“Knock yourself out.” Curran came back and stepped off the bridge onto the ledge.

Ghastek began walking across the bridge.

“This will be interesting,” Robert said.

Ghastek slowed, then stopped a few feet behind the vampire. He stared at the glowing room in the heart of the chamber for a long second, his spine rigid, and spoke, his voice too muffled to make out the words.

“What is he saying?” I asked.

“I can’t,” Curran said. “Power. Darkness . . . I think he’s losing it.”

Ghastek sank to his knees.

“You might want to go and get him,” I murmured to Curran.

“Can’t we just leave him there?”

“No, we can’t.”

Curran walked along the bridge, touched Ghastek’s shoulder, and pulled him to his feet. The Master of the Dead turned around. His eyes were wide under furrowed eyebrows, his mouth slack. I knew this emotion very well. Something had terrified Ghastek out of his wits. He returned to the ledge, his vampire and Curran following him.

“What was it?” Andrea asked.

Ghastek took a deep breath.

“I think he needs a minute,” I said.

Slowly Ghastek’s face relaxed. “Power,” he said finally. “Incomprehensible power. We’re in the very center of Mishmar, and that room is its heart. Everything you saw, all of the magic you felt, that room is the source of it all. I can’t enter. I tried. I just can’t.”

“We could wait until the tech hits,” Andrea said.

Naeemah shook her head. “Magic never goes away here.”

Curran looked at me, his gray eyes calm. “Baby?”

“Don’t,” Ghastek warned me. “You have no idea what it’s like to feel the weight of it on your mind. It will burn you. It’s darkness in the primordial sense of the word.”

It probably was darkness, but it was my kind of darkness. It spawned me and its magic ran in my blood. I stepped onto the bridge. Magic brushed against me, thin like gossamer but saturated with power. Wow.

“At least tie a rope to her so she doesn’t fall,” Ghastek called out.

I took another step. The gossamer magic thickened, sliding against me, guiding me, its touch soft against my skin but not against my mind. There the magic surged, overwhelming, terrifying, and potent. It offered no resistance. It just watched me, waiting, aware and alive, so strong that if I made one misstep it would choke the life out of me.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Curran said. “Kate?”

The gossamer veils pierced my mind, sliding through me in a flash of blinding pain.

“Kate?”

The magic moved around me, unimaginably ancient. I could see it now. It swirled with blue and gold, flowing into silver and then into deep red, a diaphanous light, its own aurora borealis spilling out in front of me, and beyond it an ancient heartless power that watched me.

“Get her off that bridge!” Ghastek yelled.