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Brother Marshall’s mouth pressed into a grim line. “I did. They said it would just create more violence. It’d undermine everything that they’d been fighting for by creating the election in the first place.”

The truth of it settled into Deirdre.

He’d shown this same thing to them, and they’d done nothing.
 

Fury choked her. “Letting Rhiannon cheat to win undermines everything we’ve been fighting for!”

“Preacher, meet the choir.” Brother Marshall waved his staff. The runes collapsed, splashing into nothingness. Darkness settled over the cathedral. Only the mural behind him still seemed to glow faintly. “Figured you’d want to know. Figured you’d want to do something about it.”

Brother Marshall was right.

She did.

Green screen. Hot lights. Video camera.

Action.

Deirdre stared unblinkingly into the lens of a handheld camcorder. It wasn’t intended for shooting this kind of video, but it had been cheap, and that was Deirdre’s priority. Stark’s old equipment had been lost in the asylum when the unseelie attacked. Brother Marshall might have been able to make his cathedral appear out of nowhere, but she couldn’t make money do the same trick.

She was struggling to remember the words she wanted to say. The face behind the camcorder—Niamh’s face—had blanked everything from her mind.

Deirdre had grabbed more lethe out of the storage closet before trying to shoot the video. She needed nerves of steel to pull off this feat of Stark-like propaganda. But she couldn’t seem to plug enough lethe into her veins to find the euphoria it used to give her. Not anymore.

At least she didn’t have to worry about hunger. That was something.

“A rally,” Deirdre finally said. “Tomorrow. Thursday. In Times Square. I want you to be there with me.” She licked her lips, swallowed hard. “Everything you thought you knew about the election—our worst fears—it’s all true. No.”
Shit. That’s not right.

She dropped her head into her hands, massaging her eyes.

“I can make cue cards,” Niamh suggested.

“Shut up,” Deirdre said. “Don’t talk.”

The harpy obeyed. It didn’t take any compulsion. This was the first time that Niamh had been away from the vampires since escaping Rhiannon, and she seemed eager to give Deirdre no excuses to send her back.

If the video took a thousand takes to shoot, Niamh would probably be thrilled.

Deirdre grabbed the napkin off of her side table, which rested beside a token that Brother Marshall had given her. It was a flat disc the size of her palm. It would get her in touch with him instantly if she needed to talk about the election, or so Brother Marshall had claimed.

She didn’t need him right now. She needed to gather her senses.

She’d jotted a few notes down on the napkin while her anger at Brother Marshall’s news was still fresh, but they weren’t significantly more coherent than her current thoughts.
Rally, Thursday, Times Square. Election.
She balled the napkin in her fist and dropped it to the water-stained floor.

Gods, but her head hurt.

“Five minutes,” Deirdre said. “Check the lights. I don’t think they’re angled right. They’re hurting my eyes.”

They were fine. Niamh set the camcorder down to mess with them anyway. They’d been crammed into the tiny apartment Deirdre was occupying, taking up the narrow space around the bare bed. The apartment was too small for such bright, hot lights. Deirdre liked heat, but even this was too hot.

Where had she put that intake bracelet?

Deirdre found it under the lumpy, sweat-stained pillow. Her hands shook as she clamped it over her wrist.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Niamh asked.

“I told you not to talk.” Deirdre wiped away a trickle of blood that escaped the edge of the intake bracelet. “Besides, you’re one to talk. You used to use lethe as a dieting aid.”

“I’m talking about the video.”

“You’re talking about nothing because I don’t want to hear your voice.” It came out even harsher than Deirdre had intended, and she meant it to be pretty harsh.

Guilt raced through her, right behind the twist of anger.

Gods. My head.

Deirdre opened the wooden box on the side table. There was only one cube of lethe left. She’d have to venture back to the storeroom again if she wanted to get more. That didn’t sound appealing. The room was being supervised by some of her shifters and some of Lucifer’s vampires, and about as tense as the border between warring countries.

She pushed it into her bracelet, braced against the sting that never came.

There was no high, either.

Not enough. Need more.

But later, after she finished the video. That mild buzz that made her vision blur was going to have to be enough to get her through it.

Deirdre slapped her cheeks lightly, trying to wake herself up.

“Our worst fears about the election have come true,” she said, facing the boarded window. Holy Nights Cathedral was no longer waiting on the other side. It had vanished as soon as she left, and there had been no sign that it had ever been there, not even a dry patch on the street. “I’m holding a rally tomorrow night after sundown, Thursday, in Times Square. Times Square. Tomorrow, Thursday, Times.” She twisted her mouth around the words to try to limber her tongue the way that January Lazar did.

“What are you announcing at the rally?” Niamh asked. She had lowered one of the lights a fraction of an inch.

The lethe might have given Deirdre a better buzz than she’d realized. The harpy’s voice didn’t make her feel stabby. “Election fraud. Rhiannon shouldn’t have won.”

“Who should have?” Niamh asked.

She hadn’t thought to ask Brother Marshall. He probably didn’t know the results anyway. “Stark should have.”

“Then why isn’t Stark making the statement?”

“He’s got better things to do,” Deirdre said.

That was what she’d been telling everyone lately.

It wasn’t exactly a lie. As far as he was concerned, hunting Rhiannon down
was
something better to do.

Niamh’s knowing eyes said that she knew Deirdre was telling half-truths. She hadn’t been there the night that Stark left. She didn’t know where he’d gone. But she seemed to guess that he wasn’t coming back, and that Deirdre was getting desperate.

“There’s no way that the OPA will let you get away with this,” Niamh said.

Friederling had agreed not to arrest Deirdre once she made a statement on Stark’s behalf, so he’d left her alone even as she raided blood banks and other government facilities under Stark’s name.

