “It’s not just about Rhiannon.”

She stared at him blankly. “They?”

“The girls.”

His daughters.

Deirdre’s heart skipped a beat. “They are? How do you know?”

“I know.” He tapped his nose. “I knew the instant that I entered the Middle Worlds.”

“It could be a trap,” Deirdre said. “Illusion cast by Rhiannon.”

“It’s not. I know them. They’re here.” He leaned toward Deirdre, fixing her with a serious look. “I did it for them.” The gentleness in his voice shocked her. She had to struggle to even understand him.

“You did what?”

“You wanted to know why I compelled Melchior to hide the girls,” Stark said. “I did it to protect them. The compulsion meant that Melchior wouldn’t be able to reveal their location under any amount of torture. He agreed to it because he believed in protecting them, too.”

Deirdre looked to Vidya and Niamh, but they were acting like they weren’t even there. “Protecting them from what?” she finally asked.

“Their mother,” Stark said.

“Melchior kidnapped Rhiannon and your daughters.”

“Not exactly. Rhiannon knew I’d sent him away with them, and she chased him down to try to get the girls back.” His jaw clenched, tendon flexing in front of his ear. “I assumed that Melchior had somehow found a way around my compulsion and turned on Rhiannon, but now I think her compulsion was merely stronger than mine.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to. I only want you to know that I have never intended to harm my daughters.” Stark drew the scraps of animal hide around him. He looked regal like that, almost like he could have been a sidhe king himself. “Rhiannon’s won the election.”

That was subject matter that Deirdre did understand. “Yeah, by cheating.”

“I don’t care about that,” he said. “What else did she do?”

“She tried to have us executed publicly. All of us.” She gestured to the other women.

“I don’t care about that either.”

Of course he didn’t. “But you’ve gotta care that I can direct you to her, right? We can get into the inauguration together and kill her.”

“It wouldn’t be that simple. Aside from the fact that Rhiannon will be expecting us, they have that mage girl orchestrating everything. The inauguration will be protected against attacks like ours on multiple levels. It would be the worst possible place to go after Rhiannon.”

“We’ll find a way to do it,” Deirdre said. “At least we’ll know where she is. Right? And it’s not a million degrees below zero on Earth.”

“I won’t leave without my daughters,” Stark said.

“Won’t it be easier to save them once Rhiannon’s dead anyway?”

“If she hasn’t placed some kind of trap to kill them in case of her death. I don’t know. We’ll need to find them. I suspect she’s holding them at Niflheimr.”

“Then you were going the wrong way when you were killing all those sidhe,” Niamh said. She pointed toward the hills. “There’s an ice bridge leading to the castle in that direction. It’s a long walk, though.”

He eyed Deirdre’s flaming skin again. “Not too long a flight.”

“I can’t,” she said automatically. “We need to get back to Earth.”

“My daughters are children. Alona is twelve. Calla is not yet eleven. They’re trapped in the Winter Court, and I will find them.”

Just the sound of it made Deirdre’s heart ache. He’d pursued them relentlessly for so long, tracking them around schools they’d attended, benefits offices that had fed them. And now he was so close.

Deirdre had disdained Rylie for prioritizing her kids over the country, but now she was thinking of helping Stark do the same thing.

“The solution is obvious,” Vidya said. “We retrieve the girls as quickly as possible and return to Earth. If we work together, we’ll get through this faster. Simple.”

Simple, but not easy.

Damn if Vidya wasn’t right, though.

“Okay,” Deirdre said. “Let’s go find your kids.”

X

Find Stark’s kids.

Get back to Earth.

Simple.

All they had to do was cross the icy landscape, find the bridge leading to the castle of ice, and enter the palace where Rhiannon had most likely hidden them.

The first two parts didn’t take long. Maybe an hour. Stark had killed all of the sidhe forces in the forest before succumbing to the cold. Deirdre melted the snow and Niamh navigated. Simple.

But then they reached a hill overlooking the ocean to find the bridge to Niflheimr, and nothing from there seemed simple.

Deirdre had seen that bridge while flying with Melchior, and given it little thought at the time. She’d been too wrapped up in her first flight to care about the towering crystalline pillars isolated in the vast frozen ocean.

It also hadn’t been surrounded by an army at the time.

Seelie and unseelie alike teemed on the surface of the ocean, visible only as sparks of magic at that distance. Their cries drifted on the wind. Deirdre couldn’t begin to count how many there were, but the numbers must have been in the hundreds—a civil war surrounding the death of Ofelia, Rhiannon’s betrayal, and seelie complicity with the OPA.

They weren’t just on the ocean. They were on the lone bridge leading to the gates of Niflheimr too, and the snow-covered beach resting in front of that.

Stark actually looked a little uncertain at the sheer numbers of them. It was a rare sight in him.

“What do we do, boss?” Deirdre asked.

He scrubbed a hand through his beard. “Kill them, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Vidya said.

Deirdre snorted. “You’re a great tactical mind, Everton Stark.”

“I killed that many and more since entering the Winter Court,” he said. “I fought for days without rest.”

“Yeah, you did,” Deirdre said. “And you’re still healing from that. You’re not exactly fresh.”

“But I have you.” He was looking far too intently at Deirdre’s flaming skin. She decided to pretend that he was talking about their party as a whole, not Deirdre specifically. She hated it when he got all intense like that.

“Four against four hundred still isn’t great odds,” she said.

“Not with that attitude it’s not,” Niamh said with a nervous smile.

“If Stark stays in his human form, he can compel some of them,” Deirdre said, trying to wrap her mind around the situation the way she’d been strategizing back on Earth. She didn’t need Stark to act like Stark to enjoy his leadership skills. She’d gotten great at mimicking him. “Plus the bridge is pretty narrow—they’d only be able to come at us five, maybe seven at a time.”

“We have the advantage of aerial assault opportunities as well,” Vidya said.

“Why assault at all?” Niamh asked. “Why don’t we just skip over them? We can come down from the cliff over there…” She pointed. “We can skim down with minimal energy, go over their heads, and hit the gates. I know how to open them.”

“It might work,” Vidya said. “My ability to fight will be limited if I’m carrying people, though.”

Niamh unfolded her tattered harpy skin from within her jacket. It expanded in her hands, dripping with feathers. “I can take one of you.”

“Very well,” Stark said. “Vidya will take Tombs.”

“No, I’ll go with Niamh.” Deirdre’s protective instinct said that only badness could come out of leaving Stark and Niamh alone. They’d kill each other, and like it or not, she needed both to survive for the time being.

Niamh’s hands shook as she pulled the harpy skin around herself. “You’ll have to turn off your fire so you don’t incinerate me, Dee. I’m flammable.”

”All of us are going to have to move fast if we plan to get through the gates before we freeze,” Vidya said.

“Or we could fly for the nearest portal back to Earth,” Deirdre muttered.

Stark shot a look at her as he wrapped an arm securely around Vidya’s waist. He wouldn’t let himself be carried in her arms the way that Deirdre did.

“Don’t die,” he told Deirdre.

Irritation rippled down her shoulders. When she felt like that, it took no effort to dim her flames until her skin went completely dark. The anger seemed to suck all of the fuel out of her. “Don’t act like you care, Stark. Remember who left whom.” Deirdre vaulted onto Niamh’s back, much broader now that she was in her harpy form. “Go!”

Niamh took off, diving off the edge of the cliff.

The original enchantment had been created by Rhiannon, which meant it had been designed to fly well in the Winter Court. She sliced right through the hard, blasting winds.

Simple.

They pulled up a few feet above the heads of the warring sidhe. Niamh flew with stunning agility, dodging the sizzling splash of magic that the faeries cast at one another.

The battle was an ugly thing to witness up close. Niamh moved quickly, but not so quickly that Deirdre didn’t see the sidhe gutting each other. They were filled with magic on the inside, more magic than blood and organs.

And they died in the most spectacularly messy of ways.

Like balloons filled to bursting, they erupted at the slightest wounds. The seelie were the worst of it. They couldn’t seem to hold themselves together in the brutal cold of the Winter Court. And as soon as they popped, they froze into hideous statues of blood and ice.

The surviving seelie seemed to be making a push for the gates of Niflheimr, but the unseelie were holding them off.

A bloody stalemate.

Niamh flapped hard, sliding over the currents of the wind. The gate drew near.

It was a towering thing, that gate. It must have been almost as tall as the UN building—and that was the tallest structure on Earth these days. Yet it barely covered a fifth of the tower it led into. The castle was so much bigger than Deirdre had realized. She felt tiny in comparison, tiny and helpless, and she wished desperately that she could flame up and fly away.

Instead, Niamh flew faster to reach it, struggling to beat her wings through the paralyzing cold. Even Rhiannon’s harpy skin didn’t protect her from that.

They were falling.

“Faster!” Deirdre shouted, her voice carried away into the frozen night, drowned out by the death-screams of battle.

Niamh tried. She really did.

But then something changed.

Tension rippled through the Winter Court, and the fighting on the crystalline bridge below slowed.

The wind stopped. The gates opened.

And a man stepped onto the bridge.

Deirdre realized who he must have been too late to stop Niamh’s flight. The icy hair, the shimmering sapphire diadem, the heavy velvet robes—it was the gods-damned king of the unseelie, the real king, and he was looking right at Deirdre as she descended.

Too late.

She jammed her heels into Niamh’s flanks, pulling out fistfuls of feathers in an effort to slow her.

“Turn around! Turn around!”

To Niamh’s credit, she tried. She tipped to the left. She tried to wheel away.

But the king lifted his hand.

“Stop,” he said.

Niamh’s wings buckled.

An instant later, they both smashed into the icy bridge, flopping over one another in a tangle of limbs.

Stark and Vidya hit shortly thereafter.

They shored up at the king’s feet.

Deirdre fought to untangle herself from Niamh, reaching deep within herself for the anger and fear to make a fire burn. But the flames didn’t return. She was so very cold, and there was nothing she could do against the king of the unseelie.

Stark came off the ground swinging his fists.

The king flashed forward, effortlessly dodging the blows that should have been too fast for anyone to dodge. His hand closed on Stark’s face. Ice spread over his beard, gripping his eyes, encrusting his ears. “You’re the Alpha,” the king said. “Who’s your Beta?”

Stark didn’t say anything. He barely even glanced at Deirdre.

It was enough.

With a flick of magic, Deirdre was jerked off of the ground, smashed into Stark, and hauled through the gates.

“Bring the others to my dungeon,” the king called over his shoulder.

Unseelie guards swarmed Vidya and Niamh.

The gates of Niflheimr slammed shut behind them all.

The throne room in Niflheimr was nothing like the place where the seelie sidhe kept the Sapling Throne. That had been out on a patio overlooking the ocean, decorated by fountains overflowing with wine, plump vines, and sweet music.

This was more like a machine shop made entirely of ice. Those huge white cogs looked like they should have been ground into powder by the way they turned. Spikes of ice thrust from the ceiling. Metal was embedded into the slick floor. Chains had been frozen into the walls, one end buried while the other end coiled on the ground, tipped by shackles.

The king gestured, and those chains came to life. They slithered around Deirdre’s ankles and wrists.

She was locked down again, just as she had been in Rhiannon’s control.

Stark tested his strength against the bonds when they trapped him. He was too dignified to struggle, but she could tell that he was straining against them with the full force of his muscles by the way his veins bulged and his shoulders trembled.

The chains didn’t break.

Against the full force of an Alpha’s rage, they didn’t even creak.

When the king moved up the stairs at the end of the hall, stalagmites erupted around him, the way that a flower girl paved a path for a bride. They grew taller and taller as he ascended. When he finally reached the apex of the throne room, looking down on Deirdre and Stark from a hundred feet above, a glorious seat had grown out of the palace. It shimmered like gemstones. It was cruelly sharp, as though it could cut Deirdre’s eyes just by looking at it.

The throne stretched toward him, yearning for his touch.

The king didn’t sit. He stood beside it, hand resting lightly on the arm. He surveyed them with chilly golden eyes that looked like December’s full moon.

“Cooper,” Stark said. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

The king—Cooper, such a common name for a king—didn’t reply. His nostrils flared as he scented the air.

His hair was frosted underneath the diadem, but he didn’t look cold. He wore his raiment with confidence. Unlike the King of the Summer Court, who had seemed uncomfortable in the trappings of royalty, Cooper was a king down to the marrow. Deirdre wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that his bones were made of the same ice spears that decorated the hall.

The entire wall beyond him was clear glass, permitting Deirdre a clear view of the motionless ocean beyond. The faintest hint of light glowed on the horizon. It was high noon at the Arctic Circle during winter, just barely touched by sunlight.

“Someone fill me in,” Deirdre said. “If you’re holding Niflheimr, then how the hell is Rhiannon laying claim to the Winter Court?”

The king’s eyes were chillingly empty, distant. “I don’t care what she’s saying on Earth. I don’t care about anything on Earth. What have you done to my queen?”

“I didn’t do anything to her,” Deirdre said.

“I smell her flesh on your hands.”

Deirdre had touched the queen’s body, searching for injuries that didn’t exist. She had abandoned the body itself in Original Sin.

“It was the sluagh,” Stark said.

Cooper’s gaze intensified. “She didn’t.”

Stark seemed to understand what he was asking. “She did. Her last request was to kill Rhiannon. I’m here to make her wish come true.”

“Her last request,” Cooper echoed.

The king paced away from them to look out the windows at the vast, frozen ocean. He was a beautiful man against the stark landscape of the Winter Court. He was frosty, a creature who belonged on that throne of ice, and as intense as a blizzard while remaining as quiet as the night after snowfall.

When he spoke again, his voice cracked.

“Do you mean that she’s dead?”

“Her body might live somewhere,” Stark said. “Her soul doesn’t.”

Cooper didn’t react to that news except to press one hand against the crystalline window. Frost curled from his fingers, creating swirling patterns like veins that spread toward the edges of the windows.

“No.” He clenched his hand into a fist, slamming it into the window. “No.”

“She died trying to take the sluagh down. She sacrificed herself to stop a terrible monster,” Deirdre said, unsure if it would help at all. She doubted it. Nothing had helped her when she learned about her father’s death—even knowing that he had been leaving to search for her, trying to help his daughter.

There was no warning that the king was about to break. He smashed his fist into the glass again with a roar. His hand punched straight through it.

The whole wall fractured. It exploded into a snowy powder, raining down on the ocean below.

He whirled on them, face contorted as he screamed, deep lines carved into his tortured features. His fists shook and the entire castle shook with him.

Magic coursed through Niflheimr. The floor rumbled under Deirdre’s knees, and panic swelled inside of her. She hoped that fear might funnel into her phoenix powers—might make her capable of shapeshifting, melting her shackles, and beating an escape. But fear only made her flame gutter and die.

The walls cracked. The sound echoed all around them, like being inside of a bell smashed in a car compactor.

Deirdre heard something snap. She threw herself to the left, bumping into Stark’s shoulder, just in time for an icicle to crash into the place she had been kneeling.

One by one, the stairs popped free of each other, cobwebbing with cracks.

Another wall broke. Tumbled off into the ocean. It exposed them to the howling wind, which blasted with new furor, fed by the rage of the king.

It was so cold. Everything was cold.

Everything hurt.

Cooper silenced suddenly.

And then he was standing in front of them, tall and glowing with his grief, skin shimmering and jewel-like.

The king fisted a hand in Stark’s hair, jerking his skull back so that the bear wolf had to look at him. “What happened to the sluagh? Where is it?” Ice flowered from his fingers where they were embedded in Stark’s shaggy hair, spreading over his temples. “Devouring Ofelia could have only made it stronger!”

“Let me go,” Stark said. His voice resonated with compulsion.

Oh gods. He was trying to compel the king of the unseelie. A faerie so powerful that he could shatter the whole castle around them with his grief, who had been worthy of marriage to the ridiculously powerful queen.

And Stark was trying to compel him.

Cooper’s eyes narrowed. He seemed to be considering Stark’s order.

“Royal blood,” he said. “You’re from the Brotherhood—but you’re so much older than the others. You must have been the first of them.”

Stark tensed. “What?”

“You’re unseelie. I should have seen it.” There was so much turmoil behind Cooper’s golden eyes, like the entire force of the Winter Court’s storm was trapped inside his skull. “I understand why she would have saved you to preserve the line, but I’d rather you and the entire Brotherhood have died a thousand times than lose my mate.”

Deirdre wanted to ask him what he meant—what the hell the “Brotherhood” was. But Cooper looked like he was on the brink of bringing all of Niflheimr crashing down around them. She didn’t dare speak.

“I’m not unseelie,” Stark said.

“You’ve got one of our talents.” Cooper’s fist tightened. Stark’s frozen hair snapped off. “What beast are you? Dire wolf? Sabertooth?”

Stark’s face reddened. “I’m not unseelie!”

“Bear wolf,” Deirdre said. “He’s a bear wolf.”

Both pairs of eyes turned on her. It was an uncomfortable feeling, having both of those powerful, unhinged men focused on her.

“Bear wolf and phoenix,” Cooper said. “Okay.” His fingers uncurled from Stark’s hair. “Okay.”

He gestured.

The chains released them.

“You’ll kill Rhiannon,” he said. “Kill her for me…for Ofelia.” He only took two steps away from them before stumbling over his own feet. He spilled to the floor, his robes swirling around him. He cradled his forehead in his hands. “Ofelia. God, Ofelia.”

Stark tossed the chains aside. “Tell me where Rhiannon is and I’ll rip her throat out.” Cooper didn’t immediately respond. Anger seized Stark, and he strode toward the king. “Tell me!”

Deirdre grabbed his shoulder. “Stop it,” she hissed. “Can’t you see he’s in pain? And about a thousand times more powerful than we are?”

He glared at her from inches away, and Deirdre realized that Cooper wasn’t the only one in pain.

Being told that he was sidhe, just like Rhiannon had said, might have been the straw that broke Stark’s composure.

“I don’t know where Rhiannon is. I’ve had Niflheimr locked down since Ofelia went missing,” Cooper said without rising from the floor. “I wanted to preserve everything for her until…” He trailed off.

With an unpleasant lurch, Deirdre realized that Cooper’s hands were turning blue.

Not frostbite-blue. Ice-blue.

His fingertips melted into the floor of the throne room as he kneeled there.

“Where is she?” Stark demanded.

“Search her quarters,” Cooper said. “She was friends with Ofelia. She had a room beside ours. Search it.”

“Are the girls there? My daughters?”

But now the icy pallor had crawled all the way up Cooper’s elbows, consuming his biceps, his shoulders, his throat. It swept quickly down his body.

Only his face remained human, and only for a moment.

“Don’t you dare run,” Stark said.

“Niflheimr is yours,” Cooper said. “Kill her.” Ice cracked as he turned to look at Deirdre. “Open the sluagh wide. Only you can free them all and return them to the natural cycle of rebirth.”

“Open it?”

The ice consumed the last of his features.

There was nothing living left in him. Nothing that vaguely resembled a human being, and nothing that could answer Deirdre’s question.

A pulse rocked Niflheimr, like a heart beating in its depths. The walls shook. The floor jumped under Deirdre’s feet, hard enough that she almost fell.

The unseelie king vanished.

XI

The dungeon was not in the depths of the castle as Deirdre would have expected. They were kept under the stairs leading up to the throne.

Stark found them easily, as though he’d known where they were the entire time. He walked to the shattered stairs, pressed his hand against the ice, and a door opened. It hadn’t been visible until that moment.

Vidya stepped out. She looked annoyed. “Where are they?” she asked, scanning the throne room with her wings flared. “Where are the guards who brought us here?”

Deirdre peered around her shoulder to see Niamh sitting under the stairs, still struggling to get to her feet. It wasn’t a very large room. They must not have intended to keep many prisoners there.

“Get her out of there,” Stark said.

Deirdre had been operating on her own for so long that it took time to register the fact that he was ordering her. And when she did, she didn’t obey as automatically as she once would have. She just looked at him.

Stark looked back at her.

Something passed between them.

The Brotherhood.

Deirdre had heard Stark’s darkest secret—the secret that even he didn’t know. Both of them knew it now, even if they had no idea what any of it meant.

He was unseelie. Not a shifter.

Deirdre didn’t obey him.

Vidya stepped back into the dungeon, extracting Niamh. “He’s dead?” she asked. “The king?”

“Something like that,” Deirdre said, at the same time that Stark said, “He’s gone.”

This time, she didn’t look at him. She didn’t need to.

He was in her head. He’d been in there for weeks. Now neither of them knew which one of them was Everton Stark.

“Rhiannon had quarters beside the king’s,” Stark said. “My daughters might be there. Find it.”

“Find them,” Deirdre told Vidya.

The sooner they found the kids, the sooner they could leave. Not just to return to Earth, but to get away from what was left of the unseelie king and his grief—the shattered ice, the crystals, the throne room.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Vidya said. She stepped up to the doorway leading to the hall, spreading her wings.

She stopped before taking flight.

The shock on Vidya’s face spoke volumes. She wasn’t a woman who was easily bothered. Deirdre had never seen her as anything but mechanical, numb to the world around her, as much a machine as her wings indicated.

Now she was bothered.

“What?” Deirdre asked. “Did the king collapse the whole place?”

Niamh peered over her shoulder. “Oh my gods. You need to see this, Dee.”

Deirdre stepped up to the doorway.

There was no hall beyond.

The king of the unseelie had done more than just collapse most of Niflheimr, though. He had dropped several of the towers into the ocean, leaving the throne room alone upon the spindle of a single icy pier. With the surface ice of the ocean cracked, Deirdre could see into the inky depths of the water below.

And every single sidhe who had been outside the walls was dead.

Every last one of them.

Deirdre didn’t have an enhanced sense of smell, like many shifters did, but even she could smell the death on the air. Even sidhe blood smelled somewhat coppery. And there was a sour bite to it that she didn’t recognize.

She grimaced, covering her nose from the cold wind. “What is that?”

“Intestine,” Vidya said. “They exploded. That’s what the inside of the intestines smell like.”

It wafted through the air, carried over the ocean to them at the top of the tower.

Deirdre swallowed hard. She assumed that the king and queen’s bedroom was in the same tower as the throne room, but what if it had been in one of the towers that plunged into the ocean? That would mean that Rhiannon’s quarters had gone, too. And if Stark’s daughters had been in there…

She glanced at Stark. He had scaled the broken stairs and stood by the throne now, as though contemplating what it might mean to have royal blood.

It didn’t look like happy contemplation.

He wouldn’t care that the sidhe were dead. Those thousands of extinguished lives would mean nothing to him.

“Search the rest of the tower,” Deirdre said quietly, trying to keep Stark from hearing her. “Rhiannon’s room has to be in here.” She wasn’t going to consider what it might have meant if it wasn’t.

Niamh jerked the harpy skin closed around her, assuming the swollen form of a bird. She looked even more ragged now that the king’s magic had snatched her out of the air. The wind lifted her feathers, ruffling her hair.

“Careful,” she said, jerking her chin toward Stark.

Vidya took off first, and Niamh followed a moment later. They swirled into the night together, graceful on wings of metal and magic.

Deirdre was alone with Stark.

She stepped away from the door, gathering her flame around her as protection from the wind that blasted through the husk of the throne room. Stark must have been freezing up there, so far away from Deirdre, but he seemed oblivious to the surrounding world.

When she put her foot on the first broken stair, he spoke.

“I’m not unseelie.”

“Who cares if you are?” Deirdre asked. “It’s a label. A word. You haven’t changed because the king stuck it to you.”

“You don’t understand why this matters.”

“It’s hard to understand anything with you. You’re not exactly an open book in which I can turn to any page and learn The History of Stark.”

“My daughters,” he said. “It matters because of them.”

“You think they won’t like you if you’re unseelie rather than a shifter?”

He circled the throne, prowling behind it, dragging the animal hides that they’d taken from dead sidhe behind him. “Rhiannon and I married in Bahrain, while I was deployed. She quickly became pregnant. Our first daughter came out…wrong.”

“Cold thing to say about your kid,” Deirdre said.

“Forget it.” He dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “Forget everything. I’ve almost found them. We’re almost together again.” He turned to survey Deirdre, as if searching her face for answers.

It made her uncomfortable, the way that he looked at her.

What was he seeing?

She rubbed a hand over the back of her neck, trying to smooth down the prickling flesh. “Did you really think hiding them was gonna do you any favors?”

“I thought it might be the only chance Rhiannon and I would have at piecing our relationship together,” Stark said. “She was hurting them—using them. I needed to shelter the girls without losing Rhiannon. I did it to save our family.” He said it with such desperation, like he wanted Deirdre to understand. Needed her to understand.

“That’s so screwed up,” she said.

Stark stood behind the throne, gripping its back in both of his hands, like a king waiting to sit.

He belonged up there, cold and strong.

Really cold, actually. He was shivering but didn’t seem to realize it.

“What do you want from me, Tombs?” Stark asked.

Deirdre mounted the stairs. She had to do it quickly to keep them from melting under her feet. “You know what I want.”

“I don’t think that I do.”

“If you want to get revenge against Rhiannon, you know the best way to do it. You just don’t want to face it yet. You’ve gotta go to Earth with me and claim the Alpha position from her. You built this empire to become Alpha. It’s what you wanted all along, it’s why I joined you, it’s why you’ve done such horrible things.”

“No, I did that for her,” Stark said. “And I gathered people around myself who would be ruthless enough to execute my every command. People who could destroy someone with soft parts. Someone like you.”

“Soft? I’m soft?” Deirdre laughed harshly. “I’m the one who killed Gage.”

“I pushed you,” he said.

“But I pulled the trigger. I’m not as soft as you think. I’m just as bad as you are in so many ways.” More ways than Deirdre was prepared to think about.

Alone in the darkness of her room at Chadwick Reynolds’s high-rise, taking hits of lethe while sending vampires out to raid blood banks…

Yeah. Deirdre was just as bad as Stark on every level.

“What have you done in my absence?” he asked.

“You haven’t been absent,” Deirdre said. “Everything’s gone on without you.”

“Because of you,” Stark said.

Her knees trembled as she finally reached the top of the throne room. Gods, Deirdre shouldn’t have had such a visceral reaction to the heat in his tone. Not now, not when they were in such a cold place. Not after everything he had done to her.

They were so alone in the throne room above the ocean of ice, surrounded by the ruins of Niflheimr.

“I thought Rhiannon died in Genesis,” Stark said. “I thought there was no hope for me after that. I thought that I would be…alone.” He circled the throne, stepping nearer to her warmth. The tint of her flame warmed his skin. “You came back for me.”

