“Well . . .” She ground out the last smoldering print with the toe of her boot. It looked like they’d used the carving to anchor the gate. “. . . that’s convenient.”

Closing the gate meant changing the carving, but it only took a slight and barely visible adjustment to lock “Land of Hope and Gory” to the site. If any variation of the Hunt tried to get back through, they’d find a full brass section locking them out.

Then she climbed to the top of the slope, slipped into the Wood between two junipers, thought about heading for Tokyo, decided the kitsune wouldn’t appreciate her sticking her nose into what didn’t concern her, and finally stepped out between two honey locusts in downtown Vancouver. A quick run across Granville Street later and she was heading down the stairs into The Cellar in a desperate attempt to get the damned bluebirds out of her head.

She should’ve gone with Blake.

Still high enough he could be seen only as moving darkness against the stars, Jack realized that the lit areas of the Forks were, if not teeming, then well populated with people trying to spot the naked woman in the river. The naked woman in the river who’d already lured two men to their death.

Humans were weird.

In the UnderRealm, people either avoided Sirens or used them as weapons against enemies who were unaware of their locations. In the MidRealm, armed with cell phone cameras and the mistaken belief that a few thousand hits on YouTube meant immortality, danger was relentlessly recorded.

If the asteroid did hit, if they couldn’t stop it, Jack knew thousands of people would record right up until the flesh burned off their bones.

He gritted his teeth and circled until he managed to replace the image of Charlie burning with Charlie lying out on the roof, then, wings aching, he looked for a place to land.

The triangular park that created the actual fork between the Red and Assiniboine Rivers was unlit on the water side of the railroad tracks. It wasn’t empty—given the news report that would be too much to ask—but it was dark, so Jack wrapped himself in shadow, landed unseen, and moved to stand behind three young women who had one hell of a lot of electronic equipment pointed at the water.