Beside me, Jo is crying soft and pretty. It’s the only noise in the night, heck, it sounds like it’s the only noise in the whole world! Figures she even cries like a dainty cat. Me, I blubber like a snot-nosed hound with big wet, gulping sounds, not tiny sighs and mews. I stand in silence, shaking, gritting my teeth and fisting my hands, to keep from blubbering.

I retreat like I do when things are too much for me to deal with. I pretend they aren’t people under all that milky frost and ice. I refuse to let what happened touch me because grief isn’t going to save Dublin. I pretend they’re puzzle pieces. Nothing but evidence. They’re the way to keep it from happening again, if I can interpret the clues they left. Later, they’ll be folks to me again, and I’ll make some kind of memorial here.

They just wanted to get warm.

“You should have let them inside,” I say.

“Speculate why it came to this spot at this moment.” Ryodan says.

“Speculate, my ass. Dude, you’re colder than they are! And ain’t that the million-dollar question?” I can’t look at him. If he’d let them inside, they wouldn’t be dead. If I hadn’t stood there arguing about stupid stuff and spent more time talking him into letting them inside, they wouldn’t be dead. I shiver and button the top button of my coat, right up under my neck, and scrub frost from the tip off my nose. “Do our voices sound wrong to you?”

“Everything sounds wrong. This whole street feels wrong.”

“That’s because it is wrong,” Dancer says behind me. “Massively wrong.”

I turn. “Dancer!”

He gives me a faint smile but it doesn’t light up his face like usual. He looks tired, pale, and there are dark circles under his eyes. “Mega. Good to see you. I thought you were coming back.” He looks at Ryodan then me with a quizzical expression.

I slice my head once to the side and shrug. Last thing I want him to do is bring up that I told him Ryodan was dead. He reads me well, like always. Later we’ll chew over how the heck Ryodan survived a gutting. “I was coming back—”

“No, you weren’t,” Ryodan says. “You live at Chester’s now.”

“Do not.”

“I had to go to somewhere,” Dancer says, “and thought maybe you came looking for me but missed the note I left.”

I try to flash him a grin that says how happy I am to see him but it comes out wobbly.

“Me, too, Mega.”

I do grin then, because we’re always on the same wavelength.

“She lives with me,” Christian says from somewhere above us. “I’m the only one that can take care of her.”

I look up but don’t spot him. “I take care of myself. I ain’t living with nobody. Got my own digs. What are you doing up there?”

“Tracking the Hag. Trying to devise a way to trap her. She’s fast but she’s not a sifter.”

I jerk, and look around warily. That’s all we need right now. “Is she here?”

“If you brought that crazy bitch near me again.” Ryodan doesn’t finish his sentence. He doesn’t need to.

“I left her south of the city. Knitting. She’ll be busy awhile.”

There’s a sudden, flat whoosh of air and it instinctively makes me duck, hare to a hawk. I think the noise made by the winged fliers of the Wild Hunt is branded into a sidhe-seer’s subconscious. I’m dusted with black snow. “Christian, you got your wings!” They’re huge. They’re incredible. He can fly. I’m so jealous I almost can’t stand it.

He cocks his head and looks at me. I don’t see anything human left in his face at all. “Don’t say it like it’s a wonderful fucking life. You didn’t hear any bells tinkling. What you heard was the sound of a demon, not an angel, recently born. And like any other newborn, it needs colostrum.” He gives me a look that I think is supposed to be a smile. “Och, and you, sweet lass, are mother’s milk.”

All the sudden he looks like the most gorgeous, hunky dude I’ve ever seen, and I blink. He’s standing there, nearly six and a half feet of black-haired, bronze-skinned Unseelie prince with gigantic wings, terrifying iridescent eyes, and brilliant tattoos moving like a storm beneath his skin, but I’m seeing a good-looking Highlander. Sort of. This is new. This isn’t a blast of his death-by-sex Fae nature. This is a controlled …

“You’re throwing a glamour!” He hits me with a blast of eroticism that almost buckles my knees. He’s learning control, fast. Way too fast for my comfort. I reach for my sword. “Off it!”