The lab was a shambles, but that also was normal; Myrnin was, to put it mildly, not concerned with appearances. The girl had made attempts to clear it, but they never lasted long. I navigated around broken glassware, fallen chairs, scattered loose books and papers, and stopped in front of a large, locked cabinet marked DANGER, with many different dire-looking symbols and icons stickered on the face of it.

As I reached out for it, I felt a flicker of energy behind me, and glanced back to see a shape forming in mist and static. Not the draug.

Myrnin’s creation.

It was unnatural, this thing, this apparition; he had used the brain of a vampire to power it, and the spirit of the man remained. A reluctant vampire, to be sure; Bishop’s little joke, making our bitterest enemy into one of our own. Punishment for both the father and the son. I wondered how Shane Collins felt, knowing his father survived—if it could be called that—in this pathetic, impotent form.

Frank Collins was an image, nothing more. He existed as flat as a photograph, and with about as much power. He was indefinably degraded since last I’d seen him; then, he’d worn a certain cockiness, but now he seemed … faded. And old. The power in the lab flickered unsteadily, and so did his image.

He said nothing to me, and I said nothing to him. There was no point in bantering with the dead.

As I rolled the cabinet aside on its concealed track, he finally spoke up. “Is my son still alive?” he asked.

“I am much surprised you care,” I responded. “But yes, so far as I am aware.”

“Tell him—” Frank hesitated, and I had the curious sense that he was struggling to remember how to form words. “Tell him I said I was sorry.”

“I doubt that will matter very much,” I said, “given your history together. But if I survive the day, I will do so.”

“I’m dying,” he said. “My brain, I mean. The power keeps going out. Maybe that’s … that’s good.”

“Maybe it is,” I said. I was not without sympathy, but I chose where to give it, and Frank Collins was not my choice. I opened the door to the portal that led from Myrnin’s lab, and beyond it was thick, black, empty space. “Are the portals still functioning?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know …” And his image flickered and faded, and didn’t return.

Not reassuring, perhaps. The portals were Myrnin’s creation as well—magical doorways (though he assured me they were based on his blend of alchemy and science) that tunnel through space, linking places together as if adjacent rooms in a single house. One could cross town in only a few moments, theoretically, if one knew the secrets of the portals and their locations. I knew a few. Myrnin never shared the full extent of his invention with anyone save Amelie.

I faced the portal and concentrated hard. There was a whisper of color through the dark, dim but definite. I traced the outlines of the place I wished to see in my mind—the brightly colored stained-glass lamps, the red velvet sofa with its lion’s-head arms, the thick, dusty carpeting. There was a small Monet painting that Amelie had favored, hanging just there …