Go on, urged the fiend, pushing hard from within the cage of my chest. We’re not afraid.

So I finished the last of the whispering path that led to Jesse’s door.

I knew what awaited me beyond. The dreams had shown me so many times before that, when I ran my fingers along the frame of the doorway as I passed, I found the protruding knot that was always there, a cat’s-eye shape at the height of my shoulder. When my feet met the rug beyond the entrance, I didn’t have to look down to see that it would be red and sage and teal, a design of intertwining vines ending in an ivory fringe.

The cups and plates on the shelves along the kitchen wall would all be arranged largest to smallest.

The cast-iron stove would be sooty and scorched. An oversize mug would be placed nearby, knives and ladles poking out of it in a sharp metal bouquet.

There would be a river-rock fireplace to my left and a dining table with four chairs.

And there would be one other door, the only other one in the house. I knew that, too, because it led to Jesse’s bedroom.

Dark Fay, reminded the fiend. Dark dreams. Dark desires.

A window–no curtains–was shiny with night, directly across the room. Jesse was seated in one of the two armchairs before it, relaxed, unmoving. He appeared to be gazing out at the trees that slept just beyond the glass.

“Lora,” he said. In the reflection of the panes, I might have seen him smile. “I’m glad you came.”

The candlelight hardly revealed him; he was more wily shadows than light. It must have danced along me a good deal more clearly as I lingered there by the front door.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” I said, and it was true. Somewhat.

“That’s all right.” He nodded toward the chair opposite his. “You still can come in. I won’t bite.”

I swallowed, abruptly remembering my idiotic threat to Armand—biting your lip off—and fighting a bloom of something in my throat that felt perilously close to panic.

“I’m not giving back the brooch,” I said.

Jesse Holms turned in place to see me. Even by the solitary candle, even from this small distance, I was near flattened by his beauty: hair, skin, jaw and brow, throat and shoulders, every inch of him golden. Every inch of him perfect, as if he’d been sculpted by the gods from some lovely, impossible stone.

“No, you shouldn’t,” he said. “That was for you.”

I tore my gaze from his and edged a step toward the free chair, then gathered my nerve and made it all the way. I sat down, feeling guilty, flustered. I’d been braced for at least a token argument. After all, I had no idea how he’d gotten it. It might have been his mother’s, or his grandmother’s, or he might have spent every last penny he’d ever saved on it, just to offer it to a girl he hardly knew. I hadn’t actually expected to keep it, but the words had popped out, anyway.

A round piecrust table, surprisingly delicate, separated the armchairs. A jam jar holding a collection of starry white flowers gleamed square in its middle. I pulled free one of the stems, inspecting it as if it held all the answers to every question I’d ever ask.

It sounds peculiar, but touching that stem, feeling the cool smoothness of it in my hand, made me realize that I truly was inside Jesse’s home, unaccompanied and unchaperoned and far, far from where I was supposed to be. I didn’t even have the debatable comfort of knowing that this was another dream.

This is how girls get into trouble, I thought. This is how charity girls end up shunned and starving on the streets. They venture out alone at night to beautiful boys, silly stupid moths to incandescent flames.

The crickets outside seemed suddenly, embarrassingly loud.

“I hope it didn’t cost much,” I said at last. “The brooch, I mean.”

“It depends.”

“On what?”

“On how you might … characterize cost.”

“Pardon?” I glanced back up, confused.

This time Jesse’s smile was aimed straight at me. “Don’t fret, Lora. I can easily afford you that brooch.”

“But why?” I blurted. “Why would you just give it to me?”

I knew I sounded ungrateful, but I didn’t care. The truth was, the brooch was exquisite. I’d never be able to repay him for it, not with money, and we both knew it.

He tipped his head, thoughtful. “Well, you didn’t like the orange I left you. So I tried something else.”

“Didn’t like it?” I began, but had to stop, because my throat had squeezed closed. I pretended to take in the view beyond the window; all I could see was the faint mirrored image of the chamber behind me, broken into rectangles. Jesse and me, fixed in the glass as if we’d been painted there in watercolors, transparent as wraiths.

