I sat on the floor of my room and tugged my boots on over my bare feet. “No I.S.,” I said as I got the second boot on and looked at Jenks, my stomach empty and hurting. “But I am going to snatch that idiot out of the ever-after. If I’m lucky, he’ll be with Lucy and Ceri, and we’ll have them both.” Maybe that is his plan.

The pixy’s wings took on a bright silver hue. “Thank Tink’s little pink—ah, rosebuds,” he said in relief as I stood and reached for my door handle. “I thought you were going after Ku’Sox.”

“Not this time.”

My boots clunked on the hard wooden floor. I was not stupid, but I was angry. Trent had gone off without me. Right after we had a plan all worked out. Maybe the books were to distract me.

“She’s not running off!” Jenks said brightly as he zipped into the kitchen ahead of me, and Belle turned from the kitchen window, her expression shocked.

“She’s-s-s-s not?” she said, and I made a face at both of them.

“Good God, you think I’m stupid?” I said, then frowned when neither of them said a word. “Why should I go to the ever-after when all I want is Trent?” I said, holding up my hand so the light caught my pinkie ring.

“Hot piss on a toadstool!” Jenks exclaimed, and Belle waved at his orange sparkles in annoyance. “I forgot about that. You think it will work?”

My feet felt funny in my boots without socks between me and the leather, and I tapped a toe on the center counter’s footplate. “Can’t hurt to try.” If it didn’t work, I might try Newt. My gaze became distant as I remembered being bloody and beaten under Cincy’s streets and using the ring to jump me out and finding it jumped the other person in. It hadn’t been exactly what I had wanted, but that’s the way wild elf magic worked.

It had better work again, I thought as I looked down at it, my knees feeling funny as I recalled the words to invoke the charm. Ta na shay. I needed to find out what that meant.

I took a breath. Grown-up decisions, I thought, thinking that Ivy would be proud of me. “One seriously angry elf, coming up!” I said, tapping the line out back and spinning the ring on my finger. “Ta na shay!”

But then my breath came in with a gasp as the ley line in the back reached out and yanked me into it.

“No!” I shouted, the last thing I saw before the line took me completely being Belle’s and Jenks’s shocked expressions as I vanished from my kitchen.

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Sixteen