“Your mother said you’d been asking for this,” Niall told him.

Declan woke with a rush of electric adrenaline. Horror pulsed in time with his heart.

He looked around in dread but his dorm room was just as he’d left it when he slept. There was nothing in it that hadn’t been carried with ordinary human hands, that hadn’t been crafted with ordinary human labor. There were no miracles or wonders. Just his unmagical room with the things he needed for his unmagical life.

He had never been so relieved.

Declan was looking at El Jaleo. He was standing there, arms crossed, head tilted to one side, studying it. A little closer than he would normally be. No, a lot closer than he would normally be. He had stepped over the chain that ordinarily warned museum-goers to stay out of the alcove, and he was close enough to see the ridges on brushstrokes, to smell the oldness of all the paint in the closed-in space. It felt quite illicit, and he couldn’t imagine what had come over him. This close, everything looked a little different than he remembered.

It took him a moment to realize that some of his disorientation was not because of proximity; it was because the museum was dark.

The dancer was lit only by a dim security light that came through the window to the right of the painting and reflected off the mirror to the left of it.

The museum was also silent.

The small, close building was never noisy, but right then, it lacked even the murmur of distant people in other rooms, the sound of life. Breath held, or breath gone. Tomblike.

He didn’t know how he’d gotten here.

He didn’t know how he’d gotten here.

Declan looked down at himself. He was dressed in the same clothing he’d been in when he’d left Jordan’s. Jacket, loosened tie. Same clothing the Declan in the portrait had been wearing. Same clothing the Declan who’d kissed Jordan had been wearing. He remembered returning to the apartment. Didn’t he? It was possible he was simply remembering other times he had and all those memories had stacked up to disguise that he was missing one.

This was dream logic, not waking logic.

He felt awake. He was awake, surely. But—

“Neat trick, right?” Ronan asked.

The middle Lynch brother leaned casually in the entrance from the courtyard, shoulder against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching him. He had changed since Declan had seen him. Not taller, because Ronan had already been tall, but bigger, somehow. Older. He hadn’t shaved in a few days and he had grizzle that instantly aged him. He was no boy. No student. He was a young man.

“Ronan,” Declan said. He couldn’t think of what else to say, how to say it, and so he just shoved everything he wanted to say into that one word. Ronan.