I closed my eyes and tried again. “It’s not that I didn’t like it. It wasn’t the orange. It was that …” You were there in my room. You saw me sleeping. I think you stroked my face. I managed, “Food is extremely important to me.”

The emotion in my voice discomfited me. I sounded raw, far more pained than I’d meant to. I had to wait to open my eyes again. When I did, he was watching me without expression.

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” he said.

“What is?”

“Being here. Being around all of them. Knowing that none of them, not one, has ever known what it’s like to go without.”

I shook my head, which wasn’t an answer really but all I could muster.

I did not want his pity. I did not want to evoke that sweet, melting look in his eyes. I didn’t want to feel this unexpected sorrow mixed with trepidation and something else—desire, insisted the fiend—that grew with every shared glance between us.

Mad, get mad, I thought to myself, but it was no use. I didn’t feel angry.

I felt … different. Drowsy but wakeful, nervous but lulled, a victim of the soft sliding light and the candle and the calm, patient way this particular beautiful boy, this dangerous flame, was looking at me. As if he was waiting for me to figure out something he already knew.

I wanted to kiss him. I wanted him to kiss me.

The thunderstorm chose that moment to save me by rousing again, boom-boom-boom-boom! I angled in my chair to find it, but the crickets chirped on, and the woods remained unflustered. No rain, no lightning, no gusts. I glimpsed teasing patches of amethyst through the crowns of the trees but nothing else.

“It’s the Germans,” Jesse said. “Airships. They’re bombing the coast.”

That brought me wide awake. I leapt to my feet. “What? Now?”

“They’re not near. The channel intensifies the sound. Believe me, no one else around here will even hear them. They won’t make it this far west before dawn.”

“Oh, I …” I blinked at him, replaying his words. “What do you mean, no one else will hear them?”

“Just that. Only you and I hear them tonight. I’d guess they’re somewhere over Sussex right now. Brighton, maybe.”

Again, I could not speak. Jesse’s calm expression never wavered.

“It’s all right, Lora. You can relax. You’re safe with me, I swear it.”

“What do you mean,” I asked again evenly, not relaxing, “that no one else will hear them?”

His gaze angled away from mine; for the first time, he looked uncomfortable. He leaned forward to pull out some flowers from the jar, just as I had done. Long, tanned fingers began to weave the stems together, making a braid of blooms. Drops of water beaded the wood.

“All the world is like an ocean,” he said. “All of it, not only the water part. And nearly everyone skims along on just the surface of that ocean, accepting what their eyes and ears show them as truth, even when it’s not. Even when it’s merely the bright skin of the ocean covering the truth. Entire lives are spent skimming that skin, person after person bobbing along the surface of things like driftwood, never sensing aught deeper beneath them. To them, real truth remains unfathomable.

“No one else hears the bombs, Lora, because almost everyone else around us is driftwood, basic human. You and I are the only ones right now who break the ocean skin to glimpse the deep. We’re the only ones who can hear the bombs because, from here, they’re beyond human hearing.”

I allowed the crickets to fill the silence, ardent behind the glass. Jesse’s fingers wove in and out between the flower petals; he was shaping the braid into a half circle upon the table, smearing the water beads. He did not glance back up at me or smile to let me in on the joke.

“You’re not human, Eleanore Jones. I think that somewhere inside you, you must know that. You must always have known. You’re not made of ordinary bone or blood but of something else completely.”

“Really. What am I of, then? Kelp and jellyfish, I suppose?”

“You are made of magic.”

He said it in an absolutely unremarkable way, as if instead he’d just said, I had coffee this morning or the floor needs mopping.

His hands stilled and finally he looked up at me. No smile. I saw nothing but that infinite patience etched on his face.

He wasn’t joking.

Everything seemed to slow down, the seconds dragging out into a creeping crawl. My pulse slowed, and the dance of the candle flame slowed, and the wind outside slowed. I could not move or even swallow.

I wanted to respond with something cutting and urbane, something Sophia might muster at the drop of a pin—You are stark mad, Mr. Holms—but my mouth felt frozen shut. My whole body, in fact, had gone ice cold. I had become crystalline, see-through.