I wish you could see the world as I do.

I wish you could see.

Or, perhaps Etude said it best. It’s not that you don’t see it. It’s that you see it as something else. All around you. All the time. The world is always mysterious. Or at least I hope so. But that doesn’t mean it’s impenetrable. We can know the Deep. As much as we can know anything anyway. But we have no more reason to fear it than ourselves, for what evil there is in the world comes from us.

Doctor Alexander knew that. Some part of me believes his story did not end at the bottom of the Handred Keep, that after seeing the book consumed, he stepped through the vortex it created and into realms beyond, and that he is traveling them now on his eternal quest for truth. It is only a wish, but let it be true.

Cerise had her baby, a beautiful little girl. The following year, she became pregnant again, and three became four. To this day, she and Kai live with their family as people have for centuries in China—with good food and good fortune.

Ólafur went home to his father, who still believed his son had been in hospital. After the events underground, he emerged a new boy. They hugged, as only parent and child can. And then the boy showed his dad the strays he’d rescued on his journey home. He had names for all of them. Our names.

Harriet continued down the path she started. The best I can say of her is that she remains her true self, the dire hunter, and, well . . . All creatures, fair and foul, should beware she who walks with the hand of the demon.

Some months after the events that brought us together, I received a letter. I knew who it was from right away. Arranged before his death, it seems. I opened it hastily and saw two words at the top, Dearest Sister, and pushed it away in tears. It was some time before I had the strength to read, my face damp from tears.

Dearest Sister,

The sun always sets. The sun always rises. That is its way. That is how it should be. Know only that your friendship, your chastisement, your love, your guidance, were one of the nine treasures of my life. Before you, I was nothing. After me, may you be whole.

The power to break your curse was never mine, nor does it dwell in the hand or heart of any man living, or who will yet live. It rests only with you. That, I believe, was the point of it. When you are ready, that which you seek will come.

Until then, do not mourn, for wherever I go from here, in whatever realms I fly, I shall carry you with me. Always.

Your brother in eternity,

He who is called Tip of the Jaguar’s Claw

That was his name, or at least that’s what it meant. The jaguar was more than the companion of the shaman. A shaman could become the jaguar—to battle evil spirits and disease-causing demons—just as he could take the form of the plumed bird to fly between the realms and recover lost souls or the wayward rains. But my friend was not called the jaguar, which is the fiercest creature in the jungle. He was not called the jaguar’s fang, which is what devours. He was not called the jaguar’s claw. His name meant the point of it, the tip that grasps, that catches even birds on the wing escaping like ephemeral thoughts. The tip of the claw is that which lets the jaguar climb the highest tree and return to earth again. It is that which is retracted and hidden and emerges only when needed.

He could’ve spelled it phonetically in our alphabet, I suppose, and made his signature that way. But it would’ve meant nothing to me—just a collection of syllables no more or less meaningful than the Western name his adoptive parents had given him.

Tip of the Jaguar’s Claw.

I wish we had a single, strong word for it, as his people did. For I can think of no better name for my friend, my brother, who gave me the greatest gift of my life. I will die after all, it seems.

I am mortal again.

I was not cursed with immortality, as I had been told. I was cursed with my heart’s desire. In the folly of my youth, I wanted to be young and beautiful forever. And so I was.

Later, even as the years passed, even as I scoured the world for a cure, I never really wanted it to end. The adventure. And so my curse lived on.

But immortality is not a gift, just as death is not a curse. Time is not the flower but the vase. It’s not the succor of wine but the chalice. It’s not time that makes life precious. It’s what you fill it with. If you fill yours with idleness, another five centuries wouldn’t bring anything but depravity. Granny Tuesday taught me that—that there never comes a time when we don’t want another bite. And another. And another. Not that we can’t be disappointed that this, too, must end. But when we linger at the table, we never experience life as life, only as an extended disappointment, a series of half-moments that can only, necessarily, end in tragedy.

The old man of the wood, the one who sealed my fate with his sacrifice, wanted me to know what I had taken. To truly know. He wanted me to understand how special it was, how rare in the universe, that life was a gift, the greatest gift there is, and that it was not a thing to be wasted in carelessness. In learning that—in knowing it truly—my curse was lifted. And I am mortal once more.

So many talented and eccentric magicians, from Baltasar to Dr. Hunter, had turned the globe for a cure. But none of them, not even the man rightly called my husband, could grasp the truth of it. Only Etude. My very best friend. My brother. He didn’t just save the world. He saved me. My only hope, now that I look ahead, as he did, to a demise—to old age and death, to an end to my story—my only hope is that by standing with the others before the bright black, in playing my small part in the greatest spell ever cast, I paid some of the debt I incurred.

So long ago.

In a forest.

Years move like water anymore.

So little time.

And so exciting. The rush to fit it all in.

Don’t ever believe love has abandoned you. No matter how barren you feel. No matter how heartbroken.

But now it’s time to add to this record. Now it’s time to finish it. For good. For it happens that a new darkness is stirring. As it inevitably does. And a new volume will need to be opened. And so it’s right to close this one.

It was Ólafur who pointed me to it. He has turned into an extraordinary young man that the world is just beginning to notice. I was reading a story about his latest effort in a magazine when, just next to the text on the right side of the screen, I caught a list of the site’s most popular articles. Number seven was a travel essay about the search for a famed bistro in Brazil, several hours up-river from Manaus. Diners are rumored to sit on a stretch of sand, striped like a jaguar’s pelt, and to eat off broad, eye-shaped leaves. The food is said to be otherworldly, full of ingredients from the deep jungle, including some fruits and spices completely unknown to civilization.

But before you pack your bags, know that like the city of gold and the fountain of youth before it, you may find this place only to be a myth. A pair of German chefs, skeptics, flew all the way to Brazil and wandered for several days, traversing the same stretch of river until one of them contracted malaria and had to be airlifted back to the city. The article concluded it was all a rumor, circulated with the tacit approval of the local government, to lure tourists.

Ostranyo. That’s how the locals know it. The stories are fantastical. The chef is never seen, and almost nothing is known of him, which the article claimed only clinched the fraud. The chef’s apprentice, who does all of the cooking, appears only after the rains, when she steps from the forest like an apparition, her bare scalp marked with paint, her arms full of strange fruits and seeds ready to be ground to powder. Even her name, Apergunta, supposedly revealed the trick: a pergunta means “the question” in Portuguese.

Apéra, they call her. Bald and lithe, with ochre skin, piercing eyes, and a quick wit. Such a beautiful name. I knew then that his strange question to Doctor Alexander—back when we were living in New York and the book first reappeared—the question about his daughter and whether or not the doctor would sacrifice himself for her, was not intended for him. Not really. Etude was asking himself. The mushrooms were a sign. After that, he found her, the orphan of the jungle. A child of the earth mother and her estranged lover. Born some years before in the wet womb of the world. Born pregnant with the future.

He told me as much the first time we met. A successor always came, he said. His teacher had waited many years for Etude finally to be born. And so, too, him.

I’m sure he talks to her. From the other side. He would’ve seen to it. He talks to her in the wind and the gurgle of the river. He talks to her in the crackle of fire and the rustle of leaves. He talks to her in the rain. And in the thunder. And in the beating of her heart. He’s passing it on. As it was passed to him. As it’s been passed for tens of thousands of years. The knowledge of the Deep, of the throbbing sinews of the universe, of the secret slips between the realms. Of the Light. Of the Dark. Of the Others, both benevolent and malign.

Apéra, they call her.

I can see it so clear. His patient voice calling her to task on the wisp of the breeze. Her sap-stained feet stepping lightly over gnarled roots to sit cross-legged before a grand old tree, like a castle door, reaching from a mound of earth straight to the heavens. Her schoolmates: monkeys and birds and bright jumping frogs. Her textbook: all the mysteries of the sky. And keeping watch in the shadows, peering through the leaves, rarely heard and never seen, her guardian: the jaguar.

I can see it so clear. The Stranger teaching the answers to the Question.

But that is another story.

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I grabbed at a hanging chain, nearly ripping the skin from my hands as they took the full weight of my swinging body. I screamed in pain, but held on. I swung amid the dangling animals and knocked loose a calico cat, which fell into the dark. The gullet was too deep and too dimly lit for me to see the bottom. I heard the echo of a landing several moments later.

“Oh, Jesus.” I held on.

There were shouts above. Then gunfire.

Cerise screamed. I heard her voice. “Behind you! Behind you!”

“You have to get them in the organ under the liver!” the doctor shouted. “Under the liver!”

“Where the fuck is the liver?” Harriet yelled back in anger.

“Right side! Right side!”

I looked down. The cutest little boy looked back.

“Are you okay?” I asked him again. My voice faintly echoed.

He nodded. But his eyes shouted otherwise. They were as wide as the ocean.

I dropped. No sooner had my feet rattled the grate floor that the whole thing shook again. In the dim light, I saw the flash of a slych. It had leapt to join us. And I had no weapon.

The fleshy pad on its insectlike appendage touched me and everything disappeared. There was only me and it. No boy. No pit. No platform. No sounds. Everything was darkness, even the nothingness on which I crouched.

It was in my head.

I could not be killed, but I realized then there was nothing to prevent my mind from being erased, or all the parts that mattered anyway. I had no defense. I was kneeling before the dark-robed monster like a supplicant. I felt like I should want to move. To run. But I didn’t, as if it had hold of my will. Behind it, some distance away, a long table appeared, like one might find in an executive board room. Seated around it were thirteen warlocks in fine business attire. Their eyes were closed, their hands clasped. We were psychically connected through the creature. I could see them and they could see me, but only in their minds, and they kept their heads bowed and eyes closed.

“Lady Mila,” they said unison. “Tell the others to lower their weapons and they will be spared. We have not underestimated you this time. We have not underestimated you at all. You have penetrated deep. But the day is ours.”

“If that is so, then why hide the battle from me?”  I couldn’t hear it, but I could feel the noise reverberate in my chest as if from nowhere.

“There is no one coming to save you. The chef is dead.”

“Lies!”

“No. See for yourself.”

The blackness dissipated then, along with the table and the warlocks and the slych and myself. I was observing a scene as if from everywhere. I was aware of it from every angle.

A taxi waited on the curb of a busy street in lower Manhattan. It was the middle of the day. The rear door opened, and a barefoot man in rainbow feathered garb stepped onto the curb. A snarling wooden mask covered his face. A drum was tucked under his left arm, and he tapped it after each careful step across the sidewalk. He was chanting softly as well-suited passersby gave him strange looks. But he paid them no mind. He stepped, one foot in front of the other, across the wide pedestrian walk directly toward the front doors of the glass-and-steel skyscraper before him. A pair of white-shirted security guards propped open the doors, as if they were expecting their guest. They waited patiently as the man in the feathered garb took step after single step, each with a pause between, while he chanted and gently tapped the drum like a slowing heartbeat. Slower. Slower.

When the man finally stepped through the doors, the guards closed and locked them behind him and walked to the taxi, where a small boy waited with his colorful backpack.

The skyscraper’s high-ceilinged entry hall was empty. The barefoot stranger stepped across speckled green marble, swirled in white, towards the elevators at the back of the columned hall. When he reached the midpoint, two elevators rang and their doors opened, one after the other. Nine men and four women exited. They wore dark suits and ties. Some had their hair slicked back. Some were bald. They wore polished, handmade shoes, which clicked on the marble as they formed two lines, five on a side, with three at the head. Thirteen warlocks stood and waited for the slowly stepping man to enter the gap they had made. The stranger stepped and strummed and they reached into their jackets and removed gloves fixed with blades. Each was different. Some had knives at the fingertips. Some had razors on the palms. Some were barbed. Some were serrated. Some were like claws. Some were like talons. The warlocks fixed their gloves snugly, and still the man walked, chanting, one step at a time, and entered the gap. He passed the first pair, and they dropped into a stance and swiped with their bladed gloves—first one, then the other. Cut feathers flew. Dribbles of red hit the green-and-white marble. The stranger stumbled and momentarily stopped his chant.

Then he recovered. And stepped once more. He passed the second pair, and the ritual was repeated, but this time, blades were swiped twice. Again, the stranger faltered. Again, cut feathers fell to the ground, leaving a littered trail in the stranger’s footsteps. Blood dribbled.

But still he walked. Still he palmed the drum. Like a heartbeat. Slower. Slower.

He passed the third pair, and the blades were swiped three times. When he reached the fourth, his legs were shaking, and at their attack, they buckled. He screamed in agony. The chant stopped, and the stranger fell to his knees. The spell was broken, and the warlocks pounced. They moved around each other and around the stranger in a steady, determined dance, swiping at him with each pass. The mask was broken and fell, revealing the stranger’s bald head. The drum was punctured by a high-heeled shoe and smashed. Droplets of blood flew like spittle against the columns of the hall. It ran over the ground.

The stranger, on his knees, grimaced in terrible pain. His lips pursed as if to continue his chant, but he could only mouth the words feebly as the attack continued apace. His feathered garb was torn to shreds, revealing his naked body underneath. His bare chest was an unusual color, like the ochre of earth, and it was marred by a great scar over his heart. The mark of the jaguar.

When at last he fell, the stranger’s chest was opened and his heart removed. Raised in triumph, it was then split in half. Each half was handed to another, who split it into quarters. Each quarter was handed off again and placed into a jar and the jars were sealed and sent in different directions, one to each of the four winds, so that the dead man on the floor would never rise again.

And with that, the warlocks removed their gloves and walked single-file back to the elevators, leaving the cut and bloodied feathers on the ground—the exact image I had seen in the picture I found in the shadow of Harrowood House.

It was true.

Etude was dead.

I felt myself engulfed by despair as if swallowed slowly by a giant snake. It slithered darkly up from the tips of my toes and over my thighs to the top of my head.

He couldn’t be dead.

Couldn’t.

“It’s a trick!” I shouted. But I knew it wasn’t.

I felt something pressing on me then, pointed and hard, like a spike. I clutched my head at the very spot where, in the real world, the slych was still touching. Its attack had begun. I might’ve had a defense, if my mind was focused and clear. But my grief was consuming. I began to sob as a psychic nail was driven into my mind. My jaw shook as I held back a scream. My lips curled around it, but nothing came.

And then it stopped.

“What’s wrong?” a man at the table asked. His voice was slow and distant, as if played on a record spun too slowly.

Everyone around the table shifted nervously. They weren’t speaking in unison anymore.

“What’s happening?” a woman asked. Her voice was slower and deeper, and her lips moved slowly to match.

They looked at each other then, slowly, slowly, amid a deep, extended baritone of syllables.

Behind me, another figure appeared. The interloper stood barefoot wearing the same brown dress we buried her in.

Anya.

Her arms extended as she rose into the air—slowly, serenely. Everything about her lightened. Her dress, her skin, her hair. All of it went from drab to pale to fair. Finally, it glowed. She had not increased in size, and yet she seemed larger than all of us by a factor of ten or more. She became ethereal. Radiant. This was the moment of her ascension, I realized, as Madame Helena had predicted. After that moment, I would never see her again.

Then the miraculous happened. Streaks of light broke in both directions from Anya’s back, like luminous wings. Her appearance changed. She became not only beautiful but so radiant I could barely discern any distinct features. Her hair was a bright dawn. Her eyes, twin suns. Her skin, the shimmer of the moon on a still pond. She was not angry or vengeful. She was not joyful or happy. She was content. Peaceful. Serene. The wings of light that shone from her back swung forward and alighted the aghast faces of the men and women seated around the table. It was not an attack. Such a being would not act with violence. Instead, it gave a vision of pure grace. Not just sights and sounds but direct experience, however brief, of the serene lands—the higher realms, where matter does not decay and creatures must not eat each other to survive.

The effect was immediate. Several of the warlocks began to shake in heaves. Some simply wept. Others went catatonic. For they knew then what they had rejected, what they had been trying to destroy. And they saw themselves as they were: not mighty and powerful, taking from the world what others could only wish, but scared, hurtful, needy little things, lashing out from insignificance and fear. Lying and lied to. Abusive and abused. Petty. They knew it to be true. One woman slid from her chair as everything disappeared, even the slych, and I saw only Anya, or whatever her true name was, smiling down at me serenely. And I knew. She was the champion we had called.

Higher beings do not experience time as mortals do. They are not limited by it. We had lit the watchtower and aid had come. A volunteer had stepped forth and slipped onto our plane one hundred and fifty years in the past, like a divine commando sneaking behind enemy lines. It took human form, as has happened many times before, from Christ to the avatars of Krishna. It was born as Anya. It suffered as we suffer. It lived her short, despicable life, its divine nature bursting through in the form of her terrible gift. And then it died, having bound itself psychically to me. And when it died, it became again what it was. It saw my life as Madame Helena described: not 150 years in a succession, but all at once, like an unrolled tapestry, and it pushed from that tapestry any threat that might divert me from the path—the path that took me to that exact moment.

It was a miracle. And I watched, penitent and in awe, as the being rose higher and higher, and as it did, it shone brighter and brighter until I could barely discern a face in its radiance. I thought it would be happy. But it wasn’t. It seemed quite worried in fact.

It spoke to me in a whisper.

“Your demons,” it breathed, “you must face alone.”

I awoke to the slych towering over me in the dark. I jumped and raised my hands to fight it off, even though I knew I could not. But it didn’t strike me. It struck the little boy. It swatted him away as its faceplate came loose from its head. I saw the boy roll to the edge and I lunged with a shout, grabbing a tiny red tennis shoe with Velcro straps. I pulled him up and cradled him, expecting the slych to take us immediately.

But it didn’t. It merely slumped to the platform, which rattled under its weight. Part of its cancerous head dropped to the grate. I got a good look at it then. It was enormous.

The boy held a buckled strap in his hand. A single, bloodied 9-inch nail erupted from the inside.

“Did you take that off?” I asked him.

He nodded.

“Why?”

“It was hurting him,” he said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

He had a fattening lip from where he’d been struck. I pulled it down and saw red on his teeth.

“Are you okay?”

He nodded as four gunshots erupted overhead. Blam blam blam blam. I looked up, but there was no movement.

“We can’t stay down here,” I said.

I knelt again and asked the boy to climb onto my back, which he did. I inverted the strap so the nail pointed out and used it to lash him to my shoulder. I tightened the buckle.

“Don’t look,” I said.

“Okay.” He was clinging to my neck, and he pressed his face to my skin.

I jumped for the lowest chain, from which a fluffy rabbit dangled. My hands grasped its fur and our weight pulled it down. The tiny corpse bounced off the platform and fell into the dark. I jumped again and grabbed the hook with one hand. With a shout, I pulled up enough to get my other hand on the chain. We dangled for a moment. This was going to be hard, not least on my hands. If I could get my feet into the hook, I could push us up nearly halfway to the hole. I would then have use of my legs and my arms wouldn’t have to do all the work. I lunged again, but I couldn’t get my foot high enough.

I dropped back into a dangle. “It’s too high.”

Suddenly, the chain jerked upward once and stopped. It lurched again, and again, and again, as if attached to a crank. I looked up and saw Harriet perched over the round opening. She had the doctor’s staff. She had threaded it through the chain and was turning it, which caused the chain to bunch at the top and pull us up.

“Hang on!”

As we neared the lip, she held the staff in place with one hand, thrusting out the other. “Give me the boy!”

I nodded, and we made a very careful trade.

“I’m stuck,” I said once it was done.

“There,” she nodded to the side.

A line dangled over the lip of the hole. The material was so dark, I hadn’t noticed it before. They had torn one of the slych’s robes into strips and braided it like a thin rope.

“It’s alright,” she said, sensing my hesitation. “It’s strong enough. I tested it.”

I would have to let go of the chain to reach it. I took a breath and lunged.

“Where is everyone?” I asked at the top.

“Come with me,” Harriet said grimly.

She led me around the curved hallway to an open chamber, like a ballroom. The far wall was open to a foyer attached to the central staircase. Curved struts—part columns, part ribcage—rose up from the floor, tapering as they stretched to the ceiling. It was a ballroom, magnificent in its day. But now it was just a hull. A slych lay face down in the center of the room in a wide puddle of dark fluid. I didn’t see the other. Cerise and Kai were tending to the doctor, who rested against one of the giant ribs. He was hurt.

“Doctor . . .” I scurried to him.

He had been shot or speared through the left side. They had bandaged him, but there was blood all down his leg and on his arm and robe.

He smiled. “Glad you made it,” he panted. He looked at the boy, who had a nervous hand to his mouth.

“What’s your name?” the doctor asked, panting. His forehead was covered in sweat, and he wasn’t moving his arms or legs.

“Ólafur,” he said, pronouncing it like a question.

“Ólafur,” the doctor repeated. “That’s an interesting—”

We screamed as something fell like rocks on top of us. But it wasn’t rocks. It was not anything physical, in fact. We knew what it was. We knew because it wanted us to know. It was a sentient malevolence, born of cataclysm: the demon, Amaimon, freed from his prison throne.

The warlocks, like all good financiers, had secured their venture with a policy to protect them from catastrophe. The man they feared was Etude. They feared him so much, in fact, that after he slipped their net, they didn’t bother to pursue, as he had expected. Instead, they sought the one being that could finish the job, the one being that had both the power and the desire, for it had been kept prisoner at his hands—humiliated and used as a dog. They sought the demon and struck a bargain.

But the warlocks knew a demon does not serve men, and rather than be beholden to a creature that might very well turn round and usurp the empire they had built, they kept it in reserve, taking that risk only if the alternative was ruin. We had succeeded. We had penetrated the Keep. In so doing, we now faced an insurmountable foe. It wasn’t possessing us, as it had done to Lady Bathory. It was eating our minds, as it had done to the men above. I saw—and felt—twin rivers of fire, like mirror images of each other, one inverted above the next, where flames rolled and undulated in a turning flow, like fog over mountains. The heat was so intense, it felt as it my flesh itself was evaporating to smoke without the lick of a single flame. Then there was the noise . . . not just of the twin rivers of fire, which roared like waterfalls, but of the demon’s voice—a growling, snarling, booming gibberish that wove through an insane laugh. It rang through us like an echo from a great distance.

I had no weapon. No barrier. None of us did. We collapsed in terror and pain.

And just like that, our quest ended in catastrophe.

I surfaced without moving, as if I had been plunged into a phantom sea. The despair that took me knew no bounds. I was finally, utterly alone, and I understood so deeply why people take their own lives. The helplessness. The certainty that no matter what you did, there was simply no point to any of it—only long years of suffering, ending in death.

But.

We should never believe it. That terrible, disgusting, enchanting lie. That love and fellowship have abandoned us. For it is never true.

In that moment that should have been our demise, a single light shone.

From a crystal.

Caught in despair, the dragon and the phoenix, the spontaneous pair, turned to each other one last time, and what flowed between them—what was invisible to us—was made patent by the gem in Cerise’s heart. The jewel of many colors, forged so many years ago, was a gift to us, the gift to see what could not be seen. It glowed and lit Cerise’s chest. And for a flicker, the demon faltered under the pure light of love. Feeling resistance, Amaimon pushed again—and again and again, like a hammer on our minds, and we crumpled. The two lovers fell together, crying—not for themselves but each for the other, that death might come. They fell down and down and down until, huddled over Cerise’s belly, she remembered the reason for her flight, and the crystal glowed again, stronger. It lit her heart and her chest and belly glowed. And we all could see.

She looked frightened into her husband’s eyes, but he smiled at her.

“You knew?” she whispered.

As the phoenix kissed her dragon, his hand moved over her womb, completing the holiest of trinities: mother, father, and child, and the jewel of many colors burned so brightly in the dark that the three of them seemed a sun and the encroaching demon was beaten to a great height.

Harriet looked to me. “They can’t hold it forever.”

“She’s right,” the doctor said, panting. He pushed himself up against the wall.

“How do we stop it?” Harriet asked.

“We can’t,” he answered.

She shook her head. “They did it before!”

“Only a saint can perform a miracle.”

The demon pushed again, harder, and the jewel cracked. Cerise screamed as we bowed under its force. The light weakened.

“Do something!” Kai yelled.

“There’s nothing to do!” the doctor yelled.

Only a saint can perform a miracle.

I mouthed the words.

Etude would’ve known that. He wouldn’t have sent us there to die.

“He knew he couldn’t win,” I whispered.

“What?”

“He knew he wasn’t a saint! He knew they had all been killed! The seekers of the dark had seen to that. Their great plan. Mr. Morgan’s plan. To remedy that which had cost them the war.”

“What are you talking about?”

Only a saint can perform a miracle.

I covered my mouth and looked at each of them in turn.

The doctor, clutching the wound in his side. Etude had sent him his library—all his knowledge gathered over years of travel, the books of the True Canon—and it was the doctor, a clever man if ever there was one, who solved the riddle of the book’s resting place.

He was Knowledge.

Cerise, aglow with her family. Etude had resurrected her, but only by virtue of being part of a spontaneous pair. He had buried the jewel in her heart and sent her through the other side so the pair rejoin and so complete their trifold destiny.

They were Love.

Harriet, fists clenched. Etude had spared her. He had turned his adversaries’ secret weapon, the dire hunter, right round against them. He’d sent her on a vision quest so the spirit walkers of old could give her that which she needed to defeat them: insight into her true self.

She was Courage.

The little boy, clutching Harriet’s hand. I did not know him. But who else—who else in this entire world—could have looked at the slych and seen not a monster but only a man in pain?

He was Compassion.

Etude knew he couldn’t beat the enemy, not by himself, not after so many years of trying, so he retired to his sanctum and did the only thing he could. The thing he did best.

He made a recipe.

He kept his mixture secret, kept it hidden, kept it occult so his enemy would never suspect. Never see. Never prepare. He made a saint as the enemy had made the Lord of Shadows. I had thought at first that our salvation was the little boy. But it wasn’t. He was merely the final ingredient in the chef’s greatest creation, a mixture baked by demon’s fire.

Us.

All of us.

He’d planned it, kept it secret, even from me, locked it inside his heart so it would never be discovered. But the enemy struck before all the ingredients had been assembled. So he let it all go. His library. His collections. His restaurant. His money. His reputation. He cast it all aside, all his worldly possessions, and went on a fast. He prostrated himself humbly before the door to the other side. He begged forgiveness. He played his flute and our ancient allies brought him to Ólafur. With his totem complete, Etude cast his spell and sealed it, immutably and for all time, with his very life.

I must have seemed catatonic to my friends. Lost in realization and shock.

My mouth hung open for a second. “He would have given us everything we needed.”

“Who?” Kai asked.

I turned to the doctor. “Do you know how to bind a demon?”

“Bind? Maybe. I mean, there are spells, but I’d have to know—”

“—it’s real name,” Harriet interrupted.

She stood and faced the howl that whirled around us. She reached up and ripped a thin chain with a gold cross off her neck and threw it to the ground. Then she stepped out of the sphere of light. She was completely bare before the demon. But then, she knew something the rest of us did not. Etude had told her. The night she broke into the sanctum. Harriet knew Amaimon’s real name.

She spat it like a curse. “Bolochai . . .”

We all felt it quiver as her voice echoed in the high chamber.

Harriet strode forward wearing a look that I will never forget. Brow low. Fists clenched.

“BOLOCHAI!” she screamed.

It quivered again, and spat at her, and she walked through vermin and blood. She walked over fire and pestilence and the burning boils of the sufferers of hell.

“Bolochai!” she yelled. “I command you. In the name of the Father. And the Son. And the Holy Spirit.

“Bolochai! I command you in the name of the Buddha. And all the bodhisattvas.

“Bolochai! I command you in the name of the prophet Muhammad. And all the saints and shamans.

“Bolochai! My eye is open! And I—Command—You.”

Harriet worshiped no god. But she had faith. She had faith in us. But more than that, Harriet had sworn on her very soul that someday, somehow, she would end the adversary’s coven. She had sworn it on All Hallow’s Eve, the night she rescued the young girl with Down’s from the warlock’s dark court. She’d sworn it again an hour before, when she saw the menagerie of corpses and what the seekers of the dark had done to the little boy. There were many reasons why that oath might never have been fulfilled. More than we could count. But one of them was not, and never would be, that Harriet Chase was afraid.

There was a shriek and a rumble like the tearing of the sky and Harriet reached out and grabbed the sentient malevolence as if by the throat and threw it down.

Then she stepped on it.

Like a cockroach.

We all had a sense that the thing we could perceive but not see was squirming like a snake under her boot.

But a demon is not so easily trapped. Furious that a mere mortal would even dare try, it pushed Harriet off. She fell back and it rose again to fill the room and behind. Fire burned, and the pair began to wrestle, the demon and the guardian shaman.

I grabbed the doctor’s arm. He had the library. In his head. “What do we do?”

“Uhhh . . . Different demons can be bound in different—I don’t have everything memorized, you know!”

“Help her!” I told Kai and Cerise.

They squeezed hands and shone again. Shafts of light radiated from them and pierced the demon like spears.

“He was trapped in bone,” the doctor said. “So that must work.”

“Shit hurry up!” Harriet was being overtaken. She had hold of the demon’s maw and was staring down it. Her eyes glowed orange, reflecting phantom fire.

“Doctor!”

“What? You want me to summon a bone? Fine.” He raised his hands. “I summon a bone.”

Animal bones.

“Did anyone keep any of the animal bones?”

But no one had.

“FUCK!” Harriet screamed.

The roar was deafening now, and she fell to her back.

“DO SOMETHING!” she screamed in the din.

If the world had turned by adults alone, we would’ve been finished then and there. But it doesn’t. The world has children, too. Little Ólafur tugged on my hand and I looked down at him looking up at me with those big eyes. There was a bit of dried blood on his cheek. He reached deep into his mouth and squinted hard and pulled out fingers covered in bloody saliva. Between them was a tooth, knocked loose in the battle.

“Oh, sweetie . . .”

The doctor grabbed it. “Close enough!”

“HURRY UP GODDAMMIT!” Harriet’s hands held open the phantom maw as it pushed down to her—closer, closer. Her fingertips began to blacken.

“It was held by a six-pointed star!” I yelled.

The doctor nodded. “Right. Two triangles. One to summon. One to bind. So we need a triangle.” The doctor looked at the ground around him. “We need something to draw with!”

I bit my finger and tore. It hurt. But I managed to draw blood. “Here!” I scratched a triangle on the floor.

“Form a circle!” the doctor yelled as he placed the tooth inside.

As we did, Harriet’s entire body was lifted a few inches in the air. She grit her teeth and grunted and grasped the nothing before her tighter. Unlike the demon, her strength wasn’t inexhaustible. I understood then why Etude was always near death after using the chair, even for a few minutes. A strong-willed mortal might hold a demon momentarily at bay. But it would never win. Not without help.

Doctor Alexander went down on one knee and held up his hand. He paused for a moment as if thinking what he should say. “Okay . . . Okay. I got it.”

Harriet’s fingernails were frayed and the tips were bleeding. “NOW! NOW! NOW! NOW!”

The doctor squinted as if in pain. Then his face was calm. “Zero is the number of nothing, which there was in the beginning. One is the number of the world, the singularity, which God created from it. Two is the number of the waters that move over the land. Three is the number of life, of the plants that grow from wet earth. Four is the number of the animals that feed on the plants. And five . . . five is the number of man, both saint and sinner, who is separated from paradise. Six is the number of the devil, curse and plague, who bars the way. But holy number seven is the final judgment of the divine, which is locked behind seven seals.”

We all felt the change. The demon had stopped struggling. It was clawing now, clawing to get away, trying to break free of our circle. It had come expecting to be master, but as the doctor spoke the words he improvised from the thousand texts of Etude’s library, it realized the truth. It was vulnerable.

But Harriet wouldn’t let go. Standing in the middle of all of us, teeth gritted, she was all but growling. She was a wolf, gripping a beast ten times her size by the throat, bringing it down.

“We here gathered,” the doctor shouted, “in holy number seven”—he reached to his right and touched Cerise’s belly—“being together anointed by a shaman of ancient order, do hereby act by the Logos of the one called the Christ, and by the three jewels of Buddha, dharma, and sangha, and by the suras of the Holy Recitation, and upon their power, we do bind the demon Bolochai, foul one, who is called Amaimon, Prince of Devils, in the flesh of an innocent!”

Harriet pulled the demon down until she had all her weight on it, and the moment the spell finished she collapsed. Her hand knocked Ólafur’s tooth free, and we cringed as it bounced away, expecting the demon to roar back upon us.

But it didn’t. Other than our labored breath, there was silence.

We looked at the blood triangle. Harriet’s left palm was pressed flat to it. I saw her grimace. She looked at me, worried, like something was wrong. She was on her knees, and as she caught her balance and lifted her hand from the triangle, it shook violently, as if something had a hold of it. She immediately pressed it flat against the floor.

“Holy . . .” Doctor Alexander’s face was pale.

“What?” Cerise stepped forward.

“It’s in her hand. In the bone.”

Harriet made a slow fist and stood. We all watched in horror as the skin of her hand darkened and turned black. Then her entire arm shook. She was sweating and grimacing and struggling against the demon inside her own body. The black color seeped up her arm as the wriggling lines of her veins traced black snakes across her skin and carried the darkness deeper into her body.

“No . . .” she said softly.

Standing there in the silence, fist clenched, Harriet Chase mumbled lines from the Invictus.

“Out of the night that covers me . . .” She gritted her teeth. “Black as the pit from pole to pole.” She grimaced again as her arm moved on its own. She grabbed the crook of her elbow with her right hand and squeezed as if to stop the blood. Her lip quivered as she held it fast. “No one uses my body but me.” She squeezed harder. “No one.”

The dark seepage slowed. Then it stopped. Her hand and wrist were stained charcoal black, as were the veins of her forearm. But her will had held. The demon was trapped.

I touched her shoulder.

“I’m fine,” she said. But she was very short of breath, and she wasn’t letting go of her elbow, as if the grip were necessary to choke the contagion at the source.

Everyone sat. Other than the sound of our breathing, it was desperately quiet.

“We’re not done yet,” the doctor said, sweating.

Our ascent up the central stairwell was unimpeded. Kai helped Harriet. I helped the doctor. Cerise took Ólafur’s hand. She appeared to be limping from the battle.

The spiral staircase stopped at a round hall one floor below the top, where an ornate pair of curved staircases rose to the final chamber. Statues in nooks lined the walls. Cerise shone her light around. They were all there, the warlock’s champions. In the ceiling were carved the six sigils of the Nameless gods. The room above, the highest in the Keep—and also the lowest—belonged solely to them. Only the highest among the seekers of the dark had ever seen it.

I left the doctor leaning on his staff to shine my weak, yellowish light at the statue of Rasputin on the wall. His long hair was parted in the middle. His eyes, which stared out to the horizon, contemplating secrets, sat like minarets atop his long face, their gaze calling the penitent to prayer. Next to him was a slightly shorter man with large hands, a square-ish head, and tousled locks of wavy hair. He was not looking to the horizon. He was looking down. His heavy eyebrows were unforgiving and seemed to push the viewer to the floor.

I must have lingered because the doctor hobbled closer with his staff. “Know him?”

“Zaragoza,” I said, as if it explained everything.

We walked up the stairs, whose surface undulated with the same coral-snake skin pattern we had seen below. I stopped near the top, my beam alighting the domelike ceiling that recessed in circular terraces. Resting at the center, as if reclining in bed, was Nebuchadnezzar’s tome. I hadn’t seen it in decades. It was exactly as I remembered. Shaped more like a cube than the rectangle of a modern book, its stiff, square pages stuck out irregularly from its tortoiseshell covers, which were lashed to the wide spine by X-shaped stitching. It was ancient and brittle and looked it—a spiteful aged imp, wrinkled and gray. It seemed to spit at us as we came. I turned to see Cerise’s reaction, but she was frozen on the stairs, her head barely over the floor.

“What do you see?” I asked.

She shook her head, like she couldn’t describe it.

My flashlight wavered then and gave out. I slapped it, which did nothing. We were down to one light. I saw a breaker box on the wall by the opposite entrance. A black cord curved up to it along the wall and then to an array of bulbs in steel cage fixtures that ran along the back of the dome. Several of them were broken.

“I got it.” Kai trotted to the breaker and swung open the metal lid, which squeaked. He flipped the switch and a low hum popped and turned into a piercing squeal.

“Gah!” I covered my ears.

He flipped it off again.

“It’s defending itself,” I said.

The terraced dome ceiling stretched nearly to the floor at the sides, where a three-foot wall left just enough space for someone to sit cross-legged in the squat meditation nooks that lined the chamber. Cerise set our remaining flashlight on the ledge and the sideways beam illuminated the floor in relief, revealing the skeletons. They seemed to have been re-mineralized in dark material, like fossils. They grasped and tumbled in a spiral, both terrified of and irrevocably drawn to the center.

Cerise looked between us. “So . . . What’s the plan?”

I turned back to the book. I could barely take my eyes from it, in fact. The scuffed, scarred, stitched, aged, gray-brown cube had pages so dry you could break them like crackers. But it seemed to be gloating. And it sung. I heard it wail in pestilence and glee. The terraces of the recessed ceiling seemed to turn around it in alternating directions, a great cog around which the whole world spun. It was everywhere. It had opened the portal. It had sprouted tendrils. It fed on all our pettiness, all our hate, like a weed covering the earth.

Cerise turned my shoulders hard. I blinked. Everyone was in different places, including the doctor, who leaned, coughing, against a different wall.

“What happened?” I asked.

“You were frozen,” she said. “We couldn’t wake you.”

I glanced at the book again, at its stack of yellowed pages. Of all those there, I alone had turned them. I alone had read.

The doctor’s staff rested obliquely against the steps of the ceiling as if pinned there, along with one of Harriet’s heavy combat boots and several bits of smoldering cloth. It seemed that at the tip of the ziggurat, gravity returned to normal.

“How long?” I asked.

“About an hour,” Harriet said.

She looked pale, and she was sweating profusely. The doctor couldn’t stop coughing. The boy was asleep on Kai’s lap.

“What happened to you?”

“I don’t know.” I looked up again. “You all have been busy.”

Doctor Alexander saw me looking at his staff. “Should’ve known it wouldn’t budge it. Truth isn’t a virtue, right?”

“We tried to douse it in lighter fluid,” Harriet said.

After she mentioned it, I could see the green plastic capsule and where it had darkened one of the terrace steps and a corner of the book in unlit fluid.

Nothing had worked.

“How do we destroy it?” Cerise asked me.

They had run out of ideas and had tried again to wake me. But I was no help. I could tell I wasn’t thinking clearly. It had done something to me. I shook my head and started to pace.

“There has to be a way,” she said meekly.

The doctor lowered himself against the wall slowly. It seems his legs were having trouble supporting him for any length of time. “The greatest magicians of the age threw everything they had at it,” he said. “They didn’t so much as dent it.”

“Then what the hell are we doing here?” Kai demanded.

Ólafur woke at the shouting, and Kai blushed.

“Kid’s got a point,” Harriet said.

“It’s laughing at us,” I whispered. “At the puny humans crawling like ants underneath it, trying to silence the song of the gods.”

Our last flashlight flickered and dimmed, along with our hopes. Cerise collapsed next to her husband, leaving me the last on my feet. But I couldn’t think. It had got to me somehow. Confused me. I rubbed my forehead.

There was a tug at my leg. I looked down at beautiful little Ólafur.

“Is it time?” he asked.

I knelt. “Is it time for what, sweetie?”

“Is it time to say my word?”

“Word?”

“The one the stag gave me.”

Silence. Everyone stared at the little boy.

He thought we were challenging him, as adults do—politely telling him by our silence that this wasn’t a place for a child—and he rushed to defend himself. “And Mr. A-trangay said if I wanted to stop all the bad stuff, I could help, and that was why the stag gave me the word, but I had to go a scary place. The scariest place anywhere. I think that’s here. But I would be okay and people would come and I could say my word.”

Harriet grunted loudly to her feet. She stopped clutching her left hand and let it fall to her side in a fist, which she opened and closed a few times to stretch her fingers. She stood behind Ólafur as if in defense.

“Do what you gotta do, little man.”

“Okay,” he said very seriously. He took a deep breath, like he was about to go on stage for his first piano recital. He stepped forward bravely. And after a moment’s pause, he finally spoke his word aloud. The new word in an ancient language. The word too heavy for anyone to carry but an innocent. He yelled it, just as he had been practicing.

It echoed.

But nothing happened.

The doctor dropped his head. “Probably should’ve said the word before we threw the lighter,” he breathed.

Cerise collapsed against her husband’s shoulder. Her lips turned down. Tears were close. “It’s not fair . . .”

Ólafur looked like he wanted to cry as well. “Did I do something wrong?”

“Oh nononono,” Cerise said, shuffling to him on her knees. She clutched his face. “No, you were perfect, sweetie. Perfect. You did just the right thing.” She hugged him and looked at me, desperate.

Harriet plopped to her butt. She’d been battling the demon for so long. She was done.

I turned to the doctor, but he only shook his head, which rested against a ridge in the wall.

“I got nuthin,” he said.

Cerise’s eyes were on me. “We need Etude. Where is he?”

I hadn’t told them.

They didn’t know.

I lowered my head.

“He would’ve given us everything we needed,” I said. “We can figure this out.”

“Why not just tell us?” she demanded.

“Because then it could be discovered. If I knew, then the slych would’ve known, and if it knew, the warlocks would’ve known, and so too the book.”

Quiet.

“It has to be something only we would know.” I looked around at my friends. “There must be a way. He would’ve told—”

I stopped.

“He would’ve told us.”

“Told us what?” Kai asked.

“How do you stop the feast of shadows?”

Everyone looked at me like my ears had started flapping. I stormed to the far wall and stopped before the electrical box.

“You turn on the light,” I whispered.

I opened it and flipped the switch. The piercing squeak resumed again immediately. It resounded in the chamber, whose recessed terraces reflected and amplified the sound, and everyone covered their ears. The noise rose and rose and until it finally cracked. The pitched changed, as if an obstruction had been cleared. A single steel-caged lamp began to flicker and glow softly, fed by a series of capacitors that had been charging since Kai activated the generator hours before. The coiled filament in the glass glowed red, then orange, then yellow, and finally white. Its intensity grew and grew, and it began to hum—louder, louder.

It burst. Showers of sparks flew from the box as well as from the fixture of every lamp in the array, which broke free from its mount and crashed. For a moment, the sparks hung in the darkness like stars, illuminating our faces. We were giants striding the universe. And then they fell—both up and down. Sparks hit the lighter fluid and flames rose immediately. They traveled up the terraced steps to the book, where they flared, and we all felt a burst of heat.

The stitching burned and contracted, forcing the pages open. The book screamed for help as it turned into a fireball. Air rushed forward to feed it. Heat escaped through the hole over which it rested, and a convection current fed the rising inferno. Flames grew and spiraled into a vortex, carrying the disintegrating tome with it. Smoke filled the room and I coughed. We would suffocate quickly in that closed chamber, deep underground. We had to retreat. Kai grabbed Cerise. Harriet grabbed Ólafur. She picked him up with one swipe of her good arm. I grabbed the doctor’s hand and was about to pull him to his feet when the world turned right-side up again. Everyone fell and hit the ceiling, which was now the floor. Smoke swirled about in whorls, unsure which way to escape, and we breathed it and coughed as a tremendous racket filled the fortress overhead. Everything loose had fallen, including the enormous mass of bones. Rocks shifted under new weight, and the fortress shook.

It was going to collapse.

“We have to go!” I screamed.

The others were already on their way up the terrace steps to the exit, whose stairs were now overhead.

“WAIT!” the doctor called. He raised his hands to the heat and side-stepped down the terrace to his staff, which he bent to retrieve.

The uneven square pages of the burning book were turning. The doctor and I could see the glyphs change. They were contracting, trying to escape the flames. I think it was jettisoning everything it didn’t need, including the spell that kept the fortress turned the wrong way in space. I remembered what Etude had told me years before, that it wasn’t a book. Not really. Knowledge is never evil, even knowledge of the dark. There was a matrix, an entity, embedded in the chorus the dark gods had sung to Nebuchadnezzar. We heard it then. The fire peeled it from the pages, and we covered our ears. The fire burst and sputtered and then burst again.

“It’s trying to escape!” The doctor raised his staff and drove the tip through the glyphs, impaling them on the burning book. He grit his teeth through the pain. His side was bloody, but he held on. “GO!” he yelled.

“Doctor . . .“

He looked at me then, and I saw his eyes. “Without hesitation,” he said with a little smile.

I nodded and turned to climb the terrace with my hands and feet. I glanced back once to see him laughing at the dark entity trying to break free.

“That all you got?” The doctor’s voice echoed over the rumble of the fire. He held his staff against the pages. The diamond tip of truth hadn’t been enough to dislodge it, but it was more than enough to stop the flight of its deceptions.

We ascended the Handred Keep using the roof of the central staircase as a spiral ramp. We crossed the scaffold bridge and the moat-pit and stepped out into a wide-open sky as the earth underneath us shook and the mine collapsed into a tower of dust that, we would later learn, was visible from space.

We who remained stood in silence and watched the sun rise on a day that was not supposed to be.

Magic burned.

Across the world, it withered and flaked and disintegrated into invisible embers. Forces bound by the book frayed and fell apart. The figurative tower the warlock had built, whose black spires cast long shadows over the earth, began to shudder. Then to shake. And then to topple. All the seekers of the dark felt it. So, too, the people of North America when a tremor rattled the entire East Coast. A sidewalk in New York cracked and three concrete slabs were forced upward, as if something massive were about the break from the ground and was stopped. The force of the rupture launched a bull statue into the air, and it crashed onto those who had strangely come to kneel before it, who had come to be obliterated by their lord as he burst through the portal and onto our plane, and so to be reborn holy martyrs. But they were not. They were crushed as the lords of shadow, high above the street, were transformed. Some wailed as wasps broke from their mouths. Others squatted painfully in their board room and shat snakes. The police would later find both when they raided the offices moments later.

What we few carried forth is still known across the world as the greatest spell ever cast. Possibly, the greatest spell that ever could be cast. At once:

the blighting of the book
the conjuring of a saint from the void
and the binding of the world against eternal night

How long he worked on it, I couldn’t say. Years, I expect. By it, his sickness had ended, the initiatory sickness of the shaman that Etude thought had concluded in the jungle. But that was just the beginning. The loss of his village, his people. That was his sickness. His removal to France. His bouts of anger and depression that ultimately manifested his revelation of the book. That was his sickness. The loss of it, his guilt, the years spent searching. That was his sickness.

The warlocks hadn’t torn Etude’s heart. They’d opened it as his master never could. Not a pinprick hole, as with the shattered splinter of the world tree. For his heart was too great for such things. They’d shorn it completely. Turned it inside out. As wide as the sky.

To let the whole world in.

With his garb and mask and drum, my strange friend was killed. He made his way to the underworld, the nadir of his journey, the journey we had started so many years ago. And somewhere along the way, he whom the Western world had falsely christened Etude Emile Saint-Antoine Étranger—he whose real name passed unknown and unspoken—became more than just the shaman of his village, or his nation. He became the shaman of the world, the greatest sorcerer who ever lived.

May his kingdom last a thousand years.

I pulled Etude down, down, down endless flights of stairs: stairs that curled, stairs at right angles, stairs that cut a straight line, our feet quickstepping across stone. By turn after turn, we descended deep into the Keep of Solomon, ahead of the shouts and calls. If it had been a rational structure, we might have been caught. So too if The Masters had ever wandered from their high apartments, where each was lord, to explore the castle of which they were stewards. But they did not. Its passages were as unknown to them as their servants’ quarters and we were molested only by a trio of bald, brown-robed librarians, who heard the shouting and gathered to investigate. They tried to stop us, but I punched one squarely across the jaw, and he doubled over, clutching it. We made our way to an arched vestibule at the very bottom of the library which formed a small monument. A modest fountain gurgled at the center. Around it, braided columns twisted upward. Carved into their capitals were various artisans and craftsmen responsible for the Keep—for its architecture or its interiors or its upkeep through the centuries. Each was depicted from the waist up and seemed to hold the weight of the Keep on their shoulders. Their heads were bent in struggle, their hands lifted to grasp the ceiling.

“STOP!” came a shout from above.

The six Masters and Mr. Morgan stood at various landings in the library. I don’t think any of them knew which of its winding paths led to that lowest of floors which I had discovered on my many perambulations.

Etude spun and saw no exit. “We are trapped!”

“I thought you were a shaman,” I accused. “Can’t you lead us through the shadow realm?”

“The veil must be pierced! I do not have my drum or flute. We have no ritual fire, no fall of water, and I do not know the spirits of this place!”

“But I do.”

I nodded to a dark arch, where a maid’s pale face—and nothing else—was barely visible, as if peering in from a wall of shadow. It hung there for only a moment before it retreated completely. I suspect she had come and gone so many times through the barrier, the veil between our world and the shadow-place, that it had been worn thin under that arch. Etude took my hand and with a silent look made it clear I should stay silent as well, and also that I should not let go.

It was as if we walked for hours through someone’s dark and anxious dreams. He navigated it as only a spiritwalker can, a man trained since birth not only to battle evil spirits but also to retrieve the lost souls of the sick. We emerged sometime later in a church in Italy. We gave the parish priest quite a fright as we stepped from the gap in a marble ensconcement at the back of the sepulcher. The clock tower in the square outside made it clear we had covered not only distance but time. It was then several hours earlier than when we had left. It was odd, I remarked, to think that right then, the two of us were also standing in the grand hall before the High Arcane. Could we not go and alter events? But he said no, that no matter which path we took from that church—train, automobile, helicopter—we would not be able to reach the Keep of Solomon one moment before we left, and so the paradox was always avoided.

“Such is the shape of space-time,” he said.

An older gentleman, a head shorter than me with long sideburns and a derby hat, shuffled by and made a face at our clothes, and again at Etude’s bare feet.

“I have heard that time is also money,” I said. “Perhaps you could find a way to render it so.” I lifted the legs of my cotton pants. “We need new clothes. We look like cultists in these outfits. Someone is bound to call the police.”

“Really?” he asked, looking down at his shirt. “I rather liked them.”

By means of a metal plaque at the door of the church, we discovered we were in Bergamo, in the foothills of the Alps. Like most Italian towns, its three- and four-story buildings were all of a similar design, and they lined the cobbled streets on both sides without gaps, as if forming the walls of a maze whose paths were never straight. Every avenue bent slightly and at odd times, seemingly for no reason other than to make sure you never quite knew where you were. It was a world unto itself and made to be so. It existed for the people who lived there and no one else. We found a quiet nook off a blind alley, too narrow for cars to pass, and sat under a cluster of hanging potted plants contemplating our options.

After a brief meditation, Etude raised his hands. Nothing happened at first, but before I could inquire as to his intentions, a rat appeared. It did nothing at first, as if it were afraid to approach. When a pair of pigeons landed nearby, the rat dared approach. It was followed in turn by all the animals of the city, not just rats and pigeons but kestrels, blackbirds, red foxes, bright finches, mouse-sized bats, feral cats—even wall-climbing lizards and a handful of frogs who hopped out of the gutter or from the mouths of dark pipes that fell from the rooftops. He asked them if they knew of the shiny metals and bits of paper that the humans traded, and they said yes. He asked if they might bring them, and they agreed. They seemed quite eager, in fact, for no one had bothered to talk to them in a very long time.

A brown rat the size of a small dog was the first to return. It walked headfirst down a vertical drain pipe carrying something in its teeth. It dropped it on the ground near Etude’s bare feet. It was a silver ring, quite large and heavily tarnished, with swirling bands at the top that held in place a sapphire of at least ten karats. Etude bowed to the rat and introduced himself and me. The rat was the wisest of his kind and told my friend he had come as soon as he heard the news, for it was rare anymore for people to honor the old ways—the ways before towns. He said that under that city many babies were starving, and Etude promised to knock over a rubbish bin near the river, which he did on our departure. The wise rat thanked him and left.

On and on it went. An animal appeared bearing a small treasure, something lost in the cracks and sewers, and asked a favor of the shaman, which he happily obliged. Most were quite simple. A kestrel had some plastic netting wrapped around its feet and tail and asked that it be removed, which I was happy to do. She left us a single diamond earring. A mother cat with Gucci collar brought a snarling kitten, a child from a recent litter—a matted, angry little menace of a cub that her owners had discarded. The mother had rescued it and kept it in secret, but it bit her and refused to eat. The young shaman wasted not a moment. He lifted the tiny terror by the scruff of its neck. It hissed and tried to bite him, but he merely moved his hands over it and spoke in a low voice. Even animals can be possessed, it seems. When the spirit was mesmerized, Etude passed his hand through the kitten’s body and brought it out in a closed fist. He whispered words to his fingers, then opened them and blew, and black ash scattered on the breeze. He returned the tiny kitten, now mewing plaintively to its mother, who gave us her owner’s wallet, stuffed with credit cards and neatly folded bills—so many, they could not be easily counted.

Before long, there was a line of animals stretching around the corner, and I felt like Etude and I were royalty, receiving gifts and entreaties from our noble subjects. We were polite to them, and they were polite to us. There was much bowing and speaking of ancient oaths. Soon, as word spread to the wilds that a true shaman had appeared, all semblance of order was dropped. As their numbers grew, the animals took to frenzy, agitated to excitement by the mere chance to see the strange bald man who remembered the ancient treaties, when men and beasts had warred and then made a pact. Birds of all stripes and colors swooped into the alley and dropped prizes. Bullfrogs croaked and hopped laboriously forward amid a tangle of rats and mice and more than a few voles who scurried so quickly that it was very hard to see them. Each deposited before the feet of the shaman the shiny detritus of the city—metals and papers and strange cut rocks.

As the animals swarmed, the pile at Etude’s feet grew, and he raised his arms in thanks. And so he stood amid the chaos, hands high, like the barefoot conductor of a great pastoral symphony. And then, just like that, it was done. Etude brought his hands down and the animals scurried away in all directions, as if they forgot that they could speak, and we were alone.

The pile we had amassed was mesmerizing. There were rings, bracelets, necklaces, loose gems and pearls, earrings, cash, and coins. Quite a bit of the jewelry was costume, of course, and amid the coins, I found several bottle caps, a penny slug, and some brass tokens to various laundromats and arcades. There was also a dog’s tag, three key chains (two with keys attached), and a ring fashioned from a nail. The birds had snagged a handful of restaurant receipts, presumably mistaking them for cash, including one bearing a freshly written phone number next to a hand-drawn heart. They had also pilfered someone’s grocery list and part of a newspaper crossword puzzle, all in Italian.

Even still, by the time the symphony reached its sudden climax, enough valuables had been delivered to fill a small chest. It was a genuine treasure. I had never seen a treasure before. Etude knelt and thrust a hand into it and lifted a full fist. Gold fell from between his fingers and clinked on the cobblestones.

“Will this do?” he asked.

I nodded meekly.

It took us some time to gather and sort it all. The crown jewel was an emerald necklace that I was certain dated to the 17th century. There was also a casino chip worth ten million lire and a Roman-era coin that we would later sell for a sizable sum.

“This looks old,” I said, raising another coin from the pile.

It was roughly the size of a silver dollar and irregularly circular. The markings, as well as the faces that had been stamped onto both sides, were worn with age. Etude went pale when he saw it and cursed softly in his mother tongue, a language I rarely heard pass his lips. It had been lost, we would discover, by an American GI during the liberation of Italy. His name was Albert Gallagher and he had wagered it in a card game against a fellow serviceman. Although no one knew it, Private Gallagher regularly cheated at cards with magic. In fact, he hadn’t lost a single game the entire war. Private Gallagher met his match, however, in a man from a different regiment, a mizzen from New Orleans named Paul Remi. Facing the prospect of losing everything, Private Gallagher played the penny. He was certain he couldn’t lose, for he knew there was no magic that could overturn it. But lose he did, to a seven-high straight, and after carrying that coin across the whole of North Africa and through seven near-death encounters, he watched it walk away in the pocket of the smiling Cajun, along with all his cash.

It was only later, after he was sober, that Private Gallagher realized the mizzen had cheated—but not with magic—simply with sleight of hand. He must have. There was no other explanation. Albert Gallagher was furious—furious that he had been beaten by a mizzen, and when finally he found Corporal Remi, they quarreled and Private Gallagher was killed. He had already spent the Moirai penny. In trying to take it back, Gallagher’s luck reversed, and he slipped and fell on his own knife—the knife that killed him twice.

As it happened, the Albert Gallagher who died that day in Italy, the day the coin was ripped from a pocket and lost down a gutter, was not the real Albert Gallagher from Ames, Iowa. The real Private Gallagher, aged 20, had lost his parents and two brothers to various unfortunate circumstances, and when the war broke out, felt that volunteering was the best way to honor their memory. However, before reporting for duty at an army base outside Mobile, Alabama, the young recruit thought he might see some of the country he was pledging his life to preserve. He hitched south and one night found himself playing a swell game of cards with some men in back of a service station. The men were smoking and drinking and shared stories of their lives. The young and inexperienced recruit let slip he was alone in the world—an innocent admission, but one that sealed his fate, for it meant there was no one alive who could identify him.

After the card game, Albert went to relieve himself by a tree, where one of the other players slit his throat with the knife. His body was buried in a bog, but not before his uniform and papers were taken. So it was the man who reported for duty in Mobile was not Albert Gallagher from Ames, Iowa, who knew nothing of magic, but one Wilbur Tuesday, aged 28, who was then wanted by the law in eight states. To keep him safe in wartime, his teenage wife, Livonia, who loved the violent, reckless Wilbur as nothing else in the world, gave her husband a gift, something she had stolen from her mother. She gave her Wilbur a silver penny, which she had been instructed not to touch. She gave it to her husband along with similar instructions. He was never to spend that penny nor even let it fall from his person—lest grave things happen. Of course, once Livonia’s mother, an old-timey witch from the hills of Tennessee, discovered it was missing, she had words with her daughter. The two fought, as mothers and daughters do—but also not as mothers and daughters do—and one of them wound up in the corn field.

Etude took the penny from my hands without a word.

We purchased new clothes, which suited me nicely, as well as train tickets to Milan, the nearest city, where I said I had an important errand. We found lodging at a small guest house and I went to the library. I knew exactly the book I needed. I had already found it in the Keep of Solomon. I needed merely to photocopy some of the pages. I was walking toward the front door, treasure in hand, when I saw Beltran waiting for me in the foyer. No one paid him any mind despite that he was dressed in a long coat and high fur hat. On the second level, one of his men was standing by the railing, keeping an eye on us both. My pace slowed. I stopped.

“Mila.” He nodded. He motioned to the door, but it was not threatening. “May I walk you back to the inn?”

“That implies I have a choice.”

He held the door for me and I stepped onto the sidewalk. The sun was shining. There were plainclothes guards at both street corners. He saw me notice them.

“They are for our protection.”

“How did you find me?”

We walked down the steps toward the street. The man from the balcony exited the doors behind us and kept a distance of twenty or so paces.

“He said you went to the library,” Beltran explained. He took one of the books I carried from my hand and stopped to examine it. “Medieval architecture?”

“Am I to suppose that by ‘he’ you meant Etude?” I took the book back.

“Yes.”

“And where is he?”

“Back at the inn. I thought we could talk alone. If it’s all right with you.”

“That depends.”

“On?”

“What you’re going to say.”

Beltran hadn’t stood on the walls of the Keep with his colleagues. He hadn’t cared to chase us. Indeed, he’d ordered his men—the last loyal to him, anyway—not to give pursuit. Instead, he stood in the grand hall contemplating the inescapable meaning of the shattered Eye. He picked up one of the shards and in its polygonal facets saw one final image before the last of its magic faded: the little inn in Milan where Etude and I took refuge.

“I have only come to say goodbye,” he said softly. “I thought we might have a few moments while your friend is busy unwrapping his present.”

“Present?”

He nodded. “A wardrobe. From China. A gift from the great Master Wu, who, it seems, had predicted these events would transpire.” He motioned to a street side cafe. “Shall we?”

I took a seat at a small table where I could keep an eye on the men keeping an eye on us. Beltran ordered two espressos.

“I suspect that knowledge,” he continued, “and not anything untoward by Master Tresillian, was the true reason for Master Wu’s disappearance.”

“That implies he told you what was coming.”

“No. He gave me the wardrobe, sealed, at our last encounter and said it could only be opened by ‘he who will blind us all.’ Until these events, I had no way of knowing it would be your friend.”

Our coffees came and we stirred them and each took a sip.

“The story will be...” he began, “that a new book was written.”

“By Etude?”

He nodded gravely.

“So. Your colleagues are going to cover up their failure by blaming an innocent man. A boy, no less.”

He nodded again.

I looked at the bar. A businessman in patent leather shoes was buying a pastry.

“They’ll despise him,” I said. “Everyone. They’ll all blame him for whatever happens.” I sighed. “And he’ll let them.”

Beltran studied me. “You mean to fight them, then? Our resurgent foes.”

I leaned forward. “They’re afraid. They’re scared of him. Of what he can do. And that means we can beat them.”

“I don’t think you’ll have to.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Eye has cracked. The end has come.”

“Just like that? After 700 years?”

“Oh, I imagine it will take a little time yet, perhaps even several years. But yes. The Eye wasn’t just the means by which The Masters kept power over others. It was also the only real mechanism of trust between us. It not only gave each visibility into what the others were doing, but also the understanding that the others had the same visibility into their own activities. Without that, suspicion will take over. They will plot against each other if only to avoid being plotted against.”

“And you?” I asked. “What will they do with you?”

“Exile,” he said without pause or grief. “I had already agreed to step down anyway. I will use this as an excuse to return to my family’s estate.”

In the mountains east of the Black Sea. Where we spent our first winter. Where we fell in love. He was telling me he was going to spend his last days in the place he’d been happiest in his life.

It took me a long moment to respond. “But surely you don’t need to honor their demands now.”

“Why? Because I can get away with not honoring them? I gave my word, Mila. Whether such men deserve it or not, I gave it all the same.”

“We could use your help,” I said softly.

He leaned forward then as well such that our faces were not so very far apart. “Are you asking me to come with you?”

“Maybe.”

“And if I asked the same?”

“Please don’t try to talk me out of it.” I wasn’t sure I could resist.

“The truth is, I’m not sure what I could do for you,” he said. “It takes me twenty minutes to straighten my back in the morning, and I can never be far from a toilet! You don’t know how lucky you are, Mila.”

Beltran’s back was permanently stiffened during the ritual that he claimed had destroyed the book. But it hadn’t. He had merely wrecked himself against it, it seemed.

“I wish you had told me the truth,” I said.

He couldn’t look me in the face. His own sagged with age and regret.

“I came into this fight protecting you,” he said looking at the table. “That was my first mission. And that is how I will leave it. It is true, I suppose, that my actions in pursuit of that aim have not always been virtuous, but I could not have done any different.”

I saw my husband then. There was still a little of him left. I leaned over the little table and took his face in my hands and kissed him, long and full, and when our lips parted, he was teary.

“Mila...” He sighed and took my wrists in his hands. He kissed my palm. “I never should have taken office.”

“No. You needed to count. If you had declined, you would’ve always regretted it. It would’ve changed nothing. Sooner or later... Well, we are who we are.”

“So it was doomed? We were doomed?”

“No. But everything comes to an end. And we had many good years together. It wasn’t all deception, was it?”

Beltran and I had split for a very simple reason: I refused to give him children. Seeing me with the orphans, how happy I was, he became convinced that I wanted to be a mother as much as he wanted to be a father—the kind of father he never had. And perhaps part of me did. But I said no all the same. Always, I said no, no matter how often, how strenuously he asked. Or demanded. To him, it seemed the greatest betrayal—worse, I think, than if I had taken another lover. But how could I have children? How could I watch them grow old and die? It would’ve broken me. As nothing else ever could.

“We must live with the choices we make,” I said.

“Where will you start?” he asked, clearing his throat of tears.

“When Mr. Morgan interrogated me, it was in an old orthodox church somewhere in Central Asia. There was an arabesque carved into the wall.” I lifted one of the books I’d gotten from the library: Far Under Heaven: Christian Churches of the Silk Road. “I remember those churches. I doubt Morgan thought anything of it. No one does these days. But those patterns were all unique. It shouldn’t be too hard to find it. When he returns, we’ll be there.”

He smiled at me, ruefully.

“What?” I asked.

“He won’t know what hit him,” he said proudly. “This is the Mila I remember. The fighter. Not the woman who cowered in the mountains, afraid of her own shadow. You have fixed yourself.” He admired me. “I only got in the way.”

I frowned.

“Have I offended you?”

“No. It’s... Mr. Morgan suggested I didn’t know who I was anymore—if I was aristocrat or thief, governess or spy. For a while, some part of me worried he was right. I couldn’t say which of those things I was. But I know who I am. I am all of those things. And now I am friend and teacher as well.” His hand rested on the linen and I took it. “We couldn’t stop our enemies. We threw everything we had at them, and it wasn’t enough. They endured. But now we have someone who can finish what we started.”

“Is he ready for such a position?”

“No. But that is what I can do. Get him ready.”

We were silent a long time, holding each other’s hand. We shared glances and looks that only we knew.

“I don’t want to say goodbye,” I said, feeling myself grow weak.

“Then don’t.” He stood resolutely and straightened his coat on his shoulders, the coat that seemed just a little too big for him anymore. “I will protect you from that as well.”

I stood. “Beltran—”

“I have given my colleagues false information,” he said, dropping some money on the table. “Our enemies will be looking for you in all the wrong places. But be careful. I’m not sure how much time it will buy you. And you know well that these men are dangerous.”

“I know,” I said.

He nodded, lips pressed together. “Farewell. My love.”

And with that, he walked away. He nodded to his men and they followed him, leaving me alone.

I wandered with my books back to the little inn where Etude and I had hidden. I stopped on the landing at the top of the stairs and let several tears fall. I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold it if I kept everything in. I thought about high mountain meadows and wildflowers and the scent of fresh game on the fire. I thought about waking naked in the night, wrapped in that great fur coat, and watching him sleep and thinking that Beltran was the bear of heaven himself come to earth. Ursa Major. The constellation my father had taught me when I was a girl. The stars on our family crest.

I heard a noise and wiped my face and cleared my throat and stepped into the room. It was long and narrow. The ceiling sloped down on one side following the line of the roof. There was a small balcony at the back and two single beds in the middle. I had thought the room’s walnut wardrobe, which dated from the 1930s, was beautiful, but the one that now stood awkwardly in the narrow floorspace was absolutely stunning. It was dark and accented in the traditional Chinese style, with simple, clean lines and a circular brass fixture connecting the front doors, which had been opened to reveal a rack of sliding shelves and small cabinet drawers. Etude was sitting on the bed removing packing paper from the object in his lap. There were books and artifacts everywhere. On the floor by my feet was a wooden box with a polished inlay depicting scenes from Chinese mythology. The rectangular border was adorned with the full collection of trigrams. It was beautiful.

“What’s this?” I asked, kneeling to it. I lifted the lid. Inside was a coat—foggy gray, folded neatly.

“That is not coming with us.”

I held it up. It was clearly old. And gorgeous. Each of the three buttons was different. There was a dollop of polished amber with an insect trapped inside, like a winged spider with an elongated body and a barbed stinger—the first wasp.

“Well?” I asked.

“Well what?”

“Have you at least tried it on?”

“Of course not.” He scowled. “It is the coat of a great Taoist sorcerer, a relic of the second century. Not outerwear.”

“Well, Master Wu obviously wanted you to have it. I’m certain he didn’t mean for you to put it in storage.”

When he didn’t answer, I set it down gently.

“Ms. Milanova—” he began.

“No. Don’t call me that.” I went to the balcony and looked out on the rooftops of the city. It was a beautiful, sunny day. “I think Lady Milanova has lived her life, several times over, in fact.”

“A new identity then?”

I nodded.

“And what will you call yourself?”

A pair of birds flew over the rooftops and in front of a spire of an old church. I could see the Alps in the distance. “How about... Milan?”

He shrugged. “As you wish.”

“And I will practice an American accent. An American can be from anywhere. People born since have no idea what a joy that is.”

