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knew he was going to kiss me, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe.
    There was a movement in the doorway just beyond. Aidan—waiting, watching, the good little chaperone, just as he’d promised Mama. Patrick stiffened. “Well then,” he said, and led me back to the house.
    And I was startled by how much I wished that my brother had stayed away.

THREE

    Diarmid
    T hey brought the man in cowering and trembling. His red hair was disheveled; there was a bruise on his pale cheek where Ossian had been a bit too persuasive. He wore an old deep-blue frock coat, and his gray tie was crumpled and loose about his throat.
    “Please,” he begged, his voice cracking. “Please, I’ve done nothing. I don’t know what you want. Please—”
    “Quiet.” Finn sat on the edge of the scarred, blood-stained table they’d raided from the Butcher Boys just last week—another gang, another fight that left them bruised and battered. But they’d won it, just as they’d won the others. They’d quickly gained a reputation as one of the most indomitable gangs in the city. Well, why shouldn’t they? Even without their familiar weapons, even in this strange world called New York City, they were the Fianna.
    Finn spun his dagger between his fingers while the manwatched, then stabbed the point into the wood—
a bit too much,
Diarmid thought, but Finn had always been dramatic.
    Diarmid glanced away. He hated the way Finn toyed and played, like a cat with a mouse. It was that mean streak in him, one you forgot most of the time, because Finn was usually just, and generous, and he was so good at knowing what they needed that sometimes Diarmid believed Finn could read his thoughts. But Finn had a temper, too, and he could hold a grudge a long time, and if he wanted something you didn’t want to give him . . . more than the others, Diarmid knew what that was like. He loved and respected Finn. But Diarmid feared him in equal measure.
    Finn said, “You’ve nothing to be afraid of.”
    “No?” the man squeaked. “How is that, when you
kidnapped
me from the Luxe? There are people looking for me, you know. They’ll tell the police. You think I don’t know who you are?”
    Finn raised a dark-blond brow. “Who are we?”
    “Finn’s Warriors. I recognize you. We’ve all heard the talk on the streets.”
    “What talk is that?”
    “That you’re the worst gang since the Whyos. You wounded more than half of them in that fight even when you were caught by surprise. Seven against twenty-five. Everyone knows it. What you want from me I can’t imagine. I’m no one. I’ve got nothing. No money—”
    “You’ve the gift of Sight, haven’t you?” Finn asked.
    The man blanched. “No.”
    It was a lie; even Diarmid could see that from across the room.
    “Is that so?” Finn glanced at Goll. “How did you find him?”
    “A boy told us about him,” Goll said, tugging at the newsboy’s cap that now covered his light-brown hair. “Said if we were lookin’ for magic we should get Cannel the Fortune-teller over on the Bowery.”
    “A parlor trick,” Cannel protested. “Truly. I read people’s faces, that’s all. I tell them what they want to hear. It’s nothing more than that.”
    Finn snatched the broadsheet from Goll, one of the many that adorned nearly every surface in the city. Finn glanced questioningly at Diarmid, who shook his head. He couldn’t read it though he was the most educated of them; he’d been fostered by the love god, Aengus Og, with Manannan—master of illusion and trickery—as his tutor. But even Diarmid found the language of this place inscrutable, and it troubled him that these people so casually ascribed their greatest secrets to paper. Did they not understand the power of words?
    Finn handed the broadsheet to their captive. “Read it to me.”
    The man licked his lips nervously. “‘Bond’s Circus. Three weeks only. Come see the Circassian Women! Magio the Sword Swallower! Chief Many-Scalps and his three