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  She growled slightly as she glared at me. "I should imprison you in your own darkness right now for running off like that."

  "I’d rather you didn’t, if you don’t mind." I crossed the room to the large wooden table that served as a counter, opening one of the drawers, happy to find the bottle of whiskey I was looking for. "And I didn’t run off. I told you in the message I sent you—"

  "Oh yes, the message." Dalia was back in her mundane form as she walked toward me, dressed as always in black, her raven hair which was red before she was taken to the Otherworld falling wildly around her pale face. Her previous antagonism had now died down to a mild, simmering anger. "'D,' you texted me, 'I’m going to be gone for a while. Please look after the shop for me. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Love, Corvin. P.S. If you’re going to drink the whiskey, make sure you replace it.'"

  I smiled as I held the bottle up. "I see that you did. Thanks."

  She shook her head and sighed, swiping the bottle from my hand so she could take a swig herself. "You’re an asshole, running off like that, leaving me here to manage this place all alone, to deal with all those… people." Dalia wasn’t a huge fan of humans anymore, not since her transformative experience in the Otherworld. Aside from me, she tended to stick with her own kind—other Demi-Fae who understood her. The only time she was interested in humans was when she was probing their inner darkness, which she did partly out of pure fascination, and partly for some sort of sustenance or balm that no one but a Fae would understand.

  "I didn’t run off, I was—"

  "Banished, yeah, I heard. It’s your own fault for rushing in. I told you to wait before confronting Iolas, didn’t I? You had no proof, nothing except the emotions of a petulant child."

  I shook my head at her, snatching the whiskey bottle back. "My mother was murdered. Sorry if I got a little emotional."

  Dalia sighed, and then came and wrapped her arms around me, her warm embrace exactly what I needed right then. "Even though I still think you’re an asshole for running off, and even though I will never, ever forgive you for doing so, I’m glad you’re back. I’ve missed my best friend."

  "Me too," I said, squeezing her tight. "Although, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t use your powers to slap me around again. That shit hurts, and it makes me feel less of a man, if I’m being honest."

  "It’s supposed to, and you deserved it." She pulled away from me, a slightly wicked smile on her face now.

  "I suppose I did."

  "No supposing about it—you did. Was there some reason you couldn’t call to let me know where you where, and that you were okay?"

  "I just needed to be alone, D, to grieve…"

  "To grieve?" Dalia shook her head like I was talking shit. "There were things here that needed sorting out. Like this shop, for one. It should’ve been you listening to the condolences of the customers, Corvin, not me… as much as I sometimes enjoyed the sweet scent of their tears and the particular texture of their private pain…" She coughed slightly. "Anyway, Teresa was…"

  "Teresa was what?" I asked.

  "Teresa was like a mother to me too. She took me in when there was no place left for me in my own family."

  "I know."

  "Yet you were happy to leave me here alone to grieve." She shook her head. "I may not feel things anymore the way most humans do, but I still feel… perhaps deeper than you could ever imagine, Corvin…"

  "I’m sorry. I thought you would have found support amongst your fellow Demi-Fae."

  "Maybe I did… a little. But I still needed you here, Corvin, since you’re about the only person who knows what I’m going through right now."

  "You can handle it better than me," I said, taking a seat at the desk. "We both know that."

  She looked at me like I was dumb. "Did you hear a single word I just said?"

  "Of course I did, and I’m just saying, we all grieve in our own way."

  "So you grieve by running away for two months?"

  "I already told you, I didn’t run away, I was—"

  "Banished, yeah. I’d still say you ran. It was just your excuse."

  I stared at her, her bluntness like another slap in the face. She wasn’t trying to be nasty, that’s just who she was these days. I still don’t know exactly what happened to her in the five years she was in the Otherworld (with only a year passing in this world), and I probably never would, but I knew she had profoundly changed from the sweet-natured if slightly sullen girl she was before she was taken. On one level she was essentially still the same person, but she was also different on many other levels, some of which I still struggle to understand to this day, or have given up on trying to understand at all. The Sidhe are a strange, mysterious bunch, possibly because they were rumored to have arrived from outer space, which I guess if they were aliens, would explain quite a bit about their strange behavior and customs.

