For the first time in my life, I prayed. God, no, please, God, no. Don’t let Barrons pick it up and turn evil because if he does, we’re all lost. I’m dead, the walls are down, and the world is a bust.

I realized, then, that the reason I’d been so conflicted since the night I’d watched Barrons step out of the Unseelie mirror was because, in my heart, I didn’t really believe he was evil. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think he was good, either, but bad is potential evil. Evil is a lost cause. I hadn’t been willing to trust my heart because I’d been afraid I’d make Alina’s mistakes, and as I was dying, the bodiless narrator of my life would remark, Gee, there goes the second Lane girl, dumber than the first. The most confused we ever get is when we’re trying to convince our heads of something our heart knows is a lie.

His fingers were inches from the Sinsar Dubh.

“Barrons!” I shouted.

He flinched and looked back at me. His eyes were black on black.

“Jericho,” I cried.

Barrons shook his head, once, a violent jerk from side to side. Moving like a man with bones fractured in every limb, he pushed himself slowly to his feet, and began backing away.

Suddenly the Book morphed into the Beast and rose, and rose, and rose until it towered over us, eclipsing the sky.

Barrons turned then, and ran.

The pain was back, crushing, crucifying. The night turned cold and life-sucking, and the wind returned, screaming with the voices of the unavenged dead.

I felt myself scooped up.

I flung my arms around Barrons’ neck and held on as he ran.

At four o’clock in the morning, we were sitting in front of a fire in the bookstore, in the rear conversation area, behind bookcases where no passersby might see us, not that any were expected at four o’clock in the morning on the edge of a Dark Zone.

I was snuggled in a nest of blankets, staring into the flames. Barrons brought me a cup of hot cocoa he’d microwaved, using two packets of instant from Fiona’s old stash behind the cash register. I accepted it gratefully. Every few minutes, I jerked with a convulsive chill. I doubted I would ever get warm again.

“She’s with O’Bannion, you know,” I told him through lips that burned with cold. Even Barrons looked chilled, pale.

“I know,” he said.

“She’s eating Unseelie.”

“Yes.”

“Do you care?”

“Fio is her own woman, Ms. Lane.”

“What if I have to kill her?” If she came after me now, I’d have no choice but to stab her.