“Sam!” Donovan’s voice echoes down to me. “What are you doing? Where are you?”

Perhaps I ought to give him up to his father. I am not the child’s parent; Julian does not belong to me. And why not give him up to the future, at that? It isn’t my responsibility to stop the future in its tracks. I can give him up, yes—I can leave this place—I can let whatever happens to him happen.

But he is not yet the child who smashed the frogs and cut Constance Wakefield down. He is a small infant in my arms, fragile with precious life. There is a magic here beyond what I thought I knew, beyond my mother’s tarot cards, beyond even the house’s sad talent for recalling not life but merely echoes of it. I bounce him gently in my arms, which calms him some.

Down the hall I pass a ghastly vision—the hulking shadow of Donovan, brooding and pacing.

My heart is so far up my throat I think I may vomit, but when he turns my way to pace back in the other direction, his hate-filled eyes pass blankly over me and Julian, gazing past us, and I know this is the Donovan of several hours before, pacing as he wracks his brain wondering where we have gone, losing himself, yes, losing himself utterly in the house. I sidle past as he stalks farther down the hall.

I think I have gone east, to the billiards room, but I am wrong again; I’ve turned unwittingly north, to the foyer and the base of the main staircase and the front door. Above I hear Don moving toward the stairs, and I shush Julian, whose small mewling sounds may yet give us away as I crouch in the dark. Does he know we are down here?

He calls out, his voice ringing through the foyer. “Stop this, Sam. Give me my son!”

An instinctual drive to escape impels me to dash for the front door and yank it open toward cold freedom—only to be met, of course, with those mounds of snow closing us in, and the bitter darkness beyond. I cannot go out there.

Don’s footsteps pound down the staircase behind me, and I turn again to run blindly down another hall, east or west it hardly matters. My running has begun to jostle Julian enough that his wails echo behind me like a sonic trail, calling Donovan to us even as I run away.

I am in the parlor; I am in the drawing room; I am floating along the hidden staircases, believing myself to be ascending, but realizing instead that I am going down; I am stealing through the cobbled back corridor that serves no purpose but to provide a secret byway around the house; I am at the base of the rickety spiral staircase that leads up to the tower room at the top of the turret, where I once looked out as a girl, seeing all the way across the tops of the trees in the swamp for miles; I am turning, turning, and all the while Mad Catherine changes the house around me as I go, as the shadows reach out to snatch Julian from my arms.