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D
id you have to hit him that
hard
?” Kelley turned on her mother.

“Yes.” Mabh snapped. “I did.” Her pale complexion was almost ashen. The glow from her wings was barely a flicker, and she wove a bit unsteadily as she stood there.

Kelley’s own wings were furled behind her. Weak. She’d barely caught Sonny when he fell, and they’d both landed heavily on the ruined stage. Out of the corner of her eye, Kelley saw Tyff moving shakily toward her. Her roommate’s face, too, was white, and she was covered in tiny scrapes and cuts.

Kelley looked around at the others. They all bore wounds—and the worst of those were
not
gotten from their foes. As for those foes, all that was left of them was the splashes of neon-green blood, painting the stage in swaths of garish color. Two of the largest canvas flats were licked with flames, and smoke boiled up into the cavernous space above the stage. The two-by-fours that Sonny’s power had animated lay strewn about, snapped like broken bones.

“Where are the rest of the glaistig?” Kelley looked around, folding herself protectively around Sonny’s inert form.

“Gone,” Tyff said, her voice hoarse. She stooped and picked something up off the shattered stage. It was Kelley’s clover charm. Tyff handed it back to Kelley, shaking her head slowly as if in denial of the images lodged in her brain. “Destroyed. In that flash of light. I saw them—he . . . they’re just
gone,
Kell.”

Kelley clutched the charm. It was cold in her hand.

“I need a body count, Tyff,” Kelley said in a low voice as Tyff came up beside her. “How many of those . . .
things
did Sonny destroy?”

Tyff snorted. “Is ‘all of them’ enough for you?”

“Was it? Was it actually all of them? Think, Tyff.”

Tyff’s brow furrowed in concentration. “Well, there were four or five of those trashy goat bimbos in my direct line of sight when our boy went all apocalypto with the light show. And they vaporized. Utterly. I’m guessing it was the same for all of them.” Her expression turned serious as she said, “And I’m pretty sure you saw with your own two eyes what happened to the leprechauns.”

“No one can ever know what Sonny is,” Kelley said, half to herself.

“That’s a little like trying to put the genie back in the bottle, isn’t it?”

“Wait.” Kelley was thinking furiously. “
She
can do that, can’t she? Chloe? Give him back the spell-song? The one that hides his true nature?”

“Sure.” Tyff coughed in the gathering smoke. “And from what I gathered, happy to do it, too. We should really be getting the hell out of here, you know?”

“What about you?” Kelley gripped her wrist.

“What about me? I’m not about to spill the beans. And neither will Harvicc. Assuming we survive this, I’ll have enough time to work on a spell for both of us that will shield that information from prying minds.” She huffed. “Gods, I
hate
magick! But at least it’ll be less painful than a sock in the jaw. Of course, your mortal pals are another matter all together. You could put a whammy on their memories, I suppose. But that sometimes has side effects—”

“No. No whammies. Jack doesn’t even know what he saw. I’m not worried about him. And I trust Fennrys.”

“That’s nice to know,” Fennrys grunted as he heaved himself up onto the stage from the orchestra pit. He must have found his way down from the booth by the back access stairs. He was covered in a score of lacerations from flying through the control-booth window. “You ladies staying for barbecue, or can we get moving?”

Behind them, Harvicc was busy heaving aside burning flats, trying to keep the conflagration at bay. But the fire’s dull roar grew louder with every passing second.

Kelley turned to her mother. “Do you have enough juice left to get Auberon out of here and back to the Otherworld? To somewhere safe?”

“Safer than here, anyway.” The Queen raised her hoarse voice over the crackling of the flames. Kelley could see that there were now flames racing through the rows of audience seating, feeding greedily on the old worn carpeting. “But that spell took almost everything I had. And I can tell you that a moment later it wouldn’t have been enough.” Mabh stared down at Sonny with something that looked like respect. Kelley refused to believe it was fear.

“I’ll take care of the others,” Kelley assured her.

“And I’ll take care of the boucca,” Mabh said in a low voice. Kelley frowned at the possible implications of her mother’s words, but she didn’t have the luxury of warning Bob or asking Mabh just how she would accomplish that task. Kelley could only hope that the boucca was wily enough to escape the worst of her mother’s machinations. Mabh’s wings fluttered, straining against the smoke-heavy air as she rose up to the balcony.

