“V’lane, I need you!” I cried, releasing his name.
It uncoiled from my tongue and swelled, choking me, then slammed into the back of my teeth, forcing my mouth wide.
But instead of soaring into the night sky, it crashed into an invisible wall and plummeted to the pavement, where it lay fluttering weakly, a fallen dark bird.
I nudged it with the toe of my boot.
It disintegrated.
I turned my face to the wind, east and west, north and south. It eddied around me, buffeting me from all sides, slapping me with hundreds of tiny hands, and I suddenly could feel the LM out there, working his dark magic to bring the walls down. It was changing things.
I flexed the sidhe-seer place in my mind, focused, turned inward, seeking, hunting, and for an instant I actually got a flash of him, standing at the edge of a stark, sheer black cliff, in an icy place, red-robed, hands raised—and was that a heart held high, dripping blood?—chanting, summoning arts powerful enough to crash a prison wrought from living strands of the Song of Making, and it was doing something to all magic, even Fae, making it go terribly wrong.
I squeezed my inner eye shut before it got me killed. I was standing in the middle of a street in a rioting Dublin, trapped in the city, alone.
V’lane would not be sifting in to save the day.
The mob was less than a block away. The marauding front-liners had just noticed my car and were roaring like maddened beasts. Some toted baseball bats, others swung batons taken from fallen Garda.
They were going to beat my Ferrari to smithereens.
There wasn’t time to dig out my cell phone and try to call Barrons. They would be on me in seconds. I knew what happened to rich people during riots. I also knew they wouldn’t believe I wasn’t rich. I wasn’t about to get beheaded with the aristocracy just because every now and then I got to drive a nice car that didn’t even belong to me.
I grabbed my backpack from the car, and ran.
A block away another mob approached.
I plunged into it, and lost myself inside it. It was a horrible, smelly, hot, surging mass of humanity. It was rage unstop-pered, frustration unleashed, envy unsuppressed. It howled with victory as it looted, smashed, and destroyed.
I couldn’t breathe. I was going to throw up. There were too many people, too many Fae, too much hostility and violence. I swam in a sea of faces, some feral, some excited, others as frightened as I imagined I must look. Fae are monsters. But we humans hold our own. Fae might have incited this riot, but we were the ones keeping it alive.
The cobbled stones were slippery from the misting rain. I watched in horror as a young girl fell, crying out. She was trampled in seconds as the crowd swept on. An elderly man—why on earth was he out here?—went down next. A teenage boy was jostled into a streetlamp, rebounded, lost his balance, and vanished from view.
For time uncounted then, I was driven by a single imperative: Stay on your feet. Stay alive.
I rode the crowd, an unwilling mount, feet trapped in the stirrups, from one block to the next. Twice I managed to break free, fight my way to the outer fringes, only to be drowned in the herd again, propelled forward by its relentless stampede.
I feared two things: that they would gallop me straight into a Dark Zone, or that the Sinsar Dubh would make a sudden appearance, and I’d fall to my knees, clutching my head. I couldn’t decide which death would be worse.
My cell phone was in my backpack, but there wasn’t enough room to maneuver in the crowd and get to it. I worried that if I slipped my pack from my shoulders, it would be jerked from my hands and carried off. My spear was cold and heavy under my arm, but I was afraid if I whipped it out, I might be speared by it in the crush.
Unseelie.
I had baby food jars of it in my pockets.
With its dark life in my veins I would be able to break free of the mob.
We were nearing the edge of the Temple Bar District. The Dark Zone wasn’t far. Were we being deliberately driven? If I were able to float above this riot, would I see Unseelie herding us from behind, cattle to the slaughter?
“Sorry,” I muttered. “Oops, didn’t mean to hit you.” Without pissing off anyone badly enough to get myself punched, I managed to extract a jar from my pocket. I’d twisted the lids too tight to open them one-handed. I jostled for space, and popped the lid. Someone shoved into me and I lost my hold on it. I felt it hit my boot and then it was gone.
Gritting my teeth, I dug for another one. I had three in my pockets. The rest were sealed in plastic bags tucked inside my boots. I’d never be able to get to them in the crush. I was more careful with this jar, easing it out, clutching it for dear life—which I hoped it was. I had to get out of the crowd. I knew my landmarks. I was two blocks from the Dark Zone. I managed to pop the lid but was unwilling to duck my head to eat it, for fear of taking an elbow in the eye, freezing or stumbling in pain, and going down.