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K
elley saw Jack hiss sharply and pull a hand back from the hilt of his sword, his forearm scored and bleeding from another glaistig attack. She would have gone to him if she’d had any kind of chance. But the Maidens just kept coming, and it took every ounce of concentration she had to fend them off. Kelley was unused to drawing on so much of her power, and she could feel herself tiring. And, even though Mabh was in her element, Kelley’s mother was useful against only a fraction of their assailants—she could keep the leprechauns at bay indefinitely, but the brothers seemed more than content to hang back anyway, letting the glaistigs do the dirty work. It was only a matter of time.

Nothing for it but to keep fighting,
Kelley thought grimly.

Her clover charm clenched tight in one hand, Kelley called up a fistful of magick in the other and turned back to face the next attack. She almost screamed for joy as a familiar shape—all lean muscles and menace—suddenly hurtled through the open doors, howling a battle cry. The Fennrys Wolf leaped into the fray, swinging an ax with gusto and hurling curses in an ancient Viking tongue. The gleaming circle of his blade cleared both space and breathing room for the beleaguered little band as his charge briefly scattered the glaistig.

“Fenn!” Kelley shouted excitedly.

“Where the hell have you been?” Sonny called.

“Drinking tea and eating scones,” Fennrys barked. “Where else d’you think?—Behind you, Irish!”

Kelley backed off a step as Sonny feinted low and spun, dispatching another of the vile things with angry efficiency. “How’d you cross over?” he shouted at Fennrys as he dodged another running attack.

“Just followed the ladies, here,” Fennrys said, positioning himself beside and slightly behind Kelley so that he could help protect her back. She gave him a grateful smile over her shoulder as she whipped a ball of crackling purple sparks at the exposed flank of a glaistig. Then she parried a running strike from Jenii Greenteeth, spinning back around in time to see Sonny dispatch another of the horrific Green Maidens with deadly grace and efficiency. His silver gaze was keen, focused—almost businesslike—as he wrenched the sword from the dead Faerie’s flesh. Then he flashed Kelley a fleeting smile of encouragement, and her breath caught in her throat for an instant.

He was beautiful and terrible to watch all at once, and Kelley could not look away.

Fennrys and Sonny went back to back in a defensive posture.

“There are rifts showing up everywhere in the Otherworld,” Fennrys said to the other Janus over his shoulder. “And on this side, the Gate has become massively unstable—rifts all over the place.”

“Back in the shadow lands,” Sonny said, sword flashing, “something knocked me out as I was about to finish off that hunter Fae. When I woke up, you were gone.”

“Funny—I was going to say something similar,” Fennrys said. “When I woke up, you were nowhere to be seen.”

“I
told
you to watch my back!”

“Quit whining. I’m here now, aren’t I? When I headed toward the Winter lands, I stumbled across this pack of darlings, moving with stealth and pretty obviously evil intent.” He gestured with his chin at the glaistigs. “I thought it best to follow them. They came through one of the rifts into the park—the Janus are trying to seal them up now as best they can.”

“Damn!” Sonny swore. “That sounds bad.”

“Yeah,” Fennrys grunted, catching a glaistig a backhand blow with the flat of his ax blade. “Remember how I said ‘evil really needs to step up its game’? Be careful what you wish for. Any rate, I followed
these
lovelies—saw them hook up with those leprechaun freaks, and then the whole pack headed straight here.”

“You took your sweet time following them.”

“Yeah, well—I didn’t want to get too close and tip ’em off. Besides, midtown traffic is a bitch.”

As if on cue, they heard the sound of squealing tires. The beams from car headlights swung through the alley. Kelley looked up and saw a hunter-green Jaguar convertible careen past. Next thing she knew, Tyff came stalking through the loading doors, carrying a lead pipe in one fist and trailing a hulking menace in her wake.

“I heard there’s a party going on in here,” the Summer Fae sang out. “I forgot snacks, but I brought my own ogre!”

With Tyff and Harvicc’s arrival the fight intensified.

The Green Maidens arrowed furiously about the stage, eyes burning red and goat hooves flashing razor-sharp. Kelley saw a glaistig lash out viciously with one foot in a high kick that tore through the sleeve of Tyff’s blouse as if it were tissue paper.

That enraged Tyff, who had been wreaking havoc without slinging any magick, just the lead pipe. Now, though, Tyff spun on her heel without a second thought and, with a blast of something that looked like liquid sunshine flaring from her fingertips, she immolated the unfortunate goat girl on the spot, leaving nothing but an oily-looking plume of smoke behind.

Tyff made a disgusted sound and glared at her still-glowing fingertips as if they had somehow betrayed her. When she saw Kelley staring at her, mouth open, she shook her wrist sharply, snuffing the glow like extinguishing a match.

“Nice,” Fennrys grunted.

“You have
got
to teach me how to do that!” Kelley exclaimed.

“Oh no, I don’t!” Tyff snapped. “I
hate
doing crap like that! Remember what I told you, Kelley. Magick is nothing but trouble. You mark my words—duck!”