“I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t have to.”

“Your dangerousness extends far beyond your potential abilities as a phoenix. It would be too easy to forget everything else and enjoy that danger.”

“You sure didn’t act like you wanted to enjoy me,” Deirdre said, lifting her chin in defiance. “All the times you’ve smacked me around—talk about mixed signals.”

“When I hurt you, Tombs, it was because nobody could see me show favoritism. It was to protect you from the likes of Jacek. Most importantly, it was to make sure everyone knows that I am the Alpha, and that nobody can defy me, or else they would die. And they would have.”

“Is that supposed to make me sympathize with you?” Deirdre asked. She poked a finger into his chest. “You had to beat women to make yourself look good. Poor baby. My heart bleeds.”

He walked into her finger, forcing her to drop her hand. They stood chest to chest in front of the throne of ice.

But there was no passion in his eyes.

The expression drained out of his face, leaving nothing but stone behind. “It was for her, for the girls. And now…”

Deirdre was losing his attention. She grabbed the hem of the hides, tugging him back. “Hey. Focus, Stark. Rhiannon’s not dead. You’re not alone. We’re on the brink of finding your daughters. What do you want to do when you have them back?”

“I want my family,” Stark said.

“And if you want them, you’re going to have to live in the same world as the rest of us. The world that’s been screwed up by Rylie Gresham. Remember that? How screwed up the system is? The schools I had to live in—the schools your daughters attended? That hasn’t gone away, and it’s going to be waiting for you when you take your daughters back to Earth.

“What could you do for them as Alpha?” Deirdre asked, tugging him closer still. “Make the world a better place for them, Stark. Take down Rhiannon. Become Alpha. Have your family, have your power. Have every damn thing you’ve ever wanted!”

Stark’s fingers curled around hers. He lifted her hand and its flickering flames, as though savoring its warmth. “Will I have you?”

Her heart dropped into her stomach.

It shouldn’t have sounded like an appealing idea.

Alpha mates ruling the country together.

He wouldn’t want her once he realized that she could disobey him. As soon as they got back to Earth, he was going to find out that she had put him in the running for Alpha against his wishes, and he was going to hate her.

Stark would kill her.

He must have seen her drawing back internally. He clasped her hand tighter. “Look at me, Tombs.”

She stared fixedly at the throne. “What are you going to compel me with this time? Tell me to go brain-dead if I mention your least favorite musicians where you can hear it?”

“Tombs.”

“We don’t have anything to talk about unless it’s making you Alpha. All right?”

“Deirdre, look at me,” he said. Surprised, her eyes lifted to his. His voice deepened. “I release the last compulsion I gave you. You won’t die if you disobey me.”

The corner of her mouth twitched in something that might have been the beginning of a smile. “You’ve never called me Deirdre before.”

His brow creased with annoyance, but not anger. There was no sign of anger in him. “That’s what you took away from that? I just released you from my compulsion. I don’t want you to die.”

She waved him off. “Yeah, thanks. I saved your life and you’ve saved mine. Whatever. So are we on a first-name basis now? Do I get to call you Everton?”

“I wouldn’t like that.”

“It doesn’t suit you anyway,” Deirdre said. “Everton sounds like a guy who goes to Yale and wears sweater vests and throws boat parties.”

“Princeton.”

“Excuse me?”

“I went to Princeton,” he said. “Not Yale. I was an economics major.”

“I thought you were a Marine.”

“Yes, that too,” Stark said.

“How’d you have time to do all of that and teach horses how to dance all pretty?”

Now he was angry. “How did you—?”

“I visited Stark Estates,” Deirdre said. She took the picture of him on horseback out of her pocket, lifting it so that he could see. “Your book wouldn’t open itself, so I went online and read spoilers. Gonna put the compulsion back now?”

He reached for the photo. She kept it away from him.

Stark gripped her waist, pulling her against his chest. His other hand clamped down on the hand that held the photo. “I don’t need compulsion to kill you. I could snap you in half.”

He lowered his lips to her clavicle, but she pushed his head back before he could make contact. “Stop it.”

“Because I’m unseelie?”

“Because I don’t kiss guys who think death threats drop my panties. I don’t care what you are or what we call you.”

His tone was feverish in the way that his skin was not. “What do you want from me, Tombs?”

“I want you to want to help people, even if your idea of how that needs to happen is messed up. I want you to think about the future. I want you to think about what the world needs, and then I want you to give it to them. I thought that we wanted the same thing, Stark.”

“Of course I want that,” he said, voice harsh.

“Then what’s the problem? I don’t understand. Make me understand.”

He ripped the photo out of her hands. “You’re right. I’ve been pursuing a vision for years. And now the vision has changed. I don’t know who I am or who you are.” He advanced on her, forcing Deirdre to back up until her legs bumped the throne. It started sweating at her proximity. She was too hot for the Winter Court, and only getting hotter. “Do you want me, Tombs? Or what I represent? Are you using me, like Rhiannon, or are your motives purer?”

“Back to last names, huh?” Deirdre asked.

He slammed her into the throne, hands braced on either side of her head. “What do you want?”

She pushed him. He slapped her hands away.

He hadn’t hit her hard, but the faint sting of his hands on her arms made her bitterly angry.

“I’m not Rhiannon,” Deirdre said. “She wants power more than she wants progress. You know what I’d pick in her position? Do you know what my priorities are?” She clutched his hide cloak in both fists. “Not only am I nothing like Rhiannon, I’m far better than she ever was. I’m a better person. And I’m better for you, too.”

Stark gripped her hands. Her bones creaked. It hurt.

“Better for me?” He scoffed. “You don’t know anything. You don’t know me.”

“I know a hell of a lot more than you think,” Deirdre said.

She smashed her lips to his in a graceless kiss, forcing him backwards. She only got away with it because he was surprised. He yielded to her an inch—only an inch.

As soon as Stark realized what he was doing, he tangled his fingers in her hair and ripped her away.

“I’m better than Rhiannon,” Deirdre said. “I’ve seen your worst and chose you anyway. I’ve got your back.”

Stark glared. “You’re not backing me. You haven’t listened to a damn thing I’ve said for weeks.”

“I am, even if you don’t recognize it. I know what’s good for you better than you do.”

“Difficult woman,” he said.

But he kissed her again, even harder than before, crushing her against his body. He molded Deirdre’s hips against his. He gripped the curves of her back as though trying to squeeze her into himself, as though he couldn’t touch enough of her to satisfy himself.

Stark was greedy in his movements, acquainting himself with all of her parts. Deirdre didn’t try to stop him. She wanted him to get to know her body and know that she was the best thing he could ever hope for.

She wanted him to know that she was the best.

Gods, but she wanted him to love her so much that he would come back to Earth and piece back together everything she had broken.

Stark was graceless and confident and harsh, tongue stroking against hers, invading her mouth the way his hands invaded her body. He shaped the cheeks of her rear, squeezing them until it almost hurt.

Deirdre climbed him. She pressed his back against the wall and spread her legs over his and climbed his body as though she couldn’t get enough of his touch.

When he drew back for air, he was still breathing hard, and some of the consciousness had gone out of his eyes. All shifters had a duality to their nature—man and beast—and Stark had always seemed a little closer to his beast than to his man. But now he was closer to beast than ever.

“And what do you think is good for me?” Stark asked.

“You’re smart,” Deirdre said. She nipped his jaw with her teeth, tracing a line to his earlobe. She sucked it into her mouth. “You’re ruthless. If you put your mind to it, you could play the system from the inside without having to kill a single person.”

Stark turned his head to capture her lips with his. “Everyone plays the system. People act like they agree with me while working against me from behind my back. You can’t ensure loyalty unless you extract it with blood.”

“There are other ways to get what you want,” Deirdre said, scraping her nails down his hairy chest.

He responded by kissing her again. It was as though he couldn’t taste her enough, couldn’t bring her close enough to his body. He was as addicted to her as she was addicted to the drugs he supplied.

“Charisma, Stark.” Deirdre’s lips brushed against his as she spoke. “You’ve got charisma. You can make people loyal without violence.”

“You want me to be weak.”

“I want you to be stronger than your fists.” She fisted his hair. “You don’t have to settle for being a radical. You could be a revolutionary. You’ve just gotta come back to Earth with me and fix everything. We can fix it together.”

“Woman, you don’t know when to shut your mouth,” Stark said.

He tried to silence her with a hard kiss, shoving his tongue between her lips, consuming the breaths that she exhaled.

“Don’t you want your daughters to live in a world that’s safe?” Deirdre asked.

“I want them to live in a just world.” He shoved her against the throne of ice. The icicles dug into her back through her shirt. “Safety is never more than an illusion.”

Deirdre had always been vulnerable to cold, as though she were a flickering flame that would only take a few drops of water to quench. But now the cold didn’t make her ache as it once had. Her fire was more powerful than that. She wasn’t a candle fluttering in the wind.

She was a blazing wildfire, and Stark was the wind to make her consume entire cities.

He spun her around. His arms clamped around her, curving around the heavy curves of her breasts.

“Now shut up, woman,” he growled into her ear. “I’m done talking with you.”

Deirdre arched back against him. “Don’t call me woman. That’s ‘Beta’ to you.”

Stark’s growl could have been annoyance or appreciation. It was hard to tell.

He pushed her face-first into the throne, hands fumbling around the front of her hips to find the buttons. Stark ripped them off. Tried to wrench her pants down to expose her body.

Deirdre drove her elbow backwards into his gut. The blow was hard enough that it sent him stumbling.

She wouldn’t be taken like that—like they were animals.

Stark slipped on the ice and landed on his back. When he tried to get up, she planted a foot on his chest.

“Don’t even think it.” She shimmied out of her pants, tossing them aside. She stood over him in her underwear, exposed to the cold, but untouched by it, blazing with the fire of her phoenix.

His hungry eyes roved over her body.

“You’re so damn difficult,” Stark said.

“I know,” Deirdre said.

She pulled her shirt off over her head and dropped it.

The moment she was unbalanced, Stark leaped out from under her foot. He was almost as fast as when he was shapeshifted. Funny what lust could do to a man.

He pushed her onto the throne of ice. It grew slick with her body heat, melting instantly, leaving a crystalline puddle underneath her.

The cold couldn’t touch Deirdre. She was fire.

She wrapped her legs around his waist, pulling him tight against her. Stark was erect and straining. It seemed like it must have been painful.

But he didn’t try to relieve the pressure, nor did he kiss her again. He braced his hands on either side of the throne and glared at Deirdre from inches away.

“I don’t like being manipulated,” he said.

Her body was burning in more ways than one. She pushed against him harder, digging her heels into his back. “Is it manipulation if I’m telling you exactly what I want?”

“Yes,” Stark said. “You think you can get me to obey you by taunting me with…this.” His hand raked down her breast, her ribs, clutched her hip. He groaned when she writhed against him.

Deirdre nipped his bottom lip. “What I want you to do for our people and what I want you to do to me are two separate things. Trust me on that.”

“Would you kill me afterward, the way that you killed Gage?” Stark asked.

The name was a shock of pain, colder than any ice.

“I need you alive,” Deirdre said. “And I need you on Earth. I’m not going to kill you.” She shoved the stolen skins off of him, exposing his flesh to the chilly throne room, to the heat of her burning arms.

Stark buried himself deep inside of her, his teeth sinking into her neck, as though claiming her from all sides.

It shouldn’t have felt so good.

It shouldn’t have felt so right.

He was inside of her, as he had been inside all along, owning her body as he’d owned her mind for too long.

She dragged her fingernails down his back, digging deep, unafraid of hurting him. She wanted him to hurt. She wanted him to know the pain that she felt, that she had been feeling for years.

Judging by the sharp intake of breath, Stark felt it.

He turned his head, biting at her chin. She caught his bottom lips between her teeth and pulled it back, stretching as far as she could go.

Stark liked that.

He kissed her harder. They tasted faintly of blood, and it was hard to tell if they were fighting or making love because there was no real difference.

Everything that built inside of Deirdre—the tension, the need, the pain—it was the same either way.

Her back and legs were soaking. Her leaping flames were melting the throne of ice around them, and it left them drenched, but not cold—warm as blood. When their bodies collided, they slapped together wetly, not unlike the sounds made when knuckles met face.

Deirdre scratched at every inch of him, squeezed him between her knees, maybe hard enough to crack ribs. She wouldn’t hold back. Not with anything.

He didn’t hold back either. If she hadn’t been a shifter—a powerful shifter, a phoenix—he might have been capable of breaking her pelvis.

The hurt was good.

Great, actually.

She was doing this. With him. She was actually screwing the terrorist who had made her kill Gage and walked her through the murder of Dr. Landsmore and broken Rylie Gresham’s neck.

Crazier still, she liked it.

Deirdre was so far beyond the point of return that she wasn’t sure that point existed. She didn’t want it to exist. She lost herself in his embrace, finally taking on the last bit of Stark that she had yet to possess. She had taken his lethe habit. She had taken his thirst for violence. She had taken his pack. And now she took him inside of her as his spine arched and his muscles tensed and he came with an ear-splitting roar.

He slowed for a moment—only a moment.

Stark had met his climax, but he wasn’t done. He kept moving within her.

It didn’t take long.

When Deirdre came, it was with a scream like she had never made before—so loud that it must have been audible throughout the entire Winter Court, echoing over the frozen landscape and shaking ice off of all the trees.

Her orgasm was also accompanied by a pillar of flame.

It flared around her, oven-hot, like being tossed into the incinerator below the asylum again.

In an instant, the throne was gone.

Stark screamed.

That was not a scream of pleasure.

He wrenched away from her, splattering in the puddle that used to be the throne.

“Oh my gods!” Deirdre fell beside him. The shock had made her fire go out again. She was suddenly very cold, naked without her fire, but the cold was the farthest thing from her mind as she ran her hands over his scorched chest. “Stark! Everton! What the hell am I supposed to call you? Are you okay? Are you dying?”

His chest heaved. He made a horrible gasping sound.

Was he dying?

Gods, that would be a hell of a way to assassinate someone. On accident. During sex.

“I’ll find Vidya,” she said.

But when she tried to stand, he grabbed her knee.

Stark wasn’t making sounds of pain. He was laughing.

He pulled her down by the hair, kissing her harder than ever before, with fierce delight. “You,” he said, “are incredible.” He tasted a little bit like barbecued ribs.

“And you are insane,” Deirdre said, tracing her fingers over his face. The top layer was peeled and black. The skin exposed underneath glistened crimson. Half his beard was nothing but blackened curls.

“Everton is fine, if Everton is what you like,” he said, dragging her down to lie on his wounded chest. She didn’t want to rest on him. It looked like it must have hurt, with all the wounds mottling his chest. But his arm locked tightly around her, and the healing fever swept over him, so he was repairing from the damage quickly. It was too cold not to cuddle herself against him. “You can call me Taye Diggs for all I care.”

“Taye Diggs? You know who Taye Diggs is?”

“Terrorists live in caves, not under rocks,” Stark said.

A nervous laugh slid out of her, and with it went the fear, the tension. “Oh my Gods. No, I’m not calling you Everton. You can’t make me. It’s weird.”

He gripped her breast in one hand and her hip in the other. “Suit yourself, Tombs. I couldn’t care less.”

XII

Deirdre wasn’t sure how long they rested there, the two of them gazing up at the stars of the Winter Court, warmed by nothing but her leaping flames.

Now that the orgiastic reverie was gone, she couldn’t believe what she was doing, where she was, whom she was with.

It was stranger than her wildest dreams and more frightening than most of her nightmares.

Stark.

She felt no affection for the man she rested against, but the deep, comfortable sense of satisfaction was impossible to deny. They had been moving inexorably toward this for weeks, and now she had crossed that line. If she’d been a feline shifter, like Colette had been, she would have been cleaning her whiskers with pride.

Gods, she really was as bad as Stark.

“I have a house in South Africa,” Stark said. “Well below the ethereal plains, near the tip of the continent. It will be good there.”

“Huh? South Africa?” For a moment, all Deirdre could summon to mind were her fantasies of living on warm savanna, roaming the wilderness with lions and elephants. “Why do you have a house there?”

“My family,” he said. “Part of my trust. We will kill the servants, of course. I won’t allow them to report back about us.” As though murdering servants to keep their affairs private was a normal thing to do.

Deirdre lifted her head to study Stark’s profile. He was resting his head on one arm. His skin had healed from the scorching, though it was dusted with the ash of the earlier damage and his beard was still blackened at the tips. “Why would we go there?”

“To raise my daughters outside the OPA’s reach. It’ll be good there. Amphicyonidae and phoenix. Forget this Brotherhood, the unseelie, politics. Forget it all.”

She pushed herself onto her knees, hair swinging over her shoulder. “I can’t do that.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because…I can’t. We have to go back to America, Stark. We have to fix this election and depose Rhiannon. That’s the whole point of this. Did you miss the part where I told you that?”

His eyes darkened. “She’s meaningless, Tombs. You were right when you said that you’re nothing like her. We’ll leave. Move on. Start new lives somewhere else.”

“But what will everyone else do when we’re gone?” she asked. “You said that you believed in helping gaeans live their natural lives. You want shifters to be free of the system. You want us to roam the wilderness and hunt like we’ve always been meant to do.”

“I wanted to punish Rylie Gresham for Genesis and avenge my wife,” Stark said. “Now, I don’t care. We’ll be Alpha mates beyond her reach.”

He sounded less patient by the word. As though he couldn’t believe that they were still discussing this.

Deirdre clenched her teeth, stood up, grabbed her clothes. They were shredded in multiple places. It was hard to weave her limbs through the proper holes when there were so many tears in the material. “Alpha mates of what? There aren’t gaeans in South Africa. There’s nothing but angels on those longitudes, from up in Copenhagen all the way down to damn Jo’burg.”

Stark stood, too. He was an impressive specimen while naked, even bearing the scorch marks of their union. “Did you think that you’d change my mind about this? I told you that I’d have nothing to do with the Alpha election. That includes making sure it’s run fairly and that victory is taken from Rhiannon.”

“But then you took the compulsion off of me.”

“Only because I decided to keep you,” Stark said.

Deirdre barked a humorless laugh. “Keep me?”

His eyes narrowed. He watched her as she dressed in a hurry, covering all of the parts that he had only just become acquainted with, and there was judgment in his eyes.

She might have been mistaken, but she thought that there was worry there as well.

Maybe fear.

“You don’t really care about Rhiannon and the gaeans in America,” Stark said. “This wasn’t really about getting me to go back.”

“Uh, yeah,” Deirdre said. “Actually, it was completely about going back there.”

“Politics is about money, power, maneuvering. It’s not about the people.”

It was like she’d been flung into the Twilight Zone. Stark had made all those statements on camera about how he was going to help the people he now disdained, and she’d believed him. “Were you lying the whole time that you presented your platform? Was it really just about revenge?”

He didn’t respond.

Stark’s body language spoke volumes, though.

“I won’t run away with you,” Deirdre said. “I thought we shared something, but…that ‘something’ doesn’t exist without our ideals. My ideals.”

“Forget your ideals, Deirdre,” Stark said. He grabbed her by the shoulders. “All I want is you.”

She gaped at him wordlessly.

The wind shifted.

Niamh alighted on the edge of the throne room, black wings folding to her sides so that the wind wouldn’t carry her into space again.

Startled, Deirdre zipped up her trousers and tried to make it look like she wasn’t getting dressed. She didn’t think that she looked convincingly casual as she walked down the stairs. Niamh’s gaze moved from the melted throne to Deirdre’s zipping and then to Stark pulling the skins around himself, unhurried, still glaring at Deirdre’s back.

She must have known.

“We’ve found something,” Niamh said. “It looks like Rhiannon and Melchior might have lived there, but—it’s weird, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s just weird.”

“Show me,” Stark said.

He strode past Deirdre, whipping the hides around his shoulders. Niamh was large enough in her harpy form that he could mount her back, and then she lifted one of her scaly legs, offering to carry Deirdre in her clawed foot. But Deirdre didn’t move toward them. She was still numb despite her fire, frozen to the shattered stairs.

Her stomach churned at the sight of Stark climbing onto Niamh so casually.

Stark wanted her to leave with him.

He wanted her to leave all of North America’s shifters.

Deirdre didn’t believe that he could be so callous. He couldn’t really feel nothing toward the gaean community he had professed such compassion towards.

Could he?

Rhiannon’s antechamber looked much like the throne room, with all its icy gears and spikes. Deirdre’s breath fogged in front of her as she stepped inside.

She couldn’t seem to flare her fire enough to stay warm. She was barely flickering.

Deirdre rubbed her arms to warm them as she looked around the quarters. “This doesn’t seem weird to me, except for the idea that Melchior could have lived here without melting everything.” Even the furniture was limned with frost. She couldn’t imagine living in such a miserable, hostile place. Just visiting it was awful.

“Go through the doors,” Niamh said.

Stark reached the doorway into the rest of Rhiannon’s quarters first. He threw them open.

Moist air gushed into the antechamber.

On the other side, it was all green.

Trees. Bushes. Grass. A world within a world, like a piece of spring growing out of the frost.

Deirdre was so shocked to see a lush forest within Rhiannon’s chambers that it took her a moment to realize that there were holes in that forest. There were places where the grass had been flattened and the trees had been cut down, configured like there should have been furniture there.

At the moment, there was no indication of anyone living there. Just an altar among the grass and a lone bed that had been stripped of sheets.

Stark stood in the doorway, fists clenched, face reddening under his scorched beard.

“We already missed them,” Niamh said.

“Why?” Deirdre asked, stepping in to touch the trees. They were alive. Either they were really growing in that room, or the unseelie illusion was just that good.

Vidya understood the question that she was trying to ask. “Rhiannon did this for the girls. The trees. The grass. She didn’t want them to grow up in ice.”

Deirdre went to the altar. It looked like anything an ordinary witch might use. It was basically a table—disturbingly ordinary in the forest overflowing within Niflheimr—covered in a velvet cloth, with candles and crystals arrayed around it.

“She’s still doing it,” Stark said. “She’s gotten worse.” He hovered over Deirdre’s shoulders, scowling at the table.

She struggled not to face him. She was acutely aware of his presence behind her, as though he was touching her, settling his hands against her waist. Their bodies weren’t in contact, though. “What are you talking about?”

“Look at it and tell me what you think,” he said.

Deirdre tried to see it as he did, looking for the things that Rhiannon had placed most prominently on the altar.

The bowl of flowers. Everything surrounded that bowl of flowers floating in tepid water.

“What are they supposed to do?” Deirdre asked, dipping her fingers into the water to touch the roots.

He gripped her wrist with crushing strength. “Don’t.”

Deirdre drew back. She picked up a crystal instead, revealing the open book underneath.

The book looked like one of the ones that had been in the polling booths for the election. Deirdre turned it over to see the spine, which had the Hardwick Industries mark stamped on it.

“She cast a spell to modify the election,” Deirdre said. “This is it. This is proof that she messed with it.”

Stark couldn’t seem to care less. He’d already moved on, searching behind the trees as though he expected to find his daughters waiting among them.

Deirdre paged through the book. The last pages were glowing with magic.

There was a list of factions on them—along with a sole name.

Sanctuary shifters.

Independent faction.

Unseelie.

Deirdre Tombs.

Seelie.

Each of them had a number beside it—numbers which were close to the figures that had been polled before the election. The sanctuary shifters had gotten thirty-six percent. Stark was at thirty. And Deirdre… She shouldn’t have had been on that list at all, but she was at six percent.

She ran her fingers over the names. It buzzed with energy against her skin.

“These are the election results, aren’t they?” Niamh said. “Do you know what that means?”

Yeah, Deirdre knew.

Rylie had won the vote. Stark had come in second.

And Deirdre had come in fourth place.

People had written her name on the ballot. That was…unexpected.

It wasn’t as important as the rest of the results. This was her proof right here, plastered in the Hardwick Industries logo. There was surely something she could have done with this. She could have gotten Pierce and Jaycee to testify, maybe—if she could have found them, pried them away from Rhiannon, gotten them on the stand.

Evidence didn’t matter at this point. Deirdre’s word had been enough to work gaeans into a riotous froth. Rylie already had enough evidence to know that Rhiannon had cheated, and she was still going through with the inauguration. Stark didn’t even care. None of it mattered.

“The rooms are empty,” Vidya reported, emerging from the bathroom.

Stark punched the nearest tree, hard enough that his fist sank deep into the trunk.

He didn’t kill the sidhe with his grief and rage like the unseelie king had, but he vibrated with such force that Deirdre wouldn’t have been surprised if he had.

“There’s something else here.” Vidya tugged a sheet of paper out from the edge of the altar cloth. “It’s for you.” She offered it to Stark, but Deirdre was the one who took it.

For Ever—by the ley lines connecting to New York. Come find us.

Rhiannon had signed it.

Nausea writhed within Deirdre. “It’s an invitation,” she said, showing it to him. “Rhiannon wants you to go to her, Stark.”

“By the ley lines to New York,” he read aloud.

“She makes it sound like you should know where that is,” Niamh said. “I don’t know where that is, so there’s no way you could.”

But Deirdre did.

Melchior had taken her through that ley line juncture the last time she’d been in the Winter Court, after all.

“This is a trap,” Deirdre said.

Stark gave her a calculating look. He knew she’d been with Melchior. And he could clearly tell that she knew where that juncture was. “Let’s go,” he said.

And they left to walk right into Rhiannon’s trap.

To escape Niflheimr, they had to pass over the bodies left behind by the unseelie king’s wrath.

Deirdre had plenty of opportunity to study them as they flew overhead. More time than she would have liked. Cooper’s grief was etched over them all, permanently memorialized in ice.

Hundreds of dead sidhe.

She tried not to look.

The distance was too far for them to fly the entire way without Deirdre’s flame to warm them. They took off from the shattered husk of the throne room and flew as far as they could before Vidya’s wings began to stiffen. Then they landed and walked the rest of the way.

Once they were grounded, Deirdre struggled to summon the fire again. She couldn’t do it while looking at Stark, while feeling that sickening dread and confusion, but she could do it when she saw how cold Niamh and Vidya were without her help.

For all the confusing feelings that Stark made Deirdre feel—very confusing, very hot feelings—he was good at quenching her fire.

She burned a path through the snow and they followed her.

There was no sign of the juncture that Melchior had used to drag Deirdre into the Middle Worlds now—no swirling patch of shadow in the air, or even the barely visible distortion that sometimes represented sidhe portals.

