He buried both hands in his hair, scowling. “How can you ask me to postulate when I don’t even understand the primary suppositions? Bugger! Now I’m going to have to bloody well do it all over again.”

“Why? It didn’t work. That means either the sphere stripped it from your computer or there’s something going on here we don’t understand. Why re-create a failed experiment?” I said pessimistically. I’d had a good feeling about our venture, and had expected the music to do something—if not outright make the sphere vanish, maybe shrink it a bit. But when the song had played with no result, I’d grown dismal.

Dancer said impatiently, “Because that bastard”—he yanked a hand from his hair and pointed an accusing finger at the sphere—“took something from me and I want it back. That’s reason enough.”

He pushed to his feet, tucked the laptop beneath his arm, and loped off without a backward glance.

I looked at Barrons. “I feel like I did something wrong. I can’t shake the feeling this music is what we need. But that blasted ‘wield’ part of the equation is eluding me. I use the True Magic by amplifying it with my Fae tether to the planet. While we were playing the song, I did the same thing, but it had no effect. And now it’s gone. What did I do wrong?”

He extended a hand and pulled me up. “As much as I hate to say it, you need to talk to Cruce. I’ll round up the others. Meet back at the bookstore.”

“Why have a meeting? It’s not like we have new information,” I said pissily.

“Failure is always new information, and those who are willing to suffer it repeatedly make it a stepping-stone to success.”

Looking up into his steady, dark gaze, I thought about how many times Jericho Barrons had pinned his hopes on some new way to end his son’s suffering, only to meet with failure. How many millennia had he worked with quiet fortitude toward his goal? I would do no less.

“I know why Dancer wants to re-create the music,” he continued. “Inspiration frequently strikes the second or third or tenth time around. The more minds we have working on this, the better. Others can deal with the black holes. We’ll figure it out, Mac.”

He kissed me then, hard and fast.

As he disappeared down the street, I sifted back to BB&B.

Barrons’s plan was for the group of us—Dani, Dancer, me, Cruce, Christian, and Ryodan—to sequester ourselves at BB&B until we had the answer. According to him, if I was so certain the music we had was the solution, we just had to figure out how to employ it, determine exactly what “wield” meant.

After Christian and Ryodan arrived, Dani and Dancer sped in a few moments later, looking strangely subdued.

When they joined us in the rear conversation area, Dancer sat on the sofa but Dani remained standing with a clear view of the room and summoned Cruce.

He appeared instantly: nude, erect, and obviously having sex. He clothed himself instantly in a short iridescent tunic and snarled, “For fuck’s sake, what?”

Before the tension could thicken further, I said hastily, “We tried to use the song from the music box and it didn’t work. We need to know why.”

“Why have you fixated upon that bloody thing?” Cruce demanded. “It is not what you seek. The king was never able to complete the song. Everyone knows that.”

“You haven’t even listened to it,” I pointed out. “How would you know?” He’d sifted out the other night before I played it to the others.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Dancer said. “Listen.” He withdrew the music box from his backpack and handed it to me. “Or, more accurately, don’t.”

I shot him a quizzical glance, took the box, sat it on the coffee table and opened it, bracing myself.

Nothing happened. Frowning, I picked up the box, closed it and opened it again. Still nothing. I closed it, shook it firmly, and opened it again.

Not a single note. Not even a whirring of damaged gears, not that I believed the otherworldly object of power had any gears. “What did you do, drop it or something?”

“As if. When I got back to the lab and opened it to begin converting the melody again, that’s what happened. The song is gone, Mac. Apparently something decided to remove every trace of it from our world.”

I shook my head in bewilderment. What the bloody hell was going on?

Dancer continued, “It would have been an exercise in futility anyway. I knew when I finished it earlier today that it wasn’t complete. It ended abruptly in the middle of an entirely new motif that wasn’t an interpretation of any other motif in the piece.”

“Then why did you bother texting me that it was ready?”

He shrugged. “Think outside your box. Who was I to presume that wasn’t the composer’s intention? Perhaps other worlds and races prefer their music to stop in what we consider the middle. Perhaps it excites them to leave it unfinished. I take nothing for granted. You can’t, if you want to drive your brain beyond established theory. But now it appears my initial impression was correct and that’s why it didn’t work. Because we only have part of it.” He muttered, “Had. Now we don’t even have that.”

I closed my eyes and sank inward, thinking hard. Thinking about how final and odd it was that every trace of the otherworldly melody had simply vanished the moment I’d played the song all the way through to the black hole. It hadn’t disappeared each time we’d listened to part of it. Nor had it puffed out of existence the moment Dancer had listened to all of it. I found it beyond the realm of probability that there might be an unknown evil entity out there, lurking in the ether, spying on us, and the moment we got close to success had seized every note of it, along with every memo we’d made about it.

Coupling that oddity with the complete erasure of the music box as well, I found it far more likely that the song had done whatever it was supposed to do, and been programmed to clean up after itself like a self-destructing mission message successfully played by an international, high-stakes spy.

But what was it supposed to do?

An epiphany slammed into my brain and my eyes flew open. Dani was staring at me with such a penetrating gaze I was surprised it wasn’t drilling holes in my face. Our gazes collided and I knew she’d been following an identical train of thought. Her mouth dropped open and, at the same moment I exclaimed, “I think I’ve got it!” she said. “I think Mac’s got it!” We beamed at each other.