Spears of white light flashed in a skeleton grin.

Is Graeson alive? That was the question I meant to ask next, but the words stuck in my throat. Graeson and I weren’t friends. He’d wrecked that possibility when he decided to use me. But I didn’t want him dead. We had gazed into the barren craters where our chest cavities ought to be and known one another, and I didn’t want to be alone in my grief again so soon.

The creature fluttered on my periphery, waiting, its ominous fingers unfurling through my hair. I stood unmoved, challenging it. “Where is Mrs. Rebec?”

Its fleeting amusement snuffed in a blink, and the eyes vanished along with the rest of its expression.

Metal scraped. I whirled as the door opened, and the man from the hotel hallway entered the room. If memory served, he was Letitia’s brother. He also appeared to be catnip to the umbra, who vibrated with pleasure at the sight of him, curling around the man’s torso like an inner tube made of smoke. He patted it absently as he appraised me through muddy-brown eyes puffed from lack of sleep. A plain white T-shirt was tucked into his jeans. Boots crusted with muck left prints behind him. His appearance was as bland as the dirt-colored hair on top of his head.

“Where is Harlow?” The unanswered question thing was getting old.

“She’s been taken to the gully.” The man hooked his thumbs over the umbra and slid it down to the floor, where he stepped out of it. The shadow puddled forlornly across the concrete, spilling long across the cement until he approximated the man’s shape. “Letitia asked me to bring you,” he said to me. “You can walk, or I can have you carried.”

Whatever the gully was, he made it sound like the last place he wanted to go, which couldn’t bode well for Harlow or for me. I shifted forward a fraction, until my shadow overlapped the umbra. It peeled off the floor and rose in a vaporous column that drifted between me and the man, who cast no shadow at all. That explained how Letitia came by at least one of her servants. “You can’t let her do this.”

“I can’t stop her.” He massaged his swollen eyes with his fingertips. “No one can. She’s a Fury. She won’t be sane again until her thirst for vengeance is sated.”

“She’s going to kill me and the mermaid. Do you want our deaths on your conscience?” I waited for a flicker of pity, something. I got nothing. He was empty. Drained. Furies burned out everyone around them, and this guy was crispy. “I’m an agent with the Earthen Conclave. When this is over, you’re going to prison for a very long time.”