It was a clear, quiet night, and there was no sign that anyone living had ever tread the ground in recent days. There weren’t even melted snow patches where Deirdre and Melchior had walked not that long ago. Everything had been consumed by snow once more.

Deirdre turned on the hilltop, searching for any sign of a hideout—anything bright, a flash of light, some flaring magic, a signal that people might live within the shadowy chill of the Winter Court.

There.

It wasn’t a bright spot on the next hill over, but a dark circle in the shadow beneath a cluster of trees. It might have been an area that the ambient light couldn’t touch.

Or it might have been a cave.

Vidya saw where Deirdre was looking. “I’ll check it out.”

Deirdre couldn’t stand back while the valkyrie scouted. She couldn’t linger on the hilltop with Stark and Niamh and all of the questions that hung in the air between them.

As soon as Vidya flared her wings and took off into the night, she followed, leaping down the mountain.

The other two probably followed, but it didn’t really matter.

As she drew nearer to the dark patch under the trees, Deirdre realized that it was definitely a tunnel leading into the depths of the earth. She only realized how steep it was once she stood on the brink, cold wind wailing at her back and a hollow silence beyond the tips of her toes.

This was it. This was what Stark had been looking for. This was all they needed before they could return to Earth.

Deirdre’s stomach flipped.

Return to Earth, sure…but to where? To the hidden Stark home in South Africa, where he’d kill his servants so they could live off his trust fund in privacy? Or to rescue the gaeans of North America?

A shoulder bumped hers. Stark wasn’t lingering at the mouth of the cave like she did, and he wasn’t stopping to look at her, either. He rammed past her and headed down the steep slope into the unknown.

Was he angry with her? Or just determined to find his daughters?

Deirdre didn’t want to find out.

Vidya followed Stark down. It was Niamh who offered her the tentative smile, cheeks ruddied by the chill. “I’ve got your back,” Niamh said.

Deirdre couldn’t muster even the faintest hint of anger at that.

The sound of the wind chased her all the way down the tunnel. Even once the faint light had vanished, she could still hear the whining, the shriek of a blizzard whistling through the rocks. The further away she got, the more it sounded like the screaming of a child than an actual wind.

A few hundred feet down—or maybe just a few steps, it was hard to tell—she could no longer see Vidya’s razor wings swaying in front of her.

She couldn’t see anything.

It was so dark.

Deirdre kept walking, shuffling her feet so that she’d feel a precipice if she came across one, hands lifted to search for a wall. She wished that she could have summoned her fire again. It would have made everything brighter. She could have lit up the whole damn Winter Court, judging by how crazy a flare she’d been able to summon while intimate with Stark.

But there was nothing for her. Deirdre’s flesh barely smoldered.

A light appeared at the end of the tunnel.

It was such a dim crimson glow that Deirdre thought at first that it was her eyes playing tricks on her. Once she saw the outline of Stark’s silhouette and Vidya’s wings outlined against it, she knew it was real.

The glow flickered.

A flame.

The tunnel twisted, corkscrewing into the earth, and when Deirdre finally turned a sharp corner, she saw the origin of the fire. It wasn’t a fire at all.

It was Melchior.

He rested at the mouth of a cave, lying on the floor, curled into the fetal position with his cheek resting on his hands. His broad, muscular back was splattered with blood. Pale metal glinted between his shoulder blades.

The dragon still had the Ethereal Blade buried in his body.

“Melchior,” Stark growled. He spoke softly, but the words echoed throughout the entire tunnel. He advanced on the resting dragon with new speed, but Vidya barred him with an arm.

“Wait,” she said.

Deirdre stopped beside them. “What?”

Vidya didn’t respond. She was looking deep into the cavern, expression unreadable, brow creased.

Most of the cave looked shockingly mundane. The walls were ragged, carved from the stone without the help of tools. Judging by the rippling patterns, it had probably been magic that had cut it open.

The strange cavern was furnished like a typical bedroom, with two beds along the left-hand wall. One had sheets patterned with soccer balls. Its twin was plainer, with pink sheets trimmed by white lace. An empty laundry basket waited at one footboard, laundry strewn around its base. A dresser with scalloped trim stood beside the other bed.

There were toys in the cave—toys and books, including some things that Deirdre recognized from her time as a young girl before Genesis. The inhabitants of the cave had been reading The Babysitters Club. There was a Barbie doll near Melchior’s feet, half of her hair torn from her scalp.

The cave was so long that its rear vanished into the murky depths beyond the bookshelves. Deirdre couldn’t see anything back there. Melchior’s fire wasn’t glowing that brightly. He was barely able to summon any flame to dance over his bare, scaly flesh.

Stark took in the sight of the cave in a breath. And then he was tossing the hide cloak off his shoulders, and Deirdre realized that he had already partially shapeshifted, allowing long claws to thrust from his fingertips where nails should have been.

He advanced on Melchior.

Deirdre noticed the line on the ground too late—a thin line of tiny magical runes.

She threw her hand out to try to stop him. “Wait!”

Stark stepped over the line.

Magic erupted in a protective shell around Melchior, lashing out at Stark in a wave. It crashed over him. Knocked him into the wall, forced him to the floor.

A pair of sidhe appeared at the sound of the magic, running from the cave’s depths.

“Papa!” one cried.

She entered the ring of runes around Melchior without triggering the magic. She dropped to his side, grabbing his arm protectively.

Stark leaped to his feet with a snarl, claws raised to kill.

But then his eyes focused on the two sidhe, who were short and square, completely bald, and had skin the color of a summer lake. Their huge eyes were faceted. They looked like something that should have developed out of the darkest depths of the ocean.

Deirdre drew her gun. Stark grabbed her arm.

“Stop,” he said sharply.

Vidya wasn’t attacking, either.

“What the heck is going on?” Niamh asked.

Once Deirdre saw past the gray-blue flesh and the strange hairlessness of their scalps, she realized that she recognized their stocky builds, their square features.

They looked very much like Rhiannon and Everton Stark.

“Alona and Calla,” she said.

Stark didn’t look surprised at the sight of them.

He had known that they weren’t human. He had always known.

“Who are you?” the younger one asked. She didn’t blink. She couldn’t. She didn’t have eyelids. But she did have long fangs filling her jaw and a bioluminescent antenna dangling from the center of her forehead.

Stark’s daughters.

Deirdre turned to him wonderingly, trying to see him in a new light with this new information.

He’d said that they had been born “wrong,” but she had been imagining some kind of birth defect, not that they could have been born as sidhe. Not before Genesis.

How must they have felt, Rhiannon and Everton, taking their new babies into their arms to see blue skin and fangs? Not just sidhe, but a lower class of sidhe that couldn’t even pass for human?

That was why Stark feared being sidhe rather than a shifter.

He feared that it was his fault his children had been born “wrong.”

“Oh my gods,” Deirdre whispered. She cleared her throat. “Uh, I’m Deirdre. I’m here to save you from—from Melchior.” The dragon that they had called “Papa.”

Alona grabbed Calla, pulling her little sister into the circle beside Melchior, as if to hide her from Deirdre’s horror. “Don’t come any closer,” Alona said. “I’ll blast you all.”

Deirdre believed she could do it. They were flush with elemental seelie magic.

“It’s me,” Stark said. He took two steps toward the circle. “I’m your father.”

“Stop,” Alona said.

She flicked a bolt of magic at him. He jerked to the left, dodging it with a growl. “Did you hear me?” he demanded.

“They heard you.” Rhiannon stepped out of the back of the cave, swathed in cobwebs and ice. Deirdre’s heart plummeted. “They just don’t remember you.”

“Rhiannon,” Stark snarled.

She gave a thin smile. “When was the last time they saw you? Alona was two, and Calla was still suckling at my teat, not even walking. You’re nobody to them.”

It didn’t seem like he was “nobody.” Not exactly.

They wouldn’t have been afraid of him if he’d been nobody.

“Who is he, Ma?” Alona asked. The cute little girl voice lisped through all of the fangs. She enunciated carefully, as though she had been trained to speak as humanly as possible.

“He’s your father, as he said,” Rhiannon said. “Now shut up. The adults are talking.”

Alona paled with fear. She glanced between Melchior’s body and Stark, as though she didn’t understand what she was being told.

They believed that Melchior was their father.

“You have a lot to explain, Rhiannon,” Stark said.

“Yes, we can cover that later. For now, I have a problem,” Rhiannon said. “As you know, I’m a witch, and I can’t be an Alpha on my own. If I show up at the inauguration alone—without the unseelie Alpha—nothing will happen. Melchior will die if I move him out of this cave. He’s useless to me now.”

“Go on,” Stark said.

“Be with me,” Rhiannon said. “I’ll make you my mate so that we can claim the unseelie court together. You’re eligible, after all. And once you become Alpha, I’ll be your Alpha mate.”

Stark bristled. “That’s your offer? I don’t care about the election for Alpha. I don’t care about any of it.”

“That’s not what your Beta said on your behalf.”

Cold washed over Deirdre.

She shook her head, silently beseeching Rhiannon not to tell him about the statement that she had made putting him in the running for Alpha.

Stark turned to her slowly. The look he gave her was one of mingled confusion and suspicion.

“Tombs?”

She didn’t say anything.

Rhiannon wasn’t a stupid woman. She saw the horror in Deirdre’s expression and Stark’s disbelief, and she knew she had hit on something critical. An unpleasant smile curved over her lips. “You must have already been in the Winter Court to hunt for my blood when she made the announcement. I assumed you’d told her to do it—keep affairs running in your absence. Didn’t you tell her to campaign for you?”

No, Stark had told Deirdre that he wasn’t going to participate in any election, and she wasn’t supposed to take action to change that. He had been very clear about it.

Furthermore, he had been clear that Deirdre was supposed to have died if she defied him.

His confusion only lasted a heartbeat. And then he understood.

Melchior, a dragon, could only be compelled by Stark with his consent.

And Deirdre, a phoenix, was the same.

She hadn’t consented to any of his compulsions from the beginning of their time together, so he had never once swayed her behavior. The memory of their shared history skittered over his face like a living thing.

In Montreal, when he had ordered her to kill innocent lives.

At the asylum, when he had ordered her to shapeshift for the first time.

When he had compelled her to die if she disobeyed him.

Deirdre had never once been under his control. In fact, she was completely beyond his control on every level. And she had pursued her own machinations behind his back while letting him believe that he was in charge.

You’re just like Rhiannon, he had said, or something like it. He had already been suspicious of Deirdre.

Now he feared her.

Stark stepped away—a small movement that spoke volumes. He moved closer to Rhiannon. “The perfect spy,” he said. “An Omega immune to my compulsion.”

Her heart ached with fear and regret even though Deirdre had done nothing that she should feel guilty about. From the beginning, she had only ever been trying to survive. Stark would have killed her as soon as he realized she was immune to him. She needed to survive.

But there it was: regret lodged in her ribcage as surely as the Ethereal Blade was in Melchior’s body.

“Even if you don’t care about the election, I do still have something you want.” Rhiannon stepped over the line of runes. She settled her hands on the shoulders of her naiad daughters, as though posing them for a perverse Christmas card portrait. “We can be a family again.”

He was thinking about it. She could see him considering the offer.

That was everything he had ever wanted.

“Stark, don’t,” Deirdre said. “Don’t do this.”

“Be their father, Ever,” Rhiannon said. “Be my mate.”

He took another step toward her.

Alona and Calla looked miserable enough to be close to their mother. Stark’s approach made both of them clutch at Melchior’s unconscious body, as though asking him to protect them. The dragon didn’t react. Damn it all, but Deirdre wanted him to wake up and embrace those children, wiping the fear off of their faces.

“No,” Deirdre said. “Stark, don’t.”

“Don’t speak to me,” he said.

He took Rhiannon’s hand. She smiled wickedly.

“Stark!” Deirdre shouted.

“You heard the man,” Rhiannon said. “Enjoy your time in the Winter Court, Beta.”

The entire family vanished.

XIII

Deirdre slapped Melchior’s unconscious face as hard as she could—twice.

He didn’t respond.

“Come on,” she muttered, digging her fingernails into his scaly chest and shaking his shoulders. “Wake up.”

The magic surrounding Melchior had vanished when Rhiannon took her family out of the Winter Court, allowing Deirdre to approach him. What if their departure had destroyed the magic keeping Melchior alive despite the Ethereal Blade, too? What if he was never going to wake up?

How was she going to be able to get back to Earth and stop the Starks?

“He’s dead, Dee,” Niamh said.

“He’s not allowed to be dead.” Deirdre whipped her hand across his face again. “That’s not acceptable.”

“Dee… Stop it.”

Stark had gone back with Rhiannon.

She punched Melchior again. One of his scales cracked.

“Wake up!” Deirdre growled, pulling her fist back to strike him again—as many times as it took for him to wake up, or for the situation to stop being so horrible in every single way.

Vidya caught her arm. “Wait.”

Deirdre tried to look at her, but her vision was blurry. Her eyes stung. “He can’t be dead!”

“He’s not,” Vidya said. “Dragons can hibernate in case of severe damage. It’s meant to allow them to heal. But Melchior can’t heal from the Ethereal Blade, so he won’t awaken naturally.” The valkyrie pulled Deirdre gently to her feet. “I can wake him up, but it will be temporary. He won’t be able to move with the sword inside of him without dying.”

“Then we’ll take it out,” Deirdre said.

“That will kill him too.”

“So…what? You wake him up, we say goodbye, and watch him die?”

“More or less.” Vidya kneeled beside Melchior. She stroked her thumb along the cheekbone under his right eye. “Give me a sec.”

Deirdre didn’t want to give her a second. She wanted to hit Melchior a few dozen more times. It felt good to hit him, better than anything else had felt lately, better than having sex with that bastard who had run off the instant he realized Deirdre presented a real threat to him. The guy who’d gone back to his crazy bitch of a wife, even though his daughters were obviously terrified of him.

The guy who didn’t care about gaeans at all.

Niamh touched her elbow. “Deirdre…”

She jerked away from the touch. “Stop.”

“Stark’s wrong,” Niamh said. “He’s wrong and he has no taste and he’s stupid and—”

“Stop.”

“—and I’ll listen if you want to talk.”

She tried to tell Niamh to shut up, but she couldn’t speak. She rubbed her hands over her face. Tried to rub the pain out of her skull.

The pain wasn’t physical. There was nothing she could do to make herself feel better.

Gods, she never should have let Stark into her mind.

“Where are they?”

Melchior was awake. He was struggling to sit up, but Vidya pressed a hand against his chest, keeping him flat on his back. “You’ve only got a few minutes and you’ll die faster if you move,” she said. “Take shallow breaths.”

The dragon shifter settled back with a groan. He looked at the sword blade, his surroundings. “Where are the girls?”

“Rhiannon has taken them,” Vidya said. “Rhiannon and Everton.”

Pain creased Melchior’s brow. “Ever?” He groaned again. He must have breathed too deeply. A vine extruded from the wound beside the hilt of the Ethereal Blade, shiny green growth. “Rhiannon’s letting that monster near the girls?”

“I’m pissed about it too,” Deirdre said. “Must be the first time we’ve ever agreed on anything.”

“They must be terrified. You have to get them away from him,” the dragon said.

Niamh sat on a bright pink chair with a shaky laugh. “That’ll be easy, considering they’ve returned to Earth and we have no way to get back.”

“We won’t have any of our allies without Stark if we do find a way to follow them. Gianna’s shifters, the vampires…” Deirdre’s head was throbbing worse. She couldn’t seem to flame at all now. “They’re going to do the inauguration, and the Starks will become the royal family, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.”

“Then we have to stop the inauguration?” Niamh suggested.

“It won’t change the oath,” Vidya said. “It’s the oath that will grant Rhiannon power. That’s the magic they manipulated. Stopping the ceremony won’t stop the Starks.”

A thought struck Deirdre. “The oath.”

“The mage girl,” Melchior said. “Remove her, and you remove the oath, and the magical bindings that will give power to Rhiannon. That also removes Rhiannon’s incentive to keep Ever around.”

Remove her? It was obvious from his steady gaze that he meant for Deirdre to kill Marion.

A fourteen-year-old girl.

But she was one girl. The number of people who would be hurt under Rhiannon’s reign was far greater than that. There would be a lot more fourteen-year-old girls who’d die in the wars to come—and they’d all be a heck of a lot more innocent than Marion.

Niamh and Vidya were both looking at her, silently questioning if she would really do it.

Even Deirdre didn’t know.

She liked the thought of the inauguration arriving with nobody to conduct it. And if there were no oath protecting Rylie, then there would be nothing to keep her from destroying Rhiannon.

It would be a free-for-all, and it might be the most merciful thing possible.

All that would require was one death.

But another death was coming first. Melchior’s hands curved around the hilt of the sword, as though he still couldn’t quite believe it was embedded within him. “Gods. They’re gone. It’s over.” The reality of Melchior’s mortality seemed to finally sink in. “It’s over.”

“It should have been over in Original Sin,” Deirdre said. “Every breath you’ve had since then has been a damn present from fate.”

“It’s nothing to do with fate. Alona and Calla, their naiad magic, the way it interacts with my fire…” He gazed helplessly around the room. “They kept me here. And now, without them, it’s over. I’m going to die.”

“The kids called you Papa,” Deirdre said.

“I’m the only dad they’ve ever known,” Melchior said. “And they’re the only family I’ve ever known. Everything with Rhiannon—everything I have tolerated these past years with her—has been for their sakes.” There was so much love in him.

Love. From a dragon.

Deirdre’s world, and everything she knew, had been shattered.

Stark wasn’t a strong man of principle. He was weak. Helpless to his wife. Disinterested in helping people.

Melchior wasn’t a serpent driven solely by greed. He truly loved two children that he had nurtured for years.

Deirdre didn’t know anything anymore.

Melchior’s chest hitched. A tiny flower blossomed at the edge of his wound.

“Stark said that he sent the kids with you to protect them,” Deirdre said. “But you surrendered them—and yourself—to Rhiannon. Who’s lying?”

“Neither of us,” Melchior said. “I was there that night, when Rhiannon went into labor. Alona came out blue-skinned. Nobody had seen sidhe at the time. They didn’t exist before Genesis. All we knew was that she was wrong. Rhiannon said it was a mistake and immediately conceived the second with Everton, but Calla came out the same. Blue and drenched in magic.”

“Naiads,” Vidya said. She was staring at the wall, eyes distant with the same memories that had taken Melchior.

“We didn’t have the word at the time, so Rhiannon called them demons. She blamed Ever. Said that he must have been half-demon Gray, a creature between man and monster, and that he had passed his devil seed into her.”

“So Stark had you take them away to preserve their marriage,” Deirdre said.

“I would have done anything for him back then. We still trusted each other.” He squeezed his fists around the sword, jaw clenching as a fresh wave of pain crashed over him. “I took the compulsion because I thought that both Ever and Rhiannon wanted it, because I wanted to protect the babies. But when Rhiannon found me, she told me that Everton had lied to me. She wanted to keep the girls. He had forced me to steal them.”

“What happened in Genesis?” Deirdre asked. “What is Rhiannon?”

“A witch. Just a witch, like she always had been. But a lot of magic was unlocked in Genesis, arcane and deadly forces that allowed her to harness the girls’ powers for herself. Their magic lets her masquerade as sidhe.”

It also gave her a lot more power than she would have had as a mere gaean witch.

What a bitter pill that must have been—coming back after Genesis surrounded by so many people who had been granted amazing, inhuman powers, only to discover she hadn’t been changed.

“You know Rhiannon didn’t chase you down because she loved her daughters, right?” Deirdre asked. “She chased you down so she could harness their powers.”

“Using the girls doesn’t hurt them. Rhiannon loves the girls. Why else would she have struggled so long to find a home safe for them in the Middle Worlds? The seelie, with all their nauseating righteousness, wouldn’t have anything to do with us. They wouldn’t forgive Rhiannon for the crimes she committed on Earth.”

“Crimes against the seelie?”

“Crimes against the people who became the seelie. Rhiannon was an orphan raised by the Arigotti family.” He said the name like it should have been significant.

Deirdre looked to Vidya, who explained. “A coven. No more than a gang, petty criminals. Practically mafia. And known for experimenting on werewolves before Genesis.”

“Rhiannon tried to apologize,” Melchior said. “The seelie wouldn’t take it from her.”

“Probably because she was full of crap,” Deirdre said.

He didn’t seem bothered by that. “But the unseelie took us in. They hid us from Ever. They helped us enchant safe rooms for the girls.” The bedroom that they had seen with all the grass and trees.

Now they were heading back to Earth so that their mother could use their magic while taking over the Alpha position from Rylie. And better still, Stark was serving as Rhiannon’s mate.

One big happy family.

“Send us back to Earth, Melchior,” Deirdre said, digging her fingernails into his chest again. “I know you can do it. You’ve been hiding out in the Winter Court for years, and you know how to get out.” She caught his gaze, holding it steady. “You can also make me a phoenix so I can kill the Starks.”

“But the girls need Rhiannon.” Melchior groaned again. Without the naiad magic, the Ethereal Blade was now shifting inside of him every time he breathed, budding with new flowers. Sweat rolled down his cheek.

“You know why Rhiannon wants them,” Deirdre said, stroking Melchior’s forehead. She couldn’t deny him the small comfort of human touch. Not when he was dying. “You know I’m right about her. They’ll be safer without her. Without either of their parents.”

He nodded reluctantly without opening his eyes. “You don’t need to convince me. You can get back to Earth through the ley line juncture we used last time. It’s still there—invisible. I’ll change you so that you can fly into it.”

Deirdre’s heart skipped a beat.

He was going to make her shapeshift again.

Excitement quickly dissolved to fear. That was only one change. One chance to embrace her animal. She had quickly lost her form last time, so she didn’t think she’d be able to maintain it long enough to confront Rhiannon, and Deirdre didn’t think she’d be able to change again.

The only man who could make her into a phoenix was dying.

“I’m taking you with me,” Deirdre said. “If anyone can heal this, it’d be Marion. I’ll make her heal you.”

“Before you kill her?” Melchior asked.

“Okay, that wouldn’t work. But there’s gotta be someone who can do it.”

“I wouldn’t make it that far. You have to go without me.”

Deirdre’s heart felt like it was shattering.

Dammit, it wasn’t fair, having her animal dangled in front of her and taken away again.

Melchior gripped her wrist. She’d never seen such grave intensity in him before. He’d always been flippant, as though above the petty politics of mortals. But now he was dying. And there was something he cared about very much. “Get the girls away from them,” Melchior said. “Rhiannon doesn’t love them and Everton will only hurt them. Find someone who will love them without fear. Please.”

The dragon had revealed to Deirdre the one treasure that mattered to him above all else.

She rested her hand over his. “I’ll do everything I can, but I won’t be able to defeat Rhiannon and Stark without your help. I can’t control my phoenix.”

“You don’t need flame,” he said. “You have something better than that.” He moved her hand to the hilt of the Ethereal Blade. It was warmed from proximity to his body. “Take it out. Take it out and save my girls.”

My girls. The children who had virtually become his daughters in the years since Genesis.

“You’ll die,” Deirdre said.

“I died the instant you buried it in my chest,” Melchior said. “You’ve already murdered me.”

She’d murdered the man who made her shapeshift, the only person who loved and cared for Alona and Calla.

The regret was so powerful she almost choked on it.

“They have a head start,” Vidya reminded her. She didn’t sound remotely grief-stricken. She was unbothered by her former comrade’s looming death.

Deirdre’s eyes stung. Fresh flame guttered over her skin, glittering on the dragon’s scales. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s do this.”

Melchior caught her gaze. “Change.”

She changed.

Deirdre’s body rearranged itself. The sensation was bizarre, but not painful.

She clapped her hands over her mouth. The beak protruded from the bones of her gums, teeth falling into her palms, hard little white rocks.

The tip of her beak was hooked for tearing, sharp as a knife. And when it pushed out of her face, it made the skin of her lips stretch back, painfully thin.

Feathers bloomed around the edge of her beak.

Niamh watched in awe as Deirdre shook herself, trying to relieve the incredible itching created by the feathers emerging from her skin. It felt like they were always lurking there, trapped, waiting for a hair follicle to open and allow them to escape.

She became a bird. Something between hawk and heron.

A phoenix.

The last of the change only took a few moments. All of her human parts were gone, and Deirdre lifted one of her feet to study it. Her skin was leathery, yet light, the skin as flaky as though she were made of papyrus. Feathers hung to her knee.

The talons tipping her toes were magma-black. They looked cruel and sharp, like she could cause real damage with them, the kind of damage that Stark did with his claws as a bear wolf.

They’d be great for killing a fourteen-year-old mage girl.

Surely it’d be swifter than burning her.

Wouldn’t that be the greatest favor that Deirdre could offer Marion? A death as swift as Gage’s and more merciful than her father’s?

“Your rage is beautiful,” Melchior said. “Don’t forget it. You’ll be able to change again if you hold it close.”

Deirdre reached toward the Ethereal Blade.

Vidya stopped her. “I’ll do this.” She dropped beside the dragon, taking the hilt in hand. “You go to Valhalla now, Melchior.”

“I’ll meet you there,” he said.

She drew the blade from his chest.

It slid free with a slick sound, like a knife carving uncooked meat.

Melchior groaned. His body arched over the ground. It wasn’t because of muscle spasms: the instant that the sword was drawn from his back, vines thrust from the rear of the wound. They pushed him off of the ground. Leaves curled around his ribs and blossoms bled down his stomach.

Everyone else that Deirdre had seen killed by the Ethereal Blade had gone like this. Their bodies had become a fertile bed for new life as their lives ended.

That wasn’t where Melchior stopped, though.

The last breath whispered over his lips. His eyes unfocused.

And then he dissolved.

He turned to nothing but ash and scales, gathered in a glittering pile on the floor where he had rested. There was no bone or blood. Just scales.

The dragon was dead.

Deirdre picked up one of the scales with her cruel talons. The scale’s edge was as sharp as Vidya’s feathers, and just as beautiful in its own way. She clenched it in her foot. The way that it bit into her leathery flesh was satisfying.

She wouldn’t forget Melchior. She would remember the dragon who had treasured the daughters of his enemies above any other riches.

And she would honor his memory by saving Alona and Calla.

Vidya extended the Ethereal Blade to Deirdre. Her eyes glistened.

“We fly,” the valkyrie said.

“To where?” Niamh asked, jerking her feathers over her shoulders.

