“Oh,” I said, and if my speech was halting, at least it sounded almost human. “That kind of Hell.”

Mab tilted back her head and cackled. It was a dull, brittle sound, like the edge of a rusted knife. “No,” she said. “Alas, no, my knight. No, you have not escaped. I have far too much work for your hand to allow that. Not yet.”

I stared at her dully, which was probably the only way I was capable of staring at the moment. Then I croaked, “I’m… alive?”

Her smile widened even more. “And well, my dear knight.”

I grunted. It was all the enthusiasm I could summon. “Yay?”

“It makes me feel like singing,” Mab’s voice grated from between sharp teeth. “Welcome back, O my knight, to the green lands of the living.”

ENOUGH, said that enormous thought-voice, the same one from the graveyard, but less mind annihilating. THE FOOLISH GAMBLE IS CONCLUDED. HIS PHYSICAL NEEDS MUST BE MET.

“I know what I am doing,” Mab purred. Or it would have been a purr, if cats had been made from steel wool. “Fear not, ancient thing. Your custodian lives.”

I turned my head slowly the other way. After a subjective century, I was able to see the other figure in the cave.

It was enormous, a being that had to crouch not to bump its head on the ceiling. It was, more or less, human in form—but I could see little of that form. It was almost entirely concealed in a vast cloak of dark green, with shadows hiding whatever lay beneath it. The cloak’s hood covered its head, but I could see tiny green fires, like small, flickering clouds of fireflies, burning within the hood’s shadowed depth.

Demonreach. The genius loci of the intensely weird, unmapped island in the middle of Lake Michigan. We’d… sort of had an arrangement, made a couple of years back. And I was beginning to think that maybe I hadn’t fully understood the extent of that arrangement.

“I’m… on the island?” I rasped.

YOU ARE HERE.

“Long have this old thing and I labored to keep your form alive, my knight,” Mab said. “Long have we kept flesh and bone and blood knit together and stirring, waiting for your spirit’s return.”

MAB GAVE YOU BREATH. HERE PROVIDED NOURISHMENT. THE PARASITE MAINTAINED THE FLOW OF BLOOD.

Parasite? What?

I’d already had a really, really long day.

“But… I got shot,” I mumbled.

“My knight,” Mab hissed, the statement one of possession. “Your broken body fell from your ship into cold and darkness—and they are my domain.”

THE COLD QUEEN BROUGHT YOU TO HERE, Demonreach emitted. My head was starting to ache, hearing his psychic voice. YOUR PHSYICAL VESSEL WAS PRESERVED.

“And now here you are,” Mab murmured. “Oh, the Quiet One angered us, sending your essence out unprotected. Had he been incorrect, I would have been robbed of my knight, and the old monster of his custodian.”

OUR INTERESTS COINCIDED.

I blinked slowly, and again my lagging brain started catching up to me.