We stare at each other. I know what she’s thinking. Nah, reading minds isn’t one of my specialties. Grown-ups telegraph everything. Somebody kill me before I get one of those Play-Doh faces. Kat’s thinking if she makes the call against me and loses Mac, Ro’ll have her head. But if she lets me make the call and things go bad, she can blame it on headstrong, uncontrollable Dani. I take the blame a lot. I don’t care. I do what needs to be done.

“I’ll go up,” she says.

“I need the visual snapshot myself, or I could end up grabbing the wrong thing. You want me coming out with some fe—er, effin’ fairy in my hands?” They rip me a new one when I cuss. Like I’m a kid. Like I haven’t spilled more blood than they’ve ever seen. Old enough to kill but too young to cuss. They make a pit bull poodle around. What kinda logic is that? Hypocrisy pisses me off worse than most anything.

Her face sets in stubborn lines.

I push. “I know Mac’s in there and for some reason she can’t get out. She’s in major trouble.” Was she surrounded? Wounded that badly? Had she lost her spear? I didn’t know. Only that she was in way deep shit.

“Rowena said alive or dead,” Kat says stiffly. She left “It sounds like she’ll be dead soon and our problems will be solved” hanging unspoken.

“We want the Book, remember?” I try reason. Times I think I’m the only one in the whole abbey that’s got any.

“We’ll find it without her. She betrayed us.”

Feck reason. Pisses me off when people jump to conclusions they have no proof for. “You don’t know that, so stop saying it,” I growl. Somebody’s fist is holding Kat’s coat collar, got her up on her toes. It’s mine. I don’t know who’s more surprised, her or me. I drop her back on the ground and look away. I’ve never done anything like that before. But it’s Mac in there and I have to get her out, and Kat’s wasting my time big-time with total BS.