“Fine,” he grumped, oblivious that he was waving in the wind. “If Newt says you’re reasonably safe, you can go,” he said sullenly. “You’ll be back in twenty-four hours anyway.”

Yes! I thought in victory. I was going to have to take a long shower to get rid of the burnt-amber stench, but I imagined they’d bring up more shampoo if I called down.

Newt turned from where she was kneeling in her pajamas before the fire, a lightly browned marshmallow at the end of her stick. “Bring a ruler with you when you return,” she said, her voice high and childlike. “The ever-after is shrinking. But I can’t prove it unless I have a tape measure from reality. All the ones here are shrinking, too.”

Scrying mirror pressed to me, I watched Al cringe. “Shrinking?” I asked.

“Slowly,” she said, her pinky sticking out as she tentatively squished the marshmallow to test how done it was. “The rate will quicken exponentially as we have less and less to lose. The ebb and flow of energy between reality and the ever-after has shifted. It’s not all coming back. There’s a hole somewhere.”

She looked at me with her black eyes, and I shivered.

Al sat completely up and tugged his robe closed. Thank God. “The lines have been balanced for eons. Nothing has changed,” he said, but his voice was too sure, too confident.

Smiling with a dead child’s face and beauty, Newt awkwardly sat cross-legged before the fire. “You haven’t been to the surface lately.” Turning away, she put the toasting fork back into the flames, unsatisfied with the puff’s doneness.

“I try to avoid it,” Al huffed.

“The buildings,” Newt continued as if he hadn’t said anything, “are falling at an astounding rate.”

Remembering the buildings in Vegas’s ever-after, I took a breath, and Al shot me a look to keep quiet. Worried, I felt the bumps of the lines on my scrying mirror. “Buildings always fall,” Al said, his eyes darting to his books.

“Yes, Gally,” she said, her voice having a childish lisp. “But now they are on fire.”

Crap, had it been me? I’d made a ley line. Maybe I hadn’t done it right. “Um, Al?” I said, scared.

Again Al grimaced, telling me to shut my mouth. “It was probably your brat Ku’Sox,” he said, and I clutched my mirror, feeling the cold soak in. Al was lying. He was lying to Newt. It hadn’t been Ku’Sox. It had been me, and Al knew it. Shit. What had I done?

“Ku’Sox is not my brat,” Newt said as she pulled her marshmallow off the stick, her little-girl pinkie stuck way out. “I was against giving him the ability to hold that much energy. You all vetoed me. Remember?”

Holy crap, Al was outright lying to Newt, and it scared me in a way that Al making a pass at me never could.

“Have a marshmallow, Rachel,” Newt said, leaning over the coffee table to hand it to me. “Consider it a prize for almost killing Al.”