The Book ducks and twists from his grasp, scrambles away, and plasters back against the wall. I try desperately to turn my eyes to the left, to see how badly I’ve injured Barrons, but the Book doesn’t cooperate. From the corner of my eye I see him move, lunge to his feet again, and heave a sigh of relief. The last time I’d driven my spear into him, he’d died.

Suddenly the many Macs go motionless and begin to chime an ear-splitting melody that is so wrong, so painful, that everyone in the office, including the Book, claps hands to ears, wincing. The hellish, crystalline symphony builds to an excruciating crescendo. I feel the horrific vibration deep in my bones.

The glass walls of the office rumble and begin to crack with the sound of thunder rolling, the floor beneath me begins to shudder, and abruptly it collapses beneath us in an explosion of glass.

Clawing air, I plunge to the dance floor below and slam into the floor hard. My body rolls, scrambles up in the midst of a tangle of humans and Seelie who trample one another in a desperate dash to escape the shower of glass.

Barrons hits the floor a dozen feet away, landing on top of a club patron brutally decapitated by a sheet of jagged falling glass. Slipping in blood, he bounds to his feet and roars, “Where the fuck did she go?”

Lor crashes into a knot of screaming women and Fade slams into a table next to him, shattering it with his weight.

“She vanished again,” Lor snarls.

“Find her,” Jada shouts from somewhere in the slipstream. “She took the spear back. We have to stop her before it’s too late!”

They’ll never find me. I’m invisible.

And the Book already has me halfway to the door.

As I’m unwillingly steered into the night, I try once again to exert control over my body. Furiously, I will my feet to stop moving. Cast away the spear. For whatever reason, having the spear makes me more dangerous. That’s reason enough to get rid of it.

Nothing happens. I can’t influence my body at all. What am I doing wrong? What’s the missing ingredient? And what didn’t Barrons tell me? Why didn’t he warn me that the Book has some deadly plan it’s trying to implement? Perhaps I could figure out some way to stop it. If I could figure out how to move.

I shake my inner head and sigh. I know why he didn’t tell me. The same reason he didn’t tell me who I killed. He didn’t want to give me more to worry about. He figured I had enough on my plate, and I do. Either that or he anticipated what I didn’t: that the Book was simply playing me again, and any information he shared with me, the Book might get, too.

And it was playing me.

How did it con me so easily? Why did I risk letting Barrons near me in the first place? I know the Sinsar Dubh is the ultimate deceiver. Why did I blithely allow Barrons to take me straight back into the middle of the people I cared about? I should have known better!

Why do I keep falling for its deceptions? And why is my belief not enough to override the Book’s beliefs? How does its force of will continue to supersede mine?

It occurs to me the answer must lie within the very definition of its nature, and mine, so I begin to tally the differences.

I’m good. It’s evil.

I’m compassionate. It’s savage.

I love. It hates.

No, I can’t even say it hates, just that it has an enormous superiority complex from which stem two mildly emotional states: rage when impeded and glee when full of itself for attaining one of its goals. It’s not capable of any true degree of—

A nonexistent lightbulb pops on in my nonexistent head. That’s it! I buy into its deceptions every time because of my emotions. Love, hope, desire, fear, doubt, confusion blind me. And it keeps winning because it has none.

How do I fight it? I’d asked Barrons.

Become it, he’d said.

I thought he’d meant I should participate to some degree in its violence and savagery, deceive it into believing I’d succumbed fully to its influence, then strike when it least expected it.

But that’s not what he’d meant at all.

He’d meant become it.

Just like it.

WE ARE DESIRE, LUST, GREED, AND THE PATH WE CHOOSE TO SUPREMACY, the Book had said as it feigned falling asleep.

The Sinsar Dubh was appetite and ambition, nothing more, capable of only vague impressions of feelings, leaving it free to coolly dissect and analyze everything around it. While I was preoccupied with my emotions, the Book had nothing in its mind at all but a hunger to figure out how to exploit me. Its path to “supremacy” was unimpeded by the slightest distraction. What an enormous advantage! And so long as I felt, it would always have that advantage, always be able to remain one step (or ten!) ahead of me, merely by keeping me in an emotional tizzy, too confused to focus fully. Emotion diluted my focus!

I snarl silently. Fucker. It used that very thing it lacked against me.

At least now I understood why the past few months had been such a wasteland of foggy confusion. It was always subtly dicking with me. Who can say what subliminal messages it fed me, whispered in my inner ear, perhaps even as I slept. I may never know to what extent it has been able to eavesdrop on me and tinker with my internal hardware, but I do know one thing: I will never be myself so long as this tick is latched into my skin.

As the Book passes the tumbled east wall of Chester’s, it spies a man and woman, walking slowly, holding hands. Invisible, they don’t even know I’m there until the Book grabs both their heads, and muttering spells, crashes their skulls together, melding their faces at the cheeks. Then it shoves them together more, joining them at the hips, ribs, thighs. They scream as they’re slowly, inexorably, fused skin-to-skin, bone-to-bone, into an awkwardly conjoined twin.