He’d broken into her apartment while she was leaving a message for me. She’d been afraid he’d come to kill her. But although they’d fought heatedly, he’d merely stormed out, telling her she needed to pull her head out of her ass and take a good hard look at the world and decide what she wanted. He’d be waiting for her.

Hours later Dani had arrived, telling her that Rowena wanted to meet with her. Numbly, Alina followed.

I knew the rest of the story.

But there was one thing she told me that I hadn’t known.

The young sidhe-seer who’d led her to that alley that day to die had ended up crying as hard as Alina. She’d shaken violently, like she was trying to throw off some kind of physical compulsion. She gnashed her teeth, vomited until there was nothing left but bile, torn at her hair and finally screamed at the end, as if it were she who lay in the alley, dying.

At that point I’d begun pounding tequila shots, trying to numb my heart and make it through the night. Until I could hug Dani and tell her how much I loved her and that none of it had been her fault.

I’d wanted to go find her as soon as I’d awakened this morning, but I forced myself to postpone it until I’d sorted through at least a few hundred files. More even than I wanted to show Dani my love and support right now, I wanted to ensure she had a long future of it.

So, I sat on the sofa in BB&B, with a throbbing head, where I’d been sitting for the past four and a half hours, staring into space, inundated by minutiae and feeling utterly inadequate to the task at hand.

The only thing I’d managed to learn about the song so far was that it had come from a completely different source than the True Magic. The Fae had no idea who’d given it to them or why. It had been gifted with a single imperative: use it only when you must and remember there is always a price.

The second part of that imperative made me uneasy. What was the price?

My imagination ran wild. Would it kill whoever sang it? If we discovered the song, would I die using it?

The rest of what I’d absorbed were nothing but vague myths and legends, some claiming the song was divine, the beginning of life as we knew it, that it had incited the “Big Bang.” Others claimed it came from a race even more technologically advanced than the Tuatha De Danann who had evolved to a higher state of being and passed off the song as a gift to a race they’d viewed as having potential.

Each myth, however, shared the common contention that it called due a price. Several seemed to imply that if the race “wielding it” (there was that damn word again) hadn’t done anything wrong, the price would not be high.

“Wrong” was an exceedingly vague word. I’d done many wrong things. Likewise, “high” was a highly nebulous degree, relative to the person it affected.

My phone vibrated with a new message from Dancer.

Done. Ready to try it. Meet here or there?

BB&B, I texted back.

I’d written several long letters a few months back: one for my parents, one for Barrons, one for Dani. That was before Alina came back, or I’d’ve written one for her, too.

They were upstairs in my bedroom, tucked between two of my favorite books, partially visible. I knew if I died, either my mom and dad would come look through my things or Barrons would make sure it got to them.

I texted him now.

Meet me and Dancer at BB&B. He finished inverting the music. It’s ready to try.

If I was going to die today, I wanted Barrons’s face to be one of the last ones I saw.

I didn’t, however, want my family to watch it happen.

Barrons arrived wearing muddy jeans and a dirty black tee-shirt, looking big, rugged, and sexy as hell. I almost never see him “slumming,” and it always takes my breath away. He somehow looks even more exotic and animalistic in all the right ways in casual clothing. I knew he’d been out there, lying on his stomach, scraping mud from beneath black holes, and I loved that he didn’t hesitate to get as down and dirty as necessary to protect the things he cared about. Harshly chiseled, muddy, earthy, and anachronistically human and savage, he turned me on when he looked like this. Who was I kidding? The man always turned me on.

Fresh black and red tattoos covered most of his right arm and part of his left, and I knew that while I’d slept, he’d either been tattooing himself or he and Ryodan had been tattooing each other.

“Do you have any idea how to do this?” he asked, storming in. Then he drew up short, stopping abruptly at the edge of his priceless, restored antique rug, scowling down at his muddy boots.

I shook my head. Then smirked a little and invited the mud to vanish from his boots.

He raised his head and looked at me, returning the smirk. “Who’s Bewitched now? Did you text the others?”

“That would be me,” I said pertly. “And no. Let’s just do it, see what happens. I figured we’d try the sphere by the church. It’s the closest.”

Dancer arrived a few minutes later, carrying a laptop. “I don’t know if we need speakers or if this is good enough.”

I glanced at him sharply, startled by the dark circles beneath his eyes, and thought again of the Elixir of Life. As he handed me the laptop, I said, “If there was a Fae potion that could make you immortal, would you drink it?”

He cut me a sharp look and scowled. “Christ, does everybody know now?”

“Pretty much,” I said. “And don’t get prickly about it. We care.”

“Don’t treat me like an invalid,” he said levelly.