Kelley felt a horrible stab of guilt when she saw Bob heroically cast aside one of the prop swords, breaking the iron circle so that Mabh could get to them. The boucca’s yowl of agony sounded over the rest of the chaos and in the moment before Mabh opened a rift, Kelley saw him clutching his hand—as if the metal had burned him. She put a hand to where her own wound throbbed painfully. The air shimmered, and Mabh raised a hand in farewell. Kelley waved her impatiently to go, trying to ignore the expression she’d seen in her mother’s gaze. The very last thing Kelley needed from Mabh was sympathy.

The air in the theater was almost furnace-hot.

Outside, in the distance, Kelley thought she could hear sirens.

She tried to lift Sonny in her arms. Her knees buckled and Fennrys caught her gently.

“I’ll get him,” he said.

Kelley climbed to her feet and gathered what little strength she had left. Standing beside her, Kelley felt Jack take her hand in his, giving her fingers a gentle squeeze of encouragement. A rift opened directly above them, and with an effort of sheer will, Kelley drew the crackling circle of darkness down to engulf them all as they stood huddled together in the middle of what had become a raging inferno. She lifted her chin and willed her eyes to stay dry as she left behind the only real home she’d ever known. She left it to burn.

Angry red darkness faded to a butter-yellow glow. Early-morning sunshine streamed in through the French doors of Sonny’s penthouse apartment. Maddox was asleep on the long leather couch, but he sprang to his feet—shocked startlingly awake by the sudden appearance of a battered company of Fair Folk and mortals appearing out of thin air in the middle of the exquisite Persian rug.

“Seven hells!” he exclaimed. “What—”

“Hullo, Maddox,” Fennrys grunted, hitching his armload of unconscious Janus Guard higher. “Stop gawping and give us a hand, will you? Which way to the bedroom?”

“Wait.” Kelley put up a hand. “Maddox—is
she
still in there?”

“Uh. Yes. Well—no. I mean—” He stopped and cocked his head. “I think she’s taking a shower. Um. I hear water. She takes long showers. Lots of them. For hours, sometimes.” He avoided looking in the direction of Tyff’s sharply raised eyebrow. “I sleep out here,” he murmured under his breath.

Kelley walked over and pushed open the door. The bed was neatly made, and she nodded for Fennrys to deposit his burden. He set Sonny down on top of the coverlet and went back out.

Maddox had followed in Kelley’s wake, and his jaw was hanging open. “What happened? Kelley—what happened to Sonny? Kelley . . . ?” he called after her as she brushed past him, back to the living room.

In the main room, Harvicc perched delicately on a settee that sagged under his bulk. Jack hovered near the kitchen. When the actor’s eyes met Kelley’s, she saw that they were full of something a little like awe. That wounded her on some level.

“I’m sorry about this. About everything,” she said quietly. “I think you should go home now, Jack.”

She almost expected him to argue. But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything. Jack just nodded and went to the door, leaving without a backward glance.

Kelley realized that her fist was still knotted around the four-leaf clover, and she opened her fingers to gaze down at the amber charm, glinting green in her palm. Without a word to Maddox or the others, she went through the French doors and out onto the terrace.

Far below, Central Park looked peaceful. She was much too high up to be able to tell whether the disturbances of the night past had left any telltale signs. Even if they had, the Janus would take care of them, she supposed. Any renegade Fae that had managed to come through would be either dead or disappeared into the city; running, hiding, waiting until nightfall, when their Faerie magick grew strong.

The Janus would be tending to wounds. Sharpening weapons. Doing damage control.

Like she needed to do. Kelley fastened her charm back around her throat. A shiver ran up her spine, and she blamed the wind.

It wasn’t long before Tyff came out to join her. She’d found Sonny’s first-aid kit and motioned Kelley to lie on her side on the terrace chaise, lifting the hem of her shirt high enough so that she could examine her injury.

“It’s not so bad. I don’t even think you’ll need stitches,” Tyff said as she crouched beside the lounge and fished around in the med kit. Tyff closed the edges of the gash along her ribs with medical tape, slathering on some sort of incredibly pungent salve and bandaging the whole area with filmy sheets of something. “Real gossamer,” said Tyff. “It’ll help the wound heal.” Apparently Sonny’s kit held more than just standard-issue medical supplies. Of course.

