Leaving?She replayed it twice more. It still didn’t make any sense.

He sounds excited.

She absently ran her hands over the new comforter they’d picked out and listened again. Aislinn heard the voice, whispering very softly in the pause in his words.

He left.

She’d trusted him with secrets that she’d never shared with anyone. When Keenan and Donia were stalking her, she’d opened up to Seth. She’d broken every rule she’d lived by, that her mother and Grams had lived by.

Tears were stinging her eyes, but she blinked them away. “What just happened?”

She couldn’t stand being in the bedroom, in the space that was just theirs, any longer. She left the room and went to check Boomer’s heat rock. The snake wasn’t coiled in his terrarium.

Boomer’s gone.

“Seth’ll be back.” Aislinn looked around the empty house.

Aislinn wanted to run, but it was Seth she ran to when she was lost—and he was missing.

“Where are you?” she whispered.

She couldn’t make herself leave yet. She washed her hands and then cleaned the couple of dishes. It wasn’t as if she really thought he’d walk in the house while she stood there washing his teacups; she just couldn’t bear leaving. When she went to put them away, she discovered that the other dishes were all gone, except the two teacups and the teapot she’d bought him.Why did he take everything? Why didn’the take the teapot I got him?

Something is wrong.It wasn’t like Seth to just vanish.

She looked around and found broken dishes in the trash. Someone had broken them and cleaned up. If not for Boomer’s absence and the excitement in Seth’s voice, she could believe that he was in danger.

He took Boomer with him.

Her emotions felt too close to the surface, and since she’d become the Summer Queen, that wasn’t something she could let happen, not with emotions like these. She’d seen the result of Keenan’s mood swings—miniature tropical storms trapped in small spaces, a sirocco on a city street—and she’d helped contain the consequences of those emotional upheavals. Her presence calmed him. Even after nine centuries as Summer King, he still slipped, but his storms weren’t the overwhelming nightmare she felt pulsing inside of her.

She didn’t have the control to deal with any of those emotions on her own.

Outside the train, a mist wafted like the fog coming in from the sea, but there was no sea near Huntsdale. The fog was her fault. She felt it, her confusion and fear and anger and hurt swirling faster and faster.

Seth left.

She walked to the door and pulled it closed behind her.

Seth is gone.

Her steps through the city were propelled by sheer will. She was in a haze. Guards spoke. Faeries paused as she passed them. None of it mattered. Seth was gone.

If Bananach or anyone else wanted to hurt her, this would’ve been the time to do it. She was aware of only the constant repetition of his message in her ears as she played it over and over.

By the time she reached the loft, all she knew of life was reduced to one fact: Seth had left.

She opened the door. The guards were talking to Keenan. Some noise about her being reckless was filtering from their mouths. Others were speaking more noise. The birds were chattering. It was all meaningless.

Keenan stood in the middle of the room; all around him, birds swooped among the trees and vines he kept in the loft. The sight of it usually made her feel a loosening of tension. It didn’t this time.

“He’s gone,” she said.

“What?” Keenan didn’t glance away from Aislinn or move toward her.

“Seth. He left.” She still wasn’t sure if she was more frightened or more hurt. “He’s gone.”

Without a sound, the room emptied of everyone but Aislinn and Keenan. Tavish, the Summer Girls, Quinn, several rowan—they all slipped away.

“Sethleft ?”

She sat down on the floor, not bothering to walk the rest of the way into the room. “He says he’ll call, but…I don’t know where or why oranything. He was upset with me, and now he’s gone. When he left the loft the other night, he said he needed space, but I didn’t think he meant this. I keep calling. He’s not answering.”

She looked up at Keenan. “What if he’s not coming back?”

Chapter 20

Seth stood with Bananach in one of the older graveyards in Huntsdale; it was an oasis set off from ruined buildings and graffiti-decorated walls. It was a place he’d come with friends, a familiar space where he and Aislinn had spent hours walking among the dead. Today, the sense of comfort he usually felt there was replaced with trepidation.

“This is it? The door ishere ?” he asked.

“Some days. Not always.” She motioned him forward, past a pair of crooked stones leaning together. “Today it is here.”

Between the Sight and the charm-impeding glamour, Seth could see the barrier that stood in front of them. He’d seen barriers elsewhere—at the park by the loft, at Donia’s house and cottage, and at the Rath. There were still others shimmering around places where a lot of faeries frequented or nested. But none of the barriers he’d seen were this substantial. The others were misty, like smoke or fog that he could slip through. Contact with them felt uncomfortable as he crossed them, so much so that if he didn’t know they were there—or that faeries were real—the barriers would deter him from crossing. It was what they did: kept humans out.

This was different in every way. Neither smoke nor illusion, a veil of moonlight hung from higher up than he could see and touched the earth. The solid fall of it bespoke weight, like thick velvet drapes. He reached out a hand to touch it. He could not push through.

As Bananach moved forward, the barrier rippled out in tiny disturbances as if she had fallen into still water. Then she jabbed her taloned hands into the moonlight veil and parted it. “Come into the heart of Faerie, Seth Morgan.”