“I know,” Anyan soothed. “We all are.”

Ryu had been watching our exchange, his frown deepening. He was about to speak, when we felt a familiar tingle in the air: First Magic.

Terk popped in a few seconds later on the carpet in front of Anyan and me. Instead of his usual dramatic entrance, however, this time he stumbled and fell. Partly because he was holding another large envelope, but I also remembered Capitola saying he was worn out from the last raid.

With a worried little cry, I sprang forward to help the brownie to his feet. He grasped my fingers so I could pull him upright, but he looked up at me with such sad sets of eyes that I went ahead and picked him up for a cuddle. He nestled against me, cooing gently, as I walked back to the couch to hand the envelope to Anyan.

As the barghest opened Capitola’s missive, he looked at me skeptically.

“Jane,” he began, “you really might not want to… Shit.”

Whatever he’d been about to say was cut off as he glanced down at the papers in his hands.

He got up and strode out of the room, pulling his cell phone out of his back pocket as he went.

I smiled down at the fuzzy little creature in my arms, and Terk smiled back, blinking all six black eyes at me so that he showed off his long lashes. I laughed, and he chittered something at me in what the supes called “old tongue,” the ancient language spoken by those of the First Magics.

“Can I get you anything?” I asked. “Are you thirsty?”

Terk chittered away, waving one of his little hands in front of my chest and nodding.

“Um, I’ll take that as a yes… Would you like water? Or soda?”

Terk chittered again, still waving his little hand.

“Umm… I’ll bring you some water and I have some Coke… I’ll bring both.”

Gently, I set the little brownie down at my feet then went to fetch him a drink. I could hear Anyan swearing from his bedroom, and I wondered what was going on. Just as I’d walked back to the couch, and knelt down to place the two glasses I’d filled by Terk, the barghest reentered the room, snapping shut his cell phone.

“Shit’s hit the fan in the Borderlands,” he said. “Cap is concerned we have a leak; that’s why she sent Terk. Because something has caused a panic among the enemy. The couple of remaining labs that different groups have been surveilling and preparing to raid went ahead and self-destructed last night. Everyone dead: patients, ‘doctors,’ everybody.”

I flipped through the pages Anyan had handed me: grainy faxed pictures of rooms with bodies strewn about, a map of the Borderlands with a smattering of little red Xs indicating the locations of labs, and a note from Capitola that read, “Someone’s getting paranoid. Have you discovered more? And has someone shared with your suspect? Call me if your line is safe.”

Rage began to burn in me, and I looked up at Anyan.

“He’s getting rid of the evidence. He knows he’s close to getting caught, so he’s getting rid of the evidence. He’ll just burn everything to the ground, kill everyone he doesn’t trust, and it’ll be like none of this ever happened, for him.”

The room was silent, everyone watching Anyan and me.

“We can’t let him get away with this, Anyan,” I said, my voice deepening with passion. “He needs to pay for what he’s done…”

The barghest’s eyes stared into mine, his glowing with understanding and compassion. Then his eyes dropped to about knee level on me, and I realized everyone else was also staring right behind me.

“What the fuck,” I said irritably as I arched my back to peer over my shoulder behind me.

Nothing there. So I looked down.

To find the “adorable” little brownie thrusting his pelvis at me and making spanking motions, one hand behind his head in maximum porn-star imitation.

“You little shit,” I swore, turning around to confront Terk. For his part, he blinked up at me, smiling roguishly. With a wink and a kiss blown from one of his tiny hands, he apparated with a poof.

I stood there, staring at where the brownie had just been, so many feelings flooding my system I couldn’t even begin to separate them.

“Oh. My. God,” I said, clenching my fists. “Is there anyone else who wants to take a potshot at Jane? Anybody? Anybody?”

I turned back around to face the room, where the boys were staring at me like I was a live hand grenade. Hell, I felt like a live hand grenade.

