The right path descended into a thick wood. The left rose to a high ridge before disappearing. Neither seemed familiar. She shouldn’t have come so far. The landscape was foreign, the twining paths looping and circling back. She had wanted to lead the Stockton child’s spirit deep into death, where it could not find its way back out. Now she was lost as well.

She chose the right-hand fork, hurrying down the slope and beneath the trees. Here within the deeper reaches, the paths were either strewn with rocks and exposed roots or sucking, quivering bogs one must traverse with care. The trees reached their black and skeletal branches to grab and harry, and there was always the threat of dangerous beings who would be drawn to her warmth and her light. She’d never encountered one, but Mother had described them all in gory detail, making certain Callista understood the danger—shambling, mindless grel and rotting, worm-riddled dead-flesh, the ghostly, shrouded soul eaters with their reaching bony hands, and phantasms whose eerie wails sounded like the screams of a million condemned souls; the world’s nightmares made real.

The path narrowed, the footing treacherous. Beneath the trees, even the dim gray light faded to darkness. A prickle teased its cold way up her spine as if something watched from the undergrowth. She peered through the gloom, here and there catching a glimmer of light, a whisper in her ear. Spirits flickered like will-o’-the-wisps to lure her from the trail. Tempting her to new paths and untried roads as she struggled to find her way back to life.

She ignored the pull of their call, keeping to the rocky path, praying it led her somewhere recognizable before the cold or the creatures found her. Rounding a bend, she staggered to a halt, gazing out over a greasy gray bog, the water slick and still. Had she come this way? She couldn’t remember. But there was no turning around. The spirits closed in behind her and every now and then, she heard a fearsome growl or an inhuman shriek from the wood behind. Her presence had been discovered. The creatures of Annwn closed in.

She stepped carefully into the thick, oozing mud, sinking up to her ankles, her gown slapping against her legs as she moved slowly out toward the far shore where the trees gripped firmer earth. With the ash-handled Blade in her hand, she felt her way a step at a time despite the panic eating its way up through her gullet.

A ripple slid across the surface to her right; a shape rising and falling into the mud. She increased her pace as much as she dared, but the bog clung, sticky and cold; her stomach cramped against the icy pain, and there was no feeling in her calves.

Twenty paces away from the shoreline. Ten. The ripples moved toward her like an arrow loosed from a bow. She cried out, shoving herself onward through the glutinous sludge. Five paces. She was lurching for a scaly green branch to drag herself up and out, when the surface peeled away to reveal a long, eel-like creature. Its limbs were jointed at odd places—no normal creature had four elbows and three knees. But it was the face that was truly horrifying. A human skull, though the features seemed oddly askew and drooping, as if the flesh had melted. Its mouth was a wide gash showing rows of needle-sharp teeth; it had two vertical slits for a nose, and eyes round and white though clearly focused on her as it rose up out of the bog with a high-pitched, glass-shattering scream.

Her mother had called them grel—no earthly spirit to be frightened with a banishment spell traced in sound from Blade, the bell clutched in her fist. This was a creature of darkness and murder and disease and pain; a foul denizen of the deepest pits of Annwn that hungered for life and human flesh. Safe in her bed, Callista had shivered with delight upon hearing her mother’s tales of these creatures. Trapped within the tangled maze of Annwn’s realm, her shivers turned to racking, pulse-racing shudders.

She swung around, her lungs burning, her legs clumsy and slow as she fought to escape. Trees scratched and clawed at her face, tugged at her gown. The grel lumbered behind her, its grasping arms reaching for her, claws long as scythes.

The path turned again. She knew this hedge. She’d passed that fallen log. The trees thinned, and she was back on familiar ground. The path broadened to a wide bricked track lined with stately limes. She was steps from the door that would take her back into the world of the living.

The grel broke from the woodland behind her, its bloody mouth drawn back from ear to ear as if someone had opened its skull with a sword, its screeching like claws down a slate, its breath an icy burn on her neck and arms.

