All day.

  All night.

  In the rare instances I let myself think about that day, I had to relieve the deep, unbearable burn of humiliation that arrived when I’d finally accepted we’d been tricked. I had to remember the way Cabell had tried so hard not to cry as we carried our things back up into the attic. I swore to myself I’d never let any man make a fool of me again.

  And yet there I was, standing in front of someone else who’d played me like a fiddle.

  “You know what this means, right?” Emrys began, interrupting that unwelcome descent into memory.

  “Oh, I can’t wait to hear this,” I muttered.

  “You’ve never been inside the estate, have you?” he continued, as if to really rub it in.

  “Didn’t we just establish that?” I snapped back. Wyrm’s personal home also served as the guild’s headquarters and library. We’d been banned from ever doing business there.

  “Well, I have, and I think I know exactly where they keep the mirror.” There was an edge of triumph to his look. “So you’re not quite rid of me yet.”

  My lips parted as I scrambled for an argument. The air around me grew colder with each second, as if to help trap me there. “You think we can’t figure it out ourselves?”

  Even as I said it, my inner logic, rarely heard, whispered, This is for Cabell.

  “There are only nine days left until the winter solstice,” he reminded me. “And you have no idea what Lord Death’s plans are. You’re—”

  He broke off midthought, his head snapping back in alarm. The air spiked with a depth of cold I’d felt only once before, when the White Lady had appeared in the field of blinding snow. Instinct and terror collided, begging me to move, but the death mark flared with such acute pain it felt as though I’d been stabbed there, straight to the heart.

  I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, even as the shadows behind me snarled.

  Emrys reached out and grabbed me by the jacket, hauling me over the top of the desk to his side as the ghost materialized from the dust and darkness where I’d stood only a second before.

  The sight nearly made my bones jump out of my skin.

  The woman’s long ropes of hair drifted around her, glittering and translucent. Even the dim light seemed to shy away from her, flickering over her face but refusing to linger more than a moment on her hideous expression of hunger.

  White, glowing eyes fixed on me with recognition, her lips silently forming the word. You.

  “What…the hell…is that?” I breathed out.

  The heat of Emrys’s body was the only relief from the iciness that filled the air.

  “That would be the sorceress this vault belonged to,” Emrys said, drawing us back. “Enora, what’s gotten into you?”

  Her features sharpened like a knife, more wraith than human. Dust, grime, loose parchment, scraps of fabric, and fragments of tile rose to form her like clay in a sculptor’s hand. They encased her in a hideous skin of filth and decay. Giving her a body.

  A phantom wind blew through the basement, rattling the chains on the Immortalities and slamming the door at the top of the stairs. I jumped at the noise, gasping at the sudden stench of ash and a rancid sourness. Flecks of dead earth and wood splinters were still finding her, scratching at our own skin as they tore through the air.

  The ghost opened her maw, revealing fangs of stone and tile shards.

  Revenant, my mind screamed. She was becoming a revenant.

  Her arms stretched out like twining vines, her talon-like nails raking through the air toward my chest.

  One of Emrys’s hands released me, fumbling with the desk drawer to retrieve something—a clay talisman, with a sigil for protection against the dead.

  “Noooooooo,” the creature wailed, turning the air rancid with her misery. She lunged toward us, but her hands dissipated as they reached the talisman, clumps of dirt and ash from the fireplace raining down on the desk.

  “You knew this thing was down here?” I squeezed out.

  “She’s a shade,” Emrys said, bewildered. “She’s just a shade…”

  A shade was a soul that remained in the mortal world, refusing to pass on. It didn’t possess the kind of malice or corrupted pain that would produce a more terrifying specter like a wraith or White Lady. Shades were stubborn, not monstrous.

  At least, they were supposed to be.

  “I’ve never seen her like this before,” Emrys said. “She’s helped me do research in the past. She was charming.”

  “Great,” I said. “Now she’s a charming revenant who wants to claw our faces off.”

