“Fuck Ryodan. Bastard had her longer than I did.” His face darkened and all trace of playful, caveman Lor vanished, leaving the hard-planed visage of a virtual stranger.

I realized I was seeing the real Lor for the first time. Brutal, cold, every bit as much a beast as the rest of them. Bonecrusher. The word floated into my mind but I had no idea why.

“You got any fucking clue what it’s like to outlive everyone? At first you think it’s the greatest goddamn party you coulda been invited to. You fuck and feast and do every goddamn thing you want and think you got the world by the balls. Then you realize every bloody person you like hanging with is gonna die. You know how many musicians I watched go before they even hit thirty? And the women, shit. How many times can you care? How long till you start to hate? Despise. Motherfucking revile.”

His eyes bored into mine and I inhaled shallowly. A series of disjointed images flashed through my mind, and I knew he was feeding them to me. Once, Lor had been a completely different man. The worst of them. The Bonecrusher. He’d befriended Genghis Khan and run with the Mongols, he’d warred with Attila the Hun, slaughtered with Caligula, rampaged with Nero, laughed with Ivan the Terrible, been executioner for Robespierre, drank blood from the skulls of their enemies with Vlad the Impaler. For a thousand years he’d sought war after war, killing endlessly. He’d abjured his own clan, until one night they’d shown up in force, led by Ryodan, captured him and dragged him away.

“You fucks’d call it an intervention,” he said with cold, dead eyes.

“You loved Jo,” I whispered.

“Nope,” he said succinctly. “But the woman made me sorta start to feel like maybe I would put up with that shit again, watch her grow old, die, deal with it. And now she’s fucking gone.”

Of all the people I could have killed, it had to be Jo. “Why are you telling me this?”

“She’s already been forgotten. So much going on, nobody’s even talking about her anymore. By the time we got back, she’d been dead for over a month. I just heard. The scraps of her body got dumped in a grave. Gonna go dig ’em up, sniff out the Unseelie that did it. Torture that fuck to death a hundred different ways.”

A chill went up my spine. “You could do that? Smell who killed her from her remains?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s easy shit. I dropped by to let you know. Seeing as you’re Fae queen and all, letting you know there’s gonna be a fuck lot of Unseelie dying tonight. Not just the one that did it. I’m gonna take down the whole caste, every goddamn last one.”

I swallowed. “And you came for my blessing?”

He got to his feet and stalked for the door, tossing over his shoulder, “Nope. Telling ya to stay the fuck outta my way tonight. I’ll take your ass down, too, if you get in it.”

The door banged shut behind him.

I sat unmoving for a moment, allowing myself to wallow in shame and grief and regret and pain, meeting it measure for measure.

Then I stepped away from crushing emotion and played out scenarios, isolating the likely one: Lor finds Jo’s remains, smells that I killed her, kills me, the song can never be sung, the Earth gets destroyed.

All because I killed Jo.

Barrons had once killed a Fae princess. No doubt Lor could kill a queen. Especially a new, young one.

He was going to have to wait to kill me until after we saved the world.

It occurred to me, as I pulled out my cellphone, that my decision might seem every bit as cold and ruthless to the casual observer as the things Barrons and Ryodan often did. Covering my ass. Deceitful, even.

My fingers flew over the letters:

Lor’s on his way to dig up Jo’s grave to sniff out the identity of her killer. He’s the Bonecrusher again.

The reply from Barrons was instantaneous:

I’ll take care of it.

JADA

I dropped out of the slipstream and blasted in the door of the physics building, shoving damp hair from my face, aware that I looked the same way I felt—not in control—but there wasn’t enough time to do everything I wanted, and something had to give. Since it took forever to dry and straighten my hair, I’d often skipped showers for days, but I’d had to take one today and wasn’t in the mood to waste time, so my hair was a mass of tangled curls just like the old days, minus slippery guts tucked into a few. Mac becoming the Fae queen had put a temporary courtesy-damper on my killing sprees. All my emotions were on the surface, and I couldn’t kill anything. It was a recipe for disaster.

When I’d left Dancer earlier, telling him I was going to the abbey, I was sidetracked by Mac’s call and ended up spending the day with Christian, getting drenched then muddy. Although he was able to move the earth out from beneath the black holes, the one at Chester’s was especially challenging, as close as it hung to the ground. He’d had to gently loosen a half inch of compacted soil at a time, without disturbing it so much the hole sucked it up. I’d alternated between seeping water beneath the sphere with a hose to keep the ground wet and sprawling on my stomach using a rake I’d modified with a super long handle, to delicately ease the loosened mud free.

Being so close to the hole had been intensely disconcerting. I didn’t hear music coming from it like Mac, but I’d been acutely aware of instant death hovering just above my shoulders the entire time. I’d plastered my hair with mud to weigh it down and flattened myself pancake thin to the ground, but it wasn’t as easy as it used to be at fourteen. Boobs were sometimes a serious pain in the ass.