When we arrived, there were already quite a few sweaty dancers twirling each other around in complicated reels, accompanied by a full ceilidh band of fiddle, flute, drums, and accordion. There was also a caller for us newbies, and they’d slow down before each song just long enough to teach the dance, but then it went to full speed and you either caught up or got whirled out of the reel.

Luckily, I was a fast learner, and all of my other friends seemed to know what they were doing. Caleb, heavily glamoured, worried me with those heavy hooves around all the daintily shod human feet, but he danced like a naked, goat-haunched Astaire. Iris looked like an angel in his arms, all that darkness she’d carried around so long totally lifted with her dispatching of the Healer. Ryu, of course, looked magnificent in his metrosexual duds, and the ladies were all doing their best to get reeled in his general direction.

Anyan was the real surprise. I’d never pictured him dancing, but he was as confident and quick on the wooden floor of the club as he was in bed. Our bodies moved together in perfect sync, and our eyes rarely left each other’s as I was passed from partner to partner then back to him during the more complicated dances.

We’d dance a few dances till we needed to wet our whistles, then we’d hit the bar. The beer was cold at the nightclub, no warm ale, thank God, and we may have also sampled the whiskey. Once we’d filled our tanks, it was back to the floor for a few more songs. We did this again and again, dancing Strip the Willow, The Dashing White Sergeant, The Eight-some Reel, the Highland Barn Dance, and the rather Yankee-sounding Virginia Reel.

I was laughing nonstop when I wasn’t panting or spinning about like a top toward Anyan, whose strong arms were always waiting to catch me.

It wasn’t until the third Strip the Willow that I officially needed a break. It was the least challenging of the dances, but it had a lot of spinning, and there were some dancers on the floor who seemed to fancy themselves preparing for the Olympics in discus. I decided my thirst was greater than my willingness to have my arms ripped off again, so I motioned to Anyan to head toward the bar. He joined me, and together we made our way past the downstairs bar to the one upstairs, placed in a loft with a perfect view of the dancers below.

We ordered a pint and a water each, taking a stool at the railing to watch our friends. Iris’s white teeth flashed in laughter as Caleb practically hurtled her through the air. Ryu had found himself a vivacious-looking blonde, and I had no doubt he’d be stripping her willow later that evening. I remembered how very well he stripped willows, and I wished them both all the pleasure in the world.

It felt a bit like being God at that moment, sitting above my friends. I let my mind toy with that idea. I pictured Iris and Caleb’s golden, goaty babies, and all the women Ryu would pleasure in his long, handsome life. I thought of Trill, back in her hospital room, and pictured her here. She would love to dance like this, and I would have glamoured her so that she could. Her bare, black-nailed feet would have pounded out the rhythms of these dances, and for a second the beating of the drums became the pounding of my friend’s pearl-gray legs and of her heart, which beat ever stronger from that hospital bed.

Maybe it was the whiskey, or the pint still in my hand, but that feeling of omniscience grew until I felt that I was floating, suspended as if on a cloud above the roiling dancers below me.

Watching that seething mass of humanity with my friends dotted amongst them, all sweating and laughing and living, I saw my choices laid out in front of me like stars. The lines of attraction and repulsion created by the dancers Stripping the Willow made a spiderweb of cause and effect that brought clarity. From my great height I understood the poem finally, and that it was right. Watching my fate swirl like a dervish, driven faster and faster by the wild piping, I knew what was really important.

These people were important. This life was important. Yes, my own relationships meant the world to me. Anyan was my life, but every person in this room also had a life.

My life was just one more glowing star, and my love was worth no more and no less than anyone else’s.

I took Anyan’s hand in mine. He was watching me, his iron-gray eyes inscrutable, but I could imagine he was also wondering about our fate, and whether I could do what he thought I had to.

And of course I could. I was the champion, and my life and my love had been fated to follow a special path, long before I was born. I’d railed against that idea of destiny for so long that to accept it felt like a strange relief, and as the spinning web before us wove faster and faster, the music wailing, the dancers panting and shining, I reveled in the motion and the joy. The universe had won and at that fact I laughed, standing to pull Anyan to his feet, just as the pounding beat ceased, everyone suddenly stock-still.

