“I need your help,” I said. “Just hear me out, please. Tristan wants me to meet him at the psych hospital. I’m sure it’s a trap, but you know that won’t stop me from going. Ricky and I are on our way. I could really use your advice, though. You’re probably too busy to talk”—meaning that you don’t want to, but I’ll give you an escape route here—“so I’ll e-mail the details. If you can talk, for a minute, I’d appreciate that, but even an e-mail reply will do. Hell, I’ll take a text, Gabriel. Am I making a really dumbass move here? Is there anything I should know? Any advice you can give? Thanks.”

I hung up.

“He’ll answer that,” Ricky said, handing me my helmet. “Guaranteed.”

For once, Ricky was not right.

When I started to worry, Ricky pulled over at a gas station with a graffiti-covered pay phone. I called Gabriel from it. He answered, which took away every possible explanation except the one that hurt the most: I needed him, and he didn’t give a damn. I hung up without a word.

—

The psych hospital. It had a name, I was sure, but I’d never looked it up. I would have preferred never to think of it again.

There was an unconnected local cemetery beside the hospital grounds. The first time we visited, we’d walked through it and I’d reflected that, as creepy as graveyards are supposed to be, it didn’t bother me at all. But the abandoned hospital? It was the most frightening place I’d ever seen—in real life, in movies, even in nightmares.

The hospital buildings sat on at least ten acres of overgrown decay. I should have been fascinated, as I was by Villa Tuscana. I was not fascinated, except perhaps in the most basic definition of the word, where you can’t look away in spite of yourself. The visions I’d had there were enough to make me not want to go back. Yet it was more than that. It was the pervasive sense of the place, a dread and terror that crept under my skin and nestled in the marrow of my bones. Whatever one’s faith, death means the end of life on this earth. The prospect is unpleasant, but I figure once it happens, it happens, over and done. The hospital represented a very different kind of death.

There is no escape from the prison of the mind. I’d seen those words there. Phantom words left imprinted on my brain. Madness was inescapable. The hospital wasn’t an old-fashioned lunatic asylum, with chains welded to the floors, but you’d be imprisoned there nonetheless. In my visions, I’d seen people trapped there. Women. The little girl said that I was tapping into hereditary memories. Were those women like me? Tainted by fae blood? Driven mad by it?