The street that only moments ago had bustled with tourists, making their merry way from one open pub door to the next, was now scourged clean by the dark, arctic wind. Doors had been slammed, music silenced.

Leaving only me.

And them.

The vision before me was not at all what I’d expected.

A gunman had a huddle of people backed against the wall of a building, a family of tourists, cameras swinging around their necks. The barrel of a semiautomatic weapon gleamed in the moonlight. The father was yelling, the mother was screaming, trying to gather three small children into her arms.

“No!” I shouted. At least I think I did. I’m not sure I actually made a sound. My lungs were compressed with pain.

The gunman let loose a spray of bullets, silencing their cries. He killed the youngest last—a delicate blond girl of four or five, with wide, pleading eyes that would haunt me till the day I died. A girl I couldn’t save because I couldn’t fecking move. Paralyzed by pain-deadened limbs, I could only kneel there, screaming inside my head.

Why was this happening? Where was the Sinsar Dubh? Why couldn’t I see it?

The man turned, and I inhaled sharply.

A book was tucked beneath his arm.

A perfectly innocuous hardcover, about three hundred and fifty pages thick, no dust jacket, pale gray with red binding. The kind of well-read hardcover you might find in any used bookstore, in any city.

I gaped. Was I supposed to believe that was the million-year-old book of the blackest magic imaginable, scribed by the Unseelie King? Was this supposed to be funny? How anticlimactic. How absurd.

The gunman glanced at his weapon with a bemused expression. Then his head swiveled back toward the fallen bodies, the blood and bits of flesh and bone spattered across the brick wall.

The book dropped from beneath his arm. It seemed to fall in slow motion, changing, transforming, as it tumbled, end over end, to the damp, shiny brick. By the time it hit the cobbled pavement with a heavy whump, it was no longer a simple hardcover but a massive black tome, nearly a foot thick, engraved with runes, bound by bands of steel and intricate locks. Exactly the kind of book I’d expected: ancient and evil-looking.

I sucked in another breath.

Now the thick dark volume was changing again, becoming something new. It swirled and spun, drawing substance from wind and darkness.

In its place rose a . . . thing . . . of such . . . terrible essence and pitch. A darkly animate . . . again, I can only say thing . . . that existed beyond shape or name: a malformed creature sprung from some no-man’s-land of shattered sanity and broken gibberings.

And it lived.