“It’s too late,” Lara whispered. “I hear them.”

Fear so potent it became fury filled Kelly’s eyes. She pushed Dafydd off her and caught his shirt in both fists. “Lara told me everything about you. You’ve been here a hundred years. What do you think happens if the cops find you, Dafydd ap Caerwyn? What do you think happens?”

“I die,” he said in a remarkably clear voice. “If I’m lucky, I die quickly.”

Lara let go a low cry of dismay, but Kelly snapped a nod, then pointed toward voices and lights that were now coming close. “You have about fifteen seconds, and that glamour trick you do is going to have to hide all of us. Do it. Do it now.”

“He can’t! Kelly, he’ll—”

“Die?” Kelly shouted. “Maybe, but if he doesn’t try we’re all going to jail and he’s going to be the most exciting lab rat anybody’s ever seen! Lara, you know I’m right, we can’t be found here!”

Dafydd whispered, “She’s right,” and wrapped them all in magic.

The world went wrong.

The double vision of Dafydd’s glamour, worked on himself, had nothing on the way the parking garage folded in on itself as magic swept over them. The air turned red and twisted around, smearing the garage’s contents into a shattering landscape. The usual unending song of truth became knife stabs of piercing noise, short and sharp. Even Dickon and Kelly were horrible to look at, bleeding pieces of themselves into the concrete.

Dafydd, though, was worse. If she saw any truth at all with his magic surrounding them, it was his truth, and that was a story of agony. Power sheeted off him, weakening him with every heartbeat: in very little time, he would be unable to recover, but he would die, if necessary, to get them to safety.

“Quick,” Lara grated, and the sound made her stomach turn, distorted by the veil of falsehood Dafydd held around them. She caught his arm, supporting him as they ran for Kelly’s car.

He arched in agony as Kelly yanked the Nissan’s front door open and propelled him inside. Silent agony: whether he had the presence of mind to stay quiet, or simply hurt too much to give it voice, Lara didn’t know. She ran to the driver’s side, climbing into the backseat beside a whey-faced Dickon, and Kelly took them out of the garage under cover of magic before snapping, “You can let it go.”

Dafydd jerked violently, then collapsed, and the ear-bleeding madness of the world faded. Lara whimpered, then bit her knuckles to calm herself, and reached forward to tug Dafydd’s seat belt around him. It would be foolish to let a detail so small give the police an opportunity to stop them.

“Straighten him up, too,” Kelly said in the same short tone. “Can you reach the glove compartment? There are sunglasses in there. I don’t know what to do about his ears, I don’t have a baseball cap with me.”

“Some people’s ears point,” Lara whispered. Kelly gave her a sharp look in the rearview mirror, then nodded, allowing Lara her illusion. It was true: some people’s ears did point, but not usually with the fine-tipped delicacy Dafydd’s did. She got the sunglasses out and fitted them over Dafydd’s face.

Kelly made a satisfied sound. “All right. I’m stopping at my bank to withdraw as much cash as I can before they put a lock on any of our accounts or a trace on the cards. Dickon, we’re going to have to abandon our cell phones, and thank God you thought the ten-year-old Nissan was a good bet at that car lot, Lar, because that means it hasn’t got GPS installed.”

Lara’s voice cracked. “Get rid of the cell ph—Kelly, when did you turn into an undercover sleuth? This is insane.”

Kelly scowled at her in the mirror. “We just ran away from a crime scene, Lara. One where, if we’re really, really lucky, there’s a police detective who’s only dying instead of dead. The cops are going to come together to find us, and being incredibly easy to track is a price tag of modern society. I’d get rid of the car if I knew another one I could get to, one that wasn’t associated with any of us.”

“I have one.” Dafydd sounded as though someone had taken razors to his throat, cutting his speech to a rough whisper. “Up north, in Peabody. If we can get out of Boston …”

“You’re sure?” Kelly asked sharply. “It’s not registered in your name?”

Dafydd chuckled, low raw sound. “I’ve been doing this for a hundred years, Miss Richards. I’m sure.”

“This is fucked up,” Dickon said abruptly. “Kelly, I can’t do this. Stop the car.”

“Dickon …” Lara spoke at the same time Kelly did, then bit her lip. She barely knew Kelly’s fiancé, and was all too aware of how little he’d been told over the past weeks.

“Dickon,” Kelly said again. Her knuckles were white around the steering wheel, jaw tense in the rearview mirror’s reflection as she met Dickon’s eyes there. “Please don’t. Let us just get out of town first, okay? So we can talk?”

Dickon raised his hands like he was blocking a physical assault. “We went way past talking about it already. I don’t know what the hell David is, I don’t know what the hell Lara is, but Washington’s probably dead because goddamned monsters attacked us, and I can’t handle that.”

“If you can just let David explain—!”

“Explain what? That Lara really was in some kind of fucking fairyland? That my best bud for the past five years is some kind of alien freak? I think I needed an explanation a long goddamned time ago.”

Lara put her hands over her mouth, caught Kelly’s despairing glance in the mirror, and tentatively reached for Dickon’s wrist instead. He jerked like she’d branded him, and she pulled back, ashamed. “I know you didn’t believe me, Dickon. I’m sorry. I thought pushing it would be worse until you could see it was real.”

“You should have tried making him believe you, like you did the judge today.” Kelly’s gaze danced between the road and the mirror, miserable accusation in her voice.

“No!” Dickon pulled further away. “I don’t know what the hell that was in there—”

“I’ve never tried that before today, Kel. And they all hated it. It wouldn’t have helped if I’d tried it with Dickon.”

“It sure as fuck wouldn’t have.”

Crescendos of broken crystal, pure shattered tones, slivered into Lara’s skin and burrowed deep, scores running to the bone. It wouldn’t have helped, but knowing that, even for an absolute certainty, didn’t make her feel any less as though she’d failed. She whispered “I’m sorry” and turned her face away, unready to meet Kelly’s eyes in the mirror. Traffic lurched by them, horns honking, windows rolled down, all the normal things expected on a warm city afternoon. Lara wondered how many of the rolling rooms around them encapsulated their own singular dramas, played out in solitude close enough to touch.

“Dickon, please,” Kelly whispered, and Lara saw a faint reflection in her window as the big man shook his head.

“Please what, Kel? Please let you explain? Please let you tell me why it’s okay we just left somebody to die on a greasy concrete floor? Kelly, I thought I loved you, but now I don’t think I even know you. How could you have done that?”

Lara looked back at her friend, whose eyes were wide, fixed on the road, though tears spilled down her cheeks. Her voice was distorted, struggling for calm through sobs that hiccupped her breath. “I could do it because we weren’t guilty of anything and because there was no explanation and because Reg might live if the paramedics got there in time, but there is no way they would have let David live. He’s not human—”

“And you’re okay with that?” Dickon cried out. Kelly hit the brakes instinctively, as though his shout warned of danger. A car behind them honked and she flipped them off, a burst of obscenity accompanying the gesture. Lara flinched and ducked her head, searching for something to defuse the situation, but Kelly spoke with unnerving calm.