When I walked back into the room, he was scowling at the pair of crystal orbs he held in his hands. I watched him pack them in felt. I walked to the door and lifted the coat again.

“Put it on,” I said. “Just once. For me. And if it doesn’t fit, we’ll seal it up forever.”

He sighed and stood. I held it out and he stuck his arms into the sleeves. He turned to face the mirror. I could tell by the look on his face that he saw exactly what I did, even if he didn’t say it.

“It looks very good.”

It fit perfectly. But then I suspect he knew it would.

He adjusted his shoulders and tugged on the sleeves and looked at himself. Wearing that fantastic foggy coat.

I stood next to him, my bald-headed friend, and took the wrinkled crook of his sleeve in my arm.

“We’ll need a cover,” I said. “Some way to avoid suspicion.”

He nodded grimly. “I have been contemplating it.”

“And?”

“I thought, perhaps, a series of dinners.”

“Dinners? Well.” I pondered it. “They would have to be quite exquisite dinners. Fantastical, even. If they’re to do the job.”

He nodded and studied himself in the mirror. “I have some ideas. But.” He looked at me gravely. “There is one final errand first.”

“Errand?”

“It will only be a matter of time before our enemies return to the forest. They will not have risked a second breach so soon. They would wait until they were sure suspicion has passed safely to me. We must act quickly. We must take from that place that which we found. We must steal the darkest object in it, you and I, even if it is the end of us. We must see that what is bound inside that chair stays bound. Forever. On this, all depends. For if it escapes, I fear there is not a soul left on the earth that can stop it.”

A three-wire electric fence stretched over the train tracks that had led us to the mine. They encircled the rocky bluff in both directions. I saw a dirt road and a metal gate in the distance.

“It’s a safe bet they’re watching the gate,” I said, sliding down a short ravine.

We had parked the truck a mile back and hiked our way along a dry gully.

“We’ll have to find another way in.”

“Milan.” The doctor’s voice was grave.

I saw why as soon as I turned. Something was wrong with Cerise. She was frozen.

“What is it?” I looked to her bandaged wound, but it seemed secure.

She stared at the bluff behind us. She was transfixed.

“It’s here,” she said.

“What do you see?” I asked.

“It’s . . .” She squinted but didn’t take her eyes from the scene.

Kai touched her arm after a moment as if to wake her, but she didn’t appear to be in a trance, just mesmerized by the vision.

“It’s like a dark sun. It’s . . .” She struggled for the words. “Glowing darkness. It’s black. But it’s bright. It’s bright black.”

The doctor pointed with his staff to a sign in front of the electric fence, which was posted by the U.S. Department of Energy. Bold print over small white test in a red box which explained in detail all of the Federal statutes we were about to violate.

I stood before the wires. I could hear the hum. “Any ideas?”

Doctor Alexander drove the tip of his staff into the ground under the wires, then pushed it forward so it would rest against them, bridging the circuit. There was a slight crack and a burst of sparks and the staff fell forward to the dry dirt, landing with a thud.

He picked it up, smiling.

“Show off,” I accused.

Kai bent one of the posts with his boot, and each of us stepped over. We snuck slowly up the rise to get a view of the mine. Cerise reached the ridge first and peered over. Then she stood.

“Get down!” I called in a stout whisper.

She pointed, and the others joined her.

It was destroyed. And very recently by the look of it. A semi lay on its side after breaking through the gate and striking an empty water tower, which had fallen over a small office, like a mobile home, and ripped part of the wall away. The rear of it was still smoldering. A line of black smoke rose as if from a chimney. A much older building, sided in wood slats, was at the back, near the steep gravel rise that led to the cave opening at the top, which was caged shut. The door to the building had been ripped free and lay in the dirt. We listened, but other than the occasional breeze, there was nothing. We shuffled carefully down the dusty slope. It wasn’t until we made it around the cliff that we saw the full extent of the damage. Cerise whistled without thinking.

“Sorry,” she whispered, covering her mouth.

Three SUVs were parked in the lee of the bluff, presumably to take advantage of the shade it offered. One of them had exploded. All of them were riddled in automatic gunfire. We had come expecting a fight. Just then it seemed like we had missed it. We walked one by one through the door of the wood-sided structure and into a long, open work area that had been cleared except for two desks, some chairs, and a sideways filing cabinet. There was a glass-lined manager’s office at the back, although most of the glass had been broken. There were nine men in the room, presumably the owners of the vehicles outside. Several had soiled themselves. All but two were conscious. But they were in a state that even now I struggle to describe. They were pale and listless and very far away. Not deranged. More like detached, as if they were no longer in our world, as if someone or some thing had drained their vitality, as if a sharp straw had been rammed into their bodies and used to suck out their essence.

A pale man sat cross-legged on the floor playing cards with himself. He had a deck in his hand and drew the cards one at a time. But they weren’t playing cards. They were tarot cards. Each one he drew was from a different deck. But every card was the same. Every card was Death. He played one on a descending line, stopped, and turned to me. For a moment, it seemed like he would say something. Like he wanted my help. Like he was trapped playing the strange game over and over and he needed my help to finish it. But the moment passed and he resumed his play.

“Any ideas, Doc?” Kai asked. He stood before a prone man whose eyes were wide open. He was still breathing.

The doctor shook his head. “I’m not a physician.”

With his foot, Kai nudged the prone man’s leg. There was no response. “Yeah, well, I don’t think they have a medical problem.”

Cerise glanced at me, expressionless, before beginning a reconnoiter of the room. The ceiling had collapsed to one side, apparently on top of something. Doctor Alexander walked to the manager’s office and knelt in front of a heavy-set Latin man with a bushy mustache who was heaving swiftly but silently, as if preparing for birth. The pair met eyes for a moment. But there was no recognition. The doctor waved his hand in front of the man’s eyes. Nothing.

“I have no idea,” he said softly.

“It’s like they’re . . . living mannequins,” Cerise breathed. She bent to one and started going through his pockets.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Maybe they have something we can use.”

“Ah,” I said. “You’re our thief.”

The others paused, as if just considering the idea. Then they bent to do the same.

The fallen paneling moved suddenly and a gun opened fire directly at Doctor Alexander. Three bullets cracked before the gun clicked impotently. Two struck the wall behind the doctor. One was true—but deflected off his staff, which he held before him making the sign of a ward with his free hand. The force from the bullet, which ricocheted past Cerise’s head and hit the paneling, spun the heavy staff, pulling it from the doctor’s hands, and it fell to the carpet with the shooter, who had never got her balance. She hit a sideways desk and then the floor. There were three indentations in her bulletproof vest. A fourth projectile had clipped her left side, and she was bleeding and in obvious pain. As she pulled herself up, panting, to lean against the desk, my lips pursed in shock. She was tall, gaunt, and had her hair buzzed to the nub. There was a tattoo of a simple sideways eye at the crown of her temple.

“Detective Chase . . .”

The others had ducked for cover, and they watched as I strode slowly to stand before the woman on the ground.

Her head fell when she saw me. She put a hand to her side, which was wet with congealed blood.

“Friend of yours?” Kai asked, standing.

“I wouldn’t say that, no. But we have the same enemy.”

“There’s a medic kit in my pack,” Harriet said with short breath. She nodded to the long, bent ceiling panel that had previously fallen over her.

Kai slid it away and brought her the camouflaged military backpack underneath. She tried to open it but her hands were shaking.

“Here.” Kai slapped his hands together hard and rubbed. Like he was starting a fire. He pressed two fingers of his right hand to her neck. The fingers of his left hand played her wrist and forearm like a flute. When he stopped, Harriet’s breath slowed. She was visibly calmer.

“What did you do?”

“It’s kinda like acupuncture,” he said. “It won’t last forever.” He took the medic kit from the bag and looked up at me. “We need to get her stitched.”

He and I carefully worked her vest over her head. She lifted her shirt with a grimace and Kai cleaned the wound with alcohol swabs and dribbles from a water bottle, which Harriet also used to take pain medication and antibiotics. After the doctor confirmed nothing major had been hit, as best as he could tell, I started stitching the slit in her side, which narrowly missed a rib.

“You sure you know what you’re doing?” she asked.

“I have been in more wars than you ever will,” I responded softly.

Kai called his wife and took the opportunity to rebandage her wound as well.

“What happened here?” I asked.

“Something hit us.” Harriet shook her head. “I couldn’t see it. It was like . . . I dunno. Like a burning building collapsed on my mind.”

“How did you even find this place?” Doctor Alexander asked incredulously.

“A little birdy told me.”

“Who is she?” he asked me insistently.

“This is Detective Harriet Chase, formerly of the New York City Police Department.” I paused. “She’s the one who broke the seal on the sanctum.”

“WHAT?” Cerise and the doctor went ballistic at the same time. She practically pushed her husband off her.

“What the hell were you thinking?” they said, and “Are you stupid?” and “Why would you do that?” and on and on.

“I know,” Harriet said, and “It was my fault,” and “I’m sorry.” Finally she yelled it. “I’m sorry! Alright?”

“Stay still,” I chided. “I haven’t closed this yet.”

“I fucked up. Why do you think I’m here?”

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“Why do you think? I’m looking for the chef.”

“Etude?” Cerise perked. “Where is he?”

“He showed up at the warlock’s place. Downtown. Right out of the blue. I had the place staked out. He had a kid with him.”

“A kid?” I shouted. “What kid?”

“I dunno. A little boy. I don’t know what happened to the chef. He never came out. But they took the kid here.”

“Why would Etude have a child?” Cerise asked me. I could tell she was skeptical—not because it wasn’t something Etude would do but because she was afraid it was.

“You expect me to believe you followed them all the way here?” I asked Harriet. “How did you really find this place?”

“I snatched one of those bastards off the street. Creepy motherfucker. He had pictures on his phone.” She took hers out of a cargo pocket. She unlocked it and showed me.

I paused when I saw the image. Then I took the device and cradled it.

“There’s more,” she said.

I swiped. She was right. There were numerous pictures of the most darling little boy. I almost couldn’t stomach it. They weren’t hurting him—I didn’t know why—but they were doing everything they could to scare him, including killing a dog, an adorable little puppy, right in front of him.

“Scroll to the one with his hands,” Harriet said. She finished the water bottle and tossed it.

I swiped quickly, accidentally passed the image with a clear shot of the boy’s hands, and went back.

“What is it?” Cerise walked forward. I’m sure she could see the shock on my face. I turned the screen to show her.

Etude’s marks were on the boy’s palms.

“How is that possible?” she asked.

That was why they weren’t hurting him. They couldn’t.

“It’s possible,” I said. “He gave them to me once.”

“And what happens to him?” she asked.

“He’s vulnerable,” I explained.

Cerise turned to Harriet. “You said you were following him. Where did he go?”

“I don’t know.”

“WHERE?” Cerise demanded.

Kai put a hand on his wife’s shoulder. A square of cotton fluff clung to her gash with specks of red. There was a roll of gauze in his hand.

“I don’t know,” Harriet repeated. “I was trying to tell you. The asshole who took the pictures didn’t wipe the EXIF data. There was a GPS coordinate in the metadata that led me here.”

“Clever,” the doctor said.

“Standard forensic procedure. Look, you all can hate me all you want. I deserve it, okay? But I’m here and I can help. We’re on the same damn team.”

“No.” Cerise raised a finger to her.

“I don’t think that’s your decision.” Harriet looked to me.

I took a long breath and sighed. They all looked to me expectantly. “We vote,” I said, and Cerise groaned. “Those in favor of Detective Chase joining our little expedition, say aye.”

“Aye,” the doctor said.

Cerise spun. “Seriously?”

“We have no idea what’s down there,” he said calmly. “We need all the help we can get.”

She pointed to Harriet. “She’s half the reason we’re in this mess.”

“Cerise—” I started.

“She killed Mr. Dench!” she yelled. “Or may as well have. She’s the reason it happened.”

“I understand why you’re upset,” I said. “I have more reason to be angry than you. But people make mistakes, Cerise. Sometimes very serious ones.”

“Fine!” Cerise yelled. “You made your stupid point.” She swiped the gauze from her husband and walked out the door.

“There’s a condition,” the doctor said to Harriet.

“Name it.”

“You’re in front.”

She snorted.

“Kai?” I asked.

He looked out the door. Cerise was gone. “I’m just here for her,” he said.

“No. You’re risking as much as any of us.”

“More,” the doctor said, and I shot him a glance.

Kai didn’t catch it. “What do you think?” he asked me.

“I think this is a very important decision and you should vote how you want.”

He turned to the door again. “I wanna support her. I do. But more than that, I don’t want anything to happen to her. So I guess my vote is that the doc’s right. We need all the help we can get.”

“All right. Then rest time is over,” I said. “We need to assume that if they lost contact with these men, they’ll send reinforcements. We need to keep moving. Take whatever you need, but don’t get weighed down.”

“Not to be a dick,” Harriet said to the doctor, “but you’re not really going down there dressed like that, are you?”

He looked down at his bathrobe. It was filthy.

“At least put a vest on,” she said.

“Fair enough.” He took a water bottle from a plastic pack on the ground and slipped it into his wide side pocket. He nudged a wide-eyed guard with his staff. Nothing.

“I’d like to hear about the thing that attacked you,” I said to Harriet.

“I told you, I couldn’t see it. It just hit us. All of us. Boom.”

“At the same time?” the doctor asked. “Everyone?”

Harriet nodded. “Yeah, it didn’t seem to care which side. Everyone went down. Why?” She looked to me. “Is that important?”

“Doesn’t sound like slychs,” the doctor said.

“What’s a slych?”

He smiled. “Something tells me, if you stick with us, you’re gonna find out.” Then he walked to the door. After a moment, Kai followed.

“Detective,” I called.

She waited.

“Why did it leave you alive? Or at least not catatonic like the others?”

“I wondered that myself.” She reached down under her vest and pulled out a small silver amulet. “I thought this mighta slowed it down. But honestly, I dunno. I definitely felt it burying me. Suffocating me. In my head. Next thing I knew, you guys showed up. I was confused.” She waved to the wall where she had nearly shot the doctor. “I’m sorry.”

“You say sorry a lot,” I said.

She looked down. “Yeah.”

“These people are risking their lives. Their families. Everything. If you come, you do as I say. No arguments and no unnecessary risks. I’m not cleaning up one of your messes again. Is that clear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

We walked out and Kai called to us. Cerise had already climbed the steep slope to the jagged, caged entrance of the mine. The barrier was made of small woven bars. The gaps between were barely big enough for fingers. The Department of Energy had posted another sign warning us of the radioactive materials inside.

She tried the door. “Locked,” she called down to us.

“There should be an emergency release or something,” I said, pushing hard up the slope.

“How do you know that?”

“Because the US government will follow all health and safety regulations. I’m sure that includes steps to ensure no one gets trapped inside.”

“Oh, yeah, I see it.” Cerise had her face pressed to the heavy mesh. “It’s inside the door.” She shook her head. “There’s no way we can reach it, though.”

The doctor rattled the metal. He tried striking the latch with his staff. The metal dented and he swung again and again. Then he stopped. The solid steel staff was heavy, and he was already out of breath.

“It would take hours to hack through that deadbolt,” he panted, “even if we took turns.”

“What do we do?” Kai asked.

Cerise had started climbing.

“What are you doing?” I called.

“You’ll see.”

Her fingers were small and could grip the mesh. She’d taken her shoes off and was using her toes to support herself.

“Doesn’t that hurt?”

“Yes,” she said after a moment. She was concentrating.

Kai pointed to a gap at the top of the barrier, some forty feet high, where the flat top of the gate didn’t evenly match the jagged A-shaped roof of the cave. Cerise grimaced every time she used her toes. But she was making it. We watched her climb higher and higher. Then she swung an arm through the gap.

“There’s no way she’ll fit,” the doctor said softly.

It seemed like he was right.

Cerise swung a leg over. “Owowowowow.” The toes of her left foot were supporting most of her weight. She pushed up as quickly as she could. Her shoulder and the side of her trunk scraped into the gap, but her head didn’t seem to make it.

She pushed. We heard her scraping against the rock. Her body was pivoting on unforgiving steel.

“Babe . . .” Kai said.

She was grunting and struggling. If she lost her footing and fell, her own body weight would snap her neck.

I covered my mouth.

But once her butt got through, she could move her head down to where the gap was just big enough and pull it through. It popped out the other side, where she was barely holding on, and she slipped.

“OH!”

She grabbed the mesh with one hand and swung around to steady herself. She descended. When she was ten feet off the ground, she dropped, preferring bare feet on rock over the continued torture of her toes. She fell to her butt immediately, dusted herself off, and opened the latch.

She could see the skeptical look on my face. “I’m the thief, remember?”

“You made your point,” I said.

She took her shoes and sat to put them on.

“What’s this?” Kai asked.

Toward the back and to one side of the U-shaped space, which narrowed very slowly as it retreated into the bluff, was an enginelike machine with a red frame. Heavy black wires snaked away from it and then into and out of another machine. From there, they were bolted to the wall and disappeared into the mine.

“Looks like a generator,” the doctor said.

Kai turned a key-switch, but nothing happened. “From when?” he asked.

It definitely looked old.

“60s maybe,” Harriet said.

“The nineteen-sixties?” he asked, incredulous.

“Is there another one?” she said sarcastically.

Kai flipped the switch off and then on again. He pressed several heavy square buttons and the machine screamed. We all jumped. We watched as it fluttered with power. There was a pop and the lights glowed.

“There,” he said proudly.

The transformer behind him blew in a shower of sparks and we all ducked. The sound resounded like a lightning strike.

“Turn it off,” I yelled over the piercing noise.

He tried. “It’s stuck!”

There was an electric light in a steel cage fixture high overhead. I don’t think anyone noticed it until it exploded and rained sparks and tiny bits of glass.

“Insulation on those wires is totally worn,” Kai said, defending himself.

Harriet pulled her Glock and looked at the entrance. “Whatever, let’s just get this over with.”

There were additional lights inside, clear bulbs of an old style that fluttered weakly with the alternating current. They didn’t help the mood. It was dark and silent down there, and we had only three lights of our own. Harriet had brought an LED headlamp and Cerise had found two roadside flashlights, one in each of the SUVs. We turned them on.

Harriet led the way, per the agreement. She kept her Glock in her hands and followed the line of weak bulbs that glowed every twenty paces, fed by the thick cluster of wires that ran along the wall. After a short walk, we came to a T-junction, where a shaft to our left plunged straight down. There was a shrine in front of it, if one could call it that. And there was blood on the walls—lines and circles, like constellations, but not any I recognized, and I remembered then that Madame Blavatsky had once told me that the dark ones had their own astrology, completely different from ours, just as they had their own gods. Candles had burnt all the way to the floor and bled wax around the centerpiece—a headless torso stripped of skin. It had no arms and no legs. I could see flies and the hint of ribs poking through the muscle.

“Wicked.” Kai stepped for a closer look, but I stopped him and shook my head. Something was feeding in the cavity, I was sure. I nodded to Harriet, who kicked it over the edge and kept moving.

We reached a Y-intersection in the tunnel, which split off to the right and left. The right tunnel had collapsed some thirty paces in. The left tunnel sloped down. Geared tracks had been laid into it, and there were narrow stairs to one side. We descended single file. At the base was another square vertical shaft. It glowed as our beams flashed over it. It was full of water—perfectly still, like solid glass. Above it was only dark. The only passage was a narrow ledge around the right side barely big enough for toes. There was heavy discarded machinery in the bottomless water, including an up-turned rail cart and what looked like the boom to a small crane or lift. It was completely submerged and rested at an oblique angle against the stone walls. It was coated in a fur of yellow-green algae, which reflected our light brightly, giving the chasm an otherworldly glow.

“I sure hope there’s nothing down there,” Kai whispered.

“Ten bucks says there is,” the doctor whispered back.

“You guys are so paranoid,” Cerise added, also in a hushed voice. “I think it looks like a wishing well.”

“Well, only one way to find out.” Harriet moved toward the ledge, which cut around one side of the square shaft, but I raised a hand and stopped her. “What?”

“Wishing well,” I repeated. I reached into my pocket and took out the coin. I held it in her lamplight.

“Are you sure?” the doctor asked.

I nodded. “The Three Sisters want these out of circulation, right?” I nodded to the seemingly bottomless pit. “Then I offer a trade.” I flipped the coin with my thumb. It flashed in the light and hit the mineral-laden water with barely a splash. Ripples broke the surface, undulating smoothly like snakes. The coin clinked off the crane and sunk into the blackness.

The crane shifted heavily and we all jumped back. The water churned.

We waited. But nothing came. Once the splashing subsided, Harriet began her crossing. Kai followed, making it look easy, even as he kept a hand on his wife, who went next. But there was almost nothing to hold onto. They could only press their hands to the wall. And the splashing water had wet the ledge, making it slippery.

The doctor used his robe’s belt to tie his staff to his back and followed the others.

“Please be careful,” I said as I helped him toe the passage.

We had to navigate two corners to make it to the other side. I took my first step. It was slick. I had to lean into the wall with my chest, head back, to keep from falling. It was awkward. The pool was almost perfectly still again, and it seemed hushed in anticipation, as if it were waiting with bated breath for one of us to fall into its embrace and be pulled down and entombed forever.

Harriet broke our concentration. Her heavy combat boots had good tread but were round-tipped and bulky, and she slipped at the turn and fell into the water with a heavy splash. We all froze, expecting something to undulate up from the depths. There was no point in telling myself not to glance into the pool. It wasn’t possible, even though it significantly increased the chance that I would also lose my balance and fall.

Tense moments passed as Harriet clambered out of the water on the far side. Her headlamp had come loose and was slowly falling. She held out her hands and silently urged us forward. Kai balanced himself deftly. He hopped to the ground and made sure his wife did the same. Harriet grabbed the doctor’s arm and pulled him and then me. We all turned back to the swaying water, now lit faintly by Harriet’s unseen lamp somewhere in the depths. The water finally broke through to the battery and the light flickered and died. We watched it fade.

There were bolt holes in the floor near the ledge. I ran my shoe over them. There had once been a bridge or other structure over the flooded shaft, but it had been removed recently. The bundle of wires continued their trek along the wall deeper into the mine, stopping only at the periodic breaker boxes on the wall. They were our guide, and we followed. Silence enveloped us, the kind of deep silence you can only get underground. It was so quiet, I could hear the rattling of the filament in a nearby bulb, tinkling weakly inside the glass as the current wavered. There was a cluster of lamps at the next gap, perched on a pole above a board with numbered pegs, but it was dark. I opened the electrical box that fed them and flipped a heavy plastic switch. The filaments in the bulbs began to glow, but only weakly, and we flashed our lights across the space. The beams hit a staggered recession that descended, like an upside-down concert hall, three stories below us. Between it and us, the gap was crossed by a kind of scaffolding, like a children’s jungle gym, whose sea foam-green paint was heavily chipped and scuffed. It was affixed to the floor on our side but to the ceiling on the other. The bundle of heavy wires we’d been following crossed underneath and disappeared into an open double-doorway on the far side.

“How are we going to get down there?” Cerise asked in the quiet, peering over the edge to the bottom of the staggered recession, which narrowed to a point. “And once we do, how are we going to get up to the doors? There’s no stairs or anything.”

“Like this.” I picked up a small rock from corner and tossed it. As it passed through the bars, it stopped its arc down and arced up instead. It hit the ceiling on the far side and bounced across it to the open doors, where it stopped, as if clinging to the ceiling like a magnet.

“We’re here,” I said.

We had reached the Handred Keep—buried by the Bureau, as I suspected, under tons of rock. They had dropped it into the gap of the mine and then exploded the bluff on top so their arcane scientists could study it in secret.

“Last chance,” I said to the others.

Harriet started forward through the bars. When across, her feet fell up instead of down. From our point of view, she stood upside down on the ceiling.

“Freaky . . .” Kai breathed.

The center of the concavity was shaped like a giant mouth, and it had been propped open with two tall iron girders, which I had mistaken for columns at first. The mouth was flanked by two empty holes which had once held toothed tentacles of some size. The open doors looked like brownish stone. But they were not stone.

“It’s similar to bone,” I said to Kai, who was marveling at them after we crossed.

“Look at this.” He pointed at a door and Cerise shone a light. There was a reddish-brown hand print.

“That’s Rasputin’s hand.”

“The Rasputin?” Cerise whispered.

“To consecrate the temple, which he had bred, Rasputin dipped his hand in the freshly spilled blood of an innocent and pressed it like a stamp on the stone door. It was symbolic. The human hand is the source of our agency, our power. It’s how we manipulate the world, whether by machine or magic. All tools come from it. The consecration was an announcement that the seekers of the dark would take, by blood, what they wished from the world. It was as close as anything to a declaration of war.”

I looked up. “We called it the Handred Keep,” I said softly, “because we never knew its real name.”

The mark unnerved me, presumably for what I had once associated with it, but whatever had happened there, I could no longer remember.

“The seekers of the dark wouldn’t so much as utter its real name, the same way Jews won’t speak the name of God. Names have a certain controlling power. You can control a demon if you know its true name—and if you have the will. We intercepted some of their minor correspondences and knew only how they described it colloquially in their native tongue, where, like in the Romance languages, modifiers come after nouns. In an official report, some clever scribe changed ‘the temple of the hand-red’ to the Handred Keep, and it stuck.”

I turned to them. “This is it,” I said. “Once we go through those doors, there’s no turning back. Our enemies are masters of deception. Expect that whatever we find inside will be unlike anything you have seen before. Some of it may not be real. Don’t get distracted. If we’re lucky, they won’t expect us to have made it this far. But that doesn’t mean this isn’t a trap. Stay focused. Stay alert. We all carry a separate pain, and that has brought us here for different reasons. Some of us chose it. Others were propelled along. But none of that matters anymore. The stakes are too high. If we can’t find a way to work together, then none of us will survive.”

Harriet nodded to me. Kai and Cerise squeezed each other’s hands. The doctor walked to the door, hefted his staff, and gouged a diagonal cut across the red hand. Bits of the hard, bonelike material fell to the floor.

“For Bug,” he said, and walked inside.

The steps up to the entrance hall stuck out from grooves in the floor like teeth in a skull, and in fact they were very similar to teeth, just as the phalanges of the door were similar to bone. The entrance chamber was dark and vast and the shuffles of our feet echoed. The floor was dark and smooth, like a black oyster shell. I had wiped most of my memories of that place, but I knew that when it was alive, it excreted a plasterlike covering that was naturally pigmented and looked like a cross between Victorian wallpaper and the diamond banding on a viper. But all of that had long since rotted away—or was carted off the Bureau. Only the smooth shell remained.

I noticed Cerise looking up, and I stepped to her. “What do you see?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. I mean, I see what you guys see. Everything else is gone. It’s like we’re inside a black hole or something.”

“We are,” I said.

The fortress narrowed as it descended—or ascended from our new point of view—like a tall ziggurat of progressively smaller vertebrae, each of which turned slightly from the one below. We were then on the largest floor. They would get smaller as we climbed. A wide central staircase curved up the entire expanse, winding around an undulating, grooved tube, now empty, which had held the fortress’s central nerves. It was open all the way to the top, but we could see only dark. Harriet cautioned us silently with her hands not to shine our lights about, certainly not up, lest we give away our presence to anyone waiting on those higher floors.

From the wide stairwell, several doors opened. The heavy black electrical wires we had followed from the surface, long ago installed by the Bureau, now began to peel off one by one to feed chambers distant.

“Which way do we go?” the doctor asked in a whisper.

Kai was looking up. “Not to be negative, but it would take a really long time to search this whole place if we all have to stick together.”

“We stick together,” I reiterated.

“I say we go right to the top,” Harriet suggested.

The others agreed, and we started up the toothlike stairs that curled like a conch cell around the central nerve cavity. We only made it one and a half times around before we heard and felt a crunch under our feet. We shone our lights on animal bones. They littered the stairs, having spilled like a mound of grain out of a giant oblong gap in the staircase wall. It wasn’t a door. It was rounded and smooth and a good fifteen feet over the steps with no way to reach it. I suspect it had been covered in soft tissues when the fortress was alive and that the incredibly tall chamber beyond had been its gullet. With the flesh now rotten away, the massive pile of bones at the bottom of the four-story stomach fell out the oblong hole and spilled into a pile and across the steps and onto the floor of a hall that curled off to our right. Some of the bones were quite small—not just short, like finger bones, but narrow like needles. I knelt and picked up what appeared to be a clean, dry wing bone from a songbird. It weighed almost nothing. There were larger bones as well: horned goat skulls, beaked bird heads, fanged mandibles, all manner of ribs and vertebrae, scapulas like blunt tomahawks, and more. With a face drained of blood, the doctor stepped into the pile and removed a jawless skull that had been cracked in half. By its shape and size, it had clearly belonged to a toddler or small child. There was no telling how many people were lost in that gargantuan meal.

“What do we do?” Cerise asked.

The way was blocked. Kai, being the most agile among us, attempted the climb, but he didn’t get very far before the pile shifted under him and he slid back to the stairs, taking thousands of bones with him. The movement released more bones from the gullet and they cascaded out in a clatter like the downpour of rain. It echoed up the central cavity.

“So much for keeping a low profile,” Harriet muttered.

“They know we’re here,” the doctor said, looking up.

We heard a distant voice then resounding faintly down from the top of the silo-shaped gullet.

“Hello?”

We all froze. By the looks on their faces, I could tell the others had the same shock I’d had: it was a child’s voice. A little boy.

“Hello?” Cerise called.

“Shhh!” Harriet chided.

“It’s the boy!” Cerise shot back in a stout whisper.

We all listened. But there was nothing.

“It could be a deception,” Harriet suggested.

“No,” Cerise said. “It isn’t.”

“She sees things,” I explained.

Cerise, Harriet, and I traded looks in the dark and quiet. Cerise wanted to call again and silently argued her case with gestures and facial expressions. The men were more direct. They stepped back, urging us to stop arguing and to look for a way up. It was a good point. We could do nothing from down there. I motioned down the hall, and Harriet nodded.

The rooms of the Keep were grown, same as the rest of it. They were not symmetrical, but they grew in runs of three to five, each with the same basic shape. The smaller were near the center, and each next room curved slightly away from the one before, indicating outward, radial growth. We passed evidence of the Bureau’s habitation: stacked desks and fallen chairs, some covered in sheets. I stepped on a dirty piece of paper and caught the date: January 4, 1982.

The passage opened into a rotunda where there seemed to be half a dozen people standing around dressed as ghosts. If so, there were frozen. Harriet walked to one, gun in hand. She turned back and I nodded. She pulled the sheet. There was a small globe atop an uneven stack of boxes with a broom leaning against it. She pulled another sheet and it was much the same—a glass lamp on a narrow shelf. Cerise walked past us and pulled another.

“Freaky,” she whispered.

Three passages split from the rotunda.

“Which way?” Harriet asked.

“Up,” I said.

There was a ramp to our left, and it took us around a gentle curve that straightened into a kind of undulating tube lined in successively shrinking concavities. At its terminus was a large chamber.

A burst of static.

To my left, inside one of the larger concavities, was an antique broadcast array, with a tangle of wires running back and forth between dialed consoles. At the center was an operator’s station: three 1950s wooden chairs sat before a narrow ledge under a block grid of headphone jacks. Overhead, one of the heavy electrical wires descended from a higher floor and ran along the cavity to feed the largest of the rectangular machines, which was connected to all the others. It seems our meddling with the generator out front had resupplied it with power. On the desk-ledge was a black plastic headset with microphone arm and foam ear covers. It looked brand new. But the Bureau had installed the radio, I was sure. It clearly dated from the post-war era. Our enemies had been using it. There was a heavy, leatherbound tome on the operator’s ledge, and I walked over and ran my finger along the open page. It looked like a Victorian ledger, with printed dark green blocks encasing a neat fountain-pen script. There were symbols as well, magical runes whose origin was a complete mystery to me. Across from each on the left were clusters of words. Council. Ringer. Yellow. Soldier. Cyst. Edmonton. Beggarly.

Harriet came up behind me. She flipped through the browned pages, reading a few of the words. “Tyrant. Red. Perspicacity.”

“Does it mean something to you?” I asked.

“This is how they were communicating with each other.”

“Come on,” Kai urged. “If there’s a boy here, we should find him.”

Harriet nodded and we followed the passage down the opposite bend, where it narrowed and shrunk and we had to duck. It was not meant as a passage. It held flesh when the Keep was alive.

We emerged into another tall chamber, but it was also very narrow, with barely any room between the walls, which were no longer smooth. There was a pattern, a cross between coral and snake skin. Spiraling around the opposite wall, as if carved from it, were a series of progressively larger and more complicated but otherwise identical conical shapes. Those near the center of the spiral were tiny and imperfectly formed. They matured and grew as they spiraled around. Each was a kind of extended vertebral ziggurat: fetal Keeps.

“We’re in its womb,” I breathed.

We all craned our necks and marveled at the three-story structure, our beams dancing over it like submarine lights at depth.

“We can climb this,” Harriet said.

She was right. As they turned around the spiral, the vertebral shapes sat at an angle to the floor and offered plenty of hand- and footholds. She started immediately. The rest of us had to make a few adjustments. Cerise and I clipped our lights to our pant loops, which did little to help, and we took them off and stuck them inside tied shirttails instead. It was less secure, but at least the beams pointed up. The doctor tied his staff to his back again, and we started up, following the trail that Harriet blazed. It wasn’t until we were halfway that we realized the tiny Keeps at the center were too small to fit our fingers between, and we had to move around. Kai made it first, testing for the best path and calling out to the rest of us from the top, which he reached in almost no time.

“Don’t look down,” he advised his wife, who of course immediately did.

“Whoa . . .”

I admit to not being a fan of heights, and I was all too happy to feel the doctor grab my hand and pull me up into the four-foot-tall recession at the top. We had to stoop to make it out the far hole. His staff got caught. The diamond tip wedged itself securely, and it took us a few minutes to free it, by which time Harriet and Kai had found our destination.

“I thought we were going to stick together,” I chided as they returned from around a bend.

“It’s just here,” Kai defended himself. “I can see him.”

Harriet wasn’t happy. “I don’t like this. Where is everybody?”

“You think it’s a trap?”

“Don’t you?” the doctor said, behind me.

“We’re not leaving a child down there,” Cerise interjected.

The undulating passage curved to an egg-shaped chamber that erupted like a cyst from the wall. Its floor was smooth and sloped down at an increasingly steep angle to the large circular gap that filled the center. The ceiling was naturally ridged. Along the ridges were regularly-spaced bolts which held hanging chains. Most fell through the hole and disappeared. The others dangled the corpses of small animals. The fresh remains of a white-coated pit bull turned slowly near my head. The barbed tip of a giant fishhook had been forced through the roof of the animal’s mouth and into its brain. It had been hung on it, and the weight of its own body had caused the hook to disfigure its face into a deranged sneer. I caught the glint of a name tag hanging from its collar. Barney. It had been someone’s pet. It’s sorrowful eyes were still open. It died not understanding what was happening.

I turned away.

“Awful . . .”

The others did the same.

“I hope there’s a special place in hell for these assholes,” Harriet said, staring at the room.

“Why would anyone do this?” Cerise asked. She couldn’t look at the animals either. Instead, she fixed her eyes to the grooves carved into the walls, onto which hard, sharp, penetrating sigils had been carved.

“It’s a spell,” the doctor told her. “A spell of corruption.”

“Corruption? Corruption of what?”

“Him.” Harriet had stepped onto the sloped floor. She pointed to the hole.

Cerise took a step. Her flat-soled Keds slipped and she started sliding swiftly toward the opening. Kai dove and grabbed her, but he slipped as well. They passed Harriet, who dropped to her butt with the soles of her combat boots planted perpendicular to the slope. She grabbed Kai. Her soles squeaked against the floor, but I had already moved to grab her. I reached for the doctor, who had driven his staff into the floor as an anchor.

“It’s the boy,” Cerise said from her perch near the edge of the hole.

“Hello.” His small voice echoed across the gap.

“Are you okay?” She called. He must have nodded his response, because she nodded back.

“But I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Hold on,” she said. “We’re gonna get you out out of there.”

“Okay.”

It took us several minutes to get everyone back to sure footing.

“He’s on a sort of platform,” Cerise said. “I don’t think it’s part of the fortress. It has a railing and metal grate floor. It’s attached to four big chains. It’s just hanging in space.”

“We’re gonna have to use the chains,” Kai said, looking up at them.

“Do they go all the way down?” Harriet asked Cerise.

“There are more pets at the end,” she said. “But yeah. The chains near the middle are a short drop above the platform. They’re too high for the boy to reach, but one of us could, if we jumped.”

“Do you think they can support our weight?” I asked.

“Plus his,” Harriet added. “It’s a looong way down.”

“I’m the lightest,” Cerise said. “I’ll go.”

I stopped her. “We need you on lookout.”

“I’ll go,” Kai said. “I’m probably next-lightest.”

In truth, that was probably me, but if so, it wasn’t by much, and Kai was certainly the more agile.

“We do the reverse of what we just practiced,” the doctor said, driving his staff just behind a ridge in the floor. “We make a human chain, get Kai to the center. He shimmies down, gets the boy, and we bring them both back up. Make sense?”

The others nodded, and we set to work. We set our flashlights down such that they shone from different angles at the center of the room. Then we grasped each other’s hands tightly and stepped out carefully in order of body mass. The doctor was at the back. Then Harriet. Then me. Then Cerise and finally Kai, who didn’t seem to need our help at all as he tiptoed down the slope to the edge, holding his wife’s hand.

“Careful,” she chided.

“You need to keep an eye out,” I told her, eyes on my own feet. My only job was to be an anchor and I was going to do it.

“We’re fine,” she said, looking around. “They probably didn’t—”

She stopped, and all eyes shot to her. Hers were glued to a dark nook in the wall, near the ceiling on the far side.

“They’re here,” she whispered.

“What is?” Harriet demanded.

None of us could see anything.

“They’re here!” Cerise shouted, trying desperately to pull her husband back.

“Go back!” Cerise yelled. “Go back!”

“Where are they?”

“They’re right there! Slychs. Three of them. They’re coming! Shit! They’re coming!”

“Hold onto her!” I shouted to Harriet. I put her hand in Cerise’s.

“What are you doing?”

“He brought the little boy here for a reason,” I whispered as I slid on my butt down to the hole and then through.

I fell.

The morning of the trial, I couldn’t sleep. Too much depended on the day, and I had too little control of it. Once it was clear sleep wasn’t coming, I decided I should instead be productive, and I retired to the library. Tomes of arcane law were stacked so high around me that I didn’t notice my ghostly maid until she was nearly on top of me.

Staring.

I set down my pen. She had never looked me in the eye before, or done anything that directly indicated she was aware of me. Now, I was being studied—my short hair, my modern clothes—as if none of it made any sense. When finally she had had enough, she dropped to a crouch behind me, like something feral. I turned in my chair and faced her. She wasn’t angry. She was sad. I think she knew something bad was going to happen. She was also confused. Were we not the same? Was I not afraid?

“Don’t worry,” I joked. “It won’t be my first death sentence.”

But my humor fell flat. One cannot jest with a ghost. My visitor turned only her head and waited.

“All right.” I took a long breath and straightened the cloth of my pants. “Where to begin?”

But of course my maid didn’t care. I wasn’t even sure she would understand my words. Like dogs and horses, ghosts are known to respond to what we mean rather than what we say. It merely had to be the truth.

“By the time I was 13,” I explained stiffly, “I had already noticed how men looked at me. What had bothered me the year before—that they dared be so presumptuous as to cast their gaze on me in that manner—suddenly became the reason I dabbed color on my lips and replaced the ribbons in my hair with pins of gold. I started pestering my father for the latest fashion—dresses from Vienna and Paris.”

I paused.

“When I was 15, I lost my virginity to a hussar nearly twice my age. He was not especially handsome, but he was cocky and brave. I didn’t want a nice boy, someone who might in the moment be too noble or timid. Nor did I choose a man of my station, who might spread rumors about me. I chose a young officer, the son of a tradesman, who was garrisoned on my father’s estate. I observed his habits, and finding that he was an early riser, I woke before dawn to bathe in the pond near the stables, as I had when I was a little girl. If I were caught, I decided I was just young enough to claim I had no idea why I shouldn’t do such things anymore. I would let my father fluster and fumble for an explanation, and then I would agree never to do it again, kiss him on the cheek, and waltz away humming some innocent tune.

“I was not caught. But I was foolish. We were too close to the servants’ quarters. I splashed about and called to my hussar from the water, pretending to be a girl at play, but he only glanced back to the windows and quickened his pace at the sight of my folded clothes on the bank. I stepped out, naked, to stop him. But instead of dropping the wood he was carrying, he only bowed and backed away.

“I was shocked. In my folly, I hadn’t once imagined he would refuse. No one ever had before. I was also terrified. My God, what if he told my father what I had done? I began to imagine how I could discredit him. Pacing in my room, I concocted countless scenarios, but being new to politics, I had no confidence in any of them. I decided instead to threaten him, to let him know the cost of betrayal. The cavalry used the rolling fields near the far border of my father’s land for training, and that afternoon, I found him practicing sword maneuvers—slicing the air, turning his horse this way and that. He looked altogether dashing in his navy-blue coat with white embroidery, and I hesitated. I slowed my mount to a trot so there would be time for my courage to build. But I was noticed. My officer stopped his maneuvers and trotted toward me. In a panic, I fled. I was a girl, so I did what the girls in my storybooks did: I pretended to lose control of my horse. I did it so convincingly, however, that before long, I truly had. The animal careened wildly down a cart path that ran for a stretch along the border of the forest. My hussar whipped his mount and charged after me. I was exhilarated. Hooves pounded the earth.

“The cart path turned into the forest, and my horse followed. Immediately, the canopy closed over us in brilliant orange. It was a bright fall day, and the wild grove was clad in its finest yellows and crimsons. My horse slowed as it ascended a steep rise and my heart slowed with it. In moments, my hussar would grab the reins and I would collapse, first into his arms, and then to the earth, and he would descend his mount to catch me, and we would be alone and out of sight among the trees.

“Or so I imagined. But we were not alone. At the top of the rise, my runaway steed whinnied and rose on his back feet. I clung to his neck for dear life as his front hooves flailed in fear. Something had startled him, and I heard his foot strike it with a crack.

“Then everything was calm.

“My hussar came up behind me and stopped, his mount breathing hard. His face was wrapped in horror. Turning my head, I saw a child lying still among the leaves. There was a scattering of sticks around him, as if he’d been gathering firewood. An old man appeared then. But he was not a man. He had leaves and twigs in his scraggly beard, and his skin was so tanned and wrinkled that, motionless, it looked of tree bark. He cast his own gathered wood to the ground and collapsed over the boy.

“A crow, who had witnessed the encounter, laughed from the branches and flew away as the old man with the leaves in his beard looked up at me. There was blood on his hands. But it was his eyes I remember. They shone blue as the sky. And they saw me. They saw me the way my old nursemaid saw me, the way my mother would’ve seen me, I’m sure, had she survived. I could hide nothing. But rather than suffer the indignity of shame, I raised my head and said it was the boy’s own fault for gathering wood on the path. Did he not hear the approach of riders?

“The old man pulled a flint knife then, chipped from use but polished to a shine. My hussar moved forward to protect me, but it was unnecessary. With a flash, the old man slashed his own throat. The blade was sharp, and at first all I could see was the faintest line in his barklike skin. Then drops of blood formed. He squeezed his neck until it ran over his hand, and he cast the blood into the leaves with a splatter that sounded like raindrops. He began muttering, blue eyes fixed on me. He squeezed again and cast again and muttered. He squeezed and cast a third time and the crow laughed longer. It swooped by as the old man finally collapsed over the child in the leaves.

“That night, I had sex for the first time. It was the farthest thing from my mind as I led my horse from that terrible scene. I thought only of getting help. But by the time we reached the manor, without so much as a word spoken between us, my hussar and I realized that what was done was done and nothing could alter it, and that if we reported the incident, there would be questions—questions neither of us wanted asked. My father and his officers were not fools. They would understand what had been meant to happen. The hussar would be sent away, his career forever tarnished, and I would be locked in the house to save my father from scandal until such time as a suitable husband could be found. Neither of us would be free again. We couldn’t bring the old man and the child back from the dead. What good would admitting it do?

“I galloped ahead and stabled my horse alone. After watching me leave, my hussar cut across the field and rode around the pond to converse with some colleagues camped on the far bank, thereby making sure we returned separately and from different directions. I went to the house and took a hot bath. As the hours passed and I realized we would not be caught, a certain glee overtook me. The young men of the regiment liked to gather after dark by the old oak on the lawn to smoke their pipes and trade stories. I made sure I was seen walking to the stables to check on my horse, which would be expected after a hard day’s ride. The hussar found me in the barn some twenty minutes later. He grabbed from behind, and I gasped. As he nuzzled my hair, I could tell he was just as confused and aroused by the day’s events. He kissed my neck and felt my body in ways no man ever had and I opened my gown and gave myself to him.

“He took me twice more before we parted, once in the kitchen while my father and his officers laughed in the parlor overhead. I fixed my dress after, the new dress from Paris that I had pestered my father to buy, and walked up the stairs and past the parlor to casually gauge whether or not we’d been heard. And also to tempt fate, I suppose. I lingered by the door until my father saw me and called me forward, his face flushed with wine. Only he and one very old man were seated. The others stood around the room or near the fire with pipes and glasses in their hands. They grew quiet and he boasted to them that I had mastered Latin by age 11 and played the piano and rode like a soldier, and he praised my beauty and my goodness. Then his face grew long and my heart quickened. My father touched my cheek and looked in my eyes, drunk, and told me in a whisper that my mother would’ve been very proud.

“My heart shrunk to a raisin. If I hadn’t been surrounded by the adoring eyes of so many old men, the rest of me would have done the same. I thanked my father in a meek voice and told the gentleman I was tired and they bowed and I stepped out the door. They hadn’t wanted me to stay long anyway. None of them could have me, which meant I was nothing but a distraction. As soon as I stepped from the parlor door, I ran to the library, which was shut and dark and offered many places to hide. There I cried, although I knew not why. And while I sat there, hiding behind a hobby horse I had ridden as a child, I saw a picture on the dark oak wall. It was one of many, hung side-by-side in that old house. Who knew how many times I had seen it? But I had never seen it. It was a watercolor on tan paper. Three very official-looking fellows in tights and ruffles and buckled shoes traded paper with an old man standing before a cluster of trees. He appeared to be naked. His skin was like bark. There were leaves in his beard. And I understood then why my family’s estate stopped at the border of the old forest and why the line of trees there was always neatly cropped. There had been a conflict and then a truce in the time of my great-great-grandfather. And I had transgressed it.

“The next morning, I sent my hussar away. I told my father at breakfast that the young officer had spoken to me familiarly and made certain suggestions and he was gone by the afternoon. I never saw him again. Later that year, just before Christmas, at a grand ball held every year by the cousin of the Czar, I entered the world of courtesans and courtiers, already a journeyman, and excelled.

“It was another fifteen years before I understood what had happened to me that—”

Doors overhead creaked open. I looked up to see librarians appear. When my gaze returned, my maid was gone.

I was given breakfast and a change of clothes, both spartan, and told to be ready within the hour, although three passed before I was led to a small stone room just off the grand hall at the center of the fortress. Through a solid oak door was a hexagonal stone room, where I was to wait. Directly across from the ingress were a set of ornate double doors. Marble benches jutted from the walls. Above them were painted frescoes in the colorful Byzantine style. In the center of the space was a gurgling font whose clear water fell in several streams from the high cistern to the lower. The door was shut and locked behind me and I took a seat. I was sure that during our confinement, evidence against Etude and I had been gathered and organized. Discussions were held, both legal and otherwise. Long documents were drafted and rejected, edited and compiled. Perhaps even some defenses were offered. Not that we were allowed to participate in them.

After half an hour, the door opened again with a loud clatter and Etude was led inside in chains. He wore the same spartan outfit as me. We were meant to appear humbly before the High Arcane. The metal muzzle marked with the binding knot still covered his mouth. He looked terrible. His eyes were sunken and bloodshot, and he had lost weight. Either he hadn’t been eating or they hadn’t been feeding him. I wondered if he’d been tortured as well. One of our minders forced him to sit while another, a burly Danish woman, removed the muzzle with a key. Etude immediately stretched his jaw as if it had been days since he’d used it.

The door slammed shut and was locked. My friend hunched over, breathing heavily. His hands were still chained behind his back.

“Might I . . .” he began.

I stood. “Anything.”

He cleared his throat. “Might I trouble you for a drink of water?”

“Of course.” I helped him to his feet and to the font, where he bent with open mouth and let the water fall inside. He gulped and gulped. Then he let the clear, cool liquid run over his bare head.

He stood and nodded. ”Thank you. That is much better.” Water ran down his face in beads.

I helped him back to the bench. He stooped a little and I could see the bulbs of his spinal column through his shirt.

“What did they do to you?”

“Less than I had expected,” he joked.

“What did they ask?”

“Only of the book. And of you.”

“Me?”

“It would seem there are certain anomalies in their organization that can only be explained if a traitor walks among them.”

“Ah. That would be Mr. Morgan using me to cover his own activities. What did you tell them?”

“The truth. That you never shared your motivations with me. Or your itinerary. That seemed to satisfy them.”

“And the book? They think you hid it somewhere. And that you returned later only to disguise your guilt.”

He nodded weakly. “It is impossible for me to prove conclusively that I do not have something. I can only show empty space.”

“Do you know what you are charged with?”

“They explained it.”

“Did they ask if you want legal counsel?”

“I denied it.”

“Why?”

“Because the charges are true. That their reasoning is flawed doesn’t change the accuracy of their conclusion. It is my fault the book was taken.”

“It was not your fault.”

“I was not honest with you,” he said under his breath.

“What do you mean?”

“I told you a lie. I told you that while I spent my year in the jungle, my people were massacred, my village burned, our sacred tree cut down. It is easier to say that than the truth.”

His face contorted. Then it relaxed. Then it contorted again. Deep wrinkles cut rivers of sadness around the corners of his mouth. I had to cover my own to keep from joining him in tears. His breath whimpered through wet lips. I knelt and took his hands.

“The truth is . . .” he breathed. “They left me.”

He broke down then. Completely.

“Oh, sweetie.” I held him, and he cried.

“I told—” His lips quivered. “I told those who found me the lie. They were so eager for it, a tragedy of the burning forest. They wanted to tell the world about the massacre in the jungle.”

His people sent him into the jungle to complete his trial and left him while he was away. He was not theirs, so they abandoned him to the world. When he returned bearing the mark of the jaguar on his chest, his village had been slashed and burned. But the loggers had only come because the villagers had already left, because they had abandoned the lot that was otherwise theirs by law. The fire that was set to clear the brush erased all trace of their movement, and a bald boy of 13, taken from his mother as an infant, stood barefoot in splinters and ash, spear in one hand, mask in the other, wondering if he was a monster.

“I had to know why.” He was pleading with me. “I had to know what my master saw that day the seed snapped. So . . . When I was older, after I learned the Western magicks, I made Nebuchadnezzar’s bargain. But I did not know it at the time. I merely wanted to know the future. But I should have known better. The integrity of time is preserved by paradox. The only knowledge we can gain of what’s to come is that which brings about its necessity. In seeking the book so earnestly, I led our enemies to me, and they led me to it, and I became the very monster foretold.”

“But what else could you have done?”

He laughed. “I could have accepted my fate with virtue and equanimity.”

“Would that have changed anything?”

“Possibly. I have spent many days contemplating whether I was ever truly free to choose another path. In the end, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t make the noble choice. I made the human one. And if the world is set, then so is the outcome of these proceedings and nothing I do will alter their outcome. If the world is not set, then by my acts I have released unspeakable evil on the innocent.” He sniffed and wiped his nose again. “Either way, I must accept punishment.”

I heard Anya’s words then, clear as a chime.

You have to stop him.

This was her charge. I had to stop him giving up.

I stood and left him hunched on the stone bench.

“I have known people who believed that everything happens for a reason,” I said. “It is a very safe way of looking at the world. It absolves one of ever having to do anything, for whatever happens has happened out of necessity.

“I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think everything happens for a reason. Quite a lot of it seems to happen for no reason at all. But neither do I think nothing happens for a reason. Nihilism, too, is easy. Cowardly, even. I suspect the truth is that we have to wrestle with a world that we will never really understand. We’re thrown into it with no say as to whether or how it moves. We never know what has happened for reasons and what has simply happened. Either way, it doesn’t matter. If it’s wrong or we don’t like it, we’re the only ones who can make it different. Complaining is as effective as giving up.”

I pointed to the double doors. “The old men gathering in that room don’t want truth. Some of them are outright opposed to it, in fact. Others simply want to avoid any responsibility. The rest are only looking to profit. No other outcome genuinely interests them.

“It is true that dark forces move in the world,” I pleaded. “But . . . not only dark. However distant, however weakly, there is light here, too. And it has its own aims and plans. Mightn’t we be part of those as well?”

He leaned against the wall facing away from me. I looked at his emaciated shape, the bumps of his spine, the shackles that even then bound his hands away from each other. He looked bent. And tired. I looked down at the marks which still adorned my hands. I rubbed them together slowly.

It is a characteristic of the genius, I suppose, to place themselves in a different category from the rest of us. The conceit of youth certainly doesn’t help. Those of us who live with our flaws every day are used to such things. I wondered then if in his short life, young Etude had ever really made a mistake. He’d faced hardships, certainly—more than the average man. But none of them were of his own doing. For a young man who’d spent his entire life being smarter, faster, cleverer than everyone around him, it surely struck a terrible blow to be fallible. To be human, after all.

“During the war,” I said, “we thought we were fighting the final battle. Did you know that? We were certain that what we were doing was no less than saving mankind—that surely, no conflict would ever be greater or more important than that very one. In scale at least, it was half true. No conflict before had ever been as large. But I suspect the very first revolution, the war in which we cast off the shackles of the dark, was ultimately the more important, just as I’m sure there were numerous points since where we were in greater danger of losing everything. In absolute number, more bodies fell in the last war than ever before, but earlier crises saw a greater proportion of life lost. Who knows the future?

“Still, we told ourselves ‘this is it,’ that winning the war was a win for all time. I suspect it was a necessary fiction. I’m not sure so many would have made the requisite sacrifice otherwise.

“We tell each other ‘life is short’ and say ‘if only there were more time.’ But when you have more time, you’re not any more likely to fight. Being immortal—having more time—doesn’t make you a better person. Because it doesn’t change who you are. It only means you are the person you are for that much longer. If you’re lazy or cruel, you remain lazy or cruel. If anything, immortality amplifies what is already there, giving it infinite space to grow.

“It’s why I fear for them. Mortals. They already live longer and longer and I suspect one day, one of them will figure out how to be like me—in approximation if not in fact. Perhaps it’s better if men lived shorter lives. Perhaps it’s better if they had less time. If their candles burned briefer, they might think more on what to light with them.”

I turned to him. “This is the choice you face, the same choice we all face: what to light with our candle. I can’t choose for you and I can’t tell you you’re fighting the final battle, that the sacrifice you make will ultimately count for anything, that there won’t simply be more of the same in an endless succession of struggle and loss. But that doesn’t mean all our choices are the same, that anything you might choose to do with your time is as good as anything else.”

The font gurgled for a few moments before the ornate double doors shuddered and opened. Beyond was a long room whose ceiling was shrouded in darkness. Nine candle-filled iron chandeliers hung down from it, presumably on pulleys, but none of them were lit. Light came in from the row of tall windows along the far wall, which cast the columns in silhouette. They had been carved to resemble the great heroes of the Knights Templar, who stood solemnly bearing sword and shield. At the back was a tall stone block, like a judge’s bench—a high tribunal, behind which sat seven seats. They were empty. Above the bench, the Eye of Annemundu glinted like a great crystal star. It was much larger than I had expected. How the High Priests of Sumer had forged it, no one precisely knew. All anyone knew for sure was that it had been commissioned by Annemundu, called Naram-Sin, the first emperor of civilization, somewhere around the year 2,200 BC, meaning it was then over four thousand years old. It was not a gentle gaze, to be sure. It had been set in an eye-shaped alcove high above the tall stone bench and seemed to stare down in judgment. The effect, I’m sure, was intentional. But it was impressive all the same. The spikes of the crystals were jagged and uneven, and they broke forth from the center in all directions at once, as if the eye were deranged, as if it belonged to a paranoiac who searched frantically for threats in all directions.

The rest of the hall was empty. The matters to be discussed were of the utmost secrecy. No one was to know of our trial, or our fate. It gave the proceedings an informal air, despite the deep and solemn setting.

I was taken first. Etude was left in chambers. After another twenty minutes of waiting, a door creaked and the High Arcane walked single file through the east arch, following the path of the sun across the sky. They moved up stairs behind the tall bench to take their seats. Beltran, Defender of the Art, led the way wearing that high fur hat and matching heavy coat, which hung laughably loose from his shoulders. He took the Caliph’s Seat, furthest to the left.

After him came Master Grimaldi, about whom I knew nothing except that he was Custodian of the Art, sort of like chief librarian—or perhaps minister of information. He had a gray beard and wore the robes of the Medici and a tasseled hat that sat lopsided on his head. He took the Imperator’s Seat.

He was followed by Master Okamoto from Japan, Keeper of the Flame, the master of ritual, wearing the stark black-and-white robes of a Shinto priest, complete with sleeves that stretched to his knees and a black cap that rose like a blunted cone from his forehead. He was clean-shaven, and at fifty-five, was the youngest of the seven. He took the Sun’s Seat.

At the center of the line, taking the lone chair that rose above all the others, was the impractically long-bearded Master Tresillian of Sutcliffe-Grange, who presided over the council from the Seat of Eternity. His father was English but his mother, I had heard, was Egyptian. I don’t think I’ve met a more pretentious man in my long life. He wore red robes with a pattern of gold thread and carried a large hooked staff that was taller than him. His bald head was half-covered in a flap of dark cloth that fell to a point on his forehead, like a widow’s peak.

After him, an old woman trundled. A hag really, like something out of a fairy book: fat, wrinkled, hook nosed, beady eyed. She was naked, including her feet. Her skin was like an elephant’s. Her vulva made a hairless knot like the exposed roots of an ancient oak. She hobbled barefoot holding a knotted rope. Her shriveled breasts swung back and forth. Her fingernails were thick and cracked and curved upward. Suna Yaga, great-granddaughter of Baba Yaga, whose stories had been told to scare me as a child, was the only one to notice me. She represented the witches and night maidens and took the Moon’s Seat.

Behind her came Masters Chang and Gupta. The latter was dressed the most humbly in a simple linen wrap and cord sandals. His skin was dark and his hair all but gone, but his eyes were kind. He took the Khan’s Seat, having recently replaced Master Imran, who had officially stepped down due to ailing health but who was rumored to have had been ousted by factions unknown.

Master Po-hin Chang from Taiwan was a pro tempore stand-in for the great Master Wu, who was thought to be imprisoned somewhere in China and who, being the eldest, would have presided over the council were he ever to be found, meaning there were more than a few people who suspected Master Tresillian had betrayed his elder to the communists. Master Chang was Keeper of the Stone—master of the physical arts—alchemy, potions, and feng shui—and he was widely known to vote opposite Master Okamoto, regardless of the cause, unless Okamoto voted with Master Tresillian, in which case Chang would fall in line.

Finally, the gray-suited American, Mr. James Thaddeus Morgan, Chief Executor of the Winter Bureau, came through a smaller arch wearing a sharp pinstriped suit. He took a seat that had been left for him off to the side. That was unknown in my time and did not bode well.

I looked up at the crystal eye glaring down at me from its angry perch.

There was ceremony. I had never seen any of it before, but I had seen plenty like it. It started with an invocation. Burning incense was swung from a chafing dish. The Masters issued a half-hearted chant, and so on. It was sclerotic in its stiffness, rigid with the accretions of centuries, more pomp than dogma. It ended with the passing of some colorful ribbons from one Master to the next. They were draped between the thumb and forefinger of both hands and passed that way as well. At the end, they were collected by an attendant who sealed them in a glass urn.

“So,” the elderly Master Tresillian began, looking down at me from the Seat of Eternity, “you are she.”

His voice echoed faintly in the long stone hall. He scanned the papers in front of him on the high bench.

“At your last stand before a tribunal magique, you were found guilty of the practice of forbidden arcana—namely, mizzenry.” He scowled at me. “As well as illegal profiteering from the practice of magic, and heresy as well. Is that correct?”

“Are you asking if I was found guilty of heresy or if I was a heretic?”

“Just answer the question,” Beltran barked.

I gave him a look. “Am I to be tried without counsel?” I asked Master Tresillian.

“You are additionally charged,” he went on, “with disobeying a direct order in a time of war, in the case of the item in question.”

I had taken the book without orders.

“That was forty years ago!”

“The accused will be QUIET!” Master Tresillian glowered down at me from under the cloth of his widow’s peak.

He waited a moment of silence, as if to confirm I would obey.

“Dereliction of duty,” he went on, “for failing to report and for which you were dishonorably discharged from the Winter Bureau, in absentia, in 1958. To these charges we add desecration—in particular, of the ancient and noble forest—as well as sedition and treason.”

“Sedition?”

Beltran cleared his throat gently and I rolled my eyes and waited for them to complete their mockery of an indictment.

“However . . .” Master Tresillian said, studying me from afar, “a pardon has been entered in your name by Master Yeĉg, who surprised us all this week with news of his retirement. Due to the urgency of these proceedings, we have yet to complete the necessary ritual of severance, and so he joins us here in his prior role one final time.”

That was why Mr. Morgan was being allowed to sit in attendance. He was, for all intents and purposes, already the incoming Defender of the Art.

I looked at Beltran. He looked back, expressionless.

After everything, he was still protecting me.

Master Tresillian coughed once and wiped his nose with a handkerchief. “You will remain accused,” he said to me, “until the completion of that ceremony, at which time the pardon, already passed by unanimous vote in honor of the outgoing Master Yeĉg, will be confirmed by this chair. As a condition of that pardon agreement, you will be taken from this place to a domicile of Master Yeĉg’s discretion, there to remain under house arrest for a period of not less than thirty-five years.”

“Thirty-five years?” I scoffed. “How is that possibly a pardon?”

Beltran lifted a hand slightly as if to tell me to back off. The look on his face hinted there was more to the story, so I did as he requested.

The Masters, including Mr. Morgan, looked at me as if expecting another outburst at any moment. I crossed my arms.

“Ey-kwo-nobilium.” Master Tresillian lifted his hooked staff and brought it down hard on the floor. It was much louder than I expected, and I flinched.

“The accused will take a seat,” Master Chang growled in a heavy accent, “as she may be called upon to give testimony in the subsequent trial. She is otherwise to remain silent. Is that clear?”

“Yesss.” I pronounced it loudly and distinctly.

I sat in a chair that had been provided on the side opposite Mr. Morgan, but further back, at some distance from the bench. The side doors opened again and Etude was brought before the council of the High Arcane, bare hands still bound in metal behind him. He coughed. The sound echoed.

Master Tresillian began without ceremony. “Young man, we have no more patience for your trouble-making. This is your last chance. Where is the book?”

“I do not possess it,” Etude answered softly.

His words elicited grumbles from the council.

“Mr. Étranger,” Master Tresillian said with disdain. “You have been accused of blatantly and willingly subverting the authority of this council, of courting that which is forbidden, and of acting with malice aforethought to trespass the sacred forest. Do you deny these charges that have been brought against you?”

“The charges?” he asked. “No, I cannot deny the charges.”

“Then you admit guilt.”

There was a long pause.

Etude was looking at me when he answered. His eyes were blank and hollow. “I admit nothing.”

The harsh Master Okomoto was not amused. “We do not dance with words here,” he said in surprisingly unaccented English. “Continue to speak so and we will find you in contempt, at which point these proceedings will be suspended and summary judgment will be made.”

In summary judgment, an immediate vote would be called, likely resulting in my young friend’s guilt and imprisonment—and eventual torture at the hands of Mr. Morgan, the warlock who would soon bear the title of Master and who, as Defender of the Art, would irrevocably corrupt the High Arcane’s defenses.

I looked down again at the symbols on my hands. I rubbed them together. “Now would be a good time to go home,” I whispered.

“Masters,” Etude explained with a raised voice. “I do not deny the charges. I deny the law.”

“This is not the forum for such debates,” Master Chang grumbled impatiently.

“Am I the first to stand in judgment?” Etude asked. “Surely others have stood before you, accused.”

“Of course—”

“Then the law did not stop them from committing their crimes,” Etude interrupted.

“Denial of the law is not the same as innocence,” Master Gupta tried to explain patiently. “We are gathered here only to discuss the latter.”

“And if you will not provide for your defense,” Master Grimaldi added, “then we have no choice but summary decision.”

That so many of them spoke was a good sign. It seemed as if they were earnestly seeking some kind of fair resolution.

“But that is my defense,” Etude explained.

“And what defense is that?” Master Chang snorted. “That you are above the law?”

“Not at all. You say I am guilty of a crime, Master Chang, of breaking the law. But what injustice have I committed? Other than disturbing your rest? Masters tell me, what is the purpose of the law if not to seek justice? It is a tool, is it not? Warped and imperfect to be sure, but isn’t that its aim?”

Master Tresillian raised his staff. “We are likewise not here to have a philosophical discussion on the nature of justice. Since the accused has not—”

“Tell me now!” Etude yelled at the top of his lungs. “On what authority you here act, if not on that pursuit! Murder has been against the law in all times and places where law existed. And still men murder. And where there were no laws, murder is wrong all the same. What then is the value of law? I ask you. Truly. Speak!”

“Would you have us abandon the law?” the patient Master Gupta asked before his colleagues could object. “What rule is there then? What order?”

“So the purpose of the law is to rule?” Etude asked.

“To govern,” Master Tresillian corrected, “for the benefit of all.”

“And all benefit from it, do they? None fall on the law in sacrifice? It is never abused nor misapplied?”

“You miss the point,” Master Grimaldi began, leaning forward in the Imperator’s Seat.

“The point,” Etude corrected, “is that there is injustice in the law. You have just admitted it. What then is a man to do when he encounters it? What is he to do when it falls on those around him? When it falls on his own head? Nothing?”

“And what is it you intend to do?” Master Okamoto asked.

“The most difficult thing in the world: the right one.”

Master Grimaldi laughed heartily.

“And what is that?” Master Gupta interjected with a raise of his hand. He seemed as if he genuinely wanted to know.

Etude looked to me then, sitting to the side. Then he turned back to his audience. “Masters, none of us can control the time and manner of our birth. You know as well as I that we enter the world fully laden with circumstance. Wealth. Poverty. Abuse. Privilege. Plenty. Pestilence. War. And yes, also Law, which is as much a coincidence of our time and place as any of those others. Just or unjust, we cannot control it. It rises like a mountain in our path and must be respected as such. We cannot ignore the law. As with any barrier, we must either respect or alter it as our time and resources allow.

“But my goodness . . . how those with resources seem so easily to slip its bounds.”

And with that, my young friend let his chains fall.

They clattered on the floor.

Master Tresillian stood, and the others did the same—all except Beltran. I could see the question on their faces. It was the same as mine. We all wanted to know how he had done it. I still couldn’t say. It should have been impossible. But then, Etude never much cared for possibility.

Without another word, he turned and walked away, leaving me to wonder who exactly had been on trial. He had given them a chance, I think, to show they cared at least an inkling for anything that mattered, that they were worthy to punish him.

“STOP!” Master Tresillian raised his hooked staff and held it. “STOP AT ONCE!”

But the accused did not, and Master Tresillian brought his staff down hard on the stone. The noise echoed through the hall, and a great power moved out from the Eye of Annemundu. I could see nothing, but I felt it roll forward through the hall like a tsunami.

I stood. “Etude!”

He turned and held up his palms, and the four-thousand-year-old power of the Eye, forged by the first high priests in their towers, met something older still—the four-billion-year-old marks of the earth-mother, which had returned to his hands.

