Dylan stood to my left, far from the stone block I had left him sitting on. Panicked, he rushed to my side. “Are you all right?”

I shook my head to clear it. “I saw…” I stopped. I wasn’t sure what it was.

He held my arm. “What happened? You froze and then fell forward.”

I pushed him away. “Nothing. Get away from me.”

He reached for me again. “Con, let’s go somewhere and talk…”

I didn’t answer. I made my way down the hill toward the Downtown Crossing retail district. Dylan called my name a few times but didn’t follow me. I mingled in among shoppers, envious of their obliviousness. No one paid me any attention. People went about their business, catching a store still open or rushing home late from work. They didn’t look like they knew or cared about fairy rings or Faerie queens or strange essence portals. Good for them. They didn’t know how lucky they were.

I was tired. Tired of the unknown. Tired of the suspicions. Tired of getting sucked into Guild politics. I didn’t care about the fairy ring or Maeve or Donor Elfenkonig. I just wanted my life back. But every day it seemed the more I tried to heal myself, the more things changed for the worse. My mind was damaged. My abilities gone, my memory screwed. The constant pain in my head. I didn’t know if my memories were buried or just not there at all. And now I was hearing strange whispering voices and seeing people no one else saw. It was starting to scare me. After everything that had happened, maybe I was losing it. The worst part was trying to figure out if I would know I was losing it or if I would become too demented to know the difference.

Dylan was right about one thing. I might not like the Teutonic Consortium, but that didn’t mean I was willing to hand Maeve the means to stomp all over Europe through mysterious fairy portals, even if I could. As far as I was concerned, the Seelie Court was only slightly less dangerous. Playing mind games with me by using my friends was a strange way to treat someone Maeve wanted for an ally. She had never done anything to make me think she cared about me, or even that she knew I existed. Why should I care about her? If that was how they all wanted to play, they deserved whatever Bergin Vize and Donor Elfenkonig threw at them, and it wasn’t my problem. I had my own hell to deal with.

Someone was singing in my apartment. I stood to the side as I opened the door, in case it wasn’t who I thought it was. You can never be too sure of anything in my line of work. My building had security wards everywhere. Still, it had taken a year for me not to freak out when I heard noise when there should be no noise. I had keyed the wards to allow certain people past them without setting them off. It’s a short list.

Joe sat on the counter. He was on my list because otherwise he would keep setting the wards off whenever he had an urge to eat whatever I had handy in the cabinets. With his cheeks engorged, he waved half an Oreo at me. “Milk.”

I took a shot glass out of the cabinet, poured the milk, and placed it next to him. He put the cookie down and gulped from the glass. And belched. “I can’t believe you still haven’t bought a nice flit-size glass for me.”

I crossed my arms. “I can’t believe you steal my food.”

He feigned innocence. “Steal? It’s still here. Sort of.”

Popping the remains of the Oreo in his mouth, he swigged some milk and made a face. “You don’t happen to have a bit of the whiskey to go with this?”

I pulled a pint of Jameson’s from the cabinet. He held the shot glass up as I topped it off. “This is disgusting,” I said.

He sipped and sighed. “Ah, but it reminds me of my childhood. Any mother will tell you, whiskey is the best way to wean a wee one off milk.”

“Flit mothers work it a bit differently.” I resisted the urge to use a patronizing tone. Who was I to criticize what makes sense for a flit mother?

He toasted me and finished the glass. “Ah. You are a most excellent host.”

I leaned against the back of the armchair facing the kitchen counter. “Joe, let me ask you something. You’ve killed people, right?”

He fluttered up from the counter. “Only the ones I’ve wanted dead.”

“How many?”

He swayed in the air, humming. I think someone had had a little Jameson’s before he got to my place. “I’m not sure. Enough to make the complaints annoying.”

Having a conversation with Joe was an art form. I was used to his out-of-the-blue comments, but this was a new one. I’ve known him all my life, but he sometimes forgot that I haven’t known him all his life. He makes strange references and non sequiturs that assume I know what the hell he’s talking about. “Complaints?”

He screwed up his face. “ ’Course. I’m not mind-deaf like some people.”

Not the direction I wanted the conversation to go, but with an opening like that, I had to ask. “Who complains, Joe?”

With a loop in the air, he flew to the window and did a handstand on the sill. I wasn’t impressed. He cheated by using his wings to hold steady. “The ones I’ve killed with their singing all the time. Can you see the queen naked from here?”

I joined him at the window. “No, she pulls the blinds. What singing people did you kill?”

He huffed and looked at me with concern. “Are you daft? Why would I kill singing people? You’re acting strange. Are you okay?”

Said the drunk flit.

“I’m fine, Joe. I’ve had a lot on my mind lately,” I said.

He swooped back to the kitchen for another cookie. “You think too much. Think, think, think, all the time, thinking.”

He flew back to the window. Actually, he flew into the window, banged his head, and fell on his back. “You have a crack in your ceiling,” he said.

“You made it when you flew into it last month.”

“Is that a crack?” he asked.

“Drink, drink, drink, all the time, drinking,” I said.

He rolled with laughter. Laughing myself, I went to the kitchen counter to get a beer. When I turned back to the living room, I froze. Joe lay on the floor chuckling. Above him, the view outside the window was filled with Guild security agents in flight, sweeping across the harbor. “What the hell?” I said.

Joe sat up, his laughter fading when he saw the agents. Without a word, he vanished. I grabbed my coat and ran down to the street. Sirens wailed as I hit the sidewalk. At the corner of Old Northern, at least a dozen police cars swept by. The officer at the security barricade near the bridge pointed at me. “Inside! That’s an order!” he shouted.

I didn’t argue. It wasn’t worth the delay, and he had the badge. When you’re on your own turf, you don’t need to use the main streets. I backtracked around my building to the dockside, across the rotting loading dock to the next street, and cut through an empty warehouse. Two blocks farther, and I was back on Old Northern. Several more blocks down, flashing police lights joined flares of essence-fire.

Joe popped in next to me. “It’s a fight. Dylan’s tearing it up with some gang, and Keeva’s got tin-heads with her.”

Sudden winds buffeted me from every side as I ran toward the commotion. Empty police cars clogged the street. The officers were not in the fight. They stationed themselves in secure positions on the side streets and alleys to keep pedestrians away. The dark mass in my head vibrated, like it was trying to decide whether to stab me in the brain. My essence-sensing ability kicked in on its own. A cloud of Taint filled the sky, tendrils of it dangling into a cluster of people in the street, mostly dwarves and elves, facing outward in a circle. The dwarves were shielding the elves, who were taking shots at the airborne Guild agents.

Calmly facing them, Dylan was wrapped in a dense body shield, white bolts of essence leaping from his hands. He moved forward, his fire intercepting his attacker’s shots, the two streams of essence sparking and dissipating as they tangled. What he missed warped around his shield.