Stay with your parents … Don’t wander off.

“Jacob,” I say softly.

But when I look up and scan the crypt rooftops, he’s not there. My pulse picks up, my hand going to the pendant at my throat.

“Jacob!” I call, louder now.

Something moves at the edge of my vision, and I spin, already lifting the mirror when I see his superhero shirt, his messy blond hair.

“What?” he asks, cringing back from my pendant. “Can you put that away?”

I sag in relief. “Yeah,” I say, a little shaky. “Sure.”

We start back toward the morbid chapel and its offerings of hands, and eyes, and teeth. And halfway there, the air changes.

At first I think it’s just the storm. Maybe the sudden cold, the way all the wind drops out of the world, the eerie quiet, is just normal.

But I know it’s not.

I’ve felt this way before.

On the platform in Paris.

In the séance room in the hotel.

And the only word I have for it is wrong.

Something is very, very wrong.

I look around, but I don’t see anything strange.

I lift the camera to my eye and scan the cemetery again, peering through the viewfinder.

All I see are graves.

And then something steps between them.

In the viewfinder, it’s … nothing. A void. A solid dark. A patch as black as unexposed film, just like I saw at the Place d’Armes.

When I lower the camera, the darkness has a shape.

Arms and legs in a black suit, a broad-brimmed hat low on its face, which isn’t a face at all but a bone-white mask, black pools where there should be eyes. That mouth, set into a rictus grin.

The Emissary of Death holds out its hand, gloved fingers uncurling toward me.

“Cassidy Blake,” it says in a voice like a rattle, a whisper, a wheeze.

“We have found you.”

Chapter Eleven

Cassidy, run!” shouts Jacob.

But I can’t.

When I try, it’s like dragging my arms and legs through icy water. And when I try to breathe, I taste the river in my throat.

My feet are stuck to the ground, my eyes locked on the Emissary, and I don’t know if it’s fear or some kind of spell, but I can’t speak, can’t move. It’s all I can do to grip the camera in my hands. The camera. My fingers scramble numbly, and I finally bring the camera up, turning it toward the advancing figure.

I hit the flash.

If the Emissary were a ghost, it would stop, stunned by the sudden burst of light. But the Emissary doesn’t stop. It doesn’t even flinch. It just keeps moving toward me, those long thin legs covering too much ground with every stride.