Deirdre couldn’t respond, but she filled her mind with her memories of the werewolf sanctuary: that oasis in the Appalachians. It was just outside of Northgate. There was a waterfall there, a lake, the academy.

Paradise.

That was where they would hold the inauguration, and most likely where Marion would be waiting.

“We’ll follow you,” Vidya said.

Deirdre took the hilt in one of her three-toed feet, flapping her wings to lift herself from the ground. It was effortless. She was lifted by magic, bearing the most incredible weapon on the face of the Earth.

Marion needed to die.

And then Stark needed to follow.

She flew.

XIV

It only took them a moment to find the portal. Deirdre’s flames lit the emptiness in the sky that indicated a hole leading back to Earth. She painted the clouds crimson. The path was a swirling blackness.

Phoenix, valkyrie, and harpy plunged inside.

The ley lines let her out distant from the shore, high over the ocean.

Deirdre blazed a path through the night, streaking through the clouds like a comet. She had all the momentum of it, too. She leaned to the left, letting the tip of her wing drop into the wind, sending her wheeling toward her target.

Vidya and Niamh popped into the sky a few hundred feet behind her. Deirdre made sure that they were following before returning her attention where it really mattered. To the job to come.

Melchior had once told her to embrace her rage.

She embraced it all right.

Deirdre was more than a phoenix. She was a fireball, devastation rained upon the earth, a mass hurtling from the depths of space to set fire to everything that Rylie Gresham cared about.

Niamh and Vidya were carried in the wake of her animal. They didn’t even have to flap their wings. They simply stretched their limbs out wide and did their best to ride along the currents.

Ocean turned to shore. Deirdre’s keen eyesight made it easy to see when people spotted her—getting out of cars, shading their eyes, tilting their heads to the sky. They looked afraid. Worried. She wondered if they were afraid that a new death, one brighter and hotter than Genesis, was coming upon the world.

They should have been afraid. Everyone should have been afraid of her.

She was going to burn the world down.

The mountains were hundreds of miles away. At that distance, they would have been invisible to Deirdre in her human form, but now she could see them as though they were directly below. She could pick out the shapes of the individual trees, their branches scraping at the sky, the fog clinging to their roots. She could see owls hunting for nighttime prey. She could see roaming deer.

She could even see wolves.

When she began to see wolves that were much too large to be natural, she knew she had spotted the sanctuary’s perimeter.

The shifters who lived with Rylie had privileges that ordinary shifters did not. They were permitted to hunt the carefully controlled deer population that was cultivated in the nearby mountains, the rabbits and the mice. They were allowed to embrace their animals.

Everyone else was forced to live an existence as human as possible.

It was wrong. It made Deirdre angry.

The anger fueled her flames.

Melchior was right. It was all she needed—this anger, this rage, this devastation.

Magic sizzled when she entered the airspace over the sanctuary, trying to rebuff her entrance. Deirdre punched through it. The warding spells crackled as they broke down, leaving a ring of fire behind her that illuminated the whole forest.

Her approach brought premature sunrise upon the sanctuary.

It also brought a thousand jangling alarms, magical and mechanical.

Sirens shrieked. Guard posts illuminated, peppered throughout the mountains and valley.

They knew she was coming.

It didn’t matter. They wouldn’t be ready for her.

The cottages spread out below, arranged along the beach of the lake, opposite the academy where the most privileged young shifters were educated. Rylie Gresham and Abel Wilder’s cottage was indistinguishable from the others. Deirdre had taken that for humility before, but now she saw how it was practical in another way: she couldn’t tell where they lived from above, so she couldn’t attack.

She wasn’t going after them anyway. They weren’t the threat now.

Deirdre needed to find Marion.

Pulling the Ethereal Blade tight against her feathery underbelly so that it would create no additional drag, she folded her wings.

Beak angled toward the earth, tail of flame trailing behind her, she plummeted.

Vidya let out a battle cry as she followed.

Only Niamh was silent, eyes wide with fear in the darkness of night.

Deirdre swooped low over the sanctuary’s downtown region. She allowed her tail to dip, flicking the feathers by instinct. Flame gushed from her body. It poured molten over the rooftops. Sparks showered over the road.

Only a few shifters in their human forms were out that night, but those who were fled at the sight of her, racing on the sidewalks and taking cover between buildings.

They didn’t run fast enough. It wasn’t possible.

Her fire consumed it all.

The buildings must have been built to be fire retardant, but they weren’t able to withstand Deirdre. She wasn’t any kind of natural fire. She was elemental, magical, and so hot that she ignited the wood. The flames were instantly white, dancing blue in the night. The smoke stank of artificial chemicals. It choked out the buildings. Choked everyone inside. Deirdre could hear them struggling to breathe.

The smoke was far deadlier than the fire. Deirdre would suffocate the pack before she could melt any of them.

Even werewolves couldn’t heal if they couldn’t breathe.

She threw a glance back at Vidya. The valkyrie’s expression was blank, obeying her drive to kill without question, without doubt.

Niamh wasn’t the same. The human face mounted on her eagle body was terrified.

But they followed her with equal readiness.

They only needed to find Marion.

Find Marion, kill Marion, end the oath.

Kill Stark.

He had laughed when she’d burned him, laughed and embraced her and started planning the rest of their lives together. He was sick. Crazier than she ever could have imagined.

If Stark wanted to raise the stakes like that, then that was fine. She’d raise them even higher.

Deirdre wouldn’t win the game. She’d change the rules.

She watched the burning pack running away from her, fleeing in waves. They were faceless gaeans. The privileged shifters fatted on Rylie Gresham’s indulgence.

They deserved to burn.

If Stark had been the man she believed him to be, he would have burned them already.

She flew in a methodical grid over the cottages, watching them ignite. Marion would be in there somewhere. Marion, and probably children, and innocents, and—no, none of them are innocent.

Deirdre flew too low.

Icy pain spiked through her right leg. She let out a musical shriek of pain, flapping harder to try to escape.

But something heavy was pulling on her. She couldn’t break free. Couldn’t gain altitude.

Deirdre curved her swanlike neck around to see a wolf hanging from her foot.

The beast was sleek and gold, almost more feline than canine.

Rylie.

The liquid flame of Deirdre’s blood poured over her muzzle, but the Alpha didn’t release even though it must have burned terribly. She swiped a paw toward Deirdre’s underbelly. Her claws opened another gash, and the pain was unlike anything she had experienced before.

An Alpha could injure other shifters in such a way that their bodies couldn’t heal at super-speed.

Apparently that applied to phoenixes, too.

Deirdre panicked. She tried to throw up more flames, tried to incinerate Rylie the way that she had incinerated Chadwick Hawfinch, destroying the Alpha in an instant. It was the only thing that could save her.

But the harder she tried to channel her anger, her fear, the dimmer her flames grew.

She felt her body changing.

No, no, no!

They dropped to the field like a rock skipped into the lake.

Deirdre struck. The world flipped and spun around her. The surrounding grass ignited.

She tried to sit up. Deirdre ran her hands over her arms. Everything hurt, like she was one giant bruise. Where were her feathers? Her wings? Her clawed feet? She had two human legs, two human arms, a vulnerable human body.

No longer a phoenix.

And without Melchior, never again a phoenix.

She shook her head, denying the change back. “No,” she said. “Damn!”

Fear rocked through her, immeasurably powerful, choking her. She rolled onto her hands and knees. She scrambled toward the nearest cottage.

As a werewolf, Rylie Gresham was a thousand times faster than Deirdre.

She didn’t even hear the Alpha coming.

Massive paws shoved Deirdre to her back on the ground. Rocks dug into her spine. She stared up at the starry sky filled with smoke and golden werewolf eyes that loomed only inches away. The Alpha, who was such a matronly woman in her human form, was a monster rippling with cruel muscle. Her claws sliced into Deirdre’s body as though her skin gave no more resistance than putty.

Rylie snarled, ropes of saliva dripping from her teeth. Their fight had gotten her worked up, and she was slathering, panting. Every breath growled through her chest. Deirdre’s molten phoenix blood scalded her fur, making it curl the way Stark’s beard had curled when she incinerated him.

She wasn’t going to die crying. She would die facing down the woman who had ruined her life, knowing that at least she had followed her principles until the very end.

“Do it,” Deirdre said. “Finish me!”

Rylie hovered there, just inches away.

Her breath smelled like Deirdre’s blood.

She didn’t kill.

Rylie stepped back, lifting her weight from Deirdre’s chest, and shifted into her human form. Bones popped as she shed all that beautiful golden fur, exposing pale white human skin, fine blonde hair, and a slender body that showed little indication of the many babies it had grown.

She stooped to pick up the Ethereal Blade. Rylie held it with obvious respect. She had seen how it killed. She knew what it could do. And she knew that even she, an Alpha werewolf, wouldn’t be invulnerable to its blade.

Rylie stood over Deirdre, the blessed sword hanging at her side.

Yet she didn’t bring it down for a kill.

“God, Deirdre,” Rylie said. The horrible pity on her face made Deirdre’s eyes burn—not with fire, but with tears.

“I told you to finish me!”

“No, honey. No.” She dropped to her knees beside Deirdre, touching the deep gashes on her chest, stomach, and legs where the Alpha’s claws had effortlessly cut into her. For the first time, Deirdre dared to glance down. The bone was exposed in a few places. It hurt so much that she almost couldn’t feel anymore. “What were you trying to do?”

Hot tears slid down her cheeks. “I have to kill Marion. I can’t let her finish the oath and inaugurate Rhiannon.” Her chest hitched. She started crying, and she wasn’t sure if it was pain or disappointment or fear or something else she didn’t even have a word for. “I burned your sanctuary. Kill me!”

Rylie bowed her back, pressing her forehead to Deirdre’s. “No,” she said softly, stroking her hair. “I won’t kill you. I wouldn’t even hurt you if I didn’t have to stop you.”

Deirdre had tried to burn down the sanctuary and kill a teenager in Rylie’s care, yet the Alpha still had nothing but compassion for her.

“Why not?” Deirdre whispered.

“You’ve already hurt yourself enough,” Rylie said.

It was too much for her.

Stark leaving. Melchior dying. Failing to stop Marion.

Deirdre sobbed right there on the street in the center of the burning sanctuary, and Rylie held her.

The healer who worked on Deirdre was an older witch with gray-touched black hair, a broad nose, and full lips. Her thick accent made it sound like she must have come from somewhere in India, though Deirdre didn’t know the region well enough to guess where. “Does this hurt?” the healer asked, probing Deirdre’s leg wounds with her fingertips.

Deirdre sucked in a breath. “Yes.”

“You’re lucky. Your nerves are intact. Many people who are bitten by an Alpha can’t say the same. Please continue to take deep breaths because this is going to hurt.” She scooped a thick paste out of a Tupperware and smeared it over the open wounds on Deirdre’s legs.

She hadn’t been lying. It hurt like a bitch. She tried to jerk her legs out of the healer’s reach.

“What’s in that? Acid?” Deirdre asked. She was in bed at a guest cottage, which was guarded by multiple werewolves outside the walls. They were patrolling the perimeter so she could occasionally glimpse their shadows sliding over the curtains. She wasn’t sure if they had been posted there to keep Deirdre inside or to keep people who wanted to retaliate against her out.

The healer held Deirdre still with strong hands. “It’s magic. The herbal compound is a base for the energy I have summoned from the universe to repair you.”

“It flipping hurts.”

“As I said—you’re lucky. It would be far more worrying if it didn’t hurt.” Once the healer finished smearing paste on the various wounds, she wrapped clean bandages around Deirdre, pinning them in place. Then she set a large bottle of water on the bedside table. “Please stay in bed for the next hour, and drink every drop of that water to rehydrate yourself before moving. Magical healing is not as fast as standard shifter healing.”

An hour. Deirdre had once healed a broken bone in five minutes.

She wouldn’t have to heal anything at all if she hadn’t tried to burn the sanctuary…or if Rylie had killed her.

Deirdre watched the healer leave with a strange panicky feeling snaking around her heart.

The sanctuary was still burning. She could sense the fire outside, since the flames had come from her body and were a part of her in many ways.

Another phoenix talent unlocked now that she had died and shapeshifted.

It seemed like her phoenix had a lot of potential powers that might be truly amazing. But she wasn’t going to get to discover them. Melchior was gone, so he’d never be able to make her shift again.

The door sighed open. Rylie entered, closely followed by her mate, Abel. He was a towering man with scars down one side of his face and neck, which vanished underneath his shirt. His skin was blacker than Deirdre’s, but his features were whiter. A man of mixed parentage. A man who looked at her like he was trying to figure out the best way to kill a phoenix.

She knew the expression well. She’d seen it on Stark’s face when he realized she was immune to his compulsion.

Between seeing Rylie and the thought of Stark, Deirdre’s face heated again, tears springing to her eyes.

She didn’t let herself cry.

Deirdre wasn’t going to cry over Stark again, not ever.

“How do you feel?” Rylie asked, sitting on the chair the healer had vacated. Abel hovered behind her, glowering silently.

“Wonderful,” Deirdre said. “Like I could go skipping through a field of pansies.”

Rylie smiled. “You must not feel too bad if you’re joking.”

“I want to die.”

“Oh, Deirdre. Honey. What happened in the Winter Court?”

Deirdre shook her head. She wasn’t ready to talk about it. She never wanted to talk about anything she had seen in there—the king’s grief, the people he had killed, what she had done with Stark.

She’d had a lot of bad days, but her day in the Middle Worlds had been among the worst.

That said a lot.

“You found Stark, I take it,” Rylie said.

Deirdre managed to nod.

Rylie twisted to smile up at her mate. “Can you give us a few minutes?”

“Are you nuts?” Abel asked.

She tipped her head so that she could rest her cheek on his protective hand, which gripped her shoulder. “You can wait right outside the door.”

“Yeah, or I can wait right here,” he said.

“Please.”

Abel shot a look at Deirdre. He didn’t have to verbalize a threat. His eyes clearly said he’d grab the Ethereal Blade and finish Deirdre off if she dared to attack his mate.

It must have been nice to be mated to a man who cared so much about his partner.

He stepped out. The door shut behind him, but Deirdre knew he would be just outside, listening with his acute Alpha senses.

“Where are my people?” Deirdre asked. “Niamh and Vidya?”

“They’re being held,” Rylie said. “We haven’t hurt either of them. I’m going to wait for news before deciding what to do with them—and you.”

“News?”

“About the sanctuary.”

“If we killed people, are you going to kill us?”

“That wouldn’t be justice,” Rylie said. “I’ll hand you all over to the OPA, and there will be a trial. It’s the best I could offer you at this point.”

“You’re crazy for letting me live at all,” Deirdre said. “You’re crazy and you’re stupid and—and you won the election. Did you know that? You won. You’re the kind of person who sends a healer to take care of the person who tried to burn down your home and you still got reelected.”

“You succeeded,” Rylie said.

“What?”

“You didn’t try to burn down my home. You succeeded. I’m waiting for the numbers to come back, but I’m estimating damage in the six figures. As I said, I don’t yet know if anyone has died.” Rylie looked exhausted. “You keep pushing, Deirdre. You keep pushing, and pushing, and you want me to push back.” She massaged her temples. “I have an adopted daughter named Sun. She’s eighteen now, and beginning to resemble a normal human being, but when she was fourteen, fifteen years old…we stopped getting along. She ran away from the academy. She pushed me, too. She wanted a reaction.”

“What did she do?” Deirdre asked.

“Sun bit a mundane,” Rylie said. “She was trying to pass on the curse. She couldn’t because she’s not a cursed werewolf like I am—she was made a shapeshifter by Genesis. But she wasn’t sure of that, and she tried, and she’s lucky she failed.”

Deirdre’s head throbbed. She hurt so much. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know how to get through to you,” Rylie said. She dropped her head into her hands with a sigh.

“So stop trying. Kill me.”

“What do you think that would accomplish?”

“I’d stop ruining your life,” Deirdre said. A tear streaked down her cheek.

Rylie’s eyebrows knitted with sympathetic concern. “Tell me what happened in the Winter Court.”

Deirdre didn’t want to tell her. But the Alpha was looking at her with those steady, calm eyes, and there was a little bit of blood staining the front of her human teeth, and Deirdre knew that was her blood. Rylie could have killed her, but she hadn’t.

You keep pushing, and pushing…

“Stark wouldn’t come back from the Winter Court unless we found his daughters. While we were looking for them, I found the election results—I found evidence that Rhiannon cheated and that you won. Not that it matters.”

Rylie beckoned for her to continue.

“Anyway, when we found Stark’s daughters, we also found Rhiannon. Melchior is dying. No, he’s—he’s dead. And Rhiannon needs someone to be her Alpha if she wants to take control, so she told Stark she would take him back if he’d take over as Alpha of the unseelie.”

“And he went with her,” Rylie said.

Deirdre swallowed hard. “He went with her.”

Rylie sat back. She actually managed a faint smile, though there was no humor in the expression. “Oh, Deirdre. This isn’t about the inauguration at all, is it?”

Those two sentences were enough to make her start crying.

So much sympathy from someone who should have been an enemy.

Deirdre had spent all this time trying to hurt Rylie, pushing and waiting for her to push back, but Rylie still only had sympathy for her.

“Look at me,” Rylie said.

Deirdre lifted her tearful eyes to the werewolf Alpha’s.

“Love is a stupid, stupid thing, and it makes smart people stupid,” Rylie said gently. “We don’t choose who we fall in love with. We don’t choose our destinies. The only thing we can choose to do is forgive ourselves.”

A wet, laughing hiccup escaped Deirdre. “How am I supposed to forgive myself when I hooked up with the guy who made me kill Gage?”

Rylie stroked her fingers through Deirdre’s hair, pushing it back from her face. “I’m not going to tell you it’s easy, but you can do it. Forgiveness is a choice we make. We have to keep making that choice again and again.” Her fingers grew still in Deirdre’s hair. “You know that Gage committed suicide, don’t you? It wasn’t your fault. That was his choice.”

That, more than anything else, made Deirdre lose control.

Once the tears spilled out of her, she couldn’t stop. She felt like her body contained an ocean of tears and there was nothing that could halt the flow once she had breached the walls holding everything in.

Gage had committed suicide. He had taken away Deirdre’s ability to choose any other option but shooting him.

It hadn’t been Deirdre’s fault he died, nor had it been Rylie’s.

It hadn’t even been Stark’s fault.

“And we’ll have to forgive Gage for that someday too,” Rylie said. She was crying silently, tears streaking down her cheeks to dangle on her jaw. “He was in so much pain, and he took the easy way out. It’s not rational. It’s not fair. I’m angry at him for it, and it’s okay if you are, too.”

“Shut up,” Deirdre said.

But Rylie wouldn’t shut up. She just kept talking in that low, soothing tone, stroking her fingers through Deirdre’s hair. “You can’t punish yourself for what Gage did. And you can’t blame your heart for following what it wants, no matter how insane those wants might be. It’s okay, Deirdre. It’s okay.”

Deirdre cried. She cried and she kept crying, clutching Rylie’s arms, riding out the waves of emotion.

Gods, it was stupid, crying over Gage.

Crying over Stark.

It made no sense. It wasn’t like it was news that he was evil. She’d known that from the beginning. His idea of a pickup line had been to tell her to kill innocent people.

But she thought that his evil had been for a noble purpose. She’d believed that they shared something important—not love, but something better than that.

Deirdre hurt, not just because he’d left her, but because she’d been so stupid. She should have been better than that. Smarter. Yet twice now—twice just this year—she’d allowed herself to fall in with men whose darkest, most selfish urges were more important to them than the greater good. More important to them than Deirdre.

Rylie seemed to understand. Her sympathy was a terrible, agonizing thing, even more horrible than if she’d judged Deirdre for it.

“Did you read my autobiography?” Rylie asked. It had been assigned reading at school. Deirdre couldn’t speak coherently, though. She nodded. “You read the part about the moon sickness. How I killed all those people when I was a teenager, before I knew how to control my wolf and became Alpha.”

Another nod.

“That was how I met Abel,” Rylie said. “He was a werewolf hunter. He tracked the deaths back to me, intending to stop my killing streak. You can’t believe how much we hated each other in the beginning. He wanted me dead, Deirdre.”

The memory of Abel’s protective presence behind his mate flashed through her mind. It was hard to imagine him as anything less than Rylie’s protective shadow.

“What happened?” Deirdre asked.

Rylie stroked her fingers along the back of Deirdre’s wrist, so gentle that it was hard to imagine she could easily sprout claws. “I changed his mind.” Her smile was wistful. “We don’t choose who we love, Deirdre.”

“I don’t think I love him,” Deirdre said. “He’s just…” She searched for words to describe the strange chemistry between them. There was no word for it in the English language. She would have been surprised if there was a word for it in any language. “Are you saying I’d be able to change Stark’s mind like you changed Abel’s?”

“No,” Rylie said. “The problem with Stark is who he is as a person. He’s a bad person. Abel—he’s always been a good person, deep down. Only his goals needed to be shifted. He had to learn sympathy. Stark is flawed in a deeper way that can’t be fixed, and you can’t punish yourself for it.” She squeezed Deirdre’s hand. “But I know what it means to fall in love with the wrong person.”

Fall in love.

Was that what Deirdre had done?

She wasn’t comfortable putting those words to it, but it was hard to think of it in any other way now that Rylie had said it.

Love shouldn’t have been tangled up with fear and pain like that. Love was those fleeting moments that Deirdre had shared with Gage in the privacy of their room at the asylum, when she had been vulnerable, and he had been understanding. Love was Niamh flat-ironing Deirdre’s hair when the moisture made it too frizzy. Love was the silent trust she shared with Vidya.

Whatever Deirdre and Stark had going on between them, it wasn’t love.

But her heart had a different opinion than her rational mind.

“How can you be so kind to me?” Deirdre asked. “I keep screwing with you. I came here to kill. You should hate me.”

“I’m annoyed,” Rylie said. “I’m frustrated. But I could never hate you. You know why that is?”

“Because you’re the magical offspring of Santa Claus and a box of cuddly munchkin kittens?”

“Hatred hurts us far more than the people we hate,” Rylie said. “Forgiveness has only brought good things into my life. Compassion heals. You’re not a bad person, Deirdre—you’re not like Stark. I would never hate you.”

She didn’t know how much she needed to hear that until it came from Rylie.

Deirdre wasn’t like Stark.

“I’m sorry,” Deirdre said. “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I came here to kill Marion. I just…I don’t know what else to do. I have to stop Rhiannon. I can’t let her spread winter over the world. And the sluagh—gods only know what she’s going to do with the sluagh, but whatever it is will definitely involve a lot of people dying. She must be stopped.”

“I agree,” Rylie said.

“But you aren’t doing anything. You’re just handing her the reins like it’s nothing.”

“You’re a woman of vision, Deirdre Tombs, but you’re so short-sighted. You should know by now that I have a plan. Don’t you?”

“Then I’d love to hear it,” Deirdre said.

The door opened. Abel stepped back inside, and Rylie gave him a hopeful look. “Everyone’s fine,” he said. “Nobody has died, no thanks to our…guests.” That last word came out as a growl.

Rylie sagged with relief. Deirdre would have been lying if she had said she wasn’t relieved, too.

“My plan is in its early stages,” Rylie confessed. “I know that we have to move forward with the inauguration, just as I know we can’t unleash Rhiannon on the country. Brother Marshall and Secretary Friederling are prepared to help as soon as we decide what to do. I hope you’ll provide support too.” She took a folder off the side table and handed it to Rylie. “This is all the intelligence I have on Rhiannon. It’s not impressive, but I’m still hoping that there’s something in here that will help me provoke her to attack me.”

Deirdre’s eyes widened. “Attack you?”

“I can’t attack Rhiannon. If I do, I’ll break the oath, and I’ll be without all the protections that entails. She will kill everyone I care about and then she will kill me.” When Deirdre opened her mouth to speak, Rylie lifted a finger to silence her. “We have to be cautious. We have to make her do the attacking, and we have to do it before the inauguration. That way, she’ll be out of the oath’s protections, and we can have her arrested.”

Or killed.

Rylie didn’t say it, but the words passed between them silently.

“She cheated with the election,” Deirdre said. “It should be enough to stop her.”

“Even if it were, that doesn’t sway public opinion. We’ve created a multi-pronged problem. It’s not enough to fulfill the terms of Marion’s oath. We have to make the whole country understand what’s happening, too. We have to get them to support us. You had the right idea with your rally, and all that stuff you were doing with January.” Rylie set the folder next to Deirdre’s knee. “Read the intelligence. I hope you’ll have an idea. I hope you’ll help us.”

“I can’t believe you want my help. After everything I’ve done.”

“You’re telling me,” Abel muttered.

“Deirdre isn’t like Stark,” Rylie said firmly. “We want the same thing—to save lives. We just don’t agree how it’s best to do that. I think that we can find common ground, though.”

“Not if it involves more boarding schools and a benefits system that keeps gaeans a permanent lower class,” Deirdre said.

“The only way we can lift everyone is by helping the lowest of the low,” Rylie said. “I’m helping them as best I can.”

“Your best sucks.”

“Then I need someone to tell me how to do better.”

Rylie was smiling. She was so pretty when she smiled.

Deirdre didn’t remember her mother. The woman had died when she was too young to remember it. But there was something in Rylie’s smile, the way that she touched Deirdre’s hand, that brought back warm, comfortable feelings she associated with the safety of childhood.

Rylie was right. They both wanted to save people.

Even if Deirdre was disgusted with her methods, maybe their urge to help others was a good starting point. Lord only knew it was a better starting point than whatever had happened with Stark.

“Your phoenix is impressive, by the way,” Rylie said.

Deirdre warmed despite herself. “Melchior changed me.” A lump formed in her throat. “I killed him with the Ethereal Blade.”

“You did what you had to do.”

“But he was the only one who could make me change. Now I’m stuck again.” She covered her eyes with a hand so that she wouldn’t have to see the room. “An Omega.”

“Melchior was an Alpha,” Rylie said. “If you guys are the same class of shifter, then he’d have been capable of telling you to change, just like I can tell my shapeshifters to change. We just need another Alpha like him. You’re not without hope.”

“If you keep being this optimistic, I’m going to barf on you,” Deirdre said.

“I like to think of it as realism, not optimism.”

Then the “real” world Rylie lived in was a heck of a lot kinder than Deirdre’s.

“You know, Melchior told me I’d be able to change if I just learned to harness my anger,” Deirdre said. “But every time I get all angry, I lose it. I can’t even make myself flame up when I’m angry. I don’t understand why. It makes me feel so helpless, and that doesn’t help either. He must have been messing with my head.”