There was a tremor. I would discover later that a volcano in the Greek isles rumbled. We felt its shock on the little island in the Adriatic. I felt it tremble in my chest, and as I looked down at my bare palms. I heard a loud crack. Everyone looked up to see the Eye teeter in its high perch. We all stood in shock. Except Etude. I turned and scurried after him as several of The Masters yelled behind me. But they weren’t yelling at us. They were yelling up. They were yelling for their own safety. I turned to see them diving from the bench, jumping in all directions as the radiant crystal fell and crashed into it, impaling the stone and shattering.

The High Arcane, their handful of attendants, even Mr. Morgan, could only stand in silence and stare at the spikes of the crystal that were embedded in the cracked stone tribunal. A thousand smaller shards were strewn about the floor like white gravel. Every last piece had turned opaque in the breaking, like the eyes of a blind man. Only Beltran could turn from the scene. He looked at me, his old face cracked with worry. I knew his worries.

Who would govern?

Who would enforce the traditions and treaties?

Who would call the dark ones to account?

Who would protect me?

But I had no answer. I just smiled. And he nodded. I turned and ran after my young friend, who had not stopped. He was, I realized, completely barefoot. There were guards beyond the massive doors of the hall, but only two. No one had contemplated a need for more. They shouted and ran as Etude clapped his hands. The heavy doors behind us swung shut with a shudder.

“STOP!” I shouted to the guards.

And they did. I don’t think they expected we would be able to flee anyway. We were on an island. Where would we go?

Etude pushed me to the side just as the stone doors shattered outward, knocking one guard back and forcing another to dive for cover. The floor shuddered as the slab fragments bounced and settled.

The High Arcane were coming.

We ran toward the front gate. Or rather I did. Etude merely walked swiftly with a scowl on his face, as if he were annoyed by the whole thing.

“Hurry!”

Standing atop the central staircase, which descended fifty feet to the courtyard, we saw the High Arcane waiting atop the walls and tower on the far side, staffs and wands in hand. Mr. Morgan was among them. Beltran was not.

I saw Etude’s fists clench. I touched his arm. “Come.”

He looked to me in confusion.

“You won’t win this battle.” I pulled him. “Come!”

I dreamed of beacon lights and a white-winged champion descending through immeasurable darkness toward a pale blue dot in the distance. And I dreamed of gifts. Three were made to the peoples of the earth from the ancient Nameless gods. The first was a dagger, so that we might smite ourselves. The second, a ring to return us to bondage. The third, their holy word. If the ancient texts were to be believed, the ring had been destroyed long ago in the conflagration that saw us break free of their dominion. The dagger was buried, unearthed, and finally swept away. After using it to kill Cerise, Etude had left it for the lady of the water, who took it somewhere it could be destroyed, which meant the last living remnant of the ancient ones on the earth was the book, the book I had read, although I did not understand the glyphs.

It’s often wondered what could be scratched on its pages, or fall darkly from the mouth of a demon, that is so evil it drives one mad—or to suicide. Since we cannot conjure such a terror even from the furthest reaches of our imagination (in which we presume all is possible), we imagine a void, a blank, or else deny the possibility and write it off to fantasy. But it is real. The reason it’s unimaginable is because your own mind conspires to keep it so. It must. To be aware of a fear is to wake it. I do not mean something as simple as spiders. The kind of fears I mean cannot be named. They are that which keeps a man in long and impenetrable melancholy, that which compels a woman to smother her children or compels anyone to vengeance and torture—all of which seem distant to us, but consider: they are daily occurrences in some part of the world. There is a reason ancient cultures long mistook derangement for demonic possession. The one is the paint and the other the artist. The evil we find in the face of a demon or on the pages of an accursed book is—simply—our own: not just our foibles and innumerable laughable failings, which we hide from the world, but our secret abominations, which we hide from ourselves.

Our true evil is that which we cannot know, for to know it is to see that we are not and never have been the people we hold ourselves out to be. In this way, it is not us that reads the accursed book but the accursed book that reads us. The reader is turned open like so many pages (which is true of every book, for with any story, it is the reader that changes, not the book). You read the black mirror and are horrified to see yourself on its pages. This is how the saintly and innocent are saved its effects, how they can read the dark tome without weeping. It’s not that the saint is sinless but that they know well their sins. They see nothing they have not already thrust into the light. The rest of us can only despair. It’s no wonder the weak go mad and fragile wish to die. It’s no wonder that, when asked, no one can put into words what the demon whispered from the shadows. To them, it is inutterable, and their teeth chatter in their own secret language, and their heart beats a devil’s quickstep, for most of us would rather die than turn to face friends and loved ones as we truly are.

Rosalía woke us well before dawn. The Pacific was still nothing but a dark expanse. The men were waiting for us on the mainland, she said. We had to leave immediately.

“Is that normal?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Sometimes. Do you have the money?”

It was most of what we had left, but in real terms, it was not very much, which made me sad—that people, even in the 21st century, still had to sacrifice so much for so little.

She counted it and set some aside. “Save this for the last men. Give the rest when we get to shore.”

Our goodbye was brief—too brief—and I hugged her, even though she did not expect it. We were put into a boat, the same boat we had ridden the night before. The sky was just beginning to lighten in the east when we made landfall at a pier made of pebbles poured into concrete. The doctor helped me up as the ocean waves pushed the boat up and down irregularly. Cerise pushed up with one foot and made the jump.

“These guys don’t look very nice,” she whispered to me at the top.

She was right. We were left in the hands of a motorcycle gang, or so the backs of their leather jackets suggested. The words “Lobos” and “Aztecos” curved around the top and bottom, respectively, of an Aztec-style image of a bloody-mouthed wolf-man in loincloth and headdress. The bikers hurried us into a detachable shipping container fixed to the back of a semi. It was well-used but empty. I turned to say goodbye to the fisherman who had carried us, the same leathery fellow from before, but he had already left, wide-eyed and silent. One particularly burly biker, with arms like bridge cables, watched from the top of the truck—a lookout, although what he was looking out for, I couldn’t say. Lightning bolts were cut into both sides of his finely manicured beard. He held a sawed-off shotgun over his shoulder. He kept turning to look down the pier. Then he did something odd. He sniffed the air.

Two grisly, jacketed men hopped into the container with us and shut the door behind them. A third man locked it from the outside, then slapped the metal twice. The engine started. We wandered to the back as the truck jerked forward and drove away. There was nothing for us to sit on, so we sat on the floor. A single long fluorescent bulb at the back lighted the space, which had slim gaps in the corner of the floor where I felt a weak breeze. The two bikers with us were heavily armed—I counted three knives and four guns—and they leaned against the door, facing each other. One passed a cigarette to the other and started speaking casually in a language I definitely did not recognize. By the looks on their faces, my friends were as concerned as I was.

“Is that Spanish?” Cerise asked softly.

Doctor Alexander shook his head. “I think it’s Nahuatl,” he said, his voice low.

“Na-what?”

“Na-hua-tl. The language of the Aztecs.”

“And people still speak na-what?”

“Some. I read about it in the Times once.”

“Of course you did.”

He leaned closer. “Did you see how worried they looked?”

“I thought they were worried about the guy on the street bike,” Cerise whispered back.

“What guy on a street bike?”

“You didn’t see him? He was down at the end of the pier. He was there when we landed. He was watching us.”

The bikers were smiling and joking, also in a low voice. Every now and then, one would glance sideways to check on us.

“Maybe it’s nothing,” I said.

“Why do I sense a ‘but’ in there?” the doctor asked.

“Just be ready.”

“For?” Cerise asked.

“Anything.”

Within an hour, it was clear why the men had wanted to start early. Baja is a desert, and as the sun rose and ascended higher in the sky, it got warm and then hot and then staggeringly uncomfortable inside the giant metal can. It appeared we were crossing a vast wasteland. Noise from passing cars was rare, as were turns. But we heard the high whine of a street bike more than once. At one point it seemed to hover along the truck before falling back quickly—too quickly, as if its owner had hit the brakes suddenly. I wondered if the men in the cab had brandished a weapon as a warning against being followed.

The temperature improved considerably when the truck boarded a ferry. The semi crept forward slowly, waiting for its turn to board. Once inside the echoing hold and out of the sun, the air cooled immediately. A horn blew and I could smell the ocean. It was then that my fears were confirmed. We were not allowed to leave, even to use the restroom. Cerise was positively dancing before they threw an empty bottle at her. After we landed on the Gulf of California’s eastern shore, we suffered several more hours on a desolate highway, or so the lack of traffic noise suggested. It was around then that we heard the high whine of the bike again. It could’ve been a different bike, of course, but that seemed unlikely. But the sound eventually faded, and we made several slow turns with long gaps between, finally onto a graded dirt road and then onto an ungraded dirt track that kicked up dust and pebbles. We slowed and stopped and the rear of the truck was opened and the men hopped down.

We were in a massive, sprawling junkyard somewhere in the Sonoran Desert. There were low mountains in the distance and swirls of dust all around. The staccato of motorcycle engines filled the air, which was dry and smelled of iron: of rust and blood. Around us were mostly cars, even the empty hulk of a Model T. Speckled between the rest was any kind of machinery that could be stripped for parts: trucks, vans, and school buses; a ring of semis; two airplane chassis with detached wings; the hull of a Vietnam-era chopper; piles of hollow washers and dryers; old lawn mowers; and of course motorcycles. Some of the husks were stacked, but most just lied about. It seemed as though someone had originally tried to put like with like—most of the washers and dryers were piled together—but then gave up. Some of the cars were half-submerged in the desert. Others had dirt pushed up over them by a plow or bulldozer. Three interior fences of corrugated sheet metal snaked through the lot, each stopping at some point for no obvious reason. Through it all, a web of scraped-dirt roads wound like a maze. In fact, I think it was a maze, deliberately intended to confuse and discourage any unwanted visitors. At a nearby intersection, I saw an empty 1970s Impala whose windshield had been replaced with a welded steel plate. It was a makeshift armored crow’s nest from which gunners could launch a counterattack on any invaders—presumably the police or rival gangs.

“Jesus, it’s a fortress,” the doctor whispered.

The central yard, which we were marched into, was bounded by a high fence covered in green plywood. It was topped a thick tangle of barbed wire. At the rumble of approaching motorcycles, one of the gang scurried to open the gate, which had swung half-closed on its weight. Three motorcycles led another semi hauling a cargo container marked with the name of a junk company.

A woman yelled at us in Spanish. She wore a similar jacket to the men but with spray-painted patches of white at the shoulder, probably indicating her gender. She pushed us forward with the butt of a shotgun. At the center of the interior lot was a rocky outcrop, like a miniature mountain rising from the desert floor, which gradually sloped up to it. A high sheet-metal garage stuck out from a cave opening filled with grimy tools and lifts, like a commercial repair shop. A backhoe and a cement truck were parked next to three unmarked commercial delivery vans and several pallets of ammunition.

“Fortress,” the doctor repeated.

The gang was well-organized, that was sure. They had to be. They were outnumbered. I counted only eight men and a handful of women. There were almost certainly more inside the cave or out on the road, but they were not an army, and the absence of any dwellings suggested most of them lived with family elsewhere. This was their clubhouse and retreat, and by the age of some of the cars and machinery, particularly those at the bottoms of piles or poking up from the ground, it had been so for generations, and generations had expanded it.

Everyone was searched. The doctor’s staff was taken and thrown into the back of a pickup with the rest of the contraband, which included anything of value or use. A dusty woman with a handgun in her belt and her hair behind her ears searched me and found the coin. There was heavy scarring on her neck, as if she’d been mauled by a wild animal.

“I wouldn’t take that,” I suggested calmly.

She ignored me and put it in her pocket.

When they stepped away, the doctor whispered aloud what all of us were thinking.

“Werewolves.”

I had to admit, trafficking was the perfect job for them. It requires a loyal and disciplined team: self-policing, fiercely territorial, and distrustful of outsiders. No one would think anything odd of their odd behavior. People expect biker gangs to be secretive, nocturnal, and violent. Those they transported were a source of income as well as sustenance. A few could go missing from time to time, and so feed their dark urges, and it would never be reported. America’s zero tolerance policy ensured that those who made it across would never come forward. Nor would they be believed.

The wolves had a bigger selection than I expected. Some thirty people were brought out of the cargo container, including a couple children. Some were worried. Others looked like they’d been there before. They were led single-file to one of two white-sided delivery trucks. But we did not join them. Cerise, the doctor, and I were pulled to the side while the others were inspected like hanging sides of beef.

“What’s going on?” I demanded as I was dragged from the line.

I got a shotgun butt to the temple in reply.

“Are you okay?” The doctor stepped over to me and examined my head.

We were pushed forward again and led up the sloping desert floor to the outcrop of banded rock.

“Please tell me there’s not a full moon tonight,” Cerise whispered.

At the back of the high garage was an opening in the rock carved like a temple arch, apparently quite old. Aztec figures similar to those on the backs of the bikers’ jackets crawled, snarling, over the border from the ceiling to the floor and back down again. There was a track in the cave passage, a smooth, shallow groove worn from centuries of tread. We passed two small antechambers and climbed a set of stairs before reaching another impressive arch. Near it to one side, amid a menagerie of carved images, was a horn-faced figure nearly as tall as me. A circular depression in the stone had worn most of his chest away at the heart. The lead woman touched it quickly in reverence, and I understood why. The others did the same as we passed, and I could see it was not horns that erupted from its face but rather enormous teeth, jutting out in all directions. She was despicable, for I saw then that what appeared to be armor was actually six pairs of breasts bearing twelve erect nipples. She brandished an ax in one hand and a staff bearing three inscribed banners in the other. She was their mother-goddess, and this was her den in the earth.

There was a metal gate just inside the arch which slid upward, like the door of a chicken coop. Beyond was a large cavern carved over the eons by the weather that erupted through the jagged hole in the ceiling. The space was open to the sky like the Pantheon in Rome or the dreaming halls of the Native Americans, where the shaman’s wandering spirit floated out on its vision quest. A rock altar grew from the horribly uneven floor, off-center from the hole. The top of it had been filed flat, but other than that, it appeared carved by nature as well. There was a kind of mezzanine also, a high recession in the wall around three-fourth of the room reachable only by a single lashed-log ladder.

But what commanded your eye was the crouched figure carved out of the far wall. It was ten feet at least. Where the carving at the door was female, the statue was definitely male. His organ was not only displayed but erect. Teeth jutted from his face as well, like horns, but in five pairs instead of the mother’s three. Around his bare feet were all the usual accompaniments: dried flowers, spent candles, incense ash, a ceremonial bowl, and blood. It stained his mouth and the floor underneath. The altar was drenched.

Lycanthropy as an illness and a curse wasn’t known in the New World until the arrival of the Spanish. (Vampirism, on the other hand, seems to have been known everywhere.) Whether the founders of that temple had been trying to organize a resistance or had merely sought refuge there, I couldn’t say, but I could easily believe it was several centuries old and that the pack had occupied it continuously, which explained the junkyard at least: the accumulated detritus of centuries. I suspected that if we could lift the cars and washing machines, we would find crumbled evidence of Spanish carriages, bridles and horse bones, and other objects much older still.

Two low cages were cut into the room, one on each side. A beaten man, a rival gang member by the looks of his clothes, was slumped against the wall inside the first. We were pushed under the second, and the wrought iron gate swung down and was locked to the stone floor.

We watched our jailers leave.

“What’s happening?” Cerise asked. “Why were we separated?”

Her hushed voice echoed incoherently in the cavern, as if the ghosts of the place were mocking her.

“It seems there’s a bounty on our head.”

The sun got low and stars appeared. We could see them through the great irregular hole in the cave.

“Look,” Cerise said, lying on her back. She pointed. “A shooting star. We should make a wish.”

But there was only one wish to make. I’m sure we all did.

The gate opened and the werewolves’ contraband was delivered by pickup truck, which backed into the cavern-room slowly and dumped its contents on the floor. After it departed, two women climbed the ladder to the second level, which was little more than a precarious slope, while the others handed the hoard up to be placed around the chamber. I think they intended to thank their horn-faced god for the bounty. The three of us watched as the doctor’s staff was lifted and leaned against the rock.

Shouts.

People were being led into the temple against their will. Their voices echoed off the rock. The rival gang member in the barred cage was roused. Our gate was opened as well, and our white-and-brown bearded jailer grabbed Cerise by the neck and pulled her backward out of the cage. We held onto her, all of us screaming, but it was no use. He was too strong. He pulled her free with a jerk and the cage was slammed in our faces. I saw her eyes as she was dragged away. I reached through the bars.

“Cerise!”

She was terrified, but not for herself—or not only. “Don’t let it win,” she said.

I nodded. The doctor only bowed his head.

The victims were chained to the altar. There were fewer of them than there were wolves. Except for Cerise, they were all men. As the lone woman, I suspected she was a prize for the lower-status males, those who were unpaired and wanted the glory of conquest to improve their rank. The first man to find her would undoubtedly rape her while clinging to her throat with his teeth. If she were lucky, she would die quickly. If she were unlucky, another wolf would discover them before the first had finished, and they would quarrel, and she would suffer the indignity multiple times. If she were very unlucky, she would survive the attack and be brought into the pack.

The older and higher-status males, or those who already had a mate, along with the unpaired women, would fight for the rest. On the numbers, several would necessarily go without a kill, which I’m sure brought shame.

The wolves circled their prey, sniffing—catching their scents, deciding which trail they would follow. Then at once they started chanting in Nahuatl, invoking their gods and elders. The rival biker was draped over the altar and a knife driven into his heart as easily as a butchered chicken. He was bled unceremoniously into the bowl. I watched steam rise from it as the last of his warmth escaped into the night with his soul. Rituals were made. Then the prisoners were loosed. They hesitated at first, unsure of the rules of the chase. Would running bring swifter reprisal? Cerise looked to me, as if judging in that moment whether or not she had a chance to free us.

“Run!” I screamed.

She did, and the others followed, out the temple arch and down the stairs and into the junkyard, whose maze they would have to navigate in the dark. No one said it, but I suspect that if any of them made it out, they would be free, and the desert would take them—part of the ancient bargain that kept that place, called La Zona del Silencio by the locals, hidden from the world.

Our jailer, who was older than the others—an ousted alpha, perhaps—stood on the sloped floor of the mezzanine and lowered the gate over the temple arch with a crank. Dried herbs were added to the ceremonial bowl, and those around the altar drank from it in order of seniority. One by one, the change took them. It was not a full moon that night. The contents of the bowl induced it, and we watched in awe. While not as dramatic as what one sees in movies—the gang did not sprout fangs or a coat of fur—it was all the more remarkable for being real. They ripped their clothes. Torsos were revealed, men’s and women’s both. There was shaking and snarling and a general engorgement of blood, as if pumped into them. All of the men had erections. I saw the women’s breasts swell, and their muscles as well. I suspected all of them then had the strength to rip my limbs from my body. They certainly tried. They smelled us and growled and came at the wrought iron cage with fury. It shook with a clatter and dust fell from the hinges, but it held, and a moment later, the main gate was lifted open and the wolves bounded into the night, sniffing the ground and howling, leaving only the elderly male on the mezzanine.

“Call your staff,” I whispered. I could still see it in the dim light.

“What?”

“Quickly,” I urged. “While there is only the one. We won’t get another chance. Call your staff.”

But the doctor was only confused.

“Surely you realize you were meant to draw it. A pure steel rod tipped in a diamond point? What better symbol of truth is there—that which you have spent your whole life seeking? You didn’t find it by accident. Of that I am sure. Call it to you.”

“How?”

“I don’t know! You’re the mage.”

The old guard turned his eyes to us but then looked away. He was making his way across the slope to the ladder, a walk that required some concentration.

“Trust your instincts,” I said.

It was Wilm who taught me that a wizard’s familiar chooses him but that his staff must be found. It was a coming together, he said, like a pair of magnets. Each moved when the other was near. Wilm had found his in the cloak room at the Vienna opera, where he had retired with a married countess fifteen years his senior. It was a dapper gentleman’s cane, and it fell and nearly tripped him.

Something very similar happened in the cave. As the old wolf climbed carefully down the ladder, he knocked a hubcap, which rolled and hit the propped staff just hard enough to make it slip off the sloped ledge to the uneven floor below, taking several cell phones with it. It bounced with a clang and rolled toward us. It hit the wrought iron bars and the doctor pulled it in. He brought the point down hard on the lock. Not the bolt, which was heavy. Rather, he struck the pin around which it pivoted. Just as in the prison, the diamond bit snapped the metal. But it took a few moments of jiggling to work the bolt loose, by which time the guard had made it down the ladder and to us. We swung the gate out, but he stopped it. He was strong, but there were two of us. We propped the gate with our backs while we grabbed the man’s feet and pulled him down.

The biker had a bowie knife on his belt, which I took as he threw the doctor off him. But he wasn’t afraid of it. He came for me, which is what I wanted. I tumbled away and lifted the cage as the doctor rammed the biker with the point of the staff, forcing him into the cage, which fell shut. I jammed it with the knife. His burly, tattooed arms were too big to reach through the curved bars, and when he realized it, he rattled the gate in a rage, cursing us in Nahuatl.

We ran outside. Just past the high garage, the gang’s bikes had been washed and gassed and lined neatly in a row under a translucent green roof that protected them from the sun.

“I’ll find her,” I said. “Knock this over.” I pointed to the lean-to. “And find us transportation.” I started running. “We’ll never make it out of the desert on foot!”

“How will I find you?” he called.

“We’ll make noise!”

“But won’t they find you?”

But I was gone. My feet hit the soft, dry dirt in heavy thuds as I ran into the junkyard maze. Cerise was smart enough to know there was no point in hiding, not from creatures that can track by scent, which suggested she would’ve run straight for the front. But after a minute or more, I began to doubt myself and stopped. Cars were piled all around me.

“She could be anywhere,” I breathed.

I spun around, looking for any kind of clue, but there was nothing.

A scream.

I ran around a bend and caught the sound of struggles. I took a wrong turn and had to double-back at a dead end, but I found her. She was on her back fending off a male wolf with no shirt. I grabbed a hunk of loose metal like a club and tried knocking him off her, but he was in a frenzy and nearly oblivious to my attack. Cerise was bleeding. In his frantic desire to remove her jeans, he’d slashed her across the abdomen. I struck him again on the head and he swatted me away. I flew back five feet and hit the dirt hard enough to twist my shoulder and knock the wind from my lungs. I had trouble getting to my feet. I was fighting the muscles of my trunk, which had seized like a vise.

Cerise screamed. It was primal. I couldn’t watch.

A street bike whined as it flew over my head. Red plastic gas tanks were lashed to both sides, but when it crashed, there was a loud noise and nothing else. The wolf stood and grunted in alarm, his face twisted bestially. The bike the engine slowed and the tires spun idly. I had hoped the distraction would give Cerise a moment to run, but she was hurt and could only roll limply to one side and crawl. But the wolf didn’t care. I think he smelled the gasoline then. The tanks hadn’t been meant to explode on impact. They had been left open and so had made a trail. A line of fire burst over the hulk behind me and across the ground to the bike, which erupted violently, knocking the wolf back. I thought that would be the end of it, but even after the blast, he still managed to get to his feet before me.

“Shit!”

He thought I was the attacker and bounded right for me.

A young man in skinny jeans dropped to the ground. He wore navy Converse and a white hoodie under a colorful silk jersey jacket. I couldn’t see his face. His hood was up. Stitched into the back of his jacket was a rainbow dragon and burning phoenix intertwined. He was lean and agile and approached the biker calmly as he pushed up his sleeves. But he was surprised by the wolf’s speed. The biker ran forward and grabbed the young man’s arm. I expected the wolf to throw him down and rip him apart in seconds.

Instead, there was a sizzle.

The biker screamed. It started like an animal squeal but ended like a man’s. The werewolf pulled away and looked at his red, swollen hand, then at the skin of the intruder’s forearm. Wrapped around his wrist were Buddhist prayer beads. The young man shook his hand and the beads fell loose. A tiny Buddha dangled, reclined in prayer, one hand raised in the symbol of love. The young man was not a priest. He was more like a monk. He had been trained since childhood by a wushu sage. He twirled the beads in the air so they wrapped around his fingers like brass knuckles.

The wolf growled and bounded forward, but the intruder stepped to the side, swung a leg around, and caught the biker’s arm in the crook of his ankle. With a rotating flip, the young man twisted the biker’s arm back and kicked him across the face with his other foot, knocking him to the ground. The wolf tried to sweep the young man’s legs as he came down, but he was blocked by a foot. Standing on one leg, the young man used that same foot to block another punch and then to kick the wolf in the face. But it was little more than an annoyance, and the shirtless biker, muscles engorged, launched himself up again. The young man punched in defense. He swung his arm around, and the beads struck the werewolf squarely in the chest. I didn’t see where it would do much to stop him, but to my surprise, the biker’s body recoiled as if struck by 10,000 volts. He smashed into a hulk of a conversion van, denting the side, before falling to the dust.

The young man looked down at the beads in shock—but only for a moment. Cerise was on her feet and she ran to him.

They hugged.

Then she pulled from the embrace and hit him and yelled in Chinese—for a moment anyway, until she clutched her side and collapsed. The young man pulled off his hood, and I saw the warm face of Cerise’s better half, as serene as the Buddha around his wrist. He looked so young to me, but then so did she.

“Kai! What are you doing here?” she demanded in English.

He shrugged. “Last time you went to New York you came back in a pot. I knew I couldn’t stop you. So I followed.”

“But... how did you find us?”

“Dude, it’s the craziest thing—”

“Tell us later,” I said, pulling them both to cover.

The wolves were in frenzy, but some of them would have heard the explosion. As if on cue, another biker bounded down the scraped-dirt lane on all fours. This one was a female.

“Run!” I said.

Cerise was hurt and traveled slowly, but it was the maze that beat us. We turned right and saw another wolf dismembering a man, pulling flesh from his chest by the teeth. He looked up with a bloody growl, and we ran the other way—right into a corrugated metal fence. A dead end.

“Fuck!”

Kai pushed Cerise into a hulk of a Toyota and shut the windowless door. He took a stance and, holding up his beaded fist, swiped the dirt with the tip of his shoe. The male wolf reached us first and they fought. The female leapt over them a moment after, bouncing off the roof of Cerise’s car and landing on two feet before me. I recognized her. It was the woman who had searched us that afternoon and taken the doctor’s staff. She didn’t hesitate, but came right for me—just as one of the delivery vans crashed through the fence, striking her as it grounded to a halt in a cloud of dust. The woman was thrown back and impaled on a piece of metal that bent out from a car. It entered under one armpit and exited under the other, skewering her.

As I approached, I could see she was still breathing, albeit barely. I pulled the coin from her jeans pocket. I held it up.

“It’s bad luck to steal the currency of fate.”

“Get in!” Doctor Alexander called from the cab of the vehicle.

But it was too late. We had made too much noise. Kai punched his adversary into the ground, where he lay crumpled, one arm bent over his back, as the entire pack descended on us. They leapt one by one to the tops of the stacks around us, howling to each other. The man with the lightning bolts shaved into his beard dropped to the ground. He was shirtless as well. The blood covering his mouth ran down his chest. He had already made at least one kill. I suspected he was the alpha. He saw the two members of his pack just killed and leaned back into a mournful howl. The others joined.

Kai didn’t hesitate. He ran and slid on his knees across the dirt and punched the alpha in the groin with his beaded fist. There was an audible pop as the alpha’s howl ended in a powerful yelp. The beast-man looked down, eyes wide, face frozen in shock, even as he fell back to the earth.

The pack ceased all noise. After a moment, a cricket resumed. No one moved. Kai had killed the alpha. He’d launched the man’s genitals into his abdominal cavity like shrapnel. If Kai had been a wolf, he would’ve been the pack’s new leader. But he wasn’t, and in that moment, with their minds still frenzied and half-animal, none of them were sure who to follow or what to do.

“GO!” I yelled.

We climbed into the truck. The others were closer and made it in a flash, but I was pulled down by powerful hands. I was helpless on the ground, about to be mauled, when my attacker was jumped by another wolf. Rivalry had begun. Whoever stopped us might make claim to being the new alpha, and every attempt was met by a challenge.

I leapt up and clung to the van’s heavy side view mirror. “Drive!”

The engine roared, the gears shrieked once, and we lurched forward. Kai helped me into the cab. Once crammed inside with the others, the doctor wove around a bend and crashed through the corrugated fence, beyond which was open desert.

“Were you bitten?” I asked Cerise.

“No.”

“Are you sure?” I leaned over her husband to feel her, and she grimaced in pain.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” The doctor pushed me back. “We need to get her to a hospital.”

“We don’t have time. We need to keep moving.”

“Getting across the border isn’t going to do anyone any good if we all die along the way,” he argued. “You can’t tell me that what waits for us isn’t ten times worse than this. We have to be ready.”

“Won’t they just follow us?” Kai asked.

“I disabled their bikes,” the doctor said with a smile. “Should buy us enough time to make it to the next town.”

My fists were clenched. “I know you mean well, Doctor, but this is always what happens. The book is always somewhere good men and angels fear to tread. That’s part of the binding that protects it! It’s always somewhere dangerous. In a cavern. In a tomb. In a war zone. It’s always somewhere reasonable people are careful to go. They always need a plan. Or supplies. Or a hospital. Or whatever. And while they dither about, it moves again. God, we’ve been here so many times! I have been right here, having this exact conversation, more times than I can count.”

“We don’t even know that it’s there,” the doctor objected.

“And waiting won’t reveal it! Do you remember the labyrinth that trapped you? Do you remember how long it took you to get out?”

The doctor didn’t answer.

“And what happened? We were too late! We don’t have the luxury of gathering all the answers, of figuring everything out. We have to act. Now. With whatever we have. With whatever we lose. We’re not more than seven hundred miles from the mine. If we keep moving, we can be there by sundown, and then whatever happens, happens. I will go by myself if I have to.”

“How are we gonna get across the border?” he asked. “None of us have passports or identification. And once they figure out we escaped, their agents will be waiting at all the checkpoints, no?”

He was right.

“Then we go through the desert,” I said.

“And the border patrol? They have drones, you know. And we don’t know the way.”

“Then we’ll figure it out.”

“How?”

“I’m in,” Cerise said, clutching her side.

Kai grabbed her hand in support.

I sighed at the reminder of her wound. “There must be something here to stop the bleeding,” I said, searching the cab.

We found an oil rag in the glove compartment, along with the remnants of someone’s lunch. There was an apple and a bag of plantains and some kind of tortilla that was now an awful shade of green. We did what we could to clean and bandage Cerise. Her husband sacrificed his hoodie, and she finished the water. The dawn rose and we realized we had been driving northeast. We adjusted course, but bad news came quick. After a few hours of driving, we ran out of gas. The truck was old, and the fuel gauge had gotten stuck at an eighth of a tank. I closed my eyes in frustration as we sputtered to a stop in the middle of nowhere. From hundreds of miles away, the book was working its dark magic.

We got out and the doctor immediately took my arm.

“Can I talk to you?” he said to me in a low growl.

We walked over gravel and dirt to a cluster of sharp-branched bushes where the others couldn’t hear us.

“We don’t have time to argue,” I said. “We have—”

“She’s pregnant,” he accused.

I breathed in deep. “I know.”

He made a disgusted face. “You knew?”

“Not until Everthorn. You were under a spell—”

“And you still took her on this—”

“Yes!” I widened my eyes at him. “I did.”

“Look.” He raised a hand. “I realize it’s none of my business. But maybe this isn’t a good—”

“Doctor.” I gripped his arm and pulled him further back. He was speaking too loudly. “Why do you think she’s here? Why do you think she left her husband and came all the way from Hong Kong? On a whim? For the fun? To imperil her child? She wants to know what kind of world her baby will grow up in. And she wants some say in what kind of world that will be. Surely you, as a father, can appreciate that.”

I looked back. Kai was helping his wife to the shade of the truck. By the worried, sheepish look on her face, she had discerned what the doctor and I were talking about. Kai was excitedly telling her his story, and I could just make out the distant words:

“But then I ran out of money. New York is expensive, man. I didn’t want to go home without you, so I changed my ticket to San Fran and stayed with my cousin. Remember Dan? I was at his place when you called. We owe him a new bike, by the way.”

Bike, I thought. Gas tanks.

“This van was meant for the crossing,” I told the doctor.

He looked at me.

“Spare tanks,” we said together.

We found them strapped under carriage in the back, four large reservoirs—enough to get us across the Rio Grande for sure, after which we’d have to find a way to fill the tank again, at least twice, if we were to make it all the way to the mine.

“We still don’t know the way,” the doctor reminded me as we emptied the second tank into the truck.

It was a fair point. We were in the middle of nowhere, a dry gully between a pair of bluffs.

“Those bikers are gonna get here eventually, aren’t they?” Kai asked. “I mean, they’re not just gonna let us go.”

“At least we’ll see them coming,” the doctor mused. “There’s nothing here.”

He looked around, and I joined him. He was right. From our vantage, we could see for several dozen miles or more in every direction. I was scanning the dry earth for a trail or road of some kind when my eyes caught a tiny speck of a shape.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“What?”

“There.” I pointed.

The doctor squinted at the horizon. The others saw us looking and stood. Kai helped Cerise to her feet. With rest, a little food and water, and a bandage, she was looking considerably less pale.

Kai raised a flat hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun. “What is that?”

Whatever it was, it was small—and getting closer. We all watched in silence as a low, gray shape emerged from the shimmer of heat. It stopped a quarter mile from us and stood.

The doctor stepped forward. “Is that—”

“A coyote,” I said.

It wasn’t moving. It just stood there. Watching. Waiting.

“Do you think it’s hungry?” Cerise asked.

“No,” I said. “I think it’s waiting to show us the way.”

After Beltran’s visit, some of my restrictions were lifted. I was not allowed to speak to Etude and had no idea where in the cavernous dungeons he was being held—the same dungeons where the Eye was discovered by the first maestri some seven centuries before. I was also kept from the high towers, where everything important seemed to happen. But there was a garden promenade left open to the sky and I was allowed access to it and to the library. Both were utterly, unspeakably magnificent. The library was large enough that one could genuinely get lost. I was never a scholar like Hank, but being raised in the centuries before television, books have remained my first love, and over the next several weeks, I spent many hours between those stacks in the company of voices past—not just the books but also the ghosts that would sometimes steal them when my back was turned. I learned quickly to feign disinterest before making a selection, lest the book I had chosen be whisked away behind me. Their thefts were an attempt, I’m sure, to get me to go innocently searching, to explore the buttressed vaults, caged nooks, and octagonal chambers that connected each to the other inside that great place.

Of all the spirits that pestered me, I made acquaintance with only one. Judging from her dress, which I only caught in glimpses, my girl was a servant in the time of Cromwell. She must have spent much of her life scrubbing the floor, for that is what she did compulsively. When she spoke, it was always to herself or to someone else not present. I heard only fragments of stories, and she would often disappear midway through. Sometimes she would glance at me first, like a wild animal, as if just realizing I was there before blinking away in fright. But as one week turned to two, and two to three, my continued presence in the library coaxed a certain calm, as with a tiger, and her stories lengthened. She didn’t relate them directly, but if I sat and read near the lower arches—which were close enough to the sea that in the quiet I could hear the gentle lapping of the Mediterranean—she would often appear, scrubbing the floor (always scrubbing, scrubbing) and talking to herself, which was of course talking to me. She seemed terribly lonely, and I would put a finger in my book and close it and look away from her and listen as she told a friend named Charlotte, who was never present, all the reasons she should stay away from the farm boy down the lane, for he was a ne’er-do-well if ever there was one. I listened to numerous one-sided arguments about why she hadn’t cleaned the kitchen or brushed the horses. She told a great many lies, especially about where she went when she wasn’t needed and why it was she lingered so long there.

How she came to the Keep of Solomon, I could only guess, but the reason for her departure seemed clear. Her unconsummated dalliance with the farm boy down the lane had turned sour after she caught him mounting her friend Charlotte behind a tree. Realizing he had no intention of honoring his promises, she demanded the return of her dowry. But the boy had already spent it on drink. My maid immediately reported him to her lord but was told she shouldn’t have been so foolish as to give it to such a man in the first place, and the matter was dropped. It was only later, after the farm boy had broken Charlotte’s heart as well, that my maid plotted her revenge.

She visited a “lady of the dells”—a witch—and gave of her hair and of her womb. It was not meant to damage him. She repeated that many times. It was merely supposed to teach the boy a lesson. What happened next, I was not told, but having dealt with a number of witches, it’s easy enough to guess. My maid was arrested and spent several years in a brutish prison, as I had, before being offered clemency in exchange for a report on the witch, who was later hanged. In consequence of her service, she was indentured to the servants of The Masters and later met her end within the walls of the Keep of Solomon, where she remained as a wayward spirit.

Early one morning, while busy with a pail and brush, my new friend airily explained to Charlotte that she was so beautiful and could do so much better than a simple farm boy from down the lane, and that if she would go to the city, she was sure to catch the eye of a gentleman. Amid the rambling, which clearly predated the rest of the tale, I heard a stray word: escape. It was spoken in the same voice, but the tone and cadence were different, as if interjected from a different time and place. I looked up and the young woman was peering at me. Then she disappeared again.

Amid the shelves of the library, I rediscovered bits of my past, including a rare manuscript by Wilm Castleby, penned in his hand. Seeing his familiar scratch brought back memories I had completely forgotten—not ones eaten by the forest but those simply lost in the years. I also discovered a collection of antique photographic plates made of glass, some of which had cracked and been mended with tape or glue. They filled a series of chests inlaid with wood grooves, each holding a single vertical slab. The Masters, or rather the librarians and scribes who worked for them, had used the new medium of photography to record the last of the woodfolk and the other child-races, whose numbers had by then precipitously declined. Many had fled to other realms after the pogroms of the 17th century, but many more had been “harvested” a century later during the so-called Age of Enlightenment, when innumerable pieces were cut from their bodies, living or dead, and sold to fill wunderkammer and gentlemen’s cabinets of curiosity. By the 19th century, precious few were left, and The Masters’ scribes made portraits, etched into glass with salts of silver. I saw twig-fingered treeherders mourning ricks of corpses, giggling gnomes hidden under furniture and machinery, preens of pixies pushed under rulers and tape measures, naked and ashamed. Some of the images were quite poignant, such as the satyr mother bent over the still body of her faun, her breasts still heavy with milk. Others were inimitably disturbing. Many of the pixies were cowed by rough-gloved fingers, their tiger-striped wings forcibly and painfully spread. The presence of several empty slots in the progression suggested there were images missing—I expect the most explicit ones.

But my greatest discovery was a secret manuscript that I myself had smuggled to America, for which I was later imprisoned for heresy. I assumed it had been destroyed, along with my freedom, and as soon as I recovered from my shock at their continued existence, I shuffled to the nearest chair and scoured the yellowed pages. I didn’t stop reading for hours.

After being rescued from the attic in Whitechapel, I was arrested and given a choice: prison or deportation, which is how I found myself sailing to India. I had finally caught the attention of the lords of magic. I had triggered it, in fact. I had never completely given up my desire to be rid of my curse, and as it happened, two years before the madness in the attic and shortly after Durance and I came to London, I happened upon a speaker standing before a large crowd—a woman, which was unusual, more so that she had the distinctive cadence of a Russian accent. There were not many Russians in London then. The British had expelled most of my countrymen during the war in the Crimea. It was rare to find one at all, let alone speaking openly before a large crowd. So I stopped.

In five minutes, I could tell she was from Ukraine, not all that far from where I was born. She was also apparently a spiritual leader, a representative of something called the Theosophical Society, a kind of magico-religious fraternity built on Eastern mysticism and worship of the occult. The Masters had been so successful in their persecution of magic, which was part of daily life as late as the seventeenth century, that by the nineteenth it was making a comeback. Not in earnest, of course. More as a quaint affectation, the way certain fashions of a bygone era will reappear ironically. Victorian gentlemen in particular, having made a fortune in machine industry, were often members of secret societies based loosely on Egyptology, Hindu spiritualism, or other bland cults of the Orient. These were generally toothless but attracted many followers. Indeed, as I moved around the crowd, I realized the speaker had already packed the hall on whose steps she now stood and that she was giving a second, abbreviated talk to the poor and the latecomers who had gathered in the hundreds outside. Since there was little chance of meeting her amid such numbers, I made a note of her name, which was printed on the marquee—Madame Helena Blavatsky—and went on with my business.

I wrote to her, explained my heritage, and told her enough of my encounter with the woodfolk that I thought I might at least get an audience. I delivered it to the hotel where she stayed, but the disinterest of the clerk suggested my post was only one of perhaps dozens or more. Several days passed and I noted in the paper that “Mme. Blavatsky, Noted Medium and International Speaker, Sails for Hindustan.” Life went on and I forgot all about it. Thus, I was quite surprised when the police, having thrown me in a prison hospital to recover, informed me that I had a solicitor and that he had secured for me an exit from a lengthy prison sentence. The solicitor, a Mr. Bentley, told me he was employed by another attorney, an American named Olcott, who had been part of the tribunal charged with investigating the death of President Lincoln. When I asked why Mr. Olcott had freed me, Mr. Bentley said he didn’t know, that he was instructed merely to secure my release, which he did. I was then taken under police custody to a steamer ship, the first I had ever seen, and placed immediately aboard.

We stopped in Cairo. I have never been so hot. I saw the pyramids and so much more squalor than I had presumed could exist in the world. The British seemed as interested in their empire as a dog its fleas. But of course in that, they were hardly unique. Within the week, thankfully, we set sail again from a port in the Red Sea. It was a further two weeks before I met the woman who had freed me. She was as curious a figure as any I would encounter—warm and genial but also much coarser in her manners than I expected. She made crude jokes, often involving bodily functions, and cackled at them herself. Her clothes never fit, her hair was frizzy and unkempt, and she never shaved. Her insults were rare, but when they came, they were vicious, direct, and incisive. I cannot recall anyone the Madame insulted who did not instantly become a lifelong enemy—including, eventually, Mr. Olcott, who had been her first and staunchest patron.

When I was finally able to ask my lady why I had been summoned, I was told that after receiving my letter, she had attempted to contact me “on the astral plane,” but that she had been rebuffed by “an immense psychical power,” so strong that she was weary for many days. By the time she recovered, she had to leave for India. Thinking I was a medium of rare and notable ability, she had her agents at the Theosophical Society’s London lodge, which included a number of state luminaries, report on my movements. She said I had been summoned to India so that the truth of the “psychical emanance” would not be lost in some brutish prison. In the meantime, I was given an occupation. I was to be a servant and tutor in my lady’s house. Like many colonial Europeans, she sponsored a small school where poor children were given a rudimentary education.

Though remanded to the Theosophical Society, I was not kept as a prisoner, nor did I think of fleeing. India bewitched me. It wasn’t simply beautiful. It was opulent, and I understood why the British coveted it so. The wealth they drained seemed eternally replenished by the constant motion of the people—more than I had ever seen before. Everything there danced and grew over and above everything else, a boiling mixture of faiths and languages and food. Pickpockets and saints walked elbow-to-elbow in the crowded markets with gods and livestock. There didn’t seem to be any order in any of it, and yet, somehow, everything got done. Fields were planted and harvested. Levees were built or reinforced. Bright festivals were held. Fish were caught and brought to sale. Oh, the British strutted about admirably and said “Here, here!” and “What, what!” but they knew it was a show, and any man outside the range of their artillery was free to live exactly as his fellows had since before the time of Christ.

Despite my many years in her service, I would never come to know Madame Blavatsky well. I was after all but one part of a very large retinue. From time to time, however, she would quiz me about the “emanance,” and eventually my defenses crumbled before her potent wit. I told her I had known only one person who could rightly be called psychic, and that she had been wracked by strange and debilitating visions.

“By the heavens, woman!” my madame exclaimed, “I hope you wrote them down!”

I explained to her that Anya and I had been scullery maids, that we barely had enough to eat and there was no question of affording paper and ink.

“She’s haunting me,” I admitted one rare evening when the two of us were alone. A gentle breeze brought cooler air up to the garden where it mixed with the scent of jasmine and roses. “I left her son in a work house.”

Madame Helena chuckled and shook her head. “It’s not a haunting,” she explained in our native language. She held the bit of a hookah between her lips. “She is not a ghost. You cannot think of her experience of these events as you do your own.”

When I asked for clarification, she took several long drags from her water pipe.

“Imagine your life as a tapestry,” she said, “or a scroll rolled out before you. You would be able to see it all at once—as if it were a single coherent thing. When your friend expired, that is what she saw: your life, her life, the flow of time as a tapestry. These acts you experience as discrete events are for her instances of a single moment whereby she pushed from that tapestry all the threats in it—at once. Not one at a time with years between. For her, it is a single psychic rebellion accompanying the moment of her death. You, trapped here in time, are forced to see each appearance singly. I regret that we have not been able to make contact. At each of these moments we experience, she is just ascending to a higher existence. She would have much to teach.”

I marked my one-hundredth birthday meditating cross-legged on the bank of the Adyar River. I wore shoes of fragrant sandalwood and a beautiful red-patterned sari with a gold necklace. My hair, having not long to regrow, was then very short, a style I have been partial to ever since, even when it was neither stylish nor convenient. By most measures, a century of life made me a very old woman. But I felt young there. It wasn’t just that everything was new, or new to me. It was that all those things that were new to me were so very, very old—timeless, even. It made me feel like a little thing, a young thing after all, and if in my tiny century I had become heavy with misfortune, I shed it like a snake skin somewhere between the river and the elephant grass.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky died in 1891 from a mixture of poor health and acute influenza. At her funeral, I was given a parcel. Inside was some cash, a letter addressed to me, and the loosely bound pages of a manuscript, which I was to smuggle to America.

Do not read it, she warned in her letter, or you will be complicit in my heresy.

I didn’t then. Not for many days, in fact, when I was locked in my cabin, steaming my way to America.

During her life, Madame Helena claimed publicly to have contact, by means of astral projection, with an ancient and arcane order whom she called The Masters. She described them as Indian swamis and said they had been manipulating the course of human events for centuries from their fortress deep in the mountains of Tibet. All of that is a matter of historical record. And yet, it was not entirely true.

Since The Masters did not allow anyone to speak openly of their existence, she had hoped that by altering certain facts and circumstances, she might escape reprobation. It was also, I suppose, another example of how she was ever willing to knead the basic facts of the world to better suit her ends, especially where that deception made others more susceptible to some higher truth she wanted them to see. Her invented Masters better fit the common preconception of what such a mystical order might look like, with robed ascetics chanting over incense in some mystical mountain monastery. Like many eccentrics, Madame Blavatsky’s profound insights into the universe were matched by an almost perplexing naivete about the people in it. The fact that one of The Masters was in fact Indian meant that even her altered version was too close for their comfort, and as the Theosophical Society grew in popularity, she was warned, repeatedly, to refrain from speaking of the High Arcane. In typical Blavatsky fashion, she laughed off the threats, only to suffer character assassination at the hands of the Psychical Research Society, which issued its infamous report denouncing her as a fraud, and she was forced to retire from the very organization she had founded.

In her unpublished chapters, Madame Helena argued, with her critics, that we can discern the nature of the deep universe from the basic facts in evidence: that the earth spends half of each day in light and half in darkness and that correspondingly there is both suffering and joy in the world. In such conditions, it was impossible for pre-modern thinkers to conceive of the world as existing anywhere but on the border between great warring realms—stuck, as it were, in the middle. For the Norse, Earth was Midgard, the middle realm, just as China considers herself the Middle Kingdom, with heaven above and darkness below. So, too, in Christianity and Islam, where we inhabit neither Hell nor Paradise but some space between.

Madame Blavatsky asked how anyone could possibly believe this. It was perhaps forgivable, she said, when we considered the earth a bowl or plate covered in a shroud of fixed stars—a canopy through which holes had been poked so as to let the divine light peek through and remind us even here of the glory of God. Once it was clear that was not the case, that each of those tiny twinkling lights in the sky was not a pinprick but its own distant sun, our ancient conception of ourselves as the center of things was never updated. It was, like that old canopy, fixed in place. Belief in the middle, she suggested, was psychologically pleasing rather than true. It suggested that everything was in some way about us, that we were yet the axle of the universe—albeit symbolically rather than literally—that the earth was the field of sport upon which every gaze in the universe was transfixed, and that our choices alone would decide the fate of the cosmic battle between light and darkness.

Hardly, she said. The night sky was not a shroud but something closer to an infinite well—cold, barren, and immeasurably vast. We didn’t seem to be in the middle of things at all. We seemed quite far flung in fact. That our planet was tilted and turned every day between light and dark certainly suggested a struggle, a supposition supported by the common occurrences of suffering and joy. And it was also true that the earth seemed to be neither heaven nor hell, as the old religions had correctly assumed. But, she asked, if our planet was the focus of the conflict, if we were the front of the war, why could we not see the forces of light? Why was there only darkness, darkness, darkness on all sides? An endless quantity of it, in fact. Our planet was swimming in an ocean of the stuff, as was the galaxy itself. Here on earth, evidence of malice was patent and universal, while evidence of grace was scant and indirect. What of it existed seemed only to come by our hand. If the divine were acting on earth, it could only be very weakly, as if at a great distance.

But the crown jewel of her argument was what she called “the state of immanent corruption,” whereby the whole of life, as the gurus in India had taught her, survived only by consuming other life. Anything that remained motionless, that took no act, inevitably succumbed to rot, and this applied even to the mountains and the rivers. All things not only suffered, they degraded. Where, then, was the influence of the light, of the incorruptible and unchanging divine whose power flowed from itself and from no other thing? Everywhere on earth there were agents of evil. One tripped over them outside every door. Yet, how rare was the saint? How rarer still were his qualities: knowledge, love, courage, wisdom, and compassion?

The truth, Madame Blavatsky argued, was obvious. We were not the middle kingdom. Earth was not the center of the universe, nor was our universe the center of all universes. Ours was patently a realm of corruption, a realm of the dark powers as other universes were realms of light. Adrift in some distant corner, we had cast off our shackles in a great conflagration, just as the ancient texts had taught us, but we had not been strong enough to embrace the divine, which is why things stood as they did, where the earth spins equally between light and dark. Our planet is not the focus of the fighting. It is an enclave of resistance well behind enemy lines.

If this doesn’t seem heretical to you, it is only because science would eventually come to vindicate it, at least in its significant facts. My lady’s views on “immanent corruption” presaged the laws of thermodynamics, which were just then being formulated. She also suggested that the distant dots of light in the sky were, like our sun, symbolic of individual acts of rebellion and that the true nature of a dark universe must be cold, bleak, and unradiant. And in as much as our cold, dark universe had been created—forged was the word she used—by the lords of night as a font of suffering from which they could power their armies, that suggested, first, that suffering should be plentiful and grace scant, and second, that such a place would have a violent beginning: a big bang. This latter observation is especially noteworthy since it contradicted the prevailing scientific view of the time that the night sky was a reflection of the divine creator: glorious, eternal, infinite, and unchanging.

And that was the danger. For if people knew—if they really knew—that our dismal planet was adrift among the dark, literally and figuratively, they might realistically lose hope. More than that, they might come to question The Masters’ grand enterprise. And that could not be tolerated.

Madame Helena bade me give her manuscript to a young goblin, Anson Gruel, who had recently taken proprietorship of The Barrows in New York City, where my lady had lived for a time. It was her hope that by surrendering it, I might negotiate clemency on the remainder of my sentence, and that by keeping it in trust with Anson, who was as greedy with books as most goblins were with money, it might avoid the flames.

One of those, at least, had come to pass. I shut the loose-bound pages and held them to my chest. I found the guard at the door of the library and asked him to bring a message to Master Yeĉg. I told Beltran I would not contest the council’s decision, I would forgo my right to trial, if Etude was allowed pen and paper so that he could at least leave some mark of himself for posterity, as Madame Helena had.

After the library, the castle garden was my second refuge. It was much smaller in scale but no less magnificent. On clear days, I sat and read on the mezzanine. If it rained, I walked the arched-and-columned promenade that encircled a gaming floor, which could only be entered through a pair of curved staircases made from the living branches of a tree. Over many years, its arms had been clipped and bent until they formed steps and a twisted railing, still very much alive. One descended in a tunnel of leaves to a floor of irregular beveled stones. Thick growth hung from the promenade, sprouting like festoons from niches in the high walls above. Flowers and shrubs and ivy and bright blooming azaleas burst from every surface and butterflies and bees flitted tirelessly between.

As it circumscribed the gaming floor, the high promenade cut a figure 8, also the sign of infinity. Below the north loop was a small stone court across which a net could be stretched. Below the south loop was a small lawn for bowling or croquet. Between them, at the center, the paving stones were square and of equal size, and moss grew on every second one such that you could play chess or checkers on a board four meters on a side—half of it made by man, half by Nature.

Etude had written to me. Or rather, he had written to the world and addressed it to me. It seemed my plea had been granted. It had been weeks since our capture, and I was delighted to hear from him, and to know that wherever he was in that place, it was not far away. He had filled a stack of pages. By the fevered writing, it was apparent he was producing as fast as his supply of paper allowed. There were gaps, which suggested some pages had been removed. What remained were instructions for spells—ideas that had come to him either prior to his incarceration or during it, when he had ample time to think. The first was a recipe of resurrection. That’s what he called it. There was so much mixing and baking, he said, that it seemed more like a recipe than a spell. He lamented that it wasn’t generally applicable but applied only to spontaneous pairs, who were known to share a soul. If one were still living, he surmised, it would be possible to bring the other back from the dead—not a spirit-raising, akin to necromancy, but a genuine reconstitution of body and life.

That alone was a career-making discovery, and if he had written it as his final thesis at the academy, it would’ve not only earned him a doctor magicus arcanae but immediate notoriety as well. But it was not alone. He had written an entire “recipe book.” There were instructions for turning the binding on a demon (or other spirit) into a kind of leash, allowing the holder to let the entity loose in the world without breaking its confinement. He explained how dreamcatchers could be used as traps and how food could be prepared to give the same effects as potions. He designed an impregnable sanctum, a magical fortress that no known magic could pierce, with its axis a living tree. But it was the last entry that was the most fantastical. It was also incomplete. He had in his solitude been turning his mind to the problem of the missing saints and of how the book might possibly be destroyed without one.

Where a thing does or can not exist, he began, it can only be conjured.

What followed were notes and speculations on how one might conjure a saint. I admit I did not follow it, especially what he called the distillation of virtue. Nor, it seemed, did the censors. They struck a few phrases here and there as if to demonstrate their power over the document, but other than that, it was largely untouched. The only part of it I remember with any clarity is the pentacle he had sketched, around which were the five attributes.

It rained often in those days. I thought nothing of it at the time, but in hindsight, it was the surest sign that Etude, buried in the depths of that place, was brooding as deeply as me—a shaman’s first dance calls the rain. I wrote to him immediately. Three days later, more pages appeared—fifty-seven, front and back. I replied before reading much of it, although I admitted that and said it was more important that we address the pending trial, whose date had been set for the following week. I asked if anyone had reviewed the charges with him and offered to act as his legal counsel.

His reply was brief, which is to say one line: How do we dispel the feast of shadows?

My answer was considerably longer. It included summaries of several relevant matters of arcane law as well as a detailed account of the procedure of the trial, both of which I had uncovered in the library.

In his reply, he answered his own question. It was an illusion.

But this illusion is not a mist you can pass through. Truly, it is real. Completely real, with all the qualities of reality. It pinches the world as surely as objects of mass and energy—but only as long as men believe in it. The feast of shadows is that to which the world is now fully engaged: a great banquet where everyone chatters to each other and gorges on illusions—on things that are not real but seem so, on money and fame and rectitude—which is how they can feast and feast and feast and never be filled. That is the point of it, that we should never stop feasting, nor that we should come to see our plates are empty.

And on and on to the end.

One dispels a shadow, he said, by turning on the light.

And that was it.

I collected his writings and gave them to the chief librarian, who was blind and therefore allowed to handle forbidden arcana. For many days thereafter, I tried to compose a defense for my friend, often working in the promenade above the garden, where a man appeared one day strolling about. I took note of him with some annoyance. For weeks, I had been alone in the garden and had come to see it as my own personal refuge. It was the only place where I was allowed to stand under the sky.

“You’ve changed your glammer,” I told the interloper as he wandered by.

“Excuse me?”

I did not raise my eyes from the notes I was taking. “You’re still slouching, Mr. Morgan.”

He smiled.

“Come to check on me?” I asked. “Or are you simply worried I might’ve worked out the truth.”

“What truth is that?”

“That you’re a warlock, of course.”

He paused, but not out of fear or surprise. He seemed relieved, in fact.

“I thought we could have one last chat,” he said, strolling casually about, “before your trial. I don’t think we’ll get the chance after.”

Since it seemed my work for the day was done, I began packing my books and papers.

“How did you figure it out?” he asked as he strolled down the steps to the stone court.

“I admit, it took some time.”

“How?” he insisted.

“Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? I know why I wanted to blot my memories. But I didn’t know how. How had I come up with this plan? How did I even know of the forest? Beltran would never have mentioned it. He was trying to maintain the lie, to me as to the world, that the book had been destroyed. He would never reveal its resting place. And then it occurred to me. There was a report.”

“Report?” he asked.

“It was on Beltran’s desk. I had been summoned, supposedly to handle matters of our separation. I was indignant, especially at having to wait. I was shown to his office where I was left alone for some time. On his desk were a stack of files and papers. At the very top, in clear view, was a report on a series of experiments conducted by the Winter Bureau on the effects of the forest on human memory. When one of Beltran’s male underlings appeared sometime later to retrieve the files, I thought it was to correct the mistake of leaving them there. But it wasn’t a mistake, was it?

“When Beltran finally showed up, he claimed not to have summoned me. I was furious. So much had transpired between us by then that I never once had the thought he might be telling the truth. In my defense, I never would’ve assumed, not in a thousand years, that anyone in the Bureau had been compromised.”

Mr. Morgan, in his glammer, was beaming. “Well, we had to set you on the path somehow. I hope you aren’t offended. You must realize I have nothing but the utmost respect.”

“So it’s to be flattery, then?” I made a face. “Fair enough. I’m old enough to admit it would’ve worked at one time.”

I joined him on the mossy chessboard, where he strolled in thought.

“Does anyone else know?” I asked.

“I think Baba is beginning to suspect. The rest of them are too busy trying to outbid each other to care about mere mortals like me. Makes it easy. It’s somewhat your fault, you know, if we’re speaking candidly.”

“Mine?”

He nodded. “Before you, it was just assumed there would be no way to infiltrate each other’s camps, that it would be impossible to preserve the lie in the face of defensive magicks. Then you came along and proved us all wrong, proved it could be done—if one were sufficiently motivated. The things you did to convince my masters that you were who you said you were . . .” He shook his head. “Do you still want to know?”

I clenched my jaw.

“Do you want to know if you slaughtered babes and ate of their flesh, or tortured your captured colleagues—men with families?”

“No,” I said flatly. “I do not.”

“Then as proof of respect, I will not burden you. Indeed, I thank you. For blazing a trail. I studied you, did you know that? Your missions. The debriefings and case notes are all in the archive. You made it seem so effortless. Being someone else. But then, you’ve had several lifetimes to practice. I didn’t have the benefit of immortality. I had to learn quickly, and the hard way. But I am your shadow, you see. Your dark reflection. What you sacrificed everything to steal, I have stolen in turn. Where ultimately you failed, I have succeeded.”

“And what are you going to do with a book you can’t read?” I asked.

“We deciphered it once. We can do it again. Even if it takes 20 years. It sings to us, you know.”

“And then? Another war?”

“Oh, lords no. Why would we ever give the world such an obvious target? I have great respect for my fathers, but their naivete was astounding. Still, I can’t blame them for trying.”

“What’s it to be then? Famine? Pestilence?”

“Let’s just say no one will see it coming. Or rather they will, but they’ll blame it on everyone but themselves. But truly, I must apologize. I didn’t come to talk about myself, and yet here I am rambling away.”

“Why did you come?”

“To talk about you. Are you really going to end like this? Is this truly your final move? To sacrifice your king? After such magnificent play? Your young friend, you know, has so much less to lose. He can only suffer for so long. You, on the other hand . . . You can suffer forever. What do you hope to gain?”

“Gain? Why must there be something to gain?”

“Does that mean you’re going to go through with it, then? This fiction you’ve invented. The noble old woman, or whatever you’re pretending to be. Do you even know anymore? How many have there been? The fallen aristocrat. The secretive governess. The devoted auntie. The carnal thief. The penitent acolyte. The long-suffering prisoner. The intractable spy. The enduring wife. Or have you gotten so good at being other people that you just keep making it up as you go along?”

“We all make it up as we go along,” I said.

He sat down on a stone bench opposite from me. He seemed tired then. But not a sad tired. More like the elated exhaustion after a successful marathon. If my description of him seems lax, it is because of his many glammers. Even now, if you showed me a picture of him, I doubt I would recognize it.

“And you, Mr. Morgan, who are you?”

“Me? Oh, I am much less complicated. I am what you see when you look up at the night sky.”

“Darkness?”

“People, you know, they’re so used to life on earth that they don’t realize there are realms without corruption, realms where dust doesn’t gather, where people don’t need to sleep, where animals don’t have to kill each other to survive because everything doesn’t just wind down on its own, so you don’t need to keep consuming others to forestall your own disintegration. The old gods are cosmic beings, interdimensional warlords you might say, and this is their realm. They created it. They rammed two branes together and BANG, made our universe, made it to empower them, like a reactor—a universe of darkness and entropy, a place from which to siphon and feed and grow strong. That’s where it all goes, our life and vitality, our malice and envy, our violence and cruelty. We feed them. Everything you do, every effort you expend, ultimately benefits me.

“People think they’re free because they feel no chains, see no walls. But entropy is the whip that lashes us forward. Consume or perish! When beings must struggle against one another to survive, conflict is inevitable, and there can be only two kinds: predator and prey. Those who do not endeavor to be the one end up the other.

“But there are other places, places where the beings are more like you than me. Your cells are imbued with the white curse. They don’t degrade. They don’t wind down slowly to death. They’re constantly rejuvenated. Such things are against the laws of our universe, but not other universes. But, those ‘higher’ beings . . .” He raised a finger. “They don’t share, do they? They keep that to themselves.

“The secret truth of the world is that we’re all in bondage. All of us. Inside this feral prison, we only have what we can take from others. My people know this. They have always known this. It is the Truth.”

He sat back as if he’d made a move on the mossy board between us.

“My colleagues used to think you were all the same,” I said, “that the only good warlock was a dead one. But it’s not true. You’re not the same. Some of you are cowards. Still, if there’s one thing that unites you, it’s your insufferable sense of entitlement. You think that if you take something, therefore you were deserved of it, because if not, someone would’ve stopped you—or taken it themselves—and that those without a pile of takings are simply weak or timid and equally deserving of their lot as you are of yours. You accuse the divine of being selfish, of not sharing, but the fact is, the Others keep nothing from us. They take nothing. What they have, anyone can have. It’s free to all. The Truth, as you call it, is that you’re nothing but thieves. And petty ones at that. You deny an eternal fortune in favor of earthly trinkets.

“You know what else I see when I look up at the night sky? Not just darkness. Millions upon millions of lights—lights that weren’t there when this place was made. And with each passing eon, with the birth of each new star, this place, this ‘well of power’ gets a little weaker, doesn’t it? Your gods are losing, Mr. Morgan. Madame Helena taught me that. You’re just too stupid to see it.”

He smirked at me. “It’s too bad you won’t be around to prove it. We have to keep up appearances, of course, and act like the book is truly missing. There has to be a trial. Someone has to be blamed. Master Yeĉg could pardon you, of course—but only if he resigns.”

As with departing American presidents, any Master laying down his mantle in good stead had the right to pardon as many people as he saw fit.

“Leaving you to take his place,” I said.

“The youngest member of the High Arcane in its entire 700-year history. Thanks to you. Of course, if he elects instead to keep his post, you will be found guilty. And I happen to know of a little glass vial down in one of the lower vaults. Sealed inside under wax is the saliva of Der Erste Vampyre. Still quite potent, I’m told. All someone would have to do is inject a little in your blood. You’ll spend an eternity writhing in a cell in Everthorn.

“You could, I suppose, hold out hope that someone will repeat Dr. Hunter’s trick. Being the dutiful scholar, he of course wrote it down. Alas, the manuscript in which he recorded his discovery seems to have disappeared from the library . . .”

He pretended to be shocked.

“And as for your little friend,” he went on. “He’s really quite extraordinary, isn’t he? My colleagues wanted to be rid of him as soon as we found him. Too dangerous, you see. But I had an idea. I thought perhaps he could do what we could not. And look. He penetrated the impenetrable. I’m not sure there’s another person in the world who could’ve done it, if I’m honest. That’s the thing about youth. So eager. They don’t always stop to think things through, do they? Or take adequate precautions—say, against being watched. They think they’re invincible. But then . . .” He looked down at my hands. “He nearly was. I wasn’t sure how we were going to kill him with those on his hands, but now . . . I suppose I should thank you for that, too.

“There’s a secret room in Everthorn. Did you know that? It was built during the war. The coal larder and the boiler weren’t of much use anymore. Your friend will be taken there. If you see him, tell him I’m going to enjoy crushing his teeth in his jaws and flaying his skin and pulling his nails from his fingers—not because I enjoy such things. To be honest, I’ve gotten bored with them. No, I’m going to enjoy it because I’ll be doing all of that while the High Arcane watch, while they repeat a question he cannot answer: ‘Where is the book? Where is the book?’ I’m going to do all of those despicable, awful things by their very authority, in their house, poisoning it from the roots. And to me, the irony of that . . . Well, there’s nothing sweeter.”

He nodded to my marked hands. “Enjoy your book.”

The door was stopped halfway and pushed back and one of the monsters forced us back. More ceiling fell on the other side. The entire prison had collapsed. I heard another great crash, this one much closer, as I stumbled backward and fell to my butt. The doctor swung his staff at the invader, which we could only see in flashes. But it hurt my eyes, and the more I tried to concentrate, the more confused I became. I gripped my forehead. Through the fog, an alarm: there were more behind it waiting to come through. We needed to seal the door. There was a large rock on the floor next to me—heavy, but able to be gripped in one hand. It rested inside a chalk circle, as if someone had meant for it to be exactly there. I grabbed it and launched myself forward as the beast attacked my friends. Cerise had found a shovel leaning against a wall—also marked in chalk—and she hammered the monster with it, over and over, trying to force it back. Her face was contorted in anger.

“Mother-fucker!” she screamed.

The creature turned hard and knocked Cerise to her back. The shovel clattered free. She had momentarily rebuffed it by kicking her feet, but it was about to tear her open even as another tried to force its way through.

There was a blast from behind. The creature squealed like a bat and threw up its arms. A short, round woman with brown skin and long dark hair was holding a shotgun almost as tall as she. I don’t think she could see the beast any clearer than we. But at that range, she didn’t need to. She pumped the stock and fired again. And again. And again. The buckshot hit the monster in the chest and threw up red-black blood. The doctor jammed it back with his staff as I shut the door, hefted the rock, and brought it down hard on the hind end of the key, which I had inserted into the lock. The brass snapped and the shard bounced away.

The door was permanently sealed.

The young woman with the shotgun, barefoot and wearing nothing but a T-shirt and poorly made jeans, just stared, eyes wide.

“Dios mío . . .” she breathed.

“What is that?” Cerise whispered. “Italian?”

“Spanish.” Doctor Alexander turned to me in query.

I shook my head. It was not a language I had learned.

He scowled. “¿Dónde esta . . . esta . . . estamas?”

“Estamos,” she corrected. “I speak some English.” Her voice was heavily accented. “I was there a little. As a girl.”

I think she meant the United States.

The doctor gently removed the empty shotgun from her hands. “Lucky you had this,” he said, mostly to himself.

“No luck . . .” she said, shaking her head. She didn’t take her eyes from the creature, which was now dead and visible to us all. “No luck.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Where are we?” Cerise asked, getting to her feet.

“Isla Natividad,” the young woman said. By the looks of her, she wasn’t much out of her teens—perhaps 21 or 22. “México.”

