High on buildings, doves cooed, sheltering beneath dripping eaves. I even glimpsed a young battered tomcat disappearing behind a trash Dumpster.
Even though the human race knew it was facing potential apocalypse, life was going on all around me. I wasn’t the only one who’d gone through hell, lost people, almost been killed, and learned to adapt in the past year. The entire human race had suffered, in every city across the world. Everyone’s preconceptions had been shattered. They’d confronted immortal beings from another world, fought and scrambled to survive, faced food shortages, walked numbly through ruined cities, found new places to live, lost and mourned loved ones. Those of us left were warriors determined to make each day count and savor the small joys, because who could say what tomorrow might bring? Or, even if it would come.
As I splashed down a narrow cobbled alley, a flicker of movement caught my eye and I glanced up to see ZEWs huddled atop the building on both sides of the street, heavily cowled heads bent, peering down at me. I stopped walking, let my umbrella fall back and turned my face up into the rain, staring back, unafraid.
I wasn’t broken anymore. Inspect me, I willed up at them. Just try to find something lacking. Or something extra. I’m undivided, unbroken, and downright unbreakable.
As one, the flock lifted off and quickly merged into the leaden sky.
I smiled and resumed my rapid pace through the city, looking everywhere, drinking it all in.
People sat, eating and talking, behind the rain-drizzled windows of bars and restaurants that now had food to serve again. There were few Fae out and about, mostly lower-caste Seelie (taking hasty glances at me before crossing to the other side of the street), and I knew why—Fae don’t care for rain. They like things to be pretty, clean, glamorous. I also suspected many of them might be off meeting somewhere en masse, discussing me. Perhaps the Unseelie as well. That was a meeting I was going to have to locate and attend at some point. As soon as Cruce came to his senses and acknowledged that I was a wolf he didn’t want in his backyard.
I rounded a corner and nearly crashed into a cluster of people gathered in the street outside a small church, wearing bright yellow rain slickers, working outside under tents on—Oh!
I stopped and stared. A few dozen workers had erected high scaffolds around the perimeter of a large black hole and were raising a waterproof tarp on long poles up and over it, careful to keep a fair distance between the tarp and the subtle gravitational pull of the sphere.
“What are you doing?” I called.
The burly man directing their endeavors shouted to be heard over a sudden crash of thunder, “It’s the bloody rain! Falling into the holes and feeding them! The water is making them grow! We’re tarping off the largest ones first but the bloody wind keeps blowing rain in sideways!” To a man on the other side of the sphere, he shouted, “Find a way to peg the tarp to the ground so the sides don’t blow it into the—Ah, shit, Colin no! Bloody hellfire! Nooooo!”
I gasped with horror. A gust of wind had just caught the edge of the tarp that was draped on poles and scaffolding and whisked it into the sphere. Instantly, every single thing touching the tarp, poles, and scaffolding was stretched thin as spaghetti, sucked into the black hole and devoured.
I stood, staring dumbly. The sphere had taken everything connected to the sole thing that had touched it. A mere corner of the tarp—and the entire apparatus and men erecting it were gone. They hadn’t even had time to scream.
We had our answer, I thought grimly: if the sphere touched the earth, the same thing would happen. The only question was: to what degree? Perhaps it wouldn’t turn the entire earth into a spaghetti at once, only a fair portion of it, but definitely all of it in time. And who could say? These were objects that didn’t obey any laws of physics. Perhaps a fairly small black hole could simply blip the entire planet out. Blink of an eye. Everyone alive one moment—gone the next.
You have mere months, at best, the queen had said. Before we’d lost thirty-five days in the White Mansion.
In my mind, a clock began spinning at a dizzying speed.
The jarring, discordant music of the sphere grew louder, more cacophonous, and I narrowed my eyes, chilled to the bone—the hole was noticeably larger after its meal. I frowned. Something else about it had changed. The outer two feet or so of the black hole was…whirling, as if the whole thing was encased in a perimeter gyroscope or small dark rim-tornado.
And the bottom of it was whirling barely two feet from the ground.
A mere twenty-four inches was all that stood between us and extinction. We needed to start removing the street from beneath it. Tunnel up from deep in the ground.
Oh, yes, we had a problem. Hundreds of them. What was going on in other countries? Was it raining there, too? Snowing? How close to the earth were their black holes? Was Ryodan keeping tabs on them all?
“Get another crew over here!” the foreman roared to four men who remained. “We’ve got to get this fucking thing covered! Bring more tarps, and mind the buggers this time!”
I had a sudden idea. I pulled out my cellphone and texted Jada.
Meet me at Chester’s ASAP. Urgent.
Abandoning my umbrella, I tucked my head against the storm and ran for Chester’s.
Amendment to my earlier assessment: a mere four inches was all that stood between us and extinction.
The black hole outside Chester’s had always been the largest, but it had grown enormously since I’d last seen it. This one, too, had that new, strange, whirling perimeter.