“I understand why Melchior would have told you that,” Rylie said. “Anger used to make me spontaneously transform between moons, long before I was Alpha.”

“What makes you change now?”

“Willpower. I am an Alpha, after all.” She tipped her head to the side, studying Deirdre thoughtfully. “I don’t think that you can learn anything from me and my wolves—you’re just not very much like us. You aren’t cursed, you know?”

“You’re not cursed either,” Deirdre said.

“That’s an argument for another time. The thing is, you’re meant to be a phoenix. You were born this way. And as destructive as you are, it’s also an incredibly beautiful thing.” Rylie stood up, smoothing her dress over her hips. “Everything you’ve done with Stark has come from a place of love—love for him, love for the people. Maybe that’s where your phoenix comes from, too.”

Deirdre stared up at her, unable to speak.

Rylie bent to kiss her forehead.

“Sorry I hurt you,” she said, her lips tickling Deirdre’s skin. “Let’s start over.”

Deirdre swallowed hard as she pulled back. “I’ll think about it.”

“That’s good enough for me.”

Rylie and Abel stepped out of the room, leaving Deirdre alone.

But she wasn’t alone. Not really.

XV

Deirdre flipped through the folder that Rylie left on her bedside, one eye on the papers and the other eye on the shadows outside the windows.

There wasn’t a lot of information that she hadn’t already known. Rhiannon was an orphan with unknown origins adopted by the Arigotti family, a coven with criminal roots. In the times before Genesis, they had enslaved multiple succubi, harnessing the energy they generated in the sex trade to fuel their black spells.

That was how Rhiannon had learned to use the power of other creatures for her own magic. That was how she had learned to abuse her naiad daughters in such a way.

The fact that she’d married Stark in Bahrain—that was old news, too. And so was the fact that she’d had two children shortly after their marriage.

There was nothing that told Deirdre how they could provoke Rhiannon into attacking.

Rylie knew little more than she did.

“Damn,” she muttered, setting the folder aside.

Deirdre rested her elbow on the windowsill and gazed thoughtfully outside.

The sanctuary was lit by huge floodlights, which illuminated all buildings Deirdre had burned. Apparently it wasn’t easy to extinguish phoenix fire. And her destruction had accomplished little other than absorbing the pack’s resources when they most needed them to fight Rhiannon.

She was chilled by the sting of humiliation.

How could she have been so selfish?

Deirdre hadn’t been thinking. Not at all.

She was about to pull the curtains closed when she noticed Rylie crossing the street to talk to Abel. Her mate was so much taller than she was that he almost made her look like a child. But no adult would willingly hand a sword over to a child, and that was what he was doing.

Abel was giving Rylie the Ethereal Blade.

They kissed briefly—a tender gesture shared between two people trying to connect before moving on to their separate jobs. The way that Abel looked at Rylie made Deirdre feel something uglier than jealousy in her stomach.

He went in one direction empty-handed. Rylie walked in the opposite direction with the sword.

Deirdre set the folder on her side table.

Where was Rylie going with the Ethereal Blade?

It seemed likely that she would return it to the mausoleum on top of the waterfall, but Deirdre had told Stark that was where the blade used to be stashed. If Rylie put it back there, it would be too vulnerable. She was smarter than that. She wouldn’t leave a deadly weapon somewhere that Stark could find it.

Curiosity got the better of her. Deirdre slipped out of bed, wincing at the pain of her skin flexing under the bandages.

Damn, but Rylie had messed her up big time.

She hadn’t been injured so severely since her last death—and probably not ever. There was no damage quite like an Alpha’s damage.

When she limped over to the closet, she felt very much like Secretary Friederling with his cane, an old mundane man hobbling along with limited mobility. It made the wounds on her chest ache to push the door open.

But there it was, exactly where she hoped it would be: a door to the crawlspace in the attic of the cottage.

Deirdre hadn’t seen the trap doors before, but she had seen such crawlspaces in foster homes, and she’d used them frequently to slip out when she wasn’t supposed to. There were a few boxes of spare men’s clothing in the closet, too. She piled them under the trap door, climbed on top of the stack, and opened the crawlspace.

It made a faint scraping noise when she pushed on the panel. Deirdre froze, waiting to see if a werewolf guard would enter the bedroom to see her attempt at escape.

Nobody came.

She was careful to be silent as she clambered into the crawlspace, deploying every ounce of agility to lift her legs without bumping them against anything. The crawlspace was tight and filled with fiberglass insulation. Deirdre bit the inside of her mouth as she navigated through it. The healing fever flared everywhere that the slivers embedded.

Faint light drew her to the back of the crawlspace, where slats in the walls permitted outside air to circulate through the cottage. She opened it.

Some of the nearest cottages were still smoking, though OPA agents with fire hoses were spraying them down. They weren’t watching the place where she was resting. They might not have even known she was there yet. Deirdre wouldn’t have put it past Rylie to attempt to protect her with anonymity.

But there were still werewolves circling the cottage. She waited until the closest of them turned the corner before leaping out.

Deirdre pushed hard enough to propel herself past the fence, landing in the yard of a neighboring cottage.

Hitting the ground hurt.

The pain radiated throughout her body, from the scrapes on her abdomen all the way to her legs. It felt like she was a rag doll coming apart by the seams, tossed by an angry child just to watch the stuffing erupt through her stitches.

Keep moving.

Gritting her teeth, Deirdre vaulted over the fence into the next yard, and the next.

Only two cottages down, she found more places that she had burned. She didn’t remember passing over them. The fire must have spread there on its own, consuming the homes of people who had committed no crime except being privileged enough to live at the sanctuary.

The sight of the sanctuary’s inhabitants attempting to repair the damage of the attack was surreal. Now that she was two-legged, Deirdre struggled to connect herself to the damage.

It wasn’t Deirdre who had done all that. It was the bird, the phoenix, the creature of fire and rage that Melchior had created.

The people who hosed down scorched walls and dragged smoke-blackened furniture out of cottages—they weren’t reacting to things Deirdre had done. They weren’t rallying as a community stunned by pain she caused. It was random devastation.

If only.

Through the gap in the fence, Deirdre glimpsed blonde hair.

Rylie was passing, escorted by OPA guards, no longer accompanied by members of the seelie court.

She still carried the Ethereal Blade.

Deirdre mirrored her throughout the yards, keeping herself hidden behind the trees, behind bushes, around walls and corners. Even wounded, she moved quickly enough to keep pace with the Alpha in her human form.

Near the northern edge of the sanctuary, Rylie turned to speak to her guards. Her voice was too quiet for Deirdre to make out the details. It was easy to guess what they were talking about, though.

When Rylie proceeded into the forest, the guards stayed behind, watching the road.

Deirdre ghosted into the trees.

The wilderness was Rylie’s natural habitat, in much the same way that cloud-tipped skyscrapers were Deirdre’s. She had to keep a fair amount of distance between herself and the Alpha to keep from being detected. She clambered into the tree branches so that Rylie, with the Ethereal Blade swaddled in cloths and tucked under her arm, wouldn’t see that she was being followed when she glanced over her shoulder.

She didn’t go far into the mountains. A young woman waited for Rylie in a clearing that overlooked the lake.

Deirdre sat in a high branch of a sturdy tree, one arm wrapped around the trunk. She was masked by the thick branches. Her body would be invisible in the gloom, but she could see the women through the gaps from above. She saw them the way that a hawk would see deer passing through the forest under its perch.

“Do you have it?” asked the stranger that Rylie had met. Deirdre didn’t recognize her shape in the dark, but she knew Marion’s voice.

“I’ve got it,” Rylie said, voice echoing through the forest.

Marion had been sitting on a rock at the end of the clearing, but now she stood to meet Rylie halfway. The grass was long after all the rain that had been drenching the east coast. It brushed their elbows, their hips.

Rylie held the sword out.

And Marion took it.

“Did you talk to her?” Rylie asked.

“I always talk to her.”

“You know what I mean. Does she know that I lost it for a while?” The Alpha sounded more anxious than Deirdre ever heard before. “Is she pissed?”

“I told her, but I don’t think she cares, honestly. She always had a soft spot for you. She only ever says nice things about you, even when she’s complaining about all the other people on Earth.” Marion slipped the cloth off of the Ethereal Blade, exposing glistening white. She sighed. “I haven’t seen this one since…when was that? Fifth grade?”

“Your first year at the academy, I think. Be careful with that. Don’t hurt yourself.”

“I can handle a sword.”

“Accidents can even happen to the Voice,” Rylie said.

Deirdre frowned, leaning further out of the tree. Had she heard that right? Why would Rylie have called Marion the Voice? What was that?

Marion swung the sword through the air. Rylie grimaced.

“I’m sorry. I’ll stop.” Marion took a few things out of her pocket and set them on a nearby rock—a handful of change, some stones the size of her fingernails, a few gems. She also set her treasured cell phone on the rock.

“Any credit cards?” Rylie asked.

Marion rolled her eyes, and in that moment, she looked so much like a typical teenage girl. Not a powerful witch of angel descent. “Mère won’t let me have one.”

“Good. I don’t want you to fry anything when you cross over.”

“I’ve done this a few times,” Marion said. “I know what I’m doing.”

Once she patted down her pockets to find everything was gone, she held the hilt of the Ethereal Blade in both hands, tipped her head toward the sky, and closed her eyes.

Rylie backed away.

“I have it,” the mage girl said. “I’m ready.”

And then she was gone.

Just like that—one moment, she stood in the clearing, and the next, she didn’t.

Both Marion and the sword had vanished.

Rylie bit her bottom lip, gazing at the empty patch of ground where she had been standing moments earlier. She glanced up at the sky. Sighed.

She turned and walked away, leaving Marion’s possessions on the rock.

Deirdre didn’t understand what she had just seen.

It wasn’t weird that Marion could disappear like that. The girl had designed magic powerful enough to bind a bunch of Alphas together for the election. Being able to vanish was some petty David Blaine stuff.

The fact that she’d taken the sword—that was weirder.

Rylie vanished down the path, but Deirdre didn’t follow this time. She was a lot more interested in the cell phone sitting on the rock with all the other contents of the girl’s pockets.

Deirdre dropped out of the tree silently. It hurt less to land than when she had jumped out of the cottage. The healer’s magic was working underneath her bandages, mending her wounds, taking away the pain.

Marion’s phone was an old thing, maybe as old as the world. It was slow to turn on, and once it did, she saw that the icons were clunky and big. The screen was scratched as though it had been rolled down a cliff a few times. She might have been important enough to orchestrate the election of the nation’s most important gaean, but her mother still wouldn’t let her have a new cell phone.

Deirdre opened the text messages, curious to see whom Marion was always chatting with.

The most recent messages were passed between people who seemed to be classmates, judging by the inane content. There were texts about homework, finals, and going to the beach. Marion seemed particularly fond of texting cleavage shots to contacts with boys’ names.

It was so ridiculously ordinary that Deirdre would have laughed if her heart hadn’t been pounding.

She was getting close to something more important than jailbait pics. She was sure of it.

A quick swipe took her to older text messages. She found a conversation between Marion and Gage Cicero there.

Gods.

Deirdre should have known better than to read it, yet she still tapped his name, bringing up the text. There were no cleavage shots or anything inappropriate there, but the content was equally inane. Marion had asked Gage some questions about Rylie’s whereabouts, pushing for information about when they were traveling, when he would be home, when they could hang out with Rylie’s son Benjamin again.

The kind of messages a brother and sister might have shared.

Those messages terminated abruptly the day that Gage had left with Deirdre to infiltrate Stark’s asylum. She remembered throwing his cell phone in the trash at a gas station so that they wouldn’t be able to be tracked.

She should have left the phone with him.

Deirdre scrolled back up to the top. The most recent thread of messages was to a contact listed as “ECF,” but it was an entirely one-sided conversation. Marion sent messages to ECF. Long messages, mostly describing the mundane details of her week, and a few pictures of Rylie’s family. But ECF never replied.

The last message to ECF said, “I got the sword. Want it back?”

Deirdre lowered the phone, staring at the churning waterfall as she rolled those words over in her mind.

Want it back?

ECF couldn’t be Rylie. They had just been talking, and that text message had been sent while Deirdre was in the tree. ECF was someone else. Someone who used to have the Ethereal Blade. Brother Marshall?

The Godslayer?

“It couldn’t be,” Deirdre muttered.

Marion was too young to have known anyone who impacted Genesis like that, especially the notorious Godslayer. She would have been…what, three years old when the world ended? Four years?

But Deirdre couldn’t shake the idea.

She needed to know who ECF was.

Deirdre went through Marion’s other accounts—her email, which was sparse, her photo cloud, and then her social media. She had a lot of social media accounts. Pretty much every site that Deirdre had ever heard of, Marion had an account there. Even old stuff like Instagram and Facebook.

She also had an app for a blogging platform that Deirdre didn’t recognize. It looked old, though. The icon was even clunkier than most of her others.

Deirdre sat on the rock to read her most recent posts.

Marion treated the blogging platform like a personal diary. Skimming the last couple of posts was pretty boring. Marion talked about the election like it was a particularly obnoxious chore, something she was doing to help out Rylie, not because she wanted to.

But even though she only talked about it in passing, the details were really specific.

Like, Rylie’s travel itineraries kind of specific.

Horror dawned over Deirdre as she read deeper, looking for more dates and times. Marion’s interest in politics was obvious, no matter how casual she tried to be about it. She even talked about Deirdre a few times. Not by name—she had codes for everyone. Rylie was Wolfy. Her mate, Abel, was Grumpy—that gave Deirdre a laugh. Deirdre was described as Scary Girl. She wasn’t sure if she should be flattered or insulted by that.

All Marion and the pack’s personal information was just sitting there on the internet, on some distant server. Who knew where that server was located? Who knew who could have had access to it?

Deirdre checked Marion’s settings. It was all private. Only she and a few other people should have been able to read it, including Gage’s account.

“MyWords,” Deirdre said. That was the name of the blogging platform. MyWords.

She ran a quick internet search on it.

According to the encyclopedia article, MyWords had been founded before Genesis—about twelve years before. Well before Deirdre had been using the internet. It was a very old site, and it had been large in its heyday. Its IPO had netted the founders billions of dollars and allowed them to retire young.

It took a little more digging to find that the founders were named Gabrielle and Haywood Stark.

No way.

Sascha Stark had mentioned that his family had gotten rich in the dot com boom. He hadn’t said how. An early blogging platform could have been a great way to earn billions.

Deirdre set Marion’s phone down slowly on the rock, her hand trembling.

“Oh my gods,” she said.

It answered so many questions.

Now Deirdre knew why Marion was always playing with her phone. She was writing lengthy, detailed, intensely personal blog posts about her life.

Posts that should have been secret, but weren’t.

Rylie and Deirdre had been wondering for months how Stark had such intimate knowledge of the pack’s movements. He’d even known that Rylie was going to be at the United Nations to meet Secretary Friederling. They’d expected that he had an informant he was protecting.

That was because Stark did have an informant.

He had access to Marion’s blog.

“Oh my gods,” Deirdre said again.

“Hands above your head.”

She reacted instinctively, obeying the order.

Deirdre turned slowly, still holding Marion’s phone. Abel stood behind her. He was accompanied by a half-dozen members of the pack in their human forms, a trio of wolves, and Vidya.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

“I know how to beat Stark and Rhiannon,” Deirdre said.

XVI

“I knew we should have taken her phone away years ago,” Abel said. “It’s not right, letting a fourteen year old have internet all the time. Rots the brain.”

“She’s not our daughter. That’s not our decision to make.” Rylie held the phone away from her, pinched between forefinger and thumb, like it was something rotten.

“Did you read it?” Deirdre asked, pacing across the stage where the inauguration would be held the next day. “She wrote about the security vulnerabilities at the sanctuary, which was how Stark got in to attack that first time. She’s been writing about your movements. She’s been sharing everything.”

“In her defense, she thought nobody was reading it,” Rylie said. “And since she wrote in code, Stark never realized that Deirdre was Scary Girl, so she didn’t expose that particular vulnerability.”

Abel snorted. “Kids these days.” He stepped back to allow a pair of technicians to run wire past him. They were connecting screens on either side of the stage, which would show Rhiannon’s enlarged figure to the audience as she took over as Alpha.

“But it’s good,” Deirdre said. “This is great, in fact! It gives us a plan of attack. We can make Stark do anything we want by writing a post on Marion’s account.”

Rylie bit her bottom lip, gazing thoughtfully at the circle of power that witches were casting among all the wires. It was the ritual space, the platform for the magic that would give Rhiannon and Stark control. “We’ll have to be careful about it. Spurring Rhiannon to attack means…well, we’ll be spurring her to attack. It could easily turn into a bloodbath.”

“It’s okay if we control the violence, though,” Deirdre said.

“Maybe.” Rylie sighed, dropping the phone to her side. “It’s good that you found this. We’d be up a creek if you hadn’t. Even so, Deirdre…I had you in that cottage for a reason.”

“What, so I wouldn’t hear about the Voice? What is the Voice?”

“You don’t—” Rylie began.

Deirdre cut her off. “Why did Marion take the Ethereal Blade? Where did she go? Who is ECF?”

Abel glanced around, as if worried someone would be listening. They were surrounded by pack members. People working for the sanctuary. People who should have been allies.

But both Rhiannon and Stark could compel shifters, and they couldn’t trust any of them.

“You can’t ask those questions,” Abel said.

Deirdre wanted to fight, to push against them. To demand answers.

But maybe they weren’t pushing back because they wanted to punish her or keep secrets.

Maybe there were answers Deirdre just shouldn’t have.

She took a few deep breaths, closed her eyes.

“Okay. Fine.”

Rylie reached over to hug her. “Thanks.”

“Whatever,” she said, trying to pretend her burning cheeks had to do with her phoenix rather than shame. “Anyway, Stark and Rhiannon’s biggest weakness is pride. They have goals, but nothing so big as wanting to be important. That’s where we can hit them. I just…I don’t know how exactly to stop them.”

“Shoot them in the face,” Abel said. “Both of them. Like to see them retaliate against our kids when they’re both dead.”

Rylie laughed, as if her mate had said something cute. “I’m not convinced a bullet to the face would kill Stark.”

“We shouldn’t kill them unless we find their daughters first,” Deirdre said. “They’re naiads. Rhiannon’s drawing all of her power off of them, so she’s got to be keeping them somewhere safe. If we kill her, we might never find them.”

“Why do you care?” Abel asked.

Rylie slapped his arm. “Stop it.”

“I know you care, you big stupid bleeding heart,” he said. “But what about you?” He glared at Deirdre. “They’re not your kids. They’re not your problem. Think of all the people you’d save if you just killed the Starks—unless you don’t actually want this Everton guy dead.”

Deirdre didn’t meet his eyes.

She wanted to tell him that she wanted Stark dead, but she was too tired to lie.

“Don’t be a dick, Abel,” Rylie said.

“You need my dick,” he said. He meant it to sound as bad as it did. He grinned when Rylie snorted. “That’s what I thought.”

They were so cute it hurt. It literally hurt. Deirdre hated them a little. “Alona and Calla Stark are naiads,” she said again. “They’re among those I want to protect. Not just shifters, but all gaeans. All people.”

“Idealists are gross,” Abel said, taking the phone out of Rylie’s hand. “Sometimes you just gotta shoot people in the face. But all right. We’ll need to get them to attack before they reach the inauguration, or else we’ll have lots of dead shifters around. They’re gonna be pissed when they realize what we’re doing. Real pissed.”

“And what is it we’re doing, exactly?” Deirdre asked.

He started to type a post on Marion’s phone, his thumbs clumsy on the touch screen. “We’re gonna need a decoy. Someone to look like Melchior.”

“Like how Rylie was in disguise at the cathedral?”

“Just like that,” Abel said. “If we disguise a member of our pack as Melchior, then when Rhiannon tries to kill him, it’ll break the oath for the unseelie faction. The Starks lose protection. We arrest them, and the second place winner gets inaugurated instead.”

The second place winner—Rylie Gresham, who had actually won the vote.

Deirdre dug her fingernails into her palms. “Is Marion’s magic that stupid? Rhiannon won’t know that the Melchior-decoy is part of your pack, so she won’t be deliberately violating the oath.”

“I told Marion to leave a loophole when she made the spell,” Rylie said.

It made Deirdre sick to know that Rylie was still playing politics, still lying to people to her advantage.

But for the first time, she was grateful, too.

If Rylie hadn’t left that loophole, they wouldn’t have had a way to stop Rhiannon.

“A decoy,” she said softly.

Deirdre gazed across the stage where the inauguration would happen. The circle was huge, with multiple rings, comprised largely of marks etched directly into the wood. The magic was both old and new, ancient runes mixed with Marion’s inventions. Other witches worked hard to put it together while the girl herself was gone.

It looked out over the sanctuary. The same open fields where Rylie had given a speech months earlier.

Soon, that space would be filled with gaeans watching the inauguration. They were already lining up in Northgate again. They would be checked more carefully than they had been at the last event, but they were gaeans, after all; stripping them of external weapons wouldn’t render them harmless.

Deirdre had seen what they did when driven to rage by injustice. She wondered what they would do when they witnessed justice—the first justice that many gaeans would have experienced since Genesis.

How would they feel to see Rhiannon and Stark struck down for cheating and the incumbent returned to her position?

She couldn’t imagine it, but she wanted to be there to see it.

It was everything she had been working for.

“I’ll be the decoy,” Deirdre said. “Induct me into your pack. Make me your Omega officially. Then I can get dressed up as Melchior, and when Rhiannon attacks me…”

“You are no Omega,” Rylie said. “I never should have called you that.”

“I want the title. It seems right. You know? Make it mine.” Deirdre thumped her fist against her chest. “It shouldn’t be an insult to be a mystery.”

Rylie touched her shoulder. Deirdre put her hand on top of the Alpha’s, just for a moment, accepting the comfort. “Okay. I’ll make you my Omega—officially. You’ll be in my pack. And we’ll work against the Starks together.”

Deirdre’s eyes stung. “Thank you.”

Hatred hurts us more than the people we hate.

That was probably true.

But Deirdre still planned to see the Starks burn.

The sanctuary was restless that night. The last of Deirdre’s fires had been extinguished, but coals continued to smolder in some places for endless hours. She watched the glimmer of her dying flames from atop the waterfall, and she knew it would be the last time she’d ever see that fire.

Melchior was dead. He wasn’t going to change her again.

And the next day, she was going to try to trap Rhiannon and Stark.

Deirdre wasn’t just saying goodbye to her fire. She was saying goodbye to the last night she might ever see.

A pair of legs appeared beside her. “Avoiding the inauguration prep?” Niamh asked, settling on the cliff. Their feet dangled off the edge together. As avian shifters, neither of them should have had reason to fear heights. They both sat right against the edge.

“I’m actually waiting for Marion to come back from her trip to…wherever she went,” Deirdre said. “She’s going to make me look like Melchior.”

Niamh had brought a couple of water bottles with her. She offered one to Deirdre. “Vidya told me that. She thinks you’re stupid and insane and she’s also not planning to do anything about it.”

“That’s because I told her not to.” Deirdre took a drink of water.

“I thought she was bound to obey Stark,” Niamh said.

Deirdre shrugged uncomfortably. “I think she’s decided I’m a better Stark than he is.” Everyone seemed to have decided that. She saw the way they looked at her, their every horrible thought about Deirdre obvious on their faces. Rylie may have decided to give her leniency, but the court of public opinion had passed a different judgment.

She was the enemy, the public face of opposition to Rylie Gresham.

Maybe she was hiding from the inauguration prep after all.

“Speaking of Stark…” Niamh said.

“Do we have to?”

“When I came back to the throne room at Niflheimr, it looked like you were getting dressed.” The harpy was trying not to grin and failing. She pointed at Deirdre with the cap of her water bottle. “Did you and Stark…? I mean, you guys totally did it, didn’t you?”

It reminded Deirdre so much of the time that she had hooked up with a guy that both she and Niamh were attracted to in school. She couldn’t even remember his name now. He had been a nerdy, weedy guy. Someone who really liked World of Warcraft.

Niamh must have been jealous that Deirdre had gotten to him first, but she’d still been supportive, eager for details, and willing to joke about the experience.

Almost as willing as she’d been to stab Deirdre.

Deirdre braced herself to reject Niamh’s tentative offer for sisterhood. But Rylie had kissed Deirdre on the forehead after her flaming phoenix rampage. She had chosen not to bite when a bite had been well deserved. Rylie believed that Deirdre’s phoenix should have been about love, not hate.

She didn’t want to hate Niamh anymore.

Deirdre made herself smile. It wasn’t easy, but she managed it, even though the expression was strained. “Yeah. We did it.” Her lips quivered. The smile faded. “We did.”

“Oh, Dee,” Niamh said.

Deirdre hugged her first.

They embraced, phoenix and harpy in their human forms, women without the wings that they’d both longed to have for so long.

“It must have been pretty bad, huh?” Niamh asked without letting go. Her bony chin dug into Deirdre’s shoulder.

“Yeah,” Deirdre said. “Well, actually, no. It was pretty good until the end, when I accidentally set him on fire.”

“You what?” She burst into laughter, and Deirdre couldn’t help but chuckle along. “You set fire to Stark!”

“When I came,” she said. “I couldn’t help it. Things just…came out. Not the normal things you expect. Other things.”

“Oh my gods,” Niamh said.

Deirdre’s cheeks were so hot that she thought she might catch on fire again, with or without Melchior’s help. She took another swig of water. “I know.”

“Oh my gods. And he didn’t kill you?”

“He thought it was funny,” Deirdre said.

“Sure he did. He’s sick in the head, and he is a bastard for running off with his wife.” Niamh’s good humor had immediately whipped around to righteous indignation. “How in all the worlds could he want to be with some ugly bitch like that when he managed to land you? Talk about dating out of your league! He should be leaving offerings to the gods in gratitude for getting a shot at your fine ass.”

“I don’t know if I’d call whatever’s going on with us dating.” She groaned, sagging back against her elbows, sinking into the grass. “If it was dating, I think it’s pretty safe to say we’ve broken up.”

“He doesn’t deserve you anyway,” Niamh said. “Wait, was he good? He seems like he’d be selfish and bossy. Like, ‘Hey Beta, suck my dick.’”

“I’m not going to dignify that with a response.”