It was joined by a second grel, and by one of the dead-flesh, shrouded in a black bloodstained cloak, a face half-pecked, an eye hanging loose from a socket, entrails spilling like greasy snakes from its belly. She stumbled and the closest grel stretched to lash her across the back with one of its long hooked claws, even as the dead-flesh reached with a hand, the skin sloughing away from the bone as it grabbed her around her wrist.

She sketched the signs that would call Key to her hand. Closed her fingers around the ebony handle and rang it once. Then twice more. The door opened. She slid through, slamming the passage closed behind her as agony ripped behind her eyes and wrenched a scream from her knotted throat.

* * *

“How do you feel?” David sat on a stool, knees drawn to his body, looking exceedingly uncomfortable. His face was carved with tired lines, a grayish cast to his skin. But his eyes shone like pewter seas.

“Sore,” she replied.

The colorful, gauzy scarves festooning the caravan still drifted above her head, but the table had been shoved into a corner, cloth torn, candle wax smeared, and a long singeing burn near the hem. She lay on the bunk, a pillow beneath her head, the smell of unwashed sheets wrinkling her nose.

“No lasting damage? Broken bones? Internal bleeding?” he asked, his tone brisk and physician-like. She couldn’t decide whether she was annoyed, relieved, or still reeling from a bad knock to the head.

She inhaled slowly, feeling nothing worse than a tightness in her chest and an ache low across her back. Bracing a hand against the edge of the pallet, she eased herself over, teeth clamped. “I don’t think so.”

“Good. I’m glad one of us is feeling all right, because my damned heart stopped. What the hell happened?”

She gripped her head lest her brains ooze slowly out her ears. “Don’t yell at me.”

“I’m not yelling. I’m asking . . . loudly.”

“Sounds an awful lot like yelling to me,” she grumbled.

“Is this better?” he asked quietly through grinding teeth.

“Not much.”

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and opened them again with a questioning lift of his brows and a motion to continue.

“It needs work, but it’ll do,” she answered faintly.

“What happened, Callista?” he asked quietly, though no less intensely.

She rubbed her temples, trying to remember what she’d just as soon forget. “It was a stupid mistake. A beginner’s error. I should have known better, but Mrs. Stockton seemed so bereft. I kept thinking it would be all right. That I could find my way out.”

“What would be all right? Pretend I don’t know anything about necromancy or Fey-born magic and speak slowly and clearly.”

She started to sigh before catching it back, seeing the combined look of concern and concentration on his face. He wasn’t just furious—despite the bulging vein in his temple. He cared. A flutter of something besides fear bounced around her stomach. “Annwn is a tangle of paths, sort of like a funnel. The farther and deeper you go, the more dangerous it becomes and the more difficult it is to retrace your steps. I went too far in and got lost.”

“Then what?” David looked as if he chewed nails, but at least his volume had receded to an acceptable level.

“There were creatures.” Even the memory was enough to send a freezing sweat between her shoulder blades. “I fled, but more caught my scent. I managed to open the door, but after that I don’t remember anything until I woke to you yelling at me.”

“And if I was? Damn it, I thought you were dead.”

A bleak smile touched her lips. “It’s nice having someone worried about me—noisy or otherwise.”

He didn’t return her smile. Instead he rose from his chair, arms folded across his chest, one hand on his chin as he pondered her words.

She didn’t know what she’d hoped for. An emotional bedside confession of his eternal love seemed beyond the realm of possibility, but a few kind words would have gone a long way to ease the churning pit her stomach had become. Last night had been a turning point for her. A toe-curling, heart-stopping revelation. To David, it seemed to rate somewhere between ho-hum and Callista who? She knew she wasn’t his first or even his hundred and first, but did he really have to make her feel like just one more in a long chain? Like she’d made a huge, embarrassing mistake?

He met her gaze, his expression holding nothing of the passionate desire she’d once seen there. Instead he looked on her as a particularly irritating problem he was solving. “If you hadn’t sealed the door, could this creature have used the rift you opened to escape?”

Her stomach shriveled, her heart sank into her boots, but she let none of that show on her face. Not this time. She’d already revealed too much of herself. She’d not compound her mistake with embarrassing entreaties, like a dog begging for a pat from its master. He would see only what she wanted him to see; a quiet reserve, a calm professional serenity. “I don’t know.”