What time is it?” I asked Jack.

He leaned into the kitchen. “We’ve got about twenty minutes before David’s friend said Raquel’s trial starts.”

“Do you know where she’s being tried?” Lend asked.

“Central Processing.” I tried to keep the sadness out of my voice. At least I wouldn’t have a hard time finding it. “I’m going to go to the hearing.”

“What?” Lend, Reth, and Jack all said at the same time.

I shrugged. “Either all IPCA is in on this and we’re completely screwed no matter what, or Anne is acting on her own, in which case we might have an advantage with our new information. Regardless, that’s the only place we know for sure Raquel will be before she potentially disappears forever. I’m going to go, and I’m going to get her back.”

I expected Lend to freak out, to yell that I couldn’t do it and it was too stupid to even consider. Which was why his soft voice saying “Okay” caught me off guard.

“Wait, okay? Seriously?”

“Seriously,” he answered. “I want this stupid curse broken more than anything. And I know you need to help Raquel. If anyone can do this, you can.”

I beamed, suddenly flush with warmth that he believed in me that much.

“What can I do?” he asked.

“For this to work, we need to find a computer system to break into.” I looked up at Jack. “I don’t suppose either one of you have previously undisclosed hacker abilities?”

Jack shook his head. “Not one of my many talents, sadly. But if you have a cherry stem I can show you a really cool one.”

“I’m not great,” Lend said. “You need Arianna.”

“I think you’re right. Jack, can you take Lend back and bring Arianna here?”

“But—” Lend started.

“No, there’s not anything you can do here. Go back home and figure out what, exactly, your mom and the others want me to do. If I’m going to make a decision about them, I need all the information I can get. Also please put some clothes on because sleeping, nude Lend is a huge distraction I can’t deal with right now.”

He laughed. “Okay, fine. Be careful. And come back soon.”

“I will.” I stood and walked into Raquel’s bedroom, then into her walk-in closet just to be safe. This wasn’t a good time for Lend to pass out.

“I’ll be back!” Jack yelled out. I was about to go tell Reth my newest Save Raquel plan when I noticed half her closet was filled with the clothes I’d left behind. It was touching that she’d kept them, and just what I needed to cheer me up. Bleep if I was going to stage a rescue in a freaking pantsuit.

 

“… for the unauthorized release of a Level Seven paranormal, for the aiding and abetting of known IPCA fugitives, and for—” Anne’s voice grated to a complete stop as I walked into the room.

I smiled cheerily at the shocked faces looking down at us from a raised platform that curved along the far end of the huge, circular room. Eleven people, all from different countries, sat along the polished, dark wood table. They were each dressed impeccably in suits, the women with no-nonsense buns. I wasn’t sure, but it looked to me like most of them were exhausted under their severe exteriors.

As for me, I was in my best hot-pink shirtdress with a big black belt, matching black boots (worth the pain), and sparkly silver tights. I wasn’t going for subtlety.

“What are you doing here?” Anne-Whatever Whatever asked from her spot in the center of the table, her jaw nearly unhinged in shock as the door slid closed behind Reth and me. I kept my hand tucked in Reth’s elbow; in this lion’s den, Reth was a bit like a security blanket. A crazy, magical security blanket who would probably hurt me again soon but for now would definitely hurt these people if they tried to hurt me.

There was a lot of hurt potential, really.

“I’m here to represent the defendant,” I said.

Anne recovered quickly. She pulled out her communicator and typed something into it, smiling smugly at me. But then she looked down at her communicator and her smile turned into a frown. She pushed the buttons again; nothing.

“The communications system is down,” she snapped, glaring at a vampire standing in the corner. He had a typically handsome glamour, dark hair and nearly black eyes, but both his faces—the glamoured one and the corpse one underneath—looked confused.

“I don’t know—” he started, but she cut him off with another glare.

“Fix it.”

He pulled out his own communicator and started tapping furiously. I so owed Arianna, that undead little genius.

“Shouldn’t we get down to business?” I asked. For the first time I let myself look over to the side, where Raquel was sitting on a simple, hard chair. She didn’t have a massive desk to hide her, and seemed shockingly small there all by herself. Her suit was rumpled and some hair had escaped her perpetual bun. She met my eyes and looked impossibly sad. I wanted to hug her, but I had to wait.