“Yeah, he’s shitty and selfish. He totally compelled you to suck his dick. And then he left you. What an idiot!”

Deirdre tipped her head to study her friend sideways. Niamh was so worked up that her cheeks were pink. “Did Rhiannon really compel you to kill me?”

Niamh’s face grew redder. She ducked her head, swinging her feet against the cliff. The buckles on her boots jangled. “Deirdre…”

“Just be honest.”

“No,” Niamh said. “She didn’t compel me. She said I wouldn’t be able to use the skin if I was away from her, so…she didn’t need to.”

Deirdre had suspected that all along. “If Rhiannon had told me she could give me control of my phoenix form, I’d have given her anything for it, too. I probably would have killed you over it.”

“Aw. You’re so sweet.”

A surprised laugh escaped Deirdre. “What? You think that’s sweet?”

“It is sweet, because I know you’re lying. You wouldn’t have stabbed me. You might be dumb enough to go riding on a terrorist’s disco stick but you’re loyal. And the whole sex thing, that’s probably because you’re so loyal too. But you’re pretending you’d kill me over it to be nice, and that is very sweet.”

Deirdre kneed the harpy gently. “I mean it. I’d kill the hell out of you.”

“You might try,” Niamh said. “I don’t think your heart would be in it.”

“I guess not. It seems like I have to orgasm if I want to kill anyone these days.”

Niamh laughed too. She pushed Deirdre’s shoulder. Deirdre pushed Niamh back.

It was a half-hearted gesture of friendship, nowhere near as genuine as they used to be. But it felt nice. It felt good. Not as good as it was being in school together when they were young, but at least as good as when they’d been playing poker in the asylum with their underwear as betting material.

“I think I’ve said this a few times, but I’m sorry I stabbed you,” Niamh said.

“It’s okay,” Deirdre said. “I got better.”

“Good thing, too. It would have sucked not to hear about how your vagina set fire to Stark.”

Their laughter faded away after a moment, and they sat in silence, gazing down at the sanctuary. The place where the stage was being erected was brighter than everywhere else. There were dozens of spotlights blazing down on the witches preparing their ritual, which was now enclosed within giant blue velvet curtains. They wouldn’t fall until Rhiannon and Stark arrived as the unseelie liaisons to become Alpha.

Hopefully they would never arrive. The end was intended to strike on a distant road in the early hours of morning.

Deirdre wished the morning would come faster. The anticipation would be worse than death.

She’d already died twice, after all.

Someone moved behind them. Marion sat on Deirdre’s other side, having appeared as silently as she had left earlier. The mage girl was no longer carrying the sword.

Deirdre took a long look at her, searching for signs of where she could have gone. There was nothing out of place. The girl’s hair was twisted into a sloppy knot and there was a little dust on the hem of her jeans, but that could have been from hiking up to the top of the waterfall.

“Hey,” Deirdre greeted.

Marion smiled. “Bonjour, my favorite terrorist.”

A thousand questions cascaded between them, unspoken. Where had she left the Ethereal Blade? Why had Rylie called her the Voice? Who was ECF?

Deirdre said nothing.

“Are you ready?” Marion asked.

Niamh responded. “Yeah.”

The mage reached across Deirdre’s lap to take Niamh’s hand. Electric blue magic flashed between them, like a camera going off.

Once the light faded, Niamh was gone, replaced by Melchior’s figure. He was taller than she was, broader, glimmering with golden scales.

“Wait,” Deirdre said. “What did you do? You’re supposed to make me the decoy.”

“Rhiannon would sense you from a mile away, with all that phoenix magic,” Niamh said with Melchior’s deep, silken voice. “Plus you smell like Stark’s dick cheese.”

Deirdre’s jaw dropped. “I do not!”

Niamh-as-Melchior cackled wildly, feet swinging.

She was sick. Sick and ridiculous. Dick cheese? So gross.

It was so offensive that she almost forgot to be horrified by Niamh’s sacrifice. She clasped Marion’s hand. “Change me. Put the Melchior thing on me.”

“It’s already done,” Marion said, pushing away from the edge of the cliff. She stood and dusted off her hands. “Niamh made the arrangements with Abel. Take it up with him if you don’t like it.”

“But Rylie made me her Omega! Niamh isn’t even part of the pack!”

“Actually, as of an hour ago, I’m officially Rylie Gresham’s Beta.” Niamh smiled weakly. “That kinda makes me your boss, doesn’t it? And as your boss, I say that I get to be the decoy.”

Deirdre’s mouth opened and closed silently.

Beta. Omega. Alpha.

“No,” she said. “Marion, wait.”

“See you guys at the inauguration!” Marion headed down the trail with a bounce in her step. Wherever she had taken the sword, it had put her in a good mood.

She didn’t care that she had just resigned Niamh to facing Rhiannon and Stark alone.

“Why, Niamh?” Deirdre asked.

It felt weird to see such a sweet, mischievous smile on Melchior’s face. She still stood like herself, twisting his toes on the ground, hips swaying. “Rhiannon didn’t have to compel me to kill you.”

“Nobody compelled me to let the vampires drain you.”

“It’s okay,” Niamh said. “I forgive you. And this is the only thing that I can do to show that.” She took Deirdre’s hand. “It’s the only way I can apologize to you. Let me fix this.”

Deirdre’s heart ached. It felt like it might explode within her chest.

When she spoke, her voice was thick, jolting. She couldn’t make herself sound properly jovial. “Okay, fine. I forgive you for stabbing me. But I’ll never forgive you for saying I smell like Stark’s dick cheese, Beta.”

Niamh barked a laugh. Deirdre flicked water from her bottle at Niamh, and Niamh flicked some back. It stung a little. Or maybe that was the tears springing to her eyes, tears of love and gratitude and feeling like someone had finally pulled that silver knife out of Deirdre’s back after so many long, painful weeks.

A rim of orange touched the horizon, illuminating the trees. The beginning of sunrise glowed over them as they scuffled playfully.

The inauguration was coming. Just a couple more hours.

And then, one way or another, everything was going to end.

XVII

To defeat the Starks, they had to think like the Starks.

Luckily, Deirdre had been acting as Everton Stark for weeks. It was easy to guess what he would do—like playing chess against herself.

The Starks would attack Melchior if they thought he was going to go to the inauguration and cut them out of the process, but they were smart enough to do it from a distance, probably using magic. Rhiannon and Stark would also want to do it themselves. They wouldn’t use proxies. They had too much pride—and too much satisfaction in inflicting pain—to let someone else take down the dragon.

Deirdre was counting on that pride to hurt them. If they sent someone else after their Melchior decoy, then she wasn’t certain the oath would truly break.

As the sun rose, the sanctuary prepared. Pawns slid into place.

Vidya carried Niamh-as-Melchior a few miles away, past Northgate, to a farm where vehicles were waiting. They would have to take a long route through Northgate to get to the sanctuary. A long, vulnerable route, filled with hidden curves in the mountains where no witnesses would be able to report back on what happened to the convoy.

No witnesses, as far as Rhiannon knew.

Marion had coated the SUV that would transport Niamh in anti-magic wards. Nobody would be able to attack it from the outside. At least, nobody less powerful than Marion—which was every witch on the planet.

The Starks would have to physically attack in order to hurt the person they believed to be Melchior.

And they were waiting to film it.

Deirdre was positioned on a cliff overlooking the road at a sensitive spot, where the visibility was the worst. There was no guarantee that Rhiannon would attack there. There were no guarantees of anything. She was just like the rest of the team watching the road at Rylie’s command. When she was among the sanctuary residents, she wasn’t a Beta, right hand to the Alpha. Neither knight nor rook. She was another pawn.

It was nice to have that responsibility taken away from her for now.

Having responsibility removed didn’t make her feel any less responsible, though. Her nerves were tangled into knots as she waited for Niamh and the convoy to enter her segment of the road.

“They’re coming,” Vidya said, landing beside Deirdre. “They’re in the foothills.”

Deirdre nodded because she didn’t trust herself to reply verbally. She repositioned the sniper rifle to look at the western end of the road, waiting for the appearance of headlights. The sun hadn’t gotten high enough to shine light on the road yet. They’d have the headlights turned on.

She would see them coming.

And once she did, she knew that Rhiannon and Stark wouldn’t be far behind.

It had been awkward when she went to the first class she shared with her ex-boyfriend after they slept together. But the level of nerves that she’d experienced then was nothing compared to her feelings now. The magnitudes of scale were the difference between grains of sand versus the sun in the sky.

Deirdre’s wrists itched. She wished that she could have taken some lethe.

Gods, she hated feeling hungry. When was the last time that she had eaten?

Headlights appeared at the end of the road.

The convoy had arrived.

Deirdre lifted the Walkie Talkie to her ear, listening as the other sanctuary shifters up the road remarked on the convoy’s passing.

“It looks pretty normal…”

“No trouble yet.”

“Did the convoy start with seven cars? I only see seven cars.”

She pressed the talk button. “Seven cars is correct.” Deirdre tried not to sound disappointed. If the Starks had attacked earlier, then Niamh’s safety would’ve been someone else’s responsibility. Some other pawn would’ve had to worry about her.

Deirdre counted them as they approached.

Two motorcycles. And then the SUVs—seven of them in a row, as one of the other shifters had observed. They were followed by two more motorcycles.

That was everyone who was meant to be in the convoy.

They came around the curve slowly, traveling at a speed appropriate for the twisted roads through the mountains. They must’ve been going twenty-five, maybe thirty miles per hour. The slowness of it made Deirdre even more uncomfortable. Shouldn’t they have been in a hurry? Didn’t the drivers know that death was waiting for them?

Deirdre watched through the scope, hands tight on the stock of the sniper rifle.

She put the window of the SUV carrying Niamh in her sights. The crosshair swayed over the tinted windows, which were so dark that she couldn’t see the people riding inside. Niamh was meant to be protected by two OPA agents. Surely they were watching her as closely as Deirdre was watching them.

Deirdre moved her aim from the convoy to the surrounding mountains, sweeping the trees for any sign of the attack to come. She only looked away for a few seconds.

That was when it happened.

Her Walkie Talkie crackled.

“Six cars. I only see six cars.”

“No way. The road doesn’t split off here. They couldn’t have gone anywhere.”

“Count again.”

“I can count, and there’s only six!”

Deirdre made a count of her own. The shifter talking on the line was right. There were two motorcycles in front, a line of SUVs, and two motorcycles in the back.

One, two, three… No way.

She now only saw six SUVs.

“Where did they go?” Deirdre asked, sweeping the scope over the road. “Where the heck did they go?”

“I’m looking.” Vidya took off. She soared through the air, diving over the mountains.

The other vehicles in the convoy peeled off, turning around to search the rest of the road. Half of them went on ahead. The other half headed back toward the farm.

The search was in vain. It wasn’t like Niamh’s SUV could have driven away.

But it shouldn’t have been able to disappear either.

Deirdre’s mind raced.

There had been no turn offs. Nowhere else for them to go. It was impossible for one of the vehicles to have gone missing on that stretch of road unless it had driven into the trees, which would have been impossible given the slope. The progress would have been slow. Someone would have seen it.

There was nowhere for a vehicle in the convoy to have gone.

A chill washed over her.

Nowhere at all.

She fumbled for her Walkie Talkie to communicate with the other shifters, but it slipped out of her hands. It tumbled end over end down the cliff, plummeting toward the road.

“No!”

Deirdre tossed the sniper rifle aside and leaped off of the ledge.

Panic burned hot through her. It felt like she floated rather than fell, sliding through the dim light of early morning with a comet trail flowing behind her.

The power of the phoenix pulsed through her veins.

Niamh.

Deirdre already knew what she would find when she reached the street.

She saw nothing. Nothing at all.

But she felt a powerful chill.

It should have been impossible for Rhiannon to cast magic upon the SUV. It was covered in so many wards that nothing should have been able to get in. Yet there was no denying what Deirdre felt.

That was sidhe magic.

The air kept getting colder as she ran to the last place that the SUV holding Niamh had been seen. Her boots pounded against pavement in time with the thudding of her panicked heart.

She wished that her heart would beat faster so that she could run faster, too.

It didn’t matter how fast she was going, though. She wouldn’t get there in time.

Deirdre had been too late the instant the SUV vanished.

Her shins smacked into something hard.

“Ow!”

She fell forward onto her hands and knees. Not on the street, but against something hard and metal that she couldn’t see, leaving her crouching in midair.

Deirdre ran her hands over the frosty metal, so cold that her fingers stuck to it and peeled away. The metal felt crumpled. Like a drunken frat guy had crushed a beer can against his forehead, but so much larger.

She blindly found a handle and wrenched it open.

Deirdre pulled so hard that the door tore off of the SUV, rendered invisible by Rhiannon’s illusion.

Her sidhe magic didn’t touch the inside of the vehicle. As soon as the door was gone, Deirdre could see inside to the cushioned leather interior and matte black roof.

One of the OPA agents stood. She was wearing full tactical gear and cradling an assault rifle.

“What happened?” Deirdre asked.

The agent lifted the gun and shot.

A bullet smashed into Deirdre’s chest, just right of center. It was like getting bitten by a dragon. It felt like her whole ribcage was crushed.

She struck the ground.

Hand clapped to her chest, blood pouring from between her fingers, Deirdre struggled to get to her feet.

That was a silver bullet.

“What are you doing?” she cried.

The OPA agent pulled her armored helmet off, tossing it aside. Long hair tumbled free. A square face was exposed, more handsome than beautiful.

Marion’s wards protecting Niamh from outside attack hadn’t failed.

Rhiannon Stark had attacked from the inside of the SUV.

She lifted the gun to fire again.

Deirdre flamed. It was an entirely instinctive reaction, with no rational control. Her fire leaped as she did, rolling across the pavement to dodge the gunfire.

Bullets pounded into the road. Holes exploded behind her. Stinging pain erupted down her arm, and her flames flared higher, pouring from the wounds Rhiannon inflicted like blood.

“No!”

Deirdre flung a hand toward the SUV.

Fire pulsed. The gun turned red with heat. Rhiannon dropped it to the road with a cry, hands blistering.

Deirdre tried to drag herself toward the gun, using the one arm that didn’t burn with healing fever.

“Look at the Omega and her fire,” Rhiannon said. She clambered out of the SUV. “You can teach an old dog new tricks. Isn’t that funny?” She got to the assault rifle first and kicked it away.

“Your sense of humor sucks,” Deirdre said, clutching her wounded arm. The holes were already closing. The fire seemed to have accelerated her healing.

“Don’t be a sore loser.” Rhiannon snapped her heel into Deirdre’s face, flattening her to the pavement. Ice built over her clenched fists. She made a couple quick gestures, barely more than finger-flicks, and frost splashed over Deirdre’s arms.

A little ice was all it took to destroy Deirdre’s budding flames. She sputtered and lost control.

The pain in her wounds intensified without the fire to numb it.

She rolled onto her back, face screwed up with pain. “Damn,” she groaned. Where was Stark? Having him appear would be the only way that the confrontation could become more humiliating.

“I’m curious,” Rhiannon said. “How did you get Melchior out of the Winter Court without killing him? Not that it matters, since I already had Stark claim the unseelie throne and made him my mate again. I’m just wondering.”

“I didn’t,” Deirdre said.

Stone crashed into the road.

One of Brother Marshall’s gargoyles had landed just a few feet away.

It must have been Dale Junior. The sluagh’s icy fluids had stained stripes into his stone hide. Brother Marshall was mounted between his wings, but he slid to the asphalt as soon as his mount struck.

Rhiannon turned to greet him, arms wide. “Thank the gods. I was worried that I was going to have to deal with this enemy of the Alpha on my own. Arrest her.”

“I’m only here to hold you until Secretary Friederling arrives for your arrest,” Brother Marshall said.

She laughed. “What? Why? Because I shot the phoenix? She killed my former mate. She’s not protected by the oath.”

“No,” he said. “For killing Rylie Gresham’s Beta.”

Deirdre didn’t stick around to see the reaction. She dragged herself to the semi-invisible SUV, pulling herself over the edge into the open door. The metal groaned around her as her weight shifted.

It reeked of quality leather and death within the SUV. Shiny cherry-black blood slicked the seats. The OPA agents defending Niamh were dead—one of them crushed, the other with a slit throat.

Melchior’s body was crushed underneath the roof, only the left shoulder and half of the face visible, eyes shut.

It was a wound that wouldn’t have killed a dragon.

“No,” she whispered.

She gritted her teeth as she pulled the roof apart enough to shift Niamh’s body. She slid her fingers under the mask of the Melchior disguise and peeled it off, the same way that Rylie had peeled off the artificial face masking her features.

Niamh’s eyes were shut underneath. Her hair spilled out from the artificial scalp. White feathers drifted to the ground.

Deirdre shook her head, over and over again, unable to speak.

If this had happened days earlier, she would have been okay. She might have even celebrated.

“What are you doing here?” Rhiannon asked sharply.

Deirdre stood, injured arm shaking as she lifted Niamh from the wreckage of the car. She was limp weight, impossibly heavy, as though death had made the gravity impacting the hollow-boned shifter triple.

The other vehicles in the convoy had returned. They ringed Rhiannon and Dale Junior, cutting off any exit.

Rhiannon turned at the sound of Deirdre rising from the SUV. Her thin smile fell.

Niamh still looked like Melchior from the shoulders down, but her face was her own. Deirdre set her beside the vehicle, sinking to her knees so that she wouldn’t have to bear her weight anymore. Every exposed inch of her skin was glowing. She felt hot, hotter than the sun, like she might ignite every tree in the forest with her grief.

Confusion quickly turned to understanding. Rhiannon wasn’t stupid. She knew when she’d been played.

She had broken the oath. She had killed Rylie’s Beta.

She was done.

Rhiannon looked calm for an instant. And then the anger crashed over her, suffusing every molecule of her body, twisting her muscles into frustrated lines and contorting her face.

“Where are Alona and Calla?” Deirdre asked. She really wanted to ask why Stark wasn’t showing his face, but she couldn’t make herself say his name.

With a roar, Rhiannon thrust her hand toward Deirdre.

Spikes of ice thrust from the road in front of her. She leaped backward to dodge them.

Rhiannon waved again, bringing more ice cresting in a wall behind her.

Deirdre leaped. She flipped, bouncing off her one remaining good hand, landing on her feet again like a gymnast back-springing across the mats.

She moved fast but not quite fast enough. The ice raced along the asphalt and finally connected when she landed a second time.

It tossed her into the air. She hit the trees. Smashed into the ground.

Brother Marshall waved his borrowed staff. Dale Junior thudded across the ground, driving toward Rhiannon with all the speed a stone beast of its size could muster.

Rhiannon screamed her fury as she shoved more ice toward the gargoyle. Frost crusted its face. But it didn’t react. It could survive against the sluagh, and Rhiannon was nothing in comparison to that.

But all her magic was coming from the girls. Wherever they were, she was sucking their power dry.

Deirdre couldn’t let her keep fighting.

“You know you’ve lost,” Deirdre shouted, getting onto her knees. “Tell me where to find the girls!”

“Why? So you can murder my children as you murdered Dr. Landsmore?” Rhiannon clapped her hands together.

Magic snapped.

The trees on either side of Deirdre wrenched from the earth, roots ripped free of the ground. They swung toward her.

She rolled out of the way, and rolled again.

Deirdre’s shoulder bumped into the SUV that was still invisible.

“Worse,” she called over the side of the car. “I’m going to save them. I’ll take care of them. I’ll be better for them than you ever have been—just like I was for Stark.”

Ice shrieked against metal.

She launched herself out of the way, tucking her wounded arm against her chest.

The SUV exploded.

Hands snapped shut on Deirdre’s ankles. The breath rushed from her lungs as she was dragged away from Rhiannon’s attack, tossed behind a tree. Shards of metal pounded into the bark on the other side. A fragment of bumper speared a rock beside her.

If she hadn’t moved that quickly, she would have been dead.

Deirdre twisted to see Vidya standing between her and Rhiannon. Not just Vidya, but January Lazar—the reporter herself, camera shouldered so she could film it all.

For once, Deirdre didn’t mind having the camera on her. She wanted everyone to see that she was fighting against Rhiannon on Rylie’s side. This was the first time that she’d be seen doing the right thing. Trying to uphold the election, even though it meant giving control back to Rylie.

“Rhiannon cheated on the election,” she told January’s camera. “And she’s killed Rylie Gresham’s Beta. She has no respect for the political process, no integrity, and no right to the powers she’s trying to seize. The OPA is going to arrest her. She’s going to trial. Justice will be served.”

On the last word, flames leaped down her body.

January stepped back with a gasp.

She pushed past Vidya’s protective wings to find that Rhiannon was trying to defend herself against Dale Junior with tides of ice. The gargoyle smashed through every one, but even though he could keep up with her, he couldn’t seem to break through. Every blast she tossed into the air just made Deirdre flame stronger, fueled by righteous anger. Not just over Niamh, but over Calla and Alona. Over Everton Stark himself.

Deirdre broke into a run.

Rhiannon heard her coming. She turned, lifting a hand. But she wasn’t fast enough. When Deirdre drew just feet away, she launched into the air, kicking high.

Her foot whipped into the side of Rhiannon’s head.

It was so satisfying to feel the crack of bone and see the witch collapse on the ground.

After all the politics and magic, the lies and deceit, Deirdre got to dispense good old-fashioned justice with a boot to the face.

It felt so right.

The impact kept Rhiannon from casting another wave of magic. Dale Junior rushed in to pin her down, and Deirdre helped him, taking Rhiannon’s arms while the gargoyle stepped on her legs. The OPA body armor wasn’t enough to protect her bones from the crushing weight of the statue. She cried out, face reddening.

“Where are the kids?” Deirdre dropped her voice to a hiss, quiet enough that only Rhiannon would hear her. “Where is Stark?”

Rhiannon spit in her face.

Deirdre reared back, wiping her hand down her cheek.

As soon as she shifted her weight, the OPA moved in. An agent rolled her onto her stomach. They clapped handcuffs on her wrists. Magic sighed around them as the runes crawled up Rhiannon’s arms, coating her skin in enough wards to keep an entire coven from casting.

Secretary Friederling limped up, leaning heavily on his cane. He looked so much more triumphant than Deirdre would have expected.

For all that he had acted impartial to preternatural politics, he seemed very satisfied to arrest the witch who had caused so much trouble these past weeks.

“Rhiannon Stark, you’re under arrest for the murder of Rylie Gresham’s Beta, among numerous other fiddly little crimes,” he said. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of law. I highly recommend remaining silent. I don’t think anything you say could help yourself right now.”

“You can’t hold me forever,” Rhiannon said.

Secretary Friederling laughed. “I don’t need to hold you forever to keep you out of my hair. Only until you die.” He waved to the SUV. “Take her away, agents.”

Deirdre could tell that January Lazar’s footage had been broadcast successfully back at the sanctuary as soon as she returned to the stage. She knew long before she actually traversed the long road back: she could hear the audience screaming.

But it wasn’t until she stepped onto the stage, hidden behind the drapes, that she realized they were cries of victory.

The shifters were celebrating Rhiannon’s defeat.

Deirdre’s knees went weak with relief. There weren’t going to be riots in the sanctuary. The place she’d burned had seen enough damage for one week—and for once, she was going to be heralded as the hero.

There might be riots elsewhere, instigated by the many supporters that the Starks had gathered. But a lot of those would be quelled by the footage that showed Deirdre cooperating with Rylie. After all, she’d worked in Stark’s stead for so long that she was almost as popular as he was. Popular enough to get six percent of the vote.

Rylie was surrounded by so many aides preparing her for the inauguration that Deirdre couldn’t approach her. But the Alpha caught her eye over the crowd, and Deirdre managed to smile. Rylie smiled back.

It was time.

The curtains on the stage dropped, exposing the sanctuary filled with an audience waiting to watch the inauguration.

Streamers drifted through the air. Balloons in the sanctuary colors bounced over the audience.

Marion stood on the stage, disguised to look like an older woman who nobody would recognize. When she spoke, her voice boomed throughout the valley, amplified a thousand times by the speakers. Deirdre didn’t hear the actual words that she was saying. All she heard was the feeling behind it—the relief that told Deirdre that even Marion hadn’t been certain their ruse would work to defeat Rhiannon.

Rylie seemed to move in slow motion as she got on stage. Her white-blond hair flowed behind her, softening her features even though she was dressed in the matronly pantsuits she always wore while making political appearances. She radiated when she smiled.

Rylie stepped into the center of the circle. Marion met her with hands lifted, drawing haloes of magic through the air.

Magic passed through them all, binding shifters to their Alpha once more.

What Deirdre felt had nothing to do with magic, though.

It was the bittersweet feeling of democracy in action. The winner of the vote, the incumbent Alpha, returning to take her position again—just as the majority of voters had wanted.

That wasn’t the outcome that Deirdre had been hoping for, but it was what she had fought to earn.

The people had made their own choices.

Rylie had won, Deirdre had lost, and that was the happy ending.

XVIII

Deirdre wanted to say that she didn’t get any satisfaction out of watching Rhiannon taken away by the Office of Preternatural Affairs for trial after Rylie’s inauguration.

But that would have been a lie.

It would have been just as much a lie to pretend that she wasn’t sort of disappointed by the anticlimax of it all.

“So nothing changes,” Deirdre said. “Everything stays the same.”

Abel stood beside her, arms folded as he watched the witches apply additional wards to the prisoner transport. It was so riddled with magic now that Deirdre was shocked the engine could continue to idle. Most mechanical things failed with that much magic on them.

“That so bad?” Abel asked. He’d been standing in the audience to watch his mate inaugurated, and there was still confetti caught in his collar. “People voted. They want Rylie’s way of doing things to keep going.”

“Thirty-six percent of them do. Sure, that’s more than anyone else got, but it’s not a majority.”

And how many of that thirty-six percent were gaeans who didn’t need to rely on the system for anything? Of course Rylie had the support of the privileged. The people who were living lives as good as those they enjoyed before Genesis.

There were almost as many people who were angry enough to vote for a man who killed innocents.

A man who had bailed on his wife at the last possible moment, leaving her to get arrested without lifting a finger to help her.

Damn, Stark. That was cold, even for him.

“Is Marion tracking all of Rhiannon’s magic back to its roots?” Deirdre asked. They were hoping they’d be able to find her daughters if they tracked the spells she’d cast within the SUV, and in turn, find Everton Stark as well.

“Yeah, kinda. She’s working on it.”

“Kinda? Isn’t she the most powerful witch in the world?”

