“Hyperbolic much?” I asked, rolling my eyes. It was always the fate of humanity with him.

“God’s honest truth,” he said, holding up his fingers like a boy scout. “If she carries through with her plan, it’ll change everything. She’s planning to clean house, Yancy. Gyre-Carlin, Queen of Winter, King Oberon and Queen Titania of Summer. Freyr the Green Man. Shruisthia, Ruler of Autumn. Even that mad bastard, Arwan. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Anyone who has ever slighted Old Man Winter or has advocated for peace with Humanity. She’s undoing all of it.”

I squinted and twirled my glass, watching the bourbon swirl and the whiskey cube tink along the bottom of the lowball glass. “How the hell would she even do that?” I said after a second. “The Morrigan ain’t no slouch, but you’re talking about the Ancient Fae rulers of every elemental court. They’re not just gonna rollover and let someone else take the throne.”

“They can’t resist if they aren’t alive,” Sullivan said, the words like a mull kick to the gut.

“Bullshit,” came my knee-jerk reaction. Everyone knew you couldn’t kill Immortals—it was in the name for Pete’s sake. Then, my mind flashed back to Hell and to the list of demonic royals Azazel had managed to murder horrendously, despite the fact that they too were immortal creatures. The Seal of Death. Of course. How had I not seen this before? But I had the Seal now and the Scythe—and as far as I knew, I had no plans to go on a Fae murder spree anytime in the near future.

“You really think she’s planning to assassinate them?” I asked in a strangled voice.

“I don’t think it,” he said, shaking his head. “I know it. It was clear from early on that taking out the High Fae was always a part of her plan. The fact that you got the Fourth Seal threw a serious monkey wrench into her plans, well done, by the way”—he inclined his head toward me—“but you know the Morrigan. She won’t let something as small not having an Angelic Seal of the Apocalypse stop her.”

“Yeah, but how in the hell do you kill a bunch of Immortals?”

“Ah. Now there the details get a little bit fuzzy. She’s cagey, but I am fairly confident that whatever she plans to do will come to fruition in the next few days.” He dropped one hand to his pocket and fished out a folded sheet of creamy paper. He tossed it too me, summoning the slightest gust of conjured wind, floating the folded note perfectly into my outstretched hand. I unfolded the slip of paper and read over the details.

Not a note at all, but an invitation. One for some sort of fancy party taking place in a few days from now. The neat scrawl was obviously done by the Morrigan’s hand, but other than that it seemed fairly innocuous.

“So she’s throwing a dinner party?” I asked. “That hardly seems like concrete proof of anything.”

“Come now, Yancy,” he admonished, “you know better than that. This isn’t just a dinner party. This will be her coup de grace and inauguration all rolled into one. Everyone who is anyone will be there, including the Head of Every Fae court, along with their nobles and entourage.”

“Bullshit,” I said, hastily cramming the invitation into my pocket. “There’s no way they’d all agree to be in the same place at the same time like that. That kind of concentration of power hasn’t happened in—”

“Since the Dark Ages,” the Arch-Mage chimed in as I struggled to remember. “During the Seelie Compact of King Arthur’s Court. Back when the Council was first formed and our rules of engagement were so carefully laid out.”

“The New Wave is angling to renegotiate certain pieces of the Compact,” Ferraro said, “at least that’s the official cover story. We think she’s really getting them all into one place.”

“Bringing ’em in like cattle onto the killing floor,” Greg said grimly.

“But there’s something I’m still not getting,” I said, holding up my hands to stop them. “Even if you’re right, there’s no way she’s actually going to be able to herd a bunch of Fae godlings into the same building. There’s no invocation in the world big enough to summon them all at the same time, and they sure as shit ain’t gonna show up just because.”

“She has leverage,” the Arch-Mage said coolly.

Ferraro walked over to me, a tan dossier gripped in one hand. I took it, wondering what kind of leverage the Morrigan could possibly get on all of them. These were the most powerful Fae in existence for gods sake. Inside were a bunch of photos along with what looked like missing persons reports. Six of them. I quickly thumbed through the glossy photos, trying to see if I recognized any of the people in the folder. Only one stood out. An older gal, maybe mid-forties, with drooping cheeks and black hair tied back into a tight ponytail.

She worked as a waitress in the Twisted Oak in Moorchester. She was a no-shit scion of Freyr the Green Man. And she’d been in Guild protective custody for years after rolling over on some shiesty movers and shakers in the upper echelons of the Spring Court.

