But his eyes said he was proud of the woman I’d become. And my eyes said that I was proud he was my man. And we smiled at each other, then he said something I never thought I’d hear Jericho Barrons say. He said—

“Fuck!” Alina exploded. “Mac, the Sinsar Dubh is here!”

For a moment I simply couldn’t process what Alina had said. We’d left the Sinsar Dubh trapped in the boudoir. It could only be here if (a) it had broken free of the stones, (b) found a body to carry it, and (c) escaped mere minutes after we’d left.

I couldn’t feel it at all. My sidhe-seer senses were completely muted by the presence of the song inside me. I spun wildly, trying to locate it, then shot a frantic look at Alina and she pointed behind me.

I whirled to find myself ten paces from the Unseelie princess we’d left cocooned in the boudoir.

Her mouth stretched impossibly wide, reminding me of Derek O’Bannion when he’d been possessed by the first Book, revealing rows and rows of whirling, sharp metal teeth. For a moment I thought she was going to eat me, bite off my head and swallow it, but she convulsed as if retching then abruptly a dark storm exploded from her jaws.

It darted straight for me.

I couldn’t sift. I had little True Magic, but I had the song, and I needed to sing it, now, to destroy the Sinsar Dubh once and for all. I opened my mouth but the inky cloud the Unseelie princess had retched narrowed to a thin funnel of toxic dust and shot straight for it. I clamped my teeth shut again so hard it hurt my entire skull. Then Barrons was lunging, trying to intercept the dark storm in his own impossibly wide jaws, transforming into the beast as he moved.

The cloud retracted into the Unseelie princess and, as I watched, stunned, Barrons twisted in midair, slapped a crimson rune on her I’d not even known he’d been carrying and had no idea where he’d gotten it from, then grabbed her by the shoulders and ground his mouth to hers in a savage kiss.

He sucked the Sinsar Dubh right out of the princess’s body in one long lip-locked inhale.

The Unseelie princess collapsed, dead, to the ground.

And all I could think was, Barrons could kill with a kiss? I thought I’d known what he was. I narrowed my eyes. I’d kissed that lethal mouth many times.

He whirled and bore down on me, eyes obsidian, full black, no crimson sparks, nothing left of my Jericho at all, and he roared, “Fucking sing, Mac, I can’t hold it long!”

The shadow exploded out of his mouth as he spoke. He shuddered violently and clawed at the air, and forcibly sucked the Sinsar Dubh back in.

I shot Alina a frantic goodbye, locked eyes with Barrons, and I opened my mouth and released the Song of Making.

I will never be able to put into words what it is. Frequency that elevates to a level of being we don’t yet understand while rendering insignificant the many daily burdens we think we carry. The song was made in Heaven, if such a place exists, by angels, spun of the divine.

For a time I was nowhere and everywhere listening to—no, being—music of such exquisite perfection that I was whole and right and I knew absolutely everything and understood it all. Each detail of existence was revealed, without enigma or confusion. I apprehended myself, the world, others, with exquisite clarity. Our entire existence was fluid and living and, as a race, a planet, a universe, it was all connected and we were all part of one another. And when we hurt one another, we hurt ourselves. And when we warred, we hurt the universe, and that was ourselves. And we were so stupid sometimes I couldn’t believe the song even hung around and let us use it.

As humans, so much is mysterious to us. As the woman that sang the ancient melody, everything was clear and it all fit. The universe was precisely as it was meant to be. No Fate. Checks and balances. The universe listed toward life and beauty, always had, always would. We were the universe: each and every one of us, light or dark, right or wrong, we were tiny, essential cogs in the grand and mighty wheel. Somehow, even the Sinsar Dubh.

As the song poured out of me, I began to glow and turn translucent, and I thought, Well, shit, maybe I’m going to die after all. But I didn’t care because I’d done what was needed. I’d been the cog it was most desirable for me to be.

A brilliant blaze of light exploded from my body, and the air was filled with countless tiny, fluid arrows of light.

Events unfolded in slow motion to me then, though later they would tell me it all happened in a split second. I suspect I was somehow out of time by that point, insubstantial, changed by the melody flowing through me.

A thousand of the golden dazzling things darted into the black hole, which began to shiver and shake, then shrink.

The destructive black sphere grew smaller and smaller until, with an audible pop, it imploded and was simply gone, leaving nothing but the deep trench dug beneath it, and ropes cordoning off normal, healthy reality.

Countless more arrows exploded forth, darting out into the world, like the Enterprise entering warp speed, seeking out the rest of the black holes.

We’d done it. The Song of Making was free and healing our world!

I turned to watch each of my companions pierced in turn with arrows shot by me. Mea culpa. Please let them live, I begged whatever god had created the melody.

The brilliant lances of light passed straight through Dani and Dancer, and Ryodan, too, coming out on the other side.

Then one vanished inside Christian but didn’t pass through. He began to shudder and snarl, and just when I thought we were definitely losing him, it abruptly shot out and moved on. Christian shook his head hard, looking dazed.