The next thing she knew, Ever had somehow managed to get to his feet, lift her in his arms, and carry her away from the courtyard. No one stopped them.

But someone watched them as they left—Izzy saw: the man with the snout and fur ears.

◆◆◆

Izzy woke still half-drugged in a room in Sky’s house. Her head a-throb with blood, Izzy blinked into the darkness. White rose petals floated on the dark water of the quilt—someone had strewn them there. The air scented with honeyed smoke—someone had lit candles, now burned to puddles of wax. Like a bridal chamber, Izzy thought. She couldn’t remember anything that had happened after she and Ever had left the ceremony.

“Ever?” Izzy said now, but he wasn’t there. She went back over what she could remember: the photo of the red-haired children with Sky, the spiked tea, the ritual, Ever. And before that: this thing that Sky had said about Izzy, Cyrus, Seth, and Nephy. That she was their mother? All of theirs? That she had slept with their fathers? What did Izzy have as evidence? The words of a bereaved Jody. The words of Sky, a crazy woman. One adopted child, three children who looked nothing like their mothers. A man and two women with black hair, thick enough, when you braided it, to use as rope. (Once this man and one of the women—maybe the other one, too, in private?—had joked about how much they looked alike.) And, somehow, whirling in her mind with no clear explanation, the image—taken by the photographer from the House of Hearts meeting—of the little tiara worn by Nephy in the photo of her with Seth on the dead boat, and the same headpiece worn by the little red-haired girl at Bombay Beach. The tiara was nothing, really, in the scheme of things, but it seemed to solidify it all, that little junkyard princess crown.

Izzy knew then.

Her lover had been more than her soul-twin.

He had been her blood.

They were all four—Izzy, Cyrus, Seth, and Nephy—they were all four blood.

If Izzy had a baby with Cyrus—

Nephy and Cyrus’s baby—

“No,” Izzy said aloud. She tasted bile and ran to the adjoining bathroom to vomit into the toilet. It could not be. It could not be. Everything had gotten to her, finally and completely. She had lost all semblance of sanity in the wake of Cyrus’s death. But there was no way around the truth.

She went back into the bedroom and looked for her things. There was her backpack, her clothing, and shoes, the sweat-soaked remnants of the white satin dress. But where was Ever?

The darkness descended then, the worst one she had ever felt, the direst warning she had ever received. It almost blinded her. But she did not push it away; this time she let it guide her.