I was hoisted up and tossed violently onto the frozen block of stone. I lay on my back, looking up at the shallow gray sky. Jaeger broke the buckles on my armor and ripped through the Kevlar covering my chest. I heard a clatter as the vampire tossed aside the tool that he had used. I looked over. Bastard had used my own knife. My wrists were shackled and chained to the stone. Not that I could have done anything anyway.

The Cursed One stood hulking a few feet away. He was a massive shambling thing. The helmet and armor had been polished to a mirror shine. The flowing robes were opulent red silks, but under them the flesh was a twisting mass of oily darkness. He just oozed evil.

"You will fail," I said calmly. "Just like you failed sixty years ago."

NOT NOW, BRAVE HUNTER. FOR THIS IS THE TIME.

His thoughts stabbed into my brain, causing mental pain equal to the physical. What had Mordechai said? He had told me to remember the things that he had shown me. I had to think of something. I tried to recall the hazy memories. I was grasping at straws. The Old Man surely couldn't have foreseen a way for me to get out of this.

"You don't know how to finish the ceremony. Thrall killed your priestess. You don't know what to do. You'll fail again."

The black thing shook. Trembling beneath his robes, bubbles rising through the space that should have been his face, splattering congealed fluids onto the snow-he was laughing at me. I had amused him.

BUT IN THIS PLACE, MY LOVE RETURNS TO ME TONIGHT.

The helmet dipped, nodding toward Jaeger. The vampire bowed, always subservient, and placed a rolled-up bundle of cloth on the ground at the base of the altar. The vampire untied the rope that encircled the package, and unrolled it on the snow.

It was a skeleton. An ancient, dried and brittle heap of broken bones, still chipped from where an ax blade had been used to peel the flesh away to ease Lord Machado's burden.

"Koriniha," I gasped. "No freaking way."

DO NOT TAINT HER NAME WITH YOUR FOUL MORTAL LIPS. IN THIS PLACE, WITH MY POWER, WITH THE ARTIFACT OFKUMARESH YAR,SHE SHALL RETURN TO ME.

The artifact was removed from under his robes, coated in black goo He kept it inside his body for safekeeping. As it was revealed, a jolt of power surged through the pocket dimension. I felt it down to the core of my being. I had seen the artifact in my visions. When I had died in Natchy Bottom, I had touched it with my spirit. It had shown me things, things which no human should have seen. It was not of this world. It did not belong here, in our time, in our space, in our plane. It was a token of the evil of the others. The Old Ones. The forgotten trespassers.