“I can’t believe that rotten Butterbutt changed me into a human when she banished me. She did it on purpose; I just know she did. Of all the double-dealing . . . Now what am I supposed to do? I can’t stand around like this,” I said, waving my hand toward my torso. A horrible thought struck me. I looked. “Satan’s little imps! My package! It’s . . . it’s . . .”

The tiny little woman gave my package due consideration. “Unimpressive is the word that springs immediately to mind, and I use the word springs without any innuendo whatsoever.”

“Aw, man! I’m human with a short-changed knapsack!”

“Sir.”

“What? Oh, yeah, I used to be a sprite,” I said. “I’m familiar with the Court. So when did the Akasha get greeters?”

“A few years ago, when it was noticed that many people arrived here without a clue as to what to do next.” She pursed her lips. “Some people appear to be even more clueless than others.”

“Since this is the ultimate place of punishment, I figured suffering untold torments was pretty much the plan of the day,” I said. “This is horrible. I can’t stay like this until Aisling notices that I’m not in Paris. I gotta do something!”

“That is your own concern, sir. I should warn you that there is no way out except through intervention of the Sovereign, and it’s not likely that it will bother itself with something like a sixth-class demon, now is it?” She tipped her head to the side as she beamed at me. “Especially not one that insists on prancing about the Akasha in the nude. Enjoy your eternity here. Ta-ta!”

She turned and picked her way through the rocky, jarring landscape until she disappeared behind a particularly jagged piece of rock that thrust upward out of the earth as if it had burst forth by immeasurable forces.

“I’d like to ta your ta, sister,” I muttered. “Great. Just great. My first day on vacation, and I end up in the Akasha, naked, and in friggin’ human form. Good thing I still have my cell phone. I’ll just call Ash up and tell her she has to summon me the h-e-double-hockey-sticks out of here.”

I picked up my backpack and had just extricated the cell phone Aisling gave me for my last birthday when a herd of five fur-and-leather-clad phantasms suddenly appeared and plowed right into me.

“Hrolf! Look! A naked demon!” One of them stopped long enough to give me the once-over. “What’s it got here, then?”

“Hey!” I yelled when the phantasm snatched the cell phone right out of my hand.

“A demon? ’Ere? Roll ’im, Runolf,” another of the phantasms said as they continued to move onward.

“Fires of Abaddon! Give that back! And my backpack! Hey!”

Runolf the phantasm—a ghost that’s been banished and has no hope of ever regaining his or her ghostly self back—stopped long enough to jeer at me. “We’re Vikings, demon. We stop for no man! Or . . . er . . . demon. Yar!”

“That’s pirate-speak, not Viking-speak, you idiot!” I yelled as I started after him. Here’s the thing, though—phantasms come from ghosts, right? So they aren’t big in the corporeal department to begin with, and once they’ve been phantasmed, they’re even less on the whole “can touch things in the plain of reality” scale. So while they could zoom around the place like a ghostly Viking blight, those of us bound to physical forms had to fight our way through a landscape that brought new meaning to the phrase cut your feet to ribbons. They were out of sight in a matter of a couple of seconds.

“Ow. Ow ow ow. Ow. Son of a sinner! Now I have a rock shard stuck between my toes!”

I sat down and yelped, leaping up immediately. “What the—ass skewers? This is worse than Abaddon!” I moved over to a spot that was mostly free of sharp, rocky spikes and plopped down to suck on my sore toes. “Man, this is supposed to be my vacation. Not having fun! I wanna go home.”

“At least you have a vacation,” a voice spoke behind me. “I haven’t had any such thing in . . . Oh, it must be seventy years now.”

I peered over my shoulder, eyeing the woman who perched on a rock behind me. “It ain’t much of a vacation, sister. Who’re you?”

“My name is Titania,” the woman said, giving me one of those sultry-eyed once-overs that nymphs were so known for. “You’re naked. You’re a demon and you’re naked.”

“Yeah, and you’re a nymph. I didn’t know they sent you guys to the Akasha. I thought they just ripped off your wings or beat you with your halo if you did something bad.”

She made a face. “You’re thinking of faeries. They are the wicked ones. If I ever catch that bastard, lying, two-timing Oberon, I shall show him that he can’t just throw me away like this. I have rights, too, you know!”

“Titania, huh? What do your friends call you for short? Titty?” I snickered to myself.

She straightened up and gave me a look that would have melted my guts if I weren’t a demon. “They call me Titania!”

“Gotcha. Wait a sec . . . Oberon? Titania?” I kicked my brain into high and dug through some old memories. “Midsummer’s Night Dream?”

“Pfft.” She examined a rose-tipped fingernail. “That Will Shakespeare got it all wrong. He said I was a faery. As if! He totally dissed us nymphs, and let me tell you, the nymphood was not happy about that.”

“Yeah, I heard you guys can be kind of . . . eh . . . militant,” I said, wondering if she wanted to use those long nails to hit all my scritchy spots. Then I remembered I didn’t have scritchy spots. At least, not in this repulsive form. I glared at my package.

“What on earth are you doing?” she asked.

“Glaring at my crotch. A Guardian did this to me,” I said, mourning the loss of my fabulous doggy form.

She, too, stared at my groin. “She has a lot to answer for.”

“You said it. I wish I could do something to pay her back. Hey! Nymphs! You guys are all militant and badass, right? I could have some of your buddies beat up the Guardian who screwed me over.”

“We prefer the term proactive to militant.” Titania pulled out a nail file and tended to a fingernail. “And if you had spent your life as underestimated and overlooked as we have been, you’d be proactive about making sure people got their facts right, too.”

“I’m a demon,” I answered, carefully sitting down and examining my abused foot. “I am all over underestimated.”

“Anyway, Shakespeare got it all wrong,” she continued. “Oberon isn’t king of the faeries at all. He’s just an advocate for the Court of Divine Blood.”

“Advocate? Like a lawyer?”

“An obscenely vile one, yes.”

“Yeah? So what did you do that you got tossed in here?” I asked.

“Oberon, my former lover and disgusting lint in the underbelly of the worst sort of beings, decided to dump me, a priestess in the house of Artemis, for a naiad. Can you believe it? He dumped me for a water trollop!” Her expression went from outraged to calculating in a split second. “But he’d just better watch out, because the minute I’m out of here, I’m going to get my pound of flesh.”

“Ew,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “Wait—a human pound of flesh or meat from, oh, say, the rump of a corn-fed Black Angus cow? Because the latter sounds really good right about now. Especially with a whisky barbecue sauce.”

“If I could just find a way out, I could rally the sisters and we’d have our revenge!”

“On who, Shakespeare? Got news for you, babe. He’s dead.”

“No, not him. Oberon.”

I thought. I always think better sitting down. “Not that I want to rush you, since I’ve got at least ten days before Aisling comes back from her cruise and finds out that witch on two legs drugged her boss just so she could banish me, but I’m a bit confused. I get that boy toy dumped you in here when he was hooking up with a naiad, but how does that translate to you nymphs going to war against him?”

“He’s Oberon,” she said, just like that made sense. When I scrunched up my face in an attempt to figure that out, she added, “He didn’t just have me banished to the Akasha—he had all nymphs banished from the Court in order to curry favor for his own kind.”