I kept pounding, all the while telling myself to stay calm, not to lose my head. It wasn’t the room from the dream, it couldn’t be. That was just a dream and this was reality. And yet . . . I could swear that I was beginning to smell the same dark aroma from my dream, the smell of ashes and earth. And I thought I heard something coming toward me from the dark recess of the room, a heavy, blunt footfall, one deliberate step at a time, and the snort of animal breathing. I shrieked in earnest, kicked and banged, jerked on the latch so mightily in an attempt to fling the door open that I might’ve dislocated my shoulder. To no avail. The acrid smell of scorched earth wrapped around me, and the heavy breath washed down my neck in cascades as though the monster was standing right over me . . . and just as I thought I felt the brush of its taloned hands reaching for me, I was pulled under by blackness.

* * *

“Dear God, Lanore, you gave me a terrible fright,” Adair said as soon as I opened my eyes.

Where was I? Not in the dungeon, I saw that right away. I was lying in my bed in the guest room, Robin and Terry visible over Adair’s shoulder, hovering at the doorway. Adair sat on the edge of the bed, watching me intently.

I bolted upright, but the sudden movement made my head spin, and Adair grabbed my shoulders to keep me from tumbling out of bed. “The cellar—”

“You’re safe,” he said, trying to get me to lie back. “Robin came to get me. She said you were trapped in one of the storerooms. The door shut behind you and she couldn’t get it open.”

The fleeting glimpse of her sly smile was frozen in my memory. “She’s lying,” I countered. I was ready to throw back the blanket and climb out of bed to confront her, but Adair held me in place. “She locked me in there! She did it on purpose. She wanted to frighten me,” I insisted, pointing in her direction.

“What cheek!” Terry shouted at me from the doorway, but I noticed that Robin scurried backward into the hall, out of my view.

“Now, Lanore, really,” Adair said, trying to soothe me. “Why would she do that?”

“How should I know?” I snapped. “All I know is that she did.”

“You’re tired, and you’ve had a lot on your mind lately, Lanore,” he said loudly enough to be overheard by the girls, then added under his breath, “Are you sure it’s not your imagination?” But he had been heard after all, for there was a giggle at the door, mean and childish and meant to intimidate me.

I grasped Adair’s shirt and pulled myself closer to him. “Adair, we need to speak in private. Please,” I said in a low voice.

He twisted in his seat and barked at the two women to leave us alone and, once they’d slunk away grumpily, got up to close the door after them. “Are you quite sure that you saw Robin close the door?” he asked skeptically as he resumed his seat.

I wanted to remind him that he was the one who suspected the malevolent witch sisters of possessing the Englishwomen in some way, but didn’t want to be pulled into an argument on the matter, not at the moment. “Never mind about that—that’s not what I want to talk to you about.” I closed my eyes and an image of the ochre stones rushed up and sent a fresh shiver through me. “That room in your basement, the room where I was trapped . . . it’s the place in my dream. The dungeon.”

He stared at me uncomprehending for a minute, and then shook his head. “You must be mistaken. . . . It can’t be.”

“It is. I’m not imagining it,” I said hotly.

“Not imagining, but maybe it’s the power of suggestion. You told me that you got lost in the basement the other day—maybe you’re only remembering what you saw then. Maybe that’s why the room seems familiar to you.”

That sounded reasonable, but—no. I hadn’t been lost in the basement for long, and besides, I hadn’t gone nearly that far down the passage on my first morning here. The hall in my dream looked precisely the same as the one snaking beneath Adair’s home—they were the same. I didn’t have the slightest doubt. I was going to tell Adair all about the demon I’d seen in my dream and whose presence I’d felt underground, but I decided not to mention it lest he refuse to send me to the underworld, thinking it too dangerous.

“Something’s going on, Adair. These dreams are a message. I know it, I can feel it.” The dreams were coming fast and furious now, and what’s more, they were breaking through to the daylight world, having followed me to Adair’s island—or lured me here. I was beginning to believe there was some kind of intelligence behind them. Someone was trying to communicate with me. It was time to lay my cards on the table. I was going to need to ask Adair for his help at some point, and it seemed that the time had come. I took a deep breath. “I don’t think they’re dreams, not exactly. I think they’re something else. I think Jonathan is trying to contact me.”

