I scowled at her. “You will not. I do not belong to y—”

The next thing I knew I was on my knees in the center aisle, and Mab was walking away from me, toward the door. “Oh, but you do, mortal. Until you have worked off your debt to me you are mine. You owe one favor more.”

I tried to get up, and I couldn’t. My knees just wouldn’t move. My heart beat far too hard, and I hated how frightened I felt.

“Why?” I demanded. “Why did you want the Denarians stopped? Why send the hobs to kill the Archive? Why recruit me to save the Archive and Marcone in the event that the hobs failed?”

Mab paused, turned, casually showing off the gorgeous curves of her calves, and tilted her head at me. “Nicodemus and his ilk were clearly in violation of my Accords, and obviously planning to abuse them to further his ambition. That was reason enough to see his designs disrupted. And among the Fallen was one with much to answer for to me, personally, for its attack upon my home.”

“The Black Council attack on Arctis Tor,” I said. “One of them used Hellfire.”

Mab showed me her snow-white teeth. “The Watchman and I,” Grimalkin mewled for her, “had a common enemy this day. The enemy could not be allowed to gain the power represented by the child Archive.”

I frowned and thought of the silver hand that had batted the fallen angel and his master sorceries around as if he’d been a stuffed practice dummy. “Thorned Namshiel.”

Mab’s eyes flashed with sudden, cold fury and frost literally formed over every surface of the chapel, including upon my own eyelashes.

“There are others yet who will pay for what they have done,” Mab snarled in her own voice. It sounded hideous—not unmelodious, because it was as rich and full and musical as it ever had been. But it was filled with such rage, such fury, such pain and such hate that every vowel clawed at my skin, and every consonant felt like someone taking a staple gun to my ears.

“I am Sidhe,” she hissed. “I am the Queen of Air and Darkness. I am Mab.” Her chin lifted, her eyes wide and white around the rippling colors of her irises—utterly insane. “And I repay my debts, mortal. All of them.”

There was an enormous crack, a sound like thick ice shattering on the surface of a lake, and Mab and her translator were gone.

I knelt there, shaking in the wake of hearing her voice. I realized a minute later that I had a nosebleed. A minute after that, I realized that there was a trickle of blood coming out of my ears, too. My eyes ached with strain, as if I’d been outdoors in bright sunlight for too many hours.

It took me still another minute to get my legs to start moving again. After that I staggered to the nearest bathroom and cleaned up. I spent a little while poking at my memory and trying to see if there were any holes in it that hadn’t been there before. Then I spent a while more wondering if I’d be able to tell if she had taken something else.