“Powerful means she can out-magic anyone. Doesn’t mean she can untangle all the knots in seelie magic. She’s an angel, after all.” Abel scowled, like that was a dirty word. “We’ll figure it out. We have to—the sluagh is still out there and all.”

Deirdre hadn’t forgotten. She couldn’t possibly forget about that. “It’s probably still hunting me.”

“We can arrange for a safe house until we pin it down,” Abel said. “In the meantime, about the whole election thing. How you got all those votes. You wanna come talk to me in private?”

She couldn’t think of many things she wanted to do less at the moment. She needed time to herself to process everything that had happened and all it would change—as well as all the things that wouldn’t change at all.

But he was mate of the Alpha. The woman who had been voted back into power. Who was Deirdre to refuse them?

“Fine,” she said dully.

She took a last look at the SUV. The windows were tinted black, so she shouldn’t have been able to see anyone inside.

But a spark flared.

For an instant, Rhiannon’s face was illuminated just bright enough for her to make out her narrow, angry eyes, the hard lines of her cheekbones and jaw.

She was glaring at Deirdre.

Probably plotting revenge.

She could go ahead and have fun coming up with all sorts of ways to kill Deirdre while trapped in an OPA detention center. She would need a hobby now that she was never going to see daylight again.

Abel was walking to a nearby limousine. Deirdre followed him.

The coroner’s van was parked nearby. The rear doors were open, allowing her to see inside to the black bag zippered closed, like a long flat trash bag. Deirdre imagined that she could see the shape of curls and feathers inside. But that was just her imagination.

Her stomach knotted.

She slipped into the limousine’s leather seats.

It was air conditioned inside, almost as cool as a refrigerator, and it chilled her sweat instantly.

There was a woman Deirdre didn’t recognize waiting for them there. She had natural hair, light skin, and excited eyes. She wore a skirt suit much like those Rylie wore, but much shorter, exposing unprofessional lengths of creamy copper thigh.

“Deirdre Tombs!” she greeted with enthusiasm, practically squealing. She had a cat resting across her thighs, a furry black monster with a flat face that made him look like he’d run into a wall at full-speed.

“Do I know you?” Deirdre asked.

“Yes, but no. We haven’t met. My name is Summer.” She stopped petting the cat and held her hand out to shake. Deirdre looked at it skeptically. “Summer Gresham?”

The name clicked. “You’re Rylie and Abel’s oldest daughter. The one who’s married to an angel. You picked out clothes for me when I first visited the sanctuary.”

She seemed delighted to be remembered. “That’s right! Wow.” They shook hands.

Summer must have been an honorary daughter, in much the same way that Gage had been an honorary son. She looked like she had to be the same age as Rylie. Her face was subtly lined, carrying the weight of almost forty years on the Earth. There were a few white hairs near Summer’s right ear. The crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes said that she’d spent every one of her years on Earth smiling.

She was beautiful, and far too down-to-earth to be married to something as terrifying as an angel.

“What do you want?” Deirdre asked. The sound of her voice made the cat look up. She startled to realize that half of the cat’s face was missing. No fur, no skin, nothing. Just skull and a bulging, glassy eye. “Oh my gods, what’s wrong with your cat?”

“He’s painfully handsome, that’s what’s wrong with him.” Summer scratched under his chin. He had a mouse skull dangling from his collar.

“He’s a zombie.” Abel looked more comfortable around Summer than he had around anyone else before. They sat shoulder-to-shoulder, all but cuddling. “Because shapeshifters can’t have normal pets, like a hamster. A living hamster.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Summer cooed to her cat. “He’s just jealous you’re immortal.”

The cat’s mouth opened in a silent, croaking meow.

Deirdre tried to think of something to say, but failed.

“Want to pet him?” Summer lifted him halfway, his legs dangling from her hands. The cat was missing part of his flank as well, exposing ribs. There was something pulsing inside of his body. A heart? Was his heart really sitting out in the open like that?

“Uh,” Deirdre said.

“We got a job offer for you,” Abel said, tactfully choosing to redirect the conversation from the zombie cat.

Summer picked up his sentence where he left off. “Six percent of voters wrote your name on the ballot, Deirdre.” She snuggled the ugly cat against her chest, stroking his exposed skull with a thumb. “You know how much six percent is?”

“Three out of every fifty people,” Deirdre said.

Rylie’s daughter laughed, slapping Abel’s knee lightly. “She’s funny! Yes, three out of every fifty people voted for you, but do you understand how absurd a number that is? Instead of touching one of the factions that was already on the page, those people wrote your name down. They grabbed the pencil and wrote.” Summer mimicked the action.

Deirdre stared at her. “Yeah. They wrote. With pencils.”

“People are spectacularly lazy. You have no idea how lazy they are. If six percent went out of their way to write your name in, then at least twice that many would have voted for you if you’d been on the ballot. Basically, gaeans love you. A lot.”

She understood what Summer was getting at now. But the truth wasn’t that the gaeans were fans of Deirdre. They were fans of Deirdre as Stark’s Beta, and all of the things that she had done to help him campaign while he was in the Winter Court. They were fans of the fact that she had allowed vampires to kill a witch at the blood bank. She didn’t think those were the kinds of fans she wanted.

“That’s…nice,” Deirdre said.

“Nice? Are you kidding? You must be something amazing.” She captured one of Deirdre’s hands in both of hers. There was something so non-threatening about Summer that Deirdre didn’t even think to draw back. “Rylie has asked me to set up an independent organization that will form a wall between her and the Office of Preternatural Affairs, liaising with the mundane government.”

“Why are you setting that up?”

“Well, I’m pretty good at organizing things. My husband and I administrate the academy. Also, Rylie wants to be kept out of the setup so she can’t be accused of bias.”

“Because her daughter couldn’t be biased in her favor either,” Deirdre said.

“I’m just setting it up. We’ll need someone amazing to run it who’s clearly much more of an independent agent.” Summer grinned at her. “You get my drift?”

Deirdre’s mouth went dry. “You mean…?”

“I was hoping that you would be the head of our new liaison office. You’d have to do lots of lobbying in Washington, help draft legislation, and generally shape the future for gaeans in North America.”

It was a lot of the more boring parts of the Alpha’s job. Not the parts that required being stronger than other shifters, but all the parts that would require good judgment and paperwork.

The parts that Deirdre wanted to be involved in.

Policy making.

“If I got voted for at all, it means I’m Rylie’s opponent,” Deirdre said. “Plus, I was on Stark’s side through the whole thing. I made some decisions that can only be described as questionable at best.”

“Even so, people obviously want you to help make decisions. You’ve got firsthand experience with the system and, as Stark’s Beta, had a leadership role with many of the most disgruntled gaeans. You also have a relationship with Secretary Friederling.”

“If you want to call it that.”

Summer’s laugh was ridiculously charming. The little snort helped. “Are you interested?”

Interested? She was more than a little interested.

But Deirdre was so flabbergasted by the offer—and so overwhelmed by everything that had happened over the last few hours—that she couldn’t wrap her mind around the implications.

“Would I have to live in Washington?” Deirdre asked.

“You could have a home there, and one at the sanctuary,” Summer said.

“We’ll see about that,” Abel muttered.

Summer elbowed him. “Oh, hush.” She turned back to Deirdre. “Did I mention that it would involve a lot of travel? Not just throughout North America, but all over the whole world.”

Deirdre liked the idea of traveling.

Heck, she liked the idea of everything.

Everything except working with the Office of Preternatural Affairs.

“I need to think about it for a while,” Deirdre said.

Summer grinned. One corner of her mouth lifted higher than the other, which made her look a lot like Abel. “Understandably. I just wanted to offer while I was around. And I wanted a chance to meet you after all this time. I’ve heard so much about you. A lot of it has even been good stuff!”

“Well… I guess it’s nice to meet you.” Deirdre reached out to shake Summer’s hand again, but instead, the zombie cat swatted at her fingers in a silent gesture of back off, don’t touch my person.

Summer gave Deirdre a business card, holding it out of the cat’s reach. “Call me if you have more questions or come to a decision.”

Deirdre ran her thumb along the edge of the card. It was on heavy stock, with Summer’s name embedded in gold leaf. “I will. Okay.”

Abel pushed the limousine door open.

She knew when she was being dismissed.

Deirdre stepped out. Abel shut the door. The engine revved, and she watched the limousine’s license plate as it retreated, leaving her on the street by the stage.

Volunteers were tearing everything down, working even more quickly than they had while setting up the event. It was a strange sort of anti-climax, hanging out after the event was already over.

Rhiannon was going to jail. Rylie, who had rightfully won the election, was keeping her office. Deirdre’s betraying best friend had died. Stark might have been missing, but that wasn’t Deirdre’s problem anymore. Other people were tracking him down.

There were no battles left to fight.

She didn’t need to deal with Lucifer, Gianna, or any of the other rebel shifters again. She could go back to Jolene. Start over again.

Or take the job.

“Huh,” Deirdre said, tucking Summer’s business card down her shirt.

Rylie stepped from behind the stage, still clad in the pantsuit she’d worn for the inauguration. Even in business wear, she looked every inch the predatory animal, a literal wolf in figurative sheep’s clothing.

“I talked to Summer about the job offer,” Deirdre said. “Wow. I’m flattered. It’s really thoughtful of you.”

Rylie didn’t even smile. “Come with me.”

“What? Is something wrong?”

“We can’t talk about it here,” she said.

Deirdre glanced around, searching for Rylie’s usual bodyguards. There was nobody nearby.

It must have been serious.

“Okay,” Deirdre said. “Should I find Vidya first? Will we need her help?”

“No,” Rylie said curtly.

Deirdre had never seen her curt before. That was beyond worrying.

She followed Rylie into the forest behind the stage. The trees quickly grew dense, since the pack allowed the forest to grow thick right up to the edge of the sanctuary. Nature was never more than a few hundred feet away from the shifters who lived there.

It was strange to be alone with Rylie when she was in professional mode. When she was dressed like this, she was meant to be accompanied by aides, politicians, lobbyists. Not just Deirdre.

The sounds of the stage’s breakdown receded quickly. All she heard was wind, the crunch of their footsteps against pine needles.

“Are we going much further?” Deirdre asked.

Rylie led her to one of the rear access roads that cut through the mountains. There was a car waiting at the mouth of the tunnel.

That was where she stopped.

Deirdre didn’t approach the vehicle. It didn’t look suspicious—it wasn’t OPA black—but the windows were tinted so dark that she couldn’t see inside.

Rylie let out a sigh, clutched her hands over her heart…and then she collapsed.

Deirdre turned at the sound of movement behind her. But she already knew who would be there, even before she looked. She recognized the sound of his footfalls. The weight of his presence in the air.

Everton Stark stood behind her.

She took a reflexive step back, heart leaping into her throat.

“Stark?” she asked. “What have you done to Rylie?”

He lifted his cell phone. Deirdre’s heart sank when she saw that he was on Marion’s blog page. The picture at the top was unmistakable, as well as the columnar layout.

Stark knew that they’d figured him out—which meant he knew that Deirdre had tried to trap him. He’d allowed Rhiannon to step into the trap while hanging back.

No wonder he hadn’t been there. He had been too busy breaking into the sanctuary to compel Rylie.

“Oh my gods,” Deirdre said.

She reached for her gun.

Stark’s arm hooked around Deirdre’s throat, squeezing her esophagus in the crook of his elbow. His other hand clapped over her mouth.

She tried to scream, but her voice was muffled into his palm.

His breath was hot in her ear. “I heard that you’re going to be liaison between Rylie Gresham and the OPA, Tombs,” Stark said. “My forgiveness is finite and you’ve found the limits of it.”

She couldn’t respond. It wasn’t just the hand on her mouth. She was unable to inhale as he squeezed tighter on her throat, restricting her air passage.

Deirdre’s head swam. Her vision blurred.

She thrashed against him, lifting her weight from the ground and trying to lean forward to flip him, but he was immobile as a cement wall. Even now, after she had shifted multiple times into her phoenix form, she was weaker than the bear wolf.

Deirdre needed to use her anger. She needed to set both of them on fire. She needed to save herself from him.

Or at least make herself a beacon that would attract help.

But the harder she grasped at her anger, the more quickly it fled from her. Her bird slipped out of her grasp. She couldn’t shift, couldn’t catch fire, couldn’t do anything but beat against Stark’s arms ever more weakly as consciousness faded away.

He was dragging her toward the car now. Her heels kicked weakly at the ground.

If Stark took her away, they’d never find her again.

No. Stop. Please, don’t…

Deirdre took one long blink, and then another.

Her eyes shut.

She was gone.

Deirdre slid between consciousness and dreams.

Everything that passed through her mind was so vivid that it might have been real if not for the bizarre things she was seeing.

She wasn’t in the Summer Court again, racing through the fields with her wings spread wide and the unicorns nipping at her heels.

Nor was she diving into the frigid ocean beyond the Winter Court, immune to the ice, swimming with the selkies as ice water smothered her nose and mouth.

Deirdre wasn’t at her childhood home with her father, playing on the swings with Gage while Alasdair Tombs handled business inside, watching them through the kitchen window.

None of it was real.

Those beautiful, surreal visions were interspersed with images horrible enough that they could have been nightmares, like opening her eyes to find that she was in the back seat of a car being driven by Everton Stark, his expression grim and intake bracelet gleaming in the dim evening light.

A heartbeat, and she was braiding Rylie’s hair while seated atop the waterfall, accompanied by the Godslayer from Niamh’s comic books. Rylie looked real. The Godslayer looked like an illustration, a 2D sprite in 3D space with Ben-Day dots tinting her hair auburn. The women talked and laughed and Deirdre couldn’t hear the words they were saying.

Another heartbeat. Stark pressed the plunger down on a syringe filled with lethe, emptying it into her body. It was a bigger syringe than he had ever used on her before. Ice coursed through Deirdre’s veins.

He was pouring waterfalls into her. Filling her with drugs. Intoxicating her, breaking her mind, shattering her body.

Another heartbeat.

The unicorns’ eyes were rolling. Blood streamed down their long faces, staining their sleek golden fur. They stretched sharp teeth toward Deirdre’s wings and tried to bite the feathers.

Stark was withdrawing a needle attached to an empty syringe and inserting a second.

The Godslayer drew her sword and walked toward Deirdre, still smiling from the last thing that Rylie had said, prepared to slaughter both of them where they sat.

Stark was shooting himself up with lethe, too.

What was real?

What was a dream?

Could Gage really be falling from her swing set and landing in the depths of an oven with white-hot coals, fur burning away, the fat of his berserker body sizzling with the heat? Why would the Godslayer want to kill Deirdre? What had she done to deserve that vengeance? She had returned the Ethereal Blade to Rylie. She had made amends.

Would Stark really kiss her one moment with the urgency of a dying man, and then fill her with gallons upon gallons of lethe in the next moment? He was sharing the needles, injecting himself as frequently as he injected her, with a dose just slightly higher to adjust for the mass of his body and the power of his shifted form.

Deirdre was so high.

Everything was so far below her.

What was real? What was a dream?

It felt like she was never going to be awake again.

XIX

Deirdre wasn’t sure how long she was unconscious.

When she woke up, she was resting in a puddle of her own vomit, muscles stiffened by long immobility, partially digested contents of her stomach caked to her cheek.

Somewhere nearby, children were crying.

Deirdre’s eyes peeled open.

Her arm was limp on the floor in front of her face, the only thing close enough for her to focus on. Her fingers twitched.

There was a catheter taped to her wrist. The plastic tube glowed bright blue.

She had woken up like this before, though she hadn’t felt quite so horrible that time. The crying children made her head throb in time with their tears.

Deirdre pushed her arm against the floor, trying to roll herself over. She couldn’t move. She wasn’t strong enough.

For a few more moments, she rested.

Get up, Tombs. Get up.

Pushing herself onto all fours, she wiped at her mouth and grimaced at the sour tang of bile on her tongue. There wasn’t much to the contents of her stomach on the ground between her hands. She hadn’t eaten in far too long.

Her head throbbed. Her body burned.

It felt like the healing fever was taking her over. But when she looked at her body, she found no wounds grievous enough to account for the sweep of heat through her muscles, the prickle of shapeshifter energy. All of the bullet holes that Rhiannon had inflicted were gone. They had healed before she suffered…whatever it was she was now suffering.

Deirdre felt almost as terrible as when Niamh had stabbed her in the back.

Her head weighed a thousand pounds, and she struggled to lift it enough to look around.

“No,” she groaned.

Deirdre was in one of the cells at the asylum.

There was no furniture in the room. It was just four concrete walls, a silver-barred window, and a bare floor.

Stark sat in the corner, elbows resting on his knees, head hanging between his shoulders. He looked as awful as she felt. The rings under his eyes were deep. His cheeks seemed to sag, his spine curved with the weight of suffering.

“Tombs,” he croaked.

Deirdre tried to speak, but it just made her whole body buck. Her shoulders hitched twice. Her mouth yawned wide, and acid trickled up her throat to splatter onto the floor.

She’d already thrown up so much that there was nothing left behind.

It hurt so much.

Her body had no resources to heal her throat, scalded by bile.

The sound of crying children was no hallucination. It echoed throughout the asylum, coming from another room. Alona and Calla were there. Stark finally had his daughters back.

And they were terrified.

The wooden box where Stark kept his lethe was on the floor beside him. It was open. There was a needle in it. But there was no lethe in sight.

He could have fit enough lethe in there to keep both of them flying like kites for a month.

It was empty now.

It didn’t feel like he’d loaded Deirdre up with it anytime recently. This wasn’t a lethe high she was dealing with—not anymore. She’d gone from delusions of running with the unicorns to a serious crash, far worse than any she’d experienced while on the drug before.

Most lethe addicts starved to death.

Most, but not all. There were few ways to kill shifters without silver, but lethe overdose was one of them.

“How much did you give me, Stark?” Deirdre asked, a little desperately. She couldn’t seem to speak without crying. She wanted to be unconscious again, no matter how painful or terrifying the visions had been while she was under. “How much?”

“Enough,” he said.

“And how long have we been here, exactly?”

Stark’s brow crimped. “A week.”

A whole week since the inauguration.

Deirdre understood.

Now all those dreams made sense.

And she was terrified.

She hadn’t been hallucinating Stark shooting both of them full of lethe. He had been dosing them for days.

How much lethe would it take to kill a phoenix and a bear wolf?

Enough.

“Rylie,” Deirdre said. “What did you do to Rylie?”

“I told her to die,” he said.

“Did she?”

“Do you care?” Stark asked.

Deirdre cared so much more than she wanted to. Rylie had shown Deirdre limitless compassion, and she had been elected as leader by North America’s gaeans. She meant so much to so many people.

She couldn’t die.

“You didn’t help Rhiannon,” Deirdre said. “You let her walk into our trap without you.”

“I’d never forgive her for what she did. I don’t forgive anyone for anything. But I needed her to get my girls back safely.” Stark scratched at his arm. The veins were a sickly shade of blue, bulging under the papery surface of his skin. “The OPA will find us here soon. They’ve been tracking us. They want to arrest me.”

“And you’d rather die than go to an OPA detention center?”

“I’m not the one who’s going to die. The OPA aren’t the only ones looking for us.”

“The sluagh,” Deirdre said, and she began trembling in earnest. She hadn’t even thought she had the strength to shake. She could barely get up. “You’re waiting for the sluagh to find me.” She couldn’t wrap her mind around the reasoning. To have the OPA and the sluagh in the same place? To let that monster kill his enemies?

Or…to kill the phoenix?

“You asshole,” she said.

Her muscles felt like they were unknitting. The fibers were going to unwrap and shake themselves apart. Her bones were fragmenting, driving slivers deep into her body. Every ounce of weight she tried to rest on her limbs felt like a thousand agonizing pounds.

She dragged herself across the floor, digging her fingernails into the floor, pushing her knees underneath her body.

“You asshole,” Deirdre said again, and she wasn’t sure that the words had actually come out.

“I gave you a lot. You shouldn’t have woken up.” Stark still didn’t look at her as he said it.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

He lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug, then dropped it again. He was beyond the point of speaking. His blue-tinted lips were cracked around the edges, caked with blood. The whites of his eyes were shot with red. He was drying out, like the lethe had replaced his blood, and now his organs were failing without the proper oxygen.

“You took too much,” she said. “You’re going to die, too.”

“I’m waiting for the sluagh to take you.” Stark’s eyes were shut. “I didn’t want to…” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard.

He didn’t want to watch her die.

Stark didn’t want to be cognizant for that, so he had dosed himself as strongly as he dosed her.

But he was still going to let the sluagh kill her.

Tears welled up in her core. But she couldn’t cry. Her body had no resources left.

She finally reached him. Deirdre wanted to beat him, pound her fists against his face, punish him for everything that he’d forced her to suffer. But she didn’t have the strength for it. Her abs were squeezing again, and if there had been anything left in her stomach, she would have vomited.

Instead, Deirdre sagged against him. His flannel shirt felt abrasive. Like it could scrape the top layer of skin off of her hand.

She wasn’t strong enough to attack him physically, but she only needed words to hurt him.

“Weak,” Deirdre hissed. “You’re so fucking weak, Everton Stark.”

His eyes snapped open. He glared at her with hate—so much hate.

Hatred hurts us more than the people we hate.

“Your daughters will never love you.” She wasn’t sure that it came out, but she meant to say it. She hoped he heard it. “I will never love you.”

His expression shifted. His eyebrows creased.

Yeah, he’d heard her.

“It doesn’t matter, Tombs,” he said. “You’re dead.” His eyes slid shut again. “The sluagh’s here now.”

Once he said it, she could feel it.

The air was colder in the presence of the sluagh. Everything was a little bit darker. The asylum was spiraling into frosty night as the cruelest piece of the Winter Court came hunting.

The girls suddenly stopped crying.

Stark didn’t even react. His eyes were closed again.

“Stark,” she said, shaking him. “Where are they? Are they somewhere safe from the sluagh?”

He was limp.

Deirdre pushed against the wall to get to her feet. It hurt. Everything hurt.

But the sluagh was there to kill her, and it was traveling through the rest of the asylum first.

She had to find the girls before it did.

Deirdre had made promises to Melchior, and she intended on keeping them, no matter how difficult.

The asylum pitched around her as she dived for the door. It was cold, so impossibly cold, and she wouldn’t have been able to move in it even if she hadn’t had more lethe than blood running through her veins.

Hallucinations swirled past her. They must have been hallucinations from the lethe, because Gage wasn’t really there. He wasn’t really standing in the doorway, trying to block her exit, his shirt hanging open and sweat dripping down his pectoral muscles.

“Don’t,” he said. “It will kill you.”

“I killed you,” Deirdre gasped.

She pushed through him. He evaporated.

Deirdre slammed into the wall opposite the cell door. Gage was standing there too, watching her stumble. She couldn’t even see his face. She didn’t remember it now. There was nothing but a swirling blankness where his tortured eyes should have been.

His voice sounded like Stark’s.

“You’re going to die.”

When she lifted her head from the wall, she faced the blackness of the Genesis void. It had consumed that entire half of the asylum. Beyond two doors down, there was nothing but black.

“No,” she whispered.

It wasn’t the Genesis void. It was the sluagh, and it had ripped through one of the asylum walls, tearing a cell open.

That was where the girls were.

Deirdre stepped into the cell beside that one. There were no walls between the cells anymore. They had been shredded by the sluagh’s entrance, creating one large room with the naiad girls cowering in the corner and the monster filling the rest of the space.

When the older of them—Alona?—looked to Deirdre, it was with fear in her eyes, but no plea for help. She was furious. Every inch her father’s daughter.

“Hey!” Deirdre shouted. “You came here for me!”

She must not have said it aloud. The sluagh didn’t react to her. It had seen two new souls to consume, brilliant and shining with seelie power, and it wanted to take them.

It wasn’t right to say that the sluagh “wanted” anything, though. It wanted nothing. It was urge, cold and flowing and raw.

Right now, those urges were drawing it toward Stark’s daughters.

Calla and Alona, so afraid.

Nothing would have been a bigger “screw you” to Stark than letting them die.

“Come on, Deirdre.” Gage was there again, standing beside her. “Who are you?”

Her stomach clenched. She leaned against the wall, letting her temple rest on cool cement. “You said my name. You know who I am.”

“Who are you?”

Gage lifted a mirror that he hadn’t been holding a moment before. Deirdre looked into it, and she saw Stark reflected back at her. An angry man, a lonely man, alone in a dank cell with enough lethe to keep him higher than an OPA dirigible.

Stark would have killed Deirdre’s daughters to make her suffer.

“Who are you?” Gage asked.

His voice had become higher, more feminine.

Niamh was cradling the mirror, crimson curls tumbling down her chest, blood smeared across her shoulders.

“Hatred only hurts you, Dee,” she said. “I forgave you. Will you forgive everyone else?”

She dropped the mirror.

It shattered on the ground at Deirdre’s feet, stinging her with shards, filling her with cold. She took a step back, but she reacted too slowly. Niamh had dropped it right on her.

No, that wasn’t a mirror. It was lighter. Papery.

A photograph.

Deirdre bent, swimming through sludgy air. She picked up the photograph.

It was a young Everton Stark sitting on his horse. They were at a dressage competition.

Had hate made him better? Had it ever made anyone better?

The sluagh slithered toward Calla and Alona.

Deirdre could have let them die. They didn’t deserve it, but their father did. He deserved every damn thing that came to him.

But she didn’t hate Stark that much.

She didn’t hate him at all, in fact.

Deirdre stepped forward, putting herself between the naiad girls and the beast—the one thing that could kill her. Forever.

If it didn’t, then it was going to kill the girls.

“Tombs!”

Deirdre turned to see Stark in the doorway, struggling to reach her though he was limping, weak with lethe, chest damp with bile. That was no hallucination. She wouldn’t have hallucinated Stark looking so awful. No matter how much they had fought, Stark would always be a strong, handsome, force of nature in her mind. Not this shriveled pathetic thing.

But Gage behind him—Gage and Niamh and Melchior, all watching Deirdre—that was a hallucination.

They wanted her to let go.

“I’ll never love you, Everton Stark,” she said. “But I forgive you.”

She spoke with Niamh’s voice. Rylie’s voice. Gage’s voice.

Deirdre wasn’t Stark anymore. She didn’t ever want to be that man.

With that, Deirdre began to change.

The phoenix form took her. It had felt strange both times that Melchior did it to her, but now it felt as natural as pulling off a bathrobe. Deirdre simply allowed her human form to fall away. She stepped into her feathers and wings.

