“Leave him alone,” Ivy said, tugging my arm off Trent, her eyes on the sky and her lips parted.

I was bleeding, and I looked at my hand in horror, flexing my fingers until I realized that it wasn’t my blood staining my fingers but Trent’s. His right bicep was soaked where I had been yanking him forward. His ears, too, had blood leaking from them, and his hand was red when he wiped his mouth. It only made me angrier. Damn it, he was hurt.

“You are my responsibility!” I shouted, ticked. “If you ever do something like that again, I’ll kill you myself. Do you hear me!”

Trent glared at me as he wiped his mouth with that ribbon, then let it fall. “You’re not my keeper,” he said, his green eyes vivid, reminding me of the elf who had almost killed me, lulled me to my death.

“Right now I am!” I shouted, getting in his face. “Deal with it!”

“Rachel, will you shut up!” Jenks exclaimed. “We have a bigger problem.”

I suddenly realized Trent had gone white faced, and like both Jenks and Ivy, was now staring at the river. Turning, I felt my mouth drop open.

“Oh,” I said, the sound of the approaching sirens taking on new meaning. I didn’t think I needed to worry about having left the scene of an accident. The cops, both the I.S. and the FIB, had something bigger to worry about.

The arch was not there anymore. Sort of. The legs were mostly there, but the rest of it was in house-size chunks between the shattered posts.

My stomach clenched, and I looked at the bunker, realizing what had happened. “This wasn’t my fault,” I said softly, but my voice was quavering as if I didn’t believe it.

“Maybe we should get out of here,” Jenks suggested.

“Good idea,” Ivy said. “Forget the rental. They have tracking charms built into the framework, and no one is going to be looking for you now.”

Nodding, I grabbed Trent’s sleeve and tugged him into motion. “They’ve probably got a tracking charm on my mom’s by now, too.”

“I can find any bug,” Jenks said, then flew up when Trent shuffled to his wheeled suitcase and limped silently beside me. We came out from the sunken sidewalk together and joined the walking wounded, heading against the wash of help flowing into the park from the surrounding city. For once, our dusty and bloody appearance was unremarked upon. We were walking, and there were lots of people who weren’t.

No way did a single support beam falling cause this. It had been the two elves and that magic that I’d pushed back into them. This was not my fault, and as I remembered the children playing on the grass, I vowed that the Withons were going to pay. With interest.

Seven

The faint smell of cinnamon, blood, and wine drifted forward from the backseat despite the fact that all the windows were down. My elbow was propped up on the sill, and my hair was a tangled mess. Jenks was on the rearview mirror, his wings flat against his back to keep them from being torn to tatters. Ivy was driving. We were an hour out of St. Louis, and no one was happy. I would have asked Ivy if she’d mind if I rolled mine up, but her grip on the wheel was tight and her eyes were halfway to black, slowly edging into hunger.