“Evie, please,” she said. “Leave.”

“By all means, stay,” Anne said. “Have a seat. We’ll take care of you next.”

“Yeah, see, I think someone else is going to be on trial next.” Baring my teeth at her in a grin I pulled out my file folder. “I’ve got some interesting reading here. And I even brought copies for everyone so you don’t have to share.”

A distinguished-looking South African man on the end shook his head. “What is this? Another farce?”

“No, but bonus points for using a funny word. You really want to read what I have here. Anne, you’ll be especially interested, since you have a starring role.”

“Enough. Rhia—”

Reth quickly flicked his wrist at her; her mouth kept moving, but no sound came out. It was one of the most satisfying things I’d ever seen. Sure, that trick had sucked when he used it on me, but I wholly approved of it now.

“Whoops. I forgot to mention these are now closed proceedings. There will be no summoning of faeries, or my faerie friend will make sure it’s the last thing you ever say.” I walked forward, setting one of the photocopied sheets in front of each Supervisor. Several of them glared at me, but a few actually looked interested. One, a Chinese woman named Hong Li who had a bad habit of patting my head whenever we met at holiday parties even after I grew taller than her, actually looked amused.

Maybe not everyone here hated me, after all.

“Now, as you’ll see, the top sheet is a detailed record of everything that Raquel has discovered about Anne’s extracurricular activities.” I stepped back and watched, holding my breath. This was the critical part. Either this was going to blow the top off Anne’s operations, or the rest of them were already in on it and I was going to have to figure out a new tactic, stat.

Hong Li skimmed the paper, then sat up straighter, putting on reading glasses and scanning it again. She looked up at me. “What proof do you have?”

“The evidence Raquel has gathered, which includes names—dozens of names—of missing people that have been filtered through IPCA, and my personal eyewitness account of Anne talking and making deals with an unnamed faerie of the Unseelie Court.”

Anne slammed her fist down onto the table, still mouthing words furiously.

Hong Li looked back at me. “Evie, you have a history of lying and misleading this organization. How can we trust you now?”

I stared at her, willing her to see my earnestness. “Because I have no interest in any of this. If I wanted to disappear, I could have. If I wanted to burst in here and break Raquel out, I could have done that, too. But I thought it was more important that you all understand exactly what Anne is doing, and just what it means for the rest of the world if she’s successful. She’s using you—everyone, the entirety of IPCA—for her own ends. And surely things haven’t changed so much since I left that you’ve all forgotten why IPCA is here in the first place: to make the world safer. Not to help evil faeries, not to conspire with governments, and not to imprison and punish a woman who’s done nothing but try to fulfill the Charter to the best of her ability.”

Hong Li turned to look at the other Supervisors. Several looked outraged, still reading the sheets. One, a woman with a shock of curly red hair, looked terrified, all the blood draining from her face. And a couple of them looked entirely impassive.

“Let Anne-Laurie speak,” Hong Li said to Reth.

I turned to him, noting the slightly murderous expression on his face that flitted there after she gave him a command, and squeezed his arm. “Go ahead.”

He flicked his wrist, and Anne cleared her throat, standing. “Surely you aren’t going to believe the words of a paranormal girl known to have betrayed everything we stand for. Do I really need to go over her crimes yet again? She’s a stupid teenager with an inflated sense of self-importance and a dangerous level of arrogance.”

The handsome black man raised an eyebrow. “Be that as it may, these are serious charges, and I think it merits discussion. There have been many breaches of protocol since you were made Lead Supervisor, and I for one vote for immediate review.”

“I agree, Baruti.” Hong Li turned to Raquel. “Do you have more evidence to back up the claims here?”

Raquel sat up straighter in her chair. “I do.”

“Very well, we’ll—”

“That’s enough,” Anne snapped. “We’re done here.”

“Excuse me?” Hong Li asked, indignant.

“I said we’re finished. I deny the motion for review, and rule that Raquel is to be immediately and permanently locked up. As for the Level Seven, since she has proven she is no longer useful to IPCA in any capacity, she will be bagged and tagged and put into seclusion at a secret location.”

