I protest instantly, “You two are immune—”

“Not to the princess’s magic. Not to K’Vruck,” Barrons points out. “When the Fae royal court is reduced, someone or something will always be altered to complete it. Who’s to say we’re immune to being transformed?”

I refuse to entertain the possibility. “Speaking of the princess,” I ask Ryodan, changing the subject, “how are you controlling her?”

“How are you controlling the Sinsar Dubh,” Ryodan mocks.

“Day by day,” I say coolly. “And I’m doing just fine.”

Ryodan smiles faintly. “Welcome to war games, Mac, where the terrain never stops changing and he who adapts fastest wins.”

None of us adapt fast enough in the next moment. But then we have absolutely no warning.

The Unseelie Princess sifts in, snatches the princes’ heads, and sifts out before my brain manages to process what my eyes just saw.

“Son of a bitch,” Barrons snarls.

“Don’t make me hunt you, Princess,” Ryodan warns softly. “You’ll become my sole target, my obsession, my compulsion, my undying homicidal fantasy, the object of my every fucking thought and inclination, and the more time I have to contemplate what I’m going to do to you when I find you—”

Christ, he’s freaking even me out. I’d never want to be that to him.

A disembodied voice snaps, “As you do not intend to kill the final prince, the Compact between us is complete. We will spare no further aid to rescue one of our enemies.” A scrap of paper materializes and floats to the desk.

“You will sift us there,” Ryodan barks.

She doesn’t reply. The princess is gone.

Barrons picks up the paper. I peer around him and see that it’s a piece of a map. In the middle of a vast mountain range is a tiny red dot. I scowl. “Austria? Christian’s in freaking Austria?”

“Dreitorspitze,” Ryodan murmurs. “Of course. Near enough to Dublin to return for prey, yet difficult to reach.”

If I were in a video game, I ponder irritably, there are two powers I’d be stalking: the cuff of Cruce and the highly useful ability to sift. Austria is hours away by plane, a full day or more by car. With so many fragments of Faery floating around out there since the walls fell, no one takes a plane up anymore. Not even Barrons and his men. It’s too risky. Driving is enough of a challenge, especially if it’s rainy or foggy, but at least you can see the dangerous reality warps coming in a car and have a chance to avoid them. “So, what now? We try to find more sifters?”

“Bloody hell,” Ryodan says to Barrons, “she watched too much Bewitched as a kid.”

Barrons shoots a dry look over his shoulder at the location of my voice. “We do it the old-fashioned, tedious, human way, Ms. Lane. Drive.”

33

“Stuck in the middle with you”

MAC

Thirty-five interminable, testosterone-soaked, cranky hours later, the six of us—me, Barrons, Ryodan, Jada, and the Keltar twins—arrive in a small town at the foothills of the Dreitorspitze mountain range, just before dawn. We stop briefly to siphon more petrol on a narrow street blocked by abandoned vehicles, filling the tank and two cans in the back of the Hummer so we’ll be prepared for a fast getaway.

The past day and a half is a surreal, grim blur in my mind, and if I’m lucky it’ll stay that way. It’s one thing to know with your brain that half the world’s population is gone, and entirely another thing to see it.

As we drove through England, France, and Germany, I’d stared out at the destroyed cities and riot-torn towns, the miles and miles of Shade-stripped landscape, derelict buses and cabs, bent and twisted streetlamps, the diminished presence of wildlife. Those humans that survived have gone to ground, holed up in barricaded homes or gathered in tightly guarded apartment buildings and hotels. Gangs are rampant, their graffiti wars painted on abandoned buildings, community centers, and underpasses. The few people we encountered in the streets when we stopped to siphon gas, or in the stores we paused to loot, were heavily armed and kept a wary distance. It appears Dublin is rebounding far more quickly than most cities. In three countries, I’ve seen no sign of people working together to rebuild, like Mom’s Green-Up group.

When I was eleven, the town a few miles east of Ashford got hit hard by a tornado, twenty-three dead and hundreds of homes destroyed. Our parents took Alina and me to help with the cleanup, food and clothing donations, and rebuilding. Though some of their friends couldn’t believe they let their kids see such horrifying devastation, we’d been glad they did, happy to help, and there’d been plenty for us to do. I still remember seeing Southwest Maple Avenue for the first time after the storm, with the quaint antique shops, pizza parlor, elaborate playground, and my favorite old-fashioned ice-cream store, destroyed, reduced to a shambles of crushed, flattened buildings, twisted slides, and fallen wires, with debris everywhere. It had made me feel dizzy and disoriented.

I’ve felt that same disorientation on this drive, multiplied exponentially.

The world is no longer the same. My world, like my Dani, is a thing of the past. I understand now why Ryodan prizes adaptability. I can’t imagine how many times their world changed dramatically overnight, with civilizations rising, falling, new ones being born. Over countless millennia, the armies they allied themselves with were defeated or did the defeating, and a new world order was born, again and again.