Before all hell had broken loose on Halloween, I’d been researching guns on the Internet and had been angling to get Barrons, with his unlimited connections, to buy me one. The gun I chose now was a PDW: a personal defense weapon. Perfect for a woman of my size and stature. Highly manageable, highly effective, highly illegal. Able to fire even from a prone position. I intended to practice firing from every position possible. Gunfire might not kill Fae, but I was willing to bet it might slow down the non-sifting kind.

I crammed clips of ammunition into my pack everywhere they’d fit, then filled my boots and the pockets of the new black leather coat I’d found draped over a chair in just my size. It irked me that Barrons had been making fashion choices for me, but not enough to be stupid about it: I needed that coat. I was pretty sure it was winter in Dublin, and it had been cold already in late October.

I wasted a lot of time searching the basement for my spear, because I knew Barrons well enough to know that he’d have requisitioned it, if it’d been possible. When I didn’t find it, I ruled out the possibility of it still being at the church. He’d have checked there. Which meant someone else had picked up my spear and backpack. I needed to know who.

I discovered crates of protein bars and loaded up on those, too. Like I said, Barrons plans for everything.

I’m not so sure he planned for one thing, though.

His OOP detector—the one he’d worked so hard to restore to sanity so he could use me some more, tracking down his precious Objects of Power—wasn’t hanging around.

“Thanks,” I told the empty house, “but I’ll take it from here.”

Besides, knowing him, he’d probably amped up his brand on the back of my skull, while I’d slumbered nearly unconscious from one of our marathon sex sessions, or put a new, improved one on me somewhere else. I had no doubt Barrons could find me one way or another. He wasn’t the kind of—whatever he was—that a woman could lose, if he didn’t feel like being lost.

I walked through the silent house, which was crammed with furniture covered with dusty sheets, and stepped out onto the front steps. The house had been built on an elevation with a good view of the neighborhood. I’d spent so much time driving in Dublin, hunting the Sinsar Dubh, that I’d gotten pretty familiar with it. I was on the northern outskirts of the city. Dawn smudged the horizon, and the first rays of sun slanted across a sea of gray roofs.

I smiled.

It was the start of a brand-new day.

The wards knocked me on my ass the moment I tried to leave the property.

“Ow!” I rebounded like a rubber ball off a brick wall and landed on the lawn. Or, rather, what was left of the lawn, which was dirt. I was in a Dark Zone. It wasn’t winter but Shades that had stripped the yard of life. Mother Nature left grass, even in her harshest moments. Shades left nothing. Barrons must have brought me here after they’d already claimed the neighborhood. What better place to hide a weapon from the enemy than deep in their own territory? Especially since he and they seemed to have a tacit agreement to leave each other alone.

I took off my MacHalo—it was light enough that I wouldn’t need it again until nightfall, and I suspected the Shades that had devastated this area had moved on to more-fertile ground, anyway—hooked it onto a strap on my pack, and rubbed my head. The wards had nearly split my skull. My molars hurt, even my scalp felt bruised. I hadn’t seen that coming. I narrowed my eyes. Faint silver runes glistened on the sidewalk I’d just tried to cross. Wards were sneaky things, often hard to see, made doubly so this morning by a thin coating of frost. But now that I knew they were there, I could discern the telltale shimmer of Barrons’ subtle work, vanishing east and west around both sides of the house. Although I knew he was meticulous, I still walked the perimeter, looking for a gap.

There wasn’t one.

I decided it must have been an aberration that the wards had repelled me so violently. Barrons warded things out. He never warded me in. I stepped onto the lightly iced sidewalk in a different place.

I went flying backward again, teeth vibrating, ears ringing.

I sat up, growling. The nerve. If I hadn’t been determined to leave before, I was now.

“He has warded me out, as well, MacKayla. Or I would have come for you long ago.”

V’lane’s voice preceded his appearance. One moment I was glowering at the air, the next at V’lane’s knees. For a moment, I kept my gaze fixed there. A woman might feel a little terrified after what I’d been through—not that I did, just that some other woman might.

V’lane is Seelie, one of the alleged “good” guys, if any of the Fae can be called that, but he’s still a death-by-sex Fae, same as those masters of killing lust that had so recently devolved me into the lowest common denominator. All Fae royalty, whether light court or dark, can turn humans Pri-ya with sex. And like his darker, deadly Unseelie brethren—when in his natural high glamour—V’lane is too beautiful for a human to look at directly. I’m no exception. The dark princes had made my eyes bleed. V’lane could, too, if he felt like it.

Since the day I met him, he’d been using his death-by-sex magnetism on me to varying degrees, although I now knew just how “gentle” his coercion had really been compared to what he could have done in his efforts to make me help him track the Sinsar Dubh. We’d had an ongoing battle about what form he would assume in my presence, with him always turning on too much sexual charisma and me always insisting he “mute” it.