“Mexico?” Cerise asked, looking to me. “Were we supposed to go to Mexico?”

“I just turned until it opened,” I said.

I looked round at the building. The single main story appeared to be a tile-floored residence. It was surrounded outside and in the courtyard by an arched portico. Its prickly coating, like an albino cactus, was badly chipped and scuffed dark near the bottom, where I could see the hint of wood. A squat lighthouse rose no more than 30 feet from the roof. It didn’t need height. The entire structure had been built on a wide, curving bluff, the highest point in any direction. The ocean curved around us. We were on a bare, barely inhabited island. It seemed such an odd place for a magical door.

“Oh my God . . .”

I turned toward the ocean, which spread out to the horizon. I started walking.

“Where are you going?” Cerise called.

I practically ran down the dirt-and-scrub slope to the edge, where erosion took the rock-studded land steeply to the sea. Waves lapped a sandy red-gray shore. Beyond was the full expanse of the Pacific Ocean. I turned about for a way down.

“There has to be . . .”

I found it after several moments of pacing. There was a narrow foot path—a tan scuff in the red-brown dirt no more than ten centimeters wide—that cut sharply along the slope of the cliff. At its steeper points, stones had been laid like steps. I saw my destination as soon as I reached the sand. Half in the surf, water swirled around its base and drained back into the sea, only to be pushed forward again by the next wave—a mortared stone ruin, the last remnants of the Mexico City watchtower.

We were not in Mexico City. We were hundreds of miles away, in fact. The watchtower had been moved for safekeeping during the war for independence. I think they had meant to move it back, but after independence came new troubles. If I remembered correctly, the island in question was just off the coast of the Baja peninsula, but if you had asked me an hour before, I couldn’t have told you the name.

“Isla Natividad,” I said. The birth of the savior.

There was nothing left of the watchtower but a cluster of broken stone walls hanging onto each other like refugees in the water. As I got closer, I could see the central chamber on the far side, or what was left of it. The nearest wall was topped in a broken, three-quarter stone circle which was empty but which I guessed had once held stained glass of some magnificence. I walked across mounds of sand, which gave way underneath me. The water came in and my feet were doused. I smelled salt and seaweed as the sound of the swirling waves echoed off the block-stone walls. A mural had been carved into it in the opulent Mayan style, full of open mouths and crouching figures in elaborate headdresses. It was very different than the murals in New York and London, which were the only other towers I had seen. But the story it told was the same. Once the earth was covered in darkness. Then came a great battle, whence our planet was rocked and turned on its axis. And there it remains, waiting for us to pull ourselves up. Or to fall back down.

I heard a sound behind me and saw the young woman, our savior, on the beach.

“Do you know what this is?” I called, excited to be standing inside a piece of history. The Mexico City tower was the last to be used, back when the Spanish were in possession of the dagger.

She shook her head. She was clearly afraid of it and wouldn’t come near. But I was enchanted. I looked up at it again. Then I started back. The tide was on its twice-daily pilgrimage to the shore. Soon the entire base of the tower would be flooded.

“She want to see you,” the woman said. “She is very sick. Maybe now is better.”

“Who?”

“My grandmother.” She pointed up the bluff, but we couldn’t see the lighthouse from where we stood. “She is very old. Very sick. She want to see you.”

“Of course.”

The cliff took considerably more effort to ascend. I was winded when we reached the top and needed to catch my breath. But the view was spectacular. It was just then evening on the shores of the Pacific. The sun had yet to set.

“You said earlier that it wasn’t luck,” I panted. “What did you mean?”

“Abuelita said to keep the gun there. And the stone and the shovel. For when the demon came.”

“Abuelita?”

“It means grandmother. Really she is my grandmother’s sister. But everyone calls her Abuelita.”

Cerise and the doctor were waiting for me outside a dark room—a bedroom, it seemed, whose aquamarine walls were chipped and faded. An old woman wrapped tightly in knitted blankets sagged into a wrought-iron bed older than her. She beckoned us forward with an open hand. She was apparently unable to lift her head from the pillow. She had stout but withered shoulders, a large nose, and a square jaw, like a man’s, from which faint white hairs grew.

“My grandmother,” the young woman said. “Clara Maria Hipólita Yáñez.”

“Nice to meet you.” The doctor bowed slightly.

Cerise hesitantly did the same. She still had black blood splatter on her shirt.

The room was cramped. There was barely room for all of us to stand, and we shuffled. Next to the door was a chest of drawers. Behind me was a curio cabinet. A tiny black-and-white television with V-shaped aerial stood on a stool at the end of the bed. Framed photos were propped on every flat surface. A lifetime’s worth. There were even some on the blanket, as if they’d been recently admired. They were all of women. The few boys I saw seemed to be their children.

The old woman tried to speak, but she was too weak, so she just muttered a few words in Spanish and smiled at us as serenely as the saints on the shelf-altar above her, where three candles in painted glass burned. The three of us stood there in awkward silence. We shared no language, but there were smiles and gestures. The old woman brought shaking fingers to her mouth, as if to indicate food, and we declined. Then she pushed out a word.

“Rosalía.”

That seemed to be the young woman’s name. She pushed forward as politely as she could in the cramped space and stuck her ear right over her grand-aunt’s mouth. Whispers were exchanged at the end of which we were politely directed to the door, which Rosalía shut carefully behind her.

“She is very sick,” she said. “But she wants you to eat.”

People had come. A trio of old trucks were parked on the bare earth a good hundred meters from the lighthouse. They had carted some two dozen people from the village, many of which were still crammed into the back, including infants and children. Their elders sat on the hoods or bumpers or else stood and watched. I could see more walking up the dirt road that swooped down the bluff to the distant town, well over a kilometer away at the low shore.

Rosalía saw me looking. “They came to see,” she said.

“I suppose it’s big news, people coming from nowhere.”

“Not to see you,” she scolded me. “They came to see Abuelita. Because she said you would come. And because she is dying.”

The little crowd was as red and silent as their island, a beautiful but bleak scrub desert in the midst of a deep, sky-blue sea. The village below was an uneven cluster of a hundred or so dwellings made of stucco or simple concrete whose windows had no glass. There was one general store, no larger than a gas station convenience shop, and one restaurant. Most people fished or worked in the small fish processing plant near the dock, where all work was done by hand. Other than the seasonal surfers who came for the waves off the southeast shore, or the scientists who came to study the seabirds that nested among the cliffs, fishing was the tiny island’s only industry. The bright, white-walled lighthouse stood by itself above the rest.

“You are tired maybe and want to rest,” Rosalía said. “There is a bathroom through there. I will make some food.”

We were led around the corner to a long room that had no wall on the courtyard-facing side. I counted six metal bunks, all empty. At one end was an open-doored toilet with shower and two stalls. We each took turns. The water smelled of rust, but it was good to wipe the sweat and dirt of Everthorn off our hands and faces.

“I could sleep for ages,” Cerise said as she unrolled an ancient cloth mattress no more than one inch thick. “Why do you think they’re being so nice to us?”

“You stay here and rest,” I said. “I’ll find out.”

Rosalía was in the kitchen. The narrow pantry had no door. It was not well-stocked. And there didn’t seem to be a refrigerator. Our host was stirring a pot on an electric stove over which dried chiles had been hung. There was a single picture of St. Francis on the wall. I smelled fish and spices.

“Thank you,” I said. “Your hospitality is . . . well, it’s unexpected.”

Rosalía kept stirring. She didn’t even turn.

I stepped into the kitchen. “If we’re intruding, please just say. I know your grandmother is sick. If there’s a boat or something to the mainland, we’d be—”

“I should have believed her,” she said.

“Believed?” I sat at the four-seat kitchen table. When nothing more came, I told her that her English was very good.

“Thank you.” She glanced back and smiled ashamedly, as if just remembering her manners. “I don’t get to practice so much. But I watch American TV sometimes. We have a TV,” she said. She looked out the window over the sink to her left. From there, you could see the water. “We used to come here when I was young.” She motioned around the scrub land.

“Oh?”

“I didn’t like it. My mother took us. She said ‘Abuelita won’t leave the lighthouse, so we will go to her.’ I thought it was stupid. I wanted to go back to America, not use my vacation to play in the dirt.” She smiled ruefully at her younger self. “But Abuelita was right. All this time.” She turned to me. “You are here.”

“She said someone would come? Through the door?”

Rosalía looked out at the ocean again. The sun had disappeared over the horizon, which glowed with the last light of the day. There was very little light pollution there, which meant the night would be dark, as it used to be all across the world.

“My mother told me the story,” Rosalía said “She said Abuelita was not a very pretty girl. When she was young, one of the boys in the village asked to marry her. My grandmother told my mother that he was a very mean boy and no one liked him and he thought Abuelita would be the only girl to have sex with him. But she was very excited to be married. So were my great-grandparents. My great-grandfather had always wanted to be an artist, so to celebrate the news, he painted a . . .” She scowled and tried to think of the word. She traced a square in the air. “A cabinet for clothes.”

“Dresser,” I said.

“Yes. A dresser. They were very poor, so furniture was a nice wedding gift. It was an old furniture with many damages and he covered it with many colors, including the face of his daughter on the front. He was very proud and showed everyone from the back of his truck. My mother said many people made jokes and when the boy heard them and saw the painting of his bride, he changed his mind and left the village. I don’t know if that’s true, but I know Abuelita was very sad and ran away.”

“How old was she?”

Rosalía thought for a moment. “Maybe 15 or 16. This was in Coahuila. My grandparents were from there.”

“What happened?”

“My mother said Abuelita ran into the desert and found a big scorpion and tried to get it to sting her so she would die.”

“Did it?” I asked.

“She said so. But she did not die. My great-grandfather found her two days later. She was not awake. She was hot and sick. But my grandmother nursed her. When she woke, she . . .” Rosalía stopped. She turned to me. “This part is very silly. Old people sometimes believe silly things.”

I smiled.

“Something wonderful happened, didn’t it?”

She nodded. “Abuelita said the scorpion spoke to her. She said he was not a scorpion. He was Huehuecóyotl, the coyote, in disguise. He said he had angered the Moon with his tricks and was hiding in the rocks until morning. He told her that he would give her what she wanted, but since it was wrong to do suicide, she had to do one good thing first. And then death could take her. She said he stung her then, in the neck, but the doctors, they never found a mark.”

“They thought she was delirious.”

“Yes. But she believed it. She believed it very much. She told everybody who would listen about what Huehuecóyotl had showed her. My mother said the other kids thought she was saying lies to make herself seem special and not to be the ugly girl no one wanted. Life in the village was hard for Abuelita then. My grandmother married and my great-grandfather died and there was nothing for her, so she left. I’m not sure when she found this lighthouse. But I know they wouldn’t give her the job. The government didn’t give jobs to women in those days. She camped out on this land for many days. She cleaned fish and did small work in the town for money. The old man who lived here tried to chase her away, but she wouldn’t leave. My father said she was a prostitute also, but I don’t think so. My father never liked Abuelita. He thought she was strange.”

“But she got the job.”

“She had to work very hard. And it took a long time. My mother tells many stories about how she would not give up. She was the lighthouse keeper’s assistant first. Abuelita says she was just a housekeeper and cook. The old man convinced the Baja government that he needed her, and they paid a little money, but he kept it for himself. That is why she was allowed to stay. So he could get money. She did all the work and he did nothing but sit on the veranda and drink beer. When he finally died, times had changed and a woman could have a job. I only knew her then, when she was keeper of this lighthouse.”

“I noticed all the beds,” I said.

Rosalía nodded. “Many womans came. One time, when Abuelita worked for the old man, there was a girl in the town who was beaten very badly by her father. She had nowhere to go, so Abuelita let her hide in the storage room. When the old man of the lighthouse found her, he was very angry. ‘This girl cannot stay here,’ he yelled. ‘She cannot eat our food.’ But Abuelita was not afraid. She knew she would live to do her one good thing. Huehuecóyotl had told her—only then could death take her. So she pushed the old man and yelled back. My mother said she waved a broomstick. Always she was cleaning, so she had the broomstick. The old man was angry but he was too lazy to do anything. When the girl was better, Abuelita took money from the old man, money she had earned, and put the girl on a boat to Baja. Wherever she went, the girl told everyone about the fearless woman of the lighthouse.”

“And other women came,” I said.

Rosalía nodded. “Some to escape their men, who could not sneak onto this island without all the fishermen knowing. Some were pregnant or had small children. Abuelita was very strict to them. They had to pray to Mary. No drugs or alcohol. I got into big trouble one time because I brought beer.” She paused. “It was very stupid. It made Abuelita very mad.”

“But she forgave you.”

“She never stopped believing. All these years.” She shook her head. She sniffed and stirred the pot of fish stew.

“How long has she been here?”

“Almost sixty years. And she told everyone, ‘I have to stay. I have to be ready when the demon comes.’ When she got sick, she begged my mother to send me. ‘Someone has to watch the door,’ she said. Since I am the youngest, and I have no job and no family, I had to go. I think my mother always felt sorry for Abuelita—that she had no family.”

“But she did have a family,” I said. “I saw the pictures.”

Rosalía nodded again. She was still in shock, I could tell. Not just because three strangers and a monster had appeared from nowhere. Not just because her great-aunt had predicted it decades before. But because of what it meant for that old woman in the bed. Huehuecóyotl’s bargain was done.

“I should be with her,” she said suddenly. She turned to leave and dropped the wooden spoon she had been using.

“I’ll get it.” I jumped up.

Reddish broth had splattered, and I got a towel. I heard the young woman scamper across the gravel of the courtyard. I picked up the spoon and washed it. I turned the burner down to a simmer and covered the pot. There were vegetables to cut, and I cut them. Fresh tortillas were wrapped in a damp towel, and I put them under a pot lid. I thought about all the pictures in the bedroom, all the old woman’s grand-nieces—some by blood, some by faith. Huehuecóyotl the trickster, whose name means “old, old coyote,” had pulled another trick. A great many women were saved by the girl who tried to kill herself in the desert. If he had told the teenager that such a life waited, it wouldn’t have deterred her from her aim. So he burdened her with purpose. He told her she had to wait and do one good thing first. It was a lie. But it was the truth. And in doing one good thing, she did many.

Clara Maria Hipólita Yáñez, known to everyone on the island as Abuelita, died that very night, within hours of our arrival. We had eaten and were sleeping when I heard a car door slam shut. Men had come. The body was examined in private. Preparations were made. We felt guilty and out of place and made up for it as best we could by staying out of the way. No one could sleep, even though we were all tired. The doctor offered his help with the medical formalities, and Cerise and I walked along the bluff to watch the dawn rise over the peninsula to the east.

“I can’t believe it,” she said, kicking a rock over the edge. I had told her the dead woman’s story. “I can’t believe she spent her entire life waiting for us.”

“No, no. Not for us. She was waiting to play her role in the story of which we are all part. It didn’t much matter to her who came through that door, just that whoever it was desperately needed her help.”

“Her whole life, though. I mean . . .”

I nodded. “I suppose. But is it really all that different from what you did? You gave your life. You can’t tell me that you truly believed Etude could bring you back.”

She paused. “I guess not.”

“But you let yourself be sacrificed all the same. To stop evil. It’s not any different.”

“Yeah . . .” Cerise turned and looked west across the Pacific.

“We can’t stay here,” I said. “We have to assume the enemy saw what those things saw. They will know we didn’t die in Everthorn. They know we used a door. They may not know which one, but there are only so many near an ocean. The longer we stay here, the more we put these people’s lives in danger.”

“How long?” she asked.

“We should leave as soon as possible. Immediately.”

“We can’t leave before the funeral. Those women saved us. We can’t just bail.”

“Fine,” I said. “We pay our respects. But we leave first thing in the morning.”

“And go where?” she asked.

“Doctor?” I said, turning to look at him as he approached.

“They’re finishing up now.” He nodded back to the lighthouse.

“Cerise was just asking where we’re going.”

He stepped to the cliff and looked over. “Before Granny’s goons got to me, I was trying to find the location of the book.”

“How?” she asked him.

“Paper, basically. Everything leaves a trail. At first, it was a food service license. Which got me thinking. What do financial firms always have a lot of, but there’s always one at the top?”

Cerise and I looked at each other. We were stumped.

“Bookkeepers,” he said. “By law, the bookkeeper of any company has to make certain filings. His identity is a matter of public record.”

“Thank heaven for financial regulation,” I breathed.

“I was digging through shell companies. It’s a lot of paper. They know how to cover their tracks. But the book has to be somewhere. A building or a piece of land has taxes owed. If they have guards on it—”

“Those guys have to be paid,” Cerise said.

“Exactly. And the greedy bastards who employ them will want their tax write-off. Follow the money, right?”

“So where is it?”

“Well . . .” He sighed. “It’s tricky. I think I narrowed it down to three locations, if only by process of elimination: an island in the Azores, an abandoned uranium mine in Utah, and a warehouse district in British Columbia. All of them have unusual activity for what are, on paper at least, empty or nonproductive properties.”

“And you got all that from tax filings?” Cerise asked.

“No, actually. Most of the information about these entities is private. I tracked the warehouses through land sale records with the help of the local BC government. They’re quite nice up there.”

“So I hear.”

“A mine?” I asked.

My friends waited for an explanation.

“The medical examiner’s report suggested that Benjamin’s remains had been exposed to uranium. And the Handred Keep, the warlock’s living fortress, was built to hold and amplify the book—underground, away from the sun.”

The doctor scowled. “In his history, Massius Crane says the Keep was destroyed.”

“Killed is a better word. It was alive when they found it. It fought back. It bled.”

Cerise looked confused.

“The Masters inherited their fortress from the Knights Templar,” I explained, “and while they kept it perpetually shrouded in the Mediterranean, it at least had the fortune of remaining in one place. The Handred Keep moved. It didn’t rise from the earth like the Templar’s tower. It sunk into it, which is why it was always found in swamps and bog tundra, where it burrowed like a parasitic worm. Death always surrounded it. After sucking the life from a place, like juice, it would move on, leaving a pustulous sore in its wake, a great gangrenous wound that wept for decades.”

“You’d expect strict secrecy around the nuclear supply chain,” the doctor suggested. “No one would be the least bit surprised by redacted documents or high security. Wouldn’t raise any alarms.”

“Wait,” Cerise said. “Just wait. That’s just a guess, right? I mean, there’s no telling if the fortress is actually there. Or if the book is inside. Or am I missing something?”

“True.” I nodded. “And if we go and are wrong, we’ll have tipped our hand. They’ll move it again, and we’ll be lost. And out of time.”

We were all silent.

“So this is it,” Cerise said. “This is all we got?”

“Looks like it,” the doctor added, rubbing his beard.

“It’s not much,” I admitted.

“And how are we even gonna get there?” Cerise asked. “There’s a big, fat border between us and Utah.”

“Also true,” I said.

“I can get you across.”

We turned. Rosalía was a dozen yards away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was not trying to listen. I came to tell you food is ready.”

“What do you mean you can get us across?”

“There are people who will take you across the border,” she said. “I go sometimes. To bring money back from my uncle.”

“Is that safe?” the doctor asked.

“I don’t think we have a choice,” Cerise said.

“When are they going?” I asked.

“They are always going,” she said. “You pay the first people, who take you out of Baja. They pay the second people, who get you to the border. To the desert. But you need to keep money for the third people, who take you across. They will always ask for extra and if you don’t have it, they leave you behind.”

“Nice,” Cerise snorted.

“They are the dangerous ones.”

“Can we leave in the morning?” I asked.

“I can call,” she said.

We spent the day resting and preparing. When I stepped out of the shower, I saw Cerise using the old wall-mounted telephone. She hung up as soon as she saw me. I was furious, but she walked away. A priest came shortly after and said prayers. A simple plywood casket was brought from the back of a truck. People lined the dirt road to town. The whole island, it seemed. There was a line of torches and flashlights all the way from the lighthouse to the dock. A silent, motionless procession.

“I didn’t realize they loved her so much,” Rosalía said softly as we lit candles.

The open-topped casket was draped in flowers. A candle burned at each corner. The old woman looked peaceful, dressed in her finest. The priest led the way, reading from a Bible. He had been brought from a church on the mainland that morning and had stayed at the lighthouse the whole day as visitors came and went. He was followed by a pair of young boys, one carrying a plaster statue of Mary on a stick and the other swing-ing a chafing dish. Rosalía was Abuelita’s only family on the island, so she followed the casket. Cerise, the doctor, and I were given the next position of honor since we were the old woman’s guests, long foretold. The sun set, and as we passed each candle-bearer on the long road to the town, they turned and followed in a long train to the sea. It was beautiful.

The dirt field before the docks served as the town square. Tables had been set up and draped with colorful streamers. On top was a cornucopia of food. There was a maypole holding Christmas lights aloft and a kind of altar to the dead woman with flowers encircling a 30-year-old photo. At the top, a pair of antlers. Candles burned everywhere. A recording of mournful music played, although I could not see from where. It stopped once the crowd had gathered and the priest spoke and offered prayers. We bowed our heads when everyone bowed their heads. We knelt when they knelt. The moment the priest finished, a man at the back howled a raucous cheer, and the band appeared, three guitars and an accordion. The crowd broke, some for food, others for dancing, and in a moment, mourning for the old woman’s death turned into a celebration of her life.

I wandered the crowd. Being unable to communicate, I was limited to polite smiles and nods. But I wanted to see the faces. Wrinkled faces. Tired faces. Fat faces. Bored faces. Drunk faces. People, in all their serenity and wickedness. After a time, I spotted the doctor in the circle that bordered the dancers. He had a plate of food and was tapping his feet.

“I see you have foregone the staff tonight,” I said.

“And the robe,” he added. “Although I admit, I’m getting kinda partial to both. You should try the mole.” He pointed to his plate with a plastic fork. “It’s amazing.”

“I just might.”

I made my way toward the buffet, which seemed to be no less full than when it first appeared. I passed the old woman’s altar and bowed respectfully. I examined her sepia-hued photo. She was certainly comely, with a block jaw and big nose. Her unstyled hair poked out from a simple head covering. But there was the hint of a smile on her face, and deep serenity in her eyes. I was jealous. It was a beautiful commemorative, even the antlers, which, when I looked at them, were not antlers at all. They were the silver-white branch of a tree.

It took me fifteen minutes to find Rosalía and drag her to the altar.

I pointed. “Where did that come from?”

She was annoyed but seemed to understand the question was important. She turned to her neighbors and asked many questions in Spanish. Heads were shaken. Quizzed looks were given. It took another twenty minutes of passed messages before a boy of about twelve was summoned to our presence. He clearly though he was in trouble. His mother practically dragged him. He was asked where he found the branch, and he answered that he had dug it out of the sand about a kilometer from the ruin.

By then, Cerise and the doctor had come.

“This is it,” I told them excitedly. “This is why we’re here!”

The fishermen told us the tide would return soon and we’d have to take a boat around the point to reach the watchtower in time. None of them seemed eager to go. In fact, they seemed as afraid as Rosalía had been. It wasn’t a place any of them visited. They believed it was cursed and that it was bad luck even to mention it. I thought we’d have to haggle, perhaps even pledge some sum we couldn’t pay, but our arrival was viewed with some portent. We had appeared from nowhere, just as Abuelita said we would, and if we wanted to take the white branch to the ruin in the dark of night, then they would see it through, if only to honor the dead woman in whose memory we had gathered. A fisherman was found, a skinny man whose skin was weathered to wood from a long life at sea. His rowboat was moored to a jagged rock, which he clambered over barefoot as if it were upholstered in velvet.

The wind off the water was noisy and insistent, and together with the drone of the outboard engine, it marooned us with our thoughts. We traveled around the point to the stretch of red-gray beach just south of the ruin where we slowed and floated in dark. The only sign of water was the undulating reflection of stars and the tinkling of waves over pebbles. I heard the bottom of the boat scrape against rocky sand before I saw the beach, which hung in the dark like an inverse Milky Way. The doctor hopped out and held the bow. The tide was already coming. In my haste, I fell and was drenched. But I held the branch dry. Once on the shore, we tried lighting candles with matches, but the wind played tricks and we had to retire to the lee of the ruin. Still, the matches failed us. We were set to give up when we saw an orange glow in the night. The fisherman had lit a cigarette on the beach. He had a lighter.

Each of us turned the candles we had carried so that melted wax fell onto the branch at several points, making a nest into which the candles could be pressed. Once they were sturdily perched, I carried the branch—very carefully—through advancing knee-high water into the remnant of the old stone chamber, whose fell wall faced the beach, forcing the waves to curl in from the back. The tide spun about and pulled and pushed with the arrival and retreat of every surge.

“What’s supposed to happen?” the doctor asked when we had it aloft. The flickering light barely illuminated the carved mural.

“I don’t know,” I said.

He waited a moment before saying it. “The branch is broken. Maybe it doesn’t work anymore.”

“It has to,” I said.

We stood under the ruin for as long as we could. Two of the candles were snuffed by the breeze, which breached the broken ramparts around us, but the last few fluttered mightily on. When the water reached my chest, the doctor demanded we return, and I consented. We strode through the surf back to shore, where the wind finally snuffed the candles. My companions were unsure what we had accomplished, but I was elated. I felt as though I had leapt from a tower and landed unharmed. We had lit the watchtower.

We had signaled for help.

Etude and I were searched. Then we were separated. What they did with him, I couldn’t say. I was taken down the mountain and thence the river to the Black Sea, where my captors and I boarded a private yacht that sailed west toward Istanbul and the Mediterranean. I was put in a small bedroom where I marked the time on a brass clock affixed to the wall above the door, which was locked from without. There was a single porthole window, completely opaque except at the very center, which had been polished by the wind. After a day of continuous travel, the engine stopped and the boat dropped anchor. My door was unlocked and I was taken, unrestrained, to a rowboat lashed to the side of the steamer. Both Etude and Beltran were inside, along with a complement of armed guards. Etude sat in the middle. His hands were trapped behind his back by a steel brace that kept his bare palms facing away from each other. His marks were still on my hands. His mouth was covered by a solid metal muzzle affixed by a strap around his head, with only two small holes under his nostrils for breath. I could hear each rasping draw.

“Is that really necessary?” I asked Beltran as one of the younger guards helped me down.

“It is as much for his protection as ours,” he said gruffly.

Knowing well the futility of argument, especially in company, I sat down in silence next to my friend as the rowboat pushed away and the oarsmen took their places. Fog stretched around us in all directions, which could mean only one thing. We were rowed some three hundred meters through a field of boulders that protruded from the surface to a natural island tower made entirely of pale granite. It rose from the lapping water in a giant weathered crag, blunted and round from eons of wind and rain. A stone fortress grew from the top, where a seven-spired castle rested like a crown, as if the pale rocks from which it erupted was the withered, white-haired head of the mage-king Solomon himself. I couldn’t see the castle from the water. It was shrouded by fog. But I knew it well. I had been there before.

The base of the island, crusted in barnacles, was slightly narrower than the rest and worn smooth by the waves. An uneven triangular cave exposed the grotto that was the only ingress to the interior, known as the Keep of Solomon. The approach was magnificent. The pale rock rose before us like a throned god. Bits of greenery erupted in small tufts from the cracks. Seabirds made nests at every hold and circled continuously about amid gentle calls. The sounds of the birds and the waves bounced in echo as the oarsmen took us into the grotto’s archlike passage. Beyond was a cavern, begun by nature but enlarged by men. Much of the roof was built of the same fitted stone as the castle above. There was an L-shaped stone dock and a long ramp into the water with stone steps to one side, caked in ocean slime. At the back were a number of small craft, similar to ours but covered in taut canvases and lashed to metal piers. A solid brick ramp rose up from the dock to the back of the hall, where it passed under a large pointed arch with raised portcullis.

Past the portcullis, the ramp was open to the sky. It turned a sharp 90 degrees to the right, rising steeper to a level platform where it turned a sharp 90 degrees back to the left and climbed to the main gate, which was inside an open stone mouth, part of a giant carved face that filled half the height of the high defensive tower. Between the pair of portcullises in its throat was a set of heavy swinging doors, then open. We were led up the ramp and around the rock island through six more minor holds, each guarded by the open mouth of a different face until finally we reached the top. From the main courtyard, I could see the seven spires of the island keep rising high above. Each tower belonged to a different Master, with one slightly taller than the others. Snarling metal dragons leaned from the corners of the roofs. When it rained, they deposited the water via a snarl of ducts into cisterns, thus providing the Keep with its fresh water.

Inside, it was cold and drafty, as castles are. The hall to which I was taken seemed to have been decorated by Master Thrangely, the prodigious hunter. In addition to the various relics of his native Egypt, the walls were covered in the mounted heads of every kind of ibex and duiker and antelope and dik-dik and oryx and gazelle that could be found, arranged from smallest to largest. My room was spartan but generous, with more space than furniture. I had a bed and a chair and a washbasin which was refilled twice a day. There was a single window out of which I could see the Adriatic and parts of the Keep. I had ample room to pace, and a giant Persian rug on which to do it. I had the call of the birds and lap of the waves to put me soundly to sleep each night. But there was nothing to do. Although my door was not locked, the guard outside prevented me from leaving, and I received no visitors. My only distraction was the small origami dragon that rested on a perch under a dome of glass, like a cake cover. It would flutter its off-white wings when I came near. If I touched the glass, it would breath fire, and I could feel the heat. But if I lifted the glass, it fell as folded paper.

The entirety of my confinement was irredeemably tedious—not because of the boredom, but because it was unnecessary. I knew exactly what would happen. There was no mystery, and so no suspense. I wanted to open the door and scream “Oh, just get on with it!” but I knew they couldn’t. The austerity and solemnity with which they went about it all was half the point—to demonstrate severity. Not for the accused, of course. For everyone else. One sees the same slow pageant in any carriage of law or custom, whose relevant bits last minutes at best. The rest is a dance. The pomp and procession before a marriage is no different than that before a witch’s execution, or the enthronement of a new king. It lulls the participants into unity so that a new reality may be forged among them—a couple is joined, a man condemned, a sovereign raised—without it being questioned. If there is enough seriousness in the doing, then everyone assumes it must be right, for all the effort given, especially if the rituals in question are so old as to have lost all use and vitality, except as ostentation.

Every generation obliterates the past in this way and venerates one they erect in its place. As a being of the past—of many pasts—I have always felt stamped out by such hypocrisy. I could accept change. I’ve often longed for it. But when it comes, it is never imagined as such. If the peoples of the world knew, truly knew, that they had such an animating power, they might use it. Instead, rulers tell the ruled that it is not a change but rather the rediscovery of an old truths, lost in the past and resurrected in the present. I know it is a lie because I lived there.

People never study the past. They study the one thing none of us in the past ever had: the result of it, which is why the lessons of history are never learned. The past is a succession of presents. In each, we never know what will happen. Those who inhabit the present, when it is the present, can’t help but feel privileged. Of all the people who ever lived, they possess the longest view, which is why, at every present, even those hundreds or thousands of years ago, those in it believed that their myths were not myths at all but the best and final truth. By learning only what did happen, and not everything that didn’t, those in the present sculpt a Golem of falsehoods and live in terror of it, the terror of history. It’s as if, in memorizing the score of every contest in a sport, you pretend to know how to play.

In 1848, I was living in Hungary—or what was then Hungary. That was the year people across Europe finally imagined change. There were marches and demonstrations right across the continent, many of which broke into open revolution. It started in Sicily, but we didn’t know that at the time. It was the actions in France and Germany, more rumored than factual, that kindled us. News didn’t spread by wire. It had to be carried by hand or hoof. That year, it came in from everywhere. Nothing like it had happened before. Nothing like it has happened since. Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Germany, the Austrian Empire. The world seemed on the verge. How could it not be, when so many had risen in protest?

But it failed. All of it failed. We couldn’t believe it. I still can’t, if I think about it. It doesn’t seem possible. I suspect those in the Arab world felt much the same when their Spring turned immediately to winter.

In school, if you learn about 1848, you get a summary of what happened as if observed from space. You learn that tens of thousands of people died but not any of their names. Many more were beaten and exiled. Families were ripped apart—or destroyed utterly—each with a story. And for what? A handful of reforms in the Low Countries? The eventual abolition of serfdom in the lands ruled by the Hapsburgs? I can tell you we imagined quite a bit more. We were beaten and shot and bayoneted and trampled for it. And when we woke the next morning—those of us who did— and nothing had changed, we envied those who had died, for they had died in noble cause. They lost their lives, but we lost our hope.

I remember there was a massacre in the town where I sought refuge. We called it a massacre. Some men started arguing outside a pub. A fight broke out. No one knows why. It could’ve been between a loyalist and a revolutionary but it could’ve just as easily been about a woman, or cards. But there was so much agitation then that soldiers came. There were no police. Only the army. And soldiers can do two things only: shoot or not shoot. So they shot, and four men were killed. A successful keeping of the peace in the eyes of the governor.

The next day, anger having simmered all night—stoked by the fires of rumor—a crowd gathered. They were led by a man we called Montaigne. That wasn’t his real name, but back then everything French seemed sophisticated. Progressive. So we called him Montaigne and he led us like a serpent through the streets so that our numbers could swell. And they did. By the time we reached the hospital, we were hundreds or more. When I say hospital, I don’t mean a house of healing. It was a squat stone building that had once been a monastery. One didn’t go there to get well. One went there to die and not infect anyone else. The crowd called for the bodies of the dead men, for there was no morgue. After whatever bureaucratic necessities had been completed, the dead were carried down the street—in the open on a cloth stretcher—and buried in the graveyard, sometimes in nothing but their skin. But there weren’t any bodies at the hospital, we were told through a crack in the door, not from the massacre. They had already been given rights and interred. The governor’s men had seen to it.

It’s hard to describe what followed with any sense because it didn’t have any. There were shouts that it was a lie and the men’s bodies were being kept from us. Some people thought we should storm the hospital. Others didn’t even understand why we were there.

“What need do we have of bodies?” a grisly old man asked me.

Feeling his control of the crowd slip, Montaigne stood on an upturned cart and addressed us, but there was no electronic augmentation, and it was very hard to hear, especially over the confused chatter, and soon the competing calls resumed. If you believe the history books, these were calls for land reform, or the reinstatement of certain legal rights, or the abolition of aristocratic excess. Standing on the ground, you would’ve heard all of that and none of it. If there was a common theme, it was return—to times remembered fondly. In truth, those days weren’t very good either. Nor did they remember them. They remembered stories told by the elderly, who are perpetually dissatisfied with how things turned out. My old fellow was very put out that the crowd contained several foreigners, which is to say non-Magyars, myself included. For him, the tragedy was not that Hungary was ruled by an aristocracy. It was that so many of his governors and lords were Austrian—or even, by God, Romanian!—and that these foreigners could never be trusted to treat Magyars fairly. He wanted them out. He wanted Hungary for Hungarians, even though such a group, which was just then being invented, had never before existed.

Others in the crowd disagreed, for I heard their chants competing with the rest: an end to conscription, the return of a local pagan festival that had been abolished by the bishop, the eternal dream of fewer taxes—and yes, land reform. It was Montaigne and his men who argued for revolution. I remember his lieutenants circling the crowd like sharks as he spoke, calling out from different places to make it seem that violence was fomenting, or else to shush the dissenters so that the great man could speak. From what I heard his arguments were not entirely unpersuasive. The Hapsburgs, he pointed out, had ample opportunity for reform—centuries, even—and they had persistently failed. How many chances were we to give them before we “took our destiny into our own hands?”

The wording, I’m sure, was intentional. It left everyone free to imagine a different “we.”

But our Montaigne was only a mediocre orator, and a crowd is a slippery thing. We could feel him struggle to hold on. For their part, I’m sure the hospitalers were terrified. Nor could I blame them. In a panic, a body was brought out the front—an older man with a bald top and a stubble of a beard, dressed in simple breeches and a bearskin tunic. A farmer or herdsman. From his perch atop the cart, Montaigne pointed suddenly to the door, a gesture that nearly caused the bearers to drop the body. Men from the crowd rushed forward and grasped the cloth stretcher and hoisted it in the air and the crowd cheered, momentarily elated at their success but unsure what they had achieved.

By chance, the dead man’s wife was among us. Whether she had come out of the hospital or had joined us earlier, I couldn’t say, but she ran to the body of her husband and tried to pull him down. She was pleading with the men, who had broken into slogans and cheers, but I don’t think they heard her. In the jostle, they rebuffed her repeatedly as they carried the corpse of her husband into the street. The body had now become the locus of the crowd, its center of gravity, and everyone swirled in orbit, desperate to touch or merely glimpse the holy martyr who had died nobly for the cause. Montaigne’s followers pushed through the tangle of bodies and practically forced their leader’s hand onto the stretcher. It wasn’t necessary that he support its weight, merely that he be seen touching it. Slowly, the competing calls narrowed to a few and then blended into one.

As the undulating crowd crept down the street, I spotted the old woman on the ground near the upturned cart. The cart’s perplexed owner stared at it with a hand to his forehead, wondering how he was going to right it again, and so his livelihood. The elderly wife was scuffed but mostly unhurt. She just looked confused.

“What are they doing?” she asked me as I helped her to her feet. “My husband wasn’t a revolutionary. He dropped dead castrating a sheep!”

The crowd carried the body of the herdsman to the governor’s mansion, where in a series of short, rousing speeches, he was praised for his courage and sacrifice in the battle against tyranny. The timing was not an accident. The governor was then supping with some guests, dignitaries from another part of the empire, perhaps even the capital. It was because of their arrival, in fact, that the governor had given the army such unusual latitude to commit violence on behalf of peace. It was widely suspected that the purpose of the visit was to coordinate the empire’s response to the civil unrest then sweeping across the whole of Europe. But that was speculation. What we knew for sure was that the men and women inside that mansion were eating well. We knew it because we were the ones who had grown and delivered the feast. In the days preceding the dignitaries’ arrival, two sides of beef, several pigs, four casks of Tokay, and a mountain of fruits, breads, and cheeses had been brought to the mansion. The arrival of the crowd coincided with the consumption of the finer of those goods. We knew it, just as we knew we would be waiting for scraps to be thrown out the back at dawn the next day.

The governor’s response was swift, as if already contemplated. The second- and third-floor windows facing the square, all of which had been covered by heavy curtains, opened simultaneously, and long-barreled muskets jutted out. There was one brief moment of silence before they fired. Then there was only panic. Three were killed instantly. We knew because their still bodies never moved from in front of the gate. Several more, men and women both, had their shoulders shattered or heads cracked by the musket balls. As their friends dragged them bleeding through the panicked crowd, the muskets withdrew and the next set took their place. Another volley was loosed, to lesser effect. Among the victims was the dead herdsman, reborn a martyr and killed again. His hoisted body had been used as shield by Montaigne and his supporters, who huddled underneath as they scurried from the square. The corpse was later found in a stable, riddled with five holes, one each for Montaigne and his lieutenants, who survived and fled to another town, no doubt to repeat the pantomime again, this time armed with stories of their bravery in the face of massacre. I could never say they had caused the fight at the bar the day before, nor do I have any evidence of it. But it wouldn’t have surprised me.

No less than twelve people died, probably more, although there were only three corpses in the square. The rest fell to sepsis over the following days. The morning after, a handful of brave souls, rightly surmising that few of us would dare approach the governor’s mansion so soon, enjoyed the bounty of scraps from the feast, tossed as usual out the back. They ate like kings, they said. The townsfolk decided this was a kind of treason, and the men were beaten to death in their beds. The women were exiled. From there came a quick descent into lawlessness, and the revolution bloomed in full.

I’ve not known anyone to suggest it, but I think the most lasting effect of that year was the birth of communism. Marx and Engels wouldn’t publish their infamous book for another two decades, but that’s only when the idea reached maturity. It was born in the failures of 1848, and everything that happened because of it—the long catastrophe that was the 20th century—happened in a sense because a handful of old men chose to fight among themselves rather than share their bread. But it is very hard to know that, let alone recognize the same forces in our own present, in the view from space.

A knock came at my door.

“Come.”

It swung with a creak and Beltran stepped in. It was shut behind him by the guard in the hall. I was sitting at the window. I had dragged the only chair across the room. He looked at me for the longest time, half pleased, half angry, as if he wanted to enjoy a brief moment of calm before the fight we were clearly about to have.

He noticed the marks on my hands. Then he lifted his palm. Inside was the jewel, wrapped in its chain.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked, his wrinkled face heavy with age and responsibility.

“He called it a ‘jewel of many colors,’” I said.

Beltran harumphed.

“You know it?”

He let the chain fall and turned the cut stone over in his fingers. He peered into it as he moved one of his bracelets underneath. Whatever he saw must have satisfied him, because the corners of his mouth turned down in grudging appreciation.

“Made from the bezoar of the basilisk.” He handed it to me.

I took it and put it round my neck. “I thought bezoars were made of hair.”

“In mammals. The bezoars of fish and snakes are mineral and translucent. Where did he get it?”

“I’m sure you can add ‘trade in rare intestinal concretions’ to his long list of appalling crimes.”

“Your young friend had proved quite resourceful.” He paused. “I suppose I should thank you.”

“For?”

“Making me aware of the recent activities of the Winter Bureau.”

“Ah.” I nodded. “And was Mr. Morgan correct? Does he have the support of your colleagues?”

Beltran nodded gravely. “A few, it seems.”

“I assume, then, that you are busy plotting your revenge, which will be swift, ruthless, and terrible.”

He just looked at me, dour.

I looked away. “I see.” Apparently, it would not be that easy.

I could guess why. My involvement had left him at a disadvantage—which was of course the point. If he retaliated against those who moved against him, they would almost certainly move against me, which they now had legal right to do. He was then still deciding whether he could tolerate that, and if not, what choice he had.

He sighed heavily and walked to the window.

“I was stupid,” I said softly. “I have no defense. I can’t even say with certainty why I did it.”

He watched me. I could tell he was upset. But neither was he furious.

“I can guess,” he breathed.

“Something happened to me in the Handred Keep, didn’t it? Mr. Morgan thinks it was the book—that it did something to me, that looking on its pages corrupted me somehow. But I think he just wishes that were so. It wasn’t the book, was it? I mean, I couldn’t even read it.”

He shook his head slowly.

“And?” I asked.

“All anyone needs to know,” he said, “yourself included, is that you sacrificed everything to complete the mission.” He looked at the rug. “Even your soul.”

I hesitated. “What did I do?” I could feel my heartbeat in my chest.

I waited, but he didn’t explain. I felt my lip quiver. Beltran was protecting me still—from myself. From my past. If I hadn’t been able to handle it once, he was suggesting to me in silence, there was no reason to think I could handle it again.

He took a long breath and let it out. “The woman who came back from Siberia . . .” He shook his head. “She was not the same. You changed, Mila. You were so dynamic before. So strong. So wise. And I was jealous.”

“Jealous?”

“Of Dr. Hunter. Of the way you looked at him.”

I thought for a moment. “Did I know that?”

He nodded.

“We argued about it?”

He nodded again. “Quite frequently. At the beginning.”

My shoulders relaxed. “I loved you, silly.”

“I know,” he said. “I came to understand that. Eventually. Do you remember the children?” he asked, suddenly turning bright.

“Children?” For a moment I panicked and thought I had blotted the memory of my own offspring.

“Yes. Most of your peace in those days came at the orphanage,” he explained. “You were like a mother to them.”

I stood and looked at him squarely. “We were happy. Weren’t we?”

He nodded. “For a time.”

I could bring so little of it to mind. The forest had taken so much. “Do you remember our wedding?” I asked. “How ridiculous it all was?”

“Ridiculous?” He scowled. “What do you mean?”

“Darling, I wore a calico dress.”

“So?”

“And the friar had a cold. He kept sneezing on us.”

“Hm.” He raised his jaw. “I remember it as a day of great solemnity.”

“Of course you do.” I rose from the chair and stood next to him, close enough that our arms touched. “I did something horrible, didn’t I?” I whispered. “Tortured people or killed them or—”

“Stop.”

He waited to see if I would ask again. I wanted to. Desperately. He put his hand on my shoulder and I hugged him. I wasn’t sure how he would react. It was an imposition, I knew. I was the one who was causing trouble. I had no right to ask for consolation. But he accepted me as he always had. I felt his arms around me.

“Why do you want to know these things?” He sighed.

“Wouldn’t you?”

“No. I would leave them where they lie.”

“Well, I can’t. I feel so lost. Like I don’t know who I am anymore.”

He moved me back so he could look me in the eye. “Please don’t ask this of me.”

“Was it that bad?”

“Mila . . .” He stepped away. He sighed.

He walked to the dragon and leaned down to inspect it. My paper companion seemed much less interested in Beltran than me. It didn’t stop preening its folds.

“Master Okamoto,” he said.

“I know you’re only trying to protect me. Still . . . I wish you wouldn’t have lied.”

He was still.

“That was also for your own good,” he said.

“Was it?”

“I tried, Mila. I tried to destroy it. The bindings on it . . . They are ancient. It wouldn’t burn. It wouldn’t be shattered. We even brought in a laser from America. Never once could we get it to work.”

“You could’ve told me. You could’ve told me anything. Why didn’t you trust me?”

“Trust?” His face grew long and pale, like I’d just kicked him in the gut. “Trust . . .” He shook his head. “You don’t remember how things were, do you? My God, you have blotted it out . . .”

He seemed so defeated then. As if the world had finally won.

“After you got back . . .” He sighed. “You were so . . . fragile. Some days, the slightest frustration would send you to tears and I . . .” He stopped.

“You thought it had some hold on me.”

“Well, I didn’t know, did I?” He sagged.

He had hoped that if he destroyed the book, it would bring me back.

Then, his whole body stiffened. He stood straight, shoulders back. The sternness had returned. He wasn’t Beltran anymore. He was Master Yeĉg.

“So,” I said. “What happens now?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Now, your friend returns what he has stolen or else he—”

“Stolen?”

“Yes.”

“Beltran. Darling. It was already gone.”

“BAH!” He threw up a hand. “So someone else took it? Is that what you expect me to believe? That after remaining impenetrable for fifteen hundred years, the forest was broken twice in one week? Mila . . . Don’t insult—”

“I’m not insulting anything! I’m telling you, Beltran, he doesn’t have it. And neither do I.”

I didn’t remember our arguments, or what we did afterward to make up, but it seemed so practiced then. So natural.

“Why would he even want it?” I demanded.

“That part was a mystery,” he said. “I admit. But we have uncovered evidence that he intends to take his revenge on the civilized world for what happened to his people, and the ongoing destruction of the rain forest that is his home.”

“Let me guess. Mr. Morgan’s special agents found this ‘evidence’ when they searched the cafe.”

He scowled at the implication.

“He’s the enemy, darling. He has been the whole time. You’re no fool. Surely you have your doubts.”

“That’s what he says about you.”

“And whom do you believe?”

“Am I supposed to say you?” he barked. “You admitted under questioning to having read the accursed book. His accusations cannot be dismissed out of hand.”

“I’m not worried about his accusations. I’m talking about yours. What is it you believe? That I was misled? Tricked into being an accomplice by a boy one-tenth my age?”

He leaned forward. “Tell me, darling. Were you with him the entire time?”

“Of course I—” I stopped.

“Well?” he asked.

My jaw set. “He may have left for a time after our first encounter.”

“Ah-ha!” He raised a finger to the sky.

“Don’t patronize me, Beltran. He didn’t find the crypt before he made the jewel, and he didn’t make the jewel until after he got back. I will testify to that.”

“And what a witness you will make—a woman who’s blotted clean her own memory.” He glowered down at me. “You can’t remember our marriage, let alone last week! Mr. Morgan would have a harder time impeaching the testimony of a five-year-old!”

I stuck my jaw out. “Don’t call me a child.”

“Bah!”

“Bah!” I mocked. “Bah, bah, bah!”

I wasn’t even very mad at him then. I was mad at myself.

He strode to the door, then stopped. “Know this.” He jabbed a finger. “Your friend would face less peril if he had stolen launch codes from the Americans. This isn’t some stray amulet or ring of invisibility. The is the Necronomicon! It is a well of infinite darkness. You more than anyone else know what it took to end the war. Tell me. How will we win, should it rage again, with the weapons now available to them?” He motioned out the window. “Next time, they will blight the earth! I will find the book, Mila. Do you understand? One way or another. For your sake, for the sake of the world, I will find it. And nothing will stand in my way.” He paused. “Not even you.”

He knocked and the guard outside opened the door.

Despite that many of them were Freemasons, a secret society steeped in the occult, the Founding Fathers envisioned an unspoiled continent, freed of old encumbrances—not just taxes but the arcane and complex practices that had for centuries determined the fate of nations. They deliberately enacted their rebellion without first seeking the advice of The Masters, of whom the Freemasons were vassals. Since they hadn’t asked, neither had they been expressly refused. Thus, when against everyone’s expectations the American Revolution was successful, the question naturally arose: what was to be done?

But the High Arcane were not autocrats, even though they sometimes acted it. Except for the handful of matters where they took direct interest, their influence was intentionally oblique. They fancied themselves kingmakers rather than administrators and left the running of things to the men known to common history. As far as they were concerned, changes in government were inevitable, even healthy, and they neither desired nor sought formal ratifying power. At the same time, enterprises that threatened to upset the balance were always likely to bring their scrutiny, and so, if only from mere prudence, it was always better to seek their consultation in advance, where possible.

Here the Founders were shrewd. No sooner had fighting ceased than a secret delegation was dispatched. The Freemasons knew that The Masters had been pursuing their own enterprise for centuries, that they had been endeavoring to discover and seal the portals and doorways that dotted the earth, particularly at the intersection of its natural ley lines, whereby dark forces entered our plane. It had been understood since the discovery of the New World that the continents of North and South America would eventually need to brought under that enterprise, although given their size and antiquity, no one had yet contemplated how. Certain influential Americans vowed to see it to fruition in return for assurances that the new government of the colonies would be left to run its own affairs. The Masters agreed, the first such scheme to be formalized in writing. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was orchestrated expressly for this purpose, and Lewis and Clark, with the help of a native shamaness, made the first serious attempt to map the ley lines of North America.

Under the terms of the understanding, which kept the United States formally separate from The Masters’ regime—whence came the Freemason’s motto: “new world order”—the fledgling nation also couldn’t request support in matters arcane, which left America with a unique problem: how to police members of its growing magical community, many of whom had emigrated not to escape persecution, but justice. Catching them was difficult enough. Holding them proved almost impossible. A crisis was reached in 1804 when, after one such failed apprehension, the city of Detroit was burned to the ground. A secret meeting was called by then-President Jefferson and proposals were solicited for a final solution. It would be a full two years before a winner was selected and another three before the necessary funds were raised, for in typical American fashion, the structure to be built was unlike anything that had been attempted before. Not just a prison. A prison to end all prisons.

Rather than a tower, which stretched the energies necessary to defend it, the centerpiece of the winning proposal, submitted by architect Jeremiah Everly and magus Zachary Xavier Thorne, was a star fort, then a common method of military fortification. Originally designed to repel magical attack—by turning a castle into a giant binding hexagram—star forts were also effective against cannon shot. Everly and Thorne’s genius was to invert the hex, to turn the binding inward: to keep people in rather than keep them out.

A remote island was selected in the bayous of Louisiana, far removed from any magical influence, and in the spring of 1809, ground was finally broken. Construction was beset by delays, including the War of 1812, and took a further thirteen years. When the doors were finally opened in 1822, it was without ceremony, for by then, the project had taken the lives of three women and thirty-seven men, including the founders. Mr. Thorne died in a smelting accident. A casing exploded and plated the man from head to toe in sterling silver. Two years later, the brooding Mr. Everly succumbed to melancholia when bog water inexplicably flooded the foundation for the third time and he threw himself in. In honor of the men, the project once destined to be called Black Water Penal Colony was instead humbly ordained Everly-Thorne Penitentiary. But it was a hulking place, distant and dire, and none of the inmates ever called it that, nor too the guards and wardens who lived in the remote fort for months at a time. Forty years later, at the outset of the Civil War, when management of the facility was transferred to a private consortium under the direction of The Masters, its true name was officially recognized—Everthorn Prison.

It was the Civil War that ended the Founding Fathers’ dream of a continent free of the influence of old-world magic. From the beginning, the native shamans had resisted—sometimes violently—the sealing of the doors and portals through which they summoned their ancestors and healing spirits, and despite that the American ruling elite had no material interest in The Masters’ long-term enterprise, it chose to ally against the shamans out of expediency. Advisers close to President Andrew Jackson secured his approval to invite members of the High Arcane’s secret apparatus—agents and provocateurs—to help break the shamanic resistance in the West in return for certain additional concessions that kept a permanent magisterial presence on the continent. The bulk of the New World’s magic users had settled in the less industrial south, and after the outbreak of war, the Union found it had no adequate response to the Confederacy’s occult army. Lincoln’s government had no choice but to scrap the document of understanding and ask for aid, and slowly but surely over the next hundred years, The Masters asserted their influence over the whole of the Americas.

The first concession approved by President Lincoln was shared use of the remote star fort on a small island in the bayou, which, over the subsequent decades, became home to countless madmen, magicians, illusionists, warlocks, and witches from all over the world. The reason they came, some from as far as Tibet, was the same reason they never left. Everly and Thorne’s ingenious design included a pair of massive enchanted boundaries: The Rings True. The outer boundary, made of pure silver, was only seven centimeters thick but ran nearly three miles in circumference. Cast in one single piece—the largest casting in human history—it took four years to produce and required new smelting techniques and several dozen attempts before a single flawless ring was produced without joints or welds. The inner barrier, made predominantly of iron, was poured around a core of pure selenium, a metal previously known only to the alchemists.

To reach the hexagonal fort at the center, or to escape it, the Rings True had to be pivoted—down in the case of the outer ring, up in the case of the inner. To preserve a continuous barrier, only one ring was tilted at a time. The energy required to move the rings and their brick encasements had necessitated the construction of another novelty, a massive geared dynamo called the Prime Mover, which was half-buried between the two rings and thus protected from attack on both sides. The gear box for the Mover, the two-story volcanic obsidian hemisphere that encased the device, was bounded on the interior by a black salt moat such that no spirits could be sent to interfere with its workings and so facilitate an escape for anyone inside, making the prison a universe to itself, hermetically sealed. Indeed, from the air, it resembled a solar diagram, or perhaps the atomic structure of hydrogen, with a black moon between two rings, orbiting at a distance from a pale six-pointed sun.

The cost and complexity of the construction meant that nothing like it was ever attempted again. Nor was there was ever a need. In two hundred years of use, the inmates took control of the ward on three occasions, once for a period of 17 weeks, but not one ever escaped.

Cerise leaned forward to peer out the windshield. “How are we going to do this exactly?”

Nature had already begun to take over the prison-fortress, whose entry looked very different from the last time I had seen it, which was the time I walked out. At some point, someone had modernized the grounds, but now even that was rusted and fading. The imposing black stone walls were dotted in moss and dangling, cottonlike lichen. Small weeds grew from nooks and crannies. In the battle between swamp and prison, the swamp was winning.

I opened my door. “Just stick to the plan and everything will be fine.”

“Says the invisible woman who can’t die. Why can’t I be the one to wear the amulet?” She looked at it, draped over my shoulders.

“I told you. It would most likely drive you mad.”

“That’s convenient.”

“Besides,” I added,” you can see me when I wear it, not the other way around.”

“Also convenient.”

“What’s the first rule?” I asked.

“Don’t touch anything,” she said.

“What’s the second rule?”

“Don’t talk about Fight Club.”

The awning that covered the sidewalk was faded and torn and hung down in flaps. Dead leaves were scattered across the walkway. We had to force the doors, which ground noisily against the vinyl floor. The enormous portraits of Messrs. Everly and Thorne that once adorned the vestibule were missing. In their place was bare plaster, which had apparently been laid over the stone sometime in the 20th century. The whole interior looked completely different, in fact. I didn’t recognize any of it.

Light entered weakly from the dirt-stained windows, making it hard to see. Cerise tried a switch, but nothing happened—not so much from lack of power as a lack of bulbs. The fixtures were empty. Dust was everywhere, but that, as it turned out, was beneficial. It left a trail for us to follow. People had been coming and going, it seemed, and recently.

“The ward is this way.” I pointed.

According to several posted signs, the upper floors were condemned. I pulled one of the curled and yellowed notices down so I could read it. It was dated 2006.

“I suppose we should be grateful she hasn’t tried to trick us with a glammer,” I said.

The stonework was still visible on the stairs, which turned in a square to stop at a barred gate. Over it, carved into the stone of an overhang, were ornate letters dating from the Civil War. They said: Everthorn Prison. And underneath: RELINQUITE MUNDI—forsake ye the world.

“You were right,” Cerise whispered. “This place is totally creepy.”

“I’m right here. Stick to the plan and we’ll be out of here in no time.”

At the end of a windowless hall was a second gate of solid riveted metal. Its only opening was a slat window whose covering was slid to one side. It was unlocked.

As The Masters regime withered, the prison was eventually abandoned and the property put up for sale. By then, it was mostly empty. There simply weren’t many magic users left worthy of the trouble. The bog-filled island was so remote and inaccessible that a buyer was never found and the property reverted to the state. At some point, it was purchased at auction by a paper entity, a company with no real employees or infrastructure, whose sole purpose was to hold the prison in trust on behalf of its owner. As a contingency.

Some years later, when that contingency was needed, an inspection was falsified and a slip of paper was stamped by a bureaucrat in Baton Rouge who had never once seen the place and the prison’s license was renewed. At the same time, the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in Westchester, New York found itself suffering an unusual spate of bad luck. No one would admit it out loud, but the various misfortunes that befell guard and inmate alike seemed to have coincided with the arrival of a certain elderly inmate. Thus, when an extradition request appeared asking that the inmate in question be remanded to the State of Louisiana to face additional charges, the warden was only too happy to sign it.

And so it was that Livonia Tuesday, who insisted everyone call her Granny, became the sole inmate of Everthorn Prison, of which she was also sole owner.

Her voice echoed up from the wide circular well formed by the cell block. “Well, come on in. Don’t be shy.”

The ward was a vast open spiral. A stone-arched walkway turned seven times, passing every cell, before stopping at the base. Each full turn had four gates, one at each of the cardinal directions. All of them, it seemed, were either damaged or open. A heavy wire mesh had been bolted over the arched openings that faced the central well, probably to prevent anyone from jumping. That was new. In the old days, no one had cared if one of the inmates threw themselves over the edge.

In appearance, the ward resembled a panopticon, but it was not. The heavy mortared-stone architecture of the time precluded such an invention, which required both high, open spaces and good lighting. Everthorn had been built not only before the electric era, but before gas as well. For the first five decades of its existence, it had been lit only by fire, which was why the high dome roof had been inlaid with heavy glass tiles—to let in the sun. Many were now broken or missing. The same true of the cell doors, which had either fallen from their hinges or were dangling from them.

Cerise and I passed the sixth gate, and I glanced inside the adjacent cell, once the home of Prudence Plunkett, one of only five female inmates, myself included. Pru was undoubtedly the most beautiful, and she would brook no rivals. I remember when she arrived. Her hands and forearms were bandaged and remained so until she died of a fractured skull. Medical care being lax in the prison, her bandages were not changed often. They came loose when she strangled me. I could see the tips of her fingers, cracked and charred permanently black. Pru tried to set the prison on fire, but Everthorn could not be burned. It was waterlogged.

Water was a perpetual problem, in fact. I remember it sometimes seeped through gaps between the stones. Such gaps were swiftly repaired when the prison was active, but they had since been left to multiply. Each was marked by thick mats of moss. In Pru’s cell, I saw a few dainty wildflowers on the wall as well. The seepage dribbled down and gathered in puddles on the floor, where it ran in rivulets out of the cell and joined a narrow stream, like the runoff from a hose, that bounced down the spiral walkway to the fourth turn. There, it was deflected and fell over the end of one of the steel struts that stuck out from the well wall, so irrigating the lush, semi-wild garden that had grown over the bottom floor. The prison’s base had collapsed on one side, revealing part of the cistern underneath. Enough water had gathered over the years to fill the cistern to a height of five or six feet. I saw lily pads and several turtles resting on the fallen rocks of the floor, which made a kind of ramp to the water. Floating in the center of the gap was a large albino alligator.

“Do you see that?” Cerise whispered.

“It’s better if you don’t talk to me from now on. She is quite sensitive.”

Cerise made bug eyes at me in protest.

“Don’t worry. Just make the trade and we’ll be gone. There’s nothing in the world she wants more than that coin. She nearly killed for it already.”

“Define nearly.”

I made bug eyes back and she shut her mouth.

To one side of the pond was a bulbous tree topped in a few small tufts of razorlike leaves. As it had grown—like a tumor, it seemed—it had picked up detritus from its surroundings. A wrought iron plaque bearing the seal of the prison was embedded in it, as was a tattered umbrella and one of the heavy glass tiles from the dome. A human skull peered out from the cavity in which it was trapped. Next to it, the branches of a thorn bush erupted from a cracked and emaciated corpse wearing the torn remains of some kind of uniform. Not police. A utility worker, perhaps. Henbane grew from his open mouth.

“Remember not to touch anything,” I said.

We passed under the dribbling water, whose echoing splatters on stone below were the only sound, and I saw Abraham Dunvluddich’s cell. I must have drawn in breath, because Cerise turned nervously to me. It was still a sight, covered in layer upon layer of frantic scratches in the stone. Diagrams. Drawings. Descriptions. Formulae. One on top of the next as if the layer below had been completely unseen. It was quite different than I remembered, reminding me how faulty our memories can be. The version in my head was much cleaner, as if my rational mind had trouble hanging onto the depth of Abraham’s madness and had tidied up a bit. My memory also had the cell in the wrong place.

Of course, if Abraham’s was there, that meant mine was next. I forced myself not to look.

“Just keep moving,” I said. “We’re almost there.”

As we reached the end, Cerise stepped around the very last cell, whose interior was pitch black, as if every ray of light was eaten as soon as it crossed the bars.

Black Tom’s cell.

It hadn’t changed. According to the old-timers, Black Tom had been a pirate and the very first resident of the prison. It was supposedly his reign of terror on the Great Lakes and northeast coast, along with his repeated escapes from earlier methods of incarceration, that had necessitated the creation of Everthorn in the early 1800s. He’d been at Everthorn longer than anyone. But he was never seen. The guards never brought him food or emptied his pail of waste, which led some of us to speculate that he had become the very darkness we saw. Others said he was a wretched creature, a tortured soul, hiding in the dark, who knew only pain. Certainly, special precautions had been taken: a ring of silver had been poured into a groove that lined the arched opening. Once, when I was sick with cholera, I stumbled weakly as the line to breakfast passed Tom’s cell. I reached for the bars to steady myself and felt the air around my fingers turn cold and then freezing. Gravity seemed to pull me in, and I had to yank my arm away.

There was a splash on the floor of the prison, and I turned to see the alligator was gone. In its place, slowly standing upright on a mossy mound, was Granny, naked and dripping. She didn’t look well. She was thinner than I had ever seen her, and her hair was falling out. What little of it remained hung wet from her scalp like white twine. Her wrinkled skin was draped over her bones like a canvas bag. One of her arms was crooked and she had a pronounced shamble to her walk and reached immediately for a gnarled cane resting against a barrel. Someone had hurt her.

“Well, well, well,” she said as she hobbled naked across the moss carpet. The knotted cane wobbled with her hands. “Who do we have here?”

“I’d like to make a trade,” Cerise said nervously. “For this.”

She held up the coin. She didn’t dare move from the staircase that joined the walkway with the floor of the prison. The poison garden started at its base. My stories of Doctor Alexander’s encounter with Granny had apparently done the job. Unfortunately, my part of the plan required me to leave Cerise to her distraction.

“Stick to the plan,” I whispered. “And don’t let her touch you.”

An outer ring of squat columns held up the spiral of cells above. Between them, folding tables and chairs had been tossed into piles, along with some exercise equipment. All of it was old and decrepit. To the left, behind the tree, flooded spiral stairs descended to the cistern. To the right, the wide hall that once held the massive pump system brooded in vines and darkness. Since all of the cells were empty that was the last best place to look.

The ceiling of the hall had since been propped with iron girders—in the 1960s, by the looks of it. Three more archways at the back had been covered in drywall. I knew for a fact that one of them held a secret door and that the space beyond had once been a coal larder but that since it had been used to interrogate suspects during the war. The old mechanical vacuum pumps were gone, which pleased me. Like all the inmates of Everthorn, I had spent innumerable hours manning the levers. Up, down. Up, down. Up, down. The water of the bog was a constant threat, and time at the pumps was mandatory in the rainy season—year-round if the guards didn’t like you. In place of the pumps was a row of dilapidated mid-20th century machinery, like something you might find in a factory or printing house. I think they were used to make license plates, which was especially ironic. I’m sure some well-intended bureaucrat meant to give the inmates an occupation, something productive to pass the time. Tethering magic users to machines was like asking the farmer to pull the ox.

The boiler that powered the old pumps was also gone, but not the banded metal cage that held it. The concrete of the foundation had been poured around its legs, making it immovable. Cast with outward-facing spikes, it was meant to keep the prisoners from breaking the expensive machine. More than one boilermaker had survived a riot by barricading himself inside. The boiler itself had been built by hand, as machines were in those days, and stood on metal claws. The opening of the furnace had snarled like an open mouth, and there were rumors it was a caged fire drake, but I could never say. At some point it had been removed, replaced by the electrical wires that snaked conspicuously down the walls.

In the cage, in place of the boiler, was a disheveled man bent over an old wooden desk. He looked like a medieval copyist as he filled the empty pages of a bound journal with scratch. His work was lit by candle. He took no notice of me. But then, I was still wearing the amulet.

I took it off.

“Oh, Doctor...” I breathed.

He turned his head to face me with frosted eyes and stared out at nothing. His long, curly beard was as wild and unkempt as the verge in the ward. He wore a long gray bath robe with loops for a fabric belt that was now missing. There was a cluster of beads and talismans over his white T-shirt, and the thick black frame of his glasses was wrapped with white tape on one side.

Slowly, he turned back to his work.

I heard Granny cackling in the main hall. Couldn’t be good. I needed to hurry.

I strode to the gate, expecting to find a heavy padlock, but there was nothing but a sliding bar, and I opened it slowly so as not to make a sound.

“Come on,” I whispered, taking my friend’s shoulders. “We have to get out of here.”

His frosted eyes alighted me again without recognition, but he complied, and I led him out of the high boiler cage. I had left the amulet on the ground. I was happy to be free from its dark chorus, if only for a moment. I wasn’t sure it would work on two people, but the collar was wide enough for us to put both our arms through at the shoulder.

“Put that on,” I heard Granny say loudly, “and dearie here dies.”

I spun. The old witch stood in the arch, naked as before. Behind her were several men in dirty work clothes. One was barefoot in overalls. His head had collapsed from severe trauma on one side. Another was scarred across his face and missing his left arm at the elbow—alligator, from the looks of it. His right arm was wrapped around Cerise’s head. His hand covered her mouth while Granny, smiling, held a thorn-covered twig to Cerise’s bare throat.

My shoulders dropped. There was no point testing Granny’s resolve. I had seen her slaughter her own people without a moment’s hesitation for nothing but the slightest gain.

“What about the coin?” I asked, dropping the amulet to the stone floor. “You can’t just take it from us. You have to trade. Let her go and I’ll give it to you.”

Granny lifted her head and cackled. “That old thing? Pshhh.” She waved it off. “You fools oughtta know better. Can’t spend the coin of fate twice. That’s what ruined my poor Wilbur! I already spent that silver on this here pocket watch.” She clicked it open and examined the face. “And it tells me I only got a few hours left. But lookee here. The Three Sisters answered my prayers. I think they want that dern coin ‘out of circulation,’ as the man says. Doesn’t bode well for the bearers!” She laughed. “Now, kick that amulet away.”

I did as I was ordered and watched it bounce over the stone. It didn’t get very far.

“Sorry.” I shrugged.

Granny hobbled over and reached for it, her tongue squirming greedily. She pulled away as soon as it touched her skin. She looked to me in shock.

