The throat tunnel ended and I walked out onto an iced-over pond in the middle of a colossal dome. The walls, dark at eye level, curved up, lightening until they grew transparent at the top. The night sky, studded with stars, spilled moonlight onto clusters of blue icicles suspended from the ceiling. The icicles glowed with soft blue light, illuminating the outlines of rectangular crypts within the walls, each marked by a glowing gold glyph.

In front of me on a rectangular platform waited three women. The first had seen seventy. Life had whittled her down, turning her body skeletal and her face sharp and predatory. She perched in a large black chair like a bird of prey. Maria, the Crone. Next to her a young woman sat in a comfortable chair. Slender, with pale blond hair down to her shoulders, she looked young, barely out of her teens, and delicate. Her power was anything but. Sienna, the Maiden. I had saved her life during the last flare. To the right, in a rocking chair, sat Evdokia, the Mother. Plump, with a heavy braid of reddish-brown hair, she rocked back and forth knitting a sweater out of gray wool. It looked almost done.

The black cat ran to her and rubbed against her feet.

Behind them a large mural showed their goddess, a tall, regal woman standing behind a cauldron that sat at the intersection of three roads. The woman’s three arms held a knife, a torch, and a chalice. A black cat, a toad, a broom, and a key completed the picture. She had many names: the Queen of the Night, the Mother of All Witches, Hekate. Her power was vast and terrible and I was disinclined to disrespect her.

Evdokia pointed to Derek and Ascanio. “You! Wait there.”

A wall of ice surged around the two shapeshifters, locking them into an icy ring.

Sienna turned to me. “Your father is coming.”

• • •

THE UNIVERSE JUST kept dumping buckets of icy water on my head. “When?”

“Soon,” Evdokia said, her needles clicking.

“He’s coming to claim the city,” Sienna said. “We have foreseen it.”

Maria raised her bony hand and pointed at Sienna. “Show her.”

Sienna stood up. The mural behind her faded, dissolving into a view of a city street. To the left typical old buildings bordered the street, one of dark brick with boarded-up windows, the other covered in beige stucco and in better condition. To the right a big, sand-colored building of Roman brick and granite took up most of the block. Its lower half, a typical rectangular structure, stood about four tall floors high. On top of it a hundred-fifty-foot tower stretched to the sky. I could see all the way down the street, past the streetlights, to the distant steeple of some church.