“Why is he still here? And after that little trick, how did he get to be such buddies with Rowena?” I tried not to think about what might have happened if V’lane had gotten to me first. It didn’t seem to me that sex with another death-by-sex Fae would have done anything but kept me Pri-ya. I could hardly imagine V’lane telling me stories of my childhood or showing me pictures of my family to help bring me back.
Dani grinned. “Easier to show you.” She moved toward me so quickly that she blurred out of sight and was gone.
Then I was gone, too, or, rather, the hallway we’d been standing in was gone, and I couldn’t make out anything but blurs of motion and noise. I could feel Dani’s hands on my shoulders. She was whizzing me somewhere at an extreme rate of speed.
I banged my elbow on something that grunted. “Ow!” I said.
Dani snickered. “It helps if you keep your elbows tucked in.”
“Watch where you’re going, kid!” someone yelled.
“Oops, sorry,” Dani muttered.
Something slammed into my hip. “Ow,” I said again. I heard someone curse; it faded quickly.
“We’re almost there, Mac.”
When we stopped, I scowled at her and rubbed my elbow. It was no wonder she was bruised all the time. “Let’s just walk the next time, okay?”
“Are you kidding me? S’the coolest thing in the world to move like I do! I’m not usually so clumsy, but there are more people out of their rooms ‘cause you’re here and they’re all talking ‘bout you. I know these halls by heart. I can do ‘em in my sleep, but the fecking people get in the way.”
“Maybe you could persuade them to start signaling their turns,” I said dryly. “You know, like you do when you’re bicycling around as couriers.”
Her face lit up. “Think they would?”
I snorted. “Doubt it. We’re not exactly their favorite people.” I glanced around. We were in a huge room filled with a U-shaped conference-table arrangement and dozens of chairs. “Why did you bring me here, and what—”
I broke off, staring past her at the enormous maps covering the walls.
After a moment, I turned slowly.
“We call it the War Room, Mac. S’where we keep track of things.”
The entire room was wallpapered with maps, hung from ceiling to floor. There were notations everywhere, with Post-it notes stuck on some areas and enlarged inserts taped to others. Some of the cities bore the Sidhe-Seers, Inc. (SSI) emblem of the misshapen shamrock, our oath to See, Serve, and Protect.
“Where’s the key?” What did all these symbols and notes stand for?
Dani saw where I was looking. “The shamrocks show the headquarters of the foreign branches of Post Haste, Inc. Ain’t no key. Ro won’t let us write it down. Room’s majorly warded.”
“We have that many sidhe-seer offices?” I was incredulous. There were more of us worldwide than I’d ever have guessed. SSI had obviously been global for a long time. Our “war” had also gone global while I’d been out of it. The Unseelie hadn’t stayed in one place once they were freed. They’d ranged out over the entire planet and, according to what I was seeing on the maps, certain castes seemed to prefer certain climes. There were drawings and notes scribbled everywhere. It would take days for me to absorb it all. I walked around the room slowly. “What are these?” I pointed to two areas close together, which were marked off with brown slash marks.
“Wetlands. There’s a caste of Unseelie that’s nuts about swamps, and they take you down as fast as Shades. We don’t go near them.”
“And these?” Squares, heavily outlined in bold black marker.
Dani flinched. “Some of ‘em ‘ve been rounding up kids, really young ones. They keep ‘em for a while before they … do things with ‘em. We try to find where and break ‘em out.”
I inhaled sharply and kept walking. I stopped when I reached a column of dates, with numbers written next to them that had been crossed out dozens of times.
The most recent date was January 1.
The number next to it was a few billion shy of the nearly seven billion it should have been.
I pointed a finger and didn’t even try to pretend it wasn’t shaking. “Is this date and number telling me what I think it’s telling me? Is that how many of us are left on this planet?”
“By our estimates,” Dani said, “total world population has been reduced by more than a third.” It was one of the few complete, well-spoken sentences I’d ever heard pass her lips. I looked at her sharply and caught a split second of a completely different Dani—a geeky, smart thirteen-year-old abandoned by everyone she’d ever trusted or loved, in a world gone mad. It was so quickly masked by an insouciant grin that I wondered if I’d really seen it at all. “Dude. Pretty intense, huh?” Her green eyes sparkled.