  Eventually, I nodded. "You’re right, it was an excuse. The truth is, I was afraid."

  "You still are. I can taste your fear."

  "Don’t taste me. You know I hate you doing that."

  She smiled slightly. "Maybe I like how you taste."

  Smiling myself now, I shook my head at her. "You’re such a wicked bitch, you know that?"

  Dalia sat on the edge of the desk, her leather boots dangling just off the floor. "You used to like me being wicked, if I remember rightly."

  "At one time, yeah, but that was a different type of wickedness, and besides, we aren’t that way anymore."

  "Do you miss it?"

  "Sometimes."

  She reached down and gently squeezed my inner thigh. "You know, I don’t mind giving you a helping hand now and again."

  "I’m fine, honestly," I said, shaking my head at her as I lifted her hand away. "We already tried that after you got back and it didn’t go so well, if you remember."

  She nodded, a trace of a smile on her face. "I may have drained you a little too much, didn’t I?"

  "It took me a week to recover. You nearly killed me."

  "You enjoyed it though, right?"

  "Nearly dying? Sure, I loved every minute of the physical agony, not to mention the extreme mental anguish. Great fun altogether."

  She shook her head at my sarcasm and grabbed the whiskey bottle off me. "I didn’t know what I was doing back then. I was new to being a Demi-Fae. I have more control now." As if to prove it, she released a tendril of dark energy from her finger and directed it toward me. I felt the energy penetrate me as a not entirely unpleasant tingling sensation began to work its way up from my nethers.

  My breathing shuttered for a moment as I went stiff. "Okay," I said. "You can stop now. I feel like I’m being violated by a worm or something."

  In an instant, the tendril of darkness flew out of my crotch and back into Dalia’s finger. "I feel sorry for you," she said. "You will never know what true pleasure is. No human will."

  "Each to their own then, eh? Lucky you know other Demi-Fae who do."

  She smiled. "Yes, I do."

  "Anyway…"

  Without missing a beat or dropping her stare from me, she changed the subject completely. "So what do you plan on doing about Iolas? I assume you have a plan?"

  "No, not really."

  "Does that mean you have sort of a plan?"

  "It means I have no plan at all." I took the bottle back off her and drank, putting it on the desk when I was done.

  "So you’re just going to wait around until Iolas inevitably comes to get you?"

  I shrugged, uncomfortable at the dose of reality she was injecting me with. "I don’t know. I’ll lay low until I can formulate a plan."

  "There’s no laying low with Iolas, not in this city," she said. "You know that."

  "Eyes and ears everywhere. Yeah, I know."

  "He also has friends in high places. Very high places."

  "Are you trying to break my confidence?"

  "I can’t break what’s already broken."

  "Ha ha…"
/>   "I’m not joking." Her eyes glowed a slight yellow as her gaze on me intensified, and I knew she was about to have a "Fae moment" as I liked to call them; those moments where she went all weird, coming across as decidedly less than human.

  "I can see that," I said, shifting in my seat. To be frank, she scared me a little when she went dark, so to speak, although it’s still a good analogy as her new form of being was shaped within the Unseelie Court which, to you and me, is the place in the Otherworld where the darker shades of Fae hang out, those who are more in tune with the darker, and in many cases, more evil aspects of the universe and the beings within it, including humans.

  "You will never defeat Iolas, Corvin." As her face darkened somewhat, I could almost feel her searching around inside me, her energy soaking up my innermost fears and emotions. "You don’t have it in you."

  I shook my head, her words deeply cutting. "You should become a motivational speaker. You’re really killing it here."

  "You need to find your self-belief, Corvin. You need to find your power."

  "What power? I already have power."

  "I don’t speak of the power of the Void, I speak of the power of your spirit… your soul."

