“Who cares if I’m pretty?” she sneered, but I saw right through her. The first time I’d seen her she’d had makeup on and been in street clothes and I’d thought she was older than she was. In her uniform and without all that black eyeliner, I could see she was thirteen, fourteen at the most, and frozen briefly at that awkward stage all of us suffer for a time. I’d had a gangly period, too, where I’d been convinced the Lane genes had betrayed me, and unlike Alina, I was going to grow up ugly and have to spend the rest of my life eclipsed by my older sister while people said sadly, and never quite quietly enough, “Poor MacKayla, Alina got the brains and the beauty.”

Dani was trapped in adolescent limbo. Her torso hadn’t yet caught up with her legs and arms, and although her hormones were wreaking havoc on her skin they had yet to shape her hips and bust. Caught between child and woman was a rough place to be, and she had to fight monsters on top of it. “You’re going to be gorgeous one day, Dani,” I told her, “so clean up your language, if you want to hang out with me.”

She rolled her eyes, leaned her bike against the counter, tossed a rolled-up wad of mail on the counter, and sauntered cockily off toward the magazine rack, but not before I caught the startled, thoughtful look in her eyes. She would remember what I’d said. She would cling to it during her worst moments and it would get her through, the same way my Aunt Eileen’s promise that I would one day be pretty had gotten me through.

“Found it on the sidewalk,” she tossed over her shoulder. “Fecking postmen can’t even hit the slot.” She punctuated it with a glance that was a dare to correct her, and I might have, but she plucked a Hot Rod magazine from the stand.

Nice choice. I’d gone for the same thing at her age.

“Do you know you’re sitting on the edge of a whole neighborhood of nasty Unseelie?”

“You mean the Shades?” I said, absently flipping through the mail. “Yeah. I call it a Dark Zone. I’ve found three of them in the city.”

“You come up with the coolest names. Doesn’t it creep you out that they’re so close?”

“Creeps me out that they exist at all. Have you seen what they leave behind?”

She shuddered. “Yeah. Rowena sent me out with a team looking for some of us who didn’t make it home one night.”