“Eudo Beskin has been a blight on my soul for two years. It’s time I repaid him for his tender mercies.”

Her gaze wandered over his face as if seeking some answer; her breath quick, her body trembling. “And Corey? My brother? You can’t face them all alone. ”

“The wolf doesn’t hide, Callista. It hunts or it dies.”

“But it’s impossible. How can there be peace when so many on both sides are unwilling to look beyond a hatred going back millennia?”

“Simple,” he answered, meeting her steady gaze. “One person at a time.”

* * *

That night, when sleep refused to come and the dark seemed fraught with restless shades, she knew exactly where she was going. Rising from their shared bed, she tugged on a heavy, quilted robe. It dragged the floor and the sleeves fell down over her hands, but it was warm and smelled of David. She cast one last glance at his sleeping form twined within the blankets. The dying fire illuminated his muscled frame, brightened the gold of his hair, carved deep lines into his face. His normal sun-bronzed skin seemed faded and washed-out, but just looking at him sent butterflies banging around her insides and squeezed her heart. Turning abruptly, she left his room for hers.

This bedchamber was twice as large and three times as elegant, but devoid of the memories of love-damped skin and soft, shuddering moans. There was nothing here but fine furniture, expensive curios, and her own uncertainties. Before she could change her mind, she took down the box from the top of a high cabinet, lit a single candle, arranged the bells before her, and then, among the flickering, crawling shadows, she read each and every letter from her mother to her lost family, beginning with the first effusive explosion of excitement and hope through the years that followed until the last few notes, just as crammed with anecdotes and news about her life, but the happiness had faded. Nothing left but grief and resignation.

“She loved you. Surely she would have stood by you. She wouldn’t have turned away when you needed her most.”

Her words to David echoed back at her from the high ceilings and dark windows. When she spoke, had she been referring to his grandmother or to the Armstrong family, who’d cut off their wayward daughter as completely as if she’d died? How could her aunt have done this to her only sister? How could she have abandoned her with nothing? Not a word? Not a hope?

Callista folded the last letter and traced the first symbol. The notes of Key rang pure, shattering the gloom, cracking the barriers between one world and the other. An icy wind rushed forth, riming the table-top, frosting her breath, and curling against her bare toes. She wrapped the robe more tightly around her, touched each bell in quick turn, and stepped into death.

The tree-lined brick path stretched out before her, but this time the statues depicted writhing limbs and arched backs, erect members and open mouths; each pose more erotic than the last.

Callista looked away, ice melting off her flaming face, even as she felt a throbbing between her legs and a tingling in her breasts. She gripped her bell tighter in the bone-chilling cold, but she would not go back through the door. Instead, she headed for the house on the hill and the dimly lit windows that seemed always out of reach.

Inhaling a breath of icy air, she stepped off the path and struck out across the lawn. The grass crunched like glass beneath her feet and a snow-scented wind buffeted her, tearing at her robe, freezing the very breath in her lungs. The path had gotten her nowhere, the house had remained always in the distance.

Not tonight.

The way grew more perilous, but Callista pressed on. The steep, rocky hill cut her hands and feet to ribbons, seeping the gray earth with black blood. Bent and crooked trees sprouted from crevices in the rock, their leaves rattling like bones. Now and then she caught sight of a spirit among the colorless landscape, but when she turned her head, the spark would flit out of sight and she was left once more alone. She paused on a narrow lip of rock, her hand ready to sketch the symbol that would bring Blade to her hand, but the sounds faded and she could not linger long lest the cold sap her strength before she accomplished the task she’d come for.

It might have been miles she walked as her feet burned, then throbbed, then went numb and ice crusted her robe and hair. It might have been weeks or years she traveled, no way to know within this starless landscape, but suddenly the hill broadened into a wide, sloping lawn. The house loomed gray and silent before her.

Windows stared like empty eyes and a doorway gaped like a wound. She climbed the steps and crossed the threshold into a dim entryway. Candles burned pale blue in sconces and on tabletops while blue flames danced in a marble hearth. As she passed from room to room, upstairs and down, she recognized the arched doorways, the antlered stair, the oriel window above the landing, from her mother’s descriptions. Killedge Hall, the seat of the Armstrong family.

