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unseelie.”
    “One of my brothers gave me his staff to use,” Brother Marshall said.
    She giggled. She didn’t know why—it wasn’t funny. But she couldn’t help herself. “What do you want?”
    Brother Marshall must have noticed something was off, but he didn’t remark on it. He wasn’t Stark. He didn’t care how messed up Deirdre was.
    Stark didn’t care, either. If he’d cared, he would have been there.
    “You have to see this.” He handed her a photograph.
    She tilted it forty-five degrees to the right and then to the left, trying to understand what she was seeing.
    It was a picture of one of the voting booths for the election. Not one of the ones at the elementary school in Chelsea, but somewhere else—somewhere Deirdre didn’t recognize.
    Brother Marshall had photographed the Hardwick Industries logo on the back of the voting booth.
    “What about it?” Deirdre set the photograph on the altar before it could melt through her fingers.
    “Hardwick Industries was a medical technology company. They’re best known for inventing the antidote to silver poisoning. The CEO of the company is a man named—”
    “Pierce Hardwick,” she interrupted. “He was changed into an unseelie sidhe by Genesis.”
    “I’m going to take the fact you don’t sound surprised to mean that you know something I don’t,” Brother Marshall said.
    “Those booths were donated by Hardwick Industries, but they didn’t have anything to do with the design of the magical vote tallying.”
    “They didn’t?” He hefted a piece of unremarkable plywood out of the pews. It was almost as tall as he was, though the bottom had been broken off. “This is a segment of a voting booth that I took from one of the polling stations. Watch.”
    He set it down in the center aisle. Then Brother Marshall stepped back and lifted his staff.
    The tide of unseelie magic surged, lifting to fill Holy Nights Cathedral with swirling neon light. That unremarkable piece of plywood was no longer nondescript and plain—it was covered in an elaborate, tangled paragraph of runes, breathtakingly elegant and unimaginably complex. Deirdre couldn’t follow the lines with her eyes.
    “This might be hard for you to follow, but I’ll make it as easy as possible.” Brother Marshall waved with his staff again, and the runes separated into a three-dimensional diagram hovering between them.
    The runes were connected to sky and earth, sending lines out that extended far into the world beyond Holy Nights Cathedral.
    He gave a sigh and gestured vaguely at the magic.
    “All right. Here’s what we’ve got. This bright stuff, all the white lines—that’s the work the mage girl did, and that’s supposed to be there.” Brother Marshall plucked at a few of the lines, dismissing them piece by piece. The magical webbing connecting the runes to the sky vanished. “This sorta yellow stuff was set up by OPA witches to validate the integrity of the magecraft. Whatever.” Those pieces were ugly and clunky in comparison to what Marion had created, and he waved them away, too.
    Once they were gone, there was still pale blue magic lingering in smudges on the wood, like frost trimming a lake on the darkest of nights.
    “What’s that?” Deirdre asked.
    “Give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.” Brother Marshall waved his staff to enlarge the remaining runes. As they brightened, she realized that they resembled the style of the runes on his staff, like different letters in the same alphabet. “The OPA looked for magical tampering before election day, but unseelie stuff is hard to spot. I only found it because I was looking within the wood, and because I’ve got unseelie spells myself.”
    “Did you check other voting booths? Are they all like this?”
    “Every one that I probed, yeah,” he said.
    Spiders of nausea scrabbled within her gut. Deirdre tried to swallow the feelings down, but it made her feel like she needed to vomit even more.
    Stark