Fire blossomed over her skin. Her clothes incinerated as she spread her arms, opening herself to embrace the sluagh.

It was frigid death, a devourer of souls, darker than the voids of space.

Deirdre was the fire that birthed new life.

The phoenix.

Day against night, sun against moonlight, the Alpha to an Omega.

For a brilliant, beautiful moment, Deirdre was infinite, filling the entirety of the asylum. She saw Alona and Calla, cowering just outside of the reach of the tentacles, where they would be safe. She saw the rain drizzling off the edge of the roof, and the incinerator where Gage’s body had burned. She saw the OPA’s black trucks pulling up outside to save her just a little bit too late.

It was good they were there. They would be able to arrest Stark, get the girls away from him, send them to Sascha at Everton Estates.

Everything was going to be okay.

She changed. Her wings spread. She flew into the depths of the sluagh, wrapped in its tentacles, her body shredded by the skeletal hands that waited within.

Deirdre burned the sluagh from the inside to keep it from killing Stark and his daughters.

And for the third time in her life, she died.

Deirdre opened her eyes on rolling green fields under a swollen, smoldering sun.

She had died.

Again.

Third time’s the charm, I guess.

The knowledge arrived along with a surprising calmness. She had died, and she was fine with that. There was nothing to change about it now. Death had come upon her, she was gone, and it was time to move on.

All of the fear that she had felt while plummeting into the depths of the sluagh—that was gone.

Her heartbreak over Stark—that was gone, too.

Everything was okay.

She turned to look around the grassy fields, and thorny brambles scraped her calves. Deirdre smelled blackberries rotting in the heat of summer. The bushes were a wall blocking her from the hills of the afterlife.

This time, Deirdre wasn’t going to let the bushes stop her from moving on.

“Get out of my way,” she said.

The bushes sighed, shivered, drew in on themselves. Their thorns retracted. They left no wounds on her bare skin.

A path opened to the grass.

Deirdre stepped away from the brambles, and her toes sank into the dew-kissed field.

She had arrived.

“Oh, baby,” a man said, and she knew before she saw him that it was her father, Alasdair Tombs.

The sight of him still took her breath away.

Gods, he hadn’t aged at all since she was a little girl. He was still a tall, handsome man with dark skin and an affable smile. And when he held his arms open, there was nothing to stop Deirdre from stepping into them, wrapping her arms around her father’s waist.

He smelled as good as she remembered, like that aftershave he’d always slapped on right before heading out the door to work. “Daddy,” she whispered, resting her cheek over his heart, shutting her eyes to savor the feeling of him.

Alasdair released her first, shifting Deirdre so that she was held tightly against his side. Another person was approaching them across the grass. It was hard to make out her features with the massive sun at her back, though it highlighted her brown curls as though she were a phoenix who had caught fire, just like Deirdre.

As she drew nearer, white skin and blue eyes became clearer. A pair of sword hilts jutted over either shoulder. One of the hilts was black, and the other was glossy white.

Deirdre had held that white sword before.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but you only have a few minutes,” said Marion Garin. She was dressed in fluttering gauze that swayed in a wind Deirdre couldn’t feel. Marion didn’t seem to be connected to the surrounding world the way that Deirdre was. Marion looked like a ghost.

“Did you die too?” Deirdre asked.

The girl shook her head with a sad half-smile. “I’m visiting.”

“What about Rylie? Stark said that he told her to die.”

“She’s an Alpha,” Marion said. “She may have succumbed to his compulsion to lure you away, but she’s much harder to kill than that. She’ll pull through. It’s lucky for Stark that she will, because Abel would rip him to pieces if she didn’t.”

“She’s harder to kill than I am, apparently,” Deirdre said. “And I’m a phoenix.”

“Phoenixes are easier to kill than other shifters because they’re meant to die. Your strength comes in death. That’s the whole point. Unfortunately, you’ve gone ahead and killed yourself permanently this time.” Marion sighed. “It’s so strange how they always know that they’ve passed on here. They’re always so calm about it. It makes me uncomfortable.”

“Who are they?”

“Those who have died. This is the afterlife.”

“We’re in Heaven,” Deirdre said. “Oh my gods. I knew Daddy would go to Heaven, but I didn’t know—”

Marion interrupted her. “Not Heaven. Just the afterlife. This is the place in between being dead and being born again.” She lifted a finger to point at the overbearing sun. “That’s where everyone goes when they’re ready to start once more—everyone except phoenixes.”

Deirdre tipped her head back to look at Alasdair. “Is that why you’re hanging around here? Because you’re a phoenix, like me?”

“He’s mundane,” Marion said. “He’s just stubborn.”

Alasdair’s arm tightened on Deirdre. “I couldn’t go until I knew you were going to be okay.”

“I died again. I think I’m about as far from okay as I get. But it’s fine—I’m here now with you.” She tried to fold herself against his chest again, but Alasdair didn’t let her.

“We don’t have much time,” he said gently.

The sun was getting brighter, hotter.

It was drawing nearer.

“What are you doing here? Who are you?” Deirdre asked Marion. She eyed the hilts of the swords. If one was the Ethereal Blade, then the other could have only been its missing twin: the Infernal Blade, a demon sword hewn from obsidian from the depths of the Nether Worlds.

Marion must have had it all along.

“You’re the Godslayer, aren’t you?” Deirdre asked.

Marion shook her head. “I only speak for her.”

“You’re the Voice.” That was what Rylie had called her.

“The Voice of God, yes,” Marion said. “The Godslayer killed Adam, Eve, and Lilith, the triad of gods who once ruled our world, and she brought about Genesis. By killing them, she assumed their role. The Godslayer became God. And I speak for her.”

“Why?” Deirdre asked.

“Because she asked very politely.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Alasdair rubbed Deirdre’s shoulder. “It’s the only answer we get, precious.”

Anger surged within Deirdre, clawing at her like a desperate animal. “Are you kidding me?” She clung to her daddy. “You’re dead because of this Godslayer. I had to live in the system because Genesis took you from me. It ruined our whole world. And now we’re here in the afterlife, and the Godslayer won’t even talk to us? Tell her to come on out!”

Marion kept smiling that faint, sad smile, grief lingering around her eyes.

“You wouldn’t be here at all if I hadn’t asked permission to bring you back. Anyone who enters the sluagh is meant to be gone. They don’t get to return to the cauldron where all death is remixed into life.” She gestured again to the sun. “But I like you, and you’ve been helpful, so I asked for a favor.”

“A favor? What kind of favor? Another chance?”

“Answers.” Marion smiled bashfully. “Ask whatever you want. She’s listening.”

This was Deirdre’s moment, at long last.

“Why make me an Omega?” she asked. “A phoenix? Why change everyone in Genesis in the first place? What was wrong with us the way we were? And why didn’t we get any guidance—why leave us so damn lost?”

Marion looked over her shoulder.

There was nobody there that Deirdre could see. But Marion, the Voice, listened quietly for several long moments, nodding along as though someone was speaking to her.

“You’re not going to like the answers to those question,” Marion said.

“Better than nothing.”

“Genesis came,” she said. “The Godslayer killed the gods. Everything ended, and she had a moment—an eternal moment, but only a moment—to start over again. She made choices, and many of those choices were mistakes.” Marion shrugged. “That’s it.”

Deirdre’s eyebrows lifted. “That’s it?”

“I said you wouldn’t like it.”

She stepped away from her father to give herself a little room to think, a little room to breathe. Was she breathing at this point? Did she need oxygen? Was there oxygen in the afterlife?

“How can gods make mistakes?” she asked. “They’re gods. They can just fix it!”

“She swore to stay out of it,” Marion said. “The world doesn’t need highly interventional gods taking control to dictate the way of things. Those commands would be as likely to be filled with mistakes as her first choices.”

“So…what? She just abandoned us?”

“The world doesn’t need her. It needs people to take charge of their own destinies.”

Deirdre laughed. She laughed, and then the laughter turned to tears, sliding hot down her cheeks. “I tried to take charge of my destiny and help people, and look what I got for it.” She spread her arms wide to encompass the whole of the afterlife, the sun crashing down upon them, the eternity of nothingness that approached. “I’ve lost everything. That’s how I’ve been rewarded for taking charge. Thanks, Godslayer.”

“She’s right. Send her back.”

Another person had appeared on the grassy plains. Another three people. No, more than three—the more Deirdre counted, the more appeared.

The man who had spoken had soulful eyes and a sad smile.

Gage.

He stood among the blackberry bushes with Niamh. Beyond them stood dozens of others. Deirdre only recognized a few of them. The unseelie queen, Ofelia, was there. So were many of the seelie sidhe who had been devoured by the sluagh when it attacked the chateau in the Summer Court.

Marion’s face brightened at the sight of Gage, but she didn’t move to embrace him. She probably couldn’t. “Hey there.”

“Hey,” he said. He was looking over Marion’s shoulder, past her to that invisible nothing standing out on the grass. “Send her back. Give her one more chance.”

“Deirdre was taken by the sluagh. She’s dead as dead gets,” Marion said. “We can’t send her back.”

“The gods can do anything. The non-intervention is just some stupid policy, right?”

“The line between ‘can’t’ and ‘won’t’ is narrow.”

Deirdre wasn’t even listening to them.

It was Gage.

She was moving, walking across the grass, heading into the brambles again. She would have gone through anything to reach Gage after all this time.

Deirdre held her hands out, and so did he.

Their fingers brushed.

She could feel him. He was really there with her, the both of them together in death.

His lips were warm and dry, stubbled chin scraping against hers as she kissed him. Her arms wrapped around his neck. He tasted salty, like tears. “Gage,” she murmured into his lips. “Gage, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I did so many things—I shot you, and I became Stark’s Beta—”

“It’s okay.” He pressed his forehead against hers. “It’s okay, Deirdre.”

He wasn’t the first to tell her that her choices were okay, but his voice was the only one that really got through to her.

“The sluagh was an abomination,” said the unseelie queen, stepping forward, her skirts bitten by the thorns. Ofelia was beautiful in this afterlife, even more beautiful than she had been in the brief moments that Deirdre had seen her in Original Sin. “I spent much of my life trying to destroy it. This phoenix finally did it, and she surrendered her life in the attempt. You should put her back.”

“I agree. Deirdre’s the most loyal and noble person I’ve ever known, and the world needs people like her,” Niamh said. She looked hale and hearty, as strong as she had been before the vampires drained her. She was even wearing one of her David Bowie shirts.

Alasdair didn’t say anything. He just smiled up at Deirdre, surrounded by the people who loved her, and his smile seemed to glow.

Deirdre’s cheeks were hot. “You’re wrong. You’re all so wrong. I’ve been getting into fights, killing people, doing things that are… No.” She shook her head, again and again. “I don’t deserve it.”

“You died saving someone who wanted you dead,” Gage said. “If that’s not heroism, I don’t know what is.”

“She is very principled,” Marion agreed, looking over her shoulder again. “She reminds me a little bit of you—but much nicer, most of the time.” She wasn’t speaking as the Voice now, but addressing the Godslayer directly.

“My girl doesn’t need to be nice,” Alasdair said. “There’s no room for being nice when things need to get done.”

“And a lot of things still need to get done,” Marion said.

Fear lodged in Deirdre’s gut. “You’re not wrong, but I don’t know that I’m the right person to do it. I need help.” She reached for Gage again.

He stepped out of her reach. “I don’t want to go back—I can’t wait to be rerolled into something new, where I don’t have to be afraid of my own anger.”

“They all need to move on,” Marion said. “I’ll make sure they all get to be reborn, even those the sluagh took. If you want to talk about mistakes, the sluagh is the biggest of them all. But it would be an even bigger mistake not to fix it—and to end Deirdre’s lives here.” She directed that last statement directly at the sun.

The voice that responded said, Fuck it. Whatever. Just this once. It might have been a female voice, or a male voice, or both. It filled Deirdre’s marrow and vibrated through the entirety of her soul. Don’t make a habit out of asking for favors.

Marion’s tinkling laugh danced through the afterlife.

The sun crackled as it bore down on her.

It was only a few inches away, right above her head. The grass was going to catch fire. They were all going to burn, remade into new lives.

Everyone but Deirdre.

“I want to go with you,” she said. She wasn’t sure if she was speaking to Gage, to her father, to Niamh—to all of them. “I don’t want to go back alone.”

“You won’t be.” Gage kissed her again, more briefly than before. He cupped her cheek in his hand. “Someone like you, Deirdre…you’ll never be alone for very long, so long as you keep hanging on to what matters. And I know you will.”

The brambles grew around her legs. They crawled up her hips, and the thorns didn’t pinch at all.

The blackberry bushes pulled her away from the sun as everyone she cared about was taken away. She fell into the trembling thorns, thrashing in a wind she couldn’t hear, and Deirdre screamed into the sun. She screamed and she screamed and then it was all over.

An ending.

A new life.

Again.

EPILOGUE

“Wake up. You have a visitor.”

Everton Stark kept his eyes closed.

He wasn’t asleep, but he also wasn’t interested in anyone who might be visiting him.

In the weeks that he’d spent incarcerated, he’d had a lot of visitors from the Office of Preternatural Affairs. He had entertained the first couple of them. It wasn’t like he had anything better to do in the detention center. But it turned out that being antagonized by OPA officials was far more infuriating than being merely bored, and now he rejected everyone who came to his cell.

There wasn’t much by way of entertainment in the detention center, so the boredom truly was endless. They didn’t allow Stark to enter the common areas. He couldn’t avail himself of the library, the weight room, or even the mess hall.

The fact that they had secured an enchanted muzzle on his face that prevented him from speaking, much less compelling other shifters, didn’t seem to matter.

His life had been reduced to the space between the walls of his cell.

Stark imagined that the fact he was in a typical cell rather than solitary confinement was intended to be a show of good will from Rylie Gresham—proof that she wasn’t the monster that everyone knew she was, proof that she could treat a rival Alpha well.

They weren’t going to risk treating him too well, though.

He wasn’t allowed to communicate with the outside world at all. He slept, he ate, he did bodyweight exercises in his cell. That was the majority of his life.

The rest of the time, Stark watched the news.

He watched as a conference held by Rylie Gresham unfolded. The coverage was near-constant and January Lazar was enjoying the attention. She relished the dramatic negotiations between the Alpha, the sidhe, the covens, and even the vampires.

Many of the sensitive details of negotiations were private, but Stark could always tell when things were going well. January acted disappointed that nothing had gone wrong.

Meanwhile, Rhiannon went to trial. That got far less coverage than the conference. It was hard to piece together what was happening with her, as it seemed that Rylie didn’t want to give the witch more publicity than necessary.

He knew when she was declared guilty, though. Guilty of killing Rylie Gresham’s Beta. Guilty of manipulating the election. Guilty of so many more things that the public would never know about.

It was infuriating to watch the news and be unable to influence it, but he couldn’t make himself stop. Any time Rylie Gresham gave a speech, or any time the cameras caught her outside the United Nations building, he was glued to the screen. Watching her every move.

Watching the people in her entourage.

Watching for her.

A baton rattled against the bars of his cell. “Hey! I told you to wake up! You have a visitor.”

Stark ignored the voice.

The OPA secretary had asked him multiple times to make a public statement declaring his submission to Rylie Gresham. In exchange, Stark would be given library privileges. Though access to the library would have been worth almost anything, it wasn’t worth that. The offer was insulting. He didn’t want to hear it again.

The guard moved away from his cell.

“Sorry, seems like he’s being stubborn. Can’t let you in.”

“But I’ve got special permission to visit him. It’s not up to the prisoner. Hey! Stark!”

The sound of a woman’s voice made his eyes fly open.

He was still in the cell where he was meant to spend the rest of his life. A metal ceiling covered in runes hung over him, marked with such elaborate magic that even he couldn’t decipher it well enough to cause damage.

The woman’s voice echoed against the metal cell.

“C’mon, let me in, Stark.”

Stark sat up, turning to face the door of the cell.

Deirdre Tombs stood on the other side of the bars. She was looking good. She had obviously been showering more often than she had as a terrorist on the run. Her clothes were new, probably purchased by Rylie Gresham: a denim skirt that hit mid-thigh, low-heeled sandals, and a snug shirt that lifted her breasts. She looked like bait for the prisoners in the detention center.

Bait for Stark.

Vidya stood behind Deirdre, offering silent support. She showed no signs of recognition when Stark looked at her. His former compatriot had no interest in him anymore. Her loyalties were clear—and those loyalties rested with Deirdre.

The OPA agent in charge of Stark for the day was trying to guide the women back through the door, making them leave the hallway, but Tombs was making a show of resisting. It was only a show. She could have incinerated him where he stood.

“He’s up,” Tombs said, pushing the agent away from her. “Now let me in.”

The agent turned to Stark. He looked surprised to see that the prisoner had actually reacted to something. Stark had been earning a reputation as stubborn.

“You want visitors?” the agent asked.

Stark’s eyes narrowed. He couldn’t respond through the enchanted muzzle.

“Trust me,” Tombs said, curling her fingers around the bars of his cell. “You want me to visit.”

Something in her tone told him that she was serious, though she was smiling and relaxed.

He drank in the sight of her, healthy and alive. The long expanse of skin on her inner forearms was smooth, unbroken. She wasn’t wearing an intake bracelet and probably hadn’t been on lethe since he’d last dosed her. The phoenix had risen from the ashes and was above all influences.

He finally nodded.

She conferred quietly with the OPA agent for a moment, and then the guard activated a rune on the wall.

The enchanted muzzle clicked.

For the first time in weeks, Stark felt the metal around his mouth loosen. It had unlocked. He peeled it off. The air stung against the itchy beard growth underneath, where he was sweaty and sore from so much exposure to silver. He worked his jaw around. It hurt. But he could speak again.

Tombs entered his cell alone, leaving Vidya outside.

“Hi,” she said.

He tossed the muzzle aside and didn’t respond.

The OPA agent shut the cell door behind Tombs.

She strolled around his cell, inspecting the runes with interest.

“Nice work they did here,” she said. “I’m pretty sure Marion invented some new magic specifically for you. No way you’re ever getting out of this.” She rapped a knuckle against the wall.

Stark folded his arms across his chest, watching her circle the cell.

Her shirt was cut low in the back to expose the pale birthmark that spanned from shoulder blades to the base of her spine. It looked like she was preparing to whip her wings out and fly away at a moment’s notice, the way that Vidya was known to do.

“You been watching the news?” Tombs asked. When he didn’t respond, she picked up his muzzle. A line formed between her eyebrows at the sting of silver on her hands. “I bet you have been watching the news a lot. And I bet you’re wondering how my job as the shifter liaison to the gaean council’s been going, huh?”

He had been wondering that, but he wasn’t going to admit it. Not to her.

Stark didn’t know what kind of relationship they had anymore. Whatever it was, they were not close enough that he could allow her to hear his thoughts. Anything could give him away.

She was allied with Rylie Gresham.

They were not Alpha mates. They weren’t even friends.

Stark wouldn’t show any weakness in front of her.

“Well, you should know that I turned the liaison job down,” Tombs said. “I don’t want to work for the system. It’s still broken. And, honestly, I’m not patient enough to sit around through months of bureaucracy when I know that people are still suffering out there. We still need change. Real change. I’m not going to wait for Rylie, Fritz, and all those other people to make it happen. I can do a lot more to help on my own.”

“Like what?” Stark asked, finally speaking.

A grin blossomed over her face. “Breaking down the bad schools and getting the kids out. Through legal methods, of course. Finding them new guardians that I know are safe. And I’m working on organizing smaller packs—a little civil disobedience to try to get power distributed more widely throughout the shifter population, even while we get ready for another big election in five years. Lots of stuff like that. Got tons of work to do.”

“It sounds like difficult work,” Stark said.

“I’ve got help.” She lowered her voice. “And financing from a few sympathetic souls. There are a lot of people looking for a new leader to follow, now that you’re gone.”

Tombs must have tapped into his network of contacts. Lucifer was probably helping her. Maybe even using profits from the sales of lethe.

“If you’re looking for an apology for what I did…”

“Nope,” she said. “I don’t need you to act all contrite. I’m sure you feel like a big enough jackass for almost getting your daughters eaten by the sluagh. I also don’t expect you to thank me for saving them, but you are welcome, for the record.”

He had never seen her in such a good mood before. He liked it—this happiness, this attitude. Stark gave a small, grudging smile. “It’s nice to see you, Tombs.”

“I’m pretty happy to see you too, boss man.”

“I didn’t say I was happy. I’m in here because of you. I’d rather be dead.”

“I know,” Tombs said. “Which is why I lobbied to have you detained instead of executed. It makes me feel good to think of you rotting in a cell, after everything you’ve done. You don’t deserve a fast death.”

Stark stepped forward an inch. His chest brushed hers. “I could kill you before the agent opens the cell.”

“Nice to know some things never change,” Tombs said. “You still think death threats will drop my panties.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Won’t they?”

“Not gonna happen, Stark. This visit isn’t conjugal. Anyway, you can kill me all you want, but I’d be back to annoy the hell out of you in a few hours. Where’s the fun in that?”

Gods, but the woman was infuriating.

“What do you want from this visit?” Stark asked. “Is it just to gloat?”

“Actually, I’ve got an update from the girls. I thought you’d like to know that they’re attending a school overseas. They’re doing really well. They’re very popular in school. Nobody has any idea who they are, so they’re not dealing with the stigma of the Stark name.”

“Where do they live that nobody has heard of me?”

“Somewhere hidden,” Tombs said. “But don’t worry about them. They’re safe.”

“How do you know that, if they’re hidden?” he asked.

Her cheeks dimpled when she smiled. “Your brother’s looking after them. He keeps in touch, and he lets me visit whenever I want—which I do, a lot.”

He was startled. “You’re helping Sascha raise my daughters?”

“Someone has to keep the Starks out of trouble.”

The warmth that unfolded in him was unexpected, but not entirely unpleasant.

Stark had wanted Tombs for his mate. They may not have ended up Alphas together, nor had they ever mated, but she was still taking care of his children.

It was a satisfying outcome. He liked the thought of his daughters with her.

“Are they giving you trouble?” Stark asked. His voice came out hoarse.

“Me? You kidding?” She pushed his chest lightly. “I dealt with you for months. Your girls are angels in comparison. Well, a lot better than angels.”

“Deirdre,” said Vidya from outside the cell.

Tombs glanced at her. She sighed. “Well, I just wanted to tell you about the liaison thing, and your kids. I wanted you to know I’m helping shifters. And I’m not waiting for things to get better on their own.”

“Good,” Stark said.

She backed away from him. She looked reluctant to leave.

He didn’t want her to leave, either.

“I made a lot of mistakes,” Tombs said. “I deserved to die when the sluagh took me. I shouldn’t have come back, but I did. I got my third chance even after all the wrong crap I did.”

“Lucky you,” Stark said.

“I learned my lessons, and I got another chance. But you? You don’t get any more chances. If you got over the cold killer behaviors—if you learned your lesson—I think you’d deserve a second chance, too. Don’t we all?”

“There’s no point talking in hypotheticals. I’m going to die in this cell if Rylie Gresham has her way.”

“Yeah.” Tombs sighed. “You’d have earned it for sure. There’s nobody as bad as Everton Stark.”

She backed away. She was going to leave him.

This was his last chance to speak with her.

He hadn’t intended to apologize, but it came out of him anyway. “If I had a chance, I would do it all differently,” Stark said. “Everything with my daughters. Everything with you. I don’t know how I could have fixed it, but I wouldn’t make those same mistakes again.”

Tombs stopped moving for the door. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he said.

The corners of her mouth lifted. “The king of the unseelie said you’re special. I like to think that if you were like me—if you could be reborn—you would have found a way to use your abilities for good, to become part of this…this Brotherhood thing. And maybe you could have changed the world for the better.”

“With you beside me?” Stark asked.

“That train left the station the first time you punched me.” But she was moving toward him again, reaching her hands out, grabbing him by the shirt. “You and me, we’re no good together. We both deserve better.”

Tombs pressed her lips against his.

Stark shouldn’t have kissed her.

He had tried to kill her. They should have both been dead. It was her fault that he was in the detention center, alone.

The feeling of her against him, though… He had no idea when he would feel a warm body again, much less one as pleasant as hers.

He pulled her tightly against him. She was a few degrees hotter than a woman should have been, the phoenix smoldering under the surface of her skin. It had been pure joy getting to pull that fire out of her once. Stark would have given a lot to do it again.

Deirdre’s tongue flicked into his mouth.

His eyes popped open with surprise.

She stepped back quickly, giving him an impish smile.

“Gotta go,” Tombs said. “I’ve got lots of work to do, and you’ve gotten in my way enough for one lifetime. I don’t want to see you ever again. Consider this goodbye, all right?” She shrugged. “Everything that happens after this is up to you.”

The OPA agent opened the cell to let her out.

“Muzzle,” the agent said while the door was open.

Stark knew better than to refuse to put the muzzle back on. They had ways of making him comply. So he lifted it to his jaw, and the magic engaged itself, looping around his head and securing the metal to his flesh. Silver sizzled.

The agent closed the door. Tombs and Vidya watched him from the other side.

“See you,” Tombs said.

She quirked an eyebrow at him and walked away. He was certain that the sway of her hips was a deliberate taunt, making sure that he would get one final look at everything he had lost.

Stark rolled his tongue in his mouth, feeling the hardness of the disc that she had transferred to him during the kiss. It was hard to tell what it was supposed to do when he couldn’t look at the thing, but he could guess.

It was a broad, flat piece of rock that tingled with magic against his teeth.

The stone must have been taken from one of the sidhe stones that had been used to track Stark, back when Rhiannon had disseminated them among his contacts. He recognized the taste of the magic.

Once activated, it would transport him somewhere else. It might be on Earth or in the Middle Worlds. He had no way to tell until he activated it.

Deirdre Tombs had given him a way to escape the detention center.

If you got over the cold killer behaviors—if you learned your lesson—I think you’d deserve a second chance, too. Don’t we all?

The OPA agent led Tombs and her friend away.

Inside the muzzle, Everton Stark smiled.

It seemed that a shifter didn’t need to be a phoenix to get a second life after all.

The Mage Craft Series, Book 1

That’s right, friends and readers! Marion Garin, the Voice of God, gets to headline a series along with the help of Seth Wilder. (You know Seth? Abel’s brother and Rylie’s ex-fiancé? Mmm hmm, that guy.)

Get more info!

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