As humans, so much is mysterious to us. As the woman that sang the ancient melody, everything was clear and it all fit. The universe was precisely as it was meant to be. No Fate. Checks and balances. The universe listed toward life and beauty, always had, always would. We were the universe: each and every one of us, light or dark, right or wrong, we were tiny, essential cogs in the grand and mighty wheel. Somehow, even the Sinsar Dubh.

As the song poured out of me, I began to glow and turn translucent, and I thought, Well, shit, maybe I’m going to die after all. But I didn’t care because I’d done what was needed. I’d been the cog it was most desirable for me to be.

A brilliant blaze of light exploded from my body, and the air was filled with countless tiny, fluid arrows of light.

Events unfolded in slow motion to me then, though later they would tell me it all happened in a split second. I suspect I was somehow out of time by that point, insubstantial, changed by the melody flowing through me.

A thousand of the golden dazzling things darted into the black hole, which began to shiver and shake, then shrink.

The destructive black sphere grew smaller and smaller until, with an audible pop, it imploded and was simply gone, leaving nothing but the deep trench dug beneath it, and ropes cordoning off normal, healthy reality.

Countless more arrows exploded forth, darting out into the world, like the Enterprise entering warp speed, seeking out the rest of the black holes.

We’d done it. The Song of Making was free and healing our world!

I turned to watch each of my companions pierced in turn with arrows shot by me. Mea culpa. Please let them live, I begged whatever god had created the melody.

The brilliant lances of light passed straight through Dani and Dancer, and Ryodan, too, coming out on the other side.

Then one vanished inside Christian but didn’t pass through. He began to shudder and snarl, and just when I thought we were definitely losing him, it abruptly shot out and moved on. Christian shook his head hard, looking dazed.

Barrons took a dozen of those arrows into his half-man, half-beast body and every one stayed inside.

His face contorted with agony and his eyes locked with mine.

I stared into his dark face, anguished, wanting desperately to stop singing. But I never would. I knew my role. I accepted it.

Jerking violently, he doubled over and vomited the dark storm of the Sinsar Dubh from his body. It gushed out of him, a black, viscous, oily river, oozing onto the pavement, and the damned thing actually shaped itself into the words FUCK YOU, MACKAYLA, YOU WILL DIEDIEDIEDIE.

If my mouth hadn’t been busy singing, I would have snorted. Pompous superiority complex to the end.

Hundreds of glowing arrows twisted and turned midair, knifed into the inky stain of the Sinsar Dubh like evil-seeking missiles. The words collapsed and the blackness shuddered and rippled, then surged into the air where it whipped around and twisted violently.

Then it was gone.

Arrows erupted from Barrons’s body. On the ground, on all fours, he threw his head back and looked up at me.

I’m still here, Rainbow Girl, he said fiercely inside my head.

My heart soared. He hadn’t died. I hadn’t killed him.

I looked at Alina and my heart sank. A hundred golden arrows pierced her everywhere and did not come out again.

Love you, Junior.

My sister was gone.

DANI

We had a blowout Beginning of the World party that night.

Best. Party. Ever.

It was like something I saw on TV. There hasn’t been time or opportunity in my life for parties, you know the kind where everyone’s just in a really good mood and nobody has a private, nefarious agenda and there’s music and all the food you could possibly want and the night seems to go on forever. And people play cards and liar’s dice and laugh their asses off and do shots.

And you’re with a man who thinks you’re beautiful and hot and can’t take his eyes off you and loves you.

Yeah, that kind of night.

Golden.

We hung out at BB&B, and even though Mac had lost Alina again, she had some kind of serenity about it that Jack and Rainey Lane shared. I think at the end of the day, they’d grieved her death once, and they just felt immensely grateful for the extra time they’d gotten with her.

That, and the world had been saved. It was impossible to not feel ebullient. We’d come so close to losing it all. And hadn’t. We’d gotten reports in from every country that had been contaminated by the destructive spheres. The black holes were gone and our planet was healed.

The Sinsar Dubh had been destroyed. For good this time. The Unseelie had all been unmade. Mac said she could feel a complete void where the Dark Court had once existed. The Seelie were alive and well, and she said they’d already begun clamoring for her immediate appearance at court. I was curious how that was going to go. Mac was the Fae queen, for good now. Strange.

We’d sent word through to each of the new worlds, and in short order folks would be returning to Earth, although I suspected some of the more adventurous types would opt to stay and colonize. It’s a great big universe out there now, and everything has changed.

As far as Dancer could tell, the song didn’t heal his heart. He said he felt the same, and if he was disappointed, in true Dancer fashion he didn’t show it. I was crestfallen but refused to brood. Things were no better—but they were no worse either. And each day, I learned new ways to deal with our situation. He’d been having problems for eleven years. I could easily get eleven more, and who knew what tomorrow might bring, or what miraculous cure Shazam might have to offer? Or maybe there was something Mac, with her Fae power, or Dancer himself, with his huge brain, could figure out to do, in time. The possibilities were limitless.

Apparently the song hadn’t considered Christian or Sean O’Bannion made of imperfect song, as I’d suspected.

Christian was still an Unseelie prince.

“I don’t bloody fucking get it,” he said to me for the third time, tossing back a swallow of scotch. “I’m Unseelie. It should have either killed me or stripped the Unseelie out of me, leaving me a normal man,” he said irritably. It may not have changed him but something about him was different. Possibly just that he was getting more comfortable being what he was.

Dancer said, “The song only destroyed what was created from imperfect song. You weren’t. You were born a human.”