“You were seventeen.” I repeated her words slowly, pivoting to look around us again, studying the silhouette of the mountains. When I’d played here as a child, one crag had resembled a crone’s crooked nose. The rock that had formed its wart, however, wasn’t visible now, and that couldn’t be right. Mountains didn’t simply move. “How old are you, Nicholina?”

She hissed through stained, too-sharp teeth, anger sparking like kindling. And I pitied her. Those teeth had once been beautiful. She had been beautiful. Not just of face and form, but also of spirit—the sort of spirit that drove a mother to the ends of the earth to save her child, the sort who loved with everything in her being. The sort who held nothing back. Yes, Nicola had been beautiful in all the ways that counted—and all the ways that didn’t too—but beauty faded with time.

And Nicholina had lived too long.

How did you become like this? I’d asked her the question once, sitting in the dark and dirt of Léviathan. She hadn’t given a proper answer then. She didn’t need to give one now. I knew without her opening her cracked lips, without her lifting her girlish, uncanny voice. She’d lived too long, and time had ravaged her to a withered husk of the woman she’d once been.

Rage washed through her at my pity, or perhaps at the memory of her dead son. Like a wild animal, savage and trapped, she spat, “You wish to be in Hell, Louise le Blanc? We shall oblige you. Oh, yes, we shall drag you down, down, down—”

When she lunged, wrapping skeletal fingers around my throat, black waves crashed upon us once more. They flattened the lavender, enveloped the sun, swept us up into their treacherous current. My lungs screamed in agony as our situation resolved with knife-sharp clarity.

We weren’t in Hell, and we weren’t in Heaven either.

Ears bursting, vision pitching, I scrabbled at Nicholina’s hold, but those fingers pressed into more than flesh now. They dug into consciousness, ripped through memory. The two of us foundered, tossed mercilessly through the waves, until Nicholina regained purchase, nearly crushing my windpipe. I felt that pressure everywhere. In my head, in my chest, in my heart. White exploded all around us as I tore free, and we pitched headlong into another memory.

Through a curtain.

A hush fell over the audience as we crashed onto the stage, and insidious fear bloomed at the sight before us: Reid caging me against his chest, my body deathly still in his arms. My hair long and brown, my face bloody and bruised. My dress torn. I glanced, panicked, to the right, where the Archbishop would step out in mere moments. And the crowd—who lay in wait, watching me? Would they recognize me? Would they find me at last?