  He exchanged a worried look with me. When he nudged me behind him, I realized he still had a grip on me. I was too harried, too distracted by the hard throbbing of my death mark, to object as we took a long arcing path around the shelves, heading for the stairs.

  The revenant stalked behind us, leaving a trail of grime and soot smeared in her wake.

  “That’s a good Enora…stay back now,” Emrys said, holding the talisman out in front of us like a shield. She snarled and snapped like a wounded animal. Her hands hovered inches from my throat, stroking the air, as if imagining how it would feel to shred my soft skin instead.

  “Noooooooo,” she wailed, almost sobbing as we made our way up the stairs backward, not daring to turn our backs on her.

  Her body contorted into grotesque shapes as she climbed on hands and knees behind us, the ridges of her spine rising like thorns. Her jaw unhinged itself like a snake’s. “Noooooooo!”

  Nash’s words shuddered through me, throbbing in time with the death mark.

  Like spring, you are cursed to die young.

  “—sin?” Emrys was talking to me. “Tamsin!”

  I forced myself to respond. “What?”

  “Can you get the door?” he asked. “She’s not going to get out, I promise.”

  I was embarrassed by how hard my hand was shaking as I felt for the knob behind me. It took another beat to get a good enough grip on it with my sweat-slick palm.

  I all but fell backward into the library’s marble atrium. The impact knocked some sense into me, and I scrambled back. The statues kept watch as Emrys struggled with the door, with hanging the talisman around the handle.

  With a scream of rage and seething magic, the revenant blew it open, throwing Emrys back into the nearby statue of Athena with enough violent force to stop the heart in my chest. The talisman flew the opposite way down the hall, clattering as it hit the floor. My mind tracked the sound of it, screamed at me to retrieve it, even as I scrambled toward Emrys’s prone form.

  There’s no blood, I thought, rocked with relief. I gripped the back of his jacket, shaking him. “Emrys!”

  He groaned, but the sound was swallowed by the revenant’s mournful wail; she sobbed and screamed until I had to cover my ears. My stomach turned as her cries echoed against the cold white stone, as inescapable as her path toward us.

  Toward me.

  The stench of rot poured from her as her eyes fixed on my face once more, her grasping claws trembling as they stretched toward me.

  “Tamsin!” Neve’s cry carried down the hall a moment before she appeared, her face etched with fear.

  “Run!” I shouted back.

  The revenant spun toward her, snapping her teeth at the sight of Neve summoning a spell. As her otherworldly song rose, a blue-white light gathered around the sorceress. The words from my dream echoed back to me, haunting and otherworldly. Protect her, protect her—

  The revenant went utterly still, as if caught in some unseen web. When she spoke, there was none of the mindless rage. There was only terror. “No…no…not you—!”

  Neve balked, taking a step back in alarm as ash and dirt dripped off the revenant, crumbling onto the pristine white marble floor. Beside me, Emrys forced himself to sit up, shaking his head as if to clear it.

  Ash and dirt and debris fell away from her form as it crumpled, until only the ethereal outline of the ghost remained. “Not you, not you—forgive me!”

  The spirit flew back toward the door to the basement, singeing the air with the scent of raw magic. The commotion had drawn Caitriona and Olwen, and the sight of them just beyond Neve’s shoulder finally spurred me to action. I released my grip on Emrys and ran for the talisman.

  “What was that thing?” Neve gasped out as I slammed the door shut and hung the talisman around the handle.

  As if sensing me there, the spirit surged forward again, rattling the door, straining it against its hinges. For a moment, I was terrified the talisman had cracked when it had fallen.

  But it held. The sigil lit with a cerulean glow, forming a seal around the door, imprisoning her, but not her voice.

  Emrys stood slowly, his gaze catching mine as the revenant’s screams turned to a lament of desperation.

  “Great Mother, I did not see! I did not know! Forgive me—forgive me—!”

