Al sniffed as if he didn’t care. “How? As you say, you cursed him to the ever-after, and even if he found a way past that, why would he?”

“Because he can’t snag Trent, and if he has Ceri and Lucy, Ku’Sox has Trent’s nuts in a vise.”

“So-o-o-o?” he drawled, gazing up to the sky that had never seen a contrail.

“My God, Al, are you being intentionally blind? I told you Nick was stealing surviving Rosewood babies. Trent can make the cure permanent. If he gives it to Ku’Sox, he won’t need you anymore. Any of you!”

Al’s expression suddenly became worried. “You have more important things to think about than what Ku’Sox is going to do over the next hundred years,” he said, a thick, heavy hand falling on my shoulder and turning me around. “We’re on trial.”

“Again?” I asked, shaking as I leaned past Al to eye Ku’Sox. “What, are we broke?”

“No.” Al’s voice was sour. “It’s your damned ley line. It went wonky. Leaking like the bloody Titanic.”

Remembering the increasingly caustic sound of the lines, I turned to face him fully. My line? Had it really gone that badly unbalanced?

Al’s eye twitched. A spot of ice slid down my spine, making me stiffen. We’d been trying for weeks to get the line I’d scraped between reality and the ever-after to close or at least balance, but until I knew how to jump the lines by myself, it wasn’t happening. The imbalance was slowly siphoning off the ever-after into reality, and the only reason that no one had said anything before was because it was only a trickle—plenty of time to fix it. That, and because I was the only female demon they might get some baby demons out of after they tired of the trinkets I could solidify into reality for them. They’d been losing maybe a cubic foot of their dimension a year, not much at all. “How bad is it?” I whispered, trying to smile as I looked at Dali, Al’s parole officer.

“Bad.” Al’s voice was faint but resolute. “Stand up. Try to look sexy.”

“In a bedsheet?” I complained, running my hands down it. “How can I look sexy in a bedsheet?” He cleared his throat, and I grimaced. “Never mind.”

Frowning, I leaned past Al to glare at Ku’Sox again, certain that he was the reason my line had gone wonky. The demon’s smile confirmed it, and suddenly I realized just how deep in the crapper we were. Ku’Sox had thriving Rosewood babies. He had the leverage to make Trent give him the permanent cure. He had a line—my line—leaking ever-after enough to be a real problem. He was going to kill the ever-after and blame me for it.