“Consider being able to see the atomic structure of everything around you, MacKayla, past, present, and part of the future, and exist within that skein. Consider possessing awareness of infinite dimensions. Imagine being able to comprehend infinity—only a handful of your race has yet achieved such awareness. Consider seeing the possible ramifications of each minute action you might make, from your slightest exhalation upon the breeze, in all realities, but you cannot piece them together into a guaranteed finale because every living thing is in constant flux. Only in death is there stasis and even then, not absolute.”

I had a hard enough time functioning on my tiny little nearsighted human level. “So, what you’re saying in a nutshell,” I distilled, “is that for all your superiority and power, you’re no smarter or better off than we are. Perhaps worse.”

A heartbeat stretched into half a dozen. Then he smiled coolly. “Mock me if you will, MacKayla. I’ll sit at your deathbed and ask you then if you would rather be me. Where is this human fool that fancies himself master of anything?”

“1247 LaRuhe. Warehouse behind it. Huge dolmen. He brings them through there. Would you mind squashing it for me?”

“Your wish, my command.” He was gone.

I stared at the empty chaise. Had he really gone to destroy the dolmen through which the Unseelie were being brought? Would he kill the Lord Master, too? Would my vengeance be achieved so anticlimactically? And without me there as witness? I didn’t want that. “V’lane!” I shouted. But there was no reply. He was gone. And I was going to kill him if he killed my sister’s killer without me. The dark fever I’d caught that first night I’d set foot in Dublin had turned into a fever of a different kind: a bloodfever—as in I wanted blood, spilled for my sister. Spilled by my hand. That savage Mac inside me still hadn’t found an audible voice, still wasn’t speaking with my tongue, but we spoke the same language, she and I, and agreed on critical things.

We would kill my sister’s killer together.

“Junior?” said a soft, lilting voice. A voice I’d never expected to hear again.

I shuddered. It had come from my right. I stared out at the waves. I would not look. I was in Faery. Nothing could be trusted.

“Junior, come on, I’m over here,” my sister coaxed, and laughed.

I nearly doubled over from the pain of it. It was exactly Alina’s laugh: sweet, pure, full of endless summer and sunshine and the sure knowledge that her life was charmed.

I heard the slap of a palm on a volleyball. “Baby Mac, let’s play. It’s a perfect day. I brought the beer. Did you get the limes from the bar?”

My name is MacKayla Evelina Lane. Hers is Alina MacKenna Lane. I was Junior on two levels. Sometimes she’d called me Baby Mac. I used to pilfer limes from the condiment tray at The Brickyard on Saturdays. Cheap, I know. I never wanted to grow up.

Tears burned my eyes. I gulped deep breaths and forced air in and out of my lungs. I fisted my hands. I shook my head. I stared out at the sea. She was not there. I did not hear the thud of a ball hitting sand. I did not smell Beautiful perfume on the breeze.

“The sand’s perfect, Junior. It’s powder. Come on! Tommy’s coming today,” she teased. I’d had a crush on Tommy for years. He was dating one of my best friends so I pretended I couldn’t stand him, but Alina knew.

Don’t look, don’t look. There are ghosts and there are worse things than ghosts.

I looked.

Behind the volleyball net, buffeted by a gentle tropical breeze, my sister stood, smiling, waiting to play. She was wearing her favorite neon lime bikini, and her blond hair was pulled back in a bouncy ponytail through the flap of the faded Ron Juan ball cap she’d gotten in Key West on spring break two years ago.

I began to cry.

Alina looked stricken. “Mac, honey, what’s wrong?” She dropped the volleyball, ducked under the net, and hurried across the sand to me. “What is it? Did somebody hurt you? I’ll kick their frogging petunias. Tell me who. What did they do?”

My tears turned into sobs. I stared up at my sister, trembling from the violence of my grief.

She dropped to her knees next to me. “Mac, you’re killing me. Talk to me. What’s wrong?” Her arms went around me, and I was crying against her neck, lost in a cloud of peach shampoo, Beautiful perfume, Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil, and the bubble gum she’d always chewed on the beach to hide the smell of beer on her breath from Mom.

I could feel her warmth, the silkiness of her skin.

I was touching her.