I flipped through the pages again, this time more slowly, scanning each face, then skimming over their personal files. Sabrina Griffin, Scion of the Gyre-Carlin. Marcus Wright, Scion of King Oberon. Charlotte Nguyen, Scion of Queen Titania. Nicholas Barton, Scion of Shruisthia. Patrick Harris, Scion of Arwan the Horned. The sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach had returned and it was much worse this time around. Scions were damned important to the Fae nobility. Even with as much as we know about the Fae, no one was sure why exactly they were so valuable. It was a secret shut up more tightly than Fort Knox, but if the Morrigan had somehow been able to kidnap each one of these people…

“Exactly,” Sullivan said, reading the panic sprinting across my face. “Like I said, she has leverage.”

“Okay, so that explains how she get’s them there, but it still doesn’t tell us what’s she planning to do once they get there. I’ve been around the block a time or two and I’ve never heard of anything that could kill a Fae Lord or Lady. Or any Immortal for that matter.”

Sullivan shrugged and spread his hands. “Unfortunately, your guess is as good as mine on that score. But I’m telling you, Yancy, unless we do something, she’s going to pull off a coup like none we’ve ever seen before. If she does that, she can install puppets of her choosing on the Throne of every Court. After that?”

“Humanity is gonna get the big green weenie,” Greg muttered.

“And the party is in three days,” Sullivan said, “so we don’t have long to figure out what she’s about.”

Well shit and double shit. I drummed my fingers on the liquor cabinet and stared into my drink, watching the brown drink slosh as I rotated the glass. If Sullivan was right, then the Morrigan was about to upend our entire society.

“Okay. Let’s say you’re right. That she is planning to off every Fae Noble that’s ever looked at her cross-eyed, what’s our next move. Do we have any leads or should I just show up at this friggin’ party and bust things up like a cop at an underaged kegger?”

“You’ll never get into the venue,” Sullivan said shaking his head. “Not through the front door at any rate and so far we haven’t managed to even find a backdoor.”

“But we are not without a few leads,” the Arch-Mage said, nodding at Ferraro.

“Well,” Ferraro said, pulling out a new manila file, “we do know a few things, just not how exactly they fit together. There’s got to be some essential, underlying link we’re missing, but we haven’t been able to put it together yet. It’s like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle without the box to look at and half the pieces missing. But here’s the pieces we do have.” She cracked the folder and pulled out another photo, this one of a man I remembered well.

And one that I knew Levi would be keen on finding.

The man in the photo was a roly-poly son of a bitch with a swatch of brown hair, sporting a too-small lab coat. Doctor Arlen Hogg. The same Doctor Arlen Hogg who’d been experimenting on all those poor homeless folks in the backwoods of Montana—trying to cook up a deadly disease capable of wiping out most of the human population at the flick of a switch. The same Hogg I’d come so very close to killing, until James Sullivan showed up and stabbed me in the back.

“We know Hogg is heavily involved,” Ferraro said, “but how exactly he fits or what role he’s playing we can’t figure out—”

Levi had gone stock still, his face oddly flat. “Hogg. Will he be at this party?” he asked, his voice like the gritty scrape of stone grinding against stone.

“Almost certainly,” the Arch-Mage said. “Given your complicated history with the man, I’m assuming that means we can count on your continued support and involvement in our predicament?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Levi said, folding his arms, gaze strangely distant.

“Now, aside from Hogg,” Ferraro continued, “the party venue also might hold some clue about what she’s up to.” She riffled through the dossier and pulled free several photos, showcasing a variety of work crews busily working away on the building, which could’ve been pulled straight from the pages of a Science Fiction magazine. The thing was a mammoth of stone, iron, and exotic materials, but the lines of the building were all wrong. Sharp angles, odd curves, windows and art displays that made little sense and were dizzying to look at. The whole building looked like it belonged in a museum. “The Morrigan is holding the event at a compound in South Africa that Black Jack used to own.”

“We don’t know much about the property itself,” Sullivan pitched in from the sidelines, “except that it’s positioned over a confluence of powerful laylines, which is likely significant.”

I flipped through the pictures again. The building was so friggin’ weird and the fact that the Morrigan had built the place over an important metaphysical site was interesting but not totally surprising. She gravitated toward places of power, after all.