  I stood up suddenly. "Okay, enough, you’re melting my brain, D."

  "I’m trying to help you, Corvin."

  "She is and all," said another voice, and we both looked to see someone standing in the shop, near the window.

  "What the hell?" I said. "Monty?"

  A broad grin crossed Monty’s boyish face as he produced a playing card from thin air and tossed it out in front of him. The card seemed to flutter across the room on an unfelt wind before landing on the desk. "I let myself in. Hope you don’t mind."

  "Jesus," I said. "Does the whole fucking city know I’m back?"

  "Dunno, bro," Monty said as he crossed the room. "But at a guess, I’d say yeah, the whole fuckin’ city knows you’re back."

  I looked down at the playing card on the desk. It was the Ace of Spades.

  The card of death.

  Chapter 3

  Monty Christo—real name Monty McGuire—was one of my oldest friends, the two of us having grown up in the same area of the city, though that didn’t mean he was my closest friend. Dalia had that distinction. Monty was, frankly, too much of a pain in my ass at times for me to consider him my best friend. Good friends, I guess you could call us, in spite of the trouble he’d gotten me into over the years as we were growing up. Monty was a street magician and YouTuber; that’s how he made his living and put his Touched abilities to good use. Before that he was something of a con artist, until he tried to con the wrong mark a few years ago and ended up doing a stint in jail. He’d leveled out a bit since then, I’m glad to say, but his behavior was still unpredictable at times, and neither was he averse to pulling off the odd con on unsuspecting tourists, "just for the craic."

  As Monty—wearing three quarter length shorts and a T-shirt that said "Touched By God" on it—perched himself lightly on the edge of the desk, I sat back down again and grabbed the whiskey bottle, hugging it to me as if I might need it to hit him with. "What are you doing here?" I asked him.

  Monty’s blue eyes shone deviously, his smile as disarming as ever. "Nigh is dat any way ter greet an auld mucker? 'Owaya Dalia, by de way. Lookin' gran' as ever, oi see."

  Dalia did her best to smile. She found Monty a little too overbearing, even before she became a Demi-Fae. "Monty," she said, coming to stand next to me as if she didn’t like having her back to him.

  "Come on," I said scrunching my face up at him. "You’re not talking to your millions of shamrock-loving YouTube subscribers. You can tone down the fake accent anytime you like."

  "Nuttin fake about this accent, boy, I tell yi." Monty smiled and I couldn’t help smiling back. "Feck it. Me subscribers love it. Anyway, you’re just jealous because you only have how many subscribers on YouTube?"

  "Fuck off."

  "Last time I checked, and I check regularly, you had… hmm, let me see now… tree-hundred-and thirty-six subscribers. Your last video of you playing that song got fifty-six views." Monty’s smile never wavered. "I have more statistics if you’re interested, such as—"

  "All right! You couldn’t just come in here and give me shit about being away like everybody else, could you? No, you have to swan in here and slag off my fucking YouTube channel!"

  Monty shrugged, still smiling. "That would’ve been too expected. As you know, I only deal in the—" He suddenly flashed a playing card in my face, out of which a tiny firework erupted, fizzing two inches into the air before fizzling out. "Unexpected!" he finished.

  I shook my head at him. "You’re still a fuckin’ eidjit."

  Monty laughed. "That’s why you love me, bro, and as far as you being away is concerned, it’s as I said to you at the funeral, we all deal in different ways, don’t we? Except everyone knows you ran away from Iolas like a little bitch."

  "Screw you," I snapped, opening the whiskey bottle and slugging it.

  Monty smiled. "Relax, would you? I’m just kidding. We all know what a scary dude Iolas is. If it was me, I’d’ve stayed away. You must have a death wish, coming back here."

  I shook my head at him. "That pointy-eared fuck murdered my mother. Do you really think I’m going to let him away with that?"

  "No, bro, of course not," Monty said, suddenly looking serious. "That’s why we’re going to get him, right?"

