The gangplank was too high for me to reach. Without a tentacle of my own—or, better yet, a rope—I’d have to go back up through the ship. By which time he’d be gone.
“Fuck!” I kicked the hull of theWidowmakerhard enough to splinter one of the boards, then stormed back inside. I went straight to the cargo hold, marched up to the hearth devil, and sliced the ropes securing him in place. “Hob, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right.” He looked me up and down. “You should know I’m immune to your little sex tricks, so don’t try anything, lady.”
“That man attacked my home and my friends. He did something to my grandson that I don’t know if I’ll be able to undo. And he got away. So, let me be very clear, little devil. I’m in no mood to fuck anyone or anything. But I’dverymuch like to kill something.”
Hob swallowed hard and remained silent.
“Start looking through Alex’s things,” I said. “Gather every scrap of paper, every spell and note and diagram, everything that will help us understand exactly what we’re dealing with.”
He eyed my knife. “Yeah, sure. Whatever. What are you gonna do?”
My back was already seizing up from being slammed around. I fished through my purse for a bottle of ibuprofen, dry-swallowed two, then grabbed my phone. As painful as that fight had been, this was going to hurt worse. “I have to call Jenny and tell her I lost Alex.”
“Dammit, do you have any clue how long it took me to prepare that place? To convince the owners to give me the keys and go away? To build the necessary protections in the galley? To run the ethernet cable for the gaming setup?”
CHAPTER 21
Temple
It was the betrayal at the signing of the Unseelie Treaty of Baltimore that changed me.
Not the betrayal itself, but the fact that it was so unsurprising. We’d spent most of 1980 and the early months of 1981 negotiating for peace.
It took less than a second for one bitter little shit of a fairy to shoot an iron-tipped arrow into her queen’s left eye and destroy that progress.
There were only so many fights you could fight, so many supernatural political schemes you could tear down, so many killers you could banish before it all began to feel familiar. Cyclical.
My family had done this for centuries. So had Ronnie’s. The Guardians Council had been training little girls to fight and die for even longer.
The world advanced swiftly but changed slowly. The hate and greed and evil carried on from one generation to the next. The players might be different, but the game remained the same.
Baltimore was the first time I felttired.
One angry fairy with an arrow. Now it was one corrupted ex-sidekick with an ancient spellbook. Destruction was so much quicker and easier than creation. The god of entropy had put his thumb on that scale when the universe was born.
“Thanks for that, asshole,” I muttered to myself.
“Excuse me?”
“Not you.” I rose from my chair. My right knee popped. I grimaced and grabbed my cane. Leaning heavily, I said, “I was talking to entropy.”
“And did you get an answer?”
“Every day, he erodes these old bones a little more. That’s his answer.”
I felt Margaret drift closer like a cool spring draft.“You’re right. He is an asshole.”
I chuckled, but my humor melted quickly. “If we don’t stop R’gngyk, the world goes to hell. If we do...” I shrugged. “All we’ve done is buy ourselves a reprieve until the next monster like Alex Barclay comes along. It’s like trying to fight a river with a fork.”
“You’re a bundle of sunshine today, aren’t you? I thought you were supposed to be studying Annette’s new pet.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I don’t regret the life I’ve had, the battles I’ve fought.” I sent my awareness through the walls to check on the cat. He was licking himself with a tongue that resembled a six-inch-long leech. I grimaced and turned away. “It was never enough.”
“It never will be,”she said matter-of-factly.“But to the people we’ve saved, it was everything.”
“Do you ever regret it?” I asked. “Getting caught up in this life? Dying so young?”