Hong Li slapped her hand against the table and stood, too. “Since when can you—”

“Since I am the only person here with any vision or sense of the direction IPCA needs to go to continue to protect the world. If you want to cow to the ramblings of an aberration of nature, please feel free to join her. I am not about to let her destroy what we’ve built here.”

“How can she destroy anything?” a blond man with impossibly square shoulders and a thick German accent asked.

“She’s currently working with a rebel group to subvert our work. And aside from that, she’s actively trying to open a gateway to another realm, which, in and of itself, could be disastrous for our world, but aside from that would allow all faeries to leave. Which would leave us entirely without their particular skills, and I think you all understand what that would mean. IPCA would dissolve. We would no longer be able to function at any capacity, leaving the world unprotected and at the mercy of the various paranormal elements we work so hard to contain.”

To my horror, the blond man looked like he was actually weighing her words. The redhead trembled—where had they even gotten her?—and a couple of other Supervisors were nodding.

But Hong Li, bless her head-patting heart, was having none of it. “You admit to it, then? Conspiring with unnamed faeries?”

Anne rolled her eyes. “I don’t have to answer to you.”

“I beg to differ,” Baruti said.

“Very well.” Anne nodded to the terrified redhead and they both started spouting off faerie names as fast as they could.

The Supervisors all started shouting at one another as lines of white light snaked along the walls.

“Raquel!” I yelled. “Time to go!” She ran to us. Reth was already holding the door open. I smashed the emergency alarm button every room in the Center had, briefly flashing back to the last time I’d done it to warn everyone that Vivian had gotten in, just after I’d found Lish’s body.

I would not lose anyone I loved tonight.

The alarm blared, so loud it made my teeth hurt, and all the lights dimmed as strobes went off. Reth said a word and raised his hand, making the air behind us shimmer and thicken like water as we ran out of the room and down the hall, Raquel and I on either side of Reth ready to take his hands.

“Too much iron in these walls,” Reth said, not even his perfect hair disturbed by his running. “Back to where we came in, if you please.”

I nodded, hoping that Jack and Arianna would take the alarm as my cue for them to leave. Jack was good at running, at least. Then I had a thought that made me feel sick. “We can’t leave Vivian here; they won’t take care of her. Do we have time—”

Reth jerked to a stop and threw me into the wall.

I didn’t even have time to register the faerie before whatever she had done slammed into where I had been standing—and straight into Reth. He stumbled back, falling to the ground as I watched in horror. Reth was Reth. He was perfect, and flawless, and supernaturally tough.

“All mine,” the faerie said, the same midnight-haired faerie I’d seen before. She walked up to me but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Reth on the ground. He let out a low sound, his golden voice tarnished, and tried to push himself up. He’d be too late. If she could do that to him …

Then I could do this to her. I lunged forward and slapped my palm against her chest, throwing open the connection there and pulling out as much as I could as fast as I could. It flowed into me, but instead of the living flame that Reth had, this soul was so cold it burned, like crystals of ice ripping through my veins, filling me and changing me and I had to stop it I didn’t want this inside me but I wanted more no, no, I didn’t want this, but—

“Evie!” Raquel pulled me away, breaking the connection, and I gasped, struggling to claw my way up from the ice crystals in my brain, this dark-blue, freezing haze of power cracking through my body. “Evie!”

I blinked, then finally managed to focus on Raquel’s eyes.

“Okay,” she said, her accent thicker when she was upset. “Okay, you’re okay.”

The midnight faerie staggered backward, slumping against the wall, and the sight filled me with shame and self-loathing. But I didn’t have time for that, either. I stumbled forward and knelt next to Reth.

“Reth? Reth! Are you okay? We need to get out of here.”

He pushed himself up from the ground, his arms trembling in a way that was so human and vulnerable it made my breath catch. I held out my hand and he took it to finish standing and, for the first time ever, my hand was warmer than his.

“Are you okay?” I whispered.

He looked at me and something—something was off. Something was not quite right underneath his glamour. Silently, he held out his other hand to Raquel as a door appeared on the wall in front of us and we walked out of the Center for what I very, very much hoped would be the last time.