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“He wasn’t wrong about that,” Dolph admitted. He likely would have ignored the warnings and premonitions if it hadn’t been for the diary—the way the pages changed and adjusted themselves to the path time took.
“But how did it get here?” she asked.
“You gave it to me,” Dolph told her, confused.
“I didn’t,” Esta said. “I never had that until a few weeks ago. I couldn’t have brought it to you.”
Dolph’s brows rose at her insistence. “And yet you did.”
She’d brought it to him with a warning and with an ingenious garment that kept Nibsy’s bullet from piercing his skin. It had been a leap of faith to believe the girl when she’d first arrived, but after she’d saved his life, he’d had little choice.
Darrigan took her hand to calm her. “I didn’t know if it would work, but I figured that if you could exist simply because the possibility remained that you’d go back—if the diary could tell us about our deaths, even though we still lived—then maybe other possibilities could exist as well. I took a chance with Dakari, because I hoped that if he helped us, maybe we could use the loop in time that you have to create by sending the girl back to our advantage.”
Esta had gone silent, her eyes wide and unblinking. And then wonder broke over her features. “You played the possibilities,” she whispered to Darrigan. “You changed a past that had already happened from a future that might never be. Nibsy wouldn’t have been able to see the threat coming. Even if he’d been using the diary, he would have believed the entry there.”
Darrigan nodded. “Exactly. I’d hoped to keep everything close enough that the diary wouldn’t change so Nibsy wouldn’t realize what I’d done.”
“You’re a genius!” She kissed him.
And she didn’t stop.
Unaccountably uncomfortable by the display, Dolph cleared his throat.
“I hate to interrupt your moment,” Dolph said, stepping closer to the edge of the roof. “But this isn’t over yet.” He nodded toward the city beyond. “Something is happening to the streets.”
Jianyu and Viola had come over to where they stood by then, along with their friends.
“The Order was using the grid to channel power to the Brink,” Jianyu explained.
“It’s more than that,” Dolph told his old friend as he watched the streets below vibrate uneasily with the glow of an otherworldly power. Cold energy corrupted by ritual magic was thick in the air. The whole city seemed on the verge of breaking apart. “Something has gone wrong.”
“The attack on the ritual and on the men of the Order was nothing more than a distraction,” Jianyu told them. “This was Jack’s plan, for the ritual to run out of control. If it is not stopped, the electric power it is channeling will overwhelm magic built deep within the city, and when it reaches the Brink…”
“It will short it out like an overblown fuse,” Dolph said. “Like half the electricity in the city does.”
He’d wanted the Brink to fall. That one hope—even more than his desire for revenge—had been the reason he’d remained in hiding these past months. But he didn’t want it to fall like this.
It wasn’t just the building beneath his feet. The entire city was awash with terrible power. Manhattan had become a city of fire. Its streets were lit with magic that crackled and swelled, and beyond it, the Brink wavered, pulsing with the energy that was coursing into it.
“We have to cut off the power,” Esta said.
She was right. If they didn’t stop this madness, the grid of the streets wouldn’t be able to hold the flow of electricity much longer. Even now the streets threatened to shatter.
“There isn’t time,” Harte told her. “We don’t even know where to begin.”
“With the statue,” Jianyu told them, pointing up toward the gilded Diana glowing with light. “We can start there.”
But when Dolph looked up to the towers, it was not only Diana who stood against the night. A girl clad in one of the Order’s robes stood with her arms wide. Her golden hair glinted in the light.
“No—” Viola screamed as the girl began to fall.
FURY AND VENGEANCE
Harte watched in horror as Ruby tumbled from the tower, her dark robes like a leaf carried in the breeze, and then suddenly he felt the brush of Esta’s magic, and Ruby Reynolds was there, steady and alive, standing on her own two feet.
As the others rushed forward in relief and confusion, something drew his attention across the rooftop. Jack.
In the shock of Dolph’s appearance and the concern over Cela’s injury, everyone had forgotten about Jack. They’d left him lying unconscious where he’d fallen, but in the meantime, he’d come to. Ruby’s little leap must have been his doing—a distraction to ensure he could sneak off back to the machine.