The threads binding the web were cut with the music’s cessation, just as all webs must inevitably be met by Fate’s scissors. It all made sense.

Anyan seemed to know I’d decided something as we left the club and made our way home. The others would spend the night dancing, drinking, living. But we had so much we needed to say.

‘Jane,’ Anyan said as I pushed him inside our little room back at the hotel. ‘You’ve made your decision…’

But I didn’t want to talk with words. I pulled him down roughly to me. My hands fisted in his T-shirt, and my mouth found his in a fierce kiss. His lips answered mine with equal vigor, saying everything that needed to be said.

I pushed him toward the bed, stripping him as we went. His shirt, his jeans, those damned motorcycle boots he loved but that took forever to remove. He peeled off his own socks as I made short work of my clothes and my easily removable Converse.

He pulled me on top of him. Neither of us needed, or wanted, any foreplay then. This was about being alive, about being with each other, about our joy at living and loving. He moved inside me with a force that left me gasping, but I met him stroke for stroke until we both broke, biting each other’s shoulders to keep from screaming and waking the crowded hotel.

Afterward, we lay panting until our hearts slowed enough to start all over again. But this time our lovemaking was slow, gentle. We tasted, and smelled, and touched, memorizing each other’s every movement, savoring each other’s bodies. If the first round had been about life and love, this round was very different.

This round was about saying goodbye.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

‘Morrigan’s troops are massing in Dalkeith,’ Griffin said, pointing to the map in front of us. Hiral had already brought us footage of her troops, where they were bivouacked at a local estate. She seemed to know all the rich folks, our Morrigan did.

‘I hate the word “troops”,’ I said to no one in particular. Anyan grunted a soft laugh.

In the grand scale of things, our ‘armies’ weren’t that big. We weren’t invading Afghanistan or Iraq. But still, there were nearly a thousand people on each side waiting to kill the other.

That seemed like more than enough to me.

‘We’ve done a good job putting together a force large enough to combat hers,’ the rebel leader Jack said, slightly defensively. He had been, of course, responsible for the majority of the troops making up our regiment. But we’d pulled in people from other territories, as well, including a contingent of soldiers from my own territory.

One of them was Nyx, who was currently standing across from us at the conference table we were using in the military base.

‘The troops won’t be a problem,’ said the baobhan sith babe who I’d once thought the scariest thing in the world. Her chestnut hair was still boy-short, and she was wearing a latex catsuit à la Underworld. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. Not because she was admittedly gorgeous, but because she used to scare the piss out of me, and now I was all ‘whatever’. If I hadn’t known I’d changed since first learning about my mother, I certainly did now.

Her eyes met mine briefly as she continued talking, and I didn’t even flinch. I deserved a cookie.

‘Our forces are equal to theirs and we’re more integrated, better fighters. Morrigan’s splitting everyone up by faction is not only crazy, but suicidal. They can’t cover for each other’s weaknesses.’

Nyx was right, and we all nodded.

‘The problem is Morrigan herself,’ Ryu added. Over the course of our various planning sessions, I had seen why they worked well together, now that Nyx wasn’t determined to be an evil cunt. They both had the same cool, assessing style of thinking that could see both the big picture and the minute details.

‘We’ve got to get her out of the way as quickly as possible. Our communities won’t stand for much more from her.’ Trevor, our US government liaison, was blunt, but I knew he was right. One of our debriefings had been an overview of current human sentiment about what was happening, as depicted in the media and in the blogosphere. It wasn’t good. Obviously, everyone knew something was up and no amount of ‘it’s all fine’ would cover the fact a massive fuck-off dragon kept popping up, and then being battled with what looked like magic.

I knew the Alfar Powers That Be all over the world were confabbing about how to handle this dilemma. Hiral had taken some time off from spying on Morrigan to spy on one of Griffin’s conference calls with the other seconds in command (who almost inevitably had more political acumen then their powerful but dazed leaders). Their suggestions for how to handle the humans had ranged from complete eradication of the species, which was immediately dismissed, thank God, to trying to act like it was a War of the Worlds-type publicity stunt for a movie.