“Dark chorus,” I said dryly, and she spat.

She snapped her fingers and the doctor turned. “Find something that’ll smash this—and her head.”

“Let Cerise go,” I said. “Killing her doesn’t benefit you.”

“Now why would I kill such a lovely child? She’s the answer to my prayers! Just lookit her.” Granny admired Cerise. She walked over and put a hand over Cerise’s womb. “Already ripe!”

I glanced at Cerise in shock. She glanced back sheepishly.

She was pregnant.

Granny stroked Cerise’s short hair. “This youngin’s gonna be my new momma. Ain’t that right, sweetie?”

“No...”

The old woman wanted more time. It seemed she hadn’t been after the coin at all. She had tricked us into giving her the pocket watch, which counted down the moments to her death. She needed to know how much time she had left. Whatever spells and offering she had made since our last encounter brought to her just what she needed, a young pregnant woman whose unborn child would be the vessel by which Livonia Tuesday would be reborn.

“Well,” Granny barked at the doctor. “Get on with it.”

It took him only a moment. He walked to one of the broken machines and pulled out a metal bar. Nearly two meters long, it appeared to be some kind of industrial chisel. It was relatively thin—no more than an inch thick—and tapered to a diamond tip. There was a flat notch near the top. It was meant to slide into a pneumatic hammer, I think, and so be driven through sheet metal. The bottom third was heavily scuffed, but beyond that, it was brushed to a shine. He held it like a walking stick.

“Break it,” Granny ordered.

The doctor lifted the long, pointed bar. The diamond tip flashed as he brought it down hard on the crystal, shattering it instantly and throwing off such a blow that all of us were knocked back amid a great swirl of darkness.

No one had expected that, and for a moment, there was silence. Cerise was prone but free. The doctor was on his back. He had taken the brunt of the blow and had lost his grip on the long metal chisel, which rolled closer to me. I looked at it as Granny looked at me.

She pointed to Cerise “Grab her!” she ordered as she struggled to her feet.

I scrambled forward on all fours, but in my haste, I knocked the long bar with my feet and it rolled back to the bearded doctor, who stood and lifted it. He was standing between me and the others. There was no way around.

“Put her against the cage,” Granny ordered.

Getting up from the ground was a struggle for her, and she was breathing hard.

The doctor raised the sharp diamond tip to me, and I took a step back. I stopped at one of the spikes of the iron cage, which pointed menacingly toward my back. I waited for the doctor to finish the job. But he didn’t move. Granny snapped her fingers again, and when nothing happened, she took a step forward.

The doctor spun and swung the diamond point at the old witch, opening up a huge gash across her shoulder and forehead and knocking her to the ground. He turned his head to me then and winked. The amulet’s blast had apparently broken whatever spell she had over him.

But Granny only laughed. It was low, like a rumble. The remains of her stringy hair hung in front of her face. The gashes on her shoulder and forehead were deep and exposed her flesh, but they barely bled—as if she were drying out.

Cerise squealed, but the one-armed zombie had her neck in a headlock and almost nothing came out. The other held her skull with both hands like it was a watermelon he was going to smash.

“You need her,” I said.

Granny thrust a fist and the doctor flew through the open gate and into the cage, where he struck the bars. The force of the throw had yanked the bar from his hand, and it bounced on the stone with a clang.

The old woman cackled. “You’re a clever one, Doc...” she sneered. “But yer not a wizard yet!”

She turned to me. “Get in there with him. Some folks is comin that wanna meet ya!”

We could hear them preparing the ritual. The sound of it echoed through the arch to the main hall, making it impossible to relax. Cerise paced around the long, high cage. The doctor sat tugging at a loose thread on his soiled bathrobe. I sat on a stack of filled journals. We had just spent the last several hours trying to find our way out of the makeshift prison and were both beaten and exhausted. The heavy Depression-era padlock that held the gate could not be reached from behind and the wide cast iron bands that comprised the cage could not be budged. Cerise, being very small, could very nearly fit through the square openings, but no matter how we pushed her, we couldn’t get her through.

I stood to stretch my tired muscles and knocked over one of the bound volumes, which fell open. Inside, someone had drawn the pages of a book. That is, it wasn’t that the text had been copied. It had been sketched, Gothic font and all. But the copy was imperfect. Several of the lines were illegible. The shape of the words and sentences were scratched in pencil, but the letters were unclear. I closed it and opened another.

“These are books from Etude’s library,” I said.

“She was having me reproduce it,” the doctor explained. “I think she was looking for something.”

“Desperate to live.”

Cerise had a leatherbound journal in her hand and was turning the pages. “You did this from memory?” she asked, incredulous.

“Etude gave Doctor Alexander everything he had,” I explained. “Every page, digitized and stored on a USB stick.”

“And you memorized it?” Cerise asked. “Seriously?”

“Not all of it.”

“You were right,” she said to me. “He even looks like a grisly old wizard.”

Doctor Alexander looked down at his open bathrobe. He fixed it around him like a suit coat. “What’s wrong with my robe?”

“Slippers are a nice touch.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” I asked.

He thought for a moment. “Taking a shower.”

“The doctor was kidnapped,” I explained to Cerise, “because he didn’t do as he was told and went to visit his daughter.”

“Fascinating,” Cerise said, snapping the journal shut. “I don’t know about the two of you, but I intend to get out of here.”

“Admirable,” I said. “How?”

She looked around. “Come on. There’s gotta be a way.”

The doctor slid down the bars to the floor. “Let me know when you need help.”

“You’re just gonna give up?”

“Never said that.” The doctor had torn loose a long thread from his robe and was rolling it between his fingers.

Cerise looked around. “There’s gotta be something.” She looked around again. Then she looked up. “What about that?”

She pointed to the roof of the cage, formed from crossing bands of cast iron that rose from the concrete and bent over top of us. Two centuries of gravity had bowed them at the middle. Unfortunately, that was 20 feet overhead.

Cerise glance to the square gap she had almost made it through. Then she started to climb.

“Please be careful,” I said, glancing back to the hall to make sure we were not being observed.

The climb was easy enough until she crested the curve. Once she was more or less hanging upside down, she had to loop her legs in and out of the gaps to keep from falling. Still, she was lithe, and it was quite a bit easier for her than it would’ve been for either the doctor or me. At the top, she used her weight to pull on the sagging cross-band, which bounced loose from its rusted rivet.

“I think I can make it,” she said, shifting her feet for leverage.

The doctor had stood and walked to me. “That’s a helluva fall...” he breathed.

The two of us watched helpless as she pulled herself into the square gap, pushing hard on the bowing metal to give her shoulder another inch or so of space.

And then she was through. She pushed up with her arms like she was exiting a pool and rested cross-legged between the spikes, which made adequate braces for her descent to the floor.

“The steel bar.” I pointed. “We might be able to use it to break the lock.”

“Good idea,” the doctor said, sliding the desk out of the way.

The loop of the old padlock was large enough that we would thread the stainless-steel bar though. The three of us pulled on one end, trying to create enough torque to break it, but it was no good. My hands slipped and I fell, which caused everyone to lose their grip. The heavy bar fell loose and clattered on the stone.

“Shit!”

A low shape appeared then. A crawling shadow lumbered up the steps to the arch. The albino alligator. It stopped at the top and stared at us with pinprick eyes. There was a red gouge across its head. The pair of dead-eyed zombies, no doubt risen from the surrounding swamp, stood behind.

Cerise stepped back from the cage door.

“Run,” I told her.

“No...” She didn’t want to leave.

“Run!”

“Where?” she asked, backing away.

“Just go! RUN!”

She took off toward the back of the hall and disappeared among the row of derelict machines. The zombies shambled after her.

“Come, out, come out wherever you are!” one of them called.

Back on two feet, Granny approached the cage just as the doctor, reaching between the bands, grabbed the steel bar and pulled it inside.

“You two are almost more trouble than you’re worth,” she said. “But don’t worry. Your friends will be here any minute to take you away.”

“They’re going to blight the entire earth, Livonia. I’ve seen it. They’re going to make a lesson of us.”

“Pshaw! Then there’d be nothing left to rule!” Granny shook her head. “Those fellas just wanna be kings. And thing about kings is, sooner or later, they always fall!”

“They’re being tricked!” I objected. “The dark gods don’t care about them. They never did. They’re using them. That’s all. They opened the portal, no thanks to you, and they’re—”

“Enough!”

I felt myself being slammed back into the bars with a clang.

“Ow...” It hurt.

“I got this,” the doctor said. He had used the steel bar’s diamond tip to gouge marks in the concrete. “Stay inside here,” he said.

Granny made a clicking sound in appreciation. “A reverse ptarmigan circle,” she said. She looked frailer than ever. “Keep ‘em out instead of in. Never would’ve thought of that.”

“I may not be a wizard,” he said, pointing the tip of the bar at her, “but I learn quick.”

“That you do, Doc. That you do. Alright, then.” She clapped her hands. “How ‘bout a rematch?”

Granny whipped her arms forward, but the doctor held the steel bar in front of him. Whatever magic came for him was directed to the iron, which seemed to move against him, and he struggled to control it. He lowered into a wide stance as the bar wavered more and more. He grunted and planted his feet apart. He was losing control. He slammed the tip of the bar into the floor to hold it, and the old witch pushed the bar instead of pulled, and it slammed into his face, knocking him back.

She chuckled and rubbed her gnarled, arthritic fingers. “Not bad. For a beginner. If’n only you had more practice. Alas.” She wiggled her pinky and smiled like she was going to gut him with it.

The doctor’s nose bled and he wiped it.

“You can’t summon her,” he said. “Not from outside the circle. You’re gonna have to come in and get her.”

Granny growled in frustration. She moved her fist and he flew back with a shout. She opened the padlock with a twist and the heavy gate swung wide. She shambled toward me, claws out.

“Don’t worry, dear. You’ll wake up again.”

Doctor Alexander starting laughing from the floor behind the desk. It was hearty, and Granny was annoyed.

“What’s so funny?” she barked.

“Well, I’ll tell ya,” he said. “By knot of one, my spell’s begun.”

Granny’s eyes went wide. She reached immediately for her withering scalp.

The doctor stood. “By knot of two, it findeth you.”

The old woman, realizing she had been shedding hair all over the prison, turned and hobbled for the cage door.

The doctor walked around the desk, rolling something in his hands. “By knot of three, you cannot flee.”

The old woman’s legs froze as if turned to stone. She wobbled.

“By knot of four, you hit the floor.”

Granny fell, as rigid as a broomstick. Her skin hit the concrete with a slap.

“By knot of five, come your last moments alive.”

The pocket watch had tumbled free from her hands in the fall, and I picked it up. Six minutes and counting.

“By knot of six...” The doctor lowered his voice as stood over her. “No more tricks,” he said softly.

Doctor Alexander dangled the stray thread from his robe over her. Several of her scraggly white hairs had been tied into a string of six knots.

“Like I said, I’m a fast learner.” He turned to me. “Sorry. Had to wait until she opened the gate.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I said, heading for the door.

There was a loud noise from behind the machines.

“Oh, no. Cerise...”

A head bounced out and rolled to a stop near my foot.

“Sorry, boss,” it said.

Its headless body appeared then, walking on wobbly legs. In its arms it cradled the head of the second zombie. The walking corpse fell to its knees and then forward, muffling the cries of the head it carried. Cerise was standing behind holding a large shovel.

“Turns out I can see their enchantment through walls.” She shrugged.

She glanced up then, as if something caught her eye.

“They’re here,” she whispered.

“Who?” the doctor asked. He pushed Granny with his foot to make sure she was stuck.

“How many?” I asked her.

“Three,” she said. “No, wait. Four.”

“Four what?”

“What do we do?” Cerise asked.

“There’s no way we can beat four of them.”

“WHO?” the doctor insisted.

“But isn’t that the only way out?”

“No,” I told her. “It’s not. We were never going out the front.”

“What?”

“I didn’t want to tell you, in case Granny sussed it out.”

“Sussed? Are you kidding me?”

“Go to the back,” I told her. “Behind one of the walls is a secret chamber. It’s the old coal larder. You should be able to see it.”

“You’re not seriously gonna go out there,” she said. “Alone?”

“No. Not alone. Doctor, bring the staff.”

He looked at the steel bar in his hand. “Staff?”

“Hold up,” Cerise called. “What are the two of you gonna do against four of them?”

“Just find the chamber!” I said.

“You can’t even see them!”

I led the doctor up to the hall and across the poison garden to the very last cell. Black Tom’s cell.

“There.” I pointed to the silver that had been poured into a groove around the opening. “Break it.”

He looked ominously at the dark. “Are you sure about this?”

“Doctor,” I said calmly. “Please.”

He nodded, and gripping the bar with both hands, brought it down hard on the silver. The sharp, diamond-tipped point pierced the metal with a spark, and instantly we felt a frigid blast. The swamp air was humid, and crystals of frost spread over the metal bar. A man appeared from smoke, a dark man dressed darkly in clothes fitting an 18th-century sailor. He didn’t appear to be more than 35. He stepped to me. The doctor tried to intervene and the man spread the fingers of his right hand. The doctor froze, veins and eyes bulging as if every muscle in his body had suddenly seized.

Black Tom leaned closer and looked into the doctor’s eyes. “I dinno you,” he said in an Irish brogue.

He lifted his hand and the doctor flew against the stone wall. His staff fell again with a clang. Black Tom took my hand gently and I felt my body lift.

“But you...” He leaned and kissed my hand. “You I remember.” He sniffed my fingers gently, as if they were the petals of a flower. “What say ye, lass. Shall we make beautiful mischief?”

I admit it was a tempting offer. But alas, it was not to be. I could already see his face wrinkling in front of me. Streaks of gray appeared in his dark hair. I grabbed his hand. He thought I was taking it to follow him up and away to freedom, but I pulled him back. I showed him his own withering fingers.

“Don’t let it win!”

He turned his hand in front of his eyes as the wrinkles on his face grew deeper.

“Your years are catching you, Tom! You don’t have much time! You won’t make it past the Rings True. Don’t let it win. Bring it down. You escaped every prison they put you in.”

Slowly, I watched his face switch from horror to anger.

“Don’t let it win,” I urged. “Bring it down.”

He pushed past me. “Get your man to safety,” he said, as if the doctor were my manservant.

We made for the arch as quick as we could as Old Man Tom strode to the center of the floor.

“You thought you beat me,” he declared, his voice already weakening. “Didn’t you?”

He reached into the air and pulled and stones erupted from the third-floor wall. The ease of it seemed to surprise him. But then, the prison was just as old as he, and water had been seeping at the cracks for decades.

Black Tom, first inmate of Everthorn Prison, started laughing. “You thought you beat me! Hahaha!”

He reached to his left and pulled again and a column tumbled. The stones of the prison, pressed together by weight and time, began to shift. Mortar cracked, and the waterlogged earth of the bog pressed in on all sides, squeezing Everthorn as if by the throat.

“I found it!” Cerise said, running to meet us. “It’s here!”

During the war, the prison’s old coal larder was converted to “asset containment,” which is to say used for the confinement and torture of high-profile captives—warlocks and mercenaries deemed too dangerous to keep anywhere but the most secure facility in the world. However, since they couldn’t be kept with the general population, who had to remain ignorant of what was going on underneath them, a secret ingress was added to the prison. I knew of it only because I had once been asked to participate in an “interrogation.” The thought of returning to Everthorn, even as a guest, was too much for me however, and I asked my partner, the good Dr. Hunter, to go in my stead.

Cerise had kicked through damp sheet rock to reveal a three-room chamber heavy with dust and years. Nearly a foot of water had gathered inside. Stone and brick began to fall around us with splashes. Wet earth followed in clumps. In moments, we would be entombed. But the space was larger than I expected, and I wasn’t sure which hallway to take.

“Which way?” the doctor asked.

“The back,” I said in false confidence.

There were no lights that deep and it was very hard to see. I saw a set of double doors and led the others through. Inside was a wide office—or rather what had once been an office. There was barely any furniture. The few pieces that remained had been covered in once-white sheets, now a deep and moldy brown. Another grimy covering, whose tail dipped into the standing water, had been draped over an enormous painting on the far wall.

Stones continuously fell, crashing through the damp plaster ceiling. One struck the doctor’s shoulder and he grimaced and went down.

“Help him!” I told Cerise.

I yanked the sheet off the painting, which depicted the very office in which it was hung—a mirror in brush strokes and oils, absent any living occupants. It was huge, as was the gilded frame that held it. Neither could be removed, for what they held was fixed in place.

At the side of the heavy ornate frame was a keyhole into which the Master Key slipped easily, but I had to turn hard. For a moment, nothing happened.

The doctor joined Cerise at the office’s double doors. The two of them braced themselves against it. Cerise shrieked as our pursuers pushed against one of the doors, bending it.

“We can’t hold them!” the doctor yelled.

He had threaded his staff through the door handles, but since the doors opened inward, it did little but slow the slychs down. Soon it would break.

The gears in the massive picture frame shuddered and clicked as the painting stuttered to life. I stepped back as the frame extended in two directions, to the left and down. A slightly smaller frame, just as ornamented, was sheathed inside the first, and it pulled out and unfurled a larger image of the office with one addition—a door. It was in the foreground of the painting, meaning it was right in front of me, and as soon as I could, I inserted the key into the lock of the door inside the painting itself.

It went in, and I turned frantically in any direction as our barricade splintered and my friends were knocked back. We could see the creatures in flashes, which hurt our eyes like a too-bright light. The doctor scrambled out of the water and to his feet. He swung the tip of his staff back and forth.

“HURRY!”

There was an enormous crash. The room shook as the dome collapsed, and everything else with it. We were about to be buried.

The door in the painting unlocked and swung out, filling the room with light. I saw a clear blue sky and white stucco walls with a portico-lined concrete courtyard swept with pebbles and dusty earth.

“Go!”

The prison’s foundation collapsed, triggering a slip of earth. A third of the tiny island slid into the swamp, taking the outer ring’s brick encasement from under it. The massive ring fell, forcing its far side into the sky. The great casting of silver broke free, and for one brief moment, shone bright in the overcast sky. Then it snapped.

The chime could be heard for miles. For those inside, it was clear and deafening. We doubled over, clutching our ears. But it seemed to cause our pursuers special difficulty. For several seconds, they were visible and writhing.

“Jesus...” The doctor breathed, seeing them for the first time.

Cerise stumbled forward and ran through the door. The doctor followed, robes dragging in the water. I stepped through behind him and the two of us swung the door closed.

But we didn’t make it.

Crows.

I heard them before I saw them.

“Get down!”

Etude didn’t move. He stood in the bramble above the narrow river and watched the far shore as agents of the Winter Bureau walked in and out of Cafe Cinota, carrying all his worldly possessions through the red portal and loading them into a truck. All that remained was the jewel, which hung around his neck. It had been cut and polished, although I no longer remember how. I only know we had carried it in a lead box at first because it had to be cut before it was struck by the sun’s rays, which it now turned to a faint rainbow against his linen shirt.

The crows descended and swirled around the cafe. Dozens, looking for places to land. But my young friend hardly noticed.

“We have to go,” I urged from between the reeds. I tried to pull him down, but he pushed my hand away and took off down the narrow lane toward the main road, which crossed the river half a kilometer ahead.

As soon as we were out of sight, he stopped suddenly and turned. “How did they find us?”

I stood straight, indignant. “What are you suggesting?”

“You know exactly what I am suggesting.”

I turned to make sure no one was watching. “You want to argue about this here? With half the Bureau on our backs?”

He jabbed a finger toward the restaurant. “That is my life! And they are carting it away.”

“It will be the very same story at my house. Not that you ever bothered to ask. How do you think we’ll get everything back? By shouting?”

“For many months I have come and gone without incident. One day after your arrival and we are discovered. Do not tell me that is an accident!”

“You may chastise me later.”

“There will be no later. Goodbye.” He turned and walked away.

“You need me.” He didn’t answer, and I followed, glancing back repeatedly. “You need me to breach the forest. No one but an immortal has a surfeit of memories.”

Nothing.

“How many have I sacrificed on your adventure?”

He spun. “You wanted them gone! Well, congratulations. You got what you wanted. I release you from our bargain.” He waved his hands over me and started walking again.

The cawing of the crows faded as I continued after him down a slow slope toward the main road ahead. A car passed carrying a disinterested driver.

“Where are you going?” I demanded.

“That is none of your concern,” he replied, marching.

“And these?” I held up my marked palms.

He stopped again. He scowled. He extended his hands to me, palms down, and I took them. After a moment, he turned his to check.

The marks hadn’t moved.

He scoffed at them like they were spoiled child and started again down the road. “It’s no matter. They will return in time. Goodbye!”

“This is ridiculous!” I strode after him. “Stop!”

He didn’t.

“Please?”

He turned a corner and was gone.

I sighed and ran after him, but when I turned the same corner, he was gone. There was no one on the sidewalk but a few townsfolk going about their midday errands. I saw a small side street just ahead and ran to it, but the way was empty. A pair of old women on a distant stoop cackled to each other as they knit a heavy rug from opposite ends. At the corner, a man sat reading the paper and smoking a pipe in front of an auto yard fenced in leaning sheet metal. I asked in Hungarian if he had seen a young man pass. Judging by his scowl, he didn’t speak Hungarian, and I hacked through enough Romanian to get the point across. He shook his head.

The crows took to the air. I heard their discordant chorus as it rose above me, and I ducked under the eaves of a locked door. But it wasn’t necessary. They weren’t looking for me. They weren’t looking for anyone. They knew exactly where they were going. They flew in churning mass, like giant black boomerang, whirling along the river.

He’d used magic to move himself somehow. They had sensed it.

“Idiot.”

I ran back to the corner. Weeds gathered along a wood-slat fence. Just past it, a short, round man in an aging sport coat removed an open-topped box from the trunk of a boxy Communist-era sedan. He had stopped on the road in front of a multi-family dwelling. A middle-aged woman and her daughter chatted with him excitedly from the front porch. It seemed they were happy to receive whatever he was carrying.

Cars honked down the road as three black SUVs passed me on the river road and gunned their engines.

“Shit.”

The man with the boxes had walked up the steps, where he kissed the cheeks of the woman and disappeared inside with his treasure. The trunk of his squat sedan, which had once been yellow, was still open. The engine was sputtering. I looked down at the marks on my hands.

“Dammit.”

I got in, released the brake, and drove off. The vehicle had absolutely no amenities—part of the dash was missing, and the seat was nothing but stitched vinyl stretched over a frame—but it was built like a communist tank. I turned onto the river road as the owner came running onto the street behind me. The women were behind him. I accelerated through traffic, honking and swerving around the lazy cars. Agents of the Winter Bureau were arresting Etude in the narrow park. I slammed the pedal to the floor and the once-yellow sedan chugged: a little faster, a little faster. Luckily, the grade was with me, and I picked up enough speed to ram the rear corner of the middle SUV, forcing it to strike the one in front like a billiard ball. The lead vehicle struck a tree. The one I hit bounced off it and rolled down the embankment and into the river with a splash. All things considered the force of the collision should’ve hurt me—at least caused a bruise. I had badly dented the hood of my tanklike sedan and dislodged some part of the internal mechanisms such that the timing belt squeaked on and off loudly. But I remained unhurt.

“Get in!” I yelled to Etude, who was on the ground, along with everyone else.

I hit the gas before he shut the door. In the side mirror, I caught one of the agents casting a spell. I don’t know if it worked. The other got to his feet and fired a gun that would’ve killed me if the trunk hadn’t been left open. The solid metal lid was still raised in front of the rear window. Several bullets impacted it and left large circular dents. Etude noticed the mahogany-haired woman in the side mirror. She had pulled out in the third SUV and was giving chase.

“Well . . .” I said, raising my voice over the loud, shimmying squeak of the engine, “we’re not going to get far in this.” It could barely pass 45 KPH.

I turned onto a narrow, cobbled street and wove through an old neighborhood at speed. Our pursuer was right behind us, but on the narrow lane there was little she could do. When the way was blocked by an outdoor cafe, I turned sharply onto a main thoroughfare, where there were enough oncoming cars to keep the mahogany-haired woman from getting around us in the other lane. That would change, I knew, as soon as we reached the edge of the city, where the roads would no longer be medieval in width, but there was no other choice. If we turned and drove in circles through the old town, it would keep our immediate pursuer at bay, but it would also give her compatriots ample time to involve the police, or gather reinforcements. Or both.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

Nothing.

Apparently, I was getting the silent treatment.

“Oh, poor you,” I mocked. “You don’t trust me. Is that it?”

“There was a very adequate binding on the cafe,” he shouted over the engine. “For months now, I have come and gone—”

“So you said. But your face is plastered across every police station in the valley. Did you know that?” I had the WANTED notice folded in my pocket. I pulled it out and threw it at him.

He unfolded it and read in silence. He looked down at his bare palms.

Behind us, the mahogany-haired woman kept a close follow. A wood fence lined the road. She could easily swerve around and knock us into it. Her car had the power, whereas ours was sounding more and more like the little engine that could. But she wanted us alive, and there were cattle fields ahead.

“If you have any tricks left, now is the time.”

The moment the mahogany-haired woman had space in the oncoming lane, she gunned her engine and jerked around us—right into a massive buffalo. A heavily-uddered cow had stepped in front of the SUV and bellowed deeply as it was struck. The front of the SUV crumpled and flew apart as both went flying. I swerved off the road to avoid hitting them and rumbled down the embankment to the field. It was not very steep, but the boxy car was top-heavy and turned on its side and slid down the grass to the dirt. No serious damage was done, but we weren’t going anywhere.

I hit the steering wheel.

Etude opened his door, which was now the top of the car, and clambered out.

“Where are you going?”

“I cannot leave it to suffer.”

I crawled out after him, but by the time my shoes hit the dirt, he was already kneeling before the prone and bloody buffalo. It was still breathing, despite that most of its viscera were exposed. He stroked its neck and whispered with closed eyes as the mahogany-haired woman struggled noisily out of her upside-down vehicle, like a butterfly from its cocoon. I walked to her. When she stumbled free, I punched her hard in the nose, which made a very satisfying crack, and she fell back. I checked her for weapons. One revolver, full barrel. I checked the rounds. Standard-issue etched silver, very effective against creatures of the night. Some things hadn’t changed.

Sirens approached. Etude was still bent over the animal, which had finally expired. I turned back to the sideways car.

“We’re stuck,” I said.

“No.” He stood, grim.

“What do you mean?”

When I turned again to plead my case, I saw the other cows wandering toward it languidly. A pair of them pressed their heads to the roof and righted it with a nudge. It bounced on its tires and we got in as the angry herdsman ran at us from across the field. The car struggled to get going at first, but when it did, it resumed its high-pitched squeal, and we left the man in the dirt. We drove over the bumpy ground and pulled onto the road, where behind us the rest of the herd milled about the pavement, completely blocking the ingress from the town. The last black SUV, the one that had struck the tree, was stopped before a hoofed wall, along with a complement of police vehicles. The men got out and I waved out the window as we drove away.

“Are you hurt?” I asked him.

The left knee of his linen trousers was torn. I could see smears of blood. I think the agents had tackled him.

He glanced with a scowl to the symbols on my hands. “I will live.” He looked around us. “You are going the wrong way. This will not take us to the forest.”

“They may be watching the forest.”

“Such an effort would be useless. The area is too large.”

“Not if they discovered our rope path.”

We had left it half-buried in the leaves so we could return.

“One inch in ten thousand acres? Unlikely.”

“But not impossible,” I countered.

“We have no choice,” he growled. “We cannot make another path. The muskroot is in the cafe, along with all of our supplies. The nectar. My notes. All my work!”

I banked right and moved up a country lane that followed the course of a large stream. “I think it’s time you told me what this is all about, don’t you?”

The suggestion seemed to perturb him. “You asked not to know.”

“If people are trying to kill us, then I think we’re past the point of caring about what I do or don’t want.”

“It’s not a question of safety.”

“Then what?”

He was quiet. He continued to sulk as we rose into the foothills. The road curved with the falling water and trees sprung up all around. Within a few miles, now under cover of a forest, we came up on a cart hauling hay. The driver sat at the front of what seemed an impossibly tall pile of the stuff as a pair of stocky horses, barely larger than donkeys, click-clacked laboriously. The man didn’t even look as our car passed making that awful racket. I looked again at the marks on my palms. The engine struggled with the slope and I shifted gears. At a slight bend, where the rising road was wider on the left, I pulled to a stop.

“What are you doing?”

“Get out,” I demanded.

He seemed shocked.

“Get out,” I repeated.

His jaw set. “Very well.”

He climbed out in a huff, and I began accelerating, faster and faster. I didn’t stop, even as the car began to shimmy dangerously. The deep stream fell across the rocks in a ravine about ten feet below the road. At the very next bend, I turned hard and drove straight over the side. The car hung in the air a moment before smashing hard into three feet of water under which was a field of boulders and gravel. Glass broke. Water poured into the car and drenched me. As expected, I suffered no serious injuries. I had been whipped hard, but I had been wearing my seatbelt.

The car settled in the water, tilting up and to one side. The movement caused a rock in the creek bed to shift and everything slid backward with a jolt. Water poured through the broken windshield. The shallow flow wasn’t more than a meter deep, but it could drown me if I were trapped in the seat. I fumbled with the belt as the stiff flow cascaded over my neck and chin, which I kept elevated to breathe. The water was freezing, and my hands shook as I tried to pull myself free.

I felt another hand on mine and pulled. Etude was under the water. The seatbelt came free and I pushed myself through the torrent and out the door. The vehicle rested at an odd angle, propped up by a round boulder. The back tires were still spinning slowly. Getting out proved to be more of a challenge than I expected. Both of us ended up falling more than once on our return to the shore, where we collapsed on a grassy embankment two meters below the road. He laid on his back and tried to catch his breath.

“Perhaps it’s time to be honest with each other,” I suggested.

“It would be a nice change.”

“The Winter Bureau seems to think you’re the most dangerous man in the world. Why? What are you after?”

He was smiling. He started to laugh. Deeply. Genuinely. He glanced to me and laughed louder.

I had to force back a smile. “What’s so funny?”

“Truly,” he said, “you are as unpredictable as you are aged.”

We sat up and looked down at the car, crumpled and tilted. The force of the water finally got the better of it, and it fell to its side with a splash. It was done.

“We needed to ditch it,” I said. “This way they’ll wonder what happened. They’ll have to check all the hospitals in case we are injured.”

“Aye,” he nodded. Then he laughed again. He was giddy.

I glanced around at the tall pines of the forest. It was so peaceful. It reminded me of home.

“The Necronomicon,” he said. “I seek the Necronomicon.”

He sat on the grass cross-legged and coughed. Every part of him was dripping. Same for me.

I was silent a long moment. “You lie,” I accused.

But it didn’t seem like he was lying.

“The book was destroyed,” I said. “After the war. I smuggled it out of the Handred Keep. I risked everything—”

“Exactly,” he interrupted. “Which is why you told me never to tell you the truth.”

“I . . .? Have we had this conversation before?”

“Yes,” he said, shaking his hands of water. “Several times.” He sighed. “And each time, it is the same. You ask how it could’ve endured, and I explain to you that it’s not a book.”

“If it’s not a book, then what is it?”

“Nebuchadnezzar transcribed what was whispered to him through the flames into a language of his own devising, which was why it was undecipherable.”

“I know that.”

“But he was a fool. It’s not the language that matters. That’s why the ancients spoke of the power of the Word—logos in the Greek. It’s why Master Newton was obsessed with Biblical numerology. He understood the patent truth: that’s simply how gods talk. They don’t make guttural noises, like animals. Divine language has a—a higher structure, something very difficult for us even to comprehend. You think the Nameless are so silly as to send across a code that could be broken simply by writing it backwards, or in a foreign tongue? They had to transmit it as a text because in Nebuchadnezzar’s time that was the height of our art. The only way anyone here could record information was by scribbling symbols on pages. If they had it to do over, today they might send a sequence of DNA for us to grow in a lab. Or machine code. But it was never the script that mattered. What mattered were the second-order glyphs embedded in the information itself. You see?”

I didn’t.

His head and shoulders dropped in frustration. “I suspect they can rearrange themselves, and in so doing, they can also rearrange the text. It isn’t a book of spells and incantations, but it contains those things—many more than are displayed on its pages at any one time. The ancient ones knew the old king would try to trick them. He was nothing if not vain. So they made certain the book could be found. It is a well—or battery, if you prefer—from which endless darkness flows. It can be used to power spells, like the amulets of Zaragoza. When it sensed it was lost, it became a kind of antenna—a transmitter, calling out to seekers of the dark.

“The Necronomicon is all of those things and none of them. It is not anything so crude as a mechanism. It is closer to the emergent complexity of life than it is to a book or a machine. That is why it could never be copied. Many reproductions were made, but each was stillborn. For there is no one here who speaks the language of the gods.”

“Then why not send more?”

“The barter was for a text. A kingdom for a revelation. Nothing more. Theoretically . . . the glyphs could sustain a portal, if one could be opened, from which more like it could come across. However, if the seekers of the dark could achieve that, then there would be no need to send another matrix. They could simply summon the old ones themselves, or their armies.” He studied my face, dour as it was. “Now do you see? It is not a book. It is a spy, a master saboteur sent to destroy us. It has but one purpose: to return mankind to slavery. So tell me. Do you think that such a thing could be destroyed by beating on it with a hammer? Or shouting incantations at it?”

“No,” I said softly.

I was quiet a long time.

“Then why do you seek it?” I asked finally. “If it’s hidden, why not leave it alone?”

He closed his eyes. “Do not make me say. Not again.”

I felt the grass under my fingers. “Please. I must know.”

He touched his chest in the same place he had when he told me of his master and teacher.

“When the seed snapped,” he said, “my master was confused. Was I not the one whose coming was foretold? Was I not meant to serve my people in his stead? It was a conundrum. So he inquired of my future. While I writhed in pain, he retired from the village and ate of the sacred fungus, which turns death into life, and summoned the ancestors and asked for shades of the future. They—” He stopped. “They revealed a dark destiny. They said I would be responsible for loosing a great darkness upon the world. That it would fly free by my hand. And that all evil would fly with it.” He curled his legs into a sitting position. “That is why I must find it. To finally see it destroyed.”

“How? If even The Masters failed?”

He shook his head. “That was their folly. Only a saint can perform a miracle.” He got up slowly from the grass, still wet.

“A saint?” I scoffed. “I have walked this world for two centuries. I have met many strange and wondrous people. Not one of them was a saint.”

“Surely that is a sign, no? That the darkness is rising. For where have they all gone?” He looked at the car in the river.

We climbed the bank and stood together on the pavement. The road curved upwards through the tall trees.

“They’ll be here soon,” I said.

He pointed up the road. “If we escape into the forest, our progress will be slow, and we will leave tracks.”

After that, there is a gap of memory. Everything is gone, eaten by the forest, until I was again standing with him above the U-shaped crevasse. We were both in different clothes. He was straddling a gap between two boulders and staring one-eyed through the cut crystal. The jewel of many colors positively glowed in the sun, and it refracted a kaleidoscope of tiny rainbows across his face as he peered through it like a spyglass. The jewel refracted light from what cannot be seen, he said, but not clearly like a lens or a mirror. He said the ancients could accomplish such a thing, but the art had been lost. Instead, all we would see through his crystal was a fuzzy distortion. But then, that was enough to reveal the book’s location, for it would surely leave the greatest void.

“The hymn of the dark gods will be the blackest thing in this place,” he said as he stood atop a boulder. He swung his face slowly to the right, then the left, and finally back right again. Then he pointed. “There.”

He hopped down and we descended to the crevasse, where he repeated the same performance.

“May I see?” I asked.

He handed me the jewel on the chain as if to be rid of it and stepped quickly toward the door-like grotto in the bulbous rock formation, the one I had nearly entered on our last visit. I saw a single wasp clinging to the rock near the entrance. It just sat there. Like a lookout. I peered through the crystal. It definitely darkened as I moved it in front of the rocks, despite that the ambient light was the same all around.

I studied it in my hands as he patted and pressed every inch of the rock arch. “Are you sure you made it right?” I asked.

“Of course!”

I noticed a red spot on my sleeve. A tiny splatter of blood.

“There must be a secret—” He stopped.

He pointed and I came up behind. The weathered gap in the bulbous rock was the entrance to a staircase that descended into the earth, down and toward where we had been standing such that it was completely obscured. So expertly was it cut that you could only see it once you crouched inside the narrow space, which no one would do unless they already suspected something was there.

“Here! Come!” He disappeared immediately, as if into solid stone.

We had to walk single file. I put the jewel around my neck and followed him down. The staircase widened as it curved and dropped into the earth. The air grew cool. Then cold. Filamentous roots hung from the packed-earth ceiling over our head like queer hairs. It seemed as though we were walking through the gullet of an enormous subterranean insect, such as the very ones we saw wriggling about.

“A riddle within a riddle,” he said.  “Where is the best place to hide something?”

“In plain sight?”

“No! Inside another secret. If you find one, you don’t keep looking, do you?”

After a brief transit, the tunnel was fully encased in stone and a railing appeared—of sorts. Carved hands of tarnished, pale green copper poked at regular intervals from holes in the wall. They grasped a heavy metal chain, which was draped between them. I could tell there was a chamber below us, but it was mostly obscured by the dark. We didn’t have a torch, and it was with some surprise that I stepped onto flat stone. I stumbled for a moment, expecting another step.

“Are you all right?” he whispered.

We stood at the edge of a single stone room cut roughly thirty feet square. It was coated in dust, which gave everything the pallor of the grave. Cobwebs choked the nook and corners. Light came from a single crack in the ceiling at the opposite end. It shone in a beam directly down. That beam filled the center of a perfectly circular waterfall, which fell like a curtain to a smooth floor. There, the water ran into a groove that fed a wide circle cut into the slab, like a tiny moat. Through the water-curtain, I could see the faint outline of a stand or pillar of some kind, onto which the light directly fell.

The water exited the moat through a shallower groove in the stone, which fell again to a lower, wider slab, forming a second circular moat. Inside, concentric circles, cast in metal, surrounded a hexagram carved into the rock. At each of the six points, grasping hands of tarnished copper erupted from holes in the floor. Black chains looped through the fingers and stretched back and forth over the single tall object at the center of the slab, which was held in place by the chains.

It was a chair. A throne of bones.

Etude squatted just outside the second moat and studied the throne as if mesmerized. I examined the back wall instead. It was covered in deep nooks that looked as though they were made to hold bodies, as in old crypts, but instead of corpses, there were only stacks of crusty manuscripts and the occasional odd metal shape.

I stepped forward for a closer look, but Etude held up a hand and directed my gaze to the floor, thereby warning me not to cross the water circle. He shook his head in silence before stepping around and kneeling again to study the chair from a distance. His gaze fixed on the skull in the chair’s high back. After a moment, he moved his hand outward, slowly breaking the plane of the moat, and I heard the tiniest sound, like the creak of metal. The chains were taught. There was no slack. And yet, it was as if something were pushing back against them, constantly, rocking them back and forth with intensity. And indeed, within moments, the six rings at the points of the hexagram began to glow red hot from friction. The chair was trying to escape.

I looked at Etude, wide-eyed, and he slowly retracted his hand. He nodded at me, as if whatever he had suspected was indeed the case.

“What is it?” I whispered.

I wondered how long it had been since words were spoken in that room.

“Something we must not disturb,” he said softly, climbing protrusions in the irregular cliff wall up to the higher platform.

The water curtain was fed by the rain and filtered clear by the mountain through which it seeped. But it was impossible to see through. Everything beyond was a blur.

I moved to follow him, sticking to the rock so as to avoid stepping on the slab or disturbing the moat. I passed by the last nook in the wall where, unbeknownst to me, a tiny stone coffin, such as might have held a child, rested atop the curling papyrus of an Alexandrian manuscript. Like everything else, it was covered in dust and cobwebs. Inside was a relic most foul—one we would come to see again—with a tarnished copped hilt and a jagged bloodstone blade. Agents of The Masters had wrested it from the Inquisitors, who had taken it from the Aztecs, and buried it in that place to be forgotten.

Etude and I stood before the circular waterfall, which parted before us like a drape. It wasn’t magic. There was a mechanism hidden by the rock overhang. A vertical plate tilted and so deflected the falling water to either side. The stone of the floor was more intricately carved than anything I had seen. There seemed to be layers and layers of absolutely beautiful runes. It was what I expect a chorus of angels might look like if one could carve such a thing. At the center was an ornate silver stand on which one might keep a book or sheets of music.

It was empty.

We stared at it. The bright light revealed that it was, like so much else, covered in the dust of centuries—that is, except for a square at the center. Something had set on that stand for years—decades, even—only to have been moved very recently.

My companion dropped to the ground. The noise echoed.

“No . . .” he breathed.

“Perhaps the High Arcane took it. They knew you were looking for it. Perhaps it was moved to a more secure location.”

“And what location is that?” he whispered.

I sat next to him. I had no words. In that moment, neither of us wanted to accept the implication of our discovery. It was, I expect, like hearing one has cancer. At first, it doesn’t seem real. It doesn’t seem possible. And so you don’t believe it. Even though you know it’s true.

“We shouldn’t stay here,” I said after a long silence.

He nodded.

It was evening then. The cemetery outside was as quiet as ever. We had little fear as we stepped from the rock. As far as we knew, no one knew we were there.

So it was we stumbled blindly into a trap.

Men in hunting gear appeared from the rocks. They carried long rifles, which they held in their hands as they surrounded us. We were handcuffed immediately as a pair of jacketed men descended to search the crypt.

Around the bend in the crevasse, Beltran approached in his high fur hat, flanked by more guards. He was old. Older than I expected.

He stopped twenty paces from us and shook his head. “I didn’t want to believe it was true.”

“Neither did I,” I said.

We threw silent rage at each other.

Beltran turned to my young companion. “And here I thought no one could vex me more than she. You, young man, are without a doubt the most troublesome fool I have ever met in all my long years.”

The two searchers reemerged from the crypt.

“It’s gone,” one of them reported.

I realized then just how silly I had been. I had asked Beltran on the phone what had happened to me under the Handred Keep. That meant I didn’t remember. It wasn’t hard for him to figure out how I could’ve forgotten such a thing.

As one of the seven High Arcane, he had access to the Great Eye, but instead of scouring the vast wilderness around the forest in vain, as Mr. Morgan and his people had done, Beltran started from an entirely different assumption: that if I meant to penetrate the forest, I would succeed, even where no one else had. And so he set his trap. He sent Mr. Morgan and his agents to the cafe in Cluj, knowing full well I would elude them, and that it would force my hand.

Beltran looked at me. Then at Etude. “I suppose you two think you are clever.”

He waved, and as my friend and I were led away in chains, it occurred to me that the only reason we had been undone was because my ex-husband believed in me so completely.

I awoke on a mattress on the floor to the rumble and muffled cheers of a distant crowd. I did not appear to be in the hands of the enemy. In fact, by the spherical, rust-covered walls, it appeared I hadn’t left the mizzen. My cell—which was not a cell, but rather a pressure equilibration chamber repurposed as such—was one of several such rooms connected by a grate-covered tube, like beads on a string. When in use, the chambers collected scalding water at their base while letting the more volatile steam pass through the tube. The grates had originally been held in place with cotter pins, but since those could be easily removed, the mizzen had run a heavy wire through the pinholes and twisted it shut inside the tube, out of reach of my fingers. In any normal situation, that would’ve doomed me. But it is simply a fact that people are, by habit, much less worried about the dead than the living. In the violent struggle of my last execution, I had managed to remove the long spring that held the cross-bar of the industrial hook that dangled me. With some effort, I managed to straighten the spring and use it to slowly untwist the heavy wire that held the grate. The tube was cramped, but I had been in tighter spaces. The secret is to stay calm. Of course, that’s easier said than done.

Peering through the next grate, I could see the adjacent chamber was empty. Alas, the portal door was locked, and after uttering a string of curses, I was forced to repeat the difficult process a second time. Luckily, the subsequent chamber was open, and I stepped—cautiously—into the full majesty of the Dunvluddich furnace.

It was named for its creator, Abraham Dunvluddich, a Lithuanian-American magician and scientist who was convinced there was a way to marry the “estranged sisters” as he called them: science and magic. Certainly, he spent his life in search of the means—perpetual energy machines, incandescent orbs of healing, crystal transmitters to communicate with the other side, or across the globe. His designs were legion. As far as I know, none of them ever worked. After he moved to America, where heresy was no more tolerated, only more weakly prosecuted, Dunvluddich began conducting experiments, of which I only heard tell later, when the two of us were neighbors in Everthorn Prison. His furnace, in which the mizzen were ensconced, had been built to contain a hellion, a being of fire, which Abraham had acquired, subdued inside a glass-and-ceramic vase, from an Arab sheik in Tangiers. The beast tried to escape as soon as it was loosed but was held in check by the iron sphere’s hermetic seal. I could still see the major constellations carved into the interior, along with the circle of the ecliptic. It was a mini universe. It kept magic in. But it also kept magic out, which made it a useful fortress.

Being made of hellfire, the hellion expanded to fill the furnace and so boiled a quantity of water carried in its pipes, the most massive of which ran through the very center. This was meant to produce steam for a turbine, but alas, hellions are not only beings of fire but of rage, and as the creature beat itself continuously against the walls, the turbine sputtered violently to a stop, its intakes choked by porous and crumbly brimstone—a sulfurous foam charcoal—which the injured hellion excreted like clotting blood. All of Abraham’s experiments suffered such infirmities, or so I learned through his ramblings. No matter his effort, it seemed there was always some peculiarity of the magic that made it impossible to harness industrially. While seeking a solution to the brimstone problem, and for reasons unknown, the enormous furnace ruptured. The damage was still visible in the upper corner, where the thick metal turned outward like shark’s teeth. That hole was now the primary ingress to the cavernous space, which had since been filled with makeshift structures: trailer siding, construction scaffolding, reclaimed wood, rope, and wire. It was a hanging city lit by strings of Christmas lights.

In the conflagration that followed the explosion, the true nature of Dunvluddich’s experiments was revealed and he was sanctioned by The Masters upon threat of dispossession. He didn’t stop, of course. He moved instead to Chicago, where the hellion ultimately escaped from a less magnificent chamber and so triggered the Great Fire of 1871. Abraham Dunvluddich was captured, tried, and convicted by a tribunal magique and subsequently imprisoned for life. By the time I met him, he’d been locked in a cell so long that he was both quite aged and quite mad. He had never stopped designing, however. The stone walls of his cell were covered in arcane engineering diagrams, one on top of the other: ghost antenna, magical dynamos, gears inscribed with pentagrams that were activated and inactivated as they ticked and turned inside concentric circles of runes, like an orrery. I observed his cell being cleaned on two occasions. Both times, the walls were scrubbed clean, but not before every design was meticulously recorded by agents of the Winter Bureau.

The furnace that he had built and which was buried under the Brooklyn Bridge was now home to refugees, all of whom were dangling from makeshift catwalks and scaffolding, cheering a fight on a round wood platform at the bottom of the sphere, called the Obolus. Every mizzen confederation had one. It was where all great matters were decided, usually by blood. Since the fight was to the death, it captured the full attention of the inhabitants, who dangled their feet over catwalks to watch the event and to cheer. Dropping under a railing, I laid flat against the spherical wall of the furnace and used the makeshift structures to pull myself slowly upward, out of sight. More than once, I was forced to stop as people walked overhead. More than once, I thought I would be captured. Holding myself that way proved too difficult, and after traversing less than a quarter-arc of the sphere, my arms were too tired to pull anymore. I stepped gingerly onto a catwalk that appeared to be made from banisters and balustrades reclaimed from a Victorian mansion. Luckily, I was by then above most of the crowd, who were watching the contest.

They roared suddenly in unison, and my eyes drifted to the Obolus. One of the combatants, a lithe woman no more than five-foot-two, had been knocked to her back. She had a tape-wrapped baseball bat in one hand and was beating away her attacker with it. A white fox mask covered face—not that it mattered.

I recognized her instantly.

“Oh, no . . .”

I jumped from the catwalk to the roof of an RV trailer lashed to the side somewhat lower on the sphere. I was noticed almost instantly. Shouts went up from the far side, but they were lost amid the calls and jeers, giving me time to leapfrog from one roof or walkway to the next and land on the Obolus with two feet.

The crowd hushed. Many stood.

I walked slowly to the middle of the round platform.

“Arrest her!” came the calls. “Take her!”

“You can’t!”

I turned to the speaker, who was high behind me. With the most of the light directed at the stage, I couldn’t see him at first.

“Anson.”

The old goblin was still alive, but only barely, or so it seemed. His head was bandaged and he was supported by a heavy crutch.

“You can’t arrest her, you cretins,” he growled. “Not without parlay. She’s one of you!”

“Lies!”

“Take her!”

“It’s true,” I called. “Check the codex. I am Milette of la bande L'Argentière, part of Confédération Illuminée of the Paris concord.”

“Illuminée died in the war,” an old woman called. She appeared to be French African. “Along with most of our Parisian brethren.”

“Yes,” I said, realizing Anson’s ploy. He was a clever old goblin who had been doing business with the mizzen for more than a century. “As the last of my clan, I am by right its head. The only person among you who can challenge me is another of my station. This woman is unbanded.” I pointed to her. “I claim her as my own. Any of my station who wish to object may approach the Obolus now.” I looked around slowly. “To the death, is it?”

There were more than a dozen gangs, large and small, on the American East Coast, each seeking to outdo their rivals in a constantly shifting web of alliances and pacts. I didn’t know these people. I couldn’t be sure one of the clan heads wouldn’t take me up on my offer.

After a moment, a tall man in a long red robe stood to face me.

“We will check the codex of records,” he said in a stout voice. “If what you say is true, then the woman is yours. She was fighting for you anyway.”

That was why I hadn’t yet been handed to the enemy. There was a pending challenge.

I turned to the young woman in fox mask, my friend, but found no clan signs.

“She is not mizzen,” I said, confused.

She shouldn’t have had the right of parlay.

“She’s the seer,” the African woman explained. “She saved many of us. A dispensation was granted.”

The politics of the mizzen were notoriously complicated, and I got the sense there was a great deal more going on than I understood, that in their desperation, deals had been struck.

The man in the robe went on. “You will both remain under guard until this matter is resolved. Take them.”

Several guards stepped onto the Obolus. The young woman jumped to her feet to fight, but I stopped her.

“It’s okay,” I said.

She took off her fox mask then, and I finally saw her face.

“Cerise . . .”

We hugged.

I first joined the mizzen after being hung for witchcraft. At my trial, I watched my own adopted son, Jakub, testify against me. I was broken in heart and soul and didn’t fight as the gendarme led me away. They wasted little time, and my body was recovered, along with two others, by the agents of the Dispossessed, which is to say those blighted of magic and unable to cast it—a sentence that, like the original sin, passes to all their descendants, who can neither curse nor be cursed. Each bloodline, when it appeared, was allowed to organize a clan, which included many people who were not dispossessed, merely outlaws: the mizzen.

The name was meant to be pejorative. It came not from the nautical but from an Arabic word meaning sick or diseased, for that is how they were seen by the magically elect, as untouchables. Through the centuries, pogroms were periodically directed against them with brutal result. They survived, as the hardy and resourceful do, by hiding—and by assiduously preserving their rich tradition in great tomes. Indeed, for the mizzen, nothing existed except what was written. Whatever was not could be invented on the spot. The mizzen did not see these inventions as lies, not any more than a castaway, stumbling upon a virgin and vacant island, would consider it stealing to claim enough of it to ensure his survival. It was mere providence. This meant, of course, that anything not marked with ownership was free to be taken and claimed as an heirloom, as ancient to one’s possession as the family name. One’s mark, then, became as sacred as the texts that assiduously recorded every detail of the mizzen’s history. Clan markings, including tattoos, were both signet seals and gang signs, and they were etched onto everything and everyone like cattle brands.

To the mages and clerics, such behavior was simple deceit and the men who practiced it beneath contempt. To conduct business with a mizzen was to bring not just disgrace but serious censure. They all did it anyway of course, albeit in secret and usually through an intermediary, such as Anson, which is how the clan leaders made their money. In the old days, part of the earnings collected from the mages were turned against them. The mizzen took it upon themselves to collect and bury the bodies of witches and hermits hung unceremoniously by The Masters or their proxies. At some risk to themselves, the mizzen rescued these corpses from the oft-unsanctified communal plots where they were discarded. I would come to learn that had at least as much to do with scavenging as honor. The recently dead have value—the eyes, the pineal gland, and the foreskin were all meagerly valuable in trade with gypsies and night maidens, to whom the mizzen were closely allied. But all the same, the bodies were buried properly after they were raided, and always with attending rites.

After waking in their care, I fell through the cracks of society and into their ranks. I became an outlaw, which satisfied me deeply. Twice I had tried to make my way honestly in the world and neither effort had worked to my favor or liking. I had been driven from two homes, impaled, raped, betrayed, abandoned, and hung, and with each death, the patent terror of a life without end—which is a life without meaning—became ever clearer. There were many days among the mizzen when I would not eat, as if to bear witness that I could not die. I simply stared out at the world in a coma of existential dread, occasionally opening my hands to feel the passing of moments, as if time itself were a steady rain dribbling over my fingers, and I would whisper “This is it. This is how it will be.”

After a series of misadventures in which I tempted depravity with greater and greater abandon, I came to meet a man called Durance Reynard l'Argentière. I doubted it was genuine, although I suspect he was indeed from the mountain town of Argentière, near Mont Blanc in the French Alps. He had the rugged constitution of a man raised in the high country. He wasn’t especially tall or muscular. In fact, he was quite lean. But he seemed carved from alpine stone. By the time I knew him, Durance had been flogged, shot, hung (briefly), poisoned, pilloried, and stabbed more times than I had. And he had the scars to prove it. After lying together, I would select a scar and trace it gently with my finger and he would tell me the story of its acquisition. The tales were never the same, although occasionally some detail would be repeated.

Durance was mizzen only by practice and association. He was not Dispossessed. But he did steal the magic he used. He carried a spyglass that allowed him to see through solid objects, including clothing. I caught him examining me with it at our first encounter, although at the time I didn’t know its purpose—nor was I the exclusive object of his gaze. But that spyglass was the secret of his success and the reason why the small crew that followed him remained so intensely loyal, even among the constantly competing mizzen clans. Durance delivered the goods, and at far less risk than most burglars of his time. By knowing in advance what was in a man’s pocket, or his home, Durance avoided the petty job as well as men who were armed or who bore papers in their back pocket revealing them to be gendarme in disguise.

Late in our career, by which time it wasn’t as easy for him to charm the young ladies as it had once been, Durance and I were forced to flee Paris for London, where we began to haunt the city’s innumerable opium dens. The stuff was then everywhere—and cheaper than the whiskey into which it was frequently mixed to make a tincture called laudanum. Druggists sold single draughts for a halfpenny, and new mothers would often purchase it for their infants to quiet them. For me, the languor of the poppy was the perfect salve to the anomie of years, and my habit, more than Durance’s, became a serious liability. It not only drained the cash he and I had saved; it also began to take its toll on my physical appearance.

I awoke one morning to find I had been taken from the opium den to which I’d retreated. I suspect I had overdosed, and in dying, had created a great deal of trouble for my companions, who no longer had use for Durance and me. I was tied to a chair in the bare A-frame attic of a dilapidated house in Whitechapel. His corpse was at my feet. I screamed for help for hours through my gag until my throat was hoarse and my every swallow stung. I went unconscious and died and rose on the third day. Shivering from withdrawals, I threw up, and the milky vomitus seeped from my gag and covered my chest. Somehow it still tasted of opium. Flies followed the stench and found the body. They buzzed in the room. They landed on the vomit. On my face. In my hair. I screamed for help. My skin began to feel like it was crawling with creepy, slimy things. Wriggling maggots ate out Durance’s eyes and I screamed more. Flies were born and danced around the room. I talked to them and imagined myself their queen and that each time they alighted my skin it was in supplication, and I thanked them. I died again, came back, and died a third time. And each time I rose, the corpse looked more and more like a ghoul. It stared at me, hollow, with a lopsided grin. Hours and hours turned to days and days and I died a fourth time. And then a fifth. I began to earnestly believe the corpse would rise. I swear I saw it move. It was getting ready, I was certain, and very soon it would struggle to its feet and hobble over to me, mouth agape. I was not the queen of the flies, but it was true that they loved me, for I was their offering to the god that had birthed them, and he was to eat me and so complete the cycle. I imagined him starting with my feet. With my toes, which wriggled like maggots. Or perhaps he would bite into my head like an apple. In some of my visions, old traumas flared and the thing on the floor rose to rape me with a rotting—

I was saved from madness by Anya, whose son had condemned me. She appeared to me just as she had before. She looked so sad. Even in my memory, it seems as if she came for just a moment, but honestly, she could’ve been standing there for days, holding my rapt attention, staving off madness. All I know is that finally I blinked and she was gone. In her place, a pair of young urchins slipped cautiously around Durance’s shriveled corpse to untie me. I was aware then just how emaciated I was, for my dress—the one I had chosen to accentuate the curves of my body—hung loose from my shoulders. I had lost most of my hair as well. My scalp looked like the underside of a wig. When I finally saw my own reflection, I realized I was as much the ghoul as Durance. My eyes had sunk shockingly deep into my skull, and my skin hugged my skeleton.

“What are you doing here?” I asked Cerise.

The two of us had been imprisoned, but not before being thoroughly searched. This time, there would be no escape. We sat facing each other in the small spherical chamber.

“You’re supposed to be safe at home. With your husband. Please tell me you didn’t bring him.”

Our words echoed off the metal walls.

“No.” She looked away. “He didn’t much like me running off again. But he didn’t try to stop me. It’s not his way.”

“You should’ve stayed.”

“I had to. You don’t understand. I can’t live like this anymore. What did he do to me?”

“What are you talking about?”

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a sheet of curled and folded paper. She handed it to me in lieu of an answer.

“What’s this?” I started unfolding it.

“It started a few months after you guys left.”

“What did?”

It was a photocopy of an X-ray. I was looking at someone’s chest. I could see the opaque white of a rib cage and the fuzzy lungs behind.

“Seeing things,” she said. “Things other people can’t. Things that aren’t there.”

Embedded in the heart was a foreign inclusion, a sharp geometric shape—solid white.

“Oh my God, you know what it is,” she said, seeing my face.

“The jewel of many colors,” I answered.

Etude had made her swallow it so that it would glint in the dark of the underworld and he could find her shade and drag it back to the light. After the ritual, her body was burned and placed with the earth of her birthplace inside the giant urn.

“It would’ve been in your ashes,” I explained.

“It’s inside my heart.”

I shook my head. “Your body must’ve reconstituted around—”

“What’s it doing to me?”

“The jewel refracts light from that which can’t be seen. It must be nudging you somehow, making you aware of what is otherwise obscured.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“I—I don’t know. I don’t think—”

“How do we know I’m not gonna go all Pet Sematary or something and kill my family? Do you know how many times I tried calling? You guys said you would help me.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

She looked down at her fidgeting hands. “Look . . . I don’t wanna be ungrateful or whatever, but . . . It got so bad. Eventually, I just got on a plane. I didn’t know what else to do. When I couldn’t find you guys at the bistro, I went to The Barrows. But it was ruined, too. The only other people I knew were Bastien’s friends.”

She looked away. I saw a tear.

“You tried to help them,” I suggested.

“They were being hunted.”

“And you can see them? These hunters?”

She nodded.

“What are they?”

“The same things that chased us at the construction site, only . . . different.”

“Different how?”

“See for yourself,” Anson said through the door.

It squeaked loudly, and he hobbled on his crutch out of the way.

“It seems the codex of records supports your claims,” he said. He was alone. “Your belongings have been returned.”

He handed me my handbag.

“Where is everyone?” I asked, slinging it over my shoulder. It was still damp.

“Preparing to leave.”

“Leave?” Cerise asked. “That’s insane. They know they’re not safe out there.”

“They wanted to use you as bait,” Anson said to me. “Now, they’re just running.”

“Running from what?”

“I’ll show you. It’s this way.”

As you might expect, casting darkness became the subject of intense study at the Winter Bureau, but without an amulet of their own and without the ability to cast darkness themselves, my colleagues’ efforts were largely confined to the theoretical, which left ample gaps for pure speculation. Someone supposed, for example, that if you spun suddenly in front of a mirror, you could catch a glimpse of a shrouded person or object in the reflection. Innumerable such tricks were passed from agent to agent, like old wives’ tales. I can’t remember most of them, nor do I expect any of them were true. When tested, looking glasses and scrying orbs all seemed to succumb equally to the effect. There was only one thing, in fact, that was able to penetrate the spell: cats’ eyes, perhaps because their owners were themselves ever half in darkness. But then, without an amulet, training the animals proved difficult, and although the Bureau made feline familiars available to every agent who wanted them, most hardly seemed to care what happened to their owners. Indeed, there were many who suggested they were in league with our enemies from the start.

Anson led us back into the main chamber of the furnace, which was quiet.

“Where is everyone?” Cerise asked.

“Gone,” he explained. “Without revenge to unite them, the confederation has splintered. Each has been left to go his own way.”

“They won’t last very long on their own,” I whispered.

“You and your ward have been given exile,” he told me.

In all other circumstances, it would’ve been a serious punishment.

“They left the beast in the triage room.”

Anson led us to the cut remains of a modular home, where a humanoid monstrosity had been dissected on a table.

“It’s awful,” I said.

It wore a hooded black robe, thin like a veil. Its body was wrapped tight in dark, woven straps, like a nylon mummy. Its face was covered in a white metal mask, etched with a swirling design, with eye holes and no mouth. It was much larger than an average person with a pair of insect-like, hinged appendages erupted from behind its shoulders. They were capped in flashy pads, like large oval suckers. Its chest had been sawed open, and it oozed. It was nothing like a normal corpse. There was little color, for one. Everything inside it was black or a red so dark it was closer to charcoal. I saw organs I didn’t recognize.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A slych,” Anson answered. “There is mention of them in Probin’s Bestiary. First created in the time of bondage, if the text is to be believed. Part shock trooper, part secret police. Permanently cast in darkness.”

“What do you mean secret police?”

He pointed. “The fleshy pads erupting from its back read the thoughts of anyone they touch, which of course you will never notice them doing.”

I walked around the table. “From where were they summoned?”

If we knew the realm, we would know how to send them back.

“It wasn’t,” Anson explained. “It didn’t come from the dark realms.”

“Okay . . .” Cerise raised her hand. “I realize I’m the only person here who doesn’t know this . . . but what do you mean by realms?”

“Other places,” Anson snapped. “That’s all it means. The realms of the cosmos are connected, like the pages of a book.” He picked one up an old clothbound hardback from a nearby workbench. The corners were curled from use. “When you’re reading it, you only see the open page. And that’s how our world seems. We see just what is going on now. But when the book is closed, all the pages are touching. You can get from page 30 to page 40 by reading all the lines between, but that’s the long way around. But it’s also only four very thin sheets apart. In absolute terms, there’s very little that separates any of the pages from any of the other pages.”

I pointed to the creature. “If this wasn’t summoned, where did it come from?”

“Nowhere,” Anson mocked. “It’s human. Or was.”

“Human?”

“Yes. Slychs are . . . modified.” He walked around the corpse and pointed. “The bone structure is different. They’ve changed things. Besides the additional limbs on the back, some of the long bones have been extended. Others have been shortened.” He pointed to the exposed central cavity. “You see that dark mass there, under the liver? It appears to be cancerous. It’s riddled with cancers, in fact.”

He walked to the head and removed the mask, which was attached to a helmet. It trailed strings of mucus. What was inside looked like rot. It was bulbous and uneven, as if growths were sprouting from everywhere. Some were soft. Other appeared bony. I covered my mouth.

“Inside the skull, or what’s left of it, as you can see, there appear to be nervous ganglia from three different species, including what looks an awful lot like a bat’s proprioception center. It sees by a kind of psychic echolocation.”

“That would explain how they can move in total dark,” I said. “And they wouldn’t be photosensitive. They can travel even in daylight.”

“Exactly.” He nodded.

With all the tumors in and around the skull, the bone was too porous to support anything, hence the need for the metal carapace. A buckled leather strap was bound to it. A long, sharp metal spike protruded perpendicular to the leather. Inserted under the jaw, it kept everything shut. But that meant the monster couldn’t speak. It couldn’t shout in pain or ask for help. The spike entered under the chin and penetrated all the way to the brain, like a persistent lobotomy.

I turned and walked to the door.

“Where are the eyes and ears?” Cerise asked, leaning closer to the face, or what was left of it.

“We buried them,” I heard him answer, “to be sure no one was watching or listening.”

We all looked at the corpse.

“How can we fight something like this,” Cerise asked, “if I’m the only one who can see it?”

I looked to Anson. “Where’s Etude? You saw him. Didn’t you? He came to you after the bistro burned.”

“He did. He knew my connections to the mizzen. The best people to smuggle him out of the city are those who smuggle everything in.”

“Where did they take him?”

“They didn’t. A meeting was arranged, but he never showed. I assumed the warlocks had gotten to him, same as everyone.”

“You mean he was betrayed.”

Anson didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to.

I had been chasing a phantom, following a dead end. I was no closer to finding him than I had been at the start.

I sighed and walked out of the room. I looked up at the roof of the massive furnace.

Anson came up behind.

“That’s why they destroyed the Barrows, isn’t it? You warned him it was a trap.”

“Oh, I think he expected it. He was quite clever, that chef of yours.”

I smiled at the old goblin, who only scowled.

“Dangerous for you to hang around,” I said.

“Well, I didn’t go back, if that’s what you mean. I knew what they would think.”

“I meant the mizzen.”

“Ah. Well. You’re the spy. You know how it goes. Have to maintain the ruse. If I run, then they know it was me, and I would be looking over my shoulder the rest of my life—which, as it happens, won’t be that long anyway.”

He held up a crutch.

“How?”

He nodded back to the slych. And to Cerise.

She had saved him.

I looked down at his wounds. “I’m sorry,” I said softly.

“Don’t be. Everything dies. Even the mountains and the seas. That is the way of things.”

“Except me,” I said.

“Nonsense. You’re just having a little more difficulty with it than most folks. That’s all. You’ll get the hang eventually.” With a heavy groan, he leaned to the side and reached into a vest pocket. “But that reminds me. I have something for you.”

“Me?”

He nodded. “He paid for passage with it.”

I stared. It was the Moirai penny.

He pushed it forward, but I refused. “If he gave it to you, then it’s yours.”

“Hardly! Taking this coin as payment for services never rendered is bad luck. I’ve had enough already, thank you very much.”

He pressed it into my palm and I ran my thumb over its smooth, faded surface.

Cerise joined us on the catwalk. “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”

“We were attacked,” I said. “We were watching our enemies so closely we didn’t keep an eye on our friends.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” Anson snapped, “that the seal on the sanctum was broken by an ally, not an adversary.”

“But . . . why?”

“A trick!” he said.

“What about Mr. Dench?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I’m sorry. After we set the bistro on fire, we split up. I’m afraid I didn’t get there in time.”

“But . . .” Cerise’s eyes welled. “He saved me,” she said finally. “He didn’t even know me. He just showed up and pulled me away.”

“It was his way.”

She walked away, and I watched her go.

I took a long, deep breath and followed. I sat down next to her. Our feet dangled over the side. Underneath us was a mini-universe.

“We were sleeping together,” I admitted.

Cerise turned to me.

“Benjamin and I,” I clarified. “The men in my life . . .” I paused. “I thought a man without a heart would be safe. I thought someone incapable of emotion, incapable of ever returning . . . anything, was a gift. A harbor in a sea of loss. Silly, really. Not that I was in love with him. Not as such. But it turns out I’m not nearly as heartless as he.”

“How did it happen? His heart, I mean.”

