Meryl sat up. She rubbed her face, looking down at Murdock first, then over at me.

I held my hand out to her. “Are you all right?”

She nodded groggily as she took my hand and swung her feet around to sit next to me. “Yeah. I was just trying to remember the last time I woke up in a graveyard with two guys.”

“What happened?” I asked.

Disbelief etched itself across her face. “You don’t know?”

I cocked my head sideways to try to read her face better. “Did I do something?”

Confused emotions played across her face, as she searched for an answer. “Uh, yeah, you did.”

I looked down at Gerin. “The last thing I remember is you showing up.”

If possible, her eyebrows rose higher. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

She gave me a strange look. “You don’t remember anything after I stopped the fighting?”

I shook my head. A sick, frustrated feeling crawled into my chest. How was I going to deal with the frustration of not remembering again? “Dammit, Meryl, why can’t I remember?”

Meryl gave my arm a squeeze. “Don’t worry about it now. You will.”

“What if I don’t?”

She looked up at me with a small smile. “Then we’ll never know why you’re bald.”

I ran my hand over my head and discovered why the air felt so cold. Smooth skin met my touch. Even my eyebrows had vanished. I pursed my lips. “I guess I missed more than a few things.”

Meryl hopped off the vault. She stooped and picked up something. Her face became still, then stricken. She turned away abruptly, and I realized she was crying. I slid off the vault and wrapped my arms around her. She actually let me. I kissed the top of her head. “What is it?” I asked.

She leaned her head against my chest. “I couldn’t save the drys. I made a choice, and they died because of it.”

I knew Hala was gone, but now I realized that I only felt Meryl’s own essence inside her, not all the drys she had held within when she purged Gerin’s spell. I didn’t know how many there had been. I couldn’t even begin to fathom the loss. “What choice?” I said.

She wiped her nose with the sleeve. “It doesn’t matter. It had to be done.”

She held her hand out to show me a small silvered acorn resting in her palm. “Seed of an oak.”

“The promise of the Grove,” I added. Even without touching it, I could feel that spark of essence within it, the potential for new life.

Meryl let it fall from her hand into the crater. It rolled down into the barren remains of what had happened there, a hope awaiting the right moment to become something more. We didn’t say anything for the longest time.

Meryl looked up at me. “Want a lift?”

I grinned. “I didn’t want to ask.”

We wound our way through the gathering police and Guild agents and slipped in among the trees. As we walked into the silence of the graveyard, Meryl slipped her arm through mine. “Just so you know, Connor, this date totally kicked ass.”

“Not a date,” I said. She jabbed me in the ribs.

As I dozed listening to the steady rhythm of the heart monitor, I scratched my head for the umpteenth time. A week’s worth of growth made a good stubble, but it itched like hell under a knit cap. At least I had some eyebrows back.

“Where’s Ryan?”

I lifted my head and smiled. “He’ll be here soon. I told him I would wait.”

Keeva looked at me from her hospital bed, eyes dim, face pale. “Gerin?”

“Dead.”

“Good,” she said. She pushed herself up into a sitting position. “How long have I been out?”

“About a week. You took a nasty hit to the head,” I said. Joe had made me promise not to stell her. He hated when someone didn’t like him.

“I can’t believe what I did,” she said.

I stretched in the chair. “You weren’t yourself. Gerin was apparently poisoning you for weeks. We found Float all over your office.”

She stared at the ceiling. “This puts the Guild in a shambles, which probably makes you happy.”

“Don’t blame me. I just pointed out the cracks. You guys didn’t bother to fill them,” I said.

“How’s Manus?” she asked.

“Fine. His house was attacked, but they managed to fight it off.” I was glad Tibbet considered me a friend. I had never seen her go boggart. The reports I had read said it was not pretty when she was done.

“Nigel?” Keeva asked.

I nodded. “Recovering.”

“You’re awake,” Ryan macGoren said as he came through the door with the kind of flower bouquet hotel lobbies used. He set it on the nightstand and leaned down to kiss Keeva. She smiled up at him. I considered how frightening it was that the two of them had found each other.

I stood. “I’m going to go. Get better, Keeva. You’ve got a Guild to rebuild.”

Keeva sighed, then grimaced at some pain. “Thanks.”

I paused at the door. “Oh, and macGoren? Call the Office of the City Medical Examiner and speak to Janey Likesmith. Donate any equipment she asks for.”

He arched an eyebrow. “Is that my penance for being bad?”

I smiled as coldly as I knew how. “It’s just a start.”

I found Nigel’s room two flights up. He lay in a stone crèche that was highly charged with essence. He smiled when he saw me. “I wondered if you’d stop in.”

“Thought I’d return the favor.” I couldn’t resist the dig.

He nodded, the smile slipping. “I deserved that, I guess. Gillen Yor tells me you remember nothing.”

“Again,” I said. I leaned against the wall just outside the field generated by the crèche.

He nodded. “Bad habit, that.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“I remember Eorla and me entering the field of Gerin’s spell. He was already lost. Eorla and I stabilized it, but we couldn’t control it.”

“How did you convince Eorla to help?”

He rubbed the edge of the sheet that lay across him. “I appealed to her nature and her desire. Eorla and I have the same goals. We’re just on opposite sides of the debate,” he said.

I frowned. “In other words, you made a deal.”

He quirked his lips with a cagey smile. “Compromise, Connor. That’s how we get things done.”

I didn’t want to get into that particular conversation. “You’ll need all the compromising you can get. Gerin set back Seelie/Consortium relations fifty years.”

Nigel nodded. “Maybe not a bad thing. The Consortium needed a slap down.”

“So did the Guild,” I said.

It was his turn to frown. “I wish you wouldn’t take what happened between you and the Guild so personally, Connor. It’s shortsighted.”

I laughed. “Really? You guys didn’t seem to be very long-viewed when you were attacking each other.”

“There are matters of weight you know nothing about, Connor. Truly important matters that are more than just one man’s problem.” He used that superior tone he has when he’s lecturing the ignorant. I’d heard it often during my training. It didn’t intimidate me anymore.

Exasperated, I shook my head. “I’ve been thinking about what to say to you for a week, Nigel. Sometimes I thought I’d let it go, and sometimes I thought I was being petty. But you know what? I can’t let it go.

“Look at you. And the Guild. And the Consortium. Some of the most powerful fey in the world, who think they know better than anyone else, and one man was able to bring it all crashing down.”

I ticked off the list with my hands. “Gerin knew just how to manipulate each and every one of you. He waited until Briallen was away because he knew she would have sensed the drys in his staff. He turned Keeva into the good soldier because he knew her ambitions. He played Manus’s fear of competition to distract him. And you, Nigel, he laid little crumbs that led to the Consortium, because he knew your obsession with beating them. And you know what? A dead human boy and a druid with no ability wrecked everything for him. Not the ones with so-called ability.”

He shifted uncomfortably in the crèche. “That’s simplifying things a bit.”

“Is it? You’ve said to me on more than one occasion that I’ve left the path. Let me give you a bit of wisdom, Nigel. When you pick one path and never reconsider, you never know when you’re lost. That’s what’s happened to the fey.”