After a few moments I said, “It’s beautiful. It makes me feel happy.”

“Yeah,” he grinned, “the nuts and bolts of the universe tend to be that way.”

I loved that Dancer saw so much beauty in the world. We needed more people like him. Could I heal his heart? Did I have such power? Should I try to find the legendary elixir and give it to him? Would he want it? I wasn’t sure I would.

“Here’s my version of pi,” he told me. “I took it more classic rock.” He opened an MP3 and hit PLAY.

It was different, but equally uplifting.

He said, “You can do all kinds of interpretations of pi but it’s just one of many mathematical equations that convert brilliantly to song. I want to break down the music in the box and study it. It makes sense to me that since sound is vibration is frequency, and the Hoar Frost King was devouring frequency from the fabric of our world, it would be another sound/vibration/frequency that would repair it. We just have to isolate it. I can’t compute it with the information we currently have because the Hoar Frost King removed those chunks of complex frequency. While I was able to determine that it was drawn to the flatted-fifth, there were multiple frequencies occurring at each scene that got iced. The Devil’s tritone may have been only one of many frequencies he stripped from those locations. I’ve tried playing all kinds of music to the black holes repeatedly, but nothing I’ve played has had any effect.”

I smiled faintly, envisioning him sitting near a black hole with a boom box. None of what he’d said explained why I heard the symphony of my dreams coming from the box while he heard a nightmarish melody. “Any idea why you and I hear it so differently?”

He shook his head. “But let me play with it and I’ll text you when I’ve got something.”

“You’ll text me?”

He grinned. “Barrons gave me a phone loaded with numbers and said he programmed my number into yours.”

Figured. After showing him how to open the music box, I said goodbye and headed for the door. I had a lengthy list of goals to accomplish today.

But first I wanted to cross a personal one off my list.

Cellphones didn’t get reception in the Silvers. Well, with the exception of IYD, which magically bypassed natural laws. As I moved toward the door I pulled mine out to call Mom and gasped. I’d been so busy I hadn’t looked at it since returning from the Silvers.

I had fifty-two voicemail messages and over a hundred new texts. My cellphone was on mute. I turned the volume back on and glanced at my texts first. Mom, Dad, Ryodan, Alina.

Alina? I thumbed them up and a long line of them whizzed by, leaving the last one on the screen:

Sept 11, 10:43 P.M.

Oh, for crying out loud, Mac, where ARE you? Mom and Dad are LOSING it! How did you handle them when I died? They totally melt down! Okay, so maybe I’m melting down, too. WHERE ARE YOU??????

I stared blankly. It was dated yesterday. I scrolled back. There were pages and pages of texts. I finally got to the first one:

August 8, 7:30 A.M.

Hey, little Mac—breakfast is ready!

August 8, 8:00 A.M.

Sissy, where are you?????

August 8, 9:02 A.M.

Seriously, Jr., what the fuck?

August 8, 11:21 A.M.

Mac, coffee’s getting bitter and so am I. Get your freaking petunia over here. I will NOT be stood up by my baby sis. You’re pissing me off.

Tears filled my eyes. How was she still here? Even though I’d put her on my list of personal goals, I’d been going through the motions, nothing more. I’d accepted that she’d been an illusion with substance, created by the Sinsar Dubh. I’d also accepted that since it had been rendered inert, she would no longer be here.

Was it possible the Book had genuinely brought her back from the dead? And whether it was contained or not, here Alina would remain?

I shivered. On some level, I found the thought unsettling, but I couldn’t pinpoint why. It was possible I’d just seen too many monkey’s paw type movies where you had to be really careful what you wished for because there was always some terrible karmic price for interfering with Fate. And although I’d once said I didn’t believe in the bitch, I’d decided that either I did or it didn’t matter because Fate believed in me.

I scrolled through Alina’s messages again. She was living with Mom and Dad in a townhouse on the north side of the River Liffey.

After memorizing the address, I hurried out into the storm.

LANDSLIDE

* * *

I learned, much later, after I’d hunted down the man named Seamus O’Leary, that I was the reason he’d broken my mother’s heart.

From my cage, I’d watched a good mom turn into a terrible mom and, finally, a mortal danger to me.

I needed to know why.

I was ten when I realized you couldn’t yield even an ounce of your essential self for any reason. Good people didn’t turn bad overnight. It happened from the accumulation of many small compromises, sacrifices, and losses.

Small, consistent erosions turn into landslides in time.

A widower with three sons, Seamus hadn’t been averse to marrying a woman with a child of her own and blending their families.

He’d found her funny and clever, pretty and kind. A junior partner at a law firm, he’d fallen in love with the gentle, downtrodden after-hours cleaning woman.

But she was cursed by the O’Malley bloodline, and while some men learned to live with the ancient heritage of the six sidhe-seer houses, to respect and love their wife and daughter’s gifts, not all men were so inclined.