She grabbed the top of Kelley’s head, pushed her down, and punched another glaistig square in the face. The goat girl squealed in pain and zoomed off into the wings, clutching her shattered nose, a trail of neon-green blood spattering on the stage deck. Tyff ran after her, hollering for Harvicc to drop whatever he was pummeling and come help her.

Their departure left a gap in the defensive ring. And suddenly Hooligan-boy, the leprechaun from the park, was there to fill it. He appeared as if from out of nowhere and ran at Fennrys from behind, hitting him with such force as to send them both hurtling far downstage.

“Now, dog . . .” the leprechaun spat, a purely vicious grin splitting his features, as he pulled the black-handled dagger from his boot. He raised his fist to bring the knife stabbing down, but Kelley’s wild tackle caught him before he could do so. Her shoulder caught the Faerie a glancing blow, spinning him away from Fennrys’s sprawling form, and they tumbled together, end over end across the stage, grappling desperately—face-to-face. Kelley cried out in terror as Hooligan-boy raised the knife again and it arced swiftly down toward her heart. She heard Fennrys shout, saw him move—not
quite
fast enough—and felt a dull thud followed by an immediate sensation like a thousand-volt electrical shock. The world bloomed in a starburst explosion, and Kelley felt her body go rigid and then limp.

A moment of terrible stillness.

Then the leprechaun was up and running but Kelley couldn’t move. His knife lay on the stage and, through a darkening haze, Kelley saw that there was blood bright on the blade.

O
ut of the corner of his eye, Sonny saw the blur of motion that carried Kelley and Fennrys and the leprechaun across the stage deck. A moment more to dispatch the glaistig that leaped for him, clawing at his eyes, and he would rush to help. Then he heard the scream. Kelley’s firecracker spark flared like an exploding star in his mind’s eye—and then vanished.

Winked out.

Sonny saw Kelley sprawled over by the fake plywood fountain. Her bright hair curtained her face, and her outstretched limbs splayed out at odd angles, unmoving.

No . . .

Sonny saw red on the blade of the leprechaun’s knife.

He saw red everywhere.

Her spark was gone from his mind.

No . . .

A fine, crimson mist swam before his eyes, and Sonny went as cold as the ice on the lakes of Auberon’s kingdom. Moving slowly, as if in a dream, he bent and picked up the clover charm that lay on the stage where Kelley had dropped it. Sonny straightened and watched as Hooligan-boy slid to a halt, turning—avarice and need blooming in his expression as his eyes fastened on the green-amber pendant.

“You wanted this?” Sonny said, holding the talisman dangling by its silver chain. His voice sounded strange to his own ears. “Is
this
what you came here for?”

From somewhere outside of him—or maybe it was inside, he couldn’t think properly—he felt a surging wave of rage and hideous hatred: blind, irrational, incandescent. Sonny felt his heart begin to burn with a terrible fire.

Although it was nothing that could truly be called light, a ghastly illumination spread out from where Sonny stood—a sullen, greenish glow. It rolled across the stage like a poisonous fog.

Fear in his eyes, the Faerie leaped for his bloodied knife and threw it at Sonny’s head. Sonny ducked, snarling like a wild animal, and the blade buried to the hilt in one of the wooden support timbers holding up the balcony set.

The air in the theater was heavy and deathly still. The fighting had dwindled and stopped.

Without a conscious, directing impulse, Sonny stretched out his hand, fingers spread wide, and watched impassively as the raw timbers of the wood frame set began to stretch and creak, groaning like a forest under the onslaught of a windstorm. Beneath his feet the slats of the stage decking rattled loudly, bucking and heaving like heavy seas. Out in the auditorium, behind the heavy black curtains that kept the theater dark, the arched wooden window frames shuddered and screeched, bent outward, and shattered the old stained-glass images. A shower of rainbow shards rained down on the empty seats in the auditorium.

Sonny turned to the half-constructed set and raised his other hand, almost as though he were conducting an orchestra. The wooden bones of the set stretched and shivered in response. Some of the two-by-fours grew skins of bark, some bled fresh-running sap, and others—impossibly—splintered into gnarled and grasping branches that unfurled shoots. Leaves sprouted from the heart of the dead timbers, rustling like wings.

Sonny clenched one fist, and the set timber—suddenly alive and supple as the branches of willow saplings—whisked through the air, pummeling the leprechaun mercilessly. Sonny raised his fist higher, and the living wood wrapped around Hooligan-boy’s limbs and spiraled up into the set rigging high above the stage, bearing the leprechaun up into darkness. He was screaming.

A flicking of Sonny’s wrist batted Hooligan-boy’s skinny, tattooed body back and forth between the bars of the bare metal scaffolding forming the overhead lighting grid. Every time his flesh touched the cold wrought iron, the Faerie howled. Sonny didn’t stop.

Sonny thought he might have heard a bone snap. Then another. Still he didn’t stop.

From the corner of his eye he could see the other leprechaun brother—the drunkard from the cottage—step from the shadows and move toward him, seemingly drawn as if by some force outside of himself. Sonny saw surprise and recognition in the Faerie’s face.

“I
know
you,” the Faerie said in a whispered, wondering lilt. “I know what you
are
. . . .”

