Reality had gone sideways, and Rowan felt it in his bones. A wrongness in the air, thick and nauseating, like standing in the eye of a storm that had nowhere to go. His stomach twisted, and for a moment, he thought he might vomit.

  Someone had broken fate, and fate didn’t take that lightly. The backlash was coming—building like a coiled spring—and Rowan just wished it would hurry the hell up and hit whoever deserved it so he could stop feeling like he was about to pass out.

  But right now, he had bigger problems.

  Rowan hovered in the night air, just outside the Ever After Books bookstore, and reshaped himself to human. That was getting easier while in the Astral. From outside of reality, most everything was gray, but the bookstore’s door glowed with an orange light. Magic was at play, but beyond the creation of artifacts, Rowan had no idea how the door had persistent magic. Was it an artifact?

  He urgently needed to find Abby’s soul and Gretta. He couldn’t float around pondering a door.

  He lifted the walking stick and examined the feathers. The feathers twitched, and when he concentrated on Abby, they moved more erratically than ever. He was getting closer. He felt it but also thought it was still too far away.

  Whatever magic was on the door, it was woven into it, so he walked through the wall. It looked like a tidy bookstore with roughly half the floorspace dedicated to children's books and the other half to adults. There was nobody here. He drifted through the space and found a small office, but there was nothing unusual to see. It was just a bookstore. If it weren’t for the magic on the front door, he wouldn’t think there was anything about it that was special at all.

  He drifted down, to check if there was a secret basement and found nothing but dirt. He drifted back up and onto the street.

  He needed to find a new way. There was nothing more Rowan the mortal or Rowan the trickster could do. What about Rowan, the god of fortune?

  This was a side of himself he had come to fear and dislike. Sure, he was the god of fortune, but it had never been his fortune. He’d never spent much time understanding his own nature as the god of fortune. Probably because the other half of his nature refused to accept that the future was set in stone. Whenever he had altered fate, there was backlash, and that backlash had always been fatal.

  What he needed right now was not so much to alter fate—not yet—but to sense Gretta’s fate. To find that thread and follow it. He wasn’t sure how—or even if fate had threads… but that twisting in his gut told him he needed to trust his other half.

  The walking stick warmed in his grip. A pulse, like an unseen hand nudging him forward. Rowan sighed.

  He let go of the Astral, snapping back into his body. Fate hit him like a hammer. He hit his knees, retching. It felt like his insides were being wrung out.

  He forced himself upright. He needed to move. Needed to see.

  He focused—not just with his eyes, but with something deeper, something he had spent years ignoring.

  The world fractured.

  Phantoms flickered around him—dozens of versions of himself stepping, turning, hesitating. A thousand futures colliding at once. They wove in and out of existence before his mind could grasp them.

  He swayed, overwhelmed—until instinct kicked in.

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  Some of the futures faded—discarded possibilities. But one remained, bright and waiting. Not the most likely path. But the one he wanted.

  He followed it.

  As he focused on Gretta, one path began to glow faintly.

  Inspiration—or sheer madness—hit him.

  He pulled the bookseller’s business card from his pocket and flicked it into the air. The wind caught instantly, twisting it into an unseen current. Not random. Not chance.

  Rowan grinned and stepped forward, following the pull.

  Cars swerved. He barely noticed. The glowing phantoms showed where the card was headed—and where he needed to be. He didn’t block out the futures where a car hit him or he tripped on the curb. He just looked past them.

  Even as cars passed inches away, he knew where his path was, and he trusted it. But more than that, he understood something else—the path he followed was only possible because he had what he needed to follow it, as unlikely as it was.

  He finished crossing the street into a grocery store parking lot and watched as the business card fluttered and landed onto the windshield of a red Honda Civic—a car he knew well.

  Two men he didn’t know were getting into the car. The person starting the engine had a key. Rowan’s eyes narrowed as they pulled out and started driving off.

  Rowan shifted to his raven form and flew after Greta's car. They didn’t go far, turning off into a long driveway leading up to a mansion on a hill. Rowan landed on a nearby Palo Verde and watched the men pull the car into the last stall of an eight-car garage, and Rowan saw them putting a tarp over it as the garage door shut.

  He and Gretta would come back for the car. Right now, he had to find her, and he saw a phantom image of himself flying toward the back of the mansion and toward a small artificial pond. He didn’t question it. He took flight and followed his phantom.

  As he approached the pond, he saw a man reclining at a table. On the table were sandwiches, and a wooden box. The wooden box was open and even from here, Rowan caught the glint of silver and the whiff of Abby’s power. Then, the man covered the box and looked up—directly at Rowan, as if waiting for him.

  Rowan streaked down from the night sky, and shifted inches from the ground, smoothly resuming his stride as a human.

  “To what do I owe this pleasure, Mr. Carter,” the man said.

  Rowan stopped, towering over the reclined man and the table. He picked up a sandwich and took a bite. He chewed slowly while staring at the man’s otherworldly features. He had pointed ears and slim eyebrows. His lips were thin and his teeth were sharp. His eyes were green and seemed to glow with their own light. And in that light, he sensed the same magic as he had in the bookshop door.

  The weight of fate’s backlash loomed behind Rowan—a tidal wave ready to crash. And for the first time, he saw exactly where it was aimed.

  Dorian had no idea.

  Rowan exhaled, rolling his shoulders. This wasn’t even a fight. This was fate unsheathing its sword. And he was the blade.

  Rowan smiled. “Dorian, you have something that belongs to my friend.”

  “I’d happily trade you,” Dorian said.

  A man Rowan hadn’t noticed standing in the shadows began playing a pan flute. Rowan only gave him the briefest glance.

  Rowan took another bite of the sandwich and realized there was nothing on the table to drink. Between the desert air and an exhausting night of magic, he really needed water.

  “Have a seat,” Dorian said, his voice offering a subtle command. “You are very tired.”

  Rowan laughed. Not at Dorian’s attempt at persuasion or the magic harmlessly breaking against Rowan’s aura of chaos. Not at the flute player scrambling in the shadows. But at the sheer inevitability of it all.

  He dropped the rest of his sandwich on the table and reached for the chair.

  Smiling.

  “Fate’s a bitch,” he said. “And tonight? You’re hers.”

  He swung.

  The tsunami of fate crashed down. The chair met Dorian’s face with bone-rattling force, lifting him off the ground and hurling him into the pond.

  A mortal would be dead. Maybe even an elf. But the moment Dorian hit the water, he didn’t splash—he vanished.

  Rowan grabbed a fresh sandwich, as the person playing the flute started playing faster. Rowan glanced over and glared at the guy. The man ran.

  Rowan picked up Abby’s necklace from the box. Foreign magic coiled around it—maybe a curse—but it unraveled against his chaos aura. He tucked it in his pocket, grabbed one more sandwich, and followed his phantom in a counter-clockwise path around the pond.