I felt a crushing sense of spatial distortion, stretching me, twisting, compressing. I was gigantic and paper-thin. I was small and round as a berry. I was inside out, my bones exposed. I was a bag of skin again.

Then the world felt suddenly much too large and horrifically skewed. The buildings below soared up at jagged, impossible angles, vanished down to pinpoints then erupted again. I watched as laws of physics were rewritten, as dimensions that were not meant to coexist crashed into each other and vied for dominance, contested for space to fill. I watched as the fabric of existence was ripped apart, and sewn back together again, aligned on diametrically opposing principles.

The universe screeched in protest as barriers collapsed, and realms collided; then the night was filled with another kind of screeching and I scrambled back, melting into the shadows, afraid of the shadows, but more afraid to turn my lights on, because the second of my questions was being answered: No, the Unseelie had not yet been freed from their prison. They were coming now, galloping down on a dark wind blowing from the horizon that had substance, the stuff of nightmares. Led by Death, Pestilence, Famine, and War?

They came.

I watched them come.

The ones who have no names, the abominations, those who are flawed yet live, those who hunger yet can never be sated, those who hate eternally, who need beyond bearing with their twisted limbs and psychopathic dreams, those who know but one joy: the hunt, the kill, the nectar of dust and ashes.

They soared over my head, high above the city, a vast, dark wave that stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, obliterating the sky, shrieking, howling, trumpeting their victory, free, free, free for the first time in nearly a million years! Free in a world warmed by sun, populated by billions of strong hearts beating, exploding with life, bursting with sex and drugs and music and glories untold that had been forbidden to them forever.

They came, the Wild Hunt, the winged ones, carrying their brethren in beaks and claws and other things that defied description, streaming from their icy hell, icing the world a slippery shining silvery frost in their wake.

I retreated into the belfry, my breath crystallizing on the bitterly cold air.

Then I retreated even farther, slinking to the lower platform, where I crept to the broom closet, pushed my way in between mops and pails, and shut the door.

Fingers numbed by cold, I shredded my T-shirt in the wan glow of one Click-It, stuffed pieces of it into every potentially telltale nook and cranny, then clicked myself on from head to toe until I filled the tiny room with light.

Heart pounding, eyes wide with terror, I backed into a corner, drew my knees to my chin, laid my spear harness on the floor beside me, and began the long vigil to Dawn.

PART THREE

Dawn

“Turned out I was wrong.
It wasn’t the dark I should have been afraid of, at all.”

—Mac’s journal

NINETEEN

It was the second longest night of my life. The longest is yet to come.

I passed the time culling my memory for good ones, reliving them in vivid detail: those two years when Alina and I were in high school together; the trip we’d made as a family to Tybee Island, the guy I’d met there, who gave me my first real kiss, out in the waves where my parents couldn’t see us; my graduation party; Alina’s farewell bash before she’d left for Ireland.

Silence came long before dawn.

It was absolute; the hours from five to seven were so unearthly quiet I was afraid some cosmic calamity had befallen my closet; that a Fae realm had been victorious in the battle for the right to exist at my precise latitude and longitude, and me and the mops had been relegated Elsewhere. Precisely where Elsewhere might be I had no idea, but at 7:25 A.M., the moment of sunrise, it was still so utterly silent that when I placed my hand on the doorknob, it occurred to me to wonder if I might open it onto the vacuum of Space.

It would certainly simplify things.

I would be dead, and no longer have to worry about what the day might bring.

If I opened the door, I had to go out there. I didn’t want to. My closet was cozy, safe, perhaps forgotten. What would I find out there? How would I get out of the city? What existed beyond Dublin’s boundaries? Had we lost parts of the world last night, in a metaphysical battle between realms? Was Ashford, Georgia, still where it was supposed to be? Was I? Where would I go? Who would I trust? In the grand scheme of things, finding the Sinsar Dubh suddenly seemed a minor issue.

I cracked open the door, glimpsed the lower platform beyond, and exhaled with relief. Distastefully, with meticulous care, I strapped my spear harness back on. Unseelie marched through my blood, posturing aggressively. It would continue to do so for days, and I would fear my spear the entire time. I eased from the closet. After a thorough look around to make sure no Shades had assumed squatting rights during the night, I clicked myself off and ascended to the belfry.