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“They must have known about the security at the church,” Deirdre said. “They wanted us to go there so that we would get arrested or killed. Melchior and the queen were screwing with us.”

“You’re only making me angrier, Tombs.”

He moved to climb out of the storm cellar, but she caught his sleeve. His eyes dropped to the place where she touched his arm.

Ignoring his look of annoyance, Deirdre said, “Let’s kill them. Now. Before we do anything else. We’ve got the sword and there’s a door to the Winter Court in Niamh’s basement, so let’s wipe those jackholes out.”

“Don’t touch me,” he said.

She released his arm and followed him onto the surface.

Stark led Deirdre to a pickup truck parked by the farmhouse’s front stoop. “We have to go back to the asylum one last time before we can confront Melchior.”

“Good idea. We’ll have to be fast if we want to evacuate everyone before the OPA shows up.” And that was assuming they hadn’t already shown up to take away Niamh and Colette and everyone else that Deirdre had grown to care about.

“I don’t care about everyone,” Stark said. “Just Vidya.”

Was he telling Deirdre something else about those elusive feelings of his? Did he actually care about that shifter? Deirdre blinked, trying to conceal her surprise. “Oh. Yeah.”

He shot a sideways look at her. He knew what she was thinking.

“She can safely wield the Ethereal Blade,” Stark said. “And we’ll need her in order to kill all those unseelie bastards who betrayed us.”

Vidya met them outside No Capes. She was wearing the leather outfit she’d stolen from Deirdre again, looking entirely out of place on the street, like she was lost.

Her eyes brightened with recognition when Deirdre and Stark approached.

“Status report,” he said.

“The evacuation is underway,” Vidya said, falling into step with them as they entered No Capes. She checked the clock on the wall. The minute and hour hands were lightsabers. “Niamh said it will only take twenty more minutes to get everyone out.”

Twenty minutes wasn’t much time, but it felt like an eternity to Deirdre.

The OPA must have gotten to Holy Nights Cathedral less than twenty minutes after Deirdre had tripped the alarm, and that had been out in the middle of the mountains. There were OPA offices in New York. They didn’t have to travel far to assault the asylum.

If the OPA hadn’t already raided them, then it was only because they were being cautious. They would be gathering their forces for a stronger assault against Stark and making sure that nobody on their team had even a drop of shifter blood in them.

“What were you doing out on the street like that, Vidya?” Deirdre asked. “You should have already been long gone.”

Vidya gave her a blank look, like her brain couldn’t quite process the question. The woman was physically healed, but her mental faculties were lacking. “Stark told me to meet him for the assault on the Winter Court. So I’ve been waiting.”

He must have called Vidya while they were on the road, heading back from the farmhouse. “Please don’t tell me that you’ve been standing outside all day,” Deirdre said.

Vidya didn’t respond. She marched into Niamh’s back room, where the stairs to the basement waited.

Protectiveness surged through Deirdre. She grabbed Stark’s arm, stopping him before he could follow her back. “Why Vidya?” Deirdre asked. “Can’t it just be you and me? Or Colette! Any other shifter.”

“Vidya’s not a shifter,” Stark said. “She needs to wield the sword.”

“But she’s already done so much,” Deirdre said desperately, digging her fingernails into his bicep. “She already sacrificed everything for you. She shouldn’t have to do anything else.”

She didn’t realize how closely she was standing to Stark until she felt his breath on her face. She was pressed against his side, forced to make contact by the narrow confines of No Capes. Stark’s expression said that he had noticed and he wasn’t happy about it.

Deirdre hadn’t meant it as a come-on, but her cheeks still burned with embarrassment.

“Vidya isn’t the wilting flower you think she is,” Stark said. He shook her off and stepped behind the curtain.

Vidya had dropped her shirt to the floor. Now she was naked above the waist as she tied her hair back from her face.

“Give her the sword, Tombs,” Stark said.