“How do such things usually happen? He bargained it away so he wouldn’t have to carry the burden it held. He asked a Santeria priestess, a woman named Josephine. Vile creature. Benjamin penetrated a swamp and circumambulated a knotted tree six and six and six times and spoke thrice a name. But we should all be careful what we wish for. A trade is a trade. Benjamin learned that Josephine intended to bargain in turn with a hellion, very much like the one once imprisoned here. For hellspawn, a human heart is like an infinite well of ink with which to write the suffering of men. With a heart, it could take human form. It could walk amongst us dripping evil. So it was, in shedding one tragedy, Benjamin found he had forged another.

“Eventually, he found Etude. I didn’t think he would take Benjamin’s case. Some wayward soldier. He turned so many away. But to my surprise, he did. And he found it, of course. The heart. The three of us came as the deal was being transacted. It was our first adventure together. The priestess Josephine had the organ sealed inside a baked-closed pot, but rather than face the great shaman, who’d come like lightning, she smashed it and leapt into a pyre with the heart in her hands. I remember she was laughing as she was engulfed in flame, like she knew it wasn’t over.

“Benjamin took it well, considering. I remember he just stood and looked at the blaze before turning and walking away. But then, he had no heart to break over the loss. Without it, he couldn’t feel, and without feelings of his own, his bereft body turned its machinery outward. He became hypersensitive to emotion, like the compensations of the blind. Before long, he could smell them. They all vexed him. Every kind. But it was love that bothered him most.” I smiled. “He said you reeked of it.”

“What does it smell like?”

“Everyone expects it to be floral scented, but Benjamin said no. He could never articulate it exactly, but I got the impression it was equal parts honey and bile. Knowing that by its scent my body might betray me to him turned me that much more cautious. I’m sure I seemed a horrible tease at times. Benjamin had no heart, but the rest of him was fully male, which was, I suspect, the worst part of his curse and yet another reason why we were so terribly needy of each other. What other woman would choose a lover who carries a cold stone in his chest in place of a heart?”

“Stone?”

“Etude put it there. To weigh him down. A heavy, round rock stolen from a river bed. A burden in place of a burden. Without it, he said, Benjamin would one day float out of the world, like a leaf on the breeze.”

“Burden?”

“The death of a child. Not his. Benjamin neither married nor had children. It was from his time as a soldier. In that way, he and I carried the same pain, which is what brought us together, I suppose.”

Cerise squinted in confusion.

“We’re both child-killers,” I whispered. “We both hoped Etude could save us. And here we are.”

“Is he dead?” she asked.

“I . . . I don’t know.” I looked at the coin in my hand. I ran my finger over it.

“So this is it?” she asked. “We’re done?”

But I didn’t have an answer for her.

She stood. She was agitated. “There has to be something we can do!”

“The only way to stop them is to destroy the book.”

“So, let’s do it.”

“What do you think Etude and I have been trying to do these last thirty years? We don’t even know where it is.”

“Well, someone has to!”

“There was one. Etude was sure he could figure it out, but—” I stopped.

I looked at the coin in my hand.

“Oh my God.”

“What?” she asked.

I stood. “Oh my God,” I repeated.

“WHAT?”

I ran to my bag. They were all there.

I laid all three items on the catwalk.

The coin.

The amulet.

The key.

“I hadn’t even considered it,” I said.

“Considered what?”

“I thought it was impossible. I hadn’t even considered it.” I looked at her. “I know what we’re going to do.”

By means that were never made clear, Etude had acquired a small cafe with a large, perfectly round door made of rough wood panels painted red. He called it Cafe Cinota, after the cenotes of the Yucatan—sinkhole wells that the Maya believed were doors to another world. The cafe was a door to a new world of cuisine, which the newly capitalist owner of the large yellow guest house across the courtyard resented. His customers—American tourists, Western European businessmen, the occasional Japanese salaryman—wanted croissants with marmalade, not maize-bread with cactus jelly. They wanted ghost tours and macabre Transylvanian lore, not bright Mayan decor and palm-leaf place mats. Of course, the locals wanted neither. They wanted a cheap place to drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and complain about the government. The cafe probably would’ve failed if it hadn’t been close to a university, which offered a small bohemian clientele.

Of course, being so close to the inn, the odd tourist naturally wandered in as well, particularly for breakfast, which they tried to the morning after our adventure in the mountains. I was woken by loud and very persistent banging. I thought my host would answer. After several minutes, when it was clear he would not, I sat up and stormed downstairs. The cafe was dark and empty. Outside, the balding and bulging proprietor of the inn was frantic. His guests wanted their morning coffee, which the innkeeper touted in his advertisements: Imported from Ecuador!

“Where is he?” the man asked in French.

His teal pants were at least two sizes too small, and despite that he wore no belt, he had tucked his white collared shirt into them all the same. The shirt had floral stitching. I saw him glance at my hands—at the marks. I can only imagine he thought Etude and I were part of the same cult, and I wondered then if he wouldn’t call the police. To prevent that, I thought I should beat him to the threat. I told him I had no idea where Etude was and if he didn’t cease with the noise, I would call the police immediately and make a complaint against him. Then I slammed the door and returned to bed.

But it was useless. By then, I couldn’t sleep. I washed and dressed and wandered to a nearby guest house, which had a terrace bar overlooking the narrow river. I bought a pack of cigarettes, despite that I hadn’t smoked in decades, and ordered some of the local wine. When half the pack was gone and the bottle empty, I asked for a telephone, which was brought to me on a long cord. I picked up the receiver and asked for the operator. It took several minutes of haggling in bad Romanian before I got through to Inspector Dragoș, who was somewhat surprised to hear from me—or so I could tell by the subtle chirp in his otherwise persistent deadpan. We greeted each other in Russian and I inquired after his wife and children as if we were old friends. I did not use my name in case his phone was tapped. He asked if I was okay, and I told him I was fine and that his “gift” was wonderful and had worked exactly as he had intended. I asked if he was free to speak and he said yes, albeit somewhat hesitantly, as if we should be careful what was said. I asked if the house we had once visited in Little Village was occupied and he said yes, which no doubt meant that all my belongings had been confiscated and the place thoroughly searched. I asked if he wouldn’t mind checking on an old friend, and he asked who without answering affirmatively. I gave him Etude’s name and suggested he call me back with whatever he could find, but he said there was no need and that there was bad news, that Interpol had been to all the police stations in the region, and that there was a WANTED notice hanging in all of them with that name below a picture of a bald man. Then I thanked him for his time, and he told me not to mention it.

“Milanova,” I said to him.

“Excuse me?”

“You wanted to know my name.”

He was quiet for a moment, and I explained that I owed him a debt, and that if he ever needed my help, I would do what I could. He said he understood and we made our goodbyes. I hung up the phone and kept my hand on the receiver a moment. I dialed, hesitating for a long moment on the last spin of the rotor.

It rang and Beltran’s secretary answered. It took a few minutes to convince her who I was.

“Mila?” I heard him say finally. “My God, is it really you? Where are you? I will come. Are you on the moon? I will fly there on the night breeze.”

“Beltran, I . . .”

I was taken aback by the sound of his voice. Immediately, I regretted the call. He sounded so old. It wasn’t how I remembered him. It wasn’t how I wanted to remember him. In my mind, he was ever vigorous and tall, a young bear in a high hat. But the man on the other end of the line was in the waning years of his life, and that made me sad, for it meant one day soon, I would live in a world without him. I felt tears. I had been his wife for as long as I could. I couldn’t anymore, but I still loved him.

“Mila, where are you?” he asked. “Are you in trouble? You must tell me.”

“No. Well . . . maybe. I’m not sure.”

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Beltran. Did something happen to me?”

“What do you mean?”

“In Siberia. Did something happen to me?”

There was a long silence.

“Where are you?” he repeated.

“Please just answer the question. Did something happen to me or not?”

“I have never spoken of it,” he said softly, “if that’s what you are asking.”

“I’m not. I’m asking what happened there. What do you know? What did I tell you?”

There was another long pause.

“I know it sounds odd, darling. Please, just—”

“Mila, what did you do?”

“I—” I stopped.

“What did you do?”

I knew that voice. I hung up the phone.

After the Wall Street crash of 1929, which saw most of their wealth disappear, our enemies fell to the brink. They were desperate, and through the ’30s, began to plot war as their final solution. After the fighting was over, thinking peace was upon us, Hank and I retired for a time. He married Nancy Willard, his childhood sweetheart, and started a family—a bit late for fatherhood, perhaps, but I was happy for him. I visited the couple at their home in Chicago whenever I could, but I never stayed long. Although she was only ever polite to me, Nancy was a straightforward woman from the middle of the continent and didn’t quite know what to make of her husband’s relaxed, casual joking with a foreign woman who always dressed sharply and who never seemed to grow a wrinkle. Rather than create trouble for my friend, I kept my visits brief and always withdrew without warning, as if to underline what an irresponsible person I was. Truth be known, seeing the happy couple and their young children stirred something in me that I hadn’t felt before. I did my best to ignore it.

As it happened, our parting was brief. Hank and I were revived by The Masters in the middle of the century. After conventional warfare had failed and their forces scattered in secret, Hitler’s sponsors turned to more directly occult mechanisms. Casting darkness—which is to say hiding objects or people in plain sight—had always required an experienced warlock, someone with the necessary skill to perform the ritual, as well as the Book of the Nameless itself, known in wider circles as the Necronomicon, from which the spell emanated. As such, our focus in the war shifted from elimination of the book—which had eluded The Masters since its rediscovery in the 19th century—to the elimination of the senior warlocks such that there would not be enough of them to use it effectively. The warlocks distrusted each other almost as much as they distrusted us, which meant very few of them were ever allowed to set eyes on its pages—an edge we exploited. Our unity was our strength, or so we were told.

But after the open conflict ended, everything changed. A Spanish warlock named Zaragoza, an acolyte of Rasputin and one-time adviser to General Franco, developed the means to imbue the power of the book within specially designed objects—amulets, mostly—such that they could cast the wearer in darkness indefinitely and without need of a talented magician. Suddenly, agents of the dark, though depleted in number, could move about in secret as never before, completely invisible to the Great Eye. Almost overnight, half of my colleagues were murdered in their beds, along with their families—including many children. At once, finding and destroying the book again became our organization’s singular mission.

As the surviving members of the Winter Bureau reassembled in a secret chamber, families in tow, I remember asking the aged Master Crowley why we had ever stopped seeking it. I suppose I was becoming disillusioned. I was starting to understand why it was The Masters had been so long unable to deliver the warlocks a knockout blow. They were too much like them. Still, leaving America to join the fight was convenient for me. I had no family to protect, and my adoptive home was becoming ever more hostile to anyone of Russian ancestry. But I begged Hank to stay. He was then past 50, and I tried to impress upon him the immense value of what he had. But then, one would sooner convince the tides to stop turning than Henry Hunter to forgo his duty, and after seeing Nancy and the children placed safely into hiding, once again we were off.

It wasn’t the same. Hank was heavier and grayer and used to life as a suburban father and teacher, and our enemies were desperate and vicious and nimble as never before. On our second mission, we met young Beltran, gregarious and cocksure. He kissed my hand wearing an amulet of steel and obsidian, and of course that fur hat that made him seem ten feet tall. He was barely twenty, and I laughed. We met him again a few years later when he was our contact in Turkey on the fateful trip that saw the gray-haired Dr. Hunter shot by Zaragoza himself.

“Stupid, stupid man,” I chided as I frantically tried to stop the blood from pouring from his chest. It covered his shirt and my hands and the floor.

We were in the back of a truck which shook violently back and forth as young Beltran, behind the wheel, weaved at speed through traffic to secure our escape.

“I know,” Hank said, smiling up at me. “Mila, don’t tell Nancy—”

They were his last words.

Some part of me died with Professor Henry Hunter. I realized then that in time, the rest of me would die as well—all the parts that mattered, anyway—and in 10,000 years, I would walk the world a zombie. Or worse, as a wicked thing who cared nothing for the mortal ants around her. I wanted desperately to deliver Hank’s body to his wife in person, but I was denied entry at the border. Now a superpower, almost against its will, America was beginning its long turn away from the freedom of its youth. It’s still turning.

Within days of Hank’s death, I was given new orders: an urgent mission, an impossible mission, one that made it clear both how desperate we were and how expendable I was, even to the point of damnation. Young Beltran, who had taken charge of Hank’s body out of sheer respect for the man, warned me not to accept, just as I had warned Hank. Standing on passenger liner, looking out at the Statue of Liberty, I told him I was going to do it, but not for The Masters. Nor even for the world. I would do it for my friend, because that’s what he would’ve wanted. I never saw Nancy or the children again.

Winter of the following year, haggard and alone, I rode a train through the Urals. It was quite possibly the defining moment of my long life, the fulcrum on which it all balanced. I traveled under a fake identity and didn’t dare leave my locked compartment. In my case I carried the most wanted item in the entire world. The most wanted item in the history of the world.

A book.

A book that never should’ve been written.

I was rushing to meet Beltran, who, against my prohibitions, had followed me as far as he could and had acted as my handler and lone contact. Although our communication was minimal, he was my sole tether to the world of men. When I fled, it was unexpected and without warning. The enemy had suffered a surprise attack. A young Lakota shaman named John Tenfeathers, acting on his own courage, had crossed the shadow realm on foot to open a secret front at the enemy’s rear. In the ensuing chaos, I stole the book and tried to cross the battle, but being confused for a warlock, was attacked by my own people. I fled. Beltran was my closest ally, but he was very far away. I wasn’t sure I could reach him. If I failed and was captured, I would be damned to an infinity of pain. But hearing of the attack, Beltran had traveled straight to the enemy’s fortress, the Handred Keep, at great risk to himself. Impossibly, he was waiting for me on the platform of a little station south of the Urals. As I stepped down from the train, shaking and emaciated, I broke into tears at the sight of him. All Hell was at our footsteps. Thunder cracked at the horizon, which was dark as if at the approach of a violent storm.

Mr. Morgan was right, or so it seemed. I hadn’t settled in Little Village by accident. Apparently, I’d had a plan. I needed a way to move about undetected. Something had happened to me in Siberia, inside the Handred Keep—something so terrible, I wanted to blot it from my mind. So I conspired to steal my own memories. I suspect a normal person would’ve simply killed themselves, but without the ability, I had had to find other means. In so doing, I had drawn attention. Mr. Morgan was clearly looking to exploit my precarious relationship with my ex-husband to unseat him and take his place among the seven. What that had to do with the strange young man I had met, or his mysterious quest, I didn’t know, but it seemed the answer lay buried in the forest of forgetting, and that if I was going to free myself from Mr. Morgan’s trap—and avoid a return to Everthorn—I would have to deliver it, whatever it was, to Beltran. That meant, first, helping my young friend find it, and then betraying him to the Bureau.

I needed a plan, and that meant I needed to know who this young fellow was. I left the bar and walked through the town center, where several of the streets were still paved with stones. I visited the red-roofed cathedral, which was quaint but beautiful. I lit a candle and said a prayer. After a long silence, I exited out the back and wandered across the square, where I lingered and turned about enough that I was confident I wasn’t being followed. I told a stranger my purse had been stolen and asked where I could find the police station, which I surmised would not be far from the church and nearby bank. They never are. I was right, and five minutes hence, I was staring at the police community billboard. It hung near the hall to the single unisex toilet, whose aquamarine door had a frosted glass pane at the top that made it possible to see the ghost movements of the occupant. Etude’s picture hung in black and white next to the announcement of an upcoming change to the hunting laws. New licenses were in effect, it seemed, and of course new fees as well.

There were few surveillance cameras in those days, especially in former Eastern Bloc countries, and I snagged the notice when no one was looking and walked out. With the help of a waiter at a cafe, I was able to translate most of it. Information was sparse, but it said Etude, a young man of 21 years, was “believed to be acting in the country,” and that he was a Satanist, a known practitioner of the black arts, and therefore “highly dangerous.” It warned that he was wanted for questioning in France in connection with “serious” but unspecified crimes. It gave his vital statistics and mentioned that he could be readily identified by his most distinguishing feature: tribal marks on his hands.

I looked at my own. I rubbed them together, as if the marks might come off.

I returned to the cafe just before dark, expecting to find my young friend there, but he was still missing without so much as a note. I made myself dinner and fell asleep reading. I was awoken by a large clatter. I grabbed a rug beater, which was the closest thing I could find to a weapon, and crept down the stairs in the dark. But it was only Etude.

“Where have you been?” I demanded.

He looked up innocently. His face reflected the light from the burner on the stove, and I realized he was so used to coming and going as he pleased that it simply hadn’t occurred to him to say anything, and so there was equally no point in getting mad. He wouldn’t have understood it. That early, I didn’t have the energy anyway.

“What are you doing?”

He had heated a vat of viscous amber, the color of dark beer, and was removing small quantities of it with a glass pipette.

I leaned closer. It smelled sweet. “Is that honey?”

“Yes,” he said again. “This is for you.”

“For me?”

I watched him dribble the amber liquid onto small dipping plates. “What is it?”

Cemeteries, he explained, have flowers. Lots of flowers. Some are cultivated in the landscaping. Others are brought cut and placed on stones and markers. All of them grow out of death—at least symbolically, if not literally as well. He had discovered a hive whose bees were dining on funerary flowers and cemetery growth and returned that morning with nearly a liter of honey that he had harvested at the witching hour the night before. “The Nectar of Death” he called it as he dribbled some from the end of the glass pipette. He served it to his guests that morning drizzled in espresso and brushed over fresh-baked maize-bread. Then he watched his guests through the window of the kitchen the way a wolf watches a hen through a fence.

“What are we looking for?” I asked.

“I have no idea.”

I looked at the unsuspecting patrons. I watched a plump German tourist with a sore at the side of her lip shove the last bite of buttery, honey-glazed croissant into her mouth. I watched a businessman from Bucharest in a snug V-neck dip his finger into the tiny porcelain pitcher in which the honey had been served and scoop the last drops into his mouth. He wiped the finger across his pursed lips with his eyes closed, like it was morphia.

“Well, what usually happens?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said with a curious scowl as he scribbled in his notebook. “No one has before made such a thing.”

He was reckless even then.

“With a curse as strong as yours,” he explained, “we must break new ground. We start with exposure to a concentrated sap of death.” He kept scribbling. “We will put it under an air hood until it reduces to a solid crystal.”

“And then?”

“You will eat it!” he exclaimed.

I turned back to the restaurant. “And what about them?”

He looked up. “A lawyer, two bourgeois tourists, a professor with his vapid mistress, three advertising men, and a French communist. If you can point to a single one who isn’t already dead inside, I shall rush to prepare an antidote!”

I looked back at the little dining room with the brightly painted windows. “They’re not going to . . .”

He scribbled in his notebook and raised an eyebrow. “Doubtful. Not with such a small quantity. I suspect at most a slight stupor, like an elixir of nightshade. Or Ulysses and the lotus.”

He looked up again and scanned the room with the penetrating gaze. The plump German did seem a bit listless. Her eyes fluttered.

“But I could be wrong,” he whispered. He picked up his notebook as if annoyed and walked toward the back. “Let me know promptly if any of them start raving about a knight.”

“A knight?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

“There is an apparition that haunts this place. If any of our patrons begin to succumb to the stupor of death, then the dead will appear to them.” He turned again for the back.

“How can be sure they’ll say anything?”

He called to me from the down the hall. “The poor wretch drags his innards across the floor like a sack of potatoes. I’m quite sure they’ll mention it!”

He was up early again the next day. He burst into my room well before the dawn.

“HA!” he yelled from my swinging door, which hit the wall with a crack.

I snapped awake.

“It was a trick! But I have seen. Come. We have work.”

I looked at the clock. “It’s nearly four in the morning.”

But he had already retreated down the stairs to the kitchen. I decided he was, if not a charlatan, then the most dedicated dabbler I had yet met. I was used to respectable and bespectacled men who didn’t contemplate the occult before their mid-morning pipe. I washed my face and slipped on my dress and came down the stairs to a great clatter. The stove was ablaze. I thought he was going to set the whole building on fire. And he almost did.

He’d had a dream, he explained, but wouldn’t say what. “The Chinese ancients were geomancers of enduring grace and skill.” And then, “a riddle and a riddle! But I have the key.”

Half an hour passed that way. He asked nothing of me, and I wasn’t sure why I was there. I sat with my head propped on my arm as he mixed earth with a tincture of mercury. My elbow grew cold from the steel counter and the chill crept up my arm. My eyes began to droop.

“HA!” He yelled at me with one finger raised.

I sat up and sighed. “I don’t know how you expect me to stay awake in the middle of the night. At least have the decency to brew some tea.”

I looked around the kitchen for evidence of where he kept the French presses. It was quiet, like the grave, and I remembered what he had said earlier about the knight. I pulled my shawl tighter.

“How do you know there’s an apparition?” I asked.

“My eyes were opened many years ago,” he said.

I’m sure I rolled my own. “That’s a boast. Not an answer.”

He turned from his twisting fire. He reached a hand to his face and stretched one eyelid. He showed it to me. Then he stretched the other. There were narrow scars across the top of both, near the sockets, extending almost, but not quite, the full width of the tissue. Whoever had cut them had left them attached, but only just.

He went back to his work.

“I don’t understand. Is that supposed to mean they were cut?”

He spoke softly without turning. “By the same man who washed my scalp clean of hair with water of lime. Who pressed barbed hooks into my fingertips until the nails lifted. Who pierced my chest with a long slender spike made from the seed pod of the a’htuai tree, whose roots run deep and whose branches touch the sky. He who was my master.”

“How old were you?”

“Seven,” he said without turning. “A most auspicious year.”

“Seven? Someone cut your eyelids and stuck barbs under your fingernails when you were seven years old? Who would do such a thing?”

“A man of great conviction.” His voice grew. “Who cared deeply for his people. It was an act of mercy.”

“It was an act of torture.”

“Not mercy for me,” he explained. “For those we served. It was necessary so that I could perform the duties for which I had been chosen. So I could call upon the great spirit to bless us. So that evil would be driven from our midst. So that the sick would become well and the community prosper. The eyes must be cut open,” he explained as he worked, “so that they may see the shades and shadows that prey on the weak and sinful. The head must be cleansed so that the thinking is clear and the mask and headdress become extensions of the body, without impediment. The fingertips must be barbed so that they can grasp the soul and drag it away to be cleansed, and return it whole. The heart must be pierced so it remains always open to the suffering of my neighbors, whom I would be called upon to heal.”

“So what happened?” I meant it as a jab.

Rather than jab back at me, as I expected him to, he acknowledged my observation of his cool, almost callous nature, and agreed. “Ah. Yes. The spike of a’htuai never reached my heart,” he said. “It snapped inside my sternum.” He turned to me again and touched the center of his chest. “It is still there. Under the skin. If you would like to feel.”

I declined.

Etude was always afflicted. To me, he always seemed bent, half in and half over the world, as if God had reached down and twisted him in space. He never fit. Anywhere. After his adoptive parents removed him to France, he was by all accounts universally reviled—by his teachers, by his classmates, by the French authorities, for whom he remained insufferably arrogant and insistently foreign. Because of his patent skill with ingredients and concoctions, he was given early admittance to a prestigious cooking school in Paris when he was only half past 16. I think madame et monsieurÉtranger cared for him as best they could but by then needed to be rid of him, for their own sake. What strange anomalies an angry, sulking, 14-year-old Etude summoned into their home, I can only imagine. Sending him to cooking school was a way to get him out of the house and to discharge their duty to supply him with an occupation. He excelled, of course, though he never graduated. He was ejected after 22 months.

It will be difficult for some people to hear, I’m sure, but cooking was only ever his hobby. It’s how the world knows him, but he saw it only as a distraction from his serious work, a way for him to make his way in a world that had no use for a shaman.

I sat in the kitchen and watched him douse the pillar of fire on the stove. As the steam and smoke cleared, a metal pot appeared. It was square and heavy and tinted copper green. It had a single handle but stood on four legs. The corners were round and the exterior was carved in shapes from the Shang Dynasty. Every tip and angle glowed red hot. It had been completely consumed by flame. Etude lifted it with heavy tongs and set it aside. Then he hung the tongs from a pot hook and leaned back. He didn’t speak. He just looked far, far away.

“The old man was shocked,” he said softly. He touched his chest again. His palms were still bare for his mark still adorned my own. “Even when the signs are clear, still we won’t accept them.”

I waited.

“I never knew she who bore me. There were signs. At my birth. When a shaman grows old, the Great Spirit sends his replacement and marks the coming. I came very late and my master was very old indeed. He had been looking for the signs for many years. For a time, I think he despaired that the knowledge would be lost. But one day, I came, and after I was weaned, I was taken from my mother to his home in the earth, far from the village, near where the jaguar dwelt. To me, he was father and mother, master and guide. He taught me everything, all he knew. When I was seven, he cut my eyes and washed away my hair. When the a’htuai seed snapped, he just looked at it in his hand. It had cut him as well, and he bled. The tip was lodged in my chest, and I writhed by the fire. Screaming in tongues. He said he had to consult our ancestors and left me to wail for many hours until I passed out from pain. When he returned, he said nothing of it. He cleaned what he could and bandaged my wound. And then the ceremony was done.”

There was a long pause.

“After that, he was never warm with me again. He was only teacher. Never lord.”

I frowned. So many of people today look back and see only the oppression of aristocracy. But a good lord was also a mighty servant of his people.

“Does it ever hurt?”

He reached for the tongs again with a weak smile. “It never stopped.”

I’m still not sure if he meant the shard or the old man’s change.

“Is that why you left?” I asked.

He smiled as if hiding a great pain. “No. At my thirteenth birthday, I was required to spend a year in the jungle alone. To prove I had mastered the skills required to serve my people. When I returned, the land was scorched.” He paused. “The Sacred Tree was cut down. As were all the others.”

“Loggers?”

CRACK!

I jumped when the lid of the metal pot popped open. It hit the ceiling and fell to the floor with a clatter. So much steam bellowed that I lost sight of the young chef, nor could I hear him over the loud bubbling. The liquid was still boiling. As the cloud parted, I saw Etude dunk the tongs into the scalding fluid, whose frothing bubbles rolled with all the colors of the rainbow, and what he returned glinted like sunlight between the serrated metal teeth. It seemed a giant diamond—oblong and uncut.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A jewel of many colors.”

“What does it do?”

“Now, nothing. But when carved, it will become a prism that refracts light from that which cannot be seen.” He put it inside a lead box waiting to one side. “It must be carved before the sun’s first rays strike it. Come. There is much to do before the dawn!”

The train rocked as it slowed and the picture in my hand rocked with it. My finger traced the line of blood that splattered across the scattered feathers, all of which had been cut by something very sharp. The train lurched hard and the photo fell. I bent to pick it up as the conductor announced over the speakers that we would be arriving soon at Penn Station. People rose from their seats and gathered their belongings. No one seemed to be paying attention to me. It felt strange being back in New York, much stranger than I expected. It had only been a few months, but already it seemed like someone else’s city, a place I had visited once and remembered both terribly and fondly but which had since gone on without me. That feeling grew as I left the relative safety of the enclosed train car, full of witnesses, and stepped onto the bustling platform. The confrontation on the lawn of Harrowood House had been designed, if not to capture me, then at least to provoke me from my hiding place. I couldn’t put Annie or Martin in any more danger. And yet, from the moment I left the protections of the Hywrod family and their ghosts to the moment I found Etude, I would be in imminent danger.

Construction in some distant part of the station had limited the number of women’s toilets to a dangerous minimum, and after waiting a small eternity, a bathroom stall finally opened and I went inside and locked the door behind me. I balanced my luggage on the seat cover, popped the latches, and removed the etched lead case from inside. The object it carried was exactly as I remembered. It had been preserved in the basement of the inverted shadow of Harrowood House, and it was neither dusty nor tarnished. It was an amulet on a woven metal collar. A dark violet crystal dangled at the center of a black disc carved in a writhing, slithering mass, like worms or snakes or eels. It hung not from a chain but from the tip of a teardrop-shaped collar made of interlocking brass. The collar’s intricate, woven design—like a sinister Celtic flourish—was hinged to curl down. It was made to be draped heavy over the shoulders such that the points underneath, like dull spokes, pressed hard through clothing to the skin. No magician had ever confirmed it for me—I dared tell no one I had such a thing—but I suspected the collar collected the pain it caused and directed it to the amulet and so powered the spell embedded in the tiny etchings in the crystal, which you could see if you raised it very close to your eye.

It was an amulet of Zaragoza, which I had stolen from the Handred Keep. As with all of its type, it cast its wearer in darkness and as such was key to my escape from that place. I removed it from the box and draped it over me. The discomfort was immediate. I tried shifting my shoulders, which helped not at all. Other than the pain, I felt no different wearing it. But I knew well the side effect of being cast in darkness and what would slowly overtake me if I indulged the amulet for very long. Anger first. Later, fear. Eventually, despair. And then madness. Those feelings accumulated slowly, and yet, like radiation poisoning, took two or three times as long to dissipate. Anyone who wore an amulet of Zaragoza for days or weeks on end—as many warlocks had while hiding in desperation after the war—eventually destroyed themselves.

I draped the straps of my purse over the handle of the suitcase and walked to the center of the busy station and stood. People moved back and forth all around me, but none approached. They didn’t even look at me. No one bumped into me either. It was as if I occupied a dead space in the world. I stuck out my hand and a woman walked around it without raising her eyes from her phone, as if she could sense me without being aware. It was fantastic to witness, and I repeated the exercise twice more before I saw an otherwise kindly-looking elderly woman step out of the ladies’ room and scan the crowd with a scowl. It was a glammer, I was sure. There was no telling what she, or he, actually looked like. I watched as her eyes passed right over me.

Despite the name, the casting of darkness does not make one dark, nor invisible. Rather, it is an obfuscation of the mind. The bearer is neglected, unnoticed, even in broad daylight, but only to the degree the fight or flight response is not aroused. That is, if those cast in darkness move very suddenly, make a loud noise, or attack, those around will become briefly aware, like the flash of a strobe. Otherwise, one is completely obscured—with one exception. Since the warlock Zaragoza distrusted his subordinates as much as his enemies, he designed his amulets such that two wearers in proximity would always be obliquely aware of one another, even though neither would ever be fully revealed. It was, I suspect, Zaragoza’s means of avoiding assassination at the hands of his own invention without diminishing its efficacy in the war. And it worked. The Winter Bureau never devised a countermeasure.

As I walked swiftly and unimpeded even through the crisscrossing crowd, the spokes of the collar pressed my skin, which made keeping a brisk pace somewhat painful. I couldn’t imagine trying to run with the thing. It was made, it seemed, for skulking and thievery, and I was all too happy to remove it after zigzagging across several city blocks. Confident I was no longer being followed, I returned it to my handbag and hailed a cab. I changed taxis twice before leaving my luggage at a hotel in midtown and taking the subway to Brooklyn. It was a dangerous risk—Etude would say a sentimental one. But I had to see what remained of Bistro Indigenes. Little, as it turned out, just an open pit and part of the old brick facade, which the city had mandated be saved and which now stood by itself, held aloft by high metal piers. A sign on the fence announced another corporate whole foods store would soon arrive. An ignominious end. Not that Etude was ever Michelin-starred.

People on the fringes of the industry, foodies and the well-to-do mostly, were always surprised to hear it. “Oh wow,” they would say. “Really? Well, it’s all political, right?” But I can tell you with absolute certainty that if the dons in Paris had ever slouched their way to the bistro—which none ever did—if they had ever stooped to awarding Etude a single star, he would’ve shut it all down. In an instant. He did as much with the Cirque, which could have made him wealthy, if he had cared of such things. Not that he lived poorly. But he was never motivated by the need for more than what was necessary for his aims. Indeed, on its first few stops, the Cirque was barely noticed, even in the local press. It wasn’t until the unfortunate incident with the flaming magpies that the world of fine cuisine was aware of Etude’s existence. And it wasn’t toward the very end of it all that the food critic at Le Monde even bothered to trash it as the worst kind of showy nonsense. The following year, the critic at The Times, seeking to distinguish herself from her rival across the Channel, used not-completely derogatory adjectives in her perfunctory coverage, appended at the end of two other reviews, one for a new chip shop. She stopped short of praising the Cirque in any way, choosing instead to label it “experimental,” “a notable effort.”

To Etude, it was a sign that the world was catching up, that he needed to quicken his pace, and within moments of reading the article, he began plotting the Dégoûter Gastronomique, which saw half his guests vomit before it was ended prematurely by the American authorities. And that was it. But the existence then of the internet insured none of it would ever really die, and the incident with the vomiting insured that, after we decided to set down roots, after we opened Bistro Indigenes, we would be continually scrutinized—harassed, even—by those very same authorities, who joined The Times and Michelin and the rest in the belief that everything Etude did in the kitchen wasn’t legitimate chefery, that it never rose above “antics.”

And you know what? They were right.

It never did.

It was, all of it, a big show, a sleight-of-hand to keep everyone’s attention from what we were really doing—traversing the globe, chasing the book, doing things that would make no sense to the modern world otherwise, such as cultivating rare herbs and insects. The giant cockroaches that had so incensed Dr. Waxman brought a citation and heavy fine from the Department of Health. But throughout the incident and subsequent lawsuit, not a single person ever asked why he needed them. Not once. It was just assumed to be part of his “antics,” his “experimental,” “just-for-show” cooking. No one considered they were meant to consume an ancient carrion ghoul, which could be destroyed no other way.

That strategy, of using a restaurant as both a cover and a source of income, started in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, on our first adventure together. But now, nothing remained of that life. Bistro Indigenes existed only as an absence, a square hole in the ground.

Feeling something incredible well up inside me, I didn’t linger but made my way immediately to The Barrows, which had fared no better. The front door was ripped away. The subterranean interior was dark, with only dim, pale light reflected off shards of broken glass. By it, I could see that everything was twisted and broken. The entire shop had been wrung like a wet rag. The cracked cabinets and hardwood slats turned over each other in a spiral, as if the ends of the room had been twisted in opposite directions by giant hands. There were shards of broken glass everywhere, and several of the splintered planks and shelf boards were turned up every which way like snaggled teeth. After stepping wide to avoid one, my foot fell on something hard and flat and unforgiving and I stopped suddenly and nearly lost my balance. I knelt to examine the object, which caused the amulet’s collar to shift slightly, and I grimaced as it spokes slid across my skin. The object underfoot was hard and flat—cast iron, it seemed—and cool to the touch. I ran my hand around it and found square edges. I tried to lift it, but it was heavy and I had to shift my stance before I could try again. With a grunt, I heaved it up to catch the faint light. There were crisscrossing footprints on the heavy plaque. It looked like soot had been scuffed loose by the sharp letters chiseled in the metal:

THE BARROWS
         Est. 1676 (A.D.)

REINTERRED 1848
at this location with
Generous Donations from
THE ROEBLING FAMILY
& H. Morton Ramsay & Sons
& Eleanor Peas

I had known one of the sons of H. Morton Ramsay—a grandson, actually. He was H. Morton Ramsay III, who introduced himself as Mr. H on the day I found him sitting in my living room. The Winter Bureau hadn’t yet been founded in those days and each of The Masters maintained their own, often competing network of informants. Mr. H worked for Master Thrangely, who was a prodigious hunter and was said to have tasted the flesh of every animal that walked, swam, or flew. His offices in Cairo were fully adorned with the taxidermied remnants of his numerous hunting expeditions, and he could summon them to life when needed. Mr. H told me that the world had recently become imperiled and that I was thought to be useful in a struggle. Against whom, he wouldn’t say. When I suggested I wasn’t interested, he made it clear that he knew I had committed numerous crimes in my time with the mizzen. Furthermore, in India I had spent many years in the employ of a known heretic. I was given 24 hours and encouraged not to refuse. He told me to meet him at The Barrows, which was then very different—sophisticated, urbane, a place for the highest of magical society to gather.

But now it, too, was gone, strangled to death around me. That’s what they’d done. They’d strangled knowledge, wrung the place dry of it. Out of a sheer sinking sadness, my fingers loosed the heavy plaque, which hit the ground with a loud thud and sent several shards and splinters into the air. I realized my mistake immediately. As soon as the plaque had left my hands, it had been freed from the amulet’s spell, and whatever noise it made could be noticed. But the force of the fall had knocked a small object into flight. A feather. A colorful plume of a bird of paradise flew into the air and then settled slowly down. I caught it in my hand. Benjamin was right. Etude had been here. He had carried his battle garb with him when he left.

There was a slight clink behind me then and I turned. It was still dark, but it certainly seemed as if someone had knocked loose a piece of glass. I heard a step to one side, as if I had just been passed. I grabbed a shard of glass and listened. But all I heard was the rush of my own heart in my ears. I was obliquely aware someone or something was in the room with me, but I couldn’t detect a single trace, which meant that they were cast in darkness as well. Whatever creature had come to Harrowood House, it seemed there were more of them. The interloper and I circled each other like submarines at depth, and I was terrified I would step into the point of a knife.

I withdrew. I ran at first but stopped after three strides due to the pain of the collar and instead walked as briskly as I was able. It wasn’t until I reached traffic noise and daylight that I noticed the dark smudges on my hands. They were black and powdery, like ash. I wiped them on my dark jeans and didn’t think anything else about it until I caught a whiff of my fingers. The scent was faint but unmistakable: burnt sulfur. Brimstone. But it was very weak. Fresh brimstone is potent, which is why absolutely everyone mentions it when it hits their nose. It’s impossible not to. The scent on my hands, however, had all but faded, which meant the brimstone was very old indeed.

That night, under cover of darkness, I watched as men with flashlights searched my dummy lodging across the street. I had checked in as Milan Roman and left enough old clothes from Annie and Martin’s attic to make it look like I was coming back. Then I paid cash for a second room in a hi-rise hotel across the street, where I was Annette Dunlop. I had no idea how they found me, but there was no shortage of spies in the city. It was the only warning I would get that I was indeed being hunted and the longer I stayed, the more likely it was that I would be captured.

I slept poorly. I had deliberately limited my use of the amulet, but even such a short exposure gave me horrible nightmares. In the shower, I noticed that my fingers still smelled of it.

“Brimstone.”

Someone had tracked it into The Barrows, which meant it was caked on their boots. But the smell was faint, which meant it was very old. I knew of a place, a hidden place, that was once filled with very old brimstone.

I left my hotel through the service exit and took a taxi to the East River bike path, which followed the water line under the bridge on the Manhattan side. The wind off the river was stiff and cold, and I walked briskly, glancing behind me periodically, while I scanned the fence for some evidence of an entrance. I saw nothing. After passing back and forth under the Brooklyn Bridge, I stopped and looked up at its iconic tower, rising like a monument to industry. The caissons for the bridge had required excavation of the riverbed, just as the anchorages did of the shore. The west side of the Brooklyn Bridge was dug much deeper than the east, and for a very specific reason. They were burying something. I was just then standing over it. But I didn’t know how to get in. The riverfront had completely changed since the era of carriages and gaslight. The tangle of overpasses that now connected the bridge with the FDR Parkway were crammed with traffic, which made it a very bad place to have a secret entrance to anything. There must be another way in.

Like most cities, New York was built on the remnants of its own past. Unlike most cities, I had been there often enough to observe it. The very first subway line, which opened shortly after I arrived from London, included a beautiful station directly under City Hall, complete with chandeliers and arches decorated in colorful tiles. It was closed after the war, as were the local platforms of the nearby Brooklyn Bridge Station, which I had used many times in my first years in America. But the express platforms of the station were still in operation, and after waiting for the cover of a departing train, I forced my way through a maintenance door which now blocked the passage to the unused sections. From there, I could make it to the derelict tracks. A wall-mounted camera caught me, but I would be gone before anyone could arrive to stop me.

From the silent tracks, I found a small tunnel that turned back toward the river, and I followed it to the caisson. But there was no light down there, which required I keep a hand on the wall for balance as I stepped over dust-blanketed debris. There was an old pallet on the ground, and as I stepped over it, it splintered, with nothing but a hole underneath.

I fell down a steeply sloped shaft for several seconds before hitting still water hard. Without balance or footing, I was confused and struggled to find the surface, even as bubbles rose around me. My handbag sank. I saw it disappear with the amulet into the dark. I inhaled sewer water, which was the shock I needed to force myself upward. I coughed and struggled for breath the moment I felt air and gradually pulled myself, wet and sopping, onto a concrete platform. I had landed in a pool that filled the irregular base of a large, vaguely dome-shaped space, although no two sides of it were the least bit symmetrical. Light fell from a single round shaft, high at the top, which suggested an exit to the surface—a vent of some kind to equilibrate pressure between the sewer and the atmosphere above. But resting as it did twenty feet above the surface of the water, there was no way to reach it. The rest of the room was almost LEGOlike in its construction. Various block protrusions and brick platforms of different heights, each dating from a different era of construction, stuck out at angles. Water dribbled from small open pipes. Larger ones zigzagged up and down between the platforms.

I sat up and brushed my hands, and what I thought were pebbles fell free from my palms. But they were not pebbles. They were bones. Tiny bones. They were everywhere, especially at the margins of the irregular space, where they gathered like cobwebs. Thousands. I stood and listened, which was when I heard a slight chime. A hinged bar stretched in front of the hole through which I had fallen. It was attached to a string that dangled half a dozen cowbells—a makeshift alarm. Someone—or something—was alerted to my presence. I climbed to the highest platform, hoping for a quick exit. I found a manhole at the back, but it was too heavy for me even to budge. There was a low arched grate across the water to my left, but after scampering down to it quickly, jumping across a gap between platforms, I found it solidly locked. I sighed and looked around. It seemed to me then that the space was a kind of hub, a meeting point of several paths, for at least four separate conveyances converged there: the gate, the manhole, the gap above, and a small grate near the base through which foul water ran. I suspected there were yet more hidden in the shadows. It was the hub of a web.

I glanced again to the bells hanging in a string from the ceiling. “I need to get out of here,” I said in a whisper.

I was in a nest—almost certainly the home of a vorviggen, sometimes called a maze master, a distant relative of the troll which had adapted much better to urban life than its mountain-dwelling cousin. In their behavior, maze masters were somewhat like hermit crabs in that they preferred to adopt ready-built “mazes,” which included anything even remotely mazelike: dense copses, junkyards, abandoned asylums, and so on. There they would gradually make modifications, like a beaver to a dam, that made it easier for the random wayward traveler to get lost inside. In my time with the mizzen, I had been reliably informed that there were at least three maze masters in the Paris catacombs and that they squabbled with each other over territory. In America, I had heard of another that constructed an elaborate roadside attraction somewhere in the middle of the country—Minnesota, I think: a maze of arched stucco in whose walls were embedded countless baubles: glass bottles, batteries, plastic toys, dishware, postcards, shoes, walking sticks, eyeglasses, fake beards, rings, toothbrushes, playing cards, old cigar boxes, fishing rods and lures, hammers, saws, vases, dolls, tins, typewriters, and memorabilia from several similar attractions—miniature replicas of the House of Mud and the World’s Largest Frying Pan. The wayward child or lone and curious tourist, tempted by a rarely open door at the very center of the maze, would, if they were not careful, disappear without a trace.

This maze master, I was fairly sure, had been collected by Granny Tuesday. Granny had collected all kinds of nasties to be loosed on the city as she saw fit. After her arrest and incarceration, this monster had apparently wandered into the old tunnels, where it had been subsisting on a diet of sewer rats and stray pets, or so the litter of bones suggested. Maze masters swallowed their prey whole and excreted whatever they could not digest. They were also known to be cruel and catlike with their food. Having a constitutional predilection for puzzles and games, they liked to play with each catch before devouring it, which is how they found their way into human folklore: as riddlekeepers who would offer their human victims a chance of escape in exchange for a contest. They were cheats of course but not outright liars. There’s no suspense where one’s opponent has no chance of winning. That meant there was almost certainly a passable exit hidden somewhere in that room. I just had to find it.

I climbed to the next platform, just a foot taller, and looked around. While running my hands carefully over the gaps and protrusions in the wall, I saw my host and stopped. Its skin was pale and its eyes huge—adaptations to a subterranean life. Its elongated, spindly legs would’ve raised it to a height of seven feet, I was sure, if they hadn’t been pressed tightly to its body. The vorviggen had tucked itself into a narrow horizontal nook. I thought it might be asleep at first, but the dark trail of dried blood that ran to the floor suggested something much more sinister. I stepped closer and saw where the vorviggen’s chest had been blown open. That was why it had been clutching its limbs to its body. The wound was brutal, and just then I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the beast. It was monstrous, to be sure, and yet, now that it was lifeless, it seemed such a pitiful thing curled up there in its nook, thin and emaciated, as if it had been starved for weeks. I didn’t want to imagine it rising up before me—or climbing down the wall on those spindly limbs like a spider. I didn’t want to imagine it detaching its jaw, like a snake, and devouring me whole in slow, deliberate gulps. I didn’t want to think about all the animals and perhaps even people it had eaten in its life. But mostly, I didn’t want to think of what had killed it, for surely it was worse.

While staring in silence at the corpse, I heard the slight squeak of metal and turned to see a masked figure—one of several—emerge through the gate. Before I had a chance to exclaim, I was struck hard in the gut, gagged, and bound. A hood was pulled tight over my head and I was carried away.

I was thrown into a spherical iron cell covered in gritty rust. It was not a prison, but it was used as such. I was left bound, gagged, and hooded, but I could hear the sound of the heavy metal door as it opened and closed, which revealed through its echo that the room was very small, like a closet. I could smell the rust over the lingering stench of brimstone. What little I heard of voices revealed a pidgin. I didn’t understand the words—slang changes too quickly—but the syllables and cadence were unmistakable. I had been taken by the mizzen.

After a passing of many hours, during which I heard repeated, muffled conversations outside the heavy metal door, it opened suddenly and I was carried down a passage and my bound hands were hung from a hook such that only the tip of my feet could touch the floor. The air was damp and I heard the tiny sound of faintly trickling water. There were men in the room. One of them beat me across the back with a club and I yelled through my gag.

My hood was removed and a bright light shone in my face such that most of the small space was shrouded in dark.

“I trust we have your attention,” a man said.

He had been sitting, and I heard him stand. I tried to tell him I was not a threat, but I was still gagged and all that came out were vowels.

“You wanted to destroy us, is that it?” the man asked as he paced around me. The others in the room remained near the circular wall. “Well, you succeeded.” He motioned down the open passage. “There aren’t but a few dozen of us left.”

There had been at least a thousand mizzen on the East Coast. Was it possible that many had died?

“Men become desperate when you give them no choice but extinction. Reckless. I think you’ll find we won’t go without a fight.”

He nodded and I was beaten with the baton again. I yelled. It hurt.

“The other side,” I tried to say calmly.

When he didn’t understand, the man pulled my gag down around my throat.

“The other side,” I panted. It hurt to breathe, and I held my breath between gasps. “You have to . . . spread it around . . . a little . . . Otherwise, I won’t make it.”

He nodded grimly to the fellow with the baton, who stepped around and struck me again on the other side of my back. I grimaced.

“That’s better,” I said through gritted teeth.

“It’s true,” my interrogator said. “Those of us who are left are novices at this kind of thing. Wallace here”—he nodded to the man with the baton—”was a family man.” He paused. “Your masters took that—”

“They’re not my masters,” I objected.

“Yes.” He smiled. “We thought you’d say that.”

“It’s true. We’re on the same side.”

“Then how do you explain this?”

The heavy amulet of Zaragoza landed on the metal floor with a clatter. The sound resounded off the rust-stained walls. I’m sure a look of shock flashed across my face. I had seen it sink with my handbag. It occurred to me a moment later that that very same look of shock would be interpreted very differently by my interrogators.

“Or are you going to tell me that’s not yours?” he asked close to my face. All I could see of his features was his dark skin and high cheekbones.

Knowing I would only have a few words, I tried to think of what set of facts would be the most convincing, but before I could decide, the man nodded again and the baton struck my back. Then my thighs. Then my shoulders. As each blow fell, I felt my strength leave me. The tips of my toes tired of holding my weight, and they began to shuffle like restless children, leaving my bound wrists to painfully bear my weight.

“Where are your masters hiding?”

“I told you—”

I was struck again.

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who does?”

“There was a man,” I said. “A clever man. But he was taken.”

“Taken? Taken where?”

“Everthorn.”

“Lies!”

He nodded and I was beaten again. I was losing strength. Every breath sent a painful sting up my spine.

“The old prison is a derelict, like the rest of the old regime.”

“Perhaps . . .” I said at a whisper.

I was struck again.

“Where are your masters?”

“i—i don’t know . . .” I whimpered.

I was struck again. And again. And again. And then I passed out.

I was tortured by the mizzen through the night. Back in my cell, I was given nothing to eat and had to lick trickling water from the rust-covered walls of my cell, which is also where I relieved myself. After a short rest, I was dragged down the passage by men in masks. When my bruised and battered body was too broken, the burlap sack went around my head again and water was poured over my mouth, giving the sensation of drowning. My body reacted involuntarily with panic, but all I could do was keep to the truth. I had served in the war, I said, and had acquired the amulet after infiltrating the Handred Keep. I was called a liar and doused again. Having no lie to satisfy them, eventually their patience ran out, and a rope was draped over a pipe on the ceiling.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“What does it look like?”

I watched a noose being tied. “Please,” I said.

“Since you won’t cooperate, you’ll serve as a message to your masters instead.”

“Please,” I repeated as the loop was draped around my neck.

I had been hung three times. I had never gotten used to it.

“Please, you don’t understand. You’re giving them exactly what they want.”

The man stepped close. “I want you to know something before you die,” he whispered in my ear. “I want you to know you’re going to lose. We have a seer. She can see those things you sent after us.” He held up the amulet. “Now, we’re the hunters.”

I was lifted onto a chair, the rope was pulled tight, and without ceremony, I was hung until dead.

The bug-lit path zigzagged through ancient trees and ended in the nook of a cliff whose base was completely overgrown with weeds and wildflowers. A skeleton emerged from the rock face. Its mouth was open. Swirling rams’ horns erupted from its temples. It was a satyr. A crooked goat’s knee and part of a hoof was also visible. He’d been cast into the rock, it seemed. Old wooden buildings were scattered about. They leaned in tatters. Trees erupted from empty doors and windows. Vines snaked across half-fallen shingles. Everything had been absorbed by the forest. I recognized the cracked carvings in the eaves: woodfolk dwellings. Centuries old.

Railway tracks curved into the nook from the forest and passed by a covered platform whose overly ostentatious roof had enough cresting and corner ornamentation for a structure three times its size. From front to back it was spindle-shaped, tapering to a point at both ends. It was more or less intact, save for the single large hole in the roof and in the floor directly underneath, as if a heavy cannon shot had fallen from the sky and crashed through both. From the hole in the floor erupted another large oak. I walked past a stack of rotted railroad ties, crumbling like old bark, and up to the platform, which was scattered in detritus from the oak—dead leaves and twigs and acorn caps. From the platform, I could see where a smaller tree, whose trunk grew many branchlike sections, had grown up in the middle of the tracks, which were just barely visible in the weeds. I wondered how the train could proceed to the tunnel carved into the cliff at the back. Vines and creepers hung down in front of it like a green curtain.

Suddenly, a single rail car appeared from the forest, clacking mightily. It was nearly as ostentatiously ornamented as the platform roof and in a matching pattern. Although it was large enough to carry freight, the car had only a half-height wall around the front and back, attached by posts to a curved roof, like a trolley car without windows or doors. I suspect it was meant to shuttle men and materials from their camp to a dam or mine some distance away. It pulled up and shuddered to a stop. The engine shuddered underneath, between the wheels. Steam hissed as a red-capped gnome, with goggles and a beard that hung over his child-sized overalls, sat on the engineer’s stool in a little compartment at the front of the car, separated from the passenger benches by nothing more than a low gate. In the train’s midline, nearer to the front, the top of a large cog poked through a long rectangular groove in the floor. I knew the type. It was meant to connect with a notched third rail in the middle of the tracks and so propel the train up grades too steep for standard locomotion. A second gnome, blue-capped and beardless and wearing an expertly tailored suit with vest and no coat, stood at the entry way.

“WyyyrdwisherrR!” he called, accenting the Y and extending the final R with flourish. “Wyrdwisher Line!”

“Excuse me,” I said.

“Yes, my lady.”

“Where is this train going?”

“This is the Wyrdwisher Line. And this”—he raised his hand to the train—”is The Wyrdwisher Star. Not the prettiest caboose in the fleet, but always the most reliable.” He slapped a pole. “Our engineer today is Mowinckel.”

The gnome at the front raised his floppy conical hat, which revealed a bald top. So perfectly did the line of his cap fit his baldness that I wondered if that was the reason he wore it.

“My name is Peri,” the fellow in front of me explained. “Your conductor. Ticket, please.”

“I’m afraid I have no ticket.”

“Oh . . .” Peri looked down, disappointed.

The little gnome glanced surreptitiously at the shiny red apple in my hands. I saw it.

“I have this apple,” I said.

Peri’s dim face brightened immediately. “Well, why didn’t you say so? We could trade that for a ticket.” He lowered his voice. “I forgot my lunch.”

“You must be hungry,” I said, handing it to him.

He doffed his cap in thanks. Resting on his bare dome was a bruised and shriveled apple that looked to have been resting there undisturbed for many weeks.

“Mr. Peri . . .” I said. “By any chance, was the lunch you lost also an apple?”

He gasped. “It was.” He replaced his cap, oblivious. “How did you know?”

“Just a guess.”

“Where would you like to go today, my lady?”

“Well, this may seem an unusual question, but where do I usually go?”

“Hmmm.” He stroked his beard. “Is it to see the young man with no hair?”

“Can you really take me to him?”

“Let’s see!” Mowinckel said excitedly.

He pulled some knobs on the contraption before him and pushed some others and I heard the clatter of the destination placard at the front of the train as it spun through many signs, eventually settling on one. The dynamo under the carriage whirred to life and the car jerked forward, knocking a few acorns loose from the oak in the platform. We were heading right toward the branched tree growing in the tracks. I imagined the car striking it and falling to its side, but it swerved from its collision course at the last second, and I realized the tree had not grown in the tracks but merely between two sets, whose adjacent rails I had mistakenly assumed belonged together. The metal car accelerated through the green curtain and disappeared into the tunnel.

Everything was dark as we mounted an incline. I heard the staccato of the gear as it turned over the notched third rail. When the car broke through the mortared stone arch at the far end of the tunnel, I gasped. We were traversing a block stone trellis that stretched over a deep, jagged gorge. It looked as if the mountain itself had been smote by God’s hammer and split. And yet, the trellis was no wider than the car, and there was no railing. Peering over the side, I saw a very deep, very unnatural hole. It was vaguely conical—that is, it tapered unevenly as it descended into darkness. It had indeed been a quarry. There was something peculiar about the rock of that mountain, which stone-age peoples believed hid their god, and it had been used by the Others, and then by The Masters to construct their enchanted fortress. But now it was damaged. It seemed almost as if a massive screw had turned itself between the cliffs, leaving a great deal of crumbled debris, including boulders the size of houses.

The giant cog turned and propelled the car up the incline at a somewhat worrying speed. After passing the trellis, the rails continued over a flat ledge carved into the side of the cliff. The car banked to the right and we crossed another deep gorge. Here, the trellis was made of wood. The planks were green with moss, and as we crossed at speed, I looked down and saw bits of them break loose and fall towards distant cascading water. We continued apace through a narrow man-made canyon. The tracks ahead descended from the smooth-sloped canyon to the shore of a lake and right into its depths. I barely had time to draw breath before we picked up speed and plunged in with a splash. But before my mind had time to examine the sensation of breathing without air, we rose out of the water into another tunnel. Each time we exited, the landscape seemed to shift, as if they were junctures in a network. When we emerged from the last, we were riding streetcar rails in a European city. Wires stretched overhead. Pedestrians walked to and fro on the sidewalks without taking any notice of us. We passed a corner bakery with a line of customers out the door and banked to the left, nearly striking a yellow sedan, which never slowed. We traveled along a cobbled road with tracks on both sides, although it seemed to me, they were no longer in use.

Mowinckel pulled a knob and we stopped so hard I was nearly thrown from my seat.

“Sorry,” he said, flipping levers and turning knobs.

The train car seemed to settle as I felt my clothes, which were dry. There was no platform. We had stopped on the street. But three metal stairs appeared from under the carriage with a pop.

“First stop, the man with no hair!” Peri yelled right in front of me.

“Thank you,” I said softly. “You’ve been most kind.”

“Will you be needing the train again, my lady?”

I hadn’t realized it was an option. “And if I did?”

“Just show us your ticket.”

“Ticket?”

The little gnome reached into his child-sized vest and produced a paper ticket inlaid with a gold foil design. He punched it and handed it to me. I thanked him and stepped from the train.

“All aboard!” Peri called.

A businessman with his face in the newspaper stepped up without looking.

“Excuse me,” I called, but the train took off, and I wondered where he would be whisked to and who would believe him when he returned.

A second-floor window shattered and sent shards to the street. Shouts of anger followed it. I heard what sounded like someone tumbling down the stairs. Something else shattered, as if thrown against a wall, followed quickly by something heavier, which hit the floor with a thud, and the young man with no hair burst from the door carrying a green vial on a strap. I caught a myriad of scents then, floral and earthy. It was a perfumerie, a rather expensive one by the looks of it. Crystal drops dangled under lace curtains in the window. Tiny labeled bottles, each filled with a few ounces of liquid lust, sat on glass cake trays of varying height.

The young man ran into me, knocking me down. My butt hit the cobbles.

“What took you so long?” he exclaimed. “I summoned you three days ago!” He grabbed my arm and pulled me up. “We must go back!”

He pulled a cork from a greenish vial stuck it under my nose.

“Smell this.”

I retched almost immediately. The scent wasn’t unpleasant—like heavy spice and sandalwood—but it was so potent that my eyes watered and my stomach instantly turned.

“What is that?” I asked between coughs.

“Oil of spikenard. Also called muskroot. It grows in the Himalayas. Its essence was prized by the Egyptians and Hebrews as a vital ingredient of holy incense.”

A fat man hobbled down the steps of the perfumerie, cursing and shaking a cane. He was so round and stuffed so tightly into his suit that he looked like a winter berry.

“You stole it?” I asked.

The corked vial had a long leather strap, which he draped over my head. The glass was teardrop-shaped and tinted a lovely shade of chartreuse. Imprinted on it were Cyrillic letters.

“Come.” He grabbed my arm and pulled me away.

I looked back at the irate man as my feet shuffled down the cobblestones. Once we were safely out of sight, he spun suddenly.

“You must smell again.”

He uncorked the vial and shoved it under my nose and my eyes burned. I coughed, which prevented me from objecting.

“Where are your supplies?” he demanded, as if just noticing I was lightly encumbered.

I looked down as if I had left a nonexistent bag on the train.

He examined me skeptically. “Did you at least bring the compass?”

“Yes, of course,” I said, nonplussed. Until that moment, as far as I knew, I was the only living person who knew of its existence. I held it up, and he snatched from my hand in a way that suggested he was not inclined to give it back.

“Thankfully,” Etude said proudly, “I have enough food and water for us both.” He looked up at the sky. “And today is fair weather. What you are wearing will suffice.”

Then he started off again.

I remember thinking he was such a funny young man, and that I liked him instantly. Not a single hair grew on his head. It wasn’t that he shaved it. It was completely bare. And his skin was an unusual color. Definitely not European. And yet, there was a French tinge to his accent.

“What is this for?” I asked, lifting the cord around my neck.

“To smell,” he said. “The senses are a direct path to memory. We have now exposed you to a novel scent. Very powerful. And very, very unique. Once more, please.” He waved back to me.

Having no choice but to keep up the ruse, I uncorked the chartreuse vial and smelled again. After clearing my throat, I rubbed the water from my eye and ran my thumb over the bumps of the Cyrillic letters on its surface. It said SMELL ME in my native Russian.

“And what am I to remember by this scent?”

“That you are,” he said.

As I was wiping my eyes, he pulled off his gloves and held out both his hands, palms down, in a style of greeting not in much use anymore. I let the vial fall and took them.

“Take these,” he said with a bare grip.

As his arms moved back to his sides, I glanced at my palms. They were covered in marks. My fingers as well. Strange symbols of a type I didn’t recognize. They seemed to be under my skin, like tattoos. I rubbed my hands together instinctively.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “They will return in a few days’ time. But until then, they will protect you.”

“Protect me?” From what? I almost asked.

After that, my memory is as blank as all of our earlier meetings. Bits of our journey can be pieced together from later conversations and events. I know we rode in the Carpathians. I know we entered a dark and silent wood. I know a braided black-and-orange cord had been tied around my waist. But I have no idea how long I wandered, trailing it behind me. I have no memory of climbing the long ridge over a narrow U-shaped gorge. What I do remember—clearly—is standing confused near the top of the crevasse at the very moment young Etude came up behind me, following the cord as a lead. He touched my shoulder as I stared in confusion at his marks on my palms, having totally forgotten what they were and how they’d got there. Seeing the vial of muskroot oil that hung from my neck, I followed the directions. I coughed and my nose and eyes watered. And pieces of myself trickled back like falling coins.

The wood encompassed the crevasse as far as we could see. It was different than any forest I had encountered before or since. The tall trees had thin, whitish trunks mostly bare of branches until the very top, where they sprouted an irregular umbrella of leaves. They towered over the pines below and swayed gently in the wind. Spindle-shaped leaves turned in the sun and I listened to their lonely rustle. There were no bird calls in that place. No buzzing insects. Nothing stirred. It was quite bright. Shafts of light danced across a floor of sienna and crimson. But it was as still as the grave. The silence between the branches almost beckoned you to sleep forever.

“Come,” he said. “The cemetery is hidden. Just there.” He pointed to the U-bend in the tree-lined chasm below.

There isn’t a common name for the magical community—other than that cumbersome phrase. Not that there hadn’t been attempts. Simply, no one could agree. But whatever you call it, it is a tower on a hill, a bastion, a keep . . . and a prison. It gets its share of tourists, but those who stay tend to make it a lifestyle rather than a hobby. It permeates their identity. The closest thing to it, I suppose, is the taking of holy vows. Once entered, one has difficulty approaching life in any other way except through the keyhole of Solomon, as it were, which is why there is so little mixing. In my long life, only Abraham Dunvluddich, my cellmate in Everthorn, attempted any serious syncretism, but that was simply his megalomania. Everyone else trucked with their school: the Illusionists in Vegas, juggling phosphorus and smoke; the Hermeticists in Rome, mumbling over stars; the Alchemists in Moscow, leaking lead and fire; the Conjurers in Sao Paolo, drawing circles within circles; the Necromancers in Tibet, turning holes in the earth; and the Sorcerers in Hong Kong, who speak only in secrets.

But it wasn’t always so, not until the priests and astrologers erected towers, and having ascended them, turned round to look down on the world of men, now beneath them. The shamans, who served mankind before the wizards, took the world as it was. They lived alongside the people rather than atop ziggurats, and their trade was practical. They were expected to know both the white and black arts and to employ whichever was necessary to cure the sick or protect the village. A shaman had no school, but did whatever worked, chasing demons or summoning them close, even where that put their own lives at risk. But then, he who serves the rich desires money, whereas he who serves the community desires wealth.

I say this only to qualify my reaction to young Etude. He was so unlike any of the grand old men I’d known, which is why it was so easy for everyone to mistake him for a charlatan. Here was a young man who, regardless of his age, had a repertoire of skills that would’ve put any of the High Arcane to shame. And yet, he employed no attendants to prepare his mixtures, as I had done for Wilm. He had no disciples or cult of hangers-on nor even a cadre of benefactors seeking to profit from his talent, as had Henry Hunter. Like any good shaman, Etude took the world as it was and, using his own hands, employed whatever worked, which meant not only the magical arts but the sciences as well. They were for him one and the same: the world in truth without division or affectation. And that was how he had done the impossible.

As we passed the boulders, the slope lessened and we stepped into a crack in the mountain, a tiny canyon, at most two meters high, with undulating walls pocked in holes from which shrubs and saplings grew. A narrow patch of flat earth stretched between the rock faces, covered in leaves. Bushes and shrubs lined the top of the short ridge. Beyond and around were the trees, whose parasols of leaves hid the canyon even from the air. Ancient stone markers, and several metal ones, had been hammered into the rocky overhang of the miniature canyon, half hidden by bramble and dead leaves. I parted them and read faint, rain-weathered letters. It was Greek, which I had been taught to read as a girl. Sealed in a nook under the stone plate was something called The Candle of Athanasius, interred in the year 6783 on the Byzantine calendar.

“It will be fake,” Etude said.

He had the compass in his hand and was turning about, apparently looking for whatever it liked least.

“You did it . . .” I breathed.

“Of course!” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Although I admit, it took longer than I promised.”

I touched the rounded canyon wall, for I then knew where we were.

Sown one and a half thousand years earlier by the Byzantine emperor Justinian, in what was then the frontier of the civilized world, the Cemetery of the Secret Canon was made to hide weapons and artifacts confiscated from the marauding Turks. In their destructive centuries-long march westward from their ancestral homeland in central Asia, the Sultan’s armies had amassed an arsenal of the occult, which elicited from the Byzantine Christians much the same reaction modern peoples have to chemical or biological weapons. In the wake of the plague that bears his name, the Emperor ordered that all such artifacts should be destroyed. But it would not be so easy. Justinian and his generals soon discovered that many of the objects were mere vessels and that smashing them would release the evil they contained. Others simply couldn’t be destroyed, for no one knew how. And so a secret place was chosen at the barbarian fringe of the empire, a mountainous crevasse carved long ago by a river that no longer ran. It was consecrated and ceremonial graves were dug, and around them, the old forest was cut and a new one was planted, grown from seeds that had been dipped in the river Styx. And it became a place of forgetting, a secret place where secrets were buried—anything the world wanted to forget had ever existed—and whosoever wandered in soon wandered blissfully out again, unaware of why they had come.

One path was kept, its entrance and meanderings a carefully guarded secret, known in any time only to the seven maestri themselves—and no others. They used it to inter the fraught and the deadly such that what was feared would be forgotten, and what was lost would stay lost. It was a place thick with years, as if time congealed around it. Standing inside, it seemed not that the forest had been forgotten, but the world itself, which ran with such speed that nothing of it persisted from age to age. Constantly made and destroyed, it was always forgetting itself, always a memory, whereas that place endured. Like me.

Etude started suddenly further into the curved canyon, and I followed. The pocked, undulating stone walls gradually widened and grew taller such I could walk under the overhang if I stooped. Here were mossy gravestones, so old the carved inscriptions had all but weathered away. Gnarled roots of ancient trees penetrated the gaps in the cliff, and there was a sense that we were disturbing something that only pretended to sleep and which wanted us to stop making noise so that it could return in earnest.

“Gah!” Etude turned again. He was searching for something, something dark and deadly enough to spin the needle of the cowardly compass away from it no matter what else lay near.

I remembered Anya’s words.

You must stop him. He’ll destroy everything.

“Can I help?” I asked.

He was growing frantic and took off at a clip. I went to follow but stopped after three steps. To my right, an arch of bulbous rock, like blobs of dough that had fallen together, stretched across a V-shaped crack in the wall of the crevasse. A natural depression had been worn into the arch, similar in shape to a low doorway. The crag was covered in narrow cracks from which bright green lichen grew. The leaves underfoot were wet and dank, for the sun never reached them directly. I smelled rot.

“Hurry,” he called, already invisible around the bend.

As I turned to follow, I noticed a wasp exiting the arch. It flew into the air as if it were a spy fleeing to its master.

“Etude . . .” I called

“Here!” came his distant return. “Here! It is here!”

Under the overhang of the crevasse, Etude had found a deeply stained and weathered sarcophagus claimed by dirt and centuries to with-in half a meter of its lid. He set to work immediately. He pulled a folding shovel, not much larger than a spade, from his bag, unfolded it with a click, and started scraping the surface as fast as he could. I had no tools, nor was there easy room under the overhang for two to work anyway, so I sat back and waited. I think that’s when I realized it: the identity of the vile fiend who had stolen my memories.

