“When you don’t behave,” Jonas said thickly, “Mother takes away your toys.”

It wasn’t what Jonas had done. Funny, because Jonas was such a fucking asshole, Dane could totally understand why someone would want to amputate his limbs, cave in his head, break his legs, and take away his healing magic. In the end, though, it was Lourdes who had gotten him in the shit.

Damn it, Dane didn’t want to feel sorry for Jonas, but he did. He was in so much pain, he had no idea why he wasn’t hammering his head on the floor to get unconscious again. But he couldn’t fathom the kind of agony Jonas was in. Sometimes, though, animals went somewhere else before they died. Their bodies became too treacherous to inhabit and their minds left. Even human animals got that little mercy once in a while. Jonas was staring at nothing out of his eyes that were canted funny in his face from his magic being gone before it could finish putting his head back together.

“Close your eyes,” Dane told him, putting an order behind it. “Try to get some sleep. You’ll need it for when we break out of here.” They would. Someone would fuck up. All they had to do was live that long, and living was what they did. Killing Jonas was Dane’s business, no one else’s. He was damned if he was going to let anyone—especially Moore and her peons—do it for him.

“Mother likes a good dog,” Jonas mumbled. But his eyes were closed, and Dane hoped leaving him alone would let him slide away into that white room where a creature’s mind went when it was waiting for the body to decide whether or not it was dying.

Dane wasn’t staying here. He felt the collar and found only weight and a slick, cool surface. He couldn’t find an opening or the runes that would be written on an artifact. Nothing. He squinted at Jonas’s collar and thought he saw something blinking, the tiny cool sparkle of an LED.

Technology and magic. Jonas was right. Time had happened to them. And here they were—

trammeled, caught in a net of electricity and things too small to see and too fast to understand, stopped in their tracks.

All this time, he’d thought that the thousand paper cuts of his little catastrophes were the way he was going to fail Cyrus. Ezqel had been right when he’d once accused Dane of having no imagination. There was no way Dane could have put the pieces together and come up with this.

Something hot was trickling down his cheek and he wiped it away with a twinge of panic that it could have been a tear, but when he raised his hand to see it, his fingers were coated with new, wet red over dried, flaking brown. Blood. He closed his eyes and wracked his limited mind for a solution to this. As long as he was still bleeding—only bleeding—he could believe he was going to get home.

Kristan got them to Detroit, driving the whole way without complaint. Through one of her contacts, she’d found a house they could stay in, a rundown brick colonial in the museum district of the city. It was abandoned and boarded up, without water or electricity, but the roof was intact—unlike the house next door.

Lindsay had focused completely on Noah during the long, daytime drive and through the night, tending his wounds according to Negasi’s and Beppe’s instructions—which mostly agreed with each other.

The drugs helped, kept him dull and silent. Lindsay knew the healer’s magic remained in the bindings on Noah’s wounds, but he wanted to do more. If giving Noah a bit of water now and again, and washing the

dried blood and lymph from his eyes and nose and mouth was all he could do, Lindsay would do it. It was better than the alternative—burying him.

Lindsay found some comfort in the small tasks, when he let himself. He would have stayed a long time in the tiny sphere of peace that formed when he focused completely on caring for Noah. Anything was better than feeling helpless.

By the following morning, Noah looked like he might live. He was conscious and lucid, which was a damn sight better than he’d been last night, but his face was still ravaged, and every time he tried to speak, it cracked and bled. Lindsay couldn’t tell what was skin or scab or blister or flesh anymore. It was painful to look at him—and Lindsay couldn’t make himself unwind the bandages and padding that hid Noah’s hands—but that was nothing next to the pain Lindsay could see in Noah’s eyes.

Lindsay had to find another healer. Every twinge and hiss from Noah made Lindsay’s gut twist; something needed to be done to stop the pain. That gave Lindsay the push he needed to leave Noah alone, when nothing else could have made him go. Kristan would stay behind to care for Noah. The day had finally come when he was glad she was there, and that was a horribly precise measure of how bad things were.

Kristan gave him directions to Apollo 11, a twenty-four-hour diner at the edge of the museum district, and told him to ask for someone named Patches. It looked like an old-school diner, complete with checkerboard floor, chrome trim, and frilly-aproned waitresses with perky ponytails and even perkier smiles.

Kristan’s directions led him to the back, past the kitchen and the bathrooms, to a door marked Emergency Exit, Do Not Block . Glancing back at the busy diner, Lindsay pushed the door open, waiting for a fire alarm that never came.

A staircase had been hacked through the original foundation. The dirty wooden stairs creaked with each step Lindsay took and led down to something that wasn’t quite a coffee shop.

Over the bar, a well-lit chalkboard menu listed things like prerolled joints and space cakes, as well as lattes and beer. The rest of the space was dim, and at first glance, the few people in the place looked normal. There were a couple homeless people sleeping under the tables, but that wasn’t a surprise. On closer inspection, Lindsay realized most of them—even the sleepers—weren’t human at all.

The bouncers at the foot of the stairs weren’t quite human either. One of them stopped Lindsay from crossing the room with a look and a quick shake of his head. “What do you want?”

“Patches.” Lindsay glanced around the room again and spotted an albino woman who fit the description Kristan had given him. She was sitting at a table near the rickety stage where they probably had poetry slams and folk music and the occasional rousing speech on equality. “Kristan sent me.”

Kristan said she’d been a regular in the downstairs room, once upon a time. The bouncer apparently remembered her, because he led Lindsay over to that little table and left him with a gruff, “Courtesy of Kristan.”

Patches apparently remembered Kristan too. She looked Lindsay over with a raised eyebrow and strange, colorless eyes, and shook her head. “Kristan’s changed. Good to know she’s still making best friends, though.”

Now that he was closer, Lindsay could see that Patches wasn’t quite albino. She was more lavender than white, and her skin had a harlequin pattern of varying shades of lilac and rose and paper-white that made her look like a doll formed from pieces of other dolls. Her hair was long and straight and faded purple, as though a neglectful child had abandoned her outside to be bleached by the weather.

“Just a friend. Coworker, more like,” Lindsay clarified.

Patches seemed satisfied by the explanation and let the matter go. “What do you have to offer in trade for my assistance?”

“We’re new to town and I have little of material value with me. But I do have my magic.” Lindsay had never been privy to Cyrus’s dealings; he had no idea if his magic would be enough. Kristan hadn’t said.

“What is it that you do?”

“I can offer minor illusions.” He couldn’t guarantee he’d have time or energy for more than that. He didn’t know how long they’d be here or how bad their situation was.