“He does it in that English accent, which is too cool.” Jesse relaxed a little and started listening with more interest and less worry.

The woman began batting at the younger policeman and swearing. I didn’t bother to listen to the details, but apparently she was mad at him now, and not us.

“And Ben is too smart to swear at cops,” Jesse said with a sincere but misguided belief in Ben’s wisdom. She had turned to look at me and got a good view over my shoulder of the only real fatality of the incident. “Jeez, Mercy. Look at the Rabbit.”

I’d been avoiding it, but I had to look sometime.

The little rust-colored car was connected to the SUV in front of it and somehow had managed to ride up on something so that the front wheels, the nearest one no longer round, were about six inches up in the air. Its nose was also about two feet closer to the windshield than it had been.

“It’s dead,” I told her.

Maybe if Zee were still around to help, he could have done something with the Rabbit. Zee had taught me most of what I know about fixing cars, but there were some things that couldn’t be fixed without an iron-kissed fae to put them to rights. And Zee was holed up in the fae reservation in Walla Walla and had been since one of the Gray Lords killed a US senator’s son and declared the fae to be a separate and sovereign nation.

Within minutes of the declaration, all of the fae had disappeared—and so had all of the reservations. The ten-mile loop of road that used to lead to the local reservation near Walla Walla was now eight miles long, and from nowhere along that route could you even see the reservation. I’d heard that one of the reservations had grown a thicket of blackberry bushes and disappeared inside.

There was a rumor that the government had tried to bomb a reservation, but the entire flight of planes had disappeared—reappearing minutes later flying over Australia. Australian bloggers posted photos, and the US president issued a formal apology, so that part of the rumor seemed to be true.

For me personally, the whole thing meant I had no one to call on when I needed help in the shop or needed some time off. I hadn’t even gotten a chance to talk to Zee before he was gone. I missed him, and not just because my poor Rabbit looked to be headed to that big VW rally in the sky.

“At least we weren’t driving the Vanagon,” I said.

The teenager I’d been—the one who had worked fast-food jobs to pay for the car, the insurance, and the fuel and upkeep—would have cried for the poor Rabbit, but that would have made Jesse feel bad, and I wasn’t a teenager anymore.