I begin to dress.

Last night my first cousin was a better leader than I.

Because I don’t know my world.

The time has come to change that.

The drive to Dublin is long and silent. There are no longer any radio stations to listen to and I don’t carry a phone or iPod.

The day was arduous, with Margery presiding over the abbey as if she were in charge, riding the wave of adulation for her lastminute save, peppering her salted commentary on my many failings with inflammatory phrases calculated to incite the girls and make them feel as if I am restricting them as Rowena did. I watch her and think: Am I to take less than three hundred children, young girls, and aging women to war? Later, I tell her. We must fight smart and hard, not fearlessly.

Smart and hard would have left us homeless, she retorted. Fearless is why the abbey stands today.

On that score she is correct, but here, between us and for the fate of my girls, is a deeper problem. She does not care. In order to gain control, Margery would lead the sidhe-seers to their deaths, because for her, leadership is not about their well-being, only hers. Ironically, her very self-engrossment makes her charismatic where I am not. On my way into the city I ponder the need for charm in my management of the girls. It is clear that a decision looms: I must either abdicate leadership or change in more ways than I am certain I can survive.

I arrive at Chester’s just after ten, stunned to find a line spanning three demolished city blocks. I had no idea so many young people were alive in Dublin or that I might find them lined up as if it were a common Tuesday night, as if this were the new Temple Bar. Do they not know the world is infected and dying? Do they not feel the pounding hooves of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding? One has been unhorsed for now, although he smiled seductively at me from my divan before I left. Another is being remade. Soon there will be four again.

I leave my car in an alley and walk to the end of the line, resigned to turning what will inevitably be an all-night wait into a lesson about my new world.

I have barely begun to say hellos to my new companions when a hand closes on my upper arm from behind.

“Ryodan will see you now.”

It is one of his men, tall, muscled, scarred as the rest. He escorts me to the front of the line, over protests and promises, from the flirtatious to the grotesque. As we descend into the club, I raise barriers to shield my empath heart.

Music hammers me, pounding, visceral. Emotions bite deep despite my efforts to deflect them. Such naked hunger, such anguished desire for connection and relevance! But they are going about it the wrong way. I see here the very definition of insanity: attending Chester’s, looking for love. Why not go to the desert, expecting to find water?

They would fare better to loot a hardware store and hope to meet another looter in the process; at least they’d know he was a responsible, capable man intent on rebuilding something. Or pilfer a library! Any man who reads is a fine one. Find a prayer group; they’ve sprung up all over the city.

On the surface, each person we pass seems happier than the next, but I feel it all: pain, insecurity, isolation, and fear. Most of them have no idea how they will survive past this night. Some have lost so many loved ones they no longer care. They live in isolated pockets of abandoned houses and buildings with no televisions and no way to keep up on the threats in the world, which are constantly evolving. Their prime directive is simple: to not sleep alone tonight. These are people who only recently could find out anything they wanted to know at the mere touch of a screen. Now, stripped of their outer hulls, defenses breached, they are adrift and listing badly.

And I cannot help but wonder …

Could I reach them? Could I somehow gather them into a single place and shape them for a purpose? I feel light-headed at the thought. They are not sidhe-seers … but they are young and strong, and impressionable.

A woman dances, her head back in mock ecstasy, smiling, surrounded by men and Unseelie. I get a flash of her heart as we pass and know that she believes a man will never love her unless she always makes him feel good. She has relinquished her right to be a person with needs and desires, and become a receptacle for filling the needs of a lover. If she is bright as a butterfly and sexual as a lioness in mating season, she will be cherished.

“That is not love,” I say as we pass. “That is a bargain. You should charge for it. You should get something in return.”

When I was young, I began ranking people by a number system: one to ten—how broken are they? She is a seven. Her heart could be healed but it would take an intensely committed man and much time. Few are so lucky. Fewer still are soul mates like me and my Sean.