Above my head bony needles clack away. I hear the wet slap of intestines against the wall as they’re drawn up the side. I should be terrified. I should be running for my life so she doesn’t do to me what she did to them. Should I hide their bodies so Mac won’t find them and figure out what I did?

“Come, lass. We have to get out of here while she’s busy. The Hag gets obsessed with her knitting but she’ll be done soon,” Christian says.

My legs are made of cement and I have concrete blocks for feet. I just keep looking from Barrons and Ryodan to the bookstore and back. First Alina. Now Barrons. There isn’t going to be any place on the face of this planet Mac won’t hunt me down when she finds out what happened here tonight.

I look at Ryodan. How can he be dead? Who’s going to run Chester’s? Who’s going to keep the loser Fae and humans in line? With both Barrons and Ryodan gone, is there any safe place in Dublin? Will BB&B and Chester’s get abandoned?

A hand closes on my shoulder and I just about jump out of my skin.

“We’ve got to get out of here, Dani. She’s finishing up.”

I shake him off violently. “Don’t you ever touch me again, Christian MacKeltar!”

He exhales sharp and sudden like I punched him in the gut. “You don’t mean that.”

“Try me.” I fist my hand around the hilt of my sword.

“I’m the one that gave it back to you, lass. I’m the one that watches out for you.”

“You’re the one that took me somewhere I didn’t know was as dangerous as it was. Folks got killed because of it. Did you at least manage to bring out the books you found?”

“I had other things on my mind. You were in danger.”

It was all for nothing. The books got dropped, forgotten. I look at the wall. Sure, I could go back in, but I can’t read any of the stuff in the library, so what’s the point? And who knows what else I might set free by opening anything else in there?

I look up. Blood drips down the side of the building. As the gruesome Hag knits away, she plucks a small bone from the mess of entrails and organs and tucks it into her corset, taking a moment to rearrange her obscenely human-looking breasts. Then she stops abruptly and looks down at me as if she’s suddenly realized there’s more prey in the alley and it’s watching her. After a moment she dismisses me and returns to her stitching, but I feel … marked somehow. Like she filed me away in her Unseelie-insect brain.

“How do I kill her? Will my sword work?”

“Might. But you’d never get close enough. Her needles are longer than your sword. She’d have your guts in her dress before you even managed to swing it.”

“You said she gets obsessed while she’s knitting.”

“Not that obsessed.”

The ambience in the back alley changes abruptly and it takes me a minute to figure out why. A light just came on in the back of BB&B and is spilling out the window, across the bloodstained snow.

I know what that means. Mac’s moving around inside, looking for Barrons. I imagine it won’t be long before she looks out back to see if his car’s out there.

If Mac walked out that door and tried to kill me right now, I’m not sure how well I’d fight.

I take one last look at Barrons and Ryodan. I have to make this right somehow. I have to balance the scales and there’s a lot weighing in against me.

“Come near me again and I’ll kill you,” I say, soft like Ryodan used to talk.

I freeze-frame into the night.

THIRTY-TWO

“If I stay lucky then my tongue will stay tied”

I spend the next two days slapping up terse Dani Dailies that describe the Crimson Hag and her M.O., hunting for Dancer, collecting the rest of the ziplocks I need from the other iced scenes (except for the club beneath Chester’s, which I’m in no hurry to go near), and packing my backpack full of samples. They’re some of the most miserable days of my life. I go up and down like a fecking psychotic elevator being controlled by some fecking psychotic little kid, punching random floor buttons. One second I’m swaggering, the next I’m drooping.

One minute I’m elated because I never have to go to work again. My life is my own. Jo can quit the subclub. She’ll stop wearing sparkly stuff between her boobs and boinking Ryodan. The next minute I remember that if Ryodan’s remaining men learn that I played even one tiny little part in their boss’s death, I’m deader than every doornail in Dublin. On top of that, the Crimson Hag is loose, the Hoar Frost King is still out there, Dublin is slowly turning into Ant-fecking-arctica, Christian and me are on the outs, and now Mac has double the reasons to kill me, assuming she knows.