It’s one of the bad scenarios.

The Unseelie prince spotted me.

TWENTY-TWO

“Your mind’s in disturbia, it’s like the darkness is light”

The most scared I get is the most alive I ever feel.

I should collapse into a puddle of terror but adrenaline shoves a broomstick up my spine.

If the Unseelie prince gets within a few feet of me, I’ll collapse anyway whether I’ve got a supercharged backbone or not. Nobody’s immune to Fae royalty. Nobody’s got any protection against them. The Seelie royalty keep their deadly eroticism mostly muted around humans as a courtesy. The Unseelie revel in using it on us full force. The princes have already turned hundreds of women Pri-ya. Nobody knows what to do with them. Folks can’t decide whether to lock them up or mercy-kill them. Last I heard, they were keeping them locked up in what used to be a psych ward.

My superpowers are useless against the princes. All that sex and need and hunger wipes your mind clean of everything but lust that you’re willing to die for. I saw Mac at her worst, when she was Pri-ya. She’s the only person anybody knows of that’s ever been brought back from the mentally shattered condition. It’s one thing to have your body caged. I can’t think of anything worse than losing your mind. I glance in at Jayne, desperate for my sword. He’s currently using it to hack another Unseelie to death in front of a screaming, snarling, roaring audience. Without Dancer’s diversion there’s no way I’ll make it past all those Guardians and guns. I glance at my watch. Still three and a half minutes to go!

“Hey, dude, what’s up?” I say all nonchalant-like to the Unseelie prince, while I pull the pin out of one of the grenades Dancer altered, months ago, to cause a blinding, delayed explosion. I use them as Shade-grenades, tucked into a ball of immortal flesh. While we were at his digs earlier, I stuffed my pockets with all kinds of things. I cram a candy bar in my mouth with my other hand and say, “Check this out. It came off the sword before Jayne took it. What do you think it is?”

I lob it high, straight over the dock. The prince does exactly what I was pretty sure it would do: catches it. A human would recognize what I threw, but I’m betting it won’t. Whether or not it does, its reaction isn’t at all what I expected. I figured worst-case scenario, it would pitch it over its shoulder.

The fecker tosses it right back at me!

Like an idiot, I catch it, too. I think there are two kinds of people in life: those you can throw something at that will instinctively duck and bat it away and those that will instinctively grab it. I’ve always been a grabber. I’ll take offense over defense any day. I rubberneck in freeze-frame and assess my situation: Jayne is clueless that we’re here because he can’t hear us over the racket the caged monsters are making. The grenade in my hand is going to explode in five, four, three—

“No, you take it,” I say, and lob it high, right back at the prince.

He catches it, closes a hand around it, and I see a flash of light in his fist. Then he opens his hand and black dust falls to the ground. If I could make out its expression, it might have just given me a total smirk.

Well, feck me. What is it made of? Galvanized steel?

Suddenly I know where the second prince is because the temperature in the space behind me just dropped forty or so degrees. The hairs on the back of my neck frost and I shiver.

I lunge into reverse freeze-frame but it blocks me and I slam back into its icy, powerful body.

Feck feck feck! I slam it into forward. It’s there before me. I twist and duck but crash into it sideways. We do this whiz/block thing about ten more times, with me cramming candy bars in my mouth. We’re moving like an orchestrated dance. It seems to read my body’s smallest cues, anticipate my moves. The thing is wicked fast! All I can make out is a tangle of long black hair and the brilliant flash of kaleidoscopic tattoos rushing beneath its dark skin.

I drop low and roll past it, then spring up to flee, but it grabs me from behind and yanks me back into it. I can’t stop shivering. I have to get away. It makes a sound against my ear that I heard a lot of Ryodan’s men making on level four when they were all having sex, low and rough and strained. I hear myself making a noise I didn’t even know I knew how to make.

I turn into a Dani-grenade, fighting with all I’ve got. It ain’t happening to me like this!

I punch, I kick, I bite. It doesn’t fight back. It bands its arms around me from behind and keeps me pulled back hard against its body, waiting for my fury to turn into something else.

And it does.