“That’s interesting, but I’m not sure I get why its such a big deal. She built herself a fancy palace to host a party. Godlings aren’t exactly known for being reasonable or rational. Least of all her.”

“That is true,” the Arch-Mage said, “but the timing is suspect. That building, you see, didn’t exist five months ago. It was a flat, vacant plot of land. As soon as you went missing with the fourth seal in hand, the Morrigan reached out to an architectural firm, called Wayland and Smith, which is based out of Seattle. A firm that has at least some connections with Hogg and some of his former alias.”

“They’ve been working on the project day and night, non-stop,” Sullivan said. “They even have new Wave Mages doing grunt work, Yancy. Excavating the site, pulling up foundation stones. Hauling material. Designing rooms. No one fully knows what she’s about—or if they do, they were more well connected than I was—but Mages don’t do grunt work. Not without a damned good reason, old boy.”

“It’s another piece of the puzzle,” Ferraro said, “but we have no idea where it fits into the larger picture. But, because the firm is headquartered in Seattle, we thought that might be a good place to start poking around.”

“Yeah, could be,” I said, rubbing at my chin. Much as I hated to admit it, the Arch-Mage was right—the timing was fishy as a friggin’ all you could eat sushi bar. Definitely a rock to kick over. “Maybe their part in this whole thing is completely above board, but even if it turns out to be a dead-end, having a set of blueprints can’t hurt. Might be we can finally find that backdoor.”

“We also have one other lead,” Ferraro said. “We mentioned that the Morrigan and the Prophet are busy gathering up Scions, but there’s still one left they haven’t managed to catch. A teenager girl named Candace Edgar. We still aren’t one hundred percent sure what she wants with the Scions—”

“But maybe if we can keep her from getting all of them it’ll screw up whatever plan she has,” I finished. My mind was already spinning. Working under tight deadlines with terrible stakes was sorta my jam. “So we break up into two groups, one team runs down the architectural firm in Seattle, the other finds the missing halfie Scion. Any idea where this Candace kid is?”

“Yes,” Sullivan said with a malicious grin. “We know exactly where she is, but there might be a few minor complications about getting her. She’s not just any Scion, she’s the daughter of King Dagda, ruler of the Tuatha De Danann.”

“No, that can’t be right. He and the Morrigan are an item,” I said, waving away his words.

“Were an item,” the Arch-Mage offered. “They had a bit of a falling out after their nuptials due to infidelity on his part. And with a human woman no less, which didn’t sit particularly well with the Morrigan. She’s withdrawn into self-exile and hasn’t returned to the land of the Tuatha De Danann. As you might imagine, she hates Dagda more than anyone—save maybe yourself—and his Scion, who is the product of the love affair that drove them apart, is certainly a target.”

That was the gut punch of the century.

The Morrigan had been spurned by King Dagda before, hundreds of years before this had been. She’d been in love with the giant oaf and had helped him win the war against the Fomorians at Cath Maighe Tuireadh. And as soon as he had what he needed from her, he’d tossed her out like a used-up candy wrapper and had a legendary affair with a nubile river goddess who bore him his only child—Aengus Óg, god of love. But if he’d cheated on her again… Well, that would drive her right to the edge. Suddenly a giant assassination attempted seemed to jive a little better in my head.

“After word started circulating that Scions were going missing,” the Arch-Mage continued, “King Dagda relocated his half-human daughter to the one place the Morrigan would never venture. Tír na nÓg. The Land of the Young and home of the High Tuatha De Danann. Which is where she currently is.”

Screw me sideways. This definitely complicated things.

True, the Morrigan might not go face down her brothers and sisters, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t send the Prophet to do her dirty work. And I had no doubt that he could get the girl. And he would, if she was somehow integral to whatever nasty plans the Morrigan had in store. Which meant we needed to get to her first. But my relationship with King Dagda was about as touch and go as they came. No way he’d just hand her over, which meant I’d need to trek my ass through the endless halls of the Tír na nÓg and find some way to make him see reason.

“There’s no way around it,” I said with a sigh, drumming my fingers on the lowball glass in my hand. “Okay, Darlene, why don’t you and the Arch-Mage hold down the fort here. Winona, you and Greg tackle the architectural firm, Wayland and Smith—squeeze ’em a little. See if maybe they aren’t hiding something. Sullivan, Ferraro, Levi, you three are with me. Like it or not, but it looks like we’re headed to Tír na nÓg. Let’s gear up, ’cause it’s time to go Scion hunting.”