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smattering of freckles, and absolutely lethal aim with a long-bow; and Cait, skilled in more forms of hand-to-hand combat than anyone else in the group, she much preferred to castspells and warding enchantments instead.
    Together they watched as the sun finally dipped completely below the horizon and Central Park slipped into darkness. The first night of the Nine had begun. With a singular purpose, the Janus moved, spreading out to cover the four corners of the park.
    Splitting off from the others to travel south, Sonny ran along the treacherously rocky terrain of the Ravine, reaching deep into his mind, feeling past the delicate, obscuring mists of Auberon’s flawed enchantment to where the walls between the worlds were so thin they became doors. He felt for which of those doors might just open that night….
    There .
    Thirty yards east—maybe thirty-five. Sonny crept up the path and stood, loose limbed and ready, his blood warmed from running and anticipation of the coming fight. Some of the Faerie that tried to cross would retreat back to the Otherworld at the very first hint of a Janus in the vicinity. But the timid among the Fair Folk were also less likely to try and cross in the first place.
    Sonny reached into the leather messenger bag slung across his body and drew forth a bundle of three short, straight sticks, tied with a red leather cord: a branch each of oak, ash, and thorn. Sonny murmured an ancient secret incantation, and a silver-bladed sword appeared in his hand in their place. He held it ready at his side.
    Suddenly the granite wall in front of Sonny began to waverlike a mirage, and then cracked. A ghostly, iridescent light seeped through the split in the stone, and Sonny could see diminutive figures silhouetted in the glow. A tiny, wizened face peered out at him. When the creature saw the Janus standing there, it did not turn and run back to the Faerie lands. Instead it gave a nasty, high-pitched giggle.
    A piskie-fae.
    Sonny tried not to roll his eyes as he reached back into his satchel and withdrew a handful of rock salt. He threw the salt into the piskie’s leering face. The thing squealed and disappeared back into the rift.
    That was far too easy! he thought, grinning. He might not even need to use his blade at all.
    His reflection was interrupted by an angry buzzing. It was as though Sonny had just thrown a stone at a nest of hornets. Scrabbling at one another and the edges of the rift, a swarm of tiny, blood-lusting piskies came rushing at him, pale thin bodies glimmering like knives in the darkness.
     
    It took Sonny the better part of an hour, and the carnage, even on a piskie-sized scale, was considerable.
    As he cleaned the green, glowing piskie blood from the blade of his sword and veiled it once more, Sonny felt no remorse. The piskie-fae that had attacked him had got what they’d deserved. Piskie weren’t all nasty. Some, back home, were even occasionally useful, although their malicious pranksmade them annoying as hell.
    But these had been positively homicidal, and in far greater numbers than Sonny had ever been warned about.
    Maddox would give him a very hard time about how long it had taken Sonny to defeat such minor fae. Sonny wondered how Maddox himself was doing. Or any of the others, for that matter. Because there were only thirteen Janus, it was unlikely that their paths would cross much over the next nine nights. They had the entire park to cover.
    The ground at Sonny’s feet was littered with rock-salt crystals and flattened by his own boot prints in a rough circle that spread about three yards wide all around him. He hadn’t, in the frenzy, realized just how big the swarm had been. He paced the diameter of the circle. Really big. Especially for creatures with an outside height of only six or seven inches.
    Sonny stared at the trampled earth and frowned. It didn’t make a ton of sense.
    Piskie weren’t necessarily the smartest fae, but they were usually pretty crafty. He would