“You’re off your fucking rocker!”

“You have no idea. I don’t have a rocker anymore. I don’t even have a fucking porch to put it on. And there certainly aren’t slow paddling fans or magnolia trees blossoming above aforementioned missing chair.” God, I get homesick for the South sometimes. A sunny day. A polka-dot bikini and a swimming pool. One day I’m going back to Ashford. I’ll walk around and pretend I’m a normal person. Just for a day or two. “I’ll punch you again. So move.” I crowd him with my body and force him to walk backward through my throng of Unseelie, out from behind the lovely bar I realize I’m really looking forward to tending.

It’ll feel like old times, soothe me. Ground me to the real Mac Lane again.

“I’m telling the boss, you freaky bitch!”

“You do that. Tell him the name’s Mac when you talk to him and see how well that goes over. Now get out. And stay out.”

I turn to the gentleman who’s completely unfazed by our bizarre altercation—this is Chester’s—and is currently studying his awful martini as if trying to decide what went so wrong with it, and pluck the glass from his hand. It wasn’t even the right glass.

“Smoked?”

He nods.

“Be right up.”

I pull the drain on the filthy water, rummage beneath the bar for clean towels, wash my hands, grab a chilled glass, and stir a perfectly proportioned smoked martini. I’m so used to dealing with my wraiths, I slide smoothly through them.

When he tastes it, he smiles appreciatively and the ground beneath my feet solidifies just like that. Familiar routine is balm to a fragmented soul.

I begin rearranging the liquor on my shelves the proper way, humming beneath my breath.

Inside me a book whumps closed. For the time being. Looks like I’ve learned one more way to temporarily shut it up. Poems and bartending. Who’d have thought? But Band-Aids for my disease aren’t what I’m after. I want a surgeon to perform an operation that leaves a deep incision where something nasty used to be, followed by a scar to remind me every day that it’s over and I survived.

And for that I need a half-mad king. Not getting any closer to finding the spell stuck in this place.

“Hey, Mac,” Jo says, dropping onto a stool. “What’s with all the Unseelie behind your bar?”

“Don’t ask. Just don’t even go there.”

She shrugs. “Have you seen Dani lately?”

That question has become a stake through my heart. One of these days I’m just going to snap, Yes, and I’m the jackass that chased her into the Hall of All Days, so crucify me and put me out of my misery.

I give my standard, noncommittal reply.

“How about Kat?”

“Not for a few days.”

Beneath a cap of short dark hair, shimmering with blond and auburn highlights, Jo’s delicate face is pale, her eyes red from crying. I shake my head and debate saying something about what I saw this morning.

My brain vetoes the idea. My mouth says, “I saw what you did this morning,” proving my suspicion that the road between the two is as bad as the highways around Atlanta, under eternal, hazardous construction.

“What do you mean?” she says warily.

“Ryodan nodded and you turned away. You dumped him.”

She inhales sharply and holds it a moment, then, “I suppose you think I’m crazy.”

“No,” I say. “I think you’re beautiful and smart and talented and deserve a man that can feel with something besides his dick.”

She blinks and looks surprised, and it pisses me off because she should know all of that.

“I understood from the beginning what he was, Mac,” she says tiredly. “What it was between us. But he has such … and I never felt … and I started wanting to believe even though I knew better. Began telling myself all kinds of lies. So I moved on before he did. Pride was all I had left to salvage.”

“Doesn’t make it any easier though, does it?” I say sympathetically. I feel my bartending skills blossoming: the pouring, listening, steering away from complete anesthetization with alcohol toward something that might actually help, change the person’s life, shake it up in a good way.

“I don’t think I’m strong enough to stay away from him, Mac. I’m going to quit working here. I can’t see him every day. You know what they’re like. He may not have taken anyone else up those stairs this morning, but he will. I’m going to ask Kat if I can move back to the abbey.”