A heavy THUD brought my attention back. He had slid the sarcophagus lid to the leaf-covered ground. Inside was a coffin. It was old, but clearly much younger than the carved stone that held it. It took him a moment to work the wooden lid. It creaked and hit the rock overhang, under which he was bent. He crawled in, using the curve of his back to prop the lid while he dug through the contents. There was no corpse inside. The coffin was full of books. Stacks and stacks of books. It was a grave of secret knowledge, and soon my young companion was tossing ancient texts onto the ground one after the next without care. I watched them bounce across the damp leaf bed—forgotten knowledge long lost to the world.

“Should you be doing that?”

One gray tome flew out and cracked open as it landed. Its uneven pages nearly disintegrated into a cloud of dust. I bent to examine it. The complete works of Heraclitus. There was also Adversus annulares by John of Pannonia and Galen’s “On the Movements of the Spirit.” I lifted a kind of folding scroll that seemed written in calligraphic Chinese.

“It’s not here!”

More books flew, two and three at a time. He was chucking them out with both hands, like a dog digging a hole. After a moment, I heard fingernails on bare wood. He pounded it. Then he came out from the grave. The lid of the coffin fell with a thud as he looked in all directions.

“It must be here . . .” He started back the way we came. He scowled at me. “What are you doing?” he yelled at me. “We must find it!”

He took out the compass and flipped the lid and very much didn’t like what he saw. The needle was spinning like a fan—round and round and round, so fast that it was beginning to smoke. It was useless. The cemetery and its plenitude of forgotten terrors offered no safe path of retreat.

Just then the compass broke. The thin glass shattered and the spinning needle flew off and landed I knew not where.

I snatched it from his hand. “That wasn’t yours!”

He was vexed. After all his preparation, his stroke of genius, whatever he was looking for was nowhere to be found. We looked angrily into each other’s eyes, both blaming the other in some way for all our faults and fiascoes.

“Did you warn them?” he demanded.

“Did I warn who?”

“Those you seek to escape. I know they have visited you.”

“Have you been watching me?” I demanded. “How many times have we been here?”

“This is the first,” he said impatiently as he stepped away. He appeared lost.

“How many tries?” I yelled.

“Bah!” He looked up at the sky though the jagged gap in the foliage overhead. “We must make our way back down before nightfall. Come. Our partnership has not been completely fruitless. I have something for you.”

The pile of charred bones I’d risked everything to recover were stacked like a tiny cairn in a dirt pit, deep underneath Harrowood House. I removed a charcoal green stone from the black velvet bag that held it and turned it in the dim light. It was studded in tiny crystals, like a reverse geode. At the edge, it was nearly black. Only the center radiated a translucent green, which was visible from all directions. It was a necromancer’s stone, similar in type to the one Baltasar had taken from Wilm and later thrown in the Danube. I put it inside the skull on top of the cairn of interlaced bones I had just made and sat in the dirt and waited. It didn’t take long.

—and I shot him, came a voice from nowhere.

My heart fluttered. It was Benjamin’s voice.

I didn’t have a choice.

It was distant, as if he was talking to me through a wall. And it seemed to whip about irregularly, like the heat from a campfire blown by the breeze.

I shot him, Mila.

“I know you did,” I said in a whisper. The patent sound of my own, real, words made his seem that much gauzier and distant—so distant, even the beat of my heart made it difficult to hear.

I shot him. He came right at me and I couldn’t see his face or what he was carrying and I shot him. In the head. I didn’t wait. I was scared and I just pulled the trigger.

“Benji, I need to know what happened before you died.”

A long pause.

I shot him, Mila.

“I know you did, darling. But I need your help, okay? Can you help me? I need to know what happened. I need to know who betrayed you. I need to know what they took. I need to know how to find Etude. Where did you take him? Where did you go?”

Another pause.

“Benji, please. I know it’s hard, but try to focus. Please. Focus on the van. What happened the day you died?”

I lost control. Something . . . something pressed on the gas. Something pressed my foot to the floor.

“What was it?”

I don’t know. I pulled my foot away. Something grabbed the wheel and spun. We were going too fast then and the van fell on its side. I hit my head.

I shot him, Mila.

“What about the chair? Do they have the chair?”

I shot him. I shot that kid.

“Sergeant Dench!” I raised my voice. “I need you to answer my questions. That’s an order.”

A third long pause.

Yes, sir.

“What happened to the chair?”

I was transporting the item, sir, as ordered. We were ambushed. We should’ve had a caravan, sir. Air support.

“And the cargo?”

They took it, sir.

My head dropped.

Now they had a demon.

“What about the rest of your unit?” I asked. “What happened to your CO?”

He ordered us to split up. I don’t think she wanted to, though.

She.

I swallowed a lump.

“Who’s that?” I asked, pretending not to know.

The lady, sir. Toughest of us all. I don’t think she wanted us to split. I think she wanted to come—

He stopped again and I covered my mouth. “I’m sorry, Benji. I’m sorry I didn’t make it in time.”

Mila . . . His voice was different then, closer, as if a different side of him was speaking. Mila, they’re coming.

“Who? Who is coming?”

The earth is trembling. I can feel it.

“Who is coming?”

The old ones.

“Here? The old gods are coming here?”

The portal was opened. We couldn’t stop them . . .

His voice faded.

“They are very powerful now,” I said in the silent cavern. “They’re deciphering the book. More of it. All of it. I don’t know. It’s showing them things, I think. They can cast darkness again. Without Etude . . . I don’t think I can stop them.” I choked on the word. “Where is he? Where did you take him?”

The Barrows.

“To Anson?”

He said we had to split up. He said you would be safe and they would follow him. He said to take the van and go ahead. He gave me a route to follow, off the interstates. He said not to stop, except for gas.

“Did he say where he was going?”

No. But he was acting strange and . . .

“And?”

He hugged me.

“Benjamin, think. Did he give you a clue? Something he said? Something he carried with him? Was he dressed for warm weather or cold?”

I knew immediately it was a stupid question.

He was wearing his coat, same as alwa . . . His voice faded away to nothing. Then it was distant again. I shot him, Mila. I shot that kid. He was ten. Did you know that? He was only ten years old.

“I know, darling. But it’s okay. You can rest now. No one will disturb you again. I promise.”

I didn’t mean to. I looked up and there he was. I couldn’t see his face. I couldn’t see what he was carrying. It was hot out there. There was a shimmer. I couldn’t see his face and I—

I removed the stone from the skull and curled into a ball on the floor. I gripped it until the little spikes of crystal pinched my skin.

It was more than sentiment that took me to Ohio, although that too. Retrieving Benjamin’s remains was a tactical necessity. During the war, the Winter Bureau had fought on two fronts: the world of the living and the world of the dead. Killing a man, after all, wasn’t enough to prevent him from revealing sensitive information. His spirit could be contacted by a medium or raised by a necromancer and subsequently compelled into providing intelligence on the enemy. “Black Ops,” a phrase we coined, had an entirely different meaning to us than it does today. I heard plenty of stories, but mere field agents rarely got more than a glimpse into that world, which always made us nervous. We never trusted Black Division, although I conceded they were a necessary evil and for the same reason I had broken into the morgue in Ohio. By recovering Benjamin’s remains, by giving him the proper rites, by holding a funeral and saying goodbye, by burying him in the Harrowood’s hallowed plot, it would be extraordinarily difficult for him to be made to serve the enemy, and that was a blessing. But completion of the rites also meant he would be gone forever. He could never be raised nor contacted again.

Curled on the floor of that pit, clutching the stone until it nearly drew blood from my hand, I didn’t want to let go. I was saved from despair by Annewyn, who came to check on me. I looked up to see her silhouette in the pit’s maw-like opening.

“Come,” she whispered in the dark. “I have something for you.”

I followed her to the third-floor library, which was also the portrait gallery. In place of wainscoting, wood shelving had been built into the walls to a height of about five feet, full of neatly ordered books, mostly from the late eighteenth to early 20th centuries. Above the shelving, the patterned-velvet walls were covered with portraits of all sizes. A narrow nook, raised one step above the floor, jutted from the back, leaving just enough room to stand before the floor-to-ceiling window it revealed. It was if it had been built for no other purpose than to stand with one’s back to the wall brooding at the world—yet another of the house’s many peculiarities.

Martin waited under a stern oil portrait of Grandma Wynnie, who stared down disapprovingly at the etched metal box in his hand. He set it on a table before me, and I ran a finger over the swirling necromantic patterns cut deeply into its surface.

“Beautiful. What are these markings?”

“Open it,” Annie urged.

I lifted the heavy lid. I shut it almost immediately.

“I asked you to be rid of it, Annie. Forever. I told you—”

“I know, I know.” She held up a hand. “And I knew you’d be upset. At first. But once you calm down, you’ll see I’m right.”

“Annie . . .” My mouth hung open. I could feel the frustration swell inside me. “This is extremely dangerous. You know that. It’s not something to keep in a drawer in Grandma Wynnie’s library.”

“It wasn’t in a drawer. It was on the other side. Out of the reach of everyone. There are no shortages of passages to that place in this old house. I kept it in the dark shadow of the basement. I designed this box and Martin crafted it. Neither the dead nor the shadow-foul can open it.” She waited for my reaction, but when I didn’t have one, she pressed her case. “With the amulet, you’ll be able to slip in and slip out unnoticed. I know it’s a dangerous thing, wicked even, but you can’t just waltz back into New York in front of God and everyone.”

“What makes you think I’m going back?”

She gave me a look, and I groaned like a teenager and plopped in a chair. Martin stepped to the high fireplace to stay out of the way.

“I can’t go back,” I said. “I can’t go anywhere. I have no money, no plan. I don’t even have any clothes.” I tugged at the ridiculous mom jeans I was still wearing. “I can’t even get out the front door. They know I’m here, which means the house is being watched.”

“There’s always the attic,” Martin suggested to his wife. “If she needs clothes and things.”

“Dear,” Annie said with a scowl, “Mila’s not gonna want any of that old junk.”

“What’s in the attic?”

“All kinds of stuff,” Martin said. “Two centuries’ worth, I gather. Boun’ to be a few things for you up there.”

I still hadn’t gotten over how much he looked like a wax version of himself. He seemed bound together by carpenter’s glue—a life-sized plastic toy made in his own likeness, stiff and falling apart from years of use. It was unnerving, which I’m sure he appreciated. He’d developed a habit of looking to the side when he spoke so as to free anyone from the polite practice of looking him in the eye, which I did not remember him doing when he was alive. In fact, I remembered Martin Hightower only as a warm, affable man who loved my friend dearly. I got the sense he was disappointed in his wife for what she’d done, but not so much as to hate her for it. The love between them was still there, but it was as stiff as his limbs, preserved in formaldehyde—neither growing nor shrinking, but also not breathing. I think he understood his situation was something his wife needed, and he was doing it for her despite his deep reservations. It helped, I suppose, that there was a natural limit. There would only be so many years before Annewyn, too, joined him in the grave, and when she was at rest, her husband would again be granted his own. Until then, he chose to endure the indignity. For her sake.

“Thank you, Martin” I said, sure to look directly at him in a way that signaled I would not remain perturbed by his appearance forever. “I suppose I should look, at least. Are you sure you don’t mind parting with any of it?”

“Goodness!” Annie scoffed. “No one’s been up there in years. You’re welcome to anything you find.”

“Except what’s in the cupola,” Martin added softly.

“Yes,” Annie said, glancing to the floor. “Best to leave that shut and locked.”

It was precisely then that we heard a loud groan, as if the timbers of the house had just heard a terrible joke. Martin’s nose fell off and he bent quickly to retrieve it just as a booming SNAP rattled the walls like thunder. The skies had been clear when we climbed the stairs. Could a storm front move that quickly?

We heard a sliding sound then, followed by a dull but prominent thud. Something had fallen off the roof.

“Oh dear . . .”

Martin held a hand in front of his face as Annie bolted for the stairs as fast as her elderly feet would carry her. Her husband held his nose awkwardly. We shared a moment then, he and I. He saw that I understood, and was all the more relaxed for it.

“You’re a brave man,” I said before rushing after his wife.

Annie had stopped in the front door. Clouds had indeed rolled in. I could smell the water of the bay, which meant the wind had shifted direction and was bringing moisture in from the sea. But there was no storm. I moved past Annie and stepped down from the patio to the winter-brown grass, where a two-meter metal spire had impaled the lawn.

Martin appeared in the doorway, standing behind Annie. He had a red-and-blue-striped necktie tied around the middle of his face, covering the gap left by his nose, which I think he had stuck in his pocket.

I glanced around the estate. The lawn around the house was broken by the occasional tree under whose shade the turf had grown sparse. We weren’t that far from the rest of the town, but a line of trees and shrubs had been planted thickly along the brick wall, topped with a wrought-iron fence, that bordered the estate such that nothing that took place inside would be readily visible to those on the street.

“Something’s here,” Anne whispered.

“Why can’t we see it?”

I smelled rain. I looked up at the dark, swirling clouds.

“Whoever you are,” Annie bellowed proudly from the porch, “there are eight generations of Harrowoods buried on this land. Believe me, the last thing the living ever want to do is piss off the dead.”

Something punched her then, hard in the chest, knocking her all the way back to the round table in the foyer, which she struck with her right shoulder before falling limp to the floor.

Martin grabbed a metal flower stand and raised it like a pike. Yelling as loud as he could, he meant to charge his wife’s attacker, but there was nothing. His yell faded as the wind whipped around us more. Something was happening.

Then Martin, too, was struck. He yelled again, this time in pain, and fell hard.

I tensed and turned my eyes left and right. Surely, I was next. Martin looked at me from the floor. He was trembling and quite literally barely holding himself together. Part of him wanted to tell me to run. Part of him also feared for his wife, whom he was unable to help. Part of him wouldn’t have minded finally joining her in death. And part of him felt terribly guilty for it. All of that rolled across his face as he glanced between his wife and me.

But it was unnecessary. For against our unseen foe, we did not stand alone.

The warlocks had forgotten—if they had ever known—that necromancers aren’t the evil summoners of the dead they’re often portrayed to be. They protect the community of the living. They stand at a wall, a wall none of us can see. Harrowood House was a kind of gate in that wall. With Annie weakened, all that lived on the other side was free to push through—if it wanted.

I saw little Mattie first. She stood in the hall at the back of the great foyer, her face hidden by the leaf of a plant. I saw another figure standing at a ground-floor window. A third peered out from the bay windows of the second floor. A fourth, in Union military dress, stood behind a hedgerow. A fifth appeared in the gazebo, face hidden by the shadow of a post.

The house groaned then, loudly, as if every tired floorboard had been trod upon at once.

The wind picked up and then blew at gale.

“She told you,” I shouted to our invisible attacker over the sudden din.

Without warning, a hand reached up from the earth. A ghastly, decaying, clawed hand, still wearing the dusty remnants of a sleeve. It erupted from the under the grass not two yards from my feet and grabbed the ankle of something I could not see. I knew it was there, tall and heavy and dark, but I couldn’t hold the image in my mind. It had been cast in darkness.

The behemoth moved as if to free itself as a second ghastly hand grabbed its other shin and pulled it knee-deep into the dry ground. Then a third hand erupted, and a fourth, and a fifth. They grabbed its waist and its cloak and its tentacle and pulled it down in jerks as it made a terrible shrieking noise. Still the dead tugged, down and down, grabbing the monster’s wrists, its collar, none of which I could see. It hurt to look, and after squinting in pain, I turned away.

And then it was gone.

The wind subsided and I heard my friend moaning. I ran to her.

“If only all this had happened twenty years ago,” Annie said weakly from the floor. She clutched her broken arm and grimaced.

Then she passed out.

Martin found his feet and called a friend of the family, a retired doctor, and the three of us managed to get Annie to the divan in the library, where her shoulder and arm were set and she was given pills and instructions. I watched the old doctor’s patient ministrations from the hall outside their bedroom. My friend had been hurt trying to protect me, to protect her family home from the danger I had put it in. I had stayed too long. I should’ve left the moment the birds cracked the parlor window. I would leave that very evening, under cover of night.

After making my friends something to eat and leaving it on a tray outside their closed door, I followed Martin’s gracious suggestion and went up to the attic, a wide A-framed space from which one reached the cupola, the same cupola I’d been asked to keep close and locked, the same cupola from which the spire had broken just as his nose came free. The house and the man, it seemed, were somehow linked. The cupola was accessible only by a slat staircase that rose so steeply it seemed more like a broad ladder. At the top was a trap door, shut tight. The rest of the attic was very much as one might expect. Two bare electric lights, one at each end, hung precariously at head height. Under them were boxes and old chests with a gaggle of loose items tossed on top with the best intentions of being properly ordered “one day.”

It didn’t take long to see why “one day” never came. I’m not sure any of the clothes I found were properly wearable—in any century. I found a faux fur mantelet with a mother-of-pearl clasp and a gaudy flower-print vest that both looked and felt as if it had been cut from sofa upholstering. There was a child’s seersucker suit with a brown stain around a knife cut in the chest, a pair of orange tweed pants, and so much plaid that one could’ve easily assumed the family was not of Welsh ancestry but Scotch. And there were hats. So many hats. Head wear, it seems, doesn’t follow you to the grave any more than it follows you to bed.

I pulled a brown fedora with a white sash off a sewing mannequin and looked at myself in an antique dressing mirror. I turned once and replaced it with a white baker boy, followed by a purple turban.

“I could be a woman of many hats,” I told myself.

But Annie was right. There wasn’t much for me. I did, however, find a stunning almond blossom silk shawl that had absolutely no business rotting away in an attic, not to mention an equally beautiful turquoise velvet dinner jacket with three-quarter-length sleeves and braided honey-yellow tassels at the shoulders, cuff, and tail. I took it out and held it up. The tassels would have to go, as would the tail, but I decided it would be very easy to cut a third from the bottom and to take a V shape from the back and resew it all to make a nice fitted coat in a shape more appropriate for a modern woman. And it would pair beautifully with the pair of black jeans I had also found, although those also needed to be hemmed—a skill I had so long ago acquired that I was no longer sure I possessed it.

I passed by my hosts’ bedroom once, but the door remained shut. Part of me knew that was to keep me from worrying needlessly, but it also isolated me and amplified my guilt—not just over the day’s events but in how poorly I had treated my friend. I had been so wrapped up with my own problems that I hadn’t seen how much Annie had been suffering since Martin’s death, a suffering that had its roots many years in the past, in the trauma of our first encounter. Adolescence is hard on Harrowood girls. It’s when their powers manifest. Every generation loses one. Annie had told me about it that first summer in Amalfi. Her mother was getting older and pressuring her to marry and have children. Annie always said she wasn’t like her mother, and that was true. She was a sensitive girl. Her older sister, Anewellyn, had been the strong one. But Anewellyn had been the one the spirits took to honor the family’s centuries-old bargain. Annie witnessed the whole thing from her sister’s bedside. By the time I met her, she was just old enough to have children herself and couldn’t bear the thought of losing one like that. So she put it off.

And off.

And off.

I’m sure her and Martin talked about it often, especially into middle age. But it never happened. When I met her, Annie said her family’s bargain was a terrible thing and she wanted to see it ended. I think as she got older and then finally aged, she had second thoughts. She had seen, as her mothers had at a much younger age, what can happen to the community of the living if a necromancer isn’t there to keep back the dead. It was indeed a terrible bargain. But perhaps—just perhaps—it was worth it.

But now there was nothing to be done. Annewyn Harrowood was an old woman. The last of her line. I expect that’s why she’d raised Martin. His death signaled the inevitability of hers—and since she was the last, her end also meant the end of her storied family as well. The specter of facing that alone was too much to bear.

I was re-stacking boxes in the attic, feeling furious and disappointed with myself at all the ways I had failed my friend, when I noticed that the trap door to the cupola was wide open. I went right to close it, the same as you would go to switch off a light that had been accidentally left on. I don’t know that I gave a single thought to why. When I reached the top of the ladderlike steps, I discovered I would have to ascend halfway into the octagonal room, which was barely large enough for three people to stand, in order to reach the handle to the trap door, which lay flat against the floor. There was a conical roof overhead rimmed in slat windows. Small pagan statues, no more than two feet tall, rested in the concave nooks at the center of each of the eight walls, with the exception of one, whose figure had fallen to the floor. It wasn’t until I stepped into the space and lifted it that I realized I could see everything clearly despite that it was night and there were no electric lights above me. The windows let in a hazy orange glow, as if it were dusk in a sand storm. I looked down at the statue in my hand, a prancing satyr who grinned at me as if he knew something terrible was about to happen. I replaced him in his nook and turned his face toward the wall, which is how all of the other statues rested, before quickly descending and locking the trap door behind me.

My feet reached the floor of the attic and I turned in the direction of an old chest where I had before noticed a torn satin dressing gown only to find that the chest was missing. I turned slowly. The room in which I stood was different. It was still an attic and it was still appointed with stacked chests and clutter, but it was different clutter, and the stacks were higher. There was a filing cabinet that hadn’t been there before. And the room itself was longer and L-shaped, as if in descending from the cupola, I had entered the attic of a different house.

I looked up to the trap door. Perhaps it was best to retrace my steps. I climbed the stairs only to find that the lock was no longer on the exterior of the door, which was immovable. The house groaned then, just as it had right before the spire fell, and the attic to my left seemed to stretch away from me. I ran around the corner, nearly striking a full suit of horse armor on a Trojan stand. I stepped around it and made my way down the stairs, which opened not into a room but into a kind of secret passageway. Joists stretched inches over my head. To my right and left were solid walls made of struts that oozed dried glue between them. Beyond, I assumed, was the house—or whatever version of the house existed in that place.

I heard sounds, voices. I couldn’t make out the words, but in the timbre and interplay I recognized Annie and Martin. They were awake and talking.

“Annie!” I called “Annie! Annie!” I pounded on the wall and repeated the name. “Annie!”

Her voice got louder then but still sounded as though she were yelling through a stack of pillows. There was a silent pause, and just as I raised my knuckles to knock again, I both heard and felt scraping.

I pulled my hand back from the wall.

“Mila?”

It was Annewyn’s voice. It rang clear, as if there were truly nothing but drywall and old slats between us.

“Mila? . . . hear me?” Her voice faded in and out as if someone was adjusting the sound on a radio.

“Yes! Annie, I can hear you! The cupola was open. I went to close it. I seem to be stuck.”

“You’re going to . . . your way out!” she yelled.

Already her voice sounded further away, as if she had stepped to the far side of the room. Whatever spell she had cast was fading—or was being countered.

“Do you . . . find your way. There’s nothing . . . to you. Okay?”

“Annie?” She seemed still further away then. “I hear you. But I don’t know the way!”

I paused.

“Annie!”

I heard more muttering, but this was as faint as before. Nor did it sound any clearer after several minutes of waiting. In fact, it seemed then that whatever was being said was no longer directed at me, that Annie and Martin had given up trying to contact me and were talking worriedly to each other. The fact that she was awake suggested that time had passed in the real world, whose relationship to and distance from the derivative dimensions was never constant.

I knew where I was—in the general sense, at least. I knew where I was in the same way that, when one is lost in a forest, one knows it’s a forest—perhaps even which forest—but I had no idea how to get out. I was on the other side, in the shadow realm, formed by the light of higher dimensions striking our thin film of reality.

Westminster chimes rang then, as if from a grandfather clock. But it wasn’t a clock. It was a recording of a clock. A vinyl record had started playing. I could faintly hear the scratches as the sound moved like a pale echo through the halls. After the chimes, the music started, but I had already recognized the recording, even though I hadn’t heard that song in ages—not since my time with the Winter Bureau. Music stays in our memory like that. But then, this song was all the more memorable for Hank Hunter and I having danced to it the one and only night we slept together. It was “Three O’Clock in the Morning” by Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, recorded in the early 1920s. I listened as the gentle swinging horn section danced off the walls amid the crackle of the scratches. Since I could no longer see the staircase that had deposited me, I started again down the narrow passage behind the walls which, despite subtle changes in texture or appearance, remained basically the same. The path was straight and never-ending, and despite that I traversed it for some time, the song never seemed to end, nor did it start over or get louder or softer as I walked.

I stopped when the hairs on my neck stood. I was being watched. I thought for sure my earlier shouting had called something to me in the gloom. Instead, I spun and saw Anya and her stringy hair standing silently some ten paces behind, next to a door that hadn’t been there before. The door was open, and I heard the music louder, as if the space beyond held its source. After a pause, she went through, and I followed as quickly as I could lest the door disappear as fast as it had come. On the other side was a billiard room with an impossibly high ceiling. The walls were lined with bookshelves to a height of about eight feet. All of the books were backwards such that their spines faced the wall. A large Victrola, complete with wooden horn, turned in the corner, spewing Whiteman’s seemingly endless song. Four pool tables took up the rest of the space. Each was topped in red velvet. Only the table at the back was in use. Six figures stood silently behind, including little Mattie, the ghost who had come to see the stranger that invaded her home. A diagonal shadow hid her face. The adult figures around her held pool sticks. The long lamps that hung over the tables obscured their faces as the shadow did hers, but by their stance, and their silence, I was sure each was watching me—partly curious, partly impatient for me to leave them to their eternal reverie.

In any normal world, Anya would’ve been just in front of me as I entered the room, but as I turned through the door, I saw her waiting for me in another door on the far side. She was leading me past the ghosts the warlocks had woken in the attack, who seemed to be celebrating their waking, deeper into whatever realm I had entered. Annie’s weakness, it seemed, was letting all manner of beings push in, including whatever had been imprisoned in the cupola. As I walked to Anya, the green-glass lamps hid the faces of the others, who never moved. Not wishing to press my luck, I stepped through the far door swiftly but without seeming afraid, and it shut behind me on its own.

The music stopped abruptly. There was only a distant hollow breeze. I was in a long, narrow hallway, as in a mansion, but without doors or windows. As before, it stretched as far as I could see in either direction. The walls rose so high that the ceiling was completely obscured by shadow. Whether it was fifteen feet tall or fifty, I couldn’t tell. The brown wainscoting on the walls was heavily scuffed while the wallpaper above it was pale tan with faded brown pinstripes. On it hung a myriad of framed pictures. Thousands and thousands of them—more even, each hung close to its neighbors, filling the walls to their distant height. No two frames were the same, although most were rectangular. A few were round or oval. Even fewer still were oddly-shaped. I saw a cast-iron frame in the shape of a fleur-de-lis and a wooden one in the shape of a sitting cat. Inside each was a still photo captured from a memory—my memories. The hall was my life. I stood at the point of my previous parting, when Beltran and I decided we could no longer live as husband and wife. Behind me was the past. Somewhere ahead was my first meeting with the young shaman who would change my life forever.

I lifted a round frame, like a wooden plate, from the wall. It hung from a nail on a loop of yellow ribbon. The border was seemingly hand-painted in a repeating floral pattern. Inside the circular window, Beltran and I posed for a picture that had never been taken. He was wearing his high fur hat with the mighty buckle. I was in a wool coat with a high collar. The sun shone. The mountain wind blew. We looked so happy, but our eyes were tinged with sadness. He had then begun asking me for that which I could not give.

My finger traced the firm line of his jaw. It had been years since I’d seen his face. Decades, even. Not a single picture of him had survived the adventure that separated us, and it took every ounce of strength not to cry at the sight of this one. My lip quivered as I smiled.

“Hello, darling . . .” I breathed.

I replaced the picture on the wall and turned my eyes over the others nearby. I began walking forward. As much as I would’ve loved to see my father one last time—or even my mother, whose face I only knew from a single painting that hung over the hearth in the great room of our house—I knew that there were no surprises in the past. Whatever I was there to discover, I was sure it lay forward in the wastes of the unknown, and I took up a brisk pace. I saw Istanbul and Little Village and a ceramic terrine in my kitchen of which I used to be quite fond. I have no idea what happened to it and realized then that I would’ve liked it back. Odd that we attach ourselves to such small things.

Still I walked, and there came the gaps, spaces where many of the pictures were missing, frame and all. The only evidence of their prior existence was the slight discoloration on the pinstriped wallpaper. In a few steps, the walls were all but bare. Only a few pictures remained. I saw the derelict train station in the woods and the cafe where I tasted the Nectar of Death. I saw a cemetery grown with trees and a grave filled with books. And I saw Etude. Younger. Skinnier. Softer. With a sheepish grin under that great bald head that contained the world.

Then, just like that, the gaps ended and the walls were full again. So many pictures, so many frames. I saw the library in the Keep of Solomon, I saw the friend I made there, I saw the garden and the grand hall of The Masters. I saw the Great Eye shattered into ten thousand shards. I saw Beltran sipping tea as a very old man. I saw a fantastic coat and the Safari Gastronomique and a jaguar-man and the towering horns of a long-dead beast, stretching to a height of five stories. I saw the Great Wall and a voodoo woman jumping into a pyre and Granny Tuesday and a fight in The Barrows. I saw my first night with Benjamin and our first visit from Oliver Waxman. I saw poor Dr. Alexander hanging in the poison garden. I saw Cerise’s dead body curled in a pot and the detective woman and the tree in the sanctum burning like an effigy to hope.

And then I saw the chair. This picture was no mere photo, like the others. It was a vanity portrait, a painting in oil at least five feet high, like something from the halls of Versailles. In it, the chair was cracked, its prisoner released. To one side, I saw a black and white photo of Harrowood House flooded by the ocean to a height of three feet, and that was it. That was the end. For before me, the entire front of the house was missing. Beyond was the water of the Chesapeake, which had risen in catastrophe to lap at the wood siding, just as in the picture. It seemed like it had been doing so for a very long time—long enough to have pulled down the windward wall. The floorboards under my feet poked out, cracked and jagged, over empty space. Below were the two lower floors of the house, while far out to sea, so distant as to be shrouded in haze, was a monster the size of a mountain. It strode slowly northward, up the bay, as if moving in slow motion, its upper half shrouded in orange hazy clouds. Its massive tentacles, too numerous to count, alternated between the earth and its mouth as if it were a grazing elephant.

It was grazing, in fact. It was too far to see clearly, but somehow I knew then not only that it was grazing, but that it was grazing on people, plucking them from huddled crowds hiding under the ruins of the capital. It slid its tentacles into the gaps of the buildings like the tongue of an anteater through a termite mound. It wrapped up whole families and pulled them screaming to its seven-holed maw. What they became after stewing in its intestines, what emerged dripping and snarling from its anus, I cannot begin to describe. Pray only that you never meet one.

It was the future, I was sure. It’s what was coming to the earth—a return to the bondage we had slipped eons ago. But this wasn’t the distant future. It wasn’t what would come if some arcane string of whether-or-nots came to pass. This future was almost upon us.

Days.

The giant creature turned as if it had heard a noise. It tilted awkwardly at first as it swung its feet around. But soon it picked up speed. I had a sense then of its power, for its legs were pushing an ocean in front of it, and yet it came right toward me, toward the broken remnants of Harrowood House all the way across the Chesapeake. I turned about looking for some kind of escape. I was certain there was no way back down the hall, to my past—one unbroken line of action to the dead end of my birth. But the boards before me were shattered and two floors below was the shallow ocean. I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know where I could run or what place could possibly shelter me from the beast, who, I was sure, was one of the six Nameless gods who ruled our universe. It had sensed me, and although it was the future, I knew that if it plucked me from this vision, I would reenter the real world at that terrible point, having skipped over all that came between.

I heard a buzzing and a flapping then, as if from a swarm of large, batlike insects. I looked up and saw black dots swirling in the sky. Devils. Thousands of them. Swirling, like wasps preparing to descend. I caught movement one floor down and saw Anya in her burial dress. She was looking silently up at me. She was waiting. On the floor near my feet, under the portrait of the chair, was a loose photo, unframed, of feathers scattered on the ground—colorful feathers, like a shattered rainbow. Bird of paradise plumes. Bits of blood were splattered across them. I recognized them. They were part of his battle garb. I leaned down slowly and lifted the loose photo. Then I looked up at the gloating demon chair.

“There’s no frame,” I whispered. I turned to Anya again. “What does it mean? Can I change it?”

She moved out of sight swiftly, and I stuffed the photo in my pocket, dropped to my hands and knees, and began to climb over the shattered boards, whose ends were capped in sharp splinters. As I dangled, I glanced to the orange-tinted sky and could just make out the faces of the descending devils. Behind me, the ocean crashed, pushed forward by the ancient god as it strode mightily forth. The noise and power were immense, and I lost my concentration and slipped and fell, and a long splinter buried itself in my hand.

Anya was already in the hallway at the back of the room, and I forced my feet to follow while pulling the bloody splinter free. When I reached the hall, she disappeared around a far corner. I heard devils land on the roof, like the sound of scampering reindeer. I heard their scratching. I heard their shrieks. I heard the first waves of the impending tsunami fill the ground floor of the house with a rush. I heard clatter as it lifted clocks and furniture and cast them against the walls. I heard a rumble then, like a cross of elephant and lion, and the whole house shook. Glass clinked in cabinets. Pictures rattled and turned crooked on their nails.

The ancient nameless god had come.

The devils broke into the house as Anya moved again. She raised an arm to direct me around the left corner of the hall, where there was a short nook with two doors, one next to the other. They were mismatched and out of place. Neither belonged to that place. I turned to Anya, hoping for some clue as to which door I should take, but she simply looked at me, scared and helpless, as if she were not allowed.

Devils entered the hall, whooping and snarling, and I turned with a fright. They had me—or so I thought. I had no escape. But Anya raised both her arms and a door shut in front of them where there had been none a moment before. They clawed and pounded against it. It would not take them long to break through.

The house groaned. The giant wave pushed by the striding god crashed over the roof. Sea water fell from every crack and drenched everything. I turned to the doors. The motion spun my wet hair and it struck my face. I had been given a vision. I looked to her.

“I must make a choice.”

I looked between the doors. One was scuffed and shabby, the other painted and pristine. Did that mean I was to take the lesser door or the greater?

I heard the bellow then, directly overhead, and a terrible crash. The god was tearing the house apart. I went for the scuffed door as the entire roof and upper floor of the house was torn free, lifted off in one piece as if by a tornado. It flew high into the air and I saw dark clouds and swirling devils and the tendrils of the mighty god and its seven-hold maw lined with millions and millions of teeth. I saw a giant tentacle plunge for me.

At the last moment, Anya shoved the empty air before her and I was propelled through the open door with force. I tumbled to the hardwood as long handles and plastic bottles hit the floor beside me. I stood immediately and slapped my palm against the back wall, but it was solid.

“ANYA!”

I was back in Harrowood House. The sun was shining. I stood in a puddle amid a tangle of broom handles and sideways spray cleaners. I was drenched. I smelled of the sea. Watery blood dribbled from the gash in my palm. I looked at it. My arm was shaking. Pain throbbed down to the elbow.

“There you are,” Annewyn said from the stairs, as if a sundered world were whole again. Her arm was in a sling. “I knew you’d make it out.” Then she saw my face and my bloody hand and the puddle that dripped from my clothes and hair. “What happened?”

I fell to the floor, crying. I reached into my pocket and took out the picture. I looked at the blood on the cut feathers.

“Oh, no . . .”

By the time Mr. Morgan’s special agents delivered me back to Little Village, it was very late and I was exhausted. But I couldn’t sleep. I woke to a full moon shining as bright as early dawn. A cricket chirped noisily outside my window.

Against all my wishes and effort, I was again a spy. I was again a prisoner. But it was the absence of my memories that roused me with dread. I pushed open the window to take the cool night air and the cricket stopped his reverie. Had I sprung a leak? Or had I simply amassed more memories than a human could, and with nowhere left to go, the new were pushing out the old? I had the sense that my very self had been slipping out from underneath me without sign, that there was nothing to hold onto, nothing I could cup with my hands to prevent the dribbling away of me. I stood at my window and thought about my life. I felt through it plank-by-plank as one might feel a rowboat for a hole. But a gap of mind leaves no void to mark its absence. Whatever memories I had lost were simply gone along with any sign they had ever been. Was the dark cause still in effect? Would I end up an immortal amnesiac, unable to know or love anyone? I had gotten used to being effectively invulnerable. Now I was scared. I had never contemplated such an attack. Mostly, though, I was annoyed. I didn’t want to chase this phantom stranger. I didn’t want to spar with Mr. Morgan. I didn’t want to have aliases and escape plans. I wanted to replant the tulips the Inspector’s men had trampled. I wanted to get my potatoes in the ground. I wanted to expand my coop so that I could have chickens to eat. I wanted to see if the bulbs of elephant grass I’d ordered all the way from India would grow in my front yard. I wanted to mend my dresses. I wanted garlic for my suppers and berries for dessert. I did not want to be clever. Or dangerous.

I sighed. “I don’t have a choice, do I?” I asked the cricket. “Best get to it, then.”

The hearth in my stone-floored kitchen was covered in ash, which I swept carefully into a receptacle. Once cleared, I used the iron poker to pry up the flagstone, under which was packed earth. Using the little brass fireplace shovel, I dug to a depth of about six inches, where I struck metal. The block chest under the dirt was made of solid lead, and even after I had freed it from its earthy prison, it still took several minutes of heaving to get it up onto the floor. I turned the lock and lifted the heavy lid, which creaked and fell to the back. Inside was all that remained of my former life—one of them anyway, the one before Beltran, the one that brought us together.

At the start, I was a very poor spy. I lost my first partner to a vampiress. But then, Spurgeon Fount was a short, awkward man, despite my many ministrations. He had Napoleon’s stature but not his confidence, and like so many of his Victorian peers, he was lustful yet repressed. The beast we chased traveled under cover of a circus, which is why I had been recruited. Many American circus performers were foreign, lured from across Europe with promises of streets of gold. Thanks to my time with the mizzen, I was handy with a lock pick and a blade, which meant, with some training, I could perform minor feats of escapistry and knife throwing, and with Spurgeon as my handler, I was inserted as an apprentice performer in order to discover the identity of the foul creature, who played some important role for our shadowy adversaries. The vampiress was at least as old as me, and after several months, neither of us could get the better of the other. Alas, I did not take adequate precautions to protect Spurgeon, who was observed sneaking out of my tent and subsequently met a gruesome end.

I avenged him at least. Our vampiress was a tumbler—quite a difficult woman to pin down. I managed to impale her on a tent pole, but only by throwing her off me, whence I was bitten. I cannot describe what followed since I was not conscious to witness it. For the longest time, two curses waged war within me: one granting me eternal life, the other eternal undeath. It seemed neither could get the better of the other. I was wracked with tremors and night sweats that emerged between long bouts of still coma—seventeen years of it. I was moved to a sanitarium, expenses covered by proxies of The Masters. Mine was a unique case, it seemed. No one in the world knew what would happen—or what to do. Countless learned men came and went at first, like carnival-goers. But gradually, the number dwindled and I became just another curiosity, locked behind a steel door. For many of those years, I was tended by the same nurse. She rose every day to check on me, returned thrice during the day, and once again before bed. My own Florence Nightingale. And yet, I never met her. She was caught with millions of others in the influenza pandemic of 1918.

The man who woke me, who discovered the means to push the eternal battle within me towards the white curse and against the black, was an American. It seemed in those days as if suddenly everyone was American. It didn’t matter whether you were in Paris or Istanbul. They were everywhere, both on the streets and in the news. They invented industrious processes and married European aristocrats and earned incredible fortunes or lost them. They made motion pictures and jazz music and chemicals and machines and war. My American was Professor Henry Hunter, a classicist and scholar of lost magicks. He was not a practitioner. Strictly speaking, he was a magus, and he pursued the conundrum of my case as a kind of intellectual past time, the way a mathematician might become obsessed with an unsolved proof or a detective, a cold case. I was a terrible mystery, it seemed. The sleeping beauty. The woman who could not be roused, who needed neither food nor drink, who simply rested—seemingly forever—in a locked cell at the end of a long hall in a basement floor of a sanitarium.

When I awoke, he was speaking to a nurse.

“Well,” he said, looking down at me through his wire-rimmed spectacles, “there you are.”

It may seem odd to say it, but I hadn’t missed the years, at least not in themselves. I have a surplus of days. They travel quickly in the aggregate but drag in the singular. After a century, one is very much like the next. I would never have minded the ability to fast-forward a bit, to use a modern phrase. Still, it was uncanny the way the world had changed in my absence. I had seen automobiles in London, but they were little more than a novelty, a new way for the rich to spend their fortunes. I had heard a phonograph as well. As a matter of history, Thomas Edison gave one to Madame Helena Blavatsky, whom I accompanied to India. She kept it in the library. The first records didn’t play music. The quality was too poor. Rather, they played random sounds: the honk of a buggy horn, the chirp of a bird, bits of human speech. It was a novelty, something to give the guests a giggle—that noises could be trapped in a box—and after clustering around it excitedly for a week, the bearded gurus and I never touched it again.

But when I finally awoke from my coma, cars choked the streets. Music, once the monopoly of the musician, played from every open window. There were machines to wash clothes, machines to refrigerate food, even machines to send messages through the air. Greater still, our mysterious enemies had launched a major offensive. The result was total war. It had stretched round the globe. Many wizards and millions of civilians had died. I couldn’t believe it. Truly, I thought someone was trying to trick me. It wasn’t until Dr. Hunter brought me stacks of old newspapers that I began to appreciate the scale of the slaughter. It was easy enough to accept that a lone man could be cruel, or a handful of men, perhaps even a nation, but this insanity had engulfed the species. It didn’t seem possible. What had gone wrong?

Dr. Hunter—“Hank” to those who knew him—arranged for me a convalescence at a women’s home run by a religious charity, where I spent many hours reading. I confided in Hank, either by letter or in person, the whole of my life’s story. A cover had been invented for me while I was in coma. I was said to be a poor girl who had fallen victim to meningitis as a child. I knew that such a disease could affect the mind. After waking from so long a sleep, I needed to say my life out loud, to repeat it continuously if only to prove to myself that it was real, that it had all really happened and hadn’t simply been a dream, as the rest of the world then seemed to be, that I wasn’t Dorothea, a deranged sanitarium girl from Montana, but the immortal daughter of a Russian noble. Some days, it seemed like the one had invented the other.

Eventually, when I was well, Hank admitted his own selfish ends. The war had surprised everyone, he explained, even the High Arcane. No one was sure what was coming next. I promise you, the followers of the dark were never stronger, more numerous, or more openly influential than in the early decades of the 20th century. As a result, a new organization had been chartered, of which Hank and I were founding members—a kind of magical intelligence agency operating under Master Crowley, whose public shenanigans were nothing but a means of keeping the public focused on a fantasy, a cartoonish magic, and so away from the truth, even as he carried it out right in front of them.

It was called the Winter Bureau, and its mission was to engage our enemies directly through espionage and subterfuge—even, where necessary, by means of the black arts, which were for all other persons expressly forbidden. Its aim was to discover, in advance this time, the enemy’s secret intents. Dr. Hunter had convinced Master Crowley that I was singularly qualified. I was attractive, he said, and skilled in the social arts, including deception. I spoke five (and two half-) languages, I could pick a lock, use both a knife and a revolver, and quote classic poetry. I had more than a passing knowledge of magic, from books as well as practical experience, not to mention almost no fear of death. Indeed, I could be killed and still return with information. I was, he intoned emphatically, “the perfect spy.”

I remember being somewhat surprised at my own resume as it was recited to me. I felt absolutely no loyalty to my superiors, who had already sent me to rot in Everthorn, but I did to the good Dr. Hunter. He was a decent man. An honest man. More than that, he was an optimist, like any good American. Americans do not see the world as it is, which often makes them seem clumsy or naive. Rather, they see the world as they want it to be, which is why they have often been successful in making it so. And in those days, I needed to believe we could win. That the world could go off and get itself into such trouble in my absence made me question my faith in our very humanity. If the 20th century proved anything, it’s that cruelty and rationality were not bitter enemies, as had been assumed at least since Plato, but in fact the best of friends. I knew that I had no chance of believing we could win, of holding on to hope, anywhere but in the good doctor’s company.

He was certainly a sharp fellow, if a bit bookish, but in a way that you don’t find much anymore. He was an athlete as well as a scholar—a fit, vigorous, studious man who had once rowed competitively for Harvard. He hated guns, but he could throw a punch if need be. He could read and write almost every ancient language, and although he enjoyed his old books immensely, never more than people. He didn’t drink, except for the occasion celebratory toast. Yet, if you played the right tune, he would dance like Fred Astaire. If he had a fault, it was most certainly his naivety, which is a poor trait for a spy and one that got us into trouble on numerous occasions. My time with the mizzen aside, I had never thought of myself as particularly deceitful, at least not by nature, but in Hank’s company, it became necessary—even fun—to indulge that side of me. During our many adventures through the radio era, we made quite the pair, a fact we demonstrated to the high society of Berlin on our first mission together. The room practically fell silent as we lightly joined a gala. That is how I remember him, as that dapper young man, hands in the pockets of his jacket, reaching for a cigarette to calm his nerves. He had forgone the wire-frame glasses that night at my request—we were, after all, undercover—and with impaired eyesight, he tripped and fell over a crystal punch bowl at just the right time to avoid getting shot. The crowd broke into screams and we were off on the first of many adventures: Timbuktu, Moscow, Shanghai, Baghdad. Automobiles and radios and airplanes with ghost pilots and boats that descended to a city under the sea.

Working for the Winter Bureau was much like working for any intelligence agency and came with all the usual accoutrements, with one or two special extras. I’d been issued a makeup compact, very much like the mahogany-haired woman’s, except of a much older style. In those days, no one thought twice about a woman checking herself in the mirror. Under the pad in the base was a pill we were to take if ever in danger of being captured. I was told we would simply fall asleep and not wake up. I had lost that compact after using the pill. In the box under my hearth was all I had left, including stacks of cash issued by countries that no longer existed. I flipped through my East German passport. It was useless, as were the communist Deutschemarks. Under a stack of files, all former aliases I was not ready to forget, was a handgun with a single clip of ammunition, also of a type no longer made. After that was a “miniature” camera—laughably large even by 1990s standards—with three rolls of film, and a Polish infantry knife still in its sheath.

“Gotcha.”

And then there was a compass—handmade by Spurgeon Fount. He had thrown it away in a fit, but I had retrieved it. I dubbed it the Cowardly Compass, much to his chagrin, and I pecked him on the cheek for it. It was made from a sliver of enchanted lodestone he’d acquired at troll auction, one of the last held. As was typical of the clumsy man, he’d affixed it in error such that it did the exact opposite of what was intended, which was to identify danger. Spurgeon’s compass pointed toward the safest possible exit, forever urging its owner to retreat. As such, it was considerably less useful than it could’ve been. But like its inventor, it was hardly useless.

I put my trunk back under the hearth and covered it, and later that morning, as the bells of the Little Village church chimed long and loud, calling the penitent to morning mass, I tossed my trampled flowers into a burlap bag. I opened the chicken coop and shooed away the occupants. Instead of mending the dresses draped over the side table, I quickly stitched a new lining into one. It wouldn’t last long, but it didn’t have to. Then I found my yellow-and-red silk shawl, a gift from Beltran, which the shopkeeper’s daughter down the lane had admired on more than one occasion.

The shop, which was a kind of general store, filled the narrow front room of a house that opened onto the dirt lane, pocked with puddles. It mainly sold tobacco, newspapers, and a few popular magazines, but there was also a small selection of overpriced candy, some vegetables, and a wall of dry goods for anyone who couldn’t make the trek to Big Village on market days. I asked the shopkeeper for his daughter, who commented on my shawl immediately. I told her I had made a Mărțișor, a traditional spring gift, for the beekeeper who lived on the hill on the far side of town, but that I wasn’t feeling well. I asked if she could deliver it for me. When she predictably made an excuse, I told her she could wear the shawl for the week. On her way back, I reminded her, she would make her way past the pastures, where a handsome hand from Big Village was working.

After a brief consultation with her father, she agreed, and I gave her the shawl and the basket. She was about my height with similar color hair. When she set off, I bought a small lunch—an apple and some hard cheese—and walked out the back. There, I lifted my dress over my head and reversed it. The bright patterned lining I had stitched into it was similar enough to the girl’s dress. I hoisted a bundle of kindling on my back to hide my face and headed up the grazing path, which steepened gradually as I walked out of town.

Mr. Morgan had told me to wait for instructions. Whether that was true or he was simply hoping to scare me into secret action, it was a foregone conclusion my house was being watched. I needed to be rid of them. He had also given me a clue. He had mentioned a quarry. He had seemed most insistent on it, in fact. If I was going to get my memories back, it seemed I would have to start there. At the very least, a retreat through the remote mountain forest would disguise my departure.

I dropped the bundle under tree cover and turned onto the cart path that cut sideways up the south hill toward the lonely peak. I stopped at a large, solitary oak that had been deliberately planted to mark the end of the town. Beyond was the shattered remnants of a Roman-era cut-stone wall. But it hadn’t been built by Romans. No one knew who had built it, in fact. The superstitious townspeople knew only that to go beyond was to invite catastrophe, and more than one child in Little Village had been hided for daring to step over it, as I did, turning immediately to look out over the broad valley, which curved in a broad U-shape around the pair of distant peaks to the north. I saw my house, sitting next to the chicken coop on the pillow-shaped hill. I saw the cluster of homes at the center of town, each a different pastel hue. I saw the modest church spire and the green of the commons and the little groves of trees that dotted the borders of the rolling pasturelands. I saw sagging barbed wire fences and oxen dotting the open spaces. I saw the distant train tracks and the road that danced around it like a dog following its master. I saw the dot of a red-and-yellow shawl hiking up the far side of the valley. I saw the pair of men surreptitiously following it at a distance.

Past the stone fence, I found an old road, little more than an overgrown depression blanketed in damp, dead leaves and broken by the occasional sapling or deep puddle. It disappeared into the increasingly dense tree cover. I followed it. The snowdrops were in bloom and they speckled the old, old forest in white. Most forests today are not old, let alone very old. I remember the shock I felt when the circus in which Spurgeon and I traveled stopped in the hills of West Virginia. There was nothing but stumps as far as the eye could see. The forest had been cut for fuel or timber, mostly to feed the coal industry, which needed trellises and buildings and railroad ties and struts to support mine shafts. Some of that old forest was later regrown and is now federal land. It’s a forest, but it’s a domesticated one. You wouldn’t know the difference unless you had walked the elder, wild forests that had never been tamed.

The trees of the wood above Little Village were stout and very tall, and they stood shoulder to shoulder like barbarian soldiers. I did not feel they were hostile to me, but neither did I feel welcome. As I ascended to a kind of plateau, the ground became very flat, and I noticed twigs gathered around the heavy base of a nearby trunk, which had been cleared of bracken. I dared not imagine there were any treeherders left, hidden by the furze. If so, then I was in greater danger than I imagined.

A snap in the distance stopped me. The forest was quiet. A cuckoo and several larks had greeted me earlier. But now there was nothing. I had the sense I was being watched. I started walking again, only to discover in my fright that I could no longer discern the path of the abandoned road from the undulations of the forest floor.

I stood and listened.

It was Einstein, supposedly, who taught us that space was not a featureless plain but rather a warped and crannied canyon distorted by the weight of the objects it contained. But the old sages, while they would not have described it that way, nor measured it precisely with mathematics, were aware of the effect. It had been known since ancient times that there were creases in the world whose insides could not be reached by traversing a line between here and there—that certain clefts in the forest or under the sea would, if approached, say, from the east, deposit you back onto the path, but if from the west, worm you someplace else entirely—that there existed entire kingdoms that, like heartbreak, you cannot find if you are looking for them but cannot avoid if you are not. In my youth, I heard of Sadko, a merchant called to the underwater kingdom by the Tsar of the Sea.

It was through such a cleft that I had stepped. I turned and saw a barrier, a crack in a cliff that had not been there before. It was jagged-walled and no more than a few feet wide, but the flat earth continued through it to the far side. I heard another snap, closer still, and did not hesitate.

Inside, it was not only quiet but still, and after walking a hundred paces, my hands alighting the walls lest they slam shut and crush me, I emerged into a different forest, a denser forest of evergreens that seemed trapped in perpetual gloaming. Ferns covered the ground, as they did in the forests primeval, and I tread a soft carpet of fallen needles. Tree frogs chirped softly in the distance. A nearby mound teemed with ants. Everything smelled of pine.

“Who goes there?” a distinctly baritone voice demanded.

I spun round and saw nothing but the dim trees and ferns and an imposing pile of twigs and moss gathered to one side of the stony gap. It rose up immediately. I saw a face and a chest and two arms but no legs.

“Who are you?” he demanded. Then he relaxed. “Oh. Excuse me, my lady. I didn’t recognize you without my spectacles.”

“Spectacles . . .” I repeated. I didn’t know what else to say. I was nearly speechless. “Do—Do you know me?”

The question seemed to stymie him, and he thought hard.

“Is it a riddle?” he asked. “I was never very good at riddles. I was supposed to ask one of every visitor, but I could never remember the answers.” He paused and turned his green eyes sideways. “You won’t tell anyone that, will you?”

“Of course not,” I said. “I’m very sorry to say this, but I have forgotten who you are.”

“Who I am?” He stood straight. Even without legs, he was twice as tall as me. “I thought it would be obvious by the uniform.”

“Uniform?”

He bent his leafy head to his riblike chest of branches, inside of which were clusters of dead leaves and moss.

“Oh dear. Where has it gone?” He took a deep breath. “My uniform!” he yelled.

I heard scampering. A pair of minks hopped down from the nearby evergreens and curled on his head, one atop the other, like a hussar’s fur hat. A cluster of silver insects scurried from his insides and arranged themselves head-to-head in a star shape on the upper left of his chest, like a badge. Blue wildflowers budded in rings around both of his cuffs.

“There,” he said, adjusting his hat. A tiny face appeared from it and sneezed meekly. “That’s better.”

“You look very handsome.”

“Thank you, my lady. I believe it is very important to take pride in one’s appearance.” He trilled the R in pride fantastically.

“May I ask you something else?”

Another worried look flashed across his face. “Only if I know the answer.”

“Why do you call me ‘my lady?’”

“Well . . .” That question seemed to surprise him as well, and he shifted his prickly mass as if to recline in contemplation. He was a complete gnarl of leaves and twigs. His beard was a carpet of green moss, and it wobbled when he spoke. “I don’t know. Aren’t you?”

“I was once. But that was a very long time ago.”

“Ah, I miss the very long times ago,” he said, yawning. Even his tongue was a broad leaf, and it unfurled like a fern bud. “You could really stretch out in them. The times today are so curt. Have you noticed that? Never bother to stick around, as if they’ve got some better place to be. Rude, if you ask me. What brings you out today, my lady? Another adventure?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t know I was having adventures. I seem to have lost some of my memories.”

“No! That’s a terrible business. Terrible. Memories are like roots. They ought to stay where they’re planted.” He leaned closer like he wanted to tell me a secret. His face was as tall as my chest. “You know, when most people lose something, they wait until the last place to look before finding it. I like to start there. Saves time, you know. That’s important since there’s so much less of it these days.”

“Well, I don’t think I have to worry about that. I’ve only ever kept my memories in one place.”

“Smart,” he said with a wink. “Very smart. Then you don’t have to worry where they’ve got off to. Have they escaped before?”

“Never.”

“Hmmm. Tricky . . .” His leafy fingers stroked his mossy beard. “Are you sure there’s nothing wrong with where you’ve kept them?”

“Not entirely. But I’ve given it a good once-over, and it seems sound.”

“Hm. Stolen then.”

“It appears so.”

“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “I lost some memories once.”

“You did? Where did you find them?”

He opened his mouth to answer. Then he stopped and scowled at the heavy canopy over his head. “I don’t remember.”

I smiled. “Well, I’m afraid I shall have to keep looking.”

“Quite right. Quite right. Best not to give up. But you’d better hurry. The train is coming.”

“Train?”

“Yes. It always rattles my bones as it comes over the peak.”

I looked across the overgrowth. It was identical in every direction. If there’d been a path, it had long since been swallowed by the ferns. “Is there a platform?”

“Platform?” He thought for a moment. “Oh dear. I hope we haven’t lost that, too.” He pounded his heavy trunk on the ground and I nearly fell. “Get up, you louts! The lady needs to know the way.”

Fireflies blinked among the ferns. They flickered as they drifted up, like a dance of constellations. They floated on the air and gathered inside glassless street lamps that rose here and there among the trees. I hadn’t noticed them in the perpetual gloam. I thought they were dead trees.

A path was lighted, a gas-lit walk through a twilight forest.

“Straight ahead,” my guide said in his baritone. Then he yawned.

“Thank you,” I told him, reaching a hand to grasp the branch of a finger. “I’ll leave you to dream of the very long times ago.”

“That sounds lovely,” he said.

And with that, the minks jumped off his head and he sunk back down.

I opened my eyes and the past faded—another bittersweet dream. I took a long breath and let it out. Back to the present. Back to agony and trial. I lifted myself up from the antique porcelain embalmer’s slab that held me. The gunshot wound in my abdomen was gone. I was in the basement work-room of a house—a house I knew well, although I hadn’t been there in many years. Not that it had changed, not in an age. The scuffed and comfortably worn cabinetry looked to be from the 1930s. The walls were papered in faded scenes from the Gay Nineties, including a bespectacled man with perfect posture riding a penny-farthing. The high-wheeled bicycle fad had actually died earlier, around 1880, but the nostalgia of later generations stitched everything from that era together into a stiff-collared Frankenstein of Victorian uprightness. Next to the porcelain slab, a neatly folded pile of clothes waited for me on a stool: high-waisted mom jeans, brown-and-gold argyle socks, a 1990s Disney princesses T-shirt, and a red sweater. Resting on top was a handwritten note:

Welcome back! Wasn’t sure when you would rise. Wake us at any hour. -A

Padded house slippers sat by the stairs like a loyal dog. After dressing, I stepped into them and listened. The house above was dark and quiet. But then, I was fairly certain it was the middle of the night. I had died sometime after three in the morning on Sunday, which meant it was within a few hours of that, either way, on the following Tuesday. I walked up the steps, two of which creaked softly, and stepped through the door, which had been left open. Beyond was the ground-floor hallway of Harrowood House, a curiosity in dark-stained oak.

Except for the addition of quite a few potted plants, hanging and resting atop metal stands, it looked exactly as I remembered. Sepia-hued photos lining the staircase recounted the history of the house and its occupants. The Hywrod family, as they were then known, came from Wales, where they had lived since Celtic times. They moved to America when it was still a colony of the English and occupied a vacant farmhouse near the Chesapeake near the town of St. Michaels, whose peculiar church had been consecrated half a century earlier, in 1677, by the first wave of English settlers. Death stalked the colonies in those days, and within a few vibrant generations, the Harrowoods, as they became, secured a reputation and a small fortune, both of which had since faded. When the old stone farmhouse burned in the early 19th century, it only seemed appropriate to replace it with something grander. The house whose steps I ascended was a beautiful nineteenth century Queen Anne, which, rather confusingly, is an architectural style once popular in America and has nothing to do with the English monarch of the same name. Harrowood House had all the typical characteristics—an asymmetric facade, lots of Dutch gabling, a high spire, a wrap-around porch, even a hexagonal gazebo—but all of it seemed to have been put together incorrectly. The gazebo jutted from a second-floor corner and could only be reached by passing through a large stone fireplace that was never used. The bathroom adjoining a pair of third-floor bedrooms was so narrow, it was nearly impossible to stand in front of the pedestal sink. A daybed nestled in the noisiest corner of the house was embraced by a pair of baby grand staircases that connected the living room with the bed-rooms above.

The manor had been well maintained over its long life but was nevertheless showing signs of age. Curls of wallpaper winked from corners. Obsolete black wires for phone and electricity ran along the baseboards and door frames, irredeemably packed with dust. The hardwood slats of the floor groaned under foot, as if long-weary of being tread. The whole place seemed asleep. An antique Chinese cabinet greeted me from the hall at the top of the stairs. To my left were the paired guest rooms. To my right, the family room—modest by today’s standards but considered quite large at the time it was built. The upright piano that rested against the opposite wall divided the space into dining at one end and reclining at the other. The tall bay windows, which dominated the asymmetric facade from the front, were drawn with unusually long lace curtains that lifted your eyes to the ceiling. It was much higher than the hall from which I entered, which gave the room the sense of being larger on the inside than seemed possible from without. The antique wood dining table, which sat eight comfortably, ran in front of a large fireplace, tall enough to stoop under. The heavy stone mantle was covered in framed pictures. The adjoining kitchen shared the same fireplace from the opposite side, and I could see hanging pans and potted herbs choking the windows.

I walked to the fireplace mantle and lifted a black and white photo of a small crowd standing in a field. The men leaned on shovels. Not a single one of them was smiling. A grove of trees was visible to one side, as was the back of a horse-drawn wagon. On the ground behind them was a massive coffin, approximately eight meters long and two meters high—meaning not a single head rose above it. The neatly printed caption read: THE LAST NEPHILIM BURIED IN NORTH AMERICA (NOV. 1886). Just behind was a sterling silver frame holding a lock of hair in front of a photo of a single infant in a crib. The baby had a white knit cap on its head. Most of its body was covered in swaddling, but a single tiny hand was exposed. The child’s face was serene but its eyes were entirely black. Next to it was a picture that looked like it dated to the 1940s, or so I gathered from the dress. Three people, a man and what looked to be his wife and daughter, stood together in a high vaulted room before a leafless tree whose branches were capped in unlit candles. Dried wax ran down the limbs and dribbled from the ends of the twigs in long tails to the floor. A handwritten note at the top said “with Mom & Dad at the Istanbul watchtower.” I strolled further down and saw a photo of two men standing before a door built into the trunk of a giant redwood. The door was open. I saw a color photo of a family trip to Disneyland during the US Bicentennial, July 1976. In a tall gilded frame behind it, a pair of clean-shaven white men in broad-shouldered zoot suits stood on either side of a shirtless native man adorned with feathers. They had their arms around each other. All three were smiling. The frame was quite ornate and had a small engraved plate at the bottom that said: CELEBRATING THE END OF THE WAR WITH JOHN TENFEATHERS.

But it was the small, three-inch photo near the front that took my breath, for I was in it. It dated from the early days of the fotomat. Somehow the gaudy hues were still sharp. I wore my hair like Jackie Kennedy. I was beaming, as was the young woman next to me. We were both in one-piece bathing suits, our heads pressed together and our hands clasped. We looked so happy. The caption said “Amalfi 1964.” I took it from the mantle and ran a thumb over the warm faces, making sure they wouldn’t smudge, as memories do.

I became aware then that I was being watched. A little girl stood by the bay windows. Her face was in shadow. She wore a simple homespun dress with no shoes. Her arms were at her side. Her skin was brown. She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. I knew immediately she was a ghost.

Seeing them is always an electric experience. There is nothing as eerie. Despite common misconceptions, most appear completely normal at first—no missing limbs or floating heads or dripping slime—and yet, somehow, you can always tell. Some distant, ancient reveille screams across the eons of our evolution, emerging as a strum of the archaic antenna in our brain stems, and the little hairs on our necks stand like soldiers, and our hearts skip.

My ghost and I stared at each other for a long moment, and I recalled the lessons of the dead.

When I was perhaps ten or eleven, a messenger with a great red plume visited our house, which was always a cause for great excitement. News didn’t come by wire or even printed page then. Whatever we knew of the outside world had to be delivered by the mouth or hand of a man on horseback. I remember running from my nursemaid and sitting atop the grand staircase in our home as my father’s valet handed him the wax-sealed parcel. I was disappointed at the contents. It seemed the occasion was nothing more than the death of a famous jurist, a legal adviser at court, whereupon my father said a few kind words and returned to his work. Later, at dinner, he announced he would make a journey of eleven days to attend the dead man’s funeral, which struck me as terribly odd. I had only ever heard my father speak ill of the man. In fact, I didn’t even know what a jurist was and only recognized the name because of the curses that always accompanied it out the door of my father’s private study. It seemed this man, Olyenkov, was callous and cruel, the worst kind of absolutist authoritarian, which angered my father, who was committed to the belief that the responsibilities of high position came in excess of its rights. And yet, here he was making token statements of mourning and uttering kinder words in death than he ever had in life.

As it happened, that was around the time I first read the play Antigone. Stretched across the Persian carpet in my father’s library, I didn’t understand why the titular heroine would defy the king and risk death simply to give her brother a proper burial, to sprinkle his body with dust and to speak a few of the old rites, just as I didn’t understand why my father spoke so kindly of a man he despised and made a difficult journey of several weeks, there and back, to do no more than nod solemnly over a corpse. I was too young to realize why all cultures, current and past, have prohibitions against speaking ill of the dead, and why even the Neanderthals buried their kin with ritual and ceremony: The dead can stir, and it’s best not to give them reason to. It’s best to forgive and to speak kindly so that they might hear and be at peace. It’s best to gather with others to do the same so that the departed are assured of their place in our memory and let go of the world. There are very few horrors in this world as genuinely hellish as a haunting, and they are so very difficult to end.

The little girl didn’t move, and neither did I. The pendulum clock on the wall ticked off the seconds without care. It seemed as though she was aware that a stranger had entered the house, but not through the front door—that I had been dead, but that I wasn’t anymore. And she had come to see. My heartbeat began throbbing loudly in my chest, and I realized I’d been holding my breath. When I couldn’t bear it any longer, I let the air from my lungs with as weak a sigh as I could effect before drawing in slowly. Sometimes the signs of life anger them—breath, warmth, laughter. The dead don’t usually know they are. They know only that something is wrong. I inhaled at a whisper, gripping the picture frame with two hands, not daring to move a single muscle. If she came for me, as she seemed wont to, there would be little I could do.

When finally I blinked, dry-eyed, she was gone. But I caught a second person in the mirror above the mantle. Anya. She was by the Chinese cabinet above the stairs, still wearing the dress we buried her in. But when I turned from the reflection, she was gone as well.

The sound of soft footsteps on old hardwood chased away the ghosts of the past, and Annewyn Harrowood stepped down the crooked staircase to the landing. Her thin hair was angel white, and she kept it neat in a simple bowl cut. She wore nothing but a full-length yellow nightgown under a thin robe, which it seemed she had grabbed in a hurry for she was still adjusting it over her shoulders.

“Annie,” I said with a soft smile.

I walked to her, arms outstretched, determined to get a hug whether one was on offer or not. She greeted me similarly, but with more distance than I’d hoped, and I ended the embrace after a moment.

She noticed the picture in my hand, and I gave it to her.

“We had such fun that summer, didn’t we?” she asked, looking at it fondly.

It was the summer we met. I quite literally bumped into her in the lobby of our hotel, causing her to drop the glass-bead necklace she’d just bought. We both watched helpless as it shattered on the floor. She was feisty, and we traded remarks. Later, after I received word that Beltran had been detained by work and would not be joining me after all, we ran into each other again on the beach. We frolicked together, splashing aggressively at first, each annoyed at having their aquatic rejuvenations intruded upon by such a distasteful person. But we were both wounded and vulnerable, and after I replaced the necklace with one grander, we became friends. Over the years, we were never able to see each other often, but we wrote many letters into which we poured our deepest thoughts and fears, including a few we hadn’t told another living soul. Distance, paradoxically, can encourage closeness. Secrets that begged insistently to be revealed could be unloaded safely in pen and ink, where they could do no further harm. As such, she knew more about me than anyone living.

“You look well.” I squeezed her arm.

She was stronger than I’d expected for a woman of her age, but still, she seemed diminished somehow.

“Do I?” she asked. “For ninety-two, you mean? It’s this old house, then. My grandmother lived her whole life here and made it to a hundred and seven before she passed. We buried her out in the family plot.” She nodded toward a dark window drawn with lace curtains. “And she stayed there, as the dead do in our care.” Annewyn viewed the framed picture in her hand with some distance, the way a great-grandmother might smile at her grandchildren’s children playing in the yard. She turned from it to me and examined my face. “But you haven’t changed at all,” she said. “You look exactly the same.”

“Don’t tell me you’re jealous.” I took the picture from her and walked it back to the mantle.

“Of course not,” she said with a snap. “I know what a burden it is, watching everything you know pass, as if carried away by a flood. Unable to hop in and join. Always stuck on the shore.”

She deftly avoided the word “alone.”

“I’m used to it,” I lied.

