Christmas Day dawned with sun across the snow. The clouds had cleared, the morning was bright and the sky a dazzling blue. Edmond and Ann Varney sat before the fire, with Matthew seated nearby, and over cups of hot tea spiced with cinnamon the innkeeper read the story of Christ’s birth from the Bible, which Matthew figured was a tradition in the house.

Matthew took a bowl of oatmeal in to Firebaugh, who had also enjoyed a plate of the pheasant, yams and fried corncakes from the evening before, and found the doctor still engrossed in the book of potions. The better for all that, Matthew thought as he left Firebaugh to his reading. Then Matthew went in to see Julian and noted that there was no change in the sleeping man’s condition, at least not any he could detect. A touch to his forehead showed the fever was still there. Julian stirred and moaned but didn’t awaken. He had not eaten yesterday but had gotten down a half-cup of tea, and one good thing—Matthew supposed, though Doctor Clark might disagree—was that Julian was no longer expelling blood.

Matthew left him, put on a woolen cap and one of Varney’s coats with a warm fleece lining and took a walk across the snowy field outside. He wandered over to where he’d thrown the bloody polar bear coat and found it vanished beneath the new snow of the previous days. It was a wonder, he thought, that Sheriff Lancer hadn’t discovered it. Or … perhaps he had.

With his hands in his pockets, Matthew walked on.

His sleep lately had not only been haunted by Lash and Black, but by the others as well: Merda, Lioness Sauvage, Krakowski, Montague, and even Victor and Bogen. Making their presences known in his nightmares were also Brux and Pellegar, who kept knocking and knocking at the door of their closet, and though they never physically appeared in all their gruesome glory Matthew was struck with terror that they would come lurching from the closet and want their wigs back.

He had dreamed of sitting in the coach with Elizabeth Mulloy, and her relating her life’s story. And while she was speaking Matthew had sensed another presence in the coach, and looking to his right had seen RakeHell Lizzie sitting there wearing her bladed claws, her face waxy and blank and her dark eyes shining. Suddenly then, as Elizabeth spoke, RakeHell Lizzie began to claw at herself, to cut away her flesh in red ribbons that whirled off as if by a demonic wind, and as she whittled herself down to her core there sat at her center a little girl with terrified eyes, who whimpered and drew herself into a tight knot of self-protection that could never again be unravelled.

And he dreamed of Berry.