I added a more immediate, personal goal to my to-do list:

• Take Dani into Dublin tonight and try to track down Chester’s and Ryodan.

IYCGM was If You Can’t Get Me on the cell phone Barrons had given me. I’d called it once. It was answered by a man named Ryodan, and we’d had a very cryptic, Barrons-like conversation. I was willing to bet my last pair of clean panties—and I was dangerously low on them—that Ryodan was one of Barrons’ eight. Both Barrons and Inspector O’Duffy had mentioned talking with the mysterious Ryodan at a place called Chester’s. I’d been meaning to track him down for months, but I’d been distracted by one crisis after another.

I had no idea what or where Chester’s was or if it even still existed in the rubble that was Dublin, but if there was an opportunity to find one of the eight men who’d stormed the abbey with Barrons to free me, I wasn’t about to pass it up. Any man who knew Barrons, any man Barrons trusted to cover his back, was someone I wanted to have a nice, long face-to-face talk with.

On the pantie note:

• Loot store tonight for new underwear.

A lot. Doing laundry wasn’t something I saw myself having time for in the near future. I raked a hand through my hair. My nails were long against my scalp. They weren’t all that had grown. I’d seen the reflection of my hairdo in a window last night. The cut was still good, but I had an inch of blond roots that made me look like a skunk.

Loot store for hair dye and manicure kit.

I planned to grab more clothes while I was at it. Whether it should matter or not, people responded to outer appearances and were motivated to certain behaviors by them. A well-groomed, attractive leader was much more influential than an unkempt one.

I made a third column: long-term major goals that would hopefully be accomplished short term, because our world was changing drastically, much too fast. These were the critical ones. They had to happen.

• Figure out how to contain the Sinsar Dubh!

I nibbled the tip of my pen. Then what? During my first encounter with V’lane, he’d made it clear he felt there was only one option, that there was no one else who could be trusted with it.

• Take the Sinsar Dubh to the Seelie Queen so she can re-create the Song of Making to rebuild the walls and reimprison the Unseelie?

I worried about that one. It wasn’t in my blood to trust anything Fae, but I wasn’t exactly flush with alternatives. I could drive myself crazy wondering what to do with the Sinsar Dubh once I’d gotten it. I decided to focus on one impossibility at a time. Get the Book, then figure out the next step.

I crossed out the last bullet and wrote another one:

•  Kick their fecking Fae asses off our world!

I liked that one. I underlined it three times.

O ye of little faith … you didn’t even try.

I winced, closed my journal and my eyes. Since Barrons had left, I’d been trying not to brood over his parting comment. For the past twenty-four hours, while I’d been running around half of Ireland, I’d been replaying the events of Halloween in the back of my mind, indulging myself in an exercise in futility, torturing myself with all the choices I might have made that night that could have yielded a different outcome.

Then Barrons had gone and fired the real killer at me: I’d had a way to reach him the whole time, right there in my backpack.

I opened my eyes, pulled out my cell, and thumbed through the three numbers that had been preprogrammed into the phone when he’d given it to me. I pressed the first one—Barrons’ cell number. I knew it wouldn’t ring. It rang, startling me.

I disconnected quickly.

Mine rang.

I flipped it open, snarled at Barrons, “Just testing,” and immediately disconnected. How in the world were these cell phones working? Was service back up in certain areas?

I changed my settings to private and dialed my parents’ number so they wouldn’t know it was me, reserving the right to hang up if they answered and I couldn’t bring myself to speak. It didn’t go through. I tried The Brickyard, where I’d bartended back home. No connection. I tried a dozen other numbers, with no success. Apparently Barrons had some kind of special service.

I thumbed up IYCGM and pressed it.

“Mac,” a male voice growled.

“Just testing,” I said, and hung up.

I scrolled to IYD.

My phone rang. It was IYCGM. I answered it.

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” Ryodan said.

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Test the third one.”

I didn’t bother asking how he knew. Like Barrons, he was on top of my every thought. “Why not?”

“There’s a reason it’s called If You’re Dying.”

“What’s that?”

“So you use it only if you’re dying,” he said dryly.

Also, like Barrons, I could go around in circles with him forever. “I’m going to call it, Ryodan.”

“You’re better than that, Mac.”

“Better than what?” I said coolly.

“Lashing out because you hurt. He’s not the one who hurt you. He’s the one who brought you back.”

“Do you know what his idea of bringing me back was?” I snapped.

There was a smile in Ryodan’s voice. “I volunteered for the job. He didn’t seem at all touched by my offer.” The smiled faded. “Don’t lose yourself in anger, Mac. It’s gasoline. You can burn it as fuel, or you can use it to torch everything you care about and end up standing on a scorched battlefield, with everybody dead, even you—only your body doesn’t have the good grace to quit breathing.”