Deirdre hugged it to her chest. She had bundled the Ethereal Blade in her jacket to hide it while they walked through the city, and the idea of giving it to this obviously damaged woman was frightening.

But Vidya’s hand was extended, waiting for the sword, and the look Stark gave her brooked no room for argument.

Swallowing hard, Deirdre stripped the jacket off of the sword and offered it to Vidya.

The woman’s fingers closed around the hilt. The wrappings that bound blade to sheath melted way, vaporized at a touch.

Vidya drew the sword and lifted it to look at the blade.

The sight of it made her smile. For the first time, there was real awareness in her eyes, actual joy in her expression, as though touching such a deadly blessed weapon had filled her with new life.

Wings unfurled from Vidya’s back, emerging from the scar tissue that Deirdre had noticed when they showered together.

Deirdre stepped back with a gasp. “What…?” She couldn’t seem to finish the question. Words left her at the sight of the shimmering steel that emerged from Vidya’s flesh.

The woman wasn’t shifting. The wings simply blossomed and unfolded while the rest of her body remained human. Her feathers were jagged and metallic, entirely unlike those of a bird. They looked more like a scrap metal sculpture. The ribs were hollow bars of steel, a tangled lacework of metal too elaborate to be inorganic, yet nothing like any wings Deirdre had seen before.

They were much too large to fit in Niamh’s back room. Vidya kept them curled around her body.

One of the feathers drifted to the ground. Deirdre picked it up.

“Don’t,” Stark said.

His warning was too late. She’d already sliced her finger open on the cutting edge of the feather. Just a brush cut her clean open, and hot blood dripped down her finger.

Vidya was a winged creature with tiny knives instead of feathers.

With the Ethereal Blade in hand, the woman looked beautiful and vicious and strong. She wasn’t going to accidentally cut herself on something as dangerous as the blessed blade. Her entire body was a weapon.

Stark was right. She was exactly the person they wanted to wield that weapon.

“Valkyrie,” Stark said. He knew what Deirdre was wondering and had supplied the word without waiting for her to ask. She was glad for that. The sight of Vidya’s deadly beauty had robbed Deirdre of words. “She came from the same unit as Melchior and me.”

Deirdre would have hated to be anyone that the Marines had sent those three to kill.

“What’s my target?” Vidya asked. Her voice had changed with the emergence of the wings. It echoed faintly, as though she spoke from the deepest recesses of a cave.

“The queen of the Winter Court,” Stark said. “I want her head.”

Vidya turned to descend the stairs, neatly tucking her wings behind her. Metal whispered against metal as she retracted them. Despite being long enough to support her weight in flight, they could still compress small enough to allow Deirdre to walk behind her.

The feathers glittered with even the slightest movement, entrancing Deirdre with their faint swaying.

Something hard dug into her ribs. She looked down to see that Stark had jabbed her with his gun.

“Don’t look if you can avoid it,” he said. “They have thrall. Like nightmares.”

Deirdre blinked to clear her head. She hadn’t even realized that she was zoning out. “Right. Thanks for the warning. What else do valkyries do?”

“Hunt and kill,” Stark said. “That’s
all
they do.”

No wonder Vidya had been kept in solitary confinement.

Deirdre felt a little bit more optimistic about their odds against Melchior and the unseelie queen.

But her optimism only lasted until they got to Niamh’s basement.

“It’s gone,” Deirdre said.

The door to the Winter Court had vanished completely. The wall was bare and smooth, as though nothing had ever been there.

Stark’s jaw tightened. “Cowards.”

The door to the sewers was still open, though. Deirdre could hear a faint, distant dripping.

And then she heard a scream echo from the sewers. It was quickly followed by the rhythmic popping of gunfire.

Stark and Vidya were only two steps behind Deirdre as she rushed into the sewers.

The sewers were filled with death.

Many dozens of bodies were sprawled in puddles of blood and sewage. They were all wearing black uniforms. At least half of them had helmets and riot shields, too.

