“Obviously she didn’t think I needed it.”

“Or doesn’t care if you survive.”

“Time will tell, old dude.”

“When you’re ash. And I’m still here.”

“Alone. Because Dani and I will have died, battling a supervillain together, and moved on to the next adventure. Together.”

Ryodan said flatly, “Never going to happen,” and stalked off toward the abbey.

I shot Barrons an uneasy look. He didn’t look any more pleased than I felt. Ryodan’s comment had sounded like an insinuation he meant to keep Dani alive at any cost. And he’d already proved he was willing to do what it took.

“And that’s the thing that’s never going to happen,” I muttered at Ryodan’s retreating back. Dani had already become a bit of a beast as far I was concerned. No way she was turning into a bigger one.

I narrowed my eyes, looking past Ryodan, absorbing the abbey as a whole, beyond the overgrown topiaries, the dazzling, trellised gardens, to the structure of the building itself.

It was here that the battle with the Hoar Frost King had been fought and the icy Unseelie vanquished. Unfortunately, not before it had deposited a cancer in our world. I’d missed that fight. Been in the Silvers with Barrons hunting a summoning spell for the Unseelie king. But I’d heard all about Dani and Ryodan saving the day down by the far end of…Oh!

I blinked but it was still there. Near the ancient chapel that abutted Rowena’s old quarters, where the IFP they’d used to destroy the HFK had been tethered, the night was darker than black.

The absolute absence of light mapped a perfect circle nearly the size of a small car. I pointed it out to the others. “Did either of you know about this?”

Barrons shook his head.

Dancer sighed. “I was hoping we’d killed the Hoar Frost King before it managed to make one of its cosmic deposits, but it fed while we were untethering the IFP. It looks like the flatted fifth we were feeding it was a bloody rich source.”

As if we’d needed any reminders why we were here or how dire our situation, hovering near the south chapel, a mere fifteen yards from the wall of the abbey, was the largest black hole I’d seen yet.

“And if it expands enough to reach the wall?” I demanded. I knew the answer. I wanted someone to tell me I was wrong.

“If it behaves like the one we saw beneath Chester’s,” Barrons said, “the entire abbey and everything in it will disappear.”

“Best case scenario,” Dancer disagreed. “I’ve been studying these things, tossing in small objects. Each one I’ve seen was suspended aboveground. I believe they all are, since the HFK took the frequency it wanted from the air and left its deposit in the same place. Which makes sense because once the sound waves contacted another object, they would no longer have emitted undiluted frequency. Each item I tossed in was instantly absorbed and the anomaly grew slightly. Worth noting, its growth was not proportionate to the mass of the item absorbed.”

“For fuck’s sake, what’s your point?” Barrons growled.

“I’m making it. When the hole beneath Chester’s absorbed Mac’s ghouls—which glided aboveground, by the way—it sucked them upward and in. Nothing I’ve tossed to any of the black holes was in direct contact with another object.”

Maybe I didn’t know the answer. Maybe the answer was worse than I’d thought.

“Worst case scenario,” Dancer continued, “it’ll devour the abbey and everything it’s touching, sensing it all as a single large object.”

“But the abbey is touching the earth!” I exclaimed.

Dancer said, “Precisely.”

“How quickly could it absorb it, if it did?” Barrons demanded.

“No way of knowing. It could be the holes will always suck things upward and in, provided the object is small enough that it doesn’t counter the pull of the thing’s gravity. It could be very large objects like the earth are beyond their ability to tackle and it would merely take a chunk of the abbey. If it emits inadequate gravitational force, one might assume matter would separate under oppositional tension as competing gravities reach critical inertia. Problem is, I can’t confirm they function identical to what we understand as black holes, and frankly that understanding is limited and speculative. Performing an experiment elsewhere might topple an unstoppable cascade of dominoes.”

“Sum it up,” I said tersely.

“Bottom line: I suggest we don’t let the black hole touch the abbey even if it means tearing the place down to get it out of the way.”

9

“Out of dark a hero forms, city’s knight that serves no throne…”

Jada stared into the night, watching through the window as visitors passed from sight beyond the columns of the grand entrance of the abbey.

She’d known they would come. Those who wanted her to be someone she was no longer, someone who would never have survived those insane, bloody years in the Silvers.

They thought she’d stolen their Dani away. She hadn’t. They thought she was split. She wasn’t.

She was what Dani had become.

Which wasn’t the Dani they’d known.

But how could they expect a teenager who’d leapt into a Silver to come out the same five and a half years later, as if nothing had happened to her while she was gone?

It wasn’t possible.

Fourteen-year-old Dani was as irretrievable as anyone’s youth.