After lunch we sat in the dark blue parlor that sported wing-backed chairs, a lovely chandelier, tall windows, and white wainscoting, gathered near a softly hissing gas fire as I filled them in on why I’d been gone so long (omitting a LOT). When I told them how I’d defeated the Sinsar Dubh and left it trapped in the boudoir, my daddy’s eyes had gleamed with pride. “That’s my girl,” he told me fiercely. “I knew you wouldn’t doom the world.”

I’d glowed quietly. My daddy’s approval was welcome salve to the injury of the many sins I’d committed in the process. When I told them I was, also, however, the Faery queen and already the castes were coming to me with petitions, my mom was the one who surprised me the most.

“I can’t think of anyone better to lead them,” she said. “That nice Mr. Ryodan told us some of what you’ve been through in the past year. I don’t think there’s anything you couldn’t handle now.”

I blinked. Wow. Rainey Lane had become downright adaptable. Then again, I shouldn’t be surprised—like mother like daughter. I’d love to know what Ryodan had told her. Surely not that I’d been raped, almost killed multiple times, and was a killer. I made a mental note to dig further into that, if the opportunity presented itself. I had a hard time picturing him talking favorably about me but it was clear he presented a very different picture of himself to “normal” people than he did to me.

Daddy said, “Does that mean you know the song that can save the planet and we aren’t going off world? Good grief, I just said off world.” He laughed and rubbed his hands together briskly. “I have to admit, I find the notion quite intriguing. I’ve always had a bit of wanderlust and no time to indulge it.” He told me Ryodan had the Lanes in the first wave of colonists, packed and ready to leave at a moment’s notice.

Sighing, I shook my head. “It means I’m the one that can supposedly sing or wield it, whatever that means, but no, we’ve not yet figured out what it is. Dancer’s working on it right now.” I filled them in on the music box and the strange song it contained that I heard so differently than everyone else.

Alina startled me by saying, “Mac, I hear music when I stand near one of the black holes. Do you hear it, too?”

I nodded.

She said, “It’s awful. It makes me feel like I’m coming apart at the seams or something. It makes me feel nearly as sick to my stomach as the Sinsar Dubh did.”

“That’s exactly how it makes me feel!” My sister and I shared yet another unusual sidhe-seer talent. “Do you hear the songs of the various castes as well?” I made a mental note to take Alina to listen to the music box, wondering if she would hear it the same way I did.

She nodded. “Each caste has a unique melody. The Seelie songs are harmonious, beautiful, but the Unseelie music is jarring and discordant. Their songs feel…incomplete somehow, like something’s missing and if only it was there, the music might be lovely.”

“Exactly! Wow, the O’Connor girls really got the sidhe-seer gifts, didn’t we?” And those gifts needed to be passed on. Alina needed to have babies. A lot of them, as I highly doubted children were in store for me. Although we’d never discussed it, I didn’t think they were an option with Barrons. We’d never used protection and he wasn’t a reckless man. I couldn’t see him fathering a child casually.

“How odd does it feel,” Alina asked me, “to be charged with leading the very race we were bred to kill?” She frowned. “I guess that means I shouldn’t slay Fae anymore, eh? This is going to be quite an adjustment.”

Back when I’d first come to Ireland, I often imagined how it might have been—had my sister survived—to fight back-to-back with her, two powerful, nulling sidhe-seers killing Fae by the thousands. I’d known it would never happen because she was dead. Now it would never happen for a totally different reason. My life hadn’t merely changed, it’d done a complete one-eighty.

“It’s an adjustment, and yes, it would probably be a good thing if you stopped killing them,” I said dryly. How complex things were becoming. The queen’s sister killing Fae would definitely not go over well with my race.

When my phone vibrated, I extracted it from my pocket and glanced down.

Meet at Chester’s. We have a problem.

It was Barrons. “I have to go,” I said, dismayed. I’d hoped to stay much longer, perhaps even spend the night. Alina and I had so much to catch up on! I wanted to know everything that had happened to her before she’d—well, whatever had happened. I wanted to hug her endlessly, tell her how much I loved her, laugh with her, go somewhere together. Enjoy a slice of normalcy while we could.

She and I made plans to meet later tonight at Temple Bar, where we were—by God, come hell or high water—going to drink Coronas with lime (and piss off every Irishman in the bar because who would choose piss-water over a dark, robust Guinness?) and talk until we ran out of things to say (which had never happened and never would), then go back home, fall asleep in the same bed, and wake up in the morning to my mom cooking breakfast and my daddy reading Ryodan’s World News by the fire.

After exchanging repeated hugs and kisses, I slipped out into the rain and opened my umbrella, glanced up in the general direction of the sky and thanked my lucky stars for days like these.

Then followed it up with a fervent prayer that I might be on the receiving end of many, many more of them.

I hurried through the gushing, neon, and rain-slicked streets of Dublin beneath a slate sky, umbrella canted against the brisk wind-driven rain, marveling at how normal it all seemed.

Young trees sprouted rain-soaked leaves, flowers retreated into sopping buds beneath the downpour, a sodden bee buzzed wetly by to land in a window, seeking refuge in a crack in the stone sill.

There were insects in Dublin again. It was a small but momentous triumph merely to have bugs in the world after the devastation the life-sucking Shades had wrought on our city.

High on buildings, doves cooed, sheltering beneath dripping eaves. I even glimpsed a young battered tomcat disappearing behind a trash Dumpster.

Even though the human race knew it was facing potential apocalypse, life was going on all around me. I wasn’t the only one who’d gone through hell, lost people, almost been killed, and learned to adapt in the past year. The entire human race had suffered, in every city across the world. Everyone’s preconceptions had been shattered. They’d confronted immortal beings from another world, fought and scrambled to survive, faced food shortages, walked numbly through ruined cities, found new places to live, lost and mourned loved ones. Those of us left were warriors determined to make each day count and savor the small joys, because who could say what tomorrow might bring? Or, even if it would come.