A man steps out.

Strong. Brilliant. Controlled.

Predator.

Unbreakable. Feck, to be so unbreakable!

He’s everything I admire plus things I can’t even begin to put into words.

I crush on Jericho Barrons violently.

My brain almost shuts down every time I see him and that’s a lot of gray matter to stupefy.

Used to be, if I couldn’t fall asleep I’d fantasize all kinds of ways I’d impress Barrons by killing monsters or saying something really smart or saving the world, and he’d see me as a grown-up woman and I’d glow just from the expression on his face, like that time I killed the Unseelie Prince in Mac’s cell and he looked at me like he really saw who I was. Most folks don’t. They fence me in with teenage rules that don’t hold me for shit, seeing how I grew up. You can kill but don’t cuss. Break any rule necessary to save the world but don’t watch porn or even think about having sex. How do they come up with this stuff — hold parental powwows for brainstorming diametrically opposed ethics? Then Ryodan began popping into my Barrons fantasies like he had some kind of business being there, and he’d look all, well … like … Ryodan, and he’d laugh and do that husky groan thing he did on level four, so I terminated that happy little exercise in somnolence.

Now, I count sheep.

Lately even those buggers look like Ryodan, with clear, cold eyes and some weird kind of hypnotic hold on me.

Fecker.

I’m beginning to think I’m going to have to figure a way to kill him, permanent-like, just to get him out of my head.

“Dani.”

I shiver. He has that effect on folks, throws off some kind of charge, supersaturates the space in his vicinity. All his dudes do, but Jericho Barrons has it in spades. I play it real cool. Shove a hand in my pocket, thumb out. Cock my hip at a jaunty angle. “Barrons.”

Time was, I planned on growing up and giving him my virginity. Or V’lane. It’s a big deal to me, the divesting of it. One of the few things I got left that’s gonna be my choice: the who, the how, the when. It’s gonna be Epic with a capital E!

But the Seelie Prince V’lane turned out to be the Unseelie Prince Cruce. And Barrons is Mac’s as much as something like him is ever anyone’s, a fact that’s never going to change, and I don’t want it to.

A piece of paper flaps on the column behind his head. I get a bad feeling and take a sec to scan it.

“Gah! Are you fecking kidding me?” How the heck did they get something printed already? Even in hyperspeed, I couldn’t have gotten a rag out this fast! But there it is, waving in the air like a great big slap in my face.

I can’t read any more. I know they’re getting ready to dis me. But my traitorous eyeballs sneak another peek and sure enough there it is!

… a certain bragging teenager that JEOPARDIZED the mission and was single-handedly responsible for getting many good, innocent people KILLED and taken CAPTIVE!

“Buh! Who is writing this drivel?” I was the hero tonight! I saved the fecking day with my winning combination of brains and skills. They even made the font size bigger on the slander about me! I know the tricks of the trade. Talk about your biased press! I feel my face getting hot and red. It pisses me off so much I’d rupture a gonad if I had one. WeCare sure as feck has them out the wazoo!

“Stop her!” Mac shouts.

I don’t stand a chance against both of them. Heck, I don’t stand a chance against Barrons by himself. He’s like Ryodan. I can’t compete on my best day.

Yet.

I fist my hands and take rapid deep breaths, clearing my head of the Wemightcarebutsureasfeckdon’ttellthetruth bull-crap. It takes me a sec to analyze possibilities and figure out how I’m getting myself out of this one. The answer is so simple it takes my breath away. I’m wired to survive on a gut level. My subconscious brought me exactly where I needed to be.

I duck past him and totally catch him off guard — or more likely he decides not to chase me for some mysterious reason, because there’s no way I can outrun Barrons, not even in freeze-frame — then can’t help myself and dart back and snatch the slanted scrap o’ crap from the column and wad it up ’cause I sure as heck ain’t letting it hang there, then I’m back behind the bookstore, hurrying to the first building on the left side of the Dark Zone.

Last time I was here was the night me and Christian searched the Unseelie King’s library, the night the words in the Boora Boora books crawled off the pages and stung me like fire ants, and I accidentally set the Crimson Hag free.

Christian. The Hag. Cripes, I got some cleanup work to do.

When he showed me the hidden portal in the wall that’s really a secret passageway into the ancient mirrors the Fae once used to travel between worlds, I’d committed the precise, unremarkable spot of bricks to memory. All weapons and escape routes — good. Not even Ryodan with his stupid contract on me can track me Fae-side. I figured if the city ever got too hot for me, I could always ditch it for a while.

It’s feeling way too hot right now.

“Dani, don’t!” Mac cries.

I leap into the brick. It’s weirdly spongelike, then so am I, then I’m standing in a large, windowless, doorless room with blank white walls and a white floor and ten enormous mirrors of varying shapes and sizes suspended in the air. They hang without visible means of support, some motionless, others twirling lazily. No surprise there. Fae stuff, animate and not, rarely give a wink and sure as heck no nod to human physics. It’s why Dancer’s so fascinated by them. Some of the mirrors have intricately carved frames, while others have thin edges of welded chain-link. A few of the looking glasses within the frames are as black as night, some milky white, and others crammed with shadows you don’t want to look at hard.

It’s a good thing I know which mirror to take — second Silver on the right plops you smack inside the infinite, a-fecking-mazing White Mansion. I been itching to explore it anyway. If they follow me through, I’ll use the labyrinthine corridors to lose them or unstopper another distraction because Rule Number One in the Mega O’Malley Handbook is and will always be: survival first, damage control second. Which is only logical. You can’t do damage control dead.

If they don’t follow me in, all I have to do is wait long enough for my superpowers to return, then come back because it’ll be a couple days, if not a couple weeks later in Dublin. When Christian and me went through last time, we lost almost a month! Time doesn’t pass the same in Fae realms. No way they’ll sit in the White Room 24/7 waiting for me. I hate losing Dublin-time that I could be using to help my city but I can’t help my city at all if I’m not alive.

Mac explodes through the wall behind me like she was shot by a cannon, slams into my back and nearly pushes me into the wrong mirror, and all I can think is what a disaster that would have been. I got no clue where the other ones go. Might be a world without air, a direct path into the Unseelie prison, or a galaxy filled with Hunters, or Shades, or gray women! I got a special hate on for the gray-folk caste of Unseelie. One of them almost killed me and forced Mac to make a promise she shouldn’t have made.

I shove her off me and she stumbles back, nearly crashing into Barrons, who just entered the room with his usual stalky animal grace.