But this? He wasn’t going to ignore this.

Neither would Rylie.

“Good,” Deirdre said. “They shouldn’t have let the election get this bad in the first place. It’s their fault.”

Niamh twirled a curl around her finger, studying Deirdre. She was paler and thinner than ever before. The bandages on her throat didn’t conceal all the needle marks. She looked like she was about to die, but she still got that expression that said she was judging Deirdre’s slipshod appearance.

“You know,” Niamh said, “you’d look better on camera with a little more makeup.”

It was an olive leaf, a peace offering. Deirdre and Niamh used to spend so many nights doing one another’s hair and makeup as though they were sisters. It had been fun, mindless, an escape from the drudgery of reality.

Being able to relax while Niamh’s soft fingers spread powder over Deirdre’s eyelids, cool and gentle, sounded like close to heaven. She could even do Deirdre’s hair again. Give it a good flat-ironing. All the moisture in the air had been making it frizz, so she’d been keeping it under a scarf since she didn’t have the time to fix it.

Nobody knew how to do Deirdre’s hair as well as Niamh did.

Nobody else had stabbed her in the back with a silver knife, either.

Deirdre felt Stark’s personality sinking into her as she sat on the stool in front of the green screen again. “I told you not to talk to me,” she said. “Get filming.”

Niamh picked up the camcorder.

The red light on the front blinked.

“Our worst fears about the election have come true,” Deirdre said. “I need New York City’s gaeans to come together and stand with me tomorrow, Thursday, in Times Square. I have an announcement to make. And I’m going to need your help to make the Office of Preternatural Affairs listen…”

Deirdre didn’t get any sleep before the rally.

She’d tried, sure. She had crawled into bed, hugged the sheets around herself, and forced herself to keep her eyes shut. For hours, she’d tossed on a sea of tormented hallucinations, like she was having nightmares without any of the rest of sleep.

Deirdre had given up around nine in the morning.

She had a rally to organize.

While the sun was still high, she arrayed shapeshifters around Times Square, finding places for them to hide. Deirdre was worried that they would need to clear mundanes out of the area before they could use it for her rally. But that didn’t turn out to be the case. By the time noon rolled around, Deirdre couldn’t spot a single mundane from her vantage point in a nearby hotel.

Ordinary humans were smart to stay out of the way. All the rioting, and the dozens of victims, had taught those people a painful lesson.

That wasn’t to say that Times Square was empty, though. Far from it. People filtered in slowly, their species betrayed by the preternatural grace of their movements.

They were shifters, mostly. The people who were likeliest to be searching for new videos from Deirdre, who would be angriest about the election. But there were witches, too. Even a few sidhe.

Sunset approached.

It was almost showtime.

Deirdre headed to the walkway leading between buildings. Her people had been setting up a stage for her at the far end of Times Square and she wanted to emerge directly on the rear of the stage. She’d have to jump right down. If she took the time to walk across Times Square, there would be too much opportunity for attack—and she was confident that Rhiannon would attack.

In fact, she hoped that the would-be queen of the unseelie was on her way. It would give them an opportunity to confront one another publicly. And if Rhiannon did, then maybe Stark would be close behind.

“The OPA has been sighted moving in,” Geoff said, speeding his pace to match hers as she moved down the hallway. “They’ve got helicopters nearby.”

Deirdre kept going without pause. “Okay.”

“Aren’t you worried?”

“No,” she said curtly.

She would have been worried if they hadn’t seen the OPA anywhere.

They certainly had the technology, magic, and coordination to break up the rally without ever being seen. They were disgustingly good at covert operations. If Geoff had spotted them, then it meant that the OPA wanted to be spotted. They were playing at security theater. That was all.

There was no way they could suspect the bomb she was about to drop on their defrauded election. If they’d known, then Deirdre probably would have already been dead.

“Vampires will be out as soon as the sun goes down,” Gianna said. “We’ve got them positioned in these two buildings.” She showed Deirdre a map of Times Square, pointing to the NYPD substation and a Foot Locker in turn. It would keep them concealed from sunlight but give them the ability to move in swiftly.

“Spread them out a little more,” Deirdre said, handing the map back to her. “Can you get a few of them to the north end?”

“Why? Want them to look out for the OPA?”

“I’m more concerned about riots,” she said. “There’s been a lot of activity by the theater lately. If there’s going to be any civilian action against us, it’ll come from there.”

“Think that’s likely?” Gianna asked.

“I don’t know,” Deirdre said honestly. The rioters weren’t aligned with any single political orientation. It wasn’t like they were all Stark’s supporters, or Rylie’s supporters. They were all over the place. That was part of the problem. It was entirely possible that she could get caught between supporters of the seelie and of the establishment and get ripped in half by the fight.

Gianna nodded. “I’ll talk to Lucifer. See what I can do.”

The shifter vanished.

Deirdre reached the windows at the end of the hallway. The congregation below had tripled in size since the last time she checked on them. Obviously her video announcement was getting around.

It was like Dick Clark’s New Years Rockin’ Eve, but populated entirely by gaeans. They filled the streets as far as she could see.

She shouldn’t have bothered sending Gianna out to rearrange the vampires. If these people rioted, then no amount of allies was going to keep things under control.

The bitter taste of acid climbed her throat.

This wasn’t what Deirdre was meant to do. Six months earlier, she had been a debt collector for a nightmare demon. She had lived in a drafty old townhouse with a lone vampire and only two pairs of jeans, both of which had been purchased from a thrift store down the street.

Now she was here, preparing to break news to an entire nation that could tear apart the gaean populations.

This should have been Stark.