As I walked slowly down the lobby, gaping at the hotel guests passing by, it started to make sense. This was the hotel in Fez where Jonathan had abandoned me nearly two hundred years ago. I felt a jolt of pain at the recollection, but I told myself that it was only the last, lingering traces of an old embarrassment and didn’t mean that I was still hurt by his cruelty. However, I couldn’t imagine what it meant that I’d been brought here to this time and place. That fateful day, the day I woke to find Jonathan had abandoned me, was not one I wanted to relive. I’d already felt the pain of that betrayal a thousand times. Perhaps that’s what happened in the underworld; perhaps I would be forced to relive all the worst moments of my life. The thought terrified me; I tried not to panic. Hang on and let’s see what happens next, I thought gamely to calm my nerves.

As I walked through the lobby, I realized that the people all around me couldn’t see me. They couldn’t hear me or feel my presence, either. I was like a ghost to them, here to observe them, not vice versa. But why I’d been sent to this place at this particular moment in time, I couldn’t guess.

I was about to turn around and look for a way out when my gaze fell on a man in a tall, fan-backed rattan chair. I knew this man. He wore an impeccably tailored suit of light wool, a swallow-tailed morning jacket in a dove gray, with a pale-pink-and-gray foulard silk cravat wound high around his throat. His blond curly hair was tamed with pomade, and a charcoal top hat sat jauntily atop his head. His gloved hands rested on the silver handle of a fine gentleman’s walking stick, and he looked at me over the rim of a pair of dark spectacles, with an amused look on his face.

“I was wondering when you were going to turn up, Lanny. I’ve been waiting for you for a whole five minutes. You’re late.” It was my old friend Savva.

* * *

I took the chair opposite him, as I’d done in an earlier life when he found me in this same lobby and brought me back from the brink of despair after Jonathan had left me. That was the first time I’d met him, and it was this meeting that made me realize there were more of Adair’s companions walking the earth than I’d hitherto guessed. After our initial meeting, Savva and I traveled together for a number of years, through northern Africa and along the Silk Road for the most part, trying to avoid detection and eke out a living. It had been a precarious existence, mainly because neither of us had any useful skills beyond being decorative and charming. I was only a woman, a fact that counted for little in those days, and Savva was a wildly unreliable drunkard, opium fiend, and homosexual. We were, in short, a suspect pair as far as society was concerned but not a threat to anyone. As long as no one took special notice of us, we managed to skate by.

The man who sat in the chair in front of me was nothing like Savva as I’d last seen him four years ago, ravaged by heavy drug use and alcoholism. By then, it was clear that what had been thought of as his nature—indolent, capricious, and naughty, by nineteenth-century standards—was actually a serious personality disorder, bipolar or some other manifestation, which he’d tried to endure through the increasingly heavy use of drugs. The man in the chair opposite me was the Savva of old, charming, devilish, and sweetly beautiful. He was like a boy bent on playful anarchy, who—with a mischievous glint in his eye—beckons you to join him.

“I thought I’d never see you again!” Savva exclaimed, at the same time I said, “What are you doing here?” and we both laughed.

“Are you dead?” Savva asked delicately.

“No, I’m not. Are you?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.

Savva nodded. “Yes, for . . . well, a short while. One loses track of time here, one day bleeding into the next, if there are actually ‘days’ at all.” He pulled a gold watch from a vest pocket and waved it nonchalantly on the end of its little chain. “Completely useless here. It reads the same all the time, regardless of whether it’s light or dark. Doesn’t matter if I look at it all day. Useless.”

“If you’re dead, then it must’ve been . . .” I’d been putting the pieces together and broke off, unable to finish the sentence.

“It was Adair, yes. He found me and released me,” Savva said calmly. “He told me that you’d sent him. Now, don’t look so shocked; I know you meant it as a kindness. It was a very enlightening encounter and I will tell you all about it, but not right now. I would much rather hear your news. How in the world did you come to be here if you haven’t died? Wait—don’t answer that yet. I want to show you something first. Come with me. We’re going for a stroll.”

Miraculously, when we stepped through a door, all of Fez unfurled before us, Fez of 1830, better than my memory could ever capture. The city was exactly as it had been, as though it had never evolved, as though it had been someone’s intent to capture it this way for eternity so it could be bookmarked and called up instantly, perhaps for a purpose very much like this—and I wondered if all of history was indexed like this, and for what reason.

