“Why have you fixated upon that bloody thing?” Cruce demanded. “It is not what you seek. The king was never able to complete the song. Everyone knows that.”

“You haven’t even listened to it,” I pointed out. “How would you know?” He’d sifted out the other night before I played it to the others.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Dancer said. “Listen.” He withdrew the music box from his backpack and handed it to me. “Or, more accurately, don’t.”

I shot him a quizzical glance, took the box, sat it on the coffee table and opened it, bracing myself.

Nothing happened. Frowning, I picked up the box, closed it and opened it again. Still nothing. I closed it, shook it firmly, and opened it again.

Not a single note. Not even a whirring of damaged gears, not that I believed the otherworldly object of power had any gears. “What did you do, drop it or something?”

“As if. When I got back to the lab and opened it to begin converting the melody again, that’s what happened. The song is gone, Mac. Apparently something decided to remove every trace of it from our world.”

I shook my head in bewilderment. What the bloody hell was going on?

Dancer continued, “It would have been an exercise in futility anyway. I knew when I finished it earlier today that it wasn’t complete. It ended abruptly in the middle of an entirely new motif that wasn’t an interpretation of any other motif in the piece.”

“Then why did you bother texting me that it was ready?”

He shrugged. “Think outside your box. Who was I to presume that wasn’t the composer’s intention? Perhaps other worlds and races prefer their music to stop in what we consider the middle. Perhaps it excites them to leave it unfinished. I take nothing for granted. You can’t, if you want to drive your brain beyond established theory. But now it appears my initial impression was correct and that’s why it didn’t work. Because we only have part of it.” He muttered, “Had. Now we don’t even have that.”

I closed my eyes and sank inward, thinking hard. Thinking about how final and odd it was that every trace of the otherworldly melody had simply vanished the moment I’d played the song all the way through to the black hole. It hadn’t disappeared each time we’d listened to part of it. Nor had it puffed out of existence the moment Dancer had listened to all of it. I found it beyond the realm of probability that there might be an unknown evil entity out there, lurking in the ether, spying on us, and the moment we got close to success had seized every note of it, along with every memo we’d made about it.

Coupling that oddity with the complete erasure of the music box as well, I found it far more likely that the song had done whatever it was supposed to do, and been programmed to clean up after itself like a self-destructing mission message successfully played by an international, high-stakes spy.

But what was it supposed to do?

An epiphany slammed into my brain and my eyes flew open. Dani was staring at me with such a penetrating gaze I was surprised it wasn’t drilling holes in my face. Our gazes collided and I knew she’d been following an identical train of thought. Her mouth dropped open and, at the same moment I exclaimed, “I think I’ve got it!” she said. “I think Mac’s got it!” We beamed at each other.

After a few moments of inner reflection I was elated to discover I did indeed contain the song. I could feel it inside me, a complex melody, thrumming with power.

Talk about your checks and balances. Apparently, the queen was the preprogrammed home for it, and once I’d listened to what we had of it, all the way through—which I’d never done until we’d played it near the sphere—it had settled into me, wiping out all trace of its presence, ensuring no one else could ever get their hands on it.

I was just about to suggest we head for the nearest black hole and see if I could figure out how to turn myself into a portable iPod when the front doorbell tinkled.

The Dreamy-Eyed Guy walked in.

I know how the world works: there’s no such thing as coincidence. If you’re seeing coincidences, check your suppositions. Somebody’s dicking with you. And it’s probably not the universe.

Each time I’d encountered him flashed through my mind, from our first meeting at Trinity College to the night he’d appeared in the catacomb beneath the abbey and melded back into the Unseelie King.

Or had he? His skin was the only one that had never dropped to the floor. At the end, the Dreamy-Eyed Guy had merely changed, absorbing the shadows that passed from the falling skins of McCabe and Liz, the news vendor, the leprechaun-like reservations clerk, and my high school gym coach. He’d stretched and expanded until he towered over us, enormous and dark as the Sinsar Dubh’s amorphous beast form. Then he’d vanished with his concubine. What was he, if not one of the king’s skins? No single human body could hold the vastness that was the Unseelie King.

“Hey, beautiful girl.”

“Hey,” I said blankly.

“See you finally stopped talking so much.”

“Might have been a bit clearer,” I groused.

“Crystal. You muddied it.”

“Come to save our world?”

“Hand of God. No fun there.”

“What do you consider fun?” I said irritably.

“Free will. Not predictable. Bites you in the ass every time.” He laughed and I shivered, feeling it roll through every cell in my body, and abruptly I was seeing, superimposed around him, a gargantuan, ancient star-sprinkled darkness that was so far beyond my comprehension I felt as tiny as a dust mote, swirling on an air current, sparkling in the sunlight.