She called Summoner to her, the blood from her injured hands leaking onto the carved faces like tears. The world was silent but for her own heavy breathing. With a swing, she rang the bell, the chime vibrating along her bones, pushing against her lungs, heating her blood. She whispered the words of the spell as she traced the symbols that would call the spirit to her.

A gossamer mist rose up before her, thin as vapor, and slid toward the doorway to the empty garden. Callista rang Summoner once more and painted more symbols in the air, binding the spirit. It struggled, the mist darkening and twisting like smoke in a drafty chimney, but Callista had been trained well, if not thoroughly, and the bell’s chime held it fast.

“What do you want with me?” The voice shimmered high and frightened as a figure took shape within the mist: a round face with a permanently soft and vulnerable expression, a body that in youth had been willowy but with age had grown gaunt and then skeletal, and arms that Callista ached to have embrace her.

“I wish to see what you see . . . Mother.”

The spirit’s expression never changed, never warmed, but she nodded before sliding into Callista’s skin and taking her over. She blinked, seeing the house, not as it was in death, but as it had been in life; golden stone in a long summer-afternoon light, a green lawn, and a sparkling stream. A girl raced before her; hair in pigtails, hand fisted on a kite string. A shout came from her lips. “Wait, Dee! My kite’s caught in the bush!”

The girl kept running and laughing, her scarlet kite fluttering above her.

“Aunt Deirdre,” Callista whispered.

The image gave way to another. It was night now and the house rose dark upon its hill. A carriage stood on the lane by the spinney; a tall, thin man with eyes sharp and clear blue as marbles smiled and took her shaking hand as he helped her into a carriage. He called her a name and kissed her lips as the house grew smaller behind them.

Faster the images appeared and vanished.

An ugly boy, his face ruddy, his lip jutting out in a pout, a swaddled bundle, a room drafty and cold with mold crawling like seaweed across the ceiling. A creaking bed where she and the man laughed and made love, a windswept cemetery by the sea. Stooped and ill and bent over, she wept, a letter falling unheeded in her lap.

“This is the past,” Callista said. “I wish to see the future. What happens to me? Is there hope for David? I wish to see what you see.”

The spirit seemed to harden within her. Callista couldn’t breathe, her throat tightened as if she would choke and the air turned gray and murky, but the images continued.

A dead man with a blade in his throat; David, bent and shaking as he slid a silver blade across his palm; a wolf running across an empty hilltop as a crow dove like a shadow before it; Corey’s scarred face flushed and twisted with excitement; a crowd of gray figures beneath an enormous stone wall; a woman kneeling; a knife falling; and the twisting unending paths of death stretching on forever.

It took all Callista’s effort to lift her arm and ring the notes that would sever the bond and release the spirit. Her mother’s form hovered before her, ghostly and pale, her expression sorrowful.

“But what of David? You didn’t show me his future.”

“I see nothing beyond death,” came the spirit’s voice, whispery as the rush of leaves or the slide of a snake along the ground.

Callista knew she shouldn’t. Knew the pain it would cause. But she couldn’t stop the words from coming or her voice from breaking as she asked, “Mother?”

Her mother’s spirit seemed to shine brighter, her form almost solid as she opened her arms and took her daughter to her heart. For the first time ever in all her journeys within this frozen merciless realm, Callista was warm and she was happy.

* * *

David watched as she took her first quick breath and the sheen of ice cracked upon her cheeks to melt and slide onto her robe like tears. As she focused her empty gaze upon the candle’s flame, the pinprick orange gleam reflected in her dilated pupils. As she lifted her blue-nailed hand from the largest of the bells, the ring banging like the clash of swords in his aching head.

She turned her heartbroken gaze to him.

“Now you understand why you have to leave with the Duncallans. Why you can’t stay here with me,” he said, though this was a rare moment when he took no joy in being right.

“I won’t believe it. There is no one future, David. Life is too messy. Humans are too unpredictable. I saw one, but there are hundreds, thousands, an infinite number of ways in which this fate can be changed.”