I dug out my cell phone to call Dani and tell her what was happening in Dublin. There was no way I could make it to the abbey. I glanced at my watch and was stunned to find it was nearly seven o’clock. I’d been running and hiding for hours! The ritual might already be completed and if it was, sidhe-seers could come to the city and help me save some of the people being driven to death-by-Shade. I might not be able to make a difference, but seven hundred of us could. If they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—come because Rowena vetoed it for some idiotic reason, I would call Barrons and if he didn’t answer, I’d call Ryodan, and if neither of them answered, it was probably time for IYD: if you’re dying. A pall of death hung over Dublin like grief over a funeral. I could smell it, taste it on the air. If no sidhe-seers were coming in to join me, I wanted out, any way I could get there.

Dani answered on the second ring. She sounded hysterical. “Feck, Mac!” she cried. “What did you do to us?”

I’d been adjusting the straps on my pack to accommodate my bulky external harness, and alarm made me drop it. “What’s wrong?” I demanded.

“Shades, Mac! Fecking Shades came out of the fecking Orb when we opened it! The abbey’s full of ’em!”

I was so stunned that I nearly dropped the phone. When I got it back to my ear, Dani was saying:

“Rowena says you betrayed us! She says you set us up!”

My heart constricted. “No, Dani, I didn’t, I swear! Somebody must have set me up!” The thought iced my blood. There was only one person who could have, one person that walked among those dark vampires without fear. How easily he’d relinquished the relic. How quickly he’d agreed to give it to me. Yet he’d not given it to me that night. Thirty hours had passed between my request, and his delivery. What had he been doing during those hours? Spiking a sidhe-seer’s drink with Shades? “How bad is it?” I cried.

“We’ve lost dozens! When we opened the Orb, they splintered, and we thought the light from the ritual killed them, but they fecking grew back together in the shadows. They’re everywhere! In closets, in shoes, anywhere there’s dark!”

“Dani, I didn’t do this! I swear to you. I swear on my sister. You know what she means to me. You have to believe me. I would never do this. Never!”

“You said you’d come,” she hissed. “You didn’t. Where are you?”

“I’m stuck in the city, holed up between York and Mercer. Dublin’s a nightmare, and I couldn’t get out. People have been rioting for hours, and the Unseelie are driving them into the Dark Zones!”