Because I could see it, see it all already. Just like had happened after my first visit to the Compound, Jarl was going to wreak havoc in people’s lives—killing, kidnapping, maiming—and then he was going to let a bunch of his cronies take the blame, or the bullet, and nothing would happen to him. He’d continue in his position of power, in his cushy life at the Compound, with a few people suspecting something but nobody acting.

Meanwhile, my mother was dead, Iris was dead, all those other women were dead. Or sitting in hospital rooms, victims of atrocities, not knowing if they’d ever get their magic back.

And it’s not like this setback was going to stop him. Jarl had lived centuries. He’d just wait for everyone to forget this latest kerfuffle—or die off—and then he’d be back at it once again. Or he’d concoct another half-baked, crazy scheme that involved other people’s pain and suffering.

“We have to do something,” I ground out, surprised at the pain in my own voice. I’d been keeping it together pretty well up until now. Trying to keep my eye on the prize: catching Jarl. Now that I saw that all of this might be in vain, cracks were spidering my veneer. I didn’t know how much longer I could hold.

Both Ryu and Anyan stepped forward, but I was tired of comforting words, placating gestures. So I took a step back from both of them.

“No,” I said, my voice stronger. “We have to do something.”

Both men looked at me, then at each other, then back at me.

“Jane,” Ryu said, but I shook my head.

“No, Ryu. No excuses. We have to figure out what we can do.”

“And we will,” Anyan said. “We just need a little more time. We’re all exhausted, especially you…”

That’s when I realized they were never going to do anything. Everyone in that room except for me, even Anyan, was such a part of the power structure that no one here would ever do anything. Attacking an Alfar like Jarl was, for them, like attacking the Pentagon, and they couldn’t even see that fact.

They think they’re doing something, but the fact is that they’re giving up the moment things look difficult, because they can’t imagine really rocking the boat…

Standing there, I had a sudden moment of clarity. Or at least I thought it was clarity at the time. Looking back, I realized it was the sort of “clarity” that is really the hangover effects of that potent cocktail comprising a lack of sleep, grief, stress, and overweening anxiety.

I am going to have to do it myself, I realized. I am going to have to take on Jarl.

With that thought came a curious sense of calm. I’m an English lit nerd, as everyone knows, and one of my favorite authors is James Joyce. It took me forever to understand what he was all about when I first read his book of short stories, Dubliners. They’re the coolest short stories that all end with their protagonist having an epiphany: one of those lightbulb moments when everything becomes clear. But in some of the short stories, like “Araby,” the epiphany was definitely important to the character, but I could also see that his “epiphany” was really a shortsighted reaction to an event, and one that would get the character into trouble in the long term.

Then I read Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. That book is five chapters, and each chapter ends with this great big epiphany that totally changes Stephen Dedalus’s perception of the world and his place in it. He has this transcendent moment and then bang: The next chapter starts with him living through the issues, problems, and backlash of whatever choice his epiphany led him to make in the preceding chapter. I finally realized that Joyce’s epiphanies weren’t wrong or right; they just were. The epiphanies brought a kind of momentary clarity that would soon be dispelled, but in that moment they were all-encompassing.

And that’s the sort of calm I felt right at that moment. I felt as if I’d realized something so fundamental that, for me, it was as important as realizing the earth orbited the sun. Granted, I should have known to distrust such emotions from reading my Joyce, but whatever. The power of the epiphany is that you don’t realize it’s slightly batshit till after you’ve acted on it.

It’s all up to me, was my epiphany, my moment of clarity. I also realized I couldn’t let anyone know what I’d realized.

They’ll try to stop you, I told myself. I wasn’t sure yet what they’d try to stop, but I knew something was cooking in my overwrought brainpan. So act normal.

And normal I acted. I apologized, then sat down and watched TV with Daoud and Caleb. Ryu and Anyan talked strategy for a while, then both went to make some phone calls. Anyan tried to get me to go train with him, but I begged off, claiming exhaustion. I went to my room early, saying I wanted to shower and hit the hay. And I did take a shower, but I also packed up my bag with what I thought would be good sneaking-away items.