Kelley clenched her teeth as Tyff worked. In spite of Tyff’s assertions, it still felt like the entire left side of her body had been dipped in acid. And then set on fire.

“It’s the iron,” Tyff explained. “You’ve been living so long as a mortal that you’ve probably built up a kind of immunity to it—and I’m guessing that charm’s probably protected you, too—but a blade like that? It’s deadly to Fair Folk. Getting stabbed must have been a serious shock to your system.”

“I’m fine,” Kelley said. She would be—physically, at least. The leprechaun’s knife had only caught her a glancing blow.

It had been enough.

Enough to short-circuit her own magickal energy and make Sonny think for an instant that she was dead. And that instant had been enough to turn him into . . .
that
. Kelley had thought that what her father had done to Sonny had been monstrous enough. But what
she
had turned him into had been infinitely worse. Her shoulders heaved as she swallowed against the tightness in her throat that was half sob, half sickness.

“There’s some aspirin in here,” Tyff said, poking through the kit. “I’ll go get you some water.” She stood and went back inside.

Magick comes from what’s inside you, Tyff had told her not so long ago.
Head and heart, mind and soul.
The words echoed in Kelley’s head. Sonny’s heart belonged to her. That made
her
the most dangerous person she knew. As dangerous as Herne had been, once upon a time. Kelley had witnessed firsthand what her mother had done in the name of love—twisted, perverse, and every kind of wrong, maybe—but it had still been love that had made her mother conjure up a darkness so profound that it had cut a swath through the mortal realm.

Sonny’s love for her, on the other hand, was a wondrous thing. Perfect, beautiful, absolutely right. And yet he had burned the Avalon to the ground with it. He had hurt her friends. Tortured and tormented her enemies. When his mind had thought that she was dead, his heart had done that. Because of her.

She could never let something like that happen again.

“So, what’s next, then?” Fennrys asked.

Kelley sat up hastily, tugging her shirt back down over her bandages.

The Wolf leaned against the door frame, watching her.

“What?” Kelley asked.

“For him.” He pointed with his chin in the direction of the bedroom. “What happens to Sonny?”

“He goes away,” Kelley said quietly. “Into hiding. No one can ever know what he is. What he did. Not even Sonny can know.”

Fennrys stared at her silently.

“Promise me, Fennrys.”

“Promise you
what,
Kelley?” His eyes were wary like an animal’s. “I don’t even know what happened back there. What the hell kind of power was Irish slinging around?”

“The dangerous kind. And it’s not going to happen again.”

“I don’t understand—”

“You don’t
have
to, Fenn,” Kelley snapped at him, her nerves frayed. Patience at an end. World collapsing in all around her. It took every ounce of control she had not to break down in tears. “I’m sorry. Just—forget all of this ever happened.
Please
.”

She waited until Fennrys nodded, accepting his silence as his word.

He crossed the flagstones to sit next to her. “What are you going to do?”

“I’ll make him leave. I’ll tell him he has to go back to the Otherworld. For as long as it takes, until I can figure out a way to make sure he’ll be safe. From himself and others.” The faint hope in Kelley’s voice sounded hollow even to her ears, but it was all she had. “I found my way back to him once, Fennrys. I can do it again. I just need to know he’ll be all right, first.”

“Exactly how are you going to make him go?” the Wolf asked quietly.

“I don’t know.” That was a lie. She knew. She just couldn’t say the words.

The air in the bathroom was full of steam and broken singing.

Kelley pulled a bathrobe off a hook on the door and tossed it over the top of the frosted-glass shower stall. “Come out here, Chloe,” she said. And then added “Please.”

Once Kelley had managed to explain to Chloe what she had wanted her to do, it was easy. The Siren was almost childlike in her eagerness to help. Together they went into the bedroom, where Maddox was sitting in a chair beside the bed. He rose when they came in, standing protectively over Sonny’s unconscious form.

The big Janus crossed his arms over his chest and glowered at Kelley. “Are you going to let me in on what’s going on now?”

“I . . . no.” She wanted to. Desperately. Maddox was Sonny’s friend and hers as well. He deserved to know. “I can’t tell you.”

“I see. But you can tell Fennrys, is that it?”