“V’lane, I need you!” I cried, releasing his name.

It uncoiled from my tongue and swelled, choking me, then slammed into the back of my teeth, forcing my mouth wide.

But instead of soaring into the night sky, it crashed into an invisible wall and plummeted to the pavement, where it lay fluttering weakly, a fallen dark bird.

I nudged it with the toe of my boot.

It disintegrated.

I turned my face to the wind, east and west, north and south. It eddied around me, buffeting me from all sides, slapping me with hundreds of tiny hands, and I suddenly could feel the LM out there, working his dark magic to bring the walls down. It was changing things.

I flexed the sidhe-seer place in my mind, focused, turned inward, seeking, hunting, and for an instant I actually got a flash of him, standing at the edge of a stark, sheer black cliff, in an icy place, red-robed, hands raised—and was that a heart held high, dripping blood?—chanting, summoning arts powerful enough to crash a prison wrought from living strands of the Song of Making, and it was doing something to all magic, even Fae, making it go terribly wrong.

I squeezed my inner eye shut before it got me killed. I was standing in the middle of a street in a rioting Dublin, trapped in the city, alone.

V’lane would not be sifting in to save the day.

The mob was less than a block away. The marauding front-liners had just noticed my car and were roaring like maddened beasts. Some toted baseball bats, others swung batons taken from fallen Garda.

They were going to beat my Ferrari to smithereens.

There wasn’t time to dig out my cell phone and try to call Barrons. They would be on me in seconds. I knew what happened to rich people during riots. I also knew they wouldn’t believe I wasn’t rich. I wasn’t about to get beheaded with the aristocracy just because every now and then I got to drive a nice car that didn’t even belong to me.

I grabbed my backpack from the car, and ran.

A block away another mob approached.

I plunged into it, and lost myself inside it. It was a horrible, smelly, hot, surging mass of humanity. It was rage unstop-pered, frustration unleashed, envy unsuppressed. It howled with victory as it looted, smashed, and destroyed.

I couldn’t breathe. I was going to throw up. There were too many people, too many Fae, too much hostility and violence. I swam in a sea of faces, some feral, some excited, others as frightened as I imagined I must look. Fae are monsters. But we humans hold our own. Fae might have incited this riot, but we were the ones keeping it alive.