I picked up the pitcher and filled our glasses. Then I lifted mine in a toast. “Well, here’s to this lovely nameless place and its people.”

“It’s not nameless,” Wil said. “The tribe calls it Isla Milagro.”

When night came, we visited the tribe, whose name meant the Caretakers, at their village of low huts. They made a feast for us of grilled fishes, vegetables, and fruits, and Ian and I watched the shaman dance around a fire with aromatic smoke from herbs that were used in the weavings.

Cricket and Ford, both wearing woven tunics had wreaths of flowers on their heads. They watched contentedly as they held hands and sat cross-legged on a mat.

Ian and I thanked our hosts and took a walk up a hill. We could hear the faint music coming from a zombie band that played in the empty hotel every night.

I stared at the bright stars above. “There are Castor and Pollux. I know who told me that now. It was just before I was attacked by Vidalia in werewolf form.”

“Your life has had many surprises.”

“One of them is that your international bon-vivanting had a higher purpose.”

“Not all of it, darling. Some of it was so that I would meet a certain delicious and elusive young woman who also was more serious than she seemed.”

“And sillier than she should be?”

“That is what I loved about her,” he said. “Once when I was in Sozopol—”

“Which is where?”

“On the Black Sea. We’ll go there,” he said. “I met an amusing little man who said he was studying folktales and shapeshifting.”

“And was his name Don Pedro?”

“It was. We went to a dinner with music by a mystic, we smoked opium, and I had just met a captivating local beauty when Don Pedro seemed to go into a trance.”

“Let me guess. He had an eerily prescient vision.”

“Exactly. He told me I would meet a woman with hair as black as midnight, a living miracle, and that she and I would do good for the world, and she would be my partner in life and that I would love her till death and beyond death.”

“So you went in search of me.”

“Certainly not. I wasn’t going to disappoint my pretty companion because of a lunatic’s prophecy,” he said. “I forgot all about it until years later when the Council sent me to meet a girl who had miraculously survived infection.”

“And then you fell madly in love with me.”

“I wanted you for my own, but you had the audacity to reject me for Oswald Grant.”

“I had a crush on Oswald first. So then you met me again and fell madly in love with me.”