All three subject lines sounded like sexual come-ons designed to evade spam filters. And when Set clicked on two of the messages, probably searching for porn, the URLs in the emails did lead to sites specializing in underage-looking women posing explicitly. But Danny knew that the contents of the emails didn’t matter, because whoever sent them knew that Danny couldn’t choose to open any email message. All that mattered was the sender’s email address and the subject line.

All three dealt with people who were brought back from death. All three subject lines could be taken as advice or requests to Danny. I’m going to die, they seemed to say. It’s your job to follow me to the land of the dead—Hades, Dis, or Duat—and “find out” whatever it was that Duat had to teach him. And one of them asserted that she was “old enough to decide,” which meant he shouldn’t feel bad about her dying, but should instead use the opportunity to learn whatever he could.

Danny didn’t allow himself even to attempt to take action, but his anxiety grew with every letter. Since all the addresses were female, he assumed that they came from a woman—from the same woman. “I’m old enough” implied that it wasn’t Veevee or Leslie. It was either one of his high school friends from Parry McCluer High, or it was Hermia from the Greek Family.

Hermia seemed unlikely, if only because she was the one who betrayed him by moving the Wild Gate and letting all the Greeks go through, turning loose the power of augmented mages—gods—in Mittlegard again.

And of the girls at Parry McCluer, the only ones educated enough to think of the names of these three mythical women were Pat and Laurette.

Danny might be wrong, he knew, but he believed Laurette was way too selfish to put her own life at risk, even in a noble cause. So the letters came from Pat. Pat was planning some insane move to try to break him free from the power of Set. Clearly her plan involved going to the land of the dead—which meant, from what Danny had been able to learn, Duat, the third planet, the one from which all the kas and bas of humankind derived.

Don’t do it, Pat, he thought. And then stopped himself from thinking it, because whatever he thought too clearly, Set could understand, at least partly, and he didn’t want to alert his enemy to how important Pat was to him.

Still, he had to admit it was clever of her to figure out a way to deliver a message to him. This way, if he should run across her dead or dying body, he would know that her plan was for him to somehow follow her into death. And then, with luck, bring her back with him.