As I splashed down a narrow cobbled alley, a flicker of movement caught my eye and I glanced up to see ZEWs huddled atop the building on both sides of the street, heavily cowled heads bent, peering down at me. I stopped walking, let my umbrella fall back and turned my face up into the rain, staring back, unafraid.

I wasn’t broken anymore. Inspect me, I willed up at them. Just try to find something lacking. Or something extra. I’m undivided, unbroken, and downright unbreakable.

As one, the flock lifted off and quickly merged into the leaden sky.

I smiled and resumed my rapid pace through the city, looking everywhere, drinking it all in.

People sat, eating and talking, behind the rain-drizzled windows of bars and restaurants that now had food to serve again. There were few Fae out and about, mostly lower-caste Seelie (taking hasty glances at me before crossing to the other side of the street), and I knew why—Fae don’t care for rain. They like things to be pretty, clean, glamorous. I also suspected many of them might be off meeting somewhere en masse, discussing me. Perhaps the Unseelie as well. That was a meeting I was going to have to locate and attend at some point. As soon as Cruce came to his senses and acknowledged that I was a wolf he didn’t want in his backyard.

I rounded a corner and nearly crashed into a cluster of people gathered in the street outside a small church, wearing bright yellow rain slickers, working outside under tents on—Oh!

I stopped and stared. A few dozen workers had erected high scaffolds around the perimeter of a large black hole and were raising a waterproof tarp on long poles up and over it, careful to keep a fair distance between the tarp and the subtle gravitational pull of the sphere.

“What are you doing?” I called.

The burly man directing their endeavors shouted to be heard over a sudden crash of thunder, “It’s the bloody rain! Falling into the holes and feeding them! The water is making them grow! We’re tarping off the largest ones first but the bloody wind keeps blowing rain in sideways!” To a man on the other side of the sphere, he shouted, “Find a way to peg the tarp to the ground so the sides don’t blow it into the—Ah, shit, Colin no! Bloody hellfire! Nooooo!”

I gasped with horror. A gust of wind had just caught the edge of the tarp that was draped on poles and scaffolding and whisked it into the sphere. Instantly, every single thing touching the tarp, poles, and scaffolding was stretched thin as spaghetti, sucked into the black hole and devoured.

I stood, staring dumbly. The sphere had taken everything connected to the sole thing that had touched it. A mere corner of the tarp—and the entire apparatus and men erecting it were gone. They hadn’t even had time to scream.

We had our answer, I thought grimly: if the sphere touched the earth, the same thing would happen. The only question was: to what degree? Perhaps it wouldn’t turn the entire earth into a spaghetti at once, only a fair portion of it, but definitely all of it in time. And who could say? These were objects that didn’t obey any laws of physics. Perhaps a fairly small black hole could simply blip the entire planet out. Blink of an eye. Everyone alive one moment—gone the next.

You have mere months, at best, the queen had said. Before we’d lost thirty-five days in the White Mansion.

In my mind, a clock began spinning at a dizzying speed.

The jarring, discordant music of the sphere grew louder, more cacophonous, and I narrowed my eyes, chilled to the bone—the hole was noticeably larger after its meal. I frowned. Something else about it had changed. The outer two feet or so of the black hole was…whirling, as if the whole thing was encased in a perimeter gyroscope or small dark rim-tornado.

And the bottom of it was whirling barely two feet from the ground.

A mere twenty-four inches was all that stood between us and extinction. We needed to start removing the street from beneath it. Tunnel up from deep in the ground.

Oh, yes, we had a problem. Hundreds of them. What was going on in other countries? Was it raining there, too? Snowing? How close to the earth were their black holes? Was Ryodan keeping tabs on them all?

“Get another crew over here!” the foreman roared to four men who remained. “We’ve got to get this fucking thing covered! Bring more tarps, and mind the buggers this time!”

I had a sudden idea. I pulled out my cellphone and texted Jada.

Meet me at Chester’s ASAP. Urgent.

Abandoning my umbrella, I tucked my head against the storm and ran for Chester’s.

Amendment to my earlier assessment: a mere four inches was all that stood between us and extinction.

The black hole outside Chester’s had always been the largest, but it had grown enormously since I’d last seen it. This one, too, had that new, strange, whirling perimeter.

“What the hell happened here?” I demanded, joining Barrons and Ryodan, who were standing a careful distance away from the hole, wearing dripping, hooded black slickers.

“Early this morning a cult of those ‘See you in Faery’ fucks committed mass suicide by running into the goddamn hole,” Ryodan snarled. “Caught it on my surveillance cameras. A hundred or more raced into it like fucking lemmings off a cliff. It’s one thing if you want to die, but don’t bloody take the world with you.”

“Gee, maybe someone shouldn’t have encouraged their suicidal tendencies,” I said, appalled. “Perhaps if you hadn’t pandered to their delusions in your club—”

“Don’t even start with me.” Ryodan began to stalk menacingly toward me.

Barrons blocked him instantly. “Never. Threaten. Mac.”

Ryodan said coolly, “I wasn’t. I was merely moving toward her.”

“In a stalking manner,” Barrons said tightly.

“For fuck’s sake, it was a nonthreatening stalk. You know I’d never harm her.”

He wouldn’t? Hmmm. Good to know.

Barrons growled, “My brain fails to distinguish nuances of stalking where Mac is concerned. A stalk is a stalk. All must be terminated. Don’t fuck with me.”

Ryodan growled back, “Got it. Get over it. We have bigger problems. Besides, she doesn’t need protecting anymore.”

“The one who bears your mark doesn’t need it either. Doesn’t stop you from feeling the burn, does it?”

Ryodan had branded Dani. “Just how much do you feel from those tattoos?” I asked.