“Claire died,” my mother said, and sat up in the tub. The red water swirled around her. “Claire is dead. All this is just you refusing to admit any of that. You’ve gone crazy—don’t you understand that? It’s very sad, but you can’t hold on to fantasy any longer. You know I’m telling you the truth, don’t you?”

“No,” I said. It sounded faint, and lost. “No, that’s wrong. We brought her back. She’s alive.”

“Of course you didn’t bring her back. That’s ridiculous. She died, and they took her body away. And you took your father’s gun and you shot yourself, and you’ve been dying ever since. You want to know the truth? She never loved you. She loved that vampire. Myrnin.”

“No.” I was backing up now, and the tile felt sharp and wet under my shoes. No, not shoes. I was barefoot. It felt as if I was standing on broken glass, and the pain helped, somehow. Helped me remember that this room was wrong, that the walls of that bathroom in that cheap motel hadn’t been dripping with water, that my mom hadn’t opened her eyes and said these terrible things, that it was him.

All this was Magnus, talking through my dead mother’s mouth.

“No.” I said it again, louder. “Get out of my head, you freak.”

“Son—”

I charged forward, grabbed the edge of the claw-footed tub and tipped it over on its side, away from me. There was a rush of bloody water around me, and then I was in the tub—no, in water, staring up at cloudy glass, and I was fighting it, banging my hands against the cover that held me in. I left bloody handprints on it, and the blows were weak, but it meant something.

So did the bobbing light that I could see coming from the side.

My face was out of the water, the liquid, and I pulled in a breath and yelled. It came out a weakened croak, but I tried again, shouted harder, and battered the glass again.

Claire. Claire came back. But wait, maybe that wasn’t right, maybe I’d made her up, made it all up, maybe she’d never existed, or maybe she had died, or maybe she didn’t love me at all …

But it wasn’t Claire who found me.

The face was familiar, but not her. And it wasn’t a girl. A larger, more squared-off face I recognized. Dick, I thought finally. Dick Morrell. To be fair, I guessed, I really ought to call him Richard now, if he was here to save my life. It sucked to be rescued by a Morrell, after all the energy I’d put into hating the whole family.

This couldn’t be a fantasy, because no way in hell would I ever fantasize about a Morrell showing up to save me.

Richard wiped moisture from the glass and saw me, and from his expression what he saw must not have been pretty. He yelled something, and then Hannah Moses was there, too, and somebody else, God, was that Monica? Maybe I was hallucinating after all. The three of them shoved the glass away.