I wonder if my wings will get as big as Cruce’s. I wonder what it would feel like to fly the night sky with him and the other two. I see a vision in my head sometimes of the four of us, swooping down over the city, black wings beating air, filling the sky, owning the world. I can hear the sound we make as the four of us chime deep in our bodies. There’s a special, bloodcurdling song the Unseelie princes sing, sometimes it plays in my head while I sleep. The call to the Wild Hunt burns in my blood.

I back up to the corner of a small brick building on the roof that houses heat pumps, lean against it and drag my back from side to side across the edge, scratching, watching as they move toward a metal door in the ground.

He catches up with her and they walk together again.

She glides through the night. He punches into it, a boxing glove with razor blades for knuckles. When she passes, the world is a better place. He leaves bloody footprints in a graveyard of bones.

He lifts the door, light blazes up from a hole in the ground, and she descends, my angel into a sordid hell.

He squats at the edge and watches her go and, for a split second, I see an unguarded expression on his face.

It chills even a creature as cold as me.

I know that look. I’ve seen it on my own face.

Then the son of a bitch looks up at me and, this time, there’s no question in my mind that he sees me. He looks straight at me and inclines his head with a mocking smile. I return it coolly. My nod says, “Yes, yes, I see you, too. Be very careful.”

I can’t decide if what he just let me see was real—or another of his games. They don’t call him the master of manipulation for nothing. Barrons breaks heads. Ryodan turns them inside out. Barrons fucks you up. Ryodan makes you fuck yourself up. He pushes buttons and rearranges things according to his own private, coolly sociopathic plan.

I liked it better when I thought he was going to kill her.

I stop scratching.

I want those wings. They’ll make the fight that’s coming easier.

He’s a walking dead man.

If he wasn’t serious about what he just showed me, and he’s gaming me, he gamed the wrong Unseelie prince. I’ll kill him long before he gets around to killing her. I know how men like him work. I’m becoming one.

If he was serious about what he just showed me, he showed it to the wrong Unseelie prince. Because what he showed me is that he sees the same things in her I do.

He knows she’s worth waiting for.

And when it’s time, he intends to be the one. That’s why he’s keeping her close. To those of us who live forever, a few years isn’t long to wait.

Not for something worth waiting for. Not for a once-in-a-lifetime girl.

A few years are a mere blink of an eye to men like us, for whom women crush sweetly like rotting pumpkins after Halloween. Sex isn’t easy for me anymore. I’m always holding back. Human women are breakable.

Not this one.

He sees her like I do: at seventeen, twenty, thirty. Superimposed over the fourteen-year-old, he sees the woman she’ll become.

And he’s staking his claim.

Over my. Dead. Fucking. Body.

And I can’t die.

But I know one of his kind that recently did, and I know how. I hear there’s a Hunter up there in the night sky that likes Unseelie royalty.

Soon I’ll have the wings to find him.

My superpowers come back three blocks from Chester’s. I know because I’ve been trying to tap a finger in hyperspeed on my thigh the whole way back. Finally did it. I still haven’t managed to make only my eyes move like Ryodan but I’ve been practicing and can get certain parts of my body to speed up for short amounts of time. Only problem is, the place where the part connects to my body gets a little sore, like I stressed out the muscles where the slow-mo and fast-mo parts are having a kind of what-the-feck-are-we-doing-here battle with each other.

But it’s not like I could sit in the Humvee with the dude, who would love to know sometimes I’m helpless, and practice trying to freeze-frame my whole body. If he stopped sudden, I could go shooting straight through the windshield and then I’d be all cut up for days on top of my usual bruises.

I look at him, irritated. “Why are you never bruised?” What is he? Like the exception to everything? And if so, where do I apply?

“Participating and all that bunk,” he says. In other words, I don’t get to know because I’m not in whatever his inner circle is. Fine. Don’t want to be there anyway.

“You got some kind of magic salve, dude? Because it’s only fair to share stuff like that.”