It was quarter to eleven by the time we arrived in Dublin. We worked our way past abandoned wrecked cars, parked near Temple Bar, and got out, MacHalos blazing, weapons in hand.

My sidhe-seer senses were picking up a tremendous number of Fae in the city. I sensed thousands of them, spread out in all directions. Why so many? The city was eerily quiet and appeared to be devoid of human life. Wouldn’t Unseelie want to be wherever the most humans were gathered? It didn’t seem as if any were left here at all.

“Are you sensing a ton of Fae, Dani?” I asked.

“Uh-huh. S’part of the reason I kept coming in. Looking for you and trying to figure out what was going on. Was kinda freaky alone, though. I think Dublin’s, like, their official headquarters or something.”

I stared into the shadows, searching the night for Shades, glancing from dark alley to darker lane.

Dani didn’t miss it. “I think most of ‘em are gone, Mac. Last time I saw one of the creepy fecks in here was more than a month ago, and it was a really small one. I think they ate their way out and just kept going. Only ones I see anymore are in the abbey with us.”

I was still keeping my MacHalo on. She made no move to take hers off, either. “Where’s the boarded-up bar you said you saw?” We’d start there. Kill everything that was Fae. Try knocking sense into any humans stupid enough to be found there. “You know what to do if we get surrounded,” I reminded her.

“Grab you and get out fast,” she said with a grin. “Don’t worry, Mac. I got your back.”

Like I said: It was one of those perfect moments. We fought for hours, racking up the kills. With each Unseelie we “exterminated,” I felt stronger, more charged, more determined to track and destroy the last one, even if it took until my dying breath.

Dani and I punched and stabbed and sliced our way down the dark Dublin streets. Drunk on our own sheer kick-ass glory, we made up a song that would one day become the anthem of sidhe-seers around the world. But we didn’t know that. We only knew that shouting it kept us pumped up, feeling invincible.

We’re taking back the night!

Let there be light.

We’re not afraid anymore.

You took what was mine

And now it’s time

For you and me to settle the score

We’re taking back the night!

“Shh!” Dani suddenly hissed.

I froze, mid-lyric and mid-stab, dying Rhino-boy stuck on my spear, tusked mouth working soundlessly.

I couldn’t hear a thing, but I don’t have heightened senses unless I’ve eaten Unseelie, and thanks but no. I’ll survive with what gifts I have.

“Pull your spear out,” she whispered.

I did, and the next thing I knew, I was being whizzed down alleys so fast and jerkily that I wanted to puke. I will never understand how Dani can stand moving like she does.

Then we were still and she was pointing. “Look up, Mac!”

I looked, and shivered. With all the Fae in the city, I’d not been able to distinguish castes. I harbored a special hatred for this one: Unseelie Hunters.

Since time immemorial, they have hunted and killed sidhe-seers. Enforcers of Fae law and punishment, mercenary to the core, they work for whoever pays them with whatever it is they want most at the moment. They flip sides constantly. They have telepathic abilities and can get inside your skull and twist you up on yourself. To make matters worse, they chill you to the bone and look like the devil himself, come for your soul.

Two enormous Hunters were circling in the sky, a few blocks from the river Liffey. Twice the size of any I’d seen in the past, they were blacker than night, with great leathery wings, forked tails, talons as long as my spear, and eyes that blazed like furnaces from hell. They were clawing air, talons forward, screaming at something in the streets the way I imagined dragons must scream, churning black ice crystals into the air with every flap of those deadly black sails.

“D’ya fecking believe it?” Dani breathed. “Are they nuts?”

She didn’t mean the Hunters. She meant whoever was down in the streets, shooting at them.

I could see holes being punched in their great wings and healing almost instantly, bullets dropping to the street below. I could hear the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic gunfire.

It was doing nothing much but pissing them off. A lot.

Whoever was doing it was going to get themselves killed!

I looked at Dani, and she nodded. “Better go save their ass,” she agreed, and reached for me.

I stepped back. “Thanks, but it’s only a few blocks. I’ll walk.”

I turned.

She grabbed my shoulder and we were there in a heartbeat. I was really going to have to loot a drugstore for Dramamine, because when she let me go again, I could only stand bent over, battling the overwhelming urge to puke on a pair of shiny black shoes.

Momentarily incapacitated was no way to arrive at the scene of potential danger. Superspeed was worse than being sifted. Sifting was smooth. Superspeed was a horse and carriage on a rutted road, at jet speeds, with no shocks.

I looked up from the shoes and blinked. For a moment, words eluded me.

“Ms. Lane. Good to know you’re alive. I’d begun to wonder.”

Turning to the uniformed troops behind him, Inspector Jayne snarled, “Fire!”

It seemed a lifetime ago that the tough-talking, burly inspector standing before me had picked me up, dragged me off to the Garda station, and interrogated me for the murder of his co-worker and brother-in-law, Inspector Patrick O’Duffy. At least half a lifetime must have passed since I’d opened his eyes to the Unseelie that had invaded Dublin by sneaking bits of their immortal flesh into his dainty sandwiches the afternoon I’d invited him to the bookstore for tea.