  "We?" I said.

  I felt Dalia shift beside me, as if she wasn’t happy with Monty insinuating himself into the situation. "Yes, bro, we. Your mother was a feckin’ saint, everyone knows that. I loved her. So yeah, I’m going to help you do this thing."

  "Do what thing?" I said. "I haven’t decided on what thing I’m doing yet."

  "Revenge, bro, cold hard revenge. That’s what the feck you’re going to do."

  I looked up at Dalia, who didn’t seem to disagree. "That’s why you came back, isn’t it?" she said quietly.

  I nodded. "Yeah, it is."

  "Well, then," Monty said, seeming a little too excited by everything. "That’s why we need a plan. A good plan."

  "I wasn’t intending to make a bad plan."

  "I know, bro, but some plans are better than others."

  "Yeah, and even good plans don’t often survive first contact with the enemy."

  "Are you being defeatist? Why you being defeatist?"

  "I’m not, I just know how hard this is going to be. I mean, it’s Iolas."

  "Everyone has a weakness, bro," Monty said. "We just need to find Iolas’s weakness and exploit the feck out of that shit, you feel me, bro?" He had his fist clenched against his chest as he said it.

  I couldn’t help smiling at him. "You’re fuckin’ crazy, you know that?"

  "He’s right, though," Dalia said. "We have to be smart about this, Corvin."

  I looked at each of them in turn. "Again with the we. This was never supposed to be a team sport. I can’t expect anyone else to risk their lives over this."

  Monty and Dalia looked at each other as if they shared the same sentiment. "Fuck you, bro. How many times have you helped me over the years? What about that time I pissed off all those orcs when I tried to con them out of their hard-earned extortion money? You remember that?"

  I nodded. "How could I forget having the shite kicked out of me by a bunch of angry orcs? I was pissing blood for a week after."

  "Exactly, bro," Monty said. "I owe you, and that was just one time. There were many others."

  He wasn’t wrong, but I was still uneasy about involving them in my revenge trip, though I couldn’t deny that both Monty and Dalia had skills that would come in useful in my quest to take down the most powerful elf in the country.

  "All right, you two," I said, standing up. "There’s some stuff in the apartment upstairs that I need to sort through."

  "Your mum’s stuff?" Monty asked.

  "Yeah, so if you don’t mind…"

  "Say no more, bro
." Monty slid off the desk and stood smiling. "I’m hitting the bars the-nite to get some footage for my YouTube channel. I got some awesome new tricks to try out."

  A moment later and Monty was gone, promising to call me tomorrow so we could begin, according to him, to come up with a plan to take down Iolas.

  "You want me to stay?" Dalia asked.

  I shook my head. "I need to do this alone, if that’s okay with you."

  She nodded. "Of course, I understand. You’ll find the place spotless. I kept it tidy while you were away."

  "Thanks." I went up and hugged her. "It’s good to see you again, Dalia, and I’m sorry for running off. It won’t happen again."

  Dalia hugged me back and then kissed me on the cheek, her lips cold on my skin. "I’ll come around tomorrow so we can continue discussing how save your bacon…"

  "And how to strip Iolas of his."

  Dalia smiled rather darkly. "I look forward to it."

  Chapter 4

  The apartment above the shop was spacious, with two bedrooms, a large living room with adjoining kitchen area and a small terrace if you fancied sitting in some fresh air. The place was kept smart and tidy, a lot like how my mother used to keep herself. She believed a good presentation was essential for anyone to take you seriously in life. This was true even more so when it came to politics and the work she did for the Council, the leaders of which consist of the thirteen most powerful families in the Touched world. The Council headquarters are situated in Manhattan, to which my mother traveled to many times on business over the years. The influence and oversight of the Council is cast far and wide, with proxy councils set up in almost every major city around the world, including Dublin. My mother was one of the three proxies here, until she was killed. The other two proxies are a dwarf named Dhorbeg McQullian, and my now nemesis, Iolas Tasar.