Then it shattered.

Someone was screaming.

The priests were pushing forward.

The guards were pulling him back.

Alucard stared down at the prince.

He didn’t understand.

He couldn’t understand.

And then Rhy’s hand slipped from his, and fell back to the bed.

Lifeless.

The last silver threads were losing their hold, sliding off his skin like sheets in summer.

And then he was screaming.

Alucard didn’t remember anything after that.

VI

For a single horrifying moment, Lila ceased to exist.

She felt herself unravel, breaking apart into a million threads, each one stretching, fraying, threatening to snap as she stepped out of the world, out of life—and into nothing. And then, just as suddenly, she was staggering forward onto her hands and knees in the street.

She let out a short, involuntary cry as she landed, limbs shaking, head ringing like a bell.

The ground beneath her palms—and there was ground, so that at least was a good sign—was rough and cold. The air was quiet. No fireworks. No music. Lila dragged herself back to her feet, blood dripping from her fingers, her nose. She wiped it away, red dots speckling the stone as she drew her knife and shifted her stance, putting her back to the icy wall. She remembered the last time she’d been here, in this London, the hungry eyes of men and women starved for power.

A splash of color caught her eye, and she looked up.

The sky overhead was streaked with sunset—pink and purple and burnished gold. Only, White London didn’t have color, not like this, and for a terrible second, she thought she’d crossed into yet another city, another world, had trapped herself even farther from home—wherever that was now.

But no, Lila recognized the road beneath her boots, the castle rising to gothic points against the setting sun. It was the same city, and yet entirely changed. It had only been four months since she’d set foot here, four months since she and Kell had faced the Dane twins. Then it had been a world of ice and ash and cold white stone. And now … now a man walked past her on the street, and he was smiling. Not the rictus grin of the starving, but the private smile of the content, the blessed.

This was wrong.

Four months, and in that time she’d learned to sense magic, its presence if not its intent. She couldn’t see it, not the way Alucard did, but with every breath she took, she tasted power on the air as if it were sugar, sweet and strong enough that it was cloying. The night air shimmered with it.

What the hell was going on?

And where was Kell?

Lila knew where she was, or at least where she’d chosen to pass through, and so she followed the high wall around a corner to the castle gates. They stood open, winter ivy winding through the iron. Lila dragged to a stop a second time. The stone forest—once a garden filled with bodies—was gone, replaced by an actual stretch of trees, and by guards in polished armor flanking the castle steps, all of them alert.

Kell had to be inside. A tether ran between them, thin as thread, but strangely strong, and Lila didn’t know if it was made by their magic or something else, but it drew her toward the castle like a weight. She tried not to think about what it meant, how much farther she would have to go, how many people she’d have to fight, to find him.

Wasn’t there a locator spell?

Lila wracked her mind for the words. As Travars had carried her between worlds, and As Tascen, that was the way to move between different places in the same world, but what if she wanted to find a person, not a place?

She cursed herself for not knowing, never asking. Kell had told her once, of finding Rhy after he’d been taken as a boy. What had he used? She dragged her memory—something Rhy had made. A wooden horse? Another image sprang to mind, of the kerchief—her kerchief—clenched in Kell’s hand when he first found her at the Stone’s Throw. But Lila didn’t have anything of his. No tokens. No trinkets.

Panic welled, and she fought it down.

So she didn’t have a charm to guide her. People were more than what they owned, and surely objects weren’t the only things that held a mark. They were made of pieces, words … memories.

And Lila had those.

She pressed her still-bloody hand to the castle gate, the cold iron biting at the shallow wound as she squeezed her eyes shut, and summoned Kell. First with the memory of the night they’d met, in the alley when she’d robbed him, and then later, when he’d walked through her wall. A stranger tied to her bed, the taste of magic, the promise of freedom, the fear of being left behind. Hand in hand through one world, and then another, pressed together as they hid from Holland, faced down sly Fletcher, fought the not-Rhy. The horror at the palace and the battle in White London, Kell’s blood-streaked body wrapped around hers in the rubble of the stone forest. The broken pieces of their lives cast apart. And then, returned. A game played behind masks. A new embrace. His hand burning on her waist as they danced, his mouth burning against hers as they kissed, bodies clashing like swords on the palace balcony. The terrifying heat, and then, too soon, the cold. Her collapse in the arena. His anger hurled like a weapon before he turned away. Before she let him go.

But she was here to take him back.

Lila steeled herself again, jaw clenched against the expectation of the pain to come.

She held the memories in her mind, pressed them to the wall as if they were a token, and said the words.

“As Tascen Kell.”

Against her hand, the gate shuddered and the world fell away as Lila staggered through, out of the street and into the pale polished chamber of a castle hallway.