I WHIP PAST SANDRA AND SOPHIE AND LEAVE WILLIAMS behind to run down the path to the bar. The back door stands open. As soon as I pass through it, I smell it. The acrid stench of illness and impending death.

It intensifies the fear fluttering my stomach.

I follow the smell to one of the feeding rooms.

Frey sits with his back to me, slumped in a chair. Still, unmoving. Only the sound of his labored breathing gives hint of life.

I tiptoe around to face him. My stomach contracts. I'm glad his eyes are closed. A violent jolt seizes me and if he was watching, the shock that must be stamped on my face could only add to his misery. The smell of decay comes from him.

Frey's dark hair is streaked with white. His face is pock marked and gouged with lines from the corner of his eyes to his chin, as if someone had drawn a trowel down the length of it. He looks emaciated, dehydrated . . . and old.

I squeeze my own eyes shut to stop the tears.

"Do I look that bad?"

Frey's voice, full of humor and, thankfully, life, brings me back. I fling my arms around him and hug until he gently pushes me back.

"Easy. I'm not in the best shape right now."

I release him and step away. "You're alive. That's all that matters." A tug at my conscience makes me turn around, look toward Culebra. If Frey looks this bad, what must Culebra look like?

When I approach the cot, I'm amazed to see Culebra looks no different than the last time I saw him. He might be sleeping peacefully in his own bed. His face is unmarked and his body unchanged. The shallow, rapid rise and fall of his chest and the intravenous tubes feeding him are the only indications that something is wrong.

I turn a questioning eye to Frey. "How is this possible?"

His smile is both sad and ironic. "My counterspell protects Culebra. Unfortunately, it drains me. Remember when I said magic always exacts a price?"

I turn my eyes away. "I put you in this position. I'm sorry."

"Don't be. I knew the risks before I came." He looks toward the door. "I hope you brought reinforcements."

"Sophie. Burke's sister. She should be able to break the spell."

"Burke's sister?" He frowns. "Can we trust her?"

"Oh, we can trust her all right." Williams pushes Sophie ahead of him into the room. "She knows if anything goes wrong, she's dead."

Frey looks around. Whatever he might have imagined a sister of Burke 's to look like, it's obviously not the dark-haired, shiny-faced young woman Williams shoves toward him. He stares at her, his face betraying his surprise. "She's a girl. How can she help us?"

Sophie lays a hand on his shoulder. At her touch, Frey grows still, his muscles relax, his eyes close.

I'm on her in a heartbeat, slapping her hand away. "What are you doing to him?"

She turns gray-clouded eyes on me. For an instant, I see the older Sophie, the witch, and it sends a shudder down my back. There 's strength and power and a strong will.

The next moment, Sophie, the girl, is back. "He is resting. He cannot be a part of the ritual."

She turns away and empties the contents of her bag onto the floor.

She picks through the herbs, separates them into piles. With a piece of chalk, she marks a pentagram on the floor. She picks up a small portion of one of the herbs and places it on a point of the pentagram.

"Horehound," she says. "Protection against spells and sorcery."

She moves on, scooping up more herbs and laying them on a second point. "Angelica. To ward off evil spirits."

On a third point, she places a different herb. "Golden-seal. Healing herb."

In the middle of the pentagram she places the fourth herb. "Foxglove. For the heart."

She moves away from the pentagram, back to the bag. She picks up a goblet. Its delicate, carved crystal winks in the light and throws off flashes of light like rainbow glitter. She places it in the middle of the pentagram, reverently, as if the thing was a religious relic. Into it she pours half the contents of a small vial. She places the vial on the cot beside Culebra's body.

Holy water? I recall it was one of the items Sophie requested. The crone's house must double as a witch's one-stop convenience store.

The only things left in the bag are a dozen black beeswax candles. Sophie places one at each of the pentagram's five points and the rest she arranges in a circle around Culebra's cot.

I watch her, fascinated by how calm and deliberate her movements are. She is in a room with two vampires who have sworn to kill her if she doesn't perform the miracle of breaking Burke's spell.

She exhibits no fear, no concern. Her features are composed, serene. Deveraux, too, seems to have removed himself from her consciousness.

She might be back in the garden with the crone.

I glance at Frey, the steady rise and fall of his chest the only indication that life exists in that ravaged body.

Can we trust Sophie? The question Williams asked, and Frey. The question I keep avoiding.

The answer is as ominous as a death knell.

We have to trust her. There's no one else.