  Neve’s shocked face mirrored my own. She brought a hand up to her chest, touching the pendant hidden beneath her shirt. I knew what she was thinking. I was thinking it too.

  What are you?

  But when silence finally came, there were no answers to be found there, either.

  Rivenoak Manor was as impossibly grand as I remembered it, made more so by the dusting of snow and the shimmering lights upon its towering facade.

  The palatial home had been an exercise in delusions of grandeur by some Elizabethan courtier who’d had no way of knowing his descendants would be brokers of stolen relics, not power.

  We weren’t Rivenoak’s only visitors that evening. The lit torches lining its long drive and the parade of sleek cars heading toward the house had been our first sign of trouble. It only got worse from there.

  Douglas firs had been hauled in to decorate the entryway. Their sweet smell filled my chest as I took in a deep breath. The glow of the party fluttered like golden wings against the house’s many windows. Entering its light was like crossing into an Otherland—as tempting as it was forbidden.

  My attention narrowed onto the man in a white tuxedo collecting invitations at the base of the marble stairs, at the very center of the circular drive. The arriving guests were kitted out in formal wear, glittering with jewels and warmed by dead animal skins. A black-tie affair.

  I glared at Emrys through the velvet curtain of night, shifting so the boxwood hedge was no longer poking my cheek. “Did you know about this?”

  “Yeah, of course,” he whispered back. “I always try to show up when I’m most likely to be caught.”

  “Should we…come back?” Neve ventured, daring to peek over the bushes we’d ducked behind. Having been able to use the hedgerow along the drive to shield ourselves from the view of passing headlights, we’d finally reached the end of it.

  “Can we just go around to the back of the house?” Caitriona asked.

  Emrys considered the idea for a moment. “No, the only way to access the library is from a door inside, or by climbing through that window there—” He nodded to the third-to-last one on the house’s face. “We have a better chance with the window. We just need to wait for the last guest to arrive—”

  Neve let out a soft, pitchy hum, her eyes fixed on one of the decorative trees on the left side of the door. Within seconds, it went up like kindling.

  As the man in the white tuxedo and several security guards turned their backs to rush toward the fire, Neve seized the initiative and leapt ungracefully over the hedge, leaving the rest of us to rush after her.

  “—or a distraction works too,” Emrys whispered, pained.

  By the time we heard the hiss of the fire extinguisher, the five of us had managed to crawl into the narrow space between the wall and the wild thicket of rosebushes—though not without a cost.

  “Why did it have to be roses?” Olwen whispered, carefully removing thorns from her hands and jacket sleeves. My own neck looked like I’d been in a losing fight with the library cats.

  “Ooh,” Neve whispered, sliding a hand under one of the bushes to pluck something from the ground. “Herald of winter!”

  Emrys whirled around the best he could in the cramped space. “Really?”

  Neve held the small yellow-bodied mushroom out for him to see. I snapped my fingers, drawing their attention back to me. “Fungi later. Focus.”

  A hint of “Greensleeves” drifted through the windows above us, played lavishly by a string quartet. When I turned back to face front, I saw that I’d lost both Caitriona and Olwen, too. They’d stuck their heads up just enough to see through the lustrous glass, to the world of the massive stone hall beyond it, and the sparkling contours of the candlelit party swirling inside.

  Several revelers blocked our view, their raucous laughter animated by the light, fizzy delirium of champagne. Their glasses clinked carelessly together as they toasted themselves.

  I knew from Nash’s journal that the west wing of the grand country home was reserved for Wyrm and his family, the east for the members of his guild, but Cabell and I had been made to wait outside like street dogs, blocked by the pig-faced butler from even glimpsing the foyer. As sweeping and immaculate as the exterior of the house was, it was an appetizer to the feast awaiting our eyes inside.

  I drew in a breath as the partygoers drifted apart and the soaring height of the hall revealed itself.

