No sooner had I arrived in her doorframe, though, than did ten more hands seize me. I had abandoned myself to them, fleeing their melee mentally in order to take refuge within the latest dream I had spun for her, uncaring which mask assumed control next since none could be as bad as the one she had helped me to shed. Of course, I had forgotten all about Madness.

His top hat now lay nearby on the floor, dropped by the figure who had followed me here, waiting for the moment when the confliction that made me Tumult swayed too far one way . . . or the other.

Stephanie took a step toward me. In response, I made a retreating one, but I faltered, nearly slipping in the congealing pool of my own blood. She extended her hand to me.

“Damn you, go.” I turned away, pressing a palm to my chest to stifle the blood as I moved toward the nearest glass wall. Once there, the pain slammed me again. And this time, it nearly sent me to my knees.

I fell toward the glass, bracing myself against the wall with my free hand.

Turning, I saw that she had ventured as far as the center of the room—just below him. The masked figure that floated above us, swirling in its own mire.

Madness.

His amorphous body of eddying clouds and silent violet lightning seemed to be having a difficult time ordering itself. Hatless, his three-faced mask sailed this way and that, eyeing me as a circling vulture does its dying prey.

“He’ll have me soon enough,” I warned her. “You mustn’t be here when he does.”

“What is he?” she asked.

“Dangerous,” I hissed. “The chandelier. It was his doing.”

I did not think Madness, or any part of me, could harm her physically. But it was his nature to be destructive. He could damage her mind with his words. Worse, he could show her our face. At the very least, he would be incapable of keeping any pretty promises when her young man showed. Wrath might not have won the hate from her that he’d deserved, but Madness would. And if she stayed in this room with me for much longer when I knew she loved another, he would win me.

“Your masks,” she said, “what’s happening to them?”

I both did and did not know the answer to her query.

Pandemonium had occurred here before, though never quite like this, and only after the shattering of a heart. But this time . . . This time . . .

Wincing under the new mask, my body seizing with another wave of pain, I tilted my head back and shut my eyes.

Your question. Is now a good time to

remind you she never answered it?

These words whisked through my mind, uttered by the highest pitched of Madness’s three voices. The lowest of his voices answered before I could.

You said yourself the boy was right.

On all counts.

That’s why you should have killed him!