“Laughter is power. One of the greatest weapons we have. It can slay dragons and it can heal. Jada doesn’t have it anymore. As long as she doesn’t, she’s more vulnerable than any of you seem to realize. Stop worrying about your idiotic ‘things’ and start worrying about her. Make her laugh, Mac. And remember how to do it yourself, while you’re at it. Nice hair, by the way.”

Then he, too, left.

—

Since we were on the first floor, I exited by the window for two reasons. One: I had no idea how long Barrons, Ryodan, and Jada might go at it, but I knew one thing for certain—I would have the spear back before the night was through.

Because I’d eaten Unseelie multiple times, if someone stabbed me with it, I might suffer the same horrific death I’d dealt to Mallucé. I hadn’t worried about that quite so much when I was invisible.

Then again, thanks to a mysterious elixir given to me by Cruce, I might survive the wound and shamble around indefinitely, rotting in various places, clumps of my badly stained hair falling out.

Yes, Barrons would definitely reclaim the spear.

I’d never have let her keep it in the first place if I had suspected for one moment Jada might turn my spear over to sidhe-seers, who not only didn’t know me but knew I harbored their ancient enemy, although they weren’t clear on the how.

I’d been willing to give it to her, no one else. That weapon was a serious liability, and like Barrons, I didn’t know or trust the new sidhe-seers, and the original ones had been conditioned with fear and manipulation for too long. It was going to take more than a few weeks for Jada to retrain them.

My second reason for slipping out via the tall casement window was because I wanted a better look at the black hole, and it would have taken me ten minutes to get there if I’d gone all the way around the inside of the abbey to the front entrance then followed the exterior wall to the rear of the abbey again.

I approached the anomaly warily, recalling what Dancer had said about gravitational pull. About fifteen feet in diameter, it hovered some three or four feet above the earth. Directly beneath it was a thick carpet of abnormally lush, tall grass, exploding with large red poppies, bobbing heavily in the breeze, shimmering with leftover droplets of rain. Many of the blossoms were as large as my hand. I inhaled deeply, the air deliciously spicy behind the sprawling stone fortress, and with my temporarily heightened senses, it was intoxicating. The night was hot and sultry as a summer noon in Georgia, the foliage lapping up the heat and humidity as if it were Unseelie-flesh-laced plant food.

I scanned the immediate area. There were no trees near the floating sphere, no jagged trunks or holes in the ground to indicate trees had once grown nearby and been sucked up and in.

Then how had the anomaly gotten so big? I couldn’t believe it had been here all this time, so large, and no one had mentioned it. More logical that it began small and grew quickly.

But what was feeding it?

I dropped onto a nearby bench some twenty feet from the ominous vortex, drew up my knees, rested my head on my arms and studied it.

When I’d been this close to the one beneath Chester’s, I was assaulted by a melody so wrong, so vile, I’d felt as if my internal cohesion was being threatened, feared I might be torn apart at the core, atoms scattered to the corners of the galaxies.

Yet tonight, gorged on Unseelie flesh, I heard nothing. My human senses might be heightened but my sidhe-seer senses were useless. If I came back in a few days when the high wore off, would it sing the same soul-rending song to me I’d heard before?

I narrowed my eyes. The poppies were trembling beneath the weight of glistening, nectar-coated insects I hadn’t noticed at first in the pale light of the moon, their soft buzzing engulfed by the nocturnal symphony of crickets and frogs and half a dozen Fae-colored fountains splashing water.

There were hundreds—no, thousands—of sticky bees swarming the poppies, Earth-born creatures gorging on Faery nectar. Flying erratically, with airborne starts and stops and stumbles, buzzing left and right with dizzying speed.

I pushed myself up and moved cautiously nearer.

Ten feet from the black hole, I became aware of a subtle change in the air. It felt…thicker…almost sticky, as if I was pressing forward into a mild, unseen paste.

If it was affecting me, with my considerable mass, how was it affecting the bees?

I took three more steps and gasped softly. Bee after bee was vanishing into the black hole above. Drunk on poppy juice, disoriented by abnormally dense air, they were being pulled directly into the spherical abyss.

How long had this been going on? Since the night they’d destroyed the HFK? How many tens of thousands of bees?

I sensed motion above and tipped back my head. Not just bees—bats. Was it messing with their echolocation? They were flying straight into it as if lured by a siren song. Was it confusing the birds, too?

“What are you doing?” A voice cut through the night behind me, and I spun around.

Two of Jada’s commando sidhe-seers stood in the moonlight, watching me with cold calculation. I’d been so lost in thought that if I heard them approach, I’d tuned it out.

“Trying to figure out why you’re letting this thing grow unchecked,” I said coolly. I didn’t like being between sidhe-seers that knew I had the Sinsar Dubh inside me and a black hole that could swallow me alive in an instant.

I eased to the left. They did, too.

I stepped farther to the left and they moved with me, keeping me pinned, black hole at my back, a mere seven or eight feet away. I could feel the light inexorable pull of it and shivered.

“Funny. We’re trying to figure out why Jada is letting you go, unchecked,” the tall blonde said icily.

“We have history,” I said. “She knows I won’t use the Book.”

“No one can resist such temptation forever,” the brunette said.

Yeah, well, that was pretty much exactly what I was worried about, but there was no way I would admit it, and certainly not to them, so I evaded. “It’s sucking in bees, bats, small animals. You’ve got to stop it from growing. Burn the ground beneath it. Get rid of the bloody flowers. I don’t know, put up a wall or something to keep the bats out.”

“We don’t answer to you,” the brunette said.

“If you answer to Jada, you know I’m off-limits. So back off.” They were moving closer, threateningly. Both were toned, athletic, draped in guns and ammo. I fervently hoped neither of them had my spear.