OPA agents.

Rylie had tipped off the Office of Preternatural Affairs and arranged to raid the asylum after all.

It didn’t look like any of them had survived.

Deirdre rolled the nearest body over. “My gods,” she said. His chest was a gaping wound.

What could have killed everyone so quickly?

Stark sprinted down the sewer toward the asylum. He took the stairs three at a time, smashing through the door to his basement with his gun drawn.

Deirdre was slow to follow him. Everyone she passed was dead, their empty eyes staring. All of them were armed and armored.

Nothing should have been able to cut through them like that.

She leaped into the asylum’s basement behind Stark and slipped on something wet.

Her hands landed in warm blood.

Bowen’s blood.

“No,” she whispered, pressing her fingers to the inside of his wrist, searching for a pulse. There was none. His skin was already growing cold. His eyes stared blankly at the ceiling of the basement.

Deirdre had no reason to mourn a person as horrible as Bowen, but she felt sick. Even he didn’t deserve to die so messily.

His flesh looked like it had been melted with magic. It had burned him so deep in places—including his face—that bone glistened underneath. It must have taken powerful offensive magic to mangle a shifter’s body so badly that he couldn’t heal it.

It must have taken someone like a dragon.

Melchior had promised that he would come back for his revolver. Deirdre still had it in her room.

Stark’s whole body vibrated with fury. “Find them, Vidya.”

“As you command,” the valkyrie said.

Her wings snapped wide, whipping just an inch away from Deirdre’s head. She flapped once. The force of it was enough to carry Vidya over the shelves, across the basement, and halfway up the stairs.

She reached the ground floor of the asylum before Deirdre could even get to her feet.

Stark and Deirdre mounted the basement stairs and emerged in the foyer behind Vidya.

The boarded windows had shattered, allowing gloomy daylight and sprinkling rain to penetrate the foyer. More carcasses barely identifiable as OPA agents sprawled in puddles of water fogged with blood. Dozens of them.

The agents weren’t the only dead in the foyer, though. There were more faces that Deirdre recognized here. A battle had been waged long before she and Stark arrived, and it was impossible to tell now which members of the pack had been killed by OPA gunfire and which had been killed by the unseelie attack.

Several surviving pack members had taken cover behind set pieces that Niamh had left sitting out after filming Stark’s last video. The half-walls hid their bodies, but provided little protection.

There was no way to guard against the unseelie sidhe who had invaded.

The three faeries seemed immune to sustained gunfire, tearing through the set pieces without even flinching at the hail of bullets. Magic blazed in their clenched fists. They hurled liquid energy at the shifters and filled the air with the discordant hum of vicious power.

Deirdre could barely take her eyes off the trio of statuesque unseelie blazing through the room in a violent dance. They were hazy, as though viewed through the fog of fond memory, smiling and peaceful even as they slaughtered shifters.

Deirdre didn’t recognize the sidhe. Pierce and Jaycee weren’t among them. She was grateful for that.

It would be easier to kill people she didn’t know.

Vidya shouted to draw their attention to her. “I’m here!” she crowed, lifting the Ethereal Blade.

Only one of the unseelie turned to face her. He was a beautiful man, with long hair the color of sunbaked grass, and he didn’t seem to realize who or what he was facing.

She whipped the sword in a wide, graceful arc, drawing a line of sapphire blood from the sidhe’s pelvis to his collarbone.

It was a shallow cut—not nearly enough to kill. But the sidhe screamed as though he’d been gutted.

Thick green vines exploded from the injury. His spine arched, snapping from the force of the extrusion, and the vines tangled around his corpse before he could collapse. Flowers grew from his wound, turning from buds to full blossoms within instants.

A single flower thrust from his open mouth.

Vidya didn’t stop to watch him die. She flapped again, propelling herself to the next room, meeting the sidhe head-on.