Barrons draped an arm over my shoulder and I moved into the shelter of it. The thing on my tongue burned. My brand itched. At that moment, I despised them both.

“Stay away from her,” Barrons growled.

“She comes to me of her own will. She calls me, chooses me.” V’lane was in high glamour, gold and bronze and iridescent ice. He raked me with an imperious gaze. “I will attend to you later. You broke our bargain. There is a price for that.” He smiled, but Fae don’t really smile. They paste a humanlike expression on and it chills to the bone because it looks so unnatural on their unnaturally perfect faces. “Do not fear, MacKayla, I will—how do you say?—kiss it and make it better when I am through.”

I removed my hand from my fly. “I didn’t break our bargain intentionally, V’lane. Barrons overheard something he shouldn’t have overheard.”

“Omission or commission, what difference?”

“There is one. Even the courts of law permit the distinction.”

“Human law. Fae law acknowledges no such thing. There are outcomes. The means by which they are achieved have no bearing. You said you did not know how to track the Book.”

“I don’t. I just followed a hunch tonight. Got lucky. You?”

“Impudence and lies, MacKayla. I suffer neither.”

“You won’t harm a hair on her head, or I’ll kill you,” said Barrons.

Really? With what? I wanted to ask. V’lane was a Fae. My spear was gone and Rowena had the sword.

The Book’s icy pull was diminishing rapidly. It was moving swiftly. Its next victim was in a car, and a fast one. I had a smug, utterly beside-the-point car-lover thought: not faster than mine. I had a Viper. Its keys were in my pocket.

The smug thought faded. It offended every ounce of my being to let the Book get away, to allow it to go cruising off to destroy more lives. But no matter how insistently my sidheseer senses were screaming at me to track it, I didn’t dare. Not with Barrons and V’lane here. I needed to know more about the Book. I needed to know how to get my hands on it, and do the right thing with it. Who was I kidding? I needed to know what the right thing was. Assuming I eventually got it, who could I trust with it? V’lane? Barrons? God forbid, Rowena? Would the Seelie Queen herself shimmer in and save the day? Somehow, I doubted it. Nothing in my life is easy anymore.

“You have no right to it,” V’lane was telling Barrons.

“Might makes right. Hasn’t that always been your motto?” Barrons said.

“You could never understand my motto.”

“Better than you think, fairy.”