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Holy hell, she sifted out! I’d missed!
Furious, I slammed more bolts into the walls, into the floor. If I couldn’t kill her at least I could obliterate their horrific club from the face of our earth. I dumped energy from my body in powerful surges of lightning, then, abruptly, I was—
Sailing in space, crystal clear and cool, surrounded by an infinity of stars on a nebula-painted canvas of black velvet sky.
It was vast but I was enormous. It was ancient but I was, too. It was timeless but I was without end.
There was wind here. Gusting, swirling waves of it buffeting my body. It felt as if I might catch one and go shooting up higher, higher, before channeling the borrowed velocity to dive beneath a moon, perhaps go ricocheting out around a star.
I’d always thought space was still but it wasn’t, it was living and flowing, ebbing and changing. Not emptiness here but some kind of…dark matter that defied understanding, the stuff of the Cosmos, rife with possibility, as if all the hopes and dreams and desires that had ever been and would ever be were nestled deep within superdense molecules of darkness we could never comprehend, and, every now and then, something came along whose wings, or melody, rippled against that dark matter, stirring it up with lightning and song, with bolts of extreme high voltage, changing, waking, beginning something new, stitching things together in ways that defied comprehension, making connections, forging patterns and symmetry from chaos.
I felt a great breeze then and turned whatever head I had into the wind. An enormous black Hunter sailed along beside me, head rocking gently as it buffeted the waves, lips pulled back as it chuffed softly and turned its gargantuan head to fix me with a single glowing orange eye. Ready?
I frowned. For what?
I fly.
I see that.
You fly, too.
What was it saying? That I might remain here with it, flying through the greatest unexplored territory of all? Discover the secrets of the Cosmos, behold its ancient mysteries?
All of that and more.
But my people. This wasn’t my world. Mine was in danger once more, and probably always would be. My world needed me. I had a job to do.
I closed my eyes, willing it all to go away.
When I opened them again, I stood blinking repeatedly, blinded by the sudden, harsh light, the jarring transition.
I was in the club but things had changed while I’d drifted in the cosmic vision. The surviving Fae had vanished; sifted, flown or run away, leaving behind only the dead, the Nine and me.
“Dani.” Ryodan’s voice seemed to come from a great distance.
I blinked again, staring dazedly at the destruction around me.
Walls were splintered and crumbling. The floor was cleft by a fifty-foot-wide crevice with jagged edges that dropped to a bottomless abyss. The LED panels had been shattered, spraying bits of glass and wiring everywhere, and those people trapped beneath the floor were gone. I shivered. Fallen to their deaths down the gorge I’d carved. A small part of my brain said, A better death than the one they were facing. A bigger part said, Yet more people you failed to save.
The structure of Elyreum groaned, as timbers contorted in a hopeless effort to accommodate the compromised foundation.
“Dani,” Ryodan said again.
“Honey,” I heard Lor say. “Can you hear us?”
I nodded tightly.
“Put your hand down, Dani,” Ryodan said softly, carefully.
I hadn’t realized it was still raised. I stared at it, turning it this way and that, trying to process it. My left forearm had sprouted darkly beautiful obsidian thorns. It looked like a black velvet, studded opera glove.
I forced it to drop to my side.
“Look at me, Dani,” said Ryodan in a low, intense voice.
I turned slowly and met his gaze. His eyes flickered strangely, swirling with shadows and I saw, as clearly as if he’d spoken the words: Goddamn, I was right. She isn’t human. I knew it. Then, Shit, this wasn’t at all what I expected. Fuck!
The words hadn’t come to me in the usual manner of his silent communications—deliberately telegraphed. I’d gotten an entire memory attached to his first thought, nothing with the second.
