I decide to eat the next human I see.

As I drag Cruce up the final flight of steps, my breathing grows labored. I pause at the top to catch my breath. For so long, I desired corporeal form. It was my sole focus. But like killing, my new body disappoints. Eons ago, before the bastard king trapped me beneath the abbey, I traveled galaxies the same way my prior incarnation traveled this world, luring host after host into picking me up, possessing them. I’d not found a single animate form I was able to possess that hadn’t rapidly decomposed, until MacKayla. But while she doesn’t come apart at a level of cellular cohesion, her body has its share of weaknesses. I must find a way to temporarily strengthen the bird in my hand besides eating the flesh of my children until I become fully, untouchably immortal.

Beyond the half-crumbled wall that once concealed the stairwell, I hear the crush of stone beneath shoes. Someone is near.

Abandoning Cruce’s body, I skirt debris and hoist myself up and into the demolished room beyond.

And smile.

There’s a pretty, delicate thing searching the ice-covered rubble for supplies. Perhaps pretty, delicate things, like strong, arrogant things, are more satisfying to kill. Margery was stout, dour, and dull, and died so quickly.

“Full of fun and games and slowly,” I murmur. Then I’ll eat. Or perhaps I’ll eat while she’s still alive. Perhaps living flesh better nourishes.

MacKayla never ate a human, bound by scruple, chained by morals, but it’s conceivable that human flesh, like Unseelie, may confer some power.

It’s a theory worth testing.

MacKayla knows this woman well.

“Jo,” I say, hurrying to join her. “Can I help?”

JADA

She sat in the passenger seat of the Hummer across the wide console from Barrons, ripping open a bag of stale chips she’d pilfered from a box of supplies in the back.

“Talk,” Barrons barked as he started the Hummer. “What happened to Mac? Were you there when it did?”

Jada recounted the tale, from the moment she’d seen Mac out the window of the bedroom, hurrying down the alley following what had looked like an ambulatory trash heap, calling Barrons’s name; her decision to follow; her subsequent assault by the ZEWs and waking in the warehouse; to the final moments of Mac’s decision to take a spell from the Sinsar Dubh to save them. She was about to tell him what happened once Mac had risen from the table when Barrons suddenly growled, “Mac.”

“Where?” Jada straightened instantly. “Stop the Hummer.”

“Not here. The abbey. I just felt her. She’s furious.”

“Sounds like the Book to me.” Its malevolence in the warehouse had been staggering, so palpable it seemed to suck the very oxygen from the air.

“It’s her. I haven’t been able to sense her at all for hours and suddenly she’s—bloody hell—I lost her again.”

“Is it a tattoo? Is that how you know Mac’s location?”

“You’re wondering if Ryodan can track you.”

“Yes.”

“Did he finish the tattoo?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

Jada felt a muscle begin to twitch beneath her eye, pressed a chip-salted finger to it and willed it to go still. Ryodan hadn’t told her that along with being able to track her if she phoned him—which put the ball in her court—he now had his very own Marauder’s Map of her that he could unfold and observe anytime he chose—which put the ball in his court. There was no place she could hide, not with Dancer, not snooping at Chester’s, perhaps not even in Faery. “Is it something you have to think about or do you just know where she is all the time?”

“It requires little thought.”

“You said she was furious. Does the tattoo allow you to feel what she’s feeling?”

“Certain emotion. At times.”

“How accurate and how far is the reach?” she said coolly.

“Depends.”

“On what?” she said frostily.

“Get over it. No magic is without price. You asked for it. Ryodan has no single-edged swords. Nor do you.”

“Maybe not. But at least I don’t go around—”

Barrons cut her off: “We have bigger problems than your irritation over not having absolute freedom and control. We all want that. None of us have it. One thing signifies: if you’d known, would you still have asked for the tattoo?”

Jada closed her mouth. Even knowing, yes, she would have taken his tattoo. She quickly polished off the last of the chips and ripped open a candy bar, wondering where the Nine stored their enviable supply of food—and why?—it wasn’t as if she’d ever seen one of them eat.

Barrons said, “After Mac used the spell, what happened?”

“The Sweeper and the wraiths vanished. The Book pretended to be Mac at first and said that it had sifted them backward.”

Barrons looked at her sharply. “In time?”

“That’s what it sounded like,” Jada said grimly.

“Fuck,” he said softly. “If it can manipulate time…”

“We’re in a world of shit,” she finished for him.

Barrons was silent a moment then said, “Resume. I want to know every detail, no matter how seemingly insignificant.”

Closing her eyes, Jada re-created the scene in her head and painted the picture for him with attention to details that would have impressed even Ryodan.

Half an hour from the abbey, Jada stretched and the cuff on her wrist pinched her arm. Thinking she’d slid it up too far, she unzipped the sleeve of her jacket and shoved it back to reposition the wide armband. The ruby gemstones on the gold and silver cuff glowed as if lit by tiny crimson flames. She turned it this way and that, examining it. “Bugger,” she muttered.

“What?” Barrons demanded.

The cuff she’d so easily removed many times in the past had somehow become a seamless band of metal, with no way to take it off short of hacking off her own hand. When she’d stretched, it had caught on her arm, trapping a tiny piece of her skin.

“My cuff. It’s closed. It never was before.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I took it off Cruce when I first arrived at the—ah, shit!”

“What the fuck?” Barrons snarled. He hit the brakes so hard it gave her whiplash.