When he was finished, Cruce said, “Find an Unseelie who calls himself Toc.” He described him to the roach god. “Tell him Cruce is on this planet and would see the Unseelie united, see them rule. Then tell him this…” The winged prince bent low and spoke at length, and the roach god nodded and committed his instructions to his very long memory.

“Before they come,” Cruce finished, “I need you to bring the ingredients I’ve instructed you to ask Toc to prepare. With it, I will make icefire. Once I’ve finished, you will conceal it where I instruct.”

“Will I be able to carry it?”

“That is why I chose it. One drop of Toc’s blood added to each drop of icefire will cause flames to explode, which no water can extinguish. It spreads rapidly. How fare you in fire?”

The roach god smiled. He’d survived nuclear fallout. Fire was nothing to him. “Do you really believe this will work? That you’ll be free in mere days?” He licked his lips with anticipation, rustling roach against roach. Freedom. So near. He would never be controlled again. And perhaps this new ally could force the gift he sought from his prior master.

Before this great winged prince crushed the arrogant prick like a bug.

Cruce laughed softly. “Not at all. But it will topple the first of many dominos. And once they begin to fall, my freedom is assured. Go find Toc and do as I’ve told you. And remember, when you next report to Ryodan, you must henceforth omit those areas of information I detailed.”

The roach god relaxed and let his body scatter into a horde of shining, virtually indestructible insects. He dispatched several parts of himself to collect the feather that had drifted to the floor of the cavern and scuttled off with it, tugging it into the unseen crack beneath the door.

20

“Life inside the music box ain’t easy…”

I raked a hand through my hair, stared at my reflection and snorted.

The paint was still visible after multiple oil and shampoo treatments. I’d even tried a stale jar of peanut butter. I’d had no luck salvaging Barrons’s rugs either. The problem was the same with both items: employ a chemical harsh enough to remove the oil paint—destroy the wool or hair.

I have a strong desire to not be bald.

After trying for over an hour to lift the crimson from my blond, I conceded defeat. It would go away eventually, and I was in no mood to go dark again. I didn’t even like the phrase “go dark.”

I blew my hair dry the rest of the way, shrugged out of my bathrobe, and glanced around my sixth-floor bedroom for something to wear. The room was a wreck. I hadn’t cleaned it in months.

Although it had moved floors again, it had a penchant to remain on the backside of BB&B, overlooking the back alley and the garage where Barrons stored his cars, and beneath which he and I often rested and fucked and lived. When Barrons isn’t around, I can’t get to our subterranean home beneath the garage. The only access to those lower levels is through the dangerous stacked Silver in his study, and I don’t have the power to survive the many traps with which he mined the path. Once, the Book helped me navigate that deadly terrain, but my inner demon no longer offers help.

Ergo, showering upstairs. At least when my bedroom spontaneously relocates, it does so in toto, with all my belongings in it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t clean itself in the process.

I rummaged for jeans and a tee-shirt in a pile of clothes I was reasonably certain had been laundered at some point, then preloaded my spear in its holster before positioning it beneath my left arm. Given the amount of Unseelie flesh in my body, I preferred to err on the side of caution.

I’d opted for a double shoulder harness, so I could carry my 9mm PPQ with its sixteen-cartridge magazine beneath my left arm, and tucked an extra magazine in my waistband. I slid dirks into both boots and my Ruger LCP .380 crimson trace—with an eight-pound trigger so I was less likely to shoot myself in the ass—into my rear pocket. I pushed Cruce’s cuff farther up my arm so it was snug, then eased a lightweight jacket over it all, zipping it at the bottom. I pocketed two more bottles of Unseelie flesh (for emergency only!) and reached for my backpack, to eliminate the useless and outdated and then restock it with fresh supplies.

When I was invisible I hadn’t worried about any of this. Now that I was back to being hunted by most of Dublin, countless creepy wraiths, an entity called the Sweeper that wanted to “fix” me (and I didn’t think that meant neuter my female parts, although I did wonder exactly what the hell it did mean), and haunted by something that looked like my sister, I wanted all weapons all the time.

I’d left Barrons and Ryodan back in the office at Chester’s, bottles of red and black ink on the desk, needles gleaming in trays nearby. I’d never seen Ryodan sporting the same unusual tats as Barrons, but when I’d left, Barrons had been tracing exactly those outlines on Ryodan’s back.

Expecting trouble? I’d shot over my shoulder.

They’d raised their heads and given me such an identical look of You’re still here/what-the-fuck, is she asking questions again?/Christ, woman, go home for a while, that I’d wondered how I could possibly not have realized they were related long before I overheard them talking about it.

After making plans to meet later that night, I’d taken the Hunter that Barrons had summoned back to BB&B and into the funnel cloud. The man has some seriously neat tricks. The Hunters might tolerate me, even cede a degree of respect, but I’d had no luck calling one myself, staring up into the sky.

I dumped the contents of my backpack on the bed. My little pink carry iPod fell out first and I smiled. How long had it been since I listened to a few hours of happy one-hit wonders? I connected it to my dock, only to discover the battery was dead. While I waited for it to draw enough juice to boot up, I rummaged through the other items in my pack, tossing out old water bottles, stale protein bars, dead batteries from my MacHalo I’d not wanted to further litter the streets with, tucked a music box up high on one of my shelves along with a glittering bracelet with iridescent stones and a small pair of jewel-encrusted binoculars, turned to throw my spare-change set of blood-and-goo-stained clothing into what I thought was the dirty laundry pile in the corner—

Music box?

I spun back around and stared at it, nestled on my shelf, stunned. The sides were elaborate gold filigree, the lid a lustrous pearl encrusted with gems, each winking with a tiny inner flame. It squatted on ornate legs, half the size of a shoe box. More gems were embedded in the sides and each held a small swaying fire. The lid was attached with diamond-crusted hinges. There were no locks, and I somehow knew it had other ways of protecting itself.