Sonny couldn’t have possibly cared less what he knew. He was busy. He thrust out his other hand, fingers splayed, and lengths of heavy hempen rope used to secure scenery uncoiled, whipping through the air, lashing the leprechaun high above his head to a heavy iron crossbeam. The Faerie’s eyes went wide in shock and pain. His mouth opened in a silent scream as the hated metal bit into his flesh. With his mind Sonny pulled the rope viciously tight, securing him there.

Distracted, he didn’t notice that the other leprechaun had darted up the set stairs to leap at him from Juliet’s balcony. Sonny heard Jack shout a warning and turned in time to see the actor come between him and the attacking Fae. But Jack was no match for the leprechaun’s chaotic grace and strength. His parry was clumsy with fatigue, and the leprechaun just shoved him to one side.

Jack raised his cutlass again, but Sonny, with a bare nod of his head, sent the old actor cartwheeling painfully off to one side of the stage. This was
his
fight. He would not be denied his revenge.

The leprechaun stuttered to a reeling halt as Sonny turned an unblinking eye on him.

The Faerie began to claw at his throat as if perishing from a desert thirst, and when he opened his mouth wide, a burning verdant light poured forth from between his lips. He fell to his knees.

“Sonny!” He heard Fennrys calling out his name. “No! Don’t kill him—you heard what Puck said about the Green Magick—you’ll destroy us all!” The Wolf ran at him.

Sonny snarled and rage flashed green and ugly in his mind. Fennrys flew a hundred feet through the theater and crashed through the control-booth window in the balcony high above.

Turning back to his interrupted task, Sonny spread his arms wide and gathered the leprechaun’s wildly coruscating energy into himself. It was
his,
Sonny thought distantly.

It had always been his.

Light flared, impossibly bright, and a wave of pressure burst outward from Sonny and the gasping Fae, like an invisible explosion. Everyone in the theater turned their faces away, squeezing eyes shut against the blinding brilliance, bracing against the shock of the blast. Sonny felt the Green Magick flood his being. He knew he stood at the center of the brilliance, glowing like a fiery comet, but the sensation elicited neither fear nor wonder in him.

At last, the drunkard leprechaun pitched forward onto his face and was horribly still. All around them, the theater groaned and creaked like an ancient forest under a hurricane wind. The air was full of splinters, sharp as hornet stings. Stage lights fell crashing to the deck and electrical cords sparked and sizzled, spitting like snakes. In the corner of the stage a canvas flat, set alight by a spark, smoldered and began to smoke. Within moments, hungry-looking flames were clawing their way up the painted wall of the Capulet’s villa to engulf Juliet’s balcony.

Buoyed upward on the searing wind, Sonny rose into the shadowed reaches high above the stage, to where the limp and twisted body of the other leprechaun hung lashed to the lighting grid. The ropes, he noticed vaguely, had sprouted huge, misshapen flowers and hideously overgrown leaves.

Sonny opened the fingers of his hand that held Kelley’s clover pendant, and with the barest hint of a thought, he sent the talisman shooting through the air toward the leprechaun. It hung in the darkness between them, burning with a ghastly, goblin-green light. The leprechaun flinched, and Sonny narrowed his gaze and nudged the charm closer.

It struck the Faerie’s chest, just beneath the hollow at the base of his throat. His cries tore through the air as Sonny poured all of the terrible magick that was in his heart and mind into the clover charm and on through into the creature. The leprechaun clawed at the talisman, writhing, kicking his booted feet at nothing, high in the air over the stage.

“Sonny!” A voice, harsh and ragged, cried out to him.

Kelley?

It couldn’t be Kelley. Her blood on the knife . . . her limp, unmoving form . . . her firecracker light vanished . . .

“Sonny—stop!” The sound of Kelley’s voice cut through the rage that fueled whatever terrible power kept him aloft.

Distracted, Sonny turned from the broken figure of the Wee Green Man, and the terrible forest he had conjured reacted sullenly. The vines and branches writhed and whiplashed, tossing the leprechaun aside like a broken doll. The Faerie fell through the air and slammed heavily down onto the stage deck, his limbs cartwheeling loosely as he bounced into the backstage shadows.

Below Sonny, flames licked up the stage curtains, and heavy smoke filled the air. Suddenly the ashy haze began to glow with the darkling flicker of Kelley’s wings as she rose up before Sonny, one hand pressed to her side. He saw a dark trickle of blood seeping between her fingers. With the other hand she reached out to him.

An illusion.

A trick. A lie. She was dead.

“Sonny, I’m
here,
” said the illusion. He felt himself falter.

The vision distracted him, only because her tears looked so real. But he’d felt her firecracker spark snuffed out. And he would make the world burn. The whole building was shuddering now and felt alive: hungry with a need to carry Sonny’s vengeance out into the mortal realm. And beyond. Sonny turned away from the illusion and, with a cry of pure wrath, bid the wood of the Avalon Grande give itself to the flames.

Then something hit him like a comet from behind, and darkness descended on Sonny like a curtain falling. The world faded to black, and Sonny plummeted to the stage, knowing full well that—because Kelley was gone—this time there would be no one there to catch him as he fell.