“He certainly doesn’t lack for energy,” Pan observed quietly.

“He doesn’t lack for determination, either,” Prue added.

They continued to wait, shifting their gazes every so often to the roads and pathways around them, keeping watch. Neither felt entirely comfortable with the situation, even though there was no reason to think they were in any immediate danger.

Xac Wen reappeared abruptly and scampered down the stairs, his young face grim. “Nothing. She’s not been there. We should go to the arch. If she came back through, she will have left me a sign.”

It took them less than half an hour to reach the gates of the Ashenell burial grounds. There was little activity in evidence here, the iron gates leading inside open, but the grounds themselves deserted. Xac Wen led his companions ahead without slowing, taking a direct route toward the Belloruusian Arch.

Even before the boy told them they had reached their destination, Pan knew it for what it was. Built of massive stone blocks stacked one atop another, the Belloruusian Arch was fully twenty feet high and almost as wide. The letter B was carved into its keystone, signifying the surname of the family and marking the entrance to all the tombs and sepulchers that stretched away within the shadow of its broad span.

“This is where she disappeared,” Xac Wen announced, pointing at the arch. “Right there, underneath. She just walked up to it and then vanished.”

Panterra studied the arch and the space below for a long time, trying to see if he could discern something that would explain what had happened to Phryne. But he couldn’t see anything unusual or revealing about it. Stones and earth—that was all.

“There must be a portal of some sort,” Prue said quietly. “There must be magic at work.”

Pan nodded. “Definitely magic.”

He was resting the black staff butt-downward against the earth, running his fingers slowly up and down its length, feeling the runes respond with a soft tingle. The staff’s magic was awake, perhaps responding to something he couldn’t see. It was sending him a signal—perhaps a warning—of something waiting.

Yet Prue had said nothing of her instincts responding to any danger. They had been quick enough to warn her when Bonnasaint had lain in wait for them in the meres. So perhaps the staff’s response was to the presence of another magic and not necessarily to anything dangerous.

“Do your instincts tell you we are threatened?” he asked her quietly.

She shook her head no.

“Wait here for me,” he told her.