“Wetlands. There’s a caste of Unseelie that’s nuts about swamps, and they take you down as fast as Shades. We don’t go near them.”
“And these?” Squares, heavily outlined in bold black marker.
Dani flinched. “Some of ‘em ‘ve been rounding up kids, really young ones. They keep ‘em for a while before they … do things with ‘em. We try to find where and break ‘em out.”
I inhaled sharply and kept walking. I stopped when I reached a column of dates, with numbers written next to them that had been crossed out dozens of times.
The most recent date was January 1.
The number next to it was a few billion shy of the nearly seven billion it should have been.
I pointed a finger and didn’t even try to pretend it wasn’t shaking. “Is this date and number telling me what I think it’s telling me? Is that how many of us are left on this planet?”
“By our estimates,” Dani said, “total world population has been reduced by more than a third.” It was one of the few complete, well-spoken sentences I’d ever heard pass her lips. I looked at her sharply and caught a split second of a completely different Dani—a geeky, smart thirteen-year-old abandoned by everyone she’d ever trusted or loved, in a world gone mad. It was so quickly masked by an insouciant grin that I wondered if I’d really seen it at all. “Dude. Pretty intense, huh?” Her green eyes sparkled.
“Dude me one more time and you’re Danielle forever.” I looked back at the maps. I was never going to be able to sleep tonight. A third of our world’s population was dead. “How long was I … out of it? What’s the date?”
“January seventh. And, sorry, it just slips.”
“What does this have to do with V’lane?” Keep talking, I told myself, so you don’t melt down. We’d lost a third of our planet’s population! More than two billion people were dead! They’d been dying the whole time I’d been a mindless animal. The guilt was crushing.
I followed the maps around the room, looking for Georgia, feeling sick inside. The state had two inky spots smudged on it, one over Savannah and one over Atlanta, both of which were only a few hours from Ashford, Georgia, my hometown. Most of the spots on the maps were over major cities. “What are the dark smudges?” I asked tightly, afraid I knew.
“Dark Zones.” My face must have betrayed my thoughts, because she added hastily, “V’lane checked on your folks. He says they’re okay.”
“Recently?”
She nodded. “He keeps watch. Says he does what he can.”
I drew a deep breath, the first since I’d laid eyes on the maps. “How did the Shades spread so quickly?” I demanded. “How did they even get overseas? Is the power out everywhere in the world?”
“V’lane says initially other Unseelie were helping ‘em, ‘til they decided the Shades were chewing up their new playground too fast. Now he says Unseelie are fighting each other for territory. Some of ‘em are even trying to get the power back up, to keep the Shades out.”
I remembered the sky battle I’d seen, wondered what it had been about.
“One time when I went into Dublin looking for you, I saw humans walking with Rhino-boys, going down into a boarded-up bar. Didn’t follow, ‘cause it freaked me out so bad. They were girls, Mac. Dunno if they were Pri-ya, but they didn’t look like it. Looked like they went ‘cause they wanted to.” Her lambent gaze clouded. “Mac, I think Unseelie are the new vamps to some fecked-up groupies out there.”
“Does V’lane know all this? Are the Seelie doing anything about it?” I was horrified. I knew my generation. We had a world of opportunities for instant gratification at our fingertips, with few or no censors, and most of my friends hadn’t had a daddy like mine, who said things like, Don’t confuse intensity of emotion with quality of emotion, baby, when I’d gotten tangled up with class heartbreaker Tommy Ralston. The more he’d hit on my girlfriends, the harder I’d worked to keep him. It was like I was addicted to whatever made me feel most intensely, even though it was hurting me. Pain is not love, Mac. Love makes you feel good. I missed my dad. I needed to see my parents. See with my own eyes that they were all right.
“V’lane says they’re trying to stop the worst of the Unseelie,” Dani said, “but they can’t kill each other, ‘cause they don’t die and we got the sword and the spear. V’lane says the Seelie want ‘em back, but so far none of ‘em have tried to take ‘em from us. He says it’s just a matter of time, though.”
Chaos. It was complete chaos. Unseelie free, fighting Seelie, fighting one another, acquiring human groupies like Mallucé’s band of Goth worshippers. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Mallucé’s cult had simply converted allegiance to the latest, greatest exotic danger in town.
A third of the world population gone!
All because we’d failed to keep the walls up on Halloween. Because I’d failed. I closed my eyes and rubbed them, as if it might somehow rub the horrifying reality of a world with a third less people right out of existence, or at least out of my mind.
“At first, we had no clue what was going on anywhere. No phones or text messages. No email. No Internet. No TVs or radios. S’like living in the Stone Age. Well, maybe not that bad,” she allowed with a grin, “but you get the picture. Then V’lane offered to help. Said he could sift around, gather intel, find out what was going on, carry messages, take Ro places. After he iced her like that, she didn’t trust him one bit. Not that she ever trusted him. But it was an offer she couldn’t refuse.”
“What about the Sinsar Dubh? I take it no one’s gotten their hands on it yet?”
She shook her head.
“Has anyone seen it recently?”
She shook her head again. “I think that’s the real reason Ro let you stay, and would have even if they’d voted against you. Just woulda pushed you ‘round harder. Her and V’lane been swapping information, bartering with each other. She told him what I told her I saw in the street the day I rescued you—”
“I wondered how V’lane knew about that.” I might have found his knowledge of the Unseelie Princes incriminating, except both V’lane and Barrons always seemed to have the inside scoop on everything. It no longer surprised me.