I replaced the frame, shifting it slightly when I noticed it was just out of place per the faint line of dust. It seemed she hadn’t added the picture for my benefit. It was part of the permanent collection, which instantly made me happier than I remembered being in a long time. I still had a friend. I hadn’t faded completely.

“I’m sorry I haven’t kept in touch,” I said with my back to her. “How long has it been this time? Eight years? Nine?”

“Oh, stop.” She walked around the table and pulled out one of the chairs. “That’s how life is. You had yours and I had mine. I don’t have any regrets and I hope you don’t either.” She sat.

“Just the one,” I said with a soft smile. “I was sorry to hear about Martin,” I added quickly. “You were both always so much in love.”

“Yes,” she said, looking down at the table and wiping her hand across it as it removing some stain or stray drop of water left from dinner.

“I’m sorry I didn’t make his funeral.” I pulled out a seat across from her and sat down. I heard the pendulum clock in the corner ticking. “I was...”

I wasn’t sure how to describe the events of the last few years: the sudden reappearance of the book and the hell it had unleashed on a world that seemed, since the fall of The Masters, to be comfortably done with magic.

“Can I offer you something?” she asked. “Coffee? No, that’s not right. You were a tea drinker.”

I glanced to the clock. “I don’t think I should. I’ve kept you up as it is.”

“Nonsense.” She stood from the table and gave me a wry, knowing look. “You know better than that. We work all hours in this business.”

“In that case, a cup of tea sounds lovely.”

That “business” was necromancy, which has something of a bad reputation. It’s come to stand for some of the most unnatural acts ever conceived, and while that’s not entirely unfair, the truth is considerably more mundane. The name itself doesn’t even refer to the raising of the dead, which is a rare and difficult task only ever accomplished by a powerful few, but rather to divination by spirit—contacting the dead for guidance and foretelling, an activity practiced by the shamans since time immemorial. But of course, if one can speak to the dead, one can do more than ask for guidance. One can ask for help—in the persecution of one’s enemies, for example—and that’s where the trouble started. Most acts of necromancy involved making it difficult for others to recruit spirits in that way. Annewyn and her colleagues interred the deceased in ways that ensured they stayed put: dispelling curses, sealing in stone or metal, staking and weighing down with stones, casting coins into coffins to pay for passage, and so forth—in short, the necromancer as a guardian and preserver of the community of the living. Of course, not everyone saw them that way.

I watched Annie shuffle to the kitchen in her nightgown and slippers. I still recognized my friend under all the years, but she was different. Reserved. As if there was something she didn’t want me to know.

“Do many of them stir?” I called.

“Less now than in the old days,” she called back over the clatter of a tea kettle. “You’re right that things have changed. Seems like we’ve come to the end, doesn’t it? Of the old ways. To be honest, I’m surprised they’ve hung on as long as they have.”

After a pause, she added, “Why? Who did you see?”

“A little girl. Just now. I think you scared her away.” Another white lie that was easier than the truth.

I heard water running and the soft burst of a gas stove.

“Ah,” she said. “That would be little Mattie. Likes a spot of blood, that one. Likes the warmth of it. Doesn’t understand the damage it does. I’ll put her back to sleep in the morning.”

“I hope she didn’t rise on my account,” I said.

“Who knows? She’s always been a light sleeper.” Annewyn stopped in the doorway where I could see her. “She used to stand over my bed when I was a girl. I would wake and there she’d be. Staring. She was a slave girl,” she said, as if that explained everything.

Annie shuffled past the door frame and into the pantry.

“Did she ever hurt you?” I asked.

“Just once,” came the reply. “She didn’t mean anything by it. The dead are not rational, as you know. But my mother made certain to teach her a lesson all the same.”

Annewauld Harrowood, Annewyn’s mother, was a fierce woman, all of four-foot-eleven, with broad shoulders and a crashing voice, like waves on a cliff. I’m not sure she ever entirely approved of my friendship with her daughter, who was beginning to stray even before I introduced her to the joys of the material world, to jewelry and clothes and dancing.

“Honestly,” Annie explained from inside the pantry, “that scared me more than the haunting. The sounds that poor girl made as Mother chanted her recitations...” She walked past again, shaking her head. There was a box of cookies in her hand. “It was terrifying. But. Mattie left the children alone after that.”

The “children” were Annewyn’s older sister, who hadn’t made it through her teens, her brother, the middle child, who died in the war, and a cousin who lived with them while his father was in Everthorn.

“You must have so many stories,” I said.

“Oh, sure. Everyone does in this business. It’s the one thing you don’t run out of, even after the money.”

“Are you still practicing?”

“A little here, a little there. There’s not much need these days. But it’s in the blood, you know. Aht!” Annewyn raised a finger from her perch by the sink. “That reminds me.”

She disappeared then and I heard a freezer open. There was the gentle pop of a rubber-lined door and the cold hiss of heavy refrigeration. She appeared a moment later carrying a clear plastic bag.

“It took some doing,” she said as she handed it across the table. “It’s getting harder and harder, you know, since all this terrorism business.”

I took it. It was cold. I popped the seal and removed the passport, tucked in the middle of a stack of neatly creased documents. I wanted to see who I was.

Cheryl Dunlop from Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

“Terrorism is just the excuse,” I said, mostly to myself. “The governments of the world would’ve done all of it sooner or later anyway. The Tsar would’ve done it two hundred years ago if he’d had the means.”

Annewyn fumbled about in the kitchen while I studied the smiling passport photo. There was very little resemblance. But that wasn’t the end of the world. She was much heavier than I was, and people expect you to look different when you’ve lost weight. I would have to fix my hair like hers and dress similarly. What a hideous outfit. And I’d have to don that happy, clueless smile. But as long as I did so in a smaller town, where the bureaucrats were less suspicious, then everything would go through and it would ever after be my picture on the replacement papers.

“Was it difficult getting my body through customs?” I asked.

“No more than usual,” came the reply. “What were you doing in Russia?”

I pulled out the death certificate to see how Cheryl had passed.

Car accident. No next of kin.

“You might want to burn that,” Annewyn warned me. “According to the system, it never existed.” She said it as if “the system” were a sentient horror.

There was a second death certificate behind the first. Milan Romanova. Resident of Long Island. Death by misadventure. I repeated my new name to myself several times to get used to it.

“Cheryl.”

It was all coming back to me. The art of resurrecting myself.

“Cheryl. Cheryl.” I had done it so many times, but each was different. “Hi. I’m Cheryl Dunlop. Nice to meet you.”

This time I felt more laden than ever. Hunted. Alone.

I took out the passport again and studied the picture. “I promise to be the best Cheryl Dunlop I can.”

Annewyn returned with a tray. She arranged the cups and saucers on the table and poured the tea, a light Japanese green, and slid one set to me. It was very hot, and I had to blow on the cup for several seconds before I could attempt a sip. Annie let hers cool. Steam rose in a spiral from the pale green liquid. She opened the box of crisp cookies, the kind that might be served at a funeral, and set them on a tray between us.

“Forgive me for saying it, Mila,” she offered hesitantly, “but it might be a good thing you’re away from him.”

I turned the cup in the saucer so I could lift it with my left hand.

“We heard about the fire,” she added.

“Really? Don’t tell me it was on the news all the way down here.”

“Oh, no. But you know how it is in our little community. Word travels. In fact, there’s a rumor floating about that he set it himself. To fool his enemies and cover his tracks.” She looked to me for confirmation.

“Is that so? Well, if that’s all people are saying, then we’re doing well. Usually the rumors about Etude are far worse.”

“Not gonna let an old woman gossip, I see.” A wry smile broke over her face, as if she’d been caught in a lie.

“It’s a long story.”

Silence.

I wasn’t being fair.

To my one friend.

I set my cup down. “Yes,” I admitted. “We burned the bistro. We had hoped it would buy us time.”

“Did it?”

“A little.” I nodded. “We split up. To draw them apart. At least, that was the plan. Etude insisted. Benjamin took the chair.”

“I see,” she said grimly.

Annie knew of the chair and what it hid. I had shared my concerns—my fury—over its continued use with her many times. It was one of many reasons she never trusted him.

“We were trying to keep it from them,” I explained. “Benjamin had been in the military. He knew of a base in the mountains with a deep hole where the government buries the dangerous waste from secret projects. It took time to set up, but we found someone on the inside.” I paused. “We were going to lose the chair forever in a place no one would dare look, a place too toxic for any man to tread.”

“But?”

The pendulum clock in the corner ticked as I took another drink.

“We were betrayed. Benjamin was ambushed. Alone.”

I sniffed and wiped my nose with my fingers, and Annie handed me a napkin.

“Thank you.”

The clocked ticked more.

“How bad is it?” Annie asked finally. “This house”—she looked up at it—“doesn’t just keep things in. It keeps them out. It protects us, but it also insulates us. Sometimes I feel we wouldn’t know if the world was ending.”

It took me a moment to find the words.

She saw me struggle. “That bad?”

I nodded. “They’re not only back, Annie, they’ve multiplied.”

“How? I don’t understand it. We all but wiped them out during the war.”

“That was fifty years ago,” I objected.

“Exactly. How could they replenish themselves so quickly?”

I smiled. “You might be surprised to know that young people consider that a very long time.”

“Yes, well, that’s how young people are.” She sighed. “You’re welcome to stay here, of course. As long as you’d like. We’d love the company.”

“You keep saying we,” I said with a wry smile. “And what is it you said in your note? ‘Wake us at any hour?’ Is that your way of telling me you have a new beau, Annie?”

“Ha! At ninety-two? I don’t think so.” She looked at me reluctantly. “Not a new one anyway.”

I scowled. “What do you mean?”

I heard someone on the stairs then, just as I’d heard her earlier, and my eyes lifted instantly. In the back corner, behind and around the stairs I had ascended, was a square landing from which rose the steps to the third floor. Those steps did not, as in most houses, follow the slope of the lower set but instead set off in their own direction, as if the floors of the house had been fit together incorrectly.

“Martin?” I asked, almost out of breath.

He was standing on the landing in a cardigan, casual khaki pants, and house shoes, as if he were the star of a 1960s sitcom. I got the feeling then that he’d been at the top of the staircase the whole time, waiting for the right moment to make an appearance.

“Martin?” I repeated. “Is that really you?”

Annie kept her eyes on the table.

He looked like a wax version of himself—one that might fall apart at any moment. His brownish-gray hair was plastered to his head like a little boy’s action figure. His skin was pale and had a slight acrylic sheen. His nose seemed crooked. And there was something terribly wrong with his eyes. But they looked at me warmly all the same.

“Mila,” he said. “Wunnerful to see you again.”

Martin Hightower was an Englishman from Bristol and sounded perfectly like it. I went to give him a hug but he stepped back gracefully and raised a hand.

“Very sorry. Touched by your affection, a’course, but I’m afraid I’m feelin rather fragile these days.”

He showed me his left hand. His pinky finger was missing. Apparently, it had snapped off.

I looked to Annewyn, my old friend, who finally took a sip of her tea.

She’d raised him.

Against all the proscriptions of her school, she’d raised her dead husband.

She moved to get up. “You’ll be wanting the stone, then.”

I looked between them. “It can wait until morning.”

“No.” Annie touched my shoulder warmly. “From what you just told me, it sounds like it can’t.”

There was a clatter on the lawn, and all three of us walked to the long bay windows in the living room. It was dark yet, but the moon shed enough light to make out the flock of blackbirds descending toward the house from the sky. They seemed to emerge from the very blackness of space, but as soon as they got close to the house, they began falling dead, one after the other until there was a pile on the lawn. I couldn’t tell if it was real or not. There were so many. Closer and closer they came, as if pushing against a barrier.

A bird hit the window and I jumped. Then another and another and another in a staccato that cracked the glass.

And then it stopped. The rest of the flock flew away.

We were quiet.

“What was that?” Martin asked.

“You’re both in danger,” I whispered. “They know I’m here.”

The first time I met Etude Étranger, I was meant to kill him. It was shortly after the fall of the Soviet Empire, and I was living in Romania recovering from divorce and heartbreak. It was the reason for the breaking more than the breaking itself that destroyed me. It was the way my husband’s once-playful jabs turned to insistence. It was the pettiness with which I deflected them. It was the speed with which everything disintegrated. Human hearts are like mountain peaks and the weather that spills over them just as volatile. We wreck ourselves with the speed of an avalanche. Eventually, after an entire adult life together, I had to leave Beltran, and without so much as a word. I suspect when he returned from abroad, gray and responsible, he was both surprised and serene, both relieved and devastated.

My heart and skin felt flayed. Looking to heal, I settled in a little village in the Romanian countryside. That was its name in translation: Little Village. It was nestled in a high bowl of a valley in the Carpathian Mountains, stuck between three stony peaks that rose like spines from tree-covered earth—a pair of squat twins to the north, like crying babes, and a solitary behemoth to the southwest that had been worshiped in stone age times. I liked Little Village because it was far enough away that I could feel as though I had genuinely fled, but not so far that I couldn’t run back if my heart propelled me, nor so far that I couldn’t be found if his heart propelled him.

It never did.

My new home had been so long in the shadow of the Iron Curtain that the rest of the world had left it behind almost completely. Living there felt like traveling back to a time I knew much better, a comforting time, which is exactly the tonic I needed to mend a broken heart. Now in my third century, I was certain I no longer had any need for people. Not that I minded them. I quite liked them, in fact. But I no longer needed them to belong to me. It was fitting, then, that there weren’t more than two hundred in Little Village. Most grazed sheep and a small, stocky breed of drafting horse, which they also sometimes ate. They cut their hay by sickle, dried it in the sun, and moved it in hoof-drawn carts, just as they’d done for centuries. I bought one set of forged papers from a border guard and secured a second set from the constabulary of “Big Village.” (That was not its name, merely what we called it.) If either man betrayed me, I was confident I could use the contrary documents to sow enough confusion to procure an escape. I put everything else I’d saved into the purchase of an abandoned workshop-cottage, once used to make cuckoo clocks, whose young owner, now living in Big Village, had inherited it from his grandparents. He was desperate to reach Bucharest, a full day’s travel by train, and from there to the wider world of blue jeans and rock music—everything I had wanted to avoid.

My cottage sat on the south side of a green pillow of a hill between a pair of very old oaks, against which it leaned like a fat man stuck between the arms of his dining room chair. My neighbors were terribly suspicious at first, and rightly so. Under communism, Romania had been forced to import a number of skilled workers from Russia and East Germany, 90% of whom later left, taking much of the country’s wealth with them. Outsiders were viewed with a mix of curiosity and skepticism. The rumor was that I was a former KGB assassin who had fled the collapse of the Soviet Union—and reprisal—to hide among those remote hills. After overhearing the story at a neighbor’s house, which doubled as a one-room market, I fostered it by leaving Soviet paraphernalia half-hidden under books. That falsehood, however inconvenient at the end, was for a time far better than the truth. It explained, for example, why I never revealed details of my past and why, despite my apparent youth and good looks, I chose to live alone. But mostly, its value was that it encouraged people not to ask, which meant I never had to lie.

To villagers distant, however, who knew me only by rumor, I was an inchoate mix of witch and assassin, and every anomaly from missing livestock to accident or death saw me the first to be questioned, which is how I came to know the lanky and impressive Inspector Dragoș, who appeared one morning with his contingent, walking up the path from the road. His eyes were covered in dark glasses, as they nearly always were, and his stout nose jutted over his bushy black mustache. The inspector had detained me seven times, always accompanied by at least four other officers, as if he actually believed the rumors that I was a deadly and cold-blooded international assassin. I never knew whether to be flattered or insulted.

He stopped at the half-collapsed stone fence that surrounded my lot, the one I had yet to finish mending.

“Miss Dubrovna,” he said with a polite nod.

Irena Dubrovna was then my alias. I made no secret of my Russian heritage. There was no point. It was hard enough living day after day under an assumed identity. Adding an assumed nationality on top of that just seemed exhausting. I chose the name Dubrovna because it had been the family name of one of my nursemaids and so was familiar to me. I chose “Rena” because it sounded similar enough to Mila that I wouldn’t have trouble learning to respond.

“Inspector.” I stood up from my garden. My hands were filthy, and I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my wrist. “How nice to see you again. What is it this time? Has someone’s horse turned up lame? Perhaps Old Man Rednic has had another fall.”

“Please.” He motioned to the cars idling on the road below, one of which had a back door open in anticipation of my arrival. It looked like a giant beetle readying for flight.

I pulled the red bandanna from my head and wiped my hands on it. There were four men behind him. I was sure there were at least two more behind the house, blocking any escape.

I held up my dirty hands. “Give a lady a moment to clean up?” I asked in Russian.

My Romanian was weak, which the inspector well knew. Most of our interviews had been conducted in Russian, which had been reasonably common under communism, especially in government, but which became unpopular, even embarrassing, quickly after.

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “You will need to come now.”

I heard heavy footsteps trampling the flowers on the sides of my house, the ones I had just planted. I sighed.

He turned and raised his hand to the car as one of his lieutenants opened the squeaky gate and held it for me.

“A gentleman,” I said in simple Romanian.

A barrel of a woman with shoulders like a cage and a face like a bat stepped out of the car as I approached. I raised my arms and waited for her to frisk me. It was her only duty, and she carried it out rigorously and with military efficiency. Once everyone was sure I was unarmed, I got into the back, where Inspector Dragoș sat on one side of me and his lieutenant on the other. After a brief wait in the hot car, where I’m sure everyone could smell my sweat and the dark earth on my fingers, we were joined by two more cars carrying the rear guard—seven more men, making a very unlucky total of thirteen. From my house, we drove in silence into the valley, passing several fields of European bison, until we reached the little town of Hațeg. We stopped in front of a narrow-windowed three-story cube of a building on a small side street. Above the door at the corner, I saw the golden eagle of the Poliția Română.

Dragoș’s lieutenant took me to an interview room while the inspector carried out official business. I was allowed a restroom break, and when I returned—face, fingers, and nails finally clean—Dragoș was waiting for me, mustache and all. He had replaced his sunglasses with tinted eyeglasses through which he studied me with all his years of experience. The inspector had grown up under a dictator and survived a change of regime, which had left him as hardened as any big city beat cop. From what I gathered across our numerous encounters—mostly in brief snippets of conversation with his lieutenants, too young to know better than to talk to the suspects, especially the pretty ones—Dragoș was the son of farmers and approached law enforcement similarly. To him, justice wasn’t dealt so much as it was sown. I was certain that if he felt I had committed a crime, even if he couldn’t prove it, he would have no difficulty charging me with a different one entirely, perhaps even a false one, as long as there was parity. He was not corrupt, however, and the reverse was also true. If he was sure I had not committed a crime, Inspector Dragoș would not see me punished for it.

“Your papers are forged,” he told me through a haze of cigarette smoke. “We have enough to arrest you now.”

I took my seat. “Am I under arrest then?”

He opened his hands—like he either wasn’t sure or didn’t care. “Why don’t you tell me who you really are, and then we’ll see.”

“Irena Dubrovna,” I said. “But if you have different information, I would love to hear.”

But Inspector Dragoș wasn’t listening. He was scowling at the paper in his hand.

“Yes, yes, you have practiced your cover well.” He picked up his cigarette from the little aluminum ash tray and put it between his lips. “Now that we are no longer communists, we are cooperating with our friends at Interpol. Perhaps you would tell me why they are so keen to get their hands on you.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

I’d never had any interactions with Interpol.

He stuck a finger in his ear and shook it vigorously, like he had a terrible itch. The cigarette was still dangling from his mouth, and as his head moved, a bit of ash fell on the table. He left it and slid the paper across the table to me.

The page was blank. There wasn’t a word or mark on it.

“Who gave you this?” I asked.

“I will ask the questions.”

The end of the cigarette moved again as he spoke, and flecks of ash fell. One of his legs shook under the table. I don’t think he noticed. It wasn’t like him. He was a sharp man with a keen sense of the world. In the back of his mind, he was aware something was very wrong. But he couldn’t put his finger on it.

He nodded to the blank page. “What do you make of it?”

I opened my mouth but didn’t know what to say. I slid it back to him. “I’m not sure. Why don’t you tell me what it means?”

“If you tell me the truth,” he said, “I may be able to protect you.”

“Protect me? From what?”

There was a knock on the door.

“Come!” he called.

A female officer stuck her head into the room and whispered something to the effect of “They’re here” in Romanian. Inspector Dragoș looked at his watch. I think he had expected more time. He nodded in understanding and said he was almost done. The door closed again and he looked at me.

“If you have anything to say, Ms. Dubrovna, now is the time.” He said it slowly and with an abundance of calm, as if he were genuinely sorry for his role in what was about to happen.

“Inspector, I have no idea what this is about.” It had the sole virtue of being the truth.

He picked up the blank paper and slipped it into a file. “Some people have taken an interest in you. Powerful people, it would seem. Their paperwork is all in order . . .” He shrugged. “And now they are outside. So. If you are half as clever as I suspect, now is the time to act.”

“What are you asking?”

There was a cautious knock and he shifted in his seat.

“You are being detained,” he explained, “by foreign parties. Once they take you off these premises, there will be nothing I can do. However, if I had cause to detain you myself, first, then as a matter of law, they would have to question you here, and only if I allowed it, pending an extradition hearing, which would take some time.”

“Are you asking me to admit to a crime?”

“Have you committed one?”

There was another knock, louder.

“Sir?” came a muffled voice from the other side.

“Not in Romania,” I said. “Not that I’m aware of, anyway. But . . .” I looked to him to finish my sentence.

“But?”

I paused as the officer in the hall knocked again and pleaded.

“Perhaps you have a suspicion,” I said. “After all, I’m largely ignorant of the laws of this new and ancient country. If there is something you think I might have done, something serious enough to warrant keeping me—”

“Sir?” came the voice again. “They are wait—”

The door opened and a mahogany-haired woman with full lips stepped into the room. She wore a hideous dark maroon hunting jacket with matching beret. She forced her way past the uniformed guard in the hall and shoved a piece of paper under the inspector’s nose, so close to his face that it knocked the cigarette from his mouth, which fell to the floor. That page was blank as well.

Glammer paper. Magic. Who knew what the inspector and his men saw printed on it? Court orders. Secret instructions from the president. Details of some dirty secret from their private lives. Whatever it was, it convinced the inspector to hand me over to the intruder after only a brief banter in Romanian and the signing of some official documents. He glanced at me once before scribbling his name illegibly. Once the ink was set, Inspector Dragoș barked at me to stand. He made a show of it. He frisked me again, vigorously, in front of his audience. It was the first time in all our encounters that he had touched me. Then he handcuffed me, again with a great deal of flourish—as if he wanted to show his guests what a tough and able policeman he was—and pushed me to one of the mahogany-haired woman’s dour companions, who pulled me outside and shoved me rather forcefully into the back of a Mercedes with tinted windows. And just like that, I was taken from the station as quickly as I’d arrived.

“I don’t suppose anyone wants to tell me where we’re going?”

No one did.

The interior of the Mercedes was cramped but elegant. If they intended to stab or strangle me, there would be very little I could do. And yet, outside it was a bright, beautiful day. It had rained most of the week, which seemed much more suitable weather for a kidnapping. I wanted to tell my hosts that they were too late, that if only they had arranged for me to be detained the day before, they would’ve had positively cinematic weather for it. It had been raining so much, in fact, that I was sick of being indoors and had been genuinely looking forward to spending time in the garden. I was finally learning the pleasure of growing things, of planting and tending and bringing forth a bounty by my labor. My father, if he could’ve seen me bent over the dirt, would’ve turned red with anger.

The mahogany-haired woman sat in the front passenger’s seat. She pulled a compact from her jacket. It was a ploy to get a view of me in the little round mirror, which had been recently cracked—pounded once by a blunt object such that a weblike fracture radiated outward from a central point, just off center. I had mixed feelings about my disjointed but whole image in the glass. If I had been separately reflected in each of the pieces, that meant someone was scrying: watching me from afar through a crystal or reflecting pool. That my reflection was complete meant that no one knew where I was, which meant no one would be coming to my rescue. Whatever was going to happen, I would have to face it myself.

After a drive, we stopped at the grounds of a spired medieval castle: the red-roofed fortress at Hunedoara, which rose from a rocky promontory at the bend of a stream. The only ingress was the high footbridge that connected the castle with the cliff, suspended on columns of stone.

“Are we getting the tour?” I asked.

I had done that once—taken a tour—although it was in Poland and more a manor than a castle, something closer to where I was raised. My father’s house had long ago disappeared. I wanted to see if being in that kind of place aroused anything in me. I laughed through the whole thing and was very nearly asked to leave. I think the staff thought I was drunk. But then, you must imagine strangers wandering your bathroom, their ears pressed to handheld speakers through which a very serious old man related the mundane details of your daily life as if giving a sermon, complete with sound effects.

“Here we see a typical bathroom. Notice the little brush near the sink? It was normal for people to scrub their teeth before work. Honk honk. Time to go. Office workers often had lengthy commutes during which they would listen to the radio. Listen now to some sounds of the radio. Pour some sugar on me, in the name of love . . .”

I’m sorry to tell you that brass horns never announced anyone, nor did I ever once hear swords crossing. Yes, we recognized the local heraldry, but in the same way you might recognize a brand or logo. Yes, we were Christian, but we were Christian the way Jews are Jewish or Hindus Hindu. The guide said nothing of what it was like to actually live one’s life in that place: to lose one’s virginity, to watch a sibling or cousin wither from illness, to scavenge the forest for fuel, to defecate into a hole, to grow up alongside the animals you ate. It said nothing of the birds that nested everywhere and how there always seemed to be dogs and vermin about. It didn’t tell you how everything smelled of smoke and earth, or about the long lonelinesses or how dark and quiet it got, especially in winter, or the sheer joy of receiving a letter, which was so rare it felt each time like Christmas, and that it expanded, however briefly, the borders of your world beyond the scope of your family land. The museum got most of the basic facts right, but all the important parts were missing: the fears we had, the joys, what we looked forward to, what made us cry. It was as if the museum’s historians were suggesting everything you needed to know about someone, everything important, could be found in their medical file, which, after all, is full of nothing but facts about them: their height and weight and the length and location of their scars, but not how they got them.

We parked in the visitor’s lot of the castle, where we were met by an attendant who took us past the electronic surveillance and through a service door marked sternly in warnings to a staircase that rose to a central hall, which is where the mahogany-haired woman drew a skeleton key from her sleeve, like a stage magician. It was six inches long and made of ornately etched silver. It was beautiful, and I recognized it immediately. I had seen one like it before. It was a Master Key, one of only seven in the entire world, which allowed instantaneous travel through any of a fixed set of enchanted doors. At one time, those doors were the High Arcane’s primary mode of travel. Apparently, one survived inside that grand old Transylvanian castle.

And yet, for a Master Key to be in the hands of a junior agent meant one of the High Arcane was without, and that was most unusual. It suggested extreme circumstances. Desperate, even.

We found the door at the end of a vaulted hall lined with bright windows. The door was in the corner. It didn’t seem like much, just slats of polished wood bolted together under an arched frame—the door to a closet perhaps, or a bathroom. The only hint was the small, nearly flat bull’s head that adorned the apex: the symbol of the labyrinth. The key went in and the woman turned it back and forth in a precise combination. After much clicking and the clatter of gears, the door swung open. On the far side was the dark interior of an abandoned church. I had no idea where, which I expect was the point. The windows had been blocked, meaning I couldn’t even tell whether it was day or night at that location. The chamber was lit by portable lamps on tall tripods. The stone floor was empty except for a foldout table and set of chairs. A man waited for me in one of them. Behind him was a banner hanging from a simple T-stand. I recognized the heraldry, a winged chimera clutching a sword on a black-and-white bend sinister. This version looked decidedly more martial than the original, but it was undoubtedly the emblem of the very organization I had helped to found, the Winter Bureau.

Seeing no escape, I stepped through.

The ruined church had been swept clean of dust and cobwebs but still smelled faintly of earth and mildew. The altar was bare. There was a stack of wooden pews in the knave. I heard the door shut with a thud. I heard the clicks of the lock. I knew that if I turned, the door behind me would look nothing like the one I’d just stepped through. I was also sure that this was an interrogation chamber and that the only way out of that place was with the Master Key, that without it, the door behind me led nowhere—to a pile of rubble, perhaps—and that if I was left there, I would be trapped. We had used several such locations in the war. I was sad that even after so much death and sacrifice, such rooms still somehow served a purpose.

The man seated across from me was near 40. His inquisitive expression seemed chiseled into his face, as if he never dropped it. His suit was nice but inexpensive. His shoes were machine-made and plain. His hair was short and neat and just beginning to gray at the temples. He was American. I could tell instantly.

“Glammer paper,” I said.

He nodded. “Old school, but effective. How’d you see through it?”

“Practice. You all don’t put nearly as much effort into perishable glammers. Not like the one you’re wearing.”

“What makes you think I have a glammer?”

“You’re slouching.”

He lifted his back.

“In my experience,” I explained, “men with your apparently athletic physique don’t slouch—not any more than a famous model or actress will sit biting her fingernails.”

“Bad habit, I’m afraid.” He stood and fixed his jacket. “My name is James Thaddeus Morgan. I believe you and I share some common acquaintances.”

It was quaint of him not to say their names, as if anyone there wasn’t privy to the truth.

I looked around. Besides the woman and the two men who brought me, there were two more guards at the back, each wearing the same dark maroon hunting jackets. There was no sign of an alternative exit. In fact, the place looked sealed, almost as if a much larger structure, a castle perhaps, had collapsed over the chapel, leaving it a dark and silent tomb. The rim of stone just above the columns was carved with a kind of interlocking flourish that was once popular along the silk road, a mix of Turkish, Arabic, and Russian influences. I made a note of it.

“Where’s Beltran?” I asked.

“My team and I have been tasked with handling this matter directly, outside the usual channels. I believe the concern was that due to your prior relationship with Master Yeĉg, he might lack the appropriate . . . objectivity in this case.”

I lifted my cuffed hands. “And you truly expect to keep this from him?”

“Not at all. As head of our security services, Master Yeĉg will of course be made fully aware of my team’s investigations. In time.”

Mr. Morgan was telling me he wasn’t simply an agent. He was Chief Executor of the Bureau.

“Until then,” he continued, “I have been given the appropriate operational authority.” He smiled. “He’s very protective of you, isn’t he? Kept your relationship secret for years. And keeping secrets from our mutual acquaintances, that’s not easy. Any other man would’ve been condemned for it. But then, that’s why they wanted him. To keep their secrets. I suppose that makes you the jewel of his résumé.”

I didn’t respond. I’d learned through careful experience that every response reveals something, even simple ignorance. Often, gathering that someone doesn’t know something is more useful than gathering that they do.

“How’d he hide you from the Eye?” Morgan asked.

“What do you want?”

“Please.” He motioned. “Sit down.”

I looked at the chair. I sat, hands still cuffed.

“Can I at least know your first name?” he asked.

“Mila,” I lied.

He studied me for a long moment with a hint of a smirk on his face. “It’s amazing, really. You get to see lots of incredible things with this job, of course, but I’ve never met an actual, real immortal before. Word is, it was a curse. But that can’t be right, can it? Is immortality a curse?”

“That’s a young man’s question.”

“Well, I can’t help that. We all don’t get to be two-hundred-and-some years old. When were you born? 1780? Earlier?”

I leaned back in my seat.

“Alright,” he conceded. “Near as we can tell, you were born up north, on the broad plain between Germany and Russia, closer to the Russian side, which means your homeland’s been conquered and lost and reconquered so many times, there aren’t many records left. We only have the family name, Milanova, along with indications that your father was a Russian noble.”

“Mr. Morgan, I’m nothing if not patient. I’ve had lots of time to practice. Whereas you are hardly the first man to have me in a chair like this. How do you expect this interview will end? With the two of us chums? With me coyly revealing bits of my past so you can dig up some kind of leverage on my ex-husband—or whatever it is you’re after? Why don’t you just ask whatever it is you’re here to ask so that I can go back to my garden?”

“Fair enough. It’s simple really. I’d like to hear everything you know about this man.”

He slid a picture between us. It was a surreptitious surveillance photo—black and white, not very clear. The branch of a tree blocked part of the man’s face, but he was very clearly young, not out of his early 20s, I guessed. He was also very skinny, and his head was completely bald. That seemed significant for some reason, but just then I couldn’t say why.

“Well, good,” I said. “Then this should be over quickly because I’ve never seen that—” I stopped. I remembered something then, something so distant it had taken some time to bubble to the surface of my thoughts through the 150 years of memories that had been piled on top.

You won’t want to. You’ll want to go back to your garden.

Mr. Morgan produced another surveillance photo, taken in the same surreptitious manner, this time of the bald man and I together.

I didn’t flinch. “And where was this supposedly taken?”

“Leipzig,” he said.

“Ah, I’ve never been to Leipzig.”

Technically, I had, but that was nearly 200 years earlier.

“It’s a beautiful city. I can recommend a couple wonderful restaurants if you’d like. For the next time.”

“I’ve never been to Leipzig,” I repeated. “And I’ve never seen this man.” I slid the photo back with cuffed hands.

“Then how do you explain the photo?”

“Your skill with glammer paper has already been established. Well done, Mr. Morgan. I see the image clearly. I also do not trust it for a second. Perhaps if you’d taken more care with the papers for the police, I wouldn’t have known better. May I go now?”

He was unperturbed. “Why’d you settle in that place? What’s it called? Little Village?”

“I wanted to be alone.”

“But why Romania?”

“It has a certain charm.”

“Do you speak Romanian?”

“No. But I picked up some Hungarian, and it’s passably common. And some of the old-timers speak my native tongue. Why am I still here?”

“But you don’t live in the Hungarian sector. Must be difficult.”

“Not if one is looking to be alone.”

“Ever been up to the quarry?”

“What quarry?”

“The area where you live is famous for mining.”

“I thought it was mostly coal.”

“There’s an abandoned quarry in the hills to the south. Ever wander up that way?”

I paused. “Why do you ask?”

“Just answer the question, please.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“But you were aware there was a quarry up there?”

“One of the villagers might have mentioned it. I hear there are also quite a few werewolves. It is Transylvania after all.”

He smiled. “And here I thought most of them had given up the country for city life. Easier pickings.”

“There are bears. I know that. They wander down into the village sometimes, especially in the fall. Did you know that under Ceaușescu, no one was allowed to hunt them but the dictator himself? Do you suppose he was compensating for something?”

“So, just to be clear, your story is that you moved out to the wilds of Romania, to that specific village, just so you could admire the view? Take some walks? Make cuckoo clocks?”

“It seemed a noble occupation for a woman with an abundance of time.”

“And an absurdist sense of humor,” he added. “I’ve seen pictures. Carvings based on the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch. And the Kama Sutra. How does that play with the villagers?”

“I’m an old woman, Mr. Morgan, whether I look it or not, and I have an old woman’s peculiar habits.”

“I see. They said you’d be a cool customer.”

“They?”

“Our mutual acquaintances.” He smiled at me. “Can I get you something to drink? A glass of water?”

“If they are so worried about me, why not simply use the Eye to check up on me?”

“The Eye was forged when the population of the largest empire on the planet was that of a small city. As you might expect, with a world full of problems and more people in it than ever before, the Eye is in high demand. We try to rule folks out the old-fashioned way, if we can, before we add them to an already long list. Besides . . .”

Here it came.

“Much like our old adversaries, you have a penchant for avoiding the Eye.” He watched my reaction.

“Are you suggesting I’m a double agent?”

“I’m suggesting you lived with the seekers of the dark for the better part of eighteen months. One can learn a lot in that time. We don’t know very much about their art, or their science. Who knows what you were exposed to? What you saw?”

I glanced again at the photo. I’m sure there wasn’t an ounce of recognition in my face. Still, something about it bothered me. I leaned closer. When I looked up, Morgan was smiling. I looked at the photo again. My jaw set.

Morgan waved his hand and a pair of guards set a large wooden box on the table between us. He seemed very proud of it.

“What’s this?” I asked.

Mr. Morgan stood over the box. “A peculiarity of our trade,” he said as he unlatched it. “A Charios Mask.”

“Ah.”

“Good. You’ve heard of it.” He raised the heavy lid.

“Just rumors. I was a mere field agent, remember? I left the torture to others.”

“We picked up the idea from our adversaries. Their method was a little more . . . brutal. They used needles.”

“I know.” I had witnessed it.

Morgan set the mask on the table between us. Facing away from me, it looked rather like a four-armed octopus made of brown leather, tentacles spread in anticipation of the hug it wanted to give me. About the head.

“We use an iron bar instead.”

“So I see.”

The Charios Mask, pronounced with a hard ch-, was named after the Greek enchanter who’d invented it, a minor bureaucrat charged with the catalog, storage, and occasional destruction of items confiscated in combat. Morgan was right about the original. It was less a mask than a headdress, and it used a menagerie of long needles which pressed in at points around the skull and face. They were thin enough that they did only minor damage upon entry. I’m told the terror was due less to the pain—although that as well—than to the feeling of so many foreign objects burrowing through your face, your identity, toward your brain, the very source of self.

Instead of needles, The Masters’ version used a fat iron bar which protruded from both sides of the mask. The shorter arm went between the wearer’s teeth. It was at least partially symbolic, I was sure—propping open your speech organ so as to elicit the release of the truth. The bar’s longer arm extended forward from the face. The whole thing shot back into the throat, like a plunger, with each uttered lie.

I looked at it. The incongruity between the heavy iron bar and the leather straps, which were padded on the inside so as not to cause too much discomfort, was laughable.

“It’s a little more dangerous than prior methods,” Morgan went on, “but also considerably more effective. What is it they used in your day? Truth potions, right? And aura mapping. Those old color projection charts, like mood rings. Damned hard to interpret.”

“In my day?”

“During the war.”

“I wasn’t aware that was ‘my day.’ I would’ve put ‘my day’ much earlier.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. You’re a real hero. The woman who smuggled the book. And against orders, if I understand it right. That’s real initiative. You’re one for the history books. Did you look at it? I mean, you were alone with it for what? Two days before you turned it over? Three? Did you sneak a peek at those forbidden pages?”

I didn’t answer.

“I would’ve. I doubt I could’ve stopped myself, honestly. To actually see the words of the dark gods.” He turned his head once, like that had to be the darndest thing.

“Good thing you’ve never faced the temptation, then,” I said flatly. I looked at the mask. “So. Let’s get on with it.”

“You’d consent to it? You’d consent to the procedure?”

His question suggested it wasn’t a foregone conclusion, that he was unwilling to force it on me. That further suggested the young Mr. Morgan—young to me, at least—was wary of doing anything that might send my ex-husband, a war-druid of some renown, into a fury.

No one did fury quite like Beltran.

“Of course I consent,” I said. “I told you. I’ve never seen that young man before. The sooner I prove it, the sooner this is over, and the sooner I can get back to my garden.”

“Well . . .” James Thaddeus Morgan seemed very pleased. I couldn’t tell if it was with himself or me. He nodded to the woman in the beret, who was waiting behind me, and the two of them carefully lifted the mask.

“Open your mouth, please,” she ordered. She was Russian—probably insurance in case I pretended not to understand English.

I did as I was told and they placed the rounded end of the fat iron bar on my tongue. It was cold. I tried to keep my teeth from touching it, but it was fat, which meant I had to open wide. Soon my muscles grew tired and I had to relax. The sensation of resting teeth on metal is not pleasant. It made the muscles in my back contract. And of course one’s saliva runs. I tried to swallow and tasted metal.

“Oo iih he?” I mumbled, nodding to the photo.

Morgan and his associate affixed the leather straps to the back of my head. One went under the ears and latched around the base of the neck. The other went over the ears and latched at the apex of the skull. With the bar between my teeth, it would be extremely difficult—painful, even—to slide the mask off in any direction. It would have to be unlatched, which was impossible as long as my hands were cuffed.

I both heard and felt the lower strap snap into place. Morgan let go and moved around to look me in the eye.

“I’m going to ask you a test question now. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

He walked back around to his seat. “Is your family name Milanova?”

“Yeth.” Making an S sound was impossible.

He organized his papers for a moment and took out a pen.

“We realize it’s difficult to speak while wearing the mask, so we’ll do our best to keep to yes-and-no questions. Fair enough?”

I nodded again.

“Please give verbal answers.”

“Yeth.”

He set the photo in front of me.

“Are you ready?”

I nodded a third time.

He pointed. “Have you ever seen this man before?”

“No,” I mumbled through the bar.

He looked to me like he expected me to be writhing in pain. But I wasn’t. In fact, I felt exactly the same as when I arrived, albeit slightly more annoyed.

“Have you had any contact with him?”

“No.”

He waited. Again, nothing happened.

“Have you had any contact with strangers? Anyone at all?”

“E’er in my lif?” I mumbled.

“In the last three months,” he said, somewhat perturbed.

“No. I old ooo, I wan oo be alone.”

He looked to the bar. It didn’t move. He looked to the woman behind me. “Well?” he demanded.

The woman paused. “I don’t know, sir.”

“You don’t know? What does that mean?”

“I’ve . . . never seen this before.”

“Is it working?”

She paused again. “I think so.”

“Is she charmed?”

“The bar is lode iron with a selenium core. After it penetrates the mouth, it should defeat all charms.”

“A binding then?”

“But she’s giving answers, sir.”

Morgan didn’t like that.

“’Erhaps you’d have more lugg wih ‘omethin from my day,” I suggested sarcastically.

“Restrict yourself to answering questions, please,” he barked.

Morgan got up to confer with his colleague. I heard them whispering. I felt them tug on the apparatus, which moved my head back and forth. Then he stepped to where he could see my face.

“Have you the ability to cast darkness?”

“Thad isn’d the line of ques’ioning we agre—”

“Do you have the ability to cast darkness?” He slammed his hand on the table.

“No.”

The bar didn’t move.

“Did you read the Necronomicon?”

I paused, and the bar twitched. He saw it.

“Have you read the Necronomicon?” he repeated.

“No.”

The bar rammed into my throat and I choked. I stood and stumbled and my chair fell back. I couldn’t breathe. I panicked. I understood then why it was so effective. The inability to breathe sends your body into an involuntary frenzy. It’s an innate biological reflex and nearly impossible to control, even with training—which is why torture seems effective: the torturer always wins. But if one is being waterboarded, one might legitimately come to doubt whether one’s torturers would truly stop at the truth. One couldn’t even be sure whether the truth would be recognized if it came, especially if it were fantastical or unexpected. Speaking truthfully, then, is never a guarantee that torture will stop, especially versus some judicious mix of truth and lie. And that, of course, is exactly why torture has been unreliable since the dawn of history. Even in the very best of circumstances, it is a game of charades.

But the Charios Mask was different—thanks to one deceptively simple twist. The mask was not under the control of the torturer but the tortured. One’s means of release was always at hand. You simply had to speak the truth, as you understood it, and the bar would retract. While you did not, you suffocated.

And I would have suffocated, if not for the good Inspector Dragoș, who had gone to the trouble of bringing a female officer with him every time he detained me for no other reason than that he didn’t consider it proper for a man, even a policeman, to touch a woman in a familiar way—at least, not until she was convicted of a crime. And yet, in the detention room, he had frisked me vigorously and in front of others. It was a cover. While everyone watched him feel my breasts, he slipped the key to his handcuffs into my palm.

I stood from the table, gagging, and pushed my chair back. My hands were already free. I pulled both latches and dragged the Charios Mask from my face, bending over involuntarily as the iron bar came out, trailing mucus and saliva. I threw it on the ground and coughed and coughed.

“This interview”—I coughed again and swallowed—”is over.”

I strode to the door, hand over my mouth. It felt like I had a bruise at the back of my throat, and my eyes were watering heavily.

“Where are you going?” Morgan asked with a mix of annoyance and humor.

I think he was still trying to figure out how I had gotten out of the handcuffs. I suspect I was far from the first to have been dragged to that secret place and that there were powerful dispels cast upon it, perhaps even wards hidden in the walls that prevented all but the most potent magic—far more potent than anything I could muster—and he was struggling to comprehend what spell I had used. I wasn’t going to tell him he had too much faith in magic, in glammer paper and secret doors, and not enough in ordinary people.

“Home,” I answered. My voice cracked on the word and I cleared my throat and wiped my eyes. “Unless you’re going to detain me without cause.”

“We have cause.” He motioned to the mask, which lay like a dead octopus on the floor.

“You can’t be serious.”

He shrugged.

“That was decades ago,” I objected, “before you were even born. I think if I was going to act against The Masters, I would have done so by now, don’t you?”

“Dunno. Perhaps you’re just as patient as you say.”

“A sleeper agent in a sleepy little village in the middle of nowhere?”

“It’s possible.”

“For what purpose?”

“That’s what we’re here to figure out.”

“Then arrest me. Of course, then you will have to file charges. I expect my ex-husband might have something to say about that. Although, I’d be more worried about what he’ll do once he realizes his own people are acting without his knowledge or consent. You think the other Masters will support you in a direct challenge to one of their own? I worked with them for decades. They’ll make all kinds of promises to you in secret, Mr. Morgan, but when it all comes out, they won’t take a single risk that jeopardizes their position.”

“Oh, I agree. But I doubt it’ll come to that. You keep calling him your ex-husband, though. My understanding is that the two of you were never formally married. That was how he got around having to disclose your relationship.”

“Why don’t you ask him about that? Ask the great Master Yeĉg if he thinks having a piece of paper with our names on it would’ve made any difference.”

I stood by the door, but no one moved to open it for me, so I waited in silence. The bit with the Charios mask wasn’t enough for them to arrest me. It could be admitted as evidence in a tribunal magique, but since magical devices can be corrupted by magic, they would need confirmation, a second independent line of evidence, to secure a conviction. Of course, that assumed they were following the laws and traditions. Exceptions were rare, especially outside of wartime. But they’d been known to happen.

Morgan bent to the ground and retrieved the “photo” of me and the bald man, which had fallen when I jumped to my feet. He held it up. He produced a Zippo from his pocket, lit it with a flick of his wrist, and held the photo over the flame. I watched it burn a typical orange. There was no flicker of blue-green. It wasn’t glammer paper. It was a real photo. Of me and a man I had never met. That triggered something, a fragment of a memory. A hotel hallway. A room key in my hand. A door opened and there he was. I couldn’t picture him clearly, but my sense was that he had been waiting for me and that we had business. But I couldn’t remember. Whatever that fragment had been attached to was gone.

The guards fixed the tables and chairs and Mr. Morgan took his seat and motioned for me to the same.

“In case it’s not clear from the evidence,” he said, “it would appear your memory has been tampered with. I would think you of all people would want to find out how, why, and by whom.”

He organized his papers while I shuffled over and sat down. The room now smelled of lighter fluid and smoke, and I coughed.

“But even if you don’t, between the photo surveillance and your answer to the Charios test, we have enough for an arrest, whereupon more exacting measures can be legally used to determine beyond a shadow of a doubt whether or not you laid eyes on forbidden arcana.” He paused. “We both know those measures are not pleasant. We both know what they will reveal. We both know that your ex-husband will not be able to circumvent the ancient rites against so serious a crime. And given your prior record, going back well over a century, we both know where you will go.” He produced another photo, a color photo, taken recently by the look of it. It was the heavy front gate of the second-to-last place on earth I ever wanted to be again. Everthorn.

We sat together in silence. I knew exactly what he wanted.

I sighed. My shoulders dropped.

“What’s the mission?” I whispered.

“That’s better.” He sat back. “It’s simple really. Your bald friend is quite possibly the most dangerous man in the world. And you’re going to help us eliminate him.”

I awoke from death, as I had so many times, shivering on a slab. For once, I had not been murdered. I had not been hung, stabbed, shot, or poisoned. This time, I had taken my own life. As my memories of the past faded, I awoke to the present.

The body bag that encased me was meant to contain stench rather than heat, and it was frigid. It also reeked of bile, and I was happy finally to work my shivering pinky into the tiny gap of the zipper and slide it down. The handwriting on the exterior label read: DOE, JANE 8W756-D. I stopped and listened carefully. Hearing nothing but the rumble of the refrigeration units, I unzipped the bag and sat up. The small room was crowded with dead. It reminded me of the casualty transports I had the unfortunate occasion to ride during the war. Bodies in bags were stacked everywhere—except on each other. Most were in the rack against the back wall, three spaces high and four long. The rest, like myself, were on metal gurneys, some of which carried a second body on a lower shelf near the wheels.

My first problem was that I was naked. I should’ve seen to it first. Instead, I stepped to the floor in bare feet and began immediately searching for Benjamin’s bones. I found them quickly enough. His was the flattest bag in the room. But it rested on a lower shelf, and I had to push the chain of gurneys to make enough space to squat. They rattled against each other, and I paused again to see if I’d been heard. After a moment, I pulled the body bag’s zipper over the bump of the skull, but rather than a pile of bones, as I expected, I discovered the corpse of a small child. There were deep red burns marks across this face and neck. He couldn’t have been more than four. Heartbroken, I found myself unable to look away. He had a wide forehead that reminded me exactly of Jakub, whose final fate I never knew. I replaced the zipper.

Finding no other suitably flat bags that might contain the remains of my friend, I turned for the door. On the other side was a long, open medical examination hall with several identical stations, each clustered around a single, long table. Two were occupied: one by a bag and one by a collection of charred bones.

“There you are,” I whispered.

It was dim—only the under-counter lights were on—but then, according to the clock on the wall, it was approaching three in the morning. At least it was warm. I shut the door to the cooler with a click and tiptoed to examine the skeletal remains, but all I could see of Benjamin was what I already knew: he had been burned. Whatever had killed him had been extremely hot. His bones were almost black. Most had bits of oily charcoal attached. They didn’t look real, and it wasn’t until I saw the stone—the large, smooth river stone that Etude had put in place of his heart—that I felt anything stir within me. It had been found with the body and kept as evidence. It was blackened as well. I touched it and felt the ash on my fingers.

The last time I had seen Benjamin, we were fleeing the bistro fire. He was hauling the chair away in the back of a van. I watched him go. I had hoped the medical examiner’s file, which rested in a slot near the cabinet, would help solve the mystery of how or why he had made his way to Adams County, Ohio—or what had happened to the throne of Amaimon—but the only clue perplexed me even more than before. According to the report, his skeleton appeared to have been exposed to uranium and as such was slightly radioactive. It wasn’t dangerous, but to avoid contamination, it was to be kept separate from other remains until retrieved by the FBI, who would presumably investigate.

I replaced the file and turned to the nearby computer, which was when I noticed the large viper slithering slowly out from behind it. I froze as the snake undulated unnervingly down the cabinet to the floor. It was big—too big, really, closer to a python than a rattler. As it moved relentlessly toward me, holding my attention rapt, I had no choice but to step back.

My head hit the barrel of a revolver. I heard it cock and raised my hands slowly as the unnaturally large viper slithered between my legs.

“This move was predictable,” a woman said, “given your talents.”

She had some kind of accent—African maybe.

A leather bag with large loop handles dropped near my feet.

“Fendi,” I said. I glanced again. “Fake.”

“Fill it.”

I understood. She wanted me to put Benjamin’s bones inside. I set the bag on the table, glancing back once as I donned a pair of latex gloves from a nearby box. I caught the last of the viper’s tail as it faded into the woman’s brown skin, completing a tattoo that spiraled around her right arm up to her neck. Several other tattoos adorned her shoulders, arms, and back, exposed by the white tank top she wore. Her cheekbones were high and her hair was wild.

I began to lift the bones one at a time and place them inside the imitation designer bag. “You left these inside the elementary school. So it would make the news and I would come.”

“I knew one of you would show.”

I smiled to myself. It seemed Etude had not yet been found.

“Where did you find them?” I asked as I went about my task. I saved the skull for last.

“Does it matter?” Her tone invited no argument.

“You’re mizzen,” I said.

“What makes you say that?” she challenged. “The tattoos? Or the color of my skin?”

“Neither. You’re using a gun.”

Seeing I had finished, she motioned with the barrel toward the back.

“Can I at least have something to wear?” I nodded to a glass-doored cabinet at the back, inside of which were stacks of folded green scrubs.

“Hurry,” she ordered.

I stepped barefoot across the cool floor and dressed as quickly as I could. The pair of scrubs I donned were too big, but they would have to do.

“I suppose shoes are out of the question,” I said.

She motioned toward the door with the barrel. “No time.”

“Are we in a hurry?”

“Move,” she ordered.

“Why not just shoot me?” I asked.

“Have you tried moving a dead body on your own?”

“Good point,” I said.

“Besides, they pay extra if I bring you in alive.”

“Must be in a hurry.” I started walking. “Can I at least know where we’re going?”

“You’ll see. Don’t forget the bag.”

I had deliberately left it. I lifted it by the handles and walked to the door, which led to a dark and silent office.

“Left,” she ordered from behind.

There was an emergency exit. A red sign warned that opening the door would sound an alarm. A battered sedan waited for us on the other side, probably stolen.

“Drive,” she ordered.

I pushed against the exit and the alarm beeped for several seconds before blaring in earnest. The car was open. The keys dangled from the ignition. I set Benjamin on the seat next to me while our kidnapper got in the back.

I paused. The interior of the car reeked of chemicals—like an over-treated pool. It burned my nostrils and irritated my lungs. I turned and saw stacks of white plastic bottles on the back seat. Each was labeled simply in monochrome lettering, as if they had come from an industrial supply company. I saw the word BROMINE repeated several times, along with screw-top cannisters labeled ANTIMONY POWDER.

“Take a left out of the parking lot.”

“Am I running red lights or not?” I asked as I started the engine.

“Just drive.”

As we drove from the morgue, she seemed to grow more agitated.

“You’re immortal, then?” she asked.

“It would seem so.”

“What’s it like?”

“It’s not any different. I’m just like you. I eat. I sleep. I go to the bathroom.”

“No. I meant death.”

“I’m afraid you’re asking the wrong person. As we previously established, I don’t die.”

“Take the next right.”

I complied and we joined a country road leading out of the small town.

“So there’s nothing?” She put her gun to the back of my head again. “If I shoot you now, what? You just wake up. Is that it?”

“If you shoot me, we’ll crash and one of us won’t wake up at all.”

I briefly considered doing just that. There were many trees along the side of the road.

“So it’s like sleep,” she said.

“No.” I hesitated. “Not exactly.”

“Then what?”

“Does it matter?”

“I wanna know.”

I glanced at her in the rearview mirror. There was an odd look on her face. “Worried about death?” I asked.

“Most people are.”

“Only in the abstract.” I watched the road in silence. It was dark out, and the ancient car’s headlights did little to illuminate the road. “I re-experience my life,” I said finally. “Or parts of it.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just what I said. It doesn’t start at the beginning. And it rarely makes it to the end.”

“A dream.”

“No,” I insisted. “Not a dream.” I paused. “A punishment.”

“Punishment?”

“I suspect someone wanted to make sure I had ample time to review my mistakes before sending me out to try again.”

“Don’t you tire of it?”

“No,” I said after a pause. “I quite like seeing everyone again.”

“I meant life.”

I studied her again in the mirror. She was looking away.

“You don’t have to do this,” I told her. “Whatever they have—”

“Yes, I do,” she said softly, as if there were a great deal more I didn’t know.

We rode in silence for another ten miles before I was ordered to pull into a gravel lot. Our destination appeared to be some kind of park. I turned slowly, and the weak headlights shone across the simple bar gate to a groundskeeper’s shack. After a short run down a gravel slope, the car stopped beside a square storage shed. It was completely dark. Not a single exterior light shone. I suspect that wasn’t an accident.

“Get out. Leave the engine on.”

“It won’t take the police long to find us,” I suggested as I opened the door. “There were cameras.”

“That’s not gonna matter. Now move.”

I grabbed Benjamin and stepped out of the car. The cold gravel of the lot poked into my bare feet, and I shifted uncomfortably. There were no crickets there, I realized. No birds. Other than the occasional breeze, there was no sound at all.

“What an odd place.”

“Move.” She pushed me toward the shed with the barrel of the gun.

The weak yellow light from the headlights flickered slightly as the car idled, but they shone bright enough to reveal the small placard near the door: SERPENT MOUND PARK.

“Where are we?”

I stopped when I saw the marking at the top of the shed door. It explained why we were there, of all places. A minotaur’s head had been etched into the frame: the sign of the labyrinth. It was old and the paint around it was heavily scuffed, but it was unmistakable.

“Get ready to run,” she said, taking up a defensive position behind me. Whatever was about to come through the door, I was apparently the shield.

“Run?” I scowled. “You realize I’m not wearing any shoes.”

“You’ll think of something.”

There was a loud click, and the handle of the shed door turned slowly.

“You’re early,” came a voice from the dark. By its sound, I could tell that the man who owned it had his face covered and that he was standing in a large, hard-walled room and not the long utility shed that held the door.

He stepped from the dark into the feeble glow of the headlights and let the door close behind him. He was dressed in crisp, dark business attire. His face was covered in etched gold. It was creepy.

A warlock.

“That’s far enough,” my captor barked. “Where’s my brother?”

“You’re good,” he said. “I mean, they told me you were the best, but—”

“Where?” she demanded.

The young warlock opened his hands. “To be honest, I didn’t expect you’d actually pull it off. Do you have any idea how long we’ve been looking for her?”

“You wanted her alive, right? Well, she’s alive. Now, where is my brother, you piece of shit?”

“You misunderstand,” the warlock said calmly, strolling forward once again.

“No, you misunderstand.” She pointed the gun at the warlock and he stopped again. “My brother and I are twins.” I could hear her voice shaking next to my ear.

“Is that supposed to mean something?” the young man asked.

“You think I don’t know what happened? You think I didn’t feel it?”

It was then that I was aware there were two more warlocks behind us, one on each side. My captor turned, surprised, and for a moment, no one moved. The gun shook. And then she opened fire. Three loud shots rang in quick succession. The lead warlock turned slightly, as if being shot merely stung. I smelled brimstone then—potent, like a cross of rotten eggs and mineral ash. He tugged on the side of his white shirt and three twisted wrinkles were pulled taut. No holes.

“Tsk, tsk,” he said.

He produced a key from his vest pocket. I froze when I saw it. Although I recognized it immediately, I hadn’t seen it in decades. It was a Master key, an antique, with an ornate loop at the end of a long stock. Its teeth were not metal but variously sized lion’s teeth, stained yellow-brown. It was Beltran’s key—or rather it had been once upon a time.

“Where did you get that?” I demanded.

The lead warlock chuckled, and his companions did the same. Their masks were not gold but rather black acrylic, which made their heads seem like voids in the dark. One of them took me by the arm while the other grabbed my kidnapper. But she didn’t struggle. She didn’t run. In fact, she hugged the man, who stumbled back in surprise. Then she started laughing—louder, louder—as the snake uncoiled from around her arm and wrapped itself like a python around the warlock’s neck, both choking and binding him. He struggled against as the woman, who released another of her tattoos with a wave of her hand—a starburst behind her left shoulder erupted into the night like a flare and disappeared.

Then nothing.

I dropped and covered just before the blast ripped out of the car. It wasn’t very strong, as explosions go, but it was enough to shatter the windows and release burning antimony into the air. It was an obscure alchemical weapon only a mizzen would know, for it was a weapon to kill a mage, their ancient enemies. Unfortunately, despite its effectiveness in breaching magical defenses, Hessian Fire, as it was known, was also quite toxic to people, which meant there was no way my kidnapper would survive the caustic chemicals that billowed over the gravel lot. It seemed she intended to join her twin brother. I only survived by dropping and staying low.

The car burned in white fire. The second warlock, the one who had been grabbed by the snake, was prone and not breathing. Neither was the woman. The third warlock held onto me, but he was coughing violently, and I pulled free and bolted past the door and around the corner of the shed, where in my bare feet I immediately tripped over a fallen branch. Before I could rise, I saw a specter standing before me. It was Anya, still wearing the brown dress we buried her in. She looked down to the branch. I did as well. Then she was gone. I grabbed the heavy stick and tossed it into the trees, where it rolled down the brush-covered slope.

The warlock, wounded and coughing, had immediately given chase, but it was dark in the unlit park, especially with the half-moon hidden behind the trees, and his face was covered in a dark mask. Once outside the range of the headlights, it was difficult for him to see me hiding in the grass, and he instead took off after the sound of the branch rolling through the dark grove. He made so much noise himself, swatting branches or breaking them, that no one heard me creep, barefoot, back around to the front of the shed. The lead warlock had lifted his gold mask over his hair to catch his breath. He was frantically dragging the still body of his comrade toward the door, desperate to leave no trace. He was young, younger than I expected, and I imagined then that he had been given this assignment with a kind of promotion, and he was presently mucking it up.

It wasn’t until I had retrieved the bag from the ground that I made any sound. He turned. But I was already swinging it, and I knocked him hard across the face and chest. Without the protection of his mask, I broke his nose. I grabbed the key from his pocket as he fell back. He grabbed my leg as I fled, and I fell, and we both scrambled to our feet. I was closer to the door, but the heavy bag slowed me down, and I barely had time to turn the key in the lock before I was grabbed again from behind. The door opened, and we both fell forward. I thought that would be the end of it. He would fall onto me on the floor and I would be caught, but luck or magic was with me, and the ancient temple that held the door from which we exited had collapsed with the rest of The Masters’ regime. With its spells of protection gone, the bulk of it had been carried over the edge of a high cliff by an avalanche long ago. All that remained was some exposed stonework attached by mortar to the wall of a jagged crook. The door swung wide over a great empty expanse, and I grabbed a handle, then two, and held on, leaving the warlock nowhere to step. The weight of his own falling body was too much for his one-handed grasp, and it slipped free of me as he fell down the snow-swept cliff. As his scream faded, I reached out with a foot to grab the door frame and pull myself back.

Unfortunately, the black-masked warlock who had chased me, by far the largest of the three, returned. He appeared at the corner and stopped. I spun and inserted the key into the door again, turning it the other way. Warm air hit as the door opened upon the high-arched vestibule of the Kaaba in Mecca. I couldn’t see the famous black cube beyond the high, arched hall, but neither did I have time to look. I stepped through and tried to slam the door shut, but the warlock was right behind me. And he was stronger than I. The door was pushed back and I ran. All around, men bent in prayer rose in angry chant. Nor could I blame them. Not only was a nonbeliever running barefoot through the holiest place in the Muslim faith, my head uncovered, I was barely clothed. Hands grasped at my shoulders and ankles as I fled. But I was in front, which meant I could stay just ahead of the crowd’s reaction. My pursuer, on the other hand, had to contend with the angry mob I had awakened. Amid the noise, I heard the sounds of a spell being cast, but in the shadow of the great holy stone, it fell flat and I was free to continue my escape. I pulled my ankle from the hand of a prostrate Syrian and ran through a high arch, down the staircase that encircled the enormous structure, and out into the crowded square. Alarms blared as rising shouts warned me that the warlock, while harried, was fighting his way through the faithful after me.

Guards appeared in the open corridor ahead. I turned and threw Benjamin over a metal security fence before scaling it myself. It was not the first time my brief but tragic career as a circus tumbler had paid its costly dividend. My feet landed on hot asphalt, and I grimaced as I picked up the bag and took off again, leaving the heavy guards to slam their palms against the bars in frustration.

It was not my first time in Mecca. I had been there once before in the 1930s in the company of a scholar-spy named Hank Hunter, whose voice immediately rose in my head amid the foreign and yet distantly familiar sights and smells of the city.

“She’s the perfect spy,” I heard him tell Master Crowley, who only ever looked on me with a Devil’s bargain of disgust and desire.

“Hardly,” I whispered as I ran.

Heads and eyes turned as I passed. People shouted and pointed. One fellow tried to stop me and got my knee in his crotch instead. With the police now after me, there was little chance of hiding. Barefoot and dressed in green surgical scrubs, I would stand out wherever I went. And then there was the fact that the sunbaked concrete was painfully hot on my bare soles. But then, Mecca was one of the most important cities in the world, and the Kaaba one of the most important relics, which meant there was not one but two doors in its vicinity. The other was in the archaic Mosque of the Jinn, where, according to the Quran, a group of jinn had once gathered to hear the Holy Recitation, after which they pledged their allegiance to the Prophet.

Of course, everything I remembered about Mecca was almost a century old, and when I emerged from the outer colonnade of the Masjid al-Haram, I was greeted not by throngs of tent-pole market stalls, which occupied my memory, but the wide hotel towers of a major 21st-century metropolis, packed one against the next. Nor were all of those rooms enough. Construction cranes arced across the sky in every direction, sometimes straddling their half-finished steel lattices in triplicate.

“Shit.”

A commotion behind me propelled me forward. A white-robed man on a moped passed on the street, and I struck him down with another swing of the heavy, stone-filled bag. Passersby were too shocked to stop me, which gave me just enough time to straddle the slim motorized bike and take off between the traffic-stalled cars. I turned my head once to see several dark-uniformed policemen helping the prone man to his feet and speaking into their hand radios. The Saudis took their stewardship of the holy city very seriously. It wouldn’t be long before I was surrounded.

The Mosque of the Jinn was to the north, I remembered, and I banked left at a stoplight amid the honking and screeching of cars. The moped’s little engine sputtered like an exhausted bee as I ran over the curb and onto the sidewalk, dodging more stopped traffic. As I emerged from under an overpass, pedestrians jumping out of my way in fright, I caught sight of a drone, high in the air. I was being tracked. Already sirens approached in the distance.

I slammed on the brake. In my distraction, I had passed my destination. So choked and modern was the street around me, with high-rise hotels in every direction, that I failed to notice the little mosque, whose ancient structure was now covered in a modern concrete exterior. After struggling for a moment to turn the half-fallen moped, I gave up and ran in bare feet, pushing through the men and occasional dark-robed woman to hop a turnstile and enter the ancient site, where a state guard waited inside the vestibule. We faced each other under a glass ceiling. The sandy-stone walls of the tiny, ancient mosque it protected, one of the oldest in the city, was just behind the guard, who had a gun. He drew it and shouted at me in Arabic.

I raised my hands calmly, taking the moment to catch my breath.

“As-salamu alaykum,” I said, repeating the simple Arabic greeting I had learned.

I looked at the gun in his hand—a tool of violence, not of peace.

He looked at it as well.

“Wa ‘a laykumu s-salam,” he said softly in response, lowering the weapon.

He wasn’t letting me go. In fact, he reached immediately for his radio. He knew there was only one exit from the mosque, and he saw no reason to shoot me, especially at its doorstep. He simply had to make sure I couldn’t leave.

It was quiet inside and smelled of centuries. Despite that I had not the time, I prostrated myself and gave thanks to the Creator and asked forgiveness for the intrusion. I have never been a religious woman, but in the circumstances, it seemed the proper thing to do.

My destination, a low and heavy wood door, sat under a block-stone arch in the side wall. Visual representations being forbidden, the head of the bull was absent from the apex of the door frame. In its place was a stylized, interlocking design reminiscent of a labyrinth. I stood and walked to it. I thought for sure I had enough time to do something as simple as open and close a door. But I was wrong. Somehow, my pursuer had found me ahead of the authorities. The state guard who, in letting me pass, had given me one of the simplest and greatest courtesies of my life now screamed in agony as something horrible was done to him. The tall, dark-suited warlock stepped into the small sacred space, still wearing his faceless black acrylic mask.

“This is holy ground,” I said.

Not that he cared.

I bolted to the door, almost forgetting Benjamin in my haste. I leaned back to grab the imitation Fendi, which now sported a broken strap, and made it to the squat door under the arch just in time to turn the key and be shot from behind with the guard’s gun, which the warlock had taken. I stumbled forward and collapsed on damp dirt. The air was cool. I was in a small outdoor fish market, or so my nose told me. But luck was again with me. I was in Siberia. I could tell instantly, not just from the cracked and faded signs in my native language, but from the people—their faces, their dress.

The warlock strode forward—right into a slammed-closed door.

A wrinkled old woman, a shamaness, had shut it. She looked down at me, both quizzical and serene.

I collapsed and felt the damp earth of my homeland.

“You are not well,” she said in Russian.

“I’m going to die,” I said in faint breath. “Please listen carefully . . .”