We took to the thoroughfare in front of the hotel. Carriages clattered by, carrying Western tourists out to see the sights of the day, but Moroccans comprised most of the traffic, traveling by foot or the occasional donkey-drawn cart. There was dust everywhere, a fine white powder raised by traffic, floating at knee height in perpetual clouds. Savva hooked my arm under his and we started along the street, the merciless Moroccan sun beating down on our heads. As we walked, Savva shot his walking stick out smartly, the polished wood glinting in the sunlight.

“How can this be? How could we be back nearly two centuries in time?” I asked, gesturing to the scene around us. “It’s not possible. It can’t be Morocco. We must be in heaven or hell. Which is it, Savva?”

He gave me a thoughtful frown. “Why, I’ve always assumed I was in heaven, for how could hell possibly be like this?”

“And have you been here the entire time you’ve been, um, deceased?”

“In Morocco? Goodness, no.” He chuckled drily. “If I had to spend the hereafter in just one place, I would hardly pick that dreary hotel. No, I suspect I was brought here because of you, to see you.”

“Is that how it works? Are you summoned to a particular time or spot every time someone once close to you dies?”

The brilliant sun glinted off Savva’s dark spectacles as he shook his head. “No, I don’t think that’s the case. When Adair killed me, I first arrived at a lovely mansion, one of those white palatial affairs, set on a huge green lawn with a hedgerow maze and clouds of sheep grazing off in the distance. I thought I’d been brought to the English countryside, that heaven was an English country manor—one teeming with gorgeous men. The best part was that they were all gay—or if they were straight they found me irresistible, because all I had to do was smile at them and we’d be off shagging in one of the upstairs bedrooms.” He smiled glassy-eyed at the memory of those early happy days after death.

“Really? Only men—no women?” I asked, thinking maybe he’d just overlooked them.

“Maybe it’s heaven for homosexuals. Maybe there is a different heaven for straight people, or lesbians,” he replied, astringent as ever. “Or maybe it was tailor-made for me, I don’t know. I can only tell you what I’ve experienced. As you can imagine, it took quite a while for all this nonstop shagging to get tedious enough for me to take a break and explore the rest of the mansion. That’s when I began running into people I knew, people who’d passed before me, and that’s when this thing would happen”—he gestured to the scene surrounding us—“when we’d suddenly be transported back to the time and place where we’d known each other. I have no idea why that happens, unless it’s to make it easier to remember who the other person is, or to ease the reconnection, or just for the cosmic hell of it. Oh, you know me, Lanny—I never wonder about these things, I just accept them for what they are.”

Yes, this was Savva’s nature, for better or worse. Easygoing and not one to question his situation, Savva wasn’t going to be much help in explaining the reasons behind the events taking place in the afterlife. I had so many questions for him but couldn’t let myself get sidetracked. I had to find Jonathan and return to Adair. I could almost feel Adair’s impatience like a string tugging at me.

“There’s a reason I’m here, Savva,” I said, getting straight to the point. “I’m on a mission. I’m here to find someone and I could use your help.” I explained my current predicament as best I could, giving him a detailed account of the nightmares.

He snorted in mild disgust at the mention of Jonathan’s name. Not that I could blame him after all the evenings he’d spent nursing me through fits of weeping. Jonathan was the root of all the evil in my life, as far as Savva was concerned. I pushed on to avoid yet another discussion about my blind devotion to a man who did not return my affections; this time, it wasn’t about love—it was about duty.

“What about the queen of the underworld?” I ventured. “Have you heard of her?”

Savva drew back like a man who’d almost stepped on a snake. “Oh yes, I’ve actually seen her. Not everybody does, you know. It’s not as though she’s Saint Peter, administering your test before you’re allowed to pass through the pearly gates,” he said with a snide laugh. He continued to hustle me along, his walking stick shooting forward in time with his stride. “I’d been here for a while before hearing about her. As I said, it’s impossible to judge how much time has passed here, but I was at a party one night, in the mansion. There were bar dancers wearing little, tiny short shorts and a mirror ball flashing light all over the room—just like the halcyon disco days in the 1970s. The place was packed and we were all dancing with abandon. Then, all of a sudden, there was a commotion on the other side of the ballroom, the sound of excited murmuring, like a swarm of angry bees.”