“If you’re not here, then how do you bleed?”

“Faerie doesn’t have spirits, Lady!” Rhea said quickly. “It’s in a different universe, with different rules—”

“So?” I demanded, watching my sleeve turn red. Damn it!

“So, you told me yourself—when your ghost servant Billy Joe entered Faerie with you, he suddenly acquired a body. Souls manifest bodies in Faerie, and Lover’s Knot is a soul bond.”

I looked up at her for a second, and then down at my bloody arm again. But before I could respond, Guinn shoved her own arm in my face. It had a gory wound both deeper and larger than mine on the bicep. It looked like an arrow or maybe a knife had clipped her, and not superficially. She’d bound it up in the remains of her other sleeve, but it had bled through the cotton, staining it bright red.

“See that?” she asked, cutting off part of her petticoat with a savage stroke from the blade. “A fey gave me this before your acolyte could save me—cut me halfway to the bone, he did. Something that shouldn’t be possible if I’m not really here!”

“Listen to her lady,” Rhea urged. And then jerked out her wand and dropped another fey, one of three who had just broken through the tree line, while Guinn’s leafy posse dealt with the rest. Rhea’s fey plowed through the dirt, coming to rest right in front of us. I stared at him and he stared back, and despite the fact that he wasn’t moving, I didn’t think he was dead.

He looked a little too vicious to be dead.

“You not only kidnapped my brain, you made me a body to go with it!” Guinn said, not missing a beat. “Can I die like this? Do you know?”

“I… I’ve told you all I know,” I said, still staring at the fey.

“Not good enough!”

I looked up to find her rebinding her wound. “Then go home! Get out of here—”

“Don’t you think we’ve tried?”

“We tried to pull all of us out, several times,” Rhea said breathlessly. “It doesn’t work, Lady. Perhaps because you brought us here—”

“Or perhaps because we have bodies now!” Guinn said savagely.

I ignored her and gave them a mental push, trying to send them back to Gertie’s or at least back to the imprint; I assumed Guinn could navigate from there. But nothing happened.

I tried some more.

“Why is she looking like that?” Guinn demanded.

“I believe she is trying to send us home,” Rhea said, biting her lip.

“It isn’t working—”

“I know it isn’t working!” I said. “But it should be!”

“Not if we have bodies—”

“Stop saying that!”

“Why?” Guinn challenged. “It’s true.”

“It isn’t true! I was in Faerie yesterday as a ghost—”

“Yesterday?” Rhea said.