Had I really helped lay the Sinsar Dubh to rest in the abbey, then watched it get absorbed by Cruce, then seen Cruce locked up?

Or had I never escaped the Book’s clutches?

That was the motherfucking question.

The worm in my apple.

Something had happened to me that night that made me begin to deeply question the nature of my reality. Being deceived so thoroughly—even if only for a finite time—made me wonder if I was still being deceived. Somedays I got by fine. Accepted that I’d made it. Saw only consistency in the world around me.

But some nights, especially those nights I dreamed the hellish song I’d been hearing lately, I wondered if something was trying to break out of my subconscious into my conscious mind that I couldn’t quite bring to the surface and it—whatever it was—existed on the opposite side of an illusion the Book had woven for me.

Plans kept me sane. Obsessively hunting the Unseelie king to get him to remove his Book had kept me focused.

Focus prevented me from stretching out on a sofa somewhere and just giving up because I couldn’t decide upon a satisfactory way to prove to myself that the reality I was living was real.

My fake mom and dad, Pieter and Isla, had seemed utterly real, too.

Now Alina.

But the Alina situation was odd.

With all kinds of wrong details. The glittering diamond on her wedding finger. Sobbing, hiding from me. Screaming if I got too close. Crying out for Darroc.

Alive.

Not.

I pressed my fingers to my temples and rubbed. “Focus, focus, focus,” I muttered. “Do not take a single illusion as a sign that everything is. That doesn’t necessarily follow. You’re in the right reality. You defeated the Sinsar Dubh. Alina is the only illusion.”

But why?

Having something inside me that was capable of weaving the convincing illusion the external Book had crafted, then having it go suddenly silent, was worse than it taking jabs at me and me snapping Poe back at it. At least our inane and bizarrely harmless spats had been something concrete I could hold on to. I’d been almost relieved when it made me kill Mick O’Leary.

Because at least then I’d been able to say: Oh, so that’s its game. I’ll just never use my spear again. I’m in my reality. This is it. I understand.

I’d told Barrons none of this. I’d hidden it from everyone.

I’d been grateful to vanish.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that even if I was in the right reality, the Book was even now spreading nooses around me everywhere, and the first misstep I made, it would jerk that rope tight.

I stared down the empty street, littered with debris and dehydrated human husks blowing like sad tumbleweeds across the cobblestones.

“Not wishing,” I growled. “I don’t want to be invisible.”

I wanted to feel like myself again. I desperately craved certainty in my soul. I was appalled to realize I’d almost given up. Withdrawing from Barrons, rarely pausing in my search for the king those weeks after I’d killed (or had I?) Rowena, not even to have sex, detaching from my parents.

But Barrons and Unseelie flesh had stirred fire in my belly again. Fire I needed.

I resolved to eat Rhino-boy and fuck constantly until I figured out this crisis of faith.

Toward that end, I needed a sifter.

Where the bloody hell was I going to find a sifting Fae?

—

“Christian,” I said, smiling. “I thought I’d find you here.”

“Mac,” he said, without lifting his eyes from the cut-crystal glass of whiskey in his hand.

I dropped down on a stool next to him at what had once been the Dreamy-Eyed Guy’s bar, then mine for a time.

The Sinatra club in Chester’s was one of the quieter ones, where human males gathered to discuss business and, on rare occasion, some freakish Unseelie took a table for a time. This subclub drew a more refined clientele, and the Fae were all about the unrefined. The more brassy, sexual, and desperate tended to catch their eye.

I gave him a once-over. Hot, sexy Highlander with strange eyes I was grateful were currently brooding into his drink, not turned on me. Something was different. He looked awfully…normal. “Where are your wings?” I asked.

“Glamour. Bloody women in this place go nuts if I show them.”

“You can sift, can’t you?”

“Aye. Why?”

“I was hoping you’d take me somewhere.”

“I’m not moving from this stool. That fuck Ryodan lied. He said he tried to bring Dageus’s body back to us but he didn’t. He doesn’t know that I know the man he brought us was from Dublin, not the gorge at all. He must have snatched a bit of plaid from our rooms upstairs and bloodied it up. Why would he give us someone else’s body, Mac?”

I rapped the counter sharply, ordering a drink. I raised my whiskey when it came as if to make a toast. “Sounds like you have a mystery. I’ve got one of my own. What do you say you help me solve mine and I’ll see what I can do about solving yours?”

He turned his head slowly and looked at me.

I dropped my gaze instantly.

He laughed softly. “That bad, Mac?”

I inhaled deeply and snatched a quick glance from beneath my lashes. I’d seen this look before, times a thousand, as I rolled in the Unseelie king’s great wings. I lowered my gaze again and steeled myself. Then looked up and straight at him, right in the eyes.

For about two seconds.

“Not bad, Christian,” I said, looking down at my drink. “Just different. Intense. Like looking up at stars. We’ll get used to it.” I paused then added, “You know I can get into more places in this nightclub than you can. I can keep an eye out. Go poking around later tonight, see if I can learn anything about your uncle.”

I had no intention of telling him. My loyalty is one hundred percent to Barrons. Period. The end. That is one of the few things I’m absolutely certain about anymore. Our bond. Our two-person religion. But I would certainly see if I could get Barrons to get Ryodan to consider letting Christian know. At some point. I knew what it felt like to lose family. I’d blamed myself a dozen different ways for all the things I hadn’t done that might have saved Alina. I could only imagine how badly Christian was blaming himself for his uncle’s death.

After a measured pause, he clinked his glass to mine. “Perhaps we can be of use to each other. You should know, lass, I’m far from a pro at it. It was easier before my stay on those cliffs.”