  It was impossible to take it all in at once. The hoarfrost clinging to the glass gave everything a dreamy, unreal quality. Guests danced around the frothy towers of champagne glasses, tucked safely beneath the ostentatious stonework bracing the hall like a rib cage. A giant Yule log burned in the hearth, the flames gorging themselves on the last of the ribbons and dried berries tied to it.

  “All of this for one family?” Olwen whispered.

  I understood her horrified amazement. The tower of Avalon had been enormous, but served a purpose as the heart of the isle and had housed dozens of families by the end. Here, the size of the house was only meant to make the rest of us feel inferior.

  Here and there, I saw faces I recognized, from my own guild and the London one—more intriguing were the collectors, the black market traders, and the auctioneers who served as the connective tissue between what a Hollower found and their payday.

  I caught a glimpse of lanterns and fur-draped seats, but once my gaze landed on the feast, I couldn’t tear it away. A long serving table nearly the length of the hall was laden with immense platters of fruits and cheeses, festive cookies, and bright sweets. My stomach gave a pitiful moan at the regiment of roasted turkeys being carved by the chef. She offered each fresh cut to the line of guests, who carried their heavy plates over to one of the smaller round tables that dotted the space.

  Most guests, however, had forgone the food and were gathered around a well-lit case at the center of the hall.

  As in my own guild’s library, the London guild had chosen to display the relics submitted for membership. A dozen display cases lined either side of the hall, interspersed with windows and full suits of armor. My lip curled in annoyance as I recognized Pridwen, King Arthur’s shield, in one; the girdle of Brynhildr in another; and what was rumored to be Merlin’s druid spoon in a third. All, however, paled in comparison to the hooded cloak.

  It had been carefully displayed on a faceless mannequin, swept out to reveal the woven image of a stag in a flowering forest. The fabric looked unbelievably delicate—as finely woven as gossamer. Certain threads glimmered silver and gold in the light, like winks of magic.

  “Arthur’s mantle?” Emrys whispered. He met my look of disbelief with one of his own. “They found it? Wyrm found it?”

  “Why would one of Arthur’s old cloaks be worth finding?” Olwen asked. “Unless—you mean the one Morgan gave him?”

  “The very same.” I sighed. “It renders the wearer invisible. Allegedly.”

  “I guess we know what the party’s for,” Emrys said. “And here I was thinking it was just a night of festive fun, when it’s actually an expensive excuse to show off his latest find.”

  “Ugh,” I muttered, almost too disgusted to keep looking. “Botheration. I hate that he’s the one who found it.”

  “I thought you didn’t care about the bigger relics?” Neve said pointedly.

  “I don’t,” I answered, fighting the urge to punch a fist into the ground like a child. “But I don’t want him to have it either. He’s awful, and not just by my standards. The first time I met him, he told me to look him up in a few years and he’d show me a good time. I was seven. And believe me, he only got worse from there.”

  It wasn’t worth going into more detail when that appeared to have sufficiently repulsed everyone. I tried not to notice the way a shadow seemed to cross Emrys’s face, or how his hands clawed at the near-frozen soil.

  Stop it, I thought. To myself. To him. Once we had the mirror and I was sure Emrys hadn’t found a way to swipe it out from under us like he had the ring, I’d never have to see his face again.

  “So what you’re saying is, you would trap him in a mirror if given the means to do so,” Neve said after a moment. She held up her hands at my expression. “Just making a point.”

  The crowd parted around the glass case, and the man himself appeared.

  Edward Wyrm pushed through the guests like a cannonball, throwing his arms out as he regaled them with some highly exaggerated tale of how he’d found it. The din of the party music was too loud to make out much. His white tuxedo shirt strained over his barrel chest, but the manner with which he carried himself was immaculate, as if centuries of noble breeding and besieged nannies had gone into the making of this moment.

  His face was even rounder and redder now, and the once-red ring of hair around his head had faded and thinned like a shedding rug. The deep scar across the bridge of his nose, however, was exactly as I remembered it. As he turned toward the fire, a silver pin on his lapel flashed.