“Pradeep, would you please retrieve these papers for Miss Lewis?”

As the orderly arrives, Emma regains her senses. It takes everything she’s got to step back, wait for Gutmunsson to collect the papers, wait for Pradeep to transfer them with his long claw. Once the folder is in her hands, Emma looks up at Gutmunsson, feeling the wasteland in her expression.

“Thank you for seeing me. And for… this.” She holds the folder low and away from her body. “Good luck with your dissertation.”

She turns to leave, and Gutmunsson speaks again.

“Emma! One last thing!”

She is holding on to her control with thin reins now. You cannot look back on the path out of the Underworld. She looks over her shoulder.

Gutmunsson stands by the front of his cell, the shadow of the bars on his face. Every other shadow in the room swarms in his eyes.

“Tell Special Agent Cooper I said hello.” Gutmunsson smiles. “Tell him he chose well.”

CHAPTER TEN

Emma’s not actually sure how she makes the transition from Simon Gutmunsson’s chapel room to the outside of the asylum. But Cooper must notice something about her when she emerges, because he deals with Dr. Scott and the sign-out process, and before Emma knows it, she’s walking through the foyer.

Cooper takes her elbow, and Emma, dazed, looks at him and thinks, I should punch you in the face. Right in the face. But that sounds as if it would involve way more energy than she is capable of right now, and then she’s out the main door and the moment has passed.

The sunlight in the parking lot is weak, but it’s clean, and the air is clean. She walks away from Cooper, who is caught up talking to Scott, and onto the grass. Her T-shirt slaps against her body with the wind. Some of the things Gutmunsson said have made her angry, and some of the things she herself said have made her angry. Above all, she hates the hot, prickling feeling that she has been rooked. But she knows if she can get a grip on it now, she can use the anger; she can funnel it down into the great storehouse inside herself, draw on it when her funds of energy are low. She thinks of the Byron, and then she thinks of a quote by Mary Shelley: I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe.

She senses more than sees it when Bell arrives to stand beside her.

“He got inside your head a little, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he did.” She feels her gut cramp, tries to ease down and realizes her abdominals have been clenched this whole time. “He’s perceptive. And he’s cruel. He likes poking at people’s scars.”

“You can’t let him in, Emma.”

She turns to face Bell then. “Do I look like an easy get?”

“No. But he would like that kind of challenge.”