“What the hell happened here?” I demanded, joining Barrons and Ryodan, who were standing a careful distance away from the hole, wearing dripping, hooded black slickers.

“Early this morning a cult of those ‘See you in Faery’ fucks committed mass suicide by running into the goddamn hole,” Ryodan snarled. “Caught it on my surveillance cameras. A hundred or more raced into it like fucking lemmings off a cliff. It’s one thing if you want to die, but don’t bloody take the world with you.”

“Gee, maybe someone shouldn’t have encouraged their suicidal tendencies,” I said, appalled. “Perhaps if you hadn’t pandered to their delusions in your club—”

“Don’t even start with me.” Ryodan began to stalk menacingly toward me.

Barrons blocked him instantly. “Never. Threaten. Mac.”

Ryodan said coolly, “I wasn’t. I was merely moving toward her.”

“In a stalking manner,” Barrons said tightly.

“For fuck’s sake, it was a nonthreatening stalk. You know I’d never harm her.”

He wouldn’t? Hmmm. Good to know.

Barrons growled, “My brain fails to distinguish nuances of stalking where Mac is concerned. A stalk is a stalk. All must be terminated. Don’t fuck with me.”

Ryodan growled back, “Got it. Get over it. We have bigger problems. Besides, she doesn’t need protecting anymore.”

“The one who bears your mark doesn’t need it either. Doesn’t stop you from feeling the burn, does it?”

Ryodan had branded Dani. “Just how much do you feel from those tattoos?” I asked.

“Too bloody much,” Ryodan said curtly.

“Seriously.” I looked at Barrons. “How much?”

He regarded me in stony silence.

“I’m not letting this one go,” I said. “You felt my rage, even when the Sinsar Dubh was in control. That means you can sense a great deal more than you’ve ever admitted to me. How much?”

“A great deal,” he finally said.

I met his gaze and held it. Big, beautiful, dark, hard-to-handle man. I was proud to call him mine. Didn’t mean I wasn’t going to still have ferocious arguments with him. And no doubt the occasional knock-down-drag-out fight. But now wasn’t the time. You and I are going to talk later, I said silently.

He smiled faintly, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

I smiled back. It didn’t reach my eyes either. I notched my chin down that same warning bit he was throwing my way, perfectly able to give as good as I got.

Ryodan glanced between us and murmured, “She became what you thought she would. Lucky man.”

Barrons inclined his head, and his eyes said to me, I am.

And just like that the tension between us was shelved for later. Assuming we had a later.

I felt a brisk breeze and suddenly Jada was there, standing in front of me.

“What’s up, Mac?” she said, eyes bright.

And faintly red-rimmed. She’d been crying recently, maybe no one but me would notice but I know Dani. Her face was pure alabaster tension, freckles on snow. I pounced on her quickly, before she could get away from me, enveloping her in one of my daddy’s bear hugs, holding tight. She felt so slender and slight in my arms, so…fragile somehow. If anyone needed a hug, it was Dani. Whether she wanted it or not. Who knew how much time we had? I wasn’t wasting any of it. When she tried to break free, I said fiercely in her ear, “I love you, Dani, and I am going to hug you every now and then. Get used to it.”

I let her go, and she backpedaled instantly, but much of the tension in her face was gone and there was a flush of color rising in her cheeks. That was a start. Later I was going to make her talk to me, tell me if she’d been crying about Dancer or Shazam and exactly what was going on inside that brilliantly, defiantly curling-in-the-rain head of hers. So much had happened so quickly that it was difficult to remember it had only been two days since her meltdown at the abbey.

For a split second I felt almost as if I was hovering, out of my body, above us, looking down.

Me, Barrons, Ryodan, Dani.

And I had the oddest feeling of…rightness in the universe while looking down at us. I’d had lunch with my family. Now I was solving world problems with my other family. I glanced at Ryodan, who was observing me with a faint smile. When he nodded minutely, I realized that while Barrons could happily go off and be solitary for the rest of his existence, Ryodan wanted family. What Barrons said to him that night I’d been spying on them was true: Kas doesn’t speak. X is half mad on a good day, bugfuck crazy on a bad one. You’re tired of it. You want your family back. You want a full house, like the old days.

I nodded back. We would keep it intact. Protect it. Always have each other’s backs. Whatever it took.

“What the bloody hell happened to this hole?” Jada demanded, staring up at the sphere. “It wasn’t this big yesterday!” When Ryodan told her about the mass suicide, she said, “Once the ergosphere appeared, the gravitational pull increased, didn’t it?”

Ryodan nodded grimly. “That’s why we haven’t tried to tarp it. It’s strong enough that it may suck the tarp in.”

“Ergosphere?” I prodded.

“The outer, spinning rim is called the ergosphere,” Jada said. “Imagine having a sheet spread flat while you use a rotating drill on it. It’ll catch up the fabric as it spins, twisting it in. Whatever matter approaches the ergosphere will get caught and be subject to what astronomers call spaghettification, pulled thin as spaghetti before being sucked in. As the sphere increases in mass and density, the pull will grow even stronger, distorting space around it.”