This was not going to be an easy topic to discuss with Adair, no matter how I brought it up. Jonathan was the last person in the world Adair would want to talk about, especially with me. He’d never liked Jonathan; what’s more, I don’t think he forgave Jonathan for breaking my heart (and, to an extent, never forgave me for falling in love with Jonathan in the first place). To say that the three of us had a complicated history was an understatement, and I’m sure Adair had hoped that was behind us now that Jonathan was dead. Only here he was again, still coming between us even in death.

Adair gave me an incredulous look, as though he couldn’t believe his ears. “You think he’s trying to reach you?”

“You sound as though you don’t believe it’s possible, but why not? You brought him back from the dead once, proving that he continues to exist—why shouldn’t he try to contact me?” Adair started in surprise and tried to cover it up, but I had been waiting for this. “Yes, I know all about it, Adair. I knew that you brought Jonathan back from the dead, thinking he could tell you how to find me. And I know what he told you, too, once you’d resurrected him.”

“That he’d been brought to the attention of the queen of the underworld,” Adair said tensely, as though even the words—“queen of the underworld”—spooked him.

“I heard how this queen had learned about him, too,” I went on, pressing the momentary advantage I had while Adair was still in shock over how much I knew. “It was because of the tattoo, the tattoo you gave him, like the one you have on your back. This queen must’ve been looking for it—looking for you.”

At this last part, Adair grew grave and tense, his cheek twitching involuntarily. But he seemed to want to deflect attention and said to me, briskly, “It seems you know a lot for someone who wasn’t there. How did you learn of this, Lanore? It had to come from one of the others who had been with me at the time. So, which one was it? Was it Pendleton, Alejandro? Or was it Jude?”

There was a time when Adair couldn’t stand for his minions to talk about him behind his back, and if any of us were caught doing so, it would’ve been grounds for a most unpleasant punishment. So the minions rarely shared confidences with one another, and on that rare occasion when we did, we kept that secret sacred, on pain of torture. It was Jude who had told me, but I had to wonder if it mattered now. Adair seemed much changed from his old self. He’d set the others free to live their own lives, and here he was, living on the island, in seclusion. Still, it felt like a betrayal to give that name up. “I can’t tell you and I’m sure you understand why,” I said after a second’s hesitation. “But you shouldn’t doubt that I know it all, everything that happened between you and Jonathan.”

As Adair’s face clouded with shame and uncertainty, I leaned even closer to him and held his hands tightly so he couldn’t pull away. “I don’t care about anything that happened in the past, Adair,” I said hotly, pleading with him. “I don’t care if you kept Jonathan from me, if you want to keep everything he told you a secret from me forever. But I know about this queen and that she’s made Jonathan her prisoner, and all this time it’s been preying on my mind.”

I could tell Adair wasn’t happy to hear that I’d been thinking of Jonathan, that I’d never stopped thinking about Jonathan, but he tried to hide his concern behind a breezy wave of his hand. “I don’t know why you call him a prisoner. . . . The word he used was ‘consort.’ I suppose you don’t like to think of him as her consort, however. And as for this queen, why concern yourself with her at all? There are endless myths of devils, demons, and gods who oversee the transition of souls to the next plane of existence. In some religions, the figure that rules the underworld is a woman, yes. I must say that I wasn’t surprised to hear that this queen had been taken with Jonathan—why shouldn’t she be susceptible to his charms, like every other female who has crossed his path?” I detected a note of exasperation in his tone. There was another pause, a gaze askance. “I sent him back, yes, but you should know that he wanted to go back. And . . . Jonathan told me the queen would come looking for him, and you must understand, I did not want that to happen.”

A flush of color bloomed on Adair’s face and he ducked his head so I couldn’t study his face while he spoke. “What I have to say isn’t very flattering, Lanore, but I’ll tell you to prove that I’m being honest with you. In the course of my life, I’ve done things that others might call questionable. I did so always thinking I was in the right, of course, that these things were necessary for the betterment of science, to improve what we knew about the world beyond our natural world, the supernatural world. If I felt a qualm for what I’ve done, well, I told myself it didn’t matter because I was going to live forever. I would never see the judgment day. Only that wasn’t strictly true, was it?