Big hands bit down on my shoulders. There were two men behind me. I could feel them. Big, electric, powerful men.

“Pull that thing out,” a man growled, “we’ll take it from you and never give it back. First rule of house: This is neutral ground. Second rule of house: Break a rule, you die.”

“Get your hands off me,” I gritted.

“We have the kid. You want to see her again, get up.”

My eyes narrowed. How had they gotten Dani? “There’s no way you—”

“We’re faster.”

“Like Barrons?”

There was no answer.

Well, I’d found my eight, or at least two of them. And they had Dani. Sighing, I stood and glared up at the Gray Woman in the mirror, but she didn’t notice, too busy serving herself off her waiter’s well-muscled platter. My blood boiled. He was no longer remotely good-looking. Barrons had told me the Gray Man rarely took so much that his victims died. Apparently the Gray Woman had larger appetites. I revised my estimate: He had another ten minutes, at most.

The dreamy-eyed boy was reflected in the mirror below them. I stared. He didn’t look the same in the mirror. He was … blurred around the edges and … wrong, very wrong. I shivered, struck by a soul-deep chill. I tried to bring his reflection into focus. The harder I tried, the blurrier he became. The blurred shape cleared, gave me a sharp look. “Don’t talk to it, beautiful girl. Never talk to it.”

I gaped. “Her, you mean? The Gray Woman?”

“It.” He spat the word with such revulsion that I flinched.

I looked down from the mirror at the real thing, not the reflection, and suddenly I could breathe again. He was a boy. A handsome, dreamy-eyed boy. Not something I wanted to run screaming from. “What ‘it’?”

He stared at me blankly. “I didn’t say anything.”

“Now,” the man behind me growled impatiently. “Move.”

* * *

They escorted me up a wide chrome staircase, to the top floor of Chester’s. Behind a chrome balustrade, dark-glass walls lined the entire circumference of the upper floor, smooth, without doors or handles.

I glanced from one of my escorts to the other. They hadn’t spoken a word since they’d closed their hands around my upper arms and begun steering me through the crowd. Nor had I. I could feel what they were made of: leashed violence. Both looked to be in their early thirties, heavily muscled. The man on my left had hands that were badly scarred. They were massive men. There was something about their eyes that made me decide keeping my mouth shut until I had a better understanding of my situation was the wisest course of action.

I glanced down as we topped the open-tread stairs. The waiter was on the floor, dead. The Gray Woman was already looking around for a new toy. My hands fisted. We walked along the wall of darkened glass until an indefinable characteristic in the featureless surface must have indicated a door, because the man on my right placed his palm to the glass. A panel slid aside, revealing a large room constructed entirely of two-way glass, cornered by metal girders. You could see everything going on outside it. The perimeter of the ceiling was lined with small screens fed by countless security cameras. Here were the guts of the club. Nothing happened anywhere in Chester’s that wasn’t seen here.

“Brought her like you said, Ry.”

They pushed me inside. The panel slid closed behind me with a soft hiss. The room was dark but for the glow of LCD panels. I took a step to catch my balance. For a moment I thought I was falling, but it was an illusion created by the floor, which was also made of two-way glass. It was so dim in the room that all I could see were outlines: a desk, a few chairs, a table, and a man standing across the room, his back to me. Everything beneath the room, however, was clearly visible. It made each step feel like a leap of faith.

“Glass houses, huh, Ryodan?” The first time I’d ever called IYCGM on my cell phone, Ryodan had berated me, told me people who lived in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, implying my goals were no loftier than Barrons’. Now here he stood, surveying his world from inside one. Did he consider his own goals so pristine? I narrowed my eyes. There was another room beyond the one in which we stood, even darker. Whatever lurked in its shadows, he was watching it intently.

After a moment he said, without turning, “Why did you come, Mac?”

“Why are you feeding humans to the Unseelie?”

“There is no force at my club. Only desire. Mutual.”

“They don’t understand what they’re doing.”